Free The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald

assault.
    Laros attacked; she blocked. And so the fight began. She let her awareness leave the physical world of the ship and the storm and go out into the network of silvery lines that wove about her. This would be her last effort to pull them in, her last attempt to still their fierce chaotic lashing. Her energy would go to Laros in the end, and the keeping of the Amisket fleet with it.
    The eiran shone with an eerie and uncommon brightness. She had never seen them glowing with such intensity; from what source they were receiving their energy, she could not tell. She let herself go still further from the physical world, into the world of vision and metaphor that was the heart of the working, and saw herself standing alone in a landscape of frozen mountains and bare rock.
    A howling filled her ears, and she turned. The path ahead of her was blocked by a mortgaunt out of legend, a looming reptilian creature all claws and fangs and oily leather hide. She had no need to guess at its true nature. The mortgaunt was the storm, the deadly menace that she needed to subdue. And it was Laros, as well—offering up the energy of his life, for Narin to take and work into ship-luck and harbor-luck to save the fishermen of Amisket.
    She knew without looking, as if it were a picture in her memory, that they were all behind her, Captain Soba and the others, a long line of sailors on the seaward cliffs over Amisket, with a sheer rock face on one side of them and a deadly abyss on the other. She was in the lead, and the mortgaunt blocked her.
    A rumble of rocks in the vision brought her abruptly out to the real world. The rumble was the sound of the Dance ’s laboring engine, and the vibration through her boot soles was answered by a humming from the trawler’s rigging. Narin had spent most of her adult life at sea; even in the midst of a working, that sound could draw her attention.
    The main yard, the one that provided the high attachment point for the trawler’s nets, was bending, whipping back and forth in the storm blast, and the wire ropes that held it vibrated like plucked strings.
    She cried out involuntarily. An instant later, the yard cracked and fell, and the lines running through its blocks fell with it in a tangle. The whole mass crashed downward and swept aft across the working deck, striking Laros and bearing him outboard.
    He arched backwards, his mouth open in a scream— his back must be broken, Narin thought—then he, the lines, and the yard vanished together over the side. The Dance ’s engines seized as the tangled mass hit the screws.
    Narin felt the surge of energy from Laros’s life flow upward, surrounding the ship, filling her.
    “Now!” she shouted; and Laros, dying, shouted with her mouth. Then she entered the vision completely, grasping the eiran, pulling them, using the strength of her body and mind to open a pathway through them. She had all of Laros’s energy now, and she used it as recklessly as she did her own, holding nothing back from the desperate effort.
    And the eiran began at last to answer to her will. The opening was there, a gap in the web of tangled silver. She turned to the line of sailors on the cliff of her mind and beckoned them through—across the shingle and the fallen rock, toward the glowing lights of home so far away.
     
     
    Path-Lined-with-Flowers set out the boarders’ after-party in the empty cargo space that had formerly held bales of leind’r. The sus-Dariv crew members put together makeshift tables out of crates and pallets and loaded them down with food and drink—a great deal of drink. Deep bowls of red-wine punch aswim with ice; strong, eye-watering spirits in thick-sided glasses; bottles of cold Eraasian beer and hot Ildaonese guukl. Someone from the Ribbon brought over a stack of music rings and a dataplayer, and someone else from Path-Lined-with-Flowers wired the output into the compartment’s main audio. Music—loud music—bounced off the overhead and filled