His men were fighting wildly against the invisible assailants; Damon, clutching the matrix, wheeled his mount and swerved, dashing away from the attackers at a hard gallop, and down the path. His throat seemed to crawl. For all he knew some invisible blade might sweep out of empty air and strike his head from his shoulders. Behind him the hoarse cries of his men were like a knife in his heart, clutching at him, clawing at his conscience. He rode, head down, cloak clutched about him, as if indeed demons pursued him; and he did not slacken pace until he came to a halt, his horse trembling and streaming sweat, his own breath coming in great ragged heaving gasps, on the next hill rise, two or three miles below the ambush, and above him the high gates of Armida.
Dismounting, he drew the crystal from its protective leather pouch and unwrapped the silk within. Naked, this could have saved us all, he thought, looking down despairingly at the blue stone with the strange, curling gleams of fire within; his trained telepathic power, enormously amplified by the resonating magnetic fields of the matrix, could have mastered the illusion; his men might have had to fight, but they would have fought free of illusions, against foes they could see, who could match them fairly. He bowed his head. A matrix was never carried bare; its resonating vibrations had to be insulated from what was around it. And by the time he could have freed it from its insulation, his men would have been dead, anyway, and him with them.
Sighing, and thrusting the crystal back into the silk, he patted his exhausted horse on the flank, and, not mounting to spare the gasping, trembling beast any further exertion, he led him slowly up the rise toward the gates. Armida was not besieged, it seemed. The courtyard lay quiet and bare in the dying sunlight, and the nightly fog was beginning to roll in from the surrounding hills; serving men came to take his horse and cried out in alarm at the state of it.
“Were you pursued? Lord Damon, where is your escort?”
He shook his head slowly, not trying to answer. “Later, later. Tend my horse, and let him not drink until he is cooled; he has ridden too far at a gallop. Send for the Lady Ellemir to tell her I have come.”
If this mission is not of grave importance, he said to himself grimly, we shall quarrel. Four of my faithful men dead, and horribly. Yet she is under no siege or trouble.
Then he became aware of the grim quiet that lay over the courtyard. Surely there were splotches of blood on the stones. A strange disquiet, a sickening unease—which he knew was in his mind, sensed from something not on this mundane level at all—crept slowly over him.
He raised his eyes to see Ellemir Lanart standing before him.
“Kinsman,” she said half audibly. “I heard something— not enough to be sure. I thought it was you, too—” Her voice failed, and she threw herself into his arms.
“Damon! Damon! I thought you were dead, too!”
Damon Ridenow held the girl gently, stroking the shaking shoulders. Her bright head dropped heavily for a moment against him, and she sighed then, fighting for control, raised her head. She was very tall and slender, her fire-red hair proclaiming her a member of Damon’s own telepath caste; her features were delicate, her eyes brilliant blue.
“Ellemir, what has happened here?” he asked, his apprehension growing. “Are you under attack? Has there been a raid?”
She lowered her head. “I do not know,” she said. “All I know is that Callista is gone.”
“Gone? In God’s name what do you mean? Carried off by bandits? Run away? Eloped?” Even as he spoke he knew that was madness; Ellemir’s twin sister Callista was a Keeper, one of those women trained to handle all the power of a circle of skilled telepaths; they were vowed to virginity, and surrounded with a circle of awe which meant no sane man on Darkover would raise his eyes to one. “Ellemir, tell me! I thought her safe in the Tower at Arilinn. Where? How?”
Ellemir was fighting for self-control. “We cannot talk here on the doorstep,” she said, withdrawing from him and regaining her self-possession. Damon felt a moment of regret—her head against his shoulder had seemed to belong there somehow. He told himself incredulously that this was neither the time nor the place for such thoughts, and resisted the impulse to touch her hand lightly again, following her at a sedate pace into the great hall. But she was barely inside before she turned to him.
“She was here for a visit,” Ellemir said in a shaking voice. ‘The Lady Leonie has sought to lay down her Keeper’s place and return to her home at Valeron, and Callista was to take her place in the Tower; but she came for a visit to me first, and she wished to persuade me to come to Arilinn and stay there with her, that she might not be so terribly alone. In any case, to see me for a little before she must be isolated for the making of the Tower Circle. All went well, although she seemed uneasy. I am no trained telepath, Damon, but Callista and I were twin-born and our minds can touch, a little, whether we will it or not. So I sensed her unease, but she said only that she had evil dreams of cat-hags and withering gardens and dying flowers. And then one day—” Ellemir’s face paled and, hardly knowing what she did, she reached her hand to Damon’s, gripping desperately as if to lean her weight upon him.
“I woke, hearing her scream; but no one else had heard any sound, even a whisper. Four of our people lay dead in the court, and among them—among them was our old foster mother Bethiah. She had nursed Callista at her breasts as a babe and she slept always on a cot at her feet, and she lay there with her eyes—her eyes clawed out of their sockets, still just alive.” Ellimir was sobbing aloud now. “And Callista was gone! Gone, and I could not reach her—I could not reach her even with my mind! My twin, and she was gone, as if Avarra had snatched her alive into some otherworld.”
Damon’s voice was hard; he kept it that way with a fierce effort. “Do you think she is dead, Ellemir?”
Ellemir met his eyes with a level blue gaze.
“I do not. I did not feel her die; and my twin could not die without my sharing her death. When our brother Coryn died in a fall from the aerie, taking hawks, both Callista and I felt him pass from life into death; and Callista is my twin. She lives.” Then Ellemir’s voice broke and she wept wildly.
“But where? Where? She is gone, gone, gone as if she had never lived! And only shadows moving since then— only shadows. Damon, Damon, what shall I do, what shall I do?”
* * *
Chapter THREE
« ^ »
He would never have thought that going downhill could be so difficult.
All day Andrew Carr had climbed, scrambled, and slid around on the sharp rocks of the slope. He had looked down into an incredibly deep ravine where the remnants of the mapping plane lay smashed, and written off any lingering hope of salvaging food, protective clothing, or the identity disks of his companions. Now, as darkness fell and a light fall of snow began to drift across the slopes, he huddled inside the thick fur coat and sucked the last few of the sweets he had with him. He scanned the horizon below him for lights or any other signs of life. There must be some. This was a thickly inhabited planet. But out in the mountains here, it might be miles or even hundreds of miles between settled areas. He did see pale gleams against the horizon, one clustered group of lights which might even have been a town or village. So his only problem was to get down to it. But that might take some doing. He knew nothing—less than nothing, really—of woodcraft or survival skills. Finally, remembering something he had read, he half buried himself in a heap of dead leaves and pulled the flap of the fur coat over his head. He wasn’t warm, and he found his thoughts dwelling lovingly on food, great steaming platefuls of it, but finally he did sleep; after a fashion, waking almost hourly to shiver and pull himself more deeply into his heap of leaves, but he did sleep. Nor did he see, anywhere in his confused dreams, the face of the ghostly girl he identified with his vision.
All the next day, and the day after, he struggled his way through, and down, a long slope covered with dense thorny underbrush, twice lost his way in the thickly wooded valley at the bottom, and finally toiled his wa
y up the far side of the slope. From the bottom of the valley he had no way to ascertain which way he should be going, and from there, he saw no sign of human or other habitation. Once he came across remnants, in extreme disrepair, of a split-rail fence, and wasted a couple of hours walking its length—the existence of a fence usually postulated something to be fenced in, or kept out. But it lead him only into thick, tangled dry vines and he decided that whatever strange kind of livestock had been fenced in at one time, both the stock and their keeper had been long, long gone. Near the spot where he had first found the fence was a dry creek bed, and he surmised that he could probably follow it down out of the mountains. Civilizations, especially farmlands, had always built their settlements along watercourses, and he believed that this planet would hardly be an exception. If he followed the stream down along its natural course, it would certainly lead him out of the hills and probably to the abodes of whatever people had built the fence and herded the stock. But after a few miles the course of the dry stream bed was obscured by a rock slide, and try as he might, he could not find it on the other side. Maybe that was why the fence-builders had moved their livestock.
Toward the end of the second day he found a few withered fruits clinging to a gnarled tree. They looked and tasted like apples, dry and hard but edible; he ate most of them and gathered the last few to be eaten later. He felt miserably frustrated. Probably there were other edibles all around him, everything from the bark of certain trees to the mushrooms or fungi he found growing on fallen wood. The trouble was that he couldn’t tell the wholesome food plants from the deadly poisonous ones, and therefore he was only tantalizing himself by thinking about it.
Late that night, as he was searching for a windbreak in which to sleep, snow began to fall again, with a strange and persistent steadiness that made him uneasy. He had heard about the blizzards of the hills, and the thought of being caught out in one, without food or protective clothing or shelter, scared him out of his wits. Before long the snow became so heavy that he could hardly see his hand before his face, and his shoes were wet through and caked with the cold and gluey mass.
I’m finished, he thought grimly. I was finished when the plane crashed, only I didn’t have the sense to know it.
The only chance I had—the only chance I ever had— was good weather, and now that’s broken.
The only thing that made sense now was to pick out a comfortable place, preferably out of the damned wind that howled like a lost thing around the rocky crags above him, lie down, make himself comfortable, and fall asleep in the snow. That would be the end of it all. Considering how deserted this part of the world looked, it was likely to be so many years before anyone stumbled over his body, that no one would be able to tell whether he was a Terran or a native of this planet.
Damn that wind! It howled like a dozen wind machines, like a chorus of lost souls out of Dante’s Inferno. There was a curious illusion in the wind. It sounded as if, very far away, someone was calling his name.
Andrew Carr! Andrew Carr!
It was an illusion, of course. No one within three hundred miles of this place even knew he was here, except maybe the ghostly girl he had seen when the plane crashed. If she was actually within three hundred miles of this place. And of course he had no idea if she actually knew his name, or not. Damn the girl, anyway, if she even existed. Which he doubted.
Carr stumbled and fell full length into the deepening snow. He started to rise, then thought, Oh, hell, what’s the use, and let himself fall toward again.
Someone was calling his name.
Andrew Carr! Come this way, quickly! I can show you the way to shelter, but more I cannot do. You must take your own way there.
He heard himself say fretfully, against the dim voice that was like an echo inside his mind, “No. I’m too tired. I can’t go any farther.”
“Carr! Raise your eyes and look at me!”
Resentfully, shielding his eyes against the howling wind and the sharp needles of the snow, Andrew Carr braced himself with his palms and looked up. He already knew what he would see.
It was the girl, of course.
She wasn’t really there. How could she be there, wearing a thin blue gown that looked like a torn nightdress, barefoot, her hair not even blowing in the bitter snow-laden wind?
He heard himself say aloud—and heard the words ripped by the wind from his mouth and carried away, so that the girl could not possibly have heard them from ten feet away, “What are you doing now? Are you really here? Where are you?”
She said precisely, in that low-pitched voice which seemed always to carry just to his ear and not an inch farther, “I do not know where I am, or I would not be there, since it is nowhere I wish to be. The important thing is that I know where you are, and where the only place of safety is for you. Follow me, quickly! Get up, you fool, get up!”
Carr stumbled to his feet, clutching his coat about him. She stood, it seemed, about eight feet ahead of him in the storm. She was still clad in the flimsy and torn nightdress, but although her bare feet and shoulders gleamed palely through the rents in the garment, she did not seem to be shivering at all.
She beckoned—now that she knew she had his attention, it seemed, she would not waste any more effort trying to make herself heard—and began to walk lightly across the snow. Her feet, he noticed with a weird sense of unreality, were not quite touching the ground. Yeah, that figures, if she’s a ghost.
Head down, he stumbled after the retreating figure of the girl. The wind tore at his coat, sent it flapping out wildly behind him. His shoes were thick, half-frozen lumps of wet snow, and his hair and the stubble of beard were icy streaks of roughness against his face. Now that the snow had obscured the ground to even whiteness, covering the lumps and shadows, two or three times he tripped over some hidden root or unseen chuckhole, and measured his length on the ground; but each time he struggled up and followed the shadow ahead of him. She had saved his life once before. She must know what she’s doing.
It seemed a very long time that he floundered and stumbled in the snow, although he thought afterward that it was probably not more than three-quarters of an hour, before he blundered full into what felt like a brick wall. He put out his hand, incredulous.
It was a brick wall. Or, anyway, it felt like one. It felt like the side of a building, and feeling about a little, he found a door which was made of planed wood, worn smooth, and fastened with stiff leather straps, hauled through a rough-cut wooden latch, and knotted. It took him some time to tease the wet leather knot apart, and he finally had to take off his gloves and fumble with stiff bare fingers which were blue and bleeding by the time the knot finally yielded. The door creaked open and Carr cautiously stepped inside. For all he knew he might have found light, fire, and people sitting around a supper table; but the place was dark and cold and deserted. But not half as cold as the outdoors, and at least it was dry. There was something like straw on the floor, and the dim light of reflected snow from outside showed him vague shapes that might have been cattle stanchions, or furniture. He had no way of making a light, but it was so quiet that he knew neither the animals which had once been stabled here, nor their keepers, still inhabited the place.
Once again the girl had led him to safety. He sank down on the mercifully dry floor, scooped a comfortable place in the straw, took off his sopping wet shoes, dried his chilled and numb feet on the straw, and lay down to sleep. He looked around for the ghostly form of the girl who had guided him here, but as he had expected, she was gone.
He woke, hours later, out of the deep sleep of exhaustion, to a raging snow-whitened world, a howling inferno of blowing sleet and ice battering against the building where he lay. But enough light filtered through the heavily fastened wooden shutters so that he could see the inside of the building where he lay: empty except for the thick straw and the uprights of stanchions. It smelled, very faintly, of long-dried animal dung, a sharp but not unpleasant pungency.
In the far corner was a
dark mass of something, which he curiously explored. He found a few rags of strangely fashioned clothing. One, a warm, blanketlike cloak of ragged and faded tartan cloth, he took to wrap himself in. Under the heaped clothing—which was ragged but, because of the dryness of the building, untouched by mold or mildew—he found a heavy chest fastened shut with a hasp, but not locked. Opening it, he discovered food; forgotten, or most likely left over for another herding season by the keepers of whatever strange beasts had once been kept here. There was a form of dried bread—actually more like hardtack or crackers—wrapped in oiled paper. There was some leathery unrecognizable stuff which he finally decided must be dried meat; but neither his teeth nor his palate could cope with it. Some pasty, fragrant stuff reminded him of peanut butter, and it went well on the hardtack, made of crushed seeds or nuts with dried fruit mashed up in it. There was some kind of dried fruit, but it, too, was so hard that, although it smelled good, he decided it would need a good long soak in water, preferably hot water, before approaching anything like edibility.
He satisfied his hunger with the hardtack and the nut-and-fruit-butter paste, and after hunting around, discovered a crude water tap that ran into a basin, apparently for watering the beasts. He drank, and splashed a little cold water on his face. It was far too cold for any more meticulous washing, but he felt better even for that much. Then, wrapped in the tartan blanket, he explored the place end to end. He was much relieved when he found the final convenience, a crude earth-closet latrine roughly enclosed at the far end. He had not relished the thought of either venturing out into the storm, even for a moment, or of defiling the place against the possible future return of its owners. It crossed his mind that the conveniences, and the stored provisions, must have been provided against just such blizzards as this, when neither man nor beast could live without some shelter.