by Doyle, Debra
So much for the primitive bit, Faral thought, as the woman entered one of the hallways.
“You come,” said the man with the spear. “We expect you.”
“We come,” agreed Jens. “Faral, Miza …?”
“Right with you, foster-brother. Let’s go.”
They passed through the door after the woman. The blue-white light of her glowcube bobbed down the hallway ahead of them like a marshwight’s lantern. Pairs of doors opened off on either side of the corridor. Offices once, Faral supposed. Now, each time the light of the woman’s glowcube passed a door, another glowcube would come to life in response—illuminating as it did so the man or woman who held it. All of them were armed, some with spears like the man behind, others with knives, a few with blasters.
*They didn’t have to do all this just to impress me,* Faral said to Jens in Trade-talk. *I was already impressed.*
*Shut up,* Jens replied.
They came at last to a round room at the far end of the passage. The room had a domed skylight above, and a spiral staircase leading down, but it was small compared to the great atrium. Aside from handwoven carpets and piles of large, gaudy pillows, the room had no furnishings save a metal brazier full of red coals. A heavy, sweetish smoke rose from the brazier in thick curls.
Another woman, this one far older than the first, sat on one of the pillows. She also wore brown and green, but over the homespun her gown was stiff and glittering with embroidery done in metallic threads. Her face was distorted and scarred, and her white hair was thin and patchy.
She must be one of the generation that survived the plagues, Faral realized. He wondered what she had been, back when Sapne was more than just the ghost of a living world. Had she been a portside dataworker, somebody who knew how to create the stamps and the certificates of passage? Or had she been something else?
“Sit now,” said the man with the spear. He indicated the pillows strewn about the floor. “And wait.”
They sat in silence for a while. The blue-grey smoke hung in the air in long, flat ribbons, and the light that angled down through the skylight slowly changed in quality as the sun moved farther past the zenith.
The building wasn’t silent at all, Faral decided. He could hear the faint rustles of people changing positions, the fainter sounds of breathing, and the coming and going of distant footsteps. The brazier hissed as the younger woman sprinkled a handful of powder on the coals.
More smoke billowed up into the room, this time dark and with a smell like moldy leaves. As he breathed it, Faral could feel himself detaching slightly from reality. Time passed, but not in a way that seemed to have anything to do with him.
The light outside faded. Somewhere else in the building a drumbeat sounded, throbbing like the pulse in Faral’s arteries. People in the room came and went beyond the edges of his vision, but the old woman and her younger attendants had not moved, except to replenish the brazier, since the interview began. Faral wasn’t certain that the other people, the ones he didn’t turn his head to see, were actually there. He was certain about the smoke, however—it had stuff in it that would make even an unbeliever see ghosts and visions.
And this is a place for seeing ghosts. With or without chemical aid.
A red glow suffused the room; high above, the clouds had gone rosy with the sunset. And in that moment, Jens unsnapped the portable power source from its carrying straps and shoved it across the carpet toward the old woman.
“A gift,” he said in slow, careful Galcenian. “For you and your people.”
*You know we won’t get our deposit back,* Faral said in Trade-talk.
Jens kept his eyes on the old woman. *It doesn’t matter. Be quiet.*
The old woman said something in the local language. One of the men in the room came forward and picked up the power source, retreating with it into the shadows that gathered with the coming night. The younger woman sprinkled more powder on the coals in the brazier. The black smoke rolled forth again, its tendrils catching in Faral’s lungs and throat and reaching up into the back of his brain.
Nobody said anything. More people came and went in the rotunda. Some of them sat and joined the circle around the brazier; others remained for only a moment before leaving.
After a while, and dimly through the increasing shadows, Faral became aware that one of the watchers in the circle was different from his fellows. Where the others were dressed in leather and homespun, this man wore a spacer’s coverall in plain unmarked black. He’d come into the room quietly—Faral had never heard his footsteps—and had taken a place in the circle next to Jens. Now he was watching the old woman as intently as Jens was himself.
I saw this man on Bright-Wind-Rising, Faral thought muzzily, and again on the transport to Nanáli from Sombrelír. Unless he was one of Amaro’s crew members … but what was he doing on the Wind, if he’s a free-spacer?
The smoke. It’s making me see things that aren’t here. Or maybe it’s making me think that things that are here, aren’t real. I can’t decide … .
The music of gongs and rattles continued in the distance. Faral continued to watch and wait. The man in black, whoever he was and wherever he came from, was still there, or maybe he wasn’t. Sometimes he seemed to fade into the shadows around him. But that didn’t prove anything—so did Jens.
Miza, sitting on Faral’s other hand, stayed unchanged in spite of the shadows and the ghost-smoke, and Faral decided to fix his eyes on her instead. Having something true and solid to look at, like Miza’s red hair and rounded form, would keep him anchored in reality when the incense fumes threatened to tease out his mind from his body and send it floating away.
As was common with Magebuilt ships, Set-Them-Up-Again was both like and disturbingly unlike its counterparts on the Adept side of the Gap Between. The technology for hyperspace transit was much the same regardless of what shipyard had produced the engines, but the vessel’s layout and interior proportions responded to a different aesthetic than that to which Captain Amaro was accustomed.
He sat with Captain Haereith in one of the Set-’em-Up’s common areas, looking over cargo manifests. Amaro couldn’t read Eraasian-style glyphic displays, and the comps aboard Set-Them-Up-Again weren’t configured to accept a Standard date feed, so they had loose sheets of hardcopy spread out all over the tabletop.
The data incompatibilities were only a minor annoyance, however. The two captains had a flask of red Norgalian wine between them, and a pair of blue-glazed ceramic mugs. They passed the wine back and forth and talked—like freetraders everywhere—about long runs, clever trades, and other people’s bad luck.
“I’m waiting for the time when we can trade with other galaxies,” Amaro said. “There’ll be plenty of luck for everybody then.”
Haereith topped off the mugs. “The Masked Ones speak of galaxies,” he said, “and say they have been to see. Nothing solid comes back with them, though … not by their road.”
“When they have the nav posits, let me know.” Amaro took another swallow of his wine and wondered how the Magelords got to places that not even starships were built to reach.
He didn’t ask, though. That went against the unwritten rules of a conversation where nothing was said outright, and where both parties traded oblique hints in hopes that the other person would say more than he’d intended. Haereith of the Set-’em-Up, matching his guest drink for drink and pouring from the same bottle, was already playing the game a good deal fairer than many captains would have bothered to do.
A wavery musical note over the ship’s comm system turned out to be the call to dinner. Captain Haereith swept the hardcopy manifests off the table in time for the first of the crew to appear and be seated. Amaro was invited to join them for a meal—more customary hospitality; the crew members back on board the Dusty wouldn’t be surprised that he had stayed—and he accepted. The food was space rations, clearly, but augmented with fresh fruits and a stew made out of some variety of local animal flesh.
Over
dinner, and more mugs of red wine, Amaro inquired about parts of the Mageworlds sector where high profits might currently be made. These things changed all the time, and a good port on one run might go cold by the next.
“Tell Geise’s Clearinghouse on Ruisi that you know me,” Haereith said, “and they will give you good prices.”
And a cut to Haereith, Amaro suspected, but that was the way such things were often done, and not a matter for resentment or suspicion. “What do they have?”
“Jade,” said Haereith. “Raw stuff and polished both.”
“Any artwork?”
Haereith shook his head. “That, the collectors already have taken. But there is a demand for unworked jade on Cashel at the Feltry Fair.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Amaro said. “Now, if you’re dealing in medicinals, Jaspar High Station is a good place to make a trade … .”
And so the talk went on, until the hour for leavetaking approached and Amaro rose from the table.
“They’ll be expecting me back on the Dusty,” he said. “Why don’t you stop by my ship tomorrow? Show you a good time, repay you for your hospitality.”
“Assuredly,” said Haereith, rising also. “Allow me, then, to see you on your way.”
The two men walked together through the Set-’em-Up’s narrow, twisting passages to the main hatch. A crew member waited there—not doing anything that Amaro could see, except looking out at the darkening jungle through the blur of the entry force field. The crew member turned away from the jungle at their approach and seemed to focus his eyes with some difficulty on the two captains.
Haereith frowned. “Naenemeis-de keth, Feashe?”
Amaro didn’t blame the Mageworlder for asking if Feashe should be working; he’d have asked the same question himself of an idler on board the Dusty, especially one he’d caught looking lazy in front of a visitor. The man’s reply came in a rapid mumble of some dialect Amaro couldn’t understand, and Haereith replied in the same dialect, more sharply this time.
The crew member muttered something under his breath and headed back into the interior of the ship. In passing Amaro, he stumbled, swaying, and seemed about to fall. The Ophelan captain reached out and steadied him.
“Easy … you don’t look well,” Amaro said. He switched to Eraasian; a common crew member like Feashe might not speak any languages beyond that and his local birth-tongue. “Briye feraet—”
Feashe shook his head. “Ie-briyai,” he said. He caught hold of Amaro’s supporting hand and looked straight at him. “Ie-briyai,” he repeated, then let go and stumbled back into the ship.
Amaro stood motionless for a moment, then shook himself as if putting the incident aside.
“Until later,” he said to Haereith, and walked down the ramp and out into the forest.
The Eraasian watched him safely out of sight, then turned to go back into the Set’-em-Up. He would pay a return call on the Ophelan captain tomorrow, Haereith decided. In the meantime, he would have to locate Feashe and find out whether the crew member was truly unwell, or merely dodging his rightful share of the dirtside labor.
He didn’t have to look far. Feashe lay on the deck a few feet beyond the first turning of the corridor. The crew member’s eyes were closed, his breath gasping and shallow.
Haereith raced to the nearest comm speaker and pushed the transmit button to call for medical assistance. But it was already too late. By the time the Set-’em-Up’s biotech came running to answer the summons, Feashe was dead.
Jens drew in another breath of the thick, mind-blurring smoke. The silent presence in the circle beside him of the man in black came as no surprise; he had been half-expecting such a thing ever since passing through the graveyard of lost ships. The man in black had been a potential presence, whatever Jens might be doing, for longer than Jens could remember—always there if Jens looked for him, a quiet observer somewhere at the edge of any gathering.
Jens did remember, quite clearly, the day that he and the stranger first spoke.
It had happened during midsummer in the High Ridges. Mamma and Dadda had come to visit, bringing with them a wealth of exciting stories and strange and wonderful presents. Then the whole family had left the house among the trees to spend a day and a night on what Uncle Ari said was “a little hunting party” and what Dadda had called an “al fresco entertainment.”
“What’s an al fresc—whatever he said?” Jens asked. “And what are we hunting?”
“I am about,” his mother said, “to lose patience with both of them. It’s an overnight camping trip.”
His mother was tall and fair—as tall as Dadda, and with eyes as blue as Jens’s own. Today she wore what she called her spacer’s clothes, snug trousers and a ruffled shirt and high boots to the knee. She strode along under the great trees as if she owned the whole world, and Jens, who was not yet big enough even for regular schooling, had to half-run to stay on the path beside her.
They were alone together for the moment. Faral, usually his constant companion, was riding on Uncle Ari’s shoulders up ahead, and Dadda was walking with Uncle Ari. Aunt Llann and Baby Kei had gone on before in the hovercar with the tents and the cooking gear; there was going to be another baby soon, and Aunt Llann hadn’t wanted to travel such a long way on foot. Some years later, Jens realized that his mother had slowed her own pace to let him match her stride—but she never spoke of it, and all he felt at the time was a great pride at keeping up with her at all.
They walked on for a while in a companionable silence, until Jens ventured to ask a question that had been puzzling him for some time.
“Mamma—who’s the man with the eye patch?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, quietly, “What man?”
“The one who comes and goes inside your head.”
“Oh.” She was quiet again for a while. “Somebody I pretend to be sometimes,” she said finally. “He’s not very nice, I’m afraid.”
“Dadda likes him.”
She smiled a little. “Your dadda’s funny that way. Do you see things like that often?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wonderful. And what does your aunt Llann have to say about all this?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“Maybe you ought to tell her.”
Jens looked up at his mother. “You wouldn’t have.”
She snorted. “Good point. But I was a rotten little brat when I was your age, so don’t go taking me for an example. How about your uncle Owen?”
“He doesn’t come here. Uncle Ari gets letters sometimes, and Aunt Llann got a comm call once.”
His mother frowned. “We’ll have to fix that. I think you ought to talk to him when he shows up. He used to see inside people’s heads, too, when both of us were young.”
She hadn’t spoken any more about it, and Jens had not thought about the question again until much later, by the firelight after dinner. Baby Kei was already asleep in the big tent, and Faral was nodding off with his head against Uncle Ari’s knee. The grownups were talking—Mamma was telling a long story about a Mandeynan customs officer and a shipment of green glass paperweights—and Jens was trying his best to keep awake and listen.
After a while Jens became aware that the man in black was there and listening too. The man had a wooden staff as tall as he was, and stood leaning on it just outside the circle of the fire’s yellow glow. Jens thought about the matter for a while and decided that the man looked lonely. In all the times so far that Jens had seen him, he had never spoken—
—but Jens had never spoken to him, either.
Carefully, Jens got up and moved away from the fire. Nobody saw him do it; his mother was approaching the climax of her tale, something to do with the customs official’s identical twin brother and a comm link that had chosen that very moment to stop working, and she held everyone’s attention but his.
Jens walked quietly, almost on tiptoe, over to where the man in black was standing. “Hello,” he said.
“I should have talked to you sooner.”
The man looked at him and smiled. Jens saw that he was fair-skinned, almost pale, with straight black hair down past his collar. “It’s all right,” he said. “Until today you didn’t have anything to talk with me about.”
“I guess not.”
Jens heard a burst of laughter from near the fire, and Aunt Llann’s voice saying, “And he combed his hair with a what?” The man in black looked amused as well.
Jens plowed on. “I’m Jens Metadi-Jessan D’Rosselin,” he said. “Who are you?”
A shadow of sadness passed over the man’s face. “I don’t know. I’ve forgotten a number of things, and that seems to be one of them. But it doesn’t matter yet.”
That meant it was going to matter someday, Jens thought. But the man said it was all right for now, and that was good. “Why can’t anyone see you but me?”
“I’m not talking to anyone else right now.”
“You’re not someone from inside my head, like the man I saw inside Mamma?” This was a possibility that had not occurred to Jens before. Now that he’d thought of it, he found that it disturbed him a great deal more than the glimpse of his mother’s internal companion had done in the first place.
“Definitely not. You are yourself, and not double-minded at all.”
Double-minded. He’d never heard the term before, but it answered some questions all by itself. “Aunt Llann is double-minded too, I think. But the other person inside her head is still her … . Mamma thinks I ought to talk to her about what I see sometimes.”
“Not to Llannat Hyfid”—the man in black spoke firmly—“and not to your uncle Owen, either. He belongs to the Guild, and she is a Magelord. And you are not meant to be either one of those things.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” said the Master of Nalensey, “that this time you have failed?”
Rhal Kasander, Exalted of Tanavral, lifted a slice of toast to his mouth and munched delicately, making sure that none of the jam touched his fingers. “As you yourself said on an earlier occasion, a setback rather than a failure.”
