By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “Naversey’s headed back in,” Ari said. “I checked.”

  “Good.” Llannat poked at her salad with her fork. “I was worried. It’s hard to tell, sometimes, what’s true and what’s just nerves.”

  “Can’t you stop it?”

  “Not the true stuff,” she said. “And not the nerves either, mostly.” She poked at the salad again, turning over the shreds of unfamiliar Gyfferan greenery as if she expected to find something crawling there. “I wish …”

  “Wish what?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. It’s just that seeing the future isn’t enough, even when you can trust it. You can dodge things a little, take precautions here and there, but it’s all too slippery. There’s nothing solid that you can grab hold of—no way to reach out from where you are and make the change.”

  “Now you’re starting to talk like my brother.”

  “It only sounds that way,” she told him. “Owen wouldn’t even think some of the things I just said—and I wouldn’t be saying them if he was around. He works very closely with Master Ransome; everybody in the Guild knows it.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Ari demanded. “Seeing the future can’t be against the rules; you told me once that Ransome does it himself sometimes.”

  Llannat was starting to look a bit tight around the mouth, as if she’d gone further into something than she’d intended to. Ari waited. Most people would keep on talking if you didn’t say anything; and Llannat seemed to trust him, which was a warming thought all by itself.

  “It isn’t seeing the future that Master Ransome doesn’t like,” she said after a while. “It’s the idea of doing something about it.”

  “That’s stupid,” said Ari. “Anybody can change the future. Everybody does. What we do now changes it all the time.”

  Llannat appeared doubtful. “Maybe. But what if, sometimes, what you do now is reach up ahead and do something then … what if you take what you’ve seen and make it over into what you want to happen?”

  Adepts, he thought, and suppressed a sigh. Between having Owen for a brother, and Errec Ransome for an old family friend, he’d grown up listening to stuff like this. Sooner or later, they all drift loose from reality.

  “Now is now,” he said aloud, “as far as I could ever tell. And change is change.”

  “Oh, Ari.” She reached across the table and caught his hands in her own. “That’s what the Mages do, in their Circles. And the Guild calls it sorcery.”

  “Damned if I know why,” he said. Her hands were cold. “Is that really all the difference there is?”

  “There’s other stuff. But that’s the important one.”

  She seemed to know a great deal, Ari reflected, about things that Adepts were supposedly forbidden to deal with. Not that the knowledge was making her any happier, as far as he could tell. And Llannat Hyfid had been his friend on Nammerin, during a time when he had desperately needed friendship.

  “If it isn’t anything you can help,” he said, still holding her hands, “then don’t let it worry you.”

  “I wish things were that simple. But they aren’t.” She paused, then looked straight at him. “What if … what if the time comes when there is something I can do to help—only it’s the wrong kind of thing?”

  The answer to that one, he thought, was surprisingly easy; maybe it wasn’t so easy if you were an Adept.

  “Help first,” he said. “Explain later. And if somebody tries to give you trouble, tell them to complain about it to me.”

  Klea Santreny didn’t much care for Suivi Point. She’d thought at first, before she left Claw Hard with Owen, that a dome settlement on an asteroid would be something like High Station Pleyver—clean and well behaved and loyal to the Republic. She hadn’t been portside for an hour before she figured out that if Suivi Point was any of those things, it was only up on top where it showed.

  The “galactic diplomat’s decimal-credit tour” that the man called Jessan had promised them didn’t change her opinion. She stuck close to Owen—Owen Rosselin-Metadi, she told herself firmly; if he won’t remember it then somebody’s going to have to remember it for him—while Gentlesir Nyls Jessan took them from one end of Suivi Point to the other.

  She wasn’t sure what to make of Gentlesir Nyls Jessan himself, for that matter. He dressed like a rich Khesatan do-nothing straight out of the midafternoon holodramas, and he certainly had the accent for the part, but his hands were all wrong. They looked like they knew things the rest of him didn’t.

  After listening for a while to his conversation with Owen, she felt inclined to believe what the hands were telling her.

  “ … being held in Suivi Main Detention on a max-pri contract,” Jessan said, as he pointed out the ten-story-high mosaic depiction of the Spirit of Enlightened Mercantilism on the front wall of the Suivan headquarters of Dahl&Dahl, Ltd. “Notice, if you will, the particularly garish color scheme and the awkward poses of the main figures … .”

  Klea craned her neck up at the pictures. “It’s part of the building,” she said. “And the way that things feel … I don’t know much about art and all, but that picture is just right for the people here.”

  Jessan lifted an eyebrow. “A banker with a sense of irony? I suppose it’s possible.”

  Owen said, “Is there some reason why you didn’t attempt to buy her out? I realize that a max-pri contract would represent a considerable sum of money—”

  “Indeed,” said Jessan. He gestured gracefully at a multilevel shopping gallery on the other side of the concourse. “Observe, also, the renowned Crystal Arcade, a favorite picture-postcube subject all over the civilized galaxy … considerable sums of money are not, in this case, the problem. The problem is that Tarveet of Pleyver has a seat on the Steering Committee of Suivi Point, and we do not.”

  Owen closed his eyes. “Tarveet. Oh, damn.”

  “Exactly. The esteemed councillor from Pleyver has petitioned the committee for your sister’s summary termination.”

  “On what grounds?” Owen’s voice and expression didn’t change, but the surge of anger that came out from him struck Klea like a physical blow. Jessan must have felt it as well, because he shook his head.

  “Calmly, Master Rosselin-Metadi. Calmly. On the grounds that she deliberately and willfully endangered the settlements of the Suivan Belt.” He paused. “And we aren’t aided in the Steering Committee by the fact that, on the face of it, the accusation is perfectly true.”

  Owen let his breath out slowly; Klea could feel him subduing the anger, holding it in check. “Do we have any friends on the committee?”

  “This is Suivi Point,” said Jessan. “There’s not a lot of friendship to go around. But there are certain individuals and corporate entities with varying amounts of self-interest which we can call upon. Dahl&Dahl”—he gestured again at the Spirit of Enlightened Mercantilism—“being one of the most prominent.”

  Owen glanced up at the mosaic without expression. “What kind of help were you planning to ask them for?”

  “I’ve already asked them for the favor of presenting a counterpetition,” Jessan said. “It remains to be seen whether or not they will do so. However, if you and your apprentice can convincingly portray a pair of off-planet bodyguards—”

  “Easily,” said Owen.

  “—we can go into the office behind that extraordinarily tasteless façade and make inquiries concerning their decision.”

  The life of a commerce raider, Commodore Jervas Gil reflected, would be considerably more fun if there were any worthwhile commerce to raid. So far, the gold and diamonds of the Mageworlds trade had mostly turned out to be medicinal herbs and small spacecraft parts. Nobody in his hastily patched-together fleet was going to retire rich on stuff like that; and the Mageworlds weren’t likely to miss it.

  It wasn’t as if Gil hadn’t tried. He’d used the classic raiding tactics from the first Magewar, taught in the service schools: either drop out well away from a world, lie th
ere silent and dark until a merchant ship lifted, then swoop in and intercept before the merch could jump to hyper; or watch the known dropout points and intercept vessels as soon as they appeared. Then—depending upon whether you intended to search ships and take prisoners, or just wanted to seize the major cargo and wreak general havoc—you had your choice of grappling with tractors and boarding, or taking the ship apart from a distance with guns and picking through the broken pieces at your leisure.

  The first way was riskier, but realized more profit for the victors. The second method was a lot safer, at the price of all the uncontainerized cargo and small loose items that could be found on board an intact vessel, not to mention the salvage value of the ship itself. Both ways still worked. But the resistance in force that Gil was hoping for never materialized.

  “Nothing,” he said gloomily to Jhunnei, after several weeks of more-or-less fruitless endeavor. He and his aide had just spent a dispiriting two hours taking inventory of the spoils to date, and had come up with a probable resale value not quite equal to their current expenditures on fuel and supplies. “No armed response whatsoever. Do you suppose the Mageworlders came through the Net with every single warship that they had?”

  “It’s possible,” said Jhunnei. “We’ve done all we could to draw them out, short of actually hitting dirtside targets, and that’s probably our next step.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” Gil said. “There’s no point in inflicting random damage if we can’t take a world and hold on to it. And if blowing up their ships and stealing their cargoes isn’t good enough to make the Mageworlders send a task force after us, I doubt that a planetary attack would do any better.”

  Jhunnei shook her head. “Not likely. Whoever’s running the war from their side feels like a gambler and a real hard bastard. He’s opted for the all-or-nothing win, and I don’t think anything we can do is going to make him split his forces.”

  The comm link beeped. Gil set aside the clipboard with the spoils inventory and picked up the link. “Gil here.”

  “Communications, sir. We’ve just picked up a hi-comms message from Luck of the Draw.”

  “Good,” said Gil. This sounded like promising news at last—a few days ago, Merrolakk had taken several of the privateers off on a hunting foray. Maybe her efforts had paid off where Gil’s hadn’t. “Where’s the Luck now? And what’s her message?”

  “She’s just entered the local system,” reported the comms tech. “Captain Merrolakk requests permission to rendezvous with Karipavo for a direct conference. It seems that her latest raid netted her some important-looking papers—and a prisoner.”

  In the half-empty bachelor officers’ quarters at the Space Force installation on Telabryk Field, Llannat Hyfid woke from an uneasy sleep. The conversation over dinner at the LDF officers’ club had been disturbing; she’d said more than she’d intended, and far more than she should have. If she’d been talking to anyone besides Ari Rosselin-Metadi, and if the Mageworlders hadn’t already broken up the civilized galaxy into convenient pieces, she would have been in serious trouble.

  The Guild hunts down Mages wherever it can find them—“for the common safety,” Master Ransome always told us, and under the circumstances I can’t really say he was wrong.

  She turned over on the narrow bunk. A bar of light came in through the high window. Not moonlight, but the reflected skyglow off the port; so strong, even almost deserted as the Field was, that it made a pale streak slanting down across the darkness.

  Face it, I don’t look all that much like an Adept anymore. A Magelord’s ship, a Magelord’s staff … even my thoughts are turning strange.

  When she looked at the night through half-closed eyes, she had to acknowledge the change. Her Adept-trained awareness of the flowing Power in the universe was still there; but these days, if she tried, she could dimly perceive something else as well: the silver cords that brought together the past and the future, weaving their patterns across the present.

  That’s what the masks are for. The knowledge slipped into the forefront of her mind like an old memory. It was one of the things the Professor had known, that had come to her somehow during her visionary trance back on the Deathwing. They shut out the distractions of flesh and blood, and let you see.

  She couldn’t sleep now; her thoughts had left her too restless for that. With a sigh she rose from her bed and dressed herself again in Adept’s blacks. Then she picked up the Professor’s ebony staff and clipped it onto her belt before slipping out into the night.

  The few small buildings that made up the Space Force installation on Telabryk Field were dark. A light shone through the window of the main office—Vinhalyn, she supposed, working late, or whoever had the duty tonight. She went around back to the open area by the loading platform, where she had practiced the ShadowDance and Ari had come to watch.

  When she got to the place, she wasn’t really surprised to find him there before her. He stood leaning back against the side of the platform, looking up at the night sky. As always, the quietness of his posture would have let normal eyes pass over him without noticing. He turned his head at her approach—he had keen ears by any human standard, and the Selvaurs on Maraghai had trained him well enough to let him earn clan status among the Forest Lords.

  “What brings you out walking at this hour?” he asked. His voice was a soft rumble.

  Llannat took a place leaning against the platform next to him. “I couldn’t sleep.” She paused. “What’s your excuse?”

  He shrugged. In the dark, with his massive height and his broad shoulders, it was like watching a mountain shift position. “Same thing, more or less.”

  They stood for a while in companionable silence. Far off on the LDF side of the field, a returning scoutship settled onto the concrete in a streak of light and a roar of engines.

  “That’s another one back,” she said. “So far, so good.”

  “The good luck can’t last forever. Which do you think it’s going to be, the Magefleet or Valiant?”

  “We’d better hope it’s Vallant,” Llannat said. “The most he’s got is going to be a sector fleet. Whatever the Mages have put together, it was big enough to break through the Net and take out the Home Fleet at Galcen.”

  . She frowned upward at where the stars would have been, if she could have seen them through the skyglow. “If you’re really looking for an answer, it’s that I don’t know which of them is going to get here first. But it’s going to be soon, and it’s going to be bad.”

  He nodded. “I thought so … . I wish that I could wish you were someplace else. But I’m too selfish for that. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “So am I.” She was silent for a few moments, remembering the silver cords the Professor had seen and drawn together five hundred years before—the work that she herself had finished, or had begun to finish, on board Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter . “I think … I believe … that I came here because of you. Because I had to find you.”

  “Me?” He turned his head to look directly down at her, though she couldn’t make out his expression in the dark. “What good would I be to an Adept? Owen always did say I was thicker than a two-meter stack of plast-block bricks.”

  “Your brother doesn’t know everything.”

  Ari snorted. “Try telling him that.”

  “Don’t worry. He’ll learn.” The words came unprompted, with the flat echo of certainty, and she shivered in spite of herself. “Oh, damn. I wish I could quit doing that.”

  “I can’t help you there, either. I wish I could.”

  “You do help,” she said. “By being here, and being you. I don’t need another Adept—we’re all crazy, you know; it comes from spending too much time looking at the inside of things—I need someone who doesn’t have trouble remembering what’s real.”

  Llannat heard his breath catch a little. “If you aren’t telling me lies in order to be kind …”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll stay. For as long as the M
agelords and the Space Force let me. Longer, if you ask.”

  She laughed unsteadily. “Coming from you, Ari Rosselin-Metadi, that’s practically a proposal of marriage.”

  “If you’d like to take it that way.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And yes.”

  Klea had never impersonated a bodyguard before. The trick, she decided after watching Owen for a few minutes, was not to impersonate anything at all.

  If I am one of Gentlesir Jessan’s off-planet bodyguards, then what an off-planet bodyguard looks like … is me.

  In the office of Dahl&Dahl’s executive vice-president for public affairs, she stood against the wall on one side of the door while Owen stood on the other. Jessan and the man from Dahl&Dahl ignored them both.

  “I’m gratified,” said Jessan, “that you were able to provide me with an answer so expeditiously.”

  The man from Dahl&Dahl pursed his lips and looked mournful. “Unfortunately, Gentlesir Jessan, the only answer that I’m able to give you is a negative one.”

  “Ah.” If Jessan was angry, it didn’t show. “I take it your superiors were unwilling to accommodate us in the matter.”

  “No, no. The firm of Dahl&Dahl still has the most earnest support for your cause, and for the cause of the Republic. However—”

  “Yes?”

  “—by our best projections, a counterpetition to block the Domina’s termination could not muster enough votes in committee to override the original. Under the current circumstances, Dahl&Dahl can’t possibly risk putting it forward.”

  Jessan nodded. “Understandable. You are, after all, men and women of business … but is there something new about the current circumstances of which I ought to be aware?”

  “Yes,” said the man from Dahl&Dahl. “At its next meeting, the Steering Committee will declare Suivi Point to be an open port, not allied to either side in the present conflict.”

  Not even a little bit like High Station, thought Klea. And High Station has a lot more to worry about if they lose.