“Ignac’,” she said. “How are the others doing?”
“All right, I suppose. Jessan knows his way around; Doctor syn-Tavaite is safe with him. The Adepts—I don’t know what they’re doing, but they can probably take care of themselves.”
“I hope so,” Beka said. “I’m going to need Owen if this is going to work. If it doesn’t …”
“If it doesn’t, we’re still in a good position to wait out the rest of the war quite comfortably.”
Beka gave him a curious look. “Are you putting that forward as a serious suggestion?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to overlook anything.”
She shook her head. “The base isn’t secure—not from the Mageworlders, anyhow. They know right where this place is, and can come and go undetected. They didn’t have any trouble pulling out Ebenra D’Caer.”
“He never mentioned a rescue,” LeSoit said. “At least not to me. And I was as close to him as anyone.”
“There’s no record of him leaving,” Beka said. “Watch.”
She sat down at the main security console. “This is the log from D’Caer’s cell,” she said, bringing up the sequences on a flatvid screen. “He was being tended by the Professor’s robots, and the record shows that he was in place right up to the moment when I opened his door. Then he was gone.”
“That’s what the record shows, all right,” LeSoit said. “But you know, comps and robots aren’t people. You may not be authorized to ask them those particular questions.”
“I damned well ought to be authorized,” she said. “And they know it. Look at this.”
She picked up the Professor’s note and shoved it at LeSoit. He smoothed out the wadded-up paper and began reading it—at first aloud, then onward silently to the end.
“‘My lady: I write this on the night before our leavetaking for Darvell; I do not know when you shall read it … . The robots will have told you long since that the base and all its contents are yours … .’”
“That’s it,” Beka said when he finished and looked up. “He never came back from Darvell, but the rest of us did—and when we got here, D’Caer was gone. I searched everything in the files, from the moment when he arrived and was definitely present until the moment when I checked for myself and he was definitely gone. Nothing.”
“He signed the note,” LeSoit said.
“Who?”
“The Professor. He signed the note. ‘Arekhon Khreseio sus-Khalgaeth sus-Peledaen.’ It’s his name.”
“He never told me,” Beka said. She felt an irrational jealousy toward LeSoit, that he should have read the signature when she could not. “‘Names change and the universe has forgotten mine,’ he said when I asked.”
“If the universe forgets a name like that, it’s because the owner wants it forgotten,” said LeSoit. “We’re looking at high nobility there, on both sides.”
Beka stared at the square of paper without speaking until the graceful characters quit showing a tendency to blur.
“All right,” she said finally. “I’ve called up the actions of Ebenra D’Caer, and I’ve called up the actions of the Professor and all the rest of us for that time period. You think I should call up the actions of one Arekhon sus-Peledaen?”
LeSoit shrugged. “Would it hurt?”
“I suppose not.” She turned back to the console and searched the security records under the new terms. New sequences began to play in the flatscreen. “I’ll be damned,” she said.
The records showed the cell of Ebenra D‘Caer, unconscious as he had been in all the sequences before, and this time they also showed the Professor—sus-Peledaen, Beka reminded herself—entering D’Caer’s cell in the company of one of the household robots. At a command from the Professor, the robot carried D’Caer away. The Professor locked the cell behind them.
The next sequence showed the base’s landing bay, with Warhammer in its customary place among the vast collection of ships. The Professor accompanied the robot carrying D’Caer aboard one of the smaller spacecraft. A few minutes later both man and robot exited the craft unencumbered. The Professor walked into the base, not looking back.
“Identify craft,” Beka said.
FREETRADER MAIN CHANCE, came a small box on-screen.
“Is Main Chance currently on board this station?”
NEGATIVE.
“What is the current location and status of Main Chance?”
UNKNOWN, came the response. LAST KNOWN DESTINATION ERAASI VIA THE NET.
“Damnation,” Beka said, and turned back to the recording. “Continue playback of actions of sus-Peledaen.”
The security records followed the Professor back through the sickbay and into the Entibor room, where the tall windows looked out across the wooded hills. The long chamber was flooded with illusory starlight. Removing his tunic, the Professor hung it on the back of a chair and sat in his shirtsleeves. Another household robot brought him a crystal decanter filled with dark liquid, and matching glasses.
He poured a drink for himself and sat with his fingers upon the delicate stem, gazing out across the landscape he had created. The moon rose, casting shadows across his white shirt and touching his grey hair with silver. He sat there for a long time, while Beka watched the record, before he looked up in the direction of the archway that led farther into the station, and spoke to the one who had come.
“You’re awake late, Mistress Hyfid,” he said.
“Damnation,” Beka said again, and froze the picture. “The Professor was the Magelord who released D’Caer. And here I thought he was a friend.”
“He was,” said LeSoit. “You went to the far side of the Net to get D’Caer, and a lot of other things followed from that.”
“Nothing that matters anymore,” Beka said sourly. “We’re still losing.” She spoke again to the log recorder.
“Call up all records of sus-Peledaen prior to arrival of Ebenra D’Caer on this station.”
A moment passed, then another.
NO BASE RECORDS OF ACTIVITIES OF SUS-PELEDAEN PRIOR TO ARRIVAL OF EBENRA D’CAER EXIST.
“The hell they don’t. Call up all base records of Doctor Inesi syn-Tavaite prior to today.”
NO BASE RECORDS OF DOCTOR SYN-TAVAITE PRIOR TO TODAY EXIST.
“‘No base records exist’ … what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Wait a minute,” LeSoit said. “Let’s try something else. Call up all records of a visit by General Metadi to this station.”
GENERAL METADI HAS NEVER VISITED THIS STATION.
“You see?” he said. “The message is different.”
Beka frowned at the console. “So Doctor syn-Tavaite was here, but this machine won’t tell us. And something happened, but it won’t tell us that, either. Wonderful.”
“I think that Arekhon sus-Peledaen wanted to make sure the truth was well hidden.”
“Hidden from me?”
“No,” said LeSoit. “Hidden from those who knew his true name. The Professor was up to something he didn’t want the rest of the Magelords to find out.”
“All right, Doctor,” Jessan said over the comm link. “Now what do you see?”
syn-Tavaite’s voice came back to him, sounding awed and nervous. “This is the place. How did you do it?”
“I didn’t,” said Jessan. “The Professor—your Masked One—did it, a long time ago. Stay right there and I’ll join you.”
He clicked off the link, said to the robot, “Continue the sequence as instructed,” and made his way through the base to the docking bay. Seeming night had fallen outside the windows of the Entibor room, where more household robots were setting the long table for dinner as he passed through. He left the robots at work behind him and continued out through the sickbay to the docking area where syn-Tavaite stood waiting.
Jessan had to admit that the change was spectacular. Everything around him was silvery-grey with moonlight, while the mountains that bordered the landing field loomed like dark shoulders against a pa
ler sky. He could almost feel the night wind and smell the dew-moistened earth.
He looked back at the door he’d come through and found that it had vanished, hidden beneath the Professor’s complex illusions. But syn-Tavaite remained visible before him, as did Warhammer, poised behind the Eraasian woman for all the world as if this were someone’s private landing area in an upcountry field.
“Well, Doctor,” he said. “Here we are. Does this look a bit more like the place where you went to create the replicant?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was day when we came, but the mountains are the same.”
“Which way did you go next?”
She pointed—not back at the sickbay door, but in the other direction. Jessan followed the gesture and saw a wide, high structure rising over the treetops on the hillside above, its white walls pale and ghostlike beneath the moon, its windows aglow with yellow light. A road wound up toward the great house through the trees.
“The Summer Palace of House Rosselin,” he said quietly. “How did you get there last time?”
“We took a car that floated,” syn-Tavaite told him. “A marvelous thing.”
“I suppose it would seem that way,” murmured Jessan, recalling the noisy, bad-smelling groundhuggers that he’d ridden on the Mageworlds side of the Net. “Well, we’re going to walk it this evening, so let’s go.”
They set out on foot. He wasn’t surprised when the great house approached more rapidly than seemed possible—though all the same, the effect was distinctly unsettling. They soon arrived under the front gates, where the moonlight threw the patterns on the carved stone into sharp relief.
With a faint start, Jessan recognized the gate as the main base door in the landing bay, the door that Beka had long ago warned him was a false entrance and booby-trapped against intrusion. He regarded it uneasily.
“Are you sure this was the way you came?” he asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“Mmm.” He thought for a moment. “Did the Masked One do or say anything in particular to make the gate open?”
syn-Tavaite shook her head. “No. He only touched the gate, and we entered.”
Positive interlock with the landing-field illusions, Jessan thought. I hope.
He put his hand against the stone, half-expecting to be felled by an energy bolt or dropped into a pit or any one of a dozen other holovid-style demises.
The gate swung open.
The more time Klea Santreny spent in the Domina’s asteroid base, the less she liked it.
“It’s too big, it’s too empty, and I’m never certain what’s real and what isn’t.” She gestured toward the dead-end wall that currently confronted them. They’d come a long way from the holographically enhanced upper regions, into an area of dim passageways and empty rooms. She hoped that Owen knew the way back. “At least down here in the basement I can be fairly sure that a blank wall isn’t really something else in disguise.”
“Maybe,” said Owen. He stood leaning on his staff and looking at the wall. “And maybe not. This is a strange place, and full of Magery. Old workings, but very strong.”
He put out a hand and touched the wall. For a moment he said nothing—then, carefully, he drew his hand away.
“Yes,” he said. “You spoke more truth than you knew—close your eyes and look at the wall again.”
She’d spent enough time around Owen by now to know that in spite of the apparent contradiction, he meant exactly what he’d said. She closed her eyes and laid the palm of her hand against the cool stone blocks in front of her.
“All right,” Owen said. “What do you see?”
She concentrated, trying to sort out the impressions. “There’s something in here that doesn’t belong. Bright pebbles in the rock … or stars, burning and burning … I can’t tell whether everything I’m feeling is big or little.”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t think … yes. It is a door. The stars light the way through.”
“Can you follow them?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll open the door. Ready … with me … now.”
She didn’t have time to argue; she could sense him moving away, along the path marked out by the bright places in the rock, and knew that he expected her to follow.
It’s just like going from one light to another on a dark street, she told herself, and took a step forward.
The first step was the hardest—like forcing herself to leave a safe place for the long walk home, and not daring to look back over her shoulder. After that the lights came closer and closer together, until she passed the final marker and knew that she was through.
Klea opened her eyes.
Walls of rough stone pressed in close on either side, and she could feel cold rock against her back. A faint white light shone nearby, pale at first but growing brighter, illuminating the long, tunnel-like passage that stretched out ahead of her into the dark.
She looked over to her right. Owen was there—the white light was coming from his staff.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Still inside the base somewhere, I hope.”
“You mean you don’t know for sure?”
He sighed. “Omniscience was never part of the job description. This base is full of doors and passages, and not all of them lead to places that I want to think about right now.”
“Oh.” Klea thought about the solid wall at her back. She couldn’t feel the lights anymore—maybe they only worked in one direction. “What do we do?”
“We go on,” said Owen. “And look for more doors.”
They followed the narrow passage for some time. Klea couldn’t tell if they were rising, descending, or keeping to a level path somewhere far beneath the surface of the asteroid. Doors—some of dull metal, some of wood—led away from the sides of the tunnel from time to time, but none of them opened to a physical touch, and none had the interior markers that would allow passage.
She lost track of time long before they reached the final door. This one, unlike all the others, stood ajar. Whatever lay beyond it was hidden in darkness.
“It looks like this is it,” Klea said. “If we end up right where we started—”
“I don’t think so.”
The door opened onto another passageway at right angles to the first. They followed the new passage for some time before coming to an open archway with a pale light beyond it. When they passed through the archway, they were once again in the long room with arched windows where they had begun their search.
“I told you,” said Klea. “Right where we started.”
“No,” Owen said. He glanced about the shadowy room with an abstracted expression. “Not really. It’s a mirror image of the room above.”
He crossed the room to the far door, the one that should have opened into the base’s sickbay, and touched the lockplate. The door slid open—but instead of medical equipment and storage cabinets, Klea saw a paneled room with a great fireplace of rough stone. A polished slab of the same pale grey rock had been set into the back of the hearth, and there were pictures carved into the stone.
Owen was already kneeling by the empty hearth, his hands tracing the carvings, by the time Klea got up the courage to enter. She hurried to join him.
“What is it?” she asked.
He glanced up at her, then turned his attention back to the hearth. “The carvings are the royal arms of Entibor and the personal arms of House Rosselin. And this is another door.”
Klea hesitated for a moment, then bent and touched the carved slab. Owen was right; she could feel the way-markers glowing inside the rock.
“Do we go through?” she asked.
“I think we have to,” he said. “This is the other side of reality here. If we don’t go through, we can’t get back.”
She closed her eyes, the way she had before, and stepped forward. When she opened them again, she and Owen were standing in the memory-room, with the first rays of moonlight coming in through the ro
w of tall windows, and tall candles in twisted silver holders burning on the long table. There was a white cloth on the table as well; and porcelain plates flanked by silver cutlery; and Beka Rosselin-Metadi sitting at the head of the table and Ignaceu LeSoit at its foot.
“Just in time for dinner,” Owen’s sister said.
Llannat stared at the Mage kneeling on the deck before her, and fought against a rising sense of panic. Of all the things she’d expected to happen, this was perhaps the last.
Now what am I supposed to do? she thought. Kill him while he’s kneeling there, and try to escape?
To where? answered the voice of reason inside her head. And another, colder voice said, What use would it be to run? They already know what you really are—and you do, too.
What I really am. I should have known a long time ago: if the student of an Adept is an Adept, the student of a Magelord is surely a Mage.
Revulsion came over her like a dark wave, blurring her vision and threatening to beat her down onto the deck. So strong was the feeling that she contemplated asking the kneeling Mage to kill her now and put an end to everything—but the moment passed. The dark tide went out again, and she knew that, Mage or Adept, she was still Llannat Hyfid of Maraghai, and she was not alone. She would have known it, if she were alone.
She said aloud, “What has become of the others who were in this ship with me?”
“They have been taken away, Mistress,” the Mage replied. “Those who were hurt are being tended.”
“Were any killed?”
“No, Mistress. The First of my Circle forbade it.”
“I want to speak with them. Come, take me to them.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
The Mage retrieved his staff, stood, and began to walk away. Llannat followed.
“Whose ship is this, Mistress?” the Mage asked as they walked through the passageways of Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter.
“Mine,” Llannat said, without thinking. Then she paused. She’d given a false answer this time—at least, false as the Gyfferan Local Defense Force would have understood the matter—but only because in her own mind she knew the answer to be true. The Daughter was hers by right of inheritance. She would have to be more careful what she said from now on.
By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 Page 31