“No,” she said. “I don’t want to risk choking on my own vomit while I’m unconscious.”
“Suit yourself.”
And he went away, leaving her alone with the throbbing in her arm and the blood-loss-induced fuzziness in her head.
Those ships from Serpent Station had better be on their way to the rendezvous by now. Otherwise, she was going to end up stranded on the sus-Radal asteroid base with a madman.
Len waited with the two former—or nearly former—sus-Peledaen security operatives for some time. He was afraid at first that they’d get impatient and go away, but they didn’t; they sat there drinking beer in silence.
The cook’s helper brought Len’s afternoon special out of the kitchen while they were waiting. It wasn’t grilled tree-rat after all, but some kind of stew, heavy on the vegetables and smelling almost spicy enough for his Antipodean taste. The aroma made his mouth water, but he didn’t feel comfortable about eating a full meal while the two operatives had nothing in front of them except a couple of beers.
“Should I order you—” He made a vague gesture at the afternoon special.
“No thanks,” said the first operative, and the second one shook his head. Len went back to not eating.
The food on his plate had cooled completely by the time Vai’s cousin Herin appeared. He was coming down the street at a fast walking pace—almost a run for Herin; he normally ambled—and Len knew at once that something had gone awry.
Herin reached the bottom of the porch steps and saw the two security men, and his face went dead pale.
Looks like he recognizes one of them, Len thought. Maybe both of them.
Herin came up the steps without breaking stride. “Egelt,” he said curtly to the first man. Then he gave a stiff nod to the other. “Hussav.”
“Relax,” Len said. “They’re here to talk friendly.”
“We can sort that out later.” Herin sat down where he could watch both men. His expression didn’t change. “Right now we have another problem.”
“What is it?”
“Gossip from the port—I went out looking for some.”
“I remember,” Len said.
“Well, the last place I stopped, I found it. Nice and fresh. Somebody shot Iulan etaze in the alley back of the Hanilat Lounge, then dragged her off to the landing field.”
“‘Somebody’?” The question came from the man Herin had named Egelt. “You mean you didn’t try to get anything better than that?”
Herin gave the man what clearly would have been a scornful look if he hadn’t been so distressed. “Of course I tried. The witnesses said the shooter was an off-worlder with yellow eyes.”
Everybody looked at Len, who shrugged helplessly. “I’ve got an alibi.” He gestured at the plate of food and the bottle of beer on the table in front of him. “Ask the cook’s helper if you don’t believe me.”
“We believe you,” said the man called Hussav. “But that does explain how we could get a message saying an individual matching your description had been spotted leaving Eraasi, right after we’d gotten through having our tails twisted by you at Aulwikh.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a twin somewhere, would you?” Egelt asked.
“I don’t even look that much like my own cousins, Syr Egelt,” Len said impatiently. “And my mother would have told me if I had a twin.”
“Peace, peace—it’s always best to eliminate the improbabilities as soon as possible.” Egelt turned to Herin. “Did your sources at the port say anything else?”
“That a ship lifted what would have been a few minutes later.”
“Which ship?” asked Len. If the Fire were stolen …
“A chartered contract-courier in from Eraasi,” Herin said. “It had been waiting on the landing field for almost a week, local, and it left without filing a destination.”
“That’s not good,” Len said.
Egelt shrugged. “Pay a contract-captain enough, and he’ll forget to file and pay the fine later.”
Len stiffened. “I have never—”
“Len.” It was Zeri’s voice, from the shadows inside the guest-home door. She came out onto the dining porch looking proud and imperious—by now Len knew her well enough to tell that she was scared to death. “He didn’t mean to give you insult.”
Len swallowed a cutting remark about the general trustworthiness of spies. “I’m sure he didn’t. How long have you been listening, my lady?”
“The whole time.” She gave him a faint smile. “I heard you say that I wouldn’t be coming down if I saw these men here … so I stayed inside out of sight. Herin—”
“Yes, cousin?”
“I’m sorry that your friend is in trouble. But you have to tell us—is there any more news from the port that we need to know?”
That’s a good guess, Len thought. Herin was nodding, his face still pale.
“Yes. The sus-Peledaen guardship—”
“What sus-Peledaen guardship?” demanded Zeri. “Nobody mentioned one of those when we landed.”
“That’ll be the ship these two came in on,” Len said, indicating Egelt and Hussav. “And probably the same one we got away from over by Aulwikh.”
“I’m sure of it.” Herin wasn’t looking any better. “The port said it pulled out of high orbit as soon as the contract-courier lifted, and followed the courier’s projected arc of transit into the Void.”
“Damn,” said Egelt. “I hate smart ship captains.”
Hussav gave a gloomy nod. “I don’t think he believed that fake accounting data.”
“On the good side, now we know he doesn’t decrypt private messages. He thinks that the chase is still on.”
Zeri glared at the two operatives. “Would you mind—”
“Right,” said Egelt. “Sorry. What happened was that the courier dropped off a chase-and-go-home when it entered the Void.”
“’Chase-and-go-home’?” Len asked.
Egelt nodded. “New tech—military stuff. A message drone that can latch on to a ship-mind and pull stuff out of it. We couldn’t get away with using them on Eraasi—but as soon as we’d beaten you to Ninglin, we handed over a whole cargo container of them to some cooperative port workers, and they’ve slapped a chaser on to the hull of every ship that’s come in since.”
“You put one of those things onto Fire-on-the-Hilltops? Onto my ship?”
“Well … yes,” said Hussav. He looked a bit embarrassed. “But we were going to tell you about it, once we’d officially switched sides.”
“Anyway,” said Egelt, “it’s the one on the courier that’s the problem now. It would have given the guardship captain an exact course to follow—”
“No blind jumps,” Hussav contributed.
“—including the projected dropout point. So unless the courier’s pilot changes plans in mid-transit, the guardship is on him start to finish.”
“And Iulan etaze falls out of the hands of someone who shot and kidnapped her,” said Herin, “and into the hands of the sus-Peledaen.”
Zeri’s cousin looked shaken, and pale around the mouth. He’s taking it hard, Len thought. Then he remembered that Vai and Herin were Mages together, and not just fellow-operatives in the shadowy world of fleet-family security, which meant there were bonds at work that he didn’t even pretend to understand.
“This is not acceptable.” Herin was talking again. “We have to do something.”
“We can’t.” Zeri had gone all straight-backed and firm-voiced, like she’d been at Serpent Station, and Lenyat Irao realized that he was hearing the head of the sus-Dariv declaring someone to be a casualty of war. “We don’t know who has Iulan etaze, or where she’s gone, and we don’t have the means of finding out the answer. But we do have a rendezvous to make, and a plan to carry through—and she was the one who set them both up for us. We go on.”
Vai lay on the pads in the hold of Kiefen Diasul’s ship, in pain and drifting.
It occurred to her that she had abso
lutely no idea how long the transit to the sus-Radal asteroid base was going to take. She knew that the base was supposed to be on the far side of the Gap somewhere, and she recalled that the first transit of the Gap had taken months to complete.
But that was a first transit, when they had nothing to guide them but Garrod’s Void-mark. ’Rekhe knew ships, and he’d explained to her once about how initial transits always took so much longer.
She missed Arekhon. Ten years since she’d last seen him, and she’d been firm with herself about not thinking of him except as the Mage who’d brought her into the Demaizen Circle and changed her life. Friend and teacher. Respect and admiration. That was it. Nothing more.
Only now it wasn’t working. She couldn’t move, and she was hurting, and Kiefen Diasul had gone insane. She’d been afraid for years that she’d be the one who would lose it—a Mage without a Circle was by definition half-mad—but the universe had a sick sense of humor and in the end she wasn’t the one who had snapped.
Kief’s made up his mind to look for you, ’Rekhe. And when he doesn’t find you at the asteroid base, he isn’t going to stop. He’ll keep right on going, unless somebody kills him.
And nobody would kill him—not even the sus-Dariv, when they showed up at the rendezvous point and she didn’t—because when he wasn’t talking about finding Arekhon sus-Khalgath and tearing apart the great working, he looked and sounded sane. Sort of sane, anyhow. More or less sane. Sane enough to convince the sus-Dariv, which was the only thing that would count.
So he’d get away, probably. And—because he was a Mage, after all—he’d keep on working the luck to get closer and closer to Arekhon. Until eventually, someday, it worked.
Somebody would have to warn ’Rekhe. And tied down and hurting as she was, there remained only one way to do it. Vai closed her eyes against the bright lights overhead, relaxed as much as she could under the pain and the safety webbing, and let herself fall into the meditative trance.
… she was alone somewhere, standing in an empty wilderness—not the stony place of the great working to repair the galaxy, but a high rolling landscape like the Wide Hills District back on Eraasi. It wasn’t Eraasi, though, not even in dream. The ground cover underfoot was the wrong shade of green, and the sky overhead was the wrong shade of blue, and the trees that grew here and there in the folds of the hills were the wrong kind of trees.
She wondered if this was Arekhon’s new world. Or was this only the way that she, who never saw it, had created it in her mind? It didn’t matter, really—it was enough that it existed to show her where Arekhon was, and to help bring her to him.
It was a cold place, this landscape of her mind; she was glad that she’d had the forethought to bring her jacket along with her when she started walking. But where should she go?
Vai remembered the Wildlife Protection League’s safety pamphlets on how to stay alive in the woods: going downhill was almost always a good move when you were lost. Downhill would put you on the way to finding things like water, and roads, and people. She headed downhill.
She walked for a long time, and still didn’t see anybody. She didn’t see any sight or sound of wildlife, either, which would have made her uneasy if she hadn’t known that none of this was real. It was a long hike down to the low ground—she felt like she’d been walking all afternoon, although she didn’t get hungry and she didn’t feel the sun getting warm on the back of her neck.
After a while she came to a grove of the not-quite-right trees, with a jumbled pile of boulders in the middle of the grove. The pile had been there for quite a while, from the look of things; grass grew on top of it, and more grass was growing out of the cracks in between the boulders.
Something about the place made the small hairs along her arms and the back of her neck stand up and vibrate. She circled the pile of boulders. She wasn’t surprised, not really, to find an opening on the other side, with two standing stones topped crosswise by a third to make a door.
I love it when my mind sends me invitations I can’t turn down.
She went in. Her nostrils were full of the smells of damp loam and cold air. The ground underfoot sloped steeply downhill; soon the light from the mound entrance faded, and she was in the dark.
Vai thought about calling light to her staff, but rejected the idea as too pretentious. She’d done it once to impress Herin, back in the basement of Demaizen Old Hall, but there was nobody to impress in this tunnel but her. She carried a perfectly good mini-light in the vest pocket of her jacket, and it would do the job.
The incandescent beam lit her way farther downward. The tunnel was a single path, with no turnings—she supposed that her mind was telling her that the journey was urgent, and that she couldn’t afford any distractions from her goal—and it coiled and spiraled ever inward and became narrower as it went.
Tighter and tighter it grew, and the ceiling grew lower. She could stretch out her hands to either side and touch the dirt walls, reach up and touch the weight of the earth over her head.
She went on. The tunnel kept on getting narrower. She didn’t even have to lift her arms to touch the sides; all she needed to do was flex her wrists, and her fingernails scraped against the dirt. She had to bow her head to keep from grinding the earth into her scalp.
Then the light in her hand went out.
She stood there, wrapped up in absolute, utter darkness, and felt its pressure so intensely that she couldn’t breathe. Then the paralysis lifted. She drew a loud, shuddering gasp—the air in here smelled ghastly, like something dead for so long it had gone past rotting—and took a step to turn and back away.
Only she couldn’t. The tunnel had narrowed behind her as well as before, and she was trapped in the dark.
She forced herself to breathe deeply. Calm. Never mind what the air smells like, take a good breath. Remember, you asked to be here. You won’t have left yourself without a way out.
No. Understanding came; this was something new she was teaching herself, under the pressure of her need. Not out. Through. She stepped forward, and the dirt walls fell away from her and the light came on.
She was in a corridor, a familiar unmystical passageway built out of steel and glass and plastic and paint, and she knew at last where she was. Over a decade had gone by since she’d last stood on the deckplates of Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter, but she hadn’t forgotten. She felt a brief surge of triumph—’Rekhe is here; I’ve done it!—and reminded herself that she hadn’t yet done it all. She had to find Arekhon and give him her warning.
She needed to look for him in crew berthing on the Daughter. She hadn’t had a chance to see much of the ship before Arekhon took Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter away across the Gap and the rest of Demaizen went with him, but she remembered how to find crew berthing from where she stood.
The cabin locks were nothing to her; this was her meditation, after all, and she knew all the codes. The first door that she tried showed her Narin Iyal asleep in her bunk, and the second cabin belonged to Ty. Watching Ty sleep saddened her a little: He’d barely been out of boyhood when she first met him, and not much older than that when she saw him last, and now he was a man nearing middle age, with tired lines on his face that not even sleep could erase.
She was prepared, then, when she came to Arekhon. The shock wasn’t as great—he’d been older than Ty before, and had already grown into the face he would wear for most of the middle part of his life—but she felt a pang nevertheless, seeing how threads of silver had stippled his thick black hair, like the threads of the eiran against the dark. Maybe that was why so many Mages went grey early, to remind them of what they worked with, and how much it sometimes cost.
Stop it, she thought. That’s done and gone. Do what you came here to do, and then go.
20:
NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER: SOMBRELÍR SUS-RADAL ASTEROID BASE SUS-RADAL GUARDSHIP EASTWARD-TO-DAWNING; SUS-DARIV GUARDSHIP GARDEN-OF-FAIR-BLOSSOMS: SUS-RADAL ASTEROID BASE NEARSPACE
Vai reached out and
touched Arekhon on the shoulder. “‘Rekhe! ’Rekhe, wake up!”
Arekhon gave a full-body shudder, said, “What!,” and sat up on the bunk with the crumpled bedsheet falling down below his waist. It was an excellent view; Vai wished she had the time to admire it properly, even if it was only a construct in her mind.
“’Rekhe,” she said. “It’s me. Iulan Vai.”
He was still half-asleep. He smiled, the smile that in the old days could convince anyone to do anything—make a lover out of a stranger or a Circle-Mage out of a sus-Radal spy—and said, “I haven’t forgotten. You talk to me in dreams, Iule, and tell me I need to come home.”
“Not this time, ’Rekhe. This time it’s different. Kief’s gone mad, and you have to stay away.”
“Mad? How?” His expression grew sharper; he was all the way awake in an instant. “Something is wrong, Vai—I can see that you’re hurt.”
She looked at herself. Arekhon spoke the truth. The self-image she’d worn while walking through the hill country was gone. The jacket she wore now had its left sleeve empty, and her arm was in a sling. Bloodstains covered her sleeve and the front of her shirt.
“Damn it, ’Rekhe—you always were too good at seeing things for what they really are.”
“Did Kief do that?” Arekhon demanded. “If he did, you’re right—he’s mad.”
Just for a moment, she let herself rest in the caring and the concern. There was nobody left on Eraasi to care for her like that anymore; now she was the one who was taking care of things. She wasn’t even part of Demaizen anymore, not really—if there was a Circle, it was only her and Herin, and she was the First of it.
She gave a deep sigh. “Yeah. It was Kief. He thinks that if he can find you, you’ll help him break Garrod’s working … or fight with him for it, and he’ll break the working if he wins.”
A Working of Stars Page 30