“You’re not joking?”
“I hope not,” said Valdir abruptly from behind them. “Kennard, what was Larry saying to you just now? I picked it up, but I can’t read him—”
With a curious prickly sensation again, Larry realized that Valdir had been well out of earshot. The Darkovan lord was looking down at him with an almost fierce intensity. He said, “Make rain? It sounds, then, as if the Terrans have a magic greater than ours. Tell me about this rain-making, Larry.”
Larry repeated what he had said to Kennard, and the older man stood scowling, deep in thought. Without a word, Lorill Hastur and the frail, flame-haired woman had approached them, and stood listening.
Lorill Hastur said, “What about it, Valdir? You know something of atomic structures. Is it practical at all?”
The men who had slept in the meadow were collecting their tools now, forming in groups, getting their orders for the day’s work. Larry looked at the forest edge. How green it looked. Yet above it rose the blanket of smoke and the omnipresent dull roar of the fire. Valdir turned, too, and looked at the cloud that hung over the burning woods.
He said, “Fire throws off the same gas as breath. There must be an enormous quantity of carbon dioxide going off into the air.”
“We can move it into the cold of the outer sky,” Lorill Hastur said. “That’s easy enough. And from there, if it falls on the clouds—”
“There’s no time to waste,” the woman said. Her eyes were closed, her voice remote, as she added, “A fire-storm has broken out on the far side of the forest, and the main blaze is racing toward the villages there. The fire-lines will never contain it. Rain is the only hope. There is enough moisture in those clouds to kill the fire—if we could only get it out of them.”
“We can try,” Valdir said. The three of them went into one of those intent silences again, the very air between their still forms seeming to tremble with invisible force.
Larry looked at Kennard. “Do you know what they’re going to do? How can the—?”
“They can teleport the gas above the clouds,” Kennard said. “If the cold can freeze it—”
Larry was becoming a little hardened to these curious powers now. If telepathy was possible, teleportation was only a minor step—
“If they can teleport, why don’t they just teleport enough water from a river, or something, to put out the fire?”
“Too much weight involved,” Kennard said gravely. “Even the clouds—they didn’t move the clouds themselves, just enough air to create a wind to move them here.” He fell silent, his eyes on his father, and when Larry started to speak, motioned him, impatiently, to silence.
The silence in the dawnlit meadow deepened; there was no sound at all, except for the distant, indistinct sound of the fire. The clouded sky seemed to darken, grow thick and dreary. Larry watched a group of men moving away toward the fire-lines; he and Kennard should have been with them. And they stood here, waiting, watching the three telepaths—
Abruptly there was a great WHOOSH from the distant fire; Larry, whirling round, saw a tremendous uprushing billow of smoke and flame, and seemed to feel, rather than hear, the wild roaring sound. Then silence again, hushed, tense and deep.
Above his head the clouds moved, writhed, seeming to form and reform into tossing shapes and worms of moisture; they curdled, coalesed, the sky darkened and darkened as the cloud-gray deepened.
Then the sky and cloud-layer suddenly
dissolved
—that was the only way Larry could describe it, afterward—and flowed into dark, thick lines of teeming, pouring rain. The burning forest sizzled, crackled in a sort of desperation. Great thick clouds of smoke and steam and soot billowed upward, and a rushing wind flung great sparks upward. Larry was soaked through in a moment, before the rain localized itself, pouring heavily down over the forest, but leaving the meadow untouched except by the brief spit of rain. The flames, visible over the treetops, sank and died beneath the upsurge of steam and smoke. The hissing sound grew louder, roared, then dimmed and was still.
The rain stopped.
Soaked, shivering, Larry stared in blank wonder at Valdir and the two gray-clad telepaths. They had cornered the clouds; they had harnessed the very force of the rain to combat the fire!
Valdir beckoned to the boys. They walked across the damp grass, Larry still a little dazed. He had boasted of Terran science; could it match
this?
“That’s over with, at least,” Valdir said, in a tone of profound relief. “Larry, I wanted to thank you; without what you told us, none of us would have known how to do that. I hardly know how to thank you.”
It was more confusing than ever. These men had forces and powers undreamed of by science—and yet they were ignorant of a simple notion like cloud-seeding! Because he could not have spoken without revealing that mixture of awe, mingled with surprise at the incompleteness of the knowledge, Larry was silent. Valdir turned to Lorill Hastur and said, “Now you can see my point, perhaps! Without their knowledge—”
But before he could finish the sentence, a wild clamor of bells broke out from the village below. Valdir stiffened; the two telepaths darted looks at one another. From further away another bell and another sounded the alarm; not now in the known pattern to signal a fire, but a wild, clamorous cry of warning. The men in the camp, the men trooping back from the dead fire, dropped their tools and axes and looked up, startled. There was a rising murmur of apprehension, of dread.
Valdir swore, furiously. “We might have known—”
Kennard looked at him in astonishment. “What is it, Father?”
Valdir’s mouth twisted bitterly. “A trick—the fire was obviously set to draw us away from the villages, so that the bandits could attack in peace—and find no one to meet them but women and old men and little children!”
The fire camp, until now so orderly, was suddenly a scene of milling confusion as men formed into groups, stirred around restlessly, broke away for their horses, and within a few minutes the crowded field was almost empty, men vanishing silently in all directions. Valdir watched, tight-mouthed.
“The raiders may get a surprise,” he said, at last. “They’ll never guess we could have conquered such a fire so quickly. Just the same”—he looked grim and angry—“I had no chance—Tell me, Larry, how would your people handle such an attack?”
“I suppose we’d all get together and fight it,” Larry said, and Valdir’s mouth moved in a brief, mirthless laugh.
“Right. But they won’t understand that it’s as urgent as a fire—” he broke off, with a violent gesture. “Zandru seize them all! Kennard, where did they take our horses?”
Fifteen minutes later they were riding away from the village, Valdir still silent and grim. Kennard and Larry not daring to break in on his anger. Larry was still struggling with the sense of wonder. The powers these Darkovans had—and the slipshod, unsystematic way they used them!
He was beginning to formulate a theory as to why Valdir had invited him to his estate. Valdir evidently had some inkling of the value of a quality which seemed alien to the Darkovan way of life, something the Terrans had. Larry hardly knew how to describe it. It was the thing Kennard had jeered at when he said, “You Terrans can’t handle your personal problems by yourselves—you have to call in everyone else.” Perhaps it could be called a community spirit, or the ability to work together in groups. They didn’t know how to organize; even in firefighting there had been no single leader but each group had worked separately. Even now, there was no way they could get together against the common danger of the bandits. And Valdir, who could see the history of failure behind these scattered efforts, hoped to change this old pattern. But they hadn’t given him a chance.
The other Darkovans who had originally been a part of the three-day hunt—how long ago that seemed!—rode several places behind, not wanting to break in on their master’s preoccupation. To Larry, Valdir’s feelings seemed as clear as if he, himself had felt them. Kennard, too, riding silently at Larry’s side, was mulling it over in his mind, the disparity behind the old codes and his father’s attempt to change things. To Larry it seemed almost as if Kennard spoke his thoughts aloud—his father could do no wrong, and yet how had he come to these conclusions?
Once away from the site of the fire, there was no sign of clouds or of the brief rain; only the high-hanging cloud of smoke and soot over the forest told where the fire had been. Even that had vanished behind the hills by the time they paused, where the road forked at the foot of a thickly wooded slope, to breathe the horses and to eat cold food from their saddlebags.
Kennard said idly, “It’s going to be good to be home.”
Larry nodded. He still ached from the unaccustomed labor in the fire-lines, and his hands were raw and blistered.
“Mine too,” Kennard said, displaying his hands ruefully. “Though you’d think they were hardened enough by now. The arms-master in the city guard wouldn’t have much sympathy for me. He’d say I’d shirked sword-practice too many times.”
Larry reached in his saddle-bag for the small first-aid kit he had brought along. It had the emblem of the Medical HQ on it, and Kennard looked at it curiously as Larry opened it and glanced at the small bottles and tubes.
“Here. Try some of this on your blisters,” he suggested diffidently, sprinkling the powder on his own. Kennard followed suit, smelling the antiseptic curiously.
“May I see it?” Kennard examined the small bottles and tubes with interested curiosity. “Your people make the damndest things!”
“Some of yours are just as strange,” Larry retorted. “The idea of telepathy still seems weird to me. And teleportation!”
Kennard shrugged. “I suppose so, though of course to me it’s very simple.” He looked at his father; Valdir, looking somewhat less unapproachable now, turned, nodded to his son, fished in the pocket of his jerkin and tossed something to Kennard. Kennard caught the small object—it was shrouded in a small chamois bag and wrapped in silk—and from it, drew a glimmering blue jewel.
“Of course I’m not as good at it all as my father, but still—here, take a look in this.”
Gingerly, Larry touched the blue jewel. It felt faintly warm. He hesitated, remembering how Valdir had probed the mind of the dying Ranger.
“It’s all right,” Kennard said gently, reassuringly. “You don’t think I’d hurt you, do you?”
Abashed at his own fear, Larry looked into the blue jewel. Within the depths, faint colors seemed to move and writhe; suddenly, as he looked up at Kennard, some barrier seemed to drop. The Darkovan boy seemed nearer, and easier to understand. Larry caught, in one quick flash of understanding, a sudden blaze of Kennard’s thoughts, as if the essence of his friend’s personality was made clear to him: Kennard’s intense pride of family, his tremendous sense of responsibility for his work, the fears with which he sometimes struggled, the warmth Kennard felt for his father and his young foster-sister, even—to Larry’s shy embarrassment—the warm friendliness Kennard felt for Larry himself, and the emotion verging on awe with which he regarded Larry’s travels in space and his Terran origin....
All this in a brief flash, as the blueness of the jewel blazed; then it faded, the barrier dropped in place again, and Kennard was smiling at him, somewhat tentatively. It occurred to Larry that Kennard now knew as much about him as he knew about Kennard. He didn’t mind—but it took some getting used to!
At least, having had a sample of it, he couldn’t doubt the existence of telepathy!
Kennard shrouded the jewel again. Larry, realizing that the medical kit was still in his other hand, thrust it quickly into his pocket.
He had no way of knowing that the moment of rapport between himself and Kennard was to save both their lives....
CHAPTER SIX
They had mounted again, and had ridden for an hour, when they came to a narrow canyon between two forested hills. Between the slopes and the dark trees the place lay in shadow, for the sun was declining; Valdir, riding ahead, slowed his horse to a walk and waited for the others to come up with him.
Kennard’s eyes rested questioningly on his father, and Larry, riding beside him, could follow his thoughts in that way that was still so strange to him:
I don’t like this place. Every clump of brushwood could have a dozen bandits behind it. It’s a perfect set-up for an ambush. ... It would be my first fight. The first time I’ve been this close to real danger, not just lolling around the city streets chasing home troublemakers. I wonder if Father knows that I’m afraid.
Larry’s skin prickled, in a strange mixture of excitement and fear. Within the last three days his peaceful life had suddenly plunged into a maelstrom of violence and danger. It was new to him, but, somehow, not unpleasant.
They were halfway down the little valley when Larry heard, through the hoofbeats, a curious sound from deep within the bushes. He stiffened in the saddle; Valdir, alert, saw the move and reined in, looking warily around. Then, from the shelter of the trees came a harsh and raucous cry—and then mounted men were all sweeping down on them.
Valdir cried out a warning. Larry, in that first instant of petrified shock, saw the riders, tall men in long furred cloaks, long-haired and bearded, mounted on huge rangy horses of a strange breed, racing down on them at incredible speed. There was no time to flee, no time to think. Suddenly he was in the middle of the attackers, saw the Darkovans had drawn their swords; Kennard, his face very white, had his dagger in his hand and was fighting to control his horse with the other.
He had a bare moment to see all this—and a strange, uprushing sense of panic that he, of all his party, was unarmed and knew nothing of fighting—before it all melted into a mad confusion of horses pushing against horses, cries in a strange tongue, the dull clash of steel on steel.
Larry’s horse reared upright and plunged forward. He gripped wildly at the reins, felt them slide through his fingers, burning his blistered hands with a brief stab of pain. Then he felt himself losing his balance and slid to the ground, legs crumpling beneath him. Half stunned, he had just sense enough to roll from beneath the pawing hooves of his frantic horse. Someone tripped over his prostrate body, stumbled, fell forward on the grass; roused up with a hoarse cry of rage, and a moment later came at Larry with a knife. Larry rolled over on his back, balling up, kicking with one booted foot at the descending knife. With a split-second sense of weird unreality—
This isn’t real, it can’t be!
—he saw the knife spin away in a high arc and fall ten feet away. The man, knocked off balance, reeled and staggered back; recovered himself and dived at Larry, getting hold of him with both hands. Larry drew his elbows up, pushed with all his might and freed himself momentarily. He struggled up to his knees, but his attacker was on him again and the man’s face—rough, bearded, with evil yellow eyes—came close and menacing. His breath stank hot in Larry’s face; his hands sought for Larry’s throat. Larry, frightened and yet suddenly cool-headed, found himself thinking,
He hasn’t got a knife, and he’s fat and out of condition.