He finished cleaning his hands and tossed the towel down, giving his hands a moment to dry. The cold air within the plastic bubble felt even colder as he waved his hands to expedite the drying process, though he hadn’t really needed to.
Altin realized he was stalling a little, and stared down into the jar with the three pupae inside. They wriggled like swaddled things. He didn’t have a lot of time to wait. He had to cast the spell before they started to come out, yet just as they were ready to emerge: such were the dictates of the spell and, thereby, the dictate that he do it
now
.
He reached into the jar and took one thumb-sized cocoon out. It might as easily have been a very large grub or a maggot of extraordinary size. He could feel the life inside of it. It made him wonder if he was really redeeming the life he’d taken after all. He would still be down by one. Perhaps Doctor Singh never would have reason to release Altin from his moral pillory.
“Oh my God, go already,” he heard Roberto say. “What’s he waiting for?” It wasn’t a direct link into Altin’s suit speaker, though. Roberto’s impatience was transmitted indirectly through Orli’s helmet feed. She’d been about to ask Altin if everything was okay just when Roberto spoke, giving Altin a glimpse of the tension outside the plastic room. Orli cut off her transmission immediately, leaving Altin in silence again.
He held the cocoon in his fist, firmly but not enough to harm it. “Slowly trickle mana in, shaping it like a heart,” the spell had read, so he turned his hand and pressed his closed fingers against his chest. He closed his eyes once more and reached out for the little plume of mana that drifted like a bit of string caught in an updraft, emerging from the mana cocoon he’d constructed around the heart stone. He took the strand up again and once more attached it to the rest of the mana all around, pulling it through the endlessness that seemed all the mana in the universe. He pulled it back out again, as if threading an eternal needle. He pushed it through his hand and wound it around the wriggling object that he held.
He poked the strand into the very center of the creature, the life that was seeking to be reborn, and he prodded with it until he found the creature’s little spark of light, the singular pink dot of the mana that animated it. Altin attached his thin filament to that.
The chrysalis popped in his hand. He could feel it, the damp of its innards there.
He had the presence of mind to catch the wisp of mana before it unraveled back and slipped beneath the surface of the crystal stones, if barely before. He locked it into place again, leaving it to dangle its length into nothingness like a lone wisp of hair. He opened his eyes and unfurled his fist. He saw the broken chrysalis lying there, gooey and unfortunate.
“What happened?” Orli asked.
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I think I put in too much mana.” He picked up the towel and wiped off his hand, pulling off his ring to clean inside and out. The green marble of the Father’s Gift that Blue Fire had given him was buried within the thick silver block. The ring was a crude piece of jewelry made by Altin’s own hand, but the stone pulsed steadily, visible only on that underside. It was beautiful. And powerful. He wondered if the phrase “slowly trickle mana in” written into the spell meant more slowly than what he’d done with it. He’d gone very slowly. As slowly as he could. But he thought that perhaps the ring made it too fast. The stone did change the nature of mana significantly, and surely the wizards who had designed the spell hadn’t been channeling mana with Hostile heart stone. Perhaps the timing had simply been off. Spells cast over long durations had that kind of temperament, so to speak, and if there was a downside to the stone, that might be it. Usually it was healers, not transmuters, who complained of such things the most, of overchanneling and impatience with patient spells. Still, he supposed he was healing in his way, even with this transmute, so he decided to give it another try. This time he would do it without the ring. Perhaps all he needed was to get the timing right.
He placed his ring atop the towel on the ground and took the second of the three wriggling cocoons out of the jar. With it gripped in his fist as he had the last, he once more reached out into the mana stream. It had been some time since he’d seen the mana this way, the thick, smashing swells of it churning in whorls of pinks and purples, sometimes so dark they were nearly black. It moved in eddies and curling licks like splashing waves and tongues of flame, yet even in doing so it moved like syrup on a cold plate. Compared to the unchanging pink mist, it seemed something else entirely when he looked into it this way.
Nonetheless, this was how the spell authors had seen it when they’d first cast the spell, and Altin was confident that he could channel the mana in its thick and slow-moving ways precisely as it was written in the spell. So he did so, and once again reached out for the tiny wisp of mana that he’d left attached to the surface of the joint he was trying to make.
But now it was no longer a tiny wisp. It was a massive thing, huge, as big around as a Palace tower. It was colossal, and it waggled about in a massive space within the mana stream like the decapitated body of a serpent grown to titan size. It nearly startled him to see how much perspective had changed. He might have laughed were the situation not so delicate. Surely that “strand” was not quite what the spell designers had in mind either. Still, he felt it might work best for the merging of the heart stone to have it that way, usable in its magnificent size, but he understood now why the chrysalis had been destroyed. It wasn’t even that he’d delivered too much mana, so much as that he’d delivered the correct amount too fast. Apparently, “slowly” meant
really
slow.
He began the words that the spell had put down for those who channeled mana naturally, slow casters like Altin had used to be, like he forced himself to be now. He took the end of that mighty mana stump and carefully whittled it down to size. Without the ring, it was the work of some time to shape it down to a point, shaving away mana as if he were sharpening some giant wooden stake.
At last he had it reduced to a thin thread, a thread so small that he wondered if he could even see it while he wore the ring. Nonetheless, he gathered it up and once more fed it into the new chrysalis that he held. Again he reached into the wriggling thing, probing and seeking the point of its tiny mana core. The little speck of mana he’d seen in the previous pupa blazed in this one like a great bonfire in the magic eyes of Altin in his ringless state. He nearly lost his concentration for seeing it, and he regarded the conflagration of pink and purple roiling in the tiny creature’s mind—its soul perhaps—with awe. He marveled at it for a time, marveled at the brilliance of the spell itself, but he caught himself and stuck to the task at hand.
He said the words and thought the thoughts of joining and becoming something new, of being one thing and then another in a sequence insistent and orderly. The transformative thoughts came clearly as each phrase of the spell argued for the certainty of a change, each word guiding the images in his mind, the concepts and very visceral understandings of what it was he sought to make the gap become: one. In time, much time, he finally had it; the nature of the clay became the nature of the crystal, which became the nature of the heart stone. One thing must become another, which becomes another yet again. He could see it, even feel it in his chest, sensing what it was to be that thing, to be that physicality, each phase of it he understood perfectly. And so, with no hesitation, with certainty born of the recognition that it must be now, he thrust his hand forward, a punching motion with his hand, opening it as he thrust, palm out. He mashed the chrysalis against the center of the heart stone. “
Ca’ana Feen stora moore
,” he shouted in the ancient tongue, and then his eyes flew open, and he stared at what he’d done.
For a moment he couldn’t see anything; the spotlights and even the glow from Yellow Fire’s pulsing heart seemed blinding to him. But he squinted and leaned forward, peering into the shadowy cracks around the violet light. The red-brown clay he’d brushed on was turning black, black like engasta syrup tiles, absolute black. It seemed to fall away, like the center of a square of wax being melted from underneath. It melted into the crack all the way around, and little wisps of smoke came out in places, emitting a noxious smell. There was a faint hissing for a time, and then nothing for several minutes more.
Then, simply, nothing.
He waited. Those standing outside the swollen arc of the pressurized plastic bubble waited. If they were speaking amongst one another, Altin hardly knew. He craned his neck forward, tilted his head, pressed his ear against the rock. He listened. Nothing.
He sniffed around the edge for a time. The noxious odor was gone. Sucked up into the evacuation vent that was filtering everything in this frigid little room.
It occurred to him that maybe the cold temperature wasn’t good for the process at this point.
“I need to get out of here,” he said. “We need to take this chamber down. It is usually hot down here. Some of the gases in the air are different. I think it should be that now.”
After reclaiming his ring, he pulled his gloves on and reset the seal. He snapped his helmet back in place as well. All the lights were green on the panel on his left arm. “Okay, take it down,” he said.
“Come here first,” Orli said over the com. “Let me check your suit.”
He would have argued, but knew it would be faster to comply. He’d put this suit on enough times over the last year to be quite capable of doing it properly by now.
“Turn around,” she ordered, and he went through the ritual she always put him through. When he was done, and she was, she said, “Okay, drop it, Rabin.”
The grad student drew down the pressure in the bubble, enough that it could be unsealed from the rock face, and soon after, Altin was standing beside the rest, waiting anxiously as Rabin and his twin brother detached the rest of the bubble and rolled it up and out of the way.
Orli and Professor Bryant were the first to be peering point-blank down at Altin’s work.
“Don’t touch it,” the professor and Altin said simultaneously as Orli began to reach toward the heart stone.
The professor straightened after a few moments of looking at it, and pulled out the blocky device he’d used to take readings from it on his first day at Yellow Fire’s original home, the device Altin knew emitted the green light beams.
“Stop,” Altin said. “I think it best if you not bombard it with anything at all. Not now.” He couldn’t help but glance around at all the small crates of explosives lying around the edges of the regrown area; the fleet had already insisted on enough potential bombardment as it was. Poor Yellow Fire’s life, if he got one, was going to be lived under the specter of death for a while. Altin hated that it was so, but understood why the explosives and detonation apparatus had to be there. At least for a while.
“This won’t do anything to it,” the professor said. “We’ve been taking readings off these things since we got here.”
“They weren’t infused with tissue-thin mana before,” Altin said. “I have no idea how your device works, but I should think if my channeling mana makes your equipment do strange things, then it is likely your equipment might make my channeled mana do strange things too, especially in a procedure as delicate as this. Given what’s at stake here, I think patience is called for.”
“He’s right,” Orli said. “Put it away, Professor. Please. You’ve done amazing work here. The team has. But it’s time to let the stuff we don’t understand run its course.”
The professor looked like he wanted to protest, but then the lines that were forming upon his brow suddenly reversed themselves. “You’ve probably got a point,” he said. “But we’re sure going to lose a lot of data about what’s happening, especially if it works.”
“As a man of science, you of all people know how observation can alter things,” Orli said.
“I do,” he said. “Which means there’s nothing left to do but have a drink and celebrate what I’m sure will be our incredible scientific victory.”
“I don’t know,” said Rabin as he came to stand next to Professor Bryant and Doctor Singh. He stared like the rest of them down at the work that Altin had just done. It didn’t look any different than it had before. “What we did is cool and all, but it seems like maybe we should pray.”
“Pray?” Altin asked. He could see the deep and gentle way that the young man was gazing down at Yellow Fire’s heart.
“Yes,” the grad student replied. “We should ask God to help Yellow Fire find his way back. Maybe even ask Him to forgive Red Fire for what he had done, for his sins, you know? We could ask for Yellow Fire’s sins too. I mean, we don’t really know who he was before. Not that it matters. We should ask for all of us really, for what we might be doing now, meddling.” He paused, and looked around, watching them all stare at him as he somewhat lost track of what he was trying to say. He resigned himself to concluding, simply, “It can’t hurt. A little humility is all. And what can it hurt to ask?”
“Nothing,” said Doctor Singh.
When they began, even Altin bowed his head.
Chapter 42
S
ocial stratification is a constant in the nature of human societies, and it is in the seams between those divisions that the criminally inclined find leverage. Location and patience are all that is required, and a carefully placed strategy can break apart any structure with a very small amount of effort. When water freezes in the tiny cracks of a castle, it can, with time, crumble the mighty thing. Black Sander knew it would be the case as much on Earth as it was on Prosperion.