Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) Read Free Page B

of the space inside the gray, filmy dome, came a long body, at least three times longer than the billow was deep. She thought immediately that the creature looked like a soft, lumpy-stemmed mushroom made of snot—with lots of tentacles.
    It was enormous. The billow, inflated and massive as it spread wide above her, had to be at least a hundred and fifty yards across, and nearly as deep inside. And the body that came out of it was a mucous gray tube that couldn’t be any less than three hundred yards long. It had two bulbs, a small one up inside of the billow and another at the center, and at the end of its very long, cylindrical body it narrowed, like the tapering of an insect’s thorax, though soft and seemingly malleable. An odd puckering of flesh at this terminal end reminded her of someone about to spit.
    The large central bulb seemed to recommend itself as the creature’s head and face, or at least something approximately so, despite being located where it was. It swelled at the middle of the long, tubular body, not much below the line of the billow’s edge, and appeared as if the creature had swallowed something enormous and oblong in the way of a python that has just had a meal of something extremely large. Around the equator of this bulbous area blinked three large, silvery eyes, massive half spheres that bulged out of black eye sockets, each of which were formed by concentric rings of black flesh like stacked rings embedded in the soft flesh.
    It was also from this bulbous central part of the creature’s body that the tentacles came. One of them, the first tendril she had seen, emerged near the top of the protuberance and now stretched taught like a guy-wire up to the grate above, holding the creature in place despite the wind. Several other tentacles waggled freely, loose and streaming like smoke plumes in the currents blowing by. Five sprouted from the bulb above the eyes, spaced evenly around, and five more emerged from beneath those blinking orbs, also equally spaced all around, ten tentacles in all.
    The creature snaked a tentacle down at the two of them, Altin and Orli standing there. Once again it flattened a few of its discs out to guide the tentacle toward them. It came waggling down, its tip flexing, not quite sharp, and it tapped once against the back of Altin’s head.
    “Oh God,” Orli said as Altin muttered something profane and entirely Prosperion.
    The tendril tapped twice more on Altin’s helmet, then right after, and quick as a dart, it dove down through the grate beneath him. It threaded its way back up and wrapped itself around the beam several times, while yet another tentacle came down and slithered around him, wrapping him up in a stack of coils.
    “I can’t imagine this is going to end well,” Altin said, though he sounded more curious than afraid.
    Orli could hardly believe he was so calm. She jumped up and tried to pull the tip of the tendril away, intending to unwind it. She couldn’t budge it. It might as well have been three-inch rebar. She reached for her blaster. It was gone.
    “I think it’s trying to do something,” Altin said, still remarkably restrained. “I can feel pressure all over my suit. It’s like a thousand fingers all over me, squeezing and prodding me everywhere.”
    He was jerked up and away before she could reply. She screamed his name. The tendril curled up into the blowing mist. Another tendril came down, this one having been first sent up to the platform above, wound through it, and sent back down. It locked together with the tip of the one that had Altin wrapped up. Both went taut between the two grates, with Altin like a joint in the middle of them.
    There followed a loud, sucking sound, and in that moment the creature sucked its puffy parachute-like billow in. The massive dome of shimmering flesh vanished almost too quickly to be seen, settling into the smaller bulbous area that she’d noted near the top of the creature’s body, situated up