It blinked away, and once again she started to fall, but she was halfway through the spell when it vanished from beneath her, so she caught it before she’d fallen far enough to even get her toes wet. She appeared on its back again, and this time she stomped on the butt of her spear as it was gathering mana again. It let go a loud huff that sprayed water in great clouds of mist, white sheets that blew back and soaked her from head to toe. It tried to escape again, twice more, and both times Pernie stomped on the spear and stole its focus away.
Then it dove.
It was only then that Pernie realized that she was now well over a hundred spans from the beach, and the seabed now dropped precipitously away.
With a few powerful strokes of its wide, flat-finned tail, the sargosagantis was streaking like an arrow shot for the depths.
The force of the water rushing up at her swept Pernie right off its back, but she muttered the words even with a mouthful of water and teleported back to her spear, gripping it for all her worth as the monster sped into the darkening water at unfathomable speed. It was all she could do to hang on, flapping in the wake of its dive like a little human flag.
But she wasn’t going to let go.
She pushed her mind into the mana and strove to find the manatee’s will, its conscious thoughts and its mind. She just knew it had one. It had to be at least as smart as Knot.
She found it. She found fear and something that, in a greater intellect, might have evolved into hate. But it simply ran, and as with Knot, the only sense she got of its thoughts could be translated to an essential negative. It simply told her
no
.
Her ears were in agony as she was struck by the absolute intractability of that mind, the massiveness of its negativity, its conviction to run to the bottom of the sea. Then it blinked away from her in the moments that she’d forgotten to watch.
The air in her lungs began to burn, and she had to think twice about whether she should blink after it again with another teleport, but it was already nearly vanishing into the dark water below. It blinked a second time and was but a tiny bluish spot.
She felt herself making a gulping sound in her throat and chest. It felt as if someone had buried coals in there. She thought her ears might burst, they hurt so bad.
She looked up toward the surface and saw that it was very far away, the sun wearing a hazy blue veil. That was something of a surprise. She began to swim for the surface, stroking upwards with her hands.
Again came the spasm in her chest and throat. It occurred to her that she might not have enough air to make it up that far.
She mouthed the words of a teleport, expelling the last of the oxygen in her lungs. The sun still looked very blue up there when she reappeared. She kicked with her feet, wishing she could be rid of the boots she wore, now heavy and water soaked. She pulled with wide sweeps of her hands.
She tried another teleport, though she could only mouth the words.
Again her lungs convulsed. And a second time. She had to take a breath. She tried to pull upwards with her arms, but they wouldn’t move anymore, had become things of inert lead.
She really, really wanted to breathe.
Another convulsion. She had to breathe. She had to.
She looked up, saw that she had started to sink again. Everything in her mind told her not to breathe. Something in her heart told her that it would be okay. And besides, her body was starting to feel as if it burned.
She looked up, thought about … nothing. There was nothing she could do. So, with one last convulsion, she resigned herself to it. It hurt too bad not to. So she took a breath. The water burned like acid in her lungs. They hurt worse than the rest of her. But only for a while.
She watched with an odd curiosity as the sun began to blue again, the white wriggling of the surface growing darker and dimmer as she sank. She even, absently, wondered if she’d see the manatee again. But she never did.
Chapter 45
A
ltin looked up into the bright sun, now high above him. It was a hot day for this early in the year, and he wiped the sweat from his brow with a sleeve as he contemplated how tired he was. He could hardly believe how complicated the spell was for making engasta syrup, and even with the added benefit of his ring, it was still the labor of several hours to move all the components into place and transform them, merely to make one single tile of the stuff, just one, not even a half-span’s length on a side and less than a half a hand thick. While intellectually he’d understood the process to be laborious and expensive, it wasn’t until his third day working to build his own private platform that he began to fully understand why this particular activity had gotten the Transmuters Guild guildmaster elevated to the rank of second on the TGS council in recent months. If Altin found toting around heaps and heaps of stone, barrels of pitch, and wheelbarrows full of wisteria and blackroot, along with thirteen types of clay—one of which happened to be the very same as that which he had used to merge the crystals around Yellow Fire’s heart back on Red Fire—then he could hardly fathom what building enormous platforms in space must be like. And that was just the labor. The cost was frightening. A primary constituent was tar wood, which was absurdly expensive, and he’d had to bribe three people to get it, despite being the Galactic Mage and ostensibly—if not actually—working on the Queen’s behalf when requesting it. Yes, the desire to have a platform at Calico Castle was turning out to be a much larger project than he’d anticipated. It did, however, keep him near home while working on it, which made Orli and Kettle happy.
Kettle was just coming around the corner of the castle with a tray of mint tea as Orli dumped another load of roots at the base of the stone heap, which Altin had just meticulously stacked, as dictated by the spell. She too was covered with a film of sweat and dust, and the two of them plopped down atop the newly made stack of stone and watched Kettle’s approach eagerly.
“I thought the both of ya could stand fer a draught,” the woman said as she strode through the knee-high grass, a trail of flour dust blowing out behind her like smoke in the light breeze.
“Well, your timing couldn’t be better,” Orli said. “It’s warming up fast today.”
“Aye, it is. And a fine day it would ha’ been were it not what it is, what it’s about ta be.”
Altin looked around and thought it a fine day altogether, if warm for heavy work. “Well, what’s wrong with it?” he asked as he took a tall wooden mug filled to the brim with tea and chips of ice.
Kettle looked to Orli, who nodded, her cheerful expression dimming momentarily.
Altin saw the exchange between the two women and, glancing from one to the next, asked his question again. “What’s wrong with today? And what does ‘what it’s about to be’ mean? What am I missing?” He gestured back and forth between them with his hand.
“They’re all the same, aren’t they, dear,” Kettle said, her words directed at Orli in a way that made it seem as if Altin weren’t standing right there. “’Tis all the work and the duty, and ne’er a thought fer the livin’ bein’ done all ’round theirselves.”
Again Orli nodded and seemed perfectly aligned with whatever the mystery was.
“Oh for the pearls of String, what is it?” Altin asked. “Out with it, already!”
Kettle looked shocked that he’d said it, and Orli just shook her head. It was as if he’d said the most offensive thing.
“Pearls a’ String is the right of it,” Kettle said. “My little pearl is there on String. And do ya know what tomorrow is? Tomorrow is the day they stole her from me. The same day the two a’ ya were ta wed. And while there’s still something fer the wedding, there’s naught fer my wee girl. Yet here ya are, buildin’ yer fancy spaceship box, and not a thought a’ poor Pernie gone a whole year away.”
Altin resisted the urge to point out that they had already been over that topic what must have been a thousand times. Instead he looked to Orli, thinking she might understand. Pernie was fine. He was sure of it. If anything had happened to her, they would have gotten word. He’d even cast a divining spell to check on her a few months back, just to calm Kettle down. The indications were certain that Pernie was alive and, at least at the time, feeling fine. Orli’s expression didn’t exactly gush sympathy.
He gulped down the rest of the tea and put it back on the tray. “Thank you for the tea,” he said, then returned to his work. With rather more violence than he had before, he once again began mixing the various types of clay, preparing the blend for the treatment of the stack of stones and roots he and Orli had made. Once it was coated with the mixture, he could convert it into another engasta syrup tile.
Perhaps as a show of mercy, Kettle changed the subject as she looked to Orli and asked, “So how’s yer friend Yellow Fire doin’ out there on that red world ya planted him in? Have ya had any luck with the magic takin’ hold?”
“Not yet,” Orli supplied. “Altin checks in on him every night before we go to bed, but it’s always the same. Still nothing.”
“Well, things take time,” Kettle said. “And no tellin’ what kind of time fer a critter such as they are, no doubt. What with the two a’ ya talkin’ about millions a’ years livin’ fer them things, it don’t seem too surprisin’ that they’d be a while gettin’ started again.”
Orli nodded. “That’s very likely true.” She turned to watch Altin adding water to the large tub where they’d been mixing clay for the last several days. “Which is why we won’t be doing anything rash to Blue Fire for a long time to come.” The elevated pitch of her voice made it clear who that comment was really directed to.
Altin glanced up from his work, his eyes shadowed by the angle of his head and his lowered brows, but he did not take the bait. They’d already had this fight several times. He’d given his word; Orli thought it was reprehensible. Both sides understood both sides perfectly. There lay underneath their relationship now the tension of that conflict. Orli had stopped complaining about waiting for their wedding anymore. Instead, on that front she seemed relieved. The timing of the wedding, past attempts and future dates, was not a source of trouble anymore.
However, he also knew that barbs like the one she’d just thrown were going to keep coming as long as they waited for Yellow Fire to wake up.
That
was a source of trouble still. She was still angry about Altin’s “threat” to kill Blue Fire, and she just couldn’t let it go. He understood. He didn’t blame her. It was the collision of two ideals. He also understood that she tried very hard not to say that kind of thing, and that mainly it happened when she was tired, which after several long days of labor under a hot sun and the frustration of having so many things, well, if not quite going wrong, not quite going right either, made such remarks nearly inevitable. The nature of tomorrow’s anniversary—combined with the fact that he had forgotten all about it—made it a certainty.
And Kettle was right about Pernie’s being gone. The castle had never been the same since she was taken by the elves. Hells, it had never been the same since Tytamon was killed. Kettle had simply lost too much. Even the death of the miner, Ilbei Spadebreaker, in the
Citadel
accident had hit her inexplicably hard. In a very short period of time, Kettle had lost a great deal, and with it, some big part of the spirit that had animated her. Altin had wanted to fill the void of lost Tytamon, and he’d hoped having Orli there at Calico Castle would give Kettle someone new to care about, someone to do things with. And in a way it had, Kettle did enjoy Orli, but there were just too many holes in the kitchen matron’s heart these days, a heart that had been, in its way, the very heart of the castle.
He thought it a strange and sad sort of parallel, the grief of Blue Fire and Kettle. Two creatures moved entirely by love. Both living at the center of worlds made of stone, a planet and a castle, and both gentle beings wanting nothing more than to give love, to pour great galactic quantities of it into someone else. And yet both were stymied by a universe, by gods, by something cruel enough to deny them. Both now lived on hope—or perhaps more accurately, survived. Both merely waiting.
Orli was right to fight for Blue Fire’s life. The promise Altin had made to Blue Fire was meant to be a merciful one, and it would be merciful if the time was right. But when is any time right in the absence of certainty, and who can be certain of anything that has yet to come? How could Altin know when Yellow Fire would finally wake up, if he ever would? How could he possibly ever know? What day was the right day to end the suffering for Blue Fire out there? Today? Tomorrow? A year from now? The chances that Yellow Fire would wake up in the hour after Altin killed her were as great as the chances that he would wake up right now. That he would never wake up. There was no stretch of time that would make it any different. His ignorance made his promise an agony.
With a sigh, he silently cast a seeing spell back into the dimly lit heart chamber on the world they still called Red Fire. Two small spotlights were directed at the dimly pulsing core that was Yellow Fire. A small camera had been mounted on one of the spotlight stands and attached to a transmitter, beaming images to Doctor Walters on the
Glistening Lady
in orbit high above. As if to remind him of the uncertainty of it all, of the lives at stake, the spotlights also illuminated the plastic crates filled with explosives and stacked around the heart chamber too. Certain death for him if he even twitched wrong. Each with an “entanglement trigger,” as Roberto had explained. “They cost more than all the rest of your equipment combined. But there’s no chance of interference from the atmosphere, so, you know, the fleet isn’t going to screw around.”