Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (64 page)

“How much power do you need to talk to Peppercorn?” Orli asked.

Peppercorn, of course! He had enough strength for that. He knew as she said it that he must be more compromised than he’d thought. Even the obvious eluded him.

A moment later, Peppercorn confirmed that she and the
Citadel
mages were already on their way to Earth. A wizard on the wall had just contacted them and told them the news, and the spell had already commenced down in the concert hall.

“So now we wait,” Orli said, once Altin announced that
Citadel
was underway. “I can keep us up to date through this.” She lifted the helmet’s earpiece and showed it to him in the palm of her hand. “It’s not as convenient as my tablet, but it will do until you get your strength back.”

Altin couldn’t bear the thought of waiting the rest of this fight out. He turned to face Pernie squarely. She saw it and knew what that look meant.

“Altin, no,” Kettle gasped.

“She’ll be fine,” he told her. To the child, “Only just a bit. No more than unwilting a daffodil. Do you hear?” He’d read the spell she’d used. He’d tried to cast it long ago when the guilds were first testing him.

“Master Altin,” insisted Kettle, stepping forward and catching Pernie from behind, gripping her by the shoulders again and hauling her to a stop. “I won’t let her do it. She’s my ward, an’ I say she won’t. Kill yerself if’n ya must, but this child won’t be doin’ it fer ya, an’ carryin’ the guilt fer it all her life. No sir, not while I’m standin’ here ta stop it.”

“It’s my castle,” he said, straightening and staring the older woman down. “So she’s my ward too. And I think there are few people in this world who are less inclined to guilt over something like that than Pernie is. Isn’t that right?” He looked to Pernie for a reply, but most of that had gone over her head, and what hadn’t had already dissolved in eagerness, anything like caution lost in the giddy joy that possessed her when she discovered she had a real chance of being useful to him.

“Altin, I forbid it.” Kettle pulled Pernie in close to her body, right up against the bloody apron, and crossed her strong hands over the child’s chest protectively. “I said no.”

“Stand aside, Kettle. It must be done. Lives are at stake.” He stepped forward and knelt down before Pernie, looked her straight in the eye. “No more than the flower, all right? Don’t try to make it bigger just because it’s me. You must have discipline.”

“I won’t,” she said. A sculptor shaping confidence could not have found a better model than Pernie was right then.

Kettle started to speak, “Altin, I—”

“Kettle!” he roared. “There are things at stake larger than the guilt of a girl. Be silent!” The volume and severity of it startled her, and her eyes went wide. She’d never imagined such a thing from him before. But she was silenced by it.

Altin looked back to Pernie, his expression soft and gentle again. He shut his eyes. “Go on, then,” he instructed her. “Just a little bit.”

Pernie glanced over her shoulder and shot Kettle a little smirk of victory, even stepping out of her protective grasp. She put her tiny hands on Altin’s blood-smeared face again and closed her eyes too. With remarkable discipline, she reached into the vast and churning whorl of mana, and as deftly as she might have snipped off a raven’s wing or a frog’s leg with her little knife, she plucked out a slender strand of mana and poked it into Altin as tenderly as if she were threading a needle. She then began pushing growthful thoughts into him as she chanted the words of the spell. There was no reason why it had to be a flower, she knew, for there was nothing in the words that seemed to be about flowers at all. In fact, she thought most of the strange words taught by Master Grimswoller and the other teachers at school were silly anyway. She simply knew that flowers grew. That they knew health from lethargy. Vigor from decay. So she filled him with it. Just that tiny bit. Just as he’d asked. Just the small thread she’d gathered and fed into him so carefully, pushing it in and feeding it as gently as if she were blowing across a hot spoonful of stew. And, after a time, she knew not how long, it was done. Enough to heal a flower, just as she had promised. She released the spell.

When she was finished, she opened her eyes, wondering if it had worked. It seemed like it had. And he was smiling back at her.

“You’re a genius,” he said to her, his green eyes wide, the whites white now and nearly aglow. He hugged her, a long, strong hug that mashed the sharp corners of the spacesuit against her ribs, pushed into her skin painfully. But she didn’t care. Then he did something he’d never done before. He kissed her. One warm kiss upon her little cheek.

Then he stood and spun round, facing Orli. “She’s done it!” he proclaimed. “It’s enough to get us there. Let’s go fetch Taot. We have to help them hold out until they come.”

“Help who?” Pernie asked eagerly. “And who is coming?” But they were already gone, Altin and Orli vanished with a single rush of air, leaving her behind, again. Which really didn’t seem fair. Not now. Not after she’d proven herself to him. She had magic. She should be with him in case he needed her. And yet here she was, alone with Kettle, like always. It definitely wasn’t fair.

And Pernie knew exactly whose fault it was.

Chapter 49

T
aot spun and rolled and blasted fire to melt away the ice lances being flung up at him, his attention fully on keeping himself and his two riders alive. His first instinct, wanting to swoop down and lend his fiery breath to the defense of the gates, proved too dangerous right away. The battle at the gate was pinched down to the area just outside the palace walls, a tiny knot of Prosperions stuck in the role of cork, whose demise seemed to be inevitable at this point, as a pair of demons had got in behind them and impeded their final retreat. Altin didn’t want to think who it was that might be down there fighting in the gate, so close and yet trapped outside, although he feared he already knew.

Whoever they were, the handful of human combatants were embattled on all sides by the piercing thrust of pointed demon limbs, the snapping grab of pincers and mandibles, and the mashing, bashing blows of so many oddly concocted variants of blunt weaponry, perverse designs that only deranged gods could have seen fit to arm any creature with. And then there were the orcs in all their numbers and with all their assorted weaponry as well and, of course, their spells.

The walls around the palace were swamped with gnashing tides of enemies whose great numbers pressed upon one another in such a way that they often turned against each other for want of an enemy to fight. And even with that self-consumption, the numbers of the enemy grew. More and more demons continued to flow into the city, causing the horde around the Palace to spread like a black stain expanding in a ruined cloth. For those amongst the ranks of the deadly host that were not bent on destroying their fellows, most were happy for the chance to take shots at anything flying by. And a low-flying dragon with two human riders was a particularly savory target for the orcs. And so it was that Taot and his human friends discovered upon arrival that they had more than enough to do in simply keeping themselves alive, much less swooping down and coming to the aid of the Queen. They were, in a way, the target of every enemy that was not directly engaged with the monarch and her valiant but very small band.

And if the projectiles being hurled up from the ground weren’t trouble enough, the treacherous skies were made more so by the blinding-bright stripes of laser fire coming down from above. It descended from orbit at unpredictable angles, appearing suddenly like plummet-lines of burning death as the starships fired with brutal accuracy and cut hissing troughs through the seething demon sea, great canals carved into the enemy ranks with banks of rent bodies that writhed and hissed and squirted foul fluids into the air like fountains, spurts and spouts that splashed into the flow of gore oozing through the city in steaming streams and pooling into lakes of wretched hideousness. But even those seared swaths filled in with new enemies nearly as soon as the laser beams had passed, the press of the enemy, the supply of its assailants seemingly without end.

The laser fire was the most dangerous for the dragon near the Palace wall, so Altin guided him away, directing Taot to take them back toward the rear of the enemy mass, the place where the incoming mobs crashed against those who crowded one upon the next in hopes of something to kill, some trying so desperately, so eagerly, to find something to bite, stab or mangle that they would simply crawl up and over the rest of the lot and continue toward the Palace anyway.

For a moment, Altin considered getting to work with Orli and the dragon fighting along that line, even though doing so would represent but a drop in the ocean in terms of overall effectiveness, but after only a few moments flying over that colliding line at the rear of the enemy, he realized it was almost as dangerous to be flying back there as it was near the Palace walls. Not so much because of projectile danger from the orcs, for most of them were forward and trying to get through the gates, but instead because of the fleet aircraft flying all around.

Several dozen fighters flew back and forth across the ranks. They streaked by at incredible speeds and strafed the attackers with bullets, burned them with lasers and blasted into them brutally with missile fire.

At first they hadn’t seen the fighters, for such was the nature of their speed. But as Taot was banking and prepared to dive in for the trio’s first attack, one such fighter came shooting down from above. The heat of its passing nearly blistered their skin, and, making things worse, Taot got caught in its passing jet stream, which nearly twisted the poor dragon into a knot. Fortunately for his riders, he was adroit enough to spin with the whirling winds, escaping the air currents in a graceful pair of barrel rolls that just managed to keep Altin and Orli in their seats.

Barely had he righted himself, however, when the fighter’s missiles struck the ground below. The explosion was tremendous, and hot blasts of air churned upward at them, the heat brought upon a column of smoke and flame and a powerful concussive wind that buffeted the dragon yet again. It hit him so hard it drove him straight up, nearly twenty paces all at once, cramming his riders down upon his backbone as he rose with such violence that their bodies compacted, their spines compressing as they absorbed the force of the sudden rise. Taot managed to bank out of the worst of it, for the fighter’s passing did mark a straight line, but even moving off that path, the air currents the fighter’s pass set in motion, the chaotic random whirl, were too dangerous and impossible to navigate—not to mention what damage might come from inhaling the smoke of chemicals made on distant Earth.

And there was plenty of that. Huge clouds of smoke filled the air in greater and greater volume, choking and foul. Some of it smelled dark and woody, but some of it did not. What wasn’t from burning timber and the possessions of dispossessed or dead citizens came from noxious things the dragon had never smelled before, acrid, artificial and alien. Taot did not need to know what it was he smelled to know it was not healthy for him to breathe. And the smoke that did not come from any of those other things was worse in its own way, for some of it was foul and yellow, odious plumes of dense, greasy smoke that curled all around them, reeking, oily, heavy with the nauseating stench of burning flesh and hair. That smoke was the most disturbing, if not for the dragon, certainly for the humans riding on his back.

In addition to the fighters attacking the rear of the crowding enemy, still other aircraft flew out over the plains. They flew sorties tracing the length of the demon line stretching into the city from beyond its broken walls, the steady stream of it constant as demons came from the blood-soaked fields like a flow of black lava, filling the smoking scar that marked where the main body of the host had trashed and ransacked their way toward the Palace gates. These bombers added their own criss-cross of laser fire, bullets and missiles to be dodged, and farther out, their bombs went off like kegs of captured thunder being opened beyond all those broken farms. Tons of them, tactical nukes going off in breathtaking eruptions that unfurled into the sky, great gray mushrooms of smoke, umbrellas of churning ash sliding up from the ground along neat narrow columns as if some angry god, an artist god, was sculpting cumulous clouds in the very likeness of his wrath. All about them the ground shook and concentric rings of rushing air smashed bodies and dismembered demons totally. At the edges of the blast waves, remnant limbs and hollowed-out carapaces blew like tumbleweeds across the field. It might have been a vision from the lowest depths of hell, though it served the cause of good.

All of this went on in the skies above and around Crown City, and though Altin had little familiarity with the combat capabilities of planet Earth, he knew within moments after having teleported the three of them into the sky above Prosperion that continued flight in the battle zone would be deadly for them all. The aircraft shot and bombed endlessly, pruning and carving away at the enemy, streaking in and out so fast that Altin could not keep track of them. Even Taot, veteran of the skies that he was, could not keep track. By the time even that great hunter heard them coming, they were already long gone. There would be no way to dodge them if they stayed. The lasers, though visible, moved far too fast, and the spitfire bullets could not be seen at all. Only the hiss of bullets cutting through the air announcing those projectiles had passed, and it was only luck that preserved them when the third fighter in less than a minute came whipping by. It didn’t take human or dragon very long to realize that they needed someplace safe to land.