“SOMETHING is wrong here, Klea. Some thing is very wrong.”
Klea Santreny stared at Owen across the table in the all-night noodle shop. His words seemed to hang in the air like a holosign above the plastic tablecloth—they weren’t going to go away. After a moment, she ventured a cautious question.
“So your teacher didn’t play completely straight with you. Is that so bad?”
“I trusted him,” Owen said. “To work as I did, there’s no other way besides trust. And if my work was based on lies—”
Klea saw him flinch away from the thought. “But meant for the best, maybe,” she said, trying to offer some comfort. “If he didn’t want to see you taken by the Mages, or something.”
She couldn’t remember ever trusting anybody enough to have the loss of faith hurt her as much as this did Owen.
Not since her mother had died, anyhow. She wondered what his own family had been like. He never mentioned them except in passing, and all his shock and horror at the news from Galcen had been for the Adepts’ Guild and not for his own blood kin.
“Maybe,” he said. “But he shouldn’t have done it, no matter what the reason. Singling out one of his students to keep safe no matter what the cost was a great wrong done to all the others. And to me.”
He fell into a long silence. Klea watched him nervously, uncertain what to do or say. He didn’t appear to want comforting words—and she’d just about exhausted her supply of them—so it seemed the only thing she could do was wait. For quite a long time, as it turned out; she began to worry that they would get thrown out of the shop for holding down a table too long without ordering more food. But she didn’t dare leave her seat long enough to buy anything, even if she’d had the appetite for it.
At last, Owen blinked and came back from wherever it was he went when he put himself under that way. From the look in his eyes, she could tell at once that he had made a decision.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Is there even anything you can do?”
“Nobody stays an apprentice forever,” he said, “and I’ve been an apprentice far too long. It’s time I became an Adept.”
“Can you?” she asked. “I mean, is it allowed?”
He nodded. “It’s every student’s right to petition his teacher for the rank of Adept, if the student thinks the rank has been unjustly withheld.”
“You can do that from here?” Klea asked. “Without going back to Galcen?”
“There’s a way,” Owen said. “It’s never been used that I know of, but there is a way.”
He didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic about the idea. Klea looked at him sharply.
“There’s some kind of catch, isn’t there?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “You only get to try once. And the way I’ll have to do it, going out of the body—it’s dangerous all by itself.”
“Oh,” said Klea. She didn’t know exactly what “going out of the body” involved, but if it was serious enough to give Owen pause then she felt inclined to regard it with respect. “You’re going to try anyway, though?”
“I have to,” he said. “I can’t work under direction any longer. I need to be free to act as I see fit.”
Klea looked down at the tablecloth. As far as she could tell, Owen had been doing exactly that as long as she’d known him—a brief while, in the grand scheme of things, but an intense one. Of course, whatever instructions he’d thought he was working under all this time probably hadn’t said anything one way or the other about making a Guild apprentice out of the hooker downstairs.
“Are you going to want any help?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll need somebody to stand guard while I’m under, and some place where I can lock the door and not be bothered.”
“I’ll watch,” Klea said at once. “But a locked door is going to be a lot harder to find.”
She heard him sigh. “I know. But we can’t stay here.”
“We can’t go back either,” she told him. “The whole damned apartment building’s probably got Namport Security crawling all over it by now. Or that Mage-Circle you keep talking about. Or maybe even both.”
Klea stopped. She could feel herself having an idea—it was crawling out of the back of her mind while she watched, and she didn’t think she was going to like it.
She was right. She didn’t like it, any more than Owen liked the thought of whatever it was he intended to do.
I wonder, she thought as she drew a shaky breath, if this is what trying to be an Adept does to you.
“There is one place we can go,” she said aloud. “You still have some credits on you?”
“Yes.”
She stood up, grabbing the day pack and the grrch-wood staff without giving herself time to hesitate. “Then come on.”
The engineering control room of the Deathwing was no longer silent. In addition to the constant whisper of circulating air, and the low humming—more sensed than heard—of the ship’s electronics and gravity systems, anyone standing in this part of the ship could feel the steady beat of the Magebuilt vessel’s realspace engines vibrating in the deckplates like a pulse.
To Llannat Hyfid, hearing the sounds of the vessel increase in complexity as system after system came back on line had been like listening to some immense creature coming out of stasis and into life. Of the Deathwing’s major systems, only the hyperspace engines remained inactive, and that wouldn’t last much longer.
“We can bring the drive up for jump-testing any time now,” said E’Patu, the hull-tech warrant officer who’d been overseeing the physical end of the job. “Everything’s as ready as it’s going to get outside of a proper shipyard. Just give the word and we’ll do it.”
He’d been addressing Lieutenant Vinhalyn, but his gaze slewed over toward Llannat as he spoke. As if it had been a signal, she felt everybody else in engineering control turning to her as well—even Vinhalyn, in the careful way he didn’t look at her at all.
I’m not some kind of oracle, she felt like telling them, but she knew that the outburst wouldn’t do her any good. Ensign Cantrel and the rest of Ebannha’s people had regarded Llannat with a combination of awe and gratitude ever since they’d learned about her part in finding the Deathwing; and Vinhalyn had a deferential regard for Adepts that was straight out of the closing days of the last war. But she didn’t have to like it.
If you don’t like it, inquired the voice at the back of her head, then why have you started wearing Adept’s gear all the time instead of your Space Force fatigues?
She didn’t have an answer for that one, except that the change had felt like a necessary one, and that it still did.
The brief, awkward pause had started stretching out long enough to be noticeable. Another breath more, and Lieutenant Vinhalyn would decide that the resident Adept didn’t have any advice for him this time, and he’d give the order to commence the jump-tests for the hyperdrive.
“No,” she said, startling herself. “Don’t do it yet.”
Now that she’d spoken, Vinhalyn cast a worried glance in her direction. “What’s the problem, Mistress? If there’s anything we’ve overlooked—”
“Not that I know of,” she said. “It’s just—hold off for a little while longer, all right? I need to make one last tour of the ship first.”
Vinhalyn looked grave. “I take it you feel that something more is needed before we power up the hyperdrive?”
“That’s about the shape of it, yes.”
“Then do what you have to, Mistress,” he said. “Keep us safe. Let us know when you’re ready to start the jump-tests.”
She gave him a nod by way of reply, then grasped her staff—her short, silver-bound, Mage’s staff—in her right hand and turned to leave the engineering spaces.
Keep them safe, she thought. Right. I still don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. All I know is that it isn’t time yet for us to jump.
But it seemed that she knew something more after all. The thought floated unbidden up to the surface of her mind. Because there’s something here that I haven’t found yet. When I find it, we can go.
She closed her eyes and let her feet take her on the path she ought to follow. She walked, turned, walked and turned again, guided by her inner certainty, until she came to a spot where she no longer felt compelled to go forward. Like a cloud lifting, her compulsion and restlessness departed, to be replaced by a profound feeling of peace.
She sighed, and opened her eyes. All at once, the stench of Magework filled her nostrils. The feel of it pressed in against her on all sides—tangled, knotty, a twisting of the substance of things, heaviest and thickest where the power should flow most cleanly. She was at the center of the ship, where no engineering or control systems ran, the dark room with the inset circle of white on its bare deck. Dim light filled the compartment. She was alone.
I’ve been avoiding this place, she thought. Ever since I first heard Cantrel talking about it, I’ve been avoiding it, even taking other paths when the direct route lay beside this compartment. And now I’m here anyway, whether I wanted to come here or not. Because this is the place that I have to be.
“All right,” she said aloud to the listening universe. “Here I am. What do you want?”
And the universe answered. A sudden lethargy filled her, and she nearly collapsed with fatigue. The urge to kneel down in the center of the circle of white was near-overpowering. She struggled to fight it off.
This is unnatural, she told herself. I should leave.
But she was unable to will her feet to move.
Klea set a fast pace on the way from the shop, walking through Namport’s darkened streets without speaking. Owen followed close behind her, also in silence; she didn’t think he was more than halfway with her, anyhow. Most of his mind was already off somewhere, making ready for whatever it was that he planned to do. She knew her way well enough that she didn’t have to slow down until she reached a moderately prosperous quarter well away from the port, and came to her destination: a brightly lit tavern, flanked on one side by a businessman’s hotel and on the other by a theater showing full-presence holovid extravaganzas.
“Okay,” she said. “Here we are. Come on inside.”
Owen glanced up at the tavern’s gaudy holosign—an advertisement for Tree Frog Moonlight Pale. “Here?”
“You wanted a locked room,” she said. “If Freling’s isn’t good enough for you, then you’re on your own.”
He looked back at her. She could see that he was uncertain, and it occurred to her that uncertainty wasn’t an expression she’d seen him wear all that often. Finally he said, “I don’t mind. But you—Klea, are you sure you want to do this?”
“Whether I want to or not doesn’t matter,” she said impatiently. “You need a place and this is it.” Shrugging off her day pack, she thrust it and the grrch-wood staff into Owen’s hands. “Hold these for me and come on.”
She turned away and headed for the tavern. A few seconds later she heard Owen following her. The door sensors beeped at their approach and the glass panel slid open. They passed through the antechamber and the inner doors into a climate-controlled dimness a long way from the muggy air outside.
A large man in a loosely cut suit came up to them out of the shadows. “You’ve been away for a while.”
“Yeah,” Klea said. “I wasn’t—” She glanced back at Owen, and lowered her voice so that only the bouncer could hear. “I wasn’t feeling too well.”
She let her voice rise again. “This sexy guy says he feels like an all-nighter.”
“Right. See Freling, then.”
The bouncer faded back into the darkness near the door.
Klea led the way deeper inside the tavern. Up on a long runway, a naked woman was dancing with a big, grey-scaled Selvaur. Over to the right, lit by pale blue lights whose illumination didn’t extend all the way to the ceiling, a long wooden bar stretched the length of the room.
Klea walked up to the bar and sat down. Owen, after a second’s hesitation, took a seat beside her.
She didn’t have to wait long before Freling showed up—a large, florid man in a long apron. He reached up to the shelf behind the bar to pull out a glass and a bottle, and poured a shot of purple aqua vitae for Klea without being asked.
“Been a while,” he said.
She ignored the drink. “But I’m back.”
“Could I see your health card? I don’t want to get busted by the medicos.”
Klea’s heart sank. Oh, hell. I should have remembered. That damned card is back at the apartment with my working clothes, and it hasn’t been updated for a month anyway.
She drew a deep breath preparatory to embarking on a string of excuses that were bound to be futile—Freling was a real bastard when it came to anything that could get him in trouble with the law.
Show him your card.
The voice in her head was clear and recognizable. Owen?
Show him the card!
Right.
She made a pretense of reaching into the pocket of her shift for a square of plastic that wasn’t there, and then held out the nonexistent card to Freling for inspection.
“There you go. All fresh and clean.”
Freling squinted at the card. By now she could almost see it herself, the official seal and her flatpic only slightly obscured by the dim blue light.
“Looks fine to me,” he said. “What’ll it be, then?”
She slipped the not-there card back into her pocket. “My hot lover here wants an all-night special.”
Freling turned to Owen. “That’ll be two hundred room rent, plus fifty for special fees. Cash up front.”
Klea held her breath, unsure of how Owen was going to react to the demand. She needn’t have worried; he looked at Freling for a moment with no expression whatsoever, then reached into a pocket of his coverall and pulled out a wad of cash. He dropped the money on the bar without bothering to count it.
Freling picked it up and counted it instead, his lips moving as he thumbed through the stack of chits. When he was done, the money vanished somewhere under his apron, and he nodded.
“Room five,” he told Klea. “You still remember the way?”
“I haven’t forgotten. Come on, lover.”
She stood up and took Owen by the hand, leading him to a darker corner of the room, where a wide stairway led upward into the dimly glowing dark. Little lights along the side of the stairway showed the treads and risers, or else the stairs would have been invisible.
“All right,” she said to Owen as soon as they were out of earshot of the room below. “You’ve got your locked door.”
Llannat couldn’t move. The compulsion that had brought her to the dark room at the heart of the ship was upon her again, this time forcing her to stay. She wanted nothing, at this moment, so much as she wanted to be out of this place, with its overwhelming stink and feel of Magework and sorcery. But her feet would not let her go.
This is where I’m supposed to be. Where the Magework is thickest. If there’s another message for me, it’s in here.
Once again she was surprised by her own thought, and even more surprised to realize that it was true. The first message left for her on the Deathwing had been upsetting enough—she had no doubt but that she was the Adept the message had addressed, in spite of the gap of centuries. Now she understood that the ship itself was a message.
Magelords live a long time, and they make long plans. And they’re particular about who’s going to have something after them; Vinhalyn told me about that. Made it sound like they hand down projects and power, and—and things the way my family used to hand down shoes.
And this ship was left out here for me.
Only one thing remained for her to do. If messages were waiting for her in the very air and steel of the ship, then she would have to go and find them. Reluctantly, she sank down to her knees in the circle. Laying the short ebony staff on the white deckplates in front of her, she closed her eyes and tried to relax enough to enter the meditative state.
It was hard, much harder than usual. The smell and feel of Magish sorcery permeated the room; with every slow, even breath she seemed to be drawing the stench deeper into her lungs. Trying to work through it was like trying to breathe water—she kept breaking through again to the surface, her heart pounding and her lungs heaving in panic.
“Fighting it never works.”
The old piece of advice came back to her—one of the first things the teachers said to a new apprentice at the Retreat. Owen Rosselin-Metadi had been the one to say it to Llannat, back when she was still a green ensign who thought that the only way to deal with what her sudden talent was doing to her was to suppress it all as much as she could.
And now she was doing the same thing again, trying to fight against the way the room really was, and to make it as if what had happened there had never been. No wonder it wasn’t working.
She quit trying to ignore the Magework that pressed in so closely about her. Instead she allowed her mind to drift, unforced, and let the room enfold her however it would, as a part of the necessary shape of this portion of the universe. Gradually, as her tension ebbed, she felt her pulse slow and her breathing become more regular—and then, as easily as slipping into warm water, she slipped away from regular thought and into the meditative trance.
She had no idea how long she knelt there before she knew that it was time to open her eyes, pick up her staff, and rise to her feet. But when she did so, she was in another place—a vast, dark-but-not-dark expanse, like a great, echoless hall. All about her were hanging curtains and tapestries, massive heavy walls of patterned cloth. The bottoms of them brushed the dusty floor beneath her feet; and she couldn’t see the tops of them because they seemed to reach up forever and blend into the darkness far overhead.
The tapestries made walls and rooms in the dark, dividing the great, unbounded hall up into a maze of curtains, moving gently in faint drafts of air that she couldn’t feel. She gripped her staff tightly in one hand and began walking—not sure whether she was standing at the maze’s edge, or trapped inside its heart.
A few minutes later, she took a wrong turning and found herself in a dead end. She looked over her shoulder, ready to reverse her steps and go back to where she started, and saw that the way had closed up again behind her. Another dark, heavy curtain hung where there had been a path only seconds before.
Is this some kind of test? she wondered. Am I supposed to find the path, even when it’s hidden?
Or is the question not about following the path at all?
What is a path, except for a way where somebody else thinks that you should go?
She raised her staff, ebony bound in silver, and red fire ran down its length. She brought it forward in a sweeping overhand blow, rending the curtain from top to bottom. Light, pale yellow, showed through the gap.
With her staff she pushed the curtain aside—tendrils of smoke curled up from the edges of the fabric—and saw, through the opening, the corridor of a spaceship. She eased her way through, and was aware, with the movement, of the long black robes that whispered about her high, polished boots. The feel of a mask was cold upon her face, and the slight loss of peripheral vision brought on by the eyeholes allowed her to see the things that the worlds of men found invisible: the silver cords that traced between all times and places through the darkness under the stars.
She walked forward, her boot heels clicking on the metal deckplates, and followed the two silver cords, strong and bright, that she had to knot together. Knot them and twist them, and make a cable tough enough to pull yet another of the cords—thick and heavy, but cut—out of the darkness where it was drifting.
“A handhold,” she murmured, and was surprised to hear her voice, deeper than she remembered it, but familiar still.
She paused and leaned back against one of the bulkheads, suddenly aware of the enormity of what she was contemplating. Betrayal of all she had fought for, all she believed, for what? For a chance, and no more than a chance, of a greater good. She pushed off from the bulkhead and started forward again.
The door to the bridge whooshed open at her approach, then closed again behind her. Two men sat in the pilot’s and copilot’s seats.
“Drop out of hyper,” she said. “Do it now.”
“With respect, my lord,” said the pilot, “it’s a long time before we’re scheduled to drop out.”
Llannat could see the silver cords drifting out of reach. She walked forward, between the two seats, and clipped her staff to her belt.
It is not right, she told it, that you should see what I do next.