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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5 (20 page)

BOOK: The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5

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Guislen stopped before a covered control panel. The housing had words embossed on it in a script that Jens didn’t recognize. Other objects in the room had similar labels.

“What language is that?” Jens asked, pointing.

“Ilarnan,” Guislen replied. “It says this is the vent-control system. Open the cover and let’s see what’s what.”

Jens pulled, and the cover came open on hinges, exposing an array of switches, knobs, and toggles.

“The captain took good care to shut the ship down in an orderly fashion,” Guislen said. “Look there. The third switch from the top. That’s external filter and vents. Rotate it to the right. The bottom switch is for the internal airways. Slide that one all the way to the right, too.”

As Jens followed the instructions, the green telltale lights beneath each switch winked on. All around him, in the bulkheads and the deckplates, he could hear the distant sound of machinery coming to life. The air inside the ship began to move, stirring the fine hairs on his neck and arms, and the scent of foulness and decay came back full force.

He swallowed. “It’s going to take a while for all the air to cycle through the exchangers. Why don’t we go back outside while that’s happening?”

“Can you find your own way out?” Guislen asked. “I want to explore things a bit further.”

“It might not be a good idea to split up,” Jens said. The bad air was worse when it was moving; it made his head ache and swim at the same time. On top of the disorientation caused by the Sapnish incense, the effect was distinctly unpleasant.

“I’ll be fine,” Guislen said. “Go join your friends, and I’ll come for you when everything’s ready.”

Jens didn’t feel like arguing. He turned and left the way he had come, going down the ladders to the outside. The air of the landing field, when he reached it, smelled even sweeter than before, and he could almost feel the oxygen reaching his blood again. He sagged against one of the ship’s landing legs and closed his eyes.

“What a smell,” Faral’s voice said. “It’s even better than the sewers.”

“Get used to it, coz; we’ll be living in it. When we reach Khesat, you can buy a whole new wardrobe.”

“Considering that we left Ophel in the clothes we stood up in,” said Miza, “we’re going to have buy a new wardrobe anyway.” She paused, and Jens could hear her breath catch as if something had startled her. When she spoke again, it was in a lower voice. “That light’s moving around out there in the trees again, and this time it’s coming closer.”

Jens lifted his head. Miza was right: a bluish-white light was bobbing along the forest trail toward them.

Faral moved up beside him and lifted the blaster. In the weak illumination of Miza’s tiny glowcube, his face looked set and determined. Miza stood close by him. Faral glanced down at her.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything truly dangerous around here yet.”

Jens watched the light moving steadily among the trees. “Better switch off the safety on that blaster. Your experience may be about to change.”

The light flickered and came closer. There was movement in the underbrush—movement but no sound that Jens could detect—and a man stepped forward into the open ground. He wore a black cloak, and a deep hood concealed his features. The light in the woods had come from the Adept’s staff he carried. Power clung to the staff like a cold white flame, making the faint light of the miniature glowcube seem grey and pale.

“Hello!” Faral called out.

His cousin sounded relieved, Jens thought. Nobody had ever said there were Adepts working on Sapne, but members of the Guild could turn up anywhere. They had their own goals, and their own reasons for pursuing them.

But the newcomer didn’t answer Faral’s greeting, and made no further move. Miza edged closer and said in an undertone, “What do we do now?”

“Wait until we find out what he wants,” Jens said. “This may not have anything to do with us at all.”

“Do you really believe that?” said Faral. “I don’t.”

Miza gave a visible shiver. “You’re scaring me.”

“I’m scared myself. Getting involved in the private affairs of Adepts isn’t healthy—I’d sooner fight a slam of rockhogs.”

“And you the son and nephew of Adepts.” Jens pushed himself off from the support of the Elevener’s landing leg. “Ah, well. If you don’t want to wait …”

He stepped away from the ship and toward the Adept, taking care not to block the clear line between the stranger and the energy weapon in Faral’s hand. “Do you have business with us? Show us your face and we can talk.”

As he walked forward, Jens noticed that in spite of the stillness of the night air, the folds of the Adept’s cloak moved as if whipped by a silent but rising wind.

“Show us your face,” Jens said again. He spoke in Standard Galcenian—most Adepts had it at least as a second or third language—but the man didn’t answer.

Jens switched languages. “Do you speak Khesatan?” he asked in that tongue. “If you do, then let us know who you are.”

He repeated the question in all the other languages he knew enough of to let him form the words: Maraghai Trade-talk, Old Court Entiboran, even Gyfferan.

No reply came to any of them, and the hooded Adept didn’t move. The glow of power from the staff he carried cast a harsh white light onto his cloak, and onto his one visible arm in its long black sleeve. With an inward shudder, Jens saw that the pale hand gripping the staff was little more than dry skin stretched over bone. The flesh had cracked and split across the knuckles, but it didn’t bleed. Sinews and tendons showed through the gaps like string.

This can’t all be the fault of that smoke back at the passport office
, Jens thought. He began to walk backward, keeping his eyes fixed on the mummified hand. He didn’t want to look at the pale blur that was the stranger’s face.

“Jens, what is it?” Faral called out.

Does he see something funny too?
Jens wondered.
And is that better or worse than not having anyone see it but me?

He took another step backward—not straight back toward the ship, but leading away at a slight angle. If Faral ever decided to use the blaster. Jens felt the vines and undergrowth behind him catching at his knees as he stepped back, but he didn’t dare turn around to see where he was going.

The stranger moved to follow, narrowing the distance between them. Time seemed to slow. Now they were close enough for Jens to see a gleam of white underneath the deep hood of the stranger’s cloak. He couldn’t make out exactly what it was, but he didn’t like it. The insects had stopped singing. In spite of the tropic night, Jens felt cold.

Then he felt even colder as he realized what had happened to make visible that flash of white. The Adept’s glowing staff was in motion and swinging toward him.

XIII. SAPNE; HYPERSPACE; KHESAT

J
ENS FLUNG himself backward, barely avoiding the staff as it passed horizontally through the air where his head had been. He hit the ground hard and rolled away to one side—a second later, the other end of the staff smashed into the leafmould beside him. He kept on rolling. The rattle and sway of the underbrush around him would betray his passage, but to keep still would be death.

He heard a high-pitched sizzling noise, like water on hot metal, and a blaster bolt passed through the air above his head. Two more bolts, glowing a dark blue with ionizing energy, followed the first. All three of them hit the cloaked figure straight on. White smoke curled up in the darkness after each impact. But the stranger—surely no Adept, Jens thought—never staggered, and the glowing staff was swinging down again.

Jens didn’t have time to stand up. He scrambled backward like an upside-down mudspider, pushing himself along with his hands and feet, shoving away from the blow as it descended.

Then another light appeared, white against the white light from the stranger’s staff, shining from somewhere above and behind Jens’s vantage point on the ground. He twisted his head back to look for the source.

Guislen stood at the top of the ship’s ramp with a ball of dazzling light in his upraised hand.

“This is not the place,” Guislen called to the intruder. “This is not the time. But if you want to fight me … do it here, and do it now!”

Jens looked back at the stranger. The brilliant light that Guislen had summoned illuminated what Jens had glimpsed briefly within the man’s hood a few seconds before: a skeletal face with glittering deep-set eyes. What features that remained to it were contorted by loathing, and the stranger raised an arm to shield himself from Guislen’s light.

At that moment, Jens kicked out and upward with both feet, supporting himself on his arms and shoulders. His heels smashed into the stranger’s midsection.

But instead of the solid thud of boot leather on flesh, Jens felt his legs passing all the way through the other’s body. A numbing cold spread through him at the contact, his legs went limp, and he collapsed onto his back in the leafmould of the forest floor. In the same instant, the stranger vanished.

A few seconds later, Faral arrived at the run, and Miza with him. “What the hell
was
that thing?” Miza asked, and Faral said, “I hit him; I
know
I hit him.”

“I don’t know what it was,” said Jens. “Help me up, coz; when I touched it I went cold all over.”

“Are you all right?” Faral asked as he reached down to give Jens a hand.

Jens’s teeth were chattering. “I hope so.”

His rescuer came up to them at a steadier pace. The glow in Guislen’s hand was dimmer now, not the blazing white it had been, and by the time he reached them it had died away entirely.

“The ship was named
Inner Light
,” he said, as if nothing untoward had happened. “She was a freetrader from Mandeyn. I believe the interior is livable, or can be made so. But we have much to do if we are to lift tonight.”

Mael Taleion’s
Arrow-through-the-Doorway
was a smaller ship than any of those to which Klea was accustomed. Mael had shown a rather old-fashioned courtesy, insisting that she take the single cabin for her own use while he slept on the bridge. They took their meals together, though, in the
Arrow’s
galley, which had a table and benches large enough for two, and which doubled perforce as the common room. As the days of the transit to Khesat passed, she found herself often in conversation with Mael over cha’a or
uffa
and the plates of small fried breads that he made to supplement the usual space rations.

“Have you felt anything odd lately?” he asked her one ship’s-morning.

Klea looked at him uneasily. “What do you mean, ‘odd’?”

“What I said. Feelings, dreams, premonitions, ripples in the currents of time and space, unusual shadowings to the lines of life.” He frowned. “Perhaps ‘odd’ is not the word. Do you Adepts even have a word for it—for the sense that something is amiss with the weaving of the universe?”

She thought about the question for a while. Mael did not press her for the answer. Like most of the Adepts she’d known in her life, the Magelord also had the ability to wait quietly, without impatience.

“Not all have the same gifts,” she said. “But those Adepts who have an awareness of such things can feel it when the natural flow of the currents of Power has been disturbed.” She picked up a scrap of fried bread and turned it over in her fingers. Mael had dusted the fritters with powdered sugar this morning, making her think for the first time in years of the sweet lacebreads her grandmother had made, back when Klea was very young. “The only problem is, to most of us Magework feels exactly the same way.”

Mael’s dark brows rose. “Can your people, then, not recognize intent?”

“How?”

“You, at least, were present at the end of the great working that closed the rift between the two sides of the Gap Between. You should be able to tell from that alone the difference between good Magery and ill.”

“Hardly,” said Klea. She gave a nervous half-laugh. “Most of what I remember about that day is tied up with what happened to Errec Ransome. And
that
—to the shame of the Guild, that wasn’t Magework at all.”

“Ransome was a powerful disturber of the true weaving,” Mael agreed. “And strong in ill will. My First tells me he died that day, in the Void—which is bad, it leaves the
eiran
loose and confused.”

Klea stood up from the galley table. The plate of fritters was empty now; she took it and slid it into an empty slot in the cleaning unit. Some
uffa
remained in the hotpot; she brought the pot over to the table and refilled both mugs. Then she carried the hotpot back to its niche and stood there looking at it.

“Your First doesn’t know the half of it,” she said without turning back around. “She wasn’t there at the time. But I was.”

Jens led the way back up the ramp into the ship. To him, the air inside smelled clean by comparison with what it had been like when the hatch first opened, but Miza made a face as they stepped inside, and Faral said, “Pfaugh!”

“You should have been in here before,” Jens said. “This is nothing.”

No one mentioned the thing that had attacked them. It was clear—to Jens, anyhow—that without Guislen’s intervention they would have been dead, or something even worse than dead; and if Guislen said that they needed to lift before morning, he’d bought the right to have his words listened to. Faral seemed to have come grudgingly to the same conclusion, though his expression remained dark, and Miza was regarding both Guislen and Jens himself with frank mistrust.

“You’re the one who’s going to lift the ship,” Jens said to her. “If you don’t think you can do it, we’ll have to go back to the
Dusty
.”

She shook her head hard enough that her tail of red hair whipped against her shoulders. “With that—that
thing
loose out there in the forest? I’ll take my chances on board here with a Class B pleasure craft license, thank you.”

*That was a dirty move, foster-brother,* growled Faral in Trade-talk.

*I know that. Now shut up.* Jens turned back to address Guislen. “Where are the switches for the light panels?”

“Let’s get the power systems fully operational first,” Guislen said. “Come.”

Together the four of them made their way up the ladders to the engineering spaces. The blank monitor screens now glowed faintly, and the gauges and meters were in their low-powered standby mode. One by one, under Guislen’s direction, Jens and Faral and Miza brought the systems all back on line. At the last, with a blaze that made Jens flinch and cover his eyes, the overhead light panels came on at full intensity.

“That’s done,” he said, taking his hand down again after a few seconds. “Let’s finish checking out the ship.”

They continued on up to the top of the craft, where the bulkheads were noticeably slanted as the hull tapered to an airframe point. A sliding airtight door opened at a touch of the actuator switch. The cockpit lay directly ahead. Small and cramped, its forward viewscreen a narrow slit, the compartment held only two seats with no room for a third. Guislen stepped inside and glanced back at Miza.

She hesitated in the doorway, looking from Faral to Jens as if expecting some kind of guidance.

*This was all your idea,* Faral said to Jens under his breath. *You set her up for it—
you
talk to her.*

Jens ignored him. “Miza,” he said. “Now that you’ve seen what we’ve got, do you think you can handle it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Some of the instruments look familiar, but a lot more of them don’t. I don’t know if I can even lift without full instrumentation, and I sure don’t see any of that here—at least not the kind I learned on. I can’t even read the labels.”

“I can,” Guislen said. “Don’t worry about the lift-off; I’ll talk you through it.”

“You’re a pilot?” Faral asked.

“No, I’m a navigator,” Guislen said. “But I cross-trained in piloting and engineering both, back when I worked the spacelanes. In dangerous times everyone in the crew has to be able to handle any position at a moment’s notice.”

Miza looked at him uneasily. “When was that?”

“A long time ago … but the
Light
’s navicomp was old even then. It’s going to take us at least ten hours, Standard, to set up a valid course.”

“You sound like we’ve got an alternative,” said Jens.

“We do. There should be coursebooks on board for the common runs like Sapne-to-Khesat. Look in the drawer under the main console on the navigator’s side.”

“There should be what?” Jens said, but Miza had already crossed over to the drawer and pulled it open. Inside was a stack of thin, slablike objects—like text readers, but bulkier, with cords and plugs dangling from the ends.

“Coursebooks,” Miza said. “We learned about them in class. But the only one I ever saw was an antique that Huool was selling to a museum.” She lifted out first one slab and then another. “‘Suivi In-System’ … ‘Ilarna to Galcen South Polar’ … I can’t even recognize the alphabet on this one … here we go. ‘Sapne and Khesatan Farspace.’”

Guislen looked pleased. “That should be good enough to get us within close visual range of Khesat’s star,” he said. “From there, even the
Light
’s navicomps will be capable of doing the rest.”

Klea replaced the hotpot in its niche and came back to the table. She sat down opposite Mael and drew a long breath before she spoke.

“There were four of us,” she said. “Owen Rosselin-Metadi, his brother, his sister, and me. We brought back the Domina Perada from the Void. We ended a war. And we killed Errec Ransome.”

Mael looked grave. “My old teacher,” he said, “spoke of Ransome as one who should not be killed without breaking him first, lest he fail to notice that he was dead.”

“I don’t know how we could have broken him. Killing him was hard enough.”

“Tell me how it happened,” said Mael. “I begin to think that it may be more important than you know.”

“We were all there,” she began slowly. “In the Void. I was the odd one of the lot; Ransome wanted a hostage for his escape, or he wouldn’t have bothered with me in the first place. As far as he was concerned, I was nothing—a Nammerinish tart with no training and a dubious past—and once he had me, he barely remembered I was there.

“But I was the one who struck him first.”

Klea gazed into the crimson depths of her mug of
uffa
for a time, remembering. The blow had driven Errec Ransome down to his knees, there in the room his mind had constructed for a refuge in the trackless Void. Maybe combat in the Void was only symbol and metaphor, as the instructors at the Retreat would have it, but her staff had vibrated against the palms of her hands like a live thing when the wood smashed against Ransome’s skull.

“He should have died when I hit him,” she said finally. “And Owen’s sister shot him twice before he hit the ground. All that happened, though, was that everything turned into fog. And Ransome was still there.

“So in the end Owen had to fight him. Master against student—‘after the way of the Mages,’ Ransome said.”

“He spoke from ignorance,” said Mael. “Such things are not done in anger, and never in the Void.”

“I wouldn’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because Owen wasn’t the one who killed him. It was the older brother, Ari—the one who married Mistress Hyfid. He was a big man—”

“I’ve met him,” said Mael. “I know.”

“—and he walked into the middle of the duel and picked up Errec Ransome in both hands and snapped him across his knee like a stick.”

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