Rift in the Races (95 page)

“Fine,” he said.

He was glad for the partial concealment of the flickering darkness as he stepped out of the puddle of his discarded robes. He was self-conscious beyond anything he’d ever felt with Doctor Leopold or Doctor Singh, and his hands went reflexively to cover his most private parts.

The high priestess, oblivious to his discomfiture, prodded him in the back, directing him toward the pit with the long iron rod she’d pulled from her belt.

He had to step over the outstretched arms of two priests, which made him even more self-aware as he swung his backside near to one of them while passing in between. He could feel the heat of a blush wash over his entire body as he stepped down into the pit.

The floor of the pit was dry and dark, made of the same black marble as all the rest. There was no residue or any textural difference to give him some hint of what hkalamate was or what it was going to do.

“Lie down,” ordered the high priestess.

Altin complied. The stone was surprisingly warm. He had that to be grateful for.

He stretched out, supine, hands still cupping his privates, and trembled despite the comfortable temperature of the stone.

“Fan yourself,” the Maul demanded. At first he thought she meant that he should wave a hand at himself to create a cooling wind, but somehow he knew immediately that’s not what she meant. She followed with, “This is no place for modesty, Sir Altin. You must make yourself as open as you can be. You must be vulnerable.”

Oh, I’m vulnerable
, he thought, but he kept it to himself. He spread his feet out some and put one arm out to his side.

“Sir Altin, please. Make yourself as wide as possible, a target. You are wasting precious time.”

He lifted his head and tried to find her from the direction of her voice. She’d climbed atop a large stone block, an altar perhaps, several paces back from the edge of the hkalamate pool. It was made of the same stone from which the chamber had been cut, which is why he hadn’t noticed it before. It blended perfectly with the rest of the space and made it look as if the high priestess floated in the air.

“What do you mean
target
?” he asked. He wasn’t fond of that choice of words.

Altin could hear the elevated pitch of his voice and suddenly realized how he must sound. The Galactic Mage, terrified of a priests’ ceremony, terrified of the very sort of thing he’d always cast aspersions on. His fear gave testament to some betrayal of personal belief. What did he have to fear if there was nothing to fear?

It was still magic, he tried to tell himself. Just magic.

He lay his head back down. She hadn’t answered him anyway.

It was just magic. He’d done enough things to himself magically. He’d been teleported by others too. Healed. Many things. It was just magic. Nothing more. He spread himself out as High Priestess Maul had asked. He tried not to think about how many others were in the room with him.

The hkalamate came from small holes at the base of the lowest stair. It hissed out in a black fog that curled like smoke and blotted out the golden veins. It came like a breath upon him, cool, odorless, and covered him completely until the blackness of it blocked out the rest of the room. Darkness shrouded in darkness.

All he could hear was the humming of the priests around him. He forgot about his nakedness.

“Open your mind, Sir Altin Meade. Open yourself to her, to the spirit of the blue sun you seek.” The high priestess’ voice came through the hkalamate cloud as if she were everywhere. He could no longer determine where she was.

He could no longer feel the floor beneath his back, the hard press of it now absent against his shoulders, buttocks and legs.

He felt as if he were floating.

“Open up, Altin Meade,” she said again. She was impatient.

He felt himself stiffening instead. Tightening up. Thinking thoughts too rapidly, caught up in a whirlwind of his own internal voice.

“Breathe, Sir Altin,” commanded the Maul from beyond the death-black fog. “You have to breathe.”

He hadn’t even realized he’d stopped. No wonder the cloud had seemed odorless.

He pulled in a lungful of the fog and found it smelled like … everything. In his expectation of smoke, he smelled that first. Then cut grass. Then Kettle’s bread. Every thought he had of smell immediately came true.

He hadn’t told them about the smells.

They must have pulled it from his mind, found it with their wicked divination spells.

He began to feel drowsy, and soon after, he was asleep. Or at least he thought he was asleep, for surely he was dreaming. Or else he was dreaming still, had been dreaming all along. Perhaps he was still in Tytamon’s tower.

Of course. That was it. He was still in Tytamon’s tower dreaming. Except Tytamon’s tower now had its own set of battlements. He was up on them. Dreaming. He held the Liquefying Stone too. He was playing with a ball, a strange one with black and white spots. Kicking it. With other children. Tytamon was yelling for him to chase down another boy who had knocked him down. He could smell the cut grass again. He got up to chase the boy, but there was a great hole opening across the field. It grew and grew until it took up all of space, as if the whole universe were yawning. But the hole shaped itself with the pink aura of Blue Fire, the planet Orli loved.

Orli Love
.

It was a thought. Or so he thought. It was so hard to think in this dream.

Orli Love
. It came again. Just that.

He could see his own face somehow. He saw his face and felt love for it. It was love. For him. It was love of him.

Orli Love
.

She was naming him. Greeting him. Slowly it began to dawn on him as he watched, as he gazed into the black circle. Blue Fire knew him. He was Orli Love.

Orli Love
, he repeated back. He sent it back. Reflected it, as he might with Taot, returning it with a sense of acknowledgement.
I am Orli Love
. He couldn’t help that the next thought came too.
I used to be
.

Sorrow filled him then, and he was consumed by it with such violence that for a moment he could only wish for death. So much agony. Such a great loss.

Orli Love. Betrayed.

He was betrayed, yes. He knew he was. He felt the loss. Let her know he felt it.

He felt his lungs begin to burn. A dim sense somewhere in him thought that the hkalamate was damaging him. It was not. This was sulfur gas. It was acidity. It was a thousand gasses he could not name.

Then he knew. Poison, he thought. It was poison.

He knew that he was right.

Orli Love. Poison
. It was followed by the image of Thadius.

He responded to that image exactly as Blue Fire did, and the rage and hatred that filled them revealed that the two of them were in perfect harmony. A bond. A bond of hate.

He saw her then, Orli, his beautiful Orli’s face, smiling at him as she so often had before. He saw the shine of her adoration bright and radiant, heard the breathy quality of her voice. The giggle like a sweet mountain brook.

Altin Love
.

Yes, she was Altin Love. She would always be Altin Love. He would die and she would still be Altin Love, the one he loved.

More hate filled him, and he received it back unexpectedly. Hate for Altin Love. And betrayal.

He fought against it. Tried to convey the sense of “No.” There could never be hate for Altin Love. Never.
Orli Love hates hate for Altin Love
.

Betrayal. Truth that is not truth.

How could he convince her that Orli had never lied?

He conjured an image of himself. Then of others. Of Tytamon. Of Orli and Kettle and Captain Asad. He conjured them all, every human he could think of assembled in his mind. Aderbury, Roberto, Pernie, Peppercorn and the Queen. Doctor Leopold and Doctor Singh. Captains and generals and students from the university. Anyone he could think of by face or by name. Humans, he tried to convey.
Us. All of us
.

But she already seemed to know.

He tried to focus on only one human then. The image of Thadius.
Hate and betrayal
, he tried to say with the feelings in his heart. He conjured Tytamon next:
love and respect, wisdom
. Kettle:
love and trust and generosity
. Captain Asad:
anger and duty, strength
. He kept at it. Cycling through everyone he knew. Attributing what he could to convey the differences. He brought Orli back every so often, thought of her the most. Thought of beauty and love. Never truth that was not truth. Never.

And then the dream was gone.

He woke, still naked, standing in a cave. The priests were gone. The humming was gone. The floor beneath him was spongy and glowing with a pale green phosphorescence not unlike what he’d seen in caves gathering spell materials. An earthy smell filled the air, mildly pungent but not unpleasant, but he was very hot, brutally so, but only for a second. Then he felt fine.

The cave ceiling was low, barely above his head, and it appeared to be made of the same stuff upon which he stood. The whole of the passage was covered in it, and a passage it had to be for it curved around gentle bends both left and right.

He thought he must still be dreaming, but he had no sense of Blue Fire now. He bit down on his lower lip hard enough to be convinced this was reality. Or, if it was a dream, it was a much more tangible one than the one he’d just been in. He could taste the blood. He was sure he couldn’t have done that in the dream of a moment ago.

After prodding at the walls for a few moments, sniffing at the phosphorescent substance covering them, he decided to investigate. He started off down the direction he’d been facing when he appeared.

The corridor wound lazily from side to side, like some hopelessly lost creature had tunneled about in search of something, but it was otherwise featureless. He followed it where it chose to go until, at length—how much length Altin had no way to tell—he emerged into a wide chamber roughly twenty paces across, though not shaped with anything resembling symmetry. Several passages exited from it. The ceiling was lower in places moving across the space, so low that he would have to duck if he tried to cross certain parts of it.

He noticed a few patches in the wall to one side where the green glowing substance disappeared. He went to the nearest one and, stooping, reached out and touched it tentatively. It was cool to the touch, at least cooler than the glowing sponge material. It was stone as near as he could tell. Hard, marginally rough. It didn’t glow.

A sound from behind him spun him on his heels, a sticky sound, like something rolling wetly down the corridor on the opposite side of the chamber.

A moment later a cylindrical object rolled into the room, like a log that’s been sent down a gentle slope, or perhaps a rolling pin over tacky dough. It was roughly as half as wide as Altin was tall and no higher off the ground than Altin’s knees. It looked as if it were made from the same glowing greenish stuff that the rest of the cave was made of. Or perhaps, given the patches of stone, it would have been more accurate to think of it as what was lining the surface of the cave. Altin could not be sure.

The spongy cylinder rolled right up to where Altin stood and bloated some at the center, a medial swelling as if blown by a glassblower’s pipe. A tendril grew from the bulge, twisting up toward Altin’s hand like a growth of vine, then gently wrapped around Altin’s wrist. The cylinder then rolled back out in the direction from which it had come. The tendril tugged lightly at him a few times, and then it began to stretch as the cylinder moved farther away.

It obviously wanted Altin to follow.

So he did.

He quickly caught up to the cylinder and let it guide him through a long maze of corridors. Most were lined with the glowing substance, but some were entirely of rock, the pale green stuff giving way completely in places, especially when the caves opened up into vast caverns. Twice the squishy rolling oddity led him along ledges that ran the length of sheer rock faces, the walls of caverns too vast to venture guessing at depth or breadth. The ledges were narrow, and small rocks gave way beneath his feet, falling away into vacuous blackness, never making another sound beyond that first crumbling release. He made a point of not looking down. Looking up was little better. So he followed, kept his eyes locked on the little cylinder which had shortened up its length and grown in height proportionately, making more of a tall, flat wheel of itself to accommodate those most narrow portions of the trail. Altin used the contemplation of these shifting feats as a distraction, an exercise to keep his mind occupied on something other than the precipitous fall that awaited his first misstep. He wondered if the cylinder and the tendril would be capable of catching him if he did fall.

The whole while, the tendril itself was a curiosity of its own. It never became too tight nor tried to tether him too close, and somehow the cylinder managed to keep itself at exactly the same distance from him at all times. No matter how many revolutions the cylinder made, no matter how tall and narrow or short and wide it got, the tendril itself never seemed as if it were going to wind up or wind out. It was as if it were floating on the surface of the cylinder, outside of or beyond the rotations that moved the main body along. A disembodied bit of glowing yarn attached to the whole of it in the way of a leaf upon a pond.