Ayil hurried forward. “Come on in … you’re leaving puddles all over the foyer.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Did something happen to your weather coat?”
“Left it behind. Outside Quantret.”
“Don’t worry about it; I can send somebody to fetch it tomorrow.” She touched his wet sleeve. “Let me hang this over the watercourse in the necessarium until it stops dripping.”
She thought at first that he would refuse, but she kept hold of the sleeve. After a few seconds, he let out his breath in a faint sigh and allowed her to help him out of the wringing-wet garment. He had his staff with him—she should have known that he would, she thought. Even the members of the Institute Circle, who wore their Magecraft lightly, as an avocation rather than a life’s obsession, kept their staves close by them at all hours. Kiefen Diasul clipped his staff onto the belt of his street clothes as soon as she lifted away the rain-heavy folds of his robe.
She left him standing in the foyer and carried off the robe to the necessarium, where she left it hanging from the drip bar. When she returned to the entryway, she found that Kief had wandered into the dining nook and was sitting in one of the cheap plastic chairs that had come with the apartment.
Considerate of him not to spoil the good upholstery, she thought. And then, as she got a look at him for the first time in a good light, He needs warming up in a bad way. She went over to the preserving-cupboard and pulled out a canister of pale leaf.
“Uffa?” she asked.
He nodded, not looking up from his contemplation of the tabletop. “Please.”
She fiddled about with the uffa makings, putting water on the stove and filling a strainer with the dried curly leaves. As she worked, she said, “What was it brought you back to the Institute? Some kind of Circle business?”
She thought he wasn’t going to answer, he was quiet for so long. But just as she was about to give up the inquiry as a bad job and talk about something else, he spoke.
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She got a cup down from the shelf over the sink and balanced the strainer over it. She could hear the kettle beginning to sing a little as the water inside grew hot. Finally she said, “I never asked … for a long time I didn’t even want to think about what happened at Demaizen … did you keep Lord Garrod’s Circle together? Afterward, I mean.”
“No.”
Curiosity warred in her briefly with the pain of memory—but she was a scholar, with her own driving passions, and curiosity won. “Whose Circle do you work with, then?”
Now he did look up—straight at her, with what might have been a warning in his glance. “There was a time,” he said, “and not so long ago, either, when that question wasn’t in bad taste.”
“Del certainly never made any secret out of belonging to Demaizen,” she agreed. As she’d half-expected, her brother’s name drew a reaction from him, as if she’d touched on a painful memory. She decided to give the matter another push. “Have things changed that much since then?”
“Are all you people here at the Institute really that sheltered?” He asked the question lightly, but the expression in his eyes was bitter.
She shrugged. “You studied here yourself. You should know.”
“Yes,” he said. He didn’t say anything more for a while. The kettle boiled, and she poured the hot steaming water over the strainer of uffa. Tendrils of steam curled upward, and the kitchen nook was suddenly full of the sharp, invigorating scent of fresh-steeped leaf.
When the water had taken on the proper golden color, she dumped the leaves from the strainer into the garbage and gave him the cup. He sipped at it, lowering the level bit by bit for several minutes. She watched him and said nothing. At last he sighed, put down the cup, and said, “It’s probably on record somewhere … I’m with one of the sus-Peledaen Circles these days. Lord Natelth’s younger brother was Second at Demaizen for a while, so there was a connection when I needed one.”
“That’s good. Say whatever else you want to about the sus-Peledaen—they take care of their own.”
“Yes.” She thought he might be going to say something more, but instead he fell silent and went back to his cup of uffa. She waited for him to finish it, watching him fade visibly with exhaustion as they talked of Institute gossip and other inconsequential matters. After he’d finished the last of the uffa, she cleared away the cup and the strainer, then left him to check on the robe hanging in the necessarium. When she returned, he was nearly asleep sitting up at the table. She touched his shoulder lightly to rouse him.
“It’s coming down like a waterfall outside,” she said, “and the wind’s picking up. I’ll make you up a bed on the couch and you can catch the bus in the morning.”
He shook his head as if to clear it. “You shouldn’t—”
“—shouldn’t help out my old officemate and the friend of my brother? Don’t be silly, Kief. It’s practically my duty to put you up for the night.”
His protests faded; there plainly hadn’t been much heart in them to start with. She fetched sheets and a pillow and turned the couch into a makeshift cot, shifting aside two folders full of student examinations in order to clear off space. That done, she retired to her own bedroom.
But sleep, for Ayil, was a long time in coming. Instead, she lay awake thinking about what she was going to have to do next. The unfinished argument with her brother about the long-term viability of his political goals would have to wait. More important, right now, was that Inadal should know what she had learned tonight: There had been blood on Kief’s robe, quite a lot of it, rinsed out by the flowing water in the necessarium and staining the rough tiles of the watercourse beneath.
His “Circle business” had included a major working—one that had ended in serious injury, had perhaps even required a death. And it had brought one of Lord Natelth’s Mages onto the Institute grounds.
The sus-Peledaen were up to something, without a doubt. Which meant that their enemies, her brother and the others of his faction among them, would need to keep close watch.
3:
ERAASI: HANILAT; ERAASIAN FARSPACE ENTIBOR: CAZDEL
So far, the morning promised to be an ordinary workday in Hanilat. Grif Egelt, the sus-Peledaen Agent-Principal for Internal Security, arrived at his office in the fleet-family’s ground headquarters carrying—as was his invariable practice—a tall serving of yellow-leaf uffa in a paper cup, purchased from one of the sidewalk vendors outside. The habit dated from Egelt’s early years in the sus-Peledaen employ. In those days, the uffa pots in the headquarters building only had red, because the head guy liked red leaf and no one knew when he might drop by. Egelt had grown accustomed to decanting the morning’s tall cup into his desktop warmer, then nursing it along for hours until he had the chance to get himself another round of yellow at lunchtime.
These days, the uffa brewed at ground headquarters came in both red and yellow like it did everywhere else, because Natelth sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen had moved up to the orbital station and all his visits to the ground office were scheduled days in advance. Natelth’s sister Isayana came and went regularly—she did liaison work with a lot of the family’s ground-based tech contractors—but from what Egelt had seen of that one, the uffa in her cup could be bright green and she wouldn’t care, or perhaps even notice.
The change in the leaf, Egelt reflected, was just one more indicator of the general decline of ground headquarters. The building had once housed the main offices for everything the sus-Peledaen fleet-family did that wasn’t managed by the big man personally—the Finance Division, the Division of Research and Development, both the Internal and the External Security Divisions, and a host of others—but most of them had suffered a downgrade to “Eraasi Branch” during the big reorganization following Lord Natelth’s move to the orbital station.
The Internal Security Division had escaped that much humiliation, at least. But the External side of the family’s security operations had moved up to th
e station with Lord Natelth—and the head of External had moved up into the syn-Peledaen—while Internal Security had not.
Egelt took the executive elevator up to the Internal Security floor. The division’s second-in-command, Jyriom Hussav, was already checking the main board in the outer office for updates. The wall-sized flat-display currently showed a detailed street map of Hanilat. Colored glyphs—violet for favorable indicators, green for items of possible interest, and bright yellow for dangerous or urgent situations—dotted the city grid. Based on the display alone, Egelt reflected, today was shaping up well. Plenty of violet dots and no yellows, and just enough green dots to make life interesting.
He joined Hussav at the board. “What have we got?”
“Not much, for a change.” Hussav was a Veredden Islander, short and dark by Hanilat standards, with curly black hair and a thick mustache. Standing next to him tended to make the fair-skinned and much taller Egelt feel like an illustration from his grandmother’s old Peoples of Eraasi textbook; nevertheless, the two men had worked well together for several years. Hussav pointed to a cluster of green dots in the port district. “The sus-Radal are still pushing at us and trying to penetrate our operations, but the level of activity hasn’t changed markedly, so it’s probably just routine snooping.”
“Get some people on all those incidents,” Egelt said. “Maybe they’re just going through the motions over there—but if they happen to find something that gives when they push it, they’re going to push even harder and move right on in. We can’t afford for that to happen.”
Hussav entered a series of notes on his textpad. “Got it.”
“Anything else?”
The second-in-command jabbed his stylus at another green dot. “More disaffected mutterings among the landed gentry. Country nobility come to town, for the most part.”
Egelt frowned. “Analysis doesn’t make it yellow?”
“No. Consensus is more hurt ego at work than actual grievance—and no real power to act. And the threat’s too diffuse; they don’t like the other fleet-families any more than they like us.”
“For now, at any rate.” Egelt understood the power of a hurt ego. It had made him head of Internal Security, when his predecessor—denied the outer-family adoption given to his External counterpart—took early retirement in the wake of the great reorganization. “Keep watching them.” He turned his attention to the largest cluster of green dots, in the area around the Court of Two Colors in the downtown entertainment district. “How’s the sus-Dariv situation?”
“Stable, for the moment,” Hussav said. “But it’ll be interesting to see what kind of policy changes come out of the big meeting.”
“I assume we’ve got people on the inside taking notes.”
Hussav nodded. “Right. We’ve been working them up through the ranks for a while now.”
“Good,” said Egelt. “Keep me posted—the sus-Dariv may not be pushing us at the moment, but they’ve got enough money and resources to become a real problem if they ever change their minds.”
Arekhon and Maraganha found Ty at the Cazdel Guildhouse. Locating him hadn’t been difficult; Ty had never made any secret of his whereabouts, and he and Arekhon had kept up a sporadic correspondence over the years.
Diplomatic relations between Cazdel and the Federated Quarter hadn’t been particularly good lately, but so far the peace accords were holding. Arekhon was able to secure passage for himself and Maraganha on a commercial jumpshuttle for a suborbital hop. They picked up a glidecab at the Cazdel shuttle port, and Arekhon instructed the driver to take them to the Guildhouse.
“You do business with those people?” the driver asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Better watch it. They mess around with things to make stuff come out right. Right for them, anyhow. They don’t care so much about the rest of us.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” said Arekhon. It was yet another strangeness of this world that he’d never grown accustomed to: the idea that people who could see the eiran would not work with them on behalf of others. Next to him in the rear of the glidecab, he saw that Maraganha looked disapproving, though whether it was the driver’s prejudice or the local Adepts’ indifference that had moved her, he couldn’t tell.
The Cazdel Guildhouse, despite its formal name, turned out to be an ordinary-looking commercial building with offices below and apartments above, located near the middle of town. Arekhon knew from Ty’s letters that the house sheltered almost two score men and women—enough to fill more than one Circle, had they known how to work in that fashion.
In the Guildhouse lobby, a gated wooden railing blocked the way to the offices and meeting rooms beyond. The young woman at the desk behind the rail wore simply cut garments in dusty beige. From her age and general demeanor, Arekhon placed her as a student of sorts, assigned to gate duty as part of her training.
“You two have business here?” she asked.
He nodded. “We need to talk with one of your people … Ty, his name is. He knows that we’re coming.”
“Wait in Room Five, down at the end of the hall. I’ll let him know that you’ve arrived.”
She touched a control on the desk, and the railing buzzed as the gate lock opened. Arekhon and Maraganha passed through and went on to Room 5, a bare conference room furnished only with a table and a number of uncomfortable-looking folding chairs. A lecture board and a rack of light-markers covered most of one wall; the board was powered down, revealing nothing. There were no windows.
Arekhon unfolded one of the metal chairs and sat down at the table to wait. Maraganha hesitated, then did likewise.
“You’re shading the truth a bit, you know,” she said.
“By not mentioning you when I sent the message?” He shook his head. “With all respect, etaze—Maraganha—that’s a bit more strangeness than I felt like explaining in an open text.”
“You know, I used to wonder whether you were naturally secretive or if it was an acquired habit.”
“And now?”
She laughed quietly. “I’m beginning to suspect you were born that way.”
“My sister would probably agree with you. She had the sorrowful task of raising me after our parents died—my brother Natelth had to take over the family at the same time—and she said later that she found it easier to instruct and maintain a house full of quasi-organics than to bring up one infant sibling.”
“She sounds interesting,” Maraganha said.
“Perhaps you’ll meet her when we … ah, here comes Ty.”
The youngest surviving member of the Demaizen Circle hadn’t changed much over the years, at least externally. He still wore his hair cut short in back and long over his forehead like a Hanilat street tough, and dressed like a laborer-for-hire—albeit one who wore plain grey and black and carried a long wooden staff.
Arekhon looked at it and raised an eyebrow. “What became of the staff you used to carry?”
“I put it away,” said Ty. He propped the long staff in the corner and unfolded another of the metal chairs. In Eraasian, he added, “How about you, ’Rekhe? I don’t see you carrying a staff at all.”
“No, you don’t,” Arekhon replied in the same language. “Not in public, anyway.”
“Why not?” Ty looked over at Maraganha. “She does.”
“Maraganha etaze is a Void-walker and a great Magelord,” Arekhon said. “On the other hand, as far as most people know, I’m Mestra Elela Rosselin’s chief of domestic security—which means that I’m part of the furniture. If people begin to think of me as one of your Adept friends, or as something else that works like one, then they’ll start to notice me, and I don’t want that.”
“It would be a bad idea,” agreed Ty. “Especially if someone also notices that you’ve been working the eiran for the Mestra’s benefit. They don’t like that around here.”
“So I’ve heard,” Arekhon said. “This world would be better off if they did, I think.”
“Like we
did for Eraasi? I remember how well that turned out.” Ty’s cheeks reddened as he spoke. “And now you’ve brought a Void-walker into the Guildhouse, and they’ll notice the disturbances in the eiran for sure.”
“Give me credit for some discretion, child,” Maraganha said. “I’ve spent more time in Guildhouses than you ever will, and I think I know how to avoid scandalizing the inhabitants.”
Ty looked hard at her. “I don’t know you,” he said at last. “I don’t know why you’re with ’Rekhe and I don’t know where you come from. Is there a reason why I should believe you?”
“Because you’re one of those who can see truth or falsehood in the eiran if you bother to look.” She met Ty’s gaze squarely. “I came here across time, space, and the Void because the great working wasn’t done with me yet … and it isn’t done with you, either.”
“She’s right,” Arekhon said. “The working isn’t finished. We have to go back.”
“There’s no ‘have to’ in it for me. You expect me to drop everything and follow you back to Eraasi?” Ty shook his head. “I have a place here, ’Rekhe, and I don’t want to lose it. Not without at least a fighting chance that it won’t all have been for nothing.”
“What would it take to convince you?”
“Narin,” Ty said. “She was always the strongest of us, except for Garrod; stronger than him, maybe. The only reason she didn’t hold rank in the Circle was because she never wanted it. If you can find Narin and persuade her to come along, then I’m in.”
Zeri sus-Dariv had been attending her family’s annual business conclave every year since she’d reached her sixteenth birthday—old enough to enroll as a fleet-apprentice if she so desired, or to leave her family’s altars and train with the Mages, though not of age to hold a family commission or Circle membership. Zeri didn’t want to be either a fleet officer or a Mage; since she had to study something until she reached her majority, she claimed to be an aspiring merchant-administrator—an entirely reasonable choice for a member of the family’s senior line. As part of her apprenticeship, she went to the meetings and observed her family’s internal politics in action, and found them dead boring.
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