“Here.” Camilla seized Jaelle’s shoulder, steered her toward the spill of light from the open door of a wineshop on the corner. The place was humming with talk, crowded with mercenary soldiers and Guardsmen, but though some greeted Camilla with a nod and a word or two, none of them attempted to hinder the tall emmasca as she led her friends to a table at the rear. A thick-bodied lamp was swinging over the table. Camilla quieted Jaelle’s attempt at protest with a word.
“They know me here. No one will bother us. Sit down and read your letter, Shaya.” She jerked her head at the round-bodied woman who hurried toward them. “Just wine punch, and privacy at this table, Chella.” Camilla flung a coin on the table, and as the woman scurried off to obey her, said deliberately to Magda, “She’s not much now, but you should have seen her ten years ago. Skin like rich cream, and the softest neck I ever tried to bite. Her hair was long enough to sit on, then, and the color—it made you want to hang it with silver, and believe me, she knew it. But she’s a good soul for all that.”
The woman, coming back with the hot wine, giggled softly and ran her fingertips lightly across Camilla’s hand. Camilla smiled up at her and said, “Another time, Chella. My friends and I need to talk. Make sure nobody gets any notion that we want company, will you, Chella?”
Jaelle tore open Rafaella’s letter and moved it under the light. As she read, she frowned, and finally said, “She’s gone raving mad.” She tossed the letter to Magda.
Reluctantly, Magda took the letter and read:
Dearest Shaya,
I’ve been trying to get you to come back to work with me long enough. Now it’s time to stop talking about it, and do something. I’m leaving this at the old place as a way of reminding you of the good times, but this is bigger in every way. There might even be a chance at the special expedition we used to talk about. Lieutenant Anders thinks she is using me for the big discovery she thinks she can make. It’s the other way round, really. But I’ll give the woman value for her money, and so will you.
Remember when we were girls, Kindra’s old legends of the secret city far away in the Hellers, where an ancient Sisterhood watches over the affairs of humankind? There’s a chance it may not be legend after all. Remember the legends used to say that if you found your way there, and you were sufficiently virtuous, they would teach you all the wisdom of the universe. I wouldn’t give a catman’s tooth for wisdom, and I probably don’t have the virtue to qualify, either.
It could be a dangerous business, but the legends all agree on one thing: they won’t, or aren’t allowed to interfere in human affairs, and if you find them, they aren’t allowed, by their laws, to kill. Their city is supposed to be filled with copper and gold and rare old books of wisdom. They say all the wisdom of the cristoforos came from them, but the cristoforos only got a little of it. Yet everyone says the cristoforos are the custodians of all wisdom!
So I don’t have to tell you what I’m doing. The Terran woman wants information for HQ, which she says will make her famous. As for me, I’m betting on some of that copper coin and gold. Forget the wisdom. If I get there, and get out again, I guarantee I’ll have something a lot better than some old books and fancy words. But I need your help. I can’t do this alone, and there aren’t that many women in the Guild-house now that I can rely on, except you.
I need trade supplies, extra-warm clothing, and a few more horses and pack animals. Try to persuade a couple of the Guild-sisters to come along, too—not goody-goodies like Doria or Keitha, but someone who can travel hard, live rough, chew leather and take orders. And whatever you do, don’t run and blab all this to Margali! For once, love, keep something good to yourself. Remember your old partner— and bring all the horses and trade goods you can get your hands on. It will be a rough trip, but believe it, it will be worth your while. Think of making your daughter independent of her father, even if he is Comyn!
I’ll wait for you for three days where we had to slaughter the chervines that time with Kindra. Don’t fail me! Get on the road at once, so we can be over the Kadarin before the weather breaks.
I know you, and I know how you must be longing to be on the road again. I’ll be waiting for you, Oath-Sister! With my love,
Rafi
Magda dropped the letter on the table and took up the smoking cup of hot wine punch that the bar woman had set before her.
She said, “It’s not Rafi who’s gone mad, it’s Lexie Anders.”
“Most likely both of them.” Camilla picked up the letter, raised an eyebrow toward Jaelle. “May I?”
“Please do.”
As she read, Camilla snorted. At last she said, “Legends! Why doesn’t she go off looking for the Hidden City, the one with the spice-bread trees all hung with candied fruit… I thought Rafi had more sense.”
“She’s going to get herself into terrible trouble,” Magda said. “Of course the responsibility is Lexie’s, but that doesn’t mean Rafaella can get away with this. Even if such a place had ever existed—”
“Oh, it may well exist,” said Jaelle unexpectedly, and Magda turned on her.
“You never said that when Callista and I were talking about strange leronyn from other parts of the Overworld—”
“To be perfectly truthful, Magda, I hadn’t associated the two. I never thought of the Sisters of Wisdom as robed figures with calling crows. When I was a little girl in the Guild-house, and first heard of the Sisterhood, I used to wonder if they came from the Hidden City. Kindra talked of it to me a time or two, when we were traveling together—a city inhabited by wise-women, perhaps descended from the old priestesses of Avarra. The city is said to be on an island, or it was, once, when the climate was different from today’s. If you find it, they have to take you in. They can tell you everything you need to know—how to make a fortune, if that’s what you want, or mystical wisdom about the purpose of your life, if that’s what you want. Kindra said she had met women who had been there, so it never occurred to me that it was a legend. If you put all the stories together, there may well be something to them. That doesn’t mean I think the place is accessible. According to Kindra, they would do everything they could to keep anyone from finding it. Everything except kill, Camilla’s right about that part of the legend. And if you actually did find it, they were obligated—oh, none of this makes any sense, I can’t imagine why the Terrans should meddle with any of it, or why Rafi would have anything to do with it if they did!”
Magda, heartsick, said, “I’m afraid that’s my fault. Lexie, I think, would do anything, anything at all now, to get ahead of me, to make her mark in Terran Intelligence in a way I couldn’t hope to equal. I swear I never intended to set myself up as a legend, I wasn’t trying to grab any glory! She accused me of wanting it all, once, saying I didn’t leave anything for anyone else to accomplish—”
“Oh, the woman’s a fool,” Camilla said, “you did what was set in front of you. If she can’t understand that you aren’t competing with her—”
It was something very different that was troubling Jaelle. “If she does this, Rafaella will end by being blackballed by the Terrans. She would never work for them again. And what will happen to Lieutenant Anders, Magda, if she does this against official advice?”
“The best she could hope for would be to be shipped offworld,” Magda said. “At worst, she could be thrown out of the service, and serve her right. Unless she made such a major discovery that they’ll—that must be what she’s hoping for, to make a discovery for M-and-Ex that’s so spectacular they’ll overlook her disobeying Standard Orders. That’s not unknown in the history of the service, either. Peter told me she was thinking of doing this, but I told him it could hardly be done, even with all the resources of the Empire behind her.”
“Evidently,” Camilla said, “she’s not trying it with them behind her. Which is just as well, Terrans aren’t welcome in the Hellers, and a big expedition wouldn’t find anything, except, probably, more trouble than they could manage. But half a dozen women, well
-provisioned, with good luck and good weather, might manage it. Kindra always said she’d like to try it, Jaelle, but when she took you in as a fosterling, she waited for you to grow up, and died before she ever had the chance.” After a minute, Camilla added, “Rafaella would know about that. Rafi was her kinswoman. I’m surprised that she’d try to take a Terran on such a trip, though.”
“I’m not,” Magda said. “The Terrans have the resources, the money, maps and so forth, to mount expeditions like that. If, in all these years, Rafi hasn’t found any women, even in the Guild-house, who were willing to try, I’m not surprised that when a woman of the Empire brought it up, she’d be excited about the possibility. I am surprised Lexie dragged Jaelle into it. And I’d want more evidence, that it was real, not just an old story.”
But had Lexie been able to provide more evidence than Magda had read in her mind? Magda realized, with sudden horror, that she was jealous; that she was thinking, This should not have been brushed aside by the Terrans, this should have been given to me, Magda Lorne! She was, after all, the first woman to do underground field-work on Darkover. If something this big was in the wind, what right did they have to let Lexie take over?
Magda was shocked at herself. This was the very kind of thing which had precipitated Lexie Anders’s hostility in the first place. And far from sending Lexie off on an exciting chase for a legendary city, Peter Haldane had specifically refused to authorize any such thing.
Or had he? Maybe calling Magda in with a blunt prohibition from the Legate’s office would be the perfect cover-up for Terran Intelligence to go out looking for the same thing. Was it even ethical for Magda, sworn to the Guild-house, to see Terrans led into the heart of the most carefully guarded women’s secret on Darkover?
No, this was nonsense, she was only giving credence to Marisela’s absurd intimations of mystical sisterhoods and cosmic secrets.
“I don’t know why I am worrying about it,” she said. “It’s impossible. Suicide. Even with luck and good weather—neither of which are easy to find in the Hellers—it can’t be done.”
And even if it were possible, even if Cholayna sent for her and asked her to take it over, she would have refused. “Totally impossible,” she repeated, again, hunting for conviction in the words.
“I don’t know about that,” Camilla said. “Assuming Kindra was right, and there really is such a place—if it has ever been done, ever—it could be done again. But I don’t think Rafi could do it. You might, Jaelle. Or might have, once. I don’t know if you’ve still got it in you, after seven years of soft living out at Armida.”
Magda said angrily, “That’s not the point, is it? Of course, that’s what Rafaella wants to do, to lure you to go with her, drag you into the trouble that she and Lexie are making for everyone. She’s counting on your sense of loyalty and your friendship. She thinks you’ll go off after her the way you pursued Alessandro Li when he took off into the hills on his own. Then she can get you back, which is what she wants—”
“I thought you said you were not competing with her, Magda. Should I let her go alone, to get into trouble in the Hellers, or die there?”
“Then—you’re going to do what she wants.”
“She was my partner for all those years. But there’s no reason to drag you into it, Magda.”
“Do you think I’ll let you go by yourself, and make trouble for yourself with the Terrans, and—” She stopped, looking into Jaelle’s glowing eyes. She said, “That isn’t the point, either, is it? You want to go! Don’t you? You want to be back on the road, and any excuse is good enough.”
“Magda—you don’t understand—” Jaelle sighed, and said, “I haven’t any right to want to go. But it drives me mad that Rafi is free to go and I am not. Besides—”
“You are free to do whatever you think you should do,” Magda said, realizing almost in despair that Jaelle was almost echoing her own thoughts. She added, “I should have been straight with Lexie. I should have told her about my own experiences with these people. Whether or not they’re real, or from some other plane of existence, if I had been willing to share that with her, tell her how and why I encountered them, perhaps she would have understood—”
Magda now felt she understood: Lexie, like herself, had encountered these mysterious ones, the same dark-robed Sisterhood who had reached out to rescue herself and Jaelle. It was they who had sent Lexie back, as they had sent help to her… She knew Camilla did not believe it, but she had been there, and Camilla had not. But Lexie had had the courage to go in search of them, and she had not.
“The legend is very specific,” Camilla said wryly, “that if you go looking for them and you are not qualified for admission, you’ll wish you’d never heard of them. Somehow I don’t think Rafaella’s desire for riches is qualification enough. I’ll bet on Rafi to bluff her way in, maybe. But not to get out again.”
“Can’t you see?” Jaelle’s eyes were bright. “Those two, they aren’t the right ones to go.”
“And we are? Oh, come, Shaya—”
“I don’t think it’s coincidence that all this has happened,” Jaelle argued. “In any case, Rafaella has put the safety of their expedition in my hands. She has asked me to catch up to her with more horses, trade goods, warm clothing—I can’t abandon her.”
“And—perhaps if I tell Lexie what I know of these— these mysterious ones, she’ll have a better chance.” Magda hesitated. “And I have access to other information she could not get, special security information, what little is known about the country in the Hellers beyond Nevarsin—”
And yet, in her heart, Magda knew Lexie would never see it that way. To Alexis Anders, the well-meant attempt to help would be no more than the Lorne Legend standing in the way again.
Hellfire, Lorne, is there any pie on this planet that you don’t have your fingers in?
“Neither of you are being honest,” Camilla said wryly, “yet both of you feel yourselves summoned to this mysterious city. As for me—my motives are perfectly clear.” She glared at them and said, “ I will go to this mysterious City of Sorceresses, but I at least am honest about my reasons. These people are supposed to be able to tell you the purpose why you were born, and—” She looked around, daring anyone to challenge her. “I have reason to question the Fates. If the Goddess has demanded of me that I suffer these things, then do I have no right to demand of the Goddess that she, or these mysterious women who pretend to do her will, account to me for my life? I choose to seek out this mysterious city, and there demand of the Goddess why she has treated me as a toy.”
And despite the angry, half-flippant way in which Camilla phrased her words, Magda knew that they were a threat. And in any confrontation of that sort, Magda would bet on Camilla to come off best.
Jaelle shoved her chair back; thrust the letter, which had been lying on the table, into the pocket of her breeches. “When do we start?”
Magda felt as if she had been caught in the track of one of the Terran earth-moving machines, the kind used to transform a green hill lush with trees and plants, into leveled, bare ground, a stripped place where a spaceport could rise, or anything happen. Jaelle had never taken her protest seriously at all. Yet she had tried, fairly tried, to assess the rights and wrongs of this. Or had she?
“She said she’d wait three days,” Magda said. “I’ll go in the morning to the HQ and get maps from Intelligence; I have access to satellite overflight pictures, and the computer time to have them blown up into scale maps.”
“And I’ll make arrangements for horses and trade goods,” Camilla said. “I have contacts now. You don’t.”
And the children? Magda thought. Yet she had been wondering, only the other day, why there seemed nothing now worthy of her energies. She found herself remembering an old Terran proverb: Be careful what you pray for, you might get it.
The rain had stopped when they came out of the wineshop, and Magda looked up to the skyline, where the high ragged teeth of the Venza Mountains rose c
lear. A small moon was just setting over one of the peaks.
They would be going up that way, then northward, past the Kadarin and into the deeps of the Hellers, to Nevarsin and beyond. She had never been so far into the unknown wilds. Her two companions were, with the skill of experienced mountain guides, already planning the stages of the journey.
If there was one thing she had learned when she left the Guild-house for the Forbidden Tower, it was never to assume that her life was settled or would follow an orderly track from now on. She listened to Camilla, scowling and talking about the difficulty of finding mountain-hardened horses at this season, and realized that she was also mentally rummaging through her wardrobe for the warm clothes she would need long before they got into the Hellers.
* * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
« ^ »
At first light, Camilla went off to see about horses, pack animals and saddles.
Magda, who could do nothing until regular work hours in the HQ, went into the dining room, where cold sliced bread and hot porridge were laid out for breakfast. As she ate, she tried to think what she should do first.
As an agent in the field, she had had access to the most sophisticated fly-over photographs, and to the elegant equipment which could, from a photo taken at eighty thousand meters, generate a map sophisticated enough to distinguish a resin-tree from a spice bush.
There were few Darkovan maps. Few traders came and went in the Hellers, and when they did, they followed trails their grandfathers had known. Beyond Nevarsin, little was known: a frozen plateau, wilderness. The maps from photograph work would help. But not, Magda thought, enough.
Jaelle came down, already dressed for the road, in riding breeches and boots. Magda had never before seen her wearing the long Amazon knife, like a short sword, of a mercenary or soldier. She slid into the seat beside Magda.
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