The Forbidden Circle Read online

  All he knew about her was that in some way she’d touched him, come closer to him than anyone had ever come before. He knew that she was lonely and miserable and frightened, that she couldn’t get in touch with her own people, that for some reason she needed him. All he knew about her was all he needed to know about her: she needed him. For some reason he was all she had to cling to, and if she wanted his life she could have it. He’d hunt her up somehow, get her away from whoever was keeping her in the dark, hurting her, and frightening her. He’d get her free. (Yeah, sneered his cynical other self, quite the hero, slaying dragons for your fair lady, but he turned the jeer off harshly.) And after that, when she was free and happy—

  After that, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, he said firmly, and curled down to sleep again.

  The storm lasted, as nearly as he could tell (his chronometer had evidently been damaged in the crash and never ran again), for five days. On the third or fourth of those days he woke in dim light to see the girl’s shadowy form, stilled, sleeping, close beside him; still disoriented, rousing to sharp, intense physical awareness of her—round, lovely, clad only in the flimsy, torn thin garment which seemed to be all she was wearing—he reached out to draw her close into his arms; then, with the sharp shock of disappointment, he realized there was nothing to touch. As if the very intensity of his thoughts had reached her, awareness flashed over her sleeping face and the large gray eyes opened; she looked at him in surprise and faint dismay.

  “I am sorry,” she murmured. “You—startled me.”

  Carr shook his head, trying to orient himself. “I’m the one to be sorry,” he said. “I guess I must have thought I was dreaming and it didn’t matter. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “I’m not offended,” she said simply, looking straight into his eyes. “If I were here beside you like this, you would have every right to expect—I only meant, I am sorry to have unwittingly aroused a desire I cannot satisfy. I did not do it willingly. I must have been thinking of you in my sleep, stranger. I cannot go on simply thinking of you as stranger,” Callista said, a flicker of faint amusement passing over her face.

  “My name’s Andrew Carr,” he said, and felt her soft repetition of the name.

  “Andrew. I am sorry, Andrew. I must have been thinking of you in my sleep and so drawn to you without waking.” With no further sign of haste or fluster, she drew her clothes more carefully around her bare breasts and smoothed the diaphanous folds of her skirt down around her round thighs. She smiled and now there was a glimmer almost of mischief in her sad face. “Ah, this is sad! The first time, the very first, that I lie down with any man, and I am not able to enjoy it! But it’s naughty of me to tease you. Please don’t think I am so badly brought up as all that.”

  Deeply touched, as much by her brave attempt to make a joke as anything else, Andrew said gently, “I couldn’t think anything of you that wasn’t good, Callista. I only wish”—and to his own surprise he felt his voice breaking—“I wish there was some real comfort I could give you.”

  She reached out her hand—almost as if, Andrew thought in surprise, she too had forgotten for a moment that he was not physically present to her—and laid it over his wrist. He could see his own wrist through the delicate appearance of her fingers, but the illusion was somehow very comforting, anyhow. She said, “I suppose it is something, that you can give companionship and”—her voice wavered; she was crying—“and the sense of a human presence to someone who is alone in the dark.”

  He watched her weep, torn apart by the sight of her tears. When she had collected herself a little, he asked, “Where are you? Can I help you somehow?”

  She shook her head. “As I told you. They have kept me in the dark, since if I knew exactly where I was, I could be elsewhere. Since I do not know precisely, I can leave this place only in my spirit; my body must perforce stay where they have confined it, and they must know that. Curse them!”

  “Who are they, Callista?”

  “I don’t know that, exactly, either,” she said, “but I suspect they are not men, since they have offered me no physical harm except blows and kicks. It is the only thing for which a woman of the Domains may be grateful when she is in the hands of the other folk—at least with them she need not fear ravishment. For the first several days in their hands, I spent night and day in hourly terror of rape; when it did not come, I knew I was not in human hands. Any man in these mountains would know how to make me powerless to fight them . . . whereas the other folk have no recourse except to take away my jewels, lest one of them should be a starstone, and to keep me in darkness so I can do them no harm with the light of sun or stars.”

  Andrew didn’t understand any of that. Not in human hands? Then who were her captors? He asked another question.

  “If you are in the dark, how can you see me?”

  “I see you in the overlight,” she said quietly, telling him nothing at all. “As you see me. Not the light of this world—look. You know, I suppose, that the things we call solid are only appearances, tiny particles of energy strung together and whirling wildly around, with much more of empty space than of solidness.”

  “Yes, I know that.” It was an odd way to explain molecular and atomic energy, but it got her meaning across.

  “Well, then. Strung to your solid body by these energy webs there are other bodies, and if you are taught, you can use them in the world of that level. How can I say this? Of the level of solidness where you are. Your solid body walks on this world, this solid planet under your solid feet, and you need the solid light of our sun. It is powered by your mind, which moves your solid brain, and the solid brain sends messages that move your arms and legs and so forth. Your mind also powers your lighter bodies, each one with its own electric nerve-net of energy. In the world of the overlight, where we are now, there is no such thing as darkness, because the light does not come from a solid sun. It comes from the energy-net body of the sun, which can shine—how can I say this?—right through the energy-net body of the planet. The solid body of the planet can shut out the light of the solid sun, but not the energy-net light. Is that clear?”

  “I suppose so,” he said slowly, trying to cope with it. It sounded like the old story of astral duplicates of the body and astral planes, in her own language, which he supposed was reaching his mind directly from hers. “The important thing is that you can come here. There have been times when I’ve wanted to step out and leave my body behind.”

  “Oh, you do,” she said literally. “Everyone does in sleep, when the energy-nets fall apart. But you have not been trained to do it at will. Someday, perhaps, I can teach you how it is done.” She laughed a little ruefully. “If we both live, that is. If we both live.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Outside the thick walls of the great house at Armida, the white blizzard raged, howling and whining around the heights as if animated by a personal fury against the stone walls which kept it at bay. Even inside, in the great hall, the windows were grayed with its blur and the wind reached them as a dulled roar. Restless and distraught, Ellemir paced the length of the hall. With a nervous glance at the raging storm outside, she said, “We cannot even search for her in this weather! And with every hour that passes, it may be that she is farther and farther away.” She turned on Damon like a fury, and demanded, “How can you sit there so calmly, toasting your toes, when Callista is somewhere in this storm?”

  Damon raised his head and said quietly, “Come and sit down, Ellemir. We may be reasonably sure that wherever Callista may be, she is not out in the snowstorm. Whoever went to so much trouble to steal her from here did not do it to let her die of exposure in the hills. As for searching for her, were the weather never so good, we could not go out and quarter the Kilghard Hills on horseback, shouting her name in the forests.” He had spoken with wry humor, but Ellemir whirled on him angrily.

  “Are you saying we can do nothing, that we are helpless, that we must abandon her to whatever fate has seized h
er?”

  “I am saying nothing of the sort,” Damon told her. “You heard what I said. We could not search for her at random in these hills, even if the weather would allow it. If she were in any ordinary hiding place, you could touch her mind. Let us use these days of the storm to begin the search in some reasonable way, and the best way to do that is to sit down, and think about it. Do come and sit down, Ellemir,” he pleaded. “Pacing the floor, and tearing your nerves to shreds, will not help Callista. It will only make you less fit to help her when the time comes. You have not eaten; you look as if you have not slept. Come, kinswoman. Sit here by the fire. Let me give you some wine.” He rose and led the girl to a seat. She looked up with her lips trembling and said, “Don’t be kind to me, Damon, or I’ll break down and melt.”

  “It might do you good if you could,” he said, pouring her a glass of wine. She sipped it slowly, and he stood by the fireplace, looking down at her. He said, “I have been thinking. You told me Callista complained of evil dreams—withering gardens, cat-hags?”

  “That is so.”

  Damon nodded. He said, “I rode from Serrais with a party of Guards, and Reidel—a Guardsman of my company—spoke of misfortune that had fallen on his kinsman. He was said to have raved—listen to this—of the darkening lands, and of great fires and winds that brought death, and girls who clawed at his soul like cat-hags. From many men, I would have dismissed this as mere babble, imagination. But I have known Reidel all my life. He does not babble, and as far as I have ever been able to determine, he has no more imagination than one of his own saddle bags. Had, I should say; the poor fellow is dead. But he was speaking of what he had seen and heard, and I think it more than coincidence. And I told you of the ambush, when we were struck by invisible attackers with invisible swords and weapons. This alone would tell me that something very strange is going on in the heights they have begun to call the darkening lands. Since it is rather less than unlikely that there would be two complete sets of bizarre happenings in one part of the country, it makes sense to begin with the assumption that what happened to my Guardsmen is somehow associated with what happened to Callista.”

  “That seems likely,” she said. “This tells me something else. It was no human being who tore out old Bethiah’s eyes as she fought to save her fosterling.” She shuddered, wrapping her arms around her shoulders as if she were icy cold. “Damon! It is possible, can it be, that Callista is in the hands of the cat-people?”

  “It seems not impossible,” Damon said.

  “But what could they want with her? What will they do with her? What—what—”

  “How should I know, Ellemir? I could only guess. I know so little of those folk, even though I fought them. I have never seen one of them, except lying as a corpse on a battlefield. There are those who believe that they are as intelligent as mankind, and there are those who believe they are little more than the brutes. I do not think that anyone since the days of Varzil the Good really knows anything about them for certain.”

  “No, there is one thing we know for certain,” Ellemir said grimly, “that they fight like men, and sometimes even more fiercely.”

  “That, yes,” said Damon, and was silent, thinking of his Guard, ambushed and lying dead on the hillsides below Armida. They had died so that he could sit here by the fireside with Ellemir. He knew he could have done nothing to save them, and sharing their death would have done no good to anyone, but all the same guilt, tore at him and would not be eased. “When the storm subsides I must make shift somehow to go back and bury them,” he said, adding after a moment, “If there is enough left of them to bury.”

  Ellemir said, quoting a well-known mountain proverb, “The dead in heaven is too happy to grieve for indignities to his corpse; the dead in hell has too much else to grieve for.”

  “Still,” said Damon stubbornly, “for the sake of their kinfolk, I would do what I can.”

  “It is Callista’s fate that troubles me now,” Ellemir said. “Damon! Can you possibly be serious? Can you really believe that Callista is in the hands of nonhumans? Beyond all other considerations, what could they possibly want with her?”

  “As for that, child, I know no more than you do,” said Damon. “It is just possible—and we must accept the possibility—that they stole her for some unexplainable reason, comprehensible only to nonhumans, which we, being human, can never know or comprehend.”

  “That is no help at all!” Ellemir said angrily. “It sounds like the horror tales I heard in the nursery! So-and-so was stolen by monsters, and when I asked why the monsters stole her, Nurse told me that it was because they were monsters, and monsters were evil—” She broke off and her voice caught again. “This is real, Damon! She’s my sister! Don’t tell me fairy stories!”

  Damon looked at her levelly. “Nothing was further from my mind. I told you before; no one really knows anything about the cat-folk.”

  “Except that they are evil!”

  “What is evil?” Damon asked wearily. “Say they do evil to our own people, and I will agree heartily with you. But if you say that they are evil in themselves, for no reason and just for the pleasure of doing evil, then you are making them into those fairy-story monsters you’re talking about. I only said that since we are human and they are cat-people, we may have to accept that we may not be able to understand, now or ever, what their reasons for taking her may have been. But that is simply something to keep in mind—that any reasons we might guess for her kidnapping may simply be human approximations of their reasons, and not the whole truth. Apart from that, though, why do any folk steal women, and why Callista in particular? Or, for that matter, any beasts steal? I have never heard that they were cannibal flesh-eaters, and in any case the forests are filled with game at this season, so we may assume it was not that.”

  “Are you trying to give me the horrors?” Ellemir still sounded angry.

  “Not a bit of it. I’m trying to do away with the horrors,” Damon said. “If there was any vague thought in your mind that she might have been killed and eaten, I think you can dismiss it. Since they killed her guards, and disabled her foster mother, it was not just any human being they wanted, or even any woman. So they took her, not because she was human, not just because she was female, but because she was one specific female human: because she was Callista.”

  Ellemir said, low, “Bandits and trail-raiders steal young women, at times, for slaves, or concubines, or to sell in the Dry Towns—”

  “I think we can forget that too,” said Damon firmly.

  “They left all your serving-girls; in any case, what would cat-men want with a human female? There are stories of crossbreeds between man and chieri, back in the ancient times, but even those are mostly legends and no man living can say whether or not they have any foundation in fact. As for the other folk, our women are no more to them than theirs to us. Of course, it is possible that they have some human captive who wanted a wife, but even if they were so altruistic and kind as to be willing to provide him with one, which I admit I find hard to believe, there were a dozen serving girls in the outbuildings, as young as Callista, just as beautiful, and infinitely easier to come at. If they simply wanted human women, as hostages, or to sell somewhere as slaves, they would have taken them as well. Or taken them, and left Callista.”

  “Or me. Why take Callista from her bed and leave me sleeping untouched in mine?”

  “That, too. You and Callista are twins. I can tell you one from the other, but I have known you since your hair was too short to braid. A casual stranger could never have known you apart, and might easily have taken Callista for you. Now it’s barely possible that they were simply wanting a hostage, or someone to hold to ransom, and snatched the one who came first to hand.”

  “No,” Ellemir said, “my bed is nearest the door, and they walked very quietly and carefully around me to come at her.”

  “Then it comes to the one difference between you,” Damon told her. “Callista is a telepath and a Keeper. Yo
u are not. We can only assume that in some way they knew which of you was the telepath, and that for some reason they wanted specifically to take the one woman here who fitted that description. Why? I know no more than you do, but I am sure that was their reason.”

  “And all this still leaves us no nearer to a solution,” Ellemir said, and she sounded frantic. “The facts are that she is gone, and we don’t know where she is! So all your talk is no good at all!”

  “No? Think a little,” said Damon. “We know she has probably not been killed, except by accident; if they went to such great pains to take her, they will probably treat her with great care, feed her well, keep her warm, cherish her as a prize. She may be frightened and lonely, but she is probably neither cold, hungry, nor in pain, and it is very unlikely that she has suffered physical abuse or molestation. Also, it is quite probable that she has not been raped. That, at least, should ease your mind.”

  Ellemir raised the forgotten wine glass and sipped at it. She said, “But it doesn’t help us get her back, or even know where to look.” Just the same, she sounded calmer, and Damon was glad.

  He said, “One thing at a time, girl. Perhaps, after the storm—”

  “After the storm, whatever tracks or traces they might have left would be blotted out,” Ellemir said.

  “From all I hear, the cat-folk leave no tracks a man could read; hardly traces for another cat. In any case, I’m no tracker,” Damon said. “If I can help you at all; that won’t be the way.”

  Her eyes widened and suddenly she clutched at his arm.

  “Damon! You’re a telepath too, you’ve had some training—can you find Callista that way?”

  She looked so excited, so happy and alive at the prospect, that it crushed Damon to have to smash that hope, but he knew he must. He said, “It isn’t that easy, Ellemir. If you, her twin, can’t reach her mind, there must be some reason.”