The Spell Sword (20 page)

Only two of the little solid cat-things were still on their feet and fighting
below him. Unconcerned, he saw one of them go down, spitted on the sword of the
man who fought afoot. One of the horsemen struck down the second. The swirling
shadow covered the great glaring eyes, their green glow changing, behind the
gray wall of mist, to a red glow, like distant, burning coals; then the gray
wall blotted them out. A black arrow of force hurled at him and he caught it on
his flaming blade. He waited, but the grayness remained, unrippled, even the
last glimpse of the glowing cat-eyes gone, and finally he permitted himself to
sink earthward, into his body.

There was blood on his sword, and blood on the pale grayish fur of the twisted
dead things in the snow. He rested the point of his sword on the ground, and
suddenly became aware that he was shaking all over.

Eduin wheeled his horse and rode toward him. He had broken open his face-wound
and, from the blue unguent smeared over it to keep out the cold, drops of blood
were trickling; otherwise he seemed unhurt. "They're gone," he said, and his
voice sounded oddly faraway and weary. "I got the last of them. Will I catch
your horse, Lord Damon?"

The sound of his name recalled Damon from a blind, baseless anger, directed at
Eduin, an anger he could not understand. Shaking, he realized he had been about
to curse the man, to scream at him with rage for riding down his prey, an anger
so great that he was shaking from head to foot, with a strange half-memory of
charging the last of the cat-men, and the other had thundered past him and
stolen the last of the quarry from him.

"Lord Damon!" Eduin's voice was stronger now, and alive with concern. "Are you
wounded? What ails you, vai dom?"

Damon passed his sweating palm over his forehead. He realized for the first time
that there was a scratch, hardly more than a razor-cut, on the back of his left
hand. He said, "I've cut myself worse at shaving," and in that instant.

. In that instant Andrew Carr sat up, shaking his head, sweating and trembling
with the memory of what he-he?-had done and seen. He had lived through the
entire battle in Damon's mind and body.

Damon was safe. And Andrew could keep contact with him-and with Callista.

The afternoon clouds were gathering when Damon and his party rode down a narrow
and grass-grown roadway toward a little cluster of cottages lying in a valley at
the foot of a cliffside.

"Is this the village of Corresanti?" Eduin asked. "I am not overfamiliar with
this countryside. And besides"-he scowled-"everything looks strange in this
damnable mist. Is it really there-the shadow and darkness-or have they done
something to our minds to make us think it's darker?"

"I think it's really there," Damon said slowly. "Cats are not sunlight animals
but nocturnal ones. It may be that whoever is doing this to these lands feels
discomforted by the light of the sun, and has spread a mist over it, to ease the
eyes of his people. It's not a complicated piece of work with a starstone, but
of course none of our people would want to do it: we have little enough sunlight
even in summer.

Not a complicated bit of work. But it takes power. Whoever their cat-adept may
be, he has power, and is growing rapidly. If we cannot disarm him swiftly, he
may become too powerful for anyone to do so. Our task is to rescue Callista. But
if we rescue her and leave these lands lying beneath the shadow, others will
suffer. Yet we cannot move against him until Callista is free, or his first act
will be to kill her.

He had been half prepared for what he was to see by the memory of Reidel's
words- "withered gardens"-but not for any such scene of blight and disaster as
met his eyes as he rode past the little houses and fanns. The fields lay
shadowed beneath the dimmed sun, straggling plants withering in the ground, the
drainage ditches fouled and filled with rotting fungus, the great sails of the
windmills broken and torn, gaping useless. Here and there, from one of the
barns, came the doleful sound of untended and starving beasts. In the middle of
the road, almost beneath Eduin's hooves, a ragged child sat listlessly gnawing
on a filthy root. As the horsemen passed, he raised his eyes, and Damon thought
he had never seen such terror and hopelessness in any face that could vaguely be
called human. But the child did not cry. Either he was long past tears or, as
Damon suspected, he was simply too weak. The houses seemed deserted, except for
blank, listless faces now and again at a window, turned incuriously to the sound
of their hooves.

Eduin raised his hands to his face, whispering, "Blessed Cassilda, guard us! I
have seen nothing like this since last the trailmen's fever raged in the
lowlands! What has come to them?"

"Hunger and terror," Damon said briefly. "Terror so great that even hunger
cannot drive them into the darkened fields." He felt a fury and rage which
threatened to spill out into furious cursing, but he clutched at his starstone
and deliberately stilled his breathing. Another score against the Great Cat and
his minions, the cat-folk he had let loose to amuse themselves in this innocent
village.

The other Guardsman, Rannan, had no such aid to calm. He said, and his face
looked green with sickness, "Lord Damon, can't we do something for these people-
anything?"

Damon said, torn with pity, "Whatever we could do would be a small bandage on a
deathwound, Rannan, and we could help them but little before whatever had
overcome them turned its strength on us and we joined them, creeping into a
doorway to lie down and die in despair. We can only strike at the heart of the
cancer, perhaps; and we dare not do that until my kinswoman is safe."

"How do we know she is not dead already, Lord?"

"I will know through the stone," Damon said. It was easier than explaining that
Andrew would somehow manage to communicate it. "And I swear to you, if once we
hear she is dead, we will turn all our forces to attack and exterminate this
whole nest of evil-to the last claw and whisker!" Resolutely he turned his eyes
away from the horror of blight and ruin. "Come. First we must reach the caves."

And once there, he thought grimly, we're likely to have our troubles getting
inside, or finding out where belowground they keep Callista hidden.

He focused his mind on the stone, looking across at the base of the hillside
where, he remembered from a boyhood excursion years ago, a great doorway led
into the caves of Corresanti. Years ago they had been used for shelter against
the severest winters, when snow lay so deep on the Kilghard Hills that neither
man nor animal could survive; now they were used for storage of food, for
cultivation of edible mushrooms, for the aging of wines and cheeses, and similar
uses. Or they had been used for these things until the cat-people came into this
part of the world. There should be food stored there, Damon thought, to tide
these starving folk over until their next harvest Unless the cat-folk had
destroyed their hoards of food out of sheer wantonness. They could bring the
villagers through. Assuming, that was, that they came through themselves.

It seemed to him now that a great and palpable darkness beat outward from the
dark edge of the cliff, some miles from them, where the doorway of the caves of
Corresanti was hidden. He had been right in his conjecture, then. The caves of
Corresanti were the very heart of the shadow, the focus at the heart of the
darkening lands. Somewhere in there some monstrous intelligence, not human,
experimented blindly with monstrous, unknown power. Damon was a Ridenow, and the
Ridenows had been bred to scent and deal with alien intelligences, and that
ancient Gift in his very blood and cells tingled with awareness and terror. But
he mastered it, and rode steadily on through the deserted streets of the
village.

He looked around, searching for any human face, any sign of life. Was everyone
here terrified into insensibility? His eyes fell on a house he knew; he had
stayed here one summer, as a boy, so long, so very long ago. He pulled up his
horse, a sudden ache clutching his heart.

I haven't seen any of them for years. My foster mother married one of the
MacArans, a paxman to Dom Esteban, and I used to come here in the summer. Her
sons were my first playmates. Suddenly Damon could stand it no longer. He had to
know what fared in that house!

He pulled the horse to a stop and dismounted, tying the horse to the post. Eduin
and Rannan called questioningly, but he did not answer; slowly, they dismounted,
but did not follow him toward the steps of the cottage. He knocked; only silence
followed the knocking, and he pulled the door open. After a moment a man
slouched toward the door, his eyes vacant; he cringed away as if by habit. Damon
thought, confused, This is surely one of Alanna's sons. I played with him as a
boy, but how changed! He fumbled for the name. Hjalmar? Estill?

"Cormac," he said at last, and the blank eyes looked up at him, an idiotic smile
touching the features briefly.

"Serva, dom," he muttered.

"What has come to you? What-what do they want of you, what is happening here?"

Words came tumbling out by themselves. "Do you see the cat-men often? What do
they-"

"Cat-men?" the man mumbled, a hint of question in his dull voice. "Not
men-women! Cat-hags. they come in the night and tear your soul to ribbons."

Damon shut his eyes, sickened. Blank-faced, Cormac turned back into the house;
the visitors had ceased, for him, to exist. Damon stumbled back into the street,
cursing.

The sound of hooves caught his ears; turning, he glimpsed the riders, coming
swiftly in single file down a road that ran from a hill above the village. Here
in the ruined village they had seen no horses, or cattle, nor any domestic
beasts of any kind.

They were near enough now to be clearly seen; they wore shirt-cloaks and
breeches of a strange cut, and they were all tall, thin men, with thick, rough
pale hair, but they were men. Human men, not cat-folk, unless this was another
of the illusions cast.

Damon focused through his starstone, through the dimming haze which still seemed
to obscure, like murky water, everything that was not close to him. But these
were real men, on real horses. No horse ever foaled would stand quiet for a
cat-man to mount. Nor were these the mindless faces of the villagers, terrorized
into immobility and apathy.

"Dry-Towners," muttered Eduin. "Lord of Light be with us!"

Now Damon knew where he had seen tall, pale, rangy men like that before. The
desert folk rarely penetrated to this part of the world, but now and again he
had seen a solitary caravan of them, traveling silent and swift toward their own
part of the world.

And our horses are already wearied; if the Dry-Town men are hostile. ?

He hesitated. Rannan leaned across to grasp his arm. "What are we waiting for?

Let's get out of here!"

"They may not be enemies," Damon began. Surely humans would not join the
cat-folk in this plunder and terror?

Eduin's mouth was a grim, set line. "There were small bands of them fighting
among the cat-folk last year, and I've heard there were cat-men helping the
Dry-Towners in that trouble down Carthon way. They trade with the cat-men, I've
heard. Zandru knows what they trade, or what they get in return, but the
trading's a fact."

Damon's heart sank. They should have fled at once. Too late now, so he made the
best of it. "These may be traders," he said, "and have nothing to do with us."

In any case they were so close now that the leading Dry-Towner was reining in
his mount. "We'll just have to bluff it through; stay ready, but don't draw
swords unless I give you the signal, or unless they attack us."

The leader of the Dry-Towners looked down at them, lounging in his saddle, the
faint trace of a sneer on his face-or was that just the normal cast of his
features? "Hali-imyn, by Nebran! Who would have thought it?" His gaze swept over
the empty streets. "What are you folk still doing here?"

"Corresanti has been a village of the Alton Domain for more years than Shainsa
has stood on the plains," said Damon; he was trying to count the horsemen reined
in behind the leader. Six, eight-too many! "I might as well ask you if you are
astray from your normal trading paths, and demand you show safe-conduct from the
Lord Alton."

"The days of safe-conducts are over in the Kilghard Hills," the leader said.

"Before long it will be you folk who learn you must ask leave to ride here." His
teeth bared in a lazy grin. He slid from his horse, the men behind him following
suit. Damon's hand slid into the basket-hilt of his sword, and the small matrix
there felt smooth and hot in his palm.

. Dom Esteban laid down the meat-roll he had been eating, and leaned back
against his pillow, his eyes wide, staring. The servant who had brought him the
food spoke to him, but he did not reply.

"It will be long before I ask leave to ride in my kinsmen's lands," Damon said.

"But what are you doing here?" His voice sounded oddly shrill and weak in his
own ears.

"We?" said the Dry-Towner. "Why, we're peaceful traders, aren't we, comrades?"

There was a chorus of assent from the men behind him. They did not look
particularly peaceful (Of course, Damon thought in a split second, Dry-Towners
never did), their swords jutting from their hips at an aggressive angle ready to
draw, swaggering like tavern brawlers. The horses behind them began to paw the
ground nervously, and frightened snorts filled the air.

"Peaceful traders," insisted the leader, fumbling with the clasp of his
shirt-cloak, "trading here by permission of the Lord of these lands, who has
given us a few small commissions." The hand whipped out of his shirt-cloak,
holding a long ugly knife, and then he jerked his long, straight sword free of
its sheath. "Throw down your weapons," he grated, "and if you're fool enough to
think you can resist, look behind you!"