The Sword of Aldones (15 page)

“And knew she was mine?” It didn’t make sense, any of it. Least of all that a child of mine had grown up to call Kadarin father, to bear his name, to love him.

“Of course he knew. How could he help it? I think he made Thyra do it,” Rafe said. “He’s had Marja home a dozen times, but he couldn’t keep her. Thyra—”

But before he could go on, we were interrupted by a palace servant with a message from Callina.

“We’ll talk again,” Rafe said, as I took my leave. And I was not sure whether it was a promise or a threat.

Callina looked tired and harried.

“The girl’s awake,” she greeted me. “She was hysterical when she came to; I gave her a sedative, and she’s calmed down a little. Lew, what are we going to do now?”

“I won’t know until I see her,” I said emptily.

The girl had been moved to a spacious room in the Aillard apartments. When we came in, she was lying across a bed, her face buried in the covers; but it was a tearless and defiant face she raised to me.

She was still Linnell’s double. She looked more so, having been decently dressed in Darkovan clothing, which I supposed—correctly—to be Linnell’s own.

“Please tell me the truth,” she said steadily. “Where am I? Oh—” she cried out, and hid her face. “The man with one hand who kissed me on the spaceport, back on Darkover!”

Callina stood apart, a figure of dignified disdain, leaving me to squirm alone.

“That was a—a mistake,” I said lamely. “Allow me to introduce myself. Lew Alton-Comyn, z’par servu. And you?”

“That’s the first sensible thing anyone has said.” Although she spoke the language badly, I was amazed at the luck that gave us someone who could speak it at all. “Kathie Marshall.”

“Terranan?”

“Terran, yes. Are you Darkovan? What’s all this?”

“I suppose we do owe you an explanation,” I said, and broke off, staring with what I suppose must have been a very stupid expression. “But I’m damned if I know how to explain it!”

“You have nothing to fear. We brought you here because we need your help—”

“But why me? Where’s here? And what makes you think I’d help you, even if I could—after you’ve kidnapped me?”

It was, I supposed, a fair question.

Callina said, “Shall we bring Linnell here, and let her see? You were brought here, Kathie, because you are twinned in mind with my sister Linnell. We had to-take the chance that you would be willing to help us, but there will be no compulsion involved. And no one will hurt you.”

As Callina moved toward her, Kathie sprang up and backed away. “Twinned minds?

That’s—that’s ridiculous! Where am I?”

“In the Comyn Castle in Thendara.”

“Thendara? But that’s—that’s on Darkover! I—I left Darkover weeks ago. I arrived on Samarra just last night. No,” she said, “no, I’m dreaming. I saw you on Darkover and I’m dreaming about you!” She wasn’t to the window and I saw her white hands clench on a fold of curtain. “A—a red sun— Darkover—oh, I have dreams like this when I can’t wake up. I can’t wake up—” She was so deathly white that I thought she would faint. Callina came and put an arm around her, and this time Kathie did not pull away.

“Try to believe us, my child,” Callina said. “You are on Darkover. Have you heard anything of matrix mechanics? We brought you here like that.” It was a grossly inaccurate description, but it calmed her somehow.

“Who are you, then?”

“Callina Aillard. Keeper of the Comyn.”

“I’ve heard about the Keepers,” Kathie said shakily. “Look, you—you can’t take a Terran citizen, and—and pull her halfway across the Galaxy; my father’s going to tear the planet apart looking for me—” Her voice broke and she covered her face with her hands. She was only a child. From the child came the scared wail.

“I’m afraid! I—I want to go home!”

Gently, as she might have spoken to Linnell herself, Callina murmured, “Poor child! Don’t be frightened!”

There was something else I had to do. Kathie must keep her immunity, and unawareness, of Darkovan forces. I knew one way to do that. Yet I hated doing it; I must make myself vulnerable. In effect, I meant to put a barrier around her mind; built into the barrier would be a sort of bypass circuit, so that any attempt to make telepathic contact with Kathie, or dominate her mind, ‘would be immediately shunted from her open mind to my guarded one.

There was no sense in explaining to Kathie what I meant to do. While she clung to Callina, I reached out as gently as I could and made contact with her.

It was an instant of screaming pain in every nerve. Then it blanked out, and Kathie was sobbing convulsively. “What did you do? Oh, I felt you—but no, that’s crazy. What are you?”

“Why couldn’t you wait till she understood?” Callina demanded. But I stood looking at them somberly, without answering. I had done what I had to do, and I had done it now, because I wanted Kathie safely barriered before anyone saw her and guessed. And, above all, before Callina confronted her with Linnell. That moment of prevision last night had left me desperately uneasy. Why, of all the patterns in the world, why Linnell?

What happened when a pair of exact duplicates met? I couldn’t remember ever hearing.

It hurt to see her cry; she was so like Linnell, and Linnell’s tears had always upset me. Callina looked up at helplessly, trying to soothe the weeping girl.

“You had better go away for now,” she said, and as Kathie’s sobs broke out afresh, “Go away! I’ll handle this!”

I shrugged, suddenly angry. “As you-please,” I said, and turned my back on them. Why couldn’t she trust me?

And that moment, when I left Callina in anger, was the moment when I snapped the trap shut on us all.

Once in every journey of Darkover around its sun, the Comyn, city folk, mountain lords, off-world consuls and ambassadors and Terrans from the Trade City, mingled together in carnival with a great outward show of cordiality. Centuries ago, this festival had merely brought Comyn and commoner together. Now it involved everyone of any importance on the planet; and the festival opened with the display of dancing in the great lower halls of the Comyn Castle.

Centuries of tradition made this a masked affair; in compliance with custom, I wore a narrow half-mask, but had made no further attempt at disguise. I stood at one end of the long hall, talking indifferently and listening with half an ear to a couple of youngsters in the Terran space service, and as soon as I decently could, I got away and stood staring out at the four miniature moons that had nearly floated into conjunction over the peak.-

Behind me the great hall blazed with colors and costumes that reflected every corner of Darkover and almost every known form of human or half-human life throughout the Terran Empire. Derik glittered in the golden robes of an Arturian sun-priest; Rafe Scott had assumed the mask, whip and clawed gloves of a kifirgh duelist.

In the corner reserved, by tradition, for young girls, Linnell’s spangled mask was a travesty of disguise, and her eyes were glowing with happy consciousness of all the eyes on her. As comynara, she was known to everyone on Darkover; but she rarely saw anyone outside the narrow circle of her cousins and the few selected companions permitted to a girl of the Comyn hierarchy. Now, masked, she could speak to, or even dance with perfect strangers, and the excitement of it was almost too much for her.

Beside her, also masked, I recognized Kathie. I didn’t know why she was here, but I saw no harm in it. She was safely barricaded by the bypass circuit I had built into her mind; and there was, probably, no better way of proving that she was not a prisoner, but an honored guest. From her resemblance to Linnell, they’d only think her some noblewoman of the Aillard clan.

Linnell laughed up at me as I joined them;

“Lew, I am teaching your cousin from Terra some of our dances! Imagine, she didn’t know them.”

My cousin. I suppose that was Callina’s idea. Anyway, it explained her badly accented Darkovan. Kathie said gently, “I wasn’t taught to dance, Linnell.”

“Not taught to dance? But what did you learn, then?” Linnell asked incredulously. “Don’t they dance on Terra, Lew?”

“Dancing,” I said dryly, “is an integral part of all human cultures. It is a group activity passed down from the group movements of birds and anthropoids, and also a social channeling of mating behavior. Among such quasi-human races as the chieri it becomes an ecstatic behavior pattern akin to drunkenness. Men dance on Terra, on Megaera, on Vainwal, and in fact, from one end of the civilized Galaxy to the other, as far as I know. For further information, lectures on anthropology are given in the city; I’m not in the mood.”

I turned to Kathie in what I hoped was properly cousinly fashion; “Suppose we do it instead?”

I added to Kathie, as we danced, “Of course you wouldn’t know that dancing is a major study with children here. Linnell and 1 both learned as soon as we could walk. I had only the public instruction, but Linnell has been studying ever since.” I glanced affectionately back at Linnell. “I went to a dance or two on Terra. Do you think our Darkovan ones are so different?”

I was studying the Terran girl rather closely. Why would a duplicate of Linnell have the qualities we needed for the work in hand? Kathie, I realized, had guts and brains and tact; it took them, to come here after the shock she had had, and play the part tacitly assigned to her. And Kathie had another rare quality. She seemed unconscious that my left arm, circling her waist, was unlike anyone else’s. I’ve danced with girls on Terra. It’s not common.

With seeming irrelevance, Kathie said, “How sweet Linnell is! It’s as if she were really my twin; I loved her, the minute I saw her. But I’m afraid of Callina. It’s not that she’s unkind—no one could have been kinder! But she doesn’t seem quite human. Please, let’s not dance? On Terra I’m supposed to be a good dancer, but here I feel like a stumbling elephant.”

“You probably weren’t taught as intensively.” That, to me, was the oddest thing about Terra—the casualness with which they regarded this one talent which distinguishes man from four-footed kind. Women who could not dance! How could they have true beauty?

I just happened to be watching the great central curtains when they parted and Callina Aillard entered the hall. And for me, the music stopped.

I have seen the black night of interstellar space flecked by single stars.

Callina was like that, in a scrap torn from the midnight sky, her dark hair netted with pale constellations.

“How beautiful she is,” Kathie whispered. “What does the dress represent? I’ve never seen one just like it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. But I lied. I did not know why any girl on the eve of her marriage—even an unwilling marriage—should assume the traditional costume of la damnee; Naotalba, daughter of doom, bride of the daemon Zandru. What would happen when Beltran caught the significance of the costume? A more direct insult would have been hard to devise—unless she had come in the dress of the public hangman!

I excused myself quickly from Kathie and went toward Callina. She had agreed to the wishes of the Comyn; she had no right to embarrass her family like this, at such a late date.

But by the time I reached her, she was already getting that lecture from old Hastur; I caught the tail of it;

“Behaving like a naughty, willful child!”

“Grandfather,” said Callina, in that quiet, controlled voice, “I will neither look nor act a lie. This dress pleases me. It is perfectly suited to the way I have been treated by the Comyn all my life.” Her laugh was musical and unexpectedly bitter. “Beltran of Aldaran would endure more insults than this—for laran rights in council! You will see.” She turned away from the old man.

“Dance with me, Lew?”

It was no request but a command; as such I obeyed, but I was upset and didn’t care if she knew it. It was shameful, to spoil Linnell’s first dance like this!

“I am sorry about Linnell,” Callina said. “But the dress pleases my mood. And it is becoming, is it not?”

It was. “You’re too damned beautiful,” I said hoarsely. “Callina, Callina, you’re not going through with this—this crazy farce! I drew her into a recess and bent to kiss her, savagely crushing my mouth on hers. For a moment she was passive, startled; then went rigid, bending back and pushing me frantically away. “No!! Don’t!”

I let my arms drop and stood looking at her, slow fury heating my face. “That’s not the way you acted last night!”

She was almost weeping. “Can’t you spare me this?”

“Did you ever think there were things you might have spared me? Farewell, Callina comynara; I wish Beltran joy of his bride.” I felt her catch at my sleeve, but I shook her off and strode away.

I skirted the floor, grimly quiet. A nagging unease, half telepathic, beat on me. Aldaran was dancing with Callina now; viciously I hoped he’d try to kiss her. Lerrys, Dyan? They were in costume, unrecognizable. Half the Terran colony could be here, too, and I’d never know.

Rare Scott was chatting with Derik in a corner; Derik looked flushed, and his voice, when he turned and greeted me, was thick and unsteady. “Eve’n, Lew.”

“Derik, have you seen Regis Hastur? What’s his costume?”

“Do’ know,” Derik said thickly. “I’m Derik, that’s all I know. Have ‘nough trouble rememberin’ that. You. try it some time.”

“A fine spectacle,” I muttered. “Derik, I wish you would remember who you are!

Get out and sober up, won’t you? So you realize what a show you are giving the Terrans?”

“I think—forget y’self,” he mumbled. “Not your affair wha’ I do—ain’ drunk anyhow.”

“Linnell should be very proud of you!” I snapped.

“Li’l girl’s mad at me.” He forgot his anger and spoke in a tone of intimate self-pity. “Won’t even dansh—”

“Who would?” I muttered, standing on both feet so I would not kick him. I resolved to hunt up Hastur again; he had authority I didn’t, and influence with Derik. It was bad enough to have a Regency in such times. But when the heir presumptive makes a public idiot of himself before half a planet!

I scanned the riot of costumes, looking for Hastur. One in particular caught my eye; I had seen such harlequins in old books on Terra. Parti-colored, a lean beaked cap over a masked face, gaunt and somehow horrible. Not in itself, for the costume was only grotesque, but there was a sort of atmosphere, the man himself—I scowled, angry at myself. Was I imagining things already?”