The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “It’s time to move on,” Narin said. “Will you come with me? I have to talk with ’Rekhe.”

  “High time. But we’ll have to find him first.”

  It took longer than Narin had anticipated. Arekhon had kept his old room, rather than moving into the larger chamber left empty by Yuvaen’s death, but this morning he was not in either one. Kief, in the kitchen, and Ty, in the library, didn’t know where he was either. Vai, sweat-covered from solo exercise in the gallery, thought he had left the building. A check in the former stables showed that the ground-car wasn’t missing. If he was out, he couldn’t have gone far.

  “What now?” Serazao asked. The two women stood beside the stable door, looking out across the grounds of the estate.

  Narin didn’t reply for a few moments. Then she pointed toward a wooded hill that stood off to the southeast. “Let’s go that way.”

  Narin had always been good at finding lost people and things. When the two women had climbed the hill—not a great walk, but strenuous, over steep ground covered by mosses and rounded stones—they found Arekhon sitting under a tree with his staff across his lap. He was looking down at the Old Hall where it stood below them in the distance, its blank windows reflecting the morning sun. Something about his expression made Narin wonder if Yuvaen had been the lucky one in the great working after all.

  To give so much, and to have it come to nothing … and now we’re about to ask him for even more.

  But there wasn’t any help for it. She moved into his field of vision, deliberately breaking his concentration, and said, “We can’t wait any longer. You have to become the First, if the Circle is going to continue.”

  Arekhon looked up at her. “By Yuva’s death I’m Second, nothing more. Garrod is First, while he lives.”

  “Garrod,” said Serazao flatly, “is incapable.”

  “We need you, ’Rekhe,” Narin said in a more reasonable tone. “We’re just going through the motions down there. Without guidance, without a controlling hand, it’s all going to fall apart. We’ll drift off to other Circles, and spend the rest of our lives doing safe, tidy little workings—and what will become of Garrod’s vision then?”

  Arekhon shook his head. “Garrod is still alive.”

  “Yes, he’s alive. He had a goal, and he came near it. Now he needs you to carry on his work.”

  “I will not be the First.” Arekhon’s protest was weaker this time, and Narin saw her opening.

  “No,” she agreed. “Garrod is First. But you have to lead us in his name until he comes to himself again.”

  Garrod continued his measurements of the skies. The days on this world were longer than he was used to on Eraasi, but each daylight period was shorter and each dark period was longer now than the one before, as if what might be the equivalent of winter was approaching. From time to time, the flying disks passed by, but he was unable to assign either a schedule or a pattern to their movements.

  Two days after his initial sighting of the flying disks, his patience was rewarded.

  Just before the sun rose, but while the sky was growing light, he heard a sound coming from the east, a growling noise with a high-pitched whine beneath it. The noise grew louder, and from around a bend came three boxy vehicles, roughly rectangular but with the forward ends sloped sharply downward. The vehicles moved at a walking pace. Ahead and on either side of them, and behind them, loped men.

  Or at least, Garrod gave them that name by courtesy. They were bipedal, and progressed with jogging movements. Round heads surmounted their trunks, and they had arms with hands. Their knees bent in the same way that his did. But while similar in their rough outlines to the people of Eraasi and the other worlds on the far side of the interstellar gap, these were crudely misshapen. Their eyes were too large, their bodies too thick and coarse.

  The vehicles they escorted had no wheels, but stood above the surface of the road, not touching it. Garrod nodded to himself, understanding now both the road’s apparent disuse and the lack of any tall-standing overgrowth. Vehicles here used a method of propulsion similar to the counterforce units used in free-moving aiketen on Eraasi.

  But these units would have to be much more powerful, Garrod reflected. The tinkerers at home would love to get their hands on one and take it apart for comparison.

  Garrod watched the vehicles as they passed from east to west and vanished again around a turn. They had scarcely gone out of sight before a flash of light came from that direction, followed by a column of white smoke. An instant later, the sound came to him: A loud whump, muffled by distance.

  Three black vee-shaped flying objects—small ones, like the flying disks—came out of the west to dive and circle around the source of the rising smoke. Lines of light shot up from the ground in response. A beam touched one of the flying vees, and it exploded in mid-flight.

  More smoke floated upward. The piercing beams stopped. Minutes passed. Three smaller explosions sounded, in rapid but paced cadence.

  Garrod watched, and kept still. Then, with a rumble of jets, a winged craft rose vertically from beyond where the smoke had risen. The flyer was painted in a flat, dark color, black against the sky. Its downward-pointing jets swiveled, and with a rising whine it shot away to the west.

  The smoke from the encounter drifted away on the wind. The sun continued on its upward course. No sound, no motion, came from the road below. At last Garrod stood, picked up his pack, and walked downhill. He turned west, toward where the smoke had been.

  He didn’t have far to go. The vehicles, their counterforce units dead, lay smashed and fallen to the surface of the road. Their rear doors hung open, marked with the scorching of explosives. Their interiors were empty.

  The men who had accompanied the convoy were here, too. They were all dead, their bodies as torn and broken as the vehicles they had guarded. Garrod could see now that what he had taken for misshapen bodies were in truth only shells, heavy suits containing mechanical aids to their muscles. The young men who had worn the suits looked as human as he did. Any one of them—if he were not bloody, broken, and burned—could have walked unnoticed through downtown Hanilat.

  Garrod said the prayers of well-wishing for the dead, and turned away.

  Theledau syn-Grevi contemplated the racks of reports that his agents had brought him, and swiveled in his chair so that the reports lay behind his back.

  All the information in the world, he thought, and not one hard fact in any of it.

  Outside the windows of his office the towers of central Hanilat thrust up against the skyglow. He would be late arriving home tonight; the moon was already rising, and he would have to keep the hour of watch later than was proper. But he would not forego it. He had given up enough of what he valued in order to come to this city he did not like, to labor for the good of the sus-Radal.

  As he had done all day, and was still doing. The key to the future, if one existed, had to lie in the mysterious reports he had gotten from Iulan Vai. His Agent-Principal had always shown an uncanny knack for turning up at the center of the real concern while others remained distracted by trivialities—and Iulan Vai had left Hanilat without notice, delegating her investigations in the city entirely to her subordinates. She had gone instead to Demaizen Old Hall, where Garrod syn-Aigal and his hand-picked Circle were doing … something.

  Thel considered the two cryptic messages he had gotten from Vai since the beginning of her investigation.

  BELIEVE SUS-PELEDAEN INTEND TRADE BEYOND EDGE. CONFIDENCE LOW. TAKE NO ACTION AT THIS TIME.

  ALL QUIET AT DEMAIZEN. NO RESULTS AS YET. CONTINUING SURVEILLANCE.

  He had gone over and over the brief communications, trying to determine what his Agent-Principal had intended to convey. That whatever Garrod had been up to was a failure? If so, then why continue her investigation—and if it was not a failure, then why report that there had been no results? He could only trust in Vai’s competence and hope that she would enlighten him.

  In the meantime, one thing was c
lear: If the sus-Peledaen meant to trade beyond the Edge, they would need to build more ships. And so would he—ships faster and stronger and farther-ranging than any vessels his rivals might send out on such a journey.

  He turned back to his desk to write the appropriate orders.

  Narin had been wrong. It wasn’t going to work.

  Arekhon sat in Garrod’s study, at Garrod’s desk, toying with the pens and the writing pads. Through the half-drawn curtains, the tall window showed low grey clouds. Late autumn had given way overnight to the chill wind and rain of early winter. The study was dim and gloomy, but Arekhon hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights. The cold, clammy day suited his mood.

  It was all very well for Narin to say that he should lead the Circle in Garrod’s name. Leading required a direction, and he had none. Instead, the Circle was spinning away from him—he could feel it. They had failed, and a path was not clear before him. He could not recover the disaster.

  The star charts he had brought from home, that he had opened for Garrod with such pride and enthusiasm, lay in their leather case on a chair against the far wall. He would have to give them back to Natelth the next time he journeyed to Hanilat on Circle business, if he ever had any Circle business to transact.

  He was ready to go down to the kitchen—someone would always be in the kitchen—and tell them all to go away. To find other Circles. That this was no place for them. Yuvaen and Garrod had defied the gods, and now they were both gone.

  Instead he did nothing but play with the small objects on the desk.

  Then a mad feeling seized him, and he swept his arm across the desktop, clearing it of papers and pens and useless, outdated data wafers. He stood. A secret existed, and the universe was concealing it. Perhaps studying the chart would bring new insight, another line of attack, and the Circle would continue, made stronger and bound more tightly by its losses.

  Arekhon removed the charts from their case, and took down the reader from the bookshelf where it had been stored. A small voice whispered to him that his real motive in not breaking up the Circle lay in his new-found discovery of a warm and experienced bed-partner, present on a nightly basis, not merely whenever her ship was in, and he was in town, and if no other obligations got in the way.

  He pushed away the thought as unworthy of the meditation—the private meditation—that he intended, and inserted the reader into the desktop. The lights flashed and cycled, and he slid the first chart into the slot. The reader snortled, sounding like the antique that it was, and the lights of the worlds and the shipping lines came up.

  There was the dark border, the Edge beyond which nothing existed, nothing was known. And there, in the uncharted space beyond it—Arekhon leaned forward in his chair, feeling his face grow hot with amazement—glowed a single white light.

  Alone and isolated.

  Impossibly far away.

  But real. In a place that had held nothing but darkness the last time he’d seen this chart, there stood now the marker for a world rich in all resources, ready for trade at advantageous bargains.

  “Son of a bitch,” Arekhon breathed. “Garrod. You left a beacon for us on the other side.”

  22:

  Year 1123 E. R.

  ERAASI: HANILAT STARPORT

  ILDAON: COUNTRY HOUSE OF ELEK GRIAT

  BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: GARROD’S WORLD

  Natelth sus-Khalgath had been away from home for ten days, making a formal tour of the new starships under construction in the family’s orbital yards. He hadn’t enjoyed the excursion. Travel beyond the homeworld’s atmosphere didn’t appeal to him, and he had done as little of it as possible after completing his apprentice voyage. But as head of the sus-Peledaen, Natelth was expected to visit new ships—not every vessel that was built, certainly, but any time there was a significant change in the design—and he didn’t believe in skimping on family duty out of personal dislike.

  The front rooms of the town house were empty when he returned. He surrendered his impedimenta to the entryway aiketh, a black-and-silver model that hovered a little above the floor on its pocket-sized counterforce unit. The aiketh floated off toward his rooms upstairs, sagging a little under the weight of the luggage—it wasn’t really a heavy-labor unit, but an information center that Isayana had retooled for her own amusement several years before.

  “Wait,” said Natelth as the aiketh reached the bottom of the staircase. “Where is Isa?”

  Light flashed inside the aiketh’s shell as it communicated with the larger house-mind. “Your sister is in the kitchen,” it said. “The kitchen reports that an unscheduled meal is undergoing consumption.”

  “Thank you,” said Natelth. Politeness was always worthwhile, even to quasi-organics.

  The aiketh continued on its way upstairs, and Natelth went on to the house’s spacious and well-appointed kitchen. Isa was there as the house had said, cutting slices off of a fresh loaf of nutgrain bread and spreading them with jam.

  Arekhon was with her. Natelth had heard rumors of strange goings-on at Demaizen Old Hall, and looking at ‘Rekhe, he believed them. His brother was thinner than he’d been when he came to borrow the star charts—and ’Rekhe had been lean enough already—with something about his eyes that suggested he hadn’t been getting enough sleep.

  He looked cheerful, though, which filled Natelth with suspicion. Arekhon didn’t come to the house these days unless he needed something from the family.

  “’Rekhe,” Natelth said. “We haven’t seen you in quite some while; if you’d come a day earlier I’d have missed you.”

  Arekhon finished his slice of bread and wiped the jam off his fingers with a damp towel. “That’s why I came today. I wanted to talk with you about something important.”

  Isa laughed. “Scoundrel. You told me that you came home for some fresh bread.”

  “I did. Nobody at the Hall makes anything like yours, and the kitchen there isn’t teachable—it’s strictly cook-it-yourself.”

  Natelth sat down at the table across from his brother. Arekhon was excited about something; that much was plain for anyone to see. With luck it wasn’t something dangerous, like being named the Third in a Void-walker’s Circle. Isa had fretted about that appointment for weeks, and worry had troubled Natelth’s own sleep as well.

  “If it’s bread recipes that you came for,” Natelth said, “I can’t help you. So it must be something else.”

  “You’re right. Do you remember those charts I borrowed?”

  “You’ve brought them back?”

  Arekhon shook his head. “They’re still at Demaizen.”

  “Then why—” Natelth began, at the same time as Isa said, in reproving tones, “’Rekhe, don’t tease.”

  “Because there was a working,” Arekhon said, abruptly serious again. “Garrod walked through the Void, out past all the known markers—and he found a world on the other side of the gap beyond the Edge.”

  “Beyond—” Natelth found himself at a loss for further words. None of the fleet-Circles had ever dared as much. It was common knowledge, or so the sus-Peledaen Mages had always insisted, that making so long a walk would destroy both the Mage who tried it and the Circle that backed him.

  “A world,” Arekhon said. “Inhabited and fit for trade. Garrod left us the marker for it.”

  “A new world is all very well,” said Isa sharply. “But what has it got to do with your brother, or with the family?”

  “Ships,” Natelth said at once. In spite of his better judgment, he’d begun to catch some of his younger brother’s enthusiasm. There hadn’t been a new world opened for trade in almost two decades, and the chance of making the sus-Peledaen the first family in a new part of space was enough to make anyone’s heart beat a little faster. “Isn’t that it, ’Rekhe? You can’t get to Garrod’s world without a starship, so you’ve come back home to ask for one.”

  Two of the guests at Elek Griat’s breakfast meeting, Oska and Tinau, departed that same morning, but Jaf Otnal remained at the
country house. So—to his chagrin, for he had hoped to spend the rest of his extended leave of absence enjoying his friend’s company in solitude—did the Eraasian conspirator, Diasul. Elek played the contra-cithara for hours at a time, while Diasul and Jaf walked about the grounds during the day and read the information text-channels in the evenings. Diasul talked about his life on Eraasi, his ambitions as head of a flourishing mercantile house, and his desire to influence planetary politics. Jaf found it all exquisitely boring.

  One evening he took Elek aside. “Is there some reason why that man is still here? You never speak to him, and the Oldest knows I don’t want to.”

  “Diasul is clearing his mind before he speaks with his brother,” Elek replied. “The Mages can’t read minds that I know of, but a talented one can tell if you’re lying about something—and where family is concerned, even a little talented could be enough. You’re also providing a distraction to cover the activities of our two other friends, who’ve been setting things in motion elsewhere. You’ve been under daily surveillance, in case you didn’t know.”

  Jaf hadn’t. “How?” he asked. He’d thought that the country house was too remote for eavesdroppers—had suspected Elek of choosing it for that reason.

  “From above. Anywhere there’s a sky, the star-lords can look down to observe and record, if they think they’ve got a reason. You haven’t written anything about this matter and left it lying by a window in daylight, have you?”

  “No,” said Jaf. Elek was joking, he decided, but there was enough truth in the jest to make him uncomfortable. “There’s nothing in writing at all.”

  Several days later, near the end of Jaf’s visit, the conspirator named Oska returned, this time bringing with him another, younger man. Dinner that night—Jaf’s last evening at the country house—was a formal affair, at which Oska introduced his companion, Syr Seyo Hannet of the League of Unallied Shippers.