The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 9

Amanda's ship, with Simon at the controls, hung in orbit above the night side of Kultis.

Only one of the planet's moons was in the sky with them. Once, when the Exotics had been the richest of the Younger Worlds, this, like its sister world of Mara, had owned a space-approach warning system that would have signaled the appearance of any craft within a hundred thousand kilometers of its surface. Now the men and women who had manned that system were dead or gone, and the very system itself had been cannibalized of its parts or left to grow dusty in uselessness.

Below, the planetary night side was a round shape of darkness occulting the stars and the smaller of the two moons beyond, but the instruments aboard the ship cut through the darkness and the cloud cover separating them from the surface and showed it as bright as if daylit. The screen showing that surface was already on close magnification that gave them a view of northern tropical uplands mounting to the foothills of successive ranges of sharply rising mountains, tall enough to have their peaks snow-capped even in this climate and season. As they continued their descent the viewer showed a road running upcountry past what had been homes and estates, scattered Exotic-fashion with plenty of land around them, through a small city and on into the mountains. Amanda was instructing Hal and Simon, particularly, at the moment, Simon.

"We'll be following the route of that road, approximately," she was saying to him. "The Chantry Guild is in the Zipaca Mountains, that range to our left there. The more lofty range to the right are the Grandfathers of Dawn, and the flat valley-floor in between them that widens as it comes toward us is the Mayahuel Valley. There's a more direct route to where we're going, but I want Hal to get the context for it all, first - I want him to see some of the rest of Kultis as it is now. So we'll make a couple days' walk out of it. You set us down, here... "

Her words were precise and clean-edged on Hal's ear, so that they stood out as if in italics. She had changed, he thought, listening, since that moment with Tam just before they left. She was more authoritative, more intense.

Without any specific alteration in her tone or her manner, her voice now seemed to carry the burden of a purpose that took precedence over everything else. As if she was now driven by something she had committed herself to carry through at any and all cost.

The difference in her had become apparent to him almost immediately they had left Tam's quarters for the ship. His first awareness of a difference in her had been when they were almost to the ship, when she had fallen back from walking at his side, turning and stopping Ajela and Rukh who were following them, so that his next few steps carried him beyond the point where he could hear what she said to them, briefly and in a low voice, before turning to catch up with him once more.

He had felt an unreasonable, but for a moment very real, flash of irritation. What was it she had to say to them that he could not be trusted to hear as well? As they had boarded the ship and all the way to where they were now above Kultis, he had waited for her to give him some explanation of what she had stopped to tell the others. But she had said nothing. In fact, she had acted as if that moment had never taken place, but since then he had noticed this driven quality in her, this difference.

It must, he thought, have something to do with Tam's vision about which he had warned her. Had some sort of private spark leaped between the two of them in that moment, without his seeing it? He told himself it was nothing, it was none of his business, in any case. But the memory and the difference in her now gnawed at him regardless.

She was reaching out now to touch the screen and a blue circle came to outline the place she had indicated, and then another, smaller screen suddenly showed a magnified view of the place she had touched. In that screen they saw things as if they hung only four or five meters above the ground, over a small patch of bushes just off the road, whose ruts were black, the higher surfaces between them palely contrasted in the cloud-filtered moonlight. The road was only some ten meters away from their point of view. "You see this?" Amanda said to Simon, holding up a white rag of a cloth, grayed from many launderings and slightly longer than it was wide, with ragged edges forming a roughly rectangular shape. "I've made a micrograph of this, so your viewer can identify even an edge of it, if that's all that's visible. You know our general route. Search along it each night, in the area of where a day's walk should have taken us. I'll try to display this somewhere every day or night we stop. I'll put it where the viewer can sight it - tangled in the branches or laid on top of one of those bushes down there, for example. One corner should always be folded under, and that corner will point in the direction we're headed, in case we have to vary from the original route. You should be able to find it displayed every night, except if we're overnighting in the city. It's too likely to be suspected as a signal there, so in the city I may not display it. If you can't find it for one night, don't worry. After three nights in a row without seeing it or any sign of us you can investigate-if you think it's reasonably safe for you to do so. Otherwise, don't try. "No otherwise," said Simon. "Simon," said Amanda. "You're our driver on this. You take orders." "Not where it comes to any chance that doing nothing might cost us Hal," said Simon. He held up a hand before she could speak. "It's what he means to our side, not just the personal connection between us - or the business of never leaving one of your own behind when you don't know what happened to them. "

Slowly, she nodded. Hal felt he should say something to refute such an opinion but there was no easy short way of doing it. In any case, it was too late. Amanda was already answering. "All right," she was saying, "I wouldn't be around to stop you, anyway, if it comes to that. Now, if you're satisfied you've got everything you want to know before we take off, you can start setting us down-" She tapped the screen where the closer view now revealed in one comer the fire-blackened wall of some ruined homestead, rather than the living villa they had seemed to view from a higher point of inspection. "Right away, ma'am," said Simon, sitting down to the controls. "Hat," said Amanda. "Come on back and get dressed." "Redressed, you mean, don't you?" said Hal, following her into the stateroom. "I've already got clothes on." "Redressed by all means, if that's the phrase you prefer," said Amanda, handing him a brown sackcloth penitential robe, similar to the one in which she had left Kultis. She started to slip out of her coveralls and back into a robe of her own. "How about you?" she went on. "Are you satisfied you know everything you need to know? You aren't rusty on your short-language and signals after three years at a desk?"

She was referring to what was basically a secret language built up and passed down from one generation of children under twelve years of age to the next. It gained and lost words from generation to generation, and was different from family to family. But the children of neighbors as close to each other as the Graemes and Morgans of Foralie had practically a language in common. The reference to signals was to the silent body language, varying from minute to large physical movements, which the Dorsai as a Splinter Culture had refined into a second tongue they could use to converse, unnoticed, even as bound prisoners under the noses of captors. "Not in the least," said Hal. "Be sure then to pay attention if I shout 'court,' whatever else you do. The people manning the garrisons that the Others put in here live for reprisals."

She was specifically alluding to the effective, short, one syllable descendant of the ancient cry of "quarter", which the old Dorsai professional soldiers had early put to use to advise each other in the midst of combat that they should disable only, and if possible avoid killing, those with which they happened to be fighting at the moment.

"I'll be listening," said Hal. "Don't worry." "I never worry," said Amanda, and he was sensible enough not to argue the point with her.

Dressed in their unflattering garments, and carrying bags with drawstring tops that held all their other possessions, they stepped out of the ship twenty minutes later into the spicily soft and warm night atmosphere of Kultis.

Amanda had picked their landing spot well - not that Simon would have done badly if the decision had been left up to him. A tall stand of trees shielded them from the road and they had landed in the darkness of one roofless room of the burned villa they had seen in the vision screen. Its walls lifted above the spacecraft and hid it further in shadow. "Good luck," said the voice of Simon from the darkened port. The outer lock door of the port closed and the ship fell silently upward, out of sight.

Amanda's fingers caught hold of the sleeve of Hal's robe, held and towed him out of the shadow into the relative illumination of the cloud-dimmed moonlight, and from there, on through a ruined doorway into further shadow again...

And suddenly they were under attack. The sounds of feet rushing across grimed flooring, the rustle of clothing, were adequate warning, along with the stink of breath and uncleaned bodies. The outburst of yells that came as their attackers closed around Hal and Amanda was clearly intended to be one of triumph, and in fact Hal found himself caught by at least three people at once, two aiming at his upper body and one at his legs. At the same time, high-pitched to carry over the other voices and noise, came the sound of Amanda's voice. "Court!"

Hardly fair, thought Hal, more than a little irritated, as he spun away from those trying to hold him, breaking the finger of one who would not loosen his hold and throwing a second into a tangle with the third, leg-level attacker. Here he was, in almost total darkness, barely hours after the three years at the desk Amanda had talked about, set upon by an unknown but certainly large number of attackers, and within moments of landing, she was telling him not to hurt these people too seriously. Those who were now earnestly trying to grab and hold them did not smell like garrison soldiers who might be eager for an excuse to indulge in acts of reprisal-

His first feeling of annoyance was wiped out without warning in a sudden upsurge of something like joy within him. Joy at having something real and physical to come to grips with after the past years of fighting imponderables and unknowns. His reflexes from his training under Malachi Nasuno, the Dorsai who had been one of his tutors as the boy Hal Mayne, and his far greater training as the young Donal, growing up and working as a professional soldier - these all but forgotten memories took him over. He began to whirl among his foes, tangling them up with one another and putting them down with throws wherever possible.

An excruciating and sudden bang on the right side of his skull changed things abruptly. The lightless room seemed to spark for a moment within his own head and then gray out around him, abruptly changing his feelings to a simple, instinctive yearning for survival. The only thought that stirred in his suddenly dulled brain was that he should have sensed coming the blow that had hit him, and avoided it. Reflexively, he had already dropped to the floor, gathering himself into a ball as he did so and rolling sideways. He came up against something and hastily spun away. The Exotics, he knew from experience, had liked homes with large rooms in them, and the houses he had seen in the screen of the ship from above had been empty shells. Therefore, there should be nothing much between the walls to impede him unless it was some other human being. Moreover, it only made sense that those who attacked him and Amanda would have let them get into the center of a room, so as to come at them from all sides at once.

He did not think all this out consciously as he was spinning away from whoever or whatever he had touched. Rather, it was a conclusion reached just above the level of instinct. He needed time for his head to clear. It did, and with his return to clarity came the beginnings of a burning anger at himself, as well as a return of the unhappiness that had been growing in him this last year and more. The fact he had been given no more than part-time instruction by a Dorsai as a growing boy on Old Earth, and that it had been a hundred years since, as Donal, he had been personally in action, did not excuse him. His lacks were clear.

He was no longer a Dorsai in the sense of the fighting potential of that name. Any adult, properly schooled Dorsai would have been moving with his ears open, would have built and carried in his head as he fought a lightless mental picture of what his opponents were doing, and been ready for that blow.

He did know that it had been no thrown fist that had hit him, but something used as a weapon - a length of wood, perhaps.

He listened for a second longer, translating the sounds around him into that mental picture he now remembered being taught to form. Amanda had cleared away all who had come close to her and was now nearly at the farther door out of the room. The ones not still engaged in trying to reach her were feeling around, trying to find him - evidently under the assumption that whoever hit him had knocked him unconscious.

Then he was on his feet again, a portion of his attention continually updating the picture from the sounds he heard and looking for a pattern in the actions of his attackers. There was always a pattern, made up in separate parts by those who were ready and willing to come to grips, followed by those who would become willing once the combat began, and those who only wanted to hang around the edges safely until the prey had been secured by the strongest of their group and it was safe to pile on, shouting as if they had been in the action from the beginning.

Now he was ready to move through them to join Amanda. This time, he met what he had expected. About thirty seconds of contact were enough to satisfy him now that the group which had jumped them was no more than a dozen adults, of which only four or five were daring enough to offer real threats.

Almost as soon as the deduction was completed in the back of his head, the three full-effort fighters he had encountered on his way to the door were either all put aside or bypassed. Amanda, his ears told him, had already gone through the farther exit. He followed her, and his ears told him those they had left behind did not follow.

Amanda's soft whistle asked if he was all right. He whistled back, went toward the sound she had made, and they came together. "No problem," messaged Amanda's fingers, tapping his cheek. "We can go on with no more trouble now. Follow me."

She led him farther through the darkness and they emerged after a bit into an area of no shadows at all, just as the clouds thinned slightly overhead, and he was able to see that they were now outside the walls of the ruined villa. "Some illegal farmers, I think. A family or families who came out to work their field at night," said Amanda in a normal voice. "They didn't have the slightest idea who we might be, except that in these clothes we obviously weren't garrison soldiers and there might be something in our sacks that could be used by them." "So those were some of the native Exotics - after only two years?" Hal demanded. A sudden suspicion stirred in him. "Did you know they were there, when you led me into that place?" "No," she said, "but it was likely we'd run into some like that along the way."

She did not elaborate, and his unspoken question was answered. There had been a reason she had wanted him to experience that particular type of "new" Exotic, so different from what she had promised to show him, back at the Encyclopedia. He tucked the fact away. Her reasons would become apparent soon enough. "Now," she said, as they emerged from the shell of the building into the moonlight. Across a ruined level area that must once have been either a lawn or garden, the surrounding trees made a semicircle of darkness, with a gap and the hint of what might have been a road or path curving off to the left to be lost in them. "We go this way."

She led into the woods to the right of the path. "A driveway, once," she said. "It'll connect with the road a few dozen meters over. But we'd better stay off the road proper. We'll just travel alongside it, and we ought to be within an easy day's walk of the city you saw on the screen - Porphyry's its name. We won't make it before sun-up. When daylight comes we'll have to be careful in our travel and avoid reaching the town at the wrong time of day."

It was a not unpleasant walk by moonlight, for the cloud cover soon thinned to nothingness, and disappeared completely shortly after that, they moved easily under Sofia, the more brilliant of Kultis's moons.

The moonlight revealed, but also hid things. Almost it was possible for Hal to imagine that there had been no changes since he had been there last, and this illusion persisted except when they would come upon the shell of some sad-looking, wrecked and burned-out habitation. In the bright but colorless light, these remains of what had once been homes seemed almost magically capable of summoning up in Hal a memory of the lightness and beauty that the Exotics had put into their habitations. As if they wrapped around themselves now the ghosts of the beauty with which the Exotics had always seemed to try to make up for the abstractness of the philosophy that was their obsession as one of the three largest and most successful of the Younger Worlds' Splinter Cultures.

There were the noises of night birds, and some insects, and other stirrings, but no sounds of large creatures. The Exotics had not imported the genetic starter material for variform animals of any size, beyond what was necessary for the ecology, except for some domestic animals. Their philosophy looked askance at the keeping of pets, and most of the things they couldn't do themselves, they were wealthy enough to buy machinery to do, or to hire off-planet workers-animals were not needed except for the stock of the dairy farms or sheep ranches.

The total effect of the night, the different darktime sounds and the soft, scented air, gave Hal a feeling of dreamy unreality which was still underlaid with his return to unhappiness, and only partially affected by the growing headache from the blow to the side of his head. He had been lucky, at that, he thought, even as he automatically began to exert some of the physical self-disciplines he had been taught in both his childhoods. His efforts were not as much to get rid of the pain, as to put it off to one side, mentally, so that it could be ignored by the normal workings of his body and mind. A little farther forward and it would have come against his temple, where that much of a blow, even from a length of tree limb, could-

He woke suddenly to the potential of what he was feeling and stopped walking suddenly. Amanda checked herself in midstride beside him. "What is it?" she asked. "I took a hit on the head, back there," he said. "Something more than someone's fist. Maybe a staff or a club of wood. I didn't think too much of it until just now-" "Sit down," said Amanda. "Let me take a look."

He dropped into a sitting position, cross-legged on the earth below him, and was rewarded by a new shock of pain in his head at his body's impact with the ground. "Right side of my head," he said.

Amanda's fingers went among his hair, parting it as she bent over him. "This moonlight's bright enough so I ought to be able to see... "

She found something by his sudden feel of her touch - a cut, at least. "No noticeable swelling about the scalp," she said, "but it's the swelling inside the skull we've got to worry about. Did it feel as if it might be enough to cause a concussion? What can you tell about it from the inside? How hard were you hit?" "I couldn't tell you - it dazed me a bit," he said, "for maybe a dozen seconds, no more. It didn't knock me off my feet. I remember dropping deliberately and rolling away from the action. Now... "

He probed his own sensations for information. It was ironic, here on this world, that the techniques he was using were as much Exotic as Dorsai. The two Splinter Cultures had been on a parallel track in these matters, and when they realized it, information had been freely passed back and forth between them. Basically, there was much the body could tell the mind that drove it, if the mind could discipline itself to listen along ancient pathways of nerve and instinct.

He sat motionless, inwardly listening in this fashion. Amanda sat beside him. After a bit, he spoke. "No," he said, "I don't think fluid's going to accumulate in the brain, at least to any point where pressure on the brain by the skull is going to cause real trouble. But I think I'd better stop, and not try to travel any more for the rest of the night." "Absolutely," said Amanda. She looked around. "We're out of sight of the road. Lie back. I'll make you a bed of twigs and large leaves, and you can shift to that when it's ready."

He lay back, suddenly very grateful to be able to do so, resting his head on a half-buried root emerging from some large native plant, a sort of tree-sized bush. He closed his eyes and concentrated his attention, not merely on isolating the pain, but on holding back the natural responses of his body that wanted to pour fluid into the bruised area beneath the unyielding bone of his skull.

Awareness of his body, of its pressure against the naked ground, the moonlight on his eyelids, and all his other feelings, began to dwindle into nonexistence. He was relaxing. The pain was dwindling too. The forest around him ceased to be and time began to lose its meaning. He was only automatically and distantly aware of Amanda helping him to shift over a half meter or so to his right, on to a soft and springy bed a little above the surface on which he had been lying.

All things moved away from him into nothingness and he slept.

Out of that same nothingness he came into the place he had dreamed of twice before. He was aware that he dreamed now, but it changed nothing, because the dream was reality and reality was the dream.

He was once more on the rubbled plain, the small stones underfoot long since grown to giant boulders. Far back, on his last visit here, he had passed the vine-covered gate of metal bars through which he had seen Bleys, who was unable to pass through and be on the same side as he was... of what? A made wall of stone? Some natural barrier of rock? He could not remember, and it did not matter now.

What mattered was that he was at last coming close to the tower. Always, it had seemed to recede from him as he worked his way toward it, but now it was undeniably close - although how close that closeness was, there was no telling. A kilometer? Half or a quarter that distance? Double or more that distance?

But it was close. Undeniably, no longer distant. It loomed over him, with its black, narrow apertures that were windows. He should be able at last, now, to reach it with just a little more effort.

But that was the problem. He was close to weeping with frustration. He lay on the lip of a steep but short drop to the bottom of a trench perhaps twenty meters wide, with as steep an upward sweep on its far side. It was perhaps four times his height in depth, but its sides were not absolutely vertical. He could slide down this side and go up the other on his hands and knees.

Only, he could not. A terrible weakness had come on him, gradually, over the long distance he had traveled. That was why he lay on the rocks now like a man half dead. Now he lacked the strength even to rise to his feet. The trench was nothing, easily passable ordinarily to anyone with even half his normal strength, but that was just what he did not have. A lack of strength like that of the dying Tam Olyn held him where he was.

He concentrated, trying to drive his body with everything that he had been taught as Donal, and as the boy Hal Mayne by all of his tutors. Sheer fury alone should have been enough to move this dead carcass that was his body, at least down the slope before him.

But it would not. He realized slowly that the enemy this time was within him. He could fight what lay outside, but it was himself who kept him from crossing the trench, though every fiber of his being and all his life was concentrated and dedicated to the effort of getting through and beyond it to the tower.

He struggled to isolate that inner enemy, to bring it to grips, but it was everywhere and nowhere in him. Desperate, still fighting, he slipped at last back into the grayness of slumber and slept until daylight woke him to the reality that was Kultis.