The Galactic Mage (19 page)

The orb split in places along its surface, steaming and bubbling, seeming almost to boil wherever the lasers burned its skin. Small blobs of the lava substance ejected from the cuts, forming glowing globes that floated away to be extinguished by the freezing darkness. She watched as the orb jerked and writhed under the onslaught, and she wondered why it insisted on holding on, wondered if perhaps it had got stuck, or worse, hadn’t unloaded all its soldiers onto the
Aspect’s
decks. It lingered for a few seconds more, but then finally it released its hold, slowly retracting its proboscis and then moving quickly away from the ship where it resumed its familiar spherical form. Once reformed, Orli could see that the orb’s surface was riddled with crevices, gouges and grooves, sorely damaged and wasting no time in shifting its surface to the reflective obsidian glass. The
Sarajevo’s
lasers winked out, useless now, and Orli once more marveled at how the orbs managed to shift their shapes and textures as they did. Missiles emerged from the
Sarajevo’s
underbelly a few seconds later and rocketed towards the orb, as did a pair from the
Aspect’s
arsenal as well.

Apparently unwilling, or unable, to bear the brunt of four more nuclear impacts, the orb shot off into the night. Orli watched it go and allowed herself a smile. She wondered how long the orb could run as she found herself once again cheering for a nuke. “Blow it to bits,” she muttered as she watched the missiles go. “Blow it to goddamn bits.”

Once the blue dots of the rockets were out of sight, she turned and faced the row of patient-laden beds. There were still a few unused. She glanced up at the ship status lights that continued to flash above the door. She wondered if there was a battle taking place somewhere on the ship. She would have heard by now had there been an alien invasion on the upper decks. Wouldn’t she? She sighed. Maybe the
Sarajevo
had made it just in time. Maybe those beds would stay empty after all.

Chapter
19

T
he more times he read it, the more Polar Piton’s Perfect Parabolic Protection spell looked to be precisely what Altin needed. If it did exactly what the enigmatic arctic explorer said it did in his notes, creating a “perfect parabolic shield, anchored firmly to the ground and impervious to sun, wind and cold,” the spell could serve to make Altin’s fishbowl—or manbowl as the case may be—highly functional. The spell description further claimed that “all aspects of the environment within the shield shall remain constant within the dome unless acted upon by countermeasures or other magical means.” He wasn’t completely sure what that meant, but he assumed that it referred to air temperature and humidity. There was something that followed about how a cooking fire would not warm up the inside of the dome (or else it would—the writing in the original book had been hard to make out during Altin’s transcription; the text was blurred, and whatever had come after that campfire line was rendered completely indecipherable by the passage of time). Piton should have cast the spell on the book, Altin thought when he’d been copying it at the time. But nonetheless, he had what he needed now.

Altin had been studying the spell all morning, or what was left of the morning after having a long night in Crown enjoying the hospitality of Aderbury and his wife—after which he found himself, as usual, wondering why it was he didn’t go see them more. Regardless, the work of a few hours studying, despite a mild, ale-induced headache, made him familiar enough with Polar Piton’s spell and its components to try casting it.

The spell called for two small beads of glass, components which Altin had in abundance in a jar in the lowest room of his tower. He ran down, retrieved the jar and was back in his room panting moments later ready for a go at Polar Piton’s shield. Holding a glass bead in each hand as the spell required, he carefully re-read the main incantation from the book laying open on the table near the ever present loaf of bread. Confident that he had it right, he focused on a large flagstone near his bed and cast the spell. The cast was complicated, and it took him several minutes to chant it all despite his intention of making his first version very small. But finally it was done, and Altin opened his eyes to see what he had made.

Apparently he’d made nothing.

“What the…?” he muttered, running through the incantation in his mind. He carefully went over each part in his head, checking it against his notes. He hadn’t done anything wrong; he’d spoken it precisely as he’d written it down. He wondered if maybe he’d made some kind of transcription error. He really didn’t want to go back to Crown.

He went over to the flagstone and gingerly reached out his hand. Maybe it was there, just invisible to the eye. His hand touched something solid where he’d thought the shield should be, something that flickered at his touch. He let out a sigh of relief. All that worry for nothing.

He tapped the invisible surface more soundly and the shield flickered once again, revealing in shimmering outline that the flagstone was now capped by a dome of energy. The shield was longish and roughly cylindrical, like an upturned drinking glass, but with a rounded top and encasing an area about a pace across and not much higher than Altin’s knees. He laughed triumphantly. “Wonderful!” he said.

He laid his hand flat against the surface; it felt solid, although there was no temperature at all. He rapped on it with his knuckles and found that the contact made no sound of its own. Interesting, he thought, I wonder how strong it is. He looked around for something to strike it with but, finding nothing suitable, had to run upstairs and retrieve a seeing stone from one of his crates.

Back in his room he struck the shield firmly with the stone. It resisted the blow entirely, shimmering briefly with the contact but showing no signs of stress. Altin gave it another whack. Still nothing. He began to beat upon it resoundingly, even stepping back and hurling the stone at the dome with all his might. The shield held firm.

“Well, it’s strong,” he said to himself. “I wonder how something like this stayed hidden for so long.” But recalling the generally inane nature of Polar Piton’s notes, and by implication probably the man himself, Altin suspected he already knew the reason why.

It was then that he noticed a length of straw, tumbled to the floor from his battered old mattress, lying on the flagstone, half in and half out of the shield. He wondered if he could pull it out.

He went round to where the golden strand protruded from the base of the shield and gave the end of the straw a gentle tug. It did not budge. He pulled a bit harder, but he knew instinctively that the straw would break before it could pull through. It would, however, slide up and down easily enough. Altin spent a few moments experimenting with that incidental discovery and found that he could move the straw around the dome in any direction that he liked—up, down and around, as fast or as slow as he wanted—but he could not pull it out. Nor could he push it back through. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but he made a note of it on his copy of the spell, along with remarking on the dome’s apparent strength. It amused him to think that others might one day read his work, just as he now read Polar Piton’s work, and it was nice to be part of the chain. He wondered if Polar Piton would be happy that his spell was once again in service for exploration’s cause. He decided that the adventurous man most assuredly would.

Satisfied that the spell would serve as he had hoped, he dismissed the magic, prepared to move the experiment to the next phase. But first he needed a new surrogate to send up to the moon. Lacking another mouse, he ran down to the stables and out to the goat pens just beyond. He searched out a small black and white kid and chased it around the pen for a while. It was as if the little creature knew what Altin had in mind as it darted to and fro, avoiding his clutches whenever he came near. “Knavish beast,” Altin spat as the kid scampered beyond his grasp for a fifth straight time. Why were the simple things always more complicated than they were supposed to be?

He approached it slowly this time, knees bent, balanced as he moved with arms out to either side. “Come on now,” he said soothingly. “This is a rare opportunity for you.” He got within a step of the goat, his feet making sucking sounds in the muck. The goat watched him closely, its brown eyes large and curious, white lashes blinking studiously. “Come on,” Altin said again, leaning in and then, snakelike, shot his hand forward to catch it by the scruff. The kid scampered away, escaping along the fence.

“Infernal beast! You’re supposed to be domesticated, don’t you know?”

He lunged after the animal again with similar results, and it was a matter of some ten minutes before he finally caught it, eventually pinning it against the gate with his leg in a rather awkward piece of luck. But at least he had it in his grasp.

The goat kicked and squirmed and twisted in his grip, bleating loudly, making noise as if Altin were torturing it with thumbscrews and a hot iron. Altin was embarrassed by how much effort and commotion it took to get the goat up into his room, and he did so with utmost speed lest anyone see him so belabored by a goat.

Eventually, however, he succeeded in getting to his chamber, and he decided it best to bind the wiry beast up before he set it down and risked having it run away again. He had no intention of chasing the little rascal around the tower all day long. He carried it to his bed and plunked it onto a blanket in which he quickly and tightly rolled the bleating goat up, swaddling it like a newborn babe. With its legs buckled and pinned against its body, the goat was finally forced to settle down. It lay there, resigned, panting heavily and allowing Altin to at last resume his work with Polar Piton’s spell.

Altin took the bundled goat and set it down on the flagstone he’d used before, and once again he cast Polar’s shield upon the spot. When it was done, he peered in at the goat to see if it was suffering any undue stress. It appeared just as it had before; its mouth opening occasionally to let out another irritated bleat—although silent, as the sound did not come out through the shield—but beyond that, nothing out of sorts. Altin decided it was time to send the encapsulated creature up to Luria.

Since it had been awhile since he’d last cast the Send Other spell, he went and got the book so that he might have another look. He spent some time reviewing it to make sure he had it right, and when he was done, he sent the goat on its way. Altin heard the pop of air as the shield, the goat and the flagstone all vanished at the completion of his chant. Now for a look! He raced upstairs to the scrying basin and conjured the view of the goat sitting next to the original seeing stone.

The image came into the water, and Altin winced as he watched the goat writhing about and struggling against the blanket in which it was bound. It flopped about like a fish on land, and Altin felt the cold grip of dread as he witnessed it floundering beneath the dome, kicking and fighting within the blanket, apparently in great distress. Now what had he missed?

After several agonized moments of thrashing, the kid broke free of the blankets and scrambled to its feet. It stood staring out into the barren expanse of Luria’s dark landscape, its mouth opening and closing repeatedly as Altin watched. It’s gasping, Altin thought with growing horror. It’s suffocating, drowning in the air that is not air.

Chills running through him, and waves of guilt, he stood up from the basin, prepared to bring the creature back. But just as he did, the goat stopped gasping and turned and looked around. It walked over to the other side of its enclosure, stopping to nudge the blanket with its nose along the way. It opened its mouth again, once, then nibbled at its hip, scratching an itch. Altin leaned back down, watching.

The goat began moving its mouth again, and Altin realized after a moment more that it was not gasping for air at all: it was complaining, bleating noiselessly into the night, likely calling for its dam. It went on like that for quite some time, but eventually it stopped. Apparently resigned to its fate, it turned and paced around its tiny little space beneath the dome for a while. There was only so much room within the magical confines, and a complete circuit took only a few steps to bring the goat all the way around. Despite the pointlessness of its exercise, the goat paced round and round anyway, until it finally grew weary of that as well. Then it turned back towards the middle and lowered its nose to the blanket lying on the stone again. It nudged the rumpled cover with its snout and then decided to take a bite.

Altin let out a cry of glee. The goat was fine. The spell had worked and the goat had just been frightened for a bit. Polar’s shield worked and had proven that perhaps it was a “perfect” protection after all. Altin was ecstatic and began immediately to make plans to send himself up as soon as he possibly could, but, in the name of caution, he decided to leave the goat up there until after dinner to be safe. He would check on it then, and, if all was well, he would be taking its place up there tonight. In the meantime he still had work to do.

The first thing he had to do was to cast a version of the dome large enough to accommodate himself. He spent some time debating on just where it was that he should stand, but it occurred to him that he really didn’t want to be up there like the goat, standing in a space hardly big enough to move.

He went back down to the notebook where he had meticulously transcribed Polar’s shield spell and looked it over carefully. There was nothing in there that indicated any maximum capacity for the spell, and Altin found himself calculating what it would take to cast one large enough to envelope his entire tower. It was a simple matter of exponential mana draw, and once he’d figured it out, he decided to give his larger version a try.

He went back up to the battlements and began once more to cast a Polar’s dome, this time over the tower as a whole. His larger version took quite a bit longer to cast, but, with patience and a few moments of nearly losing the delicate strands of mana required to craft the protective spell, he finally got it done. He opened his eyes and looked out to see what he had made.

But there was nothing. He had a moment’s panic, but then realized how absurd his distress was. Of course he couldn’t see it. He’d already been through this once. He looked about for something to throw and found the pebble he’d used when he’d first started experiments with the Liquefying Stone. He threw it over the wall and watched it as it flew. It traveled several paces out from the parapet before striking the inner surface of the shield and dropping straight to the ground below. Altin saw the faintest flicker just before the pebble fell. He gave another whoop. It did work. He’d cast it perfectly.

He heard a tinny echoing sound just as he gave his little rejoicing cry, and he turned to watch a bird fluttering wounded to the ground. Apparently it had struck the dome from without and knocked itself nearly out.

Altin grimaced in its direction and shrugged an apology to its tumbling form. Another victim in the name of progress, he tried to tell himself. It was, however, interesting to note that he had heard the sound of the impact from here inside. He told himself to add that to his notes when next he went downstairs: sound came into the dome but did not go out. That made him wonder; perhaps he should check to see if he could teleport objects in and out of the parabolic shield. He decided to use his familiar piece of gravel, so he teleported himself down to where he’d seen it land.

He appeared in the knee-deep grope of Lady Synthia’s impudent vines just outside his tower. The vines writhed about, trying to coil around him, but too weakened by the fading magic of their aged enchantment to do him any serious harm. He fumbled about for a moment, arms plunged into the twisting mass, and finally found the little stone. Looking through the shield, which he had to locate by reaching blindly forward until he touched it with his hand, he spotted a large mushroom growing just a step or two outside the dome. Perfect, he thought.

Holding the little stone in his palm, he began the chant that would send it through the barrier. An instant later the gravel could be seen sitting upon the mottled brown cap of the mushroom, as if Altin had set it there by hand. Altin gave it a satisfied grin. A moment after, Altin brought the pebble back, proving that teleporting inside the dome was not going to be a problem either. For good measure, he moved around the dome to where the bird had hit, and, searching it out in the tall grass outside, he cast a spell to teleport it inside as well—a living test, just to be safe before trying it himself.