The Wind would be going ahead of the convoy, as usual, to clear the path on the way to Ayarat, sister-planet to Ildaon—a short voyage this time, as she’d predicted when she spoke to ’Rekhe’s message-taker at the Hall. Ayarat claimed to be the original home of men, and had some fossils that seemed to prove it. Elaeli wasn’t certain she believed in Ayarat’s fossils. Too many other worlds had something similar. Eraasi even had radio sets, or something like them, mixed into sedimentary deposits laid down before the start of the historic record.
Moreover, Ayarat lacked significant in-system reserves of natural adamant, without which the first Void-capable engines could never have been constructed. In fact, the bulk cargo that Wind-on-the-Mountain was guarding on this run consisted mostly of refined adamant for the Ayaratan shipyards, which constructed small short-hop craft under license from the sus-Peledaen. The local builders paid for the license and for the imported materials both, enriching the family considerably in the process.
Unless, of course, somebody decided to attack the convoy and seize the adamant for themselves. The fleet-families weren’t above such tactics, though most of them were inclined these days to contest for trade routes and jump-points instead of cargo. The planetary merchants presented a threat as well: Not all of them appreciated the chance to buy pure Eraasian product at the family’s established price. Sooner or later somebody on Ayarat was going to figure out a way to outfit a locally-designed short-hopper with guns, and then the guardships would have to fight.
The Pilot-Principal cleared his throat. “Transit briefing,” he said, and the faint buzz of conversation among the bridge crew stopped. Elaeli took a step closer to the main chart-reader, not so much to gain a better view as to make a good impression, and looked attentive.
“Flip on chart section one,” the Pilot-Principal continued after he had everyone’s attention. In response to his words, a projection filled the air above the pilot’s station. “Here in-system we’ll be flying the markers. I have the path and times highlighted here, in pink. They’ll be displayed in pseudocolor out of the ports on approach. Marker One-five-seven is our hop, approach along line Two-two-seven true. We should be lined up two markers before. Jump bearing is One-eight-one true on Marker Four-four-three. Normal transit, no emergence for course changes. The emergence pattern for Ayarat is a standard sphere; our sector is dorsal four, distance eight to twenty, guide on the cargo-haulers. From emergence, if we’re in the slot, finding the landing field on Ayarat is their problem. Questions?”
Elaeli shook her head. No one else on the bridge team had any questions either. This was, as the captain had said, a normal run. Half of the guardships would jump before the cargo carriers while the other half watched after the convoy’s departure. The advance force would—at least theoretically-emerge from the Void in an open ball formation. After they had swept the globe’s interior volume clear of any lurking ambushers, the cargo ships would drop out into the protected area, and the remainder of the guardships would follow to strengthen the enclosing sphere.
“Right, then,” Kuyiva said. “Departure is in three hours. Who’s handling the out-leg?” He glanced over at syn-Evarat. “Captain?”
The Fleet-Captain shook his head. “The Pilot-Ancillary takes it.”
So much for a short watch, thought Elaeli, resigned.
“She’ll want to finish her qualifications in a hurry,” syn-Evarat continued. “Good news makes a fortunate beginning for a voyage, and we have word today that Pilot-Ancillary Inadi is going on to better things. She’s syn-Peledaen now, and after this run she’s off to the family yards to work on new construction.”
The Fleet-Captain was looking pleased; the new billet must have been his pet project for her advancement, as the adoption had been ’Rekhe’s. “Plate-owner of a fresh craft—it was years before I was honored like that. You have luck, Inadi.”
“Thank you,” said Elaeli, as the bridge crew cheered and applauded and a few of the younger, rowdier ones made a show of tapping at her insignia to see if some of her good luck would rub off on them. What she actually had was cramps—but this didn’t seem to be the time to say so.
Arekhon knelt on the painted floorboards and let the clean, waxy smell of burning candles drift around him on the barely moving air. His staff lay on the floor in front of him, a horizontal slash of silver and ebony against the white of the circle. He focused his thoughts and his gaze on that bold design of black and white.
The world around him receded from his awareness, and his mind slid out of the physical universe and into the interior landscape of the working—not a garden, as the Circle’s intentions often seemed to him, or a flowing river, but a harsh expanse of broken stone. There was no help here in his vision, and no sustenance, save what he had brought with him.
The eiran coiled around him where he knelt on the rough ground, and ran outward again toward the distant parts of the universe. He took the threads into his hands and sorted through them for those he knew best: Yuvaen, steady and dependable; Narin, whose self-effacement could never entirely hide her strength; and Ty, with the undefined boundaries of the mystic—a thread not unlike what little he could perceive of his own.
He followed the lines out to where they intertwined with the rest of the Circle, and beyond, as the single many-twisted cable of their collective will wound itself around the heavy, pulsing line that was Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen, walking through the Void. The Circle had tied itself to him, to hold him, to find him again. The rope of their combined intention would not be unwound until his return.
There was another line among the many that stretched across the rocky landscape—this one was rough with luck, in flecks of scarlet and grey amid the silver, and he knew without having to search further that it belonged to the newcomer, Iulan Vai. She was here as she had said she would be, apart from the greater working, an observer only.
Arekhon stood. The sun above him was harsh and burning, in spite of the cold wind that blew across the field of stone. He had made a decision—or had chosen one possible future out of many; here in the landscape of his mind the two were often the same—and it was time to act upon it. Iulan Vai would be a member of the Demaizen Circle.
He reached for the grey and scarlet cord and pulled it toward him, then looped it around the width of Garrod’s line. Then he brought another loop of the grey and scarlet to an upthrust spike of rock, and tied it into place.
There. He regarded the result of his efforts with satisfaction. She is bound to us, and we to her. For the time of this working, and after.
18:
Year 1123 E. R.
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
Vai began to lose track of how long she had waited in the darkened room. The timepiece on her wrist told her it was the tenth hour of the morning, but without the evidence of the guttering candles—she’d had to replace all of them once already, and she’d soon need to do it again—she wouldn’t have known that a day and a night had already passed.
Thinking about it, she discovered she was hungry. Yuvaen hadn’t said anything about the observer not leaving the room; she slipped through the opening in the curtains and out the door. In the deserted kitchen, she made herself a quick meal of bread and cold meat, something she could eat out of hand without wasting time, and hurried back to the meditation room.
It occurred to her that with the First of the Circle gone away in the Void and the other Mages intent upon the working, now might be a good time to search the Hall for information of interest to the sus-Radal. She considered the idea for a moment, then put it aside. The search, if she did it thoroughly, would keep her away from the meditation room for several hours, and she might be needed during that time. A genuine student of the Circle, such as she was pretending to be, would never take such a risk. Her brief foray into the kitchen had kept her away long enough.
She made a quick circuit of the downstairs, checking all the locks and finding them in order, then slipped back into the curtained room. Her eyes took a fe
w seconds to adjust to the comparative darkness; when they did, she saw that nothing had changed since she left. The Mages still knelt in their Circle with their staves laid out before them, and neither moved nor spoke.
Vai cleaned the candle stubs out of the holders and put in new ones, then settled back in her corner to wait some more. The candles had not burned for long this time before a faint, hoarse voice broke into the silence.
“Water.”
It was Arekhon sus-Khalgath who spoke, and Vai could tell by looking at him that he didn’t see any part of his physical surroundings. She filled a metal cup with water from one of the insulated jugs, then brought it to him and wrapped his hands around it. Thus prompted, he drank, without turning his gaze away from whatever inward landscape commanded his awareness.
After a moment’s thought, she filled the cup again and offered it to Yuvaen in the same way. When the Second responded, like Arekhon, by emptying the cup, she went on to bring water to the rest of the Circle as well. All of them drank, but none spoke except for Ty, who whispered “more” while looking at infinity with unseeing eyes.
She brought him a second cupful, noting how the working so far had left blue-purple shadows under his eyes and hollows under his cheekbones, and went back to her vigil. How long, she wondered, would it take a man to traverse the interstellar gap from edge to edge? All that she knew about walking through the Void came from popular stories, and made the journey from one place to another sound almost instantaneous, like opening a door and stepping through it into the adjoining room.
She was beginning to understand that the popular stories had lied. Twice more, the candles burnt down and she replaced them; and more than twice she made her circuit of the kneeling Mages with a mug of water in hand, pressing the rim against parched lips. One of the insulated jugs was already empty.
And still Garrod had not come back. The members of his Circle kept up their vigil, barely speaking and barely moving, and Vai cared for all of them as best she could.
She slept in brief snatches, never longer than a few minutes at a time. At intervals, when she remembered to do so, she went down to the kitchen for food, since there was no point in letting herself become as worn-out and exhausted as the Mages she was tending. None of them had slept, or taken anything but water, since the working began.
As the days wore on, she began to fear for their health. When she left the meditation room, she had to force herself to stay away long enough to feed herself and check on the hall’s external security. The thought that something might go wrong in her absence pulled on her like an elastic cord, and the farther from the Circle she went, the stronger the tension became.
Sometime during the fourth day, the young Mage with the curly silver-brown hair—Kief—gave a low moan and collapsed into a crumpled black-robed heap. She hurried over to him, and saw that he’d gone so pale that even his lips seemed bloodless. Drops of sweat gathered on his forehead, and he was shivering.
He needs to be put to bed … and maybe turned over to Garrod’s medical aiketen down in the basement first.
But that wasn’t going to be possible. “Nobody leaves the Circle until the working is finished,” Yuvaen had cautioned her, days ago now. “We lie where we fall.”
A pile of folded blankets lay in the corner with the water jugs. Vai used one of the blankets to make Kief a rough pallet next to his place in the Circle, a second to lift up his feet, and a third to wrap him warmly. Then she settled cross-legged on the floor beside him to wait—and to wonder how many others she would be tending before Garrod returned.
For Arekhon, the realization that failure was near came gradually. He had wandered for a long time in the private places of his mind, chief among them the field of bare stone, where the eiran of the Circle combined to hold tightly the single cord that was Garrod. Now and again he let himself return to an awareness of the physical chamber where he and the rest of the Circle knelt. Iulan Vai was there, with water—he saw how the eiran twisted around her, and knew that his binding held true. Always, though, he went back to the place of stone.
He didn’t know why the working had chosen to embody itself for him in such an unfamiliar configuration. No place that he’d ever seen on Eraasi looked like this, and no place on any of the worlds that he’d encountered during his apprenticeship with the fleet.
A reflection, he thought, of how things are.
Or of how they will be.
He shivered a little. The barren landscape did not attract him, either as an image of some real but unknown locality, or as a metaphor for something internal to himself. Then he felt a pang of guilt for fretting about his own affairs in the midst of a working, and turned back to the cable of twisted silver that was the luck of the Demaizen Circle.
The cable still anchored Garrod’s single cord to the rock beneath—but Arekhon saw with dismay that the cord itself was stretching and attenuating, growing thinner at its nearer end. If the knot slipped free, Garrod would be lost.
Arekhon opened his eyes, but held on to the secondary reality of the working, so that he saw with doubled vision—the candle-lit, curtain-shrouded darkness of the meditation chamber, overlaid with the stony expanse of the unknown landscape. He looked across the cracked and streaky whiteness of the painted circle, and saw that Yuvaen had opened his eyes to look across the circle back at him.
“More power,” Yuvaen said. The Second’s voice was hoarse and rusty. “We need more power, if we want to bring Garrod back across the Void.”
Arekhon had seen how the eiran of the Circle were slipping away from what they sought to hold; he knew what sort of power would be needed to pull Garrod home. It was for this, after all—not for his family’s star charts, and not for his own fleet training, not even for an extra hand in the day-to-day administration of the Circle’s business—that Garrod had chosen to name him Third to Yuvaen’s Second.
He picked up his staff and rose to his feet. His knees creaked and popped with the motion after kneeling for so long, and his head felt light.
“As the universe wills it,” he said, and brought his staff up into guard. “So let it be done.”
Vai had given up expecting anyone in the Circle to move—unless, like Kief, their bodily endurance failed them and they collapsed where they knelt. She was no longer certain why she herself maintained her vigil, except that Arekhon sus-Khalgath had asked it of her, and she had agreed.
Then Yuvaen opened his eyes and spoke. “More power. We need more power, if we want to bring Garrod back across the Void.”
Across the painted circle from him, Arekhon stood. “As the universe wills it. So let it be done.”
Yuvaen rose also, and lifted his staff. He moved stiffly at first, as had Arekhon—nobody could remain motionless for so long and not show the effects—but in short order the awkwardness faded. Good training, thought Vai appreciatively, just before the staves began to glow.
She had known from reports and stories that such a thing might happen. She even had a hazy memory of seeing her practice staff burn golden when she sparred with Ty. But the former was all hearsay rather than direct experience, and as for the latter … her state of consciousness had not been normal at the time. Neither research nor memory had prepared her for the moment when Yuvaen was no longer holding a cubit and a half of polished wood, but a bar of living flame, red as blood and hot as the inside of a star.
The two men met in the center of the circle. Their staves touched lightly, burning crimson against deep violet, in a contact that was half a formal salute and half a gauge of strength. After that came a few slow moves, almost a dance, as they worked together to stretch muscles and loosen joints.
Then, without warning, the pace and timbre of the combat changed. Arekhon dropped into a low position, his knees bent, and slashed to the right with the tip of his staff. Yuvaen blocked farther to the right—no gentle tapping of staves this time, but a full-strength encounter that rang out like a wooden gong—and stepped in closer to smash his staff across Arekho
n’s spine and kidneys.
Vai drew a sharp breath. This was not merely sparring at full strength; in her professional career she had seen enough blows delivered with killing intent that she could tell the difference.
Arekhon sus-Khalgath and Yuvaen syn-Deriot were good friends and close colleagues, and this was a fight to the death.
Blazing pain drove Arekhon forward. Yuvaen had struck him a blow meant not to raise welts or leave bruises, but to crush anything in its path. Arekhon went with the motion—diving, rolling, and coming back to his feet again facing the Second. He shifted his grip upward on his staff, to shorten it. If Yuvaen attempted to get inside his reach again, he’d be ready.
Two fast blows came in, overhand, aimed at his head. Yuva wasn’t a man for playing the same trick twice, even in practice or the lesser workings. Far less now, in this.
Arekhon blocked, and blocked again. His hand stung with the blows, and the bones of his arm seemed to vibrate from the marrow out, but the voice of the meeting staves shivered through his open and receptive mind like music. What had been inert wood under his hands the moment before, now gave out light against the darkness, weaving lines of deep, intense violet against Yuva’s fiery red.
A net fit to draw in all the luck of the universe, Arekhon thought, and beat down Yuvaen’s staff to take it out of guard. The lines of red and violet tightened, entangling the floating silver eiran and pulling them into accordance with the Circle’s will. But not yet strong enough.
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