Herin’s presence disturbed the security operatives at first—Vai suspected that Thel’s instructions had not mentioned what they should do with him. She identified him, firmly, as a Mage of her Circle, and was pleased to see that the eiran responded to her intent, lulling her escorts and allowing Herin to remain with her during the journey by shuttle from the Dawning to Hanilat Starport, and by groundcar from the Starport to sus-Radal headquarters.
Theledau sus-Radal was waiting for her in his office. Outside the windows, the glass-walled towers of central Hanilat dazzled in the midafternoon sun. Thel sat behind the broad desk from which she had stolen the charts for the hidden base and watched her enter, accompanied by Herin sus-Dariv and the team of security escorts. She couldn’t read his expression.
“Syr Vai,” he said.
“Theledau.”
He looked at Herin, standing silent beside her, and at the security detail. “Go.” Vai heard the office door open behind her, and then close after the security operatives had left. Thel looked at Herin again. “You too, Syr Arayet.”
Herin glanced over at Vai, a question on his face. “Iulan etaze?”
“No.” She turned back to Thel. “Herin is my Second. He stays.”
Thel said nothing for a few seconds. When he did speak, he sounded more sad than angry. “It’s like that now, is it?”
“I’m afraid so.”
He sighed and shook his head. “I should never have sent you off to spy on Lord Garrod’s Circle … it ended up costing me a starship, an observation post, and the best Agent-Principal our family ever had. I suppose you’re the First of Demaizen now?”
“Demaizen is broken. This is a new Circle.”
“I see.” He paused again, and she wondered briefly if he was about to offer her his condolences—or worse, his congratulations. It came as almost a relief when he said only, “You can’t make your Circle in Hanilat, Iule. Not here, and not in any other place where the sus-Radal have a presence. After what you did, there’s no place for you with us anymore.”
In spite of herself, she smiled a little. “You’re saying that if I’d ever made it onto the family tablets, you’d be taking me off of them now?”
“Just so.” His answering smile was even briefer than hers, but it was genuine.
“Fair enough,” she said. She would go back north, she decided, into the wilderness where neither fleet-families nor land-families had any real authority, and put together the rest of her Circle there. With Herin for a Second, she could gather enough Mages to pass along what she’d learned—from Garrod, from Arekhon, from Narin and Ty and Delath and Serazao, and yes, even from Kiefen Diasul—and make certain that there was always at least one Circle on Eraasi that wasn’t bound to fleet or land or mercantile wealth. “Give me a few minutes, head start before you turn loose the hunters—I think I’ve served you well enough over the years to ask for that—and you’ll never so much as hear word of me again.”
“Take as long as you need, within reason. But go.”
“Thanks,” she said. “And Thel, one more thing—”
He regarded her warily. “Yes?”
“I gave Lenyat Irao and Zeri sus-Dariv my private cipher. Take a good look at any messages that show up in it … if half of what I heard about where they’re going is true, a trade connection with those two will be worth more in the long run than a dozen observation posts.”
After the shuttle had left, Llannat Hyfid went to seek out Ty and Narin. Vai had not argued when the three of them remained behind on Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter, and Llannat suspected that in her heart the other woman was relieved not to have to explain their presence to Theledau sus-Radal. The three Mages sat at the table in the Daughter’s galley, drinking uffa more for sociability and to pass the time than because any of them needed the stimulant or was in the mood to relish the taste.
“So,” Ty said eventually. “Do we wait around for whatever friendly persuasion the sus-Radal have in store?”
“No,” Llannat said. The question didn’t surprise her, and from Narin’s expression, she wasn’t surprised, either. The three of them had no place on Eraasi; Iulan Vai had known it when she left them behind on the Daughter. And Vai had never mentioned returning the Daughter to Theledau sus-Radal. “I can fly this ship—Arekhon knew how to fly it, and where the Daughter is concerned, I know what Arekhon knows—and our place is on the other side of the interstellar gap.”
“If we’re going to do that, we’re going to have to do it soon,” Ty said. “I expect that someone on-planet is going to remember us any minute now, and we won’t like the plans they’ve made for us.”
“My crew is over there, on the other side of the gap,” Narin said. “I’ve been away too long. I have my own place, and this is not it.”
“And I have no place,” Ty said. “So it doesn’t matter if I go.”
“Then let’s do it,” Llannat said.
She went to the Daughter’s pilothouse, and strapped herself in. “Narin, you take copilot.”
“Got it.” The other Mage sat in the left-hand seat, but did not turn on the exterior comm rig. They stood against the door behind them.
“Like a thief in the night,” Llannat said.
“Well, in the Night, anyway,” Ty observed. “And we’re certainly stealing her.”
“I have the jump point for Entibor,” Llannat said. “It’s one of the courses Arekhon and Karil set into the board. We can do it if we don’t care how long we spend in the transit.”
“Do we have enough fuel?” Ty asked. “Remember, we had to top off on Ophel before.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Llannat said quietly. “Shifting out of orbit in three, two, one, now!”
She fired the main engines to take them away from planetary orbit surface and the sus-Radal shipyard. They ran fast, neither listening to external comms, nor caring. The jump point came; the stars blazed and died, and were replaced by grey blankness outside the pilothouse.
“Now, lunch,” Narin said. “Ty, do you want the first watch or shall I take it?”
“Mine,” Ty said.
“I’ll be in the meditation chamber,” said Llannat. She unstrapped and headed aft, leaving Ty to take the seat that she had abandoned.
Llannat knelt for a long time in the center of the meditation chamber’s white tiled circle. She waited, feeling the ship pulse around her, feeling the waves of the years about her, like black tapestries brushing her face as she walked through the dark.
She was watching the eiran. They surged around her, forming patterns, slipping away, never knitting into a pleasing form.
How long, she thought, how long? The cords stretch out from one side of the universe to the other, lost to sight with distance, but which to pull?
Then the darkness was split, and the cords became clear, and she knew that it was time.
Llannat rose to her feet, her knees creaking. I’m getting old, she thought. And I’ve been kneeling here too long. She left the meditation chamber and walked forward, back up to the Daughter’s cockpit.
As she had known that she would, she found Ty and Narin waiting for her there, looking out through the cockpit windows at the swirling, iridescent greyness beyond. The vision of the eiran was lost to her here, for the eiran did not enter the Void.
“Drop out,” she said. “Drop out now.”
“Etaze?” Ty said. “We’re nowhere near—”
But Narin reached forward and pulled back on the control lever, and the stars appeared before them in all their glory. Llannat could see the eiran where they should be and where they would be, when the pattern of the great working was at last complete—but only, only if she grasped the silver cords with greater power than was in her. Power that required lives.
“We know,” Narin said, before she could open her mouth to speak. “We’ve already pledged ourselves to Arekhon, and to the continuation of the great working. Do what you must.”
Ty nodded. “As the universe wills.”
Narin p
ulled out the knife that she’d worn in her boot top since the days when she was the First of a Circle from a fisherman’s town. She offered it to Llannat.
“This will be a little different,” she said. “Not the usual working. My Circle is calling to me. I’ve been away too long.”
“Not the usual working at all,” Llannat agreed.
“Shall we get started, then?” Ty asked. “Our wills oppose. And when the power is greatest, etaze … then you can strike.”
“Yes,” Llannat said. “For the sake of the working,” and the other two echoed, “For the sake of the working.”
Ty turned toward Narin and shut his eyes. A glow sprang up around him, as did a matching glow in the air around Narin—so dim that it would be unseen in the light of a natural sun, but visible here in the dim pilothouse of a starship gliding through a starless lane.
The glow grew brighter around them. The tendons stood out in Ty’s neck. Narin’s breath grew ragged. The light grew stronger around them both, streaming away from their fingertips, outlining their bodies in coronae. The two light-circles touched. The boundary between them flared, and the flare spread outward.
The light was growing stronger, magenta shot through with green. Now it was overpowerering the illumination in the pilothouse—it was as bright as day, as bright as noon, as bright as the heart of a sun.
“For the working!” Llannat cried out. “As the universe wills!”
She shaded her eyes with one hand, and flicked out her wrist, knife gleaming, and slashed Narin’s throat, so that the blood spurted over her hand. She struck again, and this time Ty’s throat was under the knife. She felt their power rush into her as the blood poured forth.
The power they had called up was too much for her to hold—it was more than one person should ever have to hold—and she pushed it as hard as she could into the working, and into the eiran where they made the pattern of the working all around her, and on through the eiran into the universe again. Then she grasped the threads of the eiran where they stretched out into the interstellar gap from either side, and pulled and twisted them together, so that a cord was formed from one side of space all the way across to the other.
But something was still lacking—the pattern was not yet fixed. It wouldn’t be fixed until she came aboard Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter for the first time, and began to understand what she would have to do. She had to leave the message that would bring her to this place.
She reached into her memory, and summoned up the words. Then she dipped her finger in the flowing blood—Ty’s, it was—and wrote a letter to herself on the cockpit window, in the formal second-person familiar that she had learned from speaking in this time and place with Arekhon sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen: “Maraganha etaze: bring this message to she-who-leads. Tell her what thou didst learn.”
She wrote in the script of Eraasi, for it was fitting that the great working end so, and that Ty have a proper memorial tablet even in a starpilot’s grave.
“Narin, my friend, your Circle waits,” she whispered, and kissed Narin’s forehead. Then she bowed her own head, and walked back to the galley, closing the bridge door behind her.
In the galley she opened a bottle of wine, and splashed a bit on the deck, so that Narin and Ty’s ghosts could find their ways home. Then she took the manual, the one she had helped to write during the passage to Ophel and across the Gap, and followed it step by step in an orderly shutdown.
Most of the ship’s atmosphere she gathered into the holding tanks, ready against future need. She switched off life support, gravity, the power generation, the engines. At last she put on one of the EVA suits, the last one remaining, opened the inner airlock, and wedged it.
The ship was nearly airless itself by then. She hand-cranked the outer airlock door open, and the wind of the last ghosts of air barely disturbed her. She wedged the outer door. Then she launched herself out into the darkness between the stars. As she did so she twisted, turning the corner into the Void, and began the long walk homeward to her proper time and place.
Epilogue
OPHEL: SOMBRELÍR
Arekhon Khreseio sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen, Magelord and Void-walker, stepped out through the last of the Void-marks on his long journey from the asteroid base, and found himself standing on a black-and-white tiled terrace on a summer’s evening in Sombrelír. The street below the terrace bustled with activity—hovercars and jitneys and draftbeast-carts, laden with passengers and piled high with merchandise—and the fiery dart of a lifting starship rose skyward against the blue-purple dusk beyond.
He turned to look at the building behind him, curious to see if it too had changed. It had been a hotel once, not long ago as his mind remembered it, a pleasant place with a certain faded grandeur. Now a different building stood there, solid and foursquare and weathered by the passage of many years, with a metal plaque set into the masonry next to its heavy bronze doors:
DARIV-IRAO MERCANTILE AND TRANSPORT
PRIDE—PROSPERITY—PROFIT
OPHEL—NINGLIN—ENTIBOR
It was a good thing to know, Arekhon reflected, that not everybody bound by Demaizen into the great working had served it with pain and blood—that some had served it by loving and doing well. He would call on the Dariv-Irao in the morning, and make arrangements through them, if he could, for a journey back to Entibor.
Arekhon had always prided himself on his service, and he had a promise to keep to Elaeli.
This one is for all the squad members of EMS North and the folks at Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital.
TOR BOOKS BY
Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
MAGEWORLDS
The Price of the Stars
Starpilot’s Grave
By Honor Betray’d
The Gathering Flame
The Long Hunt
The Stars Asunder
A Working of Stars
Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict
Requiem for Boone
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
A WORKING OF STARS
Copyright © 2002 by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
Edited by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
eISBN 9781466802735
First eBook Edition : September 2011
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doyle, Debra.
A working of stars / Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 0-312-86411-6
1. Life on other planets—Fiction. I. Macdonald, James. II. Title.
PS3554.09743414 W67 2002
813’.54—dc21
2001050753
First Edition: April 2002
Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Prologue - ENTIBOR: AN-JEMAYNE ERAASI: SUS-PELEDAEN ORBITAL STATION
1: ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL; DEMAIZEN TOWN; ERAASIAN FARSPACE ENTIBOR: ROSSELIN COTTAGE
2: ERAASI: HANILAT ENTIBOR: ROSSELIN COTTAGE
3 : ERAASI: HANILAT; ERAASIAN FARSPACE ENTIBOR: CAZDEL
4: ERAASI: SERPENT STATION; SUS-PELEDAEN ORBITAL STATION; HANILAT ENTIBOR: CAZDEL
5: ERAASI: HANILAT
6: ENTIBOR: TIFSET; GIFLA HARBOR ERAASI: HANILAT
7: ERAASI: HANILAT ENTIBOR: ROSSELIN COTTAGE
8: ENTIBOR: ROSSELIN COTTAGE ERAASI: HANILAT
9: ERAASI: HANILAT ENTIBOR: AN-JEMAYNE
> 10: ERAASI: HANILAT ENTIBOR: AN-JEMAYNE STARPORT
11: ERAASI: HANILAT ENTIBOR: STANDARD ORBIT GG-12
12: ENTIBOR: STANDARD ORBIT GG-12 ERAASI: HANILAT
13: ERAASI: HANILAT ENTIBOR: AN-JEMAYNE NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER: THE VOID
14: EBRAASI: ARVEDAN HOUSE; SERPENT STATION; HANILAT NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER: THE VOID
15: ERAASI ORBIT: SUS-PELEDAEN COURIER SHIP LAST-DAY -OF-SUMMER ERAASI: HANILAT OPHEL: SOMBRELÍR
16: ERAASI: HANILAT AULWIKH ORBIT: FIRE-ON-THE-HILLTOPS; SUS-PELEDAEN GUARDSHIP COLD-HEART-OF-MORNING OPHEL: SOMBRELÍR THE VOID
17: ERAASI: HANILAT; SERPENT STATION SUS-DARV GUARDSHIP GARDEN-OF-FAIR-BLOSSOMS: ERAASI NEARSPACE FIRE-ON-THE-HILLTOPS; SUS-PELEDAEN GUARDSHIP COLD-HEART-OF-MORNING : THE VOID
18: NINGLIN: NINGLIN SPACEPORT C OLD-HEART-OF-MORNING: NINGLIN ORBIT
19: NINGLIN: NINGLIN SPACEPORT; NINGLIN NEARSPACE THE VOID
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
21: SUS-RADAL ASTEROID BASE SUS-DARIV GUARDSHIP GARDEN-OF-FAIR-BLOSSOMS SUS-RADAL GUARDSHIP EASTWARD-TO-DAWNING SUS-PELEDAEN GUARDSHIP COLD-HEART-OF-MORNING NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER: SUS- RADAL ASTEROID BASE NEARSPACE
22: SUS-RADAL ASTEROID BASE SUS-DARIV GUARDSHIP GARDEN-OF-FAIR -BLOSSOMS; SUS-RADAL GUARDSHIP EASTWARD-TO-DAWNING SUS-PELEDAEN GUARDSHIP COLD-HEART-OF-MORNING FIRE-ON-THE-HILLTOPS: SUS-RADAL ASTEROID BASE NEARSPACE NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER: ERAASIAN FARSPACE
A Working of Stars Page 36