by Debra Doyle
The walk, a long half-day of hard going in mountainous terrain, took her even longer in the dark. She opened herself to the universe on the way down the mountain, letting the currents of Power guide her feet while her mind chewed over the problem. Two problems, now—keep the boys safe, and keep an eye on the Mages.
As if we didn't have more trouble than we needed already.
She reached the landing field at dawn, and found an aircar ready for her. Apparently Owen had approved of her action enough to call ahead and facilitate it. She realized then that her decision to walk had come from a hope that the Guild Master would forbid her to go.
A flight over the glistening fields of morning took her to the spaceport complex at Galcen Prime, where she scanned the listings for a link to Maraghai. The next ship heading out toward Selvauran space wasn't scheduled to depart for some days yet. Rather than going back to the Retreat, she decided, she would take up lodging in the city's Guildhouse and wait—but as she was turning away from the reservations kiosk, a flash of light on the message board caught her eye. Something had changed in the display.
She looked again at the listings, but found no updates on ships for Maraghai—nothing but a last call for the Tikún Linkship Atli's Darling, making transit to Ophel.
She walked to the Tikún Packet Line's reservation point and presented her papers. Before she had a chance to think why, she had tickets and a visa for Ophel in her possession and was on her way, with hardly time to inform the local Guildhouse that she wouldn't be needing a bed there after all.
Not until the pressure of the shuttle's lift to orbit eased did self-doubt assail her. Was this, then, the way such tracking and finding was done—following half-understood promptings and faint glimpses out of the corner of the mind's eye, with no reason to do so that she could in honesty give?
Propelled forward as much by the fact that she'd already paid for her tickets as by any deep conviction that what she did was likely to bear fruit, she went on through with the transfer. Once on board the packet ship, she checked into her small cabin, strapped in, and went to sleep.
We'll see what happens, she thought as the dreams claimed her. If Ophel isn't where the universe wants me to be, I can always try again for Maraghai from there.
Jens Metadi-Jessan D'Rosselin hummed the Fifth Mixolydian Etude under his breath as he left the unroofed summer porch behind the house in the woods. Getting his younger cousins—Kei, Dortan, and 'Rada-the-brat—to finish their dinner and clean up after the meal hadn't been particularly difficult.
"If you don't eat what's put out here for you and let Aunt Llann have her talk with Gentlesir Taleion without being interrupted," he'd told them, "then I won't show you the right way to kill a rufstaffa with a table knife."
That had calmed them in a heartbeat, and Faral had obligingly played the role of the rufstaffa when the time came for Jens to fulfill his part of the bargain. After that, with the dishes and the leftovers cleared away, the back-porch dinner had ended with wrestling and horseplay until all the parties concerned were exhausted enough to retire quietly to bed— even 'Rada-the-brat, whom Jens suspected on occasion of not sleeping at all, but merely withdrawing to plot mischief in private.
"And now," Faral said after his younger sibs had departed, "you can tell me what's going on with our visitor."
"I can? Why me?"
"You're the one who met him down on the trail." Faral leaned against the porch railing. "And whatever he's here for, I'll bet we're mixed up in it somehow… Mamma wouldn't have sent us off to have our dinner with the sibs if she wasn't worried."
"She isn't worried," Jens said. "She wants us out of the way so that she and this Taleion person can talk about Circle business at the dinner table without warping our young and impressionable minds in the process."
His cousin laughed. "Too late for that. You've been warped ever since Aunt Bee took you to Khesat to meet the relatives and the relatives sent you back here in disgrace."
"That," said Jens, "was because I wasn't warped enough."
"Sure, it was… I wish I'd been there to see it."
Faral sounded a bit wistful. He'd never been off Maraghai, since Jens's Khesatan relatives had made it plain that the extended family didn't extend to foster-siblings.
Jens had thought at first that the Jessani were trying to cast a slur on Llannat Hyfid and Ari Rosselin-Metadi—as if anybody could!—but then he'd figured out that his own parents were the actual target of their spite. It was his reaction to that insight, as much as anything else, that had finally disgraced him enough to succeed in making them send him home.
"Someday," said Jens, "I'll have to see if anyone on Khesat took pictures. As for Gentlesir Taleion—if his errand has anything to do with us, we'll hear about it in the morning." He yawned. "In the meantime, I'm for bed. Your sibs are an exhausting lot."
"Night, then."
"Night."
Jens yawned again and padded off to his room—and, he hoped, a good night's sleep. The back hallways of the house were dimly lit by low-power glows, and untroubled by any but the usual nighttime noises. Elsewhere, he knew, his aunt and uncle were still conferring with their visitor from the other side of the Gap Between.
Mael Taleion. A Mage, surely—he carried the short staff, just as Llannat Hyfid did. And Aunt Llann was a Mage; she admitted as much to anyone who asked, and that included the Master of the Adepts' Guild, whose one long-ago visit to Maraghai had left a strong impression on the younger Jens.
Uncle Ari had saved him that time, telling Master Rosselin-Metadi that he could hold off on trolling for Adepts as long as he was visiting family. Mael Taleion wasn't, as far as Jens could tell, hunting for future Mages on this visit. He looked like a man with other problems on his mind.
Jens pushed open the door to his room. Like all the other doors in the house, it had old-fashioned mechanical hinges, made out of iron to support a slab of native wood. Any number of Jens's Khesatan acquaintances would have heaped extravagant praise upon its quaint rusticity. The room inside had a bed and a desk and several closets, and a freestanding heat-bar for use in the wintertime. It had belonged to Jens since he first came to Maraghai for fostering; and it said "home" to him in a way that nothing on Khesat ever had.
The desk was blinking at him: a bright orange alert signal on the comp keyboard.
That's new, he thought. He went over to the desk and sat, bringing up the comp display as he did so.
PRIVATE TEXT MESSAGE, it Said. SOURCE: KJlO3X. TYPE: ENCRYPTED. MANUAL KEY ENTRY REQUIRED.
Out on the dining porch, the talk continued. Mael finished the purple liquor in his glass, and did not refuse when Ari Rosselin-Metadi filled it again. Somewhere beyond the force field, a forest creature gave a cry of distress that cut off, sharply, in midnote.
"How long," said Mistress Hyfid, "do you think we have before this ekkannikh of yours starts causing serious trouble? I'll be honest with you—it's not an aspect of Power that I'm familiar with."
Mael hesitated a moment before answering. He'd known when he set out that he was coming to Maraghai with bad news; he hadn't anticipated that the news would become worse even before he arrived.
"Not so long, perhaps, as I had hoped," he said. "Something has happened I did not anticipate."
She took his meaning at once, or part of it. "The rufstaffa?"
"There's nothing odd about running into one of those," protested her husband. "They're dirt-common in this district, and not even good hunting."
"Nevertheless," said Mael, "that one might have killed me, if young Jens had not intervened."
Mistress Hyfid looked disbelieving. "Surely not."
"My attention, at the time, was elsewhere… I fear that the ekkannikh has already begun to try its strength beyond the Circles on Cracanth."
"You saw it here?" she asked. She didn't go pale; her skin was too dark for that. Only the sudden stillness of her features betrayed her apprehension.
"And spoke with it," Mael said. "The eira
n weave around it like netting; it's already strong enough to pull them in and work with them. It succeeded in blinding me to the rufstaffa's attack—without your fosterling's aid, I would have been dead by now. But I fear the consequences."
"What kind of consequences?" Ari Rosselin-Metadi's voice was a dangerous rumble, and Mael chose his next words carefully.
"I turned aside," he said, "at the moment the beast attacked, and I saw the eiran wrap themselves around the neck of the boy Jens like a strangler's cord."
Faral couldn't get to sleep. The customary routine of the household had been broken, and the night disturbed by too many unaccustomed noises—the courteous, accented speech of the visitor; his parents' equally courteous but worried tones; the clicking of compkeys from Jens's room down the hall. After a while Faral gave up staring at the roof beams and got back out of bed. If he was going to stay awake, he might as well use the time to advantage.
He left the glowcube on his bedside table inactivated. His night vision had always been good, and a light coming on in his room—when he was usually a sound and regular sleeper—would draw unwanted attention.
An empty carrybag waited in the back of his closet. Moving quietly, he took it out and began to pack.
As Chaka had said that afternoon, it was high time he went out wandering. He'd already stayed here longer than most younglings; Chaka was almost the last of his agemates to leave. Except for Jens, of course, but Jens was only an off-world fosterling. Off-worlders didn't count—they weren't sent away when they came of age, because nobody expected them to live on Maraghai permanently anyhow.
Faral, however, was the born-son of a full clan member, which meant that he was a Selvaur himself in all the ways that counted. He'd even made the Long Hunt that brought a youngling into the clan, killing a massive cliffdragon with no weapon other than his own hands and body—an incident that had caused almost as much fuss as Jens's own abrupt return from Khesat. Faral hadn't been supposed to make the Hunt at all; not when the luck of the genetic draw had given him a height and mass closer to his mother's than to his father's, and nothing at all like that of the Forest Lords.
Most thin-skin fosterlings skipped the Long Hunt anyway, and contented themselves with adjunct status in the clan. But Faral had slipped out of the house when the season came, going up into the mountains without bothering to ask for the permission he probably wouldn't have got. He'd come back a month later with the cliffdragon's hide slung over his shoulder.
That had been a year ago. It was time, by Selvauran standards, for Faral to leave the home planet and not come back until the elders said he was worthy.
Past time, he thought, and the time is now.
Clothes weren't a problem. A plain shirt and trousers would do the trick anyplace in the civilized galaxy where formality wasn't an issue. He'd seen free-spacers wearing much the same style in holovid newscasts, and if it worked for them it should work for anybody.
He added his good boots and a warm jacket to the stuff in the carrybag. For a moment he thought about packing a weapon—off-worlders did sometimes, free-spacers especially—then discarded the idea. He was one of the Forest Lords, the second generation in his line, and he could take care of himself without need for such things. He sealed the carrybag and stood looking at it for a moment while he wondered what to do, now that all his packing was done and he was still awake.
His thoughts were interrupted by a low whistle, like the sound of somebody blowing across the top of a pottery jug. A few seconds later, the sound came again. He grinned and whistled back a couple of octaves higher. Clawed fingers and toes scrabbled for purchase in the heavy logs of the outer wall, and a shadowy figure loomed up head and shoulders against the moonlit rectangle of window high under the eaves.
*Are you going to take down the field,* said Chaka, *or am I going to have to hang here all night by my foreclaws?*
Faral laughed and shut off the security. The window's force field was supposed to be switched on and off from the central console like all the others in this wing, but he'd figured out how to cheat the connection a long time ago. After a few seconds of squirming, Chaka fit herself through the unshielded opening and dropped to the floor.
*What's up?* Faral asked as soon as she regained her balance. He spoke in the Forest Speech; even with his thin-skin accent, the sounds of it blended with the noises of Maraghai's night better than would any human tongue. *I thought you were heading for the spaceport.*
*I was. But I thought I'd come by here and check one more time to see if you were going, too. Looks like I had the right idea.*
Faral picked up the packed carrybag. *I'm ready as I'll ever be. But first I have to tell Jens I'm leaving.*
"You don't need to do that," said his cousin.
The doorway had opened so silently that neither Faral nor Chaka had noticed its motion. Jens stood there, dressed like Faral in plain-style traveler's gear, and he had a carrybag in his hand.
"It's time, coz," he said. "I'm going with you."
Mael Taleion went to bed feeling easier in his mind than he had since leaving the homeworlds. The talk after dinner had not settled anything—best to look at the problem again in the morning, Mistress Hyfid had said, now that it had been properly broached—but he felt better for knowing that his concerns were shared by someone on this side of the Gap Between. Even if the First of all the Mage-Circles no longer had any formal ties to the Adepts who had trained her, her husband was own brother to the Master of their Guild. The warning would be passed on.
Jens Metadi-Jessan D'Rosselin was a different problem, and one that would bear thinking on in daylight. Does the boy merely stand at a gathering-point for the cords of life and luck, Mael wondered, or does he draw them to him?
No answer came to him from the darkness, but he had expected none. He pulled the blanket over his shoulders and went to sleep.
Morning arrived sooner than he'd anticipated. The windows in his room faced the rising sun, and it was not yet full dawn when the first light shone down across his pillow and struck him in the face. Outside, a new set of birds and animals—diurnal ones, this time—practiced their characteristic noises at full Volume. Mael groaned and got out of bed.
He'd been an early riser himself once, in the days when he was a young man determined to free the homeworlds and subdue the galaxy. These days, he'd learned to savor the smaller pleasures of life, and rising when he chose to and not when the planet's rotation decreed it was one of them.
Not this morning, though, he thought with resignation, as he pulled on his clothes and his boots. Today we work.
Ari Rosselin-Metadi had said something the night before about a come-when-you're-ready breakfast on the dining porch. Mael retraced his steps to the veranda, but found no table of food and drink waiting when he got there—only Mistress Hyfid, her husband, and a pot of cha'a.
He knew at once that something was wrong. Ari Rosselin-Metadi filled him a mug of lukewarm cha'a and he drank it, in spite of the fact that he had never learned to like the bitter infusion so popular in the Adept-worlds.
"What happened?" he asked, when the mug was empty.
"Faral's gone off wandering," Mistress Hyfid said. She. poured herself another mug of cha'a and gazed into its murky brown depths while her husband took up the tale.
"It's not something we'd normally worry about," Ari said. "It would have been his time soon anyway. But he took Jens with him."
"Ah." Mael thought about the eiran, and how they had snaked across the darkness to entangle the young man he had so briefly met. "Took him where?" *
"That's the problem. Faral didn't say. The younglings don't, most of the time, when they leave."
"I joined the Space Force," Mistress Hyfid said. "And so did Ari. But that was thirty years ago, and things were different then. Faral could have decided to go anywhere."
Mael tried to remember what little he knew about the customs of Maraghai—which were known to be odd even by the standards of the Adept-worlds. "I thought tha
t your sister's son was a fosterling, and not bound by the clan law."
"You know as well as I do that the chains are in the mind, not the law."
He bowed his head in acknowledgment of her point. "If young Jens feels himself bound, then bound he is. But the danger that entangles him is not going to grow any less just because he is off your planet."
"Taking care of it's going to be harder, though," said Ari. "For one thing, young ones out wandering are on their own— clan law is firm on that."
Jens isn't the only one bound by chains in the mind, Mael decided. Not that anybody from the homeworlds is fit to point a finger on that account.
"And what is the other difficulty?" he asked aloud.
"The other difficulty," Ari said, "is finding them in the first place. Unless they send a message home—and how often did you do that, when you were young?"
"Not often enough," admitted Mael. "Though my reasons seemed good to me at the time."
"I'm sure they did," said Mistress Hyfid. "And so will theirs."
The spaceport at Ernalghan was a large, and mostly empty, building. No ships except the ground-to-orbit shuttles touched down in its docking bays, and those not more than once or twice a day—most of Maraghai's traffic with other worlds went through the nearspace station and the in-system planetary habitats. A single office window, tucked out of sight between two of the massive pillars that held up the building's vaulted roof, sufficed to handle any business that might pass through.
This morning, the work at hand included Faral Hyfid-Metadi and his cousin Jens, purchasing lift-and-transit tickets for the passenger liner Bright-Wind-Rising, out of Ruisi in the Eraasian sector and currently bound for Ophel. Chaka hooted at them as they paid down their money at the counter and fed their passports into the reader for the "No Return Until Permitted" stamp.
*You're going to make us look more like tourists than wanderers,* she said. *First-class tickets? I ask you.*
"Hey," Jens protested. "The trust fund wasn't my idea, and I have the right to draw on the line of credit just by existing. So I'm going to do it. They'll probably succumb to apoplexy back on Khesat when they find out what for."
