The Galactic Mage (23 page)

He gave her a short bow and a polite smile, the latter of which she warmly returned along with a pinch to his cheek that left a flour print to mask the red mark she’d put there. And just like that, his stale bread and old water days on the moon were at an end.

Once again thinking of water reminded him of his seeing stone, still being seen in the basin up in his tower. He wondered if it had finally hit the ground. He remembered to smile at Pernie who was studying him silently from beside the fire as he left, and then he went upstairs to see.

Chapter
23

T
he seeing stone, unbelievably, was still falling. Altin might have spent some time on exasperated expletives, but there was something new to see as well. The stone was beginning to glow, as if it were heating up.

He frowned down into the scrying basin and wondered what was going on. He cast the seeing spell that would bring his senses to the stone and once more found himself listening to the sound of violent, howling winds. But he could also hear the seeing stone as it hissed and scorched in the billowing mist. It fell and fell, and as it did, it grew hotter and hotter with each descending yard. And it was only a short time after Altin had rejoined it that the stone actually burst into flames as it tumbled through the endless glowing green.

The flames burned loudly and sounded like a torch held in a raging storm, and all the while the flames grew larger and brighter until at last the stone vanished with a hiss. The falling sensation in Altin’s vision stopped.

Anchored to the tumbling stone, his spell had just lost the object to which it was attached, leaving Altin to stare motionlessly into an endless expanse of green. He could still hear the winds howling, but the sense of falling was gone. He wondered what he should do. The stone had been falling for over half a day. Should he press on himself and see how much further he could go? Naotatica certainly seemed an unlikely place to have spawned a race of elves. But he wondered if perhaps he had just not gone deep enough. Perhaps he just had to finish passing through the clouds.

But what, twelve hours of falling through the clouds? Was that even reasonable to assume? If that wasn’t completely preposterous, then what did it imply? Maybe Altin had been right before. Maybe it was an entire planet made of air, green, whirling air. But the Elves weren’t ethereal things. So they really couldn’t be from here. Or else he just hadn’t gone far enough down to see. Or else the Church was wrong. He didn’t believe half of what they said anyway. Less than half. They seemed to have morality mostly right, but the stories were absurd. Naotatica was clearly not being accurately described. He groaned.

He decided to push his vision further in, and, using his newfound understanding of distance, was able to attain seeing speeds that were beyond him only a few weeks in the past. With some slight modifications to the chant that he was speaking beneath his breath, his vision was hurtling through the apparently depthless mist.

Eventually, even at this seemingly impossible speed, it took another hour and a half until the color of Naotatica finally began to shift. He still hadn’t found land, but as he traveled deeper into the planet the scenery began to change from greens to yellows and gradually to the brightest raging white. In fact, it got so bright that Altin once more had to tweak his spell as it became far too bright to see, brighter than staring into the sun. His vision continued on into the brightness for nearly another hour until he was abruptly in the dark.

At last! He’d finally found land. Or so he thought. He must have gone too far, pushed past and beneath the surface of the soil. He backed his vision out until once more he was in the light. The indescribably bright light. Somehow retracted too far.

Impatiently, he changed his chant back to accommodate a slower speed and tried once more to move downward towards the ground into which his sight had disappeared. It took a bit longer, but once more he plunged his view into total darkness, never having seen the ground’s approach.

“What the…?”

He backed out again, slowly. Total, overwhelming whiteness.

Forward, the tiniest movement, into black.

This can’t possibly be Naotatica, he told himself. Nobody could live in this much sunlight. And to think, he’d actually thought it was bright on Luria.

But then again, on Luria the brightness obviously came from the sun. Whatever this light was, it couldn’t possibly be the sun, not shining through the blanket of clouds Altin’s sight had just fallen through. Could it?

Good Mercy and her five favorite dogs. What was going on out here? Did nothing make sense in space? It wasn’t like he didn’t already think the Church’s version of reality was ridiculous, but, after what he’d seen in the last few weeks, even their stories made more sense than this. The whole thing was impossible to comprehend.

However, the one thing he did comprehend was that there were not going to be any elves waiting for him and his tower to arrive. At least not here. And if there were, they were not the kind of elves that he had any desire to meet. Any creature that could live in an atmosphere of fire capable of burning up a stone was not a creature Altin felt he needed to get to know. Taot’s acidic humor gave him troubles enough at home.

And besides, he had no evidence that such a race was even here. Like the satyrs and the Never Ending Song on Luria, the elves of Naotatica were nothing but a myth. It seemed that once again he had spent a tremendous amount of time and energy to discover absolutely nothing at all.

Why was everything out here so entirely empty, anyway? What was the point of all of these places and spaces if there wasn’t anyone to fill them up? The waste of time, effort and whatever it was down here serving as land was an outrage, and the possibility that something had created such waste insulted what little grip on anything approaching piety he might tenuously retain. He could not hear the curse words he uttered back in the tower, but he spoke them aloud just the same. This was annoying. Frankly, from his point of view, Naotatica could officially be written off. But, given that he was Kurr’s first interplanetary explorer and therefore technically empowered to do so, he thought it only proper that he at least see it in person before he wrote the planet’s condemnation forever in his notes.

He retracted his vision back to Kurr and recast the Polar’s shield around his tower, preparing himself to go. He immersed his vision in the shield, just to be sure that it was sound before preparing to teleport back out into the stars.

He debated how to approach this new teleport as he was about to go much farther than he’d ever tried before. He could use the Liquefying Stone and try to one-shot all the way to Naotatica, or he could try to hop the tower off of a few seeing stones along the way and get there without its help. Weighing the learning opportunities on either side, he opted for the latter and set himself about the cast.

The teleport worked easily, in fact far more easily than he’d hoped it would. He could have skipped the hop effect entirely had he known how little the distance would actually mean in terms of ease. The simplicity with which he brought himself all that way was due to knowing where he was trying to go. Even though he knew how teleportation worked, it was still surprising that such a distance made so little difference in the end. Compared to how hard it was to cast one small stone blindly out into the night, the relative effortlessness of moving the large tower all the way to Naotatica was incredible to comprehend. But it turned out to be very easy, and he was glad he’d taken the time to try.

He’d aimed himself and his tower at the last seeing stone he’d cast, the one prior to the one that had been falling for all that time. Once more he found himself floating above the surface of the enormous giant green ball, only this time he was there. Despite having seen it before, it was even more breathtaking in person; something was lost when viewing such a vista through a magical device. Naotatica was colossal. It was beyond colossal. Altin simply had no way to express his sense of amazement as he looked on. From there he decided to teleport even closer still, and in a blink, half the night was filled with the titanic green world.

He went downstairs and got his notebook from the table in his room. He brought the inkpot up with it and set them on the table near the wall. He pulled out the rickety stool and, opening his book, began to sketch the planet onto a blank page. There were a few distinguishing lines that ran round the surface of the planet, a marbling effect, which made it more than just a circle on the page.

Beneath the illustration he made a few notes. He described the fate of the seeing stone, and he wrote about his encounter with the point of light and dark. He even made a few comments about elves and the errors of the Church before looking up once more and noticing that his tower had begun to fall. He rose up from the stool and walked over to the parapet. He had to squint into the night to be certain, as the planet’s proximal size was such that it made movement hard to gauge, but soon it was confirmed: the tower was definitely falling, and it was falling directly into the giant green world.

At first fear clutched at Altin’s chest. What was going on? Was some other magician working against him down below? Perhaps he’d been wrong about the elves. But as he thought about what he’d seen, he shook himself free of such ridiculous thoughts. Of course that was not the case. This was just something new, something else with which he would now have to contend. And he needed to do it before he fell into the planetary mist. He had great faith in Polar Piton’s shield against the cold and heat of empty space. But he was not sure he wanted to try it in the whiteness that burned within Naotatica’s blazing depths.

Calming himself from the initial grip of fear, he thought for a moment about what spell would serve him best. He could teleport back to that last seeing stone and still have a reasonable view. But somehow that felt like a retreat. And he wasn’t yet willing to concede.

He ran back downstairs and went through one of the books he kept on his shelf. There was a chapter on falling that he’d read a few years back while studying flight forms and other airborne spells. He found the pages he was looking for and sure enough he had a spell called Stasis: Falling Stops. It seemed the perfect thing. Only this spell required a feather from a raven’s wing and a small bit of lead. Damn, he thought. A bad time for spell components.

He knew he had a brick of lead down in the tower’s lowest room, but the raven’s wing was something of another trick. He went down and dug out the lead from a box buried beneath a stack of old notebooks and a few sacks of assorted things. He conjured a magical flame and melted off a drop, which he then cooled with a simple spell called “Arctic Breeze.”

The feather was still going to be the sticking point. The dead bird from his initial testing of the shield was likely still outside the tower near the wall, but that was a sparrow and would be no help at all. He rummaged around the lower rooms for quite some time, opening boxes he hadn’t looked into for several years. He couldn’t believe there wasn’t a raven feather in a single one.

“What kind of mage has no feathers,” he chided himself as he finally gave up and took his bit of lead back up to the battlements. Naotatica expanded before him like a sky-devouring beast, so vast he had to look nearly ninety degrees left or right to see stars on either side. And he was falling faster than he had been prior to going and getting the bit of lead. His memory conjured a vision of the seeing stone bursting into flames and then imagined his tower doing much the same. That simply wouldn’t do.

“Fine,” he groaned. “I’ll take it back for now.” Somewhat resignedly, he teleported himself back one seeing stone further than from where he’d first arrived.

From this vantage, Naotatica was still quite large, but apparently whatever was making Altin fall towards its howling winds had no effect upon the tower now. He watched for a while to be sure but eventually decided he was safe. But he still needed a feather. He was not going to let whatever was going on near the planet work against him a second time.

Annoyed by the distraction, he went to the scrying basin and viewed the corner of Calico Castle where his tower normally sat, making sure the area was clear. It was, and a moment later found him once again on Kurr. He sighed and dropped the Polar’s shield. It was going to take a while to find a raven if his skill with goat gathering gave any clues.

He sent a telepathic message to Taot to find out where he was. The dragon was several measures away, up in the high mountains courting a female dragon that he’d had a chance to meet. A carnal wave washed into Altin’s mind as Taot’s thoughts returned, the beast simple and open in its method of communicating what was going on and causing Altin to redden far more deeply than the reddest rose. The uncultured dragon simply had no shame. Regardless of the dragon’s lack of propriety, however, Taot clearly was not going to be of any help locating a raven, which meant Altin had to do it by himself.

Annoyed, and impatient to be back at the real work of exploring space, he put on his shoes and headed downstairs and out into the meadow beyond the keep. As he made his way through the knee-deep grass, he scanned about for any trace of a raven. And of course there were none lying handily about.

He walked through the better part of what on any other occasion would have seemed a lovely mid-afternoon, but he saw not the faintest sign of a raven anywhere. He walked along, ignoring the warm sun and the fragrance of wild flowers on the breeze, until at last he came into the woods, where he spent some time in the shadowy darkness growing furious at the fact that there were still no ravens to be found.

“How hard can it be to find one blasted burning bird?” he snarled after another hour of traipsing about beneath the canopy of leaves to no avail. He was sure the forest was hiding its ravens, trying to spite him, showing him every color of bird but black, and he said as much out loud before he finally gave it up.

There had to be a better way.

Impatient, he teleported himself back to his room and went once more into Tytamon’s tower. He found the old mage working on one of his favorite never-ending quests, the pursuit of the certainty that he could make diamonds out of coal—not for want of money of course, but out of pure stubbornness after so many unsuccessful years. Altin shook his head as he watched the ancient magician chant out his newest version of the spell and, without surprise, watched the coal vanish in a puff of acrid smoke.

“That’s never going to work, Master. I don’t know why you keep trying.”

“Well, it should work,” Tytamon said, waving away the acrid fumes. “My divination says it can. I just wish the damn clues weren’t so unbelievably vague. ‘Weight’ is the impression I get. ‘Lots of weight.’ So, I conjure weight. And still, I get…this.” He indicated the smoke curling around his head with a gnarled hand. “How much weight can it possibly need?”