The Gathering Flame

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  Nivome cleared his throat again. “Your Dignity.”

  “Yes, gentlesir?”

  “You will be gratified to learn that the pilot transporting Lord Meteun and the Galcenian ambassador has landed safely at the field below the Summer Palace.”

  “Excellent. I trust that they’ve been provided with suitable accommodations and a chance to refresh themselves after this afternoon’s brief unpleasantness.”

  She turned back to the window. Galcenians. Great-Aunt ’Tina always said that they’d steal your petticoats if you let them. But I don’t think she’d ever met a Galcenian in her life who wasn’t bowing to her in formal court.

  They want a partnership, with Galcen as the senior member. That’s nothing to be surprised at—I’d try to get the same thing for Entibor, if I were asking Galcen’s Council for help against the raiders. The only crime here will be mine, if I give them everything they ask for. and forget that they were the ones who chose to come begging to me.

  She was finding it harder and harder to ignore Nivome; the man’s ambition had an intensity that was almost palpable. It made him seem to take up much more room in the small passenger compartment than his physical presence implied, and it pressed upon her awareness whether she looked at him or not. She knew what was on his mind. He wanted to be gene-sire to the Domina-in-Waiting; well, so might any man. But Nivome hinted at more. He spoke of being both gene-sire and Consort.

  He does worse than just want it, she thought. The insight wasn’t a new one, but it was the first time it had affected her with such a sense of urgency. He thinks he deserves it.

  The corners of her mouth turned up briefly. Perhaps it was time for her to take a bit of the minister’s advice after all, for the sake of public morale and her own peace of mind.

  As soon as Jos gets back from Maraghai.

  In Entiboran nearspace, Captain-of-Corvettes Graene was on the verge of shuttling across to the Galcenians’ flagship when a comms runner brought her the message from Central. She accepted the slip of flimsy and read it, frowning slightly—Central had proved remarkably unhelpful so far in today’s crisis, and she didn’t have much confidence in their ability to make useful suggestions, much less orders that she would have to obey.

  All units, crypto compromised, she read. Use plaintext only. Institute field-expedient recognition signals.

  “Are you sure this message came from Central?” she asked the messenger when she was done.

  “The communications officer verified it himself,” the messenger said.

  Graene wondered where Central had gotten the word from. There was no point in asking the messenger; he wouldn’t know. Neither would the comms officer. Central knew—at least, she hoped Central knew the source of its own information. With Mage ships spotted in-system, Central Command had better not be acting on yet another of the vaguely worded bits of information, more hint then help, passed along by Internal Security or by one of the factions at court.

  Sometimes she thought that General Metadi and Fleet Admiral Lachiel hadn’t gone far enough when they purged Headquarters. Their sweeping reforms had flat-out missed all those officers who’d made safe careers out of keeping their heads down when the trouble started. It was her own bad luck, and Entibor’s, that put one of them in charge at Central on this day of all days.

  She gave a mental shrug. At least the message hadn’t contained orders to break off contact with the Galcenians. In fact, the orders to transmit all messages in plaintext and to devise recognition signals as necessary would make liaison easier if her proposal was accepted. And so far the Galcenians hadn’t refused to discuss the idea of a unified command, which was damned decent of them. But since the Galcenians, as a group, weren’t especially decent, that left the question of where the fishhook was hiding in their easy agreement.

  I suppose I’ll find that out soon enough.

  She tucked the folded slip of flimsy into her tunic pocket and hit the plate to open the airlock to the shuttle.

  “Well,” she said to the messenger, “it’s time for me to go practice my Galcenian. Wish me luck.”

  Mistress Vasari sat back on her heels and looked at the man whom she had been, after the Adepts’ fashion, interrogating. He lay sprawled supine on the thick carpet, a nondescript man in the palace livery of dark blue and dull silver. His chest rose and fell with his regular breathing, and his eyes were open.

  He should have seen Vasari watching him, and after what she had done to him the sight should have made every muscle in his body recoil. But—to Vasari’s intense frustration, since she hadn’t finished questioning him—the man had nothing left in him to react with; his mind was as blank as his face. She’d had him on the verge of total revelation when he snapped, cutting off his mind from every physical contact so instantly and completely that it had to be a trained last-ditch defense.

  Nobody home in there anymore, she thought, with a touch of unwilling respect for her adversary’s thoroughness. Wherever he’s gone, he isn’t coming back.

  She wished she’d learned either less or more before the defensive reaction took over. As it was, she had only partial information, the vague shape and outline of treachery without the names and times and places that would make it useful. That, and her now-certain awareness that the Mages on Entibor had not forgotten the promise they’d made to the Domina Perada on the night of her accession.

  Vasari regarded the man for a moment longer, then reached out and put her hand lightly over his nose and mouth. A faint green light played around her fingers for a few seconds. The man shuddered once all over and then was dead. Vasari stood, dusted off her clothing where she had knelt, and left the room without looking back. The door locked itself behind her.

  She left the palace, taking care to stay unseen by agents of both Internal and Domestic Security, and made her way back to her apartment in the Celadon Towers. Once there, she contemplated the blank screen of her desk comp and tried to decide to whom, if anyone, she should tell what she had learned.

  Too much … she knew too much and not enough. Some people on Entibor were entirely too fond of hunting for spies and traitors. The Internal Security Minister, in particular, had a reputation she didn’t like—Adepts had run afoul of such men before, on one world or another over the centuries. On the other hand, there really were spies and traitors at work in An-Jemayne, and for all she knew, the Entiboran Adepts were numbered among them. She’d held aloof from them, avoiding their company and their Guildhouses, for just that reason.

  She activated the screen of the desk comp. I ought to send the follow-up to Master Otenu and let him decide.

  But her hands remained motionless on the keys, and the screen stayed blank. She felt a vast if wordless reluctance to pass along to Galcen any of her most recent discoveries, and she had been trained to pay attention to such things. Such feelings as those had kept Adepts from harm in the past: the journey not taken, the door unentered, the hesitation with the cup of poison at the lip.

  Not Galcen, she thought, and turned the screen off again. But who, then? The Domina is right about one thing. No one can fight the Mages alone.

  There was only one person she could think of who knew Mages, and who was free of political ties. And—it pleased her to think that, true to her training, she could make one action serve many ends—she already needed a good reason to make contact with Errec Ransome again.

  The aircar set down on the landing field of the Summer Palace in early evening. The mountains rising beyond the grassy plain had darkened to blue-black shadows with the descent of the sun; and the palace itself, a long white building high among the foothills, seemed to float against the dark background like a pale cloud. A hovercar waited on the field to take the Domina and her Minister of Internal Security up the long slope to the palace gate.

  Perada made the ride in silence, keeping her gaze fixed on the dark outside the hovercar’s armor-glass windows. She had no desire to catch Nivome’s eye and trap herself into once again recognizing his presen
ce. The journey from An-Jemayne had been hard enough to endure already.

  The majordomo of the Summer Palace had done well, in spite of the abrupt and out-of-season descent of a double-handful of assorted notables. Perada saw no white-shrouded furniture, and no blank spaces where valuables had been put into storage while she was in residence elsewhere. She let the majordomo escort her at once to the nursery wing—no doubt the way by which he chose to take her avoided those parts of the palace his frantic cleaning crews had not yet reached. Nivome followed her; she thought of dismissing him, but decided, reluctantly, that doing so would be unfair.

  Little Ari was already playing contentedly on the thick rug of the main nursery, under the eyes of a veritable platoon of nursemaids. She picked him up—oofing slightly as she did so; he was still big for his age, and growing heavier every day—and hugged him. He caught one of her braids and began to chew on it thoughtfully. She laughed. “Mamma’s little placeholder’s not so little anymore,” she said. He was the lucky one, though, she reflected wistfully—nobody ever bothered to kill placeholders.

  An unfamiliar footfall made her turn. The Galcenian who called himself Festen Aringher stood in the door of the nursery, smiling pleasantly and seeming oblivious to the suspicious glances of Nivome and the battery of nursemaids. He held a textcomm in one hand.

  “Your Dignity,” he said. “I have some news that may interest you.”

  “Really?” She tried to maintain a proper hauteur, but it was hard to do with Ari pulling on the braid he had captured earlier. “My Minister of Internal Security has been keeping me up to date with the reports from An-Jemayne.”

  “This news comes from system space, Your Dignity. By way of my—personal connections, shall we say.” He paused. “Connections not necessarily available to the Galcenian ambassador and his strategic advisor.”

  “Ah. You begin to interest me.”

  She heard Nivome exhale heavily, like some large and barely tame animal. “Your Dignity, this man—”

  “Has something to say to me. Speak on, Gentlesir Aringher.”

  The Galcenian bowed. “My thanks. The word I have is that all Galcenian forces now present inside Entiboran space have agreed to place themselves temporarily under the command of the Fleet officer in charge of in-system defense, with the stated goal of resisting an imminent Mage attack.”

  ERREC RANSOME: CAPTIVITY

  (GALCENIAN DATING 970 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 34 VERATINA)

  Alone IN his cell, Errec Ransome woke and slept and woke again. He had lost track of time, but that didn’t matter. His careful investigation of the minds around him—Mages, almost certainly—went on unhindered by the lack of physical routine.

  The journey ended before he could learn what he wanted to know. There was a moment, in one of the intervals between food and sleep, when he recognized the distinct internal sideslip, a sensation half of body and half of mind, that signaled a dropout from hyperspace. Not long after, he felt the rocking and buffeting of a descent through atmosphere. With a sigh of hydraulics and a clank of metal, the ship grounded and settled onto its landing legs. Then came silence. The hum of the air system stopped. Once again he grew tired and drowsy, his mind fogging in spite of his efforts to stay awake. Against his will, he slept.

  When he awoke, he was in another place.

  He lay on a low, wide bed, with a pillow underneath his head and a blanket drawn up over his torso against the faint chill of the air. He was naked under the blanket, and the stubble of beard that had grown during his time aboard the starship was gone—he found it a disturbing thought, that someone had undressed him and cared for him while he lay asleep.

  He pushed himself up on one elbow and looked around. This time, the room that held him had pale translucent walls that let the light from outside filter through. Strips of dark wood kept the panels together and cast intricate shadows on the floor. Except for the bed and a half-dozen black and white floor pillows stacked in one corner, the room was as bare of furniture as his cell aboard the raiding ship had been.

  The loose garments that his captors had given him lay folded across the foot of his bed. He got up and put them on, and began once more to inspect the limits of his prison.

  Some of the latticed panels that made up the patterned walls slid aside in their tracks like doors. The first one he found led to a refresher cubicle of the same design as the one aboard the ship. The second opened out into the world.

  He stood on the threshold and looked down a short flight of irregularly shaped stone steps into a tree-shaded garden. The dappled green of the foliage was not any of the multiple greens of Ilarna, nor of Galcen, and the sky overhead was a different blue than either. And he was alone. The others continued to watch him—he could sense them, when he reached out into the currents of Power and felt the pull and twist of their workings—but there was nobody near at hand.

  He ventured out into the open air. Short, feathery stems of grass tickled against the insteps of his bare feet like dense green plush. Tall trees, their spreading crowns heavy with leaves, provided comfortable havens of shade against the bright sunlight; smaller trees offered low branches laden with sweet-smelling flowers and brightly colored fruit. And the entire area was surrounded by a force field that he could not break.

  Magework, he thought. It has to be.

  Nothing else could have stopped him. Even when he was very young, force fields and related devices had shown a tendency to break down without warning whenever they blocked the way to someplace he wanted to go. Later on, after he found the Guild, he had learned to be more subtle, and even stronger—but the force field on his garden cell had stopped him utterly.

  Maybe I’m unconscious someplace, and hallucinating all this.

  He shook his head. He knew the logic and imagery of dreams, and this was different, too intense and too consistent in its details. He was a prisoner among the Mages—so far as he knew, the only prisoner they had taken from the destruction of Amalind Grange—and the Mages had brought him for their own reasons to this place of almost luxurious comfort.

  He didn’t like it. His imprisonment was yet another wrongness, added to the wrongness of being alive at all. He had seen for himself how the Mages dealt with Adepts on Ilarna, and he had never heard of them taking prisoners on the other worlds they had raided. Why, then, had they taken him, and what was it that brought them to care for him so tenderly?

  He reached out in search of a mind that would give him the answer, and found that all those within the range of his touch were guards: unsophisticated, untrained minds that gave him nothing because they knew nothing, except that their prisoner was to be maintained alive and comfortable at all costs.

  Errec returned to the cell the Mages had built for him—a snug and cleanly designed prison, as pleasant to look at as any garden bungalow—and set about the work he had learned on Galcen how to do. He ate, and slept, and walked about on the footpaths under the trees, but all the while the greater part of his mind was bent toward the seduction of those who guarded him.

  Eventually—it took some weeks, but Errec had patience, and all the time he could have asked for—one of his guards called on a superior to make a visit of inspection, in order to confirm that the cherished prisoner was being treated according to instructions.

  The Mage who arrived in response to the guard’s invitation came no closer to Errec than did the guards themselves; he was a felt presence rather than a visible one. But the excitement of the occasion made Errec’s work easier, rendering the minds of the guards even more labile and amenable to suggestion. It took almost no work at all, only a delicate nudge to an impulse that had formed already, for one of the guards to say, “I don’t understand what we’re doing here on Cracanth, my lord. Why are we keeping this one alive, when all the others are dead?”

  “Because,” the Magelord replied, “this one is our luck.”

  Errec withdrew, puzzled, from the minds of his captors. The symbols and thought-patterns that surrounded the M
ages’ idea of luck were not the same as his own; he’d given up believing in a capricious fortune when he joined the Guild. It took him careful probing, over the next several days, to determine what was intended—but eventually he understood.

  The Mages had their seers and truthspeakers, just as the Adepts had those who could watch the flow of the universe and predict the eddies and currents of the time ahead. And the word that the truthspeakers gave to the Magelords was simple: their efforts would prosper, so long as Errec Ransome lived.

  That night marked the first time he attempted suicide.

  XVIII. GALCENIAN DATING 976 A.F.

  ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 3 PERADA

  JOS METADI had been poor company on the journey back to Entibor from Maraghai, and he knew it. He wasn’t used to going anywhere on-planet and calling it home. From the day he left Gyffer until he took on the work of remaking Perada’s Fleet, home had been the ship, and dirtside only a place you went to do business or get drunk. It was a thing to leave behind you as soon as possible. The idea of deliberately returning somewhere, of going back to friends and work that were waiting for you, was new, and Jos wasn’t sure he was ready for it.

  He wouldn’t have admitted as much to anyone—not even to Errec, who’d never betrayed a secret in all the time Jos had known him—but the thought of explaining his deal with Ferrda had kept him staring at the overhead in his cabin in the muted light of ship’s night, and pacing the deckplates all day. So much depended on the deal going through, and if somebody chose to take it wrong …