The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  The rain was still falling. He looked out across the darkened field. The lowered ramp of the waiting shuttle, lit by the reflected glow of the ship’s interior lights, made a paler spot in the darkness.

  I gave my word to Elaeli, he thought. But I gave myself to the working first.

  How many more promises will I have to break before it’s done?

  A line of ruddy explosions flared down the hill, then crossed the landing zone—missing the shuttle, though not by much. He sprinted across the blackened concrete and up the ramp. Before the echoes of his footsteps died, the ramp was lifting.

  No one emerged from the forward cabin to strap him in. He flung himself onto the nearest couch, pulling the straps across his body and fumbling them closed as best he could, scant seconds before the roaring and shaking started and liftoff pushed him down into the cushions like the pressure of a giant hand.

  The acceleration went on for a long time before it eased. The shuttle pilots were spending as little time as possible on getting rid of their inconvenient passenger. Perhaps, Arekhon thought bitterly, they too had made Garrod sus-Demaizen a promise that they now regretted having to keep.

  Eventually, he felt the tug of magnetic seals taking their grip, and heard the clanks and thuds of one craft matching with another. When the door cycled open, he left his couch and passed through the joined locks into the Diamond’s receiving bay.

  Captain sus-Mevyan was waiting for him. “What happened to Lord Garrod?” she asked. “And Pilot-Principal Inadi?”

  “Gone,” Arekhon told her. “Both gone. Nothing is left but the working.”

  39:

  Year 1128 E. R.

  SPACE: OCTAGON DIAMOND

  ERAASI: HOUSE OF THE DIASUL

  Captain sus-Mevyan took Octagon Diamond out of orbit the next ship’s-morning—out of orbit, but not yet into the Void. The surviving crew members of Rain-on-Dark-Water might have been given a new ship by their unknown benefactor, but the gift had not included lessons in its use.

  “I want us a long way out before we try making a run for the Void,” sus-Mevyan told Arekhon during their conference on the bridge just before departure. “I don’t intend to pay back our benefactor for his kindness by turning the Diamond into a meteor and hitting the planet with it.”

  “I’m not sure the Councillor intended to be kind,” Arekhon said. “He had his own agenda all along; if his enemies hadn’t struck first, he might have mentioned how he planned to use us to further it. But not everyone down below is our friend, and we may have inherited some powerful enemies.”

  “Another reason to take the Diamond out deeper. As long as we’re in orbit, anyone can figure out where we’re going to be.” Sus-Mevyan turned to the young officer at the pilot’s console. “Pilot-Ancillary, you are now Pilot-Principal, acting. Make me a course out of orbit to a location where you can comfortably calculate the path to Eraasi.”

  “Working,” said the new Pilot-Principal. His station had the salvaged navigational gear from Rain-on-Dark-Water lashed into place on improvised racks that had been fastened to the main console with cords and cable tape. The connection to ship’s power appeared to be functional, although the tangled nest of wires made Arekhon think, unhappily, of how much Elaeli would have disapproved of the chaos … and how much she would have resented letting her ancillary have all the labor, and the glory, of dealing with it.

  Arekhon leaned against the bulkhead of the unfamiliar bridge for a while, watching the pilot’s calculations without saying anything. Then he pushed himself away and headed aft.

  He made his way through oddly angled passageways, the bulkheads glowing with polished brass and the decks tiled with a resilient material. The pipes and lines of the interior controls and power conduction were all exposed, not concealed within the bulkheads, overheads, and decks, and they were all neatly stenciled with what he presumed were words and numbers of identification.

  The Diamond had more room inside her than any spacecraft Arekhon had ever encountered, and the sus-Peledaen cargo ships were some of the largest in the homeworlds. He knew from talking with Captain sus-Mevyan that the vessel had guns and engines like those on the abandoned Forty-two, only of much greater power, but minimal cargo space. She was a guardship, then, or something like one, though she had a subtly alien quality about her—an unaccustomed angularity to her internal layout; dimensions always a few inches too great or too small; everything dyed or painted with odd colors in unsettling hues—persistent reminders that the Diamond had been built by other hands for other minds.

  Arekhon had a separate cabin assigned to him; he knew its compartment number in the Entiboran script that Garrod had taught him, and Captain sus-Mevyan had provided him with a sketch map of the ship’s interior. His personal effects, or what remained of them after being twice transferred from one ship to another, already awaited him in the cabin, but he himself had gone directly from the Diamond’s entry bay to the conference with sus-Mevyan on the bridge.

  It took him several minutes of wandering, therefore, to find the cabin, and several more to work out the lock on the door. Iulan Vai emerged from her own quarters shortly before he was finished; the idea that she now lived almost adjacent to him was a disturbing one. She stopped a little distance off and watched him. He could feel her curiosity pressing against him like hands in the dark, and turned his face away.

  “What happened down there?” she asked. “You look dreadful.”

  The door opened. He stepped inside, and heard Vai’s footsteps following, then pausing on the threshold before he could close the door. With a sigh, he moved aside and let her enter. She was trim and sleek as always, her plain black clothes only serving to accentuate a form at once rounded and compactly muscular. Arekhon found himself resenting, nevertheless, the fact that she was not Elaeli Inadi.

  That was no way for the First of a Circle to think about a valued and active member. He suppressed the resentment and gestured her to the cabin’s single—and oddly contoured—chair before himself dropping wearily onto the bunk.

  “What happened?” he said. “We lost Garrod and Elaeli, that’s what happened.”

  “How?”

  He explained, at first in brief sketchy sentences, then in longer and more painful ones. Vai listened to the whole story, shaking her head when he was done.

  “I mistrust our so-called friend Demazze,” she said. “He may have arranged for that attack himself.”

  “I don’t think so. But he would have known that it was coming.” Arekhon hesitated and then went on. “I haven’t told sus-Mevyan this, but—Councillor Demazze was Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen.”

  “How? Garrod was with us on the ship all along.”

  “At the same time as he was a madman back on Eraasi,” Arekhon pointed out. “The Void connects times as well as places, and Garrod was a master at walking between them.”

  “But was Councilor Demazze as mad as Garrod became—will become—whatever?”

  “I hope not,” Arekhon said. “For Elaeli’s sake, I hope not. Garrod believes—believed—that this world, that all the worlds on this side of the interstellar gap are too strong for us. They would swallow up the homeworlds and not even need to chew. He wanted to—to subvert them, somehow, and Elaeli was a part of that plan.”

  “It would help,” Vai said, “if we knew what his plan was.”

  There was no answering that; Arekhon dropped his head into his hands and sighed. After a while he spoke without looking up. “Has the Circle found any place at all on this ship that’s fit for us to meet in?”

  “One or two. But there’s another matter that needs to be settled first.”

  “What kind of matter?”

  “The prisoner,” Vai said. “We both know that sus-Mevyan isn’t planning to let her go. And I’m not sure that I blame the Captain for it, either.”

  Arekhon lifted his head and saw that Vai was serious. “Haven’t we done enough harm already?” he asked. “We crippled her ship, we killed her friends
—and now we’re going to make her finish her life among strangers?”

  “We may have to,” Vai said. “She knows—”

  “—what? That we aren’t from Entibor and don’t speak her language? There are dozens of planets like that on this side of the galaxy.”

  “But none—as far as they know—on the other side of the interstellar gap. That’s the killer,’Rekhe. How long will it take these people to send out an expedition, in their fast ships with the big guns, once they know there’s something waiting on the other side for them to find?”

  “I don’t know.” Arekhon felt deeply and inexpressibly weary, both in body and mind; he wanted nothing so much as to dim the cabin lights, collapse onto the unyielding mattress in his bunk, and sleep for a long time without dreaming. But there would be no chance of that for a while yet. “We began this journey intending to bring the galaxy back together, not tear it further apart … do you think anybody is going to believe that, five hundred years from now?”

  “It doesn’t matter if they don’t,” Vai said. “The prisoner’s coming with us—sus—Mevyan’s already made up her mind—but will she be with us as an enemy, or as an unfortunate guest?”

  Arekhon gave a short laugh. “That’s the prisoner’s decision, isn’t it? We certainly haven’t given her much cause to like us so far.”

  “No … but if she’s going to make any sort of life for herself on Eraasi, she’s going to need friends, or at least allies. I believe the Circle should think hard about trying to fill that need.”

  “Have you foreseen a reason for it?” Arekhon regarded Vai curiously; he hadn’t thought of her as having the prophetic gift. “Or is this only your personal opinion?”

  “Call it opinion based on experience,” Vai said. “She’s going to have to trust somebody eventually, or else go mad. Better she trust us, I think, than trust the sus-Peledaen.”

  Arekhon felt a brief stirring of anger—or what would have been anger, if he hadn’t been too tired to feel anything more than a kind of sullen irritability. “Are you saying that the fleet-family isn’t honest?”

  “I’m saying that the Circle doesn’t owe the family any special loyalty, and might be a better friend to the prisoner because of it.” Vai paused. “sus-Mevyan hasn’t been worried about the prisoner’s welfare. You have. That’s the difference.”

  A rumbling engine-pulse came through the deckplates, and Arekhon felt a brief catch of pressure as the Diamond accelerated. “Captain’s lifting from orbit,” he said, grateful for the interruption. “She was talking about finding a safe place to calculate the transit.”

  “How long is that likely to take?”

  “As long as it needs to,” he said. “Tracing a back-course is easier than making a blind transit, but the navigator’s working off of a makeshift console that scares me just to think of it.”

  “The prisoner could be helpful with that, if she wanted to be,” Vai pointed out.

  “If we gave her a reason not to wish all of us dead, you mean.”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  Arekhon sighed and unfolded himself from the bunk. “Summon Ty and Narin; we need to find the prisoner and talk honestly with her.”

  Kief walked the night away, and all the day, while the hot anger in him chilled, and towering fury built with every step. In the end he came to his brother’s house, and flung open the door. Felan Diasul exclaimed in horror at the staff burning in Kief’s hand.

  He walked through the doors, and no electronics could keep him out. The aiketen tried to prevent him, for he had been removed from their access lists, but he strode past them, and left them broken. At last, he stood at the door of his brother’s office, and the wind smashed in the windows. It blew the door open amid a swirl of paper, a splinter of shards, and a shower of sparks as the viewscreens and the datadesks went non-functional.

  A man was sitting facing the desk. As the door fell he rose, turning, and pulled a weapon from inside his clothing.

  Kief saw him and knew him, in sudden images that flashed through his mind like electric shocks or bolts of lightning: Men expiring in flame and smoke in an office tower … ships exploding in the deeps of space … Garrod and Del and Serazao, struck down by this man’s order and lying in their life’s blood on the floor of the Hall.

  The first priority was the weapon. Kief held out his hand, allowing the fire from his staff to leap across, arcing to the metal in the weapon’s grip.

  Flames played around the handgun, and the charges stored inside it exploded in a rippling thunder. The fire continued back, running along the veins in the man’s arms, bursting through the skin, charring the clothing, tracing out the hidden pathways in the flesh. The man fell to his knees, his left hand grasping his right arm above the elbow as the fire spurted like burning fuses up his right arm toward his shoulder. When the tongues of flames met his left hand, the fire jumped across and the veins started burning in his left arm, reaching toward his heart.

  Kief stayed with him, forcing the burn, feeling it as the man felt it—hot at first, then cold, like a stream of ice water, numbing him. He saw himself with the man’s eyes, a figure in the door like death, outlined with a pulsing glow of light too bright to look at directly.

  The man felt a tickle in his nose. It was incongruous. The fire was tracing up his arms—he could smell the hair, the meat, the cloth, all burning—and the smoke tickled. Then the smell was gone, and he sneezed. What came out was writhing, like animated white seeds. Maggots. Running from his face. Then his vision went dark, the cold reached his shoulders and spread across his chest. He could feel the maggots writhing across his face, filling his mouth as they tumbled from his nasal passages down his throat. He couldn’t breathe. Then the darkness, cold, and pain rose and took him. He didn’t feel himself slump to the floor.

  Kief stood unmoving, as the man who had been Seyo Hannet of the League of Unallied Shippers turned from a living man to a decayed corpse—all dried skin, smoke-blackened, stretched across brittle bones—in scarcely a minute. Then he turned to where his brother stood appalled in the doorway.

  “Through action or inaction,” he said, “and it matters not greatly to me which one it may have been, you have hindered the greatest working this galaxy has ever known.”

  He stepped forward, and placed his left hand over his unresisting brother’s face. “Now I take back what I gave at your desire. I take your luck—all of it—from you, from your associates, and from all who share your goals.”

  The staff in Kief’s right hand glowed with a twisting fire, more brilliant even than the fire that had consumed the men in the kitchen of Demaizen Old Hall, and the wood consumed, twisting like a serpent. His hand blistered, and still he drew luck, and held the power within himself until the taking was done.

  Then he left his brother’s house and the family altars, and never came back again to the Diasul.

  The Circle found the prisoner under guard in the ship’s laundry—at least, the Entiboran script on the compartment label said it was the ship’s laundry, and the stacks of neatly folded sheets and blankets appeared to confirm the label’s assertion. The prisoner sat on the deck against one of the machines, clutching her ankles with her hands, her chin on her knees. She looked up when the four members of the Circle came in, her grey-blue eyes sullen and mistrustful.

  Arekhon approached her—not too closely, for fear of alarming her—and went down on one knee. “My lady,” he said in careful Entiboran, “we need your help.”

  Her reply started with a verb and ended with a noun, neither of which Arekhon knew. He supposed that the intent was rude. He marshaled all of his grammar and vocabulary and tried again. “My friends and I are members of a—” he grasped for words “—meditation group. We do not wish to dishonor your ancestors. Please help keep us from falling into error.”

  Her reply this time was only a single word. Arekhon slogged on. “The Captain is unwilling to let you go, and we don’t have the authority to set you free—you can be s
ure that if the situation were otherwise, I would do so. But I can offer you an observer’s place in our group.”

  She looked directly at him for the first time. “Will I have to believe what you believe?”

  “No,” he said. “Only what you yourself see and hear. In the meantime, are you familiar with this kind of ship?”

  “Not particularly. Some.”

  “Then can you help me find the paint locker?”

  She stared at him. “The what? Why do you need it?”

  This was a test, Arekhon knew. He would have to answer fully and honestly, or the prisoner wouldn’t trust him. And having Ty on the bridge capturing her hadn’t helped that any.

  “We need to make ourselves a black deck with a white circle on it,” he told her. “To aid in meditation, as a symbol of unity. Unity is important to us. That’s why we’re here. The universe is divided, and Garrod wanted to make it one.”

  Her mouth twisted. “You’ve done a fine job of that so far, haven’t you? Listen, this ship has evacuation pods, in case of accident or injury to the ship. Put me in one of those and set me adrift.”

  “Can you guarantee that someone will find you in time? It’s a bad way to die, otherwise.”

  He could see her wanting to lie to him, but in the end she shook her head and said, “There’s a transponder—but without a distress call from the Diamond, nobody’s going to be listening for it. It’s a gamble I’m willing to take.”

  “Joining with us is so intolerable? Let us show you what we do, first, and then you can decide.”

  “If you insist. But don’t think I’m going to change my mind.”

  “Very well,” said Arekhon. “Watch and learn. But whatever happens, please don’t interfere.”

  At his nod, the four Mages of the Circle knelt close together facing inward, knees touching knees and staffs held up before them. Arekhon closed his eyes and turned his vision inward, to the place where the lines of life and luck took shape and were transformed.