Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals (38 page)

“Your Majesty,” said Altin. “I realize that ruling a continent, exploring space, and engaging in interplanetary diplomacy is stressful and time consuming, but we really must bring Yellow Fire back. In the name of decency, you must give us your permission. Orli has already agreed on the wedding ceremony. That is what you said. Please. There are so many people who have worked on this. And, if we are being frank with one another, you are right about my intentions to keep my word. I promised her that if our attempt to bring Yellow Fire back to life failed, I would end her suffering. If you refuse to let us try, then I will have failed to bring him back. You would trap me in my own honor, and so fate will write the rest. So I beg you not to set us on this course.”

“I could have my assassin finish you in an instant.”

“I can be gone in half of one. Please, Your Majesty. It is the right thing to do. She gave so much to us all. And if somehow it doesn’t work, I’ll find you another Hostile world. We’ll get you more of the stone.” He hated saying it even as the words came out. He hated the fact she’d ever found out about the stones at all. Everything that was happening was exactly why Tytamon had gone to such lengths for so many centuries to keep the secret of the Liquefying Stone his own. And now the Queen had eight hundred of them. Hells, the priests of Anvilwrath even had one, the one they’d found, the one he’d lost—assuming they’d dug it out from under the wreckage of the temple somehow. He was fairly sure they would have made a point of it.

The simple truth was that Liquefying Stone was a secret that somehow Tytamon had just known Altin would let out, as if he’d resigned himself to it, even though he’d hoped otherwise. It was a lure to corruption that the great mage knew Altin would release. And now Altin had just vowed to get the War Queen replacements, even more than the eight hundred she already had. He was the pawn of the very corruption he wanted to avoid.

It was a thought so perverse and horrible that he might even have recanted his promise. But he couldn’t. And, he hoped, the prospects of finding another Hostile world were unlikely to the point of being impossible.

The Queen glared at Altin for a time, her eyes narrow and her lips taut as bowstrings. Altin was prepared to teleport himself and Orli out, the spell poised in his mind, shaped and ready to go off with a thought. The least flick of her finger, the least movement of her head that might have the assassin moving, he would be gone.

But she did not.

“You are either very brave or very stupid to talk to me that way, Sir Altin. But since the day I first met you, I have never known anyone to be more honorable and worthy of tolerance than you. So, very well. I grant my permission—on the condition of the wedding, just as before, of course.”

Orli rolled her eyes and shook her head, but she said that she would agree. Like she already had.

“And with so much at stake, I will provide what assistance I may,” the Queen offered, as if she hadn’t just run them both through the gristmill. “Do you need anything from me to ensure the success of the work?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’d like to have Aderbury do the transmutation that will bind Yellow Fire’s heart in place.”

The Queen harrumphed at that, the sound resonant beneath the bright golden breastplate. “That is impossible. He is busy.”

“But he is the best transmuter in the land. His hand is the one we need.”

“Well, his hands are full on
Citadel
. Find someone else.”

Altin shook his head. There was no one else. No one he knew well enough to trust. He was better off doing it himself if they couldn’t get Aderbury to do it. His own transmutation abilities were made better than his rank would indicate due to his access to seven of the eight magic schools. What he lacked in the artistry of Aderbury, his raw power could make up for. Or at least they had to hope so, given that there was a life at stake.

“Then there is nothing that we need beg of you,” he said. “Except perhaps that you might get word to Director Bahri that you have given your permission for us to be under way, and that it has begun.”

“Done,” she said. She whisked him away with a backhanded flick of her fingers. “Now be off with you. The two of you have given me a headache, and I wish to close my eyes.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” He bowed, Orli curtsied, and together they backed out of the room.

When the doors were shut behind them, Orli allowed herself to grin. “Finally,” she said. “Finally Blue Fire has a chance at happiness.”

“Yes,” agreed Altin. “So long as I don’t botch the transmute.”

“You won’t.”

“Let us hope that you are right.”

Chapter 34

A
nnison lay beneath the strange spotted tiles, staring up into them as he had so many times before. So many days had passed that he’d lost count. He’d developed a reflex for looking up there during the first few months of his capture, a revulsion reflex that made him want to look away from the monitor showing the exposed dome of his brain where they had cut away most of his skull. But he was over that now. Mostly these days, he looked up there dimly absent of thought, the horror of what they did to him numbed to passivity. It was almost as if he watched from a distance, as if his mind had gone elsewhere and locked itself in a different room, someplace inside his head where things like having people peeling away parts of your brain didn’t matter anymore.

He looked back to the monitor anyway. The big one showed the table behind the reclining chair he still occupied, the same chair he’d been in since he first arrived. The upper part of his brain had been removed, the parts halved, pulled out, and chopped up like some sticky gray cabbage. The parts now floated in shallow trays of fluid, connected by shimmering strands of tiny silver wires to the portions of his brain that remained in his hollowed-out skull. The wires, thin as spider web, were attached to metal pins and long needle probes, each of which was nearly as thin as the silver fibers themselves. All of those things, those alien wires and probes, had been stuck into his butchered brain.

At night the people in white coats filled up his skull cavity with the same fluid that was in the two trays holding the left and right portions of his upper brain, but when they came in during the day to monitor him and investigate, they’d suck it out with a loud, rasping tube.

He found that he couldn’t channel mana anymore, not even with the pain-inducing electrode now removed from his throat. Whatever they’d done when they pulled out those brain parts seemed to have snipped his ability to do magic anymore. Though that’s not quite what they said.

Doctor Gaspar, the taller and leaner of the two women who worked on him, came in just as he was moving his gaze from his pared brain to the smaller monitor, which showed his emaciated body lying there. He doubted he even made five stone’s weight anymore; four might be a stretch. To his eyes, he looked like nothing more than a skeleton lying beneath a drapery of skin.

“Good morning, Annison,” the woman in the white coat intoned as she came to his side and looked down at him. “How are you feeling today? Strong enough to do some magic for us this time?”

He knew better than to let hope rise.

“So today we’re going to try communicating with your friends again. I want you to try to communicate with those men you told us about, the ones you said were trying to find you. Are you ready to try?”

Oh, he was so ready to try. But he knew it wouldn’t work. He’d tried a thousand times since that lost contact on the stage. He could remember it so clearly, more than any other memory. It was the clearest memory he had: him lying there, staring at El Segador’s shoes as the theater lights dimmed. And to think how much he had hated being there, doing those magic shows. He would have done anything to be The Incredible Spectacularo now. He could have loved those patrons if he’d wanted to. They were just people after all, perhaps victims of circumstance like he was. But now it was too late.

“Speak up, my friend. Are you ready, or do you need a jolt to get your energy up?”

He didn’t need a jolt. They’d attached the electrode that had once been in his throat to a pair of them in his feet. “I can try,” he rasped.

“Good,” she said. “One second while I pull up the telepathy file. Now be a good boy and don’t try anything else. We already know what the patterns look like. Jefe is very pleased with you, but El Segador thinks you are stonewalling us a bit.”

If there was anything like humor left in him, any place in his soul where the possibility of mirth, or even irony, remained, he might have laughed. Stonewalling? The energy for any such thing had died in him well over a month ago. Probably longer than that.

“All right, that’s got it. Go ahead. Try to call them up. And give me the name of which one you are going for.”

“Black Sander,” he said, his voice barely audible.

“You said you can’t reach that one. Do the one with the Z. You seem to do better with that.”

Annison just lay there. The effort of speaking made him tired. He started to drift off to sleep, but the short zap of electricity in his feet snapped him awake again.

“Go on. The Z. Do it.”

He let go of the breath that had locked in his lungs when the electricity hit and exchanged it for a fresh one. He closed his eyes and let the air out slowly as he once again reached out for the marchioness’ telepath, the man with the frenetic undertones in his mind. He reached for the mana as he had done so many times throughout his life with hardly more effort than it took to see something or notice a sound, the effort of smelling something cooking on a stove, hardly so much effort as even that.

He felt nothing, though. The familiar sense of probing, of finding resistance or acceptance of his thoughts, all of that was gone. He could try to smell the pot on the stove, could even feel the air passing through his nostrils, but there were no odors there. So it was with his attempt to communicate. There simply wasn’t anything there.

“Very good,” she said. “Now keep it up; don’t let it die down like you did last time.” She looked up from her monitor, where zigzag lines striped a chart in one quarter of the screen and lines of data scrolled in the bottom half. “Carmen,” she called, “reduce the filter another six hertz. Give him a little help.”

“Okay, he has it,” the other woman said from her place at a workstation across the room.

Both women worked quietly for a time. Annison kept trying to reach out to the Z-class seer somewhere on Prosperion, the habit of hope still working even in this hopeless state.

“Look,” said the woman. “They’re coming together. Give me another half. We might actually get a match.”

The sound of fingers on glass followed, and Annison nearly gave up, but then both women simultaneously cried out, “There!”

“We’ve got it, oh Blessed Mother, we’ve got the match,” said the woman across the room.

“And look,” said the first from her place near Annison’s head. “Look there. What is that? See?”

“It’s coming from outside. That’s not us.”

“Oh my God,” said the first. “He must have got them. It’s working. It’s finally working.” Her fingers beat a rapid-fire thrum on the console as she worked. “Call them, call them,” she said as she worked. “Tell them it’s finally happening.”

Annison found himself distracted by their noise, but fought to hold on. What had he done? Had he connected with the marchioness’ seer somehow? He couldn’t feel a thing. But what if he had? He pleaded for help in the same instant he allowed himself to ride the wave of his captors’ enthusiasm. He sent cries, weeping cries from the core of his most desperate soul. “Please save me,” he sent with thoughts that throbbed with tortured agony. “Please.” It felt like shouting into a pillow. Pointless.

His real sobbing broke his ability to concentrate, but, apparently, not the elation of the women in the room. They were both still jubilant when Jefe and El Segador arrived.

Chapter 35

“D
ude, you owe me,” Roberto said as he stared at Altin’s image in the monitor before him. “Look at all the stuff I’ve done for you guys on Red Fire already.” He lay on his stomach as he spoke, a buxom woman in the suggestive uniform of the
Glistening Lady
’s crew providing him with a rather rough massage that made his voice surge in volume as she dug into back muscles that lay atop his ribs and lungs.

“It’s not for lack of willingness,” Altin replied. “I’ll gladly accompany you to Murdoc Bay or anywhere else you should like to go, but Orli made me promise specifically that I wouldn’t go back there unless it was on the orders of the Queen. She insists it’s too dangerous for someone of ‘my profile.’ I promised.”

“You make too many big, binding promises, dude. But I got you covered. Technically, I’m on the Queen’s business selling this stuff. And now it’s finally been approved by the NTA Department of Health and Agriculture, which means I’ve only got a few months to build a strong brand in the market before some dickhead company clones it and starts opening up their own chain stores. You know someone is going to try to hose me, man; that’s what these big global companies do. You really think the NTA needed all this time to put it through quarantine?”

“I don’t think the NTA will go directly against Her Majesty’s first trade venture on planet Earth. That’s hardly in keeping with good diplomacy.”