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He gave a salute which Mattine echoed, and they were gone, lost in shadows before Roane could blink. In this dark she could only be sure she still had a companion when he moved. Fingers touched her arm, slid down until they closed, warm, alive about her wrist, where her own hand lay limp on her knee.

  “Why did you come?”

  Enmeshed as she was in a tangle of thoughts she was too tired to bring into order, she answered with the real truth:

  “Because of the dream—”

  “Dream?”

  Somehow it was easier to talk when there was only that quiet question out of the dark, that loose clasp about her wrist. And there was relief in speech, as if she were ridding herself of a long-carried burden. Whether he would believe her or not, Roane did not at that moment care. It was enough to put it all into words.

  She began with the dream, trying to make it live for him as it had for her, bringing every detail to mind—the room, the dishes on the table, Ludorica’s ceremonial entrance behind the usher, her ladies-in-waiting, the presence of Reddick—

  “I could not hear what they said, I only saw their lips move. It was like watching a defective tri-dee in which the sound track had been cut away. But it was alive—it was!” She lost herself in remembering. There was a need to make him understand how she had seen it all. “I have dreamed before, who does not? But never like this.”

  “A true sending.” His words reached her out of the dark. Now she realized also that his grasp on her wrist had tightened until it hurt by its pressure, and she pulled, trying to free herself.

  “A sending?” She made of that a question.

  “You have far sight—”

  “No,” she objected. “I was tested—I have no esper power. It was a dream.”

  “Of the small chamber in Urkermark High Keep, of the Queen wearing Court mourning, of the signing of the warrant which may mean my death. When were you last in Urkermark High Keep, Lady Roane?”

  “I was never there.”

  “The time has come”—his words were even, measured—“for us to speak frankly. If truth does not lie between us now, it never will—and we must have truth! Do you understand that?”

  The last choice of all. And she saw in the dark, as well as if she did indeed face it, that row of clicking machines, each with its crown, its slaves. And she saw the Ludorica she did not know, the stranger she feared, who held a crown in her hands.

  “Who are you,” he continued, “or what?”

  Roane drew a deep breath. “I am—a woman,” she said, answering his last question first. “Also I am Roane Hume. But I am not of this world—”

  Having taken the plunge, she dared not think, but struck out into the current of truth, which not only might sweep her away but could end everything she had been schooled to believe in.

  She told him of the Service, of why they had come to Clio, of her chance meeting with the Princess, of the installation, and of what that meant to him and his people. When she had done she was drained, emptied, glad of that warm encirclement of her wrist which linked her to a living world.

  “This is a tale beyond belief,” he began and she tried to jerk away from his hold, chilled—frightened that he could not believe. Immediately his hold on her tightened. “Yet,” he continued, “I know that it is true. You say you have no ability to foresee. Perhaps by the reckoning of your people, you do not. But my own House—we have that talent in part. We have also a strange tradition which has been a closely guarded secret for generations.

  “It is one I would not ordinarily speak of to any, be he even close brother-kin, unless he knew it by right of birth. But because it is akin to what you have told me, I will speak of it now. The Guardians—we worship them after a fashion, and to most they are supernatural beings. But in my House there is a tale that he who founded our line was a direct servant of Guardians—who were not immortals as all believe, but had flesh and substance. And he did certain tasks for them in that far beginning which were connected with the ordering of Reveny life.

  “When men awoke here at the Guardians’ bidding and set about living, my forefather retained hazy memories of another time and place. These he kept to himself, speaking of them only to his son, and so it passed through my line. We have in addition other things. There have been soothspeakers of our name. That is how I am sure that the Queen was not what she seemed when she found the Crown and ordered my death.

  “Now you make plain she was not being moved by the control of any mind-globe, but that she, the Duke, all of us, are game pieces moved about to fulfill some plan made by men long dead, ones who had no right to set our forefathers into such patterns. But you fear that to destroy these controls would be to destroy us also.”

  “My uncle feared that. He wants to bring in the experts of the Service. They would study the installation, make sure—if they came at all.”

  “If they came at all!” That was bitter. “Then they would have chosen, had you not broken their pattern, to let us live forever under the domination of chattering metal things! What right have they to allow such slavery? Or are they themselves slaves to other patterns? Is it so from star to star, with no one really free?”

  He was now echoing one of her own recent thoughts.

  “And these men of your Service, if they come, would take time, maybe years, to study before they moved. Is that not so?”

  “Yes.”

  “And all that while we would continue to be secretly ruled. Ludorica, who is good, would do evil. Reddick, who wishes to bring war and worse upon Reveny, who would slay even the Queen if by her death he could take the Crown, would continue in power. I—I shall do what I can against him. But if these machines will otherwise, I am defeated before I begin!”

  “The installation can be destroyed.”

  “There was Arothner, which lost its crown—”

  “The Princess told me that story,” Roane admitted.

  “Then you know what chanced there. To risk that—for Reveny—for all the world!”

  “The result may not be the same. A lost crown could differ in effect from a silenced machine.”

  “But the risk—it is too great!”

  “The choice is yours.” She had done what she could. If he said now that Clio must remain in slavery, let it be so.

  She turned her wrist again and this time his grasp loosened and fell away. With its going she felt as alone as if he had arisen and walked from her. There was no road back. She was locked in a prison she had built herself stone by stone. Yet she was unable to regret what lay behind.

  Roane settled her shoulders against the harsh stone of the wall, raised her knees, and folded her arms across them as a pillow for her head. That emptiness she had earlier welcomed now became a billowing fog of fatigue. She did not care if morning, light, or the need to take up the burden of living ever came again.

  But tired as she was, sleep did not come. Instead her thoughts twisted and turned as an insomniac might twist and turn upon a bed during a wakeful night. She walked again on other worlds, relived this small fragment of the past and that. It seemed to her that she had always been part of a set pattern, also, imposed upon her by Uncle Offlas, by the life he introduced her to. Was it true as Nelis had said, that even from star to star there was no freedom? Yet the rules of the Service called for no interference, no meddling even for good in the destiny of a troubled world.

  Pattern upon pattern, tie and bond upon tie and bond, no freedom. Roane stirred and then once more that hand out of the dark reached her, slipping across her shoulders to draw her to rest close to the warmth, the safe anchorage of another body, human, alive, no longer exiled alone in the dark.

  “What is it, Roane? Why do you cry?” His voice was a breath warm against her cheek. And she knew then that tears did wet her face and that she wept as she could not ever remember having done since she was a small and lonesome child.

  “I think it is because I am alone.” She tried to put that desolation into words.

  “But that you are not! I
s it because you come from the stars and here find no kin? Would you return to your people? I promise I shall take you to them—”

  “They will not want me now.”

  “Do not think that others believe in that fashion.” The grasp about her shoulders was very comforting. “I have been wondering—why was it, do you think, that you saw the Queen and Reddick in this dream? You were not reaching as a Soothspeaker does to read some peril or fact needful to your life. Yet you saw that which brought you to Hitherhow, to aid in my escape. And such visions are not ordinary. From whence came this one?”

  Perhaps he was kindly trying to make her think of something else. But there was certainly a strangeness to that dream.

  “I do not know. But I am sure I have no esper powers. My people understand these things, they checked me. It was important that they make sure.”

  “Yet you have also said that you have done things on this world which were counter to all your training, to what you were taught was lawful. And I do not believe that you are one who has ever deliberately chosen to break rules and flout authority before. Is that not so?”

  “I do not know why, but when I first saw the Princess, in that tower, I had to help her. Uncle Offlas said you were all conditioned. Perhaps when I had left the safeguards of our camp that also influenced me.”

  “Yet you could see these machines. The Princess could not. So if there was conditioning, for you it was not complete.”

  “What difference does it make now? I broke the Service rules, I—perhaps it was I who started the whole tangle. The Princess would not have known of the Crown had she not gone to the cave. And if she had not found the Crown—”

  “Roane, Roane, do not take on yourself guilt for a whole country!”

  Fingers touched her cheek gently, exploring, though that arm was still a barrier between her and dark loneliness.

  “You are crying once more! I tell you, this is not of your doing! You have brought good, not evil. Had you not taken the Princess from Reddick’s men then, you might have left her to her death. And had you not come to Hitherhow—I might have died, too, and been a long time in doing it.”

  “There was the Sergeant, Mattine, the others—”

  “Who could well have thrown their lives away and to no avail. Nor would we ever have known of these machines. For had you not taken the Princess there for shelter, would you ever have found them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And perhaps not. Nor without the knowledge you have gained from us would you have known what they were. No—there is a meaning to be read in all you have done, if we can see it.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Neither do I. I can only sense it is there, a reason to move you to aid the Princess, and later to do all else. You say that those we know as the Guardians are long dead, have been judged evil by those beyond the stars. They used men as tools and it did not last. Now your people fear to upset what they have done. But—why have you told this story to the one man in Reveny who could believe it, because his far-off ancestor escaped the full blight sent on Clio?”

  “Chance—fortune—I do not know—”

  “Neither do I. Save that it is making me think. Roane, can you find this cave again?”

  “Do you mean you wish to free the Crown?”

  “I do not know. I think that I shall not be sure until I stand there and know what such slavery means. But that I must do; I know it now. Can you take me there?”

  “If we dare go back. It lies near Hitherhow.”

  “Dare we not now?” he countered.

  “The LB may have come. If not, they—Uncle Offlas, Sandar—they will try to keep us away and they have weapons—”

  “Did you not use one such on me? Yes, I have tasted the power of those strange arms of yours. But that we must chance also. And I think time is fast running out.”

  “You mean we go now? Before the Sergeant and Mattine return?”

  “I think for what we may have to do we should have as little company as possible. But let us wait for dawn before we take the trail. Sleep if you can, Roane.”

  He did not release her, so that Roane’s head slipped down to rest against him as indeed she found now she could sleep.

  CHAPTER 16

  ROANE AWOKE as if summoned by some imperative call, though there was silence as she roused. The light of dawn lay outside their small corner of refuge. Imfry’s arm was still about her. They had huddled together in the night. Turning her head with care, she saw he still slept, or at least his eyes were closed.

  There was a stubble of dark beard on his jaw, yet in sleep he looked much younger, unguarded, that rigidity of feature which usually masked him gone. There were lines perhaps born of pain, or the burden of decisions, but now they were faint. Studying him so, Roane thought of the one part of her dream she had not told him—the face she had seen at its ending.

  For that had not been Ludorica’s, nor Reddick’s, and yet it had stung her into action.

  Had Nelis been right in his theory that some force had moved her to play the part she had since she had landed on Clio? Superstition, common on a backward world, Uncle Offlas would term that, note it as a native trait on his tapes put aside for the anthropologists to study.

  Many worlds had their strong faiths in powers greater than human, clung to beliefs in purposes beyond the comprehension of man. She had watched worshipers in temples, been moved once or twice by ceremonies which seemed to give those who took part an inner security and peace. But there were many gods, goddesses, nameless spirits and powers—unless each and every one was a small splinter of something greater toward which her species yearned and groped blindly. A something they must have to believe in, or be vanquished.

  All her training balanced against the thought that she was moved now by any such influence! But if she could so think—Roane envied those with the faith, even those who looked upon Guardians here as beings to whom they could appeal in times of stress.

  If they destroyed the installation would they in a way also be destroying the spirit which was Clio? What might enter in thereafter to fill the void?

  Roane shook her head—fancies. She had been too often in the past ordered to restrain such imaginings. And if she had ever betrayed such irresponsible speculation before the Service she might even have been considered a suitable candidate for mental reschooling.

  She shuddered at that thought, gazed out over the tumbled walls of the fort. There was already a tinge of red-gold in the sky—sunrise.

  “Nelis—” She spoke his name softly, moved out of the hold he had kept on her during the dark hours, though his arm tightened even as she put it aside. Then his eyes opened, squinted in the light.

  “Dawn,” Roane told him, thinking he might still be in the lingering backwash of a dream.

  “Dawn—” he repeated as if the word had little meaning. Then the lines of his face tightened once more, alert intelligence and awareness flooded back. He straightened up with a grunt, as if stiff and sore, and stretched.

  “Your medicines do well by one.” He flexed his arms again and then gently touched the plasta-skin covering over his wound before he picked up the jacket the Sergeant had left behind. “Have you any more of that strange food?”

  “Enough.” She knelt to open her bag. The night lenses—how had she come to forget that she had those? They could have started last night with their aid. And there was the tool—she could put the last charge in that now.

  “Another of your strange weapons?”

  “Not quite so. But it was what freed you from that cage. It can be used as a cutter or a digger—breaking stone, melting metal. But I have not the proper energy charges for it, only one of these left, and they are meant to power a beamer.” She screwed the butt back on and laid it to one side. He picked it up.

  “This is not what you used on me in the forest—”

  “No. That was taken from me.”

  “But that is your best weapon?”

  “It merel
y stuns. There are others more forceful, but we are forbidden to carry them on sealed worlds. There is a blaster which slays with fire, other devices. But those are employed only in the last resort.”

  He held the projectile thrower he termed a “gun” in one hand, the tool in the other, comparing them. “Your people work in metal in a way we cannot begin to equal. Just as we ride duocorns, you visit stars. What is it like to stride from world to world, m’lady?”

  “It is like being always before a constantly changing picture. Sometimes it is good, sometimes”—she remembered and shivered—“it can be very bad.”

  “As this world has been for you?”

  “No! That is not so! Here—” She had found the ration tubes, twisted the cap of the first and handed it to him, taking up another for herself, using all, as they needed the strength. The warm semiliquid did not seem to taste as it always had, but even flatter, less appetizing.

  She finished it quickly, squeezed the tube flat, put it under a stone before she reclosed her pack. The sky was now afire with sunrise. Had Imfry changed his mind during the night, or did he still want to go to the installation? She glanced up to where he stood, his head half turned from her, looking toward the blue-shadowed roll of the heights beyond.

  “We head west.” He pointed. “There are Thunderbolt and Lhang’s Beard—”

  So he was picking out landmarks. But once they were down in the forest cover, how could those guide them? She asked as much.

  “We are not so helpless as you would believe, m’lady.” He pressed the wide buckle on his belt, showed her a small dial within. “This is a device which works as effectively for path finding for us as your off-world trappings do for you. Now—” He surveyed the ground closely, knelt at a smooth stretch of earth, and there began to set up a tight circle of bits of rock, the center left bare while he flattened and smoothed it. With his fingertip he gouged a series of lines and dashes there, digging them in as deeply as he could.

  “For Wuldon and the others,” he told her. “This will let them know the direction in which we have gone and that we appoint a meeting place for later.”