The Galactic Mage (11 page)

The orb darted easily away from Roberto’s nuke, but it was never in any danger from the shot anyway. Roberto had over-compensated too in anticipation of the orb’s physics-defying speed. However, the orb’s projectile did not fare as well, and thanks to a bit of luck, as Roberto would admit a few days later, it was blown to dust by the sluggish nuke, which struck it full as the lasers pushed it directly into the missile’s path.

The bridge crew burst into cheers, Hartford pounding Roberto on the back, and even Orli could not contain a shout of glee. Once more several pairs of eyes swung round to take her in. She smiled meekly and pressed the button numbered “five.” The last thing she saw as the door slid shut was the scowl raging upon the captain’s face.

Chapter
10

A
ltin awoke the next day, once again, late in the afternoon. He hadn’t even been aware that he’d gone to bed, but at least he found himself
in
bed and not on the floor. That he’d managed to control his exuberance over his accomplishment enough to sleep was a bit of a surprise as well. It was nice to see that his discipline was working even when his conscious mind was not. Apparently running one’s sight around the moon took more energy than he had surmised. The added benefit of the Liquefying Stone’s bending of magical rules was a danger he’d do well to keep in mind.

He climbed out of bed, his head a bit sore from last night’s effort, and ran back up to the battlements to make sure he’d properly stored the Liquefying Stone. He had. That was a relief. He was taking great pains to make sure his habits with the dangerous little rock were safe ones and becoming reflexively so.

Satisfied that all was right on the tower top, it was time to address the gnawing in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten properly in a while and he was famished. Judging from the position of the sun, moving steadily down towards the horizon, he might be just in time for supper. He ran down the stairs, taking them three at a time, and soon emerged in the large dining hall where dinner was always served and quite despite his being absent from it at least half the time.

The chamber was huge and high-ceilinged, fit for a banquet with at least five hundred guests, but spider webs in the rafters high above spoke to the frequency of such events, and one could smell the musty scent of age clinging to the ancient tapestries hanging along the walls if the cobwebs were not evidence enough. Tytamon no longer felt compelled to entertain.

The weathered old sorcerer was already seated at the end of a table that was far too long for one man alone. Altin headed towards him eagerly, bare feet slapping audibly on the flagstones as he jogged, the sound echoing up into the cavernous shadows above and sending spiders scuttling for crevices amongst the oaken beams.

“Good evening, young Altin,” greeted Tytamon as his apprentice took a chair to the aged magician’s right, sitting before a plate, silverware, goblet and napkin that were all in place, set, as always, in expectation of his irregular appearance. Places for both magicians were set every night, waiting, always the same, and the servants had no end of complaining about how often neither of them arrived. Many a great meal had gone to waste in waiting for these two to come downstairs to eat.

“Good evening,” Altin replied, sparing no time in spearing a slice of mutton from a wooden tray with his fork. He stabbed a second slice, and with equal disregard for formalities, he added, “I finally did it. I put a seeing stone on the moon.”

“Really?” said Tytamon, sounding genuinely impressed around a mouthful of boiled carrots and pouring wine from a bronze decanter into Altin’s cup. “So you pulled it off at last. The Liquefying Stone has made the difference we hoped it would?”

“Entirely so.”

“That’s splendid news. Splendid news, indeed. A first for Kurr. A first for the world. You should be very proud.”

Altin nodded and stuffed an enormous chunk of mutton into his mouth, chewing ravenously.

“So what did you see? Are the stories true? Did you see the satyrs and the Never Ending Dance?”

Altin snorted, his mouth too full to laugh. He gulped his food, masticating just enough to choke it down. “Hardly,” he said. “There’s nothing up there. It’s desert. All desert, I’m almost sure. I need to spend more time exploring it, but I’m fairly certain there’s actually nothing going on up there at all.”

“Really? Nothing? Wouldn’t that be a terrible shame.”

“I’m sure the Church will be annoyed.”

“No doubt about that. You’ll want to be careful how you let that information out. No sense causing a ruckus just on the heels of such a momentous accomplishment.”

Altin almost spat. “I’m not one for politics, Master. Perhaps I’ll leave the announcements up to you.”

“Well, I’m happy to deal with the Queen and her court, but the press is up to you.”

“Well, we just won’t tell them, will we?”

Tytamon laughed. “The greatest diviners in all the land don’t find things out as fast as some of those journalists do.”

“That’s what happens when you have no magic, I suppose. Blanks. I imagine it beats digging ditches though. Getting paid to snoop on others must be easier than having real work to do.”

Tytamon grew momentarily stern. “You know little enough of real work, young man, and much less of the lives of blanks. You’ll do well to not harbor such contempt for the decent, common folk of this land. It’s those people upon whose hard work and success this nation is built and dating back long before the Magical Revolution came along.”

Altin lowered his face to his plate so that Tytamon could not see him roll his eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said as he took another bite. The man was such a mood killer.

Tytamon resumed the previous line of conversation and prodded Altin’s enthusiasm quickly back to life. “So what are you going to do after exploring Luria some more? What next?”

“Well, I think to begin I’m going to go up there myself. The Liquefying Stone seems to have a really nasty effect of exhausting me, even though I don’t quite feel it coming on. I think I’d rather teleport up and then do the rest of the exploration from there. I can teleport around without the stone, use my normal magic, and maybe get a lot more done. I’d rather not sleep entire days away if I don’t have to. The Liquefying Stone does not come without a cost.”

“This is very true,” agreed Tytamon. “However, you do get more and more used to it as you go along. It’s rather like the warriors who exercise at lifting rocks. The more rocks they lift and the heavier ones they choose, the stronger they become. Working your mythothalamus with the Liquefying Stone can have a similar effect. To a point.” He punctuated this last with a flourish of his fork, sending a bit of meat soaring half the distance to Altin’s plate.

“Why don’t we use them all the time, then?” Altin asked. “It seems silly to leave such an important tool buried in a dusty old room.”

“It’s because of the dwarves. Because of Duador.”

“You mean Melane Montclaire used the Liquefying Stone to summon the demons on Duador? Is that why there were so many?”

“No. But that is why the stone cannot be used at all. If man or, admittedly, man and elf, could do such a monstrous thing as what was done to the dwarves without the use of the stone, think what could be done
with
it? Think of it, Altin. You are young, but you understand the many hearts of men. You’ve read the histories of the ancient empires. Can you imagine Korgon the Beast or, worse, the terrible Cerrina Coldfist having access to one of those little yellow gems?”

Altin nodded as he accreted a stack of carrots on his fork in a series of successive stabs. “Another ice age. I can see it now.”

“Exactly.”

They ate in silence for a time, both matching the names of various villains through the ages with the atrocities they might better have been able to commit with help from the Liquefying Stone. It was a sobering thing to contemplate.

“So why did you give one of them to me?” Altin asked after a time. “That seems rather risky, really, now that I think about it.”

“Because I know you well enough to know....” He let the sentence trail off.

“To know what?”

“I just know you.”

“Did you divine it? Have you already seen? So you know I won’t go mad?

Tytamon was silent. Altin watched the man eat. Almost eight hundred years and yet some things remained impossible to hide.

“You did divine it, didn’t you? So what did you see? What happens? Was it clear enough to tell?”

“It was like they always are, Altin. Vague. Suggestions. Images that, as usual, tend only to mean something after the event has passed.”

“That’s a deflection if I ever heard one. Look, if I’m going to die because of the stone, I’m fine with it. I’ve resigned myself to it. You know what they say about Sixes.”

“I thought you weren’t a Six.”

Altin laughed. “I’m not. I’m just trying to get you to tell me what you saw.”

Tytamon laughed too, but his expression mellowed just as quickly as the mirth had come. “Mostly blackness, Altin. That was all.”

“Well, of course you saw blackness,” Altin replied, taking another bite, as if relieved. “I’m traveling into a vast and awesome night. What else would you see? You’re divination simply gave you a glimpse into the sky.”

“Perhaps,” said Tytamon. “But I didn’t see any stars.”

“Divination is always short on details,” Altin countered quickly.

“Spoken like a mage who’s never cast the school.”

“I’m blank there, why would I?”

“You said yourself that your being blank in that school defies the laws of circularity.”

Altin groaned, fearing another debate about his Six-ness coming in the wake of Tytamon’s dark divination. “Well, I’m not going to kill myself, so your spell probably meant something else. Maybe I’ll get the plague and die, and the Liquefying Stone can just go back downstairs.” He stuffed another huge chunk of mutton into his mouth, chewed it quickly and then added, “It’s not like I don’t have the rodents in my room to catch plague from anyway.”

“You have rats in your tower?”

“Just a mouse.” He swallowed and took a drink of wine. “Just one. I’ll get him. I was trying to make a joke.”

Tytamon recognized a subject change when he saw one and took the cue. He was not in the mood for an argument with the boy either. Altin could be easily brought to ire some nights. Once more he returned the conversation to the moon.

“So, you’re planning on going up there yourself soon, eh? What is that going to entail?”

Altin finished off another bite of meat before replying, washing it down with wine. “I have a few things to do first. I reckon it’s as hot as Taot’s breath up there; the sun looms huge in the sky, so I need something for that. And, perhaps paradoxically, I believe it can get very cold too. So, I’ll have to get a new fur coat, maybe mammoth skin. I don’t think I’ve worn mine in several years and I’m certain it no longer fits. Other than that, I think I’m mostly ready to go. I may make a fast-cast amulet to get me home, just in case something unexpected happens. Just as a precaution. Rather waste a night on one of those than be plagued by something that fulfills your nasty divination dream.”

“I didn’t say it was nasty, just ambiguous. And I think a fast-cast amulet should be a requirement at the very least, if not perhaps even considering sending a surrogate explorer first.”

“Surrogate explorer?”

“A rabbit or a lamb. Just something before you go yourself. Something… expendable.”

Altin chewed slowly as Tytamon finished making his point. It was a good one. Caution over speed. “You’re right,” he said at last. “You’re entirely right. I should have thought of that myself.”

“We can’t all be geniuses,” Tytamon chided over the edge of his wine cup.

Altin gasped and made a show of being completely taken aback. They laughed and eventually the conversation moved on to other things.

After dinner Altin returned to his library to search within his shelves of scrolls and tomes and books. He had a lot of work to do. First, he had to find a teleport spell that would work on an unwilling target, for he assumed that whatever he sent was not likely to be too excited about going to the moon, even if it didn’t understand. Second, if he was going to protect this surrogate traveler from Luria’s raging sun and life-defying cold, he would need to find some spells that would account for that as well. A mountain of research. He definitely had a lot of work to do.

Chapter
11

A
ltin woke late the next morning after a good meal, several hours of sleep and a night’s reprieve from using the Liquefying Stone. Sometimes the body just needed time to recover, even a young body like his. He got up and after a quick wash and change of robes, prepared to go down to the goat pens to procure himself a surrogate traveler to the moon, when a motion on the table stayed his hand upon the door. The mouse was back and once again having its fill of Altin’s morning bread.

“All right, mouse, that was your last free meal,” he said as he began the words for a minor fire spell. He conjured a tiny fireball, a miniature meteor no larger than a grape, and held it hovering above his hand. He was just about to throw it when he got another idea instead: the moon did not require a goat. Nor did it require a rabbit or a lamb. In fact, the spell that Altin had discovered in his research last night, called Teleport Other, only required a “willing subject,” an “enclosed or encapsulated subject” or, as now, “one too simple to fight against the magician’s will.” This last had come with a caveat regarding emotional states and elevated will, but this was a mouse after all; how emotional could it possibly be? And a mouse would do just as well as a goat for simplicity. Altin growled at the little beast and moved towards it with a malicious grin.

Crouching, he circled round to a position where he would be hidden from the mouse’s view by the curve of the bread. On tiptoe, he approached as silently as he could, cursing the rustle of his robes with every step. He snuck up quietly to the bread and, hands cupped ready to pin the mouse securely to the table planks, he lunged over the top of the loaf. The mouse darted from beneath his grasp and leapt to the floor. Altin knew this game and dove to intercept. He actually caught the creature as it was about to enter into the safety of the crack, but the defiant little beast twisted in Altin’s grip and bit him on the knuckle, sinking its tiny teeth nearly to the bone.

Altin released it with a yelp. “You little monster!” he cried as the mouse vanished safely into the hole beneath the stairs.

“It won’t be that easy,” Altin vowed rising from the floor. “I’ll have you yet, you’ll see.” Jaw clenched, he scanned about his room for something into which he could teleport the mouse. He spotted the wine cup he’d brought up from dinner last night sitting across the room on the nightstand near his bed. That would have to do. He began chanting his familiar seeing spell. Once within the magic, he let his vision sink down onto the floor and then moved it into the dark recesses of the mouse’s hideaway.

He snaked his vision through the passage, up and down, left and right, until at last he found the mouse resting contentedly in a tiny little chamber illuminated by a crack in the tower’s outer wall. Several bits of bread crust were strewn about the tiny lair, one of which the mouse was lazily nibbling on as Altin’s vision brought it into view. A small patch of straw in a corner revealed that the mouse had also made itself a bed, apparently intent on setting up permanent residence. Altin suddenly understood why his mattress had recently sprung a leak. He grunted at this revelation as he let the mana go; such vandalism would soon be coming to an end. Having what he needed from the seeing spell, familiarity with the place, he could now cast his newly learned teleporting spell to catch the little whiskered thief.

Certain he was within the requisite twenty paces needed to start a teleporting loop, he began the chant that would send the mouse directly into the wine cup by his bed. He smiled grimly, efficiency in action; he would capture the rodent and get a practice run with the spell prior to a Lurian attempt—forked lightning splits two trolls, as they say.

Having spent the night studying the spell, it was fresh enough in his mind to come off without a hitch, and after a few gestures and a brief dip into the mana stream, Altin teleported the mouse from its nest directly to the cup of wine. And it was to wine that it went, for apparently Altin had not finished his libation last night. The mouse suddenly found itself nearly drowning in several inches of the alcoholic beverage and, quite baffled, began to flounder about, squeaking dreadfully in the panic of its plight.

Altin released the mana as he uttered the last word of the spell and quickly ran to the cup, intending to cover it with a book from the shelf above before the mouse could scramble out. But upon arriving at his nightstand, he discovered the mouse in desperate circumstances indeed. He actually felt a moment’s pity for the rodent as he watched it struggle in the wine, its little paws scrabbling desperately at the slick brass sides of the goblet, grasping for a hold while its hind legs kicked furiously to keep its head above the surface of the wine. Picking up the cup, Altin went to the window and, covering the cup with his hand, poured off the liquid so that the mouse was no longer forced to paddle for its life. It was not his intention to torture the pesky thing, merely to send it to the moon.

Once the cup was empty, Altin righted it and moved back towards his bed planning once more to place a book atop the goblet, but the mouse, wet and squishy now, and with dry “land” from which to launch itself, began bouncing off his palm in an attempt to leap out and escape. Over and over it leapt, determined at all costs to break through Altin’s palm and run for the freedom of its hole and becoming more and more agitated as moments passed, squeaking hysterically, and beating itself into a frenzy against the cup and Altin’s hand. Altin began to worry if this was the “emotional state” that the spell description in his book suggested could give a target an “elevated” and spell-denying “will.”

The soggy mouse was remarkably strong for its size, and as it continued to leap for freedom, the thought came to Altin that had the wine cup been empty, he might not have caught his prey at all. The mouse would easily have jumped out and run off before Altin could have gotten to the nightstand and grabbed a book. Imagine having been twice outwitted by a mouse, and in a single day. How humiliating to even contemplate. He also realized that now, in the time it was going to take him to replace his hand with a book, the mouse might still leap out and get away. The little crumb raider continued to keep him at something of an impasse.

But then the mouse began to slow, its leaps becoming less and less frequent, its squeaks less piteous, until at length the mouse no longer moved inside the cup at all. Altin chanced a glimpse between his fingers to see if the little biter had finally given up. It had.

The mouse was just sitting there in the bottom of the cup, a small puddle of wine still sloshing beneath its red-stained feet as its little sides heaved in the effort to catch its breath. Its gray coat was stained purple now, and it gazed up at Altin through eyes that were cloudy and glazed, the once alert black dots now dull, apparently by the fact that the mouse had had far too much to drink.

“You’re drunk,” Altin laughed. “How perfect. This solves my ‘elevated will’ problem after all, assuming that’s what you were going to try to do.” He raised the goblet into the air. “Here’s to you, my plague-ridden little friend. You and your trip up to the moon.” He looked once more into the cup, but the mouse no longer seemed concerned. Altin was glad of that. He really hadn’t wanted it to suffer, physically or emotionally, and intoxication was a splendid piece of luck.

For security’s sake, he placed a book over the cup anyway then retrieved the tome that held the spells for protecting the mouse from the extremes of heat and cold. Despite the mouse having a fur coat of its own, Altin decided that spells for both ends of the thermometer were the safest bet. He would have to tone them down some—he’d practiced last night with a sheep or goat in mind—but it didn’t take him long to make the adjustments, and after a little less than an hour he was ready to make the casts.

He uncovered the anesthetized rodent and poured it out onto the table, prepared to catch it with the cup again if it tried to run away. It did not. It stared blankly into nothingness, and Altin felt that it was safe to begin. He put the cup down and began the chants that would lay the protective spells upon the mouse. First he cast the Sunscreen spell, which was, at its core, the same simple spell that every mother with B-class enchanting skills or better had cast on every child at every beach during every summer since the Magical Revolution began, and probably even before that. Only this particular version had been beefed up for workers at hard labor in the desert quarries and for some polar expeditions as well. On top of these augmentations, Altin had made a few adjustments of his own, based on his suppositions about Luria’s proximity to the sun.

When he was done casting that one, he cast the Winter Warding spell he’d found—a lucky reference to it listed in the same book that had discussed the Sunscreen spell’s application as protection even in icy climes. It took him a bit longer to cast that, it being slightly more complex, but after just a few minutes of preparation, the mouse was ready to go.

Altin took the time to dry the mouse’s fur a little on his robes before he started the cast that would send it on its way. Its body was limp and warm beneath his fingers, and Altin could not help thinking how delicate it seemed as he felt its little shoulders and tiny hips shifting beneath its skin as his thumbs worked the cloth of his robes against the grain of sodden fur. He dried it a bit more thoroughly, just in case. No sense putting the Winter Warding spell to unnecessary stress.

When the mouse was satisfactorily dried, Altin took it and the book containing the Teleport Other spell up to the battlements to make the cast. He went up there not because he needed to, but because it seemed the right place to be. Casting had an emotional center too. Once up in the fresh air, he placed the mouse on the parapet, away from the wooden bowl and the Liquefying Stone. He was certain he did not need the Liquefying Stone for this since he knew exactly where he intended the mouse to go. The mouse began to stir, and Altin knew the wine would not keep it “willing” for very long, not after so much preparation time. The moment to send it on its way had come.

He glanced once more through the Teleport Other spell in the book, making sure he had it correctly in his mind and, turning slightly to get the sun out of his eyes, he began the chant. The spell was not difficult for a Z-class teleporter, and it wasn’t long before the mouse vanished with a minuscule hiss of air. Altin could tell by the feel of it that the mouse had landed where he’d planned, just near the first seeing stone, and he practically leapt to the scrying basin to get an instant view of how the mouse’s trip had gone.

It was only a few seconds before the image in the water came into view. And Altin nearly staggered back in shock. The mouse lay broken in the red Lurian dirt, turning grey in the wan light of the seeing stone with its skin split open and little crystals of red, like garnets, floating away from it in the oddest sort of way, slowly, almost drifting as would something in a dream. Its tiny black eyes were broken, ruptured like fine caviar poked with the tine of a fork and then forgotten by some distracted party guest. The insides of its body, protruding through rents in its fur, seemed as if they’d been frozen hard as stone, a monument in miniature to an eviscerated mouse.

But how could that be? What had happened to the winter ward? Could it really be that cold up there? The warding spell was supposed to make one “impervious to cold,” and it had been tested in the worst conditions Prosperion was capable of dishing out.

Something had gone terribly wrong. Altin stared into the scrying basin and found himself suddenly going numb. He’d almost sent himself up here. He’d been planning to do it only a night ago, to go alone. Had Tytamon not suggested a surrogate, that would be him lying up there, broken open like a stomped gourd and spewing frozen agates of blood into a dreamlike night. And why did they float like that? What in a gorgon’s mirror was going on up there?

Altin suddenly cursed himself for his lack of divination. He found himself wishing that he could do it, wishing that he had made himself try to learn that school of magic more often in the past, wishing he’d pushed beyond what he knew inside was just a block. He’d always written off his unwillingness to attempt the school to laziness, procrastination and perhaps to a bit of disbelief despite what the Sorcerers Council had concluded back when he was a boy of just eleven years. What did those old bureaucrats know? Half of them were has-beens anyway, washouts whose limited intellects denied them the ability to do anything with the gifts they’d been given, regardless of their class. Besides, divination was a bore. The answers were always so ambiguous, meaningless mostly, if they even came at all. It was such a waste of time.

Except for now. He would really like the insight that a good divination might have brought him at this particular place in time. No one else knew the sequence of events like he did. No one had done and seen what he just had. No one ever could. But now he was going to have to get a Divination done, and done by someone else. And there was no room for error; he had to know precisely what had happened to the mouse, which meant that even Tytamon’s O-class Divination was not going to be good enough. And now was certainly not the time for Altin to try to learn, not when his life had a stake in the answers being right.

There were only two diviners that he trusted with this task: Ocelot, a crazy witch living deep in the Great Forest was one, but she was too odd, and her eccentricity made Doctor Leopold, the other choice, the more desirable of the two. Though a couple of classes less than Ocelot’s Z, the doctor was an expert at medical things which gave him perhaps an edge on Ocelot for this particular cast. And, well, gazing into the water at the shattered remnants of the mouse, Altin concluded that this was a decidedly medical thing.

He felt a pang of guilt as he looked into the basin, his fingers remembering how the tiny creature had felt not so long ago, gently stirring in his grasp as he’d dried it on his robes, its diminutive body soft and warm, still filled with life. He glanced down at the purple stain on his gray robes and his eyes misted for a moment as he realized what he had done. He’d wanted the mouse dead before, true, but that was different. This was an accident. An accidental death was not the same. An incredible sense of guilt began building in his guts, his mind started to whirl and fill with the strangest thoughts, images of fire and of a falling oak tree, of… was that Pernie in a pale blue dress? A voice in his mind cried, “Murderer! Incompetent!” and a wave of dizziness threatened to rise behind his eyes.