The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (34 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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“I see.”
Arekhon let the matter drop. Pushing for details right now wasn’t going to make Ty any happier—and if Captain sus-Mevyan had summoned Garrod to the bridge of the Entiboran ship, that meant the
Rain
’s boarding party had made their way past the obstacle one way or another.
The muster bay, when they reached it, was empty—even the fighting bridge on the upper level. Displays that should have been glowing were dark and empty, like eye sockets, and the entrance to the boarding tunnel was a gaping black mouth.
Ty pointed. “In there.”
“Yes,” Arekhon said. “The tunnel. But you’ll have to show us how to find the bridge.”
“I don’t … yes, Lord Arekhon.”
Garrod was already striding ahead into the dark opening. Arekhon paused for a moment on the edge of the shadows, fighting down a resurgence of his own earlier apprehension. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong; otherwise Ty wouldn’t be in the state he was in, and Captain sus-Mevyan wouldn’t have sent him as a runner to pull Garrod away from his Circle in the middle of a working.
“This is not good.” Vai’s words came out in a tight undertone. “Do you smell it?”
He
had
caught the smell—had thought, until she spoke, that it was an artifact of his own mind, a physical cue to match his unspoken concern. But it was real. Real, and horrible, and tied without question to the working that he and his Mages had done.
Slowly, with a great reluctance, he went into the tunnel, and down it to the airlock at the far end.
 
Year 1128 E. R.
 
BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: UNKNOWN ENTIBORAN SHIP
SUS-PELEDAEN SHIP
RAIN-ON-DARK-WATER
ILDAON: COUNTRY HOUSE OF ELEK GRIAT
 
E
laeli watched the instrument console on the bridge of the Entiboran ship and wished she knew what it was telling her. The console had a varied array of lights and switches and small flat screens with symbols displayed in them, and she found it at once alien and teasingly familiar.
I could make this work, she thought. Just give me some time with the manuals and a decent translator … .
She glanced over at the prisoner, tied up with a pair of uniform belts and huddled out of the way against a bulkhead. The woman didn’t look disposed to be helpful. Elaeli turned her attention back to the rest of the bridge.
Captain sus-Mevyan sat in the chair by the instrument console, looking across it at a rank of larger flatscreen displays mounted on the opposite bulkhead. The image of
Rain-on-Dark-Water
filled all the displays: A different angle in each screen, and in all of them an ominous dark presence, a black hunting bird with a prize in its talons.
“We’ve done it,” sus-Mevyan mused aloud. “Done
something
, at any rate. I wish I knew what.”
Elaeli tried to frame an answer, but was saved from the need to reply by the arrival of Garrod syn-Aigal.
Garrod spoke to the Captain. “I understand you’ve given the order to abandon ship.”
“Yes,” said sus-Mevyan. “We’re too severely damaged to live, and we don’t have the fuel to go anywhere even if we weren’t damaged. We appreciate what you’ve done with regard to luck and all that, but right now we need something else.”
She gestured toward the bound woman. “We have a prisoner, it seems, in spite of our best hopes for a fair fight and a willing exchange, and we’d like you to explain to her what happened. Maybe persuade her to help us with getting everything sorted out.”
“I’ll try,” Garrod said. He turned to the prisoner and spoke in the Entiboran language he had labored to teach the
Rain
’s officers and crew. “Good morning, honored lady.”
Her reply was long, and too rapidly colloquial for Elaeli to follow. As soon as the outburst was over, she returned to silence and sullen glowering.
“What did she say?” the Captain asked.
Garrod shook his head slowly. “I didn’t catch absolutely everything,” he said. “But the gist was that she believes we practice some amazing sexual customs, that our foodstuffs are things of wonder, that our immediate forebears were of a different species than ourselves, and that—were the worlds orderly—our lives would prove both brief and miserable.”
Sus-Mevyan didn’t look amused. “Tell her that I’m just thrilled, too. But what’s done is done, and if we work together we can all live a bit longer in a bit less misery.”
Garrod spoke to the woman again. Her reply this time was shorter. He turned back to the captain and said, “I never did have time to explain about Entiboran religious beliefs, I’m afraid. Some of them involve malignant spirits who guard an afterlife of eternal torment.”
“Let’s discuss that some other time. The ship—”
“Her exact words, Captain, were: ‘Going to hell would be a pleasure if it meant I could watch you fry.’ There are a couple of other concepts there I should explain; linguistically, the form of ‘you’ she used encompassed not just me, but all persons present in this place other than herself—”
Sus-Mevyan regarded the prisoner with what might have been respect, or the recognition of a kindred spirit. “The short version, Lord Garrod.”
“The short version of her reply is ‘no.’”
“Thank you,” said the Captain. “Tell her that we will treat her with all honor, as we are guests aboard her ship. And after that, help me find something—anything—that will show us how to run this vessel. Logbooks, records, instruction manuals—whatever will help us get back home.”
She swivelled her chair around to look at Elaeli. “Meanwhile, Pilot-Principal—get someone to fetch an
uffa
pot from
Rain-on-Dark-Water
and rig it to run.”
“We still don’t know what kind of power they’re using over here,” Elaeli protested. “If it’s incompatible, all we’re going to get for our trouble is a lot of blue smoke and a dead pot.”
“I know,” said the captain. “But we’ve got to test the Entiborans’ power systems eventually. I’d sooner blow out the
uffa
pot right now than the ship-mind later.”
 
 
Summer was well advanced on Ildaon’s southern hemisphere. The days were long and warm, and the weather remained fair. The political atmosphere was likewise pleasantly calm, at least on-planet—though news from off-world spoke obliquely of trouble brewing out in space, with clashes occurring between Ildaonese mercantile interests and the Eraasian fleet-families. Jaf Otnal, once again on holiday with his friend and mentor Elek Griat, remembered a breakfast-table conversation of some years back, and smiled to think that those early efforts had at last begun to bear fruit.
On this day at Griat’s country house, the sun cast dappling shadows on the grass among the trees, and the sky was high, cloudless, and blue. Jaf was lounging on the second-floor portico, overlooking the western lawn, when he noticed, high above, coming from west to east, a series of parallel clouds. Very high, they seemed, and perfectly aligned east-and-west. The forward edges of the clouds—they looked almost like points—were all of a level, as if the clouds were high aircraft flying in formation. But what formation could extend from horizon to horizon, north to south? Their passing seemed to take forever, but it was in fact only a matter of minutes before the line of clouds had passed across the western horizon. A second sweep of cloud appeared, following the first, if anything lower and heavier.
Then, from beyond the western horizon, a dark mist arose, and the light of the falling sun went blood red. The darkness rose, and rose, and grew darker.
The clouds were passing overhead more frequently now, and were closer together, more densely packed.
“Elek!” Jaf called. There was a shaky note in his voice that he couldn’t help. He had grown up and gone to school on this world, before leaving it to follow his ambitions elsewhere, and he had never seen or learned of any weather like that which he now saw. “I think you ought to come outside and look at this.”
Elek emerged from the country house’s interior in response to Jaf’s outcry. Jaf pointed in silence to the strange clouds passing overhead. Elek paused a moment on the portico, then turned back inside and came out again a moment later, holding his contra-cithara. He sat on the bare stones of the upper portico, and began to play a haunting tune.
“What is it?” Jaf asked. His friend’s reaction had filled him with a sudden nameless apprehension—and still he had no idea what kind of weather the strange cloud formations might portend.
“We will see, presently,” Elek replied, and resumed his music.
Jaf continued looking out in the direction of the sunset. The darkness beyond the western horizon was mixed now with light, like sparks leaping upward, and Jaf was able to feel a trembling under his feet, like a distant earthquake.
The darkness came nearer. A sound came with it, faint at first, almost too deep to hear. It grew louder. The base of the darkness came into view—highlighted with fire—and the tips of another set of clouds smashed into it. Pillars of earth, miles high perhaps, fountained up. The sound was delayed, but it came—fifty miles, perhaps, and growing closer.
And now Jaf understood.
Someone was attacking Ildaon from space, wave after wave of rocks, flung from the deep vacuum, falling through the atmosphere and smashing to the ground. Where they struck, the energy converted to heat. They struck sparks like a hammer on the forge. The sound was loud, drowning out the steady music of Elek’s contra-cithara, crashing, silent, then another, louder, closer crash. Jaf could see the flames now of a firestorm. All coming nearer.
“This isn’t what I intended!” he shouted. “I didn’t mean this at all!”
Elek did not answer, but continued to play until the leading edge of the bombardment struck. The darkness passed over them and continued to the east. Where Griat’s country house had formerly stood, only sterilized and cratered earth remained.
 
 
Arekhon was alone aboard
Rain-on-Dark-Water.
The ship was becoming progressively less habitable and more dangerous; before long the air and gravity systems would fail, and even the amber battle-lanterns would wink out, leaving the vessel to the cold and the dark.
Work parties had already come and gone, transferring as much of the
Rain
’s gear as they could to the Entiboran ship—stripping Arekhon’s cabin along with the other public and private spaces aboard. Arekhon hadn’t gone with them when they left. He supposed that eventually he would have to go back into the boarding tunnel, and through the broken airlock where the dead of Eraasi and Entibor had lain together in burning and blood.
Eventually, but not yet.
Instead he wandered through the winding, intertwined spaces and passageways of
Rain-on-Dark-Water,
oppressed by the weight of responsibility for something that he had intended but never—in its final outcome—envisioned. His black robes kept him from feeling the worst of the increasing chill in the ship’s air, but the low-light reflections he glimpsed in dark glass or burnished metal made him look like a drifting, sable-clad ghost.
One of the homeless ones, he thought. Like those two Entiborans dead in the airlock.
The
Rain
’s crew members would be properly remembered—by their shipmates, if by no one else—but Arekhon’s thoughts kept returning to the strangers who had also died. Would anyone care for them enough to tend the altars and make the memorial offerings, or would they go unnourished by honor and remembrance until they forgot their names and remembered only a hatred for everything that lived?
The people on this side of the interstellar gap didn’t believe in caring for the
eiran
; Garrod had said so. No reason, to think that they knew anything about how to honor their dead.
Someone else, then, would have to do it for them. There were no candles on board
Rain-on-Dark-Water,
and neither flowers nor wine. Everything had been taken away—almost everything.
He went back to the empty muster bay. There, standing in the amber-lit shadows, he took out the clasp knife he had carried, in fleet uniform and out of it, ever since his prentice-voyage. The engraving on the metal case had worn some in the intervening years, but he could still read the lettering: “sus-Dariv’s
Path-Lined-with-Flowers.”
He unfolded the knife and slashed the blade across the heel of his left hand.
Blood rose up and flowed freely in the track of the knife. He held out his hand and let the red liquid fall in steady droplets to the deck in front of the boarding tunnel.
I don’t know your names, he thought, but I do this for you. So you are not forgotten.
He was still standing there when the fleet-apprentice from the
Rain
came looking for him.
“Lord Arekhon!” The apprentice came up to him at a run, slowing abruptly at the sight of the knife and his dripping hand. “Lord Arekhon—what is this?”
“An offering,” Arekhon said. “There’s no wine, so this will have to do.”
The apprentice glanced down at the small puddle of blood that had already collected. Reluctantly, he held out his own hand. “Should I—”
“No. I don’t think you need to. Save it for our own people, if things come to that.” Arekhon looked about for something to staunch the bleeding, and ended up pressing a fold of his robe against the cut. “What is it you wanted me for in the first place?”
The apprentice reached into the inner pocket of his tunic. “We found this in the forward cabin on the other ship.”
This
was an envelope, stiff and heavy, with a name written across the front:
Arekhon Khreseio sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen
, in Garrod’s strong, flowing script. Arekhon took the envelope, ignoring the stab of pain from his wounded hand, and used the point of his knife to work open the flap.
“Where in the forward cabin?” he asked.
“That’s the strange part,” the apprentice said. “It was in the strongbox, the one that we needed torches to open. None of us had ever been in there before.”
“Ah.” Arekhon reached inside the envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper. It was stiffer than any he was accustomed to, with a peculiar metallic sheen, but the handwriting on the paper, like that on the envelope, was Garrod’s.

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