The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (24 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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If I do have to winter over in the mountains
, Ari thought, sitting on a pile of sun-warmed rocks that gave a good view of the deep, tree-filled valley below him,
at least I’ll have a jacket between me and the cold until something better doesn’t run fast enough.
He took a bite of his breakfast—a cliffmouse that had failed to dodge a thrown rock—and pondered future courses of action while he chewed.
Suppose you do have to winter over? You haven’t had any trouble keeping yourself fed so far—it’s only the big ones that seem to have taken themselves someplace else. Find yourself a snug little cave somewhere, get a steady fire going … you could probably make it through until spring.
He tore off another mouthful of the uncooked meat.
Only one problem. If you don’t come back before the snow falls, Ferrda’s going to feel honor-bound to let Mother and Father know about it … and Father might be willing to let things ride until the thaw, but Mother never would. There’d be rescue teams all over the place before you could sneeze, and Ferrda would never live it down.
He couldn’t cut his hunt short and go back empty-handed, for the same reason. But in three weeks on this side of the mountains he hadn’t turned up track or sign of anything larger than a rock hog, and it was beginning to look like he might have to change his hunting grounds. If another cub had been hunting the same range, the two of them together might well have driven off all the other predators.
So if I do go over the mountains, I’d better head out today so I’ll have a fighting chance of finding something and getting back home before—
A distant cry, borne up to him on the wind from the valley below, stopped him in midthought. He knew that sound, high-pitched and angry like a ripsaw chewing through green wood. Somewhere down among those trees, a
sigrikka
had finished a successful stalk.
Maybe I could
—he began to think, but then more noises came up from below: a Selvaur’s fighting roar, cut off short, and once again that ripsaw yowl.
Ari dropped the bloody remains of his breakfast and started downhill into the valley. One of the Forest Lords was in deep trouble, and not even the Long Hunt took precedence over that.
He found the injured Selvaur more by luck than anything else, luck and the sharp hearing that let him make a good guess at the direction from which the sounds had come. Once he reached the valley floor, though, smell and not sound guided him the rest of the way. Compared to a Forest Lord he had no sense of smell at all, but even a thin-skin’s nose was keen enough to pick up the sweet, heavy scent of hot blood on the clean mountain air.
Moving as fast as he could without making a racket that would arouse the whole forest, Ari followed the smell upwind, his ears straining for any sound that might help him in the search. When he heard one, he didn’t like it.
I’ve never heard a grown Selvaur whimpering like that,
he thought moving faster
. Only sick little ones … the babies and the younglings. And when they cry that way, you don’t waste time sending for a medic, you put them in the settlement aircar and go looking for one.
He started running, and the hell with the noise. The smell of blood filled his nostrils, and he knew he was nearly there. Another two strides, and he almost tripped over Issgrillikk—his agemate, friend, and foster-cousin—twisted around himself in pain at the base of one of the Great Trees, his claws gouging up the rough, grey-brown bark and tearing long white streaks into the inner wood.
“Issgrillikk!” Ari dropped down to his knees at the foot of the tree, and called to his cousin again. “Issgrillikk!”
He choked on the name as he saw how the
sigrikka
had laid his agemate open from crotch to breastbone with a single slashing blow, leaving the contents of the body cavity to spill out onto the moss-covered ground and taint the air all around with the smell of death.
It didn’t even finish the kill,
thought Ari
. It had all the time in the world to do it, and it didn’t even bother.
“Issgrillikk!” he called again. This time, the pain-clouded eyes showed recognition, and his cousin said *Ari Rosselin-Metadi* in a feeble growl.
It was like a Selvaur, to bring out his full formal name at a time like this; Ari swallowed a laugh that was mostly a sob and said, *What happened, Issgrillikk?*
*I was tracking …
sigrikka
. Didn’t know … it was tracking me. I never even … smelled it com—
nnnghrrr!*
The sentence ended in a wordless cry of pain, as Issgrillikk’s claws dug deep furrows into the wood of the tree. When the spasm ended, Issgrillikk looked at him again. *Ari … I need … *
The Selvaur’s voice failed him then, but his eyes still held Ari’s, and Ferrdacorr’s thin-skinned fosterling knew what his cousin and agemate required of him.
Even if I could carry him as far as the settlements,
Ari thought helplessly,
he’d die before we got there. He’s dying now—but it’s too slow. The rock hogs don’t care whether or not their food is still breathing, as long as it doesn’t fight.
He looked down at his hands—big, heavy hands, clenched so hard that under the dirt of three weeks’ hunting the knuckles showed white. Strong hands, for a thin-skin.
At his knees, Issgrillikk whimpered in pain, as he had done before his agemate showed up and pride had made him stop. Even pride wasn’t helping now. Ari heard the sound and swallowed hard.
*Forgive me, cousin,* he said, and struck with all his strength.
Ferrdacorr had taught his foster-child thoroughly and well. One blow was all it took, and then Ari pressed his forehead against the rough bark of the Great Tree, and cried like an unblooded child. But even while he wept, some part of his mind he hadn’t known existed kept asking why a hunting beast would have left a wounded prey alive when there was ample time to finish off the kill.
When a darkstalker goes rogue and begins attacking the settlements, the Forest Lords stake out a fanghom to draw it in … the way Issgrillikk drew you in … live bait to trap a predator hunting in another’s range … .
His brother Owen would have said that he took his warning from the currents of power that held the universe together. But Owen didn’t need to hear the padding of heavy paws on soft loam, or to smell the meat-eater scent as the wind shifted—and Ari knew better than to claim a sensitivity he didn’t possess. Only Ferrdacorr’s training and his own sharp ears kept him from following down the road Issgrillikk had already taken. He spun around and set his back to the tree, just as the
sigrikka
roared and began its charge.
Ari knew better than to run; the
sigrikka
had hunted running animals all is life. His only chance lay in letting the predator close in, and then keeping out of the way of those sharp, gut-slashing claws long enough to make his own kill. A fighting cry tore its way out of his throat, and he pushed himself away from the Great Tree to meet the
sigrikka
’s charge.
The
sigrikka
slammed into him like a pressor beam coming on at full power, and the weight and momentum of the charging animal pushed him backward. He let himself topple over, wrapping his legs around the
sigrikka
’s body and locking his ankles tight as he fell, so that his belly was pressed against the beast’s when they hit the ground.
Over and over they rolled on the bloodstained earth, gripped together by the pressure of Ari’s legs. The
sigrikka
’s claws raked at his back and ribs, shredded his clothing and lacerated the flesh beneath. Hot amber eyes glared into his face, and long teeth flashed as the
sigrikka
made a try for his throat.
He snarled like an animal himself. *Try to rip me up, will you? We’ll see about that!*
He jammed his left forearm sideways into the predator’s gaping mouth, and pressed back. Powerful jaws closed, and the
sigrikka
’s teeth pierced his leather jacket and sank into the muscle beneath like so many white-hot knives.
Enraged by the pain, he snarled again. *Bite me, will you? Stalk my cousin and use him for bait, will you?
No more!
*
He braced his right arm against the back of the
sigrikka
’s neck and pushed hard into it with his left, forcing the animal’s head up and backward. The
sigrikka
tried to jerk free, but found itself trapped by its own teeth, set deep in the muscle of Ari’s forearm. Ari gritted his teeth on renewed pain as the
sigrikka
fought to tear itself loose, and failed.
*Now—
you
pay—for Issgrillikk!* he choked out, and put all the strength of his broad shoulders into a relentless pressure that levered the
sigrikka
’s head further and further back, until a snapping sound came from inside the beast’s neck, and its muscular body twitched and then lay still.
 
N
YLES JESSAN made another restless circuit of his sleeping quarters, pausing to watch the sunset outside the wide picture window. The window had been producing vistas of Khesat for him ever since he had taken up residence, and the sun tonight had been setting for a couple of Standard hours over the fountains and flowers of a Khesatan water garden.
As always, he spared a moment to admire the Professor’s artistry. The garden view didn’t have the almost painful reality of the room from the Summer Palace, but as a courtesy done for a guest it was impressive: the
leriola
blossoms floating on the long rectangular moon pool opened as he watched, while the upper edge of the sun slid below the faraway horizon.
He turned away from the window and began roaming again. He wasn’t in the mood for a moon viewing tonight, even if the moons and their reflections had been real.
The little holoprojector he’d carried as Crown Prince Jamil lay on the bedside table next to a porcelain vase holding a set of Khesatan reed flutes. Stretching himself out full length on the bedspread, he picked up the projector and turned on the last act of
By Honor Betray’d
. This time, though, the grandeur and majesty of the classic drama failed to move him. When he realized that he hadn’t followed two consecutive lines of the Farewell Soliloquy, he punched the Off button and killed the projection.
He sat up on the rumpled bedspread and—for lack of any other occupation—began pulling reed flutes out of the vase. They’d been produced by the Professor’s robots out of synthetic reeds, and only one of the lot appeared playable. He tried a note or two, found the tone adequate, and went on into the first bars of a half-remembered practice piece.
But even the fifth Mixolydian Etude failed to have the same soporific effect it had possessed in his boyhood. He shoved the flute back into the vase with the others, stood up, and began prowling the room once more.
His eye fell on the sable form of one of the.Professor’s robots, standing in its niche by the door. Like a skilled organic servant, the robot wouldn’t speak until spoken to, or act unless it saw a need.
“Tell me,” he said, and saw a flash of crimson light behind the robot’s blank mask as the mechanism blinked into life. “What would you do if you couldn’t sleep?”
“I really couldn’t say, sir,” said the robot. “But if I may make an observation—”
“By all means.”
“I would say then, sir, that you are experiencing an excess of energy. Were you a robot like myself, I would recommend that you discharge it in some manner.”
“Well,” said Jessan, “I’m not a robot, but the suggestion has merit. You know the facilities here better than I do—is there anything special that you’d recommend to an organic sentient looking for something in the energy-discharging line?”
“As a matter of fact, sir, there’s a section of the base I believe you would find extremely interesting in that regard.”
“Is there?” asked Jessan. “Then lead on.”
 
In the darkness of his room, Ari lay awake in the huge bed. All his earlier sleepiness had vanished, as he should have known it would. Thinking about the Long Hunt might bring the comfort of knowing that short of death, few things in a thin-skinned galaxy could stop one of the Lords of the Forest—but the comfort, like the knowledge, always had a price tag attached.
The
sigrikka
he’d killed had turned out to be the biggest one ever brought down by a cub on the Long Hunt. Ferrda still had the polished jawbone, fangs intact, hanging on the wall in a place of honor. Ari carried his own memorabilia with him everywhere. The white scars on his left arm and along his ribs had shocked his mother into silence the first time she saw them—but Ari took pride in his hard-earned right to call himself a member of Ferrda’s clan, and he’d never thought of having the marks erased.
The hunt itself, though, he avoided thinking about as much as he could. He’d never been able to put his memories into compartments, the way some people seemed to. Always, the feeling of Issgrillikk going from life to death under his blow spread out to color the whole episode with the darkness of grief and regret.
Ari flopped over onto his back and stared at the ceiling.
Why can’t I ever remember just the good parts?
Even now, thinking of what he’d had to do for Issgrillikk made him feel the same slow-burning, helpless rage that had broken the
sigrikka
’s neck and then torn free the carnivore’s jawbone for proof of the kill.
At least that time he’d known the target and the reason for his anger—and if the
sigrikka
’s death hadn’t changed anything, nevertheless some kind of balance had been reached by it that would let him sleep at night. The only other time he’d felt as bad as that had been after his mother died, and the anger then had been a dark and frightening thing.
It hadn’t gone away, either. It only waited, quiescent, for a few days or weeks or months at a stretch, until something happened to stir it to life again, and he felt himself tensing to strike out blindly at the first person who gave him a reason. Not the least of his motives for joining Beka in her campaign had been the chance to drown that anger in blood and be done with it.
And I’m supposed to be the quiet, respectable one
, he thought, with a humorless smile.
If people only knew.
 
The carpet in Llannat’s room was dark green, and soft as woodmoss. In the center of the room the Adept sat cross-legged, her eyes unfocused, her breathing slow and even. Deep in meditation, she sensed the currents of power moving through the asteroid base, and traced their luminous patterns with a clarity she had seldom before attained outside the halls of the Retreat. At length she perceived another presence that mirrored hers—and knew that somewhere on the asteroid base, a mind prepared itself for tomorrow in meditations like her own.
I’m not alone here after all
, she thought, coming out of the trance. She rose to her feet, picked up her staff, and set out through the shadowed corridors toward the Entiboran room.
A pale, cold light was flooding the long chamber when she arrived, giving a bluish cast to the wainscoted walls. Outside the row of tall windows, a full moon was rising over the Entiboran hills. At the table, the Professor sat gazing out at the landscape he had created, bleak moonlight shadowing the folds of his white shirt and touching his grey hair with silver. A crystal decanter filled with dark liquid stood among matching glasses on a tray at his elbow. One full glass, untouched, rested on the table in front of him, and his fingers curled lightly around the fragile stem.
As she stepped into the room, he turned his face toward her. “You’re awake late, Mistress Hyfid.”
“I was meditating,” she said. “It seemed necessary.”
“So it is, Mistress.” He gestured toward the decanter. “Will you join me?”
“I’d be delighted,” she said, taking a chair at his right hand. “You’re awake late yourself. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow, and a long trip after that.”
“And it’s been many years since I was young?” he asked gently, pouring liquid from the crystal decanter into one of the glasses. Despite the shadows, she could see him smiliag a little as he spoke. “True enough, Mistress. But I’ll last out the trip to Darvell, never fear.”
She took the glass he handed to her and sipped at the contents, a fiery distillate that made the Uplands Reserve she’d tasted on Nammerin seem crude by comparison. “And then?”
He shrugged. “As you said yourself, Mistress, reading the future is an uncertain thing. Does the brandy appeal to you?”
“Like satin and knives,” she said. “Entiboran?”
“Yes. I picked up a dozen bottles of it in the year I swore fealty to House Rosselin, and this is the last.”
She swallowed a mouthful of the fragrant, burning drink and watched a cloud glide past the face of the moon. The room dimmed, and then filled again with faint grey light. They sat in silence for a few minutes, until finally she looked away from the window and voiced the thought that had been in her mind since she began her evening’s meditations.
“Darvell gives me a very bad feeling, Professor.”
“You’d be a fool if it didn’t, Mistress. The Master of Darvell is a man to be reckoned with.” The Professor’s grey eyes, pale in the moonlight, met hers. “My lady wants him dead because of what he’s done—but you, I think, see what he may yet do.”
She nodded, slowly. “I get the Mage-smell in my nose whenever I think about him.”
“There’s treason at work in the galaxy,” said the Professor. “Schemes within schemes. It wasn’t chance, you know, that brought an Adept into my lady’s crew.”
“I’m afraid you haven’t got anybody heroic here,” she said with a rueful smile. “I’m barely fair-to-middling with a staff on my good days, and the only Mage I ever met in the flesh was nearly the death of me.”
“The galaxy has always had all the heroes it needed,” said the Professor. “If it’s produced a Mistress Hyfid along the way, I’d say that it probably needs her as well.”
He looked out the window for a moment, and Llannat waited in silence until he turned back toward her and spoke again.
“All fighting is a matter of training and practice,” he said, “and I’ve used enough weapons in my time to know that robots and holograms make poor substitutes for a living opponent.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “If a match between friends would amuse you, I could oblige.”
He gestured, and the shadows appeared to solidify and take shape within his hand. Llannat stared as the moonlight glimmered off the silver fittings of an ebony staff that hadn’t been there a moment before.
I should have known
, she thought, and rose to her feet.
“Master,” she said, and bowed.
He shook his head. “No. I forswore sorcery long ago, when I gave my oath to House Rosselin. ‘Professor’ will do as well as any other name.”
Her voice came out in a harsh whisper. “Adepts don’t practice sorcery.”
“No,” agreed the Professor. “Adepts don’t.”
“Then that Magebuilt scoutship in the docking bay—”
“Was always mine. Yes.”
She stood looking at him for a long time, while the night clouds chased each other across the Entiboran sky. “Why?” she said at last.
His face, what she could see of it in the dim light, was sad. “What does it matter? The Magelords would flay me for a traitor, if they knew I still lived-after all this time—but I found a world and a way of life deserving of loyalty, and gave my oath gladly to them both.”
“The word of a Mage?” she asked.
“
My
word,” he said. “Which is a somewhat different matter. House Rosselin has had no cause to regret accepting that oath from me—nor will it, while I live. Does that satisfy you, Mistress?”
She looked at him, a slight, grey-haired figure standing alone in a room full of memories, and inclined her head. “Amply, Professor … and I would be honored by a match between friends.”
 
Jessan turned and fired, then turned again and flung himself onto the ground. The aircar passed low overhead, firing as it came. He rolled, and fired up at its belly.
A long trail of smoke streamed out behind the aircar, but the vehicle kept on going and started up into a loop. At the top of the loop, it rolled upright to head back the way it had come, and went into a thirty-degree dive-straight in at Jessan’s hiding place, with all its bow guns firing.
A blaster against an armored aircar
, thought Jessan. I
must be crazy
. Weapon at the ready, he crouched on the cracked and tilted pavement behind a broken wall while the bulk of the aircar grew steadily larger against the dull red of the sky.
The armored craft loomed huge above him. He saw a single burst of light, brighter than any he had ever seen, and the aircar vanished. The sounds of battle grew dim, then stopped altogether, and the red sky faded to black.
The lights came back up again. Jessan blinked at the bare white room and lowered the mock blaster still ready in his hand. From somewhere overhead, a disembodied voice said, “Final score, four hundred sixty-seven of six hundred possible in two thousand, nine hundred and sixty moves. This gives you the overall rating of Walking Wounded. Would you like to play again?”
Jessan shook his head. “No,” he replied. “I think I’ll try to find a pot of hot
sulg
instead.” He put the weapon back onto the rack, toggled open the door, and went out.
Outside the game room, the dim lighting of the base’s night prevailed. He walked down the hall and took the turning that led to a small after-hours galley. The galley was no more than a wide spot in the passageway, but it was brightly lighted, with a dining booth, a snack dispenser, and a drink machine sporting a row of ten identical, unlabeled buttons.

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