A Working of Stars (38 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: A Working of Stars
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She needed to look for him in crew berthing on the
Daughter.
She hadn’t had a chance to see much of the ship before Arekhon took
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
away across the Gap and the rest of Demaizen went with him, but she remembered how to find crew berthing from where she stood.
The cabin locks were nothing to her; this was her meditation, after all, and she knew all the codes. The first door that she tried showed her Narin Iyal asleep in her bunk, and the second cabin belonged to Ty. Watching Ty sleep saddened her a little: He’d barely been out of boyhood when she first met him, and not much older than that when she saw him last, and now he was a man nearing middle age, with tired lines on his face that not even sleep could erase.
She was prepared, then, when she came to Arekhon. The shock wasn’t as great—he’d been older than Ty before, and had already grown into the face he would wear for most of the middle part of his life—but she felt a pang nevertheless, seeing how threads of silver had stippled his thick black hair, like the threads of the
eiran
against the dark. Maybe that was why so many Mages went grey early, to remind them of what they worked with, and how much it sometimes cost.
Stop it,
she thought.
That’s done and gone. Do what you came here to do, and then go.
 
NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER:
SOMBRELÍR SUS-RADAL ASTEROID BASE SUS-RADAL GUARDSHIP
EASTWARD-TO-DAWNING;
SUS-DARIV GUARDSHIP
GARDEN-OF-FAIR-BLOSSOMS:
SUS-RADAL ASTEROID BASE NEARSPACE
 
V
ai reached out and touched Arekhon on the shoulder. “‘Rekhe! ’Rekhe, wake up!”
Arekhon gave a full-body shudder, said, “What!,” and sat up on the bunk with the crumpled bedsheet falling down below his waist. It was an excellent view; Vai wished she had the time to admire it properly, even if it was only a construct in her mind.
“’Rekhe,” she said. “It’s me. Iulan Vai.”
He was still half-asleep. He smiled, the smile that in the old days could convince anyone to do anything—make a lover out of a stranger or a Circle-Mage out of a sus-Radal spy—and said, “I haven’t forgotten. You talk to me in dreams, Iule, and tell me I need to come home.”
“Not this time, ’Rekhe. This time it’s different. Kief’s gone mad, and you have to stay away.”
“Mad? How?” His expression grew sharper; he was all the way awake in an instant. “Something is wrong, Vai—I can see that you’re hurt.”
She looked at herself. Arekhon spoke the truth. The self-image she’d worn while walking through the hill country was gone. The jacket she wore now had its left sleeve empty, and her arm was in a sling. Bloodstains covered her sleeve and the front of her shirt.
“Damn it, ’Rekhe—you always were too good at seeing things for what they really are.”
“Did Kief do that?” Arekhon demanded. “If he did, you’re right—he’s mad.”
Just for a moment, she let herself rest in the caring and the concern. There was nobody left on Eraasi to care for her like that anymore; now she was the one who was taking care of things. She wasn’t even part of Demaizen anymore, not really—if there
was
a Circle, it was only her and Herin, and she was the First of it.
She gave a deep sigh. “Yeah. It was Kief. He thinks that if he can find you, you’ll help him break Garrod’s working … or fight with him for it, and he’ll break the working if he wins.”
“I see. Where is he now?”
“No!” she said. “’Rekhe, you can’t fight with him. He’s crazy—he doesn’t even have his own body anymore; he’s gotten hold of somebody else’s somehow—and by the time he finds you he might not even give you the
chance
to fight.”
“Then I need to find him now,” said Arekhon, “before it gets worse.”
Anger rushed through her, hot and sudden. “I came all this way to warn you—to tell you to stay away from Kiefen Diasul no matter what—and now you tell me you’re going to
find
him? I’d forgotten what an ungrateful bastard you can be sometimes.”
He hung his head, and the long dark hair fell across his bare shoulders to hide his face. “I know. But I can’t let Kief destroy the great working—if he keeps on like this, he’ll pull it apart whether he fights me or not. Tell me how to find him, Iule. Please.”
She felt it now, as she realized he must feel it all the time—the inexorable weight of the working, pressing in.
“All right.”
Vai reached with her good hand into the inner pocket of her jacket, and took out the star chart she’d kept there ever since leaving Hanilat. She put it on the pillow next to where his head had lain.
“This will take you where you want to go.”
“Thank you.”
He lifted his head, and looked again at her face. In another heartbeat, she thought, he would reach out a hand and touch her.
But there was no time for it; there was never any time. The world of her meditation was coming apart around her, and she was falling, falling, down and through and backward into the glaring bright emptiness of the cargo bay.
 
 
Bertan Hafdorwen syn-Radal, captain of the sus-Radal guardship
East-to-the-Dawning,
was sleeping in his bunk when the
Dawning’s
Command-Ancillary sounded the message call. Hafdorwen pushed the Answering light on the bulkhead next to his pillow and listened.
“We have contact from the listening posts in the BK-two area,” the Command-Ancillary reported. “Someone’s come out of the Void.”
“Someone? Who? A man or a ship?”
“Ships, sir. The listening posts went dark after one challenge, per doctrine. We have three contacts, at least. No reply on the family channel.”
“I’ll be right up,” Hafdorwen said. He was already sitting up and pulling on his trousers, and had the lights up to half-intensity to enable him to find his way.
Command of
East-to-the-Dawning
was a prestigious position, and meant that the fleet-family had trust in him. Bertan Hafdorwen knew that he was one of perhaps half a dozen people in the entire galaxy who possessed the secret charts needed to reach the refuel and repair station Theledau sus-Radal was building, here on the other side of the interstellar gap. Hafdorwen suspected that there were other stations—he would certainly build more than one of them, if
he
were Theledau sus-Radal—but he had no way of knowing for certain, nor any need to know. He didn’t think about it often in any case; that sort of decision was fleet-family policy far above his present level.
But duty at the station was a long journey out of the way, and aside from the return trips to Eraasi to replace the crews and pick up supplies, it was dead boring. Ship’s-day in and ship’s-day out, the little line of fabrication drones picked at the substance of the smaller asteroids nearby, and refined them into building materials. Then they transported the materials to the larger asteroid that was being converted into a base.
The routine had gone on for months so far—months that were rapidly turning into years. Only Captain Hafdorwen saw the charts, or knew where the ship was jumping to; the crews were never told, and since one piece of space looked much like another, they had no way of finding out for certain where they were located.
But now, apparently, someone had found them. Someone who wasn’t responding on the family frequencies.
Hafdorwen arrived on the
Dawning’s
bridge, and looked at the stack of intercept reports.
“Everyone dark?” he asked the Command-Ancillary.
“We broadcast once, narrow and compressed. The drones have shut off. The base is silent. So yes, we’re dark. Our friends—” and here the Command-Ancillary tapped her fingernail against the intercept on the top sheet “—know that at least one listening post exists, because they would have heard the challenge, and they know that at least one ship exists, because they would have heard our broadcast.”
“And from that they’ll logic out that there are more ships,” Hafdorwen said. “Because we wouldn’t be talking to ourselves, eh?”
The captain strode over to the bank of bridge windows and looked out. The brilliant, unblinking stars were as they’d always been: no sign of intruders, not that he’d have been able to see them in any case. The unimaginable distances of space would have swallowed them whole.
“Whoever it is,” the Command-Ancillary said, “they know that we’re here. Otherwise a fleet would hardly pick here to drop out of the Void. So we have to assume that they know everything, including the location of the base.”
“They must be unsure of themselves at best,” Hafdorwen said. “For all they know, there’s another layer of secrets, and a whole fleet waiting to gobble them up.”
“So,” the Command-Ancillary said. “What are we going to do?”
“Prepare for battle, of course,” Hafdorwen answered. “That’s why the family put us out here.”
 
 
In the spaceport at Sombrelír, Karil Estisk sat in the pilot’s chair on the bridge of
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter.
Outside the
Daughter’s
bridge windows, the sky was turning rosy-grey with the coming dawn.
Everybody else on board was still asleep; they’d boarded the starship last night for a morning departure. The
Daughter
was fueled up, resupplied, and ready for Karil to take her back across the interstellar gap, to the home of Arekhon sus-Khalgath’s murderous relatives and entire fleets of space pirates. All for the sake of a working Karil had never seen and didn’t especially believe in.
That settles it. I am crazy.
The door behind her slid open with a click and a sigh, and footsteps sounded on the deckplates. She turned around in the pilot’s chair and saw Arekhon.
The Eraasian looked like he’d experienced a severe shock. His pupils were so dilated that his grey eyes appeared almost black, and there was feverish red color along his normally pale cheekbones. He was carrying something in his hand—she couldn’t tell what.
“’Rekhe,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Do you have the course for our Void-transit?”
“Worked out and laid in,” she said. It wasn’t like Arekhon to be so abrupt; something was definitely wrong. “Just like you asked for.”
“Scrub it.” He held out the thing he was carrying. “Use this instead.”
Karil looked at it, and saw a stiff flat piece of card plastic with no distinguishing marks. Light danced off it, quick flashes of brightness there and gone again, and she realized that Arekhon’s hand was shaking.
She took the card. “I’ve never seen one of these before. Use it how?”
“It’s a star chart. An Eraasian star chart.” He was fretting now, gazing wildly about the bridge—he had to be looking for something, only she didn’t know what. “There must be a reader on board that will interface with the
Daughter‘
s systems; they would have intended her to use the family charts … aha!”
He’d found a shallow sliding drawer under the edge of the main console. Karil had seen it before, but she’d never understood what it was for—the
Daughter
was full of inexplicable things, and she’d forgotten that one almost as soon as she’d first noticed it. Arekhon placed the flat piece of plastic into the drawer and slid it closed.
“There.” His voice held a note of satisfaction, and some—though not all—of his visible tension went away.
An image was forming over the main console. It was flat, like a rumpled grey carpet, full of folds and ridges and valleys. Colored lights shone here and there on the carpet: a big bunch all on one side, and a white one standing alone a long way off. And also a long way off from the main group, a single light colored a deep, pulsing violet.
A few seconds later, a new light—bright golden this time—winked into existence and joined the others on the grey carpet.
“What is that?” Karil demanded.
“The new light—the gold one—that’s Ophel. The chart picked it up from the
Daughter
now that we’ve set a Void-mark here.”
“That’s what you and Maraganha were doing the other night?” she asked. “Setting Void-marks?”
“Yes,” he said. “The white Void-mark, that’s Entibor—Lord Garrod set it, at the start of the great working.” He pointed to the cluster of lights. “And those are the homeworlds. Eraasi, there, and Ninglin and Cracanth and all the others.”
“Uh-huh. And what’s that purple one, over here on the same side as us?”
“That’s the place we have to go.”
Karil stared at him. “What?”
“You need to scrub the old course,” he told her, “and set up a new one for that mark.”
“’Rekhe, I can’t even
read
this chart of yours, let alone interface it with the navicomps!”
“I’ll help you. My fleet-family days were a long time ago, but ’Prentice-Master syn-Lanear wouldn’t have turned me loose if I couldn’t set up a straightforward course from a standard chart.”
“I am never going to understand you people.” She looked at him with concern. “Listen to me, Arekhon. Last night you were bound and determined to head home to Eraasi, the same as you’ve been ever since you showed up on my doorstep and talked me into making this trip. Then this morning you come bounding onto my bridge with a star chart you’ve apparently pulled out of your left ear, and you point at a blob of purple light and tell me that we have to go there instead. Before we do anything, I think you need to tell me what’s going on.”
Arekhon sat—no, collapsed—in the copilot’s chair. “Iulan Vai—remember her?—”
Karil nodded slowly. “Dark hair, wore black a lot. One of your people, not the, whatever you call it, the family.”
“‘Fleet-family.’ Yes. That’s Vai. She stayed behind on Eraasi. And she brought the chart to me last night.”
“If anybody else in the galaxy said that to me, ’Rekhe, I wouldn’t believe them.” She looked again at the star chart, and the glowing white light that was Entibor. “But I’ve seen what you can do.”

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