Read By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 (3 page)

BOOK: By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3

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Klea Santreny was thin and small-boned, with a tangle of curly, light brown hair; she would have seemed more girl than woman still, at twenty Standard years, except that working for Freling was no way to stay young. Her grey eyes had shadows under them like bruises, and cheap bangle bracelets on her left wrist hid the old, pale scars beneath.

She had fallen asleep on the coarse-piled carpet, with her day-pack tucked underneath her head for a pillow. Her Adept’s staff, a piece of iron-hard
grrch
wood that had begun its career as a broomstick, lay on the floor beside her. A few feet away, in the center of the room, a tawny-haired young man in a beige coverall was moving through the sequences of what looked at first sight to be a slow, graceful dance. He held a plain staff of blond wood in both hands.

Klea drew her knees up and sat for a while watching him. The last time she’d seen Owen—that was all the name she had for him, though she knew he had a family somewhere on Mage-occupied Galcen—he’d been lying on the room’s only bed. His body had been bruised and swollen, and there had been blood on his face and his clothes. But now the marks of ill-usage were gone, and he moved easily, without flinching.

She wondered where he’d been and what he’d done. And how he’d done it; he hadn’t brought the staff into the locked room with him, any more than he’d brought those transitory bruises. “Going out of body,” Owen had called it, when he first told her what he needed to do. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t left the room to do it.

He finished the sequence and turned toward her, his attention seeming to come back from concentration on something not visible in the here-and-now. Hazel eyes regarded Klea with a thoughtful, measuring expression.

“I should have thanked you before,” he said.

She looked down and away, toward the corner of the room where the ugly carpet met the peeling mirror on the long wall opposite the bed. “You don’t need to do that. The room’s yours until morning—you paid for it.”

“I’d never have gotten in here if you hadn’t brought me.” He frowned. “And this is not a place you should have had to come back to.”

“It’s not so bad,” Klea said. Gratitude wasn’t something she’d encountered much of, and she wasn’t certain how she felt about it.

“Don’t lie,” Owen said. “You’re not one of Freling’s hookers any longer. You’re an apprentice to the Guild.”

She snorted. “And your teacher’s going to have fits when he finds out what sort of riffraff you’ve let in.”

His expression changed from faint reproof to something she couldn’t name. “Master Ransome doesn’t have anything to say about it anymore.”

“He’s dead?”

“No,” said Owen. “I’m no longer bound to him.”

“What happened?”

“I asked him for an end to my apprenticeship.”

Getting straight facts out of Owen, Klea reflected, was worse than pulling out mud-thorns. Persistence was the one tactic that sometimes worked. “So—did he give it to you?”

“He said I already had it. What he gave me …” Owen paused. “He gave me Mastery over the whole Guild.”

Klea jerked her head up, startled. “He did
what
?”

“He can’t fight the Magelords any longer,” Owen said. “They have him prisoner—on one of their ships, I think, orbiting Galcen. When I came to him there—”

She stared at him. “You went … ‘out of body,’ did you call it … all the way to Galcen?”

Owen nodded. “It was necessary. When I found Master Ransome, he told me that if I wanted to serve the Guild, I would have to claim the Mastery of it.”

“So you did.”

“Yes.” The corners of his mouth quirked briefly upward. “Granted, nobody knows about the change except for Master Ransome and me—and you, of course—which is going to make asserting my authority somewhat difficult.”

“Uh … yeah.” Klea shook her head, bemused. “So what are you supposed to do with this authority once you assert it?”

“Defeat the Magelords,” he said. “Restore the Guild.”

“All by yourself?”

“No,” he said. “You’re going to help.”

Suivi Point proper—the original settlement, and not the myriad smaller habitats strung out along the Suivan Belt—spread across its main asteroid beneath a series of transparent domes. Over the years, full climate control and artificial gravity had come to most of the residential and business areas, though not to the low-rent districts on the fringes or to the warren of interconnected tunnels and caverns hollowed out of Suivi’s inner depths.

The spacedocks were located well away from the better part of town, behind an impressive series of airtight checkpoints, partly to lessen the risk of accidents from ships coming in and leaving—“but mostly,” Beka said to Jessan as they walked along one of the dockbound glidewalks, “they want to keep the scum and riffraff confined to the port quarter as much as possible. The first thing a free-spacer learns about Suivi Point is that the people who keep their money here don’t want anything to do with the folks who help them make it.”

The glidewalk slid into an interchange where several of the routes peeled away and others joined the main stem. Overhead, a lighted holosign flashed its crimson letters on and off: DINING AND ENTERTAINMENT/PORT ALLEY—SECOND STREET/NEXT LEFT; MAIN DOCKING/NEXT RIGHT; LAST EXITS/ FORWARD THIS WALK.

Jessan glanced up at the sign. “‘Last Exits’? What have we got there—mortuary services?”

“Not exactly,” Beka said.

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

“Well … some of the higher-class firms do include final disposition in their package deals.”

“Package deals,” said Jessan. “Packages of what?”

Beka’s lips twitched in a humorless smile. “Executions. Formal, semiformal, or impromptu, all nice and legal.”

“How charming.”

“This is Suivi Point, remember—if you can’t buy it here, it’s not for sale anywhere.”

Jessan looked curious. “I suppose you have to buy a trial and a conviction first?”

“It helps.”

A little farther on, the glidewalk for Main Docking split off the primary track. The stores alongside changed from gaudy souvenir shops to cheap eating establishments and grim-looking transient hotels. Sealed airlocks broke the graffiti-stained walls at irregular intervals.

Beka pointed at one of the locks. It had a sign stenciled on the hatch: CAUTION! P-SUIT AREA. NO GRAVITY OR ATMOSPHERE BEYOND THIS POINT.

“You have to watch those. Sometimes the portside kids take the warning signs down for laughs.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Jessan told her. “Along with all the other quaint local customs.”

Beka chuckled. “Not the sort of place the group tours from Khesat make a habit of visiting, I suppose.”

“I have never,” said Jessan, “traveled anywhere with a group tour. And while the Space Force, in its infinite wisdom, sent me to a number of fascinating places, Suivi Point wasn’t one of them.”

“Lucky you. I got Suivi Point for my very first port call after I left home. It was a real eye-opener, let me tell you—if Ignac’ hadn’t been looking after me that time, I might never have made it back to the ship.”

“Then I owe Gentlesir LeSoit a debt of gratitude,” Jessan said with a marked lack of enthusiasm, as they followed a smaller glidewalk off the main branch. “Remind me to pay it back to him someday.”

They stopped in front of an airlock door with a security palmplate set into the hatch. Beka put her hand on the plate; it beeped, and the synthesized voice of the door’s annunciator said, “ID scan confirmed. Docking bay atmospheric integrity confirmed.”

“Good,” said Beka. “I’d hate to think that somebody had let all our air out while we were gone. That happened to the
Claw Hard
once, while I was crewing on her,” she went on while the lock cycled them through. “Captain Osa didn’t want to put up the nonrefundable one-week deposit on the docking fee when we were only going to be here for two days. So the Port Authority depressurized our bay until he handed over the money.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” murmured Jessan.

Inside the docking bay,
Warhammer
rested on landing legs beneath the transparent dome. On the far side of the enclosed space another airlock, this one with its NO GRAVITY OR ATMOSPHERE warning still fresh and clean, led out to the asteroid’s surface.

The ’
Hammer
’s ramp was down, but the force field was up. It took Beka’s hand on another ID panel to turn off the field so that she and Jessan could pass through.

An unfamiliar p-suit hung in the open locker inside the ’
Hammer
’s door. Beka and Jessan glanced at each other.

“Looks like our problem is a visitor,” Jessan said.

“Not to mention somebody Ignac’ doesn’t think he can handle all on his lonesome,” Beka said. “Which means that shooting him, her, or it won’t be an option for us, either.”

“It’s always possible that they mean us no ill will.”

“Hah. Legit business shows up at the place in town, like our old buddy damn-him-for-interrupting-breakfast Tarveet. We might as well go on into the common room and see who’s there.”

As she spoke, Beka checked the knife up her left sleeve. Maybe the Domina of Entibor-in-Exile couldn’t get away with a tied-down blaster, but she was damned if she was going to walk around Suivi Point without a weapon or two for backup. And Jessan, for all his Khesatan elegance, had a single-shot needler concealed somewhere about his person, along with various other lethal surprises. If matters did come down to violence, they’d be ready.

She straightened the heavy tiara—without the formal structure of braids to anchor it, the famous Iron Crown of Entibor tended to slip askew—and stepped through the door into the common room. Jessan followed her, a step or two behind.

Two people waited at the common-room table. Ignaceu LeSoit, dark and wiry, with his thin mustache and his well-worn blaster, was a familiar sight. The woman was a stranger, dark-haired, her face creased with worry lines, but she wore the uniform of the Republic’s Space Force and the insignia of a full captain. She rose and bowed when Beka entered.

“My lady,” she said. “Please forgive this irregular method of securing an audience—but I needed to meet with you, away from the eyes and ears of the local authorities.”

Oh, wonderful
, thought Beka.
More politics, and it isn’t even lunch yet
. “I haven’t got the time for diplomatic games. What do you need?”

The Space Force captain glanced from Beka to Jessan and back. “I have reason to believe,” she said, “that the Steering Committee of Suivi Point wishes to commandeer my forces. In fact, I suspect that the committee’s messenger is looking for me right now. Regardless of the situation on Galcen, I don’t want to swear allegiance to Suivi Point, or to have my ships taken from my command.”

I don’t blame her one little bit, Beka thought. Let those bastards on the committee get a fleet of their own, and it’ll be hurray for Suivi Point and to hell with the rest of us.

She did her best to keep her features schooled to an expression of mild interest, as if they were discussing nothing more pressing than the allocation of tax levies for glidewalk repair. “So what do you want from me?”

The captain paused. This was not, it seemed, a decision she had come to easily. “Domina,” she said, “we—myself and those under me—wish to swear ourselves formally to you … .”

I don’t believe this
, Beka thought.
Nobody’s bothered with all that oath-of-fealty nonsense since before I was born.

She kept her face impassive. The Space Force captain was still talking.

“ … with the understanding that you not require us to oppose the Republic’s Space Force or to act against the Republic’s interests, and that you will release us from our oath once the present situation normalizes.”

Beka drew a deep breath. “Is that all?”

“Yes, Domina,” said the captain. “All I ask is that you put me and my detachment under your protection.”

“All?” she asked. “Sounds like a great deal for you with not much in it for me.”

“I’m afraid so, my lady. I can only hope that you’ll be generous.”

“Generous,” said Beka. “Right. Hang on for a moment while I confer with my advisors.”

She didn’t wait for the captain’s reply, but nodded to LeSoit and Jessan and swept out of the common room in her most regal manner. The Iron Crown, fortunately, didn’t slip until she was out of sight around the bend in the passageway that led to the engineering spaces.

“Well,” she said, as soon as they had a solid bulkhead and a closed door between them and the Space Force captain. “What do you think?”

“It is a chance to increase the size of the fleet,” LeSoit pointed out.

“To more than one vessel. Yes, that’s a start. Jessan, what’s the Space Force got here?”

BOOK: By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3

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