A Working of Stars Read Free Page A

apparently sourceless glow actually came from a Mage’s staff in the woman’s right hand. He couldn’t see her face, and it took him another few seconds to realize that the blank, reflective darkness underneath the hood of her black cloak was in fact a spacer’s ship-combat hardmask.
    “Etaze, ” he said, using the term of respect for a Magelord of high rank. Maybe this one was merely somebody’s Circle-Mage, disaffected enough to send along a request for a personal meeting. But if she was not—if she was the First or even the Second of a major Circle, whether in Hanilat or in one of the fleets—then she would need polite and careful handling. “Your message reached me only a short while ago. I came as soon as I dared.”
    The woman chuckled, a surprisingly warm sound to come from behind the dark plastic of a combat hardmask. “You mean you came as soon as you’d made sure that my message was genuine. Nobody’s ever called you a fool, Syr Arayet.”
    “I must need to work more on my presentation,” he said. “What is it you wanted to talk with me about?”
    “I heard that you were interested in what became of the Demaizen Circle.”
    Herin nodded. “I’ve only heard the rumors, and I’m curious.”
    “That all happened a long time ago. Why start asking questions about it now?”
    “Call it a hobby,” he said. “The past informs the present, and so forth.”
    There was a long pause. Herin could feel the woman’s gaze assessing him from behind the unrevealing hardmask.
    “A present,” she said finally, “in which the sus-Dariv are debating whether or not to deploy private ground security forces as an auxiliary to their fleet arm.”
    He said nothing, though he was uncomfortably aware that the damp, cobwebby basement of Demaizen Old Hall was the sort of place in which a too-curious researcher could conveniently disappear. Lord Garrod’s Circle had died there, as far as anyone could tell, and nobody had come to gather up their bones. Another body moldering away in the dark would probably never be noticed.
    “Don’t worry,” she said, as if his hidden trepidation had somehow manifested itself around him like an aura. For all Herin knew, it could have. Mages saw things like that, where other people saw nothing but plain air. “I still have some standards. If I’d wanted to do you harm, I wouldn’t have come up with anything half as melodramatic as this.”
    “I’m relieved to hear it, etaze.”
    “I’m sure you are,” she said. “Now for the reason you came here: Ask me your questions, and I’ll answer them. At least, as much as I can and may.”
    “Very well,” said Herin. “What happened to Lord Garrod’s Circle?”
    “Who sent the killers, do you mean?”
    “Well, yes.”
    She shrugged. “The first time? No one knows. They’re all dead.”
    “Yes, I know … what do you mean, ‘the first time’? There was a second attack?”
    “When the rest of the Circle came back from across the Gap Between. But the Hall had already burned down by then.”
    Herin felt a brief flicker of intellectual vindication. Investigating the destruction of the Old Hall had been a personal project. If he’d made it official, he would have had some trouble justifying his interest in a bit of recent history that the family’s less irregular agents had chosen to overlook. Already, though, he had retrieved an interesting bit of previously uncollected knowledge—two bits, if he counted the implication that the identity of the second group of attackers, unlike that of the first, was not unknown.
    “You must have a theory about why the initial attack failed,” he said.
    “You think that this—” she used the hand that held the glowing staff to describe a vague circle, presumably meant to include the entirety of the Hall “—was a failure?”
    “If the attack had been a complete success, somebody would have taken credit for it. Nobody ever did.” Herin paused. He’d never intended to keep up his