Rift in the Races (98 page)

The second guard, the younger of the two, took in Altin’s nudity then looked past Altin, seeking someone else. “Coming or going, sir?” he said, barely holding back a guffaw. The older guard’s elbow caught him so hard in the throat he nearly choked. He doubled over, clutching at his neck, coughing and gasping.

“Forgive him, my lord, for he is a simpleton and his mother was a whore.”

Altin grinned, sheepish, but mainly amused. “It’s fine. I’d probably have wondered the same thing.”

The older guard continued to stand at attention, his eyes locked straight ahead. He fumbled down and grasped a handful of gray tabard at his side and dragged the youth to attention as well.

Altin realized they were waiting for him to dismiss them. “Carry on,” he said and waited for them to pass.

He heard the older guard hiss at the young one as they rounded the bend, “What’s the matter with you? You want to get us blown to stew?”

Altin dressed quickly, fearing that the temple would be closed for the night, but his fears were warrantless. When he arrived, the temple glowed brightly in the darkness. Its fluted columns stood as black stripes against the light of the fires that burned behind them, the glow coming around them giving each a copper-lined effect, which was enhanced by enchantments cast upon the stone. Deeper inside, the gigantic statue of Anvilwrath seemed to churn the air with his five arms set to motion by the flicker of the fires, the long shadows of his limbs moving about on the marble walls like the phantoms of his might.

Altin looked up the twenty-five steps and had no patience for the hammer ritual of the lowest ones. But he also didn’t want to incite the very people he needed most. So he spent the time, going through the motions, muttering the words, and eventually made it to the top.

Klovis was waiting for him.

“The Maul is expecting you,” she said as she stepped out from the shadows of the nearest column. “We must hurry.”

Altin trotted after the priestess, who led him swiftly through the maze of corridors that took them to the high priestess’ outer offices. He passed through the unornamented door and found her waiting for him as she had been only a few short—but such long-seeming—days ago.

She said nothing, only pointed at the chair with a movement of her head. An acolyte bearing an iron tray offered him a pint of thick dark ale, which he took, suddenly aware of a monstrous thirst and the hunger gnawing in his guts. The ale would do for both. She waited for him to drink, expectant but patient with every silent breath. Finally the ale was gone and, soon after, the acolyte.

“I met her,” he said at last, pausing to wipe brown foam from his upper lip. “I met Blue Fire. I saw right into her heart. She is afraid of the Earth weapons. They can kill her, and she knows it to be true. She also knows, or at least I think she does, that we did not kill her mate. None of us. No humans.”

He hadn’t been forthcoming about Orli’s note prior to the hkalamate pit, and he wasn’t sure if they’d figured it out with the divination spells that he was certain they’d been casting on and about him ever since. So he told her, just in case. He told her everything he knew of it, from the death of the original Blue Fire in a sun flare, to Blue Fire’s belief that it had been humanity that had done it all.

She hadn’t known about that. She took it all in, only nodding, never moving her gaze from Altin’s as he spoke, not the least twitch of the mouth, no impatient movement of hands, no shifting in her chair. Absolute focus until he was done. She waited for at least fifty heartbeats after he’d stopped talking before she finally spoke. “So you are certain that the men from Earth did not harm her husband?” The question came with no expressions of incredulity, no questions to determine Altin’s veracity. Just that. Did they do it?

“Orli wouldn’t lie, despite how it looks right now between her and Thadius. They are innocent. Earth and Andalia, I mean.”

“She’s been drugged,” the high priestess told him after a moment of watching him. “Siren’s blood and extract of Forget-Me-Not.”

Altin looked confused. “Blue Fire?”

“Miss Pewter. I told you we would help you. And we have. Miss Pewter has been given an elixir of love.”

“An elixir of love?” Altin couldn’t believe a woman of the Maul’s station had just said something that ridiculous out loud. Everyone knew that love potions only worked in the fantasies of adolescent boys and fat men, but the high priestess was looking at him as if it were a fact. “Siren’s blood potions are the stuff of myths and children’s stories,” he said.

“As are celestial beings with power large as the universe. You have said as much on more than one occasion, and yet here we are discussing the nature of your recent experience.” Her expression was neither cynical nor snide.

Altin’s mind raced as he considered it. It was possible, he supposed. Just highly unlikely. Thadius did have a penchant for the rare and seemingly impossible. And Altin did have a tamed dragon upon which he could fly. And he’d gone to space. All of which was supposed to be impossible too.

She saw the absent expression on his face and drew him back into the room. “Sir Altin, let us return to the subject of Blue Fire. I only brought Miss Pewter up because, well, you mentioned her, and I wanted you to know we are doing our part. I know how much she means to you. We will help you with the issue, if there is help to be had, after we figure out how to stop the colossal blasphemy of your Earth friends.” She pronounced the last part of it as a sentence, as if she’d come to the same conclusion Blue Fire had. Except that, in Altin’s mind, it was even more dangerous, because he had the dawning suspicion that the priests thought Blue Fire was a deity.

“She’s not a goddess,” he said. “She’s something else. Like us. She’s alive. But different. A living world. Or perhaps, part of a world that lives would be more accurate. But definitely not a goddess.”

“
Definitely
, Sir Altin? How can you conclude such a thing? How would you know a goddess if you saw one?”

“She would have told me so,” he said, although he was unsatisfied with the response the moment it came out. “I would have sensed it. Besides, she is afraid. She’s afraid for her life. And her mate was killed. Gods are immortal.”

“Her mate may not have been a god. They joined with mortals frequently in ancient times.”

He couldn’t decide if she believed him or was just pressing him for what he took for fact.

“I just didn’t get the sense that she was,” he said. “I won’t argue it with you. Believe what you want. She is in danger, and we have to save her, goddess or not. She’s willing to speak to you.”

That arched a pious eyebrow.

“She is,” Altin pressed. “She needs you to convince the Queen to call off the attack, to stop the ships from launching those missiles. We must act fast or it will be too late. She can’t defend herself against them now. Not at all.”

Silently, she regarded him for some time. He was fairly certain she was conferring with her diviners, the hidden priests that he knew were looking into this room and perhaps into his mind. He didn’t know what was possible anymore.

“There’s something you aren’t telling me,” she said at length.

“No, that’s everything, I swear.”

“What about the yellow stone.”

Confusion collapsed his brow for a moment but quickly passed. “Oh, yes. That.” He didn’t want to say anything about the green sphere he’d been given, and the fact that the image of it flickered in his mind’s eye came as an irritant. He quickly pushed it away, shaping it into the more familiar Liquefying Stone. “She’s made of it,” he said. “Or at least, the cavern that I believe is her is filled with it. It’s everywhere, studding every wall, the ceiling, the floor. More of them than you could possibly count. Or else one giant one. I don’t know if it makes any difference.”

Her lips twisted a little at that, and he could tell she knew he’d still left something out, but it was close enough to truth that it must have slipped past the diviners secreted behind the walls.

“Did she tell you what she wished to say to us?”

“She just wants you to believe.”

“We already believe. We’ve believed for a thousand years.”

He rolled his eyes. “Not that,” he said. He wanted to go take her by the shoulders and shake her, dislodge her from her place of ancient certainty and bring her tumbling into the reality of now. He calmed himself and started again. “Shape it how you will. But you have to go let her find you. She is seeking you in the hkalamate fog. I told her to look for you, so you could know. So you could approach the Queen with confidence and with absolute truth. I only hope that, if you decide she is not a goddess, you will still agree to help.”

She stood and came to where Altin sat.

“Pride and vanity, Sir Altin, are what have brought us to this pass. The arrogance of a Queen who grows bored in the autumn of her victories, the arrogance of your friends from Earth who would destroy something they know nothing about and the arrogance of all of humanity for thinking they belong out amongst the stars.” She leaned down and put her hands on the arms of his chair and leaned down close to him. “And you, Sir Altin Meade, are the tool of that arrogance on Prosperion, the very knife that cut open the skies and handed their secrets to a monarch who now rides to new fields of glory to feed an aging vanity. Goddess or not, Sir Altin, if Blue Fire dies, her death belongs to you.”

“Me?” he wanted to protest. He thought about pushing her away. He even considered a head-butt to get himself some space, but his outrage flashed and died on his lips before the first utterance. She was right.

Everything she said was true. Blue Fire would have never been in danger had he stayed at home. He would never have found the fleet, and they would never have made it to Prosperion. They would never have gotten Peppercorn’s anti-magic spell.

They would have died out there instead. The Hostiles would have killed them.

Orli would be dead.

The high priestess straightened herself and watched him work through it with an expression barely short of disgust. Pity attenuated it enough to keep it from that, but the patient kindness of earlier was now gone. “Now it’s time to clean up your mess, young mage. You must get to work before your dawning sense of it turns into something centered on yourself again.”

“Will you seek her out?”

“Of course.”

“And speak to the Queen?”

“I will let you know when I go.”

He started to thank her but stopped. Her answer wasn’t necessarily a commitment.

She saw the look, the distrust in his eyes that shone as clearly as if he’d just written it in charcoal on the wall, so she clarified, impatience with him obvious in her tone. “Yes, Sir Altin, I will go. And you will accompany me. She is a stubborn woman. She is pious enough for a queen, but she has no love for the Church. However, you are still one of her favorite recipes. So put on your sweetest solicitor’s sauce when we arrive, and we’ll try to feed her something she will eat.”

He nodded. It was true. He wondered what the chances were of getting Her Majesty to come lie in the hkalamate pool. He tried to imagine her stripped of her armor and all the trappings of government, naked and vulnerable, even her bodyguard denied her in the room.

That did not seem likely. Not even marginally so.

“I will,” he said. “Find Blue Fire.”

The woman was obviously only waiting for him to get out. So he left. He found Klovis outside in the corridor, as usual, expecting him. She handed him a bundle that contained his robes and all his amulets folded up inside, the ones he’d left behind when Blue Fire had whisked him away … or when the priests had … however that had worked. He wanted to ask but decided it didn’t matter anyway.

He needed to get to Orli and tell her what he’d learned. And, for whatever it was worth, he needed to try to get her people to call off the attack. He could at least try to get the waterwheel turning, even if he didn’t have the current that would come with the War Queen and High Priestess Maul.

Even as he thought it, he shook his head. He could already hear Captain Asad spitting out insults. He could see the raised brows of skepticism on all the officers’ foreheads. Only Orli would believe him. And she already knew. But he had to try.

If only he could keep from blowing Thadius straight to the darkest depths of hell….

Chapter 79

A
ltin didn’t need the seeing stone on the
Aspect’s
bridge to find the place on the ship. He was familiar enough with it to see his way straight to it. He wasn’t sure if Orli would be there or elsewhere on the ship, but it was the first place he thought to look. She was there, working the same communications panel she had been the first time he’d laid eyes on her. She was just as beautiful then as now, her hair so bright and shimmering, her features perfectly refined, her slender fingers moving gracefully across the controls as if the finest bit of statuary had come to life, as perfect as any artist could conceive. More so.

He missed her so violently upon seeing her that he almost lost the spell, but he held on and took the moment to just enjoy watching her.

She did not smile at the man sitting next to her, a face Altin did not recognize, nor did anything the woman sitting in the captain’s chair said seem to bring her any levity. Her soft lips were unmoving, expressionless, her eyes empty and sad.