Ice and Shadow (4 page)

“Ah—here!”

She had crawled some distance back from the parapet, and now she dug away at what seemed to Roane an ordinary crack between those slabs of stone which made up the roof. “Your knife—give it to me! This must be loosed.”

Again Roane believed that Ludorica knew what she was about. She passed over the blade, nor did she voice the protest she felt when the Princess rammed its point into the crack.

Small rolls of black were gouged out, the Princess smearing them away with her hand. Now Roane could see that the break was much wider than it had first looked, so that a few minutes’ work cleared a recess wide enough for Ludorica to get her fingers into. She motioned impatiently to Roane—

“Move back—over there. This may take some time; the packing is very old. But these were meant for escape means during the first Nimp invasions and I have never seen one yet which would not answer. Though I must find the lock stone.”

She moved her hand back and forth, manifestly working her fingers within the crack. Then, even as the trap door had given, there was a thin grating sound and the stone block moved, sliding as a drawer toward the parapet. A whole section of that, as wide as the moving slab, sank out and forward as if on invisible hinges.

“Help me—” the Princess panted.

Roane scrambled to the opposite side of the slab, pushed at it. It slid on and on, passing out over the now horizontally leveled section of parapet to form a narrow bridge which did not quite touch that rocky spur beyond but came close to closing the gap.

The Princess sat back on her heels, panting with effort, her dirty face flushed. “We must be quick; these do not hold long—”

Roane did not try to take that narrow path on her feet but crawled on hands and knees, and was careful to keep her eyes to the tongue of stone which she must traverse. There was a giddy sensation in her head. She had never been fond of heights, though she had fought that fear through the wandering years of her life. This was the worst test she had yet faced.

She reached the end of the slab. There was still open space between its end and the ledge. She jumped, landing heavily on the stone. Then she stood ready, holding out her hands, to aid the Princess.

It was lucky that she did, for just as Roane took firm grip of the wrists the other girl held out to her, the stone tongue trembled, moved, backed toward the tower. She was just in time to jerk Ludorica to safety. The slab rolled into place, the parapet arose, and their bridge was gone.

“Now—for Yatton—” The Princess was trying to order the remnants of her robe. She took a step and then gave a sharp exclamation, holding up a bare foot to brush at its sole.

Roane thought of her own plans—to aid the Princess and then fade away into the woods, leaving the other to go where she chose. Now she discovered that she could not desert her companion. The rain was chill and the Princess was barefoot. How long would it be before those men in the tower found their captive gone? And then—how long before they ran her down again?

“Where is this Yatton of yours?” Roane demanded impatiently. The only alternative would be to take the Princess back to camp, and she could foresee only outright disaster in that. Either way she was in deeper trouble with every passing moment.

“Two leagues—nearer three.” The Princess raised her other foot to brush at it. “To speak the truth, I do not believe I can walk that without shoes. It would seem my feet are too tender for such wayfaring.”

“We cannot be too far now from Hitherhow.”

The Princess, having brushed her feet, was now busied in coiling the collar chain about her slender shoulders in a strange and ugly necklace. “I do not return to Hitherhow—not until I am sure—”

“Sure of what?”

“Of how I could be lifted from my bed there so easily with no guard’s hand raised to prevent it.” She eyed Roane bleakly, and then her eyes focused on the off-world girl far more searchingly.

“You—you are surely not one of us. But a Guardian would not have needed to climb that wall stair, cross a safety bridge. A Guardian, by all the old tales, needs merely to desire a thing and it becomes so. I do not know what you are, and you will not tell me who—”

“I am Roane Hume.” Roane had not meant to say that. It was again an odd compulsion to tell the truth which moved in her before she was aware. “I am not of Reveny, but I think I have proved I mean you no harm.”

“Roane Hume,” the Princess repeated. “Your name, too, is strange. But this is a time of many things which are not as they once were.” She had continued to eye Roane closely, but now she smiled and held out her hand.

And when she did so Roane experienced a melting inside her. It was as if no one had ever really smiled at her before, asking her aid, not demanding it impatiently. And her own well-tanned hand caught those whiter, if dirty, fingers and squeezed them for an instant before she remembered again that she, least of all on this world, had any right to commit herself in friendship, or even in a fleeting companionship.

“You pay no homage. In this you are like a Guardian,” commented the other. “Is it that where you come from there is no difference between those of the Blood Royal and others?”

“Something of that sort,” admitted Roane cautiously.

“I do not believe that one of Reveny could live easily in such a strangely ordered place,” the Princess began and then laughed, put her fingers to her lips as if she would catch back those frank words. “I mean no disrespect to your customs, Roane Hume. It is only that, bred in one pattern, I find such a different one bewildering.”

“We have no time to discuss it.” Roane fought back her own desire to ask questions, to know more of Ludorica. “If you cannot return to Hitherhow, and it is impossible to reach Yatton, then where will you go?”
She
must be on her way, but still she could not abandon the Princess.

“You have come from somewhere.” The Princess seized upon the very solution Roane dreaded. She had no idea what Uncle Offlas might do if she turned up at the camp with this bedraggled fugitive. That the end would be drastic, she could guess. But there did seem to be nothing else left to do.

“I will take you there then.” Her voice sounded harsh and cold in her own ears. She tried to think of some other way. There was one feeble hope. She might discover a hiding place in the woods, leave Ludorica there, get supplies, clothing, footwear for her, and eventually start her off to her own people. A project in which there were as many chances for failure as she had fingers and toes. But there was nothing else—

Now she turned to study what she could see of the tower and the woods. That they would be tracked she had no doubt. Therefore she must leave as devious a trail as possible. At the same time she must give the Princess as good a chance of escape as she could.

“We must head that way—” She gestured north, away from the camp. The detour would buy them time.

They climbed down from the ledge and the Princess must go slowly. Finally Roane took her supply bag, dumped its contents into the front of her coverall, slit it with the knife, and bound the halves about her companion’s feet. That done, they were able to march at a better pace.

The rain continued to fall steadily, if not with the force of the storm, and the Princess was shivering. Roane had a new worry. Immunized as she was through the arts of her own civilization, she was aware that those without such medical protection must be highly susceptible to exposure. What if Ludorica became ill, what if—Their future was far too full of such ifs. Roane should lead her directly to camp. Only the stern conditioning of Uncle Offlas kept her intent on leaving a confused trail which might ward off disaster.

But, she realized at last, Ludorica could not stand much more. Though the Princess made no complaint, she lagged behind. Twice Roane returned, having missed her, to find her charge leaning against a tree, holding to the bole as if she were lost without support. And finally she must half carry her along.

It was then they came to one of the stony hills Roane recognized as a landmark. On its side was a raw new gash. And there was the smell of burnt, smoldering wood. Lightning must have struck and, in so striking, started a landslide.

Where that had passed now gaped a hole. The slide must have uncovered a cave, or at least a deep crevice. Here was shelter and Roane brought the Princess to it.

CHAPTER 4

THEY WERE NOT TOO FAR FROM THE CAMP
, Roane knew. She could leave the Princess here, go for the supplies she needed and return. And she refused to think of all the difficulties which might face her during the performance of that plan. One step at a time was best.

Once they pushed into the raw opening in the cliff wall the rain no longer reached them. And though the opening itself was narrow, it widened out, stretching into the dark as if they had entered a place of considerable space. Lowering the Princess to the floor, Roane unlooped her beamer, turned it to full.

This was no natural cave. She was startled by the evidence the light made plain. It was the anteroom to a tunnel, one that she had enough knowledge of archaeology to know had not been formed by nature. In fact the walls were so smooth that she went to lay a hand on the nearest, finding that her finger tips slipped across it as they might on a sleek metal surface—though it still had the outward look of native stone.

Swiftly she triggered the control on her detect, heard the answering tick which told her she was right in her guess. Not only was this a nonnatural cut into the cliffside, but it bore a reading for ancient remains. By chance she had stumbled on the very site they had been prospecting for! Roane brought up her wrist, ready to try again to relay her news via com. But before she pressed the broadcast pin she remembered.

Bring Uncle Offlas and Sandar here—let them find the Princess—They would never allow any inhabitant of Clio to go free with the news of this discovery. If their cover was so broken, they would not only be under the ban of the Service; they could be planeted for all time wherever the authorities sent them. Uncle Offlas, Sandar, their careers blasted, blacklisted in the only field they knew—Their only alternative would be to silence the girl now sitting hunched on the stone, coughing and rubbing her hands across her flushed face. That silencing would not mean death, as it might have once. (Roane had heard the horror tales of the early days of space expansion.) But it might mean memory blocking, or even transportation off world into a limbo for Ludorica. Either way the innocent would suffer. All Roane could do was buy time and hope for some miracle to occur. Her head ached with her inability to see her way clear. She did not know what there was about the Princess that so enchained her sympathies. Perhaps she was being affected by a faint shadow of the original conditioning which had repatterned the settlers here when this unhappy test world had first been conceived.

As she stood there, caught in the net of the dilemma, a hand gripped her wrist, tightening above the com which she must use if she were to be true to her people and her training.

“What is this place? It is no cave!”

She had believed the Princess too sunk in exhaustion to be fully aware of her surroundings. But Ludorica was now on her feet, staring into Roane’s face, not accusingly, but as if she could not wholly believe she saw what her eyes reported.

“You have done it!” The Princess swayed as if it were hard to stand on her bruised feet. “You have brought us to Och’s Hide! The Crown—give me back the Crown!”

“Please, I do not know what you are talking about—what crown? And Och’s Hide—” Roane protested. Was it possible that a Forerunner find had already been made in Reveny, that they were too late? But the Service snoopers had picked up not the slightest hint of any such happening, one which would have caused stir enough to leave a deep imprint on public memory.

For a long moment the Princess stared into the eyes of the off-world girl, as if by the very force of her will she would get the truth from Roane, past any ambiguous or false answer. But whether she might have decided that her companion was lying Roane was not to know, for there was a dull roar from the mouth of the opening.

Roane whirled, the Princess clutching at her for support. Recklessly she turned the beamer on the opening to the outer world. But that door was no longer there. Instead the harsh glare of the beam showed a curtain of rocks and earth, with bits of splintered bough and torn leaf caught in it.

Crying out, Roane pushed aside the Princess, ran to tear at the fall which had corked the entrance. She was able to scrape out some of the rain-slicked clay, pull at the branches in it. But underneath was a boulder she could not move. Though perhaps she could use the power of her tool to undercut it.

“Are—are we trapped?”

Roane had gone to her knees, was holding the beamer steady on the boulder. In one way her own problem was solved. For both their lives now depended upon help from outside—from the camp. Only the men there had the equipment to handle this easily.

“Yes. I do not have power enough to undercut this. I shall have to call for help.” Should she warn the Princess of the results of that? Or continue to wait, always hoping that something might happen to make a hard choice easier?

“This could be Och’s Hide. If we must wait for help, need we remain crouching here? For if it is the Hide and I can find the Crown—” She drew a deep breath. “For me, for Reveny, this could be the greatest day in a hundred years!”

“What crown do you seek?” Roane thought of the many forms that Forerunner discoveries had taken in the past. There
had
been a few times when such had consisted of objects which could come under the age-old designation of treasure—gems, weird art forms of precious metal, and the like. Though what were more important by far, and what they had come to seek here, were machines, records, and the clue to such a find had been enough to make them risk search on Clio.

“Our crown—the Ice Crown of Reveny.” The Princess answered almost absently. She no longer watched Roane but gazed into the shadowed passage. Then she did turn, and her face was stricken with a shadow of fear and her hands went to her mouth, covering her lips. When she spoke again it was in a very low and shaken voice.

“That is a great secret, Roane Hume, one that only two people know—my grandfather the King, and I. And I have sworn by that which is most sacred to our people not to speak of it. Now I am forsworn.”

“But I am not of Reveny, and I shall swear as you wish to say nothing.” Roane, made uncomfortable by the bleak look on the other’s face, was quick to answer.

“If this is Och’s Hide, then the harm is small, covered and forgotten in a greater good. But I
must
know! Come, use your light and let us look—”

If they stumbled on Forerunner remains and the Princess saw them—But what did that matter now? Roane had to do what she should have done long ago.

“Let me first call for help to free us.” She fingered the com, moving its button in the camp call. Waited—and saw the answering code flash on the dial, demanding—But she interrupted with her own terse signal, of where she was and what she might have stumbled upon. Though she made no mention of the Princess.

The answering flash was a jubilant series of dashes, promising all speed. She had forethought enough to add then a warning of people in the forest, thinking of the searchers which might be combing there.

She half expected some question from Ludorica, but the Princess said nothing, only turned the beamer on the passage.

“Can you not tell me more of what you seek?” Roane asked as they started on.

“Knowing a part, there is no reason now for you not to hear it all. The Ice Crown is the crown of Reveny, given by the Guardians at the far beginning. Just as the Flame Crown is for the rulers of Leichstan, the Gold Circlet worn in Thrisk—but surely all this is known to you. My grandfather, King Niklas, came to the throne while he was yet a boy and his stepmother-under-second-rights, Queen Olava, was regent in his name—though she was no true kin, not even of the Blood Royal, having been taken in a marriage on the left hand by my great-grandfather when he was well into his dotage. She was of the line of Jarrfar. They once held this hill country and tried twice to make a kingdom of their own. However, having no crown power from the Guardians, they of course failed.

“But it was in their blood to rule and they did not lose that desire, even when their lands dwindled and they held only a stead keep and two villages. Olava had great beauty, and it became the plan of her people that they might achieve by an ambitious marriage what they had not been able to do by force of arms. So they gathered their resources and brought her to court, humbly presenting her as a handmaiden.

“The King had long been a widower. Oh, he had had his ladies during those years, but they were only passing fancies, and he chose shrewdly such as would be easily satisfied with small favors and not beg for greater. But though Olava seemed of a like sort in the beginning, she was not! And—well, it is said she had had occasion, before she came to court, to visit a certain wise woman who dabbled in things better left alone. But then such is always whispered of a woman who rises rapidly in the favor of a high-born man. As time passed she became first a wife of the left hand and minor law, and then the Queen—though she was not allowed to touch the Crown lawfully, for all her pleading and intrigues. My great-grandfather might be besotted with her, but he was royal born, and it is very true (though some today think this is also a legend) that the crowns choose who will wear them. And once they have so chosen, that king or queen cannot surrender them during his lifetime. It is a protection the Guardians set upon them. Though sometimes it has led to death for the proposed wearer, he being killed that another might present himself to the crown.

“So Olava had to bide her time until death reached for the King, hoping that before his son might confront the Crown for its choosing, her own candidate might take it. And he was her son—though the King would never let him drink from the kin-cup and thus acknowledge him as a true blood son before the Court, since he was not fully of the Blood.

“When the King died, they went to fetch the Ice Crown for the choosing. Though Olava tried to prevent my grandfather from standing before it, the choosing went as it has always done and he was proclaimed king. However, he was but a child and there were great lords enough favoring Olava to say that the old King had named her regent with them as a council to advise her.

“A common enough tale, one which has been told before. But what had not happened before is that when my grandfather came of an age to put on the Crown and thus assume all power, the Crown, brought from safekeeping for the ceremony, disappeared immediately thereafter before it could be returned.

“For Olava dared what never had been dared before. She took the Crown, meaning thus to defeat my grandfather. And the power of the Crown blasted her as it always does those handling it unlawfully. But before she died, my grandfather finding her privately, she laughed and said that it had gone to Och’s Hide and that only chance might now find it. Her clan, she said, would guard the way to it, and only when it accepted one of them would it appear again.

“Since then there has been this hidden darkness in Reveny. We dared not let any know of the loss. And since it has not yet been needed to hail a new king, the secret has been kept. My father died during a hunt in these very hills, but what he sought was no animal of the chase, but Och’s Hide. Two of my uncles also died young. The third disappeared. And now—King Niklas is very old, and it has fallen on me to take up the search. For if I cannot stand before Reveny with the Ice Crown when death claims him—then our line comes to an end. And Reveny itself will be overrun by Leichstan or Vordain, where true wearers of crowns rule. A land without a crown is a land without name or being. So the Guardians decreed in the far beginning.”

“Has it ever happened that a country did lose its crown?” asked Roane.

The Princess shivered, but with more than just the chill of the passage through which they walked now.

“Once, in Arothner. The crown—it was the Shell Crown, for Arothner was of the sea—was destroyed in a tidal wave. And what followed was horrible. The people—a madness fell upon them. They turned upon their own lords, upon each other, so that all the nations on their boundaries set up armies to keep them in their own torn land. And thereafter it has been accursed and no one goes there for fear the same mind-blasting force might strike them. What was once a great nation with many ships, and the trading city of Arth as its capital, is now only barren waste, and if any still live there, they are no longer men—

“At least the Ice Crown has not been destroyed, for then the same fate would have fallen on Reveny. And to that hope we hold. But it must be found!”

“It would seem that there are those who also know the secret and do not want this crown discovered—if your father and the others died and this has happened to you.”

“Yes.” The Princess’s lips tightened. “I guess and think I guess rightly, though I have no proof, that it is Reddick’s doing. Though I never thought he would go so far as to have me taken out of Hitherhow when it was well known I was within those walls. There must be some desperate need to bring him so into open action. It may be this passage he would protect. Roane, does it seem warmer here to you?”

Ludorica slowed, put out her hand as if to touch the wall, but did not quite complete that gesture.

She was right! The chill which had closed about them in the fore part of the passage was gone. This was like walking under a gentle sun, just comfortingly warm. Roane touched the wall. There was warmth there, more so than in the air about them. And also something else, a faint vibration.

Excitement surged in her. A Forerunner installation still alive? It had happened on other worlds—Limbo, Arzor. If that were possible then this would be one of the
big
finds, and anything—even breaking cover on a closed planet—would be forgiven the discoverers! This could be the answer to her problem.

“What is it?” Ludorica, watching her closely, must have read the elation on her face.

“I do not know—not yet—” Roane returned quickly and then asked: “Who is Reddick, and why would he want to hold the Crown?”

“Though the King would not claim Olava’s son, he ennobled the boy and gave him command of Hitherhow in his lifetime, a right which must be renewed in each generation. Reddick is his grandson. But so might he have the secret of Och’s Hide. If I can only find the Crown, Duke Reddick has no chance. Then he cannot lay hand to it before the King’s death, or as long as I live—”