They withdrew slowly, and the two men faced one another, the heavy wooden swords in hand, circling slowly. Damon was faintly conscious of the harsh grip-touch that was Dom Esteban’s (What did I tell Andrew, you get to recognize people by their images as well as by their voices?) and felt a strange droning in his ears, a sense of harsh pressure. He saw Eduin’s sword come up, and before he knew what he was doing, he felt the flexing of his own knees, his arm moving without his knowledge in a quick whirling stroke. He heard the rapid-fire whack! whack! whack! of wood-and-leather clashing, then saw an incongruous whirl of images: Eduin’s astonished face, with its seamed raw wound; Andrew’s flare of amazement; his own arm coming up and a rapid backward step and feint; Eduin’s sword flying out of his hand and across the room, landing almost at Andrew Carr’s feet. The Earthman bent and picked it up as the droning suddenly receded from Damon’s head.
Esteban said quietly, “Now do you believe me, kinsman? Have you ever been able to touch Eduin before, let alone disarm him?”
Damon realized that he was breathing fast and his heart beating like a smith’s hammer at the forge. He thought, I never moved that fast in my life, and felt a mingled fear and resentment. Someone else’s hand, someone else’s mind… in control… control of my very body.
And yet— To get back at the damned cat-things who killed his Guardsmen, Dom Esteban would have been the logical choice to lead swordsmen against them. And he would if he could.
Damon had never especially wanted to be a swordsman. It wasn’t his game. Just the same, he owed the cat-men something. His men were relying on him, and he’d left them to die. And Reidel had been his friend. If with Dom Esteban’s help he could do it, did he have the right to refuse?
Esteban was lying quite still, passive between his sandbags, just flexing and unflexing his fingers thoughtfully. He did not speak, only met Damon’s eyes with a look of triumph.
Damon thought, Damn the man, he’s enjoying this. But after all, why shouldn’t he? He’s proved to himself that he’s not completely useless, after all.
He put down the practice sword. From the naked jewel against his throat he was picking up flashing impressions, wonder and terror from Eduin, a sort of bemusement from Andrew, dismay from Ellemir. He tried to shut them all out, and went toward the bed again.
He said slowly, steadily—but he had to force the words out—“I agree, then, kinsman. When can we start?”
* * *
Chapter
« ^ »
They started later that day, near to high noon, and Andrew, watching them ride away from the roof of Armida, thought they were a small party to go up against an army of nonhumans. He said so to Ellemir, who stood beside him wrapped to the earlobes in a heavy plaid shawl of green and blue. She shook her head, saying in an odd faraway voice, “Force alone wouldn’t get them through. Damon has the only weapon that matters—the starstone.”
“It looks to me like he’ll be doing some fairly tough fighting—or your father will,” Andrew said.
Ellemir answered, “Not really. That will just—if he’s lucky—keep him from getting killed. But swordsmen have failed, before this, to get into the darkening lands. The cat-men know it, too. I am sure they took Callista in the hope of capturing her starstone as well. The cat-people who are using a matrix unlawfully must have discovered that she was here—in a general way one matrix-user can spy out another—and hoped to gain her stone. Perhaps they even hoped they could force her to use it against us. Men would have known better—they would have known that any Keeper would die first. But the cat-people are apparently just beginning to learn about these things—which is why there is still some hope.”
Andrew was thinking, grimly, that was lucky; if they had known more about Keepers, the cat-people would not have kidnapped Callista, but simply left her lying with her throat cut, in her bed. He saw from Ellemir’s grimace of horror that she had followed his thoughts.
The woman said in a low voice, “Damon blames himself for running away and leaving his men to be slaughtered. But it was the right thing to do. If they had captured him, and his starstone—alive—”
“I thought no one could use another’s stone except under very special circumstances.”
“Not without hurting its owner terribly. But do you think the cat-men would have hesitated to do that?” she asked, almost with contempt, and was silent.
The riders had virtually disappeared now, only three small dots on the horizon: Damon and two swordsmen of the guard.
Andrew thought bitterly, I should have been with them. Rescuing Callista is my job; instead I sit here at Armida, no more use than Dom Esteban. Less. He’s fighting along with them.
He had wanted to go. He had thought until the last that he would ride with them, that he would be needed to guide them to Callista, at least when they got inside the caves. After all, he was the only one who could reach her. Damon, even with his starstone, couldn’t. But Damon had absolutely refused.
“Andrew, no, it’s impossible. The best bodyguard in the world wouldn’t be able to ensure you against getting killed accidentally. You are absolutely helpless to defend yourself, let alone help anyone else. It’s not your fault, my friend, but all our energies have to go to getting inside the caves and getting Callista out. The spare minute we might take to defend you might make the difference between getting out alive—or not. And—let me remind you—if we get killed,” he said, his lips tightening, “someone else can try. If you get killed, Callista will die inside the caves, from starvation, or ill-treatment, or with a knife in her throat when they discover she’s no good to them.” Damon had laid his hand on Andrew’s shoulder, regretfully. “Believe me, I know how you feel. But this is the only way.”
“And how will you find her without me there? You can’t, even with your starstone; you just said so!”
“With Callista’s starstone,” Damon said. “You have access to the overworld. And you can reach me, too. Once I am inside the caves, you can lead us to her through the starstone.”
Andrew still wasn’t sure how that would be done. He had, in spite of yesterday’s demonstration, only the foggiest notion of how it worked. He had seen it work, he had felt it work, but twenty-eight years of not believing in such things weren’t wiped away in twenty-eight hours.
At his side, on the parapet, Ellemir shivered and said, “They’re gone. There’s no sense standing out here in the cold.” She turned and went in through the doorway that led into the upper corridor of Armida, and slowly, Carr followed.
He knew Damon was right—or more accurately, he had faith that Damon knew what he was doing—but it was still galling. For days now, ever since he had realized that if he lived through the storm, somehow he would find Callista and rescue her, he had sustained himself with a mental picture of Callista, alone in the darkness of her prison, of himself coming to her side and sweeping her up in his arms, and carrying her away… Some damn romantic dream, he thought sourly. Where’s the white horse to carry her away?
He had never envisioned a world where men took swords seriously. For him a sword was either something to look at on the wall of a museum, or something to play with for exercise. He had wished for a gun or a blaster— that would make short work of a cat-man, he’d bet—but when he had said so, Damon had looked at him with as much horror as if he’d suggested gang-rape, cannibalism, and genocide, and mentioned something called the Compact. Before signing his contract with the Empire on Cott-man IV, Andrew had fuzzily noted that they did have something there called the Compact, which as near as he could understand—he hadn’t paid much attention to it, you never paid much attention to technicalities of native culture—forbade any lethal weapons which didn’t bring the user within an equal risk of being killed in return. Damon had spoken of it, saying it had been universally accepted on Darkover, which seemed to be his name for the planet, for either a few hundred years or a few thousand. Andrew wasn’t sure which; his command of the language was improving, but still wasn’t pe
rfect. So guns were definitely out, although swordplay had become a fine art.
No wonder they start training their kids in fighting before they’re out of short pants. He wondered, in view of the ghastly cold weather on this planet, if children ever wore short pants at all, and cut off the thought with impatience. He went into the guest-room they had assigned him earlier and walked to the window, drawing aside the curtain to see if he could still catch a glimpse of Damon’s party disappearing. But evidently they had ridden away past the crest of the hill.
Andrew lay down on the bed, hands tucked behind his neck. He supposed sooner or later he should go down and say a few polite words to his host. He didn’t much like Dom Esteban; the man had tried hard to humiliate Damon, but the man was an invalid, and his host. Also, he felt some sense of obligation toward Ellemir. He didn’t know what he could say to her, torn as she was between fear for Callista, fear for Damon, and anxiety about her father. But if he could do anything, or say anything, to let her know he shared her anxiety, he ought to do it.
Callista, Callista, he thought, it’s some world you brought me into. Nevertheless, he felt a curious acceptance of what he would find here.
Callista’s starstone around his neck felt reassuringly warm, like a live thing. It’s like touching Callista herself, he thought, the nearest to touching her that I’ve ever come. Even through the silk insulation, there was an intimacy in the touch against his throat. He wondered where she was, if it was well with her, if she was crying alone in the darkness?
Damon seemed to think I could reach her through the stone, Andrew thought, and he drew it from his shirt front. The grayish silk envelope in which it was wrapped protected it from a careless touch. Carefully, mindful of Damon’s warning, he unwrapped it with infinite caution, and a curious sense of hesitation. It’s almost as if I were undressing Callista, he thought with a tender embarrassment, and at the same time he was ready to explode with hysterical laughter at the incongruity of the idea.
As he cradled the stone in his palm, he suddenly saw her close beside him. She was lying on her side, her lovely hair tangled—he could see her in a strange bluish light quite unlike the dim red sunlight in the room—and her face blotched and swollen as if she had been crying again. Quite without surprise, she opened her eyes and looked at him.
“Andrew, is it you? I had wondered why you had not come to me before,” she said softly, and smiled.
“Damon is on his way to you,” Andrew said, and the surge of resentment that he was not with them, that he would not be the one to find her, boiled over. He tried to conceal it from her and realized too late that he could not, that in this kind of close touching of minds no thought could be concealed.
She said very tenderly, “You must not be jealous of Damon; he has been as a brother to me since we were children.”
Andrew felt ashamed of his own jealousy. It’s no good to pretend not to be jealous, I’ll just have to get beyond thoughts like that. He tried to remember how much he had liked Damon, how close he had felt to him for a little while, that in the deepest way of all he was grateful to Damon for doing what he himself couldn’t, and he saw Callista smiling gently at him. He sensed somehow that he had overcome one of the first major barriers to acceptance on their own terms as one of themselves in a telepath culture, that because of this he was somehow less of an alien to Callista than he had been before.
She said, “You can come to me in the overworld now.”
He looked at her helplessly. “I don’t know how.”
“Take the stone and look into it,” she said. “I can see it, you know. I can see it like a light in the darkness. But you must not come to me here, where my body is. If my captors should see you, they might kill me to keep me from being rescued. I will come to you.” Abruptly, without transition, the girl lying wearily on her side in the dark cave was standing before him at the foot of the bed. “Now,” she said. “Simply leave your solid body behind; step out of it.”
Andrew focused on the stone, fighting back the faint, crawling inner nausea, the perceptible surge of terror. Callista held out her hand to him, and suddenly, with a strange, tingling sensation, he was standing upright (he had not moved at all, he thought), and below him he could see his body, clad in the heavy unfamiliar garments Damon had given him, lying motionless on the bed, the stone between his hands.
He reached out his hand on the overworld level, and for the first time touched Callista’s. It felt faint, and ethereal, hardly a physical touch at all, but it was a touch, he could feel it, and he saw from Callista’s face that she felt it, too.
She whispered, “Yes, you are real, you are here. Oh, Andrew, Andrew—” For an instant she let herself fall against him. It was like embracing a shadow, but still, for an instant, he felt her light weight against him, felt the warmth and fragrance of her body in his arms, the wispy feel of her hair. He wanted to crush her in his arms and cover her with kisses, but something in her—a faint sense of hesitation, a drawing away—kept him from acting on his impulse.
I’m not even supposed to think about a Keeper. They’re sacrosanct. Untouchable.
She raised her shadowy fingers to lay them gently against his cheek. She said very gently, “There will be time enough to think about all that later, when I am with you—really with you, really close to you.”
“Callista. You know I love you,” he said hesitantly, and her mouth trembled.
“I know, and it is strange to me, and I suppose under any other conditions it would be frightening to me. But you have come to me when I was so terribly alone, and fearing death, or torment, or ravishment. Men have desired me before,” she said very simply, “and of course I have been taught, in ways I couldn’t even begin to explain to you, not to respond to them in any way, even in fancy. With some men, it has made me feel—feel sick, as if insects were crawling on my body. But there have been a few that I have almost wished—wished, as I wish now with you—that I knew how to respond to their desire; even, perhaps, that I knew how to desire them in return. Can you understand this at all?”
“Not really,” Andrew said slowly, “but I’ll try to understand what you’re feeling. I can’t help how I feel, Callista, but I’ll try not to feel anything you don’t want me to.” To a telepath girl, he was thinking, a lustful thought must have some of the quality of a rape. Was that why it was rude to look at a young woman here? To protect them against one’s thoughts?
“But I want you to,” Callista said shyly. “I’m not sure what it would feel like to—to love anyone. But I want you to go on thinking about me. It makes me feel less lonely somehow. Alone in the dark, I feel as if I am not real, even to myself.”
Andrew felt an infinite tenderness. Poor child; brainwashed and conditioned against any emotion, what had they made of her? If only he could do something, anything to comfort her… He felt so damned helpless, miles and miles away from her, and Callista alone in the dark and frightened. He whispered to her, “Keep up your courage, my darling. We’ll have you out of there soon,” and as the words escaped him he found himself back in his body, lying on the bed, feeling sick and faint and somehow drained. But at least he knew Callista was alive, and well—as well as she could possibly be, he amended—until Damon got her out of there.
He lay quiet for a moment, resting. Evidently telepathic work was a lot more strenuous than physical activity; he felt about like he had when he’d been fighting his way through the buzzard.
Fighting. But Damon was doing the real fighting. Somewhere out there, Damon had the really serious task, fighting his way through the cat-men—and from what he’d seen downstairs, when Dom Esteban’s party had dragged themselves home, wounded and broken, the cat-men were damned formidable antagonists.
Damon had told him that it was for him to lead them to Callista, once Damon was inside the caves. He supposed he could do that, now that he knew how to step outside his body—what Callista had first called his “solid” body— and into the overworld. Then a frightening thought str
uck him.
Callista was in some level of the overworld where she could not reach, or even see, Damon, or Ellemir, or any of her friends. He, Carr, could reach her, somehow; but did that mean that he was on her part of the overworld, the only one the cat-men had left open to Callista? If that was true, then he couldn’t reach Damon either! And how in hell—in that case—could he lead Damon anywhere?
Once the thought had come into his mind it would not be dispelled. Could he reach Damon? Even through the starstone? Or would he find himself, like Callista, wandering like a ghost in the overworld, unable to reach any familiar human face?
Nonsense. Damon knew what he was doing. They had been in contact, last night, through the stones. (Again the memory of that curiously intimate moment of fusion warmed and disturbed him.)
Just the same… the doubt lingered, would not be chased away. Finally he realized there was only one way to be sure, and once again he drew forth the starstone from its silk envelope. This time, he did not attempt to physically move out of his body into the overworld, but concentrated, with all his strength, on Damon, repeating his name.
The stone clouded. Again the curious creeping sickness (Would he ever get past that stage? Would he ever be free of it?) surged up and he struggled for control, trying to focus his thoughts on Damon. Deep in the depths of the blue stone—as he had seen Callista’s face, so long ago now in the Trade City—he saw tiny figures, like riders, and he knew that he saw Damon’s party, the swirling cloak of green-gold, which Damon had told him were the colors of the Ridenow family, the two tall riders on either side. Over them, like a menace, hovered a dark cloud, a dimness, and a voice, not his own, whispered in Andrew’s thoughts: The edge of the darkening lands. Then there was a curious flare and touch, and Andrew felt himself merging with another mind—he was Damon…