Black Priestess of Varda Dominant

  Bolan went out first. Krasno followed a few minutes later with the lemur-creature riding upon his shoulder. Eldyn was left alone with her own very unpleasant thoughts.

  * * * *

  She slept, and was awakened by a skittering sound in the room. Silently she touched the nearest wall and thought light, and as the glow flashed she grabbed up the dagger she had placed near. Her breath went out in a sigh of relief, for it was only Tikta, and then with a shock she knew something was wrong.

  She tried to catch the agile little creature, but it eluded her easily. Then she remembered Krasno's lessons about the power of thought. She sat down again and concentrated on the idea that she meant it no harm.

  At last, with desperation overcoming shyness, Tikta made a leap to her shoulder. It had never come near her before. She sat perfectly still as the hand-like little paws moved to her head, remembering how she had seen it communicate with Krasno.

  The room was gone. A forest glade blurred, cleared, blurred again, shifted from colors to colorblind tones of grey, widened, narrowed, as though seen through changing sets of eyes, finally settled.

  Krasno was there, writhing in the grasp of a pair of lumpy grey creatures who towered above him. Luvans. One was using a device that Eldyn guessed was calling an aircraft to pick up the prisoner.

  She pulled Tikta's paws away and instantly was back in the underground room. Tikta glared at her reproachfully as she sat on the side of the couch. Her heart was pounding and she was caught in the grip of uncertainty.

  Finally she rose and fumbled in one of the wall cupboards for the extra blast rod Krasno had left behind. She knew she had to at least try, no matter what the odds, but she moved reluctantly.

  Tikta pulled at her trouser leg to attract attention, and Eldyn remembered with a gasp of dismay. Power weapons such as the blast rod were worse than useless against Luvans. They backfired. Slowly she picked up the heavy sword the lemur-creature had laboriously dragged to the middle of the floor.

  Titka's chattering reached a frantic pitch. It leaped to Eldyn's shoulder, clinging to her collar with one paw and pointing the way with the other in a manner almost human. The naked blade felt clumsy in her unpracticed right hand. All her life she had been left-handed, and she was no swordswoman, and she was frankly frightened. But she had to at least try.

  Huge butterflies flitted among the gigantic trees of the forest and rainbow-hued lizards raced over the rough bark, but Eldyn hardly noticed. She was haunted by the vision of Krasno.

  Tikta guided her straight to the clearing. It was not far. The two Luvans, indistinguishable duplicates of each other, still held the struggling Rebel boy between them.

  Tikta leaped down in shrill, gibbering rage and raced ahead of Eldyn to the defense of its master. One of the Luvans looked up unperturbed as Eldyn tensed her muscles and forced herself to charge with sword swinging. One of them brought her knife hilt crashing down on Krasno's skull, and as he dropped unconscious both turned toward the Earthwoman.

  Eldyn staggered in mid-stride as her knees went rubbery with a chilling, unearthly fear surpassing her worst nightstallions. Her wrist drooped and her fingers were lax on the sword hilt. For an instant she came to a complete standstill, her body swinging involuntarily to run, and she knew herself as an arrant coward.

  But, as she hesitated, through her terror, seeped an impression of cynical amusement.

  Then Eldyn knew. Rage burned away panic. And with the rage came relief. She herself was not afraid—at least not that desperately’ afraid. The Luvans were using a mental weapon against her, a lance of fear.

  She took an unsteady step forward. Another. The third was easier, although her entire body still trembled. But now that she knew its cause the fear was less effective.

  An expression that might have been amazement crossed the pasty grey features of the Luvans.

  Eldyn's sword slashed in a hissing arc, and as one Luvan moved sluggishly back it stumbled over Krasno's prostrate form. With a savage bellow Eldyn leaped. Her back-swing bit deep. The Luvan's shapeless mouth opened soundlessly as blue-black fluid gushed from the wound.

  Eldyn's blade flashed bright in the sunlight as she brought it down again with all the strength of her arm. Then it was no longer bright and the ugly grey body collapsed slowly.

  But the second Luvan had prepared. One splayed hand held a dagger while the other grasped an evil-looking whip tipped with a cluster of hooked blades.

  The Earthwoman almost sprawled as projected fear gave way to a momentarily successful attempt to confuse the coordination of her leg muscles. Then she screamed aloud as her body burst into flames and she had the illusion that mile upon mile of empty space lay between her and the Luvan. But with an effort of will she plunged ahead, heartened by the growing sense of consternation she could read in the monsters thoughts. Any creature of Varda would have shriveled and died under the Luvan's psychic barrage. But not the cripple from the Closed World of Earth.

  The metal whip licked out faster than eye could follow. The blades of its tip grated against the bone of Eldyn's forehead and a gush of blood poured into her single eye. She lowered her sword momentarily to clear her vision with the back of her single hand, and in that defenseless instant the Luvan struck.

  She felt the dagger snick against a rib and plunge deep into her breast. Automatically her foot came up in a tremendous kick that sent the Luvan reeling back, unhurt but thrown off balance.

  Eldyn knew she was bleeding internally but as yet her shocked nerves refused to transmit the full story of pain to her mind. Minutes to live. Something clogged her throat as she panted, and she spat a gobbet of red-tinged foam onto the moss underfoot. Punctured lung.

  She swung in a wide, clumsy lunge that missed by feet. And then she staggered, sagged, barely saved herself from falling. Her sword point dropped weakly.

  She felt the wave of triumphant, cruel gloating as the alien creature stepped in for the kill. And that had been the Earthwoman's last desperate hope, that the thing's inherent bestiality would not allow it to stand back and wait for her to fall. Her time was short.

  With a supreme, final effort she brought the sword up in a whistling uppercut. And struck. The point bit into the Luvan's breast. Into its throat. Snagged against the creature's jaw. Eldyn stiffened her arm and let her body fall forward. The double-edged blade sliced through flesh and cartilage, then met with lessened resistance as the point emerged.

  Eldyn fell, blood from her wounds showering upon the obscene carcass, but she went down with the elation of the kill still in her mind.

  * * * *

  Krasno moaned and opened his eyes as three women in blue-green emerged from the trees. 'Bolan!' he gasped.

  His sister took one shocked look at the carnage, misunderstood, raised her sword above Eldyn's bloody head.

  There was no time to argue or explain. The sword was descending even as he snatched out his blast rod and fired.

  Orange fire blazed. The sword went spinning away, torn from Bolan's fingers. But power weapons used near Luvans—even hacked and bleeding Luvans—invariably backfired, and where Krasno's right hand had been there was only a shapeless mass of mangled, heat-seared flesh. For an eternity everyone remained frozen by the unexpectedness of the blast rod's discharge.

  'The exile!' one of the women whispered fearfully. 'He is truly a Sassa-creature! Kill him!'

  'Wait!' Bolan spoke as though dazed. 'Why did you-?'

  Krasno did not answer. Instead he seized the Luvan's dagger in his uninjured hand and carved a gaping cross-shaped gash in the breast of the carcass beside him. Through glazing eyes Eldyn watched as he plunged his hand into the slimy, quivering mess and felt disgusted at his exhibition of rank savagery.

  He brought his arm out, fouled and defiled to the elbow with the Luvan's evil-smelling blood. In his hand was a tiny glittering capsule. He tossed it to the ground. 'Smash it!' he said weakly.

  Uncomprehendingly one of the women crushed it beneath her heel. Instantly th
e bloated, obscene, mangled carcass vanished as though it had never existed. Even its spilled blood was gone. The women drew unsteady breaths and a look of awed understanding appeared on their faces.

  'The other one!' Krasno writhed as pain from his blasted hand penetrated his consciousness. 'I—can't.'

  Eager swords hacked at the remaining monster and eager hands pawed among the filth of its body.

  'We have killed a Luvan!' One of the women shouted exultantly as the second capsule shattered under her foot and the second carcass disappeared. 'We know their secret now.'

  Bolan had recovered from her stupefaction. 'The Chamber!' she ordered. 'Be quick!'

  'But it is forbidden,' a woman objected. 'He is an exile. The Council—'

  'Damn the Council!' Bolan picked up her sword and brandished it. 'To the Chamber!' she repeated. The woman looked to where the two Luvans had been and nodded.

  'Take—him.' Krasno spoke with great effort. 'She must be El-ve-dyn.'

  'Both!' Bolan decided instantly. She whistled and three more Forest People emerged from the trees. One was a tall, rawboned man who took charge of administering first aid while the women prepared makeshift litters.

  Eldyn knew she was dying, but she tried to speak.

  'Be still!' the man ordered without rancor, continuing his ministrations.

  One of the women picked up a small furry bundle and deposited it tenderly beside Krasno. The lemur-thing whined softly and snuggled against him.

  Eldyn felt no pain as she was rolled onto a stretcher. She was too far gone for that. As everything grew dark Krasno was looking at her, and now for the first time there was no pity in his glance. Instead there was dawning admiration. His thought reached her, bypassing her ears and entering her brain as a telepathic whisper.

  'Call me, I will be near.'

  CHAPTER VI

  Dead. Dead. No bodily sensations. No being. But still thought. The individuality of Eldyn Carmichael looked without eyes, listened without ears. It was absolutely, utterly alone in nothingness. Nothing but terrible aloneness.

  But something—someone—had said, 'Call me.' What? Whom? Shreds of memory began to coalesce.

  'Krasno!' The individuality of Eldyn Carmichael shouted without lungs or, mouth. 'Krasno!'

  The nothingness was no longer quite so empty. A thought brushed hers.

  'Eldyn? Where?'

  'Here!'

  'Think of your shape!' a thought commanded.

  The individuality of Eldyn Carmichael thought. Memory shreds were coagulating to remind her she had once had a body. This was not death. It was something else.

  'Think of me—help me form!' The thought-appeal was urgent but unfrightened. 'I can't alone.'

  'Krasno?' She sent out the wordless question.

  'Yes!'

  She remembered his as she had watched his bathing in the warm pool that flowed through his home. And then she could see his floating in nothingness beside her, tenuous at first, then solidifying. She saw him with a new three-dimensional clarity and depth, as though with two eyes. Instinctively she reached toward her—and her left hand clasped his right.

  Krasno looked down at himself, at the crescent-shaped scar marring his loveliness, and winced.

  'Even here I must bear that,' his thought reached her. 'Until Sassa is no more.'

  Confused memories were returning now, bringing horror of this unknown emptiness.

  And then Krasno's thoughts were flowing around her protectively, soothingly—but not in pity. And his thoughts brought understanding.

  They were in the Thin World, a place outside the more solid worlds. Here only thought had actuality. Their bodies here were nothing but thought-projections. And here they must remain until the Chamber had had its way with their torn, tortured real bodies, healing them. For such were the unique powers of the Chamber.

  'But my arm? And my eye?' Eldyn asked.

  'You forgot you had lost them. Here you are as you think you are. And I—'

  'Exactly as I have dreamed.' The thought left Eldyn's mind before it could be altered by her loyalty to Marion and her desire to return to Earth.

  Krasno glanced at her sharply, but he seemed not displeased. And there was gratitude in his thoughts. Gratitude and surprised admiration for the way she had come to his rescue without thought of her own safety.

  'We must stay away from our actual bodies long enough but not too long,' he told her. 'Otherwise we could not return at all.'

  He read her questioning thoughts. 'No. A Vardan mind can not take knowledge of the Thin World back. I can remember almost nothing of the time I was here after escaping the Faith.

  'But you, with your Closed World brain, can perhaps do what I can not.'

  With her new knowledge Eldyn understood also that those crystalline capsules in the gross grey carcasses were the real essence of the Luvans. The bodies in which they had clothed themselves to live in Varda had been purely artificial.

  'I learned the secret of the Luvans in the slave-pits of the Faith.' Krasno's thoughts grew grim and bleak as he remembered the things to which he had been subjected there. Vardan memories could be carried into the Thin World, though not back again.

  Eldyn's thought-body drew his close as they floated side by side in limbo, drew his to her comfortingly and protectingly, to thrust those memories aside. She thought he should be soft and warm to touch—and he was.

  He pulled away—after a time that could have been either a moment or an age—with a tinkling laugh and a change of mood.

  'Time here is different and it will seem long before we can return,' his mind said. 'Let us build a world to our own hearts’ desires and live there until—until you can destroy Sassa and the Faith.'

  'But—'

  He ignored her protest.

  'I will go back to the Chamber occasionally—it will be necessary—but if you with your tenacious Earth mind went it would be disastrous.'

  'Understand this once and for all,' she warned him. 'If ever I can return to my own Earth I shall do so. I am not your marvelous El-ve-dyn, and I have no intention of fighting this thing you call Sassa. Those Luvans were bad enough.'

  Krasno frowned. Then his look of disappointment gave place to a knowing smile.

  There was a hint of a surprising idea. Just the faintest sort of hint—and then he closed his mind, half laughingly and half in seriousness. But tightly.

  'Let's build our world,' he said.

  * * * *

  It was a Godlike sensation to think a world. It changed with their thoughts, part Earth, part Varda, and part the solidification of the non-existent lands of dreams. There were groves, streams, mountains, plains. There were towns too, but these could be seen only dimly, indistinct in the distance, the women and men in them tiny figures without individuality.

  Neither Krasno nor Eldyn had formulated their ideas for an inhabited utopia concretely enough to fill in the details.

  Krasno created for himself a wardrobe of wonderful gowns every fold of which draped in a perfection of beauty, and jewels of kaleidoscopic inner fires that shifted with his mood. After his hunted forest life in Varda he indulged his fancies to the fullest.

  Eldyn built a laboratory. She lavished concentrated attention upon it—and then it failed to give her the satisfaction she ha expected. For she did not have to work to find solutions. She knew. Even the mysterious bound charges yielded up their secret in minutest detail, and when she discovered her Earth theorizing about the close connection between interacting bound charge and life itself had been on the right track she felt no surprise. The experiments equipment she designed was worse than useless, answering so perfectly to her thoughts that she could make the needle of her meters swing by merely willing it. She gathered almost limitless knowledge.

  Krasno asked about life on Earth, and occasionally Eldyn created an Earth scene for him. Once she built a dream automobile unhampered by the structural limitations of Earth materials, and any number of miles of broad highway. Ever
ything but the traffic. Krasno was delighted at first, amused by the manually-operated controls, but then he saddened as he remembers that once Varda had had its own system of roads. So Eldyn erased the perfect automobile and perfect highway from existence.

  Krasno looked at her peculiarly. He seemed almost afraid of her, so deep was his awe.

  'You—you are most certainly El-ve don!' he whispered. 'Only El-ve-dyn could know how to do such a thing. My people will be grateful to you forever when you save us from Sassa.'

  Irrational anger stirred within her at his assumption. 'No! I shall return to Earth as soon as I can—if I can. I am not El-ve-dyn.'

  Krasno was shocked. 'Then someday Sassa will come to Earth.'

  Eldyn shrugged, rejecting the thought her mind still unwilling to believe in the very existence of Sassa.

  Then it was time for his to visit the Chamber. His thought-body thinned out, vanished.

  Eldyn found their private world dreary and dead without him. With the bright, vital waves of his personality missing there was no joy. She grew intolerably lonely, anxious for his return.

  When he reappeared everything was right again in their self-created world. The news he brought was mixed. Their bodies were repairing satisfactorily, he reported, but outside the Chamber there was chaos and steadily deepening defeat for the Forest People. Many had been captured—she shuddered with horror—while others more fortunate had been killed.

  His eagerness to leave their dream world communicated itself to Eldyn, but their reasoning was different. He was dedicated to the struggle against Sassa. She hoped with her newfound knowledge to escape the brutalities of Varda and return to old familiar Earth.

  But the time was not yet.

  Once more he went away and once more he returned, this time almost at once. 'Eldyn!' he wailed even as he materialized. 'We must go back now!'

  'Why?' she demanded.

  'Because The Night approaches. Two Earth minds aiding the Faith have disturbed the balance. My people can not hold the Gateway much longer.'

  'But-?'

  'If we don't we shall be lost here forever!'

  Suddenly Eldyn's homesick longing for Earth gave way to hesitation. Here she was whole, not a cripple. There—

  But Krasno's absences had shown her that to be alone for all eternity on this self-created world would be unendurable. Even a disembodied brain could—would go mad from loneliness. And there was Marion, a prisoner of the Faith. She had no choice.