The Saga of the Renunciates

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  No. Think. This is a dream. Slowly a sense of reality penetrated Magda’s mind; slowly, slowly. She felt herself pull free, free of the invisible bonds, raised her arms, jerked herself up, and found herself sitting bolt upright in her cold sleeping bag. Her heart was still pounding with the nightmare. She heard Jaelle cry out, and reached over to shake her freemate awake.

  “Shaya, Shaya, are you having a nightmare too?”

  “Zandru’s hells,” Jaelle whispered, “it was a dream, a dream, I was only dreaming—Aquilara’s sorceresses. They were torturing Rafaella, and they had chained me up to Rafi’s big rryl and were making me play ballads on it, and she was screaming—ah, how she was screaming, like a girl of fourteen in childbirth—and the demons all kept yelling, ‘Louder, play louder, so we cannot hear her scream… ’ ” She shuddered and buried her head against Magda’s shoulder.

  Magda stroked Jaelle’s soft hair, comprehending what had happened. Even the themes in the nightmares they had shared had been all but identical.

  She wondered if Camilla and the others were suffering nightmare too. She was almost afraid to try to sleep again. “I thought this place was guarded,” she said, “that even the names of that witch and her people could not be spoken here… ”

  “I think that was only while we were sick and exhausted,” Jaelle ventured. “Now that we are well again, and there are decisions to be made, nightmares can move in our minds, those demons—” she hesitated, said tentatively “… torturing us?”

  But Magda could not attend to the question. A wave of horror swept through her, making her physically ill with its impact.

  She was lying on the ground, chained hand and foot at the center of a ring of robed and hooded figures… no; they were men, scarred bandits, wielding knives, naked, their gross hairy bodies and erect phalluses touching her everywhere, intruding into her everywhere, and they were like razors, like knives shearing off her breasts, invading her womb, tearing her womanhood from her. One of them, an evil hawk-faced man with a scar, held up the body of a naked, bleeding child, a fetus half-formed, shrieking, “Here is the Heir to Hastur that she may never bear!” Slowly, slowly, the face of the bandit changed, became, not gross and scarred, but noble, pale, detached, the face of the sorceress Leonie… No; it was a man’s face. The face of the regent, Lorill Hastur. “How can I acknowledge as my own child a girl who has been so treated, so scarred?” he asked coldly, and turned away…

  “Magda!” Jaelle clutched at her in horror; Magda freed herself from the terrible paralysis of nightmare. Once before during the waking of her own laran she had become a part of Camilla’s nightmares. A dreadful time; and the worst of it had been Camilla’s horror and shame, that she could not barricade these memories and horrors from her friend and lover.

  She bent over Camilla and shook her awake.

  “You were crying out in your sleep, love. Were you having a bad dream?”

  Magda had seen this before: how Camilla struggled up from the paralysis of terror. With shaking hands, she wiped the sweat of nightmare from her face, fighting to compose herself.

  “Aye,” she whispered at last. “My thanks for waking me, oath-sisters.” She knew, and she knew they knew, what she had been dreaming. But she could trust them to ask no questions, and she was grateful.

  The next morning, Cholayna’s color was good, and her breathing so easy that the women who came to bring the breakfast porridge dismantled the steam tent and took it away. Cholayna sat up and dressed herself, all except her boots, saying she felt perfectly well.

  But Magda knew this raised again the question they had been avoiding while Cholayna’s life was in danger, and she found herself dreading the debate. Cholayna could face no more rough weather and exposure.

  Yet how likely was it that she would agree to go back, and could she turn over the search for Lexie to Vanessa and Magda? Would she? Magda doubted it.

  So they carefully avoided the subject, and Magda felt the enforced silence fraying away at her nerves. It was a fine bright day, and Vanessa went out to walk along the cliffs, trying to scan out a route ahead. Magda walked with her a little way.

  “Tell me, Vanessa, did you have bad dreams last night?”

  Vanessa nodded, but she turned her face away, her cheeks crimson, and did not volunteer to say what she had dreamed, and Magda did not ask. They were under attack again; the Sisterhood of the Wise was most effectively guarded by the Sisterhood of the Dark or so it seemed… or could it be that the two were inextricably intertwined? Her own nightmare and Jaelle’s had come from their own inner demons and flaws, not from anything anyone had imposed on them from the outside.

  But Camilla? This was no nightmare based on something she had done wrong, no background of mistake or cruelty or omission coming back to haunt her, as with Jaelle and Magda, but something done to an innocent child who had no way deserved any of it…

  Jaelle had asked the unanswerable question: Why do the wicked flourish? But even the cristoforos had no answer to that question; they framed the question itself in poetic language and called it a mystery of their God.

  Vanessa was involved at the moment not in philosophical speculations, but practical realities.

  “We’ll have to go on from here, on foot. A couple of chervines might make it, but I can’t imagine taking a horse over those trails.”

  “Do you think Cholayna can make it?”

  “Hellfire, Lorne, I’m no mind reader. But she’ll insist on trying, and I don’t think I’d be able to stop her. You want to try convincing her? No? I thought not.”

  When they went back to the building where they had spent the last few nights, Camilla was on her feet, bowing to someone in the lee of the fireplace. Magda and Vanessa came in, and Jaelle said, as if completing an introduction she had begun, “and these are our companions Vanessa ryn Erin and Margali n’ha Ysabet.”

  Magda came around the fire and saw a small, slight young woman, with her hair in a long braid down her back, as the countrywomen around Caer Donn wore it. She wore a simple knee-length tunic, dark saffron-color, embroidered at neck and sleeves with a childish pattern of leaves and flowers, and simple unadorned brown riding breeches. Otherwise she wore no jewelry or ornament except for a plain copper ring in her left ear.

  She said, “My name is Kyntha.” She spoke the ordinary casta of the hill country, but slowly and carefully.

  “I have been sent for, and I must go soon. Tell me why you have come into this country, so far beyond Nevarsin?”

  Jaelle leaned forward and whispered so softly that no one else could hear, “This is the woman Rakhaila told me about.” Aloud she said, “We came after friends of ours. Now we have cause to think they have met with catastrophe, or captivity.”

  Kyntha said nothing, and Jaelle dug into a pocket and pulled out Rafaelle’s letter, which had started them on their travels.

  “I do not know if it is the custom in your country for women to read and write—”

  “I can read, yes,” said Kyntha, stretching out her hand for the letter. She read it slowly and carefully, her lips moving as if it were in some other language.

  Then she said, “What do you want of me? If it is the Sisterhood of the Wise that your friend seeks, I think you know she failed before she started.”

  “Can you help us rescue her?” Jaelle asked.

  “No.” It was flat, final, left no room for discussion or argument, and had more impact than a dozen protestations or excuses.

  “Nevertheless, for the sake of our friendship, I must attempt it,” said Jaelle.

  “If you must, you must. But beware of being dragged into the causes which she set in motion. And if you save her from the effects of her own folly, what then? Will you safeguard her all her life lest she fall again into error?”

  Vanessa began, “If she has trespassed unwittingly on your sacred Sisterhood, would you punish her for ignorance?”

  “Does the snow punish the child who strays into it without cloak or hood or boots? Is th
e child less frozen for that?”

  That was, Magda thought, another conversation-stopper. At last Jaelle asked, “Can you help us find the way to the City where the Sisterhood dwells?”

  Kyntha said, even more deliberately:

  “If I knew the way to that place, I should be sworn never to tell. I think you know this much. Why then do you ask?”

  “Because I know that there are some who have come and gone,” Jaelle said, “and why should I look for a key to a strange lock when, perhaps, knocking politely on the door will gain me entrance?”

  Kyntha smiled fleetingly for the first time.

  “Some have gained entrance there. It is not for me to say you would not be welcomed. Who told you of that place?”

  “My foster-mother, for one,” Jaelle said. “Though I never thought I would seek it. But now it seems to me that the time has come.”

  “And your companions? Do you speak for them?”

  Jaelle opened her mouth, then shut it again. Finally she said, “No. I will let them speak for themselves.”

  “Good.” Kyntha looked at each of them in turn, but there was a perceptible silence. At last Cholayna said, “I have no wish to trespass upon your City. My interest is in one of the young women mentioned in the letter.”

  “Is she your daughter or your lover? Or is she a child that you seek to keep her from the consequences of her own actions, daughter of Chandria?” Magda was surprised that Kyntha, after the hasty mass introductions, remembered Cholayna’s name.

  “None of those. But she was my student; I trained her. I accept responsibility for her failure.”

  “Arrogance,” Kyntha said. “She is a grown woman. The choice to fail was her own, and she is entitled to bear her own mistakes.”

  Vanessa interrupted in an argumentative tone, “If it is forbidden to help a friend in your city, I hope I may never go there. Dare you tell us that it is forbidden, or unlawful by your rules, to help a friend?”

  Kyntha’s eyes met Vanessa’s for a long moment.

  Then she said in the same serious manner, “Your motives are good. So with the child who wanted to help the tigercat move her kits to a warm and cozy den in his own bed. You do not know what you are doing, and you will not be spared because your motives were admirable.”

  Her eyes moved on to Camilla. “Do you seek the City, or are you here only from an ill-conceived desire to share the fate of your friends?”

  “If you scoff at friendship, or even at love,” Camilla retorted, “then I care not what you think of me. My reasons for seeking that city are my own, and you have not yet convinced me that I should entrust them to you. What evidence have I that the key is in your hands?”

  “Good,” Kyntha remarked. “There are many who know the way to that place, but some of those who offer to show you the way do not know it as well as they think they do. It is not impossible that permission would be granted for you, and perhaps for this one—” she indicated Jaelle with a faint movement of her head. “I don’t know. If it is ordained that you shall be allowed to seek that end to your journey, then you may be guided or even helped. But many have been offered help and turned back, and some who persevered could not finish the journey, for one reason or another. You must be wise and wary.” She turned to Magda and said, “And you?”

  “Twice I have encountered the Sisterhood, or so I believe,” Magda said. Kyntha’s eyes on her were oddly compelling; Magda felt it would be unthinkable to lie before those eyes. “Once they saved my life and the life of my freemate. One of these women who in your words, trespassed, has also, in great crisis and at the point of death, encountered these same Sisterhood. Therefore I believed that I—and perhaps she too—had been summoned. How do you know that we have not been summoned, but assume immediately that either of us has chosen to trespass?

  “Because I read her companion’s letter,” Kyntha replied. “Even if she had been summoned, anyone who could concur in the motives of that letter would never find the place they sought. It would be for her, at that particular time, and in that particular company, an act of trespass. As for you, I have no way of knowing whether you have in fact been summoned, or whether you suffer from a delusion. If you have in truth been summoned, help will be forthcoming. And you will be left in no doubt.”

  Silence. At last Jaelle said, “May I ask you a question?”

  “Or a dozen. I cannot promise to answer, though. I was not sent to you for that, and I am not learned or wise.”

  “Are you a member of that Sisterhood?”

  “If I should claim to be so, how would you know I told you the truth? Anyone might make such a claim.”

  Camilla interrupted, “There are those among us with laran. Enough, at any rate, to know a liar from a sooth-teller.” Her voice was hard, but Kyntha only smiled. Magda got the definite impression that she liked Camilla.

  “Another question,” Jaelle said. “We met with—” She hesitated, and Magda guessed she remembered they were not to speak Aquilara’s name. “With one who presumed to try and give us commands in the name of the Goddess. Tell me, was she one of your Sisterhood?”

  “Why do you question your own instincts, Shaya n’ha Melora? Will you let me counsel you a little, as much as I may?”

  “Certainly,” said Jaelle.

  “Then this is what I advise you. Be silent. Speak to no one of your objective, and never, thrice never, name the evil you distrust. It would be simpler for your little daughter to cross Ravensmark pass in her silken indoor slippers and armed only with a wooden spoon against the banshee, than for you to enter into that place in the wrong company. And there are some who, if you are summoned, will attempt to stop you out of jealousy, or from the sheer love of mischief-making. If help is sent to you, trust your instincts.” She bowed, somehow including all of them in the gesture.

  “I wish you good fortune, whether you believe it or not,” she said, and without any more fuss or any kind of leavetaking, went away.

  “Well,” said Cholayna, when it was obvious that she would not return, “what are we to make of that?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Jaelle said. “But I wouldn’t count on hospitality from these people much longer. We’ve had our warning, we’re rested and well again, now it’s up to us to decide whether we are going on, or back.”

  “I am not going back,” said Camilla. “I gather from what she said that the city we seek is near, and as for a city of Avarra’s Sisterhood, it would be safer to assume it is nearer Avarra’s holy house, than farther. She said nothing of sending us back.”

  “And I think perhaps she was sent to determine how determined we are,” said Jaelle. “She certainly did her best to discourage us.”

  “That wasn’t the idea I got at all,” Magda protested. She thought Kyntha had been admirably straightforward. “However, if she’s gone to make some sort of report to her superiors, maybe we ought to wait until the report’s gone through and the verdict delivered. She said help might be forthcoming, even guides.”

  “I gather we all agree on one thing, that she was sent, and that she is not a member of—the other crew,” Vanessa said. “She acted, though, as if there was no question of letting me, or Cholayna, near the place. Just you two and maybe Magda.” She looked, mildly startled, at Magda. “I noticed she treated you as if you were one of the Darkovans yourself.”

  Magda felt she should have noticed that herself. Yes surely, she had a right to be considered among the Darkovans. But did she really, or was that merely a flattering assumption? And why was she worrying about this, questioning her own motives, at this late date? She had surely gone too far to turn back now.

  “I think we should leave as soon as we can, then,” said Jaelle.

  “I think we should wait to see if the help they hinted at is offered,” Magda demurred.

  “I don’t agree,” said Camilla, “and do you know the reason why? She said she could give us no help in rescuing Lexie and Rafaella. She treated Cholayna and Vanessa as if they were slightly unwelc
ome intruders, in spite of the kindness and hospitality they had been offered. My guess is this: if we wait for their help, it will come at the price of sending you two—” she nodded at the two Terrans, “back at once, and on abandoning all hope of rescuing Rafaella. I’m not ready to do that.”

  “Nor I,” said Magda. “I think we should pack at once, and go as soon as we possibly can.” She added, diffidently, “None of us has been ready to try this, but I believe it’s our last resort; I am willing to try to follow Lexie and Rafaella with laran, no matter in whose hands they may now be. You, Jaelle?”

  “I would be afraid of picking up—that other,” Jaelle said, troubled, but Camilla shook her head.

  “If they’re in her hands, as I have begun to suspect, we have no choice. I see Lexie and Rafaella, and I see—her. Shaya, is this what happens when you call it laran?”

  But there was no leisure to answer the question. First a couple of the attendants came in, scurrying. Then the old woman who had tended Cholayna walked in with kindly assurance, and took her seat among them.

  And behind her a small sturdy woman at whom they blinked for a moment, disbelieving. If the Terran Legate himself had walked in, Magda could not have felt more amazement, more disruption of everything she had expected.

  “Well, this looks like a meeting of the Hellers branch of the Bridge Society,” the woman said. “Isn’t anyone even going to wish me good day?”

  But they were all too astonished to speak. It was Cholayna, at last, who croaked, in a voice still hoarse and rasping, “I should have known. Hello, Marisela.”

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Marisela! How did you get here?” demanded Jaelle.

  “Same way you did; riding when I could, walking when I couldn’t, climbing when I had to,” Marisela said. “Of course, since I knew where I was going, I took the straight road as far as Nevarsin.