“Yes, Your Majesty. There was one more. He also insisted that we do nothing without your consent.”
“That is correct. And, my dear, your plan needs a lot more … massaging, before I will consider it.” She shot a glance at Altin that suggested his suspicions about her motives might be right. “I will, however, grant you permission to attempt to convince me again when you have put a little more work into the idea, something besides the great bleeding of that kind heart of yours, Miss Pewter. I think you ought to do a good deal more looking into what it is you plan to do. You say you want to bring Yellow Fire back to life, but do you even know if the host world, the Hostile you called Red Fire, is truly dead? You say that Yellow Fire has merely been dormant for a million years, that Blue Fire’s mate was just sleeping after some sunny accident rather than truly dead. And if we suppose it to be so, then what’s to say that Red Fire hasn’t simply been dormant these last five months since you say you blew him up? What evidence do you have that your explosives worked? Or, for that matter, that any of what you plan to do next will work as well?”
Altin started to answer for Orli, his mouth opening reflexively, but he shut it without speaking. He had no way to confirm that the Hostile world known as Red Fire, the world responsible for over a million human deaths, was truly dead. The orbs attacking planet Earth had all stopped moving, their angry red colors turned to ashen gray. That had seemed like evidence enough, but perhaps it was merely circumstantial at best.
“Yes,” said the Queen, seeing the same expression on both faces before her. “You don’t know a great deal. And while my gratitude to Blue Fire is as vast as the galaxy itself, I think the two of you ought to go gather the facts before you press me for my permission on such a poorly planned and poorly researched epic undertaking. Make sure it’s dead, Sir Altin. With absolute certainty. As the Galactic Mage, that is most assuredly your jurisdiction. And find out if the yellow one is actually still alive. I hardly think it befits my position to endorse an idea that is barely half-baked, wouldn’t you agree?” Again came the cunning look, flitting as it did like a flung dart meant for Altin alone, the faintest narrowing of the royal eyes. She smiled, barely perceptibly, and the light coming through the stained glass windows high above glinted beneath those lowered eyelids.
Orli started to say something, but stopped. Altin was glad of that. Clearly she realized they’d just gotten Her Majesty to move from absolute “no” to something approaching a maybe.
“You are, as always, quite right, My Queen,” he said. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”
“Oh, stop it,” the War Queen said. “You and I both know those words taste like bile upon your tongue. If I truly wanted another Vorvington, I’d simply get myself one. Miss Pewter, what is it your people call that duplication process I’ve been reading about? Was it
cloaking?
That can’t be right?”
“Cloning, Your Majesty,” said Orli with the first vestiges of a smile.
“Ah, yes, that was it. Cloning. I believe I would rather have the NTA scientists whip me up a whole batch of fat Vorvingtons than see you turned to another fawning courtier, Sir Altin. Gods know I’ve more than enough backstabbing and arse kissing as it is.”
Altin grinned, but he kept the tilt of his head forward, slightly submissive all the same. “Of course, My Queen.”
She laughed again. A great merry laugh that filled up the gilded hall to its gold-encrusted rafters. The bonds of tension that bound the courtiers burst at once, and they all laughed with her, some nervously, some simply out of joy that they’d not been struck by the flung scepter of royal outrage today. To be included in a mild insult was, by comparison, a great relief.
The Queen, when her fit of humor had passed, looked back at the two of them standing there and smiled. Her gaze passed from one to the next, then back again. Finally, it settled on Sir Altin. The smile faded to absolute seriousness. “You play the game well, Sir Altin. And if you’re smart about it, everybody wins.
Every
body.” The smile returned as she waved them away with the royal scepter. “Now be off with you. Both of you. I’ll hear not another word of this until you have something I can consider, something that won’t make me look the fool in the eyes of posterity.”
“We will, Your Majesty. And thank you.” He bowed. Orli curtsied, and the two of them backed properly away. Altin kept his grin in check until they were well beyond the Palace gates. They hadn’t quite gotten what they’d come for, certainly not what Orli had had in mind, but they’d gotten more than he’d actually expected that they would. Which was a start. Maybe there was hope for Blue Fire after all.
Chapter 4
T
he elves dashed off into the woods again, gone just as fast as fast could be. Little Pernie stood watching the last waggle of a young rubber tree as the motion of Seawind’s passing settled back to stillness again. This was her third day doing this, and she was convinced now that he did that purely for her benefit. She’d seen him move enough over these last few days to know he didn’t have to touch that tree if he didn’t want to. Yesterday hadn’t gone any better than the first day in terms of catching them, but she was determined to do it somehow. She thought perhaps it was those little things, those signs of dancing rubber trees, that she was supposed to look for to keep up. So, with a determined sigh, she set off at a run again.
She ran past the rubber tree and through the dense underbrush for a time. She came across an animal trail and stopped, looking about for some sign, something else to track them by. There was nothing.
She listened for silence in some direction, any direction, hoping for a cessation of the cacophonous screeching and squawking and howling and whistling along some sliver of the jungle somewhere. Maybe the creatures of the jungle could help her find which way the elves had gone.
They did not.
She ran on. She ran down the animal trail for so long she finally had to stop and catch her breath. She did so, and began running yet again. She came to a stream again, perhaps the same one she’d first encountered the other day, perhaps a new one. She had no way to know. She stopped and got herself a drink. She looked around. The sweat sticking her silky elven tunic to her body annoyed her. She looked all around yet again, but still there were no signs of them. She thought about running on again, even did so for a dozen steps or so, but soon realized that seemed pointless too. She might be going the wrong way as easily as the right.
Still panting, she stopped and looked up into the canopy high above. Maybe she could spot them from up there. Casting her gaze around, squinting through the green ubiquity, she found a thick kapok tree covered with climbing vines. She went to it and set to climbing it herself.
A practiced climber, she made quick progress, and soon found herself a hundred spans above the jungle floor. She took a thick vine in her hand to secure herself, and peered around to see what she could see. It looked nearly the same from up here as it did from below. Green. There were, here and there, small clearings that she could look across, but no movement at all. She supposed the creatures of the jungle didn’t survive for very long making it so easy for predators as that. Especially the elves.
She thought it might be funny to make them come up here and find her instead of her running after them again. So she climbed another twenty spans up and found a comfortable place in the boughs where she could rest and watch.
She lay up there for some time, silently gloating over her own cleverness, when a wave of noise came at her from far off to the right.
She rolled onto her stomach and peered through the leaves, the line of her sight just below the lowest level of the canopy, like looking along the bottom of a great green cloud. Something was coming. Lots of somethings. Great dark things with legs like spiders, only directed upwards rather than down, reaching into the cloud. They came in a flurry of falling leaves and shrieking racket, at least forty of them all roughly in a row, a pack of them, or a herd, or whatever such things comprised.
Her first thought was to climb down before they got to her, but a glance below reminded her just how high up she was. She’d be several minutes exposed trying to shimmy down all that.
She considered climbing higher into the canopy, but the sight of those creatures frightened her. What if there were others hidden in the sea of leaves? Her fingers spidered down her side to where her little knife had always been, the little knife she’d had for many years—the one the elves had taken along with her sling and the miner’s pick she’d gotten from Master Spadebreaker when he died. All she had left to her was to hide.
She crushed herself into the leafy vines around the tree trunk as best she could, wriggling under them like she might a thick blanket on a cold winter’s night. She thought the noise she made was awful as she did it. The piercing shrieks of the creatures swinging toward her grew louder and louder with each passing heartbeat.
Soon the racket was nearly deafening as they approached. They came all together like the first winds of a terrible hurricane. She peered out from her hideaway and watched them as they went by, the leading edge of the storm passing on both sides.
They were great hairy things, and what she’d mistaken for spider’s legs were arms. Lots of arms. At least six that she could count on each creature, thrusting out from oblong bodies that from one end sprouted long tails of pale, smooth flesh like rats and from the other, hairy-faced heads with faces that were frighteningly like those of men. They reminded her of the apes that the carnival men from Murdoc Bay brought when they came to Leekant during the Harvest Festival holiday, but only in the vaguest sort of way.
The whole group of them swung past her hiding place at marvelous velocity, their many arms reaching up into the leaves to clutch branches with absolutely surety. Occasionally, one or another of them would suddenly seem as if it were falling. It would start to plunge toward the ground, and for the first few instances of it, Pernie had watched in expectation of a mighty splat. But none of the creatures fell. They gripped vines in one or two of their hands, and they held them confidently as they fell, the vines falling with them, limply at first, but soon enough they went taut. In that instant the creatures would swing forward in long and graceful sweeps, sometimes so close to the ground that the bulging curves of their undersides—or perhaps what served as their backs, though Pernie could not be sure—would brush the tips of the low brambles before they were once again slung upwards toward the canopy. In these moments, these great swinging arcs, the creatures on the vines would get out way ahead of their companions, shrieking and raising a racket that made Pernie cringe. But then, as the rapturous noise had barely just begun, another of the many-handed apes would suddenly be plummeting toward the ground. Soon after, that one was way out in front, screeching its supremacy back to the rest. Pernie was sure it was a game.
The whole of their passing came and went in less than a minute. They swept in, swept past, and swept out of sight again, the storm gone and only the diminishing racket of their cries marking that they’d ever been by at all.
Pernie shook a little with fright at first, but she recovered most excitedly. She’d never seen such things before. Great Forest was home to nothing so wondrous as that, at least not that she’d ever seen. And as she thought about what she saw, she realized too that they might have just shown her the way. She couldn’t run with the elves very well, but perhaps she could keep up with them like that. By swinging from the trees.
She pressed her lips together firmly, determined, as she stared up into the shadows of the canopy. It was so thick above her that she couldn’t see the sky, not even a patch of it. She knew there would be creatures in there for sure. She’d been listening to them for days. If she only had her knife!
But she didn’t have it. And she did want to learn how to not be afraid of an orc.
She supposed learning that might start with not being afraid of whatever lived up in those trees. It surely couldn’t be any worse than those bugs with all their legs and waggling eyes, much less that pack of two-legged dragons with the stubby wings and giant, gnashing teeth. And besides, swinging from those vines looked like fun.
She climbed a little farther up into the canopy and found a long limb extending far out from the trunk. It made something of a tier in the canopy, and she found she could run right down it for over sixty spans. Other limbs from other trees crisscrossed it as she went along. She hopped over some and ducked under others, never losing any speed.
Soon the limb became too thin, barely as wide as her hand across, and it wouldn’t be much farther before it began to bow beneath her weight. It grew increasingly springy the farther down it she ran, and there were more and more forks in it, each of them sprouting tufts of leaves that tangled up with the tufts from other trees. Still, she could get good lift from it, so, spotting another branch that looked promising, she took the last few running steps and then bounced, riding the flex of the branch down and letting the rebound launch her into the air. She flew to the next branch and landed easily, just as nimble as a chipmunk—not so unlike her play back home in Great Forest used to be.
She trotted along the new limb, looking around for one of the thick vines she’d seen the six-armed apes swing from. Soon enough she spotted one and made her way to it, straight as an arrow shot.