Rift in the Races (29 page)

But, right as that might seem, he was first going to have to figure out how to find them, a problem at least as difficult as it was going to be to find the Hostile world itself. In both cases, he had no idea where to look. Yes, he could have gotten “coordinates,” as they called them, from Orli, but that didn’t mean anything. At least not magically. Which meant he was going to have to find them himself, the hard way.

His first thought was to cast a seeing spell aboard the bridge of one of the ships. But he didn’t know if any of the ships remaining were ships that he’d ever been aboard. He’d only been on a few Earth vessels anyway, and one of them for certain had been destroyed when Admiral Crane was killed. But there had been others. He’d cast Combat Hop on four ships all those months ago, so there were those. One of them was destroyed in battle the day he’d cast the spells, but the other three remained. Of those, one was Orli’s ship, the
Aspect
, which he knew was in orbit above Tinpoa right now. That left two ships for which he had a sense of place, two ships that might
not
be in orbit above Tinpoa or around Prosperion. He knew neither of them by name, but if one of those ships had gone out with the admiral, he could find it. But he was reluctant to try.

What would happen if he tried to see his way to someplace that did not exist anymore?

He understood the possibility of this instinctively. If he tried to see to a ship that had been destroyed, there could be significant magical backlash. The sense of place that made up his knowledge of the location on the ship relied on the existence of an internal space as defined by the structure that comprised it. The ship was in motion, making the external place in space changing. So the internal space, the box, must be intact. The possibility of this being an issue was enough to deter him from trying immediately. He wondered if there were precedents for that written up in the library at the Seers Guild Hall. Surely someone somewhere in the past had tried to see their way into the captain’s quarters or the galley of some sailing ship that had been sunk without the seer’s knowledge. There must be records of that somewhere. Although, finding them might take a lot of work. And a lot of time.

Which meant divination was probably a better choice, even though Altin hated working in that particular school of magic. It was tedious, but at least he could try to combine what he understood of the Earth ships and the Hostiles, limited as both knowledge sets were, to shape the core of the question he would pose:
Where were the ships in relation to that which they had gone to find?
There would be no backlash from that. Ambiguity, confusion and probable failure, sure, but no dangerous backlash.

Returning to his bedchamber, he went to the small shelf above his bed and pulled down his most recent book of notes. He flipped quickly to the seeking spell he’d copied there, not quite grumbling as he paged through the book. When he found it, he smiled. He couldn’t hate it. This was the spell that had led him to Orli.

He studied the notes he had written, and the spell itself, reminding himself of the words that would shape his thoughts. He read them with the idea of the wounded fleet heading back toward Prosperion. He even allowed that he was not without some sense of where they were, for he did know, in a way, how far they’d gone: just over eight months’ travel time. That was roughly a month of their “light speeds” farther than where he’d first encountered them all those months ago. The distance between Prosperion and his first contact represented a known unit of measurement, albeit in a way that had nothing quantifiable to it. It was essentially a feeling, a gut measurement. And while that wasn’t much to go on, it was better than having no idea at all. He had the sense of how much mana would be required to cast a teleportation like that. And he was no stranger to casting teleportation blind, having pioneered the technique.

He spent nearly an hour studying the spell before going back up to the battlements. He wasted no time in starting, and he began to sing the magic words to the tune of “My Cat’s Paw,” a song familiar to children across Kurr for centuries.

At first he felt nothing. Saw nothing. But slowly, as he focused his thoughts on the idea of the Earth ships fleeing from the Hostiles, pictured them with their long, metallic shapes, the lights, the discs, the weaponry jutting from them, slowly an image began to form, an image of space, a section of it. He could see it like a star map just out of view. He couldn’t stare at it like he might if it really were some artist’s rendering of the constellations in the sky, and he had to resist the urge to try. Studying it was like trying to watch something taking place at the edge of vision, but something tentative that would vanish if you looked at it straight on, a fearful thing, or perhaps something that thought itself safely shrouded in the mists that linger at the periphery of perceptible truth. Which it was. The infernal nature of divination, and why so often these spells took so gods-be-damned long to work through.

Nearly three hours had passed by the time he felt he could shape those stars in his memory. When he felt it was so, he released the spell, letting the tender threads of palpable darkness slip back into the seething purple whorl of the mana tides.

Immediately he leapt up and stared out over the battlements. He had a vague sense that he was looking the right way, a feeling only. It was a sensation he still had not come to trust.

He squinted into the darkness but could not find the familiar pattern of stars he’d seen in the divination dream. He went to the dilapidated little table near the tower stairs and flipped open a notebook lying there. Grabbing the quill from the inkpot, he drew the star formation as best he could recall it from spell memory. He would draw one star, then close his eyes and see the patch of stars he’d divined, then open his eyes and put the next star down. He repeated this until he had them all drawn in. Then he studied his star map, tried to fathom the shape it made, connecting the dots with imaginary lines like children and ancient astronomical geniuses do. He created a constellation of his own from it, a few even, whether childish or genius he could not know. It looked like someone reaching up and picking something. Or maybe a woman dancing. Or perhaps a fencer with a foil.

Hmmm
.

Whatever it was, the ships would be coming out of that pattern, from that expanse of space. At least that is what he assumed it meant. That’s what felt the most like accuracy.

He studied the sketch a bit longer and decided it was definitely someone picking something. A man-figure made of dimmer stars, stepping forward and reaching up to pluck a very bright star, a yellow one, the fruit, so to speak. Another bright star, even larger than the yellow one, was falling and about to strike the picker’s knee.

He stared at his work, taking up the nearby oil lamp and holding it close to his hastily sketched star map. He fixed the image in his mind, carefully committing his homemade constellation to memory. Certain he had it, he snuffed out the bobbing yellow flame and returned to his place near the wall.

He scanned the sky. There were so many stars. And more popped into view the longer he looked. More and more with each minute since extinguishing the lamp. They were closer together than the stars he’d seen within the divination spell. Much closer together. The vision had made it seem as if his picker constellation would be huge and obvious, nothing else competing with it at all. Such was not the case.

How was he supposed to pick out a cluster of stars shaped like a man harvesting fruit from the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of tiny lights? He could find as many figures as he chose to look for. The longer he looked, the more little people-patterns appeared. It was simply a matter of which stars he chose to ignore to let the pattern emerge. Granted, he was looking for a specific yellow fruit, and a falling blue one, but, the whole mass of space seemed an endless crowd, all performing some similar act, the great harvest of the night. It was the stuff of epic songs.

He spent the better part of an hour staring like that, futility becoming more and more apparent with each passing breath. Finally he gave up.

“I’m too far away,” he said, long in the habit of speaking to himself out here. He relit the lamp and studied his sketch again. He was sure he hadn’t drawn it wrong or memorized it improperly. Which meant he might well need to be somewhere else, somewhere farther along toward the location to make out that particular pattern of stars. Perspective was something he’d learned a lot about out here in his early forays into space. What counted for “close” was a matter of relative scale and one’s opinion of what constituted nearness as measured on that scale. How close must one get to a dragon before appreciating the creature’s magnificent size? How close to a starship, a gas giant, or even a galaxy? In the sense of cosmic seeking, “close” could be as elusive as outright fantasy.

So he set himself to making a new outward leap, a new blindly cast teleport, in keeping with the practice that had got him out this far to begin. He welcomed it. In a strange way, the discomfort of casting an incongruent spell, the drain on his energy, was satisfying. There was something nostalgic about it. And mainly, it felt like progress.

Once again counting the good fortune that had prevented the orcs from finding his lone Liquefying Stone, Altin went down to his room and retrieved it from its place on the shelf above his bed. He climbed back to the battlements and placed the wooden bowel on the table at the top of the stairs. Flipping back the fold of towel covering it, he gazed down at it, a half-finger’s length of yellow stone, crystalline, ugly, yellow as a urine stain. He plucked it out and held it to the flickering lamp, watched the light being drawn into it in that odd familiar way, that way that still made his stomach turn if he stared into it too long, an odd sense of vertigo.

“Be nice,” he said to it. “I know it’s been a while.”

He went to the wooden crate near his scrying basin in which was stacked a supply of enchanted seeing stones, the magical mechanism he’d devised to help him find his way into the void. Each was a way point, a beacon of sorts, to help him stay on course.

He closed his eyes and focused on the familiar sense imparted to him by the divining spell, feeling for the direction, the place out there that felt right despite what he couldn’t see, the place where the picker constellation might be. He opened his eyes and turned himself perhaps another ten degrees, facing outward with tenuous confidence. He calmed himself, regulating his breathing, aware of the pace of his beating heart, willing it to its slowest meter. Then he began the spell.

The stone left his hands with a tremendous snap, both physically and in the mana place within his mind. He couldn’t tell for certain how far it had gone, but he easily found it in his scrying basin thanks to the enchantments on the stone. Seeing it was safe, he quickly followed the stone with a teleportation spell, bringing the tower, and himself, to the location of the fresh-cast seeing stone. Upon arrival, he guessed he might be twice as far from Prosperion as he’d just been. He turned around and saw that Prosperion’s sun was in fact remarkably far off, barely even the brightest star in the sky.

He grinned. This was what he was meant to do.

He turned back and scanned the area for signs of the Earth ships. He knew it was a long shot, but he had to start somewhere. But there were no bright lights approaching, no flashes of movement, no flicker of their red laser beams, none of which came as a surprise. So he set himself to looking for the picking man shaped somewhere in the stars. Perhaps the teleport had brought him close enough for his star chart to make sense. Perhaps now he was “close” enough.

He was not.

Undaunted, he repeated the whole exercise again: a seeing stone cast, a quick search in the basin and, once again, chasing that stone with a tower teleport. All guided by the sense imparted by the divining spell.

Once again, no ships and no picking man. Just as it had been in his last location, he could find his constellation in almost every swatch of space, and in none. Sketched amongst all those stars were both an endless harvest performed by an infinite number of imaginary men and the lonely privation of an entire universe.

He went through the sequence twice more. Still nothing.

Which brought him back to the problem of scale. He didn’t understand the scale of the constellation he was looking for. Should the picker fill most of the sky into which he looked, big, like in the divination dream, or would it reside within a tiny space seen from far away? How much had it changed since he had moved from the point where he had cast the divining spell? Should he not have moved, or had he seen what he would see only once he got to where he was supposed to be?

Divination vexed him thoroughly.

He wondered if he’d been a bit rash coming out here without a better plan. He considered once again whether or not he should go back and work things out, do some research, get ship names and view some images of captains or crews. That might help. But then, it might not. The divination spell he’d cast had worked to help him find Orli, and he hadn’t even known he was looking for her. This very spell, not some version of it that was merely similar. So, he just had to trust it. Besides, spending too much time planning was the realm of gray-haired officers and withered old politicians, aged to caution in bodies no longer strong enough or quick enough to safely improvise.

However, activity for the sake of itself wouldn’t help much either. There was no point randomly leaping about the galaxy as he was doing now. It was just as likely that this was the right spot as the last one had been. Or that the next one would be. Perhaps teleportation was not what he needed. Perhaps patience was. Maybe he just needed to give the spell time.