Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (9 page)

And so he was sailing through the darkness. He thought he heard Orli’s voice again, right after they took off, but he was waggling around too much to know where to look.

Flashes of light went by him as he soared along. They flew over—and under—grate upon grate upon grate. He got the sense that each grate was on the order of several measures long, at least as measured in the direction they flew, separated by spans of dark emptiness. They were traveling down the length of the ship, so he could not tell how wide the grates were. He thought perhaps they might stretch all the way across, as he saw no vertical supports anywhere. But he could not be sure. Orli’s people had things that defied gravity. And these creatures obviously had some ability with mana, if the manaless bubble around the ship—or that
was
the ship—was any evidence.

He saw other aliens as he and his captor flew along. Some were working at various tasks, anchored to the grates with tentacles like tent wires reaching up, out, and across at various angles. Others flew past, going back in the direction from which Altin had just come. Those rode upon air currents blowing the opposite way, riding wind on a level below the grates over which Altin and his alien … escort flew. He surely hoped it was an escort and not an executioner.

He wondered at what oddities the creatures were, and once again thought this might not be as bad as it seemed. He thought that perhaps it was promising that the creatures worked together, suggesting a cooperative nature and, at least between themselves, some degree of civility. He surely had reason to cling to that idea. Though he might just as easily be on his way to the slaughterhouse right now. It did seem, however, that he was hardly big enough to be much of a meal for creatures of this size. There was also some hope in that. Unless he was but a bit of caviar. A single egg of the novafly perhaps. He cringed as they flew on.

The alien carrying him angled left, toward a bright oval light that glowed with the orange hue of starfish. As they neared the light, he could see it was anchored to the far edge of another grate. The alien flew right over it. It reached up with two tentacles and grabbed onto the grate above them. Another two tentacles grabbed the grate near the light. It pulled itself—and Altin—down toward the light.

The wind changed, buffeting him all around. It whisked and whirled, but much less violently.

The alien pulled them into the change of wind pattern, sending out new tentacles to grasp farther down the grate. Another tentacle reached off into the darkness beyond the light, grabbing something unseen above, out of sight and at least a quarter measure away. He wondered what it was.

The creature pulled them onto another grate, and then spidered along it for a time, across the direction of the wind and right along the edge of the grate. Looking out over the edge, he saw a vast expanse of nothingness off to his left, a wide gap between this grate and the next. When the creature reached up into the darkness again, they were climbing up a wall. It was the hull of the ship, or at least it seemed to be, for it was solid, made of that same green-brown protein as everything else, and it had a gentle curve to it.

The alien snaked its tentacles up the surface, buoyed some by occasional updrafts that couldn’t have been a third of the strength of the wind that had carried them through the ship. But it was enough to help with the climb in intermittent puffs. In short order, they were at what Altin realized must be a hatch, for there were controls near it, and it housed a very large window that looked up into the storm clouds of Yellow Fire’s roiling sky.

The creature sent a tentacle toward a giant boxy shape that looked as if it had grown out of the wall. There were holes in it arranged in geometric patterns, several of which had lights nearby. The creature thrust the tip of a tentacle inside several of these holes in a rapid sequence. Altin had the feeling he was about to be taken outside.

So he
was
going to die. He sighed. He thought they might be going to kill him by mistake. Maybe they didn’t understand what his helmet had been for. What a terrible way to go.

“I can’t breathe out there, you know?” he said.

The creature, as usual, made no response.

They waited there for several minutes. Altin realized the clouds were getting closer. And closer. Soon they were in them, and Altin could see nothing but red-and-gray mist. It reminded him of his first explorations of the gas giant Naotatica back in his home solar system, now so very far away.

Something scraped against the hull beneath him, a dull sound blown up to his ears on an updraft.

He looked down and saw that something was coming up the wall. It was another alien, though this one entirely different than the others he had seen. It was much smaller. No more than fifty or so paces long—large by comparison to his tiny human body, but minuscule compared to his original captors. The newcomer appeared to be made of the same sort of mucous material as the bigger ones, but it had no billow and no bulbs. It was longish, with three eyes—left, right, and center—and its not-quite-cylindrical body tapered to a tail that ended with a hook. It had three long tentacles emerging from beneath its eyes, like a mustache with only three long hairs. It was with these that it climbed the wall, gripping it with its little suction cups. On the hook at its hind end—and, by comparison in size to the hook itself, barely appearing more than a tiny droplet of milk—was Altin’s spacesuit helmet.

“I hope you’re not going to throw me out,” Altin said upon seeing it. “Because I’m not leaving without Orli.”

Chapter 9

T
he lady they gave Pernie to be her fake mother leaned down and buttoned the top button on her uniform collar. The woman’s breath smelled like mint. It always smelled like mint. Or sort of like mint. Mint in that fake way people on Earth made fake natural stuff. She handed Pernie a navy-blue sweater to pull on over the light blue shirt. It was itchy and way too hot.

The woman, Sophia Hayworth, stood and watched as Pernie wrestled with the stupid sweater. Once it was on, the woman reached behind Pernie’s head and pulled her long ponytail out from under it, letting the golden waves fall free, still nearly halfway down her back. Pernie wouldn’t let them cut it.

“Well, don’t you look smart,” Sophia Hayworth said in that chipper voice she always used when talking to Pernie. She smiled down at her, obviously pleased, like someone who has just finished putting together an arrangement of flowers that came out nicely.

Pernie turned and looked at herself in the wall monitor that doubled as mirror. She looked dumb. The shirt was dumb and the sweater was dumber. The plaid skirt was dumb too, hanging down to her knees, of which there were about two finger widths visible before they were consumed by dumb blue socks that itched just like the dumb sweater did. The shoes were the dumbest. They were shiny like polished leather, but made out of something fake. The soles were hard and made out of some dumb Earth material that was too slick to grip the ground very well.

“I can’t run in these,” she said for the fifth time since having been fitted in them.

“You won’t need to run in them, sweetheart,” Sophia Hayworth said. Every time she talked, her voice was just like a children’s song. It made Pernie want to punch her in the throat, even if she was trying to be nice. Pernie’s fake mom lifted up a pair of blue-and-white shoes made out of something else that was fake. “These are your running shoes. You’ll wear them when you have gym.”

“I don’t want to have gym,” Pernie said reflexively. “I hate gym.” She didn’t know what gym was, but some things had to be said on principle.

“Well, I’m sure you feel that way right now,” said her fake mother. “But you will see.”

There was a bunch more of that sort of thing that followed, and eventually Pernie was taken out of the blocky gray house in which she now lived—Sophia Hayworth told her it was “paid for,” which Pernie was made to understand was an important thing. They walked three blocks down one street and two blocks up another. They sat together, Pernie and her fake mother, until a vehicle came along on quiet black wheels and parked in front of them. On the side of it were the words Carson-Millerton Junior Military Academy, painted in black upon the gray-and-blue side of the vehicle. Her fake mom had been teaching her to talk and read for the last three days, in anticipation of school starting. She was picking it up fast. It had helped that she’d learned a little while helping Orli Pewter learn to speak the language of Prosperion, but Pernie was a quick learner too. She was going to learn all their words, and all their science too, but she wasn’t going to tell them that.

“Here’s your bus,” Sophia Hayworth said. “It will take you right to school. You see in the front that it is bus number thirty-five. Remember that number. That’s the bus you’ll need to get on to come home. I will meet you here this afternoon.”

“What if I don’t want to come
home
?” She said the last word derisively.

“Then you can sleep in the streets where the other stray animals live, eat garbage, and hope nobody runs over you with their car.”

If that was supposed to scare her, it didn’t. Pernie could teleport right through one of those dumb cars. If she could blink away from an elven spear, she could blink away from something like that. Although she had promised Djoveeve and Seawind that she would not cast any magic while she was here. “Not one word. Not even telepathy,” Djoveeve had told her. “It’s part of the agreement made by Her Majesty herself. So your promise is the promise of a future Sava’an’Lansom made to the Queen of Kurr.” Pernie had agreed to it even though she was mad at Her Majesty for not saying goodbye to her when she left the throne room that day. But she understood that queens could be very busy sometimes, so she supposed it was all right if they were rude occasionally. Pernie was rude sometimes, too, so she didn’t think it was fair to stay mad at the War Queen.

“Fine,” she said in her best Earth words. She wore a translation pin buttoned to her collar. One of the enchanters she’d come to Earth with a few days ago had enchanted it with the Greater Common Tongues spell. He’d done it for everyone in the box with her, the teleportation chamber the TGS had sent them in.

Sophia Hayworth’s husband, a man named Don, had given her a little device that was hardly bigger than the tip of her thumb. It had a curving bit of fake wire—they called it plastic—that wrapped around her ear. The device had a fat, white button that pulled out on a length of metal thread. If Pernie put the button in her ear, the device translated words for her as well. But it was slow, and it was weird listening to people say something in one language and then have it spoken right on top of that language in another. She thought it was a pretty poor substitute for the translation spell, so she left it in a drawer in the room Sophia Hayworth had given her to use.

The door to the vehicle opened, and an older man who looked in some ways like a much older version of Roberto smiled down at her. “Well, howdy,” he said, seeming very happy. “Welcome to Earth. You know you are my very first Prosperion passenger.”

Pernie shrugged. She looked to Sophia Hayworth, who placed a hand gently on her back and nudged her toward the steps that would take her up into the bus. They sure didn’t use any horses on this world.

“Go on,” Sophia Hayworth said. “Don’t be afraid.”

Pernie spun on her. “I’m not afraid,” she said. She wasn’t either. To prove it, she climbed right up the stairs.

The driver was still smiling, like it was his birthday or something. She turned and looked down a long, narrow aisle that divided rows of seats on either side. There were at least thirty other children staring back at her. Some were very little, like maybe only five or six years old. Others were older than Pernie by four or five years, maybe even as old as seventeen or eighteen. Every one of them looked at her like she was painted pink and green.

She looked down one row and back up the next. A little girl Pernie’s age stared at her with eyes so wide Pernie thought they might roll right out of her head. The girl saw Pernie looking at her, and her eyebrows ran and hid beneath bangs that were slightly arced and cut perfectly straight across her forehead. Pernie realized that the girl, and the rest of them, were all dressed exactly the same as Pernie was.

“Arrr!” Pernie growled at the girl. She feinted, like she might lunge into the seat at her. The girl screamed and slid against the side of the bus, hitting it with a thud and no room to run.

“Hey now, you be nice,” said the bus driver. “You want to make a good impression here on your first day. That’s no way to make friends.”

Pernie turned a bored look on him. “I don’t need friends,” she said. “I’m only here to learn.”

There was an empty seat three rows down on the left. She went to it and sat down near the window as the door swung shut. She was sure she saw Sophia Hayworth sigh.

Chapter 10

P
ernie sat at a little square table that was attached to its own seat. They called it a “desk,” but it didn’t look like one. Someone had made the whole thing all one piece, and she couldn’t move the chair closer at all. The desktop lit up and glowed, and she could move images around with her fingers. All the other students in her class had desks just like it, though they were all much better at using them than Pernie was.

It wasn’t much different than the tablet Orli Pewter had let Pernie play with back at Calico Castle, and it wasn’t much different than the interior wall of her room at Sophia Hayworth’s house. She knew how to make things move. What she didn’t know was how to stop from opening up the wrong things.