“I did gather that she is a few years older than he is,” Jaime admitted.
“Seven standard, to be exact.”
Coryn caught himself before adding that that was the same age-difference which existed between him and Sarah, only in their case it was he who was the older one.
By this time they had settled into the kitchen to eat the meals that Dili had prepared for them.
“Nuking your supper, or maybe it’s breakfast, is about the extent of housework required of the inhabitants of the Official Residence,” Coryn said drily, as he set about doing just that. “Leave the dirty dishes in the sink; Curt and Dili would be scandalized if we deigned even to stick them in the dishwasher.
“Do you want a glass of wine, or beer, maybe, with your food? We’re always well-stocked when it comes to stuff like that. The expense account that goes with the household is generous, and until you came, the only guest I’ve had has been Sarah, when she needs a break from her studies at the Witch Central.”
“She’s the one Steph refers to as ‘the kid sister’, right? A feisty young woman I gathered, from what he and Fiana had to say.”
“Having a rather hard time at the present, which makes it a little bit difficult to deal with her.”
Jaime could hear the regret in Coryn’s voice. Fiana had mentioned that he might want to tread softly on the subject of Sarah with the Liaison Officer; Fiana was pretty certain that there were romantic feelings involved on his side, but that he did not feel free to court the young woman because of the situation which put him in the position of being a de facto guardian to her.
“Coryn is very honourable, and very sensitive,” Fiana had explained. “That’s partly what made him such a good alyen. The only way he ever took advantage of his clients was by passing on The Organization secrets that they’d confide during pillow-talk. Otherwise, those women received their money’s worth—I say that knowing well that his services did not come cheap.”
“I suppose that he would not have heard secrets worth passing on if he hadn’t been an expensive bed-partner,” Steph had said. “Those who have important secrets to spill generally figure that they deserve the best when they’re buying something, or somebody. And the Agency uses that attitude to advantage, through Agents like you, Fiana, and Coryn.”
“Precisely.” Fiana had grinned at her spouse. “You’ll make an Agent yet.”
“I’m not sure that I’m in any dire need of another hair-raising adventure,” he had responded, with a shake of his head. “The last one was quite the ride.”
“Ferhil stones is not an easy place for a lively young woman to be confined in,” Coryn added to Jaime. “I’m always amazed at how well the Apprentices handle it, although, for them, just to be there, allowed to take lessons from the Circle Witches, is an honour. The honour is sort of lost on a young woman who was already working as an—excellent—ship mechanic before she ever came into her Stone-talent.”
*****
Jillian had arranged for a desk of lovely Kordean wood to be brought in to create a workspace for Jaime. Coryn brought the three half-eggs that he had left, from his office, and lay them on the new desk.
“This is what the offending mechanisms look like,” he said. “Not particularly earth-shattering, but I’ll be the first to admit that all I figured out is how to turn the dratted things on and off.”
He demonstrated, and a pin-prick of green light appeared on the object’s flat surface, at one of the longer ends.
“When we experimented with Sarah, and she activated her amarto, an arrow appeared on that surface, pointing in her direction.”
Jaime picked the object up in his hands, giving it a careful visual scrutiny. It looked pretty much like any, indefinite-as-to-purpose electronic piece of equipment might, small enough to be easily concealed in his palm, which, admittedly, was larger than, say, the average woman’s hand. But, he judged, Jillian Ashton could have palmed the thing without difficulty, although a smaller woman might have had some trouble.
“Two things we know about them; The Circle of the Twelve may have found out something more by the time we go out there tomorrow, but the august ladies will tell us nothing on the communicator—we’ll have to talk to them in person,” Coryn went on.
“One: when the detector zeroes in on an amarto-sensitive using her Stone, it creates an emotional backwash in the sensitive. Sarah said that it was like the feelings of the user, and, possibly, of those around him, were amplified at least tenfold and directed at her. She also thought that the Hounds using the things were unaware of the effect; some of the emotions being projected are what made her come to that conclusion.
“Two: The gadgets are not terribly precise when it comes to zeroing in on the amarto-user. If there are two witchy-looking females close together and one of them is an amarto-sensitive doing a mental scan, the detector cannot tell its user which one of the two is the correct target. We know this because when we trapped the Hounds who were chasing Sarah, she was running arm-in-arm with the wife of our flyer pilot and mechanic, Texi. She’s a very attractive, black-haired Kordean, and the Hounds assumed that she was the Witch-to-be, and stunned her instead of Sarah.”
He turned to the fellow who had accompanied him out of the office the night before, and asked:
“How is Nance, by the way? Sarah said that I had to make sure that she kept on being okay.”
“Oh, she’s good. There was just that one headache which Sarah eased. Even the lethargy that you people warned her about, had disappeared by the time she went back to work. She’s pretty buoyed up actually, hoping for another opportunity to play Agent.”
He shook his head, sounding slightly exasperated. Coryn grinned at him.
“Them feisty women can be handfuls.”
He turned back to Jaime.
“You’re welcome to take one of these apart, if you think it’ll help. We have very few specialized tools, but Texi can show you what we have. And the Port Maintenance have offered the use of anything that they possess that might work. Texi can usher you there too; he knows pretty well everyone who works there, and can introduce you to the Maintenance Head, Sackow.
“Well, go to it; if Texi can help you, he may. He hates paperwork, and prefers to dabble in anything to do with equipment.”
*****
By the end of the work-night, Jaime and Texi had the half-egg which they had chosen for dissection taken apart, the individual components spread out across Jaime’s desk, tiny labels glued to the wood beside the various items, and a large “Do not disturb anything on this desk, under the threat of death” sign displayed prominently on one corner. Jaime had written the sign on a piece of cardboard which he had obtained from Jillian, and Texi had written a Kordean translation of it underneath the Terran Standard words.
“Just in case some of the cleaning people aren’t fluent in Standard,” he explained. “I wouldn’t put it past one of the more diligent ones to say to themselves: ‘Hey that’s a messy desk; I’ll just sweep it clean’, and then where would we be?”
“I’ll leave a message for the cleaners that they’re not to touch anything on the new fellow’s desk,” Jillian said when she walked by. “How’s it going anyway?”
“It’s early days, yet,” Jaime replied. “By the way, can I keep Texi as an assistant—when he’s not needed to fly people around, or to maintain the Office’s fleet of flying machines, that is? He’s got nimble fingers with the tiny tools that we have to use with these things.”
“I’ll run it by Coryn, but I don’t think that he’ll object,” Jillian promised. “As a matter of fact I think that he’ll be pleased if we have work that Texi enjoys more than pushing computer buttons, to give him. The Liaison Officer believes in trying to challenge the workers as much as is possible. Though the scut work still has to get done.”
“Doesn’t it always?” Jaime replied grinning at her over the component he had in his palm for study. “Though I have noticed that on this world a lot of that is delegated to
the so-called servants.”
“Hah! Life at the Official Residence is lived at the level of upper class Kordeans! Makes sense, I guess; diplomats have to keep up appearances. Still, I’m pretty much a democrat myself, and all this caste-business does rub me the wrong way. Which is why I’m the Second Liaison Officer, and will never make Chief. I don’t have Coryn’s ability to set aside my personal prejudices, and work with who, or what, is available.”
“I gather that he has accomplished rather a lot in a short time,” Jaime said.
“He has, and he has my admiration for it. He even manages to get along with that stiff-backed Witch Marlyss; I’d probably scream if I had to try. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating Coryn because he’d be useless in a laboratory; a lab is probably the only place where he’d be helpless.”
“And he obviously has the sense to find people who can make up for that lack in himself.” Jaime chuckled. “He’d probably have found a way to entice me to Kordea, even if I hadn’t found the notion of coming here, and looking into your problem a challenge worth taking.”
Jillian laughed out loud.
“Yeah. He was busy trying to think of angles to use on you when Steph Clennan called to say that you were already on your way.”
“The trouble,” Jaime said to Texi when Jillian had gone back to her office, “is that I can’t see much here, among all these pieces, that’s different from any of the electronic gadgets that are commonly sold everywhere in the Confederation.
“I guess what I’ll have to assume is that what makes it different is in one or more of the items that do look out of place, or unnecessary, to me. But, at the moment, I don’t have a clue as to what they might be doing.”
“We maybe need an amarto-sensitive to take a look at them,” Texi mused. “Something that means nothing to us, might speak to a Witch.
“Should we try to pack the stuff up somehow, so that you can take it to Ferhil Stones, when you and Coryn go there, tomorrow night?”
“I’d hate to do that,” Jaime said, staring at the components spread all over the desk. “We’ve got them all arranged so that we can easily put the thing back together if that seems to be what we need to do.”
He grinned at Texi.
“The night’s getting on towards the morning. We’ll all be going home shortly—I’m sure that you’ll want to return to your wife, who I hear, is a looker by anyone’s standards. Let’s leave things as are, for the moment; it would take too long to do the individual bagging that we’d have to do. Maybe our magic-working Liaison Officer could persuade one of the Witches to come here to take a look at the components, if he asks nicely enough.”
Texi shook his head.
“If he can do that, he’s as big a magic-worker as the Witches are.”
But he let it alone. He did not want to start bagging the components at the end of a work-night. He wanted to go home to Nance, of course he did, Jaime was right about that. Tomorrow would be soon enough to deal with—whatever.
*****
Coryn was at the controls of the flyer when he and Jaime touched down on the dusty ground beside the large stone pile which was Ferhil Stones.
The sun had set a short while ago, and the full moon Lina had been rising in the opposite quarter of the sky from the sunset, while they had travelled across the countryside. Jaime had stared at it, shaking his head, every now and then.
“What’s wrong?” Coryn had asked him, when he had first noticed the gesture.
“That moon is all wrong,” Jaime had replied. “I did read about it when I was researching Kordea, but seeing it is a bit different from knowing that it exists. That moon should not be the way it is, where it is, so consistently.”
“Consistent is about the right description for it,” Coryn had said, glancing at the offending night light. “It does that every night. Comes up directly across from where the sun sets, when the sun sets, crosses the sky, and then goes down as the sun rises. And always full, so it’s handy, if anything. I was raised on Space Stations so I’ve really no concept of how moons ought to behave.”
“It must be at the L2 point of the sun-planet system,” Jaime had said.
At Coryn’s eye roll, he had added: “Okay, I’ll skip the scientific lingo, and just mention that the L2 point is one of the places where the gravitational forces of the system are exquisitely balanced. And it is in a direct line with the planet and the sun, which is why you get the constant full moon effect. However, no satellite with any amount of mass should be able to stay at the L2 point without throwing the whole gravitational balance out of whack, so that sort of screws up my explanation.”
“If it helps, the other six moons, I’ve been told, behave more like normal moons.”
Jaime had groaned, and shook his head.
“No, it doesn’t, because that’s crazy, too. Seven moons, for crying out loud. Some of them, like this Lina, look pretty big. I guess the normal moons might have some mass, but from what I can figure, Lina should be light as a feather, to stay in place as positioned.”
He had shaken his head once again.
“The only way I can square this circle,” he had added, “is by assuming that the famed Witches have something to do with keeping the skies above this world intact. Otherwise..., well there are laws of physics being broken, left and right.”
“You would know more about that than I possibly could,” Coryn had stated. “Mind you, I wouldn’t put it past the respected ladies....”
His words had trailed off.
“There’s a song that I’ve heard Jillian sing,” he then had resumed. “She said that she learned it from Nance and Sarah. It’s about travelling through the night by Lina-light, and it states that Lina is ‘kept up above’ by the ‘power of the Seven Circles’.”
“Those would be the famed Witch Circles, of course,” Jaime had mused. “The largest, and the most powerful of which is The Circle of the Twelve, at Ferhil Stones, which is where we’re heading right now.”
Like always when Coryn arrived at Ferhil Stones in a flyer, a manservant arrived to greet the ones alighting, as soon as the machine had settled on the ground. Coryn had often wondered whether the Witches were so aware of their surroundings that they knew who came on to their property and when, or did the servant just keep an eye out for arrivals, whether expected or not, and then come out to check them out, or welcome them, whichever was the more appropriate reaction. He suspected that the first explanation for the prompt greetings was the more correct one, although, possibly, when the arrival was expected, and a known quantity, the second supposition might be the operational one.
In any case, he and Jaime were expected; he had used a communicator to connect to the console at the Witch Stronghold, to announce their planned arrival as soon as he had known when he and Jaime would be making the trip. He assumed that the Witch Alta, who handled receptionist duties for the place, had received the message and passed it on.
“Welcome to Ferhil Stones,” the servant intoned, in the ritual greeting, making the ritual bow.
Coryn returned the bow.
“Thank you, and may peace be with you,” he spoke the ritual response.
Jaime bowed, too, but did not speak; he did not need to, Coryn’s response was enough.
The manservant turned around, leading them into the building through the heavy wooden doors which served, among other purposes, to keep the daytime heat from penetrating into the interior of the building.
*****
“Witch Marlyss, the Eldest of the Twelve, I would like you to meet my new Scientific Advisor, Jaime Morrow,” Coryn introduced Jaime to the most important person in the room.
Once again they were in Marlyss’ office, and once again Witch Dian and Sarah were present. This time, however, there were no others in the room, although the half-egg which Coryn had left with the Witches when he had dropped Sarah off, was lying on Marlyss’ desk, the only item on the large surface.
“According to Sarah, here, you’re hoping that
this—Scientific Advisor—can help you understand the mechanism you and your cohort at the Port removed from the so-called Organization Hounds?”
Marlyss’ tone sounded rather dubious.
Coryn donned his most endearing grin.
“Probably he can’t help me understand anything,” he said. “I’d be happy if he succeeds in figuring out how it works, in collaboration with your colleagues, Witch Marlyss. Perhaps, if that can be done, we can work out how we can counter what the Hounds are doing with them.”
“Perhaps.”
Marlyss’ eyes travelled from Coryn to Jaime, and back again. She appeared to be thinking, mentally weighing something. Dian was studying Jaime, Coryn noted; she was being somewhat covert about her interest. Sarah’s eyes were flitting from person to person; whenever they stopped, it was to rest on an inanimate object, like the desk top.
“Can we trust you, Scientific Advisor, Jaime Morrow?” Marlyss asked suddenly.
Jaime looked taken aback.
“Trust me?” he asked, surprised. “What do you mean, trust me? In what way could I betray you?”
“You could always run off to these Organization people and sell them the knowledge you have gained on this world,” Marlyss said coolly. “Or you could bruit about our secrets in what, I understand, are known as learned journals.”
Jaime seemed to have regained his equilibrium.
“The second one is much more likely than the first,” he said with a short chuckle. “Although writing scientific papers on what I’m doing here, and now, is off the table, too, since I was sworn in as an Agency employee very recently—was it less than two days ago? The Agency, it seems, is as keen to keep the discoveries concerning what they call ‘the amarto-angle’ secret, as you, the Kordean famous Witches, are.”
“One of the reasons why I wanted to recruit Jaime for this position is that trusted friends of mine vouched for him,” Coryn threw in.
“Steph?” Sarah asked, surprising Coryn.
Love and Intrigue Under the Seven Moons of Kordea Page 10