By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 (14 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3

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Owen had said once, back on Nammerin, that the ShadowDance was as much a meditation as it was a combat skill or a means of acquiring self-discipline. She’d come close once or twice to understanding through experience what he had meant, but never as close as now, when the small patch of clear deck that was her Dancing-ground seemed in that moment to stretch out toward infinity, as if her movements themselves were creating it around her out of nothingness.

The door and the bulkhead were gone; they had receded with everything else into the infinite distance she was creating with her Dance. Only the low-power glow remained, suffusing everything with a blue, sourceless light.

This is no-place
, she thought—not stopping the steps of the Dance, keeping the Dancing-ground in being around her.
This is no-time. This is nowhere I have ever been.

This is important.

She kept on Dancing. Phantoms and illusions began to take shape around her in the blue light.

These are what I came here to see.

She Danced, and watched.

The inchoate forms drew together into a single clear vision—and she was no longer all by herself on the Dancing-ground. Somewhere in the blue infinity ahead of her, too far away for her to touch but so close she could see the finest detail, another Dancer worked as she did to keep the nothingness at bay.

Who are you? What are you doing here inside my Dance?

She flung the questions out into the universe of blue light, but the other did not answer, or even seem to hear. A slight man, far from young, with grey hair and a worn, lined face, he moved in a Dance that was at once like and not like the one that Owen had taught her. The staff he worked with was not an Adept’s, meant to be grasped in both hands, but a shorter rod, of ebony bound with silver, that he held in a loose one-handed grip.

She couldn’t fail to recognize the weapon. The Circle-Mages on Nammerin had carried rods like that one.

But the man she was watching didn’t act like a Mage, didn’t wear the black robe and gloves and the immobile mask of black plastic that made all the members of a Circle look alike. And he was alone … no shared strength of his fellows to draw on when his own powers began to fail. Only himself.

Wait. He isn’t alone after all.

Now she could make out another form, half-obscured by the blue shadows behind the old man. It was a woman this time, fair-skinned and taller than the man who guarded her, swathed from head to foot in a hooded cloak of some rough-textured white fabric.

Are you the one I came here to see?

This time, her question seemed to reach its target. The hooded woman turned her head and looked directly at Klea. The woman’s eyes were a deep, brilliant blue, sharp and penetrating, but beyond the sharpness was a fear too profound for words.

Have I failed again? Have you come too late?

The thought struck Klea like a blow from a knife; she drew a sharp breath, and stumbled. The infinite blue Dancing-ground contracted around her like a skin tightening, and she fell down and away, out of the trance and back into the tiny, crowded cabin aboard
Lady LeRoi.

She swayed and almost fell. Owen caught her, lowering her with strong hands down to the deckplates. She was shivering; he opened the sleepsack and wrapped it around her shoulders.

“You saw something,” he said.

She didn’t bother asking how he knew. “A man,” she said. “And a woman. I think—I think he was guarding her. From the nothing. Keeping it away.”

“These people. What did they look like?”

“Strangers,” Klea said. “A fair woman, and a man with grey hair. And a staff like a Magelord’s, but no mask. And they were waiting for something.”

She paused, remembering the fearful question in the woman’s deep blue eyes. “Or someone.”

VII. INNISH-KYL: WAYCROSS

WARHAMMER
: HYPERSPACE TRANSIT TO BASE

PLEYVER: HIGH STATION

G
IL CONTINUED his circuit of the roof, pacing his aide and her phantom companion, until he came to the corner where the road to the docking bays split off the main street. He peered around the turning, and drew his head back in haste.

A man—a free-spacer by his garments, though not a prosperous one—crouched a few feet away behind the shelter of the parapet. The spacer clutched an energy lance in his hands, and he was watching Jhunnei’s progress along the street beneath. She passed beneath him, Gil’s uncanny doppelganger still walking by her side. The man raised his weapon and sighted down toward the street.

Gil flicked his hand-blaster to “stun,” and fired. The sniper collapsed against the stone parapet. A bolt from the energy lance struck the holosign for the Hundred Blossoms Cabaret and disintegrated its waltzing flowers into an explosion of colored sparks. In the street below, Jhunnei glanced upward, and Gil’s double winked out of existence with considerably less fuss than had the Hundred Blossoms’ sign.

Gil collected the fallen energy lance, then moved away from the unconscious sniper to wait for his aide. A few minutes later she joined him on the rooftop.

“Good shooting, Commodore.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Gil looked at her for a moment without saying anything, then sighed. “Tell me something, Jhunnei. Did you know he was waiting up here? Or did you make a lucky guess?”

Jhunnei paused. “I … suspected. Strongly.”

“Suspected,” said Gil. There was another stretched-out silence, broken only by the background racket of the port and the nearby fizzing and popping of the broken holosign. Jhunnei seemed pale and nervous in the scant light. “Lieutenant, tell me something straight out. Are you an Adept?”

“Adepts can’t hold rank, sir. Everybody knows that.”

“Do they?” Gil regarded his aide thoughtfully. “Errec Ransome used to say as much to everybody who asked, and the handful of known Adepts in the service used to make a big point of not wearing any kind of insignia. It strikes me now that if I were Errec Ransome, and wanted to place an observer or two in the Space Force, I’d say the same.”

Jhunnei remained silent.

“Well?” Gil prompted.

“With respect, Commodore, I can’t answer your question.”

“That’s insubordination, you know.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gil paused again, considering. “I don’t want to lose a perfectly good aide,” he said finally. “Can we agree to take your silence as an affirmative?”

“Take it as you please. Sir.”

“Don’t get so stiff,” Gil said. “As far as Waycross is concerned, we’re both civilians anyway.”

“Yes, sir. If you feel you can trust me, sir.”

“Very much so, Lieutenant.”

She seemed to relax then—until he saw the change, Gil had not appreciated the depth of her previous unease—and glanced over at the still-unconscious sniper for the first time since her initial greeting.

“What about him?” she said. “Do we take him home with us and ask him lots of interesting questions?”

Gil shook his head. “He’s not important. Somebody hired him to take a shot at us, is all.”

“Well, yes—but don’t we want to find out who?”

“I don’t think we need to bother. Unless I miss my guess, we’ll find whoever hired him waiting for us at the docking bay.”

“Now you’re the one who’s being mysterious, Commodore.”

Gil smiled. “This is wartime, Lieutenant. A man has to take his pleasures as he can find them.”

By the time
Lady LeRoi
docked at High Station Pleyver, Klea was more tired of dried, reconstituted water-grain than she would ever have believed possible. To her chagrin, Owen insisted that they wait a day to disembark.

“We’ll leave ship when the crew does,” he said. “No sense in getting ourselves shunted off to transient quarters with all the other refugees.”

“I suppose not,” she said. Until now, she hadn’t thought about what might happen if Pleyver didn’t want all the people the
Lady
was bringing. Not everybody who’d left Nammerin was going to be better off in a new place.

It wasn’t until the next morning that she collected her belongings—the ancient daypack and the
grrch
-wood staff—and followed Owen down the
Lady
’s ramp to the landing-bay deck. The great echoing cave of the bay, with only the shimmer of a force field at the open end to keep hard vacuum where it belonged, looked like nothing she’d ever seen outside of a holovid show. Owen seemed unimpressed, as if he’d seen and done such things enough times to make them commonplace, but Klea stared about like any other tourist.

She’d thought that the
Lady
looked big when the ship stood on landing legs in the middle of Namport’s otherwise empty field. But that was before she’d had a chance to see what a freighter looked like when it rested in a nullgrav cradle at an orbital dock. The metal side of the ship curved up and away from her as she descended the ramp, seeming to stretch as far as the horizon of a small world. Then she looked out in front of her, and saw the ranks of larger and smaller ships in their cradles, and the moving pinpoints that were the spacers, port laborers, and officials who worked in this part of High Station.

“I hadn’t realized a spacedock was so big,” she said.

Owen glanced back at Klea over his shoulder. “This is one of the smaller bays,” he told her. “Independent merchant craft, mostly—vessels that can do surface landings if they have to. If you want to see something really big, you need to check out the docks on the Space Force side. The cradles over there can handle anything the Republic’s got.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Nervously, she looked away from the long vista and back to the foot of the
Lady
’s ramp. There was a distortion in the air down there, too, one that she traced without much trouble to the semicircle of portable force-field generators set out on the deckplates. Two people in uniforms of some kind sat at a folding table just outside the field.

“Customs inspection,” said Owen, before she could ask. “Immigrant processing. High Station’s an artificial environment and they like to keep things orderly.”

“That’s why you waited?”

He nodded. “Yesterday would have been a mob scene. Anybody looking the least bit strange would have gotten shoved up the ladder for somebody more important to decide on, and from there it might take days to get out. Today they’re bored.”

She and Owen were both wearing spacer’s coveralls from the
Lady
’s clothes locker, courtesy of Owen’s work down in the engine room, and she wasn’t surprised when the inspectors waved them past with nothing more than a cursory glance at their papers—which, in fact, did not exist as anything more than imaginary constructs. She’d known for quite a while now that Owen was good at making people see things that weren’t there.

“All right,” she said, after the thick armor-glass doors had shut between them and the docking bay. “We got off Nammerin, and we got off the
Lady
. Where do we go next?”

“We find a bar,” he said. “And buy a drink.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think I want—”

“Then drink tap water with ice in it,” he said. “But we need to hear all the hot gossip, and hear it fast.”

For such a tense confrontation, the encounter with the sniper had taken very little time. Gil and Jhunnei reached docking bay 358-A, and
Karipavo
’s shuttle, only a few minutes later than Gil had originally planned. The craft’s ramp was still down but the entry force field was up, with a crew member standing guard down below.

The trooper saluted. “Commodore. There’s a visitor waiting for you inside the shuttle, sir.”

“I rather thought there would be,” said Gil, returning the salute. “Did our visitor say what was wanted?”

“No, sir. Only that he—that it—that you were the only person it was going to talk to. At least, that’s what the chief says that it said.”

“She,” Gil said, as he palmed the security lockplate at the top of the ramp. The force field dissolved to let him and Jhunnei pass through. “If it’s who I think it is.”

It was. Merrolakk the Selvaur sat on one of the acceleration couches in the main body of the shuttle, with the nervous crew members giving her plenty of room. The slit pupils of her yellow eyes narrowed when she saw him.

*D’Rugier.*

Gil thought he detected a note of surprise in the hooting, rumbling voice. “Captain,” he said. “Have you conferred with your associates, then?”

*My associates.* It wasn’t surprise, now, in the Selvaur’s voice, but amusement. *Oh, yes. We conferred.*

“And have you made up your mind about our business deal?”

*I had a few doubts,* Merro said. *But not anymore. I’m throwing in with you, Commodore—my ships, your terms.* She held out a big, green-scaled hand. *Done?*

The Selvaur’s switch to his military title wasn’t lost on Gil. He met her grip to seal the contract in free-spacer fashion. “Done.”

*Good enough,* said Merro. *When do you launch?*

“As soon as possible. You’ll be informed. See Chief Bertyn about codes and comm frequencies; you can pass them around to your own people as you see fit.”

Merro stood, stretching. *I’ll see that everybody’s up to speed before we lift,* she promised. *What’s our first target? *

“I’ll let everyone know after the fleet is formed up,” Gil said. “Spacers in port talk more than they should, and I don’t want the Mageworlders to listen.”

*Fair enough,* said Merro.

The Selvauran captain headed off in the direction of the shuttle’s cockpit, presumably to consult with Chief Bertyn. Gil and Lieutenant Jhunnei looked at each other. Gil was the first to speak.

“Well,” he said. “Between those twenty-seven ships from the Net, and Merrolakk’s irregulars, it looks like we have a fleet.”

“Merrolakk,” said Jhunnei thoughtfully. “She’s the one who set up that ambush, you know.”

“I know. I didn’t think you did, though.”

“I didn’t—not until we got here. But
you
knew.”

“I met a lot of Selvaurs when I was with General Metadi,” Gil said. “It’s the way they think. Merro wasn’t about to join forces with someone she hadn’t checked out first. So she arranged for a test.”

“That’s arrogance for you,” said Jhunnei. “Auditioning the commodore of the Mageworlds Fleet like a—like a cabaret act.”

Gil shrugged. “It’s the way they think, is all. If it turned out that I was clever enough, or lucky enough—or in my case, Lieutenant, well-advised enough—to evade Merrolakk’s ambush, she’d be here waiting to make a deal. If I didn’t make it … well, she’d have an amusing time watching a bunch of thin-skins run around getting hysterical.”

“Not for very long,” said Jhunnei.

Gil looked at his aide—who was, it seemed, probably an Adept and probably one of Errec Ransome’s deep-cover operatives as well—and shook his head. “I think our Captain Merro is luckier than she knows.”

“There’s no such thing as luck, sir. Not really.”

“Too bad,” said Gil. “Because from now on, we’re going to need a lot of it.”

Portside on High Station was cleaner and better behaved than Klea had expected. The bars all had OPEN 33 HOURS signs on them, and they all came fully staffed with the usual complement of hookers and joyboys, but nobody seemed to be offering anything more exotic than the standard services. The dancers in the zero-g bubbles at the Web-Runners’ Grill looked like only that—dancers—and when one of the free-spacers drinking at the bar pointed at the nearest bubble and asked the bartender a question, the bartender shook his head. The free-spacer shrugged and went back to his drink.

Owen must have seen Klea’s change of expression. “This is High Station,” he said. “Nobody comes here for the night life. Any lonesome spacer who wants some real entertainment can take a shuttle dirtside to Flatlands Portcity.”

“You sound like you’ve been here before.”

“I worked in Flatlands for a while.”

She looked at him. “Like you did in Namport?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve gone a lot of places—”

“—and done a lot of things,” he finished for her. “All for the sake of the Guild. At least, I thought so at the time.”