The Mage swept back his hood with his free hand, and removed his mask in the same gesture. Klea saw that he was a man about a decade older than she was herself, with ordinary, unterrifying features. His thick black hair was streaked liberally with iron-grey. After a moment, Klea realized that she knew him.
“Mael Taleion,” she said. “Second of the Circles.”
“As you, too, are Second,” he said. “After the Adepts’ fashion. Now, please, let us go each to our own business.”
A suspicion stirred in Klea’s mind. “Your business wouldn’t happen to concern a pair of young men from Maraghai, would it?”
“And if it does?”
“Mine does as well. The Master of the Guild wants to see them kept away from danger.”
“If that’s the case,” Taleion said, “you appear to have had little success. But I dare not chide you for it—I have similar orders from the First of the Mage-Circles. And, like you, I tracked the young men from the spaceport to here. Where, trust me, they currently are not.”
“This part of the trail is cold,” Klea said. She nodded toward the tea shop, where two members of the Civil Guard were talking with a straight-backed, grey-haired woman. A smudge of soot marked the woman’s forehead where she had wiped away the sweat, and blaster-fire had scorched the gold-embroidered fabric of her vest and skirt. “We need to talk to that one over there sometime soon. Maybe she knows where our birds have flown.”
In the plush and paneled offices of the Green Sun Cooperative, a man stood at uneasy attention before the desk of Nilifer Jehavi—the son of the organization’s founder, and currently in charge of its day-to-day operations.
“Well?” Jehavi said.
“There were … complications,” the man said. His name badge, clipped to his left breast pocket, said that his name was Kolpag Garbazon, that his serial number was 13tq4908y, that he was an Operative First Class, and that he was cleared for Upmost-level secrets. He had over a dozen years of experience in the service of the Cooperative.
“I know there were complications,” Jehavi said. “If there hadn’t been complications, we wouldn’t have had to refund the deposit. You don’t know how we hate doing that.”
In fact, Kolpag had a fairly good idea how much the head man—and his son—hated to give back a customer’s money. Not to mention how much they hated seeing any lowering of the firm’s reputation. Now, however, was not the time for a prudent man to talk about such things.
“I know there were complications,” Jehavi repeated, more quietly, and in a kinder tone. “You had orders that the packages were not to be damaged in any way, and you walked into an ambush.”
He paused a moment. Then: “Please, sit down.”
Kolpag sat, and tried not to show his relief. The young boss wasn’t as dangerous or as unpredictable as his father had been, but he still wasn’t a man whose wrath anyone could take lightly.
Jehavi leaned back in his chair and looked at Kolpag. “Well, then,” he said. “You are still my best field operative, regardless of what our recent contractors expressed to me in some exceedingly colorful language just now. Leaving all that aside—you lost your partner. Will you be able to work?”
“Yes,” Kolpag said. For a simple snatch-and-go on a couple of tourists, this afternoon had turned into a complete disaster. He knew intellectually that Freppys wouldn’t be waiting in the employees’ lounge cracking jokes when he walked out of Jehavi’s office, but the emotional reality hadn’t yet sunk in.
“Good. These are your new orders. You are still to pick up the packages. Previous rules of engagement remain in effect: the packages are not to be harmed in any way. The difference is that this time, instead of delivering the packages anywhere else, you are to bring them here to me. Clear?”
“Clear.” Kolpag allowed himself to wonder, briefly, what new enterprise Jehavi had in mind. Then he laid the question aside: he was an employee, not an executive, and the Green Sun did not pay him to think about such things.
“Excellent,” said Jehavi. “And if, in the course of your efforts, you learn who set up the ambush this afternoon—and why—I would be delighted to learn of it. Where
that
matter is concerned, survivors among the opposition are neither necessary nor desired. Clear?”
Kolpag nodded. “Clear,” he said again. He didn’t add, because it was not a matter for the boss’s concern, that with the death of Freppys, finding out who’d arranged the ambush in the Old Quarter had ceased to be merely a business obligation.
“Excellent. Let us move on to the next item.”
One thing, at least, Jehavi had in common with his more notorious father: whenever he was in a room, he commanded the attention of everyone else present through the sheer force of his personality. When he gestured at a chair over against the wall to his right, Kolpag noticed for the first time that another man had been sitting there all along.
“This is Ruhn,” Jehavi said. “He’s your new partner.”
Ruhn was a short man with close-cropped red hair. He nodded once, politely, at Kolpag, and Kolpag returned the nod without enthusiasm. He didn’t need to waste time right now settling into a new partnership … but it was against Green Sun policy for operatives to work alone.
Both men turned back to Jehavi. “Right,” the boss said. “My gut tells me that the packages are on-planet, but not for long. The two of you know your jobs. Do them.”
Kolpag pushed back his chair and stood up. “Expenses?”
“Draw them from the accounting office,” Jehavi said.
He turned back to his desk. “That’s all, gentlesirs. You can go.”
Faral glanced over at his cousin. Jens hadn’t yet put down the blaster, and everybody else in the crowded storeroom—Gentlelady Tillijen, the Roti named Huool who apparently owned the place, and the girl Miza who worked there—was waiting to see what he would do with it.
“Come on,” Faral said. “I think we can trust these people.” In Trade-talk, he added, *If it turns out we can’t, you can always shoot them later anyhow.*
The girl stepped out from behind her worktable and gestured at a door on the far side of the room. “This way,” she said. “Upstairs.”
The staircase was narrow and steep, as well as being heavily soundproofed. Red glowdots set at intervals into the paneling gave a murky crimson light.
Miza led the way up the carpeted steps. She wore snug green trousers—Faral had an excellent view from the stairs behind her—and she had a thick brush of bright red hair that bobbed against her shoulder blades as she walked. If Jens’s blaster frightened her, she was doing a good job of not showing it.
Faral moved a bit closer to his cousin. “What exactly are you planning to do with that thing?”
“Protect us from snakes and strange men,” Jens said. “I think we’ve fallen into a den of thieves. Right now I just want to get to the port and get out of here.”
“So do I. Chaka’s going to laugh her head off, though.” He switched back to Trade-talk. *Is there something else going on that you know about and I don’t?*
*Maybe,* Jens said. *We’ll talk about it later.*
They reached the top of the stairs and followed Miza down a narrow passage. The walls, paneled in dark wood like the stairway, hemmed them in on either side. Light panels overhead provided enough illumination to show that the carpet underfoot was dark green, patterned with a convoluted design of golden serpents. The deep nap muffled the sound of their footsteps. No outsider in the rooms below would know if someone came or went on the upper level.
Miza stopped at a door on the right-hand side of the passage. It slid open, not swinging on hinges the way most of the doors in the Old Quarter had done, and revealed a small, windowless room lined with shelves and cabinets. A bank of comps and repro units filled most of the remaining space.
“All right,” Miza said. Her Galcenian sounded as idiomatic as Faral’s own—maybe more so, without the Forest accent to get in the way. “Hand over your identification plates. I’ll need them to create new personas for you. And take off your clothes.”
Faral blinked. “What?”
He was grateful that his skin didn’t show a blush easily. Jens might have heard stranger requests every day while he was living on Khesat, but life under the Big Trees was more sedate. Miza didn’t seem to notice his reaction, however, except as a request to explain further.
“Dump your old things in the recycler and put on clean outfits from the stuff over there.” She pointed at the far wall, where piles of folded cloth in assorted colors and textures lay on shelves next to racks of boots and shoes.
“With you in the room?” Faral asked.
She looked at him impatiently. “Where else am I supposed to be? I’ve got to get your documents ready, and this is where I do it.”
Faral looked at Jens. His cousin still held the blaster at the ready, but he’d already removed his ID case from his jacket with his left hand. If Miza’s request had startled him, it wasn’t showing. Faral shrugged—
Mamma always said things were different out here in the big galaxy
—and pulled out his own ID case.
The girl took both sets of ID without comment and carried them over to the comp setup. Turning her back on the rest of the room, she began feeding their datacards and flatpix into the reader. She ignored Jens’s blaster completely, as if it had been a younger brother’s water toy.
“Now what?” Faral muttered to his cousin. “Am I supposed to go first, or you?”
Jens looked at Miza’s back. She was hunched over the comp, her hands busy on its input panel. The repro unit next to her hummed and blinked and spat out hard copy.
“Here, take this,” he said, handing Faral the blaster. “Essence of Sewage isn’t my favorite perfume, and there’s no point in walking around Sombreír in this condition if we can reasonably avoid it.”
The weapon felt heavier than Faral had expected. “How am I supposed to—”
“The safety’s off. If you need to shoot, the firing stud is that red button there by your thumb.”
Faral held the blaster gingerly, keeping his grip well clear of the firing stud. “I’ll try to remember. Foster-brother … if it isn’t too much to ask, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Changing clothes.” Jens already had his boots off and was peeling away his socks.
There were times, Faral reflected, when his cousin became almost too Khesatan to put up with. “I
know
that. But why pull a blaster on someone who’s helping us out of trouble? Are you expecting—?”
“—treachery? No.” Jens pulled a clean white shirt off the nearest shelf and held it up for a critical inspection. “But it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”
“You were never this suspicious before you went off to visit Khesat,” Faral complained. “What did they
do
to you back there, anyway?”
“They told me to think of it as a learning experience,” Jens said. “I learned a lot.”
As soon as he’d finished changing, he stuffed his old clothes into the recycling bin and held out his hand for the blaster. Faral handed the weapon over with relief. It didn’t take him long to shuck out of his mud-stained garments and put on new ones—as long as the size was approximately correct, he didn’t care about the finer points of style and color. He’d just gotten the shirt over his head and had started tugging on the collar laces to tighten them when the repro unit beeped.
Miza gathered up the stacks of items from the unit’s various output trays and sorted the lot into a pair of leather credit cases. She turned around and held the cases out to Faral and Jens.
“Here,” she said. “Take these. The best fake ID that money can buy. And it’s yours for free.”
Was the timing on that just good luck
, Faral wondered,
or did she keep her back turned in order to spare our feelings?
He took the case she offered him, uncertain whether having his feelings spared was a good thing or not. A quick glance inside the case showed him that he was Ilwyn Fane, of Therabek, and that he had a more-than-respectable line of credit with the banking firm of Dahl&Dahl on Suivi Point. He slid the case into his pocket.
“Thanks,” he said. “But what about our real IDs? And what about our tickets? We can’t get on board ship without them.”
Jens was inspecting his own credit case—a bit awkwardly, because of the blaster in his right hand. “With the stuff they’ve set up for us in these, coz, we could buy a ship outright if we had to.”
“Nothing but the finest merchandise from Huool Galleries,” said Miza. She gave the blaster a dubious glance. “Are you planning to lug that thing around in plain view all the way to the port?”
“Yes, I am,” Jens said. “And I hope you remembered to include a permit-to-carry along with all the rest of the fake paperwork.”
“It’s in the back with the insurance papers,” Miza said. “But I wouldn’t take it out yet, if I were you. The ink may not be all the way dry.”
C
HAKALLAKAK
ngha
-CHAKALLAKAK had slept late that morning. Let Faral and Jens tire themselves out with rushing about in downtown Sombrelír; some people had more sense than to bother. She’d gotten out of bed in her own good time, and had spent a pleasant day lazing amid the trove-stores in the spaceport concourse, before making her way over to RSS
Lav’rok
—the ship that would carry them all to Eraasi and who-knew-what adventure.
As she’d expected, Faral and Jens weren’t aboard yet. If the pair of them ran true to form, they’d arrive breathless and flushed with exertion moments before the ship’s main passenger lock snapped shut for lift-off. Chaka looked forward to watching the two thin-skins try to strap in while the nullgravs were tilting
Lav’rok
to launch position.
Already the luggage was strapped in place in the middle of their travel compartment for their use during the trip. Rather than unship it and have to put it back again before launch, Chaka left the cabin and headed for the
Lav’rok
’s common compartments. Now was as good a time as any to look over their shipmates for the coming transit. From Ophel to the Mageworlds was a long haul no matter how you sliced it.
Lav’rok
’s common passenger space had room for a gaming area, an industrial-size refreshment dispenser, and a holovid lounge. Chaka stopped first at the dispenser to get a tall frosty mug of Khesatan
sulg.
She’d never tasted it before, but starting off your wandering-time with a new experience was supposed to be good luck. Besides, Jens claimed that the bright blue liquid didn’t taste half-bad.
Jens was wrong. It did taste half-bad, and then some. No point in wasting it, though, or the luck. She pulled the membranes across her nostrils and swallowed anyway. Mug in hand, she walked across to the holovid lounge, where a dozen local broadcast stations were displayed on as many monitors.
The main holovid tank was showing an ancient
Spaceways Patrol
episode with voices dubbed into the local lingo. A glowing line of unfamiliar script ran around the base of the tank, translating the dialogue into a second language that Chaka didn’t understand either.
A flatvid screen set into a nearby bulkhead was showing what looked like a newscast from downtown Sombrelír. A thin-skin wearing what Chaka had learned was their sober-and-serious expression gazed earnestly out over his audience and spoke in rapid Ophelan. Behind him, a long shot of the city showed a plume of smoke rising from among the buildings.
Chaka sipped at her mug of
sulg
and gave the newscast half an eye. Some kind of disaster in the city, apparently—thin-skins in medical and emergency uniforms rushed about while the announcer kept talking in front of them. Suddenly two pictures flashed on the screen, side by side: Jens and Faral, in their entry-visa flatpix.
*Wait a minute!* Chaka shouted as she slewed around toward the screen fast enough to slosh her drink. *What’s going on? Does anybody in here speak that forsaken lingo?*
*Settle down, young one,* came a low growl from the table beside her.
Chaka turned in that direction. The speaker was a big male Selvaur, his grey-green hide starting to go coarse and wrinkly with age. A ripple of scar tissue ran down his left arm, and his left eye was filmed over. He had a mug of redbriar ale in one hand, and his demeanor was considerably calmer than her own.
*Did you understand what the announcer said?* Chaka asked him—adding the honorific, *Known One,* almost as an afterthought at the end.
*Maybe I did … what’s your interest?*
*I believe I’m acquainted with those two thin-skins.*
*Then this could be your lucky day,* said the older Selvaur. *There’s a reward out for both of them—for them personally, or for knowledge of their whereabouts.*
*Never mind the reward,* Chaka said, tossing back the sulg regardless of the taste. *They’re my friends.*
*No good ever came of consorting with their kind,* the old one said. *Take it from me.*
*Thanks,* said Chaka. She stood up and slapped the empty mug down on the table as she spoke, then headed for she door. *I’ll try to keep that in mind.*
The secret way out of Huool’s back rooms opened onto a brick-paved street in another block, beneath a green-painted arch of metal sculpted to look like a flowering vine. An open-air café stood on one side of the arch, a millinery shop on the other; the arch itself bore only a house number worked into the metal. This was the section of the Old Quarter where the more conservative members of Sombrelír’s business community were in the habit of keeping their established paramours, in jewel-box apartments with just such unmarked entrances. Anybody who happened to see three young people leaving together in the middle of the afternoon would think, with a bit of amusement, that some paragon of wealth and respectability was not getting all the fidelity that he or she had paid for.
Miza led the way, setting a brisk pace—but not, she hoped, one so brisk that the two young men behind her would think she was trying to outrun the blaster that Jens Metadi-Jessan D’Rosselin had inside his jacket pocket. Huool had made it clear, by his words and his manner, that the safety of Jens and his cousin was a matter of paramount importance, and that responsibility had fallen upon her to get them to the port and away.
Huool wanted somebody who’d never done escort duty before
, she thought. She knew what that meant, too. On all the civilized worlds, a package in the hands of a recognized and neutral courier was, by tradition, safe from attack. So if Huool was taking pains not to let a known courier like himself be connected with the two young men, then he wasn’t counting on people being civilized.
Miza wondered what had made the pair such a hot item on everybody’s requisition list. She’d probably never find out.
Get them safe to their ship and that’s an end to it,
she thought.
Maybe I’ll hear about them someday on the holovid news.
“All right, guys,” she said, turning back toward them. “We go left at the next corner.”
The words were all the way out of her mouth before she noticed that neither of the two young men was there anymore. They were, in fact, gone. And they’d been right behind her—she could have sworn it—not a second before.
“Oh, damn,” she muttered. She could see the failing grade on her work-study transcript already. She hopped up onto the plinth of a bronze statue of the city’s first Lord Mayor, the better to look back at the street behind her, but her wayward charges were nowhere visible. They were well and truly gone.
“Oh, damn,” she repeated, with deep feeling.
“The problem with letters of credit,” Jens said, “is that they’re traceable.”
Faral made a noncommittal noise. He was fairly certain that his cousin’s knowledge was a secondhand acquisition, much as the blaster had been. So far, their escape from pursuit hadn’t been difficult—giving Miza the slip had required nothing more than an exchange of glances, a nod, and a quick fade at the nearest corner; easy work for anyone brought up under the Big Trees—but the hard part was yet to come. If Jens knew something useful, it didn’t matter to Faral how and where his cousin had picked it up.
Jens was still explaining, or remembering aloud as the case might be. “Once you draw on the credit you leave a record of your exact whereabouts for at least the person or entity who issued the letter. Cash, on the other hand—”
“—doesn’t have anybody’s name on it,” said Faral. A shopwindow beckoned ahead on the left, with the word EXCHANGE glowing inside a sheet of what looked like solid armor-glass. The display technique—the effects of depth and movement embedded in a solid substance rather than projected outward—was one that he’d already learned to associate with the Mageworlds, and half of the languages in the display looked to be from the other side of the Gap Between. He pointed at the sign. “Is that what you’re looking for?”
“It is,” Jens said. “Let’s see how much of the local coin we can draw on these instruments, and then drop Gentlesir Huool’s generous gifts down the nearest recycling tube.”
The little shop had an armor-glass wall against the back, thick enough to slow almost any portable energy or projectile weapon. A single clerk, a wizened little man wearing a green apron, sat behind the glass reading a datapad. He looked up when Faral and Jens walked in.
The clerk’s mouth moved, but the security screen blocked whatever sound came out of it. Instead, an amplified voice spoke from the upper right corner of the outer room.
“Can I help you?”
The speaker’s accent was local, but the words were Galcenian. Faral wondered if he and Jens had that obvious an off-planet look, even in borrowed clothes from the upstairs room at Huool’s establishment.
Probably
, he thought.
Nothing we can do about it right now, except hope that this guy doesn’t care as long as our money is good.
Jens had apparently reached the same conclusion. “We find ourselves in need of ready funds,” he said. He drew forth the credit voucher—using, Faral noted, his left hand, which meant that his right was free for the blaster now tucked out of sight in his coat pocket—and slid it toward the exchange slot. “How much can you advance us on this paper?”
The letter of credit vanished with a gentle sigh of air as the security screen’s vacuum system pulled it under the armor-glass. The purple glow of an active scanner flashed from the narrow aperture a second before the slip of paper appeared on the other side. At a nod from Jens, Faral extracted his own letter of credit and slid it through the scanner after the first one.
“A fairish amount,” the clerk said a moment later. “On both of them combined, considerably more than a fairish.” It was disconcerting to see the man’s mouth move while his words came from a disembodied source in the outer room. “Assuming that you are the persons to whom these letters apply.”
“We have identification,” Faral said.
“Assuredly,” said the clerk. “Such fine gentlemen as yourselves. Please put your identity chit in the slot, then place your hand in the receptacle.”
The panel below the security screen lit up, revealing a row of narrow slots paired with open bays. Faral regarded the setup dubiously. Back among the woods and rocks of Maraghai, only foolhardy off-worlders reached barehanded into shadowy recesses—and some of them came away with fewer fingers than they’d started with. But Jens was already feeding his ID card into one of the slots with a studied nonchalance; Faral supposed that he had no choice but to do likewise.
The reader swallowed his card. An amber light flashed on the panel, and he fitted his right hand into the bay underneath. A tight band closed around his wrist, trapping his hand in the reader.
Foolhardy off-worlder
, he thought.
That’s me, all right.
He supposed that if anything awkward showed up in the data scan, the cuff wouldn’t let go until local peace officers arrived and escorted him to someplace where he could assist them in their inquiries.
It wouldn’t be a problem,
he reassured himself.
Even if they did show up. We were attacked, and that wasn’t our fault, and nothing that happened afterward was our fault either. A few words with local security might be the fastest way to get back to our ship, and maybe the safest, too.
He was almost hoping that the papers would ring up false—that Dahl&Dahl had never heard of him, or that his fingerprints and his protein scans didn’t match. But instead, he heard a buzzing sound from somewhere inside the panel, and the pressure of the restraining cuff diminished. He pulled his hand away as the clerk spoke again.
“And how would the noble sirs prefer their cash?”
“In large tokens,” said Jens. “Though not so large as to be unusable. I have obligations to meet.”
The clerk began pulling out stacks of orange chits and sliding them through the inner door of the exchange lock.
“How are we going to carry all those?” Faral asked.
“Silence, coz,” Jens said. “We’ll purchase a carrybag at the first convenient opportunity. In the meantime, I’m positive we can stow them about our persons somehow.”
Miza carefully traced her way back from the corner where she’d noticed that Faral and Jens had gone missing.
They can’t have made it too far, she told herself. They’re strangers here, they have no friends, they’re being hunted. Where would they go?
Where would
I
go?
Their first stop, she decided after a few seconds of panicky deliberation, would be to get cash. That meant visiting a cambio, since the pair of them couldn’t have been in town long enough to set up a local account. And with neither hard money nor transit tokens in the packets she’d handed them, they couldn’t hop into a jitney and tell the driver to take them somewhere.