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

  The clerk-tertiary halted before an airtight door like all the others they had passed by, or through, on the way inward.

  “Prentice berthing,” he said. “Stow your gear and report to the junior wardroom in an hour.”

  With that, he departed, leaving ‘Rekhe to confront the door alone. Fortunately, it was merely closed, rather than dogged down tight. ’Rekhe pulled it open and stepped over the sill.

  The compartment held four bunks, stacked two deep on either side of the door. Corresponding lockers filled the rest of the available space along the bulkheads. The bunks were rigged with the cushions and webbing to double as acceleration couches.

  A girl sat cross-legged on one of the lower bunks, reading a flatbook and making notes on the margin-pad with a stylus. She wore prentice livery like ‘Rekhe’s own—more dark blue trimmed with crimson—and her short brown hair curled around her bent head in a loose mop. She looked up as ’Rekhe stepped into the compartment.

  “It’s first-come, first-served on the bunks,” she said. “You might as well take the bottom one on the other side before somebody else does.”

  “I like the top bunks,” said ’Rekhe. “Nobody steps on your face every night and morning.”

  The girl shrugged. “No accounting for taste. I’m Elaeli Inadi, by the way.”

  “Arekhon sus-Khalgath,” he said, sketching a bow.

  And the eiran that had hung like cobwebs around Ribbon-of-Starlight’s dark metal hull began to weave themselves into a newer pattern.

  On the day that the Ribbon left Eraasi for her trading voyage to Ildaon and beyond, Serazao Zulemem was at work in the outer office of the Harradi Group, a firm of legalists specializing in the financial affairs of Eraasi’s middle and upper nobility. The Demaizen estate was about to pass into the hands of its final inheritor, and Serazao had drawn the work of sorting and filing all the hardcopy that the case had generated during two decades of legal contests.

  Serazao’s parents, Alescu and Evya, had come to Hanilat from Eraasi’s antipodal subcontinent because well-trained legalists—and they were both well-trained—could prosper in the employ of the merchants and star-lords who made the city their base of operations. Her father soon achieved membership in the Harradi Group; her mother, more combative by nature, kept her own office as a court-litigant.

  Serazao herself was a quiet, industrious child. From the time she was old enough to make plans for her future and have others take them seriously, she intended to become a legalist like her parents. To that end, as soon as she reached the age of employment, she worked part time—full time during the school intervals—at her father’s firm.

  The litigation concerning the Demaizen estate had come near to outlasting the family lines that contended for it. Serazao knew from her parents’ dinner-table conversation that only the death from old age of one of the parties involved had brought the matter to a conclusion. Now the remaining heir was required to present himself at Harradi’s offices to take possession … in this case, of a portfolio full of deeds and account-books.

  Nobody had bothered to mention that the last of the sus-Demaizen line was also a Mage; or if they had, they’d done it so long ago that Serazao had not been there to hear. From the length of time that the estate had been in the hands of the legalists, she assumed that its ultimate heir would be another one like the deceased claimant, whom she’d had the misfortune once to meet: Elderly, avaricious, ill-tempered, and infirm, with more money already in his possession than any one man could reasonably think to spend.

  Garrod syn-Aigal was not what she’d expected at all.

  Her first impression, when he came into the outer office, was that he was the heir’s driver, or perhaps his bodyguard: A big man, broad in the shoulders and firmly muscled, but with none of the clumsiness that so often came with strength. He wore plain street clothes, of good quality but far from new, with a long weather-coat thrown over them. It was the middle of Hanilat’s rainy season—she remembered the date ever afterward, very clearly—and both the coat and the loose-brimmed hat he wore with it shed water in puddles on the office floor.

  He paused inside the door, still dripping, and looked about with a searching expression that lightened when he saw her at work behind the office-bar.

  “Good morning, Syr—”

  “Zulemem,” she said, and then, in reply to his unspoken question, “There’s a coat-rack in the corner behind you.”

  He smiled, which made his heavy dark eyebrows bristle even more fiercely than they did already. She didn’t like men with thick eyebrows—she preferred an elegant antipodal arch, like her father had, or her cousins—but the newcomer’s good humor made them, and the roughness of the features around them, surprisingly attractive.

  “Ah. So there is. Thank you, Syr Zulemem.”

  “Serazao,” she said, as he pulled off the coat and the hat and hung them up on the polished brass hooks of the coat-rack. With the coat out of the way, she caught her first glimpse of the short wooden staff that the man wore clipped to his belt. Seeing it, she frowned.

  He was quick; he caught the change in her expression almost before the muscles of her face made their fractional changes to echo the shift within her mind.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “No,” she said hastily, “nothing wrong. I didn’t realize that syn-Aigal had a Mage-Circle on his side, is all.”

  “He doesn’t, not really.” He smiled again. “Or I don’t, at least—and I was Garrod syn-Aigal the last time I looked.”

  She felt the blood rising in her face. If any of the office partners found out that she had, at least by implication, insulted their client … “I’m sorry; I was impertinent.”

  “You told the truth as you saw it, Syr Zulemem. No impertinence there.”

  “Maybe not for you,” she said. “But I want to work here someday, when my schooling’s finished.”

  His eyebrows went up again. “You don’t look like a legalist to me.”

  “Oh?” Irritation flared; she frowned at him, never minding what the office partners might have to say. He hadn’t looked like a man who would pay heavy-handed compliments of that sort, and it was depressing to find out otherwise. “What do I look like, then?”

  Once again, he surprised her. “A Mage.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “About that, never.”

  “I couldn’t—”

  “There should be a Circle working near your school,” he said. “Ask your instructors; one of them will know. And when you’ve trained in Hanilat long enough, come to Demaizen Old Hall and ask for me. I’ll be building a Circle there.”

  The wet weather that had been merely annoying in Hanilat was chilly and unseasonable in the Wide Hills district several days later. On the road going up past Demaizen Town, the rain slanted down cold and hard in the driving beams of Garrod’s heavy six-wheel groundcar. The vehicle bumped along over the muddy track, then turned the corner in a cut braced by stone shoring and began growling up the final slope.

  “There it is,” Garrod said. He pointed to the massive stone pile that loomed among its outbuildings at the crest of a long hill. “Demaizen Old Hall.”

  The driver grunted, unimpressed. “I see it.”

  The main gate stood open in a twist of rusted iron. The groundcar passed slowly through, and kept on until the road ended in front of the heavy bronze doors of the central building. The beams from the groundcar’s driving lamps picked up the Hall’s blank windows, its moss- and lichen-spattered walls. Everything here was untended and overgrown, even the road itself; weeds poked up knee-high through what had once been the gravel surface of a circular driveway.

  The driver switched the engine to neutral, and the sound dropped to a low throb. “Here you are.”

  “Thanks, Yuva,” Garrod said. He pushed open the passenger-side door. The wind took it, smashing it fully open against the front engine cowling. The rain stung like needles and plastered Garrod’s hair flat in an instant. He jumped o
ut of the groundcar, his staff swinging from his belt, and ran the ten feet to the doors.

  The arched opening gave at least some protection from the wind, but the doors were locked. Garrod frowned. The keys had not been part of the inheritance.

  He unclipped his staff. A moment’s preparation, a reaching-out and a pulling-in, and the staff began to give off a steady blue-white light. He touched the door and bent his energies toward persuading it to open, but to no avail—the locks were rusted fast, their mechanisms destroyed by more than a generation without maintenance.

  Garrod sprinted back to where Yuvaen waited in the groundcar. “Back her up to the doors,” he shouted above the howling wind.

  “Got it.”

  The groundcar lurched forward, then swung back and to the left. Its wheels ground and bumped up the shallow steps until the rear towing bar nearly touched the bronze doors.

  Garrod opened the cargo compartment and pulled out the tow chain. He threaded it through the handles of the doors, linked it with a clevis bolt to the rings on the towing bar, and stepped aside.

  “Yuva! Ahead slow!”

  The groundcar sent out a puff of chemical vapor from its upper tubes, and growled forward. Hinges and bolts gave way behind it in a howl of tearing metal, and the bronze doors buckled under the strain.

  “Hold up!” Garrod shouted.

  The groundcar stopped. Yuvaen shut off the engine and emerged from the driver’s side.

  “Give us a light,” Garrod said. “Let’s see how it looks.”

  “Right.” Yuvaen had brought an electric lantern with him from the groundcar. He turned it on and lifted it to shine a yellow light at the doors of the hall—the right-hand one pulled entirely away from the frame, the one on the left tilted crazily and hanging by a single hinge. He cast a gloomy eye over the damage. “It’ll cost you a pretty to have those fixed.”

  “I’ve got all the money I need,” Garrod said. “What I don’t have is time. Come on.”

  The two men entered the Hall. White-sheeted furniture stood ghostlike in the foyer. Dust lay thick, and gnawing creatures had worked on much of the interior woodwork. Garrod pointed through an arch to where a staircase went curling upward.

  “There,” he said, and started up toward the long gallery on the second floor. Yuvaen followed.

  At the entrance to the gallery, both men paused on the threshold. Their rain-soaked clothing clung to their bodies like wet leaves, and the glow from Yuvaen’s lantern cast a swaying circle of yellow light on the space within, where the sus-Demaizen kept their tablets of remembrance.

  Plaques and memorials covered the walls—ancient slabs of grey slate scratched with names in a language no longer spoken by anyone living, and newer tablets of painted wood and cast metal. On the altars beneath them, long-guttered candles spilled out their wax across carven wood.

  Garrod strode into the center of the room, where a small altar stood in front of a freestanding memorial on tripod legs. The candle holders were empty—whoever had last tended the memorial had scraped them clean when the rite was done—and a spray of white flowers, long since dried, lay on the altar between them.

  “This is an end and a breaking,” Garrod said. With that he picked up the memorial and flung it out through one of the high, west-looking windows in the center of the long wall. The window glass gave way in a jagged, shivering peal, and the memorial went crashing down onto the gravel drive outside.

  “Wait!” Yuvaen cried over the noise. “Hasn’t there been enough broken already?”

  Garrod put his hands against the wooden altar and shoved it toward the broken window. “No,” he said. “Not enough by half. Before I am done, I will break our very universe.”

  The altar smashed against the low sill and tumbled over it to the ground below. Rain poured in through the gap in the window, driven slantwise by the rising wind.

  “Your ancestors will curse you,” Yuvaen said.

  “My ancestors mean nothing to me,” Garrod said, “and I mean nothing to them.” He pulled another of the tablets from the wall, and the dried wood splintered in his hands. He threw the tablet out onto the gravel with the other wreckage. “I am the last of my line, and what follows after will follow the older days.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The sundering of the galaxy is not just a parable, or an allegory suitable for children and scholars,” Garrod said. He was pulling tablet after tablet away from the plastered walls, working now with a fierce, unstoppable intensity. “It is nothing less than the truth. And I intend to bring together that which was split apart.”

  Yuvaen shook his head. “You’re right not to fear your ancestors. It’s the gods themselves that you should fear.”

  Garrod fished in his pocket and pulled out an incendiary, of the kind used by workers in the metal and construction trades. He pulled the igniter and tossed the incendiary down onto the tangle of broken wood on the gravel drive. A brilliant white light blossomed up, mixed shortly after with red as the wood caught fire. The western windows glowed with the color.

  Garrod heaved another wooden tablet out of the broken window and into the flames. “I don’t have time to fear the gods, Yuva—you’ll have to do it for me. Come, help me clean out this space, for here will be our workroom.”

  “May the gods forgive me, then,” Yuvaen said. “Because I’m with you.”

  The two men embraced, then fell to stripping the walls of their memorials, and clearing the floor of its altars.

  2:

  Year 1116 E. R.

  ERAASI: WESTERN FISHING GROUNDS

  SYN-GREVI ESTATE, NORTHERN TERRITORIES

  ILDAON: ILDAON STARPORT

  The deep-water fleets from Amisket, Demnag, and Ridkil Point had been having a bad summer. Like most of the coastal settlements in the Veredden Archipelago, the three towns depended for a livelihood on their commercial fisheries, and a poor haul meant a lean year to come. In autumn, the fish migrated to spawning grounds near the equator—too great a distance for the Veredden ships to follow, even if biological changes during the spawn didn’t turn the fish sour and spongy—and winter in the northern latitudes was too stormy for surface craft to ply the waters at all. Winter was for spending the long nights snug in harbor, making repairs and hoping that the money from last summer’s catch would last until spring.

  As First of the Amisket Circle, Narin Iyal took the season’s lack of good fishing harder than most, and most were taking it hard. It was her Circle’s place to provide fish-luck and weather-luck, and to tell the captains of the fleet where the silver was running. But all she could tell the captains now was that the fish had abandoned their usual grounds, and she had no idea where they might be.

  The nets of the deep-sea trawler Dance-and-be-Joyful trailed astern, and the lines still had the slack of an empty haul. The crew lounged in the shadow of the deckhouse, playing cards. The engines throbbed ahead slow.

  Narin stood on the main deck, staring over the rail at a horizon made dim by haze, and at the rolling blue waters beneath the empty sky. She was a short dark woman with a square snub-nosed face and calloused hands. The sun, just past its zenith, burned down upon her neck and shoulders. Other than the wind of the ship’s passage, no breeze ruffled her hair.

  Narin looked up at the distant line where sea met sky. A set of masts there, black lines against the paler sky, told where First-Light-of-Morning ran, hull down, tracing a parallel course. They’d had no better luck than the Dance, she was sure.

  “You asked for me?”

  The familiar baritone rumble belonged to Big Tam, Second of the Amisket Circle. Tam was a dark-skinned, wide-shouldered man, and in his many-times-laundered work shirt and loose trousers he looked more like the son and grandson of deep-sea fishers—which he also was—than like a ranking Mage. He’d been with the Circle for almost as long as Narin had, and had been her Second since the beginning.

  Narin looked back out at the water. The sunlight sparked painfully bright on the blue sw
ells. “Yes,” she said. “If we don’t want children going hungry in Amisket by year’s end, it’s time we did something about our luck.”

  “I agree.”

  “Good. Call the others to the meditation room. We will have a working.”

  The meditation room on Dance-and-be-Joyful was a cramped space set forward belowdecks. It was far narrower and more confining than such a room should have been, even for a small Circle like Narin’s, and its atmosphere was a malodorous slurry of machine oil, fish, and rank sweat. But space for the Circle was carved out of the Dance’s cargo hold, and every cubic inch taken away from storage cost the ship’s master money when the fish were running.

  Narin made her way below, stopping by her cabin to change into her robes and pick up a small-scale chart of the fishing grounds. As First of the Circle, she had her own quarters. The rest of the Amisket Mages shared crew’s berthing, though they stood no watches and hauled no lines.

  She took the paper chart forward to the meditation room. In spite of the summer heat above decks, the air inside the room was cold, chilled by the heavy-duty cargo refrigeration system in the adjacent compartment, and condensation beaded and ran down the bulkheads in a steady, relentless trickle. A single incandescent light illuminated the white circle painted on the deck.

  Laros, the older of the Circle’s two unranked Mages, was already there, dressed in formal robes, with his staff clipped to his belt. In a moment, Tam and young Kasaly arrived as well. Narin swung the door to behind them and dogged it shut.

  “The time has come,” she said, “for a working. To make our own luck, and force the gathering of the fish.”

  “Past time,” Kasaly said. Kas was red-haired and pretty, and a great favorite with the sailors. Her luck-making was among the best, however, and Narin suspected that she had it in her to be First herself someday, provided that she learned enough patience and discipline first.