The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (16 page)

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

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds
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Arekhon didn’t need to consult the symbols on the readout panel. “This one shows my family’s common routes from Eraasi to the Edge. This marker over here”—he unclipped his staff and used it as a pointer to circle the flashing green dot—“is the homeworld. The routes go out from it—the darker the color, the longer the transit. The family’s colonies and trading worlds show up as more dots; the colors for those mostly have to do with what’s bought and sold at the port.”
“Nothing that concerns us, then,” said Garrod.
“Most of them, no. The bright orange dots, though … those are known and charted worlds where the fleet never grounds a ship, even in an emergency.”
“Why not?” Yuvaen asked.
Arekhon shrugged. “Believe it or not, there are places where the people don’t like us. Sus-Radal trading partners, some of them; their fleet and ours have been pushing against each other for a while now. Others … I don’t know all the reasons. There’s a lot of strange stuff out there.”
“This blank area at the side,” said Yuvaen, pointing. “Is that the Edge?”
“It is.”
“Why aren’t there any worlds marked beyond it? There are stars on the far side—and if there are stars, then presumably, there are planets, and the stargazers should have a fair idea of their locations.”
Arekhon reminded himself again that Yuvaen was one of the planet-bound. “There aren’t any worlds marked on the far side of the gap because there’s no point in marking them,” he said. “No ship can make a transit to a place where no beacon has been set.”
Yuvaen snorted. “They’re afraid to try it, more likely.”
“If my brother asked such a journey of his captains,” said Arekhon, a bit stiffly, “they would attempt it. But Natelth isn’t a fool, and he’s not going to send the family’s ships through a transit without a Mage to walk the Void before them and set the markers.”
Garrod had been studying the chart in silence while they wrangled. At Arekhon’s last words he looked up again, his eyes burning with a familiar purposeful fire.
“The fleet-Circles and the stargazers don’t want to think about what lies beyond the Edge,” he said. “They make their little explorations for the sake of trade, and whenever they find a new world for their charts they mark it down and never think about what its existence implies. Why is there even one settled world, let alone a hundred?”
He made a circular gesture that took in the whole building. “The foundations of Demaizen Old Hall were laid before the first starships ever left Eraasi. Other worlds have houses equally old, that were already there and waiting when our ships arrived. How did such worlds come to be?”
“The usual answer is that they must have been peopled before the Sundering,” Arekhon said. “Or that the inhabitants were all descended from Mages who walked the Void and remained on their new worlds.” He shrugged. “Of course, the people who say that are also the ones who insist that the Sundering is a pious allegory.”
“I know,” said Garrod. “And I threw their writings onto the bonfire with my family shrines. I say that the Sundering was a real event, brought about by some physical cause—and if populated worlds survived on this side of the interstellar gap, then others must have survived beyond the Farther Edge. If the fleet-Circles have no interest in finding them, then here is a Circle that will.”
 
Year 1123 E. R.
 
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
 
I
ulan Vai spent the morning in the company of the young Mage who had opened the door for her the night before. It was his job, he said, to make certain that the new pupil knew her way around the Hall and met all its inmates.
Vai had no objection. She had her own reasons for coming to the Hall, and a proper orientation would make a good starting-place for uncovering as much as she could about Garrod sus-Demaizen and all his works. To that end, she had returned her high-speed flyer to the rental agency in Demaizen Town, and sent a message informing the second-in-command of sus-Radal’s investigative force that she would be absent indefinitely on House business.
“Did Lord sus-Demaizen train all of you here?” she asked as they made their way up the great staircase.
“Depends on what you mean by training,” said the young man. His name, or as much of it as he’d seen fit to give to her, was Ty, and the Hanilat port-slum accent was strong in his voice. Vai would have marked him down as nothing more than an ambitious street urchin with a touch of the Mage’s gift—except that this was Garrod’s Circle. “We’ve worked together for quite a while, if that’s what you want to know.”
“So is your Circle going to”—she paused, as if hunting for the right phrase—“pass me along to somebody who’s more accustomed to working with raw beginners?”
“Maybe,” said Ty. “Or Garrod may decide that since you came to us, we’re the ones who should take you in.”
They had come by this time to a long, narrow room on the second story of the hall. There was no furniture other than a couple of low benches and a stack of folded-up exercise mats, and the wooden floor had the scuff-polished look of regular use. The wall on the room’s western side was mostly windows; on the other side, the white plaster showed paler oblong patches, regularly spaced, with empty wooden ledges beneath.
A quick glance upward at the ceiling revealed, as Vai had expected, the faint discoloration left by the smoke from years of offerings. The sus-Demaizen line had been an old one, and a long one before Garrod, childless, came to end it; this had been their votive gallery. Vai had never considered herself one of the devout, but she found the room’s change of purpose disquieting all the same.
“This is where you practice?”
Ty took one of the battered teaching staves from its rack. It was a piece of plain light wood, not a polished black staff like the one that he himself carried; Vai supposed that the Circle kept the ordinary staves around for training tools, rather than as objects of focus and meditation.
“Here, give this a swing or two,” he said. “If you’re going to join us, you’ll have to get used to it.”
Vai took the staff, weighed it, and swung it in a lazy arc before settling back, balanced, with the staff in guard before her.
“You never learned
that
birdwatching,” Ty said, watching her. “Which Circle did you train with?”
“I didn’t,” Vai said. “A woman living alone … I took classes. Some of my teachers might have been Circle-trained; I never asked.”
“Want to show me what they taught you?”
“Is it all right?”
“It’ll be fine,” Ty said, taking up a practice staff of his own. “Quarter speed, nothing to the head or knees. Sound fair?”
“Fair enough,” Vai said.
She wondered what she ought to do about this situation. Deliberately losing might be as dangerous as trouncing the boy. And the prospect of losing from lack of skill did not please her at all … ego, she thought. A
good operative can’t afford one of those.
Ty took his own stance, smiling. “We spend our lives with bruised ribs at Demaizen Old Hall,” he said. “But Garrod’s medical
aiketen
are first-rate, and Narin has some salve that works wonders on anything they miss.” With that he let his staff swing slowly toward Vai, his right, her left, aiming for wood, not flesh.
Vai brought her staff just as slowly outward, maintaining it in a vertical line, and blocked his blow. When the staves kissed, Ty brought his back as if it were rebounding, while Vai stepped forward and left, and lowered her staff to the horizontal. Her right shoulder pointed at Ty’s chest, and she swung outward toward him, inside of his staff, where he could not block, nor bring more than the strength of his wrist into a counter-blow, while all the muscles above her waist were set to slam her staff into his chest.
Ty did the only thing he could. He stepped back, out of range, and recovered his stance.
“Very good,” he said. He was still smiling; she thought he was happy to have discovered her unexpected skill. “No need to show you the basics. You have ’em. How do you feel about half-speed?”
Vai stepped back into guard.
“What pleases you,” she said, “pleases me.”
 
 
Arekhon lived on the third floor of the Hall, in what had once been a guest bedroom. The room was smaller than the one he’d had while he was growing up in Hanilat—and which remained, technically, his whenever he chose to visit—but it was larger than the cabin on Ribbon-of Starlight that he’d shared with three other fleet apprentices. In common with most of the other rooms in the Hall, it contained worn-but-good furniture several generations older than Arekhon himself: A bed, a night-table, a wardrobe full of clothing, a desk.
The desk lamp and the reading light on the bedside table answered to a switch plate by the door. Like most of the Hall’s other concessions to modernity, they had been less than efficiently fitted into the building’s existing features, and had to be activated by hand—the house-mind wasn’t sophisticated enough to accept verbal instructions.
The desk, however, said, “You have a message waiting for you from Pilot-Ancillary Inadi,” as soon as Arekhon opened the door. He’d made the necessary alterations to the room himself, not long after the last time he’d missed returning one of Ela’s calls—first installing the thumbnail-sized scanner where it could watch the door, then linking it to the desk’s contact with the house-mind so that it could respond with the appropriate status-change update. The original version, made for his shipboard locker back when he was a fleet apprentice, had said, “Touch my good boots, Meni, and you die horribly,” but he’d civilized it a bit since then.
Elaeli Inadi was one of the callers whom the house-mind knew to pull out of a message queue and announce by name at once. There weren’t many. He’d lost contact with the other, more casual friends of his apprentice days, and he’d never been that close to his older brother and sister. He entered his recognition code into the desk’s message box. It hummed for a moment, then clicked twice. The desk spoke again, this time in Elaeli’s voice rather than the synthesized one which Arekhon had provided for it.
“’Rekhe—looks like I’ve missed saying goodbye to you again. The fleet’s going back out ahead of schedule—syn-Evarat isn’t telling anybody where until we link up with the cargo convoy. I think your brother’s got him seeing spies under his bunk or something. He says the run this time should be a short one, but for all I know he’s making that up to fool whoever Lord Natelth thinks is listening.
“At least we had a chance to talk while you were in town. I’ll call you when the fleet comes back. Wish us luck.”
The message box clicked again, hummed, and was silent.
Arekhon stood for a moment, gathering his thoughts. A wish for luck was no casual thing to ask of a working Mage, though a friend could ask it of a friend and expect nothing stronger than positive thoughts and maybe an offering to the spirits of the house. Ela had probably meant no more than what was usual—she’d known him before he went to the Circles, and still thought of him, he suspected, as more fleet than Mage. But just because she hadn’t counted on anything besides the common intentions of goodwill toward a traveler, was no reason for him to give her only that.
Now was as good a time as any. If he failed to appear for the mid-day meal, the others would assume—truthfully—that he was absorbed in some project of his own and would make an appearance later.
He locked the door against accidental intrusion, and drew the curtains that he normally kept open. The heavy fabric blocked most of the light; only a dim greyness remained. He unclipped his staff from his belt, then settled himself into a kneeling position on the worn carpet, with the staff lying on the floor in front of him. Then—carefully, gently—he let out his breath and began the process he sometimes thought of as taking down the shutters of his mind to gain a better view of the universe.
When he was very young, it had been easier to see the world this way than not: As a web of life-threads and luck-threads overlying physical reality. Growing older had been a matter of learning how to shut out the parts of the universe that others didn’t see, in order to move and talk and think like the people around him. The Circles, in turn, had taught him how to go back.
Elaeli Inadi, now as always, was a bright thread running through the weave of his universe. He found her thread and followed it into the complicated pattern of many threads that was the sus-Peledaen fleet.
Luck,
he thought, and began sorting through the glowing lines, bringing them together where they threatened to stray apart and making the web stronger where it threatened to wear thin.
Jump luck to make the void-transits clean and hold the engines steady; fighting luck to keep the family’s cargo away from thieves and pirates; trader’s luck to bring a profit home.
And lovers’ luck, to bring her safe to me.
 
 
Garrod and Yuvaen remained in the study after Arekhon had departed. The First sat musing over the star chart, with one hand under his chin and the other tracing out the lines from Eraasi to the Edge. Each mapped planet would have its beacons for the ships that came after. It would have other beacons as well, non-material ones left as guideposts by the first Mage to reach that world through the Void. Not until after passing the Void-marks for Rayamet, edgemost of the sus-Peledaen trading worlds, would a walker need to strike out into the blank spaces of the interstellar gap.
Yuvaen, meanwhile, had located the textfiles that gave instructions for interpreting the chart, and pulled them up onto the desk’s reader. He paged through them, shook his head, and closed the file.
“It’s a good thing we’ve got ’Rekhe to explain this thing,” he said. “It’s nothing but blinking lights to me.”
“I told you he’d do well,” said Garrod absently, most of his attention on the chart. “He’s young, but so were we, once, and it didn’t—”
He stopped, breath catching, and looked up from his contemplation of the starmap. His gaze met Yuvaen’s and he knew that his Second had likewise felt the sudden, almost visceral pang: The twisting, stretching sensation of luck-lines being woven into a new design. And this wasn’t somebody’s personal undertaking done with a stronger-than-usual will—more than one hand lay on the threads and pulled the pattern taunt.
“There’s a working going on,” Garrod said. “Somewhere in the Hall.”
“How—?”
“I don’t know.” Garrod pushed back his chair and stood, leaving the chart to blink and swirl unheeded on the desk-top. “But if this goes out of control—”
The sense of cords weaving and interlacing had grown stronger as he spoke; he could see them, if he let his vision widen to take them in, thick bright cords whose names and purposes he didn’t know and had no way to guess. The design they wove pulsed in his view, demanding his care and attention, all but shouting its importance.
“The long gallery,” he said to Yuvaen. “And hurry!”
Without looking to see if his Second followed, Garrod ran down the hall outside his private chambers, up the half-stairs, and through the door that led to the second-floor passageway along the edge of the grand staircase. He caught a glimpse of Delath passing by in the hall below, and shouted down to him, “The long gallery—fetch everyone!” without breaking stride.
The sense of urgency that had impelled Garrod from his study had not eased with his decision to take action, but rather drove him faster. Halfway down the hall from the long gallery, he could already hear the sound of cracking staves.
Who could have been so reckless?
he demanded of himself as he began to run in earnest. A pounding of footsteps told him that Yuvaen was a pace or two behind him.
None of them are as foolish as that, none of them … .
Garrod took his own staff in his hand as he ran, and let it blaze with blue-white fire. When he reached the door of the long gallery he didn’t bother stopping to open it, but burst on through by main force, so that his shoulder tore the bolts away from the antique jamb.
In the middle of the gallery, wreathed in spirals of green and golden fire, Ty and the newcomer fought with staves. Garrod’s eruption into the room made no impression upon the pair. Their concentration was wholly on each other, and the sound of fast blows blocked and returned echoed off the high ceiling.

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