The Spell Sword

  He tried to blur everything else, every other sensation, the feel of Ellemir’s cold hands on his wrists and her warm breath against his throat, the faint woman-scent of her closeness; he blotted these out, blotted out the flicker of fire and candle beyond them, dimmed the shadows of the room, let vision sink into the blue pulsing of the starstone. He sensed, rather than physically felt, the relaxing of his muscles as his body went insensible. For an instant nothing existed except the vast blue of the starstone, pulsing with the beating of his heart, then his heart stopped, or at least he was no longer conscious of anything except the expanding blueness: a glare, a blue flame, a sea rushing in to drown him…

  With a brief, tingling shock, he was out of his body and standing over it, looking down from above, with a certain ironic detachment, on the thin, slumped body in the chair, the frail, frightened-looking girl kneeling and grasping its wrists. He was not really seeing, but perceiving in some strange, dark way through closed eyelids.

  In the overlight forming around him he cast a swift downward look. The body in the chair had been wearing a shabby jerkin and leather riding breeches, but as always when he stepped out he felt taller, stronger, more muscular, moving with effortless ease as the walls of the great hall thinned and moved away. And this body, if it could be called a body, was wearing a glimmering tunic of gold and green that flickered with a faint firelight glow. Leonie had told him once, “this is how your mind sees itself.” He was bare-armed and barefoot, and he felt an incongruous flicker of amusement. To go out in the blizzard like this? But of course the blizzard was not here, not at all, although if he listened, he could hear the faint howl of the wind, and he knew the violence of the storm must be intense indeed if even its echo could penetrate into the over-world. As he formulated that thought he felt himself begin to shiver and quickly dismissed the thought and memory of the blizzard; his consciousness of it could solidify it on this plane and bring it here.

  He moved, gliding, not conscious of separate steps. He was conscious of Callista’s jeweled butterfly still between his hands, fluttering like a live thing, beating with the impress of her mental “voice.” Or rather, since the jewel itself was in the hands of his body, “down there,” the mental counterpart of the ornament which he bore “here.” He tried to sensitize himself to the special reverberations of that “voice,” adding to it his call, a shout that felt to him like a commanding bellow.

  “Callista!”

  There was no answer. He had not really expected an answer; if it had been that simple, Ellemir would have already made contact with her twin. Around him the over-world was as still as death, and he looked around, all the time aware that the world, and himself, were only comfortable visualizations for some intangible level of reality… That he saw it as a “world” because it was more convenient to see and feel it that way than as an intangible mental realm; that he visualized himself as a body, striding across a great barren empty plain, because it was easier and less disconcerting than visualizing himself as a bodiless point of thought adrift in other thoughts. At the moment it looked to him like an enormous flat horizon, stretching away dim and bare and silent into endless spaces and skies. In the far distance shadows drifted, and as his curiosity was roused about them, he moved rapidly, without the need to take steps, in their direction.

  As he came nearer, they became clearer, human forms which looked oddly gray and unfocused. He knew that if he spoke to them, they would immediately vanish—if they had nothing to do with him or his quest—or immediately come into sharp focus. The overworld was never empty: there were always minds out on the astral for one reason or another, even if they were only sleepers out of their bodies, their minds crossing his in the formless realm of thought. He saw a few faces, dimly, like reflections in water, of people he vaguely recognized. He knew that these were kinsmen and acquaintances of his who were sleeping or deep in meditation, and that he had somehow come into their thoughts; that some of them would wake with a memory of having seen him in a dream. He passed them without any attempt to speak. None of them could have any bearing on his search.

  Far in the distance he saw a great shining structure which he recognized from previous visits to this world, and knew it was the Tower where he had been trained, years before. Usually he bypassed it, in such journeys, without passing near; now he felt himself drifting nearer and nearer to it. As he came closer it took on form and solidity. Generations of telepaths had been trained here, exploring the overworld from this base and background. No wonder the Tower stood firm as a landmark in the overworld. Surely Callista would have come here, if she was out on the planes and was free, he thought.

  Now he stood on the plain, just below the looming structure of the Tower. Grass, trees, and flowers had begun to formulate around him, his own memory and the joint visualizations of everyone who came into the overworld from the Tower keeping them relatively solid here. He walked amid the familiar trees and scented flowers now with an aching sense of loss, of nostalgia, almost of homesickness. He passed through the dimly shining gateway, and stood briefly on the remembered stones. Suddenly, before him, stood a veiled woman, but even through her veils he knew her: Leonie, the sorceress-Keeper of the Tower during his years there. Her face was a little blurred: half, he knew, the face he remembered; half, the face she wore now.

  “Leonie,” he said, and the dim figure solidified, took on more definite and clear form, even to the twin copper bracelets, formed like serpents, which she always wore. “Damon,” she said, with gentle reproach, “what are you doing out here on this plane tonight?”

  He held out the silver butterfly clasp, and felt it cold and solid between his fingers. He said, and heard his own voice strangely thinned, “I am looking for Callista. She is gone, and her twin cannot find her anywhere. Have you seen her here?”

  Leonie looked troubled. She said, “No, my dear. We, too, have searched, and she is nowhere on any plane we can reach. From time to time I can feel her somewhere, her living presence, but no matter where I look I cannot come to her.”

  Damon felt deeply disquieted. Leonie was a powerful, trained telepath, and all the accessible levels of the over-world were known to her. She walked in that world as readily as in the solid world of the body. The fact that Callista’s distress was known to her, and that she herself could not locate her pupil and friend, was ominous. Where, in any world, was Callista hiding?

  “Perhaps you can find her where I cannot,” said Leonie gently. “Blood kin is a deep tie, and may link kindred when friendship or affinity fails. Somehow I think she is there.” Leonie raised a shadowy arm and pointed. Damon turned in the direction indicated, and saw only a thick, foggy darkness.

  “The darkness is new on this plane,” Leonie said, “and none of us can breach it, at least not yet. When we move in that direction we are flung back, as if by force. I do not know what new minds move on this level, but they have not come here by our leave.”

  “And you think Callista may have strayed into that level and be held there, unable to penetrate that shadow with her mind?”

  “I fear so,” Leonie said. “If she were kept drugged, or entranced; or if her starstone had been taken from her, or she had been so ill-treated that her mind had been darkened by madness; then it might appear to us, on this level, as if she were imprisoned in a great and impenetrable darkness.”

  Quickly, with the swiftness of thought, Damon told Leonie what he knew of the abduction of Callista, from her very bed at Armida.

  “I do not like it,” Leonie said. “What you tell me frightens me. I have heard that there are strange men from another world, at Thendara, and that they have come there by permission of the Hasturs. Now and again one of them strays in a dream on to the overworld, but their forms and their minds are strange and mostly they vanish if one speaks to them. They are only shadows here, but they seem harmless enough, men like any others, without much skill at moving in the realms of the mind. I find it hard to believe that these Terrans—that is what they call th
emselves—can have had any part in what has happened to Callista. What reason could they have had? And since they are on our world by sufferance, why would they antagonize us by such conduct? No; there seems more purpose to it than that.”

  Damon became conscious that he was cold again, and shivering. The plain seemed to tremble under his feet. He knew that if he wished to remain in the overworld, he must move on. Speaking to Leonie had been a comfort, but he must not linger here if he hoped to carry on his search for Callista. Leonie seemed to follow his resolution, and said, “Search, then. Take my blessing.” Even as she raised her hand in the ritual gesture, her form faded and Damon discovered that he had receded a great distance and was no longer standing on the familiar courtyard stones of the Tower, but had come a long way over the gray plain toward the darkness.

  The cold grew and he shuddered with the recurrent blasts, like icy winds, that beat out from that dark place. The darkening lands, he thought grimly, and against the cold he quickly visualized himself dressed in a thick gold and green cloak. The cold lessened, but only slightly, and his motion toward the darkness grew ever slower, as if some pressure from that darkness were flowing out, pushing him backward, backward. He struggled against it, calling out Callista’s name again. If she’s anywhere out on the planes, she’ll hear that, he thought. But if Leonie had sought in vain, how could he hope to succeed?

  The darkness flowed, like thick boiling cloud, and seemed suddenly peopled with dark twisted shapes, menacing half-seen faces, threatening gestures made by bodiless limbs that were seen for a moment in the darkness and vanished again. Damon felt a spasm of fear, an almost anguished longing for the solid world and his solid body and the fireplace at Armida… The world seemed full of half-heard threats and cries. Go back! Go back or you will die!

  He slogged painfully onward, forcing his way hard against the pressure. Callista’s butterfly clasp, between his hands, seemed to shine, and flutter, and vibrate, and he knew that he was coming nearer to her, nearer…

  “Callista! Callista!”

  For an instant the thick dark cloud thinned, and almost, for a moment, he saw her, a shadow, a wisp, in a thin, torn nightdress, her hair loose and tangled, her face dark and bruised with pain or tears. She stretched out her hands to him, in appeal, and her mouth moved, but he could not hear. Then the darkness boiled up again, and for a moment he saw flashing sword-blades, curiously shaped, slashing.

  Quickly, Damon shifted ground again, and with a swift thought, transformed the thick warm cloak into a gleaming coat of armor. None too soon. He heard the half-visible sword-blades clash against it and a nightmarish stab of pain came and went, momentarily, near his heart.

  The swords retreated into the darkness, and again he tried to press forward. Then the darkness began to boil up again, like the whirling of a tornado, and out of the thick bubbling whorl of the maelstrom of cloud came a thin, malevolent voice.

  “Go back. You cannot come here.”

  Damon stood his ground, working hard to make the feel of the surface beneath his boots solid, to formulate familiar paving stone so that he and his invisible antagonist stood on ground of his choosing. But beneath him the surface rippled, and flowed like water until he felt dizzy, and again the invisible voice spoke, in tones of command.

  “Go, I tell you. Go while you still can.”

  “By what right do you tell me to go?”

  The indifferent voice said thinly, “I know nothing of right. I have the power to make you go, and I shall do so. Why provoke such a struggle without need?”

  Damon stood his ground, although it seemed as if he were swaying in a sickening up-and-down rhythm, his head pounding with pain. He said, “I will go if my kinswoman comes with me.”

  “You will go, at once, and that is all I intend to say,” the voice said, and Damon felt an enormous thrust of power, a great blow that sent his head reeling. He struggled inside the boiling darkness, and cried out, “Show yourself! Who are you? By what right do you come here?” The starstone—or its mental counterpart—was still between his fingers; he swung it over his head, like a lantern, and the darkness was illuminated by a dazzling blue glare. By that light he beheld a tall, strangely robed figure, with a savage cat’s head, and great claws…

  And at that moment there was another of those savage blows. The darkness receded, into a great howling, screaming wind, and Damon found himself alone on what felt like a slippery hillside. Around him was the buffeting wind, the razor-needles of sleet driving into his face… the thick driving snow, the storm…

  He struggled to regain his footing, knowing that out here he had met something he had never before encountered on this plane. His flesh seemed to crawl, and he tensed himself, knowing that now he must fight for his sanity, his very life…

  The telepaths of Darkover were trained to work with the starstones, which had the power, assisted by the human mind, of transforming energies directly from one form to another. In the realms where their minds traveled to encompass this work, there were strange things, intelligences which were not human, or material, but came from other realms of existence. Most of them had nothing to do with humankind at all. Others were prone, when touched by human minds come seeking in the realms to which they, the alien intelligences belonged, to meddle with those human minds. A few of them, reached by human minds trained to reach their levels, remained in contact with the human levels, and were visualized as demons, or even as gods. The Ridenow Gift, Damon’s Gift, had been deliberately bred into the minds of his family, to allow them to scent and make contact with these alien presences.

  But he’d never seen one who took that form… the great cat.… It was deliberately malevolent, not just indifferent. It had thrust him here, into the level of the blizzard…

  He forced himself to search for rationality. The blizzard was not real. It was a thought-blizzard, solidified here by thought, and he could take refuge in other realms where it did not blow. He visualized warm sunshine, a sunlit mountainside… for a moment the snow-needles thinned, then began to rage with renewed force. Someone was projecting it at him… someone or something. The catmen? Was Callista in their power, then?

  The gusts of wind strengthened, forcing his weakening body to its knees. He struggled, slipped, and fell on rugged ice, which cut him. He felt himself bleeding, freezing, weakening…

  Dying…

  He thought, with icy rationality, I’ve got to get off this level, I’ve got to get back to my body. If he was trapped here, out of his body, his body would live a while, spoonfed and helpless, slowly withering, and finally die.

  Ellemir, Ellemir, he sent out the call that sounded like a scream. Wake me, bring me back, get me out of here! Again and again he shouted, feeling the howling of the winds carry his cry away into the snow-cut needled darkness. His face was cut, his hands bleeding as he struggled again and again to get to his feet in the snow, to raise himself to his knees, to crawl even…

  His struggles grew fainter and fainter, and a sense of total hopelessness, almost of resignation, came over him. I should never have trusted to Ellemir. She isn’t strong enough. I’ll never get out. It seemed he had been sliding, slipping, floundering in the nightmare blizzard for hours, days…

  Agony lanced through him, and an icy pain squeezed his head. A glare of blue fire sprang up wildly around him, there was a shock like a thunderclap, and Damon, weak and gasping and exhausted, was lying in the armchair in the great hall at Armida. The fire had long burned down, and the room was icy cold. Ellemir, pale and terrified, her lips blue and chattering, looked down at him. “Damon, oh, Damon! Oh, wake up, wake up!”

  He gasped, painfully. He said, “I’m here, I’m back.” Somehow, she had reached into the nightmare of the over-world and brought him back. His head and heart were pounding; and his teeth chattering. He looked around. Daylight was beginning to steal through the long windows; outside, the courtyard lay quiet and peaceful in the daybreak; the storm was over, inside and out. He blinked and shook his head. ?
??The blizzard,” he said, dimly.

  “Did you find Callista?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I found whatever has her, and it nearly took me too.”

  “I couldn’t wake you—and you were blue and gasping, and moaning so. Finally I grabbed the starstone,” Ellemir confessed. “When I did, I thought you were having a convulsion. I thought I’d killed you—”

  She nearly had, Damon thought. But better that than leaving him to die in the raging blizzard of the overworld. She had been crying. “Poor girl, I must have frightened you out of your wits,” he said tenderly, and drew her down to him. She lay across his knees, still trembling; he became aware that she was nearly as cold as he was. He caught up a fur lap-robe that lay across the back of the settle, and wrapped it around them both. Soon he would mend the fire; just now it was enough to huddle within its comforting warmth, to feel the girl’s icy stiffness begin to lessen a little and her shivering quiet. “My poor little love, I frightened you, and you’re half dead with cold and fright,” he murmured, holding her tight against him. He kissed her cold, tear-wet cheeks and became aware that he had been wanting to do that for a long, long time; he let his kisses move slowly from her wet face to her cold lips, trying to warm them with his own. “Don’t cry, darling. Don’t cry.”

  She stirred a little against him, not in protest but in returning awareness, and said, almost sleepily, “The servants are still abed. We should make up the fire, call them—”

  “Damn the servants.” He didn’t want anyone interrupting this new awareness, this new and beautiful closeness. “I don’t want to let you go, Ellemir.”

  She lifted her lips and kissed him on the mouth. “You don’t have to,” she said softly, and they lay quietly, close together in the great fur robe, barely touching, but warmed by the contact. Damon was conscious of deathly weariness and of hunger, the terrible depletion of nervous force which was the inevitable penalty of telepathic work. Rationally he knew he should get up, mend the fire, have some food brought, or he might pay in hours or days of lassitude and illness. But he could not bring himself to move, was deeply reluctant to let Ellemir out of his arms. For a moment, letting the exhaustion have its way, he lapsed into brief sleep or unconsciousness.