Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Darkover - A World Divided 2 - The W

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

The Winds of

Darkover

Marion Zimmer Bradley

a world divided 02 - a darkover novel

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

EBook Liberation Front digital back-up edition

1.0

click for scan notes and proofing history

valid XHTML 1.0 strict

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

Contents

|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

He was standing on a stretch of soft grass; it was night, but it

was not dark. All around him the night flamed and roared with a

great fire, reaching in tendrils of ravening flame far above his

head. And in the midst of the flame there was a woman.

Woman?

She was almost inhumanly tall and slender, but girlish; she

stood bathed in the flame as if standing carelessly under a

waterfall. She was not burning, not agonized. She looked merry

and smiling. The flames were licking around her face and her

flame-colored hair. And then the girlish, merry face wavered

and became supernally beautiful with the beauty of a great

goddess burning endlessly in the fire, a kneeling woman bound

in golden chains…

He stumbled over his own feet leaving the office, and the face

of the burning woman, in its inhuman ecstasy, went with him in

terror and amazement.

He thought, what in the world—any world—has happened to

me?

And, in the name of all the gods of Earth, space and Darkover—

why?

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

reproduced in any form or by any means, except for the

inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without

permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely

coincidental.

Published Simultaneously in Canada.

An ACE Book, by arrangement with the author

Printed in U.S.A.

DARKOVER novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley

available in ACE editions:

STAR OF DANGER

THE BLOODY SUN

THE SWORD OF ALDONES

THE PLANET SAVERS

THE WORLD WRECKERS

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

^ »

BARRON dumped the last of his gear into a duffel bag, pulled the

straps tight, and said to nobody in particular, “Well, that’s that and

the hell with all of them.”

He straightened, taking a last look around the neat, tight little world

of spaceport living-quarters. Built to conserve materials (it had been

the first Terran building on Darkover, in the zone later to become

Trade City), it had something in common with a spaceship’s cabin;

it was narrow, bright, clean and cramped, the furniture functional

and almost all built-in. It would have suited a professional

spaceman perfectly. Ground crews were another matter; they tended

to get claustrophobia.

Barron had complained as much as anyone else, saying the place

might be a decent fit for two mice, if one of them were on a stiff

diet. But now that he was leaving it, he felt a curious pang, almost

homesickness. He had lived here five years.

Five years! I never meant to stick to one planet that long!

He hoisted the duffel bag to his shoulder and closed the door of his

quarters for the last time.

The corridor was as functional as the living quarters; reference

charts and maps papered the walls up to the height of a tall man’s

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

eye level. Barren strode along, not seeing the familiar charts, but he

did cast a brief bitter glance at the dispatch board, seeing his name

there in red on the dreaded rep-sheet. He had five reps—official

reprimands—when seven would put one out of the Space Service

for good.

And no wonder, he thought. I didn’t get any dirty deal; in fact, they

went easy on me. Pure luck, and no credit to me, that cruiser and

the mapping ship didn’t crash and blow the damned spaceport right

off Darkover, and half Trade City with them!

He set his mouth tight. Here he was, worrying about demerits like a

kid in school—and yet it wasn’t merely that. Many people in Terran

Space Service went through their whole twenty years without a

single rep—and he’d piled up five in one disastrous night.

Even though it wasn’t his fault.

Yes it was, damn it. Who else could I blame it on? I should have

reported sick.

But I wasn’t sick!

The rep-sheet read: gross neglect of duty, grave danger of causing

accident to a landing spacecraft. They had found him literally

napping on duty. But damn it, I wasn’t asleep either!

Daydreaming?

Try telling them that. Try telling them that when your every nerve

and muscle should have been alert over the all-important dispatch

board, you were— somewhere else. You were caught up in a deep

dream, bewildered with colors, sights, sounds, smells, blazes of

brilliance.

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

You were leaning into an icy wind, under a deep purple sky, a

blaze of red sunlight overhead—the Darkovan sun—the sun

that the Terrans called The Bloody Sun. But you’d never seen it

like that, reflected in rainbow prisms through a great wall of

crystalline glass. You heard your own boots ringing on ice-hard

stone—and your pulse was pounding with hate, and you felt the

surge of adrenaline in your blood. You broke into a run, feeling

the hatred and blood-lust rise to a crest inside you; before you

something reared up—man, woman, beast—you hardly knew or

cared—and you heard your own snarl as a whip came crashing

down and something screamed—

The dream had dissolved in the thundering nightmare noise of

klaxons, the all-quarters alarm of sirens and whoopers and bells,

the WRECK lights blazing everywhere, and your reflexes took over.

You’d never moved so fast. But it was too late. You had slammed the

wrong button and the dispatch tower was fouled up by that all-

important eight-second margin, and only a minor miracle of seat-of-

the-pants navigation by the young captain of the mapping ship—he

was getting three medals for it—had saved the spaceport authority

from the kind of disaster that waked people up—what people were

left—in screeching nightmares for twenty years afterward.

Nobody had wasted words on Barron since. His name on the rep-

sheet had made him a pariah. He had been told to vacate his

quarters by 2700 that night and report for a new assignment, but

nobody bothered telling him where. It was as simple as that—five

years in Darkover Spaceport and seventeen in the service had been

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

wiped out. He didn’t feel especially mistreated. There wasn’t room

in the Terran Spaceforce for that kind of mistake.

The corridor ended in an archway; a plaque, which Barron ignored

after seeing it every day for years, told him he was now in Central

Coordinating. Unlike the building where quarters were located, this

one was constructed of native Darkovan stone, translucent and

white as alabaster, with enormous glass windows. Through them he

could see flaring, blue spaceport lights, the shapes of groundcraft

and resting ships, and, far beyond the lights, pale greenish

moonlight. It was half an hour before dawn. He wished he’d

stopped for some breakfast; then he was glad he hadn’t. Barron

wasn’t thin-skinned, but the way the men ignored him in the

cafeteria would put anyone off his food. He hadn’t bothered eating

much in the last couple of days.

There was always the Old Town, the Darkovan part of Trade City

where he sometimes slipped away for exotic food when he was tired

of the standard fare of the quarters; there were not a few restaurants

which catered to spacemen and tourists who came for “exotic

delicacies.” But he hadn’t felt like trying to pass the guards; he

might have been stopped. They might have thought he was trying to

escape an official process. He wasn’t officially under arrest, but his

name was mud.

He left the duffel bag outside the narrow bank of elevators, stepped

in and pressed the topmost button. The elevator soared up,

depositing him outside the dispatch room. He lowered his head,

passing it without a glance inside and headed for the coordinator’s

office in the penthouse.

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The Winds of Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 02

And then, without warning—he was standing on a high parapet,

winds flowing icily around his body, ripping at him with enough

force to tear his clothes off, ridging his skin with gooseflesh and

pain. Below him, men screamed and moaned and died over the

sounds of clashing steel; and somewhere he heard stone falling

with a great crunching rumble like the end of the world. He

could not see. He clung hard to the stone, feeling frost bite with

fiery teeth at his stiff fingers, and fought the sickness rising in

his throat.

So many men. So many dead, all of them my people and my

friends…

He let go of the stone. His fingers were so cramped that he had

to pry them off with his other hand. He caught his blowing

garments around him, feeling an instant of incongruous physical

comfort in the thick fur against his cold hands, and went swiftly,

on groping feet, through the blind dark. He moved as in a

dream, knowing where he was going without knowing why; his

feet knew the familiar path. He felt them move from flagstone to

wood parquet to thick carpeting, then down a long flight of

stairs and up another flight—farther and farther, until the distant

sounds of battle and falling walls were muffled and finally

silenced. His throat was thick and he sobbed as he went. He

passed through a low archway, automatically ducking his head

against the stone arch he had never seen and would never see. A

current of chill air blew on him. He fumbled in the darkness for

something like a loose hood of feathery textures; he drew it

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