by John Daulton
Maybe he’d finally come and take her out of here. He had rescued her from orcs before. He might come. Though she knew he wouldn’t.
Seawind took the silvery chains off the orc’s wrists, neck, and ankles and pushed him into the center of the chamber. A bare room, barely forty paces across, roughly round, with a ceiling a little less than two spans above Pernie’s head.
Shadesbreath stood near the entrance where Seawind had come in, holding a spear and a long knife made of steel, a human-made weapon rather than the volcanic glass the elves preferred.
“I can see the fear in your eyes, little Sava,” Seawind said. “So can this creature here. You cannot move on in your preparations to become Sava’an’Lansom until you are over this. The time has come. As you said, you have ridden the sargosagantis. This orc should take you mere moments to dispatch.”
“I won’t,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “You can’t make me.”
“We shall see.”
Shadesbreath came across the room and tried to hand her the spear and the knife. He studied her out-thrust lips and the petulant defiance in her eyes. She seemed a most curious object to him, judging by the look that moved his features ever so slightly. He made no other expression and simply dropped both weapons at her feet. He resumed his position by the door, though only briefly, and then he vanished without a word.
Seawind vanished as well, and Pernie blinked her eyes and watched the wisps of mana curling around where he’d gone. She couldn’t find him in it now, but she saw what he had done.
Djoveeve took her gnarled hand off of Pernie’s shoulder. “Just get it over with, child,” she said. “You’re more than a match for it now. Respect its power, but have it over and done.” She sang a few lines of a spell she knew and became a crane fly, which flew up and disappeared into the shadows somewhere near the upper reaches of the room, leaving Pernie in the silence and the near darkness of the cave.
She crouched and grabbed the weapons, then immediately muttered an illusion, her familiar variety of sight, sound, and smell. Then she stood and watched the orc as she fidgeted with the spear and knife. The knife was longer than she was used to, but she could wield it well enough if she needed to. She slid it carefully into her belt.
The orc was just standing there, rubbing its wrists. Her heart was pounding as she waited for it to do something to her.
She also thought that one throw of the spear would end it. It wasn’t even moving.
Her eyes fluttered as she watched the movement of mana around the orc. They were rumored to have magic more like animals than men, raw magic shaped by emotions rather than thoughts and words, though she didn’t know if that was true. She’d had animal magic at one time too, barely a year ago. It was surprising how quickly that had been lost.
She kept watching the orc for quite a long time, but it simply stared into the place where she stood. She wondered if it saw her. It wasn’t channeling any mana that she could see.
She moved carefully around it, silent on her feet despite the silence spells. Illusions failed constantly, especially when cast upon those who knew enough and had reason to disbelieve.
She snuck up right near it, her whole body trembling as she did. The stink of its unwashed body struck her like a blast of wind, driving her back a step. It smelled like death and misery. She could not help remembering the terror of that day in the courtyard back at Calico Castle. All the screaming and the blood. Fire and smoke everywhere. Tytamon lying on the ground and looking dead. Sir Altin almost cleaved in two. And Kettle. Pernie heard the snap of Kettle’s forearm breaking, loud in her memory like the sundering of some great tree branch.
With those images in her head, those sounds, a vision of Kettle standing there, bones jutting through her sleeve, bloodstains spreading dark and terrifying, Pernie thrust her spear straight into the orc, right between its ribs. One rib cracked as the weapon drove for the orc’s lung, echoing the sound in Pernie’s mind. She yanked the weapon out as the creature fell.
A rattling gasp came from the wound she’d made, and the orc slid down the wall and landed on its back.
It lay there doing that for a time, gasping, gurgling, both from its mouth and from the hole she’d made in its side. Watching it reminded her of the monkey and the latakasokis she’d killed. She watched it staring up at the ceiling, its green brow wrinkled in pain, shaping little Vs in its skin like angular ripples in the wake of its nose.
Pernie watched it, and her fear slipped away, the terror inside her evaporating like steamy condensation from a plate of glass. Clarity followed, and fear was replaced by recognition of a simple fact. The orc wanted to die.
Pernie wondered how that could be.
But if the orc wanted death, then it wasn’t going to get it from her.
She dropped to her knee and let go the invisibility. She touched the orc on its clammy green shoulder, and she sang the healing spell she knew, the simple one she’d learned before coming to live with the elves. She sang the song and funneled mana into it, and in the course of a few moments, the hissing gurgle from the orc’s lung had disappeared, as had, to a large extent, the wound.
She stood and stepped away from it, prepared to fight it now that it could see her, fully expecting it to leap up and attack. She wasn’t going to kill it, though. That’s what it wanted her to do. And that’s what they wanted her to do.
But the orc just lay there. It didn’t get up. It didn’t move. It lay prone, motionless, its big dark eyes staring into the black shadows in the ceiling of the cave. Then Pernie noticed the strangest thing. She saw a tear running down its face.
She couldn’t believe that such a thing could be real, for it defied everything she’d ever heard and seen. With no thought for her own safety, or perhaps with absolute confidence in its security, she approached the orc again.
It didn’t even look at her. It simply stared up at the ceiling still.
She wondered if she hadn’t healed it properly. She did know that broken ribs could be very painful things, so she put her arm back on its chest and cast the spell again. She didn’t know if it did anything or not. Her training with healing magic was nonexistent beyond her single bit of magic, and that really intended for unwilting daffodils.
The tear had run down and fallen into the grit of the cave floor, and there was not a second to follow. She saw merely the empty sadness of the creature lying there. Which frustrated her to the point of speech.
“What kind of orc is it that cries?” she asked. “I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
The orc stared at the ceiling.
“Hey,” she said, prodding the orc in the hip with her boot. “What’s the matter with you?”
Still nothing.
She looked around the room, expecting Seawind or Shadesbreath or Djoveeve to appear, but none of them did. She called out for them. “I already killed him,” she said. “Well, sort of. Then I brought him back. But that means I passed the test. So you can come back now.”
She turned full circle, but nobody appeared.
She harrumphed at that and looked back down at the orc.
“Is it because you want to go home?” she asked it after a while. When it didn’t answer, she very nearly gave up and left. Orcs were probably too stupid to speak anyway.
“Home,” it said as she started toward the exit where Shadesbreath had disappeared. “Death.”
She turned back and retook her place, looking down at it. “You want to go home to die?”
“Yes. Home to die.”
“You speak pretty good human for an orc,” she said, cocking her head sideways and rather caught up with such novelty. “Nobody ever said you could. Is that so you can talk to your food?” The thought came out before the ramifications did, and she took a step back suddenly, her spear pointed at it again.
“Kill Gromf,” it said. “Or take home. Kill Gromf or take Gromf home.” It sounded more agitated now.
“What is Gromf?” she asked.
/> “I Gromf. You Sava. Sava please kill or take to north clan for die.” It was actually a mix of the common tongue of Kurr and the elven tongue, which made Pernie wonder where it had learned any elven words. She wondered if it had been listening somehow while Djoveeve worked with her at night. But the most striking thing to her was not the common words or the elven ones that it spoke. It was the “please.” The very thought of an orc saying please was the most confounding thing Pernie had ever considered before.
She had to think about that very hard. Why would an orc say please to her if it would eat her when it got the chance? But as soon as she thought it, she realized she often talked to animals that she liked to eat as well. She’d had a pet frog once, yet she could kill them by the basketful when gathering frog legs for Kettle’s pot. She’d been quite good friends with the calves that Gimmel’s cow gave birth to, and twice they’d had them for dinner and many other things. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that people often talked to their food. And while she wasn’t quite happy about the fact that orcs would pick on little girls, she supposed she could understand it in the way of natural things.
She knew for sure she wouldn’t let an orc ever try to eat her again.
And as she realized it, she also realized that her fear was truly gone. The orc was no more dangerous than a man, or an elf, or even a sargosagantis swimming in the sea. Likely less so than the last. Likely less so than any of them. She supposed they might always give her the shivers if she thought about them wrong, but in a way, they were no different than poisonous parrots, pythons, or giant mantises. Things to be wary of, but nothing to be feared.
Once again she turned around and looked out into the empty spaces around the room. “I’m not killing it,” she said again. “It’s sad, and it wants to go home. Keeping it here all this time was mean. You should have killed it or let it go.” She turned and looked back at the orc and shook her head, then corrected what she had said. “You should have killed him or let him go.” Then, as if realizing the possibility of a mistake, she asked the orc, “You are a boy, right?” The orc didn’t have any breasts like human women did, or like the glistening bosoms of the splendid lady elves.
It wrinkled its brow at her, less in agony than as if for the first time its own interest had been piqued. “Human whelp?” It seemed like a question. “Whelpling?”
“Well, I don’t think that’s a polite way of saying it,” she said, “but I am a child, if you must know.” She looked down at herself, at her skinny little frame, and frowned. She looked back at him. “And I’m a girl, just in case you want to know.”
He sat up and stared at her for a time, and for some unknown reason, he began to laugh. It was a great, bass, throaty thing that filled the whole chamber with noise, larger than his emaciated body ought to have been able to produce.
“What’s so funny?” she asked him, her hands on her hips.
He said something, five words in a coarse, guttural tongue that she knew was orcish, but that she didn’t realize were the words to a spell until it was too late.
A ring of fire appeared, just a half step behind where she stood. Its heat beat upon her back. Her spear was already swinging butt end around in the instant it appeared, and before she realized the wall of fire was washing outward from the orc, she’d already knocked him flat with a solid thwack to the forehead, delivered by the butt of her spear.
The fire spread across the room, and as it passed over Seawind and Shadesbreath, they both emerged from their invisibility spells. Djoveeve dropped down from somewhere near the ceiling just before they appeared, apparently not wanting to risk melting her fragile little wings as the heat filled the room.
Gromf sat back up, rubbing a plum-sized knot that was already growing on his head, and he laughed as he saw the two elves glaring at him with wisps of smoke rising from the leather of their armor.
“Golden Queen’s elf not like Gromf’s fire still,” he said. “Elf need human whelp female for kill Gromf.” This apparently was the height of all humor for the orc, and once more, he lay flat upon his back, forced back this time by the power of unchecked hilarity.
The elves and the old Sava’an’Lansom came to stand beside Pernie and watch.
“I think you broke him,” Djoveeve said after a time. “His wits have snapped.”
“I confess that I had not anticipated such an outcome,” Seawind said. “But it appears you may be right.”
Pernie looked first at Djoveeve, then at Seawind, tilting her neck back for each. She looked then to Shadesbreath, who was still simply watching her. He was kind of creepy, she decided, like something in a nightmare. But in a good way. Or maybe not. She wondered if she really could someday be like him. She thought it would be fun to look at people and make them feel that way. She’d love to see Kettle or Nipper try to shuffle her off to bed if she could look at them like that. They’d never even say anything. In fact she was fairly sure she could walk straight into the kitchens and eat all the tarts and berry pies she wanted and nobody would say a thing about it again, ever.
“So what shall we do with him?” Djoveeve asked. “Shall I drag him out and leave him for the jackals and latakasoki?”
Pernie snapped round to face her upon hearing that. “No,” she said. “We have to send him home.”
“We?” Djoveeve asked with an arched eyebrow. “And how do we plan on doing that?”
She spun and pointed at Seawind with a slender little finger. “He said that if I could beat the orc, I could go home. Now he has to send me home. So, he can send the orc back with me.”
“We ought to just finish it off,” the old woman said. “You know the Queen’s army and the warriors from Earth have all but eradicated its people anyway. It has no home.”
“It’s the difference between killing and murder,” Pernie said. She glared at Seawind as she said it.
Djoveeve crooked an eyebrow, but she grinned a moment afterward, glancing up at the two elves standing there regarding the child. “Well,” she said, “she’s got a point. And she’s your weapon, not mine. I’m only helping you sharpen her. You do what you please.” She backed away from the orc and took her hand off her knife.
The two elves seemed to be communicating between themselves, though Pernie didn’t know for sure. Humans couldn’t speak to elves telepathically. For some reason it just didn’t work.
Unexpectedly, Seawind agreed. “Very well. We’ll send him back when he recovers his wits and health. I’ll see to his wounds myself.” Pernie smiled. She hadn’t won a battle of any kind with the elves since mastering Knot and running with the hunt. “And for you, little Sava, the time has come to complete your test.”
Pernie looked stunned. Complete? What did he mean by that?
“Where would you like to go?” he asked.
“You already know where,” she said. “I want to go home.”
“So be it,” he said. “Give me your hand.” She did. He placed something soft and cool upon her palm and whispered into her ear. Then, just like that, she was home, right back where she’d been standing the moment they took her away.
Chapter 48
To their credit, neither Ramachandran twin complained about being asked to unpack the equipment needed to set up the bubble for Altin again. It was a great deal of work to go through the stacked crates and find the pumps and hoses and filters and sheeting, and then get it all affixed and airtight. They’d taken down the power grid and atmosphere purifiers they’d set up, and getting it all going again, even with everyone pitching in, and Altin’s generous use of teleportation spells to move the inert pieces around, was still the work of two full days.
It felt like déjà vu as Altin once again slipped off his helmet and gloves and knelt before the pulsing purple light of Yellow Fire’s heart stone. “All right,” he said to it, “now we’ve gone to a lot of trouble for you. Why aren’t you cooperating?”
He placed his left hand against the crystals embedded in the cavern wall, half his hand
on the luminous edge of Yellow Fire, half on the dead gray crystals all around, his middle finger touching the place where the hairline crevice had been sealed. He felt nothing. No heat. No anything from any part.
Leaning forward, he peered into the gray clumps of the crystals that Professor Bryant had grown, just as he had before. The light from the spotlights behind him, as well as those on the helmets of the others outside the bubble, shone into them, lit them up a little, but mostly shone right through.
Not the least bit of color in them. Definitely not Liquefying Stone.
He drew in a long breath of the cold air being pumped into the chamber and closed his eyes, letting his mind slip into the mana as he had before. The endless pink constant of it was there, just as it had been ever since he’d gotten his own gift of heart stone from Blue Fire—the Father’s Gift that Blue Fire had melded with a tiny bit of her own Liquefying Stone. It was with that gift, that ring of heart stone, that he had shaped the first part of the melding spell. It was with that mana, the misty form of it made possible by his ring, that he’d infused the crack. But he hadn’t used the ring when he’d shaped and finished the cast. The ring had been off for that. And he wondered now if that was the difference somehow.
He sought the shape of the cast he’d made to finish it, thinking that perhaps it hadn’t completed itself somehow, that the joint he’d made between the two halves of the spell was not complete, the texture of the channeled mana different on each side of the joint. He hoped to find some small part of that unconnected or undone, some last loose end in need of being tied off or melded into place.