The Gathering Flame (37 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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“I hope so. It’s an arrangement between equals—Selvaurs don’t make any other kind.”
“Under whose command?” she asked. “Ours or theirs?”
He gave a quick, tight shrug. “We haven’t settled that.”
“I want you to run it. I’ve said so from the beginning.”
“I could.” It was a statement of fact, not a boast. He wasn’t looking at her at all; instead, he was gazing with intense concentration at the patterns of light and shadow cast onto the tabletop by the leaded window-glass. “But it won’t work unless the Entiborans and the Selvaurs come to the same conclusion on their own.”
“I can speak for Entibor,” she said. “As for the Selvaurs … you know them, Jos. Knew Ferrdacorr, anyway. Will they accept a—a thin-skin leading them?” “I hope so. Under certain circumstances.”
He still wasn’t looking at her. Perada felt a strange, unexpected chill. “What kind of … circumstances … are you talking about?”
Jos lifted his head to meet her gaze, and she saw that his face was pale and set. “I’ve promised to give them Ari as a foster child.”
“
What
?” She stood up so fast that her chair fell backward and hit the floor with a clatter. “You had
no right
—!”
“Do you want an alliance?” His voice had an edge to it like a knife. “If you want the Selvaurs to fight on our side, that’s their price: family bond with me and mine.”
She felt like she was choking. “Family? You think a bunch of scaly, green, bad-tempered—”
“Ari will be safe with Ferrda’s people. Can you promise me that much if he stays on Entibor? I had to shoot my way in, and I suppose that in order to take him to safety on Maraghai I’ll have to shoot my way back out.”
Perada had to grip the edge of the table with both hands. The rush of anger was so strong it was making her dizzy. She drew her breath in through her teeth to keep from screaming.
“You had no right,” she said again. “If the Selvaurs want your blood kin, you’ll have to look some place besides here.”
His face was like a carving out of ice. “What do you mean?”
“You are the Consort,” she said. “Ari is your son by law, and by my command. But your gene-child, he is not.”
 
(GALCENIAN DATING 966 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 30 VERATINA)
 
T
HINGS WEREN’T good aboard
Wandering Star.
The combined crews worked together as well as could be expected, but the sick ones continued to die at an astounding rate. Two days in orbit over Sapne saw four more cycled out the airlock. During those two days, Jos and Maert and Covain worked over the manuals for the navicomp—a model far different from the one Jos had used on
Meritorious Reward
—and discussed where they should go.
“We can’t bring plague to a civilized world,” Covain insisted. “That wouldn’t be right.”
“I’m not planning to, but there are places,” Maert said. “And maybe by when no one else is sick, no one is infectious.”
“Maybe,” Covain said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“How about Yasp?” Jos said, looking up from the text-files in the
Merchanter’s Guide.
“It says here they’ve got orbiting reception areas, including quarantine berthing.”
“You don’t feel up to a ground landing?”
“I can do it,” he said. “But I think maybe Captain Covain has a point.”
“I’m the captain,” Maert said. “On my ship there is no other.” She paused for a moment. “You will make course for Yasp. Seek the quarantine berthing.”
Jos did the calculations, once with the navicomp, then again using ship’s memory as a check. Later that day, Maert called the crew to acceleration stations, they made the run to jump, and Jos took
Wandering Star
into hyperspace.
When the stars had flared and died outside the bridge windows—actual armor-glass, not viewscreen projections—and the view had changed to the grey pseudosubstance of hyper, Maert leaned forward and handed him a piece of paper. It was a full pilot’s license, with the name of the last holder masked off and Jos’ own name lettered in its place.
“Here,” she said. “You’re an accredited, certified pilot now.”
Jos looked at it.
“You wonder if other ships will take this? Look.” Maert pointed to the bottom, where one signature had been crossed out and another added. “That’s my chop. Everyone knows me. Anyone doubts it has to fight me. No one will dare.”
“Two weeks to Yasp,” Jos said.
That ship’s-night on the midwatch, Sedver—one of the supply clerks from the
Merry
, who’d contracted a mild case of the plague and then had seemed to recover—relapsed. He fell to the deck, blood running from every orifice, and died before his shipmates could carry him to a bunk.
Number-two cargo bay was pumped clear of air, taken down to freezing, and turned into a temporary morgue until they got to realspace and a chance to use the airlocks. Sedver was only the first occupant. Before the night was over, Berud—the engineer off the hopper, whom so far the plague had spared—came down with the fever, cramps, and rash that marked the first stages. In four days he was dead, screaming in pain. The
Star’s
medical locker had expended all its painkillers.
By then Covain and three crew members from
Wandering Star
had relapsed too, and died. The ones who remained—there wasn’t any shortage of berthing spaces now—gathered around the mess table, their faces haggard, and wondered which one of them would be next. That night Captain Maert opened the grog locker, and they held a noisy, drunken free-spacer’s wake for those who had died already, and for themselves.
The plague walked through the ship, and this time mortality was complete. Jos used the engineering skills he’d picked up in his short turn aboard
Quorum
, and everything that he’d learned since, to keep the freighter’s engines running. They weren’t too different from
Quorum’s,
though far simpler than
Meritorious Reward’s
. Between checking the course—the autopilot was old and cranky—and checking the engines, he barely had time to eat, and what sleep he got he took in the pilot’s chair or on the spare acceleration couch down in the engine room.
He knew that the number of the ship’s crew was steadily diminishing, but not until Captain Maert stopped him as he made his endless cycle from the bridge to engineering and back to the bridge again did he realize how far it had gone.
“Come, young Jos,” Maert said, laying a hand on his arm. She opened the door to the captain’s cabin—the only single on the little ship, to starboard off the common room—and gestured him inside. In the better light of the cabin, Jos saw that Maert’s eyes were fever bright, and the plague’s telltale rash had started on her forehead and her hands.
She lay back on the bunk. From the way she moved, he could tell how much the effort of rising from it and fetching him had cost her. “It is only the two of us now,” she said, “and soon it will not be me.” She pointed to the cabin’s fold-down desk. “All the account numbers are there. Now I give this ship to you. It is yours. You are captain.”
She held up her hand. “Now you shake my hand. I say ‘Done?’ and you say ‘Done.’ That’s how it is among free-spacers. Come now.”
Jos took her hand. It was hot and dry, but her grip was still firm. “Done?” she said, and, “Done,” Jos replied.
“Now, Captain, I ask you to leave me,” Maert said. “You have your ship to fly.”
Two days later, Jos put Maert’s body into the morgue. While he was securing it to the deck, the navigation alarm buzzed in the headset of his pressure-suit. He made his way to the bridge, and was ready in time for dropout from hyper. When he checked the navicomp readouts, he saw that he was near the Yasp system, but not yet in it and not yet in communications range. He set course for the star, clicked on the autopilot, pulled off the helmet of his p-suit, and went back to the galley for a cup of cha’a.
As he reached for the cup, the muscles in his arm throbbed. He felt lightheaded. The room swam before him. “Too tired,” he muttered. “Only me left.” He reached up to rub his eyes, and his hand came away with a smear of blood. His hand was showing the beginnings of a crimson rash.
“Only me. Not even me.”
He went forward again and picked up his pilot’s license, the one Maert had given him. He unsealed his p-suit, put his license into the internal pocket, and sealed up the suit again. Then he picked up the external comms. Setting the link to automatic repeat, he spoke one word, “Plague,” and began transmission.
That done, he made his way back to the captain’s cabin, strapped himself into the acceleration couch, and sealed the faceplate of his p-suit. The suit’s air would give out in less than the two to four days it usually took for the plague to run its course, but—considering how all the others had died—perhaps that would be a mercy.
The fever came over him, and he shook, and sweated, and the nightmares came. At one point in his delirium, he saw the door open, and a man came into the cabin. Jos would have thought he was a ghost, except that none of the many dead, on Sapne or in space, had looked like him: pale and dark-haired, and dressed in plain black.
The stranger carried a polished wooden staff in one hand, and when he saw that, Jos knew his visitor was an Adept, a member of the powerful and mysterious Guild. Rumors of the Adepts and their powers were all over dockside, and once or twice back on Gyffer Jos had even seen Adepts, quiet black-clad figures going about whatever business such people had to do.
“Don’t worry,” the Adept said. “I’m here now, and I’ll take care of you.”
“There’s no one on the ship but me.”
“You’re right,” said the other. “But don’t worry. I can handle it.”
“What are you doing here?”
The Adept smiled—somewhat ruefully, it seemed to Jos. “I owe you a debt, I suppose. I don’t really remember. But it doesn’t matter. You rest, and I’ll take care of the ship.”
Jos gave up and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he wasn’t in the
Star’s
forward cabin anymore. He was in a brighter, larger, whiter space, lying on a soft bed. He felt weak, but his head was clear.
“Good morning,” said an older man in a pale blue uniform. “Glad to see you with us.”
“Where am I?” Jos asked.
“Infirmary Three, Yasp Reception,” the man said. “And you’ve been very ill—you spent a week in the isolation pod before we could be sure we weren’t going to lose you.” He produced a clip-pad from some place Jos couldn’t see. “Now, if you don’t mind, there are a couple of points to clear up. You had some papers on you which gave the name Jos Metadi?”
“That’s right. I’m Metadi.”
“Ah. And who are you, Gentlesir Metadi? And what is the name of the ship you were on? I’m afraid the log was incomplete, and the registry here doesn’t list a vessel of her description.”
“Warhammer,
” Jos said—a name out of Gyfferan legend, and maybe better luck for the old ship than its former name had been. And definitely not on anybody’s list of ships that had ever touched dirt on plague-ridden Sapne. “My ship is called
Warhammer
, and I’m her captain.”
 
ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 3 PERADA
 
H
AVE YOU found what you’re looking for?”
Mistress Vasari couldn’t keep the relief out of her voice. She and Errec Ransome had been walking in the rain and mist for some hours, ever since leaving the gate at the landing field. She wasn’t lost, in the general sense—she’d lived in the capital long enough by now to have some feel for the local geography—but she had no idea where they were going. Errec had chosen the route, without bothering to explain how or why, and she had gone with him.
They’d come at last to a grubby business and light-manufacturing district, somewhere in the outskirts of greater An-Jemayne. Business hours had ended, but full dark was still almost an hour away. Already, though, everything looked drab and greyed out. The streetlamps hadn’t yet flicked on, and buildings on all sides blocked most of the light. And here Errec Ransome had, finally, stopped.
“There are Mages here,” he said.
“There are Mages all over An-Jemayne, Errec. That’s the problem. As far as I can tell, they’ve got all the local talent either totally hoodwinked or completely subverted—the Guild hasn’t gotten anything useful out of Entibor in decades—and not even the Ministry of Internal Security has managed to catch them at work. I was hoping you could help with that.”
“I’ve found them for you,” he said. “You’ll have to ask your own questions.”
“I’d rather you did the interrogation, to be honest. You’re better at it than I am—the only Mage I ever got close enough to, destroyed himself while I was working on him.”
He shook his head. “I don’t do that sort of thing anymore.” She waited for an explanation, but he didn’t give her one. Instead, he pointed to a doorway in the brick wall of the nearest office building. “Behind there. Up a flight of stairs. If you want them, come on.”
He walked over the twisted the mechanical fastener on the door. The metal broke. He applied his shoulder. The door squealed open on rusty hinges.
“Remember,” she said, “these people also carry blasters.”
Errec glanced back at her. “I know.”
She followed him up a narrow staircase to the second floor, and down an unlit corridor to a closed door. This one opened quietly. Inside, a circle of black-robed figures knelt facing inward, heads bowed. Vasari felt a thrill of recognition: for the first time, she was actually watching the enemy at work.
The privateers were right. Errec’s turned into one hell of a Mage-finder. These guys were so warded and guarded that I couldn’t spot them at all.
Errec stepped over the threshold of the room and into the center of the kneeling Circle. For several seconds, nothing happened at all. Then the air in the darkened room began to glow with a greenish light—faint and sourceless at first, then concentrating on Errec. The members of the Circle had not moved, but Vasari could feel a struggle going on nevertheless.
The green light grew brighter. Errec closed his eyes and brought his hands up, empty, as if they held a staff. The light collected in his hands—
Power
, thought Vasari,
he’s calling in more Power than he can hold
—and increased in intensity until she had to shield her face. The silence in the room grew louder and louder, until the absence of sound reached a point where her ears hurt from it.
“Ask them your questions,” Errec said. His voice was oddly normal and conversational, as if he were not keeping in balance more of the substance of reality than any one person ought to hold. “They won’t break away.”
Vasari hesitated a moment, then stepped forward and laid her hand on the shoulder of the nearest Mage. As Errec had promised, the mind within lay open and unresisting.
“Interesting,” she said. “A minor Circle, but part of a larger work. Hold them as long as you can, Errec—this is going to take quite a while.”
 
The private rooms of House Rosselin’s Summer Palace had the same high-ceilinged, many-windowed architecture as the public chambers. The design factors that made for coolness and light during the long summer days of these higher latitudes had a less fortunate effect during the autumn evenings. All along the dim unheated corridors, the night outside made the windowpanes into black and chilly squares.
Jos Metadi had been prowling restlessly through the palace ever since leaving Perada in the hall of light. The dinner hour had passed long ago, and he had ignored it; he didn’t have an appetite. Nor did he have the faintest idea what he was going to do next.
He didn’t even know if the deal with Ferrda was still good.
Mine by law and custom—I don’t know if that’s enough or not. I don’t know if Perada
… He stopped the thought before it could finish. He didn’t want to think at all about Perada right now if he could help it. Later, maybe. After he’d figured out what he was supposed to do.
He wished he were out in space somewhere. Fighting Mages was easy, and he suspected that at the moment he would enjoy hunting down something dangerous and blowing it to pieces.
The servants were nowhere in sight; he hadn’t encountered a warm body in palace livery since the nursemaid took
Ari upstairs. They’re probably all lying low, he thought. They can tell There’s bad stuff happening, and they want to stay out of it. Smart people.
He decided that he envied them.
Jos halted. His wanderings, prompted by who-knew-what unconscious impulses, had brought him to the doors of the nursery wing. On an impulse—
Ari’s a good kid; he doesn’t need to get jerked around by all of this—
he put his hand on the lockplate.
The door didn’t open.
For a while he stood there, not thinking, only looking at the door. After a few seconds, a single realization struggled into the foreground of his mind: they had changed the ID codes for the nursery locks.
Changed them to keep him away from Ari.
He drew in a sharp breath and turned away. This time his strides were fast and purposeful, taking him from the nursery wing to the Domina’s private apartments. Those lockplates had always answered to his ID as well.
They still did. The door slid open at his touch, and he stepped into the bedchamber of the Domina of Entibor: a big, airy room, with casement windows stretching from floor to ceiling all along one wall. Curtains—thin, summery things—framed a vista long since taken over and obliterated by the night. The panes gave back nothing but reflections, and beyond the reflections, darkness.
The floor of polished parquetry was meant to be cool and slick against bare feet on high-summer nights and mornings. Jos remembered the feel of it, as he remembered not caring whether the flimsy curtains were drawn or not, and forced himself to push the memories away. He couldn’t afford to think about those things right now.
Perada sat in one of the cushioned bentwood chairs on the opposite side of the room from the bed. The back of the chair was taller than she was—she wasn’t a big woman; Ari was going to dwarf her before he was half-grown—and she had her feet on a cushioned footstool. She wore a quilted night-robe, and her hair hung down in two long, shimmering braids.
Jos couldn’t think of what to say. She could have made it easier by speaking first, but she just looked at him, her eyes bright and blue, like the heart of a flame. Finally he mastered himself enough to speak.
“Why have the lockplates been changed in the nursery wing?” He knew as soon as he’d spoken that it was a disastrously wrong thing to say. But words couldn’t be called back any more than could a blaster bolt, and he couldn’t do anything but stand there waiting.
Perada’s eyes went cold, and her voice had nothing behind it that wasn’t iron. “I suppose that the locks were changed at the order of the Minister of Internal Security.”
“Nivome do’Evaan.” He pronounced the Minister’s name with distaste. There was a clammy suspicion in the back of his head, and he wasn’t going to think about it, especially not now. Later, after all this was straightened out … later there would be time to speculate about Ari Rosselin’s gene-sire.
“Yes,” Perada said. “Nivome.”
“Did you tell him to do it?”
Her lips thinned briefly. “The Minister of Internal Security is responsible for the protection of House Rosselin. And my lord Nivome takes his duties seriously.”
“I’ll bet he does.”
“He would be no use to me or to Entibor, otherwise.”
Jos drew a deep breath. “Then I wish you joy of him.” It was all painful now, whatever he might decide to do or say; better to deal the worst hurt himself than to wait for the blade to strike home. “Maybe you ought to take
him
for Consort, if he’s so damned devoted.”
Perada went stiff and pale. Red patches burned on her cheekbones like rouge or fever. “It wouldn’t do at all, I’m afraid. Nivome has his undoubted talents, but commanding a warfleet isn’t among them.”
“So you’re keeping me around for the military stuff, is that it?”
“Well … fleet command is one of
your
undoubted talents.”
“Fine.” Jos’s head was pounding and his shoulders hurt. “I’ll run your warfleet for you as long as you need one. You want anything else, get someone else to do it. I’m done.”
 
The Silver Slipper was a fairly decent place. Not quite on-base, it stood near Central HQ in that area which formed An-Jemayne’s version of a portside strip. After too long on ship’s rations and Selvauran cookery, Tillijen and Nannla had chosen to dine there for their first night in port.
Tillijen went back up to the buffet; leaving Nannla behind to sip warm mezcla from a silver-fitted thimble-cup. Tilly wanted to refill her own plate with another assortment of Entiboran dainties—things that bore no resemblance to whatever they had once been while running the woods, swimming the seas, or growing in the fields. Only now that she was tasting the flavors of home again, after so many years away, did she realize how much she had missed them.
“My lady Chereeve?”
She started, and turned—half-expecting to see Nivome do’Evaan, the only man on Entibor to address her by that name. But the speaker was a smallish, muscular man with thick red hair, dressed in plain dirtsider clothes, and his accent was respectable middle-class Entiboran. Tillijen shook her head. “Never heard of her.”
“Tillijen Chereeve,” he said. “Oldest daughter in your generation to the head of House Chereeve.”
“I told you, there’s nobody by that name left alive. I signed the papers and declared myself dead, the way they wanted me to, and that was it.” Her voice was low.
“For someone who’s dead to House and homeworld,” the man said, “the Minister of Internal Security is certainly spending a great deal of trouble to find you.”
“Ooh, that was nasty,” Tillijen said, with genuine admiration. “I suppose he’s hoping to find out what happened on Maraghai—if you’re one of Gentlesir Nivome’s enemies, I’m almost tempted to give it to you for free, just to disoblige him.”
The man looked as if he might have been amused, if he hadn’t been too well-mannered to indulge himself at her expense. “We would appreciate knowing it, that’s true—”
“We?”
“—but that isn’t why I’m here. My lady—”
“Tillijen.”
“My lady, you are alone, and Internal Security has agents everywhere. Please come with me. You do not dare fall into the minister’s hands.”
“Why?”
“In brief—one Tillijen Chereeve, were she alive, would be a female of childbearing years, and closely enough related to House Rosselin that a child of her body would be difficult to disprove as one of the Domina’s by genetic means—should both the Domina and the lady Chereeve be dead. Especially if half the genetic material for the child was provided by my lord Nivome, and he swears that the Domina selected him for her honor.”
Tillijen kept her face calm and her voice equally low. “No one can possibly think of getting away with that.”
“An officer of the Interior Ministry is in this building right now, looking for you. At this very moment he’s talking with your companion. She may or may not direct him this way. You must go at once, and not return to any of your usual haunts.”
Out of here, to the port, and see if someone can fetch me out of a sealed gun bubble, Tilly thought. Then, No. All they’d have to do, if they knew where I was, would be to put Nannla in danger, and offer to trade my life for hers. Damn them all. Just when you think you can’t make things any worse …
“I can give you escort to a place of safety,” the man said, “until such time as the danger is past. Should the Domina again become gravid, you will be safe. Until then … the ministry’s agents are charged with the task of finding you and ensuring your cooperation. You cannot return to your ship without hazarding your life—and the lives of your shipmates.”

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