The Galactic Mage (2 page)

However, the fire was not a complete disaster, and unlike all those Sixes before him, Altin was not dead. At least not yet. The fire hadn’t killed him, and if he could hide this present mess from Tytamon, he might survive his mentor’s wrath as well. But as Altin gazed up and saw that the traitorous breeze had turned the smoke towards Calico Castle’s lofty central tower, Tytamon’s abode, he realized that he probably wasn’t going to pull that off.

And it was just as he thought it that Tytamon came striding out of the castle gates. His gray robes were open at the chest, drawstrings whipping about and wiry white hairs bristling chaotically from within. This uncharacteristically disheveled appearance suggested that not only was the great mage aware of Altin’s latest magical mishap, he had been awakened by it too. This circumstance was further evidenced by the waggling strands of wispy white hair that stuck out in every direction from beneath his wrinkled sleeping cap, bobbing feather-like with each angry step of his approach like butterflies bound above his ears. If any doubt lingered in Altin’s mind, the expression of molten rage disfiguring Tytamon’s gray-eyed face made the situation clear. He definitely knew.

“What in the name of Dunnagan’s dragon are you doing this time, boy?” The ancient magician practically erupted as he approached. “The sun isn’t even up yet and you’re trying to burn my castle down?”

“I. Um,” Altin managed. It really was rather complicated to explain.

Calico Castle’s other residents were now straggling to the gates as well, but none of them dared say a word or venture into view. They just peeped around the gate like a stack of heads spitted on an invisible pole. Despite the keep’s size, there were only six people living there outside of Altin and Tytamon, but to the last of them, none dared to cross either magician—the elder out of respect and the younger out of fear, not fear of Altin’s temper or anything untowards in his character of course, but fear of, well, random fires, for example. They all gawked at Altin’s misfortune from the safety of just inside the gates, except for a tiny blonde child who couldn’t see around all the rest and so stepped boldly out to afford herself a better view. She tilted her head slightly sideways and frowned a little as she watched, ignoring the hissing sounds coming at her from the adults ensconced behind the gate.

“Well?” Tytamon was waiting.

“Well,” explained Altin, “technically, it’s not my fault. You see, I’m not the one who conjured the vines, so, in a way, I can’t be blamed for what happens when they attack.” He followed this up with an expectant half grin, knowing full well it wasn’t going to work.

“You’re going to burn my house down and blame it on Lady Synthia?” Tytamon’s beard quivered as he glared at Altin with ice-lance eyes.

Altin sighed. He’d been down this road before, back when he blew up the gardener’s ox. And when he teleported a basilisk into the kitchen by mistake. Oh, and there was the time he enchanted a Breeze spell on a cold stone that ended up destroying a barn, a shed and two chicken coops. He winced inwardly at that. The list got longer the more he thought about it. He decided it might be best not to argue any more.

“Gods be damned, Altin. It’s not just my castle. It’s you. For the love of life, you have to have discipline. You’re a Six. Look around you!” Tytamon’s arm swept through the air in a gesture meant to take in the mismatched colors of the keep. “You of all people have to think before you cast. You don’t have Circularity. You have all that power, but you don’t see it all; you can’t with only six. How many times do I have to tell you—do I have to beg you—to think before you cast?”

“It’s not like that,” Altin said, having some ground to stand on here. “I wasn’t working when the fire caught. It was just the vine. I shot a fireball. A reflex, that’s all. I wasn’t overreaching. I swear. It was just an accident.”

“You only fool yourself, boy. Ignoring the gorgon doesn’t make her go away.”

Altin glowered back at his mentor, frustrated and prepared to protest further, but there was such intensity in the old man’s eyes that it took the energy from Altin’s hastily forming defense. Even if the old wizard was wrong in assuming Altin had overreached, he was right about the rest. But Altin had learned so much more since he’d been working on his own, and that exploding ox incident was over a year ago. A groan rattled at the back of Altin’s throat, but he grit his teeth and let defiance go. He wasn’t going to win this one and he knew it. Tytamon just didn’t understand. Tytamon had no faith.

“Yes, sir,” Altin said, the words like vinegar in his mouth.

“Well, at least you had the presence of mind to get it out,” Tytamon said, taking in, accepting, and moving past Altin’s contrition in less than a breath. “I’m assuming the fire was only in the vines and not inside to burn your books?”

“Yes, just the vines.”

“Well, good. That way, when you get the ashes cleaned up, you’ll be able to go through them and find a spell to remove the smell of smoke from my curtains.”

Altin looked up and saw that the treacherous breeze was still blowing the last remnants of smoke and steam into the windows of Calico Castle’s massive central spire, the only one of Calico Castle’s five as yet unmolested by magic gone awry. He rolled his eyes.

Tytamon watched as Altin looked up. “Yes, that smoke,” the old mage confirmed.

“Of course. I’ll get that too.” Altin let go a long breath in anticipation of an awful day.

“Indeed,” said Tytamon and turned back towards the keep.

Altin watched as Tytamon waded through the grass and reentered the gates, sweeping the muttering house staff and grounds crew back inside with his arms out wide. Their eyes lingered on Altin a moment before they reluctantly allowed themselves to be brushed back into the castle—all except the little girl, who ducked under the dangling sleeve of Tytamon’s robes like a tiny towheaded bull bursting through the cape of a matador. She would not be so easily shooed away. She smiled a wide smile at Altin and waved enthusiastically. She started to call something to him, but a woman’s flour-covered hand darted out from behind the gate and snatched her from view before the words got past her eager lips. This left Altin finally alone. He harrumphed and spat into the dirt. What did they know? Any of them.

He returned his attention to the tower, now half black and half green, neatly divided in two distinctly “painted” halves. He groaned. Calico Castle at its best. At least those infernal vines wouldn’t be a bother for the next few months. But he wasn’t looking forward to cleaning up the mess. He wished he had anything else to do.

A familiar screech reached his ears just as he started back into the castle. He turned and surveyed the skyline above the forest to the not-so-distant west. It took him a second to spot it, but he soon made out the form of a dragon winging its way towards him above the trees of nearby Great Forest. Taot. The dragon must have spied the smoke and been concerned. For a big fire-breathing brute, Taot was quite motherly sometimes. The forest-green reptile flew steadily closer, and Altin could hear the rush of air under his mighty wings as he neared, circled, and prepared to land upon the grass.

If recklessness could gain nothing, how would Tytamon explain Taot? Nobody else had a dragon to call their own. Nobody. Only Altin. He was even willing to admit that trying to tame it had been reckless initially, but it had worked out in the end, which had to count for something. Oh sure, Tytamon would probably argue something like, “And the point of a pet dragon is…?” To which Altin would say, “Prestige.” At which point Tytamon would likely add, “Which is useless and completely not worth the risk. You could have been killed just as all the other would-be dragon tamers have.” At which time Altin could say, “But I wasn’t.” But then Tytamon would likely just return to his original point, that there was no point in having a dragon to begin with, which was why Altin so assiduously avoided having that conversation with Tytamon at all—that, and because the old man simply bristled every time the dragon was around.

To be honest, Altin actually thought that the great magician was afraid of Taot, but he wasn’t exactly sure why. He was sure Tytamon could destroy the dragon easily enough if push came to shove, but he figured there was something superstitious involved. Tytamon was of the old, old school, and dragons held a place of reverence a millennium ago that they no longer did today; their mystique was gone and they were slowly being hunted out. Their time of awe was before the Magical Revolution, before the power of Language had harnessed the power of mana. The people of Prosperion no longer needed symbols like dragons; they no longer needed the stories of old. They had themselves to view with awe. Only the last remnants, like Tytamon—
the
last remnant—held on to the old stories at all.

Which worked in Altin’s favor. It was nice to have something on the old man. A dragon to keep Tytamon from thinking he had Altin all figured out. Because he didn’t. Altin was not reckless. Altin was not going to kill himself. And Altin refused to believe that he was just a Six.

As Taot settled to the ground, Altin looked up at the mess of his tower and groaned. Six or not, dragon or not, his head still throbbed from last night’s effort, and he was completely not in the mood to go clean up. What he needed was something to clear his head. Something like a cool wind blowing in his face. He turned and sent a simple telepathic greeting to Taot who was getting a drink from the little creek that ran out from beneath the trees.

The dragon returned what roughly translated to a telepathic grin, clearly satisfied that his little human friend had not been burnt to a crisp. Fire was something it was abundantly familiar with. Taot followed this with the sense that he was feeling in the mood to fly too, having just dined on a fat grizzly bear and in need of either some exercise or a nap.

Altin glanced back at his tower as he put his fingers to his temples and rubbed his aching head. “A nap would be good too,” he sent back to the dragon. But he knew he’d never get away with that for long. At least a dragon flight would take him out of sight for a while and give his head some time to rest. With a sigh, and grunt when the dragon leapt mightily from the ground, Altin found some solace in the presence of the wind.

Chapter
2

A
fter a refreshing flight on Taot’s back, Altin returned to the tower and went about the labor of cleaning up the mess the fire had made. The breeze had blown soot and ash down the stairs into his chambers, and there was spotty black dust on absolutely everything. Better soot than flames, he supposed, as he had been admittedly lazy about casting fire-resisting enchantments on his books. He made a mental note to get on that very soon.

Nonetheless, his books were fine, and he went through them looking for something to expedite the cleaning of his room. He found a Minor Tornado spell which he cast and set to the task of vacuuming up the mess. Once cast, the miniature tornado looked like a twenty foot serpent of whirling wind that had had way too much wine to drink. It seemed to stagger about the room on the tip of its tail, stumbling into every nook and cranny as its funnel head searched for somewhere to disgorge what it had imbibed. It finally waggled and arced its wide-mouthed way to the window where it snaked a length of itself through and began vomiting ash into the meadow below. Window found, the tail end continued to move about the room sucking up whatever tidbits it could get. Altin’s expression contorted speculatively as he watched. It wasn’t exactly methodical, but he supposed that, while a bit awkward, it would suffice.

Satisfied that his room would eventually be soot free, he went back up to the battlements to have another look. This was going to be a bit more difficult to clean. Near the parapets, the mess was more than ankle deep, and large chunks of half burnt ivy stems jutted from the mounds of gray, promising to be both annoying and filthy to pick up. He contemplated another Minor Tornado spell, but realized that in order for it to do anything with the larger chunks of charred vine, he’d have to cast the tornado a bit bigger than was safe. Not to mention, given the direction of the wind, if the thing decided to spout on the wrong side of the tower, the ash might be carried up to Tytamon’s window above. He already had Tytamon’s curtains to attend to as it was. With a grunt, he went back down stairs and thumbed through his books, realizing with each turning page that he was probably going to have to clean this up the old fashioned way: with shovel, broom and pail. He groaned. How demeaning for a wizard of his skill.

For a time, he simply refused to do it, and he lay himself down on his bed and stared at the ceiling while the Minor Tornado did its work. Eventually, he drifted off to sleep, getting some well-needed rest. However, he woke a few hours later to the not-so-gentle sensation of the tornado sucking on his face.

“Good gods!” he sputtered, gasping for air as the spell snatched the breath right out of his lungs. “Attack!” He bolted upright and looked furtively about, then quickly regained his wits. He must have been more tired than he thought.

Blinking sleep away, he saw that his room was now free of ash, and so, in the absence of anything better to do, the little twisting tube of wind had begun to meander aimlessly. But for the near suffocation, Altin was quite pleased with the outcome, and he dismissed the tornado spell with a satisfied nod. Now for the mess upstairs. With a sigh, he set himself to the chore.

Later that night, after several hours carrying buckets of soot and charred lengths of ivy out to the gardener’s refuse heap, and after a hasty lunch and two more hours trying to find a deodorizing spell for Tytamon’s curtains, Altin was finally able to return to the much more important task of magically seeing towards the moon.

He climbed atop his tower, a little tired, but feeling better for the completion of the work. The sky was clear and black, strewn with the millions of lights that had been calling him outward for what felt like his entire life. They seemed both an invitation and an insult, a promise and a threat, daring him to come out to them and yet forbidding him to try. And then there was Luria, loudest of them all. The moon. Sweet, pink Luria, lady of the night, dark mistress of moods whose aspects were true to her gender: beautiful, powerful, unpredictable and sublime. Some nights she was as red as blood, angry crimson and almost too dark to be seen. Other nights, like tonight, she was pale pink, almost white, appearing soft as if just powdered or made from the petal of a rose.

She was still low on the horizon, and Altin waited patiently for her to draw near, rising higher and nearly straight above. He knew the distance to her was far, and he wanted her as close as she possibly could be. He was willing to be patient. He’d been at this task for two years already; what was another hour now?

He moved over to a crate pushed up against the crenellated wall, filled with enchanted seeing stones. The crate was blackened from the flames, and two sides of it looked as if they might crumble if he tried to pick it up. He sighed. At least the stones inside remained unharmed. The seeing stones were fist-sized river rocks he’d enchanted with a location spell so that he could find them wherever they might go. His project of the last two years had been to teleport them as far as he could into the night, and then use sight to find them and have a look around.

Sight, like teleportation, required that magicians be familiar with the locations to which they wanted their spells to go. Sorcerers simply could not travel to places where they had never been—not in body, not in mind. And since Altin had absolutely no idea where Luria actually was, at least not precisely, he couldn’t directly target any magic there at all. He had to know a place intimately to cast magic to it. Period. Knowing that something was “way up there, right there, where I’m pointing” just didn’t get it done. Not directly, anyway, and so Altin was having to, in essence, crawl towards it, step by step, breaking the fundamental rules of transportation magic and casting with a guess, exhausting himself each night and having to start again the following day. But the seeing stones helped him find his way, sparing him from starting over every night from scratch. At least with them he could start from where he left off the night before and not “all over again.” But even with the stones, it was proving to be an interminably long road. Apparently Luria was a lot farther off than anyone had ever guessed.

Resigned that his task was to be one of many years, he set himself to the work of yet another night of blind casting. He plucked a seeing stone from the crate and cradled it in his hands, savoring the smooth, cool feel of it as he gazed back up at Luria tempting him across an unknowable expanse of sky. And he waited.

Eventually she was high enough for him to begin. Deeply familiar with the teleporting spell, having used it nearly every night, he needed no notes or spellbook to prepare. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and began the chant that would send the seeing stone from his hands out into the sky, hopefully far beyond his best attempt from the night before. Soon after he began the incantation, he felt his mind open itself to the mana. He probed the curling wisps of deep purple mystery, touched it gently and let it flow into his brain. He gathered the dark vapor in, using his mythothalamus, the gland of magic, to collect and then roll the mana into a thin thread, one end of which he fed into the center of the seeing stone. Tracing the line of mana back out into the night, he pushed his mind up into the coursing sea of nebulous blackness and began seeking the furthest seeing stone cast the night before. The enchantment on the stone throbbed faintly across the distance, its magic beacon pulsing through the darkness and drawing Altin’s sight straight to it after only a moment’s look around. There, he thought as he centered his mental balance out upon that stone. It was the only target he could see.

Within the mana, as his mind currently was, Luria herself was only an idea. Unlike the enchantment that illuminated the seeing stone drifting out there since last night, he could not see the moon within the mana stream at all. The moon, like any form of normal matter, existed outside of the mana stream. The only way to find things through mana was to know them magically, to memorize the signature they left as they moved through the sea of teeming blackness from which all magic grew. His enchanted stones had a vibrant signature, almost like a magic scent; he could find them easily. But unknown Luria did not. Size didn’t matter; seeing magically was about familiarity. He could not see the moon, because in this place, in the stormy mana sea, he did not know where it really was. He had no way to find it. He had no familiarity. And so, as he had every night before, he was going to have to guess.

With last night’s stone as guidepost, he pushed the mana thread past it, thickening the stream as he drew more power into his mind, shoving outward with every ounce of his might, up to where he felt Luria just had to be. He pushed against the conflict of his ignorance—the bane of all magic but the divining kind—and very quickly he found that he could push the thread no further. This was as far as he could go. He anchored the thread to the nothingness and returned his focus back to the seeing stone he held. With a flick of his mind to make certain that his mana thread was still securely bound, he drew the thread back into the recesses of his intent, imbuing it with the elasticity of his will. He stretched it taut and then let it go with a silent mental snap.

He opened his eyes as the stone vanished from his hands. There came the familiar sense of release as the mana left his mind and a faint sucking sound as air filled the space once occupied by the stone. He had to wait a few moments after the cast for his head to clear—blind casting was a brutal thing to do—and then he could see how far his stone had gone. He hoped that this time, unlike all the other times, it would be floating at least somewhere near the moon.

He used a basin of water, a new one as the old one had been burnt beyond repair, to serve as an enchanted scrying well in which to locate the seeing stone. Scrying was a far easier form of seeing than direct sight was, and using the basin helped conserve his energy during the long nights of casting blind. The down side of the scrying spell was that he couldn’t move the view around within the basin’s frame; and there was no sense of smell or sound to be gotten from the watery spell at all. But it did what it needed to do. The view the scrying basin afforded him was simple: either Luria would be huge and his seeing stone was getting close, or it would not. It would either look noticeably changed, larger and filling the scrying basin with its pinkish light, or it would still be hanging as it always was, distant, the same size, and still excruciatingly far away.

And it turned out to be the latter case. Luria still loomed far beyond the tiny seeing stone, looking no different from the seeing stone’s location than it did from Altin’s tower on Prosperion. It was as if he’d traveled no distance at all. Again. But he was not discouraged. This was the pattern he’d fallen into over the many long months since he’d begun. It had become an old familiar dance. And so he pressed on.

He used the information he got from the new seeing stone as the founding location for the next—once he saw the stone in his basin, looked through it from its location high above, he then knew the place, even if it was just a patch of empty darkness somewhere in the night. Technically, he’d been there, and it became a patch of empty darkness that he was now familiar with. It was also helpful that teleported objects left a mana trail that lingered sometimes as long as several hours. And it was with this added aspect of the magic that Altin could cast an improvised Hop spell, making quick jumps possible, which helped distance and energy efficiency. Hopping was a form of teleportation that allowed for double, triple, and even quadruple teleports, like skipping stones on a pond if a teleporter was sufficiently powerful and skilled. Altin was both. Teleportation was Altin’s primary school, and one in which he was ranked a Z.

With his bearings settled on the newest seeing stone, Altin took another enchanted river rock and began once more to chant. He followed the same procedure as before, but this time aimed the string of mana precisely at the newest stone, guided by and linking to its trail. He summoned the mana necessary to send this seeing stone up to where the last one was, and then let it go, intent on hopping this one off the first and doubling the distance with almost no more effort than he’d used for the last attempt. He felt the stone leave his hands and the reverberation in his mythothalamus as the new stone streaked up the mana trail and skipped off the other one, whipping right on by and taking Altin’s quest another step further into the night. Then came a second mental jolt, solid like that sense transferred up a croquet mallet when one’s ball has been precisely struck. The stone had reached its final resting point. Altin tried not to allow himself any undue optimism as he opened his eyes and moved over to the scrying basin for a look.

Still nothing.

He had to make an effort not to become angry, just as he’d had to curb his hope. This was the dance of his every night. He took another stone and began again.

And again.

And again.

For six hours he hurled stones into the night, and for six hours he still made no progress. Each spell, always targeting an unknown place, took a hundred times the mana that it ordinarily should. Perhaps a thousand times more. The ambiguity by its very nature made such things impossible to know. But each attempt sapped a portion of his strength, the cumulative effect like rubbing one’s soul against coarse carpet, over and over for far too long, allowing friction to build and heat to grow until the outer parts begin to chafe and burn, and finally it begins to tear through to the tender places beneath the surface where discomfort gives way to frustration, and frustration to anger, and sometimes, when the pain is great, to fits of rage.

Just the thing to kill a Six.

With all of his anger teeming, boiling like a cauldron in a fire, Altin prepped the last stone in the box. He was going to be goddamned sure this infernal stone got to Luria if it was the last blasted thing he ever did. He closed his eyes and reached out into the night, seeking the mana. His rage was further frustrated by the lack of mana; he’d tapped most of it from the region with so many attempts tonight. His patience was gone, and he was not about to wait for mana to flow back into the sky. He found himself absently cursing Tytamon for likely having used some mana too. A thought flickered across his mind then; somewhere deep inside, he heard the alarm go off. He’d lost his focus. But he caught himself in time.