The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5

Read The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5 Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5
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For Nancy Hanger and Andrew Phillips
 
MARAGHAI
 
T
HE LAST part of the journey he had to make on foot.
He’d come a long way, beginning in the Eraasi Sector and finishing with a suborbital hop to the long-range hoverbus that ran upcountry from Ernalghan—or South Landing, as the speakers of Galcenian Standard would have it. Not even the locals bothered to call the loose collection of warehouses and transport terminals a city, even though it was the second-largest built-up area on Maraghai. As far as Mael could determine, nobody actually lived in Ernalghan. They lived outside of it, strung out along the dozens of obscure roads and narrow footpaths that led away from the hoverbus route into the deep wilderness that covered so much of this planet. The house he was looking for was a half-day of steady walking beyond the last stop on the route.
He could have hired an aircar at South Landing—most people did—but he lacked the skill to fly one. The Eraasi of his childhood had lost the means of making such vehicles in the aftermath of the First Magewar. Mael could drive a ground-hugging flivver, and he could take a combat-equipped scoutship into hyperspace and out again, but he’d never picked up the knack of handling the nullgrav-assisted atmospheric craft that were commonplace on this side of the Gap Between.
He’d come to the opportunity too late, he supposed. He’d been a man full-grown when the Second War ended and the barriers between the homeworlds and the rest of the galaxy came down at last. He was more than happy to let the young people—the ones who remembered neither war nor deprivation—enjoy the new technologies without him.
The walk was long, but not difficult for anyone who had grown up on Eraasi in the days of the Republic’s occupation. Mael wasn’t young—his straight black hair had long since gone mostly to iron grey—but he came of hardy stock, and kept a steady pace on the uphill path. This wasn’t the first time he’d made the journey from Eraasi to the house in the high reaches of Maraghai’s southern continent, but it was the first time in almost twenty years.
The passage had given him less trouble in those earlier days. Twenty years ago—the recent war notwithstanding—most people on the Republic’s side of the Gap Between had never met a genuine Eraasian. More and more, however, prosperity and ease of travel were giving people the chance, and not all of them had forgotten the war. Life spans were long on the Adept-worlds; some of the men and women Mael encountered had memories that went back farther than his own, to the Sack of Ilarna and the destruction of Entibor.
He might have experienced less trouble, he thought, if he had left behind the short ebony staff that marked him out as not merely a Mageworlder, but a Mage in truth. But that would have felt disloyal, to abandon the training of a lifetime—and the legacy of a friend and teacher—just to avoid hostile stares and bureaucratic entanglements.
And Mael Taleion was, above all things, a loyal man.
 
U
P ON Graksha’s Bluff the air was cool, but by late afternoon the sun had warmed the bare rock to basking temperature. The wind that sighed and rustled through the trees on the slope below brought with it a smell of conifers, sharp and resinous, underlaid with the dry granite smell of the mountain itself. Jens Metadi-Jessan lay on his back half-dozing, his eyes closed against the brightness of the sky overhead, and heard the faint scrape of boot leather on stone as his cousin Faral shifted position a few feet away.
“Noisy, coz,” he said without opening his eyes. “Too noisy by half.”
“Be grateful I decided to wake you up gently, thin-skin.”
“Your skin’s no thicker than mine … what’s up?”
“Company at dinner, I think,” said Faral. “I spotted somebody down on the valley trail.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Jens sat up and joined Faral near the edge of the bluff. The cousins were much of an age, but otherwise resembled each other very little. Faral Hyfid-Metadi was dark-skinned, stocky, and heavily muscled, with sleek, close-trimmed black hair. A polished animal claw almost a handspan long hung from a leather cord around his neck. Jens, by contrast, was lean and fair-skinned, gone a pale biscuit golden from the sun. His yellow hair, tied back with a scrap of rough twine, hung in a loose tail between his shoulder blades. Like Faral, he wore boots and trousers, but—on this day in midsummer—no shirt.
From up on Graksha’s Bluff, the valley trail looked like a darker line drawn against a background of green. Now and again, a flash of sunlight reflecting off clear water marked where the stream at the bottom of the valley ran parallel to the trail for a short distance before diverging again into the trees. A group of black specks swirled upward from the treetops far away.
“Let me have a look,” Jens said, and Faral passed him a pair of binoculars.
He watched the trail below for some time. “You’re right,” he said finally. “Something sure disturbed all the rattlewings along that stretch.”
“Something on the ground,” Faral said, “and coming this way at a walking pace. Offworlder, maybe.”
“Maybe,” agreed Jens. The local fauna wouldn’t disturb the noisy fliers, and none of the neighbors—in the generous High Ridges sense of the word—would bother walking the valley trail. Most of them lived far enough away to make taking an aircar more practical; the few who lived closer came and went by hidden deep-woods tracks. Even somebody from elsewhere on planet would have known to rent a tree-skimmer in Ernalghan. “I wonder who it is.”
“Somebody who didn’t send word ahead, that’s who.” Faral sounded disapproving.
“That lets out most of the people we know.” Jens considered the possibilities for a moment. “Maybe it’s somebody who doesn’t like talking on the public links.”
“What kind of person is that?”
“A private one, at a guess. One of Father’s relatives, maybe, if they wanted to be rude.”
“What for?” Faral asked. “Mamma never notices—and Aunt Bee would give them hell if she ever found out. Not even a Khesatan would go through all that trouble for nothing.”
“You don’t know ’em, coz. There’s one or two in the crowd who’d slit their own noses if they thought they could get at Father that way.” Jens looked down again at the solitary figure on the trail below. “But you’ve got a point. I can’t imagine any of them going so far as to hoof it all the way uphill from Ernalghan.”
*If it’s a blood feud,* cut in a third voice, *do I get to help out?*
The speaker was a young Selvauran female whose scaly hide was decorated in whorls of red and blue body enamel. She scrambled up onto the bluff and unslung a bulging backpack from her shoulders. Chakallakak
ngha
-Chakallakak—known as Chaka for short—stood over a head taller than Jens, which put her at medium height for one of the Forest Lords, and her scales under the body paint were a mottled bluish green. She set down the backpack and joined the two young men at the edge of the bluff.
“If I ever get in a blood feud,” Jens promised her, “you’ll be the first to know.”
Faral, meanwhile, was eyeing the patterns in Chaka’s body paint. *You get thrown out?*
Chaka grinned—courteously, with no teeth showing—and said, *Finally. I thought they’d never get around to it.*
“We know how you feel,” said Jens. “The elders haven’t decided what they’re going to do with Faral yet, and it’s been almost a year.”
*Do like I did,* Chaka advised. *Pack your bag yourself and leave it sitting in the middle of the floor until they get tired of walking around it and take the hint.*
Faral scowled. *I might … I’ve tried everything else. Any idea where you’re going to go?*
*Away somewhere. There’s no good fighting anyplace, worse luck.*
“Don’t let Aunt Llann hear you talking like that,” said Jens. “She already thinks you’re a bad influence.”
Chaka laughed, a breathy
hoo-hoo
noise. *No, she doesn’t. She just thinks that I make your cousin act more like a Forest Lord than he already is.*
“Comes to the same thing.”
“Not really,” said Faral. “If Mamma didn’t like Chaka, she’d have fixed it so that the wrinkleskins threw her off-planet as soon as she was blooded.”
Privately, Jens doubted that his aunt would ever make a tactical error of that magnitude—but Faral and Chaka weren’t likely to be convinced by his arguments. Older, wiser people than the two of them had made the mistake of thinking that just because Llannat Hyfid was quiet and kindhearted, she didn’t have a firmness of purpose that the rocks themselves would envy.
When Aunt Llann decides that she wants Faral to go off-planet, he thought, the wrinkleskins will trip over themselves to send him there. But not before.
 
Mael Taleion reached the top of the valley trail shortly before sunset. The path that led away from it into the deeper forest was little more than a narrow track marked by white blazes cut into the trees on either side.
He quickened his pace—the woods of Maraghai were no place for an off-worlder to linger at night. The predators on this planet came in sizes to match the towering vegetation that covered the mountain slopes all around him, and local custom held that none of them should be slain with any weapon besides the hunter’s own strength. Humans, being weak and thin-skinned compared to the dominant Selvauran population, were allowed the use of knives and clubs in cases of dire emergency.
Mael didn’t want to find out the hard way how dire the emergency had to be before a Magelord’s staff counted as a permissible weapon.
Simpler by far
, he thought,
to avoid catching anything’s attention, and let the question go unanswered.
The sinking sun brought a rapid darkness under the great trees. The gloom made the trail harder and harder to pick out, and the ground was by turns rocky and boggy underfoot. It would not do, Mael reflected, for him to get lost. He took his staff from his belt and called the pale green witchfire to cling around it. The blazes on the tree trunks glimmered with its reflected light, but the shadows it cast between the stones and roots below were inky black, so dark that he couldn’t tell whether they were truly shadows or ankle-twisting potholes. The going got slower.
Then, off to the left, Mael saw another light flickering among the trees.
Is that the place?
he wondered.
Have I been going in the wrong direction all this time?
It was possible, he knew. He’d never followed this trail by night before. If he’d mistaken the way in the dark, or missed a branching side path, then he might keep on walking far into the high country until weariness or disaster overcame him. At the best, he’d have to backtrack, shamefaced, in the morning; and at the worst …
The temptation to leave the path and strike out across country was almost stronger than he could resist. He told himself that it was folly. He was no countryman, though his first teacher had been, but he knew that anywhere off the trail he risked becoming stuck in a bog, or walking across the lip of a cliff. He wished now that he’d waited overnight at the transit hub before starting, or that his legs had been younger to carry him faster over the ground.
He walked onward. The night was deep; the wind made little whispering noises under the trees, and Mael fancied he heard footsteps behind him that matched his own, and far-off voices calling out his name. Anywhere else, he would have rejected such fantasies out of hand—but not here, and not when the night had grown so thick with Power that a man need no more than half-close his eyes to see the threads and colors of it like a tapestry against the dark.
The light off to the left was bobbing like a lantern or a hand torch. Mael halted and turned toward it.
“Hello!” he called out.
The light stopped moving for a few seconds, then changed its course to intercept him. Mael wished that he had dared to walk abroad in the Adept-worlds in his proper garments, and not with his staff alone. He would have felt safer wearing the enveloping robe that blurred all question of rank or person outside the Circle, and the mask that narrowed the outside vision and made the threads of the universe easier to find and grasp. He could see them now, the
eiran
—the silver cords of life and luck—tangled and leading off in all directions.
And tarnished, some of them, which is a thing that should not be.
Which is a thing that the First must know.
The light drew closer. Mael saw now that it was coming from a man, a cloaked and hooded man—but not from any light or lantern. Instead, the entire figure was glowing, and the tarnished cords seemed to draw closer to the apparition and knot themselves around it. The man halted an arm’s length away at the edge of the trail, his face a shadow underneath the hood. Only his eyes glittered in the pale green light.
The man spoke in the language of Eraasi. “What you seek to do, I will prevent.”
He raised his hands and cast back his hood, and Mael saw that the face within was nothing but an empty skull. Rotting shreds of flesh and patches of matted hair stretched across the bony cranium, and the hands were skeletal and thin. But the eye sockets burned with their own lurid light.
Mael brought his staff to the guard before him. “Homeless one,” he said. “Nightwalker. Go away from here and trouble me no longer.”
The ghost-man laughed and brought up his right hand to strike at Mael’s face. Mael swept his staff up and inward, blocking the attack. The polished ironwood of the staff passed through the man’s arm as if through fog, and the blow kept on coming.
At that moment, a scream sounded from the woods behind Mael. He half-turned, distracted from the specter by the urgency of the cry—and saw, by the flickering light of his staff, a tall, fur-covered beast rearing up, its gaping mouth lined with fangs, and in front of the beast a young, fair-haired man with one hand buried deep in the creature’s belly.
Man and beast stood together for an instant like a tableau. Then the youth pulled back his hand, all black with blood in the pale green witchlight, and Mael saw that he had a heavy-bladed knife a double hands-breadth long gripped in his fist.
The furry creature, man-tall, crumpled to the ground. “Rufstaffa,” the young man said, wiping his blade on the animal’s fur before sheathing it. “They aren’t all that dangerous, but the only way to kill one is to go in through the diaphragm up to the heart, and the only time you can get there is when it’s attacking.”
He stuck out his blood-covered hand to Mael.
“I’m Jens, by the way,” he said. “Aunt Llann asked me to come see if you’d gotten lost.”
Mael returned the handclasp, feeling somewhat bemused. “You didn’t happen to see another man, standing over about there …?” He gestured. As he had expected, the apparition was gone.
Jens shook his head. “Just you. And we’d better get moving—that rufstaffa was trailing you for the last three miles. Rufstaffas travel alone, but there’s usually a slam of rockhogs following after.”
“Rockhogs?”
“Scavengers. They aren’t really dangerous either, but you don’t want to be around them when they get into a feeding frenzy.”
He pulled a hand torch from his belt and flicked it on. In the clear white light, the path seemed more open, and Mael could see his footing. The two set off together at an easy pace.
Mael followed his guide along the uphill path, sorting out the young man’s names and lineage in his mind as he did so:
Jens Metadi-Jessan
in the short form common among the Adept-worlders; by Eraasian reckoning,
syn-Metadi
and
sus-Rosselin
both in his mother’s line. He carried the weight of all that lineage lightly enough. In his plain trousers and his leather soft-boots, he could have been a backcountry youth from Mael’s own homeworld—if somewhat taller and fairer than most.

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