The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Authors’ Preface - [for those who have been here before]

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1: Year 1116 Eraasian Reckoning

  2: Year 1116 E. R.

  3: Year 1116 E. R.

  4: Year 1116 E. R.

  5: Year 1116 E. R.

  6: Year 1116 E. R.

  7: Year 1117 E. R.

  8: Year 1118 E. R.

  9: Year 1122 E. R.

  10: Year 1123 E. R.

  11: Year 1123 E. R.

  12: Year 1123 E. R.

  13: Year 1123 E. R.

  14: Year 1123 E. R.

  15: Year 1123 E. R.

  16: Year 1123 E. R.

  17: Year 1123 E. R.

  18: Year 1123 E. R.

  19: Year 1123 E. R.

  20: Year 1123 E. R.

  21: Year 1123 E. R.

  22: Year 1123 E. R.

  23: Year 1124 E. R.

  24: Year 1124 E. R.

  25: Year 1124 E. R.

  26: Year 1124 E. R.

  27: Year 1126 E. R.

  28: Year 1126 E. R.

  29: Year 1128 E. R.

  30: Year 1128 E. R.

  31: Year 1128 E. R.

  32: Year 1128 E. R.

  33: Year 1128 E. R.

  34: Year 1128 E. R.

  35: Year 1128 E. R.

  36: Year 1128 E. R.

  37: Year 1128 E. R.

  38: Year 1128 E. R.

  39: Year 1128 E. R.

  40: Year 1130 E. R.

  41: Year 1130 E. R.

  42: Year 1130 E. R.

  43: Year 1130 E. R.

  44: Year 1130 E. R.

  45: Year 1130 E. R.

  46: Year 1130 E. R.

  47: Year 1130 E. R.

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  Authors’ Preface

  [for those who have been here before]

  I. So THERE WE WERE …

  … In the Republic of Panamá. It was the mid-eighties. Macdonald was nearing the end of a career in the US Navy and Doyle was teaching freshman composition at the University of Florida extension campus. And new English-language science fiction wasn’t easy to find. The tropical sun did something to our brains, and we started writing short stories, mostly for our own amusement. Or, to be more accurate, Doyle started writing them.

  One of the stories—a vignette, really—dealt with a young lady named Beka who’d just been given a spaceship by her father. Odd and exciting doings were hinted at. Macdonald enjoyed reading the story (as did our friend Sherwood Smith, a writer in California with whom we shared our manuscripts). Macdonald got to like Beka, and pestered Doyle for the next story about her. Doyle, who was absorbed by that time in another project, said words to the effect of, “If you want another story, write it yourself.”

  So Beka landed her spaceship, and spent some twenty double-spaced pages working through all the routine of clearing a cargo through customs in a foreign port, before a booted foot slammed unexpectantly into her knee, knocking her to the ground so that an assassin’s shot would miss her head. The boot belonged to a mild-mannered, elderly gentleman with a mysterious past. He and Beka went on to have adventures together.

  Doyle took the manuscript, cut out the twenty-page meticulously detailed depiction of filling out paperwork in a government office, poured a bottle of bleach over the purple prose, and said, “Well, go on.” The first part of the story went off to California, where Sherwood likewise read it and called for more.

  Two hundred pages later, we were still calling the piece “the short story” (being at that point still unclear on the concept of “novel-length”) and the older gentleman had gained a name. He was the “Professor.” The Prof and Beka continued to have adventures, mailed off to California at the rate of one every couple of weeks, with each episode ending with a cliffhanger. The new episode would go off by mail to California, Sherwood would reply “Arrrgh!” and we’d be off for the next round.

  Move forward a few years of real time. Macdonald was out of the Navy, and was living with Doyle in New Hampshire, far removed from the tropics. They had written and published eight young-adult novels. Their method was pretty much the same one that they had developed while working on the “short story.” Macdonald would write a first draft/outline, Doyle would put it into English, and then they’d argue about the details. They were both between projects and that collection of pages about Beka and the Professor looked like it could be made into a real novel.

  So, as they say, it came to pass. The Price of the Stars was published as a paperback original in 1992. By the end of the novel, the Professor was dead.

  But you can’t keep a good character down. The Prof had a lot of mysterious past to explore. In the third Mageworlds book, By Honor Betray’d we finally learned his true name—Arekhon Khreseio sus-Khalgaeth sus-Peledaen—and in the prequel volume, The Gathering Flame, we met him as Ser Hafrey, Armsmaster to House Rosselin. His influence extended, in fact, throughout the entire series, so that Doyle eventually asserted that if she ever wrote another Mageworlds book, it would be about the Professor as a young … well, as a young whatever he really was, way back then on the other side of the galaxy.

  II. THE DARK ON THE OTHER SIDE

  Which brings us to the present work. When we came to write this volume, we realized that in the course of five Mageworlds novels we had scarcely visited the Mageworlds themselves at all. Beka Rosselin-Metadi and Nyls Jessan touched ground briefly on Raamet and Ninglin and Eraasi; Errec Ransome was held prisoner for a short while on Cracanth; but little more than that.

  And our characters, by and large, were not going to give us any sympathy when we felt guilty. From the viewpoint of the civilized galaxy—as the worlds which later became the Republic and its allies liked to think of themselves—the Mageworlds were a menace, home to a faceless enemy.

  “The Mageworlds” was not even the raiders’ own name for their place of origin. The name they used, most of the time, was simply “the homeworlds.” Sometimes they, or the more politically aware among their adversaries, would call themselves “Eraasians,” from the dominant planet in their loose confederation.

  Even more than the Mageworlds’ attempts at conquest, the metaphysical differences between the two cultures set them at odds. In the civilized galaxy, those who worked with and through the power inherent in the universe called themselves Adepts. Their philosophy favored individual action over collective effort, and they believed in riding the natural flow of power in the universe and letting that flow add to their own strengths.

  On their own worlds, the Adepts were historically regarded with both distrust and superstitious awe. As a consequence, they became, as a group, inclined toward secrecy and the protection of their own. Tradition set the Adepts apart from formal involvement in political life; during certain periods, however, their informal participation was considerable. The years during and immediately after the First Magewar were especially noteworthy in this regard.

  The Mages, as they referred to themselves (their enemies then expanded the term to cover an entire society, and not merely a comparative few of its members), were integrated into the public life of their worlds as the more solitary Adepts never were. Believing in group action and in the combination of forces toward a single effort, the Mages regarded the power resident in the universe as something to be manipulated and worked with directly. For the Adepts, on the other hand, actually making changes in the flow of power, or attempting to impose a pattern on that flow, was regarded as nothing less than an abomin
ation—“sorcery,” as Llannat Hyfid describes it when she first feels it in action on Darvell; “Magework and dark sorcery.”

  Another philosophical dividing point between the two cultures came on the question of luck. The philosophy of the Adepts, in its strictest form, holds that there is no such thing as luck at all, only the natural flow of power in the universe. Those people who are spoken of by others as “lucky” are regarded by the Adepts as having an innate sense of this power flow, of where it goes and of when and how it is about to change. Even among people who believe in luck in its more casual sense, there is no feeling that luck is subject to conscious manipulation.

  The Mages, on the other hand, view luck as something real in itself, and inextricably bound up with human life. Grand Admiral sus-Airaalin of the Mageworlds Resurgency speaks of Beka Rosselin-Metadi as a “luck-maker”; something of the same quality, in the Mages’ view, also attaches to her father, Jos Metadi, “whose luck two generations of Magelords had tried in vain to break.” The forces of life and luck together make up the eiran, perceived by working Mages as a network of silver cords. Attempts on a Mage-Circle’s part to untangle the eiran of a particular place, or to bring them into a more pleasing pattern, are often experienced by Adepts as unnatural changes or damage to the natural flow of power.

  In the aftermath of the First Magewar, these philosophical differences—and, of course, the atrocities committed by the Mageworlders on Ilarna and Sapne and Entibor—almost proved fatal to the Eraasian worlds. Driven by a need for security and a desire for revenge, the military forces of the victorious Republic did their best to reduce Eraasian industrial capacity below the level necessary to wage interstellar war. At the same time, Errec Ransome and his Adepts strove to break the Mage-Circles and eliminate their practices from the civilized galaxy. The combined result was not so much a period of occupation and pacification as it was—to quote the Ilarnan scholar Vinhalyn, who observed the process as a young officer with the Republic’s Space Force—“the systematic destruction of a culture cognate to ours, yet unimaginably alien.”

  III. CONCERNING THE SUNDERING OF THE GALAXY

  A great expanse of starless space separates the Mageworlds from the rest of the galaxy. In Mageworlds legend, this interstellar gap was the product of the Sundering of the Galaxy, a catastrophic event with theological or metaphysical roots, prior to which the gap did not exist. The story of the Sundering also exists on the other side of the gap, although the versions current in the rest of the galaxy differ considerably in their details.

  Whatever the actual cause and origin of the interstellar gap, it looms much larger in Mageworlds thinking than it does in the greater galactic culture. Some scholars conclude therefore that Eraasi and the other Mageworlds suffered more than the rest of the galaxy from the effects of the Sundering, and thus retained more memories, however distant, of the actual event. Others take the opposite position, and assert that the Sundering’s effect on the rest of the galaxy was so much greater that on those worlds proportionately more memory of the event was lost.

  IV. OTHER CULTURAL CHANGES

  The astute reader will notice a number of differences, both small and large, between the Eraasian worlds as they appear at this earlier point in their history and as they became by the time of the First and Second Magewars. The Eraasian language provides an instructive example. Five hundred years, give or take (and depending upon which planet’s revolution is used to define the term), separate the events chronicled in this book from those of the later Magewars; Eraasian speech did not go unchanged in the interim. The reader should note especially the tendency toward greater diphthongization over time, as exemplified in Rayamet vice the later Raamet. Also contrast the family name sus-Khalgath with its later spelling (as derived from Ignac’ LeSoit’s pronunciation) sus-Khalgaeth.

  Noticeable changes also occurred in Circle garb and procedure during the five-hundred-year gap. Readers will notice the absence, in earlier times, of the geaerith, or full-face mask. The Mage-Circles of Llannat Hyfid’s and Mael Taleion’s day justify the use of the mask as allowing a clearer perception of the eiran. More recently gathered historical evidence suggests—in view of the fact that the geaerith also provides its wearer with anonymity—that the change had its roots in political developments in the Eraasian hegemony.

  Also worth noting are the differing conceptions of the relationship between hyperspace and the Void. In the rest of the civilized galaxy, technology and cosmology draw a careful distinction between hyperspace (as traveled through by starships) and the Void (as visited but mostly steered clear of by Adepts). Eraasians, however, view the two places/phenomena as essentially the same.

  Acknowledgments

  The authors would like to thank Marina and Sherwood and Thyme, for beta-reading the manuscript; Norman and Marian, for letting us hold down a table at the Red Lantern Cafe while we drank coffee and worked on revisions; and Gregory Feeley, for coming up with a title when our minds remained obstinately blank.

  Prologue

  This is the story’s true beginning. On other worlds and in other places they tell it differently, but nowhere has it been altogether forgotten.

  In the years when the worlds first bore life, the galaxy was all one. The eiran—the silver cords of life and luck—wound unbroken throughout all the aspects of human existence. They bound life to life, and world to world, and past to future, and the pattern was all of one weaving.

  But the people of the many worlds grew lazy, and failed to tend the eiran as they should have done, and as had been their task from the beginning. The eiran turned wild, and grew and changed until the pattern was no longer of one weaving but of many, and the cords in the many patterns pulled and twisted in all directions.

  “Look,” said some of the people, the clear-sighted ones. “The one pattern has been destroyed through our careless inattention, and who can say what the consequences of that may be.”

  The others never listened. They no longer saw the one pattern even in the many weavings, but each of them saw a single and separate pattern, and tended only the eiran that lay within it.

  “See now,” the clear-sighted ones told them. “The threads in the one pattern grow tight and tangled, and the strain on the weaving is greater than it can hold. If the pattern is not mended now it will pass away from us.”

  But still the others would not listen.

  And the day came when the threads of the pattern snapped, and the eiran flew wide across the face of the universe like floss on the wind, and the two halves of the galaxy were ripped apart and flung away one from the other, and the people were blinded to the sight of the silver cords that had perished from their lack of tending.

  Of those who had been clear-sighted, only a few remained. All of the rest were lost, and their worlds with them.

  1:

  Year 1116 Eraasian Reckoning

  ERAASI: HANILAT STARPORT

  DEMAIZEN OLD HALL

  Ribbon-of Starlight, foremost guardship in the sus-Peledaen fleet, waited on the landing field at Hanilat like a dark, angular bird. She was the largest family ship that could actually touch the soil of Eraasi. The merchant ships she escorted were bigger—huge constructs, hold-swollen with cargo—but they never left orbit. The shuttles that would bring up the flats and bales and crates of tradeware clustered like nestlings on the burnt ground next to the Ribbon’s protective bulk.

  Arekhon Khreseio sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen, riding out to the guardship in the back compartment of an open land-hauler, gave the shuttles nothing more than a cursory glance. Ribbon-of-Starlight—his home for the remainder of his fleet apprenticeship—claimed the greater part of his attention. She was a new ship, no more than a couple of voyages old, but already known for a lucky one. ’Rekhe squinted at her, trying for the catch and angle of sunlight that would let him see the eiran wrapping and weaving around her.

  A moment … there … yes. To the right eyes, Ribbon-of-Starlight was rich with luck, hung about with it in lacework so
thick it looked like silvery gauze.

  Arekhon himself was a slight, dark-haired youth. He’d worked with the fleet Circle in Hanilat since he was first able to count his age in two digits, but now that he was, by everyone’s reckoning, old enough to make a full commitment to the Mages, his duty to the family came first. His brother Natelth was the head of the sus-Peledaen family’s senior line, and Natelth wanted ‘Rekhe to go through his apprenticeship in the fleet … so an apprentice, perforce, ’Rekhe would have to be, and the Circles could wait until later.

  “Here you are.”

  ’Rekhe blinked, and the luck-lines went away, leaving the Ribbon looming stark black as before, only much nearer. A door was open high on one curving side, and a narrow metal ladder led up to it.

  “Thank you,” he said politely to the driver of the land-hauler, collected his duffel, and climbed out of the back compartment onto the ground. The hauler sped off on its next errand. ’Rekhe shouldered his duffel and started climbing.

  A young man in a blue work coverall was waiting for him when he reached the top of the ladder. The crimson piping and insignia on the man’s coverall told ’Rekhe that he was a clerk-tertiary, not long out of his own training days.

  “Arekhon sus-Khalgath?” the clerk said.

  “Reporting for instruction, sir.” Everyone outranked an apprentice—even when the apprentice came from the family’s senior line—and ’Rekhe took pains to keep his voice respectful. Natelth had made it plain that he would not have his younger brother disgracing the family by causing trouble and discontent.

  “Come with me.” The clerk-tertiary led the way into the coiling three-dimensional labyrinth of the Ribbon’s interior, and ’Rekhe followed.

  He tried to memorize the route as they went, but in spite of his efforts he knew that he would have to spend time with the ship’s map-models later. The ground-based portion of his prentice-training had given him an understanding of the basic principles of ship construction, but each ship had its own set of variations on the common design.