NAMMERIN: SPACE FORCE MEDICAL STATION DOWNTOWN NAMPORT
T
HE SUN had not yet risen. In the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters of the Med Station, most of the rooms were still dark and their occupants asleep. Except for the fading starlight coming in through one unshaded window, Room 231A was as dark as the rest; its occupant, however, was awake and had been for some time. Llannat was alone—the room had bunks and closet space for two, but Housing hadn’t seen fit to assign her a roommate—and she stood in the middle of the bare floor with a short ebony staff in her right hand, fighting against shadows.
Here,
she thought, blocking where her imagined opponent struck.
And here. And the counterstrike—now!
Faster and faster she went through the sequences, until the ebony staff became only a dark blur, almost invisible against the night. Llannat was sweating, and the dark coverall she wore clung to her back and shoulders, but her breathing was steady. She practiced every day, if not always for so long or at such an early hour. This morning, though, she’d awakened in the silent time before dawn and hadn’t been able to sleep.
She’d been dreaming again—not of Darvell, with its blood and fire, but of Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s hidden base in an uncharted belt of asteroids, and of the soft-spoken, grey-haired Entiboran who had bequeathed it to her. Llannat had never known the man’s true name. Beka had called him “Professor,” which suited his demeanor; he had called Ari’s sister “Captain” and “my lady” in return, and had given her loyalty until death.
Nor had Llannat ever learned the Professor’s true age. He was older than he looked, impossibly old; she’d heard him speak of centuries as though they were nothing. He had been Armsmaster and confidential agent to House Rosselin for a long time when the Magewars began. And before that he had been something else.
“ … I foreswore sorcery long ago, when I gave my oath to House Rosselin.”
“Adepts don’t practice sorcery.”
“No. Adepts don’t.”
But the Mages did, and the silver and ebony rod the Professor had carried with him to Darvell was a Magelord’s weapon and badge of office. The Professor hadn’t returned from that journey, but his staff had. Beka had picked it up, either not knowing or not caring about its true nature, and had given it to Llannat without understanding what she did.
Llannat’s own staff, the long one of plain wood that marked her as an Adept, had vanished somewhere in the grey nothingness that those who worked with power called the Void. Some people—Ari’s sister, for one—might think it was chance that had brought Llannat the Professor’s staff in exchange.
But I know better,
Llannat thought.
If this staff came to me, it’s because the Professor wanted it to.
She hadn’t told Master Ransome about the staff. She’d spoken with the Guild Master more than once in the aftermath of the Darvell affair, but she’d left the staff at Prime Base with her luggage every time. Nor had she told Master Ransome anything about the Professor, except in his role as Beka’s copilot. The omissions worried her. She ought to have told the Master of the Guild everything that had to do with the Magelords and the use of power.
It looks like I inherited the Professor’s secrets along with his staff. He never told anyone what he was, except me—and what am I, now? What would the Guild Master call an Adept who carries a Magelord’s staff, and who acknowledges a Magelord as her teacher?
She didn’t need any special wisdom to answer that one. Errec Ransome had never forgotten what the Mages had done to the Guildhouse on his homeworld of Ilarna; nor, so far as Llannat could tell, had he ever forgiven it. He dealt ruthlessly with those remnants of the old Mage-Circles that still surfaced from time to time, and he would not be gentle toward an Adept who had betrayed the Guild by choosing to learn from the enemy.
But you can’t always pick your teachers
, Llannat thought.
Sometimes the universe picks them for you.
The learning didn’t always stop just because the teacher was dead, either. In her dream, she and the Professor had been practicing staffwork in one of the corridors deep beneath the surface of the asteroid base. Sometimes in these dreams she won the practice bouts, and sometimes she lost them, but almost always the Professor talked with her as they fought.
Tonight he had spoken of Ari Rosselin-Metadi.
“My lady’s brother is not a man who works to avoid trouble.
”
“Ari couldn’t be inconspicuous if he tried,”
she had answered, countering the Professor’s blow as she spoke and striking out in turn.
“But the hand of the Guild is over him.”
The Professor turned the stroke aside with ease.
“The Guild’s hand? Or your own?”
“I’m an Adept,”
she said.
“My hand and the Guild’s are the same.”
She missed her block then, and the Professor’s next blow came in against her side. He struck again without waiting for her to recover.
“Mistress, are you sure?”
“When I came to the Guild,”
she said, blocking again,
“I told Master Ransome I would obey—”
“—in order that you might learn,”
the Professor finished for her. The third blow in his sequence came crashing down past her guard and ended the match.
“Apprentice vows. But no one remains an apprentice forever.”
After that she had awakened, to lie staring up at the darkness with her ribs aching from blows that she had taken in a dream. Now she moved through the sequences as she had dreamed them, taking the blows and blocks and counterstrikes and working with them until they flowed together without need for thought.
She didn’t want to think, particularly. It didn’t take dreams and prophecies to know that trouble was coming, and that when it arrived, the vows of a single medic-turned-Adept would dwindle to matters of no importance at all.
The old section of downtown Namport dated from the first few decades of the planet’s settlement. In those days, the buildings had been thrown together using local materials whenever possible, to cut down on the cost of importing fixtures and fittings. Later, in the good times after the end of the Magewar, Namport had grown too fast for the old section to keep up. The wooden-frame buildings with their shuttered balconies weren’t fashionable anymore. Prosperous citizens moved out to newer parts of town, leaving the run-down older houses for the workers who provided casual labor around the port and the industrial districts.
Namport’s traffic, like its architecture, was a mix of galactic technology and local materials. Most of the city dwellers drove nullgrav-assisted hovercars that didn’t need roads in order to operate; and the small-time farmers who harnessed the native tusker-oxen for draft animals had no use for pavement at all. Pedestrians like Owen Rosselin-Metadi had to pick their way through the mud from puddle to puddle.
Owen lived in one of the old quarter’s oldest buildings—a slowly decaying clapboard structure painted a faded and peeling green—and his current job, in the laundry room of a bathhouse at the edge of the spaceport, had him working nights and walking home along the unpaved streets as the sky grew light. Today the street outside his apartment building was deserted except for the neighborhood drunk sleeping propped up against a trash bin. Even the one or two streetwalkers who worked this part of town had gone home.
The main door of the building was open, as usual; whoever owned the place and collected the rent wasn’t going to waste good money on scan-locks or security guards. Owen climbed up the four flights of stairs—ignoring the lift, which had been broken for so long most of the tenants didn’t realize that it existed—and unlocked the door to his room.
His apartment was “furnished,” which in this section of Namport meant that it contained a table with one leg shorter than the other three, a folding metal chair with dents in the seat and back, and a narrow cot with a lumpy mattress. The sheets on the mattress were Owen’s, purchased out of his first week’s pay. Master Ransome had supplied him with enough funds to cover his expenses, but he preferred to work his own way as usual, leaving the roll of credit chits tucked inside the mattress cover for an emergency backup.
Nobody had come into his room since he’d left it the evening before. He would have known if anybody had. After Pleyver, he’d taken precaution upon precaution, but if there were any Mages left on Nammerin they were keeping their distance. Owen had counted on setting something in motion with his arrival, anything from a disturbance in the currents of Power to a physical attempt on his life, and he found the lack of interest disturbing.
The Mages ought to be here,
he thought, as he stripped out of his working clothes.
They’ve had a functioning Circle on Nammerin for a long time, and it shows. All the patterns have knots and kinks in them; they’ve been twisted out of shape by sorcery. I should have startled the Circle into action just by showing up.
He folded his discarded garments and laid them on the chair, with his shoes side by side on the floor beneath, then stretched himself out on the lumpy cot. Sleep tugged at him like an undertow, trying to pull him away from the shore, but he forced himself to stay awake and keep thinking for a few minutes longer. He had work to do, and—if Master Ransome was right—little enough time to do it in. If the Mages on Nammerin weren’t going to reveal themselves of their own accord, then he would have to stir them into action.
Tomorrow,
he told himself.
Tomorrow’s a better time for it. I can wait. Time isn’t just on the Mages’ side. It works for me as well.
In the quarters he shared with another of the Medical Station’s lieutenants, Ari Rosselin-Metadi squeezed a dollop of shaving gel out of the tube and rubbed it onto his cheeks and chin. While the depilatory was doing its work, he laid out his uniform on the neatly made bottom bunk. He’d gotten dressed as far as socks and trousers when he was interrupted by a pounding at the door.
Bare to the waist, with the greenish shaving gel stiffening on his face, Ari padded across the room. The old scars of an encounter with a
sigrikka
—one of the great predators on the planet Maraghai—stood out against the massive, heavy muscles of his bare back and arms. He palmed the lockplate and the door panel slid aside.
Out in the hallway, the greyish pink light of early morning filtered down through the skylight onto the tousled hair and short, stocky form of Bors Keotkyra. The younger officer was carrying a thick bundle of printout flimsies in one hand.
Ari scowled at him. “What’s the racket about? Thomir just got in from being night officer, and you’re pounding loud enough to wake the dead.”
“Promotion lists are in,” said Bors. “Three people from the station made lieutenant commander, and you’re one of them.” He rattled the sheaf of flimsies. “And new orders came in along with the promotion lists—you’ve got some of those, too. Orders, I mean. You’re getting out of this mud-pit. Some people have all the luck.”
“I’ll trade my luck for yours any day,” Ari said. “You don’t happen to know where they’re sending me, do you?”
Bors shook his head. “You’re getting a ship tour; that’s all I know. See you at breakfast—I have to go finish spreading the good word. Later!”
“Later,” said Ari. He hit the lockplate again, and the panel slid shut.
Over in the top bunk, Thomir lifted his head off his pillow far enough to ask blearily, “What was that all about?”
“Orders and promotions.”
“Oh,” Thomir said, and yawned. “And here I thought it was something important.” Ari’s current roommate was both a recent arrival on Nammerin and a newly minted lieutenant; promotion and reassignment wouldn’t be coming his way again any time soon.
“Well, it isn’t. Go back to sleep.”
Ari wiped off the shaving gel with a damp facecloth—actually, a square of the standard-issue reclaimable synthetic that the Space Force used for everything from bandages to blankets—then stuffed the cloth into the recycler and began putting on the rest of his uniform. He slid his arms into the sleeves of his tunic and shrugged it into place, then sealed the tabs and went back over to the closet. A leather gun belt hung from a hook inside the closet door.
The gun belt supported a heavy, war-surplus blaster. Ari belted on the weapon and straightened it so that that holster lay along the outside seam of his trousers. He gave his uniform a final check in the mirror, then headed out of the room and down the corridor to the officers’ mess.
The doors of the dining hall slid open, and Ari caught the Nammerin station’s distinctive early-morning smells of water-grain porridge and fresh-brewed cha‘a. A babble of voices mingled with the clink of glasses and tableware. Even the people who usually didn’t speak to anybody until after the third cup of cha’a were talking, passing the printout flimsies of the promotion and reassignment lists back and forth and checking for news of friends and acquaintances.