by John Daulton
“Who took her, Gimmel?”
“She went herself.”
“On horseback? She’ll be days getting there that way.”
Kettle’s florid cheeks rounded and rose as she smiled. “Ya don’t give her much credit askin’ that,” she said. “The girl learns quicker than that.”
Altin wrinkled up his face. “Then how?”
“She done gone up and sent a homing lizard to the TGS from that clean room up in the tower. She gone straight to Crown, and meant to make the rest a’ the way afoot.”
Altin’s dread instinct kicked him in the chest. A reflex. He panicked sometimes from merely thinking that Orli would go off alone. But she did go off alone, and frequently, at least when she could. She was much like little Pernie in that way. Turn your back on her for a moment and she’d be gone, out along the creek or wandering into Great Forest nearby, happily following whatever path curiosity tempted her to.
But Crown City was another thing. Most of the city was perfectly delightful, but there were darker neighborhoods too, and with the devastation of the war, there were still plenty of desperate people around, people who had fallen through the cracks of Her Majesty’s bureaucratic aid programs, or who disdained it on principle. Orli had been taken from him once by such people and in such a neighborhood, though in Leekant, and he’d almost lost her for good.
Kettle saw what he was thinking, and it was her turn to furrow up her brow. “Now don’t ya go and start frettin’ her every last breath,” she scolded. “I can see it in yer face. She’s a fine strong lass and can fend fer herself as well as anyone. You’ll smother her goin’ on at her like all that worryin’ in yer eyes.”
“Says the woman who frets for Pernie every moment of every day.”
“Well, that’s a wee tiny child,” Kettle said, putting her hands on her stout hips. “And there’s a whole heap a’ difference tween the two.”
Altin laughed. No, there wasn’t. He’d seen little Pernie in a fight. That child was as helpless as a prairie wolf. And like as not, after two months with the elves, being trained in the art of butchering humans, no doubt, he expected she was even less helpless now than when she left. But he didn’t want to argue, so he nodded instead. “As you say.”
He left the kitchen and stepped out into the hall, where he cast a quick seeing spell into the TGS office in Crown City. Of course Orli wouldn’t be there.
He thought about pushing his vision through the streets and out into the fields beyond the city walls, but thought better of it. If she went on her own, she likely wanted to be on her own, so he decided the easiest thing to do was simply meet her there.
With another quick seeing spell to make sure he was clear, he teleported himself just outside the gates of Little Earth. He greeted the two guards with familiarity, went inside, and headed straight for General Pewter’s office, intent on finding out if Roberto and his crew had gotten the Glistening Lady restarted yet back near Earth. It had been a few hours since he’d teleported them there. He was anxious to know how long it was going to take Professor Bryant to find the right machinery.
The general’s pinch-faced secretary greeted him as familiarly as had the gate guards, and he was admitted right in to see the general. Orli was already sitting there.
“What?” Altin exclaimed. “How did you get here so fast?”
“I ran,” she said. “I felt up for a run today. It’s been a long time since I really got out at all. A little three-mile jaunt was nice, but honestly I wish they’d built this thing a little farther out. I did like running through the city, though. The rebuilding is coming along well, at least in the mile-long stretch I saw. The Temple of Anvilwrath looks like it’s nearly finished now. That’s amazing, such a huge building and in such a short period of time.”
“The Church is never short on money. Fear and desperation make the salvation business extremely profitable, especially when you never have to deliver the goods.”
“You’re such a cynic. Those people helped save everyone’s lives.”
“As did many others, and it wasn’t with the people’s money.”
“I’ve got work to do if you two are going to debate the morality of monetized theology,” said the general, but he was smiling at his daughter, contented to have her there.
Altin shrugged. The fact that many of the people of Crown still struggled to rebuild their neighborhoods while the temples and city buildings went up with speed bothered him more than a spell song with a missing note, but he let it go. “Well, I’m glad I found you here,” he said instead, moving to sit next to her. “I wanted to tell you what Blue Fire said.”
“I was afraid of what she was going to say. That’s why I needed to go for a run.”
He nodded, knowing well what she meant. “Well, the good news is that she has agreed to have us do it. You might even say she holds the smallest bit of optimism that it might work. Very small, but I saw it, if briefly.”
Orli perked up at that, but she saw the way Altin’s expression flattened after. “But what?”
He hadn’t said “but,” but it was in his eyes. “Well,” he began, and then started fidgeting with his sleeve. Everyone in the room was waiting impatiently, so eventually, after twitching the material back and forth a few times between his forefinger and his thumb, he finished it. “She said she’ll let us do it so long as I promise that”—he paused again and swallowed—“if something happens, and Yellow Fire really does die, I will do the same to her. Cut out her heart in the same way, so that she will finally die too. She wants to be with him in death if it doesn’t work out in life.”
“Makes sense,” the general said to that. But Orli leapt out of her chair and spun on Altin, glaring at him as if he’d already done the deed.
“You will promise no such thing! So you can go right back there and tell her that. That’s not going to happen. You wouldn’t dare.”
“I already did. It was the only way she’d let us try.”
“Altin Meade!” Orli gasped. She looked to her father for support, but there was none coming. Her mouth dropped open, but she was stunned to silence.
The general looked uncomfortable, but he was not one to lie. “She’s been living in eternity without him; at least that’s the way I hear you both talk about her. I have to tell you, having lost a wife myself, I can see wanting to die.” His expression was one of absolute sobriety. “If it hadn’t been for you, Orli girl, I would have happily lain down and died after your mother passed. Nothing ever hurt me like that did.” He stared at nothing for a moment, then blinked back to them. He looked to his daughter, and the corner of his mouth twitched. “I will say, when I thought I’d lost you to the NTA death machine, it was looking like misery was going to raise the bar.”
Orli’s lips rolled in and her eyes narrowed, her posture like the hammer on a gun that’s just been cocked, but she stopped, looking into his eyes, seeing the pain reflecting in his memory, remembering her own—not for her near fiasco, but for her mother. Orli had been old enough to know well what her mother’s death had done to her father.
Slowly at first, but then all the rest at once, tension left her. She turned back to Altin with only one eye narrowed this time. “Fine,” she said. “But you didn’t promise you’d do it right away, did you? Like, you didn’t specify a time?”
He smiled, a wan thing, then laughed a little. “No,” he admitted. “I did not.” He might have pressed on, explaining that the essence of his intent had been clear to both Blue Fire and himself, the implied understanding clear enough via the exchange of their thoughts, but why bother. Orli was technically correct, and that was enough to get him through the difficulty of the moment now. “But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Which is, actually, why I am here. I was hoping to see if Roberto has his ship powered up after the teleport shut everything down, and if so, to find out whether the professor perhaps has a line on our equipment yet.”
Orli turned to her father and, looking as if some marginally foul odor had just
blown into the room, made a face as she asked him to bring up the Glistening Lady on his com.
The general laughed at the way she sneered the name; so did Altin, and soon Roberto’s face was up on the wall monitor. His first words were directed straight at Altin. “Listen, man, I know it’s all magic awesome with you and the teleporting thing, but you really need to do something about turning out all the lights. Granted, my ship is a lot smaller than the Aspect was, but five hours floating helpless is still a royal pain in the ass.”
“Patience, Captain,” Altin said. “The TGS can only build so many platforms at a time. The secret of the engasta syrup, from which the platform tiles are made, is a well-guarded one, and the process for making it expensive and time consuming. There are only so many people who can do it at all. But, in time, there will be TGS depots everywhere.”
“Yes, Captain,” Orli added to that, pronouncing his title in a way that made it sound mildly insulting, “so until then, be thankful you are friends with people who can toss you about the galaxy as you please. Everyone else is still sitting on their hands, and ninety-nine percent of them still will be for years.”
Roberto laughed. “True,” he said. “But it just wouldn’t be me if I didn’t bitch.”
She laughed. “Also true.”
“So how about that water saw Doctor Bryant spoke of?” Altin asked.
“Oh, yeah, no worries. He was on that the second the power came back up. I guess the parts he needs to make one aren’t that rare as long as you got the cash. He’s working out the details with the vendors now. It’s going to set you back big time, dude, like, we’re talking bank.”
Altin frowned a little, and absently fingered the amulet he wore, which was enchanted with the translation spell called Greater Common Tongues. Even with that powerful magic in place, sometimes things Earth people said only barely made sense. “I think I got the gist of that,” he replied.
Orli clarified for him in his own language, she being the first person from planet Earth to have learned the common tongue spoken by most in the kingdom. “The bottom line is it’s going to be expensive.”
“Whatever it takes,” Altin said. “Gold is not a problem.”
“It may take more than you think,” Roberto said. “We’re talking about a really big machine and people to run it. Plus a crew to dig it all out down there and set it in place.”
Altin laughed. “My friend, you forget who you are speaking to. My mentor, Tytamon, was two years shy of his eight hundredth birthday when he died. And in all those years, and all those adventures, and with all those favors and remarkable deeds he performed for lords and ladies along the way, the man amassed wealth you can’t even imagine in that time. And more than amassing it, he hardly ever spent so much as a copper piece. Why, Kettle herself spends more money in a year than that man ever did.”
“Good,” Roberto said. “Because you’re going to need it.”
Altin shrugged, and smiled at Orli. “I think Tytamon would be happy to have some or even all of his fortune spent on such a noble cause.”
Orli beamed and leaned into him, hugging his arm. “I think he would too.” She stared vacantly at the edge of her father’s desk for a time, then added, “I miss him,” with a sigh.
Altin tipped his cheek down and rested it upon her soft blonde hair, his sigh a mournful echo of hers. “As do I.”
Chapter 20
The net was strung between two cliffs, stretched over a wide split that cut a five-hundred-span wedge into the island. Beneath the net, far beneath, tormented waves rushed in and out of the angularity, churning and seething. They crashed against giant rocks that had lain there since the island broke long ago, and the foaming water reached up like hands, snatching at the two figures that danced and darted back and forth across the net. But Pernie’s feet were in no danger of getting wet, not from the sea-green fingers anyway. Nor were Seawind’s as the two of them lunged and leapt around the wide mesh of ropes, as sure-footed as two two-legged spiders locked in mortal combat.
And it was mortal combat for Seawind, for Pernie’s spear thrust forth with the speed of a toad’s tongue, the sharp point aimed for the small concavity of his throat. He turned it aside easily enough, of course; the barest movement and the shaft of his own spear clacked against hers as he knocked the thrust away. With a deft movement of the bottom of his spear, he blocked the cut of her knife too, a speedy, hooking slice with which she meant to cut the tendon at the back of his knee.
She reached too far for the cut and exposed the side of her neck, which he struck with the edge of his flattened hand, just hard enough to dim her vision for a moment and send her falling into the ropes. She tangled up in them for a moment, then fell through a wide gap, but she caught herself with her spear, flattening it horizontally just in time.
Seawind stared down at her dangling there above the churning sea far below. “You gave me your head,” he said.
“I know what I did,” she spat back. She threw her dagger at him as she said it, and he just leaned away as it flicked past his face. In the time it took him to do it, she’d swung back up through another opening in the net and landed neatly, straddling the gap. She held her spear at the ready again.
“You’ve only just earned the right to have that blade, and already you throw it away,” he said.
Pernie circled him and feinted a thrust for his face. She feinted another for his groin before muttering the two-word command Djoveeve had taught her, the words for a short teleport, which brought her right behind him in the barest breath of time. She plunged the point of her spear straight for where she had learned his kidneys would be if he were human.
Seawind spun in that instant, and again came the clack of his spear shaft against hers. The wooden sound echoed back and forth between the cliff faces, audible even against the thunder of the surf below.
“You would kill me if you could, wouldn’t you, little Sava?”
Pernie thrust for his face and then cast the teleport again. She feinted for his back, and cast the teleport yet again, this time appearing to his left and trying to sweep his legs with the butt of her spear, intent on sending him crashing into the rocky, roiling waves.
It didn’t work. He hopped over the sweep so easily, so quickly and lightly, that it didn’t even flex the ropes.
Seawind smiled as she came at him in a flurry of blows, her small feet dancing along the ropes and over the gaps with surety. Her thrusts and cuts, long sweeps of the spear butt toward his ankles and knees, all came in a frenzy of accuracy, and for a pair of steps, even he only just managed to dance away. The smile grew.
“Do you hate me so much, little Sava,” he asked as he sidestepped another thrust, “that you would have me dead? There is more that I can teach you still.” He jumped over the low, flat arc of her spear tip, which was once again seeking to knock him down. He landed catlike on the ropes as she teleported herself behind him again and thrust for his elven guts.
He spun and blocked it yet again, and danced away, and repeated his question twice more before she finally saw reason to reply.
“You said I could go home if I mastered the spear.”
“But you haven’t.”
She made two quick stabs for his belly and teleported behind him, then back again, where she tried to split his head open with a jab toward his open mouth as he began to speak. That thrust he had to teleport away from.
“I have,” she insisted, dashing along the ropes at him so quickly she was like a little monkey on a branch. She stabbed at his feet, rolling out from under a sweep of his own spear tip, and blocked two more he sent right after. He blocked her backhanded swing with his forearm, a cut that would have slashed him open along the ribs. The clack of her spear against his arm was nearly as wooden as if he’d blocked with his weapon. He teleported behind her and kicked her feet out from under her again, once more sending her tumbling through the ropes.
She didn’t get her spear flattened out in time, and she fell right through, heade
d for the rocks, her spear held uselessly in her hand.
She vanished ten spans into the fall, then reappeared, right behind him, a little off balance, but with a jab of her spear meant for the back of his knee. He jammed his spear butt down into the heavy rope, violently, the angle just right to deflect her stabbing attempt and the strength of it enough to send a shock wave up the rope, which dislodged her once again.
She hooked a knee over the rope, and caught herself with her left arm. His first thrust toward her she was able to tap aside with her own weapon, but the second one scored, a blunt thrust with the butt end that caught her right between the eyes.
When she woke up she was resting against the rock face where the edge of the net was anchored to the southern cliff. Seawind squatted beside her in the way the elves did, seemingly averse to sitting most of the time.
“You’re growing very strong, little Sava,” Seawind said as he looked out across the ocean. “Barely a half year and already you are very dangerous.”
Pernie, remembering what had transpired, chose to pout rather than respond. She was never going to beat him. He was too fast. And his magic came without words. All the elves did it that way; that’s what Djoveeve had said. Two words was the best she’d ever do. Her “animal magic,” Djoveeve called it. The thing that made her special because she clung to it so hard. That’s what Djoveeve said. But it wasn’t special.
Pernie knew it wasn’t, because she knew that she was weak. Djoveeve had already told her how much power she had, her rank in her three magic schools. The old woman told her that her strongest power was growth magic, the stupid Healing sphere. She didn’t want to be a healer. But that was her best one. And she was only G class in that. G class. That was nothing. She could only be a nurse, or some bumpkin village healer. As if she would ever want to.
Her teleporting magic was even worse, a whole grade weaker. She’d never be like Master Altin was. Never jump into the stars. The more she practiced with her magic, the more she knew her magic was stupid and lame. She wanted to be a great sorcerer, and Djoveeve said she never would be.