Rift in the Races (51 page)

Roberto laughed. “Good enough,” he said. His face grew stern then. “And look in on Orli, will you? I hate not talking to her this long. She hasn’t checked in since she left. I know Tytamon probably has her riding unicorns into the heart of some magic cave in quest of the sacred mushroom of mind blowing or whatever, and she’s probably happy as hell doing it. But tell her that people worry about her up here.”

“
That
, I can do,” he said, always glad to be of use to a friend and sensing the deep concern beneath Roberto’s glib-seeming comment.

“All right. Tell her to contact us, as soon as she gets the
Citadel
array set up. That’s probably the only delay, anyway. That kind of thing is not exactly her strong suit. She’s probably already shorted it out, and that’s why we haven’t heard from her.” He laughed at his own attempt at humor, but Ilbei could tell the Earth man was working hard to convince himself.

“I’m sure that’s the right of it,” Ilbei said. “But I’ll hunt her down just the same, and tell her ta send word.”

“I sound like her mom, don’t I?”

“Aye, that ya do, lad.”

They both laughed. They finally let go the long handshake. “Be careful out there, young man. I expect there’s a fair share a’ young lasses down yonder what would be missin’ ya if’n ya don’t.”

Roberto winked at him then turned to the three wizards standing nearby. “All right, then. You guys ready to go?”

“We are,” said Envette, tasked with transporting her own people down from Tinpoa Base before returning to the
Aspect
and further teleporting exercises. “Are you ready to return to Prosperion, Master Ilbei?”

Ilbei made a face then, a dour one, followed by a shudder. “I expect I’m as ready ta be vaporized as I’m ever gonna be.”

“Sir?” the teleporter asked.

“Nothin’,” he said. “Let’s just get it over with.” He wore his nervousness like an illusionist’s enchanted sign.

“I’m X-ranked,” she told him. “I promise you, you will arrive safely, sir.”

He nodded and closed his eyes, squinting so violently it made his face vibrate. He looked like someone expecting an explosion to go off. In his lap.

Compassion showed upon Envette’s face as she watched him, and she wasted no time sending him back to Prosperion.

“Can’t really blame him,” Roberto said as a hiss of air filled the space Ilbei had so recently occupied. “Kinda creeps me out too, if you want to know the truth. Just,
poof
, like that.” He quivered, his head and shoulders shimmying as a shudder ran down his spine. “It’s fast, though. I’ll give you that. Really fast.”

Envette smiled. “It does take some getting used to,” she admitted. “We still have people who refuse to travel in this way. Some simply will not accept modernity no matter how many centuries pass.”

It was a full half-minute before Roberto stopped laughing.

“All right. Turn out the lights,” he said when he could finally catch his breath. “It’s closing time.” Envette frowned at that and turned around looking, as did her companions, for something they could blow out. Roberto laughed again. “God, I love you guys.”

They climbed into the shuttle, and Roberto took them to the
Aspect
“the old-fashioned way.”

Chapter 35

O
rli’s teeth rattled almost as loudly as the wagon itself. The springless lorry trundled along the rocky remnants of a road, transferring the impact of every rut and pothole straight through its timbers to the ironwork of her cage and, ultimately, to her. Worse, they hadn’t given her cloak back, despite the torrential rains. They had it; it was about the only thing left of hers that they’d kept. Most of the rest had been dumped back in the mountain pass along with what they told her were Tytamon’s bones. But not her cloak.

She could see it. It was stuffed under the driver’s seat just out of reach. She knew that because she’d tried to get it for a while. For a long while. She’d become obsessed with it as the cold soaked through her body to its core. She watched it as she jounced and bounced along, its thick woolen folds just lying there beneath the bench, ignored, channeling water off of itself and taunting her with its forbidden warmth, desirable now even with the horror of the garment’s recent history. She didn’t care anymore. She only knew how cold she was.

“P-p-please,” she’d begged them more than once. “I’m f-f-f-reezing. G-g-give me my cloak.”

They’d only answered once, a curt, “It’s still the warm season, missy—and you’ll want to toughen up.” Her captors made no more attempts to speak with her or treat her like anything other than an animal after that, and no amount of begging, threats or promises sufficed.

Her entire body ached. The cold dug into her like the roots of something evil, and physically, on the surface, she was bruised nearly from head to foot by the violence of the wagon and the road. Her body had not known such physical agony since the wasting Hostile disease. She was hungry, shivering uncontrollably, and terribly alone. She couldn’t even be sure which was worse anymore: the aches, the cold or the loneliness. She even began to long for the attention of the hawk-nosed man or his nervous companion, Belor, the one with the facial tic. She just wanted to be acknowledged. A glance back, a word. Anything but acting as if she weren’t even there, besieged by the weather, battered by the road and covered with bruises black as old bananas. But they never did. They never looked back. The warm-season remark had been at least five days ago, although in truth she’d lost track. It might have been six. What difference did it make? They didn’t even talk to each other. Not on the road. Not in camp.

She watched them at night in the firelight, watched them sitting in the golden glow of it, the hawkish nose under that black brim flashing like a knife when he adjusted his hat or turned his head just right to take a bite.

The nervous man was not as immune to the weather as Black Sander was. Orli could see it in the way he moved, the way he hunched and hugged himself beneath his cloak. He may have had more flesh on his bones than his hawkish master, but he was cold too. He huddled in his wet wool near the fire and tried not to shiver when his master happened to look up. Which was rare at night. Black Sander would sit with his head bowed, the wide brim hiding him, becoming little more than a stack of shadows sitting there, and he would not move till morning when the meal was prepared.

Belor would see to that detail, and to the horses, and to Orli’s meals day and night, but even in the act of providing them, he would not speak to her. He’d hand her food through a square space between the bars, push through a rabbit’s leg or some scrap of quail, then walk away. He’d forgotten her completely two nights ago when the rain was falling particularly hard.

Now, she sat in the center of the cage, away from the cruel bite of the bars, bouncing heavily on her battered backside and staring blankly across the barren stretch of open land. The plains of northeast Kurr seemed endless, so beautiful only a week ago, but now transformed to a cruel expanse of sodden green despair.

At first their journey had taken them toward the mountains in the north. They traveled off the road, the violence of such passage exacting its toll on her body straight off. They’d made their way up into a narrow pass as far as the wagon could go. The whole while, in the very back of the wagon bed, a bundle wrapped in cloth had lain. Two cloaks, hers and Tytamon’s together. It was too small to be a body, that she knew, but the single digit of one white bone protruded from a careless fold and suggested the horror of that bundle’s contents. She’d refused to believe what her mind told her must be true. No human could actually be that cruel. It simply wasn’t possible.

At the mountain pass, her fears were confirmed. The skeletal remains of someone human—she would still not allow that it was Tytamon—were lain out at an abandoned campsite beside the narrow trail. Black Sander and his accomplice threw Tytamon’s tattered robes against the rocks not too far away when the deed was done. They’d had a handful of his other belongings, taken from his pockets and belt pouches, which they tossed around as well.

Then Black Sander had come to her, reached through the bars of her cage and grabbed her firmly. “Get a bit of those leggings and a boot,” he ordered his minion. “And hack off a clump of hair.”

Belor had entered the cage, with his knife drawn and his left cheek quivering as it always did, the soft flesh pressing at the bottom of his eye as if he were endlessly on the brink of winking. She could feel the point of Black Sander’s dagger poke through the fabric at the back of her uniform even as the thought of kicking Belor in the face came into her mind. Black Sander didn’t even have to speak. She froze, forced to let the winking rodent do his work.

He pulled off her left boot and cut a line up the leg of her uniform to the middle of her thigh. The high-tech fabric gave way reluctantly, and it was a few moments’ work for him to saw through it, but eventually he got it done. He then reached for her head, from which she tried to jerk away. Black Sander grabbed her by the hair at the back of her head and yanked her hard against the cage.
Slam
. “Get it done, man. And be quick about it.”

Belor grabbed a fistful of Orli’s hair and prepared to cut. “Not that much,” Black Sander barked. “We don’t have a healer, and they’re going to want her to look nice faster than that will grow.”

Belor shot him an exasperated look, which made his cheek vibrate even more. He slid his fingers down the length of hair he held and then cut two finger-widths from her rain-soaked bangs. Through the dull haze that came over her, the nightmare lethargy that perhaps mercifully took her mind away from the moment at hand, she was reminded of Altin’s gentle touch, his reluctant hands reaching to clip that first bit of her hair from her, a component for that first translation spell, a time that now felt like a million years ago. She smiled at the vision of him and lost track of what they did after that. At least for a short while.

When she regained her wits, at least some, Belor was no longer in the cage. He was sprinkling bits of her hair around the campfire like chicken feed. When that was done, he retrieved the cut bit of her uniform from where he’d tucked it into his belt and tossed it near the fire pit.

“Pick it up,” ordered Black Sander when he saw Belor toss it down like that. “Cut it up into smaller pieces and bring them over here.” While he was waiting for his henchman, he went to the front of the wagon and pulled out a wooden chest. He extracted Orli’s utility belt and holster assembly and removed several items from compartments along its length: a small flashlight, the tarwood box that held her magic mirror and a bullet clip loaded with conventional rounds. She could tell by his expression when he held up the box that he knew exactly what it was, if not what was in it. He didn’t open it, and instead tucked it into a pocket beneath his cloak. The ammo clip clearly confounded him, and he made a curious face at it after flicking a single cartridge out into the mud with his thumb. He turned his attention to the flashlight, which he quickly figured out how to operate. He nodded at its practicality, seemed to lament having to leave it behind, then smashed it against the iron bars of Orli’s cage. It took three strikes to break it to his satisfaction, but when it was adequately destroyed, he carried both Earth artifacts to the campsite and tossed them amongst the rocks.

“I’ve got them cut into strips, Master,” said Belor, moving toward the black-clad man with several ragged bits of Orli’s uniform.

Black Sander was about to order the pieces thrown around the camp, but after looking up into the cloudy sky once again, he changed his mind. “Let’s bloody them up a bit,” he said. “In case the rain washes the scent away.” They came back toward the cage.

This time Orli moved away from them.

They split up, each taking a side of the wagon bed. Black Sander drew a rapier from the scabbard at his belt and pushed it through the bars. He pricked her in the ribs with it, causing her to scoot toward the twitchy-faced Belor. Belor grasped at her, clutched at her desperately, but he was weak and she was desperate and wet. She slipped away and scurried to the front of the cage.

Black Sander reached into his shirt pocket, extracted something small and white, and with a word, a white light flashed so brightly she was temporarily blinded. In the moment of that effect, Black Sander once again had her in his iron grip. He pinned her to the cage with an arm wrapped around her neck and then reached through with his free hand to capture her recently uncovered leg.

“Bring the strips over here,” he said. “Don’t cut too deep either. A couple finger-widths at the back of the calf.”

Belor moved to comply, once more drawing the dagger from his belt.

“No, use mine. We want a fine wound.”

She cried out when the knife plunged into her leg. Belor cut the gash with a few short, methodical strokes. He then began dipping the strips of her uniform into the wound as if dunking biscuits in gravy, poking the fabric in nearly as deep as the first knuckle of his finger and wriggling it about for best effect. Orli gasped and cried out again each time he jammed another bit of cloth into the inkpot of her leg, the blood running freely over her skin, turning pink as it mixed with rain water in the wagon bed and then drained through gaps in the boards, pouring down into the mud.