A Working of Stars by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald

bit by bit for several minutes. She watched him and said nothing. At last he sighed, put down the cup, and said, “It’s probably on record somewhere … I’m with one of the sus-Peledaen Circles these days. Lord Natelth’s younger brother was Second at Demaizen for a while, so there was a connection when I needed one.”
    “That’s good. Say whatever else you want to about the sus-Peledaen—they take care of their own.”
    “Yes.” She thought he might be going to say something more, but instead he fell silent and went back to his cup of uffa . She waited for him to finish it, watching him fade visibly with exhaustion as they talked of Institute gossip and other inconsequential matters. After he’d finished the last of the uffa , she cleared away the cup and the strainer, then left him to check on the robe hanging in the necessarium. When she returned, he was nearly asleep sitting up at the table. She touched his shoulder lightly to rouse him.
    “It’s coming down like a waterfall outside,” she said, “and the wind’s picking up. I’ll make you up a bed on the couch and you can catch the bus in the morning.”
    He shook his head as if to clear it. “You shouldn’t—”
    “—shouldn’t help out my old officemate and the friend of my brother? Don’t be silly, Kief. It’s practically my duty to put you up for the night.”
    His protests faded; there plainly hadn’t been much heart in them to start with. She fetched sheets and a pillow and turned the couch into a makeshift cot, shifting aside two folders full of student examinations in order to clear off space. That done, she retired to her own bedroom.
    But sleep, for Ayil, was a long time in coming. Instead, she lay awake thinking about what she was going to have to do next. The unfinished argument with her brother about the long-term viability of his political goals would have to wait. More important, right now, was that Inadal should know what she had learned tonight: There had been blood on Kief’s robe, quite a lot of it, rinsed out by the flowing water in the necessarium and staining the rough tiles of the watercourse beneath.
    His “Circle business” had included a major working—one that had ended in serious injury, had perhaps even required a death. And it had brought one of Lord Natelth’s Mages onto the Institute grounds.
    The sus-Peledaen were up to something, without a doubt. Which meant that their enemies, her brother and the others of his faction among them, would need to keep close watch.

3 :
     
    ERAASI: HANILAT; ERAASIAN FARSPACE ENTIBOR: CAZDEL
     
    S o far, the morning promised to be an ordinary workday in Hanilat. Grif Egelt, the sus-Peledaen Agent-Principal for Internal Security, arrived at his office in the fleet-family’s ground headquarters carrying—as was his invariable practice—a tall serving of yellow-leaf uffa in a paper cup, purchased from one of the sidewalk vendors outside. The habit dated from Egelt’s early years in the sus-Peledaen employ. In those days, the uffa pots in the headquarters building only had red, because the head guy liked red leaf and no one knew when he might drop by. Egelt had grown accustomed to decanting the morning’s tall cup into his desktop warmer, then nursing it along for hours until he had the chance to get himself another round of yellow at lunchtime.
    These days, the uffa brewed at ground headquarters came in both red and yellow like it did everywhere else, because Natelth sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen had moved up to the orbital station and all his visits to the ground office were scheduled days in advance. Natelth’s sister Isayana came and went regularly—she did liaison work with a lot of the family’s ground-based tech contractors—but from what Egelt had seen of that one, the uffa in her cup could be bright green and she wouldn’t care, or perhaps even notice.
    The change in the leaf, Egelt reflected, was just one more indicator of the general decline of ground