by John Daulton
He waited for the doctor to catch up again, reaching out a hand to help haul him up the knee-high ledge that the blocking stone step had become. The doctor slipped on it anyway, before Altin could catch his hand, and he fell backwards, tumbling down the slope several spans before finally coming to rest, his momentum stopped by the fortuitous presence of a blackberry bush. Or at least, the marginally fortuitous presence of one.
“Sons of Hestra and the infernal rot of ten thousand harpies,” swore the doctor as he wallowed and flailed in the groping bramble of the blackberry bush’s entangling vines. “I’m besieged, for Mercy’s sake. Ow, ow, ow.” With his head downslope and his capacious posterior pointed uphill, his broad backside flashed with his thrashing, the white fabric of his pants blinking through the dimness like a signaler’s flag. His stubby legs thrust into the air like the broken, twitching antennae of an insect trapped in a web, and the doctor threatened Altin with numerous forms of violence if he did not come immediately to his rescue.
On another day, Altin might have laughed, but today, he had no time for it. Irritated, he made to teleport the doctor out of his predicament, but, unfortunately, the doctor’s rage and consternation precluded him from being treated so. Teleportation spells come with certain realities, and one of them is that the object being teleported not be in a frenzied emotional state. So Altin had to climb back down to where the doctor was and pull him out the old-fashioned way, by hand.
The vicious thorns of the blackberry bush did their fair share to punish Altin for his kindness, and by the time the doctor was back on his feet, both of them were bleeding profusely, though the doctor far more so than the Galactic Mage.
“I’ve had enough,” the doctor announced with absolute finality. “I won’t go a step farther.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a peach, which Altin thought he might be about to eat, but instead, the doctor peeled off a long section of its fuzzy skin. He closed his eyes and began to sing, and after a few moments, the abrasions on his face and arms were gone. He pulled off another strip of peach skin and repeated the exercise, this time for the benefit of Altin’s hands and forearms. When he was done, he took a bite out of the peach as if it were an enemy and set a stubborn look upon his countenance. “Not one more step, young man. This exercise is ridiculous and barbaric. There are reasons our people tamed horses and gryphons, much less learned to weave flight into carpets and other things.”
“But we’re almost there.”
“If we were standing on her doorstep, and she stood before us stark nude in the most buxom and comely of aspects, holding forth a platter of steaming pheasant with raspberry and mushroom sauce and promising me the bountiful joy of both food and flesh, I would still refuse to move one jot. I demand that you send me back to my office this instant. I shall bear not another moment of this torture, do you hear me? Not one!”
Altin turned away from him and looked up the slope. The doctor’s divining spell had indicated that the mad Ocelot lived atop a great flat rock in a wooden hovel built for her by a woodsman whose love she had entertained some decades past. From the doctor’s description of what he’d seen while casting, that rock should be at the top of this infernal hill. He’d tried to find it with a seeing spell, but it appeared that it had been hidden from such things, hence the reason for their climb.
He glanced back at the doctor, who looked quite disheveled now in his tattered and filthy clothes, his rotund torso heaving from the exertion of the blackberry fiasco and his face a portrait of misery. They definitely needed to find Ocelot soon.
With a thought, and the barest shape of the words that used to come reflexively to his mouth, he let go the ice lance once more and cast a seeing spell instead. He pushed his vision up the hill, moving around trees and over rocks, climbing up and up, the slope long and treacherous and likely to trouble the doctor even more than that which they’d already climbed. He spent several minutes in the search, knowing they had to be close. He was dimly aware of the doctor complaining, the man’s voice a dull sound droning as if on the other side of a wall. Still Altin pushed upward, moving back and forth as he did, his sight snaking to and fro as he gobbled up altitude. He knew the odds were slim that he would find anything, but he was running out of both time and ideas. There must be some sign of it somewhere, some thing of hers left lying about. The doctor’s divining spells were Y-class after all. They had to be close by now.
And then he saw it. At first, there was nothing but trees. But as he moved up the slope, he noticed a trail of smoke rising from nothingness, a smudge against the stars that caught his eye. It wafted up out of thin air, a plume with no source simply beginning high amongst the treetops. He knew then that they’d found her, for that smoke could not simply be. The moment he thought it, the rest of it appeared, the illusion burst and the reality revealed: a long sweep of flat ground formed a clearing in the woods, a high one, a steppe, and in the middle of it was a pool fed by a little brook. Rising out of the pool was a large formation of rock, nearly fifteen spans high and flat as a table at the top. And there, built upon it like a wooden hat, stood a modest cottage in a most dilapidated state. The thin plume of smoke poked like a crooked gray stick from its stone chimney up into the sky, moving about lazily while the pulse of yellow light coming through the wickerwork of the hovel’s front shutters gave the impression that someone must be home.
Altin came out of his seeing spell in time to hear Doctor Leopold’s body land with a leafy splash back in the blackberry bush. At first he assumed the doctor had fallen into it again, but the black figure moving down the slope toward the fleshy doctor quickly dispelled that idea. A troll had thrown the doctor in!
A large figure, bipedal, mud brown with flesh rough as tree bark, waded into the bramble after the physician, reaching for him with long angular limbs that the thorns could not penetrate. It tore at the tangling vines as it pursued the doctor, who this time did not fight the thorny embrace of the blackberries but rather attempted to scramble deeper into them for protection, vain hope that it was.
The creature let go a loud, hungry roar, frustrated more by the binding ropes of the bush than any bite of its thorns, and it wasn’t until the sound of that roar was reverberating through the trees that Altin recovered his wits enough to conjure the ice lance back, cursing the decision to let it go in the first place. Who knew how long its blue glowing light had kept that troll at bay?
The hissing blue spear formed instantly, and in the time it took to blink, the three-span shaft hurtled through the intervening distance and pierced the troll straight through. The power of the throw carried the monster over the blackberry patch completely and pinned it to a tree. Pinecones, pine needles and several chipmunks tumbled down like rain upon impact, the latter skittering off into the darkness, squeaking in protest to the violence that had awoken them.
The troll snapped off the end of the ice lance where it jutted out from its chest, then pulled itself free, sliding off the remainder of the spear and dropping to the ground at the base of the tree with a grunt. It came lumbering at Altin with huge, ground-eating strides, its legs nearly as long as Altin was tall.
Altin’s fireball came as quickly as the thought, and it hit the troll full force, blowing it back against the tree once more, the heat of the fireball causing both troll and embedded ice lance to steam and hiss. The troll rebounded quickly, however, bouncing off the tree as if striking it were the merest inconvenience before plunging back up the slope toward Altin again.
He sent another fireball at it, this one spinning the troll off the tree to go tumbling downhill for forty paces or more. Flames leapt from its body as if it were a bonfire, and yet back up the hill it ran, oblivious to the heat. A third fireball had a similar effect, blowing it back but not stopping it. Many trees had begun to burn.
Altin watched the monster charging up at him again, this time from nearly a hundred paces off. He was going to set the whole forest on fire if he kept up like this. But the ice lance hadn’t done anything e
ither. He had never fought a troll before.
“You have to cut them up,” came a diminutive voice to his right.
He looked for its source, but didn’t see anyone. He scoured the area all around, searching through the trees, but the forest beyond the light of the fire was now lost in impenetrable darkness, made so by the growing glow of the mighty flames.
“Sheet ice, conjuror. Your first instinct was the better one.”
Altin followed the sound to the exposed roots of a nearby pine, where two bright yellow eyes glinted in the light of the flames. Slowly his squinting gaze began to shape the feline face out of which those two yellow dots shone.
“You ought to hurry,” said the animal. A slight forward thrust of its pink nose pointed to where the troll was only a few paces away.
Altin reflexively hit it with another fireball and sent it tumbling back down the hill again. The blaze of its descent was bright enough to be uncomfortable to look upon now. “My gods, but you’d think it would burn to death by now,” he said, shielding his eyes from the glare with a raised forearm.
“It might in time,” said the animal, stepping out from the shadows of the trunk, revealing a small creature with a soft coat of ochre fur, spotted black across the back and ribs and with a bright white chest and underbelly. It had large eyes and large tufted ears, the black fur at the tips of them nearly as long as the whiskers growing from its feline muzzle. It stood no higher than Altin’s knee, and he knew right then that he’d finally found the object of this trek, the fabled diviner, Ocelot. Somehow he’d always thought that name was, well, just a name.
He watched the troll right itself and come charging back yet again. At least trolls were dumb, he thought. That helped. He opened his mind once more to the mana all around, still not quite used to the change that had come upon it since he’d been given the green marble of Blue Fire’s great gift. No longer were there teeming currents of mana coursing like rivers through his mind. There was simply mana everywhere, a uniform vapor that moved not a lick.
He could shape anything he wanted in it, just as a sculptor might make anything he chose from an infinite block of stone. This time, rather than forming a spear of ice, Altin shaped a long flat sheet, just as the ocelot, Ocelot, had said. He took care to make it fine along the leading edge, adding bulk to it as he gave it size, forming in this way a plane of ice that would serve as something of a horizontal guillotine.
He sent his icy construct hurtling toward the oncoming troll and neatly cut it in half. It didn’t even roar as it went down. It simply parted ways with half itself about halfway up the hill. And then it was done. The blade of ice sliced through several trees before its energy was lost, and the sound of their crashing filled the air, for a while even louder than the roar of the flames nearby.
Altin rushed down to check on Doctor Leopold. In what was a rather more elaborate and bloody reenactment of their earlier blackberry incident, once again the doctor was on his feet, though he shook with fear so terribly his whole body jiggled like a bowl of underdone pudding.
“Are you just going to let my forest burn?” came the voice from the knee-high feline, much closer than it had been before, no more than a pace away.
Altin looked to her, then to the fires burning brightly in three nearby trees—and just beginning in a fourth. Not to mention several bushes and another berry patch in between. One corner of his mouth twitched a bit. That could be a problem, he thought. “I don’t have a rain spell memorized,” he said. “Though I can go home and find one, I suppose.” He dreaded digging through the randomness of Tytamon’s library for that, and it was apparent in his tone.
The cat started to turn away. “A rude conjuror comes to my house in search of aid,” she said. “This is the arrogance of man.”
“I said I would go get the spell.”
“But you must first know if I am the Ocelot you seek. As if it were not obvious enough. Otherwise you’d just as soon leave them burn.”
“Well, now it is confirmed, isn’t it? So you see, it worked,” said Altin, having no inclination to pretend otherwise. He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get anything over on a Z-class diviner anyway.
She actually laughed at that, which was a strange thing coming from the throat of a cat, especially a big one like Ocelot was. “Tsono havora. Cosoahn na’vakalias pendinto. Mel aba menzon moson mon. Those are the words you need but do not need.” She padded cautiously up to him, and with the flick of a paw, she scratched him through the material of his robe, a short, stinging cut just below his knee. He started and stepped away from her, about to shout, considering a fireball, but then, in that moment, realized he now knew the conjuring rain spell.
That set him to blinking in bewilderment for a moment, but only that long. He supposed it made sense that she might be able to do that sort of thing. He’d heard some diviners, strong ones, could transfer spells that way, but it was mainly the sort of thing practiced by the Church. Normal people didn’t go around stabbing each other when some time spent with a book would do. He might have spent more time marveling at the convenience, but then something she’d said suddenly registered. The moment it did, just when it hit him, she saw it in the widening of his eyes. He watched her recognize it—or perhaps she’d simply already known he was going to be a bit slow in catching what she’d said and that he’d be startled when he did. Altin had no idea which, but it occurred to him then that she somehow knew about the ring. And likely other things.
“Yes, I know about your world gift,” she said, and as Altin stared down at her, he could see the faint green light that pulsed from beneath his ring reflecting in her eyes. He started to say something but stopped. That would have been pointless too. “Put the fire out,” she said. “I’ll be waiting for you and your clumsy friend. He will come when his complaints are done.” With that she ran off up the hill, her paws silent upon the forest floor, the high curl of her tail suggesting she was completely at her ease.
When she was gone, Altin turned back to the doctor, who appeared to have regained some small measure of his wits, if only enough for speech. Altin verified that the doctor’s injuries were, while messy, only minor, though all the while the shaken physician complained and argued and insisted that Altin take him back to Leekant at once, for surely he teetered at the brink of death. It was the matter of some time before Altin finally got the good doctor to relent in his tirade and recognize that, at least for the pain, he, the doctor himself, was the source of his own remedy if he could just calm himself enough to effect it. This recognition marked the beginning of the man’s return to reason, and it was only a matter of a few minutes more before he set himself to the task of healing his wounds.
Altin, in the interim, used the spell Ocelot had imparted to him upon that scratch, and in doing so, he recognized it as being the one he’d taught himself two or so years before, the very same one he’d cast to snuff out a fire he’d ignited in the ivy climbing up his tower. Given how many variations of this sort of spell there were, he could not help but marvel at the coincidence, and he wondered if perhaps Ocelot had plucked it out of his memory, even though he himself could not. It was unnerving to think she could do such a thing, but also inspired hope, for divination worked best when the diviner knew as much as possible. What better way to know Altin’s mind than to, well, know his mind? So, while in a way he suddenly felt quite exposed, it was with renewed confidence that he put out the blaze and then set to work convincing Doctor Leopold to come with him to Ocelot’s humble rock-top abode. The doctor had information from his own divining spell that would serve the Z-ranked feline as much as would things that Altin knew. And, just as predicted, the good doctor eventually agreed that he would.
Chapter 15
Director Nakamura’s face, even in the small shuttle monitor, looked visibly shaken when Captain Asad gave him the news of the colossal red orb orbiting Mercury, and after watching the brief video record from the shuttle’s log, the director’s expression only barely concealed how d
isquieted he was. “We can’t afford to pull any of the Juggernauts out of orbit to go after it,” he said. “We’re not even holding them off now as it is. They’re still slipping orbs through and hitting smaller and smaller cities systematically. Hell, there are ten times as many of those things in New York right now than there were six hours ago. Washington and Boston are hardly any better. None of them are. Europe is just as bad.”
“But it may be the source,” replied Captain Asad, as Roberto was guiding the small ship toward the Aspect’s shuttle bay, around which the outer lights had just turned green. “If they are coming from that thing, then we have to take it out. We’re not going to win on defense. Send a Juggernaut. That’s what they’re for, taking down big targets, planetary assaults. I can’t think of a better time to put one to its proper use.”
“Until we confirm it’s the source, I’m not opening us up any more than we already are. We’ll send probes to get a closer look. Maybe it’s some kind of repair station, or it’s the transport that brought them here. Unless it gets close enough to engage with the main body of the fleet, I’m not sending even one Juggernaut after that thing.” He didn’t look happy about saying it, but he was clearly not going to budge. “For God’s sake, Asad, we’ve got cargo ships and cruise liners up there fighting alongside you guys. I move a Juggernaut, no telling how many smaller ships go down. The whole net could unravel.”
“The net is unraveling. And you and I both know there’s no chance it’s just a repair station or a transport ship. If you won’t send the Juggernauts, then take it out with smaller ships. Send twenty starships and just bombard the hell out of it.”
