“They’re going to—where did you hear that?”
“At work. One of the bathhouse regulars is a clerk in the Customs Office. Klea, you’re going to have to make up your mind tonight. Do you want to go or stay?”
“Go,” she said without stopping to think. Now that she had to choose, the choice was surprisingly easy.
“Then pack what you need. We have to get to the port as soon as possible. It’s going to be a mob scene by morning.”
She was already stuffing clean clothes and underwear into the ancient day pack that she’d brought with her from the farm all that long time ago. I kept telling myself I ought to throw it out, she thought somewhat dizzily; it’s a good thing I never listened.
“Is there a ship in for Galcen?” she asked aloud.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Once we manage to get off-planet, then we can start thinking about Galcen.”
“What are we going to do about money?”
He made an impatient gesture with one hand. “Don’t worry about the money—I’ll take care of it. First we have to find a ship.”
She sealed up the pack and slung it onto her shoulders. “Whatever you say. Let’s go.”
“One more thing first,” he said. He looked straight at her, and his hazel eyes were so dark a green they seemed almost black. When he spoke again, his voice took on a more formal cadence. “Kela Santreny—do you come to the Adepts for instruction only, or will you take the apprenticeship that is offered to you?”
“What do you mean, ‘take the apprenticeship’?”
“Answer yes or no,” he said. “Please. It’s important.”
She stood there for a minute, feeling her life changing around her like a forest whipped by the wind. Everything else I’ve ever done, I could back out of. What I say now is going to make things different forever. She drew a deep breath.
“Yes,” she said.
Owen let out an exhalation of relief. “Good. Now that you’re a Guild apprentice, if anything happens to me or we get separated, you can ask for help from any Adept or Guildhouse in the civilized galaxy.”
He paused, and glanced about her small apartment as if searching for something. “You’ll need a staff.”
“What for? You don’t have one.”
“That’s different … my teacher on Galcen keeps mine.”
He crossed the room to the kitchen nook in a couple of quick strides, and picked up the broom that stood in the corner: a plain, local-made thing, the sort of broom that farmers put together out of grrch wood and grain-straw and sold for a quarter-credit apiece when they came to town.
With seeming ease he snapped off the brush and offered the stick to Klea. She wasn’t surprised to see that both ends appeared equally smooth and even; anybody who could break grrch wood bare-handed could probably make the broken part look like anything he wanted it to.
“Take this,” he said. Once again the words sounded like part of a formal ceremony. “Hold it and cherish it as you do your honor. Wield it in truth and justice, and as the patterns of the universe direct it and you together. By the staff an Adept is known; let neither one disgrace the other.”
She took the broomstick—the staff, she supposed she ought to call it now—and held it awkwardly before her in both hands. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“The ShadowDance, to begin with,” he said. “It also makes a decent walking stick. And more things, that you can learn when you have time. But now we have to hurry. If the port gets too crowded the Assembly may decide to close it early.”
Above the plane of the Opheline system, far to the Netward of the Central Worlds, the fabric of realspace stretched and shifted as two ships dropped out of hyper. Several tense seconds later, a third ship followed.
In RSF Karipavo’s Combat Information Center, the duty sensor analyst looked up from his board and announced to the compartment at large, “Lachiel’s made it through.”
A ragged cheer went up, and Commodore Jervas Gil, the ’Pavo’s acting CO, let out a sigh of relief. If three ships were all that was left of his squadron, they were at least his, and he was still their commodore.
“Signal Lachiel,” he told the communications tech. “Ask if the voyage repairs to their realspace engines are holding up well enough for them to make Ophel.”
It would be good for Lachiel’s pride, he reflected, if the crew could bring their ship in without assistance—but in the long run it wouldn’t matter if they needed the help of a spacedock tug. After the battle at the Net, when Lachiel had taken a crippling hit to the realspace engines and lost airtight integrity in over half her compartments, what counted was that the third ship of Gil’s much-diminished fleet was here at all.
“Lachiel reports that she can make it all right if we take it low and slow,” reported the comms tech.
“Very well,” said Gil. “Low and slow it is. How are we doing on a hi-comms link to Prime?”
“No joy, sir,” said the tech. “Whoever took down hi-comms is still keeping them that way.”
“Keep trying,” Gil said. “The minute they come back I want to know. For now, get me Ophel on the lightspeed comms.”
From this distance out, patching through the connection took several minutes. Gil waited, frowning with barely restrained impatience. Ophel hadn’t been his first choice for a dropout point. It was a neutral world, friendly enough but not bound to the Republic by an treaties that Gil knew of; and ever since the First Magewar it had been a major transshipment point for trade back and forth across the Net.
But Ophel was in range of Lachiel’s hastily repaired and barely functioning engines, and Ophel’s shipyards, the biggest between the Net and the Central Worlds, were capable of handling the refit. Of course, Gil reflected further, those yards meant Ophel would be high on the Mageworlders’ strategic priority list when they got around to mopping up after—Not after, he corrected himself, if—the Central Worlds fell.
“We have Opheline Inspace Control on lightspeed comms, sir,” reported the communications tech.
“Put it on audio,” Gil said.
“Audio, aye.”
A moment later a crackly, attenuated transmission came on over the speakers in CIC:
“Unknown ship, this is Inspace Control, Ophel. Identify yourself. Opheline law requires that all inbound vessels provide their planet of registration and their last port of call; the name and homeworld of their master, captain, or commander; and a summary of their cargo before receiving permission to approach, orbit, dock, or land. Over.”
Gil picked up the handset for the lightspeed comms and keyed it on. He paused for a moment, trying to put into order all the things he needed to say. Working with lightspeed comms from this far out was awkward and slow, with a lag time of minutes between a message and its reply.
“Inspace Control,” he said finally, “this is RSF Karipavo, in company with RSF Shaja and RSF Lachiel. We request permission to orbit and perform repairs. I am Jervas Gil, captain, Republic Space Force, and commodore of this squadron; my world of origin is Ovredis. I am declaring an in-flight emergency and claiming the right of innocent passage. I regret that I cannot provide details of our cargoes and ports of call; I request a direct connection to the Republic’s embassy as soon as possible. Over.”
Gil keyed off the handset. Again, there was the long wait. He paced, fretting; then realized he was pacing and made himself stop. Dealing with Inspace Control was going to be only the first of his problems. All three of his ships needed repairs, not just the much-battered Lachiel, and he had no idea whether any of Ophel’s yards would be willing to do the work.
One thing at a time, he told himself. The ’Pavo’s not as banged up as Lachiel or Shaja; I can probably find a yard that’s willing to take her. That’ll give me one fully operational ship to work with while I figure out how to fix up the others.
And after that, I still have to come up with some way to pay for all this—because if there’s one thing you can depend on when you’re de
aling with civilians, it’s that absolutely nothing comes free.
Finally, the speaker crackled again. “RSF Karipavo, this is Inspace Control. You have permission to approach and orbit with three vessels.”
Gil’s tension subsided by a fractional amount. His deepest fear, firmly suppressed during the slow hyperspace transit from the Net, had been that the Ophelines would want nothing to do with him or his ships at all. That would have meant scuttling the crippled Lachiel—transferring the crew to Shaja and Karipavo, destroying the engines, the weapons, and main ship’s memory, then leaving the hulk to drift—before the squadron could go on. At least he was going to be spared that much.
Meanwhile, Inspace Control was still talking.
“Karipavo, Shaja, Lachiel: Make your orbit in compliance with the following data … .”
The voice halted for a second, then continued in a slightly altered tone—as if, Gil thought, somebody had handed the talker at Inspace Control an unexpected addition to the standard message.
“Break—new subject. Coded text incoming. Stand by to capture immediately. This text will be transmitted only once. I repeat, stand by to capture immediately—”
“Get ready to grab it,” Gil said to the comms tech. He looked over his shoulder for Jhunnei. As usual, his aide was there, seeming to materialize out of the background as easily as she faded into it the rest of the time.
I wish I knew how she does that, he wondered—again, as usual—and said aloud, “We’re going to need the code-book for this one. Have you got it?”
The lieutenant held up the palm-sized scanner/breaker unit. “Right here, Commodore.”
“Good,” said Gil. Inspace Control was back to sending the orbital data now, and the comms tech was handing him a sheet of printout flimsy.
The coded message was several lines of letters and numbers with no pattern to them that Gil could make out. Jhunnei handed him the codebook, and he ran the unit’s scanner over the message.
The codebook beeped.
“Got it,” he said, and looked at the unit’s minuscule screen for the plaintext version.
FOR COMMODORE. REPORT IN PERSON TO EMBASSY SOONEST. AMBASSADOR SENDS.
Gil hit the codebook’s Wipe button and the plaintext vanished. Crumpling up the sheet of flimsy, he dropped it into the nearest recycler and turned to Jhunnei.
“Pack an overnight bag, Lieutenant. We’ve got an important engagement. Dress uniform with all your medals.”
Improvised staff in hand, Klea paused in the doorway for one final glance back at her apartment. This would make the second occasion in her life when she’d abandoned everything in order to look for something better.
“Let’s hope I have more luck this time,” she muttered under her breath.
“There’s no such thing as luck,” said Owen. “We make our own choices, for good and for bad.”
“Yeah—and my track record as a chooser isn’t exactly the galaxy’s hottest.” She shifted her day pack into a more comfortable position on her shoulders. “We might as well get going before I lose my nerve.”
They stepped out into the hallway, and started down the stairs to the street. Halfway down the flight to the second-floor landing, Owen halted. Klea almost bumped into him.
“What—?”
In the dim glow from the light panel at the top of the stairs, she could see him frowning slightly. He held up a hand for silence, but all she heard was her own breath and the sound of her heartbeat in her ears.
“Someone’s waiting outside the front door,” he said.
“How can you tell?”
“I can sense them,” he said. “What people think and do shows up in the pattern of things. It’s mostly a matter of knowing where to look.”
She nodded—not really understanding him, but supposing that she’d learn more about it eventually in this new life she seemed to be headed for. “So what do we do?”
“We go up onto the roof,” he told her. “There’s a ladder and a trapdoor, for when somebody has to fix the lift.”
“Nobody’s fixed the lift for as long as I’ve lived here.”
“So much the better,” Owen said. “They won’t be expecting anybody to go that way. Then we cross over and go down the fire escape on the other side.”
He looked back down the stairs, and then at her again. “You lead; I’ll follow and keep an eye out in case somebody comes in after us.”
Klea swallowed. “Sure.”
The stairs felt a lot steeper and darker going up than they had on the way down. Halfway to the third floor, she turned and looked back. Owen wasn’t anywhere in sight; she supposed he was hanging back and keeping watch, like he’d said.
She took a tighter grip on the broomstick staff and kept on climbing. Her footsteps echoed in the empty stairwell. She was on the third-floor landing now—only one more set of stairs and she could wait for Owen by the ladder to the roof.
But out of the shadows ahead of her stepped a man in a black hooded robe, his features hidden by a dark plastic mask. Laughing, he held up a short staff of dark steel-bound wood before him. Red fire ran along its length, and its flame-colored aura limned him in a nimbus of gory light.
“Little girl,” he said, “you’re only pretending to be an Adept. If you’re all that Ransome has left to send, then surely our day is near at hand.”
Klea was afraid—more afraid than she’d ever been in her life; not even the worst of the streets had been able to scare her as much as this—but it was a strange, cold fear without the familiar edge of panic in it. The black-robed Mage took a step toward her; she took an involuntary step back.
Then she halted.
Where am I going? There’s only the stairs, and another man at the front door.
She clasped the grrch-wood broomstick before her, and stood her ground. A picture filled her mind, cool and strange, like the fear: Owen, moving through the steps of the ShadowDance.
The ShadowDance, which could also be used as a weapon—which could also be done with a staff—
—and she moved without thinking into the Dance’s first sequence, bringing up her hands and the staff with them. In the next instant she felt a stinging in her palms as the grrch wood caught and stopped a blow.
The shock brought her out of her half-trance in time to see an orange-yellow light, pale but there, tracing down the length of her staff, and the Mage drawing back his arm for another strike. Desperately, she groped with her mind for the next step in the Dance. This time she couldn’t find it.
I’m going to die, she thought.
But in the moment before the Mage’s staff came down, he seemed to stagger and bend backward. His arms flew wide and he dropped his staff. For another second he hung there. She heard a cracking sound, not loud but clear and distinct in the awful stillness. Then he dropped like a broken doll to the floor, and the crimson light around him faded as he died.
Now, where there had been only shadows a moment earlier, Owen stood. The Mage’s body lay crumpled at his feet. Klea stared and backed away.
“How did you get there?” she demanded shakily. “I didn’t see you anywhere. And what did you do?”
“I broke his neck,” Owen said. He was looking down at the body of the Mage with an intent, thoughtful expression—nothing like his usual almost absentminded regard. He glanced up at her briefly.
“I was walking behind you the whole way; you just didn’t see me, and neither did he. When his whole mind was set on the fight in front of him, I slipped past both of you and took him from behind. Misdirection, mostly—it’s an easy trick, compared to some things. I’ll teach it to you later.”
Bending down, he picked up the Mage’s staff and propped it against the wall so that the metal-bound wood made the long side of a triangle. Then he stamped down and broke the staff in the middle. The two pieces clattered to the floor.
“That’s done,” he said. “Let’s go.”
III.
NAMMERIN: NAMPORT OPHEL: SOMBRELIR
; NOBODY BOTHERED Klea and Owen on the way to the port. She wasn’t sure whether it was because nobody was trying, or because of something Owen had done to confuse the pursuit. She didn’t ask; the answer wasn’t going to make a difference, so why bother? Another question, though, was nagging at her too much to ignore. By the time they had passed through the gates and had almost reached the main terminal building, she had finally nerved herself to speak.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
Owen didn’t break stride. “Understand what?”
“Why those people—the Mages—want to keep us from leaving Nammerin. If you’re dangerous to them as long as you’re here, I’m surprised they aren’t delighted to see you go.”
“Some things are more complicated than that.”
Klea sighed. “Everything’s more complicated than that these days. I should have stayed on the farm.”
“Your life might have been safer that way,” Owen conceded. “But mine would have been shorter, if you hadn’t been in Namport to find me lying in that alley.”
“Not really,” she said. She’d had plenty of time to consider this over the past few weeks. “You’re tougher than you look; you’d have still been breathing when the garbage truck came through in the morning.”
He didn’t answer. The terminal building was just ahead of them now, and beyond it the arc lights on their tall poles were casting a stark white light over the landing field. Coming early had been a good idea: there was already a small but noisy crowd gathered outside the doors of the terminal. Out on the field, there was only one ship in port that Klea could see, and no shuttles waiting to ferry stuff back and forth to the larger craft that never left orbit.
“If that clunky little freighter is the only thing in,” Klea muttered, “we’ve got a problem. They’ll never let us past the gate.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Owen. “Stick close to me and don’t say anything.”
They were at the edge of the crowd. He didn’t pause, but headed straight on into the terminal. Klea followed him. By now, she wasn’t surprised when people stepped aside to let them pass. Somehow, without changing either his clothes or his features, Owen had transformed himself from a scruffy portside laborer to a person of importance and someone to be deferred to.
Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds Page 34