Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

thinking about it still made him shudder. What if Altin had already found her? He was the most powerful sorcerer they had. What if he was watching right now, spying on him, planning … whatever he had next in mind, the next move in the great betrayal?
    Suddenly he could feel Altin’s eyes crawling on him like a thousand tiny insects, the small hairs on his arms prickled with the sense of it. He turned back and looked around again, searching everywhere, even up into the rafters high above. Altin could easily be up there.
    There was nothing to see, but still the feeling clung to him. He shook his head as he peered up into the vacant space. “Fuck you, Altin. I thought you were my friend.”

Chapter 4
    A ltin had exactly enough discipline to do two things before going to the Aspect in search of Orli. The first was to teleport himself to his old friend Doctor Leopold and insist the doctor remove the tracking device the Earth people had implanted in his arm. He had no intention of letting that thing be his downfall this time as it had been on the Aspect the day he got caught visiting Orli. The second thing he did was cast a version of Combat Hop on himself that would keep him out of danger from both the laser beams and the projectiles that the fleet weapons discharged. He accomplished both in just under an hour.
    From there his plan was simple: get Orli out, and not get shot. If he could talk to them and try to explain things, he would, but even then, he would slip Orli the fast-cast amulet the moment he arrived, just in case something went wrong. That way, no matter what happened, she could get out of there. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
    He cast a seeing spell directly into the sick bay of Orli’s ship, right where he knew her bed had been. It occurred to him as he did it that he might be able to simply send her the amulet secretly. That could make things very easy for them both. Unless her hands were bound.
    In the end it didn’t matter because Orli was not there. And not only was she not there, the bed was not there. No one was there.
    He pushed his sight into the next room and found Doctor Singh sitting before a monitor, staring into it, at the battle taking place outside his ship, and slowly shaking his head. Altin spared a moment to watch the activity in the monitor as well before shoving his sight through the rows of beds looking for Orli. She wasn’t anywhere he could find.
    He pushed the seeing spell right through decks, bulkheads and machinery, darting furtively into chambers and bays, hangars and loading docks, spaces set up for work about which he had no inkling. He looked everywhere, up and down as he made his way through the ship. He didn’t know his way around it very well, but he knew he was moving toward the bridge. She might be up there. They might have put her back to work. She was not. He pushed his way down through the floor, through several more decks, speeding his way down in search of the Aspect ’s brig. That’s where she had to be. But there was still no sign of her when he got there. For several more minutes, he chased his fear down the lift tube and through a few random corridors before realizing he’d never find her that way. He let go of the spell.
    “Minotaur’s horns,” he growled, stuffing Orli’s amulet into a pocket of his robes. “I don’t have time to divine.”
    He cast another seeing spell, this one to Aderbury’s house in Crown City. He knew it was an invasion of privacy, but he didn’t have time to worry about such things. Fortunately, Aderbury’s wife, Hether, was home and not in a state that would make her indisposed toward company. He quickly searched out an empty room and with a thought that barely allowed him time to release the seeing spell, teleported himself into their home.
    “Hether,” he called out in a voice loud enough to be heard but not startle. “It’s Altin. I’m sorry to intrude.”
    “Altin?” she called back as the sound of footsteps on