The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5

by Doyle, Debra

  “But I was the one who struck him first.”

  Klea gazed into the crimson depths of her mug of uffa for a time, remembering. The blow had driven Errec Ransome down to his knees, there in the room his mind had constructed for a refuge in the trackless Void. Maybe combat in the Void was only symbol and metaphor, as the instructors at the Retreat would have it, but her staff had vibrated against the palms of her hands like a live thing when the wood smashed against Ransome’s skull.

  “He should have died when I hit him,” she said finally. “And Owen’s sister shot him twice before he hit the ground. All that happened, though, was that everything turned into fog. And Ransome was still there.

  “So in the end Owen had to fight him. Master against student—‘after the way of the Mages,’ Ransome said.”

  “He spoke from ignorance,” said Mael. “Such things are not done in anger, and never in the Void.”

  “I wouldn’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because Owen wasn’t the one who killed him. It was the older brother, Ari—the one who married Mistress Hyfid. He was a big man—”

  “I’ve met him,” said Mael. “I know.”

  “—and he walked into the middle of the duel and picked up Errec Ransome in both hands and snapped him across his knee like a stick.”

  Klea stopped talking. Mael sat waiting, patiently as always, until she drew another deep breath and went on.

  “Ransome was dead then; I’m sure of it. What we saw next was an illusion, a memory given shape by the Void … Errec Ransome, as the Domina Perada knew him when they both were young.”

  “Did it speak?” Mael’s eyes were dark with worry. “And did you answer it?”

  “Oh, yes.” Klea shivered, remembering how the phantom had stretched out a hand to the Domina—“Have I wronged you, Perada? What can I do to make things right?”—and then had let it fall. “It spoke. And the Domina answered. She called him a wanderer, and gave him leave to go.”

  Mael made an impatient noise. “Does no one in the Adept-worlds understand the Void at all? Not even an unranked Circle-Mage would think of saying a thing like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A wanderer she called him,” said Mael. “And a wanderer he has become. He goes now to Khesat, and I … I am summoned to meet him there.”

  “‘Patience is all very well,’” said the young man in a servant’s free-day livery. From the tone of his voice, he was quoting the words of another. “‘You have counseled patience. We have been more than patient. But time grows short, and the Worthy you promised us has not appeared.’”

  “Whoa—they were getting into it,” said the woman who sat beside him on the riverbank. “What did my lord of Redonti say to that?”

  The young man shrugged. “What could he say? ‘The Worthy will appear, I promise you’—but personally, I doubt it.”

  “That entire cabal is cutting things too fine,” said the woman. “The Manches already have their worthy, and so do the Barbicans. And let’s not forget the Roundels. They don’t have just one Worthy—their public one—or even two Worthies—counting their secret candidate that they intend everyone to know about. They have three Worthies, if we include that pitiful creature living in their pockets whom they actually hope to see ascend to the Jade Eminence.”

  “The upshot of the whole argument,” said the young man, “was that they’re going to go find some other poor fool to carry their banner. I was out of the room fetching a bottle of the Erilani vintage when they named the man, but figuring out who they lighted on shouldn’t be a problem.”

  The woman narrowed her eyes. “There’s something else that you aren’t telling me.”

  “I was saving the best for last. The Exalted of Tanavral still backs his missing man. Which meant that the meeting. grew rancorous—as far as such dignified gentlemen lower themselves to rancor.”

  The woman tore a small piece of bread from the roll she held in her hand and tossed it to the wildlife which teemed on the waterbank. On the river itself, winding through downtown Ilsefret, colorful pleasure boats with scarlet and blue sails flitted before the light autumn breeze.

  “With your position in the household of Caridal Fere,” the young man went on after the silence had stretched out too long, “you’ll be in a poor position if someone decides to cry ‘treachery.’”

  “We have to tell Master Pariken,” she said.

  “Important as this is, maybe we should bypass the Guildmaster and send a notice all the way up to Master Rosselin-Metadi.”

  The woman frowned. “Pariken says that he sent one messenger already.”

  “Maybe Master Pariken is playing his own game.”

  “If we’re unable to trust one another at our level, we are lost. Unlike the Guildmaster, you and I have seen enough of the future to know that a crisis is drawing near, and one without favorable result. Unless some kind of action—”

  “—is taken,” finished the man. “Actions of the kind that some people contemplate would make us worse than our enemies.”

  “Which is why”—the woman smiled sweetly—“we will not take that action, but rather watch in outward horror while others perform tasks which are not far removed from our needs.

  “Don’t fret,” she added. “You won’t be called on to do anything more than your conscience can stand.”

  “Sometimes just carrying Kasander’s slippers is more than my conscience can stand. What an immoral—”

  “Don’t even think it,” the woman said. She stood up and brushed off her skirt. “I’ll meet you again next LastDay at the usual place.”

  They parted beneath the bright spires of central Ilsefret, and the man went back to the servants’ quarters beneath the house of the Exalted of Tanavral.

  A ringing bell greeted him almost as soon as he had entered. He let his free-day livery fall to the floor, and pulled on his servitor’s robe as he dashed for the stairs. One tread before the top he paused, took a breath, and stepped forward and out, standing like a carven thing until he saw where his master waited. There was Kasander, over by the balcony. The young man walked slowly over.

  When he got to the customary distance of three paces, he paused and bowed his head.

  “Fetch my slippers,” the Exalted said. “We must go visiting.”

  “May one be so bold?” the man asked of the air beside the Exalted’s head.

  “To the residence of the Republic’s negotiator,” the Exalted said. “Bring two bottles of claret. Good, but not great, vintages. You may choose which ones.”

  A gift chosen by a servant, the young man thought. The insult direct. Maybe the timetable had moved up.

  Faral didn’t much care for the idea of leaving Miza alone in the Light’s cockpit with the enigmatic Guislen, but as long as his cousin was determined to leave Sapne in this ship and no other, he didn’t seem to have a choice. Something strange was going on—something that went beyond even oracular old ladies and hooded Adepts with murderous intentions.

  If Jens knew what the problem was, however, he wasn’t telling. He accompanied Faral on his inspection of the rest of the starship, and never once mentioned either Guislen or the strange Adept. He and Faral worked their way through all the Light’s compartments one at a time—most of the spaces they found had obvious uses, but one or two proved utterly baffling. Faral supposed it took being brought up on shipboard to recognize them.

  “What I’m worried about,” he said, “is food and water. If the engines go we’re dead in a second. But thirst—that’s a nasty way to die.”

  “You’re certainly cheerful tonight,” said Jens. “Look over here. I think I’ve found the galley.”

  A closer inspection proved that he was right. The closet-sized nook held a washer and a cook-set, and dinnerware stacked for lift-off in secured trays. Not surprisingly, the fresh-provisions locker had failed to remain cold under standby power, and the meat and vegetables inside had first rotted and then dried into a foul-smelling powder. Jens wrinkled his nose
.

  “If we can’t find an airlock to cycle this out of when we make high orbit,” he said, “we’ll need to toss it now.”

  “Right,” said Faral. He opened another formerly-sealed cabinet. “Hey, look at this—space rations, in packets. Let’s see if they’re any good.”

  The foil packets had their seals intact, and pulling the tab on one of them revealed a dried bricklike substance. The pictorial instructions on the back of the packet showed a similar brick immersed in boiling water.

  Faral put the opened rations back into the cabinet. “I guess we’re supposed to boil these and trust to luck.”

  “I’ve got luck,” Jens said. He fingered the necklace of bone and leather that the old woman had given him. “Our hostess back at the customs office gave me some. How are you doing for cleaning supplies to make this place tidy?”

  “Not so good. Let’s look below.”

  The next level down from the galley was crew berthing. There were no overhead light panels here; only red safety glows that would keep people’s eyes from being blinded, and allow those crew members off watch to sleep during the ship’s day. The air on this level was thicker than it had been up above.

  Faral pushed on ahead into the berthing area. “We’ll need more than soap and a plastic sponge for this one,” he called back out to Jens.

  “What do you have?”

  “The crew,” Faral said.

  His cousin joined him in the berthing area. The small compartment had two bunks mounted to the bulkheads. One bunk held blankets collapsed over a thin, long lump. A brown skull lay with jaws wide above the top sheet. Faral noted that the skeleton’s arms were crossed across its chest.

  The occupant of the other bunk had never made it back there. He—or maybe she, Faral couldn’t tell—lay facedown on the deck in a pair of stained, unisex coveralls. With no insects on board the Light to finish the work of decay, mold and bacteria had reduced the crew member’s flesh to a film of greasy brown dirt. The skull had patches of skin and hair stretching over the partly dried and partly rotted cranium.

  “That one died first,” Jens said, pointing at the bunk. “His partner laid him out, and then took ill himself—too suddenly to reach the bed.”

  “Save the archeology. We have some cleaning to do.”

  “Respectful cleaning,” Jens said. “We’re borrowing their ship, after all.”

  Faral sighed. “After all.” He nodded toward the bunk. “This one first, I think; he’s already partway wrapped.”

  Working together, he and Jens bundled the sheets and blankets up and around the body, and carried it outside between them. They halted at the foot of the ramp, uncertain what to do next. The ground was too hard for digging, and didn’t provide enough loose stone to raise a suitable cairn.

  “We can’t just leave them out here for the animals,” Faral said. “Or for that—that whatever-it-was your friend Guislen chased away.”

  “On Entibor they used to cremate people,” Jens replied after a moment’s thought. “Lay the bodies down under the ship’s jets. Let the fire purify them.”

  XIV. SAPNE

  FOLLOWING GUISLEN’S instructions, Miza took her place on the Light’s command couch and went to work. The couch was dirty, and the fabric of the seat coverings, no longer as flexible as it had once been, crackled under her as she sat.

  I hope that doesn’t mean that we’re going to find a major problem later on, she thought, a seal that’s lost its airtight integrity or something.

  She put the thought aside and kept on going over the numbers and instructions. The annotations for the coursebook were in Galcenian, though they had been amended in some other script—not the Ilarnan of the engineering control panels but something that Guislen had identified as one of the Infabedan languages.

  Miza frowned. Guislen was a strange one, with his Adepts’ gifts and his spacer’s ways, and she wasn’t sure what to make of him. He could have come from almost anywhere. She’d never seen any members of the Dust Devil’s crew except for the captain, and there was no way of knowing what other ships might be using the Sapnean port. That Jens trusted the man was obvious, but as far as Miza was concerned that didn’t necessarily count as a recommendation—she still wasn’t altogether sure that she trusted Jens.

  Faral had his own doubts about Guislen, she could tell that much from just watching him. Faral, unfortunately, did trust Jens. He’d accepted Guislen’s offer of help on his cousin’s word alone, and nothing Miza could say was likely to move him from that position.

  Let’s hear it for family loyalty, she thought. I hope it doesn’t end up being the death of all of us.

  When night fell, and after some hours Captain Amaro had still not returned from his courtesy visit to the Eraasian ship, Trav Esmet began to worry. Around local midnight, he left the bridge and went down to the common room. As he’d hoped, he found the Dusty’s owners still awake and playing kingnote—waiting up, he presumed, for the return of the three young people who’d ridden as smuggled cargo from Ophel.

  They were talking, for some reason, about ghosts.

  “All the Mageworlders believe in ’em,” said Bindweed, scooping up the cards from the table and shuffling the deck again. “If you ask them, they’ll tell you right to your face that Sapne is haunted.”

  “They’ve got plenty of good reasons to feel that way,” Blossom said unsympathetically. “It was Mageworlds biochem that brought down Old Sapne in the first place. I’m surprised that they’ve got enough nerve to show up.”

  “There’s money in it. And where there’s money, folks will find the nerve.” Bindweed paused in dealing out the cards, in order to look more closely at Trav. “You don’t look like a happy man, Esmet. Is there a problem?”

  “The captain’s not back yet,” Trav said. “And I’m concerned. Ghosts or no ghosts, Sapne isn’t a healthy place to be, at night and on foot.”

  “Have we talked to the Mages yet?” Bindweed asked.

  “No. If you could—”

  Bindweed laid her cards facedown on the table and stood up. “All right, people. Let’s go make a comm call.”

  The two owners followed Trav back up to the Dusty’s bridge. The pilot-apprentice opened up the ship’s comm log and found the frequency that Set-Them-Up-Again had used before. Bindweed keyed on the link and waited until the squeal and crackle had stopped.

  “This is Gentlelady Bindweed, half-owner of Dust Devil,” she said. “I need to speak to your captain.”

  “I am Haereith, captain of Set-Them-Up-Again,” a Mageworlds-accented voice replied over the link. “What is your pleasure, Gentlelady?”

  “Our captain—may I speak with him?”

  “He is not here.”

  “He isn’t?” Bindweed glanced over at Trav, and her expression told the pilot-apprentice that he had been right to worry. “We expected him back here at the Dusty several hours ago. When did he leave?”

  “He stayed to share supper with us,” Haereith replied. “But he left afterward, not long past dark. Is there some emergency?”

  “No, no emergency,” Bindweed said. “But we’re a bit concerned. Did he have time enough to walk back here?”

  “In the dark … hard to say. But yes, I think that there was time.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said. “Bindweed out.”

  She keyed off the link. “Well,” she said to the others on the bridge, “now we know. I hope I haven’t embarrassed Captain Amaro too badly in front of his counterparts from the other side of the Gap.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Blossom. “Ship’s owners do so many stupid things that one more bit of dottiness on our parts isn’t going to make a difference. Esmet, you were right to come and get us.”

  Trav felt relieved. “The captain’s always been on time before, is all. And this is Sapne—I don’t believe what the Mages say about the place being haunted, but the locals are a funny lot and you can’t really trust any of them with your back turned.”

  “Dir
tsiders are like that everywhere,” Bindweed said. She looked thoughtful for a moment. “One thing we can do right now is set up a vertical light beam—something that’ll show above the trees—for Amaro to guide home on.”

  “Shouldn’t we assemble a search party?” Trav asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Bindweed said. “In the dark, there’s too much danger of someone else falling into a hole or getting lost, and we don’t have enough people on board to mount an effective night search anyway. In the morning, if he hasn’t returned—”

  Blossom nodded agreement. “But your idea of rigging a light makes sense for now. It’ll take more than three pairs of hands to do it, though. Trav, you go wake up Sarris down in Engineering, and let’s get moving.”

  “I’ve never crewed a starship in my life,” Faral complained. He and Guislen were in the Light’s engine room, going over the gauges and readouts one last time. “How am I supposed to do it now?”

  “There’s an acceleration couch in here,” Guislen said. “All you have to do is strap down and wait. During planetary departure there’s nothing you could do anyway if things went wrong.”

  “Maybe the ship’s had all its bad luck already.”

  “We can only hope.” Guislen checked the lighted gauges. “We seem to have reaction mass enough to get to the Central Worlds. Unless the gauge is frozen.”

  He laughed, and swung onto the ladder to take him up. Faral closed the vacuum-tight door behind him, and went over to the acceleration couch to strap down. There was a comm-link button on the arm of the couch. He keyed the link.

  “You ready topside?”

  “Ready as I’m going to get,” Miza’s voice came back. She sounded scared but resolute. “Waiting for my copilot.”

  “He’s on his way.”

  Faral keyed off the link and settled back into the couch padding to wait for lift-off. All things considered, this place in the brightly lit engineering compartment, surrounded by burnished metal and sharply angled machines, was better than the strapdown position Jens had found—the unused bunk in crew berthing. The ship had been designed for two, and two bunks were all there were. The padding and parts of the other bunk had been discarded entire, and now lay on the ground below with the bodies of the former crew, awaiting the cleansing flames of the Elevener’s jets.