Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) Read Online Free PDF

his turn to strive for calm.
    “You’re right,” he said. “But it’s too late to do anything about that part now. We’ve got to get help.”
    “Are they all right? Are they hurt?”
    “Well ….” He paused and had to think about that. He didn’t think they were hurt. But he hardly knew. “No,” he told her. “They were unharmed last time I saw them.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. “But I didn’t get to talk to them before they went into the ship, so I think it would be best if we had Citadel there. You know, in case the … uh … the meeting doesn’t go well.”
    “I dinna just bounce off the potato wagon and inta the pot, young man,” she said, “and this here ain’t potato-me boilin’ fer mash.”
    His face crowded in around itself as he stared at her, his mouth half-open. “What do potatoes have to do with anything?”
    “It means don’t treat me like a child, boy. Now if they’re in trouble, I need ta know.”
    He straightened, looked her directly in the eye. “Kettle, they were alive the last time I saw them. I don’t know what’s happening to them now. But I do know the aliens had a chance to kill me—easily, I think, if they’d wanted to—and they didn’t. So, while I admit I don’t really know anything, that part I do know, and it’s all completely true. I think they are okay. Maybe. But I don’t like it, and I need Tytamon.” He watched her face for her reaction. She seemed satisfied.
    “He was outside this mornin’, workin’ with them girls a’ yer crew on that fancy black floor you’ve got him and poor Altin makin’ out there.”
    He knew where Altin’s teleportation pad was being built—a project Roberto himself had inspired—but he let her lead him across the courtyard and out through the gates. The armored guards looked back and forth between them as Roberto and Kettle ran through, sensing something amiss, but unable to detect anything to which they might put their halberds.
    In his spacesuit, and with Kettle as agitated as she was, it was a bit of work for Roberto to keep up with her. Her stout frame and round, florid cheeks gave a false impression about her when it came to speed.
    Soon they rounded the corner of the castle and were heading into the meadow to the east. There was a bulging section of the castle wall now, arcing out into the grass and made of lighter stone than the rest. It was a new construction, an extension Altin had added to accommodate the frequent absence of his tower, the boot, these days. Beyond its curve, another hundred paces out into the meadow, lay several large black stacks of tiles, nearly a yard square, piled five feet high. All around them were heaps of stone, barrels of pitch, wheelbarrows full of wisteria and blackroot, and mounds of various types of clay, some dry and cracked, others wet and glistening in the sun. Weaving around all of this were several members of Roberto’s crew, most having eschewed the glittering purple corsets of their Glistening Lady uniforms in favor of tank tops more suitable to heavy work under a springtime sun. Sami, Fatima, and Betty-Lynn were all pushing wooden wheelbarrows full of clay over to a frame staked to the ground, their muscular bodies leaning into them as the creaking wheels bounced over rocks and in and out of animal burrows. Roberto’s fourth brawny bodyguard, Chelsea, pushed a gravity sled from the other side of the site toward the frame, hers stacked with at least a half ton of stone, while his lean but lovely navigator, Tracy Applegate, singularly still in uniform, worked with an axe chopping down strips of wisteria to length. And there amidst them all, attired as always in his gray robes, was the ancient wizard, Tytamon, Calico Castle’s original tenant and a man approaching his eight hundredth birthday.
    The great wizard heard them coming and looked up from his work. He set down a block of the black material he was making, a substance called engasta syrup, which he made from the