by John Daulton
“Captain, we don’t have time.”
Roberto stood and tapped his com badge. “Betty-Lynn, can you bring out a thermal?”
“She’s already on the way, Captain,” came Tracy’s reply.
“Vorvington, I have to tell you, I’m not impressed with the way you treat your people.”
“I’m not here to impress you, Captain. I’m here to get our friends back from the aliens.”
“Right,” Roberto said. He didn’t buy that for a second. He looked down at the parchment star map in the grass again, moving the sun shape of his flashlight’s narrow beam to the far corner where the single dot was. “I’m going to be honest, Lord Vorvington, that don’t look like it’s going to be much help to Orli and Altin.”
“The diviners assure me it is exceedingly relevant.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they do. They do that this morning, or after we talked?”
Vorvington lifted his nose and rolled his eyes skyward, above responding to such a thing.
The stocky-framed Betty-Lynn approached, a laser rifle crooked casually over the elbow of one arm and two thermal blankets folded over the other. She proffered the thermals to Roberto. He took them and thanked her, but did not ask her to go back to the ship.
Roberto set the tablet down and unfolded one of the blankets, his flashlight beam cutting wildly through the night as he worked. He went to the illusionist and wrapped it around her. “Here you go,” he said. “I’m sorry we dragged you out here for this. You can keep this when we are done. These are great blankets. Think of it as a souvenir from planet Earth.”
She looked up at him, gratefully, but she didn’t smile. There was something in her eyes that he couldn’t pin down exactly, and he didn’t like it at all. He looked past her to the three figures behind Vorvington. He shone his flashlight back at them. One was a large man, broad shouldered and muscular. He was young, but his face was tan and had the look of someone who spends most of his time in the sun and wind. Next to him was a slender man in gray robes. He was pale and looked uncomfortable. The third figure was, as before, shrouded in blackness, cloak and hat. Roberto flicked the light back and forth between them and held the other blanket up. “Any of you need this?”
“I’ll take it,” the big man said, a big grin on his face. “It’ll sell for a heap bein’ as it’s from Earth and all.”
The black hat moved side to side as the man beneath it shook his head, but he didn’t say anything. Roberto handed the blanket over and then went back to the star maps. He debated quitting, but he had a feeling that might be a bad idea. And if there was even a chance this could still help Orli and Altin, he supposed there wasn’t much to lose if it was not. A few more minutes of his time. No sense causing an incident.
He looked to the illusionist. “Are you okay to try?” he said. She shook her head, as if saying no, but she closed her eyes and started chanting again anyway. There followed a succession of chimes, six of them, five higher notes and one an octave lower. With each note, a star in the glowing sphere flared briefly, though Roberto missed the first three, not realizing what was happening.
“There, you see,” Vorvington said, pointing to the star globe. The highest note is Prosperion, the next is Earth, the one below that Andalia, then Blue Fire, then Yellow Fire. The last and lowest is the world we need to find. That is where the secret lies.”
“What secret?”
“The one that might free our friends.”
“I notice you have already shifted to might.” Roberto didn’t know why he was even bothering to point this stuff out anymore. So he didn’t wait for a reply. He picked up the tablet and went closer to the globe. “Can you ping them again? Slower so I can see them.”
“Do it,” Vorvington ordered the woman unnecessarily.
Again came the chimes. This time Roberto saw each star as it pulsed, once for each note in turn. There were five together on the opposite side of the star globe from where he stood, and the last one pulsed right in front of him, nearly on the surface of the globe. He had the illusionist repeat the tones several more times as he walked around the star map hanging there, the only thing unaffected by the wind.
“I’m still not sure how this is going to help me,” he said.
“Well, I surely have no idea,” said Vorvington.
He circled twice more, then raised the tablet and circled it again. “I can’t pick it up on this thing. This is less help than the paper one. These illusions aren’t real.”
Deeqa came out of the darkness to stand beside him, looking into the star globe. She stepped into it, put her hand in the cluster where the five suns with the five known habitable worlds were. She went to the new one near Roberto. “Let me see the tablet,” she said.
Roberto handed it to her. She quickly found his original star map scan. She squeezed it together on way, stretched it another. She went into the code and changed the scale. When she hit the reconfigure, it came up with a new list. She handed it back to Roberto. His four hundred twenty three thousand nine hundred and eight had been reduced to nine.
Deeqa cocked an eyebrow, but said nothing. He saw what she had done. He looked up at Vorvington, who was standing on his tiptoes, trying to look over the top of the tablet, even though he was ten feet away. Roberto was tempted to key in the code to the ship’s computer and flick the record to his own system, but he didn’t know what these guys were capable of in terms of recovering that access later. Who knew who else they knew from Earth, and those goddamn diviners were freaky in the extreme. He committed the system names to memory instead, then handed the tablet back to Vorvington. “There you go,” he said. “Best I can do.”
Vorvington’s grin was hideous, a globular movement of his face and neck, flesh shifting like gelatin being squeezed. “This will do fine, Captain. I’m sure it will do fine. The beauty of divination is that it works with what you know. If I can give them nine stars to choose from, they can surely rule out eight of them. The gods favor those who get themselves to where the gifts are given out.”
“So should I stay up late waiting for my copy of whatever results the gods are giving out?” Roberto asked.
“Don’t lose any sleep at all, good Captain. You have my word that as soon as I know how to get poor Sir Altin and Lady Meade home safely, you will be the first one I notify.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He glanced to Deeqa and shook his head. “Come on, let’s go.” They started to walk away, but he stopped and turned back. “Hey, you, illusionist lady. Are you okay? Do you want a ride somewhere before we go?”
The four figures vanished before he got the last word out.
Chapter 28
Pernie trotted along the sidewalk at a steady clip. She wished she had Knot with her. Running on her own feet seemed very slow compared to being on his back. In the time it took her to run past the bus stop and reach the park on her own, with Knot she could already have been downtown looking at Hostile husks in the rubble of the broken buildings. She sighed, but she kept on running anyway.
She ran around the park and down the street she’d taken after school, the one that had brought her to the tall buildings. As she made her way steadily down it, imagining how big some of the Hostile corpses might be, a vehicle rolled up beside her in the dark. It was one of the older kind with wheels that touched the ground, not one of the gravity kind like Pernie was going to get someday. Its headlights were bright, and they lit up the street for a long way ahead. A cat’s eyes glowed green under a parked car, bright like a basilisk’s eyes will when it is about to turn someone into stone. Pernie heard that gorgons didn’t do that when they turned people into stone. She didn’t think the cat was going to turn anything to stone, but she thought it looked very impressive in the dark.
The vehicle didn’t drive past her like the scant few that she’d seen earlier in her journey had. The lights turned off as it neared, and then it was rolling along beside her, keeping pace. She could hear bits of gravel popping under its black wheels. She glan
ced over to see who was inside. She recognized the man she’d seen in the park yesterday.
“Hi,” he called out through the open passenger side window. He scooted across the seat and leaned through the opening, leaving the vehicle to drive itself. “Where are you going this late at night?”
“None of your business, that’s where,” Pernie said. She’d heard someone say that at school and liked the way it sounded when it came out. She ran a little faster.
The man said something, and his vehicle sped up. She looked back at him. The vehicle looked very old. It was very plain, like a box, dirty and with plastic and metal visible in places where paint should have been.
The van caught up to her easily enough and drew closer to the sidewalk next to her as she ran toward the corner. “You need a lift?” he asked.
Pernie frowned. Why would she need him to lift anything? She wasn’t even carrying anything. She thought he was probably very stupid. She’d met stupid adults before on Prosperion too. Kettle said that the gods kept all the peoples’ brains in baskets and handed them out to babies when they were born. She said some babies got the brains that were on the bottom of the basket, and they were kind of smooshed. She said Pernie was supposed to be nice to those people, though, because nobody got to pick their own brain, even the smooshy ones.
“No,” she said. “I’m not carrying anything.”
The man laughed. “You’re funny,” he said.
That made her frown some more. She wasn’t trying to be funny. There wasn’t anything funny about not carrying anything. She thought she’d been nice enough, though, so she didn’t feel bad about cutting through some trees and across someone’s yard to avoid him now. Sophia Hayworth said it was rude to go in people’s yards, but Pernie thought that peoples’ yards were dumb. They grew grass but then cut it too short for any animals to eat. They paid for water to water it, and complained about the cost. They also complained about the shortage of water that made it cost a lot, which they’d known about before they planted the grass they knew would need water. People from Earth didn’t make sense a lot of the time. So Pernie ran across the short grass and hopped the fence, then ran through another yard, and turned down the street that would take her directly to downtown Reno.
The dirty white box vehicle rolled up beside her a little farther down the street.
“Hey,” the man said. “I’m just trying to be nice.”
“Me too,” said Pernie. She wished he would just go away.
“So where are you going? I really don’t mind giving you a ride.”
She looked back at him. “You’ll just take me back home and tell me I’m too small to be out at night. That’s what you all do.”
“Not me,” he said. “You look like a big girl. Old enough to be out if you want to.”
“I am,” she said. She could see the rows of green and yellow and red lights now, down the slight incline, all straightening up and marking where the streets crisscrossed the downtown. It was still pretty far away. And the big buildings were even farther than that.
She looked up at the moon. Earth only had one moon, like Prosperion. She’d learned in school that some planets had lots. Even hundreds and hundreds of them. It didn’t matter that Earth only had one, though. Pernie still hadn’t figured out how to tell when morning would come with it. If Sophia Hayworth stopped trying to be her guardian all the time, she might get out more and find out. She didn’t know precisely how long she’d been working on deactivating the window alarm, though. It might be closer to morning than she thought.
“Come on,” urged the man. “It doesn’t matter how far. Wherever you want, I’ll take you there. We can even get pizza on the way. Or ice cream. Whatever you want.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Pernie said, “but I want to go downtown. Where the buildings are broken from the Hostiles. Will you take me there?”
“Sure,” he said.
Pernie slowed to a walk. “Do you know where the dead ones are?”
He frowned for the barest moment. Pernie saw it in the glow of the streetlight a few yards up ahead. She started to run again, but then he said, “Oh, yeah. Sure I do. Whole piles of them.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I just hadn’t been over to look at them in a while. Not since, you know, they all died and all.” He stopped his vehicle and pushed open the door. He slid over to the far side of the seat. “Hop in. I know the perfect place.”
Pernie grinned. She’d just known she was going to see a Hostile tonight. She was very glad she hadn’t given up on trying to cut through the paneling on the wall.
She climbed into the vehicle and waited for the door to close.
“You have to pull that thing shut,” he said. “My poor van is shot to hell. Motor’s been dead on that side for ten years.”
“Who shot it?” Pernie asked. “Was it the Hostiles?” She felt stupid the moment she asked it. The Hostile war hadn’t been over for even two years yet, so it couldn’t have been ten.
“I’m Marty, but everyone calls me Zest,” he said. “What’s your name?”
He didn’t sound like he thought she was stupid like a lot of other grown-ups did. That was good. She pulled the door closed as she said, “I’m Pernie. What does Zest stand for?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He tapped in a destination on the van’s console.
“Sophia won’t let me learn to drive,” Pernie said. “She says I can’t have my own car until I am sixteen.”
“Yeah, that’s not very fair,” he said as the van lurched into motion. Soon they were moving right along.
Pernie looked out the window as they drove. She liked having the wind blowing her hair again. The windows on the bus only came down halfway, and it never went fast enough to make much wind. It made her think of Knot again.
The man wasn’t very talkative, so Pernie contented herself with watching the buildings going by. Soon the tall buildings were climbing toward the stars, or at least what few stars there were. Pernie thought that Earth didn’t have half as many as Prosperion did. Maybe less than half. Sophia said it was light pollution, but Pernie wasn’t sure that made any sense.
They wound their way through a few blocks of downtown, and Pernie found herself growing more and more eager to see a dead Hostile.
“So how big is the biggest one?” she asked.
“Biggest what?” he said.
“Hostile. How big is the biggest Hostile corpse? Or are they just shells, and the Hostiles are dead inside?”
“Oh, uh ….” He glanced into the monitor that showed the street behind him, then looked out the windows on either side. She thought he looked very nervous doing it. “Very big. Bigger than the van.” She thought he sounded nervous, too. It was kind of silly for a grown man to be afraid of a dead Hostile, but Pernie was polite enough not to say anything.
She wanted to tell him that Master Altin killed Hostiles all by himself, and that she had magic and would protect them, too, if she had to. But she knew that she actually couldn’t because of the promise she’d made to Tytamon and Djoveeve. “No casting magic, no matter what,” Djoveeve had said. “You promised. And you know what a promise is from the Sava’an’Lansom.”
Pernie did. The Sava’an’Lansom couldn’t tell a lie. Djoveeve said that the protector of the High Seat had to be absolutely trustworthy, or the whole world would fall apart. She said that trust was the glue of civilization. Pernie didn’t know about all that, though, and she’d said as much. That’s when Djoveeve got her good.
“You said you want to marry your Master Altin one day,” Djoveeve had said. “Marriage is a promise, don’t you know?”
Pernie hadn’t ever thought of it like that before.
“It is,” the ancient old assassin had pressed. “It is a promise to be faithful until your dying day. A promise is not something to enter into lightly, child. And it’s all the more important for you. When you become Sava’an’Lansom, your promises must be stronger than your steel. When you promise
to protect, when you promise to kill, there must never be a doubt in anyone’s mind. Ever. That is how the Keeper of the High Seat on String, and the Royal Assassin in your lands of Kurr, help hold the peace. It is their promise of death that makes the knot of peace between us, the humans and the elves. You, little Sava, must never make promises lightly. One day, your promise might hold together everything.”
So Pernie had promised not to use her magic. Which was fine. Especially here on Earth. Nobody else had magic anyway. Including a dead Hostile.
They turned up another street and were now driving toward the mountains. Pernie saw that they were leaving the tall buildings behind.
“Hey,” she said. “The Hostiles are back there where the broken buildings are.”
“I know a better place,” he said. “A great big one that crashed into the trees.”
He didn’t look scared anymore, and Pernie thought he might be running away. She didn’t want to call him a coward, though, because that would not be polite. His brain did come from the bottom of the basket, after all.
“Well, you said you would take me to the broken buildings,” she said. “And that’s where I want to go. So take me back like you said you would.”
“We’re going to see the big one way up in the trees.”
Pernie frowned at him. He looked back at her only briefly, flashed a flat smile, and looked back out again.
“Speed seven,” he said. Pernie knew he was talking to the car.
“Well, I don’t want to see the big one,” she said. “So if you are afraid to go to where there are lots of smaller ones, then you can just let me go myself. Take me back.”
“Just wait,” he said. “You’ll like this one.”
“Take me back,” she said again. She was getting mad.
“No, be patient. I told you there is a big one up here.” He was staring straight out the windshield now. “Window up—passenger front,” he said. Pernie’s elbow had been resting on the window frame, and the glass suddenly rising startled her.
“Hey,” she said. “Put that down. And take me back right now.”