The Gathering Flame (43 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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Vasari let go the man she was holding. The commands she had laid on him, of silence and forgetfulness, would keep him from summoning help for a few minutes, but no longer. And the pilot of the chartered aircar would have seen the whole thing.
“Come on,” she said to Errec. “We’ve got to get you to a spaceport. After everything you’ve done tonight, this whole planet’s going to be too hot for you.”
 
(GALCENIAN DATING 970 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 34 VERATINA)
 
I
T TOOK Errec Ransome ten days to make the journey from his prison house to a working spaceport. He’d walked without a destination at first, seeking only to put as much distance behind him as possible. Then on the second night he saw, beyond the horizon, the rising fire-trail of a massive surface-to-orbit ship lifting off, and turned his face in that direction.
Next day the temperature dropped and it began to rain.
He kept on walking. The broken ground—full of precipitous downslopes, thorny tangles, and grotesque piles of tumbled rock—slowed his progress and often forced him to turn aside from the straight bearing to the port. Patches of fog rose up from every dip and hollow, so that a sudden drop-off or a leg-twisting jumble of stone seemed to hide wherever he looked. And always, at the edge of his vision, moved shadows not cast by any natural part of the desolate landscape, persistent reminders that the dead walked with him.
The rain fell all that day and into the evening. About midnight a cold wind sprang up; it caught at his sodden garments and slapped them against his body with stinging force, then pulled away the cloth to slap at him again. By daybreak he was chilled to the bone and shivering without letup. He pressed his fist against his mouth to keep from answering the voices that spoke to him out of the shadows. And he kept on walking.
The foul weather came close to killing him, but in the end it brought him a different gift. Late in the evening of the fourth day he spied a white light coming from the mist on the far side of the next hill. He didn’t dare let his mind go forth to see what awaited. Heedless of what might lie ahead, he broke into a stumbling run.
What he found was a cut where a road passed under the shoulder of a hill. Rain had washed dirt and stone down into the road from the hillside above. A convoy of vehicles had stopped; men with shovels were working on the slide.
The convoy drivers had rigged strong white emergency lights to punch through the dark and fog. The glare, and the noise of the workers, reached up even to where Errec crouched, half-frozen and half-starved, under a tree near the crest line. He was close to half-mad as well—the circle of his dead pressed close around him and would not let him be—but he retained enough grip on sanity to understand that the trucks presented him with his only chance for survival.
Stumbling through the shadows, catching onto bushes and saplings for support, he made his way down into the confusion below. His clothing was no wetter than anyone else’s in the downpour, and thanks to those who had imprisoned him, the garments were of local cut. He took a shovel, and—using what scraps of Power he could in his weakened state—persuaded those he moved among to see him as another member of their crew, someone whom they recognized but didn’t know well enough to engage in conversation. He fell to shoveling with the rest, and let his labor push the shadows away.
The work warmed him, and when someone came by with hot drinks and paper-wrapped food packets he took both gratefully. He tore open his packet with teeth and fingernails and ate all the contents. The meal, scanty as it was, gave him enough energy to begin work on the next step: he pushed away the faces of the dead and began, instead, to reach out toward the minds of the living.
He sipped at the hot liquid in his thick paper cup and eavesdropped on the thoughts of the men around him, as he had eavesdropped earlier on the thoughts of his guards. This time it was easier, since the convoy workers weren’t Mages or Magelords, only drivers and freight handlers. They were taking the string of unladen vehicles to the spaceport, there to fill them with goods from the cargo carriers that brought home loot from across the Gap Between.
At least one of the convoy workers, Iel Geiraed by name, had other plans. Errec followed Geiraed’s thoughts even more carefully than he did those of the others—and was rewarded, in time, by learning that the man possessed the local equivalent of a free-spacer’s license and ID papers. Errec swallowed the dregs of the hot liquid in his cup and began the process of invasion and compulsion that had served him so well before.
It took remarkably little effort to persuade Geiraed to come up and ask to take Errec’s shovel and relieve him at the dirt slide. Geiraed reached for the shovel, and their hands made contact. A touch was enough. Errec made the leap, and sent his tired body to rest in the dry warmth of a truck’s interior while his essential self found refuge in the dim recesses of Geiraed’s mind.
And rode there, hidden, while the slide was cleared, and for the rest of the journey to the port. Errec wasn’t striving, this time, to assert control. He ransacked his host’s mind thoroughly, as he had learned on Galcen how to do, and took into himself the man’s knowledge and mannerisms and language, until the would-be spacer scarcely had a thought unmirrored by his invisible doppelganger.
On the tenth day, the convoy reached its destination: a fenced landing field surrounded by an ugly jerrybuilt boom town. The red earth behind the fence, scraped flat by heavy machinery and baked hard by repeated takeoffs and landings, stretched out to the horizon. Ships big and small stood in rows on their landing legs: some of them black and wing-shaped like the ships that had broken the Guildhouse at Amalind Grange, others made of plain or painted metal in dozens of different configurations.
Errec slipped out of hiding when the convoy halted outside the gate of the field. His unwitting twin, Geiraed, had business in the town—a meeting with an employment agent, a local who specialized in matching out-of-work spacers with ships in need of a crew. The agency had its office in a prefabricated metal-sided building set up on stone blocks in a side street near the port fence. Errec found a sheltered corner out back near the trash bins, and let his body wait there while his mind-mate took them both inside.
The employment agent had good news this time: not just one ship in port wanting hands, but several.
“Lord syn-Taalen’s raider
Knife-in-the-Morning
,” the agent said. “That’s good, if you don’t mind a bit of risk. Or if you’d sooner work cargo, there’s
Wild-Rippling-Water
and
Heart-of-the-Sun
both looking to take on crew.”
But Errec, riding unseen in the back of Geiraed’s mind and looking about the office through Geiraed’s eyes, had spotted another name on the agency list. Errec leaned on his host a little, influencing without overt command.
Geiraed pointed at the notice board over the agent’s desk. “What about that one with the funny name?”
“Oh. You mean
Tzeelig?”
The agent shook his head. “I don’t know if that’d suit you. It’s an outlander ship, come from Ophel, and they wouldn’t be looking if one of theirs hadn’t died on the way.”
The part of Errec that had once been a free-spacer was inclined to agree with the agent. A death on a voyage was never good, and
Tzeelig
didn’t sound like a happy ship. But she was going back to Ophel, and Ophel was—barely—a part of the civilized galaxy.
He leaned on Geiraed again. “I’ll take that one.”
The agent shrugged. “Your choice,” he said, and brought out the paperwork.
When Geiraed left the office, he had an employment contract in his coat pocket along with his ID and license papers.
Not thinking about why he did so, he wandered around to the back of the prefab building, where a dirt alley ran along between the trash bins and the rows of empty packing crates.
Later that day, a dark-haired, dark-eyed man bearing the license and identity papers of Iel Geiraed presented himself to
Tzeelig
’s supercargo and signed as crew. And a host of shadows—one of them newer than the others—came aboard with him.
 
ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 3 PERADA
 
I
N HIGH summer, the formal audience chamber at the Summer Palace was supposed to be pleasant and airy. Perada didn’t find it so. This late in her second pregnancy, even the coolest rooms in the palace felt stuffy and uncomfortable.
She would have gone back to the Palace Major, and up-to-date environmental engineering, except that nobody on Entibor was traveling anywhere these days. Strict control of population movement was the only measure that could keep the plagues from overwhelming everything—and if the average Entiboran couldn’t get a permit to travel from the center of town to a nearby suburb, neither should the Domina.
Custom
. She shifted her weight on the solid wooden throne. The cushion, a thin leather pad almost as old as the throne itself, felt like it was stuffed with gravel.
Another month, no longer, and I won’t be able to plead custom anymore. And Nivome do’Evaan will come to me for an answer again
.
Errec Ransome had promised her that Jos would come back … “but not soon.” More and more, she feared that “not soon” would slip into “not soon enough.”
She straightened her shoulders and lifted up her head under the weight of the Iron Crown. The holocameras mounted on the walls of the audience chamber would pick up her image and broadcast it to the people of Entibor—for all she knew, the newsfeeds were sending it out to the entire civilized galaxy—and she owed it to her subjects to show a proud face.
“Gentles,” she said to the handful of men and women in the audience chamber. She spoke slowly and clearly, so that the audio pickups on the holocameras wouldn’t miss anything. Most of the people in the hall would already know everything she had to say. The real listeners were outside the walls of the Summer Palace, following the news and hoping to hear something good for a change.
Perada didn’t have much to offer them, but she’d make the best of what she had. “We have word, at last, from the Fleet.”
One or two people moved a little closer. Tillijen, who normally stood at her left side as befitted the armsmaster, was one. Like Perada herself,
Warhammer
’s former gunner waited for a partner’s return—but no ship of the Fleet had landed on Entibor since the plague first struck.
“The captain isn’t going to do it if the people he’s working with aren’t allowed to,
” Tillijen had said. But that had been a long time ago.
“Our ships have driven the Mages from our home system,” Perada went on.
She knew that the statement was an exaggeration—that it came close to being a flat-out lie. The Mage ships had begun pulling away from Entibor as soon as the plagues began, but they’d left enough ships in-system to make punitive raids and harass any off-world vessels bold enough to attempt planetfall. Still, the assertion sounded well.
“Now, together with our Selvauran allies, the Fleet is preparing to bring the Mages to battle.”
She drew a deep breath, trying not to let her expression change as the child inside her squirmed and kicked.
Time for the inspirational part of today’s speech, she thought. For all the good it’s going to do anyone.
“Let us therefore remain undaunted. This war is far from over, but the end is now in sight, and victory will—must—be ours.” She paused and glanced about the audience chamber. “Is there anyone here with further messages or petitions?”
She wasn’t expecting an answer. The public audiences these days were performances for the holovids, rather than the working sessions they had been as recently as half a year ago. Today, however, the double doors at the rear of the audience chamber swung open, and the court annunciator called out, “Gralanann son of Granaghal!”
With a name like that, Perada knew, the messenger had to be a Selvaur. The saurian who strode into the audience hall was larger even than Ferrda had been. His body-paint was metallic gold, and his crest was studded with rows of faceted stones. The interpreter who accompanied him was hard put to keep up with his long steps.
Gralanann halted in front of the throne and gave the brief nod that sufficed among his people for respect. He growled a sentence or two in his native tongue. Perada caught what sounded like Ferrda’s name among the hoots and rumbles, and leaned forward as best she could over her swollen belly, anticipating the translation.
“Greetings, She-who-rules-Entibor,” the interpreter said. “I carry word from Ferrdacorr son of Rillikkikk that his fosterling grows and does well under the Great Trees.”
“Convey my thanks to Gentlesir Ferrdacorr,” she said. “His care for the placeholder of House Rosselin is a comfort to all of us in these hard times. But surely, Gentlesir Gralanann, you have not braved the troubled surface of Entibor only to pass along family messages.”
Gralanann gave a quick
hoo-hoo
of Selvauran laughter, and a longer rumble of reply.
“Thin-skin ills are no danger to the Forest Lords,” the interpreter translated. “I bring an offer to your people from the elders of Maraghai.”
“Let us hear it, then, by all means.”
More rumbles from Gralanann, and an accompanying patter of translation from the interpreter. “We have a world, one among our distant outplanets. Good for farming. Not many of our people want to go there—no fame in farming, and too much fame in hunting Mages. But you have farmers, and no crops.”
“The Forest Lords are offering this planet to Entibor?”
A quick rumble of negation. “We open it to colonists, no more.”
Perada hesitated only a moment. Selvaurs had little respect for thin-skin dithering; she knew that much from the stories Jos had told about his dealings with them. And, in truth, there was only one answer she felt able to give.
“Let it be done,” she said. “The Minister of Agriculture, the Minister of Transport, and the Minister of Public Health will work with your people to do whatever is needed.”
It isn’t much of an offer,
she thought.
But we’ll need food, even after the war is over—if the war is ever over—and at least it’s a way to safety for a few of us
.
 
“All right, gentle sirs and ladies,” Jos said, “it’s time to place our bets and spin the wheel.”
The officers who crowded elbow-to-elbow in
Warhammer
’s tiny common room made noises of agreement. They were a mixed lot—Galaret Lachiel was there as Entibor’s fleet admiral, along with representatives of local defense forces from the worlds of Perpayne and Infabede, as well as a number of privateers and a huge Selvaur in crimson body-paint.
Over by the ladder that led up to number-one gun bubble, Nannla watched the proceedings with an expression of controlled impatience. Ever since leaving Tillijen behind on Entibor, the gunner had resented any time not spent in deep space hunting Mages; she’d gotten as bad as Errec Ransome that way, and Jos didn’t blame her.
He brought up a chart on the common-room holovid screen, pulling the data out of newly expanded main ship’s memory. Being in charge of a fighting fleet in wartime did have one or two advantages—chief among them being that it was easier to talk a shipyard into doing extensive refitting and upgrading to an already nonstandard vessel.
“We’ve been picking up word of Mage scoutships nosing around outside the system for weeks now,” he said. “If the old patterns hold true, that’s their buildup to a big push. Which means that we ought to have a Mage warfleet assembling someplace nearby—relatively speaking, that is.”
Using a pointer, he highlighted a section of the chart. “Most likely, here. The Mages know about the Web—they’ll be expecting us to make a stand either out beyond it, where there’s room to fight and room to jump away to safety, or somewhere in-system, where there’s good comms and clear lines of sight.”
He paused and looked around the common room. “Gentles, we aren’t in the business of running for safety. We’re going to be waiting for them within the Web itself, where nobody can get away until it’s finished.”
A mustachioed privateer captain in a long-coat of purple moiré spidersilk was the first to break the silence that followed. “How do we know they’ll come in?”
“If they want to do anything inside the system,” said the senior captain from Infabede, “the Web’s the only way to get there. Either they come through, or they go somewhere else.”
“And the Mages
will
want to get in, sooner or later,” Jos added. “Pleyver’s on the arc for a lot of places. They’ll need to secure it before they move on to the Central Worlds.”
“Too bad we don’t have Pleyver’s permission to use their system for a battlefield,” remarked the Infabedan. “It’s going to make things tricky afterward no matter who wins.”
Jos ignored the comment. Instead, he pointed to a place near the top of the chart. “I want the ships from Maraghai and Perpayne to go out here as if on normal patrol. The Mages will have you outnumbered and outgunned—but you’ll also be too large and important a force for them to ignore. When they give chase, you run. Stay out of their range; all you have to do is get them to follow you into the Web.”
“And then?” the Infabedan asked.
“At the time marked on your schedules, everyone here will arrive at the coordinates listed, proceed at high local speed into the Web, and go hunting. The Infabedan ships will remain outside to pick off stragglers. Up to now, whenever they’ve taken hits, the Mages have jumped back to their own worlds. This time they won’t be able to do that. I want their fleet to vanish like it never existed.”
*You figured out yet what we’re going to do if we lose?* asked the Selvauran captain.
Jos grinned at him, teeth showing. “We all
die
, that’s what. But anyone who comes out of this alive is going to have enough fame to make the wrinkleskins back home choke on swallowing it. That good enough for you, Ramgha?”
The Selvauran’s yodel of agreement didn’t need translation.
“Good,” said Jos. “People, you’ve got the best available maps and coursebooks for the Web, but coordinated action is still going to be difficult. If you get lost or lose comms: look for the Mages, and attack.”
Lachiel’s expression grew sober. “With respect, General, where will you be during all this?”
“Right in the middle of things. I’ll let everybody know when it’s time to go home.”
Lachiel frowned. “Jos—is it wise … ?”
“No,” he said. “This isn’t the time for wisdom. This is the time when we make the gamble and trust in our luck.”
The privateer captain laughed aloud. “Trust in
your
luck, you mean. I was with you at the drop points off Ophel, Metadi; your luck is good enough for me.”
 
In the heart of the Web, the stars might as well have been in a different universe. The drifts of glowing dust, the phosphorescent gas, and the uncanny pseudostructures that loomed and shifted among the Web’s magnetic fields all worked to obscure everything except the brightest and nearest realspace objects. Jos Metadi checked
Warhammer
’s chronometer again.
We should have heard something by now.
The air in the cockpit was cold—he’d shut down most of the ’
Hammer
’s nonessential systems to conserve energy, the way he always did when there was a fight in the offing—and he shivered a little under his quilted vest. Maybe the Mages hadn’t taken the bait.
He shifted in his chair and looked at the chronometer again. In spite of his words at the briefing, he knew that a battle here and now would be his sole chance. He’d drawn on all the credit he had—with the Selvaurs, with the privateers of Innish-Kyl and the local defense forces of half a dozen worlds, with the officers of the Entiboran Fleet—to pull together a temporary alliance. If they lost … worse, if the Mages never came … he’d never be able to do it a second time.
He’d never get his old crew back together, either. Right now he had a Selvaur down in the engine room, but Wrann was a barely blooded youngling fresh off the home planet—good enough with engines, but mostly on board because his mother’s cousin Ferrdacorr was looking after a fosterling on Maraghai. Tilly was stuck on quarantined Entibor, playing bodyguard to Her Dignity, and there was a pink-cheeked Fleet ensign working number-two gun in her place.
And then there was Errec Ransome. Jos looked over at the man in the copilot’s seat. Errec wore Adept’s black these days, and he had a staff tucked away in his locker in crew berthing. He never spoke about what had happened to him before he made it off Entibor on the last Fleet ship to lift—but Jos had seen the regular news reports from the Summer Palace, and he knew something of how ’Rada’s mind worked.
“Errec,” he said quietly. “Any Mages out there?”
“Not yet,” Errec said. His voice was even quieter. “But they’re close. I can feel them moving around, out on the fringes of the Web.”

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