Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (14 page)

But Gromf’s description was enough. It filled in the missing bits of information the old shaman had gleaned while using the lamp he had stolen from the old human fortress at the base of the great mountain, the fortress with the towers of mismatched stone. The water effect is the changing of mana to a thing more powerful. It was the thing God had hinted of when he told Kazuk-Hal-Mandik of the stones.

Now, Kazuk-Hal-Mandik led Gromf down into the deep and sacred caves of the clan, the dying places where the honored warriors went to the last season. This was the place where the warlords and heroes came never to be seen again. The old ways said the gods came to claim them and take them to a new place where they were reborn in greater bodies, a land of beasts many times larger than those that roamed the vast plains of Kurr, the greatest beasts. There were no humans there. No dwarves. No elves. Only orcs. Orcs and the greatest beasts endlessly seeking to devour one another for all of time.

Gromf no longer believed that this was true. The new God promised other things. He promised a land where there
were
humans. And elves. There was justice in this land. Eternal justice and the enslavement of hated humanity. The squeaks and squawking of birds during the day, the howling of wolves at night, all of these were replaced by the weeping sounds of broken men and their sobbing pleas for mercy and forgiveness. Gromf thought those stories seemed too good to be true, but he hoped that they were. He allowed himself to believe in the one God, had faith in his promises, for had not everything he had told them worked thus far? And it was with that faith and hope that he followed Kazuk-Hal-Mandik into the chamber where God was said to speak.

“You are the only orc alive besides me to see this place,” said the ancient warlock as they entered the sacred chamber. “It was here that God found me.”

“Where is he?” Gromf asked. He was in no mood for long histories now. Enough talking had been done. “Call him forth.”

“One does not call forth God,” Kazuk-Hal-Mandik began, but he did not continue for suddenly the chamber filled with light as the pool itself appeared to come to life.

The water filled first with the light of a bright blue sky, so bright Gromf felt as if he stood in broad daylight, and in a way, he did. Into that nearly blinding azure grew hazy shapes which solidified into a formation of rocks and gnarled trees. The trees were low-elbowed things that looked as if growth for them was the pursuit of obsequiousness. They seemed to bow and scrape across the uneven terrain, snaking over the jagged stone and only daring to put the barest spread of greenery up into the air, feeble tufts like trees in miniature, and even those too fretful to be green, favoring instead a groveling yellowed hue.

In the midst of the jumble of stones sat a figure that might once have been an orc, though upon closer examination, even that similarity seemed farfetched beyond merely the count of its head and limbs.

Its head was a vast, craggy thing, colored and textured so as to nearly match the stones upon which it sat, red and brown and black, no pattern, and covered with lichens and the white and gray smears left by the droppings of passing birds. Despite this head, its location relative to the rest of the form, it could not be said to be head-shaped, though it did sit upon a chunky foundation that shaped in its fissures and angles a set of shoulders and a torso. From this grew a pair of arms and legs, though none of them of equal size, and at the ends of each, three of them at least, were things that moved in the way of hands and feet. The left arm of the figure was far longer than the right, longer than the body as a whole, so long its terminal end could not be seen. What served for legs were a bramble of twisted joints, too many joints to be needed, four on one leg, six on another, and none of an orientation that seemed to complement the rest. Gromf couldn’t imagine what it must look like when it moved.

To Gromf’s eyes, it was a thing of unrivaled deformity sitting there, an abortion to be cast off a cliff the moment it arrived. Such misshapenness would never have been allowed to live amongst the clans. It was an abomination to be rid of, nothing more.

“He has come,” muttered Kazuk-Hal-Mandik in a low voice as he threw himself to the ground. “It is the one God.”

Gromf did not fall so easily to the ground. He stood staring into the pool at the hideous thing sitting there. He studied it even as he suspected it studied him. Gromf noticed that the rocks it sat upon were covered with crystals, stones like the yellow stone, hundreds of them, thousands even. The more he scoured the image in the pool, the more of them he saw. It was everywhere. God Stone. A heap of it, a whole place of it. What power must this one God wield?

“You do not fear me,” said the figure in the water. A crack in the craggy rock-heap of its head moved as it spoke. Gromf thought the voice was in his head, not his ears, though its timing matched the motions of its mouth. The pond remained still.

Kazuk-Hal-Mandik was groveling at the edge of the pool, hissing at Gromf to get down before he got them both killed.

“No, I do not fear you,” Gromf said. “Are you a god, or do you have the power of so much yellow stone to pretend it?”

The figure in the pool laughed, and there was fluidity to the movement that convinced Gromf it could not be a creature of solid stone. It had a body like an orc beneath all that, or in spite of it.

“There is no difference,” said the one God. “I am God. Your God. I have vanquished the others, and now have come to help you destroy the children of those gods that I have slain.”

“What children?”

“The humans and the elves. Just as I destroyed the dwarves before them. When it is done, I will set an orc upon the throne of humanity and another in the elven vale.”

“Why?”

“Because it is just.”

Gromf stared into the pool, tried once more to count the bits and pieces of all that yellow stone. He knew little of the dwarves or the elves. But he knew enough of power to recognize the promise of what he saw.

“What must we do?”

“You begin,” said the one God, “by killing that one. He is weak. Break his neck, and you may take his stone as well.”

Gromf glowered down at the horrified expression that briefly crossed Kazuk-Hal-Mandik’s face. In that instant the old shaman knew fear, but he put it quickly away. He was as ashamed by it as Gromf was at having seen it. He recovered in an instant, then nodded, solemn and calm. “It is true,” he said. “My part has been done.”

Gromf felt better then, and forgave the old warlock for his fear, though he would not break his neck. He turned back to the one God. “I am not done with him,” he said. “He will die when he is no longer of use to the All Clans. That is the way of Discipline. You demand waste.”

The one God laughed, the sound of stones rolling down into a hole. He turned away then and spoke to someone Gromf could not see. “There is hope after all,” he said. “Finally.” There came from behind him, somewhere far below, a great caterwauling, raucousness formed in throats that Gromf could not picture the creatures for. Nothing he’d seen in his life made such sounds.

Gromf looked down at Kazuk-Hal-Mandik still on his hands and knees. “Get up,” he said. “The time for groveling is done.”

Chapter 11

D
octor Leopold came out of the divination spell seven hours after he began. As unspectacular as it was to watch, him sitting there mumbling with his eyes closed and doing nothing else to entertain the eye, his masterful inquiry into the location of Ensign Orli Pewter was high-level magic coming from a diviner of his rank. He leaned back, causing a ruckus of protests from the rickety chair in which he sat, and pulled a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket. He dabbed at the beads of sweat that had formed on the expanse of his hairless brow and then did the same across his thick forearms which also showed a sheen of sweat by the light of the candles burning low nearby.

“Well, my boy,” he said at length, “you are correct in assuming she is on that planet. I need parchment.”

Altin rifled through the heap of items he’d dumped on the floor and found a basket in which had once been stacked a pile of blank parchment sheets. He fished around until he found a piece that wasn’t too wrinkled and then sought for a quill and the inkpot he knew had to be down there as well. Fortunately, there was still enough ink in the ink pot for the doctor’s use.

The doctor set to work making a sketch of planet Earth, upon which he drew the shape of one of its significant landmasses, and upon that he drew a small circle to which he pointed as he handed his map to Altin. “She is in that area somewhere.”

Altin took the parchment to the window and looked out, the vantage he had on the distant planet good enough that he could just make out the landform described by the doctor’s picture. The continent he’d drawn occupied the upper portion of the globe from the angle of Altin’s view, though with some portion of it out of sight around the left side. He spent a few moments looking back and forth between parchment version and the actual landmass, then turned back to the doctor with a frown. “Surely you have more than this. If this world is remotely similar in size to Prosperion, that is at least two or three hundred measures you’ve marked there.” He poked at the map as he spoke. “You can’t expect me to find her in time in all of that.”

“If it helps,” said the doctor, “I get the feeling she’s in a fortress of some kind. Possibly in the dungeon.”

Altin’s eyes bulged and the doctor knew immediately that Altin only barely kept his temper in check. “Are you telling me we just wasted seven hours to narrow it down to … to
that
?”

“Well, I’m not sure it’s entirely a waste,” the doctor replied, his cheeks billowing with his indignity. “That is a large and completely foreign world, you know. I’ve gotten you quite close.”

Altin spun and stared back down into the bright light of planet Earth, his jaw working as furiously as his mind.

He turned back and strode to the table where the doctor sat, taking a chair from nearby and setting it across from him. He fished into his robes and pulled out the tablet he’d taken from the
Aspect
’s sick bay. He stared at it for a moment, could see his reflection in the shiny black surface of its rectangular face. He wished it worked like the mirror he’d made for her, even though he knew that, in some ways, it could.

He pressed the small button on one edge of it as he had seen Orli and Doctor Singh do with this type of device, and as expected, it lit up when he did. He pushed the symbols on it randomly, but none of it made any sense. He could not read the language printed there. The translation spells on his amulet required the person speaking or writing to intend that he might understand. Nothing on this tablet was written for a Prosperion.

He poked at it anyway, stared into the bright bluish light of its window hoping somehow to find something that looked like the map Doctor Leopold had drawn and that somehow he could then add Orli’s name to it. He knew how to make her name in Earth letters. She’d drawn it in the sand for him once while they were chasing sunsets. And he’d seen it on the monitor in the troop carrier he’d been on with Colonel Pewter the day they’d gone to rescue her from Thadius. If he could find that map, he could bring up the symbols chart on this machine—he’d seen Orli and Doctor Singh do that much as well. But no matter how many times he tried, no matter how many icons he poked, he could not find the map.

He did find what appeared to be a scrying spell in progress, and there was a woman wearing strange clothing, much different than the familiar uniforms of the fleet, standing in front of a scene depicting Hostiles flying amongst huge shimmering monoliths. The structures were familiar to him, at least in a general sense, for he recognized their type from pictures Orli had shown him before, images of Earth cities made of magnificent mirrored towers with lamps that burned but never flickered and could be made any color of the rainbow.

These great structures were besieged by Hostiles, and he could see that many of the mirrored monoliths had Hostiles draped over them like sheets of dripping red-hued clay. Several of the structures appeared to have eroded beneath the blanket of whatever the Hostiles did, and it was apparent from the slump and missing angles at the tops of several of the structures that whatever the orbs were doing, it was dissolving the material. Altin could not help but wonder if this is what they had done to the world of Andalia. From the pictures Orli had shown him, on a tablet very much like this one, there had once been structures like these on that world too, or at least close enough that they seemed alike to Altin’s Prosperion-born eyes. When Orli’s people arrived on Andalia, however, there were no such structures to be found. The entire world had been wiped clean. And it appeared that Blue Fire was at it again.

He had to find Orli fast.

He pressed the button that shut off the images and the meaningless drone of the woman’s voice. The tablet was no use. Doctor Leopold was only marginally useful, and High Priestess Maul, who had Altin’s lost Liquefying Stone, refused to speak to him. Which meant he needed to find another, better, diviner.

Magic ranks worked by halves and doubles. If Doctor Leopold was a Y-class diviner, then a Z-class diviner would be twice as powerful. And given that the best the Y-class healer could do was draw a three-hundred-measure-wide circle on a map, Altin definitely needed a Z. With that kind of power, he might be able to narrow that circle down to something more manageable, even if only by half—and he hoped for much better. He needed much better. But there was only one Z on Kurr that Altin knew of: the crazy Ocelot, a wild witch-woman living in the depths of Great Forest, rumored to be over a thousand years old and completely mad. The answers provided by divination were ambiguous at the best of times. He could not imagine how unintelligible hers would be. Assuming he could find her at all. But he resolved to do it anyway. He had no other choice.