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 wear
ing 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.
Del thought of spending the remainder of his holiday in the Wide Hills district, navigating with map and compass from landmark to landmark, but if he was going to make it back to Arvedan on foot—as he had, somewhat irrationally, promised himself that he would—he didn’t have the time. He estimated that he could spend one last night sleeping out in the hills before turning back.
Maybe, he thought, he could explore the Wide Hills roving-trails during next year’s holidays. It would give him something to look forward to while he was studying to become a banker or a legalist or a city resources developer.
His last campsite in the district was a small, unimproved patch of level ground high up on a long hillside overlooking a rolling plain. He pitched his tent, and boiled enough water over his pocket-stove to cook a packet of dried noodles and steep a cup of uffa. That done, he should have crawled into his sleep-sack and rested for tomorrow—but tonight, for some reason, he was wakeful. He sat cross-legged on the ground next to his extinguished pocket-stove, and looked out at the landscape and the evening sky.
The plain below him was largely empty, marked into fields for crops or grazing, and divided by the darker and lighter lines of paved and unpaved roads. Demaizen Town, which he had hiked through yesterday, lay somewhere just below the horizon to the south and east. The only habitation in view was a stone manor house, identified on his map as the Old Hall, and marked by the symbol for a landmark building in disused or unoccupied condition.
The sun went down and the sky changed from pale slate blue to a purpler velvet, and then to the dark blue-black of early summer night. The stars came out, great shoals and drifts of them—the same stars he’d seen every night during the past few weeks, but more dazzling tonight, somehow, and more numerous. When the silver lines appeared and began to coil and twist among them, he thought at first that he was watching an auroral display, of the sort that he’d read about in school but never seen.
He watched, fascinated, as the display grew brighter and more intense. Then he saw that the lines of silver were not in the sky alone, but curving and looping across the plain below him—a silver tracery, like writing in some ancient and esoteric script. The lines branched and spread and came reaching up the hillside and out toward the horizon, until he sat in the middle of a tangled network of silver.
This, he thought, still dazed by the beauty of it all, isn’t the aurora.
One of the cords began to shine still more brightly, as if his realization had given it a kind of life. The quality of its glowing substance altered slightly, so that it seemed to shimmer with a rainbow iridescence, and he found that he could pick out its peculiar shifting colors no matter where it went in the pattern of light that now surrounded him.
He was seized by the unshakable conviction that this rainbow line was, in some fashion, his. He rose from where he had been sitting, and followed the glowing thread down the long hill and out onto the plain.
It led him onward, wrapped and entwined in silvery light, from dusk almost to midnight, across the open fields and down the deserted roads until he came to the door of the Old Hall. He pulled on the rope for the doorbell, and listened as footsteps came to answer the deep metallic note.
The door of the Hall opened. The stocky, dark-haired woman who stood on the threshold wore a black wooden staff at her belt. For a moment he thought that it was a rover’s cudgel, and that she was only a summer vagabond like himself. Then he looked again at the way the silver cords wreathed around her where she stood, and knew that she was a Mage—and that he, who had never come any closer to the Circle in Arvedan than it took to wish them well at Solstice and Year’s-end—had followed the eiran to Demaizen Old Hall so that he might become a Mage as well.
8:
Year 1118 E. R.
ERAASI: HANILAT STARPORT
In the year 1118, Arekhon sus-Khalgath’s fleet-apprenticeship came to an end, and he returned to his family’s house in Hanilat. After two years living in prentice-berthing on Ribbon-of Starlight, ‘Rekhe found the sus-Peledaen town house in Hanilat to be echoing and empty by comparison. The spacious building was occupied in this generation only by his brother Natelth and his sister Isayana—both of them considerably older than he was—and by the aiketen that Isayana built and instructed. At the moment, as ’Rekhe stood in the corridor outside of Natelth’s study, there wasn’t even an aiketh to keep him company. He was, for almost the first time in months, completely alone.
&nbs
p; He knocked on the door. Natelth’s voice, muffled by the thick wood, said, “Come in.”
’Rekhe obeyed. The room he entered was furnished in dark, polished wood—everything solid and proper, like Natelth himself. A deep bay window looked out over the streets of Hanilat as they sloped away toward the port.
In times past, the head of the sus-Peledaen could have overseen the landing field from that window, and the shipyard where the fleet-family’s star-going vessels took shape within their great metal cradles. These days the office towers of Hanilat’s business district blocked the view, and most of the new construction took place in orbital facilities, but Natelth kept the room’s arrangements as he had found them, out of respect for tradition.
Two armchairs and an uffa table stood in the window alcove, but they were unoccupied and likely to remain that way—for this meeting, Natelth sat behind his desk with a thick folder lying on the desktop in front of him. ’Rekhe suspected that the folder held the hardcopy records of his time with the fleet; Natelth disliked posturing too much for him to be toying with somebody else’s papers just for the effect.
“Allow me to commend you,” Natelth said formally, “on the successful completion of your prentice-voyage. The family is pleased to have you back with us.” He paused and looked at ’Rekhe gravely over the closed folder. “We need to devote some thought to your future career. Prentice-master Lanar of the Ribbon speaks highly of you—your voyage was an excellent one by anybody’s standards—and Captain syn-Avran states that he would be willing to advance you to Navigator-Tertiary on merit alone, regardless of your family.”
“I’m honored,” ’Rekhe said.
The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Page 7