Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (53 page)

Such were their ways, their ostentatious displays. But today would be the end. The demons with their crushing feet were chewing up huge chunks of the carefully placed and carefully cut stone. Even the children of the new god trampled that work under with the stomping of their metal feet. More delightful irony.

But the most glorious thing he saw was God. God towered above them all and wiped swaths of humans aside like insects crawling in the dirt. That awesome length of his great arm swung back and forth to the roar of his immensity, splashing humans into the air as if he were stomping in mud puddles. The humans flew away from him in waves, flung out over the battle, over the buildings, and looking like flocks of wingless birds clawing at the sky as they tumbled and spun away.

Gromf looked for one of them to gleam with gold, hoping to see the human queen land at his feet. He would pull out her tongue and push in her eyes with his thumbs. Then he would drag her to Warlord to eat.

She did not land near him, however, for such was not his destiny. He saw it when he spotted her, still in combat with Warlord. He found them by the sound of Warlord cursing her in the secret language of their clan. Gromf knew what he had spoken, though the golden queen did not.

How long had that battle raged? How long had Gromf been unconscious? Long enough for the army to cut this deep into the sprawling city. Long enough for God to stop the lights from falling from the sky. And still the two leaders fought.

He wondered why God did not strike her down, and yet he knew. It must be Warlord. Such was the prophecy.

But Warlord hadn’t done it yet. Why?

And then Gromf saw why.

It was the wicked elf.

Warlord ran at the golden queen and swung at her with his axe. The queen parried it aside and then dove back, away from the upward thrust of the axe haft as Warlord swung it toward her groin.

Then the elf was on Warlord’s back. It raised its daggers and went to plunge them in, but Warlord reached back and snatched him off and threw him into the crowded melee all around.

The golden queen leapt on Warlord in that moment and somehow drove him to the ground, where the two of them grappled for a time. Finally, with a mighty thrust of his legs, Warlord threw the queen in her gleaming armor off of him. She flew back several paces and rolled right back to her feet. Warlord was back on his. They circled each other warily again, and Gromf knew then that this had been going on for hours.

It was Gromf’s fault. He was meant to kill the elf.

He looked to the crowd where the elf had vanished. He could not find it, but he could tell by the way the crowd seemed to fall in on itself where it was. The thrusting spears and swords of the orcs trying to kill it dove and slashed, yet they found nothing to bite into, no flesh to cut, no bones to break. Such was the elusive nature of that awful thing.

The elf cut his way clear and once again moved to get behind Warlord. Then it disappeared.

Gromf shook his head and ran toward the fight. The elf would not cut Warlord down from behind. He sent a wave of fire at an angle, the farthest end of it just missing Warlord’s back.

The elf appeared when the fire passed over him. He spun and faced Gromf coming on even as he patted at places where the black leather of his armor smoked. The snarl that formed on his wicked face was an invitation to death.

Gromf sent two ice lances, each as long as the elf was tall, thick as his fist, both sharp to a needle’s point.

The elf vanished, avoiding Gromf’s missiles, and reappeared running straight for Gromf. Gromf had done this before.

This would be for the glory of God, Gromf thought as he gripped his God Stones tight. He had been given a second chance, and this time he would not fail. He would see how much fire the elf could endure.

The elf’s daggers were already on their way.

Chapter 42

A
ltin was down to his last seeing stone when he found the red sun. Ten stones to get there, a massive and desperate undertaking, but there it was, a giant red sun. It was still far away, barely bigger than a button in the distance, and perhaps a bit more orange than he’d expected, but it was where it was supposed to be, and there could be little doubt. Altin knew this was the one.

He also knew from what Orli had taught him about Blue Fire’s mate, and even about Blue Fire herself, who the fleet people had named Goldilocks for a reason, that there would only be planets capable of supporting life in a certain area around that enormous red sun. Too close, and it would be too hot for life. Too far away, and it would be too cold. And while that made perfect sense to him, he’d still have to guess at where that band was, and even if he got it right, he’d then have to hope there were planets in orbit there. And if there were, he’d have to find them and then determine if there was actually life living there. It was a lot of
if
s.

Now certain that he had found the star they sought, he took up his last seeing stone and drew a deep breath. “Get me close,” he said as he gazed down upon it. Its surface was smooth, polished by time and the flow of water down that sweet little creek, a gurgling brook on a planet that was now so far away, a distance so great that measurements meant nothing, and the best Altin could do to comprehend the scale of it was through the way thinking of it made him feel. It was that far away. He almost felt bad for the little rock. It would never see that place again. It would be stranded out there forever. Thinking it reminded him of his first seeing stone, cast successfully onto the surface of Luria. He’d felt the same way then. His will sentencing something to eternal banishment. How easily it could be done, anthropomorphosis or not. He shuddered at the thought.

Then he sent the stone on its way, sent it to the place that needed to be right, that seemed right, which was all he had. It was a guess, a placement based on what felt like the right distance relative to the scale of what he already knew. He knew where Prosperion was in relation to its sun. He knew where Earth was in relation to Sol. He even knew where Blue Fire was in the same sort of way. He measured those distances and used that to guide his last seeing stone. It was surely not science, and he knew that some suns burned hotter than others. He’d listened to all that he’d been told. But he sent the stone, and it would have to be enough. He would have to begin the search for life from there.

He checked the scrying basin a moment after to see if there was anything to see. He immediately saw that the red sun was as he had hoped, or mainly so, a bloodied orange sphere glowing brightly and similar in size to the suns he knew, if perhaps a bit bigger than they were. He gauged he’d gotten a little closer than he ought to have, but he hoped he hadn’t missed by much. The rest would have to be done by casting seeing spells anyway.

He wasted no time and began looking for a planet nearby, plunging his vision out into the silent blackness and pushing it around.

As always, the distances, even within a solar system, were infuriatingly large, and quite despite Altin’s considerable experience moving his sight as quickly as he was. And this solar system seemed even worse than the three other solar systems he had explored so far. Orli had said the sun would be much bigger, nearly a hundred times more, but such things were intellectual concepts, abstracts for the mind that somehow never struck one properly until experienced for real.

Eventually, after a great deal of searching and wondering which angles he pursued might intersect the plane of planetary rotation, and wondering even if he did find it whether there were any planets anyway, he finally saw a “star” in the distance that was growing rapidly as he moved. It started out as a tiny dot of light like all the rest, but it began to expand in his vision, drawing attention to itself as Altin sped along.
Finally
, he thought as he rushed toward it.

It grew and grew as he approached. It was very red, and the closer he got to it, the more he began to despair that he would find water there. Closer and closer he went, and still no blue oceans shaped themselves as he approached. No white clouds or snow appeared, not the least brushstroke of color beyond ever-present red, though he did begin to notice a few dark spots, like freckles growing slowly as he drew near.

When he was close enough, he realized the freckles were moons. The planet had several, and he made a quick circuit of each of them. Blue Fire’s mate was, by Orli’s theory anyway, a moon around a colossal world, and that gave him hope. He’d almost forgotten about that. The planet didn’t need water if the moons had some.

They did not. They were all barren things, dark and rocky. Clearly without atmosphere, and certainly no large bodies of water anywhere. Frustrated at the lost time, he pushed his way down to the planet itself. He raced around it in a high orbit as he had the moons, looking for signs of small seas, large lakes, rivers, glaciers, anything that might give him a place to start looking for life. All he saw was red and the occasional whorls of what looked to be mustard-colored clouds. At least there was some kind of atmosphere.

He pushed his vision downward, and came upon the surface, discovering as he did a red place that was as much like Mars as it was Luria. It was barren, just like its moons, though heaped in places with mountains that seemed to Altin’s magical eye as if they must thrust hundreds of measures into the sky. They dominated huge portions of the landscape like bloody teeth rooted in an enormous jaw. The roar of the wind in places sounded the shouts of that violence too. At times it roared with such power that Altin had to tweak the spell to mute the sound. The frenzy of this place, of the wind that blew beneath the mustard smears of that sky, was everywhere.

A few times he paused, awed by it, in particular, mesmerized by the great snaking tubes of enormous tornadoes that would suddenly pounce upon the land. They were thick and furious flutes of wind that, from nothing, would instantly appear, scores and scores of them like a mighty herd, tightly wound things that stretched upward as far as he could see, twisting and writhing ropes of turmoil that bound the violence of the land to the violence of the sky. They wove and danced around each other like the ghosts of awful giants celebrating hate and rage. It was both fantastic and horrifying at once.

Surely no life could live in such a place.

He spent a long time pushing around that seething red world, racing back into orbit and diving back down somewhere else, probing into the shadowed places between and around mountain ranges that seemed as large as Prosperion itself.

He even pushed through the surface, ran around in the darkness for a long time, hoping to chance upon some series of tunnels, some underground rivers or lakes, some winding passages filled with the dim glowing substance that lined the walls of the caves around Blue Fire’s core, the porous planetary tissues of a planet-sized organism.

But he found none of that.

After wasting what he knew was far too long on it, he pulled his vision back into the darkness of space again. He gazed out upon the sun. What had he missed? Why was there no life here? There had to be life. If not, well, then there wouldn’t be life anywhere.

Or maybe he’d just gone too far. Maybe this world was too close to the sun.

Or too far away.

How much time should he waste guessing again? But what other choice was there? He couldn’t go back and try divining now. Or perhaps he could. Perhaps Ocelot would know. She’d known before. Maybe she’d be home this time. Maybe she’d be waiting for him. Maybe.

If not, he’d lose even more time.

The debate with himself wasted time too. He let the seeing spell go.

When he came out of the teleportation chamber, he found Orli seated at Tytamon’s desk and busy at work on her tablet. He realized for the first time that she must be wondering what he had done, perhaps thought he’d lost his mind.

She did not. She looked up when he came out and smiled a tired smile at him, her teeth and the whites of her eyes bright and reflecting the bluish light of her tablet where it lay on the table before her. “Did you find him?” She asked it in a way that said she already knew he had, that she knew he’d never have come out otherwise.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I found the red sun. And a big red planet. But I can’t find water. No oceans, no lakes, not even a puddle anywhere. And no … no womb, or whatever chamber a male would have in its place. I found nothing. I don’t know what to do.”

“Where did you look? Where in the system, I mean. How far away was the planet? How many are there, do you know?”

“I remembered what you told me about distances from the sun. About habitable zones. I guessed at it. I made the red sun the same size as yours and mine in my mind, and on what felt like the right relative scale, started looking there. And as I said, I did find a planet too. But nothing on it. I don’t know if there are other worlds.”

Her mouth shaped the hum that followed, and she set herself to tapping on the surface of her tablet again. She tapped for a long time. Altin started pacing, his mind racing, his heart beating with the urgency of a task he was afraid he wouldn’t accomplish. Finally he said, “We need to go see Ocelot.”

Orli looked up at him. “Do you think she can help? Do you think you can find her?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t waste more time guessing. Guessing got us this far, but now we need something else. If this is the red world she spoke of, then perhaps she will know more.”