The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  Her brother told her thinking about things might make them happen … or maybe things that were going to happen made people think about them first. When he talked that way, she wasn’t always clear on what he meant. She didn’t think that he was, either.

  A knock sounded at her door. Karil switched the treadmill off. She wasn’t expecting a visitor, and this was hardly the hour for a stranger to arrive at anyone’s home. She hurried over to the security flatscreen that showed the view outside her main door. The screen showed static snow. The relay still hadn’t been repaired. She made a mental note to file another work order with the house management.

  The knock sounded again.

  “Damn,” Karil said, hunting around for a shirt. One of the benefits of living on an upper floor was that no one was likely to be standing outside her window, and she liked to exercise topless for the sake of freedom of movement. She pulled on the first shirt she found—an oversized stretch-knit with the Swift Passage Freight Line’s logo screen-printed on the back—then went over to the door and peered out through the vision prism.

  Someone was waiting—a tall, fair man dressed in black, carrying a long wooden staff. With an exasperated sigh, Karil opened the door.

  “Lenset,” she said. “You have some nerve showing up after everything you put Mamma and Dadda through.”

  “We all choose our own paths.”

  “Pompous, aren’t you? Come on in before somebody sees you. That would be all I need, for the neighbors to know that I get visits from religious fanatics.”

  “Your rooms are too small,” he said. “Let’s walk.”

  “It’s cold outside. And wet.”

  “Not that wet. Let’s walk. I have some news.”

  Karil sighed again. “Oh, well, if you must.” She set the thumbprint lock to positive, pulled down a heavy jacket, and followed her brother back out into the hallway. She closed the door behind her and asked, “Where to?”

  “Around. Wherever the spirit of the universe wills us.”

  “Stop talking that way.”

  “I won’t argue it, not tonight,” Lenset said. He walked ahead of her along the hallway and down the stairs—the elevator was stuck again—until they came to the street.

  “How did you get in?” Karil asked, breaking the silence at last out of curiosity. “The front door’s only supposed to admit residents.”

  “If I explained it to you you’d only get angry,” he said. He nodded to the right, where a paved sidewalk bordered the building’s outer wall. “That way.”

  “You haven’t changed,” Karil said. Her breath steamed in the cool air. She started out walking at a brisk pace, forcing Lenset to lengthen stride to catch up to her, and willed her teeth not to chatter. She’d just gotten warmed up, and this was not her idea of the way to cool down. “Come on.”

  “I have a job,” Lenset said, after they had walked for a while in silence.

  The worst thing about him, Karil thought, was that it was impossible to predict what he’d do. She hated that.

  “Good,” she said aloud. A hoverbus clamored by on their left, its internal lights showing seats full of sleepy passengers, its side panels lit up with advertising slogans. “That means you won’t be asking me for money. This time.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what kind of job it is?”

  “If it isn’t dropping fritters in a quick-lunch booth, I can’t imagine what it might be.” She looked at his staff. “Do you have to carry that thing around with you?”

  “It’s a symbol,” he said.

  “So’s everything, with you. You’re dying to tell me about this job—you came to see me in the middle of the night, you were so damned excited. So talk.”

  “Councillor Demazze’s hired me.”

  “You’re kidding.” The richest, the most powerful, the most mysterious and reclusive member of An-Jemayne’s entire ruling elite. If Demazze ever left the city, the press didn’t report it. Karil didn’t think that they would dare. “Does he know about your little hobby?”

  “I think it’s what got me the job,” Lenset said. “Either that, or I got it because you’re my sister.”

  Karil didn’t know how to respond. The whole idea of someone like Demazze paying attention to her—of even knowing about her—was downright unnerving.

  The main road was coming up just ahead, with its twin lines of illuminated signs. Most of them advertised one vice or another, all the way from gluttony to drunkenness and avarice. They were getting near the starport strip now, and away from places where smart people walked alone at night. Karil avoided this area as much as possible; whenever she needed to get from her apartment to the port she used the direct underground shuttle. Lenset, of course, could walk through all sorts of squalor without even noticing it was there. She supposed the staff was protection for him. Not even criminal scum liked to deal with someone who openly proclaimed mental instability.

  This part of An-Jemayne was one of the pre-war areas that hadn’t been bombed, and the lack of renovation showed. One sign showed a mug tilting back to a man’s mouth, over and over. Karil wondered how the illusion of liquid vanishing into his gigantic maw was done. Holos, she supposed, but the picture didn’t have the typical holo fuzziness.

  So, was this a mechanical? She let her mind travel that way for a bit, in order to avoid thinking about her brother’s news. It was bad enough that Len was here at all. To have him bear the news that a member of the shadow government knew of her existence was worse. Most people—those with an average supply of sense, anyway—tried to escape the notice of the powerful.

  “Demazze asked a lot of questions about you,” Lenset said finally. “And he asked me to do him a favor. To ask you to do it, that is.”

  “What kind of favor?” Karil felt a shiver that wasn’t related to the air temperature run down her back. This sounded like politics, and it sounded like Len had finally done something too stupid for her to get him out of, and had capped it by dragging her in after him.

  “He said to do this only if you wouldn’t tell anyone where it came from,” Lenset began ominously.

  “Cut out the drama, would you?”

  “I can see your heart, and …”

  “Cut it out, I said.”

  A rising whine of traffic told Karil that crossing the street would be dangerous if they hesitated. She grabbed her brother by the right arm, being careful not to touch the staff he carried in that hand, and pulled him across to where a lighted alley showed signs for gamblers and usurers. No one was visible out on the street, which was a blessing.

  “Oh, all right,” Lenset said. “He wants you to take an envelope, and put it in the Captain’s safe on your ship.”

  “The ship doesn’t have a safe.”

  “Well, wherever the Captain puts the papers that only the Captain can see.”

  Karil fought against a sense of relief. It wasn’t unknown for crew members to keep their personal papers in the ship’s strongbox, since most regular berthing compartments didn’t have much by way of secure storage. So Demazze’s favor wasn’t impossible. She rather wished that it had been; then she would have had a plausible reason for saying no.

  “What sort of story am I supposed to tell the Captain?”

  “You’re the resourceful one,” Lenset said. “Make something up.”

  “To save you the trouble of making it up beforehand?”

  “I don’t lie.”

  “No, you ask me to do it for you. What’s this envelope got in it, that Demazze wants to hide it away like that?”

  “I don’t know.” Lenset reached into the inner pocket of his black tunic and withdrew a slim yellow rectangle. “Here.”

  Karil accepted the envelope reluctantly, then stood for a moment turning it over in her hands. The envelope itself could have come from any stationery store; what made it unusual was what had been done to it afterward. Someone—Demazze himself? she wondered. Who knows?—had marked the yellow paper with a pattern drawn in black ink: A series
of marks, some unique, some repeating, with looping swirls and crooked lines throughout.

  She tapped the pattern with one finger. “What’s this? Second place in the ‘design a bad border’ contest?”

  “If it’s so bad, why would it get second place?”

  “Because it’s so bad. Once the envelope’s in the Captain’s strongbox—assuming that I put it there instead of tossing it into the nearest trash compactor the instant you’re out of sight—what then?”

  “Then nothing. Forget it even exists. Leave it.”

  “Right. Leave it. Len, are you doing anything illegal?”

  “Nothing that isn’t for the greater good of the universe. I can feel the winds of chance … .”

  “Oh, give it a break,” Karil said, cutting him off. “So you don’t know whether it’s legal or not. Lenset, if you get into trouble from now on, Demazze will have to bail you out himself. I’ll hold this envelope for you, and that’s it.”

  “That’s good enough.”

  “I’m going to regret this someday, I know I am … what am I supposed to tell the Captain?”

  “Councillor Demazze has great confidence in you.”

  Karil stuffed the envelope under her jacket. “All right, I have it. What else do you want to talk about?”

  “Nothing,” Lenset said. “I have to go now—Demazze will want to know that everything is in order.”

  He stepped aside, then seemed to fade away between the circles of light from the streetlamps. Karil looked after him for a moment, then turned back toward her apartment, trying to walk rapidly but confidently, as if she passed through this neighborhood unmolested every night of the year.

  Underneath her jacket, the stiff corners of Demazze’s envelope poked at her skin like little paper knives.

  Aregil was a commercial seaport on the northwestern shore of Eraasi’s primary continent—not the largest port along that coast, but not small either, as cities went. Ty had never visited the place, nor did he know anyone who had. At the end of the school term, he packed up his clothing and his few possessions into an issued rolling case, received his ticket of leave from the hall porter, and walked through the main door of the Home for the last time.

  His path to the public transit nexus took him past the renovated office building on Three Street where the Mages had their residence and workplace. He passed by without stopping, but a flutter at the back of his neck made him turn. A woman was following him, running: Binea Daros, from the Circle.

  “Wait!” she called out after him. “Stop!”

  He kept walking, outpacing her easily in the crowded street. “Why should I?”

  “You don’t understand … we have a letter … .”

  “I have enough letters already,” he said, and didn’t look back again.

  Instead, he hastened onward to the ground-transit depot, where he exchanged some of his school scrip for a one-way ticket to Aregil, with a transfer at Nakkad. He spent the trip, three days on hard seats, looking out the window at the passing scenery: First the city, then trees, then the bare rock of the mountains and more trees. At last, under a violet sunset, he stood on the Long Pier at Aregil, watching the sun fall away from him into the sea.

  The hiring halls wouldn’t open until morning. The cash that came with his ticket of leave would not last much longer, even with stringent economies, but he needed a place to stay. He found one in a cheap hotel near the waterfront, an establishment that took cash in advance by the day in return for a worn key to a bare room and a narrow bed.

  At dawn, under a sky of red and black clouds, he rose and took his things with him to the first of the two Aregilan hiring halls. His letter of introduction gained him admittance, and in the morning light he saw that the hall was crammed with men seeking a day’s wages. They packed the wooden benches that ran along the walls, and filled the ranks of molded plastic chairs set up in the center. The walls themselves were a cream color, curdled by age, with brown-painted wainscoting that wouldn’t show marks.

  From time to time other men—better dressed than those who waited—came in and paid their fees to the clerk. Then they would point at one candidate or another, and the waiting laborer would rise and follow. The process went more rapidly than he would have thought; before long, the sun was up and shining in the front windows, and the hall was all but empty. Nobody was left except for Ty, sitting strictly upright with his case tucked away for safety behind his knees, and a few old men, broken down by drink and age, asleep on the benches.

  An hour passed, then two. A fly buzzed, and behind the service window the clerk rustled paper and clicked away at his keyboard. Ty’s mouth felt parched, but he was too proud, or too stubborn, to ask where he could find water. The shadows moved across the floor as the sun moved outside. Toward noon the shadows faded as the sun was obscured by gathering clouds, and a rain squall lashed against the windows.

  The door of the hall opened and a woman stepped in out of the rain. Foul-weather clothing muffled the lines of her body, and the rainwater dripped from her heavy woolen cloak and made dark spots on the floor. She went straight to the clerk’s station and spoke with him briefly, then came to stand in front of Ty.

  “Do you want a job?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’m just out of school in Hanilat, and I need a job.” Then, remembering his manners, he added, “Ma’am.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t offer you work,” the woman said. Her hand reached beneath her cloak and emerged holding a short staff of dark wood, bound with silver. “But—on behalf of the Demaizen Circle—I can offer you a working. Will you come with me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  10:

  Year 1123 E. R.

  AYARAT: BESHKIP

  ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL

  The offices of the Zealous Endeavor Manufacturing Company occupied a tall building in the industrial city of Beshkip on Ayarat. The tower overlooked a factory complex whose tall stacks sent up columns of white smoke at the level of the upper windows. Far below on the roadway, ranks of heavy delivery trucks waited their turn at the shipping docks. Farther out on the edges of the industrial park, the cooling pools and the generator buildings sent up their characteristic plumes of vapor into the cool morning air.

  Nefil Kammen had a suite of rooms high up on the monolith’s inward-facing side, as befitted a rising member of the firm’s hierarchy. A wide, uncurtained window gave him an unrestricted view of the whole operation. Today, however, all his attention was on Jaf Otnal, and the bad news that Jaf had brought from Ayarat Spaceport.

  “The shipper says there’s no mind-gel.”

  Kammen regarded Jaf with a mixture of incredulity and dismay. “What happened to all the stuff we ordered?”

  The mind-gel was a vital part of Zealous Endeavor’s operations. Without a steady supply of the quasi-organic substance, imported from Eraasi at considerable cost, local production of high-standard house and ship minds would be impossible. Inorganic components, while available on Ayarat, wouldn’t function reliably at the level needed to interface with the Eraasian standard.

  “I know we ordered it,” Kammen went on. “I signed the requisitions myself. So what happened?”

  “Pirates.” Jaf’s voice still held traces of his native Ildaonese, making it hard for Kammen to tell whether or not the younger man believed what the shipper had told him. Jaf’s narrow face and grey-green offworlder eyes made reading his expression equally difficult. “The shippers were hit by pirates.”

  Kammen snorted. “We’ve all heard that story before.”

  “It’s covered by insurance. And there’s plenty of mind-gel for sale right here in Beshkip, if we don’t care too much about its pedigree.”

  “I’ll bet my paycheck against yours,” Kammen said, “that most of it comes from our own shipments.”

  “You’re probably right. Do you want to get some anyway?”

  “The alternative is shutting down the line.” Kammen leaned forward across his desk. “I’ll bet you again, J
af, double or nothing, that the pirates who lifted our mind-gel have the same name as the shippers we hired to carry it.”

  “No bet. As long as we need imported material, we’re vulnerable.” Jaf’s voice and posture changed subtly—the voice dropping in both tone and volume, while Jaf leaned forward, closing the distance between himself and Kammen. “Some of us have been … discussing … the situation for a while now.”

  Kammen’s own voice dropped in response. “And did you come to a conclusion?”

  Jaf said nothing for a moment. Then he rose abruptly, walked over to the window, and looked out.

  “The problem,” he said, gazing down at the parked trucks outside, “is the star-lords. They don’t do anything more for us than our own truck drivers do—they move goods to the market. What would we do if our drivers were stealing some of our loads and selling them on their own?”

  “Discharge them,” said Kammen at once. “Punish them. And hire new ones more to our liking.”

  “So we would,” agreed Jaf. He turned away from the window and looked at Kammen directly. “Why shouldn’t the same hold true in the case of the star-lords?”

  Kammen laughed without humor. “It’s the ‘hire new ones’ part that’s the problem. We both know the next fleet-family we contract with will be just as bad as the last.”

  “Then maybe it’s time we broke them all.”

  “Let’s not talk about that in here,” Kammen said quietly. “Too many ears. You and I and Riet need to get together one of these days, though, and talk it over. In the meantime—let’s buy some mind-gel. Draw the money from the general fund.”

  “What about the insurance?” Jaf asked. The inflection and posture of intimacy were gone, and everything was business once again.

  “Use it to get a new supply shipped in. Let’s see if the pirates hit this one, too.”

  The Circle at the Old Hall bought most of its perishable supplies at the shops in Demaizen Town, but at least once a month somebody had to rise before dawn and take the groundcar over to Bresekt to buy staples in volume. Narin, whose turn it was this month to make the run, had filled the groundcar’s rear seat and its cargo compartment with everything from jugs of laundry soap to boxes of dried high-protein noodles. Eight people involved in strenuous mental and physical discipline could run through an amazing amount of both of those commodities, and others as well.