The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (17 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds
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Garrod drew a sharp breath. Full speed and full strength—this was a working, indeed, and a serious one.
But was it intended? Or is there more to Iulan Vai than we thought?
“Break them apart,” he commanded. “They can’t be allowed to finish—it’s a rogue pattern, and no true weaving.”
Yuvaen started forward, but Garrod was moving as he spoke, and interposed his own staff between the two combatants. In an instant he found himself on the defensive as they attacked both him and each other, at seeming random but with more than random skill. Garrod fought back, striving to guard himself against injury and against being himself drawn into whatever pattern Vai and Ty had inadvertently—he hoped—begun.
More footsteps came drumming in the hall outside the gallery, and a moment later Delath and Narin skidded over the threshold. Kief plunged through the door a heartbeat behind them, his long hair flying and his staff ablaze.
“Help us out!” Yuvaen shouted at the startled Mages. “Break them apart!”
“There’s luck here, Yuva,” Garrod said, panting—the web pulled tighter with every exchange of blows, and he found himself hard-pressed. “Strong luck.”
“There’s luck everywhere,” Yuvaen said. He was moving in toward Ty from behind, his staff up to guard against the danger of backstrokes.
“Not like this.” Garrod brought his staff against Iulan Vai’s in a move that should have ripped the practice weapon out of her hand. Instead, the maneuver drew him into striking range of her counterattack. “This luck is ours—if we can take it. Now!”
Narin had been circling outside the melee. On Garrod’s word, she launched herself forward in a rolling dive, slamming into the back of Vai’s knees. Vai lost her balance and toppled backward; Kief and Delath grabbed her arms and pinned her almost before she hit the floor. In the same moment Yuvaen dropped his staff and stepped forward to wrap Ty’s upper arms in a crushing hug. At once the blaze of colors dimmed. Only Garrod’s staff continued to give off light.
He turned slowly, looking from one member of the Circle to the next. Ty and Vai were dripping with sweat, their expressions like those of sleepers pulled from their dreams by a bucket of water. Yuvaen, still gripping Ty closely, was looking, if anything, even more stolid than usual; Garrod, who knew him well, understood from that the depth of his Second’s dismay. Kief and Delath looked concerned and—on the part of the former—not a little frightened, but they didn’t let go their hold on the unprotesting Iulan Vai. A few feet away, Narin was pulling herself to her feet and saying nothing.
“Where are Arekhon and Serazao?” Garrod demanded after he had scanned the room. “Narin—go and fetch them. I want the entire Circle here for this.”
“No need to send for us, my lord,” came a voice from the door—Serazao, sounding worried but not unduly so; she hadn’t been part of the brief, fierce melee in the long gallery. “We’re here. Del told me to find ’Rekhe, and I did—he was at a working in his room, and didn’t hear you call.”
“A working, you say?” Garrod pointed his blazing staff at Arekhon as he, too, entered the room. “What kind of working, that twists the patterns so strongly it catches up these two young ones and nearly bums them out altogether?”
Arekhon shook his head. “It was a luck-sending, nothing more,” he said. His grey eyes were wide and dark-pupilled, as they would be if he’d been dragged out of deep meditation without warning, but nothing in his bearing spoke of guilt or deliberate wrong. “A private intention, as a favor to a friend.”
“This was no private intention,” Yuvaen cut in. “It was a working, and nearly a great working. If we hadn’t—”
“Peace, Yuva!” Garrod said. “He’s telling the truth. Which friend, ’Rekhe?”
“Elaeli Inadi,” Arekhon said, after a second’s pause. “A pilot with the sus-Peledaen. We were fleet-apprentices together, and kept up our friendship afterward.”
“More than friendship,” said Garrod, “if the intention was so strong. And for whatever reason, this time the luck you sent traveled no farther than to the Circle. This is world-changer’s luck, ’Rekhe, and nothing we dare to waste.”
He heard Yuvaen’s breath catch, and ignored it.
“Tonight,” Garrod said. “Tonight I will walk. The time is now, and we can’t afford to wait any longer.”
 
Year 1123 E. R.
 
ERAASI: HANILAT STARPORT
DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
 
It was close to noon in Hanilat. Natelth sus-Khalgath was at the desk in his study, going through the latest set of documents from the family’s legalist-in-chief. He came upon the autumn quarter’s list of recommendations for outer-family adoption, and raised his eyebrows at the sight of his younger brother’s name set down as the sponsor for one of the pilots in the fleet.
What’s ’Rekhe up to now?
he wondered, and flipped through the files in the reader until he found his brother’s name again, this time on a formal letter of severance.
“ … craves your permission to withdraw his name permanently from the rolls of the sus-Peledaen fleet, and to be freed from any ties beyond those of natural affection and of proper respect; wherewith he submits to the family in his stead the name of Pilot-Ancillary Elaeli Inadi …”
Natelth frowned. He was tempted to refuse the severance, but ’Rekhe had done everything in order and in the proper form. To turn him down would be capricious, and Natelth loathed caprice in all its manifestations. He scowled, feeling as if his brother had boxed him into taking action yet again, and marked the documents “approved.”
The study door opened then, without forewarning. “Isa,” Natelth said instantly. “What’s the problem?”
His sister Isayana was the only other person whom the house-mind would allow to open those doors set to his personal lock—not surprising, since she had given the house its operating instructions in the first place. Dealing with inorganic and quasi-organic minds was her specialty, and she had been in charge of the sus-Peledaen affairs in that area for almost two decades.
She was a tall woman, at least for the sus-Khalgath line, with greying black hair pulled up into a loose knot. At some point earlier in the morning, she’d thrust a stylus into the knot for safekeeping, or to free her hands for some other task, and then had forgotten about it. It would stay there, Natelth suspected, until the time came to change for dinner.
“No problem,” she said. “But I thought you’d like to know—I checked the private logs, and you’ve got some activity on that set of charts you passed on to ’Rekhe.”
“What kind of activity?”
“Standard open-and-display, so far. Nobody’s interfaced anything with it besides a reader. They didn’t lose any time waiting to do that much, though.” She gave him a sharp look. “And they looked at the routes going from Eraasi to the Edge. Exactly what are ’Rekhe and his friends planning to do with those charts, anyhow?”
“He didn’t say.”
“But Garrod’s made him Third, and we all know what that means.” Her eyes darkened. “You shouldn’t have let him go to Demaizen in the first place—the fleet had more than one Circle willing to take him.”
“He was set on working with Garrod,” Natelth said. This was not the time, he reflected, to tell his sister about ‘Rekhe’s letter of severance. She had raised their younger brother as a mother would have, and there was a distinct chance that she would take his formal departure from the family more personally than ’Rekhe had intended it. “You know how he is when he makes up his mind.”
She nodded in rueful agreement. “He could give stubborn lessons to a stone.”
And slippery lessons to a mudsnake,
Natelth added to himself. The matter of ’Rekhe’s transfer from the fleet to the Demaizen Circle still rankled; it had not been one of Natelth’s more successful moments. That had been long ago, however, and Isa’s fears were part of the present. He set himself to allaying them as best he could. “He’s only been Garrod’s Third for a couple of days now; you probably don’t need to worry about him for quite a while.”
 
 
While Garrod was making himself ready for the evening’s working, Yuvaen called the rest of the Demaizen Mages—with the exception of the problematic Iulan Vai—to an informal conference in the long gallery. Arekhon was the last to arrive, after making a circuit of the Hall to see if all was well after the disruptions of the morning. He only wished that the temper of the Circle could be as easily called back into order. The rogue working and Garrod’s subsequent decision had set everybody’s nerves on edge, and it showed.
Kief and Ty and Serazao, the three youngest in the Circle—in service if not in age—sat close together on one of the padded exercise mats. Delath stood nearby at one of the tall windows, and Narin sat on one of the wooden benches a few feet away. Arekhon would have gone to sit on the bench next to her, except that he was no longer one of the unranked Mages, but Third of the Circle. He went, instead, to stand beside Yuvaen, where the Second waited beside the rack of practice staves.
“Everybody’s accounted for,” he said quietly. “Garrod’s meditating, and Syr Vai is in her room.”
“Tactful of her.” Yuvaen pushed himself away from the wall. “Whatever else the woman is, she’s not a fool.”
He had the attention of the others by now. Del turned around from the window, and the three junior Mages, seated together on the mat, looked at the Second expectantly.
“Tonight the First will go out into the Void,” Yuvaen said. His voice took on the steadying cadences of a formal speech, and Arekhon felt the tension in the room ease slightly. “And we will anchor him. This working is the one for which he formed our Circle in the beginning. Our practices and our lesser efforts have all been steps toward this end. The time has come a little sooner than we expected, but only a little—if we hadn’t been ready, the wild luck would have passed us by. We
are
ready, and all we have to do is settle the practical details.”
“What kind of details?” asked Serazao. She had her arms wrapped tightly around her updrawn knees, and her yellow-hazel eyes were bright and intent in her narrow face.
“Iulan Vai,” said Del from his place near the window. “She isn’t a member of the Circle—so what part does she have in our working?”
There was a silence in the workroom. Del, square and solid and dispassionate, had asked the question that everyone had been worrying about. Arekhon drew breath to give his own opinion on the matter, but at a glance from Yuvaen he let the breath out without speaking.
Finally Kief said, “I think we ought to send her away.”
His voice rang harshly against the gallery’s high ceiling, and Arekhon saw him flinch at the echo. Kief tugged at his early-greying hair with long, nervous fingers and went on, not quite so loudly, “There are other Circles. If she wants training, we can recommend her to one that will train her. If she’s meant to come to this Circle she can return later, when we’re done.”
Narin shook her head. “I don’t know. If Syr Vai brought the wild luck along with her to Demaizen, then we won’t help ourselves any if we send her away. Let her stay and make herself useful. In a working as long as this one’s going to be, we’ll need someone to keep watch and fetch water for the rest of us.”
“That’s another thing,” said Serazao. She turned to Yuvaen. “How long do you expect this working to last?”
“Perhaps as long as a week. Perhaps not.”
Serazao continued to look doubtful. “I’ve never heard of any walk through the Void lasting for more than a day.”
“This one goes beyond the bounds of what we know,” Yuvaen said. “And once we begin it, there’s no stopping.”
“That’s what worries me,” said Delath. “If the working runs into trouble … we’ve lived together in this Circle for years. We know what we’re capable of and how we’ll react, no matter what the emergency. Iulan Vai, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity.”
“We were all unknown quantities once,” Narin said. “And the Circle took us in. You’ve kept quiet so far, ’Rekhe—what do you say?”
Arekhon looked over at Yuvaen, but this time the Second made no gesture for him to keep silent. “I believe that Syr Vai was meant to be here,” he said. “When she became part of the accidental working, she became part of our greater design as well.”
“But what kind of part?” Delath asked. “Yuva, will Garrod give us a ruling on this?”
“No. His part of the working has already begun.”
Narin said, “You’re the Second. Give us a ruling in his place.”
“So be it,” said Yuvaen. “The newcomer stays.”
 
 
Iulan Vai sat in a straight-backed chair at the window of her room, looking out over the hills of Demaizen. The room was a small one on the third floor, one of several along a central hallway—guest bedrooms once, when the Old Hall was the heart of the district’s social life, and now living quarters for the Mages of Garrod’s Circle. Of whom she was, apparently, one.
She couldn’t remember the moment when her good-natured exploratory sparring with Ty had transformed into something else. Once or twice in her career as a confidential operative, she had found herself in the position of having to fight for her life, and the episode in the long gallery had possessed some of that same intensity. What was missing from the experience, though, was the driving, knife-sharp underpulse of fear. In fear’s place had come an ecstatic subsumption into rhythm and movement that made the combat into something closer to dance, or to the act of love.
The combination of the two feelings was one she had not experienced before—but one which she already knew she would do much for, in order to experience it again. The ruse she had employed to gain entry into the Hall had turned out to be truth. Now she had to wonder how much of the idea had been her own, and how much of it the luck of the Circle, drawing her in.
If this was going to happen to me,
she thought irritably,
why did it wait until now?
Footsteps sounded in the hall outside her room, and she turned as the steps halted at the open door. She wasn’t surprised to see that the visitor was Arekhon sus-Khalgath, whose private intention for his beloved in the fleet had meshed with the sparring in the long gallery to create that unexpected—and nearly fatal—transcendence. He had come by the room earlier, a brief and preoccupied stop on the way to what Vai had suspected was a conference on how to handle the problem that she presented.
He didn’t look preoccupied now; in fact, his grey eyes fixed her with a direct and specific regard. She knew a sudden panic fear that the Circle had decided to send her away, and told herself that the fear sprang out of concern for her mission and for her employer’s good.
“What happened this morning—” she began.
Arekhon waved her to silence. “What’s done is done. The important thing is that you’ll be staying here with us, as you asked. You won’t be able to start your instruction right away, though; you’ll have to wait a week, maybe more, until after Garrod’s latest working is done.”
“You’re not sending me away?” she said, and then dealt herself a mental slap for the eagerness that crept into the words.
The first rule is never to let them know what you really want.
She discounted automatically the folk-belief that Mages could read minds. No Mage of her admittedly scant acquaintance had ever made that claim, and her own experience was that no one could do so, else she would have been out of a job long since. And if Arekhon had noticed her reaction, he at least had the courtesy not to show it.
“We’re not sending you anywhere,” he assured her. He sounded almost apologetic as he went on. “But for the moment you’ll be mostly an outsider. Not completely, though; if you like you can help us by taking care of the chores that would normally fall to the junior member of the Circle. Things like fetching water for those who need it, or dealing with accidental disruptions from outside.”
“I think I can handle that,” she said. “Housebreakers and lightning-rod salesmen get told to come back later.”
He laughed, and the moment of good humor warmed his features in a way that made her unexpectedly aware that Natelth sus-Khalgath’s baby brother was, in fact, a very personable young man indeed. “You’ve got the general idea. It doesn’t sound like much, especially if you’ve been used to holding a lot of responsibility someplace else, but a nonworking watch-keeper is a luxury we hadn’t expected to have until you showed up.”
“It sounds like a great deal of responsibility to me.”
“Some people never see past what’s on the surface,” Arekhon said. “Fortunately for us, you’re not one of them. The working will be starting in a few hours; when the time comes, I’ll send Ty up for you.”
“What, exactly, is the working?” Vai said. It was a reasonable question, one that a newcomer to the Circle could plausibly ask. And as Theledau sus-Radal’s Agent-Principal, she could learn as much from what information she wasn’t given, as from what she was actually told.
But Arekhon answered her at once, with—as far as she could tell—perfect openness, as one member of the Circle would speak to another. “Garrod is going out into the Void in search of a new world, one with people on it. Beyond the Edge.”

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