The Spell Sword (6 page)

"I suppose so," he said slowly, trying to cope with it. It sounded like the old
story of astral duplicates of the body and astral planes, in her own language,
which he supposed was reaching his mind directly from hers. "The important thing
is that you can come here. There have been times when I've wanted to step out
and leave my body behind."

"Oh, you do," she said literally. "Everyone does in sleep, when the energy-nets
fall apart. But you have not been trained to do it at will. Someday, perhaps, I
can teach you how it is done." She laughed a little ruefully. "If we both live,
that is. If we both live."

Outside the thick walls of the great house at Armida, the white blizzard raged,
howling and whining around the heights as if animated by a personal fury against
the stone walls which kept it at bay. Even inside, in the great hall, the
windows were grayed with its blur and the wind reached them as a dulled roar.

Restless and distraught, Ellemir paced the length of the hall. With a nervous
glance at the raging storm outside, she said, "We cannot even search for her in
this weather! And with every hour that passes, it may be that she is farther and
farther away." She turned on Damon like a fury, and demanded, "How can you sit
there so calmly, toasting your toes, when Callista is somewhere in this storm?"

Damon raised his head and said quietly, "Come and sit down, Ellemir. We may be
reasonably sure that wherever Callista may be, she is not out in the snowstorm.

Whoever went to so much trouble to steal her from here did not do it to let her
die of exposure in the hills. As for searching for her, were the weather never
so good, we could not go out and quarter the Kilghard Hills on horseback,
shouting her name in the forests." He had spoken with wry humor, but Ellemir
whirled on him angrily.

"Are you saying we can do nothing, that we are helpless, that we must abandon
her to whatever fate has seized her?"

"I am saying nothing of the sort," Damon told her. "You heard what I said. We
could not search for her at random in these hills, even if the weather would
allow it. If she were in any ordinary hiding place, you could touch her mind.

Let us use these days of the storm to begin the search in some reasonable way,
and the best way to do that is to sit down, and think about it. Do come and sit
down, Ellemir," he pleaded. "Pacing the floor, and tearing your nerves to
shreds, will not help Callista. It will only make you less fit to help her when
the time comes. You have not eaten; you look as if you have not slept. Come,
kinswoman. Sit here by the fire. Let me give you some wine." He rose and led the
girl to a seat. She looked up with her lips trembling and said, "Don't be kind
to me, Damon, or I'll break down and melt."

"It might do you good if you could," he said, pouring her a glass of wine. She
sipped it slowly, and he stood by the fireplace, looking down at her. He said,
"I have been thinking. You told me Callista complained of evil dreams-withering
gardens, cat-hags?"

"That is so."

Damon nodded. He said, "I rode from Serrais with a party of Guards, and Reidel-a
Guardsman of my company-spoke of misfortune that had fallen on his kinsman. He
was said to have raved-listen to this-of the darkening lands, and of great fires
and winds that brought death, and girls who clawed at his soul like cat-hags.

From many men, I would have dismissed this as mere babble, imagination. But I
have known Reidel all my life. He does not babble, and as far as I have ever
been able to determine, he has no more imagination than one of his own
saddlebags. Had, I should say; the poor fellow is dead. But he was speaking of
what he had seen and heard, and I think it more than coincidence. And I told you
of the ambush, when we were struck by invisible attackers with invisible swords
and weapons. This alone would tell me that something very strange is going on in
the heights they have begun to call the darkening lands. Since it is rather less
than unlikely that there would be two complete sets of bizarre happenings in one
part of the country, it makes sense to begin with the assumption that what
happened to my Guardsmen is somehow associated with what happened to Callista."

"That seems likely," she said. "This tells me something else. It was no human
being who tore out old Bethiah's eyes as she fought to save her fosterling." She
shuddered, wrapping her arms around her shoulders us if she were icy cold.

"Damon! It is possible, can it be, that Callista is in the hands of the
cat-people?"

"It seems not impossible," Damon said.

"But what could they want with her? What will they do with her? What-what-"

"How should I know, Ellemir? I could only guess. I know so little of those folk,
even though I fought them. I have never seen one of them, except lying as a
corpse on a battlefield. There are those who believe that they are as
intelligent as mankind, and there are those who believe they are little more
than the brutes. I do not think that anyone since the days of Varzil the Good
really knows anything about them for certain."

"No, there is one thing we know for certain," Ellemir said grimly, "that they
fight like men, and sometimes even more fiercely."

"That, yes," said Damon, and was silent, thinking of his Guard, ambushed and
lying dead on the hillsides below Armida. They had died so that he could sit
here by the fireside with Ellemir. He knew he could have done nothing to save
them, and sharing their death would have done no good to anyone, but all the
same guilt tore at him and would not be eased. "When the storm subsides I must
make shift somehow to go back and bury them," he said, adding after a moment,
"If there is enough left of them to bury."

Ellemir said, quoting a well-known mountain proverb, "The dead in heaven is too
happy to grieve for indignities to his corpse; the dead in hell has too much
else to grieve for."

"Still," said Damon stubbornly, "for the sake of their kinfolk, I would do what
I can."

"It is Callista's fate that troubles me now," Ellemir said. "Damon! Can you
possibly be serious? Can you really believe that Callista is in the hands of
nonhumans? Beyond all other considerations, what could they possibly want with
her?"

"As for that, child, I know no more than you do," said Damon. "It is just
possible-and we must accept the possibility-that they stole her for some
unexplainable reason, comprehensible only to nonhumans, which we, being human,
can never know or comprehend."

"That is no help at all!" Ellemir said angrily. "It sounds like the horror tales
I heard in the nursery! So-and-so was stolen by monsters, and when I asked why
the monsters stole her, Nurse told me that it was because they were monsters,
and monsters were evil-" She broke off and her voice caught again. "This is
real, Damon! She's my sister! Don't tell me fairy stories!"

Damon looked at her levelly. "Nothing was further from my mind. I told you
before; no one really knows anything about the cat-folk."

"Except that they are evil!"

"What is evil?" Damon asked wearily. "Say they do evil to our own people, and I
will agree heartily with you. But if you say that they are evil in themselves,
for no reason and just for the pleasure of doing evil, then you are making them
into those fairy-story monsters you're talking about. I only said that since we
are human and they are cat-people, we may have to accept that we may not be able
to understand, now or ever, what their reasons for taking her may have been. But
that is simply something to keep in mind-that any reasons we might guess for her
kidnapping may simply be human approximations of their reasons, and not the
whole truth. Apart from that, though, why do any folk steal women, and why
Callista in particular? Or, for that matter, any beasts steal? I have never
heard that they were cannibal flesh-eaters, and in any case the forests are
filled with game at this season, so we may assume it was not that."

"Are you trying to give me the horrors?" Ellemir still sounded angry.

"Not a bit of it. I'm trying to do away with the horrors," Damon said. "If there
was any vague thought in your mind that she might have been killed and eaten, I
think you can dismiss it. Since they killed her guards, and disabled her foster
mother, it was not just any human being they wanted, or even any woman. So they
took her, not because she was human, not just because she was female, but
because she was one specific female human: because she was Callista."

Ellemir said, low, "Bandits and trail-raiders steal young women, at times, for
slaves, or concubines, or to sell in the Dry Towns-"

"I think we can forget that too," said Damon firmly. "They left all your
serving-girls; in any case, what would cat-men want with a human female? There
are stories of crossbreeds between man and chieri, back in the ancient times,
but even those are mostly legends and no man living can say whether or not they
have any foundation in fact. As for the other folk, our women are no more to
them than theirs to us. Of course, it is possible that they have some human
captive who wanted a wife, but even if they were so altruistic and kind as to be
willing to provide him with one, which I admit I find hard to believe, there
were a dozen serving-girls in the outbuildings, as young as Callista, just as
beautiful, and infinitely easier to come at. If they simply wanted human women,
as hostages, or to sell somewhere as slaves, they would have taken them as well.

Or taken them, and left Callista."

"Or me. Why take Callista from her bed and leave me sleeping untouched in mine?"

"That, too. You and Callista are twins. I can tell you one from the other, but I
have known you since your hair was too short to braid. A casual stranger could
never have known you apart, and might easily have taken Callista for you. Now
it's barely possible that they were simply wanting a hostage, or someone to hold
to ransom, and snatched the one who came first to hand."

"No," Ellemir said, "my bed is nearest the door, and they walked very quietly
and carefully around me to come at her."

"Then it comes to the one difference between you," Damon told her. "Callista is
a telepath and a Keeper. You are not. We can only assume that in some way they
knew which of you was the telepath, and that for some reason they wanted
specifically to take the one woman here who fitted that description. Why? I know
no more than you do, but I am sure that was their reason."

"And all this still leaves us no nearer to a solution," Ellemir said, and she
sounded frantic. "The facts are that she is gone, and we don't know where she
is! So all your talk is no good at all!"

"No? Think a little," said Damon. "We know she has probably not been killed,
except by accident; if they went to such great pains to take her, they will
probably treat her with great care, feed her well, keep her warm, cherish her as
a prize. She may be frightened and lonely, but she is probably neither cold,
hungry, nor in pain, and it is very unlikely that she has suffered physical
abuse or molestation. Also, it is quite probable that she has not been raped.

That, at least, should ease your mind."

Ellemir raised the forgotten wine glass and sipped at it. She said, "But it
doesn't help us get her back, or evea know where to look." Just the same, she
sounded calmer, and Damon was glad.

He said, "One thing at a time, girl. Perhaps, after the storm-"

"After the storm, whatever tracks or traces they might have left would be
blotted out," Ellemir said.

"From all I hear, the cat-folk leave no tracks a man could read; hardly traces
for another cat. In any case, I'm no tracker," Damon said. "If I can help you at
all, that won't be the way."

Her eyes widened and suddenly she clutched at his arm.

"Damon! You're a telepath too, you've had some training-can you find Callista
that way?"

She looked so excited, so happy and alive at the prospect, that it crushed Damon
to have to smash that hope, but he knew he must. He said, "It isn't that easy,
Ellemir. If you, her twin, can't reach her mind, there must be some reason."

"But I've had no training, I know so little," Ellemir said hopefully, "and you
were Tower-trained-"

The man sighed. "That's true. And I'll try," he said. "I always meant to try.

But don't hope for too much, breda."

"Will you try now?" she pleaded.

"I'll do what I can. First, bring me something of Callista's-jewelry she wears a
good deal, a garment she has often worn, something of that sort."

While Ellemir went to fetch it, Damon drew his star-stone from the protective
silk wrappings about it, and gazed at it, broodingly. Telepath, yes, and
Tower-trained in the old telepath sciences of Darkover-for a little while. And
the hereditary Gift, the laran or telepathic power of the Ridenow family, was
the psychic sensing of extrahuman forces, bred into the genetic material of the
Ridenow Domain for just such work as this, centuries ago. But in these latter
days, the old Darkovan noncausal sciences had fallen into disuse; because of
intermarriage, inbreeding, the ancient laran Gifts rarely bred true. Damon had
inherited his own family Gift in full measure, but all his life he had found it
a curse, not a blessing, and he shied away from using it now.

As he had shied away from using it-he faced the fact squarely now, and his own
guilt-to save his men. He had sensed danger. The trip which should have been
peaceful, routine, a family mission, had turned into a nightmare, reeking with
the feel of danger. Yet he had not had the courage to use his starstone, the
matrix stone given him during his Tower training, and too intimately keyed to
the telepath patterns of his mind to be used or even touched by anyone else.

Because he feared it. he had always feared it.

Time reeled, slid momentarily away, annihilating fifteen years that lay between,
and a younger Damon stood, with bowed head, before the Keeper Leonie, that same
Leonie now aging, whose place Callista was to have taken. Not a young woman even
then, Leonie, and far from beautiful, her flame-colored hair already fading, her
body flat and spare, but her gray eyes gentle and compassionate.