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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

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Ships. Warships. Coming here.

“This is the wrong room,” he said, fighting down a rising terror.

“It has to be. We can’t stay here any longer—they’ll destroy us.”

“This is the right place,” said Maraganha calmly, as if life had never given her reason to fear warships coming out of the Void. “Follow the marks, and they’ll take us home.”

“But there aren’t any more—”

He stopped. There
were
marks now, out beyond the armored glass, out in the deep of space. All he had to do was trust them—

—and step through—

—onto a balcony in Sombrelír, with the sun going down across the bay. He looked over his shoulder and saw Maraganha coming out through the windowed doors of the hotel room to join him.

“It was real,” he said. “It wasn’t just the Void.”

She smiled at him, the proud smile of a teacher to a beloved student. “It was real. And now your own marks are there as well, in case you ever need to find your way through that place again.”

17:

ERAASI: HANILAT; SERPENT STATION SUS-DARV GUARDSHIP
GARDEN-OF-FAIR-BLOSSOMS:
ERAASI NEARSPACE
FIRE-ON-THE-HILLTOPS;
SUS-PELEDAEN GUARDSHIP
COLD-HEART-OF-MORNING
: THE VOID

Z
eri sus-Dariv felt the vibration of the
Fire
’s run for the Void subside to the quieter, more familiar sensations of normal operation, and allowed herself to start breathing normally again. Lenyat Irao—“captain,” Iulan Vai called him respectfully, now that they were in space, and if Syr Vai, Iulan
etaze,
gave someone a title of respect, then custom doubtless required the head of what remained of the sus-Dariv to do likewise—
Captain
Irao had called the
Fire
’s earlier departure from Serpent Station a hurried mess when he spoke of it afterward. She wondered how he was going to describe this one.

Zeri hadn’t been afraid when she heard the noise of magnetic grapnels attaching to the
Fire
’s outer hull, and felt the shock travel through the metal of the ship clear into her bones. What she knew was going to happen next and what she wanted Herin to do for her before it did were the only things she’d had room for in her mind. She’d been too cold and too clearheaded for anything like fear.

That was then. Now that the crisis was over, she knew in her heart and stomach, as well as in her head, why it was that spacers liked the Void. All she could do was lie on the acceleration couch, and look up at the lights in the overhead, and shake.

She heard the sound of the bridge door sliding open, and turned her head. Captain Irao—the name didn’t work right inside her head; she’d thought of him as “Len” for too long while they were on Eraasi—came into the passenger pod. The captain looked like she felt: pale and sweaty and exhausted. Zeri wondered if he hadn’t started shaking until afterward, either.

Iulan Vai was the first one to speak. “That was good shiphandling, Captain.”

“Thanks.” He gave her weak grin. “Tell you the truth, I’d just as soon never have to do it again.”

Zeri unstrapped and sat up on the edge of the acceleration couch, the better to speak to the captain herself. “I’d just as soon you never had to again, as well. But I’m extremely grateful that you could.”

“You’re not the only one.” Herin was also looking bad. It wasn’t a kind thing that she’d asked of him, Zeri knew, but it was something better asked for from family than from a stranger like Iulan Vai. “I’m a man of boundless curiosity, Captain. Where did you learn a trick like that?”

“I didn’t. I heard someone talk once about having been there to see it done.”

Herin closed his eyes and looked ill. “Oh.”

Zeri stood up. Her knees had stopped shaking, which surprised her somewhat. She crossed the passenger pod to look at Len directly. “In that case, Captain Irao, you have my admiration as well as my personal gratitude.”

“I could hear what you said to him.” Len jerked his head at Herin. “Over the audio. Made it sound like a good time to try anything that might work.”

“And you were right,” Iulan Vai said. “So don’t lose sleep worrying about it afterward.”

At the mention of sleep, Zeri had to fight against an involuntary yawn. She was more exhausted than she ever remembered being in her life, in spite of having done nothing except ride out the crisis in the passenger pod. “Is that what we do now? Sleep?”

Len nodded. “And eat, and maybe play solitaire against the ship-mind. Work on inside repairs, if it turns out that we need any. Then sleep some more, and so on until we get to Ninglin.”

“Sounds like an excellent schedule of activities,” said Herin. Her cousin was looking better, Zeri reflected, now that he’d worked out what the captain’s untested maneuver had saved him from having to do.

“Glad you approve of it,” Len told him. “But I warn you—the ship-mind cheats.”

Kief had never gone into space before, despite the fact that he’d studied the stargazers’ disciplines before going to the Demaizen Circle. Nor was riding second-seat in a cargo courier his idea of the best way to start; but nothing else had advertised itself as available for hire, and he was uncomfortably aware that he lacked the expertise to seek out a better alternative.

Chartering the courier ship for an indefinite term—in theory from the sus-Radal, who held the captain’s contract—would also come near to wiping out Kief’s share of the Diasul fortune. The money didn’t matter; he’d spoken the truth to Ayil syn-Arvedan when he’d said that he never used it anyway. He’d lived off his stipend as a sus-Peledaen Mage for the past ten years, partly from a reluctance to touch his share of the family’s assets, but mostly because he’d lacked the desire for anything more.

The great working had bound and controlled him in that as in so many other things, and he had never fully comprehended the magnitude of that binding until now. Stepping away from his old body had taken him outside of the
eiran
that surrounded it, and had finally made him understand. He was no longer one of the Demaizen Mages, and it was time to do what was necessary and set himself free.

There was, he had to admit, a distinct possibility that once the job was done, he might not be a sus-Peledaen Mage any longer, either. That didn’t matter any more than the money did. He was the First of his own Circle, and First above the First of the Institute Circle, and nobody in history had ever linked two Circles in that way before. Someone on Eraasi would always need the kind of luck-working that such combined power made possible, and those who needed it would always pay.

Given time, he could cut himself and his Circle-Mages free of patronage and the fleet-families altogether. They could be truly free, as only those with power could be free—but Kief’s glimpse of Iulan Vai in the news-channel image, and his long meditation afterward, had brought him to a realization of what first had to be done.

He had to free himself from Garrod’s working. If all his efforts so far had been worthless, it had to be because Arekhon sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen was still alive, still the First of a remnant Demaizen, still tending and maintaining the
eiran
of the great working. Kief had thought his fellow-Mage lost forever by now, or even dead, but the working wouldn’t be resisting Kief’s efforts to break free if Arekhon weren’t caught up in it as well. Iulan Vai had been one of the Demaizen Mages who’d gone with Arekhon when the Circle split; if she was still a Mage, she would be with ’Rekhe now.

If he wanted to find ’Rekhe, he had to follow Iulan Vai.

Kief had known better than to try explaining his decision to Ayil. She was a scholar and a stargazer; she’d never seen the silvery threads of the
eiran
and known beyond certainty that one of them gleamed brighter than all the rest. But he had that thread now, and his firm grip on it and his determination to follow where it led gave Kief his first real sense of steadiness and purpose since he’d stepped out of Isayana’s gel-vat.

He forced himself out of his light meditation and back into reality, where the courier ship’s pilot was waiting on launch permission from port control. Only vital traffic was lifting—the port had been full of gossip about Natelth sus-Peledaen’s stolen bride, and the courier’s pilot was disposed to be chatty.

“Some people say she wasn’t kidnapped,” the pilot said. “That she figured out what was really going on, and she ran away.”

“I’m not much for following the news channels,” Kief said. “If you could enlighten me … what is ‘really going on,’ that it should distress a young woman so to find it out?”

The pilot cast a disbelieving look in Kief’s direction. “Huh. Word is, wasn’t pirates that did for the sus-Dariv fleet, any more than it was an accident that blew up the Court of Two Colors—and the lady got herself proof of it from somewhere.”

“You’re verging on dangerous speculation, my friend. The sus-Peledaen make bad enemies.”

“Did you hear me say anybody’s name but the lady’s?” the pilot demanded indignantly. “You did not—” An amber light began blinking on the main console. “There’s the port.”

He flipped the switch underneath the blinking light. “sus-Radal contract carrier
Waves-Breaking-Softly.”

“Waves-Breaking-Softly,
you have permission to lift for orbit with one passenger.”

“Waves-Breaking-Softly,
preparing to lift. Out.”

The pilot flipped switches and pressed buttons in a sequence that Kief made no pretense to himself of understanding, and the world closed down around him until there was only the roar of engines and the pressure of liftoff. This was it; he was leaving Eraasi. If he’d had the breath for it, he would have laughed. Star travel wasn’t supposed to be for him; it was supposed to be for fleet-family scions like ’Rekhe had been, or for Void-walkers like Lord Garrod …
strange,
he thought,
what necessity compels.

The pressure eased, replaced by a new sensation. He had no weight, and he was floating inside the constraints of the safety webbing. For an instant he teetered on the verge of nausea, but the courier’s pilot flipped another switch, and the floating sensation was replaced by the return of normal gravity, or by something that mocked normal gravity well enough for all practical purposes.

The pilot gave Kief a sympathetic look. “First time up, eh?”

“Yes.”

“We can rest here in orbit a bit,” the pilot said kindly; “let you get used to it. I need to file a projected Void-transit with inspace control.”

Kief was not so distressed by the experience of liftoff that he missed the pilot’s subtle inquiry. The courier ship had been hired for lift to orbit and a Void-transit to be filed later: a mildly shady deal, but not illegal. Anybody watching the boards at the port would see only the first destination, the lift to orbit, and not the second. The maneuver bought time, not safety; inspace control wasn’t in the business of keeping anybody’s secrets.

Now that the courier had made it into orbit, Kief needed more than the name of a world to give the pilot. He needed the course that would take him to Arekhon sus-Khalgath and the end of the great working. Iulan Vai, he told himself, Iulan Vai was the thread he needed to follow, wherever she was going and why. She’d been the last Mage to join the Demaizen Circle and the first Mage of Arekhon’s teaching, and the combination made her life and luck into a glowing thread in the great working.

He let his mind tell over the roster of the settled planets: Eraasi, Ildaon, Rayamet, Ruisi, Ninglin, Aulwikh, Ayarat, Cracanth … those were the heartworlds, the worlds where Mages had found each other and spoken across the deeps of space. Then came the lesser worlds, settled from the greater ones; the bright thread that was Iulan Vai didn’t touch those, but instead wove through and around them in the pattern of the great working and came to rest on—

“Ninglin.”

“If they went into the Void, they’ll come out of the Void,” Egelt said. With
Cold-Heart-of Morning
safely in the Void, the sus-Peledaen security operatives had time to consider exactly where they were going next. “Did the captain get a fix on their likely point of emergence?”

“After much profanity and repeated assertions that doing something crazy like this was a good way to end up inside a star someplace in the middle of nowhere—yes.” Hussav laid a printout on the wardroom table. “Here’s the arc”

Egelt studied the printout carefully. “So … Cracanth if they want to get lost in the crowd, or Ninglin if they want to go somewhere obscure. What do you think?”

“sus-Dariv has assets on Cracanth.”

“Then we’ll go to Ninglin,” Egelt said. “Whoever’s running their operation isn’t stupid, or we’d have grabbed them by now. They have to know that we know about those assets, and after getting ambushed at Aulwikh they know that we’re faster than they are in the Void. So they’ll be looking for us to put on speed and catch them at Cracanth.”

“You’re the boss.”

Egelt sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, Lord Natelth is the boss. I’m only the guy who has to obey his whims. If some girl was that dead-set against marrying me, I’d tell her to go with my blessing, and find me a different one that I dared to close my eyes around.”

“You don’t think she was kidnapped?” Hussav asked.

“Not really,” Egelt said. “You remember questioning those guys from Serpent Station? They all seemed to think she’d gone of her own free will.”

“Assuming that they weren’t all fibbing, too.”

“We asked them pretty persuasively.”

“Not so persuasively that someone couldn’t be prepared to resist,” Hussav said. “I’m not a monster.”

“The fangs and horns aren’t real?”

“Nope. Stuck on with tape.”