A Working of Stars

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  Isayana sus-Khalgath took the offered chair and settled in to wait for the man she had come here to see. He was entering the dining room now, a big square-shouldered man with tanned skin like a farmer’s—though she supposed that common farmers never dressed so well, or had membership in an exclusive club like the Ploughmen’s. His eyes widened for a second when he saw that she’d come to the meeting masked, but the rest of his face didn’t change.

  He took the seat opposite her at the table. “I don’t suppose you want me to welcome you here by name.”

  “It wouldn’t be wise.”

  “I can understand that.” He took a pack of cards out of the table drawer, broke the seal, and began to shuffle them. “We can play a round of break-and-braid while we talk. Five hundred points, or two-fifty?”

  “Two-fifty will do.” She waited until he had dealt them each a hand of cards, then continued. “I’ve heard rumors that you don’t care for the sus-Peledaen.”

  He picked up his hand of cards and sorted them. “There might be some truth in that. It’s not personal, though.”

  “I’m relieved,” she said. “On what grounds, then?”

  “The world isn’t what it was when I was young,” he said. “It used to be that the merchants and the landed families were what held everything together, and not the star-lords.”

  “Times change. When I was young, we didn’t know for certain that there were Mages on Ninglin. Now half our ships’ crews are from there.”

  “And your big ships never touch the ground at all,” he said. “That’s the part I don’t like. If the sus-Peledaen rule everything, and rule it from space, who’s left to take care of things on the ground?”

  “A good point,” Isayana said. She’d made it to Natelth herself, in fact, and more than once, during his push to extend fleet-family control out beyond Eraasi’s orbital space. He hadn’t listened—ironic, given her brother’s own dislike of working at or visiting the family’s strongholds outside of planetary gravity, but Na’e had never been one to let personal comfort or affection get in the way of what he saw as the family’s best interest.

  And he’ll never be persuaded that what he sees is wrong. Especially now that he’s managed to annex the sus-Dariv family assets as well.

  Isayana laid down her first three cards. Their values made a good start on a braided line. syn-Arvedan could opt to continue the braid, or to tear it apart, depending on the cards in his own hand and upon whether he felt like playing this hand in the slow, cooperative mode or the fast and vicious one.

  Break-and-braid was a lot like life that way, she reflected. You never knew in advance which version the other person was playing, and a game could change modes two or three times before the end.

  Syn-Arvedan laid down two cards—building on the braid, Isayana noted with interest. Maybe it was the only thing he could do with the cards he held; maybe it was a preferred style of play. Either way, she could take it as a good omen.

  She said, “What do you think? If the fleet-families can’t take care of planetary matters, then who should?”

  “You know my opinions on that issue already,” he said. “At the moment—considering that you were the one asking for this meeting—I’m curious about yours.”

  She pulled a card out of her hand and laid it down, stretching the braid even further. “I believe that you and I have some feelings in common.”

  He paused, his hand already touching the next card, ready to pull it out and lay it down. “Somehow, I don’t think you went to all the trouble of arranging this meeting so the two of us could play cards. What is it that you want?”

  “An alliance,” she said. “I have certain projects—various investigations and ongoing researches—that are withering away under my brother’s disregard. I need somebody outside the family to sponsor them.”

  His hand moved away from the card he had initially chosen, and pulled out another. He laid the new card down—still building the braid—and said, “If I’m going to sponsor any researches, I want first refusal on the fruits of them.”

  “Of course,” she said. Three cards from her hand this time, extending the braid yet again, and she was out for this hand. “If the syn-Arvedan want to make themselves into the first family on Eraasi—and take on my brother while they’re doing it—they’re going to need the help. We have a bargain, then?”

  “An arrangement.” syn-Arvedan looked at the cards on the table.

  Isa knew from his earlier hesitation that he had at least one breaking card left in his hand. This would be his last play; with it, he could either destroy their braid or tie it off. He put one of his cards into the discard pile, and laid down the ones remaining to tie off the braid. “Yes. We have an arrangement.”

  The journey by island-skimmer back to Tifset took place in subdued quiet. Arekhon had lost his taste for idle conversation after the interview with Juchi Haris, and sat hunched and brooding on one of the open-air deck-benches. Maraganha left him alone and spent most of the trip looking out over the rail at the open ocean and watching the seabirds wheel about overhead. They were about fifteen minutes out from Tifset when she came back and sat down next to him.

  “We have to go back to the Guildhouse,” she said. “The one in—where was it?—Cazdel. Where your friend lives.”

  Arekhon found the thought a painful one, but he nodded. “You’re right. I have to let Ty know what happened to Narin. He doesn’t deserve to hear it secondhand.”

  “No—but that’s not the reason we have to go back.”

  “Then what is?”

  “You do know that she isn’t dead, don’t you?”

  The sea breeze gusted and blew his hair forward across his face. One of the seabirds let out a long, harsh cry as it arrowed past him and down to pick up something from the froth at the top of a wave. He drew a careful breath, reminding himself that he was talking with a Void-walker and a great Magelord—who might not necessarily see the universe in the same terms as other people—and said, “What do you mean exactly, that she isn’t dead?”

  “You said yourself that Narin Iyal must have gotten lost in the Void, while she was trying to get back to her shipmates in distress.”

  He nodded bitter agreement. “And died there. Yes.”

  “You’re forgetting—time means nothing in the Void. If she was lost, then she still is lost.”

  “And you’re proposing that the two of us go looking for her?”

  “You and I,” said Maraganha. “And your friend from the Cazdel Guildhouse.”

  “Just the three of us?” He was hard put to keep the disbelief from his voice. “The last time I saw a Magelord walk any distance through the Void, it took a great working to accomplish the fact, and the Second of our Circle gave his life to it.”

  “Some techniques get easier with practice,” she said. “As it turns out, Void-walking is one of them. But actually bringing a person back takes help.”

  Len took Fire-on-the-Hilltops into Eraasi nearspace nice and slow. He’d already made one risky close-in Void-translation, and had no desire to push his luck with a second—not so long as he was on record as a sus-Dariv contract carrier in a system where the sus-Peledaen warships made regular patrols. He couldn’t afford to come to the notice of that particular fleet-family, not until he’d made it safely back to Hanilat and unburdened himself of his dangerous knowledge. Let any of the sus-Peledaen suspect what he knew, and he’d be handed over to their security forces—or worse, to one of their Circles—before he had time to run.

  He spent his free time during the approach in expunging all traces of his meeting with the sus-Dariv vessel from the Fire’s ship-mind. It was a finicky job, first removing the unwanted memories and then knitting together a fabric of lies and alterations to stretch across the gaps. For once, though, the Fire’s age and her general crankiness worked in his favor. Any blips and stutters that remained could be blamed on the vagaries of an obsolete and decaying system.

  “I don’t want to insult you in f
ront of strangers, old girl,” he said as he finished making the last of the changes, “but I will if I have to. If those sus-Peledaen pirates find out our little secret, they’ll kill me and break you up for scrap.”

  To his considerable relief, however, he didn’t have to go so far as to speak ill of his own ship. The nearspace patrols let him pass into Eraasian orbit with only routine questions. Nobody paid much attention to contract carriers, after all. They certainly weren’t a threat to anyone’s security.

  He set the Fire down on the landing field at Hanilat, and went through the formalities of turning over his cargo to the various parties who had contracted with the sus-Dariv for its delivery. What he learned during the process was disturbing, to put it mildly.

  The loss of the fleet was already a matter of common knowledge—one of the guardships had launched a final despairing message drone before falling to the pirates—but the identity of the attackers remained unknown. What was worse, though, from Len’s point of view, was that all the people he might have approached with his secret information were also gone. Somebody had wiped the names of an entire generation off of the sus-Dariv family tablets in a single night.

  Len found the news of an incendiary device beneath the Court of Two Colors to be shocking but, in light of his private knowledge, not as surprising as it should have been. With all of his contacts in the senior lines lost in one attack or the other, though, he was hard put to figure out what to do next. He had to tell his news to somebody, if only to spread out the burden, but it looked as if all the people who ought to hear it were dead. And under the circumstances, this didn’t feel like a good time to ask questions.

  Meanwhile, he began the process of looking for another contract. He still had to eat, and he still had to make the payments on the Fire. He put his name up on the looking-for-contracts roster at the pilots’ hiring-hall, and checked it at least twice a day. On the third day, he found a message posted for him in reply, the offer of a possible cargo, and the time and place for a meeting: two hours before noon, at the breakfast shop outside the gated landing field.

  Len was there early, dressed in his good clothes. He ordered a cup of uffa and a plate of mixed pastries, and alternately nibbled and sipped while he waited. Precisely on the hour appointed, a man and a woman entered the shop and sat down at the table across from him.

  “We understand from the message boards that you’re looking for a new contract,” the man said. He was lean and dark-haired, and dressed in clothes that looked like they’d been bought secondhand. The woman was smaller and not quite as shabby; and when he looked at her a second time, he saw that she carried a Mage’s staff clipped to her belt.

  “That’s right,” Len said, even though the hair on the back of his neck wanted to stand up. Getting involved with the Circles was never a good idea for an independent, especially these days.

  “I did some looking,” the man continued. “You worked for the sus-Dariv, your last couple of runs.”

  “I’m not making a secret of it. If it makes you worried about my luck … well, I’m here now and so’s my cargo. Even it did come with sus-Dariv paperwork.”

  “Point taken,” the woman said. “Unlike our late friends, you appear to have excellent luck.”

  She had a pleasant voice, but Len could feel the strength in it. He wondered if she and the man were sus-Peledaen operatives, then decided that they probably weren’t. The way things were going on Eraasi these days, if these were Lord Natelth’s agents they would already have picked him up and hauled him away for questioning.

  The man said, more quietly than before, “What we’re wondering is whether your luck happened to get entangled—however briefly—with that of the sus-Dariv during this most recent run.”

  Len set down his uffa and stood up. “I’m very sorry, but right now I don’t think it’s healthy to talk about things like that. I really must be going.”

  “Stay,” said the woman. “Please.”

  He sat back down, telling himself that it was the woman’s politeness and not the strength of her will that kept him from leaving, and not believing himself very much.

  The man said, “Don’t worry. We’re not fleet-family operatives—at least, not anymore.”

  “Then who are you?” Len asked. “And what do you want to talk to me about?”

  The woman smiled. “I suppose you could call us the last of the Demaizen Circle. But my friend here—” she nodded at the dark man “—is sus-Dariv born and bred, my word as a Mage on it. So you might as well tell us the truth.”

  Elaeli was still in An-Jemayne with the Provost of Elicond—sometimes these things took longer than anticipated, Arekhon supposed—and the summer cottage was empty when he arrived there with Ty and Maraganha. The Void-walker had said already that any place would do for the working in a pinch; here, at least, they wouldn’t be interrupted, or need to make awkward explanations afterward.

  “There’s a cook and a housekeeper,” he said. They were sitting together on the screened verandah where Maraganha had first stepped through from the Void. Night had fallen, and the stars were coming out in the sky above the trees. He’d lit a candle, some minutes earlier, and set it on the low table. “But only when the Mestra is in residence. For myself—I don’t bother.”

  “Self-sufficiency is good,” Ty said. He looked amused. “Even for the sus-Peledaen.”

  “I doubt that Natelth kept my name on the family tablets for very long after we left Eraasi.”

  Maraganha turned her head and regarded Arekhon curiously. The yellow candle flame threw changeable patterns of light and shadow across the dark planes of her face. “Who’s Natelth?”

  “My brother,” Arekhon said. “He and I … Natelth doesn’t take well to being thwarted.”

  “He means his brother tried to have us all killed,” Ty explained. “And will probably try again if we go back.”

  “Is that the real reason you don’t want to do it?” Maraganha asked. “Because of what might happen?”

  “Yes. But not the way you think.” Ty looked away from the candle flame, out into the dark. “I had a place to be, when I was at the Guildhouse in Cazdel. If I go back to Eraasi, I think I’m going to lose it. One way or another.”

  “Only help us find Narin,” Arekhon said. “Then we’ll talk some more about Eraasi.”

  “And if Maraganha etaze can’t help us find her—”

  “Then we already have a bargain, and you stay in Cazdel.” Arekhon stood up. “Maraganha—is now a good enough time, or would it be better to wait until tomorrow?”

  The Void-walker stood also. “Now is as good as tomorrow, and better for being sooner.” She looked at Ty steadily until the younger Mage also rose to his feet. Then she said, “Listen to me, both of you. This is something that you need to learn, and learn well enough to teach if you have to. And the first question that you need to ask is how your friend was able to walk to Gifla Harbor from a sinking ship without a Circle to back her.”

  “It’s not the going,” Ty said. “At least, that’s what all the stories say. It’s the coming back.”

  “I came here without a Circle. And regardless of what you may think, I plan to return home when I’m finished.” She turned then to address Arekhon. “This is the part where you’re supposed to say, ‘Please, Auntie Maraganha, tell us how you did it?’”

  “Well, then,” he said, “how did you?”

  “There’s a trick to it—a simple one, once you know the way. You look for an angle, and you turn the corner, and there you are. Like turning the corner in a hall in your own home in the dark.”

  She vanished, and a moment later reappeared.

  “The trick,” she said, “is to come out where you left.”

  “And how do you learn to do that?” Arekhon asked.

  “In the Void, all times are the same time, and all places are the same place. So to begin a journey is to arrive.”

  Ty said, “That’s certainly full of possibilities for error.”

&
nbsp; “You’re a very perceptive young man,” Maraganha told him. “And the chance of going astray is why the Mages in my time are accustomed to setting Void-marks to light their way home. I set my own Void-marks when I first walked here, and they’ll help us get back once we’ve collected your friend Narin.”

  “If you say so,” Ty said. “But this corner that we’re supposed to look for—how do we find it?”

  “Take my hand, and I’ll show you.”

  She held out her hands. Ty took one, and Arekhon the other—he would have known even blindfolded that it was a Mage’s grip, from the strength in it, and the telltale rough spots left by daily practice with a wooden staff.

  Maraganha spoke quietly, in the shadows of the darkened verandah. “Now look for the path around the corner, the half-step sideways from here, the journey that has your friend at the end of it.”

  Narin, Arekhon thought, and watched the cords of the eiran glow brighter in response to her name. Then he saw the particular Narin-lines that stretched out around the angle in reality. He followed them, and he was through.

  The folded slip of paper in Inadal’s pocket had arrived at Arvedan Hall with the morning mail. It contained only an address—a residential building not far from the sus-Peledaen town house—a date and time, and the words Come alone. Curious, he had returned to Hanilat and done exactly that, leaving his groundcar several blocks away in a parking tower and finishing his journey on foot. The doorkeeper-aiketh that let him into the well-kept-up older building was a starkly functional model, its voice the product of a synthesizer module, its casing plain brushed metal.

  “Please come this way. The workrooms are on the basement level.”

  He followed the aiketh down a flight of steps, and from there into a hallway that led to a surprisingly well lit and modern laboratory. As he’d expected, Isayana sus-Khalgath was waiting there for him, unmasked this time and carrying a stiff cardboard tube under one arm. In her plain work clothes, with her hair pinned up with a metal clip, she could have passed for a midlevel fleet-family technician and not the sister of Natelth sus-Peledaen.