[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

  He sat with Captain Haereith in one of the Set-'em-Up's common areas, looking over cargo manifests. Amaro couldn't read Eraasian-style glyphic displays, and the comps aboard Set-Them-Up-Again weren't configured to accept a Standard date feed, so they had loose sheets of hardcopy spread out all over the tabletop.

  The data incompatibilities were only a minor annoyance, however. The two captains had a flask of red Norgahan wine between them, and a pair of blue-glazed ceramic mugs. They passed the wine back and forth and talked—like freetraders everywhere—about long runs, clever trades, and other people's bad luck.

  "I'm waiting for the time when we can trade with other galaxies," Amaro said. "There'll be plenty of luck for everybody then."

  Haereith topped off the mugs. "The Masked Ones speak of galaxies," he said, "and say they have been to see. Nothing solid comes back with them, though… not by their road."

  "When they have the nav posits, let me know." Amaro took another swallow of his wine and wondered how the Magelords got to places that not even starships were built to reach.

  He didn't ask, though. That went against the unwritten rules of a conversation where nothing was said outright, and where both parties traded oblique hints in hopes that the other person would say more than he'd intended. Haereith of the Set-'em-Up, matching his guest drink for drink and pouring from the same bottle, was already playing the game a good deal fairer than many captains would have bothered to do.

  A wavery musical note over the ship's comm system turned out to be the call to dinner. Captain Haereith swept the hardcopy manifests off the table in time for the first of the crew to appear and be seated. Amaro was invited to join them for a meal—more customary hospitality; the crew members back on board the Dusty wouldn't be surprised that he had stayed—and he accepted. The food was space rations, clearly, but augmented with fresh fruits and a stew made out of some variety of local animal flesh.

  Over dinner, and more mugs of red wine, Amaro inquired about parts of the Mageworlds sector where high profits might currently be made. These things changed all the time, and a good port on one run might go cold by the next.

  "Tell Geise's Clearinghouse on Ruisi that you know me," Haereith said, "and they will give you good prices."

  And a cut to Haereith, Amaro suspected, but that was the way such things were often done, and not a matter for resentment or suspicion. "What do they have?"

  "Jade," said Haereith. "Raw stuff and polished both."

  "Any artwork?"

  Haereith shook his head. "That, the collectors already have taken. But there is a demand for unworked jade on Cashel at the Feltry Fair."

  "I'll keep that in mind," Amaro said. "Now, if you're dealing in medicinals, Jaspar High Station is a good place to make a trade…"

  And so the talk went on, until the hour for leavetaking approached and Amaro rose from the table.

  "They'll be expecting me back on the Dusty," he said. "Why don't you stop by my ship tomorrow? Show you a good time, repay you for your hospitality."

  "Assuredly," said Haereith, rising also. "Allow me, then, to see you on your way."

  The two men walked together through the Set-'em-Up's

  narrow, twisting passages to the main hatch. A crew member waited there—not doing anything that Amaro could see, except looking out at the darkening jungle through the blur of the entry force field. The crew member turned away from the jungle at their approach and seemed to focus his eyes with some difficulty on the two captains.

  Haereith frowned. "Naenemeis-de keth, Feashe?"

  Amaro didn't blame the Mageworlder for asking if Feashe should be working; he'd have asked the same question himself of an idler on board the Dusty, especially one he'd caught looking lazy in front of a visitor. The man's reply came in a rapid mumble of some dialect Amaro couldn't understand, and Haereith replied in the same dialect, more sharply this time.

  The crew member muttered something under his breath and headed back into the interior of the ship. In passing Amaro, he stumbled, swaying, and seemed about to fall. The Ophelan captain reached out and steadied him.

  "Easy… you don't look well," Amaro said. He switched to Eraasian; a common crew member like Feashe might not speak any languages beyond that and his local birth-tongue. "Briye feraet—"

  Feashe shook his head. "Ie-briyai," he said. He caught hold of Amaro's supporting hand and looked straight at him. "Ie-briyai," he repeated, then let go and stumbled back into the ship.

  Amaro stood motionless for a moment, then shook himself as if putting the incident aside.

  "Until later," he said to Haereith, and walked down the ramp and out into the forest.

  The Eraasian watched him safely out of sight, then turned to go back into the Set'-em-Up. He would pay a return call on the Ophelan captain tomorrow, Haereith decided. In the meantime, he would have to locate Feashe and find out whether the crew member was truly unwell, or merely dodging his rightful share of the dirtside labor.

  He didn't have to look far. Feashe lay on the deck a few feet beyond the first turning of the corridor. The crew member's eyes were closed, his breath gasping and shallow.

  Haereith raced to the nearest comm speaker and pushed the transmit button to call for medical assistance. But it was already too late. By the time the Set-'em-Up's biotech came running to answer the summons, Feashe was dead.

  Jens drew in another breath of the thick, mind-blurring smoke. The silent presence in the circle beside him of the man in black came as no surprise; he had been half-expecting such a thing ever since passing through the graveyard of lost ships. The man in black had been a potential presence, whatever Jens might be doing, for longer than Jens could remember—always there if Jens looked for him, a quiet observer somewhere at the edge of any gathering.

  Jens did remember, quite clearly, the day that he and the stranger first spoke.

  It had happened during midsummer in the High Ridges. Mamma and Dadda had come to visit, bringing with them a wealth of exciting stories and strange and wonderful presents. Then the whole family had left the house among the trees to spend a day and a night on what Uncle Ari said was "a little hunting party" and what Dadda had called an "al fresco entertainment."

  "What's an al fresc—whatever he said?" Jens asked. "And what are we hunting?"

  "I am about," his mother said, "to lose patience with both of them. It's an overnight camping trip."

  His mother was tall and fair—as tall as Dadda, and with eyes as blue as Jens's own. Today she wore what she called her spacer's clothes, snug trousers and a ruffled shirt and high boots to the knee. She strode along under the great trees as if she owned the whole world, and Jens, who was not yet big enough even for regular schooling, had to half-run to stay on the path beside her.

  They were alone together for the moment. Faral, usually his constant companion, was riding on Uncle Ari's shoulders up ahead, and Dadda was walking with Uncle Ari. Aunt Llann and Baby Kei had gone on before in the hovercar with the tents and the cooking gear; there was going to be another baby soon, and Aunt Llann hadn't wanted to travel such a long way on foot. Some years later, Jens realized that his mother had slowed her own pace to let him match her stride—but she never spoke of it, and all he felt at the time was a great pride at keeping up with her at all.

  They walked on for a while in a companionable silence, until Jens ventured to ask a question that had been puzzling him for some time.

  "Mamma—who's the man with the eye patch?"

  She didn't say anything for a moment. Then she said, quietly, "What man?"

  "The one who comes and goes inside your head."

  "Oh." She was quiet again for a while. "Somebody I pretend to be sometimes," she said finally. "He's not very nice, I'm afraid."

  "Dadda likes him."

  She smiled a little. "Your dadda's funny that way. Do you see things like that often?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Wonderful. And what does your aunt Llann have to say about all this?"

  "Sh
e doesn't know."

  "Maybe you ought to tell her."

  Jens looked up at his mother. "You wouldn't have."

  She snorted. "Good point. But I was a rotten little brat when I was your age, so don't go taking me for an example. How about your uncle Owen?"

  "He doesn't come here. Uncle Ari gets letters sometimes, and Aunt Llann got a comm call once."

  His mother frowned. "We'll have to fix that. I think you ought to talk to him when he shows up. He used to see inside people's heads, too, when both of us were young."

  She hadn't spoken any more about it, and Jens had not thought about the question again until much later, by the firelight after dinner. Baby Kei was already asleep in the big tent, and Faral was nodding off with his head against Uncle Ari's knee. The grownups were talking—Mamma was telling a long story about a Mandeynan customs officer and a shipment of green glass paperweights—and Jens was trying his best to keep awake and listen.

  After a while Jens became aware that the man in black was there and listening too. The man had a wooden staff as tall as he was, and stood leaning on it just outside the circle of the fire's yellow glow. Jens thought about the matter for a while and decided that the man looked lonely. In all the times so far that Jens had seen him, he had never spoken—

  —but Jens had never spoken to him, either.

  Carefully, Jens got up and moved away from the fire. Nobody saw him do it; his mother was approaching the climax of her tale, something to do with the customs official's identical twin brother and a comm link that had chosen that very moment to stop working, and she held everyone's attention but his.

  Jens walked quietly, almost on tiptoe, over to where the man in black was standing. "Hello," he said. "I should have talked to you sooner."

  The man looked at him and smiled. Jens saw that he was fair-skinned, almost pale, with straight black hair down past his collar. "It's all right," he said. "Until today you didn't have anything to talk with me about."

  "I guess not."

  Jens heard a burst of laughter from near the fire, and Aunt Llann's voice saying, "And he combed his hair with a what?" The man in black looked amused as well.

  Jens plowed on. "I'm Jens Metadi-Jessan D'Rosselin," he said. "Who are you?"

  A shadow of sadness passed over the man's face. "I don't know. I've forgotten a number of things, and that seems to be one of them. But it doesn't matter yet."

  That meant it was going to matter someday, Jens thought. But the man said it was all right for now, and that was good. "Why can't anyone see you but me?"

  "I'm not talking to anyone else right now."

  "You're not someone from inside my head, like the man I saw inside Mamma?" This was a possibility that had not occurred to Jens before. Now that he'd thought of it, he found that it disturbed him a great deal more than the glimpse of his mother's internal companion had done in the first place.

  "Definitely not. You are yourself, and not double-minded at all."

  Double-minded. He'd never heard the term before, but it answered some questions all by itself. "Aunt Llann is double-minded too, I think. But the other person inside her head is still her… Mamma thinks I ought to talk to her about what I see sometimes."

  "Not to Llannat Hyfid"—the man in black spoke firmly— "and not to your uncle Owen, either. He belongs to the Guild, and she is a Magelord. And you are not meant to be either one of those things."

  "Do you mean to tell me," said the Master of Nalensey, "that this time you have failed?"

  Rhal Kasander, Exalted of Tanavral, lifted a slice of toast to his mouth and munched delicately, making sure that none of the jam touched his fingers. "As you yourself said on an earlier occasion, a setback rather than a failure."

  His houseguest remained unmoved. "Our Worthy has utterly disappeared," said Caridal Fere, "and our former hirelings now openly oppose us. A delicate touch is always best with setbacks. Not this—"

  "A setback," Kasander repeated. "Nothing more. Our hirelings remain unenlightened; they fight only against others of their own kind. And our Worthy is not dead; therefore in time he must emerge."

  A peal of bells sounded in the distance, a broken, untuned chord like the notes of wind chimes in a light breeze. A servant appeared at the door of the balcony overlooking the forest glade that surrounded Kasander's country retreat. He carried a flatchip on a silver tray.

  "Exalted," the servant said. "A message, with the highest of identifiers upon it." He placed the tray on a side table and departed, bowing.

  The conversation between the two men turned to landscape design and the next year's flower season. Half an hour later. Kasander picked up the flatchip, and inserted it into a shielded reader.

  "Failure?" he said after a moment's study of the chip. "Here is our Worthy. See? He appears on Sapne, under his own name, requesting entrance visas. And see here, a vessel on Sapne projects a transit."

  "Do we see a date of arrival?"

  "Two weeks hence," said Kasander, "by the captain's estimate."

  Fere looked pleased. "Then the time has come for us to declare."

  "No," Kasander said firmly. "Not until the lad is safely here. If we had succumbed to temptation and declared already, these minor setbacks would have seen our names mentioned in the Ilsefret Tattler—in the section devoted to subscribers' attempts at humorous topical verse."

  The voice of the old woman drew Jens back from his reverie. Again she was speaking in the local tongue—though he would have guessed that she understood some Galcenian— and the man with the spear acted as interpreter.

  "What do you seek?"

  "A name," said Jens. "We have heard that the old machines for talking between worlds are here. I wish to place our names into those machines, so that those on other worlds may know me."

  "You do not need a name," the old woman said through the interpreter. "You need luck."

  The man in black spoke for the first time. "There is no luck. Only what happens, and what we make to happen."

  Jens heard a startled intake of breath from Miza. Huool's intern had apparently also seen the man in black—and hadn't expected a smoke-born illusion to open its mouth and begin arguing philosophy with the local oracle. The old woman, on the other hand, appeared unsurprised by the development. Maybe for her the illusions talked all the time.

  "Then we will make luck to happen," she said.

  She added something further that the interpreter didn't bother to translate, and a couple of the people at the outer edge of the circle moved off into the shadows. Time passed. The old woman remained silent, and everyone else in the circle followed her example. Then one of the attendants who had left came back, this time carrying a necklace of leather cord strung with odd-shaped bits of bone. At a word from the oracle, the attendant dropped the cord over Jens's head.

  "This is luck for you, Jens Metadi-Jessan D'Rosselin," the oracle said. "Wear it."

  Jens didn't ask how she had learned his full name and lineage. The old woman clearly did not live in reality as most people knew it—and in the place where she did live, anything could be possible. He wasn't especially startled when another of the women came back into the room holding thin plastic ID cards: one each for Jens Metadi-Jessan, Faral Hyfid-Metadi, and Mizady Lyftingil. Miza gasped a little in surprise; Faral said nothing, but his silence was eloquent.

  "They have the visas and passports?" Jens said.

  "They are complete," said the old woman.

  There was another long pause. Something hissed and popped among the coals on the brazier—a seed pod, maybe, or a nodule of incense—and sent up a tiny spiral of red-orange sparks. The old woman spoke again, this time more urgently. "You must not leave this planet by the way you came."

  "How are we supposed to manage that?" asked Faral. Jens's cousin was taking great care with his words, as if he distrusted his own voice under the influence of the pungent smoke. "We came in a spaceship. We're going to have to leave in a spaceship. There is no other way."

  The m
an in black leaned forward into the circle of the firelight. "This is a spaceport. There will be more than one ship. If you let me, I can find one for you."

  Chapter XII.

  Sapne

  « ^ »

  The old woman rose. Two attendants came forward to support her, and with their aid she walked down the spiral stairs and away into the shadows below.

  The man with the spear stepped forward from among those who had remained behind.

  "You have your name," he said to Jens. "Now you go."

  Jens tucked the ID card into his pocket and stood up. His head spun a little from all the smoke he had taken in over the past few hours.

  "We go," he agreed. He looked at the others in his party: Faral, Miza, and the man in black. He felt somewhat resentful that the stranger—for so long his private, invisible companion—had chosen this occasion to make himself seen and heard by all comers. "Are we ready?"

  "We're ready," said Faral.

  He stood, and held out a hand to help Miza to her feet. She didn't need any help that Jens could see—she'd already proved herself to be quick and limber during their adventures on Ophel—but she took Faral's hand anyway. She blinked a little, as if trying to clear the smoke out of her eyes.

  "Captain Amaro was right," she said somewhat fuzzily. "We really did need a portable power source to get our visas."

  "Cheap at the price," said Faral. He turned to the man in black. "You said you could help us find passage to Khesat on a different ship. Are we talking about the one you came here in?"

  "No. That wouldn't be a good idea."

  Faral scowled. "Not a good—who are you, anyway?"

  "One name is Guislen," the man said after a moment.

  *Guislen,* said Faral in Trade-talk. *It sounds a lot like an alias to me. Jens—foster-brother—are you seriously proposing that we trust this guy? We don't even know who he really is.*

  *I'm pretty sure that Guislen isn't his name, but I've seen him around before.*

  Faral shrugged. "It's your decision—you're the one who's calling the dance. Miza and I are just here for the show."