The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds (8 page)

Read The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds
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“Who needs to ask? Y‘just come up to them like this”—Tuob gave ’Rekhe a clap on the shoulder that nearly felled him—“and y’say, ‘Hey, got anything?’ Go ahead—try it.”
’Rekhe took a swallow of
guukl
and tapped at Tuob’s upper arm with his fist. “Hey,” he said. “Got anything?”
“Sure do. Take a look at this.” Tuob reached into his shirt pocket and took out a folding knife. Red and blue light shifted and reflected off the polished metal case, which had the words “sus-Dariv’s
Path-Lined-withFlowers”
engraved on it in flowing script. He pressed it into ’Rekhe’s hand. “Family special. Name on it and all. ’S yours.”
“It’s too good—I can’t—”
“Too late,” said Tuob. “You got it now. Trade me something back—’s how it’s done.”
’Rekhe pondered for a moment, his thoughts somewhat hampered by
guukl
-induced fuzziness, then pulled off his quilted red and blue ship-jacket and held it up. “It’s got my name on the pocket. Is that all right?”
“It’s fantastic,” Tuob assured him. “I’ll show it to my girl back home, and she’ll know I had some real excitement on this run. You got a girl?”
“Ah … no.”
“What about th’ curlyhair you had with you back in port? She isn’t your girl?”
’Rekhe shook his head. “Last time I saw Elaeli she was dancing with Macse.”
“Macse’s already got a girl,” said Tuob. “Got a couple of girls, in fact. You want to dance with th’ curlyhair, you go find her and ask.”
“You think she would?”
“Sure she would. Saw her kiss you, back on Ildaon. Some places, girls don’t kiss you like that ’til you’re married.”
’Rekhe finished his
guukl
at one draught. “If you’ll excuse me …” He made his way through the press of bodies in the
Path
’s cargo bay to the cleared space that served as a dance floor. The music changed, and it took him a minute to spot Elaeli standing with Macse at the edge of the crowd. Quickly, before his nerve could give way, he went up to her.
“Do you want to—I mean, may I have the next dance?”
Her smile was even warmer and more dizzying than the
guukl
had been. “Of course.”
Taking hands, they stepped into the dance. Elaeli was soft and graceful, and her hair smelled like flowers. ’Rekhe could have danced with her forever, and felt a stab of disappointment when the music ended.
“Let’s go back to the
Ribbon,”
she said.
“Now?” He tried to think of some excuse to keep her at the party so he could ask her to dance again. “Have you done any trading yet?”
“Macse gave me a sus-Dariv bracelet,” she said. “So I gave him my
Ribbon-of-Starlight
keyholder with the thumbprint lock. I think he wanted something else instead, but I didn’t feel like giving it to him.”
She smiled at ’Rekhe again, and his head spun. “I’d rather go back to prentice berthing and give it to you.”
 
Year 1117 E. R.
 
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
ARVEDAN HOUSE
HANILAT STARPORT
 
When the fleet steamed back into Amisket, Narin Iyal discovered that she was a hero. The Storm of 1116, product of a massive weather system raised by the Circles of the drought-stricken antipodes, had raged up and down the length of the Veredden Archipelago for three days. The townspeople of Amisket had feared that the fishing ships were lost, taking their families and the town’s livelihood with them. The people were grateful—exceedingly grateful. For weeks afterward Narin couldn’t pay cash money for as much as a shoelace, and half a dozen children were named after her in the first month alone.
She wanted nothing to do with any of it. Halfway through the second month, she told the town council of Amisket that they would have to find a new Mage to head their Circle for them. Then she took passage to the mainland on the packet-boat that brought the weekly mail, and walked inland from the coast.
She had no clear idea of where she was going—except away from Veredde—and she wandered the by-roads for almost half a year. The Circles she came across would give her hospitality, and invariably wished her well, but none of them offered her a place. Always, after a day or two, or at most a week, she would thank them politely and move on.
On the first warm day of spring, she was in the Wide Hills district, walking beside the highway running out of Demaizen Town. She’d heard rumors, over the past months, of a new Circle forming in the area. Maybe they would have a place for a Mage who understood the work of a First—all the work of a First, down to the bitter last of it—but who didn’t want to do it ever again.
Shortly after she’d turned off the highway onto the road leading to the Hall, she heard the sound of a groundcar’s engine, and a truck bearing the logo of a prominent medical-services firm overtook her and slowed to a stop.
The driver called out the window, “Is this the road to Demaizen Old Hall?”
“I think so,” she said. “Back in town they said to turn at the stone gate, and that was a stone gate back there. So either this is the right road or we’re both lost.”
“You’re going to the Hall? Might as well ride the rest of the way with me. I’ve got a delivery to make up there.”
She climbed into the passenger-side seat. “What are you delivering?” she asked, as the truck began rumbling once again up the long slope.
“Medical
aiketen,”
he said. “Top-line trauma units. Not something you install in somebody’s basement every day, let me tell you.”
“Are they going to the Demaizen Circle?”
“That’s right. Complete installation, fully instructed and fully stocked.”
Narin was impressed. Medical
aiketen
cost a great deal of money—the Amisket Circle had made do with the fishing fleet’s ancient basic-services model, which only worked half the time and was chronically short of supplies. If the Demaizen Circle was equipping itself with a fully functioning infirmary tucked away in the basement, they could push their workings to the limit.
The Hall itself turned out to be large and imposing—big enough to hide a dozen infirmaries and not feel crowded—but Narin was more interested in the Mage who came out to meet the driver of the delivery truck. She waited, standing a little to one side, while the driver identified himself to the Mage as a person authorized by the company to unpack and install its products, and the Mage identified himself as Yuvaen syn-Deriot, Second of the Demaizen Circle. The driver and the Second signed and countersigned half a dozen different papers; when the driver put away his copies and began offloading, Narin came forward.
“They told me in Demaizen Town that there was a Circle forming here,” she said. “Is this so, or is there only you?”
“Myself and the First, for now,” Yuvaen admitted. “But Garrod has large plans.”
Narin looked at the truck full of crates and boxes. “I can see that. Is there a place in your Circle for a working Mage?”
“Are you asking on your own behalf, or a student’s?”
“My own,” she said. “I’m Narin Iyal, from Veredde—”
His eyes lit with recognition at the name. “The First of the Amisket Circle,” he said. “The one who saved the fishing fleet.”
“Saved the fleet,” she said, “and broke my whole Circle doing it. I won’t lie to you, Syr Second-of-Demaizen—”
“Yuvaen.”
“—Syr Yuvaen: My luck is not good. Your First may want nothing to do with me.”
“For what Garrod has in mind, he needs strong Mages,” Yuvaen said. “If you’re determined to leave Amisket—”
“I left Amisket half a year ago. I didn’t want to live there any more.”
“Were the people that ungrateful?” he asked.
“Far from it,” said Narin. “They thanked me until I was sick of hearing the words. But I had no Circle-Mages left, and no wish to find more and train them, then spend their lives all over again the next time the sea decided to take them. And nobody in the Islands would come to Amisket and have me as a Mage working under them—they all said it was not right, when I had been First in Amisket for so long.”
Yuvaen smiled. “Come inside,” he said. “If you are determined to put away rank and join with us, there are things about the Demaizen Circle that you need to know.”
 
 
Delath syn-Arvedan was the odd one out, in a family where everybody else’s future was settled. There was an older brother, who would who take the greater part of the family lands in the district; and there were sisters both older and younger, the one already married into a well-off local manufacturing family, and the other bound to Hanilat for advanced schooling in the stargazers’ disciplines. For him, there remained a few smaller parcels of land—enough to rent out for a modest income, but too scattered to make up a single holding—and funds sufficient to educate him in whatever profession he might find attractive.
The problem was that he had no inclination toward such a life. When he returned to Arvedan at the conclusion of his basic schooling, he wanted nothing more than to stay there. He found himself, after a few weeks, expostulating in vain upon the subject to his brother, who cornered him in the herb garden near the orchard and demanded to know—as one who would someday be the head of the syn-Arvedan line in his turn—when Delath planned to make up his mind about things.
“I don’t want to go back to school and spend another six or eight years training for something I don’t want to do when I’m finished,” Del said. He had his back set firmly against the stone wall enclosing the small garden with its patches of sweet and pungent flowerings. “I like it here.”
Inadal gave an exaggerated sigh. “You can’t stay here, Del. There isn’t anything for you.”
“I thought—maybe—I could help you, eventually. With the farms and all. It’s a lot of work … .”
“Not.”
His brother’s reply came out flat and unadorned by polite qualification. Del looked at him and saw at last—clearly and unmistakably—the thing that he’d been working hard not to see for almost the past ten years. Inadal truly liked his younger brother, and wished him all happiness and prosperity in whatever life Delath should choose, but Inadal would not cede any part of the syn-Arvedan inheritance, once it was his. Even the drudgery of land-work, which Del would have gladly undertaken just for the chance to stay here in the one place which was best-loved to him on all Eraasi, was to be his brother’s, and his brother’s alone.
“I understand,” Del said. The wind across the herb garden shifted as he spoke, bringing with it the ticklish scent of summer tartgrass—ever afterward the smell of it, in a kitchen or a market or even at table with friends, had the power to make him feel a stab of unexpected sorrow. “I’ll think of something else, then. But it’s my life we’re talking about—let me have a little time to decide.”
 
 
The streets of Hanilat Starport bred their share of orphans and runaways and nobody’s-children. The Port Street Foundling Home didn’t take in all of them—no single institution could—but for those unfortunates who fell within its geographical bounds, it provided food, clothing, safety, and the rudiments of an education. Most of the youngsters thus rescued were duly grateful, or at least had the good sense to pretend gratitude.
Ty was one of the other ones. He had been not quite a day old when a security guard working for one of the Hanilat shipping firms heard him crying in a trash bin out back of a warehouse. Because it was the middle of the week when he was found, the warden entered him on the Home’s master roll simply as Ty—a traditional use-name for children born on that day. Family and family name he had none, and the Home could not give them to him; he therefore gave the Home nothing back in return, least of all respect.
It was purely by good luck that he wasn’t in trouble on the afternoon when the Mages came to speak to the middle-grades assembly. He’d been in trouble only the day before, cast out into the hallway for drawing insulting caricatures on sheets of notebook paper, then making them into darts and sailing them—with merciless accuracy—onto the desks of their targets. On this day, however, he was allowed to file in with the rest of his class and take his place on the third bench from the front, in between Gea and Ismat and close under his instructor’s watchful eye.
Ty’s good behavior was already wearing thin. This assembly promised to be another dull one, like the time the man from Hanilat City Council came and talked for an hour about city government. The bench was hard, and Ismat was so broad in the bottom that he filled a place and a half on it, pushing Ty over towards Gea, who had sharp elbows and used them vigorously.
Ty was about to retaliate—a move that would undoubtedly have seen him exiled again to the hallway—when the warden came out onto the stage and said, “Good afternoon, students. For today’s assembly we have Syr Binea Daros and Syr Dru Chayad of the Three Street Mage-Circle, who’ve come here to tell us about their work.”
The Mages turned out to be a man and a woman in ordinary street clothes. If it hadn’t been for the short wooden staves they wore fastened to their belts, they would have been indistinguishable from the great mass of petty shopkeepers and office workers in downtown Hanilat.
Ty found them fascinating.
Not for what they said—they talked about doing luck-bindings for the neighborhood association, and about helping the City Guard with searches and investigations, none of which interested Ty very much—but for the way they moved. All the other people he had met so far in his life moved as if they were half-blind to the rest of the world, pushing through the shining interconnected web of things as though no part was real except the tables and chairs and walls of it, leaving tangles and disarray behind them. The Mages moved like people who saw the connections.
At the close of the program the two Mages sparred briefly, and the whole assembly drew breath when the staves began to glow. Ty, watching as if transfixed, saw more. The blows and blocks and countermoves and parries were pulling the web tighter, drawing it up where it had grown loose and mending it where it was broken. He wondered what the purpose of it was, other than the simple beauty of the doing; then it was finished, and he understood.
Nets and webs were made for catching things, and this one had caught him.
 
 
The summer had just started. Del had promised his brother that autumn would find him a student again, on his way to a lifetime of doing … he didn’t yet know what, except that it wasn’t what he had always desired to do. The months in between would be the last he’d ever spend at Arvedan as someone who had the right to live there. When he next came back, he would be only another guest.
He was surprised, therefore, to find that staying home was almost unbearable. The knowledge that he would soon have to leave pressed down upon him so strongly that he might as well have already left. He endured two miserable weeks pretending that nothing was wrong; then he gave up. He got out the frame backpack and the pair of stout boots he had used for expeditions with his school’s wildlife-observation club, and told his family that he intended to occupy himself for the rest of the summer in exploring the local countryside on foot.
Nobody protested, or tried very hard to dissuade him. The roving-trails in the district were long-established and clearly marked, and the area was well-supplied with campgrounds and overnight hostels. Delath would be only one young person among many who had decided to spend the holidays out on the road.
He was strong, and his endurance was good. By the time half the summer was past, he was out of his home district altogether. As he penetrated farther into new territory, the countryside grew wilder and more open, the hills rising and the horizon growing broader as the continent sloped inexorably upward into the northern highlands. The trails were more rugged than the ones that he’d explored closer to home, and the hostels fewer. Most of the campsites provided flat ground and a fire-pit and little more.

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