Darkover: First Contact (56 page)

He didn’t like it. Still less did he like the confusion and fear which the
other
was feeling. Bard, without much
laran,
could still somehow
feel
all that emotion.

He couldn’t stop himself. He got up and went across the room to the naked man lying there. He knelt beside him and put an arm under his head.

“How are you feeling?”

Only after he had spoken did be stop to wonder if the alien
other
could understand his language. That would be luck entirely too good, though he supposed that perhaps his kin somewhere in the Kilghard Hills had probably fathered this duplicate. Could any man be so like without being kin somehow ? The strange man’s skin looked darker, as if it had been burned brown by a fiercer sun. . . . No, that was folly, the sun was the sun . . . but still, the picture was in his mind of spinning galaxies, a world with a single cold white moon, and the frightening thing was that somehow all those images seemed to
belong
in Bard’s mind!

The strange man spoke. He was not speaking Bard’s language; somehow Bard knew that no one else in the room could understand him. But Bard knew what he had said, as if they were linked in the strongest
laran
bond.

“I feel like hell. How do you expect me to feel? What happened, a tornado? Hell—you’re
me!
And that’s not possible! You’re not the devil by any chance?”

Bard shook his head. “I’m not any of the devils, not even nearly,” he said.

“Who are you? What is this? What happened?”

“You’ll find out later,” Bard said, then, feeling him stir urgently, held him unmoving. “No, don’t try to move yet. What’s your name?”

“Paul,” the man said weakly, “Paul Harrell.” And then he fell back, unconscious. Bard moved, spontaneously, to raise him, support him. He shouted for help. The
laranzu
came and examined the unconscious man.

“He’s all right, but the energy expended in that journey was frightful,” he said.

Dom Rafael said, “Get old Gwynn to help you carry him; I’d trust him with my life, and more.” Bard helped the old
coridom
carry the stranger to his own old rooms, laid him in his bed, locked the door of the suite—not that it was necessary; the
laranzu
assured them that he would not wake for a day and a night, or perhaps more.

He returned, to find that Dom Rafael had ushered the
leroni
into an adjacent chamber, where the old
coridom
had laid ready a hot supper, with plenty of wine. Bard, desperately curious about the stranger, reached for contact with his father, but for some strange reason his father was wholly shielded against him.

Why should his father barricade his mind so strongly?

“Food and drink is prepared for you, my friends. I have been a
laranzu,
I know the terrible hunger and thirst of such work. Come, eat and drink and refresh yourselves. Then I have had rooms made ready for you to sleep, and rest as long as you will.”

The three
leroni
went quickly to the table and began to raise the wine glasses. Bard was thirsty too; he began to pick up a glass, but his father seized his arm in an iron grip, preventing him. At that moment one of the women screamed, a dreadful raw-throated scream, and slithered down lifeless to the floor. The
laranzu
gulped, spluttered in shock, but it was already too late.

Poisoned,
Bard thought with a thrill of fear, thinking how close he had come to drinking of that same wine. The other
leronis
raised her face in blind appeal, and Bard felt her terror, the dread of certain death; she had swallowed almost none of the wine, and he saw her look around, hunting against hope for a way of escape.

Bard hesitated, for the woman was young, and not without attractiveness. Sensing his confusion, she came and flung herself at his feet. “Oh no! Oh, my lord, don’t kill me, I swear I’ll never say a word—”

“Drink,” said Dom Rafael, and his face was like stone. “Bard. Make her drink.”

Bard’s confusion was gone. His father was right; none of them could let the
leronis
live to tell of this night’s work. Old Gwynn could be trusted with their lives; but a
leronis
whose mind could be read with another’s starstone—no, not possible. Essential to their plan was the knowledge that he should not be known to have a double. The woman was still clutching his knees, babbling in terror. Reluctantly, he bent to his work, but before he could touch her the woman dodged away, springing to her feet, and ran. He sighed, foreseeing a really nasty chase and the need for cutting her down at the end of it; but she ran around the table, caught up the goblet and drank deeply. Even before the third swallow she gave a small strange cough and fell lifeless across the table, upsetting a tray of bread, which fell with a
clunk
to the floor.

Dom Rafael poured out the rest of the poisoned wine on the stone floor.

“There is a wholesome bottle here,” he said. “I knew we would need it. Eat, Bard, the food is untouched, and we have work to do. Even with Gwynn’s help, it will be a night’s work to bury them all three.”

Paul Harrell was not sure whether the thought so strong in the forefront of his mind was his own thought, or that of the man who stood before him. It was immensely confusing. At the same time, two emotions warred in him:
this man would understand me
, and
I hate him; how dare he be so much what I am?
It was not his first experience with ambivalence, but it was his most disturbing awareness of it.

The man who had introduced himself as Wolf said his name again. “Paul Harrell. No, that is not one of our names, although the Harryls are among my father’s most loyal men. It would have been too much to ask that you should have been one of them.”

Paul felt his head again, finding, rather to his surprise, that it was all in one piece. Then he thought of the perfect way to test whether this was, after all, a bizarre nightmare of the stasis box.

“Where’s the head?”

He knew that the other man had understood even the slang phrase—how the
hell
did he do that thought-reading trick?—when he pointed. “Across the corridor.”

Paul got up, naked, and went through the indicated door. No locks. He wasn’t a prisoner, whatever they wanted with him, so it had to be an improvement. The corridor was stone, filled with an icy draft, and his feet felt freezing. The room was a reasonably well-appointed bathroom. The fixtures were somewhat strange in appearance, and he couldn’t even imagine what they were made of, though it certainly wasn’t porcelain, but it was easy enough to figure out the plumbing; he supposed there were only a few designs among humans. There was hot water—in fact, there was a large sunken tub filled with steaming hot water that looked somewhat like a Japanese bath-house fixture, and from the faint medicinal smell he supposed it came right up from a volcanic spring somewhere. Relieving himself, Paul supposed this was the ultimate reality testing. He caught up a fur-lined rug or blanket from a bench and wrapped it around himself.

Returning to the room, the other looked at Paul in his improvised blanket, and said, “I ought to have thought of that. There’s a bedgown on the chair.”

It looked like an old-fashioned bathrobe, but bulkier, lined with some silky fabric that felt like fur, and fastened tightly up at the neck to keep out draughts. It was very warm; in his own world it would have been good for a topcoat intended for traveling in Siberia. He sat down on the bed, drawing up his bare feet under the warm robe.

“That’ll do for a start. Now, where am I, and what is this place, and what am I doing here? And, incidentally, who are you?”

Bard repeated his name and Paul tried it over on his tongue. “Bard di Asturien.” It was not so outlandish, after all. He was trying to assimilate what Bard had told him about the Hundred Kingdoms. He wondered what the name of the sun was—if they were a pre-space culture, they probably called it The Sun—and he didn’t know of any world within the Confederacy which had a sun as large as this, or as red. The really big red suns usually didn’t have habitable planets. “Are there really a Hundred Kingdoms?”

He was thinking of a kind of United Confederacy where the kings all met together, as in the four-yearly Congress of the Confederacy of Worlds. Only there weren’t a hundred inhabited planets. A hundred kings together would be quite an assembly, especially if they got along no better than the embassies of the Confederacy usually did! And there were only forty-two of them!

Bard took his question quite seriously.

“I am better at strategy than at geography,” be said, “and I have not consulted a map maker recently; there may have been some new alliances, and the Hasturs have recently taken over a vacant throne or two. I think perhaps there are seventy-five or eighty, no more. But the Hundred Kingdoms is a good round number and sounds well beyond their borders.”

“And how did you manage to bring me here?” Paul asked. “The last I heard, even with hyper-drive, to go much farther than the Alpha colony took an enormous amount of time, and I notice that my hair and nails haven’t grown all that much.”

Bard scowled and said, “I haven’t the least idea what you are talking about.”
Does he have sorcery stronger than ours?
Paul heard the unspoken thought perfectly well.

“I take it, then, we’re right outside the Confederacy of Worlds.”

“Whatever they may be, we are,” Bard said.

“And the Terran police have no jurisdiction here?”

“It, or they, certainly do not. The only law within this kingdom is that of my father, as regent for my brother Alaric. Why do you ask? Are you a fugitive from justice, or a criminal under sentence of death?”

“I spent enough time as a fugitive,” Paul said. “I was remanded for rehabilitation twice before I was eighteen. At this time I am supposed to be in custody, and under sentence. . . .” It made no sense to speak of the stasis box. They evidently didn’t have it here and there was no sense in giving them ideas.

“Your country imprisons, then, rather than giving death or exile?”

Paul nodded.

“And you were—imprisoned? Then, since I delivered you out of prison, you owe me service.”

“That’s a moot point,” said Paul, “and we’ll moot it later. How did you bring me here?”

But the explanation—
starstones, a circle of wizards
—made no more sense to him than, he suspected, the stasis box would have made to the Wolf. Come to think of it, it was as likely as anything else that could get him out of a stasis box. It had been tried, of course, but had never been managed before; or if it was, the government wasn’t telling anybody.

“What about the people who brought me here?”

Bard’s face was grim. “They’re in no condition to go blabbing about it.” Paul knew perfectly well what he meant. “In your own idiom, they are in earth, except for my father. He will meet you later; he is still sleeping. His night’s work was—strenuous, for so old a man.” Paul had a fragmentary picture: three graves, hastily dug by moonlight, and suddenly he turned cold. This was no place for frightened conformists. Well, that was the kind of place he had wanted all his life. The people in this place played by rules he could understand. He knew Bard was quite willing to frighten him, and he decided it was time to let this self-styled Wolf know that he didn’t scare easy.
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Not me.

Bringing him here this way must have been illegal; or else they wouldn’t have killed off all the witnesses; so he had something already on Bard, and on his father.

“I don’t suppose you brought me here out of pure-hearted love of knowledge,” he said, “or you’d be shouting it from the housetops, instead of hiding me here and murdering anyone who knows about it.”

Bard looked disconcerted. “Can you read my mind?”

“Some, yes.” Not nearly as much as he wanted Bard to think he could. But he wanted to keep the Wolf a little off balance. He knew this was a man who played rough, played for keeps, and he needed every advantage he could get!

But Bard wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble for nothing. He was probably safe until he knew what Bard wanted him for, and unless it was to impersonate the guest of honor at a public execution, it couldn’t be worse than the stasis box.

“What do you want with me? I didn’t get any good-conduct medals—any more than you did,” he said, making a shrewd guess.

Bard grinned. “Right. I was outlawed at seventeen, and I’ve been a mercenary soldier ever since. This year I came back and helped my father claim the throne of Asturias for my brother.”

“Not for yourself?”

“Hell, no. I’ve got better things to do with myself than sit in council with all the graybeards in the kingdom, making laws about keeping cattle in their pastures and mending roads and stocking travel shelters and whether the Sisterhoods of the Sword should share fire-watch with men!”

Put like that, Paul decided that the business of kingship sounded a bit dull after all. “You’re a younger brother and your elder brother is the king?”

“No, the other way around. My younger brother is the legitimate son. I am
nedestro
. . . more than a bastard but not in line of succession.”

“Born the wrong side of the blanket, huh?”

Bard looked briefly puzzled, then chuckled as he caught the image. “You could put it that way. I’ve no complaint about the old man; he reared me in his own house and supported me in my quarrel with the old king. And now my brother’s put me in charge of his armies.”

“So what do you want me for?” Paul demanded, “and what’s in it for me?”

“At the very least,” Bard said, “freedom. If you’re as much like me on the inside as you are on the outside, that means a lot to you. Beyond that? I don’t know. Women, if you want them, and again, if you’re anything like me, you want them and you’ll get them, too. Riches, if you’re not too greedy. Adventure. Maybe a chance at the regency of a kingdom. Anyway, a better life than you led in your prison. Isn’t that a good start?”