Ice and Shadow (2 page)

They had no time really to look about until the last of the equipment was out. Uncle Offlas slammed the hatch and jumped back as the LB bounded up. Even during the short time of the unloading, twilight had deepened into night. Roane sat back on a box and brought out from the inner pocket of her coveralls a pair of night lenses. With these on she looked around.

They were in a glade surrounded by tall trees. Several bushes had been squashed by the LB, splintered and flattened, and the boxes they had tumbled out had torn and gouged up chunks of moss.

Uncle Offlas had a small map and was glancing from it to the right and left as if he hunted landmarks. Meanwhile Sandar forced open one of the padded containers and brought out a box which he balanced on his knees, bending close to read the dials on its top. He set two of these, then reached for another twin box to do the same.

“Good enough. Put it about twelve—no, perhaps twenty paces in that direction.” Uncle Offlas pointed left. “I’ll do the same with this.” He picked up the second box.

Once those distorts were working they could set up camp. The distorts would prevent any unauthorized invasion of either man or beast native to this planet. Each member of their own party wore, clipped to the front of his belt, the broadcast which would nullify the effect for him.

By midnight they were settled in. Under Uncle Offlas’s expert handling a working laser had cut a pit as deep in the ground as Sandar was tall. Over this arose, for more than an arm’s length, a weather dome, which in turn was concealed by greenery which had been stass-sprayed not to wither for days. Their equipment, moved within, formed narrow partitions for three small cubbies and one larger one. And they dared to turn on a camp-sized beamer there while each prowled in turn around the clearing to inspect for any betraying light.

For a time they must work by night, sleep by day. Roane was tired enough to yawn her way to sleep as soon as she was free to curl up in her own cubby. Nearby were the detects and as soon as it became dusk again she would take one in hand and begin her first sweep of the area. Sandar would go in the opposite direction, while his father was in charge of assembling the com, setting out the other tools they would need as soon as a detect gave them a lead. It was apparent that Offlas seemed very sure they would find what they sought. In the past his confidence had never been so high. It was as if he had complete assurance they would make their find shortly.

Such belief was infectious. Roane almost expected to be able to report success on her first scouting trip. But she did not; neither did Sandar. And the third night they ranged farther afield, guided back to camp by distort signals. While it was impossible to get lost, Roane found that venturing alone into the wilderness made her slightly uneasy. She had never been completely by herself before. On board ship there was the cramped feeling, even in a private cabin, of other lives close by, just as the lifeless air one breathed had, as one well knew, been recycled many times. But here—with the night lenses to give her clear vision, she began to feel at last oddly free.

Midway through the fourth night she climbed a ridge, swinging the detect on its strap over her shoulder, using both hands to pull herself up. It had rained earlier and the grass tufts and the branches which slapped at her were moisture-laden. But the waterproofing of her clothing kept her body dry, and she relished the feel of the droplets on her face and hands, even though they plastered her short hair lankly to her skull.

Roane had passed by a road earlier, in fact had tumbled into it when a sleek clay surface made her slip. It had been an odd hollow, boring through greenery which grew on grassy banks taller than her head, and it was overarched with a lacing of boughs which roofed it. Whether this had been done by purpose to make a tunnel hidden from sight or was merely the result of unchecked growth she did not know. But the surface was rutted and scored with hoof prints to tell her it was in good use. And she had hurried to climb out, using a broken branch to sweep away her own tracks there.

This ridge lay at right angles to that road and well above it. She did not get to her feet as she reached its crest, but squirmed along so that she would not be silhouetted against the sky. The moon was now well up and bright.

Thus her sight of what lay below was very plain. Roane substituted distance lenses for the night ones to study the scene carefully. For there was a village-sized collection of buildings.

Almost directly below was the major one. It consisted of two square towers about five stories high, connected by a building looking to be no more than one room wide but rising three stories. The towers and the roof of the smaller portion were all parapeted and there was a tall outer wall completely encircling the building. Two or three of the very narrow windows showed faint gleams of light, late as the hour was. The tower nearest her had a gate giving on a garden which ran to the very foot of the ridge.

The garden itself was cut by walks gleaming white-bright in the moonlight and there were beds of flowers formally arranged. But what kept Roane from withdrawing at once was that there were men busy in the garden. They worked in pairs, six in all, and the couples were setting up in the ground posts which supported large grotesque figures. Each one of these weird effigies bore on one forelimb an oval shield painted with a complicated sign, while the other forepaw, or claw, gripped the pole of a small banner.

These were being placed in line to face the lower story of the tower, and the work seemed to be no light task. The effigies were of animals or birds, or in one case a crowned and shrouded humanoid thing. But all were strange to Roane and she wondered if they had some allegorical significance.

Why they must be put in place in the middle of the night was the puzzle, and she watched until the last was braced in place. Then the men disappeared toward the buildings along a single cobbled street running to the main gate in the wall. Outside the fortress-like wall there were two lines of houses built of the same stone as the keep, but they were much smaller, the largest only two stories high. Their roofs were slabs of stone slanting sharply from the peaks, the ends of those turning up to be carved into heads of beasts.

It was a keep, a village, in miniature. And though it looked different from the tri-dee she had been shown, she knew it for Hitherhow—the principal royal hunting lodge of Reveny.

Did the setting up of the figures mean that the King was coming? If so, what would such activity in the forest mean to her own party? Of course the distorts would protect them. But if there were many hunters abroad, they would have to hide until the chase was over, and Uncle Offlas was not going to take kindly to that loss of time.

CHAPTER 2

“WHAT DID THEY SAY IN BRIEFING?”
Uncle Offlas was pacing up and down, chewing at his thumbnail, an old sign of deep drought. Now he rounded on Roane with that question. “Who might be coming—the King?”

“King Niklas is an old man, judging by planet years—would he be hunting?”

“I am asking
you.
You saw the tri-dees the snooper robots brought in.”

“They weren’t sure about anything. If it isn’t the King—” Roane thought of the possibilities. “His children are all dead. He has one granddaughter—Princess Ludorica—”

Sandar laughed. “Now that’s a mouth filler! How do they think up such names?”

“Be quiet! A princess—who else?” Uncle Offlas demanded.

“Why does it matter?” His son refused to be subdued.

“It matters a great deal, you fool! The rank of the hunter can govern the number of followers he brings along.”

Sandar flushed. Uncle Offlas was really upset or he would never have been so short with his son. She hurried to tell the rest she knew.

“There’s a Duke Reddick, a distant cousin of the King but a lot younger. That’s all the snoops picked up.”

“With all the preparations you saw”—Uncle Offlas fretted his lower lip with the nail he had been chewing on earlier—“it has to be one of the royal line. If it’s the Princess we may be a fraction safer—she might be less keen on hunting. But I don’t like such activity so close. It might be well to take day watches until we do know who comes. Time!” He balled his right hand into a fist and brought it down forcibly into the palm of the left. “We have to make the best time we can. The longer we remain planet-planted, the better chance of discovery—”

Sandar’s head was up, he was sniffing the rising wind. “There’ll be cover today; storm coming. But it won’t be good to be out in it—”

His father had swung around in the same direction. The thin gray of dawn did seem to be more dusky than usual. And they could all see massing clouds.

“Several hours before that breaks. Roane,” he said to her, “you take first watch, before the storm. Report in with this if it is needful.” He handed her a wrist com. “And work your way in from the north; these foresters are trained trackers. Sandar, you set out the extra distorts. I didn’t want to use up the charges so fast, but now there is a need. I’ll put a repell as well as a distort into working order.”

Roane sighed but not audibly. She did not relish crawling the long way back to the ridge. But in spite of being tired, and chancing discovery by storm, the thought of watching the pocket castle was exciting. And inwardly she was surprised that Uncle Offlas had set her to it. Except that Sandar knew more about setting distorts.

She slipped inside the camp and crammed some of the sustaining, if tasteless, E-rations into her coverall. There was no reason to go hungry, and her stomach already felt empty.

Circling north brought her into new territory. She could waste no time in exploration, but she did all she could to wipe out traces of her passing, being careful to snap no branch and to smear out any boot track in the forest muck. This delayed her, so that the gray was lighter when she again reached the ridge. She had made one discovery during her travels, a second tower set in the woods, brush growing so high about it that it was almost masked. There was no door closing the opening in its side and the place had the appearance of long disuse. Perhaps it was an abandoned ruin. She would have liked to explore it and promised herself she would when she had the chance.

Now she watched both village and castle. There were lights in plenty at the windows. And she could see people moving about. The wooden figures were bright with color, and the flags they held snapped in the wind.

Roane was so intent on the scene that she was startled by a rising call, saw a man on the castle parapet wearing a brightly colored overtunic raise a horn to his lips to answer that. Riders were coming down into the village, led by a man who managed his reins with one hand while he blew a horn for a series of calls. Behind him rode another in the same fantastic clothing, the tunic overlaid on the breast in an intricate design.

There was a small troop of six then, riding in military formation, wearing metal helmets and carrying bared swords in formal salute. Behind them came two riders, followed by a longer train of armed men. One of the riders was a woman, her long skirt flapping on either side of her mount as if it were slit. The skirt was of a deep forest-green, and her tight jacket was of the same shade, though it bore braiding of silver in spirals across the breast.

From this height Roane could not see her face, for she had the collar of a cloak turned up about her throat, though the rest of its folds had been pushed well back on her shoulders. And on her head was a broad-rimmed hat ornamented with a cockade of long yellow feathers.

Her companion was in the same green from the boots on his feet to the narrow-brimmed, high-crowned hat on his head. Roane could see little of his face either, though by his dress he must be of the high nobility.

The villagers had turned out to greet the company. Men waved their caps, women curtsied. And the woman rider raised one hand in salute. All the mounts were Astrian duocorns and thus the fact was brought home to Roane that this was indeed a settlers’ culture, established at the whim of a mind half the galaxy away, with the resources of many planets to call upon. These beasts were smaller and lighter than those Roane had seen before. But there was no mistaking their curved sets of horns as they tossed their heads, even danced a little.

Roane watched the party enter the courtyard of the keep, the woman and the green-clad man dismounting before the main door. He bowed from the waist and offered her his wrist, she touching her fingers to it formally. It was like watching a living story tape and Roane was enthralled. The brilliant colors, the people did not seem real, rather story-inspired, and she could not believe in them. It was one thing to have such reported on snooper tape, another to see it in action. She slipped away from her post reasonably sure of one thing, that it was the Princess Ludorica who had just arrived.

Who the man might be, Roane could not guess; any member of the Revenian nobility from Duke Reddick down. She held to caution in her retreat, knowing she must take the roundabout way back. And the time so spent brought the storm upon her.

Suddenly it was night-dark, so that if she had not had her night lenses she would have been lost. Wind caught the crowns of the trees with a fury which frightened her. Roane had been on many worlds; she had known storms of wind, of drenching rain, of whirling sand, wind-driven grit to scrape the skin raw. But then she had been in such cover as their camps afforded, sheltered from the full force of such gales.

Now, caught in the open, her nerve almost broke. She must find shelter. And for that there was only the ruined tower. With what strength she had left she headed for it.

Rain added to the hammer blows of the wind. Branches splintered and fell. Roane cowered away from one jagged club. The whip of lightning lashed across the dark, to be followed by a crack of deafening thunder. And the tree to which she now clung, thick and sturdy as it seemed, swayed under the pull of the gale.

She could not stay there, but dared she try to go on? There was another bolt of lightning, which found a target not too far away. Roane screamed, her voice swallowed by the thunder, and tried to run, beating at the bushes to force a path. Then she saw ahead the mouthlike doorway of the tower.

Once she gained that, she held tight, panting and gasping. Her clothing, meant to be waterproof, had kept her body dry. But her hair was plastered to her head; water dribbled across her face and into her half-open mouth. For a moment or two out there she had felt as if the force of the storm had torn away her breath.

Now she recovered enough to move on in, and then dared to use the beamer, set on its lowest power, to inspect what lay about her.

To her surprise there was furniture here. But as she went closer she could see that its presence was probably due only to the fact that it could not have been moved except by the greatest of effort.

There was a table hewn from a single thick slab of dark-red stone which was veined with thin lines of gold that glittered even in the weak light when she smeared away a deposit of dust. Inset in the top of this was a series of squares, alternating red and white, perhaps to form a playing board for some game.

Facing each other across this slab, which was mounted on round balls of legs, were two chairs lacking legs at all, the seats being square boxes with the high backs and wide arms. Both arms and backs were carved, the gray dust filling the hollows of the patterns until they could hardly be distinguished.

Against one wall was a massive chest, also carved. And beyond it was a stair set against the wall, the outer edge unguarded by any rail, fashioned of the same stone as the walls, not quite as red as that of the table, but a dull rust shade.

There were, in addition, two tall standards of rust-encrusted metal, the tops of which were level with Roane’s shoulder. Each of these held a lamp, a bowl with a support for a wick.

A drift of leaves and soil spread inward from the doorless entrance. Roane went to the stair and began to climb, pointing the beamer to where the steps disappeared into a dark opening above. It was when she came out on the second level that she discovered that the tower, which had appeared three stories high from without, was really only two. If there had ever been a third floor above, it either had been wood and rotted away or had been removed. She flashed the beamer up there to see only stone and mighty beams.

This second room had furnishings also: two more of the lamp standards, plus a chest, and on a step dais a wide bed frame of the same wood which formed the massive chairs below. It was in the form of an oblong box, full of an evil-smelling layer of what might have been rotted fabric, perhaps the remains of bed linen left to molder away.

There were windows, narrow slits, without any protection against the wind and rain which now drove spears of damp across the floor. Another bolt of lightning made the whole room brilliant. And then followed such a burst of thunder that Roane dropped the beamer and cowered against the chest, her eyes squeezed shut, hands over her ears.

It seemed to her the thunder filled the tower, which shook from the blast. Even when it had gone she was too weak with sheer terror to move. She had never known such natural fury before and it made her a prisoner.

How long that panic lasted—it could well have been more than one hour, even two—she never knew, but finally she began to think again. Uncle Offlas—Sandar—they were in the woods. Could the camp stand up to such a storm as this? What if the lightning hit—or a tree crashed down?

She fumbled with her wrist com, tried to tap a code call. But she listened in vain for any reply. The storm must be cutting off reception. If there was any longer a receiver—

Although the wind still moaned around the tower and now and then she heard a crash as if some branch or even tree fell, the very worst of the storm seemed spent. Roane brushed off the top of the chest, testing it gingerly lest it splinter under her weight, and then sat there, bringing out an E-ration tube and making a meal from its contents.

So heartened, she used the beamer once more and made a careful examination of the room. That the tower had ever been a dwelling place she doubted, in spite of the bed. Perhaps it had been intended for just the use she was now putting it to, a shelter for storm-stayed hunters.

The evil smell of the bed, which was growing stronger in the dank air, had kept her away from that portion of the room. But finally she ventured to approach it. The bed itself was like a box without a lid, the cavity holding the rotten stuffs. At the four corners stood carven posts, matched as well as tools could sculpture to the bark of trees, vines twined about in high relief, now much masked by thick spider webs which held dust and mummified insects to form a nasty draping.

But there was a small open space between the tall head (also much carven and possessing several niches in which were set miniatures of the bigger lamps) and the wall of the tower. The beamer there showed Roane something odd, a series of holes hollowed into the stone, as if they were a ladder by which one might mount to the rafters overhead. Turning the beamer on to full, she traced those as high as she could and found that they did lead to one of the great crossbeams. This had the suggestion of a secret way, which it would have been in truth had the walls been covered with any form of tapestry or hanging.

She was tempted to take that climb. But prudence argued that she had better be on her way again, ready to leave the tower as soon as the storm slackened a little more. And she knew she must go when the lightning, which she feared the most, ceased.

Only she was too late. Hovering at the door, watching the rain, debating whether or not she dared chance it, Roane saw a flash of color, heard the high nicker of a duocorn. Some hunters storm-stayed like herself? She jerked back, looked at the floor where the pattern of her tracks had been only a little blurred by her restless coming and going.

She jerked open the seal of her coverall and brought out a scarf mask. Using that as best she could, whisk-fashion, she retreated to the stair and the only hiding place she could think of—behind the head of the bed above.

Though she had snapped off the beamer at once, there was enough grayish light for her to grope aloft. And she reached the upper story none too soon. She was no more than into the bedroom when she heard voices, the tramping of feet below. No more taking chances. She had already been far too reckless. Roane squeezed between the head of the bed and the cold of the wall, her hands covering her nose against the putrid scent of the bed stuffs.

She could not see now—the wood before her had no cracks. But she could hear. The newcomers did not speak Basic, of course. But her briefing had given her a working knowledge of the Reveny tongue. And now she began to pick up words. They were coming up the stairs, how many she could not tell, though she tried hard to distinguish voices and number of footsteps. Now and again there was a metallic clang as if something had struck the wall, followed by exclamations she could not translate but thought were curses.