Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (68 page)

Orli heard the breath leaving him and looked back at him. She smiled, her eyes sparkling as Luria’s pink light caught them just right. She scooted back against the cliff face beside him, snuggling up close for warmth in the chill of the night. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to spoil the mood.”

“It’s all right,” he said, putting his arm around her and drawing her tightly against him. She always smelled so wonderful. “It’s going to be a while before we stop doing things like that.”

“It is,” she agreed. She looked out across the end of the valley, far to the west between the pair of mountain peaks where the sun had lost itself behind the mountain range several hours ago. A lone star hung there now, dangling between two spires like a brilliant jewel lying in the cleavage of the world. She watched it for a while, and then, suddenly, she started, nearly jumping to her feet as she turned to face Altin again. Breathless, she asked, “Is that Hope?”

Her urgency startled him, the energy that radiated suddenly in her words. He frowned and asked, “Is what hope?”

“That,” she said pointing back toward the star. “That star. Is that the Hope star?”

He leaned forward, looking around her, then nodded. “Yes, that is Hope.” The star of Hope, named for a mourning woman of Prosperion myth. The eternal lover waiting in the sky for a lost sailor only the gods knew was never going to return.

“It’s a blue star,” Orli said.

He nodded. “Yes. It is.” He didn’t know what else to say. She seemed all aflutter now, like a flock of birds had taken flight in her.

“Altin, it’s a blue star. Like Yellow Fire was. Like the original Blue Fire. Blue Fire’s lover.”

“Okay,” he said, smiling but still completely lost.

“Think about it. How did her husband die?”

Altin blinked a few times, trying to catch her intent, but could only answer the question without insight. “You said the sun blew up.”

“No, not blew up, it flared. Solar cycles. It blasted the world he lived in.”

Altin nodded. He’d understood it well enough when she explained it to him before.

“Don’t you see it? We killed Red Fire in the heart chamber.”

Altin continued to nod, but he still wasn’t seeing what she saw.

“We blew up his heart. But not the life. Or at least, I don’t think the life. It’s all still there. In the living things.”

“Yes, but, Orli, what are you on about?”

“Altin, it’s the exact opposite from Blue Fire’s mate.” Altin’s blank look forced her explanation on at increasing speed. “They need both to live. Don’t you get it? To kill Blue Fire, we were going to destroy all the life on her world. She needs the living things, remember? That’s why she was ‘defending’ Andalia. She thought the Andalians were killing the essential life. It was a prospective nest for her. The life came first. Life provides life; it’s the life energy for them, for her species. Life is the spark … or something like it, and the heart chamber is the soul. It must be. And if it is, that means we can bring him back!”

“Bring who back?”

“Blue Fire’s husband. Yellow Fire.”

He looked completely perplexed, his eyes narrowed, his head moving marginally side to side. “What are you talking about?”

“We can go get his heart.”

Altin’s eyes narrowed even more, but his mouth fell open, and by the look of him, she might as well have just told him the sky was made of foxtails and that Queen Karroll was an orc.

Her own expression shaped impatience and more than a little frustration too. She knew that she was talking too fast, that she was skipping parts that needed to be filled in, but in her urgency, her elation at this epiphany, she could hardly contain herself. She pulled in a long, slow breath to calm herself, and began again. “All right. Look, do you remember when we were in Blue Fire’s great cavern getting the Liquefying Stones for the
Citadel
mages? Remember what you told me about the heart chamber? How she had that cluster of dark green stones in the middle of it? The core of the heart chamber, you said. She told you it was the father’s gift. It was some kind of something special. Remember?”

He nodded. He remembered it quite clearly.

“Well, Red Fire had one too. It wasn’t blue, it was orange, but otherwise it was just like you said it would be, a concentrated batch of different crystals, a patch that was clearly a different type of stone. The father’s gift. Or maybe it was the mother’s gift in this case. I don’t know. But what if that part is still alive? What if it’s dormant or something? Plants do it all the time, geophytes with storage organs like bulbs and tubers. The precedent is totally there.”

He shook his head a little then. He didn’t speak what he was thinking, but he thought it anyway. They weren’t talking about a dormant plant. They weren’t talking about plants at all. And more importantly, Yellow Fire had been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Maybe even millions. They didn’t really know how long it had been, but however long, it was longer than any flower bulb was going to stay alive.

She could see what he was thinking simply by the way he moved his head, by the way he lowered his eyes briefly when she’d finished saying what she’d said. She saw and knew precisely what was going through his mind. “And don’t think it’s a matter of time either. These creatures are made of stone after all. They live for millions and millions of years. Far longer than any of the organisms on their surfaces do. Who knows how long a perennating organ for one of them might last? What if we could transplant that? What if we could go to his world and find that part, that piece of him? What if that
is
him? What if that’s his mind and soul, and all the rest is … like skin or some other body part?”

Altin watched the light of her enthusiasm grow. Her eyes were wide and glistening with it, her hands moving frantically as she spoke. He wanted to share in that enthusiasm, but it didn’t really make enough sense for him to get caught up in her energy. “What if it’s not?” he said. “What likelihood is there that it is? You’re making wild assumptions here. What has ever happened to suggest that this is how they, how Hostiles, work?”

“It’s not about likelihoods and suggestions, Altin. It’s about hope. Don’t you see? It’s so obvious. Just ask her. Ask her if it’s true.”

Altin looked down at his thick silver ring and touched it, turning it on his finger slowly. The pulsing light from under it painted his finger green and part of his hand to match. “She doesn’t like to talk to me anymore,” he said. “I make her sad.”

“Well she can deal with it for this. Just ask her. She’s probably already heard us anyway, so go on and try.”

“I don’t know. I think you’re shooting at pretty high-flying fowl with this.”

“Just do it. Please. Don’t make me beg.”

“Fine.” He drew in a long breath of the chill night air and sent the idea as best he could to Blue Fire. He asked the question through images, asked if she thought it might be true, if she thought perhaps there was a chance that the essence of her mate might still be there, waiting in silence like some lonely iris bulb, an ancient thing lying in a lifeless cave on a dead moon, orbiting a dead planet, orbiting a moody blue sun.

Unlike the Blue Fire he’d come to know before the war was won, the creature she’d become since did not send forth waves of anger or remorse. She didn’t send forth much of anything. It was as if her strength had been taken away. Sharing thoughts with her was akin to watching a bird that’s flown into a pane of glass and now lies on the ground, not quite lifeless, the forces that animate it still working, but the thing that it was, the vibrant thing, now somehow gone.

He tried to show her the image of a human heart, the essence of it beating in his chest. He did likewise with the mind, conjuring in his mind the images he’d seen on Doctor Singh’s monitors, the drawings in Doctor Leopold’s offices. He linked those ideas to what he understood of being. Of life in its essence. Of souls. He contrasted that with images of body, of arms and legs and toes. He connected that to things of the world, to trees and grass and creatures roaming there. Things of blood and tissue. Of hair and hooves and, well, and meat. One part was physicality, one part was essence, spirit. One was animating, the other animated. He tried to convey the essence of
me
and then
you
to her, all wrapped around those two ideas, the shape of what it was to be someone rather than something. He shaped it as best he could, reiterated it, made it feel the way a question feels, adding it to the idea of that lonely bulb, in turn attached to the image of the father’s gift in her own heart chamber. He asked, and then he waited.

He waited for a long time, the silence in his mind as uncomfortable as had been the endless hum of her misery before Red Fire died. So it went for several minutes, him staring blankly out of his eyes, listening to his own thoughts for echoes of another’s with tension in his body, expectant and on edge as if he expected twigs to snap somewhere in the dark woods of a nightmare. He’d just about given up when finally a thought came. It was as close to a
maybe
as she could communicate. She didn’t know.

He sent the whole pack of images again, wanting to be sure she’d at least understood the question properly. Wanting to make sure that feeble response was what he thought it was, neither confirmation nor denial. She had. And it was.

“She doesn’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t think they think about themselves in that way. Souls and selves are things for priests and philosophers, bulbs and bodies for botanists and people of biology, doctors and the like. None of that is really the kind of thing they have concepts for. At least that is the impression that I got.”

“Ask her if she thinks it’s possible.”

“She already said she didn’t know. She didn’t say it wasn’t true. She just didn’t say it was.”

“It is. I just know it is.”

“But you don’t. And we don’t even know if life has anything to do with it. For that matter, we don’t even know if there is anything alive up there anymore. It might all be dead by now, what little there was. The life that was there might have become bound to him somehow.”

“Well, it would only take you two seconds to find out,” she countered, her chest swelling defiantly. “You could look up there like you always do, with a seeing spell.”

“But there wasn’t anything alive when we were there. I didn’t see a single thing.”

“I did. You can go and see if the lichens are still there.”

He didn’t recall any lichen, but he wasn’t going to argue the point. “Even if I saw them, how would I know they are alive? You’re the botanist, not me.”

“I will tell you. Just go look. Then come back and do that illusion like you did when you were showing the Queen the armies on the plains. The spell the
Citadel
mages do all the time in the concert hall.”

“Well, I never saw them. So at least tell me where to look.” He was trying not to let exasperation become apparent in his voice. There was no point in this.

“We were in the big jumble of rocks, not all that far from the first pit we jumped in. If you can get me close to that, I’ll show you where they were.”

He could tell she wasn’t going to relent, so it would be easier to oblige. Besides, he didn’t want to say no to her anyway. Not today. Not on a night like this. “Fine,” he said. “Let me go look.”

He closed his eyes and pushed himself into the mana, shaped the taut line that ran across the vast distances between his world and that from which Red Fire had once made his angry presence known. He found the place where they’d first had to learn to fall together, Orli operating the Higgs prism and the jets for both of them. He opened that vision up in his mind, saw the place, a narrow, natural corridor of broken stone, dark but lit well enough by the diffuse red light of the planet’s ever-present rusty atmosphere. He ran his vision up and down, looking for something that looked like the lichens he knew from Prosperion. There was a patch on one rock, a whitish flaky place, that might pass for that sort of thing.

He tethered the spell to that location, bound the view of it to a thread of mana and pulled back into his own mind again. He wound that thread around a globe of nothingness that he fashioned with a thought, like covering a ball with string. He wrapped it tightly around until it was a semi-solid thing. He opened it to the vision he had left upon the surface of dead Red Fire’s world, and then spoke the last word of the spell.

When he opened his eyes, Orli’s face was set aglow, her pale features washed in the red light of the illusion that hung above them and a single pace off the edge of the cliff. “Well, there it is,” he said. “That’s where we jumped. There’s something on that rock on the right that might be your lichen, though it doesn’t look like it’s doing well.”

She peered into the luminous sphere before her, leaning forward to study what was depicted in it. “Can you make it bigger?” she asked. “Like a close-up right on that?”

He resisted the urge to grumble. He reset the image again, much closer to the flaky patch on the rock, staring right down at it from what might be only a hand’s width away.

She clapped her hands. “You see,” she said. “It is still alive! I told you. Life didn’t die with Red Fire. Which means there really is a chance Yellow Fire can be saved.”