She was not aware of how long she had worked, checking out every detail and rearranging the material into an order more conformable with her own habits and training, until the sky outside the windows began to grow light. She heard a footstep on the stairs, and put aside the stack of data wafers to go see which of her fellow Mages was up so early.
It was Kief, heading down to the kitchen to start the uffa brewing for breakfast. “And fresh biscuits,” he said. “Since I’m awake anyway.”
She fell in beside him. “I’ll help—if I go to bed now I’ll only have to get right out again.”
“You were up all night?”
“I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep,” she said. “So I spent the time going over the Hall accounts, just in case.”
The kitchen was still dark. Kief turned on the overhead fixture as they entered, filling the long, high-ceilinged space with clear white light reflected off of spotless metal. The brewing urn sat in coppery majesty on the bare counter; Kief rinsed it out and filled it with clean water. Serazao pulled the leaf canister out of storage.
Kief shook his head. “The little packet. In the jar there.”
She out back the big canister and took out the smaller one. “Why this stuff?”
“It’s ’Rekhe’s private stash. He likes it red, and he doesn’t get it that way very often. So, for a send-off—” Kief shrugged. “Why not?”
She measured out enough of the curly dark leaf to make a full brewing, and poured it into the filter. Leaving the urn to heat, she turned back to Kief.
“Are you sorry not to be going?” she asked. “I know what holds me on Eraasi, and I can make a guess about Del, but what keeps you?”
“I don’t know,” Kief said, scooping out biscuit flour from the bin as he spoke. There was a careful quietness to his voice that Serazao found disturbing. “The eiran, maybe—when we made the division, they were all I could see, growing over the Hall like vines, with me and you and Delath and Garrod all tangled up in them together. The more I tried to work my way free of them, the tighter they pulled.”
“It sounds frightening.”
“I’ve been places I liked more.” He took the salt-box down from the shelf, and paused a moment with measuring spoon at the ready to look at her across the kitchen. “I don’t suppose you saw anything similar?”
“No,” Serazao told him honestly. “I didn’t see anything like that at all. Only the Hall and Garrod, and the windows full of light. So I knew that I was to stay.”
The journey from Demaizen to Hanilat took most of a day by groundcar, even when the roads were clear. The members of Garrod’s Circle who were bound for the sus-Peledaen ship Rain-on-Dark-Water left the Hall first thing in the morning, when the sun was coming up and turning the clouds in the east bright red.
They had time for one last round of farewells, with all the Circle members crowded awkwardly into the converted outbuilding that served as the Hall’s garage—quick, silent embraces, after everything to say had been said and said again. Then the four who were going took their places inside the heavy vehicle and closed the doors. The engine grumbled to life and the groundcar pulled away, out of the garage and down the long gravel drive to the road. Narin was steering; Arekhon had yielded the first turn to her in exchange for navigating the vehicle later through the intricacies of downtown Hanilat.
Arekhon resisted the urge to turn his head for a last glimpse of the Hall as the road curved away. He was the Second of the Circle, the First in all but name, and he needed to set an example for the Mages traveling with him—looking forward, not back.
Ty was the first to speak, several minutes later when the Hall was well behind them and the groundcar was purring down the open highway. “The other side of the galaxy.”
“Figuratively speaking,” Arekhon said. “More like the middle, if you want to be accurate. Still, it’s no place we’ve ever been.”
“Unknown waters,” said Narin. “And we’re the chart.”
“You could say that.”
Silence descended again for several minutes. Arekhon thought, from the sound of their regular, even breathing, that one or both of the rear-seat passengers had fallen asleep, but Ty surprised him by speaking again.
“I’ve never been on a spaceship.”
“Not even in school?” So Vai hadn’t been asleep either. She sounded curious, but not excessively so—a good tone, Arekhon thought, for soothing tight nerves and drawing out confidences from the reticent.
At any rate, it seemed to work for Ty. “We were supposed to go visit one at the port,” he said. “But I was in some kind of trouble and didn’t get to go.”
“Somebody probably told you that you’d be sorry for it one day, too,” said Narin. “And you probably didn’t believe them.”
“I was sorry for it right then. But I wasn’t going to tell them so.”
Vai chuckled. “Well, I’d say you came out ahead in the long run. You’re not just wandering through with a guided tour—you’re part of the show.”
Arekhon said to her, “You sound like you’ve been off-planet a time or two yourself.”
“To high orbit a few times,” she said. “And once to Rayamet. Part of my job.”
“Passenger?”
“Mostly. But I’ve got the emergency qualifications, just in case.”
Narin made a skeptical noise. “Interesting work you must have done.”
“It paid the bills.”
“Good enough,” said Arekhon. “But you’ll need to report those qualifications to Captain sus-Mevyan once we’re aboard—keep the ship’s records up to date.” He turned slightly in his seat, so that he could look at all three of the others at the same time. “Does anybody else have emergency qualifications like Vai’s … or anything like them that I ought to know about?”
Ty shook his head, and Vai spread out her empty hands in a gesture that could have meant almost anything. Narin said, “I can repair a marine engine, and find my way on the ocean by the stars and the shape of the waves, and by the smell of the wind in a pinch—but I don’t think any of those things are going to do Captain sus-Mevyan any good.”
“Report them all anyway,” Arekhon told her. “Unknown waters, as you said. You never know what may come in handy.”
With half the Circle gone, the Old Hall was full of silence and unexpected shadows. It was the turn of Delath and Serazao to waken Garrod, to clean him and get him ready for the day, a task they would be sharing with Kiefen Diasul for however long it took for the rest of the Circle to make their journey and return.
Kief wasn’t surprised that the other two Mages had been part of the half-Circle to remain at Demaizen: ’Zao still cherished the hope that some day she might see the First return to some kind of normal awareness; and whatever Del thought on that matter, he had proved to be as careful and reliable in tending Garrod as he had been in the Circle’s workings. Kief was far less certain why he also had been chosen to remain.
He wandered through the empty rooms of the Hall: The dining room, the front entry, the kitchen—the breakfast dishes were stacked on the counter where ’Rekhe had put them before everyone went to the garage, so he moved them into the washer and started it cycling—down into the basement, with its warren of storerooms and the Circle’s infirmary and the back way out to the gardens through the old root cellar—then around the Hall on the outside and in through the front.
Only minutes of time spent, and the rest of the Circle would be gone from Demaizen for … how long? His stargazer’s knowledge let him make an estimate, and the answer was a depressing one. Years … years to stay at the Hall with an incapable First and a Second gone away into the Void, and nothing to do except work the luck. He saw himself as he had been in his vision, bound into the Hall by the silver network of the eiran, and laughed without humor.
“The luck of the Diasul.”
He shivered as his words fell into the unnatural quiet of the Hall. He’d gotten a voice-message from his younger brother just yesterda
y, another one of Felan’s long dull rambles about the family business, matters of buying and selling and who-did-whom-out-of-what that Kief found impossible to keep straight in his head.
He did remember that Felan had asked, as usual, for Kief’s luck-intentions in the furtherance of some profit-making enterprise. Kief felt a stirring of anger, that his brother should be thinking about such petty matters in a time when men like Garrod were risking and losing all in an effort to remake the very galaxy.
Still, family was family. He would make the intentions for his brother—and for himself as well. For surely, if luck was needed for anyone involved in Rain-on-Dark-Water’s voyage of discovery, it was needed for the ones who stayed behind.
26:
Year 1124 E. R.
ENTIBOR: RASKE-BY-THE-SEA
VILLA OF MESTRA ADINA
ERAASIAN SPACE: SUS-PELEDAEN ORBITAL DOCKS
When the travelers came at last to Raske-by-the-Sea, Garrod’s sense of foreboding deepened. The city—not one of the first importance, from the way his friends spoke of it—was at least twice the size of Hanilat. Everything about it seemed gleaming, new, and filled with wonders, things he had never seen on Eraasi: Fast-moving groundcars that hovered above the earth without touching it, like the armored vehicles he had encountered earlier on the road; immense, delicate-looking buildings that glittered in the sunlight like ice palaces caught in webs of metal; gaudy images in light and sound that unfolded from the pavement or danced across the sides of the impossible buildings.
The spectacle filled Garrod with a terrible fear. This world, clearly, was rich in natural resources, and existed at a higher technological level than any planet on the other side of the interstellar gap. Yet he’d learned from Hujerie’s recent comments that Entibor was neither the richest nor the most powerful of the known worlds.
We have found them. What shall we do when they find us?
For a few minutes Garrod considered quietly vanishing, returning to Eraasi and never mentioning this place at all. It would be safer all around—for him personally, and for Eraasi, which this world would snap up like a solstice-cake if the people here ever put their minds to it.
But he was Garrod the Explorer, and leaving a world unsurveyed and uncatalogued would not make it go away. The danger has always been here, he reminded himself. We just didn’t know about it until now.
Neither Hujerie not Saral paid the wonders around them any heed. Hujerie, in particular, seemed unimpressed by Raske’s smooth rainbow-hued pavements, its gleaming towers, its multitude of booths and kiosks selling objects about whose use Garrod tried in vain to speculate. Instead, the former tutor walked through the city streets with a singleness of purpose and a near-quivering anticipation.
They came eventually to yet another kiosk, this one situated next to a broad tree-lined boulevard. Hujerie, looking pleased, placed his hand within a dark opening inside the kiosk, and a moment later turned back to Garrod.
“You have been our savior,” he said. “Now it is our turn to show generosity, though it may be less than a hundredth of your own.”
Garrod began an awkward speech of demurral—he could understand the spoken language fairly well by now, but constructing a sentence involving abstract concepts like friendship and gratitude still had the ability to slow his tongue. He was saved from having to finish his reply by the appearance of a shadow on the pavement. A moment later, with a scarce-heard whistling, an atmospheric craft descended to hover a few inches above the sidewalk.
The craft looked and sounded nothing like the flyers Garrod was familiar with on Eraasi. It was smooth, almost ovoid in shape, with bubbles like eyes on its forward end. The doors on either side opened upward, winglike, revealing a cozy interior with padded seats. Cool, sweet-smelling air washed out over the grimy and sweat-stained travelers like a friendly welcome.
They entered the craft, the doors swung down and closed, and a moment later pressure beneath his feet told Garrod that the vehicle was rising rapidly. A moment later, they were flying with incredible speed over the ocean. Dazzling sunlight reflected back at them from the waves below, its intensity mollified by the tinting of the flyer’s windows.
“Safe at last,” Saral said. She hugged Minnin, then held the baby out at arm’s length, bouncing him until he crowed with delight. “Your mamma and dadda will be happy to see you again.”
Soon enough the ocean was replaced by land, and the flyer came down to a smooth landing. Its doors once again lifted open, and the travelers stepped out onto a hillside covered with soft grass.
Something that looked like a ground vehicle waited nearby. A door on the vehicle’s side slid open, and a woman—young and pretty, in a loose gown made of some shimmering fabric that shifted colors as she moved—jumped out. She ran across the grassy hillside to snatch Minnin from Saral’s arms and hug him close.
“Come, come,” the woman said, somewhat breathlessly—she was still hugging Minnin, and the baby didn’t seem to know whether to be happy or distressed about it. “Teng will be so pleased. We scarcely dared hope, when your message came—”
She shooed them into the groundcar. The vehicle rose from the ground and shot forward in a way that made Garrod suspect it contained a counterforce unit of some kind—but one far more powerful than those which gave mobility to the aiketen back home on Eraasi.
“Who is your friend?” the woman asked Hujerie, as soon as she had soothed the restive Minnin into quiet. She talked more rapidly than the older man, and with a different accent, so that Garrod hoped he was understanding her correctly.
“He is called Garrod,” the old tutor said. “We owe our survival to him.”
The woman turned to Garrod. “Then you are a friend to us as well. What did you do, Friend Garrod, before the war?”
Garrod hesitated a moment before answering. In this strange world—so advanced in some ways, and so primitive in others—it did not strike him as a good idea to announce outright, “I am a Mage.”
Instead he told the woman, “I was a scholar”—at least, he hoped that was what he had said, and the self-description was not completely untrue.
“Ah, Master Scholar Garrod,” the woman said. “Welcome to our House.”
Natelth sus-Khalgath stood in the observation box overlooking the cradle holding Rain-on-Dark-Water. The newly-finished deep-space explorer was ready for her long voyage, and all but the last few crew members had ridden the gondola up her curving side to the open hatch. When the hatch closed, the chamber would seal its air-tight doors and the last phase in the construction cycle would begin.
Family responsibility decreed that Natelth should be present for the occasion, in the company of the director of the sus-Peledaen orbital yard and half a dozen of its most senior shipbuilders, all outer-family by adoption at least. And the first departure of a ship like the Rain—larger, more advanced in its design, and with a longer range than any of the existing vessels in the sus-Peledaen fleet—required more than Natelth’s approving presence. Such a momentous occasion demanded his full participation in the speeches and festivities, all duly broadcast for the benefit of ordinary workers and family members currently enjoying their own, much less formal, celebration.
Natelth had expressed, for the record, the family’s gratitude toward all the workers who had made the Rain into such an advancement on the fleet’s existing design, and the family’s unswerving confidence that her crew would find in her a swift journey to luck and glory. The shipyard director had thanked innumerable people without whom the Rain would not have reached her current state of perfection, and had enjoined the captain and crew to treat the new ship with the affection and respect which she deserved. Captain sus-Mevyan, speaking over voice-comm from the Rain’s bridge, had thanked the family and the shipyard alike for giving the ship into her hands, and had promised to care for the Rain like a sister.
Then the shipyard director poured out glasses of red wine all around, as Captain sus-Mevyan would be doing on the ship’s bridge. Everyone s
pilled the ritual drops that would do courtesy to the spirits of the ship and of the orbital yard, as well as to any of the family’s dead who might feel a connection with the venture.
All that remained was for the ship’s Circle to go abroad. Natelth could see them, far down below on the cradle platform, four small figures in hooded black robes, standing together in an inward-facing huddle. Not much to look at—but without them, and their presence on this first voyage, Garrod’s marker for the distant world was useless.
The director of the shipyard keyed on the voice-comm to the construction chamber. “Have you seen the luck of the voyage?”
The question was traditional: The Mages of a ship’s Circle, being the last of the crew to go aboard, had a good vantage point from which to see all of the diverse luck-patterns that hung about a vessel. On a new-built ship the lines ought to be clear and untangled … but Natelth fancied that there was a moment’s pause before Arekhon’s voice came back, not loud but quite distinct all the same.
“The voyage is fortunate. We see the lines going forth and coming back again.”
“Are you ready to board?”
Another pause. The distant figures on the platform appeared to consult one another briefly. Arekhon’s voice came over the speaker again.
“We are ready.”
“Board her, then,” said the shipyard director; and, a few moments later, “Gondola away.”
The gondola began its slow ascent to the open hatch. When it reached the top, the four tiny figures that were Arekhon’s half of the Demaizen Circle walked across the hair-thin bridge to the hatch and passed into the ship. The bridge retracted into the belly of the gondola, the hatch closed, and the gondola descended.
The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Page 22