Drask’s oath rang even above the cries of the wounded and the cursing of the shaman … and another voice, laughing, mocking, echoed him from the empty air:
“Check—and mate, Warlord. And remember—I have taken your queen!”
The invisible voice had spoken true. For the dancing girl, too, had vanished!
7.
THE STAR OF TOMORROW
THE NOONTIDE SUN blazed down on a windswept hillside a few leagues east of the Sea of Dragons. Below, sleek purple lizards splashed in green water, returning to the scarlet-sanded shore with wriggling fish in their long scaly jaws. But here on the hill’s crest was only a bare knoll grown with tough, sighing tendrils of blue-green whipgrass, between the foam-crested waves and the empty sky above, where both suns burned clear and bright.
Calastor appeared, melting from thin air, the slim girl in his arms. She sank to the grass, still trembling with tension. Only seconds before she had seen the arrows flashing, the ring of grim, masked faces, the thunderous shouts and cries had beat on her ears—and now, the smooth sea, empty sky, and this placid hilltop, bathed in the sunlight.
“Here we will be safe,” Calastor said, seating himself on the grass beside her.
“Safe?” She laughed shakily. That will be a novelty! I’ve gone from one danger to the next so swiftly in the last day and night that I’ve nearly forgotten what the word means.” She peered at the tall, gray-eyed young man with unrestrained curiosity.
“Now that I think of it,” she said, “where is ‘here’? And how did we get to this place?”
He shrugged. “It would take too long to explain—and you would not understand anyway, unless you have had the benefits of an education in plenum mechanics. We are a few miles from Argion-City.”
“And how did you transport us here?” she demanded again.
“Well … let’s say I bent space, making this hilltop so ‘close’ to the Hall of Zargon that we could travel between the two places with a single step.”
She shivered a little. “Magic?”
“If you like.”
The girl gazed at sea and shore and the ridges of blue-green hills that retreated towards the horizon.
“And where, from here?”
Calastor stretched out his long legs on the grass, resting on one elbow, regarding her quizzically. “That’s a good question. I had planned to travel with the Star Rovers to the next world in their march of conquest, but rescuing you has destroyed my disguise, and also complicated things.”
She flushed a little under his thoughtful eyes. “What do you mean?”
“You are a new problem. What am I supposed to do with you? Take you with me, as I continue my plan to harry the Rovers until their morale crumbles? I can hardly do that … yet I cannot spare the time to transport you elsewhere.”
“Why time? If you can ‘walk’ from one planet to the next with your weird magic—”
He shook his head impatiently. “That means of travel is limited to brief trips. It would take a mental focus thousands of orders stronger than mine to bend space across interstellar distances. No, we shall travel by my ship.”
Lurn stared around at emptiness.
“What ship?”
Perion’s mockery glinted in Calastor’s laughing eyes.
“This one.”
He did something with one of the several rings on his fingers, and Lurn stifled a shriek of surprise as a sudden shadow fell over them. Looking up, she saw a small spacecraft hovering on negative gravity above the hilltop. A lean, wolfish speedster of glittering white alloy: a racing-craft, from the slim, rakish lines of hull and needle-prow. A trap slid open beside the keel, and a boarding ramp extended to their feet.
“Come aboard the Wolfhound and we’ll discuss our problem over some lunch.”
They boarded the craft and went forward to the small cabin. Lurn was almost beyond wonder by now, nearly accustomed to these thought-swift changes and appearances. But the Wolfhound was a miracle of engineering beyond anything in her experience, a sleek, deadly fighter, a dream-ship that surpassed even the technology of the Lost Ages of the Empire. Calastor indicated the shower and invited her to refresh herself, while he busied himself in the small but admirably complete galley. While she was gone he again made the craft invisible to the Rover-fleet’s detectors, and lifted her from the surface into orbit above Argion, near the orbiting ships of Drask’s mighty fleet.
When Lurn emerged from the shower, bathed, refreshed and relaxed, he lifted his eyebrows with surprise. Gone was the timid dancing girl with disheveled hair and tearstained cheeks, her lush young body scarce-veiled in floating tatters of soiled gauze. In her place stood a flushed young tomboy in tawny-yellow tunic, long legs tight-stockinged in golden-brown Altairian silk, small feet shod in sandals of choate-leather. Her eyes sparkled at his expression of surprise.
“Am I so different?” she asked demurely.
“I’d hardly know you!” he swore. “I see you’ve discovered my collection of costumes?”
She nodded, and slid into a seat before the lunch he had prepared—wine, cheese, olives, and spiced meats.
“Yes. I wonder that you need them, with your magic appearance-changing rings.”
Pouring wine into her goblet, he shrugged. “There are times when I cannot use the illusion-casters … shipboard, for example, makes it difficult because of the conflicting magnetic fields.”
“Then how had you planned to travel with the Rovers?”
“By pretending to be space-sick, and keeping to my cabin throughout the voyage. Which brings us back to the question of what I am to do with you …”
“I should return to Malkh. My talisman was destroyed, and My Lady will be wondering what has happened to me.”
He finished his meal and sat back with a cigaret of blue Harza smoke-weed.
“That raises another question,” he said, contemplating the veils of smoke. “In this struggle between the adepts of Parlion and the Rim-Barbarians, the Green Goddess represents an unknown quantity. Is She with us—is She against the Warlord?”
Lurn veiled her eyes and said noncommittally, “Her motives are Her own, and I have not been in the Sisterhood long enough to know Her plans. I was simply detailed to join the dancers in Argion-Palace and to watch, listen, and serve as Her eyes and ears.”
His attention sharpened.
“How—‘not long in the Sisterhood?’ All rumor says that those who serve Niamh of Malkh are sworn to Her service from childhood.”
“Not I,” Lurn said. “I came to Her by accident. On the world of my birth, my House pledged me in marriage to one whom I would rather die than wed. I stole a small yacht and fled … but the mechanisms were faulty. All our ships are breaking down for lack of any trained in the lore of repairing them. For weeks I drifted in the void, till gravity drew my vessel slowly into the fiery embrace of a green star. Although I knew it not, this star was parent to Malkh, the Green World of the Goddess. She it was who drew my ship, by what weird art I know not, from certain doom to the safety of Her realm. And, hearing my woeful tale, gave me refuge in Her Order.”
“Then you are sworn to chastity and the unwedded state?”
Rather curiously, her eyes dropped and a flush stained her white cheeks.
“No, I am … but a novice. I have not yet taken the Vows.”
Calastor grinned. “Well, I am glad of that.”
“Why, Lord?” she inquired guilelessly. Now it was his turn to avert his gaze.
“Oh … I … do not approve of … chastity. On Parlion we are few—so few—and marriage is a sacred bond,” he said, somewhat stumblingly.