Jens let out his breath and sat down abruptly on one of the carved wooden chairs. All of a sudden he looked much more like his usual self, in spite of the moire spidersilk and the string of opals. *I got a message,* he said, *the night you were going to leave Maraghai with Chaka and go off wandering. *
*What kind of message?*
*My father was with Space Force Intelligence for a long time,* Jens said. *Maybe he still is, I don’t know. Anyway, he arranged things so that if anything bad ever happened to my mother or to him, I’d be sure to get word of it whether he could make contact himself or not.
That
kind of message.*
*Did it say what was going on?* Faral tried to imagine how trouble that bad could possibly have befallen his aunt and uncle. He’d always thought of them as dazzling and somehow invincible, living an exciting life in some place very far away, like people in a holovid. *Did they ask you for help?*
Jens shook his head. The opals glittered. *Nothing that clear and obvious. But I’m worried that both Dadda and Mamma are being held incommunicado by someone on Khesat who wants to use them in setting up a new Highest. If I want to learn anything more, I’ll have to play the game as if I intend to be a candidate for the office myself. Is everything clear enough for you now?*
Faral couldn’t think of an answer that wouldn’t sound either rude or stupid. Finally he gave up. *Shouldn’t you call Public Security to report a kidnapping first?*
*So far, nothing illegal has happened. But you can go a long way on Khesat and stay inside the boundaries of the law
… especially if you’re a Worthy and confine yourself to dealing with others of similar rank.*
*I can see why your father joined the Space Force and left the planet,* said Faral after a moment.
*Not yet you can’t,* Jens told him. *But you will.*
“Well,” Blossom said. “That was certainly an unusual reception.”
Along with Bindweed, Chaka, and Trav Esmet, she was sitting at the table in
Dust Devil‘
s common room. She poured herself some cha’a, hot and bitter, and swirled it around in the cup before looking over at her partner. “Have you ever seen the like?”
“No,” said Bindweed, “but I’ve never been to Khesat before, either.”
“Granted. Trav, did you happen to catch who that gentlesir in the morning-robe might have been?”
“Hafelsan,” the navigator replied. “Gerre somebody somebody Hafelsan.”
“You must improve your memory for names,” Bindweed told him. “Such things may be important someday when you’ve got a ship of your own.”
Blossom ignored her partner’s comment and concentrated on the navigator. “But do you recall what was said?”
“Yes,” Trav replied. He laced his fingers around his cha’a cup—Blossom had poured it for him herself, so that he’d know he wasn’t in trouble with the owners—and continued.
“The gentlefellow in the morning-robe inquired of the captain for his passengers. Captain Amaro said no, we carried none. The fellow with the morning-robe grew impatient, and asked if the captain was sure that no one named Jens Metadi-Jessan D‘Rosselin had taken passage. ‘None such,’ the captain said, but from the way he looked when the fellow spoke the name ‘Metadi’ I could see that some memory was being jarred loose.
“The fellow in the morning-robe started to head off, but then he seemed to change his mind. He came back and put an arm around the captain’s shoulders and said, real hearty-like, ‘There are some things I want to show you.’ Then they walked off together and neither one looked back.”
Blossom turned to the Selvaur. “What do you think, Chaka?”
*Weirder than anything I’ve ever heard.*
“This whole trip has been strange, I’ll grant you that. Now, my dears, here’s what we will do. Bindweed and I will play the role of dotty old ladies on holiday.”
“That sounds like grand fun!” Bindweed said. “We shall go shopping, yes we shall!”—delivered with a manic leer that made the others laugh in spite of themselves.
“Trav, you will remain on the ship, with Sarris and the rest of the crew,” Blossom continued. “Carry out business as usual, the same way you would in any working port. The captain may return, and he may wish to set a course elsewhere. Follow his orders, of course.
“However,” she went on, “unless I miss my guess, someone will approach you and ask you to hire on with them, or to sell them information, or something of that nature. Normally, I’m sure, your loyalty to the ship would preclude your accepting any such offer. This time, you will accept after holding out for the best price you can.”
“We’ll let you keep whatever you gain,” Bindweed put in. “Don’t sell yourself cheaply. No one will believe it.”
Blossom nodded. “As I was saying, we as owners of this craft give you permission to sell out. Do what’s asked. Take careful note of who, where, and what, as well as other details you may notice, and bring back a full report.”
“It should be fascinating,” Bindweed said. She rose and set aside her empty mug. “Now we’ll have to dress for town.”
*And if fame beckons?* Chaka asked.
“Then seize it with your fangs,” Blossom replied, “and don’t let go. Despite your misgivings, I believe that fame is to be had here.”
She took a deep breath. “Yes, fame is in the air of Khesat today.”
“Does no one in this room speak whatever beastly language those two boys are using?” asked the Exalted of Tanavral. He sat with Caridal Fere, Master of Nalensey, in the latter’s study. The voices of the Worthy cadet-Jessani and his traveling companion issued from a desktop comm link molded in the shape of a black crystal lily. “What’s the use of sewing ears into their robes if they’re going to jabber to each other in some uncouth tongue?”
“I believe that they’re speaking one of the Selvauran dialects,” said Fere. “Nearly impossible to learn unless you’re brought up with it. Or so I’m told.”
“Find me a translator,” the Exalted said. “One without political affiliation, if possible.”
“If such a thing exists on Khesat at a time like this,” said Fere. “The scholars at the university have a Worthy of their own already, so we can’t ask them. And the staff at the Maraghaite Embassy claims to refuse all such requests as a matter of principle.” He paused. “If we look outside the usual channels … on that ship from Sapne, the one that Hafelsan made such a fool of himself over meeting, the engineer’s apprentice is a Selvaur. Shall we hire it to listen to these two and bring us translations?”
Rhal Kasander began to smile. “An off-worlder,” he said. “Excellent. No local ties to create … misperceptions. And no one will notice its absence after the events, when witnesses may no longer be necessary.”
The Master of Nalensey clapped his hands twice. A young woman appeared. He did not address her, but instead spoke aloud with his back to her.
“There is a ship in port from Sapne,” he said. “There is a Selvaur on that ship. Hire it. Bring it here.”
The woman bowed, and left.
Kolpag Garbazon sat with his partner Ruhn at a sidewalk cafe in Ilsefret, sipping fruit juice and looking over the poetry section in the
Galactic Intelligencer
. Kolpag was finding the famed Khesatan decadence to be considerably less impressive than folklore made it out to be—for his money, you could find more of it, and better, in Freemarket Plaza on a LastDay night.
Ruhn was even less impressed. He cleared the screen on the
Intelligencer
’s text display and said, “More nonsense. We might as well have stayed home in Sombrelír.”
“Patience,” Kolpag said. “Everything is here, and all we need do is wait for it to present itself. Our analysis could not be wrong.”
“Oh yes it could,” Ruhn said. “And we’re sitting a long way out in the cold for my comfort, on a planet where they won’t put booze in their fruit juices because they think it ruins the natural bouquet.”
“They’ve got a point, you know.”
“Of the
juice
?”
“Some people care about such things, I suppose.” Kolpag nodded toward Ruhn’s discarded newsreader. “And speaking of cold comfort, did you catch the word of a new plague out of Sapne? The opening of the Tremoncton Gallery—it’s in that squib.”
“There’s nothing of interest in these papers written in Galcenian,” Ruhn said. He picked up the newsreader again anyway. “Did you know that in Khesatan, the same word means stranger, foreigner, non-native-speaker, and mannerless boor?”
Kolpag grunted. “Not surprising. What’s more surprising is the number of words that rhyme with it.”
“I still don’t see where you got that bit about the plague.”
“Plague from Sapne, that’s what they mean by the Miller’s White. And when you combine that with the news of a merchant spacer found dead in an alley yesterday afternoon …”
“Where did you see that?” Ruhn demanded.
“In the off-planet message feed,” said Kolpag. “It helps to pay attention. I put up a stop-and-hold on any mention of known members of the
Dust Devil‘
s crew, and guess who didn’t make it?”
“Bindweed and Blossom,” said Ruhn, “if there’s any justice in the universe.”
“None that I know of. It was our friend Captain Amaro, the man in too much of a hurry to pick up the cargo he’d contracted for.”
“Maybe one of the people he stiffed wasn’t happy with him, and sent him a present.”
“Maybe indeed,” Kolpag said. “But when you combine that story with no news of anyone of importance arriving on that ship, it tells me that our package surely did arrive on it. Now watch the long knives appear.”
“In what form?” Ruhn asked.
“A series of entertainments,” said Kolpag, “to which we won’t be invited. Followed by an entertainment to which everyone will be invited, and to which we’ll invite ourselves.”
“Don’t be so cryptic. You’re starting to go native.”
“Not if I can help it,” Kolpag told him. “I improved my mind during the transit by reading everything that was available on Ophel about Khesatan politics. Made me glad I’d been born in poverty before I was done.”
He had arrived on Khesat. That was right, it was the proper place. More and more was coming to him. People he recognized. He was sure he had been a starpilot, the skills were there. Skill did not fail him.
In dreams he saw himself dressed in white, a white staff in his hand, striding across the worlds, finding the corruption and exposing it, cleansing the worlds, then binding them so that they could never escape from control again.
Then came the waking, and a delegation meeting him. A memory stirred, of the end of a war, of being happy, the awards and the honors. Coming down from the starship where Tilly and Nannla ran the guns, a Selvaur in the engineering spaces, and there he stood with the captain beside him—
And the man in the morning-robe said the word “Metadi.”
Rosselin and Metadi.
The memories came in a rush. He was Ransome, Errec Ransome, the Breaker of Circles. The final chance had come, the final Circle waited to be broken. Now everything was within his grasp, along with the vengeance.
Vengeance on Rosselin and Metadi, the ones who had killed him before his time.
Ransome willed the man before him to approach.
“There are some things I want to show you,” the man said.
Good,
Ransome thought.
There are some things I want to see. And I shall see them through your eyes.
J
ENS METADI-Jessan D’Rosselin, cadet-Jessani, Worthy scion of a Worthy Lineage, stood in the reception hall of Rhal Kasander’s town house, sipping moonflower wine from thimble-sized glasses while being sized up, it seemed, by every Worthy dowager on the planet.
Shopping for their great-granddaughters,
he thought.
At least I
hope
it’s for their great-granddaughters.
The reception hall was high and airy. An early-autumn rain pattered against the windows, and the breeze through the clerestory brought blessed coolness to what might otherwise have been an overcrowded scene. Retrofitting the antique heating and cooling systems of the town house for proper climate control was well within the means of Jens’s cousin-once-removed, but doing so would have spoiled the architect’s carefully planned patterns of natural air circulation.
Jens put aside his wineglass without looking—one of the Exalted’s servitors slid a silver tray into place beneath it before he released his fingers—and strolled over to the retiring-corner. There, low tables and piles of cushions awaited the pleasure of those who chose to recline and view the passing scene. Having chosen a cushion, he sank back, resting on his elbows, and surveyed the room.
His purpose here, at the party and on Khesat in general, was merely to exist, or so his cousin-once-removed had claimed. Apparently a rival faction within the current faction had pressed the advantage of another Worthy, one whom the Exalted of Tanavral found far less worthy than strictly necessary. As an off-world candidate of impeccable lineage—but somewhat disreputable upbringing—Jens was to be the lever to remove that fellow, and bring up another.
“An intelligent man, but not
too
intelligent,” Rhal had said of that second Worthy, and everyone in the little prereception room had laughed. Jens thought that his being present for the witticism was indiscreet, to say the least, but who was he to say? His cousin-once-removed stood upon the pinnacle of fashion, and was far more aware of nuance than was Jens.
A maze of curtains and cushions led farther away from the main reception hall. Low murmurs and squeals of laughter came from back among the deeper shadows.
Jens glanced about the hall. As he had half expected, Faral was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Miza.
It was something, he supposed, that he should have seen coming. The way the two of them had carried on aboard
Inner Light
—holding hands, gazing deeply at one another, blocking the route from engineering to the galley so a man couldn’t get himself a midnight cup of cha’a without having to duck under a pair of sleeping amorati floating fully clothed in the middle of the common room—it hadn’t improved his outlook on life at all. Maybe they had finally … no, both of them were too straightlaced to avail themselves of the semiprivate cushions at a reception. If they hadn’t locked themselves in the pilothouse of the
Light
for a couple of hours during the transit, they weren’t going to do anything now.
Holding hands
, he thought.
And talking. I wish
…
Jens wasn’t certain exactly what he wished, but he knew that he wasn’t likely to get it. Not tonight.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and scanned the hall once more. Still no sign of his cousin or of Huool’s courier, but not far from the retiring-corner a Worthy in a crimson evening-robe was in earnest speech with the Master of Nalensey. They had their heads practically on each others’ shoulders, and from the expression on his face, the crimson-robed Worthy was deeply worried.
To make such a slip from studied indifference was a bad sign. The Worthy had certainly fallen a notch in the estimation of everyone present.
Jens studied his own indifference and found it excellent. He tried to look as if he were trying to stifle a yawn brought on not by fatigue but by boredom. The former was dishonorable—a true Worthy never slept before dawn, and then only enough to prepare himself for the next night’s revelry.
Time to make Cousin-once-removed Rhal happy and circulate some more
, Jens thought. He pushed himself to his feet. Before he could take more than a few steps in the direction of the wine fountain, he heard a whisper in his ear: “Come.”
An invitation? Jens turned toward the speaker and found himself facing Heridand Agilot, Freeholder of Derizal. Though only of middling rank, the Agilots had been the leading family in Derizal for longer than most Worthy Lineages could claim existence. Nothing political happened in Ilsefret, it was said, without an Agilot working somewhere behind the scenes.
“Yes, Gentlesir?” Jens asked politely.
“Serious business,” the Freeholder said. “You’re wanted.” With that he turned, without the common obeisance to one of higher grade that could be expected, and walked off.
The woodwind consortium was in the midst of Zaragini’s Third Obsession, but to Jens the entire place seemed muted in an instant. A glance about the hall showed him that the number of guests, especially among the truly important, was noticeably lower now.
Jens trailed after the Freeholder’s retreating back as Agilot went out through a pair of double doors onto the rear balcony. The light rain spattered Jens briefly before the nearby entry-servant draped a cloth-of-gold weather cloak over his head and shoulders.
A hovercar on high-step nullgravs waited on the far side of the balcony railing, its passenger-side door lifted up. A servant placed a set of polished ocherwood steps against the railing, and assisted the Freeholder up and across. Jens followed after him, and the door of the hovercar swung down.
The trip wasn’t long—just to another spot on Rhal’s estate. The hovercar settled to the ground in front of what appeared to be a caretaker’s cottage, lifted up its side door long enough for Jens and the Freeholder to step out, then closed the door and sped off.
The cottage turned out to be almost empty of furniture, but full of people. Not that many, perhaps—his cousin-once-removed, the Master of Nalensey, the crimson-robed Worthy whose name he had never quite caught, a handful of others—but with enough accumulated rank and importance to crowd a much larger room. They were gathered around a large holovid tank, the first one that Jens had seen since his arrival on Khesat. He wondered if the cottage was where Cousin-once-removed Rhal betook himself to indulge in holodramas, cheap factory-made snacks, and other tasteless pleasures.
At the moment, though, the tank showed only a picture of a statue, with a fountain behind it. “I will speak plainly.” Rhal’s voice came to him above the steady plashing of the water in the holovid. “We had thought to spend some weeks, or months, in search of a Worthy fit to stand before the mobile party. That time is now no longer ours. I have been reliably informed that the Highest is brought low.”
So that’s the reason for the fountain,
Jens thought.
The waters of weeping, all according to good form.
Jens saw the Freeholder looking directly at him in an unprecedented display of rudeness. Tonight seemed to be the night for aberrant behavior, far beyond that expected of the well-bred. Perhaps it was the crisis that did it.
Rhal continued. “This sudden development renders all our intended stratagems unworkable. We—those of us gathered here—must put forward a plausible candidate at once.”
The morning after Rhal Kasander’s official introduction of his Worthy dawned clear and bright. The rain had come to a halt shortly after midnight, and the day bid fair to be unseasonably warm—or so said the weather section in the Galcenian-language
Galactic Intelligencer
, when Miza woke to find the newsfiles and a text-reader lying on her bedside table.
She hadn’t thought much of the introductory festivities. The Khesatan Worthies had apparently placed both her and Faral somewhere between servants and poor relations on the social scale, at least until one of the genealogy-mad dowagers had worked it out that the young man from Maraghai was as much a member of the distinguished Rosselin lineage as the cadet-Jessani himself, and that his father’s sister’s husband was the senior Jessan. After that they hadn’t ignored Faral at all, only Miza.
When three Worthy gentlesirs in a row had failed to acknowledge her presence even when she was standing directly in their line of sight, and a fourth—younger and more high-spirited than his fellows—had noticed her only to offer her an hour of light pleasure upon the retiring-cushions, Miza had slipped away and gone back to the private wing. Not long after, as she got into her bed and turned out the light, she’d heard footsteps pass by in the corridor outside as Faral made his way to his room.
Apparently, he hadn’t found the party worth staying at without her. Now, in the morning, the thought made her smile. She picked up the
Intelligencer
and began scrolling idly through the sections. She knew, in general, what she was looking for: an address, of sorts, that those who knew the secret could find and use. Huool’s training was admirably thorough; Miza knew all the secrets. Halfway down the Select Rental Advertisements page, she found the address she needed, and smiled again.
She finished her morning cha’a and biscuits, then allowed the maid to assist her in dressing—High Khesatan garments, even at the poor-relation level, were more complex affairs than she was used to—and went in search of Faral. She found him in the morning room, where a sideboard held platters of cold meat and warming-trays of poached eggs in case any of Rhal Kasander’s guests should feel the need for more sustaining food.
“Where’s Jens?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Faral said. He added a serving of eggs to his plate. “He’s not in his room—I don’t think he ever came back to it. Kasander’s not around anywhere, either.”
She made a face. “More Worthy nonsense. That’s all right … I’ve got plans of my own for today.”
“What sort of plans?”
“I need to contact Huool back on Ophel,” she said. “Let him know I got the two of you where you were going, like he said to do … find out what he wants me to do next … that sort of thing. But I don’t particularly want to use the Exalted’s comm set to do it, if you know what I mean.”
“Makes sense to me,” said Faral. “Whose comm set are you going to use instead?”
“No names,” she said. “Let’s just say that Huool has exchange agreements with all sorts of, well, entrepreneurial organizations. I’ve located the contact point for one of them, down in Riverside Park. Want to go sightseeing?”
Mael Taleion was in his newly rented apartment in the Castledown Acres Guesthome in suburban Ilsefret. From the balcony overlooking the river, he could see the Golden Tower rising in the distance deep within the city.
Twenty years ago, the delegation from the homeworlds had come to Khesat to negotiate with the Adept-worlders following the end of the Second War. That delegation had been deliberately free of any person with ties to the Circles. Mael himself had decreed it so.
He had been Second of the Prime Circle then—as he had been since the day Grand Admiral Theio syn-Ricte sus-Airaalin had first chosen him—and it had fallen to him to set the conditions of the treaty team. The new First was a latecomer to the ways of the Great Lords, and she was aware that there was much she did not know.
“I trust you, Mael,”
she had said. It was the way of Adepts to act alone, and Llannat Hyfid had been Adept-trained before she found her proper teacher; she thought nothing of putting the power to change everything into the hands of one man.
“Act for me in this. Do what is good for the Mageworlds, and do what is honorable.”
Mael had labored to fulfill that commission. Magery altered luck. Therefore Mael had thought it less than honorable to allow Mages to come to Khesat. So far as he knew, he was the only Masked One currently on-planet.
The time had come for him to violate his own rules. “If you will forgive me,” he said aloud, addressing the far-distant Llannat. “But I must find the
eiran
and see how life and luck stand in this place.”
Mael sat on the sun-dappled balcony and balanced his staff across his knees. Then, without his Circle to support him, without a friend to guide him back should he get lost in the visions, he donned the black mask that was a distinguishing mark of those who saw with more than their eyes.
As the cool breeze from the river fanned him, he closed his eyes and stretched himself forth. Before long, the vision came.
The city was overlaid with Adeptry, so that the silver lines here were tangled and untrimmed. He felt a certain distaste even in looking at it, and had to restrain himself from the temptation to make changes, just small ones, that would set a tiny bit of order amid the sloppiness of this world. It would be so easy to grasp one of the
eiran
and pull it a little more into accord with its neighbors, or set it at a pleasing angle against another behind it. But no—balances are delicate, and to commence a working without the intention of completing it would be immoral, as well as against the conditions he had set that nothing on this world was to be touched.