In the Entiboran room, Llannat stepped away from the table and leaned her staff against her chair. “Just a moment. Formal blacks weren’t really designed to practice in.”
She took off the jacket and hung it over the back of her chair, so that she stood dressed like her opponent in shirt and trousers alone. Then she retrieved her staff and came to guard, holding the weapon two-handed at the horizontal before her.
Green fire flickered to life in the air about her, but she was careful not to draw more power into herself than befitted a match between friends. Working with all the energy at one’s disposal had a lethal beauty that could dazzle onlookers—she’d seen Master Ransome and Ari’s brother, Owen, spar that way once or twice, for the edification of students at the Retreat—but a match like that demanded control far beyond her own.
A few feet away from her, the Professor also picked up his staff. The silver and ebony rod was much shorter than hers, and plainly meant for one-handed use. He held it loosely, almost casually, but the power of his aura flowed about him in streamers of deep violet against in the moonlight.
“Shall we begin?” he asked.
Llannat nodded, and waited for the Professor to come to the guard position in his turn. The shift to guard never came. Instead, the former Magelord moved without warning, striking for the left side of her head with his ebony staff.
Llannat blocked high and to the left.
The Professor must have anticipated the classic reply. He dropped the tip of his ebony rod to pass below her block, and his attack came back in toward her right cheek.
She shifted her block to the right. The Professor, still holding the rod in that loose-looking one-hand grip, let it return to vertical. His next attack threatened her unprotected abdomen. In response, she pushed her staff straight forward and down against his, but the Professor neither stepped backward nor extended his attack. Instead, he spun his weapon outward with a quick twist of his wrist.
The violet aura around him flared high, and Llannat felt her weapon snatched from her hands. The flickering green light of her own summoning vanished as her staff clattered against the opposite wall.
The Professor crossed over to the fallen staff, picked it up, and handed it back to Llannat. “Shall we try again?”
She drew a deep breath, and took position. “I’m ready.”
Once more, the Professor stood with the ebony rod held loosely at his side. The other hand rested lightly on his hip. “Begin,” he said.
For a long time, neither of them moved. Power flickered around them in a glowing nimbus of green and violet. At last the Professor attacked, the end of his short staff flashing toward Llannat’s left side in a whistling blur.
She blocked. The staves touched; then, somehow, the Professor’s ebony rod was coming in toward her other flank. She blocked again, the two weapons kissed in a flare of green and violet light—and the Professor’s staff flashed over to strike at the left side of her face.
Llannat blocked left.
This time, though, there was no moment of contact with the other weapon. Instead, she felt the ebony staff tap lightly first against her left leg, and then against her right. Too late, she dropped her guard downward to counter the blows—and felt the light contact a third time on the side of her neck.
“You win,” she said, lowering her staff. “I’m dead.”
The Professor stepped back, and bowed to her in salute. “Mistress, attack me. I shall do no more than defend myself.”
“Right,” said Llannat, and swung her staff down toward the Professor’s head.
He blocked it with ease. She followed with a quick series of blows from either end of her staff. They filled the air with the whistling of their passage, but the Professor met them all without shifting his stance. Only his right hand and his extended arm moved at all, catching and deflecting each stroke as it came.
At length, Llannat took a step back and regarded the Professor. He appeared calm and unruffled. Her own forehead and neck ran with sweat, even in the chill of the base’s night, and her breath came in shallow gasps.
“Mistress,” inquired the soft voice, with its incongruous Entiboran accent, “where is your guard?”
Llannat took in her stance. She was out of line, and badly extended. She shook her head, and came back into position.
“Choose a line and guard it,” said the Professor. “I can’t attack you through a closed line.” He emphasized his point with a series of slashing attacks to Llannat’s right side—all of them falling, without any movement of her own, onto the staff she carried. “But try to guard all, and you guard none. Now—what line do you guard?”
“My right flank.”
“Wrong!”
The Professor swung harder than before, and this time the strength of his blow pushed Llannat’s staff away before it, so that she felt the sting of his blow against her ribs. “What line do you guard?”
Llannat shifted her grip, so that she held her staff tightly in front of her. “My head.”
“Again wrong!” The Professor’s weapon circled low, and the end tapped her leg just above the knee. “Your head is not in danger. What line do you guard?”
Llannat felt a hot rush of blood to her face—anger? humiliation?—and struck out with one end of her staff at the Professor’s neck. “You tell me.”
The Professor caught the blow and allowed her staff to slide down his as he stepped forward. Now, with the staves caught between them, the young Adept and the grey-haired Magelord stood heart to heart in the long, moonlit hall.
“Guard against anger, Mistress,” he said, low-voiced. “It’s a waste of energy, and it insults the power you bear.”
This time she knew that the heat under her skin was embarrassment, because she’d managed to forget the first thing anybody had ever told her about the Adept’s art.
“Don’t ever lose your temper when you’re working with power,” she remembered Master Ransome saying to a group of new apprentices that had included a confused young ensign from the Medical Service. “Somebody always gets hurt.”
Now the Professor nodded over their crossed staves. “I see you remember.”
Without warning, he stepped back, and resumed his one-handed guard position.
I’ve seen that guard before, thought Llannat. Not at the Retreat, she was sure—she’d have remembered something like that, if it had ever shown up during those long hours of drill in the practice yard.
Not at the Retreat, no, but twice since, once in a clearing on Nammerin and a second time here on this asteroid, when she had been deep in her visionary trance. Whoever she had been that time, she herself had used that same short weapon, the same stance and grip.
This one’s power is weak, she could remember her adversary/self thinking. She doesn’t really believe.
But the frightened and unbelieving young Adept sent by Master Ransome to guard Ari Rosselin-Metadi had stayed at her post just the same—and Ari’s blaster bolt had cut down the Mage as he raised his arm for the killing blow.
Now, standing in the moonlight of an Entibor that never was, she smiled with sudden understanding. There’s no such thing as luck or chance . . . and there’s power in everyone, even a seven-foot Galcenian who claims to be about as sensitive as a brick, or a Space Force medic from a border planet where there hasn’t been an Adept born for as far back as the Forest Lords can remember . . .
The insight flooded through her like a rush of light, and for a brief, dizzying second she could feel the universe itself, surrounding her and within her at the same time.
“I think you begin to understand,” the Professor said. “Now shall we spar in earnest?”
Once more, Llannat took a guard position, this time with her staff held vertical by her right side, and waited. Still buoyed up by her moment of realization, she sensed the Professor’s blow coming at her a second or more before his staff began to move. Her own staff turned with his as he tried to come under her guard.
Their auras flared high around them, surges of green and violet mingling in patterns of fire against the dark. Rather than step back, she lunged with the end of her staff, forcing the Professor to give ground. When he tried to beat her weapon aside, she dropped the tip so that he contacted only air.
“You see,” he said. “You’ve learned one important lesson. Now let me teach you another.”
The Professor whirled to the right, ducking under her blow and stabbing upward. She gave ground rather than take a hit to the arm, and felt her sense of oneness with the universe slipping away under the pressure of the immediate.
The Professor seemed to feel it slipping, too. He redoubled his attack. Once more, the unfamiliar rhythms of his fighting style began to dance around her Adept-trained blocks.
Llannat stepped back, and opened herself to power. The sensation of including and being included in the bright oneness that was the universe flowed out of its cramped little corner of memory and filled her as it had before.
It doesn’t go away after all, she thought. It’s always there if you look for it.
She turned her awareness outward again, and was surprised to see that she was attacking, moving in hard with fast, arcing swings that started back behind the shoulder. The Professor was slipping each blow, his staff redirecting the force of each smashing stroke outward and away from him, but he was giving ground just the same.
Llannat pressed her attack, forcing the Professor backward step by step until his shoulders touched the far wall. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, the Professor stood pressed against the wainscoting, pinned by the light but unwavering pressure of the center of her staff against the flesh of his throat.
The Entiboran Magelord smiled. “Now, Mistress, I yield.”
If everybody’s awake, thought Ari, sliding into the booth in the after-hours galley, you sure couldn’t prove it by me.
So far the breakfast nook, the main dining area, and the game room had all turned up empty. If there hadn’t been two half-empty mugs of cha’a still warm on the table in front of him, Ari might have begun to suspect that the valet robot and its cohorts had been mistaken.
He stabbed a few buttons at random on the drink machine. A mug slid into position under the spout to receive a stream of blue liquid. Hot sulg, he guessed, from the look of it, and an experimental sip proved him right. He tried to remember what buttons he’d pushed—Jessan might be interested, since his friend was always claiming he hadn’t been able to find good sulg since he’d left Khesat.
Ari gave up experimentation after his first try at a repeat garnered him a bowl of something black and sludgy that smelled like it ought to be repairing potholes in a landing pad. Instead, he sat watching steam rise off the azure surface of the sulg. His self-inflicted insomnia still hadn’t left him, and he toyed with the idea of going back to the game room and having a go at one of the simulations himself. It’s not real, but it passes the time.
Another of the Professor’s robots came up to the table and began clearing away the two half-empty mugs.
“Wait a minute—can you tell me how long those have been here?” asked Ari.
“I really can’t say, sir,” said the robot. “I was last by about a Standard hour ago.”
“And they weren’t here then?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
Ari looked again at the two mugs. Both of them held straight black cha’a.
One of them’s likely to be Jessan’s, he thought. This is the first place anybody would hit after the game room, and he drinks his cha’a black. The Professor’s incommunicado somewhere, and Llannat drinks her cha’a with sugar and milk when she can get them . . . which leaves Bee.
“You can go on with your cleanup,” he told the robot. “And take the sulg and that black stuff with you.”
“Yes, sir,” said the robot, and trundled off.
Air watched it disappear into the darkness beyond the bright lights of the little galley. So his sister and Jessan were off nightwalking somewhere . . . he tried to decide just how he felt about that, and realized he wasn’t certain.
Their problem, not mine, he told himself, standing up again. Seems like Llannat’s the only one not accounted for. I’ll take one more look around; if she doesn’t turn up she’s probably gone back to bed, and I can spend the rest of the night in the game room practicing up to get killed.
He left the little galley behind, and headed for the only part of the base known to him that he still hadn’t checked: the sickbay and the docking area. Llannat was a medic, after all, besides being an Adept. She could have decided to double-check for anything useful the on-load might have left behind.
He was still a corner or so away from the Entiboran room and the entrance to the sickbay when he heard the noise: a faint, high hum at the topmost end of his hearing, mixed with the whistle of parting air and the crack and tap of wood on wood. He halted, frozen, in the darkness, and felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.
He’d heard sounds like that before, in a clearing on Nammerin, and he knew what they meant. He still dreamed about that night sometimes: the heavy wet-mulch smell of the rain forest, the poisoned blood pounding in his ears, and outside the downed aircar power surging and flaring in auroras against the dark as two staves met and parted and met again. Llannat Hyfid had fought for his life that night, and the Adept was—he had thought—the only person now on the asteroid base who carried a staff and knew how to fight with one.
D’Caer? Ari wondered. Escaped?
He began a slow stalk down the passageway toward the sound of the fight.
As soon as he rounded the corner he saw them, a changing pattern of light framed by one of the tall archways that led into the Entiboran room. The reverse side of the room’s elaborate holoprojection gave him a view partially obscured by greenery and the spaces between the tall windows, but the illusory moonlight flooding the long chamber showed the two moving figures clearly enough. The light that played about them—vivid green and deep, almost indigo violet—was all he needed to see the rest.
For a moment he tensed, weighing how best to move in weaponless on a duel where both fighters were armed with more than just the staves they bore. Then he saw that the duelists were Llannat and the Professor, and that they both wore the dark trousers and loose white shirt that made up a part of an Adept’s formal blacks. In the clear emerald light of her power, Llannat’s face wore an expression that Ari knew all too well; he’d seen it before on his brother’s face back on Galcen, when Owen sparred with Master Errec Ransome for pleasure’s sake.
The two Adepts fought down the length of the room, the Professor wielding an unfamiliar, shorter staff in an odd one-handed style, and Llannat using the traditional two-handed grip. The auras around her and the Professor grew brighter, until the whole room shone with dancing streamers of colored light.
Llannat swung her weapon in sweeping figure-eight loops. By the intense, unnatural light, Ari could see how the sweat that dampened her shirt had plastered the white fabric to her torso, and how the muscles of her back and shoulders worked to put power behind the blows. The Professor deflected each stroke with easy grace, wasting no motion as he parried, and the violet light around him rivaled in brightness the medic’s corona of vivid green . . . but he still gave ground.
The younger Adept pushed her opponent farther and farther across the room. Then, without warning, all movement stopped. The Professor had his shoulders pressed to the wall. Llannat stood facing him, her staff laid across the Entiboran’s throat and her whole body poised to press the last blow home.
The Professor said something—he actually appeared to be laughing, for the first time since Ari had met him—and lowered his weapon. Llannat’s aura faded a second later, and the candles in the chandelier overhead flamed into sudden fantasmagorical life as the two Adepts embraced.
Ari turned away. He was not, he told himself, such an inexperienced fool that he would mistake honest comradeship for a highly unlikely passion. He and Issgrillikk had clasped each other by the shoulders in much the same fashion often enough, after a hard-fought bout at hand-to-hand under Ferrdacorr’s watchful eye.
But still, he found himself unwilling to watch any longer. “Power knows its own,” he remembered his brother saying once, and like most of the things his brother said, it had turned out to be true. As long as there were Adepts in the galaxy, Llannat Hyfid wasn’t going to need anything else. Certainly not the friendship of a powerless Galcenian medic, even one who’d been fostered on Maraghai.
The game room had lost what little appeal it had held for Ari in the first place, and he made his way back through the darkened hallways to his bedchamber. His valet robot was still there when he got back. Its lights blinked as the door snicked shut, but like a good servant it asked no questions. Ari threw himself onto the bed without bothering to remove his night-robe, and pushed the button that brought the room lights up to “dim.”
After a while he said, “Do you think you could find me a drink to help me get to sleep?”
“Of course, sir. What would you prefer?”
“I don’t care,” Ari said. “Whatever’s handy, as long as it’s strong.”
“Understood, sir,” said the robot. It trundled out the door, and returned shortly with a heavy cut-glass tumbler on a silver tray. A deep amber liquid filled the tumbler to within an inch of the rim.
“Thanks,” Ari said, picking up the tumbler. He took a careful swallow, and then set to work finishing the rest.
“That was good,” he said a few minutes later, contemplating the thick bottom of the empty tumbler. “But I’m not sleepy just yet. I think I’ll try another round.”
Harsh light streamed in through the glassweave curtains and beat against Ari’s protesting eyes. Somewhere outside his skull, a maniac was playing reveille on the door buzzer while the robot announced, in dulcet tones, “Your clothing is ready, sir. My series-mates report that the others are already awake.”
“All right, all right.” He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute and then stood up, swaying a little. “Death and damnation . . . open the door and let whoever the hell that is come on in so they’ll shut up.”
Ari stumbled off in what he hoped was the direction of the bathroom, the rumpled night-robe flapping around him. He emerged several minutes later, dressed in the garments that a blessedly silent robot had handed him one piece at a time, and found Nyls Jessan sitting in the chair by the window.
The Khesatan, dressed for the upcoming journey in a free-spacer’s loose shirt and trousers, was smiling a little as he looked out at the holoprojected garden. He half-turned at the sound of footsteps, and his eyes widened. “My word, Ari—what hit you?”
“About a liter of something or other that one of the Professor’s robots found for me,” Ari told his friend. “And for space’s sake, Nyls, have some respect for the dead.”
“You got drunk?”
Ari nodded, and wished he hadn’t. “It took some work, but I managed.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Ari turned to the valet robot. “Where’s the blaster I brought with me?”
“Right here, sir.”
Ari blinked at the weapon and holster the valet robot held out in one mechanical hand. “Ah, yes . . . I see it. Thank you.” He belted on the blaster and turned to Jessan. “You said the others were waiting?”
The Khesatan smiled. “No, I didn’t. And you forgot your boots.”
Ari sat back down on the edge of the bed with a curse. “Where is everybody?” he asked, as he pulled on first one boot and then the other. “Still having breakfast?”
“Llannat was drinking cha’a the last I saw her,” said Jessan, “and the Professor was making a final check on something or other. Beka went back to get into her Tarnekep gear, and I drew the short straw.”
Ari glowered at him. “There’s nothing like friends—thank the universe for small favors.” He stood up again. “Now, shall we go?”
Jessan rose lithely from his chair. “Of course.”
In the docking bay, Warhammer and Defiant waited side by side on the deckplates. Even through his headache, Ari could hear the low hum of the active engines, and sense a readiness in the air that hadn’t been there before.
“Still the same matchup?” he asked Jessan.
“That’s right. You and Llannat with Beka in the ’Hammer , and me in Defiant to help watch the autopilot and bring the Professor cups of hot cha’a during the tough parts.”
Ari grunted. “Sounds like a hard assignment—think you can handle it?”
“I’ll push myself,” the Khesatan assured him. “Good morning, Professor.”
“Good morning, Commander.”
The grey-haired Entiboran stood next to the lowered ramp of the Magebuilt scoutship. He still wore the black trousers and white shirt he’d worn when Ari had last seen him. The short, black and silver staff he now carried tucked under his belt. Ari saw Jessan’s eyebrows rise at the sight of it, but the Khesatan didn’t say anything beyond “Are the captain and Mistress Hyfid here yet?”
“Mistress Hyfid is already aboard the ’Hammer,” said the Entiboran. “And Captain Portree is arriving now.”
Ari looked back the way they had come, and saw the sickbay doors closing behind a figure he hadn’t seen since that first meeting off Nammerin.
Long brown hair queued back and tied off with black velvet ribbons; white spidersilk shirt frothing into pure lace at the neckcloth and the ruffled cuffs; heavy government-surplus blaster bolstered low and strapped down onto one thigh—from up close, Tarnekep Portree looked like nothing so much as a foppish piece of very rough trade. Ari searched the features of that androgynous but extremely menacing young gentleman for some trace of his sister Beka, and found none there.
“Good morning, Professor,” said Tarnekep. The Mandeynan’s gaze flicked over to the other two men in the docking bay. “Ari . . . Jessan.”
“Morning,” said Ari.
Jessan only nodded.
A corner of Tarnekep’s mouth turned up for a second in what might have been a smile. “Is everything ready?”
“Since yesterday evening, Captain,” said the Professor.
“Then let’s go. If everything works, I’ll see you on Darvell.”
“And what if something doesn’t work?” Jessan’s voice had a note in it Ari couldn’t quite place.
“If something doesn’t?” Tarnekep shrugged. “Then this is it, I suppose.”
“Like hell it is,” said Jessan harshly.
Ari stared—the words and tone were a sharp contrast to Jessan’s usual flow of light chatter—and was still staring when his friend took a sudden step forward and grabbed Portree by the shoulders.
“Get yourself killed on the way in,” the Khesatan said, “and I swear I’ll never forgive you.”
He pulled Tarnekep toward him into a hard embrace and a prolonged, almost desperate kiss. After what seemed to Ari an unconscionably long time, the two figures broke apart. Jessan turned and strode up Defiant’s ramp without looking back.
Tarnekep watched him go. Then—still wearing that maddening half-smile—the Mandeynan nodded to the Professor.
“Well, we’re off,” he said, and started for Warhammer at a brisk pace that was almost a run.
Ari caught up with him in a couple of long steps. “Was that last bit really necessary?” he growled.
The single bright blue eye and that unnerving eye patch looked at him for a few seconds from a thin-featured and deadly face, and then Beka chuckled.
“No, it wasn’t necessary . . . but it sure was fun. Come on, big brother. Let’s go set Darvell on fire.”