Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack. Marion Zimmer BradleyЧитать онлайн книгу.
spoke, her eyes resting on Karamy.
“She has done much evil.” The others clamored, but Gamine shook her head, long pale hair lifting electrically around her face. “No,” she disclaimed softly. “Why should they die? They are only an old dwarf—a silly fool who could not make up his own mind—” her eyes dwelt disquietingly on Adric. “And Karamy. They have no power, now we are freed. Pity them—now we are freed.”
Adric, slowly, drew himself upright. His slackly-parted lips set firmly and he looked at Narayan with a dispassionate, stubborn shrug. “Kill me, if you like.”
“No, Gamine.” Narayan stepped toward the man in crimson, “Adric,” he said in a strange, half-choked excitement, “I want to see what you saw before—to see what sent you away—to see the thing that drove you mad. Gamine’s veils—Gamine, let him see! Show him, Gamine! Show him what he saw then!”
Gamine came forward slowly to where Karamy knelt. “Stand up!” Slowly Karamy rose to her feet. There was no hope in her eyes; no mercy in Gamine’s. The two pairs of eyes, cat-yellow and blue, fought for a moment; it was Karamy’s that fell. The Dreamer woman smiled faintly. “My brothers and my sisters,” she said at last, “Karamy is beautiful, is she not?”
I suppose no woman on earth has ever been or ever will be as beautiful as Karamy the Golden. She stood proudly, turning to Adric, and I saw longing and love break forth in the man’s eyes. He gazed and gazed, and Karamy laughed and held out her arms, and Adric, bemused, went toward her—
“Hold him,” commanded Narayan tersely.
One of the Dreamers made a curious sign with his left hand and Adric was arrested; stood gripped in a vise of invisible force.
“See?” Gamine said in a ringing voice, “But now see Karamy—shorn of the Illusion her Dreamer threw! See the form of Karamy that she made me wear! This!” She reached out and touched Karamy with the little Talisman she held.
There was a gasp of horror from many throats. Karamy—Karamy the Golden—there are no words for the change that took place before our eyes. I was sick and retching with horror before the metamorphosis was half complete, and turned away my eyes; Cynara was sobbing softly into her skirt; but Adric, frozen, could not look away.
Gamine’s laugh—low and sweet and doubly deadly for its sweetness—reached my ears. “Shall I lend you my veils—sister?” She murmured, mocking, and again the horrible laugh. “NO? Go forth!” Her voice was a lashing whip, and with a broken wail, the thing that had been Karamy threw up an arm across the staring sockets and fled away into the night. And we never saw it again.
So that was the end of Karamy the Golden—the end—
A little later I found that Adric and I were staring stupidly at one another, puzzled, but without animosity. Cynara came and slipped an arm round Adric, and I turned away, embarrassed, for the man was sobbing like a child. I was amazed and sick with the enormity of all that I had seen and done. I stood and shivered and shook with deadly chill. I suppose it was reaction.
“Steady!” Narayan’s steely hand on my shoulder kept me once again from making an ass of myself. “You’ve done us a big favor,” he said after a few minutes. “I wish I had some adequate way of thanking you—not for myself—for millions of people. Perhaps one day we’ll find a way of sending you back to your own world, but—” his shoulders moved negatively, “I can’t say—”
Adric’s lean non-human face peered over Narayan’s shoulder. He looked subdued, and spoke with a curious humility. He sounded sane. “There will be a way, some day. It will take time to find it, now, but—there will be.”
Spontaneously we grinned at each other. I could not hate this man. I knew him too well. I knew, suddenly, that we would be friends. Which, indeed, is what happened.
Narayan looked from one to the other of us, troubled; then Gamine’s intent face was at his elbow.
“I’ll see to these men,” she said quietly. “Narayan, they need you, and it’s your responsibility. They have to be told why they were wakened, and how; there are slaves to be freed, armies—”
Narayan glanced guiltily over his shoulder at the other Dreamers who stood huddled together in a bewildered little knot. “That’s so,” he acknowledged gravely, and went to his people. I watched him, feeling as if my one friend here had deserted me; but it had to be that way. Narayan was not our kind. He was the sort of man who could remodel a world; but the look he sent us over his shoulder told Adric and I that we should, if we liked, have a share in that work.
“Now Mike Kenscott,” said Gamine, “I want to talk to you.”
We left Adric and Cynara in that place, and I cast a wistful glance back at them. Cynara was lovely, and very human, and I suppose I had hoped that in some way she would compensate for my enforced stay in this world. But there was Adric—
Gamine and I stood on the steps of the Dreamer’s Keep, and her voice, soft and wistful, mourned in the grey dawn. “No one ever knew I had the Dreamer powers— except old Rhys. Rhys and I were bound together—he knew, and kept me close to him, hid me and helped me. One day Adric found out. It—changed Adric. He—we freed Narayan together. Then Karamy made me what I was—what you saw. It hurt Adric—hurt something in him. I could have cured him, in time, but Karamy had him bewitched. She stripped him of power, of memory. I do not know, but perhaps some day, Adric may remember that I was—I was—”
“Gamine! Gamine!” Adric’s voice cried from within, and the next moment he rushed forth—caught the Dreamer woman in his arms, and his mouth met hers and she stood swaying in his arms, laughing and crying together. Cynara, following slowly, smiled with gentle satisfaction. I said, stunned, “What—”
Over Adric’s shoulder Gamine’s blue eyes met mine in liquid satisfaction and she finished her interrupted sentence. “I was Adric’s wife,” she said, gently. Cynara’s voice was tenderly humorous as we left them together in the glory of the rising sun. “Poor Gamine,” she said, “and poor Adric, too. I was sorry for them both. But I wish these men would make up their minds!”
I had an idea.
“Adric’s made up his mind,” I said, turning my head a little toward the couple who stood, clasped, as if they could never let go. “I suppose—” I came a little closer to Cynara, who stood looking up at me with wide, innocent eyes and lips ingenuously parted, “I suppose that gives me the right to make up my mind. Doesn’t it?” She smiled. “Does it?” But her bright eyes had given me my answer, and I never had to make up my mind again.
Death Between the Stars
They asked me about it, of course, before I boarded the starship. All through the Western sector of the Galaxy, few rules are stricter than the one dividing human from nonhuman, and the little Captain of the Vesta—he was Terran, too, and proud in the black leather of the Empire’s merchant—man forces—hemmed and hawed about it, as much as was consistent with a spaceman’s dignity.
“You see, Miss Vargas,” he explained, not once but as often as I would listen to him, “this is not, strictly speaking, a passenger ship at all. Our charter is only to carry cargo. But, under the terms of our franchise, we are required to transport an occasional passenger, from the more isolated planets where there is no regular passenger service. Our rules simply don’t permit us to discriminate, and the Theradin reserved a place on this ship for our last voyage.”
He paused, and re—emphasized, “We have only the one passenger cabin, you see. We’re a cargo ship and we are not allowed to make any discrimination between our passengers.” He looked angry about it. Unfortunately, I’d run up against that attitude before. Some Terrans won’t travel on the same ship with nonhumans even when they’re isolated in separate ends of the ship.
I understood his predicament, better than he thought. The Theradin seldom travel in space. No one could have foreseen that Haalvordhen, the