The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (18 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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Out on the balcony, three more members of the
’Hammer
’s crew sat together around a glass-topped breakfast table. Beka still wore Tarnekep Portree’s clothing, but she’d left off the red plastic eye patch and had done something to her long hair to turn the single braid back to its familiar yellow. The others had clearly taken at least partial advantage of the valet robots’ services. The Professor had switched from his free-spacer’s outfit to a plain white shirt and black trousers cut in the old Entiboran style, and Nyls Jessan carried off a pale blue Khesatan lounging robe with an air of having just arrived from an early-morning session of birdsong and flute music.
Ari slid into one of the empty chairs and began filling his plate with shirred eggs and slices of grilled meat. “Where’s Llannat?” he asked.
Beka shrugged. “Still asleep, I suppose. What does the robot assigned to Mistress Hyfid have to say?”
The valet robot that had escorted Ari to breakfast paused for a moment before responding. “My series-mate reports that Mistress Hyfid dressed and left her chamber some time ago.”
“Then she ought to have gotten here by now,” said Ari.
“Maybe not,” said Jessan. He turned to the robot. “Did Mistress Hyfid have an escort when she left?”
Another pause. “She refused one, sir.”
“There you have it,” said Jessan. “She’s lost.”
The Professor shook his head. “An Adept? Unlikely. Mistress Hyfid is undoubtedly going about her own business—but what it is, I wouldn’t venture to guess.”
 
After a night full of confused and disturbing dreams about the gentle-voiced Professor, with his illusory windows onto an Entibor long dead, Llannat Hyfid had awakened to a room flooded with light—and to the knowledge that she needed to make up her mind before she went any further.
All right
, she demanded of the universe, as the shower room’s multiple jets and sprays of water sluiced the night sweat off her body.
Here I am. Now what do I do?
She didn’t get an answer. She never did, when she tried to push things that way. The prompting she’d gotten unasked on Nammerin had been so strong that she’d pulled away from a conversation in midsentence to make a dash for the hospital airfield, but that inner sureness had left her as soon as the
’Hammer
lifted out of atmosphere and headed for hyperspace.
She turned off the shower room, twisted her long hair up into its customary out-of-the-way knot, and padded back into the sleeping chamber to get dressed. The robot had brought her a set of formal Adept’s blacks while she showered: trousers and tunic and a clean white shirt, laid out in proper order on the new-made bed.
“I swish,” she said, as she fastened the high collar of the black broadcloth tunic, “that whatever’s pushing me around would tell me where I’m heading.”
“I don’t understand, Mistress,” said the robot.
“Never mind,” she said. “I was talking to myself.”
It was close enough for truth, she supposed. The robot seemed to think so, anyhow. It hesitated a second before asking, “Would you care for breakfast, Mistress?”
She shrugged. “Why not?”
“If you would follow me, then …”
“No,” she said. “I’ll find my own way. Thank you.”
The robot made demurring noises. She said no a second time, more forcefully; the robot gave up and rolled away, still clicking with disapproval.
She sighed, and went out into the passage.
It looks like the decision is all yours,
she told herself
. If you say you want out of whatever they’re planning, they’ll honor the request. The Professor’s old-fashioned enough to understand an Adept wanting to keep her hands clean, and Captain Rosselin-Metadi wishes you hadn’t come along in the first place. And those two are the ones who count.
She didn’t need the machine to tell her that breakfast was down the hallway and to the left. The rich, eyeopening aroma of fresh-brewed cha‘a reached her nose even more distinctly than the mingled aura of the
’Hammer’
s crew came to her other senses. She swallowed once, and headed in the opposite direction.
 
“Mistress Hyfid’s absence need not delay us any longer,” said the Professor. “The robot can record and replay as needed. So—my lady?”
“Right,” said Beka. “The latest bit started with a letter from Dadda. I’d set up a mail drop through General Delivery on Pleyver not too long after the Prof and I rigged that crash outside Port Artat, so I thought it was time to make a side trip to Flatlands and check it out. There was a message confirming something I’d asked about, and he told me about the new Space Force clinic in Flatlands. The officer in charge, he said, was discreet and reliable.”
“Considering the source,” Jessan said, pouring more cha’a into the translucent porcelain cups, “I’m flattered.”
“As well you should be,” said the Professor. “Pray continue, my lady.”
“Right,” said Beka. “Besides the word about the clinic, Dadda passed along what he’d learned: Gilveet Rhos, the man who did the electronics work when they killed Mother, hasn’t been in circulation since then. It sounded like somebody wasn’t happy with the way that job went down, which tallies with what out late friend on Pleyver had to say.”
“Which friend was that?” asked Ari. The only Pleyveran he could name offhand was Tarveet, and the councillor had still been alive and making long-winded speeches the day before the
’Hammer
hit Nammerin.
“The one who was hiring me to kill you, big brother,” said Beka, with a crooked smile. “He never did give me his name … but he certainly was generous with everybody else’s.”
Something about her expression sent a cold finger tracing down the back of Ari’s neck. “What did you do to him, Bee?”
“Nothing more than he deserved,” she said. “Owen was in Flatlands—Guild business, I think; he was doing a passable imitation of a spaceport bum—and the bad guys caught him. I don’t know how, and I didn’t ask. But I’d just finished shaking hands on the original deal when a couple of goons dragged Owen into the room, and the head man wanted me to do him, too.”
She paused. “So I shot a goon and cut the head man’s throat, and after that things got violent.”
There was a moment of silence. Ari didn’t doubt that his sister had done everything she described—lying had never been one of Bee’s particular vices—but he was damned if he’d give her the satisfaction of knowing that shed shocked him. When he was fairly certain he could match Beka’s offhand manner, he asked, “What happened to Owen?”
Beka looked worried. “I don’t know. He stayed in Flatlands—unfinished business, he said. But he needed somebody to draw away the hired guns, which is how the Prof and I wound up ruining your friend Jessan’s evening.”
“Believe me,” murmured Jessan, “the night had its moments.”
Beka cast a quick glance sidelong at the Khesatan, but Jessan’s bland face was an noncommittal as ever. With only a faint—and uncharacteristic—pinkness in her pale cheeks to show that the exchange had taken place, Ari’s sister went on.
“After everything fell apart,” she said, “we were, well, busy for a while. But later on, I had some time to think. And the longer I thought, the more the affair on Pleyver started to smell like a setup. Like a whole damned series of setups, in fact, all the way back to the start.”
Ari set his knife and fork aside; the conversation had killing his appetite a long time ago. “A setup? How?”
Beka leaned back and steepled her hands, tapping the fingertips together. “Try this on for size, big brother. Somebody wants to smash Dahl&Dahl and the Suivi lobby so hard there isn’t even a damp spot left on the pavement afterward.”
“It’s conceivable,” the Professor commented. “The Dahls of Galcen are a powerful clan—as are their Suivi cousins.”
“Powerful,” said Jessan, “but not well-loved.” The Khesatan surveyed the breakfast table’s array of jams and preserves, took a spoonful of something clear and green, and began spreading it on a torn-off bit of fresh bread. “Power and popularity,” he continued, “don’t usually go hand-in-hand. Your mother the Domina was a notable exception to the rule.”
“And that’s why someone killed her,” said Beka.
She picked up the silver butter knife from the side of her plate and frowned at it for a moment. Then she changed her grip in a single quick, blurred motion, and started turning the blade first one way and then another.
“It’s how I’d do it,” she went on, her blue eyes following the glint of the breakfast nook’s artificial daylight on the polished metal, “if I wanted to make somebody squirm and bleed.”
“What do you mean?” Ari growled.
His sister smiled—not at him, but at the edge of the knife. “Work it out for yourself. First, you get debates going hot and heavy in the Grand Council over Suivi Point.”
“Tarveet of Pleyver,” said Ari, remembering. “He introduced the original Expulsion Bill. Mother cut it to ribbons on the Council floor.”
“The slug-eating idiot deserved it,” said Beka, and went on. “Step two—assassinate the beloved public figure who happens to be the most passionate voice against expulsion. And step three—make certain your killers get caught, to lay the blame on Dahl&Dahl.”
She tossed the knife from hand to hand for a few seconds, then flicked it out to take up a pat of butter from the crystal dish. “But they didn’t count on Dadda,” she finished. “And their assassin wound up too dead to interrogate.”
Ari scowled into the depths of his cha’a. “Why would anybody believe that Suivi Point
wanted
to get kicked out of the Republic?”
“In order to gain freedom of action,” said the Professor, who’d been listening to Beka with grave approval, like an instructor in keyboard and the voice at a favorite student’s graduation recital. “And a release from the constraint of law.”
“That would make sense to most people, you have to admit,” said Jessan. “Your mother was hitting the ‘how can we control them if we expel them’ note pretty hard in her speeches.”
Ari growled an obscenity under his breath in the Forest Speech—a language he’d always found more satisfying than Galcenian for such purposes.
“You won’t get any argument on that from me,” said Beka. “But think about it, Ari. If I’m right, and the original plan was a putup job, then so was everything else.”
 
T
HE INNER tunnels of the asteroid base ran deep. The Professor had taken over the upper layers for his holovid-enhanced complex of luxurious chambers, but over half of the base’s volume lay empty and unused.
Llannat Hyfid had sensed the structure’s tremendous size as soon as she’d stepped out of
Warhammer
onto the floor of the docking bay. Something about the asteroid smelled familiar, too—an acrid-sweet odor somewhere between engine coolant and rotting meat, one that wasn’t there at all if she made herself close down her sensitivity to the currents of power and rely on her nose alone. The smell had crept into her dreams, making her restless and uneasy in the huge bed, when back at the Nammerin Medical Station she’d slept untroubled on a standard-issue cot and mattress less than a quarter the size.
Now, as she moved downward out of the inhabited sections of the asteroid, the unpleasant nonsmell grew even stronger. However the Professor had come into possession of this place, she reflected, he’d scoured it most thoroughly afterward … but a full squad of cleaning robots couldn’t get rid of a stink that was only there for an Adept to notice.
Back on Maraghai, the Selvaurs always claimed that trouble had a bad smell to it, and perhaps because of her upbringing she had a nose for such things. The practice yard of the Adepts’ Retreat on Galcen, for instance: its hard-packed earth had always smelled faintly of blood to her, a relic of the slaughter done there in the opening days of the war, when the Magelords had attacked the Guild’s inmost citadel and nearly brought it down. She’d gotten used to the smell in time, but most of the other apprentices never even noticed it.
There’d been a class of new students busy in the yard at staff practice on the day she took her Adept’s vows, all oblivious of any lingering impressions from the past. One of the senior apprentices was coaching them. As she drew nearer, she recognized Owen Rosselin-Metadi—Master Ransome’s personal student and, some said, his most trusted aide. Owen looked around from correcting one apprentice’s faulty stance, took in her new suit of formal blacks and the staff, and began to smile.
Congratulations!
His “voice” came through strong and clear, even at that distance, and she knew that her own
Thank you
was a mumble by comparison.
He gestured in the direction of a shady spot over to one side of the yard.
Have time to chat before you go?
Sure.
Just wait a minute, then, while I get them started on the next bit.
She leaned against the practice-yard wall and watched as he matched up the new students for two-person drill. Llannat wondered about Owen sometimes. He’d been a senior apprentice and a teacher when she first came to the Retreat, he was a senior apprentice and a teacher now that she was leaving—and if her training had taught her anything at all, it was how to recognize somebody already working on a level she wasn’t ever going to reach.
He left the apprentices sparring with their staves and came over to join her in the shade.
“Congratulations,” he said again. “You look good.”
She wiggled her shoulders inside the stiff new garments. “I feel like somebody’s about to come along and write me up for impersonating an Adept.”
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “You’ll get used to it. Where are you going now that you’re finished here?”
She grinned at him, and whistled a scrap of an old melody.
“‘Back into space again’?”
She nodded. “I could have gotten waivered out, I suppose, but I like being a medic.”
“And you don’t like being an Adept?”
“I like it,” she said. “I just don’t think I’m ever going to feel easy with it.”
“I don’t know anyone who does,” he said. “It’s better that way, I think—always to be a little uneasy with power.”
She looked at him curiously. “Is that why you’re still an apprentice after all this time? Because you’re … uneasy?”
“Uneasy?” he asked, startled. “No. Not that.”
He paused, and then seemed to make up his mind about something. “Taking Adept’s vows with your whole heart isn’t just a matter of speaking the words,” he said finally. “When you say the words and mean them, the experience changes you—or you change yourself, if you’d sooner look at it that way. And sometimes Master Ransome finds it useful to have an agent on hand whose aura won’t show those changes to anyone who knows how to look.”
“I see,” she said. “I don’t
feel
particularly changed.”
“It’s there, all right,” he told her. “Master Ransome wouldn’t have let you go if you weren’t ready. Where’s the Space Force sending you, anyway?”
“Nammerin,” she said. “Almost like going home. Lots of Selvaurs, lots of big trees—”
“Lots of rain,” said Owen. “My brother Ari’s on Nammerin these days.”
“That, too.”
He gave her a measuring look. “Is that how it is, then?”
“That’s how it is. Master Ransome sees trouble brewing on Nammerin, with your brother at the heart of it. So he did whatever it is he does to arrange these things, and I’m off to keep an eye on the situation.”
She got a different look this time, almost a humorous one. Owen didn’t explain the joke, though, but said only, “You’ll have your work cut out for you—Ari’s not the type to appreciate having a bodyguard.”
“With any luck, he’ll never need one.”
Owen laughed under his breath. “Don’t tell me you still believe in luck.”
Llannat sighed. That was something else she’d be leaving behind her for good, and she was going to miss it. “No,” she admitted. “Not any longer.”
Owen never had explained why he found the idea of an Adept bodyguard for his brother amusing, either. Enlightenment on that score needed to wait until Nammerin, when she’d walked into the staff lounge one afternoon and heard Nyls Jessan telling some tall tale about the CO’s pet sand snake … a nice enough beast, and one that didn’t deserve the problems it had in adapting to the humid climate.
“Come on, Jessan,” she’d said as she came through the door, “tell us another one.”
And then the lounge’s other occupant stood up from the battered, lumpy couch—and kept on standing, until he loomed up like one of the Great Trees of Maraghai under the ceiling struts of the converted storage dome.
“Gentlelady … Mistress.”
The big man’s deep, Galcenian-accented voice didn’t stumble on either title, and the bow of respect he made, while a bit unnerving coming from someone his size, had none of the clumsiness she’d expected.
Someone’s taught him how to move
, she thought, oblivious of Jessan nattering introductions in her ear.
Adept? No, he’s got lieutenant’s bars.
Besides, his aura showed none of an Adept’s almost unstable brilliance.
Strong,
she thought.
Strong and rock-steady-solid … why does he make me think of home?
“I’m from Maraghai,” she said, while her mind worked on sorting out the confused impressions. “And the ‘Mistress’ bit makes me uncomfortable.”
The big man surprised her again. His rather guarded expression changed to a genuine smile, and then she was listening to the rumbling bass notes of a language she hadn’t heard in years, least of all from a human throat.
*Do you understand the Forest Speech?*
Humans from Maraghai were a rare breed, especially in the Space Force. Caught in the glow of meeting somebody else who’d grown up under the Big Trees, it took her several minutes to make the connection between the lieutenant and Owen’s brother on Nammerin. Then she had to struggle to keep her face from showing her disbelief and her mouth from saying anything stupid.
Master Ransome thinks a man like this needs a bodyguard? Lords of life—what sort of trouble can he be in?
But she’d had to wait for the answer until the next night, when a pleasant meal at the Greentrees Lounge in Namport had ended with a wild aircar ride and a fight to the death in a jungle clearing. The heavy, rotting nonsmell had filled the air again that evening—as it did now, even when the passage that she’d been following dead-ended abruptly in a blank wall.
Under her feet, though, she could still sense the lower reaches of the base beneath.
This can’t be the end of the line,
she thought
. There has to be something more.
She closed her eyes, and let the darkness intensify her awareness of buried passages extending coreward.
Over this way a step
, she thought, suiting the action to the words.
And another, and one more … here.
She stamped on the floor with the heel of one sturdy, standard-issue boot. The sound rang hollow. She opened her eyes, and looked. No seams, just solid concrete.
Llannat propped her staff against the wall and knelt on the floor. Then she put both hands flat against the concrete and opened herself to whatever insight the material had to offer. After a second, she lifted her hands again.
There’s some strong pattern-working in place here. Nobody gets any further who can’t find the key.
She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Finding a way through the barrier was going to take a probe deeper than she’d ever tried before, one reaching down into the elementary particles of matter, and she didn’t know if she had the resources to carry it off. If she failed, she might die down here, merged so completely with the material she was probing that she couldn’t pull free.
Even if she didn’t fail, she’d be working so close to her limits that she might come unbound from the physical world altogether and become lost in the Void. Existing outside of place or time, the Void touched all places and all times equally, and the power that filled the rest of the universe had no meaning there. An Adept who overstretched her abilities might fall into that bleak dimension and be drained of energy before she could find the way home.
Llannat squared her shoulders.
Time to find out if you’re more than just a medic in an Adept suit
. One by one she lowered the barriers between her essential self and the outside world, until nothing remained to stop her from sinking into the slab of concrete beneath her hands.
Vertigo threatened to overwhelm her as her mind opened up. She felt a flash of panic—
Trapped inside the stone forever!—
and then steadied, reaching for the pattern of the substance around her. When the universe settled down again, she could feel subtle differences within the surrounding material. Long ago, she realized, someone had hidden points of instability within the flooring to mark the door to the other side: a door closed against the weak and the timid, but open to anyone bold enough to search for the key.
Llannat pulled back into herself, breathing hard from the effort, but smiling. Now that she’d felt the markers the way she had, finding them a second time would be easy, like looking at pebbles on the bottom of a pool.
And then—
she picked up her staff and rested it across her knees—
and then, you just slip right on through …
She knelt on a landing at the top of a metal staircase spiraling down some kind of access tube. The rotting smell filled her nostrils, mixed now with the scents of wet earth and moldering vegetation. When she stood, the floor of the upper passage made a ceiling close above her head. The dim, sourceless lighting of the base’s upper reaches was gone, leaving her in a kind of visible darkness.
She stared down the twisting metal staircase, making her way by feel, one hand grasping her staff and the other the stair rail. As she descended, the darkness grew less profound, until she could look down on thick rain forest far below her.
Where am I? What am I seeing?
She kept on climbing down the staircase, gripping the handrail even tighter than before. The wet jungle-feel was in the air all around her now, and the narrow metal treads felt slick and treacherous underneath the soles of her boots.
Once you’ve started
, she reminded herself,
you can’t go back. You have to go on through, or else be lost.
She heard a high whine from the sky beyond. An aircar came in on a low approach, streaking over the forest canopy to land with a sudden braking blast in a small open area. Space Force Medical Service insignia caught the hazy starlight for a second as the cargo door of the aircar slid back.
Two figures—one tall and fair, the other taller and scaly-skinned—left the aircar and headed off into the jungle. After that, the clearing lay silent; nothing in it moved at all.
Llannat felt her breath catch in her throat.
I remember this. I was there
. She kept on climbing down. She reached the end of the staircase, and stepped off the bottom tread onto the damp, leaf-covered earth.

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