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  Time slowed down as Merinda moved, her mind focusing on the task at hand, drawing up her resources from within herself and preparing for the battle to come. She had her wits, her considerable Vestis skills, and a simple cutlass. She knew it was all she had. She knew it would not be enough.

  Her first steps into the hall prepared her stance. The cutlass came up, a focal point for the energies of her mystical powers. The edge of the blade had no chance of penetrating Targ’s flesh, for the Prime was far too well protected for such weapons. As a conduit for her own powers, however, the metal shaft of the blade would work quite well. She directed the point forward, summoning all her reserves. Her legs bent down as she prepared to accept the recoil of the blow she was about to deliver and prepared herself for the battle which would certainly follow her first strike.

  Only then did she notice the dusts forming about her feet. Hands, legs, bodies, mouths …

  Destiny! whispered the voices of the dead …

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1998 by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,

  Toronto.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a

  trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/delrey/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-94297

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55862-6

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue: Traveler’s Tales

  ALPHA: LOG OF THE KNIGHT FORTUNE Chapter 1. L’Zari

  Chapter 2. Bonefield Narrows

  Chapter 3. Keening

  Chapter 4. Celestial Tomb

  Chapter 5. Unfinished Tales

  BETA: SHADOWS Chapter 6. Whispers

  Chapter 7. Mantle of Wisdom

  Chapter 8. Tempered Edge

  Chapter 9. A Little Treason

  Chapter 10. Old Wounds

  Chapter 11. Misdirection

  Chapter 12. Fatal Assumptions

  Chapter 13. Reversals

  Chapter 14. Detours

  KAPPA: LOG OF THE BRISHAN Chapter 15. Interstellar Flight

  Chapter 16. Tall Man

  Chapter 17. Familiars

  Chapter 18. Courts of Tsultak

  Chapter 19. Cold Trails and Old Tales

  Chapter 20. Minister of Peace

  Chapter 21. Cartographer

  Chapter 22. Last Stand

  Chapter 23. Followers

  Chapter 24. Star Cross Tavern

  Chapter 25. Gales and Tides

  Chapter 26. Boarding Action

  GAMMA: INHUMAN CREED Chapter 27. Smoke of Battle

  Chapter 28. Perspectives

  Chapter 29. Buccaneer

  Chapter 30. Shoals

  Chapter 31. Ruins Vinculum

  Chapter 32. Shades and Shadows

  Chapter 33. Deal with the Devil

  Chapter 34. Resurrections

  Chapter 35. Zanfib

  Chapter 36. Formal Declarations

  Chapter 37. Friend or Foe

  Chapter 38. Oblivion

  Chapter 39. Deadly Pursuits

  OMEGA: EYE OF THE MAELSTROM Chapter 40. The Gate

  Chapter 41. Ghost Fleet

  Chapter 42. Excursion

  Chapter 43. Tomb

  Chapter 44. The Edge

  Chapter 45. Betrayal

  Epilogue: Marooned

  Dedication

  Other Books by These Authors

  Prologue

  Traveler’s Tales

  There is a place called the Maelstrom Wall.

  It sits at the very boundaries of stellar civilization, a border of chaos that guards the center of the galaxy from those who are too foolish or too adventurous for their own good. In that region the quantum fronts are piled up one atop the next, the realities that exist between them fleeting and ephemeral at best. Spacers—those sailors of the stars who man the ships of the region—are versed in a diversity of magic and skill that dwarfs the knowing of most men. Yet it is not enough, for the Maelstrom Wall rages against such order, throwing reality after reality against the hulls of the spacers’ ships. Relentlessly, it searches for that place and time where a spacer crew’s knowledge, equipment, and manna are not enough. When that happens, the Maelstrom Wall exacts its victory with a toll of blood.

  A spacer’s life is a flirtatious dance with unique and unexpected death.

  Yet still the spacers come in their globelike ships with their unkempt appearance and their cold eyes. They dance the dance again and again—no small few of them for the last time. It is there; there among the straining rigging and weary magical incantations that stand between existence and beyond; there among the impossible worlds and regions where everything is possible and nothing is likely; there on the worlds of the most dangerous region in all the stars that the yar trees grow.

  The yar tree is a magnificent specimen. Entire forests of them, each ranging from fifty to two hundred feet tall, grow to full maturity within a year, only to vanish completely by the following season. Their great branches reach up toward the stars, their leaves forming a layer of dappled sunlight far below among their roots. They thrive amid the chaos. Indeed, many of the learned that study them believe that it is the horrible entropy of the Maelstrom Wall itself upon which they live. Their like is not known, nor has ever been known, anywhere else in the galactic disk.

  Most importantly, however, their sap—called yardow—is one of the rarest and most sought after commodities in all of known space. Yardow has the amazing ability to suspend gravity within its confines. Once refined into a hard resin, even a small amount of yardow will contain a quantum black hole with perfect safety and portability. Every synthetic mind known to exist is based on this very phenomenon. No temporal fold processor from one end of the galaxy to the other can exist without a yardow-resin mounting for a quantum black hole.

  To obtain a single shipment of yardow is to ensure one’s comfort for life.

  Each place in the galaxy holds its own tales and legends, but none more so than the Maelstrom Wall. Down through the centuries, the stakes have remained high; the rewards, beyond avarice. Such elements have forever been the fertile, if uncertain, ground for many a dire traveler’s tale.

  ALPHA:

  LOG

  OF THE

  KNIGHT FORTUNE

  1

  L’Zari

  His name was L’Zari.

  He gripped the thrumming stay line, his youthful hands white, drained of blood in his fear and desperation. A snarling wind whipped his hair about his face, belying the fact that he was inside the protective dome of the ship. How could a wind blow inside the dome, his mind raged. How, indeed, he thought savagely, could anything that he had experienced over the last few weeks have been real.

  His legs were braced against the grandyard boom some thirty feet above the deck. L’Zari had inconspicuously slipped both feet underneath the stay cables running the top length of the massive yard, despite the warnings of the other spacers that he might just lose a foot that way. The youth had gone beyond caring as he clung high in the rigging of the starship. He knew little of the trade, in any event—which, he suspected, was why his fellow spacers had seen to it that he was hanging here in the midst of a quantum gale.

  All about him, up ratlines and occasionally across the backstays, the spacers moved nimbl
y from task to task as they were called out from the deck below them. L’Zari knew they were watching him with great amusement, his discomfort and open-faced fear a confirmation of their own superiority here in the rigging. They meant to teach him his place.

  He already knew his place, he thought grimly—and he fervently hoped that it was a place back down there on the deck swinging far below him. At least there you didn’t have quite so far to fall, he thought angrily to himself. At least there you had a much better chance of actually hitting the deck instead of missing it altogether and falling into the stars.

  The stars. He looked up the mast toward those same romantic stars that had called him here—or so he had fancied in his imagination that they had done. They were there: so many and so bright. There were far more than one might expect here among the brilliantly lit dust clouds surrounding the ship. Toward the rim such clouds would have obscured most of the stellar bodies beyond, limiting one’s view to a few stars and the great nebulae that hung in interstellar space. Not here. Here the ship rushed upward along the Maelstrom Wall, that vicious curtain of quantum fury at the very edge of the galactic core. Here the stars were so thickly clustered that it was difficult to avoid them even when boring down a tunnel through the nebular mass itself.

  The ship to which he clung so desperately was rushing upward through just such a cavernous drift in the Wall. The Knight Fortune—a ludicrous name, chosen by an apparent idiot, L’Zari thought—was of Aendorian design, or at least had been crafted on that world after the manner of the core explorers. Her shape was generally spherical, compressed somewhat along her vertical axis so that her cross section suggested something of an oval. The hull forming the bowl-like bottom of the ship swept upward into three great, curving prows that arched over the main deck until they nearly touched the mast. The ancient Aendorian totemic forms and symbols covered the hull itself, which if the legends were true, would have been grown to this exact shape by the mystic artists of that world. The main deck was cradled within the triple fingers of those prows with access to the several decks below and the massive cargo hold.

  Running through it all was the drive-tree—the core of the ship. It began beneath the center of the hull with the massive keelbob—another foolish spacer name, L’Zari thought. He couldn’t see it now but had gotten a good look at its brilliant brass finish, tooled down to a spike, when the ship had been careened on E’knar a few weeks ago. The keelbob alone was nearly four times his own height. The mast extended upward from the bob, through the center of the intervening decks, and past the clear bubble of atmosphere into the vacuum of space itself. Along the mast were mounted several booms. Lanyards to each from the deck below repositioned them as the prevailing quantum weather dictated. It was this massive complex called the drive-tree that dragged the ship upward into the stars, the ship’s direction of motion following the same line as that of the mast. The Aendorian ships didn’t sail across space so much as up into it.

  In calmer weather, the various crystal focus booms would only need to be repositioned now and then as the ship passed from one quantum zone to another. Then the spacers would climb the ratlines into the rigging and reposition the various booms with their braces and incant their magical spells to simulate whatever drive system functioned in the new zone. Spacer magic was powerful, as everyone knew, and it was rare that a good spacer crew couldn’t come up with some kind of configuration that put the mystic wind into the various sheets of light, crystal, plasma, or flesh that would bring them home again.

  But the weather was not calm. The rapid shifts between the quantum fronts near the core brought with them a terrible price to the spacers who braved their reach. The quantum fronts came quickly here: a succession of realities which constantly challenged the integrity of the drive-tree and its configuration. The spacers challenged the assault in the rigging, swinging the booms wildly as they fought chaos itself from moment to moment, altering their incantations and their mystic spells with each new reality as it came.

  Sailing the Maelstrom Wall was a challenge even in the best of times. One would normally take the changes slowly and accept the fact that the transit from system to system would take a lot more time than you would prefer. Move slowly. Take your time. Better to get there late than not at all.

  None of which would do right now, L’Zari reminded himself. He twisted his head and looked down his right shoulder. The ratlines, rigging, and mast ran down dizzyingly below him to the deck. He dreaded the sight, but needed to know.

  There, just as the ship’s hull yawed to starboard, he saw it. A dull, orange-red mottled hull. It was smaller than his merchant ship but apparently every bit as nimble and swift. The arched cone of the aft hull casing projected horns forward and encompassed the raider’s main deck. He could see vague shadows moving there, could somehow sense their hunger for his own ship.

  It was a Gorgon ship.

  That wasn’t entirely true, he reminded himself. The ship itself was of an old K’tan design or, at least, that was what Old Phin had told him when the other ship made its first pass at them. But it flew the Gorgon flag. L’Zari could see the great ensign trailing down the hull from one of the horned mounts—a bright red swath of cloth bearing the white Gorgon’s skull with a saber passing through one eye socket. That left no doubt to it—it was Marren-kan. No other ship dared fly such a flag. No other buccaneer had such a reputation for dread.

  The hull of the Knight Fortune swung across his view of the raider. In his musings, L’Zari was unprepared for the unexpected roll of the ship to port. His body swung away from the boom, his feet slipping from under the stay cables. In sudden panic, the boy gripped the ratlines even tighter as he found himself suddenly suspended by his arms alone, high above the shifting deck. He cried out against the howling winds whipping about him, but his voice sounded hollow and small in his own ears. The ship suddenly pitched upward through another break in the nebula clouds, swinging him wildly and slamming him against the mast. The sudden impact pressed the wind out of his lungs. Gasping and dazed, he released his grip.

  The lines, backstays, halyards, and booms swung crazily around him. I let go! His mind screamed at him as he flailed through the hurricane, searching for something to which he might hold. Falling … he felt himself falling for the longest time …

  Suddenly he stopped and spun madly about. The world was a blur until something grasped his leg, then gathered the front of his tunic in its massive hand. L’Zari shook his head, trying to clear the bleariness from his eyes. After a moment they focused fairly well but had trouble holding steady, as they tried to follow the spin that his inner ear told him he still was experiencing. Unstable as his sight seemed to be, he was pretty sure that he was hanging somehow from the rigging directly over the face of his father.

  “Boy?” An angry face with bright squinting eyes was staring up at him not a handsbreadth from his own face. A broad nose and a stubble-length beard filled his vision. “This is certainly no time to be hanging about!”

  “Sorry, Father,” L’Zari said miserably.

  In a single motion, the man pulled a broad knife and cut the safety line that suspended L’Zari over him. The moment the boy was free, the man moved aside to allow him to fall the rest of the way to the hard planks below.

  L’Zari landed painfully and, groaning, pulled himself up to sit. At least I’m back on the deck, he thought as he rubbed his right shoulder.

  L’Zari’s father—Kip-lei, whom all the ship knew only as “Kip”—stood over him, his legs spread wide on the moving deck, paying not the least bit of attention to the plight of his own son.

  It was understandable, L’Zari thought ruefully. The old man had known this ship intimately for the last seven years. He had only known his son for three weeks, so it wasn’t difficult to guess where his affections lay.

  L’Zari’s mother—K’thari—had come from one of the honored houses in the Far Trade Coalition. Interstellar trade was invented by them, or so they believed, and was therefore a co
ncept they owned. His mother had been raised in a somewhat sheltered atmosphere. The best tutors did all her schooling at home lest she be corrupted by any outside influence into ideas that were contrary to her clan. Her friends were selected for her. Her activities were planned for her. In time she was deemed sufficiently competent to actually go out on her own and face the galaxy, but K’thari hadn’t quite set in their mold. She found excitement in the greater galaxy that unfolded around her—especially in the arms of the forbidden and roguish free-trade captain with the brilliant blue eyes and confident manner. He filled her mind with visions and tales: stories of the great treasures of the core and his passion for it. The romance of his tales wove a passion in her that all the mythology of the ancient clans never inspired.

  To the shame of the entire trade house, the roguish captain was soon gone again to dance romantic dreams among the stars, and K’thari was left with the reality of a child. No less love was bestowed on the boy as he grew—he wanted for nothing and his training was as thorough as his mother’s had been. Yet it had always been understood that while he was of the family and cared for, there would never be a place for him in the family trade.

  In time his mother’s overprotective dictums became sentences of doom and the atmosphere of the clan’s compound a sour breath in his lungs. So, with what power and money he could muster, he determined to show them all how worthy he was of their name and right a few wrongs along the way. He fled his home, made his way into the stars and found, at last, his legendary father.

  The legend had diminished considerably now that he had suffered with him for three weeks.

  “Avast aloft!” Kip cried out through his cupped hands. “Mystic’s shifting five points down! Stay with her, lads! Squeeze that tree! We need all the speed she can give!”

  “Father …,” L’Zari began.

  “Call me Kip, boy,” the captain said without looking away from the rigging overhead. “I’ve not time for anything longer than Kip, Boy-Out-of-Nowhere.”