Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (17 page)

She spun on him then, her eyes turned to slits. “You will fail me far sooner than Vorvington ever will, commoner.” She spat that last as if it were the worst of epithets.

Black Sander realized he’d stepped on an enchanted stone with that one, so he apologized immediately. He began moving toward the door. His business here was done anyway. For now.

“May I go, My Lady?”

She turned back to the box of rifles. “Is this all there is?”

“No, My Lady. There are five more cases of each at Gevender’s. For now. And we have accounts under various names on Earth with NTA credits totaling three and a half million.”

“Is that a great amount?”

He nodded toward a parchment lying on the end table near the couch, where the marchioness had been sitting moments before. “I’ve included the conversions for NTA credits to gold crowns and silver marks on that list. The NTA is very efficient about posting that sort of thing on the global net.”

She returned to the couch and took up the document. Her lips curled in. The lines radiating around the grim stretch of her mouth looked like little shadow flames. “I want a thousand of each,” she said. “Everything in those boxes. Can he deliver that?”

“I don’t know, My Lady. But I imagine that he could given a little time.”

“See to it. And see to your men. If one of them is leaking information, I want his heart on a plate.”

“Yes, My Lady. Will that be all?”

“No. There is one other thing.”

He tilted his head, expectant, his hands curling the wide brim of the hat he held as he waited.

“On the subject of leaked information: I need you to leak something for me. And I need it leaked so that it gets to the director of the NTA.”

Black Sander did not allow his expression to reveal the volume of his curiosity. “Yes, My Lady?”

“Can you do it?”

“Of course.”

“Then let them know about Sir Altin Meade.”

“My Lady?”

“He’s been captured by aliens, you fool. Don’t you read the
Crown City Sentinel
?”

“Of course I do. So do the people at the NTA. I’m certain they are already aware.”

“But are they aware that Her Majesty intends to leave him there?”

“She what? But I thought Meade was her favorite. The Galactic Mage. He’s a pet.”

“It seems he
was
. I’ve got news that a plea was made to her to send
Citadel
to rescue Sir Altin and the new Lady Meade. The appeal came from the Earth woman’s friend, the captain of that spaceship we’ve seen flying toward the plantations. Our plotting monarch gave him platitudes and vague promises, but would not commit. Even Tytamon the Ancient could see it, for he was there and misses little. The royal fool yawned and promised, and sent them away. And then, three days ago, Vorvington saw a
Citadel
teleporter delivering something to the Lord Chamberlain to give to the Queen. It was a collection of seedlings.”

“I don’t understand, My Lady.”

“Idiot! There are no plants on the red world. Sir Altin is not on a planet where anything grows.”

“Perhaps
Citadel
is fighting Sir Altin’s captors on a different alien world. Perhaps the aliens have taken him away.”

“They haven’t.” She went to the far side of the room, to another table, upon which sat a small black box made of enchanted tarwood. She took off the lid, and a mirror appeared, the box expanding in an instant and becoming quite large, with the mirror sticking up out of it even larger. The mirror was beautiful, its frame made of carved bones that twisted around one another. A sizable emerald was mounted at the top of the frame, and in the gaps of the contours were carved tiny replicas of the fleet ships upon which the first humans from Earth had arrived.

The marchioness closed her eyes, and for a moment she was silent, her expression consistent with one engaged in telepathy. She opened them shortly after and pulled the smashed remnants of a small fleet communications device, one of their collar pins, out of a fold in her skirts. She touched the emerald with one hand and pushed the rumpled com button into a slot near the bottom of the mirror with the other.

Black Sander moved closer. He was well aware that the mirror was enchanted. He’d been the one to get it for her. He understood that it had been enchanted by Sir Altin Meade himself, a gift for Orli Pewter back before she’d become his wife, locking sight magic that was bound to her into the mirror. He had made it so that he could find her and speak to her through it, though much of the speaking part was wound into associations with Earth ships and technology, the magic woven together by those inexplicable cross-school strands that only a wizard who was a Seven or Eight could do. It was a monstrously complicated spell, exquisitely complex, and it had been woven so tightly around Sir Altin’s lover, around them both, that it was almost useless to anyone else at all. But the marchioness’ Z-ranked seer, the idiot savant Kalafrand, had managed to burrow into the enchantments well enough that the marchioness could spy on Orli now, if only visually. Kalafrand had somehow muddled the mirror’s listening ability when he’d wormed his way into what Altin Meade had cast. But seeing was enough, and as long as Orli was near her new husband, the marchioness could also spy on him, the Queen’s Galactic Mage.

“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

P
ernie 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.