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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: A Working of Stars
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As always, she used the private side entrance with the lock keyed only to close members of the inner family and its most trusted employees, and passed through without disturbance. The hour was late enough that most of the stairs and hallways inside were darkened. The night before, Theledau sus-Radal had entertained guests at dinner until the small hours, but not now.
Once inside, Vai removed her mask and tucked it under one arm, then made her way unchallenged to the room at the top of the house where the attic had once been. The room answered to another purpose these days. Thel came from the same far northern district as Iulan Vai, and he followed the ritual of his native country even in subtropical Hanilat.
To those of the north, the moon was holy, and proper worship lay in keeping watch over her movements. The upper room, its ceiling replaced by a circular dome of clear glass, was Theledau syn-Grevi sus-Radal’s temple and observatory. At this hour of the night, on this day of the lunar month, Vai could usually depend on encountering him in the moon-room—alone, most often, since those of the sus-Radal who were native-born to Hanilat had their own ways of tending the family altars.
Vai had also been raised in the northern worship, but she had left it behind her when she came south to be Theledau’s eyes and ears in Hanilat. When Thel became head of the sus-Radal, he had rewarded Vai’s service by making her the fleet-family’s Agent-Principal. So high a promotion often brought with it an adoption into the outer family, the syn-Radal, but Thel knew better than to offer her such a thing. It would be an insult, when only the lack of their common father’s acknowledgment had kept Vai’s name from being inscribed along with Thel’s on the inner-family tablets of the sus-Radal.
Thel was standing in the center of the darkened moon-room when Vai entered. There was no moon visible tonight to flood the room with silver; heavy clouds obscured all but the faintest of reflected city light, and the driving wind threw the rain in heavy spatters against the glass dome.
Turning at the sound of her footsteps—she had made no effort to mute them—Thel brought up the room lights with a gesture toward the control panel on the nearby wall. The increased illumination showed her a square-built man with hair the same rusty black color as her own, though in his case the black was liberally streaked with iron-grey.
“Vai,” he said. “What kind of trouble have you brought me tonight?”
“‘Trouble’?” Vai feigned indignation; she might not be Thel’s Agent-Principal any longer, but their relationship was still close enough to allow for a good deal of familiarity if she chose to exercise it. “Why do you always ask me about trouble?”
“You’re a storm-bird,” he said. He gestured at her sable garments. “These days you even dress the part.”
She lifted one corner of her cloak and let it drop again into folds at her side. “All black and fluttering? I suppose I do. But if all I bring you is bad news, blame it on the times and not on me.”
“From which I take it the news isn’t good this evening, either?”
“I don’t know,” Vai said slowly. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done any of your official security work; and I don’t know what your Agent-Principal may have advised—but speaking as a Mage, my lord, and one whose Circle owes you a debt: You’re right; there’s trouble coming. Tell your fleet-Circles to practice and be ready.”
“Be ready for what?”
She gave him a brief, rueful smile. “That’s the heart of the problem. I’m not sure. But I’m not the only one who’s noticed it. The sus-Dariv are taking an interest as well.”
Thel frowned. “The sus-Dariv aren’t a threat—they stay out of politics and stick to trade, and believe me when I say that I wish that the sus-Radal could do the same. What about the sus-Peledaen?”
“You and I both know,” Vai said, “that the sus-Peledaen don’t take an interest in the problem because the sus-Peledaen
are
the problem.”
“You never used to be that blunt when you worked for me.”
“I never used to be a Mage, either, when I worked for you. I’ve seen the
eiran
, Thel, and they’re changing. The patterns are different now, and the Circles and the fleet-families and all of Eraasi are being drawn into them like fish into a net.”
“What am I supposed to do about it?”
“Do what you’re doing now,” she said. “Whatever it is that’s keeping the
eiran
around you moving. Keep the sus-Radal free as long as you can.”
He nodded slowly. “You don’t really think we’ll be able to stay out of it, do you?”
“Not this time,” Vai said. “Something new is beginning, and it isn’t good.”
 
 
Ayil syn-Arvedan snapped shut her mail-reader and sat for a while frowning at the closed cover. She had studied the stargazers’ disciplines at the Hanilat Institute for almost two decades, and had taught them as well: a quiet life, and one much to her liking. She’d seen what too much passionate involvement did to people. Going to the Mages had killed one of her brothers years ago, and—if this latest angry communication from her older brother Inadal was any clue—the current round of city-versus-country, star-lords-versus-everybody politics was fast eating away at the other one.
The old land-families didn’t have the influence they used to—well, they hadn’t had
that
for a couple of centuries, but now the urban bankers and merchants who’d made common cause with them were losing power as well. Her brother thought that outside trade alliances would strengthen the mercantile party against the fleet-families. Ayil considered that idea to be foolish optimism: a few off-planet traders might make big talk about their independence, but none of them had crossed an Eraasian fleet-family in years—not since sus-Peledaen warships had left a space-bombed scar across the heart of a rival world’s largest continent.
She would write to her brother, she decided, and tell him what she thought. In the morning, after she’d had a chance to sleep on it first. This was a wild and rainy night, with a strong wind for the season and the barometric pressure heading steadily downward. Not a good night for composing a tactful letter to the head of the family, asking him to back away from a losing fight.
A gust of wind drove the rain hard against the windows of her Institute Towers apartment. She was three floors up, on a level with the swaying treetops. Light from the streetlamps and from the watch-out glows embedded in the sidewalks didn’t make it up this far, except for the occasional glimpse through tossing branches.
She was looking out of the window when the door-tone sounded: the low, gong-like note of the outside building directory, rather than the light chime of her own apartment’s sounding-pad. Somebody had come to the Institute Towers in this weather, and at this hour, to call at her address.
Another lost drunk,
she thought, reluctant to answer the summons.
Or some kind of student prank.
On the other hand, she did give out her home number and address to those students whom she was advising directly. If one of them needed help badly enough to come asking for it in person—
“House-mind,” she said. “Answer.”
“Answering,” said the apartment’s house-mind, and she heard the click of the voice connection opening as the gong-tone sounded for a second time.
“Who is it?” she asked.
At first she heard nothing in reply except what sounded like ragged breathing. Then—“Ayil?”
Not a student. A student would never call her by her personal name, not if he—the speaker
was
male, she thought—not if he had come here needing a favor. A prankster, maybe, using the unwanted familiarity to frighten her.
“Who is it?” she demanded again, more sharply.
“Ayil … it’s me. Diasul.”
“Kief?”
“Yes. Let me come up?”
She knew the voice by now, the name and the accent together bringing back memories of earlier days. She’d shared office space for a while with Kiefen Diasul, back before he’d left the Institute to join a Void-walker’s Circle—her late brother Del’s Circle, in fact, which she supposed gave Kief at least as much claim on her late-night attention as one of her wayward students.
“Are you all right, Kief?” she asked. “Do you need me to call someone for help?”
“No.” Too fast, too firm—something was wrong, she thought, no matter what he said. “I don’t need help. I just need … I don’t know. Someplace to rest for a while. It’s been a … it’s raining sheets and buckets outside tonight, Ayil. I’m soaked with it.”
“Come on up, then. House-mind: Open exterior.”
She heard the noise of the downstairs door opening. Then the voice connection clicked shut, and she had to wait uneasily for the sound of the elevator, and footsteps in the hallway outside her own apartment. At least, she reflected, if she was going to have an unexpected visitor from the past, the luck had brought him to her on a night when everything was fairly tidy. She had books and papers strewn all over the place, of course, but Kief had been a scholar once himself; he’d be used to that.
The sounding-pad chimed. “Open,” she said to the house-mind, then raised her voice as the door swung open. “Come in.”
Kiefen Diasul stepped over the threshold into the entryway. He hadn’t changed much since the last time she’d seen him—he was older, of course, but his early-greying brown hair still hung in loose curls down to his shoulders, and he still wore the same pendant earring of rock crystal and twisted wire that he had affected during their officemate days. He was wearing the black garments of a working Mage, and he hadn’t lied when he said the rain was coming down in sheets; the heavy fabric of his robe looked sodden with it. He moved carefully, as though his joints and muscles protested the effort, and his face was grey and exhausted.
Ayil hurried forward. “Come on in … you’re leaving puddles all over the foyer.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Did something happen to your weather coat?”
“Left it behind. Outside Quantret.”
“Don’t worry about it; I can send somebody to fetch it tomorrow.” She touched his wet sleeve. “Let me hang this over the watercourse in the necessarium until it stops dripping.”
She thought at first that he would refuse, but she kept hold of the sleeve. After a few seconds, he let out his breath in a faint sigh and allowed her to help him out of the wringing-wet garment. He had his staff with him—she should have known that he would, she thought. Even the members of the Institute Circle, who wore their Magecraft lightly, as an avocation rather than a life’s obsession, kept their staves close by them at all hours. Kiefen Diasul clipped his staff onto the belt of his street clothes as soon as she lifted away the rain-heavy folds of his robe.
She left him standing in the foyer and carried off the robe to the necessarium, where she left it hanging from the drip bar. When she returned to the entryway, she found that Kief had wandered into the dining nook and was sitting in one of the cheap plastic chairs that had come with the apartment.
Considerate of him not to spoil the good upholstery
, she thought. And then, as she got a look at him for the first time in a good light,
He needs warming up in a bad way
. She went over to the preserving-cupboard and pulled out a canister of pale leaf.
“Uffa?
” she asked.
He nodded, not looking up from his contemplation of the tabletop. “Please.”
She fiddled about with the
uffa
makings, putting water on the stove and filling a strainer with the dried curly leaves. As she worked, she said, “What was it brought you back to the Institute? Some kind of Circle business?”
She thought he wasn’t going to answer, he was quiet for so long. But just as she was about to give up the inquiry as a bad job and talk about something else, he spoke.
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She got a cup down from the shelf over the sink and balanced the strainer over it. She could hear the kettle beginning to sing a little as the water inside grew hot. Finally she said, “I never asked … for a long time I didn’t even want to think about what happened at Demaizen … did you keep Lord Garrod’s Circle together? Afterward, I mean.”
“No.”
Curiosity warred in her briefly with the pain of memory—but she was a scholar, with her own driving passions, and curiosity won. “Whose Circle
do
you work with, then?”
Now he did look up—straight at her, with what might have been a warning in his glance. “There was a time,” he said, “and not so long ago, either, when that question wasn’t in bad taste.”
“Del certainly never made any secret out of belonging to Demaizen,” she agreed. As she’d half-expected, her brother’s name drew a reaction from him, as if she’d touched on a painful memory. She decided to give the matter another push. “Have things changed that much since then?”
“Are all you people here at the Institute really that sheltered?” He asked the question lightly, but the expression in his eyes was bitter.

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