Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (24 page)

“That could kill Blue Fire,” Roberto said. “Or piss her off real bad. The Queen knows that. She wouldn’t do it, no way.” He glanced to Deeqa and back to the earl again. “Would she?”

“They do call her the
War
Queen.” It was not a question. “And the diviners saw clearly that she’s gone after a source of more of the yellow stone. It is certain.”

“Well, shit.”

“Indeed.”

He stared out the window for a time, thinking. “Fine,” Roberto said. “I’ll read your star maps to confirm it. But you need to do something for me.”

“Of course. I had no intention of being the only beneficiary of our luncheon on the river.” He looked out the window at the alders and cottonwoods going by. The river was a wide blue stripe running easy and smooth, the channel deep this far from the source and heavy with the late spring rains. There was still no restaurant in sight.

“I need harbor stones. And I need a lot of them. I can’t sit there with my thumb up my ass trying to clear NTA customs and then dealing with the damn TGS bureaucracy. It took us a day and a half sitting on our hands just to get back here today. Nobody will even talk to us about going to Yellow Fire. Orli and Altin will be in specimen jars in some damn alien laboratory before we ever get back there at this rate.”

The gilded earl held up his hands, palms up and out at his sides. “I can’t get you through the TGS system any faster than you can. They are Her Majesty’s people, not mine. And if I’m being honest, only barely that.”

“I thought you guys were on the same side.”

His cheeks colored a little, and he looked out at the river again. “Yes,” he said, as if speaking to the terns flying over the water, “but they are an entity apart. Frankly, I doubt she controls them as well as she thinks she does. I have no pull there. Not anymore.”

Roberto harrumphed and shook his head. But that was rather the point. “That’s the problem I have. Which is why I need harbor stones. You guys made them for the fleet ships before. So I know it can be done. I need a bunch of them. I need at least ten each way, here and back to Yellow Fire. Maybe another ten each to go back and forth between Earth and Prosperion. Hell, make it an even sixty and get me ten apiece back and forth from Yellow Fire to Earth.”

“You won’t get them going between the red world and Earth, but the others could be done. However, your problem is still the TGS. And the enchanters. What you are asking for will require a small concert. You’ll need a conduit—hard enough to find—and you’ll need a whole stack of teleporters and enchantment mages. The TGS has gobbled up every teleporter beyond what is absolutely necessary for commerce and intra-continental travel, and all the best enchanters that weren’t already on
Citadel
have just been sent to Earth as part of the student exchange. I really do want to help you, but what you are asking for is simply not feasible.”

“Well, then you didn’t come to the bargaining table with much, did you?”

“Why not get your friend Tytamon to make your stones? There is no other wizard on Prosperion who could do it on his own—other than Sir Altin, of course, and he’s not on the planet, which is rather the problem you and I both share so exactly.”

Roberto was fairly sure Lord Vorvington couldn’t give a crap about Altin, but he didn’t call him on it.

“Well, if you can’t do that for me, what can you do?”

“I can help you find, and hopefully free, your friends. I realize that does not give you any more than I am getting out of this, but, well, I think it still has value. Don’t you?”

Roberto shook his head again. He knew that he’d been played. But Vorvington was right. And he was offering more than the Queen.

“Fine,” he said. “So where’s the wizard with the maps and the 3-D spell?”

“Why don’t we meet outside of Murdoc Bay, an hour after sunset tonight. That will give me time to get the last bit of divining done. There’s a good stretch of flat land above the cliffs at the top of the Decline. Perhaps you could land a measure west of the road. We’ll meet you there.”

Roberto exchanged glances with Deeqa again. She shrugged. It was his decision to make.

“We’ll be there.”

They sat in silence all the way back to Crown, forgoing the rhino ribs in favor of ending the façade.

Chapter 23

S
ophia Hayworth didn’t shriek. She didn’t wail or cry. She didn’t even put her hands on her hips like Kettle would have. In fact, Sophia Hayworth in anger was the exact opposite of Kettle in every way. Where Kettle would have been all red faced and shouting—and a couple of whip-strike smacks on Pernie’s backside with that big, nasty wooden spoon she had—Sophia Hayworth was the very picture of calm. In fact, not only did her voice not go up in pitch or volume like Kettle’s would, it actually came down.

She sat across from Pernie and stared at her seriously, but she did it in this patient sort of way that irritated Pernie to no end. Don Hayworth was still talking to the man from “Reno PD” at the front door. They were talking about baseball, though, so Sophia Hayworth was free to come look at Pernie now in her annoying, patient way.

“I only asked one thing from you,” Sophia Hayworth said. “I asked that you come straight home. Can you explain why you were unable to do so?”

“I already told you. I wanted to find a dead Hostile.” Pernie let go a patient breath of her own. How many times was she going to have to answer that question?

“You went downtown. You knew that it was dangerous. Even the bus driver told you it was dangerous.”

“But it wasn’t,” Pernie said. She fiddled with her fingers on the tabletop.

“Yes, Pernie, it was. Those hoodlums you encountered were dangerous. The young man the police arrested is a known criminal.”

“He didn’t seem dangerous to me,” Pernie said. “And he and his friends even chased a bad man away.”

Sophia closed her eyes and seemed like she had to concentrate very hard for a moment. Pernie thought she might be going to get mad, but she didn’t. When she spoke again, she was still talking in that calm way. “He was dangerous, and you put yourself at great risk, young lady. Not only yourself, but the rest of us: me, Don, and even your guardians back at home, Mr. Tytamon and Ms. Kettle. We are all trying to do our part, building history and trust between worlds, and if you run off and do something reckless like that again … if you were to be hurt, a lot of hearts would be broken, and a lot of work on the part of many people doing other things you cannot conceive just yet—it would all be put in jeopardy.”

The surface of the plastic table was textured to look like wood. Pernie scratched her fingernail into the little ruts of the faux wood grain. To the touch it felt hard enough to be wood, but it seemed silly to make plastic wood when wood wood was just as good. Jeremy had showed her how there were many things that could be made from plastic, too many to count. He said there were even plastic bones in case something bad happened to your regular ones.

“Are you listening to me?”

Pernie looked up. Sophia Hayworth was obviously waiting for an answer, because her eyebrows were both high up on her forehead. “No,” Pernie said.

Sophia’s mouth dropped open, and between the raised brows and the dangling chin, her face looked very long. Pernie wondered if they could make plastic jawbones, which she knew were kind of bendy and had teeth in them, or only just straight bones like leg bones and arm bones. She’d seen her own leg bone once, back on the Isle of Hunters. It broke right out of the skin. It hurt a lot, but it was also very interesting.

Sophia eventually closed her mouth and started talking again. Pernie only heard the last part about “what are we going to do with you?” because Don Hayworth came in. The Reno PD man was gone.

Don looked down at Pernie and grinned at her, a proud thing, the same look he’d given her when she was hitting all the baseballs he threw at her. “The lieutenant says you damn near knocked that guy out. Says you kicked him into a garbage can.”

Pernie shrugged. “I only tripped him. They were trying to take me to a
seen-o
to get Sophia’s chips.”

“
Ca
-sino,” he corrected. “And either way, that was well done. You should always stand up for yourself.”

Pernie nodded and smiled back at him. “That’s what Kettle and Master Altin and even Master Tytamon always say. Djoveeve and Seawind showed me how.”

He laughed, a few notes anyway, wry and with a tinge of admiration beneath. “Yes, that they did.”

“And you are going to encourage this behavior?” Sophia said. “She was nearly abducted by a gang of thugs, and you think that is a laughing matter?”

“But she
wasn’t
abducted by a gang of thugs. She knocked one half out, and the rest ran away.” He turned his gaze back to Pernie. “But you do need to stay away from down there, okay? At least by yourself. Your mothe—Sophia is right that it is too dangerous. You were lucky the cops came along.”

Pernie made a face at that and wrinkled up her nose. She didn’t know what that word, “cops,” meant. Don saw it.

“Cops are the guys that brought you here. Reno PD.”

She shrugged. That was good to know. She planned on avoiding cops from now on.

Sophia looked sideways at her husband before regarding Pernie once more. “So, the lesson here is that we won’t be running off downtown again, right?”

“But I didn’t get to the broken buildings where the dead Hostiles are.”

A pained expression, the flicker of a flinch, crossed Sophia’s face, but her voice remained calm. “There are no dead Hostiles down there. Only drugged-out dirtbags and transients. There are bad people on our world, Pernie. Please, promise me you won’t try that again.”

Pernie shrugged again.

“I need you to promise,” Sophia insisted.

Pernie didn’t want to promise. She looked back to the table and fussed with it again. She wondered if a plastic bone would be stronger than a regular one. Some plastics were strong but also flexible. She’d read that much. She might be able to jump very far if she had plastic bones. She decided she’d ask Jeremy if that was possible. If it was, maybe she could get her bones changed. They did lots of things like that on Earth.

“You see?” Sophia was saying to Don. “She just tunes me out. Angela never tuned me out. How am I supposed to talk to her?”

“I’d start by giving up trying to find comparisons,” Don said.

That made Sophia scowl, and for the first time she actually looked mad. Pernie was glad she was mad. She would rather have her mad than talking to her in that stupid quiet way. The quiet way made Pernie feel stupid somehow. Pernie thought Sophia might be more mad at Don, though.

Sophia got up, and for a moment Pernie thought the woman was going to put her hands on her hips. Pernie thought it might be funny to see her mad like Kettle finally. But she didn’t. Instead, Sophia glared down at Pernie, took another one of those closed-eye breaths, and said, “Go to your room. You are grounded and will not leave this house alone again until I say so. And you can forget about walking back from the bus stop on your own as well.”

Pernie would have laughed at that as well, but she didn’t. She knew how to be patient when she needed to. She shrugged yet again.

Sophia turned narrow eyes on Don, then spun and left the room.

Pernie looked to Don, who shrugged like she had. “Well,” he said, “you better get in there so we don’t both end up in the doghouse.”

Confusion contorted Pernie’s features. The Hayworths didn’t even have a dog.

Chapter 24

P
ernie lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. She’d tried to watch some net shows on the monitor up there, but they were boring. She was too busy thinking about real things. Things that happened outside. She’d wanted to see a dead Hostile was all. Sophia was making a sea out of a flooded cellar, as Kettle used to say. Pernie still wanted to see a dead Hostile. And she didn’t like being “grounded.”

Sometimes the NTA fighter pilots got grounded. Pernie had watched a net documentary about them. If they did bad things or made mistakes, they got grounded and couldn’t fly. Gryphon riders in Her Majesty’s armies got grounded too. They didn’t call it that, but it was the same thing. Pernie was glad she was grounded like a fighter pilot. Someday she would learn how to fly, though. Faster than sound. That would be fun. She could shout “hello” into the wind and then fly in her fighter to the other end of Earth, stop her plane, and get out in time to hear herself. She could have a whole conversation that way.

Jeremy told her she could even go faster than light if she flew in a spaceship. Then she could hear herself and see herself too. That would be fun.

What wasn’t fun was sitting in here watching the world on ceiling video. That was boring. And it was still early. It wasn’t even nine o’clock.

She got up and went to the window across the room. There was electricity running through it. That’s why the alarms went off. She’d looked it up on the net and knew that it was true. But Pernie also knew how electricity worked now. She just had to jump the window connection so as not to break the closed loop. Either that, or she had to shut it down at the power source.