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center. Lights flashed inside and Keff heard a scream. Whether it was fury,
fear, or pain he couldn't determine.
Suddenly, the sphere broke apart. The smoke dissipated on the evening sly,
leaving the female free. Her hair had escaped from its elegant coif and stood
out in crackling tendrils. The shoulder of her robe was burned away, showing
the tawny flesh beneath. Eyes sparking, she levitated upward, arms gathering
and gathering armfuls of nothing to her breast. Her hands chopped forward, and
lightning, liquid electricity, flew at her opponent.
The male crossed his forearms before himself in a ges-
ture intended to ward away the attack, but only managed to deflect some of it.
Tiny fingers of white heat peppered his legs and the runner of his chair,
burning holes in his robe and scorching the vehicles ornamentation. In order
to escape, he had to move away from Carialle toward the open fields, where the
lightning ceased to pursue him. Tri-
umphantly, the female sailed in and spiraled around the brainship in a kind of
victory lap. In front of the ship, a translucent brick wall built itself up
row by row, until it was as tall as Carialle herself.
Keff stared.
"Are they fighting over us?" he asked in disbelief.
Carialle took umbrage at the suggestion. "How dare they?" she said. 'This is
my ship, not the competition trophy!"
The male did not intend to give up easily. As soon as the cloud of lightning
was gone, he headed back toward the ship. Between his hands a blue-white globe
was forming.
He threw it directly at the brick wall and the enchantress behind it.
The female was insufficiently prepared and the ball caught her in the belly.
It knocked her chair back hundreds of meters, past the hovering strangers who
hastily shifted out of her way. The illusory wall vanished. With a cry, the
female flew in, arching her fingers like a cats claws. Scarlet fire shot from
each one, focusing on the male. His chair bounced up in the air and turned a
full loop. Miraculously, he kept his seat. He tried to regain his original
position near Carialle.
'They are fighting over me. The unmitigated gall of the creatures!"
At the first sign of mystic lightning, the workers had judiciously fled to a
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safe distance from which they avidly watched the batde. Ignoring Alteiss
hissed commands to keep his head down, Brannel watched the overlords hungrily,
as his eyes had earlier fed on Keff. Maybe tills time a miracle would occur
and one of them would drop an object of power. In the confusion of batde, it
would go unnoticed until he, Brannel, dove for it and made it his own. Mere
possession of an object of power might not make one a mage, but he wanted to
find out. All his life he had cherished dreams of learning to fly or control
lightning.
The odds against his success were immense. The mages were the mages, and the
workers were the workers, to live, die, or serve at the whim of their
overlords, never permit-
ted to look above their lowly station. Until today, when
Mage Keff arrived out of the sky, Brannel had never thought there was a third
way of life. The stranger was not a mage by Ozran standards, since the
overlords were fight-
ing over him as if he wasn't there; but he was certainly not a worker. He must
be something in between, a stepping stone from peasant to power. Brannel knew
Keff could help him rise above his lowborn status and gain a place among
mages, but how to win his favor and his aid? He
had already been of service to Mage Keff. Perhaps he could render other
services, provided that Keff survived the contest going on above his head.
Brannel had recognized Magess Potria and Mage Ase-
dow by their colors while his peers were too afraid to lift their heads out of
the dust. He'd give his heart and the rest of his fingers to be able to spin
spells as they did. In spite of the damage that the combatants were doing to
one another, not a tendril of smoke nor a tongue of flame had even come close
to Keff, who was watching the battle rage calmly and without fear. Brannel
admired the strangers courage. Keff would be a powerful mentor. Together they
would fight the current order, letting worthy ones from the lowest caste
ascend to rule as their intelligence merited.
That is, if Keff survived the war in which he was one of the prizes.
"A world of wizards, my lady!" Keff chortled gleefully to
Carialle. 'They're doing magic! No wonder you can't find a power source. There
isn't one. This is pure evocation of power from the astral plane of the
galaxy."
The beautiful woman zipped past him in her floating chair, hands busy between
making signs and spells. He adjusted IT to register all motions and divide
them between language and ritual by repeat usage and context.
He was also picking up on a second spoken language or dialect. IT had informed
him that Brannel had used some of the terms, and Keff wondered at the
linguistic shift from one species to the other.
"Magical evocation is hardly scientific, Keff," Carialle reminded him.
'They're getting power from somewhere, that's for sure. I can even follow some
of the buildup a short way out, but then I lose it in the random emana-
tions."
"It comes from the ether," Keff said, rapt. "It's magic."
"Stop calling it that. We're not playing the game now,"
Carialle said sharply. "We're witnessing sophisticated manipulation of power,
not abracadabra-something-out-of-
nothing."
"Look at it logically," Keff said, watching the male lob a hand-sized ball of
flame over his head at his opponent.
"How else would you explain being able to fly without engines or to appear in
midair?"
2~1 i.fAUV-'iyi I
'Telekinesis."
"And how about knitting lightning between your hands?
Or causing smoke and fireballs without fuel? This is the stuff of legends.
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Magic."
"Its sophisticated legerdemain, I'll grant that much, but
there's a logical explanation, too."
Keff laughed. 'There is a logical explanation. We've dis-
covered a planet where the laws of magic are the laws of science."
"Well, there's physics, anyhow," Carialle said. "Our magimen up there are
beginning to fatigue. Their energy levels aren't infinite."
Ripostes and return attacks were slowing down. The magiwoman maintained an
expression of grim amusement throughout the conflict, while the magiman
couldn't dis-
guise his annoyance.
As if attracted by the conflict, a bunch of globe-frogs appeared out of the
brushy undergrowth at the edge of the crop fields. They rolled into the midst
of the Noble Primi-
tives, who were huddled into the gap, watching the aerial battle. The
indigenes avoided contact with the small crea-
tures by kicking out at them so that the globes turned away. The little group
trundled their conveyances labori-
ously out into the open and paused underneath the sky-bome battle. Keff
watched their bright black eyes focus on the combatants. They seemed
fascinated.
"Look, Carialle," Keff said, directing his contact-button camera toward them.
"Are they attracted by motion, or light? You'd think they'd be afraid of
violent beings much larger than themselves."
"Perhaps they are attracted to power, like moths to a candle flame," Carialle [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]