[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

  He stepped through the door. There was Rhal Kasander, there was Caridal Fere, there was Gerre Hafelsan in another of his highly colored morning-robes.

  "You!" Faral said, seeing Gerre.

  "Yes," Hafelsan replied. "That was well done, wasn't it?"

  The voices from the Plaza of Hope sounded in Jens's ears like the roar of the sea.

  "Bring him low! Bring him low!"

  The two men in the livery of the Council of Worthies stepped forward. Jens waited, expecting at any instant to feel the grip of their hands on his body, and then the lifting and the sudden descent… I wonder if Cousin-once-removed Rhal was lying all the time about the bribes? ...

  Then, like an arrow of fire, a blaster bolt came sizzling out of the archway at the top of the stairs. It struck the nearer of the two men in livery, dropping him with his hand only an inch away from Jens's shoulder. Before the body hit the floor of the tower, another bolt took out his fellow.

  The shooter stepped forward. "I have my orders," he said to Jens, "and they're to bring you back."

  Jens stared. If this was a reprieve, it was like nothing he could have imagined. "And who the hell are you?"

  The man stepped forward and grabbed Jens's shoulder. "I'm Kolpag. My partner's Ruhn. And we've got orders."

  Before he had finished speaking, the Presenter leapt from his platform out of sight beyond the stone archway, and came down with all his weight on Kolpag's back. Kolpag twisted under the smaller man and heaved him outward, over the railing, to fall into the crowd below.

  Then Kolpag turned back to Jens. "You're coming with us to Ophel," he said, and shoved him through the archway.

  Jens fell awkwardly onto the landing at the top of the spiral stairs, where another man was waiting— This one must be Ruhn, he thought. But why do they want me on Ophel?

  "Everything arranged below?" Kolpag asked.

  "I sure hope so," Ruhn replied. "Let's get this little bastard out of here. The longer I stay on this planet the more it makes my teeth hurt."

  Kolpag turned to Jens. "Stand up. I'm going to take those leg irons off of you, so you can move quicker. But if you do anything at all besides what we tell you, I'll stun you and carry you. It's all the same to me. Ready to go?"

  Jens pulled himself to his feet, encumbered by the wrist binders and the hobble chain. Kolpag worked on the locks of the hobble briefly, and took it off.

  As soon as Jens felt the links fall away from him, he turned and sprinted for the stairway. If he could only get out of sight around the first curve… A stinging blast took him in the spine and he fell limp to the stone floor.

  "That's a quarter stun," Kolpag said. "Higher power hurts more. Don't do anything stupid again."

  No one is going to believe that I didn't arrange for this myself, Jens thought as he was dragged backward down the stairs, the heels of his slippers bouncing on each tread as they went.

  "I think we've lost them," Bindweed said.

  She and Blossom stood at the edge of Ilsefret's main plaza, beneath the historic Golden Tower. They had been waiting there, blasters fully charged and discreetly concealed, ever since watching the two men from the Green Sun enter the Tower some hours earlier. That had happened while the streets were still dark, before the plaza had started to fill with pedestrians, and neither of the two operatives had come out again later—though there was no telling, Bindweed had to admit, about things like back doors and underground passageways.

  "Maybe," said Blossom. "But whatever's going to happen here looks like it might be interesting—I think this is the Acclamation of the Highest that we saw mentioned." She broke off and pointed. "Look there."

  "Where?"

  "Behind us—see that window, third from the right, past the arch? Who does that look like?"

  Bindweed looked. "Hard to see with the light behind them, but from the shoulders on him I think it's Faral Hyfid-Metadi."

  "And the other one is Miza from Huool's," said Blossom. "But no Jens. I don't like that at all. Not when our friends from the Green Sun were trying their clumsy best to snatch him and his cousin both out of our shop."

  "No," said Bindweed. "It isn't good."

  She and her partner remained silent, watching. After a few minutes she glimpsed what might have been movement up at the top of the Golden Tower. A figure in white and black, his fair hair showing plainly in the predawn light, stepped into view above the tower railing.

  "Blossom," said Bindweed quietly. "I think I've got a fix on Jens."

  The crowd fell silent in anticipation. The sun rose, the first spear of light passing high above and striking the tip of the Tower. A voice lifted above the plaza, calling out a phrase in Khesatan.

  A low grumble rose from the crowd, a steady, rhythmic chanting, growing louder and louder. Then there came another sound, in a language that Bindweed knew very well indeed.

  "Karpov '75 blaster," she shouted at Blossom over the noise of the crowd. "Open-bell model, firing full-power bursts!"

  "That's what I thought," her partner shouted back. "It's coming from the Tower. Let's go."

  They started forward. The crowd slowed them—nobody was moving out of the way of a pair of elderly tourists, not today. Before they could reach the foot of the tower the crowd roared out, and a white-clad figure came hurtling from the balcony. Then, in spite of themselves, Bindweed and Blossom were surging forward with the rest of the crowd toward the point of impact.

  Soon enough they came in view of the body. The white robes it had worn were crimson now. Members of the crowd were lining up to dip their handkerchiefs in the rivulets of blood that flowed from the broken body. The partners looked at each other.

  "That's not Jens," Bindweed said.

  "Right. Which means that he needs a backup."

  "No." Bindweed put her hand on her partner's arm. "We can't go inside the Tower. We'd be trapped, and in no position to help anyone."

  Blossom's cheeks were bright red with frustration. "Where then?"

  "The Green Sun men spent most of yesterday stashing hovercars near this plaza," said Bindweed. "You cover one, I'll cover another, and we'll see what comes of it."

  The underground parking area near the Golden Tower was large and echoing, its roof supported by stout pillars and lit with overhead tubes. The walls were made of stone, intricately carved in arabesques and patterns of stylized fish and worms. When Jens had seen them for the first time that morning, arriving by hovercar from the town house of the Exalted of Tanavral, he'd thought the carvings a gruesome conceit. Now, as he was dragged past them with the effect of the quarter stun barely starting to wear off, he found them even less appealing.

  He had no illusions about his future. He might have been saved from a collision at high speed with the plaza's historic bloodstained marble, but his time was limited none the less. His captors had made no attempt to hide their faces, or to conceal their names—they knew, then, that he would not be living long enough to identify them. Whatever fate awaited him on Ophel would not be pleasant.

  They were dragging him to a parked hovercar. One of them—Kolpag, the blaster man—slid into the driver's position and switched the machine on. It rose, humming, on its nullgravs, and hung there vibrating gently.

  The other man shoved Jens into onto the front seat beside the driver. Jens fell heavily backward onto his bound wrists, and the man who had dumped him—Ruhn, if the driver was Kolpag—started to walk back to the rear passenger compartment, where he would sit behind Jens.

  Time to go out with style, Jens thought; now or never—and smashed his left foot sideways into the driver's ribs.

  Kolpag lost his breath in an explosive whuff and fell partway out of his still-open door—twisting the hovercar's control yoke to the left and dragging it all the way out to reverse as he went down. The car spun backward and to the right with startling speed, increasing its angular velocity as it pivoted. The side of the hovercar took Ruhn in mid-body, crushing him between the vehicle's mass and the unyielding granite of
the wall. An explosion of blood flew from the man's mouth and spattered the window above Jens's head.

  Jens drew back his legs and kicked again. This time he knocked Kolpag entirely out of the vehicle. Jens kicked the control yoke with the right side of his foot to put the hovercar back into forward motion.

  His hands were bound behind him, which wasn't going to make controlling the vehicle any easier. At least the car was powered up and hovering, or he'd never be able to make it.

  He squirmed and twisted to get himself up and sitting in the driver's position. He raised his knees. By hitting the bottom edge of the control yoke he could steer the hovercar to right and left.

  A blaster shot took out the rear windscreen, and a second shot plowed up a furrow along the roof.

  So his captor was up and moving—and, more important, shooting. Jens snapped his left knee up to hit the bottom left side of the control yoke. The vehicle twisted right, but with plenty of forward momentum still on it. A pillar loomed up— the hovercar slipped by, but the pillar clipped the open door, ripping it off with a loud bang. The car shuddered but continued on.

  Wind whipped through Jen's unbound hair. He'd lost the ribbon that held it somewhere on the stairway going down, at about the same time as he'd acquired a cut on his face that stung and dripped salty fluid past his mouth. He wanted to slow the hovercar—or at least to have that option—but without the use of his hands he lacked the leverage needed to pull back the yoke and decrease speed. He could lean forward, perhaps, and increase his velocity, but other than that his choices were limited.

  He was coming out of the underground parking area now. Daylight showed ahead and to the left. He smashed his right knee up to put the car into a screaming left turn. It broadsided a parked duo-van before it came straight again.

  I think I'm starting to get the knack of this.

  The exit from the garage was just ahead. He steered smaller, lining up his departure. It was up a ramp—Jens could see buildings beyond the sunny gap. A right turn, he figured, on the way out.

  The hovercar scraped pavement all along its bottom when it hit the foot of the ramp, and went completely airborne at the top. Jens lost sight of the ground—he couldn't see anything but the onrushing building ahead. He pushed up on the yoke with his left knee, and leaned his right shoulder down against the other of the yoke to press it down farther.

  When the car hit the ground again the impact jolted through him—from the seat, from the yoke, from every point of his body that was in contact with a solid part of the car. Then the side vector took effect and he felt the car slew to the right. He was almost thrown out through the missing door by the centrifugal force of his turn.

  He braced himself and rode it out, allowing his head to come up at the finish to see where he was and where he was going. He saw a broad boulevard—not much traffic, not many pedestrians. Everybody must still be over in the plaza, he thought, trying to soak the hems of their garments in the spattered Highest.

  Then he glanced behind him. Another hovercar was exiting the garage, coming up behind him fast. Capture or worse had been delayed—but not, perhaps, for long.

  Chaka was again on duty in the listening room, though it was barely dawn and none of her employers had seen fit to order her attention. On this day, at least, she had reasons of her own for listening.

  So far, she had heard nothing of interest. It seemed that no one had been able to, or had thought it necessary to, put a listening device in Jens's new clothing—when he changed garments in preparation for his Acclamation, the ambient noise became that of a clothes hamper, and his voice was heard no more.

  Faral, however, was in one of the front rooms here in the house of Caridal Fere, speaking in Galcenian to the redheaded female. They had quarreled, it seemed, and now were restoring their friendship. Without Jens present a word in Trade-talk would be unlikely.

  Chaka let herself relax a little, thinking of Jens and his current situation. He had certainly found fame, though of a kind which was unlikely to let him return to the high ridges and the Big Trees. Or maybe not. Both his mother and his grandmother had renounced a crown, and had gained considerable fame thereby. Jens could do something equally unlikely.

  A change in air pressure told Chaka that the door at the end of the hall had opened. A smell of perfume mixed with anxiety floated in. The Selvaur remained seated. Someone was approaching, and that someone was trying to be stealthy. It occurred to her, not for the first time since the start of her employment, that persons who hired an unlicensed translator from a transient ship might well have reason for disposing of that translator afterward.

  Faral's voice came through the speaker of the listening device. "Huzzah! Huzzah!"

  At the same time, a woman stepped into the doorway. She wore plain livery—somebody's servant, then. Chaka observed her without turning, following her reflection in the sheet of glass fronting an ornate arrangement of pressed dried flowers.

  The woman in the glass raised a blaster, aiming it at Chaka.

  The Selvaur rose, sidestepped, and as part of the same motion picked up her chair and hurled it across the room. The item of furniture struck the woman just as she shot, knocking the blaster aside. She fell, and the bolt went wide.

  Chaka leapt across the room and, with one taloned hand, grasped the woman's right hand, the one that held the blaster, and pulled. The arm came off.

  *Find another translator,* Chaka said, straightening as she extracted the blaster from the limp fingers. *Your old one just quit.*

  Holding the weapon awkwardly—it had not been designed for a Selvaur's grasp at all—the young saurian loped down the hallway, dodged through the door, and made her way toward the front windows of the house of Caridal Fere.

  Klea and Mael walked the through silent, polished halls of the Adepts' Guildhouse in Ilsefret. Nothing but echoes responded to their voices, and their feet made the only other sounds within the walls.

  "Mistress," Mael said, "I fear that this place has been long deserted."

  "Never inhabited, you mean," Klea said. "Come here and look at this." She was standing in the doorway of a library. "Books, scrolls, readers, and pads. What do you see?"

  "Records, I suppose. The secrets of the order?"

  "Nothing," Klea said. "Look!" She pulled one of the books at random from the shelf at her left hand. She opened it and riffled the pages. "Blank. Empty."

  "All of them?"

  "Every single one I looked at. From the oldest to the newest. This is a stage set. A sham."

  "Where, then, are the Adepts of Khesat?"

  "Hidden. I'm sure that hundreds of witnesses see Adepts entering and leaving this building every day. They don't stay here. So where do they go?"

  "Are you proposing that we tap on the walls, Mistress, to seek the hidden door?"

  "Something like that," Klea said. "It won't be a path that many can find. But in here, somewhere, is an answer to all our questions."

  "If you can find it."

  "I think that I can." Klea shut her eyes and relaxed. Such mental wandering had been her gift ever since Owen had found her years ago—untrained, and afraid she was going mad. The past and the future were locked to her. But the present she could see. And this time, when she looked, she found a trail, and the signs that marked out a pathway between the smallest particles of matter that made up the measurable world.

  "There are markers," Klea said. "Like the pebbles beneath the surface of a pool. Like stones that can be grasped. They will lead us through."

  This part of the hall was dead. The passages that continued had none of the vibrancy that went with passing life. Klea turned back down the passage in the direction they had come.

  "Under the stones of the rock garden?" Mael asked, hastening to catch up.

  "No, no," Klea said. "That one's a trap. The right place is somewhere else…"

  She came to the passage leading to the foyer and the street. With the coming day, the sky was growing light beyond the high stained-glass
windows above the door. Deep red splashes fell onto the floor of the lobby, making it look more like an abattoir than like the reception room of a powerful and respected Guild.

  The gems set in the entry wall twinkled at her.

  "Those aren't stones," Klea said. "They're the marks. They tell those trained in power the way to go."

  "Mistress, what are you talking about?"

  "Those," she said, and pointed at the glowing patterns.

  Mael shook his head. "That's the sunlight coming in through the window."

  "Don't you see? Here!"

  Klea pushed her hands forward against the cold strength of the wall, the painted plaster over stone of which the building was made. She stretched more, and her hands sank into the solid material.

  "Klea!" Mael shouted. "Mistress Santreny! This way you are going—I cannot go that way!"

  "Yes you can," Klea said. "Just as a Mage can take an Adept into the Void. Take hold of me, and let me take you where you cannot pass."

  "Meaning no disrespect," Mael said, and stepped behind her, putting his arms gently around her, trying not to touch her more than necessary.

  "You'll have to hold me tighter than that," Klea said. "You won't be the first, or the rudest."

  His arms tightened around her waist, and she stepped through.

  Jens looked back. His lead would never be greater than it was right now. If he could just find a soft place on the left-hand side near a cross street, he might be able to make a clean getaway. Then find a ship, and get off planet. Faral could help with that, if he could just get to Faral.

  I've done what I was supposed to do—been presented as the Highest of Khesat. What I do next is my problem.

  He nudged the control yoke with his right knee in order to drift left and stay in the street. No good crashing, not unstrapped as he was. Having avoided an official sudden impact already this morning, he had no desire to try an impromptu one against a building.

  A little park was coming up on his left. The wind through the opening where the door had been torn off howled and whipped at his hair. Jens spotted a connecting road leading off to the right. Opposite that point, in the park, he didn't see any trees, just some shrubs and a grassy slope. He counted to himself, checking his speed, trying to figure out where he'd have to turn, and where he was most likely to land.