LLANNAT DREW the long knife out of the hidden sheath on her left forearm—and I know someone else who wears a blade there, she thought as she watched the events unfolding, but who?
She couldn’t quite catch the name, or more than a vague, tickling memory of the person. She saw her hand lash out and cut the throats of the pilot and copilot strapped into their seats before her.
The men surged against the restraining webbing, then fell back as blood spurted from their severed arteries. Before the two she had just murdered were quite still, she turned back to the control panel and began the process of taking Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter out of hyperspace.
The dropout sequence ran and the glory of the stars reappeared. She closed her eyes briefly. The two silver cords that had brought her to this moment were drifting closer, but still they did not touch. And now a third cord had appeared, one that she hadn’t seen before. Good—the new cord would help her bring together the two that she needed; but the cords were not yet bound, and until they were, nothing would come of her treason.
“Not done,” Llannat whispered. “Still not done.”
She looked again. The third cord was far off, at the extreme range of her vision, hard to see in the distance. It brought her an impression of a person, as if it were an acquaintance whose name had slipped her mind, met in the marketplace. She tried, but no names came. Still, something had to be done.
Do the best that you can, she thought, and hope to luck for the rest.
She dipped her finger in the red blood that flowed from the neck of one of her friends and wrote upon the viewscreen in large letters, trying to describe the persons she had seen: “Adept from the forest world: Bring this message to She-who-leads. Tell her what thou didst learn.”
And there, in the darkness, two of the cords knotted—one of those that she had seen earlier, and the newcomer. Odd, unexpected, but enough to pull in the cut cord. It was enough. For good or ill the future had been changed, and the long plans she herself had helped to form had been disrupted.
She sat back upon the deck, overcome by fatigue. Looking at the future always brought her near to collapse when the effort ended, and she knew that it would be the death of her someday.
Owen Rosselin-Metadi stood in the windowless room at the top of the stairs. The room smelled of disinfectant, in spite of the climate-control system wheezing and rattling through the floor-mounted vents. The dim light from a faux-opal glow-globe showed him a bed, a sink in one corner, and a long mirror along the far wall. In the mirror’s peeling surface he could see Klea Santreny reflected behind him, locking a heavy soundproof door.
Number Five, he thought. Then there are four more like this, at least. The thought depressed him.
He forced the dark mood away. He would think about the room later, when he thought about Galcen and the Magelords and all the other things he couldn’t afford to think about now. Silently, he watched in the mirror as Klea propped her staff against the door and let her day pack slide off her shoulders to fall beside it.
“Well, here you are,” she said. “Whatever you’re going to do, you’d better get on with it.”
He didn’t understand why she trusted him; he’d told her almost nothing, not even his full name, and he’d asked her for more than any apprentice should have to give.
Like teacher, like student, he thought. I’ve learned some things too well.
“Don’t let anybody come in the door,” he said aloud. “Stop them however you have to.”
She gave him a quick, slightly crooked smile. “Don’t worry. You could skin a swamp-devil in here and nobody would pay any attention.”
He nodded, not liking the memories that stirred in the back of her mind as she spoke. I can’t deal with that now. But I will do something about this place before I’m finished with Nammerin.
“You might as well make yourself comfortable,” he told her. “From your point of view, it’s going to be a long, dull night.”
“Dull is fine,” she said. “I like dull. I could use a little more dull in my life, if you want to know the truth.”
Owen smiled in spite of himself. “Save it up while you can, then,” he advised her. “Adepts don’t get very much of it.”
He went over to the bed—hoping that the management here at least changed the sheets between rounds, and telling himself that he couldn’t afford to be fastidious—and stretched himself out on the nubbly green coverlet. Over in one corner of the room, Klea was sitting down on the floor, using her day pack for a backrest. He closed his eyes.
The climate-control system sighed and gurgled. His pulse beat softly in his ears, his breath whispered in and out. He allowed the sound of his pulse to turn to a rush and a roar, and let his inner vision expand. When he was ready, he stood up and left himself behind.
He saw himself, lying on the bed, and he saw Klea, sitting beside the door, eyes closed but holding her staff upright—she was still awake. Then he wiped all external sensory input and allowed the darkness to enter his mind.
From the darkness, he plucked a single bright spot of light, while concentrating on home: Galcen, and the small room in the Retreat where he had lived and studied for years, the place to which he felt most strongly bound. He took the dot of light, and added another to it, and then another, as he had learned the theory, until a picture emerged—a picture, then a scene, then a full world.
Home.
He stood on a flat surface open to the stars, with the shadowy leaves and pale waxy petals of night-blooming flowers pressing close about him, and his first thought was that he had missed his goal completely. Recognition came a moment later: this was the rooftop terrace of his family’s house in Galcen’s Northern Uplands.
I underestimated, he said to himself. This place has more power to draw me than I thought.
A moment later he understood that he had gone astray in time as well. A woman came up onto the terrace from the steps below, with the starlight bleaching her pale braided hair. He thought at first that it was his sister Beka come home, but then he looked more closely—this was the Domina Perada Rosselin, walking in her night garden as she had done in life.
This is the past, Owen realized. I should go; I need to trace the path up to the present and find Master Ransome. I shouldn’t stay here in a time where I don’t belong.
Nevertheless, he found himself unwilling to move. He was still watching when the shadows at the far end of the terrace seemed to darken, and a man stepped out from what had been empty air only a moment before. Owen tensed, knowing the peculiar frustration of one who travels out of body and witnesses disasters in which he cannot intervene.
But his mother seemed unfrightened. In fact, she came forward to greet the stranger as if she had expected him—a formal greeting, not the true cordiality she would have given an old friend of the family like Master Ransome, but more kindly by far than the cool, practiced smiles she gave to Tarveet of Pleyver and others of his kind.
The stranger bowed. He was not a tall man, but his body was compact and muscular. His loosely curling black hair was going prematurely to grey.
“My lady,” he said. He spoke Galcenian with a strong accent, one that Owen didn’t recognize. “It is good of you to meet with me.”
The Domina smiled. “I gave up hoping for goodness long ago. I thought that justice would serve me well enough instead. But since it hasn’t—my lord sus-Airaalin, let us talk.”
Llannat felt a hand shaking her shoulder. “Mistress, it’s time to drop out of hyper. You left orders to tell you first. It’s time, Mistress.”
Llannat shook her head and looked up. It was Vinhalyn, the acting captain.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be on the bridge presently. Don’t drop out until I arrive.”
She was in a berthing compartment. The lights were dim, and she was naked beneath the sheets. Her staff lay ready to hand on the deckplates beside the bunk—the same silver-bound ebony staff that she had carried in her walking dream, and that the Professor had carried before her.
This ship was his, she thought, and the back of her neck felt cold. His, and he left it here for me.
The stranger on the terrace paused, about to speak, then looked sharply in Owen’s direction. “We’re being watched.”
“No,” the Domina said, “this place is secure.”
“I think not.” And the stranger began to walk toward Owen.
That’s impossible, Owen thought. He can’t see me.
But the man’s gaze was fixed on the place where Owen stood, and he was still coming forward. Forcing down his panic, Owen shut his eyes and wiped the scene from his mind. Once again, he began the process of pulling himself to a place, dot of light by painful dot, as he had done before.
Master Ransome, he thought. Not in the past. Now.
Again the shining dots coalesced around him into a place and a time—a dark place, this one, full of the rumble of engines and the sigh of recirculating air, with close, tight walls that pressed in on him from every side. Something about the rhythm of the sound made him think of the ships on which he had traveled and worked his way between the worlds.
But what is Master Ransome doing here ? He was a pilot once; he’d never be down near the ship’s engines if there was some way that he could see the stars.
Owen frowned. This place, whatever it was, had no light, and in his noncorporeal state he couldn’t touch the physical switch even if he could find it. But there were other ways to achieve clear sight, and he used them now, concentrating on his extended senses until the cell—it was a cell, without a doubt—became suffused with a greyish, sourceless illumination.
And Ransome was there. The Master of the Adepts’ Guild lay huddled in a black cloak on the narrow bunk that was the cell’s only furnishing. His features were pale and haggard; there were marks like bruises on his temples and forehead, and dried blood around his mouth.
Despair washed over Owen like a heavy, sluggish wave. Not until now had he truly believed that all the worst had happened. If Galcen Prime had fallen—if the Space Force had been defeated—even if the Retreat itself had broken under the assault—all of these together wouldn’t have been enough to give the Magelords the victory. But if the Master of the Guild was a prisoner in their hands, then all was lost.
No, he told himself urgently. Remember what you used to say to the apprentices—‘Despair is a liar; nothing is ever certain.’ You came all this way because there was something you had to do. What you see here doesn’t change any of that.
He stepped forward and went down on one knee beside the bunk, then reached out a hand and touched Ransome lightly on the shoulder. Except for the fleeting sensation of pressing against an intangible boundary, Owen felt nothing from the contact; and few beside the Master of the Adepts’ Guild would have felt anything in return.
But Errec Ransome was who he was, and he came awake at the touch. The Adept Master made no sound, but his eyes widened in recognition. Owen wondered how his disembodied presence appeared to Ransome—as a cloudy phantom, perhaps, or as something even more vague and nebulous, a sigh of wind or a coldness in the air. Master Ransome.
Owen strove to project his subvocal words across the immense gap between his physical body and this place where the essence of him had come. He groped for the half-forgotten words of the traditional apprentice’s challenge—now so seldom used, and never before under such circumstances.
Master Ransome, I have been apprentice to you long enough; I would claim my staff and call myself my own master.
Improbably, Ransome’s bruised mouth curved into a faint smile. Owen, came the answering thought. I did not think you would come this far.
But now I am here. And I require . . . The dark cell and the manacles on Errec Ransome’s wrists made a mockery of the formal wording; Owen’s thought stumbled, and he forced himself to go on . . . I require that you test me as you see fit.
Ransome laughed silently. If you’ve come all the way from Nammerin into this place, then you’ve passed a harder test than anything I would have set for you.
Then do you give me mastery?
I give you nothing, Ransome said. You have claimed it, and it is yours. The Adept Master laughed again—no sound, only a troubling of the dark air. And I see that the Mages have set themselves a greater task than they thought, since you are free. But if you are willing, there is something more.
Owen bowed his head. Command me.
No. You are Adept now, not apprentice. What you do must be of your own choosing.
Then I choose to serve, said Owen. Tell me what needs to be done.
There was a terrible joy in Errec Ransome’s eyes. For this I trained you, for this I kept you from the destruction that I knew would come. Go to the Retreat. Your staff is there. Claim it, and become the Master of the Guild.
Owen drew back, shaken. I did not ask . . .
But it is given.
And if I fail?
Ransome closed his eyes, as if the strength to hold them open were failing him. Then the Adepts have no leader; our sun is set; and Lord sus-Airaalin has conquered.
sus-Airaalin? Owen felt a tremor go through him at the name. But I saw him . . .
The Adept Master paid no heed to his unvoiced question. You should go, Errec Ransome said. It isn’t safe for you to be here. But I have looked into the future and have seen how it lies. You will be the Master of the Guild when the Mages threaten us no longer.
It was a dismissal. Obediently, Owen allowed himself to drift away, passing like a bodiless ghost through decks and conduits until he seemed to float in open space above a planet. He let himself fall downward through the upper air onto the surface of his homeworld.
After the painstaking transit through darkness from Nammerin, his progress to the Retreat was simple and almost effortless. Guided by his knowledge of the world’s geography, and increasingly by the feeling of wrongness and evil coming from his goal, he floated cloudlike through the middle atmosphere until he came to the Retreat.
He knew what to expect when he came close to his destination, but what he saw sickened and angered him just the same. Within the walls of the Retreat, the courtyard was blackened and cratered. Black-robed and masked Mages stood there, and they tended fires. The fires burned the books and furnishings of the Retreat, they burned the broken staves of Adepts, and they burned bodies as well. I should have been here, Owen thought, as he had protested aloud to Klea on Nammerin. These are my people; I should have been with them.
He knew that Klea had been right, that he couldn’t have stopped an invasion single-handed. But he still felt an overpowering sadness as he passed over the courtyard, and its flagstones puddled with drying blood. Forcing himself to go onward, he entered the main building, and walked through halls he knew well toward his old room. That was the place to start the search.
And there, indeed, was his staff, leaning against the far corner, as if he had never been away. Now to put his hand upon it, and somehow bring the physical object through the vast distance to Nammerin—if such a thing was possible.
Before he could touch it, he became aware of someone else inside the room. A Mage. And like the stranger on his mother’s terrace, this one seemed able to see him even in his noncorporeal state. Owen shuddered; from the dark familiarity of this one’s aura, he was facing the same Magelord who had held him pinned down in Flatlands for more than two seasons.
“You’ve come,” the Mage said. “We were certain you would. Now you can follow me to the Void, and die.”
The Mage crossed the room in a stride, snatched up the staff, and gestured toward Owen. With his movement the room vanished, to be replaced by a dull grey place, skyless and groundless, and Owen knew that his worst fears had come to pass.
This was the Void, where all of an Adept’s skills were useless, where reality itself was unreal, where the very nonsubstance of this nonplace leached power and strength away. And there in the Void the Magelord turned, and laid down Owen’s staff at his feet.
“Come to me, Adept. Take back your staff if you can. Here you will be destroyed.”
As soon as Llannat was alone again in the berthing compartment, she sat up in the bunk and looked around for her clothes. Somewhat unnervingly, she found them hung over the back of the only chair in the compartment, just as she always dealt with them when she got ready for bed.
Judging from that, and from what Vinhalyn had said to her a minute or so earlier, she must have put herself to bed in here—after walking about the ship and speaking to people in what must have seemed to be a normal fashion.
She shivered. If I’m going to be doing things like this a lot, I’d really like to know about them at the time.
Her preferences, she knew, weren’t likely to count for much. She got out of bed and dressed, then headed for the Deathwing’s cockpit. Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter was still cruising in hyperspace when she arrived.
“I’ll be doing the dropout,” she said.
The pilot looked at her curiously. “But you don’t know the systems . . . ”
“I said I’ll be doing the dropout.”
Llannat let her fingers trace over the control panels along the patterns she had seen herself use in her trance. This one first, and then the others in the sequence . . .
“Hey!” said the pilot. “That’s not the way it says in the manuals!”
She kept working. “The manuals are incomplete,” she said, speaking from the memories she had shared, trying not to think of what that other self had done in this very place. “The code for disarming the self-destruct was a matter of personal instruction only, as a final safeguard against having captured ships used by the enemy.”
“I . . . see,” said the pilot, as the dropout process ended and the stars reappeared around them.
Llannat straightened and stepped back from the control panels. “Where are we?” she asked.
“Gyffer system.”
“Gyffer? Not Galcen?”
Again the pilot looked startled. “It’s where you told us to go, Mistress. Don’t you remember?”
Llannat shook her head. “It’s not important. I’m going back to my quarters now; when Naversey arrives, let me know.”
Owen felt his strength draining away wherever the grey mist of the Void drifted against him. Whatever happened next would have to happen quickly—he couldn’t live here long.
How can the Mages endure it?
But Owen’s black-robed adversary was living, standing like a statue with a glowing staff in his hand. The staff’s red aura flickered off the black mask that hid his features.
“Are you the Master of your Circle?” Owen asked the Mage. He circled as he spoke, looking for position. The Mage turned to follow him throughout. “For if you are not . . . ”
Between one word and the next Owen dived through the nonsubstance of the Void toward his staff. He reached for it, trying to call it into his hands. The Mage’s ebony rod slammed him in the ribs as he rolled to his feet, and he felt a bone crack under the blow.
Worse, his move had taken him into the fog, and now his strength was waning further. With the last of his momentum he sprang straight up, letting the edge of his foot fly out at the Mage’s head.
The Mage ducked under the kick and brought his staff around in a blazing circle against Owen’s knee. All the strength fled from the limb in a hot splash of pain, and Owen went down. The grey, soul-draining mist swirled around him. He struggled again to his feet.
“Now you will die here,” the Mage said. “But see, I bring friends and family to play with you in the time that remains.”
The Mage gestured with his free hand, and shapes arose from the mist: Beka in her guise as Tarnekep Portree; Owen’s brother, Ari; the General and the Domina; Master Ransome. All pale and expressionless, with cold and lifeless eyes, and the flesh sloughing from their bones to reveal the skeletons underneath.
“Come, embrace your kind,” the Mage said.
“They’re all illusion.”
“Are they?”
The phantasmal Beka reached forth one rotting hand and brushed Owen’s cheek. Pain followed her touch, burning and chilling him at once. Owen reacted by punching straight into the creature’s face—but nothing resisted him, and his fist exploded into pain as the unreal face deformed like smoke.
“Not quite illusion,” the Mage replied, laughing behind his mask. “And real enough for what I do.”
But Owen noticed that his enemy was breathing hard, and that under the mask his jaw was set and tense. So this place does take something out of the Mages as well. In that case—Owen dropped straight down, throwing himself flat, and rolled through the grey mist. He felt a burning pain in his midsection as he passed through another of the phantom figures, and then he was away.
Ahead of me, and to the right. My staff is there.
Owen tried to call it to him, but nothing responded. “An Adept’s skills count for nothing in the Void.” Had he heard that lecture once, long ago, or had he given it himself? He didn’t dare breathe; taking a breath would draw the grey mist into his lungs, and that would be the end of him.
He struck something solid—the Mage’s leg—and grasped it, whipping around in a wrestler’s throw and pulling his adversary down into the mist with him. The Mage’s staff struck him low on the hips, but the blow lacked strength. Owen drove his elbow into his opponent’s belly and was rewarded with the sound of an explosive gasp.
Owen slid his left hand up the Mage’s arm to grab the other man’s staff. His right hand was still numb from punching his sister’s phantom double. The ebony rod was glowing and hot to the touch. Owen seized it, rolling as he did so to bring the Mage over on top of him.
Now the Mage’s back was pressed tight against his chest. He crossed his right arm over his left to hook the other end of the Mage’s staff. And then he pulled.
The short staff pressed inward against the Mage’s throat. The black-robe struggled, trying to pull Owen’s hands free, reaching down and striking Owen’s ribs, smashing his head backward into Owen’s face.
Owen felt an explosion of pain as his nose broke and the hot blood ran down over his mouth and chin. His lungs were burning. He hadn’t dared to breathe since he’d gone down below the mist. He pulled back more sharply on the Magelord’s staff.
The Mage convulsed. The vertebrae in his neck snapped, and he fell still. Owen rolled from beneath the suddenly inert shape and swept out with his left hand.
There.
He pulled his staff to him and used it as a prop to lever himself upright. If this was victory, he reflected, it wasn’t likely to do him any good. The featureless fog stretched as far as his vision extended. He was tired—if not for his staff, he would have collapsed—and he had no idea how to get home.
Then a dark mound stirred where the Mage had fallen. It rose, and stood upright. The Mage.
Owen brought his staff to guard, and white witchlight flickered down its length. But the Mage neither attacked him nor spoke. Instead, the dark figure turned and ran away, and Owen ran after. His legs hurt, his lungs hurt, and his side ached where the ends of the broken rib grated together—but wherever the black-robed phantom was going now, he was Owen’s last remaining link with reality.
A shape appeared before them, a pointed archway of impenetrable shadow. The Mage pulled ahead, fell into the blackness, and was gone. Owen followed him into the dark.
By the white glow of his staff he saw that he had come into a rough stone passage, one that he recognized from the Retreat, a corridor deep underground. Doorways lined both sides of the passage. He felt himself being drawn forward and to the right, to a rough wooden door with a pull-ring in the center. He pulled, and took a step forward—
—into a windowless room lit by an opaline glow-globe, where cool air sighed and rattled through the vents in the floor. A young woman with a staff in her hand slept leaning against a wall. On the far side of the room was a wide bed with an ugly green coverlet. Owen was filled with the desire to sleep. He walked forward, staggering in his fatigue, and lay down with his staff beside him.
Much later, he opened his eyes. Klea was bending over him, cleaning the dried blood from his face with a damp cloth.
He reached for his staff. In defiance of all he had ever thought possible, it was still beside him—real, tangible, and here.
“We may yet win,” he said. “At least, we have not yet lost.”
Klea’s eyes were troubled. “I had dreams,” she said.
“So do we all,” he replied. “So do we all.”