Destiny's Lovers (2 page)

Heading the ten colonists was Almaric’s
younger son, Tarik, with Tarik’s wife, Narisa, as second in
command. They made their headquarters upon an island in a large
lake, where there was a shelter built more than six centuries
before by a vanished Race. Once their communications equipment was
working well, they had begun to explore the planet. The first group
to set out had chosen the southern area of the continent they had
landed on, and had relayed massive amounts of information back to
headquarters before returning eight days later.

Reid volunteered for the second expedition,
toward the east. Of course Alla then said she wanted to go, too,
and Herne had grumbled that he might as well go along on this trip,
because the third expedition was scheduled to explore the rocky
northernmost region of the continent and he hated cold weather and
certainly did not want to be assigned to that group.

The three of them were flown by shuttlecraft
for an entire day across a barren, stony desert before they were
set down at the edge of a prairie. They planned to trek to the
cliffs which their scanning instruments told them rimmed the sea.
When they reached the cliffs, they would signal for pickup by the
shuttle.

Two of the Chon went with them. The friendly,
telepathic birds indigenous to Dulan’s Planet were seldom far away
from the colonists.

Reid, Alla, and Herne had tramped across the
prairie for three days, finding nothing more interesting to report
back to headquarters than a wide variety of grasses and small
mammals, and a remarkable number of stinging insects.

The forest was a relief from the unbroken
glare of the orange-gold sun, but as they moved into the trees,
they lost their winged companions, who apparently did not frequent
this part of the planet. Reid missed them. Still, he could
understand why they did not come into a forest so impenetrable.
Among the closely packed trees and draped vines there would be no
space for the large birds to spread their wings and fly. When they
were gone he felt a peculiar sense of loss, almost of foreboding,
as though the Chon were trying to warn him of something. He
mentioned his feeling to the others. They said they had noticed
nothing strange.

“Beloved…”

Reid stuffed his nonfunctional communicator
back into the waist pocket of his high-visibility orange treksuit
and looked upward, to see if the owner of the mysterious voice was
hiding there, but he could discern nothing except the thick canopy
of leaves. He decided there was no point in staying where he
was.

“We are supposed to be exploring,” he said
aloud to the disembodied voice, “so I will explore. Perhaps I’ll
find you, or at least find the others.” He moved forward.

* * * * *

“You have fostered a prophetess!” Osiyar
stared at Tamat across Janina’s limp figure. He had snatched her
from the surf just in time to keep her from being swept out to sea.
She lay across his arms, her long wet hair dragging in the sand,
her eyes closed. On her otherwise peaceful face there was the
faintest hint of a line between her brows. Whether it was a line of
pain, or of bewilderment at what had happened to her, no one could
tell. Osiyar kept his eyes fixed upon the High Priestess. “Did you
know of this before?”

“I did not know, I only suspected,” Tamat
replied. “Because she is of my grandmother’s blood, some portion of
the Gift must be hers. I tried repeatedly to touch it and could
not. I thought it was locked within her because she witnessed the
horror of her parents’ death. But I never dreamed the Test would
result in prophecy.”

“You should have told me what you planned,
dear Tamat.” Sidra spoke in a low-pitched voice, sweet as the
nectar of the reddest flowers of the khata plant. “I might have
helped you. With our minds joined we might have reached her, and
there would have been no need for this terrible Test.”

“Sidra, you do not love Janina,” Tamat
replied. “You have always been afraid of her, as most of the
village is afraid of her. Now we know why.”

“Since she is not a true telepath, she can
never be High Priestess,” Osiyar said.

“No,” Tamat agreed, and with an aching heart
she watched the tiny flare of triumph in Sidra’s blue eyes.

“Will you banish her?” Osiyar asked.

“Never.” Tamat’s voice cracked on the word.
Banishment meant certain death, for there was nothing beyond the
narrow strip of land that was Ruthlen, only empty desolation and
danger.

“What will you tell them?” Osiyar inclined
his head toward the villagers still waiting at the far edge of the
beach.

“The truth,” Tamat replied.

“They will kill her with demands that she
take the potion again and again so they can know the future,” Sidra
objected. “Tamat, I may not love Janina, but I do love you, who
have been my teacher all my life. I would not see you bowed down
with grief at Janina’s death, which will happen if she must drink
that strong brew too often. Tell the villagers only a part of the
truth. Say that she has a portion of the Gift, but it is inadequate
to qualify her to be High Priestess. Then let Janina remain with us
as a lesser priestess. She will be well cared for all of her
life.”

And her Gift well-used by you, Tamat thought.
She knew Sidra heart and soul, knew her need for power and her
frustrated lust for Osiyar. Once Tamat was dead, Sidra would have
no compunction about feeding the potion to Janina so she could use
the girl to gain knowledge of the future in order to improve and
consolidate her own position. And though Sidra might never break
her Sacred Vow to remain a virgin, she would probably find a way to
use Osiyar to satisfy her desire for him in some other manner.
Tamat suddenly felt the weight of every one of her ninety-eight
years crushing her.

“Tamat? Are you ill? I knew the walk was too
long for you.” Sidra reached out a hand to steady her, but Tamat
drew herself up, brushing aside her assistant’s concern.

“I am not ill. You are right, Sidra. Janina
must remain with us as a lesser priestess. It shall be as you say.”
Tamat silently promised herself she would think of something else
for the future. Tomorrow, after she had rested, she would think of
another plan. “Osiyar, can you carry her to the temple?”

“Easily,” the priest replied. “She is a small
weight.”

Tamat turned and began to walk toward the
villagers. Behind her back, Sidra and Osiyar shared a long, silent
look.

* * * * *

“Beloved, come to me. I need you…help me…”
Reid jerked himself awake, uncertain if it was day or night. He had
been walking for so long that he had lost all sense of time. He
imagined that days must have passed because he was so tired. His
food packets were gone. He must have eaten them, which further
convinced him he had been in the forest for a long time.

He had given up hope of finding Herne and
Alla. Poor Alla was probably frantic with worry over him. He was
sorry about that, yet he remained confident they would all be found
soon. If he did not send periodic reports back to the headquarters
building on the lake, Tank would begin a search for them. But how
could anyone find him in this strangely luxuriant forest when his
instruments would not work to guide rescuers to him?

His instruments. Reid felt for his
communicator. He found it in the waist pocket where it was supposed
to be, but the packet of other communications equipment he usually
carried slung over his left shoulder was gone. He could not recall
having dropped it. He decided he had most likely removed it the
last time he slept, and then forgotten to pick it up again when he
moved on. He turned around, half determined to retrace his steps to
try to find it, before he realized that he had no idea which way to
go to backtrack. At that moment, he wasn’t even certain in which
direction he had been going when he had heard the voice. With all
the greenery pressing around him, he had no means of orientation.
Shaking his head at the dense lushness of trees and undergrowth and
hoping to get a better perspective on his location, he stepped
backward a couple of paces.

He stepped off the ground into empty air.

With well-trained reflexes immediately alert,
he caught at a bush to stop his fall. To his horror, the bush began
to pull out of the ground. Grunting with the effort it took, he
heaved himself upward to catch at another bush. This one was
sturdier than the first, with deeper roots. It held while Reid
slowly, painfully pulled himself back to solid ground. He lay on
his belly, his legs dangling into emptiness, unable to move any
further until his heart stopped its thunderous pounding and he
could breathe normally again. Then he pulled himself all the way
up, rolled over, and looked down into the abyss into which he had
almost fallen.

It was a deep, narrow ravine. The thick
foliage had screened it from his view, and he was so tired and
confused that he had not noticed the brighter quality of light
where the ground suddenly fell away and the trees ended.

He stared across the tops of tall trees to a
rock wall on the opposite side which towered so far above him that
its uppermost heights were lost in clouds and mist. The only
interruption in the solid, gold-brown rock was the narrow veil of
white water cascading down its length to lose itself in the green
far below. On either side of him, the ravine extended as far as he
could see.

“Beloved…please…”

“Stop tormenting me!” he yelled. “Star-blast
you for a coward! Whoever you are, show yourself!”

“Please…”

“Leave me alone!” Jumping to his feet, Reid
formed his hands into fists, ready to fight the possessor of that
ghostly voice, but nothing materialized. “I can’t help you if I
don’t know who or what or where you are. Damnation! Either stand
where I can see you or go away!”

The response to his furious outburst was
silence. Temporarily relieved of the annoyance of the voice, Reid
considered his situation. He knew there was no ravine on the
computer model of this area that he had studied so carefully back
at headquarters. Remembering that model, he felt a prickling at the
nape of his neck, accompanied by a sense of something eerily wrong,
something far beyond his experience. He knew deep in his soul that
he had wandered into a place where he should not be.

He thought later that he must have been mad
or delirious to be so indifferent to danger or common sense, but
the longer he stared at the bare rock escarpment confronting him,
the more strongly it beckoned to him. He thought that if he could
get down into the ravine, cross it, and somehow climb far enough up
the cliff face, he would surely be permanently free of the
irritating voice that was either inside his head or whispering into
his ear, he couldn’t tell which. He believed if he could just get
above the smothering leaves, his communicator might work again. If
it did, he would be able to contact Alla and Herne, or, failing
that, to reach Tank at headquarters and ask for help.

The first thing he did was make certain the
communicator was securely fastened inside his pocket. Then he
grabbed at the dangling end of a long, thick vine, pulling at it
until it unwound from the branches of the tree where it had been
growing and tumbled to the ground beside him. He wrapped one end of
the tough, fibrous vine around the trunk of a sapling. Once
convinced that this makeshift rope was secure, he held onto it
while he let himself down over the edge of the ravine. He slid
almost to the end of the vine, which brought him within reach of a
particularly tall tree. Kicking his feet against the rocky side of
the ravine to swing himself outward, he reached for the topmost
branches.

He was not to have a second chance. When he
was at the outermost limit of his swing, the vine tore loose from
the sapling. With a loud whoop of dismay, Reid fell into the
treetop. Grabbing for anything that might stop his fall, he
clutched at leaves, small branches, and round, yellow, sticky
fruit. He fell through a tangle of branches, bumping and scraping
his hands and face, until he caught a branch strong enough to
support his weight. He thought his arms would be pulled out of
their sockets by the jerk when he stopped falling, but he held on
tightly to that lifesaving branch while around him the debris he
had created fell away toward the ground.

Cautiously, Reid edged his way along the
branch to the tree trunk. Having reached it, he clutched it tightly
and began to descend, using the branches as though they were the
rungs of a ladder.

It was a long way down, and he paused on the
lowest level of branches to look around. Here at the bottom of the
ravine the still air was misty with moisture. The voice he had
heard before was silent, perhaps because the roar of the waterfall
was so overwhelming. If he followed that sound, he would come
before long to the cliff wall. He dropped to the ground and,
ignoring numerous bruises and cuts, began to walk again, pushing
his way through ferns almost as tall as he was, slipping now and
then on moisture-soaked mosses.

He was frequently distracted by swarms of
brilliant blue butterflies or by small red-and-yellow birds with
exceedingly long tail feathers. The waterfall blotted out any
sounds the birds made. By the time he reached the cliff, Reid’s
head was reverberating with the noise.

He did not waste time looking for the pool
into which the water fell. The sound of it had guided him as he’d
intended, but he knew he would have to get away from the roaring of
that relentless cascade or he would be unable to use his
communicator. Turning left, he made his way along the base of the
cliff, brushing aside the undergrowth, trampling delicate flowers
without thought in his eagerness to find a place where he could
climb.