Thendara House (67 page)

Two hours north of the City she paused to consider. There was a multitude of roads into the Kilghard Hills, and Jaelle might, or might not, have seen the good aerial map of Darkover which had been made by survey. The commonest road to Armida itself was to take the Great North road as far as Hali, and turn off westward, just south of the ruined city, riding along the Lake on the road to Neskaya as far as Edelweiss; then turn southeast toward the fold of the hills where the Great House of Armida lay. This meant good fast roads all the way, and she had heard that a good rider on a really fast horse could, in dire necessity, make that trip in a single day. It would be a very long day indeed, of very hard riding, pushing your best horse to the edge of exhaustion. Riding with the fire-fighting crew they had, of course, had riders good, bad and indifferent, and had been accompanied by pack-wagons and pack animals of equipment and supplies; it had taken the best part of two days and they had not gone nearly as far as Armida. Also, they had traveled by side roads, some of them not much better than pack-trails.

Alessandro Li had been out with the fire-fighting crew though they had arrived when most of the work was over. He might have known the road they took better than the North road. Jaelle, she supposed, who had actually staffed a travel-service, would know virtually all the roads through the hills, but which one she had taken, and which one she thought Li would have taken, was still conjectural. For the first time since she had taken flight from the Amazon house, Magda stopped to wonder if she had done a reckless and foolish thing. Tracking Jaelle into the hills, when Jaelle herself was distraught and on the trail of a man who did not know the hills himself, was a blunder twice compounded. As a Terran she could have requisitioned a helicopter for a search to find Ambassador Li - or at least to make certain he was not in any danger. But with the cloud-cover and rain, it was unlikely that a helicopter could see much, and if the wind of the fierce storm she felt in her bones should actually arise, it might well blow any helicopter right out of the sky.

As for Jaelle, herself on the trail of Li - perhaps she should have gone to Comyn Castle and thrown herself on the mercy of someone like Lady Rohana, to trail her with a starstone… and then Magda wondered if she were going mad. How Jaelle, who detested everything to do with matrix technology, would react to such trailing, she could only conjecture.

Yet I have done a foolish thing
. Jaelle was in danger; she knew it; she could feel it, like the oncoming storm, in her very bones; yet racing off alone into the storm after her, with no hint even as to which way she had taken, was not the most rational decision either. At the very least she should have asked the weatherwise Camilla, a skilled tracker and guide, to accompany her.
Camilla loves us both… and Jaelle is like a daughter to her
. Yet it had never occurred to her.

Why did I rush off like this alone
? Try as she might, Magda could find no answer except the compelling,
Because I must, because there was no other honorable way
.

She had rushed away from the Guild House without eating her dinner. Now she took a handful of dried fruit from the pocket of her cloak and chewed on it, a piece at a time, while she let her horse take a slow jog. Soon she must decide which road to take into the hills. She could follow the present good road, the Great North Road which ran all the way up into the Hellers to end at Aldaran, as far as Hali; but if she did so, she might lose her chance of overtaking Jaelle quickly. She might not be able to persuade Jaelle that Alessandro Li could be trusted on a mission - but she could, at least, ride with her and help to find the man before his ignorance of Darkovan roads and Darkovan weather killed him.

Damn fool girl, rushing off like that
… would she, Magda, have done as much for her superior officer? Well, yes; in a sense she had done something nearly as rash when she had taken the road into the mountains, disguised in Free Amazon clothing, though knowing little of the Amazons, to rescue Peter Haldane. And that apparent madness had brought her here; Amazon herself, sworn Renunciate, it had been a mad choice and yet the right one on the road to her destiny. Would she have wished it undone? No, for it had saved Peter’s life - and for all the ways in which she was angered by Peter, she still would not have wished him dead - and it had brought her to the Guild House, which had also been a part of her fate so inescapable that now she could not think of her life without the background of the Oath.

Even though, at this moment, she left the sworn oath behind her…

No. There was no reason to torment herself with scruples. She had Camilla’s permission to go, the permission of a Guild Mother in the House. Magda drew up her horse, in the fading gray light and rain, looking at the crossroads and trying to summon up in her mind - trained in eidetic memory techniques by Terran Intelligence - the picture of the map, the roads that ran into the Kilghard Hills. Where she sat her horse, three roads forked; the Great North Road running northward past Hali and later turning off to Armida, the small trail that led westward up through Dammerung Pass and into the Venza Mountains (at least she could forget about that one), and the road that turned directly into the Kilghard Hills. This road was narrow, steep, twisting and turning along the slopes of several hills - or, to put it correctly in any but Darkovan terms, fairly high mountains. No sensible person familiar with the terrain would take this road to Armida. Yet anyone who had only seen it on the flat surface of a map, since it cut directly across the hypotenuse where the Great North Road and the road from Hali were the two straight legs of a right triangle, might consider it a short cut; and Alessandro Li, as far as she knew, had spent most of his life in civilized planets and probably believed that a road marked on a map was a road as he thought of it; a surfaced artifact. If Jaelle’s intention had been only to reach Armida before him, she would have taken the longer, faster, better-surfaced road. But Jaelle’s concern was for Li, traveling alone and unprotected on a world whose dangers he would not recognize.

Mentally Magda rehearsed those dangers. Sleet and snow, even at midsummer, in these latitudes. Hardly banshees, unless he went astray and got on to one of the high passes above the timberline. But that was not impossible, either. And there was the ever-present danger of forest fire among the resin trees, he could set a fire himself, unless he was overwhelmingly careful about camping and cooking his food. And, if he thought of roads in the way most Empire personnel thought of roads from experience on tamer worlds, he could easily lose the trail and be hopelessly lost in country which was, except to the trained eye, trackless wilderness.

Now it would really be a help to be psychic, and know which way Li went, and which way Jaelle went after him. And did she know which way he had gone or was she only guessing? Jaelle makes a point of the fact that she has no really reliable
laran,
and again and again she makes it clear that she hates and mistrusts her own
laran.

So I’ll just have to psych her out and try to decide how her mind was working when she made the choice.

She was afraid of the hazards of the wild road through the hills. Yet even as she told herself that Li would not have hazarded it but stuck to the better traveled road, a picture came to her mind, Jaelle on her scrubby little mountain pony, her tartan hood bundled over her head, riding head down along a road that clung hazardously to the side of a narrow track overlooking a shadowed valley.

Hallucination? Or a genuine flash of psychic sight? Magda did not know. The picture was gone and try as she might she could not bring it back. Whichever way she chose, she would be guessing; she might as well treat her hunch as valid. She had done so before and never regretted it. Hesitating, trying to see in that strange way, she tried to cast her mind ahead and see if she could bring to mind an image of Jaelle on the better-surfaced Great North Road, hurrying along to catch up with Li - but she only saw again the steep mountain trail. She sighed and tugged at the rein to turn her horse off the main road and on to the narrow trail.

At first the road was only a little narrower, leading past isolated farmsteads with dim huddled shapes of buildings, the soft noises of animals bedded in snug barns for the night, pale firelight past the windows. Once or twice a dog barked with idle curiosity but to her great relief no one ventured into the rain to see what had aroused the creatures. Any solitary traveler on a night like this, the farm people doubtless thought, was bound on his own concerns, and in no way interesting. It made Magda think of that other trip - had it, after all, been less than a year ago? - when she had ridden north after Peter Haldane.

But after a time the road grew softer underfoot, sodden with rain, and began to climb into the hills. Thick trees, smelling of resin and wet needles, overhung the road which was narrower and narrower, until Magda knew that two horses could hardly ride abreast on the trail. The isolated farmsteads were left behind, and somewhere Magda heard the cry of a prowling night-beast of the cat-kind, hunting. The sound made her shudder; the cat-creatures seldom attacked mankind unprovoked, but if she disturbed one by accident they were savage. Then, too, in these hills there were still the remnants of the wild hominids called by early explorers
catmen;
they were sentient, probably protohuman, and very dangerous. She did not know of any Terran, except Kadarin, who explored in curious places alone, who had ever actually encountered one; but his reports had been quite enough to imbue her with a healthy respect for the creatures. Of all the nonhuman races on Darkover, only the catmen were a real threat to
homo sapiens
. And while she had heard that they no longer lived in the Kilghard Hills, only four or five years before this, a nest of them had made war on the folk of the hills, and word had come to the Trade City that many of them had been killed; there might be stray survivors, bitterer than ever against the humans who had all but exterminated them

Strictly speaking the Terrans should have moved in to prevent genocide, if they are protohuman. Humans are the worst enemy of the protohuman cultures. Why am I worrying about that now
? Afar in the hills she heard again the cat-cry and knew why it was in her mind. Well, she had a knife, and had been trained in its use, and she had sworn the Amazon oath to defend herself and turn to no man for protection. She could probably manage the catlike hunting beasts, and if she let them alone they would certainly let her alone. And since few humans, and no Terrans, had ever encountered a catman, why should she imagine she would be the first?

It was completely dark now; her horse had to pick its way, step after step, on the trail which was growing steeper and muddier by the minute. The rain beat down as if something had forgotten how to turn off a celestial spigot somewhere up there.

She began to wonder how long she could continue riding like this, Magda’s horse, Lady Rohana’s gift, was a good one; but Jaelle’s pony was trail-bred and accustomed to these steep paths. She had no idea what Li was riding. Proof, if needed, that she had been insane to rush off without further inquiry. But she had really had no choice.

I am sworn to Jaelle. There is a life between us
.

And she wondered, puzzling it out slowly between the careful complaining steps of her horse under her, just what that meant.

Jaelle was her oath-mother; had brought her into the Comhii’Letzii. That was a part of it. Jaelle was her friend - they had stood side by side under attack by bandits, they were shield-mates. Yet she could say the same of Camilla, when they had fought together on the steps of the Guild House. Further, Camilla was her lover. So why should the bond with Jaelle be stronger?

She shied away from that. She was still not comfortable with that idea. But sneaking into her mind through her attempt to turn away from it was the awareness; that too was a part of the bond with Jaelle and though she had not known it at the time -
it was Camilla who made me see it
- it had been there all along.

And Jaelle, who had married my husband, who is to give him the child I cannot
… Deliberately she made herself turn away from that thought. What led her after Jaelle was nothing so complex; only that she was sworn to defend Jaelle and Jaelle needed her now, when Jaelle, alone, sick, pregnant, had gone off on some insane impulse…

No. That was certainly what an outsider would say, but, knowing Jaelle, she knew that the impulse which had sent Jaelle after Li was as sane as her own.

Li certainly had not known what he was getting into; but Jaelle did know and had made herself responsible for him. She had done what she must, as now Magda, in following her, had done what she must.

She reached the top of the steep path and paused there. To the west there was a break in the clouds; sullen pale light shone there, and the face of the largest moon, intermittent as the swift-moving clouds covered, then blew away from the luminous disk. To the east all was dark and endless, only the deeper blackness of mountains obscuring part of the sky, and occasional flashes where lightning played around a peak. Here at the height of the pass the wind blew with such ferocity that Magda’s horse shuffled around to present its sturdy rump to the wind. The rain was less heavy here, but still coming down with some ferocity. She searched the path below her as far as she could see, hoping against hope to see the small figure she had seen in her… was it a vision? But the road down between the hills was shrouded in the impenetrable darkness of the night, and the storm. Somewhere down there was a flicker of light. A farmstead where someone still sat by an open fire, seen through the window? The flame of a campfire where Jaelle - or Li himself - crouched for shelter? She had no way to know. A bandit pack huddled together in a lean-to, awaiting the cessation of rain?