by John Daulton
However, his mission remained. The dismissal by Anvilwrath’s priests in Leekant merely meant he needed another diviner. He’d been confident that the combined power of the Maul’s circle of twenty-five could find anything for him, but that was no longer an option. They were busy. So his next best option, being that his own lowly level of divination was not worth the time it would take to try, not to mention the fact that he was already in Leekant, was Doctor Leopold. He made his way straight to the Guilds Quarter part of town.
He burst into the doctor’s office twenty minutes later, panting for having jogged the entire way. A few months ago, he might have risked teleporting into a back alley to expedite the trip despite such things being expressly against the law. But not now, not with the Orc Wars ratcheted back up. There were wards up and watchers monitoring the mana flow. The last thing he needed was conflict with the city guard, running was only slow, a delay with the guards could be catastrophic.
“Why hello, Sir Altin,” greeted the buxom and nearly-ever-cheerful Lena Foxglove. “I’m glad to see your arm has recovered so nicely, even though you didn’t let the doctor finish healing the incision.” Her smile was wide and white, her eyes sparkling, but he was glad to see she didn’t go to the great lengths she’d used to in displaying her cleavage to him every time he came by. He had Roberto to thank for that.
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s fine. I need to see Doctor Leopold immediately.”
“Oh, you always need to see him ‘immediately,’” she teased. “I don’t suppose you have another mangled mouse for him, do you?”
He shook his head, impatiently. “Lena, I really need to see him right away. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“For you or for Taot? You know the doctor had nightmares for a month after spending that much time with the dragon that day. You really should make a point of acknowledging what he did for you. He still gets requests for veterinary services because of it, and he’s lost two good patients because he refused their pets.”
“Lena, please. It’s Orli. She is going to die if I don’t speak to him right now.”
“Oh,” replied the comely receptionist then, a thin film of ice forming over the lake of her loquaciousness. “Wouldn’t that be a shame?” She made a show of looking through some papers on her desk. “Let me see,” she mumbled as she rifled through them.
Altin went to the door leading back into the doctor’s office and examination rooms and tried to open it. It was locked.
“Your choice,” Altin warned. “You can open it, or I can blow it down. I don’t care which.”
“He’s with a patient,” she said then. “And if you break it down, I’ll have the constable on you.”
Altin rolled his eyes and was about to argue when he heard the doctor’s voice coming down the hall. The door opened a moment later, revealing the tremendous bulk of Leekant’s top physician and the well-dressed figure of Lady Falfox, the self-proclaimed nobility of Leekant, though in truth merely the wife of one of its more prosperous citizens, Bucky Falfox, proprietor of the Patient Peacock Inn.
“And so, Madame, I’ll have the alchemist mix you up some tom-tom and willow powder and bring it by this afternoon. Mix it in tea twice a day, and you’ll be as good as gold by the end of the week,” the doctor was saying as they emerged.
“Oh thank you, Doctor,” she exclaimed. “You have no idea how much your work means to me. You cannot imagine how I do suffer, and my husband could not care less about all my agonies. He’d rather write another campaign speech than spend the tiniest bit of energy on sympathy for me.”
“Yes, I’m quite sure,” agreed the doctor as he opened the front door and gently guided the woman outside.
She dabbed a soft palm up to the long feathers projecting from her sparkling turban as she stepped out into the breeze. “Oh yes, it’s quite true,” she began, but the doctor, smiling, politely cut her off.
“Goodbye. Don’t forget to take your medicine.”
He turned to Altin once the door was shut and exasperation flared his features for a heartbeat or two. “If I were Bucky, I would have hung myself years ago.”
Altin didn’t have time to empathize. “I need a divination,” he said in lieu of greeting. “Orli is going to be executed if I don’t find her. She’s being taken somewhere on planet Earth, and I have to get to her. Her execution is certain after what has happened now.”
“Whoa, slow down,” demanded the ponderous physician. “What are you talking about? What has happened?”
The frustration that gasped from him was nearly as loud as a gorgon’s rasp, but he knew he’d have to explain it all in detail before the doctor could divine. Divination was about what the caster knew as much or more than it was about what they might find out.
Altin grabbed the doctor by the upper arm, his hand not even wrapping around half of the doughy girth, and nearly dragged him back to his office. The doctor was wheezing by the time he made it to the creaking chair at his desk.
“The Earth people tried to attack the Hostile world. I found out, or Orli did and then I did, that the planet is alive. It has a name, Blue Fire, and apparently it is female. The extermination of the people on the Andalian world was a terrible mistake. Blue Fire, through Orli, tried to explain, to apologize, but the fleet wouldn’t listen. They’ve lost too many ships and too many people. So, I, with permission from the Queen, helped her to thwart the attack from Earth, in hopes of getting it all sorted out. But, well, they took me captive, and then Her Majesty took that as an affront—you know how she is—and, so words were exchanged, the fleet was getting ready to fire on us, so, well, Blue Fire and I used a seeing stone Conduit Huzzledorf’s people sent to Earth the day before to locate the planet for ourselves, and then we, Blue Fire and I, sent the whole fleet home. Which didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time, but then, it turns out Blue Fire sent a bunch of her minions—eggs she calls them, but orbs in the eyes of the fleet—and, well, it seems she is bent on taking out Earth in the same way she took out Andalia, although she denies it entirely, which I know, because I went to her and asked.” By the time he was done speaking, he was nearly as out of breath as the doctor had been from the effort of hustling through the hallways.
The doctor stared, his mouth open, his mind still processing Altin’s hasty summary a full half minute after Altin’s tale was told. His brows furrowed, then un-furrowed, then furrowed again. “So, you’re saying …,” he began, but stopped, and there followed another few sequences of wrinkles forming upon his brow.
“They’re blaming Orli for it,” Altin said as he watched the doctor trying to work it out. “Or at least for part of it, and after all that’s happened between us, they think she is a traitor and that I, that all of us, everyone on Prosperion, have been in league with Blue Fire all along.”
That much the doctor could grasp easily enough. “I can’t say as I blame them,” he said. “From where they stand, that’s surely how it appears.”
Altin nodded. “But it’s not true, and Orli must not die for their misapprehension.”
“No, she must not,” the doctor agreed. “But what about this Blue Fire? That seems a larger problem, don’t you think?”
“I’m working on it. But I can’t do anything until Orli is safe.”
“Ah, the priorities of youth,” cooed the older man. He nodded to himself as he said it, which made the folds of the many chins cascading down his neck spread outward like smiles intent on strangling him.
“She doesn’t have time for a lecture on priorities. I need you to find her. My divination is too weak, and there isn’t time.”
“Surely they’ll have a trial and that sort of thing first. The Earth people are not orcs.”
“Their entire world is surrounded by an uncountable number of Blue Fire’s legions. They will know I am coming for her, and they’ll cut her down as quickly as Her Majesty would were she in their shoes. Her Majesty is not an orc either, and you know how it would go if things were reversed.”
Altin could not have looked more relieved. “Please, hurry.”
“I think speed is the last thing you need, my boy. You’re asking me to find someone on a planet I’ve never even seen and as it relates to a tumult of events caused by another planet I’ve not only never seen but never had a chat with, as you seem to have, and much less a thousand other intricate details about which I have no knowledge at all.”
“I can fix that. Some of it anyway.”
The doctor looked intrigued and terrified in turns by the way Altin’s eyes were narrowing. “Then do so,” he said, but his expression made it look as if he were admitting that having his head removed was the best remedy for a headache.
Altin wasted not another moment, and by the time the doctor had finished speaking, the two of them were at Calico Castle. Altin had teleported them directly to the clean room, a space reserved for teleportation in the tall tower that had been occupied for centuries by Calico Castle’s recently murdered keeper, the great mage Tytamon.
“That was fast,” commented the doctor. “I didn’t see you cast.”
“I’ve gotten better,” was all Altin said. He closed his eyes for a few moments after that, then stepped out of the chamber, beckoning the doctor to follow.
Altin went straight to an arched window on the far side of the cluttered room, stepping over the tumble of Tytamon’s collected artifacts and magical curiosities as he went. “There,” he said, pointing through the window. “That’s Blue Fire.”
The doctor nearly stumbled twice trying to navigate his prodigious bulk across the room, squeezing between tables that were set at random angles and which created pathways never meant to accommodate such commodiousness. Muttering and cursing his way through them, stepping over and around the stacks of books and the odd antiquities, and doing so with far less grace than Altin had, he finally approached the window where Altin stood. Upon looking out, his mouth fell open and stayed that way for quite some time.
This was a man who had never been to space. Despite Altin’s several invitations in those first few months after the fleet had arrived on Prosperion, the doctor had always found a reason to decline. Not even a trip to the pink moon Luria had tempted him past his fear. And now, here he stood, gazing down upon another world in its immensity, a massive brown and gray globe with vast seas around both its poles as if it wore a mantle and an immodest skirt of matching blue.
Altin gave him exactly long enough to adjust to the suddenness of the teleport and the equally sudden discovery of his whereabouts—which came with no small degree of awe—and then he did it a second time. In the span of a blink, at least as the doctor saw it, the planet he observed changed clothes, so to speak, and was, in that seeming instant, transformed to a bright ball of blue, painted in places with wisps of white clouds, beneath which stretched large expanses of land similar in hue to those he’d just seen, though not nearly in equal measure to its seas. This world was wrapped mainly in blue.
“And that,” said Altin impatiently, “is Earth.”
Doctor Leopold simply had nothing he could say for a time, and he leaned against the stone of the windowsill staring at the world, his breath whistling audibly through his nose as he slowly pieced things together, eventually realizing what the movement and flashing lights were, and how all of what he’d seen related to Altin’s tale.
Altin waited as long as he could stand to do so and then called the doctor out of his reverie. “Doctor, we have to work fast or Orli will die somewhere down there.”
The doctor blinked free of his amazement and turned to face his longtime friend and patient. “You hop around the universe like a rabbit on hot rocks,” he said.
“Yes, I do,” said Altin. “You get used to it. Now, please, we have to get her out of there.”
“Look at them all,” the doctor intoned, his voice sounding as if his lips had gone numb. “I take it the little reddish balls are the Blue Fire planet’s eggs, and the bright fortresses are the fleet ships?”
“Yes, Doctor, but please, you of all people appreciate the value of her life.”
He shook himself, a great wiggling of jowls and folds of breast and belly beneath his clothes, waves of movement that made it seem as if he were scarcely more than a bag of buttermilk below the neck. “You are right,” he said. “I will marvel at it more when we are done. Let me see what I can do. Have you got anything that belongs to her?”
Altin’s mind raced, but he couldn’t think of a single thing. He briefly considered going to the evacuated mining base on the Naotatican moon Tinpoa to search for something. But he wasn’t sure if there would be air to breathe. He knew the fleet had taken many of their machines when they left to attack Blue Fire. He then thought about going to her ship, snatching something from her quarters and then coming right back, but that seemed too risky as well. Even if they didn’t have some energy trap or poison gas waiting for his arrival, he might appear just in time for a Hostile to destroy the ship. He was tempted to do it anyway, but he knew he wouldn’t be any good to Orli dead.
He realized in that moment that he didn’t have anything of hers at all. He had nothing. No trinkets. No gifts. The daisy chains and crowns of laurels she’d made for him on their outings together had all been lost when his tower was destroyed, now several months back. He had nothing of her now. If she was lost, her absence would be in totality. He felt panic begin to rise.
The doctor saw it, sensed it in that way that people whose entire lives have been spent in comforting others can. He reached a hand out and placed it on the small of Altin’s back. “I know her well enough,” he said. “I did heal her leg, you’ll recall.”
“That’s true,” Altin breathed with relief.
“All right, clear me out some space to work. I can’t do anything in all this clutter.”
Altin rushed to the table at which Tytamon had sat in work for so many centuries and, with a sweep of his arm, pushed everything onto the floor. He pulled out the chair and indicated the doctor should take a seat.
Doctor Leopold looked at the heap Altin had made upon the rug, the dust cloud of its manufacture churning thickly in the air, but held back any disparaging expression or remark. He waved his hand before his face as he walked through the dust storm and took his place upon the chair. From the ticks and creaks it made, Altin feared it might not be up to the task of supporting the doctor, but it didn’t give out. He wished he had a strengthening enchantment memorized to cast upon the wood, but he let the thought go, resigned to hoping that the chair would make it through the duration of the spell. If it broke, the doctor would have to start again. Altin didn’t think Orli had that kind of time.
Chapter 9
Orli came out of the drug-induced haze slowly. The rigidity of the surface upon which she lay suggested she was back in her quarters, although she couldn’t remember leaving sick bay. The memories of Captain Asad coming into the room with two Marines and a nurse slowly coalesced as images in her mind. There had been a syringe and Doctor Singh’s voice shouting something as one of the Marines dragged him bodily away. That was all she could recall.
She sat up, blinking into the brightness. She was weak and had to use her hands to push herself upright. Even blurred as her surroundings were, she knew she wasn’t in her quarters. Her quarters weren’t this small, this stark or this white. To her right was a door with a small square window in it, covered from the outside. To her left, a stainless steel toilet and a tiny matching sink jutted from the wall. Beneath her was this bunk. That was it.
Someone had dressed her, for she was no longer in the hospital gown. She felt for her communicator, but it was gone. So were the emblems of her rank. She wore only the plain black bodysuit of a first-year cadet, this one completely unadorned, not even an NTA patch. That was odd.
She looked under the bunk but knew before she did so that there wouldn’t be anything beneath it.
She lay back down a
nd stared at the ceiling. Light came through all of it, a diffusion screen scattering it all evenly, the whole of it glowing so that the light came from everywhere above all at once. It was too bright.
She was in prison again. Why, she did not know. She couldn’t remember what she’d done this time, at least not clearly, though her thoughts were still reassembling themselves. She tried to focus, to think and speed the process along.
She vaguely remembered seeing something on a computer. There had been an orderly talking about Hostiles at Earth. Or that they were at Earth, the Aspect and the rest of the fleet. Yes, that was it. She could remember feeling shocked. And Orli was strapped to the bed. She remembered that too, prompting her to look to her forearms where the straps had been and to make a reflexive movement of her legs, both confirming that she was no longer bound.
Why had she been strapped to the bed? And what did the Hostiles have to do with Earth?
She looked around the cell again as her mind cleared. It slowly came to her that this room was not on any ship. The door was a conventional one, not the sort one finds on a spaceship. She was back on Earth.
Memories came rushing in. Suddenly she knew why she’d been bound to the bed. She’d tried to rescue Altin. She remembered the fight in the hallway outside his cell. The Marines and the canisters of gas. Shadesbreath, the Queen’s assassin, had come with a few other Prosperions. They must have gotten him out. Please, she begged silently, they must have gotten him out. The thought filled her so fully it almost burned. She sat up with the urgency of it. He had to have escaped. She could vaguely recall the empty cell, the last thing she’d seen through the fog. Surely he had.