Love and Intrigue Under the Seven Moons of Kordea

by Helena Puumala

  “Ah, you’re asking some useful questions, little one.”

  If in her disembodied state Sarah could have jumped, she would have done exactly that! She recognized the tone of that thought!

  “Yes,” sent the Greencat, and suddenly its astral form was next to hers.

  “So, what have we here?” came the questioning thought of Jaime, who seemed to have let his attention wander from the amarto-reflector to the newest disembodied arrival.

  “It’s the Greencat!” Dian exclaimed. “Sarah made friends with it on the Planet of the Amartos. Apparently the Neotsarians’ barriers mean nothing to it!”

  “They don’t when I’m travelling astrally,” the animal conceded. “I don’t have the limitation of depending on the power of the Stones which you Witches use to amplify your psychic talents.”

  The animal stared out of its intelligent (if, at the moment, unphysical) eyes at each of Jaime, Dian and Sarah. It even turned to gaze upon Anya and Janelle for a moment.

  “Note the word ‘amplify’,” it then added.

  “Ah.” Jaime was on that immediately. “You’re saying that there is a similarity to the way that this construction uses amarto-power, and the way the Witches of Kordea do. Are you suggesting that therein lies the solution to our problem?”

  “Yes, but, unfortunately, you do not have the time to work out the implications involved.”

  The cat was staring at Jaime again.

  “Perhaps, considering the interest you are taking in the subject, you will be able to solve that problem at a later date, to the benefit of both Kordea and the Confederation.

  “However, here and now, you people are running out of time. Sarah is going to have to use brute force rather than finesse to deal with the situation—and it will have to be Sarah doing it, since she is the only one of you with access to enough strength to break the hold of the mechanical amplifier.”

  “But the thing is draining my power!” Sarah protested. “It’s putting me into a position of conflict, just the same as Dian, Anya and Janelle! It is powering itself with the energies of my Stone, leaving me with only dregs of the strength I usually have when I use my amarto!”

  “Consider, Sarah, what other sources of power are available to you?”

  Sarah thought that the Greencat sounded exactly like a teacher. A patient teacher, at that, trying to get the student to answer her own questions by thinking things through.

  “Besides your personal Stone, that is?” added the animal.

  “Well, Dian’s energies, of course, and possibly those of Anya and Janelle,” Sarah iterated. “But they’re in the same fix that I am! Caught in the amarto-reflector trap, however that works! And you just said that it would take way too long for Jaime and Dian to figure out the mechanics of releasing us!”

  “Indeed. So where else might you look for energy enhancement?”

  The astral eyes of the Greencat bore into Sarah’s.

  “Well, if I could get hold of them—if I dared to contact them—Marlyss’ Circle of the Twelve could and would help me,” she said tentatively. “Only thing is that I don’t want to take the risk of drawing their energies into the trap, too. Doing that would be like giving the Neotsarians everything they covet, and more!”

  The Greencat seemed to ponder on this for a moment. Then it shook its astral head.

  “You’re right. That’s too risky. A Circle is only as strong as its weakest link, and with Witch Dian and you both here, the last spot in the Circle of the Twelve is filled by an Apprentice. A talented young woman, but not a fully trained Witch, and certainly not the pillar of psychic strength that you are, Sarah, and which Dian is to a somewhat lesser extent. No, it won’t do.

  “But there is still another source of power available to you, and this one is presently available only to you.”

  Sarah drew in a breath; then exhaled slowly before speaking.

  “You don’t mean the cache of amartos which I inadvertently keyed in the cavern of the eyeless ones, on the Planet of the Amartos?” she asked. “They would amount to a huge explosion of power, now that I am trained enough that I could make use of them. Only—I would certainly not want to allow energy like that to fall into The Organization hands!”

  “I rather doubt that the piece of equipment the insides of which Jaime has been studying could handle a blast of power of that magnitude, even if you mishandled it.”

  Sarah was quite certain that the Greencat was grinning at her—mentally, of course.

  “Don’t mishandle it, Sarah,” Jaime thought at her. “I’d like for us to be able to take this thing with us to Kordea so I can study it.”

  The animal turned its attention to him.

  “It hardly matters,” it informed the astral man. “You can always take the three who created it to Kordea, to re-create it, should things go that far astray.”

  “Still, I’d have to get word to Marlyss to release the cache from its insulating sac,” Sarah protested. “And supposing I can do that, and I get the energy into my hands, what do I do with it? How do I release the four of us amarto-sensitive women from the thrall of that machine?”

  She was starting to feel anxious. Too much was riding on her, and she did not know enough! She was not a fully trained Witch, no matter how talented, and how strong she might be!

  “Don’t forget stubborn, and capable of utter single-mindedness, when you’re listing your useful attributes,” sent the Greencat. “I’ve begun to understand why you were allowed to take those pebbles with you from that cave.

  “And as for what you do, follow your instincts, as you did with the Lina-trap. And take good advice when you get it. Like... didn’t someone mention that it might be a good idea to get the women and their Stones physically away from the vicinity of the amarto-reflector?”

  “Jaime made that suggestion, but Anya pointed out that even if we could be taken away physically, we amarto-sensitives would still be caught, in our astral forms, by the amarto-reflector.”

  Sarah wrinkled her unphysical nose at the thought. She had the feeling that she was missing something, and whatever it was that she was missing was at the crux of the solution.

  “Think back, Sarah, to the time when you were faced with what seemed like an insoluble problem in the cavern of the eyeless ones,” the Greencat encouraged her. “Or, a little later, when you were being hounded by the energies besetting you from both sides, and you had no intention of falling under the dominion of either one of them.”

  Sarah thought back to the time in the cavern. That seemed like it had happened so long ago, although, really, not that much time had passed between then and now. A year, a year and a half, or maybe two years at the most? Space travel screwed up a person’s sense of time, she realized, partly because it really did muddle up her experience of it, what with the only measuring stick available being the Standard with which the Confederation kept some kind of order among the chaos of a plethora of planets. Every world, including the one she was physically on, at the moment, had its own seasons, and marked its own time. The space stations generally ran on The Standard, but she had not been on one since she had left Station XER aboard the Explorer Ship Beth 117.

  Anyway—she was woolgathering. Avoiding the issue. She heaved a mental sigh. The Greencat was waiting patiently for her to order her thoughts and to plumb her memories. She knew that was so, though she was hazy on how she knew it.

  In the cavern, she had slept, and had had a dream. Her brother Cam had been in the dream. He was now in the laboratory in which she was astrally but which she could not sense physically. What had life been like for him these long years, growing up into adulthood among the Neotsarians? Anya had told her that her father and Cam had avoided even thinking about Sarah, for years, because they had been afraid that acknowledging her existence in any way would have spurred a search for her, in order to bring her amarto-talents into The Organization fold. As long as the Neotsarians had believed that Peter had only one daughter, and she was not in the least ama
rto-sensitive, they had not bothered to dig too deeply into the family’s affairs.

  But—she had to concentrate on the cavern, and the dream that had fuelled her impetus to take some kind of action to save herself. That was the way to help herself, her colleagues, her father and brother! And her biological grandmother, and Janelle, and even the scientist named Jerold who had worked with her father and brother.

  What was it that Cam had yelled to her in the dream, when she had found herself caught between a cliff and a sheer drop?

  “You can do it, Sarah! It’s not impossible!”

  Yes, those were the words, perhaps not the exact ones, but close enough. “It’s not impossible!” had become her guiding statement, she remembered. Her thought at the time had been: there has to be a way. There has to be!

  And she had found a way! A convoluted way, perhaps, but it had been a way! It had involved keying the amartos lying on the rock beside her trussed-up body, and reaching the mind of the Greencat who since had become an ally.

  Now she needed to find a way, once again, this time for a whole civilization, and for the Witches and the people of Kordea.

  “Brute force?” she subvocalized to the Greencat. “You said that I’d have to use brute force, because we don’t have the time to finesse a solution. Do you mean that I need to use what I have learned at Ferhil Stones, and the power in the cache of Stones keyed to me, to force reality as humans know it, to change its shape? By bending the underlying structure, the non-physical one which everywhere supports the universe that we know?”

  “That is what you do with amarto-power any time that you exercise it. That is what the Neotsarians are trying to do with their reflected and refracted amarto-power. Surely, after all your studies at the Stronghold of the Circle of the Twelve, that does not come as a surprise to you!”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Sarah sighed. “But it is a grave responsibility to interfere with the structure of reality.”

  The Greencat’s astral form seemed to smile at her—in a very feline manner.

  “That attitude is one reason why I’d rather you did the interfering, rather than allowing the Neotsarians to keep on doing so. They do it thoughtlessly, obeying only their own intent of becoming the masters of the galaxy, and insisting that all humans follow their ideas of what is proper. Of course, what they want to achieve is unattainable; the whole of humanity would never agree to live under the rules that they envision. Plus, they have no hope of policing their rules, regardless of whether they have tamed amarto-power to their use or not. But they could create much confusion, and do a lot of damage while making the attempt.”

  “However,” said Sarah, making her last objection. “I have no way of accessing Marlyss to ask her to release the cached amartos from their insulation. Not without risking her Circle, and perhaps endangering everyone here even more than they are already endangered.”

  “Your means for doing so,” responded the Cat, “is just about to arrive.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Five pairs of eyes stared at Nance and the Elite Karil as he shoved her into the middle of the laboratory.

  “I brought you people another Witch!” crowed the Neotsarian. “She and her Stone ought to increase the power of that fascinating creation on the counter—“, he nodded at the amarto-reflector, “—by leaps and bounds!”

  “Ah,” responded Anya, in a slightly condescending tone, “and which talented woman is this that you have brought to us, Elite Karil?”

  “Sarah Mackenzie, of course,” Karil replied confidently. “Although she denies the identity. She’s been calling herself Nance, lately, but the pretty little snoop’s not fooling anyone with that.”

  Anya’s lips twitched into a twisted grin. Peter opened his mouth to speak, but she shook her head determinedly at him, and he shut it again.

  If the Elite Karil noticed this interaction, he ignored it.

  “I charge you, Anya, and you, Peter Mackenzie, with making your granddaughter, and daughter behave,” The Elite Karil said imperiously. “I want her and her Stone drawn into the orbit of the amarto-reflector, the soonest. That done, Les and I should be able to devise a new way to trap the Kordean bitches and force them to work for us! And you three male geniuses, working with Anya and Janelle will work out the details of whatever plan Les and I will come up with.”

  He walked over to the desk, indicating that the young man in its chair ought to vacate it.

  Cameron Mackenzie stood up, displaying an air of slight insolence.

  “So this is my little sister, is she?” he asked, studying Nance. “I never thought that she’d fill out so nicely; she was a scrawny runt when she was ten.”

  He grinned.

  “A loveable, scrawny runt, with so much spirit it practically spilled out of her! And imagination! Always coming up with schemes to subvert parental rules, some of them pretty hair-raising. And here she is, probably having surpassed our sister Maris in the looks department, and clearly having settled down to a reasonably ordinary existence!”

  “She has even married, apparently,” added the Elite Karil. “I think her husband is around somewhere, among the Settlement fools that think they can threaten us, the Neotsarians. Texi, or something like that, by name, I was told.”

  He had turned on the communicator.

  “Les, meet me at the Cafeteria; bring some strong drink from Morri’s stash. You and I will have to do some brainstorming, now that we’ll have some more power. And have Morri call my pilot, Rickon, to move the flyer, and come inside; I’ll be staying for a while.”

  Nance had said nothing so far, merely stood where the Neotsarian had left her when he had gone to use the lab communicator. Why he was not using his portable one, she did not know, and didn’t care. At least the gun barrel was gone from the back of her head, although it was still hanging from Elite Karil’s fingers. She was sharp enough to have noted the silent interplay between the Witch Anya, and the middle-aged man who had to be Sarah and Cameron Mackenzie’s father, and understood from it that she ought to stick with the impersonation that the Neotsarians had thrust upon her, for at least a little while longer. To that end, she deduced that it was best that she say as little as possible; she was no Sarah Mackenzie, after all. Having known Sarah a bit, she could credit the brother’s description of Sarah, the child, and for a moment she found herself wishing that she could have been that girl, or the woman she had grown into, for just a day, or a few hours. Sarah would never have amused herself by tricking dumb men into saying idiotic things by displaying her cleavage to them. No, Sarah would have done more impressive, dangerous deeds; she would have been busy doing stuff that mattered to the people and the worlds around her!

  “The young woman whom the Neotsarians take for you was just brought into the lab by the fool named Elite Karil,” subvocalized the Greencat to Sarah. Apparently it could see the physical laboratory, as well as its eye-of-storm counterpart.

  Attuned to the Greencat as she was, for a few seconds Sarah could almost see Nance in spite of the shimmer that was obscuring her view of the lab. And she sensed Nance’s thoughts—was the Greencat drawing her attention to them? The beautiful Nance looked up to her, to Sarah, of all people! How was that possible? Then she realized that the Greencat was making her aware of Nance’s attitude in order to build up her self-confidence. Of course!

  “She hides a com that can reach your Agency colleague, Jeb. As soon as the arrogant Elite fool leaves, get Anya to direct her to put in a call. The word has to go to the man, Coryn. He has to—quickly—persuade Marlyss to release the amarto cache from its insulation. As soon as that’s done, girl, you make your move—or your immense effort rather! And, understand, you can do it! You have what it takes! You proved that underground, on the Planet of the Amartos!”

  Jeb had given Nance one of the communicators when she had been left alone on Hera’s Hope. Just like the one he had passed to Jaime, and which was in a pocket, on his physical body, at the moment, useless because Dian had been unable
to send his astral being back to the body. But the communicating had to be done quickly; Jeb had not been in the laboratory to disable its spy-eyes! Someone at Security was no doubt still monitoring them! Would that person raise an alarm the moment he saw Nance pull the thing out and begin speaking into it?

  “Witch Anya,” Sarah addressed the woman who would be her conduit to Nance. “Heed me very carefully. As soon as the Neotsarian fool leaves the lab, we’ll need to move. The Greencat, the presence of which I’m assuming that you are aware, is helping me, and with its encouragement I’m hoping to break us out of this trap—how much damage I’ll end up doing, I don’t know, but it’ll certainly be less than if we allow these Organization idiots to have their way. I have the Greencat’s assurance on that, and it knows a lot that even the Witches of Kordea don’t.

  “What I need from you is that you speak to the friend who is impersonating me, since I cannot. She has a com hidden on her person which can reach our communications person outside the barrier, and who, in turn, can access The Agency Headquarters. Nance needs to tell Jeb that he has to pass the word to Coryn, to get Marlyss to release the amarto cache which I keyed, and helped to bring to Ferhil Stones from the Planet of the Amartos. We need the energy of those Stones to break us out of the thrall of the amarto-reflector, and, right now, I am the only one who can use them.”

  Sarah could tell that Anya was mentally listening, very carefully taking in every word. She herself could do nothing more about the communication; now she had to wait.

  On the way to the door the Elite Karil patted Nance’s shoulder, a pleased look on his face.

  “Don’t forget, girl, we Elites can handle your Stone without any harm coming to us!” he said to her in the passing.

  He threw a kiss to the amarto-reflector, drawing a grimace from Peter, a snort from Cam, and a baleful glare from Jerold.