The fire spread across the room, and as it passed over Seawind and Shadesbreath, they both emerged from their invisibility spells. Djoveeve dropped down from somewhere near the ceiling just before they appeared, apparently not wanting to risk melting her fragile little wings as the heat filled the room.
Gromf sat back up, rubbing a plum-sized knot that was already growing on his head, and he laughed as he saw the two elves glaring at him with wisps of smoke rising from the leather of their armor.
“Golden Queen’s elf not like Gromf’s fire still,” he said. “Elf need human whelp female for kill Gromf.” This apparently was the height of all humor for the orc, and once more, he lay flat upon his back, forced back this time by the power of unchecked hilarity.
The elves and the old Sava’an’Lansom came to stand beside Pernie and watch.
“I think you broke him,” Djoveeve said after a time. “His wits have snapped.”
“I confess that I had not anticipated such an outcome,” Seawind said. “But it appears you may be right.”
Pernie looked first at Djoveeve, then at Seawind, tilting her neck back for each. She looked then to Shadesbreath, who was still simply watching her. He was kind of creepy, she decided, like something in a nightmare. But in a good way. Or maybe not. She wondered if she really could someday be like him. She thought it would be fun to look at people and make them feel that way. She’d love to see Kettle or Nipper try to shuffle her off to bed if she could look at them like that. They’d never even say anything. In fact she was fairly sure she could walk straight into the kitchens and eat all the tarts and berry pies she wanted and nobody would say a thing about it again, ever.
“So what shall we do with him?” Djoveeve asked. “Shall I drag him out and leave him for the jackals and latakasoki?”
Pernie snapped round to face her upon hearing that. “No,” she said. “We have to send him home.”
“We?” Djoveeve asked with an arched eyebrow. “And how do
we
plan on doing that?”
She spun and pointed at Seawind with a slender little finger. “He said that if I could beat the orc, I could go home. Now he has to send me home. So, he can send the orc back with me.”
“We ought to just finish it off,” the old woman said. “You know the Queen’s army and the warriors from Earth have all but eradicated its people anyway. It has no home.”
“It’s the difference between killing and murder,” Pernie said. She glared at Seawind as she said it.
Djoveeve crooked an eyebrow, but she grinned a moment afterward, glancing up at the two elves standing there regarding the child. “Well,” she said, “she’s got a point. And she’s your weapon, not mine. I’m only helping you sharpen her. You do what you please.” She backed away from the orc and took her hand off her knife.
The two elves seemed to be communicating between themselves, though Pernie didn’t know for sure. Humans couldn’t speak to elves telepathically. For some reason it just didn’t work.
Unexpectedly, Seawind agreed. “Very well. We’ll send him back when he recovers his wits and health. I’ll see to his wounds myself.” Pernie smiled. She hadn’t won a battle of any kind with the elves since mastering Knot and running with the hunt. “And for you, little Sava, the time has come to complete your test.”
Pernie looked stunned.
Complete
? What did he mean by that?
“Where would you like to go?” he asked.
“You already know where,” she said. “I want to go home.”
“So be it,” he said. “Give me your hand.” She did. He placed something soft and cool upon her palm and whispered into her ear. Then, just like that, she was home, right back where she’d been standing the moment they took her away.
Chapter 48
T
o their credit, neither Ramachandran twin complained about being asked to unpack the equipment needed to set up the bubble for Altin again. It was a great deal of work to go through the stacked crates and find the pumps and hoses and filters and sheeting, and then get it all affixed and airtight. They’d taken down the power grid and atmosphere purifiers they’d set up, and getting it all going again, even with everyone pitching in, and Altin’s generous use of teleportation spells to move the inert pieces around, was still the work of two full days.
It felt like déjà vu as Altin once again slipped off his helmet and gloves and knelt before the pulsing purple light of Yellow Fire’s heart stone. “All right,” he said to it, “now we’ve gone to a lot of trouble for you. Why aren’t you cooperating?”
He placed his left hand against the crystals embedded in the cavern wall, half his hand on the luminous edge of Yellow Fire, half on the dead gray crystals all around, his middle finger touching the place where the hairline crevice had been sealed. He felt nothing. No heat. No anything from any part.
Leaning forward, he peered into the gray clumps of the crystals that Professor Bryant had grown, just as he had before. The light from the spotlights behind him, as well as those on the helmets of the others outside the bubble, shone into them, lit them up a little, but mostly shone right through.
Not the least bit of color in them. Definitely not Liquefying Stone.
He drew in a long breath of the cold air being pumped into the chamber and closed his eyes, letting his mind slip into the mana as he had before. The endless pink constant of it was there, just as it had been ever since he’d gotten his own gift of heart stone from Blue Fire—the Father’s Gift that Blue Fire had melded with a tiny bit of her own Liquefying Stone. It was with that gift, that ring of heart stone, that he had shaped the first part of the melding spell. It was with that mana, the misty form of it made possible by his ring, that he’d infused the crack. But he hadn’t used the ring when he’d shaped and finished the cast. The ring had been off for that. And he wondered now if that was the difference somehow.
He sought the shape of the cast he’d made to finish it, thinking that perhaps it hadn’t completed itself somehow, that the joint he’d made between the two halves of the spell was not complete, the texture of the channeled mana different on each side of the joint. He hoped to find some small part of that unconnected or undone, some last loose end in need of being tied off or melded into place.
But there was nothing there. There was no spell for him to connect to, no thread to find, no joints or loose anything. The spell was complete. There was nothing left for him to do.
He let go of the mana for a moment and, on a lark, asked, “Turn off the spotlights, please.”
“Why?” someone asked, but someone else hushed the lot of them watching there.
The lights went off, and were it not for the dim luminescence of the panel on his spacesuit’s chest pack and sleeve, the darkness would have been absolute.
He had to think for a moment, trying to recall the magic detection spell he’d learned to help Roberto last month, looking for spells or magical devices that might have been planted in or upon the Goblin Tea crates before they were placed in the
Glistening Lady
’s cargo hold. If the transmutation spell was still in effect and in process, or frozen mid-process, if somehow it remained as magic rather than finished physicality, then he thought he might be able to detect it. He had to know. If it truly was complete—if it truly simply wasn’t working—he would know that as well.
He spoke the words of the spell, though he hadn’t really needed to, and in his mind he saw the wedge of mana, a shimmering pair of planes pressed together in the shape of a V. He pushed the magical fabrication into the wall of the heart chamber and watched it for signs of interactivity.
There were none.
He let go of the spell, and pushed himself away from the rock, his head drooping to his chest as he sat back on his heels. No evidence of anything, either way. Just nothing. Which meant his spell simply hadn’t worked.
“So, uh, what’s the trouble, dude?” came Roberto’s inquiry. “You got everybody’s butt puckering up here. Is it going to work or what?”
“No,” Altin answered even as Orli was scolding Roberto for his insensitivity. “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Orli said. “It’s just going to take time.”
Altin let go a long, slow breath, frustrated and resigned. In the darkness, he couldn’t see the foggy plume of it, but he knew he blew one just the same. Absently, he reached his hand out to feel it, for what reason he had no idea why, and there in the darkness before him was the gentle pulsing light of Blue Fire’s gift to him, a dim green light tracing the inside edge of his ring.
It lay there upon his finger, like a tiny beacon of hope, the very pulse of everything that had brought them all here today. Orli’s hope and his. Blue Fire’s. The hopes of people long gone for centuries, whose only legacy was the names they gave to stars. Altin filled with it as he looked at that small green light. He knew what he needed to do.
It was all he could do to keep the euphoria of epiphany from his voice when he said, calmly, “I do have one more idea.”
“Yeah, like what?” said Roberto. “Because we need to wrap this show up and get out of here. I’m due to pick up another load come the end of the week.” He preempted Orli’s next remark, adding, “Not that I’m not in here with you guys until the end, of course. It’s just, you know, I get tired of restarting my ship all the time.”
“Give me a moment,” Altin said. He turned toward the bubble where the others stood, each of them shaped by the lights blinking on their suits. “I need a pair of those small shears you people use for clipping wire.”
There was a brief pause before Rabin said, “One pair of wire cutters coming up.” He jumped on one of the gravity sleds, and then the lights on the back of his suit vanished as he dropped below the edge of the heart chamber for a while.
“So,” pressed Roberto in the breathless silence—being up in orbit seemed to have left him unaffected by the sphere of optimism that Altin had inspired—“you going to tell me or not? Because, I’m just saying, once you turned off all the lights, this show got pretty boring up here.”
“Roberto,” Orli warned for yet the third time, “let the man concentrate. For all we know, he’s holding onto half a spell.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought about that,” Roberto said. “Sorry, bro.”
Rabin was already rising back to level with the rest as Altin muttered that it was fine. Rabin held out the clippers and switched on his light to illuminate them in his gloved hand. “These, right?” he said.
“Yes, those are the ones. Give them to Orli.”
Rabin did as he was told.
“Orli, I’m bringing you inside.”
“All right,” she said. “I’m ready.”
A moment after, she was at his side, quickly removing her helmet and gloves.
He pulled off his ring and held it out to her, gripping it by the thick silver block into which he’d carved her name. “Cut it,” he said, indicating the bottom of the band.
“Really?” she said.
“I’ll fix it later. Just cut it, please.”
She could hear the urgency in his voice, so she reached down and snipped the ring, the cutters parting the silver easily, directly opposite the setting that held the green stone.
He pulled the two halves of the band apart, opening them as far as he could until both were bent up alongside the setting itself. He held it up and looked at it, verifying that the green stone protruded slightly from the bottom of its mount.
He turned a lopsided smile at Orli. “Wish him luck,” he said. “Wish them luck.”
Orli realized right away what he meant and muttered, “Good luck, Yellow Fire. There’s someone waiting for you.”
Altin could hear Rabin and Prakesh muttering it too.
“Here goes,” Altin said, and, with that, pressed the pulsing green of his stone to the place where he’d merged the heart stone with the surrounding crystals the professor had grown.
For a moment they all sat watching breathlessly, the long shadow of Orli standing in Rabin’s light shadowing Altin’s hand. Rabin clicked it off, and for a few moments more they all stared into the darkness, watching as the pulsing green light of Altin’s ring lit, then vanished, then lit, then vanished, scattered about by the gray crystals it sat upon.
Altin held his breath as he watched, staring into the space, his heart trying to beat with the rhythm of the ring’s pulsing.
He touched the heart stone with the ring, and waited a while more. Still nothing, so he put it back against the joint.
That’s when the whole cavern flickered like a lantern in a breeze. It flickered once, then twice, a pale blue color like a springtime sky, then in that instant, the whole chamber flared to brilliant life, as bright as any day on Prosperion or planet Earth had ever been, all around them, so bright they all had to shield their eyes. Not just the heart chamber. The whole enormous cavern, everywhere.
The light flared several times, and everyone began to cheer. Orli burst into tears of joy as she shouted, “It worked, it worked,” through sobs of ecstasy.
There came a succession of further flares, and a few dimming right after, all in the span of a few seconds, then the bright, daylight azure turned just slightly green, only just barely so, the palest aquamarine.