Debra Doyle & James MacDonald - Mageworlds 06 - The Stars Asunder

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In memory of Vickie Bunnell, Dennis Joos, Les Lord, and Scott Phillips;

and with gratitude to Jeff Caulder, John Fifer, Robert Haase, and Wayne Sanders.

Lives spent in service, and not forgotten.

Author's Preface

(for those who have been here before)

I. So There We Were…

In the Republic of Panama. It was the mid-eighties. Macdonald was nearing the end of a career

in the US Navy and Doyle was teaching freshman composition at the University of Florida extension

campus. And new English-language science fiction wasn't easy to find. The tropical sun did something to

our brains, and we started writing short stories, mostly for our own amusement. Or, to be more accurate,

Doyle started writing them.

One of the stories-a vignette, really-dealt with a young lady named Beka who'd just been given a

spaceship by her father. Odd and exciting doings were hinted at. Macdonald enjoyed reading the story

(as did our friend Sherwood Smith, a writer in California with whom we shared our manuscripts).

Macdonald got to like Beka, and pestered Doyle for the next story about her. Doyle, who was absorbed

by that time in another project, said words to the effect of, "If you want another story, write it yourself."

So Beka landed her spaceship, and spent some twenty double-spaced pages working through all

the routine of clearing a cargo through customs in a foreign port, before a booted foot slammed

unexpectantly into her knee, knocking her to the ground so that an assassin's shot would miss her head.

The boot belonged to a mild-mannered, elderly gentleman with a mysterious past. He and Beka went on

to have adventures together.

Doyle took the manuscript, cut out the twenty-page meticulously detailed depiction of filling out

paperwork in a government office, poured a bottle of bleach over the purple prose, and said, "Well, go

on." The first part of the story went off to California, where Sherwood likewise read it and called for

more. Two hundred pages later, we were still calling the piece "the short story" (being at that point still

unclear on the concept of "novel-length") and the older gentleman had gained a name. He was the

"Professor." The Prof and Beka continued to have adventures, mailed off to California at the rate of one

every couple of weeks, with each episode ending with a cliff-hanger. The new episode would go off by

mail to California, Sherwood would reply "Arrrgh!" and we'd be off for the next round.

Move forward a few years of real time. Macdonald was out of the Navy, and was living with

Doyle in New Hampshire, far removed from the tropics. They had written and published eight

young-adult novels. Their method was pretty much the same one that they had developed while working

on the "short story." Macdonald would write a first draft/outline, Doyle would put it into English, and then

they'd argue about the details. They were both between projects and that collection of pages about Beka

and the Professor looked like it could be made into a real novel.

So, as they say, it came to pass. The Price of the Stars was published as a paperback original

in 1992. By the end of the novel, the Professor was dead.

But you can't keep a good character down. The Prof had a lot of mysterious past to explore. In

the third Mageworlds book, By Honor Betray'd we finally learned his true name-Arekhon Khreseio

sus-Khalgaeth sus-Peledaen-and in the prequel volume, The Gathering Flame, we met him as Ser

Hafrey, Armsmaster to House Rosselin. His influence extended, in fact, throughout the entire series, so

that Doyle eventually asserted that if she ever wrote another Mageworlds book, it would be about the

Professor as a young… well, as a young whatever he really was, way back then on the other side of the

galaxy.

II. The Dark on the Other Side

Which brings us to the present work. When we came to write this volume, we realized that in the

course of five Mageworlds novels we had scarcely visited the Mageworlds themselves at all. Beka

Rosselin-Metadi and Nyls Jessan touched ground briefly on Raamet and Ninglin and Eraasi; Errec

Ransome was held prisoner for a short while on Cracanth; but little more than that.

And our characters, by and large, were not going to give us any sympathy when we felt guilty.

From the viewpoint of the civilized galaxy-as the worlds which later became the Republic and its allies

liked to think of themselves-the Mageworlds were a menace, home to a faceless enemy.

"The Mageworlds" was not even the raiders' own name for their place of origin. The name they

used, most of the time, was simply "the homeworlds." Sometimes they, or the more politically aware

among their adversaries, would call themselves "Eraasians," from the dominant planet in their loose

confederation.

Even more than the Mageworlds' attempts at conquest, the metaphysical differences between the

two cultures set them at odds. In the civilized galaxy, those who worked with and through the power

inherent in the universe called themselves Adepts. Their philosophy favored individual action over

collective effort, and they believed in riding the natural flow of power in the universe and letting that flow

add to their own strengths.

On their own worlds, the Adepts were historically regarded with both distrust and superstitious

awe. As a consequence, they became, as a group, inclined toward secrecy and the protection of their

own. Tradition set the Adepts apart from formal involvement in political life; during certain periods,

however, their informal participation was considerable. The years during and immediately after the First

Magewar were especially noteworthy in this regard.

The Mages, as they referred to themselves (their enemies then expanded the term to cover an

entire society, and not merely a comparative few of its members), were integrated into the public life of

their worlds as the more solitary Adepts never were. Believing in group action and in the combination of

forces toward a single effort, the Mages regarded the power resident in the universe as something to be

manipulated and worked with directly. For the Adepts, on the other hand, actually making changes in the

flow of power, or attempting to impose a pattern on that flow, was regarded as nothing less than an

abomination-"sorcery," as Llannat Hyfid describes it when she first feels it in action on Darvell;

"Magework and dark sorcery."

Another philosophical dividing point between the two cultures came on the question of luck. The

philosophy of the Adepts, in its strictest form, holds that there is no such thing as luck at all, only the

natural flow of power in the universe. Those people who are spoken of by others as "lucky" are regarded

by the Adepts as having an innate sense of this power flow, of where it goes and of when and how it is

about to change. Even among people who believe in luck in its more casual sense, there is no feeling that

luck is subject to conscious manipulation.

The Mages, on the other hand, view luck as something real in itself, and inextricably bound up

with human life. Grand Admiral sus-Airaalin of the Mageworlds Resurgency speaks of Beka

Rosselin-Metadi as a "luck-maker"; something of the same quality, in the Mages' view, also attaches to

her father, Jos Metadi, "whose luck two generations of Magelords had tried in vain to break." The forces

of life and luck together make up the eiran, perceived by working Mages as a network of silver cords.

Attempts on a Mage-Circle's part to untangle the eiran of a particular place, or to bring them into a more

pleasing pattern, are often experienced by Adepts as unnatural changes or damage to the natural flow of

power. In the aftermath of the First Magewar, these philosophical differences-and, of course, the

atrocities committed by the Mageworlders on Ilarna and Sapne and Entibor-almost proved fatal to the

Eraasian worlds. Driven by a need for security and a desire for revenge, the military forces of the

victorious Republic did their best to reduce Eraasian industrial capacity below the level necessary to

wage interstellar war. At the same time, Errec Ransome and his Adepts strove to break the

Mage-Circles and eliminate their practices from the civilized galaxy. The combined result was not so

much a period of occupation and pacification as it was-to quote the Ilarnan scholar Vinhalyn, who

observed the process as a young officer with the Republic's Space Force-"the systematic destruction of a

culture cognate to ours, yet unimaginably alien."

III. Concerning the Sundering of the Galaxy

A great expanse of starless space separates the Mageworlds from the rest of the galaxy. In

Mageworlds legend, this interstellar gap was the product of the Sundering of the Galaxy, a catastrophic

event with theological or metaphysical roots, prior to which the gap did not exist. The story of the

Sundering also exists on the other side of the gap, although the versions current in the rest of the galaxy

differ considerably in their details. Whatever the actual cause and origin of the interstellar gap, it looms

much larger in Mageworlds thinking than it does in the greater galactic culture. Some scholars conclude

therefore that Eraasi and the other Mageworlds suffered more than the rest of the galaxy from the effects

of the Sundering, and thus retained more memories, however distant, of the actual event. Others take the

opposite position, and assert that the Sundering's effect on the rest of the galaxy was so much greater that

on those worlds proportionately more memory of the event was lost.

IV. Other Cultural Changes

The astute reader will notice a number of differences, both small and large, between the Eraasian

worlds as they appear at this earlier point in their history and as they became by the time of the First and

Second Magewars. The Eraasian language provides an instructive example. Five hundred years, give or

take (and depending upon which planet's revolution is used to define the term), separate the events

chronicled in this book from those of the later Magewars; Eraasian speech did not go unchanged in the

interim. The reader should note especially the tendency toward greater diphthongization over time, as

exemplified in Rayamet vice the later Raamet. Also contrast the family name sus-Khalgath with its later

spelling (as derived from Ignac' LeSoit's pronunciation) sus-Khalgaeth.

Noticeable changes also occurred in Circle garb and procedure during the five-hundred-year

gap. Readers will notice the absence, in earlier times, of the geaerith, or full-face mask. The

Mage-Circles of Llannat Hyfid's and Mael Taleion's day justify the use of the mask as allowing a clearer

perception of the eiran. More recently gathered historical evidence suggests-in view of the fact that the

geaerith also provides its wearer with anonymity-that the change had its roots in political developments

in the Eraasian hegemony.

Also worth noting are the differing conceptions of the relationship between hyperspace and the

Void. In the rest of the civilized galaxy, technology and cosmology draw a careful distinction between

hyperspace (as traveled through by starships) and the Void (as visited but mostly steered clear of by

Adepts). Eraasians, however, view the two places/phenomena as essentially the same.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Marina and Sherwood and Thyme, for beta-reading the

manuscript; Norman and Marian, for letting us hold down a table at the Red Lantern Cafe while we

drank coffee and worked on revisions; and Gregory Feeley, for coming up with a title when our minds

remained obstinately blank.

Prologue

This is the story's true beginning. On other worlds and in other places they tell it

differently, but nowhere has it been altogether forgotten.

In the years when the worlds first bore life, the galaxy was all one. The eiran-the silver

cords of life and luck-wound unbroken throughout all the aspects of human existence. They bound

life to life, and world to world, and past to future, and the pattern was all of one weaving.

But the people of the many worlds grew lazy, and failed to tend the eiran as they should

have done, and as had been their task from the beginning. The eiran turned wild, and grew and

changed until the pattern was no longer of one weaving but of many, and the cords in the many

patterns pulled and twisted in all directions.

"Look," said some of the people, the clear-sighted ones. "The one pattern has been

destroyed through our careless inattention, and who can say what the consequences of that may

be." The others never listened. They no longer saw the one pattern even in the many weavings,

but each of them saw a single and separate pattern, and tended only the eiran that lay within it.

"See now," the clear-sighted ones told them. "The threads in the one pattern grow tight

and tangled, and the strain on the weaving is greater than it can hold. If the pattern is not mended

now it will pass away from us."

But still the others would not listen.

And the day came when the threads of the pattern snapped, and the eiran flew wide across

the face of the universe like floss on the wind, and the two halves of the galaxy were ripped apart

and flung away one from the other, and the people were blinded to the sight of the silver cords

that had perished from their lack of tending.

Of those who had been clear-sighted, only a few remained. All of the rest were lost, and

their worlds with them.

I : Year 1116 Eraasian Reckoning

Eraasi: Hanilat Starport

Demaizen Old Hall

Ribbon-of-Starlight, foremost guardship in the sus-Peledaen fleet, waited on the landing field at

Hanilat like a dark, angular bird. She was the largest family ship that could actually touch the soil of

Eraasi. The merchant ships she escorted were bigger-huge constructs, hold-swollen with cargo-but they

never left orbit. The shuttles that would bring up the flats and bales and crates of tradeware clustered like

nestlings on the burnt ground next to the Ribbon's protective bulk.

Arekhon Khreseio sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen, riding out to the guardship in the back

compartment of an open land-hauler, gave the shuttles nothing more than, a cursory glance.

Ribbon-of-Starlight-his home for the remainder of his fleet apprenticeship-claimed the greater part of his

attention. She was a new ship, no more than a couple of voyages old, but already known for a lucky one.

'Rekhe squinted at her, trying for the catch and angle of sunlight that would let him see the eiran

wrapping and weaving around her.

A moment… there… yes. To the right eyes, Ribbon-of-Starlight was rich with luck, hung about

with it in lacework so thick it looked like silvery gauze.

Arekhon himself was a slight, dark-haired youth. He'd worked with the fleet Circle in Hanilat

since he was first able to count his age in two digits, but now that he was, by everyone's reckoning, old

enough to make a full commitment to the Mages, his duty to the family came first. His brother Natelth

was the head of the sus-Peledaen family's senior line, and Natelth wanted 'Rekhe to go through his

apprenticeship in the fleet… so an apprentice, perforce, 'Rekhe would have to be, and the Circles could

wait until later.

"Here you are."

'Rekhe blinked, and the luck-lines went away, leaving the Ribbon looming stark black as before,

only much nearer. A door was open high on one curving side, and a narrow metal ladder led up to it.

"Thank you," he said politely to the driver of the land-hauler, collected his duffel, and climbed out

of the back compartment onto the ground. The hauler sped off on its next errand. 'Rekhe shouldered his

duffel and started climbing.

A young man in a blue work coverall was waiting for him when he reached the top of the ladder.

The crimson piping and insignia on the man's coverall told 'Rekhe that he was a clerk-tertiary, not long

out of his own training days.

"Arekhon sus-Khalgath?" the clerk said.

"Reporting for instruction, sir." Everyone outranked an apprentice-even when the apprentice

came from the family's senior line-and 'Rekhe took pains to keep his voice respectful. Natelth had made

it plain that he would not have his younger brother disgracing the family by causing trouble and

discontent.

"Come with me." The clerk-tertiary led the way into the coiling three-dimensional labyrinth of the

Ribbon's interior, and 'Rekhe followed.

He tried to memorize the route as they went, but in spite of his efforts he knew that he would

have to spend time with the ship's map-models later. The ground-based portion of his prentice-training

had given him an understanding of the basic principles of ship construction, but each ship had its own set

of variations on the common design.

The clerk-tertiary halted before an airtight door like all the others they had passed by, or through,

on the way inward.

"Prentice berthing," he said. "Stow your gear and report to the junior wardroom in an hour."

With that, he departed, leaving 'Rekhe to confront the door alone. Fortunately, it was merely

closed, rather than dogged down tight. 'Rekhe pulled it open and stepped over the sill.

The compartment held four bunks, stacked two deep on either side of the door. Corresponding

lockers filled the rest of the available space along the bulkheads. The bunks were rigged with the

cushions and webbing to double as acceleration couches.

A girl sat cross-legged on one of the lower bunks, reading a flatbook and making notes on the

margin-pad with a stylus. She wore prentice livery like 'Rekhe's own-more dark blue trimmed with

crimson-and her short brown hair curled around her bent head in a loose mop. She looked up as 'Rekhe

stepped into the compartment.

"It's first-come, first-served on the bunks," she said. "You might as well take the bottom one on

the other side before somebody else does."

"I like the top bunks," said 'Rekhe. "Nobody steps on your face every night and morning."

The girl shrugged. "No accounting for taste. I'm Elaeli Inadi, by the way."

"Arekhon sus-Khalgath," he said, sketching a bow.

And the eiran that had hung like cobwebs around Ribbon-of-Starlight's dark metal hull began

to weave themselves into a newer pattern.

On the day that the Ribbon left Eraasi for her trading voyage to Ildaon and beyond, Serazao

Zulemem was at work in the outer office of the Harradi Group, a firm of legalists specializing in the

financial affairs of Eraasi's middle and upper nobility. The Demaizen estate was about to pass into the

hands of its final inheritor, and Serazao had drawn the work of sorting and filing all the hardcopy that the

case had generated during two decades of legal contests.

Serazao's parents, Alescu and Evya, had come to Hanilat from Eraasi's antipodal subcontinent

because well-trained legalists-and they were both well-trained-could prosper in the employ of the

merchants and star-lords who made the city their base of operations. Her father soon achieved

membership in the Harradi Group; her mother, more combative by nature, kept her own office as a

court-litigant.

Serazao herself was a quiet, industrious child. From the time she was old enough to make plans

for her future and have others take them seriously, she intended to become a legalist like her parents. To

that end, as soon as she reached the age of employment, she worked part time-full time during the school

intervals-at her father's firm.

The litigation concerning the Demaizen estate had come near to outlasting the family lines that

contended for it. Serazao knew from her parents' dinner-table conversation that only the death from old

age of one of the parties involved had brought the matter to a conclusion. Now the remaining heir was

required to present himself at Harradi's offices to take possession… in this case, of a portfolio full of

deeds and account-books.

Nobody had bothered to mention that the last of the sus-Demaizen line was also a Mage; or if

they had, they'd done it so long ago that Serazao had not been there to hear. From the length of time that

the estate had been in the hands of the legalists, she assumed that its ultimate heir would be another one

like the deceased claimant, whom she'd had the misfortune once to meet: Elderly, avaricious,

ill-tempered, and infirm, with more money already in his possession than any one man could reasonably

think to spend.

Garrod syn-Aigal was not what she'd expected at all.

Her first impression, when he came into the outer office, was that he was the heir's driver, or

perhaps his bodyguard: A big man, broad in the shoulders and firmly muscled, but with none of the

clumsiness that so often came with strength. He wore plain street clothes, of good quality but far from

new, with a long weather-coat thrown over them. It was the middle of Hanilat's rainy season-she

remembered the date ever afterward, very clearly-and both the coat and the loose-brimmed hat he wore

with it shed water in puddles on the office floor.

He paused inside the door, still dripping, and looked about with a searching expression that

lightened when he saw her at work behind the office-bar.

"Good morning, Syr-"

"Zulemem," she said, and then, in reply to his unspoken question, "There's a coatrack in the

corner behind you."

He smiled, which made his heavy dark eyebrows bristle even more fiercely than they did already.

She didn't like men with thick eyebrows-she preferred an elegant antipodal arch, like her father had, or

her cousins-but the newcomer's good humor made them, and the roughness of the features around them,

surprisingly attractive.

"Ah. So there is. Thank you, Syr Zulemem."

"Serazao," she said, as he pulled off the coat and the hat and hung them up on the polished brass

hooks of the coat-rack. With the coat out of the way, she caught her first glimpse of the short wooden

staff that the man wore clipped to his belt. Seeing it, she frowned.

He was quick; he caught the change in her expression almost before the muscles of her face

made their fractional changes to echo the shift within her mind.

"Is there something wrong?"

"No," she said hastily, "nothing wrong. I didn't realize that syn-Aigal had a Mage-Circle on his

side, is all."

"He doesn't, not really." He smiled again. "Or I don't, at least-and I was Garrod syn-Aigal the

last time I looked."

She felt the blood rising in her face. If any of the office partners found out that she had, at least by

implication, insulted their client… "I'm sorry; I was impertinent."

"You told the truth as you saw it, Syr Zulemem. No impertinence there."

"Maybe not for you," she said. "But I want to work here someday, when my schooling's

finished."

His eyebrows went up again. "You don't look like a legalist to me."

"Oh?" Irritation flared; she frowned at him, never minding what the office partners might have to

say. He hadn't looked like a man who would pay heavy-handed compliments of that sort, and it was

depressing to find out otherwise. "What do I look like, then?"

Once again, he surprised her. "A Mage."

"You're joking."

"About that, never."

"I couldn't-"

"There should be a Circle working near your school," he said. "Ask your instructors; one of them

will know. And when you've trained in Hanilat long enough, come to Demaizen Old Hall and ask for me.

I'll be building a Circle there."

The wet weather that had been merely annoying in Hanilat was chilly and unseasonable in the

Wide Hills district several days later. On the road going up past Demaizen Town, the rain slanted down

cold and hard in the driving beams of Gar-rod's heavy six-wheel groundcar. The vehicle bumped along

over the muddy track, then turned the corner in a cut braced by stone shoring and began growling up the

final slope.

"There it is," Garrod said. He pointed to the massive stone pile that loomed among its

outbuildings at the crest of a long hill. "Demaizen Old Hall."

The driver grunted, unimpressed. "I see it."

The main gate stood open in a twist of rusted iron. The groundcar passed slowly through, and

kept on until the road ended in front of the heavy bronze doors of the central building. The beams from

the groundcar's driving lamps picked up the Hall's blank windows, its moss- and lichen-spattered walls.

Everything here was untended and overgrown, even the road itself; weeds poked up knee-high through

what had once been the gravel surface of a circular driveway.

The driver switched the engine to neutral, and the sound dropped to a low throb. "Here you are."

"Thanks, Yuva," Garrod said. He pushed open the passenger-side door. The wind took it,

smashing it fully open against the front engine cowling. The rain stung like needles and plastered Garrod's

hair flat in an instant. He jumped out of the groundcar, his staff swinging from his belt, and ran the ten feet

to the doors.

The arched opening gave at least some protection from the wind, but the doors were locked.

Garrod frowned. The keys had not been part of the inheritance.

He undipped his staff. A moment's preparation, a reaching-out and a pulling-in, and the staff

began to give off a steady blue-white light. He touched the door and bent his energies toward persuading

it to open, but to no avail-the locks were rusted fast, their mechanisms destroyed by more than a

generation without maintenance.

Garrod sprinted back to where Yuvaen waited in the groundcar. "Back her up to the doors," he

shouted above the howling wind.

"Got it."

The groundcar lurched forward, then swung back and to the left. Its wheels ground and bumped

up the shallow steps until the rear towing bar nearly touched the bronze doors.

Garrod opened the cargo compartment and pulled out the tow chain. He threaded it through the

handles of the doors, linked it with a clevis bolt to the rings on the towing bar, and stepped aside.

"Yuva! Ahead slow!"

The groundcar sent out a puff of chemical vapor from its upper tubes, and growled forward.

Hinges and bolts gave way behind it in a howl of tearing metal, and the bronze doors buckled under the

strain. "Hold up!" Garrod shouted.

The groundcar stopped. Yuvaen shut off the engine and emerged from the driver's side.

"Give us a light," Garrod said. "Let's see how it looks."

"Right." Yuvaen had brought an electric lantern with him from the groundcar. He turned it on and

lifted it to shine a yellow light at the doors of the hall-the right-hand one pulled entirely away from the

frame, the one on the left tilted crazily and hanging by a single hinge. He cast a gloomy eye over the

damage. "It'll cost you a pretty to have those fixed."

"I've got all the money I need," Garrod said. "What I don't have is time. Come on."

The two men entered the Hall. White-sheeted furniture stood ghostlike in the foyer. Dust lay

thick, and gnawing creatures had worked on much of the interior woodwork. Garrod pointed through an

arch to where a staircase went curling upward.

"There," he said, and started up toward the long gallery on the second floor. Yuvaen followed.

At the entrance to the gallery, both men paused on the threshold. Their rain-soaked clothing

clung to their bodies like wet leaves, and the glow from Yuvaen's lantern cast a swaying circle of yellow

light on the space within, where the sus-Demaizen kept their tablets of remembrance.

Plaques and memorials covered the walls-ancient slabs of grey slate scratched with names in a

language no longer spoken by anyone living, and newer tablets of painted wood and cast metal. On the

altars beneath them, long-guttered candles spilled out their wax across carven wood.

Garrod strode into the center of the room, where a small altar stood in front of a freestanding

memorial on tripod legs. The candle holders were empty-whoever had last tended the memorial had

scraped them clean when the rite was done-and a spray of white flowers, long since dried, lay on the

altar between them.

"This is an end and a breaking," Garrod said. With that he picked up the memorial and flung it out

through one of the high, west-looking windows in the center of the long wall. The window glass gave way

in a jagged, shivering peal, and the memorial went crashing down onto the gravel drive outside.

"Wait!" Yuvaen cried over the noise. "Hasn't there been enough broken already?"

Garrod put his hands against the wooden altar and shoved it toward the broken window. "No,"

he said. "Not enough by half. Before I am done, I will break our very universe."

The altar smashed against the low sill and tumbled over it to the ground below. Rain poured in

through the gap in the window, driven slantwise by the rising wind.

"Your ancestors will curse you," Yuvaen said.

"My ancestors mean nothing to me," Garrod said, "and I mean nothing to them." He pulled

another of the tablets from the wall, and the dried wood splintered in his hands. He threw the tablet out

onto the gravel with the other wreckage. "I am the last of my line, and what follows after will follow the

older days."

"I don't understand."

"The sundering of the galaxy is not just a parable, or an allegory suitable for children and

scholars," Garrod said. He was pulling tablet after tablet away from the plastered walls, working now

with a fierce, unstoppable intensity. "It is nothing less than the truth. And I intend to bring together that

which was split apart."

Yuvaen shook his head. "You're right not to fear your ancestors. It's the gods themselves that

you should fear."

Garrod fished in his pocket and pulled out an incendiary, of the kind used by workers in the

metal and construction trades. He pulled the igniter and tossed the incendiary down onto the tangle of

broken wood on the gravel drive. A brilliant white light blossomed up, mixed shortly after with red as the

wood caught fire. The western windows glowed with the color.

Garrod heaved another wooden tablet out of the broken window and into the flames. "I don't

have time to fear the gods, Yuva-you'll have to do it for me. Come, help me clean out this space, for here

will be our workroom."

"May the gods forgive me, then," Yuvaen said. "Because I'm with you."

The two men embraced, then fell to stripping the walls of their memorials, and clearing the floor

of its altars.

II : Year 1116 E. R.

Eraasi: Western Fishing Grounds syn-Grevi estate,

Northern Territories

Ildaon: Ildaon Starport

The deep-water fleets from Amisket, Demnag, and Ridkil Point had been having a bad summer.

Like most of the coastal settlements in the Veredden Archipelago, the three towns depended for a

livelihood on their commercial fisheries, and a poor haul meant a lean year to come. In autumn, the fish

migrated to spawning grounds near the equator-too great a distance for the Veredden ships to follow,

even if biological changes during the spawn didn't turn the fish sour and spongy-and winter in the northern

latitudes was too stormy for surface craft to ply the waters at all. Winter was for spending the long nights

snug in harbor, making repairs and hoping that the money from last summer's catch would last until

spring. As First of the Amisket Circle, Narin Iyal took the season's lack of good fishing harder than

most, and most were taking it hard. It was her Circle's place to provide fish-luck and weather-luck, and

to tell the captains of the fleet where the silver was running. But all she could tell the captains now was

that the fish had abandoned their usual grounds, and she had no idea where they might be.

The nets of the deep-sea trawler Dance-and-be-Joyful trailed astern, and the lines still had the

slack of an empty haul. The crew lounged in the shadow of the deckhouse, playing cards. The engines

throbbed ahead slow.

Narin stood on the main deck, staring over the rail at a horizon made dim by haze, and at the

rolling blue waters beneath the empty sky. She was a short dark woman with a square snub-nosed face

and calloused hands. The sun, just past its zenith, burned down upon her neck and shoulders. Other than

the wind of the ship's passage, no breeze ruffled her hair.

Narin looked up at the distant line where sea met sky. A set of masts there, black lines against

the paler sky, told where First-Light-of-Morning ran, hull down, tracing a parallel course. They'd had

no better luck than the Dance, she was sure.

"You asked for me?"

The familiar baritone rumble belonged to Big Tarn, Second of the Amisket Circle. Tam was a

dark-skinned, wide-shouldered man, and in his many-times-laundered work shirt and loose trousers he

looked more like the son and grandson of deep-sea fishers-which he also was-than like a ranking Mage.

He'd been with the Circle for almost as long as Narin had, and had been her Second since the beginning.

Narin looked back out at the water. The sunlight sparked painfully bright on the blue swells.

"Yes," she said. "If we don't want children going hungry in Amisket by year's end, it's time we did

something about our luck."

"I agree."

"Good. Call the others to the meditation room. We will have a working."

The meditation room on Dance-and-be-Joyful was a cramped space set forward belowdecks.

It was far narrower and more confining than such a room should have been, even for a small Circle like

Narin's, and its atmosphere was a malodorous slurry of machine oil, fish, and rank sweat. But space for

the Circle was carved out of the Dance's cargo hold, and every cubic inch taken away from storage cost

the ship's master money when the fish were running.

Narin made her way below, stopping by her cabin to change into her robes and pick up a

small-scale chart of the fishing grounds. As First of the Circle, she had her own quarters. The rest of the

Amisket Mages shared crew's berthing, though they stood no watches and hauled no lines.

She took the paper chart forward to the meditation room. In spite of the summer heat above

decks, the air inside the room was cold, chilled by the heavy-duty cargo refrigeration system in the

adjacent compartment, and condensation beaded and ran down the bulkheads in a steady, relentless

trickle. A single incandescent light illuminated the white circle painted on the deck.

Laros, the older of the Circle's two unranked Mages, was already there, dressed in formal robes,

with his staff clipped to his belt. In a moment, Tam and young Kasaly arrived as well. Narin swung the

door to behind them and dogged it shut.

"The time has come," she said, "for a working. To make our own luck, and force the gathering of

the fish.""Past time," Kasaly said. Kas was red-haired and pretty, and a great favorite with the sailors.

Her luck-making was among the best, however, and Narin suspected that she had it in her to be First

herself someday, provided that she learned enough patience and discipline first.

"Are we all agreed, then?" Narin asked-a formality, mostly, since it was a poor First who

couldn't gauge the temper of her own Circle. It was her right, as First, to direct their combined intention,

but she wasn't foolish enough to push them where they were determined not to go.

As she'd expected, nobody raised an objection.

"Good." She walked to her usual place in the arc of the white-painted circle closest to the

Dance's bow, and knelt on the welded metal deckplates. On that cue, the rest of the Mages took their

customary positions: Tam opposite her, Kas to her right, Laros to her left.

"As we are gathered," she said, "so we are one."

She turned away from her physical surroundings and looked inward, searching the

three-dimensional world of the sea for the streaky feeling of the fish's lives. She could sense the others

searching as well-Tam strong and steady, Laros knife-blade sharp, and Kas like a bright flame of luck in

the deep water. Now she had to draw them together like one of the purse seines that the trawlers used,

combining all their energies to bring both the fish and luck in taking them into one physical spot.

"Seek them, hold them, bring and bind them," she said. "We are one." The circle pulsed in the

depths like a ring of silver, marking the darting presence of the fish. "Find the place. Join them and lock

them to a place."

"We need to be stronger," Tarn said. His voice seemed to come from far away, outside of the

sea-deeps where the minds of the Circle made their search. "To find the place so that the boats can find

it." "I'll give to the working," Narin said. "Who will match me?"

"I will," Tam replied.

He stood, bringing his staff up before him. Narin did the same, and felt the power of the universe

surging around her, ready to be taken like the fish she sought. She drew the power into herself and let it

flow out again redoubled, making her staff shine with a deep green fire. Blue fire answered from the other

side of the tiny space. The same current that flowed through Narin like one of the rolling seas beneath the

ship, flowed now through her Second as well.

The two staves met with a crack. Narin saw the luck fly out from them like rainbows, and felt a

surge of joy. This would be a good working, a strong working-the congruence of the inner and the outer

worlds would guarantee its success.

Again Tam attacked; again she countered, then counterattacked. They pressed together, striving

to create and make manifest the luck of the fleet through the essential contradiction of the universe

opposing itself. Sweat rolled down their necks in spite of the physical chill of the space, and their

breathing grew hoarse and ragged.

Then, as quickly as the energy had risen, it flared in a last bright dazzle and fell away. Narin

stepped back.

"It's done," she said. "I have them."

She reached into her shirt pocket underneath her robe and pulled out a pencil stub and the chart

of the fishing grounds. She drew a neat dot on the chart, circled it, and wrote a time beside it. Then she

drew more circled dots, and wrote more times. The dots and times, when she had finished, represented

where the fish had been, were, and would be. The pattern showed an eastward drift at slow speed.

"So that's why we couldn't find anything," Tam said, watching over her shoulder as she worked.

A fisherman and a fishers' Mage for many years, he knew that the location lay well outside the fleet's

usual grounds, farther to the west of the island homeports than anyone had expected.

Narin refolded the chart and tucked it back into her shirt pocket.

"Rest," she said to the other Mages. "I'll take this to the Captain. He'll want to inform the fleet."

The sus-Peledaen convoy guarded by Ribbon-of-Starlight made its first trading stop at Ildaon.

The chief exports of Ildaon were mineral pigments, raw textiles, and exotic furs; in return, the Ildaonese

bought second-cut red uffa to blend with the harsher native leaf, and luxury-model flyers of Eraasian

design. Captain syn-Avran allowed members of the guard-ship's crew to go on liberty in the port city, as

long as they kept out of trouble. Arekhon sus-Khalgath and Elaeli Inadi were in the next-to-last group to

go. They wore their best apprentice livery for the occasion-inconvenient, if someone on Ildaon had it

in for traders, but useful if a port official or a fellow crewmember needed to spot them quickly in a

crowd. They also wore sus-Peledaen ship-cloaks of dark blue lined with crimson. Ildaon's starport was

situated on a high northern plateau, and the season was local winter.

A traders' hostel at the edge of the landing field provided lodging for star-travelers, as well as for

operators of Ildaonese ground and air transport. Arekhon, Elaeli, and the others in their group stopped

there first. A bored-looking desk clerk assigned them rooms and changed their family scrip for local

currency.

The rooms were small and bare: A bed, access to sanitary facilities, and a door that locked.

'Rekhe was accustomed to better; even aboard Ribbon-of-Starlight, the quarters were crowded but far

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