The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Read Online Free Page A

lines still had the slack of an empty haul. The crew lounged in the shadow of the deckhouse, playing cards. The engines throbbed ahead slow.
    Narin stood on the main deck, staring over the rail at a horizon made dim by haze, and at the rolling blue waters beneath the empty sky. She was a short dark woman with a square snub-nosed face and calloused hands. The sun, just past its zenith, burned down upon her neck and shoulders. Other than the wind of the ship’s passage, no breeze ruffled her hair.
    Narin looked up at the distant line where sea met sky. A set of masts there, black lines against the paler sky, told where First-Light-of-Morning ran, hull down, tracing a parallel course. They’d had no better luck than the Dance, she was sure.
    “You asked for me?”
    The familiar baritone rumble belonged to Big Tam, Second of the Amisket Circle. Tam was a dark-skinned, wide-shouldered man, and in his many-times-laundered work shirt and loose trousers he looked more like the son and grandson of deep-sea fishers—which he also was—than like a ranking Mage. He’d been with the Circle for almost as long as Narin had, and had been her Second since the beginning.
    Narin looked back out at the water. The sunlight sparked painfully bright on the blue swells. “Yes,” she said. “If we don’t want children going hungry in Amisket by year’s end, it’s time we did something about our luck.”
    “I agree.”
    “Good. Call the others to the meditation room. We will have a working.”
    The meditation room on Dance-and-be-Joyful was a cramped space set forward belowdecks. It was far narrower and more confining than such a room should have been, even for a small Circle like Narin’s, and its atmosphere was a malodorous slurry of machine oil, fish, and rank sweat. But space for the Circle was carved out of the Dance ’s cargo hold, and every cubic inch taken away from storage cost the ship’s master money when the fish were running.
    Narin made her way below, stopping by her cabin to change into her robes and pick up a small-scale chart of the fishing grounds. As First of the Circle, she had her own quarters. The rest of the Amisket Mages shared crew’s berthing, though they stood no watches and hauled no lines.
    She took the paper chart forward to the meditation room. In spite of the summer heat above decks, the air inside the room was cold, chilled by the heavy-duty cargo refrigeration system in the adjacent compartment, and condensation beaded and ran down the bulkheads in a steady, relentless trickle. A single incandescent light illuminated the white circle painted on the deck.
    Laros, the older of the Circle’s two unranked Mages, was already there, dressed in formal robes, with his staff clipped to his belt. In a moment, Tam and young Kasaly arrived as well. Narin swung the door to behind them and dogged it shut.
    “The time has come,” she said, “for a working. To make our own luck, and force the gathering of the fish.”
    “Past time,” Kasaly said. Kas was red-haired and pretty, and a great favorite with the sailors. Her luck-making was among the best, however, and Narin suspected that she had it in her to be First herself someday, provided that she learned enough patience and discipline first.
    “Are we all agreed, then?” Narin asked—a formality, mostly, since it was a poor First who couldn’t gauge the temper of her own Circle. It was her right, as First, to direct their combined intention, but she wasn’t foolish enough to push them where they were determined not to go.
    As she’d expected, nobody raised an objection.
    “Good.” She walked to her usual place in the arc of the white-painted circle closest to the Dance ’s bow, and knelt on the welded metal deckplates. On that cue, the rest of the Mages took their customary positions: Tam opposite her, Kas to her right, Laros to her left.
    “As we are gathered,” she said, “so we are one.”
    She turned away from her physical surroundings and