The Gathering Flame (46 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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Nannla brightened. “You really think so?”
“Some predictions are easy.”
Jos poured himself another shot of the aqua vitae and wished that the same could be said about his own reception on Entibor. He hoped that the news he carried would at least win him a fair hearing. The planet’s current troubles had proved him right about taking Ari to Maraghai—but being right had never made anyone better loved.
“What
I
want,” he said slowly, “is to take ’Rada off planet before the plagues get so out of control that nobody’s safe.”
“Won’t work,” Nannla said. “Tilly told me, once—the Domina never leaves Entibor. Custom.”
“Hang custom.”
“You’ll never get a trueborn Entiboran to agree with you on that,” Errec said. “Custom is life and death to them.”
“We’ll see,” Jos said. “I’m going to try my best, anyway.”
“What’ll you do if it doesn’t work?” Nannla asked.
“Then I’ll stick to fighting the Mages,” Jos said. He tossed back his shot of aqua vitae. “What about you guys?”
“I’m with you, boss. One of these days I’m going to retire and use my share of the loot to open up a tea shop in Sombrelír, but not just yet.”
“Errec?”
The copilot shook his head. “I can’t. I have to go back to Galcen.”
“To the Guild, you mean,” said Jos, unsurprised. He’d been expecting something like this for a while now—ever since Errec had taken to wearing Adept’s blacks. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, you know. They can’t make you.”
Ransome gave a faint laugh. “I know. They don’t have to. But I know that I need to go.”
“Whatever makes you happy,” Jos said. “We’ve only got this run to finish first.”
 
“Mages in the palace.” Mistress Vasari’s voice was only a thread of sound, and blood bubbled from her mouth when she breathed. “I found the Mages,” she said. She choked, and more blood ran from her mouth, thick and dark. “I know what they’re doing.”
“Don’t try to talk,” said Perada. Somewhere behind her, she could hear Tillijen speaking urgently over one of the room’s hidden comm links, trying to summon help. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
“No,” Vasari said. She moved her head from side to side—a fraction of an inch, a visible agony of effort—and said, “They’re trying to tear away the skin of the planet.”
Perada’s breath caught. She felt the child inside her kick, hard and low, as if the sudden surge of adrenaline had jolted it. “How—?”
“A working. Volcanoes. Mountains. The oceans boiling … the sky in flame … .”
“Massive geothermal upheavals,” Perada heard Aringher murmur under his breath. “At a guess, they’re aiming for total devastation in the shortest time possible.”
“But they can’t!” Perada protested. “They’ll all die too!”
“They don’t … care.” Vasari was struggling to form the words. Her breath choked and gurgled. Another rush of blood came up, soaking the carpet under her mouth. “Mages gain strength … from death. The more who … die … the greater the …”
The Adept’s voice stopped altogether. Perada looked away.
She’s dead. We’ll all be dead, soon.
Aringher was speaking in an undertone to Garen Tarveet and to Ambassador—to Gentlesir—Oldigaard. “Take an aircar to the nearest landing field with an operational courier ship. I need you to carry the word to Galcen. I intend to remain on Entibor and render what assistance I can in this extremity.”
“Then I ought to stay here, too.” Garen sounded terrified but stubborn. Perada knew the combination well from their days together at the Delaven Academy—nothing Aringher could say was going to persuade him.
She stood up, pushing herself awkwardly to her feet with her hands on the arms of the chair of state, and stood face-to-face with Garen. “You need to go,” she said. “Somebody has to finish carrying out the plans we made, and I won’t be able to.”
“What do you mean?” Garen’s question came out in a squeak.
“The Domina of Entibor doesn’t leave the world of Entibor,” Perada said. “And even if I wanted to break custom, I couldn’t—I need to stay at work here for as long as possible, to start getting people away.”
“Your Dignity,” Nivome broke in, “Lord Meteun is right. You need to go. You can’t save more than a handful—”
“Then I
will
save that handful!” Perada snapped. “Starting with you, Garen Tarveet. Take ship with Gentlesir Oldigaard, and do whatever it is that the new ambassador is asking you to do.”
 
(GALCENIAN DATING 970 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 34 VERATINA)
 
W
ARHAMMER
HAD come into Suivi Point with a hold full of cargo, some of it honest trade goods but most of it seized under Gyfferan letters of marque. Jos Metadi hadn’t taken long to reconcile himself to the privateering life. The
’Hammer
had the guns and the speed for taking prizes, and enough cargo space to stash the loot—and as Rak Barenslee said, anything they took off a Magebuilt ship probably belonged in the civilized galaxy anyway.
Jos had been making a name for himself of late, gaining a reputation both as a good captain and as a lucky one. At Rak’s insistence, he’d taken to dressing the part: flashy velvets and spidersilks, heavy with gold braid and precious stones. All that unnecessary flamboyance made him uneasy, somewhere in the Gyfferan core of his soul; he told himself it was advertising, nothing more, and soothed his feelings by dressing like a proper man of business outside the port quarter.
Today, though, was a port-quarter day. They’d already off-loaded the cargo and found a buyer, rendering the ‘
Hammer
’s account at the Merchants’ Cooperative even plumper than before, and Jos and Rak were making a tour of the Strip to celebrate. They’d had dinner together in a good restaurant just beyond the portside airlocks, then taken the main glidewalk through the entertainment district, heading for the docks and home.
They stopped along the way at the No-Name Lounge—advertising, again, to get word out among the free-spacers that Metadi’s
Warhammer
was back in port from a lucky run—and sat up front near the bar, drinking fruit punch spiked with Ophelan rum and eating salted frillfruit out of the bowl in the middle of the table.
“Here’s to the next cargo,” said Jos. “It’s out there waiting for us to find it.”
Rak laughed and handed him a frillfruit. “No worries, then. You’ve got the knack—all we have to do to get rich is stick with you.”
“Couldn’t do it without a great crew. And you’re the best.”
“Don’t you know it,” said Rak, and Jos felt his ears reddening.
These days on
Warhammer
, they were sharing quarters. Nobody else in the crew seemed to care—not the gunners, who’d signed on as a team anyway, and certainly not Ferrda—and Jos himself found the setup highly educational. That didn’t stop him from being embarrassed, though. He looked away briefly to hide his discomfiture, pretending a sudden interest in the free-spacers drinking at the No-Name’s bar. Then he turned and looked again, with an interest no longer feigned.
“What’s up?” Rak asked.
Jos nodded toward a dark-haired man in spacer’s coveralls, sitting at the bar with the stiff formality of someone entirely drunk. “That guy. I’ve seen him before.”
Rak followed his glance. “Longish black hair, plain outfit with no ships’ patches on it? Soused as a bar rag? That one?”
“That’s him.”
She looked dubious. “Where do you know him from?”
“I don’t know him. But I saw him once.”
“He must have made quite an impression on you.” Rak shook her head. “Sure doesn’t look like much at the moment, though.”
“Maybe not,” said Jos slowly. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “But I think he saved my life. If he’s down on his luck right now … well, I owe him a big one.”
Rak sighed and got to her feet. “Messing with drunks is always a bad idea. I’ll watch your back.”
Jos wandered over to the bar, trying hard to look casual and nonthreatening. Rak trailed him, just out of arm’s reach. When he came within speaking range of the stranger, he became, if anything, more confused than before. The man at the bar both was and wasn’t like the Adept whom he’d seen in his plague-induced delirium. The dark hair was right, along with the pale coloring and the slight but muscular build, but this man’s face was all hollows and angles, with weary purple smudges under the dark eyes that gazed so fixedly at the middle distance.
Undaunted, Jos persevered. “Hello. My name is Jos Metadi. Can I buy you something?”
The man ignored him.
“The thing is, I think I know you.”
The man continued to ignore him.
“Jos,” muttered Rak from behind him. “He’s past noticing anything but the bottom of the bottle. Let’s go.”
“All right,” said Jos, after a moment’s pause. “Sorry to bother you, stranger. I thought I recognized you from somewhere, is all.”
Reluctantly, he began to move away.
“You’re real.” The man’s voice was barely above a whisper, but the articulaton was painstakingly clear.
Jos halted. “What?”
“You’re leaving. You must be real. The ones who aren’t real don’t leave.”
Rak tugged at his jacket sleeve. “Jos, he’s not just drunk, he’s crazy. You don’t
need
trouble like that.”
“He’s not going to make any trouble. Not for me. anyway.” Jos sat down on the empty stool next to the stranger. “You have a name I can call you by?”
“Errec,” said the man after a long pause. He looked at Jos for a moment, then seemed to make a decision to amplify the statement. “Ransome.”
“Thanks.” Jos tried again. “Look, this is going to sound like a strange question, but do you know me?”
“Not yet,” Ransome said. “Someday. I think.”
“Someday.” Jos drew a deep breath and proceeded carefully. “Are you—did you ever belong to the Guild?”
“They burned the Guildhouse.”
“They?”
“Mages,” said Ransome. He looked at Jos again. This time his dark eyes seemed to take in the gaudy clothing and the heavy blaster, not to mention Rak Barenslee standing equally armed and dangerous a few feet away. “You kill Mages.”
“I take their ships and seize their cargos,” Jos said. “They fight back, most of the time. So, yes—I kill Mages.”
“I can find them for you.”
Jos blinked. “What?”
“Their ships. I can find them.”
“Jos,” Rak said.
“Nobody
just ‘finds’ things out in space.”
“I don’t know,” Jos said. “Maybe this guy can.”
He turned back to Ransome. “Are you saying you want to sign aboard
Warhammer?”
“Your ship? Yes.”
“Jos, he’s crazy. Don’t do this.”
“I told you,” Jos said. “I owe him one. And besides—I think he’s telling the truth.”
 
ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 3 PERADA
 
M
EINUXET CHECKED the visual log from one of the spy-eyes that were scattered, like a trap-line, all around the Summer Palace. A week after the emergency evacuation had begun, so few people remained in residence that there wasn’t much point in checking them—no point, if poor Vasari’s dying revelations turned out to be true—but Ser Hafrey had set up the system, and Meinuxet would continue it.
Dutiful to the last,
he thought, with a touch of amusement at his own predictability.
Still, he continued checking the logs. Even in this last extremity, there were mysteries to be uncovered, and tantalizing hints of things going on: shadows out of place, blurs and fuzz in the records. Possibly technical faults in the devices. Possibly …
This place, the Blue Room, a clutter of furniture and bric-a-brac , was a nexus of the anomalies. He hoped to find out what was going on. And so he waited, hoping that whatever was going on here didn’t present more difficulties than he could deal with. Mistress Vasari had stumbled on one Mage Circle within the palace walls … where there was one there might be two.
“Where do you eat?” he asked in a whisper. “Where do you drink? Why don’t you leave footprints?”
With most of the palace maintenance staff gone, the floor of the Blue Room had not been swept in some time. Meinuxet could look back the way he had come, at the sun reflecting off the polished hardwood of the floor, and see the marks of his passage in the dust.
He loosened his blaster in its shoulder holster, silently pushed the safety to the off position, and stepped off the main path through the maze of standing curio cases.
Tapping the walls. At least I’ll
feel
busy
.
Then the sound of footsteps echoed in the room, and he froze. A man entered: Nivome do’Evaan, the Minister of Internal Security, Ser Hafrey’s old enemy. The minister walked partway into the room and stopped.
“Come out,” he said in a loud voice.
Meinuxet remained frozen. The Minister of Internal Security wasn’t speaking to him, it seemed, but to a blank section of the palace wall.
“Come out,” Nivome said again. “I know you’re here. We need to talk.”
The air seemed to warp and waver, and a dark figure stood before Nivome where a second before there had been only empty space. Black robes, black staff, featureless mask of hard black plastic: Meinuxet realized with an inward tremor that he was looking, for the first time, at one of the dreaded Mages. He didn’t dare move; he hardly dared to draw breath.
“You are a dead man,” the Mage said—
To Nivome
, Meinuxet told himself;
to Nivome, not to me.
Nivome paid no apparent attention to the threat. “You’ll never break the Domina,” he told the Mage. “While she lives, while she is fruitful, this world is beyond your grasp.”
“Perhaps. But you were told where to find us; you were given safe conduct. My brothers in An-Jemayne believe you have something of importance. Speak now, tell me what it is, and maybe you will walk away.”
Nivome scowled. “I want to rule,” he said. “But not over a lifeless hunk of rock. Call off your attack, and I can give you a peace treaty in this part of space. More than that—I can give you the gateway to the Central Worlds.”
“You’re offering us things that we already have.”
“You’ll get neither one of them if the Domina reigns. I’ve spoken with one of your seers—”
“We do not use that word.”
“But you understand it. Hear me out. I have spoken with one of your seers, and he tells me what you all know—that while the Domina lives, you will never reach the Central Worlds. I can deliver her to you dead.”
“Can you indeed?” The Mage’s black mask hid any expression, but he seemed to pause and consider what he had heard. “Well. Because of what we have seen, we know that you speak part of the truth.”
“I must rule over a living world,” Nivome said. “Or I throw my lot in with the Domina, and thwart you all.”
“A living world you asked for—a living world you shall have. Only deliver the Domina to us, that the luck may change.”
There’ll never be a better chance
, Meinuxet thought. The weight of his blaster was heavy in his grip.
But the first movement will draw their attention.
Which one to shoot first? The Mage or the traitor? Which one is the more dangerous?
Put that way, the choice was easy.
The traitor
.
Meinuxet raised his arm—and felt, before he could press the firing stud, the crushing pain of a blow coming down on him from behind.
Another Mage
, he thought. His mind was still clear—it surprised him, really, the clarity of everything, even as his hand lost all strength and dropped the blaster, and his legs failed him, and he toppled to the floor. From a very great distance, he heard the first Mage speak to Nivome again.
“It seems that your secrets were not as well kept as you thought.”
Meinuxet heard footsteps—coming close, jarring the wooden floor painfully underneath his head—and Nivome do’Evaan saying, “He’ll be dead in a minute or two. I’m not worried.”
“Please yourself,” said the Mage. “Now, go. Carry out your side of our bargain while you still can.”
 
Perada’s back ached from sitting at the combined desk comp and communications rig in the sub-basement recesses of the Summer Palace, and her eyes felt hot and gritty from gazing at the comp screens. She’d had a bed and a chair-of-state moved down into the shielded chamber a week ago, as soon as she’d fully taken in the implications of Vasari’s final words. A holocamera on the far wall, now inactive, was trained on the corner of the room that held the empty chair-of-state. The bed hadn’t been slept in for over seventeen hours.
The sliding door of the room opened and Tillijen came in. “Domina, you should get some rest.”
“Why should I bother?” Perada asked. “Any day now, I’ll have all the time in the universe for resting. In the meantime, I’m busy.”
“No surrender, then,” said Tillijen.
“No,” Perada said. “I don’t know how much time we’ve get. But as long as we can still get ships, we’ll keep moving people off-planet.”
“What about the plague?”
Perada shrugged wearily. “I don’t know. Let them stay in deep space until everybody’s either dead or clean, I suppose. And don’t
you
start telling me that it’s never going to save everybody, or that it isn’t even going to make a dent in the mortality rates, or anything like that. I don’t want to hear about it.”
She picked up a datapad from the table by the desk comp, checked it against the comp display, and wiped the pad with a stroke of the attached stylus. “The agricultural settlements on that Selvauran outplanet will have to take in more than just farmers, that’s all. Now, let’s see … if those merchant ships from Wrysten get here tonight or tomorrow … that’s a few more we can save.”
A beeping from the comm set broke through her words. Tillijen leaned forward over her shoulder to look at the ID code on the incoming message.
“It’s a Fleet override. This must be important.”
It was. The ships that had dropped out of hyper on the edge of the system hadn’t been merches from Wrysten after all; they were Mages, dreadnoughts and battleships to augment the small raiding and harassing craft that had remained in-system since the plagues began. Captain-of-Frigates Trestig Brehant, the commander of the system defense fleet, was warning all planetary installations to prepare for a serious attack.
Perada clicked off the comm set and turned to face Tillijen. “It’s time to make one more broadcast, to show the people on the ships—and the ones who’ll never make it to a ship—that their Domina hasn’t taken herself to safety off-planet, that she’s still working hard to bring her people luck.” She rubbed her bulging belly with one hand as she spoke, trying to ease the itching, tight-stretched skin. “Let’s fetch the Iron Crown for this broadcast, Tilly, since it’ll probably be the last.”
Tillijen nodded and moved toward the door. “Where should I go to look for the crown, Your Dignity?”
“The jewel chest in my private chambers,” Perada said. “Not the Khesatan trinket case—I bought that one on Galcen, the year before I left school. The ugly square box with the arms of the House carved on the lid.”
“Right, Your Dignity.”
“Thank you, Tillijen. And hurry … we don’t know how much time we have left.”
 
The man who had once called himself Ser Hafrey sat at the light openwork table in the morning room of the Summer Palace. Outside the pointed arches of the windows, the sun was rising—an angry red-orange sphere seen through the haze on the eastern horizon.
Plague fires,
he thought,
somewhere between here and An-Jemayne.
There had been no reports from many of the provincial cities for a week now, a sure sign that the measures taken to control the spread of disease and famine had failed.
So far, the Summer Palace remained untouched. The trees outside the tall windows had all their summer green, not the premature withering of the blighted districts, and the flowers in the nearby shrubbery bloomed in shades of purple and blue that echoed the fruit in the cut-glass bowl on the table.
He raised a wineglass from the tray before him to his lips, and tasted the vintage. The wine was good, but it brought him no pleasure. He rose and paced for a moment, still holding the wineglass. The blackwood staff at his side swung with each pace. That too had remained hidden, a last remnant of what he had once been, but now the time was nearly past. He raised his glass toward the window, in a silent toast to those whom he knew were coming—to those who, in carrying out their own plans, were furthering his own.
If
, he thought,
I am not wrong. If this garden has not gone too long untended.
He had not dared give it the fullest attention of late. Too many eyes, too many ears, too many minds surrounded him, each one looking, listening, feeling for the slightest slip, the merest hint. But hint of what? None of them could guess.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he muttered, turning away from the windows. “You aren’t that subtle. And you make mistakes.”
The passage of so many years could cause a man to falter, even one who had faced time on its own ground and forced it to relent. There was a time when he would never have let a power struggle with the likes of Nivome do’Evaan distract him from his proper work. But he grew tired, and he knew that he was old—and the help that he’d expected hadn’t come. Perhaps he’d been wrong, and no one waited in the shadows of the future after all.
He sat down again and lifted a roseapple to his lips, then placed it back in the bowl untasted. Instead he refilled his glass from the decanter of amber fluid that sat beside the wineglasses, and leaned back in the delicately made chair.
The door behind him made a slight rattle as someone lifted the ring on the far side and pulled. Hafrey stood, turning to face the newcomer, taking his ebony staff from its clip.
The door swung open and a woman stepped through: Tillijen, the gunner from Metadi’s ship, whom Perada had made armsmaster in his place. He smiled to himself, seeing now the appropriateness of it all.
“Greetings,” he said. “So you were to be the one.”
“But you’ve been exiled!” Tillijen exclaimed, then reddened, more than the ruddy light from the rising sun could have accounted for.
“A fate we all share, one day or another,” he said.
An alarm began to shrill, high and insistent. Hafrey knew what it meant. The disaster long feared and long prepared for, a direct Mage attack on the Summer Palace, had finally come. He glanced out the window, over his shoulder. The clouds of morning had broken up; the sky was a clean blue.
“For some the day will arrive sooner than they expected,” he added. “It has begun. Come with me.”
He walked past her, through the door by which she had entered, into the receiving room. The dark wood floor and the paneled walls reflected lights set in high sconces. He went over to the fireplace at the far side of the room, its hearth tall enough for a man to walk into it without bending his head, and pointed with his staff to one of the stones in the back. The stone was smooth and polished, unlike the other, rougher, stones that formed the back of the hearth, and it was carved with the arms of House Rosselin and of Entibor.
“Look and remember,” he said—talking to the past, now, and the shadowy future, as well as to the woman who stood before him. “All times and places meet where the power of the universe does not extend. Some have called me a traitor. Others may call you the same. But you and I, we will know the truth.”

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