A Working of Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

and easy job?”
    “If I ever thought so,” he answered, “it didn’t take me long to learn otherwise. And if that’s what you’re here for, you’ve come a long way to tell me something I already know.”
    “Well, I didn’t come here for the sake of sitting on your front porch and admiring the view,” she said, rather more sharply than before. “I’ve got forests at home that I can look at.”
    “Why, then?”
    “I dreamed about you last night for the first time in—let’s just say, for the first time in a long while—and when I woke up I had a feeling you were going to need my help. So I walked the Void until I found where you were waiting.”
    “ That’s certainly clear,” he said. “Did you happen to see what kind of help I was going to need?”
    Maraganha shrugged. “It’s as clear as I can make it. And I’m afraid the universe didn’t bother to give me specific instructions.”
    “I don’t think anything scares you, etaze .” He gave her the title without thinking, and wasn’t surprised when she accepted it as her right. If Maraganha was a Void-walker, then she’d have to be the First of her Circle as well. For all her superficial friendliness and ease of manner, Arekhon knew that he was looking at one of the great Magelords—Garrod syn-Aigal’s equal and perhaps even more.
    “You’d be surprised,” she said. “When I was young, I was scared to death of everything, and scared of myself most of all. That’s the biggest part of what you taught me, in fact—to trust in what I knew and what I was.”
    “I’m glad that I was able to help. Or will be able to, as the case may be.” He shook his head. “If we’re going to keep on talking like this, we need better verbs.”
    “I can’t help you with the verbs,” she said. Then she looked at him straight on, and her voice had the same firmness and surety it had held in his dream. “But whatever else it is you’re planning to do—I can help you with that.”
    “My Circle,” he said. There was no chance, not after all this, that his dreams of late had been mere homesickness, born out of a wish that his life here with Elaeli could be something other than what necessity had given them. This was the great working, that he had pledged himself to finish when he was still the Third of Garrod’s Circle, and there was no escape from it. “I need to find the rest of my Circle on Entibor, and take them home.”
     
     
    It was the damned ship-mind again.
    Lenyat Irao—known to his cousins and most of his workaday associates as Len—watched in disgust as the display on the chart table flickered. Fire-on-the-Hilltops was an old ship, a one-man light-cargo carrier purchased secondhand from the sus-Radal after that fleet-family had upgraded all of their own vessels to the new style. Len had known she was obsolete on the day he bought her, but that was how the game was played. New construction was for the star-lords, and everybody else took what was left over.
    Still, he’d expected the Fire to hold together long enough for him to finish paying for her. And it was starting to look like—absent a complete flush-and-renewal of the ship-mind’s quasi-organics—that wasn’t going to happen. Lately she’d been growing reluctant to interface with anybody’s charts but her own, and if that kept up, there went any hope of getting another decent contract.
    The display blinked on and off and on again one more time, then settled down. The false-color display took on a three-dimensional aspect, the orbital lanes in blue, the world in yellow, and the marker-buoy in white.
    “Finally,” Len said. “Took you long enough.”
    As usual, he addressed his ship not in the Hanilat-Eraasian that he’d learned in school, but in his milk tongue, the language of Eraasi’s antipodal subcontinent. The Irao had never intermarried with outsiders, and Len’s knife-blade nose and yellowish-hazel eyes would have passed without remark in the homeland that his