Most thin-skin fosterlings skipped the Long Hunt anyway, and contented themselves with adjunct status in the clan. But Faral had slipped out of the house when the season came, going up into the mountains without bothering to ask for the permission he probably wouldn’t have got. He’d come back a month later with the cliffdragon’s hide slung over his shoulder.
That had been a year ago. It was time, by Selvauran standards, for Faral to leave the home planet and not come back until the elders said he was worthy.
Past time
, he thought,
and the time is now
.
Clothes weren’t a problem. A plain shirt and trousers would do the trick anyplace in the civilized galaxy where formality wasn’t an issue. He’d seen free-spacers wearing much the same style in holovid newscasts, and if it worked for them it should work for anybody.
He added his good boots and a warm jacket to the stuff in the carrybag. For a moment he thought about packing a weapon—off-worlders did sometimes, free-spacers especially—then discarded the idea. He was one of the Forest Lords, the second generation in his line, and he could take care of himself without need for such things. He sealed the carrybag and stood looking at it for a moment while he wondered what to do, now that all his packing was done and he was still awake.
His thoughts were interrupted by a low whistle, like the sound of somebody blowing across the top of a pottery jug. A few seconds later, the sound came again. He grinned and whistled back a couple of octaves higher. Clawed fingers and toes scrabbled for purchase in the heavy logs of the outer wall, and a shadowy figure loomed up head and shoulders against the moonlit rectangle of window high under the eaves.
*Are you going to take down the field,* said Chaka, *or am I going to have to hang here all night by my foreclaws?*
Faral laughed and shut off the security. The window’s force field was supposed to be switched on and off from the central console like all the others in this wing, but he’d figured out how to cheat the connection a long time ago. After a few seconds of squirming, Chaka fit herself through the unshielded opening and dropped to the floor.
*What’s up?* Faral asked as soon as she regained her balance. He spoke in the Forest Speech; even with his thin-skin accent, the sounds of it blended with the noises of Maraghai’s night better than would any human tongue. *I thought you were heading for the spaceport.*
*I was. But I thought I’d come by here and check one more time to see if you were going, too. Looks like I had the right idea.*
Faral picked up the packed carrybag. *I’m ready as I’ll ever be. But first I have to tell Jens I’m leaving.*
“You don’t need to do that,” said his cousin.
The doorway had opened so silently that neither Faral nor Chaka had noticed its motion. Jens stood there, dressed like Faral in plain-style traveler’s gear, and he had a carrybag in his hand.
“It’s time, coz,” he said. “I’m going with you.”
Mael Taleion went to bed feeling easier in his mind than he had since leaving the homeworlds. The talk after dinner had not settled anything—best to look at the problem again in the morning, Mistress Hyfid had said, now that it had been properly broached—but he felt better for knowing that his concerns were shared by someone on this side of the Gap Between. Even if the First of all the Mage-Circles no longer had any formal ties to the Adepts who had trained her, her husband was own brother to the Master of their Guild. The warning would be passed on.
Jens Metadi-Jessan D’Rosselin was a different problem, and one that would bear thinking on in daylight.
Does the boy merely stand at a gathering-point for the cords of life and luck,
Mael wondered,
or does he draw them to him?
No answer came to him from the darkness, but he had expected none. He pulled the blanket over his shoulders and went to sleep.
Morning arrived sooner than he’d anticipated. The windows in his room faced the rising sun, and it was not yet full dawn when the first light shone down across his pillow and struck him in the face. Outside, a new set of birds and animals—diurnal ones, this time—practiced their characteristic noises at full volume. Mael groaned and got out of bed.
He’d been an early riser himself once, in the days when he was a young man determined to free the homeworlds and subdue the galaxy. These days, he’d learned to savor the smaller pleasures of life, and rising when he chose to and not when the planet’s rotation decreed it was one of them.
Not this morning, though,
he thought with resignation, as he pulled on his clothes and his boots.
Today we work.
Ari Rosselin-Metadi had said something the night before about a come-when-you’re-ready breakfast on the dining porch. Mael retraced his steps to the veranda, but found no table of food and drink waiting when he got there—only Mistress Hyfid, her husband, and a pot of cha’a.
He knew at once that something was wrong. Ari Rosselin-Metadi filled him a mug of lukewarm cha’a and he drank it, in spite of the fact that he had never learned to like the bitter infusion so popular in the Adept-worlds.
“What happened?” he asked, when the mug was empty.
“Faral’s gone off wandering,” Mistress Hyfid said. She poured herself another mug of cha’a and gazed into its murky brown depths while her husband took up the tale.
“It’s not something we’d normally worry about,” Ari said. “It would have been his time soon anyway. But he took Jens with him.”
“Ah.” Mael thought about the
eiran
, and how they had snaked across the darkness to entangle the young man he had so briefly met. “Took him where?”
“That’s the problem. Faral didn’t say. The younglings don’t, most of the time, when they leave.”
“
I
joined the Space Force,” Mistress Hyfid said. “And so did Ari. But that was thirty years ago, and things were different then. Faral could have decided to go anywhere.”
Mael tried to remember what little he knew about the customs of Maraghai—which were known to be odd even by the standards of the Adept-worlds. “I thought that your sister’s son was a fosterling, and not bound by the clan law.”
“You know as well as I do that the chains are in the mind, not the law.”
He bowed his head in acknowledgment of her point. “If young Jens feels himself bound, then bound he is. But the danger that entangles him is not going to grow any less just because he is off your planet.”
“Taking care of it’s going to be harder, though,” said Ari. “For one thing, young ones out wandering are on their own—clan law is firm on that.”
Jens isn’t the only one bound by chains in the mind,
Mael decided.
Not that anybody from the homeworlds is fit to point a finger on that account.
“And what is the other difficulty?” he asked aloud.
“The other difficulty,” Ari said, “is finding them in the first place. Unless they send a message home—and how often did you do that, when you were young?”
“Not often enough,” admitted Mael. “Though my reasons seemed good to me at the time.”
“I’m sure they did,” said Mistress Hyfid. “And so will theirs.”
The spaceport at Ernalghan was a large, and mostly empty, building. No ships except the ground-to-orbit shuttles touched down in its docking bays, and those not more than once or twice a day—most of Maraghai’s traffic with other worlds went through the nearspace station and the in-system planetary habitats. A single office window, tucked out of sight between two of the massive pillars that held up the building’s vaulted roof, sufficed to handle any business that might pass through.
This morning, the work at hand included Faral Hyfid-Metadi and his cousin Jens, purchasing lift-and-transit tickets for the passenger liner
Bright-Wind-Rising
, out of Ruisi in the Eraasian sector and currently bound for Ophel. Chaka hooted at them as they paid down their money at the counter and fed their passports into the reader for the “No Return Until Permitted” stamp.
*You’re going to make us look more like tourists than wanderers,* she said. *First-class tickets? I ask you.*
“Hey,” Jens protested. “The trust fund wasn’t my idea, and I have the right to draw on the line of credit just by existing. So I’m going to do it. They’ll probably succumb to apoplexy back on Khesat when they find out what for.”
He thought about it for a moment and added, “I hope Mamma gets to watch.”
They left the counter and made their way to the outbound shuttle lock. One other passenger waited there, a stout and prosperous-looking man in Galcenian-style clothing.
Jens recognized Terrel Bruhn—a distant acquaintance of his foster-parents, a trader in rarities and luxury goods who made his home in one of the domed cities on Maraghai’s moon, and visited the planetary surface from time to time. Bruhn wasn’t a full-member of any clan that Jens knew of, and if he had the “Permanent Return Allowed” stamp on his passport, he’d never bothered to claim the privilege.
“Good morning to you,” Bruhn said. “Off chasing fame like all the other youngsters?”
“We’re headed for Eraasi,” Faral said. “Everybody says that’s where the interesting stuff is happening these days. But if we trip over some fame along the way—”
“Better to leave it lying where you found it,” Bruhn said, “if you get the chance.” The trader looked serious for a moment. “I fought in the war, you know, and I found out something about fame, and what it’ll buy.”
*Thin-skins,* Chaka muttered.
“It’s different for Selvaurs,” Bruhn told her. “But most of the famous people I knew were famous for the way they got killed, and two weeks later, no one remembered their names.”
“We’ll bear that in mind,” Jens promised. “Because I, for one, intend to live a long time and be truly memorable.”
Bruhn chuckled. “Watch it when you say things like that, boy. You never can tell what might be listening.”
Then the door to the shuttle lock cycled open, and the conversation ended.
On the far side of the sector, a chittering info-rat noted an atypical transaction in the account of one of the Worthy Lineages, and went off to report its findings. Soon the news had come to the Guildhouse on Khesat that the youngest member of the Jessani line was drawing on the family account, and that the draw-down had been enough to cover a spaceship passage for three.
Noted
, read the corresponding entry in the Guildhouse’s Private intelligence log.
Under advisement.
T
HE OLD Quarter in Sombrelír lay on the opposite side of the city from the spaceport. Tourists desirous of exploring the Quarter’s narrow, brick-paved streets and handkerchief-sized parks had to abandon their flivvers and hovercars for more archaic modes of transportation at the edge of the modern business district.
A surprising number of them made the effort. Ophel—falling as it did between the Mageworlds and the rest of the civilized galaxy—presented an exotic face to travelers from both sides of the Gap. The First Magewar had seen the isolated world prosper as a trading and transshipment point for raiding ships from the Eraasian hegemony. Later, in the decades leading up to the Second War, Ophel had provided the blockaded worlds with access—however restricted—to galactic technology and culture. Through it all, the Ophelans had grown wealthy by keeping neutral.
Twenty years of genuine, if sometimes unsettled, peace had increased Ophel’s importance as a trade and communications nexus. Merchants and bankers from all parts of the civilized galaxy met to make their trades and cut their deals in Sombrelír. Between negotiations, they refreshed themselves in the enjoyment of those unique art forms—musical, culinary, and others even more exotic—that had grown up in the tension and isolation of earlier times.
Bindweed & Blossom’s was a tea shop near the center of the Old Quarter. The shop occupied the bottom front of one of the Quarter’s handsome stucco houses, and the proprietors occupied the rest.
The pair of elderly but still handsome women who ran the shop had been serving tisanes and pastries to discerning guests ever since the end of the First War. Business folk from central Sombrelír came to Bindweed & Blossom’s every afternoon to drink sweetgrass tea and discuss politics. Shoppers from the smaller towns paused in midday to rest their feet and nibble on filled finger buns before heading back into the press. Even galactic travelers up from the port ventured inside to sample the local delicacies. A brass plaque beside the front door indicated that a number of languages were spoken within, and all varieties of cash accepted.
This morning the shop opened its doors on time as usual. The Sombrelír/Port-Antipode suborbital shuttle rumbled skyward on the other side of the city, the front door of the tea shop opened, and Gentlelady Bindweed came striding down the walk to hang out the NOW SERVING sign on the wrought-iron gate.
Something of a mystery, was Bindweed. The lean, elegant woman with the mop of iron-grey curls had answered to what was clearly an alias for as long as the inhabitants of the Old Quarter had known her. Where she had come from, and what she had done with her life before settling down, “in retirement,” as she put it, to sell penny nutcakes and other dainty nibble-bits, she had never bothered to say.
In point of fact, Bindweed was Ophelan born and bred—although the same couldn’t be said of her partner, whose voice carried traces of Lost Entibor. The two were nearly inseparable, however, and were well known to the merchants in the fresh-goods markets of the Quarter, who supplied the tea shop with all of its perishable supplies.
This morning, with the sign duly put in place, Bindweed returned to the interior of the shop. The main room was bright and fresh, with white tablecloths and crisp starched curtains, and the odors of yeast and spices added piquancy to the air. She straightened the tablecloth on the nearest table, more out of habit than actual need, and repositioned the bowl of flowers in the center. Then she continued into the tea shop’s kitchen, a homey place half-visible through the arched doorway from the tables outside. Blossom—a small, thin woman whose efficient bearing contrasted oddly with her chosen by-name—was already taking the first tray of sweet biscuits out of the big stove.
Bindweed went over to the gleaming steel urn on the counter and poured herself a first-of-the-morning ration of strong black cha’a in a delicate bone cup. The shop had a menu of teas and tisanes longer than the wine lists of some local restaurants, but no one had ever seen Bindweed drink any of them.
“What’s the news?” she asked her partner.
Blossom glanced over at the readout screen set into the kitchen wall, where it couldn’t be seen from the main dining room. The display showed a list of portside shipping schedules. “
Liberty’s End
is due in this morning. Do we have anything on her?”
“A five-percenter. Nothing that’s going to make us rich.”
“Enough of them, and they’ll add up,” Blossom said. “There’s three other merchantmen due in, too, and a passenger liner making connections for Eraasi. A good day for travelers, maybe.”
“We’ll put on an extra tray of buns,” Bindweed decided. “Something sweet. Parchants, do you think?”
“Only if we serve them with sugared berry-root. Shall I start a bit going?”
Before Bindweed could answer, the chimes above the front door rang to announce an arrival: Gentlesir Thalban, most likely, stopping by on the way to his shop across the square. He liked to arrive before any of his employees, and he liked a steamed fouma to eat beforehand. Bindweed picked one up from its warmer on the stove and hastened out into the main room to meet their first customer of the morning.
Faral Hyfid-Metadi stood with his cousin Jens on the observation deck of the passenger liner
Bright-Wind-Rising,
watching the world of Ophel swing beneath them. The huge blue and green planet filled the viewport, its glittering, cloud-streaked surface brilliant in the light of the local sun, and dark like black velvet on the side of the globe beyond the sunset line.
So this is where Granda’s privateers caught the Mageworlds treasure-fleet.
He almost said as much aloud, but thought better of the idea. Simply because the Ophelan run had made Jos Metadi’s name ring out from Galcen to Maraghai didn’t mean the folks down below at the time had approved of it. The data files in main ship’s memory—or, at any rate, in those parts of ship’s memory available to the text readers in the passenger cabins—didn’t say whether the subject was one to avoid or not.
Faral had checked, just in case. He knew that he couldn’t help being an off-worlder, but he didn’t want to make things worse by acting like a boor. If he couldn’t match Jens at High Khesatan elegance, he could at least put forward the impression of being an experienced traveler. The data files had helped some, but not enough.
“Are you and your cousin planning to go dirtside while the
Wind
is in port?”
The speaker was another of the passengers on the observation deck, a youngish, dark-haired man in dusty black. Faral didn’t remember seeing the man before today, but the
Wind
carried so many people on board that he wasn’t surprised he hadn’t yet encountered them all. The phrase “planning to go dirtside” marked him out as a spacer—Aunt Bee talked that way, too, using the same word no matter whether the world in question was a barely civilized outplanet or Galcen itself—so Faral thought the man in black might not be a passenger at all, but part of the ship’s crew.
“We haven’t decided,” he said. It didn’t take reading the cautions in the data files to know that volunteering one’s itinerary in public was a bad idea.
“Ah,” said the stranger. “If you like sightseeing, there’s always the Old Quarter. Beautiful architecture there, and nice shops if you want to pick up something besides the usual cheap souvenirs.”
Jens turned away from the viewport to join the conversation. For a moment, Faral thought that his cousin had already met the man in black—recognition or something like it flickered briefly in his eyes—but he only asked, with the same well-bred blandness he always used around strangers, “Is there some place in particular that you’d recommend?”
The stranger considered for a moment. “Almost any place in the Quarter is good … but if you’re after small objects of artistic value, Thalban’s is probably the best.”
Before Faral or Jens could say anything in reply, a bell sounded throughout
Bright-Wind-Rising,
and a soft alto voice came over the observation deck’s comm system.
“All passengers are required to return to their cabins for atmospheric entry,” the voice said. It spoke Standard Galcenian with a faint Eraasian lilt. “All passengers are required to return to their cabins for atmospheric entry.”
The voice switched languages—to Ophelan, Faral supposed, or one of the languages from beyond the Gap—and kept on speaking. At the same time, the SIT DOWN AND STRAP IN glyph began to flash above the viewport, and there was no more time to talk.
Faral and Jens made their way back to the triple suite they shared with Chaka. The Selvaur was already there and strapped down onto her deceleration couch.
*About time you showed up.*
Faral took one of the two remaining couches and began fastening the safety webbing. A sharp jolt ran through the ship as he hurried to get the last of the buckles snapped. Chaka gave a rumbling laugh.
*Like I was saying … *
“It’s a reminder,” said Jens—though Faral noted that his cousin hadn’t delayed getting his own webbing into place. “To hurry along the stragglers.”
Another jolt shook the cabin, and the deckplates beneath the couches began to vibrate.
“I don’t know,” said Faral. “That feels like the real thing to me.”
Chaka hooted in agreement. *Read your tickets. These guys don’t guarantee
anything
—not even that there’ll always be air for us to breathe. And not a word about holding up landing waiting for everyone to get webbed.*
The back room at Huool Galleries in Sombrelír was windowless, dim, and climate-controlled. Shelves and cabinets and stasis boxes lined the walls and occupied most of the floor space. Gentlesir Huool specialized in the acquisition and disposition of precious objects, and not all of his stock in trade could risk public display. Some of the cloistered items, like the woven gemgrass funerary ornaments from Miosa Mainworld, depended upon preservation technology for their continued existence; others, more simply, had no legal business being in the gallery at all.
Mizady Lyftingil, Huool’s work-study intern, had grown accustomed to spending most of her time surrounded by the rare, the valuable, and the highly sought-after. Miza found the back room a good place to work in if the weather was bad outside, though somewhat confining on pleasant days. Today was hot and humid enough that she hadn’t even gone out for lunch, but had eaten her bread and cheese and fruit without leaving her worktable.
She crumpled up her empty lunch bag and tossed it into the mouth of the recycling chute, then turned back to the status display glowing on the table’s surface. The Atelier Provéc, one of Huool’s closest competitors, was having an auction today, and there was something about the bidding patterns …
On the far side of the room, a door slid open and snicked shut again. Miza glanced up, saw that it was only Huool coming back from his own, more private, lunch hour, and kept on working. Huool was a Roti, and sensitive to giving offense; he couldn’t do anything about the fact that his digestive system demanded live—or at any rate fresh-killed—meat, but he did make a practice of eating his noontime ration of locally bred foodmice in a side room where his human assistant didn’t have to watch.
The display on Miza’s worktable shifted and shifted again, as bidding continued across town in the Atelier Provéc. She frowned. Something was going on, she knew it … she could see the ripples of it on the surface, in the changing patterns of the bids.
She heard a faint rustle of body feathers as Huool drew closer and looked at the display over her shoulder.
“You see something, young one?” he asked. His Standard Galcenian had the distinctive Rotish accent, all breath and clicking beak, but the words were kind.
She gestured at the display. “Look here.”
Huool’s eyes were bright yellow and perfectly round, with tufted, astonished-looking brows. But Miza had learned by now not to judge the Roti’s state of mind by his expression, which never changed much anyway. The soft clatter of his beak as he looked at the table display told her that he’d spotted the same anomalies that she had.
“The patterns,” he said. “What do you make of them?”
She wanted to ask what Huool made of them, since his experience in the field surpassed hers, but she knew better. The Roti wasn’t a hard taskmaster—he was, if anything, softhearted to a fault—but neither was he one to let misplaced benevolence interfere with the proper training of those students whom the Arthan Technological Institute gave into his charge.
“Somebody’s looking for something,” she said.
“Yes. That much is plain. But does Provéc have it?”
“I don’t think so.” She frowned at the patterns again. “I’m not even sure the big fish is bidding. But all the other fish are nervous … you can see it, the way they scatter and regroup, as if something hungry and large is swimming in the waters beneath them.”
Huool gave a brief chitter of amusement. “You grow poetic … but I believe you may be right. You have a gift for judging the flow of data, young one; perhaps the Guild should be training you, not I.” “Oh, no.” Miza threw up her hand in the gesture her grandmother back on Artha had always used to avert an evil omen. Not that she believed in such things, but one couldn’t be too careful. “I come from a respectable family. And I don’t want anything to do with those people, thank you very much.”