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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: A Working of Stars
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“Word will get out eventually. It always does.”
“By that time, we should already have a string of bases in place. And they’ll be mobile, not fixed. If a particular location is compromised, the base in question can—”
An eye-searing flash lit up the darkness outside the office windows, followed an instant later by a thunderous blast that rattled the glass panes and sent Thel’s heavy ceramic stylus-holder skittering across the desktop. The floating image of the asteroid base wavered and winked out.
In the after-silence, Vai heard Theledau drew a sharp breath before demanding, “What was that?”
“Explosion in the entertainment district. Big one.” She found herself at the window, not quite aware of having gotten there, looking out at the city. The night sky was full of orange flames shot through with clouds of white steam and heavy black smoke, and the flashing lights of emergency vehicles made streaks of bright purple and hot amber on the streets below. “I can’t pinpoint exactly where from up here.”
“Give me a moment.” Thel was at his desk already, working the buttons and touch-points. She knew that he had to be forcing his way into the fire and security information grid with the brute force of a star-lord’s personal level of access. “Hanilat Emergency Response puts the explosion at the Court of Two Colors.”
“The sus-Dariv,” Vai said at once. “They’ve been meeting at the Court all this past week. The attack has to have been aimed at them.”
“This time.” Thel was working the controls on his desk again. The sigils for all the various branches of sus-Radal family security flared to life on its glossy black surface, shifting under his hands from low-threat violet to flashing max-pri yellow until the entire desktop seemed aflame.
When he was done, he sat down heavily in the chair behind his desk. A few minutes ago, showing off the family’s latest project, he had looked confident and satisfied with the world; now he just looked tired.
“If you’re right,” he said, “then nobody is safe anymore. The rules of the game are changing—and we’ll have to change with them, or die.”
 
 
Herin stood in the doorway of a building not far from what had been the Court of Two Colors, watching the wreckage burn. Training and instinct said that he should go—that he should put as much distance as possible as fast as possible between himself and the death some enemy had meant for him and his family—but for a long time he found himself unable to turn away from the destruction.
The night air was full of smoke and chemicals and the noise of sirens. Searchlight beams crisscrossed the darkening sky, and the flashing amber and violet lights of a dozen or more fire and safety vehicles lit up the street at ground level.
He knew already that the rescuers weren’t going to find anybody alive—not in the conference rooms, at least, and none of the attending sus-Dariv anywhere. The
eiran
would not have manifested themselves to somebody like him, at his age and without warning, for anything less than a total disaster.
Zeri, now, had rescued herself without knowing it. The easy luck that had always let her slide out from under unwanted obligations without causing trouble had played a trick on her at last. But Herin couldn’t give himself a like credit for his own survival. He had been found—singled out—caught by the
eiran
like a fish on a lure, and what little he knew of the Mage-Circles suggested that if the
eiran
had him, they were unlikely to let him go.
I do not need this,
he thought. He tried to laugh at the sudden absurdity of his situation, but the breath caught in his throat halfway and he was sobbing instead. He closed his mouth tightly and forced himself to stop.
Especially not now.
He took one deep breath, then another, and tried to think about what he ought to do next. Find Zeri, maybe. She would need to know what had happened. He shook his head.
She’ll hear about it soon enough.
Something teased at the corner of his vision, wisps and threads of silver that faded as soon as he looked at them directly. He kept on watching the public-safety workers toiling in the debris of the Court of Two Colors, and waited. It didn’t take long for the
eiran
to come back. This time the shift and flicker of light resolved into a line of blue-white fire trailing off into the shadows—another message, he supposed, from the capricious forces that had pulled him away from death a little while before.
Herin moved out of the doorway and let the silvery threads draw him away through the periphery of the crowd. This time they didn’t vanish until he was well away from the street where the Court of Two Colors lay burning.
He took a closer look at his new surroundings: deserted alley, no streetlights, big industrial buildings all around. A far cry from the ultra-fashionable Court.
“I get the idea,” he said aloud. His voice sounded hoarse and shaky, as though it belonged to somebody else he’d never met: Herin Arayet sus-Dariv, talking to the
eiran
like a drunken Magelord. Shock and grief could do that sometimes, leave a man bare to the universe in ways he hadn’t been before. Sometimes the changes went away as the trauma faded; sometimes they were forever; but it was never a wise idea to ignore them. “It’s time for me to lie low for a while.”
The idea sounded like a good one. All he needed to do was find a place to hide out in. Then he could wait until enough time had passed that the destruction of the Court of Two Colors was yesterday’s news—and until the
eiran
either went away or told him to go do something else.
 
 
Vai waited for half an hour after Theledau had left the office building, then started home herself. She had more than one bolt-hole in Hanilat—places that, because she was by nature cautious, not even the sus-Radal knew of—but she ignored all of them and headed instead for the Five Street transit hub. The city was not a safe place tonight, even for someone who carried a Mage’s staff, and she would rest better on the railcar to Demaizen than in a downtown bed.
A light rain had started falling while she was indoors, diffusing the light from the streetlamps into a yellow glow. Over on the other side of the city, the Court of Two Colors still burned, painting a smear of sullen orange across the overcast sky, and the night air was full of the stink of smoke and chemicals.
That was another reason she wanted to get out of Hanilat. The events of the night had set the
eiran
to stretching and interweaving in new and restless patterns, and she could feel the will and intention behind them.
Partway to the hub, she became aware that the
eiran
of the city were changing around her as she walked—directing her attention not to the elusive pattern of the current working, but to something else. She let her eyes unfocus a little, and was rewarded by a glimpse of silvery cord, a tantalizing wisp of light that curled and twisted its way into the shadows of a nearby side street. The light flickered and blinked out as she watched; a few seconds later, it flickered back on again.
Vai smiled in spite of herself. Somebody, it appeared, was trying very hard to remain inconspicuous and escape public notice, and the eiran were not cooperating. In fact, one could almost say that the eiran were actively seeking out her attention in the matter.
But if they’re expecting me to follow a come-hither look into a dark alley, she thought, they’re going to have to think again. The sus-Radal trained me better than that.
Still, Vai had to admit that the incident had piqued her curiosity—and she didn’t think that it was part of whatever working had struck against the sus-Dariv. She applied her mind to another part of the extensive training she had received from the sus-Radal in earlier days, and came up with a mental map of this portion of Hanilat. The side street up ahead was one that she’d used as a shortcut more than once in the past, since it connected at its other end with the major Three Street transit corridor, but it was sufficiently dark and out of the way that a person with a need to stay unseen might find it a useful hideout.
If she could trust the
eiran,
whoever lurked in the shadows had most of their attention turned in this direction. She had plenty of time before the last railcar left the Five Street hub; she could afford the time to work her way around to the alley’s Three Street entrance. Maybe the lurker would be gone by then, in which case she could simply cut back through the alley shortcut and continue her journey home.
Or maybe the lurker would still be in there hiding—and she could find out what kind of person the
eiran
had seen fit to bring to her attention.
Be honest,
she told herself.
You’re all keyed up, and you want to
do
something for a change instead of watching it all happen.
Maybe. But that’s not going to stop me.
Going around the long way to the Three Street entrance took about fifteen minutes, long enough for the lurker to be well away if flight had been his intention. Vai unclipped her staff from her belt and entered the darkened alley.
Finding him was easy after that. He wasn’t running; in fact, he’d settled himself in for the night in the sheltered corner between a trash bin and a flight of concrete steps. If the
eiran
hadn’t been swirling and twisting about him like threads of spun sugar, she would never have spotted him. As it was, she ghost-footed up to within a few feet, cleared her throat politely, and spoke.
“Who are you hiding from?”
Somebody had definitely trained him: He was on his feet and reaching inside his jacket for a weapon almost before she’d put the final inflection on the sentence.
She said, “Please don’t do that,” and let her mind release a little of its collected energy, so that the staff in her hand began to glow.
He lowered his hand again, slowly and carefully. In the glow from her staff, she recognized Herin Arayet sus-Dariv—his hair in disarray, his eyes still wide and dilated in the aftermath of shock, and his skin and clothing covered with a fine layer of pale grey dust.
“Ah,” she said. “I can see why you might not want to be found tonight.”
He looked at her intently. She thought that he might be planning to make a break for the mouth of the alley—he was still on edge, and probably not as rational as he thought he was—but he didn’t. Instead he said, “I know you. You’re the Demaizen Mage I talked with at the Old Hall.”
“You have sharp eyes, considering that I was wearing a mask at the time.”
“Sharp ears, actually. Your voice is the same.”
She made a mental note to remember that for the next time she went incognito, then said, “I know what happened tonight at the Court of Two Colors. How close were you to the blast?”
“Too close.” He stopped, drew breath, and began again. “Across the street. I’d left the building a minute or two earlier … .”
She nodded. “Right. And you’re sure that you happened by coincidence to leave the building before the bomb went off.”
“No,” he said. “Something else happened.” His eyes flicked sidelong to her glowing staff. “It was the
eiran.
I’d never seen them before, and they came looking for me and pulled me out of there just in time.”
“That explains a few things,” she said. “Like what the
eiran
were doing when they showed up wanting me to come in here and look for you.”
“Oh?” He was finally relaxing a little, which was good—less of a chance that he’d try to overpower her and bolt for the main thoroughfare, or reach again for the weapon inside his jacket. “What were they doing?”
“They were bringing me a Mage,” she said, “and you a Circle.”
 
ENTIBOR: TIFSET; GIFLA HARBOR ERAASI: HANILAT
 
A
rekhon and Maraganha took a shuttle-hop to the city of Tifset, on the main island of the Immering Archipelago—“This can’t be cheap,” Maraganha said; and Arekhon replied, “It isn’t. But the money I’ve saved here on Entibor isn’t going to do me any good back on Eraasi.”
“Don’t spend all of it,” she told him. “You never know what may happen.”
In Tifset, they spent several hours going through the paper archives—raw data, unscanned and unprocessed. It was slow, dreary work. Arekhon possessed only a basic reading knowledge of Immeringic, and Maraganha’s trick with the
eiran
didn’t work on the written language. They ended up dividing the job accordingly, so that he read, painstakingly, all the reports and files and ledgers, while she talked to the clerks and secretaries.
Their efforts paid off, eventually, in the tax records for Gifla Harbor, a small fishing port at the isolate southern end of the archipelago. One Narin Iyal, a resident alien with birthplace self-listed as “Amisket in Veredde,” had dutifully reported and paid last year’s taxes on money earned as a crew member aboard the deep-sea fishing boat
Ninefold Star.
“I should have guessed it when she talked about honest work,” Arekhon said to Maraganha. “She ran the Mage-Circle for Amisket’s fishing fleet before she came to Demaizen.”
The tax form gave a residence address, 14 Upper Shore #2b, but no voice number. Arekhon thought of calling the general information office for Gifla Harbor, then thought better of it. His command of the island language was sketchy at best. He could read the Immering tax records, provided that he knew what he was looking for to start with, but conversation—especially over a voice comm with no help from expressions or gestures—was another matter. And Maraganha’s knack for languages, they had already determined, did not work well over communications lines.
Instead, they booked seats on one of the hydrofoil island-skimmers, and arrived in Gifla Harbor early the next morning. After some confusion with street maps and half-understood directions, they found 14 Upper Shore—a weather-beaten tile-and-stucco house broken up into apartments—and Arekhon knocked on the door of #2b.
After a minute or two, he heard grumbles and the sound of movement from within. The door swung open, revealing not Narin but a stranger, a stout man who wore a loose bedrobe over work trousers, and smelled faintly of fish and stale beer. He scowled and said something in Immeringic.
“I’m sorry,” Arekhon said, in his own halting version of that language. “Narin lyal—is she here?”
“No. Not here.” The man had switched to An-Jemaynan, although his grasp of the Federated Quarter’s main language was even shakier than Arekhon’s knowledge of Immeringic. “Gone. Last winter.”
Arekhon sighed in exasperation. If Narin had moved on from Gifla Harbor, there was no telling where she might be. “Gone where? Do you know?”
The man muttered something in Immeringic that sounded like either a curse or an invocation—the gesture that went with it was one that Arekhon didn’t recognize, and that could have belonged to either. In An-Jemaynan, he said, “Nobody knows.”
Maraganha stepped forward, just enough so that the movement drew the man’s attention. “Is there anyone we could ask?”
After a moment, as if reluctant, the man said, “Fishing Office. Maybe. Now go away.”
 
 
Zeri sus-Dariv yawned and stretched her way out of a sound and dreamless sleep, then sat up in bed and raised her voice for the benefit of the house-mind.
“Kitchen! Fix me some toast and red
uffa.”
The kitchen’s synthesized voice came back to her. “I hear.”
She rose and made her way down the hall to the necessarium. Compared with the house in which she had been raised, Zeri’s apartment was cramped—scarcely more than two rooms, not counting the necessarium and the kitchen nook—but it didn’t lack for comfort. After a session of hot mist followed by a cooling waterfall had coaxed her the rest of the way to wakefulness, she put on a light morning-gown and thin-soled slippers and went to have her breakfast.
The late-morning sun shone in through the half-curtained windows of the apartment’s outer room. Zeri sat down in the high-backed wovenwood chair where she usually took her meals, and the household
aiketh
floated in from the kitchen carrying a tray. The servitor construct—a quasi-organic node of the house-mind, encased in a roughly cylindrical shell of metal and plastic—hovered on its counterforce unit a handspan or so above the green and yellow carpet.
“As you required,” the
aiketh
said.
“Excellent,” said Zeri, after the
aiketh
had unfolded the legs of the tray to make a table. “You may go.”
The
aiketh
floated off. Zeri applied herself to the toast and
uffa.
She was not quite halfway through the meal when the entrance monitor chimed an alert and spoke.
“Fas Treosi is here with urgent news, and requests admittance.”
She felt a stirring of curiosity, not unmixed with guilt—had the conclave actually decided something noteworthy, after all? “Let Syr Treosi come in.”
She heard the door opening, and a moment later Treosi appeared: an elderly gentleman, the very image of a respectable legalist, his coat and trousers of sober grey a silent reproach to her own informal dress.
“My apologies for being so late in breakfasting,” she said to him, and gestured toward the wovenwood guest chair. “Please join me for
uffa,
at least.”
“I don’t want to trouble you—” Treosi began.
But the
aiketh
was already bringing up another tray, this one bearing a cup and saucer, and placing it beside his chair. Then the servitor took the pot of
uffa
from Zeri’s tray and filled Treosi’s cup with the steaming red liquid.
“You see,” Zeri said lightly, “it’s no trouble for me at all. Now, Syr Treosi—what brings you to my door, of all places, so early in the midmorning? Has some unforeseen disaster cut down all the senior family and left no one standing besides me?”
To her astonishment—followed, a heartbeat later, by the slow crawl of increasing fear—Fas Treosi’s face went pale. “Yes,” he said. “You are Zeri sus-Dariv sus-Dariv, the oldest living survivor in the senior line.”
“Explain,” she said. She knew better, seeing Treosi’s face, than to ask if this was a joke. “Please.”
“An incendiary device,” Treosi said. “During the late meetings … somebody must have known who would be there. If you hadn’t chosen to leave early …”
“Yes,” said Zeri. She’d meant to look in on her theatre-arts group, but the conclave had left her feeling dull and out of sorts. She’d gone home instead, to read a journal article called “Civic Turmoil and Public Art: A Window of Opportunity?” and play solitaire against the house-mind. Pure slackness on her part—Cousin Herin would have said so, and only half in jest—but she was alive because of it, and he was dead.
“I can’t possibly be the only one left,” she said in desperation. Her mind didn’t want to shape itself to comprehend the idea of complete destruction, because comprehending it would mean that the news was real. “Somebody else
had
to have missed the late meetings. Great-uncle Beven—he wasn’t there at all that I remember. Somebody said he hadn’t been feeling very well.”
“Apparently not,” said Treosi. “His household
aiketen
found him dead this morning.”
“Killed?”
Treosi gave a minute shrug. “Without further examination, who can say? You are the head of the family now; if you want to order—”
“What would be the point?” She set down the cup she’d been holding ever since Treosi made his first, bald announcement. There was a puddle of red
uffa
in the saucer—she didn’t remember making any sudden movements, but she must have done so all the same, if she’d spilled it like that. She laced her hands together in her lap, hidden under the breakfast tray so that Treosi would not see them shaking. “He’s gone. So are the rest of them. Anybody left is away with the fleet. We have to call the convoy home and sort things out.”
“I’m sorry,” said Treosi. He was shaking his head, and his expression had not lightened. “I didn’t get the chance to finish telling you—”
She had been cold; she was growing colder. Cold inside and out. “Finish it, Syr Treosi. What else happened last night?”
“The trading fleet is lost.”
“What! How—?”
“Pirates, out beyond Ruisi. The guard and attack ships were destroyed, the cargo haulers boarded and left empty. The final message drone from
Path-Lined-with-Flowers
came in-system before midnight.”
“I see.” Piracy had always been a key element of the game of trade as the fleet-families played it, but seldom piracy so complete and so disastrous. “Did the
Path
recognize any insignia or fleet-livery?”
“Black only,” said Treosi. “And the boarders never unmasked. The attackers may have been hired crew for some group who either didn’t know enough or didn’t care enough to follow proper custom; the message drone was sent by the ship-mind, and didn’t include speculation.”
“Clearly we have an enemy who cares nothing for custom,” Zeri said. She clasped her hands even more tightly under the shelter of the lacquered tray. “It would have been more convenient for everybody if I
had
stayed at the meeting. I was never intended to be head of the family.”
“If I may offer a suggestion—”
“Please.”
“The outer family and the junior lines are relatively intact despite the losses of the past few hours. Your wisest course would be to approach one of the syn-Dariv, or perhaps the Arayet—I can make a few recommendations, if you don’t actually have a preference—with an offer of contractual alliance.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“You have to do something,” Treosi protested. “Soon, before the other families notice the absence of control and move to devour you.”
“Someone is devouring us already,” she pointed out. “Our fleet is weaponless; our senior line is destroyed … if I were to find a capable man and make him head of the sus-Dariv in every important respect, with his line to be senior after I’m gone—that’s the kind of agreement you were thinking of, wasn’t it?—how long do you think the rest of the fleet-family would last?”
“But what else is there to do?”
She had shocked him, Zeri could tell; he hadn’t thought that she would reject the idea. She wondered briefly which of the ambitious junior families had seized the moment, in the midst of flame and consternation, and solicited Treosi’s ear.
It didn’t matter. The star-lords were not universally loved in Hanilat, for all that their ships and trade had made the city prosperous, and kept Eraasi the dominant force in the homeworlds. They had enemies among the newer mercantile families, and among the members of the old land-based aristocracy—and now one of those enemies had discovered the way to take a fleet-family down.
Without ships, and without the cadre of trained managers and administrators that had been lost in the disaster, the collapse of the sus-Dariv was inevitable. The candles on the altars would burn out, the family tablets would go untended, and all the people who depended on the sus-Dariv for their place in society would be left without protection.
We have the money to rebuild our fleet,
she thought, while Syr Treosi was remonstrating with her across the breakfast tray.
But we don’t have the time.
“Go to Natelth sus-Peledaen,” she said at last.
If this comes down, in the end, to the star-lords against the rest of Eraasi, we need the most powerful ally we can get.
“Tell him that the head of the sus-Dariv wishes to speak with him on a matter concerning our two families.”
 
 
The Gifla Harbor Fishing Cooperative had its headquarters in a whitewashed stone building with a weather station on the roof. The building directory listed an Overseer of Ships and Crews, whose office, when Arekhon and Maraganha finally located it, turned out to be a single large room occupying most of the building’s top floor. One wall of the office was mostly windows looking out over the waterfront; the other three walls were covered with charts and notice boards.
Maraganha nodded in the direction of the woman working at the biggest and least cluttered desk. “That one’s probably the Overseer,” she said. “You try charming information out of her while I complain to the clerical help about the way you’ve been dragging me from island to island on a missing-person search. I’m going to abuse you shamefully and claim that you’re my nephew.”

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