They started within the hour. Barron rode silently close to Melitta, but he didn’t try to talk to her. There was some comfort in her mere presence, but he knew that she felt ill at ease with him and he did not force himself on her. It was enough to be near her. He spared a thought for Storn, and this time he pitied him. Poor devil, to have come so far and been through so much and then be forced offstage for the last act.
He supposed Storn was lying entranced, high in his old wing of the castle, and if he was conscious at all—which Barron doubted—not knowing what had happened. Hell, that’s a worse punishment than anything I could do to him!
He had been riding without paying much attention to where he was going, letting the horse choose his own road. Now the air began to be filled with the faintly acrid smell of smoke. Barron, alert from his days at the fire station, raised his head to sniff the wind. but the others rode on without paling attention.
Only Melitta sensed his attention and dropped back to ride at his side. “It’s not fire. We are nearing the caverns of the forge people; you smell the fires of their forges.”
They rode up along a narrow trail that led into the heart of the mountains. After a while Barron began to see dark caves lining the trail. At their entrances, small, swart faces peeped out fearfully. There were little men dressed in furs and leather, women in fur cloaks who turned shyly away from the strangers, and wrapped in fur, miniature children who looked like little teddy-bears. At last they came to a cavern gaping like a great maw, and here Melitta and Desideria alighted, their guides standing close to them in a mixture of fear and dogged protectiveness.
Three men in leather aprons, bearing long metal staves and with metal hammers thrust into their belts—hammers of such weight that Barron did not think he could have lifted them—strode out of the cavern toward Melitta. Behind them the fearful people came up and gathered, surrounding them. The three men were dark, gnarled, short of stature but with long and powerful arms. They made deep bows to the women. Barron they ignored, as he had expected. The central one, with white patches in his dark hair, began to speak; the language was Cahuenga, but the pronunciation so guttural and strange that Barron could follow only one word in three. He gathered, however, that they were making Melitta welcome and paying Desideria almost more reverence than the village people had done.
There followed a long colloquy. Melitta spoke. It was a long speech that sounded eloquent, but Baryon did not understand. He was very weary, and very apprehensive without knowing why, and this kept him from the attempt to reach out and understand as he had done with Larry and Valdir. How the devil have I picked up telepathic gifts anyhow? Contact with Storn? Then the white-haired forge man spoke. His was a long chanting speech that sounded wild and musical, with many bows; again and again Barron caught the word Sharra. Then Desideria spoke, and again Barron heard Sharra, repeated again and again, to cries and nods from the little people gathered around them. Finally there was a great outcry and all the little people drew knives, hammers, and swords and flourished them in the air. Barron, remembering the Dry-towners, quailed, but Melitta stood firm and fearless and he realized it was an acclamation, not a threat.
Rain was drizzling down thinly, and the little people gathered around and led them into the cavern.
It was airy and spacious, lighted partly by torches burning in niches in the walls, and partly by beautifully luminescent crystals set to magnify the firelight. Exquisitely worked metal objects were everywhere, but Barron had no leisure to examine them. He drew up beside Melitta as they walked through the lighted cavern corridors, and asked in a low voice, “What’s all the shouting about?”
“The Old One of the forge folk has agreed to help us,” Melitta said. “I promised him, in turn, that the altars of Sharra should be restored throughout the mountains, and that they should be permitted to return, unmolested, to their old places and villages. Are you weary from riding? I am, but somehow—” she spread her hands, helplessly. “It’s been so long, and now we are near the end—we will start for Storn, two hours before the dawn, so that when Brynat wakes we will surround the castle—if only we are in time!” She was trembling, and moved as if to lean on him, then straightened her back proudly and stood away. She said, almost to herself, “I cannot expect you to care. What can we do for you, when this is over, to make up for meddling in your life this way?”
Barron started to say, “I do care, I care about you, Melitta,” but she had already drawn away from him and hurried after Desideria.
With jewel lights and with music provided by small, caged tree frogs and singing crickets, there was a banquet that evening in the great lower hall. Barron, though he could eat little, sat in wonder at the silver dishes—silver was commoner than glass in the mountains—and the jeweled, prismed lamps which played unendingly on the pale, smoke-stained walls of the cave. The forge people sang deep-throated, wild songs in a four-note scale with a strangely incessant rhythm, like the pounding of hammers. But Barron could not eat the food, or understand a word of the endless epics, and he was relieved when the company dissolved early—he could understand enough of their dialect to know that they were being dismissed against the ride before dawn—and one of their guides took them to cubicles carved in the rock.
Barron was alone; he had seen Melitta and Desideria being conducted to a cubicle nearby. In the little rock room, hardly more than a closet, he found a comfortable bed of furs laid on a bed frame of silver, woven with leather straps. He lay down and expected to sleep from sheer exhaustion. But sleep would not come.
He felt disoriented and lonely. Perhaps he had grown used to Storn’s presence and his thoughts. Melitta, too, had withdrawn from him and he was inexpressibly alone without her presence to reach out to, in that indefinable way. He reflected that he had changed. He had always been alone and had never wanted it any other way. The rare women he had had, had never made an impression on him; they came, were used for the brief emotional release they could provide and were forgotten. He had no close friends, only business associates. He had lived on this world and had never known or cared how it differed from Terra or from any other Empire planet.
Soon it would be over, and he did not know where he would go. He wished suddenly that he had been more responsive to Larry’s proffered friendship; but then, Storn had spoiled that contact for him, probably for all time. He had never known what it was to have a friend, but then he had never known or realized the depths of his aloneness, either.
The room seemed to be swelling up and receding, the lights wavering. He could sense thoughts floating in the air around him, beating on him, he felt physically sick with their impact. He lay on the bed and clutched it, feeling the room tipping and swaying and wondering if he would slide off. Fear seized him; was Storn reaching out for his mind again? He could see Storn, without knowing how it was Storn—fair, soft-handed and soft-faced, lying asleep on a bier of silks—face remote and his human presence simply not there at all. Then he saw a great white bird, swooping from the heights of the castle, circling it with a strange musical, mechanical cry and then sweeping away with a great beating of wings.
The room kept shifting and tipping, and he clung to the bed frame, fighting the sickness and disorientation that threatened to tear him apart. He heard himself cry out, unable to keep back the cry; he squeezed his eyes tight, curled himself into a fetal position and tried hard not to think or feel at all.
He never knew how long he lay curled there in rejection, but after what seemed a long and very dreadful time he came slowly to the awareness that someone was calling his name, very softly.
“Dan! Dan, it’s Melitta—it’s all right; try to take my hand, touch me—it’s all right. I would have come before if I had known—”
He made an effort to close his fingers on hers. Her hand seemed a single stable point in the unbelievably shifting, flowing, swimming perspective of the room, and he clung to it as a man cast adrift in space clings to a magnetic line.
He whispered, “Sorry�
�room’s going round. ... ”
“I know. I’ve had it; all telepaths get this at some time during the development of their powers, but it usually comes in adolescence; you’re a late developer and it’s more serious. We call it threshold sickness. It isn’t serious, it won’t hurt you, but it’s very frightening. I know. Hold on to me; you’ll be all right.”
Gradually, clinging to her small hard fingers, Barron got the world right-side up again. The dizzy disorientation remained, but Melitta was solid, a firm presence and not wholly a physical one, in the midst of the shifting and flowing space.
“Try, whenever this happens, to fix your mind on something solid and real.”
“You are real,” he whispered. “You’re the only real thing I’ve ever known.”
“I know.” Her voice was very soft. She bent close to him and touched her lips gently to his. She remained there, and the warmth of her was like a growing point of light and stability in the shifting dark. Barron was coming quickly back. At last he drew a deep breath and forced himself to release her.
“You shouldn’t be here: If Desideria discovers you are gone—”
“What would it be to her? She could have done more for you; she is a Keeper, a trained telepath, and I—but I forgot, you don’t know the sort of training they have. The Keepers—their whole minds and bodies become caught up into the work they do—must keep aloof and safeguard themselves from emotions—” She la ughed, a soft, stifled laugh and said, almost weeping, “Besides, Desideria doesn’t know it, but she and Storn—”
She broke off. Barron did not care; he was not interested in Desideria at the moment. She came close to him, the only warm and real thing in his world, the only thing he cared about or ever could ...
He whispered, shaken to the depths, half sobbing, “And to think I might never have known you—”
She murmured, “We would have found one another. From the ends of the world; from the ends of the universe of stars. We belong together.”
And then she took him against her, and he was lost in awareness of her, and his last thought, before all thought was lost, was that he had been a stranger on his own world and that now an alien girl from an alien world had made him feel at home.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They started two hours before dawn in a heavy snowfall; after a short time of riding on their thickset ponies the forge folk looked like polar bears, their furred garments and the shaggy coats of the ponies being covered with the white flakes. Barron rode close to Melitta, but they did not speak, nor need to. Their new awareness of one another went too deep for words. But he could feel her fear—the growing preoccupation and sense of desperation in what they were about to dare.
Valdir had said that the worship of Sharra was forbidden a long time ago, and Larry had been at some pains to explain that the gods on Darkover were tangible forces. What was going to happen? The defiance of an old law must be a serious thing—Melitta’s no coward, and she’s scared almost out of her wits.
Desideria rode alone at the head of the file. She was an oddly small, straight and somehow pitiable little figure, and Barron could sense without analyzing the isolation of the one who must handle these unbelievable forces.
When they came through the pass and sighted Storn Castle on the height, a great, grim mass which he had never seen before, he realized that he had seen it once through Storn’s eyes—the magical vision of Storn, flying in the strange magnetic net which bound his mind to the mechanical bird.
Had I dreamed that?
Melitta reached out and clasped his hand. She said, her voice shaky, “There it is. If we’re only in time—Storn, Edric, Allira—I wonder if they’re even still alive?”
Barron clasped her hand, without speaking. Even if you have no one else, you will always have me, beloved.
She smiled faintly, but did not speak.
The forge folk were dismounting now, moving stealthily, under cover of the darkness and crags, up the path toward the great, closed gates of Storn. Barron, between Desideria and Melitta, moved quietly with them, wondering what was going to happen which could make both Melitta and Desideria turn white with terror. Melitta whispered, “It’s a chance, at least,” and was silent again, clinging to his hand.
Time was moving strangely again for Barron; he had no idea whether it was ten minutes or two hours that he climbed at Melitta’s side, but they stood shrouded by shadows in the lee of the gates. The sky was beginning to turn crimson around the eastern peaks. At last the great, pale-red disc of the sun came over the mountain. Desideria, looking around her at the small, swart men clustered about her, drew a deep breath and said, “We had better begin.”
Melitta glanced up uneasily at the heights and said, her voice shaking, “I suppose Brynat has sentries up there. As soon as he finds out we’re down here, there will be—arrows and things.”
“We had better not give him the chance,” Desideria agreed. She motioned the forge folk close around her, and gave low-voiced instructions which Barron found that he could understand, even though she spoke that harsh and barbarian language. “Gather close around me; don’t move or speak; keep your eyes on the fire.”
She turned her eyes on Barron, looking troubled and a little afraid. She said, “I am sorry, it will have to be you, although you are not a worshiper of Sharra. If I had realized what had happened, I would have brought another trained telepath with me; Melitta is not strong enough. You”—suddenly he noticed that she had neither looked directly at him, nor spoken his name, that day—“must serve at the pole of power.”
Barron began to protest that he didn’t know anything about this sort of thing, and she cut him off curtly. “Stand here, between me and the men; see yourself as gathering all the force of their feelings and emotion and pouring it out in my direction. Don’t tell me you can’t do it. I’ve been trained for eight years to judge these things, and I know you can if you don’t lose your nerve. If you do, we’re probably all dead, so don’t be surprised, whatever you see or whatever happens. Just keep your mind concentrated on me.” As if moved on strings, Barron found himself moving to the place she indicated, yet he knew she was not controlling him. Rather, his will was in accord with hers, and he moved as she thought.
With a final, tense look upward at the blank wall of the castle, she motioned to Melitta.
“Melitta, make fire.”
From the silk-wrapped bundle she carried, Desideria took a large blue crystal. It was as large as a child’s fist, and many-faceted, with strange fires and metallic ribbons of light. It looked molten, despite the crystalline facets, as she held it between her hands, and it seemed to change form, the color and light within it shifting and playing.
Melitta struck fire from her tinderbox; it flared up between her hands. Desideria motioned to her to drop the blazing fragment of tinder at her feet. Barron watched, expecting it to go out. Desideria’s serious, white face was bent on the blue crystal with a taut intensity; her mouth was drawn, her nostrils pinched and white. The blue light from the crystal seemed to grow, to play around her, to reflect on her—and now, instead of falling, the fire was rising, blazing up until its lights reflected crimson with the blue on Desideria’s features—a strange darting, leaping flame.
Her eyes, gray and immense and somehow inhuman, met Barron’s across the fire as if there were a visible line between them. He almost heard her voice within his mind. “Remember!”
Then he felt behind him an intense pressure beating up—it was the linked minds of the forge folk, beating on his. Desperately he struggled to control this new assault on his mind. He fought, out of control, his breath coming fast and his face contorted, for what seemed ages—though it was only seconds. The fire sagged and Desideria’s face showed rage, fear and despair: Then Barron had it—it was like gathering up a handful of shining threads, swiftly splicing them into a rope and thrusting it toward Desideria. He almost felt her catch it, like a great meshing: The fire blazed up again, exuberantly. It dipped, wavered toward
Desideria.
It enveloped her.
Barron gasped almost aloud and for a bare instant the rapport sagged, then he held it fast. He knew, suddenly, that he dared not falter, or this strange magical fire of the mind would flare out of control and become ordinary fire that would consume Desideria. Desperately intense, he felt the indrawn sigh of the men behind him, the quality of their worship, as the fires played around the delicate girl who stood calmly in the bathing flames. Her body, her light dress, her loosely braided hair, seemed to flicker in the fires.
With a scrap of awareness on the edge of his consciousness, Barron heard shouts and cries from the wall above, but he dared not cast an eye upward. He held desperately to the rapport between the girl in the flames and the forge folk.
An arrow flew from nowhere; behind them someone cried out and an almost invisible thread broke and was gone, but Barron was barely conscious of it. He knew without full consciousness that something had roused the castle, that Brynat’s men knew they were under strange attack. But his mind was fixed on Desideria.
There was a great surge of the flame, and a great shout from behind them. Desideria cried aloud in surprise and terror and wonder, and then—before Barron’s eyes, her frail fire-clad figure seemed to grow immensely upward, to take on height, majesty and power. And then it was no delicate girl who stood there, but a great veiled Shape, towering to the very height of the outworks and castle, a woman in form, hair of dancing flame, tossing wildly on the wind, wrapped in garments of flame and with upraised arms from which dangled golden chains of fire.
A great sighing cry went up from forge folk and village people crowded behind them.
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