“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.
“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.
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.
“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.
“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.”
“Vai!” said Thel. He glanced automatically at the antique clock on the landing above him, an old-style devotional timepiece whose complex analog interior allowed its multiple dials to show the phases and movements of the moon as well as the current hour. There would be time to speak with Vai and still keep the moonwatch—excellent. “Where is she now?”
“She waits in the reception room, my lord.”
“Good. Instruct the kitchen to bring some light refreshment.”
“I hear, my lord,” said the aiketh, and floated off.
Thel hurried back down the stairs to the reception room where Iulan Vai waited. She was a compact, deceptively quiet woman, dressed as usual in a tailored black overtunic and black leggings. When he’d first met Vai, Thel had attributed her taste in clothing to a streak of austerity in her temperament, but over the passage of time he’d decided that she dressed in black mainly because it allowed her to hide better in dark corners.
Iulan Vai was the syn-Grevi family’s eyes and ears in Hanilat. Thel’s father, before he died, had paid for her training and seen to her placement in that position. Theledau had his own theories about the reason why. Vai was a decade or so younger than Thel, but like him—and like, also, the elder syn-Grevi in his prime—she had fair skin, and hair of a reddish-brown so dark that in most lights it appeared as a rusty black. Thel had offered her formal adoption into the syn-Grevi a number of times since their first meeting, as part of the customary advancement for someone who had served the family more than well, but Vai had always refused the honor.
When he came into the room, she rose from the chair where she waited, and knelt.
“My lord sus-Radal,” she said.
Thel opened his mouth to correct her, and then thought better of the idea. Iulan Vai dealt with only the latest, most accurate information. If she addressed Theledau syn-Grevi as the head not of a minor north-country line but of the entire sus-Radal fleet-family … then the unthinkable had happened, and it was true.
“Don’t do that,” said Thel. “We’re not in somebody’s mansion in Hanilat.”
Vai rose gracefully to her feet and resumed her chair. “No, my lord. But you’ll get there.”
“How did it happen?” he asked. “We were never all that close to the primary line.”
“Close enough for old Jofre to pass over the whole bundle of senior lines and pick you to succeed him.”
“He was mad,” said Thel, with conviction.
“Mad as a mortgaunt,” Vai agreed. “Disinheriting people was a hobby of his. Every time he felt his stomach twist or his bones ache he’d call in the legalists and start scratching out names. Only this time, he died before he could change his mind back again. The sus-Radal are yours, my lord.”
A kitchen-aiketh floated in bearing a tray of spiced wafers and two glasses of sweetroot cider. Thel waited until Vai had made her choice, then took the remaining glass. The cider was cool and tart, with a natural sweetness and a hint of fizz. Thel had never heard of it being made or sold anywhere outside the far north country. In the old time, it wouldn’t have kept in the subtropical temperatures of Hanilat; these days, he supposed there just wasn’t a demand for it.
“You’re right,” he said after a while. “I’m going to have to leave syn-Grevi Lodge and go to Hanilat. The fleet won’t accept me otherwise.”
“The city’s not so bad. You’ll get used to it.”
“Maybe,” he said. He picked up one of the spiced wafers and bit into it, turning the full circle into a crescent with a couple of bites. “Vai … I want you to come work for me in Hanilat.”
She gave a faint laugh. “I thought I already did.”
“You worked for the syn-Grevi,” he told her. “I want you to leave the syn-Grevi behind you and work for the head of the sus-Radal.”
3:
Year 1116 E. R.
ILDAON: ILDAON STARPORT
ERAASI: WESTERN FISHING GROUNDS
The search for gloves took longer than ‘Rekhe had expected. The street signs were all in the local alphabet, presumably because traders from Eraasi came only once or twice a year, but cargo flyers and trucks arrived daily from all over Ildaon. Fortunately, most of the signs also had pictorial symbols, though the meanings were not always what ’Rekhe would have anticipated. After going down a number of false trails, he and Elaeli came to a three-story building about a mile from the hostel. Upon inspection, the building proved to be a roofed-over concourse housing several major emporia and a host of smaller shops.
Inside, the building was warm. ‘Rekhe unclenched his fists and let the heat start thawing out his fingers. He and Elaeli were the only members of the Ribbon’s crew inside the concourse. The bright blue and crimson of their garments stood out in vivid contrast to the drabber colors favored by local fashion, and the ambient murmur of voices had the unfamiliar pitch and rhythm of an unknown language. ’Rekhe felt disoriented and conspicuous at first, but realized after a while that nobody in the big high-ceilinged building was paying him any particular attention. With relief, he applied himself to the search for a pair of gloves.
His liberty-companion, he discovered, was inclined to be thorough about such things. Left on his own, ’Rekhe would have bought the first non-disgraceful gloves that happened to fit—in this case, a pair made of dull black leather lined with soft fabric, on sale at a small men’s-haberdashery kiosk just inside the main door. Elaeli would have none of it. Undeterred by the lack of a common language, she inspected the stock of every merchant in the concourse with a pair of gloves to sell.
The gloves she ultimately bought came from a large emporium on the top level of the concourse. ’Rekhe could distinguish only minor differences between those gloves and the ones he had seen earlier—black fabric instead of grey for the lining, and stitching done with a heavier thread—but when Elaeli professed herself satisfied at last, he shrugged and purchased a similar pair for his own use. The price, when he translated it from local money to fleet scrip, made his eyebrows go up; he hadn’t expected something that small to be so costly.
“Don’t worry,” Elaeli reassured him. “They’ll last forever, and that’s what’s important. Haven’t you ever bought gloves before?”
“No,” he said. “I grew up in Hanilat, remember? It doesn’t get cold like this in Hanilat.”
And his sister Isayana—or the aiketen she had built and instructed—had always purchased the family’s food and clothing anyway. But ’Rekhe didn’t intend to pass along that kind of information to Elaeli Inadi. It might cause her, for some reason, to think less of him, and that was something he already knew that he did not want.
“You’ve done well,” said Captain Soba. He and Narin stood on the port wing of the pilothouse, looking back on a deck running with fish guts and salt water. Dance-and-be-Joyful’s crew swung the boom inboard with another dripping load and dumped the fish out onto the deck for processing. In the aftermath of the Circle’s working, the sun had continued hot and the skies clear every day for a week, while the crews of the fishing fleet labored to bring up the plentiful catch and stow it in the holds below.
“Well ended, when ended,” Narin replied formally, to ward off luck-breaking—but she grinned as she said it.
“We’ll have full holds by nightfall,” Soba told her. “More than a season’s catch. And after that it’s homeward bound.” He clapped Narin on the shoulder. “It’s a feat to tell the youngsters about—from a bare beginning to the best year that I can recall, and all in less than a week.”
“You can buy me dinner in Amisket after we sell the haul,” Narin said. “In the meantime, I’ll be below if you need me.”
“Bring more of that luck back topside with you,” Soba called down to her as she descended th
e ladder.
“I’ll try, Cap’n.”
Narin headed aft along the port side of the main deck to the companionway. When she looked away to windward off the port beam, two other fishing ships were visible—miles off, but hull up, plying their nets and lines. All across the broad expanse of ocean the swells were long and low, with wavelets dancing across their surface.
While she paused there, gazing outward, the vista changed. A long dark line appeared on the horizon, a boundary drawn with black ink between the sea and the sky. Within minutes the dark boundary wasn’t a line any more, but a solid grey-blue wall, growing higher and racing across the water with frightening speed. A pale streak at the bottom of the wall marked where rain and wind whipped the ocean into foam.
Narin stood, all thought of going below abandoned, and watched the wall of cloud draw closer. In all her years at sea, she had never seen a squall line move so fast. She estimated its speed of advance at forty knots or more.
Other members of the Dance’s crew were watching the onrushing squall and not liking it any better than she was. In the pilothouse above and behind her, she heard the Captain giving orders to the helmsman—“Left full rudder. Increase your rudder to left hard. All ahead two thirds.”—and farther aft, the chief rigger shouting to the crew—“Get your load on deck! Fuck the winches, cut the burton!”
Narin held onto the gunwale with both hands, her fingers clamped to the wood, as the front came on. The Dance was coming left to try and take the blow on the bows, but the trawler had been moving too slowly, her engines only making enough turns to pull the nets; she wasn’t going to swing in time.
Then the wall hit them.
The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Page 3