“The
eiran
aren’t the worst of it.” Mael looked from the First to her husband. “Back in the homeworlds, an
ekkannikh
has risen up to disrupt the Circles.”
“
Ekkan—?”
Mistress Hyfid stumbled on the unfamiliar word.
“In the old stories,” said Mael, “a hungry ghost. But among those who work with Power, it is the word for someone among us who has too much strength and too much will—or too much anger—to let himself die completely.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Ari Rosselin-Metadi. He stood up and fetched the decanter of purple liquor from the side table, then refilled all their glasses to within a hair of the brim. “Because the only dead man I can think of with that much of that kind of power is Errec Ransome.”
Errec Ransome.
Master, once, of the Adepts’ Guild, and teacher of Mistress Hyfid when she first came to learn the ways of Power.
The Breaker of Circles,
they had called him in the homeworlds, for what he had done at the end of the First War.
Traitor
, they called him now, on both sides of the old border zone, and schoolchildren from one side of the civilized galaxy to the other made an insult of his name.
Mael tipped a splash of the purple liquor onto the smooth-planed boards of the veranda—a ritual gesture, of little worth against a determined adversary, but the habit of a lifetime could not be shed that easily. “You said the words, not I.”
“I’m right, then.”
“Yes,” said Mael. “So far, the creature has not killed—it hasn’t yet recovered enough identity to be that powerful. But the Circles on Cracanth have felt its touch these five months and more, and someday soon it—he—will cross the threshold.”
Mistress Hyfid frowned. “Why Cracanth, of all places?”
Mael fell silent for a moment, the better to choose his words before he spoke. Not all the history of the First War was common knowledge in the Adept-worlds—especially history from the Eraasian point of view—but some matters were more ticklish to deal with than others.
“The story is obscure,” he said finally, “and all those with direct knowledge of it are long since dead … but it was told to me when I was young that Errec Ransome had once been a prisoner among us, and that Cracanth was the world on which they held him.”
“Now that,” said Rosselin-Metadi, after another silence, “is something nobody mentioned when I was growing up.” He took a long drink of the purple liquid in his glass. “I wonder if they even knew.”
“It makes sense, though,” Mistress Hyfid said. “The way he hated the Magelords …”
Mael said, “Yes. The stronger the
ekkannikh
grows, the more he will remember. When he remembers enough, he will know that it was not the Circles who defeated him in the end. And Errec Ransome was a man who devoted his whole life to crushing the ones who had injured him.”
K
LEA SPENT the rest of the day worrying about how to handle her latest commission from Owen Rosselin-Metadi.
She thought about it while she talked in the practice yard with Mistress Yarro, deciding on the quarterly schedule of instruction for the senior apprentices. She thought about it while she was closeted in the lesser pantry with Master Enolt, planning the Retreat’s long-term food purchases. And she thought about it in half a dozen other corners of the ancient citadel, in between dealing with a host of smaller matters that would otherwise have claimed too much of the Guild Master’s attention.
The basic problem remained intractable. She was somehow supposed to shadow and protect—and at all costs to keep away from Khesat—a pair of young men well past the age when they would tolerate such protection.
How to begin?
She rubbed her forehead, where the beginnings of a headache had begun to gather.
I can’t see calling up Maraghai and asking Owen’s brother if his boys are still at home … what am I supposed to tell him if they are? “Don’t let them go to Khesat”? As soon as the kids get wind of that—and they will, they always do!—Khesat’s going to be the first place they’ll want to go.
And that’s if they’re home. If they’ve left …
Definitely, a headache. The only person she’d ever heard of who’d successfully tracked a lost object outside of local planetary space was Llannat Hyfid, the First of all the Mage-Circles. Rumor had it that Errec Ransome had done something similar in his youth—but the subsequent careers of both those individuals gave her pause.
One of them a turncoat
, she thought,
and the other a traitor and a madman
. And both of them more powerful by a long way than Klea Santreny.
She went to bed early that night, nursing her headache. Sleep eluded her in spite of all her efforts. She was still awake when a messenger found her several hours later, with the news that the Second of the Mage-Circles had crossed the old border zone, and appeared to be headed for Maraghai. In theory, the border was now open, and Mageworlders could come and go as they pleased. Klea didn’t care much for the idea. She’d killed Mages with her own hands, back during the Second War, while other Mages had tried to kill her, and she didn’t have a forgiving nature about such things.
She pushed herself to her feet and addressed the messenger. “Tell Master Rosselin-Metadi that I’ve departed on business.”
“Will you need a car down to the field?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll walk. I need to think.”
She pulled down her heavy black cloak from its peg beside the door and started out for the landing field.
The walk, a long half-day of hard going in mountainous terrain, took her even longer in the dark. She opened herself to the universe on the way down the mountain, letting the currents of Power guide her feet while her mind chewed over the problem. Two problems, now—keep the boys safe, and keep an eye on the Mages.
As if we didn’t have more trouble than we needed already.
She reached the landing field at dawn, and found an aircar ready for her. Apparently Owen had approved of her action enough to call ahead and facilitate it. She realized then that her decision to walk had come from a hope that the Guild Master would forbid her to go.
A flight over the glistening fields of morning took her to the spaceport complex at Galcen Prime, where she scanned the listings for a link to Maraghai. The next ship heading out toward Selvauran space wasn’t scheduled to depart for some days yet. Rather than going back to the Retreat, she decided, she would take up lodging in the city’s Guildhouse and wait—but as she was turning away from the reservations kiosk, a flash of light on the message board caught her eye. Something had changed in the display.
She looked again at the listings, but found no updates on ships for Maraghai—nothing but a last call for the Tikún Linkship
Atli’s Darling,
making transit to Ophel.
She walked to the Tikún Packet Line’s reservation point and presented her papers. Before she had a chance to think why, she had tickets and a visa for Ophel in her possession and was on her way, with hardly time to inform the local Guildhouse that she wouldn’t be needing a bed there after all.
Not until the pressure of the shuttle’s lift to orbit eased did self-doubt assail her. Was this, then, the way such tracking and finding was done—following half-understood promptings and faint glimpses out of the corner of the mind’s eye, with no reason to do so that she could in honesty give?
Propelled forward as much by the fact that she’d already paid for her tickets as by any deep conviction that what she did was likely to bear fruit, she went on through with the transfer. Once on board the packet ship, she checked into her small cabin, strapped in, and went to sleep.
We’ll see what happens
, she thought as the dreams claimed her.
If Ophel isn’t where the universe wants me to be, I can always try again for Maraghai from there.
Jens Metadi-Jessan D‘Rosselin hummed the Fifth Mixolyd-ian Etude under his breath as he left the unroofed summer porch behind the house in the woods. Getting his younger cousins—Kei, Dortan, and ’Rada-the-brat—to finish their dinner and clean up after the meal hadn’t been particularly difficult.
“If you don’t eat what’s put out here for you and let Aunt Llann have her talk with Gentlesir Taleion without being interrupted,” he’d told them, “then I won’t show you the right way to kill a rufstaffa with a table knife.”
That had calmed them in a heartbeat, and Faral had obligingly played the role of the rufstaffa when the time came for Jens to fulfill his part of the bargain. After that, with the dishes and the leftovers cleared away, the back-porch dinner had ended with wrestling and horseplay until all the parties concerned were exhausted enough to retire quietly to bed—even ’Rada-the-brat, whom Jens suspected on occasion of not sleeping at all, but merely withdrawing to plot mischief in private.
“And now,” Faral said after his younger sibs had departed, “you can tell me what’s going on with our visitor.”
“
I
can? Why me?”
“You’re the one who met him down on the trail.” Faral leaned against the porch railing. “And whatever he’s here for, I’ll bet we’re mixed up in it somehow … Mamma wouldn’t have sent us off to have our dinner with the sibs if she wasn’t worried.”
“She isn’t worried,” Jens said. “She wants us out of the way so that she and this Taleion person can talk about Circle business at the dinner table without warping our young and impressionable minds in the process.”
His cousin laughed. “Too late for that. You’ve been warped ever since Aunt Bee took you to Khesat to meet the relatives and the relatives sent you back here in disgrace.”
“That,” said Jens, “was because I wasn’t warped enough.”
“Sure, it was … I wish I’d been there to see it.”
Faral sounded a bit wistful. He’d never been off Maraghai, since Jens’s Khesatan relatives had made it plain that the extended family didn’t extend to foster-siblings.
Jens had thought at first that the Jessani were trying to cast a slur on Llannat Hyfid and Ari Rosselin-Metadi—as if anybody could!—but then he’d figured out that his own parents were the actual target of their spite. It was his reaction to that insight, as much as anything else, that had finally disgraced him enough to succeed in making them send him home.
“Someday,” said Jens, “I’ll have to see if anyone on Khesat took pictures. As for Gentlesir Taleion—if his errand has anything to do with us, we’ll hear about it in the morning.” He yawned. “In the meantime, I’m for bed. Your sibs are an exhausting lot.”
“Night, then.”
“Night.”
Jens yawned again and padded off to his room—and, he hoped, a good night’s sleep. The back hallways of the house were dimly lit by low-power glows, and untroubled by any but the usual nighttime noises. Elsewhere, he knew, his aunt and uncle were still conferring with their visitor from the other side of the Gap Between.
Mael Taleion. A Mage, surely—he carried the short staff, just as Llannat Hyfid did. And Aunt Llann was a Mage; she admitted as much to anyone who asked, and that included the Master of the Adepts’ Guild, whose one long-ago visit to Maraghai had left a strong impression on the younger Jens.
Uncle Ari had saved him that time, telling Master Rosselin-Metadi that he could hold off on trolling for Adepts as long as he was visiting family. Mael Taleion wasn’t, as far as Jens could tell, hunting for future Mages on this visit. He looked like a man with other problems on his mind.
Jens pushed open the door to his room. Like all the other doors in the house, it had old-fashioned mechanical hinges, made out of iron to support a slab of native wood. Any number of Jens’s Khesatan acquaintances would have heaped extravagant praise upon its quaint rusticity. The room inside had a bed and a desk and several closets, and a freestanding heat-bar for use in the wintertime. It had belonged to Jens since he first came to Maraghai for fostering; and it said “home” to him in a way that nothing on Khesat ever had.
The desk was blinking at him: a bright orange alert signal on the comp keyboard.
That’s new,
he thought. He went over to the desk and sat, bringing up the comp display as he did so.
PRIVATE TEXT MESSAGE, it said. SOURCE: KJ103X. TYPE: ENCRYPTED. MANUAL KEY ENTRY REQUIRED.
Out on the dining porch, the talk continued. Mael finished the purple liquor in his glass, and did not refuse when Ari Rosselin-Metadi filled it again. Somewhere beyond the force field, a forest creature gave a cry of distress that cut off, sharply, in midnote.
“How long,” said Mistress Hyfid, “do you think we have before this
ekkannikh
of yours starts causing serious trouble? I’ll be honest with you—it’s not an aspect of Power that I’m familiar with.”
Mael hesitated a moment before answering. He’d known when he set out that he was coming to Maraghai with bad news; he hadn’t anticipated that the news would become worse even before he arrived.
“Not so long, perhaps, as I had hoped,” he said. “Something has happened I did not anticipate.”
She took his meaning at once, or part of it. “The rufstaffa?”
“There’s nothing odd about running into one of those,” protested her husband. “They’re dirt-common in this district, and not even good hunting.”
“Nevertheless,” said Mael, “that one might have killed me, if young Jens had not intervened.”
Mistress Hyfid looked disbelieving. “Surely not.”
“My attention, at the time, was elsewhere … I fear that the
ekkannikh
has already begun to try its strength beyond the Circles on Cracanth.”
“You saw it here?” she asked. She didn’t go pale; her skin was too dark for that. Only the sudden stillness of her features betrayed her apprehension.
“And spoke with it,” Mael said. “The
eiran
weave around it like netting; it’s already strong enough to pull them in and work with them. It succeeded in blinding me to the rufstaffa’s attack—without your fosterling’s aid, I would have been dead by now. But I fear the consequences.”
“What kind of consequences?” Ari Rosselin-Metadi’s voice was a dangerous rumble, and Mael chose his next words carefully.
“I turned aside,” he said, “at the moment the beast attacked, and I saw the
eiran
wrap themselves around the neck of the boy Jens like a strangler’s cord.”
Faral couldn’t get to sleep. The customary routine of the household had been broken, and the night disturbed by too many unaccustomed noises—the courteous, accented speech of the visitor; his parents’ equally courteous but worried tones; the clicking of compkeys from Jens’s room down the hall. After a while Faral gave up staring at the roof beams and got back out of bed. If he was going to stay awake, he might as well use the time to advantage.
He left the glowcube on his bedside table inactivated. His night vision had always been good, and a light coming on in his room—when he was usually a sound and regular sleeper—would draw unwanted attention.
An empty carrybag waited in the back of his closet. Moving quietly, he took it out and began to pack.
As Chaka had said that afternoon, it was high time he went out wandering. He’d already stayed here longer than most younglings; Chaka was almost the last of his agemates to leave. Except for Jens, of course, but Jens was only an off-world fosterling. Off-worlders didn’t count—they weren’t sent away when they came of age, because nobody expected them to live on Maraghai permanently anyhow.
Faral, however, was the born-son of a full clan member, which meant that he was a Selvaur himself in all the ways that counted. He’d even made the Long Hunt that brought a youngling into the clan, killing a massive cliffdragon with no weapon other than his own hands and body—an incident that had caused almost as much fuss as Jens’s own abrupt return from Khesat. Faral hadn’t been supposed to make the Hunt at all; not when the luck of the genetic draw had given him a height and mass closer to his mother’s than to his father’s, and nothing at all like that of the Forest Lords.