Trader's Leap (Liaden Universe Book 23)

by Sharon Lee

  He offered her his arm.

  “I suggest we go to bed, Priscilla, and get some sleep.”

  Padi entered her quarters . . . cautiously, stopping just inside the door to scan the room, right to left.

  Everything seemed orderly; just as she’d left it at the beginning of her duty shift. The desk was neat: styli, pads, and hardcopy placed just so; the keyboard under the dark screen; the chair locked into position beneath.

  Farther along, the table beside her bunk displayed a framed flatpic of Quin, Syl Vor, Grandfather Luken and herself in the Tree Court, taken just before she’d left Surebleak, and also a note taker in case she should wake with an idea worthy of recording. The bunk itself was in order, the blankets pulled tight, the pillow comfortably plump.

  In a word, everything appeared to be in order.

  Very well.

  She crossed the room, and opened the door to the ’fresher. Keeping the door open by the simple expedient of standing in the way of its closing, she surveyed the spare facilities.

  Here, too, all was as it should be.

  She stepped back; the door slid closed.

  Crossing the small space, she opened her locker. Neatly folded clothes on neat, uncluttered shelves. Padi stepped forward and put her palm on each pile of clothes in turn, compressing each, releasing it, and watching the pile spring back into shape.

  She failed to discover any hard, regular shape among the cloth.

  Padi sighed, closed the locker, and sat down at her desk.

  “Well where is the damned thing, then?” she asked the room, rather peevishly.

  There was a slight clatter, as if a stylus or two had tapped the desktop. She turned her head, frowning, and the small noise ceased.

  Padi bit her lip.

  Where else could it be? she asked herself. Had it—could she—Oh, but surely not! She couldn’t have sent it back to Ambassador Valeking!

  Could she?

  For a moment, she was ice-cold. If that was in fact the case, the ambassador, who had very plainly not approved of Master Trader yos’Galan, would recognize the coaster as the special token she had presented him on behalf of her homeworld, and she would certainly find an insult in it—

  But, no. No. It simply could not be. Why, she didn’t even know where Ambassador Valeking was, except in the most general way possible. And one needed a connection, didn’t one?—An . . . entanglement? In order to send things—no, it was ridiculous. One simply couldn’t send an object—a very solid object—into, into hyperspace with a thought . . . well, really, in her case, without a thought! At the very least, she must have made a decision, and all she had been was . . . startled.

  Frightened.

  Padi took another breath—and another.

  No. The idea was absurd. What was most likely, now that she had eliminated her quarters as a landing zone, was that she had simply thrown the blue-green coaster, well . . . up, in a sense. Very far up—but it would eventually come down, directly onto Father’s desk where, after all, it belonged.

  Yes, she thought, that was by far the most likely scenario.

  So, then . . .

  The lesson with Father had been the last thing on the day’s duty roster. As it had been cut short, she now had time to do . . . something else.

  She had time, in fact, to read the book that the master trader had caused her to bring to him from Pommierport, and which she had done no more than glance at over a hurried lunch.

  Smiling slightly in anticipation, Padi reached for her copy of Wu and Fabricant’s Guide to The Redlands.

  Off-Grid

  * * *

  “Ow!”

  Tekelia vesterGranz spun ’round from the screen, hand on head, half expecting to find one of the youngers giggling in the shadows at the far end of the room. It was a game, after all, with the youngers—to try to approach Tekelia unaware.

  But there was no delighted child pretending to cower in fear of their own audacity, not in any shadowy corner, tucked behind a chair, nor squeezed in beside a cabinet.

  Tekelia thought about sunlight, and the room was replete, all shadows banished. A glance into the ambient discovered no disturbance such as might be created by someone wrapped in invisibility.

  The room was empty, save for Tekelia. Tekelia—and a stone disk, cunningly cut to display glittering swirls of green and blue, lying on the floor an arm’s length behind the desk chair.

  Power glittered around and within the artifact. A last bit of energy flashed, playfully, as Tekelia approached, releasing a sweet, intoxicating scent before it dissipated.

  Tekelia dropped to one knee and addressed the stone: Who sent you?

  In answer, there came a flash of the thrilling signature that identified the norbear’s pupil: the woman with the shields like a carnivorous flower.

  Tekelia queried the disk more fully, feeling along the lines of history and intention, gaining the impression that it had been launched inadvertently, yet not entirely at random. It had not, in any sense, been sent, but had rather arrived in what could only be described as a happy coincidence.

  Tekelia smiled slightly.

  So then, a token had arrived from what must be considered an equal power, propelled by instinct rather than intent. Tekelia must be close in her thoughts.

  Picking the disk up, Tekelia carried it to the desk, placing it by the screen.

  “Bide a bit. You’re quite safe with me.”

  Dutiful Passage

  En Route to Volmer

  * * *

  I

  Padi woke, eyes still closed, certain that she’d been dreaming—a very odd dream, where someone had been walking, walking, walking . . . and staring up into the sky, perhaps hiking up a hill. She had been uncertain of the identity of the walker in the dream—whether it was herself, or someone else, only that they moved with a steady and inexorable tread . . .

  But there! The sound came again, and she was most certainly awake now—and the sound was in her cabin with her, presenting no quality of dreaming, no fey overtones of distance.

  Blick. Blick. Blick.

  She tried to catalog the sound, recognizing none of those ordinary to her quarters. Almost—not footsteps, but as if someone were impatiently tapping their fingers on a hard—

  BLICK!

  “That,” she said, “was positively petulant.”

  Eyes well open now, she surveyed the dim room, catching the hint of motion above her desk.

  A stylus—no, two were rising above the desk from the spot where she usually kept them to hand, and falling back with precision, each strike producing a . . .

  Blick.

  Padi rose and approached the desk. The desk light obligingly came on, illuminating the scene.

  The styli were not, as she had at first supposed, striking the desktop, but rather the facsimile of Wu and Fabricant’s Guide. The hour had been late, and while the book had not been, precisely, boring, she had abandoned it open where it was, having finished the section on ancient demographics, and not wishing to venture half-asleep into system mechanics.

  “I see,” she said conversationally to the styli. “The book is in your way.”

  The rising stylus wavered in its ascent, then continued. The falling stylus—fell.

  “I will fix this,” she said. “When I have done so, you will have done, and allow me to go to sleep.”

  Reaching out, she took the book in hand.

  Both styli fell at once, struck the desktop—and remained there.

  Sighing, Padi glanced down at the book. The pages were cool under her fingers, the illustrations of brightly colored crystals of quartz, amethyst, citrine, emerald. Her eye moved down the page to the text, learning that the planet Colemeno was possessed of a geological oddity known to the locals as the ridge, an outcropping of quartz and quartz-bearing material that might have been the remains of another planet smashed in collision a couple billion years before, spearing a world half-made.

  Padi glanced again at the illustrations, seeing
colors that reminded her of Father’s missing coaster, and thinking about this ridge, the local landmark. Ruefully she considered that she might have just read the only thing about The Redlands that would still be much the same now as it had been when the guidebook was written.

  Her eyes were beginning to close again. Cradling the book against her, keeping one wary eye on the now-quiescent styli, she opened the desk drawer, rummaged briefly, and found a bookmark. She inserted it, closed the book and placed it on the desk well away from the usual resting place of styli.

  She turned off the desk lamp and returned to her bed, pulling the blanket up with a whispered, “Sleep well,” to the room, and all that might be listening.

  II

  “Lute,” Shan said, his voice soft against the fog. “Lute, I need to speak with you, urgently.”

  He paused, expectant, but there was no alteration in his surroundings. The gentle fogs of Healspace eddied softly around his knees and neck; a tendril unfolding like a flower to kiss his cheek. It was tempting—somewhat too tempting—to close his eyes and just . . . go to sleep, here among the sweet mists—but that would not do. He had business here, serious business made all the more dangerous by the certainty that, if Priscilla discovered him in Healspace, shields wide, open to and receiving all, she would certainly strangle him.

  “Lute,” he said again. “Your attention, please. I require your presence, here and now.”

  For a moment, he despaired of an answer, then the fog thickened, darkened, and resolved itself into a thin tall man in black cloak and patched breeches, striding forth as if he had been walking for some time, and came to rest a bare two steps from the end of Shan’s nose.

  “Since you called so sweetly,” Lute said. “How may I be pleased to serve you, child?”

  “By telling me the truth, employing neither ambiguity nor metaphor,” Shan said. “I need what is known in Terran as a straight answer.”

  Lute sighed.

  “I wouldn’t have come if I’d have known it was going to be as difficult as that to placate you. Does your lady know where you are, and what you are doing to yourself?”

  “She does not. However, you approach my subject. It is of my lady and, as I understand it, yours—their futures together and apart—that I wish to speak.”

  “Even worse,” Lute said, and was seen to sigh. “Ask, then, and I will attempt to govern my natural inclinations.”

  Shan gave a sigh of his own.

  “Understand that we must deal in gods and their doings,” he said. “This is not a topic I willingly take up.”

  “I do understand,” Lute said cordially. “I am not myself a godly man.”

  “And yet you had told me that you were once a god.”

  “Therefore, I have no need to believe in anything outside myself.”

  Shan considered him while the mist swirled, all colors and none, cool and seductive.

  “Is your lady not a goddess? Or do you not put faith in her?”

  “My lady began as something very much stranger than a goddess, clever child. She has since diminished, though not so much as her sisters, as I have expanded. We stand as equals now, which we were not, at the beginning. As for faith—she has never done anything other than what she intended, and I have faith that she will continue as she began.”

  Shan frowned.

  “I was told that you and your Lady Moonhawk love with a passion that transcends that of mere mortals.”

  “Now there, you open a new topic. Stories have their own peculiar truth, and gods . . . well, what would you, mortal man? Gods are beyond you. The stories teach that—and it is true.

  “As for Moonhawk and myself. Perhaps we grew to love each other down the ages and the lifetimes we shared. But the thing that binds us, at core, is much simpler than love—we need each other. We are two halves of a whole, and neither can go forward without the other.”

  “We now arrive at my topic,” said Shan. “Are you aware that Lady Moonhawk intends to die?”

  “Oh, yes,” Lute said, unconcerned, “I know that.”

  “She has spoken of her intention with her vessel in this lifetime, my lifemate Priscilla. She has extended thanks and blessings, and she has shown two tarnished silver rings.”

  “In that case, she is well advanced to her goal, and I will gladly join her in seeing it completed. We were not meant for this universe, and ought to have quit it long ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Shan asked. “Leave.”

  “We had left a door open, child,” Lute said gently, “and as best as we could know, we two, and Moonhawk’s sisters, were the only protections this universe might have, did our enemy step through behind us.”

  Shan frowned, feeling slightly askew, and shook away the thought that it would be . . . comfortable . . . to lie down on the fog and rest.

  Instead, he forced his attention to the man before him, and gazed into frank and knowing dark eyes.

  “Was it probable that . . . the enemy from the Old Universe might come through?” he asked.

  Lute shrugged.

  “We judged that it was not impossible. Unlikely, yes; there we agreed, but we could not prove an absolute to our own satisfaction; therefore, we remained.”

  “But now the door has closed.”

  “So it has. And we are free, at last, to go.”

  “Will Moonhawk’s death murder Priscilla?”

  There, it was asked, more harshly than he had intended, and there was something . . . glittering in the mists, at the very edge of his vision.

  Lute appeared amused.

  “Is that what frets you? Be at peace. Moonhawk and I will return to those elements which spawned us. Say that we will die—it may look, a little, as if we had died. But that won’t be true; it will be a sweet release, and a return to what we were meant to be.

  “Your lady Priscilla has been, so I gather from this talk of blessings and gifts, likewise released to her full self. Though you don’t ask for it, I freely give you assurance that no harm will come to you from our parting.”

  Well, it hadn’t occurred to him, Shan admitted. On the other hand, he was scarcely the vessel of a god. Or possibly he meant only very scarcely . . .

  “Stay,” Lute said, placing his hands on Shan’s shoulders. “Allow me at least to replenish that which you have spent.”

  He smiled, sardonic.

  “After all, prayer must be rewarded.”

  “Prayer,” Shan said, but he placed his hands on Lute’s shoulders, and looked into his eyes. The mists swirled; he felt energy flow, sparkling, in his veins, and his eyes drifted shut, for a moment only.

  When he opened them again, he was sitting in his desk chair, shields closed, and heart at peace.

  Well, he thought.

  And spun his chair around to address his work screen.

  III

  Shan considered his schedule. Padi was due within the next minute for their trade discussions. After that, he needed, most urgently, to have a word with Dyoli ven’Deelin. After that—

  The door chimed, and Padi entered at his call, note taker in one hand, and a scowl on her face.

  “Good shift to you, Trader,” he said, spinning his chair so that he faced her. “Did you have a pleasant off-shift?”

  For a moment, she didn’t answer, and he followed her gaze to the spot on his desk where the blue-and-green coaster had been accustomed to repose.

  “It didn’t come back,” she said, her tone somewhere between irritated and disbelieving. “I was certain it would come back.”

  “Well,” Shan said, extending a hand and placing it, palm down and fingers wide, in the very location, “at least it hasn’t come back yet.”

  “Blast,” Padi said comprehensively.

  “Indeed, it must be a sad disappointment to all who wish it well.”

  She threw him a black look.

  “The point is,” she said, with exaggerated patience, “that we don’t know where it did go. It might have hurt someone. It might have—i
t might have gone back to Ambassador Valeking!”

  “That might be amusing,” he offered, at the risk of yet another angry glance. “What do you suppose the odds are of it having actually struck her?”

  “I don’t know!” Padi answered, clearly frustrated, though her voice was quieter. The effect was of a subdued scream.

  “I don’t know where it went—or, really, how I sent it . . . wherever it went! I—could I have sent it back in time? What happens if Ambassador Valeking never gave you that coaster?”

  “I think we can dismiss any concerns regarding temporal displacement. Even your Aunt Anthora can’t charm time.”

  “But Uncle Ren Zel can,” Padi said, her face rather pale. “Can’t he?”

  “No. Or rather—perhaps. Ren Zel has a certain affinity for the fabric of the universe and the energies that influence cause and effect. I believe that there is not a temporal element, save what may be bound up in the distances involved.”

  He extended a hand, showing her the empty chair, and when she had seated herself, he rose and walked across the room, taking his wine glass with him.

  “What will you have to drink, Trader?”

  “Cold tea, if you please.”

  He poured for both of them—the requested cold tea for her, ice water for himself—and carried the glasses back to the desk.

  “Peace,” he told the scowl that persisted on her face. “You probably threw the wretched thing into a sun, and if so, your instincts are most wonderfully appropriate.”

  She half-laughed. Sighed.

  “It’s only that it would be good to know—for certain. If I am capable of throwing something into a sun, then . . . ” She sighed again, and sipped her tea.

  “I would only like to know,” she repeated.

  “One should know one’s own strength,” Shan said softly. “I’ve spoken to Priscilla about the matter of the coaster, and you, of course, will bring it to Lina when next you meet with her. In the meanwhile, we have matters of trade before us. Tell me what you thought of Wu and Fabricant’s Guide to The Redlands.”