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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: A Working of Stars
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He sat back down, telling himself that it was the woman’s politeness and not the strength of her will that kept him from leaving, and not believing himself very much.
The man said, “Don’t worry. We’re not fleet-family operatives—at least, not anymore.”
“Then who are you?” Len asked. “And what do you want to talk to me about?”
The woman smiled. “I suppose you could call us the last of the Demaizen Circle. But my friend here—” she nodded at the dark man “—is sus-Dariv born and bred, my word as a Mage on it. So you might as well tell us the truth.”
 
 
Elaeli was still in An-Jemayne with the Provost of Elicond—sometimes these things took longer than anticipated, Arekhon supposed—and the summer cottage was empty when he arrived there with Ty and Maraganha. The Void-walker had said already that any place would do for the working in a pinch; here, at least, they wouldn’t be interrupted, or need to make awkward explanations afterward.
“There’s a cook and a housekeeper,” he said. They were sitting together on the screened verandah where Maraganha had first stepped through from the Void. Night had fallen, and the stars were coming out in the sky above the trees. He’d lit a candle, some minutes earlier, and set it on the low table. “But only when the Mestra is in residence. For myself—I don’t bother.”
“Self-sufficiency is good,” Ty said. He looked amused. “Even for the sus-Peledaen.”
“I doubt that Natelth kept my name on the family tablets for very long after we left Eraasi.”
Maraganha turned her head and regarded Arekhon curiously. The yellow candle flame threw changeable patterns of light and shadow across the dark planes of her face. “Who’s Natelth?”
“My brother,” Arekhon said. “He and I … Natelth doesn’t take well to being thwarted.”
“He means his brother tried to have us all killed,” Ty explained. “And will probably try again if we go back.”
“Is that the real reason you don’t want to do it?” Maraganha asked. “Because of what might happen?”
“Yes. But not the way you think.” Ty looked away from the candle flame, out into the dark. “I had a place to be, when I was at the Guildhouse in Cazdel. If I go back to Eraasi, I think I’m going to lose it. One way or another.”
“Only help us find Narin,” Arekhon said. “Then we’ll talk some more about Eraasi.”
“And if Maraganha
etaze
can’t help us find her—”
“Then we already have a bargain, and you stay in Cazdel.” Arekhon stood up. “Maraganha—is now a good enough time, or would it be better to wait until tomorrow?”
The Void-walker stood also. “Now is as good as tomorrow, and better for being sooner.” She looked at Ty steadily until the younger Mage also rose to his feet. Then she said, “Listen to me, both of you. This is something that you need to learn, and learn well enough to teach if you have to. And the first question that you need to ask is how your friend was able to walk to Gifla Harbor from a sinking ship without a Circle to back her.”
“It’s not the going,” Ty said. “At least, that’s what all the stories say. It’s the coming back.”
“I came here without a Circle. And regardless of what you may think, I plan to return home when I’m finished.” She turned then to address Arekhon. “This is the part where you’re supposed to say, ‘Please, Auntie Maraganha, tell us how you did it?’”
“Well, then,” he said, “how did you?”
“There’s a trick to it—a simple one, once you know the way. You look for an angle, and you turn the corner, and there you are. Like turning the corner in a hall in your own home in the dark.”
She vanished, and a moment later reappeared.
“The trick,” she said, “is to come out where you left.”
“And how do you learn to do that?” Arekhon asked.
“In the Void, all times are the same time, and all places are the same place. So to begin a journey is to arrive.”
Ty said,
“That’
s certainly full of possibilities for error.”
“You’re a very perceptive young man,” Maraganha told him. “And the chance of going astray is why the Mages in my time are accustomed to setting Void-marks to light their way home. I set my own Void-marks when I first walked here, and they’ll help us get back once we’ve collected your friend Narin.”
“If you say so,” Ty said. “But this corner that we’re supposed to look for—how do we find it?”
“Take my hand, and I’ll show you.”
She held out her hands. Ty took one, and Arekhon the other—he would have known even blindfolded that it was a Mage’s grip, from the strength in it, and the telltale rough spots left by daily practice with a wooden staff.
Maraganha spoke quietly, in the shadows of the darkened verandah. “Now look for the path around the corner, the half-step sideways from here, the journey that has your friend at the end of it.”
Narin,
Arekhon thought, and watched the cords of the
eiran glow
brighter in response to her name. Then he saw the particular Narin-lines that stretched out around the angle in reality. He followed them, and he was through.
 
 
The folded slip of paper in Inadal’s pocket had arrived at Arvedan Hall with the morning mail. It contained only an address—a residential building not far from the sus-Peledaen town house—a date and time, and the words
Come alone.
Curious, he had returned to Hanilat and done exactly that, leaving his groundcar several blocks away in a parking tower and finishing his journey on foot. The doorkeeper-
aiketh
that let him into the well-kept-up older building was a starkly functional model, its voice the product of a synthesizer module, its casing plain brushed metal.
“Please come this way. The workrooms are on the basement level.”
He followed the
aiketh
down a flight of steps, and from there into a hallway that led to a surprisingly well lit and modern laboratory. As he’d expected, Isayana sus-Khalgath was waiting there for him, unmasked this time and carrying a stiff cardboard tube under one arm. In her plain work clothes, with her hair pinned up with a metal clip, she could have passed for a midlevel fleet-family technician and not the sister of Natelth sus-Peledaen.
This laboratory, though, with its long tables, its drafting and mechanical
aiketen
, its well-stocked shelves and cabinets, was clearly her personal domain. The doorkeeper-
aiketh
said, “Inadal syn-Arvedan is here, my lady,” and retired upstairs about its business.
He said, “I received your letter. At least, I assume it was your letter—if it isn’t, then we’re already in more trouble than I want to think about.”
“Breathe easily, syn-Arvedan. It was mine.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m guessing that this isn’t merely a friendly meeting for cards and
uffa.”
“You’re right.” She uncapped the cardboard tube and pulled out several large sheets of drafting parchment. Spreading the first one out on the laboratory table, she said, “I wanted you to see what I’ve been working on.”
He stepped up to the table and looked. He didn’t have enough technical training to understand most of what he was seeing—his sister Ayil might have, or some of Ayil’s friends—but he could follow the summary paragraphs and the conceptual drawings.
Bodies. Not
aiketen,
but bodies that live.
He wondered, briefly, if he was standing across the table from a madwoman. Finally, he said, “This is it?”
She shrugged. “Preliminary notes only.”
A corner of the parchment tried to curl up again. Almost absentmindedly, she weighted it down with a stone jar full of rulers and marking tools.
Inadal, watching, said, “That’s a cumbersome method of storage you’re using there.”
“The working files are encrypted in the house-mind. I had one of the drafting
aiketen
make these up to show you.”
“Ah.” He looked at the notes and drawings for a while longer in silence, then asked, “Is your brother aware of the direction your researches have been taking?”
“No.”
“I see.”
A spot of color rose in her cheeks, and she spoke more rapidly. “Natelth is enamored of inorganic mind components—the materials come cheaply from Ayarat, and the new instruction techniques give us the kind of speed we’ve been accustomed to getting from gel-based constructs. Not so elegant as before, but …” Again, she shrugged. “So I began to think of other uses for the mind-gel, since we weren’t going to be using it in our ships anymore.”
Not a madwoman, then, he reflected, but a tinkerer, a dedicated user-up of spare parts and unwanted extras. He turned back to the parchment and touched one of the less-confusing sketches with his forefinger. “This would be a medical
aiketh,
here?”
“It could be adapted from one,” she said. “For the prototype. Custom-built units would come later.”
“These … bodies,” he said. “Is there any point in making them? What would they be good for, that we don’t already have either
aiketen
or true people enough to do?”
“I thought you might have some ideas,” she said. “One thing I haven’t even put in my notes, although anybody with the right training could probably guess at it—given the right blood to seed the process, the finished body can be a match for anyone you like.”
He felt a chill run down his back, a not-entirely-unpleasant sensation. If the syn-Arvedan were going to make themselves into a force of opposition to the likes of Natelth sus-Peledaen, they would need reliable security and intelligence operatives. Doorways of possibility were opening up inside Inadal’s mind, and some of the things behind those doors were both dark and tempting.
“Yes,” he said. “That does have possibilities. You would be instructing these bodies for their work, I suppose, like you instruct the
aiketen?”
“The process should be essentially the same,” she said. “Of course, I haven’t done it yet, so there are no guarantees.”
“I understand.” He pondered the sketch drawing of the converted medical
aiketh.
“It looks like you’ll need a physician—”
“I know that. I have several in mind already.”
“—and more than a physician, I suspect that you’ll need a Mage. Probably a whole Circle of Mages.”
“And that’s another problem I thought you might be able to help me with. All of the fleet-Circles answer to my brother these days, whether they admit it or not.”
“That will make things difficult, then.” He thought about what he’d learned of the Mages from his brother Delath. “The Demaizen Circle could have done it—”
“—but Demaizen was broken when the Old Hall burned.” Her expression was sympathetic, and he remembered belatedly that she too had once had a brother in the Demaizen Circle. “I know. And Garrod syn-Aigal died a madman.”
“Not all of Demaizen’s Mages are dead.”
“Diasul?” she asked, somewhat to his surprise. “That one already has secrets he doesn’t mention to my brother; I’m sure of it. But I don’t think I like him.”
“All the same,” Inadal said, “he’s the only Mage I know of these days who’s doing experimental work on Lord Garrod’s level.”
Isayana sus-Khalgath nodded briskly and rolled up her sheets of parchment. “Then Diasul it will have to be.”
 
 
The Void was all smoky greyness, a thick fog illuminated by a sourceless glow that came at once from everywhere and from nowhere at all. Arekhon felt the cold of it pulling the warmth from his flesh, and realized a bitter truth—that the
eiran
had shown him the way into this place, but nothing more. The cords of life and luck did not extend into the Void.
“No wonder Narin couldn’t find her way home,” he said. His voice sounded flat and echoless to his own ears, like a megaviol with dampened strings. “With all her skills and techniques useless, working by instinct and intuition alone … a lesser Mage would never have reached Gifla Harbor at all.”
“Will and intention are everything in the Void,” Maraganha said. “What you will—what you intend—becomes real.”
“It can’t be that easy,” Ty said. “Nothing ever is.”
“And the prize for the day goes to the man from Cazdel,” she said.
“Willing a single thing, purely and clearly—holding a single focused intention—it’s not easy at all. Fortunately, gentlesirs, you have the training. We’re here to look for your friend, and in the Void—”
“—to seek for a thing is to find it,” Arekhon finished. He pointed out into the mist of the Void, in a direction that he defined by an act of will as not-random, and said, “There.”
The mists of the Void swirled and parted, revealing a many-branched tree, stark black against a grey background, with the heads of young women impaled on its branches. Thick grey blood fell away in slow drops from their necks and spread out like ink in water on the fog below.

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