Debra Doyle & James MacDonald - Mageworlds 07 - A Working of Stars

/* /*]]*/ function ChSize(size) { document.body.style.fontSize = size + "px"; }

Color

1- -2- -3- -4- -5- -6- -7- -8- -9-

Text Size

10 -- 11 -- 12 -- 13 -- 14 -- 15 -- 16 -- 17 -- 18 -- 19 -- 20 -- 21 -- 22 -- 23 -- 24

A WORKING OF STARS

Mageworlds 7

By

Debra Doyle & James McDonald

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the

author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

A WORKING OF STARS

Edited by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN: 0-812-57193-2

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001050753

First edition: April 2002

First mass market edition: July 2003

Printed in the United States of America

This one is for all the squad members of EMS North

and the folks at Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital

Prologue

ENTIBOR: AN-JEMAYNE

ERAASI: SUS-PELEDAEN ORBITAL STATION

On a world not his own, in a life he had never anticipated, Arekhon sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen

slept—and sleeping, dreamed. In his dream he knelt in the meditation chamber of the starship

Night's-Beautiful-Daughter, where he had not gone in his waking body for over a dozen years. His

staff, a cubit and a half of black wood bound with silver, lay on the deck in front of him, and all around

him the Daughter vibrated with the urgency of her passage through the Void.

Arekhon wondered what he was meant to do. Had he only now begun his meditation, here inside his

dream, or had he just ended it? He couldn't remember; but somewhere outside the chamber, an alarm

began to sound.

He picked up his staff in his right hand and got to his feet. Outside the chamber, the alarm bell continued

its steady, pulse-note chime. He found the door and opened it, and stepped through—not into the harsh

illumination of a star-ship's passageway, but into the Old Hall at Demaizen, and the warm golden light of

an autumn afternoon.

Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen—great Magelord, Void-walker, and finder of worlds—had taken the

land and fortune that were his inheritance, and had used them to build a Circle strong enough and

dedicated enough to carry out the greatest of great workings: to bring together the two parts of the

sundered galaxy, crossing the interstellar gap and healing a rift that had existed since the unimaginably

long ago. Arekhon had left the sus-Peledaen fleet and his family altars to become a part of Lord Garrod's

Circle, and when the working demanded it of him he had left his native world as well.

He had walked through the Old Hall in dreams often enough since then, in the years after the Demaizen

Mage-Circle had split apart in fire and blood, but never as now, with the weight of knowledge bearing

down hard upon him. In these rooms, he had grown from a sus-Peledaen fleet-apprentice with a knack

for seeing the eiran and making luck to a working Mage in Lord Garrod's Circle—and now he came

back to them with the sound of the Daughter's alarm bell following him wherever he went.

Sometimes in his dreams he saw the Mages of Demaizen as he had known them before. On those nights

he sparred with Delath or Serazao in the long gallery, or talked of space and stars with Kiefen Diasul,

though in the waking world both Del and 'Zao were dead, and Kief had betrayed all of them years ago.

Tonight, though, was different. Instead of Delath or Serazao, the dream gave him Lulan Vai.

Vai—the last-come member of the Circle, who had brought Night's-Beautiful-Daughter from her

employers, the sus-Radal, to save the Demaizen Mages from utter destruction, and who had stayed

behind on Eraasi in order to repay the debt. Arekhon found her in the long gallery, with its tall,

westward-facing windows and its racks of exercise mats and limber practice staves. She hadn't altered

her appearance since the last time he saw her in the flesh. Under the touch of the afternoon sun, her dark

hair still glinted with rusty-brown highlights, and she still clothed her compact frame in tunic and leggings

of ordinary black.

"Lule," he said—though she had always refused the forms of affection, even with those who might have

had a claim to use them. "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you. Did you think you could go away forever?"

"I didn't think I had a choice."

"You didn't," she told him. "Not then. But everything changes, and we have to change with it."

As she spoke, the light from the westering sun struck the windowpanes at a new and sudden angle,

dazzling his eyes for a moment. When the glare died, he wasn't seeing Lulan Vai any longer. Another

woman looked at him in her place: an older woman, whose thick black hair was shot through with wide

streaks of iron-grey, and whose skin was the color of burnished copper. Not Vai, though like Vai she

wore plain black and carried a Mage's staff, and not anyone else he recognized.

"Do I know you?" he asked her.

"Not yet," she said. "But soon." Outside the long gallery, somewhere in the rooms—and the life—that he

had left behind him, the sound of the Daughter's alarm changed from a bell note to a strident metallic

wail. "You have to leave now. It's almost time."

Natelth sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen stood with his back to the observation deck of his orbiting shipyard

and stronghold, his face only a few inches from the armored glass that gave the deck its name. The world

of Eraasi lay before him, a great globe against the starfield, black in the vacuum of space, stars glittering

all around it. The sunset line lay across the world, on the left as he looked at it, the darkened crescent

alive with city lights.

He knew that elsewhere, hidden beyond the bulk of the planet, the citadel of the sus-Radal fleet-family

circled Eraasi in an orbit exactly opposite to his own. But Natelth, secure in his own place, hardly thought

of the sus-Radal. He led, and the other star-lords followed; and if he started hopping on one foot, before

long Theledau sus-Radal would be bouncing around on his head.

Natelth heard the swish-click of the doubled inner airlocks that isolated the observation deck from the

rest of the station, but he didn't turn. He would have known who was approaching him even if the

armored glass had not shown him her reflected image. His sister Isayana, joining him in the safety of exile

from the planet's surface, had come bearing news.

He hated living on the orbiting station.

He watched Isayana's reflection approaching, not a twin of his own, but close enough that he and she had

often been mistaken for such when both were young: the same square frame and strong features, the

same black hair now going grey. Isayana's light-colored garments appeared stark against the black of

space, under the dim light of the room. The reflected light of Eraasi provided all the illumination here. The

observation deck held no chairs, no furniture, no decoration. When Hanilat and the station slid under

Eraasi's nightside, then he could dial up the lights. He could. So far, he never had.

"What's happening?" Natelth asked his sister, after she had walked, ghost-silent, to his side.

"Not much," she said. "The launch of Fair-Wind-Rising will be on time."

She fell silent, looking down at the world where they had both been born, and where they could never

live at ease again. Star-lords they were, as their family had always been, but never so much as now.

"We'll need to spend some time in Hanilat before the end of the year," he said. "Working out of the family

house."

"The security people will hate that," Isayana said.

"I know."

Another long silence.

"Have you heard any word from any of the other fleet-families?" Isayana said at last. "About some kind

of cooperative arrangement for dealing with problems down on the planet?"

Natelth's face hardened. "There's no cooperation between star-lords."

"We're living in changing times, Na'e. What was true a generation ago isn't going to be true forever."

Natelth turned to look at his sister. The empty observation platform stretched out to his right, the light

from Eraasi bringing up the profile of his face, his right side in shadow. "And how do you propose to

bring about this new era of cooperation?"

"We need to make alliances," she said. "Alliances based on trust, not fear."

"With the likes of Theledau sus-Radal?"

"Thel isn't a rival," she said. "He hasn't been building warships for almost five years now; maybe he's

waiting for you to notice that he's not a threat."

"He's still there," Natelth said. He turned back to the window and gestured expansively across the face of

the globe below them. The orbital shipyard was in geosynchronous orbit, the starport city of Hanilat lying

forever directly below them. Whatever the space station lacked in comforts for the soul—and Natelth

thought that it lacked most of them—at least here he could see strangers approaching from a long way

off. "Down in Hanilat, waiting for me to make a mistake. And if he isn't building warships, it's probably

because he's working on something else. I would be."

"We have larger enemies than the other fleet-families, Na'e," Isayana said. She hadn't stopped looking

out, her feet square to the flat expanse of armor glass. A late-season storm washed over the southern

ocean, but Hanilat, approaching its own sunset, had a cloudless sky. This station would be visible soon to

those who lived and worked below. "We both know it. The other families know it, too. You, me, the

sus-Radal, everyone."

She turned to face him, then, and laid a hand on his shoulder. "What will the people of Eraasi do, when

the people of Garrod's world come back across the Gap to deal with us?"

"Garrod was a meddling fool," Natelth said. "And I was foolish enough to help him."

"All done before we knew, and beyond recall." Her hand continued to rest on his shoulder. "Will you

come and inspect Fair-Wind-Rising with me?"

"I suppose I should," Natelth said, and turned his back on the glittering world outside the armored glass

windows.

Arekhon awoke into darkness. The hour was well past moon-set, so that the starlit rectangle of his

bedroom window took a long minute to resolve into a patch of grey against the black. The

furniture—bed, nightstand, chair, desk—took a little longer to emerge from the undifferentiated night.

When he could distinguish the outline of the half-open closet door, over on the far side of the room, he

got out of bed and began to dress.

His clothes were on the chair where he had laid them out before retiring: garments of local cut, but made

in the plain black and white he had always preferred. He'd never grown accustomed to the colors of this

world, its alien dyestuffs and yet more alien aesthetics, and after a while he had given up trying. He put on

shirt and trousers and a loose jacket, then hesitated a moment before pulling on his boots. Stocking feet

would have been quieter, but far less dignified. Arekhon had nothing against suffering embarrassment in a

good cause, but he had no desire to suffer it unnecessarily.

He picked up his staff and fastened it to his belt, then stood for a moment, thoughtful, before opening the

drawer of the night table and pulling out a hand-sized object shaped like a flattened cylinder. He slid the

pulse-gun into the inner pocket of his jacket, then shut the drawer and left the room.

The lower floors of the building were silent and empty. In the town houses of Arekhon's childhood, the

night hours had belonged to the aiketen, the constructed intelligences in their metal shells; it had been

impossible for anyone to move about in secret without first subverting the quasi-organic servitors. They

didn't have aiketen here on this side of the interstellar gap. The men and women who did what should

have been a construct's labor—and who worked late and rose early—slept in a warren of small rooms

high up under the mansion's gabled roof.

No one lived on the bottom floor except for Arekhon. He was, at least nominally, a scholar-savant under

Mestra Elela Rosselin's patronage, and entitled to maintain private chambers elsewhere at her expense.

But those closest to the Mestra knew him—by face if not by name—as the man responsible for House

Rosselin's domestic security, and they would expect to find such a one keeping his quarters under the

Mestra's roof. Arekhon, who had known the Mestra when she was still Elaeli Inadi syn-Peledaen,

considered himself fortunate in the arrangement.

The stairs ascending from the mansion's lower level were dark and narrow. Arekhon went up them with

the familiarity of long practice, and up the next set of stairs as well. These were wider, and lit by a

night-glow in a niche halfway along. The door at the top answered to a palmprint scan; Arekhon was one

of the people it recognized. He placed his right hand against the pad and the lock clicked open.

He passed through one darkened room, noting the dim shapes of chairs and cabinets and pieces of

unobjectionable art, all unchanged since his last visit, and through another, this one a private office

similarly unaltered, before he came to another door with a palmprint scan. Again he touched the pad,

and, when the lock answered, opened the door.

Elaeli was awake, though it took him a moment to spot her in the unlighted room. She wore a loose

bedrobe of dark fabric, and—standing as she did a little to one side of the window—seemed at first like

a part of the curtain that had been drawn aside. She looked around as he entered.

" 'Rekhe," she said. "I was wishing I dared to go looking for you. I couldn't sleep."

He crossed over to where she stood, and put an arm around her, so that she could lean her head against

his shoulder. She was as tall as he was, and her light brown curls were soft against his cheek.

She still wore her hair short, after the style of the sus-Peledaen fleet—it was almost the only part of her

past she'd been able to hang on to, he supposed. Arekhon had let his own black hair grow out long when

he left the fleet for the Demaizen Circle, and he hadn't cut it since, but Elaeli had more reason that he did

to cherish the older style.

She'd been a bright young light in the sus-Peledaen fleet—Pilot-Principal on the first exploratory voyage

to make contact beyond the Edge—until Lord Garrod and the Demaizen Circle had conscripted her into

the service of the great working. Arekhon was never sure whether her political maneuverings here on

Entibor sprang from honest ambition in search of an outlet, or from the need to bury a past that hurt too

much to remember.

"I'm here now," he said.

"I miss you when you're away downstairs."

"This is the city," he said. "If I stay in your rooms for the whole night, the servants will officially know, and

if the servants know, the scandal-rags will have it by nightfall."

"Damn the scandal-rags." She sounded tired, worn down with waiting for sleep that hadn't come.

"Fourteen years I've been here, 'Rekhe, and I still don't understand this place."

"Don't try. Just ride the luck, and trust it to carry you in the right direction." Which it would do, Arekhon

reflected; he had expended considerable energy over the years in working the eiran for this world, and

for Elaeli Inadi syn-Peledaen. The threads of his own luck were tangled and untended by comparison. He

would probably come to regret that one of these days, but not yet.

She made a disgruntled noise. "The Provost of Elicond doesn't believe in luck. He favors persistence."

"I know." Nothing could make Arekhon like the idea of the Provost's visit—Elaeli needed the Provost's

support in the complicated political intrigues of the Federated Quarter, and the Provost had asked for

axgene-link with House Rosselin in return. "Make it the three weeks requested, and that's an end," he

said, more to himself than to Elaeli.

"I hope that's long enough to suit him," Elaeli replied. "Because three weeks is about all I can handle

thinking about."

"Tell him all the security arrangements are for three weeks, and that it's too late to change them. Put the

blame on me if you have to."

"That's hardly fair."

He didn't bother telling Elaeli that nothing about their life together was fair; she already knew that as well

as he did. Instead, he told her, "I'll be absent from the city by then. Venner—" his second, a clever and

ambitious young man from the rough side of An-Jemayne "—has already been briefed on everything, and

you can trust him to handle whatever comes up."

"If you trained him, 'Rekhe, I'm sure he's good." She leaned against him for a moment in silence, looking

out at the dark, and then said, "As soon as the Provost is taken care of, I'm going to the country and

staying there for a while… will you stay there with me?"

"Yes," said Arekhon. Elaeli's summer cottage was isolated enough that the scandal-rags didn't bother

with it—at least not for something as commonplace as bedroom gossip. Arekhon thought of the pleasure

of waking beside Elaeli in the morning sunlight, and sighed.

You have to leave now, the woman in his dream had told him. It's almost time.

He did not think that she had been speaking of the house in An-Jemayne.

1:

ERAASI: DEMAIZEN OLD HALL; DEMAIZEN TOWN;

ERAASIAN FARSPACE ENTIBOR: ROSSELIN COTTAGE

Herin Arayet sus-Dariv took his rented groundcar around the last curve on the uphill drive to Demaizen

Old Hall. The burnt-out shell of the ruined building reared up against the sky ahead of him. A little later,

he saw a line of rusting metal hulks drawn up in good order on the overgrown gravel driveway, with

clingvine spreading over them and tall stalks of field weeds springing up around their treads.

He slowed the groundcar into a careful approach. He'd taken his usual precautions before setting out on

today's errand—a pocket-pistol concealed inside his jacket, a knife hidden up his sleeve, a note to the

family's Agent-Principal filed among his personal effects—but he knew that against Magecraft, such

measures would do him little good. And whatever had happened to the line of blasted and shattered

assault vehicles had been a Mage's work.

Nobody knew, or at least nobody admitted in public to knowing, exactly who had sent the private assault

team up against Garrod syn-Aigal and his Circle. The incident had taken place during the period of civil

unrest that had disturbed Eraasi's main continent over ten years before; but Demaizen had been an

independent Circle during that period, supported by Garrod's private fortune and not tied formally to any

particular faction or institution. True, they'd had an informal connection to the sus-Peledaen

fleet-family—Lord Natelth's younger brother had been one of the Demaizen Mages, and members of the

Circle had taken part in the sus-Peledaen exploratory voyage to the far side of the interstellar gap—but

such a connection should have given Demaizen more protection, rather than less.

The one thing Herin could say for certain about the attack was that neither side had survived the

encounter, and that no guilty parties had revealed themselves by coming in to clean Slings up afterward.

The house and grounds had passed into the hands of the Wide Hills District Wildlife Protection League,

according to Lord Garrod's testamentary wishes; and the League so far had operated strictly within the

boundaries of its charter, leaving the ruined Hall untouched.

Herin wasn't surprised. What the Mages wanted had a way of happening. Garrod had wanted the Old

Hall left alone, and alone it stayed, unaltered except by the elements. No graffiti marked its

smoke-stained walls, and no empty cans or broken bottles littered the shadowed ground beneath. Even

the local adolescents, it seemed, chose to go elsewhere for their amateur debaucheries.

He left his groundcar parked in the driveway and made his way up the front steps of the Hall and through

the great, broken doors. Inside was more destruction, cracked brick and burnt wood and more than

once a disturbing glimpse of something that looked like bone. He found the door that his contact had told

him about, a small one that opened onto a service stairway, and started down the narrow steps into the

basement.

"Syr Arayet."

The voice came from the darkness ahead of him. It was low and not unpleasant—a woman's voice, he

thought. A moment later, a light came on in the corridor. After a few seconds, he realized that the pale,

apparently sourceless glow actually came from a Mage's staff in the woman's right hand. He couldn't see

her face, and it took him another few seconds to realize that the blank, reflective darkness underneath the

hood of her black cloak was in fact a spacer's ship-combat hardmask.

"Etaze," he said, using the term of respect for a Magelord of high rank. Maybe this one was merely

somebody's Circle-Mage, disaffected enough to send along a request for a personal meeting. But if she

was not—if she was the First or even the Second of a major Circle, whether in Hanilat or in one of the

fleets—then she would need polite and careful handling. "Your message reached me only a short while

ago. I came as soon as I dared."

The woman chuckled, a surprisingly warm sound to come from behind the dark plastic of a combat

hardmask. "You mean you came as soon as you'd made sure that my message was genuine. Nobody's

ever called you a fool, Syr Arayet."

"I must need to work more on my presentation," he said. "What is it you wanted to talk with me about?"

"I heard that you were interested in what became of the Demaizen Circle."

Herin nodded. "I've only heard the rumors, and I'm curious."

"That all happened a long time ago. Why start asking questions about it now?"

"Call it a hobby," he said. "The past informs the present, and so forth."

There was a long pause. Herin could feel the woman's gaze assessing him from behind the unrevealing

hardmask.

"A present," she said finally, "in which the sus-Dariv are debating whether or not to deploy private ground

security forces as an auxiliary to their fleet arm."

He said nothing, though he was uncomfortably aware that the damp, cobwebby basement of Demaizen

Old Hall was the sort of place in which a too-curious researcher could conveniently disappear. Lord

Garrod's Circle had died there, as far as anyone could tell, and nobody had come to gather up their

bones. Another body moldering away in the dark would probably never be noticed.

"Don't worry," she said, as if his hidden trepidation had somehow manifested itself around him like an

aura. For all Herin knew, it could have. Mages saw things like that, where other people saw nothing but

plain air. "I still have some standards. If I'd wanted to do you harm, I wouldn't have come up with

anything half as melodramatic as this."

"I'm relieved to hear it, etaze."

"I'm sure you are," she said. "Now for the reason you came here: Ask me your questions, and I'll answer

them. At least, as much as I can and may."

"Very well," said Herin. "What happened to Lord Gar-rod's Circle?"

"Who sent the killers, do you mean?"

"Well, yes."

She shrugged. "The first time? No one knows. They're all dead."

"Yes, I know… what do you mean, 'the first time'? There was a second attack?"

"When the rest of the Circle came back from across the Gap Between. But the Hall had already burned

down by then."

Herin felt a brief flicker of intellectual vindication. Investigating the destruction of the Old Hall had been a

personal project. If he'd made it official, he would have had some trouble justifying his interest in a bit of

recent history that the family's less irregular agents had chosen to overlook. Already, though, he had

retrieved an interesting bit of previously uncollected knowledge—two bits, if he counted the implication

that the identity of the second group of attackers, unlike that of the first, was not unknown.

"You must have a theory about why the initial attack failed," he said.

"You think that this—" she used the hand that held the glowing staff to describe a vague circle,

presumably meant to include the entirety of the Hall "—was a failure?"

"If the attack had been a complete success, somebody would have taken credit for it. Nobody ever did."

Herin paused. He'd never intended to keep up his current pose as a hobby-researcher for very long—it

was a means of gaining entry, and little more—but he shied away from revealing his true interests quite so

bluntly. "I think that whoever sent in the strike team was afraid. Those assault vehicles up there were

blasted by Magecraft. They had to have been; there's no record anywhere of the Demaizen Circle having

weapons.

If one of Lord Garrod's Mages survived long enough to do something like that—"

"—then he or she might still be alive," said the woman. "And still angry."

"Yes."

"A good theory."

"I like to think so," said Herin. "What I don't know is who he was."

"Or she," said the woman. She gave a quiet laugh. "If it will make your mind easier, I can tell you that it

wasn't me."

"Can you tell me who—?"

"Delath syn-Arvedan died in the first attack," she said. "So did Lord Garrod and Serazao Zuleimem."

He knew the names of the Demaizen Circle, both the ones who had stayed behind on Eraasi and the

ones who had gone exploring with the sus-Peledaen across the interstellar gap; he'd made it his business

to find out when he began his researches. And he could do subtraction in his head as well as any man.

"Diasul," he said. "Kiefen Diasul."

Lulan Vai stayed behind in the shadows and watched the sus-Dariv agent make his way out of the ruins

and back down to the overgrown drive. He'd come to her for this meeting, not the other way around,

and she wasn't sure what that meant. She'd heard rumors that someone was asking questions about the

Old Hall, and about Lord Garrod's Circle—maybe she wasn't the sus-Radal's Agent-Principal anymore,

but she hadn't cut all ties with her old contacts in the shadow world of information gathering—and she

had taken steps to make certain that the questioner made contact with her.

Herin Arayet sus-Dariv had not been what she was expecting; To begin with, he wasn't a hireling. He

was a family member from one of the inner lines, and probably well-off enough in his own right that he

didn't need to work at all if he lacked the inclination to do so. She wondered what had induced him to

take up his peculiar hobby. Was he moved by concern for the family good, or by the pleasure of finding

out secret things—or had somebody high up in the inner family trained him for the work?

He was suited for it, Vai conceded, at least inasmuch as nobody would take him at first glance for one of

the sus-Dariv. That family ran to slightly built blonds and redheads, especially in the inner lines, and Syr

Arayet was dark and wiry and at least a head taller than the average. Something about the man continued

to nag at her as she withdrew from the ruins of the Old Hall and made her way back to Dema-izen

Town.

She kept a rented room there, upstairs from an all-night staples-and-sundries shop. The name on the

lease wasn't hers, of course, except in the sense that she'd created the identity and used it off and on for

over a decade. She'd wanted to have a bolt-hole available somewhere outside of Hanilat, and it had

made sense, or so she told herself, to set one up where she could keep an eye on the Old Hall as well.

The manager of the sundries shop collected the rent and watched over the place for her when she was

absent.

The cloak and hardmask Vai had worn at the Old Hall were out of sight in her daypack by the time she

reached town. The staff wasn't as easily concealed, so she didn't bother. As far as the townspeople were

concerned, her local persona claimed affiliation with a minor Circle someplace in Hanilat, the kind of

Circle whose members all had day jobs and only came together for fellowship and the occasional minor

working.

She stopped in the sundries shop to buy a pack of candles and exchange greetings with the night clerk,

then went on upstairs to her room. She'd told the store manager that she was a field investigator for the

Wildlife Protection League, using the small apartment as a place to rest and write up reports in between

assignments, and she'd fixed up the room with that identity in mind: locally purchased secondhand

furniture mixed in with a scattering of folk-art pieces from the Antipodes and the northern territories;

bedspread and curtains made of hand-spun fibers block-printed in traditional patterns; maps and journals

Debra Doyle & James MacDonald - Mageworlds 07 - A Working of Stars

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: