She nodded in rueful agreement. “He could give stubborn lessons to a stone.”
And slippery lessons to a mudsnake, Natelth added to himself. The matter of ’Rekhe’s transfer from the fleet to the Demaizen Circle still rankled; it had not been one of Natelth’s more successful moments. That had been long ago, however, and Isa’s fears were part of the present. He set himself to allaying them as best he could. “He’s only been Garrod’s Third for a couple of days now; you probably don’t need to worry about him for quite a while.”
While Garrod was making himself ready for the evening’s working, Yuvaen called the rest of the Demaizen Mages—with the exception of the problematic Iulan Vai—to an informal conference in the long gallery. Arekhon was the last to arrive, after making a circuit of the Hall to see if all was well after the disruptions of the morning. He only wished that the temper of the Circle could be as easily called back into order. The rogue working and Garrod’s subsequent decision had set everybody’s nerves on edge, and it showed.
Kief and Ty and Serazao, the three youngest in the Circle—in service if not in age—sat close together on one of the padded exercise mats. Delath stood nearby at one of the tall windows, and Narin sat on one of the wooden benches a few feet away. Arekhon would have gone to sit on the bench next to her, except that he was no longer one of the unranked Mages, but Third of the Circle. He went, instead, to stand beside Yuvaen, where the Second waited beside the rack of practice staves.
“Everybody’s accounted for,” he said quietly. “Garrod’s meditating, and Syr Vai is in her room.”
“Tactful of her.” Yuvaen pushed himself away from the wall. “Whatever else the woman is, she’s not a fool.”
He had the attention of the others by now. Del turned around from the window, and the three junior Mages, seated together on the mat, looked at the Second expectantly.
“Tonight the First will go out into the Void,” Yuvaen said. His voice took on the steadying cadences of a formal speech, and Arekhon felt the tension in the room ease slightly. “And we will anchor him. This working is the one for which he formed our Circle in the beginning. Our practices and our lesser efforts have all been steps toward this end. The time has come a little sooner than we expected, but only a little—if we hadn’t been ready, the wild luck would have passed us by. We are ready, and all we have to do is settle the practical details.”
“What kind of details?” asked Serazao. She had her arms wrapped tightly around her updrawn knees, and her yellow-hazel eyes were bright and intent in her narrow face.
“Iulan Vai,” said Del from his place near the window. “She isn’t a member of the Circle—so what part does she have in our working?”
There was a silence in the workroom. Del, square and solid and dispassionate, had asked the question that everyone had been worrying about. Arekhon drew breath to give his own opinion on the matter, but at a glance from Yuvaen he let the breath out without speaking.
Finally Kief said, “I think we ought to send her away.”
His voice rang harshly against the gallery’s high ceiling, and Arekhon saw him flinch at the echo. Kief tugged at his early-greying hair with long, nervous fingers and went on, not quite so loudly, “There are other Circles. If she wants training, we can recommend her to one that will train her. If she’s meant to come to this Circle she can return later, when we’re done.”
Narin shook her head. “I don’t know. If Syr Vai brought the wild luck along with her to Demaizen, then we won’t help ourselves any if we send her away. Let her stay and make herself useful. In a working as long as this one’s going to be, we’ll need someone to keep watch and fetch water for the rest of us.”
“That’s another thing,” said Serazao. She turned to Yuvaen. “How long do you expect this working to last?”
“Perhaps as long as a week. Perhaps not.”
Serazao continued to look doubtful. “I’ve never heard of any walk through the Void lasting for more than a day.”
“This one goes beyond the bounds of what we know,” Yuvaen said. “And once we begin it, there’s no stopping.”
“That’s what worries me,” said Delath. “If the working runs into trouble … we’ve lived together in this Circle for years. We know what we’re capable of and how we’ll react, no matter what the emergency. Iulan Vai, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity.”
“We were all unknown quantities once,” Narin said. “And the Circle took us in. You’ve kept quiet so far, ’Rekhe—what do you say?”
Arekhon looked over at Yuvaen, but this time the Second made no gesture for him to keep silent. “I believe that Syr Vai was meant to be here,” he said. “When she became part of the accidental working, she became part of our greater design as well.”
“But what kind of part?” Delath asked. “Yuva, will Garrod give us a ruling on this?”
“No. His part of the working has already begun.”
Narin said, “You’re the Second. Give us a ruling in his place.”
“So be it,” said Yuvaen. “The newcomer stays.”
Iulan Vai sat in a straight-backed chair at the window of her room, looking out over the hills of Demaizen. The room was a small one on the third floor, one of several along a central hallway—guest bedrooms once, when the Old Hall was the heart of the district’s social life, and now living quarters for the Mages of Garrod’s Circle. Of whom she was, apparently, one.
She couldn’t remember the moment when her good-natured exploratory sparring with Ty had transformed into something else. Once or twice in her career as a confidential operative, she had found herself in the position of having to fight for her life, and the episode in the long gallery had possessed some of that same intensity. What was missing from the experience, though, was the driving, knife-sharp underpulse of fear. In fear’s place had come an ecstatic subsumption into rhythm and movement that made the combat into something closer to dance, or to the act of love.
The combination of the two feelings was one she had not experienced before—but one which she already knew she would do much for, in order to experience it again. The ruse she had employed to gain entry into the Hall had turned out to be truth. Now she had to wonder how much of the idea had been her own, and how much of it the luck of the Circle, drawing her in.
If this was going to happen to me, she thought irritably, why did it wait until now?
Footsteps sounded in the hall outside her room, and she turned as the steps halted at the open door. She wasn’t surprised to see that the visitor was Arekhon sus-Khalgath, whose private intention for his beloved in the fleet had meshed with the sparring in the long gallery to create that unexpected—and nearly fatal—transcendence. He had come by the room earlier, a brief and preoccupied stop on the way to what Vai had suspected was a conference on how to handle the problem that she presented.
He didn’t look preoccupied now; in fact, his grey eyes fixed her with a direct and specific regard. She knew a sudden panic fear that the Circle had decided to send her away, and told herself that the fear sprang out of concern for her mission and for her employer’s good.
“What happened this morning—” she began.
Arekhon waved her to silence. “What’s done is done. The important thing is that you’ll be staying here with us, as you asked. You won’t be able to start your instruction right away, though; you’ll have to wait a week, maybe more, until after Garrod’s latest working is done.”
“You’re not sending me away?” she said, and then dealt herself a mental slap for the eagerness that crept into the words. The first rule is never to let them know what you really want.
She discounted automatically the folk-belief that Mages could read minds. No Mage of her admittedly scant acquaintance had ever made that claim, and her own experience was that no one could do so, else she would have been out of a job long since. And if Arekhon had noticed her reaction, he at least had the courtesy not to show it.
“We’re not sending you anywhere,” he as
sured her. He sounded almost apologetic as he went on. “But for the moment you’ll be mostly an outsider. Not completely, though; if you like you can help us by taking care of the chores that would normally fall to the junior member of the Circle. Things like fetching water for those who need it, or dealing with accidental disruptions from outside.”
“I think I can handle that,” she said. “Housebreakers and lightning-rod salesmen get told to come back later.”
He laughed, and the moment of good humor warmed his features in a way that made her unexpectedly aware that Natelth sus-Khalgath’s baby brother was, in fact, a very personable young man indeed. “You’ve got the general idea. It doesn’t sound like much, especially if you’ve been used to holding a lot of responsibility someplace else, but a nonworking watch-keeper is a luxury we hadn’t expected to have until you showed up.”
“It sounds like a great deal of responsibility to me.”
“Some people never see past what’s on the surface,” Arekhon said. “Fortunately for us, you’re not one of them. The working will be starting in a few hours; when the time comes, I’ll send Ty up for you.”
“What, exactly, is the working?” Vai said. It was a reasonable question, one that a newcomer to the Circle could plausibly ask. And as Theledau sus-Radal’s Agent-Principal, she could learn as much from what information she wasn’t given, as from what she was actually told.
But Arekhon answered her at once, with—as far as she could tell—perfect openness, as one member of the Circle would speak to another. “Garrod is going out into the Void in search of a new world, one with people on it. Beyond the Edge.”
“Beyond the Edge,” Vai repeated in a whisper.
“If the thought frightens you—”
“No, no,” she said. “I just didn’t expect to walk into something quite so big.”
“You’ll do fine,” he said. “Rest while you can; I have a few more things to take care of before we start.”
He left. Vai waited until his footsteps had receded into the distance of the stairwell at the other end of the hall. Then she put her hand into her jacket pocket and closed her fingers around a small, flat object about the size and shape of a drinking flask or a hiker’s posit-finder—neither of which it was, though its appearance, when she pulled it out into the open, did a fair job of mimicking the latter tool.
She flipped the case open to reveal a flatscreen and keys like those of a miniature pocket-scribe. Using the stylus from her wildlife observation log, she carefully picked out a message: BELIEVE SUS-PELEDAEN INTEND TRADE BEYOND EDGE. CONFIDENCE LOW. TAKE NO ACTION AT THIS TIME.
Then she erased the visible text, set the flat object on the floor near one of the power lines that fed into her room, and used the stylus to press another key. Her encrypted message entered the house power system, and went along the backflow toward the district distribution system to be lost in the surge and roar of power’s creation.
Long before then, however, the small repeater that Vai had fastened yesterday to the grid between the Old Hall and the nearest substation had already found her intelligence mixed with the carrier. The repeater extracted the message, boosted its strength, and with a tiny camouflaged antenna squirted the information to a fixed satellite belonging to the sus-Radal. From there one copy would go to Vai’s files, with a second copy eyes-only to Theledau syn-Grevi in Hanilat.
That done, Vai closed the device and put it back into her pocket. Then she went downstairs to see if there was anything she could do to help the Circle with its preparations.
17:
Year 1123 E. R.
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
SPACE: SUS-PELEDAEN SHIP WIND-ON-THE-MOUNTAIN
During her employment as a confidential operative for the sus-Radal, Iulan Vai had done any number of unlikely things, but until coming to Demaizen, she had made it her practice to leave the internal workings of the Mage-Circles strictly alone. She had thought, when she left her observation post on the hillside, that a rational calculation of risks and benefits had led her to abandon her usual methods in favor of investigating Garrod’s Circle from within. Since the episode in the long gallery, however, she was no longer certain that rationality had played any part in her decision.
She sat where Yuvaen had directed her, in a corner of the big downstairs room at the heart of the Hall. The Second had told her to care for those members of the Circle who might need help, and had shown her the part of the room where the materials—the water jugs, the extra candles, the ominous, carefully labeled medical packs—were stowed. For the present, at least, she would obey his commands as if she were here to seek instruction.
Heavy black curtains blocked out light from the outside—if the room possessed windows at all, which her mental diagram of the Hall’s exterior dimensions suggested that it did not—and made the room’s size difficult for her to estimate. The only illumination came from fat candles in freestanding holders set around the room’s periphery. The white-painted circle in the middle of the black floor was big enough that all of Garrod’s Circle could kneel around it without crowding.
Except for Garrod himself, they were kneeling there now. All the Mages, from Yuvaen down to young Ty, had short wooden staves lying on the floor in front of them. Some of them had brought to the working the same staves that they habitually wore at their belts, or others much like them; but one or two had weapons considerably more ornate. Narin Iyal from Veredde, for example, who during the day had carried only a polished brown rod of common wood, had a gleaming black staff wrapped with an intricate lacing of silver wire.
The Mages wore hooded robes of black cloth, with plain cloth belts, as well as—on a prosaic note—sturdy but flexible boots. Arekhon’s pair, Vai suspected, had once been part of his sus-Peledaen fleet uniform; they had that look about them. Like the rest of the Mages, he also wore gloves, long and gauntlet-wristed, made of black leather supple enough to let the hand within grasp and move freely.
None of the members of the Circle had moved or spoken since they had taken their places. Vai, in her corner, tried to remain equally still and quiet. She had heard any number of highly colored stones—who had not?—about what could happen during a working. Now she would have the opportunity to learn whether the stories were true.
She heard the door to the room swing open, but no light came in—the wall-enshrouding curtains blocked that source as well. Then she heard the latch click shut. A moment later the yellow candle-flames bent and came straight again as the curtains parted and Garrod stepped through them into the light.
His choice of clothing and equipment for the working startled Vai briefly. Unlike the other Mages, he wasn’t wearing a robe at all. Instead, he had chosen to dress in the fashion of a hiker who planned to spend a week or more rambling through the back-country: Sturdy trousers and high lace-up boots; a many-pocketed cloth jacket similar to the one Vai herself had chosen for her role as an ersatz wildlife observer; and a well-furnished metal-frame pack big enough to hold all the necessities for an extended holiday. Even the staff in his hand, if she overlooked the black wood and the silver bindings, could have been taken for a rover’s cudgel.
The only things that marred the illusion were the breathing mask that Garrod carried slung across one shoulder, and the sailor’s life-vest he wore uninflated over his jacket. Vai was inclined to find those items humorous, until she considered what they meant—that Garrod had no idea what he might encounter at the end of his journey, even to the presence of breathable air or solid ground under his feet.
What will he do, she wondered, if he comes out of the Void in a place where the gravity can crush him flat, or the heat of the sun broil him between one heartbeat and the next?
Considered in that light, it was no wonder that the Mages of the fleet-Circles were so reluctant to find new worlds for trade, if the stargazers couldn’t at least point them to a less-than-fatal destination first. She watched with a new respect as Garrod entered the painted circle, passing between Ty and Yuvaen
and—without pause or sign—vanishing in mid-stride when he reached the center.
Pilot-Ancillary Elaeli Inadi—Inadi syn-Peledaen, the notification of approval for outer-family status having come onto the board as the ship left orbit—eased the waistband of her uniform trousers with her thumb before sealing the front of her tunic and straightening the lower hem. She’d had the new uniform tailored to her measure during her first day in Hanilat on leave from the guardship Wind-on-the-Mountain. But that had been over two weeks ago, and the water-bloating that came with the arrival this morning of her monthly courses was making the snug fit of the trousers just tight enough to be annoying.
The mirror on the inside of her locker door annoyed her further by giving back the reflection of a trim young woman who—regardless of how she felt—looked fit and eager for action. Captain syn-Evarat would have no qualms about keeping her hopping well past the end of her watch.
At least my luck is good, she thought. She closed her locker and headed for the bridge. But I’ve probably got ’Rekhe to thank for that.
There were advantages for an unmarried woman in consorting with a Mage and a luck-maker, and not having to worry about the expiration date on her contraceptive pod was one of them. She’d pushed the renewal on her current one somewhat farther than was prudent. With no need for it on the last voyage, she’d forgotten all about the matter until the fleet came back to Eraasi, and then she hadn’t wanted to waste her precious port time putting up with a week or so of new-implant nausea and fatigue.
As soon as we’re in the Void, she promised herself. I’ll get the Wind’s physician to do it then.
Elaeli, in her rank as Pilot-Ancillary, and now also as part of the family of the sus-Peledaen, had both the right and the obligation to be present on the guardship’s bridge during the jump to transit-in-convoy. Fleet Captain syn-Evarat and Pilot-Principal Kuyiva were already waiting on the bridge when she got there; the rest of the Wind’s bridge crew followed shortly.
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