Legacy of the Darksword (20 page)

My window opened up onto one of
the many gardens with which the Font was surrounded. I have no idea of the name
of the flowers which grew out there; some sort of large, white blooms that hung
heavy on their stems and seemed, to my imagination, to be hanging their heads
in sorrow. I was thinking to myself that this would make a good metaphor to use
in a new book I was then planning. I was about to turn away, to note it down,
when I saw someone enter the garden.

Of course, Joram has taken his
worries outside, I thought. I felt uneasy about disturbing his privacy and also
about the possibility of him seeing me through the window and thinking I was
spying on him. I was about to draw shut the curtains when the figure stepped
out into an open walkway, almost directly opposite me, and I saw that it was
not Joram.

It was a woman, wearing a cloak
and hood and carrying a bundle in her arms.

“Eliza!” I said to myself. “She’s
running away from home!”

I went cold all over. My heart
constricted. I stood bolted to the floor in that terrible indecision which
sometimes comes over one in a crisis. I had to do something, but what?

Run and wake Saryon and have
him
talk to her? I recalled his weariness and how ill he had
looked and decided against that.

Wake her parents?

No. I would not betray Eliza. I
would go to her myself, try to persuade her to stay.

Grabbing up my jacket, I threw it
on and dashed out into the hall. I had only the vaguest idea where I was going,
but on reflection, I seemed to remember passing the garden on my way to the
outbuildings. I found the door after only one wrong turn and stepped out into
the night. The creak of the hinges, as I passed through, was the same creak I’d
heard earlier.

The night was bright and it was
easy to see the shadowy figure ahead of me. She had been moving at a fairly
rapid pace when I first saw her from my window, and I was afraid she might have
already crossed the garden and disappeared over the wall before I could reach
her. As it was, she had reached the wall, but the bundle she was carrying had
slowed her down. She had placed the bundle on the top of the wall and with it
something else, the sight of which gave me another cold chill—Teddy.

Teddy, a.k.a. Simkin, sat on the
top of the wall beside the bundle while Eliza vaulted over the wall, in a
flurry of cloak and skirt. Turning, she reached for the bundle with one hand
and Teddy with the other. She saw me.

Her face, framed by its
night-dark cloud of hair, was pale as the heavy flowers; pale but resolute. Her
eyes widened when she saw me, and then narrowed in displeasure.

Frantically, I waved my hands,
though what I hoped to accomplish by this gesturing was beyond me. Whatever it
was, it didn’t work. She snatched up the bundle, and it was obviously heavy,
for she had a difficult time managing it. She was forced to drop Teddy—on his
head, I hoped—and use both hands to grasp the bundle.

There was a muffled clang—steel
wrapped in cloth striking stone.

I knew then what she carried and
the knowledge knocked the breath from my body. I faltered, came to a halt.

She saw that I
knew,
which served only to increase her haste. Securing her burden, she turned away
from me and I heard her footsteps slipping on the rocks of the hillside.

I came to my senses and hurried
after her, for now it was more imperative than ever that I catch up to her.

The Technomancers were listening.
But according to Mosiah, the
Duuk-tsarith
were
watching!

Expecting to see their dark forms
leap out of the shadows any moment, I scaled the wall, scrambling over it
clumsily. I have said that I was not very athletic. I could not see the ground
beneath me in the dark shadow cast by the wall. I misjudged the drop and fell
heavily, bruising my knees against the wall and scraping away the skin on the
palms of my hands.

“Oof! Zounds! Oaf! You’ve knocked
the stuffing out of me!”
came
a voice.

I was too busy trying to regain
purchase on the steep slope to pay any attention to the lamenting Teddy. My
feet scrabbled on a loose rock, which bounded down the hillside and started a
small avalanche. I slipped and slithered and then she hovered over me. The
folds of her cloak settled around me. Hands grasped my arms and pinched my
flesh.

“Stop it!” she whispered
furiously. “You’re making enough noise to wake the dead!”

“Happened once,” said a doleful
voice, somewhere near my elbow.
“The Duke of Esterhouse.
Dropped dead, sitting in his armchair, reading the paper.
Everyone afraid to tell him.
Knew he’d take the news
frightfully hard. So we left him there. And then one day cook forgot and rang
the dinner bell—”

Startled, Eliza let go of me and
sat back on her heels.

“You can talk!” she said to me in
a tight voice. She was not carrying the bundle.

I shook my head emphatically.
Reaching underneath my scraped rump, I pulled out the alleged stuffed bear and
gave it a -shake.

Eliza looked at the bear and bit
her lower lip and the sudden inkling of the truth formed in my mind.

“Are you hurt?” she asked in a
grudging tone.

I shook my head.

“Good,” she said. “Go back to
bed, Reuven. I know what I’m doing.”

And without another word, she
snatched the bear from my hand and was up and gone in a flutter of skirt and
cloak. She stopped some distance on the hill below to pick up her heavy bundle,
and then I lost her in the darkness.

She knew where she was going. I
did not. She was accustomed to climbing and walking these steep hills. I was
not. I could not shout after her, although I wouldn’t have, in any case. The
last thing I wanted to do was call attention to her and what she carried. I
hoped to be able to persuade her to return home before any harm was done. But
first I had to catch her.

It would cost more time in the
long run, I reasoned, if I stumbled blindly down the hillside. There had to be
a trail; she could not be moving so fast otherwise. I took time to search, my
knees stiffening and my palms burning. My patience was rewarded. Not far from
where I had fallen I found a crude trail, half-natural, half-man-made, carved
into the hillside. It was an old trail; the feet of many catalysts had trodden
it before me. The trail was formed of deep gouges in the hillside, reinforced
here and there with large embedded rocks or exposed tree roots.

The rocks gleamed white in the
starlit night; the tree roots, worn by the passage of many feet, were slick and
shiny. I made my way down the trail, wondering as I did so where it led.

The way was steep, and despite
the help from rocks and other foot and handholds, my going was difficult and
slow. I could no longer hear Eliza’s footfalls and knew she must be far ahead
of me. My taking this route was a foolish idea. If I slipped and fell, I would
probably break my leg or my ankle, and be forced to lie out here all night with
no hope of rescue.

If only I could move faster! I
could see, in my mind, those catalysts
who
had once
made this trail and walked it every day, bounding down it like goats. . . .

I was bounding down it, if not
like a goat, at least swiftly and easily. Brown robes hiked up to my waist,
sandals flapping, a bag of scrolls flung over my shoulder, I ran down the trail
in the bright sunshine of a fine day. All the young catalysts and occasionally
some of the old ones took this route when they were late for classes, for this
trail led straight to the University.

The vision was eerie and
startling, just like the other vision I’d had before—of
myself
in brown robes, of Eliza my queen. . . . Of course, as an author, I was accustomed
to living in my imagination and my fancies and dreams are very real to me.
But not as real as this.
Again, I lifted a curtain to look
out a window and saw myself on the other side, looking back in.

But—could I use this to my
benefit? Did I dare?

I was light-headed from
exhaustion and the thin air of the high altitude. Plus I was desperate, fearful
for Eliza’s safety. Otherwise I do not believe that I could have done what I
did. I let go of myself in this life and gave myself to the other life, if that’s
what it truly was. I became that catalyst, late for class, certain to be in
trouble with the master, and I plunged down the hillside.

My feet knew where the stones
would be, my hands knew where to grasp. I knew where I could safely slide and
once I even jumped from one ledge to another. It was madness, it was
exhilarating. If I had stopped to think about what I was doing, I would have
frozen in place and been unable to move another step.

When I finally reached the
bottom, I gasped for breath and stared up the hillside and the catalyst that I
was vanished. I realized what I had done and my stomach turned within me.
Quickly, I looked away and started to search for Eliza. I had a final image of
the catalyst running in the opposite direction from the one I was taking and
part of me was sorry to let him go.

I had reached a broad, flat,
white-stone-paved road. It must be the main highway, leading down from the Font
to the foothills and the long abandoned city below, a city whose sole reason
for being had been to support the Font and the University. This road must have
been clogged with wheelless carts that floated on the wings of magic and the
exotic and fanciful carriages of the nobility coming to pay their respects or
to ask for favors or visit sons and daughters attending the University.

I stared down the road’s bending,
winding length, shining like a white ribbon in the night, and after a moment I
saw a dark shadow moving along it, keeping to the side, but not taking any
other precautions. She was not far ahead of me and moving slowly. I guessed her
burden must have weighed more than she’d imagined when she started. I was
thankful to see that she was still alone, not counting Teddy, of course.

I hastened after her, my way
comparatively easy now. She heard my footsteps, when I drew near, and made a
halfhearted attempt to increase the speed of her pace, but that didn’t last
long. Realizing the futility of trying to escape, she stopped and turned to
face me. Her extreme pallor made her face ghostly in the starlight; her black
eyes beneath their thick brows were bright with anger and defiance. But I saw
that she was tired, too, and perhaps a little frightened, and that there was
something in her which was glad she was no longer alone.

I caught hold of her arm beneath
her cloak and started to draw her into the shadows of the trees that lined the
road. “What are you doing?” she demanded, breaking free. I pointed to the
shadows, then to the gleaming white road, and shook my head.

“He’s trying to tell you that we
stand out like a mole on the Countess D’Arymple’s backside. She had a very
white, smooth backside,” Teddy added helpfully.

“I don’t see what difference it
makes,” Eliza said petulantly. She held the bear tucked under one arm, the
heavy bundle awkwardly in the other hand. “No one is around to notice us,
anyway.”

“From your mouth to the Almin’s
ear,” said Teddy, which was, more or less, exactly what I had been thinking.

I took hold of Eliza’s arm again
and this time she allowed me to lead her off that gleaming highway and into the
shadows of the trees. She carried the bundle. I did not try to take it from
her. Once in the deep shadows, she dropped the burden on the ground, in a pile
of leaves. Then she sank down on a low, crumbling wall and stared at the bundle
at her feet.

“I didn’t know it would be so
heavy,” she said. “It didn’t seem heavy when I first picked it up. But now it
weighs more and more. And it’s awkward and difficult to carry.”

I pulled out my electronic
notebook from the pocket of my jacket; thanking the Almin that I’d put it there
earlier, for such had been my haste at departure that I had not thought to
bring it along. I typed the words.
The Darksword.

“Yes,” said Eliza, looking at
what I’d written.

What are you doing with it? Where
are you taking it?
I
asked.

“To the army base,” she replied.

I was so
astonished,
I stared at her and forgot to type.

“My father is wrong,” she said in
a low, determined voice, looking down at the sword at her feet. “It’s not his
fault.” She defended him loyally, glanced at me defiantly, as if I’d accused
him. “You don’t know him! If he finds it hard to trust people, can you blame
him? Time and again he was betrayed by those he trusted.”

It was not quite as simple as
that, but I honored her for defending him.

“I’m taking the sword to the army
base, to give it to the Border Patrol to take back to Earth. Then people will
leave us alone and our lives will be peaceful once more. And when the sword is
gone, no one will hurt Father, ever again.”

I saw the tears shine in her dark
eyes that were looking forward to that life, a life that would be empty for
her, isolated and alone on this deserted world. I saw her generous, noble
spirit in that moment and I loved her. I could not tell her. It would not be
fair to take advantage of her. But silently I pledged my heart and my soul to
her service, as I knew in that other life the catalyst had pledged his heart
and soul to serve his queen.