Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds Read online

  She didn’t look surprised. “Not yet,” she said. “I have a question for you first. Guild business.”

  “I doubt if I can answer it for you,” he said. “I’m just an apprentice, remember?”

  Llannat shook her head. “You’re more than that, and every Adept in the Guild knows it. I want you to tell me what’s going on with Ari. Master Ransome sent me here to play bodyguard for him—so why is he being shipped out when I’m not?”

  “I don’t know,” said Owen truthfully. Master Ransome hadn’t mentioned Ari in their discussions back at the Retreat. Even the cautionary note Owen had sent to the Medical Station had been his own idea. He and Ari had never been close—quite the opposite, in fact—but there was always the chance his brother might spot him by accident in the Namport crowd. “The orders probably have something to do with Space Force policy, whatever that is.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. “The last time I got any orders, Master Ransome pulled strings or pushed buttons or did whatever it is he does. Next thing I knew, instead of going to Galcen South Polar and treating recruits for snow blindness, I was wading through the water-grain paddies on Nammerin with your brother. This time, though, nobody did any such thing—and I want to know how I’m supposed to be protecting Ari if he’s off on a ship somewhere and I’m stuck down here on the mud flats until further notice.”

  “It could be that Master Ransome has assigned someone else to look after my brother. Or he may not need looking after any more. Who knows?”

  “I think you do. Are you here to guard him?”

  Owen hesitated. The question was coming too close to matters that shouldn’t be spoken of aloud—not to someone who carried a Magelord’s staff on a planet where a Mage-Circle still worked as Circles had in the old days.

  “I think you ought to go now,” he said.

  He saw her drawing herself together, as if gathering her resolve. Then she spoke, quietly and with a touch of reluctance. “I don’t want to do it like this,” she said. “But it’s Ari’s life we’re talking about. I’m an Adept, Owen Rosselin-Metadi, and you’re still an apprentice in the Guild. You owe me an answer. I’m waiting.”

  “As you will, Mistress,” he said formally. She really has changed. The Llannat Hyfid who left the Retreat for Nammerin would never have had the nerve to ask me like that. “No, I didn’t come here to guard my brother.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m here because I was sent here, like you. But unless Master Ransome told you to make contact with me, please leave. You’re putting us both in danger as long as you stay.”

  He didn’t wait for her reaction this time, but closed his eyes and let himself sink back into deep meditation. It was flight, pure and simple: questions he didn’t hear, nothing would oblige him to answer. Eventually, she would grow tired of waiting and go away.

  When he opened his eyes again, the apartment was dim and empty, and the door was closed.

  Owen unfolded himself from his sitting position. The rush of blood to the limbs made him sway. He had been far under this time, farther than he’d expected when making his escape from Llannat’s questions. He shouldn’t have brought anything with him out of a trance that deep except a renewed sense of calm, but this time a faint disquiet still remained: perhaps an echo of Llannat’s worries, but more likely an echo of his own—for he knew, with a conviction beyond knowing, that his older brother Ari still needed an Adept to look out for him.

  IV.

  RAAMET: GEFALON NAMMERIN: NAMPORT

  EVEN IN the Mageworlds, Jessan reflected, a spaceport remained a spaceport. There was something about building a city on the widest, flattest piece of ground available that made places as different as Embrig and Namport unmistakably members of the same family. Galcen Prime was different, of course—Galcen Prime was always different—but Prime had ruled a world long before it went on to rule most of the civilized galaxy, and in any case Galcen South Polar had more than enough wideness and flatness to make up for the lack.

  Gefalon on Raamet was another example of the breed. The sun beat down on a city built out of rock, in the same bleached-out brown color as the arid landscape. A range of blue-green mountains in the far distance, with clouds wreathing their snowcapped peaks, suggested that Raamet might elsewhere have better, and cooler, scenery to offer, but no starpilot would risk traveling away from the port to find out. Not on this side of the Net, anyway.

  The spaceport itself was mostly landing field, with none of the Republic’s high-tech docking facilities. Ships here didn’t even set down on tarmac. The lines marking off the vast area into sections had been etched directly into the packed and hardened earth. Jessan wondered how often it rained in Gefalon, if it ever did—and how many Mageworlds warships over how many years of conflict it had taken to bake the desert ground into a surface as hard as rock.

  Gefalon had been one of the Magelords’ staging bases in the old days, and the landing field looked big enough to hold an entire fleet. Those days were gone, though; the Mageworlders had been stripped of their starflight capability at the end of the war. The few ships currently in port were all registered in the Republic, and had passed through the customs inspection at one Net Station or another.

  Jessan and Beka—No, he reminded himself, Doc and Tarnekep Portree—sat at table in an open-air diner just outside the spaceport landing field. A roof of corrugated metal provided shade, and at the brick grill in the center of the diner a bored cook tended small bits of anonymous meat threaded onto sticks.

  The local beer was unspeakable. But the local wine—or so the interpreter sharing Doc and Tarnekep’s table had advised them—was even worse. As for the water, Jessan’s medical training made him chary of drinking anything remotely resembling that liquid in an unfamiliar and primitive port.

  But we have to drink something in this climate, he thought with resignation, unless we want to add dehydration to the rest of our problems. So beer it is.

  Jessan refilled his glass from the pitcher in the center of the table. Tilting back his chair, he watched with half-closed eyes as Captain Portree negotiated for a cargo with a Raametan from somewhere on the other side of the mountains.

  According to the interpreter, the small, dusty-looking man claimed to be Raamet’s foremost dealer in medicinal herbs, barks, and minerals. His claim, Jessan reflected, might even be true. If so, the Mageworlds had come down a long way from the height of their power, when their medical and biochemical technology had been preeminent in the galaxy.

  “Take it or leave it,” Tarnekep was saying, while the interpreter murmured his running translation a sentence or so behind. “But I can’t guarantee a delivery date for your material. The quantities you’re talking about aren’t enough to fill a quarter of my cargo space. I’m not going to go straight on to—what’s its name?—straight on to Ninglin with most of the hold empty; I’m going to hit a couple of closer systems first. Anything that’s perishable, if it’s not too bulky, I’ve got stasis boxes for—or I can carry it frozen, which is a lot cheaper because it doesn’t eat up power like the box does. You still interested?”

  The herb merchant replied in a rapid patter of sentences that the interpreter relayed in accented Galcenian. “I am interested. But it is not me you will be collecting payment from. My associates on Ninglin may not wish to give you the full fee if shipment is delayed.”

  “What delay?” Tarnekep demanded. “You didn’t have a carrier lined up before I got here. If I walk away, you may have to wait another month or so before you find another. I’ll settle up with your buddies, don’t worry. Is it a deal or not?”

  The merchant shrugged and said something brief and final-sounding. “A deal,” relayed the interpreter.

  “Good,” said Tarnekep, and held out his hand. “Done?”

  The merchant met the captain’s grip and uttered what might have been his only word of Galcenian. “Done.”

  Tarnekep nodded. “Have the stuff here before dark so we can get i
t loaded,” he said as he drew his hand away. “I’m lifting ship first thing in the morning.”

  After the Raametans had left, Tarnekep picked up his untouched glass of beer and drained it, grimacing a little at the taste. He set the glass down on the table and regarded the two empty chairs.

  “I wonder,” he said thoughtfully, “which one of our friends is the spy.”

  “You have a nasty suspicious mind, Tarnekep Portree,” Jessan said. “Slandering a couple of honest businessmen like that. They’re probably wondering the same thing about us.” He took a sip of his beer and added, “My bet’s on the interpreter.”

  “Too easy,” said Portree. “I think the interpreter’s just for show. That little worm of a dealer, now—he understands more Galcenian than he lets on.”

  “You could be right,” Jessan said.

  “I know I’m right,” Portree told him. “Did you see his eyes? He was listening to me, not to the interpreter. But it doesn’t matter—as long as he’s got a legitimate cargo bound for Ninglin, I don’t care who he tells about how much I charge to carry it. Think of it as free advertising.”

  “Out of what we’re charging him for that run, we could put up a holosign over every bar in Gefalon.”

  Tarnekep shook his head. “You’re too soft, Doc. I was earning my living at this job while you were still giving physical examinations to lonesome recruits. Traders like us are all the intersystem carriers the Mageworlds have these days.”

  “The only game in town.” Jessan took another sip of beer, and his dubious expression was not entirely for the taste of the pale yellow liquid. “That’s not going to make us particularly loved by any of our customers, mind you.”

  “I’m not asking them to love me,” Tarnekep said. “Just to pay up when I hand them the bill.”

  Jessan considered the statement for a moment. “Prompt payment is usually a good idea,” he conceded.

  “Damned right it is.” Tarnekep scowled at the pitcher of beer. “And it looks like our friend and his interpreter have gone off and left us with the tab for the bar.”

  “Oh, dear,” Jessan said. “Do we have any local cash at all?”

  “Zero point zip. We’re going to have to turn one of our Ophelan bank drafts into something negotiable before we can settle up and get out.”

  Jessan finished his beer and stood up. “I can handle the money changing,” he said. “You hold down the table so the manager won’t think we’re trying to skip town without paying.”

  “That’s right,” said Tarnekep. “Stick me with having to drink some more of this stuff.”

  Jessan nodded toward the grill. “Order some of the lizard-on-a-stick instead. It can’t be any worse.”

  “You really think it’s lizard?”

  “Who knows? You can tell me when I get back.”

  “Hah.” Tarnekep looked up at Jessan. As always, the red plastic eye patch made it hard to read the expression on the captain’s face. “You take care, Doc, wandering around dirtside with all that money on you. I’d hate to lose a perfectly good copilot.”

  The sun was coming up over Namport, and Klea Santreny was tired. She picked her way along the dirty streets in her uncomfortable shoes—her working shoes, cheap and flimsy and overdecorated, with open toes and with heels too high and narrow for the sticky black Namport mud. Even though she stayed on the duckboards as much as possible, she would have to clean the shoes when she got home, no matter how tired she felt.

  One more chore to do before I can sleep, she thought wearily. If I can get to sleep at all.

  She hadn’t slept much yesterday or the day before: the nightmares were back again. She’d had bad dreams for as long as she could remember, dark and confusing stories with no beginning and no end, but never as often or as dark as lately.

  I don’t even remember what I dreamed yesterday. But it was bad, I know that much.

  Tonight, though, had been even worse. Sometime around the third trick of the evening, she’d starting seeing things again. The pictures weren’t real—she’d figured out that much by now, but the knowledge didn’t help. The pictures were thoughts, other people’s thoughts, come loose somehow and crawling into her head: images of faces that weren’t in front of her, drifting patches of color, a stab of pain in someone else’s leg, the occasional word … . Bitch. Slut. Whore.

  Klea hadn’t thought anything could be worse than the pictures. She’d actually begun getting used to those, or at least she’d started learning how to sort them out from her own thoughts. But the images kept getting sharper, and the words kept getting louder, and now the feelings weren’t just the ones on the surface anymore. She’d wondered sometimes what the customers at Freling’s Bar really wanted when they bought themselves a few minutes’ use of her body in one of the rooms upstairs; lately she was finding out. A stiff drink—a real drink, not one of the fakes she had while she was working—helped blur the thoughts a little, but not enough.

  If it’s like this again tomorrow night I don’t know how I’m going to stand it.

  She laughed unsteadily. “If today’s as bad as yesterday, kid,” she said aloud, “you may not last until tomorrow night.”

  One of the neighborhood’s early risers was passing by in the other direction, on his way to whatever crack-of-dawn job forced him awake and out onto the streets. He caught what she was saying—she hadn’t made any effort to lower her voice—and increased his pace.

  Emotions touched her as he went past: a suffocating wave of disapproval … electric blue tickles of fear … a dark image of the warehouses by the spaceport.

  “No,” she muttered—under her breath, this time. “No, damn you. I’m not coming from the port. And I’m not going there either.”

  She’d worked in Namport for five years now, long enough to know that for a hooker, the bars and the narrow streets around the edges of the spaceport were the last stop. She shivered.

  If I don’t quit acting crazy I will be working there. Freling isn’t going to want a crazy woman hanging around his bar, and if he knows I’m cracking up he’s going to spread the word.

  I’ve got to get some sleep.

  She was approaching the street of old, close-packed houses where she had her apartment. On the corner of the block, a bit closer to her, was one of the few places open at this hour: the little hole-in-the-wall grocery where she did most of her shopping. She quickened her stride, stumbling a little as the high heels of her shoes slid in a patch of mud that some earlier pedestrian had left on the sidewalk.

  Outside the shop, she paused for a second on the woven grain-straw mat, steadying herself with a hand on the door-frame as she wiped the clots of mud off her shoes. She caught a brief glimpse of herself in the shopwindow as she did so: hollow cheeks, shadowed eyes, and a bright red dress that only made it all worse.

  I look like a hag.

  She ran her fingers through her brown hair in a futile attempt to improve the sweaty, tangled curls. The colored lights in the shopwindow bounced off the mass of bangle bracelets on her arm. The sudden painful glare made her head spin; she clutched the doorframe even tighter until the dizziness faded and her head came back to something like normal. Still shaking, she pushed the door open and went in.

  At this hour, the shop was empty except for the owner at his usual place behind the front counter and a tawny-haired young man in a worn beige coverall. The young man was one she’d seen a few times around the neighborhood, usually in the late evening or the very early morning; he was looking at the shelves in back, and she supposed he must be another person who worked nights and slept—or tried to—during the day.

  The shopkeeper smiled and nodded at her as she entered. But the gesture was an empty one: just beneath the surface of his mind the small ugly thoughts twisted and squirmed, while his pleasant expression never changed.

  Liar, she thought, biting her tongue to keep from saying the word aloud, and forced herself to nod back. Her money was as good as anyone’s, no matter what she had to do to earn
it, and Ulle would keep his opinions to himself as long as she had something to spend.

  Nobody’s hurt by what he doesn’t say, she told herself. Nobody except you, anyhow, and that doesn’t count.

  She picked up a basket from the stack by the counter and began to fill it. A box of water-grain cereal for porridge—a bundle of fresh greens for stewing—a brick of frozen marsh-eels that probably wouldn’t taste too bad when she added them to the greens—and then she was at the racks of bottles in the back of the store.

  “Can’t have marsh-eel soup without beer,” she said. She was talking to herself out loud too much these days, she knew that; but it helped her keep track of which thoughts were hers. “Beer for the soup, and aqua vitae for the cook.”

  She put a couple of bottles of Tree Frog beer into the basket. The square purple bottles of aqua vitae were on the top shelf; she was going to have to stretch to get one. The thought of doing so made her aware that her legs weren’t as steady as she had thought. Better not to try at all than to reach for a bottle and fall down while Ulle was watching.

  She could feel the shopkeeper’s gaze like hands on her back, following the movements of her hips under the tight red skirt. Vertigo struck again without warning; her head reeled, and the bottles of beer and instant-heat cha’a in front of her wavered and blurred, overlaid with a grotesque, distorted image of her own body seen from behind. Reality and hallucination ran together like water, and she watched the dress peel away from her flesh, showing Ulle her naked back and buttocks.

  Klea’s gorge rose. She gripped the edge of the shelf in front of her and swallowed hard. The image faded and the nausea went with it, leaving her soaked in cold sweat.

  “Damn,” she whispered hoarsely. “Damn, damn, damn … kid, you have got to get some sleep.”

  She drew a long, shaky breath and reached again for the aqua vitae. It was no good—her knees started to buckle under her and she knew she was going to fall.