Dragon Pearl(56)

“I’m going to make you a deal,” I said. Another bluff: “I’ll take you to your captive ship and get you out of here. In exchange, you’ll take me to the Fourth Colony. That’s where you were going originally, wasn’t it?”

The scholar drew a shaky breath, his mouth tightening. After a moment, he said, “I don’t see that we have much choice at this point. But I have bad news for you. I can’t wield protective magic, and the shaman we hired to exorcise the ghosts was a casualty of the fighting.”

“I can deal with that,” I said, more boldly than I felt. “I have ways to persuade them to listen. Ghosts are still people”—even if they were dead—“and fox magic should work on them. I’ll be able to calm them down so we can negotiate.”

The scholar considered it. “I suppose it could work . . .” he said, his fear subsiding a little.

“If that thing is really a fox, it might be preparing to eat us,” the woman said in an undertone, although I could hear her perfectly well.

I couldn’t help feeling nettled. I was standing there with a blaster and she thought I was going to use my teeth? Besides—and it’s not like I would ever do such a thing—I bet she’d taste revolting. “If you really don’t want to be eaten,” I said flatly, “maybe you should get moving like I told you to.”

The woman began to protest, but the scholar made another placating gesture and she shut her mouth. The other man, his face pale, remained silent—too dumbfounded to speak, I guessed—but nodded at the scholar.

I changed back into Captain Hwan’s shape. Borrowing the captain’s authority would help us get by the guards more easily. Once again, the smell of fear wafted from the scholar and his comrades. Fear—and hope.

They didn’t have to trust me, exactly, but I needed them as badly as they needed me. I just hoped they didn’t catch on to that. In the captain’s voice, I growled, “Forward.”

When we reached them, the guards startled. “Sir,” one of them said hesitantly, “I’m not sure this is the best—”

“Did I ask your opinion?” I said pointedly.

This, plus another dose of Charm, did the trick. The guard subsided. I pushed harder to convince them to skip the usual step of signing out the prisoners. Not only would that slow us down, I didn’t want to leave any record of what had occurred.

The female prisoner coughed to catch my attention. “Maybe we should . . .” She jerked her head toward the guards, who were smiling blankly at an empty stretch of the wall. “You know . . .” She made a throat-slitting gesture.

A growl escaped my throat.

“Suit yourself,” she said, “but you know they’re going to cause trouble later.”

No way am I killing anyone, I thought. Not unless absolutely necessary. I would have to keep an eye on the woman, in case she tried anything.

The scholar glanced back at me thoughtfully while I gave him directions to the bay where his captured ship was docked. After I’d Charmed a cluster of crew members into passing us by with glazed eyes, he said in a low voice, “I’d always thought the old stories were exaggerations. Apparently not.”

I was dying to ask why, if he was so impressed with my magic, it didn’t seem to be having much effect on him.

As if he’d divined my question, the scholar smiled. It wasn’t a happy expression. “I may not be the best scholar,” he said—and I was reminded that he’d gotten his position by faking his credentials—“but some of my knowledge of the old lore is genuine.”

That lore presumably included ways to resist fox magic. I longed to ask him how he was doing it, but he had no reason to tell me. I’d have to see if I could coax it out of him later. Assuming we all survived.

More guards awaited us at the docking bay. I practiced my glare some more, reinforced by Charm. Even if the Pale Lightning’s crew was intimidated by Captain Hwan, his decision to reunite the prisoners with their ship was going to make them hesitate.

While I’d grown more confident in wielding magic, I was throwing a lot of it around, and my headache had intensified. Just a little longer, I told myself. Once we got off the Pale Lightning, I could ease up.

“There it is,” the pale-faced man breathed. I wished he would stop sweating so heavily, even though I knew he couldn’t help it.

The mercenaries’ starship rested on several struts. For something that had caused us so much trouble, it was dwarfed by the expansive space of the bay. It had a blockish, rectangular shape with protrusions for its various missile launchers and laser cannons. Most of them had been melted into blobby shapes like tree fungus. Good, I thought vindictively. Then I remembered I was going to be a passenger on it, and I gulped.

The ship’s hull was dented and blackened with laser marks. No one had done any repair work on it—there was no reason they should have—and I winced, wondering how reliable the ship would be. But it was my only way off the Pale Lightning.

I followed the three mercenaries to their ship. The scholar smelled calm, but the woman swore when she looked it over. “We’ll be lucky if we can get the maneuver drive to work,” she said as she opened the hatch.

“You’re going to have to do your best,” the scholar said to her. I gathered that she must be the engineer, or the closest thing that remained.