Klea stopped talking. Mael sat waiting, patiently as always, until she drew another deep breath and went on.
“Ransome was dead then; I’m sure of it. What we saw next was an illusion, a memory given shape by the Void … Errec Ransome, as the Domina Perada knew him when they both were young.”
“Did it speak?” Mael’s eyes were dark with worry. “And did you answer it?”
“Oh, yes.” Klea shivered, remembering how the phantom had stretched out a hand to the Domina—
“Have I wronged you, Perada? What can I do to make things right?”
—and then had let it fall. “It spoke. And the Domina answered. She called him a wanderer, and gave him leave to go.”
Mael made an impatient noise. “Does no one in the Adept-worlds understand the Void at all? Not even an unranked Circle-Mage would think of saying a thing like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“A wanderer she called him,” said Mael. “And a wanderer he has become. He goes now to Khesat, and I … I am summoned to meet him there.”
“‘Patience is all very well,’” said the young man in a servant’s free-day livery. From the tone of his voice, he was quoting the words of another. “‘You have counseled patience. We have been more than patient. But time grows short, and the Worthy you promised us has not appeared.’”
“Whoa—they
were
getting into it,” said the woman who sat beside him on the riverbank. “What did my lord of Redonti say to that?”
The young man shrugged. “What could he say? ‘The Worthy will appear, I promise you’—but personally, I doubt it.”
“That entire cabal is cutting things too fine,” said the woman. “The Manches already have their worthy, and so do the Barbicans. And let’s not forget the Roundels. They don’t have just one Worthy—their public one—or even two Worthies—counting their secret candidate that they intend everyone to know about. They have three Worthies, if we include that pitiful creature living in their pockets whom they actually hope to see ascend to the Jade Eminence.”
“The upshot of the whole argument,” said the young man, “was that they’re going to go find some other poor fool to carry their banner. I was out of the room fetching a bottle of the Erilani vintage when they named the man, but figuring out who they lighted on shouldn’t be a problem.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “There’s something else that you aren’t telling me.”
“I was saving the best for last. The Exalted of Tanavral still backs his missing man. Which meant that the meeting. grew rancorous—as far as such dignified gentlemen lower themselves to rancor.”
The woman tore a small piece of bread from the roll she held in her hand and tossed it to the wildlife which teemed on the waterbank. On the river itself, winding through downtown Ilsefret, colorful pleasure boats with scarlet and blue sails flitted before the light autumn breeze.
“With your position in the household of Caridal Fere,” the young man went on after the silence had stretched out too long, “you’ll be in a poor position if someone decides to cry ‘treachery.’”
“We have to tell Master Pariken,” she said.
“Important as this is, maybe we should bypass the Guildmaster and send a notice all the way up to Master Rosselin-Metadi.”
The woman frowned. “Pariken says that he sent one messenger already.”
“Maybe Master Pariken is playing his own game.”
“If we’re unable to trust one another at our level, we are lost. Unlike the Guildmaster, you and I have seen enough of the future to know that a crisis is drawing near, and one without favorable result. Unless some kind of action—”
“—is taken,” finished the man. “Actions of the kind that some people contemplate would make us worse than our enemies.”
“Which is why”—the woman smiled sweetly—“
we
will not take that action, but rather watch in outward horror while others perform tasks which are not far removed from our needs.
“Don’t fret,” she added. “You won’t be called on to do anything more than your conscience can stand.”
“Sometimes just carrying Kasander’s slippers is more than my conscience can stand. What an immoral—”
“Don’t even think it,” the woman said. She stood up and brushed off her skirt. “I’ll meet you again next LastDay at the usual place.”
They parted beneath the bright spires of central Ilsefret, and the man went back to the servants’ quarters beneath the house of the Exalted of Tanavral.
A ringing bell greeted him almost as soon as he had entered. He let his free-day livery fall to the floor, and pulled on his servitor’s robe as he dashed for the stairs. One tread before the top he paused, took a breath, and stepped forward and out, standing like a carven thing until he saw where his master waited. There was Kasander, over by the balcony. The young man walked slowly over.
When he got to the customary distance of three paces, he paused and bowed his head.
“Fetch my slippers,” the Exalted said. “We must go visiting.”
“May one be so bold?” the man asked of the air beside the Exalted’s head.
“To the residence of the Republic’s negotiator,” the Exalted said. “Bring two bottles of claret. Good, but not great, vintages. You may choose which ones.”
A gift chosen by a servant
, the young man thought.
The insult direct.
Maybe the timetable had moved up.
Faral didn’t much care for the idea of leaving Miza alone in the
Light
’s cockpit with the enigmatic Guislen, but as long as his cousin was determined to leave Sapne in this ship and no other, he didn’t seem to have a choice. Something strange was going on—something that went beyond even oracular old ladies and hooded Adepts with murderous intentions.
If Jens knew what the problem was, however, he wasn’t telling. He accompanied Faral on his inspection of the rest of the starship, and never once mentioned either Guislen or the strange Adept. He and Faral worked their way through all the
Light’
s compartments one at a time—most of the spaces they found had obvious uses, but one or two proved utterly baffling. Faral supposed it took being brought up on shipboard to recognize them.
“What I’m worried about,” he said, “is food and water. If the engines go we’re dead in a second. But thirst—that’s a nasty way to die.”
“You’re certainly cheerful tonight,” said Jens. “Look over here. I think I’ve found the galley.”
A closer inspection proved that he was right. The closet-sized nook held a washer and a cook-set, and dinnerware stacked for lift-off in secured trays. Not surprisingly, the fresh-provisions locker had failed to remain cold under standby power, and the meat and vegetables inside had first rotted and then dried into a foul-smelling powder. Jens wrinkled his nose.
“If we can’t find an airlock to cycle this out of when we make high orbit,” he said, “we’ll need to toss it now.”
“Right,” said Faral. He opened another formerly-sealed cabinet. “Hey, look at this—space rations, in packets. Let’s see if they’re any good.”
The foil packets had their seals intact, and pulling the tab on one of them revealed a dried bricklike substance. The pictorial instructions on the back of the packet showed a similar brick immersed in boiling water.
Faral put the opened rations back into the cabinet. “I guess we’re supposed to boil these and trust to luck.”
“I’ve got luck,” Jens said. He fingered the necklace of bone and leather that the old woman had given him. “Our hostess back at the customs office gave me some. How are you doing for cleaning supplies to make this place tidy?”
“Not so good. Let’s look below.”
The next level down from the galley was crew berthing. There were no overhead light panels here; only red safety glows that would keep people’s eyes from being blinded, and allow those crew members off watch to sleep during the ship’s day. The air on this level was thicker than it had been up above.
Faral pushed on ahead into the berthing area. “We’ll need more than soap and a plastic sponge for this one,” he called back out to Jens.
“What do you have?”
“The crew,” Faral said.
His cousin joined him in the berthing area. The small compartment had two bunks mounted to the bulkheads. One bunk held blankets collapsed over a thin, long lump. A brown skull lay with jaws wide above the top sheet. Faral noted that the skeleton’s arms were crossed across its chest.
The occupant of the other bunk had never made it back there. He—or maybe she, Faral couldn’t tell—lay facedown on the deck in a pair of stained, unisex coveralls. With no insects on board the
Light
to finish the work of decay, mold and bacteria had reduced the crew member’s flesh to a film of greasy brown dirt. The skull had patches of skin and hair stretching over the partly dried and partly rotted cranium.
“That one died first,” Jens said, pointing at the bunk. “His partner laid him out, and then took ill himself—too suddenly to reach the bed.”
“Save the archeology. We have some cleaning to do.”
“Respectful cleaning,” Jens said. “We’re borrowing their ship, after all.”
Faral sighed. “After all.” He nodded toward the bunk. “This one first, I think; he’s already partway wrapped.”
Working together, he and Jens bundled the sheets and blankets up and around the body, and carried it outside between them. They halted at the foot of the ramp, uncertain what to do next. The ground was too hard for digging, and didn’t provide enough loose stone to raise a suitable cairn.
“We can’t just leave them out here for the animals,” Faral said. “Or for that—that whatever-it-was your friend Guislen chased away.”
“On Entibor they used to cremate people,” Jens replied after a moment’s thought. “Lay the bodies down under the ship’s jets. Let the fire purify them.”
F
OLLOWING GUISLEN’S instructions, Miza took her place on the
Light’
s command couch and went to work. The couch was dirty, and the fabric of the seat coverings, no longer as flexible as it had once been, crackled under her as she sat.
I hope that doesn’t mean that we’re going to find a major problem later on,
she thought,
a seal that’s lost its airtight integrity or something.
She put the thought aside and kept on going over the numbers and instructions. The annotations for the coursebook were in Galcenian, though they had been amended in some other script—not the Ilarnan of the engineering control panels but something that Guislen had identified as one of the Infabedan languages.
Miza frowned. Guislen was a strange one, with his Adepts’ gifts and his spacer’s ways, and she wasn’t sure what to make of him. He could have come from almost anywhere. She’d never seen any members of the
Dust Devil
’s crew except for the captain, and there was no way of knowing what other ships might be using the Sapnean port. That Jens trusted the man was obvious, but as far as Miza was concerned that didn’t necessarily count as a recommendation—she still wasn’t altogether sure that she trusted Jens.
Faral had his own doubts about Guislen, she could tell that much from just watching him. Faral, unfortunately,
did
trust Jens. He’d accepted Guislen’s offer of help on his cousin’s word alone, and nothing Miza could say was likely to move him from that position.
Let’s hear it for family loyalty
, she thought.
I hope it doesn’t end up being the death of all of us.
When night fell, and after some hours Captain Amaro had still not returned from his courtesy visit to the Eraasian ship, Trav Esmet began to worry. Around local midnight, he left the bridge and went down to the common room. As he’d hoped, he found the
Dusty
’s owners still awake and playing kingnote—waiting up, he presumed, for the return of the three young people who’d ridden as smuggled cargo from Ophel.
They were talking, for some reason, about ghosts.
“All the Mageworlders believe in ’em,” said Bindweed, scooping up the cards from the table and shuffling the deck again. “If you ask them, they’ll tell you right to your face that Sapne is haunted.”
“They’ve got plenty of good reasons to feel that way,” Blossom said unsympathetically. “It was Mageworlds biochem that brought down Old Sapne in the first place. I’m surprised that they’ve got enough nerve to show up.”
“There’s money in it. And where there’s money, folks will find the nerve.” Bindweed paused in dealing out the cards, in order to look more closely at Trav. “You don’t look like a happy man, Esmet. Is there a problem?”
“The captain’s not back yet,” Trav said. “And I’m concerned. Ghosts or no ghosts, Sapne isn’t a healthy place to be, at night and on foot.”
“Have we talked to the Mages yet?” Bindweed asked.
“No. If you could—”
Bindweed laid her cards facedown on the table and stood up. “All right, people. Let’s go make a comm call.”
The two owners followed Trav back up to the
Dusty
’s bridge. The pilot-apprentice opened up the ship’s comm log and found the frequency that
Set-Them-Up-Again
had used before. Bindweed keyed on the link and waited until the squeal and crackle had stopped.
“This is Gentlelady Bindweed, half-owner of
Dust Devil
,” she said. “I need to speak to your captain.”
“I am Haereith, captain of
Set-Them-Up-Again,
” a Mageworlds-accented voice replied over the link. “What is your pleasure, Gentlelady?”
“Our captain—may I speak with him?”
“He is not here.”
“He isn’t?” Bindweed glanced over at Trav, and her expression told the pilot-apprentice that he had been right to worry. “We expected him back here at the
Dusty
several hours ago. When did he leave?”
“He stayed to share supper with us,” Haereith replied. “But he left afterward, not long past dark. Is there some emergency?”
“No, no emergency,” Bindweed said. “But we’re a bit concerned. Did he have time enough to walk back here?”
“In the dark … hard to say. But yes, I think that there was time.”
“Thank you, Captain,” she said. “Bindweed out.”
She keyed off the link. “Well,” she said to the others on the bridge, “now we know. I hope I haven’t embarrassed Captain Amaro too badly in front of his counterparts from the other side of the Gap.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Blossom. “Ship’s owners do so many stupid things that one more bit of dottiness on our parts isn’t going to make a difference. Esmet, you were right to come and get us.”
Trav felt relieved. “The captain’s always been on time before, is all. And this is Sapne—I don’t believe what the Mages say about the place being haunted, but the locals are a funny lot and you can’t really trust any of them with your back turned.”
“Dirtsiders are like that everywhere,” Bindweed said. She looked thoughtful for a moment. “One thing we can do right now is set up a vertical light beam—something that’ll show above the trees—for Amaro to guide home on.”
“Shouldn’t we assemble a search party?” Trav asked.
“I don’t think so,” Bindweed said. “In the dark, there’s too much danger of someone else falling into a hole or getting lost, and we don’t have enough people on board to mount an effective night search anyway. In the morning, if he hasn’t returned—”
Blossom nodded agreement. “But your idea of rigging a light makes sense for now. It’ll take more than three pairs of hands to do it, though. Trav, you go wake up Sarris down in Engineering, and let’s get moving.”
“I’ve never crewed a starship in my life,” Faral complained. He and Guislen were in the
Light’
s engine room, going over the gauges and readouts one last time. “How am I supposed to do it now?”
“There’s an acceleration couch in here,” Guislen said. “All you have to do is strap down and wait. During planetary departure there’s nothing you could do anyway if things went wrong.”
“Maybe the ship’s had all its bad luck already.”
“We can only hope.” Guislen checked the lighted gauges. “We seem to have reaction mass enough to get to the Central Worlds. Unless the gauge is frozen.”
He laughed, and swung onto the ladder to take him up. Faral closed the vacuum-tight door behind him, and went over to the acceleration couch to strap down. There was a comm-link button on the arm of the couch. He keyed the link.
“You ready topside?”
“Ready as I’m going to get,” Miza’s voice came back. She sounded scared but resolute. “Waiting for my copilot.”
“He’s on his way.”
Faral keyed off the link and settled back into the couch padding to wait for lift-off. All things considered, this place in the brightly lit engineering compartment, surrounded by burnished metal and sharply angled machines, was better than the strapdown position Jens had found—the unused bunk in crew berthing. The ship had been designed for two, and two bunks were all there were. The padding and parts of the other bunk had been discarded entire, and now lay on the ground below with the bodies of the former crew, awaiting the cleansing flames of the Elevener’s jets.
But first Miza needed Guislen forward, to instruct her in working the unfamiliar gear.
A nagging thought came to Faral that this was wrong, this was all too convenient.
The easy way leads to the ambush,
he kept thinking, recalling cliffdragons waiting above the worn game trails in the Gahlbelly Mountains of Maraghai. I hope we aren’t doing something really stupid.
Jens lay back against the cushions of his bunk and tried to relax. He and Faral had cleaned out the berthing compartment as best they could with scant time and no proper equipment, but the odor of corruption—and the memory of the two dead crew members—still lingered. He envied Faral his proper acceleration couch down in the bright lights and relatively clean air of the engine room, even though the decision to take the unused bunk for a strapdown position had been his own.
All this was my idea; so if anybody has to sleep with the ghosts and skeletons, it’s me.
Nevertheless, he reflected, he could have used some human company. Faral’s, preferably; Jens’s cousin had been his agemate and fellow-conspirator for a long time. Faral had been hurt, though, when he’d learned of the plan to abandon him and Chaka at the Sombrelír spaceport—he’d concealed his reaction well, but not well enough.
Jens grimaced, thinking that Faral was going to be hurt yet again when he found out what the other things were that his cousin hadn’t yet bothered to mention.
I hope I haven’t managed to mess up everything completely before I even start.
The intraship comm system clicked on, and Miza’s voice came over the link to interrupt his thoughts.
“Copilot’s in the cockpit. Let’s go down the checklist, and see what happens when I press the Launch button.”
Pleasure craft, limited
, Jens said to himself.
Class B and up. Guislen … whoever you really are … make certain that she knows everything she needs to know.
“Shut down exterior vents. Shut down nonessential internals. That’s the blue switch. Seal for launch. Hatch reports positive lock.”
‘Miza ran down the checklist as Guislen read it to her. When they reached “crew strapped down for lift-off,” Faral answered up from engineering, though he added, “You have to understand that I don’t have the slightest idea what to do back here.”
“Not a problem,” Guislen said. “The old Gyfferan Eleveners were pretty much automatic in this phase. The
Light’
s designed to run with a crew of two, both of them in the cockpit—pilot and navigator for the launch and the run-to-jump.”
“And here we both are,” said Miza. She was beginning to feel somewhat giddy with tension and uncertainty, and had to suppress the urge to laugh at the absurd mental picture of herself-as-starpilot. “Next step?”
“Exterior hazard lights on. The yellow toggle, above you. You’ll have to stretch to get it.”
She reached, flipped the toggle, subsided again onto the cushions. “Okay. Got it.”
“Internal test, check fuel system, check engines.”
“The board is green.”
“Test airtight integrity. Overpressure on.”
“Testing.” She felt her ears pop, but the indicators on the board stayed green. “Test sat.”
“When you come to launch,” Guislen said, “you’ll have to do a lot by feel. If there’s excessive vibration, then you change attitude, or increase the power or decrease it until the vibration eases.
“Mostly, what we have to do here and now is get into space. We don’t have to worry about reaching an assigned orbit, so half of your problems have gone away already. Keep her pointed more or less straight up and you’ll get where you’re going. The throttles are on the arms of your chair. You can do it any time.”
Miza flexed her fingers and looked over at Guislen uncertainly. “Aren’t we supposed to call Field Operations and Inspace, and tell them that we’re launching?”
Guislen smiled faintly. “Under the circumstances, I don’t believe that’s necessary.”
The pleasantry didn’t reassure Miza as much as it could have. She clicked on the interior communications. “If you’re ready back there, I’m ready up here. Departure as soon as I click off, if I haven’t heard different from you by then.”
Miza hoped that she sounded more confident than she felt. She knew that the real difficulty wasn’t at this end—some astoundingly primitive systems could reach orbit. All it took was pumping out enough energy. Landing at the far end would be the tricky part. She had no confidence at all in her ability to maneuver antique computers through a fins-down pillar-of-fire landing. But if she thought about it too long she’d never get anything done.
“Gentlesir Huool had
better
give me an A for this course,” she muttered to herself, and rammed the throttle levers full forward.
The acceleration answered a lot faster than she’d expected. This wasn’t a slow and stately launch like the shuttle that had taken her to the liner for Ophel, or a smooth lift followed by a quick boost like the nullgrav-assisted short-hoppers she had learned on. It was more like getting kicked in the small of the back by a street fighter.
Outside the viewport, the
Light’
s drapery of jungle vines flashed into sudden fire. A weird howling came from all of the ship’s metal parts shaking and singing at once. The vibration made Miza’s jaws ache, and she reached for the throttles to ease back on the thrust.