The Forbidden Circle (14 page)

“No one doubts you,” said Damon, stepping forward to grasp the man by the arms; he seemed about to fall. “I met them myself, crossing the darkening lands. How did you escape?”
Not as I did, running away and leaving my men to die
. Suddenly his disgust with himself and his own cowardice rose up and sickened him. He felt for a moment as if he would choke. Before Eduin’s words he forced himself to be calm and listen.

“I’m not sure. We were walking our horses, and all at once they all shied, started to bolt. While I was trying to get mine under control, there was this—this
howl
, and Dom Istvan had his sword out and there was blood on it. And this cat-man just—just
materialized
out of the air and fell dead. Then I saw Marcos fall with his throat cut, and heard Dom Istvan yell,
‘use your ears,’
and Caradoc and I got back-to-back and started swiping at the air with our swords. There was a sort of a hiss, and I thrust at it, and I felt the blade go in, and there was this cat-thing, dying in the snow, and I—Somehow I got the blade free, and kept cutting at everything I could hear. It was like night fighting—” His eyes fell shut as if for a moment he fell asleep where he stood. “Can I have a drink, Lord Damon?”

Damon broke the eerie paralysis that held him. Servants were running into the court with pails of hot water, blankets, bandages, steaming jugs. He beckoned quickly to one of them, wondering who had had sense enough to order a hot brew of
firi
at this hour. He poured a cupful and thrust it at Eduin. The man swilled down the hot raw spirit as if it were watered wine at a banquet, and stood shuddering. Damon said, “Go into the Hall, man; your wounds can be tended better there.” But Eduin shook his head. “Nothing much wrong with me, but Caradoc—” He gestured toward the heavyset brown-bearded man who lay, fists clenched, on the stone bench. “He took a wound in the leg.” He strode toward his friend and bent over him.

“The Lord Alton—” Caradoc muttered between clenched teeth. “Is he still alive? I heard him cry out when they picked him up.”

“He is alive,” Damon said, and Eduin held a cup of the strong liquor to Caradoc’s lips. The man gulped at it greedily, and Eduin said, low-voiced, “He’ll need it when we move him. Give me a hand,
vai dom
. I’m still strong enough to help carry him, and I’d rather help him myself than leave him to the servants; he took the stroke that was meant for me.”

Moving as carefully as he could, Damon helped Eduin support Caradoc’s great weight up the stairs and into the Great Hall. Caradoc moaned and muttered, half coherently, as if the raw spirit had loosened his control over himself. Damon heard him mumbling, “Dom Esteban was fighting with his eyes closed . . . killed near a dozen of them . . . a lot of us were dead, and more of them . . . heard them running away, can’t blame them, felt like running myself, but one of them got him, he crashed into the snow . . . we were sure he was dead until he started swearing at us. . . .” Caradoc’s head fell forward on his chest and he slumped, unconscious, between the two who were carrying him.

With Damon’s help, Eduin arranged his comrade carefully on one of the camp-beds which had been hastily set up in the hall, and covered him tenderly with warm blankets. He refused help for himself when Dom Cyril offered bandages and ointments, saying that he was almost unhurt. “—But Caradoc will bleed to death unless someone gets to him at once! Help
him!
I did what I could, but it wasn’t much in the cold.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Damon said, gritting his teeth. He felt sick, but like all Comyn Guardsmen commanding even small detachments, he had had sound training in field-hospital techniques; he had, perhaps, had more than most because his deficiencies in swordplay had made him feel he should have a special skill to counterweight his shortcomings. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, that Andrew Carr had come down into the Great Hall and was staring at the scene of carnage with wonder and horror. He caught a glimmer of thought,
Swords and knives, what sort of a place have I landed in
; then he forgot him completely again. “The healer is with Dom Esteban, but this can’t wait. Dom Cyril, give me a hand with these bandages.”

For the next hour he had not a breath to spare in thinking of Andrew Carr or even of Callista. Caradoc had a wound in the calf of the leg and another in the upper thigh, from which, despite the rough tourniquet Eduin had tied on, blood still oozed slowly. It was a struggle to stanch the bleeding, and an awkward spot for a pressure bandage: one of the great blood vessels in the groin had been nicked. At last he thought it would hold, and he turned to sewing up the flesh wound in the calf—a messy business and one that always made him feel sick; but by the time he had finished that, blood was oozing again from the wound in the groin. He looked down at the man, bitterly, thinking.
One more for the damned cat-things
, but under Eduin’s pleading glance he shook his head.

“No more I can do,
com’ii
. It’s a bad place.”

“Lord Damon, you’re Tower-trained. I have seen the
leronis
stop worse wounds than this with her jewel-stone. Can’t you do anything?” Eduin pleaded. He had withstood all attempts to get him to rest, or eat, or leave his friend for a moment.

“Oh, God,” Damon muttered. “I haven’t the skill or the strength—it’s delicate work. I could just as easily stop his heart, kill him—”

“Try, anyway,” begged Eduin. “He’ll die, anyhow, in a few minutes if you can’t stop the bleeding.”

No, damn it
, Damon wanted to lash out.
Let me be, I’ve done as much as I can
. . . .

Caradoc didn’t run from the cat-men. He probably saved Esteban’s life. Thanks to him Ellemir is not this moment fatherless. Is he still alive? I have had not even an instant to go and see!
Reluctantly, he said, “I’ll try. But don’t hope for too much. It’s just a bare chance.”

He fumbled with tense fingers for the jewel around his neck, drew it out.
Now I must do the work of a sorceress
, he thought bitterly.
Leonie said it, as a woman I would have made a Keeper
. . . .

He stared into the blue stone, concentrating savagely on controlling the magnetic fields. Slowly, slowly, he focused his heightened psi awareness, carefully down and down, to the molecular level and beyond, feeling the pulsing blood cells, the fumbling heart . . .
careful, careful
. . . . For an instant his mind merged with the unconscious man’s, a dim swirl of fear and agony, a growing weakness as the precious life’s blood oozed away . . . down and down, into the cells, the molecules . . . the blood vessel severed, broken, the gush, the pressure. . . .

Pressure, now, directly against the severed vessel . . . telekinetic psi force, to hold together, together . . . cells knitting; careful, don’t stop the heart; ease up just there
. . . . He knew he had not moved a muscle, but it felt as if his hands were
inside
the man’s body, gripping tight on the severed vessel. He knew he was holding pure energy against the flowing blood. . . .

With a long sigh, he withdrew. Eduin whispered, “I think the bleeding’s stopped.”

Damon nodded, exhausted. He said hoarsely, “Don’t move him for an hour or so, until the clot’s strong enough to hold by itself. Put sandbags around him to keep him from moving accidentally.” Once the bleeding was stopped, the wound was no great matter. “Bad place, but it could be worse. Half an inch to one side and he’d have been castrated. Keep him from moving, now, and he’ll be all right. In hell’s name, man, get up. What are you about—”

Eduin had dropped to his knees. He murmured the ritual formula, “There is a life between us,
vai dom
.”

Damon said sharply, “There may be times coming when we’re going to need brave men like the pair of you. Save your life for that! Now, damn it, if you don’t go and get yourself some food and rest, I’ll knock you down and sit on you. Go on,
teniente
—that’s an order!”

Eduin muttered groggily, “Dom Istvan—”

“I’ll see what’s with him. Go and have your own wound seen to,” Damon ordered, and looked around, coming up to sharp focus again. Ellemir, white-faced, was still supervising the placing of beds and coverings for the wounded men, and the bringing of food to the less severely wounded. The healer-woman still sat beside Dom Esteban. Damon went slowly toward her, and noticed, as if his body belonged to someone else, that he swayed as he walked.
I’m not used to this anymore, damn it
.

The healer-woman raised her head at Damon’s question. “He’s sleeping; he won’t answer any questions this day. The wound missed his kidneys, by just a fraction; but I think something’s hurt in the nerves of the spine. He can’t move his legs at all, not even wriggle a toe. It
could
be shock, but I fear it’s something worse. When he wakes—well, either he’ll be perfectly all right, or else he’ll spend the rest of his life dead from the waist down. Wounds in the spine don’t heal.”

Damon walked away from the healer-woman in a daze, slowly shaking his head. Not dead, no. But if, indeed, he was paralyzed from the waist, he might as well be, would probably rather be. He didn’t envy whoever it was that would have the task of telling the formidable old man that his daughter’s rescue must be left in other hands.

Whose hands? Mine?
Damon realized, with shock, that ever since he had realized that Esteban lived, he had hoped that his older kinsman who, after all, was Callista’s father, her nearest kinsman, and thus in honor bound to avenge any hurt or dishonor to her—would be able to take over this frightful task. But it hadn’t happened like that.

It was still up to him—and to the Earthman, Andrew Carr.

He turned resolutely and left the Great Hall to go in search of Andrew Carr.

CHAPTER SEVEN

What kind of a world is this, anyway? Swords and knives—bandits, battles, kidnappings
. Carr had seen the wounded men, but had quickly discovered that he was only in the way, that his hosts had no time or thought for him now, and had retreated upstairs to the room where they had taken him. He had felt strange about not offering to help, but the place was crawling with people and they all knew more about what to do than he did. He decided the best thing he could do was to keep out of the way.

What was going to happen now? He had gathered, from what little he could understand of the servants’ talk—mostly in a dialect he could barely follow—that this was the Lord of this estate: Ellemir’s father. With the owner returned, would Damon still be in charge of whatever arrangements could be made for Callista’s rescue? It was Callista he was thinking about, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Then, almost as if his thoughts had drawn her to him (maybe they had, she seemed to think there was some such bond between them), he saw her standing before his bed.

“So you are safe, safe and well now, Andrew. Have my kinsfolk been hospitable to you?”

“They couldn’t have been kinder,” Andrew said. “But if you can come into their house, why can’t
they
see you?”

“I wish I knew. I cannot see them, I cannot feel their thoughts; it is as if the house were empty, without even a ghost to haunt it! Or as if I were the ghost haunting it—my own house!” Her face crumpled with sobbing. “Somehow, someone has been able to barricade me from everyone, everyone I know. I wander in the overworld and I see only strange, drifting faces, never even a glance from any familiar face. I wonder if I have gone mad . . . ?”

Andrew said slowly, trying to explain the things Damon had told him, “Damon believes you are in the hands of the cat-men; it seems that they have attacked others, and that they keep you prisoner so that you cannot use your starstone against them.”

Callista said slowly, “Before I left the Tower, Leonie said something of this. She said that something was amiss is the darkening lands and she suspected that some unmonitored stones were being used—or misused—there. You are a Terran—do you know what I mean by the stones?”

“Not a word of it,” Andrew confessed.

“It is the ancient knowledge—science, you would say—of this world. The matrix stones, starstones we call them among ourselves, can be attuned to the human mind, and amplify what you call psi powers. They can be used to change the form of energy. All matter, all energy and force, is nothing but vibration, and if you change the rate at which it vibrates, then it takes another form.”

Andrew nodded. He could follow that. It sounded as if she were trying, without the scientific training of the Terran Empire, to explain the atomic field theory of matter and energy; and doing it better than he could do it with the scientific training he had had. “And you can use these stones?”

“Yes. I am a Keeper, and Tower-trained; the leader of a circle of trained telepaths who use these stones for the transmutation of energy. And all the stones we use, keyed to our own individual brains, are monitored from one or another of the Towers; no one is allowed to use them unless he has been personally trained by an older Keeper or technician, and we are sure he will damage nothing. The stones are very, very powerful, Andrew. The higher-level ones, the larger ones, could shatter this planet like a roasting bird bursting in the oven. This is why we were frightened when we discovered that someone, or some
thing
, in the darkening lands was probably using a very powerful stone, or stones, unmonitored and without training.”

Andrew was trying to recall Damon’s words. “He said men have done this before, but nonhumans never.”

“Damon has forgotten his history,” Callista said. “It is well-known that our ancient forebears first received the Stones from the
chieri
folk, who knew how to use them when we were savages, and have gone so far beyond them that they no longer need them. But the
chieri
have little to do with mankind these days, and few men living have so much as seen one. I wish I might say the same of the cat-things, curse them!” She drew a long, exhausted breath. “Oh, I am weary, weary, Andrew. Would to Evanda I might
touch
you. I think I shall go mad, alone in the darkness. No, I have not been ill-treated, but I am so tired, so tired of the cold stone, and the dripping water, and my eyes ache with the darkness, and I cannot eat the food or drink the water they give me, it is foul with their stink—”