A Working of Stars

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  This laboratory, though, with its long tables, its drafting and mechanical aiketen, its well-stocked shelves and cabinets, was clearly her personal domain. The doorkeeper-aiketh said, “Inadal syn-Arvedan is here, my lady,” and retired upstairs about its business.

  He said, “I received your letter. At least, I assume it was your letter—if it isn’t, then we’re already in more trouble than I want to think about.”

  “Breathe easily, syn-Arvedan. It was mine.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m guessing that this isn’t merely a friendly meeting for cards and uffa.”

  “You’re right.” She uncapped the cardboard tube and pulled out several large sheets of drafting parchment. Spreading the first one out on the laboratory table, she said, “I wanted you to see what I’ve been working on.”

  He stepped up to the table and looked. He didn’t have enough technical training to understand most of what he was seeing—his sister Ayil might have, or some of Ayil’s friends—but he could follow the summary paragraphs and the conceptual drawings.

  Bodies. Not aiketen, but bodies that live. He wondered, briefly, if he was standing across the table from a madwoman. Finally, he said, “This is it?”

  She shrugged. “Preliminary notes only.”

  A corner of the parchment tried to curl up again. Almost absentmindedly, she weighted it down with a stone jar full of rulers and marking tools.

  Inadal, watching, said, “That’s a cumbersome method of storage you’re using there.”

  “The working files are encrypted in the house-mind. I had one of the drafting aiketen make these up to show you.”

  “Ah.” He looked at the notes and drawings for a while longer in silence, then asked, “Is your brother aware of the direction your researches have been taking?”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  A spot of color rose in her cheeks, and she spoke more rapidly. “Natelth is enamored of inorganic mind components—the materials come cheaply from Ayarat, and the new instruction techniques give us the kind of speed we’ve been accustomed to getting from gel-based constructs. Not so elegant as before, but …” Again, she shrugged. “So I began to think of other uses for the mind-gel, since we weren’t going to be using it in our ships anymore.”

  Not a madwoman, then, he reflected, but a tinkerer, a dedicated user-up of spare parts and unwanted extras. He turned back to the parchment and touched one of the less-confusing sketches with his forefinger. “This would be a medical aiketh, here?”

  “It could be adapted from one,” she said. “For the prototype. Custom-built units would come later.”

  “These … bodies,” he said. “Is there any point in making them? What would they be good for, that we don’t already have either aiketen or true people enough to do?”

  “I thought you might have some ideas,” she said. “One thing I haven’t even put in my notes, although anybody with the right training could probably guess at it—given the right blood to seed the process, the finished body can be a match for anyone you like.”

  He felt a chill run down his back, a not-entirely-unpleasant sensation. If the syn-Arvedan were going to make themselves into a force of opposition to the likes of Natelth sus-Peledaen, they would need reliable security and intelligence operatives. Doorways of possibility were opening up inside Inadal’s mind, and some of the things behind those doors were both dark and tempting.

  “Yes,” he said. “That does have possibilities. You would be instructing these bodies for their work, I suppose, like you instruct the aiketen?”

  “The process should be essentially the same,” she said. “Of course, I haven’t done it yet, so there are no guarantees.”

  “I understand.” He pondered the sketch drawing of the converted medical aiketh. “It looks like you’ll need a physician—”

  “I know that. I have several in mind already.”

  “—and more than a physician, I suspect that you’ll need a Mage. Probably a whole Circle of Mages.”

  “And that’s another problem I thought you might be able to help me with. All of the fleet-Circles answer to my brother these days, whether they admit it or not.”

  “That will make things difficult, then.” He thought about what he’d learned of the Mages from his brother Delath. “The Demaizen Circle could have done it—”

  “—but Demaizen was broken when the Old Hall burned.” Her expression was sympathetic, and he remembered belatedly that she too had once had a brother in the Demaizen Circle. “I know. And Garrod syn-Aigal died a madman.”

  “Not all of Demaizen’s Mages are dead.”

  “Diasul?” she asked, somewhat to his surprise. “That one already has secrets he doesn’t mention to my brother; I’m sure of it. But I don’t think I like him.”

  “All the same,” Inadal said, “he’s the only Mage I know of these days who’s doing experimental work on Lord Garrod’s level.”

  Isayana sus-Khalgath nodded briskly and rolled up her sheets of parchment. “Then Diasul it will have to be.”

  The Void was all smoky greyness, a thick fog illuminated by a sourceless glow that came at once from everywhere and from nowhere at all. Arekhon felt the cold of it pulling the warmth from his flesh, and realized a bitter truth—that the eiran had shown him the way into this place, but nothing more. The cords of life and luck did not extend into the Void.

  “No wonder Narin couldn’t find her way home,” he said. His voice sounded flat and echoless to his own ears, like a megaviol with dampened strings. “With all her skills and techniques useless, working by instinct and intuition alone … a lesser Mage would never have reached Gifla Harbor at all.”

  “Will and intention are everything in the Void,” Maraganha said. “What you will—what you intend—becomes real.”

  “It can’t be that easy,” Ty said. “Nothing ever is.”

  “And the prize for the day goes to the man from Cazdel,” she said.

  “Willing a single thing, purely and clearly—holding a single focused intention—it’s not easy at all. Fortunately, gentlesirs, you have the training. We’re here to look for your friend, and in the Void—”

  “—to seek for a thing is to find it,” Arekhon finished. He pointed out into the mist of the Void, in a direction that he defined by an act of will as not-random, and said, “There.”

  The mists of the Void swirled and parted, revealing a many-branched tree, stark black against a grey background, with the heads of young women impaled on its branches. Thick grey blood fell away in slow drops from their necks and spread out like ink in water on the fog below.

  Whose mind, Arekhon wondered, had worked on the Void to give it such a grisly substance? Was the image something from his own dark nightmares, or from Ty’s—or was it Maraganha’s, a reminder that the Void-walker was, for all her helpful good humor, essentially alien? He pushed the thought away from him; such speculation would only distract him now.

  “Look for your friend here,” Maraganha said. “If you let fear stop you, she’s lost for good.”

  Arekhon opened his mouth to speak, but Ty was ahead of him, looking straight on at the dreadful tree and asking, “Where is Narin Iyal?”

  The head nearest to them opened its grey eyes. Its mouth moved. “Better to ask, where are you?”

  A second head spoke as soon as the first was silent. “Better yet to ask what it is that you truly need.”

  “Do not ask for that which you do not desire,” said a third. “For surely then your wish will be granted.”

  “We don’t have the time to play games with oracles,” Maraganha said to the head that had first spoken. “Talk straight. Do you know where Narin is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she still in the Void, or is she in some other place?”

  The head’s pale lips turned upward in a smile. It was mocking them, Arekhon thought.

  “She is here, and she is not, and she was, and she shall be, and she is not.”

  “Fine,”
said Maraganha. She wrapped her fist in the head’s long dark hair and pulled it free of the branch on which it was impaled. “Since you know so much, you can come along and show us the way.”

  The tree dissolved back into the mist from which it had emerged, but the head still dangled from Maraganha’s hand. The Void-walker looked back at Ty and Arekhon.

  “Follow me,” she said, and they began to walk.

  It seemed to Arekhon that they traveled through the cold grey mist for hours without discernible progress. His legs grew tired, and his feet ached, but the mist around them never changed—nothing changed, except that every now and again the woman’s head, its neck still dripping misty grey blood, would turn to right or left as it hung from Maraganha’s upraised hand. When that happened, the Void-walker would change her direction so that the head once more gazed straight forward, and continue on. Ty and Arekhon followed her without speaking.

  After an interminable while, there was a noise, coming from what—if this place had distance—would have been somewhere far away. Arekhon thought that it sounded like the noise of the sea, or of breakers crashing against distant cliffs. Then, suddenly, the mist was roiling about them like storm clouds filled with wind, and rushing and curling about their feet like water foaming over stones.

  “Here,” Ty said, and reached down, his hand going through the layer of nonsubstance on which they stood. Arekhon flung himself down full-length on the illusory ground and thrust his arm through it, and felt a body there, cold, wet, and he grabbed at soggy cloth and pulled, and up into the Void came Narin, dripping wet, blue about the face, and gasping.

  She looked from one of them to the other. “Not without my crew,” she gasped, “no one dies, not this time,” and rolled sideways and down into the breaking mist.

  “Catch her! Quickly!” Maraganha shouted, and Ty and Arekhon plunged their arms down again into the foam.

  Arekhon touched hair this time, like the woman’s hair that Maraganha held twisted in her fist. He pulled, and Ty pulled with him, until Narin rose out of the deep and let herself be gathered into their embrace.

  “As the universe wills,” said Maraganha, and the phantom head she had carried turned to scraps of grey cloud and blew away on the wind. She laid her hand on Arekhon’s shoulder, and he felt them turning the corner again—for an instant he could see the Void-marks shining ahead of them like beacons in the dark—and then they were through, all of them, standing on the dark verandah in the yellow light of a single candle.

  Narin said, “My shipmates—where are they?”

  “Saved,” Arekhon said. “All of them pulled from the water off of Skeppery Reef except for you.”

  “Why did you bring me back?” she asked. “I wanted to join my crew, be one of them—I was almost there.”

  “You’re part of the great working,” Arekhon said. “And it isn’t finished yet.”

  8:

  ENTIBOR: ROSSELIN COTTAGE ERAASI: HANILAT

  The next morning, Arekhon begged hospitality for Ty and the others from the Master of the Cazdel Guildhouse, and took them all there together. Ty was glad to be back, however briefly, in the place that had become his home on Entibor, and Narin—having decided that not drowning was, on balance, a good thing—was resigned to staying there with him. Maraganha, for her part, appeared to find the prospect amusing for reasons Arekhon didn’t feel qualified to guess.

  Having seen to the comfort and accommodation of his Circle, Arekhon returned alone to the Rosselin town house in An-Jemayne. When he got there, the servants told him that Elaeli was gone. The Provost of Elicond, they said, had taken his leave only the day before, and the Mestra had departed also. Arekhon thanked them politely and took one of the household’s private aircars to Rosselin Cottage, a familiar journey and one that he feared he was making for the last time.

  Elaeli was waiting there for him, sitting in her favorite spot on the screened verandah, overlooking the wooded downslope. She appeared somewhat paler than usual, and tired. Arekhon wasn’t surprised; he knew from prior engagements that a visit like the Provost’s involved very little in the way of personal pleasure. That knowledge had provided him with a certain amount of consolation from time to time, which he worked hard to keep Elaeli from noticing. She hadn’t asked for the life that Demaizen’s great working had given her, and she was entitled to make the best of it however she could.

  She rose from her chair and came forward to embrace him. He buried his face in the soft brown curls of her hair. “’Rekhe,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  “I can’t stay,” he said. It wasn’t the greeting that he’d intended, but he couldn’t unsay it once he’d spoken. He tried to explain it instead. “The working is too strong. I’ve found Narin and Ty, and they both agree—” after some persuasion, said the voice of honesty in his head “—that we need to go back across the Gap to Eraasi.”

  She released him from her embrace and stepped away to look at him. “What for?”

  He turned his empty hands palm-up, sketching a shrug. “I don’t know. But I had a dream that said it was time.”

  “You never used to dream like that before.”

  “I had a proper Circle before.” For a moment he closed his eyes, feeling again the pang of loss. “Things were … more orderly, back then.”

  She bit her lip. “I shouldn’t let you go. If you cross the Gap, you won’t come back. You told me yourself that Natelth wanted you dead.”

  “If I live, I’ll come back,” he said. “I promised it once before, remember, and I keep my promises.”

  “That’s the problem, ’Rekhe. I don’t think anybody can be that lucky twice.”

  “Nevertheless,” he said. “I think it has to be done.”

  “Nevertheless,” she agreed, on a sigh. She went back to her chair and gestured him into its partner a few feet away. After he had settled himself on the gaudy fabric cushions, she gave him a rueful smile and said, “It’s true what all the people say, you know.”

  “What is?”

  “That if you take a Mage for a lover, you’ll only have to give them back in the end.”

  He knew better than to deny the charge. “I’m sorry. It’s the real reason we leave our family altars, I suppose. The pull of the Circle is too much for us.”

  She looked at him sharply. “And what if the Circle is gone? What do you do then?”

  “Go mad, some of us. Find another, if we’re lucky.”

  “Ah.” On the slope below the porch, a long-tailed bird—impelled by some unknown stimulus—burst out from among the leaves and darted across the green background in a vivd, crimson streak. Elaeli followed its motion and subsequent disappearance with her eyes before asking, “So what does that mean for you? Is Garrod’s Circle broken, or not?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Kiefen Diasul was still alive on Eraasi when I left, and still bound into the working, and so was Iulan Vai. But it’s been more than ten years. Anything could have happened.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any way you can talk yourself out of going back there to find out,” she said.

  “If I could—”

  “Never mind,” she told him. “I shouldn’t be giving you a hard time, after everything you’ve had to put up with to spend a few years here with me.”

  “It’s had its moments,” he said. In spite of himself, he smiled. “I certainly never expected to find myself working as a politician’s personal bodyguard.”

  “It was the only way I could think of to keep you close to the politician’s personal body,” she said. “And let’s face it, you’ve got a streak of natural deviousness in you that makes you damned good at the job.”

  “You’re kinder to me than I deserve.”

  She snorted. “Hardly. I’ve used you abominably, ‘Rekhe.”

  “No more than I used you in the service of the great working.”

  “You did. We each deserve more than we’ve granted. Nevertheless, I’m going to ask for one thing more. Come back
to me, ’Rekhe. Choose me over the working. Be with me and don’t leave.”

  He sat quietly.

  At last she said, “So, you see. We each of us have things that compel us. So I’ll make another request. Return when it’s over.”

  “I swear it,” Rehke said. “Living or dead, I will return to you when my part in the working is done, and I will ply the luck for you in the meantime.”

  “I don’t want an ekkannikh; no revenant can warm my bed the way you do.”

  “Nor will I be,” ’Rekhe said. But I have given my word, and I will protect you and all that you have built and will build here, with all my power, in any place or time soever.”

  “Be careful with words of power,” Elaeli whispered.

  “I am,” ’Rekhe said.

  Zeri sus-Dariv had never given serious thought to marriage. She had reached the age of legal independence several years past, and had come at that time into the possession of an income sufficient to let her live as she pleased provided she did not live extravagantly. She had her friends and her occasional lovers; she had her small but elegant apartment; and she did not see how the acquisition of a husband would improve her comfortable state.

  Some people thought it a flaw in all of her generation, that they did not make haste to marry and raise up children to tend the family altars. Zeri had looked at the number of her cousins and given it as her opinion that there were, if anything, too many descendants crowding those altars already.

  That was before the hecatomb at the Court of Two Colors. If there had been one, just one, minor child of sus-Dariv’s inner line closer to its head than she was, she might have secured the same degree of alliance by giving that one over for adoption into the sus-Peledaen. Then she could have gone on by herself to manage whatever remained of the family’s affairs, and all without the need to marry.

  Instead, she found herself sequestered with Fas Treosi and Natelth sus-Peledaen in the office chambers of the sus-Khalgath town house, under the watchful eye of one of Lord Natelth’s own Mages. The three of them—and the Mage—had spent most of the afternoon going over the articles by which, upon the consummation of Zeri’s union with Natelth, the sus-Dariv would be subsumed into the sus-Peledaen.