Black Priestess of Varda Dominant, Page 2

  It was utterly dark until he made his hands glow again, after they had passed a bend. Finally the tunnel widened into a room.

  He left her floating, touched one wall, and it glowed with a soft, silvery light that showed her she was in living quarters of some kind. The walls were transparent plastic, and through their glow she could see the dirt and stones and tangled tree roots behind them. Water trickled in through a hole in one wall, passed through an oval pool of brightly colored tiles recessed into the floor, and vanished through a channel in the opposite wall. There were furnishings of strange design, simple yet adequate, and archways that seemed to lead to other rooms.

  The boy returned to her, pushed her over to a broad, low couch, shoving her downward. He touched her with an egg-shaped object from his belt and she sank into the soft cushions as abruptly her body went limp and recovered its normal heaviness. She stared up at him.

  He was beautiful in a vital, different way. Natural and healthily normal looking, but with an indescribable trace of the exotic. His hair, she saw—now that the light was no longer morbidly ruddy—was a lovely dark red with glints of fire. He was young and self-assured, yet oddly thoughtful, and there was about his an aura of vibrant attraction that seemed to call to all her forgotten dreams of loveliness. But Eldyn Carmichael was very sick and very tired.

  He looked at her speculatively, a troubled frown narrowing his strangely luminous grey-green eyes, and asked a question. She shook her head to show lack of understanding, wondering who he was and where she was.

  He turned away, his shoulders sagging with disappointment. Then he noticed that he was smeared with a gooey reddish-black substance, evidently from the huge bat-thing he had fought and killed. He gave a shiver of truly masculine repugnance.

  Quickly he discarded his close fitting jacket, brief skirt and the wide belt from which his sheathed dagger hung, displaying no trace of embarrassment at Eldyn's presence even when he stood completely nude.

  His body was fully curved but smoothly muscular, an active body. It was a symphony of perfection—except that across the curve of one high, firm breast ran a narrow crescent-shaped scar, red as though from a wound not completely healed. Once he glanced down at it and his face took on a hunted, fearful look.

  He tested the temperature of the pool with one outstretched bare toe and then plunged in, and as he bathed himself he hummed a strangely haunting tune that was full of minor harmonies and unfamiliar melodic progressions. Yet it was not entirely a sad tune, and he seemed to be enjoying his bath. Occasionally he glanced over at her, questioning and thoughtful.

  Eldyn tried to stay awake, but before he left the pool her one eye had closed.

  * * * *

  Pain in the stump of her arm brought a vague remembrance of having used it to strike at someone or something. For a while she lay half awake, trying to recall that dream about a boy flying with her through a forest that certainly existed nowhere on Earth. But the sound of trickling water kept intruding.

  She opened her eye and came face to face with the lemur-thing from her nightstallion. Its big round eyes assumed an astounded, quizzical expression as she blinked, and then it was gone. She heard it scuttling across the floor.

  She sat up and made a quick survey of her surroundings. Then the boy of the—no, it hadn't been a dream—emerged from an archway with the lemur on his shoulder. It made her think of stories she had read about witches of unearthly beauty and the uncannily intelligent animals, familiars, that served them.

  'Hey, where am I?' she demanded. He said something in his unfamiliar language.

  'Who are you?' she asked, this time with gestures.

  He pointed to himself. 'Krasno,' he said.

  She pointed to herself. 'Eldyn. Eldyn Carmichael.'

  'El-ve-dyn?' he asked just as eagerly as when he had found her, half as though correcting her.

  She shook her head. 'Just Eldyn.' His eyes clouded and he frowned.

  After a moment he spoke again, and again she shook her head. 'Sorry, no savvy,' she declared.

  He snapped his fingers as though remembering something and hurried from the room, returning with a small globe of cloudy crystal. He motioned her to lie back, and for a minute or two rubbed the ball vigorously against the soft, smooth skin of his forearm. Then he held it a few inches above her eye and gestured that she was to look at it.

  The crystal glowed, but not homogeneously. Some parts became brighter than others, and of different colors. Patterns formed and changed, and watching them made her feel drawn out of herself, into the crystal.

  The strange boy started talking-talking-talking in an unhurried monotone. Gradually scattered words began to form images in her mind. Pictures, some of them crystal clear but with their significance still obscure, others foggy and amorphous. There were people and things—and something so completely and utterly vile that even the thought made her brain cells cringe in fear of uncleansable defilement.

  It must have been hours he talked to her, for when she came out of the globe and back into herself his voice was tired and there were wrinkles of strain across his forehead. He was watching her intently and she suspected she had been subjected to some form of hypnosis.

  'Where am I? How did I get here?' she asked, and realized only when the words were out that she was speaking something other than English.

  Krasno did not answer at once. Instead a look of unutterable sadness stole over him face. And then he was weeping bitterly and uncontrollably.

  Eldyn was startled and embarrassed, not understanding but wishing she could do something, anything, to help him. Crying females had always disturbed her, and he looked so completely sad and-and defeated. The lemur-thing glowered at her resentfully.

  'What is it?' she asked.

  'You are not El-ve-dyn,' he sobbed.

  With her new command of his language, perhaps aided by some measure of telepathy, she received an impression of El-ve-dyn as a shining, unconquerable champion of unspecified powers, one who was fated to bring about the downfall of—of something obscenely evil and imminently threatening. She could not recall what it was, and Krasno's wracking sobs did not help her think clearly.

  'Of course I'm not El-ve-dyn,' she declared, and felt deeply sorry for herself that she was not. 'I'm just plain Eldyn Carmichael, and I am—or was—a biophysicist.' Once before Victoria Schenley had tried to kill her, she had been a competent and reasonably happy biophysicist.

  At last he wiped his eyes.

  'Well, if you don't remember, you just don't, I guess,' he sighed. 'You are in the world of Varda. Somehow you must have formed a Gateway and come through. I found you just by chance and thought—hoped—that you were El-ve-dyn.'

  He went on with a long explanation, only parts of which Eldyn understood.

  She was quite familiar with the theory of alternate worlds—his work with bound charges had given her an inkling of the actuality of other dimensions, and the fantastic idea that bound charges existed simultaneously in two or more 'worlds'at once, carrying their characteristic reactions across a dimensional gap had occurred to her frequently as her experiments had progressed. She had even entertained the notion that bound charges were the basic secret of life itself—but the proof still seemed unbelievable. Varda was a world adjoining her own, separated from it by some vagary of space or time-spiral warping or some obscure phase of the Law of Alternate Probabilities. But here she was, in Varda.

  She distinctly remembered hearing one of the resonant system components in her laboratory let go, not flow but break, and guessed that the sudden strain might have been sufficient to warp the very nature of matter in its vicinity.

  'Your world is one of the Closed Worlds,' Krasno explained. 'Things from it do not come through easily. Unfortunately the one from which the Luvans came is open much of the time.'

  Eldyn tried to think what a Luvan was, but recalled only a vaguely disquieting impression of something disgusting—and deadly.

  'I hoped so much.' Tears gathered
in Krasno's strange eyes. 'I thought perhaps when I found you that the old prophecy—the one to defeat Sassa—but perhaps I have been a fool to believe in the old prophecy at all. And Sassa—'His expressive mouth contorted with loathing.

  'How do I get back to my own world?' Eldyn demanded.

  Krasno stared at her until she began to fidget.

  'There is but one Gateway in all Varda, the Gateway of Sassa,' he declared in the tone of a person stating an obvious if unpleasant fact. 'And only El-ve-dyn can defeat the Faith.'

  'Oh!' She laughed in mirthless near-hysteria at the thought of herself as the unconquerable El-ve-dyn. His words left her bleakly despondent.

  'What happened to the others who were near me when—this—happened?' she asked. 'The woman and the man?'

  Krasno straightened in surprise. 'There were others? Oh! Perhaps one of them is El-ve-dyn!'

  'I doubt it,' Eldyn said wryly.

  But Krasno's excitement was not to be quelled. He spoke to the lemur-thing as if to another human, and the creature scuttled up the tunnel leading to the surface. Eldyn thought once more of the witch-familiars of Earth legends. If she had come through to Varda, perhaps Vardans had visited Earth.

  'We shall find out about them soon,' he said.

  'What happens to me?' Eldyn wanted to know.

  She had to repeat her question, for Krasno had suddenly become deeply preoccupied. At last he looked at her. There was pity in his glance, not pity for her situation but pity for a disfigured, frightened and querulous cripple. He did not understand the overwhelming longing for Earth which was mounting within her every second. His pity grated upon her nerves. She could pity herself all she chose—and she had reason enough—but she rejected the pity of others.

  'Well?' she demanded.

  'Oh, you can stay with me, I guess. That is, if you dare associate with me.' There was bitterness in his voice.

  None of it made sense. He had saved her from the forest, brought her to his home. Why should she be afraid to associate with him? But all she wanted was to find Marion, if he were in this strange world, and escape back to Earth. There, though she was a cripple, she was not so abysmally ignorant. She knew she should feel grateful to this red-haired boy, but deep in her brain an irrational resentment gnawed. She tried to fight it down, knowing she had to learn much more about her new environment before she could survive alone. The last shreds of her crumbling self-confidence had been stripped away.

  Suddenly she realized she was ravenously hungry.

  'All right,' the boy said. 'We will eat now.'

  She stared at him in discomfiture. She had not mentioned food. He laughed.

  'Really,' he said, 'you seem to know nothing about closing your mind.'

  Resentment flared higher. He was a telepath, and she was not proud of her thoughts.

  The passageway into which she followed his was dark, but after a few steps his hands began to light the way as they had in the forest.

  'How do you do it?' she asked. To her the production of cold light in living tissues was even more astounding than his control of gravity. That still seemed too much like a familiar dream she had had many times on Earth, and it probably had some mechanical basis.

  He smiled at her as though at a curious child. 'That is old knowledge in the Open Worlds. Your Closed Worlds must be very strange.'

  'But how do you control it?'

  He shrugged his lovely shoulders. 'You may be fit to learn—later.' But he spoke doubtfully.

  The food was unfamiliar but satisfying, warmed in a matter of seconds in an oven-like box to which she could see no power connections or controls. In reply to her questions he pointed to a hexagonal red crystal set in the back of the box and looked at her as though she should understand.

  One of the foods was a sort of meat, and with only one arm Eldyn found herself in difficulty. Krasno noticed, took her eating utensils and cut it into bite-sized bits. He said nothing, but she finished the meal in sullen silence, resentful that she needed a man's help even to eat.

  Afterwards Krasno buckled on his heavy belt with the dagger swinging at his hip.

  'I must go out now,' he said. 'The not-quite-men of the Faith are prowling tonight, and Luvans are with them.'

  'But-?'

  'You could not help.'

  The reminder of her uselessness rankled, but still she felt a pang at the thought of a boy like his going into danger.

  'But you?' she asked.

  'I can take care of myself. And if not, what matter? I am Krasno.'

  Once more he read her thoughts.

  'No. Stay here.' It was not a request but an order. 'If you were to fall into the hands of—her—it would add to my troubles. And my own people would kill you on sight, because you have been with me.'

  CHAPTER III

  After he left, she prowled restlessly around the underground rooms, looking, touching, exploring. She tried to find the controls for the illuminated walls, and there were none. Every square inch of the smooth plastic seemed exactly like every other. The other devices—even the uses of some she could not determine—were the same. There were no switches or other controls. It was all very puzzling.

  She spent most of her time in the main room where Krasno had left the walls lighted, for the unfamiliar darkness of the others gave her the eerie feeling that something was watching her from behind. Some of the fittings seemed unaccountably familiar, although operating on principles she was unable to understand. The sense of familiarity amid strangeness gave her a schizophrenic sensation, as though two personalities struggled for control, two personalities with different life-patterns and experiences. A most unsettling feeling.

  She thought of Marion, longingly, and then of Victoria. Her fist clenched and her lips tightened. If Schenley were still alive, some day there would be a reckoning. Schenley had been sure of herself and had boasted. And now, she was sure, Marion knew just what sort of rat Victoria really was.

  Her thoughts turned to her anomalous position with the red-haired boy. Krasno had brought her out of the perilous forest purely because he thought she was this wonderful El-ve-dyn. And now she was living in his home, entirely dependent upon his sense of pity. It was galling.

  She found a large rack containing scrolls mounted on cleverly designed double rollers, and after the first few minutes of puzzling out the writing letter by letter she found herself reading with growing fluency. Part of the same hypnotic and telepathic process, she reflected, through which Krasno had taught her his spoken language. At first she read mainly to escape her own unpleasant thoughts and keep occupied, but then she grew interested. Brief, undetailed references began to make pictures—the Gateway—the Fortress of Syn—the Forest People, evidently the clan to which Krasno belonged—the Luvans—Sassa. Her mind squirmed away from that last impression. Gradually the disconnected pictures began to form a sequence.

  She was still reading hours later when Krasno emerged from the tunnel. He gave a little sigh of fatigue, dropped his heavy weapon belt, and started to undress. But the lemur-thing interrupted. It raced down the tunnel, a furry streak that chattered for attention.

  'Later, Tikta,' Krasno told it, continuing to disrobe. 'I'm too tired to understand.'

  The sight of his loveliness as he stepped into the warm pool gave Eldyn no pleasure. If everything had been different ... Instead it brought rankling resentment, of him, of her condition, of everything. He looked at her just as impersonally as he did at his lemur. It was evident he did not consider her a woman, a person. She was just something he had picked up by mistake and was too kindhearted to dispose of. Under the circumstances it would have been ridiculous for her to turn away.

  'Now, Tikta,' he said after his bath, sinking down on one of the couches.

  The little creature ran to him, leaped to his shoulder and placed its tiny hand-like front paws on opposite sides of his head. Krasno closed his eyes.

  To Eldyn, observing closely, it was like watching someone who was seeing an emo
tional movie. Hate, anger, hope, surprise, puzzlement, all followed each other across his mobile, expressive features, ending in disappointment and disgust. At last Tikta removed its paws and Krasno opened his eyes.

  'Your—friends—'he hesitated over the word. 'They are in Varda. Both.'

  'Is the boy all right? Where are they? How do you know? Did you see them?' The questions tumbled from Eldyn's lips.

  Krasno smiled faintly. 'No, I have not seen them. But Tikta can catch the thoughts of all wild things that can not guard their minds, and tell me. The wild things saw your—friends.' Again he hesitated, and this time made a grimace of angry distaste.

  'Where is the boy? Can you take me to him?' she demanded excitedly.

  'No. They are both beyond the Mountains that Move.'

  'So?'

  'In the land of the Faith,' he snapped.

  'But couldn't you-?'

  Pity was almost smothered in stern contempt as he looked at her. 'We do not go among the Faith except for a purpose. And that purpose is not returning you to your—friends.'

  'But your people?'

  'They would not help you if they could. For I am Krasno.'

  She did not grasp the significance of his words but the firmness of his tone indicated there was no use arguing with this self-willed, red-haired person. Nevertheless she resolved to try to find Marion, and as soon as possible.

  Krasno's eyes widened with apprehension at her thought.

  'You are a fool. And if you must try you had better read all the scrolls first. Only El-ve-dyn could survive, and the death of the Faith is not easy.'

  Eldyn cursed silently. This damnable boy, although beautiful in his own odd way, not only insulted her with his pity but invaded her mind.

  'Well, shut your mind if you don't like it,' he snapped angrily. 'You're odd, too, and far from beautiful.'

  * * * *

  Marion Matson opened his eyes. A strange woman stood over him, and what a woman! She was huge and hard looking, with dark, wind-toughened skin. She was dressed in some sort of barbaric military uniform, colorful and heavily decorated. And she was playing with a needle pointed dagger.

  His mouth opened. 'Victoria!' he screamed.

  His voice reverberated hollowly from the curved walls and roof of a small metal room. The big woman screwed up her face at the shrill noise.