A World Divided (71 page)

“The secret passage through the old cliff-town; have any of Brynat’s men discovered it?”

“No—Melitta, you cannot go that way; you’ll be lost in the caves, you’d die in the mountains if you ever found your way out—and where would you go?”

“Carthon,” Melitta said briefly, “wherever that is. I don’t suppose you know?”

“I know only that it’s a city beyond the passes, which was great in the days of the Seven Domains. Melitta, are you really going to dare this?”

“It’s this or die here,” Melitta said bluntly.

“You seem able to stand it here, though—”

“I don’t want to die.”

Allira was almost sobbing and Melitta hushed her roughly. It was not Allira’s fault that she was so timid. Perhaps even such protection as Brynat could give seemed better than a desperate trek through strange crags, passes and mountains.
Maybe I ought to be like that too,
Melitta thought,
maybe that’s a woman’s proper attitude, but I suppose there’s something wrong with me—and I’m glad. I’d rather die taking the chance of doing something to help Storn.

But the brief moment of censure for her sister passed. After all, Allira had already faced, or so it seemed to Allira herself, the worst that could happen to her; what more had she to fear? By escaping now, she would only lose the life she had saved at such cost.

“You must go, then, before sunrise,” Allira said with quick resolution. “Quick, while Brynat sleeps and before the guards come in”—a brief flicker of something like her old smile—“as they do each night, to make sure I have not killed him while he sleeps.”

The wind blew briefly into the room and was barred out again as the two girls slipped inside. Brynat lay sprawled and ugly in the great bed, breathing stertorously. After one blazing look of hate, Melitta averted her eyes, creeping past him silently, holding her breath and trying not to think, as if her very hate might wake their enemy. She breathed more freely when they were in the ornate reception room of the suite, but her hands were still clenched with tension and terror.

There were the carven chests, the hangings and the strange beasts around the elaborate false fireplace. She pressed the hilt of the marble sword there and the stone slid away, revealing the old stair. She clutched Allira’s hands, wanting to say something but falling silent in desperation. She went forward. Whatever happened, she was safe or dead.

Allira might somehow summon up the courage to come—but the escaping, Melitta knew with a practical grimness, was only the beginning. She had a long way to go, and she could not encumber herself with anyone who did not share her own desperate resolve; at this point, even if Allira had begged to come with her, she would have refused.

She said briefly, “The guards outside my room think I’m still in there. Try anything you can to keep them from finding out how I’ve gone. You saw nothing; you heard nothing.”

Allira clutched at her, a frightened hug and kiss. “Shall I—shall I get you Brynat’s knife? He would search me for it, but when he didn’t find it, he’d only think he lost it.”

Melitta nodded, a tardy spasm of admiration for her frightened sister touching her. She stood frozen, not daring to move, as Allira crept back into the bedroom, and then returned with a long, unsheathed knife in her hand. Allira thrust it into the top of Melitta’s boot. Allira had something else in her hand, wadded together in a torn linen coif. Melitta glanced hastily at the soggy mess; it was a torn half-loaf of bread, some cut slices of roast meat, and a large double handful of sticky sweets. Uncritically, she wrapped it up again and put it into her deepest pocket.

“Thank you, Lira. It will keep me going for a day or two, and if I don’t find any help by then, it’s no use anyhow. I must go; it will be light in three hours.” She dared not frame a goodbye in words; it would have loosened the floodgates of her fear. “Give me your gold chain, unless you think Brynat will miss it; I can hide it in a pocket and the links will pass current, though it’s not as good as a copper one would have been.”

Allira smiled a wavering smile. “The amulet didn’t protect me, did it? Maybe it will do better for you. Lucky charms protect you only if you have your own luck.” She pulled off the long chain, looped it twice and put it over Melitta’s head. Melitta clutched at the small amulet, suddenly touched—Allira had worn it since she was three years old; it had been their mother’s and grandmother’s.

She said quietly, “I’ll bring it back,” gave Allira a quick kiss, and without another word, plunged into the long deep stairwell. She heard Allira sob softly, as above her the passage darkened and the light went out.

She was alone in the depths of the castle.

“We should reach Armida by nightfall.” Colryn drew his horse to a walk in the neck of the narrow pass, waiting for the others to draw abreast of them, and looked across at Barron with a brief smile. “Tired of traveling?”

Barron shook his head without answering. “Good thing, because, although the Comyn Lord may want us to break our journey there for a day or two, after that we start into the hills.”

Barron chuckled to himself. If, according to Colryn, they started into the
hills
tomorrow, he wondered what they had been traveling for these past four days. Every day since they had left the plains where the Terran Trade City lay, they had been winding down the side of one mountain and up along the side of another, till he had lost count of the peaks and slopes.

And yet he was not tired. He was hardened now to riding, and sat his horse easily; and, although he would not have known how to say so, every inch of the road had held him in a sort of spell he did not understand and could not explain.

He had expected to travel this road filled with bitterness, resentment and grim resignation—he had left behind him everything he knew: his work, such friends as he had, the whole familiar world made by the men who had spanned great giant steps across the Galaxy. He had been going into exile and strangeness.

Yet—how could he explain it even to himself?—the long road had held him almost in a dream. It had been like learning a language once known but long forgotten. He had felt the strange world reach out and grip him fast and say, “Stranger, come; you are coming home.” It gave him a sensation, of riding through a dream, or under water, with everything that happened insulated by a curtain of unreality.

Now and then, as if surfacing from a very long dive, the old self he had been, during those years when he sat at the dispatcher’s board in the Terran Trade City, would come to the surface and sit there blinking. He tried, once, to make it clear to himself.

Are you falling in love with this world, or something?
He would breathe the cold, strangely scented air, and listen to the slow fall of his horse’s hooves on the hard-frozen road, and think,
What’s wrong? You’ve never been here before, why does it all seem so familiar?
But familiar was the wrong word; it was as if, in another life; he had ridden through hills like these, breathed the cold air and smelled the incense that his companions burned in their campfires in the chilly fog of evening before they slept. For it was new to his eyes, and yet—
it’s as if I were a blind man, newly seeing, and everything strange and beautiful and yet just the way I knew it would be....

During these brief interludes when the old Barron came to life in his mind, he realized that this sense of
déjà vu
, of living in a dream, must be some new form of the same hallucinated madness that had cost him his job and his reputation. But these interludes were brief. The rest of the time he rode in the strange dream and enjoyed the sense of suspension between his two worlds and the two selves which he knew he was becoming.

Now the journey would break, and he wondered briefly if the spell would break with it. “What is Armida?”

Colryn said, “The estate of the lord Valdir Alton, the Comyn lord who sent for you. He will be pleased that you speak our language fluently, and he will explain to you just what he wishes.” He looked down into the valley, shading his eyes with his hand against the dimming sunlight, and pointed. “Down there.”

The thick trees, heavy gray-blue conifers that cast dark spice-smelling small cones on the ground, thinned as they rode downward, and here and there in the underbrush some small bird called with perpetual plaintiveness. Thin curls of mist were beginning to take shape in the lowlands, and Barron realized that he was glad they would be indoors before the nightly rain began. He was tired of sleeping on the ground under tarpaulins, though he knew that the climate was mild at this season and that they were lucky it was only rain and not snow. He was tired, too, of food cooked over open fires. He would be glad to sleep under a roof again.

He guided his horse with careless expertness down the slope, letting his eyes fall shut, and drifted off into a brief daydream.
I do not know the Alton lords, and I must keep my real purpose secret from them, until I am certain they would help and not hinder. Here, too, I can find some information about roads and the best way to travel—snow will close the passes soon, and before then I must somehow find the best road to Carthon. The way to the world’s end . . .

He jerked himself out of his dream. He wondered what rubbish was he daydreaming. Where was Carthon, for that matter,
what
was Carthon? As far as he knew, it might be the name of one of the moons!
Oh, hell, maybe I’ve seen it on a survey map somewhere.
He did look at such things now and then when he had nothing better to do. Perhaps his unconscious—they said the unconscious mind never forgets anything—was weaving dreams with these half-forgotten fragments.

If this went on, he’d be ready for Bedlam.
Ready? Hell, I’m going Tom-o-Bedlam one better!
His brain juggled with scraps of a song learned years ago on another world; it was about the world’s end.

No, that’s wrong.
He frowned, trying to recapture the words; it fixed his mind on something other than the strangeness around him.

Lerrys drew his horse even. “Did you say something, Barron?”

“Not really. It would be hard to translate unless—do you understand the Terran language?”

“Well enough,” Lerrys said with a grin.

Barron whistled a scrap of the melody, then sang in a somewhat hoarse but melodious voice:

Lerrys nodded. “It does seem a little like that sometimes,” he said. “I like that; so would Valdir. But Armida isn’t
quite
at the wild world’s end—not yet.”

As he spoke, they rounded a bend; a faint smell of wood smoke and damp earth came up to them from the valley, and through the thin mist they saw the great house lying below them.

“Armida,” said Lerrys, “my foster father’s house.”

Barron did not know just why he had expected it to be a castle, set high among impassable mountain crags, with eagles screaming around the heights. On the downslope, the horses neighed and picked up speed, and Lerrys patted his beast’s neck.

“They smell their home and their stable-mates. It was a good trip; I could have come alone. This is one of the safest roads; but my foster father was afraid of dangers by the way.”

“What dangers?” Barron asked.
I must know what I may face on the long road to Carthon.

Lerrys shrugged. “The usual things in these hills: catmen, wandering nonhuman bands, occasional bandits—though they usually prefer wilder country than this, and in any case we aren’t enough to tempt the more dangerous ones. And if the Ghost Wind should blow—but I’ll be frightening you away.”’ He laughed. “This part of the world is peaceful.”

“Have you traveled much?”

“Not more than most,” Lerrys said. “I crossed the Kilghard Hills leading out of the Hellers with my foster brother, when I was fifteen; but it wasn’t any pleasure trip, believe me. And once, I went with a caravan into the Dry Towns, crossing the passes at High Kimbi, beyond Carthon—”

Carthon!
The word rang like a bell, kicking something awake in Barron and sending a jolt of adrenalin into his system; he physically twitched, missing the next sentence or two. He said, cutting almost rudely through the younger man’s reminiscences, “Where and what is Carthon?”

Lerrys looked at him strangely. “A city; or it used to be; it lies well to the east of here. It’s almost a ghost town now; no one goes there, but caravans go through the passes; there’s an old road, and a ford of the river. Why?”

“I—seem to have heard the name somewhere,” said Barron lamely, and lowered his eyes to his saddle, using as his excuse the horse’s increasing pace as the road leveled and led toward the low ramparts of Armida.

Why had he expected it to be a castle? Now that he was at the gates, it seemed reasonable that it should be a wide-flung house, sheltered by walls against the fierce winds from the heights. It was built of blue-gray stone with wide spaces of translucence in the stone walls, behind which lights moved in undefined patches of color and brilliance. They rode through a low arch and into a warm, sheltered courtyard; Barron gave up his horse to a small, swart man clad in fur and leather, who took the reins with a murmured formula of welcome. The Terran slid stiffly to the ground.

Shortly afterward he was beside a high blazing fire in a spacious, stone-flagged hall; lights warred with the dark behind the translucent stone walls and the wind safely shut outside. Valdir Alton, a tall, spare, sharp-eyed man, welcomed Barron with a bow and a few brief formal words; then paused a minute, his eyes resting on the Terran with a sudden, sharp frown.