The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (21 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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She had not anticipated, before coming to Demaizen, that she would find him physically attractive.
Slowly—knowing quite well that she was about to do an incredibly foolish thing, but no more willing to stop herself than she had been willing to remain on the hillside overlooking the Hall—she unbelted her borrowed night-robe and let it drop to the floor. Then she lifted the covers and slid beneath them.
For a moment she did nothing more, only lay there and let herself become accustomed to the warmth of Arekhon’s body next to hers, and to the fact that she had put herself into a position from which there would be no going back.
I’ve gone mad,
she thought dispassionately; comforted by the diagnosis, she took him in her arms and held him.
He turned and embraced her in return. “Friend?” he asked in a sleep-muzzled voice.
“Friend,” she replied.
Somewhat surprised by what her own hands were doing, she began to stroke his back. His hand reciprocated, and they drew closer together, so that she felt the hardness of his arousal. He bent his knee, and she parted her thighs enough to take his leg between hers.
She rolled him onto his back—he went unprotestingly, more asleep than awake—then straddled him and took him inside her. Toward the end, he cried out “Elaeli!” Vai was surprised how much that hurt.
Then they were lying side by side, and he was deeply asleep. Vai decided to remain there until morning. Let him wake up beside her. If he turned out to be angry, and she had to leave the Circle … well, that would be a solution to at least some of her problems. She could report the episode to her employer as a failed attempt at seduction, and think no more of it.
In the morning, though, she was awakened by a kiss on her cheek, and a whispered, “Vai—I thought I was dreaming.” And then they repeated the process, and he knew who she was.
 
Year 1123 E. R.
 
BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: GARROD’S WORLD
ILDAON: COUNTRY HOUSE OF ELEK GRIAT
 
After the grey mist of the Void, the first things Garrod felt were the sunlight beating against his face and the pressure of solid ground beneath his feet. The walk to this world had proved even more strenuous than he had anticipated. Time and space meant nothing in the Void, but the work of finding a hospitable planet in that featureless infinity—an action that was neither searching, nor summoning, nor calling into being, though it contained elements of all three—had left him cold and drained of energy.
The new world to which he had come, however, was pleasant beyond his greatest expectations. The steep-sided hills that rose around him were green with low brush, and the air was sweet and pure. High overhead, a straight-line cloud made a white streak across the vivid blue sky, an effect that could only have been produced by the engines of a high-altitude mechanized flyer.
Seeing it, Garrod smiled. An advanced technological civilization existed on this planet, and such a civilization meant the possibility of trade and cultural exchange. More, it meant that his theories on the Sundering were correct, and those of other philosophers were wrong. Still smiling, he lay down on a patch of sun-warmed stone and let the heat that the Void had sucked from him re-enter his aching bones. He slept.
Later, when he awoke, the sun had changed its position in the sky. He assigned the sunset direction the name “west,” then rose and began stretching to bring back flexibility to muscles cramped by sleeping on the bare ground. Stiffness aside, he could move easily. The long walk through the Void had blurred his judgment of how closely the gravity here matched that of Eraasi, but the difference could not be great.
Further investigation meant leaving his current position. A pocket-compass settled its magnetized needle in one direction. Garrod called that direction “north,” and decided to proceed on that bearing until he saw something that would make another direction seem more promising.
Perhaps a quarter of an Eraasian hour later, he saw his first artificial structure: A slab-sided tower on a distant hilltop, its featureless sides reflecting the light of the setting sun. Rather than walking toward it, he decided to cast in another direction. Such a large and deliberately impressive structure could have a purpose inimical to his own researches. A guard tower with an unfriendly garrison, a microwave tower with deadly radiation—there were too many possibilities.
He altered his course slightly, so that the tower shifted out of his direct line of sight, and moved on through the alien landscape. Small creatures chirked and rustled amid stands of low, scrubby-looking trees. He noticed an abundance of flying things, both large and small—not birds and insects as he knew them on Eraasi, but apparent functional equivalents for the local ecology. He was not a student of the life-sciences, to analyze things in greater depth; such efforts would come later, when others came in ships along the way that he had marked for them.
So far, what he had seen bore out his idea that the Sundering of the Galaxy was not legend, but truth. If he could find one of the natives, one of the intelligent beings, and see that they were like him—two legs, five fingers on each hand—it would be further proof.
The galaxy had been one. Of that, Garrod was convinced. There had been spaceflight, trading, the intermingling of the seed of worlds. Perhaps the ones making the contact had been Void-walkers like himself; more likely, they had been the spacefarers of an unimaginable past, before truth had been overwritten by legend, and legend by allegory.
“And the sword fell because the people had offended … .”
The pious tale from his childhood still had the power to fill him with anger and confusion. What could anyone possibly have done, to merit so deep and terrible a blow?
Eventually the shadows grew long and the sun went down behind the western hills. Garrod stopped and made camp for the night. Walking in the dark would bring him nothing more than a twisted ankle. He didn’t light a fire, for fear of drawing unwanted attention.
Nevertheless, he had observations to make if the Eraasian fleet-captains were ever to find this world. He removed his instruments from his pack and set them up—his bubble sextant, his star spectrometers, his chronometers—and began to measure the stars that glistened in the night sky.
Later he would find his way to another hemisphere, and make measurements from there as well. He would need to remain on-planet for at least half of the planet’s orbit around its star, so that he could make observations through the daylight sector too. All of these things Garrod had done before on other worlds, though none of them so distant as this one. He had earned the name of Explorer before he ever headed a Circle of his own, and he was doing what he had the talent to do.
 
 
Jaf Otnal had been some days at Elek’s country estate, and had begun to think that he’d made the transit from Ayarat for nothing, when he came downstairs one morning and found three strangers seated around a fully laden breakfast table—one dark man, one fair, and one with the indefinable difference in looks and manner that marked him as an offworlder of some kind, rather than native-born Ildaonese. Jaf stood for a moment in the doorway, uncertain of his welcome, before hearing Elek’s voice.
“Ah, Jaf, good morning.” The older man entered the morning-room through an interior archway, holding a crystal flask of fruit juice in one hand. He took a seat at the table and gestured for Jaf to take the remaining chair. “I’d like you to meet some associates of mine. Mael Oska”—he indicated the stocky fair-haired man with the thick mustache—“Oath Tinau” —the darker one, a thin, edgy-looking man—“and Felan Diasul, who’s come the longest way of all of us to be here. I have to ask you to trust these fellows. I trust them, but unless you trust them, there’s nothing that can be done.”
“On your word,” said Jaf, “I’d trust anyone.”
“A dangerous way to live,” Elek said. “Not even I trust myself that far. But I trust you—and because my friends here have all had occasion, in the past, to echo your sentiments concerning the fleet-families, I’ve asked them to trust you as well.”
“Such high regard honors me,” said Jaf. To cover his self-consciousness, he broke open one of the breakfast-buns and began filling the interior cavity with golden jelly. “I hope I can deserve deserve it.”
“Trust and deserving are all very fine,” said Oska. He took a long drink of the chilled fruit juice—bits of pulp stayed clinging on his damp mustache—and set the glass down with a thump. “But what are we going to do about the star-lords? It’s easy enough to hate them, but let’s be honest, they hold all the advantages. They control all our interplanetary communications. They control all our interplanetary trade. And they’re loyal to themselves alone.”
“All very true,” Elek said. “But they have weaknesses.”
Tinau laughed harshly. “Name them.”
“Since you ask … the fleet-families aren’t monoliths. Simply because a person is born or adopted into one of their lines doesn’t keep him or her from having private goals and failings. And outside of keeping space travel and transport in their own hands, there’s no common interest among them. The captains play at raiding and piracy, scoring points off one another with honest people’s cargos, while the senior members spy on each other at home. They aren’t accustomed to looking for threats from any other quarter.”
“What do you intend to do, then?” said Tinau. “Send the families money in an unmarked envelope, and watch them knife each other in the back while they fight to claim it?”
Elek smiled. “That’s the general idea. You can help us there, if you want to—”
“Oh, yes.” Tinau’s dark features had begun to take on an eager light. Here was one, Jaf suspected, whose grudge against the fleet-families went beyond matters of business or politics. There was an interesting story in that probably; a pity he’d never get to hear it. Tinau didn’t look like someone who called out his private grievances to the world. “Just tell me where to start.”
“You can begin by setting up a front organization or two,” Elek told him. “Something high-minded, with ‘peace’ or ‘cooperation’ in the title. Then add some cutouts so that our names won’t be the first ones that show up when someone takes an interest. That’ll be our unmarked envelope.”
The man called Felan Diasul spoke up for the first time. He was a lean, bony individual, with light brown hair; his Ildaonese was fluent enough to be colloquial, but his accent was Hanilat-Eraasian. “What about me?”
“You’re absolutely vital,” Elek said. “We can’t do this without somebody on Eraasi to keep an eye on things from close up.” He poured out more of the fresh juice all around, as calmly as if they were not discussing a complete upheaval in the usual way of things, then continued, “And if you don’t mind exploiting your own family connections in a good cause—you have a brother who’s a Mage, don’t you? The next time you talk with him, see if you can ask him to work luck for us, without being too specific as to what you need it for. Trade-luck and work-luck; it’s true enough if you look at it the right way, and everything helps.”
Jaf, who sat listening in respectful silence, knew that his self-imposed mission to Ildaon had been successful. And there was no way to back out now. Elek might have been reluctant at first—but having made up his mind to join a conspiracy, he would conspire with all the boldness and insight that had so impressed Jaf when he was the older man’s student and protégé. The prospect, in all honesty, was a somewhat daunting one.
I wonder,
Jaf thought,
in my heart, did I come to Ildaon hoping that Elek would talk me out of this venture before it went too far? I should have known better.
“We could be starting a civil war,” he said aloud. “If anybody has qualms about something like that, now would be a good time to say so.”
“Too late for that already,” Elek said. “The mere fact that we gathered here at all would be enough to condemn us, if the star-lords ever got word of this meeting. Which they will, in time. All we can do is take precautions and strive to put off the day.”
“I’ll talk to my brother about the luck,” Diasul said. “But it may take me a while to reach him—he’s back on Eraasi, working with Garrod syn-Aigal.”
“What?” Tinau exploded. He turned to Elek. “Why don’t you invite the star-lords to sit in on our discussion in person next time!” To Jaf, he explained, “You’re not from Eraasi. You wouldn’t know. But Garrod’s Circle is in the pockets of the star-lords. Sus-Peledaen’s own brother is in that Circle!”
Elek nodded, unfazed by the announcement. “So much the better, if the Circle is above suspicion. From unexpected quarters, the victory will come.”
 
 
Later that first night on his newly-discovered planet, Garrod slept again, wrapped in the warm coverings he had packed from home.
He started awake, midway through the dark hours, at a sound. Something had passed overhead, making a mechanical whining noise. It was gone before he could come fully awake.
Dawn came, then sunrise. Garrod continued on his way, making observations as before. The sun rose to its zenith and started to sink again. It passed to the north of him when it was highest in the sky, an indication that he was in this world’s southern hemisphere.
The mechanical noise returned in mid-afternoon, a whuffling sound more than a whine. This time he was able to locate the source of the noise: A lenticular disk, cruising through the sky. Without knowing the object’s size, he couldn’t tell its exact distance; but assuming that it was a double arm-span across, it was perhaps five hundred feet overhead. He froze in place, making himself quiet and still after the way of the Circles’ discipline.
He had reacted in time, or so he hoped. The disk neither slowed down nor betrayed any curiosity about his location. Whether the disk itself was an intelligent or quasi-intelligent being, like the
aiketen
at home, or whether it merely served as eyes and ears for a distant observer, Garrod couldn’t tell.
The disk continued on to the north—the same direction in which he had been walking. It went between two hills, paused, circled, and turned east, flying in that direction until it passed out of sight.
Garrod reached that line of hills himself in mid-morning of the next day. Beyond the hills lay a valley, and up the middle of the valley, leading from west to east, was a road, or something that had once served as one. Now it was a cracked mass of blackish rocks, laid out on the dry ground like a mosaic, with short narrow blades of dusty green vegetation poking up through the cracks. The sort-of-road had edges, though not distinct ones; the rocks grew farther apart, and the vegetation thicker, until there were no rocks at all.
He contemplated the road for a while. Whatever used it—if anything still did—seemed not to wear down the plants. Maybe it was disused, after all, and fallen into ruin. Or perhaps not. The surface, weed-grown though it was, remained largely clear of dirt and sand, and the weeds themselves grew no taller than the width of his palm.

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