Free The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald

File that away for future reference … .
    *Come on!* roared Munngralla from the hall outside. *The whole upstairs is going to blow in about two minutes. *
    Ari took a firm hold on the unconscious man and started out after the Selvaur. At the top of the stairs, he paused. “What about the tholovine?”
    *Under the counter,* snarled Munngralla from the foot of the stairs. *But we haven’t got all night.*
    “I know, I know,” Ari said, starting down. The staircase looked steeper and more rickety than it had when he was charging up it a few minutes ago. A streak of drying blood ran down the plastered wall opposite the stairwell. It looked like that early casualty who’d come flying out through the door had made it away under his own power.
    In the shop, Munngralla paused only long enough to shift his burden and pull a small, tidily wrapped brick from behind the Changwe temple gong before running on out through the ruined doorway. Ari followed at a breathless lope.
    He jumped off the raised sidewalk to get a running start for the far side of the street—and then, in a roar of sound and a blinding light, came the explosion. Scraps of brick, plaster, and flaming wood rained down, setting the shop awning afire in several places. Five different burglar alarms in nearby shops went off in a jangling discord. Someone in the next building started having hysterics. And all up and down the block the doors flew open, discharging people in every imaginable state of dress and undress.
    Ari picked himself up from his knees in the mud. The man he’d brought out still breathed, for a miracle; Ari half-carried, half-dragged him the rest of the way to the far sidewalk. Munngralla was already there, sitting on the edge of the raised walkway and watching the flames reaching skyward from the blown-out windows of his shop.
    The force of the explosion, and the frantic overburdened run, made Ari’s head start spinning again. He laid his man down on the wooden sidewalk next to the man Munngralla had carried out, then sat down himself and waited for the vertigo to stop.
    “What,” he asked aloud as soon as he had breath, “was all that about, anyway?”
    *They didn’t like the way I operate.*
    “Complaining to the Small Business Board wasn’t good enough for them, I suppose.”
    The Selvaur gave a sardonic growl of laughter and pushed himself to his feet. *We’d better leave before Fire and Security show up.*
    “What about—?” Ari flapped a hand at the two casualties stretched out behind them on the sidewalk.
    *Let Security handle them.*
    “I suppose that is easier that explaining,” agreed Ari. Rising seemed to take almost more effort than he had energy for at the moment, and his head reeled. “Damned if I’m ever going to touch your local booze anymore.”
    *Come on—we haven’t got much time left.*
    The sound of an aircar’s engines came to them on the night breeze, and Air shook his head. “Correction. We don’t have any time left. Here they come.”
    But the scoutcar that settled on its nullgravs in the center of the street had Space Force markings. The side door slid open and a dim figure appeared, beckoning wildly.
    “Come on—hurry!” shouted Llannat Hyfid from the open door.
    “Here’s our ride,” said Ari to the Selvaur, and ran for the aircar with Munngralla at his heels.
     
    On Galcen, the first blue shadows of evening gathered over Prime. From the old waterfront district beside the bay, the twilight spread up through the government buildings and commercial towers of the city proper, then out into the sprawling suburbs and over the city-beyond-the-city that was Prime Spaceport Complex.
    The commerce of the civilized galaxy passed through Prime Complex—water-grain from Nammerin, raw minerals from Lessek, wool from the Galcenian highlands, passengers from everywhere. The Republic’s Space Force maintained its central administrative headquarters there as well. South Polar Base might do better for planetary