The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5 (31 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5
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Klea came up to him and helped him to rise up from the dirt.
“Mistress Santreny,” he said. “I feared that you were dead.”
“No,” she said. “Hurt, but no more. Come—let me take us home.”
 
“The revenant has gone,” said Caridal Fere, “and I remain. I rule those who rule the world of Khesat.”
“I don’t think so,” said a voice that Faral knew—and his cousin Jens stepped over the threshold with a blaster in his hand.
“Another ghost,” Miza said. Her voice trembled. “Jens, I didn’t want this to happen.”
“It hasn’t happened,” Jens said. He turned to the Master of Nalensey. “There’s only one ghost here, and that’s you.”
He raised his blaster and shot Caridal Fere, there in his study with the windows overlooking the Plaza of Hope.
“If you’re real, let me touch you,” Faral said to Jens.
“Oh, I’m real,” Jens said. He reached out his hand, the one that didn’t hold the blaster, and Faral gripped it hard. Miza was hugging Jens and Faral both, and laughing and sobbing at the same time.
Rhal Kasander came forward, delicately sidestepping the body of Caridal Fere. “Highest,” he said to Jens, “command me!”
“I’m not the Highest,” Jens said. “They didn’t shout ‘huzzah!,’ remember?”
“Shouting ‘huzzah!’ is a minor thing,” Kasander said. “The requirement is only that you be presented. You are already Highest at that moment, and—unless you choose to retire—you reign as long as you live thereafter.”
“Oh, I may choose to retire,” Jens said, “but not just yet. If I
am
the Highest, I have things I need to attend to.”
Kasander paled slightly. “What do you mean?”
“I came in response to a message,” said Jens, “saying that my parents were in danger here. Everything—the Presentation, the Tower, all of it—comes from that. And I will find out what happened to them if it takes the land, the sea, and the sky to do it.”
“You don’t need to go that far.” If Kasander had gone pale before, he was pink with embarrassment now. “I sent the message to secure your presence here, as a Worthy, for the changing of the rule—it cost me a pretty sum to get the codes, I’ll have you know. I wouldn’t have dared to do it at all if your mother and father had actually been within a sector of Khesat.”
“Do you mean,” said Jens, “that I went through all of this for nothing?”
“Not exactly,” said Kasander. “You
are
the Highest now, after all—that should count for quite a bit.”
Jens stared at him for a moment longer, then laughed and shook his head. “I suppose it does,” he said. “If I’m the Highest, then where do we go next?”
“To my town house,” Rhal said. “I’ve got dozens of invitations to your Acclamatory ball all written out. I promise you, the celebrations will go on for days.”
 
MARAGHAI
 
T
HE HIGHEST of Khesat had come to Maraghai. His security guards, his personal staff, and even the elderly nobleman of exceedingly Worthy Lineage who claimed the courtesy title of Hereditary Slipper-Bearer, discovered—too late for effective protest—that the Selvauran rulers of the planet would allow none of them closer to the surface than the nearspace docking station.
They protested, vigorously, but the Highest merely looked amused. He divested himself of his jewel-encrusted travel coat, purchased with his own hands a cheap quilted jacket from a station-based clothes vendor, and borrowed a knife from one of the security guards “in case of rufstaffas on the way.” Then he presented his passport—not the Khesatan one, which was written in purple ink on tablets of gold and ivory, but a common plastic affair with lettering in the local script—to the Selvauran immigration clerk.
With much chortling and hooting, the clerk accepted the passport and fed it through the reader. The Highest accepted the stamped and returned passport with a laughing comment in one of the local dialects. Tucking it into his pocket, he bowed a smiling farewell to his entourage.
“Entertain yourselves until I get back,” he told them, and disappeared through the blastproof door to the shuttle bay.
 
In the South Continent High Ridges the season was midwinter, the time of the Year’s Turn. The quilted jacket that Jens had bought on the docking station was of local make and designed for the weather. What it lacked in elegance it made up for in padding and interlining that kept him warm in spite of the falling snow.
He had chosen to walk from the last stop on the hoverbus line, rather than renting an aircar in Ernalghan, in order to spend as much of his stolen time as possible among familiar landscapes. When at last he reached the final uphill trail, the sky had long since grown dark. A cover of thick snow lay over everything, bending down the lower branches of the great trees and muffling all sound except the sighing wind. No rufstaffas or other predators stalked the home woods tonight, and the borrowed knife he wore at his belt remained unused.
Drifted snow obscured the path, and the snow on the trees hid many of the marks and blazes that pointed out the trail. But his feet still remembered the way; and ahead, at last, he saw the lighted windows of the house in the woods, all bright yellow and welcoming.
He walked up to the house and mounted the steps. He hadn’t yet reached the door when a giant burst outward onto the veranda, swept him into his arms, and whirled him into the air.
“Jens! It’s good to see you,” said Ari Rosselin-Metadi, his voice a deep rumble. “We were afraid you wouldn’t be able to come.”
“Let me breathe a minute,” Jens said, laughing, as he regained his feet. “I told Aunt Llann that I’d be here if I could arrange it. As it happens, the Highest of Khesat can arrange quite a bit if he feels like it—and I did.”
“Come inside, then, and be welcome,” said Ari, kicking open the door and pulling him into the immense, high-raftered reception room. “We’re in the small room, in back … . Llannat! Faral! Jens is home!”
They hurried through the great room, which was as tall and echoing as Jens remembered it, and large enough to entertain most of Ari’s Selvauran relatives at once. From there they went into the informal family hall behind it.
The family hall was a cozier place altogether, a big room with one wall made of glass and another wall mostly fireplace. Chairs and benches and piles of cushions were scattered here and there across the floor. A warm light came from candles and from low-power amber glows, and from the orange-yellow flames on the hearth. Jens’s nostrils prickled with the familiar Year’s Turn smells of mulled wine and hot berry-cider and aromatic wood.
As soon as he entered, he was clasped in more embraces, first from his Aunt Llann and then from Beka Rosselin-Metadi, and from her husband.
“Mamma!” Jens said, still somewhat breathless, as he returned the hugs. “It’s high time you and Dadda decided to reappear … where
were
you, anyway, while I was racketing all over the galaxy thinking you were locked up in a cell somewhere?”
His parents looked at each other. “Hiding,” his mother said. “People started to sidle up to your father at parties and say things like, ‘trifling questions of eligibility can be … dealt with’; so we decided that it was time to go check out some urgent security breaches in the Accardi Sector.”
“And left me holding the bag,” said Jens, taking a seat on one of the piles of cushions near the fire. “I like that, I do.”
“You can always quit the job,” said his mother. “I did. And threw the Iron Crown of Entibor out of the airlock into deep space afterward.”
“An inspiration to all of us,” murmured Jens, “but I think I’m getting accustomed to the work.”
The conversation turned to other things as the evening wore on—in between wine and cider, and roasted fruit, and other traditional Year’s Turn delicacies. The family gathering this year was made even larger by the added presence of Owen Rosselin-Metadi, who in the past had only sent Aunt Llann the traditional greetings and his apologies, and of Owen’s trusted right hand, Mistress Klea Santreny. Another unexpected guest was Mael Taleion. The Second of the Prime Circle had recovered by now from his struggle to put right the life and luck of Khesat—and his newfound closeness to Klea Santreny appeared to be puzzling the Master of the Adepts’ Guild considerably.
An interesting set of relationships
, thought Jens.
Even money which one wins, I think. But it should be amusing to watch.
All the Hyfid-Metadi siblings were there—Kei and Dortan and ’Rada-the-brat, and Faral home from studying with Gentlesir Huool on Ophel. He had Mizady Lyftingil with him; the pair of them were sitting close together on one of the high-backed benches.
“How’s life treating all of you in Sombrelír, coz?” Jens asked.
“Well enough,” Faral said. “Chaka’s apprenticed on board the
Dusty
—she liked the taste of free-spacing she got there, and I think she plans to own a ship of her own some day. And Huool gets enough work out of me, one way and another, to keep me from getting bored. I’m not as famous as the Highest of Khesat yet, but give me and Miza time.”
“Any more trouble from the Green Sun?”
Miza looked amused. “They’re very quiet and well behaved whenever the subject comes up. But they aren’t taking political commissions much these days at all. I think our friends Bindweed and Blossom had a few words with the boss-man after they got back from Khesat.”
“Good,” said Jens. “We’ve been asking questions on Khesat along those same lines, trying to figure out who paid whom for what. My cousin-once-removed the Exalted of Tanavral admits to sending me the false message as a lure—he doesn’t say anything about hiring the Green Sun, but all the trails lead that way, so I expect that he’s guilty.”
“No,” said Faral. “That was Gerre Hafelsan, before Ransome got to him. He wanted to deprive the Exalted of Tanavral of his prize Worthy. Then the Adepts on Khesat got word of what was going on—not hard to do, since Caridal Fere was the Exalted’s fellow-conspirator—and removed a lot of the background data from the Green Sun’s intelligence files in the hopes that they’d fumble the snatch, and maybe even get the two of us killed in the crossfire.”
“Huool gave Faral a B-plus for that analysis,” Miza said proudly.
Jens raised an eyebrow. “Only a B-plus?”
“I skimped on the footnotes,” Faral admitted. “Sorry.”
“Kasander would have wanted one of the Jessani for a Worthy,” said Jens’s father. “Ideally, one whom nobody would actually pick as a candidate for presentation—just so that his faction could derive prestige from convincing one of us to make the attempt. And our branch of the family, I greatly fear, is thought of on Khesat as sadly unstable.”
“You worked hard on that impression for years,” Beka Rosselin-Metadi said. “It had to convince someone eventually.”
“
I
want to know what the Khesatan Adepts thought they were doing,” said Llannat. “Staying out of local politics has been a Guild rule for as long as I can remember.”
“And I,” said Owen. “Which was part of the problem, I think. Errec Ransome—whatever else he did—put a stop to that sort of thing most places. It was the Guild for the Guild alone, with him. Those of us who grew up under his rules forgot that things had ever been otherwise.”
“Khesat was one of the places where they were otherwise,” Jens told him. “Very much otherwise, apparently; I’ve read my predecessors’ journals. The Khesatan Adepts gave up local politics when Errec Ransome reformed the Guild after the First Magewar—or at least they said that they did. What we’re finding out now is that they merely changed their act on the surface and kept all their old bad habits underneath.
“So Caridal Fere—acting as the Master of the local Guild—made certain that the Green Sun on Ophel was hindered in its kidnapping attempts, and bribed the crowd in Ilsefret to reject me at the Acclamation. And it was Caridal Fere and the Khesatan Adepts who killed my predecessor, instead of letting the poor man retire in good time.”
“They were afraid he’d support your candidacy if they let him live,” said Miza. “You
were
related to him, after all—even if your branch of the family isn’t respectable. So he had to die, and you had to be put out of the running, as soon as possible.”
“And letting the Council of Worthies regretfully decide that I wouldn’t be suitable wasn’t good enough for them.” Jens shook his head. “I don’t know why—I certainly never had any quarrel with the Khesatan Guild. Not before now.”
“I think,” said Miza, “that the Khesatan Adepts were afraid of you, even as a candidate not seriously intended for presentation. They didn’t want you or any other member of your family coming anywhere near the contest. You’re too well known and well connected outside of Khesat’s own sphere of influence, you’re far too close to the Guild Master and the First—and face it, exciting times follow your family around like a stray pet looking for a home.”
“Enough talk of troubles past,” said Mael Taleion. “On Eraasi, this would be the season to speak of new beginnings, and to offer peace to those who are gone.”
He poured mulled wine and berry-cider for all present, even the young ones, and raised his cup to his lips. A moment before drinking, he poured a splash onto the floor.
“For all the spirits who still seek rest,” he said, like a benediction. “An old age is ending; a new age begins. May it bring good fortune to the Republic and the Homeworlds both.”
“Good fortune,” Jens echoed him—and the Highest of Khesat spilled a drop of wine, and drank.

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