The Spell Sword (4 page)

"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?"

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 way 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.

So this world was not only inhabited, it was civilized, at least after a
fashion. All the comforts of home, he thought, returning to his bed of piled
straw. Now all he had to do was to wait out the blizzard.

He was so weary, after days of climbing and walking, and so warm in the thick
blanket, that he had no trouble at all in falling asleep again. When he woke
again, the light was declining, and the noise of the storm was lessening a
little.` He guessed, by the gathering darkness, that he had slept most of the
day away.