“That’s hardly fair.”
He didn’t bother telling Elaeli that nothing about their life together was fair; she already knew that as well as he did. Instead, he told her, “I’ll be absent from the city by then. Venner—” his second, a clever and ambitious young man from the rough side of An-Jemayne “—has already been briefed on everything, and you can trust him to handle whatever comes up.”
“If you trained him, ’Rekhe, I’m sure he’s good.” She leaned against him for a moment in silence, looking out at the dark, and then said, “As soon as the Provost is taken care of, I’m going to the country and staying there for a while … will you stay there with me?”
“Yes,” said Arekhon. Elaeli’s summer cottage was isolated enough that the scandal-rags didn’t bother with it—at least not for something as commonplace as bedroom gossip. Arekhon thought of the pleasure of waking beside Elaeli in the morning sunlight, and sighed.
You have to leave now, the woman in his dream had told him. It’s almost time.
He did not think that she had been speaking of the house in An-Jemayne.
1:
ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL; DEMAIZEN TOWN; ERAASIAN FARSPACE ENTIBOR: ROSSELIN COTTAGE
Herin Arayet sus-Dariv took his rented groundcar around the last curve on the uphill drive to Demaizen Old Hall. The burnt-out shell of the ruined building reared up against the sky ahead of him. A little later, he saw a line of rusting metal hulks drawn up in good order on the overgrown gravel driveway, with clingvine spreading over them and tall stalks of field weeds springing up around their treads.
He slowed the groundcar into a careful approach. He’d taken his usual precautions before setting out on today’s errand—a pocket-pistol concealed inside his jacket, a knife hidden up his sleeve, a note to the family’s Agent-Principal filed among his personal effects—but he knew that against Magecraft, such measures would do him little good. And whatever had happened to the line of blasted and shattered assault vehicles had been a Mage’s work.
Nobody knew, or at least nobody admitted in public to knowing, exactly who had sent the private assault team up against Garrod syn-Aigal and his Circle. The incident had taken place during the period of civil unrest that had disturbed Eraasi’s main continent over ten years before; but Demaizen had been an independent Circle during that period, supported by Garrod’s private fortune and not tied formally to any particular faction or institution. True, they’d had an informal connection to the sus-Peledaen fleet-family—Lord Natelth’s younger brother had been one of the Demaizen Mages, and members of the Circle had taken part in the sus-Peledaen exploratory voyage to the far side of the interstellar gap—but such a connection should have given Demaizen more protection, rather than less.
The one thing Herin could say for certain about the attack was that neither side had survived the encounter, and that no guilty parties had revealed themselves by coming in to clean things up afterward. The house and grounds had passed into the hands of the Wide Hills District Wildlife Protection League, according to Lord Garrod’s testamentary wishes; and the League so far had operated strictly within the boundaries of its charter, leaving the ruined Hall untouched.
Herin wasn’t surprised. What the Mages wanted had a way of happening. Garrod had wanted the Old Hall left alone, and alone it stayed, unaltered except by the elements. No graffiti marked its smoke-stained walls, and no empty cans or broken bottles littered the shadowed ground beneath. Even the local adolescents, it seemed, chose to go elsewhere for their amateur debaucheries.
He left his groundcar parked in the driveway and made his way up the front steps of the Hall and through the great, broken doors. Inside was more destruction, cracked brick and burnt wood and more than once a disturbing glimpse of something that looked like bone. He found the door that his contact had told him about, a small one that opened onto a service stairway, and started down the narrow steps into the basement.
“Syr Arayet.”
The voice came from the darkness ahead of him. It was low and not unpleasant—a woman’s voice, he thought. A moment later, a light came on in the corridor. After a few seconds, he realized that the pale, apparently sourceless glow actually came from a Mage’s staff in the woman’s right hand. He couldn’t see her face, and it took him another few seconds to realize that the blank, reflective darkness underneath the hood of her black cloak was in fact a spacer’s ship-combat hardmask.
“Etaze,” he said, using the term of respect for a Magelord of high rank. Maybe this one was merely somebody’s Circle-Mage, disaffected enough to send along a request for a personal meeting. But if she was not—if she was the First or even the Second of a major Circle, whether in Hanilat or in one of the fleets—then she would need polite and careful handling. “Your message reached me only a short while ago. I came as soon as I dared.”
The woman chuckled, a surprisingly warm sound to come from behind the dark plastic of a combat hardmask. “You mean you came as soon as you’d made sure that my message was genuine. Nobody’s ever called you a fool, Syr Arayet.”
“I must need to work more on my presentation,” he said. “What is it you wanted to talk with me about?”
“I heard that you were interested in what became of the Demaizen Circle.”
Herin nodded. “I’ve only heard the rumors, and I’m curious.”
“That all happened a long time ago. Why start asking questions about it now?”
“Call it a hobby,” he said. “The past informs the present, and so forth.”
There was a long pause. Herin could feel the woman’s gaze assessing him from behind the unrevealing hardmask.
“A present,” she said finally, “in which the sus-Dariv are debating whether or not to deploy private ground security forces as an auxiliary to their fleet arm.”
He said nothing, though he was uncomfortably aware that the damp, cobwebby basement of Demaizen Old Hall was the sort of place in which a too-curious researcher could conveniently disappear. Lord Garrod’s Circle had died there, as far as anyone could tell, and nobody had come to gather up their bones. Another body moldering away in the dark would probably never be noticed.
“Don’t worry,” she said, as if his hidden trepidation had somehow manifested itself around him like an aura. For all Herin knew, it could have. Mages saw things like that, where other people saw nothing but plain air. “I still have some standards. If I’d wanted to do you harm, I wouldn’t have come up with anything half as melodramatic as this.”
“I’m relieved to hear it, etaze.”
“I’m sure you are,” she said. “Now for the reason you came here: Ask me your questions, and I’ll answer them. At least, as much as I can and may.”
“Very well,” said Herin. “What happened to Lord Garrod’s Circle?”
“Who sent the killers, do you mean?”
“Well, yes.”
She shrugged. “The first time? No one knows. They’re all dead.”
“Yes, I know … what do you mean, ‘the first time’? There was a second attack?”
“When the rest of the Circle came back from across the Gap Between. But the Hall had already burned down by then.”
Herin felt a brief flicker of intellectual vindication. Investigating the destruction of the Old Hall had been a personal project. If he’d made it official, he would have had some trouble justifying his interest in a bit of recent history that the family’s less irregular agents had chosen to overlook. Already, though, he had retrieved an interesting bit of previously uncollected knowledge—two bits, if he counted the implication that the identity of the second group of attackers, unlike that of the first, was not unknown.
“You must have a theory about why the initial attack failed,” he said.
“You think that this—” she used the hand that held the glowing staff to describe a vague circle, presumably meant to include the entirety of the Hall “—was a failure?”
“If the attack had been a complete success, somebody would have t
aken credit for it. Nobody ever did.” Herin paused. He’d never intended to keep up his current pose as a hobby-researcher for very long—it was a means of gaining entry, and little more—but he shied away from revealing his true interests quite so bluntly. “I think that whoever sent in the strike team was afraid. Those assault vehicles up there were blasted by Magecraft. They had to have been; there’s no record anywhere of the Demaizen Circle having weapons. If one of Lord Garrod’s Mages survived long enough to do something like that—”
“—then he or she might still be alive,” said the woman. “And still angry.”
“Yes.”
“A good theory.”
“I like to think so,” said Herin. “What I don’t know is who he was.”
“Or she,” said the woman. She gave a quiet laugh. “If it will make your mind easier, I can tell you that it wasn’t me.”
“Can you tell me who—?”
“Delath syn-Arvedan died in the first attack,” she said. “So did Lord Garrod and Serazao Zuleimem.”
He knew the names of the Demaizen Circle, both the ones who had stayed behind on Eraasi and the ones who had gone exploring with the sus-Peledaen across the interstellar gap; he’d made it his business to find out when he began his researches. And he could do subtraction in his head as well as any man.
“Diasul,” he said. “Kiefen Diasul.”
Iulan Vai stayed behind in the shadows and watched the sus-Dariv agent make his way out of the ruins and back down to the overgrown drive. He’d come to her for this meeting, not the other way around, and she wasn’t sure what that meant. She’d heard rumors that someone was asking questions about the Old Hall, and about Lord Garrod’s Circle—maybe she wasn’t the sus-Radal’s Agent-Principal anymore, but she hadn’t cut all ties with her old contacts in the shadow world of information gathering—and she had taken steps to make certain that the questioner made contact with her.
Herin Arayet sus-Dariv had not been what she was expecting. To begin with, he wasn’t a hireling. He was a family member from one of the inner lines, and probably well-off enough in his own right that he didn’t need to work at all if he lacked the inclination to do so. She wondered what had induced him to take up his peculiar hobby. Was he moved by concern for the family good, or by the pleasure of finding out secret things—or had somebody high up in the inner family trained him for the work?
He was suited for it, Vai conceded, at least inasmuch as nobody would take him at first glance for one of the sus-Dariv. That family ran to slightly built blonds and redheads, especially in the inner lines, and Syr Arayet was dark and wiry and at least a head taller than the average. Something about the man continued to nag at her as she withdrew from the ruins of the Old Hall and made her way back to Demaizen Town.
She kept a rented room there, upstairs from an all-night staples-and-sundries shop. The name on the lease wasn’t hers, of course, except in the sense that she’d created the identity and used it off and on for over a decade. She’d wanted to have a bolt-hole available somewhere outside of Hanilat, and it had made sense, or so she told herself, to set one up where she could keep an eye on the Old Hall as well. The manager of the sundries shop collected the rent and watched over the place for her when she was absent.
The cloak and hardmask Vai had worn at the Old Hall were out of sight in her daypack by the time she reached town. The staff wasn’t as easily concealed, so she didn’t bother. As far as the townspeople were concerned, her local persona claimed affiliation with a minor Circle someplace in Hanilat, the kind of Circle whose members all had day jobs and only came together for fellowship and the occasional minor working.
She stopped in the sundries shop to buy a pack of candles and exchange greetings with the night clerk, then went on upstairs to her room. She’d told the store manager that she was a field investigator for the Wildlife Protection League, using the small apartment as a place to rest and write up reports in between assignments, and she’d fixed up the room with that identity in mind: locally purchased secondhand furniture mixed in with a scattering of folk-art pieces from the Antipodes and the northern territories; bedspread and curtains made of hand-spun fibers block-printed in traditional patterns; maps and journals and data readers covering all the available flat surfaces.
She’d thought for a while of painting a proper meditation circle in white and black on the wooden floor—nothing in the terms of her lease said that she couldn’t, and people would be unwilling to gainsay a Mage in any case—but in the end she had decided not to. The landlord would have to refinish the surface if she did that, and there was no point in giving him extra work. A chalk outline scrawled on the floor served well enough for her purposes, and scrubbed away easily afterward.
Vai shucked off her daypack and tucked it out of the way beneath her local persona’s cluttered desk. A pottery bowl at one end of the desktop held the stub end of a stick of chalk, along with a flick-top lighter, a spool of black thread, and half a dozen small, weathered stones. She stood for a moment undecided, then picked up the chalk and used it to inscribe a circle on the polished wooden floorboards. Nobody would be surprised if the Mage upstairs chose to meditate upon a private intention. They would assume that she held the shop and its environs in her thoughts as well, and would be, if anything, grateful.
The cabinet in the kitchen nook held a quartet of cheap glass can-dleholders. She fetched them down and set them out around the perimeter of the chalk circle, then unwrapped the candles she’d bought in the store below and put one in each holder. The rest of the candles went into the cabinet. Then she took the flick-lighter from the pottery bowl and used it to light each of the candles in turn.
A quick tap on the desk’s control pad, and the lamp that had come on when she entered the apartment clicked off again, leaving the room lit only by the yellow, unstable candle flames. Vai stepped into the circle she had drawn, and knelt.
As always when she did this, she felt keenly the absence of the rest of Demaizen’s Mages, the dead and the estranged and the unimaginably far away. She needed them here with her, needed their greater strength and their longer training as she opened herself to the vision of the eiran. The silver cords of life and luck came to her sight hesitantly at first, in wisps and tendrils. She let herself watch them, and tried not to think about them overmuch. If she focused her attention on them too soon, they would fade, and all her careful non-effort would be lost.
Herin Arayet sus-Dariv.
The name emerged unbidden out of her thoughts, not as a distraction but as something to be dealt with, a part of the unsettled state of mind that had led her to this meditation in the first place. She considered the name, and marked how the words insinuated themselves into the weave of the eiran as she watched. The silver threads caught hold of the name, and ran in and out of it like vines on a wrought-iron fence.
Vai smiled at their eagerness. The eiran knew Syr Arayet, whether Syr Arayet knew them or not.
She considered the matter a little longer, then pulled on the cords enough to twist and lodge them yet more firmly into the man’s name and his place in the pattern—working the luck, just a little, for a man who was, in some sense, a colleague in a dangerous profession. And if more should ever come of it than that, well, the universe had a strange sense of humor sometimes, and she herself had first come to the Demaizen Circle as a spy for the sus-Radal.
Satisfied, she let her thoughts move outward from the troubles of the present, following the eiran as they traced their patterns through time and space. Arekhon sus-Khalgath had seen the pattern of the great working, the binding-together of the sundered galaxy, both as it stood now and as it would come to completion—but ’Rekhe was on the far side of the galaxy and not likely to be coming home soon no matter how much she wished for him.
She needed him, though; the working needed him. The Circles were changing, moving away from what they had been … we served all of the people once, she thought; it was that way even when I was a child. Now the fleet-famili
es and the merchant-combines want to make us tend the luck for them alone and not for the whole world, and I don’t know enough about the old ways to set things right.
I don’t even know if it’s possible to set things right. Some things, when they change, can’t be changed back.
The tangle of eiran closest to her hand and mind had brighter and darker threads in it. She tugged at one of the dimmer lines, hoping to tease it out of the mass and straighten up at least a fraction of the disarray. When she pulled on the thread, it grew brighter in response.
Under the surface of her meditation, curiosity stirred and came to life. This was a new thread, stretching away out of the local tangle and leading off into strange and uncharted realms. Something different was coming into the working—something fresh and unanticipated, yet at the same time very old and very strong.
Something dangerous.
The sun was rising over the hills beyond Rosselin Cottage, and a light mist hovered between the branches of the spring-green trees. Arekhon had risen early, after his custom when he was here alone. He sat in a wicker chair on the screened-in verandah, sipping at a mug of the hot bitter liquid the people on this world drank for a morning stimulant.
Elaeli’s summer cottage, she’d told Arekhon once, had been Elela Rosselin’s first home on Entibor—part of the fictitious identity that Garrod syn-Aigal had made ready for her, knowing that the great working would bring her to it in time. Remote, isolated, and rustic, the cottage had provided a safe haven from which to launch a political career, and Elaeli had used it to play politics with a will.
“I was planning to be Fleet-Admiral for the sus-Peledaen,” she’d said to him, “back before Lord Garrod conscripted me into the great working and then marooned me on Entibor with a bankroll and a fake identity. I couldn’t leave all that ambition behind just because I wasn’t with the fleet anymore; I had to do something, or I’d go crazy. And when I came here, politics was what there was to do.”
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