Read The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds for Free Online Page B

“This sounds like something the CO doesn’t want to know about.”
    Jessan nodded. “He’d just worry.”
     
    The things I do for the Service , Ari thought, as the duckboards laid across the intersection buckled under his feet and then pulled free of the mud in a series of sucking noises.
    After yesterday’s rains, the town of Namport lay steaming under the late-afternoon sun. A smell of decaying vegetation and other unwholesome substances rose from the muddy streets. Like most of the roads in this lowland agricultural district, the thoroughfares of Namport were unpaved. The shaggy tusker-oxen used as draft animals by the small farmers didn’t care for hard surfaces, and nullgrav-assisted vehicles didn’t need them; so when wet weather came to Namport, foot traffic was left with mud on its boots.
    Ari stepped off the duckboards onto the raised wooden sidewalk. He’d worn civilian clothing for this expedition—a dark shirt over uniform trousers and boots—and a glance at his reflection in a shopwindow showed a looming, piratical figure. A heavy Ogre Mark VI blaster completed the effect.
    The Mark VI had been Jos Metadi’s, back in the days when the General still carried a sidearm openly instead of hiding one up his sleeve. When Ari left Galcen to join the Space Force, the blaster had gone with him—“for luck,” his father had said, although Ari had never needed to wear it until today.
    Halfway down the block, Ari spotted the sign he was looking for: FIVE POINTS IMPORTS, G. MUNNGRALLA, PROP.
    G. Munngralla, Prop., hadn’t wasted valuable credits on a holosign; the words were spelled out in fading gold paint on the shop awning over the sidewalk. When Ari reached the door of the shop, he saw that the same legend had been painted on the glass of door and window, along with a stylized depiction of a five-planet star system.
    Ari knew as well as anybody else that Nammerin was the fourth planet out in a ten-planet system. He smiled at the sight of the design. So far, so good.
    He pushed the door open—no fancy sliding doors with body-heat sensors for Munngralla, just ordinary cheap metal hinges, in need of a good oiling—and stepped inside. The air in the shop was cool and dry: Selvaur-cool, which made it two-shirts-and-a-jacket weather for a human. After the muggy heat of downtown Namport, Ari found it hard to keep his teeth from chattering.
    He shouldered his way past a rack of pugil sticks and a pallet-load of boxes labeled “genuine Entiboran fused-rock paperweights—certificate of authenticity included,” and came up against a Changwe temple gong bearing a hand-lettered sign in Maraghite script: PLEASE RING FOR SERVICE. There was no mallet in sight.
    Carrying it a bit far, aren’t you? Ari asked the absent Munngralla. How many humans can read Maraghite in the first place? I’m lucky Ferrda took the time to be thorough with his responsibilities. And as for your missing mallet …
    He pulled his right arm back a little and struck the heavy cast metal ball with the side of one large and solid fist. The bell gave voice.
    A single deep note tolled through the shop like a moan. A small grey lizard, frightened by the sound, ran out from behind a shelf of jars and into a crack in the wall. In the display cases, frangible items vibrated against one another on the glass shelves, setting up a high, brittle tinkling.
    Ari struck the gong again.
    *All right, all right. Let an old wrinkleskin get his midday sleep, why don’t you?*
    G. Munngralla—two meters and then some of not even slightly wrinkled Selvaur—pushed his way through the beaded curtain separating the back of the shop from the storefront.
    Ari grinned at him, making sure to bare his canine teeth. *You’re no wrinkleskin—and since when do the Masters of the Forest sleep in midday like animals?*
    *Who are you calling “animal,” thin-skin?* growled the shopkeeper. Selvaurs didn’t like that name any better than other sentients did, and they took