A Working of Stars

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “He’s approaching the necessary speed for Void-translation,” the Cold-Heart ’s captain said.

  Egelt snapped, “Make sure he doesn’t get in.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “I said, make sure.”

  There was a brief moment of silence, and then the Cold-Heart’s Pilot-Principal said to the captain, “He’s in.”

  “What was his heading?”

  “Nowhere,” said the Pilot-Principal. “That wasn’t a standard translation point. There’s nothing out that way.”

  “Did you mark the position?” Egelt asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Then make our translation the same way, in the same place. Wherever he’s gone, we’re going to follow.”

  The Cold-Heart’s captain paled. “That’s suicide!”

  “No more than telling Lord Natelth that we’ve failed again,” Egelt told him. “Make your translation.”

  “I didn’t want my pension anyway,” the captain said, and took the ship through.

  Arekhon and Maraganha were walking through a tunnel cut in the rock, the muted green glow of their staves the only light. The tunnel was a labyrinth of forks and curves; Maraganha picked right or left each time without hesitation.

  “How do you know where we’re going?” Arekhon asked her, after she’d made the choice for the fifth time.

  “I don’t,” she said. “Not in the usual sense of the word.”

  “In what sense of the word do you know it, then?”

  Even in the dim light, he could see that Maraganha looked amused. “I didn’t think all that deference and respect would last very long—not in a great Magelord and the First of a famous Circle. I’m looking for marks at the turnings.”

  “Marks. At the turnings.” He looked harder, and found that he could see them after all—faint pinpricks of white light, not so much on the stone as somewhere inside it. “Like Void-marks, only quite a bit smaller?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody was here before,” he said, after a moment’s thought.

  “And they left a trail for the rest of us.”

  “A lot of people have been through here,” Maraganha told him.

  “Sometimes you’ll find yourself following your own marks even though you haven’t left them yet.”

  “I don’t think these are mine.” His own marks, he was convinced, would have a different feel to them—he remembered the blaze of white light when the Ophelan Void-mark set. “Are they yours?”

  “Not mine. Maybe a friend’s, though. If I’m reading them properly, they lead upward and out, not deeper in.”

  He hoped she was in fact reading them properly. If she was wrong, the two of them would be heading into the core of whatever this place was. He decided not to dwell on that aspect of their journey any longer; too much thought along those lines only served to make him hot and sweaty and oppressed by a conviction that the walls were closing in.

  They hiked on in silence for some time, until they came to the first door. It was made of heavy wood bound with iron, like a door out of legend, and it blocked the whole passage.

  “We could go back,” Arekhon said. “Maybe we took a wrong turn somewhere a few junctions ago.”

  Maraganha shook her head. “No. The marks on it are clear.”

  Arekhon gave it a push. The door was hard and unyielding; he thought it might be locked in some fashion on the other side. “It’s not going to budge.”

  “Then we go through it.”

  “How?”

  “Very carefully,” Maraganha said. “Relax, keep your eyes on the marks, and let them guide you as you slip through.”

  Suiting her action to her words, she stepped up to the door, then passed through it and out of sight. Arekhon was alone in the labyrinth.

  “Right,” he said under his breath. “Relax.”

  He looked for the marks, and as before he saw them inside the wood of the door—sparkling like a string of jewels, leading him through. He took a deep breath and walked forward to touch the first mark. As soon as he reached it, the second mark flared up like a nova, farther in. Then the third, then the fourth, and he was standing with Maraganha on the other side of the door.

  The tunnel here looked much the same as before, only now it was illuminated by a dim, sourceless light. Maraganha had dampened the glow of her staff in response; he did the same, and was able to see how the marks continued on this side. Maraganha gestured at the marks with the tip of her staff.

  “See?” she said. “I was right, by the way. They’re leading up.”

  She moved on, and Arekhon followed her. The walls of the tunnel became smoother and smoother as they progressed, until at length the tunnel wasn’t cavelike at all anymore, but even-surfaced both underfoot and overhead, in a manner reminiscent of passageways on the fleet-family vessels of his youth. But those corridors had been made of metal and glass and hard plastic, not of stone, and he found the resemblance not so much comfortable as oddly disquieting.

  There were doors again, suddenly—not blocking the passage, but appearing along it to either side at irregular intervals. This time he saw no marks lighting the way.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “This is your journey, Arekhon etaze. Choose a door.”

  He stood in the middle of the passageway, looking at doors stretching out ahead to the limits of his vision. Doors upon doors, and all of them the same—and at the same time, he knew that picking the right one was vital, that things bad beyond imagining lay behind all of the others. He could have chosen, but he had nothing left to guide him in the choice. The marks were gone, and looking for the eiran in the Void was a pointless exercise.

  But the passageway wasn’t the Void, or at least it wasn’t the un-living no-place, no-time of grey mist without substance that he had always thought the Void to be. This place was other. He looked again, searching now for traces of the eiran—and he saw them, looping and coiling along the corridor walls and lacing themselves in a familiar pattern across the surface of a particular door.

  “That one,” he said.

  He opened it with a touch—it slid open; it wasn’t even locked—and stepped through before he could lose his nerve. Maraganha followed close behind him.

  They were standing on an observation platform, a bare room that was mostly floor and a half-dome of ceiling, opening up above them to show clear glass and a view of the surrounding stars. Other lights were winking into being out in the darkness as he watched—they were still too distant for detail, but in his heart he knew already what they were.

  Ships. Warships. Coming here.

  “This is the wrong room,” he said, fighting down a rising terror.

  “It has to be. We can’t stay here any longer—they’ll destroy us.”

  “This is the right place,” said Maraganha calmly, as if life had never given her reason to fear warships coming out of the Void. “Follow the marks, and they’ll take us home.”

  “But there aren’t any more—”

  He stopped. There were marks now, out beyond the armored glass, out in the deep of space. All he had to do was trust them—

  —and step through—

  —onto a balcony in Sombrelír, with the sun going down across the bay. He looked over his shoulder and saw Maraganha coming out through the windowed doors of the hotel room to join him.

  “It was real,” he said. “It wasn’t just the Void.”

  She smiled at him, the proud smile of a teacher to a beloved student. “It was real. And now your own marks are there as well, in case you ever need to find your way through that place again.”

  17:

  ERAASI: HANILAT; SERPENT STATION SUS-DARV GUARDSHIP GARDEN-OF-FAIR-BLOSSOMS: ERAASI NEARSPACE FIRE-ON-THE-HILLTOPS; SUS-PELEDAEN GUARDSHIP COLD-HEART-OF-MORNING: THE VOID

  Zeri sus-Dariv felt the vibration of the Fire’s run for the Void subside to the quieter, more familiar sensations of normal operation, and allowed herself to start breathing normally again. L
enyat Irao—“captain,” Iulan Vai called him respectfully, now that they were in space, and if Syr Vai, Iulan etaze, gave someone a title of respect, then custom doubtless required the head of what remained of the sus-Dariv to do likewise—Captain Irao had called the Fire’s earlier departure from Serpent Station a hurried mess when he spoke of it afterward. She wondered how he was going to describe this one.

  Zeri hadn’t been afraid when she heard the noise of magnetic grapnels attaching to the Fire’s outer hull, and felt the shock travel through the metal of the ship clear into her bones. What she knew was going to happen next and what she wanted Herin to do for her before it did were the only things she’d had room for in her mind. She’d been too cold and too clearheaded for anything like fear.

  That was then. Now that the crisis was over, she knew in her heart and stomach, as well as in her head, why it was that spacers liked the Void. All she could do was lie on the acceleration couch, and look up at the lights in the overhead, and shake.

  She heard the sound of the bridge door sliding open, and turned her head. Captain Irao—the name didn’t work right inside her head; she’d thought of him as “Len” for too long while they were on Eraasi—came into the passenger pod. The captain looked like she felt: pale and sweaty and exhausted. Zeri wondered if he hadn’t started shaking until afterward, either.

  Iulan Vai was the first one to speak. “That was good shiphandling, Captain.”

  “Thanks.” He gave her weak grin. “Tell you the truth, I’d just as soon never have to do it again.”

  Zeri unstrapped and sat up on the edge of the acceleration couch, the better to speak to the captain herself. “I’d just as soon you never had to again, as well. But I’m extremely grateful that you could.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Herin was also looking bad. It wasn’t a kind thing that she’d asked of him, Zeri knew, but it was something better asked for from family than from a stranger like Iulan Vai. “I’m a man of boundless curiosity, Captain. Where did you learn a trick like that?”

  “I didn’t. I heard someone talk once about having been there to see it done.”

  Herin closed his eyes and looked ill. “Oh.”

  Zeri stood up. Her knees had stopped shaking, which surprised her somewhat. She crossed the passenger pod to look at Len directly. “In that case, Captain Irao, you have my admiration as well as my personal gratitude.”

  “I could hear what you said to him.” Len jerked his head at Herin. “Over the audio. Made it sound like a good time to try anything that might work.”

  “And you were right,” Iulan Vai said. “So don’t lose sleep worrying about it afterward.”

  At the mention of sleep, Zeri had to fight against an involuntary yawn. She was more exhausted than she ever remembered being in her life, in spite of having done nothing except ride out the crisis in the passenger pod. “Is that what we do now? Sleep?”

  Len nodded. “And eat, and maybe play solitaire against the ship-mind. Work on inside repairs, if it turns out that we need any. Then sleep some more, and so on until we get to Ninglin.”

  “Sounds like an excellent schedule of activities,” said Herin. Her cousin was looking better, Zeri reflected, now that he’d worked out what the captain’s untested maneuver had saved him from having to do.

  “Glad you approve of it,” Len told him. “But I warn you—the ship-mind cheats.”

  Kief had never gone into space before, despite the fact that he’d studied the stargazers’ disciplines before going to the Demaizen Circle. Nor was riding second-seat in a cargo courier his idea of the best way to start; but nothing else had advertised itself as available for hire, and he was uncomfortably aware that he lacked the expertise to seek out a better alternative.

  Chartering the courier ship for an indefinite term—in theory from the sus-Radal, who held the captain’s contract—would also come near to wiping out Kief’s share of the Diasul fortune. The money didn’t matter; he’d spoken the truth to Ayil syn-Arvedan when he’d said that he never used it anyway. He’d lived off his stipend as a sus-Peledaen Mage for the past ten years, partly from a reluctance to touch his share of the family’s assets, but mostly because he’d lacked the desire for anything more.

  The great working had bound and controlled him in that as in so many other things, and he had never fully comprehended the magnitude of that binding until now. Stepping away from his old body had taken him outside of the eiran that surrounded it, and had finally made him understand. He was no longer one of the Demaizen Mages, and it was time to do what was necessary and set himself free.

  There was, he had to admit, a distinct possibility that once the job was done, he might not be a sus-Peledaen Mage any longer, either. That didn’t matter any more than the money did. He was the First of his own Circle, and First above the First of the Institute Circle, and nobody in history had ever linked two Circles in that way before. Someone on Eraasi would always need the kind of luck-working that such combined power made possible, and those who needed it would always pay.

  Given time, he could cut himself and his Circle-Mages free of patronage and the fleet-families altogether. They could be truly free, as only those with power could be free—but Kief’s glimpse of Iulan Vai in the news-channel image, and his long meditation afterward, had brought him to a realization of what first had to be done.

  He had to free himself from Garrod’s working. If all his efforts so far had been worthless, it had to be because Arekhon sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen was still alive, still the First of a remnant Demaizen, still tending and maintaining the eiran of the great working. Kief had thought his fellow-Mage lost forever by now, or even dead, but the working wouldn’t be resisting Kief’s efforts to break free if Arekhon weren’t caught up in it as well. Iulan Vai had been one of the Demaizen Mages who’d gone with Arekhon when the Circle split; if she was still a Mage, she would be with ’Rekhe now.

  If he wanted to find ’Rekhe, he had to follow Iulan Vai.

  Kief had known better than to try explaining his decision to Ayil. She was a scholar and a stargazer; she’d never seen the silvery threads of the eiran and known beyond certainty that one of them gleamed brighter than all the rest. But he had that thread now, and his firm grip on it and his determination to follow where it led gave Kief his first real sense of steadiness and purpose since he’d stepped out of Isayana’s gel-vat.

  He forced himself out of his light meditation and back into reality, where the courier ship’s pilot was waiting on launch permission from port control. Only vital traffic was lifting—the port had been full of gossip about Natelth sus-Peledaen’s stolen bride, and the courier’s pilot was disposed to be chatty.

  “Some people say she wasn’t kidnapped,” the pilot said. “That she figured out what was really going on, and she ran away.”

  “I’m not much for following the news channels,” Kief said. “If you could enlighten me … what is ‘really going on,’ that it should distress a young woman so to find it out?”

  The pilot cast a disbelieving look in Kief’s direction. “Huh. Word is, wasn’t pirates that did for the sus-Dariv fleet, any more than it was an accident that blew up the Court of Two Colors—and the lady got herself proof of it from somewhere.”

  “You’re verging on dangerous speculation, my friend. The sus-Peledaen make bad enemies.”

  “Did you hear me say anybody’s name but the lady’s?” the pilot demanded indignantly. “You did not—” An amber light began blinking on the main console. “There’s the port.”

  He flipped the switch underneath the blinking light. “sus-Radal contract carrier Waves-Breaking-Softly.”

  “Waves-Breaking-Softly, you have permission to lift for orbit with one passenger.”

  “Waves-Breaking-Softly, preparing to lift. Out.”

  The pilot flipped switches and pressed buttons in a sequence that Kief made no pretense to himself of understanding, and the world closed down around him until there was only the roar of engines and the press
ure of liftoff. This was it; he was leaving Eraasi. If he’d had the breath for it, he would have laughed. Star travel wasn’t supposed to be for him; it was supposed to be for fleet-family scions like ’Rekhe had been, or for Void-walkers like Lord Garrod … strange, he thought, what necessity compels.

  The pressure eased, replaced by a new sensation. He had no weight, and he was floating inside the constraints of the safety webbing. For an instant he teetered on the verge of nausea, but the courier’s pilot flipped another switch, and the floating sensation was replaced by the return of normal gravity, or by something that mocked normal gravity well enough for all practical purposes.

  The pilot gave Kief a sympathetic look. “First time up, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can rest here in orbit a bit,” the pilot said kindly; “let you get used to it. I need to file a projected Void-transit with inspace control.”

  Kief was not so distressed by the experience of liftoff that he missed the pilot’s subtle inquiry. The courier ship had been hired for lift to orbit and a Void-transit to be filed later: a mildly shady deal, but not illegal. Anybody watching the boards at the port would see only the first destination, the lift to orbit, and not the second. The maneuver bought time, not safety; inspace control wasn’t in the business of keeping anybody’s secrets.

  Now that the courier had made it into orbit, Kief needed more than the name of a world to give the pilot. He needed the course that would take him to Arekhon sus-Khalgath and the end of the great working. Iulan Vai, he told himself, Iulan Vai was the thread he needed to follow, wherever she was going and why. She’d been the last Mage to join the Demaizen Circle and the first Mage of Arekhon’s teaching, and the combination made her life and luck into a glowing thread in the great working.

  He let his mind tell over the roster of the settled planets: Eraasi, Ildaon, Rayamet, Ruisi, Ninglin, Aulwikh, Ayarat, Cracanth … those were the heartworlds, the worlds where Mages had found each other and spoken across the deeps of space. Then came the lesser worlds, settled from the greater ones; the bright thread that was Iulan Vai didn’t touch those, but instead wove through and around them in the pattern of the great working and came to rest on—