The Gathering Flame (35 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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An unfamiliar footfall made her turn. The Galcenian who called himself Festen Aringher stood in the door of the nursery, smiling pleasantly and seeming oblivious to the suspicious glances of Nivome and the battery of nursemaids. He held a textcomm in one hand.
“Your Dignity,” he said. “I have some news that may interest you.”
“Really?” She tried to maintain a proper hauteur, but it was hard to do with Ari pulling on the braid he had captured earlier. “My Minister of Internal Security has been keeping me up to date with the reports from An-Jemayne.”
“This news comes from system space, Your Dignity. By way of my—personal connections, shall we say.” He paused. “Connections not necessarily available to the Galcenian ambassador and his strategic advisor.”
“Ah. You begin to interest me.”
She heard Nivome exhale heavily, like some large and barely tame animal. “Your Dignity, this man—”
“Has something to say to me. Speak on, Gentlesir Aringher.”
The Galcenian bowed. “My thanks. The word I have is that all Galcenian forces now present inside Entiboran space have agreed to place themselves temporarily under the command of the Fleet officer in charge of in-system defense, with the stated goal of resisting an imminent Mage attack.”
 
(GALCENIAN DATING 970 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 34 VERATINA)
 
A
lone IN his cell, Errec Ransome woke and slept and woke again. He had lost track of time, but that didn’t matter. His careful investigation of the minds around him—Mages, almost certainly—went on unhindered by the lack of physical routine.
The journey ended before he could learn what he wanted to know. There was a moment, in one of the intervals between food and sleep, when he recognized the distinct internal sideslip, a sensation half of body and half of mind, that signaled a dropout from hyperspace. Not long after, he felt the rocking and buffeting of a descent through atmosphere. With a sigh of hydraulics and a clank of metal, the ship grounded and settled onto its landing legs. Then came silence. The hum of the air system stopped. Once again he grew tired and drowsy, his mind fogging in spite of his efforts to stay awake. Against his will, he slept.
When he awoke, he was in another place.
He lay on a low, wide bed, with a pillow underneath his head and a blanket drawn up over his torso against the faint chill of the air. He was naked under the blanket, and the stubble of beard that had grown during his time aboard the starship was gone—he found it a disturbing thought, that someone had undressed him and cared for him while he lay asleep.
He pushed himself up on one elbow and looked around. This time, the room that held him had pale translucent walls that let the light from outside filter through. Strips of dark wood kept the panels together and cast intricate shadows on the floor. Except for the bed and a half-dozen black and white floor pillows stacked in one corner, the room was as bare of furniture as his cell aboard the raiding ship had been.
The loose garments that his captors had given him lay folded across the foot of his bed. He got up and put them on, and began once more to inspect the limits of his prison.
Some of the latticed panels that made up the patterned walls slid aside in their tracks like doors. The first one he found led to a refresher cubicle of the same design as the one aboard the ship. The second opened out into the world.
He stood on the threshold and looked down a short flight of irregularly shaped stone steps into a tree-shaded garden. The dappled green of the foliage was not any of the multiple greens of Ilarna, nor of Galcen, and the sky overhead was a different blue than either. And he was alone. The others continued to watch him—he could sense them, when he reached out into the currents of Power and felt the pull and twist of their workings—but there was nobody near at hand.
He ventured out into the open air. Short, feathery stems of grass tickled against the insteps of his bare feet like dense green plush. Tall trees, their spreading crowns heavy with leaves, provided comfortable havens of shade against the bright sunlight; smaller trees offered low branches laden with sweet-smelling flowers and brightly colored fruit. And the entire area was surrounded by a force field that he could not break.
Magework,
he thought.
It has to be.
Nothing else could have stopped him. Even when he was very young, force fields and related devices had shown a tendency to break down without warning whenever they blocked the way to someplace he wanted to go. Later on, after he found the Guild, he had learned to be more subtle, and even stronger—but the force field on his garden cell had stopped him utterly.
Maybe I’m unconscious someplace, and hallucinating all this.
He shook his head. He knew the logic and imagery of dreams, and this was different, too intense and too consistent in its details. He was a prisoner among the Mages—so far as he knew, the only prisoner they had taken from the destruction of Amalind Grange—and the Mages had brought him for their own reasons to this place of almost luxurious comfort.
He didn’t like it. His imprisonment was yet another wrongness, added to the wrongness of being alive at all. He had seen for himself how the Mages dealt with Adepts on Ilarna, and he had never heard of them taking prisoners on the other worlds they had raided. Why, then, had they taken him, and what was it that brought them to care for him so tenderly?
He reached out in search of a mind that would give him the answer, and found that all those within the range of his touch were guards: unsophisticated, untrained minds that gave him nothing because they knew nothing, except that their prisoner was to be maintained alive and comfortable at all costs.
Errec returned to the cell the Mages had built for him—a snug and cleanly designed prison, as pleasant to look at as any garden bungalow—and set about the work he had learned on Galcen how to do. He ate, and slept, and walked about on the footpaths under the trees, but all the while the greater part of his mind was bent toward the seduction of those who guarded him.
Eventually—it took some weeks, but Errec had patience, and all the time he could have asked for—one of his guards called on a superior to make a visit of inspection, in order to confirm that the cherished prisoner was being treated according to instructions.
The Mage who arrived in response to the guard’s invitation came no closer to Errec than did the guards themselves; he was a felt presence rather than a visible one. But the excitement of the occasion made Errec’s work easier, rendering the minds of the guards even more labile and amenable to suggestion. It took almost no work at all, only a delicate nudge to an impulse that had formed already, for one of the guards to say, “I don’t understand what we’re doing here on Cracanth, my lord. Why are we keeping this one alive, when all the others are dead?”
“Because,” the Magelord replied, “this one is our luck.”
Errec withdrew, puzzled, from the minds of his captors. The symbols and thought-patterns that surrounded the Mages’ idea of luck were not the same as his own; he’d given up believing in a capricious fortune when he joined the Guild. It took him careful probing, over the next several days, to determine what was intended—but eventually he understood.
The Mages had their seers and truthspeakers, just as the Adepts had those who could watch the flow of the universe and predict the eddies and currents of the time ahead. And the word that the truthspeakers gave to the Magelords was simple: their efforts would prosper, so long as Errec Ransome lived.
That night marked the first time he attempted suicide.
 
ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 3 PERADA
 
J
OS METADI had been poor company on the journey back to Entibor from Maraghai, and he knew it. He wasn’t used to going anywhere on-planet and calling it home. From the day he left Gyffer until he took on the work of remaking Perada’s Fleet, home had been the ship, and dirtside only a place you went to do business or get drunk. It was a thing to leave behind you as soon as possible. The idea of deliberately returning somewhere, of going back to friends and work that were waiting for you, was new, and Jos wasn’t sure he was ready for it.
He wouldn’t have admitted as much to anyone—not even to Errec, who’d never betrayed a secret in all the time Jos had known him—but the thought of explaining his deal with Ferrda had kept him staring at the overhead in his cabin in the muted light of ship’s night, and pacing the deckplates all day. So much depended on the deal going through, and if somebody chose to take it wrong …
He gave up thinking about it, or tried to, on their last day in hyperspace, and went to fill up his favorite blue mug with fresh cha’a. Fleet Admiral Lachiel was in the common room already, eating freeze-dried winemelon slices for breakfast like a true spacer, without bothering to rehydrate them first.
“Decent rations,” she said. “Better than Fleet issue, if you want to know the truth.”
“Remarquaine. Ferrda picked them up the last time we were there. The Fleet could probably cut some sort of deal with the factory if they tried.”
“I don’t think so—the rules for procurement discourage off-planet purchases. ‘Buy Entiboran’ and all that.”
He looked at the depths of his cha’a, and the pale steam rising in faint attenuated curls. “It’s a good idea, I suppose, as long as Entibor has what you’re after. But winemelon grows on Remarque.”
“And ships grow on Gyffer and Maraghai.” Lachiel put down her last, half-eaten slice of melon. “My lord general, may I speak freely?”
Jos grimaced. “I’m not anybody’s lord—we didn’t do things that way back where I grew up. Hell, unless we’re both in uniform you don’t need to bother with the ‘General’ part.”
“‘Jos,’ then. Were you drunk?”
“Several times in my life, yes. But if you mean at the moment I made the deal with Ferrda, no.”
“There’s no way to back out if you have to?”
“No.” He tried to explain. “Ferrda and I shook hands on the deal. I’m a free-spacer, and my word and a handshake are all that I’ve got. If those are no good, then I might as well go dirtside and become one of those melon farmers.”
“Some people,” she said, “might say that the General of the Armies of Entibor isn’t a free-spacer anymore.”
“They’d better not say that where I can hear it.”
“I’ll make certain the warning gets around.” She picked up the partial slice of freeze-dried melon and started crumbling bits off the ragged edge with her fingers. “I don’t suppose the Selvaurs would keep up their end of the alliance if you didn’t deliver the kid?”
Jos shook his head. “Not a chance. And I wouldn’t blame them, either.”
“Damn.” There was nothing left of Lachiel’s melon now but confetti-sized fragments and a brittle strip of rind. “We’ve got to keep the Selvaurs—if we lose them, there goes our chance of pulling in anybody else. Damn.”
She pushed the plate away and looked him in the eye. “All right, Jos. I’ll back you.”
“How far?”
“As far as it has to go.”
A buzzer sounded, rough-edged and strident.
“Dropout warning,” said Jos. He felt the nervous tension of the past few days changing into the anticipation that came before action. The time for wondering how to do it was over; from now on, what was done was how it would be. “Time to get to the bridge.”
The buzzer kept sounding as they hurried to the cockpit and strapped in. Jos hit the Off switch to silence it, then picked up the link for the intraship comms.
“Places, everyone. Gunners, to your stations.”
Lachiel made a startled noise. “We’re coming into Entibor,” she protested. “There’s no need for—”
“There’s always need for guns.”
“You didn’t have them up at Maraghai.”
“I was trying to make a point at Maraghai,” he said. “And it worked. But don’t think I wasn’t sweating the whole time.”
Lachiel shrugged under her safety webbing. “It’s your call. I make it dropout in plus five, counting.” “Understand dropout in five. Switching to manual control.”
Jos toggled the switch, and the two of them sat watching the navicomp clicking down. The grey, wavering non-stuff of hyperspace swirled outside the armor-glass viewscreens like puddles of oil on top of milky water.
“Three, two, one, mark,” Lachiel said.
Stars burned through the grey in a dazzle of light as normal vacuum replaced the hyperspacial resonance effect. Jos let out a sigh of satisfaction.
“Let’s see how close we got,” he said.
The navicomp clicked on and began to struggle with beacons and angles and star maps. A field spiked, and the navicomp chittered as it tried to correlate an unexpected radiant source with its tentative conclusions.
“What the hell—!” Jos exclaimed.
“Energy flare in system space.”
Jos worked the controls for
Warhammer
’s sensors and for the ship’s electronic-countermeasures apparatus. A pattering of signal came over the cockpit’s audio—fire-control readings.
“Someone’s shooting,” he called out over the intraship link. “Condition red, weapons tight.”
“Got ’em, Captain,” Nannla replied from the number-one gun bubble. “No targets.”
“Stay passive,” Jos said. “Errec, what’s power look like?”
“Rated max available,” Errec reported from the engine room.
A loud rush of sound cascaded from the console speakers, almost wiping out intraship comms. Jos adjusted the sensors again to bring down the noise.
“That guy’s close,” he said to Lachiel. “And he’s looking for us.”
“Then let’s get going.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’m getting a weapons signature on that flare … a Mod Pandemonium.”
“That’s a Galcenian setup!” Lachiel started furiously working the settings for the external comms. “I’d like to go active and see if someone will report to me.”
“Let’s find out what’s happening first,” he said. “We might not want to let on that the fleet admiral and the General of the Armies are out here without any protection.”
“I’m picking up some ship-to-ship comms already,” Lachiel said. Her voice hardened. “And what’s going on is a Mage attack in progress.”
“We knew it had to happen sometime. Where do the Galcenians fit in?”
“Damned if I know. But they’re here.”
“Captain,” said Tillijen over the link from number-two gun bubble. “I have a target showing on the indicator. If I can see them, they can see me. Looks like we’re detected.”
“Hell.” He turned to Lachiel. “Admiral, you have crypto to contact Fleet? Get a message together. Tell them we’re going to be arriving in high orbit and proceeding directly to the surface, at—” He looked at a chrono. “—sixteen sixty-eight, plus or minus ten, and not to shoot at us.”
She nodded. “Tomorrow?”
“No, today.”
He saw Lachiel’s eyebrows go up in disbelief. “It’s not possible. Not in this ship.”
“Make the signal,” Jos said. “Let me worry about getting there.”
He waited a few seconds for Lachiel to begin sending the encrypted message, then keyed on the intraship comm and called down to engineering.
“Errec,” he said. “We’re heading in at a run. I need you to go take a look at the main engineering control board.”
“I can see the board from here, Captain.”
“All right. You should be staring at a row of switches labeled ‘auxiliary heat dispersal.’”
“I’ve got them in view.”
“Flip ’em on.”
“Got it.” A pause. “All the redlines have moved to the right. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we just got another fifty percent rated power.”
“Good,” said Jos. He reached up and flipped two switches on the overhead panel. “Now take the safeties off line.”
“Right.” Another pause. “Safeties off.”
“Now I’m going to give it throttle. I want you to balance the loads, and I want ’em balanced at twenty percent over redline.”
“If you say so.” Errec sounded dubious. “But remember, I’m not really an engineer.”
“After this run,” Jos promised him, “you will be.”
“Captain,” Nannla’s voice cut in. “Target inbound, locked on with fire control, signature looks Mage.”
“Weapons free,” Jos said. He twisted ship to present a narrower profile, and to put the target inside the covered arc of both the dorsal and ventral guns. The
’Hammer
started firing, a steady pounding that made itself known in the vibration of the freighter’s strength members and in the wavering power readouts on the main console.
“Two—one—boost,” Jos chanted, and pushed the throttle levers forward. Acceleration shoved him back against the cushions … but it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t reach out and push the levers forward a little bit more.
 
Rain beat steadily against the windows of the Orgilan Guesthouse. The day was a grey and chilly one—late autumn had never been An-Jemayne’s best time of year—and the heat-bar in the sitting-room fireplace glowed faintly as it warded off the cold. Ambassador Oldigaard sat at a graceful antique desk close by the hearth, watching incoming message traffic on a shielded textcomm.
The screen of the textcomm currently displayed reports sent in by the flotilla that had accompanied him to Entibor. He found them uneasy reading. Already, in the reaches of space beyond Entibor, Galcenian ships fought side by side with Entiboran vessels against the Mages.
“I don’t like it,” he said aloud.
The room’s other occupant turned at the sound of his voice. Master Guislen, a quiet presence in formal black, had been standing at the tall window and looking out at the rain-lashed street. Now he faced the ambassador and said, “What is it, exactly, that you dislike?”
“The Domina,” Oldigaard said. “We should have had her agreement to the proposals by now. Instead, she only smiles and gives excuses for why she has decided absolutely nothing—while my escort ships are fighting the Mages under local command!”
Guislen left his place by the window to stand nearer the hearth. “If that idea worries you,” he said, “then why not direct our ships to withdraw?”
“If I’d had the chance to forbid them in the first place—but I didn’t expect to be trapped in an aircar halfway between here and the Summer Palace at the point when the question came up. Withdrawing now would be a disaster. We’d lose whatever goodwill our ships have earned for us. Our own fleet personnel wouldn’t understand the political necessity.”
“True. Some other kind of pressure, then.” Guislen looked thoughtful. “Her economic advisor, Lord Meteun … she depends on his analyses, I think. Can something be done to break him away from her, or to divert his attention?”
Oldigaard nodded slowly. “You have a point. He’s from Pleyver; something may be possible there. But that’s in the future. We need to apply the pressure now.”
“She’s young,” said Guislen. “Perhaps her husband—”
“Consort. The head of Entibor’s Ruling House doesn’t marry; she names consorts at her pleasure, and dismisses them at will. The old Domina—Veratina—went through hers like some women go through clean underwear, for all the good it ever did.”
Guislen accepted the correction with a look of faint amusement. “Perhaps the young woman’s consort, then, provides a weak point that can be suitably exploited.”
“Metadi?” Oldigaard snorted. “The man’s not an opportunity, he’s a menace!”
“If you say so,” murmured Guislen. “But his political views can’t be popular. He’s Gyfferan, which means he’s probably egalitarian and possibly a Centrist, neither of which is likely to sit well with the local conservative element.”
“As far as our sources can tell, the man has no political views. What he does have, unfortunately, is a damnable amount of charisma—the fire-eaters in our own fleet already admire him too much for comfort.”
“Then take what advantage you can of his absence; it won’t last forever.”
“I have been—”
The textcomm flashed its warning light, and Oldigaard turned his attention back to the flickering screen. He read the message, then thumbed the screen dark again.
“Metadi!” he said. “Even when he doesn’t plan it that way, the man’s timing is impeccable.”
“I take it the Consort has returned.”

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