By the time Commodore Gil and Lieutenant Jhunnei abandoned their table in the Blue Sun Cantina, local midnight had already come and gone without any new word from Merrolakk. The Selvauran captain had left the bar not long after their conversation, and Gil and Jhunnei had waited on her return for as long as they dared. They couldn’t hold down a table forever, though, without appearing anxious, and therefore weak—always a bad idea when dealing with one of the Forest Lords. At last Gil pushed his empty glass away from him with a sigh.
“Time to go, Lieutenant,” he said. “We’ll see if our friend Merro is any more helpful in the morning.”
He left a couple of ten-credit chits on the table to cover their tab, and worked his way through the close-packed tables to the door. Lieutenant Jhunnei followed close behind him.
Outside, the night air felt cool and dry after the sweaty congestion of the cantina. Karipavo’s shuttle was in docking bay 358-A, several minutes of brisk walking away from the crowded activity of the Strip. As soon as they were free of the noise, Gil pulled a comm link out of his coat pocket and keyed it on.
“Commodore Gil here. Status on the new arrivals?”
The voice of the shuttle pilot came back over the link with a tinny clicking sound. “Word from the ‘Pavo is that the entire flotilla is up there in high orbit, awaiting orders.”
“Good,” said Gil. “How soon can they be ready to make a hyperspace jump?”
“They report they’re ready right now.”
“Even better. Anything else to report?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Very well. Get ready to lift for orbit; we’ll be with you in about ten minutes.”
He clicked off the link and pocketed it again. “Let’s get moving,” he said to Jhunnei. “I want to be out of orbit and heading for hyper by local dawn—if Merrolakk hasn’t gotten in touch with us before then, she’ll have to wait until we come back into town.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jhunnei.
Her voice sounded oddly absent and detached, and she hadn’t moved since Gil started his conversation with the shuttle pilot. The patchy light from a nearby holosign shone down on her face. Her eyes were half-shut, and she held her head at an angle, as if listening.
Gil regarded her anxiously. “Is something wrong?”
“Maybe,” she said. She hesitated for a moment, and then appeared to make up her mind. “Commodore, I don’t think we should walk any further along this street. Something very bad is going to happen if we do.”
Ari found Llannat Hyfid out back by the skipsled loading platform, in a secluded corner where the bulk of two adjoining buildings cast a patch of cooler shadow on the hot tarmac. She still wore the black trousers and the plain white shirt of her formal Adept’s gear; the stiff broadcloth tunic hung, neatly folded, over the handrail of the loading platform nearby. She had her staff, the short ebony one that she’d brought back from the raid on Darvell, and she was practicing the movements of the ShadowDance, alone.
Ari had seen the Dance before. Given a younger brother who’d seemed destined for the Guild from toddlerhood, he didn’t think he could have avoided seeing it. But he knew that the movements as Llannat did them were not in the customary form, any more than was the staff she carried.
If I were an Adept, he thought, I’d probably be all bent out of shape about the changes.
But he wasn’t an Adept, so he could lean against the loading platform and enjoy watching Llannat work through the postures and sequences, first slowly and then with a sharp, decisive edge. She was sweating in the warm midday sun, so that her brown skin glistened, and her black hair was coming down in loose, curling tendrils from its knot at the back of her neck.
He waited there as a hunter would, not calling attention to himself until she had finished. When she was done, she nodded a greeting in his direction, then clipped her staff back onto her belt and came over to the loading platform.
“I saw you come out here,” she said as she retrieved her tunic from the safety railing. “I stopped the sequence as soon as I came to a good spot.”
“You could have kept on. I don’t mind watching.”
It was hard to tell, with her dark complexion, but he thought she blushed. “I don’t mind having you watch me. But you came out here to talk, I think, and I haven’t had much friendly conversation lately.”
“Lieutenant Vinhalyn seems to regard you highly enough,” Ari said. He frowned. “Is there a problem with one of the others?”
She shook her head. “Not unless you call too much awe and respect a problem. Which I do, when I’m on the receiving end of it, but there’s no polite way to make them stop.”
“I suppose not. Isn’t there anything I can do to help?”
“Don’t start respecting me so much we can’t talk anymore. And whatever you do—no, whatever I do—don’t get scared of me. I don’t think I could stand that.”
Ari felt a stirring of apprehension, like a fist closing on something just behind his rib cage. He took a deep breath and willed the tightness away. “I won’t do it, then.”
“Thanks.” She was quiet for a moment; then she reached out and laid her fingertips against the back of his wrist. He felt his skin warming under her touch. “I missed that, you know—having somebody treat me like a regular person, instead of like some kind of miracle-working oracle.”
What did you see for them? he wanted to demand of her; what did you say?
But he knew better than to ask.
Commodore Gil glanced down the street. Most of the groundcar traffic had gone home for the night, and the heavy null-grav cargo transports wouldn’t be making an appearance until the grey hours just before dawn. Waycross at this hour belonged to the free-spacers who made their way on foot—sometimes strolling and sometimes staggering—from one gaudily illuminated place of entertainment to another.
“I don’t see any problems,” Gil said. “Everything looks about the same as usual.”
“That’s what I don’t like.”
“You’re starting to sound like an Adept.”
“I do a great imitation at parties.” She nodded toward a narrow side-street branching off to their right. “Humor me, please, Commodore. Let’s go that way instead.”
Gil looked at his aide for a moment longer, then shrugged. “No reason we shouldn’t, I suppose. This is Waycross, after all—sneaking around in dark alleys is practically the national sport.”
With Gil in the lead, they left the main thoroughfare and started down the alley. Their new route wasn’t much more than a murky service passage between two rows of buildings, dimly lit by occasional blue safety glows marking back entrances and garbage bins. The night sky was a paler stripe of darkness overhead. Halfway down the alley, an access ladder of some kind ran up the wall on Gil’s left.
Jhunnei halted. “That’s it,” she said. “Look.”
Gil bent and examined the ladder. There was enough light for him to see a thin crust of mud clinging to the iron rungs. He touched it, and felt the coolness of residual moisture. The dirt was only half-dry.
“Looks like somebody climbed up the ladder recently,” he said. “Probably a maintenance worker.”
“That track isn’t more than half an hour old,” Jhunnei pointed out. “And midnight’s an odd time for anyone to be doing maintenance, even in Waycross.”
She paused. “Call it a hunch, Commodore—but I think it’s time we split up. You check out whatever’s going on up on the roof, and I’ll take a little walk down the main street and see if anyone shows an inordinate interest in me.”
Gil looked at Jhunnei for a moment, considering. What she proposed could be dangerous—though more so for her, as the one to draw fire, than for him. On the other hand, there was the muddy footprint on the ladder.
If she’s right about that, Gil thought, then her proposal’s a sound one. And if she’s wrong, and it was some environmental-systems tech doing a bit of emergency repair work … well, we won’t hurt anyone by checking out the sit
uation.
“Good idea,” he said aloud. “Let’s do it, Lieutenant. If nothing happens, we’ll meet back here in fifteen minutes.”
Jhunnei nodded. “Yes, sir.” She faded away toward the mouth of the alley.
Gil set his foot onto the bottom rung of the ladder—the caked dirt fell away when his boot sole touched it—and climbed up until he came to the low brick wall that ran around the flat roof of the building. Keeping his feet planted on the top rung of the ladder, he raised his head a few inches above the edge of the parapet and looked about.
His caution didn’t do him much good. The big e-c housings in the middle of the roof cut off his view, and cast their shadows everywhere. He swung himself up onto the roof, and pulled out the miniature hand-blaster he’d carried up his sleeve ever since his tour as an aide, when he’d picked up the habit from General Metadi. Keeping his head low, he made his way around three sides of the roof until he could look down at the main street.
There she was, Lieutenant Bretyn Jhunnei, five stories below—and not alone. She was walking beside someone who seemed eerily familiar; who was, in fact, Gil’s double, from the nondescript brown hair down to the combination of uniform trousers with the formal pleats and tucks of a white spidersilk evening shirt.
She shouldn’t be able to do that!
Gil shook his head. It doesn’t matter right now. She is doing it, so make use of it while you can.
Lady LeRoi wasn’t carrying cargo to Pleyver this trip. Nothing produced on Nammerin, the freighter’s previous port of call, would pay as much to reach the Pleyveran system as had the passengers crowded into every cubic inch of the Lady’s free space. Her captain had hooked up life support in the holds and stacked the cargo bays three deep with jury-rigged acceleration bunks.
The ship’s environmental systems labored noisily under the added load of so many extra bodies. The air smelled like sweat and stale urine, even with the scrubbers cycling overtime, and the drinking water was flat from repeated distillation—and so bitter with purifiers that nobody ever forgot its origins. The food was, by official definition on the side of the package, sufficient to sustain life under emergency conditions.
“This is the first emergency I’ve ever seen that was mostly boredom,” said Klea. “And I never thought that a person could get tired of eating water-grain.”
She and Owen were in crew berthing, a relative luxury Owen had secured for them back at Namport by methods about which Klea still wasn’t sure. He was doing some kind of work in return, down in the maintenance sections of the ship, but the Lady had turned away a dozen passengers for every one she took aboard, and Klea didn’t think Owen could have bought their tickets with labor and money alone.
“Be grateful that Nammerin-to-Pleyver isn’t one of your longer jumps, he told her.”The Lady isn’t exactly a demon for speed. Now … the ShadowDance.”
Klea looked about the cramped cabin. The only light came from a blue low-power glow set into the bulkhead near the door. Sleeping crew members occupied all four of the regular bunks, and two more crew members—thrown out of their own quarters to make room for paying passengers—found places as Owen and Klea did, in sleepsacks on the deck.
“Here?” she said. “There isn’t an extra inch to Dance in.”
“One must learn accommodation.”
“If I kick somebody and wake them up, they’re liable to accommodate me straight out an airlock.”
“I don’t think so,” said Owen after a moment’s consideration. “They’re more likely to throw you in with the hold passengers. You shouldn’t let the prospect disturb you.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Klea grumbled.
Nevertheless she folded the sleepsack and stood up, grasping her broomstick staff in both hands. She placed her feet in the beginning position and began to Dance.
It was difficult, working in such a small area. She felt as if invisible barriers surrounded her, circumscribing her movements—forcing her to scale everything down, to take smaller steps and move more slowly and always, always return to the center point she had established when she began. But she persisted—and between one awkward motion and the next the essence of the ShadowDance asserted itself, transcending her dogged endeavors and flowing into her like bright water.
Owen had said once, back on Nammerin, that the ShadowDance was as much a meditation as it was a combat skill or a means of acquiring self-discipline. She’d come close once or twice to understanding through experience what he had meant, but never as close as now, when the small patch of clear deck that was her Dancing-ground seemed in that moment to stretch out toward infinity, as if her movements themselves were creating it around her out of nothingness.
The door and the bulkhead were gone; they had receded with everything else into the infinite distance she was creating with her Dance. Only the low-power glow remained, suffusing everything with a blue, sourceless light.
This is no-place, she thought—not stopping the steps of the Dance, keeping the Dancing-ground in being around her. This is no-time. This is nowhere I have ever been.
This is important.
She kept on Dancing. Phantoms and illusions began to take shape around her in the blue light.
These are what I came here to see.
She Danced, and watched.
The inchoate forms drew together into a single clear vision—and she was no longer all by herself on the Dancing-ground. Somewhere in the blue infinity ahead of her, too far away for her to touch but so close she could see the finest detail, another Dancer worked as she did to keep the nothingness at bay.
Who are you? What are you doing here inside my Dance?
She flung the questions out into the universe of blue light, but the other did not answer, or even seem to hear. A slight man, far from young, with grey hair and a worn, lined face, he moved in a Dance that was at once like and not like the one that Owen had taught her. The staff he worked with was not an Adept’s, meant to be grasped in both hands, but a shorter rod, of ebony bound with silver, that he held in a loose one-handed grip.
She couldn’t fail to recognize the weapon. The Circle-Mages on Nammerin had carried rods like that one.
But the man she was watching didn’t act like a Mage, didn’t wear the black robe and gloves and the immobile mask of black plastic that made all the members of a Circle look alike. And he was alone … no shared strength of his fellows to draw on when his own powers began to fail. Only himself.
Wait. He isn’t alone after all.
Now she could make out another form, half-obscured by the blue shadows behind the old man. It was a woman this time, fair-skinned and taller than the man who guarded her, swathed from head to foot in a hooded cloak of some rough-textured white fabric.
Are you the one I came here to see?
This time, her question seemed to reach its target. The hooded woman turned her head and looked directly at Klea. The woman’s eyes were a deep, brilliant blue, sharp and penetrating, but beyond the sharpness was a fear too profound for words.
Have I failed again? Have you come too late?
The thought struck Klea like a blow from a knife; she drew a sharp breath, and stumbled. The infinite blue Dancing-ground contracted around her like a skin tightening, and she fell down and away, out of the trance and back into the tiny, crowded cabin aboard Lady LeRoi.
She swayed and almost fell. Owen caught her, lowering her with strong hands down to the deckplates. She was shivering; he opened the sleepsack and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“You saw something,” he said.
She didn’t bother asking how he knew. “A man,” she said. “And a woman. I think—I think he was guarding her. From the nothing. Keeping it away.”
“These people. What did they look like?”
“Strangers,” Klea said. “A fair woman, and a man with grey hair. And a staff like a Magelord’s, but no mask. And they were waiting for something.”
She paused, remembering the fearful question in the
woman’s deep blue eyes. “Or someone.”
VII. INNISH-KYL: WAYCROSS
WARHAMMER: HYPERSPACE TRANSIT TO BASE
PLEYVER: HIGH STATION
GIL CONTINUED his circuit of the roof, pacing his aide and her phantom companion, until he came to the corner where the road to the docking bays split off the main street. He peered around the turning, and drew his head back in haste.
A man—a free-spacer by his garments, though not a prosperous one—crouched a few feet away behind the shelter of the parapet. The spacer clutched an energy lance in his hands, and he was watching Jhunnei’s progress along the street beneath. She passed beneath him, Gil’s uncanny doppelganger still walking by her side. The man raised his weapon and sighted down toward the street.
Gil flicked his hand-blaster to “stun,” and fired. The sniper collapsed against the stone parapet. A bolt from the energy lance struck the holosign for the Hundred Blossoms Cabaret and disintegrated its waltzing flowers into an explosion of colored sparks. In the street below, Jhunnei glanced upward, and Gil’s double winked out of existence with considerably less fuss than had the Hundred Blossoms’ sign.
Gil collected the fallen energy lance, then moved away from the unconscious sniper to wait for his aide. A few minutes later she joined him on the rooftop.
“Good shooting, Commodore.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Gil looked at her for a moment without saying anything, then sighed. “Tell me something, Jhunnei. Did you know he was waiting up here? Or did you make a lucky guess?”
Jhunnei paused. “I … suspected. Strongly.”
“Suspected,” said Gil. There was another stretched-out silence, broken only by the background racket of the port and the nearby fizzing and popping of the broken holosign. Jhunnei seemed pale and nervous in the scant light. “Lieutenant, tell me something straight out. Are you an Adept?”
By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 Page 10