By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 (44 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3
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“I am Mid-Commander Taleion,” he said. “The Second of your Circle. Command me.”
 
WARHAMMER
: NUMBER-ONE CARGO BAY
SWORD-OF-THE-DAWN
: OBSERVATION DECK
RSF
VERATINA
: COMBAT INFORMATION CENTER
 
B
EKA FELL several feet, hit the ground, and rolled as the Professor had taught her, coming up with her blaster gripped in both hands, pointing straight out from her center of gravity.
Grey mist was everywhere, swirling about like the pseudosubstance of hyperspace—but hyperspace was the starpilot’s friend, promising rest from labor and safety from pursuit, and this place, she could tell from the feel of it, was no friend to anybody. The air was neither hot nor cold, and the fog burned wherever it touched her.
Ransome. I want Errec Ransome. Where the hell is that son of a bitch?
She didn’t see the former Master of the Adepts’ Guild anywhere. She did see Owen, standing a little way off and leaning on his staff. He looked pale and tired. He was frowning a little—not at her, but at the other two who had come with her. Ari and—leaning against Ari’s massive frame with her face turned away from the sight of the Void—the Domina Perada.
Beka rounded on Ari. Her nerves were frayed, and it felt good to lose her temper in this flat and sterile place. “What the hell are
you
doing here?”
Ari, for once, didn’t rise to the bait. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re the one who had to go asking our brother for a favor. This is no time to argue about the results.”
She bit her lip in frustration. “Owen,” she said. “What happened? I told you just me, not the whole damned family.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Owen said. “You must have done something to make it happen that way.”
“
Me?
I’m just a starship pilot, remember. You’re the one who walks through walls.”
“Children.” The Domina’s quiet voice cut through their rising tones, just as it had when they were young. “You’re wasting time.”
Beka let out her breath in a long sigh. “I know, Mother, I know. Owen—where the hell are we, anyway?”
“This is the Void,” Owen said. “You asked me to bring you here, and I have. I hope we don’t all come to regret it.”
“Not if I can get hold of Master Ransome,” Beka said. “What the hell is
wrong
with him anyway? You told me that he’d been captured, not that he’d gone insane.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Owen said. “He’s here, though. I can feel it.”
Beka waved her blaster at the endless, undifferentiated fog. “What the hell does
here
mean in a place like this? That bastard killed my friend, and I want him dead.”
“
Here
is here,” Owen said. “Where what you will, becomes real.”
“What I—”
“Be quiet,” said Ari. “Look.”
She looked.
As if Owen’s words had called it forth, a dense mass had begun to coaleasce out of the formless grey expanse above and ahead of them. It grew darker and colder, like a black sun burning through the fog, and brought with it the moaning sound of wind around bare stone. The mist-covered non-surface upon which they stood began to sway and shudder.
A black monolith thrust itself up through the fog, high and wide, like a stone dagger piercing a length of fabric from beneath. The monolith became a tower, built of rock and bound with iron, with narrow windows set in its walls—and at its base, where it stood fixed and firm, a massive wooden door.
“Damn,” said Beka quietly. She tightened her grip on her blaster. “What brought
that
thing here?”
“Things bring themselves here,” said Perada. Her voice was tight, as if she thought about subjects best not remembered. “This is a place where it doesn’t pay to think too long about something, or it may come looking for you.”
Beka looked at her mother. The Domina was pale to the lips, and her eyes were full of a fear that she didn’t express.
I used to think that Mother wasn’t afraid of anything,
Beka thought.
I wish I hadn’t found out I was wrong.
She straightened her shoulders. “Good,” she said. “Then I’m thinking real hard about Master Ransome.”
Ari looked upward at the looming tower. “Could be it worked, baby sister.
Something
sure came looking for us.”
“We came after it,” Owen corrected him. “Which amounts to the same thing. Here, at least.”
“If you say so,” said Ari, “You’re the Adept.” He pointed at the heavy wooden door. Beka saw for the first time that it hung splintered and askew on its wrought-iron hinges. “There’s a way in,” he said. “If you want to go hunting for someone.”
“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “Damned if I know about you and Mother, though.”
Ari shrugged. “I know how to hunt things.”
“I was part of this from the beginning,” said Perada. Her voice was stronger now, and she stepped away from Ari’s support. “Now it’s time to finish it for good. Owen—”
“Yes, Mother?”
“Show us the way.”
Owen led them inside, holding his staff up before him. It gave off a pale and dingy light. A
two-credit glowstick could do a better job
, Beka thought irritably. She dwelt on her discontent, keeping it alive—it was a distraction, like a pebble in a shoe, to keep her from thinking too hard about where she was and what she was doing.
Within the great keep, the light of Owen’s staff shone into halls and corners, illuminating broken doorways and stone floors covered with decaying sticks of furniture. Beka went up to one of the doorways and looked into the room. Inside, jagged edges of milk-colored glass still clung to the frames of shattered windows, in walls lined with empty, broken bookshelves. A golden goblet lay amid the dirt, partly covered with dust and grime. A splash of rubies from the goblet spread across the floor like a puddle of spilled wine.
“Nobody here,” Beka said. “Wherever this is.”
“A symbol,” said Owen. “A construct, called up out of the Void to mirror a person’s mind.”
“Wonderful,” she said. “I hope it isn’t the inside of your head that looks like this, because I’m damned sure it isn’t me.”
“Don’t look at me, either,” Ari said, his voice a deep rumble. “I wouldn’t visit a place like this on a holiday.”
“Children,” said Perada again. She sounded weary, Beka thought, and full of all the sorrow in the galaxy. “Can’t you tell? This is Errec Ransome’s last stronghold. This is the Retreat on Galcen, as his mind builds it here for him.”
At length they came to a room with a single door on its far side, and behind that door a stone wall. The wall was cracked and marred, but not broken. The four of them looked at the wall for a while in silence. It stood there, firm and unyielding, defying them to pass.
Then Ari put his hands against it and pushed. The wall remained solid. “No good. It’s not going anywhere.”
Owen drew a deep breath, and struck at the wall with his staff. “Listen to me, Errec Ransome. The Retreat isn’t yours any longer. It never was yours. It belongs to the Adepts’ Guild, and you gave away the Mastery of the Guild to me.”
Silence, from the halls and the empty rooms. Far off, Beka heard the keening of the wind.
“Let me try,” Perada said. She laid a hand against the blank masonry. “Let me in, Errec. In the name of what we shared.”
The stones and mortar crumbled and fell away.
“Come,” said Perada, and stepped through the gap.
Beka followed, with Ari and Owen close after her. They entered a part of the tower where destruction and decay had not taken root: a long room full of deep carpets and rich wood, where the polished windows blazed with colored glass, and bright sunlight shone through them onto tapestries, rugs, and books. Only one thing marred the perfection of the place: from all around the eerie howling sounded louder than ever before.
Errec Ransome was waiting there for them, with Klea beside him. She looked broken-spirited and weak; her head was bent and her eyes downcast. Beka couldn’t see her expression. She held her staff awkwardly, as if it were no more than a broomstick.
“Welcome,” Ransome said. “More came than I expected. But I’m happy to see you, Perada. It can be lonely in the Void.”
“That’s true, at least,” the Domina said. “As I have reason to know.”
“Master Ransome,” Owen broke in, before his mother could say anything more. “I can see how you might have wanted no part of a future that would include peace with the Mageworlds. I can see how you couldn’t endure watching Mistress Hyfid betray her training. I would have let you go into the Void unhindered.” He paused. “But you had no right to take my apprentice with you. Give her back.”
Ransome laughed. “The Nammerinish tart? No. You failed me, and I have need of her. I have a great deal of work before me to undo all the damage that you have done, and she will be
my
apprentice here.”
“You’ve done quite enough,” Perada said. Her voice was cold now, cold as the Void outside—as cold, Beka thought, as the Domina herself must have felt after she had resolved to lose Entibor rather than surrender the civilized galaxy to the Magelords. “You weren’t satisfied with winning the last war and humbling the Mages; you were the Breaker of Circles, and you wanted the Mages destroyed. You wanted to stop any movement toward unity, any chance that someone might persuade the Republic to bring in the Mageworlds as equals rather than keeping them locked away on the far side of the Net. And to do that, you needed to kill me.”
Beka’s grip tightened on her blaster; only shock and a momentary disbelief kept her from firing. But the stricken expression on Errec Ransome’s face convinced her that Perada had spoken the truth.
“You were committing treason,” Ransome said. “You were sworn to a Mage. You
were
a Mage. You had to die.”
You bastard
, thought Beka.
After everything we did—after everywhere we looked—after I damn-near took the civilized galaxy to pieces with my bare hands—it was all done in the name of your precious Guild after all. And Dadda was blind enough to call you his best and oldest friend!
But Perada didn’t look surprised. “Do you believe in vengeful ghosts?” she asked Ransome.
“No.”
“Believe in them,” Perada said. “We exist.”
“Then believe in this also,” Ransome said. “I will bear no interference in my work. The war can still be won, if only I have the time—and here in the Void, I will have all the time I need.”
There was a blur of movement beside him.
“‘Nammerinish tart,’” Klea said, as her staff came down on him, her posture suddenly no longer awkward, her form in the Dance perfect. “I’m my own, not yours, and I’m
not
a tart.”
Now
, thought Beka, as Ransome staggered forward. She leveled her blaster and fired twice in rapid succession.
The bolts flashed through Ransome without apparent effect. They slammed through the furnishings behind him without leaving holes. Their passage through the air left none of the usual acrid smell. But as their sound and light died, the stones of the tower began to waver and turn into smoke.
The walls fell and the floor dissolved, and once more there was nothing, anywhere, but the swirling grey fog that was the mark and substance of the Void.
Owen stepped forward, his staff a blazing bar of white light. “Now, Master Ransome—fight me.”
Ransome smiled, and there was a bitterness in it that hurt Beka to look at. “The final, true contest for Mastery, after the way of the Mages? So be it, and let the apprentice here stand witness.”
“Apprentice no longer,” said Owen. “She said it herself. She is her own. Mistress Santreny?”
The girl took a step nearer. “Owen?”
“Whatever happens, see that the others get home.”
If the command—and the unexpected elevation in rank—were too much for Klea, Beka thought, she didn’t show it. Her eyes were clear, and she nodded gravely. “I will.”
“Good.” Owen turned back to Master Ransome. “Let us begin.”
The two Adepts faced one another, and their staves lashed out in swirling blazes of light, a basketwork of glowing lines surrounding them, swift and deadly.
Ari stood looking at them with the same intent regard he had given to Llannat Hyfid’s duel in the cargo bay. “Master Ransome is the one who killed you, Mother?”

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