The Shattered Chain (18 page)

She had finished eating, and was watering her animals at the village trough when she saw a pair of men riding into the square. By the cut of their cloaks she knew they were from the far Hellers; they were bearded, and wore wicked-looking knives in their belts. They looked at Magda and, she fancied, at her laden saddlebags, with a regard that made her uneasy. She cut short the watering, clambered hastily into her saddle, and took the trail out of town. She hoped they would stop there for a good, long rest, and she would not see them again.

For a long time the trail led upward between heavily wooded slopes. The ice and snow were melting in the noon sun and the trail was slushy underfoot; Magda let her horse find its own pace, and when the road grew steepest, dismounted to lead it. She paused at a bend in the trail, where the trees thinned at a giddy height, looking down at the narrow line of road far below. There she saw, with consternation, what looked like the same two men she had seen in the village. Were they following her?

Don’t be paranoid. This is the only road northwest into the Hellers; am I the only one who could have legitimate business along it?
She stepped to the edge, careful not to slip on the muddy, slushy cliff, and looked down at the men riding the trail. Could she even be sure they were the same two men? Yes, for one man had been riding a roan horse; they were not common at any latitude, and to see two in the mountains in the same day’s ride was entirely unlikely. As if to dispel her last doubt, one looked up, apparently saw Magda silhouetted along the edge, and leaned over to speak urgently to his companion; they drew at their horses’ reins, edging in toward the cliff where they would not be visible from above.

Magda felt panic grip and drag at her, a physical sensation like a cramp along her leg muscles. She hurried back to her horse, ordering herself sternly to be calm.
I’m armed. I’ve been combat-trained since I was sixteen, and first knew I was going into Intelligence.
On any other world, she knew, she would have been expected to take this kind of chance routinely, man or woman. Here she’d been sheltered by Darkovan custom.

If it came to a fight—she laid her hand on her knife for a moment, trying to reassure herself—it would be better to make a stand in the pass. She could defend herself better there than on the down slopes. But need it come to a fight? Terran agents were trained to avoid confrontations when possible. And she would have bet that even Free Amazons didn’t go around looking for trouble.

Suddenly she knew that she could not,
could not
force herself to make a stand here and face them. She commanded herself to stay here and think it through, but even while she tried to form her thoughts clearly she was guiding her horse away down the slope, down the trail, hurrying and urging it more, she knew, than a good rider would ever do (there was a mountain proverb of her childhood, “On a steep road let your horse set the pace”), yet she knew she was almost racing downhill, hearing small stones slip and slide beneath the horse’s hooves.

It was not long before she realized she could not go on like this; if one of her animals should fall and break a leg she would be afoot and stranded. She drew the horse to a stop, patting its heaving sides in apology.
What’s wrong with me, why did I run away like that?
Behind her, the road to the pass lay bare and unoccupied.
Maybe they weren’t following me at all. …
But she felt the vague unease, the “hunch” she had learned, in years of successful agent work, always to trust; and it said, loud and clear:
run, hide, disappear, get lost.
The woman who had trained her, far away on another world, had said: “Every good undercover agent is a little psychic. Or they don’t survive long in the service.”

Now what? She couldn’t outrun them, burdened as she was with luggage and pack animal. Sooner or later they would come up with her, and then it would come to a fight.

She looked at the ground, covered with melting snow and mud, an amorphous trampled brownish mess.
Lucky. In new snow they’d see my tracks … and see where I left the trail, which would be worse …
But in the running, muddy water and slush all tracks vanished as fast as they were made. She turned aside from the road, leading the animals through a small gap in the trees; turned back to obliterate, with a quick hand, the marks in the snow where she had crossed the edge; led them some distance from the road and tethered them in a thick grove of evergreens, where they could not be seen.

Then she slipped back, found a concealed vantage point where she could conceal herself between tress and underbrush, and gnawed nervously on some dried fruit as she waited to see the success of her trick.

It was nearly an hour before the riders she had seen came down the slopes, hurrying their mounts as much as they could in the mushy trail underfoot. But neither of them even glanced in Magda’s direction as they hurried past. When they were out of sight, she crawled shakily from her hiding place. She noted peripherally that her knees were weak and trembling, and that the palms of her hands were clammy and wet.

What’s the matter with me? I’m not behaving like a trained agent
—
or even like a Free Amazon! I’m behaving like a
—
like a bunny rabbit!

And why am I panicking now, anyway? I did the sensible thing. Any of our agents, man or woman, on any world, in that situation, would have done just what I did. Kept out of trouble…

Yet she knew, no matter how she tried to rationalize it, that her flight had not been a considered thing, based on her standing orders to avoid a fight where possible. It had been, quite simply, a rout.
I panicked. That’s the long and short of it. I panicked, and I ran.

I behaved like … like …
Realization flashed over her.
Not like a Terran agent. Not like a Free Amazon. Like an ordinary, conventional Darkovan girl.

The kind I’ve taught myself to be, in Thendara. The kind I was brought up to be, in Caer Donn …

The short winter day was drawing to a close, and she thought,
I’ll camp here tonight, in the woods; I’ll let them get a good, long start. By tomorrow they’ll have gone through two or three of those little villages; and with luck they’ll think I just found a place to stay in a village, and give up.

Or, possibly, they were respectable traders on their own lawful business and in a hurry to get home to their wives and children, she considered.

She put up her small tent. It was a compromise, the maximum possible protection in bad weather combined with the minimum possible in weight and size; a combination of an undersized tent and an oversized sleeping bag. It was the standard Darkovan traveler’s model. She knew already that no sane person ever spent a night outdoors if he could possibly help it, which was why the roads were lined with the travel-shelters and huts and why they were sacred places of neutrality.

But she spent that night in the open anyway. By good fortune the weather kept fine, even the predawn snowfall unusually light; but Magda knew, as she emerged shivering, this was a bad sign. Clouds scudded thick and black, away north, and a high wind had already begun to toss the tips of the evergreens, promising a severe storm on the way.

In the lonely silence of the trail she went over and over her failure. However she rationalized it, it
was
a failure; she had panicked.

I’ve taught myself always to behave that way, whenever I step on the Darkovan side.
It was the standard Intelligence conditioning: build yourself a
persona,
a character for whatever planet you’re working on, and never step out of it, even for an instant, until you’re safely back inside the Terran Zone.

But the personality I built for myself in Thendara won’t work here. Because of the particular society on Darkover, and the way women live. It was different for the men. But I was the only woman; and I never realized how jar I had come from ordinary agent’s training …

She tried to think it through, to analyze just what basic changes she would have to make in her basic Darkovan
persona
for this assignment, but the attempt made her so overwhelmingly anxious that she had to give up the effort.
The trouble if, I’ve been trained never to think of Terra outside the Zone.
Now she was trying to bring a process as automatic as breathing under voluntary control; and it wasn’t working.

I can’t be a Free Amazon, I don’t know enough about them. Even Lady Rohana said she didn’t know enough about them. So I can be only my basic Darkovan
persona, pretending
to be a Free Amazon. Lady Rohana seemed to think it would be effective enough to fool people who didn’t have much to do with Free Amazons; but I’d just better hope I don’t meet any
real
ones!

This caused another of those weird small repercussions which, for years, she had thought of as “hunches” and learned to trust. Oddly, this one iced her blood; she had physically to pull her cloak tighter about her shoulders against the sudden runnel of cold down her spine.
It would be just my luck, to meet a couple!

Peter always said I had a talent for bluffing. Better get used to thinking of him by his Darkovan name.

She had a sudden moment of blank terror when the name refused to come to her mind, when she wholly blanked on it. It lasted only a few seconds, and the panic ebbed away as the name came back to her.
Piedro. That’s in the Hellers. In the lowlands they’d call him Pier…—why did I blank on it like that?

It was an hour past noon when she passed one of the shelter huts; it was empty, and she hesitated, tempted to stay there overnight. But she had already lost half a day, and always, at the back of her mind, was the thought of the midwinter deadline. She must not only be at Sain Scarp by midwinter, but she must leave some leeway for return to Thendara before the winter storms closed the passes.
I can’t see us camping on Rumal di Scarp’s doorstep all winter.

Nor did she particularly want to spend the winter cooped up anywhere, alone with Peter.
Once I used to daydream about something that would isolate us, so we had time only to be alone together. … Even now, it might be … pleasurable. …
Exasperated, Magda told herself to snap out of it. She wondered, half annoyed, if Bethany had been right all along;
was
she still half in love with Peter?
I should have taken another lover right away, after we separated. God knows I had enough chances. I wonder why I didn’t.

She checked the notice board, and discovered that there was another shelter just about half a day’s ride distant. As she turned her back on the shelter she felt again the curious, almost physical prickling of the “hunch,” but told herself fiercely not to be superstitious.
I’m afraid to go on, so I find reasons, and call it ESP!

The trail steepened and grew rough underfoot; by midafternoon the thickening clouds lay so deep on the mountain that Magda was riding through a thick white blanket of fog. The dim gray world was full of echoes; she could hear her horse’s hooves sounding dimly, behind and before her, like invisible, ghostly companions. The valley was gone, and the lower slopes; she rode high and alone, on a narrow trail above the known world. She had never been afraid of heights, but now she began to be afraid of the narrowness of the dim trail, of the white nothingness that hemmed her in on every side and might hide anything—or worse, nothing. Her mind kept returning to the cliffs and crags below, where an animal, putting a foot down wrong, might step off the trail, go plunging down the mountainside to be dashed to death on the invisible rocks far below. …

As the darkness deepened, the fog dissolved into fine rain and then into a thick, fast-falling snow, wiping out trail and landmarks. The snow froze as it fell, and the slush underfoot crunched and crackled under her horse’s hooves; then the wind began to howl through the trees and, where they thinned, to roar across the trail, driving icy needles of sleet into her face and eyes. She pulled up her cloak’s collar and wrapped a fold of her scarf over her nose and chin, but the cold made her nose run, and the water froze on her nose and mouth and turned the scarf to a block of ice. Snow clung to her eyelashes and froze there, making it impossible to see. Her horse began to slip on the icy trail, and Magda dismounted to lead it and the faltering pack animal, glad of the knee-high boots she was wearing; a woman’s soft low sandals or ankle-high, tied moccasins would have been soaked in a moment.