Reluctantly, Ari let go of Llannat’s hands and picked up the stylus. It felt even smaller and clumsier in his fingers than such implements usually did, and there were a lot of marked spaces. He made himself write carefully, so that the characters didn’t go sprawling and wavering all over the empty blocks.
When he was done he handed the stylus to Llannat. She took it and began signing her name in turn—the same firm, unhesitant lettering he’d seen every day back on Nammerin, on forms and reports and requisitions. She signed the last page, and handed the flimsies and the stylus back to Vinhalyn.
Ari had been expecting the room to break out in conversation and the clink of glassware as soon as she finished, but nobody spoke. The room stayed quiet, and the trays of food waited untouched on the side tables. He felt painfully awkward and outsized, standing there in the center of things, and he cast a desperate glance toward Lieutenant Vinhalyn.
The acting CO nodded toward the pitcher and cups, and the loaf of flat bread. “That’s it as far as Space Force is concerned,” he said, “but we’re on Gyffer now, so we ought to follow Gyfferan custom. You’re supposed to pour wine for each other, and break off pieces of the bread.”
Ari nodded. “All right,” he said. Somewhere in the back of his mind a memory surfaced, of his father saying, “It was space biscuit and Innish-Kyl firewater, but that was good enough … .”
He let the recollection slip back into the depths, and watched Llannat Hyfid pouring wine from the pitcher into the cup nearest to him. When she was done, she handed him the pitcher; it was fuller than he’d expected, and he had to concentrate on not letting it slide out of his grip. He filled her cup and set the pitcher back down on the tray.
The bread was dark and rough-textured. The piece he broke off and gave to Llannat shed brown crumbs on the tabletop like rain. Llannat broke off a piece in turn and gave it to him; the taste was rich and nutlike, with sweet bits of whole grain in it.
She was already sipping at her wine. At a nudge from Vinhalyn, Ari picked up his own cup, looked down uncertainly for a moment at the golden-tawny liquid, then tilted it back and drained it in a single swallow.
The silence broke then—in cheers and whistles and a few ribald comments that made his ears burn—and the strong native wine went straight to his head. Llannat Hyfid was grinning at him in pure amusement.
“So here we are,” she said, under the noise of resumed conversation and the general rush toward drinks and sandwiches. “Married and everything. You do realize that since we’re the guests of honor, none of these nice people can go anywhere until after we’ve left?”
Ari set his empty cup back down on the table. “In that case, we should probably leave here as soon as possible. Would now be a good time, do you think?”
“Now would be wonderful,” she said.
For Klea Santreny, the lift-off from Suivi Point was the worst part. The fight at the execution studio had been vicious but exciting—the sort of thing she suspected she ought not to start liking too much—and the retreat through the portside warrens had gone too fast for her to become frightened. Then had come strapping herself into the padded bunk in crew berthing, and waiting for the pressure of acceleration to ease.
But this time the red Danger light over the cabin door had kept on burning. There had been strange shudders and rattlings in the frame of the ship, and a steady percussive noise that seemed at once too high for her ears to pick up all the notes, and too low. The sound vibrated in her teeth and bones like a repeated chord from a madman’s orchestra, causing her to cry out in sudden fear.
“What is it? What’s going on?”
Owen spoke from the other couch. His voice was tense but steady. “The ’Hammer is firing her guns.”
“We’re in a battle?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Not here,” said Owen. “Not now. Wait.”
She had waited. In time—a short time, by the bulkhead chronometer, but it seemed long—she felt the queasiness that marked a jump into hyperspace, and the noises stopped.
A few minutes later, the green Safety light came on. They unbuckled the webbing that anchored them to their couches, and Owen said, “Well, we’re here.”
Klea stood, unsteadily, and stretched. She reached for her staff where she’d strapped it down on the couch beside her.
‘Where’s ’here,’ though?“she said.
Owen shrugged. “Hyperspace somewhere, at a guess. Whoever was trying to stop us, didn’t. Bee’s a good shiphandler.”
“‘Bee’?”
“Beka. My sister.”
Klea thought for a moment about the yellow-haired woman who had so nearly gone to her death wearing the Iron Crown. “I thought you said she was the Domina.”
“She is.” He sighed. “But she wasn’t, for a long time, except for the name. She’s flown starships for a living since she was seventeen.”
“Your family let her do that?”
“Well … no. But she did it anyhow.”
She ran away, Klea translated mentally. I’m glad somebody got a better deal out of that than I did. But this didn’t seem like the time to pursue the question further.
The wave of queasiness that marked a hyperspace dropout came; shortly afterward, the ship jumped to hyper again.
They left the berthing compartment and went into the starship’s common room. The compartment was still empty when they came in, but it didn’t stay empty long. Klea was still looking about uncertainty—there hadn’t been time to get her bearings before lift-off—when the door leading to the cockpit snicked open. Beka Rosselin-Metadi stepped into the common room, followed by an older woman in Space Force uniform.
Owen’s sister was still wearing the long green dress she’d had on for the execution; it was ripped at one shoulder, where a badly set-in sleeve hadn’t withstood the scramble of their escape, and the full skirt was ragged and charred along the hem. Her face was pale except for a flush of bright red at the cheekbones, and shadows like bruises underneath her eyes.
Beka looked at Owen for a moment without saying anything, then turned her unnerving blue gaze onto Klea. “And what the hell are you?” she asked without preamble.
Klea relaxed a little. She’d been asked that question more than once aboard Claw Hard on the run to Suivi Point, and the words came easily by now. “Master Rosselin-Metadi’s apprentice. Klea Santreny, from Nammerin.”
“Apprentice, eh?”
“You have her to thank for my being here,” Owen said. “She saw a blue-eyed, fair-haired woman being protected by an elderly gentleman, but needing more help. You’re the only blonde I know, and the man sounded like your old copilot, the dead one. Since he’s not around, I decided to check on you.”
“Thanks, I suppose.”
Klea wasn’t sure what an apprentice Adept was supposed to call a Domina, and compromised by leaving off the formal address entirely. “You’re welcome,” she said.
Owen’s sister didn’t appear to take offense—or maybe, Klea thought, she had enough things to be offended at already. Before anybody else could say anything, however, footsteps sounded on the deckplates. Nyls Jessan and the dark man Beka had called Ignac’ came into the common room together.
“That was good shooting, you two,” said Beka as they entered. “Thanks.”
Jessan bowed—an exaggeratedly formal gesture that made Owen’s sister smile in spite of her obvious exhaustion. “We aim to please. We also aim. Occasionally.”
“Idiot,” Beka said, but there was a note of affectionate laughter in her voice, and the jangling, sharp-edged tension that was so much a part of her nonphysical presence eased off somewhat. “Is there any cha’a?”
“In the galley,” said Ignac’. “It’s cold, though.”
“I don’t care,” Beka said. “And if somebody were to doctor up the mug with something a bit stronger, I don’t think I’d care about that either.”
Ignac’ went off in what Klea suppose
d was the direction of the starship’s galley, and Beka sat—collapsed, really; it was plain to Klea that the Domina was close to falling down from exhaustion—in one of the chairs by the common-room table.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll be coming out of hyper at Captain Yevil’s rendezvous point real soon now, and everybody’s going to want to know what we’re doing next. Which is a good question, and I’m open to suggestions myself. Nyls?”
The Khesatan had taken a seat at the table while she was speaking. Now he shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve been—preoccupied with other things the past few days.”
“You’re forgiven,” said Beka.
Ignac’ came back from the galley with a mug of cha’a-and-something, mixed with a heavy enough hand that Klea could smell the sharp tang of the liquor. Beka took it, drained what looked like half of it in one gulp, and went on talking.
“Thanks … . Galcen’s out, I know that. But I don’t know the situation anywhere else.”
“Bad,” said the woman in the Space Force uniform—from her nametag, the Captain Yevil that Beka had mentioned earlier. “We haven’t heard from any of the sector fleets yet except Infabede, and all the word we’ve gotten on that one says Vallant’s gone rogue and taken the fleet with him.”
“No welcome there, then.” Beka sipped at her remaining cha’a. “I wish we had a few more ships; I’d try for Pleyver. Maybe send them their ex-councillor back home from high orbit without a lifepod while I was at it.”
“Not a good idea,” said Owen. He’d been leaning on his staff without saying anything during the talk so far; from the way the others reacted, it seemed that everyone except his sister had forgotten he was there. “They’ve got a civil war of their own going already. Pleyver’s declared for the Mages, High Station’s loyal.”
“Three cheers for High Station,” Beka said. She turned to Ignac’. “LeSoit—how about you? Ideas?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Ophel, maybe. Or another one of the neutral worlds.”
“Most of those are a long way from here,” Captain Yevil pointed out, “and closer to the Mageworlds than civilization. There’s a reason why they’re neutral, after all. Unless you’re planning to give up the resistance and settle down someplace—”
“Not yet,” said Beka. “What other choices are there?”
LeSoit began counting on his fingers. “Entibor’s dead, Sapne might as well be dead, Khesat and the rest of the Central Worlds are too close to Galcen, Nammerin’s too far away—”
“Nammerin’s got Mages on-planet already,” said Jessan, somewhat to Klea’s surprise. She wondered when the Khesatan had been on Nammerin, and what he’d been doing there.
“Not so many Mages as before,” said Owen. “But you’re right. We can’t trust it.”
“We can’t trust any world,” Beka said. Her eyes were brighter now, and she didn’t look as tired as before. “Not without more information. The first step in getting more information is going where we can find it—and in this part of space, if it isn’t Suivi then it’s Innish-Kyl.”
Emergencies can take many forms, so Space Force emergency supplies ranged from very high tech to very low. Now, in a small room at Space Force HQ Telabryk, a candle burned. Ari had pilfered the candle from emergency stores—an act of wild abandon for someone usually so matter-of-fact and painfully scrupulous—and had set it up in a saucer from the galley. Now the room was full of yellow-orange light and soft brown shadows.
Llannat was taking the pins out of her hair. When the heavy mass of it was freed, it would hang down below her shoulder blades almost to the small of her back. Keeping it up off her shoulders, as required by Space Force regulations and plain good sense, was a major undertaking.
“I keep thinking I ought to cut it,” she said, breaking without preamble into the candlelit silence. Her voice sounded as if it belonged to a stranger. “But I never do.”
“Don’t ever. Please.” Ari was still standing beside the plast-block windowsill where he had placed the candle. She didn’t think he’d moved since he’d put it there. He was halfway across the room, but she felt as if he were standing close enough to touch her.
“I won’t if I can help it.” She took out the last pin and laid it beside the others on the table, then shook out her hair and ran her fingers through it. “I usually braid it at night, because of the tangles. Shall I—?”
“Not tonight. No.”
Ari’s reply came quickly enough to embarrass him, it seemed; his usually pale skin had darkened in the golden light.
Llannat didn’t say anything, but went on as though she hadn’t noticed. She unfastened the black broadcloth tunic of her formal Adept’s gear, and hung it carefully on the back of the chair. Shirt and undergarments followed, until she was bare to the waist, with her loose hair brushing against her skin.
She sat down on the edge of the narrow bed and bent over to unfasten the uniform boots. As she worked, she heard sounds of movement from over by the window; Ari had apparently broken free of his immobility enough to begin taking off his dress uniform. She took her time over the boots, carefully rolling up the black socks and placing them inside, then pushing the boots back side by side under the bed.
When she looked up again, Ari had taken off the uniform tunic and the shirt underneath. The candle threw highlights and shadows on the muscles of his torso, and the pale white lines of old scars stood out against his skin: deep punctures from massive teeth in the flesh of his forearm, and long, slashing claw marks along his back and ribs. Those would be the scars of his Long Hunt, back among the Selvaurs on Maraghai—proud marks, not to be erased.
He still held the white shirt in one hand; when she stood and came up next to him, his fingers twitched and loosened, and the shirt fell onto the tile floor. She put out a finger and touched the raised white scar that cut across one of Ari’s ribs.
“Sigrikka?” she asked, naming the largest and most feared of Maraghai’s great predators, excepting always the Forest Lords themselves. He would have killed it after the Selvauran fashion, without the use of any weapon other than his own body.
“Yes,” he said. “Sigrikka.”
She let her finger slide up the rib to his breastbone, and down the line of dark hair that ran to his navel. Ari shivered, eyes closed, at her touch.
“What’s it like,” she said, “being strong enough to do something like that?”
“Frightening,” he said. His voice was barely above a whisper. “Everything breaks so very easily … .”
“Ah,” she said. “Ari, put out the candle.”
Obediently, he pinched out the wick. Except for the square of starlight that was the window, the room was dark.
Llannat reached into the currents of power and called up light. She held up the sphere of cool, bright green flame in her cupped hands for an instant, then let it go.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Nothing we do tonight is going to hurt me. Nothing.”
Grand Admiral sus-Airaalin paced the observation deck on board Sword-of-the-Dawn, waiting for the reports from the fleet. Coming out of hyper was always dangerous, and doing so this time—with the Gyfferans already patrolling farther out than he’d anticipated—would be even more dangerous than usual. And so much, now, was at stake.
This is the most important battle, he thought. Not the taking of Galcen, or the penetration of the Gap Between … those were bold strokes against a blinded enemy. If we can defeat Gyffer—a forewarned and aggressive Gyffer, with its fleet still intact—then we are truly the victors, and the other systems will give in to us one by one.
But this time it will not be quick. The knowledge came to him bearing the weight of certainty; he could see the weave of the universe too clearly to delude himself any longer. Gyffer will make us bleed.
Blastproof doors opened and slid shut as Mid-Commander Taleion entered the observation deck. “Messages coming in, my lord. All units secure; the fleet maneuver was successful.”
“Ex
cellent,” sus-Airaalin said. “Any mention of General Metadi’s whereabouts in the planetary message traffic?”
“Not in any of the material we’ve been able to pick up and decode,” said Taleion. “The Gyfferans are keeping fairly tight control of their communications.”
“Keep watching for it, Mael. If Metadi is not dead—and his death seems more and more unlikely as time goes on—then I am convinced he must be here.”
If Taleion had doubts, he was too loyal to show them. “Yes, my lord.”
The deck’s voicelink sounded its alarm. sus-Airaalin went over to the flashing yellow light and activated the pickup.
“Admiral,” he said. “What do you have?”
“A courier, my lord,” replied the voice on the other end of the link. “Incoming to the Sword’s main docking bay.”
“One of ours, I presume?”
“Yes, my lord. From Galcen via the original dropout point.”
sus-Airaalin frowned slightly. We have hi-comms with Galcen. Why are they sending a courier when even a fast ship is the slow way to pass messages?
“What about the courier’s message?” he asked. “Do we have that yet?”
“No, my lord. The pilot says that his orders were to report to you in person.”
“Send him up here to me as soon as he docks.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The voicelink clicked off, and the yellow light over the pickup quit flashing.
sus-Airaalin gave a sigh. “We have trouble on Galcen. The question is, how much trouble, and how serious is it?”
“That’s two questions, my lord,” said Taleion, with a faint smile. “Shall I begin readying pull-back orders?”
“No,” he said. “We stand or fall on Gyffer, and we will not leave here until the issue is settled—one way or the other.”
The blastproof doors to the deck opened again before Taleion could answer. The courier pilot hurried in and went on one knee to the Grand Admiral.
“My lord sus-Airaalin,” he said. “We have word of Metadi’s location.”
By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 Page 21