The Gathering Flame Read online

  “Deal with me honestly, and I deal honestly in return. But until I know what you want from me, there’s nothing else I can say.”

  “What I want,” she said, and for the first time hesitated, as if marshaling her arguments. “You’ve made a name for yourself, Captain Metadi, and not merely on Gyffer and Innish-Kyl—the newsreaders on Galcen talk about you as well. They say you are something more than a successful pirate—”

  “Privateer,” he corrected. “I bear letters of marque and reprisal.”

  A whole sheaf of them, in fact, from the Citizen-Assembly on Gyffer and a host of other sources, including the Galcenian Council and the Highest of Khesat—and Veratina Rosselin herself, by way of House Rosselin’s ambassador on Perpayne. But if the young woman across from him didn’t know that, Jos Metadi wasn’t going to tell her. Knowledge was power, and it was never a good idea to give away power to somebody with whom you were trying to strike a deal.

  “My apologies, Captain,” Perada said, her expression unruffled. “Privateer. And something more. If the newsreaders don’t lie—and I have excellent sources who say that they do not—you have proven yourself able to meld independent raiders into a fleet and carry the war to the enemy.”

  “Enemy?” Jos shook his head. “No. Enemies are personal. None of this is personal with me. I take prizes—rich ones—and I take them for the goods and merchandise they carry. If your sources are any good, they should have mentioned that I don’t fight warships if I can help it.”

  “You fight when you must, and you win when you fight.” Her voice remained composed. “I have decided. You are the man who will return with me to Entibor and, once there, make a warfleet for me.”

  The certainty of it nettled him. “You’ve decided, have you?”

  “You will be amply rewarded.”

  “I have enough money,” he said. “And if I want more, I know how to get it. I don’t need to cramp my style by putting myself under anybody else’s command.” He stood up. “I’m sorry, but there’s no advantage for me in taking your offer. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “No,” said the Domina. “I have not given you leave.”

  “I didn’t ask,” he said. “I’m a free citizen of Gyffer, and nobody’s subject. Which means I come and go as I please, and right now it pleases me to go.”

  “Wait!”

  He paused, one hand on the door. “I told you, I don’t want money.”

  “Money isn’t the only reward.” Her blue eyes were very bright. She reminded him of a gambler just before the last card went down. “Name your price, Captain. I can meet it.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “But I don’t play cards with somebody else’s deck.”

  He pressed the lockplate to open the door. Nothing happened. He turned back to the Domina.

  “I hope you’re the one who set the door to lock behind us,” he said. “Because otherwise, I think we’ve got a problem.”

  Ser Hafrey gave the Domina and the merchant-captain plenty of time to begin their discussion before he made any move to leave. He checked the lockplate on the private room first, to make certain that all was in order, then moved toward the outer door.

  As he did so, he ignored the other man in the room. As Minister of Internal Security for Entibor, Nivome do’Evaan of Rolny shouldn’t have come on this journey in the first place. He should have stayed behind on Entibor to make ready for the Domina’s accession. But the Rolnian had insisted; had, in fact, exerted the considerable political power of his office to force himself onto the mission.

  Perhaps it was better to keep Nivome busy close at hand, where his schemes for advancement could be watched and countered, rather than leaving him to work his machinations in the palace undisturbed. Nevertheless, Hafrey found the minister’s self-interest distasteful—and felt, therefore, no obligation to tender his associate any more than the minimum of deference.

  Stepping past Nivome, the armsmaster opened the door and glanced out into the hall. As be had expected, Warhammer ’s second-in-command was nowhere in sight. Hafrey stepped back into the room and closed the door before addressing the Minister of Internal Security directly for the first time.

  “The copilot’s away. We should be going as well.”

  The minister’s expression of disapproval didn’t change. “You, maybe. I’m staying right here.”

  “The word Her Dignity used was ‘leave.’”

  Nivome didn’t move from his position against the wall. “The Domina of Entibor should not be wandering the streets of Waycross unprotected.”

  Ser Hafrey allowed himself a faint smile. “I doubt that she will be.”

  He bowed—the slight inclination of formal politeness, nothing more—and added, “Nevertheless, we must all comport ourselves according to our inclinations. I’ll wait for you at the ship.”

  The armsmaster departed from the Double Moon without looking back, and made a slow and introspective passage through Waycross to the docks. All along the dockside thoroughfares, the ranks of grounded starships waited in their bays, each enclosure separated from the next by privacy walls looming even taller than the ships themselves.

  The gates of Warhammer’s bay stood open. From the look of things, the Innish-Kyllan dockworkers had begun to off-load cargo while the captain and his copilot worked off their nerves and excess energy along the Strip.

  Ser Hafrey lingered in the shadows for a while, watching as the skipsleds ran in empty and departed stacked high with shrouded loads—the pick of the loot from Metadi’s Ophelan run. The worklights mounted on top of the privacy walls were harsh and blue—white, mimicking in their spectra the suns of another world.

  Warhammer was an ugly vessel, at least to the armsmaster’s exacting eye—a huge, flattened disk that stood on heavy metal landing legs. Its cargo doors gaped open, with ramps leading down to the floor of the bay. A shower of blue—white sparks rained from the underside of the freighter, where somebody was making repairs to the skin of the ship.

  After a few minutes Hafrey moved away again, continuing toward his own ship: an Entiboran Crown courier, small and fast and discreetly armed against the day when speed alone would not answer. He showed his identification to the scanner at the entry force field and walked through the main passageway to the bridge. Once there, he settled back in the command chair, laced his fingers in his lap, and closed his eyes, calming himself and bringing his thoughts into a better order.

  If all went well, he told himself, matters would proceed as he intended. If not, then he would deal with reality as it developed. Ser Hafrey was old—far older than he gave others to understand, or than he ever admitted even in his most private thoughts—and he had schooled himself long ago to accommodate the universe when it decided to change itself around him.

  “Whoever locked the door,” Perada said, “it wasn’t me.”

  She regarded the captain uncertainly as she spoke. She’d been expecting an older man; not as old as Ser Hafrey, perhaps, but at least someone well into the middle of life. Jos Metadi, however, looked barely a decade older than she was herself.

  Tall and tawny-haired, he wore dark trousers and a spidersilk shirt underneath a crimson velvet coat fastened with massive gold buttons. An odd combination, she would have thought—but thanks to Ser Hafrey’s preliminary report, she knew that rich, almost gaudy, clothing was the traditional mark of a prominent captain, an advertisement of his success in the same way that the heavy blaster, its holster tied down to his thigh, was a mark of his violent profession.

  Metadi had come a long way in a short time, then, and he wanted to go even farther. A good sign, she hoped. Just the same, he was an untried quality. Veratina’s court on Entibor hadn’t contained anyone like him; neither had the finishing school on Galcen. She drew a breath and tried for a note of careful detachment.

  “You say we might have a problem?”

  He glanced at her again and nodded. “I’m not sure if you’re the target, or if I am, or if it’s the two of us together—but
I’m feeling more like someone has me locked and tracking with fire control than makes me comfy.”

  “Oh.” At least, she reflected, Captain Metadi had spoken of “we” and “us.” Maybe there was a chance she could bring him around after all.

  Great-Aunt ’Tina would be furious—the Head of House Rosselin taking a Gyfferan nobody for Consort!

  She was willing to go that far if she had to. Ser Hafrey hadn’t approved of the idea when she’d broached it to him on the hyperspace run to Innish-Kyl, but he knew better than to gainsay the Domina on a dynastic matter.

  Captain Jos Metadi was not, after all, simply a Gyfferan nobody. His family and his early history might be untraceable—if Ser Hafrey said that a man’s lineage was obscure, no conventional records check was going to provide the information—but his current fame and his known accomplishments were matters of established fact. Jos Metadi was, by anybody’s reckoning, the foremost captain among the privateers of Innish-Kyl, and the only one who had proved consistently able to bring other ships under his command.

  If he can do it for a rabble of pirates, she told herself, he can do it for me.

  Meanwhile, the captain was rummaging under the tapestries that covered the walls of the private room.

  “Damned thing’s back here somewhere,” she heard him mutter under his breath. He let the tapestry drop back against the wall. “I wasn’t counting on a room with only one way out.”

  “My fault, I’m afraid. Ser Hafrey insisted—the better to control the circumstances of our discussion, he said.”

  “I hope he hasn’t controlled us right into a bloody ambush,” Metadi commented. His Gyfferan accent was stronger than it had been, and there was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there when he came in. “I suppose he insisted on scanning the room for spy-eyes and snoop-buttons?”

  “Of course,” she said. “But there weren’t any.”

  “No electronics.” Metadi was prowling about the perimeter of the room, looking for she didn’t know what. “Then how would they … hah!”

  He’d come to the alcove with the bed, where heavy curtains swagged across the entrance partly hid and partly revealed the cushioned interior. He seized the fabric of the curtains with one hand and jerked it aside. Light came into the alcove from the glowcubes that illuminated the room itself, and Perada saw with a faint sense of shock that the entire back wall of the alcove was a single large mirror.

  She blinked, and swallowed. “What? Surely you don’t—not now?”

  Metadi wasn’t listening. He picked up one of the high-backed wooden chairs, lifted it over his head, and threw it full-force into the alcove. The chair hit the mirror with a tremendous splintering crash. Shards of silver-backed glass fell down like spangles onto the bed below. Where the mirror had been, Perada saw an empty hole—and beyond that, a small room with walls of dead black, and a pale, clerkish-looking man with an expression of intense surprise on his otherwise unremarkable face.

  “One-way glass,” said Metadi. He’d drawn that heavy blaster she’d noticed earlier, and was pointing it at the clerk—which explained, Perada thought, why the man hadn’t made any attempt to run away. “I expect that news of our chat is all over Innish-Kyl by now. In a week most of the civilized galaxy will know about it. In two, even the Magelords will know.”

  “You expected something like this, didn’t you?”

  “Let’s say it doesn’t surprise me very much.”

  By now, Metadi was inside the black-walled cubicle, presenting the frightened clerk with a close-range view of his blaster. “Maybe our friend here is nothing but a random pervert who bought himself an evening at the peep show—but it’s a lot more likely that he’s a paid spy.”

  The clerk turned even paler than before. “No, no …”

  “A pervert, then,” said Metadi. “In that case, gentlesir, it will only increase your enjoyment if I tie you securely before we go.”

  He glanced about the little room, frowning slightly. Perada thought that he seemed to be looking for something.

  “The curtain ropes,” she said. “Will those do?”

  “Good thinking. Pull ’em down.”

  The ropes were thick and sturdy underneath their velvet casings. Perada worked quickly, and soon had an armful of them ready to pass across the glass-strewn bed to Captain Metadi, who holstered his blaster and set about binding the unfortunate clerk.

  “There,” he said when he was done. He looked down at the clerk, now trussed and tied like a fowl for the roasting. “I wouldn’t struggle, by the way, if I were you. You’ll only strangle yourself.”

  “He isn’t struggling,” Perada felt obliged to point out. “He’s too scared.”

  “Smart man,” Metadi said. He extended a hand to help her scramble over the couch. “There you are, Domina. Let’s go.”

  PERADA ROSSELIN: ENTIBOR

  (GALCENIAN DATING 962 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 26 VERATINA)

  PERADA ROSSELIN—five years old, her pale yellow hair barely long enough to make into braids—shivered as she made her way carefully along the second-floor ledge of her mother’s manor house. She wished she’d remembered to wear a jacket. The late-spring sun of Felshang Province looked bright and warm, but outside, and this high above the ground, the wind was cold.

  She’d reached the ledge quite easily, by climbing over the sill of the casement window in the upstairs guest bedroom next to the nursery. Because it was the smallest and most inconvenient of the empty rooms, nobody had ever noticed that the force field over the window opening didn’t work anymore. The ledge itself was over a foot wide, and the big bluestone statues that stood along it at intervals were tall enough to hide a small person from anyone looking up from below.

  Just the same, she’d taken care not to be seen. She knew that she wasn’t going to fall off the ledge, but she also knew that none of the adults in the house would ever agree. If anybody suspected that the ledge, with its high, windy solitude and its view of the fields and vineyards of Felshang, was her secret haven, then the window in the empty room would be locked and the force field repaired—and Perada would be taking all her meals in the nursery until Mamma decided she’d grown up enough to know better.

  So Perada was always very quiet, and very cautious, when she went out onto the ledge. Especially today. She made her way on hands and knees past the nursery windows, and eased herself an inch at a time across the carved stone lap of the statue on the southwest corner. At last she came to a spot outside the open windows of her mother’s study.

  She squeezed herself into place beyond the outflung pane of the open casement, in a nook sheltered from the wind by the hunched shoulder of a bluestone gargoyle. She didn’t normally risk coming so far, but today she had a special reason. She wanted to listen to what Mamma and Dadda were talking about when she wasn’t there.

  Dadda had come down from the capital by aircar that morning—in the middle of the week during school season, which wasn’t usual for him—and all through lunch he and Mamma had spoken to each other in worried-sounding half-sentences. Perada had understood without asking that they didn’t want to talk about it in front of her—whatever “it” was that could make Mamma look frightened and solemn and excited all at once—but they were talking about it now, in Mamma’s study.

  “She won’t do it,” Mamma was saying, and Perada knew that they were talking about Great-Aunt Veratina. Not just at the Felshang manor house, but everywhere, “she” in that tone of voice always meant the Domina of Entibor: a tall, hatchet-faced woman with iron—grey hair and pale, cold eyes, loved and feared and hated and worshiped in almost equal proportions by everyone in Perada’s life.

  “It’s not a matter of ‘won’t,’” Dadda said. Dadda was Owen Lokkelar, a professor of galactic history at Felshang University and Mamma’s husband by commoners’-rite. “She can’t do it.”

  “Can’t do what?” Mamma sounded angry—and afraid, too, which made Perada, crouched out of sight on the ledge, hug her knees and shiver.
“Can’t come out and say what everybody from here to the Far Colonies knows perfectly well already—that she’s as barren as a parched field and has been for the last thirty-seven years?”

  Barren … Perada had heard that word before, when the nursery maid and the majordomo were talking in the hallway while they thought she was napping. “A bad thing,” the majordomo had said; “no vigor left in that line, anyone can see it. Not like our own lady.”

  “She can’t afford to make it official,” Dadda said. “As soon as she does, the factions will start pressing on her twice as hard.”

  “I don’t blame them,” said Mamma. “You know how people are about things like that, even in this day and age. If she doesn’t either step down or name somebody capable, they’ll start blaming the House for every disaster that comes along.”

  “After word of this gets out, she won’t dare name anyone,” Dadda said. He’d started using what Perada thought of as his teacher—voice, the one that her mother always listened to. “She’s broken tradition—which most people could forgive her for; this isn’t five hundred years ago—and she’s failed at it, which nobody is ever going to forgive.”

  Nobody said anything for a while. Perada wished she dared look in through the open window and see their faces—she could almost always tell from the faces what people were thinking. At last her mother said, “If she doesn’t name anyone, it all comes down to the closest heir left. Now that the Chereeves are out of the picture, with that oldest girl of theirs cutting her braids so disgracefully, exactly who might be closest is a matter for discussion.”

  “It won’t be for long.” Dadda sounded worried, which wasn’t like him. “It’s going to be the Blood Tontine all over again.”

  “Not for me,” Mamma said. “I’m out of all that.”

  There was another long pause, and then Dadda said, very quietly, “But should you be?”

  Mamma sighed. “Damn you, Owen. I was afraid you were going to come around to that. You know what it’ll mean, though.”