The Forbidden Circle Read online

  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 unfestered. 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 homosexua
l 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 teenage 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 ther
e, 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 still beat at him. When the Guard Reidel brought him food, he took it without smiling, and his thanks were absentminded. The Guardsman lingered with the privilege of an old acquaintance.