“Getting a reply, faint,” the communications specialist reported. “syn-Avran syn-Peledaen, calling us. Wants us to present a positive identification.” He listened to his headset for a moment longer. “They seem to be concerned that our present configuration doesn’t match what’s on record for the ship with this transponder.”
“Let me talk with him,” Arekhon said. “I know the man.”
“Do so,” Captain sus-Mevyan said. “Output on open speakers.”
Arekhon moved into range of the audio pickup. “Captain syn-Avran, this is Arekhon Khreseio sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen. Do you recall when I was with you on the
Ribbon
for my apprentice voyage? I was one of those two apprentices who brought back news about sus-Dariv’s
Path-Lined
-
With-Flowers
lifting from Ildaon—we picked up some
leind’r
out of it.”
“Understand Arekhon Khreseio sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen,” the reply came back. “What was the name of your particular friend on that voyage?”
A reasonable request, Arekhon reflected. Anyone could give his name, and the matter of the
Path
could have been found in the
Ribbon
’s logs. A cautious man like syn-Avran would want corroborating details … . “Elaeli Inadi,” he said. “You’ll find her on the family rolls as Inadi syn-Peledaen these days, with my name down as sponsor.”
There was silence for a while. Then syn-Avran’s voice came over the speaker again. “Elaeli Inadi syn-Peledaen is listed as Pilot-Principal for
Rain-on-Dark-Water.
Put her on.”
Arekhon closed his eyes tightly for a moment and drew a deep breath. “I regret to inform the fleet-family that Inadi syn-Peledaen was a … casualty … on the voyage. Unable to comply.”
“Stop your engines. You’re entering sus-Peledaen controlled space.”
“May I, Captain?” Vai said, before sus-Mevyan could speak.
“If you think you can help, go ahead.”
Vai moved into audio pickup range. “Captain syn-Avran,” she said. “This is Iulan Vai. If you’ve got
Rain-on-Dark- Water’s
crew list there, you’ll see that I’m listed with the ship’s Circle. Do you recall the last time we met, on the corner of Port and Lily Streets in Hanilat? I handed you an envelope, you handed me one. Do you want me to embarrass you all over the system by telling you what was in both of those envelopes, in the clear, on a common frequency?”
There was another pause, this one not so long as before. “ID check complete,
Rain-on-Dark-Water.
I intend to escort you to orbit.”
Captain sus-Mevyan took Vai’s place by the audio pickup. “Thank you for your assistance, Captain. We accept with gratitude. It’s been a long trip. Request you pass to Lord sus-Peledaen that I’d like to report to him in person as soon as possible.”
“I’ll pass that along.” The carrier wave clicked off.
“What was in those envelopes?” the Captain asked Vai.
“Dirty laundry,” Vai said. “And enough soap to make it all clean again.”
The captain raised an eyebrow but made no further comment. “Shape course for Eraasi,” she said to the Pilot-Principal.
“Ahead slow. And switch off that close-in weapons system. I don’t want to shoot any of my friends.”
Year 1130 E. R.
ERAASI:
OCTAGON DIAMOND
HANILAT STARPORT
Octagon Diamond
hung in orbit over Eraasi. There was no cradle in the yards, Arekhon knew, that was large enough to take her, and like the lost
Rain-on-Dark-Water,
she had never been intended to touch ground. She could only wait; but she did not have to wait for long.
“Shuttle inbound,” the communications specialist reported as soon as the orbit had stabilized. “And a message: Lord Natelth is pleased to welcome us back from our historic voyage. Captain sus-Mevyan, the First of the ship’s Circle, and our honored guest are invited to dine with him tonight in Hanilat.”
By “honored guest,” Arekhon supposed, his brother meant the prisoner. He hoped that the invitation meant Natelth was inclined to look to the worlds beyond the gap as potential friends and allies, but nothing he had seen so far in the homeworlds had given him cause to feel sanguine about the possibility.
He was not, apparently, the only one to harbor doubts. Captain sus-Mevyan wore her most formal fleet livery for the evening’s dinner, in spite of the fact that the sus-Peledaen shuttle had to dock with the
Diamond
by means of a boarding tube, necessitating an awkward zero-gravity scramble from the larger ship to the smaller. Arekhon, after considerable thought, had chosen to wear his most formal working robes, as a reminder to Natelth that the Circles were not the fleet, and that he belonged to the Circles. Nor would it hurt for the head of the sus-Peledaen to be reminded exactly whose agency had made the voyage of discovery possible.
The prisoner had presented difficulties. sus-Mevyan had offered Karil a set of fleet livery—trousers and tunic of blue piped with sus-Peledaen crimson—but she had refused them. Her own clothing, such of it as had been transferred from
Forty-two
before leaving Entibor, was worn and strictly utilitarian. Narin had to use the sharp point of her knife to rip away the crimson flashes and piping from the fleet livery, leaving it a plain nobody’s-color blue, before Karil would agree to wear it.
The three of them, sus-Mevyan and Arekhon and Karil, made a silent, uneasy party aboard the shuttle to the planet’s surface. The dimensions and angles of the Eraasian ship, instead of reassuring Arekhon with their familiarity, felt disturbingly alien after the time he had spent aboard
Octagon Diamond
. The shuttle’s captain and crew all wore sidearms, another new thing in his experience: Not symbolic weapons like the boarding pikes, but heavy projectile weapons meant to kill from a distance.
He saw that sus-Mevyan was also taking in the sidearms. The Captain’s expression, which had not been cheerful before, darkened even further, but she said nothing. If the Captain had dreamed of better things for her homecoming than this, she wasn’t going to embarrass herself by admitting it.
The shuttle landed, and the crew escorted them to a waiting groundcar. Arekhon supposed that all the men and women in sus-Peledaen livery were meant to show Natelth’s respect, but he couldn’t help thinking of them as an armed guard. The groundcar had thick tinted windows, so that nobody watching it go past would be able to tell who was inside, and it whisked them through the streets of Hanilat without stopping for signs or signals.
Another oddity, Arekhon thought. Natelth hadn’t thought before that the sus-Peledaen were above the law. That they
were
the law, sometimes … but never above it.
The sus-Peledaen town house where he had grown up looked much the same as it always had, at least from the outside. But when the door swung open, it wasn’t one of Isayana’s hand-crafted
aiketen
waiting inside to welcome them, but yet another armed man in fleet livery.
“Dinner will be ready shortly,” he said. “Meanwhile, Lord Natelth wishes to see you in his study.”
The three from the
Diamond
followed him up the stairs. Arekhon felt the give of the carpet underfoot and the cool slickness of the polished darkwood banister beneath his hand, and remembered how he had come up the same stairs, once upon a time, for the purpose of talking his brother out of the fleet-family’s confidential charts. He wondered if Natelth remembered the occasion as well.
The study looked much as it had during that previous visit, except that there were two more chairs, and the glass in the bay window was thick and tinted like the windows of the groundcar. The
uffa-
pot stood on its tripod legs in the center of the low table, with crystal glasses surrounding it, and Natelth stood with his back to the table, looking out of the window.
He didn’t speak until after the door guard had left. Then he turned and spoke to Captain sus-Mevyan, without bothering with a formal greeting.
“So. Your message-drones preceded you, and the family’s builders and stargazers have been doing wondrous things with what you have already given them. But what you say about a multitude of worlds on the far side of the gap disturbs me; I don’t know if that is good news, or bad. You were there, Captain—tell me what you say.”
“Mixed, I think,” the Captain said. “Lord Garrod—who is lost—him—self had grave misgivings about what he had done. It’s true that the far-side worlds can build starships faster and more powerful than any I’ve ever heard of, with ship-minds of unusual construction and weapons that make ours seem pitiful. But they have no idea that any worlds lie beyond the interstellar gap, and unity, as we have it, is unknown to them. And more—we were able to bring back with us a native of that world, who can translate all the
Diamond’
s papers and textfiles, and explain its workings.”
She gestured to indicate Karil. The Entiboran caught Arekhon’s eye and murmured in her own language, “What is she saying to him about me?”
“She says that you can be a translator and a teacher for his people.”
“Hunh. Does he plan to give me a choice?”
“Probably not. We can talk about it later.”
The quiet exchange in Entiboran had caught Natelth’s ear, and Arekhon saw a moment of suspicion cross his brother’s features. It vanished as Natelth came forward to clasp him in a warm embrace.
“’Rekhe, it’s good to have you back safe again. Isa’s been working over the kitchen’s instructions ever since word came that your ship was in orbit—she doesn’t trust the far-siders’ ship-kitchens, she says. I think she believes you’ve been starving.”
“For lack of red
uffa
and
neiath
jam, most certainly,” Arekhon said. “Otherwise … I do well enough. All the same, it’s good to be home.”
“Excuse me, my lord,” Captain sus-Mevyan broke in. “But we’ve been out of touch for quite a while, and have returned to find things changed from what they were. How shall I explain the difference to my crew?”
“There is no explanation,” Natelth said, “except that somehow we must have offended the gods and the ancestors beyond all forgiveness. The old customs that kept peace between the star-lords have been broken, and the ties of trade and obligation that bound together the homeworlds have come undone. The unity you spoke of is a thing of the past.”
“Someone’s going to have to restore it, then,” said sus-Mevyan bluntly. “Because I tell you truthfully, my lord, it’s the only advantage we’ve got.”
“I don’t like it,” Narin said.
Iulan Vai looked at her. “Don’t like what?”
The three remaining Mages of the
Diamond’
s Circle had gathered in their meditation chamber after the shuttle’s departure. Their withdrawal had gone unnoticed, as far as Vai knew, in the general excitement of making orbit and renewing direct contact with the sus-Peledaen. She had long since determined that the chamber was both without spy-holes—either accidental or deliberately constructed—and free of electronic eavesdroppers, and she rechecked it frequently; it was as safe a place for private conversation as any aboard ship.
“Don’t like having ’Rekhe down in Hanilat while we’re stuck up here,” Narin said. The Veredden woman had a long strip of the scarlet piping from Karil’s despised fleet-livery, and her square brown hands worked with it as she spoke, tying and untying complex knots. “If he runs into trouble, we’ll never know until it’s too late.”
“He’s going to dinner with his own brother,” Ty protested. “What kind of trouble could he run into that way?”
Vai suppressed an urge to smile. Ty was the youngest of the Demaizen Mages, and sometimes it showed. “His brother is also the head of the sus-Peledaen fleet-family—which appears to be claiming this part of space, though I’d like to know how—and Natelth might have ideas about keeping things like the new ship-knowledge private to the family.”
“’Rekhe’s brother has trouble understanding that the fleet doesn’t own Circles like it owns ships,” Narin said. The strip of red piping twisted and knotted under her hands. “I’m afraid he may try to claim us for the fleet as well.”
“That would start trouble, all right,” Ty said, after a moment’s thought. “Arekhon wouldn’t like it.”
Narin began unpicking the latest knot with the point of her knife. “As long as we’re on board the
Diamond
, the fleet has us, whatever Lord Arekhon likes or doesn’t like about it.”
“Then we have to get off the
Diamond,”
Ty said.
“It’s not so easy as all that,” Vai told him. “Notice how few people they’ve actually let down to the surface so far—the Captain, the First, and the prisoner, and all three of them sent straight to Natelth.”
“Maybe we should ask—”
“No.” The knot came undone, and Narin slid her knife back into its sheath. “If we ask the sus-Peledaen for a shuttle to the surface, they’ll have to refuse. And then they’ll know what we want to do.”
“So we don’t ask,” Vai said. This was a problem whose solution she understood. “We tell them. And we don’t tell them the truth, either. We tell them a lie, and make sure it’s a big enough lie that they’ll want to believe it … that Garrod spoke to us through the Void, maybe, with an urgent message for Lord Arekhon.”
“They’ll never believe it long enough to send up a shuttle,” Ty said. “No matter what we tell them.”
“We’re Mages,” said Narin. She tucked the red piping away inside her jacket and unclipped the staff from her belt. “If we work the
eiran
properly, the sus-Peledaen will believe us for as long as we need them to.”
Dinner was worse than the conversation in the study had been. Isayana had done prodigies of instruction in the kitchen, and the food served up by the
aiketen
was everything that Arekhon could have hoped for—
neiath
jam and all.
Nevertheless, he found himself having to feign an appetite. The changes he had witnessed since returning to the homeworlds, and sus-Mevyan’s words to Natelth, combined to fill him with a sense of oppressive dread. The voyage they had all undertaken with such great hopes and such high aspirations—what could be nobler and more audacious than striving to bring together an entire sundered galaxy?—had ended in nothing but corrupted endeavor and growing darkness.
Natelth and sus-Mevyan spoke together for most of the meal. Natelth asked an occasional question about the far side of the interstellar gap, but only to clarify things he’d already learned from the message-drones. The rest of the talk was all about the current state of affairs on Eraasi, and why somebody had seen fit to fire a missile at the
Diamond
on her way past Ayarat.
“Sus-Radal, most likely,” Natelth said. “They’re born pirates, those people, and they hold a lot of trade routes on the edges of homeworlds space.”
“You’ll have to take care of them someday,” said sus-Mevyan. “Maybe sooner than someday, if things are as bad as you say.”
“They’re that bad. But the sus-Radal are too strong for me to hit them now. Let somebody else try it and get broken first.”
Arekhon had been translating under his breath for Karil’s benefit—there was no point in keeping the prisoner in the dark, and she understood enough of their language by now to follow the drift of the conversation anyway—and Natelth’s remarks appeared to startle her much less than they did him. She caught his change of expression, shrugged, and said in Entiboran, “Politics. You’ll get used to it.”
In the same language, he said, “I shouldn’t be having to get used to it. Things were never like this before.”
Isayana looked at him with concern from her end of the table. “Is there something wrong, ’Rekhe? I hope the menu isn’t displeasing to our guest.”
“It’s fine, Isa,” he said. “She was asking me about the jam—I told her it was my favorite when I was a boy.”
He hadn’t lied to Isayana before, outside of the usual minor evasions of childhood; that he did so now, by instinct, disturbed him. Isayana would never use his private opinions against him—he trusted her implicitly on that—but she would pass them on to Natelth. And Arekhon was not quite willing, any longer, to trust his brother.