And the place was decorated as if it were a palace. There was elaborate artwork hanging against the walls or, in some cases, unsupported in the air; there was a great couch in the middle of everything, with rich coverings and ornate cushions scattered over it; there was enough furniture—sofas and wardrobes and chests—to supply a good-sized furniture store, except that no furniture store Dairine knew would be likely to carry this kind of stuff, everything glittering with gold or inlaid with green or blue metals that Dairine didn’t immediately recognize. Just look at all this junk, she thought. It was dazzling but, to her eye, overdone.
Then again…if I grew up in a place that looked like this, maybe I’d think it
was normal, too.
She tried very hard to believe that but had trouble. Why are you bothering with him? part of her brain kept shouting. He’s a waste of your time!
Dairine looked around. Anyway, he’s not here, she thought. Well, maybe he had something to take care of at home, and used his custom worldgate this morning, before anybody noticed. She shrugged and was about to turn away and go back upstairs when something in the back of the pup tent caught her eye: a subtle shimmer in an empty patch on the back wall. Dairine walked over to it, looked at it, curious; reached out a hand…then stopped herself.
Should I put on a ‘glove’? she wondered. As a rule, it wasn’t terribly safe to stick your hand through an interface without being sure of what was on the other side. Then again…there’s air in here, and the pup-tent interface isn’t one of the impermeable types. So there has to be air on the other side of that…
She pushed her hand into the interface, saw it vanish to the wrist. Her hand didn’t feel unusually hot or cold, and there wasn’t the strange dry tautness of the skin that exposure to vacuum produced. No, it’s okay, she thought. Dairine stuck her head through, looked around.
And froze.
She was looking into not another artificial space, not an extension of the pup tent, but an area that was almost the outdoors; daylight wasn’t too far away. She stepped through. A translucent terrace roof arched over Dairine’s head, and she slowly walked out from under it onto the terrace proper—a huge spread of golden-colored stone, reaching hundreds of yards to her left and right, with a carved stone railing standing about a meter high in front of her and running all down the terrace’s length. At the railing she stopped, looking out in wonder at an immense landscape all covered in a massive garden of red and golden plant life. Everything was manicured, managed, perfect, the strangely shaped trees not seeming to have so much as a leaf out of place, the amber-colored grass seemingly mown with micrometric precision. There wasn’t a molehill or a hump or a hill anywhere in sight. It was as if a myriad of gardeners had worked the place over with rollers from right where Dairine stood to the distant horizon, where the sun was setting in a glowing blaze of cloud.
Dairine let out a breath. This was beautiful, but she couldn’t spend all day admiring the scenery. She turned around to go back the way she’d come—
—and froze yet again. There was the terrace, and the terrace roof, but above it reared up a huge, graceful, imposing mass of a building, all built in the same golden stone as the terrace, and spreading away far in both directions. It was at least a New York City block square—And a long block, not a short one! she thought—and reared up before her in stack upon stack of towers and spires and turrets and battlements, spearing defiantly upward as if to make up for the flat countryside all around.
This is a palace, Dairine thought. His palace.
She immediately looked around her guiltily, as if somebody might catch her being somewhere she shouldn’t and dump her in a dungeon. Then Dairine straightened, held her head up. He shouldn’t be here, either. Not like this!
She marched back under the terrace roof, toward the long line of glass-paned
doors she saw at the back of the roofed-in area. One of them stood open, near where the illicit pup-tent access still hung down. Dairine headed on past it and through that door.
If she’d thought the furnishings of the pup tent were opulent, she’d been seriously mistaken. She now found herself in a high-ceilinged, elliptical space that was nearly the size of the auditorium at her school. This, too, was filled with massive and ornate furniture, rich carpeting scattered across the goldstone floor, figured hangings on the walls. The gold and gems were everywhere, inlaid or appliqued or just stuck onto things with wild abandon. Dairine shook her head, gazing around—
And someone laughed at her. Her head snapped around. There he was, in more of his trademark glittering robes, leaning back in a gaudy chair that was halfway to being a throne, and with his feet up on a footstool.
“I wondered how long it would take you to sneak in here,” Roshaun said, stretching and lapsing back into a comfortable slouch again. “I admit, you kept me waiting longer than I thought I’d have to.”
I wish I’d kept you waiting a lot longer, Dairine thought. “What are you doing here?” she said. “The pup tents are what you’re supposed to be sleeping in, on an excursus, if you’re not using the actual host family space for it. And you’re not supposed to sleep away every night, either!”
“The guidelines are just that,” Roshaun said, “guidelines. You’ll have noticed that there’s not a lot of heavy enforcement. The Aethyrs have better things to do.”
His word for the Powers That Be, I guess, Dairine thought. “And that’s another thing! You’re not supposed to retroengineer the wizardries They gave us, either—”
“That restriction is only on the custom worldgates,” Roshaun said, “not the pup tents.” He smiled slightly.
Dairine stared at Roshaun, remembering how obvious and casual this rationale had sounded when she was considering it, and wondering why it now sounded so outrageous and annoying.
“And why are you so stuck on every little rule all of a sudden?” Roshaun said, obviously amused at Dairine’s expense. “You’ve broken a fair number of them in your time.”
She looked at him in shock. “Oh, yes,” Roshaun said, “I’ve seen your precis. Something of an early star, weren’t you? But suffering something of a decline at the moment. Ah, that tough time when you have to redefine yourself as something less than you dreamed…”
Dairine opened her mouth, but managed to stop what she was about to say on its way out. The best she could find to replace it was, “Why are you such a pain in the ass?”
“Probably for the same kinds of reasons you are,” Roshaun said, and turned away. “But I don’t propose to discuss my developmental history with the likes of you.”
The likes of—!! “That’s not good enough!” she shouted. “Why did you even bother applying for this excursus if you didn’t want to be with other—”
Suddenly doors burst open all around. Dairine looked around her in shock as a sudden inrush of people arrived from what seemed every possible direction. Most
of them were dressed like Roshaun, in long overtunics over shorter tunics and breeches and boots, though all of these people wore the style in plainer, more sober-colored fabrics. Some of them were actually carrying spears, and Dairine’s wizardly senses detected a number of energy signatures hidden about those servants’ persons that had nothing to do with spears. Pulse weapons, she thought, and a few other niceties…
Dairine stood there with her head up, but inside her head, she said eighteen words of a nineteen-word spell that would bounce back at them anything they threw at her. And if Roshaun gets a little singed, well, tough—
Roshaun, though, just laughed and waved his servitors away. “No, it’s all right. You’re not needed,” Roshaun said. “You may all go.”
“Lord prince,” said one of the spear carriers, looking at Dairine. “This is an alien! You shouldn’t be alone with—”