Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (28 page)

Roberto stared up at the glittering ball of stars. It was beautiful to look into. But he wasn’t sure, even with a holographic simulation of sorts, how he would be able to find which star was the one they were looking for. The parchment star map was a joke.

Apparently they saw the look on his face, because the man with the wide-brimmed hat stepped forward, though he was careful to keep his face in the shadows of that broad brim. He tapped Vorvington in the back with something. The portly nobleman turned and took it. He turned back to Roberto and proffered it to him straightaway. “Ah yes, and of course Lady Pewter used one of these to … to somehow combine them, the map and the illusion.”

Roberto took it. It was a computer tablet, the standard sort of thing one would expect on Earth, other than the fact it was wrapped in a fancy alligator case. There was something familiar about it, but he couldn’t fathom why. It was certainly not what he expected to get from a Prosperion. Roberto tilted his head sideways and tried to get a better look at the man in the hat, but Vorvington was fat and the man was completely shrouded in shadow. Roberto was curious enough to raise his light and shine it on the man anyway. All he saw was the hat, its brim warping this way and that in the wind but otherwise mashed down securely upon the man’s head.

Roberto harrumphed, but let it go. He wasn’t too sure how much use the tablet would be, but he’d come this far, so there was no use not giving it a try.

He opened it up and turned it on. He flipped through screens until he found the star charts application. He crouched and set it in the grass long enough to lay the parchment map out on the ground next to it. He took up some rocks and laid them on the map, then used the tablet, scanning the drawing into its memory. A few taps and slides later, he ran the star dots against patterns on file. It came up with four hundred twenty three thousand nine hundred and eight possible matches. He actually laughed again. “Well, that’s not going to get anywhere.”

“Yes, Captain. I believe you need this too.” He pointed with the torch to the star globe illusion. “You!” Vorvington snapped at the woman. “Show him with the sounds. Make them chime like the Sunderhusk map. Like you did this morning.”

Roberto frowned, but hid it by glancing back at the map on the ground. This morning? He looked up at the woman. Her teeth chattered, this time for the cold, no doubt, as she was only wearing a thin shift that barely came to her knees. Her arms were bare and so were her feet.

“Why don’t you get her a blanket or something?” Roberto said.

“Captain, we don’t have time.”

Roberto stood and tapped his com badge. “Betty-Lynn, can you bring out a thermal?”

“She’s already on the way, Captain,” came Tracy’s reply.

“Vorvington, I have to tell you, I’m not impressed with the way you treat your people.”

“I’m not here to impress you, Captain. I’m here to get our friends back from the aliens.”

“Right,” Roberto said. He didn’t buy that for a second. He looked down at the parchment star map in the grass again, moving the sun shape of his flashlight’s narrow beam to the far corner where the single dot was. “I’m going to be honest, Lord Vorvington, that don’t look like it’s going to be much help to Orli and Altin.”

“The diviners assure me it is exceedingly relevant.”

“Yeah, I’m sure they do. They do that this morning, or after we talked?”

Vorvington lifted his nose and rolled his eyes skyward, above responding to such a thing.

The stocky-framed Betty-Lynn approached, a laser rifle crooked casually over the elbow of one arm and two thermal blankets folded over the other. She proffered the thermals to Roberto. He took them and thanked her, but did not ask her to go back to the ship.

Roberto set the tablet down and unfolded one of the blankets, his flashlight beam cutting wildly through the night as he worked. He went to the illusionist and wrapped it around her. “Here you go,” he said. “I’m sorry we dragged you out here for this. You can keep this when we are done. These are great blankets. Think of it as a souvenir from planet Earth.”

She looked up at him, gratefully, but she didn’t smile. There was something in her eyes that he couldn’t pin down exactly, and he didn’t like it at all. He looked past her to the three figures behind Vorvington. He shone his flashlight back at them. One was a large man, broad shouldered and muscular. He was young, but his face was tan and had the look of someone who spends most of his time in the sun and wind. Next to him was a slender man in gray robes. He was pale and looked uncomfortable. The third figure was, as before, shrouded in blackness, cloak and hat. Roberto flicked the light back and forth between them and held the other blanket up. “Any of you need this?”

“I’ll take it,” the big man said, a big grin on his face. “It’ll sell for a heap bein’ as it’s from Earth and all.”

The black hat moved side to side as the man beneath it shook his head, but he didn’t say anything. Roberto handed the blanket over and then went back to the star maps. He debated quitting, but he had a feeling that might be a bad idea. And if there was even a chance this could still help Orli and Altin, he supposed there wasn’t much to lose if it was not. A few more minutes of his time. No sense causing an incident.

He looked to the illusionist. “Are you okay to try?” he said. She shook her head, as if saying no, but she closed her eyes and started chanting again anyway. There followed a succession of chimes, six of them, five higher notes and one an octave lower. With each note, a star in the glowing sphere flared briefly, though Roberto missed the first three, not realizing what was happening.

“There, you see,” Vorvington said, pointing to the star globe. The highest note is Prosperion, the next is Earth, the one below that Andalia, then Blue Fire, then Yellow Fire. The last and lowest is the world we need to find. That is where the secret lies.”

“What secret?”

“The one that might free our friends.”

“I notice you have already shifted to
might
.” Roberto didn’t know why he was even bothering to point this stuff out anymore. So he didn’t wait for a reply. He picked up the tablet and went closer to the globe. “Can you ping them again? Slower so I can see them.”

“Do it,” Vorvington ordered the woman unnecessarily.

Again came the chimes. This time Roberto saw each star as it pulsed, once for each note in turn. There were five together on the opposite side of the star globe from where he stood, and the last one pulsed right in front of him, nearly on the surface of the globe. He had the illusionist repeat the tones several more times as he walked around the star map hanging there, the only thing unaffected by the wind.

“I’m still not sure how this is going to help me,” he said.

“Well, I surely have no idea,” said Vorvington.

He circled twice more, then raised the tablet and circled it again. “I can’t pick it up on this thing. This is less help than the paper one. These illusions aren’t real.”

Deeqa came out of the darkness to stand beside him, looking into the star globe. She stepped into it, put her hand in the cluster where the five suns with the five known habitable worlds were. She went to the new one near Roberto. “Let me see the tablet,” she said.

Roberto handed it to her. She quickly found his original star map scan. She squeezed it together on way, stretched it another. She went into the code and changed the scale. When she hit the reconfigure, it came up with a new list. She handed it back to Roberto. His four hundred twenty three thousand nine hundred and eight had been reduced to nine.

Deeqa cocked an eyebrow, but said nothing. He saw what she had done. He looked up at Vorvington, who was standing on his tiptoes, trying to look over the top of the tablet, even though he was ten feet away. Roberto was tempted to key in the code to the ship’s computer and flick the record to his own system, but he didn’t know what these guys were capable of in terms of recovering that access later. Who knew who else they knew from Earth, and those goddamn diviners were freaky in the extreme. He committed the system names to memory instead, then handed the tablet back to Vorvington. “There you go,” he said. “Best I can do.”

Vorvington’s grin was hideous, a globular movement of his face and neck, flesh shifting like gelatin being squeezed. “This will do fine, Captain. I’m sure it will do fine. The beauty of divination is that it works with what you know. If I can give them nine stars to choose from, they can surely rule out eight of them. The gods favor those who get themselves to where the gifts are given out.”

“So should I stay up late waiting for my copy of whatever results the gods are giving out?” Roberto asked.

“Don’t lose any sleep at all, good Captain. You have my word that as soon as I know how to get poor Sir Altin and Lady Meade home safely, you will be the first one I notify.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He glanced to Deeqa and shook his head. “Come on, let’s go.” They started to walk away, but he stopped and turned back. “Hey, you, illusionist lady. Are you okay? Do you want a ride somewhere before we go?”

The four figures vanished before he got the last word out.

Chapter 28

P
ernie trotted along the sidewalk at a steady clip. She wished she had Knot with her. Running on her own feet seemed very slow compared to being on his back. In the time it took her to run past the bus stop and reach the park on her own, with Knot she could already have been downtown looking at Hostile husks in the rubble of the broken buildings. She sighed, but she kept on running anyway.

She ran around the park and down the street she’d taken after school, the one that had brought her to the tall buildings. As she made her way steadily down it, imagining how big some of the Hostile corpses might be, a vehicle rolled up beside her in the dark. It was one of the older kind with wheels that touched the ground, not one of the gravity kind like Pernie was going to get someday. Its headlights were bright, and they lit up the street for a long way ahead. A cat’s eyes glowed green under a parked car, bright like a basilisk’s eyes will when it is about to turn someone into stone. Pernie heard that gorgons didn’t do that when they turned people into stone. She didn’t think the cat was going to turn anything to stone, but she thought it looked very impressive in the dark.

The vehicle didn’t drive past her like the scant few that she’d seen earlier in her journey had. The lights turned off as it neared, and then it was rolling along beside her, keeping pace. She could hear bits of gravel popping under its black wheels. She glanced over to see who was inside. She recognized the man she’d seen in the park yesterday.

“Hi,” he called out through the open passenger side window. He scooted across the seat and leaned through the opening, leaving the vehicle to drive itself. “Where are you going this late at night?”

“None of your business, that’s where,” Pernie said. She’d heard someone say that at school and liked the way it sounded when it came out. She ran a little faster.

The man said something, and his vehicle sped up. She looked back at him. The vehicle looked very old. It was very plain, like a box, dirty and with plastic and metal visible in places where paint should have been.

The van caught up to her easily enough and drew closer to the sidewalk next to her as she ran toward the corner. “You need a lift?” he asked.

Pernie frowned. Why would she need him to lift anything? She wasn’t even carrying anything. She thought he was probably very stupid. She’d met stupid adults before on Prosperion too. Kettle said that the gods kept all the peoples’ brains in baskets and handed them out to babies when they were born. She said some babies got the brains that were on the bottom of the basket, and they were kind of smooshed. She said Pernie was supposed to be nice to those people, though, because nobody got to pick their own brain, even the smooshy ones.

“No,” she said. “I’m not carrying anything.”

The man laughed. “You’re funny,” he said.

That made her frown some more. She wasn’t trying to be funny. There wasn’t anything funny about not carrying anything. She thought she’d been nice enough, though, so she didn’t feel bad about cutting through some trees and across someone’s yard to avoid him now. Sophia Hayworth said it was rude to go in people’s yards, but Pernie thought that peoples’ yards were dumb. They grew grass but then cut it too short for any animals to eat. They paid for water to water it, and complained about the cost. They also complained about the shortage of water that made it cost a lot, which they’d known about before they planted the grass they knew would need water. People from Earth didn’t make sense a lot of the time. So Pernie ran across the short grass and hopped the fence, then ran through another yard, and turned down the street that would take her directly to downtown Reno.

The dirty white box vehicle rolled up beside her a little farther down the street.

“Hey,” the man said. “I’m just trying to be nice.”

“Me too,” said Pernie. She wished he would just go away.

“So where are you going? I really don’t mind giving you a ride.”

She looked back at him. “You’ll just take me back home and tell me I’m too small to be out at night. That’s what you all do.”

“Not me,” he said. “You look like a big girl. Old enough to be out if you want to.”

“I am,” she said. She could see the rows of green and yellow and red lights now, down the slight incline, all straightening up and marking where the streets crisscrossed the downtown. It was still pretty far away. And the big buildings were even farther than that.