Star-Born Mage

by David Estes

  “Feels like a long time ago. And don’t forget the mouths on their arms. And legs. And hands. And—”

  Silence. The rebuke came from Kukk’uk, who turned and glared at them. The Cir’u’non were once more on their feet, leaving clawed tracks in the dirt. Ever since their wings had grown tired and they’d been forced back to the ground, they’d been quick-tempered.

  “Did you hear something?” Dacre asked, frowning and listening for any sign of the return of the ground-tunneling creatures.

  Just two fools with moonrocks for brains, the general clicked.

  “She’s a charmer, make no mistake,” Coffee said. “Who needs a sword when you’ve got a tongue like that.”

  Kukk’uk’s glare sharpened into twin scythes, her eyes as dark as unlit coals.

  Dacre knew he was losing control of the situation, and quickly; that is, assuming he ever had control of it to begin with. “We should—”

  Keep moving? Kukk’uk said. That’s what you keep saying, but we’re not getting anywhere. My soldiers can scout ahead now that it’s light again. Save us all a lot of wasted time.

  It certainly wasn’t the worst idea in the world… “Fine. Send your fastest flyer. We’ll rest for a spell.”

  Kukk’uk clicked a command to a Jackal she referred to as Shan’uk, and one of the slighter creatures nodded and shot into the air, her wings unfurling like the dual sails of a sailboat catching a steady breeze. She climbed up the cliffside in a straight shot, finally beginning to curl into a glide just as she reached the precipice.

  A bolt of energy—almost like lightning—crackled from somewhere beyond the canyon wall, jackknifing into Shan’uk. Her body jolted and went rigid, stricken by the blast of energy. Her wings faltered, smoking from the cartilage that surrounded them.

  Kukk’uk clicked something rapidly and Dacre’s translator droned what she’d said, but he didn’t hear any of it, the blood rushing through his head as he watched the Jackal glance off the edge of the cliff, bouncing twice more off rocky ledges before landing a stone’s throw away, unmoving.

  No one said anything for a while.

  Finally, Dacre said, “We should bury her.”

  No, Kukk’uk said. She is already gone. There’s nothing left to bury.

  Dacre didn’t understand exactly—the body was still there, right there—but the Jackal spoke the words with such certainty he couldn’t deny that the general believed them to her core.

  He had brought them to this place.

  A place he now suspected they would never leave.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  ~~~

  By the time they reached the top of the canyon wall, the shock of the man’s death had worn off slightly, pushed away by exertion and sweat.

  Miranda stood beside Vee, their gazes traveling in opposite directions, searching for something, anything, in the darkness.

  My night vision must not be very good, Vee thought. For she couldn’t see even the darker space where the mountains must have been. Everything looked shades of gray in a tight range. There were other canyons, she thought, but that was all. No other identifying features.

  And then it was day again, and she slammed her eyes shut, the brutal red light bright and piercing after so much darkness. Slowly, bit by bit, she cracked them open, blinking rapidly to moisten her eyes.

  Her heart sank into her stomach a moment later.

  Impossible.

  The mountain range she knew had been to the south a couple hours earlier when they began their climb was gone, the area now an endless sea of interwoven canyons, as far as the eye could see. She turned in a full circle, her arms extended to maintain her balance as the wind picked up, buffeting her from all sides.

  No.

  Everything looked the same around them. Red rock canyons, a twisting, spiderwebbing maze with no beginning nor end. And they were in the middle of it. Wait. There was something else. It was almost as if the pattern of canyons were swirling around some central core, a space in the middle that appeared to be empty, like a big circle.

  “Do you see that?” she asked no one in particular.

  “Yes,” Miranda said, following her gaze. “It’s like a hole in the rock. Perhaps we’ve been going about this all wrong. It’s not an entrance into the mountain we should be looking for…”

  “But an entrance into the ground,” Vee finished. Oh great, we’re finishing each other’s sentences now? Vee and Em. Best friends forever.

  Miranda nodded. “Could be. Getting to it could take hours. This place is a maze.”

  Vee couldn’t disagree. Her heart was still beating too fast and she felt the first signs of panic begin to set in. She took a deep breath and counted to ten. Clearly, she was missing something. Clearly, she was overreacting. The abrupt change from day to night and back again, followed by the strenuous climb and death of one of Miranda’s soldiers, had addled her mind.

  She refocused, following the path of the canyon back to the broader area between the walls, where Frank had landed the starship.

  Nothing.

  The starship was gone, along with Dacre’s rig.

  ~~~

  Miranda uttered another curse under her breath. Vee had almost muttered something similar thirty seconds earlier.

  Confound this blasted planet! she thought.

  Breathe. Breathe, she reminded herself. Think.

  My implant! “Frank,” she said. “Do you copy?”

  The cat had either turned off his comm system or was in a deep sleep, dreaming of chasing mice or catching his own tail or whatever it was that cat wizards dreamed of.

  There was another possibility too, but Vee didn’t want to consider it just yet.

  “He’s not answering,” Vee said when Miranda looked a question at her. “Maybe the canyons are screwing with the connection.”

  Miranda nodded, though they both knew it was a flimsy excuse. Her line of sight was as good as it was going to get from up here, and the connection down in the canyons—where it should’ve been worse—had been crystal clear.

  Think, she urged herself again. There had to be something they hadn’t considered. This place. The people who lived here. The Gremolins.

  The answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not realizing it sooner. “It’s a spell,” she said. Miranda looked at her, brow furrowed. “All of it. The blocked tunnel. The day/night thing. The missing starship. The disappearing mountain range. We’re being messed with. By the Grems.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  “I’m not, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s not like we got so turned around we don’t know which way we came from. We stopped at the blocked tunnel, went to the west-facing wall, and climbed. That means our starship should be”—she pointed where the empty canyon lay still and silent—“there.”

  “But it’s not.”

  “Our eyes deceive us. It’s still there. It has to be. Whatever spell the Grems cast is clouding us somehow. Our vision or our minds, or both.”

  “I’ve never heard of a spell like that.”

  “Me neither, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. No one knows much about the Gremolins. Who knows what crazy magic they’ve been cooking up for the last thousand years or so.”

  “Okay,” Miranda said. “So we backtrack. We go where our ship should be.”

  “And then what? Wait for Dacre and his posse to return to their rig?” It wasn’t the worst idea in the galaxy.

  “Exactly. They’ll have to come back sometime.”

  “Terry? Minnow?” Vee asked. “Head to the starship or try to get to that big blank space in the canyons over there? What’s your vote?” She pointed to where the middle of the spiraling vortex of canyons continued to wait patiently.

  Her two compatriots had been strangely silent since they’d reached the top of the cliffs. Minnow especially, his face darker than usual from the toll the climb had taken on him. Minots are not made for climbing, he’d grunted more than once on the way up.
Terry had muttered a few indistinguishable words in Chameleot but offered nothing else. He didn’t look tired in the least; the opposite of Minnow, his slender body and sticky, padded fingers were made for defying gravity.

  Minnow said, “I’ve got no clue.” With an exaggerated motion, he turned his canteen upside down and shook it. Not even a single drop fell from the spout. “But if we don’t get more water soon, we’re all burnt toast. Literally.”

  Terry said, “I don’t know if this is magic or not. But the Minot is right. I’ll dry out even faster than you lot. My body isn’t made for hot, dry climates.”

  “It’s settled then,” Vee said. “We head back to the last known position of the starship. If it’s cloaked somehow, we’ll soon find out.”

  The only problem was: the starship wasn’t cloaked.

  When they finally arrived back in the original canyon, they were exhausted and worn out from their harrowing climb back down the cliff face.

  They walked back and forth a dozen times across the width of the canyon. There were no bloodstains from the fight Dacre’s crew had with the monsters. No monster corpses.

  And no starship.

  ~~~

  Dacre and the others stuck to the shadowy spaces close to the canyon walls. Night fell again. Then day. Alternating every couple of hours. Then every hour. Then every thirty minutes.

  “Is it just me, or are the days getting shorter?” Coffee said.

  “It’s just you,” Dacre said, though he’d started timing the day/night changes as soon as he realized they were speeding up. The last one was twenty-one minutes. The previous one had been thirty-two. The one before that? Forty-Five.

  Like a countdown.

  Maybe it means we’re getting closer to the end, Kukk’uk clicked.

  Yeah, Dacre thought. That sounded right. But the end of what?

  Day again. Twelve minutes, Dacre thought.

  Night. Six minutes.

  Day. Two minutes.

  The canyon curled to the left, almost a full hook, which limited forward visibility to only ten-square-meter slices at a time, like pieces of a pie slowly being fitted together to make a whole.

  And then the whole pie was revealed past an arched entrance, a rainbow of stone crossing overhead from one canyon wall to the other. The face of the arch was carved into recognizable images. Screaming mouths full of razor-sharp teeth. Dozens of them.

  A warning: Turn back now.

  Or else.

  Night fell like a dropped blade. One minute, Dacre thought.

  “I’m game, are you?” Coffee said.

  “Why not? We’ve gone this far,” Dacre replied, trying to joke away the sense of foreboding he felt in every cell of his body.

  In a tight line, the group stepped beneath the arch and the world changed.

  ~~~

  Staying in one place was pointless, Vee knew. They would die of dehydration well before starvation. Or the monsters would find them first and speed up the whole dying thing.

  So they walked, no one speaking, heading in what they believed was the right direction to reach that strange empty space in the canyons they’d seen from the top of the rock wall. It was an objective, at least. Better than walking aimlessly, without direction.

  From within the bowels of the canyons, navigation was difficult. Every twist and turn in the trail felt like a new code that needed to be deciphered. For all Vee knew, they had hair-pinned back around and were now traveling further and further away from their goal. Somehow, however, she knew that wasn’t the case. And as the days got shorter and shorter, and the nights shorter still, the planet seemed to be sending them a message:

  You’re close. Don’t stop. Come on. Find me.

  But then they saw it. Terry, with his keen eyesight, spotted it first—the carved arch leading into the empty space nestled amongst the canyons. One by one, they stopped.

  Night turned to day.

  Vee said, “They went this way,” finally noticing the footprints on the ground before them, something they must’ve missed while their eyes were constantly readjusting to the alternating periods of light and dark.

  The footprints spurred her on and she ran as day turned to night, hearing the others fall in behind her.

  The canyon walls whipped past and then the arch carved with monstrous, howling faces flashed by overhead. And then—

  She saw him just as day turned to night turned to day.

  And blinked.

  And he was gone.

  Night.

  Day.

  Night.

  For just a moment he had been there and no time had passed, and they hadn’t ruined each other, their whole lives spread out before them like an unfurled banner, and his eyes were full of surprise and something else—Vee wanted to believe it was what she felt, hope—and then he was gone.

  Vanished, like he’d been nothing but an apparition.

  “Dacre?” Vee said. And then louder: “Dacre!”

  It was still night, and the darkness finally seemed to be holding, except the godstar was still visible in the sky, sheened with crimson armor but not bright enough to usher in the daylight, as if it was covered by a thin blanket, only strong enough to illuminate the ground, casting haloes at her feet.

  There was no response except the wind picking up, howling through the empty space in the canyons, whipping up dirt and creating tiny dust devils.

  The ground began to shake.

  ~~~

  The moment Dacre and his posse stepped beneath the arch, the empty space had been filled. Not with structures or things, but with people.

  Grems, he thought, seeing the hundreds of hunched over natives set in a line before him. Not a line, he realized. A circle.

  “Are you seeing this?” he asked. The daylight had held this time, the red godstar so bright he was forced to shield his eyes.

  Coffee said, “Seeing what?” but when Dacre glanced at him he could tell the man was joking, his eyes filled with the same wide wonder he knew his own were.

  The scuff of running footsteps dragged him away from the spectacle for a moment, and then—

  She was there.

  Impossible, his mind told him even as his eyes drank her in. Storm-gray eyes that seemed to burn with a single-minded intensity. A lithe but muscular physique, a product of the rigid physical training in the Academy, something she must’ve maintained in the years since the time they spent together there. Everything was different about her. Everything was the same.

  Verity Toya, the girl he had loved. The girl he still loved. The girl forbidden to him, his punishment as severe a penalty as death would be.

  And then she was gone, leaving only the faintest cloud of dust where her feet had been, each individual mote visible in the bright light.

  He took a faltering step forward, reaching out as if he still might be able to touch her.

  What are you doing? Kukk’uk clicked sharply.

  Dacre shook his head. His mind was clearly playing tricks on him, the stress of the situation intensifying his own regrets. He turned around and, once more, forgot about Vee.

  The scene before him was enough of a distraction. The Gremolin circle was massive. He’d originally estimated their number in the hundreds, but now he realized he’d underestimated. There were thousands, each wearing a dark, hooded cloak that hid their bodies and feet. Their backs were to him, their faces turned inward toward the center of the circle.

  They began to chant, a low, guttural sound almost like a series of barks.

  “What now?” Coffee hissed.

  Kukk’uk clicked a command and his soldiers drew their weapons.

  Dacre rolled his eyes. “Put those away. If this becomes a fight, they won’t help anyway.” He knew even half a dozen Grems would wield enough magic to decimate them. No, if there was still a way to accomplish their goal, it wouldn’t be through violence. Except maybe as a last resort.

  Kukk’uk narrowed her dark eyes and then gave the order. Dart guns slid back into hip hols
ters.

  “What are you thinking?” Coffee asked. The chanting grew more intense, the voices raised perfectly in sync with each other.

  “Say hello,” Dacre said, taking a step forward. “Introduce ourselves. See if we can borrow a cup of sugar. They’re your neighbors, after all. Be neighborly.”

  As it turned out, Dacre didn’t need to be the one to break the ice, for just as he took his second step, the thousands in the circle turned as one, facing outward. And all eyes within view focused immediately on him, or so it felt.

  At the same time, the Grems began to trace spells in the air with gnarled, crooked fingers. Glyphs. Their barking continued as they drew, growing louder, filled with what sounded like malevolence.

  Something wasn’t right. Dacre could feel it like he might detect a coming storm in the raised hairs on the back of his neck. “Wait here,” he said, and started running.

  ~~~

  The wind whipped around Vee, throwing her hair into her face.

  “What the Hole is happening?” Minnow shouted, catching up to her. His large hand was thrust in front of his face to protect his eyes from the swarms of dust in the air. Terry arrived next but was thrown from his feet as the ground shook harder, seeming to buck and roll under their feet. Vee barely managed to maintain her own balance by pressing a palm to the ground. Through the layer of dirt, she could feel the tremors more sharply, her own bones beginning to rattle beneath her skin. She tried to respond to Minnow’s question, but her teeth chattered violently and almost took off her tongue.

  “Something’s coming!” Miranda managed to shout. She and the other Centaurians had drawn weapons and were aiming toward the nothingness, as if at any moment enemies might materialize from the dust itself.

  The monsters with the mouths and teeth, Vee thought. Is this what happened to Dacre and the Jackals?

  She managed to draw her own mag-pistol, feeling the thrum of magic through her veins.

  The ground exploded beneath her.

  ~~~

  With reckless abandon, Dacre charged through the line of Grems, bashing between two of them. They sprawled to the ground on either side, their hoods flying back to reveal their gnarled faces. Their eyes were rolled back in their heads, their fingers continuing to trace complicated glyphs in time with the others.