The Fall of Neskaya

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  The thought flickered through Rumail’s mind that if he delayed, if Belisar were caught and killed, then he, Rumail, might well be the heir to Ambervale and all its possessions. As quickly, he brushed aside the notion as unworthy. At one time, it might have seriously tempted him, but he had grown beyond the desire for simple kingship. Now he knew better. The key to ruling Darkover did not lie in the might of ordinary arms. This day’s battle proved that decisively. Without their laran, the Hastur would have been easy prey.

  Brows furrowed, Rumail studied the laran-powered devices. The bonewater dust which filled their fragile glass bellies was intended only as a last resort. If this was not a situation of last resort, with Belisar’s freedom and perhaps his life at stake, then what was? Unchecked, the Hastur forces might well plunge on into Acosta. They had momentum, confidence and leadership on their side. With their laranzu’in, they might even lay a successful siege to Acosta Castle itself. And if Damian could take the castle, then so could Rafael Hastur.

  They must be stopped, no matter what the price, or all might be lost, far more than Belisar’s cowardly skin.

  The bonewater dust, quiescent now, with only a faint greenish pinpoint radiance, had been purchased from the renegade circle in Temora at an obscene cost, since Tramontana insisted they were unable to produce it.

  Unable? he’d wondered. Or simply unwilling? As soon as he could convince Damian, he meant to travel there and institute proper obedience. Since he could not train up his own circle, not in the time these momentous events demanded, he must take control of an established Tower. Being Keeper of a fully trained circle would be a very different affair than struggling to draw together unsuitable, undisciplined novices. Tramontana and then Neskaya would fall into his hands like ripened plums.

  He established a link with the small starstone guide chips set in each device and tossed them into the air. The guidance mechanisms were so simple, he effortlessly controlled all three of them. Mechanical wings whirred as they gained altitude. He followed them with his mind as they navigated the air currents, never drifting on thermals as would natural birds, but heading unerringly toward the sky above the oncoming Hastur force.

  Not too high . . . He wanted a limited area of dispersal, so as little of the surrounding area as possible would be polluted. The poison would last for generations, rendering the Drycreek area impassable to all but suicidal fools.

  Rumail brought the mechanical birds lower. He could not follow them with his physical eyes, only with his laran senses. He gave the Release signal. Glass cracked and shattered into myriad tiny shards.

  Dust began its slow, inexorable fall toward the Hastur soldiers. Rumail looked up, squinting, as it caught the sunlight. It had never occurred to him that it might be so beautiful, sparkling and glowing in the sun. Men on both sides paused to look up.

  With death drifting from the skies, those Hastur fools stood gaping at their doom. Suddenly a breeze sprang up, as if from the bellows of Zandru’s forge.

  It blew the unnatural poison back toward Rumail and his own men.

  Rumail pulled his mule to a halt. Gesturing, he shouted and pointed in the direction of the retreat.

  “Flee! Flee for your lives!”

  Those closest to him took heed and bolted, some dropping their weapons and packs. Others paid no attention or looked to their own officers, if they could find them in the growing chaos. Ordinary dust billowed up, choking man and beast.

  Taking out his starstone on its chain around his neck, Rumail focused on its depths, using its resonances to amplify his laran. He launched his mind aloft, into the currents of air, and felt a wash of relief. This was a natural wind and not one created by psychic meddling with weather patterns. The Aldarans were rumored to do this on a huge scale, and most circles could manipulate rain clouds to some degree. That is, when their Keepers allowed them, without the usual endless agonizing over disrupting natural patterns and causing unforeseen consequences elsewhere, a drought here or a flood there, all from moving a few little clouds around. These things doubtless would have happened anyway. Rumail possessed no special talent in controlling weather, but neither was he overly modest about his power as a laranzu. He knew enough to contain the breeze and even turn it back on the Hastur forces.

  Rumail spread out his psychic senses, mapping out the areas of cooler and warmer air. Nudging the streams of different temperatures, he felt the pressures driving the breeze lessen. A moment more would reverse the air current, sending the deadly powder back toward its target.

  “DEMON!”

  A cry, so hoarse as to be barely human, burst through Rumail’s concentration. Blinking, he snapped back to the material world to see a man in Hastur colors rush at him. In a single moment, his vision filled with sky, glowing dust and a reddened face, distorted with fury. The man stumbled, caught his balance, and lifted his arms. Sun flashed on the point of the man’s halberd, aimed upward toward Rumail’s belly.

  Without thinking, Rumail jerked the mule’s head and twisted in the saddle. Something struck him in the side, a heavy blow like the kick of a wild oudrakhi that sent him tumbling to the ground. The earth rose up to knock the breath from his lungs. Someone shrieked, rising above the shouting, neighing mass.

  With a panicked bray, the mule reared up. Rumail tried to roll out of its path. His body felt leaden, unresponsive. Heavy blows battered him. He couldn’t tell if he’d been kicked by the mule or the men rushing past him. His eyes caught the image of the mule’s belly as it leaped over him. He pulled himself into a ball, covering his head with his hands.

  Someone hooked him under the armpits and dragged him along the ground. Rocks bit through his clothing, scoring his skin. The pain receded, as if happening to someone else. Roaring filled his ears.

  For a long moment, he lay still, tensed against the next blow of hoof or booted foot, but none came. Pain throbbed along his side, over the short ribs, so sudden and intense it took his breath away. He uncurled himself and tried to sit up. The slightest movement escalated the pain. His vision whirled, but he saw that he lay at the base of a little rocky mound, well out of the path of the army.

  Gingerly, he reached over with the uninjured hand and brought away fingers sticky with blood.

  Rumail lay back and closed his eyes, gathering his strength. Thank all the gods at once, he still had his starstone. The chain had not snapped in his fall. Moving carefully, he gathered it up.

  He had only the most basic training as a monitor, lacking the empathy necessary to do the work really well. But now his life depended on his skill.

  The pain would be a distraction, so he would have to deal with it, but if he numbed the area, he would not be able to determine the nature of his injuries. He lay very still, keeping his breathing shallow and high in his chest.

  Go into the pain, he told himself. Immerse yourself in it. Move through it to your goal. For a moment, he remembered the transfixed expression on Ginevra’s face as she drank in the pain of the young girl—what had her name been? It didn’t matter.

  The pain eased somewhat as he penetrated deeper into his own body. Within a few minutes, he knew that the tip of the halberd had slashed through his skin and splintered one of his ribs. The point had pierced his lung, collapsing one lobe. Blood quickly filled the surrounding tissues. Given time, he could heal himself. But if it pinned him here, the wound might nonetheless prove fatal.

  Tightening his grasp on his starstone, he focused on the torn tissues—skin, muscle, capillaries, nerves. It would be a slow task to mend them enough so that he could travel.

  The first particle of bonewater dust touched him.

  In Rumail’s state of heightened laran awareness, it burned like clingfire, though it was neither hot nor caustic. Desperately, he threw up an energy barrier between himself and the particle and felt it lift, buoyed by the repulsion forces. He shifted his consciousness to sense thousands of them, millions perhaps, hovering in the breeze.

  The breeze, he repeated bitterly to himself,
which he’d been unable to stop. He wondered if his own death were a fitting payment for that failure.

  But he still wanted very much to live. He had not finished all that he wanted to accomplish. In fact, he had just begun to figure out what those things were. Somehow, he had to find a way to survive.

  Rumail drew his knees to his chest, making his body as small as he could, and drew upon his trained laran to create a shield between himself and the toxic dust.

  As he sank into a deep trance, he realized that he had no strength to spare to heal himself. And without the ability to walk, he could not leave the contaminated area. No man alive, nor woman either, could teleport him or her self without the aid of a circle and great artificial matrix screens. He might lie here undiscovered and undisturbed, locked behind the barriers set by his own mind, as his life energies dwindled and guttered out, cinders to ashes.

  He was trapped.

  Somewhere out there were the Hastur laranzu’in, the ones who had shielded themselves from him and masked the encirclement of the army. If he could reach them—

  Beg for rescue from my brother’s enemies?

  But he must survive, he must. If not for his own sake, then for the vision which he had shared with Damian, and the far greater dream which was his alone.

  His last conscious act was to disguise his mental thought pattern as he sent out a plea for help. . . .

  29

  A rider clattered into the Hastur encampment just as dusk was falling. Coryn heard shouting from the tent he shared with several of the junior officers. He had not planned on coming at all, but had agreed at the last moment, hoping for a chance to plead his case privately before Rafael. Surely the King would agree that whatever role laran weaponry might play, the Towers themselves must not become involved.

  Here in the field, it all seemed a moot point. He had not realized the seriousness—or the desperation—of men in armed conflict. No sane king would throw away his most powerful weapon.

  At the same time, Coryn felt sure that neither King Rafael nor his adversary truly understood the magnitude of the forces a Tower controlled. They had never delved miles beneath the surface to raise precious minerals, nor manipulated the energy binding the tiniest particles together, nor touched the vast magnetic and electrical fields of the planet itself. If laran could power an aircar or send messages across hundreds of miles, how much more was possible? Yet anything Coryn could say might only strengthen Rafael’s resolve to use the Towers at his command in this or any other war.

  Coryn, still biding his time, found the sentry-birds of interest, never having learned to fly one. Neither Tramontana nor Neskaya had any use for the birds, which required the care of a skilled falconer. In this case, the handler was a stocky, middle-aged laranzu named Edric, who answered all of Coryn’s questions with grunted monosyllables and kept his laran barriers so tightly raised that Coryn suspected he was comfortable only in the presence of his beasts. He, along with Lady Caitlin and the third worker, a shy young woman named Graciela, had ridden out with the main body of the army two days before.

  Now the shouted hails and hoofbeats of the rider brought out everyone left in camp. The rider wore an officer’s tunic in Hastur colors, torn and caked with sweat-streaked dust. His horse slid to a halt. Its sides heaved like bellows. Lather dripped from its muzzle and frothed the sides of its neck where the reins had rubbed. Its coat was so dark with sweat, it looked black.

  The rider stumbled into the circle at the center of the encampment. Two of Rafael’s personal guards ran to catch him or he would surely have fallen.

  “Are you hurt, man?”

  The rider shook his head. “I must—tell—the King.”

  “The battle—did it go against us, then?”

  The rider only shook his head again and pulled free, toward the King’s tent. Just then Rafael Hastur appeared, lifting the door flap aside. The reddening sunset flashed on the simple copper circlet on his brow. Coryn felt the aura of energy surrounding the king like a crackle of dry lightning.

  “Your Majesty!” the rider cried. “We are undone!”

  A stormy expression flickered across Rafael’s eyes, as quickly gone. “Come with me,” he told the rider, gesturing to his tent. He gave a string of orders, for food to be brought, for wine, for the camp physician, for his senior officers. Coryn felt the heat of his gaze. “You, too. You will hear and advise me.”

  Within minutes, the party gathered in the shadowed closeness of Rafael’s tent. Laran-powered glows brightened at Edric’s touch to fill the space with eerie radiance. The rider lowered himself to a canvas camp stool before the King’s chair, gulping water. Coryn thought he would rather be on his knees, pleading outright.

  “At first everything went as we had planned,” the rider said. His name was Vincenzo or Vincento, Coryn didn’t catch which, and he was a captain, a leader of men.

  There was something subtly wrong with Vincento that went beyond the stress and urgency of the moment. The man was not only exhausted, he was ill in some way that Coryn could not pinpoint. Gareth or Liane would know.

  “Deslucido advanced as we retreated, right into the trap. Domna Caitlin and the others held the illusion until the last moment. Then we lifted the fog and let them see us.” Vincento stopped for more water. His skin looked dull, like unfired clay, and he was sweating visibly, although the tent was cool and night was falling. A flicker of pain crossed his face, deepening the lines of strain.

  They all waited for him to continue. Rafael sat back in his chair, stroking his beard with one hand.

  “We offered them your terms and they agreed.”

  One of the officers said. “Did they forswear themselves, then?”

  Vincento shook his head. “Their men gave us the required oaths, and we permitted them to leave after Belisar Deslucido had given himself into our custody. But once he came into our camp, Domna Caitlin looked straight at him. The air shivered, and we saw we had been tricked. It was not young Deslucido, but an ordinary man, put under some kind of spell so as to resemble the Prince.” He paused, mouth working, sweating even harder now.

  Coryn reached out with his mind and tasted Vincento’s sickness, felt the roil of nausea an instant before the man bolted for the back of the tent. They heard him retching outside. Rafael gestured for everyone to remain as they were except for the camp physician.

  The physician came back a few minutes later, his face seamed with concern. The messenger followed him for a step or two before collapsing. Coryn caught the man before he fell and lowered him to a pile of folded blankets. The man curled on his side, body spasming with dry heaves. His skin felt hot and papery.

  “This man is acutely ill, Highness,” the physician said. “He must rest, or he may not live past the telling of his story.”

  “What is wrong with him?” Rafael asked.

  “I . . . I am not sure.”

  Coryn heard the resonances in the physician’s voice. If he did not know, he suspected, and that possibility terrified him.

  The messenger flinched at the physician’s touch as if the merest contact with his skin pained him. He struggled to sit upright. His retching had subsided enough for him to speak. Rafael, despite the physician’s warning, came closer.

  “Sire—” the voice, like the man’s skin, sounded shriveled, whispery. “We pursued them—and they—they—” For a moment, his words were lost in labored breathing. Coryn heard the wheeze and rale of congested lungs. A shiver went through him as he remembered that horrifying moment of being Kristlin stricken with lungrot.

  Yet another foul weapon . . .

  “Bird-things—dropped—” the next word was indistinguishable. The man sagged back on the piled blankets. His chest rose and fell like the fluttering of wings. A shudder passed over his body and watery blood trickled from his mouth.

  Coryn felt the sudden stillness, the weight of the man’s flesh as the spirit left him. The old ache behind his breastbone, which he had thought healed and gone with his childhood n
ightmares, throbbed.

  “What is it?” Rafael asked. “What did he say?”

  “He said nothing, vai dom,” the physician said in a hollow voice.

  “Out with it, man! What happened?” And will others of my men die like this?

  Coryn heard the fury in Rafael’s voice, the passionate concern for his people. Rafael raised one hand and Coryn saw his intention, to go to the aid of his men, to see the destruction with his own eyes. He would spare himself nothing.

  “No, Highness!” the physician let out a cry. “You must not risk yourself. We must move this camp back and set up to tend to the survivors—”

  “I will not abandon my men to die.” Rafael barked out commands—to move the camp to a safer location, to set up facilities for nursing the wounded.

  Within minutes, Coryn found himself on horseback, galloping in Rafael’s wake in the midst of the King’s hand-picked guard. Before long, night gathered inky shadows about them. Improvised torches wavered in the distance. Sometimes they heard rather than saw the oncoming soldiers.

  Coryn called a sphere of cold blue light and held it aloft. They passed the retreating Hastur forces, cavalry bearing double or sometimes triple. Others jogged by on their own two feet, weapons and gear abandoned. Coryn saw how orderly their progress was, despite the darkness and the fear which burned in the air and glazed the eyes of the exhausted-looking men. There was no shoving, no disarray, no sign of panic.

  A mounted officer held a torch aloft, shouting orders. He spotted Rafael’s banner and spurred his horse toward it. At Rafael’s command, he gave his report. The substitution of captive had been discovered, even as the dead messenger had said, and orders given to halt the retreat. An elite party of the fastest cavalry had ridden for the Ambervale vanguard where the real Prince Belisar must be hiding. The last third of the enemy foot soldiers, who had no notion of what had transpired, had halted. Somehow, word had gone forward, and the Ambervale forces had split in two. No one was sure what happened next in the dust and confusion, with riders going in both directions.