[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

  His purpose here, at the party and on Khesat in general, was merely to exist, or so his cousin-once-removed had claimed. Apparently a rival faction within the current faction had pressed the advantage of another Worthy, one whom the Exalted of Tanavral found far less worthy than strictly necessary. As an off-world candidate of impeccable lineage—but somewhat disreputable upbringing—Jens was to be the lever to remove that fellow, and bring up another.

  "An intelligent man, but not too intelligent," Rhal had said of that second Worthy, and everyone in the little prereception room had laughed. Jens thought that his being present for the witticism was indiscreet, to say the least, but who was he to say? His cousin-once-removed stood upon the pinnacle of fashion, and was far more aware of nuance than was Jens.

  A maze of curtains and cushions led farther away from the main reception hall. Low murmurs and squeals of laughter came from back among the deeper shadows.

  Jens glanced about the hall. As he had half expected, Faral was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Miza.

  It was something, he supposed, that he should have seen coming. The way the two of them had carried on aboard Inner Light—holding hands, gazing deeply at one another, blocking the route from engineering to the galley so a man couldn't get himself a midnight cup of cha'a without having to duck under a pair of sleeping amorati floating fully clothed in the middle of the common room—it hadn't improved his outlook on life at all. Maybe they had finally… no, both of them were too straightlaced to avail themselves of the semi-private cushions at a reception. If they hadn't locked themselves in the pilothouse of the Light for a couple of hours during the transit, they weren't going to do anything now.

  Holding hands, he thought. And talking. I wish…

  Jens wasn't certain exactly what he wished, but he knew that he wasn't likely to get it. Not tonight.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and scanned the hall once more. Still no sign of his cousin or of Huool's courier, but not far from the retiring-corner a Worthy in a crimson evening-robe was in earnest speech with the Master of Nalensey. They had their heads practically on each others' shoulders, and from the expression on his face, the crimson-robed Worthy was deeply worried.

  To make such a slip from studied indifference was a bad sign. The Worthy had certainly fallen a notch in the estimation of everyone present.

  Jens studied his own indifference and found it excellent. He tried to look as if he were trying to stifle a yawn brought on not by fatigue but by boredom. The former was dishonorable—a true Worthy never slept before dawn, and then only enough to prepare himself for the next night's revelry.

  Time to make Cousin-once-removed Rhal happy and circulate some more, Jens thought. He pushed himself to his feet. Before he could take more than a few steps in the direction of the wine fountain, he heard a whisper in his ear: "Come."

  An invitation? Jens turned toward the speaker and found himself facing Heridand Agilot, Freeholder of Derizal. Though only of middling rank, the Agilots had been the leading family in Derizal for longer than most Worthy Lineages could claim existence. Nothing political happened in Ilsefret, it was said, without an Agilot working somewhere behind the scenes.

  "Yes, Gentlesir?" Jens asked politely.

  "Serious business," the Freeholder said. "You're wanted." With that he turned, without the common obeisance to one of higher grade that could be expected, and walked off.

  The woodwind consortium was in the midst of Zaragini's Third Obsession, but to Jens the entire place seemed muted in an instant. A glance about the hall showed him that the number of guests, especially among the truly important, was noticeably lower now.

  Jens trailed after the Freeholder's retreating back as Agilot went out through a pair of double doors onto the rear balcony. The light rain spattered Jens briefly before the nearby entry-servant draped a cloth-of-gold weather cloak over his head and shoulders.

  A hovercar on high-step nullgravs waited on the far side of the balcony railing, its passenger-side door lifted up. A servant placed a set of polished ocherwood steps against the railing, and assisted the Freeholder up and across. Jens followed after him, and the door of the hovercar swung down.

  The trip wasn't long—just to another spot on Rhal's estate. The hovercar settled to the ground in front of what appeared to be a caretaker's cottage, lifted up its side door long enough for Jens and the Freeholder to step out, then closed the door and sped off.

  The cottage turned out to be almost empty of furniture, but full of people. Not that many, perhaps—his cousin-once-removed, the Master of Nalensey, the crimson-robed Worthy whose name he had never quite caught, a handful of others— but with enough accumulated rank and importance to crowd a much larger room. They were gathered around a large holovid tank, the first one that Jens had seen since his arrival on Khesat. He wondered if the cottage was where Cousin-once-removed Rhal betook himself to indulge in holodramas, cheap factory-made snacks, and other tasteless pleasures.

  At the moment, though, the tank showed only a picture of a statue, with a fountain behind it. "I will speak plainly." Rhal's voice came to him above the steady plashing of the water in the holovid. "We had thought to spend some weeks, or months, in search of a Worthy fit to stand before the mobile party. That time is now no longer ours. I have been reliably informed that the Highest is brought low."

  So that's the reason for the fountain, Jens thought. The waters of weeping, all according to good form.

  Jens saw the Freeholder looking directly at him in an unprecedented display of rudeness. Tonight seemed to be the night for aberrant behavior, far beyond that expected of the well-bred. Perhaps it was the crisis that did it.

  Rhal continued. "This sudden development renders all our intended stratagems unworkable. We—those of us gathered here—must put forward a plausible candidate at once."

  The morning after Rhal Kasander's official introduction of his Worthy dawned clear and bright. The rain had come to a halt shortly after midnight, and the day bid fair to be unseasonably warm—or so said the weather section in the Galcenian-language Galactic Intelligencer, when Miza woke to find the newsfiles and a text-reader lying on her bedside table.

  She hadn't thought much of the introductory festivities. The Khesatan Worthies had apparently placed both her and Faral somewhere between servants and poor relations on the social scale, at least until one of the genealogy-mad dowagers had worked it out that the young man from Maraghai was as much a member of the distinguished Rosselin lineage as the cadet-Jessani himself, and that his father's sister's husband was the senior Jessan. After that they hadn't ignored Faral at all, only Miza.

  When three Worthy gentlesirs in a row had failed to acknowledge her presence even when she was standing directly in their line of sight, and a fourth—younger and more high-spirited than his fellows—had noticed her only to offer her an hour of light pleasure upon the retiring-cushions, Miza had slipped away and gone back to the private wing. Not long after, as she got into her bed and turned out the light, she'd heard footsteps pass by in the corridor outside as Faral made his way to his room.

  Apparently, he hadn't found the party worth staying at without her. Now, in the morning, the thought made her smile. She picked up the Intelligencer and began scrolling idly through the sections. She knew, in general, what she was looking for: an address, of sorts, that those who knew the secret could find and use. Huool's training was admirably thorough; Miza knew all the secrets. Halfway down the Select Rental Advertisements page, she found the address she needed, and smiled again.

  She finished her morning cha'a and biscuits, then allowed the maid to assist her in dressing—High Khesatan garments, even at the poor-relation level, were more complex affairs than she was used to—and went in search of Faral. She found him in the morning room, where a sideboard held platters of cold meat and warming-trays of poached eggs in case any of Rhal Kasander's guests should feel the need for more sustaining food.

  "Where's Jens?" she aske
d.

  "I don't know," Faral said. He added a serving of eggs to his plate. "He's not in his room—I don't think he ever came back to it Kasander's not around anywhere, either."

  She made a face. "More Worthy nonsense. That's all right… I've got plans of my own for today."

  "What sort of plans?"

  "I need to contact Huool back on Ophel," she said. "Let him know I got the two of you where you were going, like he said to do… find out what he wants me to do next… that sort of thing. But I don't particularly want to use the Exalted's comm set to do it, if you know what I mean."

  "Makes sense to me," said Faral. "Whose comm set are you going to use instead?"

  "No names," she said. "Let's just say that Huool has exchange agreements with all sorts of, well, entrepreneurial organizations. I've located the contact point for one of them, down in Riverside Park, Want to go sightseeing?"

  Mael Taleion was in his newly rented apartment in the Castledown Acres Guesthome in suburban Ilsefret. From the balcony overlooking the river, he could see the Golden Tower rising in the distance deep within the city.

  Twenty years ago, the delegation from the homeworlds had come to Khesat to negotiate with the Adept-worlders following the end of the Second War. That delegation had been deliberately free of any person with ties to the Circles. Mael himself had decreed it so.

  He had been Second of the Prime Circle then—as he had been since the day Grand Admiral Theio syn-Ricte sus-Airaalin had first chosen him—and it had fallen to him to set the conditions of the treaty team. The new First was a late-comer to the ways of the Great Lords, and she was aware that there was much she did not know.

  "I trust you, Mael," she had said. It was the way of Adepts to act alone, and Llannat Hyfid had been Adept-trained before she found her proper teacher; she thought nothing of putting the power to change everything into the hands of one man. "Act for me in this. Do what is good for the Mageworlds, and do what is honorable."

  Mael had labored to fulfill that commission. Magery altered luck. Therefore Mael had thought it less than honorable to allow Mages to come to Khesat. So far as he knew, he was the only Masked One currently on-planet.

  The time had come for him to violate his own rules. "If you will forgive me," he said aloud, addressing the far-distant Llannat. "But I must find the eiran and see how life and luck stand in this place."

  Mael sat on the sun-dappled balcony and balanced his staff across his knees. Then, without his Circle to support him, without a friend to guide him back should he get lost in the visions, he donned the black mask that was a distinguishing mark of those who saw with more than their eyes.

  As the cool breeze from the river fanned him, he closed his eyes and stretched himself forth. Before long, the vision came.

  The city was overlaid with Adeptry, so that the silver lines here were tangled and untrimmed. He felt a certain distaste even in looking at it, and had to restrain himself from the temptation to make changes, just small ones, that would set a tiny bit of order amid the sloppiness of this world. It would be so easy to grasp one of the eiran and pull it a little more into accord with its neighbors, or set it at a pleasing angle against another behind it. But no—balances are delicate, and to commence a working without the intention of completing it would be immoral, as well as against the conditions he had set that nothing on this world was to be touched.

  He allowed himself to wander amid the lines.

  Then he saw that all was not random, that a pattern did exist. The lines tended to a point. He stretched out more, to know of this pattern. Was it the power of the universe, creating order from chaos, or was it the work of human hands? He had to know.

  He approached it, and looked closer. Here, too, was the tarnish that he had noted on Eraasi, when it had sent him in haste to the First to ask for the guidance—for the permissions—that only she could give. How deep did the corruption run? In this place where the Circles had never held their workings, he dared not touch the line to find an answer. The slightest motion would ruin it all.

  The world had gone still around him, in the inner place where he could see the lines. But here in his mind, he heard the sound of footsteps, and knew that they belonged to the ekkannikh he had fought against in the Void.

  "Look for me on Khesat," it had said, and now it was here.

  He turned toward the footsteps, and saw, then, the pattern. The ekkannikh stood in the midst of the visionary city, grasping the lines of silver light and twisting them, adding them to a cable made up of many strands—wire ropes like the mooring hawser of sea-ship or the cables of a hanging bridge. Huge it was, as thick through as a man was tall, and it looped out of sight, stretching up into the sky, long enough and strong enough to bind whole worlds. And it was tarnished black all the way through.

  "This is what you came here to see, before you die," the ekkannikh said. "This is my victory, and my vengeance."

  "I will prevent it," Mael said.

  "Will you indeed? But you have already lost."

  Then, in the way of visions and dreams, the silver lines melted before Mael's eyes. The breeze from the river, so steady that he had taken its permanence for granted, was suddenly gone, sucked into the creature before him and replaced by a debilitating heat. Mael strove to trace the lines before they vanished completely, and to mark in his mind the pathways between them that would lead him home.

  Though he sought the paths, he could not find them. He exerted all of his will, but the vision that had always come to him before was gone. He could not see the cords of life. And all around him, the city of his mind had become a desolation of stone.

  He turned to leave, to return to the world of waking men and normal vision, but found that he could not remember the way.

  Panic rose in him. Remember, he commanded himself. You know this. It's second nature to you—more than that, it's first nature, your true existence. Find the way.

  It was useless. He collapsed with his head in his hands. How much power was it possible for an ekkannikh to have?

  He already knew the answer. Killed improperly, in the Void, where all time and space are one—its power could have no limits. Did he really seek to fight such a creature?

  I have no choice.

  That decision made, he felt at once a cool, refreshing breeze spring up. He opened his eyes, and found himself lying on a pad in a dim room, with Klea sitting beside him. The cool breeze was her hand, laid against his forehead.

  "Where have you been, Mael?" she asked. "I looked for you, but I couldn't see you anywhere."

  "I was searching for something," he replied tiredly. "And finding more than I sought. There is more wrong on this world than politics alone. Someone is working with power in ways that corrupt everything they touch—and there are no Mages on Khesat, except for me, to put it right."

  Kolpag and Ruhn sat eating fruit-ices beside the wheeling-path that ran along the eastern waterbank. The morning sun threw sharp white sparkles across the river's blue. A waveskimmer sped by them on its way downstream, throwing up a wake of white froth as it went. The wavelets from its passage spread outward, lapping at the pilings of the rustic boating pier.

  Two young people, obviously more interested in each other than in the view of the river, sat on the bench at the end of the pier.

  Ruhn looked at them sourly. "I wish those two would get out of here, if we're going to meet our contact."

  "Maybe," Kolpag said, between spoonfuls of honeymint ice, "the message we got wasn't really a message. Or maybe it wasn't meant for us."

  "You mean that finding the hidden meanings in newspaper advertisements isn't as easy as you made out?"

  "Not an exact science, no… wait a minute." Kolpag set his paper cup aside on the grass and shaded his eyes with one hand for a closer look. "I think we've seen those two before. Isn't that one of our packages, plus Huool's courier?"

  "Son of a bitch," said Ruhn. "All tricked out like nobs, but that's them. You were right."

  Kolpag returne
d to eating his honeymint ice—he'd found that he liked honeymint, and he didn't want to abandon the cup half-finished if the situation should change in a hurry. "The question is, do we snatch them now, and try to pick up the other package later, or do we follow them, see if the other package shows up, and get 'em both at once?"

  "Hang on. Someone's going out to meet them now."

  "That's not the other package," Kolpag said, as the woman in shop-keeper's garments reached the end of the pier and conferred with the two young people. "Package two is a male and fair-haired."

  Package number one and the redheaded female got up from the bench.

  "There they go," said Ruhn. "Now what?"

  "Follow them, for now." Kolpag stood up and tossed his now-empty ice cup into a recycling basket. "We have to assume that we'll need the hovercar near the Plaza of Hope, another stashed near the Fishcomber's Market, and one more in the Regent's Masqueing-Park. Once we've got a firm posit on those slippery little bastards, we can refine the plan."

  Kolpag and Ruhn drifted on foot along the waterbank, doing their best to look like a pair of data clerks on their half-holiday. They kept the two young people and their companion in sight without difficulty until the three of them reached a wheeler-rental establishment on the border of the park and went inside.

  "Make a note of this one," Kolpag said, after some time had passed without any of the three reappearing. "I think we'll need the snatch ship sooner rather than later."

  Klea sat back on her heels and regarded Mael Taleion anxiously. She was not familiar enough with the ways of Mages to know whether his collapse was a normal thing or not—but he still looked unwell. And his words had been unsettling.

  "There may be no Mages except yourself on Khesat," she said. "But Adepts—yes, there are Adepts."