A World Divided (81 page)

The man was tall, dark-bearded, well past middle age, and had an air of authority which reminded Storn vaguely of Valdir, although this man was clearly one of the mountain people. Storn realized from the hubbub surrounding him that he must be looking down at the arrival of the Lord of Aldaran. In a few hours he must face this man and ask for his help. Deep depression lay on Storn, for no discernible reason. Could even a whole army, if Aldaran were willing to put it at his disposal (and why should he?) dislodge Brynat? Storn Castle had been besieged before and it had never even been necessary to defend it.
Now that Brynat holds it, could anyone retake it? Army? We would need a god.

The scene below melted away and Storn seemed to see within himself the great chained shape of Sharra, flame-crowned, golden-chained, beautiful and awesome. It was the vision he had seen when he lay helpless and blind behind the magnetic force-field at Storn Castle, his body tranced, his mind free ranging time and space in search of help from
somewhere.

Sharra again! What does the vision mean?
Melitta came for him late in the forenoon with Desideria, who told them that her guardian was ready to receive them. As he followed the girls down the long corridors, stairs and hallways, Storn was quietly evaluating the poise, the strength and the obvious telepathic awareness of this very young girl, and coming up with a disquieting answer. She must be a Keeper—one of the young girls trained from infancy to work with the old matrix crystals and screens which would have made the few things at Storn Castle look like children’s toys. But, overhearing snatches of conversation between them—Desideria seemed to have taken a fancy to Melitta, and talked to her freely—he gathered that there were four of them. In the old days a matrix circle, isolated from the world and giving all their time to it, had barely managed to train one Keeper in about ten years. If Aldaran had managed to train four in the few years since Storn had been here last, what was going on in this place?

But when he asked her a random question, using the polite form of address,
leronis
, Desideria gave him a merry smile and shook her head: “No, my friend, I am not a
leronis
; my guardian does not like the word and its connotations of sorcery. I have been trained in a skill which anyone can learn who is a good telepath, just as anyone who is strong and fit enough can learn hawking or riding. Our world has accepted foolish ideas like sorcery for all too many years. Call me, if you like, a matrix technician. My sisters and I have learned this skill, far better than most; but there is no need to look at me with reverence because I have learned well!”

She went on looking at him with a girlish, ingenuous smile, then suddenly shivered, flushed and dropped her eyes. When she spoke again it was to Melitta, almost pointedly ignoring Storn.

He thought with a certain grimness,
Training or not, she is still conventional in the old ways—and I owe my life to that. If she were old enough to look at it that way—a trained telepath of her caliber need only look at me to know what I have done. Only the convention that girls of her age may not initiate any contact with men other than their blood kin, has saved me so far.

The thought was strangely poignant—that this young girl of his mountain people, of his own kind and caste, and trained in all those things which had been the major solace of his life, was so guarded against him—and that he dared not reach out to her, mind or body. He felt as if he could have wept. He set his lips hard and followed the girls. He did not speak again.

Aldaran received them, not in a formal audience chamber but in a small, friendly room low in the castle. He embraced Storn, calling him cousin, kissed Melitta on the forehead with a kinsman’s privilege, offered them wine and sweets, and made them sit beside him; then he asked what had brought them there.

“It is far too long since any of your kinsmen have visited us at Aldaran; you live as isolated at High Windward as eagles in their aerie. It has come to mind in the last year or so that I have neglected kinship’s dues and that I should ride to Storn, there is much astir in the mountains these days, and no one of our people should hold himself aloof too far; our world’s future depends on it. But more of that later, if you are interested. Tell me what brings you to Aldaran, kinsman? How can I help you?”

He listened to their story gravely; with a gradually darkening and distressful face. When they had finished, he spoke with deep regret.

“I am ashamed,” he said, “that I offered you no help before this, to prevent such a thing. For now it has happened, I am powerless to help you. I have kept no fighting men here for more than thirty years, Storn; I have kept peace here and tried to prevent feuds and raids rather than repelling them. We mountain people have been torn by feuds and little wars far too long; we have let ourselves go back to barbarian days.”

“I, too, had no fighting men and wanted peace,” Storn said bitterly, “and all I gained from it was Brynat’s men at my outworks.”

“I have Terran guards here and they are armed with offworld weapons,” Aldaran said. “Would-be invaders knew enough, after a time or two, to let us alone.”

“With—weapons? Force weapons? But what of the Compact?” Melitta gasped in genuine horror. The law which banned, on this world, any weapon beyond the arm’s reach of the wielder, was even more reverenced than the taboo against meddling with the mind. Aldaran said quietly, “That law has delivered us to petty wars, feuds, murders and assassins. We need new laws, not stupid reverence for old ones. I have broken the Darkovan code and as a result, the Hasturs and the Comyn hold my family in horror; but we are at peace here and we have no hooligans at our doors, waiting for an old man to weaken so that he can be challenged and set down as if the stronger swordsman were the better man. The law of brute force means only the rule of the brute.”

“And other worlds, I believe,” Melitta said, “have found that unrestricted changes in weapons leads to an endless race for better and better weapons in a chase to disaster which can destroy not only men, but worlds.”

“That may even be true,” Aldaran said, “and yet look what has happened to Darkover, in the hands of the Terrans? What have we done? We refused their technology, their weapons, we insisted on refusing real contact with them. Since the Years of Chaos, when we lost all of our own technologies except for the few in the hands of the Comyn, we’ve slipped back further and further into barbarism. In the lowlands, the Seven Domains keep their old rule as if no ships had ever put forth into space. And here in the mountains we allow ourselves to be harassed by bandits because we are afraid to fight them. Someone must step beyond this deadlock, and I have tried to do so. I have made a compact with the Terrans; they will teach us their ways and defenses and I will teach them ours. And as a result of a generation of peace and freedom from casual bandits and learning to think as the Terrans think—that everything which happens can and must be explained and measured—I have even rediscovered many of our old Darkovan ways; you need not think we are totally committed to becoming part of Terra. For instance, I have learned how to train telepaths for matrix work without the old superstitious rituals; none of the Comyn will even try that. And as a result—but enough of that. I can see that you are not in any state to think about abstract ideas of progress, science and culture as yet.”

“But what all this fine-sounding talks means,” said Storn bitterly, “is that my sister and brother, and all my people, must lie at the mercy of bandits because you prefer not to be entangled in feuds.”

“My dear boy!” Aldaran looked aghast. “The gods help me; if I had the means to do so, I would forget my ethics and come to your aid—blood kin is not mountain-berry wine! But I have no fighting men at all, and few weapons, and such as I have could not be moved over the mountains.” Storn was enough of a telepath to know that his distress was very real. Aldaran said, “We live in bad times, Storn; no culture ever changed without people getting hurt, and it is your ill-fortune that you are one of those who are getting hurt in the change. But take heart; you are alive and unhurt, and your sister is here, and believe me, you shall be made welcome here as kin; this is your home, from this very day forth. The gods seize me, if I am not as a father to you both from this moment.”

“And my sister? My brother? My people?”

“Perhaps some day we will find a way to help them; some day all these mountain bandits must be wiped out; but we have neither the means nor any way.”

He dismissed them, tenderly. “Think it over. Let me do what I can for you; you certainly must not return to throw your lives after theirs. Do you think that your people really want you to share their fate now that you have escaped?”

Storn’s thoughts ran bitter counterpoint as they left Aldaran. Perhaps what Aldaran said made sense in the long run, in the history of Darkover, in the annals of a world. But he was interested in the short run, in his own people and the annals of his own time. Taking the long view inevitably meant being callous to how many people were hurt. If he had had no hope of outside help, he would gladly have sent Melitta to safety, if nothing more could be salvaged, and been glad there was a home for her here. But now that hope had been raised for more, this seemed like utter failure.

He heard, as from a distance, Desideria saying to Melitta, “Something draws me to your brother—I don’t know; he is not a man whose looks I admire, it is something beyond that—I wish I could help you. I can do much, and in the old days, the powers of the trained telepaths of Darkover could be used against intruders and invaders. But not alone.”

Melitta said, “Don’t think we are ungrateful for your guardian’s good will, Desideria. But we must return to Storn even if all we can do is to share the fate of those there. But we will not do that unless all hope is gone, even if we must rouse the peasants with their pitchforks and the forge folk of the hills!”

Desideria stopped dead in the hallway. She said, ”The forge folk of the caverns in the Hellers? Do you mean the old folk who worshipped the goddess, Sharra?”

“Indeed they did. But those altars are long cold and profaned.”

“Then I can help you!” Desideria’s eyes glowed. “Do you think an altar matters? Listen, Melitta, you know, a little, what my training has been? Well, one of the—the powers we have learned to raise here is that associated with Sharra. In the old days, Sharra was a power in this world; the Comyn sealed the gates against raising that power, because of various dangers, but we have found the way, a little—but Melitta, if you can find me even fifty men who once believed in Sharra, I could level the gates of Storn Castle, I could burn Brynat’s men alive about him.”

“I don’t understand,” said Storn, caught in spite of himself. “Why do you need worshipers?”

“And you a telepath yourself, I dare say, Storn! Look—the linked minds of the worshipers, in a shared belief, create a tangible force, a strength, to give power to that—that force, the power which comes through the gates of the other dimension into this world. It is the Form of Fire. I can call it up alone, but it has no power without someone to give it strength. I have the matrixes to open that gate. But with those who had once worshiped—”

Storn thought he knew what she meant. He had discovered forces which could be raised, which he could not handle alone, and with Brynat at his gates. He had thought,
If I had help, someone trained in these ways
—

He said, “Will Aldaran allow this?”

Desideria looked adult and self-sufficient. She said, “When anyone has my training and my strength, she does not ask for leave to do what she feels right. I have said I will help you; my guardian would not gainsay me—and I would not give him the right to do so.”

“And I thought you a child,” Storn said.

“No one can endure the training I have had and remain a child,” Desideria said. She looked into his eyes and colored, but she did not flinch from his gaze. “Some day I will read the strangeness in you, Loran of Storn. That will be for another time; now your mind is elsewhere.” Briefly she touched his hand, then colored again and turned away. “Don’t think me bold.”

Touched, Storn had no answer. Fear and uncertainty caught him again: If these people felt no horror of breaking the Darkovan League’s most solemn law, the Compact against weapons, would they have any compunctions about what he had done? He did not know whether he felt relieved or vaguely shocked at the thought that they might accept it as part of a necessity; without worrying about the dubious ethics involved.

He forced such thoughts from his mind. For the moment it was enough that Desideria thought there was a way to help. It was a desperate chance, but he was desperate enough for any gamble, whatever that might be—even Sharra.

“Come with me to the room where my sisters and I work,” she said. “We must find the proper instruments and—you may as well call them talismans, if you like. And if you, Storn, have experimented with these things, then the sight of a matrix laboratory may interest you. Come. And then we can leave within the hour, if you wish.”

She led the way along a flight of stairs and past glowing blue beacons in the hallways which Storn, although he had never seen them before, recognized. They were the force beacons, the warning signs. He had some of them in his own castle and had experimented until he had learned many of their secrets. They had given him the impregnable field which protected his body and had turned Brynat’s weapon, and the magnetic currents which guided the mechanical birds that allowed him to experience the sensation of flight. There were other things with less practical application, and he wanted to ask Desideria question after question. But he was haunted by apprehension, a sense of time running out; Melitta must have sensed it too, for she dropped back a step with unease.

He tried to smile. “Nothing. It’s a little overwhelming to learn that these—these toys with which I spent my childhood can be a science of this magnitude.”