Queen of Stars (9 page)

“However badly Mintaka got mangled,” he said, “they’ll never mistake him for human. I wonder if yesterday’s three bodies survived the fire?”

“Enough of them did,” the queen said. She turned and walked away, so Rigel and the two mages necessarily followed. “We have identified two of them, Aludra and Benetnash. The third was unrecognizable. Starfolk Mizar and Achird were keeping watch over the gallery, and when the bodies were removed, they trailed the vehicles.”

She came to a grouping of sofas and armchairs outside the seance court. Achird, another mage trainee, was stretched out there, fast asleep. Whereas Mizar was a typical halfling-despising snob, Achird was the closest thing to a friend Rigel had among the adult male elves. Mizar came from a family blessed by high magical talent, in which reds were commonplace and even Naos cropped up every few generations. By way of contrast, Achird had few relatives above yellow grade, which was the Starlands equivalent of being poor. He was the first red his family had produced in centuries. He was no taller than Rigel and his scalp fur was a sandy shade that would not have seemed out of place anywhere in northern Europe. He even had a sense of humor, unlike most starfolk over the age of a hundred.

Talitha sank into a chair, but did not invite the others to sit. The smile she directed at Rigel was not a sharing smile. It made him think of tigers and young ladies of Niger.

“They also kept watch on the room where the bodies were stored. A few hours ago, Hadar, Botein, Sadalbari, and Mintaka extroverted in. They proceeded to steal the bodies and introvert with them. Mintaka left the building on foot.”

“But now the denizens of Earth may have two other cadavers to categorize,” Fomalhaut proclaimed. “Mizar, return to the seance court and determine whether the tweenling twosome extricated themselves from their vehicular contraption before it impinged on the other traffic.”

His apprentice ran off. Talitha dismissed the problem with a flick of her fingers. She had lost interest in the extroverting halflings now that there was no urgency to find out what they were up to. The Light of Naos that glowed around her neck and shoulders was sparkling much redder than usual. Rigel had rarely seen her truly enraged and never before had her fury been directed at him. Perhaps now he would know better than to drink champagne with a promiscuous woman. Or not.

“He had an access amulet, I suppose?” he asked. Earth’s best locks could not withstand magic.

“Of course. But he set off alarms. That’s how the city guard was alerted, I imagine. Halfling Alkes was waiting outside with that big vehicle while he and Mintaka drove off to collect the guns. Mage Mizar was still watching, and he seanced after them. That’s when I tried to call you, halfling. And where exactly were you?”

Fomalhaut sneered in the background.

“I was with a friend, Your Majesty,” Rigel said.

The starry glow had spread up her chin and down almost to her breasts. It glowed even redder. “It could only be that hairy halfling hussy, I suppose?”

This was going to be their first lovers’ spat, and the fact that she was choosing to start it in front of witnesses made him all the madder. “And what if it was?”

“Your duty is to guard my son!”

“All day and all night? No time off at all?”

“Not without my permission!” She glared at him. Time off was not the problem, of course. Avior was.

Rigel discovered that he was perilously close to losing his temper. Either they were lovers or they weren’t…and they weren’t. They could never be lovers, at least not for fifty years or so, when the starfolk grew more accustomed to having a child queen. He had been stupid to drink champagne when he had so little experience with it, but was he really supposed to be on duty 168 hours a week? “Then I ask your permission to take a night off once in a while. That doesn’t seem an unreasonable request. And I can safely leave your—”

Your what? Rigel looked down, around…
Bloody gizzards!
The imp had disappeared. He bellowed at the top of his lungs,
“Starling!”

But he could guess exactly where the brat had gone. Ever since their first visit to Fornacis, several months ago, Izar had been dying to inspect the Time of Life, and the many times Fomalhaut had warned him away from it had only made him more determined. Rigel took off at a sprint. Now that he was listening for trouble, he could hear Izar screaming, far away.

Chapter 11

R
igel hurdled a marble lion with centimeters to spare. It came to life roaring and tried to bite him, an instant too late.

“I’m coming!” he yelled.

It is the Time of Life
, the mage had said.
It is as dangerous as the Star of Truth itself and an even greater magic.
That last bit was doubtful, because it had obviously been inspired by the earthly invention of the pendulum clock, which was only a few centuries old, whereas the Star was ancestral. Nor had the mage ever explained what the Time
did. Possibly nothing except impress Fomalhaut’s friends.

Rigel was approaching the great disk edge-on, and something was moving inside it. The curved crystal distorted the view too much for him to be certain, but it had to be Izar. Somehow the machine had swallowed him. And now the disk had passed its low point and was very slowly rising. It might be hours before it swung low enough for the imp to be rescued.

Having leapt over a toothy mouth that opened in the floor and dodged a vine whose tendrils moved to intercept him, Rigel reached the disk, a meter or so out of reach above him. Now he saw that there was a hole in the bottom edge, apparently the start of a narrow vertical shaft. Izar’s feet and legs were visible just inside, on the lowest rung of a crystal ladder.

Izar was screaming more from glee than terror. He was yelling for Rigel to come and join him, so they could explore together.

“Drop!” Rigel shouted. “Let go and I’ll catch you!” He had to repeat his command several times before the imp heard him. Even then, the shaft was so narrow that Izar could barely look down to see who was shouting.

“Come on!” Izar insisted, scrambling up a few rungs.

“Izar!
Starling!
Come down now.”

But he obviously wasn’t going to listen, and the disk was rising relentlessly. Rigel crouched and sprang. His fingers caught nothing and he dropped back. He backed away several paces and took a running start.

This time his left hand caught a cold glass bar. He swung, got his other hand on it too, and dangled there for a moment. The others had arrived below him.

“Rigel, come down!” Talitha shouted.

“Not until I get Izar. Find us something soft to land on.” He hauled himself up a couple of rungs, so that his head was just below the mouth of the shaft. He thought he would fit in there, but only just.

“Izar! Come back down here.”

He heard a very faint treble laugh from much higher up the shaft. “This is doggy! Come on, Rigel!”

“Go no farther, halfling!” roared Fomalhaut. “The starling’s continuance is incommensurable, but the measure of your ephemerality may be divulged unto you. Drop now, while you hazard only moderate corporal impairment.”

All very well for him to say that. What he meant was that Rigel would just break an ankle or two if he jumped down now. That might not be true, and he was certainly facing humiliation. It was barely an hour since he’d failed Talitha by not being on immediate call, and failing her twice in one day was unthinkable. Besides, his arms were being pulled out of their sockets. He began hauling himself up, rung by rung.

“Stop, halfling!” the mage yelled. “Your rationality cannot tolerate cognizance of your predestined expiration.”

Talitha was shouting also, but soon Rigel was completely inside the disk and could rest his toes on the bottom rung of the ladder. Then he couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Izar had disappeared into the darkness above. Rigel turned on the light amulet on his helmet. The rungs of the ladder seemed to be made of glass all the way up, and the inside of the shaft was shiny black, like obsidian, but his helmet prevented him from tipping his head back far enough to see very much. He couldn’t tell if the starling’s feet were still in sight. Likewise, he couldn’t look down well enough to see his own. He turned off the light while he thought.

He could take off his helmet, but he couldn’t lay it down anywhere, and he still wouldn’t be able to see past it.

He shouted for Izar a few times without result. Stars alone knew how far the little demon would go before he saw that Rigel was not following. Knowing him, he’d probably just continue up alone.

Rigel would be stuck in this hellhole for hours. On his first visit to Fornacis, he had estimated that the pendulum’s period from vertical to vertical was less than a day, but not much less. So if old Fomalhaut didn’t fetch a very long ladder very quickly, Rigel and Izar would have to wait that long before they were safely returned to ground level.

He might as well go on up until he caught the little bastard and could deliver a blistering sermon on obedience. He started to climb into the darkness.

The swing of the pendulum was too slow for him to sense it. Nor could he detect any tilt away from the vertical, at least not yet. But there was something very fishy about the tube. He could barely bend his arms enough to move up, banging an elbow for every rung gained, and he couldn’t lower them below his shoulders. Yet he could bend his legs far enough to advance his feet up from one rung to another, and legs were much longer than arms. It was almost as if the damnable machine kept changing the tube’s diameter to accommodate him, in a sort of mechanical peristalsis. He wondered if Izar was as cramped as he was.

A whole day with his arms above his head was not going to be pleasant. The strain on his feet and ankles was not insignificant, either. In short, he might cramp up until he lost his grip on the ladder; if that happened, he was going to fall a very long way. Or he might get struck on the head by a descending Izar.

Putting such thoughts aside, he concentrated on working out what Fomalhaut had been trying to tell him at the end there. When he got excited, the old pedant drowned in his own vocabulary. “Your rationality cannot tolerate cognizance of your own predestined expiration.” That meant something like,
Foreknowledge of your own death will drive you crazy.
Very likely, but how was that relevant to his present situation? What did the damnable contraption actually
do
?

He was getting very tired of climbing this fecal ladder. He tried calling Izar’s name again, but there was no response. The acoustics in the tube were horrible.

How far up could this wormhole go?

How high had he climbed already? He should have counted the rungs.

There was a light above him, very faint. His helmet prevented him from seeing where it came from. Spurred by the hope that he might soon find himself somewhere more pleasant, he kept climbing.

The light grew steadily brighter, and then suddenly became very bright. There was a window behind the ladder, a peephole about the size of a sheet of paper. It seemed to be unglazed, because he could hear sounds of rustling and vigorous breathing from behind it.

He found himself looking into a room, a bedroom. His viewpoint seemed to be where the headboard of the bed should be, or behind it, but both the headboard and the wall were transparent. A man was stretched out on the bed; his face was tipped downward, but Rigel could make out human ears and a bald patch. All that could be seen of the person underneath him was the tip of one elfin ear.

Rigel had never considered himself a voyeur or a Peeping Tom, but he could not tear his eyes away from the couple’s frenzied copulation. He even knew the room, with its heavy nineteenth-century furniture and overpowering wallpaper, for it was where he had enjoyed the only genuine conversation he’d ever had with his mother, the night before she died. That was her bed. The male covering her was no human, but a halfling, old Wasat—court archivist, curator of the royal treasury, and Electra’s secret lover for longer than several earthly lifetimes. By a freak event that almost never happened, Wasat had sired a child with her. That was obviously what he was in the process of doing now. Rigel was viewing his own conception. As he realized that, Electra began to cry out in the ecstasy of climax. Wasat increased his efforts.

Of course the Time of Life would begin at the beginning.

Had Izar seen this on his way up? Certainly not. He would have been shown the ancient voluptuary Prince Vildiar, with the barely nubile Princess Talitha as his reluctant partner. They would have been engaged in the same act as Wasat and Electra, and Izar was certainly old enough to know what it meant. Given how much he feared and detested his father, it must have been torture for him.

Oh, Izar! Rigel resumed his climb up the shaft. He dared not shout now, lest the sound pass through the magical window and into his personal history. If he somehow interrupted his own creation, would he fulfill old Fomalhaut’s prophecy by vanishing in a flash of paradox? The light faded away below him. He climbed through darkness again until he detected another faint glow above. He paused to think.

His conception…and then his death? But surely there ought to be more than just the beginning and the end. How many windows would there be between them? One for every birthday? He set off upward again.

The second view was of another bedroom, one without grandeur, just peeling walls, rickety furniture, and a floor of cracked linoleum, slummy and base. A blizzard howled beyond the window, a Canadian winter at its worst, and the woman giving birth on the blood-soaked bed was Queen Electra of the Starlands, hiding her shame in voluntary exile. This time she was the visible one and her companion was out of view. Rigel just saw the occasional glimpses of grizzled hands holding towels in an effort to staunch the hemorrhage. Of course it must be Wasat again, a terrified old man desperately trying to save his lover and unborn child.

Somewhere in the paraphernalia littering that room must lie a collection of amulets borrowed from the royal armory, including an engraved silvery bracelet best known as Saiph, the king of swords. When Wasat succeeded in hauling out the bloody babe, he would grab that murderous Lesath in place of the amulet he had intended to use, and place it on his son’s tiny wrist.

Rigel shuddered at the gory scene. He wanted to shout out the good news that mother and child would live, but he dared not. He resumed his climb.

He could run barefoot over sharp gravel, perhaps even walk on nails, as Avior had bragged, but continual standing on the ladder’s cylindrical rungs was a different sort of stress, and it was starting to cramp his feet. He recalled reading about the dreaded Chinese form of bastinado, where relentless gentle tapping on the soles of the feet eventually produced a hypersensitivity that sent fearful spasms of pain through the entire body. Muscles he had not known he had were starting to shriek complaints.

Was it time to give up?

The answer had to be no. The climb down would be just as bad as going on, magnified by a sense of failure. He had a mission. He had been given custody of a child and he had failed in his trust. He had to honor that responsibility. But must he suffer so? His helmet was another legendary amulet. If he invoked Meissa, he would become invisible to magic. Then the Time might just vanish, leaving leave him a hundred meters in the air above the mage’s workshop, and he would not see the prophecy of his death.

The worst part about this was that he knew he
wanted
to see more. He would want to even if he didn’t have the excuse of rescuing Izar. Fomalhaut had warned him once that the hunger for knowledge grew by what it fed on. He had seen his own conception, then his birth…What next? Boyhood? Manhood? He forced himself upward until he came to the third window.

Another bedroom was what it showed. Were bedrooms all that mattered in life? Well, perhaps so. Surely that was himself he was seeing, that sweating, gasping, pounding male animal? He couldn’t make out the woman because there were pillows in the way, and this did not surprise him; only one participant was shown in each of these erotic visions. He did have a good view of her legs, though, for they were pointing straight up, and he could hear her gasps of pleasure. She was certainly not Avior Halfling.

Whoever she was, if the rest of her matched those legs, she was worth all the effort his future self was providing. This was the next stage in the Time of Life—conceiving a child of one’s own, for children were the only possible down payment on immortality. For a human-starborn cross, it was a gloriously welcome sight, because halflings were normally mules. Ever since he learned that his father was a halfling, he had been hoping that three-quarterlings like him would be fertile too.

Rigel stayed and stared at the pornographic vision until it faded away and the window itself disappeared. What next? One child only? Or a large brood and a new window for every conception? One generic conception might stand for many, in which case the visions would jump straight to the last bed, the death bed. For a mortal there could be no other ending to this series. Izar might be up there already, staring at his own corpse. Or at the stars, the final home for which old starfolk yearned. Hopefully it was the latter. Despite what the mage had said, elves were mortal, for even their lives could be cut short by violence.

No one ever wanted to view his own death. Rigel now suspected that catching Izar was a magical impossibility. And a physical one, too. Not only did his shoulders ache from the strain of holding his arms high, but there were only so many places on the soles of his feet that would support his weight on the polished glass rods. Standing still was rapidly becoming more torturous than continuing to climb.

He had barely started again when he thought he heard Izar cry out. Rigel shouted, but there was no reply. The imp might have fainted. Or worse. Mustn’t think that. He twisted his head to look up the shaft, and spotted the next window only a meter or so above his head. A man chuckled.

It sounded like Hadar.

The light filtering in through the spyhole was very faint. When Rigel reached it and peered through, he saw no bedroom this time, but a forest of giant conifers—cedars, perhaps, although Starlands flora was no more realistic than the fauna. Trees this size never grew so close together on Earth.