Not yet.
He thrust toward Yuvaen’s belly. Yuva struck the blow aside. Arekhon stepped forward into the opening and smashed his staff butt-end upward against the point of Yuvaen’s chin, so that the Second’s head snapped backward with the force of the blow. Arekhon had no time to appreciate the changing patterns of colored light and silver thread—an instant later his skull rang and his vision blurred as Yuvaen struck him on the side of his head, beside his left ear.
When his eyes cleared somewhat he saw that he was back in the stony place of his working imagery. There was the great cable of the Circle’s bound and unified will, and there was the fading and attenuated cord that was Garrod, slipping away.
Not enough. Still not enough.
Yuvaen was facing him here as well, looming black-clad and indestructible, driving a blow past Arekhon’s guard into the ribs on his right side. Arekhon felt bone shatter under the blow, and more pain flared with his next breath from the broken rib-ends grating together, but the cable of the great working shone with renewed light.
Arekhon let out a gasp of satisfaction and struck at Yuvaen in his turn. Bone broke—in Yuvaen’s upper arm, this time; Arekhon felt it go. The Second grunted with the pain, but the lines of life and luck grew even brighter, and the barren field seemed warmer than before. Then Arekhon realized that the warmth was his own blood from a lacerated scalp, flowing down over his face.
Yuvaen’s foot slipped, turning on a pebble or a shard of loosened rock, and his concentration wavered with the momentary loss of balance. Arekhon saw it—a shift in the pattern, an opening—and his staff slashed forward and took Yuva straight across the eyes, shattering the orbits, crushing the nasal bone, and sending Yuvaen’s blood flying outward in a bright spray of red.
The blood was everywhere—even the rocks were covered with it—and Yuvaen’s staff took up the color and increased its light tenfold. Arekhon had never seen the like.
Garrod’s line was no longer slipping away. The power drawn in by the working was making it stronger, holding it tighter to its homeworld … but holding only.
Not enough.
Arekhon didn’t know if the thought was his, or Yuvaen’s, or if the difference even mattered.
Still not enough.
He slammed his staff forward again, striking at Yuvaen’s already shattered face with all his strength.
Yuvaen stood, accepting the destruction. Arekhon felt his friend’s skull collapsing inward under the blow, doing damage that could never be repaired. Power was everywhere, flowing outward—
—still not enough—
—and Yuvaen lashed out with a blow to Arekhon’s injured side that drove fragments of bone deeper into the wound—
—all we have, if it takes all we have—
Then, with a blaze of light, Yuvaen fell.
Vai saw the last blows of the combat like explosions of color in the darkened room. Synesthesia, her mind told her; your senses are blurring things together. But what her mind said didn’t matter; she knew that the room was full of a network of silver lines, stretching out over everything and growing steadily brighter.
She shook her head, trying to see past the lights and colors to what she would have thought of, a few days ago, as the only reality. She didn’t succeed in banishing her new vision completely, but after considerable effort she was able to push the silvery lacework into the back of her awareness and see instead the room around her.
There was blood inside the painted circle, clots and spatters of it on the white floorboards, and more of it matting ’Rekhe’s hair and flying away in droplets as he moved. Yuvaen stepped in a patch of the smeared blood and the sole of his boot slid a few inches before he caught his balance—a second later, he recovered, but it was too late. Arekhon’s staff swung round and caught him in the face.
Vai bit her lip. That was a killing blow, even if Yuvaen hadn’t yet given in to it, and Arekhon was making ready to strike again. Yuvaen put up no defense; he must have known that there was no point. Instead, he drove in one more bone-crushing assault on Arekhon’s injured side. Then Arekhon hit him for the last time, and the silver cords pulled so tight around Vai that she cried out aloud.
The sound of her voice was muffled by the thick black curtains. Arekhon stood alone in the middle of the circle with Yuvaen dead at his feet, and the silver cords were drawing tighter because he held them all in his hands. She felt his strength failing as he pulled against something she couldn’t see.
“Narin!” he called. “Help me!”
The woman from Veredde picked up her staff and rose to her feet.
“As the universe wills,” she said, and struck at him in the next instant, without pausing to salute or come to guard.
Arekhon blocked the attack—it was a beautiful move, smooth and instinctive despite the injuries he had taken, and Vai marveled at it. His counter-strike nearly did for Narin as he had done for Yuvaen a few seconds earlier, but the islander turned the blow in time. Then, suddenly, she dropped her staff and sank to her knees.
“He’s moving!” she shouted. “He’s coming near—’Rekhe, help me pull!”
Arekhon threw his staff aside, out of the painted circle, and gripped Narin’s shoulders. Vai felt the cords that bound her go taut and shiver with the effort the two Mages were exerting—something’s tied me into this, she thought; I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to get loose. The pull drew her up to her feet. Despite her attempts to withstand it she began edging forward, closer to the circle’s boundary.
Then she felt the resistance at the far end of the cords give way. Narin collapsed onto her hands and knees, taking Arekhon down with her. At the center of the circle a figure appeared, took a step forward, staggered, and started to fall.
Nobody else was moving; the working had left them spent. Vai sprang forward, caught the man by the shoulders, and eased him to the floor.
It took a moment for her to recognize Garrod syn-Aigal. The First of the Demaizen Circle had not been a young man before he left on his journey, but now he was old. His face was lined and wrinkled, bearded rather than cleanshaven, and his grizzled black hair had gone completely grey. Even his clothes were not the practical garments she had seen before. The fabrics likewise were unfamiliar, either synthetic or derived from natural substances she didn’t recognize. Their colors seemed equally strange, garish where she would have expected dull, and muted where they should have been bright.
Garrod’s body was jerking spasmodically, his mouth working and his eyelids twitching. He shouted a phrase in a language Vai didn’t understand, and lay still.
19:
Year 1123 E. R.
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
THE VOID
Arekhon felt nothing, only a great, echoing emptiness. Blood was everywhere, on his face and on his hands; he knelt in a puddle of it. Yuvaen’s blood … Yuva was dead, gone in the working.
Somewhere far away over his head, there were voices.
“Bring a stretcher, quickly.” Vai, the newcomer, the unfamiliar accent stronger in her voice than before. “We have to get him down to the infirmary.”
He heard the shuffling of feet and the whisper of robes … not everyone was dead, then; that was good … and Serazao’s voice choking out a phrase in a language he didn’t understand. He heard the distress in it, though, and tried to rise … he was the Second, if Yuva was dead, and it was the Second’s place to deal with such things … but the effort caused his broken ribs to grate together so that his head swam with the pain.
“Help him, then.” Vai again, her voice sharper than before. Something was wrong … not just the end of the working … Arekhon tried again to stand up.
This time somebody was beside him, helping him rise and taking most of his weight: Serazao, from the thin, strong hands and the faint odor of spice-flower soap.
“Up you go, ‘Rekhe.” ’Zao’s voice was steadier, but whatever had caused her to cry out in her birth-tongue had not gone away. “Let’s get you
downstairs.”
“Who else … ?” His tongue felt thick in his mouth, and he had to struggle to think of the words he needed to say. “The working … what happened?”
“It’s done,” ’Zao said. “Garrod is back.”
Her words heartened him, even through the fog of pain. “Then it was enough,” he said. “So long as we didn’t fail.”
Later that night—much later—Iulan Vai came back to the bedroom that had been assigned to her over a week before. She was dead tired, but full of an adrenaline-charged restlessness; she knew from experience that it would be some time before she could relax enough to sleep. The medical aiketen in the infirmary belowstairs had labored over the injured members of Garrod’s Circle from afternoon until well after dark, mending broken bone and damaged tissue. For Kief, and even for Arekhon, all that remained was a time of rest and nourishment, so that their own bodies could finish the processes already begun.
About Garrod, Vai wasn’t so sanguine. The First of the Circle had not regained consciousness under the ministrations of the aiketen, and the Mages who had touched him to carry him downstairs were grim and closemouthed about what, if anything, they had sensed from the contact. And Yuvaen … tomorrow they would bury Yuvaen.
She’d asked Narin Iyal what should be done about the late Second—thinking that someone, surely, had to be notified about what had happened. The other woman had shaken her head.
“The Circles bury their own,” Narin said. “The sus-Demaizen had a family crypt, not far from the hall. Garrod meant for us to use that, if we ever needed to.”
“Shouldn’t we tell the watch?” In Vai’s experience, the district watch had an inconveniently strong interest in knowing who had died within their purview, and for what reasons. Maybe in the countryside it was different, but she didn’t think so. “Or his family?”
“Later,” said Narin. “Yuva was ours, and it’s for us to care for him. There are five of us still on our feet; enough for what needs to be done.”
What needs to be done …
Vai, remembering, sighed and extracted the signaling device from her pocket, where it had lain forgotten during the whole length of the great working. She sat cross-legged on her bed in the darkened room and contemplated the device’s tiny backlit screen. There were other things that needed to be done as well, and she had to decide how she was going to handle them.
Slowly, with her stylus, she began picking out a message.
DEMAIZEN WORKING FAILED. GARROD INCAPACITATED. ANTICIPATE CIRCLE BREAKUP WITHIN THREE MONTHS.
She stared at the finished text until the letters lost all significance and became random lines and dots on the pale violet of the messager’s screen. If what she had written was true, her work here for the sus-Radal was done … a dead end, no profit, time to go home.
But had she, in fact, written the truth? Something had happened during the working, and the Garrod who had returned was not the same as the Garrod who had left. Where had he been, that had aged him decades in the span of a week, and who had given him that unfamiliar clothing?
A jab of her stylus consigned Vai’s first report to oblivion. She tried again.
DEMAIZEN WORKING SUCCESSFUL. CONTACT MADE BEYOND THE EDGE.
There. That was right. Time to send it off to her employer and be done.
She didn’t move. The pale violet backlighting of the display screen shone at her, unblinking, in the dark. Finally, she erased her second attempt as well.
Entering the third draft of her report took a long time, because her hands were shaking.
ALL QUIET AT DEMAIZEN. NO RESULTS AS YET. CONTINUING SURVEILLANCE.
Quickly, before she could think better of what she had done, she placed the device next to her room’s power line and started the message on its way to Hanilat.
He was Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen, and the first lesson that he had taught to his Circle was this: In the Void all places and times are one. To seek for a place within the Void, therefore, is to find it, and to make the journey is to arrive. He stepped away from the meditation chamber at Demaizen Old Hall, and began the walk that would take him across the interstellar gap to the still-unknown world that existed—would have to exist, since he had resolved to find it—somewhere on the other side.
The Void itself stretched out around him like an expanse of featureless grey nothing, full of a pale mist that curled about his feet and wrapped in tendrils around his legs and torso. He knew that the mist was not real, that he only saw it as mist because—like the numbers and equations contained in Arekhon’s star chart—its true nature was something that a human mind and body had no means of understanding.
He felt a rumbling, a deep vibration coming up through the soles of his feet, as if some immense and unseen thing was causing the nonexistent ground to tremble beneath him. The vibration from below was matched by a sound in the air, a stir in the nothingness, a low growl half-heard, half-sensed.
He turned toward the thing that his mind perceived as a sound, and saw a dark line out at the limit of his vision, something that looked like a vertical stroke of charcoal on a grey background. The mark appeared to grow higher and thicker as he walked toward it, or as it came toward him, and the vibration coming up through his feet became a sharp tingling, like the points of needles.
The black mark took shape and became a solid, three-dimensional object, protruding from the substance of the Void like a rock out of the sea. And like a rock surrounded by angry waves, the darkly glistening object rose up from a swirl of turbulent mist.
As the object drew closer to him, he saw that it was not a rock but a starship, the largest one that he had ever seen. Pale roundels and oblongs marked out windows high above along its curving sides; fleeting shadows within betrayed where officers paced or looked out upon their featureless domain. The mist cut away from the nose of the craft like the bow wave of an ocean-going vessel straining under full sail.
The starship’s hull bore no insignia or family colors that Garrod recognized. Neither could he identify the design of the craft, or the yard which had constructed it—and there were few enough builders of starships in the homeworlds that a man with a good eye and a retentive memory could know them all.
It was a ship, then, from beyond the Edge.
The great ship bore down upon him, pushing the Void away before it in a surge of white mist. He let the massive bow wave take him and drive him under, out of the grey nothingness and into the world he had come so far to find.
As she had expected, Vai found herself unable to sleep. After spending so long isolated from the normal rhythms of day and night, napping fitfully when she slept at all, her natural cycles of rest and waking were in complete disarray. The disruption, coupled with the aftereffects of prolonged tension upon her body’s chemistry, kept her eyes open and her nerves on edge even after the other inhabitants of Demaizen Old Hall had settled at last into exhausted sleep.
She thought of going back to the basement infirmary and requesting a sedative from the dispenser there, but feared that the unit’s resident aiketh would not consider mere restlessness a sufficient need. One of the Circle’s established members could probably override the unit’s prohibitions, but in the haste and confusion of the past week, Vai had never been introduced to the house-mind. She had the talent and knowledge to deal with that obstacle as well, but considered it impolite to do so for a trivial cause. She lay for a while staring at the ceiling of her room, considering various methods of circumventing the dispenser.
None of them appealed to her, and she abandoned the idea. After a while she threw aside the covers and got out of bed. It was for the sake of taking care of the Circle that she’d gotten out of the habit of sleeping; maybe if she checked on the survivors of the working one more time, her mind would relax long enough for her body to give in to exhaustion.
A worn but sturdy night-robe had been lying folded at the foot of her bed since the day she came to the Hall: Somebody’s cast-off, presumably, pressed into service as
sleeping gear for an unexpected visitor who had arrived with the scantiest of personal effects. Vai, who habitually slept without clothing, had ignored it until now. She belted the robe around her and padded out into the darkened hallway.
No sound came from Garrod’s room, where the First of the Circle lay in his unresponsive stupor, with Narin to watch over him. Vai had offered to take her place, since Narin was almost as wrung-out as Kief and Arekhon, but the other woman had said no—better for Garrod to encounter a familiar face upon waking, if he ever woke. Narin herself was nodding in her chair; Vai left that room undisturbed, and continued upon her self-imposed round of inspection.
The carpet in the upstairs hall was old, like so much of Demaizen, and the worn patches scratched at the soles of her bare feet. She checked the other bedrooms each in turn; none of Garrod’s Mages bothered to lock their doors at night, and for one of Vai’s talents it was easy work to slip into a room and out again unnoticed by a sleeping occupant.
Ty, judging from his regular breathing, was deep in recuperative slumber, as was the gently snoring Delath. Both of them, she thought, would be back to normal—in body, at least—by the time they woke up in the morning. Kief, she estimated after observing him for a short period, would need at least another day in bed to recover, though his sleep, too, was peaceful. Serazao slept also, but uneasily; she had tangled herself in her blankets, and as Vai approached her bedside she flung out an arm and muttered a disjointed phrase before once again lying still.
The last room belonged to Arekhon sus-Khalgath. Vai paused outside the door, struggling against a sudden urge to flee Demaizen Old Hall before the sun came up in the morning. She knew, with a certainty that went beyond reason, that if she stayed with Garrod’s Circle nothing would ever be the same again … not with her life, and not with far more than her life alone.
The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Page 17