City of Sorcery (48 page)

It was enough for Magda at that moment, after seeing Marisela murdered before her eyes, to be certain that both her lover and her freemate had escaped that fate. Yet she and her two Terran compatriots were in the hands of a cruel and unscrupulous woman, possibly one with some kind of
laran
- she remembered how Acquilara had struck down Camilla with a look.

She would as soon kill us, too, as look at us!

Vanessa felt the shudder and her arms tightened about Magda.

“Are you cold? Here, put my blanket round you. We might as well relax while we can; for all we know it could be early evening and they’ll get a good night’s sleep before they come to fetch us here. We may as well try and do likewise.”

They huddled together, silent, under the blankets. Magda could pick up the dread and apprehension of the other women, the pain that crept, with the cold, into Cholayna’s bones and muscles, as if in her own body. She wanted to shelter her, to protect them both, yet she was powerless.

Time crawled by; they never knew how long. Perhaps an hour, perhaps two. Magda kept falling into little dozes, where she would hear incoherent words at the very edge of hearing, see blurs of light that turned into strange faces, then jerk awake and know that none of this had happened at all, that she was still huddled between Cholayna and Vanessa in the dark and cold of their prison. She thought it was another of these tiny dreams when she began to see a light, but Vanessa stiffened at her side and whispered, “Look! They’re coming!”

There was the light of a torch, bobbing up and down as if being carried, waist-high. It moved closer. It was no illusion. It was not fire on the end of a long stick. It was a small, brilliant flashlight, and in another minute she could see who was carrying it.

Lexie Anders bent over them and said, “All right, Lorne, get up and come with me. Do you see this?” Briefly, she showed Magda something that made Magda gasp; this was breaking every lawful arrangement between Terrans and Darkovans.

“It’s a stunner,” Alexis explained. Magda could see all too well what it was.

“For your information, it has a lethal setting. I would rather not be forced to use it, but I swear that if you try to make trouble, or attempt any silly heroics, I will. Get up. No, Van, you stay where you are, I don’t choose to try to handle you both at once.”

“Anders, in heaven’s name, are you working with these people?” Cholayna sounded outraged. “Do you know what they are? Do you know they killed Marisela in cold blood?”

“That was a mistake,” said Alexis Anders. “Acquilara was very angry about it. Marisela got in the way, that was all.”

Cholayna said with hard anger, “I’m sure Marisela would be glad to know that.”

“It wasn’t my doing, Cholayna, and I refuse to feel guilty about it. Marisela had no business to interfere.”

“Interfere? Going about her lawful business… ” Magda cried.

Lexie moved the stunner. “You don’t know a damn thing about it, Lorne, you don’t know what’s at stake here or what Marisela was involved in. So keep your mouth shut and come with me. If you’re cold, you can bring the blanket.”

Magda crawled slowly out from between Vanessa and Cholayna. Cholayna put out a hand to hold her back.

“For the record, Anders. Insubordination; defection; intrusion into closed territory without authorization; possession of an illegal weapon in violation of agreements between the Empire and duly constituted planetary authorities. You
do
know you’re throwing your career away - “

“You’re a stubborn old bitch,” said Lexie. Shocked, Magda remembered Vanessa saying the same thing; but she had said it affectionately. “You don’t know when you’re beaten, Cholayna. You can still get out of this alive; I’m not bloodthirsty. But you’d better keep your mouth shut, because I don’t think Acquilara is particularly tolerant of Terrans. I warn you, shut up and stay shut.”

Another peremptory gesture with the stunner. Magda touched Cholayna’s hand, saying in an undertone, “Don’t put yourself on the line for me. This is between us. I’ll see what she wants.”

When she rose to her feet, she found that she was shaking all over. Was it the stunner pointed menacingly at her, was it the cold, was it simply that they must have struck her on the exact site of the previous concussion? She saw the glint of satisfaction in Lexie’s eyes.

She thinks I am afraid of her and for some reason that pleases her
. Well, let Lexie continue to think that. Magda realized that while she was a little bit afraid that the stunner in Lexie’s hand might go off by accident, she was not at all afraid of Lexie herself.

She didn’t turn a hair when Cholayna was throwing that list of indictments at her. That means one of two things. Either she’s resigned to throwing her career away
-
or she has no intention of leaving Cholayna alive to testify against her
.

Lexie waved the stunner again.

“This way.”

She took Magda across the great cave filled with stalactites, gestured to her to walk down a slippery ramp, wet with falling water from somewhere, and pushed her through into another cave.

This one was lighted by torches stuck in the wall and smoking upwards; randomly Magda noted the direction of the smoke and thought,
there must be air coming in somewhere from outside
. At the center was a fire burning; at first Magda wondered where they got wood for fire, then realized from the smell it was not a wood fire at all, but a fire of dried chervine dung; a stack of the dried pats was at one side of the fire. Around the fire was a rough circle of hooded figures, and for an instant of awful disillusionment Magda thought,
is this the Sisterhood
?

Then a slender familiar figure rose from beside the fire.

“Welcome, my dear,” she said. “I’m sorry my messengers had to use so much force. I told you to be ready when you were summoned, and if you had listened to me, you could have saved us a great deal of trouble.”

Magda drew a deep breath, trying to compose herself.

“What do you want, Acquilara?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

But Acquilara did not do business that way. Magda should have known.

“You are hurt; let us bandage your wounds. And I am sure you are cold and cramped. Would you like some tea?”

Magda sensed that to accept any offers from the black sorceress would be to yield to her power. She started to say proudly,
No, thank you, I want nothing you can give
. She never knew what stopped her.

The most serious obligation she had now was to stay as strong as possible, so that she could get away, could help get Vanessa and Cholayna out of this. She said deliberately, “Thank you.” Someone handed her a foaming cup of tea. It was faintly bitter, and smelled of the dung-fire, and a lump of butter had been stirred into it, which gave it a peculiar taste, but added, in the bitter chill, to its strengthening quality. Magda drank it down and felt it warming her all through. She accepted a second cup.

Two women came from the ring around the fire to help bandage her wounds. On the surface they were somewhat more prepossessing than the women of the hermitage of Avarra; they seemed clean enough and wore under their long, hooded cloaks the ordinary dress of village women from the mountains, long tartan skirts, thick overblouses and tunics, heavy felted shawls and hoots. The bandages they used were rough, but seemed clean. Magda realized that skin had been stripped from her leg - she never knew how it happened, though she surmised that in the fight she must have rolled down a slope covered with sharp rocks. There were abrasions on her face too; she had not noticed them before.

With the scrapes and bruises salved and bandaged, she did feel better, and the tea, even with its faintly nauseating taste, had strengthened her so that she felt prepared to meet whatever might come next.

“Feeling better?” Acquilara was almost purring. “Now let us sit down together and discuss this like civilized women. I am sure we can come to some agreement.”

Agreement? When you have murdered my friend, imprisoned my companions, and for all I know you may have killed my freemate and my lover? Never
!

But Magda had more common sense than to say this aloud. If this woman was half the
leronis
she claimed to be, she would sense Magda’s antipathy and know how little likely Magda would be to accede to her plan.

“What do you want with me, Acquilara? Why have you, as you put it, summoned me?”

“I am the servant of the Great Goddess whom you seek - “

Magda started to say,
Nonsense, you’re no such thing
, but decided not to antagonize her.

“Very well then, tell me what your Goddess wants with me.”

“We should be friends,” Acquilara began. “You are a powerful
leronis
of the Tower called Forbidden, which has refused to play into the hands of the Hasturs, or to submit to that terrible old
teneresteis
Leonie of Arilinn, who keeps all the people of the Domains paralyzed under the iron rule of the Arilinn Tower. As one who has helped to free our brothers and our sisters, you are my ally and my comrade and I welcome you here.”

And Marisela
? But Magda said nothing. Perhaps if she waited long enough Acquilara would tell her what really was going on. As Camilla had pointed out, even an “evil sorceress” did not go to all this trouble simply to amuse herself.

“Your friend has told me that you are from another world, and she has said something about the Empire,” Acquilara began over again. Magda’s eyes strayed to Lexie where she stood in the corner. She had put the stunner out of sight. “You are a powerful
leronis
, but you owe nothing to the Comyn. And among your companions are two others of Comyn blood. Am I not right?”

“You have been correctly informed,” she said.
Casta
was a stiff language and Magda wasted none of its formality.

“Nevertheless, I cannot imagine what all this has to do with the fact that you have murdered one of my friends and imprisoned others.”

“I told you, Acquilara, you wouldn’t get anywhere with her that way,” said a voice from the shadows where Lexie stood. Rafaella n’ha Doria did not have a stunner, or any weapon Magda could see except for the usual long knife of a Renunciate.

“Let me talk to her. In a word, Margali, she knows you have had
laran
training in your Forbidden Tower, or whatever it may be. But you are Terran. On the other hand, Jaelle, born Comyn, has renounced her Comyn heritage, and as a Renunciate she is free to use her powers as she will.”

She stood waiting for Magda to confirm what she said; instead, Magda burst out in anger.

“I would not have believed it if they had told me, Rafi! You, whom she loves as a sister, to sell her out this way! And Camilla, too, calls you her friend!”

“You don’t know what you are talking about,” Rafaella said angrily. “Sell her out? Never! It is you who have induced her to betray herself, and I am trying to remedy that.” She came all the way forward and stood facing Magda.

“You have not even let Acquilara tell you what she is offering. No harm is intended to Shaya, or even to Camilla - “

“That is the red-headed
emmasca
?” Acquilara nodded with satisfaction. “She has Comyn powers, perhaps Alton, perhaps Hastur, there is no way of telling but to test her. That’s easily enough done. She may balk a little at the testing, but there are ways of handling that.”

The words of the Monitor’s Oath flashed through Magda’s mind:
enter no mind save to help or heal and only by consent
. These people had never heard of this obligation. The thought of Camilla, forced unwilling to enter, undesired, that painful openness, made her shake with rage. At that moment, if she had had a weapon, she could cheerfully have killed Rafaella.

Did Rafaella even know what she was proposing or how painful it would be?