An army, she thought, suppressing her reflex expression of disapproval. We have—the sus-Peledaen have—an army.
“We’ve got searchers out on the streets already, my lord,” one of the guards was saying. “But so far, no sightings and no reports.”
Isayana moved forward. The guards recognized her and made way for her to pass. She thought that perhaps they seemed a little grateful for her appearance—she was, after all, almost Natelth’s equal in rank, and capable of standing, if need be, between them and his growing anger.
“What is going on here, Na’e?” she asked her brother. “I’ve heard shouting and rumors, but very little so far by way of an explanation.”
“Zeri sus-Dariv sus-Peledaen,” Natelth told her, “appears to be missing.”
Looking past him through the open door of the bride’s withdrawing-room, Isayana could see that it was so. The room was empty, and the window overlooking the flower garden was open. Drops of blood—red in the center but drying into brown at the edges—flecked the blueweave carpet between the door and the window. A single silver ribbon from the bridal crown lay on the floor near the window in a disconsolate curl.
“When was that window opened?” Natelth demanded of the head of internal security.
“I ordered it opened last night,” Isayana said before the man could draw down Na’e wrath by answering. “To freshen the room. The aiketen had instructions to close the window before morning.”
“Then we want the person or thing who opened it again.” Natelth turned to his security chief. “Find my wife and whoever took her, and bring them back. Close the spaceport if you have to.”
“I’ll question the house-mind as soon as the outcry dies down,” Isayana promised him. “But the authorities will have to be notified sooner or later. The wedding guests, I’m afraid, are gossiping already.”
“We’ll do our own search first. The city watch doesn’t have our resources.”
“People will say we’re taking on the bad luck of the sus-Dariv,” Isayana said. “Her family’s enemies could be responsible for this.”
“Whoever did this wasn’t an enemy of the sus-Dariv; they were enemies of the sus-Peledaen. This is a crime against our family—and against me.”
“If you say so,” Isayana said. She looked again at the bloodstains on the carpet, and felt the stretch and tingle of a new idea taking shape inside her mind. “Na’e … will you let me take a sample of that blood?”
“Do you think you can learn something useful from it?”
“Many things,” she told him.
And some of them I may even share with you. Some others … maybe not.
Arekhon brought his Circle to An-Jemayne spaceport in the early morning, when the low fog wisped along the ground. The two Mages and Maraganha had the rumpled clothing and disgruntled expressions of people who had spent too much time on public transit—a hoverbus from the Cazdel Guildhouse to the transit hub, a suborbital short-hop from Cazdel to An-Jemayne, and yet another hoverbus to meet Arekhon at the port. At least, he consoled himself, none of them looked reluctant or afraid.
The air at the port was thick with moisture, the sunrise a rose shade that bespoke a hot and humid day in the offing. Arekhon, who’d lost his taste for subtropical weather during the years he’d spent with Elaeli in Entibor’s Central Quarter, was glad that they wouldn’t have to endure it for very long. He’d worried that Karil might lose her nerve at the last minute, but she hadn’t let him down; the pilot was standing by the operations hut on the private side of the field, wearing an orange pressure-suit with K. ESTISK embroidered on the tape over her right breast. She carried a helmet swinging loose in one hand.
“I don’t know what kind of strings you pulled to do it,” she said to Arekhon as soon as he came within speaking distance, “but you’ve got me hired from InterWorlds Shipping on an open-ended contract. I have to warn you, those deals don’t come cheap.”
“I’m not worried about the money,” he said. “It comes from having relatively few expensive vices.”
She smiled. “And I have the current flight plan already filed like you said: test flight; auto-return clicked in, signed for, and ready. You say this trip is supposed to be in-system only?”
“That’s the story,” he said.
“As in ‘the story is a damned lie’?”
“Something like that.”
“Right,” Karil said. “We have the extra EVA suits on board. They’re military surplus, but they’ve been checked and graded and they’re all service-ready.” The deep rumble of nullgravs overrode her speech, the sound of a nearby sludge barge tilting itself nose-upward and launching for orbit. After the noise had abated, she continued, “I’m assuming you guys are ready, because we’re on minus minutes now. I have a skipsled. You have any supplies you’re taking?”
Arekhon shook his head. “Only what you see. I don’t want to make it obvious that we’re heading out on a long voyage.”
“Obvious to whom?” asked Ty. It was the first time he had spoken since getting off the hoverbus and greeting Arekhon by the landing-field gate.
“Spies,” said Karil. “Pirates. Other bad guys.” She looked over at Arekhon. “Am I right?”
“Yes,” he said. “No disrespect to your world, Karilen, but there are people in it I would just as soon not have follow me home.”
“I thought so. Let’s load up the skipsled and get going.”
The pilot walked over to the other side of the hut, where the nullgrav-mounted cargo carrier—an open sled twice as long as she was tall—waited. She stepped aboard and stood at the control pylon, playing her hands across the keypad. A moment later the vehicle floated upward, so that it was bobbing gently on a cushion of air. “Come on up if you’re coming.”
Arekhon and the others of the group stepped on, and the sled trembled slightly as they added their weight.
“Hold on,” Karil said, and they pushed away, skimming over the ground. A couple of minutes later, they arrived at their destination, an in-system surface-to-space transfer shuttle resting on stubby landing legs.
She waved a hand at the bulbous-nosed craft. “This is it for getting us into orbit. Not as good as what I’d like to be flying, but hey, it’s what was available.”
Maraganha stepped off the sled and walked around the base of the shuttle, taking it in. She laid one hand on the metal, closed her eyes briefly, then nodded and rejoined the group. None of them needed to ask what she’d been doing: there was more than one way to look for the eiran, after all, and if Arekhon’s Void-walker wanted to do it by touch rather than by sight, that was her business.
“Climb inside and strap in,” Karil said. Once they’d all dismounted from the skipsled, she twisted the safety catch on the control pylon and set the sled’s autodrive to “return.” The sled departed at little over walking speed, going back in the direction of the ops shed.
One by one, Arekhon and the others climbed the ladder into the main part of the cargo shuttle, a large open room filled with passenger acceleration couches. Another ladder led up and forward out of the main passenger cabin.
Karil paused at the foot and gestured at the row of couches. “Your home from here to high orbit. Pick out a place you like and secure yourselves for liftoff.”
“I’ll come up front with you, if you don’t mind,” Arekhon said. “If there’s room.”
“There’s room, but I don’t see the point.”
He shrugged. “I want to watch the departure. Call it sentiment.”
“You—sentimental?” Karil shook her head. “You’re the most cold-blooded son of a bitch I’ve ever known, and that’s saying something.”
Arekhon wanted to protest, but decided, upon quick reflection, that he didn’t have the right. Demaizen’s great working had not been kind to Karilen Estisk, and he was the working’s personification in her eyes, the chief agent of her worst misfortunes. If she’d agreed to join the Circle on this venture, it could only have been out of a conviction th
at trying to refuse him wouldn’t have done her any good.
Which was a thought with more truth in it than Arekhon cared to dwell on at the moment. He followed Karil up the ladder to the control bridge, and didn’t say anything.
The pilot swung into the acceleration seat on the right, leaving the left seat for Arekhon. She strapped herself into the safety webbing and began examining the gauges that dotted the panel in front of her.
“Ready for this?” she asked, as soon as her inspection was done. “I have the clearance I need, and it’s coming up.”
“I’m ready.” He glanced at the telltales on the panel. “And it looks like the others are all properly strapped in.”
“Then here we go,” Karil said, and slid down the launch sequencer switch.
A tone sounded, mind-numbingly loud—the launch alarm. Then the alarm fell silent, and instead an even louder roaring noise filled Arekhon’s ears, to be replaced in turn by a trembling sensation. The squares of light that were the windows of the shuttle’s control bridge danced a crazy jig in his field of view, and he felt himself pressed down into his seat. Karil had been right, he thought muzzily; this shuttle definitely wasn’t the best ride at An-Jemayne spaceport.
Over in the right-hand seat, the pilot was working with the control switches and the twist-knobs, her eyes fixed on the distance and horizon readouts. Arekhon thought suddenly of Elaeli, who had also been trained to do this and who had done it well, and looked away again to watch the sky turn from sunlit blue to violet to black with stars.
“In orbit,” Karil said at last, unstrapping her webbing. “Ready to try out those suits?”
Zeri sus-Dariv still didn’t know whether she was being kidnapped or being rescued. So far, she felt inclined toward the latter—which, she was prepared to admit, might have more to do with her reluctance to complete the process of becoming sus-Peledaen than it did with any rational assessment of the situation.
Her—abductor? rescuer?—her current companion had treated her with courteous efficiency, turning his back in the withdrawing-room while she stripped out of her wedding finery and put on the loose workaday trousers and baggy overshirt that he’d brought along with him. They’d stuffed the flame-red dress and the bridal crown into the paper shopping bag he’d brought the work clothes in, and taken the bag with them when they left the room by the garden window.
They dumped the bag and its contents into a back-alley trash bin a few blocks away, after she used a fold of her gown’s soft-textured fabric to wipe her face clean of ’Yida’s carefully applied maquillage.
“I won’t make a convincing nobody if I’m walking around Hanilat with a wedding-day face on,” she said. “The orange slippers are bad enough.”
Her companion—Len, was it, he’d called himself?—pointed at a puddle of something Zeri hoped was only mud. “Walk through that.”
“It looks disgusting,” she said; but he had the right idea, and she was already stepping into the puddle as she spoke. “And it smells worse. Stage two of this daring endeavor had better include picking up suitable footgear.”
“Blame your cousin, my lady. He’s the one who put the kit together.”
“I’ll be kind,” Zeri said, “and assume that he was trying not to copy anything he thought I would actually wear.”
That had been five city blocks and two transit stops ago, and now she and Len were strolling through Bricklayers’ Park hand-in-hand like a pair of slightly shabby young lovers out taking some fresh air during their noonday break. As a desperate getaway, it was a very low-key, almost slow-motion procedure.
“One would think that we’d be running for our lives at this point,” she said eventually. “The sus-Peledaen probably have every watch-patrolman in Hanilat looking for us by now.”
“Probably. And if we start running, we’ll draw their attention for sure.”
“Then by all means, let’s not run.” They continued along in silence under the rustling shade trees. Here in the depths of the park, the steel-and-glass commercial towers of central Hanilat were barely visible, and the noise of the city was muffled. Eventually she said, “Where exactly are we not-running to?”
“A safe house, or so your cousin says.”
“And then what? If I’m running away from my own wedding on Herin’s say-so, he’d better have some kind of plan.”
“I’m not your cousin,” Len said, “but if I were him I’d be planning to wait out the worst of the hue and cry before making another move. The first thing Lord Natelth’s going to do is close the spaceport, and there’s no point in trying to smuggle you off-planet while that’s going on. Not even if we put you up in a metal drum labeled ‘preserved greyfish in wrinklefruit sauce’ and export you as a local delicacy.”
“I don’t like wrinklefruit sauce,” she said. “Red-wine pickle, yes. Wrinklefruit, no. How long do you think we’ll have to wait?”
He shrugged. “Lord Natelth doesn’t confide these things in me, my lady. But I’d say not too long. The port can’t stay closed forever—sooner or later, cargoes have to start moving or the sus-Peledaen go hungry. And your husband’s fellow-star-lords won’t be much pleased with him, either.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Zeri said. “And all this talk of pickled greyfish is making me hungry. Did my cousin give you enough money to buy something to eat?”
“That part of the bold escape plan seems to have slipped his mind,” Len said. “But don’t fret about it—I just got paid off for delivering a cargo. I can afford to buy some lizard-on-a-stick for a pretty girl.”
Zeri felt herself blush, which was ridiculous considering the difference in their respective stations and the fact that she was wearing Cousin Herin’s idea of inconspicuous clothing. She concentrated instead on the pushcart vendor who’d set up his temporary shop next to the path up ahead. The writing on his menu card was in the antipodean script, and she didn’t recognize any of the food items being offered.
“Is that stuff really lizard-on-a-stick?” she inquired under her breath. “I’m sure it’s absolutely delicious, but I’ve never—”
He laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s ordinary spiced sausage. On Rayamet, now, it probably would be lizard.”
They ambled over to the pushcart, where Len purchased two of the grilled sausages and a couple of bottles of chilled red uffa, and from there they went to a cool stone bench set in the shade of the trees. Zeri took a tentative bite of the hot, highly seasoned sausage, and found it delicious. She hadn’t realized how little appetite she’d had for the past few weeks—nothing had tasted worth eating, and half the time she hadn’t bothered—but she thought she could have eaten a dozen of the sausages. It wouldn’t be right to impose upon Len, though, when he’d used his own money once already to make up for Herin’s deficiencies.
Instead, she licked the last of the sausage grease off of her fingers and said, “So when do we go looking for this safe house my cousin told you about? I don’t want—”
“—to sleep out in the rain all night?” said an unfamiliar voice. “I don’t blame you one bit.”
The new speaker was an older woman, trimly built, dressed in an all-black and better-fitting version of the plain work clothes that Herin had provided for the getaway bag. She carried a hardmask in one hand—which implied that she was well known enough in some quarters to go incognito—and she wore a Mage’s staff at her belt. Her hair was a brown so dark it looked like a rusty black, and her expression was cheerful and amused.
“Good afternoon, my lady,” she said. “Shall we be going, then?”
When Kief returned home from his day with Ayil syn-Arvedan and, later, with the Institute Circle, he found a summons on his desktop waiting for him: a time, now scarcely two hours distant, an address, and a block of encrypted text that served as a signature.
Isayana sus-Khalgath, he thought. On her brother’s wedding day, no less.
Curiosity as much as anything else spurred him into quick movement. He made the journey across town in street
clothes, taking only his staff with him—if Natelth’s sister wanted a full-scale working, she wasn’t going to get it before tomorrow at the earliest. It took time to gather a Circle, if its members weren’t already living under the same roof. There would be messages to send out, and last-minute arrangements to make—somebody would have to cancel a business meeting, and somebody else would have to find a neighbor to take the children; it was no wonder that Garrod had kept everybody together at Demaizen.
Garrod had also possessed a private fortune and nothing else to spend it on, and he hadn’t been trying to reinvent the structure of the Circles from the ground up, either. He would never have thought of subordinating another Circle to Demaizen, feeding its energies into Demaizen’s working and focusing them through Demaizen’s intent. But Kief had thought of it—intrigued by tales of the antipodean Circles ending a drought by directing all their separate workings toward the same end—and Kief was doing it. On his own, with no money to speak of, and with an official patron who would undoubtedly be horrified if he realized the implications of what the First of his personal Mage-Circle was doing.
Isayana, on the other hand, wouldn’t care. She had her own plans, Kief was sure of that much, and someday Lord Natelth was going to be sorry he’d taken his sister and her skills for granted. Considering the timing, this might even be the day.
The address Isayana had given him wasn’t far from the sus-Peledaen town house. She had a set of workrooms on the building’s basement level, full of examining tables and biomedical aiketen and deep rectangular vats full of quasi-organic gel. She met him there, still dressed in wedding-banquet finery beneath her work apron.
“Kiefen etaze,” she said, “my brother has a problem. Someone has spirited away his new-wedded bride, and he desires very greatly to find out who.”
“Look for somebody with the young woman’s best interests at heart,” Kief suggested.
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