A Passage of Stars (17 page)

Five days into the trip, Lily returned to her cabin to find Aliasing helping Jenny outfit herself. Gregori had been banished to the top bunk.

“Trouble?” asked Lily as they both looked up at her entrance.

Jenny shrugged on a double-belted shoulder harness that sported a fascinating array of weapons. “Nothing that isn’t routine for a smuggler,” she said with a grimace. “The main routes into Central are so heavily policed and regulated that we’ve got to come in the back door. But the back door also means the back roads, and it’s a little fey out there, the navigation points a little shiftier, if you take my meaning, and we’ve run into pirates more than once.” She wore a skintight gray bodysuit; her hair, short anyway, was covered by a skullcap. She took out a forearm length metal rod and twirled it. “Heredes knows how to use one of these,” she said. “We had a go at it today.”

“Is that how he got that cut on his cheek?”

“Forgive me, but no!” Jenny contrived to look offended. “I’ve got better control than that. And anyway, your father is one mean old bastard and taught me a trick or two, much as I hate to admit it. No, your blue-hair had to try it. I don’t mean to say he’s useless, because he’s really rather good, but he’s not got the real knack, not like us. He lacks control.”

“I wish I’d done more weapons.” Lily took the stick when Jenny offered it to her and weighed it in her hands. “We did some, but I’ve always preferred empty-hand.”

“That’s because you’re an artist.” Jenny retrieved the stick and slid it into her belt. “I’m just trained to kill.”

“Can I help?”

“You’re not used to this kind of raiding. Stick to the cabin, for now.”

Heredes had other plans. He persuaded the captain to let Lily sit next to him on the bridge for the next shift. Strapping himself in, he leaned to whisper to her.

“We’re going to be running an irregular route here, Lily. This is possibly the best chance you’ll ever get to see firsthand how they run the road virtually on manual.”

Her reply was equally soft. “Isn’t it a lot more dangerous?”

He smiled. He seemed placid, but beneath it—beneath it she suspected he thrived on chances like this. “Living is dangerous, Lilyaka,” he said. He turned back to the com-console.

She watched the two harried sta navigators, doubling shifts to ensure accuracy; Milhaviru, the pilot, a sloppy, loudmouthed woman who sat still as sealed air now; Captain Bolyai, nervous at the sensors; the weapons man; and the scanner operator. It was remarkably quiet:

“Homing at eleven ought two two three degrees. Forty-seven bits.” The sibilant tones of a sta.

“Check.”

“Did you hear the one about the pirate’s son who—”

“Shift—two point eight on vector.”

“Vector shifted.”

“Eleven ought three. Forty-eight.”

“Closing imperative.” Heredes’s voice.

“Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Break.”

They went through.

The mind like water, formed to calm reflectivity. All is mirrored.

And came out.

The calculations began anew. A station, a solitary beacon in a dark and isolate system, quavered a greeting and wished them well.

They went through.

The mind like the moon. Light touching all equally.

And came out.

They drifted for an eight-hour rest shift on the edge of a minor system. On a dog-tag such as this, with a necessarily small crew, Lily saw how easy it would be to lose your ship through a miscalculated window or on an incorrectly vectored entrance just from fatigue. She wondered where such ships ended up. And she saw how these folk might easily come, like Jenny, to bear themselves with a cheerful fatalism. Heredes woke her, and they returned to the bridge.

They went through.

Infinity of stars. Place, in this dimension, a hand, so. Bend, angle, shadow, each exact.

And came out.

And were hailed. Heredes caught the channel and relied. Captain Bolyai stood anxiously beside him.

“This is the
Easy Virtue
. We are, I repeat, passing through.”

“Throw down your colors,
Easy Virtue
, and prepare to be entered.” The static across title channel lent a certain insouciance to this command.

Bolyai flipped on the alert. It echoed over the intercom.

“Captain!” The woman on scan gasped. “I’ve got them. Void help us. They’re huge. Captain, look at those specs! Central’s battle fleet has got nothing this big—Look at that hull!” Her voice trailed off in horrified awe.

“The
Easy Virtue
replies that she is not available to just anyone,” said Heredes primly.

Static crackled. “We respect your finer feelings,
Easy Virtue
, but this is
La Belle Dame
, and she takes what she wills.”

“Get me the closest window!” cried the captain, rushing to the scanners. The navigator began frantic calculations on the computer, but Lily saw Heredes’s face freeze into stillness and thaw into anticipation.

“
La Belle Dame
,” he called into the console. “Tell your mistress that my original country is the region of the summer stars.”

Lily stared at him. Most of the bridge, catching the end of this, stared at him. Bolyai stepped back, about to speak.

“Stay on course,
Easy Virtue.
Don’t attempt evasion.” Static arced.

A second voice came on. “Hold your course. Please repeat your last statement.” Heredes repeated it. A longer pause, scrambled with the faint hiss of static.

“
Easy Virtue
.” A new voice. Female, yet something more than that. “‘Long and white are my fingers as the ninth wave of the sea.’” Even the sta, now, ceased at his calculations to gaze in astonishment at Heredes. “Are you coming over?”

“Of course,” replied Heredes, and he unstrapped himself and rose. “Captain, give me a shuttle and crew, and I can guarantee your safety, your cargo, and your ship.”

“But who is that?” the captain asked, gazing at the scan numbers with bewilderment. “What is that? What pirate has a better than class seven fleet ship?”

“An entirely different breed of pirate,” Heredes answered, not ungently. “And in any case, we have just met the queen.”

“I thought we were on the queen,” Lily said.

“That was a joke,” Heredes said with perfect seriousness. “
La Belle Dame
is the true and the only queen of the highroad. Shall we go?”

K
YOSTI CAME, AND THREE
of the crew, but the blue-haired man, after the jerky removal from the
Easy Virtue
, demanded and received the shuttle’s controls. The massive hulk of
La Belle Dame
loomed outside the viewports. She was as large as the unmanned lowroad freighters Lily’s father commissioned for transport of unprocessed ore, but she was also as sleek as an animal, a dark creature stalking the highroad.

“Do you know her, this ship?” Lily asked Heredes.

“This ship, no. She’s new.” He was tidying himself, straightening his clothes, combing his hair. “But I know her mistress. I know La Belle Dame.” His voice had a husky quality, almost passionate. “These people are not from the Reft, Lily. Like Kyosti, they’ve come a long way to get here.”

“Like you,” she said, but he merely smiled.

Grappling hooks rang on the shuttle’s hull as the big ship fastened onto them; the lock sealed on, and Heredes, Lily, and Kyosti passed into the ship.

Four armed men met them. One, to Lily’s surprise, was a tattoo, standing with complete ease among her fellows. They wore striking clothes: large-sleeved shirts of silk, each a different color—scarlet, turquoise, emerald, and indigo—with collars and wrist bands of profuse white lace; tailored white trousers, wide belts, and ornately hilted cutlasses; high boots, rings, jeweled bracelets, necklaces of gold and silver and platinum. It was a uniform, but one individual to each man and woman. Kyosti sighed deeply, but forebore to comment on his own drab tunic.

The guards politely requested their presence on the bridge. Heredes politely agreed.

They followed corridors that seemed as numerous and as long as those of Ransome House. No grey walls here—from brilliant solid colors on the lowest deck the decoration progressed from simple geometric patterns, to murals, to, at the top deck, a complex interaction of color, pattern, raised relief, and texture that was evidently so fascinating to Kyosti that he lagged behind to examine it by touch. He had to hurry, finally, to catch them just as the lift doors began to shut.

The doors opened onto the bridge. The four guards hung back to let their three guests move out unescorted. Five plushly carpeted steps led down to a half-circle of silver floor. Chairs, individually crafted, sat before consoles inlaid with the material Heredes called wood. The crew, as brightly dressed as the guards, conversed in low tones to each other. Here, too, Lily saw Ridanis casually intermixed; it was this more than anything that convinced her that this ship, at least, came from outside the Reft.

Three huge screens filled the forward part of the half-dome above. One chair, on a low dais, sat with its back to them. Like a stilling hand, as the chair began to swivel in its foundation, its smooth, silent turn created a sudden immobility among the watching crew.

She was revealed as dawn is revealed: the slow, anticipatory unveiling that brings forth the sun. Her high brow was white as alabaster, her face framed by a close-cropped crown of blue-black hair that swept back and down to reappear over her shoulder in a single, sable braid reaching to her waist. She wore simple, black clothes—a shirt belted with gold clasps at the waist, a full skirt; her small white feet showed at the base. The high seat in which she sat seemed at once to dwarf her small stature and yet to be scant enough that it was a wonder it could hold her. Her eyes, even at this distance, pierced with the blue-white intensity of young twin stars. She rose, skirts rustling down as if a living creature clung to her.

“What have you brought me?” Her voice was as hushed as if cloth muffled it, but it filled, nevertheless, the bridge as air fills any space it enters. “Is this my eagle, is this my prisoner? Is this a ghost, or is it indeed the seventh age?”

Heredes walked forward, a solitary path across the silvering floor. He knelt at her feet on the dais.

With two fingers she raised his head until he looked up at her. “Is this truly my Taliesin?”

He lifted a hand to enfold hers, brought it to his lips, and kissed it with the reverence due a sacred object. “It is truly your Taliesin, Bella,” he said, his voice so soft that the slightest movement in the room would have overwhelmed it. “Dead, mad, and a poet.” He smiled as absently and thoroughly as a dreamer.

She studied him a time longer, then lifted her head to examine with unnerving steadiness Lily and Kyosti. “The hawk I recollect,” she said in her quiet way. Lily felt Kyosti shift in apparent dis-ease beside her. “But who is this young woman?” Lily, meeting this gaze, felt the passage of respect between differences and familiarities, as judged as judging. This woman she could deal with, in the openhanded sense, although the formidable reserve behind that penetrating gaze might never allow for the intimacy of friendship. Caught up in her perusal, Lily was unaware that Heredes had turned his head to look at her.

A mere name could not satisfy the question the queen of the highroad had just asked—she dealt in relationships. And Joshua Li Heredes, by whatever name, was rarely at a loss for an answer. But he looked at Lily and could not define her.

First, she was his pupil: the lean athleticism, the posture of confidence that comes from mastery, the quick beam of her eye. Later, she had become something more than that, because she had excelled in a way no other he had taught had; there she stood with that controlled cast of face she had learned from him, worn away from the inside by the insatiate rabidity that drives an artist to seek further up the hidden path. And behind it all, the quality that had finally linked her to him completely: the core of restlessness that, like him with his master, she had never managed to still, could never still. It came very clearly to him the feeling when he had opened her cell, back at Nevermore, and she had, with rare spontaneity, come to him—and he knew with the swiftness of just-illuminated truth who she was.

“Bella,” he said, as grave as he was surprised, standing now. “I would like you to meet my daughter, Lily.”

Kyosti’s astonishment was as much physical as his blurted, “Mother bless us.” Lily felt him start, like a bolting animal glimpsing freedom; his hand touched her elbow, a delicate pressure, but one that seemed to claim something of her.

Bella looked not in the least disconcerted, merely thoughtful. Lily, once Kyosti’s touch brought her back from her initial shock at Heredes’s statement, realized that from her own conversation with Jenny, this could not be entirely unexpected.

“Then, my dear,” said La Belle Dame finally, “I must offer you my welcome, and give you the hospitality of the ship while you wait.”

“Are we waiting?” asked Lily.

“Of course, my child. Your father and I have some private business to discuss.”

“But will our ship wait?” Lily asked it more of Heredes than La Belle, but he merely stood as meek as a servant beside her.

La Belle smiled, so ruthlessly cold a smile that Lily felt pity for those souls who found themselves opposed to her. “With our justly famous Sans Merci guns trained on them, I feel they will find that their patience extends indefinitely. Adam.” She beckoned with a single, imperious hand, and a man rose from one of the consoles and came to stand at the foot of the dais. He had La Belle’s blue-black, straight hair, but also, standing below Heredes, a dusky cast of skin and green eyes that reflected some trace of the older man. “Give your father your good wishes, and then offer your sister and the hawk some refreshment.”

He bowed, salute enough on this ship, and stepped up to give a stiff shake of the hand and a few inaudible words to Heredes. He retreated as Heredes put his arm out to take La Belle’s and the two of them walked as if on procession into the lift, the door sealing them off from the rest. The bridge crew turned with self-conscious busy-ness back to their tasks, leaving Adam alone to approach Lily and Kyosti. The four guards had vanished.