The Galactic Mage

by John Daulton

  By then, two nurses and Doctor Singh were there, and Orli saw Doctor Singh plunging a needle into the raving man’s shoulder as the two nurses fought to pull him back. The bloodied man collapsed onto her a moment later, limp and heavy as death, and Orli scrambled out from beneath him, swearing and trembling with rage and fear.

  “Are you okay?” Doctor Singh asked, a dark hand on each of her shoulders and leaning his face down to study hers close up. His expression was one of fright and genuine concern. She nodded that she was, and the doctor ran a cursory inspection over the rest of her body. He saw the blood on her smock. “Did you get any in your mouth or eyes?”

  She saw what he was looking at and shook her head, no. “At least I don’t think so.”

  “Are you cut?”

  She held out her bloodied hands, still trembling, and they both looked to see if she’d been cut by either the madman’s gnashing teeth or clawing nails, or cut by something sharp on the tray when she had fallen, a scalpel or a shard of broken glass. But she was fine. No cuts. Maybe she’d gotten lucky after all.

  It wasn’t until she was back in her quarters, given a twelve-hour leave by Doctor Singh, that she allowed herself to cry. She sat on her bed and sobbed, shoulders heaving as she let the terror out. All of it. Terror of the patient who had attacked her, and terror for the one that was going to attack her next. Terror of the disease, of the horrible vomiting and diarrhea, of the headaches that made the people scream, of the raging fever and, now, apparently of the dementia that followed the body-wracking shakes. She felt terror of the anarchy that was fast becoming the ship, and terror of the orbs. Terror of death. And perhaps mostly, terror of misery.

  “Orli,” came Roberto’s voice from the speaker on her small desk. “Hey, Orli, you there?”

  She wiped her eyes on her blanket and tried to put on her regular face. She blew her nose and, after a moment, clicked on the monitor. “Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. What’s up?”

  “You don’t look fine. I just heard what happened. Pennington told me. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. Just scared the crap out of me is all. Really. I’m fine.”

  “Well good,” he said. He looked relieved. “You look like shit though.” He smiled.

  “Thanks,” she said, sniffling. She heard the captain’s voice in the background, typically surly despite being too far off for her to make out all the words.

  “Gotta run,” was all Roberto said before the monitor went blank.

  She spent a few expectant moments waiting for the ship-rattling crash of another projectile from an orb, assuming the returning Hostile to be why Roberto had been called away. But after a time she decided Roberto’s abrupt departure was due to his having been caught sneaking the time to check on her, and she allowed herself to breathe. She didn’t know what she would do if Roberto wasn’t on the ship, wasn’t there to care. Probably shoot herself or go entirely insane. She sighed. No, it would have to be insanity for sure; she’d never pull the trigger. She didn’t have the guts. She sighed again. God, this was such an awful place. And the nightmare had just begun.

  Chapter 25

  Pernie was as good as her word, and it was with remarkable speed that she returned to Altin with two raven’s wings, cut neatly from the bird and sparing Altin from disposing of a corpse. While a bit unnerved by the delight the girl seemed to take in butchery, he had to admit she’d done precisely as he’d asked. She also refused to take the silver coins.

  “I never seen Master Tytamon paying you,” she informed him. “So I ain’t taking money neither since I’m going to be yer apprentice too.”

  Technically, Altin had an allowance, but still, what was he supposed to say to her? He frowned. This child certainly was difficult. “Well, I won’t be taking any apprentices any time soon, so you don’t have to worry.” It wasn’t the perfect evasion, but he figured it would do. He was wrong. The tears that he had so adeptly avoided in the meadow threatened once again to pour, forcing him to quickly add, “But if I do, I promise I’ll let you give it a try.”

  That seemed to hold back the water for now, if barely, and she handed off the severed wings and turned morosely from the room. Altin felt as if he should add something more, something to make her smile, but he couldn’t think of the exact right words. There were things he might have said.

  He grunted as she disappeared down the stairs, pushing inconvenient emotions aside, then went to the window that faced the courtyard to make sure she had really gone away. He saw her carrying her little basket of frog’s legs into the castle proper and knew that he was safe to cast his Polar’s shield.

  Once the shield was up, he went to the spell book with the stasis spell. He studied it closely and read the description aloud:

  Cast upon a falling or levitated object, stasis will grant such properties of location as if the spell’s recipient were firmly planted on the ground. The object cannot be moved by force or magic unless there is a more powerful magic at work. Applied physical force can, and will, move or destroy the object if said force is too great, as Stasis does not buttress the target’s physical properties in any way. However, the object may be moved about at leisure by the caster through the use of the simple release command embedded in the spell and re-stasised with the same activating word. The effect lasts for approximately two hours unless enchanted otherwise as per standard extension procedures.

  The description went on from there about K-rank enchanters and whatnot, but Altin saw what he needed to see. Stasis was exactly what he wanted, or at least seemed to be, and he wasted no time in beginning to memorize the spell; his tower would not be falling into planets again any time soon. He worked a few hours memorizing it, and by the time he had it cast and sent himself back to Naotatica, he yawned and stretched tiredly from all the work.

  He spent another hour in static orbit above Naotatica, back at the point where the falling in had begun, to make sure that the stasis spell was indeed working as it should. Once he was convinced of it, he enchanted it permanently in place. He made the appropriate changes in his notes, and then put himself to bed after a meal eaten out of Kettle’s crate.

  He woke up an indeterminable number of hours later and wrote a note to remind himself to get a water clock the next time he went to town. It was so unendingly dark out here that he felt he might lose his sense of night and day completely at some point. Particularly if he was going to be out here for a while, which was exactly what he intended to do.

  Now that he’d mastered the strange pull of Naotatica, he felt it was time to press on with the next planet in the line. He wished there actually had been a line, however, for according to his astronomer’s maps the planets at this time of year were nowhere near aligned. The closest one was the sixth planet in the solar system, Venvost. He squinted up into the night sky and tried to spy where he thought it should be based on his astronomer’s charts. But there were only stars speckling the night. He couldn’t tell one from the other.

  He looked back in the direction of Prosperion and realized how very small it had become. He’d been so focused on moving outward, he hadn’t spent any time appreciating just how far away from home he’d come. Prosperion was just a pale blue dot. Hardly bigger than any other star, but still discernable by its hue. The sun was getting smaller too. Not uncomfortably small, but Altin could tell that he wouldn’t be able to travel a whole lot farther before being well beyond its range, which made him start to think. What if he did pass so far away that it faded out of sight? What if he got so far away that it disappeared and he could not find his way back. The thought made his stomach clench.

  But he knew immediately that that was absurd. He had the advantage of always “knowing” where Prosperion was. That idea was at the core of teleportation law. You just had to know where you wanted to go. But still, it was a frightening thought. To be so far away from home. So far that even the sun might go away.


  As a security precaution, he decided he needed to construct a fast-cast amulet to take him home. Or perhaps just to Luria so there would be no danger of someone standing in the way. He remembered discussing it with Tytamon. It was still a good idea, something for just-in-case.

  And so he did. The prospect of losing sight of Prosperion and perhaps even the sun was such that Altin was willing to spend the two days required to make his fast-cast amulet. He only had a few flawed garnets in his tower to use, but the gem was not important beyond its purpose of storing the energy and the focus of the spell. Any gem would do. He chose a good-sized garnet, about the size of a lima bean, and trickled the mana into its tiny mass slowly over the course of two days; he even used the Liquefying Stone so he could layer in mana for what he figured would be more distance than he would ever need, a ridiculous amount. Why not? Given the distances he’d discovered out here so far, there was no sense taking chances after all. When he was done, he used a bit more lead from the brick downstairs and crafted a crude mount for the garnet using a transmutation spell from one of his books. He ran a leather cord through it and held it aloft to examine his work when he was done. The amulet was hideous.

  He had to laugh at how horrible it looked. He was sure no jewel crafter. He should have had Aderbury do it; the man was an artist when it came to things like this. Oh well, he thought, it’s functional and that’s what matters. It made him feel a bit safer. It also gave him license to push outward harder too.

  Satisfied, and annoyed that he’d allowed fear to cost him two days, it was time to press on. He looked back up into the sky in the direction of Venvost, ready to go. But, it was still not there. Or at least not that he could tell. Just an enormous darkness sprinkled with spots of light. He groaned. He wished he could divine. Finding the general direction of Venvost would be the simplest kind of divination anyone could do. Even B-class divination could provide enough of a feel for him to start.

  After scanning hopelessly in the vast night sky, and after six tremendously long seeing stone casts with the Liquefying Stone in the direction he hoped was right, he decided to give divination a try. For all he knew he was casting in entirely the wrong direction anyway. He was not the mathematician Aderbury was, but he knew enough of angles to know that, given the distances he was working with out here, guessing could be an extremely time consuming way to get it done. Harder than finding a tadpole in a tar pit, as Tytamon would say. Altin was certain that he could cast himself around forever out here and never find a planet by anything approaching chance. The size of space was simply too great.

  He went downstairs and got his Divining for Beginners book from his personal library on the tower’s second floor. He hadn’t opened this book in years, a decade at the least. He sighed as he blew dust off the top of its yellowed bulk.

  He opened it up to the first page, the binding creaking as he did, and leafed impatiently through the introduction which explained the value of knowledge and defined the nature of Divination as “images that work with what you know.” He knew what he needed to know. He needed to know where in the last layers of hell damnable Venvost was.

  He turned to the page that held the starter spell. It was a very simple spell, and it was a directional one. The instructions read:

  Think about your mommy or your daddy, or your teacher if your parents aren’t nearby. Then, sit on the floor. Close your eyes and try to picture where that person is. As you think of them, chant the following words to the tune of “My Cat’s Paw:” Leenox para meh, foor nah for nah moor. Leenox para meh, foor nah for nah loor.

  Altin moaned and snapped the volume shut. The book was infantile. And he hated that stupid kiddie’s song. And his parents had been dead for years. And he already knew where Tytamon was, so what use was that supposed to be? He threw the book down onto his bed. He didn’t have time for stupid childhood spells.

  He went back upstairs and cast four more seeing stones to absolutely no avail. His casts were still improving, and his distances were getting extreme. He could easily cast a seeing stone twice the distance it was from Luria to Naotatica now with the help of the Liquefying Stone. It was amazing what just being able to conceive of the distances out here did to help the casts.

  He began to wonder if perhaps he’d already passed Venvost completely by. He moved from his latest view in the scrying basin and cast an improved seeing spell out to the tiny seeing stone he’d just sent blindly into space. He spun his vision round in all directions but still there were no other planets in his sight. There was nothing, just stars.

  And his theory about the sun was proving right too. It was almost completely gone when viewed from this most recent seeing stone. It really looked like nothing more than a giant star. Which made him wonder if maybe that was all it really was.

  What if the sun was just a star?

  The thought struck him like a blow. He stared at the bright spot of light far back behind his tiny seeing stone floating in the night and realized that another cast or two like the last and his sun would be no more significant than any other of those other dots of light sparkling in the sky. It would be just like them. Exactly like them.

  Which meant that they in turn might be exactly like it. The thought was chilling in its magnitude. What if the stars really weren’t holes in the ceiling of the sky? What if the stars were suns? Suns like the one that shone down upon Prosperion? And if they were, what if every star had a planet or two around it that was filled with life? A Prosperion for every point of light in the whole seemingly endless stretch of space? What an incredible thought. And it seemed to him as he considered it that it must be true.

  Every sun had its own life. And maybe there could only be one place with life near any given sun. Maybe there weren’t going to be other people on the rest of the planets around his sun after all. Maybe that was just how the universe worked. He’d cursed the moon for being an empty waste of space. He’d cursed Naotatica too. But perhaps, once again, he’d been thinking entirely too small. He snorted in recognition of this fact and nodded to himself. Maybe there were only so many fish allowed to live in any given solar bowl.

  He snapped his vision back into his body and then teleported himself and the tower out to his furthest seeing stone. He stood for a long while looking out into the stars. The darkness was as beautiful as it was vast and terrifying, the stars seeming to crowd together in every swatch of space. He marveled that as close together as many of them might seem, they were likely as far away as was his sun. Perhaps farther. Almost definitely farther. Nothing out here was close. It made him shudder just to think. And yet they called to him, daring him to come outside his tiny little space, challenging him to leap out of his tiny solar bowl and swim—swim with people from the stars. There simply had to be someone else.

  But first there was Venvost he had to find. He would not begin another quest until his current one was done. That was not Altin’s way. As tempting as the stars might be, he had a few more planets to explore. And it was with a resigned sense that there would be no one to greet him on any single one that he set out to find them just the same. If he did not look for them, perhaps no one else ever would. He would not leave anyone out here all alone.

  Chapter 26

  Altin’s theories involving the vacant states of the other planets turned out to be entirely true, and, though it took him almost six weeks to find them all, and some considerable time scouting each of them out, in the end he was convinced that the races of Prosperion were all that his solar system had brought to life. Furthermore, religion was entirely disproved for him. There was both satisfaction and discontent in that. He’d always been happily agnostic before. In an odd way, the possibility that the Church might be at least partly right, despite his skepticism, had always been something of a security net. But now that had been taken away. Altin’s sense of loneliness was complete. There was no one else circling round the sun.

  But the revelation helped to drive him on. He knew that there were others in the vast space t
hat he found himself drifting in, there had to be, and he was bent on finding them no matter how long it took. And so it was that he set himself to the task of reaching for another sun—reaching for a star.

  He had no particular one in mind, and it was on a lark that he forced himself to use the childish divining spell in picking one out. He sat atop the battlements with the infantile book in his lap and chanted the stupid baby song—though rather than picturing someone he already knew, he decided in his typically obtuse fashion that he was going to concentrate on someone he wanted to know instead. He knew that this attitude was probably going to prompt failure, particularly in a school for which he’d been told he had no gift, but such was his mood when he gave the spell a try.

  He followed all the steps, just as the book said he should, and, just as he expected, when he was done he felt that he had no answers at all. The only new impression that he came away with in his mind was that now he knew he was a fool—that and, after sitting cross-legged on the floor singing that infernal cat song, he was very glad that there had been no one in the tower to see him try. He tossed the book onto the scorched table near the wall and looked back up into the sky. So many stars and no intelligent way to choose.

  But he needed to pick one. So he did. He closed his eyes, vowing to fix his attention on the first one he noticed when he opened them back up. And he did just that. He opened his eyes, picked a star at random from the view, and marked it in his mind with a silent seer’s mark. “I will go there,” he said aloud and then his newest quest was underway.