She was not, he decided ruefully, the sort to be impressed by Natelth sus-Khalgath’s younger brother.
“Captain,” he said politely.
She nodded. “sus-Khalgath. Will you and Pilot-Principal Inadi take uffa in my quarters? Lord sus-Peledaen’s message bears discussion in private.”
I couldn ’t agree more, Arekhon thought. Unfortunately, I’m not going to get the chance.
He said a reluctant mental farewell to the prospect of leisurely discourse with Elaeli, and followed sus-Mevyan through the Rain’s interior labyrinth to the captain’s cabin, where a polished copper pot was already steaming on its tripod. Three carved wooden folding chairs—one with a back and arms, and two without—waited in conversational arrangement on the heavy carpet. More tapestry panels, in a green and gold far-islands pattern, covered the metal bulkheads. Standard light emplacements studded the overhead, but their output was scaled down to a dim glow.
Arekhon and Elaeli took their seats in the two guest chairs, and waited as sus-Mevyan poured uffa into cut-glass cups. The Captain took her leaf pale, Arekhon noted with resignation—no truckling here to inner-family taste by claiming a preference for red.
“Now,” said sus-Mevyan, after the first taste of the hot liquid had been respectfully sipped and savored. “Sus-Khalgath—tell me about this new world your brother’s message spoke of.”
Arekhon heard Elaeli’s breath catch slightly: She remembered, then, what Garrod’s Circle had been working on. He didn’t dare take his attention off sus-Mevyan long enough to see if she remembered it with favor or with dismay.
He kept his eyes fixed on the Captain instead, saying, “My brother told you that Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen has found a new inhabited planet circling a distant star. How much more did he tell you?”
“He told me,” sus-Mevyan said, “that the Second of Garrod’s Circle would come aboard and convey the details in person. From which I assume that this new planet is something out of the ordinary, if Lord sus-Peledaen feels unable to trust even his own fleet’s crypto systems with the full transmission.”
“Natelth has a point. The planet Garrod found lies beyond the Farther Edge.”
With great care and precision, sus-Mevyan set her cup down on the low table beside the copper pot. “You are quite sure of this?”
“My life on it,” said Arekhon.
She took the meaning as he intended. “Demaizen will provide the ship’s Circle for this voyage?”
“Yes.”
“It’s risky … very risky.” Sus-Mevyan turned her icy, penetrating gaze on Elaeli. “Pilot-Principal, what do you say about this venture that Lord sus-Peledaen and his brother have proposed for us?”
Arekhon concentrated on keeping his breathing steady and his expression noncommittal. Elaeli deserved the chance to give an honest answer, and sus-Mevyan didn’t need to know how important her Pilot-Principal’s opinion was to the acting head of the Demaizen Circle.
“I’ll be honest, Captain,” Elaeli said. “I think the voyage could kill us all. But if it doesn’t kill us”—she grinned suddenly, with a blaze of pure honest ambition that filled Arekhon’s senses like a lambent flame—“we’ll come back so covered with glory that Natelth sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen will give us whatever we ask him for.”
24:
Year 1124 E. R.
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
BEYOND THE FARTHER EDGE: ENTIBOR
“It’s settled,” Arekhon said.”We have a ship, and the Captain is with us.”
The surviving functional members of the Demaizen Circle sat together in Garrod‘s—now Arekhon’s—study, where the star-chart projected its illusory topography into the air above the desktop. The brilliant golden-white dot that marked out Garrod’s new-found world glowed unblinking beyond the dark line of the Edge.
“A sus-Peledaen ship,” said Kief. “And the sus-Peledaen get the trade, I suppose.”
Serazao spoke before Arekhon could form an answer. “The sus-Peledaen, or somebody else; it doesn’t matter. We’re doing this for Garrod’s sake.”
“And we need to think about how we’re going to do it,” Arekhon said. “Since the First is … how he is, he can’t make the journey himself. But he is the First of our Circle, and it wouldn’t be right to leave him behind in the care of strangers.”
“Not to mention what might happen to our luck if we tried,” said Narin. “Nothing good ever comes from abandoning one of your own.”
Arekhon nodded, grateful for the opening. “Narin is right. Which is why I propose to split the Circle, some to go and some to stay. Those who stay will keep the eiran smooth and untangled here at home, and send luck to those who cross the interstellar gap. And Garrod will remain the First at Demaizen, as before.”
“How are we going to make the split?” asked Ty. “Draw lots?”
“Nothing quite so random,” Arekhon said. “I had in mind meditating together on the question.”
“Now?” asked Kief. “Without preparation?”
“It’s the best way to find out a true division,” said Arekhon. “There’s no time for us to be influenced too much by the desires of one person or another.”
He stood up, and looked at each of the Circle members in turn—Narin and Delath and Kief, Ty and Serazao and Iulan Vai. “Come.”
He left the room without looking back to see if the others followed. He had anticipated a brief stir of conversation and questioning, but heard nothing beside the sounds of scuffing chair legs and footsteps on carpet. That was good; it meant that the rest of the Circle had concurred in his decision without the need for talk.
The group that reassembled in the meditation room was a quiet and sober one. No workings had taken place in the chamber since Garrod’s return. All the physical traces of the previous occasion had been cleared away, but the patterns of that time were plainly marked to the inward sight. Arekhon knelt in Yuvaen’s old place—Garrod’s he left empty—while the others took their places as they had done before.
Iulan Vai hesitated. Arekhon beckoned her into the group as well. Last time she had been an observer; this time, and for the voyage to come, she would be a part of the whole. Ty moved aside, yielding the newest member’s position, and Vai knelt with her usual limber grace.
Arekhon nodded, satisfied, and closed his eyes.
The place he came to, when his inner vision cleared, was chaotic. A tumble of ragged, grey-black clouds blocked out the sky overhead. The land itself was shattered stone, like the place Arekhon had seen when the First had gone Void-walking before. But this time the land was divided at Arekhon’s feet, stone from air, in a cliff that plunged straight down, a hundred times the height of a man, to a churning lead-grey sea below.
Water smashed, wave on wave, against the foot of the cliff, then withdrew in white foam between jagged teeth of rock. The wind whipped Arekhon’s hair around his face, then snatched it back again, as the force of the air pushed him first toward, then away from, the edge of the cliff.
When he looked out across the sea, he saw a boat tossed about on the water. Two figures sat and rowed away from the cliffs; a third stood in the stern. He recognized the rowers as Ty and Narin, pulling hard lest their craft be sucked in amid the breakers and dashed to pieces. The third he recognized as well: Iulan Vai, standing pale and beautiful, her hand raised in salute or farewell.
“Wait!” Arekhon called. “Wait for me!”
The wind tore away his words, and the rowers did not pause. Arekhon launched himself over the edge of the cliff. The sea came closer and closer, the rocks grew large, the waves boomed, and the roaring wind howled about his ears as he fell, and fell … .
Arekhon opened his eyes and found himself once more kneeling on the floor of the meditation room, with his Circle gathered around him. For a moment there was silence; then, slowly, the Mages began to speak.
Narin was first, turning to face Ty and saying, “I saw you.”
“And I saw you,” Ty replied. “You came to help me
break down the wall, and Vai did … I think we’re meant to go together on the ship.”
Kief, standing with the other group, met Arekhon’s questioning glance and shook his head. “I didn’t see you with us at all.”
Del and Serazao nodded agreement. What they might have seen, Arekhon did not ask, nor did they volunteer the information.
The Circle had made its division.
In the company of his new friends Hujerie and Saral, Garrod continued his journey through the region of Entibor known as Tulbith. They traveled by day, walking with greater confidence as no further armed men or fighting machines showed up to impede their progress, but they did not abandon all their old caution. The times, or so Garrod inferred from his companions’ half-understood words and fleeting thoughts, were unsettled in the extreme—and his own earlier observations did nothing to contradict that impression.
The refugees avoided buildings and settled areas, living chiefly on fruits and berries found along the wayside, and on small animals that Hujerie proved adept at snaring, augmented by the concentrated rations that Garrod carried in his pack. Every night they camped, and while the others slept, Garrod pulled on the eiran to bring good luck to them all.
As the worst dangers of the road receded into the distance behind them, Garrod’s spirits and those of his comrades began to lift. The woman Saral smiled more now, and the songs she sang to baby Minnin were cheerful ones.
Hujerie, for his part, talked to Garrod almost constantly, with expansive gestures. Garrod soon realized that the man’s flow of conversation was deliberate, a conscious attempt at instruction in the local tongue, and bent his own efforts to the same end. With both men working at it, the process went much faster, and Garrod was soon able to carry on a simple conversation. When he made mistakes, which happened frequently, Hujerie would only laugh, then correct Garrod’s errant pronunciation or pantomime an action to supply a missing verb, and carry on.
Eventually Garrod learned enough of the language to piece together the essentials of his friends’ story. Hujerie was not Saral’s father, as Garrod had first assumed, but her grandfather, and the baby boy Minnin—it was a name after all, and not an endearment—was not her child. Both Saral and Hujerie were in service to another, much more powerful family, of which Minnin was the youngest member. Hujerie, if Garrod understood the abstract ideas correctly, had been some kind of family tutor, but was now officially retired, and Saral was the baby’s nursemaid. When the city of Feliset, supposedly a safe haven, was attacked and burned, the two of them were alone in the house with the child. They took the baby and fled, with the goal of bringing Minnin to safety and reuniting him with the rest of his family.
“They must be very worried,” Garrod said.
“Worried indeed,” Hujerie replied. “But we will repay their trust. And you, too, shall be rewarded.”
“I do not seek a reward.”
Hujerie clapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said. “But we will reward you just the same, for your deserving.”
They walked on. As Garrod’s vocabulary grew larger, he began to make careful inquiries about the history and the political system of the world through which he traveled. He learned through indirect questioning that Entibor’s political divisions were roughly coterminous with its major continental masses, though the exact boundaries—and the exact rulers—of some areas were currently the subject of intense dispute. Garrod accepted the situation without comment, although he felt rather as if he’d slipped backward in time to Eraasi’s own remote and disunited past; Hujerie and Saral apparently took him for a wilderness vacationer from one of the smaller regions, stranded a long way from home by the outbreak of open warfare, and he didn’t want to disabuse them of the notion.
One day, however, as they were descending from the hills toward a distant sparkling sea, a statement from Hujerie brought Garrod to a stop, and made him doubt his growing fluency in the local dialect.
“It isn’t like this on other worlds.”
“Other … ‘worlds’?” Garrod hoped that his expression and inflection betrayed linguistic bewilderment rather than the shock he actually felt. He had not thought that a planet still in the grip of internecine warfare would have access to anything beyond its own immediate space.
“‘World,’ yes, that’s the word,” Hujerie said approvingly. “Miosa, Khesat, those pious bastards from Galcen. And all the rest.”
Garrod nodded, and listened, and knew that he held the luck of all Eraasi in his hands.
25:
Year 1124 E. R.
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL
ENTIBOR: RASKE-BY-THE-SEA
Once all the decisions were made, the days until the Rain’s departure slipped by with unnerving speed. Arekhon felt the two halves of the Demaizen Circle, those who would go and those who would stay, beginning to draw apart and take on separate purpose. His own preparations were brief. He packed lightly for a journey to the other side of the galaxy, taking with him little more than his staff and his working robes, and enough changes of regular clothing to see him through a ship’s wash cycle.
The other travelers followed Arekhon’s example. Narin and Ty had not accumulated large stocks of personal possessions—Narin through lack of inclination and Ty through lack of time and opportunity—and Iulan Vai, as far as Arekhon could tell, had cut the ties to her old life completely when she came to the Circle.
He worried somewhat about that. His own abandonment of the family altars had been mostly a formality—it was his choice of Circle that had, for a while, put a strain on his relations with Natelth and Isa—but making the severance was harder for some people than for others. Vai’s reticence argued that she might be one of the unlucky ones, for whom the late discovery of a Mage’s calling could prove disastrous to an established and well-ordered life.
In the quiet of the last night at Demaizen, his conscience prompted him to seek her out. She was in her room, shutting down the clasps on the duffel that contained—as far as Arekhon was able to tell—everything that she wanted to claim by way of material goods. He saw a couple of her old Wildlife Protection League patches, their anchoring stitches neatly unpicked, lying on the bedside table in the pool of yellow light from the reading lamp. After he had greeted her, somewhat tentatively, with a kiss, he nodded toward the patches and raised his eyebrows.
“You’re not taking those?”
She shook her head. “The gear itself may come in handy, you never know, but the patches seemed like a bad idea. Someone might misinterpret them.”
Arekhon paused a moment to admire Vai’s practicality; but the admiration carried him back to the same concern that had brought him here in the first place. Someone on Eraasi had been accustomed to enjoying the benefits of Iulan Vai’s peculiarly clear and efficient mind, and was enjoying them no longer … to the Circle’s good, but not necessarily to the good of her own out-questing spirit.
“Iule—” he began.
“Just ‘Vai’,” she said. “Please. I know it sounds odd, but I’m accustomed to it.”
“Vai,” he amended—and was there never, he wondered silently, anyone at all before now to call you by the forms of affection?—“once we’re on the road tomorrow, we might as well have left Eraasi behind. So if there’s anyone to whom you feel the need or the obligation to say goodbye, this is the time to do it. You’re part of the Circle, so the Hall’s distance-connections are as much yours as anybody else’s.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “There isn’t anyone in particular. My old job’s gone to someone else by now, and the job”—she shrugged—“was all there was, really. I won’t be missed.”
“That’s no fit life for anyone to lead,” said Arekhon, with a shiver for the essential loneliness her words implied. “I’m glad you found us … Demaizen and the Circle … because I would miss you, if the division had made you one of the group to stay.”
She smiled at him. “You’re a sweet young man, Arekhon, and honest enough to be dangerous.”
She paused, then asked, with careful lack of emphasis, “How will the Circle be quartered, on this ship of yours?”
“According to the usual custom,” he said. “Private cabin for the First—or whoever’s in charge—and the rest bunk with the crew.”
“And the gossip, I suppose, is perpetual?”
“Never-ending,” he agreed. “And memories are long.”
“I see.” She turned away for a moment to lift her sealed duffel off the bed and set it against the wall by the door, then came back to stand beside him. She lifted one hand and gently touched the corner of his mouth, while with her other hand she worked at undoing the braided loop fasteners of her high-necked tunic, one loop at a time. “Perhaps, then, we should make good use of the time we have.”
Serazao Zulemem did not sleep at all on the last night the shipbound Circle members spent at Demaizen. Instead she worked at the desk in Garrod’s study, with the star-chart and its display turned off and removed to a shelf, making certain that the Hall’s legal status was in order. It would not do for some hitherto unknown, but litigious, offshoot of the sus-Demaizen family to make a sudden appearance while the Circle’s acting First was out of touch.
Arekhon had only that afternoon handed over to her the necessary keys and passwords. She’d had a few sharp remarks for the occasion, concerning his dilatory habits and his irrational fondness for keeping secrets well past their useful date. Now she feared that Garrod’s files would turn out to hold some disastrous matter which could not be resolved in time, and which would hang like a cloud over the divided Circle all during the long separation.
As the night wore on, however, it became clear that her worries were groundless. Garrod had taken good advice when he came into the sus-Demaizen inheritance, and had made provision in great detail for the Circle’s continued welfare in case of his own death or disability. Extending those provisions to cover any problems caused by the absence of Arekhon and the others would not be difficult.
The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Page 21