“I may only have traded one master for another, but yes; it seems I’m free from the grasp of the program. How about you? Are you still being tracked?”
“I don’t know. This pad only tracks you, but I would assume so,” she replied.
“I agree. Let’s assume you are for now,” I said.
22
03-23-0065 — Lyshell
We made the trip back to the capital on a luxury liner. I booked us adjoining rooms, and we stayed in them for the course of the journey. She told me everything she knew about my prior lives, and I was able to combine that with information from the news reports to build a working model of my past.
She told me very little about her own past, though. She claimed that she had no idea where she came from, who her family was or anything of a personal nature. It made sense if her memory had been wiped, but I still felt there was more to Joan than she let on.
I dedicated one of my sub-cores to do nothing but study the treaty and all associated law. My goal was to be an expert by the time we landed. I probably couldn’t win a case in Joan’s defense, but I was sure I’d be able to bog things down long enough for Mathorn to make her case.
When the time came to disembark, I met Joan outside her room.
“You ready?” I asked.
“I’m going to ask to be let out of the program,” she said.
“What?”
“When we get back and they take me in, I’m going to ask to get out,” she repeated.
“But they’ll wipe your memory!” I pointed out.
“Yes, but it’ll be the last time at least,” she said.
I shook my head. “It won’t come to that.”
“You don’t know that, and I don’t believe it. Besides, with you gone they’ll probably wipe my memory either way, so I might as well get out.”
A dark thought came to mind as she said that. What if she had asked to leave before and they had simply removed the memory of her request? That could have happened to me too. There was no way to be sure we hadn’t refused every time. I could not let that happen this time.
I hefted both of our bags and led her off the ship. As we entered the spaceport proper, we were met by my former commander and several magi.
“It is good to see you back, officer,” he said as I walked up.
I raised my hand to ward off further comments. “Sir, before you say any more, there is something I have to show you.”
He nodded.
I turned to one of the magi and held out my hand. “Do you recognize this?” He gasped. “Good, please explain it to the commander.”
“Sir, that is a wizard’s ring.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It marks him as a citizen of the Wizard Kingdom, and — a mage.” He looked up at me, the shock evident on his face.
The commander looked at me. “What does that mean exactly?”
“It means that I have a new chain of command and I’m operating under their orders,” I said.
“And what are those orders?”
“I am to go to my apartment immediately and await further orders.”
He chuckled. “Good to know that ‘hurry up and wait’ is universal.”
I smiled. I hoped his good nature meant there would be no problem.
“But you will have to come with me,” he said.
“No, sir, I cannot do that. I have my orders,” I replied.
A look of surprise crossed his face. “No, you will come with me.”
Engage combat level two.
“Is that a threat?” I asked. I could feel the adrenaline flow into my veins as my automated systems detected the threat in his voice and prepared me for a response.
He waved to the mage closest to him. “Knock him out and let’s go.”
The mage took a step back. “Sir, you know I cannot do that.”
“Why not?” demanded the commander.
“That ring places him under the protection of the Wizard Kingdom. If you make a move against him, it would be in direct violation of the treaty.”
The commander looked back at me, his hand on his sidearm. “Your body is filled with the property of the Empire; you must return it.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I have my orders. Surely you can understand that I’m compelled to obey them.”
He cursed loudly, spun on his heels and marched off.
I took Joan’s arm and quickly led her away in a different direction. I was moving too fast for any normal human to keep up, but somehow she managed.
“We need to keep moving before he remembers you,” I said quietly to her.
She didn’t respond but let me lead her towards a group of waiting shuttles. We secured a ride on one of them and returned to my apartment. It was a small affair with only one bedroom, but it would have to do for now.
“They probably have this place heavily bugged by now,” I warned.
“It always has been,” she said with a sigh.
Engage duty mode.
I could feel my body slow down and the world speed up as my functions returned to some semblance of normality. “Nothing we can do about that, I guess.”
“No, but it doesn’t matter. It won’t be long until I get orders to return to command.”
“Can’t you just ignore them?”
“No more than you could have.”
I sighed and dropped our bags by the door. I wasn’t sure why I was still holding them. It was almost as if I were thinking about leaving again.
“They might want you to shadow me for as long as you — ” A knock at the door cut me off.
I moved to the door and used the security camera to look outside, but saw no one. That meant a mage had come calling.
I slid open the door and found the mage from the spaceport, the one who had identified the ring. Before I could get a word out he said, “No time for explanations; come with me.”
Down the hall there were two more magi standing guard, and when I looked up the hall I saw two more. Five magi; that was about seven more than I could get to come on a call.
“We don’t have much time. I’ll explain when we’re safe,” he said.
I grabbed our bags and called back to Joan, “Let’s move.”
He was a mage, and his actions in the spaceport proved that his real allegiance was to the wizards, which meant I could trust him. At least, that seemed the most plausible explanation. Anyway, that apartment wasn’t safe for Joan, so moving out was the best bet.
We followed him out into the corridor and he shut the door to my apartment. “Are we blacked out?”
“Yes, sir,” called back one of the other magi.
“Open the gate and get us out of here,” said the mage from the spaceport.
One of the other magi opened a gate and we were ushered through. As we passed through the azure of jump space I wondered if I had made the right choice. It was likely that these magi were risking violation of the treaty and causing an interstellar incident. What if it came to war? Could I live with that?
The trip through the gate was too short for me to come to any conclusion. We came out in what was obviously a bunker of some kind. Magi were working at various stations around the room, and the walls were covered with displays of maps and diagrams. There was the constant sound of men working at terminals, talking to each other and probably themselves. Magi moved back and forth, apparently working at several stations at once, and no one gave any indication that they’d noticed our arrival.
“This way,” said the mage who had brought us here.
“Wait,” I said. Something was wrong; I couldn’t reach datanet. That had never happened before. “I appear to have lost my connection. I just need a moment to figure out why.”
He sighed. “There was no time to warn you. This is a shielded location; no datanet. Come with me into one of the situation rooms and I’ll brief you both.”
We followed him back into what appeared to be a small conference room. Three walls were covered in displays wh
ich were all powered off, and the fourth was all glass and looked back into the main room. When he closed the door behind us, all the sounds from the adjoining room were cut off.
“Please, sit,” he said with a gesture.
The center of the room had a circular table with a holographic projector in the center. I looked at Joan, who shrugged and sat down. Placing our bags in a corner, I followed suit.
“First let me introduce myself. I am Journeyman Starfire. I was sent here a few years ago to take over this operation,” he said, gesturing back to the room we had left.
“What operation is that?” I asked.
“Operating under the cover of working with local security forces, we’re hunting sorcerers. We have reason to believe that at least one group has hidden itself here in the old Empire with plans to infiltrate and take control. Over the years we have found smaller cells, but they all suggest there is a much bigger operation here.”
My mind ran through all the implications. “So you’re saying that all this time you weren’t really here to help us keep the peace?”
“Not exactly. We did that as much as we could, but that had lower priority than countering the sorcerer threat here in the old Empire,” said Starfire.
I leaned back in my chair. “Well, that explains why it was so hard to get back-up.”
He slumped down in his seat. “I don’t have enough magi to go around, but that’s all secondary right now. Grandmaster Vydor will be meeting with the Emperor later this week, and I have orders to keep both of you here until the results of that meeting are known.”
I had no connection to datanet, but I had enough in my internal memory to understand that he probably had the rank to order me to stay here.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He pulled a wand out of his robes and laid it on the table. “I’m not sure if this will work. If you wouldn’t mind, please pick up that wand and say the command word that is written on the side.”
I picked up the wand. It wasn’t much more than a twig, but I had seen enough of these in battle to know that looks were very deceiving. The word on the side was unfamiliar, but the pronunciation seemed easy enough. I held up the wand and repeated the word.
Nothing happened at first, but as I was about to give up and put it down it started to glow a soft blue.
“But … ” I started, trailing off as I couldn’t form a coherent thought.
“But that shouldn’t work? Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. However, now that it has, we know you’re a mage, though I don’t recognize the pattern.”
He took the wand and handed it to Joan. Joan looked it over, sighed and put it on the table. “I’m not a mage.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I picked up the wand and handed it back to Starfire. “Master Mathorn gave her the ring and told us she was a mundane. I pleaded her case to him, and he decided to appeal to Grandmaster Vydor. He gave her the ring to buy time for him to do that.”
“What is her case?” he asked.
“If she returns without me, her mind will be wiped and she will be reassigned,” I told him.
23
03-08-0065 — Greymere
As with the first time I came to this realm, we exited Master Spectra’s gate in the middle of an empty plain that stretched in all directions seemingly without end. The last time I had been here, I’d flown for what might have been weeks before finding anything but this empty plain. Time was impossible to judge here; there was no sky, no sun and no stars by which to judge its passage. It may not even pass at the same rate as it does back home. In truth, nothing about this land made any logical sense.
What I did know was that it was a living prison seeking to ensnare me with its temptation of infinite amounts of energy: a temptation that would ensnare Saraphym within moments of her arrival. A shudder passed through me with that thought.
“Are you okay?” asked Master Spectra.
I turned to her and smiled. “Yes, Master. It is much easier this time. I can smell the foulness in the energy of this place.” She looked confused by my statement. “Perhaps ‘smell’ is not the best word. On the surface it seems delicious, but when I look closer I can detect the rot.”
She nodded. “I understand. What you smell, see or otherwise sense is the danger this place has for Saraphym. Can you teach her to survive here?”
I looked around again. “If we bring her here now, she will be lost. I’m sure of it. She barely understands what she is yet and hasn’t refined her senses to find the best sources of food.”
Master Spectra sighed. “We almost did lose her, and we were here only a few seconds.”
Several months previously they had been forced to make a rapid retreat from a space station which was exploding around them. Master Spectra had brought her here, as it was the safest place they could reach in the seconds they had. The Spirit Realm held danger, but it was safer than the center of an exploding space station.
They got off the station before the explosion reached them, but the moment they arrived Saraphym started to fall for the trap. She still had nightmares from the experience.
“I think her first step should be to investigate jump … er, the weave,” I said. I had been calling the weave ‘jump space’ all my life. It was only when I’d joined these wizards that I learned the real name for the place and its true nature.
“Why there?”
“The weave also offers infinite power for us to consume, but unlike this place, it is the purest, cleanest power one could find.” I waved my hand, gesturing at the world around us. “This place pales by comparison. When she learns to handle herself in the weave, it will teach her both self-control and also have something with which to compare this place.”
“That makes sense, but how do we do that? We have no spellweavers on board.”
“We can start by placing Saraphym and myself on the exterior of Nemesis each time we jump. It’s a perfect small controlled trip. After that, we’ll have to see.” She had been to jump space once before, but it would probably take many trips before she was truly comfortable with it.
“I like that idea. We’ll start with the next jump. Now, we should move on.”
She was comfortable here. I could see that in her more relaxed posture. Somehow she was more comfortable here than even on the Nemesis. She had told us more than once that she had lived here for a long time, probably years. I couldn’t imagine the horrors she would have seen in that time. I would have expected her to be traumatized or at least wary; anything but comfortable.
She opened another gate and we went through. The room we entered took my breath away. We were surrounded by rows and rows of bookcases, mostly filled with real paper books. I couldn’t believe my eyes as I looked around. I didn’t know there were so many books in all the galaxy. The bookcases varied in height from one to two meters and seemed to be organized into pathways. Along the pathways of shorter bookcases, taller ones isolated off small areas that seemed to be reading nooks.
As I looked around, my eyes came to rest on Grandmaster Vydor and his wife, Master Kellyn.
“Welcome to my humble library,” said Grandmaster Vydor.
“Humble? You call this ‘humble’?” I said, hating how breathless I sounded.
He smiled broadly. “It was much smaller once, nothing more than some shelves with a few dozen books. An old friend of mine once remarked that that library was amazing. When I told him I felt it was disappointing, he said that it was a matter of perspective; to him it was the biggest collection of books he had ever seen, while to me it seemed minuscule compared to some of the libraries in Korshalemia. I suspect the same is true for you now.”
“Grandmaster, I didn’t think that all the libraries in the galaxy housed so many books,” I said.
“Oh, I am sure there are many more out there than in here.” He gestured to his wife. “I assume you remember my wife, Kellyn.”
She smiled warmly at me. “It’s been a long time, Greymere.”
“Yes, but these are much better circumstances.” The last time I’d seen her, I had sneaked past security and dragged a badly-wounded partner into her hotel room. A normal woman would have screamed and sunk my career, but not she. Not only did she heal my partner but she told everyone that I was her friend, despite it being the first time she had met me, and that I was welcome to visit any time; this prevented me from getting into serious trouble.
My friend’s life was on the line at the time, so I would gladly have faced the negative fallout but was immensely grateful that I hadn’t had to.
“Indeed they are!” She beamed.
Spectra walked up and greeted them both in a very formal manner, but Master Kellyn said, “Enough of that. Come here,” and gave her a big hug.
“Sorry, I should have warned you. If I don’t drop by and say hello whenever I visit, they get very grumpy,” sent Master Spectra privately. Her words made it sound like a chore, but I could hear in her mental voice that she enjoyed visiting them.
Grandmaster Vydor led us into one of the nooks I had noticed. When we were settled, Master Spectra gave them a brief update on the state of the crew and the mission. Then I told them about the problem with the engines and our intention to visit the shipyards.
Master Kellyn looked concerned. “If something happens to that ship, Nemesis is not likely to survive at this stage of his development. I’d better return with you and check that side of the equation. It could be mechanical, but it might be related to Nemesis in some way.”
“Master, what do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, what if it’s something as simple as Nemesis having a cold?” she suggested.
“Do spirits get sick?” I asked.
“They don’t, but neither do they embody spaceships, so who knows?” she commented.
“Master, I’ve observed no change in him, and surely Shea or Nanny would have noticed if Nemesis was sick,” commented Master Spectra.
“Perhaps, but I would feel better if I checked myself, though it’s probably nothing. The engineers at the shipyards will find that it’s some adjustment that is noted wrong in the manual or something of the like.”
Mage Hunter (Lost Tales of Power Book 8) Page 11
