by Ryk E. Spoor
“Skysand’s where you’re from, right?” At Tobimar’s nod, Xavier looked over to Poplock. “What about you?”
“My home?” He tried to keep from looking too sad. “It was called Pondsparkle. You heard about the attacks, must have seen—”
“Yeah. Didn’t know your hometown was in the middle of that, though. I’m sorry.”
“We’ll go back and fix things up one day,” Poplock said with certainty, gripping Tobimar’s shoulder a bit tighter as the Prince paid for two full-size and one small fare on Circle, a large lake ferry. “Blackwart told us that was our special place, and he won’t let us lose it forever.”
He saw Xavier’s mouth twitch, restraining a familiar smile. “Blackwart? Who’s that, one of the kings or something?”
He’s from a completely different world, Poplock reminded himself, warding off his usual annoyance at the ignorance of the bigger people. “Um, no, he’s our god. God and patron of the Toads and anyone else who wants to follow him. A lot of elementalists, Forestals, those kinds of people follow him. And Shargamor and Eonae, of course.” They made their way up Circle’s long deck and stood near the prow.
Xavier looked up. “They’re taking in the sails—I guess they’ll use magic to go against the wind?”
“Most ships on Heart of Water have magic to help do that, yes, and the regular ferries would all have to if they want to have anything like a schedule,” Tobimar said.
“So, um,” Xavier went on, looking oddly . . . embarrassed? Confused? Poplock couldn’t quite figure it out . . . “Do you . . . I mean, what’s your god, Tobimar?”
“The Skysands have followed Terian, the Light in the Darkness, for as long as we’ve been in Skysand, maybe before,” Tobimar said proudly. “What about you?”
“Um,” and now the nervous look was strong enough for Poplock to recognize it. It’s that look humans get when talking about something that they think is really delicate or maybe crazy. “Well, I don’t have one. I don’t believe in gods.”
For a moment Poplock couldn’t quite wring meaning out of the words. The words themselves were familiar, but put together . . . “What do you mean you don’t believe in gods? That’s . . . that’s like saying you don’t believe in this boat we’re standing on!” He could see Tobimar was equally dumbfounded.
Xavier, meanwhile, was obviously trying to look apologetic in the face of something he couldn’t quite accept. “Look, Pop, Toby, I can see this deck, but I’ve never seen a god, or ever seen them do anything.”
“Never?” Poplock was astounded. “Don’t you have temples and holy emissaries in your world?”
“Well, sure, but all they do is talk, you know.”
Tobimar had finally found his voice. “I . . . begin to realize that we have not yet fully understood just how very different your world is from ours, Xavier. Let me clarify, just to be sure: in your world, your priests do not heal the wounded and the sick, or seek out the truth for the rulers, or use the powers of the gods to hold back and destroy evil?”
“No, not really,” Xavier said, his tone that of a man picking his way through a nest of snares. “I mean . . . well, there’s some that claim to do a lot of that, but I’ve never seen it and there’s never been any good evidence. The best stories of that come from a long time ago when there wasn’t much idea of proving anything.” A pause. “So . . . yours do?”
The discussion of the different worlds continued as Circle crossed the huge lake Heart of Water, all the way through dinner in the West Gate Inn, and resumed the next morning as they set out on the long walking part of their journey.
Poplock found himself alternately pitying the people of Earth, envying them, and being completely baffled by them. The feelings were obviously mirrored by Xavier’s reactions to Zarathan.
“So everything in your world seems to run on these ‘electronics’ you say aren’t magic, but certainly sound like magic to me,” Tobimar was saying the next day, as the sun was dropping away before them and the shadows were starting to lengthen. “I wish I could see some of this. We can show you magic, and the gods will reveal themselves to you sooner or later, but your world remains on the other side of the Great Seal . . . unless by some chance your mission succeeds.”
Xavier looked thoughtful. “You know, I could show you something.” He brought out a strange object, like a stretched oval, mostly black with silver highlights. A large rectangular area in the center was black, shiny, but without feature; on each end were some raised areas with various symbols on them. “This is my LTP—LumiTainment Portable. It’s a videogame handheld console.”
The last words might as well have been in Ancient Sauran for all the meaning they carried. “What does that mean?”
“It means I can play games on this thing without having to be at home. Games made for it, that is.”
Tobimar took the LTP gently, turned it over, passed his right hand over it with a look of concentration, then let Poplock look at it. Poplock studied it for a few moments and did the usual mumbled scans. There wasn’t a sign of magic on it anywhere. “Well, then, can you show us? As far as I can tell, it’s a really funny-looking and not very good mirror, and that’s it.”
The young man from Zaralandar hesitated. “Well . . . I guess so. I just hate to use up the last of the batteries. But I suppose this is as good a time as any.” He took the LTP back and touched a barely noticeable stud on one side. To Poplock’s startlement, light suddenly glowed from the formerly black central region, and a chime of music echoed out. More music—sounding like an orchestra heard from a distance—streamed from the LTP and brilliant scenes of moving images appeared, showing landscapes of fantastic design and people performing momentary feats of combat and magic of surprising skill and versatility.
Poplock bounced over to Xavier’s shoulder and down, mumbling the scans again. Still there was no sign of magic of any type. And it’s active now, so even things like gemcalling or hidden symbols would be sensed. “It really isn’t magic!”
“Told you.”
“This is . . . a game?” Tobimar said, looking at it more closely.
“Yeah—this is Chrono Victory, one of my favorites so far—I haven’t finished it yet. I could start a new game and show you how it works when we camp.”
“That would be . . . very interesting, I think,” Tobimar said.
Poplock bounced his agreement. “I’m really fascinated by this. I know, to you our magic and things must be really exciting, but this is something new to us!”
Xavier laughed. “Sure, I understand.”
A few hours later they set up camp, using the self-anchoring tents Tobimar had picked out with Poplock’s help before they left Zarathanton. The Skysand prince brought out some of the packed meals Toron had given them. “We’ll have to either buy food along the way, or do some hunting and picking,” he said, “but no reason we can’t relax tonight.”
“Yeah, no big rush.”
Once the dinner was finished, Xavier brought out the LTP. “Here we go. I’ll start it running and give us a new game start. It’s got a tutorial—a teaching sequence, you know?—at the beginning, but I’ll bet it makes all kinds of assumptions about what you know.” He spent a few minutes telling them about what the raised areas on the sides did; they controlled the performance of various actions in the moving world of the game, something that Poplock thought was very ingenious. I wonder . . . I could see something like this being a lot of fun. Have to see if there’s some easy way to do this with the right magic. Alchemy or symbolism, maybe with some illusion-shapers, maybe?
The game finished a pretty introduction sequence and they began selecting aspects of a character to play. Xavier glanced down. “Well, we’ve got started and to the first save point. But I don’t know how long it’ll run.” He pointed to something blinking red in a corner of the LTP. “Batteries are almost dead.”
“There’s something alive in there?” Poplock backed away from the LTP.
“What? No, no!” Xavier laughed. �
�That’s just an expression, you know, like when you’re finished with a discussion or something and you say the topic’s dead?” He pushed the little stud on the side and the LTP shimmered and went dark again; the boy then flipped the LTP over and opened a hidden compartment underneath, removing a flat, rectangular silvery object with writing on it. “That’s a battery. It holds electricity, stores it, you know, and then gives it to the LTP when it’s on.”
“And it’s almost out of electricity?” Any elementalist worth anything knew about electricity—lightning, the little sparks from rubbing some things together, stuff like that—but this was something new, something that used electricity to work.
“Yeah. My guess is there’s maybe twenty, thirty minutes left of play before it goes dark.”
Poplock turned the little object over, flicked his tongue over various points. Ooch. That sour taste. Definitely a little electricity across those areas.
“Hey!” Xavier said with concern. “Don’t, like, bite it or anything. It’s the only battery I have.”
The Toad looked thoughtfully down. “I might be able to make it work better.”
“What?” The boy stared at him. “Are you serious? You don’t even know how it’s built. Honestly, I don’t either.”
“Well . . . would it really hurt to try? You said it will last only a short time more.”
Xavier looked reluctant, then shrugged. “I . . . guess not. Just be careful, I’ve heard doing the wrong thing with batteries can make them blow up. And I know that you have to have the right, um, voltages or whatever to run a gadget like this.”
With permission given, Poplock focused on the battery-thing. Okay, it’s giving enough power to operate that LTP now. So if I can keep that taste about the same, maybe just a little more intense, but find a way to keep a little power flowing in . . .
He took the battery and pushed it into place. Spring-loaded clips. That leaves a little space here and here.
“Hey, Tobimar. You got any Zeus’ Rains in your ‘reserves’ over there?”
“I think I’ve got a few . . . not very big, though.”
“I don’t need big ones.”
Tobimar opened up the small bag, rummaged around in it as Xavier watched. “Um . . . yeah, there’s a couple . . . three. That’s it, though.”
Two of them were too big, but the third was a deep blue-black oval that was small enough to fit on one side without crowding.
Now, let’s see. This is sort of like that trap I ran across back in the mazakh stronghold. I want to channel the energy out of the Rain into this battery-thingie, and just enough to keep the taste the same—not sharper, not sweeter.
He took out his notebook and riffled to the section with runes and symbols. A lot of them were still way out of his comfort zone, but just a simple guide-and-drop channel . . . “Hey, do you just get new batteries when they run out?”
“No, you recharge them.”
There were several shiny gold-colored parts of the battery. “Can you tell me if these are the parts that ‘recharge,’ or the parts that give the power out?”
“I don’t think . . .” Xavier blinked, then grinned. “Maybe I can!” He dug around in his backpack and came up with a small battered printed booklet with a picture of the LTP on it. “Here, I still have the manual, never can bring myself to throw them away . . . um . . .”
After a few moments of looking at pictures in the manual and arguing, they were able to conclude that two of the “contacts,” as the book called them, were for recharging the battery.
“Okay, here goes.” He first fit the battery back in carefully and then pulled it back out after marking the right spot. On that spot he put the Zeus’ Rain, sticking it fast with a drop of hawkspinner’s glue. Then he took out a thin engraving stylus and drew two lines, one from each end of the Zeus’ Rain and each going to one of the two contacts in question.
Elemental magic . . . here, this page. He focused as old Watersparker had taught him and began to channel his own strength into the symbols, copying each precisely along the lines graven on the battery. It took a while, during which Xavier and Tobimar started talking about their fighting styles. That’d be interesting, but not time to get distracted . . . There!
He felt a tingle along his fingers which were still touching the Zeus’ Rain, and he was sure he could see a very faint blue-violet glow.
“Hey,” he said, as the two were both reaching for their scabbards. “Instead of comparing your swords, let’s see if this worked.”
This time Xavier and Tobimar looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t think you chose those words by accident,” Xavier said.
Poplock grinned inside, but just blinked innocently. “I don’t know what you mean by that. But here, put your battery back in.”
The gray-eyed boy studied the modifications for a moment, shrugged, and put it back in. “Doesn’t look like you did anything that would damage it, anyway. Well, here goes nothing.”
The screen lit back up, and Xavier’s jaw dropped slightly. “Damn! Look at that!” The little corner symbol was now a full green. “Thanks, Poplock! That’s great! I mean . . . maybe I won’t get lots of chances to play it, but it’s like a kind of, you know, comfort reminder from home.”
Poplock felt a warm swell of pride and some mingled surprise. It worked! “I guess practice pays off. I’m not much of a mage . . . not really a mage at all, mostly more into sneaking past mages, and sometimes you have to know how they work to get away with that.”
“You sound like a couple other people I know, which means I bet you can do more than you admit. But thanks again.” He handed the device over to the Skysand prince. “So here you go, Tobimar!”
Several hours later Poplock kicked the little device almost out of Tobimar’s hands. “Time for you to go to sleep, Tobimar.”
“But I’m almost through this challenge! Just another few minutes and I’m sure I’ll figure it—”
Poplock just looked at him, and Tobimar sighed and shut the strange device off. The little Toad then dragged it over to Xavier, who was already asleep.
Maybe fixing that “battery” thing wasn’t the best idea I’ve had.
34
“Ha,” said Xavier, looking at Tobimar. “Got sucked in, didn’t you?”
The expression wasn’t hard to figure out, and neither was the knowing grin. Tobimar rolled his eyes and nodded. “Yes. I suppose that’s not uncommon?”
“Depends on the person, but no. Especially if it’s new and exciting. First time I played, my mom came into my room and I wondered what she was doing up so late . . . and that’s when I looked up and saw that the sun was rising and I had to get ready for school. Didn’t learn much that day.” He started packing up his sleeping roll. “So where’d you get to?”
“Trying to cross the river.”
“Oh, that one stopped me dead for a while.”
As they prepared a quick breakfast, Poplock spoke up. “Hey, Xavier, I was wondering—have you known the rest of your group a long time?”
“Long time? Ha. No, Khoros yanked us all together and then dumped us in your world with some old mysterious wizard handwavy advice maybe six weeks before we got grabbed by the city on suspicion of regicide.”
That makes sense. “I rather thought so,” Tobimar said aloud. “The way you stood and talked with each other; you knew each other somewhat, and you’d been through at least enough to feel like a group . . . but you weren’t friends, really.”
“Yeah. Though they’re all pretty nice people, really, even Toshi. Who can be such a dick, without meaning to, if you know what I mean.”
Tobimar was breathing in when Xavier said that, so the laugh came out more as a snort. “Your precise meaning is lost in sand, yet I think I still understand you perfectly.” There was a short pause as they continued walking. “But one thing does puzzle me, a great deal. There’s no magic in your world, right?”
“Right.” Xavier suddenly blinked, as though he’d caught himself in a lie. “
Um . . . lemme change that. There wasn’t any as far as I knew, up until a little while before Khoros got us together.”
“Ohhh,” Poplock said with an enlightened tone. “Of course, if he’d just been brought over by Khoros, how’d he learn those magic tricks from his sensei?”
“Those aren’t magic. At least, I don’t think so,” Xavier protested. “If they were, I’d have been detected, right?”
That did stop Tobimar, and from his suddenly wrinkled expression, Poplock too. “I . . . I think I would have to agree, yes,” Tobimar said after a moment. “Yet you wandered around the Dragon’s Castle for weeks without anyone noticing.”
“Still,” Poplock said, “from the way you act, that’s got to at least seem like magic to you, so how’d you end up learning what you know before you got here?”
Xavier’s sharp-edged face showed expression clearly, and now it was suddenly downcast. “I did something inexcusably stupid, that’s what. And didn’t quite pay the full price for it.” He sighed, looked up into the sky, then back at them. “My . . . my brother died. Killed, while I was talking to him on the phone.”
Tobimar restrained himself from asking what a “phone” was, and his glance kept Poplock from doing more than opening his mouth.
“It really messed up our family bad. And the cops, the police, they couldn’t find who it was—eventually pinned it on some guy I know hadn’t done it, because I’d heard the killer myself, and it wasn’t a man, it was a woman, sounded almost like a little girl, and she’d laughed. So . . . I decided I’d go find the killer myself. And so I got less than halfway there, cut through the wrong alley, and got ambushed by a gang that didn’t like some kid walking through their turf. They’d stabbed me in the gut and were going to finish me off when this old man shows up and tells them to back off—and then beats the heck out of all of them when they don’t.”
“Khoros?” asked Poplock.
Xavier managed a cynical grin. “Oh, no, that wasn’t Khoros. Khoros was the bastard who’d told me to take that alley as a shortcut, I found out later. No, the old man ended up being my sensei. I knew some fighting stuff, martial arts, before I met him, but by the time he was done I knew how to do things I didn’t think were possible. This after he told me how much of an idiot I was and got me to realize how much I was hurting my family by disappearing.”
