previous | Table of Contents | next

II. asteroid base: the inner depths

The inner tunnels of the asteroid base ran deep. The Professor had taken over the upper layers for his holovid-enhanced complex of luxurious chambers, but over half of the base’s volume lay empty and unused.

Llannat Hyfid had sensed the structure’s tremendous size as soon as she’d stepped out of Warhammer onto the floor of the docking bay. Something about the asteroid smelled familiar, too—an acrid-sweet odor somewhere between engine coolant and rotting meat, one that wasn’t there at all if she made herself close down her sensitivity to the currents of power and rely on her nose alone. The smell had crept into her dreams, making her restless and uneasy in the huge bed, when back at the Nammerin Medical Station she’d slept untroubled on a standard-issue cot and mattress less than a quarter the size.

Now, as she moved downward out of the inhabited sections of the asteroid, the unpleasant nonsmell grew even stronger. However the Professor had come into possession of this place, she reflected, he’d scoured it most thoroughly afterward . . . but a full squad of cleaning robots couldn’t get rid of a stink that was only there for an Adept to notice.

Back on Maraghai, the Selvaurs always claimed that trouble had a bad smell to it, and perhaps because of her upbringing she had a nose for such things. The practice yard of the Adepts’ Retreat on Galcen, for instance: its hard-packed earth had always smelled faintly of blood to her, a relic of the slaughter done there in the opening days of the war, when the Magelords had attacked the Guild’s inmost citadel and nearly brought it down. She’d gotten used to the smell in time, but most of the other apprentices never even noticed it.

There’d been a class of new students busy in the yard at staif practice on the day she took her Adept’s vows, all oblivious of any lingering impressions from the past. One of the senior apprentices was coaching them. As she drew nearer, she recognized Owen Rosselin-Metadi—Master Ransome’s personal student and, some said, his most trusted aide. Owen looked around from correcting one apprentice’s faulty stance, took in her new suit of formal blacks and the staff, and began to smile.

Congratulations!

His “voice” came through strong and clear, even at that distance, and she knew that her own Thank you was a mumble by comparison.

He gestured in the direction of a shady spot over to one side of the yard. Have time to chat before you go?

Sure.

Just wait a minute, then, while I get them started on the next bit.

She leaned against the practice-yard wall and watched as he matched up the new students for two-person drill. Llannat wondered about Owen sometimes. He’d been a senior apprentice and a teacher when she first came to the Retreat, he was a senior apprentice and a teacher now that she was leaving—and if her training had taught her anything at all, it was how to recognize somebody already working on a level she wasn’t ever going to reach.

He left the apprentices sparring with their staves and came over to join her in the shade.

“Congratulations,” he said again. “You look good.”

She wiggled her shoulders inside the stiff new garments. “I feel like somebody’s about to come along and write me up for impersonating an Adept.”

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “You’ll get used to it. Where are you going now that you’re finished here?”

She grinned at him, and whistled a scrap of an old melody.

“ ‘Back into space again’?”

She nodded. “I could have gotten waivered out, I suppose, but I like being a medic.”

“And you don’t like being an Adept?”

“I like it,” she said. “I just don’t think I’m ever going to feel easy with it.”

“I don’t know anyone who does,” he said. “It’s better that way, I think—always to be a little uneasy with power.”

She looked at him curiously. “Is that why you’re still an apprentice after all this time? Because you’re . . . uneasy?”

“Uneasy?” he asked, startled. “No. Not that.”

He paused, and then seemed to make up his mind about something. “Taking Adept’s vows with your whole heart isn’t just a matter of speaking the words,” he said finally. “When you say the words and mean them, the experience changes you—or you change yourself, if you’d sooner look at it that way. And sometimes Master Ransome finds it useful to have an agent on hand whose aura won’t show those changes to anyone who knows how to look.”

“I see,” she said. “I don’t feel particularly changed.”

“It’s there, all right,” he told her. “Master Ransome wouldn’t have let you go if you weren’t ready. Where’s the Space Force sending you, anyway?”

“Nammerin,” she said. “Almost like going home. Lots of Selvaurs, lots of big trees—”

“Lots of rain,” said Owen. “My brother Ari’s on Nammerin these days.”

“That, too.”

He gave her a measuring look. “Is that how it is, then?”

“That’s how it is. Master Ransome sees trouble brewing on Nammerin, with your brother at the heart of it. So he did whatever it is he does to arrange these things, and I’m off to keep an eye on the situation.”

She got a different look this time, almost a humorous one. Owen didn’t explain the joke, though, but said only, “You’ll have your work cut out for you—Ari’s not the type to appreciate having a bodyguard.”

“With any luck, he’ll never need one.”

Owen laughed under his breath. “Don’t tell me you still believe in luck.”

Llannat sighed. That was something else she’d be leaving behind her for good, and she was going to miss it. “No,” she admitted. “Not any longer.”


Owen never had explained why he found the idea of an Adept bodyguard for his brother amusing, either. Enlightenment on that score needed to wait until Nammerin, when she’d walked into the staff lounge one afternoon and heard Nyls Jessan telling some tall tale about the CO’s pet sand snake . . .  a nice enough beast, and one that didn’t deserve the problems it had in adapting to the humid climate.

“Come on, Jessan,” she’d said as she came through the door, “tell us another one.”

And then the lounge’s other occupant stood up from the battered, lumpy couch—and kept on standing, until he loomed up like one of the Great Trees of Maraghai under the ceiling struts of the converted storage dome.

“Gentlelady . . . Mistress.”

The big man’s deep, Galcenian-accented voice didn’t stumble on either title, and the bow of respect he made, while a bit unnerving coming from someone his size, had none of the clumsiness she’d expected.

Someone’s taught him how to move, she thought, oblivious of Jessan muttering introductions in her ear. Adept? No, he’s got lieutenant’s bars.

Besides, his aura showed none of an Adept’s almost unstable brilliance. Strong, she thought. Strong and rocksteady-solid . . . why does he make me think of home?

“I’m from Maraghai,” she said, while her mind worked on sorting out the confused impressions. “And the ‘Mistress’ bit makes me uncomfortable.”

The big man surprised her again. His rather guarded expression changed to a genuine smile, and then she was listening to the rumbling bass notes of a language she hadn’t heard in years, least of all from a human throat.

*Do you understand the Forest Speech?*

Humans from Maraghai were a rare breed, especially in the Space Force. Caught in the glow of meeting somebody else who’d grown up under the Big Trees, it took her several minutes to make the connection between the lieutenant and Owen’s brother on Nammerin. Then she had to struggle to keep her face from showing her disbelief and her mouth from saying anything stupid.

Master Ransome thinks a man like this needs a bodyguard? Lords of life—what sort of trouble can he be in?

But she’d had to wait for the answer until the next night, when a pleasant meal at the Greentrees Lounge in Namport had ended with a wild aircar ride and a fight to the death in a jungle clearing. The heavy, rotting nonsmell had filled the air again that evening—as it did now, even when the passage that she’d been following dead-ended abruptly in a blank wall.

Under her feet, though, she could still sense the lower reaches of the base beneath. This can’t be the end of the line, she thought. There has to be something more. She closed her eyes, and let the darkness intensify her awareness of buried passages extending coreward.

Over this way a step, she thought, suiting the action to the words. And another, and one more . . .  here.

She stamped on the floor with the heel of one sturdy, standard-issue boot. The sound rang hollow. She opened her eyes, and looked. No seams, just solid concrete.

Llannat propped her staff against the wall and knelt on the floor. Then she put both hands flat against the concrete and opened herself to whatever insight the material had to offer. After a second, she lifted her hands again.

There’s some strong pattern-working in place here. Nobody gets any further who can’t find the key.

She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Finding a way through the barrier was going to take a probe deeper than she’d ever tried before, one reaching down into the elementary particles of matter, and she didn’t know if she had the resources to carry it off. If she failed, she might die down here, merged so completely with the material she was probing that she couldn’t pull free.

Even if she didn’t fail, she’d be working so close to her limits that she might come unbound from the physical world altogether and become lost in the Void. Existing outside of place or time, the Void touched all places and all times equally, and the power that filled the rest of the universe had no meaning there. An Adept who overstretched her abilities might fall into that bleak dimension and be drained of energy before she could find the way home.

Llannat squared her shoulders. Time to find out if you’re more than just a medic in an Adept suit. One by one she lowered the barriers between her essential self and the outside world, until nothing remained to stop her from sinking into the slab of concrete beneath her hands.

Vertigo threatened to overwhelm her as her mind opened up. She felt a flash of panic—Trapped inside the stone forever!—and then steadied, reaching for the pattern of the substance around her. When the universe settled down again, she could feel subtle differences within the surrounding material. Long ago, she realized, someone had hidden points of instability within the flooring to mark the door to the other side: a door closed against the weak and the timid, but open to anyone bold enough to search for the key.

Llannat pulled back into herself, breathing hard from the effort, but smiling. Now that she’d felt the markers the way she had, finding them a second time would be easy, like looking at pebbles on the bottom of a pool.

And then—she picked up her staff and rested it across her knees—and then, you just slip right on through . . . 


She knelt on a landing at the top of a metal staircase spiraling down some kind of access tube. The rotting smell filled her nostrils, mixed now with the scents of wet earth and moldering vegetation. When she stood, the floor of the upper passage made a ceiling close above her head. The dim, sourceless lighting of the base’s upper reaches was gone, leaving her in a kind of visible darkness.

She stared down the twisting metal staircase, making her way by feel, one hand grasping her staff and the other the stair rail. As she descended, the darkness grew less profound, until she could look down on thick rain forest far below her.

Where am I? What am I seeing?

She kept on climbing down the staircase, gripping the handrail even tighter than before. The wet jungle-feel was in the air all around her now, and the narrow metal treads felt slick and treacherous underneath the soles of her boots.

Once you’ve started, she reminded herself, you can’t go back. You have to go on through, or else be lost.

She heard a high whine from the sky beyond. An aircar came in on a low approach, streaking over the forest canopy to land with a sudden braking blast in a small open area. Space Force Medical Service insignia caught the hazy starlight for a second as the cargo door of the aircar slid back.

Two figures—one tall and fair, the other taller and scaly-skinned—left the aircar and headed off into the jungle. After that, the clearing lay silent; nothing in it moved at all.

Llannat felt her breath catch in her throat. I remember this. I was there. She kept on climbing down. She reached the end of the staircase, and stepped off the bottom tread onto the damp, leaf-covered earth.

She started across the open ground toward the open door of the downed craft. The stink of evil welled up around her, almost choking her, but she couldn’t stop. There was something important that she had to do here, something that she’d been sent to accomplish. She saw a movement against the blackness of the aircar’s cargo bay, and spoke to the moving shape.

“Adept,” she said. “Give me Ari Rosselin-Metadi.”

“Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi isn’t mine to give anybody,” came the reply. The words were brave, but Llannat read another message in the currents of power she sensed interweaving in the darkened forest. This little one is afraid. She stands between me and what I have to doand she expects to die.

Llannat shook her head at such foolishness. But she was ready to be merciful, within the limits of her business here.

“Let us abandon playing with words,” she said. “What matters is that nobody is here to guard a dying man but you—and who can say, afterward, whether help that comes too late might have arrived in time? Stand aside.”

“No.”

“Then on your own head be it, Adept.”

Llannat called forth power, drawing on the strength of the night, and the air about her shone a deep crimson. The small figure facing her called up power in turn. Against the aura’s vivid green the other showed up clearly, and a sudden realization made anger rise up in Llannat like a burning tide.

She’s taken my staff! thought Llannat. How the little stranger had done it, and left her with a shortened rod fit only for one-handed use, Llannat didn’t know—but I’m going to make the bitch sorry she ever dared to call herself an Adept.

Llannat tried a few elementary moves with her shorter staff to test the other’s quality. Even working with an unfamiliar weapon, she found the little Adept sadly lacking, clumsy in her attacks and slow with her blocks.

What are they turning loose from the Retreat these days? she raged inwardly as they fought. This one shouldn’t be allowed out without a keeper.

She turned an ill-timed combination of blows with ease, and pressed forward with a simple attack of her own—beginner’s moves, fit for playing with such a novice. The strange Adept’s training sufficed to let her stop most of the blows and evade the rest, but not even Master Ransome’s expert teaching had brought her far enough to last much longer.

Llannat laughed aloud. “You’re overmatched, Mistress.” On the last word, she launched a series of feints at the stranger.

“I’m still alive,” came the breathless reply. “You have to win this fight. I only need to keep from losing it too soon.”

In spite of the bold words, the Adept was gasping for air. Llannat herself felt strong and fresh, and still able to draw on the power that surrounded them both.

I’ve given this little one chance after chance, she thought. Now it’s time to end the game.

She stepped forward, whipping her staff into a series of blows. Power shone around her, making a haze of blurry red against the night. The other Adept blocked, and blocked again. But now Llannat fought in earnest, forcing her weaker opponent back step by step—and then a quick move sent the other stumbling backward. The young stranger, already overbalanced, lost her footing on the slippery ground and went down on her back. The impact knocked her staff from her hand.

Llannat took a step forward. On the ground in front of the aircar’s open cargo door, the stranger was already clambering, weaponless, to her feet.

Poor fool. She still hopes to delay me, even if it’s only for the moment it takes to smash her down.

Llannat put aside the temptation to give the little stranger a few seconds more of life, and lifted her staff for the killing blow.

There was a smell like lightning, and a hot flower of light blossomed from the dark interior of the aircar. The bolt of energy caught her in the chest, hard and burning, and she was flying backward, with the world tilting up behind her.

She fell back to the ground, through it, and came to rest in a bright chamber, surrounded by figures wearing black robes and masks like her own.

“Did you succeed?”

The voice was deep and slow, with an unfamiliar accent.

“I don’t . . . know . . . ” The pain of the blaster wound in her chest was blurring her vision. The black-robed figures towered over her. “He was poisoned . . . as you ordered . . . but he had an Adept with him . . . ”

“An Adept!” came a voice from the circle. “How much does Ransome know?”

“Enough to make him wary, it seems,” said the first man. “Very well; we can wait. Someone else can do our work for us—you know the ones I mean.”

Llannat heard a harsh laugh of agreement from somewhere in the circle, and a third voice said, “That’s right—let them take some risks for a change.”

The room was going black before her eyes, and the pain of the blaster burn in her chest was taking over the universe. She could feel her blood running out of her, and her life with it, as she struggled to draw in enough air to speak.

“But . . . what about me? Can’t you do something . . . ?”

“You have a point.” It was the voice of the first speaker, the stranger in the circle. “Failure must always draw its reward.”

He lifted a silver knife in the blackness above her. She saw the glittering blade growing larger, slashing down—the pain when it hit swallowed up the little hurt of the blaster burn like a sinkhole swallowing a pebble, and she couldn’t hold on to life any longer, but sighed out her breath and let it go.


Llannat woke.

Or was I ever asleep? she wondered.

The air smelled clean around her—still and dusty, yes, but free of the rotting stench of evil. She was sitting cross-legged on a stone floor, with her staff lying across her lap.

One thing that hadn’t changed was the darkness. She called forth power, and was satisfied when the air lit up with its familiar green glow.

I’m still myself. What happened wasn’t real. True, I think, but not real.

She looked about her. She wasn’t alone. Owen Rosselin-Metadi sat cross-legged on the floor across from her. He still wore his plain apprentice’s coverall, a drab garment that could belong equally to a farmhand or to a spaceport mechanic. A staff lay across his lap, and his eyes were closed.

Llannat blinked. She recognized the room—its rough stone walls could only belong to one of the oldest chambers in the Galcenian Retreat. But she’d never been alone with Owen Rosselin-Metadi in any of those rooms.

Another dream? she wondered, and stood, as quietly as only an Adept can.

Silent as she had been, Owen must have heard her rising to go—without opening his eyes, he lifted his hand and gestured at her to stop. Then his hand fell back to his lap and he sat motionless once more.

“You’re not dreaming,” he said, his eyes still closed. “Or remembering. When the time comes, look for me here.”

She stared at him, confused. “What do you mean, ‘when the time comes?’ ” she asked. “And where is here? The asteroid? The Retreat? Somewhere else?”

Owen’s face didn’t change. With his hands motionless on the staff in his lap, and his eyes shut, he might have been a holovid frozen in midframe, except that he spoke.

“When you know why your second question has no answer,” he said, “then you’ll know that the time has come.”

Llannat was still puzzling over his meaning when he opened his eyes. His pupils widened when he saw her waiting, almost as if he’d been unaware of speaking to her a moment before.

He stood up. “Let’s find a way out of here,” he said, and gestured toward the door of the chamber. “The path I need to take is in this direction, I think.”

She followed him out into the hallway, and closed the door behind her. The power she had summoned earlier cast a flickering green light on the stone walls, and she saw more doors opening off the corridor to her left and right. She couldn’t tell where they might lead to—all of them looked alike in the leaping, twisted shadows.

“What did you mean,” she asked again, “to look for you here when the time comes?”

He shook his head. “Did I say that? I don’t know yet what I meant, either . . . but I will know when the time comes, and so will you.” He paused, and put his hand on one of the doors. “I have somewhere to go now. Don’t follow me until you’re certain that you should.”

He pushed the door open as he spoke, and was through into an unlighted space before Llannat could say anything more.

The door swung closed and vanished, and the stone corridor vanished along with it. The faint green light remained, but it illuminated only a cramped space, no wider than she was tall and perhaps twice as long, enclosed on all sides by smooth walls, with no hint of a door or other opening.

She let her instinct turn her toward one end of the room. Then she walked forward, not breaking stride as she came to the wall. Her physical being blended with the apparent obstacle—she passed through—and Llannat found herself once again in the corridor above the hidden stairway.

She reached out with her feelings. The marks hidden in the concrete beneath her were still there.

Doors, she thought. Hidden from anyone who lacks the strength and insight to use them. This is a strange place, and no mistake.

She walked forward and out, toward the upper reaches of the Professor’s asteroid.


“A put-up job,” Ari repeated. He glanced across the breakfast table at his sister. Bee must have thought more about this than she lets on. She’s actually starting to make sense.

“Care to get specific?” he asked.

“Well,” said Beka, “whoever the bad guys are, Dadda shot their main plan right out of the air. Not long after that, I got the ’Hammer and started asking questions. So then our mysterious somebodies got nasty—maybe they wanted to send a warning to Dadda, so that he’d keep out of things.”

Ari grimaced. “They don’t know him very well, do they?”

“Not everybody has had the privilege,” said the Professor quietly. “Pray continue, my lady.”

“I was knocking around the outplanets by then,” Beka went on, “so they decided to kill me and lay a false trail pointing back to Dahl&Dahl. They fed fake information to a gambler on Mandeyn who was making book on my odds of getting off-planet in one piece, and he would have spilled his guts to anybody who leaned on him a little. But somebody killed him over a crooked card game before he could talk to anyone who mattered.”

“Somebody,” said Ari. “Any idea who?”

“Me,” said his sister.

She paused a moment, as if waiting for him to challenge her, and then continued. “So our friends decided to try again with you as the target, and some humorous soul in their organization had a really bright idea: give the Rosselin-Metadi contract to Captain Tarnekep Portree. That way you’d get yours for stopping whatever they were up to on Nammerin with that Rogan’s epidemic—oh, yes, Jessan told me about that—and getting wrung out and hung up to dry by Space Force Intelligence would be just about what Portree deserved for wrecking things back on Mandeyn.”

Ari thought about it for a while. “If you’re right,” he said slowly, “then somebody’s been playing all of us—even Mother—like so many game pieces. Nobody does that to my family if I can help it. Whatever it takes, Bee, I’m with you.”

“Thanks,” said Beka. “We won’t be working blind, either; Owen slipped me a hot datachip before we split up on Pleyver, and the comps here have been making it dance and sing. We’ve got a line on two or three different groups who might want Dahl&Dahl out of the picture—so now we go out hunting.”

She looked over at Jessan. “This isn’t your quarrel, Commander. You don’t have to consider yourself held here at blaster-point any longer.”

Jessan ran a forefinger around the rim of his empty cup. “Am I being invited to leave, Captain?”

Beka shook her head, but didn’t meet his eyes. “No.”

“Then by all means count me in,” said Jessan. The Khesatan’s words were light as usual, but his expression, for once, was not. “If the Space Force isn’t happy with me afterward—well, I can always resign my commission and go back home to Khesat.”

“I don’t think you’ll need to do anything quite that drastic,” said a familiar voice from the stairway.

Llannat Hyfid came down the last few steps to the balcony. With an emotion that he couldn’t put a name to, Ari saw that she was wearing an Adept’s formal blacks, something she’d never done on Nammerin.

“Where have you been?” he asked as she slipped into the empty seat. “You damn near missed breakfast.”

“That’s all right, as long as there’s cha’a,” she said, and added, “I’ve been exploring. Professor, you have an unusual setup here. Did you know it was Magebuilt?”

The grey-haired Entiboran inclined his head. “I did, Mistress. But that was long ago . . . five centuries and more.”

Ari poured a cup of the now-cool cha’a and passed it to Llannat. She drained it in one swallow and held it out again.

“More, please . . . ahh, thank you, Ari. Time doesn’t mean much to the Magelords. This year, next year, a hundred years from now . . . they make long plans.”

She set the cup down in its saucer and turned to face Beka. “You’ll need an Adept where you’re going, Captain Rosselin-Metadi. Will I do?”



previous | Table of Contents | next