Marion Zimmer Bradley - Falcons of Narabedla

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Falcons of Narabedla

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Version 1.0

CHAPTER ONE

SOMEWHERE on the crags above us, I heard a big bird

scream.

I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream

beside me. "There's your eagle. Probably smells that

cougar I shot yesterday." I started to reel in my line,

knowing what my brother's next move would be.

"Get the camera, and we'll try for a picture."

We crouched together in the underbrush, watch-

ing, as the big bird of prey wheeled down in a slow

spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy was trembling

with excitement, the camera poised against his chest.

"Golly," he whispered, almost prayerfully, "six-foot

wing spread at least, maybe more—"

The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into

the wind. We were to leeward; the scent of the car-

rion masked our enemy smell from him. The eagle

failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and drop-

ping on the cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked

twice. The eagle thrust in its beak.

A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the

bird—I leaped out of cover, running swiftly across the

ten-foot clearing that separated us from the attacking

eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting

knife in my belt. Andys shout of surprise and dismay

was a far-away noise in my ears as the eagle started

away with flapping, angry wings—then, in fury,

swept down at me, pinions beating around my head.

I heard and felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust

blindly upward with the knife: ripped, slashing, hear-

ing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of wide

wings.

A red-hot haze spun around me—

This had happened before. I had fought like this

before, for my life, for my life-

Then the screaming eagle was gone, a lifting cry

down-wind and a vanishing shadow, and Andy's

rough grip was on my shoulder, shaking me, hard.

His voice, furious and frightened, was barely recog-

nizable. "Mike! Mike, you damned idiot, are you all

right? You must be crazy!"

I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The

hand came away red. I was standing in the clearing,

the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird blood. I

heard myself ask, stupidly, "What happened?"

My brother's face came clear through the red haze,

scowling wrathfully. "You tell me that! Mike, what in

the devil were you thinking of? You told me yourself

that an eagle will attack a man if it's bothered. I had

him square in the camera when you jumped out of

there like a bat out of a belfry, and went for the eagle

with your knife. You must be clean crazy!"

I let the knife drop out of my hand. "Yeah," I said

heavily, "I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm

sorry. I didn't..." My voice trailed off, helpless. I felt

like a prize fool. The kid's hand was still on my shoul-

der. He let it fall away and knelt in the grass, groping

for his camera. "That's all right, Mike," he said in a

dead voice. "You scared the daylights out of me, that's

all."

He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my face.

"Only—damn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a

week. I don't mind the blasted camera, but when you

start going for eagles with your bare hands—"

abruptly he flung the camera away, turned, and

began to run down the slope in the direction of the

cabin.

I took one step to follow, then stopped, bending to

retrieve the broken pieces of Andy's cherished cam-

era. He must have hit the eagle with it. Lucky thing

for me. Even a hawk can be a mean bird, and an

eagle—Why, why in the hell had I done a thing like

that? I'd warned Andy, time and time again, to stay

clear of the big birds.

Now that the urgency of action had deserted me, I

felt stupid and a little light-headed. I didn't wonder

that Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself,

more than half the time. I stowed the broken camera

in my tackle box, mentally promising Andy a better

one, hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,

cleaned our days catch. It was dark before I started

for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric

dynamo I'd rigged, and see the electric light across

the dusk of the Sierras. A smell of bacon greeted me

as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded bulb.

Andy hadn't waited for the fish. He was standing at

the cookstove, his back stubbornly turned to me. He

did not turn.

"Andy-" I said.

"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper."

"Andy—I'll get you another camera."

"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat."

He didn't speak again for some time; but as I

stretched back for a second mug of coffee, he got up

and began to walk restlessly around the room.

"Mike, you came here for a rest," he said at last.

"Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a

while, and relax?" He looked disgustedly over his

shoulder at the work table where the light spilled

over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils.

"You're turning this place into a branch office of Gen-

eral Electric."

"I can't stop now," I said violently, "I'm on the

track of something, maybe something big, and if I

stop now, I'll never find it!"

"Must be real important," Andy said sourly, "if it

makes you act like bughouse bait."

I shrugged, not answering. We'd been over that

before. I'd known it when they threw me out of the

government lab, just before the big blowup. I thought

angrily, Maybe I'm heading for another one. But I

didn't care.

"Sit down, Andy," I told him. "You don't know

what happened down there. No, it's not any military

secret, or anything. It was all declassified a long time

before I finished my service hitch." I paused, swal-

lowing down the coffee, not caring that it scalded my

mouth. I said, with the old bitterness, "Except for

me."

I'd been working in a government radio lab, on

some new communications equipment. Since I'd nev-

er finished it, there's no point in going into details. It's

enough to say that it would have made radar as ob-

solete as the stagecoach.

I'd built a special supersonic condenser, and had

had trouble with a set of magnetic coils that wouldn't

wind properly. When the thing blew up, I hadn't had

any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason.

That was normal around there. I was normal then,

just another communications man, a little bug-eyed

about the kind of research tinkering I liked, but

without any of the crazy impractical notions that had

lost me my job afterward. They called it overwork

Only I know they thought the explosion had dis-

turbed my brain. I didn't blame them. Sometimes I

thought so myself. Or at least I'd have liked to think

so.

It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the

sun and an elusive short-circuit somewhere that kept

giving me shock after shock until I was dizzy. By the

time I got it fixed—and I never could figure out why

that circuit should have shorted—the oscillator had

gone out of control, or so I thought. I kept getting a

series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing

I'd ever seen before. Then there was something like a

voice, speaking out of a very old, jerry-built crystal set

—only there wasn't a radio receiver, or a speaker,

anywhere in the lab, and nobody else heard it. I

wasn't sure myself, because right then, every instru-

ment in the place went haywire; and forty seconds

later, part of the ceiling hit the floor, and the floor

went up through the roof They found me, they say,

half-crushed under a beam. Anyway, I woke up in a

hospital, with four cracked ribs, and feeling as if I'd

had a lot of voltage poured into me.

It went down in the report that I'd been struck by

lightning. They had to say something.

It took me a long time to get well. The ribs, and the

other things, healed fast—faster than the doctors liked.

I didn't mind the hospital part, except that I couldn't

walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without

burning myself, for weeks. The thing I minded was

what I remembered from before I woke up.

Delirium. That was what they told me. But the

kind and type of marks all over my body didn't ring

true. Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make

those kinds of burns. And this comer of the world

doesn't make a habit of branding people.

Only before I could show the marks to anyone out-

side the hospital, they were gone. Not healed, just

gone. I remember the look on the intern's face when

I showed him the spots where the burns had been. He

didn't think I was crazy. He thought he was.

There was a psychiatrist sniffing around, too, put-

ting forth slow, soothing suggestions about psycho-

somatic medicine and hysterical stigmata, but that

was just for the record, too.

I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The

Major knew it, too. I found that out the day I reported

back to work All the time we talked, his big pen

moved in stubby circles across the pages of his log-

book, and he talked without raising his head to look

at me.

"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms re-

ported in the vicinity, no radio disturbances within a

thousand miles. But," his jaw was stubborn, "the lab

was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to have

something for the record."

I could understand all that. What I resented was

the way they treated me when I went back to work

They transferred me to another division and another

project. They turned down my request to follow up

research on those low-frequency waves. My private

notes were ripped out of my notebook while I was at

lunch, and I never saw them again. And as soon as

they could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska,

and that was the end of that

The Major told me all I needed to know, the day

before I took the plane to Alaska. His scowl said more

than his words, and they said plenty.

"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more

trouble. We can't monkey with side alleys, anyhow.

Next time, you might get your head blown off, not just

a dose of stray voltage out of the blue. We've done

everything but stand on our heads, trying to find out

where that spare energy came from and where it

went."

"Then you admit there was something!" That was

more than I'd been able to get from anyone else on

the project.

"Unofficially, yes." The Major scowled, not looking

at me. Then it all came out in a single fast string of

words. "What it boils down to is that it shows up

when you're around, and it doesn't show up when

you're not around, and we don't know if it's fakery or

poltergeists or ESP but we don't want any more of it,

whatever it is. We've marked that whole line of re-

search closed, Kenscott. And if I were you I'd call my-

self lucky and keep my mouth shut about it."

"It wasn't a message from Mars," I suggested

without smiling, and he didn't think it was funny

either. But there was relief on his face when I left the

office and went to clean out my drawer.

I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. They put

me on paperwork, routine supervisory jobs, and ig-

nored me when I tried to get back to the practical end

of it. And then they shipped me back to the States,

with a discharge, and a recommendation of a long

rest I tried to explain it to Andy:

"They called it overwork They said I needed rest

Maybe so. The shock did something funny to me—

tore me open—like the electric shock treatments they

give catatonic patients. I seem to know a lot of things

I never learned. Ordinary radio work doesn't seem to

mean much to me any more. It doesn't make sense.

And every now and then something will start to

make sense, and then doesn't. When people out West

were talking about Flying Saucers, whatever they

were, and when there was all that talk about atomic

fallout changing the weather, and the cloud-seeding

experiments, all this sort of halfway made sense for a

while. Only I kept expecting it to happen without"—

I moved my hand, helplessly, trying to put words to

a random impression—"without people having to go

up there in planes and do anything about it. And

when we came up here—" I paused, trying to fit more

confused impressions together. He wasn't going to be-

lieve me anyhow, but I wanted him to. A tree slapped

against the cabin window, and I jumped.

"It started the day we came into the mountains.

Energy out of nowhere, following me around. It can't

knock me out. Have you noticed that I let you turn the

lights on and off? The day we came up here, I shorted

my electric razor," I rubbed my hand over a stubbled

face, "and I blew out five fuses trying to change one.

Remember?"

"Yeah, I remember: we had to drive into town for

some more." My brother's eyes rested uneasily on my

face. "Mike, listen—you are kidding, aren't you?"

"I wish I were," I said. "That energy just drains

into me and nothing happens. I'm immune." I

shrugged, rose and walked to the Hallicrafter, picked

up the disconnected plug and thrust it into the socket.

I snapped the dial on. "Watch."

The panel flashed and darkened; confused static

came crackling from the speaker. I took my hand

away.

"Turn it up," said Andy uneasily.

"It's already up." My hand twiddled the dial.

"Try another station," the kid insisted. I pushed

each button in succession; the static crackled and

buzzed; the panel light flashed on and off in little

cryptic flashes. I said "And reception was fine at

noon; you were listening to the President's press con-

ference." I took my hand away again. "Okay, you try

it."

Andy frowned, but he came over and switched the

button back on. The little panel light glowed steadily,

and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the

room:

"... orchestra in the Fifth, or Fate Symphony of

Beethoven..."

And then the majestic chords of the symphony,

thundering through the cabin:

"Ta-da-da-dumm. ... ta-da-da-DOOM!"

My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds

caught up with the brasses. There was nothing

wrong with the radio. I stood listening to the sound of

fate.

"Mike. What did you do to it?"

"I wish I knew." I reached out; touched the volume

button briefly.

Beethoven died in a muttering static of insane

drums.

I swore, and Andy sucked in his breath between

his teeth, edging warily backward. He stared at the

radio and then at me, and then reached out and

touched the dial. Once more the smoothness of the

"Fate" symphony rolled out into the room and swal-

lowed us. I shivered.

Andy said, shakily, "Maybe you'd better let it

alone."

The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main

room, smoking, restless, wishing I could get a drink

without driving eighty miles over bad mountain

roads. Neither of us had thought to turn the radio off,

and it was moaning out some interminable, throb-

bing jazz. I turned my notes over restlessly, not really

seeing them.

Lightning that wasn't lightning. Scars on my body

—curious festering marks that the psychiatrist had

tried to tell me were psychosomatic. The cry of an

eagle wheeling above me—striking savagely at my

eyes, set to kill—and I deserved that death.

What had I remembered, just then, when I went

far the eagle with a hunting knife?

I let my head sink in my hands, closing my eyes,

trying to clear my mind of surface things and re-

member ... remember. ...

Fantasy? Was it fantasy that made me see a

strange, cloaked form, and between the cloaked form

and me, a woman? A golden woman. ...

Golden hair, tiger-tawny, fell like silk around her

shoulders; her eyes were golden, wide open and fixed

on me like the eyes of a great cat. She held something

in her hands.

Vision, dream, fantasy—abruptly she was gone as

Andy's voice came sleepily from the alcove:

"Going to read all night, Mike?"

"If I feel like it," I said tersely, and began walking

up and down again.

"Michael! For the luvvagod quit that and let me get

some sleep," Andy exploded, and I sank into the

armchair again. "Sorry, Andy."

Where had the intangible part of me been, those

hours and days while I lay crushed under a fallen

beam in the lab, then under morphine in the hospi-

tal? Where had those scars come from—and where

had they gone?

More important—what had made a radio lab, of all

places, explode like that? Electricity can set fires, and

radio waves, too intense, will inflict burns. Men can

be shocked into insensibility, or even killed, by elec-

tricity. But electricity just doesn't explode.

And what freak of lightning was I carrying in my

body, that made me immune to ordinary current? I

hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately

shorted the dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole

current through my body. I was still alive. It would

have been a hell of a way to commit suicide, but I

hadn't.

I swore, slamming down the window. I was going

to bed. Andy was right; either I was crazy, or else

there was something wrong that ordinary doctors

didn't know about. Sitting here stewing about it

wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train

home and see another psychiatrist—and if that didn't

help, well, maybe I'd see a good electrician! But right

now, I was going to hit the sack

My hand went out automatically and switched off

the light.

"Damn!" I thought incredulously; I'd shorted the

dynamo again. The radio stopped as if the whole or-

chestra had dropped dead; every light in the cabin

winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch

crackled with a phosphorescent glow as the entire

house current poured through my body. I tingled

with weird shock, heard my own teeth chattering.

And something snapped open in my brain. I heard,

suddenly, an excited voice, shouting.

"Rhys! Rhys! That is the man!"

CHAPTER TWO

"You ARE MAD," said the man with the tired voice.

I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a vast

abyss of caverned space; chasmed, immense, lim-

itless. Vaguely, through that humming distance, I

could hear two voices. This one was old, and very

tired.

"You are mad. They will know. Narayan will

know."

"Narayan is a fool," said the second voice. There

was something hauntingly familiar about that voice.

I had heard it before. Where?

"Narayan is the Dreamer," the tired voice said, "he

is the Dreamer, and where the Dreamer walks they

will know. But have it your way. I am old, and it does

not matter. I give you this freely to spare you, and to

spare Gamine what must come."

"Gamine—" the second voice stopped. After a long

silence, "You are old and also a fool, Rhys. What is

Gamine to me?"

Bodiless, blind, I drifted and swayed and swung in

the sound of the voices. The humming, like a million

high-tension wires, sang around me, and I felt myself

cradled in the pull of something like a giant magnet,

that held me suspended securely on nothingness, and

drew me down into the field of some force below—

above—elsewhere. Far below me the voices faded,

and as if their sound had removed some invisible and

intangible support, I swung free—fell—plunged

downward in sickening motion, head-over-heels into

the abyss. ...

And yet, through all this, I was conscious of stand-

ing motionless, my hand on the light-switch in the

cabin—and yet I was falling through nowhere

space....

My feet struck hard flooring with a kind of snap. I

wrenched back to full consciousness with a jolt.

Winds blew cold in my face: the cabin walls had

been flung back to the high-lying stars. I was standing

at a barred window at the very pinnacle of a tall tow-

er, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched flicker-

ingly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face,

a lean tired old face beneath a high, peaked hood, in

the moment before my knees gave way and I fell,

striking my head against the bars of the window.

I was lying somewhere in the dark I had no

awareness of myself as Mike Kenscott; instead my

mind was filled with a nightmarish fear and urgency.

There was something I had to do, a warning I had to

give. ... and I was horribly afraid.

I stirred and around me the darkness thinned and

grew paler; I could see, dimly, shapes and forms. I

rose, with the fluid motion of movement in a dream,

passed through a strangely arched door and into a

dim-lighted corridor, burning with blue fluorescence.

My own breath was loud in the silence, but I heard

no footsteps. I knew I must be very still and keep to

the edges of the corridors, and at the same time some-

thing angry and proud in me told me to walk fearless

and unafraid.

The corridor was long, but I felt no fatigue. Twice

I passed strange forms, feeling no curiosity about

their strange cloaked and muffled shapes; I knew

somehow that they could not see me. I paused before

a bolted door, and the frightened part of myself

stopped, feeling dreamish panic. Then I felt myself

raise my hands, making curious gestures. The door

slid noiselessly back and I passed through.

The room was dark and empty, with a great win-

dow opening on starred night. Here and there around

the walls hung strange limp winged forms. Without

hesitation I went to the wall and lifted down one of

the things. ...

A cloak? A dead bird? I felt feathers, pinions, limp

and lifeless; a curious fear sucked under my

breastbone. Some tiny packed-away part of me

screamed, What am I doing? But without hesitating,

I drew the dark feathered thing over my head. ...

There was a strange, suspended, timeless moment

when I floated, bodiless, a mere point of conscious-

ness in space. Then, fumbling, I found my body

again, moving the feet carefully to a low couch; sup-

porting myself with my hands, I lowered myself and

lay down. There was a strange pull to my body, an

awful tugging as if the essential me was struggling to

get out, to free myself from tangled heavy clothes. I

knew somehow that I dared not yield yet to this strug-

gle for freedom. Carefully, painfully, I lowered myself

to the couch, straightened my body into a careful line,

drew a deep breath ...

And suddenly I was out and away, rising up with

a great flapping of wings, soaring on the rhythmic

beat of pinions. My arms—my arms were great

wings, and all around me was empty sky and cold

fresh winds.

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FalconsofNarabedlabyMarionZimmerBradleyVersion1.0CHAPTERONESOMEWHEREonthecragsaboveus,Iheardabigbirdscream.IturnedtoAndy,knee-deepintheicystreambesideme."There'syoureagle.ProbablysmellsthatcougarIshotyesterday."Istartedtoreelinmyline,knowingwhatmybrother'snextmovewouldbe."Getthecamera,andwe'lltryfor...

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