The Galactic Mage (25 page)

Chapter
25

P
ernie was as good as her word, and it was with remarkable speed that she returned to Altin with two raven’s wings, cut neatly from the bird and sparing Altin from disposing of a corpse. While a bit unnerved by the delight the girl seemed to take in butchery, he had to admit she’d done precisely as he’d asked. She also refused to take the silver coins.

“I never seen Master Tytamon paying you,” she informed him. “So I ain’t taking money neither since I’m going to be yer apprentice too.”

Technically, Altin had an allowance, but still, what was he supposed to say to her? He frowned. This child certainly was difficult. “Well, I won’t be taking any apprentices any time soon, so you don’t have to worry.” It wasn’t the perfect evasion, but he figured it would do. He was wrong. The tears that he had so adeptly avoided in the meadow threatened once again to pour, forcing him to quickly add, “But if I do, I promise I’ll let you give it a try.”

That seemed to hold back the water for now, if barely, and she handed off the severed wings and turned morosely from the room. Altin felt as if he should add something more, something to make her smile, but he couldn’t think of the exact right words. There were things he might have said.

He grunted as she disappeared down the stairs, pushing inconvenient emotions aside, then went to the window that faced the courtyard to make sure she had really gone away. He saw her carrying her little basket of frog’s legs into the castle proper and knew that he was safe to cast his Polar’s shield.

Once the shield was up, he went to the spell book with the stasis spell. He studied it closely and read the description aloud:

Cast upon a falling or levitated object, stasis will grant such properties of location as if the spell’s recipient were firmly planted on the ground. The object cannot be moved by force or magic unless there is a more powerful magic at work. Applied physical force can, and will, move or destroy the object if said force is too great, as Stasis does not buttress the target’s physical properties in any way. However, the object may be moved about at leisure by the caster through the use of the simple release command embedded in the spell and re-stasised with the same activating word. The effect lasts for approximately two hours unless enchanted otherwise as per standard extension procedures.

The description went on from there about K-rank enchanters and whatnot, but Altin saw what he needed to see. Stasis was exactly what he wanted, or at least seemed to be, and he wasted no time in beginning to memorize the spell; his tower would not be falling into planets again any time soon. He worked a few hours memorizing it, and by the time he had it cast and sent himself back to Naotatica, he yawned and stretched tiredly from all the work.

He spent another hour in static orbit above Naotatica, back at the point where the falling in had begun, to make sure that the stasis spell was indeed working as it should. Once he was convinced of it, he enchanted it permanently in place. He made the appropriate changes in his notes, and then put himself to bed after a meal eaten out of Kettle’s crate.

He woke up an indeterminable number of hours later and wrote a note to remind himself to get a water clock the next time he went to town. It was so unendingly dark out here that he felt he might lose his sense of night and day completely at some point. Particularly if he was going to be out here for a while, which was exactly what he intended to do.

Now that he’d mastered the strange pull of Naotatica, he felt it was time to press on with the next planet in the line. He wished there actually had been a line, however, for according to his astronomer’s maps the planets at this time of year were nowhere near aligned. The closest one was the sixth planet in the solar system, Venvost. He squinted up into the night sky and tried to spy where he thought it should be based on his astronomer’s charts. But there were only stars speckling the night. He couldn’t tell one from the other.

He looked back in the direction of Prosperion and realized how very small it had become. He’d been so focused on moving outward, he hadn’t spent any time appreciating just how far away from home he’d come. Prosperion was just a pale blue dot. Hardly bigger than any other star, but still discernable by its hue. The sun was getting smaller too. Not uncomfortably small, but Altin could tell that he wouldn’t be able to travel a whole lot farther before being well beyond its range, which made him start to think. What if he did pass so far away that it faded out of sight? What if he got so far away that it disappeared and he could not find his way back. The thought made his stomach clench.

But he knew immediately that that was absurd. He had the advantage of always “knowing” where Prosperion was. That idea was at the core of teleportation law. You just had to know where you wanted to go. But still, it was a frightening thought. To be so far away from home. So far that even the sun might go away.

As a security precaution, he decided he needed to construct a fast-cast amulet to take him home. Or perhaps just to Luria so there would be no danger of someone standing in the way. He remembered discussing it with Tytamon. It was still a good idea, something for just-in-case.

And so he did. The prospect of losing sight of Prosperion and perhaps even the sun was such that Altin was willing to spend the two days required to make his fast-cast amulet. He only had a few flawed garnets in his tower to use, but the gem was not important beyond its purpose of storing the energy and the focus of the spell. Any gem would do. He chose a good-sized garnet, about the size of a lima bean, and trickled the mana into its tiny mass slowly over the course of two days; he even used the Liquefying Stone so he could layer in mana for what he figured would be more distance than he would ever need, a ridiculous amount. Why not? Given the distances he’d discovered out here so far, there was no sense taking chances after all. When he was done, he used a bit more lead from the brick downstairs and crafted a crude mount for the garnet using a transmutation spell from one of his books. He ran a leather cord through it and held it aloft to examine his work when he was done. The amulet was hideous.

He had to laugh at how horrible it looked. He was sure no jewel crafter. He should have had Aderbury do it; the man was an artist when it came to things like this. Oh well, he thought, it’s functional and that’s what matters. It made him feel a bit safer. It also gave him license to push outward harder too.

Satisfied, and annoyed that he’d allowed fear to cost him two days, it was time to press on. He looked back up into the sky in the direction of Venvost, ready to go. But, it was still not there. Or at least not that he could tell. Just an enormous darkness sprinkled with spots of light. He groaned. He wished he could divine. Finding the general direction of Venvost would be the simplest kind of divination anyone could do. Even B-class divination could provide enough of a feel for him to start.

After scanning hopelessly in the vast night sky, and after six tremendously long seeing stone casts with the Liquefying Stone in the direction he hoped was right, he decided to give divination a try. For all he knew he was casting in entirely the wrong direction anyway. He was not the mathematician Aderbury was, but he knew enough of angles to know that, given the distances he was working with out here, guessing could be an extremely time consuming way to get it done. Harder than finding a tadpole in a tar pit, as Tytamon would say. Altin was certain that he could cast himself around forever out here and never find a planet by anything approaching chance. The size of space was simply too great.

He went downstairs and got his
Divining for Beginners
book from his personal library on the tower’s second floor. He hadn’t opened this book in years, a decade at the least. He sighed as he blew dust off the top of its yellowed bulk.

He opened it up to the first page, the binding creaking as he did, and leafed impatiently through the introduction which explained the value of knowledge and defined the nature of Divination as “images that work with what you know.” He knew what he needed to know. He needed to know where in the last layers of hell damnable Venvost was.

He turned to the page that held the starter spell. It was a very simple spell, and it was a directional one. The instructions read:

Think about your mommy or your daddy, or your teacher if your parents aren’t nearby. Then, sit on the floor. Close your eyes and try to picture where that person is. As you think of them, chant the following words to the tune of “My Cat’s Paw:”
Leenox para meh, foor nah for nah moor. Leenox para meh, foor nah for nah loor.

Altin moaned and snapped the volume shut. The book was infantile. And he hated that stupid kiddie’s song. And his parents had been dead for years. And he already knew where Tytamon was, so what use was that supposed to be? He threw the book down onto his bed. He didn’t have time for stupid childhood spells.

He went back upstairs and cast four more seeing stones to absolutely no avail. His casts were still improving, and his distances were getting extreme. He could easily cast a seeing stone twice the distance it was from Luria to Naotatica now with the help of the Liquefying Stone. It was amazing what just being able to conceive of the distances out here did to help the casts.

He began to wonder if perhaps he’d already passed Venvost completely by. He moved from his latest view in the scrying basin and cast an improved seeing spell out to the tiny seeing stone he’d just sent blindly into space. He spun his vision round in all directions but still there were no other planets in his sight. There was nothing, just stars.

And his theory about the sun was proving right too. It was almost completely gone when viewed from this most recent seeing stone. It really looked like nothing more than a giant star. Which made him wonder if maybe that was all it really was.

What if the sun was just a star?

The thought struck him like a blow. He stared at the bright spot of light far back behind his tiny seeing stone floating in the night and realized that another cast or two like the last and his sun would be no more significant than any other of those other dots of light sparkling in the sky. It would be just like them. Exactly like them.

Which meant that they in turn might be exactly like it. The thought was chilling in its magnitude. What if the stars really weren’t holes in the ceiling of the sky? What if the stars were suns? Suns like the one that shone down upon Prosperion? And if they were, what if every star had a planet or two around it that was filled with life? A Prosperion for every point of light in the whole seemingly endless stretch of space? What an incredible thought. And it seemed to him as he considered it that it must be true.

Every sun had its own life. And maybe there could only be one place with life near any given sun. Maybe there weren’t going to be other people on the rest of the planets around his sun after all. Maybe that was just how the universe worked. He’d cursed the moon for being an empty waste of space. He’d cursed Naotatica too. But perhaps, once again, he’d been thinking entirely too small. He snorted in recognition of this fact and nodded to himself. Maybe there were only so many fish allowed to live in any given solar bowl.

He snapped his vision back into his body and then teleported himself and the tower out to his furthest seeing stone. He stood for a long while looking out into the stars. The darkness was as beautiful as it was vast and terrifying, the stars seeming to crowd together in every swatch of space. He marveled that as close together as many of them might seem, they were likely as far away as was his sun. Perhaps farther. Almost definitely farther. Nothing out here was close. It made him shudder just to think. And yet they called to him, daring him to come outside his tiny little space, challenging him to leap out of his tiny solar bowl and swim—swim with people from the stars. There simply had to be someone else.

But first there was Venvost he had to find. He would not begin another quest until his current one was done. That was not Altin’s way. As tempting as the stars might be, he had a few more planets to explore. And it was with a resigned sense that there would be no one to greet him on any single one that he set out to find them just the same. If he did not look for them, perhaps no one else ever would. He would not leave anyone out here all alone.

Chapter
26

A
ltin’s theories involving the vacant states of the other planets turned out to be entirely true, and, though it took him almost six weeks to find them all, and some considerable time scouting each of them out, in the end he was convinced that the races of Prosperion were all that his solar system had brought to life. Furthermore, religion was entirely disproved for him. There was both satisfaction and discontent in that. He’d always been happily agnostic before. In an odd way, the possibility that the Church might be at least partly right, despite his skepticism, had always been something of a security net. But now that had been taken away. Altin’s sense of loneliness was complete. There was no one else circling round the sun.

But the revelation helped to drive him on. He knew that there were others in the vast space that he found himself drifting in, there had to be, and he was bent on finding them no matter how long it took. And so it was that he set himself to the task of reaching for another sun—reaching for a star.

He had no particular one in mind, and it was on a lark that he forced himself to use the childish divining spell in picking one out. He sat atop the battlements with the infantile book in his lap and chanted the stupid baby song—though rather than picturing someone he already knew, he decided in his typically obtuse fashion that he was going to concentrate on someone he
wanted
to know instead. He knew that this attitude was probably going to prompt failure, particularly in a school for which he’d been told he had no gift, but such was his mood when he gave the spell a try.

He followed all the steps, just as the book said he should, and, just as he expected, when he was done he felt that he had no answers at all. The only new impression that he came away with in his mind was that now he knew he was a fool—that and, after sitting cross-legged on the floor singing that infernal cat song, he was very glad that there had been no one in the tower to see him try. He tossed the book onto the scorched table near the wall and looked back up into the sky. So many stars and no intelligent way to choose.

But he needed to pick one. So he did. He closed his eyes, vowing to fix his attention on the first one he noticed when he opened them back up. And he did just that. He opened his eyes, picked a star at random from the view, and marked it in his mind with a silent seer’s mark. “I will go there,” he said aloud and then his newest quest was underway.

Given his work over the past several weeks, he was able to teleport completely out of his solar system in just one cast, roughly four times the distance that Naotatica was from the sun. From there, however, it was back to work with the Liquefying Stone.

He took a seeing stone—both his crates freshly refilled with newly enchanted stones made during a recent trip back home and augmented with the new stasis spell, given what he’d learned from Naotatica about things tending to drift out here—and sent it far out into the night, aimed directly at his chosen star.

He didn’t even bother to check on it in the scrying basin, and instead he immediately picked up another seeing stone and sent it skipping off the first. He repeated the process eleven times, growing wearier with each successive cast, before finally looking into the scrying basin to see what he had done. Which turned out to be nothing. No change. No closer than before.

He knew it, of course, and there was no surprise, no disappointment. Just the establishment of fact. He was in for a long haul, and the early stages of this new pursuit were going to be about fathoming new extremes of distance. And so to that he set his mind.

Every day, Altin cast and cast his stones. Every day, for seven to ten hours, he would send seeing stones out into the night, aimed each time at his private, distant star. He cast until he was exhausted, throwing stones so far into the depths of space with each successive spell that by the end of the third week the stones were vanishing from his hands with an almost thunderous crack. After a day’s labor, for labor it was, he would collapse in his bed—if not onto the flagstones beneath his feet—following a last attempt and sleep for seven to ten hours. He’d eat, sometimes wash up, sometimes not, and begin again. And so it went for nearly a month and a half, a grueling display of discipline, Altin’s will only becoming more entrenched the longer that it took, an obdurate thing buried in resolve with roots deeper than a mountain’s and even less pliable. And still his star was no closer. After the month and a half, he’d actually spent two hours on his bed contemplating the nature of his own frailty, of his quest’s impossibility, but that moment quickly passed, and he was back to casting again. And so it went for yet another month. And then a month after that.

His occasional trips home—he’d taken to teleporting home every so often in person just to get his laundry done and get more seeing stones—yielded him a scolding from Kettle for his disheveled look. Pernie stared at him from shadowy corners on those occasions when he arrived, looking almost afraid. A glimpse in the mirror showed that he was indeed a frightful sight, but such things were not in his realm of concern. He had a goal and he would get there if it killed him. No matter what. And to hell with the history of the Six.

At times he was delirious after days of casting endlessly in a row. He knew he was walking on the edge, and he caught himself on two occasions mumbling over the scrying basin with nothing conjured in the water at all. He shook himself to sense both times and put himself to bed. He had an endless headache now as well, had had it for at least six weeks in a row. And he noticed that he didn’t smell the same. He caught whiffs of his own scent sometimes and realized that something in his body odor had changed, had turned more acrid, more acidic somehow. And his robes hung off of him like rags. But he did not care. He would go on, would continue to press his limits every day, press the Liquefying Stone. And he was having success when it came to that. The distance of his teleports became something too vast to be explained, even to himself, space so incomprehensible he had no way to describe it symbolically. He simply called each cast a “stone’s throw” and sufficed himself with that.

Somewhere just past his third month out—time was really something of a blur—was when he first encountered movement in the eternal dark of night. He’d just finished a string of six successive casts and was sitting on his stool catching his breath and having a bit of cheese when he saw it. He had to squint to be sure that he’d seen what he thought he saw, but sure enough, against the star-spotted curtain of sky there was a spot of total black, round and looking as if he’d caught a portion of space in a yawn. The yawn continued to widen, however, and it wasn’t long before Altin realized that the dark spot was moving. Very soon it was looming up at him blotting out a good portion of the night, as much as would a fist held out at arm’s length against the sky. It seemed to stop then, and just hovered quietly beyond the tower for a while.

Once more Altin felt himself cursing the unknowable distances of space. He couldn’t be sure if the dark spot was huge, like Naotatica, and still very far away, or if it was relatively small and right outside the shield. He took a torch from the sconce by the stairs and walked it over to the parapet, holding it out as far as he could reach. Its paltry flickering flames did nothing to illuminate the black ball dangling in the night.

Altin squinted up at it again and shook his head. It began to move again, or to swell, he really couldn’t tell which, and he got an uncomfortable sense of vertigo as it grew considerably bigger and drifted to the side. He wondered if his stasis spell had failed and maybe it was him doing the moving all the while. He quickly mumbled the words that would put his mind inside the Polar’s shield. No, the stasis spell was working as it should.

“Hmm,” he muttered aloud. “Well, at least I’m not alone. Unless it’s just an empty rock.” He had to admit that movement did not necessarily mean life. Nothing else since leaving Prosperion had. There was no reason to believe that this spot would offer anything new. In fact, it was his experience that most of the round things out here possessed no life at all, Prosperion being the sole exception to the rule. However, this object did not seem to move randomly or by chance.

He didn’t have much time to ruminate on it, however, for the black spot suddenly began to grow again, and the next thing he knew his tower shuddered as if an earthquake had struck.

“Nine hells!” he cried, staggering against the wall with the violence of the attack. The tower stopped shaking almost immediately, allowing him to regain his balance and to curse again. “Manticore’s milk, what did I do to deserve that?”

He cast his eyes around him seeking out the dark spot against the sky. He plunged the torch into the scrying basin to aid his vision; the light had made it difficult to see very far into the darkness. There it was, off to his right and slightly above. It was small again, not much bigger than a walnut from Altin’s point of view, and still shrinking. But it stopped a moment later, and once more began to grow. Altin, considered by most who knew him to be a quick thinker, stood transfixed. He was out of his element here.

Again the spot became huge and swept past his tower, once more battering the Polar’s shield with an incredible, stone-rattling blow that this time knocked Altin to the floor.

“For the love of Mercy,” Altin muttered as he scrambled to his feet. He wasn’t sure which would fall apart first, the Polar’s shield or his tower, but either way, he couldn’t just stand there any longer and let that thing beat upon him like it was, or his adventure through space was going to come quickly to an end.

He looked out at the spot again, once more diminishing in size as it passed him by. It stopped, and then headed back. He knew that he didn’t have time to cast a full teleport and for a moment considered using the amulet he had made. But that would be akin to him having run away. He wasn’t about to do that.

And just what was this gods-be-damned thing anyway? And why was it attacking him? In fact, how dare it attack him! He’d done nothing to deserve this offense. Only orcs attacked without provocation, not civilized beings like men or even elves. This was an affront to his honor, and he would not be put to flight.

However, the words of the stasis spell came back to him now:
Applied physical force can, and will, destroy the object if said force is too great.
Altin suspected he’d found the kind of force the spell was talking about, if not of any origin that the creator had had in mind.

With a word he released the stasis spell, granting the tower at least the luxury of absorbing the blow in the same manner that a warrior might roll with a punch or fall away from a truncheon blow. That done, he plunged his mind inside the shield to see how it was holding up. The strands of mana with which it was woven were indeed beginning to vibrate as the energy of the two great impacts struck them like strings upon a lute, but for now it seemed as if they were holding remarkably well. He just needed time to go down and run through his book of combat spells to see what he could use. He was going to put this black spot in its place.

He was halfway down the stairs when the next impact sent him tumbling the rest of the way into his room. He rolled into his bedchamber in time to see the bookshelf empty itself onto the floor.

“Damn it,” he spat as he scrambled to his feet.

The candle rolled off the table and fell onto the rug upon which the table sat.

Altin ran over and stomped out the small fire that ignited on the rug and put the candle back in its holder, mashing it firmly into place. He then ran to the pile of books lying near his bed, tossing tomes aside and looking for his book of combat spells. Finally he found the one he needed and flipped it right side round so he could have a look.

He leafed through it hastily, not even sure what he was looking for, when he came across an old familiar spell called “Luminous Aura.” Perfect he thought; that would help him see the dark ball better against the night. He scoured the spell rapidly, and memorized it with little trouble at all. Such was the beauty of the
Military Book of Spells
, everything in it was designed for combat efficiency, and it did not hurt that Altin, as a mage in service of the Queen, had been forced to read them nearly every day for the duration of his two-year stint. The incantation came easily back to mind.

But he needed more than just a way to see it. He flipped through some more, looking for something else. The tower shuddered as another impact shook it to its ivy-covered base. He ignored the impact and continued paging through until he found a spell called “Combat Hop,” a quick reflexive teleport spell meant to, in essence, “blink” combatants out from beneath descending blows. He thought he might be able to add it to the Polar’s shield. It would be fantastic if he could make it work, but he still needed something else. The tower shuddered again, and a light rain of dust and grit fell onto the pages of his book.

He blew the grit away and paged past the fire spells; no need to read them, he would never forget those after the drilling he got with them in the service. He stopped briefly in the section on electrical spells. He wasn’t sure if he could conjure lightning out here, but there was a simple version that wouldn’t hurt to try. It was a short spell with a single word release. It only took him a moment to get it in his head. He realized when he was done, however, that it required that he touch the target to release the spell. Rushing was causing him to make stupid mistakes and to waste valuable time.

The tower shook again, violent but not as bad as the last. More dust came down and settled on the page. It was like having orcish trebuchets launching boulders as big as wagons against his shield; the raw insult of it was really beginning to stir him to a fury, particularly as he’d done nothing to deserve this unwarranted attack. The candle rolled off the table in the middle of the room again.

He rose and replaced it in its holder once more, and then leafed quickly through the rest of his combat book; there wasn’t much else in it that he didn’t already know by heart. He’d have to make do with what he knew. Besides, the volume of dust falling from the ceiling suggested he didn’t have time to continue looking for a better set of spells.