Bradley, Marion Zimmer - The Spell Sword

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THE SPELL SWORD

Marion Zimmer Bradley

forbidden circle 01 - a darkover novel

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Contents

|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|

Author’s Note on Chronology

Spell-swords… The history of Darkover was full of such weapons. There was the

legendary Sword of Aldones in the chapel at Mali, a weapon so ancient—and so

fearful—that no one alive knew how to wield it. There was the Sword of Hastur, in

Castle Hastur, of which it was said that if any man drew it save in defense of the

honor of the Hasturs it would blast his hand as if with fire.

And there was the sword of Dom Esteban … a mighty swordsman now laid low, unable

to use it. But the sword’s hilt bore a matrix stone by means of which the skill of Esteban

could reach across to the holder of the sword.

It was that sword that was to play the key role in the quest of the Earthman Andrew Carr

to restore light to the ever-darkening skies of a hostile world.

The Spell Sword

Chapter ONE

^ »

He had followed a dream, and it had brought him here to die.

Half conscious, he lay on the rocks and thin moss of the mountain crevasse, and in his

dazed state it seemed to him that the girl he had seen in that earlier dream stood before

him. You ought to be laughing, Andrew Carr said to her imagined face. If it weren’t for

you I’d be halfway across the galaxy by now.

Not lying here half dead on a frozen lump of dust at the edge of nowhere.

But she was not laughing. It seemed that she was standing at the very edge of the lip of

rock, the bitter mountain wind blowing her thin blue draperies about her slender body,

her hair bright red and gleaming, long about her delicate features. Just as he had seen her

before, in the dream, but she was not laughing. Her delicate face looked pale and stern.

And it seemed that she spoke, although the dying man knew—knew—that her voice

could not be anything but the echo of the wind in his fevered brain.

“Stranger, stranger, I did not mean you harm; it was none of my calling or my doing that

brought you to this pass! True, I called you—or rather I called to anyone who could hear

me, and it was you. But those above us both know that I meant you no ill! The winds, the

storms, these are not under my command. I will do what I may to save you, but I have no

power in these mountains.”

It seemed to Andrew Carr that he flung angry words back at her. I’m mad, he thought, or

maybe already dead, lying here exchanging insults with a ghost-girl.

“You say you called me? But what of the others in my ship? You called them too,

perhaps? And brought them here to die in the crosswinds of the Hellers? Does death by

wholesale give you any pleasure, you ghoul-girl?”

“That isn’t fair!” Her imagined words were like a cry of anguish and her ghost-face on

the wind twisted as if she were about to weep. “I did not call them; they came in the path

where their work and their destiny led. Only you had the choice to come, or not to come,

because of my call; you chose to come, and to share whatever fate their destiny held for

them. I will save you if I can; for them, their time is ended and their destiny was never at

my disposal. You I can save, if you will hear me, but you must rouse yourself. Rouse

yourself!” It was like a wild cry of despair. “You will die if you lie here longer! Rouse

yourself and take shelter, for the winds and the storms are not mine to command…”

Andrew Carr opened his eyes and blinked. As he had known all along, he was alone,

lying battered on the mountain ledges in the wreckage of the mapping plane. The girl—if

she had ever been there at all—was gone.

Rouse yourself and take shelter, for the -winds and the storms are not mine to command.

That was, of course, a damn good idea, if he could manage it. Shelter. Where he lay,

under a fragment of the smashed cabin of the mapping plane, was no place to meet the

bitter night of this strange planet. He’d been warned about the weather here when he first

came to Cottman IV—only a lunatic would stay out in the nights during the storm season.

He fought again, with a last desperate effort, to free the ankle which was caught, like the

leg of a trapped animal, in twisted metal. This time he felt the metal crumple and give a

little, and, although the ripping pain grew greater, tearing skin and flesh, he wrenched

grimly at the caught foot in the darkness. Now he could move enough to bend over and

move the leg with his hands. Torn clothing and torn flesh were slippery with blood which

was already beginning to stiffen in the icy cold. When he touched the jagged metal his

bare hands burned like fire, but now he could guide the wounded leg upward, avoiding

the worst jagged edges of metal. Now, with a gasp of mingled agony and relief, his foot

was free; blood-covered, boot and clothing torn, cut to the bone, but free; he was trapped

no longer. He struggled to his feet, to be beaten again to his knees by a gust of the icy,

sleet-laden wind that whipped around a corner of the rock-ledge.

Crawling, to present less body surface to the wind, he crept inside the cabin of the

mapping plane. It was swaying dangerously in the battering wind, and he immediately

abandoned any thought of taking shelter in here. If the wind got any worse, the whole

damn thing would catapult down at least a thousand feet into the invisible valley below.

Part of it, he thought, had already gone with the first crash. But finding himself still alive,

beyond all expectations, he had to be sure there was no other survivor.

Stanforth was dead, of course. He must have been killed in the very first shock; nothing

could survive with that gaping hole in its forehead. Andrew shut his eyes against the

ghastly sight of the man’s brains frozen and spilled all over his face. The two mappers—

one was called Mattingly; he had never known the other’s name—were twisted limp on

the floor, and when he cautiously crawled across the jiggling balance of the cabin to find

if any spark of life remained in either, it was only to feel the bodies already cold and

stiffened in rigor. There was no sign of the pilot. He must have gone down with the nose

of the plane, into that awful chasm below them.

So he was alone. Cautiously, Andrew backed out of the cabin; then, steeling himself,

reentered it again. There was food in the plane—not much, a day’s rations, lunches,

Mattingly’s hoard of sweets and candies, which he had so generously passed around and

which they had all laughingly refused; emergency supplies in a marked panel behind the

door. He dragged them all out, and, shaking with terror, set himself to wrench

Mattingly’s huge topcoat off the stiffening corpse. It made his stomach turn—robbing the

dead!—but Mattingly’s topcoat, a great expensive fur thing, was of no use to its owner

and it might mean the difference between life and death in the terrible oncoming night.

When he edged out of the hideously shaking cabin for the last time, he was trembling and

sick, and his torn, cut leg, no longer mercifully numb, was beginning to tear at him with

claws of pain. He carefully backed away against the inner edge of the cliff, piling his

hard-won provisions close to the rock-face.

It occurred to him that he should make one final essay inside the plane. Stanforth,

Mattingly, and the nameless other man had carried identification, their disks from the

Terran Empire Service. If he lived, if he came again to the Port, this would serve as proof

of their death and mean something to their kinfolk. Wearily, he dragged himself forward.

And she was there again, the girl, the ghost, the ghoul who had brought him here, white

with terror, standing directly in his way. Her mouth seemed drawn with screaming.

“No! No!”

Involuntarily he stepped back. He knew she was not there, he knew she was only air, but

he stepped back and his lamed foot crumpled under him; he fell against the rock-cliff as a

gust of wind struck it, howling like a damned thing. The girl was gone, was nowhere, but

before he could drag himself to his feet again, there was a great howling blast of wind

and icy sleet, a sound like a thunderclap. With a final rattling, rocking clash the cabin of

the wrecked plane slid free from its resting place and overbalanced, tipped, slid down the

rocks, and crashed into the chasm below. There was a great roar like an avalanche, like

the end of the world. Andrew clung, gasping, to the face of the cliff, his fingers trying to

freeze to the rocks.

Then it quieted and there was only the soft roaring of the storm and the snow-spray, and

Andrew huddled in Mattingly’s fur topcoat, waiting for his heart to quiet to normal.

The girl had saved him again. She had kept him from going into the cabin, that last time.

Nonsense, he thought. Unconsciously I must have known it was ready to go.

He shelved the thought for later pondering. Just now he had escaped, by the second in a

series of miracles, but he was still very far from safe.

If that wind could blow a plane right off a cliff, it could blow him, too, he reasoned. He

had to find some safer place to rest, shelter.

Cautiously, clinging to the inner part of the ledge, he crept along the wall. Ten feet

beyond where he lay, in one direction, it narrowed to nothing and ended in a dark rock-

fall, slippery with the falling sleet. Painfully, his foot clawing anguish, he retraced his

steps. The darkness seemed to be thickening and the sleet turning to white, soft thick

snow. Aching and tired, Andrew wished he could lie down, wrap himself in the fur coat,

and sleep there. But to sleep was death, his bones knew it, and he resisted the temptation,

dragging himself along the cliff-ledge in the opposite direction. He had to avoid the

fragments of torn metal which had held him trapped. Once he gave his good leg a painful

shin-blow on a concealed rock which bent him over, moaning in pain.

But at last he had traversed the full length of the ledge, and at the far end, he found that it

widened, sloping gently upward to a flat space on which thick underbrush clung, root-fast

to the mountainside. Looking up in the thickening darkness, Andrew nodded. The

clustered, thick foliage would resist the wind—it had evidently been rooted there for

years. Anything which could grow here would have to be able to hang on hard against

wind and storm, tempest and blizzard. Now, if his lamed foot would let him haul himself

up there…

It wasn’t easy, burdened with coat and food supplies, his foot torn and bleeding, but

before the darkness closed in entirely, he had dragged himself and his small stock of

provision—crawling, at last, on both hands and one knee—up beneath the trees, and

collapsed in their shelter. At least here the maddening wind blew a little less violently, its

strength broken by the boughs. In the emergency supplies there was a small battery-

operated light, and by its pale glimmer he found concentrated food, a thin blanket of the

“space” kind, which would insulate his body heat inside its shelter, and tablets of fuel.

He rigged the blanket and his own coat into a rough lean-to, using the thickest crossed

branches to support them, so that he lay in a tiny dugout scooped beneath the tree-roots

and boughs, where only occasional snow-spray reached him. Now he wanted nothing

more than to collapse and lie motionless, but before his last strength left him, he grimly

cut away the frozen trouser-leg and the remnants of his boot from his damaged leg. It hurt

more than he had ever dreamed anything could hurt, to smear it with the antiseptic in the

emergency kit and bandage it tightly up again, but somehow he managed it, although he

heard himself moaning like a wild animal. He dropped at last, exhausted beyond

weariness, in his burrow, reaching out finally for one of Mattingly’s candies. He forced

himself to chew it, knowing that the sugar would warm his shivering body, but in the

very act of swallowing, he fell into an exhausted, deathlike sleep.

For a long time, his sleep was like that of the dead, dark and without dreams, a total

blotting-out of mind and will. And then for a long time he was dimly aware of fever and

pain, of the raging of the storm outside. After it diminished, still in the darkening fever-

drowse, he woke raging with thirst, and crawled outside, breaking icicles from the edge

of his shelter to suck them, staggering away from the shelter to answer the needs of his

body. Then he dropped exhausted inside his hollowed-out shelter to swallow a little food

and fell again into deep pain-racked sleep.

When he woke again it was morning, and he was clearheaded, seeing clear light and

hearing only a faint murmur of wind on the heights. The storm was over; his foot and leg

still pained him, but endurably. When he sat up to change the bandages, he saw the

wound was clean and un-festered. Above him the great blood-red sun of Cottman IV lay

low in the sky, slowly climbing the heights. He crept to the edge and looked down into

the valley, which lay wrapped in mist below. It was wild, lonesome country and seemed

untouched by any human hands.

Yet this was an inhabited world, a world peopled by humans who were, as far as he

knew, indistinguishable from Earthmen. He had somehow survived the crash which had

wrecked the Mapping and Exploring plane; it should not be wholly impossible, somehow,

to make his way back to the spaceport again. Perhaps the natives would be friendly and

help him, although he had to admit it didn’t seem too likely.

Still, while there was life there was hope… and he still had his life. Men had been lost,

before this, in the wild and unexplored areas of strange worlds, and had come out of it

alive, living to tell about it at Empire Central back on Earth. So that his first task was to

get his leg back in walking shape, and his second, to get out of these mountains. Hellers.

Good name for them. They were hellish all right. Crosswinds, updrafts, downdrafts,

storms blowing up out of nowhere—the plane wasn’t made that could fly through them

unscathed in bad weather. He wondered how the natives got across them. Pack-mules or

some local equivalent, he thought. Anyway, there would be passes, roads, trails.

As the sun rose higher, the mists cleared and he could look down into the valleys below.

Most of the slopes were tree-clad, but far below in the valley a river ran, and across it

there was some darkening which could only be a bridge. So he wasn’t in entirely

uninhabited country, after all. There were blotches which might well be plowed lands,

squared fields, gardens, a pleasant and peaceful countryside, with smoke rising from

chimneys and houses—but very far away; and between the cultivated lands and the

cliffside where Andrew clung were seemingly endless leagues of chasms and foothills

and crags.

Somehow, though, he’d get down there, and then back to the spaceport. And then, damn

it, off this ghastly inhospitable planet where he never should have come in the first place,

and having come, should have left again within forty-eight hours. Well, he’d go now.

And what about the girl?

Damn the girl. She never existed. She was a fever-dream, a ghost, a symbol of his own

loneliness…

Lonely. I’ve always been alone, on a dozen worlds.

Probably every lonely man dreams that someday he will arrive at a world where someone

is waiting, someone who will stretch out a hand to him, and speak to something inside,

saying “I am here. We are together…”

There had been women, of course. Women in every port—what was the old saying,

starting with sailors and transferred to spacemen, always a new one in every port? And

there were men who thought that state of affairs was enviable, he knew.

But none of them had been the right woman, and at heart he knew all the things the Psych

Division had told him. They ought to know. You look for perfection in a woman to

protect yourself against a real relationship. You take refuge in fantasies to avoid looking

at the hard realities of life. And so forth and so on. Some of them even told him that he

was unconsciously homosexual and found ordinary sexual affairs unsatisfactory because

it wasn’t really women he wanted at all, he just couldn’t admit it to himself. He’d heard it

all, a hundred times, yet the dream remained.

Not just a woman for his bed, but one for his heart and his heart-hungry loneliness…

Maybe that was what the old fortune-teller in the Old Town had been playing on. Maybe

so many men shared that romantic dream that she handed it out to everybody, as psi-

quacks back on Earth told romantic teen-age girls about a tall dark stranger they would

surely meet someday.

No. It was a real girl. I saw her and she—she called me.

All right. Think about it now. Get it all straight…

He had come to Cottman IV en route to a new assignment, and it was simply a port of

call, one of a series of crossroads worlds where routings were changed in the great

network of the Terran Empire. The spaceport was large, as was the Trade City around it,

to cater to the spaceport personnel, but it was not an Empire world with established trade,

travel, tours. It was, he knew, an inhabited world, but most of it was off limits to

Earthmen. He didn’t even know what the natives called it. The name on the Empire maps

was enough for him, Cottman IV. He hadn’t intended to stay there more than forty-eight

hours, only long enough to arrange transit to his final destination.

And then, with three others from the Space Service, he had gone into the Old Town. Ship

fare got tiresome; it always tasted of machines, with a strong acrid taste of spices to cover

the pervasive tang of recycled water and hydrocarbons. The food in the Old Town was at

least natural, good grilled meat such as he had not had since his last planetside billeting,

and fresh fragrant fruits, and he had enjoyed it more than any meal he had tasted in

months, with the sweet clear gold-colored wine. And then, out of curiosity, he and his

companions had strolled through the marketplace, buying souvenirs, fingering strange

rough-textured fabrics and soft furs, and then he had come to the booth of the fortune-

teller, and out of amused curiosity he had paused at her words.

“Someone is waiting for you. I can show you the face of your destiny, stranger. Would

you see the face of the one who waits for you?”

He had never dreamed that it was more than a standard pitch for a few coins; amused,

laughing, he had given the wrinkled old woman the coins she asked for, and followed her

inside her small awning-covered canvas booth. Inside she had looked into her crystal—

strange how on every world he had ever known the crystal ball was the chosen instrument

of pretended far-seeing—and then, without a word, shoved the ball toward him. Still half

in laughter, half in disgust, ready to walk away, Andrew had bent to see the pretty face,

the shining red hair. A pitch for a high-class call-girl, he thought cynically, and was

prepared to ask what the old madam was charging for the girl that day, and if she made a

special price for Earthmen. Then the girl in the crystal raised her eyes and met Andrew’s,

and…

And it happened. There were no words for it. He stood there, half-crouched and

unmoving over the crystal, so long that his neck, unheeded, was stabbed with cramp in

the muscles.

She was very young, and she seemed to be both frightened and in pain. It seemed that she

cried out to him for help that only he could give, and that she touched, deliberately, some

secret thing known only to both of them. But he could not, later, understand what it had

been, only that she called to him, that she needed him desperately…

And then her face was gone and his head was aching. He gripped at the edge of the table,

shaking, desperate to call her back. “Where is she? Who is she?” he demanded, and the

old woman turned up a blank, frowning face. “No, now, how do I know what you saw,

off-worlder? I saw nothing and no one, and others are waiting. You must go now.”

He had stumbled out, blank with despair.

She called to me. She needs me. She is here....

And I am leaving in six hours.

It hadn’t been exactly easy to break his contract and stay, but it hadn’t been all that hard

either. Places on the world to which he was going were in high demand, and there

wouldn’t be more than three days’ delay in filling his position. He’d have to accept two

downgrades in seniority, but he didn’t care. On the other hand, as Personnel told him,

volunteers for Cottman IV weren’t easy to find. The climate was bad, there was almost

no trade, and although the pay was good, no career man really wanted to exile himself

way out here on the fringes of the Empire on a planet which stubbornly refused to have

any dealings with them except for leasing the spaceport itself. They offered him a choice

of work in the computer center, or in Mapping and Exploring, which was high-risk, high-

pay work. For some reason, the natives of this world had never mapped it, and the Terran

Empire felt that presenting them with finished maps which their native technology could

not, or would not, encompass might be a very good thing for public relations between

Cottman IV and the Empire.

He chose Mapping and Exploring. He already knew—in the first week he had seen every

girl and woman in the spaceport—that she was none of the workers in Medic or

Personnel or Dispatch. Mapping and Exploring enjoyed certain concessions which

allowed them to go outside the severely limited preserve of the Empire. Somewhere,

somehow, she was out there waiting…

It was an obsession and he knew it, but somehow he could not break the spell, and didn’t

want to.

And then, the third time he’d gone out with the mapping plane, the crash… and here he

was, no closer than ever to his dream girl. If she had ever existed, which he doubted.

Exhausted by the long effect of memory, he crawled back into his shelter to rest. Time

enough tomorrow to work out a plan for getting down off the ledge. He ate emergency

rations, sucked ice, fell into an uneasy sleep…

She was there again, standing before him, both in and not quite in the little dark shelter, a

ghost, a dream, a dark flower, a flame in his heart…

I do not know why it is you I have touched, stranger. I sought for my kinfolk, those who

love me and could help me…

Damsel in distress, Andrew thought, I just bet. What do you want with me?

Only a look of pain, and a sorrowful twisting of the face.

Who are you? I can’t keep calling you ghost-girl.

Callista.

Now I know I’m freaked out, Andrew said to himself. That’s an Earth name.

I am no Earth sorceress, my powers are of air and fire…

That made no sense. What do you want with me?

Just now, only to save the life I unwittingly endangered. And I say to you: avoid the

darkened land.

She faded abruptly from sight and hearing, and he was alone, blinking.

“Callista” means simply “beautiful,” as I remember, he thought. Maybe she is simply a

symbol of beauty in my mind. But what is the darkened land? And how can she help to

save me? Oh, rubbish, I’m treating her as if she were real again.

Face it. There’s no such woman, and if you’re going to get out of here, you’ll have to go

it alone.

And yet, as he lay back to rest and make plans, he found himself trying, again, to call up

her face before his eyes…

Chapter TWO

« ^ »

The storm still raged on the heights, but here in the valley daylight shone through, and

lowering sunlight; only the thick anvil-shaped clouds to the west showed where the peaks

of the mountains were wrapped in storm.

Damon Ridenow rode with head down, braced against the wind that ripped his riding-

cloak, and it felt like flight As if he fled before a gathering storm. He tried to tell himself,

The weather’s getting into my bones, maybe I’m just not as young as I was, but he knew

it was more than that. It was an unease, something stirring, nagging at his mind,

something wrong. Something rotten.

He realized that he had been keeping his eyes turned from the low tree-clad hills which

lay to the east, and deliberately, trying to break the strange unease, made himself twist in

his saddle and look up and down the slopes.

The darkened lands.

Rubbish, he said to himself angrily. There was war there, last year, with the cat-people.

Some of his folk were killed and others were driven away, forced to resettle in the Alton

country, around the lakes. The cat-people were fierce and cruel, yes, they slaughtered and

burned and tormented and left for dead what they could not kill outright. Maybe what he

felt was simply the memory of all the suffering there during the war. My mind is open to

the minds of those who suffered—

No, it was worse than that. The things he’d heard about what the cat-people did.

He glanced behind him. His escort—four swordsmen of the Guard—were beginning to

draw together and murmur, and he knew he should call a halt to breathe the horses. One

of them spurred and came to his side, and he reined his mount in to look at the man.

“Lord Damon,” the Guardsman said, with proper deference—but he looked angry. “Why

do we ride as if foemen rode hard at our heels? I have heard no word of war or ambush.”

Damon Ridenow forced his pace to slacken slightly, but it was an effort. He wanted to

spur his mount hard, to race away for the safety of Armida beyond them…

He said somberly, “I think we are pursued, Reidel.”

The Guardsman warily swept his eyes from horizon to horizon—it was his trained duty to

be wary—but with open skepticism. “Which bush, think you, hides ambush, Lord

Damon?”

“That you know no more than I,” said Damon, sighing.

The man looked stubborn. He said, “Well, you are a Comyn Lord, and it is your business,

and mine to carry out your orders. But there is a limit to what man and horseflesh can do,

Lord, and if we are attacked with wearied horses and saddle sores, we will fight the less.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Damon said, sighing. “Call halt if you will, then. Here at least

there is little danger of attack in open country.”

He was cramped and weary, and glad to dismount, even though the nightmare urgency

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