The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (22 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 determined to make camp for a day or two in the high ground to the south of the road, where he could watch and yet remain concealed. He had a week’s supply of water left in his canteens, and the nearby hills made as good a place to stay as any while he waited for this new world’s secrets to reveal themselves.
 
Year 1123 E. R.
 
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
HANILAT STARPORT
BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: GARROD’S WORLD
 
The sun slanted golden into the upper room at Demaizen Old Hall, and cast a bright square of light on the juncture between wall and floor. The late-autumn sky outside the windows was a clear, intense blue.
Serazao and Narin finished cleaning up Garrod. They had given him his breakfast—warm cereal mixed with sugar—that Serazao spooned into his mouth while Narin wiped his chin. They had cleaned his mess and changed his clothes, and Narin had talked to him throughout, speaking of the day-to-day activity of the Circle as though he were able to understand. Through it all Garrod did not seem to notice, but rocked back and forth, playing with his fingers and saying nothing at all.
At midmorning Delath arrived to continue the watch, and the two women left the bright room for the gloomy hall beyond. This had been the routine at the Old Hall for nearly a month, the members of the Circle taking it in turns to care for Garrod, in the hope—now flagging—that he would return to himself and speak of what he had seen beyond the Edge.
Narin turned to Serazao. The younger woman was taking this very hard, though she never betrayed any emotion in front of Garrod beyond a steadfast cheerfulness.
“It’s time to move on,” Narin said. “Will you come with me? I have to talk with ’Rekhe.”
“High time. But we’ll have to find him first.”
It took longer than Narin had anticipated. Arekhon had kept his old room, rather than moving into the larger chamber left empty by Yuvaen’s death, but this morning he was not in either one. Kief, in the kitchen, and Ty, in the library, didn’t know where he was either. Vai, sweat-covered from solo exercise in the gallery, thought he had left the building. A check in the former stables showed that the ground-car wasn’t missing. If he was out, he couldn’t have gone far.
“What now?” Serazao asked. The two women stood beside the stable door, looking out across the grounds of the estate.
Narin didn’t reply for a few moments. Then she pointed toward a wooded hill that stood off to the southeast. “Let’s go that way.”
Narin had always been good at finding lost people and things. When the two women had climbed the hill—not a great walk, but strenuous, over steep ground covered by mosses and rounded stones—they found Arekhon sitting under a tree with his staff across his lap. He was looking down at the Old Hall where it stood below them in the distance, its blank windows reflecting the morning sun. Something about his expression made Narin wonder if Yuvaen had been the lucky one in the great working after all.
To give so much, and to have it come to nothing … and now we’re about to ask him for even more.
But there wasn’t any help for it. She moved into his field of vision, deliberately breaking his concentration, and said, “We can’t wait any longer. You have to become the First, if the Circle is going to continue.”
Arekhon looked up at her. “By Yuva’s death I’m Second, nothing more. Garrod is First, while he lives.”
“Garrod,” said Serazao flatly, “is incapable.”
“We need you, ’Rekhe,” Narin said in a more reasonable tone. “We’re just going through the motions down there. Without guidance, without a controlling hand, it’s all going to fall apart. We’ll drift off to other Circles, and spend the rest of our lives doing safe, tidy little workings—and what will become of Garrod’s vision then?”
Arekhon shook his head. “Garrod is still alive.”
“Yes, he’s alive. He had a goal, and he came near it. Now he needs you to carry on his work.”
“I will not be the First.” Arekhon’s protest was weaker this time, and Narin saw her opening.
“No,” she agreed. “Garrod is First. But you have to lead us in his name until he comes to himself again.”
 
 
Garrod continued his measurements of the skies. The days on this world were longer than he was used to on Eraasi, but each daylight period was shorter and each dark period was longer now than the one before, as if what might be the equivalent of winter was approaching. From time to time, the flying disks passed by, but he was unable to assign either a schedule or a pattern to their movements.
Two days after his initial sighting of the flying disks, his patience was rewarded.
Just before the sun rose, but while the sky was growing light, he heard a sound coming from the east, a growling noise with a high-pitched whine beneath it. The noise grew louder, and from around a bend came three boxy vehicles, roughly rectangular but with the forward ends sloped sharply downward. The vehicles moved at a walking pace. Ahead and on either side of them, and behind them, loped men.
Or at least, Garrod gave them that name by courtesy. They were bipedal, and progressed with jogging movements. Round heads surmounted their trunks, and they had arms with hands. Their knees bent in the same way that his did. But while similar in their rough outlines to the people of Eraasi and the other worlds on the far side of the interstellar gap, these were crudely misshapen. Their eyes were too large, their bodies too thick and coarse.
The vehicles they escorted had no wheels, but stood above the surface of the road, not touching it. Garrod nodded to himself, understanding now both the road’s apparent disuse and the lack of any tall-standing overgrowth. Vehicles here used a method of propulsion similar to the counterforce units used in free-moving
aiketen
on Eraasi.
But these units would have to be much more powerful, Garrod reflected. The tinkerers at home would love to get their hands on one and take it apart for comparison.
Garrod watched the vehicles as they passed from east to west and vanished again around a turn. They had scarcely gone out of sight before a flash of light came from that direction, followed by a column of white smoke. An instant later, the sound came to him: A loud
whump,
muffled by distance.
Three black vee-shaped flying objects—small ones, like the flying disks—came out of the west to dive and circle around the source of the rising smoke. Lines of light shot up from the ground in response. A beam touched one of the flying vees, and it exploded in mid-flight.
More smoke floated upward. The piercing beams stopped. Minutes passed. Three smaller explosions sounded, in rapid but paced cadence.
Garrod watched, and kept still. Then, with a rumble of jets, a winged craft rose vertically from beyond where the smoke had risen. The flyer was painted in a flat, dark color, black against the sky. Its downward-pointing jets swiveled, and with a rising whine it shot away to the west.
The smoke from the encounter drifted away on the wind. The sun continued on its upward course. No sound, no motion, came from the road below. At last Garrod stood, picked up his pack, and walked downhill. He turned west, toward where the smoke had been.
He didn’t have far to go. The vehicles, their counterforce units dead, lay smashed and fallen to the surface of the road. Their rear doors hung open, marked with the scorching of explosives. Their interiors were empty.
The men who had accompanied the convoy were here, too. They were all dead, their bodies as torn and broken as the vehicles they had guarded. Garrod could see now that what he had taken for misshapen bodies were in truth only shells, heavy suits containing mechanical aids to their muscles. The young men who had worn the suits looked as human as he did. Any one of them—if he were not bloody, broken, and burned—could have walked unnoticed through downtown Hanilat.
Garrod said the prayers of well-wishing for the dead, and turned away.
 
 
Theledau syn-Grevi contemplated the racks of reports that his agents had brought him, and swiveled in his chair so that the reports lay behind his back.
All the information in the world,
he thought,
and not one hard fact in any of it.
Outside the windows of his office the towers of central Hanilat thrust up against the skyglow. He would be late arriving home tonight; the moon was already rising, and he would have to keep the hour of watch later than was proper. But he would not forego it. He had given up enough of what he valued in order to come to this city he did not like, to labor for the good of the sus-Radal.
As he had done all day, and was still doing. The key to the future, if one existed, had to lie in the mysterious reports he had gotten from Iulan Vai. His Agent-Principal had always shown an uncanny knack for turning up at the center of the real concern while others remained distracted by trivialities—and Iulan Vai had left Hanilat without notice, delegating her investigations in the city entirely to her subordinates. She had gone instead to Demaizen Old Hall, where Garrod syn-Aigal and his hand-picked Circle were doing … something.
Thel considered the two cryptic messages he had gotten from Vai since the beginning of her investigation.
 
BELIEVE SUS-PELEDAEN INTEND TRADE BEYOND EDGE. CONFIDENCE LOW. TAKE NO ACTION AT THIS TIME.
 
ALL QUIET AT DEMAIZEN. NO RESULTS AS YET. CONTINUING SURVEILLANCE.
 
He had gone over and over the brief communications, trying to determine what his Agent-Principal had intended to convey. That whatever Garrod had been up to was a failure? If so, then why continue her investigation—and if it was
not
a failure, then why report that there had been no results? He could only trust in Vai’s competence and hope that she would enlighten him.
In the meantime, one thing was clear: If the sus-Peledaen meant to trade beyond the Edge, they would need to build more ships. And so would he—ships faster and stronger and farther-ranging than any vessels his rivals might send out on such a journey.
He turned back to his desk to write the appropriate orders.
 
 
Narin had been wrong. It wasn’t going to work.
Arekhon sat in Garrod’s study, at Garrod’s desk, toying with the pens and the writing pads. Through the half-drawn curtains, the tall window showed low grey clouds. Late autumn had given way overnight to the chill wind and rain of early winter. The study was dim and gloomy, but Arekhon hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights. The cold, clammy day suited his mood.
It was all very well for Narin to say that he should lead the Circle in Garrod’s name. Leading required a direction, and he had none. Instead, the Circle was spinning away from him—he could feel it. They had failed, and a path was not clear before him. He could not recover the disaster.
The star charts he had brought from home, that he had opened for Garrod with such pride and enthusiasm, lay in their leather case on a chair against the far wall. He would have to give them back to Natelth the next time he journeyed to Hanilat on Circle business, if he ever had any Circle business to transact.
He was ready to go down to the kitchen—someone would always be in the kitchen—and tell them all to go away. To find other Circles. That this was no place for them. Yuvaen and Garrod had defied the gods, and now they were both gone.
Instead he did nothing but play with the small objects on the desk.
Then a mad feeling seized him, and he swept his arm across the desktop, clearing it of papers and pens and useless, outdated data wafers. He stood. A secret existed, and the universe was concealing it. Perhaps studying the chart would bring new insight, another line of attack, and the Circle would continue, made stronger and bound more tightly by its losses.
Arekhon removed the charts from their case, and took down the reader from the bookshelf where it had been stored. A small voice whispered to him that his real motive in not breaking up the Circle lay in his new-found discovery of a warm and experienced bed-partner, present on a nightly basis, not merely whenever her ship was in, and he was in town, and if no other obligations got in the way.
He pushed away the thought as unworthy of the meditation—the private meditation—that he intended, and inserted the reader into the desktop. The lights flashed and cycled, and he slid the first chart into the slot. The reader snortled, sounding like the antique that it was, and the lights of the worlds and the shipping lines came up.
There was the dark border, the Edge beyond which nothing existed, nothing was known. And there, in the uncharted space beyond it—Arekhon leaned forward in his chair, feeling his face grow hot with amazement—glowed a single white light.
Alone and isolated.
Impossibly far away.
But real. In a place that had held nothing but darkness the last time he’d seen this chart, there stood now the marker for a world rich in all resources, ready for trade at advantageous bargains.
“Son of a bitch,” Arekhon breathed. “Garrod. You left a beacon for us on the other side.”

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