The Spell Sword

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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  Chapter

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  Damon Ridenow woke and lay for a moment staring at the ceiling. Day was waning; after the strenuous all-night search within the overworld, and the confrontation with Andrew Carr, he had slept most of the day. His weariness was gone, but apprehension was still there, deep within. The Earthman was their one link with Callista, and this seemed so unlikely, so bizarre, that one of these men from another world should be able to make this subtle telepathic contact with one of their own. Terrans, with Comyn laran powers! Impossible! No, not impossible: it had happened.

  He felt no revulsion for Andrew personally, only for the idea that the man was an alien, an off-worlder. As for the man himself, he was inclined rather to like him. He knew that was, at least in part, a consequence of the mental rapport they had, for an instant, shared. In the telepath caste, it was often the accident of possessing laran, the specific telepath Gift, which determined how close a relationship would come. Caste, family, social position, all these became irrelevant compared to that one compelling fact; one had, or one did not, that inborn power, and in consequence one was stranger or kinsfolk. By that criterion alone, the most important one on Darkover, Andrew Carr was one of them, and the fact that he was an Earthman was a small random fact without any real importance.

  Ellemir, too, had suddenly taken on a new importance in his life.

  Being what he was, born telepath and Tower-trained telepath, the touching of minds created closeness, above and beyond anything else. He had felt this for Leonie— twenty years his senior, pledged by law to remain virgin, never beautiful. During his time in the Tower, and for long after, he had loved her deeply, hopelessly, with a passion that had spoiled him for other women. If Leonie had known this—and she could hardly have helped knowing, being what she was—it had never made any difference to her. Keepers were trained, by methods incomprehensible to normal men or women, to be unaware of sexuality.

  Thinking of that brought him around to thinking again of Callista—and of Ellemir. He had known her most of her life. But he was almost twenty years older than she was. His parents had many times urged him to marry, but the devotion of his first youth had gone up in the white heat of smokeless flame for the unattainable Leonie. Later he had never thought of himself as having much to offer any woman. The intimacy he had known with the others, men and women, in the Tower Circle, minds and hearts open to one another—seven of them come together in a closeness where nothing, however small, could be hidden—and nothing refused or rejected, had spoiled him for any contact lesser than this. Cast out of the Tower, he had known such a desolate loneliness that nothing could dispel it.

  Lonely, lonely, all my life alone. And I never dreamed… Ellemir, my kinswoman, but a child, only a little girl…

  Rising swiftly from his bed, he strode to the window and looked down into the courtyard. So young Ellemir was not. She was old enough to care for this vast Domain when her kinsmen were away at Comyn Council. She must be nearly twenty years old. Old enough to have a lover; old enough, if she chose, to marry. She was Comynara in her own right, and her own mistress.

  But young enough to deserve someone better than I; torn by fear and incompetence…

  He wondered if she had ever thought of him as a lover, if perhaps she had known other lovers. He hoped so. If Ellemir cared for him, he hoped it was built on awareness, experience, knowledge of men: not the infatuation of an unawakened girl, which might well dissipate when she knew other men. He wondered. Twin sister to a Keeper, she might somehow have picked up some of Callista’s conditioned unawareness of men.

  In any case, it was now a full-blown thing between them which had to be faced. The sensitivity, the almost-sexual awareness between them, was something they could no longer ignore, and there was not, of course, any reason to ignore it. It would also heighten their ability to work together in whatever lay ahead; they were committed to find Callista, and the rapport between them would only heighten their contact and strength. Afterward—well, they might never be able to get free of one another. Smiling gently, Damon faced the knowledge that they would probably have to marry; they might never be able to remain apart after this. Well, that would not displease him too much either, unless Ellemir was for some reason unhappy about it.

  The awareness of this was still on the surface of his mind when he went downstairs, but the moment he saw Ellemir in the Great Hall it was no longer an apprehension. Even before she raised her serious eyes to his, he knew that all this was something she too had come to realize and accept. She dropped the needlework in her hands and came up to him, snuggling in his arms without a word. He drew a deep breath of absolute relief. After a long time, during which neither of them spoke aloud, standing with linked fingers before the fire, he said, “You don’t mind, breda—that I’m nearly old enough to be your father?”

  “You? Oh, no, no—only if you had been too old to father children, like poor Liriel when they married her off to old Dom Cyril Ardais; that would trouble me a little. But you, no, I’ve never stopped to think whether you were old or young,” she said, very simply. “I do not think I would want a lover who could not give me children. That would be too sad.”

  Damon felt an incongruous ripple of inner laughter. That he had never thought about; trust a woman to think of the important things. It was not an unpleasant thought, and it would please his family. He said, “I think we need not worry about that, preciosa, when the proper time comes.”

  “Father will be displeased,” Ellemir said slowly, “with Callista in the Tower. I think he had hoped I would stay here and keep his house while he lived. But I have completed my nineteenth year, and by Comyn law I am free to do as I will.”

  Damon shrugged, thinking of the formidable old man who was the father of the twins. “I have never heard that Dom Esteban disliked me,” he said, “and if he cannot bear to lose you, it matters little where we choose to live. Love…” He broke off, then with swift apprehension, “Why are you crying?”

  She curled closer into his arms. “I had always thought,” she said bleakly, “that when I chose, Callista would be the first I would tell.”

  “You are very close to Callista, beloved?”

  “Not as close as some twins,” Ellemir said, “since when she went to the Tower, and was pledged, I knew we could never, as so many sisters do, share a lover, or husband. Yet it seems so sad that this thing that means so much to me, she will not know.”

  He tightened his clasp on her.

  “She shall know,” he said. “Be sure of this: she will know. Remember, now we know she is alive, and there is one who can reach her.”

  “Do you really think this Earthman, this Ann’dra, can help us to find her?”

  “I hope so. It won’t be easy, but then we never thought it would be easy,” he said. “Now, at least, we know it’s possible.”

  “How can it be? He’s not one of us. Even if he has some powers or gifts like our laran, he doesn’t know how to use any of it.”

  “We’ll have to teach him,” Damon said. That wouldn’t be easy either, he thought. He closed his hand over the starstone on its cord around his neck. It must be done if they were to have the faintest hope of reaching Callista; and he, Damon, would have to be the one to do it. But he dreaded it, Zandru’s hells, how he dreaded it. But he said calmly, trying to give Ellemir confidence, “Until last night, you yourself never thought you could use laran; yet you used it, you saved my life with it.”

  Her smile wavered, but at least she was smiling again. He said, “So for now let us take what we can have of happiness, and not spoil it with worry, Ellemir. As for the law and the formalities, I expect Dom Esteban will return sometime soon.” As he spoke the cold awareness rushed over him again, so that he caught his breath for a moment. Sooner than I think, and it will not be well for any of us, he thought but he closed his mind to it, hoping Ellemir had not picked up the thought. He continued: “When your father comes, we can tell him our plans. Meanwh
ile, we will have to teach Andrew what we can. Where is he?”

  “Asleep, I suppose. He, too, was very weary. Shall I send to him?”

  “I suppose you must. We have little time to lose,” Damon said, “although now we have found each other, I would rather be alone with you a while.” But he smiled as he said it. They already shared more than he had ever known with any other woman, and for the rest, there was no urgency. He was no raw youth clutching his girl in haste, and they could wait for the rest. Briefly he picked up a shy thought from Ellemir, But not too long, and it warmed him; but he let her go, and said, “There is time enough. Send a steward to bid him come down to us, if he is rested enough. And now, I must think.” He moved away from Ellemir and stood looking into the blue-green flames that shot up from the piled resin-treated fuel in the fireplace.

  Carr was a telepath, and a potentially powerful one. He had found and held rapport with a stranger, not even blood-kin. A part of the overworld barred even to the Tower-trained might be accessible to him. Yet he was wholly untrained, wholly untaught, and not even inclined to believe very much of these strange powers. With all his heart Damon wished someone else were here to teach this man. The awakening of latent psi powers was not an easy task even for those trained to it, and for an off-worlder, with an unthinkably strange background, without even belief and confidence to help him, it was likely to be a difficult and painful business. Damon had shied away from such contacts ever since he had been dismissed from the Tower Circle. It wouldn’t be easy to take them up again, to drop his barriers for this stranger. Yet there was no one else.

  He looked around the room, searching. He said, “Have you kirian here?” Kirian, a powerful drug compounded of the pollen of a rare plant from the mountains, had a tendency, in carefully regulated dosage, to lower the barriers against telepathic rapport. He was not sure whether he meant to give it to Andrew Carr or take it himself, but one way or the other it might make it easier to get through to a stranger. Most deliberate telepathic training was done by the Keepers themselves, but kirian could heighten the psi powers, temporarily, enough to make contact possible even with non-telepaths.

  Ellemir said doubtfully, “I don’t think so. Not, at least, since Domenic outgrew the threshold sickness. Callista never needed it, nor I. I will look and see, but I fear not.”

  Damon felt the cold shudder of fear, gnawing deep in his belly. Blurred a little by the drug, he might have been able to endure the difficult business of directing and disciplining the arousal of laran in a stranger. The thought of going through it without some help was almost unendurable. Yet, if it was Callista’s only chance—

  “You have a starstone,” Ellemir said. “You used it to show me what little I could do—”

  “Child, you are my blood-kin and we are close enough emotionally—even so, when you gripped the stone, it was agony, more than I can tell you,” Damon said gravely. “Tell me. Has Callista any other of the matrix jewels, unused?” If he could get for Carr a blank, unkeyed jewel, perhaps he could work more easily with him.

  “I am not sure,” Ellemir said. “She has many things I have never seen, nor asked about, because they have to do with her work as Keeper. I wondered why she had brought them here rather than leaving them in the Tower.”

  “Perhaps because—” Damon hesitated. It was hard to speak of his own days in the Tower Circle; his mind kept shying and skittering away like a frightened horse. Yet somehow he must overcome this fear. “Perhaps because a leronis, or even a matrix technician, prefers to keep his, or her, working gear close at hand. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it feels better, somehow, to have it within reach. I do not use my own starstone twice in a year,” he added, “yet I keep it here, around my neck, simply because it has been made into a—a part of me. It is uncomfortable, even physically painful, to have it too far from me.”

  Ellemir whispered, verifying swiftly his guess about her own fast-developing sensitivity: “Oh, poor Callista! And she told Andrew that they had taken her starstone from her—”

  Grimly, the man nodded. “So even if she has not been ravished or ill-treated, she is suffering now,” he said. Why should I shrink from a little pain or trouble, to spare her worse? he thought. “Take me to her room; let me look through her things.”

  Ellemir obeyed, without question, but when they stood in the center of the room the twin sisters shared, with the two narrow beds at opposite ends of the room, she said in a frightened whisper, “What you said—won’t it hurt Callista for you to touch her—the things she uses as a Keeper?”

  “It’s a possibility,” said Damon, “but no worse than she has been hurt already, and it may be our only chance.”

  My men died because I was too cowardly to accept the thing that I was: a Tower-trained telepath. If I let Callista suffer because I fear to use my skills… then am I worthless of Ellemir, then am I a lesser thing than any off-worlder — but, God, I am afraid, afraid… Blessed Cassilda, mother of the Seven Domains, be with me now…

  His even, neutral voice betrayed nothing. “Where does Callista keep her belongings? I can tell yours from hers by their feel, but I would rather not waste time or strength on that.”

  “The dressing table there, with the silver brushes, is hers. Mine is the other, with the embroidered scarves and the ivory-backed brushes and combs.” He could feel the tension and fear in Ellemir’s voice, but she was trying to match his cool, dispassionate manner. Damon looked on the dressing table, and rummaged briefly in the drawers. “Nothing here but rubbish,” he said. “One or two small matrix jewels, first-level or less, good for fastening buttons, no more. You’re sure you never saw where she keeps anything of the kind?” But even before he saw her shake her head, he knew the answer.

  “Never. I tried not to—to intrude on that part of her life.”

  “What a pity I’m not the Terran,” Damon said sourly. “I could ask her directly.” He clasped his hand, reluctantly, over the starstone which hung on its cord, slowly drew it from the leather pouch, closing his eyes, trying to sense something. As always when he touched the cold, smooth jewel he felt the strange sting of fear. After a moment, hesitantly, he moved toward Callista’s bed. It lay still tangled and the bedclothing crumpled, as if no one, servant or mistress, had had the heart to disturb the last imprint of her body there. Damon wet his lips with his tongue, bent and reached under the pillow, then drew back, lifting the pillow gingerly. Beneath it, against the fine linen sheet, lay a small silk envelope, almost—but not quite—flat. He could see the shape of the jewel through the silk.

  “Callista’s starstone,” he said slowly. “So her captors did not take it from her.”

  Ellemir was trying to remember Andrew’s exact words. “He said—Callista did not say her starstone had been taken from her,” she repeated slowly. “She said, ‘They could only take my jewels from me lest one of them should be my starstone.’ Something like that. So it has been here all along.”

  “If I had had it, maybe I could have seen her in the overworld,” Damon mused aloud, then shook his head. No one but Callista could use her stone. Yet it explained one thing. Without her starstone, she could be concealed in the darkness. If she had been touching it, he could probably have located her; he could have focused his own stone on it… No good thinking about that now. He stretched out his hand to take it, then drew back.

  “You take it,” he directed, and as she hesitated, “You are her blood-kin, her twin; your vibrations are closer to hers. You can handle it with less pain to her than anyone living. Even through the silk insulation there is some danger, but less from you than anyone else.”

  Gingerly, Ellemir picked up the silk envelope and slipped it into the bosom of her dress. For all the good that would do, Damon thought. Callista, with her starstone, might have been better able to resist her captors. Or maybe not. He was beginning to surmise that it could be she was held prisoner by someone using one of these matrix jewels, someone stronger than herself, who wished mostly to hold he
r powerless; someone who knew that, free and armed, she would be a danger.

  The cat-men. The cat-men, Zandru help them all! But how, and where, did the cat-men get together enough skill and power even to experiment with the matrix jewels? The truth is, he thought, none of us knows a damn thing about the cat-men, but we’ve made the bad mistake of underestimating them. A fatal mistake? Who knows?

  Well, at least the starstone was not in nonhuman hands.

  They were halfway down the stairs when they heard the commotion in the courtyard, the sounds of riders, the great bell in the court. Ellemir gasped and her hand flew to her heart. Damon felt for an instant that prickle of tense fear; then he relaxed.

  “It cannot be another attack,” he said. “I think it is friends or kinsfolk, or an alarm would have been rung.” Besides, he thought grimly, I felt no warning!

  “I think it is Lord Alton come home,” he said, and Ellemir looked startled.

  “I sent a message to Father when I sent to you,” she said, “but I did not believe he would come during Comyn Council, whatever the need.” She ran down the stairs, picking up her gray skirt about her knees; Damon followed more slowly through the great doors into the bricked-in courtyard.

  It was a scene of chaos. Armed men, covered in blood, swaying in their saddles. Too few men, Damon thought swiftly, for Dom Esteban’s bodyguard, any time. Between two horses, a litter rudely woven of evergreen boughs had been slung, and on the litter lay the motionless body of a man.

  Ellemir had stopped short on the courtyard steps, and as Damon came up, the pallor of her face struck him like a blow. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, nails driven into the palms. Damon took her gently by the arm, but she seemed not to know he was there, frozen into herself with shock and horror. Damon went down the steps, looking quickly around the pale, strained faces of the wounded men. Eduin… Conan… Caradoc… where is Dom Esteban? Only over their dead bodies ... Then he caught a glimpse of the swarthy aquiline profile and iron-gray hair of the man in the litter, and it was like a blow to the solar plexus, so painful that he physically swayed with the shock of it. Dom Esteban! By all the hells—what a time to lose the best swordsman and commander in all the Domains!