The Forbidden Circle (7 page)

Damon raised his head and said quietly, “Come and sit down, Ellemir. We may be reasonably sure that wherever Callista may be, she is not out in the snowstorm. Whoever went to so much trouble to steal her from here did not do it to let her die of exposure in the hills. As for searching for her, were the weather never so good, we could not go out and quarter the Kilghard Hills on horseback, shouting her name in the forests.” He had spoken with wry humor, but Ellemir whirled on him angrily.

“Are you saying we can do nothing, that we are helpless, that we must abandon her to whatever fate has seized her?”

“I am saying nothing of the sort,” Damon told her. “You heard what I said. We could not search for her at random in these hills, even if the weather would allow it. If she were in any ordinary hiding place, you could touch her mind. Let us use these days of the storm to begin the search in some reasonable way, and the best way to do that is to sit down, and think about it. Do come and sit down, Ellemir,” he pleaded. “Pacing the floor, and tearing your nerves to shreds, will not help Callista. It will only make you less fit to help her when the time comes. You have not eaten; you look as if you have not slept. Come, kinswoman. Sit here by the fire. Let me give you some wine.” He rose and led the girl to a seat. She looked up with her lips trembling and said, “Don’t be kind to me, Damon, or I’ll break down and melt.”

“It might do you good if you could,” he said, pouring her a glass of wine. She sipped it slowly, and he stood by the fireplace, looking down at her. He said, “I have been thinking. You told me Callista complained of evil dreams—withering gardens, cat-hags?”

“That is so.”

Damon nodded. He said, “I rode from Serrais with a party of Guards, and Reidel—a Guardsman of my company—spoke of misfortune that had fallen on his kinsman. He was said to have raved—listen to this—of the darkening lands, and of great fires and winds that brought death, and girls who clawed at his soul like cat-hags. From many men, I would have dismissed this as mere babble, imagination. But I have known Reidel all my life. He does not babble, and as far as I have ever been able to determine, he has no more imagination than one of his own saddle bags.
Had
, I should say; the poor fellow is dead. But he was speaking of what he had seen and heard, and I think it more than coincidence. And I told you of the ambush, when we were struck by invisible attackers with invisible swords and weapons. This alone would tell me that something very strange is going on in the heights they have begun to call the darkening lands. Since it is rather less than unlikely that there would be two complete sets of bizarre happenings in one part of the country, it makes sense to begin with the assumption that what happened to my Guardsmen is somehow associated with what happened to Callista.”

“That seems likely,” she said. “This tells me something else. It was no human being who tore out old Bethiah’s eyes as she fought to save her fosterling.” She shuddered, wrapping her arms around her shoulders as if she were icy cold. “Damon! It is possible, can it be, that Callista is in the hands of the cat-people?”

“It seems not impossible,” Damon said.

“But what could they want with her? What will they do with her? What—what—”

“How should I know, Ellemir? I could only guess. I know so little of those folk, even though I fought them. I have never seen one of them, except lying as a corpse on a battlefield. There are those who believe that they are as intelligent as mankind, and there are those who believe they are little more than the brutes. I do not think that anyone since the days of Varzil the Good really knows anything about them for certain.”

“No, there is one thing we know for certain,” Ellemir said grimly, “that they fight like men, and sometimes even more fiercely.”

“That, yes,” said Damon, and was silent, thinking of his Guard, ambushed and lying dead on the hillsides below Armida. They had died so that he could sit here by the fireside with Ellemir. He knew he could have done nothing to save them, and sharing their death would have done no good to anyone, but all the same guilt, tore at him and would not be eased. “When the storm subsides I must make shift somehow to go back and bury them,” he said, adding after a moment, “If there is enough left of them to bury.”

Ellemir said, quoting a well-known mountain proverb, “The dead in heaven is too happy to grieve for indignities to his corpse; the dead in hell has too much else to grieve for.”

“Still,” said Damon stubbornly, “for the sake of their kinfolk, I would do what I can.”

“It is Callista’s fate that troubles me now,” Ellemir said. “Damon! Can you possibly be serious? Can you really believe that Callista is in the hands of nonhumans? Beyond all other considerations, what could they possibly
want
with her?”

“As for that, child, I know no more than you do,” said Damon. “It is just possible—and we must accept the possibility—that they stole her for some unexplainable reason, comprehensible only to nonhumans, which we, being human, can never know or comprehend.”

“That is no help at all!” Ellemir said angrily. “It sounds like the horror tales I heard in the nursery! So-and-so was stolen by monsters, and when I asked why the monsters stole her, Nurse told me that it was because they were monsters, and monsters were evil—” She broke off and her voice caught again. “This is
real
, Damon! She’s my
sister!
Don’t tell me fairy stories!”

Damon looked at her levelly. “Nothing was further from my mind. I told you before; no one
really
knows anything about the cat-folk.”

“Except that they are evil!”

“What is evil?” Damon asked wearily. “Say they do evil to our own people, and I will agree heartily with you. But if you say that they are evil in themselves, for no reason and just for the pleasure of doing evil, then you are making them into those fairy-story monsters you’re talking about. I only said that since we are human and they are cat-people, we may have to accept that we may not be able to understand, now or ever, what their reasons for taking her may have been. But that is simply something to keep in mind—that any reasons we might guess for her kidnapping may simply be human approximations of
their
reasons, and not the whole truth. Apart from that, though, why do any folk steal women, and why Callista in particular? Or, for that matter, any beasts steal? I have never heard that they were cannibal flesh-eaters, and in any case the forests are filled with game at this season, so we may assume it was not that.”

“Are you trying to give me the horrors?” Ellemir still sounded angry.

“Not a bit of it. I’m trying to do
away
with the horrors,” Damon said. “If there was any vague thought in your mind that she might have been killed and eaten, I think you can dismiss it. Since they killed her guards, and disabled her foster mother, it was not just
any
human being they wanted, or even any woman. So they took her, not because she was human, not just because she was female, but because she was one specific female human: because she was Callista.”

Ellemir said, low, “Bandits and trail-raiders steal young women, at times, for slaves, or concubines, or to sell in the Dry Towns—”

“I think we can forget that too,” said Damon firmly.

“They left all your serving-girls; in any case, what would cat-men want with a human female? There are stories of crossbreeds between man and
chieri
, back in the ancient times, but even those are mostly legends and no man living can say whether or not they have any foundation in fact. As for the other folk, our women are no more to them than theirs to us. Of course, it is possible that they have some human captive who wanted a wife, but even if they were so altruistic and kind as to be willing to provide him with one, which I admit I find hard to believe, there were a dozen serving girls in the outbuildings, as young as Callista, just as beautiful, and infinitely easier to come at. If they simply wanted human women, as hostages, or to sell somewhere as slaves, they would have taken them as well. Or taken them, and left Callista.”

“Or me. Why take Callista from her bed and leave me sleeping untouched in mine?”

“That, too. You and Callista are twins.
I
can tell you one from the other, but I have known you since your hair was too short to braid. A casual stranger could never have known you apart, and might easily have taken Callista for you. Now it’s barely possible that they were simply wanting a hostage, or someone to hold to ransom, and snatched the one who came first to hand.”

“No,” Ellemir said, “my bed is nearest the door, and they walked very quietly and carefully around me to come at her.”

“Then it comes to the one difference between you,” Damon told her. “Callista is a telepath and a Keeper. You are not. We can only assume that in some way they knew which of you was the telepath, and that for some reason they wanted specifically to take the one woman here who fitted that description. Why? I know no more than you do, but I am sure that was their reason.”

“And all this still leaves us no nearer to a solution,” Ellemir said, and she sounded frantic. “The facts are that she is gone, and we don’t know where she is! So all your talk is no good at all!”

“No? Think a little,” said Damon. “We know she has probably not been killed, except by accident; if they went to such great pains to take her, they will probably treat her with great care, feed her well, keep her warm, cherish her as a prize. She may be frightened and lonely, but she is probably neither cold, hungry, nor in pain, and it is very unlikely that she has suffered physical abuse or molestation. Also, it is quite probable that she has not been raped. That, at least, should ease your mind.”

Ellemir raised the forgotten wine glass and sipped at it. She said, “But it doesn’t help us get her back, or even know where to look.” Just the same, she sounded calmer, and Damon was glad.

He said, “One thing at a time, girl. Perhaps, after the storm—”

“After the storm, whatever tracks or traces they might have left would be blotted out,” Ellemir said.

“From all I hear, the cat-folk leave no tracks a man could read; hardly traces for another cat. In any case, I’m no tracker,” Damon said. “If I can help you at all; that won’t be the way.”

Her eyes widened and suddenly she clutched at his arm.

“Damon! You’re a telepath too, you’ve had some training—can you find Callista that way?”

She looked so excited, so happy and alive at the prospect, that it crushed Damon to have to smash that hope, but he knew he must. He said, “It isn’t that easy, Ellemir. If you, her twin, can’t reach her mind, there must be some reason.”

“But I’ve had no training, I know so little,” Ellemir said hopefully, “and you were Tower-trained—”

The man sighed. “That’s true. And I’ll try,” he said. “I always meant to try. But don’t hope for too much,
breda
.”

“Will you try
now?
” she pleaded.

“I’ll do what I can. First, bring me something of Callista’s—jewelry she wears a good deal, a garment she has often worn, something of that sort.”

While Ellemir went to fetch it, Damon drew his starstone from the protective silk wrappings about it, and gazed at it, broodingly. Telepath, yes, and Tower-trained in the old telepath sciences of Darkover—for a little while. And the hereditary Gift, the
laran
or telepathic power of the Ridenow family, was the psychic sensing of extrahuman forces, bred into the genetic material of the Ridenow Domain for just such work as this, centuries ago. But in these latter days, the old Darkovan noncausal sciences had fallen into disuse; because of intermarriage, inbreeding, the ancient
laran
Gifts rarely bred true. Damon had inherited his own family Gift in full measure, but all his life he had found it a curse, not a blessing, and he shied away from using it now.

As he had shied away from using it—he faced the fact squarely now, and his own guilt—to save his men. He had sensed danger. The trip which should have been peaceful, routine, a family mission, had turned into a nightmare, reeking with the feel of danger. Yet he had not had the courage to use his starstone, the matrix stone given him during his Tower training, and too intimately keyed to the telepath patterns of his mind to be used or even touched by anyone else.

Because he feared it . . . he had always feared it
.

Time reeled, slid momentarily away, annihilating fifteen years that lay between, and a younger Damon stood, with bowed head, before the Keeper Leonie, that same Leonie now aging, whose place Callista was to have taken. Not a young woman even then, Leonie, and far from beautiful, her flame-colored hair already fading, her body flat and spare, but her gray eyes gentle and compassionate.

“No, Damon. It is not that you have failed, or displeased me. And all of us—I myself—love you, and value you. But you are too sensitive, you cannot barricade yourself. Had you been born a woman, in a woman’s body,” she added, laying a light hand on his shoulder, “you would have been a Keeper, perhaps one of the greatest. But as a man”—faintly, she shrugged—“you would destroy yourself, tear yourself apart. Perhaps, free of the Tower, you may be able to surround yourself with other things, grow less sensitive, less”—she hesitated, groping for the exact word—“less vulnerable. It is for your own good that I send you away, Damon; for your health, for your happiness, perhaps for your very sanity.” Lightly, almost a breath, her lips brushed his forehead. “You know I love you; for that reason I do not want to destroy you. Go, Damon.”

From that there was no appeal, and Damon had gone, cursing the vulnerability, the Gift he carried like a curse.

He had made a new career for himself in Comyn Council, and although he was no soldier and no swordsman, had taken his turn at commanding the Guardsmen: driven, constantly needing to prove himself. He never admitted even to himself how deeply that hour with Leonie had torn at his manhood. From any work with the starstone (although he carried it still, since it had been made a part of him), he had shied away in horror and panic.