A Working of Stars

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Lord Natelth doesn’t get your base or your ships until after his wedding night, and he hasn’t had a wedding night yet because he seems to have lost track of his bride.”

  Amazing, Herin thought, how sudden hope can smooth out the lines on a man’s face.

  “Where is she?” Winceyt demanded.

  “Lady Zeri will be arriving here very shortly—followed not long after, unless we are very fortunate, by sus-Peledaen ground security. If I were you, Port-Captain, I’d start working on some new plans right now.”

  14:

  EBRAASI: ARVEDAN HOUSE; SERPENT STATION; HANILAT NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER: THE VOID

  Winter wasn’t the best time of the year at Arvedan House. All the fields were grey and stubbled, and the trees were bare. The sky this morning was even greyer than the fields, and full of a harsh, gusty wind that drove before it rain turning to spitting snow. The drops plittered and hissed against the windows of the study where Inadal syn-Arvedan had taken refuge from the day outside.

  In spite of the foul weather, he was glad to be back in his home district, away from the intrigues and dangers of Hanilat. He had chosen to spend the day restoring his tranquility of mind by going through his cache of unread scientific-farming journals and planning ahead for the spring. Trade and starships might be all they thought of in Hanilat, but without the food grown in places like Arvedan, even the great fleet-families would perish.

  Even the sus-Peledaen, he thought, and Isayana is right that her brother is a fool for not seeing it.

  Nevertheless, the food had to be grown, sus-Peledaen or no sus-Peledaen, and if Eraasi was heading into another period of unrest like the troubles of a decade ago, some of the farming districts would fall short of their usual production. He wondered if it would be a good idea to add some more planting and harvest aiketen to the ones already at work on the family’s various estates, in case Arvedan needed to help make up the shortfall.

  Del would have had an opinion, he thought, and wondered if giving Del more of a say in the management of the family lands would have kept him from going off to the Mages and finding his death at Demaizen Old Hall. The twinge of guilt was an old one by now; he felt relief when his line of thought was interrupted by the buzzing of the voice comm on his desk.

  He laid aside the journal and crossed the room to pick up the handset. “syn-Arvedan. Hello.”

  “This is Isayana.”

  She had never used the voice comm before in communicating with him, only written notes. He’d gotten the impression she didn’t trust anything else. That was wrong, apparently. Maybe she was merely … eccentric. That was it. Eccentric.

  “What—” he began, then started over. “Has something gone wrong?”

  “No,” she said, and he realized that the unfamiliar note in her voice was not fear or worry, or even madness, but satisfaction. “Nothing’s wrong. I thought you might like to hear that we’ve succeeded.”

  We’ve succeeded.

  Inadal thought back to the basement workroom, and the sheets of plans and drawings. Something had come of them after all. Something that moved and walked and thought like a human being. Exactly like. He wasn’t sure that he was as happy as he should be about this.

  We’ve succeeded.

  “Do you need me in Hanilat?” he asked.

  “No. Everything went well.”

  “How did you … ah … animate the replicant?”

  “I didn’t; I had a Mage-Circle do the work. One of them is currently filling the replicant.”

  Filling the replicant. Inadal thought about the ways something like that might have been done. Things Del had said, on rare occasions, about the body and the self and the Void. Inadal had never understood them, really; now he wished that he had tried harder at the time.

  He seized on the first detail that came to mind and asked, “You aren’t planning to keep him that way, are you?”

  He thought he heard a faint hint of laughter at his anxiety when Isayana replied, “No. His proper body is being well cared for against his return. But this was a difficult working—not a great working; nobody died; just hard—and the Circles aren’t going to be up to another effort like that for a month or so at least.”

  “And what happened to the …” He paused, searching for the right word. “ … the original? The person you replicated?”

  “Nothing.” Isayana’s answer this time was quick and terse. “So far as we know, he’s fine.”

  Something isn’t being talked about here, Inadal thought. “What do you mean, ‘so far as you know’? Aren’t you going to keep an eye on him?”

  “It isn’t necessary. The process doesn’t involve the original at all, once the necessary sample material is obtained.”

  And where did you get the sample material, Lady Isayana? The wind outside the manor house pushed hard against the windows, rattling the panes in their wooden frames. Long streaks of rain ran down the outside of the glass like cold fingers. The study should have been warm, not frozen like the landscape outside, but the winter chill kept getting in anyway.

  I should have kept Del here, Inadal thought, and never pushed him off to join the Mages. Del wouldn’t have thought what I’m thinking now.

  “I see,” he said finally. “Are you planning to tell your brother about your success?”

  “Of course not. You and I still have our agreement.”

  He pushed again. “Does word of this go to any of the other fleet-families?”

  “No.”

  “Then—if we plan on keeping the secret and using it later—is it wise to allow the original and the replicant free movement while they both exist?”

  There was a thoughtful silence on the other end of the comm line. Finally, Isayana said: “No. If anybody happens to see the original and the replicant close together—or if they’re seen at the same time by different people in different places—we lose the advantage of being the only ones who know that such a thing can be done.”

  Fire-on-the-Hilltops set down on the burnt earth of Serpent Station field in a roar of maneuvering jets. As soon as the ground had cooled, the Fire’s main hatch opened to disgorge the captain and the passengers.

  Zeri had never traveled to the Antipodes before, though she knew the family had bases there, and her first impression of Serpent Station was of scattered ships and buildings dotted across a vast stretch of empty land—hot, dry, and rocky. By contrast, the main station building turned out to be dim and cold, and full of sus-Dariv fleet personnel apparently bent on suicide.

  “You were going to do what if I hadn’t turned up?”

  She was angry. She hadn’t expected to be, but she was—angry enough that she had made a deliberate effort to keep her voice from scaling upward with sudden outrage. A small sane corner of her mind reflected that all the hours she’d spent working on amateur and sometimes professional theatrics hadn’t been wasted after all; she could keep the pitch down and make herself heard in the back row and the top of the gallery.

  At close range, apparently, the effect was scathing. The Port-Captain flinched. “Set the self-destruct charges. The ones that—”

  “—that give a ship honorable farewell. I know what they are.”

  In her peripheral vision, Zeri could see Cousin Herin looking worried, and Iulan Vai—still in her snug black bodysuit, but minus the mask and glitter—looking more amused than anything else. Lenyat Irao stood several paces away, with his arms folded; this was a family quarrel, his expression said clearly, and he wasn’t family.

  She drew a deep breath. “I made a bargain with the sus-Peledaen in order to preserve what was left of our ships and our family, not to see them blasted into wreckage. You would have made that bargain into nothing.”

  Port-Captain Winceyt looked chastened. “I am sorry, my lady. But suspicion is one thing, and knowledge is another. Once we heard the truth from a witness, it wasn’t possible for us to contemplate becoming syn-Peledaen.”


  Her surge of anger was already starting to ebb, leaving only weariness and resignation behind.

  “As it happens,” she said, “I feel the same way. But if my cousin and Syr Vai between them hadn’t come up with a better idea, I would have married Lord Natelth all the same. It wasn’t a good plan, but it was the only plan anybody had.”

  Len Irao spoke up for the first time since they’d entered the building. “I don’t think Lord Natelth would have been very happy on the morning after, once he found out that all his new-wedded ships had blown themselves to pieces instead of changing their colors from green-and-yellow to blue-and-crimson.”

  “Fortunately,” Iulan Vai pointed out, “Syr Arayet arrived in time to keep our friends from unnecessary self-immolation. Tell them about the new plan, Herin.”

  Herin stepped forward and looked around at all of them with an attention-gathering glance—very much like a teacher, Zeri thought—and said, “It’s this way. If we decide that there isn’t going to be a finished wedding—”

  “I decided that when I went out the window with Lenyat, back in Hanilat,” Zeri said. She liked her cousin, and she was glad that he had escaped the disaster at the Court of Two Colors, but that was no reason to let his newfound Magery go to his head. “And it’s not as if I can turn back now. Go on.”

  “If there’s no finished wedding,” Herin said, “and no formal union of the fleets, then something has to be done about the ships and crews. Otherwise, the sus-Peledaen will simply take them and not bother holding to the agreement made in your marriage contract. The self-destruct charges were one way to handle it, but we have a plan that we hope is somewhat better. To start with—Fire-on-the-Hilltops leaves Serpent Station sometime in the next hour, and we don’t tell you where we’re going. That way, when the sus-Peledaen security forces show up and start asking you pointed questions about our destination, you can honestly tell them that you don’t know.”

  Port-Captain Winceyt looked unimpressed. “We could have thought of that much all by ourselves. What makes this plan special?”

  “Because,” said Herin, “as soon as the sus-Peledaen strongarms go away again, you take everything from Serpent Station that can lift, head for high orbit, and go from there into the Void.”

  Winceyt shook his head. “I won’t lie to you, Syr Arayet—between a blind transit and the self-destruct charges, I know which one I’d pick for a clean ending.”

  “You won’t be making the transit blind, any more than the Fire will be,” Herin told him. “We’ll pass you all the necessary star-chart data—and when Syr Vai is done with you, you won’t remember the data exist until after the sus-Peledaen have taken their bullyboys and gone home.”

  Zeri looked curiously at Iulan Vai. “You can do that?”

  “At least three different ways,” Vai assured her, “and two of them don’t need a Mage’s hand in them at all.”

  “One last thing,” Herin said. “Nobody lifts from Eraasi who isn’t willing. Because none of the sus-Dariv who leave are coming back.”

  Llannat Hyfid wasn’t surprised, once the Daughter entered the Void, when Narin Iyal sought her out in the privacy of the meditation chamber. She’d locked the door earlier, but the Eraasian Mage was no more to be kept out by physical barriers than Llannat herself was. Opening a locked door was discourteous, but Narin had not struck Llannat as a person who committed discourtesies without good reason. Presumably, thought Llannat, she had a good reason now.

  Llannat knelt in the white circle on the floor of the chamber, her staff lying in front of her on the painted deck. Narin came into the circle and knelt opposite her. Narin’s staff was black bound with silver, in a style not dissimilar to Llannat’s own.

  “This isn’t the time for a working,” Llannat said. She didn’t think the Eraasian Mage had come for that purpose, but it never hurt to be sure.

  “I’m not interested in your workings, etaze,” Narin said. “But we need to talk.”

  “Yes,” said Llannat. “We do—but please, call me by my name. Too much deference makes me wake up in the mornings wondering who I really am.”

  Narin’s mouth quirked slightly in what might have been a smile. “I’ve been in that position myself. I didn’t like it much.”

  “How did you handle it?”

  “I quit the job and left.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Llannat, “I can’t do that. So I hope you can convince yourself to humor me instead.”

  Again the half-smile. “I’ll try.”

  “Good enough. Now—you said we had to talk?”

  “Yes.” Narin stretched out a hand to indicate Llannat’s staff without touching it. “This one and ‘Rekhe’s—”

  “—are alike? I know.”

  Narin shook her head. “They’re more than alike. They’re the same.”

  “You’ve noticed that, have you?”

  “I’m surprised that ’Rekhe hasn’t,” Narin said.

  “He can’t afford to notice it. So he doesn’t.”

  “I see,” said Narin. “Tell me one more thing: Do you mean Arekhon sus-Khalgath any harm?”

  “Believe me,” Llannat told her, “I wouldn’t have traveled across time and the Void for the sake of something as essentially petty as all that. Which means you can stop thinking about the knife in your boot and enjoy the trip.”

  Egelt headed south in the private sus-Peledaen flyer that his rank as chief of security allowed him to requisition. Along the way he radioed back to the sus-Peledaen ground office and spoke with Hussav. “I’m en route to Serpent Station—I’m going to see if I can persuade them to tell me what’s going on down there. If we can manage this without getting rough, in the long run everyone will be happier.”

  “Right,” said Hussav. “Want me to start checking that picture against anything?”

  “We’ll know when I get there. Put a team together to escort our missing friends back home, but do it quietly. We don’t need the boss to get any maybe-mistaken ideas about how close we are.”

  “No disappointment for the boss. Check.”

  Egelt broke the transmission, and settled back in his seat. Off to his left, the sky was going grey. He’d had a long night after a long day, and if he called ahead he’d alarm a number of people whose loyalties, in all likelihood, remained uncertain. No sense in telling them how close pursuit was—assuming that it was close. But if the mysterious kidnapper had fled to Serpent Station, there was always a chance that he’d needed the extra time on the ground to pick up fuel and supplies outside the Hanilat surveillance net, and hadn’t yet left Eraasi.

  Egelt called Hussav again. “Do we have any guardships orbiting over or close to Serpent?” He’d long ago committed to memory those portions of the family’s defense and security structure that fell into his formal area of responsibility—but he hadn’t needed to know about the family’s space defenses until now. He felt his ignorance keenly, and promised himself that he would take steps to rectify it as soon as the current problem had resolved itself one way or the other.

  “You want me to call up the Fleet-Captain?” Hussav asked. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “I’m painfully aware of what time it is. Consider that closing the ports may not be one hundred percent effective, and that we’re dealing with people who may not ask permission to leave.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. What message do you want me to pass along?”

  “Tell Fleet-Captain sus-Mevyan I consider flight from the southern zone to be a possibility, and that she should be prepared to block, board, and capture anyone who makes the attempt.”

  “Right.”

  Egelt sat back again, and tried to close his eyes. There was nothing else to do right now, so he might as well sleep. The red plush of the seat was inviting, even if the hum and whistle of the atmospheric passage wasn’t especially conducive to sleep or anything else. Just the same, no sooner had he had stretched his back and composed his mind than the flyer’s pilot came on over the intercom.

/>   “We’re on approach to sus-Dariv control. They’re asking us what we want.”

  “Tell them we want to land and inspect their field,” Egelt said. “Since the marriage we have the right to do so, and I’m exercising that right.”

  “I’ll relay,” the pilot said. A moment later he was back. “The sus-Dariv want to know if you know what time it is.”

  “Doesn’t anyone on this planet own a pocket watch?” Egelt demanded “Tell them yes, I know what time it is, that this is a matter of some urgency, and that I want someone with decision-making power awake and ready to talk with me on my arrival.”

  “They won’t like that.”

  “Our likes and theirs aren’t of much concern to the ones who cut our paychecks,” Egelt said. “How long until we land?”

  “Couple of minutes. Strap in if you aren’t already.”

  “No rest, and no help for it. I’m wrapped and strapped.”

  The landing was no more bumpy than usual, and the air when the door was opened no more breathable than he expected. It was hot and bone-dry, like stepping face-first into a brick oven, and it smelled of smoke and burnt clay. A young man in sus-Dariv colors with his tunic misbuttoned stood outside the safety perimeter.

  “I’m here because a ship arrived here from Hanilat a few hours ago,” Egelt began before he was fully down the ramp. “I want to visit that ship, if I may.”

  “This is most irregular,” the young man said. “From Hanilat, you say?”

  “Yes. Did a ship arrive?”

  “Perhaps before I came on duty? Come with me to Control,” the young man said. His nametag read YERRIS, and he’d pinned it on upside down. “We can look at the logs and see where it is, if there is one.”

  Control was a one-story building at the edge of the field with no windows on the field side, and it was locked. Yerris opened it with a keycard. The lights came on as they entered.

  “Isn’t there anyone on duty in here?” Egelt asked. “Who did my pilot talk to on approach?”