Rift in the Races (94 page)

So now Orli was back aboard her old ship, working third shift on the bridge, as far from Captain Asad as he could get her. She hardly ever got to see Roberto anymore. Which was just as well. He’d been standoffish since she came back. She’d asked him about it, and he told her bluntly why: she was different now, and he didn’t like Thad at all.

Nobody liked him. Which made her sad. Like everything else seemed to do these days. Her whole world was sad, and it seemed as if it had been forever, ever since leaving Earth, nothing but endless misery. The few bits of happiness she’d had had all been fleeting. She’d been happy with Altin. She remembered it with crystal clarity. She could feel the essence of those moments with him, the times on Taot’s back, soaring in the wind, sensing the young man’s arousal, his discomfiture and propriety at odds with his desire in such a quaint and wonderful way. She remembered how happy she was chasing sunsets with him. Sitting with him under the stars. But it was gone now. The feelings. The time of it. She was back here. On the ship. In this now. But at least she had Thadius. Her Thad. Her savior.

She could understand why Roberto didn’t like him. It had been sudden. She couldn’t explain it either. She’d tried. But she could not deny her heart. She looked at the tall, handsome young lord and could feel nothing but affection for him.

“Why?” Roberto had asked. “What do you see in him? The guy is an asshole.”

“He’s not,” she argued. “He’s just got noble blood. They don’t act like everyone else.”

“Yeah. They act like assholes.”

That irritated her, and she looked down into the meal she’d agreed to have with her longtime friend, silent and pensive. What else could she say?

He relented after a while, though. He’d never been one to let her pout for long. “Orli, I’m sorry. If you love him—I mean, what can I do, right? You’re my friend. I’ll try to get along. I just, you know … I like Altin better. A lot better. I know that’s probably not the right thing to say, but it’s honest.”

“He’ll grow on you,” she said, looking up and feeling better by that. “He did for me. I didn’t care for him much at first either. I remember being in his house and really almost hating him. It’s funny now. Almost like another me, in another time. It’s almost cloudy now. I feel stupid for thinking it.”

“It’s your life,” Roberto said. “I’ll always be your friend.” He finished his dinner, and that was the last time they’d eaten together. He checked in on her during her shifts sometimes, but the conversations were usually short. She’d either bring up Blue Fire or Thadius, and both topics seemed to remind Roberto that he had to be up early for his shift or that he’d forgotten to do something or another somewhere else.

So, they drifted apart. And Orli found herself constantly alone. Thadius never came to see her. Not once since he’d been on the ship had he initiated contact. He spent his time in the company of the conduit and the other mage, and they’d even made some friends amongst the crew, the Prosperion blanks mainly, but a few fleet folks too, fleet blanks, something Thadius would never have done before. Exile had a way of changing one’s attitudes apparently. They played cards and drank in the brief moments between their shifts. Orli had heard a rumor that Thadius had slept with a petty officer his second night on the ship, but of course she dismissed that as jealousy on the part of whoever had started it. He would never do that to her, of that she was sure. He was of noble blood, a gentleman. And, of course, he loved her.

But he definitely wouldn’t listen to her about enchanting the missiles, and it was her futile hope that if she kept appealing to him, at some point his love for her would win out. If she couldn’t stop him from enchanting them, perhaps she could stop him from maintaining the enchantment on the trip to Blue Fire’s world, to Goldilocks. She still had nearly a week and a half to convince him—to convince them all—before they destroyed that helpless world. It didn’t take much to keep the anti-magic enchantment “charged” with mana, the conduit had said, but if neglected for long, the magic would dissipate. She could get Thadius to let that happen when he was on watch.

Once the conduit was gone, and the O-class mage they’d brought in to help, Thadius could let down the cool façade he’d put on since coming aboard. She was sure that’s all it was. An act. Augmented by homesickness, perhaps, and anger. A sense of betrayal that the Queen had accused him of such heinous acts. Some said he’d kidnapped her. Or at least the elf had told the Queen as much. Orli was convinced the Queen privately believed it too, though she hadn’t said so to the admiral or Captain Asad. Orli knew her father believed that it was true. And Altin. None of them had listened to her, no one had believed. Everyone had changed. It was as if she were living in some twisted, alternate reality, and everyone had turned, or was turning, their backs on her.

The loss of Blue Fire made it so much worse. The most incredible being, the most massive presence she’d ever experienced in her life, a presence almost divine, and now she, too, was gone. Leaving Orli feeling so completely alone.

But at least she had Thadius.

And she still had eleven days. Eleven days to stop an unmitigated travesty.

Chapter 76

A
ltin lay on a small cot near the window of Tytamon’s study. He still couldn’t bring himself to go up to Tytamon’s sitting room, much less his bedchamber on the top floor, not even way out here amongst the stars, and despite the fact the guest room he’d been using for himself at Calico Castle was now many of the fleet’s light years away. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. It wasn’t right. It felt too intimate. A violation. It wasn’t his to take.

It was his, of course. He knew it was. Legally. But somehow
legally
really didn’t mean anything that mattered. What mattered was what was in his heart, what his mind believed. And he still didn’t want to believe that these things were “his.” They were not. They belonged to Tytamon and represented almost a thousand years of accumulated effort. Time and passion and curiosity. Genius. Genius that Altin knew he would never be capable of. He felt far too small in comparison. Unworthy. And it wasn’t that he was only a Seven to Tytamon’s Eight. That was none of it, or at least only the tiniest fraction.

He felt like his presence might somehow pollute the memory of the great man. Dilute something that he had done, some great work of genius absently tidied up or organized out of existence, knocked off the brink of discovery as Altin packed things up to make room for himself. Altin could not guess what great bits of learning might be buried in all these things around him. He feared to lose them, whatever they were. Feared to not recognize them at all. The upper rooms emotional, the lower, purely mind. Both felt taboo.

He rose and strode to the window, looking out into the empty space beyond. He wondered what Tytamon would want him to do. Perhaps an inventory at least. Someday, when he could bear to do it. At least a chronicle of it all before storing it away. Burying it beneath Calico Castle until one day, maybe hundreds of years from now, Altin came across the need for some bit of it, the day when, in some tiny way, he began to live up to the least measure of his mentor, the day he finally caught up to but one question of the many Tytamon had asked.

He turned back into the room. He would write a history, too, he thought. A fitting biography. Altin knew that he should be the one to do it, not some random historian looking to make a name. It should be written by someone who cared, someone who knew the man firsthand, someone who had seen into his heart. When the time was right, he would set down the record of Tytamon’s deeds. Go through his private papers in quest of his story, an adventure into the past that would surely yield much that Altin didn’t know. He’d barely known the man, barely been an adult long enough to glimpse who his mentor was. But he would learn. Eventually.

He gazed wistfully into the clutter for a time, then returned to the view of the endless night beyond the narrow window. The firmament. The vast emptiness like his heart. If he went to the window opposite this one, he would see something else. A sun and a band of icy rocks. A solar system. The place where Orli’s Blue Fire was supposed to be. The Hostile system.

It was his fifth night out here, the exact spot where he and Orli had been—in what now seemed centuries ago. He spent his days lying on the cot dreaming in any way he could, trying to dream in every way and with every bit of what he’d gathered from Orli’s dreams and from Orli herself. He’d burned candles, cooked food, sprayed perfume, opened wine, brought fresh-cut grass. He’d even brought a bucket of manure from Calico Castle’s stables hoping that smell might do the trick. He’d been back and forth between the tower and Calico Castle twenty times in the course of the week trying every possible scent, stench and aroma he could think of but, still, nothing. Not the least peep from Orli’s Blue Fire. Not even a vision of it in a dream.

He knew that Orli had used the Liquefying Stone, or at least that she’d held it in her hands, and now, five days later, he was certain it was the key. Because if it wasn’t, then there was no key. Or at least there was no key he had access to. He certainly couldn’t find anything else in any of the divination books. And the note he’d gotten from Orli yesterday, tied to the back of a homing lizard, had given him a description of the death of Blue Fire’s mate that didn’t help him in any way. He’d hoped somehow holding that answer in his head would make a difference, that it would work like bait to draw Blue Fire to him somehow, reach out to her sense of loss and need. But it hadn’t. The simple truth was, he had completely failed. Not even the type of failure from which one hopes to learn something, anything, a scrap of insight to help him move forward. He had nothing.

Which is why, despite how much he dreaded what it was ultimately going to cost, he was genuinely happy when he finally got the message from Klovis that he should return to the temple of Anvilwrath. It was a simple note, appearing above his head written in a whiff of smoke. “The ceremony is ready.” He wasted no time in smashing the fast-cast amulet he had made.

Upon his return to the temple, he was escorted to a chamber far below—he counted twenty-five flights of stairs, always in increments of five when it came to Anvilwrath—and stepped out into a vast chamber that appeared as if it had been hewn inside a great block of black marble. Gold veins snaked through it like threads, picking up the flicker of firelight from torches in iron sconces fixed to the walls and from tall brass braziers that burned around the outer edge of a large circular pit at the center of the massive space. The flickers seemed to chase each other like sparks, running up the veins of the walls and into the ceiling where they joined others or simply faded away. Altin felt as if he were in some great golden net floating in a starless night, the shimmering strands the only thing preventing him from falling through into the black forever of an abyss.

The pit was five steps deep, concentric rings, and standing on the center of these, no more than a pace apart, were twenty-four priests, all wearing the rust-hued robes of Anvilwrath. Rust is the shade of tarnished iron, which is metal in need of care, of absolution and the purification of work.

Shortly after Altin came into the chamber, High Priestess Maul met him, sending Klovis to take her place in the circle of priests around the pit, making her the twenty-fifth.

“Sir Altin,” said Maul, eschewing any sort of pleasantries, “you must disrobe and go lay yourself in the center of the pool.”

“I what?”

“Disrobe and go lie in the center of the pool, there.” The high priestess pointed to make it completely clear.

“That’s what I thought you said.”

He looked past the circled priests into the pit. “What is in there that makes you call it a pool?”

“You will be floated in hkalamate, and we will deliver your spirit to the blue sun.”

Altin took a step back as he considered making a run for it. He’d never heard of
hkalamate
before, but he was fairly certain he had no interest in having his spirit delivered anywhere.

Two huge warrior-priests emerged in the opening behind him, each with a massive two-handed maul large enough to bash in the sturdiest bascinet. Altin was helmetless and found himself acutely aware, just then, of the flimsy nature of his skull.

“Maybe you could start by explaining this to me first,” he said, fear rising and goose-prickling his flesh.

“It has already begun,” the high priestess said.

He followed her eyes back to the stairs where the priests had gone to their knees. Each had taken the hands of the priests to either side, and they’d all begun to hum.

“Listen, I know we agreed to do this, but you were fairly stingy with the details. What do you mean you’re going to deliver my spirit? You’re not going to … to disconnect my soul or something, are you?”

“You don’t believe you have a soul. You have said as much a thousand times before. Surely you have no fear for such a thing.”

“I never said that. I said I don’t believe in the gods.” He blanched as soon as he said it and tried to save it by adding, “Or at least not that much.”

“This prayer does not require that you be awake.” Her expression became one of stone. “You can disrobe and lay yourself there, in the center of the pool, or I can have it done for you. The choice is yours.”

Altin glanced over his shoulder at the two behemoths with the war hammers. He thought he could probably take them if he had to but not with the high priestess there. Gods only knew what she was capable of. Literally.