by John Daulton
“Look for yourself,” she said once she’d finished the process Kalafrand had given her for activating the enchantment. “There is the wife of Sir Altin Meade.”
In the mirror was the image of the Earth woman. She was encased in something dark and yellow. She wore one of the suits the Earth men wore when they went outside their ships or tramping about on alien worlds, places where there was no air or no air that was any good. There were no lights blinking on the suit like Black Sander knew there usually were. She did not move. She did not blink.
“Is she dead?”
“I have no idea,” replied the marchioness. “But wait. It gets more interesting.”
There came a knock on the door.
“Enter,” said the marchioness. In came Kalafrand. The marchioness did not turn to greet him. “Show him what we found the other day,” she said, stepping away from the mirror and gesturing for the lumbering seer to draw near.
Kalafrand said nothing and set his hands on either side of the pale gray frame. He closed his eyes and chanted for a time. The image of Orli grew smaller as the perspective in the mirror moved away some, drawing back to a vantage two spans distant.
“Stop,” the marchioness commanded. She pointed with the negligible tipping of her head. “Look who’s there with her. Like little bugs in amber.”
Next to her in a very dark place was the Galactic Mage. He too was encased in the yellow material, and he too wore a spacesuit that had no lights glowing on it. Both of them had three dark lengths of some kind of tubing pushed into the amber-like material they were in, all of which drooped like limp rope from them and then disappeared into darkness at the edge of the mirror’s vision.
Black Sander stared at the two figures for quite some time, and the marchioness let him. “Their eyes are open,” he said after a while. “Yet they do not blink. I think they are dead.”
The marchioness grinned. “That, my friend, is what I want you to get out.”
“But why?”
She turned back to Kalafrand. “Go on, pull out all the way and show him the hole.”
Kalafrand pulled back the view in the mirror so rapidly that in seconds they were staring down on a vast spread of land, a red land ravaged by churning winds. Plumes of red dirt blew into the air and smeared the clouds like filthy paint, the whole of the place a great, violent tempest. Still, visible through all that were four dull shapes that dominated the landscape, long greenish-brown objects, nearly identical. They lay in a formation around a large expanse of the red land, at the center of which was a massive hole. The thickest plumes of red sand blew up out of that cavernous opening.
Black Sander studied it for a time. “What am I looking at?” he asked.
“An excavation,” she announced. “Those four monstrosities are the ships of the aliens who took Altin Meade and the Earth girl. They’ve been at this dig for two straight weeks.”
“What are they digging for?”
“Vorvington says they’re after the heart of a rekindled Hostile world.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. And you don’t need to. The point is, look at them. What do you see?”
Black Sander stared into the mirror for another long stretch of time. It was hard to know what to make out of it all. He started piecing together details. It was difficult to tell how big the mountains behind the ships were, but if they were anything like Prosperion mountains, then those spaceships had to be very large. Measures and measures large. Which meant, by comparison, the hole was large too.
“It’s all very massive,” he said. He knew that wasn’t what she was looking for.
“No, you fool. Look. What don’t you see?”
What was he supposed to say to that? “I don’t know, My Lady. I confess you have the advantage of knowing what your purpose is.”
“There are no Prosperions, you dullard. Where is the rescue? Where are the siege craft? Where are the allies from Earth in their machines?”
Black Sander looked back and saw that it was true.
“Perhaps the rescue is still in the planning stage.”
“Even if I thought that was true, how well do you think the people of Crown City will take it, learning that their beloved Galactic Mage and his Earth bride are so low a royal priority that now, two weeks after his abduction, she has done nothing?”
“Not well, My Lady.”
“And the people of Leekant?”
“Even worse.”
“And imagine this: what if the people of Prosperion, and the people of Earth, discovered that aliens have come through that opening and are now digging down to a new heart that has been placed in that world? A new heart meant to bring it back to life! The world that killed over a million people between our two planets. How do you think the people will take that news, as they still weep each night over their dead? How popular do you suppose that will make the War Queen when the people learn that she allowed it to happen?”
“Not popular,” he said. “But as I understand it from my sources, the heart of that world was easily destroyed last time with the use of fleet explosives. Lady Meade did it herself. Surely the NTA will have required measures be taken before they would allow the resurrection of the Hostile. They lost more lives than we did. I am no expert in the war-making ability of planet Earth, but I know enough now to understand that the simple push of a button would be enough to detonate incendiary devices placed there. It seems implausible to me that anything less would have been acceptable to them—assuming they were consulted, which I can’t believe they would not have been. Reason suggests the threat from that Hostile source could not be counted credible. It is surely already locked into the guillotine.”
“Since when does the general populace need a credible threat to fear? A plausible story is all they require, and even an implausible one will suffice if the message is delivered with style.”
Black Sander nodded. That much was true. And if the outrage of the War Queen having abandoned the Galactic Mage to aliens wasn’t enough to incite the people to anger, surely the threat of danger brought on by a reckless ruler could be set into the public’s collective mind. Many weren’t too happy with her anyway, not after the war, regardless of the outcome. The sweaty glow of victory dulls in the dust of digging graves.
“But what if she does launch a rescue?” he asked. “It may truly be that she is setting plans in motion as we speak. Those alien vessels are very large. Like laying siege to a city, I should think.”
“You and I both know Crown City can have battalions in place in less than half a day. Even if she were arranging for reinforcements from Earth—war vehicles and those delicious walking armor machines of theirs—well, they’d still be there by now. The TGS has been working for over a year. She’s got more than ample resources to execute a rescue.”
Black Sander frowned as he stared into the mirror. “So why aren’t they there fighting, then? Is she afraid of the aliens? Are those ships a threat that we, Earth and Prosperion combined, cannot thwart?”
“For the last two, I have no answer. I do not know. But for the first, I can. She is not there fighting because she is fighting elsewhere.”
“She’s what?”
“She’s gotten us into another war already. One that has already begun.”
He turned from the mirror to regard her. “It has? With whom?”
“She’s kept that secret well, so far. But soon, very soon, I will know. She’s not the only one with a stable of diviners, you know. I’ll dig it out of her. Then things will change.”
Chapter 18
Pernie was impatient for the school day to end. It was the start of her third week, and finally Sophia was going to let her walk home from the bus stop alone. The woman had been babying her since she got to Earth, and Pernie was more than ready for some alone time. She would have had some a week ago if she could have figured out how to get out of the house without setting off the alarms, but that place had more wards on it that any nobleman�
�s castle ever did. All she’d done was unlock one window and slide it open, intent on having a look around in the dark—since there sure wasn’t any way Sophia was going to let her go out and explore the city during the day, apparently—and off went the sirens. The alarms were so loud she would have thought orcs were pouring down from the mountains to invade the whole city. Lights had come on in the yard, dogs around the neighborhood barked, and that was it. Pernie got caught.
“You can’t just go out in a city like Reno at night,” Sophia Hayworth said. “There are people who go about at night who aren’t the sort a little girl ought to meet—and, yes, that includes little girls who have been taught by Prosperion elves how to defend themselves, do you hear?”
Pernie heard her, all right. But mostly she heard the alarms. It was like being in prison. But fortunately, she did have Don on her side. Don Hayworth was not fixated on danger and safety all the time like Sophia Hayworth was. In fact, the very next morning, while Pernie was putting on her scratchy clothes getting ready for school, she heard Don and Sophia arguing over what Pernie had done.
“She’s not like other kids,” Don said. “And she’s definitely not like Angela. You can’t just stuff her in her room and expect her to be content devouring books.”
“But she is!” Sophia Hayworth said. “She’s already through the third grade material. That’s a whole grade level every week. She’ll be ahead of them all in two months if she can stay on course.”
“I didn’t say she isn’t smart. I said she isn’t Angela. She’s an outdoor girl. You’ve got to let her run sometimes. Let her look around. You read Angela’s last email from Calico Castle. That’s not an ordinary kid in there.”
“I did read it, and that only makes it more important we keep her where we can see her.”
“You need to trust her, honey. She needs to be free to make some mistakes.”
“Angela didn’t need to make mistakes.”
“Yes, she did.”
Pernie didn’t know what that meant exactly, but he said it in a weird way, and the kitchen got pretty quiet downstairs for a while. Pernie was putting her hair up in the requisite ponytail—because apparently she was supposed to look just like all the other dumb little horses in the herd—when she heard Sophia say, “Fine. So what do you want me to do? Just open up all the doors at night? Should I get her a gun, so if she wanders all the way downtown, she can defend herself?”
“Honey,” came Don’s reply, part empathy, part exasperation. “How about you just let her walk home from the bus by herself? How about just that to start? None of the other kids her age have parents walking them back and forth. I think she can handle that.”
More silence followed. Pernie decided she definitely liked Don Hayworth the best. They’d played baseball last weekend, and Pernie hit every ball he threw at her. She could see how he was going to throw it before he even let it go. It was like watching sugar shrimp, and she paid attention to his fingers on the ball. And he was much slower than an elf when it came to the rest of him. His body gave away what he was doing well before any motion was complete. So Pernie “dinged” every one of them, as Don had said. He said she could make a hundred million credits a year as a professional baseball player one day, playing for one of the NTA corporate teams.
Pernie thought that sounded pretty weird. Why would anyone pay people to play a game? Besides, money was boring. Everyone on this planet talked about money all the time. Talking about money had made Jeremy cry, although Pernie still didn’t quite know why. Nobody talked about money when she was growing up, and the people at Calico Castle had more of it than almost anyone.
But today was the day she was going to walk home from the bus stop by herself, so none of that other stuff mattered at all. She just had to get through lunch, and a few more hours of class. Then she was finally going to explore her neighborhood, maybe even go up into the mountains rising up so temptingly all around. She wondered what kind of creatures lived up there. She hoped there was something she could tame like she had tamed Knot.
She missed Knot a lot. Djoveeve had told her she wasn’t supposed to use any magic, not even telepathy, but twice now, late at night, she’d sent a bare little flicker to her bug back on String, just to make sure he was okay. He was. He was doing his bug thing, under the low clouds of the wispy ferns, running around in the powdery yellow dust, sucking dry the eyeballs of any creature that grew weary and slept, laid low by the dust’s effect. Pernie was glad he was happy, and she’d let the sounds of the jungle calm her, heard through the vibrations he sensed in all those tiny feet of his. She could listen to the jungle, to the rustle of the other bugs, and forget about the frustrations of her long, book-learning days.
She didn’t think there would be any creatures quite like him in the woods, because Sophia Hayworth said there weren’t any animals—or people—on Earth that had any magic at all. But Don had been quick to point out that, technically, nobody actually knew that for certain. He told Pernie that there might be creatures on Earth with magic; people just didn’t know how to tell. He told her that long ago the native inhabitants of Reno and surrounding areas used to believe that animals had magic. He said that it still might be so.
Sophia Hayworth had rolled her eyes and said, “Don, you’re going to confuse the poor girl. She just got here. Can we stick to the facts for now?”
He’d shrugged across the dinner table at Pernie after that one, and it was then that she’d begun to see him as something of an ally.
“Miss Grayborn?” asked Mrs. Beckman, apparently for the second time. “I don’t see you working. Are you having trouble, or do you have the answer already in your head?”
What answer? She must have drifted off. Pernie looked up at the big board monitor at the front of the class. Mrs. Beckman had written a math problem up there. A missing-number problem. Pernie still couldn’t figure out the purpose of making math problems with letters in them, being that letters were supposed to be for spelling, but the answers were always obvious anyway. “Seventeen,” she said. “The X is seventeen.” She sounded bored, because she was bored. The other kids all looked up from their desktops at her. She shrugged.
Math was the worst. She thought it was boring. Not because she thought doing it was boring, she actually kind of liked that part, but because they moved through it so slow. Sophia Hayworth had already gotten her through the math program for the whole year. She said Pernie was as good as her own daughter, Angela, at math. “Now if you would just put more effort into reading, writing, and history,” she would say. Pernie didn’t care about history, and she didn’t have anything to write about. She didn’t mind reading, though. She just only liked reading stuff that wasn’t boring.
Mrs. Beckman grinned a big smile at her. “That’s correct. Very good, Miss Grayborn.” She did that a lot.
There followed two more problems, but Pernie was looking out the window at the mountainside. She wished she were there. She wished she were flying over it in one of the NTA fighter planes, dropping bombs on the orcs that came to invade the town. She wished she could go that fast. Faster than Knot. Faster than Taot. Faster than “the speed of sound” Jeremy had told her. That’s how fast Pernie wanted to go.
Fortunately, Mrs. Beckman didn’t call on her for the other math problems, the ones she called algebra, and soon enough the drone of the bell marked that it was time for lunch.
As regular as the bell itself, Jeremy was standing beside her while the rest of the class cleared out. She had already shut her desk down, so she got up and led the way out of class. They joined the herd of tablet tappers and visor zombies moving toward the cafeteria. She glanced down at the screen on the tablet of one boy as she swerved around him to get by. He was playing something where two men were depicted, fighting with swords. One of them, wearing red armor with pauldrons that were way too thick and wide to be useful, lunged at the other figure, who was wearing blue pants and black boots but no armor at all, not even a shirt. That was probably better than the bulk
y, impossible armor of the first.
The red warrior’s lunge was a fake. He followed with a second one that was so slow Pernie wondered why the blue warrior didn’t take his throat out and maybe make a pot of tea in the interim. The blue warrior made a low, sweeping kick instead, which was dumb given the opening he had, and then the red warrior cut off his head.
A boy behind Jeremy shouted, “Hah. Ritchie, you suck. I own you.”
“No, you don’t. You got lucky. I missed my combo.”
Pernie listened to them for a moment and realized the boy behind Jeremy was the one who’d been playing the red-clad fellow with the unlikely armor.
“Is that some kind of fight simulator?” Pernie asked the boy near her. “Like the flight simulators I read about over at the fort?” She’d been reading about pilot training over the last few nights, and found out that there was a huge NTA fortress nearby called Fort Reno. People learned how to fly fighter planes there, and even how to fly spaceships like Roberto did.
The kid beside her stopped, saw who it was, and recoiled. He stepped away from her as if she were about to stab him with a real sword.
The other boy stepped up in his place and smiled winningly. “Kind of,” he said. He was taller than Pernie by almost two full hands—or eight inches in Earth measurements. He had thick, wavy hair, dark and combed back over his head, dark enough that it really set off his very light blue eyes. “It’s a game: Blades of Death XIV: Return of the Lich.”