Rift in the Races (96 page)

Such were the things Altin thought as he moved along. That and an endless sense of wonderment. And eventually fatigue. He had no way to tell time, so all he had was the gauge of his feet growing tired and the fact that he had to keep moving his jaw back and forth to release the pressure in his ears. Wherever they were going, they were definitely going down. It wasn’t that he couldn’t detect the down-slopes, but it certainly seemed as if they did a fair amount of climbing, too, which confused him. He gave up trying to keep track.

The air grew warmer as they descended, and Altin often caught whiffs of sulfur and other foul gasses, felt blasts of heat, but every time he did, every time he coughed or any time the least drop of sweat appeared upon his brow, he was instantly cool again, and the air became perfectly clean.

He slowly realized that someone was doing it for him. And he was pretty sure he knew who.

It was just as he was coming to this opinion that the little cylinder rounded a bend and rolled into a very low opening that required it to lengthen itself like some long, fat worm. It pulsed and wriggled its way through. Altin had to get down on his hands and knees and crawl in after it.

The spongy material beneath him ended halfway through the small crawlspace, and he scraped his knees wickedly against the rough stone as he crawled through the second half. But finally he came out the other end, which is where he found Blue Fire waiting for him.

Chapter 77

H
e was in a vast cavern, bigger than any he’d yet seen, or at least bigger than those in which his imagination had had to shape and fathom scale by the potential looming beyond landscapes of unknowable depth and darkness. This place was the opposite in that. Dark depths became light depths, with the cavern’s every surface alight with a golden glow, bright but not overwhelming, like a piece of amber held up to a torch or candles seen through beer. The glow was everywhere, above him, below him, on every surface he could see. He stood on a ledge that would afford him five steps in any direction but no more; the sixth would send him falling into the golden void beneath, a depth that fell away for as far as he could discern, the depth of that glow as unknowable as darkness had been in other places along the way. Above him the distance was the same. Unassailable. Beautiful.

He went to the nearest wall to investigate the light, for there was something familiar about its source. Yellow crystals studded it completely, and it was from these that the glow came. They covered every bit of it, every surface Altin could see, poking out in little clumps and clusters like tiny pyramids, flowering islands of luminous citrine. It took him no longer to realize what it was than it would have taken him to recognize a dearest friend.

The whole cavern was filled with Liquefying Stone. All of it. And it was not ugly anymore.

This was Blue Fire.

Happiness filled him as he realized where he was. And who she was. What she was. A simple joy poured into him as if he were a vessel that could contain an ocean of happiness. He realized right away that it was happiness from outside of him. It was her happiness. Her joy. The joy of Blue Fire. Joy for the presence of Orli Love.

He hadn’t felt joy from her in the hkalamate dream. He hadn’t felt joy in the dream he’d caught in his divination spell. He was glad to know she knew joy sometimes.

Afraid of doing too much, even thinking, while standing within such a massive quantity of Liquefying Stone, he simply spoke. “I’m glad to know you have happiness.”

He felt the gladness in him swell.

He saw, whether before his eyes or in his mind he was not sure, a long, flat expanse of brown stone, and he knew, as if in a dream, that it was hot. Then rain came and fell upon it. He could smell the dust stirred up as the drops pattered down. He knew the water cooled the heat. The brown stone was contented by the rain. Content. For now. But the heat would return when the rain went away.

Orli Love. Rain
.

He smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “I am glad to be here with you too.”

He looked around the space, awed by its scale and bright magnificence. It seemed to drip with liquid gold, like crystallized honey backlit by a hundred million oil lamps.

“You are beautiful,” he said, still unwilling to try pushing thoughts. He wanted to see if she could understand his words. Or pick their meaning from his mind.

He felt contentment again.

“So where are you?” he asked.

He saw the chamber of golden stones in his mind. It was like an echo of what his eyes were already putting into his head. He was made to understand that she was there.

“But where?” He tried to think of the space in a way that was aware of its great size.

He saw the chamber again.
Size of Blue Fire. Blue Fire
.

Frowning, he confirmed what he thought he understood. “You are the room?”

Truth
.

“But you aren’t blue.” At first it was a thought, but he spoke it aloud. He clarified. “You are … golden fire. Yellow fire.”

Yellow Fire, Blue Fire Love.
His mind filled with the vision of a distant star. A blue star. And then it was gone. The sky black, the image filled by a torrential sense of absence. Of nothing. An awesome, brutal cessation
. Yellow Fire, Blue Fire.

Orli had mentioned something about that. Something about the nearest star, the blue one having had a planet in its system that had once been able to support life but had somehow moved too close to the sun and been destroyed in a flare. Something else, too, something about hiding behind a planet for several hundred million years. Altin tried to remember it all, but he was still baffled by most of the Earth people’s astronomical learning.

“I’m sorry about your mate,” he said. That much he understood. “Orli—. Altin Love told me what happened.”

Anger. Hate. Images of humans ripping up a world.
Andalians
, Altin thought, for he’d never seen such imagery, though some of it reminded him of the pictures Orli had shown him of her home world, the massive buildings reaching up into the sky. Machines moving about everywhere.

“No,” he said. He tried to fill the space of his mind with as much sense of honesty as he could, daring to feel, though not daring to reach for mana to do it. An internal appeal. “No. They did not destroy Blue Fire. It was an accident. His world moved too close to the sun when it came out of hiding. The moon, I mean. It burned up.” His own lack of understanding undermined his ability to properly convey what he meant, but he knew it had to be true. Orli would not lie to him.

He saw then an image of Thadius.
Poison
.
Altin Love. Truth that is not truth. Love that dies. Poison
. The image changed to Orli, but it was as if she stood in a cloud of sickly brown gas.

Grief and mourning. And hate. Hatred of humans.
Betrayal
.

He saw an explosion, a huge white flash that made him stagger back, and the shape of a smoky plume rising into the air that formed a bulbous top like some great tree or a mushroom of enormous size. An excruciating pain lanced through his temple as if he’d been stabbed. He dropped to a knee, which added the bite of several sharp crystals of Liquefying Stones to his list of minor medical complaints.

“Please, stop,” he gasped, clutching at his head.

Humans
. He saw them all. The same ones he’d conjured for her in the black fog of the hkalamate dream. The representation of all humanity, made up of faces that he knew.
Betrayal
, she sent to him.
Death
.

“No. Not all of us. Only some. They don’t understand. They don’t believe.” He was frustrated by how difficult it was to communicate. “Many think that Blue Fire is truth that is not truth. They think that Blue Fire is
not
.” He tried to think of living things; he thought of mice and grass and birds. He thought of Taot.
Life
, he thought. “They don’t think you are … that.”
Alive
.

She sent him an image of a stone. A bit of the dark rock from which the caves he’d come through were cut. It was a question.

“Yes. They think you are stone.” He tried to convey a sense of truth to that, but then he realized it wasn’t quite true either. They thought of the Hostiles as people somehow. Not humans, but enemies. He tried to add a sense of enmity to how he thought about the image of the rock. “A rock that hates humans,” he said. “They think you hate humans.”

Hate
. She sent back hate. She did hate humans. That was truth.

“But we didn’t kill your mate.”

Images of Andalians carving out great mines, clearing jungles and molding molten metals into things. Huge things that were used to rip up more earth. It never ended.
Pain and death
.

“Our planets aren’t alive.”

He saw the Great Sandfalls in the Sandsea Desert.

“I don’t know what that means.”

Hope
. Then came great sorrow.

He was growing increasingly frustrated. Anger seeded itself in the pit of his stomach.

“We didn’t kill your mate. You need to stop killing our people. We are like you. We are alive. We feel sorrow. We feel love. We also feel hate. You must stop killing us. My people are going to come. They are coming. Right now, they come to kill you with their hate. You must stop. We must make peace before it is too late.” How could he possibly convey all of that in images?

He thought about the meadows outside of Calico Castle, the green grass shimmering, swaying in a gentle breeze made warm by a noontime sun. The scent of the forest blew along with it. He imagined himself lying in the grass, watching clouds blow by, their shadows scuttling along the ground, washing him with their cool gray passing. He imagined Blue Fire there with him. Just the sense of her. Lying there next to him in the grass. He took a deep breath and let the contented essence of that moment fill him.
Peace
, he thought at her. “Peace,” he said aloud. “No hate. No betrayal.”

For a moment he felt the sense of that peace reflected back at him. She understood. But then came the searing pain in his head again. The image of the mushroom cloud and the blinding light. He also saw a line of Hostiles snapping up the missiles that came from Earth ships and then carrying them off into the sun. Sadness and mourning.

He saw the fleet. All of them. Streaking through space. He knew instinctively that they were coming here, coming now. Right now. Coming to kill her. And he knew they could do it this time. They would send a thousand of their missiles at her, all enchanted with anti-magic by
his
people, and, as they had so proudly proclaimed, they would fill her skies with dust so thick it would blot out the sun, killing everything. They’d even said that someday, once life was gone, the clouds of ash and dust would go away and then the very air would burn. It would burn until there was nothing left but dead rock. Forever.

He tried to convey that threat to her. He questioned it, really. Unwilling in the deepest parts of himself to believe it was even possible, even knowing that it was. Could that kill her? Would she die? Could she?

He saw the image of the cavern again, all in its luminous golden light.
Blue Fire
, she sent. But the image began to expand, growing wider, the golden light diminishing into a field of darkness that expanded until the golden chamber of Blue Fire was barely but a pinpoint of light, and then, briefly, it was gone, leaving only darkness. The vision grew again, and the blackness gave way to green and gray. He could see land, a continent, its green earth and silvery rivers, dark patches where forests grew. But still the expansion grew, the land shrinking, ringed by blue that grew wider and wider until it revealed itself to be the sea around the planet’s northern pole. That too faded away. Soon his vision was filled with the whole planet, much as Prosperion had appeared during his visits to Luria.

Blue Fire. All.

She was all of it. He knew then that the dust layer would kill her. She needed the planet to function in just the same way he needed all his organs to work. She could die, just as her mate had died.

The image vanished, and he was once more simply standing on the ledge.

He saw the ships of the fleet again, knew they were coming, knew they were close. He also knew in that moment that he had to help her fend them off. He had to buy her time so that he could go explain. Or perhaps so that she could explain. That would be better. Let Blue Fire speak for herself. If she could speak to him, if she could speak to Orli, she could speak to all of them.

“You must tell them,” he said, trying his best to feel the essence of his words out into the space around him. “You have to find them, like you found me. You have to find them and talk to them. Show them you understand. Show them you don’t want to hurt us anymore.”