The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (43 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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“Sometimes things happen and you never know the reason,” Narin told him. “That’s how life works.”
“Not for us,” said Arekhon. The coldness that had been with him since coming to Eraasi was back, changed now into a bleak resolve. “We’re Mages. We can learn the reason.”
Karil asked, “How?”
“Come with me,” he said.
He led the way through the ruin to the open, fire-blackened space that had once been the meditation chamber. Without needing to be told further, the other Mages joined him to form a circle, kneeling on the burned-over ground with their staves lying before them.
Karil hung back—something in her, Arekhon suspected, still thought that Magery was an unnatural act. He beckoned for the Entiboran to come closer.
“Keep watch,” he said. “If anyone comes, let me know.”
She nodded and moved away toward the entrance to the Hall. Arekhon watched her go, then turned back to his Circle.
“Now,” he said, and allowed himself to slip away from the material present to the place where the
eiran
themselves had weight and form …
… it was the place of broken stone, again and always as it had been since the start of Garrod’s working.
He looked for the
eiran
, and found them at last, high above him and out of his reach, all torn, the broken ends snapping one way and another as if a hard wind blew them. Through the gaps in the shattered weaving he could see the stars in a night sky. As he watched, the
eiran
turned from silver to blood-red.
“Who did this?” he shouted into the silence. “Who?”
No answer came. Instead the stars began to fall, rushing down out of the sky, straight toward him. Then he realized that the stars were not falling—that instead he was moving toward them at titanic speed. They zoomed past him on every side like streaks of light. He passed through the ragged network of the
eiran
and out into the Void.
He stood on a grey hillside surrounded by fog, his staff blazing in his hand. He looked behind him, and saw a woman bundled in white wool, her face obscured by the folds of cloth.
“You promised to come back,” the woman said. She spoke with Elaeli’s voice, and the hand that reached out to him and touched his shoulder was Elaeli’s also, though it was cold. “You have to cross the gap, if you want to mend what was broken.”
 
Year 1130 E. R.
 
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
 
T
he hand on Arekhon’s shoulder grasped more tightly, and shook him hard. He opened his eyes and saw that night had fallen over the ruins of the Old Hall, and that the hand on his shoulder belonged to Karil.
“Someone’s coming,” she hissed in his ear. “Wake up. You asked me to wake you if anyone came. Wake up.”
He took his staff and rose from his knees. “Thank you. You did right.”
“What about the others? Should I wake them up too?”
“Yes. But quietly, and tell them to stay back.”
He left Karil struggling to rouse Narin from a deep meditative trance, and went out to the broken doors of the Hall. There he saw that the Entiboran woman had spoken the truth. A man was coming on foot up the long drive, his progress marked by the red glow of the staff in his hand. The man’s posture and gait were familiar: Even before he drew near enough for the light to illuminate his features, Arekhon recognized the lanky, gangling frame of Kiefen Diasul.
I wanted to know why Kief wasn’t dead like all the others,
Arekhon thought
. And it looks like he’s come here himself to tell me.
Kief passed by the line of empty, burnt-out vehicles and climbed the steps to the doorway. Arekhon moved forward to meet him, and the two men embraced.
“’Rekhe,” Kief said. “You were gone for too long—I believed that the
Rain
was lost.”
“The distance across the interstellar gap was greater than we expected,” Arekhon said. He gestured toward the empty walls. “What happened here?”
“Treachery,” Kief said. His voice was harsh, and heavy with old anger. Arekhon saw the lines of it marking his face in the red light from his staff. “There’s more than enough of it to go around in these degraded times.”
“What became of Garrod?”
“Dead, like the others.”
“You spoke of treachery,” Arekhon said. The memory of Natelth’s silence was painful in his mind, and the thought of Kief’s staff, absent from the burning.
Don’t say it was your word that betrayed them, or his money that paid
… . “Whose?”
Kief laughed, a bitter choking noise that was more like a sob. “Mine,” he said, “though I didn’t know it until too late. He used me—”
“Natelth?”
“No,” said Kief. His voice was still ragged. “It wasn’t
your
brother who asked the Mages for luck, and it wasn’t
your
brother who twisted the luck he got until it snapped and took the Circle with it. It was mine.”
Relief surged through Arekhon; he felt ashamed of it, in the face of Kief’s pain and regret. “The guilt is your brother’s, then, and not yours.”
“His—and I broke him for it, ’Rekhe, when I knew! I took back all the luck I had ever given him, and all the luck he had, and the luck of all the
eiran
he had ever touched … in my anger I took everything. And there’s no way to give it back.”
He spoke truth. In the darkness of the ruined Hall, Arekhon saw the webs and skeins of the
eiran
wrapped around Kief’s entire body like chains—more luck than one man could spend in a dozen lifetimes, and all of it stained with blood. His heart ached for Kief, trapped in the
eiran’
s knots and coils.
“Our Circle is smaller than it was,” Arekhon said, “but it isn’t broken. We can take your brother’s luck and use it to finish the working.”
“No.” Kief’s features were set and implacable. “Garrod’s working was a disaster from the beginning, and I won’t waste luck on repairing it. I have another Circle now. Come to us as First, if you like—but Demaizen is dead.”
“Demaizen lives, and so does Garrod’s working.” Arekhon thought of the Circle’s
eiran
as he had seen them in his meditation, stretching away and out of sight amid the stars.
You have to cross the gap,
the woman had told him,
if you want to mend what was broken
. “I can’t join your Circle—not even as First. There’s no place left for me in the homeworlds.”
“I know you, ’Rekhe. You think you can finish a working that killed the greatest Magelord of both our lifetimes. You’ll betray your blood and your ancestors for the sake of your own pride.”
“I don’t think either one of us is going to convince the other,” Arekhon said. He felt an overwhelming rush of sadness and futility. “We should part friends while we still can.”
“You’re right on that, at least. Good-bye, ’Rekhe.”
They embraced again on the steps of the broken Hall. Then Kief let go and moved back. At the foot of the steps he dodged to the right and flattened himself to the ground.
At that moment a twinkle of lights sparkled among the overgrown hedges two hundred yards away. Arekhon felt a burning pain in his side. He fell backward, his knees no longer supporting him, and collapsed across the threshold. A hand, wet and dark with blood, swam into his view, and he realized it was his—his hand, his blood.
A rushing sound filled his ears, and even above the intense pain he felt the floating sensation that meant his body was going into shock.
I can’t die here
, he thought as the rushing sound grew louder and his vision darkened.
I have to cross the gap and finish the working.
At the edges of his clouded sight, the
eiran
started to glow.
 
 
Narin stood on the cliff above the harbor at Amisket. For all her years of absence, she hadn’t fully understood how much she’d missed the Veredden fishing port until she returned there at last in her mind’s interior world. Always, with Demaizen, she had used traditional imagery of ordered parks and gardens, drawn from the common training of all Mages, or—for her private intentions—images of water and the open sea. But never a real place until now, when her quest for understanding brought her home to the town for which she had saved the fishing fleet, and broken her Circle doing it.
She stood on the windswept headland, looking down at the harbor and wondering what her mind—or the universe—was trying to tell her, until a hand on her shoulder brought her abruptly out of her meditative trance. The woman Karil’s voice hissed in her ear.
“Wake! One comes—Arekhon says to wake!”
Narin opened her eyes and saw that the daylight had come and gone since she began her meditation. The grey of early morning had left the sky, and the ruins of the Hall were wrapped in the full darkness of another night. Karil had moved on, and was busy rousing Ty; Narin left her to it and stood up, her staff in her hand.
Moving as quietly as she could, she reached the shadows behind the broken doors just in time to see Kief Diasul bid Arekhon farewell and then step away. An instant later, weapons fire opened up in flashes of light from the shelter of the overgrown hedges, and Arekhon fell backward across the threshold of the Hall.
There was no time for thought. Narin threw herself forward to grab Arekhon by his shoulders and pull him away from the door, sliding his limp body across the ash and rubble. A moment later Ty and Karil arrived, crawling on their elbows and knees. Karil took one look at Arekhon and began tearing away his clothing to expose the dark, ugly wounds where the projectiles had struck. She drew a hissing breath inward between her teeth.
“Is bad.” As she spoke, the Entiboran woman pulled off the fleet-livery tunic she’d worn since leaving the
Diamond
and rolled the fabric into a bulky pad. She pressed the makeshift dressing against the wound in Arekhon’s side. “Help me please here yes?”
“Yes,” Narin said. With her knife—the same one she’s used to cut the crimson trim from Karil’s livery only the day before—she began slashing at the sturdy fabric of Arekhon’s formal robes, first a wide band of cloth to make a second pad for his chest, then narrower strips to tie both of the pads into place. “You were here when it started. What happened with Kief, and who
are
those other people?”
Karil wiped her bloodstained hands on the trousers of her fleet-livery and shrugged. “They talk,” she said. “Whatever they want, he says no. Stupid. Dead soon now, bleeding like that.”
“Maybe I should try talking with them this time,” Narin said. She felt responsibility for the Circle settling onto her shoulders like a heavy weight. “Now that ’Rekhe’s wounded—”
“I don’t think they’re interested in conversation,” Ty said. He had crawled forward to peer out around the edge of the doorjamb. His voice was higher than usual, but at the same time curiously flat. He’d sounded the same way, Narin suddenly remembered, after the fighting when the
Rain
captured
Forty-two.
“I see at least a dozen of them out there.”
“Too many,” said Karil. “We all die soon, not just him.”
“Not if we can find shelter for long enough to work undisturbed,” Narin said.
“The basement,” Ty said. “If it survived the fire, there’s a way down to the basement behind what’s left of the grand staircase. And if the medical
aiketen
are still intact—”
“—then ’Rekhe’s got a chance at living,” Narin said, “and we’ve got a place to hide. Let’s go.”
 
 
Arekhon stood in the midst of the desolate and rocky place from his meditations, and the
eiran
glowed around him like a web of polished silver. He could see the pattern clearly now, the true pattern of the great working that Garrod syn-Aigal had barely started, and that had fallen into his own hands. From one side of the galaxy to the other the working stretched, and from age to age, and its beauty was enough to make him shake with awe.
All this is mine to finish … and I’m not worthy.
Weakness swept over him, forcing him to his knees. He braced himself with one hand to keep from collapsing further; the jagged rocks cut into the flesh of his palm.
Unworthy
, he thought again.
Unworthy and dying, the fading of his strength here in the nonmaterial world only an image of his body’s collapse. He wanted to weep, for the glory of the pattern that stretched out overhead, and that was destined to remain unfinished.
My fault. I didn’t have the time.
A voice spoke out of the dark behind him. “You can have the time, if you want it.”
Arekhon tried to turn around to see who had spoken, but felt the speaker’s hands on his shoulders pressing him back down. He moistened his dry lips. “How?”
“You’ve seen the pattern of the working. Your life is woven into it, and its energy and yours are one. When the end comes, you will know.”

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