by Debra Doyle
"So did everyone in the valley," Jens said. "The trail is easy to spot from up on the bluffs. Watch it now, the path gets a little tricky here."
"Thank you," said Mael gravely. "It's discourteous enough of me to arrive on your doorstep unannounced. To show up injured and in need of tending would be even worse."
In the mountain peaks of Galcen's northern continent, the air smelled of snowmelt and the first hints of new growth.
Mistress Klea Santreny drew a deep breath, relishing the change in the atmosphere. Even after more than two decades away from the warmth of equatorial Nammerin, she still wasn't wholly reconciled to the winters here at the Retreat. Let others think that her preference for the high collar and the close-buttoned sleeves of an Adept's formal blacks signaled an ingrained commitment to distance and rigidity. Klea knew better. If she had an ingrained commitment to anything, it was to keeping warm during the two-thirds of the year when the centuries-old stone-built citadel was—for everyone but the natives of this windy and isolated district—damned near uninhabitable.
The Master of the Guild, she supposed, counted as a native. He'd come to the Retreat for apprenticeship when he was still a boy, and had grown to manhood inside its walls. Klea knew before she opened the door to his private office that he would have celebrated today's foretaste of spring by abandoning formal garb for a lightweight coverall in dusty black… and never mind that it's going to be snowing again by the end of the week, he's not going to switch back until next autumn.
She palmed the lockplate.
"You're right," she said as the door slid open, before he could make the remark she knew he would; "it's a beautiful morning, and positively balmy outside as long as the wind isn't blowing. Of course, the wind hasn't stopped blowing since the day I first came here, and that was back in '05, but what's a minor detail like that among friends?"
Owen Rosselin-Metadi laughed under his breath. "What, indeed?"
The Master was working at his desk, a massive, domineering piece of furniture that only grudgingly shared office space with three chairs and a Standard calendar. An overhead light panel, its crude metal brackets dating back to the first time the citadel had undergone a conversion to more recent technology, supplied the room with most of its illumination. The single window was a narrow vertical opening that might at one point have been an arrow slit. These days, treble-thickness armor-glass covered the gap.
Owen gestured at the more comfortable of the room's two empty chairs—the other was reserved for unwelcome guests and errant apprentices—and went back to contemplating whichever piece of business was currently occupying his desktop. Klea sat.
"So what's today's headache?" she asked.
There was always a headache, of one kind or another. Directing—however gently—the affairs of the galaxy's Adepts took more comm time and comp time and paperwork than any one job ought, especially for a man who would have been happy to spend his days teaching the apprentices and the junior masters. In Klea's opinion, it was all Errec Ransome's fault, for selling out the Guild and betraying the Republic and then handing everything over to Owen without bothering to clean up what he had done.
Dead over twenty years, she thought, and still screwing up everybody's lives for them. Bastard.
If Klea Santreny hated anybody these days, it was the former Master of the Guild. But she was careful to keep those thoughts well below the surface of her mind. Owen had loved his teacher—had willingly done whatever tasks the Guild Master had set for him—and the knowledge of Ransome's treachery had been hard for him to bear.
"The galaxy is behaving itself at the moment," he said in reply to her question. "It does that, sometimes. Mostly so I can worry about my family, I think."
Klea pressed her lips together. The members of Owen's far-distant family were more than capable, in her opinion, of handling their own problems without looking to the Master of the Guild for assistance. But she'd made that argument, and lost it, too many times already. These days, she tried to cultivate patience instead.
"What about your family?" she asked.
"That's a good question." Owen touched a spot on the surface of his desktop. "All I know so far is that this showed up in the morning message traffic."
A display panel lit up the desktop where Owen had touched it: letters and numbers, routing codes of some kind or another. Klea didn't recognize them. They weren't for the Retreat, she could tell that much, or for any other place on Galcen that she knew of.
"Transmission glitch?" she asked.
"That's what I thought. But this was riding the wave along with it—don't ask me how, I don't do that sort of work anymore."
He pressed another spot on the desktop. The routing codes vanished, and a voice—tense and hurried; it could have belonged to either a man or a woman from the pitch—came on over the desk's onboard speaker.
"I'm going to keep this short. I think this is a safe line, but you never know. Listen, Owen—there's something nasty going. on with the Khesatan succession, and I want you to keep Jens the hell out of it. I can handle everything else, no problem, as long as the kid stays clear."
The audio clicked off and the desktop went dim. Klea let out her breath. "Your sister, right?"
"Who else? Jens is her boy."
"I thought he was on Maraghai with your brother's family."
"He is," Owen said. "But that doesn't mean he's going to stay there. The law on Maraghai says that once you're grown, you leave the homeworld—and Jens has been grown for a year now, by Maraghite reckoning."
"Your sister thinks he'll head for Khesat when they kick him out?"
"She's afraid he will, anyway." Owen looked thoughtful. "I don't know what's happening on Khesat… we haven't heard any rumblings from the local Guildhouses, so whatever's going on there hasn't spread outside the nobility… but I expect we'll be getting word on the situation before long, if it's so bad that Bee wants to steer Jens away from it."
Klea didn't need to ask whether Owen would fall in with the mysterious request. Beka was his sister, and he had been schooled since earliest boyhood to follow her whimsies and keep her out of trouble. Whatever she wanted, he would bend the universe itself, if necessary, to deliver.
"So what are we supposed to do?" Klea asked. "Fend him off from Khesat ourselves?"
"Fend him off or lure him elsewhere. As appropriate."
"Mmh." Klea gazed out the narrow window at a vertical strip of scenic vista: a shoulder of mountain, a scrap of sky, a ragged wisp of cloud. Troublesome and high-spirited young men were a problem she no longer had to deal with, thank fortune; the ones who came to the Retreat for training or apprenticeship had invariably been through a few chastening experiences along the way. "So what are you going to do with him?"
"Them," said Owen. "Jens has a cousin. Several, actually… but Faral is his agemate and foster-sib. If one of them leaves the planet, so will the other."
Klea suppressed a grimace of distaste. At that age, they were even worse when they traveled in pairs… "All right—so what are you going to do with them?"
"I can't do anything." He gestured at the desktop, and the dark surface lit up with an eyestrain-inducing display of glyphs and icons and blinking response-requested message buttons. "And that's just the ordinary stuff. It doesn't count whatever's brewing on Khesat—we're going to have to watch that situation, in case the local Guildhouses are keeping quiet out of something besides ignorance or sheer Khesatan perversity…"
He was sounding tired again. And she knew that more than anything else he feared the possibility of local Adepts involving themselves in political conspiracies. In the old days before the Republic, the Guild had earned a bad name for that sort of thing in some places—and the temptation hadn't gone away in the decades since. Klea sighed.
"All right," she said. "You watch Khesat. I'll watch the boys."
Some twenty minutes after meeting with Jens, Mael saw the lights of the house shining out in welcome through the trees. The house hadn't changed
much over the years. The pillars that held up the long veranda were as tall as ordinary trees back on Eraasi. Other parts of the house were trees, more of the immense sky-tickling giants that made up the local forests. Warm yellow lantern-glow made the veranda pleasant and welcoming, although the faint haze-effect of a force field let Mael know that casual intruders—rockhogs and rufstaffas, perhaps—would not find an easy entrance.
Llannat Hyfid was waiting for them on the steps outside the force field. She hadn't changed much either, as far as Mael could tell. She was still a small, dark-skinned woman, with features closer at first look to plain than to pretty, although they had worn better over the years than some. Her black hair had the streaks of early grey that came to so many of those who worked with Power, but her face was almost as unlined as when Mael had first met her.
"Mistress," he began.
"Dinner first," she said. "Talk afterward. Jens, you go help Faral feed his sibs and send them off to bed; I'll be in to say goodnight to 'Rada later."
The young man nodded amiably and vanished through the force field into the depths of the great house. Mistress Hyfid called out, "And wash that blood off your hand before you go anywhere! I don't want Kei or Dortan getting any ideas about going out hunting with the table knives!"
Mael suppressed a smile, and followed her up the steps. She led the way to a dining table set up on an open porch illuminated by more of the lanterns. Her husband was waiting there for her, looming almost as tall among the shadows as one of the Selvaurs themselves.
"Flybynights are running," Ari Rosselin-Metadi said as they approached. He gestured at the steep slope out beyond the veranda, where shadows dipped and flitted in the clear air above the treetops. "Shall I send the boys out to get some for dessert?"
"No," Mistress Hyfid said. "There's no need. Let's pour a drink to absent friends, then have our dinner and get to business."
Ari nodded, and moved to a side table that held three tiny crystal glasses and a cut-glass decanter of something purple. Ceremoniously, he filled the glasses and passed them round. Mael took one, and breathed in a cautious sniff of the liquid's fumes. The scent was sharp and medicinal, and he wondered what the Adept-worlders made it from.
"Absent friends," Mistress Hyfid said. She tossed back her drink, and Ari and Mael did the same. The purple liquid had a sour, almost electric feel in the mouth. It was an acquired taste, Mael supposed, though he didn't plan on working to acquire it.
The meal itself was plain but satisfying: a great deal of roast meat and steamed grain, accompanied by thick slices of sweet, yellow-fleshed fruit. Mael found that his long walk upcountry from the last pubtrans stop had left him famished. He ate heartily, finding the textures and flavors sufficiently alien to be interesting but not—he felt certain the choice was deliberate—so strange as to be disquieting.
When they were all finished, Mistress Hyfid wiped the fruit juice off of her fingers with her napkin and. laid the crumpled white fabric aside.
"I'm glad you could make it this far," she said. "I'm sorry I couldn't give you much of a reason in my invitation, but it wasn't something I—"
"Mistress—" Mael experienced a sudden sting of anxiety.
"—you didn't call me here. I came on my own to ask for your advice."
She looked distressed. Her husband rumbled something in the Selvauran language; Mael supposed he meant it for comfort and reassurance, but if so the effect was lost on a neutral observer.
"I sent messages," she said. "I even called in some old favors for the last one, and it went out by personal post on a Space Force courier."
Mael shook his head. "No messages from you came to Eraasi while I was there."
"And when did you leave?"
"A month ago, planetary reckoning."
"Then at least one of the messages should have reached you," said Mistress Hyfid. "But if it wasn't my summoning that brought you, why did you come?"
Mael paused a moment to gather his thoughts before presenting them. Llannat Hyfid was the First of all the Mage-Circles, but she had been born on Maraghai and schooled in Power with the Adepts on Galcen… much about the homeworlds would always be alien to her.
"Let me tell you," he said, "about what happened to me on the way this evening."
"The rufstaffa?"
"In part. I should have sensed it following me… a hunting-beast is a powerful disturber of patterns… but I was caught up in watching the eiran. The cords are tarnished my lady, and decaying."
Mistress Hyfid's eyes were dark and sober. "I know. I've seen them more and more often of late. That's why I wanted to talk to you."
"The eiran aren't the worst of it." Mael looked from the First to her husband. "Back in the homeworlds, an ekkannikh has risen up to disrupt the Circles."
"Ekkan—?" Mistress Hyfid stumbled on the unfamiliar word.
"In the old stories," said Mael, "a hungry ghost. But among those who work with Power, it is the word for someone among us who has too much strength and too much will—or too much anger—to let himself die completely."
"I don't like the sound of that," said Ari Rosselin-Metadi. He stood up and fetched the decanter of purple liquor from the side table, then refilled all their glasses to within a hair of the brim. "Because the only dead man I can think of with that much of that kind of power is Errec Ransome."
Errec Ransome. Master, once, of the Adepts' Guild, and teacher of Mistress Hyfid when she first came to learn the ways of Power. The Breaker of Circles, they had called him in the homeworlds, for what he had done at the end of the First War. Traitor, they called him now, on both sides of the old border zone, and schoolchildren from one side of the civilized galaxy to the other made an insult of his name.
Mael tipped a splash of the purple liquor onto the smooth-planed boards of the veranda—a ritual gesture, of little worth against a determined adversary, but the habit of a lifetime could not be shed that easily. "You said the words, not I."
"I'm right, then."
"Yes," said Mael. "So far, the creature has not killed—it hasn't yet recovered enough identity to be that powerful. But the Circles on Cracanth have felt its touch these five months and more, and someday soon it—he—will cross the threshold."
Mistress Hyfid frowned. "Why Cracanth, of all places?"
Mael fell silent for a moment, the better to choose his words before he spoke. Not all the history of the First War was common knowledge in the Adept-worlds—especially history from the Eraasian point of view—but some matters were more ticklish to deal with than others.
"The story is obscure," he said finally, "and all those with direct knowledge of it are long since dead… but it was told to me when I was young that Errec Ransome had once been a prisoner among us, and that Cracanth was the world on which they held him."
"Now that," said Rosselin-Metadi, after another silence, "is something nobody mentioned when I was growing up." He took a long drink of the purple liquid in his glass. "I wonder if they even knew."
"It makes sense, though," Mistress Hyfid said. "The way he hated the Magelords…"
Mael said, "Yes. The stronger the ekkannikh grows, the more he will remember. When he remembers enough, he will know that it was not the Circles who defeated him in the end. And Errec Ransome was a man who devoted his whole life to crushing the ones who had injured him."
Chapter II.
Galcen; Maraghai, Hesat
« ^ »
Klea spent the rest of the day worrying about how to handle her latest commission from Owen Rosselin-Metadi.
She thought about it while she talked in the practice yard with Mistress Yarro, deciding on the quarterly schedule of instruction for the senior apprentices. She thought about it while she was closeted in the lesser pantry with Master Enolt, planning the Retreat's long-term food purchases. And she thought about it in half a dozen other corners of the ancient citadel, in between dealing with a host of smaller matters that would otherwise have claimed too much of the Guild Master's attention.
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The basic problem remained intractable. She was somehow supposed to shadow and protect—and at all costs to keep away from Khesat—a pair of young men well past the age when they would tolerate such protection.
How to begin? She rubbed her forehead, where the beginnings of a headache had begun to gather. I can't see calling up Maraghai and asking Owen's brother if his boys are still
at home… what am I supposed to tell him if they are? "Don't let them go to Khesat"? As soon as the kids get wind of that—and they will, they always do!—Khesat's going to be the first place they'll want to go.
And that's if they're home. If they've left…
Definitely, a headache. The only person she'd ever heard of who'd successfully tracked a lost object outside of local planetary space was Llannat Hyfid, the First of all the Mage-Circles. Rumor had it that Errec Ransome had done something similar in his youth—but the subsequent careers of both those individuals gave her pause.
One of them a turncoat, she thought, and the other a traitor and a madman. And both of them more powerful by a long way than Klea Santreny.
She went to bed early that night, nursing her headache. Sleep eluded her in spite of all her efforts. She was still awake when a messenger found her several hours later, with the news that the Second of the Mage-Circles had crossed the old border zone, and appeared to be headed for Maraghai. In theory, the border was now open, and Mageworlders could come and go as they pleased. Klea didn't care much for the idea. She'd killed Mages with her own hands, back during the Second War, while other Mages had tried to kill her, and she didn't have a forgiving nature about such things.
She pushed herself to her feet and addressed the messenger. "Tell Master Rosselin-Metadi that I've departed on business."
"Will you need a car down to the field?"
"No," she said. "I'll walk. I need to think."
She pulled down her heavy black cloak from its peg beside the door and started out for the landing field.