The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (3 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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“Hold up!” Garrod shouted.
The groundcar stopped. Yuvaen shut off the engine and emerged from the driver’s side.
“Give us a light,” Garrod said. “Let’s see how it looks.”
“Right.” Yuvaen had brought an electric lantern with him from the groundcar. He turned it on and lifted it to shine a yellow light at the doors of the hall—the right-hand one pulled entirely away from the frame, the one on the left tilted crazily and hanging by a single hinge. He cast a gloomy eye over the damage. “It’ll cost you a pretty to have those fixed.”
“I’ve got all the money I need,” Garrod said. “What I don’t have is time. Come on.”
The two men entered the Hall. White-sheeted furniture stood ghostlike in the foyer. Dust lay thick, and gnawing creatures had worked on much of the interior woodwork. Garrod pointed through an arch to where a staircase went curling upward.
“There,” he said, and started up toward the long gallery on the second floor. Yuvaen followed.
At the entrance to the gallery, both men paused on the threshold. Their rain-soaked clothing clung to their bodies like wet leaves, and the glow from Yuvaen’s lantern cast a swaying circle of yellow light on the space within, where the sus-Demaizen kept their tablets of remembrance.
Plaques and memorials covered the walls—ancient slabs of grey slate scratched with names in a language no longer spoken by anyone living, and newer tablets of painted wood and cast metal. On the altars beneath them, long-guttered candles spilled out their wax across carven wood.
Garrod strode into the center of the room, where a small altar stood in front of a freestanding memorial on tripod legs. The candle holders were empty—whoever had last tended the memorial had scraped them clean when the rite was done—and a spray of white flowers, long since dried, lay on the altar between them.
“This is an end and a breaking,” Garrod said. With that he picked up the memorial and flung it out through one of the high, west-looking windows in the center of the long wall. The window glass gave way in a jagged, shivering peal, and the memorial went crashing down onto the gravel drive outside.
“Wait!” Yuvaen cried over the noise. “Hasn’t there been enough broken already?”
Garrod put his hands against the wooden altar and shoved it toward the broken window. “No,” he said. “Not enough by half. Before I am done, I will break our very universe.”
The altar smashed against the low sill and tumbled over it to the ground below. Rain poured in through the gap in the window, driven slantwise by the rising wind.
“Your ancestors will curse you,” Yuvaen said.
“My ancestors mean nothing to me,” Garrod said, “and I mean nothing to them.” He pulled another of the tablets from the wall, and the dried wood splintered in his hands. He threw the tablet out onto the gravel with the other wreckage. “I am the last of my line, and what follows after will follow the older days.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The sundering of the galaxy is not just a parable, or an allegory suitable for children and scholars,” Garrod said. He was pulling tablet after tablet away from the plastered walls, working now with a fierce, unstoppable intensity. “It is nothing less than the truth. And I intend to bring together that which was split apart.”
Yuvaen shook his head. “You’re right not to fear your ancestors. It’s the gods themselves that you should fear.”
Garrod fished in his pocket and pulled out an incendiary, of the kind used by workers in the metal and construction trades. He pulled the igniter and tossed the incendiary down onto the tangle of broken wood on the gravel drive. A brilliant white light blossomed up, mixed shortly after with red as the wood caught fire. The western windows glowed with the color.
Garrod heaved another wooden tablet out of the broken window and into the flames. “I don’t have time to fear the gods, Yuva—you’ll have to do it for me. Come, help me clean out this space, for here will be our workroom.”
“May the gods forgive me, then,” Yuvaen said. “Because I’m with you.”
The two men embraced, then fell to stripping the walls of their memorials, and clearing the floor of its altars.
Year 1116 E. R.
ERAASI: WESTERN FISHING GROUNDS
SYN-GREVI ESTATE, NORTHERN TERRITORIES
ILDAON: ILDAON STARPORT
T
he deep-water fleets from Amisket, Demnag, and Ridkil Point had been having a bad summer. Like most of the coastal settlements in the Veredden Archipelago, the three towns depended for a livelihood on their commercial fisheries, and a poor haul meant a lean year to come. In autumn, the fish migrated to spawning grounds near the equator—too great a distance for the Veredden ships to follow, even if biological changes during the spawn didn’t turn the fish sour and spongy—and winter in the northern latitudes was too stormy for surface craft to ply the waters at all. Winter was for spending the long nights snug in harbor, making repairs and hoping that the money from last summer’s catch would last until spring.
he deep-water fleets from Amisket, Demnag, and Ridkil Point had been having a bad summer. Like most of the coastal settlements in the Veredden Archipelago, the three towns depended for a livelihood on their commercial fisheries, and a poor haul meant a lean year to come. In autumn, the fish migrated to spawning grounds near the equator—too great a distance for the Veredden ships to follow, even if biological changes during the spawn didn’t turn the fish sour and spongy—and winter in the northern latitudes was too stormy for surface craft to ply the waters at all. Winter was for spending the long nights snug in harbor, making repairs and hoping that the money from last summer’s catch would last until spring.
As First of the Amisket Circle, Narin Iyal took the season’s lack of good fishing harder than most, and most were taking it hard. It was her Circle’s place to provide fish-luck and weather-luck, and to tell the captains of the fleet where the silver was running. But all she could tell the captains now was that the fish had abandoned their usual grounds, and she had no idea where they might be.
The nets of the deep-sea trawler
Dance-and-be-Joyful
trailed astern, and the lines still had the slack of an empty haul. The crew lounged in the shadow of the deckhouse, playing cards. The engines throbbed ahead slow.
Dance-and-be-Joyful
trailed astern, and the lines still had the slack of an empty haul. The crew lounged in the shadow of the deckhouse, playing cards. The engines throbbed ahead slow.
Narin stood on the main deck, staring over the rail at a horizon made dim by haze, and at the rolling blue waters beneath the empty sky. She was a short dark woman with a square snub-nosed face and calloused hands. The sun, just past its zenith, burned down upon her neck and shoulders. Other than the wind of the ship’s passage, no breeze ruffled her hair.
Narin looked up at the distant line where sea met sky. A set of masts there, black lines against the paler sky, told where
First-Light-of-Morning
ran, hull down, tracing a parallel course. They’d had no better luck than the
Dance,
she was sure.
First-Light-of-Morning
ran, hull down, tracing a parallel course. They’d had no better luck than the
Dance,
she was sure.
“You asked for me?”
The familiar baritone rumble belonged to Big Tam, Second of the Amisket Circle. Tam was a dark-skinned, wide-shouldered man, and in his many-times-laundered work shirt and loose trousers he looked more like the son and grandson of deep-sea fishers—which he also was—than like a ranking Mage. He’d been with the Circle for almost as long as Narin had, and had been her Second since the beginning.
Narin looked back out at the water. The sunlight sparked painfully bright on the blue swells. “Yes,” she said. “If we don’t want children going hungry in Amisket by year’s end, it’s time we did something about our luck.”
“I agree.”
“Good. Call the others to the meditation room. We will have a working.”
The meditation room on
Dance-and-be-Joyful
was a cramped space set forward belowdecks. It was far narrower and more confining than such a room should have been, even for a small Circle like Narin’s, and its atmosphere was a malodorous slurry of machine oil, fish, and rank sweat. But space for the Circle was carved out of the
Dance
’s cargo hold, and every cubic inch taken away from storage cost the ship’s master money when the fish were running.
Dance-and-be-Joyful
was a cramped space set forward belowdecks. It was far narrower and more confining than such a room should have been, even for a small Circle like Narin’s, and its atmosphere was a malodorous slurry of machine oil, fish, and rank sweat. But space for the Circle was carved out of the
Dance
’s cargo hold, and every cubic inch taken away from storage cost the ship’s master money when the fish were running.
Narin made her way below, stopping by her cabin to change into her robes and pick up a small-scale chart of the fishing grounds. As First of the Circle, she had her own quarters. The rest of the Amisket Mages shared crew’s berthing, though they stood no watches and hauled no lines.
She took the paper chart forward to the meditation room. In spite of the summer heat above decks, the air inside the room was cold, chilled by the heavy-duty cargo refrigeration system in the adjacent compartment, and condensation beaded and ran down the bulkheads in a steady, relentless trickle. A single incandescent light illuminated the white circle painted on the deck.
Laros, the older of the Circle’s two unranked Mages, was already there, dressed in formal robes, with his staff clipped to his belt. In a moment, Tam and young Kasaly arrived as well. Narin swung the door to behind them and dogged it shut.
“The time has come,” she said, “for a working. To make our own luck, and force the gathering of the fish.”
“Past time,” Kasaly said. Kas was red-haired and pretty, and a great favorite with the sailors. Her luck-making was among the best, however, and Narin suspected that she had it in her to be First herself someday, provided that she learned enough patience and discipline first.
“Are we all agreed, then?” Narin asked—a formality, mostly, since it was a poor First who couldn’t gauge the temper of her own Circle. It was her right, as First, to direct their combined intention, but she wasn’t foolish enough to push them where they were determined not to go.
As she’d expected, nobody raised an objection.
“Good.” She walked to her usual place in the arc of the white-painted circle closest to the
Dance
’s bow, and knelt on the welded metal deckplates. On that cue, the rest of the Mages took their customary positions: Tam opposite her, Kas to her right, Laros to her left.
Dance
’s bow, and knelt on the welded metal deckplates. On that cue, the rest of the Mages took their customary positions: Tam opposite her, Kas to her right, Laros to her left.
“As we are gathered,” she said, “so we are one.”
She turned away from her physical surroundings and looked inward, searching the three-dimensional world of the sea for the streaky feeling of the fish’s lives. She could sense the others searching as well—Tam strong and steady, Laros knife-blade sharp, and Kas like a bright flame of luck in the deep water. Now she had to draw them together like one of the purse seines that the trawlers used, combining all their energies to bring both the fish and luck in taking them into one physical spot.
“Seek them, hold them, bring and bind them,” she said. “We are one.” The circle pulsed in the depths like a ring of silver, marking the darting presence of the fish. “Find the place. Join them and lock them to a place.”
“We need to be stronger,” Tam said. His voice seemed to come from far away, outside of the sea-deeps where the minds of the Circle made their search. “To find the place so that the boats can find it.”
“I’ll give to the working,” Narin said. “Who will match me?”
“I will,” Tam replied.
He stood, bringing his staff up before him. Narin did the same, and felt the power of the universe surging around her, ready to be taken like the fish she sought. She drew the power into herself and let it flow out again redoubled, making her staff shine with a deep green fire. Blue fire answered from the other side of the tiny space. The same current that flowed through Narin like one of the rolling seas beneath the ship, flowed now through her Second as well.
The two staves met with a crack. Narin saw the luck fly out from them like rainbows, and felt a surge of joy. This would be a good working, a strong working—the congruence of the inner and the outer worlds would guarantee its success.
Again Tam attacked; again she countered, then counter-attacked. They pressed together, striving to create and make manifest the luck of the fleet through the essential contradiction of the universe opposing itself. Sweat rolled down their necks in spite of the physical chill of the space, and their breathing grew hoarse and ragged.
Then, as quickly as the energy had risen, it flared in a last bright dazzle and fell away. Narin stepped back.
“It’s done,” she said. “I have them.”
She reached into her shirt pocket underneath her robe and pulled out a pencil stub and the chart of the fishing grounds. She drew a neat dot on the chart, circled it, and wrote a time beside it. Then she drew more circled dots, and wrote more times. The dots and times, when she had finished, represented where the fish had been, were, and would be. The pattern showed an eastward drift at slow speed.
“So that’s why we couldn’t find anything,” Tam said, watching over her shoulder as she worked. A fisherman and a fishers’ Mage for many years, he knew that the location lay well outside the fleet’s usual grounds, farther to the west of the island homeports than anyone had expected.
Narin refolded the chart and tucked it back into her shirt pocket.
“Rest,” she said to the other Mages. “I’ll take this to the Captain. He’ll want to inform the fleet.”
The sus-Peledaen convoy guarded by
Ribbon-of-Starlight
made its first trading stop at Ildaon. The chief exports of Ildaon were mineral pigments, raw textiles, and exotic furs; in return, the Ildaonese bought second-cut red
uffa
to blend with the harsher native leaf, and luxury-model flyers of Eraasian design. Captain syn-Avran allowed members of the guardship’s crew to go on liberty in the port city, as long as they kept out of trouble. Arekhon sus-Khalgath and Elaeli Inadi were in the next-to-last group to go.
Ribbon-of-Starlight
made its first trading stop at Ildaon. The chief exports of Ildaon were mineral pigments, raw textiles, and exotic furs; in return, the Ildaonese bought second-cut red
uffa
to blend with the harsher native leaf, and luxury-model flyers of Eraasian design. Captain syn-Avran allowed members of the guardship’s crew to go on liberty in the port city, as long as they kept out of trouble. Arekhon sus-Khalgath and Elaeli Inadi were in the next-to-last group to go.
They wore their best apprentice livery for the occasion—inconvenient, if someone on Ildaon had it in for traders, but useful if a port official or a fellow crewmember needed to spot them quickly in a crowd. They also wore sus-Peledaen ship-cloaks of dark blue lined with crimson. Ildaon’s starport was situated on a high northern plateau, and the season was local winter.
A traders’ hostel at the edge of the landing field provided lodging for star-travelers, as well as for operators of Ildaonese ground and air transport. Arekhon, Elaeli, and the others in their group stopped there first. A bored-looking desk clerk assigned them rooms and changed their family scrip for local currency.
The rooms were small and bare: A bed, access to sanitary facilities, and a door that locked. ’Rekhe was accustomed to better; even aboard
Ribbon-of-Starlight,
the quarters were crowded but far more up-to-date than these. He didn’t protest, however, since he suspected that most of the people with rooms at the hostel would not be using them. There were, or so he had heard, drinking establishments and houses of notorious behavior on Ildaon, and the crew members in this liberty section had until the next local mid-day to amuse themselves however they chose—provided, of course, that they did nothing that might interfere with trade or damage the reputation of the sus-Peledaen.
Ribbon-of-Starlight,
the quarters were crowded but far more up-to-date than these. He didn’t protest, however, since he suspected that most of the people with rooms at the hostel would not be using them. There were, or so he had heard, drinking establishments and houses of notorious behavior on Ildaon, and the crew members in this liberty section had until the next local mid-day to amuse themselves however they chose—provided, of course, that they did nothing that might interfere with trade or damage the reputation of the sus-Peledaen.
“Get in trouble with the local authorities,” the prentice-master had said, “and there’s no guarantee that the family will pull you out. There’s not one of you that’s worth losing the good will of a whole planet for.”
The information board at the traders’ hostel gave directions to public transportation. After waiting for several minutes without any luck at the pickup stand, Arekhon and Elaeli turned up the high, lined collars of their cloaks and headed into town on foot. Prentice-master Lanar had insisted that the ship’s apprentices do all their exploration and revelry in pairs—in the hope, he said, of thus adding up to one person’s complement of good sense. As the two most junior, Arekhon and Elaeli had fallen naturally together.
“Where shall we go first?” ’Rekhe asked. He was shivering a little in spite of the ship-cloak; the weather never got this cold in Hanilat. The sky was a deep and merciless blue, and a dry wind blew without ceasing around steep-roofed buildings of fired brick and grey stone. “Sightseeing?”
“I don’t think there’s any sights around here to see,” Elaeli said. The wind caught at her loose curls and whipped them into a wild tangle. “All the scenic beauty is probably off over the horizon somewhere, and we can’t get there and back in a day.”
“What, then?”
“Well—there’s always shopping.”
’Rekhe looked about dubiously at the square, plain buildings of the starport—a small town, really, compared to the sprawling conurbation that was Hanilat. “What have they got here that we couldn’t find a better one of back home?”
“I don’t know … local stuff, I suppose. Souvenirs, knick-knacks—”
“Gloves,” said ’Rekhe. The dignity of fleet livery would not allow for hands in the pockets, but surely gloves—of a proper color and good material—would not disgrace the ship or incur the prentice-master’s disapproval.
“Right,” said Elaeli. “Gloves it is.”
The messenger from Hanilat reached syn-Grevi Lodge at twilight, in the long pale gloaming of Eraasi’s high northern latitudes, just before the hour of lunar observance. Theledau syn-Grevi was on the stairs leading up to the moon-room when he heard the front door’s two-note chime. He paused, one step short of the second-floor landing, and waited.
The Lodge’s doorkeeper
-aiketh
—a cylinder of burnished metal half the height of a living man, wrapped around a carefully built and instructed quasi-organic mind—floated up the stairs to meet him. The counterforce unit in its base hummed gently as it rose. Behind the smoky grey plastic housing of its sensorium, a blue light flickered briefly.
-aiketh
—a cylinder of burnished metal half the height of a living man, wrapped around a carefully built and instructed quasi-organic mind—floated up the stairs to meet him. The counterforce unit in its base hummed gently as it rose. Behind the smoky grey plastic housing of its sensorium, a blue light flickered briefly.
“My lord syn-Grevi,” it said. The synthesized voice was genderless but pleasing to hear. Like all of the
aiketen
at syn-Grevi Lodge, its instruction-set had it speaking northern dialect, rather than Hanilat-Eraasian. “Iulan Vai has come with news.”
aiketen
at syn-Grevi Lodge, its instruction-set had it speaking northern dialect, rather than Hanilat-Eraasian. “Iulan Vai has come with news.”
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