Read A Working of Stars Online
Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald
A Working of Stars (3 page)
Herin Arayet sus-Dariv.
The name emerged unbidden out of her thoughts, not as a distraction but as something to be dealt with, a part of the unsettled state of mind that had led her to this meditation in the first place. She considered the name, and marked how the words insinuated themselves into the weave of the
eiran
as she watched. The silver threads caught hold of the name, and ran in and out of it like vines on a wrought-iron fence.
eiran
as she watched. The silver threads caught hold of the name, and ran in and out of it like vines on a wrought-iron fence.
Vai smiled at their eagerness. The
eiran
knew Syr Arayet, whether Syr Arayet knew them or not.
eiran
knew Syr Arayet, whether Syr Arayet knew them or not.
She considered the matter a little longer, then pulled on the cords enough to twist and lodge them yet more firmly into the man’s name and his place in the pattern—working the luck, just a little, for a man who was, in some sense, a colleague in a dangerous profession. And if more should ever come of it than that, well, the universe had a strange sense of humor sometimes, and she herself had first come to the Demaizen Circle as a spy for the sus-Radal.
Satisfied, she let her thoughts move outward from the troubles of the present, following the
eiran
as they traced their patterns through time and space. Arekhon sus-Khalgath had seen the pattern of the great working, the binding-together of the sundered galaxy, both as it stood now and as it would come to completion—but ’Rekhe was on the far side of the galaxy and not likely to be coming home soon no matter how much she wished for him.
eiran
as they traced their patterns through time and space. Arekhon sus-Khalgath had seen the pattern of the great working, the binding-together of the sundered galaxy, both as it stood now and as it would come to completion—but ’Rekhe was on the far side of the galaxy and not likely to be coming home soon no matter how much she wished for him.
She needed him, though; the working needed him. The Circles were changing, moving away from what they had been …
we served all of the people once, she thought; it was that way even when I was a child. Now the fleet-families and the merchant-combines want to make us tend the luck for them alone and not for the whole world, and I don’t know enough about the old ways to set things right.
we served all of the people once, she thought; it was that way even when I was a child. Now the fleet-families and the merchant-combines want to make us tend the luck for them alone and not for the whole world, and I don’t know enough about the old ways to set things right.
I don’t even know if it’s
possible
to set things right. Some things, when they change, can’t be changed back.
possible
to set things right. Some things, when they change, can’t be changed back.
The tangle of
eiran
closest to her hand and mind had brighter and darker threads in it. She tugged at one of the dimmer lines, hoping to tease it out of the mass and straighten up at least a fraction of the disarray. When she pulled on the thread, it grew brighter in response.
eiran
closest to her hand and mind had brighter and darker threads in it. She tugged at one of the dimmer lines, hoping to tease it out of the mass and straighten up at least a fraction of the disarray. When she pulled on the thread, it grew brighter in response.
Under the surface of her meditation, curiosity stirred and came to life. This was a new thread, stretching away out of the local tangle and leading off into strange and uncharted realms. Something different was coming into the working—something fresh and unanticipated, yet at the same time very old and very strong.
Something dangerous.
The sun was rising over the hills beyond Rosselin Cottage, and a light mist hovered between the branches of the spring-green trees. Arekhon had risen early, after his custom when he was here alone. He sat in a wicker chair on the screened-in verandah, sipping at a mug of the hot bitter liquid the people on this world drank for a morning stimulant.
Elaeli’s summer cottage, she’d told Arekhon once, had been Elela Rosselin’s first home on Entibor—part of the fictitious identity that Garrod syn-Aigal had made ready for her, knowing that the great working would bring her to it in time. Remote, isolated, and rustic, the cottage had provided a safe haven from which to launch a political career, and Elaeli had used it to play politics with a will.
“I was planning to be Fleet-Admiral for the sus-Peledaen,” she’d said to him, “back before Lord Garrod conscripted me into the great working and then marooned me on Entibor with a bankroll and a fake identity. I couldn’t leave all that ambition behind just because I wasn’t with the fleet anymore; I had to do something, or I’d go crazy. And when I came here, politics was what there was to do.”
The cottage itself was a rustic, sprawling building, built of wood and painted white, that floated like a low cloud on the brow of the mountain, against the forest’s edge. At the moment, except for Arekhon himself, it was deserted. Elaeli was in the city, entertaining and being entertained by the Provost of Elicond; and it was better for everybody’s peace of mind if her chief of domestic security—who was not, officially, her lover—stayed away until the Provost had finished his business and gone home.
As a domestic arrangement it was less than ideal, but far better than nothing at all. They’d had a little over ten years of it, by local reckoning. Arekhon tried to do the arithmetic for converting the passage of time into Eraasian measures, and gave up when he couldn’t remember the exact ratio of one planetary year to the other.
At the moment, though, he was content. This world was fair, and this country house was fair, and here, when her business with the Provost was done, Elaeli would be joining him. For a little while, at least, they could pretend that nothing would ever change—though the time he’d had here with Elaeli would never be long enough, and the time he’d spent away from the homeworlds was far too long.
But both times are the same,
he thought.
Like the Void, where all times are the same time …
he thought.
Like the Void, where all times are the same time …
“ … and all places are the same place.”
The words were Eraasian, but marked by a strong accent, as though the speaker had learned the language as an adult. Turning, Arekhon recognized the strange woman who had come to him in his dream of Demaizen Old Hall, displacing Iulan Vai and telling him that he would know her soon. One of the wooden floorboards creaked faintly as she stepped forward out of what might have been a shadow left over from the night.
So she was real, then, and a Void-walker as well, one of the powerful Mages who could journey alone and unprotected through the no-time, no-place that lay beneath the physical universe. Garrod syn-Aigal had also been a Void-walker, earning the nickname “Explorer” because of the worlds he had journeyed to in that fashion, marking a way through the Void for the ships that would follow; for that reason, Arekhon was less startled by the manner of his visitor’s arrival than by the fact that she had spoken to him earlier in his dream.
Seen in the unexpected flesh, she wasn’t tall—perhaps half a head less than Arekhon’s own moderate height, even in the sturdy boots that she wore with her white shirt and black trousers—but compact and trim with muscle. The staff she carried in her right hand was a cubit and a half of ebony, bound and ornamented with silver wire.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Llannat Hyfid,” she said. “I’m your last student.”
“Llann—”He stumbled a bit over the unfamiliar syllables. The words weren’t Eraasian, or any other language that he was aware of. That meant nothing, given that a Void-walker could be from anywhere, or any when. If such a one had deliberately sought him out, first in dreams and then in the flesh … he tried the name again, this time with better luck. “Llannat.”
“If the name gives you trouble,” she said, “you can call me Maraganha instead. Some people find it easier on the tongue.”
“Maraganha.” The name meant “from the forested place” in Eraasian, which told him something, at least, about his mysterious visitor—and as she had promised, its syllables were easier for him to say. But the woman herself remained an enigma. “I don’t know you. And I’ve never had a student.”
“You were—you will be—quite a bit older then.”
Arekhon shivered, even though the morning was warm. He remembered how it had felt to look upon Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen as a great Magelord in the vigorous prime of his life, and know that the same man would in time become the white-haired idiot the Circle had already left behind on Eraasi. The thought of Maraganha or anyone else looking at him in the same manner was profoundly disturbing.
“I said something like that to my own teacher once,” he told her. “When Garrod came back through the Void to show the rest of us the way to Entibor. But there aren’t any Mages on this world, Maraganha. Only Adepts, and they’re a cold and solitary lot.”
“It’s their way.” Maraganha came forward and took a seat in the other chair, the one that was usually Elaeli’s, and laid her ebony staff across her knees. “I was one of them, until it didn’t suit me any longer. My fault as much as theirs; I’ve known Mages who would do well in an Adepts’ Guildhouse—”
“I’ve seen it happen,” Arekhon said. “It’s not for me.”
“Here you are, though, as lonely as any Adept in the galaxy.”
“None of it was my idea. I had a Circle once, but it’s broken and scattered across the interstellar gap.”
“Scattered, maybe,” she said. “But not broken.”
He shook his head in protest. “I don’t know that. How can you?”
“My first teacher was called the Breaker of Circles. Believe me, I know all about these things.”
He sat for a moment in silence, not looking at her, gazing out into the flower-scented dawning. Then he said, “I’m not sure I like my future very much, if it has people in it with names like that.”
“It’s all part of the great working. Did you think that putting the galaxy back together was going to be a quick and easy job?”
“If I ever thought so,” he answered, “it didn’t take me long to learn otherwise. And if that’s what you’re here for, you’ve come a long way to tell me something I already know.”
“Well, I didn’t come here for the sake of sitting on your front porch and admiring the view,” she said, rather more sharply than before. “I’ve got forests at home that I can look at.”
“Why, then?”
“I dreamed about you last night for the first time in—let’s just say, for the first time in a long while—and when I woke up I had a feeling you were going to need my help. So I walked the Void until I found where you were waiting.”
“
That’s
certainly clear,” he said. “Did you happen to see what kind of help I was going to need?”
That’s
certainly clear,” he said. “Did you happen to see what kind of help I was going to need?”
Maraganha shrugged. “It’s as clear as I can make it. And I’m afraid the universe didn’t bother to give me specific instructions.”
“I don’t think anything scares you,
etaze
.” He gave her the title without thinking, and wasn’t surprised when she accepted it as her right. If Maraganha was a Void-walker, then she’d have to be the First of her Circle as well. For all her superficial friendliness and ease of manner, Arekhon knew that he was looking at one of the great Magelords—Garrod syn-Aigal’s equal and perhaps even more.
etaze
.” He gave her the title without thinking, and wasn’t surprised when she accepted it as her right. If Maraganha was a Void-walker, then she’d have to be the First of her Circle as well. For all her superficial friendliness and ease of manner, Arekhon knew that he was looking at one of the great Magelords—Garrod syn-Aigal’s equal and perhaps even more.
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “When I was young, I was scared to death of everything, and scared of myself most of all. That’s the biggest part of what you taught me, in fact—to trust in what I knew and what I was.”
“I’m glad that I was able to help. Or will be able to, as the case may be.” He shook his head. “If we’re going to keep on talking like this, we need better verbs.”
“I can’t help you with the verbs,” she said. Then she looked at him straight on, and her voice had the same firmness and surety it had held in his dream. “But whatever else it is you’re planning to do—I can help you with that.”
“My Circle,” he said. There was no chance, not after all this, that his dreams of late had been mere homesickness, born out of a wish that his life here with Elaeli could be something other than what necessity had given them. This was the great working, that he had pledged himself to finish when he was still the Third of Garrod’s Circle, and there was no escape from it. “I need to find the rest of my Circle on Entibor, and take them home.”
It was the damned ship-mind again.
Lenyat Irao—known to his cousins and most of his workaday associates as Len—watched in disgust as the display on the chart table flickered.
Fire-on-the-Hilltops
was an old ship, a one-man light-cargo carrier purchased secondhand from the sus-Radal after that fleet-family had upgraded all of their own vessels to the new style. Len had known she was obsolete on the day he bought her, but that was how the game was played. New construction was for the star-lords, and everybody else took what was left over.
Fire-on-the-Hilltops
was an old ship, a one-man light-cargo carrier purchased secondhand from the sus-Radal after that fleet-family had upgraded all of their own vessels to the new style. Len had known she was obsolete on the day he bought her, but that was how the game was played. New construction was for the star-lords, and everybody else took what was left over.
Still, he’d expected the
Fire
to hold together long enough for him to finish paying for her. And it was starting to look like—absent a complete flush-and-renewal of the ship-mind’s quasi-organics—that wasn’t going to happen. Lately she’d been growing reluctant to interface with anybody’s charts but her own, and if that kept up, there went any hope of getting another decent contract.
Fire
to hold together long enough for him to finish paying for her. And it was starting to look like—absent a complete flush-and-renewal of the ship-mind’s quasi-organics—that wasn’t going to happen. Lately she’d been growing reluctant to interface with anybody’s charts but her own, and if that kept up, there went any hope of getting another decent contract.
The display blinked on and off and on again one more time, then settled down. The false-color display took on a three-dimensional aspect, the orbital lanes in blue, the world in yellow, and the marker-buoy in white.
“Finally,” Len said. “Took you long enough.”
As usual, he addressed his ship not in the Hanilat-Eraasian that he’d learned in school, but in his milk tongue, the language of Eraasi’s antipodal subcontinent. The Irao had never intermarried with outsiders, and Len’s knife-blade nose and yellowish-hazel eyes would have passed without remark in the homeland that his family had left a hundred years ago.
With the chart finally stabilized, he went to work setting up the
Fire
for emergence from the Void. The marker he’d asked for was a deep one, out at the farther limits of Eraasi’s normal-space travel lanes. He’d have a long crawl past the outer planets, doing it that way, but he wasn’t hauling perishable cargo and safety was better than speed.
Fire
for emergence from the Void. The marker he’d asked for was a deep one, out at the farther limits of Eraasi’s normal-space travel lanes. He’d have a long crawl past the outer planets, doing it that way, but he wasn’t hauling perishable cargo and safety was better than speed.
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