Golden Torc - 2 (14 page)

"Indispensable in a house of healing," Gordon said. They had reached a landing just below the topmost floor of the tower. "The recovery rooms are arranged around the perimeter. The Candidate Gwen-Minivel is resting in Three."

"Please don't trouble yourself to wait." Dedra was firm.

"We'll find our way out, and we'll only stay a very few minutes." Gordon received this suggestion dubiously, but after arguing with the farspeaker for a few minutes, he bowed and retreated, leaving them standing before the door marked 3. Slowly, Dedra slid it open.

Stein pushed past her into the darkness. "Sue? Are you here?"

Someone moved on a chaise near the open window and sat up, dark against the lights of Muriah outside. "Steinie-?"

He knelt down beside her and took her face between his hands. "Have they hurt you? Have they?"

"Hush, love. No." Gently gently my darling ah how did you know? How could you hear me?

Muffled, he said, "I did and I came."

You broke Dedra/Mayvar control O Steinlove how did you break free how is it possible O mydear so wilduntamedrashmadloving!

They will not tie me separate us never until I die.

"Stein," she whispered, and began to weep.

From one corner of the darkened room, the one farthest from the door, came a small sound. The tinkle of a tiny bell.

"So you like to spy, too, do you?" Stein's voice was very soft. He rose to his feet and stood motionless.

"So tall! So strong!" The bells shivered up the scale and down. One with a lower note began a languorous rhythm. The dancer came, fluid as a shadow, and undulated before him. "So you want her? How sweet."

It was a song the dancer sang, accompanied by the suddenly discordant chiming. "You want to take her, to take her, to take her!"

In Stein the white-hot anger was born again, an eruption of primitive psychoenergy howling wrath against the mocker and her music. Stein uttered a low cry and reached out to stem the peril; and Dedra, with her back against the closed door, threw her mind against him, too, even though her restraints were even weaker than Sukey's against that uniquely masculine tidal bore.

"Don't, Stein!" Sukey cried aloud. "Oh, don't!"

"You want to take her," laughed the bell-dancer, bending and thrusting. "But why why why? Take her her her?" The bell sound and the laughing blended with twisting lights-the glittering bits of metal that rippled over white skin, the pulse quickening with the danger that made it more sweet-and then the music and dance ended in a shuddering finale and she opened to him as Dedra moaned and Sukey made one last futile try to prevent what was going to happen.

"Take me" invited Tasha-Bybar.

And the bronze sword did.

There was a great silence. Quite calm now, Stein wiped his blade on the draperies, sheathed it, and lifted Sukey into his arms. He stepped over the thing on the floor. "Get out of the way," he told Dedra.

"You can't!" the farspeaker wailed. Mayvar! Mayvar!

The door to the corridor opened, admitting a wide swath of light. An immensely tall man stood there, flanked by two servitors in the scarlet-and-white livery. "I warned Dionket that this was a mistake," Creyn said, his tone weary. He came into the room, gestured, and turned on festoons of the small coldlight lamps. A grim smile played over his lips as he looked beyond Stein and Sukey to the fallen dancer. The coarseness of his mental comment brought a gasp from Sukey and a surprised bark of laughter from Stein.

"You're on our side," marveled the Viking.

"Put Sukey down, you great ass," Creyn told him. "Thanks to you, your wife must be hidden away until the Grand Combat... and we'll have to move even faster than we'd originally planned."

8

NODONN SENT THE THUNDERBOLT DOWN INTO THE DARK WATERS of the Gulf of Aquitaine, where the wavelets reflected the moon and an unsuspecting monster chased a school of tunny not far beneath the surface.

As lightning struck, the sea boiled and belched clouds. Fifteen of the big fish went belly-up, electrocuted instantly. The plesiosaur, however, was only stunned. It broke through the maelstrom, raised its wattled head, and bellowed.

"Oh, you got him!" Rosmar cried. "And a big one!"

"The prey! The prey!" The other Hunters all burst forth into radiance, riders and mounts alike, now that there was no longer a need for concealment. A wheel of rainbow splendor turned in the air above the feebly swimming beast, almost fifty gloriously armored men and women from the court of the Tanu Battlemaster. And to one side, aloof as rosy-gold comets, were Nodonn himself and his new bride.

The Hunt whacked shields, sounded crystal horns. "The prey! The prey!"

"To Vrenol," Nodonn decided, his voice storm-loud. One of the riders plummeted, trailing sparks, and swooped over the brute writhing amid the deadly waves. The snakelike neck of the plesiosaur lashed out and the knight hauled his chaliko up just in time to escape the dagger teeth. The rider thrust with his glowing sword and a ball of purplish fire flew from the tip to strike the marine monster between the eyes. The animal screamed.

A cheer was emitted by the circling Hunt. "At him, Vrenol!" some woman urged.

The Huntsman waved his sword in jaunty acknowledgment which was a mistake. With its attacker distracted, the plesiosaur sounded with a simultaneous push from all four paddlelike limbs, leaving the discomfited Tanu knight poised in the air above a surge of evil-smelling bubbles. "Oh, hard luck," an anonymous voice drawled. One of the armored women blew a derisive triple toot on her animalheaded glass trumpet.

Now Vrenol was faced with the dreadful expedient of pursuing the beast into the water-that element so abhorred by his race-if this first attempt at a kill were not to end in humiliation as the prey escaped.

"Ah, the silly young juggins," said Rosmar. "Bring the leviathan back up, my Lord!"

The blazing face of the Battlemaster smiled upon his bride. "If you ask it, vein of my heart. But Vrenol deserves to dunk for his foolishness." Nodonn reached out to discern the monster's position. "Oh, you'd sneak away, would you?" A blue bolt of energy split the gulf's water, causing the chalikos of the circling Hunt to rear and squeal. The plesiosaur surfaced once more and this time Vrenol went for it with his lance. "He's got it!" Rosmar exclaimed. "Right at the base of the neck! Let's go down for the kill!"

The Lord and Lady of Goriah spiraled toward the water, the wheel of light fracturing respectfully before their passage. Now the individual Hunters poised waiting for the end. The plesiosaur, paralyzed by the wound, was still able to open and close its great jaws slowly. The seven-meter bulk of it wallowed amidst spreading bloodstains, lapped by small waves and glistening from the moonlight and the radiance of the killer hovering above.

Vrenol gripped his sword in both hands. The blade flashed down. The Hunt cried, "A trophy! A trophy!" One of the ladies descended, her lance couched, and with easy expertise pierced the floating severed head and hoisted it high. She presented the trophy to Vrenol. His glowing form changed from rainbow to neon-red and he was off like a scorching bolide to draw triumph figures among the stars.

"Well, he's young," Nodonn observed tolerantly. "We must make allowances."

But on the command mode of the mental speech he warned the others: Don't think the rest of you will be permitted such sloppiness! These beasts are getting scarce with overhunting and I'll not have them wasted.

The shining troupe responded: We hear Lord and Battlemaster!

Aloud, Nodonn said, "Then back to Armorica and the Tainted Swamp. I require heads from the Firvulag Foe on your lances this night, for they are growing bold. And we must find, if we can, one of the great armored reptiles. It is urgently needed for the arena in the capital."

"On with the Hunt!" cried the sparkling riders. They formed a fiery procession again, with the scarlet figure of Vrenol now leading, and vaulted into the sky on the way to the mainland of Brittany.

Nodonn and Rosmar followed more slowly. He said to her, "There came to me just now a farspoken message from my Lady Mother. You and I must go to Muriah-and the reptile with us. We will take only a small escort to see to the beast."

"You are troubled," she said.

"It's nothing that can't be dealt with." But his deep thoughts on this matter were heavily screened.

Rosmar lifted the flashing glass helmet from her head and hung it from the horn of her saddle. "That's better. The wind in my hair! How I love to ride beside you, my daemon lover! Shall I ever learn to fly without your help?"

"In time you may learn. It's a shallow enough trick. We reverence you more for your gentler powers." And he smiled on her.

"My powers are for your service," she said. "But tell me what is happening in Muriah."

"There are matters touching upon our dynastic hopes. I must go down to assist other members of the Host of Nontusvel-for our Tanu people only respect the display of power."

"Is it the Firvulag?"

"There is a certain Delbaeth," he said, "whom I shall have to deal with before another does, shaming our House. But the real danger comes from newly arrived humans. Damn the timegate! When will the others understand its perils?"

Rosmar laughed. "Do you think we humans should be locked out of Exile? Do you think the Tanu could survive without us?" He reined up his steed and halted hers, so that the two of them drifted a moment in apparently motionless air. The sound of surf against the coastal rocks reached them, a faint booming.

"Some humans belong in the Many-Colored Land. People like you, Rosmar, my green-eyed, gray-eyed love, who never truly fit into the world of Elder Earth. But not all members of your race who come through are willing to accept the Tanu as masters. There are those who'd take the land away from us... or failing that, destroy it."

"Let's fight them together!" she said, wild with excitement. "Yours is the only world I want to know." Her soul opened to the bright Apollo, showing that what she said was true. Their two minds embraced in an ardent lifting.

"My daemon lover," she laughed.

And he said, "My own Mercy-Rosmar."

JUMP ELIZABETH.

She stood on the headland above the White Silver Plain, looking down on the phantom cavalry of cloud shadows racing there on the empty moonlit salt. At the rim of the grassy terrace was a low railing. Beyond that a few stunted, picturesquely deformed pines at the precipice edge overhung a sheer drop of perhaps 100 meters to the Mediterranean abyss.

Jump Elizabeth jump to peace.

"Do you hear it?" she asked Brede.

A dark shape sitting on a stone bench stirred. Its topheavy headdress with the padded brim inclined in agreement. "They're farwatching me from the palace," Elizabeth continued.

"See what happens when I approach the brink-"

Jumpjumpjump! Be free abandoned onlyoneofkind! Poorforlorn thing Elizalonelybeth. Jump to release. Escape undesecrated while yet possible. Jump...

Palms resting on the balustrade, she leaned far out. Night winds brought the scent of the distant lagoon to mingle with the orange blossoms of Brede's garden. Out here on the land's end of Aven, far from any freshwater influx that would encourage simple algae and hardy crustaceans to flourish, there was no fishy-iodine smell of marine life-only the bitter alkali of the Empty Sea.

Elizabeth said, "They worked on me all afternoon while I was locked in my suite, trying to set up what they thought would be an appropriate emotional basis for the suicide impulse. Trading mostly on motifs of despair and dignity-threat, mixed with a good dollop of old-fashioned funk. But their whole foundation is spurious. The motivations are unacceptable to my metapsychic ethic. If they'd gone for the self-sacrificing altruism angle they'd have been nearer the mark-not that that would have worked, given this exile situation." Brede's mental voice, so formal and lacking in the elisions and concatenations of ordinary mindspeech, said:The masterclass metapsychics of your Milieu embraced a common ethical formula?

Elizabeth let amiable affirmation shine through the barrier she had maintained between herself and the Shipspouse since her first meeting with the exotic woman two hours earlier.

"Most of us followed a system consonant with the philosophy of an evolving theosphere. Are you familiar with this concept? With the major religions of the later human era?"

I have studied your people since their first timefaring. Some of their professed philosophies have dismayed and repelled me. You must understand that the Tanu embrace a simple, unstructured monotheism without any priesthood or established hierarchy. We have been quite willing to grant religious freedom to those humans whose faith was nonmilitant. But there have been zealots who persisted in disrupting the King's peace-bareneck ones, of course-and these were speedily granted the martyrdom they subconsciously craved... But none of the humans I have studied was able to shed light on the Unity of your Galactic Milieu. And this is understandable, for only a true metapsychic can know it. In humility I request that you enlighten me.

"What you ask is virtually impossible, Brede. A young meta usually begins training before birth. The mental enlargement is intensified in early childhood-this is the kind of work I devoted my life to before my accident. A person with masterclass potential must expect to spend thirty years or more adapting to the full Unity. Enlighten you?...You invited me to inspect your intellectual potential and I'll agree that psychounion between us two is not utterly impossible. But that torc of yours presents a wall and a snare all at once. You think of yourself as operant. But, believe me-you aren't. Not truly. And without genuine metafunction you can't know the Unity or any of the rest of Milieu essence."

The calm thought came: It is foreseen that one day my people will partake of this essence.

"Foreseen by whom?"

By me.

Elizabeth came away from the railing and stood in front of the Shipspouse. Upon their first encounter Brede had revealed that she belonged to a race different from that of the other exotics. She was of less than medium height, with eyes that were carnelian-brown instead of blue or green. Her face, the lower part exposed now that she had once again removed her baroque respirator, lacked the preternatural beauty of the ruling Tanu race but was comely enough, appearing middle-aged. Brede wore a gown of metallic red fabric that was styled in a different manner from the thin flowing robes of the Tanu. It was trimmed with red-and-black beading and over it she wore a black coat with trailing bell sleeves and borders of red flameshapes. Her huge chapeau, also black and red, was aglitter with jewels and had a black veil floating from it. The costume, except for the ornate breathing equipment, reminded Elizabeth of one of the tapestries from the Middle Ages that had adorned the grand salon back at l'Auberge du Portail. There was an archaic aura about the Shipspouse, a flavor of something conspicuously absent from the other exotics. Brede was no barbarian, no oracle, no priest-mother. All of Elizabeth's attempts at analyzing her had thus far proved futile.