The Spell Sword (2 page)

Yet this was an inhabited world, a world peopled by humans who were, as far as
he knew, indistinguishable from Earthmen. He had somehow survived the crash
which had wrecked the Mapping and Exploring plane; it should not be wholly
impossible, somehow, to make his way back to the spaceport again. Perhaps the
natives would be friendly and help him, although he had to admit it didn't seem
too likely.

Still, while there was life there was hope. and he still had his life. Men had
been lost, before this, in the wild and unexplored areas of strange worlds, and
had come out of it alive, living to tell about it at Empire Central back on
Earth. So that his first task was to get his leg back in walking shape, and his
second, to get out of these mountains. Hellers. Good name for them. They were
hellish all right. Crosswinds, updrafts, downdrafts, storms blowing up out of
nowhere-the plane wasn't made that could fly through them unscathed in bad
weather. He wondered how the natives got across them. Pack-mules or some local
equivalent, he thought. Anyway, there would be passes, roads, trails.

As the sun rose higher, the mists cleared and he could look down into the
valleys below. Most of the slopes were tree-clad, but far below in the valley a
river ran, and across it there was some darkening which could only be a bridge.

So he wasn't in entirely uninhabited country, after all. There were blotches
which might well be plowed lands, squared fields, gardens, a pleasant and
peaceful countryside, with smoke rising from chimneys and houses-but very far
away; and between the cultivated lands and the cliffside where Andrew clung were
seemingly endless leagues of chasms and foothills and crags.

Somehow, though, he'd get down there, and then back to the spaceport. And then,
damn it, off this ghastly inhospitable planet where he never should have come in
the first place, and having come, should have left again within forty-eight
hours. Well, he'd go now.

And what about the girl?

Damn the girl. She never existed. She was a fever-dream, a ghost, a symbol of
his own loneliness.

Lonely. I've always been alone, on a dozen worlds.

Probably every lonely man dreams that someday he will arrive at a world where
someone is waiting, someone who will stretch out a hand to him, and speak to
something inside, saying "I am here. We are together."

There had been women, of course. Women in every port-what was the old saying,
starting with sailors and transferred to spacemen, always a new one in every
port? And there were men who thought that state of affairs was enviable, he
knew.

But none of them had been the right woman, and at heart he knew all the things
the Psych Division had told him. They ought to know. You look for perfection in
a woman to protect yourself against a real relationship. You take refuge in
fantasies to avoid looking at the hard realities of life. And so forth and so
on. Some of them even told him that he was unconsciously homosexual and found
ordinary sexual affairs unsatisfactory because it wasn't really women he wanted
at all, he just couldn't admit it to himself. He'd heard it all, a hundred
times, yet the dream remained.

Not just a woman for his bed, but one for his heart and his heart-hungry
loneliness.

Maybe that was what the old fortune-teller in the Old Town had been playing on.

Maybe so many men shared that romantic dream that she handed it out to
everybody, as psi-quacks back on Earth told romantic teen-age girls about a tall
dark stranger they would surely meet someday.

No. It was a real girl. I saw her and she-she called me.

All right. Think about it now. Get it all straight.

He had come to Cottman IV en route to a new assignment, and it was simply a port
of call, one of a series of crossroads worlds where routings were changed in the
great network of the Terran Empire. The spaceport was large, as was the Trade
City around it, to cater to the spaceport personnel, but it was not an Empire
world with established trade, travel, tours. It was, he knew, an inhabited
world, but most of it was off limits to Earthmen. He didn't even know what the
natives called it. The name on the Empire maps was enough for him, Cottman IV.

He hadn't intended to stay there more than forty-eight hours, only long enough
to arrange transit to his final destination.

And then, with three others from the Space Service, he had gone into the Old
Town. Ship fare got tiresome; it always tasted of machines, with a strong acrid
taste of spices to cover the pervasive tang of recycled water and hydrocarbons.

The food in the Old Town was at least natural, good grilled meat such as he had
not had since his last planetside billeting, and fresh fragrant fruits, and he
had enjoyed it more than any meal he had tasted in months, with the sweet clear
gold-colored wine. And then, out of curiosity, he and his companions had
strolled through the marketplace, buying souvenirs, fingering strange
rough-textured fabrics and soft furs, and then he had come to the booth of the
fortune-teller, and out of amused curiosity he had paused at her words.

"Someone is waiting for you. I can show you the face of your destiny, stranger.

Would you see the face of the one who waits for you?"

He had never dreamed that it was more than a standard pitch for a few coins;
amused, laughing, he had given the wrinkled old woman the coins she asked for,
and followed her inside her small awning-covered canvas booth. Inside she had
looked into her crystal-strange how on every world he had ever known the crystal
ball was the chosen instrument of pretended far-seeing-and then, without a word,
shoved the ball toward him. Still half in laughter, half in disgust, ready to
walk away, Andrew had bent to see the pretty face, the shining red hair. A pitch
for a high-class call-girl, he thought cynically, and was prepared to ask what
the old madam was charging for the girl that day, and if she made a special
price for Earthmen. Then the girl in the crystal raised her eyes and met
Andrew's, and.

And it happened. There were no words for it. He stood there, half-crouched and
unmoving over the crystal, so long that his neck, unheeded, was stabbed with
cramp in the muscles.

She was very young, and she seemed to be both frightened and in pain. It seemed
that she cried out to him for help that only he could give, and that she
touched, deliberately, some secret thing known only to both of them. But he
could not, later, understand what it had been, only that she called to him, that
she needed him desperately.

And then her face was gone and his head was aching. He gripped at the edge of
the table, shaking, desperate to call her back. "Where is she? Who is she?" he
demanded, and the old woman turned up a blank, frowning face. "No, now, how do I
know what you saw, off-worlder? I saw nothing and no one, and others are
waiting. You must go now."

He had stumbled out, blank with despair.

She called to me. She needs me. She is here....

And I am leaving in six hours.

It hadn't been exactly easy to break his contract and stay, but it hadn't been
all that hard either. Places on the world to which he was going were in high
demand, and there wouldn't be more than three days' delay in filling his
position. He'd have to accept two downgrades in seniority, but he didn't care.

On the other hand, as Personnel told him, volunteers for Cottman IV weren't easy
to find. The climate was bad, there was almost no trade, and although the pay
was good, no career man really wanted to exile himself way out here on the
fringes of the Empire on a planet which stubbornly refused to have any dealings
with them except for leasing the spaceport itself. They offered him a choice of
work in the computer center, or in Mapping and Exploring, which was high-risk,
high-pay work. For some reason, the natives of this world had never mapped it,
and the Terran Empire felt that presenting them with finished maps which their
native technology could not, or would not, encompass might be a very good thing
for public relations between Cottman IV and the Empire.

He chose Mapping and Exploring. He already knew-in the first week he had seen
every girl and woman in the spaceport-that she was none of the workers in Medic
or Personnel or Dispatch. Mapping and Exploring enjoyed certain concessions
which allowed them to go outside the severely limited preserve of the Empire.

Somewhere, somehow, she was out there waiting.

It was an obsession and he knew it, but somehow he could not break the spell,
and didn't want to.

And then, the third time he'd gone out with the mapping plane, the crash. and
here he was, no closer than ever to his dream girl. If she had ever existed,
which he doubted.

Exhausted by the long effect of memory, he crawled back into his shelter to
rest. Time enough tomorrow to work out a plan for getting down off the ledge. He
ate emergency rations, sucked ice, fell into an uneasy sleep.

She was there again, standing before him, both in and not quite in the little
dark shelter, a ghost, a dream, a dark flower, a flame in his heart.

I do not know why it is you I have touched, stranger. I sought for my kinfolk,
those who love me and could help me.

Damsel in distress, Andrew thought, I just bet. What do you want with me?

Only a look of pain, and a sorrowful twisting of the face.

Who are you? I can't keep calling you ghost-girl.

Callista.

Now I know I'm freaked out, Andrew said to himself. That's an Earth name.

I am no Earth sorceress, my powers are of air and fire.

That made no sense. What do you want with me?

Just now, only to save the life I unwittingly endangered. And I say to you:
avoid the darkened land.

She faded abruptly from sight and hearing, and he was alone, blinking.

"Callista" means simply "beautiful," as I remember, he thought. Maybe she is
simply a symbol of beauty in my mind. But what is the darkened land? And how can
she help to save me? Oh, rubbish, I'm treating her as if she were real again.

Face it. There's no such woman, and if you're going to get out of here, you'll
have to go it alone.

And yet, as he lay back to rest and make plans, he found himself trying, again,
to call up her face before his eyes.

The storm still raged on the heights, but here in the valley daylight shone
through, and lowering sunlight; only the thick anvil-shaped clouds to the west
showed where the peaks of the mountains were wrapped in storm.

Damon Ridenow rode with head down, braced against the wind that ripped his
riding-cloak, and it felt like flight As if he fled before a gathering storm. He
tried to tell himself, The weather's getting into my bones, maybe I'm just not
as young as I was, but he knew it was more than that. It was an unease,
something stirring, nagging at his mind, something wrong. Something rotten.

He realized that he had been keeping his eyes turned from the low tree-clad
hills which lay to the east, and deliberately, trying to break the strange
unease, made himself twist in his saddle and look up and down the slopes.

The darkened lands.

Rubbish, he said to himself angrily. There was war there, last year, with the
cat-people. Some of his folk were killed and others were driven away, forced to
resettle in the Alton country, around the lakes. The cat-people were fierce and
cruel, yes, they slaughtered and burned and tormented and left for dead what
they could not kill outright. Maybe what he felt was simply the memory of all
the suffering there during the war. My mind is open to the minds of those who
suffered-
No, it was worse than that. The things he'd heard about what the cat-people did.

He glanced behind him. His escort-four swordsmen of the Guard-were beginning to
draw together and murmur, and he knew he should call a halt to breathe the
horses. One of them spurred and came to his side, and he reined his mount in to
look at the man.

"Lord Damon," the Guardsman said, with proper deference-but he looked angry.

"Why do we ride as if foemen rode hard at our heels? I have heard no word of war
or ambush."

Damon Ridenow forced his pace to slacken slightly, but it was an effort. He
wanted to spur his mount hard, to race away for the safety of Armida beyond
them.

He said somberly, "I think we are pursued, Reidel."

The Guardsman warily swept his eyes from horizon to horizon-it was his trained
duty to be wary-but with open skepticism. "Which bush, think you, hides ambush,
Lord Damon?"

"That you know no more than I," said Damon, sighing.

The man looked stubborn. He said, "Well, you are a Comyn Lord, and it is your
business, and mine to carry out your orders. But there is a limit to what man
and horseflesh can do, Lord, and if we are attacked with wearied horses and
saddle sores, we will fight the less."

"I suppose you're right," Damon said, sighing. "Call halt if you will, then.

Here at least there is little danger of attack in open country."

He was cramped and weary, and glad to dismount, even though the nightmare
urgency still beat at him. When the Guard Reidel brought him food, he took it
without smiling, and his thanks were absentminded. The Guardsman lingered with
the privilege of an old acquaintance.

"Do you still smell danger behind every tree, Lord Damon?"

"Yes, but I can't say why," Damon said, sighing. Afoot he was little more than
medium height, a thin pale man with the fire-red hair of a Comyn Lord of the
Seven Domains; like most of his kindred he went unarmed except for a dagger, and
under his riding-cloak he wore the light tunic of an indoor man, a scholar. The
Guardsman was looking at him solicitously.

"You are unused to so much riding, Lord, and in such haste. Was there so much
need for it, so swiftly?"

"I do not know," the Comyn Lord said quietly. "But my kinswoman at Armida sent
me a message-a guarded one-begging me to come to her with all speed, and she is
not of that fearful kind who start at shadows and lie awake nights fearing
bandits in the courtyard when her menfolk are away. An urgent summons from the
Lady Ellemir is nothing to treat lightly, so I came at once, as I must. It may
well be some family trouble, some sickness in her household; but whatever it is,
the matter is grave or she could deal with it on her own."