The Gathering Flame Read online

  “I know,” Dadda said. “One of the Urnvards would be a good choice, I think; or Gersten Kiel, if you prefer. He’s produced nothing but girls so far, and he did well enough for ’Rada.”

  “Mmm. I’d hoped that maybe you—”

  “Not when the stakes are so high. If you want to play at all, you can’t make any sentimental choices.”

  “No.” Mamma’s voice sounded tight and brittle, like sugar candy drawn out fine and ready to break. “The question is, do I want to play?”

  There was another long pause. “For the sake of your House, Shaja … I think you have to.”

  II. GALCENIAN DATING 974 A.F.

  ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 38 VERATINA

  THE SECRET room had a hinged door with an old-style mechanical latch, leading into a narrow service hallway dimly lit by a flickering low-power light panel. Metadi latched the door behind them from the outside.

  “That should buy us a minute or two,” he said. “Now, let’s see … if I’m not lost, the rear exit to this dump should be down that way.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Perada said, after an unsuccessful struggle against her baser impulses. “You really do know the back door of every bordello in Waycross.”

  The captain threw a quick glance in her direction. “People say that about me, do they?”

  She didn’t know what to say in reply—most of Nivome and Ser Hafrey’s comments on the subject of Jos Metadi had been even more uncomplimentary than that. But the captain had already found what she supposed was the way out, another hinged door set flush with the grimy plast-block wall of the service corridor. He set his hand against it, pushed, and the door swung open.

  “This way, Domina.”

  She followed him out into what looked—and smelled—like a back alley, full of slimy puddles and malodorous garbage bins, illuminated only by the occasional blue safety glow. She wrinkled her nose.

  “It’s not as clean as the front lobby,” Metadi said, as if he’d seen her change of expression. “But it’s probably safer at the moment.”

  Something hot and bright red zinged past them before he finished speaking, and the plast-block next to Perada’s head bubbled up and blistered from the sudden intense heat. She drew breath to exclaim something—she wasn’t sure what—only to have most of the wind knocked out of her when the captain pushed her full-length onto the reeking pavement of the alley.

  Another instant, and he was on top of her, a warm and solid weight, with the gold buttons of his fine velvet coat digging into the flesh along her spine. Any urge she might have felt to protest died as soon as she realized that his entire body was between her and the source of the unexpected attack. For attack it was; Metadi had his blaster out and in hand, and she heard footsteps approaching, sounding rapid but at the same time cautious. She felt the captain’s free hand on her shoulder, pressing her down … Stay quiet. She had no trouble in interpreting the wordless command. Don’t move.

  Perada endeavored not to breathe.

  The footsteps drew closer—coming to check on the kill, she supposed. Then the weight on her back lifted as Metadi rolled away. A loud, high-pitched buzz sounded from close overhead, followed by the pop-and-flash of an exploding glow. She turned her head sideways as much as she could without raising it above the pavement, and saw Metadi, now in deep shadow, fire the heavy blaster twice more down the alley.

  The whole exchange, from the first shot to Metadi’s last, had taken only a few seconds. The owner of the footsteps was nowhere in evidence. Metadi rose out of the half-crouch from which he had fired, and held out a hand—presumably, Perada thought, it was safe for her to get up. She took the offered hand, and stood.

  Her mask was gone, forgotten and left back in the Double Moon. The blue dress—carefully chosen for the interview just past—had lost several of the tiny, hand-sewn buttons that gave the bodice its exquisite fit, and she didn’t want to think about what nameless substances might have been ground into the delicate fabric. On the other hand, she was alive, when she might well have been otherwise; and the understanding of it filled her with a peculiar sense of exhilaration.

  “Time to leave this place behind,” the captain said. “Even in Waycross, if you fire a blaster somebody eventually shows up to investigate.”

  “How soon is ‘eventually’?” Perada inquired. Getting arrested was something that Nivome and Ser Hafrey could extricate her from, but they’d exact a high price for their complicity in such an escapade. Legal entanglements, then, were best avoided.

  “Soon enough that camping out at this address isn’t a good idea,” said Metadi. “Where were you supposed to be meeting your two buddies after our chat was over?”

  She gestured at the building behind them. “In there—the front lobby.”

  “No good, I’m afraid. You came here from off-planet; is your ship waiting for you dirtside, or up in orbit?”

  “‘Dirtside’? Oh. Down here, yes.” She paused. “I’m sorry I can’t give you any better directions—I never expected the need.”

  She heard him laugh quietly in the dark.

  “Domina, if I can’t find a ship when it’s in port, I’ll eat my pilot’s license. I’ll get you home safe—it’s the least I can do.” Blaster in hand, he started down the alley in the direction from which the shots and footsteps had come.

  “That way?” she asked, hesitating. “I thought …”

  “So did they, probably.” He paused, then reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a second, smaller blaster. “But in case they didn’t—did that finishing school you were at teach you how to work one of these things?”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid the curriculum didn’t include a course in heavy artillery. Sorry.”

  Metadi pressed the weapon into her hand anyway. “It’s easy,” he said. His hand was warm over hers. “You hold it here, and when you want to shoot it, you press on this stud here with your thumb. Whatever’s standing in front of the bell goes away.”

  “How about aiming it?”

  “No time to practice that—just don’t point it at me.”

  She hefted the blaster. It had an oddly heavy feel to it for its small size, and she felt inclined to treat it with considerable respect. “Is there a—what do you call it? A safety mechanism?”

  “I’ve already armed it.”

  “You seem to have thought of everything,” she said—and at that moment the back entrance to the Double Moon flew open and a voice shouted, “It’s them! Stop them!”

  “Come on,” Metadi said, and sprinted for the mouth of the alley. Perada gathered up her skirts with her free hand and followed after him. Somewhat to her surprise, nobody shot at them from either direction.

  When they reached the juncture of the alley and the street beyond, she understood why. The man who’d carried her message upstairs to Captain Metadi was standing there waiting for them, leaning on what she thought at first was an Adept’s staff.

  Surely not, she thought, and then saw that the staff was a bar of plain metal, such as anybody might pick up and wield. Three men lay motionless on the pavement nearby, their weapons fallen from their hands.

  “I thought you’d given up that sort of thing,” Metadi said. There was a note in the captain’s voice that Perada couldn’t quite identify, as if he’d touched on something that was an old issue between him and his copilot.

  The other man—Errec Ransome, that was his name—glanced sideways at the bar of metal, and shrugged. “One uses the tools that come to hand. I’ll deep-space it once we leave orbit, if it makes you happier.”

  “Up to you,” Metadi said. “But we’d better go.”

  He started down the street at a brisk pace, threading his way through the press of vehicles and pedestrians. Nobody seemed to notice his blaster, still at the ready in his hand, or perhaps nobody cared. Nor, to Perada’s relief, did anybody seem to notice her: the blue spidersilk gown was a good deal more formal than what passed for the usual female garb in this part of Waycross, but
the mud-stained fabric and ripped bodice—and the blaster Metadi had given her—apparently sufficed to camouflage the fact.

  “So what happened?” Ransome said to Metadi. “Get into trouble again?”

  Again? wondered Perada, but Metadi didn’t break stride.

  “Some kind of misunderstanding,” he said, hurrying through the noisy crowd. Ransome matched his pace easily, but Perada—shorter than both of them and hampered by the long skirt of her gown—had to half-run to keep up. “What about you? Find out anything?”

  “Quite a bit,” Ransome said, followed by something in the unfamiliar language he and the captain had spoken together earlier. Perada wondered if it was the copilot’s birth-tongue that he and Metadi used for privacy’s sake, or the captain’s.

  Another cry of “There they are! Over that way!” made itself heard above the noise of the crowd. Metadi looked in the direction of the shout.

  “Uh-oh,” he said, picking up his pace. “Security goons. Time to get scarce.”

  “But you said—” Perada began, at the same time as Ransome said, “What about her?”

  “She comes with us,” said Metadi. “We had an interesting conversation after you left.”

  “And that made people madder at you than wrecking fifty Mage warships did?”

  Fifty? Perada wondered breathlessly—she was running in earnest now, gripping the blaster in one hand and her skirt in the other. Her soft blue slippers would never recover from this expedition through the trash and slime of Waycross’s port quarter.

  Boots, she thought. I’m going to need boots.

  She heard the whining, zinging sound of blaster-fire again a second later; the bolts of ugly red light came near to hitting more than one of the people thronging the busy street. The crowd thinned out almost instantly, in what she supposed must be a local survival skill, and Metadi paused long enough to turn and fire back.

  “Teach ’em to keep their damned heads down, anyway,” he observed; and then, in response to Errec Ransome’s question: “Looks like it did. All I know is that somebody sure as hell didn’t like what the lady had to say.”

  Amid the welter of broken glass on the floor of the Double Moon, Festen Aringher rolled onto his back. The curtain cords that bound him were tight, but the privateer captain, while thorough and efficient, had not been as ruthless as his words had implied—so long as Aringher didn’t mind cramped muscles, he wouldn’t choke himself by moving.

  He inched back with his shoulders, trying for purchase against a wall. Bits of glass crunched underneath the heavy broadcloth of his coat and scraped against the bare skin of his wrists and hands. He winced as his movements ground the splinters even deeper, but he didn’t stop.

  He needed to find a shard of glass long enough to cut through the cords around him; with luck, he wouldn’t slash any important blood vessels at the same time. Once he’d done the first loop, the rest of the escape would be tedious, but not difficult. Some minutes later he had moved all the way against the wall, and had gotten several small and annoying cuts on his hands and arms in the process of attempting to sever the cord. Otherwise, he was no closer to freedom than he had been when he started. He stopped working, intending to catch his breath for a few seconds before starting over.

  Only then did Aringher notice that he was being watched. A slender woman wearing a coronet of dark braids stood with crossed arms in the broken frame of the mirror.

  “Mistress Vasari,” Aringher said. “I should have known you’d take an interest in tonight’s proceedings eventually. You didn’t consider untying me, did you?”

  “Briefly. But you looked like you were having so much fun I decided to let you go on.” She looked around the tiny, black-walled room. “I didn’t think that you were interested in this kind of thing.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “Come on, untie me.”

  “If you insist.” She knelt behind him, and he felt her fingers tugging at the knots. A little longer, and he was free.

  She helped him to his feet. He stood massaging his wrists and shrugging his shoulders, trying to get back the circulation.

  “If you don’t get off on this,” she said finally, “then what’s the point?”

  “All in good time,” he said, flexing his stiffened fingers. Most of the cuts had stopped bleeding, and the blood had started to dry. He took a few seconds to glance around the inner room where the Domina and Captain Metadi had held their conference. Except for the torn bed curtains and the broken glass—and a black velvet mask lying forgotten on the table—no evidence remained of that earlier encounter. Aringher contemplated the mask for a moment, then almost absentmindedly picked it up and stowed it in his jacket pocket. One never knew when such things might come in useful.

  “I learned something tonight,” he said, “that may be to our advantage.”

  “Right. How do you feel about getting out of here, now that you’ve learned it?”

  “Highly positive,” Aringher said. “I believe I’ve exhausted all the possibilities of the current situation.”

  The two walked together into the outer room. Vasari pursed her lips thoughtfully. “What are the odds that the first person out in the hall gets picked up by Security?”

  “About fifty-fifty,” Aringher said. “Did you bring a blaster?”

  “Better yet. I brought two.”

  “You know me too well, I’m afraid. Well, nothing for it.”

  He took the weapon from her outstretched hand, and pressed the lockplate enough to disengage the bolt. Then he kicked the door, making it fly open, and in the same movement threw himself out into the hall in a low, flat dive. The action brought him up against the far wall, lying prone with his blaster leveled toward the farther reaches of the Double Moon.

  Nothing else happened. The hall was deserted.

  “Do you know how silly I feel lying here?” he asked, after a little while.

  “I have my suspicions,” she said. “Shall we away?”

  Aringher pushed himself back up onto his feet. “Your place or mine?”

  “Yours is closer.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  A short walk later, the two of them were safely ensconced in Festen Aringher’s apartment overlooking the Strip. Monitors and projectors flashed against three of the four walls in the main room, filling the place with a babble of images and sounds. Aringher had stripped off his jacket and shirt and was busy applying antiseptic to his cuts. Mistress Vasari sat curled up on the divan watching him.

  “Time for a talk,” she said. “What brought you to the Double Moon, and how did you end up in such an undignified position?”

  “You see before you,” Aringher said, “a martyr to the cause of a more equitable galactic polity. I came to the Double Moon because I had heard that Captain Metadi made Waycross his usual port of call, and the Double Moon his usual site of recreation, after a successful voyage. As it happens, I desired speech with the good captain on a certain subject.”

  “Dare I ask?”

  “My unending search for truth, beauty, peace, wisdom—”

  “Money.”

  “There is that,” he admitted. “But we never spoke, Captain Metadi and I, except informally in passing. Before I could arrange a meeting, I heard that someone of considerable importance was already in the building in search of the good captain, and an interview between them was to commence in mere minutes. As I soon discovered, that someone was the Domina of Entibor herself.”

  “Veratina?” Vasari looked surprised. “I know the old lady has an eye for well-set-up young men, but—”

  “Your gossip is sadly out of date, my dear. Veratina’s dead, and the new Dómina is a schoolgirl fresh out of the Delaven Academy on Galcen.”

  “She’s not wasting any time, then, is she?”

  “Indeed not,” said Aringher. “Which stirred my curiosity a great deal, let me tell you. ‘Why,’ I asked myself, ‘should this person be seeking that person?’ Motives interest me, so I decided to find out—and what I
learned is that an innocent, beautiful …”

  “Rich.”

  “ … rich young woman desired to contract an alliance with an old, deceitful—”

  “Spare me. Jos Metadi is younger than you are.”

  “Details, details. What counts is that the new Domina appeared to have reached the same conclusion I had, of the need for this particular man in that particular job at this very time. Not only that, she had learned, as had I, the best place to find him—and while I had determined to wait until he was finished with other business before pressing my case, she was bolder. In short, the sly minx outmaneuvered me.”

  Vasari smothered a laugh. “That has to be a first.”

  “Regrettably, it isn’t.” Aringher sighed theatrically. “Yet while I couldn’t be the earliest person to open negotiations with Captain Metadi, I was admirably positioned to become the best-informed. And what I learned is that neither Metadi nor the young woman really wanted to make the bargain. I was mentally rehearsing my own presentation to the captain, setting forth our cause in terms based on my new knowledge, when … well, I’ve seen people be manipulated before …”

  “You’ve done your own share of manipulating.”

  “True, I confess,” said Aringher. He shrugged, grimacing a little as the motion tugged at the cuts along his shoulder blades. “At any rate, just as it appeared that no agreement could be reached between the two of them, another party decided to take a hand in the proceedings. Subsequently I was discovered. The rest you know.”

  “‘Another party’?” Mistress Vasari’s eyes gleamed with a businesslike curiosity. “Mages, do you think?”

  “I doubt it, my dear. The captain and the young lady are still alive, and the Double Moon is still standing. Considering the magnitude of the grudge the Mages must hold against Jos Metadi, any attempt at revenge would involve considerably more than a locked door and, from the sound of it, a few poorly aimed blaster bolts in a dark alley.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me, I assure you.”