“The pattern here is too great for us to break. We have to slip it. Not quell the storm—just bring as many ships and crews home as possible. That much, we can do.”
Laros reached the aft door. “As the universe wills,” he said, and pulled up the lever.
The door pulled out, sucked by the wind, and slammed against the after bulkhead of the deckhouse. The noise was lost in the clamor of thunder and wind that awaited them.
’Rekhe peered at the inside of the vehicle. In the light from the street lamps, he could make out at least three passengers, all wearing dark green ship’s livery piped and faced with dull gold—the colors of the sus-Dariv fleet-family.
He hesitated, uncertain whether to take the sus-Dariv up on their invitation or not. He couldn’t see the luck-lines any more. The bright light of the street lamps had dispersed them, or had dazzled his vision so that he couldn’t make them out. But Elaeli had a hand on his sleeve and was pulling him forward—she must have found the empty streets more unnerving than she let on, if the mere sound of a Hanilat accent could be so reassuring.
He decided to get into the vehicle first just the same, so that Elaeli wouldn’t have to sit next to one of the strangers. Not everyone from Hanilat was a friend, and the sus-Dariv family had no alliance that he knew of with the sus-Peledaen.
The trio in the vehicle were all young, not much past apprentice age. ‘Rekhe didn’t know enough about the sus-Dariv markings to be certain of their rank, but they seemed friendly. The one sitting in back had an insulated picnic-box on the seat beside him—he took out a couple of cans and handed them to ’Rekhe and Elaeli.
“’S a cold night,” he said. “You look like you could use a warmup.”
’Rekhe took the can but didn’t open it. “I don’t know—”
“What’s the matter?” The sus-Dariv’s voice took on a faint note of belligerence. “You sus-Peledaen too good to drink with the rest of us?”
“No, no.” ’Rekhe unsealed the can and took a tentative swallow. The liquid inside was hot and sweet, with an astringent overtaste and a definite kick going down. It reminded him of the mulled sweetroot cider he’d tasted once on a family trip to Eraasi’s northern interior, only quite a bit stronger. After the long walk in the cold and dark, the drink felt good. “What is this? Something local?”
“’S ‘guggle,’” said the sus-Dariv who’d given him the can. “Something like that, anyhow.”
“‘Guukl,’” said the driver. ’Rekhe thought for a moment that the man was hiccuping, and belatedly realized that he must be the linguist in the group. Not a particularly sober linguist, however; he had one hand on the controls of the vehicle and the other wrapped around his own can of guukl.
The car speeded up and slewed around a corner onto another, narrower street. ’Rekhe groped for safety webbing, but didn’t find any. To cover up his nervousness, he took a long pull of the hot guukl.
“That’s the way!” said his seatmate. “Here … have another.”
’Rekhe shook his head, but the gesture went unheeded. Before he could muster a more effective reply, he had a container in each hand, one mostly empty and the other full.
“I’m Macse,” said the sus-Dariv who was handing out the cans of drink. “That’s Freo and Tuob up front.”
“I’m Tuob,” the driver said. He tilted back his can of guukl and drained it, then swung the vehicle’s front door open partway, tossed out the empty, and reached back to get another can from the ever-generous Macse.
“You sure you know where the place is?” asked the second passenger in the front seat—Freo, presumably.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Tuob said. “Gotta be around here somewhere.” He speeded up.
“This doesn’t look like the way to the spaceport,” Elaeli said nervously. The buildings had opened out into a dimly-lit, monochromatic tangle of bridges and overpasses. Other vehicles were moving on the streets in this part of the city, but their lights were a long way away.
“Don’ worry,” Macse said. “We’re dropping by the party first, ’s all.”
“Party?” Elaeli’s question sounded casual, but the back seat of the vehicle was cramped enough that ’Rekhe could feel her tension. “Whose?”
“Some of the guys who’ve been here before,” said Freo. “They rented a place for the week, so we don’t have to stay in the hostel.”
“Th’ hostel’s a pit,” Macse explained.
Elaeli giggled. “That’s the truth,” she said, and ’Rekhe felt her tension easing. He let himself relax as well—the eiran were faintly visible again, here in the darkened interior of the vehicle, and he felt strongly that following them was the right thing to do. He drank some more guukl.
To his surprise, the first can turned up dry. He put the empty down on the floor between his feet, and popped the seal on his second. The thought occurred to him that not only hadn’t he had anything to drink in a long time, he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. The guukl was hitting him harder than he expected, and he liked the feeling. So did Elaeli, apparently; she was sitting closer beside him than strictly necessary, with her head leaning on his shoulder.
“Over there! Over there!” Freo shouted suddenly.
Tuob leaned forward and squinted out the front window. “Over where?”
“There!”
Tuob cut sharp right into a residential side street, pressing Elaeli even closer to ’Rekhe with the force of the turn. The car pulled over to the curb and shut down.
“Yeah,” Tuob said. “I knew it was around here somewhere. Come on!”
He led the way up the steps of one of a block of seemingly identical buildings and knocked on the door, while ’Rekhe and the other occupants of the groundcar clustered behind him. The door opened and a blast of hot air, noise, and music came out. The light inside was deliberately low, its obscurity punctuated by flashes of green and yellow from a light-sculpture in one corner.
“Hey, Strangler—we made it!” Macse said to the sus-Dariv crew member who had opened the door. “We brought some friends along—sus-Peledaen lookin’ for a ride to the field.”
“Come on in,” Strangler said. “The party’s just getting started.”
5:
Year 1116 E. R.
ILDAON: ILDAON STARPORT
ERAASI: WESTERN FISHING GROUND
’Rekhe and the other new arrivals walked up the steps of the house, and in. The room was crowded and sweaty-hot, in spite of the cold weather outside, and the music was loud enough that a normal conversation was impossible. ’Rekhe found more guukl, in a bottle this time, pressed into his hand as soon as he crossed the threshold.
“What took you so long?” Strangler yelled at Tuob.
“Duty section’s finishing the on-load,” Tuob shouted back. “The last stuff was delayed, so we didn’t have anything more to do. The Chief let us go.”
“Great!”
“Two m’re days a’ liberty, then off t’ Rayamet with a hold full of leind‘r,” Macse shouted. “I’m gonna spend both days gettin’ drunk and gettin’ laid!”
‘Rekhe looked around. Not everyone in the room was wearing green-and-gold. A few tough-looking young people—local, rather than Eraasian, by their features—stood around wearing clothes trimmed with scarlet sequins and other gaudy ornaments. When one of the women saw ’Rekhe looking at her, she jerked her head toward a door at the other side of the room. ’Rekhe shook his head in a little “no” gesture and turned away, his face reddening.
He finished his guukl and went looking for another. There was a warming-tub in one corner of the crowded room; he pulled out a bottle and twisted off the seal, then took a long swallow. A sus-Dariv spacer walked over and threw an arm over his shoulder.
“Don’t care if you’re sus-Peledaen,” the spacer said, “I say you’re all right!” He took a big swallow of his own guukl and wandered off again.
‘Rekhe looked around for Elaeli. He spotted her in the middle of the room, dancing with another young man in
sus-Dariv colors. The dance was a vigorous one—and almost fit the music, which ’Rekhe presumed was Ildaonese—and sweat had dampened Elaeli’s curly brown hair so that it clung to the back of her neck. When the music changed, she broke off the dance with a laugh and headed over to ’Rekhe.
She stumbled a bit, falling against him, and he caught her. She hadn’t had any more to eat that day than he had, he thought, and not much less to drink. Her arms went around him, and she pressed close. Her head tilted back, right in front of his, and for some reason he thought that kissing her would be a good idea.
He did, and to his surprise, she responded. When they broke for air about two minutes later, Elaeli leaned against him and said, “That was nice. Let’s do it again sometime.”
“You’ve had worse ideas,” said ’Rekhe. “We need to keep an eye on Tuob, though. When he leaves, we have to go with him.”
It turned out that Strangler was the next one going back to the field, with a first watch in engineering on the sus-Dariv tradeship Path-Lined-with-Flowers early in the morning. Elaeli and ‘Rekhe left with him. The ride back to the port ’Rekhe didn’t notice much. He found that leaning back in the seat with his face pointing straight up felt better than looking out a window. He was aware that other bodies were on either side of him, but he didn’t pay much attention.
Strangler let ’Rekhe and Elaeli off by the traders’ hostel. Wearily, they collected the gear they had left behind in their unused rooms, and trudged back to Ribbon-of-Starlight just as dawn was breaking.
The prentice-master, syn-Lanar, met them at the top of the ramp. “Look what the tide washed in,” he said, without visible sympathy. “Inadi, sus-Khalgath—are you ready to turn and burn all day?”
’Rekhe struggled against a yawn. There was something he needed to remember—something to do with the luck-lines that had drawn him down the wrong street in the first place. With difficulty, he pulled the memory out of a confused montage of dance music and guukl and green and yellow lights.
“I heard something,” he said. “That sus-Dariv ship-Path-something-or-other —she’s taking on a cargo of leind’r for Rayamet. Lifting in two days.”
Syn-Lanar drew a sharp breath and looked at him intently. “Are you sure of that?”
“Heard it from some people in her crew,” ‘Rekhe said. “What’s leind’r, anyway?”
“Spun vegetable fiber,” said the prentice-master. “On Rayamet they make cloth out of it, or eat it for breakfast, or something like that … we’ll need to wake up the Captain and let him know what you’ve found out.” Syn-Lanar almost never smiled, but he was smiling now. “This may be a profitable voyage after all.”
Narin stepped out onto the deck of Dance-and-Be-Joyful, and into the full blast of the storm. The humidity was smothering, and the hot wind tore at her hair and stung her cheeks with spray. She clutched a bulkhead-mounted cleat with her right hand to keep her balance.
A wave washed over the deck, parted by the deckhouse and running from the scuppers. The water was no more than ankle-deep by the time it reached her, but it felt like stepping into a bath. Mist and cloud glowed in the Dance’s running lights, and lightning shot through the sky. The air was full of a cacophony of sound—howling wind, roaring thunder, the boom of seas breaking on the ship.
“Lights!” she shouted back at Tam. “We’ll need lights!”
Her Second opened the cover on the electric switchbox and twisted the watertight rotary switch. The Dance’s aft working lights came up, white glaring bright, shot through with the rain and spray like silver cords. The storm was not natural, Narin could see that much already—though she could not imagine for what purpose any Circle would have raised such a ship-killing tempest.
It doesn’t matter, she thought. We didn’t ask for the weather, but we’ve got it. She remembered her grandmother’s stories of the Big Wind of 1034, when three-quarters of the Amisket fleet had been lost at sea despite the Circle’s best work to save them, and the town had taken more than a generation to recover from the loss.
Not this time.
“To bring the ships and crews to port!” Narin shouted to the Circle behind her, her words torn by the wind. “Join me!”
She let go her grip on the cleat and staggered toward the center of the working deck. Staff in hand, she planted her feet on the rolling, plunging deck and opened herself to knowledge and understanding. Her staff began to pulse with deep green color in the rain-streaked whiteness of the working lights. Above her, limned in ghostly blue against dark clouds, the Dance’s masts and yards glowed in the coronae of electric discharges.
“As the universe wills it,” Tam replied. He let go his own grip and braced himself against the wind. He stepped aft from the deckhouse, and raised his staff. “I give of myself to this.”
Narin let the double-seeing take her. On one level she saw Tam and the physical reality of the Dance’s rain-swept working deck. On another, she perceived the world around her as a network of shining silver touched with color—the lines of life and luck, that she had set her Circle the task of straightening and binding for the sake of the Amisket fleet.
Tam struck at her, and she blocked. The howling wind slowed her arm, but it also ruined his aim. The blow was sloppy, grazing her shoulder rather than striking cleanly—but the pain it brought conveyed in a burst of sparks the line she needed to pull to bring more order to the tangle of lines, confused as a pond when a rock had plunged in.
Double vision became single, and she saw herself at the pond on a sunny day, watching the ripples and the way they crossed and interfered with one another, sometimes gaining strength from the meeting and sometimes damping one another out. The ripples on the pond were coming from the feet of a man of brass who stood on the surface of the pond.
Narin stood up—she had been lying on her belly on a dock extending into the pond, looking down at the water, seeing only the small bit right in front of her face—and stepped onto the surface of the water. Rings of ripples scattered from her feet, adding to the pattern.
The edges of the pond were beyond her sight. The man of brass was a long way away. Narin walked on the surface of the water, and it felt soft beneath her feet. She bobbed up and down on the soft water for a long time, until the sky blazed with green light, and something heavy fell against her, and she looked down.
It was night outside of the brilliant circle of working lights on deck. Tam had slumped against her, falling to the deck, then rolling to the fishrail with the ship’s motion, the last of his power given up for the working.
Her left eye was swollen closed, and her head hurt. She turned to Kasaly and pointed at the Circle’s luck-seer with her staff.
“Bring home the ships and crews!” she shouted over the noise of the wind and the driving rain.
Kas stepped toward her, mouth open, shouting back, “As the universe wills!”
They crossed staves and continued the working.
Prentice-master Lanar had been right: Captain syn-Avran of the Ribbon was more than pleased to hear the word that ’Rekhe and Elaeli had brought back from liberty. The guardship, having seen the sus-Peledaen cargo carriers safely away from Ildaon and into the void, turned back to the planet on business of her own. Shortly afterward, the sus-Dariv tradeship PathLined-with-Flowers left Ildaon nearspace and commenced the runup for its own entry into the Void.
Ildaon’s sun was behind the planet, shining around the edge of the sphere in a diamond-ring dazzle of light. The Ribbon—her active sensors doused, not radiating energy into space—lay in the planet’s shadow, where reflected light wouldn’t give her presence away. The other choice would have been to hang in the sun-flare, where the Path’s sensors would be overloaded. One way or the other, dazzle or shadow, a guardship intending ambush had to chose a place and stay there until its target drew near enough for interception.
’Rekhe and Elaeli waited, sweating and anxious, in Ribbon-of-Starlight’s docking bay, drawn up in formal ranks with the rest of the boarding party. All
the boarders carried pikes of steel and molded plastic, and wore gauntlets and hardmasks over tunics and trousers in customary drab. The hardmasks provided both safety and, with their featureless black surfaces, a further degree of anonymity, but wearing them was a hot and stuffy ordeal.
It was also, ’Rekhe knew, a distinct honor for the only two apprentices in the group, a reward for their alertness and perspicacity in bringing word to the ship of a profitable enterprise. The other boarders were crew members of several years’ standing, all with good records. The boarding-chief, a veteran crew member chosen for his size and strength and time in service, stood alone in battle armor at the front of the party, his pike held horizontally before him.
’Rekhe glanced up at the fighting bridge, a suspended tracery of expanded metal that ran around three sides of the docking bay. The Ribbon’s bridge officers were all there in secondary conn—closer to the planned action than the guardship’s main bridge, the better to maintain contact and control—and the back-and-forth of their voices carried down to the waiting boarders clustered on the deck below.
“She’s coming on fast.”
“Very well—” that was Captain syn-Avran, sounding cool and decisive “—rotate into pursuit position.”
“Rotating. Speed matching, set. Vector designator, set. Grapnels, set.”
“Stand by.”
“Target in range, request permission to give chase.”
“Permission granted. Commence chase run.”
Time dragged out. ’Rekhe fancied that he could feel the Ribbon straining as her engines put on speed.
Then, from the sensor operator: “Path-Lined-with-Flowers, in sight.” And, like an echo, the voice of one of the Ribbon’s other apprentices, assigned to safety check for the occasion: “Visual confirm, Path-Linedwith-Flowers. On track for assumed entry point.”
The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Page 5
