“Because of how pretty they are?”
“Yes. Because of that. As I said, you will see. And if you are weak like I was, you will carry the heart wound with you always, as I do, like a scar in your heart’s memory. But the heart heals over, and you will be stronger for it in the end. It doesn’t happen a second time.” She looked off into the distant space of memory for a moment, and when she spoke again, her tone was tutorial again. “But only if you pass your test.”
“The test of seeing an elf woman or of killing the orc?”
Djoveeve’s brow wrinkled a little, only for an instant, before she nodded. “Yes. Most of that, anyway.”
Pernie couldn’t decide if she wanted to see a woman so beautiful she’d have a wounded heart, but she supposed Seawind could cure anything. And what could be worse than a giant manatee horn through the guts anyway? She did, however, dread that rotten orc.
Chapter 40
B
lack Sander sat upon the wide lip of a clay jar as if it were a stool. He stared across the pale yellow gloom at his three companions, two men he’d hired for muscle and the teleporter, who still trembled as much as he had at the candle shop before making the teleports. His companions sat, as he did, atop their own clay jars, and at their feet were four more small jars, one filled with almonds and the other three with water, each corked tight. The only light came from the cap of a yellow mushroom, which one of the thugs held in his lap as dearly as a child might a favorite bedtime toy. The man’s fingers twitched as he held it, the tips of them caressing its glowing flesh in a searching sort of way, as if he were certain that at any moment it might disappear.
“You’re going to break it apart if you keep fiddling with it,” Black Sander said in a voice so low it was barely a hiss. The man started at the sound, his eyes wide and the whites jaundiced by the mushroom’s light. He followed the direction of Black Sander’s gaze to the cap in his lap, and jerked his hands away as if it might bite him.
“Don’t like it in here,” he muttered back. “It’s too dark and too tight. I can’t hardly breathe.”
“You’ll breathe just fine if you stop thinking about it,” Black Sander hissed back. “Just relax. We’ll be there soon enough.” He turned to the man to his left, and watched the sand in the hourglass run out. He waited for the man to turn it over, which he did immediately.
The brawny fellow saw Black Sander looking at him, and gave a grim nod. “Twenty-six,” he mouthed silently.
Black Sander lifted his wide-brimmed hat and pushed his long, agile fingers through the dark hair beneath, nodding back at the man. He would have liked to have stood and stretched, but there was no room for it. The small space, a square cube made of taut canvas stretched over a wooden frame, would not accommodate such a thing. It was even worse now than it should have been; the unexpected near collapse of one corner of their little hiding place had reduced their headroom substantially on one side. Someone on the outside had thrown in additional weight, and a knot in one of the four main poles had proven a nearly fatal flaw for the plan. Were it not for the quick reflexes of the man now holding the hourglass, they might all be sitting in a Crown City jail.
But he’d caught the drooping canvas and held up that side of their tiny room, all upon his back, his legs trembling and his arms braced against his knees as he held up the weight of well over thirty stone in Goblin Tea beans. They’d had to scramble to aid him, Black Sander and the claustrophobic lad, but they’d strapped a pair of daggers in place with two belts and somewhat splinted up the pole. It still drooped, and they all knew it might give at any moment, but at this point in the plan, they had no other choice but to trust to chance.
The man with the mushroom got up and went to a length of bamboo sticking through a hole in the side of the canvas wall. It had a small bellows-like device affixed to it near its end. He wrapped his lips around the opening and pumped the bellows hungrily, sucking in the air it brought from outside the crate they were hiding in.
“Sit down, you fool. They’ll hear you panting like a damn dog. There’s plenty of air in here.”
He did as instructed, but he mumbled, “I can’t breathe.”
“Calm yourself. We’ll be off the ship at any moment now.”
The man slumped back on his clay pot, too late to prevent the aroma of urine from mixing and even overwhelming even the mask of the Goblin Tea for a time.
Another two turns of the hourglass passed after that, but at length, and such a length that even Black Sander began to grow anxious, there were sounds from outside their confinement again. Faint sounds, dull and muffled, but clearly something was finally happening. He glanced to the teleporter sitting there, the man having not uttered one word since they’d left, and gave him a look that promised death to him, his wife, and his unborn baby if he uttered so much as one magical word. The man nodded that he understood.
The crate jolted a moment after, and Black Sander quickly yanked off the bellows from the tube and slid a long wooden dowel through it, stopping where a mark on the dowel lined up with the tube opening. The hole was now plugged up tight.
The crate rocked several more times, then settled. He could make out the faintest hum of voices, but there was far too much wood crate and Goblin Tea in between for him to make out what was being said.
They all tipped at a shallow angle then as someone outside moved the crate. The man with the mushroom looked as if he might cry out. The fellow with the hourglass set it down and slapped a hand over the mushroom bearer’s mouth.
Black Sander smiled as their tiny apartment leveled out again, and for some time there was no movement again, or at least none they could detect. The crate jolted once again, then all was silent. No one said a word. After a time, there came another jolt, as if something had been slammed up against the side of the crate. Then silence followed yet again. This sequence repeated eight more times, and after the last, a new type of rumble commenced. They were all jolted once more, this time in a distinctly directional sort of way, as if a wagoner had just whipped a team of draft horses into motion.
They bounced along long enough for half the sand in the hourglass to fall, and once more came to rest. A few more jolts and jostles, more mumbling from outside, and finally all was silent again. Silent for long enough that Black Sander decided it must be time.
“You ready?” he said to the man whose composure had been so admirable all along.
“I am.”
“All of you get up and come over here,” he said. “Get in close.”
When they had, when they were all stuffed into the corner of the little canvas box, Black Sander drew a dagger from his boot, leaned across the small space, and cut through the canvas where it began to droop near the broken part of the frame. The pitch-black beans of the Goblin Tea began to pour in like mud.
The man with the mushroom actually made a whimpering sound, and Black Sander had to suppress the urge to cut his belly open just like the canvas so they could all watch his frightened guts pour out.
With his foot, Black Sander pushed the heaping beans into the far corner as best he could. Confident with the process, he cut the gash a bit longer still. He made another long cut along the bottom of one canvas wall, near where they all stood, cutting the long, angular gash nearly to the height of their knees.“Give it a push up,” he told the timekeeper.
The man did as told, pressing into the tarp between the crossed wooden braces and causing the beans to pour in more forcefully.
“Can you feel the top?” Black Sander asked.
“Not yet,” the man replied.
It was the matter of some long and admittedly nervous minutes, letting more beans in, letting them pile up beneath their feet, until at last the man found the top of the crate. They let out a collective breath of relief, the man with the glowing mushroom most of all.
Black Sander cut away the remaining tarp above them, and with some cringe-inducing volume, they were able to pound the crate open from within. They were immediately met with a rush of chill alien air, air cooled by the electricity-powered machines of planet Earth. In minutes, they had the rest of his crew out from the other crates; all twelve men had made it without a hitch. After so many months of trying, he had finally arrived.
Chapter 41
A
ltin placed his hands on the new crystals that the professor and his team had grown. It was the first time he’d felt them without the mediating layer of a spacesuit glove. His breath blew in foggy plumes, giving him the aspect of a sea dragon blowing steam. The clouds of each breath played amongst the gray formations of the crystals like clouds around miniature mountaintops. He looked to his left, through the clear plastic sheet of the atmospheric tent that separated him from the rest of the team. Orli stood centermost amongst them, her spacesuit helmet’s spotlight glaring in at him along with all the rest, the combination of them making it so that he couldn’t see her face. He knew she’d be chewing on her bottom lip, though, like she often did when she was nervous. He made a point of smiling and gave the thumbs-up gesture that the Earth people often used.
The new crystals were just as Professor Bryant had said they would be, exactly like the rest of them had been when they first arrived. They were a little smaller on average, but otherwise they seemed no different, and the professor had assured him they would grow a bit more in time. Altin hoped it wouldn’t make a difference for what he had to do.
He scooted to his left a little and got down on his knees, peering as he did into the prickly-seeming expanse of dull crystal where it butted up against the pulsing purple mass that was Yellow Fire’s crystalline heart. The science team had done their part, and now it was time for Altin to finish off the work.
He leaned forward and had to stare very closely to find the hair-thin line that traced the edge of the new-growth crystals, the tiny line of separation between the transplanted heart and the “regrown skin,” as the professor had been calling it. He placed his hand over the crack, his right hand, upon which he wore his ring. The silver touched the tip of a crystal with a
clink
. He let go another long, foggy breath and opened his mind to the mana, the calm endlessness of its pink eternity. He swept at it with his thoughts, as if waving away a breath of smoke, and in this way he wafted it into the crack between the heart stone and the newly formed heart chamber “skin.” He spoke the words of the spell he’d learned from Aderbury’s book, forcing himself to cast the magic slowly, meticulously. There was so much at stake. He let himself lean on the rhythms of the spell, since it was so new to him, and soon enough by his measure of it—though a matter of nearly an hour to those observing from outside—he’d traced the gap all around the heart stone. He filled it all with the gentle mist of mana, shaping the surface of the heart stone as he saw it in his mind.
When the mana was all wrapped around and the gap was full, he spoke the words that anchored the transmutation spell in place, the first portion of it anyway, and then opened his eyes, staring down at what he had done. So far there was nothing to see. Just a hairline crack that was nearly impossible to locate with the naked eye.
“Well,” Professor Bryant asked, “did it work?”
“He still has to do the other half,” Orli snapped. “Be silent. Don’t you listen?”
Altin couldn’t help the smile that came upon his face.
Be silent
. She sounded like the Queen. But she was right, and he needed to stay focused on the spell.
He turned to his right to reach for reagents, a simple task made still difficult by the heavy spacesuit he wore, despite having the helmet and gloves pulled off. The environmental bubble they’d made for him around the heart stone was perfectly functional, but nobody on the team would let him take any more chances than that, just the helmet and the gloves.
Beside him were two jars. One was filled with soft clay taken from the bed of a hot spring north of Hast, and the other held three cocoons containing the pupae of the rare Endoru moth, found in the northwestern parts of Great Forest, where the gulf breezes cooled the trees and prevented frost come wintertime.
First he applied the clay, smearing it into the crack with his fingertips as best he could, then evening it out with a small brush made of artificial fibers, something manufactured on Earth that was much softer than horsehair.
He worked carefully, brushing the clay evenly so that no gaps or holes were in it. The spell instructions had been clear on that. There must be no part uncovered. He pulled a magnifying glass out of his belt and carefully examined the work all around. There was one tiny gap, barely a pinhole, that had opened up where the clay had been brushed too thin. He was glad he’d had the discipline to check. He only got one chance at this, and if he failed, both the heart stone and the crystal for several spans around would crumble and turn to dust. This was an all-or-nothing spell. Quite terrifying.
He brushed more clay into the crack, carefully blending it with the rest so that it was all even and smooth again. To be sure—that pinhole having made him nervous—he went around the whole thing again, adding just a little more. It was good. The work was patient and thorough.
He put the brush down and wiped off his hands with a chemical-coated towel that Doctor Singh had handed him before he’d been zipped into the atmosphere bubble. The doctor had not looked him in the eyes. He wouldn’t anymore, not after, as he saw it, Altin’s cold-blooded murder of Thadius Thoroughgood. Altin wondered if the doctor would ever understand. If he would ever forgive him. He wondered if maybe this time, this spell would be enough, the two of them working together with the rest to bring another life back from death. Surely that would be redemption, wouldn’t it?