By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 (35 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3
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“Yes,” said Beka. “All of us. The two new guests are Owen Rosselin-Metadi, Master of the Adepts’ Guild, a native of Galcen, and his apprentice Klea Santreny of Nammerin. See that their accommodations are suitable as well. Aboard
Warhammer
, in number-one crew berthing, there is another person, whose name is not important. Make certain that he has adequate food and water, and that the cabin door stays locked with him behind it.”
“Yes, my lady,” the robot said.
“One more thing,” Beka said. “Is there a stasis box containing a replicant on board this station?”
“Not to my knowledge, my lady,” the robot replied. “Shall I query my series mates?”
“Yes,” Beka said. “Please do.”
The red light inside the robot’s sensor pod flickered for a moment before it spoke again. “I’m sorry, my lady. None of us have any information concerning stasis boxes or replicants, in any combination.”
“Thank you,” Beka said. “You may go.”
She turned back to the others. “Now that the formalities are out of the way, let’s figure out what we’re going to do next. First is finding the replicant. I’m certain that it exists, and that it’s here.”
“You do realize,” Jessan said, “that searching the whole base is not going to be like playing a game of find-the-slipper. This place is huge.”
“If she’s here, she’s in a stasis box, and something like that can’t just have been shoved out of the way at random,” Beka said. “There’s got to be a record somewhere. The Prof would have wanted it to be found.”
“The Prof didn’t need a record if he already knew where the replicant was,” said Jessan.
“He left the base to me, and he knew he wasn’t coming back. So there has to be a record—maybe in the main comp system. I wasn’t looking for anything like that the last time I was here, so I wouldn’t necessarily have spotted it. You can all look different places; the robots will help if you ask.”
“How about Tarveet?” LeSoit cut in. “I don’t like leaving him alone on the ship.”
“You heard,” said Beka. “The robots will take care of him.”
LeSoit looked dubious. “Like they did with D’Caer?”
“That’s something else I have to look into,” Beka said. “When I was here that time when we found he’d vanished, the Prof had just died and I was fresh out of a healing pod on Gyffer. We didn’t spend a lot of time on meticulous records checks.”
“We’ll see,” Jessan said. “Meantime, I’m going to check out the sickbay for anything that looks like a stasis box.”
He turned to syn-Tavaite with a flourish and a courtly bow. “Doctor, will you accompany me?”
 
The others had all gone, and Klea Santreny was alone with Owen in the strange, illusion-filled room. The sun had gone down beyond the distant mountains, and the first stars glimmered in the night sky.
“I didn’t know you could get holographic projections this good,” she said. “Even that place we went to on Innish-Kyl wasn’t this pretty.”
“That’s because Aneverian’s country house was real,” Owen said. “Reality has lumps in it; fantasy doesn’t. And this is all fantasy.”
“There must have been a real place a lot like this, though,” Klea said, “because I can feel the memories here if I try hard enough. I think … I think somebody very lonely made this room to remember something by.”
“Memories like that can be dangerous,” said Owen. “Don’t get to liking this place too much. I’m not comfortable with the thought that Magelords can come and go here as they please.”
“The air is cold here,” Klea said. “And dry. Not like home.”
“The sooner we find that stasis box, the sooner we can leave. And I’ll be glad to go.”
Klea looked at him curiously. “You think there really is a stasis box with a replicant in it?”
“My sister does. And if I were a gambler, I wouldn’t put money on her hunch being wrong.”
“You said there wasn’t any such thing as luck.”
“There isn’t. But some people don’t have to be Adepts to see which way the universe is flowing. They have the knack of throwing themselves into the stream at the moment when it’s heading the way they want to go.”
“Owen,” Klea said, “what happens after we find the box? Does your sister—”
“Expect me to do sorcery, or work a miracle, or jump into the Void blindfolded carrying a life preserver?” Owen shrugged. “Something like that. But what she’s contemplating—it goes against everything my own Master taught me.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Watch to see which way the stream is running,” he said. “And in the meantime, search.”
 
Llannat Hyfid was in the
Daughter’s
meditation room when the Mages broke through.
She had been in a high state of nerves ever since Ari had given her another hasty kiss and hurried down to the engine room to help attempt repairs. He hadn’t come back. After a while all feeling of ship’s motion had ceased, only to be replaced by an uneasy vibration, then by a high-pitched sound more felt through the deckplates than heard.
She had run, then, to the black-walled chamber where the door opened only to her, and had knelt there gripping her staff in her hand, trying to find and trace the currents of the universe. Somewhere, somehow, there had to be a trickle of power that she could follow, some loose thread in the weaving that she could catch hold of to pull them all out of the Magelords’ grip—but there was nothing that she could see or do, and the universe held itself aloof.
“Patience,” she muttered, and was silent. The ship had not been destroyed. Did they want prisoners? A moment of hand-to-hand fighting seemed the best she could hope for, and not even that if the Mages pumped some kind of gas into
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
and waited to let it do its work.
Llannat wished she could be with Ari one last time. The brief while that they’d been married … she pushed the memories behind her.
Uneasy motion returned to the ship, followed by a short period of weightlessness. Then gravity returned. Llannat became aware that a stranger was approaching the meditation room.
The door slid open. A dark figure stood in the opening, dressed in the robes and mask of a Mage—similar in color to an Adept’s garb, but different in cut and style. But the staff this person carried was very similar indeed to the staff that Llannat clenched in her own sweating hand.
The newcomer spoke.
“Ekkat aredenei,
etaze.”
He bowed, then knelt before her, laying his staff on the deck, and spoke again in slow, heavily accented Galcenian:
“Welcome home, Mistress.”
 
Jessan stood in the gleaming, well-appointed sickbay of the asteroid base, with Doctor syn-Tavaite beside him. He remembered the first time that Ari and Llannat Hyfid had seen the sickbay, when they were fresh from the Med Station on Nammerin—Llannat had pointed out, with awed appreciation, that the equipment was state-of-the-art, nothing older than two Standard years.
And now,
he thought,
we all know why.
“Look around,” he said to syn-Tavaite. “Do you remember this room?”
“No,” the Eraasian said. She seemed confused. “I remember the room we were in before. But the door that opens into here—didn’t, when the Masked One brought me to this place.”
“Damn,” said Jessan. “Another brilliant idea shot to hell. Any other differences you’ve noticed so far?”
“We didn’t come through here to find that other room,” she said. “And the entrance was different … not a door in bare rock … I saw a great house on a mountainside, and everything green and growing.”
“How odd,” Jessan said. “But considering the person who used to own this place, not really surprising.”
“You knew the Masked One?”
“Oh, yes,” said Jessan. “Someday, Doctor, I’ll tell you about the night he and the captain showed up in my workroom. In the meantime, let’s try going at our problem the other way around. That door in the other room—the one that opens into this sickbay now—where did it lead to before?”
“A big room,” syn-Tavaite replied at once. “With more high windows, and other doors leading from it, and a stone floor, and a fire on the hearth.”
“Doesn’t sound like a sickbay to me,” Jessan said. “Maybe it was another holoprojection.” A quick scan of the immaculate walls, however, failed to reveal any unexplained switches or toggles. “Damn.”
He fell silent for a while, thinking. Finally he looked up. “That bay outside has disguised itself as a landing field at least once before. Let’s head back to
Warhammer
. I need to get a comm link.”
“A … link? You’re going to leave me alone someplace?”
“Yes. But we’ll be able to talk.” He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, you’ll be safe.”
“Safe among the Adepts,” syn-Tavaite muttered. She added something else in a language Jessan didn’t understand.
Probably just as well, he thought. It didn’t sound particularly flattering.
However, she followed him without protest out into the main docking area, where he ducked briefly into
Warhammer
and came out with one of the pocket comm links. He handed her the link.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll be in touch with you over this. If you want to say something to me, push that button there and talk. As soon as you see something that looks like the place you came to before, give me the word.”
She gave him an uncertain nod. “Yes. If I see mountains and sky here inside a cave in the rock, I will surely tell you.”
“Good. Now stay right here.”
Jessan went back inside, and made his way through the base’s maze of passageways to a room filled with holoprojectors and comp consoles—and memories. The last time he’d been in here, Beka had been trying to get the truth about Perada’s assassination out of Ebenra D’Caer. The Professor had used an elaborate illusion-making setup to turn the base’s landing bay into a spaceport on Ovredis.
He frowned as he remembered further. The Prof had drawn that particular sequence extempore, playing over the keys on the projector console to create a rolling panorama. What if he’d done the same thing for Doctor syn-Tavaite?
No. He came in with her. He couldn’t have been up in the booth making the scenery.
He looked up at the overhead. “I need a robot in here.”
A few seconds later, one of the robots floated into the projection room. “What can I do for you, Commander?”
“Can you work the controls in here?”
“Of course, Commander,” the robot said. “The base comps are provided with any number of pleasing sequences, all of which I am able to access.”
“Do any of those sequences show the landing field at Entibor?”
“Which field, Commander? There are several.”
“The one at the Summer Palace,” Jessan said.
“An excellent choice,” said the robot. “That sequence is one of the most extensive in the entire library. The real-time links to the continuing display in the informal dining room are particularly—”
“Thank you,” said Jessan. “Run it, please.”
The robot floated over to the holoprojector console. Jessan keyed on his comm link.
“Stand by, Doctor,” he said. “Take a look at this.”
 
GYFFERAN FARSPACE:
SWORD-OF-THE-DAWN
 
B
EKA STOOD in the control center of the asteroid base, the circular chamber that housed the base’s hyperspace communications links, its internal security monitors, and the access terminals for main base memory. She hadn’t been in here since taking the
’Hammer
to Suivi Point; nor—absent the necessary specific instructions about this most secure of the base’s areas—had any of the robots entered the room to clean. The Professor’s last, handwritten note still lay crumpled on the console where she had dropped it.
The door behind her slid open to let in Ignaceu LeSoit. Beka nodded a greeting.
“Ignac’,” she said. “How are the others doing?”
“All right, I suppose. Jessan knows his way around; Doctor syn-Tavaite is safe with him. The Adepts—I don’t know what they’re doing, but they can probably take care of themselves.”
“I hope so,” Beka said. “I’m going to need Owen if this is going to work. If it doesn’t …”
“If it doesn’t, we’re still in a good position to wait out the rest of the war quite comfortably.”
Beka gave him a curious look. “Are you putting that forward as a serious suggestion?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to overlook anything.”
She shook her head. “The base isn’t secure—not from the Mageworlders, anyhow. They know right where this place is, and can come and go undetected. They didn’t have any trouble pulling out Ebenra D’Caer.”
“He never mentioned a rescue,” LeSoit said. “At least not to me. And I was as close to him as anyone.”
“There’s no record of him leaving,” Beka said. “Watch.”
She sat down at the main security console. “This is the log from D’Caer’s cell,” she said, bringing up the sequences on a flatvid screen. “He was being tended by the Professor’s robots, and the record shows that he was in place right up to the moment when I opened his door. Then he was gone.”
“That’s what the record shows, all right,” LeSoit said. “But you know, comps and robots aren’t people. You may not be authorized to ask them those particular questions.”
“I damned well ought to be authorized,” she said. “And they know it. Look at this.”
She picked up the Professor’s note and shoved it at LeSoit. He smoothed out the wadded-up paper and began reading it—at first aloud, then onward silently to the end.
“‘My lady: I write this on the night before our leavetaking for Darvell; I do not know when you shall read it … . The robots will have told you long since that the base and all its contents are yours … .’”
“That’s it,” Beka said when he finished and looked up. “He never came back from Darvell, but the rest of us did—and when we got here, D’Caer was gone. I searched everything in the files, from the moment when he arrived and was definitely present until the moment when I checked for myself and he was definitely gone. Nothing.”
“He signed the note,” LeSoit said.
“Who?”
“The Professor. He signed the note. ‘Arekhon Khreseio sus-Khalgaeth sus-Peledaen.’ It’s his name.”
“He never told me,” Beka said. She felt an irrational jealousy toward LeSoit, that he should have read the signature when she could not. “‘Names change and the universe has forgotten mine,’ he said when I asked.”
“If the universe forgets a name like that, it’s because the owner wants it forgotten,” said LeSoit. “We’re looking at high nobility there, on both sides.”
Beka stared at the square of paper without speaking until the graceful characters quit showing a tendency to blur.
“All right,” she said finally. “I’ve called up the actions of Ebenra D’Caer, and I’ve called up the actions of the Professor and all the rest of us for that time period. You think I should call up the actions of one Arekhon sus-Peledaen?”
LeSoit shrugged. “Would it hurt?”
“I suppose not.” She turned back to the console and searched the security records under the new terms. New sequences began to play in the flatscreen. “I’ll be damned,” she said.
The records showed the cell of Ebenra D‘Caer, unconscious as he had been in all the sequences before, and this time they also showed the Professor—sus-
Peledaen
, Beka reminded herself—entering D’Caer’s cell in the company of one of the household robots. At a command from the Professor, the robot carried D’Caer away. The Professor locked the cell behind them.
The next sequence showed the base’s landing bay, with
Warhammer
in its customary place among the vast collection of ships. The Professor accompanied the robot carrying D’Caer aboard one of the smaller spacecraft. A few minutes later both man and robot exited the craft unencumbered. The Professor walked into the base, not looking back.
“Identify craft,” Beka said.
FREETRADER MAIN CHANCE, came a small box on-screen.
“Is
Main Chance
currently on board this station?”
NEGATIVE.
“What is the current location and status of
Main Chance?”
UNKNOWN, came the response. LAST KNOWN DESTINATION ERAASI VIA THE NET.
“Damnation,” Beka said, and turned back to the recording. “Continue playback of actions of sus-Peledaen.”
The security records followed the Professor back through the sickbay and into the Entibor room, where the tall windows looked out across the wooded hills. The long chamber was flooded with illusory starlight. Removing his tunic, the Professor hung it on the back of a chair and sat in his shirtsleeves. Another household robot brought him a crystal decanter filled with dark liquid, and matching glasses.
He poured a drink for himself and sat with his fingers upon the delicate stem, gazing out across the landscape he had created. The moon rose, casting shadows across his white shirt and touching his grey hair with silver. He sat there for a long time, while Beka watched the record, before he looked up in the direction of the archway that led farther into the station, and spoke to the one who had come.
“You’re awake late, Mistress Hyfid,” he said.
“Damnation,” Beka said again, and froze the picture. “The Professor was the Magelord who released D’Caer. And here I thought he was a friend.”
“He was,” said LeSoit. “You went to the far side of the Net to get D’Caer, and a lot of other things followed from that.”
“Nothing that matters anymore,” Beka said sourly. “We’re still losing.” She spoke again to the log recorder.
“Call up all records of sus-Peledaen prior to arrival of Ebenra D’Caer on this station.”
A moment passed, then another.
NO BASE RECORDS OF ACTIVITIES OF SUS-PELEDAEN PRIOR TO ARRIVAL OF EBENRA D’CAER EXIST.
“The hell they don’t. Call up all base records of Doctor Inesi syn-Tavaite prior to today.”
NO BASE RECORDS OF DOCTOR SYN-TAVAITE PRIOR TO TODAY EXIST.
“‘No base records exist’ … what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Wait a minute,” LeSoit said. “Let’s try something else. Call up all records of a visit by General Metadi to this station.”
GENERAL METADI HAS NEVER VISITED THIS STATION.
“You see?” he said. “The message is different.”
Beka frowned at the console. “So Doctor syn-Tavaite was here, but this machine won’t tell us. And something happened, but it won’t tell us that, either. Wonderful.”
“I think that Arekhon sus-Peledaen wanted to make sure the truth was well hidden.”
“Hidden from me?”
“No,” said LeSoit. “Hidden from those who knew his true name. The Professor was up to something he didn’t want the rest of the Magelords to find out.”
 
“All right, Doctor,” Jessan said over the comm link. “Now what do you see?”
syn-Tavaite’s voice came back to him, sounding awed and nervous. “This is the place. How did you do it?”
“I didn’t,” said Jessan. “The Professor—your Masked One—did it, a long time ago. Stay right there and I’ll join you.”
He clicked off the link, said to the robot, “Continue the sequence as instructed,” and made his way through the base to the docking bay. Seeming night had fallen outside the windows of the Entibor room, where more household robots were setting the long table for dinner as he passed through. He left the robots at work behind him and continued out through the sickbay to the docking area where syn-Tavaite stood waiting.
Jessan had to admit that the change was spectacular. Everything around him was silvery-grey with moonlight, while the mountains that bordered the landing field loomed like dark shoulders against a paler sky. He could almost feel the night wind and smell the dew-moistened earth.
He looked back at the door he’d come through and found that it had vanished, hidden beneath the Professor’s complex illusions. But syn-Tavaite remained visible before him, as did
Warhammer
, poised behind the Eraasian woman for all the world as if this were someone’s private landing area in an upcountry field.
“Well, Doctor,” he said. “Here we are. Does this look a bit more like the place where you went to create the replicant?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was day when we came, but the mountains are the same.”
“Which way did you go next?”
She pointed—not back at the sickbay door, but in the other direction. Jessan followed the gesture and saw a wide, high structure rising over the treetops on the hillside above, its white walls pale and ghostlike beneath the moon, its windows aglow with yellow light. A road wound up toward the great house through the trees.
“The Summer Palace of House Rosselin,” he said quietly. “How did you get there last time?”
“We took a car that floated,” syn-Tavaite told him. “A marvelous thing.”
“I suppose it would seem that way,” murmured Jessan, recalling the noisy, bad-smelling groundhuggers that he’d ridden on the Mageworlds side of the Net. “Well, we’re going to walk it this evening, so let’s go.”
They set out on foot. He wasn’t surprised when the great house approached more rapidly than seemed possible—though all the same, the effect was distinctly unsettling. They soon arrived under the front gates, where the moonlight threw the patterns on the carved stone into sharp relief.
With a faint start, Jessan recognized the gate as the main base door in the landing bay, the door that Beka had long ago warned him was a false entrance and booby-trapped against intrusion. He regarded it uneasily.
“Are you sure this was the way you came?” he asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“Mmm.” He thought for a moment. “Did the Masked One do or say anything in particular to make the gate open?”
syn-Tavaite shook her head. “No. He only touched the gate, and we entered.”
Positive interlock with the landing-field illusions
, Jessan thought.
I hope
.
He put his hand against the stone, half-expecting to be felled by an energy bolt or dropped into a pit or any one of a dozen other holovid-style demises.
The gate swung open.
 
The more time Klea Santreny spent in the Domina’s asteroid base, the less she liked it.
“It’s too big, it’s too empty, and I’m never certain what’s real and what isn’t.” She gestured toward the dead-end wall that currently confronted them. They’d come a long way from the holographically enhanced upper regions, into an area of dim passageways and empty rooms. She hoped that Owen knew the way back. “At least down here in the basement I can be fairly sure that a blank wall isn’t really something else in disguise.”
“Maybe,” said Owen. He stood leaning on his staff and looking at the wall. “And maybe not. This is a strange place, and full of Magery. Old workings, but very strong.”
He put out a hand and touched the wall. For a moment he said nothing—then, carefully, he drew his hand away.
“Yes,” he said. “You spoke more truth than you knew—close your eyes and look at the wall again.”
She’d spent enough time around Owen by now to know that in spite of the apparent contradiction, he meant exactly what he’d said. She closed her eyes and laid the palm of her hand against the cool stone blocks in front of her.
“All right,” Owen said. “What do you see?”
She concentrated, trying to sort out the impressions. “There’s something in here that doesn’t belong. Bright pebbles in the rock … or stars, burning and burning … I can’t tell whether everything I’m feeling is big or little.”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t think … yes. It is a door. The stars light the way through.”

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