The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5

by Doyle, Debra

  The Dusty’s landing legs deployed at the last minute with heavy metallic clanks. The ship’s nullgravs eased off a bit at a time, and the hydraulic systems sighed massively as they took over the strain of the Dusty’s weight. The vessel settled into place without a bump.

  “And we’re down,” Amaro said, unstrapping and standing. “Stay close while I let our passengers off, then meet me back in the commonroom. Who wants to go visiting with the Mages?”

  The Gentleladies Bindweed and Blossom had been observing the landing from the same seats as before. Bindweed glanced out at the expanse of trees and vines that filled the Dusty’s viewscreens.

  “Not us, I think,” she said to Captain Amaro. “But if it’s customary to pay a courtesy visit, you should by all means do so.”

  “It’d look odd if we didn’t talk with them,” Amaro said. “Maybe we can swap trade goods—they wouldn’t have come by Sapne in the first place if their cargo didn’t need its pedigree improved.”

  Faral, Miza, and Jens stood at the top of the Dusty’s main ramp, ready to go out into the forest that covered Sapne’s old spaceport. Captain Amaro had escorted them up from the passenger cabin himself, and now stood in the open hatch to say good-bye and wish them luck.

  “A word of advice,” he said. “You might want to take a portable generator with you. You’ll need to get into the filing system, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll find any power out there to do it with.”

  “Right,” said Faral. “And where do we get a portable generator?”

  Amaro glanced at Faral’s carrybag. Its soft leather sides bulged with most of the Ophelan money they’d gotten at the cambio in Sombrelír. “I just happen to have one for rent.”

  Several minutes later, the carrybag was lighter by a pile of cash for a security deposit. Amaro, in return, produced a generator—a small one, built into a box not much bigger than the case Faral was carrying, and fitted with a backstrap.

  “This should give you all the power you’ll need,” he said. “Once you’ve taken care of your business in the port, we can talk again about Khesat.”

  “Until later, then.” Jens shouldered the portable generator. “Faral, Miza—let’s go.”

  The three of them went down the Dusty’s ramp and out between the vessel’s landing legs, onto the surface of Sapne. The ground wasn’t as level as it had appeared from higher up. Though the area had been used lately as a landing zone, most of the tiny plants that would have been scoured away by the fires of a working spaceport still covered the rocky ground with sprawling patches of green and blue.

  Faral took a deep lungful of the warm outdoor air. It carried the scents of fresh vegetation and recent rain.

  “Smells good,” he said to Jens. “I hope it’s safe.”

  “If it wasn’t, I don’t think Captain Amaro would have opened the hatches. Besides, it’s been a long time—two or three generations—since the plagues hit.”

  “People trade here all the time,” said Miza impatiently. “And a lot of them bring stuff in to Huool’s. If this were still a plague port, I’d have heard about it.”

  Faral looked around. The trees and the underbrush were full of life. Brightly feathered birds darted in and out among the trees, a garland of flowers uncoiled itself from a lower limb and became a snake with garish, many-colored scales, and the insects whirred and stridulated everywhere. “I don’t see any people here right now.”

  “They stay clear of the port,” said Miza. “The files at Huool’s talked a lot about that.”

  “Then we’re heading in the right direction,” Jens said. “Presumably we’ll find what we’re here for when it’s ready to let us find it.”

  Faral tried to work that statement out as they made their way across what had once been, from the look of things, a landing field. The stony surface underfoot might have been baked earth or concrete or tarmac; it was hard to tell. Tree roots thrusting upward from beneath the surface had heaved and broken the formerly level expanse.

  “Does either one of you know which way to go?” Miza asked after a little while longer.

  “Not the slightest,” admitted Jens. He didn’t sound particularly worried. “But if we follow a straight line we’re sure to get somewhere.”

  “There was a map of the old port area in Dust Devil’s files,” Faral said. “I got a good look at it during transit.”

  “No fair doing research,” Jens said. “Are we going in the right direction?”

  “More or less.”

  “You understand,” said Bindweed to Chaka, “what it is we want you to do.”

  The woman and the Selvaur stood in the shadows of the Dusty’s landing legs. Chaka glanced out at the forest into which Jens and Faral and the redheaded female had recently disappeared.

  *You don’t trust my agemates out loose without a keeper, it sounds like to me.*

  “Not exactly,” said Bindweed. “We have entirely too much confidence in those two. They’ve ditched the perfectly good plans older and wiser heads have made for them at least once already, and I’ve got a bet going with my partner that they’re going to figure out some way to do it again.”

  Chaka grinned, taking care not to show her teeth—Bindweed was an elder, as thin-skins reckoned age, and deserved a semblance of respect no matter what she was asking. *I don’t believe in messing with other people’s wagers.*

  “Neither do I, hothead.” Bindweed laughed. “Our boys will do whatever they decide to do. But Blossom and I don’t want to lose track of them, either. So …”

  *So if they do something stupid like stow away for the Mageworlds on Set-Them-Up-Again, I don’t have to stop them, I just have to watch.*

  “Right,” said Bindweed. “And bring us back the word.” She handed Chaka a pocket comm link. “Save this for emergencies; there’s no crypto on it, and in an unauthorized port like this one you never know who might be listening.”

  Faral and his two companions continued on beneath the vine-draped trees. Jagged slabs of stone poked up here and there among the bushes. A light wind rustled in the leaves, and the sunlight shone down in golden dots and speckles through the lace of greenery.

  Ahead of them, a swirl of vines climbed up some half-hidden object. Through the gaps in the woody stems, Faral glimpsed the sheen of metal: beneath the broad leaves and delicate pink blooms a derelict spaceship waited for a launch command that would never come.

  Jens looked at the ship with an expression that Faral couldn’t interpret—not curiosity, and not the fake-Khesatan insouciance he sometimes put on as a cover for nerves or indecision. “Do you suppose the crew is still aboard her?”

  “What makes you say that?” Miza asked. The words came out in a jittery rush—she was a city girl, Faral reminded himself, and liable to imagine all sorts of strange things.

  “A feeling,” Jens said. “Somebody is watching us here. And this place is full of ghosts.”

  They kept on going, but Miza remained edgy, starting at commonplace noises and glancing around with wide, uneasy eyes. Faral had also been put on his guard. He’d known his cousin to do any number of things purely for dramatic effect, but telling outright lies had never been one of them. If Jens said that he sensed ghosts, then ghosts—or things that moved just like them—were somewhere out there.

  It’s not the bodiless spirits we need to worry about, Faral told himself. It’s the living, breathing ones.

  Now that he looked closer he saw that the entire forest was made of abandoned hulks. Looming objects that he had taken at first for hills and boulders had mechanical structures beneath their coverings of green and brown, and what appeared at one point to be a cave turned out to be the darkness beneath a flattened ship-disk, supported like the Dusty on landing legs. Another vessel had not been so lucky. Its legs had rusted away, or had been knocked out by some natural force, so that the ship had fallen onto its side. The metal plates that made up its hull were pushed inward like the sides of a crumpled egg carton.

  Faral glanced over
at Miza. She’d lost some of her apprehension—maybe it was recognizing manufactured structures underneath the wildness that had done it—and was regarding the toppled freighter with an appraising eye.

  “There’s probably a fortune in treasure lying around out here,” she said. “Sapne was a major transshipment point back before the First Magewar—stuff going from the Central Worlds out to the fringes, and raw materials coming back.”

  “We didn’t come here to steal from the dead,” Jens interrupted sharply. “Don’t even think about it.”

  They kept on walking through the graveyard of lost ships, surrounded by trees and by tangled draperies of foliage, across ground cracked and mounded where broken slabs of stone protruded above red earth.

  Captain Amaro settled the dagger he had taken out of Dust Devil’s armory into its tooled leather sheath, and double-checked the available charge in his cross-draw blasters. The Mageworlders he’d met in times past, and the old-stock Eraasians in particular, had tended to be impressed by good-looking weapons. Reassured that everything was in order, he left the Dusty behind and set out on his courtesy call.

  The air of the morning smelled sweet, and a gentle breeze sighed past the looming bulk of his ship. Based on the transponder readings, the Eraasian vessel would lie a bit to sun-ward. Captain Amaro took his bearings and commenced hiking.

  The Mages would be expecting him to show up fairly soon. As the newcomer in port it was his obligation to call on the senior arrival, unless he intended to be hostile. And a merchant and trader was never hostile without provocation; it tended to cut down on business opportunities thereafter. In any case, Amaro had moderate hopes for the visit. He hadn’t taken on a full cargo at Sombrelír, but there were two or three things in the Dusty’s hold that might work as trade goods—and news and contacts were always valuable.

  An hour of steady walking later, the other ship came into view: a Magebuilt trading craft, nowhere near as pretty a sight as the Dusty, but a good bit larger. Under its shadow the Eraasian free-spacers had set up tables and piled them high with trade goods of the cheap but glittering kind. Bolts of patterned cloth and cheap cast-in-one-piece hand axes lay on the tables beside holocubes of fractal landscapes and plastic boxes set with synthetic gems.

  Even this early in the day a few locals had shown up, short and sullen-looking types dressed in crude handwoven fabrics, solemnly picking over the tables of trade materials. They carried woven baskets full of barter items of their own—beetle shells, bark, and small glittering stones.

  Most of the local items would be medicinals, Amaro knew. The Mageworlders had a lively pharmaceutical industry going, and you couldn’t leave your ship on a nonindustrial planet without tripping over a plant-and-earth prospector or two. Primitive artwork was another trade possibility, but a risky one. No telling in advance what the collectors in the Central Worlds would like, and if you guessed wrong you could wind up with a worthless cargo. It took a clever cargomaster to make a profit out of the Sapne run, and a good ship that didn’t need refueling in order to enter the system and leave again.

  The captain of the Eraasian ship was sitting in a folding chair behind the tables of trade goods. He rose and stepped forward as Amaro approached.

  “Greeting,” he said. “I am Haereith, captain of the Freetrader Set-Them-Up-Again.” He spoke passable Galcenian—at least as good as Amaro’s Eraasian. “We had not expected to see another merchant here on this voyage. Have you anything interesting by way of a swap?”

  “One or two things, maybe,” Amaro replied.

  “Then let us drink to the one or two things.” Haereith reached under the table and pulled out a stoppered flask and a pair of mugs. He filled both mugs with a deep red liquid—wine, from the sharp, rich smell of it—and offered one of them to Amaro before taking the other for himself.

  The Mageworlder splashed a few drops of his wine onto the ground before taking a drink. “Ghosts about,” he explained, sounding a little embarrassed by the action. “A place like this, you cannot be too careful.”

  “That’s what I always say, myself,” Amaro replied, and poured out a dollop of wine from his own mug.

  “Then come aboard with me,” Haereith said. He extended a hand to Amaro, who took it briskly in return. “And if it pleases you, tell all of us on the Set-’em-Up where you have come from, and what are—what is—the news.”

  XI. SAPNE; KHESAT

  THE FOREST of derelict ships extended for several miles beyond the point where Faral and the others had begun walking. They were lucky, Faral supposed, that Amaro had set the Dusty down close to the edge of the old landing area, and not near its center. The maps in the shipboard data files had shown an extensive port complex at Sapne Market, with a landing field bigger than some small towns.

  Now, if he’d been right in his guess about the building most likely to house a black-market passport-and-visa operation …

  Sometime about noon they left the forest behind them. The terrain changed from woods to open ground overgrown with stands of tall grass. Here and there a trail appeared among the waving, head-high stems.

  “Do we need to be following one of those?” Miza asked.

  “Depends,” said Faral. “Do we want to be ambushed?”

  They continued in a straight line, guiding on the sun. At last a building appeared, looming tall and wide above the grasses, with blank walls that gave back the light in a fierce dazzle. They’d built well on Old Sapne, before the Biochem Plagues—neither time nor vandalism had made any change to the building’s armor-glass sheath. Many paths converged in the open ground before it, and the grass there was trodden short.

  Jens shifted the weight of the portable generator on his shoulders and squinted up at the building. “If this isn’t the place where we get our passports validated, it certainly ought to be.”

  “Somebody uses it for something, at any rate,” Faral said. “All those trails leading up to it—those are footpaths, not animal tracks.”

  Cautiously, they approached the building. Its main doors stood open, the dilation membrane that had once covered them jammed apart at the three-quarter point. Beyond, lit by high skylights, lay the entrance foyer. Once it might have been a grand atrium in the prewar style. Now it was dim, and decorated … oddly.

  Carved images of human forms, larger than life, stood at intervals along the atrium walls. At first glance they seemed to have been crudely hacked out of tree trunks, then planed to smoothness. A closer look revealed that the distortions and the twisted, half-melted postures were deliberate, the results of careful hand-carving and polishing. Where light from above struck the images, their surfaces gleamed with oil.

  In between the wooden statues, huge plates of hammered metal hung in pairs and threes from the interior balconies surrounding the atrium. The ropes that suspended them were wrist-thick cables of twisted wire. The panels hung closely enough together that the vibration of footsteps on the atrium floor caused them to shiver and strike against one another with a sound like flat, atonal bells.

  The floor itself had once been a solid sheet of pure unmarked—and unmarkable—crystal, whose deep black luster would have given back reflections like an unmoving tarn. Now it was covered with spiraling, labyrinthine pathways drawn out in lines of pollen, petals, and colored stones.

  “It’s … different,” Jens said, after contemplating it for a few moments. “The combination of decadence and primitive vigor—”

  “Never mind the art criticism,” said Faral. His ears had picked up the sound of movement somewhere in the vast atrium, faint noises that the constant chiming of the metal plates had for a while obscured. “I think we’re about to get an escort.”

  “I think you’re right,” Miza said. “Look there.”

  Faral looked. On the far side of the atrium, a stairway curved down to the floor from the first-level balcony. A woman was coming down the staircase toward them.

  She was dressed in shades of green and brown, as if to blend in with the forest tha
t covered so much of the old spaceport. In one hand she carried a musical instrument of some kind—a wooden frame strung with wire, with metal and glass beads threaded on the wires. Its high, rattling chime echoed the lower notes of the heavy metal plates.

  The combined notes, high and low, blurred the ambient sound even more than had the chiming of the plates alone. Faral was not surprised when the first unfamiliar voice came from behind him, where the outer doors stood open and anyone might have entered on their tracks.

  “We expect you.”

  It was a man’s voice, speaking Standard Galcenian with a stilted accent, as if he had learned the tongue in adulthood from one who did not speak it as a native. A quick glance toward the door revealed a young man of about Faral’s own age, dressed in more greens and browns. Instead of a stringed rattle, he carried a spear.

  The woman had reached the foot of the stairway. “Come.” she said.

  Faral looked at Miza and Jens. In response to his unspoken question, Miza shrugged and said, “Beats me. Huool’s reports didn’t say anything about what kind of people were running the passport office these days.”

  “Come,” the woman said again. She turned and started back up the stairs without waiting to see if anyone followed her.

  “That kind of people, apparently,” said Jens. “Let’s take care of our business and be gone.”

  The woman led them up onto the balcony. Faral was aware of the young man following behind with his spear at the ready. Dark hallways going back farther into the building opened off the sides of the balcony. A three-legged table of wood lashed together with twine stood near the top of the staircase, and a woven grass basket stood on the table; the woman reached into the basket and pulled out a glowcube. She pressed the activation stud and the glowcube came on, filling the balcony with cold white light.