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"That is it. Isn't it? It's been absent for years. What did you do out there,
Marika?"
Marika refused to explain. They would learn soon enough.
Grauel kept after her, but Barlog said little more. She looked terrified of
what was to come, for she and Grauel, as always, would walk Marika's path with
her.
Marika spent a busy few days contacting silth all across the world, silth with
whom she had worked in her rogue-hunting days. She left suggestions and
instructions, for there had been no further trace of Kublin. He had escaped
for certain, though. The warlock rumor had begun to grow.
How could she have been so blind? The thought that he might be the one had
never occurred to her.
Everyone who had investigated the destruction of Maksche, silth or brethren,
agreed that that whole city had died because of the warlock's determination to
kill her. And she had spared him twice.
Why did he hate her so? She had given him no cause, ever, that she knew.
He would not escape again. If he persisted, she would destroy him as surely as
she would anyone else who rebelled against silth power.
The waiting was not a happy time.
III
Marika's first venture through the Up-and-Over was the most ambitious she had
yet tried, three times the length of the journey to Kim. The magnitude of it
overcame her.
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She lost her nerve and turned loose before she should have, not maintaining
the courage to follow what her talent told her was right. The star she sought
still lay ahead, brighter now, but still far away. She searched the broad
night, locating her home star and all the stars she already knew, then noted
all those that she had not seen before. There in the heart of the dust cloud
those were few, and she was able to inventory them in her mind with no trouble
at all.
She dithered awhile, reveling in the glory of the void, till Grauel and Barlog
began to disturb her with their increasing nervousness. Then she went down
through her loophole again, gathered ghosts-which were scarce in the deep-and
went on, pulling the darkship in close to the target sun.
It was not an inhabited or even habitable system. Marika had known before she
jumped that it could be little more than a landmark on the trail the Serke
walked, both because the system had been investigated often and because all
logic said the Serke would have taken up residence in a system capable of
sustaining life. Perhaps they shared it with the aliens or had taken control
of the aliens' homeworld, as they wished to do with the homeworld of the meth.
In any case it did not seem plausible that two races of apparently similar
needs would stumble into one another in the neighborhood of a giant or dwarf.
Each would be seeking worlds of potential value, and those circled only
certain types of stars. Only a small percentage of stars fit. Marika meant to
concentrate upon those and use other types only as stellar landmarks.
Of course, all that had been reasoned and done before, in the hot, furious
days after the bombing of TelleRai, when the might of all the dark-faring
sisterhoods had been flung into the hunt. But Marika meant to carry the search
far afield, avoiding stars already claimed or visited. The surviving Serke
documents suggested that that sisterhood had been much more daring than any
other, and that they had visited scores of starworlds to which they had laid
no formal claim. That, unlike the other orders, they had kept exploring long
after it had come to be deemed counterproductive.
It would be among those unnamed and unclaimed worlds that she would find her
enemies.
She drifted near that first target star, a red giant, devouring its vast
glory, extending her touch through its space in search of watchers, feeling
for new or unusual ghosts or one of the great blacks, and found nothing of
interest but the giant star itself. She scanned the night, learning the new
stars she saw, then looked for and found her next target. This was another
star on an almost straight line out from her homeworld. This one lay at the
edge of explored space and would place her outside the dust cloud when she
reached it. She would see the universe as she never had from home.
She faced that with trepidation, for the few silth who had been that far out
had been unable to relate the marvel they had felt when they had been able to
see the cloud and the galaxy from beyond the mask of dust.
Too, she was frightened because once she reached that star she would no longer
be able to see her home sun. She would be cut off. The way home would rely
upon memories impressed upon a few chemicals within her fragile brain.
She almost abandoned the quest then.
But she went on, defying fear, and those-who-dwell bore her well and quickly,
and this time she did not allow her self-confidence to flag during the course
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of the jump.
She returned to the natural universe close to a white dwarf so brilliant she
dared not look in its direction. It radiated so powerfully in the
electromagnetic range that it threatened to disrupt her grip upon her talent.
She did not stay long, though she did take in one awe-inspiring glimpse of a
cloud of stars upon one paw and a vast darkness upon the other, only lightly
speckled with points of light.
Grauel and Barlog practically whined with fear. The bath were unafraid, but
stricken with awe.
Onward. And this time with care, for the next target was a wobbling star that,
even from so far away, could be heard screaming as it died. A sister who had
been there had told Marika that that star had an invisible companion that had
to be treated with great respect, for it was a cannibal star, devouring the
stuff of its visible sister the way some insects devoured the stuff of others.
The electromagnetic fog around that third target was more furious than
anything Marika could have imagined. For minutes she remained disoriented,
unable to select her next target, her last. It was hard to find. It was a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]