Once the drum was in place, the bombmaker pulled the shim out. Slowly. Carefully. A click, and he held his breath. Then it was done.
“Right, then,” he said. “Anyone tries to moves that drum before time, up it goes.”
5:
ERAASI: HANILAT
His cousin Zeri, Herin decided, might look like nothing more than a nicely rounded bit of yellow-haired fluff—but she was quite a bit smarter than she appeared. She’d made a neat escape from a largely pointless evening, not to mention the remainder of the afternoon working sessions, while at the same time ensuring that her vote was counted on the only issue of any actual importance. The folded paper with her authorization on it crackled stiffly inside his jacket as he made his way to the banquet hall from a roundtable seminar on kinship parity. He didn’t have any interest in the subject—he was high enough in the inner family that the work he did was not done for rank or recognition—but he’d attended the seminar out of a sense of duty.
The banquet, of course, would be excellent; the Court of Two Colors could hardly provide anything less. The debate to follow, on the vexed issue of private security forces, would be acrimonious, but would settle nothing, even with the weight of Zeri’s vote added to Herin’s own.
A flicker of motion caught at the corner of his eye outside the leather-covered double doors that led from the conference area to the banquet hall.
He looked in the direction of the anomaly, only to have it vanish; a second later, it was teasing at him again. This time he was more careful, using his peripheral vision to watch the thing, whatever it was. He was rewarded with a glimpse of what looked like pale, glowing thread, that sometimes trailed on the black-and-white patterned carpet and sometimes appeared to float in the air above it.
Very odd, Herin thought. People who worked in the Mage-Circles spoke of the eiran as looking like silvery thread; but he had never been a Mage, or even trained for one. He wasn’t supposed to be seeing the eiran for the first time at a business conference in Hanilat.
But now that he’d spotted it, the glowing line wouldn’t go away. It curled and snaked about, twisting in and out among sus-Dariv and syn-Dariv alike. Herin was seized by the thought that it must be trying to find him, personally, by some kind of touch. Before he could think better of his action, he stepped around a knot of gossiping life-sciences savants and let the questing silver thread wrap itself whiplike around his ankle.
An electric sensation passed through him with the contact. This was luck, all right—strong and real, the pulsing current of life itself. Next to it, the furnishings of the Court of Two Colors, and the chattering crowd outside the banquet hall, seemed diminished and pale, like objects from a lesser order of existence. He marked how the thread of the eiran wound away from him, through the room and out the farther door, and felt it pulling at him to follow.
This is definitely something new, he thought. And because Herin Arayet sus-Dariv was an inquisitive man by nature as well as by profession, he gave in to the urge and let the silver cord draw him away from the banquet hall.
Chief Provisioner Tabbes looked at his chrono, then touched the intercom for Loading Dock 3. “Has the tenderwort arrived?”
The voice of the lading-clerk came back over the link. “No, sir.”
“No? Ridge Farms was supposed to get it here an hour ago at the absolute latest!”
There was a moment of silence, in which Tabbes fancied he could hear the lading-clerk shrug before answering, “Nothing’s come in at the loading dock in the last hour except a drum of fish sauce.”
“We didn’t order any fish sauce,” Tabbes said indignantly. He would need to have words with the people at Ridge Farms, if their order department had become capable of such confusion. “Where did they put it?”
“A-Twelve.”
“Leave it be, then. I’ll go over the order myself later and see if I can figure out where they went wrong. Fish sauce, of all things … .” Tabbes was still seething with irritation. “We don’t need fish sauce. We need tenderwort, and the menu’s gone to the printer already. Let me know if anything looking remotely like tenderwort happens to show up in the next ten minutes.”
A restlessness seized him. Rain tonight, hardly low humidity. A whole shipment lost, possibly ruined.
Tabbes decided to walk down to the loading dock and check things out on-scene. It was always possible that the fatal error had occurred not in the order-processing department at Ridge Farms, but somewhere at the Court’s end of things. Perhaps the tenderwort had already arrived unnoticed, and was now being allowed to sit there wilting in the heat. If so, the parties responsible would need to be singled out and disciplined, perhaps even discharged with prejudice. The Court had a reputation to keep up.
He stood and left his office, heading for the loading docks by way of the managerial corridors. The restricted-access halls and stairways provided the Court’s upper staff with expeditious routes to all the key service areas, without the delays that might come of encountering other workers along the way. He was on the second level, and heading at a quick pace for the passageway that opened onto the general loading area, when he rounded a corner and saw a polished metal drum standing untended in the middle of the corridor.
Tabbes came to an abrupt stop. “What in the world?”
He looked at the drum. No markings on the outside. Nothing to show where it had come from or what it contained.
“This isn’t right at all,” he said to himself, and hurried to the belowstairs security office in one of the small rooms opening off of Loading Dock 1. “There’s a big drum of something-or-other in the managers’ corridor,” he said to the officer on duty. “And it doesn’t belong there.”
“Probably one of the janitors left it,” the officer said. “They’ll get it in the morning.”
Tabbes had a thin set to his lips. “No. It doesn’t belong, and there wasn’t anyone around. I want a qualified person to come take a look at it.”
“All right,” the security officer said at last. “I’ll come look. But it’s probably nothing but some trash that didn’t get picked up.”
Tabbes led the way back to the corridor with the drum. He unlocked the management-only doorway, and then went down the ramp, with the security officer following close behind. They could see the drum waiting for them up ahead, under the glaring lights.
The two men were perhaps twenty feet away from the drum when the timer’s fifty-eighth minute passed. The bombmaker was good at what he did: Both of his backups proved unnecessary.
By strict count—if victims are divided one from another by fractions of a second—Tabbes and the security officer were the first two victims of the blast. Could they have watched with slow-motion eyes, they would have seen the drum first bulge around its center, then split with great vertical tears, black against the yellow light inside. But they never had the chance. Instead, the overpressure from the expanding gas took them and hurled them down the passageway, stripping flesh from bone and pulverizing the bone afterward.
The eiran led Herin away from the private areas of the Court of Two Colors, and down to the pavement level. He let the silver thread draw him, unresisting, through the heavy glass doors and past the gatekeeper-aiketh, and from there to the street.
Night had fallen outside, and the glowing thread stood out against the darkness like a line of silver fire. Herin wondered if any of the passersby hurrying along to their transit connections or their evening appointments also saw the eiran as he did—or was that beckoning silver thread intended for him alone?
He followed it across High Port Road, weaving in and out of the vehicular traffic and through the press of pedestrians on the other side. There, in the shelter of a recessed doorway, the eiran left him, dissipating like fog and taking its strange compulsion away with it into the night.
That was certainly peculiar, he thought, in the instant remaining before the world as he had known it came to an end.
There was a noise—an enormous, unexpected no
ise—and the whole Court of Two Colors swayed as if struck by a giant fist. The right-hand side of the building, the side holding the grand ballroom, collapsed downward. Dust rose in a vast cloud; water spurted from broken mains; electricity sparked from severed cables. The high-velocity shock wave touched and killed everyone in its path, as far out as the middle of High Port Road.
The left side, where the public restaurant and the guest rooms were, swayed and canted but did not collapse and—judging strictly from its effects—the shock wave was more attenuated there. After the explosion, silence fell; though it could have been merely a temporary deafness. Tongues of fire began to lick at the wreckage. Emergency vehicles with lights and sirens—all the power of a city come to deal with a hurt—arrived soon after that.
Herin watched, unscathed. And all that he could think of, beyond the fact that the eiran for some reason wanted him alive, was that somebody else had definitely wanted all of the sus-Dariv dead.
Theledau sus-Radal had plans. Iulan Vai knew that as soon as his summons reached her Hanilat message-drop:
Come to the office tonight. The usual hour.
She wasn’t as high in Thel’s private councils as she’d been back in the old days, when she’d been his Agent-Principal and the sus-Radal’s eyes and ears in Hanilat. She was a private person now, and worked for the family only when asked, and only if she saw fit to do so. Nevertheless, her unannounced visit of the previous evening had apparently moved the head of the sus-Radal to a decision of some kind.
She came to Thel’s headquarters a little after dusk, slipping into the tall building through the service entrance with her dark hair wrapped in a day laborer’s kerchief. Here in the downtown business district, she didn’t need the concealment of a hardmask and Mage’s robes. If anybody noticed her, they would take her for one of the maintenance workers who followed after the building’s aiketen and took care of those jobs that fell outside of the servitors’ limited instruction sets.
Thel was waiting for her in his top-floor office. He nodded a greeting to her as she entered. “Vai.”
“Thel,” she replied.
He had the windows uncovered and the room lights dimmed, the better to see the last glow of the sunset and the first emerging stars. Vai knew that he hated working late—it meant taking a chance on missing the hour of lunar observance. Thel had always been devout, but his years in equatorial Hanilat had made him, if possible, even firmer in his adherence to northern ritual and custom.
“What have you got for me?” she asked.
“After our talk last night, I decided I needed to show you something.” He pressed a control on his desktop and an image appeared, hovering in the air above the polished wooden surface. “This is what the family’s engineers have been working on for the past five years.”
Vai frowned at it. “A rock?”
“An asteroid,” he said. “On the surface, at least. Inside—”
He pressed another control. Half of the image peeled away, leaving a cross section riddled with caves and tunnels like an insect mound. He plucked a stylus from the desktop holder and used it for a pointer. “Living quarters, docking and construction space, observation and recording equipment … even accommodations for a working Circle.”
“Is this a natural object?” she asked. “Or did your engineers make it from scratch?”
“Natural to start with. But they’ve worked on it extensively.”
“It’ll make somebody a nice observation post once it’s operational.”
“That’s the general idea.”
“Ah,” said Vai. “Who’s going to be observed? Our friends the sus-Peledaen?”
Thel smiled. “We already have agents in place for that. No, this is for watching the planets on the far side of the interstellar gap.”
She contemplated the floating model for a while in silence. ‘Rekhe would have loved to play with this thing, she thought, with a rare pang of nostalgia. “Something this big, you’re never going to keep word of it from getting out.”
“It doesn’t really matter if people think that we’re building something like one of the sus-Peledaen orbital stations,” he told her. “We’ve already got one of those in progress anyway, as a decoy. What’s important is that nobody suspects where we’ve been building this one.”
“You built it all the way over there?” The plan, she had to admit, was alluringly audacious. Audacity, however, brought along problems of its own. “How did you shuttle the workers back and forth without being spotted?”
“One rock in space looks much like another,” he said. “The people on the transport ships know the truth, of course, but we’ve been sticking with family for this project—no hired crews and no contract carriers.”
“Word will get out eventually. It always does.”
“By that time, we should already have a string of bases in place. And they’ll be mobile, not fixed. If a particular location is compromised, the base in question can—”
An eye-searing flash lit up the darkness outside the office windows, followed an instant later by a thunderous blast that rattled the glass panes and sent Thel’s heavy ceramic stylus-holder skittering across the desktop. The floating image of the asteroid base wavered and winked out.
In the after-silence, Vai heard Theledau drew a sharp breath before demanding, “What was that?”
“Explosion in the entertainment district. Big one.” She found herself at the window, not quite aware of having gotten there, looking out at the city. The night sky was full of orange flames shot through with clouds of white steam and heavy black smoke, and the flashing lights of emergency vehicles made streaks of bright purple and hot amber on the streets below. “I can’t pinpoint exactly where from up here.”
“Give me a moment.” Thel was at his desk already, working the buttons and touch-points. She knew that he had to be forcing his way into the fire and security information grid with the brute force of a star-lord’s personal level of access. “Hanilat Emergency Response puts the explosion at the Court of Two Colors.”
“The sus-Dariv,” Vai said at once. “They’ve been meeting at the Court all this past week. The attack has to have been aimed at them.”
“This time.” Thel was working the controls on his desk again. The sigils for all the various branches of sus-Radal family security flared to life on its glossy black surface, shifting under his hands from low-threat violet to flashing max-pri yellow until the entire desktop seemed aflame.
When he was done, he sat down heavily in the chair behind his desk. A few minutes ago, showing off the family’s latest project, he had looked confident and satisfied with the world; now he just looked tired.
“If you’re right,” he said, “then nobody is safe anymore. The rules of the game are changing—and we’ll have to change with them, or die.”
Herin stood in the doorway of a building not far from what had been the Court of Two Colors, watching the wreckage burn. Training and instinct said that he should go—that he should put as much distance as possible as fast as possible between himself and the death some enemy had meant for him and his family—but for a long time he found himself unable to turn away from the destruction.
The night air was full of smoke and chemicals and the noise of sirens. Searchlight beams crisscrossed the darkening sky, and the flashing amber and violet lights of a dozen or more fire and safety vehicles lit up the street at ground level.
He knew already that the rescuers weren’t going to find anybody alive—not in the conference rooms, at least, and none of the attending sus-Dariv anywhere. The eiran would not have manifested themselves to somebody like him, at his age and without warning, for anything less than a total disaster.
Zeri, now, had rescued herself without knowing it. The easy luck that had always let her slide out from under unwanted obligations without causing trouble had played a trick on her at last. But Herin couldn’t give himself a like credit for his own survival. He had been found—singled out—caught by the eiran like a f
ish on a lure, and what little he knew of the Mage-Circles suggested that if the eiran had him, they were unlikely to let him go.
I do not need this, he thought. He tried to laugh at the sudden absurdity of his situation, but the breath caught in his throat halfway and he was sobbing instead. He closed his mouth tightly and forced himself to stop. Especially not now.
He took one deep breath, then another, and tried to think about what he ought to do next. Find Zeri, maybe. She would need to know what had happened. He shook his head. She’ll hear about it soon enough.
Something teased at the corner of his vision, wisps and threads of silver that faded as soon as he looked at them directly. He kept on watching the public-safety workers toiling in the debris of the Court of Two Colors, and waited. It didn’t take long for the eiran to come back. This time the shift and flicker of light resolved into a line of blue-white fire trailing off into the shadows—another message, he supposed, from the capricious forces that had pulled him away from death a little while before.
Herin moved out of the doorway and let the silvery threads draw him away through the periphery of the crowd. This time they didn’t vanish until he was well away from the street where the Court of Two Colors lay burning.
He took a closer look at his new surroundings: deserted alley, no streetlights, big industrial buildings all around. A far cry from the ultra-fashionable Court.
“I get the idea,” he said aloud. His voice sounded hoarse and shaky, as though it belonged to somebody else he’d never met: Herin Arayet sus-Dariv, talking to the eiran like a drunken Magelord. Shock and grief could do that sometimes, leave a man bare to the universe in ways he hadn’t been before. Sometimes the changes went away as the trauma faded; sometimes they were forever; but it was never a wise idea to ignore them. “It’s time for me to lie low for a while.”
A Working of Stars Page 8
