by John Daulton
“She told you all of this?”
“It is her will.”
His face showed complete and total perplexity, his mouth open, dumb. “Her will? Will to do what? Orli, you’re speaking in riddles almost as bad as she does. There isn’t time for this.”
“Not her will to do anything. It’s her final will. A last will and testament. She’s going to die, going to let go. She doesn’t want to live through this.”
“But why?”
“Because, Altin. Because she can’t take another tragedy, another layer of it in her long life. You don’t know what utter hopelessness is. To be helpless and powerless. I do. I’ve seen it. She doesn’t have the strength to fight back. And she doesn’t have anyone to come and save her before it happens like I did. So she’s going to wait for it and then let it smother her, let the horror of his violation crush her until there is no more. She can finally be free.”
“We’ll save her. We’ll prevent it somehow.”
“It’s already begun.”
Altin frowned, furious, helpless in his own way. Frustrated. He paced away from the window and back. “I thought she couldn’t kill herself. That’s why she’s suffered so long as it is.”
“She can’t. But she can let him snuff her out.”
Altin leaned out through the window, watching the events unfold. His heart raced. His mind raced. His whole body trembled with rage layered atop the horror he felt from Blue Fire.
He screamed inside his head at her. Screamed for her to speak to him. To tell him what to do. But still there was nothing. He was beyond impotent to help.
“We have to do something,” he said. “Orli, we have to stop it.”
“He will kill you. His power is ten times greater than hers. A hundred times greater. She has no words for it, but it’s massive. He will kill you as easily as he did High Priestess Maul. If you let him find your mind as the Maul did, you will be killed. It will be quick.”
“If that’s the case, why can’t he find me now? I have this.” He held up the ring. “If my taint was on the Liquefying Stone that Maul had, and if he somehow … what, smelled it? Then why can’t he smell me on this?”
“I don’t know, Altin. I have no idea. I only know what she told me. He’s striving for her inner core. He means to take her seeds by force, since she would not give them up willingly. And when he does, when he finds her and breaks in, she is going to let her life flow out through the wound.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
She looked at him, something in the intensity of his tone sparking the tiniest bit of hope. He spun and stormed back into the teleportation chamber. He slammed the door. She heard the lock slide into place. Then she didn’t hear anything.
She turned back to look down upon Blue Fire, but she was gone. The window frame lit up with bright red light in that instant, the glare of it intense and coming so suddenly it startled her. She stepped back, and for a moment thought somehow Altin had transported them to the vile red world somehow. But then she saw the familiar shapes of rocky Phobos and Deimos. This was Mars. Of course he hadn’t brought them to Red Fire. How could he have?
Looking to the right, she saw that there was another of the giant Hostile orbs in orbit again. Not quite so large as the first one had been, but there it was nonetheless. Apparently Red Fire had sent another already to take the place of the one they’d sent into the sun. The new one, like the other, sent a trail of small orbs running off over the sun, toward Earth again. She sighed when she saw it. Director Nakamura would take the arrival of the new orbs as evidence of Her Majesty’s deceit. He’d call off the air support. No ground troops would be sent to Prosperion from Earth. Her father and Roberto would die. Everyone would die.
It really was all going to end. Even Blue Fire. And only the red world would survive. The ultimate victor, Red Fire.
Their last hope lay in whatever Altin was doing now. Whatever madness struck him. She knew him well enough to know he was up to something.
Then Mars was gone. She blinked, and it wasn’t there anymore. She blinked again, a few times, a quick fluttering, waiting for something else to appear in its place, the next great cosmic sphere. She knew it was foolish, but hoped that it might be Red Fire next. She hoped Altin was in that room, that teleporter’s room, doing what he did best, consuming vast distances with his potent genius. She hoped somehow he could cross a thousand light years in only a few moments’ time. That’s what she hoped, and she blinked and blinked, wishing Red Fire to appear.
Nothing appeared. They were nowhere. All was emptiness. Stars upon a black void. Billions of burning cores serving to heat something, or nothing, and destined to die one day. To die like everything else, like Blue Fire, like Tytamon, like her mother so long ago. There were only the good people to make it matter at all. Sweet, beautiful Altin, in there probably about to blow out his brainstem trying to save the universe. Her father, distant, aloof and brave, but he loved her too—for all the misery his decisions had made of Orli’s life. She’d never really thought much about what he’d gone through way back then, what had led to the decision to bring a little girl aboard a spaceship like he had—a shitty bit of parenting that was. But she understood. She could allow herself to now. His heart must have broken when her mother died. She’d never thought about it like that before, from his point of view, not very hard anyway. What wreckage a lost love like that must cause. The misery of Blue Fire stood as the galactic font of that kind of misery, the colossus of pain pouring fountain-like into the black veil of eternity, every star yet another tear. In a way, Orli thought Blue Fire might be better off dead. At least that torment, that eternal wound, would be over for her. Blue Fire seemed to lack the one thing humans had, hope. Blue Fire seemed to have nothing she hoped for, not survival, not the chance that tomorrow might be okay.
She thought of Roberto and a long list of other friends, old fleet friends and new ones on Prosperion, Aderbury out there in Citadel right now, thousands of magicians trying to defend a planet that wasn’t even theirs. It was all so beautiful in its love and human association, and so horrible in its irony. The beauty of humanity at war with the evil that it made.
For the barest moment, she wondered if maybe the universe might not be better off rid of humanity. At best it was equal parts good and evil. At worst something less favorable.
She knew even as she thought it that it wasn’t so. It wasn’t so because of those same people she’d been thinking of. As long as they lived, there was hope. They were the hope of humanity. She was.
The stars shifted noticeably outside the window, like a movement seen at the edge of vision, a phantom motion that, when caught, freezes to stillness again. She had to stare hard to decide if their position had changed. In the absence of planetary light, there were so many stars out there. She spotted a greenish nebula far off to the right and high above. She wasn’t sure if that had been there before. But she decided to use it for a landmark. She knew what Altin was doing in there. There could be nothing else.
She stared up at that nebula for a long, long time. It felt like an hour, though perhaps it was less. And then the nebula was gone.
Still there was nothing out there. She ran to a window on the opposite side of the tower and looked out through it. More stars. A binary system was very close, so close she instinctively feared for the radiation coming off of it, though she trusted in Altin’s shields. They’d preserved them much closer to suns than this. It was frightening though, for despite how much she loved him, she also knew that he was ignorant of so many things. He was the truest manifestation of the early explorer, daring to do what no one else had done, doing it out of courage, true, but also out of having no fear of things that, had he known them, might have given him cause to turn back. Although, probably not. Not Altin. He would have figured something out. That was who he was.
The binary system vanished sometime later, and Orli knew then that her assumptions had to be correct. Altin was chewing up the expanse of the galaxy, h
ell-bent on getting to Red Fire. But then what? What did he plan to do? Was he going to blink down to the surface and challenge the being to a duel? Blue Fire had told her that Red Fire was far more powerful than she was. Given how much more powerful Blue Fire was than Altin, Red Fire would be godlike by comparison.
She had to help Altin. If she knew the Galactic Mage as well as she thought she did, he was in all-action mode. Which meant he probably didn’t have a plan for what would happen when they got there. So she would make one for them. She would try to anticipate their needs.
Moving away from the window, she took her seat at Tytamon’s desk and thought through everything she knew. Everything Altin had told her about Blue Fire, everything she had seen and experienced in all her dream exchanges with the giant living world. She sat amongst the clutter collected by a once-great mind and willed herself to the same kind of exercise, the pooling of imagination, learning and discipline. She pulled out her tablet and went to work making her best guesses at what they would find if—when they found the distant star. If Altin could somehow get them there, they would not arrive without at least some kind of strategy.
Chapter 41
Gromf woke slowly, the sound of tearing flesh all around him now. He lay in a pool of mud, made runny with his own blood. Something heavy lay upon him. He lifted his head to see and saw that a horse had fallen across his legs. Its rider, a human female, lay dead nearby, her mud-splattered face looking at him, eyes wide, perhaps in shock that she had been slain. Her mouth was open in a scream that Gromf had not heard. He’d heard nothing since the strange human had shot him with the beam of red light. He touched his forehead where the light had struck, just above the bridge of his nose. His finger slipped into the hole that was there, two knuckles deep into the bone.
Someone had healed him again. He knew it had been God. Few shamans had the gall to conjure healing. It was a coward’s craft. Death was welcomed in the clans.
Looking about him, he saw scores of demons everywhere, the smallish ones, the ravenous ones who ate the bodies of the dead, slurped and gobbled all around. There were two near him, sucking the last marrow from a human skeleton.
One of them looked up from its meal and saw him. It flashed long and pointed teeth, a row of spikes like blackberry thorns grown half the length of Gromf’s arm. Gromf wondered if it would eat him next, though it should not be so. He was the opener of the gate. They should leave him alone. Respect him. But he knew that they did not.
There were worse deaths than to be eaten by the servant of a god.
The demon leapt across the field and landed upon the carcass of the horse. It tore into its new meal hungrily. Gromf tried to push the horse off of his legs, but he could not. He would have to wait.
In time, the second demon came, and Gromf thought that the two of them would have him free very soon, but the second one started on the human female instead. It snatched her up like a freshly caught fish and bit into her head. Gromf watched, testing the weight of the horse, and the course of the demon’s progress, in doing so. He could not move the horse off of himself yet. The demons scooped out the soft parts of their meals, sucking entrails into their mouths like strands of boiled salt grass.
Eventually, as the demon ate, Gromf was able to work himself out from beneath the animal. He slowly rose to his feet and stood upon wobbly legs. Perched upon the horse, the demon raised its head and pushed its hideous face near his. The reek of the offal, the copper scent of blood, and something indefinable, assaulted Gromf’s sense of smell.
Gromf pushed the demon aside, or made to, but the effort staggered him to the side instead. It was as if he’d pushed against a boulder twice his size. So he stumbled toward the sounds of fighting in the distance now.
He saw that the south wall of the city was in ruins. A measure in either direction smashed down by the might of God’s minions and the great army Warlord had made. Though Gromf himself had fallen, or at least had lost a great deal of time, the All Clans were nearing the height of victory.
He turned back and fished through the mud, looking for his two pieces of God Stone, fearing someone might have taken them while he was unconscious. But no one had. No one knew of them. All those who knew had died in the great arena. All but Gromf and Kazuk-Hal-Mandik, and the old shaman had died in the first moments of summoning. So there was only Gromf now. He found the stones right where he expected they would be. He picked them out, wiped them off, then gripped them triumphantly in his fists. There was still time to help.
He made his way to the wall, passing through the blocks of its falling as if through the aftermath of an avalanche. Inside the city, smoking ruins were everywhere, the jagged lines of burnt timbers thrusting like blackened limbs reaching to the skies, pleading uselessly for aid that would not come. Fires crackled and popped as he walked onward, regaining his equilibrium a little more with each new step. From time to time, he would follow the line of those reaching timbers as they pointed skyward, directing his gaze up into the clouds. He scanned all around in the air above the city for signs of the huge red lights, the beams sent by the children of the new god. But they flashed no more.
He smiled, knowing that his god, the true God, had defeated the new one. That was good, and Gromf was happy in his heart. Gaining strength from this, he increased his speed, trotting up the ruins of the street in hopes of rejoining the fight. The fires burned darker, blacker and thicker the farther into the city he went. He knew that Warlord would be pressing for the golden queen’s palace, for that was where victory would be. That was the seat of power upon which Warlord would sit.
Faster and faster he went, and even at near full speed, he had to run for some time, tracing the progress of the fight by the smoke and the trail of bodies everywhere. He had never realized how huge the human city was, and for a moment, even in this moment of humanity’s obvious downfall, he found himself wondering if such a people could be killed. But it quickly passed, and on he ran.
He dodged around smoking hulks of dead demons, waded through swamps of gore, great lakes of innards flowing from wide areas of death where human, orc and demon corpses lay jumbled together like some vile stew. He sloshed through it without hesitation or rise of bile, sometimes deeper than his knees. Bones snapped under his feet. Skulls rolled like loose rocks unseen in the riverbed. Occasionally some broken human moaned. Humans whined like younglings when they died.
He passed through several such sites, low places of mire. Other areas had perhaps less gore but far greater devastation. He crossed broad intersections in which he beheld the complete obliteration of what must once have been places of great pride for the golden queen, and increasingly so the farther on he went. The buildings that burned as he pressed through the city grew larger in their ruin, more spectacular in their collapse. Grand columns toppled and smashed here and there, demolished statues of humans carved in careful likenesses, their weak faces and fragile limbs hewn ironically of stone. Gromf laughed at these, spat on the careful polish of the white marble pieces lying all about, lying there dull and dust covered, a cracked and empty glory slowly being buried in the soot of all that smoke. As it should be.
The sound of fighting was louder now. He heard thunder cracks and knew that lightning was coming down. Lots of lightning. The shouts of humans fighting sounded like swarming bees to him in the distance, the noise of thousands of beating wings. He heard the roars of demons echoing from buildings beyond as well, buildings that had yet to be pulled down and burned. It was the song of the battle, and it cheered him. It raised his spirits and helped reduce his shame for having fallen as easily as he had. There was still time for glory. He would fight again.
Running at top speed now, he raced down the human city’s streets. The fighting seemed to have cut a great wedge into the city, and it was easy to find where the brunt of the fighting was, as the wreckage drove him right to it now.
He came upon a vast city square, a broad flat space which was lined all around with buildings that climbed high into t
he air, each rising in tiers of stone stacked one upon the next like flat rocks, but unbelievably large, wide flat squares piling up toward the clouds, making it easy for humans to climb the steep slopes to the fanciful human structures at the top of each. Most of these were made of the shiny white stone he’d seen in other statuary as he’d come into the city, though one was made of darker stone. It was the largest of the buildings. A blocky colossus that dominated the square at the farthest end. The mountain of its construction had at the top such an immense assemblage of columns Gromf could not fathom the reason for such a thing. They’d made a forest of fluted stone, for what purpose? To prove to someone that they could? Stupid and vain humans.
However, it was a structure that must represent the seat of some power, for atop its steps were hordes of humans in robes the color of rust. Lightning forked out from these humans like the fury of a god, and it licked around the man-made mountain and burst orcs like stomped-on fruit.
Demons threatened them on all sides, however, and only one lightning bolt in ten gave trouble to the crawling black death that came at them. The humans fought these with weapons of steel, and Gromf was surprised at the efficiency. But he knew it would only be a matter of time before that great structure was overrun and destroyed. All those columns would come down, toppled in the demise of human arrogance.
He looked past it to the palace in the distance, its taunting spires reaching so unfathomably high. That too would fall, although perhaps not physically. Gromf thought it would be good to keep. Warlord could look out upon his lands from that great height and see all that he had conquered today.
Gromf had to find Warlord. He had to return to his side, show him that Gromf survived. That Gromf still made war for the All Clans. That he still fought for God.
