by John Daulton
They bounced along long enough for half the sand in the hourglass to fall, and once more came to rest. A few more jolts and jostles, more mumbling from outside, and finally all was silent again. Silent for long enough that Black Sander decided it must be time.
“You ready?” he said to the man whose composure had been so admirable all along.
“I am.”
“All of you get up and come over here,” he said. “Get in close.”
When they had, when they were all stuffed into the corner of the little canvas box, Black Sander drew a dagger from his boot, leaned across the small space, and cut through the canvas where it began to droop near the broken part of the frame. The pitch-black beans of the Goblin Tea began to pour in like mud.
The man with the mushroom actually made a whimpering sound, and Black Sander had to suppress the urge to cut his belly open just like the canvas so they could all watch his frightened guts pour out.
With his foot, Black Sander pushed the heaping beans into the far corner as best he could. Confident with the process, he cut the gash a bit longer still. He made another long cut along the bottom of one canvas wall, near where they all stood, cutting the long, angular gash nearly to the height of their knees.“Give it a push up,” he told the timekeeper.
The man did as told, pressing into the tarp between the crossed wooden braces and causing the beans to pour in more forcefully.
“Can you feel the top?” Black Sander asked.
“Not yet,” the man replied.
It was the matter of some long and admittedly nervous minutes, letting more beans in, letting them pile up beneath their feet, until at last the man found the top of the crate. They let out a collective breath of relief, the man with the glowing mushroom most of all.
Black Sander cut away the remaining tarp above them, and with some cringe-inducing volume, they were able to pound the crate open from within. They were immediately met with a rush of chill alien air, air cooled by the electricity-powered machines of planet Earth. In minutes, they had the rest of his crew out from the other crates; all twelve men had made it without a hitch. After so many months of trying, he had finally arrived.
Chapter 41
Altin placed his hands on the new crystals that the professor and his team had grown. It was the first time he’d felt them without the mediating layer of a spacesuit glove. His breath blew in foggy plumes, giving him the aspect of a sea dragon blowing steam. The clouds of each breath played amongst the gray formations of the crystals like clouds around miniature mountaintops. He looked to his left, through the clear plastic sheet of the atmospheric tent that separated him from the rest of the team. Orli stood centermost amongst them, her spacesuit helmet’s spotlight glaring in at him along with all the rest, the combination of them making it so that he couldn’t see her face. He knew she’d be chewing on her bottom lip, though, like she often did when she was nervous. He made a point of smiling and gave the thumbs-up gesture that the Earth people often used.
The new crystals were just as Professor Bryant had said they would be, exactly like the rest of them had been when they first arrived. They were a little smaller on average, but otherwise they seemed no different, and the professor had assured him they would grow a bit more in time. Altin hoped it wouldn’t make a difference for what he had to do.
He scooted to his left a little and got down on his knees, peering as he did into the prickly-seeming expanse of dull crystal where it butted up against the pulsing purple mass that was Yellow Fire’s crystalline heart. The science team had done their part, and now it was time for Altin to finish off the work.
He leaned forward and had to stare very closely to find the hair-thin line that traced the edge of the new-growth crystals, the tiny line of separation between the transplanted heart and the “regrown skin,” as the professor had been calling it. He placed his hand over the crack, his right hand, upon which he wore his ring. The silver touched the tip of a crystal with a clink. He let go another long, foggy breath and opened his mind to the mana, the calm endlessness of its pink eternity. He swept at it with his thoughts, as if waving away a breath of smoke, and in this way he wafted it into the crack between the heart stone and the newly formed heart chamber “skin.” He spoke the words of the spell he’d learned from Aderbury’s book, forcing himself to cast the magic slowly, meticulously. There was so much at stake. He let himself lean on the rhythms of the spell, since it was so new to him, and soon enough by his measure of it—though a matter of nearly an hour to those observing from outside—he’d traced the gap all around the heart stone. He filled it all with the gentle mist of mana, shaping the surface of the heart stone as he saw it in his mind.
When the mana was all wrapped around and the gap was full, he spoke the words that anchored the transmutation spell in place, the first portion of it anyway, and then opened his eyes, staring down at what he had done. So far there was nothing to see. Just a hairline crack that was nearly impossible to locate with the naked eye.
“Well,” Professor Bryant asked, “did it work?”
“He still has to do the other half,” Orli snapped. “Be silent. Don’t you listen?”
Altin couldn’t help the smile that came upon his face. Be silent. She sounded like the Queen. But she was right, and he needed to stay focused on the spell.
He turned to his right to reach for reagents, a simple task made still difficult by the heavy spacesuit he wore, despite having the helmet and gloves pulled off. The environmental bubble they’d made for him around the heart stone was perfectly functional, but nobody on the team would let him take any more chances than that, just the helmet and the gloves.
Beside him were two jars. One was filled with soft clay taken from the bed of a hot spring north of Hast, and the other held three cocoons containing the pupae of the rare Endoru moth, found in the northwestern parts of Great Forest, where the gulf breezes cooled the trees and prevented frost come wintertime.
First he applied the clay, smearing it into the crack with his fingertips as best he could, then evening it out with a small brush made of artificial fibers, something manufactured on Earth that was much softer than horsehair.
He worked carefully, brushing the clay evenly so that no gaps or holes were in it. The spell instructions had been clear on that. There must be no part uncovered. He pulled a magnifying glass out of his belt and carefully examined the work all around. There was one tiny gap, barely a pinhole, that had opened up where the clay had been brushed too thin. He was glad he’d had the discipline to check. He only got one chance at this, and if he failed, both the heart stone and the crystal for several spans around would crumble and turn to dust. This was an all-or-nothing spell. Quite terrifying.
He brushed more clay into the crack, carefully blending it with the rest so that it was all even and smooth again. To be sure—that pinhole having made him nervous—he went around the whole thing again, adding just a little more. It was good. The work was patient and thorough.
He put the brush down and wiped off his hands with a chemical-coated towel that Doctor Singh had handed him before he’d been zipped into the atmosphere bubble. The doctor had not looked him in the eyes. He wouldn’t anymore, not after, as he saw it, Altin’s cold-blooded murder of Thadius Thoroughgood. Altin wondered if the doctor would ever understand. If he would ever forgive him. He wondered if maybe this time, this spell would be enough, the two of them working together with the rest to bring another life back from death. Surely that would be redemption, wouldn’t it?
He finished cleaning his hands and tossed the towel down, giving his hands a moment to dry. The cold air within the plastic bubble felt even colder as he waved his hands to expedite the drying process, though he hadn’t really needed to.
Altin realized he was stalling a little, and stared down into the jar with the three pupae inside. They wriggled like swaddled things. He didn’t have a lot of time to wait. He had to cast the spell before they started to come out, yet just as they were ready to eme
rge: such were the dictates of the spell and, thereby, the dictate that he do it now.
He reached into the jar and took one thumb-sized cocoon out. It might as easily have been a very large grub or a maggot of extraordinary size. He could feel the life inside of it. It made him wonder if he was really redeeming the life he’d taken after all. He would still be down by one. Perhaps Doctor Singh never would have reason to release Altin from his moral pillory.
“Oh my God, go already,” he heard Roberto say. “What’s he waiting for?” It wasn’t a direct link into Altin’s suit speaker, though. Roberto’s impatience was transmitted indirectly through Orli’s helmet feed. She’d been about to ask Altin if everything was okay just when Roberto spoke, giving Altin a glimpse of the tension outside the plastic room. Orli cut off her transmission immediately, leaving Altin in silence again.
He held the cocoon in his fist, firmly but not enough to harm it. “Slowly trickle mana in, shaping it like a heart,” the spell had read, so he turned his hand and pressed his closed fingers against his chest. He closed his eyes once more and reached out for the little plume of mana that drifted like a bit of string caught in an updraft, emerging from the mana cocoon he’d constructed around the heart stone. He took the strand up again and once more attached it to the rest of the mana all around, pulling it through the endlessness that seemed all the mana in the universe. He pulled it back out again, as if threading an eternal needle. He pushed it through his hand and wound it around the wriggling object that he held.
He poked the strand into the very center of the creature, the life that was seeking to be reborn, and he prodded with it until he found the creature’s little spark of light, the singular pink dot of the mana that animated it. Altin attached his thin filament to that.
The chrysalis popped in his hand. He could feel it, the damp of its innards there.
He had the presence of mind to catch the wisp of mana before it unraveled back and slipped beneath the surface of the crystal stones, if barely before. He locked it into place again, leaving it to dangle its length into nothingness like a lone wisp of hair. He opened his eyes and unfurled his fist. He saw the broken chrysalis lying there, gooey and unfortunate.
“What happened?” Orli asked.
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I think I put in too much mana.” He picked up the towel and wiped off his hand, pulling off his ring to clean inside and out. The green marble of the Father’s Gift that Blue Fire had given him was buried within the thick silver block. The ring was a crude piece of jewelry made by Altin’s own hand, but the stone pulsed steadily, visible only on that underside. It was beautiful. And powerful. He wondered if the phrase “slowly trickle mana in” written into the spell meant more slowly than what he’d done with it. He’d gone very slowly. As slowly as he could. But he thought that perhaps the ring made it too fast. The stone did change the nature of mana significantly, and surely the wizards who had designed the spell hadn’t been channeling mana with Hostile heart stone. Perhaps the timing had simply been off. Spells cast over long durations had that kind of temperament, so to speak, and if there was a downside to the stone, that might be it. Usually it was healers, not transmuters, who complained of such things the most, of overchanneling and impatience with patient spells. Still, he supposed he was healing in his way, even with this transmute, so he decided to give it another try. This time he would do it without the ring. Perhaps all he needed was to get the timing right.
He placed his ring atop the towel on the ground and took the second of the three wriggling cocoons out of the jar. With it gripped in his fist as he had the last, he once more reached out into the mana stream. It had been some time since he’d seen the mana this way, the thick, smashing swells of it churning in whorls of pinks and purples, sometimes so dark they were nearly black. It moved in eddies and curling licks like splashing waves and tongues of flame, yet even in doing so it moved like syrup on a cold plate. Compared to the unchanging pink mist, it seemed something else entirely when he looked into it this way.
Nonetheless, this was how the spell authors had seen it when they’d first cast the spell, and Altin was confident that he could channel the mana in its thick and slow-moving ways precisely as it was written in the spell. So he did so, and once again reached out for the tiny wisp of mana that he’d left attached to the surface of the joint he was trying to make.
But now it was no longer a tiny wisp. It was a massive thing, huge, as big around as a Palace tower. It was colossal, and it waggled about in a massive space within the mana stream like the decapitated body of a serpent grown to titan size. It nearly startled him to see how much perspective had changed. He might have laughed were the situation not so delicate. Surely that “strand” was not quite what the spell designers had in mind either. Still, he felt it might work best for the merging of the heart stone to have it that way, usable in its magnificent size, but he understood now why the chrysalis had been destroyed. It wasn’t even that he’d delivered too much mana, so much as that he’d delivered the correct amount too fast. Apparently, “slowly” meant really slow.
He began the words that the spell had put down for those who channeled mana naturally, slow casters like Altin had used to be, like he forced himself to be now. He took the end of that mighty mana stump and carefully whittled it down to size. Without the ring, it was the work of some time to shape it down to a point, shaving away mana as if he were sharpening some giant wooden stake.
At last he had it reduced to a thin thread, a thread so small that he wondered if he could even see it while he wore the ring. Nonetheless, he gathered it up and once more fed it into the new chrysalis that he held. Again he reached into the wriggling thing, probing and seeking the point of its tiny mana core. The little speck of mana he’d seen in the previous pupa blazed in this one like a great bonfire in the magic eyes of Altin in his ringless state. He nearly lost his concentration for seeing it, and he regarded the conflagration of pink and purple roiling in the tiny creature’s mind—its soul perhaps—with awe. He marveled at it for a time, marveled at the brilliance of the spell itself, but he caught himself and stuck to the task at hand.
He said the words and thought the thoughts of joining and becoming something new, of being one thing and then another in a sequence insistent and orderly. The transformative thoughts came clearly as each phrase of the spell argued for the certainty of a change, each word guiding the images in his mind, the concepts and very visceral understandings of what it was he sought to make the gap become: one. In time, much time, he finally had it; the nature of the clay became the nature of the crystal, which became the nature of the heart stone. One thing must become another, which becomes another yet again. He could see it, even feel it in his chest, sensing what it was to be that thing, to be that physicality, each phase of it he understood perfectly. And so, with no hesitation, with certainty born of the recognition that it must be now, he thrust his hand forward, a punching motion with his hand, opening it as he thrust, palm out. He mashed the chrysalis against the center of the heart stone. “Ca’ana Feen stora moore,” he shouted in the ancient tongue, and then his eyes flew open, and he stared at what he’d done.
For a moment he couldn’t see anything; the spotlights and even the glow from Yellow Fire’s pulsing heart seemed blinding to him. But he squinted and leaned forward, peering into the shadowy cracks around the violet light. The red-brown clay he’d brushed on was turning black, black like engasta syrup tiles, absolute black. It seemed to fall away, like the center of a square of wax being melted from underneath. It melted into the crack all the way around, and little wisps of smoke came out in places, emitting a noxious smell. There was a faint hissing for a time, and then nothing for several minutes more.
Then, simply, nothing.
He waited. Those standing outside the swollen arc of the pressurized plastic bubble waited. If they were speaking amongst one another, Altin hardly knew. He craned his neck forward, tilted his head, pressed his ear against the rock. He liste
ned. Nothing.
He sniffed around the edge for a time. The noxious odor was gone. Sucked up into the evacuation vent that was filtering everything in this frigid little room.
It occurred to him that maybe the cold temperature wasn’t good for the process at this point.
“I need to get out of here,” he said. “We need to take this chamber down. It is usually hot down here. Some of the gases in the air are different. I think it should be that now.”
After reclaiming his ring, he pulled his gloves on and reset the seal. He snapped his helmet back in place as well. All the lights were green on the panel on his left arm. “Okay, take it down,” he said.
“Come here first,” Orli said over the com. “Let me check your suit.”
He would have argued, but knew it would be faster to comply. He’d put this suit on enough times over the last year to be quite capable of doing it properly by now.
“Turn around,” she ordered, and he went through the ritual she always put him through. When he was done, and she was, she said, “Okay, drop it, Rabin.”
The grad student drew down the pressure in the bubble, enough that it could be unsealed from the rock face, and soon after, Altin was standing beside the rest, waiting anxiously as Rabin and his twin brother detached the rest of the bubble and rolled it up and out of the way.
Orli and Professor Bryant were the first to be peering point-blank down at Altin’s work.
“Don’t touch it,” the professor and Altin said simultaneously as Orli began to reach toward the heart stone.
The professor straightened after a few moments of looking at it, and pulled out the blocky device he’d used to take readings from it on his first day at Yellow Fire’s original home, the device Altin knew emitted the green light beams.
“Stop,” Altin said. “I think it best if you not bombard it with anything at all. Not now.” He couldn’t help but glance around at all the small crates of explosives lying around the edges of the regrown area; the fleet had already insisted on enough potential bombardment as it was. Poor Yellow Fire’s life, if he got one, was going to be lived under the specter of death for a while. Altin hated that it was so, but understood why the explosives and detonation apparatus had to be there. At least for a while.