Andrew, guessing some formal remark was expected, said, “Very. Thank you.”
“Now it is time to go over your story again, from the beginning, and in detail.” They moved to the fireside, Andrew on one of the high-backed benches, Ellemir in a low chair. Damon dropped to the rug at her feet, and said, “Now begin, and tell us everything. Especially I want to hear every word you exchanged with Callista; even if you did not understand it, there may be some clue in it which would mean something to us. You said that you saw her first after your plane crashed—?”
“No, that was not the first time,” Andrew said, and told them about the fortune-teller in the Trade City, and the crystal, and how he had seen Callista’s face. He hesitated at the thought of trying to tell them exactly how deep that random contact had gone, and finally left it without comment.
Ellemir asked, “And did you accept her as real, then?”
“No,” Andrew said. “I thought it was a game—the fortune-telling. Maybe even that the old dame was a procuress, showing me women for the usual reasons. Fortune-telling is usually a swindle.”
“How can that be?” Ellemir said. “Anyone who pretended to psi powers which she did not in fact possess would be treated as a criminal! That is a very serious offense!”
Andrew said dryly, “My people don’t believe there are any psi powers which are not pretended. At that time I thought that the girl was a dream. A wish-fulfillment, if you like.”
“Yet she was real enough for you to change your plans and decide to stay here on Darkover,” Damon said shrewdly.
Andrew felt uncomfortable under his knowing gaze, and said, “I had nowhere special to go. I’m—what’s the old saying? ‘I’m the cat who walked by himself and all places are alike to me.’ So this place was as good as any other and better than most.” (As he said it, he remembered Damon saying, “I know when I’m being lied to,” but he couldn’t explain it and felt foolish trying.)
“Anyhow, I stayed. Say it seemed like a good idea at the time. Call it a whim.”
To Carr’s relief, Damon left it at that. He said, “In any case, and for whatever reasons, you stayed. Exactly when was this?” Andrew figured out the time, and Ellemir shook her head in puzzlement.
“At that time, Callista was safe in the Tower. She would hardly have sent any psi message for help and comfort, certainly not to a stranger!”
Carr said stubbornly, “I don’t ask you to believe it. I’m trying to tell you just exactly what happened, the way I felt it. You’re supposed to be the ones who understand psychic things like this.” Again, their eyes met in that queer hostility.
Damon said, “In the overworld, time is often out of focus. There may have been some element of precognition, for both of you.”
Ellemir flared, “You’re acting as if you believe his story, Damon.”
“I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt, and I suggest you do likewise. I remind you, Ellemir: neither you nor I can reach Callista. If this man has done so, he may very well be our only link with her. It would be best not to anger him.”
She dropped her eyes and said curtly, “Go on. I won’t interrupt again.”
“So. Andrew, your next contact with Callista was when the plane crashed—?”
“After the plane crashed. I was lying half conscious on the ledge, and she called to me, and told me to take shelter.” Slowly, trying to recall word by word what Callista had said to him, he told of how she had saved him from trying to reenter the plane a moment before it crashed down into the bottom of the ravine.
“Do you suppose you could find the place again?” Ellemir asked.
“I don’t know. The mountains are bewildering, when you’re not used to them. I suppose I could try, though the trip was bad enough one way.”
“I see no reason why it’s necessary,” Damon said. “Go on. When did she next appear to you?”
“After the snow began. In fact, just about the time it was working up to blizzard proportions, and I was ready to give up and decide it was all completely hopeless, and the best thing to do was to pick out a comfortable spot to lie down and die.”
Damon thought that over a moment. He said, “Then the link between you is two-way. Possibly her need established a link with you, the first time. But your need and danger brought her to you that time, at least.”
“But if Callista is free in the overworld,” Ellemir cried out, “why could she not come to you there, Damon? Why could Leonie not reach her? It makes no sense!”
She looked so distressed, so frantic, that Carr could not endure it. It was too much like Callista’s weeping. “She told me she did not know where she was—that she was being kept in darkness. If it is any comfort to you, Ellemir, she came to me only because she had tried, and failed, to reach you.” He tried to reconstruct her exact words. It wasn’t easy, and he was beginning to suspect that Callista had reached his mind directly without too much need for words. “She said something like—I think— it was as if the minds of her kinsfolk and friends had all been erased from the surfaces of this world, and that she had wandered around a long time in the dark looking for you, until she had found herself in communication with me. And then she said that she kept coming back to me because she was frightened and alone”—he heard his own voice thicken and catch—“and because a stranger was better than no one at all. She said she thought she was being kept in a part of that level—overworld you call it?— where her people’s minds could not reach.”
“But how? Why?” Ellemir demanded.
“I’m sorry,” Carr said humbly. “I don’t know a thing about it. Your sister had a dreadful time trying to explain even that much to me, and I’m still not sure I’ve got it straight. If what I say isn’t accurate, it’s not because I’m lying, it’s because I just don’t have the language to put it in. I seemed to understand it when Callista was telling me about it, but it’s something else to try to tell it in your language.”
Ellemir’s face softened a little. “I don’t think you’re lying, Ann’dra,” she said, again mispronouncing his name in that strange soft way. “If you’d come here with some evil purpose, I’m sure you could tell much better lies than those. But anything you can tell us about Callista, please try to say it somehow. Has she been hurt, did she seem to be in pain, had she been ill-treated? Did you actually see her, and how did she look? Oh, yes, you must have seen her if you recognized me.”
Andrew said, “She did not seem to be injured, although there was a bruise on her cheek. She was wearing a thin blue dress, it looked like a nightgown; no one in her right senses would have worn it out-of-doors. It had—” He closed his eyes, the better to visualize her. “It had some kind of embroidery around the hem, in green and gold, but it was torn and I could not see the design.”
Ellemir shivered faintly. “I know the gown. I have one like it. Callista wore it to bed the night we were—raided. Tell me more, quickly!”
“Proof of the truth of his tale,” Damon said. “I saw her, only for an instant, in the overworld. She still wore that nightdress. Which tells me two things. He has in fact seen Callista. And—a little more ominous—she cannot, for some reason, although she walks in the overworld as if it were her own courtyard, clothe herself in anything more suitable, even in thought. When I have seen her before this in the overworld, she was clothed as befits a leronis— a sorceress,” he added to Andrew, in explanation, “in her crimson robes, and veiled as a Keeper should be.” He repeated, unwillingly, what Leonie had said: “If she were drugged, or entranced, or her starstone taken from her, or if she had been so ill-treated that her mind had darkened into madness—”
“I can’t believe that,” Andrew said. “Everything she did was too—too sensible, too purposeful, if you will. She guided me to one specific place, in the blizzard; and she came back again, so she could show me where to find food that had been stored there for emergencies. I asked her if she was cold, and she told me it was not cold where she was. Also—when I saw the bruise on her face??
?I asked, and she told me she had not been hurt or really ill-treated.”
Damon said, ‘Try to remember everything she said to you.“
“She told me that the herdsman’s hut where I sheltered from the storm was not more than a few miles from here. What she said was, she wished she were there with me in body, so that when the storm was over, in a little while she could be—” he frowned, again trying to remember a communication which now seemed to be more in thoughts than words—“warm and safe and at home.”
“I know the place,” Damon said. “Coryn and I slept there, when we were boys, on hunting trips. It is something, that Callista could come there in thought.” He rowned, trying to add it all up. “What else did Callista say to you?”
It was after that, that I woke and found her sleeping almost in my arms, Andrew thought, but I’m damned if I’m going to tell you about that. That’s strictly between me and Callista. And yet, if some random thing she had said to him might give Damon a clue to her actual whereabouts— He paused, irresolute.
Damon could clearly see the conflict in his face, and followed it more accurately than Andrew would have believed. He said kindly, trying to spare him, “I can well believe that alone in the dark, and both of you in strange and hostile places, you may well have exchanged—” He paused, and Andrew, sensitized to his mood, knew that Damon was searching for a word which would not trespass too strongly on his emotions. “Exchanged—confidences. You don’t have to tell us about that.”
Funny, how these people can get so close to you, know almost what you’re thinking. Andrew was aware of Damon’s attempt not to trespass on his privacy, or on the more intimate things he had shared with Callista. Intimate… funny word when I’ve never set eyes on her. To have come so close, so close to a woman I’ve never seen. He was also aware of Ellemir’s sullen face and knew that she, too, sensed something of how close he had come to her twin; and that she did not approve.
Damon, too, sensed Ellemir’s resentment. “Child, you should be grateful that anyone, anyone at all, could reach Callista. Just because you could not come to her and comfort her, are you going to resent the fact that a stranger could? Would you rather that she should be all alone in her prison?” He turned back to Andrew and said, as if apologizing for Ellemir, “She is very young, and they are twins. But for your kindness to my kinswoman, I am ready to be your friend. Now, if you can tell me anything she said, about her captors—”
“She said she was in the dark,” Andrew said, “and that she did not know precisely where she was, that if she knew precisely, she could have left the place somehow. I didn’t quite understand that. She said that since she did not know exactly, her body—that’s how she seemed to differentiate it—had to stay where they had confined it. And she cursed them.”
“Did she say who they were?” Damon asked.
“What she said made no sense to me,” Andrew answered. “She said that they were not men.”
“Did she tell you how she knew that? Did she say that she had seen them?” Damon asked eagerly.
“No,” Andrew answered. “She said that she had not seen them, that she suspected they had kept her in darkness so that she should not see them. But she suspected they were not men because—” Again he hesitated a little, trying to find a way to phrase it, and then thought, Oh hell, if Callista didn’t mind talking about it to a stranger it can’t be anything to be so embarrassed about. “She said she knew they were not men because none of them had attempted to rape her. She took it for granted that any man would have done just that, which says something funny about the men of your planet!”
Damon said, “We knew already that whoever would stoop to kidnapping a leronis, a Keeper, would be no friend to the people of the Domains. I had surmised that she was stolen, not as any woman might be kidnapped, for revenge, or slavery, but quite specifically because she was a trained telepath. They could not have hoped that she could be forced to use her Keeper’s powers against her own people. But if she was kept a prisoner, and her starstone taken from her, she could not be used against them, either. And kidnappers, if they were men, would know that a Keeper is always a virgin; that there was a simpler, less dangerous way to make a Keeper powerless to use her skills against them. A Keeper in the hands of her people’s enemies would not long remain a virgin.”
Carr shuddered in revulsion. What a hell of a world, where this kind of war against women is taken for granted!
Once again Damon followed his thoughts and said, with a little wry twist of his mouth, “Oh, it’s neither that easy nor that one-sided, Andrew. The man who tries to ravish a leronis has no easy or innocent victim, but takes his very life, not to mention his sanity, in his hands. Callista is an Alton, and if she strikes with her full Gift, she can paralyze, if not kill. It can be done, it has been done, but it’s a more equal battle than you would imagine. No sane man lays hands on a Comyn sorceress except at her own desire. But to anyone who has good reason to fear that a Keeper’s powers will be used against him, it may seem worth the danger.”
“But,” Ellemir said, “she has not been touched, you say.”
“She said not.”
“Then,” Damon said, “I think my first surmise is true. Callista is in the hands of the cat-men, and now we know why. I guessed earlier, when I spoke to Reidel, that somewhere in the darkening lands, someone or something is experimenting with unlicensed and forbidden matrix stones, trying to work with telepath powers; to harness these forces outside the wardenship of the Comyn and the Seven Domains. Men have done this before. But as far as I know, this is the first time any nonhuman race has tried to do so.”
Suddenly Damon shuddered, as if with cold or fear. He reached blindly for Ellemir’s hand, as if to reassure himself of something solid and warm.
As if, thought Andrew, he were in darkness and fear like Callista’s.
“And they have done it! They have made the darkening lands uninhabitable to mankind! They can come on us with invisible weapons, and even Leonie could not find Callista when they had hidden her under their darkness! And they are strong, Zandru seize them with scorpions! They are strong. I am Tower-trained, but they flung me out of their level, into a storm I could not overcome. They mastered me as if I were a child! Gods! Gods! Are we helpless against them, then? Is it hopeless?”
He buried his face in his hands, shuddering. Andrew looked at him in surprise and consternation. Then, slowly, he spoke, reaching out to lay his hand on Damon’s shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “That doesn’t help anybody. Look, you just pointed out that Callista still has her powers, whatever they are. And she can reach me. Maybe, just maybe— I don’t know anything about this kind of thing, or whatever wars and feuds you have in your world, but I do know about Callista, and I—I care a lot about her. Maybe there’s some way I can find out where she is— help get her back for you.”
Damon raised his face, white and drawn, and looked at the Earthman in wild surmise. “You know,” he said to Andrew, “you’re right. I hadn’t thought of that. You can still reach Callista. I don’t know why, or how, it happened, or even what we can do with it, but it’s the one hope we have. You can reach Callista. And she can come to you, when another Keeper can’t reach her, when her own twin is barred away from her. It may not be completely hopeless after all.”
He reached out and gripped Andrew’s hands, and somehow the Terran sensed that for him this was a very unusual thing, that touch, among telepaths, was reserved for close intimacy. It put him almost unendurably in touch with Damon for an instant—Damon’s exhaustion and fear, his desperate worry about his young cousins, his own deeper doubts and terrors about his own inability to meet this challenge, his horror of the overworld, his deep and desperate doubts of his very manhood… For a moment Andrew wanted to withdraw, to reject this undesired intimacy which Damon, at the end of his endurance, had thrust on him; then he met Ellemir’s eyes, and they were so much like Callista’s now, pleading, no longer scornful, so full of fear
for Damon (Why, she loves him, Andrew thought in a flash; he doesn’t seem much of a man to me either, but she loves him, even if she doesn’t know it) that he could not refuse their plea. They were Callista’s people, and he loved Callista, and for better or worse he was entangled in their affairs. I’d better get used to it now, he thought, and in a clumsy surge of something almost like affection, he put his arm around Damon’s shoulders and hugged the other man roughly. “Don’t you worry so much,” he said. “I’ll do what I can. Sit down, now, before you collapse. What in the hell have you been doing to yourself, anyway?”
He shoved Damon down on the bench before the fire. The unendurable contact lessened, dropped away. Andrew felt confused and a little dismayed at the intensity of the emotion that had surged up. It was like having a kid brother, he thought, cloudily. He’s not strong enough for this kind of thing. It struck him that Damon was older than he was and far more experienced in these curious contacts, but he still felt older, protective.
Damon said, “I’m sorry. I was out all night in the over-world, searching for Callista. I—I failed.”
He sighed, with a sense of utter relief. He said, “But now we know where she is, or at least how to get into contact with her. With your help—”
Andrew warned, “I know nothing about these things.”
“Oh, that.” Damon shrugged it aside. He looked completely exhausted. He said, “I should have more sense; I’m not used to the overworld anymore. I’ll have to rest and try again. Just now, I haven’t any more strength. But when I can try again”—he straightened his back—“the damned cat-men had better look to themselves! I know, now, I think, what we can do.”
And that, Andrew thought, is one hell of a lot more than I know. But I guess Damon knows what he’s doing, and that’s enough for me, for now.