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Book: Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald
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Authors: Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald
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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
E VEN 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
“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
E VEN 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
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