The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (25 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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Year 1124 E. R.
 
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: ENTIBOR
 
“It’s settled,” Arekhon said.”We have a ship, and the Captain is with us.”
The surviving functional members of the Demaizen Circle sat together in Garrod‘s—now Arekhon’s—study, where the star-chart projected its illusory topography into the air above the desktop. The brilliant golden-white dot that marked out Garrod’s new-found world glowed unblinking beyond the dark line of the Edge.
“A sus-Peledaen ship,” said Kief. “And the sus-Peledaen get the trade, I suppose.”
Serazao spoke before Arekhon could form an answer. “The sus-Peledaen, or somebody else; it doesn’t matter. We’re doing this for Garrod’s sake.”
“And we need to think about how we’re going to do it,” Arekhon said. “Since the First is … how he is, he can’t make the journey himself. But he is the First of our Circle, and it wouldn’t be right to leave him behind in the care of strangers.”
“Not to mention what might happen to our luck if we tried,” said Narin. “Nothing good ever comes from abandoning one of your own.”
Arekhon nodded, grateful for the opening. “Narin is right. Which is why I propose to split the Circle, some to go and some to stay. Those who stay will keep the
eiran
smooth and untangled here at home, and send luck to those who cross the interstellar gap. And Garrod will remain the First at Demaizen, as before.”
“How are we going to make the split?” asked Ty. “Draw lots?”
“Nothing quite so random,” Arekhon said. “I had in mind meditating together on the question.”
“Now?” asked Kief. “Without preparation?”
“It’s the best way to find out a true division,” said Arekhon. “There’s no time for us to be influenced too much by the desires of one person or another.”
He stood up, and looked at each of the Circle members in turn—Narin and Delath and Kief, Ty and Serazao and Iulan Vai. “Come.”
He left the room without looking back to see if the others followed. He had anticipated a brief stir of conversation and questioning, but heard nothing beside the sounds of scuffing chair legs and footsteps on carpet. That was good; it meant that the rest of the Circle had concurred in his decision without the need for talk.
The group that reassembled in the meditation room was a quiet and sober one. No workings had taken place in the chamber since Garrod’s return. All the physical traces of the previous occasion had been cleared away, but the patterns of that time were plainly marked to the inward sight. Arekhon knelt in Yuvaen’s old place—Garrod’s he left empty—while the others took their places as they had done before.
Iulan Vai hesitated. Arekhon beckoned her into the group as well. Last time she had been an observer; this time, and for the voyage to come, she would be a part of the whole. Ty moved aside, yielding the newest member’s position, and Vai knelt with her usual limber grace.
Arekhon nodded, satisfied, and closed his eyes.
The place he came to, when his inner vision cleared, was chaotic. A tumble of ragged, grey-black clouds blocked out the sky overhead. The land itself was shattered stone, like the place Arekhon had seen when the First had gone Void-walking before. But this time the land was divided at Arekhon’s feet, stone from air, in a cliff that plunged straight down, a hundred times the height of a man, to a churning lead-grey sea below.
Water smashed, wave on wave, against the foot of the cliff, then withdrew in white foam between jagged teeth of rock. The wind whipped Arekhon’s hair around his face, then snatched it back again, as the force of the air pushed him first toward, then away from, the edge of the cliff.
When he looked out across the sea, he saw a boat tossed about on the water. Two figures sat and rowed away from the cliffs; a third stood in the stern. He recognized the rowers as Ty and Narin, pulling hard lest their craft be sucked in amid the breakers and dashed to pieces. The third he recognized as well: Iulan Vai, standing pale and beautiful, her hand raised in salute or farewell.
“Wait!” Arekhon called. “Wait for me!”
The wind tore away his words, and the rowers did not pause. Arekhon launched himself over the edge of the cliff. The sea came closer and closer, the rocks grew large, the waves boomed, and the roaring wind howled about his ears as he fell, and fell … .
 
 
Arekhon opened his eyes and found himself once more kneeling on the floor of the meditation room, with his Circle gathered around him. For a moment there was silence; then, slowly, the Mages began to speak.
Narin was first, turning to face Ty and saying, “I saw you.”
“And I saw you,” Ty replied. “You came to help me break down the wall, and Vai did … I think we’re meant to go together on the ship.”
Kief, standing with the other group, met Arekhon’s questioning glance and shook his head. “I didn’t see you with us at all.”
Del and Serazao nodded agreement. What they might have seen, Arekhon did not ask, nor did they volunteer the information.
The Circle had made its division.
 
 
In the company of his new friends Hujerie and Saral, Garrod continued his journey through the region of Entibor known as Tulbith. They traveled by day, walking with greater confidence as no further armed men or fighting machines showed up to impede their progress, but they did not abandon all their old caution. The times, or so Garrod inferred from his companions’ half-understood words and fleeting thoughts, were unsettled in the extreme—and his own earlier observations did nothing to contradict that impression.
The refugees avoided buildings and settled areas, living chiefly on fruits and berries found along the wayside, and on small animals that Hujerie proved adept at snaring, augmented by the concentrated rations that Garrod carried in his pack. Every night they camped, and while the others slept, Garrod pulled on the
eiran
to bring good luck to them all.
As the worst dangers of the road receded into the distance behind them, Garrod’s spirits and those of his comrades began to lift. The woman Saral smiled more now, and the songs she sang to baby Minnin were cheerful ones.
Hujerie, for his part, talked to Garrod almost constantly, with expansive gestures. Garrod soon realized that the man’s flow of conversation was deliberate, a conscious attempt at instruction in the local tongue, and bent his own efforts to the same end. With both men working at it, the process went much faster, and Garrod was soon able to carry on a simple conversation. When he made mistakes, which happened frequently, Hujerie would only laugh, then correct Garrod’s errant pronunciation or pantomime an action to supply a missing verb, and carry on.
Eventually Garrod learned enough of the language to piece together the essentials of his friends’ story. Hujerie was not Saral’s father, as Garrod had first assumed, but her grandfather, and the baby boy Minnin—it was a name after all, and not an endearment—was not her child. Both Saral and Hujerie were in service to another, much more powerful family, of which Minnin was the youngest member. Hujerie, if Garrod understood the abstract ideas correctly, had been some kind of family tutor, but was now officially retired, and Saral was the baby’s nursemaid. When the city of Feliset, supposedly a safe haven, was attacked and burned, the two of them were alone in the house with the child. They took the baby and fled, with the goal of bringing Minnin to safety and reuniting him with the rest of his family.
“They must be very worried,” Garrod said.
“Worried indeed,” Hujerie replied. “But we will repay their trust. And you, too, shall be rewarded.”
“I do not seek a reward.”
Hujerie clapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said. “But we will reward you just the same, for your deserving.”
They walked on. As Garrod’s vocabulary grew larger, he began to make careful inquiries about the history and the political system of the world through which he traveled. He learned through indirect questioning that Entibor’s political divisions were roughly coterminous with its major continental masses, though the exact boundaries—and the exact rulers—of some areas were currently the subject of intense dispute. Garrod accepted the situation without comment, although he felt rather as if he’d slipped backward in time to Eraasi’s own remote and disunited past; Hujerie and Saral apparently took him for a wilderness vacationer from one of the smaller regions, stranded a long way from home by the outbreak of open warfare, and he didn’t want to disabuse them of the notion.
One day, however, as they were descending from the hills toward a distant sparkling sea, a statement from Hujerie brought Garrod to a stop, and made him doubt his growing fluency in the local dialect.
“It isn’t like this on other worlds.”
“Other … ‘worlds’?” Garrod hoped that his expression and inflection betrayed linguistic bewilderment rather than the shock he actually felt. He had not thought that a planet still in the grip of internecine warfare would have access to anything beyond its own immediate space.
“‘World,’ yes, that’s the word,” Hujerie said approvingly. “Miosa, Khesat, those pious bastards from Galcen. And all the rest.”
Garrod nodded, and listened, and knew that he held the luck of all Eraasi in his hands.
 
Year 1124 E. R.
 
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
ENTIBOR: RASKE-BY-THE-SEA
 
Once all the decisions were made, the days until the
Rain’
s departure slipped by with unnerving speed. Arekhon felt the two halves of the Demaizen Circle, those who would go and those who would stay, beginning to draw apart and take on separate purpose. His own preparations were brief. He packed lightly for a journey to the other side of the galaxy, taking with him little more than his staff and his working robes, and enough changes of regular clothing to see him through a ship’s wash cycle.
The other travelers followed Arekhon’s example. Narin and Ty had not accumulated large stocks of personal possessions—Narin through lack of inclination and Ty through lack of time and opportunity—and Iulan Vai, as far as Arekhon could tell, had cut the ties to her old life completely when she came to the Circle.
He worried somewhat about that. His own abandonment of the family altars had been mostly a formality—it was his choice of Circle that had, for a while, put a strain on his relations with Natelth and Isa—but making the severance was harder for some people than for others. Vai’s reticence argued that she might be one of the unlucky ones, for whom the late discovery of a Mage’s calling could prove disastrous to an established and well-ordered life.
In the quiet of the last night at Demaizen, his conscience prompted him to seek her out. She was in her room, shutting down the clasps on the duffel that contained—as far as Arekhon was able to tell—everything that she wanted to claim by way of material goods. He saw a couple of her old Wildlife Protection League patches, their anchoring stitches neatly unpicked, lying on the bedside table in the pool of yellow light from the reading lamp. After he had greeted her, somewhat tentatively, with a kiss, he nodded toward the patches and raised his eyebrows.
“You’re not taking those?”
She shook her head. “The gear itself may come in handy, you never know, but the patches seemed like a bad idea. Someone might misinterpret them.”
Arekhon paused a moment to admire Vai’s practicality; but the admiration carried him back to the same concern that had brought him here in the first place. Someone on Eraasi had been accustomed to enjoying the benefits of Iulan Vai’s peculiarly clear and efficient mind, and was enjoying them no longer … to the Circle’s good, but not necessarily to the good of her own out-questing spirit.
“Iule—” he began.
“Just ‘Vai’,” she said. “Please. I know it sounds odd, but I’m accustomed to it.”
“Vai,” he amended—
and was there never
, he wondered silently,
anyone at all before now to call you by the forms of affection?
—“once we’re on the road tomorrow, we might as well have left Eraasi behind. So if there’s anyone to whom you feel the need or the obligation to say goodbye, this is the time to do it. You’re part of the Circle, so the Hall’s distance-connections are as much yours as anybody else’s.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “There isn’t anyone in particular. My old job’s gone to someone else by now, and the job”—she shrugged—“was all there was, really. I won’t be missed.”
“That’s no fit life for anyone to lead,” said Arekhon, with a shiver for the essential loneliness her words implied. “I’m glad you found us … Demaizen and the Circle … because I would miss you, if the division had made you one of the group to stay.”
She smiled at him. “You’re a sweet young man, Arekhon, and honest enough to be dangerous.” She paused, then asked, with careful lack of emphasis, “How will the Circle be quartered, on this ship of yours?”
“According to the usual custom,” he said. “Private cabin for the First—or whoever’s in charge—and the rest bunk with the crew.”
“And the gossip, I suppose, is perpetual?”
“Never-ending,” he agreed. “And memories are long.”
“I see.” She turned away for a moment to lift her sealed duffel off the bed and set it against the wall by the door, then came back to stand beside him. She lifted one hand and gently touched the corner of his mouth, while with her other hand she worked at undoing the braided loop fasteners of her high-necked tunic, one loop at a time. “Perhaps, then, we should make good use of the time we have.”
 
 
Serazao Zulemem did not sleep at all on the last night the shipbound Circle members spent at Demaizen. Instead she worked at the desk in Garrod’s study, with the star-chart and its display turned off and removed to a shelf, making certain that the Hall’s legal status was in order. It would not do for some hitherto unknown, but litigious, offshoot of the sus-Demaizen family to make a sudden appearance while the Circle’s acting First was out of touch.
Arekhon had only that afternoon handed over to her the necessary keys and passwords. She’d had a few sharp remarks for the occasion, concerning his dilatory habits and his irrational fondness for keeping secrets well past their useful date. Now she feared that Garrod’s files would turn out to hold some disastrous matter which could not be resolved in time, and which would hang like a cloud over the divided Circle all during the long separation.
As the night wore on, however, it became clear that her worries were groundless. Garrod had taken good advice when he came into the sus-Demaizen inheritance, and had made provision in great detail for the Circle’s continued welfare in case of his own death or disability. Extending those provisions to cover any problems caused by the absence of Arekhon and the others would not be difficult.
She was not aware of how long she had worked, checking out every detail and rearranging the material into an order more conformable with her own habits and training, until the sky outside the windows began to grow light. She heard a footstep on the stairs, and put aside the stack of data wafers to go see which of her fellow Mages was up so early.
It was Kief, heading down to the kitchen to start the uffa brewing for breakfast. “And fresh biscuits,” he said. “Since I’m awake anyway.”
She fell in beside him. “I’ll help—if I go to bed now I’ll only have to get right out again.”
“You were up all night?”
“I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep,” she said. “So I spent the time going over the Hall accounts, just in case.”
The kitchen was still dark. Kief turned on the overhead fixture as they entered, filling the long, high-ceilinged space with clear white light reflected off of spotless metal. The brewing urn sat in coppery majesty on the bare counter; Kief rinsed it out and filled it with clean water. Serazao pulled the leaf canister out of storage.
Kief shook his head. “The little packet. In the jar there.”
She out back the big canister and took out the smaller one. “Why this stuff?”
“It’s ’Rekhe’s private stash. He likes it red, and he doesn’t get it that way very often. So, for a send-off—” Kief shrugged. “Why not?”
She measured out enough of the curly dark leaf to make a full brewing, and poured it into the filter. Leaving the urn to heat, she turned back to Kief.
“Are you sorry not to be going?” she asked. “I know what holds me on Eraasi, and I can make a guess about Del, but what keeps you?”
“I don’t know,” Kief said, scooping out biscuit flour from the bin as he spoke. There was a careful quietness to his voice that Serazao found disturbing. “The
eiran,
maybe—when we made the division, they were all I could see, growing over the Hall like vines, with me and you and Delath and Garrod all tangled up in them together. The more I tried to work my way free of them, the tighter they pulled.”
“It sounds frightening.”
“I’ve been places I liked more.” He took the salt-box down from the shelf, and paused a moment with measuring spoon at the ready to look at her across the kitchen. “I don’t suppose you saw anything similar?”
“No,” Serazao told him honestly. “I didn’t see anything like that at all. Only the Hall and Garrod, and the windows full of light. So I knew that I was to stay.”
 
 
The journey from Demaizen to Hanilat took most of a day by groundcar, even when the roads were clear. The members of Garrod’s Circle who were bound for the sus-Peledaen ship
Rain-on-Dark-Water
left the Hall first thing in the morning, when the sun was coming up and turning the clouds in the east bright red.
They had time for one last round of farewells, with all the Circle members crowded awkwardly into the converted outbuilding that served as the Hall’s garage—quick, silent embraces, after everything to say had been said and said again. Then the four who were going took their places inside the heavy vehicle and closed the doors. The engine grumbled to life and the groundcar pulled away, out of the garage and down the long gravel drive to the road. Narin was steering; Arekhon had yielded the first turn to her in exchange for navigating the vehicle later through the intricacies of downtown Hanilat.
Arekhon resisted the urge to turn his head for a last glimpse of the Hall as the road curved away. He was the Second of the Circle, the First in all but name, and he needed to set an example for the Mages traveling with him—looking forward, not back.
Ty was the first to speak, several minutes later when the Hall was well behind them and the groundcar was purring down the open highway. “The other side of the galaxy.”
“Figuratively speaking,” Arekhon said. “More like the middle, if you want to be accurate. Still, it’s no place we’ve ever been.”
“Unknown waters,” said Narin. “And we’re the chart.”
“You could say that.”
Silence descended again for several minutes. Arekhon thought, from the sound of their regular, even breathing, that one or both of the rear-seat passengers had fallen asleep, but Ty surprised him by speaking again.
“I’ve never been on a spaceship.”
“Not even in school?” So Vai hadn’t been asleep either. She sounded curious, but not excessively so—a good tone, Arekhon thought, for soothing tight nerves and drawing out confidences from the reticent.
At any rate, it seemed to work for Ty. “We were supposed to go visit one at the port,” he said. “But I was in some kind of trouble and didn’t get to go.”
“Somebody probably told you that you’d be sorry for it one day, too,” said Narin. “And you probably didn’t believe them.”
“I was sorry for it right then. But I wasn’t going to tell them so.”
Vai chuckled. “Well, I’d say you came out ahead in the long run. You’re not just wandering through with a guided tour—you’re part of the show.”
Arekhon said to her, “You sound like you’ve been off-planet a time or two yourself.”
“To high orbit a few times,” she said. “And once to Rayamet. Part of my job.”
“Passenger?”
“Mostly. But I’ve got the emergency qualifications, just in case.”
Narin made a skeptical noise. “Interesting work you must have done.”
“It paid the bills.”
“Good enough,” said Arekhon. “But you’ll need to report those qualifications to Captain sus-Mevyan once we’re aboard—keep the ship’s records up to date.” He turned slightly in his seat, so that he could look at all three of the others at the same time. “Does anybody else have emergency qualifications like Vai’s … or anything like them that I ought to know about?”
Ty shook his head, and Vai spread out her empty hands in a gesture that could have meant almost anything. Narin said, “I can repair a marine engine, and find my way on the ocean by the stars and the shape of the waves, and by the smell of the wind in a pinch—but I don’t think any of those things are going to do Captain sus-Mevyan any good.”
“Report them all anyway,” Arekhon told her. “Unknown waters, as you said. You never know what may come in handy.”
 
 
With half the Circle gone, the Old Hall was full of silence and unexpected shadows. It was the turn of Delath and Serazao to waken Garrod, to clean him and get him ready for the day, a task they would be sharing with Kiefen Diasul for however long it took for the rest of the Circle to make their journey and return.
Kief wasn’t surprised that the other two Mages had been part of the half-Circle to remain at Demaizen: ’Zao still cherished the hope that some day she might see the First return to some kind of normal awareness; and whatever Del thought on that matter, he had proved to be as careful and reliable in tending Garrod as he had been in the Circle’s workings. Kief was far less certain why he also had been chosen to remain.
He wandered through the empty rooms of the Hall: The dining room, the front entry, the kitchen—the breakfast dishes were stacked on the counter where ’Rekhe had put them before everyone went to the garage, so he moved them into the washer and started it cycling—down into the basement, with its warren of storerooms and the Circle’s infirmary and the back way out to the gardens through the old root cellar—then around the Hall on the outside and in through the front.

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