Rift in the Races (10 page)

“I can imagine,” she said. She watched the sandfall for a while, a veil of motion that somehow never managed to run out. “Has it really been a million souls?” she asked after a while. “That seems like so many.”

“No, not that many.” He dismissed the exaggeration of the ages with a shrug. “But I believe, the last I read, it has been well over sixty expeditions over the last five hundred years. They varied in size, but the real death toll is probably closer to a thousand souls. It’s still a lot of lives to risk for the sake of such a curiosity.”

She made a strangled sound, part grunt, part laughter. “This,” she said, “coming from the Queen’s Galactic Mage. It seems I remember being told some stories about magicians dying trying to teleport to the moon.”

He laughed. She had him there. “Yes, a few did,” he admitted. “But nowhere near as many as this thing has devoured. And even those were spread out over most of a thousand years.”

“Why the fascination with this, then?” She tossed a handful of fine sand down the slope at the gaping hole.

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s because it’s right here with us. A riddle right on our doorstep. Some people take that sort of challenge seriously. And, unlike Luria, the sandfall is accessible to anyone who cares to try. You just have to come out here and take a stab at it.”

“Do you think you ever will?”

He thought about it for a while but eventually shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I guess this riddle doesn’t interest me all that much. It’s beautiful, but it’s a thing of Prosperion. I am more interested in what is out there.” He looked into the sky, a blue vastness tinted beige by the layer of sand carried on air currents high above, much of which had been blown there by updrafts from the chasm itself, disgorged, as it were, by an effect many called the breath of the sand dragon.

She sighed and stared back down into the yawning expanse. He heard it and knew what it implied. Neither spoke for a while, allowing the spectacle before them to be what it was, each lost for a moment in private, suddenly melancholy thoughts.

The sun crept farther and farther down behind the mountains making the snow-capped peaks sparkle like diamond-tipped spears. Orli stared out at them for a while and urged Altin to take her to them. “I’m hot. Let’s go to the snow.”

“What?” he asked, coming slowly out of his reverie and following the line of her pointing arm. “Up there? It will be freezing. We’re not wearing any shoes.”

“Just long enough to cool off,” she said. “Come on, it will be fun.”

He could not deny her a thing, particularly after the unexpected malaise his comments had brought upon the rarity of their time together. “All right, but just that long.”

A few moments later found them standing in the snow. The sudden arrival at altitude made their ears feel as if they might burst, and it was more than a moment before they’d adjusted properly. At first they’d exchanged horrified glances, their jaws working back and forth trying to acclimate and each blaming themselves for the other’s agony, but as the pressure worked itself out, they both began to laugh.

“I told you that was a horrible idea,” he said, one eye still nearly closed by a sharp pain in his left ear.

“You didn’t say anything about our ears. You were worried about our feet.”

“It’s your people who measure every last barometric detail. You should have thought of it.”

She responded by hitting him squarely in the forehead with a snowball. He sputtered and gasped as he wiped it away, clearing his eyes in time to take another in the throat, much of it sliding down inside the neckline of his robes.

“Hah, hah,” she teased, dancing about, her bare feet already turning pink.

“Oh, that was a really bad idea,” he said, still brushing snow away. “Do you have any idea who—” The third snowball scored a hit in the center of his chest, but bits of it exploded upwards and got into his mouth midsentence, cutting him off.

He spat it out, then closed his eyes, quickly summoning up a simple version of a military spell called Ice Lance—a spell every combat wizard learned during their mandatory two years in service to the Queen. He shaped a child’s-play version of the spell, modified it some, and then conjured a snowball at her that was so large the explosive
whumph
of the soft mass crashed into her like a cotton buffalo and carried her back a half a span, nearly burying her twice that deep in the slope of a high snow bank.

He laughed as she spat and slapped away the snow falling in on her from the edges of the fissure her body had shaped on impact.

“As I was trying to say, you should think twice before you cross snowballs with a conjurer.” He laughed as he approached her, but she looked as if she were about to cry, and he stopped laughing instantly.

Horrified that he had been too rough, he rushed to her and reached into the depression her figure had pressed into the snow. “Orli, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

Quick as a spark, she grabbed his arm and, placing a foot in his stomach, tossed him over her head. He flew up the slope of the embankment and landed with a
whumph
of his own. The sprawl of his arms and the stretch of his robes, his legs flung akimbo, stamped a perfect, if wildly contorted, angel shape deep into the snow—upside down of course. She scrambled to her feet and pushed the edges of the hole in over the top of him, burying him as she laughed maniacally. “How do your snowballs like that, conjurer!” During the Hostile pestilence that had plagued her ship all those months back, they hadn’t picked her to sedate insane crewmen because she couldn’t handle herself in a fight!

She laughed the entire time he thrashed about trying to extricate himself, clutching at his robes all the while in a mainly futile attempt to maintain some degree of modesty. He looked like a beetle that had been flipped onto its back, its legs flailing hopelessly, and she made no efforts to help him extract himself. She nearly went into fits when his efforts collapsed the thin wall between the fissure his body had made and the one hers had initially formed below it, the dissolution of it sending him sliding headfirst into the lower tier in a tangle of frosted limbs and snow-encrusted robes that nearly exposed him to his underclothes.

Finally he regained his feet, as pink from embarrassment as he was from the cold, and he glared at her in mock ferocity. “You, Miss Pewter, are a brute.”

She smiled and gave a bit of a curtsy. “Why thank you, Sir Altin. You are too kind.”

Both were giggling as they beat away the snow clinging to them, all traces of the desert melancholy gone.

“My toes are freezing,” he said at last. “We should head to the gulf.”

“Not until you concede that the snow throwers of Earth are the greatest in all the universe.”

He laughed and vigorously nodded his assent. “I willingly concede the title and all honors therein.”

Crossing her arms triumphantly, she put on a smug look and accepted his surrender semi-graciously. “Good. Then you may take me to the gulf.” When he cocked an eyebrow at her haughtiness and looked as if he might summon another giant snowball, she relented some by admitting, “My feet are killing me too.”

Chapter 7

W
hen they arrived, Orli laughed and romped about, allowing her feet to thaw in tingles that burned like pinpricks. Once again the rocky sand, more gravel than sand really, retained the warmth of the day’s sun, and after the snowy adventure they’d just come from, such lingering energy was all the more appreciated.

She couldn’t stop laughing as she ran, the smooth round gravel
crunch-crunching
beneath her feet, and the joy that filled her making her as giddy as a little girl. She loved hopping across the continent like they were. One moment a cool sunset on a northern shoreline, the next a raging -hot desert sandfall, then a snowy mountain peak and now a balmy equatorial sunset on yet another beach. How could anything ever be better than this?

Just then an enormous mosquito flew near, a creature of such proportions that its wings made it sound as if it had a motor onboard. Only at the Gulf of Dae. Though it was one of her favorite sunset beaches, and she did love nature with all her heart, the fist-sized mosquitoes creeped her out. They were monstrous, with beady little eyes like black blueberries mounted above proboscises longer than the morphine needles in a combat med-kit.

A second flew near the first, hovering not far from her, and she was half tempted to draw her blaster and shoot them both—and she would have except that she knew she probably couldn’t hit them. She turned to say as much to Altin, but he was watching her, grinning, and paused in the act of setting out the tapers he’d brought along for the purpose of repelling the blood-sucking beasts.

“Well, fortunately for you, oh, great snowball queen of Earth,” he said through his grin, “not all of my tapers are soaked through or broken, so we may be able to keep these monsters at bay, although, we’ll have to sit rather close, given I won’t be able to protect as large an area as I had planned.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, trying to put on a resigned yet regal air. “That is my fault about the snow, isn’t it? I will suffer the consequences.”

He nodded in a way that confirmed he recognized her concession in the matter, then went back to establishing a mosquito-free perimeter with his grin still intact.

Orli watched him for a moment, then looked out over the water happily. Giant mosquitoes or not, Orli loved being at the gulf. The moist soil released a warm humidity that kept up nicely with the ocean breeze, making it always delightful to sit and enjoy the smell of the land and the sound of the crashing waves. They always stayed here long after the sun went down.

Altin sat down on a grassy bank at the edge of the sand and watched her enjoying herself. She found a purple fog-crab and laughed excitedly when it tried to hide itself in a puff of foul-smelling vapor. A toothless sea snake bit her a while later as she tried to pick it up. She squealed and ran back to Altin with it dangling from her thumb, the snake flapping wildly and Orli hoping she’d not just been poisoned fatally.

He laughed as he pried its mouth open, Orli insisting all the while that he be careful not to hurt it. He tossed it down the beach a few paces away satisfied that it would slither back to the water on its own, but she immediately ran to it and tried to pick it up once more, intent on doing it properly this time and, therefore, having a less traumatic look, as had been her initial plan.

It bit her again, this time catching a pinch of skin between her thumb and forefinger. She was laughing so hard during the process of Altin’s second removal that tears ran down her face.

Eventually, after several minutes poking about enjoying the sea creatures and local flora, she came and sat down with him again. The sun would be vanishing into the sea in twenty minutes or so, and she did like to watch the lightshow.

They leaned together again, as was their habit in places like this.

Absently she asked, “Why don’t we keep going after the southern marsh? We come here, we go to the marsh, but then you always stop. We could keep chasing this same sunset forever if we wanted to. Today would never have to end.”

He nodded. It was true. Technically, they could chase the same sunset eternally. But it didn’t really work like that.

“We’d need a boat for the sunset after the one in the southern marsh. Either that or we’d have to land on String and wait. The elves don’t take too kindly to human trespassers, and they have the right, by treaty, to kill us on the spot. I think that would definitely spoil the fun.”

“I’m sure they would like us,” she said.

“Maybe,” he replied, but seemed more than dubious.

She sighed and looked out over the water. “I don’t want to go back tomorrow,” she said. “One day is not enough. I’m sick of that stupid mine. And every other weekend at Little Earth is not enough.”

Little Earth was the name the fleet had given to the compound the Queen had built outside of Crown City to accommodate the Earth people when their ships first arrived in orbit above her world. Orli was allowed, mainly thanks to the Queen’s intervention, to log some time at Little Earth for botanical work, but not much. Admiral Crane had acceded to Her Majesty’s request on that front—who had asked at Altin’s request of course—but only so far as keeping order in the fleet would allow. He’d known perfectly well that after the bulk of the fleet left for the Hostile system, Captain Asad’s influence would grow amongst the captains and crews that were staying behind long enough to make repairs. He’d had to make an arrangement that would be palatable for all.

“It’s not for long,” Altin reminded her. “Soon your ships will be fixed and on their way.”

“And then what? They drag me back out into space, so I can try to catch up in time for the carnage?”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But the first thing I have to do is get back out there. Maybe I can find the Hostile world before the fleet does. You said it will be years before your people get there, so we have time. We can find them on
Citadel
. Wipe them out before there is any need for your people to fight.”

“You really think one space fortress can do what all our ships can’t?”