The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (32 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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Beka stared at her copilot.
He’s never spoken to me that way before—it’s always been ‘Captain,’ or ‘my lady,’ with him
.
Whatever he just did … changed him.
And saved my life. Again.
“I’m with you,” she said to her partner. “Let’s go.”
 
Ari and Estisk circled each other amid the wreckage of the tool-issue point in 125-34 Outer Ring. Ari’s muscles burned, and his left eye didn’t want to focus. Across from him, Estisk was bleeding freely from the nose, and seemed to be favoring his right foot when he moved.
Ari brought the edge of his hand down against the other man’s collarbone. Estisk grunted in pain, but the bone didn’t break, and the Darvelline retaliated with an elbow strike to Ari’s belly.
Panting, Ari fell back, but not quite far enough. Estisk wrapped one arm around Ari’s neck and began slamming the other fist into his ribs like a hammer.
Ari grabbed for the hand on his shoulder, caught it, and twisted under. Estisk turned with him—it was turn, or go down with a dislocated shoulder. As the Darvelline came round, Ari let go and lashed out with a kick that took the other man in the right kidney.
Estisk stumbled forward into the half-demolished workbench and caught himself on the table edge. Ari stood his ground, waiting. Slowly, Estisk pushed himself back around to stand with his hands braced against the bench behind him.
Ari eyed the sagging Darvelline.
Isn’t he ever going to go down? That kick would have put most guys into the healing pod for a week.
Without warning, Estisk launched himself forward, swinging a twelve-inch length of pipe snatched up from the workbench. Instinctively, Ari blocked up and out. The impact made his left hand and wrist go numb, but the pipe crashed onto his forearm instead of his skull.
Before Estisk could pull the pipe back for another swing, Ari reached over with his right hand, grabbed the other man’s wrist, and bent arm and pipe backward together toward Estisk’s right ear. At the same time, his nerveless left hand lay in the crook of Estisk’s right elbow, pulling down. Between the two, either the arm would break, or Estisk would yield to the pressure and fall onto his back.
And then—what was it Ferrda used to say? *Jump on his head until he stops moving*?
Ari laughed a little between his clenched teeth.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
But Estisk still had a lot of power in his barrel-like chest. The hand holding the pipe reached his ear, went a little farther back, and then stayed there.
Ari pushed harder.
A crashing pain exploded in Ari’s right side—Estisk had dropped the pipe from his right hand to his left, then smashed it upward into Ari’s floating ribs.
Ari let go his hold on Estisk’s arm and fell back. A kick came from out of nowhere toward his chest. He caught the ankle and heaved upward.
The Darvelline hit the ground hard, and rolled upright.
Ari stared, feeling a sharp pain in his side with every indrawn breath.
What the hell does it take to keep this bastard down?
Estisk smiled through bloody lips, and gestured to Ari to come closer. “Come on, then—brother. I thought you wanted to fight.”
 
Llannat pushed herself away from the side of the aircar. Jessan was busy under the belly of the craft; she couldn’t see him, but she could hear him talking himself through the repairs in High Khesatan. From the few words she could catch, the repair job looked like taking a while.
But time was running out. She didn’t worry about the fighter craft still circling overhead, or the sirens howling in the streets. She could hide two people and one small aircar from a search like that. But the Mage-smell hung in the air like the reek of a slaughterhouse, heavy and growing closer.
Time. She had to buy time for Jessan and the others.
You’re as ready now as you ever will be,
she thought.
Quit stalling and show Master Ransome he didn’t make a mistake when he gave you a staff and called you an Adept.
She left the aircar behind and walked down to the point where the long alley branched out into two wider streets. Stepping into the center of the junction, she lifted her staff overhead in both hands, holding it high against the deep blue of Darvell’s midafternoon sky.
Magelords!
she shouted with wordless intensity.
Magelords—here is an Adept! Come to me!
She heard a rustling in the alley ahead of her. A masked figure stepped out from among the stacks of shipping crates. The newcomer held a short, dark staff in one black-gloved hand.
“So it’s true,” he said. “We have an Adept in our midst.”
“A very young and foolish Adept,” added a voice to Llannat’s right. She resisted the urge to turn her head for a glimpse of the speaker.
“How long has it been,” the new voice went on, “since an Adept was rash enough to walk openly on the streets of Darvell?”
“Longer than either of you would know,” a third voice said, and another tall, black-robed figure came forward out of the shadows in the alley to her left. “Not since the wars, at least. But I remember.”
Like the first speaker, the newcomer wore black robes and mask, and held a short black staff in the Magestyle one-handed grip. Holding her own staff two-handed before her, Llannat turned half-right, bringing the second, hitherto unseen speaker into view. This one, too, was robed and masked in black.
Three of them,
she thought.
I never expected to face this many.
But many or few, she still knew better than to let them choose their own time and manner of attack. She threw a sudden blow toward the rightmost of the three, taking his staff against hers while the green fire of her power flared up to illuminate the air around her.
The man she had targeted-spun to divert her blow. She turned with him, putting all three of the blackrobes in front of her as she had intended, with their backs to the grounded aircar. Beyond them, in the cul-de-sac, Jessan was for the moment inaudible as well as invisible.
Good,
she thought. She’d pulled the hunters away from him for a little while at least.
Let him finish the repair work. Then I can break away from whoever’s left and we can both get out of here.
Then the time for thinking was past. The blackrobe to her right, the nearest of her three opponents, attacked with a backhanded blow to her leg, trying to pull her out of line and give his fellows an opening. Llannat dropped the tip of her staff and allowed his blow to slide off it. When he withdrew, she followed with an attack of her own, aiming the butt of her staff at his solar plexus.
He turned to avoid the thrust, and the enemy on Llannat’s left attacked in the moment when she stood extended. She stepped backward, turning to meet and block the stroke.
So far, her staff had served her well. But staffwork alone couldn’t help her now. Just as she had done back on the Professor’s asteroid, she drew a deep breath and opened herself to the universe.
Strength came to her—not the rush of well-being she had known before, but a calm, steady certainty. Using both ends of her staff, she threw three blows in quick succession at the man on her right, aiming for the head, the leg, and the head again. Her opponent stumbled back a pace; she feinted toward the man in the center, then came back to press down the right-hand blackrobe’s weapon with the center of her staff.
If she pushed the blackrobe’s ebony rod down far enough, she could shove the center of her staff up into his throat and take him out of the fight. But before she could complete her move, she felt the patterns of power shifting around her. The opponent on her far left was making ready his own assault.
She whipped her staff under the right-hand blackrobe’s defense, bringing it up and leftward in time to block the new attack, and then countered with a blow of her own that diverted at the last moment to smash against the biceps of her central opponent. He cried out in pain, and his staff dropped to the ground with the loss of strength in his hand.
“First touch to you, Adept,” said the tall Magelord, the latecomer to the crossroads, as the wounded man fell back a pace and went down on his knees in pain, grasping his injured arm with his good hand. “Shall we go on?”
Llannat said nothing.
The two unwounded men circled her slowly to left and right. The tall one swept his staff upward; she turned, dropping to one knee as his blow came smashing down, and swung her own staff in a flat arc into his diaphragm. He crumpled forward.
The patterns of power changed again as he fell. She pulled her staff back toward her and brought the center up over her head into a horizontal block. Wood struck against wood as she caught and stopped a blow from behind.
She somersaulted backward, forcing the only Magelord still standing to leap over her or be knocked down. He jumped; she rolled to her feet, pivoting into a guard position as he hit the ground and spun to face her. He lunged. She turned a little to let the ebony rod go past her, and whipped the butt of her own staff forward and up into his masked face.
The wood caught him below the jaw, shattering the plastic mask and the bone and flesh beneath. He went down, clutching his face, and the blood ran out between his black-gloved fingers.
Of the three who had come out to answer her challenge, now only the one she had first wounded remained—oddly fitting, she supposed, since he had also been the first to appear. He had regained his feet, and held his staff in his good hand.
Llannat came to guard position with her staff before her. Her opponent let his arm fall to his side. Llannat stayed in guard, having learned from an expert how fast that one-hand grip could move the short rod up and into action. The Mage gave a faint laugh.
“You’ve done well so far, Adept,” he said. “Can you do as well with this?”
He gestured, and she felt a hand close on her throat.
“Adepts understand the structure of the universe,” said the other’s mocking voice. “But we Magelords control it.”
The grip on her throat tightened.
Illusion!
she insisted, and threw herself open to the flow of power. The unseen hand loosened its stranglehold and fell away.
“Very good—for an Adept,” said the Mage. “But we’ve only just begun.”
 
L
LANNAT SCREAMED as the currents of power around her warped and twisted. Dark sorcery pulled at her, dragging her someplace she couldn’t see, couldn’t understand. She fought back in the only way she could, struggling to ride the flow of the currents even as the sorcerer kinked and knotted them.
The wrenching and pulling came to a peak and stopped. Llannat opened her eyes and looked around.
The alley, and everything in it, had vanished. She and the Mage stood in a place of grey mist; no zenith, no horizon, no ground underfoot. The creature that ranged itself alongside her adversary seemed to be made out of mist as well—darker and more solid than the rest of this place, but just as featureless and shifting.
The thing lashed out at her with a whiplike extension of its body. Llannat blocked. The shadowy flail dissipated as her staff hit it, but already another pseudopod was coiling out to strike her on the side of the head.
The scalding, unexpected pain almost blinded her. She counterattacked by reflex, her staff passing through the arm as if through mist. The agony receded, leaving her light-headed and slow. She took a long step backward and away from the hovering creature.
The Mage swung his short ebony staff up into a whirling strike against her ribs. She knocked the weapon aside, but her counterattack dissolved in searing pain when another of the shadow-creature’s misty arms looped out and curled around her torso. She cried out and twisted away.
“The creature follows you,” said the Mage. “I willed it so—and here in the Void, what I will becomes what is real.”
Llannat took one more step backward, and came to guard. She had to fight now; she had no choice. Already she could feel the emptiness of the Void sapping her energy, as the place would ultimately drain the energy from any living thing that traveled through it, but the Mage’s creature made matters even worse. Her body ached wherever the pseudopods had touched, and energy flowed out from those touches like blood from a wound.
She gripped her staff tighter, and ran in toward the Mage. He met her with his own staff upraised. She beat on it with all the strength of both arms, and his guard came down.
She started the blow that would smash his skull, and aborted it as the Mage’s creature flung out another pseudopod. She ducked under the whip of grey-black fog, but even the near-miss left her stinging all over.
I can’t afford to take hits from that thing
, Llannat thought. She blocked against another flailing extrusion and dissolved it into grey rags, blocked a blow from the other staff, and dodged the stroke of a third pseudopod almost as an afterthought.
But I can’t touch its master unless I do.
She steeled herself to make another assault. But something new touched her awareness, and she held back.
More Magelords?
she wondered, dodging and parrying by reflex. But the auras she’d caught didn’t feel like Mages at all, and she felt a surge of renewed hope.
If I can just get to them … in a place like this, even neutrals count as friendly.
Llannat broke away and ran.
Ahead of her, emerging from the mist, she could make out three figures: a man and a woman, guiding a third person between them. The man paused, with the distinctive stillness of one who reads the patterns and currents of power, and halted his two companions with a gesture.
A glance over her shoulder showed Llannat that the Mage had started running also, narrowing the gap between them. His creature drifted with him, a pace or so ahead.
Llannat ran faster, expending energy at a reckless rate. She could feel the Void drawing more life-force out of her with every breath, but if she didn’t reach the strangers and find help, none of that would matter anyhow.
Something grey and snaky curled down over her shoulder in a lazy looping motion. She dropped and rolled away from the pseudopod’s caress, but two more ropes of living mist whipped out and caught her by waist and ankle as she came up.
Pain-blinded, she struck out at the shadow-creature’s body. The misty substance thinned a little, but not enough. Before she could strike again, a third pseudopod lashed out and caught her right arm by the wrist.
Her staff fell from her hands. Then, suddenly, two of the strangers stood over her.
One, the woman, carried a Magelord’s short ebony staff, but wore an Adept’s formal black. The man with her was dressed like a mechanic or a spacehand in a worn grey coverall—but he bore the staff of an Adept, and his aura shone with the blinding white of a captured star.
They’re Adepts!
she thought, exultant, even as the man called to her, “Get back!”
She staggered away, and felt herself falling. Somebody caught and supported her—the third stranger, unarmed and holding away from the melee. Llannat got a fleeting impression of someone unknown but somehow not unknown, muffled to the eyes in a hooded cloak of heavy white wool.
A friend, at least
, she thought.
But I know the others. I know them both.
The male Adept faced the Mage, their fight swirling before her as if they were partners in a deadly dance. Owen Rosselin-Metadi had still been an apprentice the last time she’d seen him, but there was no mistaking that aura, or the fluid economy of his technique. And the woman—shorter than Owen, and darker—whose staff kept the shadow-creature and its pseudopods at bay … Llannat had seen her before, too.
Every time I pass a mirror,
she thought.
But she’s older than I am … and Owen’s different too, somehow … .
“Don’t worry, child,” the stranger said. “Leave the Mage and his pet to them. It’s time you went back. Ari needs you.”
The stranger’s voice was comforting, and oddly familiar. Llannat relaxed against the rough fabric of the woolen cloak, and her eyes closed. She thought that she felt a hand stroking her hair … and then there was sunlight beating down on her face and hard ground under her back.
“Llannat,” a voice was calling in her ear. “Llannat, we have to go now. Wake up, Llannat. Please wake up.”
 
Ari drew his breath in through his teeth. He felt another jab of pain from his cracked rib, and ignored it. He’d taken worse from the
sigrikka
he’d killed on his Long Hunt, and the
sigrikka
hadn’t smiled and called him “brother,” either.
He growled in his throat, a wordless sound of disgust. He’d been fighting like a thin-skin all along, when this smooth-voiced betrayer didn’t deserve that much consideration.
*That does it,* Ari said in the Forest Speech, and took a step forward. *I’m through with play-fighting. Now I’m going to kill you. *
He took another step, and Estisk drove in a punch at him. This time, Ari didn’t waste time blocking it. He let it smash into him, ignoring the pain, and kept on moving forward.
Estisk punched him a second time, and a third. Then Ari was inside the Darvelline’s reach and grabbing the false Quincunx man by the collar with his left hand. The Darvelline struggled, fighting to slip the hold. Ari twisted the handful of fabric tighter and slammed his right fist into the other man’s stomach with all the strength of his back and shoulders.
Then, like a
sigrikka
in a killing fury, he shook Estisk twice with neck-snapping force and flung the Darvelline away from him into the front door of the tool-issue point. The wooden panel burst outward under the impact.
Ari went out between the hanging splinters. Estisk lay on his back in the street, dazed and blinking.
Ari reached down and pulled the Darvelline upright. “On your feet, you bastard.”
Estisk swayed, but stayed up. Ari’s cracked lips curved into a grin.
“Good,” he said, knotting his hands together like a club. “I’m not done with you yet.”
On the last word, he brought his locked fists up from his hips, smashing them against the side of the other man’s head with an impact that split the skin over his knuckles and lifted the Darvelline clear off the ground. Estisk staggered, going down on one knee for a second, and hauled himself back upright.
Ari swung his clenched fists up from the other side. This time he heard bone crack as they connected. Again the Darvelline stumbled backward, but still he refused to go down.
Again and again, Ari pounded the other man, driving him step by step across the street. Not until Estisk reached the far side of the road, and his heels met the curb, did the big Darvelline fall at last and lie staring upward with eyes that did not blink.
 
 
I don’t think I like this
, thought Beka.
The Professor held the short ebony staff in front of him. A glowing red aura surrounded him and reflected off the polished walls of the echoing reception chamber. Beka followed, blaster in hand, feeling superfluous—as she had felt ever since those last moments in the entry bay, when the Professor had run past the wreckage of the hovercar to a door she’d never even spotted, and opened it with one touch of his staff.
He’d taken the stairway beyond at a run, and she had followed him through a maze of corridors—all of them empty and lightless through what Beka uncomfortably thought might be the Professor’s sorcery.
This is she man who saved your neck back on Mandeyn,
she reminded herself.
The one who broke his arm for you in Flatlands Portcity. He’s on your side.
They kept on, always moving upward: up stairs, up ladders, up ramps, through rooms and along corridors. Nothing and nobody came out to stop them, but she still felt watched and followed by eyes she couldn’t see. From time to time the Professor would pause, point without explanation to a particular tile in the floor, then leap over it. Or he would throw an object through a door before entering it himself. She followed his lead jumping where he jumped, pausing where he paused—and still her feeling of wrongness grew.
They made it as far as a large reception chamber somewhere in the Citadel’s upper reaches. There they stopped. Now the Professor stood in the center of the hall, turning first one way and then another. The scarlet glow that surrounded him made shadows move in the corners like living things.
He’s looking for something
, Beka thought.
And I think he’s found it.
The grey-haired Entiboran—or whatever he really was—raised his left hand. A circle of greenish flame sprang up from the floor in front of him. He said something, too low for Beka to catch the words, and a black shape appeared inside the fiery circle, shifting and elongating to become a black-robed figure. A mask hid its features, but it carried a short, silver-bound staff like the Professor’s own.
More sorcery,
she thought.
Now I know I don’t like this.
The Professor lowered his upraised hand. The circle of witchfire died, but the figure in black remained. Beka’s copilot walked forward into the shadowy form. It solidified, taking on outline and detail as the Professor’s white shirt and black trousers lost resolution, until the two were one.
“So you’ve come back at last.”
Beka whirled toward the unfamiliar voice, her blaster coming up in her hand, but the black-robed man standing at the far end of the hall never even gave her a look. She recognized the second man from the Rolny’s hovercar as he continued, “I told them that if I waited long enough, you would return.”
“Half a thousand years,” the Professor said, “is a long time to wait.”
“Not to avenge treason.”
“I suppose not,” the Professor said. Beka couldn’t see his face behind the immobile features of the molded plastic mask, but the familiar voice sounded weary, and a little sad. “Well, now I am here.”
“True,” said the stranger. He lifted his staff. A pale red-orange glow surrounded him, in contrast with the Professor’s deeper scarlet aura. “Guard yourself, traitor.”
The Professor brought his staff up into what Beka supposed was a guard of some sort. “And you do the same, my friend.”
“No friend of yours,” the stranger said. “Keep that word for the ones you serve.”
“As you will,” the Professor said. His staff whipped out at the stranger in a fiery blur.
The other’s staff caught and stopped it only inches from his neck. Then Beka, watching, saw a passage-at-arms such as she had never seen before—a fast-moving fight of advances and retreats, stamping feet and swirling black robes. The glowing auras wove a colored tapestry in the air about the two men as they fought, and arcing streamers of colored fire crackled like small lightning bolts, making the high-ceilinged reception room resound with their echoes. But the Professor was smaller than his adversary, and more slightly built; little by little the stranger seemed to gain the upper hand.

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