The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (38 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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The field was silent and mostly dark. The shuttle still waited, ramp down on the hard black earth, but the pole-mounted lights that had shone so starkly before were all dead now. A flash of light from a distant explosion showed him the way to the heavy, armor-plated door, and he took the rest of the distance at a run.
The door was open, but only onto darkness. He stepped across the threshold and called light into his staff.
“Elaeli?”
“Go back to your ship.”
The words were Eraasian; the voice was that of Demazze’s aide who had guided the companions earlier. Master Lenset was standing between Arekhon and the passageway into the complex’s lower depths. The attack had not left him unmarked—his rain-surcoat was ripped and mudstained, and his yellow hair was clotted with blood and earth.
“Where is Elaeli?” Arekhon demanded in Entiboran. “The young woman who came with me?”
“Go back to your ship.” Lenset didn’t move, or change languages in response. “You must return to Eraasi to finish the working.”
“Not without Elaeli. Men took her—did they come this way?”
“Go back to your ship. You must return to Eraasi to finish the working.”
“No.” Arekhon strode over to confront the fair-haired man directly, gripping him by the shoulder with his free hand and shaking him hard.
“What—happened—to—Elaeli?”
To his horror, the man’s head jerked and lolled sidewise with the motion. The limp wet flesh of the earlobe brushed across Arekhon’s knuckles as the head swayed back and forth, making him cry out and snatch his hand away.
With a wet, crunching sound, the head righted itself on the broken neck.
“Arekhon, you fool,” it said, and the accent and cadences of its speech were those of Garrod sus-Demaizen. “She is as safe as I could make her. Safer than you are. Get to your ship and go.”
Arekhon stood his ground. “I have to find Elaeli—I promised, when the men took her away.”
“The great working isn’t complete.” The dead man’s eyes focused on Arekhon’s face, and for an instant it seemed as if Garrod himself stood before him. “Leave it half-finished, and the galaxy will learn that there are worse things than the Sundering.”
“Then come back yourself and finish it!”
“I did come back. You brought me out of the Void through your own efforts. Are bringing me, even now. And left me behind, mad, on Eraasi.” A wet laugh gurgled in the broken throat. “You’ll get no more help from Garrod sus-Demaizen. He’s dead.”
With that, all intelligence vanished from the corpse’s staring eyes, and its voice became a flat, wheezing monotone. “Go back to your ship. You must return to Eraasi to finish the working. Go back to your ship … .”
Arekhon backed away, toward the open door. He didn’t turn around and put the dead man behind him until he had stepped back over the threshold into the night.
The rain was still falling. He looked out across the darkened field. The lowered ramp of the waiting shuttle, lit by the reflected glow of the ship’s interior lights, made a paler spot in the darkness.
I gave my word to Elaeli, he thought. But I gave myself to the working first.
How many more promises will I have to break before it’s done?
A line of ruddy explosions flared down the hill, then crossed the landing zone—missing the shuttle, though not by much. He sprinted across the blackened concrete and up the ramp. Before the echoes of his footsteps died, the ramp was lifting.
No one emerged from the forward cabin to strap him in. He flung himself onto the nearest couch, pulling the straps across his body and fumbling them closed as best he could, scant seconds before the roaring and shaking started and liftoff pushed him down into the cushions like the pressure of a giant hand.
The acceleration went on for a long time before it eased. The shuttle pilots were spending as little time as possible on getting rid of their inconvenient passenger. Perhaps, Arekhon thought bitterly, they too had made Garrod sus-Demaizen a promise that they now regretted having to keep.
Eventually, he felt the tug of magnetic seals taking their grip, and heard the clanks and thuds of one craft matching with another. When the door cycled open, he left his couch and passed through the joined locks into the
Diamond
’s receiving bay.
Captain sus-Mevyan was waiting for him. “What happened to Lord Garrod?” she asked. “And Pilot-Principal Inadi?”
“Gone,” Arekhon told her. “Both gone. Nothing is left but the working.”
 
Year 1128 E. R.
 
SPACE:
OCTAGON DIAMOND
ERAASI: HOUSE OF THE DIASUL
 
C
aptain sus-Mevyan took
Octagon Diamond
out of orbit the next ship’s-morning—out of orbit, but not yet into the Void. The surviving crew members of
Rain-on-Dark-Water
might have been given a new ship by their unknown benefactor, but the gift had not included lessons in its use.
“I want us a long way out before we try making a run for the Void,” sus-Mevyan told Arekhon during their conference on the bridge just before departure. “I don’t intend to pay back our benefactor for his kindness by turning the
Diamond
into a meteor and hitting the planet with it.”
“I’m not sure the Councillor intended to be kind,” Arekhon said. “He had his own agenda all along; if his enemies hadn’t struck first, he might have mentioned how he planned to use us to further it. But not everyone down below is our friend, and we may have inherited some powerful enemies.”
“Another reason to take the
Diamond
out deeper. As long as we’re in orbit, anyone can figure out where we’re going to be.” Sus-Mevyan turned to the young officer at the pilot’s console. “Pilot-Ancillary, you are now Pilot-Principal, acting. Make me a course out of orbit to a location where you can comfortably calculate the path to Eraasi.”
“Working,” said the new Pilot-Principal. His station had the salvaged navigational gear from
Rain-on-Dark-Water
lashed into place on improvised racks that had been fastened to the main console with cords and cable tape. The connection to ship’s power appeared to be functional, although the tangled nest of wires made Arekhon think, unhappily, of how much Elaeli would have disapproved of the chaos … and how much she would have resented letting her ancillary have all the labor, and the glory, of dealing with it.
Arekhon leaned against the bulkhead of the unfamiliar bridge for a while, watching the pilot’s calculations without saying anything. Then he pushed himself away and headed aft.
He made his way through oddly angled passageways, the bulkheads glowing with polished brass and the decks tiled with a resilient material. The pipes and lines of the interior controls and power conduction were all exposed, not concealed within the bulkheads, overheads, and decks, and they were all neatly stenciled with what he presumed were words and numbers of identification.
The
Diamond
had more room inside her than any spacecraft Arekhon had ever encountered, and the sus-Peledaen cargo ships were some of the largest in the homeworlds. He knew from talking with Captain sus-Mevyan that the vessel had guns and engines like those on the abandoned
Forty-two
, only of much greater power, but minimal cargo space. She was a guardship, then, or something like one, though she had a subtly alien quality about her—an unaccustomed angularity to her internal layout; dimensions always a few inches too great or too small; everything dyed or painted with odd colors in unsettling hues—persistent reminders that the
Diamond
had been built by other hands for other minds.
Arekhon had a separate cabin assigned to him; he knew its compartment number in the Entiboran script that Garrod had taught him, and Captain sus-Mevyan had provided him with a sketch map of the ship’s interior. His personal effects, or what remained of them after being twice transferred from one ship to another, already awaited him in the cabin, but he himself had gone directly from the
Diamond
’s entry bay to the conference with sus-Mevyan on the bridge.
It took him several minutes of wandering, therefore, to find the cabin, and several more to work out the lock on the door. Iulan Vai emerged from her own quarters shortly before he was finished; the idea that she now lived almost adjacent to him was a disturbing one. She stopped a little distance off and watched him. He could feel her curiosity pressing against him like hands in the dark, and turned his face away.
“What happened down there?” she asked. “You look dreadful.”
The door opened. He stepped inside, and heard Vai’s footsteps following, then pausing on the threshold before he could close the door. With a sigh, he moved aside and let her enter. She was trim and sleek as always, her plain black clothes only serving to accentuate a form at once rounded and compactly muscular. Arekhon found himself resenting, nevertheless, the fact that she was not Elaeli Inadi.
That was no way for the First of a Circle to think about a valued and active member. He suppressed the resentment and gestured her to the cabin’s single—and oddly contoured—chair before himself dropping wearily onto the bunk.
“What happened?” he said. “We lost Garrod and Elaeli, that’s what happened.”
“How?”
He explained, at first in brief sketchy sentences, then in longer and more painful ones. Vai listened to the whole story, shaking her head when he was done.
“I mistrust our so-called friend Demazze,” she said. “He may have arranged for that attack himself.”
“I don’t think so. But he would have known that it was coming.” Arekhon hesitated and then went on. “I haven’t told sus-Mevyan this, but—Councillor Demazze was Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen.”
“How? Garrod was with us on the ship all along.”
“At the same time as he was a madman back on Eraasi,” Arekhon pointed out. “The Void connects times as well as places, and Garrod was a master at walking between them.”
“But was Councilor Demazze as mad as Garrod became—will become—whatever?”
“I hope not,” Arekhon said. “For Elaeli’s sake, I hope not. Garrod believes—believed—that this world, that
all
the worlds on this side of the interstellar gap are too strong for us. They would swallow up the homeworlds and not even need to chew. He wanted to—to subvert them, somehow, and Elaeli was a part of that plan.”
“It would help,” Vai said, “if we knew what his plan was.”
There was no answering that; Arekhon dropped his head into his hands and sighed. After a while he spoke without looking up. “Has the Circle found any place at all on this ship that’s fit for us to meet in?”
“One or two. But there’s another matter that needs to be settled first.”
“What kind of matter?”
“The prisoner,” Vai said. “We both know that sus-Mevyan isn’t planning to let her go. And I’m not sure that I blame the Captain for it, either.”
Arekhon lifted his head and saw that Vai was serious. “Haven’t we done enough harm already?” he asked. “We crippled her ship, we killed her friends—and now we’re going to make her finish her life among strangers?”
“We may have to,” Vai said. “She knows—”
“—what? That we aren’t from Entibor and don’t speak her language? There are dozens of planets like that on this side of the galaxy.”
“But none—as far as they know—on the other side of the interstellar gap.
That’s
the killer,’Rekhe. How long will it take these people to send out an expedition, in their fast ships with the big guns, once they know there’s something waiting on the other side for them to find?”
“I don’t know.” Arekhon felt deeply and inexpressibly weary, both in body and mind; he wanted nothing so much as to dim the cabin lights, collapse onto the unyielding mattress in his bunk, and sleep for a long time without dreaming. But there would be no chance of that for a while yet. “We began this journey intending to bring the galaxy back together, not tear it further apart … do you think anybody is going to believe that, five hundred years from now?”
“It doesn’t matter if they don’t,” Vai said. “The prisoner’s coming with us—sus—Mevyan’s already made up her mind—but will she be with us as an enemy, or as an unfortunate guest?”
Arekhon gave a short laugh. “That’s the prisoner’s decision, isn’t it? We certainly haven’t given her much cause to like us so far.”
“No … but if she’s going to make any sort of life for herself on Eraasi, she’s going to need friends, or at least allies. I believe the Circle should think hard about trying to fill that need.”
“Have you foreseen a reason for it?” Arekhon regarded Vai curiously; he hadn’t thought of her as having the prophetic gift. “Or is this only your personal opinion?”
“Call it opinion based on experience,” Vai said. “She’s going to have to trust somebody eventually, or else go mad. Better she trust us, I think, than trust the sus-Peledaen.”
Arekhon felt a brief stirring of anger—or what would have been anger, if he hadn’t been too tired to feel anything more than a kind of sullen irritability. “Are you saying that the fleet-family isn’t honest?”
“I’m saying that the Circle doesn’t owe the family any special loyalty, and might be a better friend to the prisoner because of it.” Vai paused. “sus-Mevyan hasn’t been worried about the prisoner’s welfare. You have. That’s the difference.”
A rumbling engine-pulse came through the deckplates, and Arekhon felt a brief catch of pressure as the
Diamond
accelerated. “Captain’s lifting from orbit,” he said, grateful for the interruption. “She was talking about finding a safe place to calculate the transit.”
“How long is that likely to take?”
“As long as it needs to,” he said. “Tracing a back-course is easier than making a blind transit, but the navigator’s working off of a makeshift console that scares me just to think of it.”
“The prisoner could be helpful with that, if she wanted to be,” Vai pointed out.
“If we gave her a reason not to wish all of us dead, you mean.”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
Arekhon sighed and unfolded himself from the bunk. “Summon Ty and Narin; we need to find the prisoner and talk honestly with her.”
 
 
Kief walked the night away, and all the day, while the hot anger in him chilled, and towering fury built with every step. In the end he came to his brother’s house, and flung open the door. Felan Diasul exclaimed in horror at the staff burning in Kief’s hand.
He walked through the doors, and no electronics could keep him out. The
aiketen
tried to prevent him, for he had been removed from their access lists, but he strode past them, and left them broken. At last, he stood at the door of his brother’s office, and the wind smashed in the windows. It blew the door open amid a swirl of paper, a splinter of shards, and a shower of sparks as the viewscreens and the datadesks went non-functional.
A man was sitting facing the desk. As the door fell he rose, turning, and pulled a weapon from inside his clothing.
Kief saw him and knew him, in sudden images that flashed through his mind like electric shocks or bolts of lightning:
Men expiring in flame and smoke in an office tower … ships exploding in the deeps of space … Garrod and Del and Serazao, struck down by this man’s order and lying in their life’s blood on the floor of the Hall.
The first priority was the weapon. Kief held out his hand, allowing the fire from his staff to leap across, arcing to the metal in the weapon’s grip.
Flames played around the handgun, and the charges stored inside it exploded in a rippling thunder. The fire continued back, running along the veins in the man’s arms, bursting through the skin, charring the clothing, tracing out the hidden pathways in the flesh. The man fell to his knees, his left hand grasping his right arm above the elbow as the fire spurted like burning fuses up his right arm toward his shoulder. When the tongues of flames met his left hand, the fire jumped across and the veins started burning in his left arm, reaching toward his heart.
Kief stayed with him, forcing the burn, feeling it as the man felt it—hot at first, then cold, like a stream of ice water, numbing him. He saw himself with the man’s eyes, a figure in the door like death, outlined with a pulsing glow of light too bright to look at directly.
The man felt a tickle in his nose. It was incongruous. The fire was tracing up his arms—he could smell the hair, the meat, the cloth, all burning—and the smoke tickled. Then the smell was gone, and he sneezed. What came out was writhing, like animated white seeds. Maggots. Running from his face. Then his vision went dark, the cold reached his shoulders and spread across his chest. He could feel the maggots writhing across his face, filling his mouth as they tumbled from his nasal passages down his throat. He couldn’t breathe. Then the darkness, cold, and pain rose and took him. He didn’t feel himself slump to the floor.
Kief stood unmoving, as the man who had been Seyo Hannet of the League of Unallied Shippers turned from a living man to a decayed corpse—all dried skin, smoke-blackened, stretched across brittle bones—in scarcely a minute. Then he turned to where his brother stood appalled in the doorway.
“Through action or inaction,” he said, “and it matters not greatly to me which one it may have been, you have hindered the greatest working this galaxy has ever known.”

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