Barron scowled. This was a job for an anthropologist, a liaison officer, a specialist in Darkovan language, or—
fire watching! Hell, that’s a kid’s job!
He said stiffly, “Sir, let me remind you that this is out of my sector and out of my specialty. I have no experience in it. I’m a scheduling expert and dispatch man—”
“Not as of five days ago, you aren’t,” Mallison said brutally, “Look, Barron, you’re through in your own line; you know that. We don’t want to ship you out in disgrace—not without some idea of what happened to you. And your contract isn’t up for two years. We want to fit you in somewhere.”
There was nothing Barron could say to that. Resigning before a contract was up meant losing your holdback pay and your fee passage back to your home planet—which could strand you on a strange world and wipe out a year’s pay. Technically he had a right to complain about being assigned outside his specialty field. But technically they had a right to fire him with seven reps, blacklist him, fine him, and press charges for gross negligence. He was getting a chance to come out of this—not clean, but not wrecked for good in the service.
“When do I start?” he asked. It was the only question he had left.
But he did not hear the answer. As he scanned Mallinson’s face, suddenly it blurred.
He was standing on a stretch of soft grass; it was night, but it was not dark. All around him the night flamed and roared with a great fire, reaching in tendrils of ravening flame far above his head. And in the midst of the flame there was a woman.
Woman?
She was almost inhumanly tall and slender, but girlish; she stood bathed in the flame as if standing carelessly under a waterfall. She was not burning, not agonized. She looked merry and smiling. Her hands were clasped on her naked breasts, the flames licking around her face and her flame-colored hair. And then the girlish, merry face wavered and became supernally beautiful with the beauty of a great goddess burning endlessly in the fire, a kneeling woman bound in golden chains....
... “and you can arrange all that downstairs in Personnel and Transportation,” Mallinson finished firmly, shoving back his chair. “Are you all right, Barron? You look a bit fagged. I’ll bet you haven’t been eating or sleeping. Shouldn’t you see a medic before you go? Your card is still good in Section 7. It’s going to be all right, but the sooner you leave, the better: Good luck.” But he didn’t offer to shake hands, and Barron knew it wasn’t all right at all.
He stumbled over his own feet leaving the office, and the face of the burning woman, in its inhuman ecstasy, went with him in terror and amazement.
He thought,
what in the world—any world—has happened to me?
And, in the name of all the gods of Earth, space and Darkover—why?
CHAPTER TWO
The breach in the outwork was being repaired.
Brynat Scarface had gone out to watch, and was standing on the inner parapet supervising the work. It was a cold morning and mists flowed up the mountainside; in the chill the men moved sluggishly. Little dark men from the mountains, most of them ragged and still battle-stained, fought the rough ground and the cold stone; they were moved by shouts and the occasional flick of a whip in the hands of one of Brynat’s men.
Brynat was a tall man, dressed in ragged and slashed finery, over which he had drawn a fur cloak from the spoils of the castle. A great seamed scar ridged his face from eye to chin, giving to a face which had never been handsome the wolfish look of some feral beast which had somehow put on the dress of a man. At his heels his sword bearer, a little bat-eared man, scurried, bowing under the weight of the outlaw’s sword. He cringed when Brynat turned to him, expecting a blow or a curse, but Brynat was in high good humor this morning.
“Fools we are, man—we spend days tearing down this wall,” he complained, “and what is the first thing we do? We build it up again!”
The bat-eared man gave a nervous sycophant’s laugh, but Brynat had forgotten his existence again. Drawing the fur around himself, he walked to the edge of the parapet and looked down at the ruined wall and the castle.
Storn Castle stood on a height defended by chasms and crags. Brynat knew he could congratulate himself for the feats of tactics and engineering which had broken the walls and poured men through them to storm the inner fortress. Storn had been built in the old days to be impregnable, and impregnable it was and had remained through seven generations of Aldarans, Aillards, Darriels and Storns.
When it had housed proud lords of the Comyn—the old, powerful, psi-gifted lords of the Seven Domains of Darkover—it had been known to the world’s end. Then the line had dwindled, outsiders had married into the remains of the families, and finally the Storns of Storn had come there. They had been peaceful lords without any pretense to be more than they were—wilderness nobility, gentle and honorable, living in peace with their tenants and neighbors, content to trade in the fine hunting hawks of the mountains and sell fine wrought metals from the forges of their mountain tribe, which dug ore from the dark cliffs and worked it at their fires. They had been rich and also powerful in their own way, if by power one meant that when word went forth from the Storn of Storn, men obeyed; but they smiled instead of trembling when they obeyed. They had little contact with the other mountain peoples and less with the lords of the farther mountains; they lived at peace and were content.
And now they had fallen.
Brynat laughed smugly. In their prideful isolation, the Storns could no longer even send for help to their distant lordly neighbors. With care, Brynat would be established here as lord of Storn Castle long before the word went out through the Hellers and the Hyades that Storn Castle had a new lord. And would they care that it was ruled no longer by Storn of Storn, but by Brynat of the Heights? He thought not.
A cold wind had come up, and the red sun was covered in scudding clouds. The men toiling at the lugged stones were moving faster now to keep warm in the biting wind, and a few flakes of snow were beginning to fall. Brynat jerked a careless shoulder at Bat-ears, and without looking to see if the little man followed—but woe to him if he hadn’t—strode inside the castle.
Inside, far from watchers, he let his proud grin of triumph slide off. It had not been all victory, though his followers revelling in the rich spoil of the castle thought it had been. He sat in Storn’s high seat, but victory eluded him.
He walked swiftly downward, until he came to a door padded with velvet and hung with curtains: Two of his mercenaries lolled here, drowsing on the comfort of cushions; an empty wineskin showed how they whiled away their guard. But they sprang up at the sound of his heavy tread, and one sniggered with the freedom of an old servitor.
“Ha, ha! Two wenches are better than one—hey, Lord?”
Seeing Brynat scowl the other said swiftly, “No more weeping and wailing from the maid this morning, Lord. She is still, and we have not entered.”
Brynat scorned answer. He moved his hand imperiously and they flung open the door.
As the door hasp creaked, a small blue-clad form sprang up and whirled, long red braided hair flying about her shoulders. The face had once been piquantly lovely; now it was swollen and dark with bruises; one eye was half shut with a blow, but the other blazed in quenchless fury.
“You whelp of a bitch-wolf,” she said low, “take one step further—I dare you!”
Brynat rocked back loosely on his heels, his mouth drawn to a wolfish smile. He set hands on hips and didn’t speak, surveying the girl in blue. He saw the white, shaking hands, but noted that the swollen mouth did not tremble nor the eyes drop. He approved with inward laughter. Here he could feel genuine triumph.
“What, still unreconciled to my hospitality, Lady? Have I offered you word or deed of insult, or do you blame me for the roughness of my men in offering it?”
Her mouth was firm. “Where is my brother? My sister?”
“Why,” he drawled, “your sister attends my feasts nightly; I came to invite you to attend upon my lady wife this morning; I believe she pines for a familiar face. But, my Lady Melitta, you are pale; you have not touched the fine food I sent to you!” He made a low, burlesque bow and turned to pick up a tray laden with wine and rich food. He proffered it to her, smiling. “See, I come in person, at your service—”
She took one step, snatched the tray, picked up a roast bird by one leg, and hurled it into his face.
Brynat swore, stepping backward and wiping the grease from his chin—with a great burst of laughter. “Zandru’s hells!
Damisela
, I should have taken you, not the whimpering, whining creature I chose!”
Breathing hard she surveyed him defiantly. “I’d have killed you first.”
“I make no doubt you’d have tried! Had you been a man, the castle might never have fallen—but you wear skirts in place of hose and the castle lies in ruins and my men and I are here and all the smiths in Zandru’s forges can’t mend a broken egg. So I advise you in good sadness, little mistress: wash your face, put on your fine robes, and attend on your sister, who is still Lady of Storn. If you have good sense, you’ll advise her to have patience with her lot, and you shall both have robes and jewels and all things that women prize.
“From you?”
“Who else?” he said with a laughing shrug, and flung the door open to the guards.
“The Lady Melitta is to come and go as she wills within the castle. But attend me, Mistress—the outworks, the parapets and the dungeons are forbidden, and I give my men leave—hear me well—to stop you by force if you attempt to go near them.”
She started to hurl a curse at him and then stopped herself, visibly toying with the thought of what even limited freedom could mean. At last she turned away without a word, and he shut the door and moved away.
Perhaps this would be the first step in his second victory. He knew, though his men did not, that Storn Castle conquered was only the first victory—and hollow without the second conquest. He bit off another curse, turned his back on the room prisoning the girl and strode on. Upward and upward he went, high into the old tower. Here there were no windows. There were only narrow slits which admitted, not the red daylight but a strange, eerie, flickering blue light like chained lightning. Brynat felt a strange, cold shiver pass over him.
Of ordinary dangers he was fearless. But this was the ancient Darkovan sorcery, the bare legends of which protected such places as Storn Castle long after their other defenses had fallen. Brynat clutched the amulet round his neck with suddenly nerveless fingers. He had guessed that the old magic was merely a show, had hardened his mercenaries to storm the castle and had won. He had caroused in Storn Castle and had laughed at the old tales. Their magic hadn’t saved the castle, had it? He had thought it a show to frighten children, no more harmful than the northern lights.
He strode through the ghostly flickers, through a pale arch of translucent stone. Two of his hardened and brutal men, the most nerveless he could bribe to the task, lounged there on an old carven settee. He noted that they were neither gaming nor drinking, and that their eyes were averted from the arch beyond, where a flickering curtain of blue light played like a fountain between the stones. There was naked relief in their faces at sight of their chieftain.
“Any change?”
“None, Lord. The man’s dead—dead as Durraman’s donkey.”
“If I could believe that,” Brynat said between his teeth and strode boldly through the curtain of blue flame.
He had been through it before and it had been his bravest act—bold enough to dwarf the single-handed taking of the last barbican. He knew his men held him in awe for it, but this alone he did not fear. He had seen such things beyond the mountains; they were fearsome, indeed, but harmless. He felt and endured with distaste the electric tingle, the hairs bristling on head and forearms. He stiffened his backbone against the surge of animal fear and strode through.
The blue light died. He stood in a dark chamber, lit with a few pale tapers in fixed cressets; soft hangings of woven fur circled a single low couch, on which a man lay motionless.
The still form seemed to glow softly in the darkness; he was a slender, frail man, with pale hair streaming from a high forehead and deep-sunken eyes. Though he was still young, the face was drawn and stern. He wore a tunic and plain hose of woven silk, no furs and no jewels but a single star-shaped stone like an amulet around his neck. His hands looked white, soft, and useless—the hands of scribe or priest, hands which had never held a sword. The feet were bare and soft; the chest did not stir with breathing. Brynat felt the old frustrated fury as he looked down on the pale, soft-looking man. Storn of Storn lay there, helpless—yet beyond Brynat’s reach.
His mind whirled him back to the hour of the castle’s fall. The servants and soldiers had been seized and subdued; trusted men had been sent to bind, but not to harm, the ladies. The younger Storn, no more than a boy and bleeding from many wounds, Brynat had spared with grudging admiration—a boy to defend this castle alone? The lad was dungeoned, but Brynat’s own surgeon had dressed his wounds. Storn of Storn was Brynat’s real prey.
His men did not know; they had seen only the spoil of a rich house, the power of holding an ancient fortress where they could be secure. But Brynat sought choicer game: the talismans and powers of the old Storns. With Storn of Storn in his hands, a Storn of the true blood, he could wield them—and Storn, he had heard, was a fragile, sickly, unwarlike man—born blind. Hence had he lived in retirement, leaving the management of his castle to his young sisters and his brother. Brynat had maidens and boy;
now for the feeble Lord!
He had found his way through weird lights and magical fire curtains to the private apartments of the Lord of Storn—and found him escaped; lying unrousable in trance.