Rift in the Races (12 page)

“Not even that.” His face colored darkly, and she knew she was on to something. She pressed for another several minutes, but he was stalwart as a stone fence. Admirably so, she supposed. She both liked that and found it frustrating all at once.

“Come, have a seat,” he said at last, moving down the beach to a nice comfortable spot. “I have a surprise for you as well.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

She scampered down the beach and plopped into the sand next to him. Waiting. Finally, after several long moments of silence, she prompted, “Well?”

He laughed, then fished around inside his robes for a moment and finally extracted a small square box that fit neatly in the palm of his hand. She immediately sucked in a breath. It couldn’t be. Could it? She, and Her Majesty, had been expecting this to happen several months ago.

“You know that I love you?” he said. “By now you surely know it to be true.”

“I do,” she replied, eyes wide and hands trembling as she stared at that little box. It was made of some kind of black wood. She could just see the grain of it, and it had been intricately carved with what looked like ivy, not unlike the kind that wrapped around Altin’s tower.

“And you know that I intend to have you in my life until I die, don’t you?”

“I do,” she said again. Her heart was racing, and she would have sworn she could hear it thumping against her breastbone.

“Which means I never want to lose you as I nearly did before. I never want something to happen where I can’t find you. Or, if needs be, I want you to be able to find me. That’s why I made you this.” He pushed the little box forward, indicating with a nod that she should take it.

She had a strange sense that this might not be what she thought it was a moment ago. That sense grew when she made to open it and he started, calling out, “Whoa, wait!”

She stopped, fingers pinching the sides of the lid, frozen at the brink of opening it, and stared back at him, startled by the urgency of his tone.

“It’s tarwood. You can’t just open a shrinkbox like that. You have to set it down. What if it was something huge?”

“A what?” She got the feeling she should probably have her com badge on right then. Whatever he’d just said wasn’t making any sense, or not much. She knew enough of this world to approximate the general point, however, even without a perfect mastery of their speech. “How was I supposed to know it was something magical?”

He laughed. “It’s tarwood. I thought you knew. Everyone knows what a tarwood box does, and, well, you looked like you knew too, so I didn’t think.” She wasn’t laughing, so he added, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Orli’s irritation passed quickly, flying from her like wedding doves at an abandoned ceremony. “So what do I do? Just set it down right here, next to me?”

“Yes. Set it down. Pull off the lid.”

“Nothing is going to jump out and bite me, right?”

He laughed again. “Of course not. You saw the snake swim away.”

“Funny,” she said. She fixed her attention on the box. “All right. Wish me luck.” She set it in the sand next to her and hesitantly pulled off the lid, leaning away from it as if she expected flames to shoot out or some catastrophic electric shock.

There was a quick rush of air and a shushing sound, and suddenly next to her was a larger black box, just over two feet wide, eight inches front to back, and barely half that in height. Though there was nothing terrifying about it, and nothing leapt at her, it appeared so unexpectedly that she jumped anyway. They both laughed.

Inside the box stood a small dressing mirror, oval in shape, set in a beautifully carved frame made from what she thought must be some kind of bone. Though solid as steel, the carving gave the frame a sinewy effect, a frozen cascade of ivory luster, nearly white but with the lightest tint of gray. At the top of it was an emerald, a big one, nearly the size of her thumbnail, which sparkled dazzlingly in the setting sun. The whole thing was breathtaking, and she spent several moments studying its every intricacy. As she did, she noticed Altin in the reflection, grinning widely behind her. She waved at him.

“Does it come out of the box?” she asked as she studied it. The gap around the edges where the base was set into the box was as narrow as a razor blade, a perfect fit.

“It does,” he said. “But you’ll want to keep it hidden from view most of the time.” She nodded, looking again at the huge emerald set at the top. Not the sort of thing one wants to leave lying around, she thought.

The mirror itself was polished perfectly, her reflection in it bright and clear, and it seemed to give her something approaching a subtle radiance. She commented on that.

“It sees you as I do,” he said.

She sighed. She found she did that a lot when he was around. She turned her attention back to the mirror again, this time noticing tiny runes, like those she’d seen on
Citadel
. They ran down into dark crooks in the twisting pattern of the frame inside of which she discovered tiny replicas of Earth spaceships. “What do these do?”

“They represent your ship,” he said. “And more specifically, it’s your ship as it relates to you.”

She understood the words, but somehow she felt she needed her com badge here, certain she must be missing critical bits of what he was saying now. She raised a hand, stopping him for the moment. “I think this is a good time for perfect clarity.” She ran to retrieve her com badge and his translation amulet from the rock where she’d stowed them both.

“Okay, let’s try that again,” she said when she had returned.

He stood and took his amulet from her extended hand. As he lifted the gold chain over his head, his features drooped some, disappointed that they were to have the intermediary again. There was an intimacy to unaided conversation that had made those few moments speaking with her even more sublime. Still, it was obvious she wanted to know more about the gift, and clearly she didn’t have the vocabulary yet to understand some of what he said.

“It’s a tarwood box,” he repeated, just to be sure she’d understood it all from the start. “It can hold anything that you can set inside, and it will shrink back to the size of a plum simply by the act of replacing the lid.” He glanced down at her hand, where she still held the small square of the lid. “Here, I’ll show you.”

She gave it to him. He stepped around her and knelt beside the box. Extending his arm, he reached toward the top of the mirror frame. He looked as if he were about to touch it, but then with no warning, no flash of light, the whole thing was tiny once again.

“You’ll want to hold the lid lightly when you do that because it’s going to leave your hand one way or another. You don’t want to wrench your shoulder, and you certainly don’t want your fingers to be in the way.”

She clapped her hands in childlike ecstasy as he pulled the lid back off and the mirror popped up full sized again. “So, I understand the shrinking and expanding part,” she said as he gave her back the tarwood lid. “It’s wonderful. But what I meant when I said I was looking for perfect clarity is that I don’t understand what you mean when you said it represents my ship as it relates to me. Or at least that’s what I think you said.”

“That is what I said. What that means is that this mirror will always orient me to you, wherever you are, and it will orient me to your ship. It’s tuned both to the place that is your ship as it is defined by the person that is you. It will set itself to whatever ship you are on so long as you have this with you when you go. All you have to do is open the box on the new ship, and it will reestablish itself. Plus, I can see you in it as long as you have it up. That’s what the emerald does. It’s a seeing stone. I can find you wherever you may go, and, even better, we can talk through it whenever we want. It’s very similar to the two-way mirrors you use as part of the communication devices for your ships.”

“They’re monitors, not mirrors,” she corrected warmly as she looked into her gift. After a time she said, “You’re so funny.”

“Funny? How so?”

“It’s just how thorough you are. And you are such a worrier. You know perfectly well I’m never going off again. So you’ve gone to great lengths to be able to find me, when I have no intention of ever being farther away than Tinpoa. And not even that far for long.”

“I hope not. But I’m not taking any risks.”

“You see, that’s what I mean: a worrier.”

He had to laugh. She had him there.

“So how do I work it? If I want to talk to you, how will you know? And vice versa?”

He pointed out a small hole at the bottom of the frame, completely inconspicuous in the writhing sensuousness of the carving. “Put your collar pin in there. It will detect the enchantment I placed upon it when we first met. That will be enough to activate the spell.”

“My com badge? What happens if I lose it or have to get a new one for some reason? They break, you know.”

“Then you will have to wait five minutes until the next time I have decided I want to speak to you on my own.”

That made her feel warm inside. She looked at his reflection in the mirror again and saw him smiling back at her. “Look, it’s already working,” she said.

He kissed his fingertips and blew it to her.

“So is there any limit to how far this will work?”

“Not that I know of. I confess to understanding just enough of the distances in space to not be sure, but I don’t believe so. It should function just as your tangled communicator works.”

She laughed. “You really struggle with that word, don’t you?”

“Ugh, yes, I do.
En
-tangled. I know it. It just never comes out.”

She nodded that he’d got it right that time and spent a few moments appreciating the beauty of the gift. “Hey,” she said at length. “I thought your people built that special anti-magic room in
Citadel
so we could communicate back and forth using the entanglement array. It was a big deal for you guys, and pretty expensive for us, all-in-all. Why didn’t you guys just make a bunch of these and save everybody the trouble we nearly had up there in that room when Asad and Jefferies started freaking out?”

He shook his head. “I think you underestimate how many people and how much time this took. We are supposed to have all qualified enchanters working on
Citadel
, and I confess to some small abuse of my new rank and privileges as Galactic Mage in the getting of this. If Her Majesty were to find out I commissioned this, I believe I would fall out of favor straightaway. ”

“Oh, I doubt that. She worships you.”

“Hardly that,” he said. “And her favorites change more rapidly than the illusions on her ballroom walls. But I do have her ear just now, I’ll grant you. She wants her great space armada so she can go out and discover everything. You have no idea what we have awakened by introducing her to so much open space.”

“Well, I think she’s sweet.”

He laughed, the angle of his head while doing so revealing to his peripheral vision that the sun was about to be swallowed by the sea. “You’re going to miss the sunset,” he said, unfolding his legs and settling himself into the sand to watch the night arrive.

“Oh, I’m going to miss it all right,” she said, then she pounced on him with devilry in her eyes and a tongue that had no intention of staying behind her teeth.

Chapter 8

A
ltin teleported them to the last sunset they could chase. They leaned together against a large piece of driftwood on a beach that marked the westernmost point on Kurr. They’d snuggled close in the stiff breeze as they prepared to watch their fifth and final sunset of the night. Orli had fallen asleep tipped against him a full half hour before it set, however, and now, long after it was gone, he sat watching the stars alone, enjoying the warm rhythm of her breath against his neck. The surf crashed gently in the distance like a whisper, and the swampy humidity in the air combined with her nearness to relax him and fill him with peace he rarely knew.

He wanted to make a life with her. He knew it with absolute certainty. He’d dreamed of it almost every night since that night they’d flown off together after the ball. He dreamt of it now. The two of them discovering worlds together and maybe, one day, making a family. He couldn’t think of a better life.

He wondered if she would want to discover new worlds. She didn’t like being in space. He knew that. But she loved new places. The contradiction unnerved him. Perhaps if he built them a small version of
Citadel
. She could keep a garden on it. And a horse. She could ride it on all the new worlds they found, gathering plants and cataloging them as she liked to do. Surely she could be happy in a life like that. Couldn’t she?

He lay his head back against the smooth wood and stared absently up into the stars. So many of them. There’d be lots of planets out there, he thought. And just as he began to imagine what they might be like, something black shot across the sky, something small—or distant—something that briefly marked its passage by blotting out stars along its path.

A Hostile! he thought as he snapped out of the dreamy trance and got to his feet, prepared to defend her.