[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

  "Right," said Bindweed. "And bring us back the word." She handed Chaka a pocket comm link. "Save this for emergencies; there's no crypto on it, and in an unauthorized port like this one you never know who might be listening."

  Faral and his two companions continued on beneath the vine-draped trees. Jagged slabs of stone poked up here and there among the bushes. A light wind rustled in the leaves, and the sunlight shone down in golden dots and speckles through the lace of greenery.

  Ahead of them, a swirl of vines climbed up some half-hidden object. Through the gaps in the woody stems, Faral glimpsed the sheen of metal: beneath the broad leaves and delicate pink blooms a derelict spaceship waited for a launch command that would never come.

  Jens looked at the ship with an expression that Faral couldn't interpret—not curiosity, and not the fake-Khesatan insouciance he sometimes put on as a cover for nerves or indecision."Do you suppose the crew is still aboard her??"

  "What makes you say that?" Miza asked. The words came out in a jittery rush—she was a city girl, Faral reminded himself, and liable to imagine all sorts of strange things.

  "A feeling," Jens said. "Somebody is watching us here. And this place is full of ghosts."

  They kept on going, but Miza remained edgy, starting at commonplace noises and glancing around with wide, uneasy eyes. Faral had also been put on his guard. He'd known his cousin to do any number of things purely for dramatic effect, but telling outright lies had never been one of them. If Jens said that he sensed ghosts, then ghosts—or things that moved just like them—were somewhere out there.

  It's not the bodiless spirits we need to worry about, Faral told himself It's the living, breathing ones.

  Now that he looked closer he saw that the entire forest was made of abandoned hulks. Looming objects that he had taken at first for hills and boulders had mechanical structures beneath their coverings of green and brown, and what appeared at one point to be a cave turned out to be the darkness beneath a flattened ship-disk, supported like the Dusty on landing legs. Another vessel had not been so lucky Its legs had rusted away, or had been knocked out by some natural force, so that the ship had fallen onto its side. The metal plates that made up its hull were pushed inward like the sides of a crumpled egg carton.

  Faral glanced over at Miza She'd lost some of her apprehension—maybe it was recognizing manufactured structures underneath the wildness that had done it—and was regarding the toppled freighter with an appraising eye.

  "There's probably a fortune in treasure lying around out here," she said. "Sapne was a major transshipment point back before the First Magewar—stuff going from the Central Worlds out to the fringes, and raw materials coming back."

  "We didn't come here to steal from the dead," Jens interrupted sharply. "Don't even think about it."

  They kept on walking through the graveyard of lost ships, surrounded by trees and by tangled draperies of foliage, across ground cracked and mounded where broken slabs of stone protruded above red earth.

  Captain Amaro settled the dagger he had taken out of Dust Devil's armory into its tooled leather sheath, and double-checked the available charge in his cross-draw blasters. The Mageworlders he'd met in times past, and the old-stock Eraasians in particular, had tended to be impressed by good-looking weapons. Reassured that everything was in order, he left the Dusty behind and set out on his courtesy call.

  The air of the morning smelled sweet, and a gentle breeze sighed past the looming bulk of his ship. Based on the transponder readings, the Eraasian vessel would he a bit to sunward Captain Amaro took his bearings and commenced hiking.

  The Mages would be expecting him to show up fairly soon. As the newcomer in port it was his obligation to call on the senior arrival, unless he intended to be hostile. And a merchant and trader was never hostile without provocation, it tended to cut down on business opportunities thereafter. In any case, Amaro had moderate hopes for the visit. He hadn't taken on a full cargo at Sombrelír, but there were two or three things in the Dusty's hold that might work as trade goods— and news and contacts were always valuable.

  An hour of steady walking later, the other ship came into view a Magebuilt trading craft, nowhere near as pretty a sight as the Dusty, but a good bit larger. Under its shadow the Eraasian free-spacers had set up tables and piled them high with trade goods of the cheap but glittering kind. Bolts of patterned cloth and cheap cast-in-one-piece hand axes lay on the tables beside holocubes of fractal landscapes and plastic boxes set with synthetic gems.

  Even this early in the day a few locals had shown up, short and sullen-looking types dressed in crude handwoven fabrics, solemnly picking over the tables of trade materials. They carried woven baskets full of barter items of their own—beetle shells, bark, and small glittering stones.

  Most of the local items would be medicinals, Amaro knew. The Mageworlders had a lively pharmaceutical industry going, and you couldn't leave your ship on a nonindustrial planet without tripping over a plant-and-earth prospector or two. Primitive artwork was another trade possibility, but a risky one. No telling in advance what the collectors in the Central Worlds would like, and if you guessed wrong you could wind up with a worthless cargo. It took a clever cargomaster to make a profit out of the Sapne run, and a good ship that didn't need refueling in order to enter the system and leave again.

  The captain of the Eraasian ship was sitting in a folding chair behind the tables of trade goods. He rose and stepped forward as Amaro approached.

  "Greeting," he said. "I am Haereith, captain of the Freetrader Set-Them-Up-Again." He spoke passable Galcenian—at least as good as Amaro's Eraasian. "We had not expected to see another merchant here on this voyage. Have you anything interesting by way of a swap?"

  "One or two things, maybe," Amaro replied.

  "Then let us drink to the one or two things." Haereith reached under the table and pulled out a stoppered flask and a pair of mugs. He filled both mugs with a deep red liquid— wine, from the sharp, rich smell of it—and offered one of them, to Amaro before taking the other for himself.

  The Mageworlder splashed a few drops of his wine onto the ground before taking a drink. "Ghosts about," he explained, sounding a little embarrassed by the action. "A place like this, you cannot be too careful."

  "That's what I always say, myself," Amaro replied, and poured out a dollop of wine from his own mug.

  "Then come aboard with me," Haereith said. He extended a hand to Amaro, who took it briskly in return. "And if it pleases you, tell all of us on the Set-'em-Up where you have come from, and what are—what is—the news."

  Chapter XI.

  Sapne; Khesat

  « ^ »

  The forest of derelict ships extended for several miles beyond the point where Faral and the others had begun walking. They were lucky, Faral supposed, that Amaro had set the Dusty down close to the edge of the old landing area, and not near its center. The maps in the shipboard data files had shown an extensive port complex at Sapne Market, with a landing field bigger than some small towns.

  Now, if he'd been right in his guess about the building most likely to house a black-market passport-and-visa operation…

  Sometime about noon they left the forest behind them. The terrain changed from woods to open ground overgrown with stands of tall grass. Here and there a trail appeared among the waving, head-high stems.

  "Do we need to be following one of those?" Miza asked.

  "Depends," said Faral. "Do we want to be ambushed?"

  They continued in a straight line, guiding on the sun. At last a building appeared, looming tall and wide above the grasses, with blank walls that gave back the light in a fierce dazzle. They'd built well on Old Sapne, before the Biochem Plagues—neither time nor vandalism had made any change to the building's armor-glass sheath. Many paths converged in the open ground before it, and the grass there was trodden short.

  Jens shifted the weight of the portable generator on his shoulders and squinted up at the building. "If this
isn't the place where we get our passports validated, it certainly ought to be."

  "Somebody uses it for something, at any rate," Faral said. "All those trails leading up to it—those are footpaths, not animal tracks."

  Cautiously, they approached the building. Its main doors stood open, the dilation membrane that had once covered them jammed apart at the three-quarter point. Beyond, lit by high skylights, lay the entrance foyer. Once it might have been a grand atrium in the prewar style. Now it was dim, and decorated… oddly.

  Carved images of human forms, larger than life, stood at intervals along the atrium walls. At first glance they seemed to have been crudely hacked out of tree trunks, then planed to smoothness. A closer look revealed that the distortions and the twisted, half-melted postures were deliberate, the results of careful hand-carving and polishing. Where light from above struck the images, their surfaces gleamed with oil.

  In between the wooden statues, huge plates of hammered metal hung in pairs and threes from the interior balconies surrounding the atrium. The ropes that suspended them were wrist-thick cables of twisted wire. The panels hung closely enough together that the vibration of footsteps on the atrium floor caused them to shiver and strike against one another with a sound like flat, atonal bells.

  The floor itself had once been a solid sheet of pure unmarked—and unmarkable—crystal, whose deep black luster would have given back reflections like an unmoving tarn. Now it was covered with spiraling, labyrinthine pathways drawn out in lines of pollen, petals, and colored stones.

  "It's… different," Jens said, after contemplating it for a few moments. "The combination of decadence and primitive vigor—"

  "Never mind the art criticism," said Faral. His ears had picked up the sound of movement somewhere in the vast atrium, faint noises that the constant chiming of the metal plates had for a while obscured. "I think we're about to get an escort."

  "I think you're right," Miza said. "Look there."

  Faral looked. On the far side of the atrium, a stairway curved down to the floor from the first-level balcony. A woman was coming down the staircase toward them.

  She was dressed in shades of green and brown, as if to blend in with the forest that covered so much of the old spaceport. In one hand she carried a musical instrument of some kind—a wooden frame strung with wire, with metal and glass beads threaded on the wires. Its high, rattling chime echoed the lower notes of the heavy metal plates.

  The combined notes, high and low, blurred the ambient sound even more than had the chiming of the plates alone. Faral was not surprised when the first unfamiliar voice came from behind him, where the outer doors stood open and anyone might have entered on their tracks.

  "We expect you."

  It was a man's voice, speaking Standard Galcenian with a stilted accent, as if he had learned the tongue in adulthood from one who did not speak it as a native. A quick glance toward the door revealed a young man of about Faral's own age, dressed in more greens and browns. Instead of a stringed rattle, he carried a spear.

  The woman had reached the foot of the stairway. "Come." she said.

  Faral looked at Miza and Jens. In response to his unspoken question, Miza shrugged and said, "Beats me. Huool's reports didn't say anything about what kind of people were running the passport office these days."

  "Come," the woman said again. She turned and started back up the stairs without waiting to see if anyone followed her.

  "That kind of people, apparently," said Jens. "Let's take care of our business and be gone."

  The woman led them up onto the balcony. Faral was aware of the young man following behind with his spear at the ready. Dark hallways going back farther into the building opened off the sides of the balcony. A three-legged table of wood lashed together with twine stood near the top of the staircase, and a woven grass basket stood on the table; the woman reached into the basket and pulled out a glowcube. She pressed the activation stud and the glowcube came on, filling the balcony with cold white light.

  So much for the primitive bit, Faral thought, as the woman entered one of the hallways.

  "You come," said the man with the spear. "We expect you."

  "We come," agreed Jens. "Faral, Miza…?"

  "Right with you, foster-brother. Let's go."

  They passed through the door after the woman. The blue-white light of her glowcube bobbed down the hallway ahead of them like a marshwight's lantern. Pairs of doors opened off on either side of the corridor. Offices once, Faral supposed. Now, each time the light of the woman's glowcube passed a door, another glowcube would come to life in response— illuminating as it did so the man or woman who held it. All of them were armed, some with spears like the man behind, others with knives, a few with blasters.

  They didn't have to do all this just to impress me,* Faral said to Jens in Trade-talk. *I was already impressed.*

  *Shut up,* Jens replied.

  They came at last to a round room at the far end of the passage. The room had a domed skylight above, and a spiral staircase leading down, but it was small compared to the great atrium. Aside from handwoven carpets and piles of large, gaudy pillows, the room had no furnishings save a metal brazier full of red coals. A heavy, sweetish smoke rose from the brazier in thick curls.

  Another woman, this one far older than the first, sat on one of the pillows. She also wore brown and green, but over the homespun her gown was stiff and glittering with embroidery done in metallic threads. Her face was distorted and scarred, and her white hair was thin and patchy.

  She must be one of the generation that survived the plagues, Faral realized. He wondered what she had been, back when Sapne was more than just the ghost of a living world. Had she been a portside dataworker, somebody who knew how to create the stamps and the certificates of passage? Or had she been something else?

  "Sit now," said the man with the spear. He indicated the pillows strewn about the floor. "And wait."

  They sat in silence for a while. The blue-grey smoke hung in the air in long, flat ribbons, and the light that angled down through the skylight slowly changed in quality as the sun moved farther past the zenith.

  The building wasn't silent at all, Faral decided. He could hear the faint rustles of people changing positions, the fainter sounds of breathing, and the coming and going of distant footsteps. The brazier hissed as the younger woman sprinkled a handful of powder on the coals.

  More smoke billowed up into the room, this time dark and with a smell like moldy leaves. As he breathed it, Faral could feel himself detaching slightly from reality. Time passed, but not in a way that seemed to have anything to do with him.

  The light outside faded. Somewhere else in the building a drumbeat sounded, throbbing like the pulse in Faral's arteries. People in the room came and went beyond the edges of his vision, but the old woman and her younger attendants had not moved, except to replenish the brazier, since the interview began. Faral wasn't certain that the other people, the ones he didn't turn his head to see, were actually there. He was certain about the smoke, however—it had stuff in it that would make even an unbeliever see ghosts and visions.

  And this is a place for seeing ghosts. With or without chemical aid.

  A red glow suffused the room; high above, the clouds had gone rosy with the sunset. And in that moment, Jens unsnapped the portable power source from its carrying straps and shoved it across the carpet toward the old woman.

  "A gift," he said in slow, careful Galcenian. "For you and your people."

  *You know we won't get our deposit back,* Faral said in Trade-talk.

  Jens kept his eyes on the old woman. *It doesn't matter. Be quiet.*

  The old woman said something in the local language. One of the men in the room came forward and picked up the power source, retreating with it into the shadows that gathered with the coming night. The younger woman sprinkled more powder on the coals in the brazier. The black smoke rolled forth again, its tendrils catching in Faral's lungs and throat and reaching up int
o the back of his brain.

  Nobody said anything. More people came and went in the rotunda. Some of them sat and joined the circle around the brazier, others remained for only a moment before leaving.

  After a while, and dimly through the increasing shadows, Faral became aware that one of the watchers in the circle was different from his fellows. Where the others were dressed in leather and homespun, this man wore a spacer's coverall in plain unmarked black. He'd come into the room quietly— Faral had never heard his footsteps—and had taken a place in the circle next to Jens. Now he was watching the old woman as intently as Jens was himself.

  I saw this man on Bright-Wind-Rising, Faral thought muzzily, and again on the transport to Nanáli from Sombrelír. Unless he was one of Amaro's crew members but what was he doing on the Wind, if he's a free-spacer?

  The smoke It's making me see things that aren't here. Or maybe it's making me think that things that are here, aren't real. I can't decide.

  The music of gongs and rattles continued in the distance. Faral continued to watch and wait. The man in black, whoever he was and wherever he came from, was still there, or maybe he wasn't. Sometimes he seemed to fade into the shadows around him. But that didn't prove anything—so did Jens.

  Miza, sitting on Faral's other hand, stayed unchanged in spite of the shadows and the ghost-smoke, and Faral decided to fix his eyes on her instead. Having something true and solid to look at, like Miza's red hair and rounded form, would keep him anchored in reality when the incense fumes threatened to tease out his mind from his body and send it floating away.

  As was common with Magebuilt ships, Set-Them-Up-Again was both like and disturbingly unlike its counterparts on the Adept side of the Gap Between. The technology for hyper-space transit was much the same regardless of what shipyard had produced the engines, but the vessel's layout and interior proportions responded to a different aesthetic than that to which Captain Amaro was accustomed.