Read The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

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BOOK: The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds

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“I can see your heart, and …”

“Cut it
out,
I said.”

A rising whine of traffic told Karil that crossing the street would be dangerous if they hesitated. She grabbed her brother by the right arm, being careful not to touch the staff he carried in that hand, and pulled him across to where a lighted alley showed signs for gamblers and usurers. No one was visible out on the street, which was a blessing.

“Oh, all right,” Lenset said. “He wants you to take an envelope, and put it in the Captain’s safe on your ship.”

“The ship doesn’t
have
a safe.”

“Well, wherever the Captain puts the papers that only the Captain can see.”

Karil fought against a sense of relief. It wasn’t unknown for crew members to keep their personal papers in the ship’s strongbox, since most regular berthing compartments didn’t have much by way of secure storage. So Demazze’s favor wasn’t impossible. She rather wished that it had been; then she would have had a plausible reason for saying no.

“What sort of story am I supposed to tell the Captain?”

“You’re the resourceful one,” Lenset said. “Make something up.”

“To save you the trouble of making it up beforehand?”

“I don’t lie.”

“No, you ask me to do it for you. What’s this envelope got in it, that Demazze wants to hide it away like that?”

“I don’t know.” Lenset reached into the inner pocket of his black tunic and withdrew a slim yellow rectangle. “Here.”

Karil accepted the envelope reluctantly, then stood for a moment turning it over in her hands. The envelope itself could have come from any stationery store; what made it unusual was what had been done to it afterward. Someone—
Demazze himself?
she wondered.
Who knows?
—had marked the yellow paper with a pattern drawn in black ink: A series of marks, some unique, some repeating, with looping swirls and crooked lines throughout.

She tapped the pattern with one finger. “What’s this? Second place in the ‘design a bad border’ contest?”

“If it’s so bad, why would it get second place?”

“Because it’s so bad. Once the envelope’s in the Captain’s strongbox—assuming that I put it there instead of tossing it into the nearest trash compactor the instant you’re out of sight—what then?”

“Then nothing. Forget it even exists. Leave it.”

“Right. Leave it. Len, are you doing anything illegal?”

“Nothing that isn’t for the greater good of the universe. I can feel the winds of chance … .”

“Oh, give it a break,” Karil said, cutting him off. “So you don’t know whether it’s legal or not. Lenset, if you get into trouble from now on, Demazze will have to bail you out himself. I’ll hold this envelope for you, and that’s it.”

“That’s good enough.”

“I’m going to regret this someday, I know I am … what am I supposed to tell the Captain?”

“Councillor Demazze has great confidence in you.”

Karil stuffed the envelope under her jacket. “All right, I have it. What else do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing,” Lenset said. “I have to go now—Demazze will want to know that everything is in order.”

He stepped aside, then seemed to fade away between the circles of light from the streetlamps. Karil looked after him for a moment, then turned back toward her apartment, trying to walk rapidly but confidently, as if she passed through this neighborhood unmolested every night of the year.

Underneath her jacket, the stiff corners of Demazze’s envelope poked at her skin like little paper knives.

Aregil was a commercial seaport on the northwestern shore of Eraasi’s primary continent—not the largest port along that coast, but not small either, as cities went. Ty had never visited the place, nor did he know anyone who had. At the end of the school term, he packed up his clothing and his few possessions into an issued rolling case, received his ticket of leave from the hall porter, and walked through the main door of the Home for the last time.

His path to the public transit nexus took him past the renovated office building on Three Street where the Mages had their residence and workplace. He passed by without stopping, but a flutter at the back of his neck made him turn. A woman was following him, running: Binea Daros, from the Circle.

“Wait!” she called out after him. “Stop!”

He kept walking, outpacing her easily in the crowded street. “Why should I?”

“You don’t understand … we have a letter … .”

“I have enough letters already,” he said, and didn’t look back again.

Instead, he hastened onward to the ground-transit depot, where he exchanged some of his school scrip for a one-way ticket to Aregil, with a transfer at Nakkad. He spent the trip, three days on hard seats, looking out the window at the passing scenery: First the city, then trees, then the bare rock of the mountains and more trees. At last, under a violet sunset, he stood on the Long Pier at Aregil, watching the sun fall away from him into the sea.

The hiring halls wouldn’t open until morning. The cash that came with his ticket of leave would not last much longer, even with stringent economies, but he needed a place to stay. He found one in a cheap hotel near the waterfront, an establishment that took cash in advance by the day in return for a worn key to a bare room and a narrow bed.

At dawn, under a sky of red and black clouds, he rose and took his things with him to the first of the two Aregilan hiring halls. His letter of introduction gained him admittance, and in the morning light he saw that the hall was crammed with men seeking a day’s wages. They packed the wooden benches that ran along the walls, and filled the ranks of molded plastic chairs set up in the center. The walls themselves were a cream color, curdled by age, with brown-painted wainscoting that wouldn’t show marks.

From time to time other men—better dressed than those who waited—came in and paid their fees to the clerk. Then they would point at one candidate or another, and the waiting laborer would rise and follow. The process went more rapidly than he would have thought; before long, the sun was up and shining in the front windows, and the hall was all but empty. Nobody was left except for Ty, sitting strictly upright with his case tucked away for safety behind his knees, and a few old men, broken down by drink and age, asleep on the benches.

An hour passed, then two. A fly buzzed, and behind the service window the clerk rustled paper and clicked away at his keyboard. Ty’s mouth felt parched, but he was too proud, or too stubborn, to ask where he could find water. The shadows moved across the floor as the sun moved outside. Toward noon the shadows faded as the sun was obscured by gathering clouds, and a rain squall lashed against the windows.

The door of the hall opened and a woman stepped in out of the rain. Foul-weather clothing muffled the lines of her body, and the rainwater dripped from her heavy woolen cloak and made dark spots on the floor. She went straight to the clerk’s station and spoke with him briefly, then came to stand in front of Ty.

“Do you want a job?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m just out of school in Hanilat, and I need a job.” Then, remembering his manners, he added, “Ma’am.”

“I’m afraid I can’t offer you work,” the woman said. Her hand reached beneath her cloak and emerged holding a short staff of dark wood, bound with silver. “But—on behalf of the Demaizen Circle—I can offer you a working. Will you come with me?”

“Yes,” he said.

10:

Year 1123 E. R.

AYARAT: BESHKIP
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL

T
he offices of the Zealous Endeavor Manufacturing Company occupied a tall building in the industrial city of Beshkip on Ayarat. The tower overlooked a factory complex whose tall stacks sent up columns of white smoke at the level of the upper windows. Far below on the roadway, ranks of heavy delivery trucks waited their turn at the shipping docks. Farther out on the edges of the industrial park, the cooling pools and the generator buildings sent up their characteristic plumes of vapor into the cool morning air.

Nefil Kammen had a suite of rooms high up on the monolith’s inward-facing side, as befitted a rising member of the firm’s hierarchy. A wide, uncurtained window gave him an unrestricted view of the whole operation. Today, however, all his attention was on Jaf Otnal, and the bad news that Jaf had brought from Ayarat Spaceport.

“The shipper says there’s no mind-gel.”

Kammen regarded Jaf with a mixture of incredulity and dismay. “What happened to all the stuff we ordered?”

The mind-gel was a vital part of Zealous Endeavor’s operations. Without a steady supply of the quasi-organic substance, imported from Eraasi at considerable cost, local production of high-standard house and ship minds would be impossible. Inorganic components, while available on Ayarat, wouldn’t function reliably at the level needed to interface with the Eraasian standard.

“I know we ordered it,” Kammen went on. “I signed the requisitions myself. So what happened?”

“Pirates.” Jaf’s voice still held traces of his native Ildaonese, making it hard for Kammen to tell whether or not the younger man believed what the shipper had told him. Jaf’s narrow face and grey-green offworlder eyes made reading his expression equally difficult. “The shippers were hit by pirates.”

Kammen snorted. “We’ve all heard that story before.”

“It’s covered by insurance. And there’s plenty of mind-gel for sale right here in Beshkip, if we don’t care too much about its pedigree.”

“I’ll bet my paycheck against yours,” Kammen said, “that most of it comes from our own shipments.”

“You’re probably right. Do you want to get some anyway?”

“The alternative is shutting down the line.” Kammen leaned forward across his desk. “I’ll bet you again, Jaf, double or nothing, that the pirates who lifted our mind-gel have the same name as the shippers we hired to carry it.”

“No bet. As long as we need imported material, we’re vulnerable.” Jaf’s voice and posture changed subtly—the voice dropping in both tone and volume, while Jaf leaned forward, closing the distance between himself and Kammen. “Some of us have been … discussing … the situation for a while now.”

Kammen’s own voice dropped in response. “And did you come to a conclusion?”

Jaf said nothing for a moment. Then he rose abruptly, walked over to the window, and looked out.

“The problem,” he said, gazing down at the parked trucks outside, “is the star-lords. They don’t do anything more for us than our own truck drivers do—they move goods to the market. What would we do if our drivers were stealing some of our loads and selling them on their own?”

“Discharge them,” said Kammen at once. “Punish them. And hire new ones more to our liking.”

“So we would,” agreed Jaf. He turned away from the window and looked at Kammen directly. “Why shouldn’t the same hold true in the case of the star-lords?”

Kammen laughed without humor. “It’s the ‘hire new ones’ part that’s the problem. We both know the next fleet-family we contract with will be just as bad as the last.”

“Then maybe it’s time we broke them all.”

“Let’s not talk about that in here,” Kammen said quietly. “Too many ears. You and I and Riet need to get together one of these days, though, and talk it over. In the meantime—let’s buy some mind-gel. Draw the money from the general fund.”

“What about the insurance?” Jaf asked. The inflection and posture of intimacy were gone, and everything was business once again.

“Use it to get a new supply shipped in. Let’s see if the pirates hit this one, too.”

The Circle at the Old Hall bought most of its perishable supplies at the shops in Demaizen Town, but at least once a month somebody had to rise before dawn and take the groundcar over to Bresekt to buy staples in volume. Narin, whose turn it was this month to make the run, had filled the groundcar’s rear seat and its cargo compartment with everything from jugs of laundry soap to boxes of dried high-protein noodles. Eight people involved in strenuous mental and physical discipline could run through an amazing amount of both of those commodities, and others as well.

The journey and the shopping put together took up most of an entire day, and as usual it was late afternoon before Narin returned to the Hall. She maneuvered the groundcar into its sheltered place in a converted outbuilding, then cut power and got out.

She picked up a couple of the jugs of soap, those being the nearest things to hand, and entered the Hall by the rear door that led to the kitchen. Yuvaen syn-Deriot was there when she came in, pouring hot water through a leaf-strainer into a blue pottery mug. The sharp scent of pale spring-picked
uffa
rose up from the steaming mug and pricked at her nostrils.

Yuvaen looked up as the kitchen door slammed shut behind her. “How was Bresekt?” he asked.

“Crowded,” she said. She set the two jugs of soap down on the tile floor near the stairs to the laundry room. “Noisy. Like always. Want to come help me unload the rest of the stuff?”

“Of course,” he said.

Several minutes later, the groundcar was empty and most of its contents—still in bags and crates—had been transferred to the kitchen’s central worktable. From there, Narin and Yuvaen began the task of sorting through the purchases and stowing them in their appointed places.

“Ten cans of sliced
neiath
fruit in heavy syrup,” Narin said, removing the items in question from the bag and passing them to Yuvaen one by one. “The third cabinet from the left, under the counter.”

“We still have four cans of
neiath
from the last time,” Yuvaen observed as he bent to put the fruit away.

“Everybody likes it. And it keeps.”

“A good point.” Yuvaen straightened, and added, in the same tone as before, “Garrod thinks it might be time to name a Third for the Circle.”

Narin didn’t look up from the bags on the worktable. “Four bottles of dish soap, two bottles of shampoo … those go upstairs … . Garrod’s probably right.”

“I thought it might be a good idea if I talked with you about it first.” Yuvaen stashed the dish soap underneath the main sink next to the floor cleanser and set the bottles of shampoo aside on the counter. “What do you think about taking on the rank yourself?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t got the luck for it. Or the nerve, at my age.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your nerve that I can tell. But you know best about your luck.” Yuvaen paused. “That leaves us with a choice of Del or ’Rekhe, or maybe Serazao.”

“Not ’Zao,” Narin said at once. “She’s too rigid. She’ll keep the workings anchored as long as she’s got breath, but she doesn’t have enough imagination.”

“So it comes down to Delath and Arekhon.”

“Unless Garrod’s willing to wait for Ty to get quite a bit older,” she said. “And if waiting were an option, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place, would we?”

“Probably not,” Yuvaen admitted. “But since we are having it, how do you read our two possibles?”

He waited, saying nothing, while Narin unpacked an entire crate of breakfast supplies—porridges, fruit jellies, flaked grains, quick-heating baked goods in long-term storage pouches. Finally she said, “Del’s steadier, in some ways, but …”

“You don’t think he’s up to it?” Yuvaen sounded a bit surprised, which confirmed Narin’s suspicions about which candidate the Second himself favored. “He got his training right here, after all.”

“Which means he’s a lot like you. And like Garrod. If you’re serious about bringing in a Third, you’ll need someone with enough difference to balance things out.”

“That’s why we thought maybe you—”

“No.”

“I suppose not,” Yuvaen said. “But I don’t know if Arekhon’s strong enough for the job, either.”

She abandoned the bags of groceries and faced the Second squarely, her feet set apart as though she braced herself again for balance on the Dance’s moving deck. “You asked my opinion, and I’m giving it to you. ’Rekhe isn’t a solid rock like you are, or like Garrod is, or like Del. He’s the water that goes around the rock, maybe, or the wind that blows across it—and believe me, Yuva, because I know it, wind and water are strong enough to outlast all the rocks in the world.”

Jaf Otnal returned to his own office suite in the Zealous Endeavor Building, full of a warm sense of satisfaction with the interview just past. He wasn’t surprised to find his friend Riet waiting in the inner office when he arrived. Riet was the firm’s chief economic forecaster, and would have heard about the mind-gel problem from his own sources already—and he knew how long Jaf had been waiting for such an opening.

“Do you think Kammen went for it?” he asked as soon as Jaf had shut the door behind him. Riet was Ayaratan by birth, and had little patience with subtlety and indirect maneuvering. He’d wanted to broach the matter of the star-lords to Kammen several months ago, but Jaf had counseled him to be patient.

“I believe he did,” Jaf replied. He walked to his desk, picked up a black onyx puzzle-paperweight and started to play with it. The desk toy was both complex and delicate—a good metaphor, he reflected, for any number of things in life. “But we’re still talking about a course that might destroy the company. We could wind up selling fruit pies on street corners, or worse.”

“Or we could wind up richer than even the star-lords could imagine,” Riet said. “But someone, somewhere, has to make a stand—and if we’re the ones who lead it, then we’ll be running Zealous Endeavor when the star-lords have all gone begging.”

Jaf regarded the chief forecaster thoughtfully. “Don’t you think the people on the top floor will have something to say about that?”

“I don’t think the top floor needs to know too much.”

“What are you saying?”

Riet began ostentatiously counting on his fingers. “I’m saying that all our communications pass through satellites owned by the star-lords—all our essential raw materials move from planet to planet through the star-lords—all our finished goods move back to market again through the star-lords—and the star-lords have enough money to hire the very best in traitors and espionage.”

Jaf nodded. “You have a point. Several points. I think we can bury our efforts somewhere in your research budget, at least for now.”

“Then we’ll need to see results in the next two or three quarters.” Riet thought for a moment. “I can give you something, I believe.”

“Good. Meanwhile, I’m going to take a leave of absence to clear up some family matters—and visit with a few close friends—back on Ildaon.”

Riet gave him a dubious look. “Riding with the star-lords?”

“If the star-lords ever find out about this conversation,” Jaf pointed out,

“riding in my own groundcar won’t be safe. Don’t worry about me this time, though. By the time the star-lords notice that something unusual is going on, I’ll be back.”

“Good luck to you, then. Lunch today?”

“The usual place.”

Riet left the office. Jaf watched him go, then glanced down at the black onyx puzzle in his hands. At some point in their conversation, he had slid the last piece into place and locked it down.

“So,” he mused aloud. “We’re doing it.”

He looked out the window, away from Beshkip toward the distant mountains obscured by industrial haze. The project was not, he thought, impossible. The star-lords bought their food somewhere, they bought their steel somewhere, they sold their pirated goods somewhere, and they did their banking somewhere. And somewhere—in one of those places, or in another—they would have to be vulnerable.

He set down the puzzle and touched the desktop switch that reactivated the room’s voice sensors.

“I need to take extended personal leave,” he said to the office-mind. “A matter of family obligation. Get me passage to Ildaon, first available transit. Make reservations for lunch today at the Windflower, two guests. And purchase two hundred Eraasian tons of mind-gel, local spot market price, immediate delivery.”

“Return from Ildaon?” the room inquired.

Jaf thought for a moment. “Leave that open.”

BOOK: The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds

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