He dared not mount and ride till at some distance. Taking the bridle, he led the horse carefully down the slope and down the mountain road, then paused to take stock. He was ready; he closed his eyes to orient himself. He must go over the ranges and past the castle he could see from the fire tower, skirt the bends of the River Kadarin and beware of trailmen in the forested slopes on the near side. Then the road toward Carthon lay clear before him.
He was warmly clad. He had a good horse; it was Gwynn’s, which was the best, one of the finely bred blacks which the Altons bred for the rangers. He had heard Gwynn boast that Valdir had broken this one with his own hands. It was a crime to deprive the ranger of such a beauty; yet—“Necessity would make a thief even of a Hastur,” he reminded himself grimly. Yet another proverb came to mind: “If you’re going to steal horses, steal thoroughbreds.”
He was well provided with money. Nudged by his subtle prodding, Barron had had Valdir change his Terran credits for Darkovan coins.
He spared a thought for Barron. It was almost a pity to do this to the Earthman, but he had had no choice. One of the greatest of crimes on Darkover, ever since the days of the Compact, was to take over another human mind. It could only be done with a latent telepath, and telepaths on Darkover were aware, and they guarded against such invasion. He had hoped to find an idiot mind, so that he would be robbing no man of his own soul. But instead, as his mind ranged in the desperation of trance, unbound by the limitations of space, he had touched Barron. ...
Were the Terrans even human? In any case, what did it matter what happened to these invaders on our world. Barron is an intruder, an outsider—fair game.
And what could I do, blind and helpless, but this?
At the foot of the path leading to the fire station, he came to a halt and swung into the saddle. He was on his way.
And for a bare instant Dan Barron, confused, disoriented, surfaced as if coming up from a long, deep dive. Was this another hallucination—that he was riding along a dark road, faint dying moonlight overhead, icy wind whistling around his shoulders? No, this was real—where was he going? And why? He shuddered in terror, jerking on the horse’s reins....
He disappeared again into fathomless darkness.
The man in the saddle urged his horse to top speed; by dawn he wished to be hidden from the station by hills, so that when he emerged again, if they sought him from there he would simply be another man on horseback, moving on his lawful occasions through the countryside. He was very weary, but as if he had taken some euphoric drug, not at all sleepy. For the first time in his sheltered, invalid’s life he was not resting inert, waiting for someone else to take action. He was going to do this himself.
He had stopped briefly three times to let his horse rest and breathe before the great red rim of the sun peered over the hills. He found a sheltered clearing and hobbled the horse. He rolled himself in his blanket and slept for an hour, then rose, ate a little cold food from his saddlebag and was on his way again.
All that day he rode through the hills, keeping to little-known roads—if Larry had sent for Valdir the one thing he did not dare was to meet Valdir on the road. Valdir had the old Comyn powers, which made his own look feeble by contrast. Valdir would know at once what he had done. The Storns had no traffic with the Comyn; certainly they would not come to his aid, even in this emergency. He must keep clear of the Comyn.
Toward noon it became cloudy, and Storn, looking up, saw gray caps hanging over the far hills. He thought of Melitta making her way toward Carthon from the far side of the Kadarin, and wondered, despairingly, if she could make her way across the passes in time. Snow must be falling on the heights; and in the hills there were bandits, trailmen, and the terrible banshee birds, which hunted anything living and could disembowel man or horse with one stroke of their terrible claws. He could do nothing to help Melitta now; he could help them both best by bringing himself safe to Carthon:
All that day he met no one on the road except an occasional farmer working in his fields, or, in scattered villages, miles apart, women chatting in the streets with rosy children clustered around them. None of them paid attention to him, except in one village where he stopped to ask a woman selling fruit by the road for a drink of water from her well; he bought some fruit, and two small boys sidled up to admire the horse and ask, shyly, if it was of the Alton breed, which gave him a moment’s shock.
A
Storn of Storn, fugitive and thief!
He slept again in the woods, rolled in his cloak. Toward afternoon of the second day he heard hoofbeats on the road, far off, ahead of him. Riding after, hanging at a distance lest he be seen and the horse, perhaps, recognized by the wrong people, he found that the small road he was travelling spread out into a wide, graveled surface, almost a highway. He must be nearing the Kadarin. Now he could see the riders ahead of him. They were a long line of men wearing cloaks of unfamiliar cut and color—tall men, sandy-haired, fair, and fierce-looking. Only a few of them had horses; the others rode the antlered, heavy-set pack beasts. He recognized them—Dry-towners from Shainsa or Daillon returning home after trading in the mountains. They would not recognize him and they would have no interest in him, but, as was customary in these lands, they would let him travel in their company for a small fee, since everyone added to their band was an extra protection against bandits or nonhuman attackers.
He spurred his horse and rode after them, already rehearsing what he would say. He was Storn of Storn Heights, a man who need fear nothing in foothills or mountains.
He could ride with them almost as far as Carthon.
He was safe now. He prayed, with gut-wrenching intensity, that Melitta had had equal luck—that she, too, was safe. He dared not let his mind range backward to Storn Heights, to the castle where his body lay entranced behind the blue fire, guarded by magnetic fields; that might draw him back. He dared not think of Allira, brought to a bandit’s bed, or to Edric, wounded and alone in the dungeons of his own castle.
He sent his hail ringing out after the caravan and saw the riders stop.
CHAPTER NINE
They rode down into Carthon at midmorning, as the morning mist was beginning to burn away under the quick, hot sun.
For five days they had ridden through diminishing mountains and foothills and now they came between the hills into the wide plain which lay in the bend of the River Kadarin—where Carthon lay bleaching on the plains. It had the look of incredible age; the squat buildings were like mountains leveled by the erosion of millennia. It was the first part of Darkover that he had seen where there were no trees. The Dry-towners had been silent and apprehensive moving through the mountainous forests; but now, with the ancient city lying in their gaze, they cheered visibly. Even their pack animals quickened their steps, and one of the men began to sing a heptatonic melody in a rough and guttural dialect that Storn could not understand.
For Storn—despite his fear of being overtaken, the constant and growing sense that he was pursued, and his endless apprehension for Melitta, struggling somewhere in the snows and passes around High Kimbi—the journey had been magical. For the first time in his life he tasted freedom and even adventure; he was treated as a man among men, not as a handicapped invalid. Deliberately he had suspended his fears for his sister, the thought of Edric and Allira in danger and captivity, and his own sense of guilt for breaking one of the most rigid of Darkovan taboos—the meddling with another human soul. He dared not think about these things; if he let his mind roam back or forward, he risked losing control of the man he had mastered; once, in fact, in the night while Storn dreamed; Barron had wakened in astonishment and terror, looking around at the unfamiliar surroundings and ready to panic and run wild. Only with difficulty had Storn resumed the upper hand. He could feel somewhere, at a level beyond his control—in that ultimate fastness of the human spirit where not even a telepath or Keeper could penetrate—Barron watched and defied him. But Storn kept control. He told himself now that even for Barron’s sake he must maintain surface control—among Dry-towners, a Terran would not be permitted to live. Small was the contact between Terran and Darkovan in valley and mountain country; with the Dry towns it was absolutely minimal. Many of them had never seen or heard of the Terran Empire cities, and in the Dry towns any stranger walked with his life in his hands. An off-wonder could not have maintained safety for a single day.
As they reached Carthon, Storn realized that his single-minded enjoyment of the journey was of necessity coming to an end. Carthon had been deserted years ago by the valley lords, who had withdrawn into the mountains when the fertility of the land failed and the river changed its course. It had become a no-man’s-land, inhabited by the flotsam and jetsam of a dozen civilizations. At one time, Storn remembered—he had traveled here twice in his boyhood, with his late father, long before assuming the heirship of his house—it had been the haunt of half a dozen bands of mercenaries, recruited from mountain bandits, renegade Dry-towners and the gods alone knew what else. It had been Storn’s thought that here he might hire one of these bands to aid in freeing High Windward. It would not be easy—Brynat had had no easy task and a captain of that quality would not be simply dislodged—but Storn knew a trick or two, besides knowing every niche of the castle. With an able band of mercenary soldiers he had no doubt of his ability to recapture his home.
He had urged Melitta to meet him there because he was, or had been at that time, uncertain of the ultimate degree of control he could establish over Barron. He could have sent her alone, keeping only telepathic contact with her; but he was not sure of her continuing ability to maintain rapport over long periods of time and distance. What Storn knew of the old Darkovan
laran
powers was of necessity incomplete and based on trial and error. Only the long, idle childhood and adolescence of a man born blind had given him leisure and impetus to explore them, and he had had no teacher. They had been a way to alleviate his terrible boredom and the feeling of worthlessness felt by a physically handicapped man in a society which put great reliance on strength, physical skill and action. He knew that he had accomplished a great deal for a man with his handicap, even in the fields proper to a man of his family and caste: he could ride; he could climb skillfully in his own mountain cliffs and crags with little help; and he administered his own estates, with his sisters and young brother at his side. In fact, not the least of his pride was in that he had won, and kept, the loyalty of his younger brother in a society where brothers were often bitter rivals and he could easily have been relegated to the background, with Edric taking his place as Lord of Storn. To them—until Brynat had appeared and made war—he had seemed strong and competent. Only when the castle was under siege had he tasted the bitterness of helplessness.
But now the other things he had explored were coming into their own. His own body was guarded against Brynat, and he was free to seek help and revenge—if he could get it.
The red sun was high and warm, and he had thrown back his riding cloak when they rode through the gates of Carthon. At first glance he could see that it was unlike any of the mountain villages they had ridden through; it felt, sounded and smelled like no Darkovan city he had ever known. The very air was different; it smelled of spice, incense and dust. It was obvious to Storn that in the intervening years more and more Dry-towners had moved into Carthon, possibly in search of the more abundant water from the Kadarin River, or perhaps—the thought crossed his mind—feeling that the lowlands’ and valleys’ peaceful peoples would lie there at their mercy: He dismissed the thought for later worry.
Nevertheless he felt apprehensive. He was less confident in his ability to win help in a predominantly Drytown area. Traditionally they had their own concerns and their own culture; he could offend them fatally by a chance word. From what he had heard and what he had seen traveling with these merchants in the last days, their prime motivation was the scoring of points in an elaborate, never-ending game of prestige. No outsider could hope to win anything in this game, and Storn, traveling in their company, had been ignored, as men intent on a gambling game will ignore the cat by the fireplace.
It was humiliating, but he knew it was safer that way. He had no knowledge and no skill in knife fights, and they lived by an elaborate dueling code under which the man who could not defend himself to the death against enemy or friend was dead.
It was a forlorn hope that he could find Dry-towner mercenaries here. Still, there might be mountain or valley bands here, even though the predominant culture now seemed Drytown. And even Dry-towners might be tempted by the thought of sacking Brynat’s riches. He was prepared to offer them all the loot of Brynat and his men. All he wanted was the freedom of Storn Castle and peace to enjoy it.
They had passed the city gates, giving their names at the outworks to fierce-looking, bearded men; Storn saw with relief that some of them wore familiar mountain garments and heard them speaking a dialect of his own language. Perhaps they were not all Dry-towners here. The city was wide-flung, not like the huddled mountain villages cramped behind protective walls or the
forsts
, the forest forts behind high stockades. The outworks seemed little manned. Everywhere were the tall, fair-haired Dry-town men, and women walked in the open dusty streets—slender Dry-town women, sunburnt and swift, carrying their heads proudly and moving in the tiny chiming sound of chains, the jewelled fetters that bound their hands, restricted movement and that proclaimed them chattel to some man of power and wealth.
At the main square of the city the caravan turned purposely toward the Eastern quarter, and Storn was reminded that their agreement terminated here. Now he was on his own—alone, in a culture and country strange to him, where any moment might bring some fatal blunder. But before he began to rack his brains as to how he could best explore the possibilities, the leader of the caravan turned back and said bluntly, “Stranger, be reminded that in our towns all strangers must first pay respects at the Great House. The Lord Rannath will be better disposed toward you if you come of your free will in courtesy, than if his men must hail you there to give an account of yourself.”