The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “This is where you practice?”

  Ty took one of the battered teaching staves from its rack. It was a piece of plain light wood, not a polished black staff like the one that he himself carried; Vai supposed that the Circle kept the ordinary staves around for training tools, rather than as objects of focus and meditation.

  “Here, give this a swing or two,” he said. “If you’re going to join us, you’ll have to get used to it.”

  Vai took the staff, weighed it, and swung it in a lazy arc before settling back, balanced, with the staff in guard before her.

  “You never learned that birdwatching,” Ty said, watching her. “Which Circle did you train with?”

  “I didn’t,” Vai said. “A woman living alone … I took classes. Some of my teachers might have been Circle-trained; I never asked.”

  “Want to show me what they taught you?”

  “Is it all right?”

  “It’ll be fine,” Ty said, taking up a practice staff of his own. “Quarter speed, nothing to the head or knees. Sound fair?”

  “Fair enough,” Vai said.

  She wondered what she ought to do about this situation. Deliberately losing might be as dangerous as trouncing the boy. And the prospect of losing from lack of skill did not please her at all … ego, she thought. A good operative can’t afford one of those.

  Ty took his own stance, smiling. “We spend our lives with bruised ribs at Demaizen Old Hall,” he said. “But Garrod’s medical aiketen are first-rate, and Narin has some salve that works wonders on anything they miss.” With that he let his staff swing slowly toward Vai, his right, her left, aiming for wood, not flesh.

  Vai brought her staff just as slowly outward, maintaining it in a vertical line, and blocked his blow. When the staves kissed, Ty brought his back as if it were rebounding, while Vai stepped forward and left, and lowered her staff to the horizontal. Her right shoulder pointed at Ty’s chest, and she swung outward toward him, inside of his staff, where he could not block, nor bring more than the strength of his wrist into a counter-blow, while all the muscles above her waist were set to slam her staff into his chest.

  Ty did the only thing he could. He stepped back, out of range, and recovered his stance.

  “Very good,” he said. He was still smiling; she thought he was happy to have discovered her unexpected skill. “No need to show you the basics. You have ’em. How do you feel about half-speed?”

  Vai stepped back into guard.

  “What pleases you,” she said, “pleases me.”

  Arekhon lived on the third floor of the Hall, in what had once been a guest bedroom. The room was smaller than the one he’d had while he was growing up in Hanilat—and which remained, technically, his whenever he chose to visit—but it was larger than the cabin on Ribbon-of Starlight that he’d shared with three other fleet apprentices. In common with most of the other rooms in the Hall, it contained worn-but-good furniture several generations older than Arekhon himself: A bed, a night-table, a wardrobe full of clothing, a desk.

  The desk lamp and the reading light on the bedside table answered to a switch plate by the door. Like most of the Hall’s other concessions to modernity, they had been less than efficiently fitted into the building’s existing features, and had to be activated by hand—the house-mind wasn’t sophisticated enough to accept verbal instructions.

  The desk, however, said, “You have a message waiting for you from Pilot-Ancillary Inadi,” as soon as Arekhon opened the door. He’d made the necessary alterations to the room himself, not long after the last time he’d missed returning one of Ela’s calls—first installing the thumbnail-sized scanner where it could watch the door, then linking it to the desk’s contact with the house-mind so that it could respond with the appropriate status-change update. The original version, made for his shipboard locker back when he was a fleet apprentice, had said, “Touch my good boots, Meni, and you die horribly,” but he’d civilized it a bit since then.

  Elaeli Inadi was one of the callers whom the house-mind knew to pull out of a message queue and announce by name at once. There weren’t many. He’d lost contact with the other, more casual friends of his apprentice days, and he’d never been that close to his older brother and sister. He entered his recognition code into the desk’s message box. It hummed for a moment, then clicked twice. The desk spoke again, this time in Elaeli’s voice rather than the synthesized one which Arekhon had provided for it.

  “’Rekhe—looks like I’ve missed saying goodbye to you again. The fleet’s going back out ahead of schedule—syn-Evarat isn’t telling anybody where until we link up with the cargo convoy. I think your brother’s got him seeing spies under his bunk or something. He says the run this time should be a short one, but for all I know he’s making that up to fool whoever Lord Natelth thinks is listening.

  “At least we had a chance to talk while you were in town. I’ll call you when the fleet comes back. Wish us luck.”

  The message box clicked again, hummed, and was silent.

  Arekhon stood for a moment, gathering his thoughts. A wish for luck was no casual thing to ask of a working Mage, though a friend could ask it of a friend and expect nothing stronger than positive thoughts and maybe an offering to the spirits of the house. Ela had probably meant no more than what was usual—she’d known him before he went to the Circles, and still thought of him, he suspected, as more fleet than Mage. But just because she hadn’t counted on anything besides the common intentions of goodwill toward a traveler, was no reason for him to give her only that.

  Now was as good a time as any. If he failed to appear for the mid-day meal, the others would assume—truthfully—that he was absorbed in some project of his own and would make an appearance later.

  He locked the door against accidental intrusion, and drew the curtains that he normally kept open. The heavy fabric blocked most of the light; only a dim greyness remained. He unclipped his staff from his belt, then settled himself into a kneeling position on the worn carpet, with the staff lying on the floor in front of him. Then—carefully, gently—he let out his breath and began the process he sometimes thought of as taking down the shutters of his mind to gain a better view of the universe.

  When he was very young, it had been easier to see the world this way than not: As a web of life-threads and luck-threads overlying physical reality. Growing older had been a matter of learning how to shut out the parts of the universe that others didn’t see, in order to move and talk and think like the people around him. The Circles, in turn, had taught him how to go back.

  Elaeli Inadi, now as always, was a bright thread running through the weave of his universe. He found her thread and followed it into the complicated pattern of many threads that was the sus-Peledaen fleet.

  Luck, he thought, and began sorting through the glowing lines, bringing them together where they threatened to stray apart and making the web stronger where it threatened to wear thin. Jump luck to make the void-transits clean and hold the engines steady; fighting luck to keep the family’s cargo away from thieves and pirates; trader’s luck to bring a profit home.

  And lovers’ luck, to bring her safe to me.

  Garrod and Yuvaen remained in the study after Arekhon had departed. The First sat musing over the star chart, with one hand under his chin and the other tracing out the lines from Eraasi to the Edge. Each mapped planet would have its beacons for the ships that came after. It would have other beacons as well, non-material ones left as guideposts by the first Mage to reach that world through the Void. Not until after passing the Void-marks for Rayamet, edgemost of the sus-Peledaen trading worlds, would a walker need to strike out into the blank spaces of the interstellar gap.

  Yuvaen, meanwhile, had located the textfiles that gave instructions for interpreting the chart, and pulled them up onto the desk’s reader. He paged through them, shook his head, and closed the file.

  “It’s a good thing we’ve got ’Rekhe to explain this thing,” he said. “It’s nothing but blinki
ng lights to me.”

  “I told you he’d do well,” said Garrod absently, most of his attention on the chart. “He’s young, but so were we, once, and it didn’t—”

  He stopped, breath catching, and looked up from his contemplation of the starmap. His gaze met Yuvaen’s and he knew that his Second had likewise felt the sudden, almost visceral pang: The twisting, stretching sensation of luck-lines being woven into a new design. And this wasn’t somebody’s personal undertaking done with a stronger-than-usual will—more than one hand lay on the threads and pulled the pattern taunt.

  “There’s a working going on,” Garrod said. “Somewhere in the Hall.”

  “How—?”

  “I don’t know.” Garrod pushed back his chair and stood, leaving the chart to blink and swirl unheeded on the desk-top. “But if this goes out of control—”

  The sense of cords weaving and interlacing had grown stronger as he spoke; he could see them, if he let his vision widen to take them in, thick bright cords whose names and purposes he didn’t know and had no way to guess. The design they wove pulsed in his view, demanding his care and attention, all but shouting its importance.

  “The long gallery,” he said to Yuvaen. “And hurry!”

  Without looking to see if his Second followed, Garrod ran down the hall outside his private chambers, up the half-stairs, and through the door that led to the second-floor passageway along the edge of the grand staircase. He caught a glimpse of Delath passing by in the hall below, and shouted down to him, “The long gallery—fetch everyone!” without breaking stride.

  The sense of urgency that had impelled Garrod from his study had not eased with his decision to take action, but rather drove him faster. Halfway down the hall from the long gallery, he could already hear the sound of cracking staves.

  Who could have been so reckless? he demanded of himself as he began to run in earnest. A pounding of footsteps told him that Yuvaen was a pace or two behind him. None of them are as foolish as that, none of them … .

  Garrod took his own staff in his hand as he ran, and let it blaze with blue-white fire. When he reached the door of the long gallery he didn’t bother stopping to open it, but burst on through by main force, so that his shoulder tore the bolts away from the antique jamb.

  In the middle of the gallery, wreathed in spirals of green and golden fire, Ty and the newcomer fought with staves. Garrod’s eruption into the room made no impression upon the pair. Their concentration was wholly on each other, and the sound of fast blows blocked and returned echoed off the high ceiling.

  Garrod drew a sharp breath. Full speed and full strength—this was a working, indeed, and a serious one.

  But was it intended? Or is there more to Iulan Vai than we thought?

  “Break them apart,” he commanded. “They can’t be allowed to finish—it’s a rogue pattern, and no true weaving.”

  Yuvaen started forward, but Garrod was moving as he spoke, and interposed his own staff between the two combatants. In an instant he found himself on the defensive as they attacked both him and each other, at seeming random but with more than random skill. Garrod fought back, striving to guard himself against injury and against being himself drawn into whatever pattern Vai and Ty had inadvertently—he hoped—begun.

  More footsteps came drumming in the hall outside the gallery, and a moment later Delath and Narin skidded over the threshold. Kief plunged through the door a heartbeat behind them, his long hair flying and his staff ablaze.

  “Help us out!” Yuvaen shouted at the startled Mages. “Break them apart!”

  “There’s luck here, Yuva,” Garrod said, panting—the web pulled tighter with every exchange of blows, and he found himself hard-pressed. “Strong luck.”

  “There’s luck everywhere,” Yuvaen said. He was moving in toward Ty from behind, his staff up to guard against the danger of backstrokes.

  “Not like this.” Garrod brought his staff against Iulan Vai’s in a move that should have ripped the practice weapon out of her hand. Instead, the maneuver drew him into striking range of her counterattack. “This luck is ours—if we can take it. Now!”

  Narin had been circling outside the melee. On Garrod’s word, she launched herself forward in a rolling dive, slamming into the back of Vai’s knees. Vai lost her balance and toppled backward; Kief and Delath grabbed her arms and pinned her almost before she hit the floor. In the same moment Yuvaen dropped his staff and stepped forward to wrap Ty’s upper arms in a crushing hug. At once the blaze of colors dimmed. Only Garrod’s staff continued to give off light.

  He turned slowly, looking from one member of the Circle to the next. Ty and Vai were dripping with sweat, their expressions like those of sleepers pulled from their dreams by a bucket of water. Yuvaen, still gripping Ty closely, was looking, if anything, even more stolid than usual; Garrod, who knew him well, understood from that the depth of his Second’s dismay. Kief and Delath looked concerned and—on the part of the former—not a little frightened, but they didn’t let go their hold on the unprotesting Iulan Vai. A few feet away, Narin was pulling herself to her feet and saying nothing.

  “Where are Arekhon and Serazao?” Garrod demanded after he had scanned the room. “Narin—go and fetch them. I want the entire Circle here for this.”

  “No need to send for us, my lord,” came a voice from the door—Serazao, sounding worried but not unduly so; she hadn’t been part of the brief, fierce melee in the long gallery. “We’re here. Del told me to find ’Rekhe, and I did—he was at a working in his room, and didn’t hear you call.”

  “A working, you say?” Garrod pointed his blazing staff at Arekhon as he, too, entered the room. “What kind of working, that twists the patterns so strongly it catches up these two young ones and nearly bums them out altogether?”

  Arekhon shook his head. “It was a luck-sending, nothing more,” he said. His grey eyes were wide and dark-pupilled, as they would be if he’d been dragged out of deep meditation without warning, but nothing in his bearing spoke of guilt or deliberate wrong. “A private intention, as a favor to a friend.”

  “This was no private intention,” Yuvaen cut in. “It was a working, and nearly a great working. If we hadn’t—”

  “Peace, Yuva!” Garrod said. “He’s telling the truth. Which friend, ’Rekhe?”

  “Elaeli Inadi,” Arekhon said, after a second’s pause. “A pilot with the sus-Peledaen. We were fleet-apprentices together, and kept up our friendship afterward.”

  “More than friendship,” said Garrod, “if the intention was so strong. And for whatever reason, this time the luck you sent traveled no farther than to the Circle. This is world-changer’s luck, ’Rekhe, and nothing we dare to waste.”

  He heard Yuvaen’s breath catch, and ignored it.

  “Tonight,” Garrod said. “Tonight I will walk. The time is now, and we can’t afford to wait any longer.”

  16:

  Year 1123 E. R.

  ERAASI: HANILAT STARPORT

  DEMAIZEN OLD HALL

  It was close to noon in Hanilat. Natelth sus-Khalgath was at the desk in his study, going through the latest set of documents from the family’s legalist-in-chief. He came upon the autumn quarter’s list of recommendations for outer-family adoption, and raised his eyebrows at the sight of his younger brother’s name set down as the sponsor for one of the pilots in the fleet.

  What’s ’Rekhe up to now? he wondered, and flipped through the files in the reader until he found his brother’s name again, this time on a formal letter of severance.

  “ … craves your permission to withdraw his name permanently from the rolls of the sus-Peledaen fleet, and to be freed from any ties beyond those of natural affection and of proper respect; wherewith he submits to the family in his stead the name of Pilot-Ancillary Elaeli Inadi …”

  Natelth frowned. He was tempted to refuse the severance, but ’Rekhe had done everything in order and in the proper form. To turn him down would be capricious, and Natelth loathed caprice in
all its manifestations. He scowled, feeling as if his brother had boxed him into taking action yet again, and marked the documents “approved.”

  The study door opened then, without forewarning. “Isa,” Natelth said instantly. “What’s the problem?”

  His sister Isayana was the only other person whom the house-mind would allow to open those doors set to his personal lock—not surprising, since she had given the house its operating instructions in the first place. Dealing with inorganic and quasi-organic minds was her specialty, and she had been in charge of the sus-Peledaen affairs in that area for almost two decades.

  She was a tall woman, at least for the sus-Khalgath line, with greying black hair pulled up into a loose knot. At some point earlier in the morning, she’d thrust a stylus into the knot for safekeeping, or to free her hands for some other task, and then had forgotten about it. It would stay there, Natelth suspected, until the time came to change for dinner.

  “No problem,” she said. “But I thought you’d like to know—I checked the private logs, and you’ve got some activity on that set of charts you passed on to ’Rekhe.”

  “What kind of activity?”

  “Standard open-and-display, so far. Nobody’s interfaced anything with it besides a reader. They didn’t lose any time waiting to do that much, though.” She gave him a sharp look. “And they looked at the routes going from Eraasi to the Edge. Exactly what are ’Rekhe and his friends planning to do with those charts, anyhow?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “But Garrod’s made him Third, and we all know what that means.” Her eyes darkened. “You shouldn’t have let him go to Demaizen in the first place—the fleet had more than one Circle willing to take him.”

  “He was set on working with Garrod,” Natelth said. This was not the time, he reflected, to tell his sister about ‘Rekhe’s letter of severance. She had raised their younger brother as a mother would have, and there was a distinct chance that she would take his formal departure from the family more personally than ’Rekhe had intended it. “You know how he is when he makes up his mind.”