by John Daulton
“So you’re saying it just moves us somewhere else when they shoot?” She wanted to be clear.
“Yes, that’s precisely what it does. Although you’ll want to spread your ships far enough apart. The spell doesn’t care if there is someone else already occupying the space. Generally speaking, it’s a last-ditch defense, and it was never intended for use amongst a crowd.”
“Well, we don’t have a lot of options at the moment as it is.”
“I believe you are right about that,” he said, looking once more at the scene depicted on the wall.
Orli relayed what he had said to Captain Asad who looked dubious at best. But he was under orders from the admiral to talk to the magic man and report whatever came of the conversation back to fleet command. He did as much while Altin and Orli chatted privately in their mysteriously encoded spell. Their secrecy annoyed him greatly. Roberto actually began to look a bit jealous too, hating to be left out.
In the end it was decided that, as the captain stated before, they had so little chance of survival as it was, anything that might buy them time until the fleet could arrive in force was a chance that they should take, however ridiculous it might sound. But the final decision was left to each individual ship’s captain, and they were given their choice regarding admittance for the magician upon their ship, and they were reminded that if there was still contagion aboard the Aspect, the robed man might be bringing that along as well.
In the end, only four of the other ships agreed to let Altin come aboard. Most thought that Captain Asad and his crew had lost their minds, a residual of the infection, the general consensus being that Altin was in fact a hallucinogenic Hostile trick. And even amongst those captains who did believe, or at least who were willing to hope that somehow Altin could actually do what he said he could, few were willing to risk infection by the disease that had decimated the Aspect’s crew now that Altin had been aboard. Which is why there were only four of the eighteen that agreed to receive the Combat Hop.
Orli reported all of this back to Altin who simply shrugged it off. “That is their choice,” he said. “And I’m not worried about some disease. There’s nothing Doctor Leopold can’t cure, no disease beyond the Healers Guild but death. Nobody dies from disease back home. At least very rarely, and usually it’s a blank.” He blanched as he said it, hoping she didn’t take offense at the latter part.
She pointed out the willing ships on the monitor, apparently unbothered by the reference to her magical powerlessness, and he said that he would teleport his tower just above each in turn when he was ready to enchant their ship. He made her promise that she would explain the requirements regarding the parchment targets to each captain so that they all completely understood. She came up with the idea to have them flash their docking lights five times to let him know that they were ready for him to arrive. He agreed that this was a good idea and prepared to teleport back to his tower to begin working out the details of the spell.
“Hurry,” she said as he was just about to start his spell. “And…” she paused. What else could she say? He was obviously a man of extreme decorum. She was afraid to scare him off. “And be careful.”
He smiled at that, and his face became so bright that it felt to her as if he shined down upon the entire universe, the look of grim determination that had been his countenance a moment before replaced by jubilant innocence revealing that she’d found the perfect thing to say.
“I will,” he promised, and a moment later he was gone.
Chapter 41
Working out the details of Combat Hop to the point where the spell could encompass an object as large as Orli’s ship was the project of several hours. Technically, just adding more mana to the spell should make it work, but Altin had other things to check as well. He wasn’t going to make any mistakes. Not this time. Not after meeting her. And more mana was not what was slowing the process down. The problem was that the spell he’d written required that its anchor be embedded within the Polar’s shield; it was the immersion in the shield that allowed Combat Hop to be so easily spread around an area as large as the surface of the tower and its foundation rock. At first, that seemed as if it would be easy enough to do; his initial thought being to encapsulate the ships in pairs of Polar’s domes butted up to one another like two halves of a split coconut. The thought was ironic. However, it wasn’t helpful in the end, because, try as he might, he couldn’t find any way around the spell requirement that the Polar’s shield be anchored firmly to the ground. The element of “ground” was too critical an aspect of the spell to be bypassed, which meant he had to enchant Combat Hop on the entire ship—steel plate by steel plate—an entirely different thing.
The original spell from which his version had come to pass had the advantage of a person’s sense of “self.” The Earth ships had no such thing; they had no will or concept of “being,” no accepting thought to which the spell could be attached. Worse, the ships’ hulls were not even magically wrought; they had no merged metal from some transmuter’s spell, the casting of which would have left some residual energy to which Altin might bind Combat Hop, so Altin was reduced to pouring through his sparse assemblage of divination books hoping for anything that looked like it might suggest somewhere else to begin.
Finally, as he sat on his bed, crossed legs buried beneath a mound of tattered old tomes, he found a spell that he thought might give him the insight that he sought. The discovery was fortunate, for he’d gone through every divination book he had. In the last volume, his most advanced, was a spell called “Curiosity” that promised “answers for a caster willing to see.” The book was ancient, the edges of its yellowed pages gone brown and crumbling ragged parchment flakes like dried skin that worked their way atop this letter or that, masking commas and quotation marks or even truncating a word. He wiped them away, sending some sliding down into the crease and some tumbling into his lap. He ran his green-eyed gaze along the lines carefully, his lips silently pronouncing words he’d never spoken before, his fingers tracing script penned gods-knew-how-long ago. He worried that the spell might be outside his competence. He was horribly new to divination for a spell like this. But failure meant letting Orli down. And that was not going to happen, not on his watch. In his heart he knew that she was the reason he was here, the reason he had come so far from home. Hers was the voice that had been calling to him all these years, and he wasn’t going to let her die.
Behind those thoughts was a sinister one as well, a skulking sense of craven and selfish need that came lurking into the dark parts of his mind. It was cowardly, this thought, and without any of honor’s sense, but Altin found himself thinking that, if this battle was going bad, he would go get her and carry her away. Even if he had to take her against her will. He would not care if their entire fleet hunted him down, chased him forever for having kidnapped one of theirs and taken her to Prosperion. He did not care. She would not die out here in this vast and endless night. Not while he could still draw a breath. Not even if she hated him for it somewhere down the road. She only had to live.
He didn’t want it to come to that, however, so he worked furiously to figure out the spell. The instructions were as ambiguous as Neven’Na’haria’s ever-changing head, and, unlike the mythical figure, it was unwilling to show him a helpful face. However, after several hours and an excruciating headache, he finally managed to get it down. Or so he hoped.
Straightening his legs that had long gone to sleep, he sat at the edge of his bed and slowly began the chant. The spell required no components and was entirely based in focus and time, so, with eyes closed, he sang the song that, in theory, was going to leave an impression in his mind, an image or sense that would address the question he wove repeatedly back into the spell, an impression of the “thing,” whatever it might be, to which he might attach his Combat Hop.
The effectiveness of this assumed, of course, that he could understand what the impression meant. This was the real problem with divining. Given how completely little
he knew of anything regarding Orli’s “technology,” he felt his chances were ultimately pretty grim. The odds were he’d get an impression of something that meant nothing to him anyway, like a knight trying to explain the advantage of shifting his charger’s lead to someone who’s never ridden a horse. He wished he’d had time to rummage through Tytamon’s library; he likely could have found a more certain way if he had, but, given the gathering of the orbs somewhere out beyond his view, he had no opportunity to do such a thing. Besides, what would Orli think if she found out that he had gone? She might think that he had run away, and that would never do.
And so he chanted well into a second hour of the spell, his mind open to receive the product of his inquiry, meticulously held blank, staring into darkness maintained through force of will—and still nothing. He felt himself growing weary. And then, finally, as he was about to return to the beginning of what would be his divination’s last chanting loop, he saw an image like a dream. In his mind he dimly saw Orli’s ship with a shimmer around its length, not entirely unlike that seen when something touched upon his Polar’s shield, a flicker like a ripple of hidden light. He got a sense of lightning and something tugging him to the ground. And then it was gone.
But he knew exactly what it meant. The image did not seem vague to him at all, not as he had feared. He’d seen an aura flickering around the ships when the Hostile rams pounded into them. He’d assumed it was part of the Hostile attack, something that happened on impact, but now he knew that it wasn’t that at all. Orli’s people had a shield of energy all their own, and according to the feel of the divination, it was a suitable anchor for his Combat Hop.
Tired, and weak with hunger, he hadn’t eaten in what had to be over a day, he went back up the battlements and waved a sheet of parchment in the air towards Orli’s ship. A moment later he saw several amber lights and two bright white ones flicker on and off five times in a row.
With a quick glimpse into the scrying basin just to be sure, he sent himself back to the Aspect’s bridge. “I have it,” he announced when he arrived. “I’m sorry it took so long. I had no idea you had a protective shield.”
She looked puzzled, but her face showed that she was happy he was back. “Yes, we do. I’m sorry. I should have told you that we did.”
“You could not have known,” he said, not wanting her to feel one instant of regret. “It was I who should have asked.” He was invigorated just by seeing her again, his hunger gone completely from his mind. Had she told him to leap off of Mt. Pernolde just then, he would have been grateful for the sound of her voice even as he fell. But there were serious matters at hand. He forced his mind to focus.
“All right, if you’re ready, I’m prepared to give the spell a try.”
Orli conveyed this to the captain who, looking doubtful, nodded.
“Go for it,” she said.
“All right. Here goes.” He closed his eyes and began the spell that would enchant the ship with Combat Hop. He plunged his mind into the mana flowing all around them, it seemed so thick out here in space—though he could feel it steadily flowing towards the growing mass of orbs—and he grabbed a stream of it intending to feed it into the ship’s protective shield. But when he searched for the shield he found it difficult to see. Its power was manaless and almost indiscernible until he figured out how to look. But eventually he found it. Their shields were nothing like his Polar’s shield was, not even remotely, but they were made of energy just the same, and so he tried to slip the mana cord inside.
Suddenly everyone was shouting, loud enough that his concentration broke, and he had to let the mana go. The force of the spell’s incompletion threw him to the floor, and he had to grasp his head as the pounding in his skull nearly knocked him out. He threw up, and for a time his vision went completely dark. It came back to him, oddly, in eerie shades of red, and sound returned to him as well.
The captain was yelling at him, and Roberto was yammering on about something urgent too. Only Orli seemed to be concerned about Altin lying on the floor, and she was on her knees beside him, her hands cradling his face.
He blinked up at her, his vision still hazy as he tried to make the red glow that filled his vision go away. It was disconcerting and hardly helped him see. He was only vaguely aware of commotion around him as Orli wiped the bile from his lips gently with her sleeve. “Altin,” she called to him through the blur that filled his brain. “Altin, are you okay?” Her face hovered above him, angelic but nearly lost in the bloated darkness that was barely held back by the blood-red light.
He shook his head, but could not clear the ringing from his ears, and several moments passed before he could focus enough to muster a coherent thought. Finally, raising an arm to indicate he was recovered enough to stand, he drug himself to his feet. A bit ambitious—he nearly fell, and Orli had to catch him and hold him up awhile. It was at least another minute before he could see.
When he could, he looked around the bridge and saw that the three of them were watching him closely, scrutinizing him each in their own way: Orli was clearly concerned for his safety as she propped him up; Roberto was uneasy, his trust threatened, but beginning to relax and prepared to call whatever happened an accident; and the captain, by his posture, by his hand gripped around his red-light weapon and ready to draw, clearly saw Altin as a continued threat.
The captain’s glaring mistrust annoyed Altin to no end. As his thoughts became increasingly clear, he decided he did not like the man at all. The Iris Leopards of String got their name because, according to the stories anyway, they only attack after they see themselves reflected in a victim’s eyes. There had to be something of those leopards in the captain as far as Altin was concerned. Altin had done nothing to earn so little faith.
“Tell them not to yell again,” he said. “They can’t break my focus when I’m casting a spell as complicated as that. There’s no place for the mana to go. They’ll burn me out. It was lucky I’d just begun.”
He could tell that Orli wasn’t sure quite what that meant, but she was quick enough to apprehend the essence of his point.
“I’m sorry. We didn’t know. I was yelling too.” She could feel him standing on his own, and released him to test his strength. He appeared to be okay. “What happened, though? You scared us when it all went dark. You shut down everything on the ship.” His quizzical look prompted her to add, “Or something did. It would be an amazing coincidence if it wasn’t you.”
He had to wait for his head to clear a little more before he could concentrate enough to figure out what went wrong. He frowned and blinked a few more times; he still wasn’t seeing right because the red lighting would not go away. But he forced himself to think the whole cast through, going back through every moment of the cadence bit by bit. As he did, normal light returned. He was glad that the horrible red glow had finally faded from his eyes. It helped him think.
“There we go,” Orli said, sounding calm. The captain snarled something too.
“What did he say?” Altin asked.
She grimaced. “Basically, he’s glad that the power’s back and there was no permanent harm.”
Altin was certain that the captain’s comments had not been so benign, but he knew it was important to figure out what went wrong. “Give me a moment to try to figure it out,” he said. “Let me think.”
He closed his eyes and muttered a few words, playing out into the mana stream again, this time only intending to have a look. With a filament of mana so thin as to hardly be a thread, he tapped the shield around the ship as lightly as one might test a pot handle with a finger to see if it was hot. The gentle probe told him exactly what he needed to know, and he let the spell go only moments after he’d begun. He came out of it as Orli screamed at the captain to “put the laser down,” and as both Roberto and the captain were shouting as loudly as they could. He saw that the lights were flickering back on as well, darkness dissipating the moment he opened his eyes.
Altin turned to regard the captain
and simply shook his head as he saw that the captain’s red-light weapon was leveled at his head. That man was incapable of trust. However, Altin was even more surprised when he turned back to Orli to find that her weapon was drawn as well. It was pointed at the captain’s chest. Altin blanched and let out a muffled grunt. This was an unexpected turn. He needed to end this standoff quickly before it got out of hand.
“Tell him I know what I did wrong.”
She hardly dared to look at him, keeping her eyes on the captain and his raised red-light gun.
“Tell him,” Altin repeated. “Tell him it was an accident, but that I have it figured out. I almost broke your shield. I did not know it was so…,” he cut himself off, unwilling to call it weak. “I did not know it was so delicate. I won’t make that mistake again.”
Orli repeated what he had said. The captain was apparently unwilling to believe.
Roberto said something to the captain then, which the captain countered with whatever he said next.
“Oh for God’s sake, Captain,” Orli nearly spat, “if he wanted to kill us, he would have done it already. How can you possibly be so fucking naïve? Jesus. Just shoot us both and get it over with then.”
Altin decided he might have been a bit quick in assuming Orli had nothing of the hardened warrior in her. It seemed that she was not completely soft and gentle after all.
“Tell him I can do it now,” he said, hoping he still had time to save anyone from being shot. “Although your lamps may flicker once again, I will not put them out.” He realized that their shield was somehow connected to their lamps, and perhaps much of their other “technology” too, and Altin understood what he had done. He’d simply pushed too hard. Their shield was as brittle as an egg shell and had to be treated as such. But he could do it now. “Tell him,” he urged again.
