by John Daulton
They wound about through low caves until they came upon a great fissure. “We’ll have to go down that,” he said, a boyish grin upon his face.
It was a wide crack, perhaps a hundred feet across, split open long ago when the moon was still a living world, the rent made by some ancient shifting of the surface that had broken this place apart. It was pitch black inside. Orli peered down into the darkness and shuddered. Altin saw it.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I just had a flash of us falling down that damn pit back on Red Fire. I thought I was going to lose you when you drifted out of range of the Higgs prism that day.”
“That was an anxious few moments, wasn’t it?” His grin was even more boyish than before. “But we came out all right.” He was clearly having fun.
“Yes, thank God.” She looked at him through the helmet glass, then glanced down at his Higgs prism. “You’re sure you are going to be comfortable using that?”
“It’s only one button,” he said. “I confess to being a slow learner, but I am confident that even I can handle that much Earth technology.” He waggled one thickly gloved finger at her, then made a show of repeatedly poking an invisible button right in front of her. “You see? I’m really quite good at it.”
She laughed, a bit of color blushing her cheeks. “All right. Just ignore me. I think I’m just really anxious about finding him alive.”
Unlike Orli, Altin seemed perfectly at ease. If anything, he was nearly as giddy as a child. This was precisely what he’d hoped to do his entire life, discover and explore things out amongst the stars. He could not have been happier if he tried, and she knew it. As much as he cared about Blue Fire, he wasn’t as attached to the idea of bringing Yellow Fire back to life as Orli was. She wasn’t even sure he really believed it was possible. He said he did, but she thought he might just be doing all of this because she’d asked. But she supposed that was okay. He was here, and he was a happy companion.
“Here,” he said upon approaching the edge of the abyss, “this will show us how far.” He pulled a rock out of a sack that he was carrying and cast an enchantment spell upon it. The spell lit the stone with a soft white glow. Then he tossed it down into the hole. They watched it fall for a time, the luminous enchantment washing the side of the fissure in pale light, revealing the lines and narrow ledges along the walls for a while until it faded away, shrinking to tininess and then blinking out of sight in the distance.
She looked into Altin’s visor and saw that his eyes were closed. She knew that he was riding it down with a magical seeing spell. She smiled, to match his own. He was so carefree in all of this, so delighted to be here, so content to be with her.
If she weren’t so afraid it wouldn’t work, that Yellow Fire could not be saved, and that Blue Fire would be alone in the universe for all of time—and worse, that all of Altin’s warnings, all the Queen’s worries, all the Director’s worries might come true, the Hostiles reawakened, the whole war resumed, another million people killed—if she weren’t afraid of that, she might be enjoying it as much as he was too. But at least there was hope. And she was here with him. They knew they were doing the right thing, or at least she did. She knew it in her heart, but what if ….
Finally, after a long wait staring back and forth between him and the pit, which seemed to her bottomless, his eyes snapped open as if knocked wide by the rising energy of his broad grin.
“Got it!” he announced. “I’d bet it’s twelve measures deep at least. Pretty spectacular crevice for a world much smaller than Red Fire was.” He pronounced all this, named the distance as if it were an amusement park ride, something to be enjoyed with candy and rapturous screams as they plummeted into its depths. And before she could comment on it, they were at the bottom of it. “See.”
“You’re a nut,” she said, but had to laugh. She’d gotten used to him teleporting her around like that. It was disorienting, but exhilarating just the same. “But you do make this much easier than falling with a Higgs prism.” She checked his suit, then her own, to make sure there were no magical mishaps. Her air mixture setting had changed, and Altin’s suit clock had to be reset. “Well, somewhat easier.”
He shrugged and offered only a crooked smirk as she worked on their suits. It was only a matter of minutes, and then the two of them went on, traveling just as they had before on Red Fire, blindly following passages, led by the unfolding memories Blue Fire had given him of these places that he had never been. They walked on and on for hours.
Even though she understood, at least mostly, how the memories worked, Orli asked at least five different times if Altin was sure they were going the right way. When they came into a low, round chamber in which curled strange wisps of dry gray material, dangling in sheets from the cave walls and ceiling, he nodded. He reached up and touched a bit of the stuff hanging all around them. Whatever it was, it crumbled like old, dry tree bark. Altin nodded a second time.
“Yes, this is definitely it,” he said as he picked up a sheet of the stuff. “All of this was bright at one time, I’d wager. It was all glowing and alive, like the green, glowing parts of Blue Fire and Red Fire that you’ve already seen.” He grimaced as he added, “This is the dead flesh of Yellow Fire.”
“I feel like a grave robber,” she said. She cringed and sort of hunched her head down into her shoulders some. “Maybe this was a bad idea.”
“It wasn’t,” he replied, sobriety replacing his merriness for the time. “You were right. Blue Fire gave up what little she had of happiness for us. We owe her this much. And Her Majesty won’t sign off on it until we’ve determined it’s all possible.”
“But, what if I’m wrong? Maybe this is crazy.”
“If you are wrong, then so be it. Her Majesty already thinks you are crazy, and I couldn’t care less if you are as batty as a cave. I love you all the more for trying. You will be the conscience of my next several centuries. And rightly so. These creatures we’ve ironically dubbed Hostiles live for millions of years. Why should one such world suffer across eons for the brief happiness of Earth and Prosperion, populated with such temporary creatures as the likes of humanity?”
“Why do you say it’s brief? We may die, but our race lives on. There is no need for us to be temporary at all. I agree with what I think you are saying in principle, but I don’t think it’s fair to write us off as a race.”
“Look at how close we came to wiping ourselves out. All of us. Hells, the humanity on three worlds is already down to two, and we damned near did finish off the lot of us barely six months ago. We stopped it that time, but what’s going to prevent us from doing it properly the next? I should say the odds are pretty high that we will get to the threshold again. The history of Prosperion certainly gives enough evidence for that, just as I am sure your world’s history does as well. Why else would your people have a fortress city on the scale of that monstrous Fort Minot? Why would your people have such incredible weaponry? What were your people shooting at before you discovered life on other worlds, surely not nothing?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “My people are all the same. And now we’re in the process of merging your technology with our magic. You have to admit, that does seem the recipe for finally pulling off whatever will see an end to us all. Don’t you think?” Despite all of it, he grinned at her. “Don’t misunderstand me, my love. I am entirely for enjoying it while it lasts.”
The breath of Orli’s resignation was loud in the confines of her helmet. She didn’t want to argue with him. She thought it was too pessimistic a view, though she could admit he was right in a way. But she wasn’t ready to give up on humanity’s chances any more than she was on Yellow Fire’s. No matter what the future held, Blue Fire deserved better than she had gotten since the war came to an end. The only fear Orli really held to was the one in which Altin’s warnings, and those of Her Majesty and Director Bahri, might come true. She didn’t want her kindness to bring about more misery and death. That was
the real risk here. Fortunately, Altin’s levity would not allow her to dwell on her concerns, and soon they were making their way again.
For another two hours they moved farther into the moon. In places, the dead skin of Yellow Fire’s corporeal flesh lay so thick in the spaces they passed through that they had to push through it blindly, the mess of it higher than their heads. It crumbled like the burnt remnants of wood, more easily in places where it turned to powdery ash and less so in others, where making progress was akin to wading through gray popcorn, chest deep and seemingly endless. By the time they’d pushed their way through the clogged arteries of the moon and into a cavern where they could move freely and see beyond their helmet glass, they were both breathing heavily. But emerge they did, and they soon found themselves in a giant subterranean space that opened up all around them in such magnitude that its distance devoured all forms of light.
“I think we found it,” Altin said, looking about. The beam of his helmet’s light glinted off great formations of crystals clumped everywhere around them on the walls and floor nearby. Some of the crystals were as thick as Orli’s wrists, and the formations of them several feet long, all jagged and sharp.
“Looks like it,” she agreed. There could be little doubt. This was just like the inner chambers of the two other Hostile worlds she’d been inside. “But how do we find the heart chamber without the help of it being a different color and glowing obviously for us? Everything is dead and gray in here.”
And it was true; there was no color in the chamber at all. The crystals were as gray as the ashen surface far above. Shining light into the crystals revealed nothing unusual. They were lifeless.
Altin bent down and let his helmet light shine into a clump of crystals nearby. He peered into it for a time, and shook his head. “It’s not eating the light,” he said. “Like the Liquefying Stones do.”
She nodded. She understood well enough. He’d been hoping for the light-eating effect the yellow magic-enhancing stones had. The crystal he called Liquefying Stone. He’d used one small piece of it when he’d first begun his journeys into space. Orli had seen the effect too. Light had this odd way of sort of vanishing into it. These crystals just reflected the light back, the gray merely becoming a little bit lighter.
Altin said that Liquefying Stone ate light. It pulled it in with an inexplicable anti-luminous gravity, an effect that was nearly nauseating to watch for very long. Altin’s mentor, Tytamon, had first found the stones on Prosperion. He’d kept three of them. Later, Altin discovered there were millions upon millions of them lining the caverns that served as Blue Fire’s womb, and there were more on the walls of the tiny chamber where her heart was. The whole of Blue Fire’s inner self was studded with the yellow stones, all of which ate light and all of which could soften mana in the hands of human sorcerers. But here, on this world, that effect was gone. It was obvious they were the same sort of crystal, but these were dead. It was as obvious as the difference between a living human heart and a dead one. Whatever worked within those crystals had been snuffed out with everything else. And that didn’t bode well for Orli’s plan.
“Hmmm,” he muttered. “Maybe this isn’t it after all.” Orli thought he sounded like he was trying to sell that to himself.
“Why not?”
“It’s not taking in the light. Liquefying Stone eats light.”
“I noticed. And I think that is how the Hostile worlds find each other. Like they can sniff each other off the rays of the host sun. Or at least, it’s how males find females,” Orli said. “It has something to do with how Red Fire found the Liquefying Stone that High Priestess Maul had when she went with Conduit Huzzledorf to find Earth. I got that much from Blue Fire in my dream the day Red Fire attacked her like he did.”
“Well, nobody is going to find these,” he said, pointing down at the formations, and then pointing around in a wider arc. “It’s not doing it.”
Orli suppressed an urge to swear. She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment while she considered it. “Well, why should it?” she said after beaming her light around the chamber a second time. “If you think about it, it’s to be expected. Yellow Fire is dead or dormant right now.”
“Yes, but there’s a big difference. If these stones are dead because everything’s dead up there too, well, then that seems to portend disappointment.” He pointed through the unseen ceiling, the ceiling they both assumed must be above somewhere. “But it should still work if the heart is alive, shouldn’t it?”
Orli shrugged. “Ask Blue Fire. I only got what I got from her in a dream, remember? But if my bulb hypothesis is correct, perhaps it’s all working as it should. Think about it: daffodils don’t bloom while they are dormant. So, perhaps Hostiles don’t either, in their way.”
His brow wrinkled and he hummed low, almost too low for the helmet microphone to pick up. “I suppose.” He didn’t look convinced.
“Just ask her,” Orli said again.
“I kind of hate asking her anything,” he said. “It’s so brutally sad to talk to her these days. I have a hard time recovering afterward. A conversation with her is like finding out everyone you’ve ever known and loved is dead. Again. And for the first time. It is like the rediscovery of the most awful tragedy. Every single time.” It was his turn to shudder. “I’d rather not quite understand if I don’t need to.”
“Well, if you don’t, how will we know we’re in the right place?”
“We are. I think. We just have to find the heart chamber, like we set out to do.”
“Well, then we’re back to our original problem. Where is it?”
“It should be over there somewhere,” he said, tilting his head to the left. “Let’s go.”
She knew he was guessing, but she followed anyway. She understood that Altin’s way of communicating with the distant world of Blue Fire was deeper than her contact with the creature in dreams. Altin shared Blue Fire’s mind when he talked to her. Felt her feelings. Great, planet-sized feelings that were overwhelming and strong. He felt those emotions as if they were his own, and amplified. She didn’t blame him for wanting to avoid such an experience if possible.
They made their way along the floor of the cavern. In places the going was easy enough, and the hard soles of spacesuit boots prevented injury or discomfort caused by the points of the crystals they trod upon. But in other places, the crystal formations were very large, and squeezing through short forests of them that grew inexplicably large became arduous and risky to the integrity of the spacesuits. Twice they had to teleport to the other side of formations of that kind—also risky to the suits, though less so, perhaps. Fortunately, neither instance caused any problems with the spacesuit controls and only cost them the time it took for Altin to cast a seeing spell to find the other side.
Progress was slow, but at length they chanced upon something glowing dimly in the distance, a pale purplish radiance coming up from the floor.
“Look,” Orli shouted, seeing it first. “Look, there!” She laughed aloud. “I just knew it. There. He’s still alive. He’s still alive!” She started running toward it before Altin had even spotted it.
“Wait,” he called after her, but she was already well on her way.
They ran up to the edge of what seemed a small crater, small enough that Orli could have jumped across, but deep enough that climbing down into it would make it awkward getting back out. Peering into it, they saw the source of the purple glow, a round patch of crystals barely an arm’s length across.
They stood side by side, staring down at it for a time, Orli barely daring to hope that it might really still be alive. “Do you think it’s possible this is really going to work?” she said.
His head rotated in the fishbowl of his helmet to look at her. “It was your idea. Of course it will work.” He flashed his beautiful smile at her and then started climbing down inside.
“Altin,” she began, reaching out to touch his arm.
“What?”
She looked into
his eyes, so steady, so perfectly committed to this plan, so wholly given to the passionate entreaty she had made that brought him here despite his own misgivings at the start. She drew in a long breath and smiled. “Nothing. I love you.”
He smiled again, his teeth tinged with a touch of blue by the reflected lights of his helmet controls. “I love you too. Now let’s see about getting Blue Fire someone to love as well.” With that, he climbed down into the hole.
Chapter 8
Calico Castle’s tall central spire settled into its proper place with a great rush of air. Its sudden arrival out of the teleport spell blew dust up from between the cracks of the uneven flagstones in the central courtyard and blew the skirts and apron strings of the kitchen keeper, Kettle, all about. She squinted and looked up to the window high above, then back to the Earth man standing next to her. She pointed at the tower, her stout arm raised, as she said, “There ya be. That’s the master what finally come home. Ya can keep yer questions ta him, ’cause I hanna got time fer em, and weren’t likely ta have a proper answer anyway.”
As if he’d heard it, Altin stuck his head out through the window, and from the perspective of poor Kettle down below, he might easily have been some form of alien monster looking down at her. She knew quite well that Altin had taken Miss Pewter to some distant world, and for a moment upon seeing that helmeted head, she was right sure they’d both been killed and this bulbous-headed freak had returned to eat the rest of them.
The engineer standing beside her, however, was entirely familiar with the spacesuit design, and he waved an eager hello. “Sir Altin,” he called up. “We need your input on a few things before we can continue down here.”
Altin’s gloved hands came up, and they could see him pawing at the helmet for a time until a pair of smaller hands, a woman’s and without gloves, came into view and deftly unlatched Altin’s glassy lid. He lifted the helmet off and, looking slightly exasperated, called out, “I’ll be right down.”
