by Doyle, Debra
“Where’s Jens?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Faral said. He added a serving of eggs to his plate. “He’s not in his room—I don’t think he ever came back to it. Kasander’s not around anywhere, either.”
She made a face. “More Worthy nonsense. That’s all right … I’ve got plans of my own for today.”
“What sort of plans?”
“I need to contact Huool back on Ophel,” she said. “Let him know I got the two of you where you were going, like he said to do … find out what he wants me to do next … that sort of thing. But I don’t particularly want to use the Exalted’s comm set to do it, if you know what I mean.”
“Makes sense to me,” said Faral. “Whose comm set are you going to use instead?”
“No names,” she said. “Let’s just say that Huool has exchange agreements with all sorts of, well, entrepreneurial organizations. I’ve located the contact point for one of them, down in Riverside Park. Want to go sightseeing?”
Mael Taleion was in his newly rented apartment in the Castledown Acres Guesthome in suburban Ilsefret. From the balcony overlooking the river, he could see the Golden Tower rising in the distance deep within the city.
Twenty years ago, the delegation from the homeworlds had come to Khesat to negotiate with the Adept-worlders following the end of the Second War. That delegation had been deliberately free of any person with ties to the Circles. Mael himself had decreed it so.
He had been Second of the Prime Circle then—as he had been since the day Grand Admiral Theio syn-Ricte sus-Airaalin had first chosen him—and it had fallen to him to set the conditions of the treaty team. The new First was a latecomer to the ways of the Great Lords, and she was aware that there was much she did not know.
“I trust you, Mael,” she had said. It was the way of Adepts to act alone, and Llannat Hyfid had been Adept-trained before she found her proper teacher; she thought nothing of putting the power to change everything into the hands of one man. “Act for me in this. Do what is good for the Mageworlds, and do what is honorable.”
Mael had labored to fulfill that commission. Magery altered luck. Therefore Mael had thought it less than honorable to allow Mages to come to Khesat. So far as he knew, he was the only Masked One currently on-planet.
The time had come for him to violate his own rules. “If you will forgive me,” he said aloud, addressing the far-distant Llannat. “But I must find the eiran and see how life and luck stand in this place.”
Mael sat on the sun-dappled balcony and balanced his staff across his knees. Then, without his Circle to support him, without a friend to guide him back should he get lost in the visions, he donned the black mask that was a distinguishing mark of those who saw with more than their eyes.
As the cool breeze from the river fanned him, he closed his eyes and stretched himself forth. Before long, the vision came.
The city was overlaid with Adeptry, so that the silver lines here were tangled and untrimmed. He felt a certain distaste even in looking at it, and had to restrain himself from the temptation to make changes, just small ones, that would set a tiny bit of order amid the sloppiness of this world. It would be so easy to grasp one of the eiran and pull it a little more into accord with its neighbors, or set it at a pleasing angle against another behind it. But no—balances are delicate, and to commence a working without the intention of completing it would be immoral, as well as against the conditions he had set that nothing on this world was to be touched.
He allowed himself to wander amid the lines.
Then he saw that all was not random, that a pattern did exist. The lines tended to a point. He stretched out more, to know of this pattern. Was it the power of the universe, creating order from chaos, or was it the work of human hands? He had to know.
He approached it, and looked closer. Here, too, was the tarnish that he had noted on Eraasi, when it had sent him in haste to the First to ask for the guidance—for the permissions—that only she could give. How deep did the corruption run? In this place where the Circles had never held their workings, he dared not touch the line to find an answer. The slightest motion would ruin it all.
The world had gone still around him, in the inner place where he could see the lines. But here in his mind, he heard the sound of footsteps, and knew that they belonged to the ekkannikh he had fought against in the Void.
“Look for me on Khesat,” it had said, and now it was here.
He turned toward the footsteps, and saw, then, the pattern. The ekkannikh stood in the midst of the visionary city, grasping the lines of silver light and twisting them, adding them to a cable made up of many strands—wire ropes like the mooring hawser of sea-ship or the cables of a hanging bridge. Huge it was, as thick through as a man was tall, and it looped out of sight, stretching up into the sky, long enough and strong enough to bind whole worlds. And it was tarnished black all the way through.
“This is what you came here to see, before you die,” the ekkannikh said. “This is my victory, and my vengeance.”
“I will prevent it,” Mael said.
“Will you indeed? But you have already lost.”
Then, in the way of visions and dreams, the silver lines melted before Mael’s eyes. The breeze from the river, so steady that he had taken its permanence for granted, was suddenly gone, sucked into the creature before him and replaced by a debilitating heat. Mael strove to trace the lines before they vanished completely, and to mark in his mind the pathways between them that would lead him home.
Though he sought the paths, he could not find them. He exerted all of his will, but the vision that had always come to him before was gone. He could not see the cords of life. And all around him, the city of his mind had become a desolation of stone.
He turned to leave, to return to the world of waking men and normal vision, but found that he could not remember the way.
Panic rose in him. Remember, he commanded himself. You know this. It’s second nature to you—more than that, it’s first nature, your true existence. Find the way.
It was useless. He collapsed with his head in his hands. How much power was it possible for an ekkannikh to have?
He already knew the answer. Killed improperly, in the Void, where all time and space are one—its power could have no limits. Did he really seek to fight such a creature?
I have no choice.
That decision made, he felt at once a cool, refreshing breeze spring up. He opened his eyes, and found himself lying on a pad in a dim room, with Klea sitting beside him. The cool breeze was her hand, laid against his forehead.
“Where have you been, Mael?” she asked. “I looked for you, but I couldn’t see you anywhere.”
“I was searching for something,” he replied tiredly. “And finding more than I sought. There is more wrong on this world than politics alone. Someone is working with power in ways that corrupt everything they touch—and there are no Mages on Khesat, except for me, to put it right.”
Kolpag and Ruhn sat eating fruit-ices beside the wheeling-path that ran along the eastern waterbank. The morning sun threw sharp white sparkles across the river’s blue. A waveskimmer sped by them on its way downstream, throwing up a wake of white froth as it went. The wavelets from its passage spread outward, lapping at the pilings of the rustic boating pier.
Two young people, obviously more interested in each other than in the view of the river, sat on the bench at the end of the pier.
Ruhn looked at them sourly. “I wish those two would get out of here, if we’re going to meet our contact.”
“Maybe,” Kolpag said, between spoonfuls of honeymint ice, “the message we got wasn’t really a message. Or maybe it wasn’t meant for us.”
“You mean that finding the hidden meanings in newspaper advertisements isn’t as easy as you made out?”
“Not an exact science, no … wait a minute.” Kolpag set his paper cup aside on the grass and shaded his eyes with one hand for a closer look. “I think we’ve seen those tw
o before. Isn’t that one of our packages, plus Huool’s courier?”
“Son of a bitch,” said Ruhn. “All tricked out like nobs, but that’s them. You were right.”
Kolpag returned to eating his honeymint ice—he’d found that he liked honeymint, and he didn’t want to abandon the cup half-finished if the situation should change in a hurry. “The question is, do we snatch them now, and try to pick up the other package later, or do we follow them, see if the other package shows up, and get ’em both at once?”
“Hang on. Someone’s going out to meet them now.”
“That’s not the other package,” Kolpag said, as the woman in shop-keeper’s garments reached the end of the pier and conferred with the two young people. “Package two is a male and fair-haired.”
Package number one and the redheaded female got up from the bench.
“There they go,” said Ruhn. “Now what?”
“Follow them, for now.” Kolpag stood up and tossed his now-empty ice cup into a recycling basket. “We have to assume that we’ll need the hovercar near the Plaza of Hope, another stashed near the Fishcomber’s Market, and one more in the Regent’s Masqueing-Park. Once we’ve got a firm posit on those slippery little bastards, we can refine the plan.”
Kolpag and Ruhn drifted on foot along the waterbank, doing their best to look like a pair of data clerks on their half-holiday. They kept the two young people and their companion in sight without difficulty until the three of them reached a wheeler-rental establishment on the border of the park and went inside.
“Make a note of this one,” Kolpag said, after some time had passed without any of the three reappearing. “I think we’ll need the snatch ship sooner rather than later.”
Klea sat back on her heels and regarded Mael Taleion anxiously. She was not familiar enough with the ways of Mages to know whether his collapse was a normal thing or not—but he still looked unwell. And his words had been unsettling.
“There may be no Mages except yourself on Khesat,” she said. “But Adepts—yes, there are Adepts.”
“I recall the Adepts of Ophel,” Mael said. He pushed himself up into a sitting position. “They were … interesting.”
Klea tightened her lips briefly. “They were that,” she said. “Master Owen will be interested indeed, I assure you. That is one planet, and this another. Shall I attempt to see what it is the Adepts of Khesat are doing?”
“If you feel it will do any good,” Mael said. “But tell me: when you Adepts look for such things, do you follow the lines of life and luck?”
“Luck doesn’t exist,” Klea said. “Which makes following it difficult.”
“We will not debate the details,” Mael said. “Do you see with other eyes, and go to other places, when you meditate?”
“I go there in fact,” Klea said, “and the things that I see are real.”
Mael nodded wearily. “As you say.” He stood, swayed, and walked toward the door. “Shall we go?”
“I’ll go,” Klea said. “You stay here and rest.” She hefted her staff, then slung it across her back on its leather cord. “Wait for me here. If I don’t return in a reasonable amount of time … well, perhaps I was detained.”
She opened the door, and stepped through before Mael could say anything more. Outside, she found the morning streets oddly subdued. A thrill was in the air, as of thousands of voices whispering a long way away. What the news was, she had no idea.
Sooner or later, she knew she would find out. First she had to discover what the Adepts were doing on Khesat, and where—if not in their own Guildhouse—they were doing it. She had seen no one who carried the staff so far during her time on-planet. That was not unexpected. By all accounts Adepts were not numerous here on Khesat, or highly placed. And Owen had said he’d not heard much from them in a long time.
Only Mages changed the course of events by altering the universe. Adepts found the way the universe was going and went with it. Klea opened herself to the universe, trusting that the same forces which had put her on the liner to Ophel would direct her now in the way that she needed to go. She wandered idly, as the fit took her or the flow of pedestrians moved her, until she found herself at the foot of the Golden Tower.
“Ho, m’lady,” said a child—one not out with a nanny or keeper, and therefore of a different order than the tidily dressed tots who rode their cabriolets through the district. “Be here tomorrow?”
He spoke in Galcenian, she thought; or perhaps he spoke in Khesatan and she understood him, even though she didn’t have the language. A tingling sensation spread up her back: This is significant. I must mark it, and learn its meaning.
“I believe I will be here,” she said. “Why?”
“This is yours,” the child replied, reaching into a basket and withdrawing a pale-blue envelope. “Cry ‘huzzah’ and there’s more to come, to them’s got the seal.”
An elaborate red-wax seal did indeed grace the envelope, when Klea accepted it. She walked on, and turned the corner before deciding to open the billet. When she did so, her eyes got large. The envelope held a sizable amount of nontraceable hard-asset credit, payable to “bearer,” non-rescindable.
“Lords of Life,” Klea said. “I’d be tempted to shout ‘huzzah’ for that, if I knew what I was applauding for.”
The road she followed was taking her close to the Palace of the Jade Eminence, within the center of downtown Ilsefret. She placed the envelope in an inner pocket of her tunic, then stood briefly against a wall and effaced herself. Now that no one would see her, for when she passed by them they would all choose to look away, Klea felt safer. She would find out what was happening.
The guards of the Jade Eminence were not lax, but they did not happen to see when she walked between them. Nor were the silent alarms within the palace less than cunningly hidden, but Klea saw their location as if they glowed, and avoided them.
She walked on until she came to a central courtyard, and found there a casket placed on a heap of aromatic woods, and a man lying in it. She stepped up and laid a hand on his forehead, in order to know him after the Adepts’ fashion, and found that the traces of poison tingled on her skin like a dusting of red pepper. It was so subtle that it would be invisible to a toxicological examination—she could sense it only through her extended feelings.
The palace was empty, only one dead man within all its silver and ivory corridors. That was wrong, Klea knew, except in the logic of vision and dream. She continued on, past crystal and carved plaster, past lapis and carnelian. Nothing. No one.
Ahead she saw an object out of place, fallen on the polished marble floor like a thing discarded: an Adept’s staff. She picked it up. It, too, tingled with the trace of poison.
“Adepts?” she asked. “No.”
But then came a memory of what Owen had told her about times long ago, when Adepts had garnered to themselves the enmity of many worlds by their love of power, and by the means through which they gained it.
She dropped the staff. It clattered to the floor, and the sound melded in her ears with the noise of a passing wheel-cart bumping over cobblestones, and the corridor of the palace was instead the sun shining on the white walls of a building she recognized, without surprise, as the Khesatan Guildhouse.
“If luck existed,” she told herself, “I’d surely need some now.”
She stood debating whether she should enter the building immediately or not. My only ally a Mage, she thought, and turned to retrace her path, this time through the real world to where Mael Taleion awaited her return.
“‘O down by the river I met with my love, a-washing white linen on the rocks where it flowed,’” Gentlelady Bindweed sang softly under her breath, as she and her partner exited the Golden Lily Pleasantry Shop, each of them bearing several large, gift-wrapped boxes. “Blossom, we should have visited Khesat long ago.”
“An oversight we’ve mended,” Blossom said. “Shall we go back to the hotel?”
“I suppose; then we can find out if the
re’s any news since last night. The whispers this morning were fierce.”
Blossom nodded. “Just like the old days, when Jos would come roaring into town and turn everything topsy-turvy.”
“So it is,” agreed Bindweed. She looked about her at the tree-shaded streets of the riverside shopping district. “It really is a lovely day. Shall we walk?”
“Why not? I didn’t pass through fire and the shadow of death to look at the inside of a taxi. I think there’s a park on the way. Maybe tiffin from a pushcart?”
“I don’t know if they serve tiffin this early around here,” Bindweed said. “But something nice might present itself. They said the weather would continue unseasonably warm, but to my old bones, the sun feels nice today … .”
They crossed the street and passed through the arched gateway of the park, then continued along the waterbank toward their hotel. The gravel path crunched under their feet; the leaves rustled pleasantly on the quilfer trees; all was serene. A few other pedestrians strolled along the paths, also taking their pleasure in the warm autumn day. Through a gap in the trees appeared a glittering bend of the Leeden River that ran through the heart of downtown Ilsefret.
All at once Bindweed stopped, stuffed her recent purchases into a recycling bin, and said, “Lords of Life.”
“What’s wrong?” Blossom demanded.
“That pair who just passed us. I don’t know who the short guy is, but the other one I know. The last time I saw him I had him in my sights back at our shop.”
“And you missed?”
“He ducked very fast.”
Blossom ditched her purchases as well. “Think they recognized you?”
“No—their attention was on something else.”
