Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (45 page)

Orli glanced to Altin, who glanced back and shrugged. He’d never met the Grand Maul before, but he knew who the man was, and he had no intention of showing disrespect, no matter how farfetched or even ridiculous whatever might be coming turned out to be.

“Five worlds,” rasped the man who had held the highest office in the Church for nearly six hundred years. “One for each hand of Anvilwrath. Three human worlds, plagued by arrogance. Hope weeps for Feydore in another. And the fifth grips the hammer of his judgment. Justice comes and even Hope’s sorrow is not enough. Our time nears its end.”

He motioned for the acolyte tasked with pushing his chair to move him still closer to Altin and Orli, right up until the plank’s edge bumped against Orli’s shins. His tortoise head stretched to its fullest length, the wattles of his neck hanging loose like pale, soggy prune skins draped from the tendons visible beneath.

Altin glanced back to Orli again, but she was staring into the old man’s eyes as if hypnotized. Perhaps she was. Altin couldn’t know. He looked back and saw the Grand Maul’s gaze narrowing at him. “The Seven doubts,” the old priest said. “And the Alien does not believe.”

“We believe,” Altin said. “Sort of. We need to know where it is. The big one. The male.”

“You would disarm Anvilwrath,” hissed the old man, his face shaking with the violence of the expulsion, the waddles swinging wildly. “You would kill him if possible.” His body was old, beyond crumbling, held together by willpower alone, but those eyes were steady and strong. They compelled Altin to speak.

“Yes,” he said. “We would.”

“No!” Orli exclaimed almost violently in response. “We would ask him to stop. We would plead our case to him, as I have, as we both have, to Blue Fire. If she can be reasoned with, so can the new male. But you have to tell us where he is. If you know, please, we don’t have time to wait. The demons are in the city now, and all of Earth is being devoured. Tell us. Let us try.”

The Grand Maul smiled then, his cracked lips a rip in the brittle pages of an ancient book. “It will not be enough.”

“If not, then we die and your prophecy comes true,” Orli said. “No surprises for you people at least, right? So let us try. Where is he?”

The Grand Maul laughed then, a deep and honest laugh that rattled out from the cage of his storied bones. He raised the gnarled palsy of his left hand and, without a word, the acolyte behind him pulled his chair away and turned him around. The youth wheeled the Grand Maul back through the crowd of priests, which parted before him like city pigeons beneath the tread of tourist feet. He came to rest at the top stair of a wide, circular pit, five concentric rings leading down to the bottom of what Altin knew was a hkalamate pit. He’d been in the bottom of one of them before.

The Grand Maul waved again and the acolyte turned him back around to face the rest of the room. “These children will show you the way,” he said, pointing at Tribbey Redquill and Caulfin Sunderhusk with his eyes. “And the Alien will show us what their maps mean in her device. Then
we
will speak to Anvilwrath. Not you.” He slid icy scorn across Orli and Altin in turns. “Unbelief is what brought us here.”

Altin shrugged. He didn’t care who talked to the new Hostile world. Just so long as someone did, and did it quick. Part of him was willing to admit that these priests were probably better suited to it than he was anyway.

The Grand Maul made a hissing sound and jerked with his head in a way that sent Tribbey Redquill and the slender Caulfin Sunderhusk scurrying to where Altin and Orli were. Caulfin unrolled a parchment and held it stretched before them while Tribbey started to explain.

“This is a basic star map we made,” she said. “It’s not to scale because, well, we’d have had to do it on enchanted mammoth skin, which we didn’t have time for. But, it’s a start. This is where we are, here.” She pointed to a symbol like a tiny sun drawn near the bottom of the chart, three finger-widths left of center. “Over here is Blue Fire.” Again she pointed near the lower edge, a little higher up and two finger-widths right of center this time. When they’d seen it, she moved her finger again. “And this one here is Earth.” The mark was a third of the way up the map, a half hand from the left edge. “Now this is where the scale issues came up, but this makes the point.” She flicked Caulfin’s fingers where they covered a portion of the top edge of the map. He moved them without complaint. “This is what we believe is the location of … Anvilwrath.” She glanced to the cluster of priests nearby and smiled, then gave Altin and Orli a private look, which each understood entirely.

The map in between and all around these three sun-symbol shapes was dotted by various other symbols, the shapes of constellations Altin had known all his life and that Orli had learned only recently. They both stared at the map for a time, Altin looking up first. He looked askance at Orli, then back at the map. Eventually she looked up too. She saw that everyone was watching her expectantly, waiting for her to explain what the map “meant” in her “alien” device.

“I don’t think I can do anything with that,” she said bluntly. She glanced to Altin and then back across the gathering. “There’s just not enough there.”

“There’s more,” Tribbey said. She took the map from Caulfin and motioned for him to go on with his part. “Do your map.”

“So,” stuttered the youngster, growing nervous now, “I’m not sure how good this is, but we came up with this one too. It’s a spell I wrote based on the models the fleet’s computers make.” He started casting immediately, and a moment later, an illusion appeared in the air just behind the green-eyed mage and the Earth girl. They turned together to look, following the direction of so many other pairs of eyes, and saw it there, a huge three-dimensional star map twice Altin’s height and twice that again both deep and wide.

Upon seeing it, Orli took the scroll from Tribbey and walked into the illusion, unfurling the parchment as she went. She looked back and forth, trying to find Prosperion’s sun. Caulfin, guessing her purpose, helped her by having one star amongst them all pulse and give off a note like the striking of a tiny bell. The star was near her foot, near the nearest edge of the illusionary map.

“That’s Prosperion’s sun,” he said. “And here is Blue Fire.” Again a star pulsed brightly and once more came a single sound, though a different note this time. The star was higher, up at the level of Orli’s calf, but it too occupied space close to where she’d stepped into the area of the spell. If she spread her feet apart, she could touch them both with her legs. “Here is Earth,” he said, and again came a tone. Two steps into the illusion another star pulsed, this one about chest high.

Orli walked right to it and stared at the golden speck of it for a moment, almost expecting to see tiny planets revolving around the depiction of Earth’s sun, Sol. She turned back and looked through the illusion at Altin and the rest of them standing there. She could not help but think they were a remarkable people, and though she dreaded what was to come, she was glad she knew that they were here, living on this world that was so different, yet so terribly the same as the place she’d come from.

“This one way back here, near the top, is the one I’m calling Red Fire,” Caulfin said.

That drew Orli up and spun her around. She went straight to where the ringing sound had been, tipping her head back and seeing a bright red spot pulsing near the uppermost edge. “It’s a red sun,” she said.

“Yes,” Tribbey jumped in. “That is what you suggested we might be looking for in the male Hostile, and with the help of the priests here, we’ve divined this star map. I couldn’t verify it, of course, with the fleet being gone and us having lost access to all their machinery, but we were hoping you could do that for us now.”

Orli was already pulling the tablet out of her waistband, and soon she was tapping up the star maps in its memory. If Caulfin’s illusionary galaxy was even remotely accurate, the star in question was a long way from Earth. If the spell depicted the distances even remotely close to reality, she estimated the red star must be hundreds of light years from Earth at least.

Once she had the charts called up, she moved back to the golden speck that was Sol and, from that vantage, pointed the tablet’s input lens up toward the red sun at the far upper edge of the illusionary map. She saved the image to memory and then checked the star patterns against what she had on file, wondering as she did so if an illusion would even register on video. What if that kind of magic was all in the mind? She’d never thought to ask.

It did not register.

“It’s not working,” she said. “It doesn’t pick up on video.”

Tribbey pointed at the map, which Orli had rolled up and tucked under her arm. “That’s why we made that one.”

Fortunately, the parchment star pattern did register when Orli scanned it with her tablet, and with a bit of resizing, Orli was able to query the records for a pattern match. She found one almost immediately, a red supergiant star listed as Cep 128a1. It was an extremely young star by star standards, barely forty million years old, and it was huge, over ninety times the mass of the suns that nurtured Earth and Prosperion. It was also very far away, over a thousand light years from Earth. And rounding out the bad news, the entry said nothing about planets around it at all.

She scanned through the article, but there was little else she could use. There was little there at all, just a name, coordinates and the brief estimates about its size and age. But at least she knew where it was in relation to Earth. She could have pointed it out to Altin from Earth if they were there, or at least from near Earth once they were beyond the glare of all its lights.

She became aware of everyone staring at her again, and the weight of their expectation was nearly physical.

“Well,” said Altin, “do you know where it is?”

She nodded. “I do. But I don’t know if there are any planets there, much less life. This thing doesn’t have much detail on it at all. Worse, I don’t know how we can possibly get there in time. It took you days to get to Blue Fire, and she is so much closer than that one is. You have no idea how far. We’ll never get there before it is too late.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said High Priestess Maul. “We don’t need you to ‘get there.’ We will speak to him from here. What we do need from you is all the information you can give us to guide the divination spell. You must tell us everything you have just learned and what it means. Every scrap of information will get us closer to finding him.”

“And,” Altin added, “try to tell it as if you were explaining to me. You know, someone who is not understanding more than half of what you say.”

“Of course,” she said. She called up a few relevant files on her tablet and then started right in. Over the course of twenty minutes, she told them everything she learned from the short computer entry about the star Caulfin had designated Red Fire, and she gave as much technical background as she could in such a short period of time. She explained as precisely as possible in the absence of meaningful Prosperion terminology the distance involved, and this was augmented by periodic input from both Altin and Tribbey, who stood as something of a bridge between the technologies of the two cultures, much as Orli was, and had gotten through their own efforts more understanding of intergalactic things than anyone else on Kurr. The explanation was further assisted by frequent references to the illusion Caulfin continued to maintain, where Orli would step into it and point out this detail or that, and reference images to go with it on her tablet. She explained the nature of red supergiant stars, and even tried to explain star collapse, dwarf stars and black holes as best as possible. But they were running out of time and everyone knew it.

Finally the Grand Maul said, “Enough.” He touched her soft hand gently with the wreck of his own, and bade her shut off her device. “And let us hope it is.” For the first time Orli thought he might not be rooting for the end of humanity after all, or at least part of him anyway.

“Places,” said High Priestess Maul, after which she went directly to the edge of the circular pit. Without the least thought for modesty, she slipped out of her robes and handed them to Klovis who folded them neatly and took them away. The Maul was strong and lean, and she looked confident and proud as she made her way gracefully down into the pit. While Orli had no idea what the reasons for it were, her composure gave Orli confidence. Maybe they really had a fighting chance.

The assembled priests took places around the middle stair, just as the priests in Leekant had done when Altin went into the hkalamate pool in the temple there. The acolyte powering the Grand Maul’s chair pushed him around to the far side of the pit where the square block of an altar sat. The youth cast a levitation spell, and a moment later, the ancient figure was atop the altar, chair and all, ready to conduct the spell.

“What are they doing?” Orli asked as she watched the ritual being prepared.

Altin explained as best he could, but the hissing
shush
he got from the Grand Maul prevented thoroughness. It was enough, however, and Orli settled in close to Altin and waited patiently.

Klovis came up beside them and motioned that they remain silent. Orli had to resist the urge to say, “Duh.”

Shortly after, it began. The fires of the braziers lowered around the walls, and the crushing darkness from above descended, as if it meant to join with the equally-crushing silence that filled the vastness of the chamber now. Then, slowly, and with rising volume, the Grand Maul’s old voice became audible. It creaked like old ship timbers as he sung the spell that would start the hkalamate dream, and Altin stared all the while into the bottom of the pit where High Priestess Maul lay, her arms and legs spread out nearly to a cross, exposing herself, making herself, mind and body, a target, open and vulnerable. Just as he had once done.