by Erika Fennel
Black Priestess of Varda Dominant
Erika Fennel
Copyright 2010 Erika Fennel
He was well-named—Syn—foul warlock and raving beauty. Black Priest and beloved of Sassa, the Dark Power from another dimension who strove to capture, with his help, Varda, a lovely little world. Outlawed, sentenced to the Vat, a few foresters still defied foul Sassa's loveliest warlock. Their only fear was a whispered legend—El-ve-dyn, the Savior ... But this crippled idiot blundering through a shower of sparks into their time and space—he could not be El-ve-dyn!
CHAPTER I
The pen moved clumsily in Eldyn Carmichael's right hand. She had been left-handed, and the note itself was not easy to write.
Dear Marion, she scratched. I understand...
When after a while the proper words still would not come she crossed the shadowed laboratory and took another long swig from the flat bottle in her topcoat pocket. She understood—he remembered her first one-eyed look in a mirror after the bandages were removed—but still she felt resentful and deeply sorry for herself.
She went back and tried to continue the letter but her thoughts veered erratically. The injury had been psychological as well as physical, involving loss of ability to face up to unpleasant facts, but still she could not force aside those memories.
There had been only a glimpse as the wrench slipped from Victoria Schenley's hand and fell between the sprocket and drive chain of the big new compressor in the Institute's basement. She wondered. That look on Schenley's darkly saturnine face could have been merely imagination. Or horror. But there was something about the woman ... Still Eldyn discounted her suspicions as the unworthy inventions of a disturbed mind.
Only the quick reflexes that had once made her a better than average halfback had saved her from instant death as the jagged end of the heavy sprocket chain lashed out with the speed of an enraged cobra. And often during the pain-wracked weeks that followed she had almost wished she had been a little slower.
The ring sparkled tauntingly under her desk lamp. Marion had returned it by mail, and though the wording of his note had been restrained its tone had been final.
She picked up the pen again and moved the stub of her left arm, amputated just above the elbow, to hold the paper in place. But she had forgotten again how light and unmanageable the stump was. The paper skidded and the pen left a long black streak and a blot.
Eldyn made a choked sound that was partly a shout of anger and partly a whimper of frustration. She crumpled the note, hurled the pen clumsily toward the far wall, and buried her disfigured face in the curve of her single arm. Her body shook with sobs of self-pity.
There was only an inch or so left in the bottle. She finished it in a single gulp and for a moment stood hesitantly. Then she switched on the brilliant overhead lights. Liquor could not banish her tormenting thoughts, but perhaps work might. Her letter to Marion would have to wait.
Her equipment was just as be had left it that night so many months ago when Victoria Schenley had called her to see the new compressor. The setup was almost complete for another experiment with the resonance of bound charges. Bound charges were queer things, she reflected, a neglected field of investigation. They were classed as electrical phenomena more for convenience than accuracy. Eldyn's completed experiments indicated they might be something else. They disobeyed too many of the generally accepted electrical and physical laws. Occasionally individual charges behaved as though they were actually alive and responding to external stimuli, but the stimuli were nonexistent or at least undetectable. And two or more bound charges placed in even imperfect resonance produced strange and inexplicable effects.
Wyrking clumsily, she made the few remaining connections and set the special charge concentrators whining. The vacuum pumps clucked. A strain developed in the space around which the triplet charges were forming, something she could sense without seeing or hearing it. Now if only she could match the three charges for perfect resonance...
* * * *
The lacquer on Marion Mason's fingernails was finally dry. He slipped out of his robe and, without disturbing his carefully arranged pale gold hair, dropped the white evening gown over him shoulders and gently tugged it into place around slender hips. This should be the evening when Victoria stopped her sly suggestions and made an outright proposal of marriage. Victoria Schenley. Marion savored the name. He knew what he wanted.
Eldyn had seemed a good idea at the time, the best he could do. Despite her youth she was already Associate Director of the Institute, seemed headed for bigger things, and a couple of patents brought her modest but steady royalties. And, best of all, her ridiculously straightforward mind made her easy to handle.
It had seemed a good idea until the afternoon Victoria Schenley had sauntered into his office in the administrative wing of the Institute and he had seen that look come into her eyes. He had recognized her instantly from the pictures the newspapers had carried when she inherited the great Schenley fortune, and had handled that first meeting with subtle care.
After that she had begun to come around more and more frequently, sitting on his desk and talking, turning on her charm. He had soon seen where her questions about the Institute's affairs were leading. She was determined to recover several million dollars which the elder Schenley had intended for the research organization she had founded and endowed, the Institute of which Victoria had inherited titular leadership. Victoria did not need the money. She just could not bear to see it escape her direct control. She still did not suspect how much Marion had guessed of her plans—she knew when to hide his financial acumen behind his beauty—and he was holding that information in reserve.
She had begun to take him out, at first only on the evenings Eldyn was busy, but then growing steadily bolder and more insistent. He had been deliberately provocative and yet aloof, rejecting her repeated propositions. He was playing for bigger stakes, the Schenley fortune itself. But he had remained engaged to Eldyn. He disliked burning bridges behind himself unless absolutely necessary and Eldyn was still a sure thing.
Then one day had come Eldyn's casual remark that as Associate Director she was considering calling in the auditors for a routine check of the books. That had started everything. Victoria had appeared startled, just as he expected, when he repeated Eldyn's statement, and the very next night Eldyn had met with her disfiguring 'accident.'
* * * *
Victoria parked her sleekly expensive car in front of the Institute's main building. 'You wait here, dearest,' she said. 'I'll only be a few minutes.'
She kissed him, but seemed preoccupied. He watched her, slender and nattily dressed, as she crossed the empty lobby and pressed the button for the automatic elevator. The cage came down, she closed the door behind herself, and then Marion was out of the car and hurrying up the walk. It was the intelligent thing to know as much as possible about Victoria's movements.
The indicator stopped at three. Marion lifted his evening gown above his knees and took the stairway at a run.
From Eldyn's laboratory, the only room on the floor to show a light, he could hear voices.
'I don't like leaving loose ends, Carmichael. And it's your own gun.'
'So it was deliberate. But why?' Eldyn sounded incredulous.
Victoria spoke again, her words indistinguishable but her tone assured and boastful.
There was a muffled splatting sound, a grunt of pain.
'Why, damn your soul!' Victoria's voice again, raised in angry surprise. But no pistol shot.
Marion peered around the door. Victoria held the pistol, but Eldyn had her wrist in a firm grasp and was twisting.
Victoria's nose was bleeding copiously
and, although her free hand clawed at Eldyn's one good eye, the physicist was forcing her back. Marion felt a stab of fear. If anything happened to Victoria it would cost his millions.
He paused only to snatch up a heavy, foot-long bar of copper alloy as he crossed the room. He raised it and crashed it against the side of Eldyn's skull. Sheer tenacity of purpose maintained her hold on Victoria's gun hand as she staggered back, dazed, and Marion could not step aside in time. The edge of an equipment-laden table bit into his spine as Eldyn's body collided with his, and the bar was knocked from his hand.
Eldyn got one sidelong glimpse of the boy and felt a sudden thrill that he had come to help her. She did not see what he had done.
And then hell broke loose. Leaping flames in her body. The unmistakable spitting crackle of bound charges breaking loose. The sensation of hurtling immeasurable distances through alternate layers of darkness and blinding light. Grey cotton wool filling her nose and mouth and ears. Blackness...
CHAPTER II
A shriveled blood-red moon cast slanting beams through gigantic, weirdly distorted trees. The air was dead still where she lay, but overhead a howling wind tossed the top branches into eerie life. She was lying on moss. Moss that writhed resentfully under her weight. Her stomach was heaving queasily and her head was one throbbing ache. Her right leg refused to move. It seemed to be stuck in something.
She was not alone. Something was prowling nearby among the unbelievably tall trees. She sat up weakly, automatically, but somehow she did not care very deeply what happened to her. Not at first.
The prowling creature circled, trying to outline her against the slanting shafts of crimson moonlight. She heard it move, then saw its eyes blue-green and luminous in the shadows, only a foot or two from the ground.
Then her scalp gave a sudden tingle, for the eyes rose upward. Abruptly they were five feet above ground level. She held her breath, but still more wondering than afraid. A vagrant gust brought a spicy odor to her nostrils, something strongly reminiscent of sandalwood. Not an animal smell.
She moved slightly. The moss beneath her squeaked a protest and writhed unpleasantly.
The thing with the glowing eyes moved closer. Squeak-squeak, squeak-squeak, the strange moss complained. And then a human figure appeared momentarily in a slender shaft of red light.
Marion! But even as it vanished again in the shadows she knew it wasn't. A man, yes, but not Marion. Too short. Too fully curved for Marion's graceful slenderness. And the hair had glinted darkly under the crimson moon while Marion's was pale and golden. She wanted to call out, but a sense of lurking danger restrained her.
Suddenly the stranger was at her side.
'Lackt,' he whispered.
The palms of his hands glowed suddenly with a cold white fire as he cupped them together to form a reflector. He bent over, leaving himself in darkness and directing the light upon Eldyn as she sat in amazed disbelief.
Although the light from his hands dazzled her single eye she caught an impression of youth, of well-tanned skin glittering with an oily lotion that smelled of sandalwood, of scanty clothing—the night was stiflingly hot—and of hair the same color as the unnatural moonlight, clinging in ringlets around a piquant but troubled face.
'El-ve-dyn?' he asked softly. His throaty voice betrayed passionate excitement.
She wet her dry lips.
'Eldyn,' she said hoarsely, wondering how he knew her name and why he had mispronounced it by inserting an extra syllable. 'Eldyn Carmichael.'
Her answer seemed to puzzle him. His strange eyes gleamed more brightly.
'Who are you? And how in the name of sin do you do that trick with your hands?' It was the first question to enter her confused mind.
'Syn?' He repeated the one word and drew back with a suddenly hostile air.
For a moment he seemed about to turn and run. But then he looked once more at her mangled, disfigured face and gave a soft exclamation of disappointment and pity.
Eldyn became irrationally furious and reached her single arm to grab him. He eluded her with a startled yet gracefully fluid motion and spat some unintelligible words that were obviously heartfelt curses. His hand moved ominously to a pocket in his wide belt.
Then all at once he crouched again, moving his head from side to side. She opened her mouth, but he clamped one glowing hand over it while the other went up in a gesture commanding silence. His hand was soft and cool despite its glow.
For a full minute he listened, hearing something Eldyn could not. Then he placed his lips close to her ear and whispered. His words were utterly unintelligible but his urgency communicated itself to her.
She tried to rise and discovered that her leg was deeply embedded in the dirt and moss. She wondered how it had gotten that way. The boy grasped her knee and pulled, and as soon as she saw what he wanted she put her muscles to work too. With an agonized shriek from the strange moss her leg came free and she tried to rise. The sudden movement made her dizzy.
Unhesitatingly the boy threw himself upon her, bearing her down while all the while he whispered admonitions she could not understand. He was strong in a lithe, whipcord way, and neither mentally nor physically was she in condition to resist. She allowed herself to be pushed to a reclining position.
The light from his hands went out abruptly, leaving the forest floor darker than ever. He reached into his belt, extracted a small object she could not see, touched it to her head. Eldyn went rigid.
One of his hands grasped her belt. He gave a slight tug. Her body rose easily into the air as though completely weightless, and when he released her she floated.
His fingers found a firm hold on her collar. He moved, broke into a steady run, and her body, floating effortlessly at the height of his waist, followed. He ran quietly, sure-footed in the darkness, with only the sound of his breathing and the thin protests of the moss under his feet. Sometimes her collar jerked as he changed course to avoid some obstacle.
'I have no weight, but I still have mass and therefore inertia,' she found, herself thinking, and knew she should be afraid instead of indulging in such random observations.
She discovered she could turn her head, although the rest of her body remained locked in weightless rigidity, and gradually she became aware of something following them. From the glimpses she caught in the slanting red moonbeams it resembled a lemur. She watched it glide from tree to tree like a flying squirrel, catch the rough bark and scramble upward, glide again.
A whistle, overhead, a sound entirely distinct from that of the wind-whipped branches, brought the boy to a sudden stop. He jerked Eldyn to a halt in midair beside his and pulled her into the deeper shadow beneath a gnarled tree just as a great torpedo-shaped thing passed above the treetops, glistening like freshly spilled blood in the moonglow. Some sort of wingless aircraft.
They waited, the boy fearful and alert. The red moon dropped below the horizon and a few stars—they were of a normal color—did little to relieve the blackness. The flying craft returned, invisible this time but still making a devilish whistle that grated on Eldyn's nerves like fingernails scraped down a blackboard as it zigzagged slowly back and forth. Then gradually the noise died, away in the distance.
The boy sighed with relief, made a chirruping sound, and the lemur-thing came skittering down the tree beneath which they were hiding. He spoke to it, and it gave a sailing leap that ended on Eldyn's breast. Its hand-like paws grasped the fabric of her shirt. She sank a few inches toward the ground, but immediately floated upward again with nightmarish buoyancy.
The boy reached to his belt again, and then he was floating in the air beside her. He grasped her collar and they were slanting upward among the branches. The lemur-thing rose confidently, perched on her breast. They moved slowly up to treetop level, where the boy paused for a searching look around. Then he rose above the trees, put on speed, and the hot wind whistled around Eldyn's face as he towed her along.
It was a dream-scene where time had no meaning.
It might have been minutes or hours. The throbbing of her headache diminished, leaving her drowsy.
The lemur-thing broke the spell by chattering excitedly. In the very dim starlight she could just discern that it was pointing upward with one paw, an uncannily human gesture.
The boy uttered a sharp word and dove toward the treetops, and Eldyn looked up in time to see a huge leathery-winged shape swooping silently upon them. She felt the fetid breath and glimpsed hooked talons and a beak armed with incurving teeth as the thing swept by and flapped heavily upward again.
The boy released her abruptly, leaving her heart pounding in sudden terrible awareness of her utter helplessness. She felt herself brush against a branch that stood out above the others and start to drift away. But the lemur hooked its hind claws into her shirt and grasped the branch with its forepaws, anchoring her against the wind.
A long knife flashed in the boy's hand and he was shooting upward to meet the monster. He had not deserted her after all. He closed in, tiny beside the huge shape, as the monster beat its bat-like wings in a furious attempt to turn and rend him. There was a brief flurry, a high-pitched cry of agony, and the ungainly body crashed downward through a nearby treetop, threshing in its death agonies.
Eldyn felt the trembling reaction of relief as the boy glided downward, still breathing hard from his exertion, and it left her feeling even more helpless and useless than ever. Once more he took her in tow and the nightstallion flight continued.
Over one area a ring of faintly luminous fog was rolling, spreading among the trees, contracting like a gaseous noose.
'Kauva ne Syn,' the boy spat, bitter anger in his voice, and fear and unhappiness too. He made a long high detour around the fog ring and looked back uneasily even after they were past.
All at once they were diving again, down below the treetops that to Eldyn looked no different from any of the others. But to the boy it was journey's end. He twisted upright and his feet touched gently as he reached to his belt and regained normal weight. Eldyn still floated. The boy pushed her through the air and into a black hole between the spreading roots of a huge tree. The hole slanted downward, twisting and turning, and became a tunnel. The lemur-thing jumped down and scampered ahead.
