by John Daulton
It was a few yards closer to Orli than the larger aliens were, and as it rose and fell gently on the blowing air, it pointed itself at the nearest of them. On its head, or just above it—it was hard to say what was what with the creature—there was a puckering sphincter sort of apparatus, right above its three short tentacles. It looked rather like pursed lips about to whistle, and she decided that end must be its face.
A droplet—or at least it seemed as one compared to the size of the thing—of brown fluid formed at this puckering cervical orifice. The larger alien nearest the little one was apparently aware of this operation under way, and it curved its lower end toward the growing droplet and puckered its own orifice—the same sort of opening from which ochre jelly had been spat at Altin when he’d cast the fireball in his attempt to rescue her. That seemed like a million years ago, though she thought it couldn’t have been more than some span of minutes at best. Less than an hour certainly.
The hook-tailed alien let the droplet go, and the wind caught it and blew it right into the orifice of the larger alien. The bigger one sucked it up, and for a moment neither it nor its two large counterparts flashed any lights at all. Then its whole body began to light up again, just that alien that had imbibed the droplet. What began as a dull, mucous gray turned blue, then darker blue, then a deep purple that began to darken nearly to black. The alien became so dark it almost disappeared into the darkness around and beyond it. Its whole body went rigid, and most of its tentacles stiffened straight as morphine needles for a time. It actually lost its grip on the grate with all but two of its anchoring limbs, and the other two aliens had to catch it so that it wasn’t blown off by the wind.
These other two flashed blue and green and yellow in alternating patterns. Despite the dire nature of her predicament, Orli couldn’t help thinking they were beautiful. If she hadn’t been in fear for Altin’s life and her own, she might have watched for as long as the strange ritual went on.
As the rigid and purpled alien returned slowly to the normal mucous-colored state, the smaller alien with the hook angled its flowing body skirts and guided the bulk of its body back down upon the grate. It crawled toward the next alien in the line. The big three began flashing colors of every variety in what seemed an excitement of color. Orli used their distraction to duck down and pull herself along the bottom of the grate, getting herself underneath and then downwind of them by several yards. She had to get beyond them so that when she pushed herself up into the wind, she didn’t just blow right into them.
When she was far enough, she drew herself back level with the top of the grate and peered back again. The three aliens were tilting up into the darkness angling high above. The little alien was angled into the wind again too, just releasing another droplet of the brownish liquid. The droplet floated up, struck the larger alien’s orifice just a bit off center, and went in, sending just the barest splash into the wind.
Orli felt it more than she saw it as it blew right into her face. She realized it immediately, and with horror prepared for some kind of agony.
Instead she lost her hold on the grate and fell back into the wind, her whole body wracked with ecstasy. She bounced along the grate like a leaf on the wind, helpless in orgasmic contortions.
Before she could recover herself, she’d blown all the way past the end of the platform, several miles of it, and another mile out over a dark abyss that separated that platform from another just like it far in the distance. Her whole body quivered, and her muscles ached. She could hardly move. It was only by dumb luck that her spacesuit sail hadn’t blown off her left leg, as the right one had come free of the loops she had tied.
As she regained herself, still blowing farther across the abyss formed between what she thought of as stacks of platforms that ran through the ship, she wondered if she would hit an updraft like she had earlier. The thought came to her lazily, almost dreamily, as the effects of the brown droplet wore off reluctantly.
And it was through that lazy sort of fog that she realized where she was and what was happening to her, and to Altin. That realization and the resulting fear for how far she’d been blown, even greater distances from Altin perhaps than before, jolted her to motion again, allowing her to shake off the last of the numbing afterglow.
“Good God,” she gasped. Her whole body still tingled, but she shuddered anyway. “Okay, that was freaking gross.” She shuddered again. “Sort of.” She would definitely make a point of avoiding the little ones. That kind of pleasure she didn’t ever need again.
She hooked her free foot back through the spacesuit and started angling upward again. Soon enough, she sailed her way to the stack of grates across the abyss. She’d lost a lot of distance and a lot of time. She still wondered if maybe this abyss had another updraft. It seemed likely, and if so, it would sure save time having to, in effect, tack her way upward back and forth in the alternating layers of crosswinds. She had a lot of altitude to gain to get back to where Altin was. That was the only thing she knew for sure. Her fall had been long, and that distance had to be undone.
She pulled herself along the edge of the grate platform, checking to see if there were any aliens on it nearby. There weren’t.
She hauled herself along for what felt like it had to be at least a mile, gauging the distance by the nearing presence of a large oval of pale orange light. Still no updrafts. She probably had to be farther out over the abyss to find one.
As she neared the pale orange light, she realized that she just wasn’t going to catch a break on the updraft thing, so she began pulling herself up onto the platform, getting ready to jump into the wind. She did that right as an alien came blowing straight toward her at speed.
Its billow was open and full, but it was high above her, and she was terrified that it had seen her head and shoulders coming up over the edge of the platform. She ducked down and held her breath, staring up along the edge of the grate, waiting for one of those goddamn tentacles to snatch her up and … well, maybe just throw her away again. Who knew? But she didn’t want to find out.
She waited. Knowing it would show up any second now.
It did. But it showed up over the orange oval of light. It flew right over the light, and then its billow seemed to empty some, deflating by perhaps half. Right after, it began climbing down, stretching tentacles to the platform beneath, and descending without any trouble from wind.
Orli realized immediately what she was looking at: a chimney of calm air. Not the same as an updraft, but perhaps just as workable.
She looked down and realized there were orange lights just like it above and below as far as she could see. She saw others in a neat vertical line across the abyss, back the way she had come, paralleling those on this side.
Of course they had a way to change directions more easily that what she was trying to do.
She waited to make sure that it was gone, watching it climb down four layers before continuing on in the direction it had been going when she’d first spotted it. She grinned. Finally a bit of damn luck.
She pulled herself along the edge of the grate and got herself even with the orange light. Sure enough, the wind died down quite a lot. It still blew, but it blew in gentle whirls and gusts, and not enough to change her direction much. With a glance up and down to see if anyone—anything—was coming, she gave a great pull with her arms and set herself gliding up the nearly dead-air column, at least heading in the direction from which she had come: up. Maybe she would find Altin soon, now.
Maybe now it wouldn’t be long before they could get the hell out of here.
Chapter 27
Roberto set the Glistening Lady down on a rocky flat a mile from the road and a half mile from the cliff that overlooked Murdoc Bay. A careful sensor sweep showed there was no one nearby, and for at least the hundredth time since beginning his Goblin Tea enterprise, he was grateful for the discovery that illusion magic did not fool light. It fooled minds, but not optics and computers, and somehow computers filtered out the eff
ect for human brains and eyes. There was no one out there.
They shut the engines down. All the lights had been turned off since they crossed the Gallspire Mountains. Roberto leaned back and watched out the ship’s forward window, dimming the monitor below it so the light wouldn’t spoil his ability to see. The darkness was nearly complete. The moon, pink Luria, was in its red phase, a gentle curve that turned deep red during this time of the month, beautiful but providing little light.
“I can’t believe you told Master Tea no on that extra half ton,” Deeqa said, shaking her head as she looked at the parchment manifest. She set it down on the control panel before her and looked at him. “That was free money. If you are so worried about your conscience, you could have split the profit with the Queen. That’s all she cares about anyway, is it not? Raking in coin?”
“Look, I got everyone pissed off at me right now, and the last thing I need is to introduce a new idea into that woman’s paranoid head. I start out with ‘Hey, so your tea master is offering side deals to me, so I’m splitting it with you,’ and what ends up happening is I get the tea man screwed and her wondering what other sneaky shit I’m doing that I’m not telling her about. It just makes me look guilty. And as far as keeping it for myself, I don’t need that kind of karma. I’m trying not to piss off God right now, because I need God on my side for Orli and Altin’s sake.”
“I think your God would not hold your behavior against others.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time, and I’m just not taking any chances. I don’t mind end-running the rules for lots of things, but this thing, our Goblin Tea setup, well, we can’t screw with that. That has to be by the letter, or the whole thing comes crumbling down. There’s already little enough I can do for my friends right now. I’ll do even less if I am banned from Prosperion and put on permanent cock-block status by the TGS. Hell, talking to Vorvington right now is probably going to screw me anyway.”
“He is a regular adviser to the Queen, and a relative of Her Majesty’s, is he not? I do not think that is going to draw heat. Why should it?”
“Look where we are,” he said, pointing out the window. “If this don’t scream some kind of guilty, nothing does.”
“There they are,” Tracy announced from her post at the helm. “Just appeared.”
Roberto squinted into the darkness in time to see a torch bloom to orange a hundred yards distant. He turned up his monitor and saw the spike on the magic detection graph. “Not bad,” he said with a glance at the device as he got up. “Picked up a teleport at a hundred yards. You see, I told you it was worth eighty-five grand for that upgraded module.”
Deeqa nodded. “I admit, I thought they were lying when you bought that.”
“Well, on the subject of liars, come on, let’s go talk to one.”
They got up, and Tracy shifted into the pilot’s seat.
The Earl of Vorvington waited in the darkness, his round face and long jowls painted golden in the torchlight, the wattles of his neck casting shadows like black vines rooted beneath his collar somewhere. The wind stirred the torchlight and the weeds around his feet. Four figures waited in the darkness behind him, barely visible beyond the glare.
“It’s a cold night on the bluffs,” the earl said. “The sea breeze still has its teeth this time of year.”
“We talking weather here or looking at your star maps?” Roberto said. Deeqa stepped out of the torchlight, clicking off her flashlight as she went.
“Now, now,” Vorvington said as she disappeared. “We’ve no need of all that. We’re all friends here. With common cause.”
“Then let’s get to it,” Roberto said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Vorvington produced a square of folded parchment from his cloak, which he unfolded and handed over to the Spaniard. It was large, and the wind buffeted it so much that Roberto had to kneel and set it on the ground. He looked at it for half a second, looked up, looked back, and clicked up his flashlight to a brighter setting. Then he laughed. “Are you kidding me? It’s six dots. You can’t be serious. How in the hell am I supposed to tell you anything about this?”
It was true. The parchment had six dots. Five in a little cluster near the bottom left corner of the parchment and one at the top right, almost off the edge of it. Roberto wouldn’t have even noticed that last one if he hadn’t looked a second time.
“My understanding is that those five at the bottom are the suns of Prosperion, Earth, Blue Fire, Yellow Fire, and Andalia,” Vorvington said. “That other is the location we are interested in.”
Roberto looked back at the map, then back at Vorvington.
“I thought you said you were trying to figure out if Her Majesty was mining Liquefying Stone on Blue Fire.”
“We are. Or, I should say, we were. I did mention on our last meeting that I had some additional divining to do.”
“Yeah, you did say that, all right.” Roberto shook his head. He knew he’d been played that day. Now it was more a matter of trying to figure out why. And what the real game was. So for now, he had to keep playing along.
He looked down at the map again. “Well, if this thing is supposed to be anything remotely close to scale, that star up there is seriously far away. Yellow Fire is a thousand light-years from Earth, and it’s hardly showing any farther away from Earth on this than Prosperion, which is essentially right around the corner by comparison. So we’re talking tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand. Hell, it could be another galaxy. Even if we draw the line between these dots with a laser, the width of the damn beam just on the dot is going to be a massive area, a couple hundred light-years at least. Do you have any idea how big that is?”
“No, Captain. I admit to complete ignorance. That is why we came to you.”
“Well, you got what you paid for, because I can’t tell you shit from this.” He got up and made to hand the parchment back.
“Wait. I said we’d bring an illusionist.” He turned back and motioned with the torch. At first no one moved, but then one of the dark silhouettes, the one with the wide-brimmed hat, shoved the figure in the center into motion. A woman in her middle years staggered forward. Bits of straw stuck out of her dark hair, glinting golden in the torchlight. Roberto raised his flashlight and shone it on her, clicking the beam’s brightness down a notch. She looked like she’d just come from rolling in the dirt. Vorvington reached back and drew her forward by her upper arm. “Go on, then, show him what you got from the rest of them.”
She trembled as she cast the spell, and Roberto was pretty sure it was not due to the chill blowing in on the sea breeze. But soon after she began chanting, an enormous globe shaped itself in the air about a foot off the top of the wind-bent grass. It was vast, twenty-five feet in diameter. It held no images other than the fact its shape was visible by the presence of an uncountable number of tiny lights. They were obviously stars.
“You see there, Captain, an illusion that our diviners, working in concert with our illusionist here, were able to construct. It was no small feat, mind you, and as you suggested, we did elicit some help from students at the university. But it was mainly technical. Now is the moment of truth. Can you put the two together? It is my understanding that this is the sort of magic that the Redquill girl and the Sunderhusk boy provided to aid Sir Altin and Lady Meade in finding the red world.”
Roberto stared up at the glittering ball of stars. It was beautiful to look into. But he wasn’t sure, even with a holographic simulation of sorts, how he would be able to find which star was the one they were looking for. The parchment star map was a joke.
Apparently they saw the look on his face, because the man with the wide-brimmed hat stepped forward, though he was careful to keep his face in the shadows of that broad brim. He tapped Vorvington in the back with something. The portly nobleman turned and took it. He turned back to Roberto and proffered it to him straightaway. “Ah yes, and of course Lady Pewter used one of these to … to somehow combine them, the map and the illusion.”
Roberto took it. It was a computer tablet, the standard sort of thing one would expect on Earth, other than the fact it was wrapped in a fancy alligator case. There was something familiar about it, but he couldn’t fathom why. It was certainly not what he expected to get from a Prosperion. Roberto tilted his head sideways and tried to get a better look at the man in the hat, but Vorvington was fat and the man was completely shrouded in shadow. Roberto was curious enough to raise his light and shine it on the man anyway. All he saw was the hat, its brim warping this way and that in the wind but otherwise mashed down securely upon the man’s head.
Roberto harrumphed, but let it go. He wasn’t too sure how much use the tablet would be, but he’d come this far, so there was no use not giving it a try.
He opened it up and turned it on. He flipped through screens until he found the star charts application. He crouched and set it in the grass long enough to lay the parchment map out on the ground next to it. He took up some rocks and laid them on the map, then used the tablet, scanning the drawing into its memory. A few taps and slides later, he ran the star dots against patterns on file. It came up with four hundred twenty three thousand nine hundred and eight possible matches. He actually laughed again. “Well, that’s not going to get anywhere.”
“Yes, Captain. I believe you need this too.” He pointed with the torch to the star globe illusion. “You!” Vorvington snapped at the woman. “Show him with the sounds. Make them chime like the Sunderhusk map. Like you did this morning.”
Roberto frowned, but hid it by glancing back at the map on the ground. This morning? He looked up at the woman. Her teeth chattered, this time for the cold, no doubt, as she was only wearing a thin shift that barely came to her knees. Her arms were bare and so were her feet.
“Why don’t you get her a blanket or something?” Roberto said.