City of Sorcery (14 page)

And despite the angry, half-flippant way in which Camilla phrased her words, Magda knew that they were a threat. And in any confrontation of that sort, Magda would bet on Camilla to come off best.

Jaelle shoved her chair back; thrust the letter, which had been lying on the table, into the pocket of her breeches. “When do we start?”

Magda felt as if she had been caught in the track of one of the Terran earth-moving machines, the kind used to transform a green hill lush with trees and plants, into leveled, bare ground, a stripped place where a spaceport could rise, or anything happen. Jaelle had never taken her protest seriously at all. Yet she had tried, fairly tried, to assess the rights and wrongs of this. Or had she?

“She said she’d wait three days,” Magda said. “I’ll go in the morning to the HQ and get maps from Intelligence; I have access to satellite overflight pictures, and the computer time to have them blown up into scale maps.”

“And I’ll make arrangements for horses and trade goods,” Camilla said. “I have contacts now. You don’t.”

And the children
? Magda thought. Yet she had been wondering, only the other day, why there seemed nothing now worthy of her energies. She found herself remembering an old Terran proverb:
Be careful what you pray for, you might get it
.

The rain had stopped when they came out of the wineshop, and Magda looked up to the skyline, where the high ragged teeth of the Venza Mountains rose clear. A small moon was just setting over one of the peaks.

They would be going up that way, then northward, past the Kadarin and into the deeps of the Hellers, to Nevarsin and beyond. She had never been so far into the unknown wilds. Her two companions were, with the skill of experienced mountain guides, already planning the stages of the journey.

If there was one thing she had learned when she left the Guild-house for the Forbidden Tower, it was never to assume that her life was settled or would follow an orderly track from now on. She listened to Camilla, scowling and talking about the difficulty of finding mountain-hardened horses at this season, and realized that she was also mentally rummaging through her wardrobe for the warm clothes she would need long before they got into the Hellers.

CHAPTER EIGHT

At first light, Camilla went off to see about horses, pack animals and saddles.

Magda, who could do nothing until regular work hours in the HQ, went into the dining room, where cold sliced bread and hot porridge were laid out for breakfast. As she ate, she tried to think what she should do first.

As an agent in the field, she had had access to the most sophisticated fly-over photographs, and to the elegant equipment which could, from a photo taken at eighty thousand meters, generate a map sophisticated enough to distinguish a resin-tree from a spice bush.

There were few Darkovan maps. Few traders came and went in the Hellers, and when they did, they followed trails their grandfathers had known. Beyond Nevarsin, little was known: a frozen plateau, wilderness. The maps from photograph work would help. But not, Magda thought, enough.

Jaelle came down, already dressed for the road, in riding breeches and boots. Magda had never before seen her wearing the long Amazon knife, like a short sword, of a mercenary or soldier. She slid into the seat beside Magda.

“I’ll go and see about trail food,” she said. “And you should have a riding cape. You’ll need it when we get into the mountains; no jacket is ever really warm enough. Do you suppose we can get some Terran sleeping bags? They’re better than what we can find in the market.”

“I’ll arrange it.” Extra warm socks, she thought, special gloves, sunburn cream, sunglasses… A little group of women, readying themselves for work in the market, came in and dipped up bowls of porridge. Sherna raised her eyebrows at Jaelle.

“Dressed for riding? You’re away, then?”

“As soon as we can get away. Taking a caravan north.”

“If you see Ferrika at Armida, give her my greetings.” Sherna finished her porridge and went into the kitchen for the loaves for the bake-stall. She turned back to ask Magda, “Are you going with Jaelle, Oath-sister?”

Magda nodded, feeling raw-edged; she knew it was all meant kindly, but one of the few things she still found difficult about Guild-house living was the way everyone intruded on your private life.

She had never seen Jaelle at the work for which her freemate had been trained. She was astonished at the swift efficiency with which Jaelle plotted packloads, ran down lists of items.

“Maps, sleeping bags, perhaps some packaged high-energy Terran rations, they’d be better when we get into the mountains. Camp stoves and concentrated fuel tablets. I’ll leave everything from the Terran Zone to you.”

“I may have to tell Cholayna - “

Jaelle sighed. “If you have to, you have to. She’s met Rafaella, hasn’t she?”

“Rafaella is listed with Mapping and Exploring, and in Intelligence, as the best of the available - ” Magda stopped, swallowed down “
native
” and finished, “Darkovan guides. Not the best of the
woman
guides, just the best of the guides. She’s worked before this with mapping expeditions. Naturally Cholayna knows her. She probably recommends her to all of the bigger expeditions.”

Jaelle nodded. “Rafi told me once that she likes working with Terrans. They get the best equipment and they never try to argue about the bills. They either agree to pay, or tell you it’s too much and go somewhere else. They don’t bargain just for the fun of bargaining. Also, they tip better.”

There were, Magda thought, not a few Darkovans like that: working for the Terrans, secretly despising them. Since her first year in the Guild-house, she had had the same curious relationship, compounded almost in equal parts of affection and dislike, with Rafaella.

She said, “Sherna told me the other day that she dislikes trading with Terrans for that very reason - they take all the fun out of being in business. They won’t bargain, just yes or no, take it or leave it.”

“I know what she means,” Jaelle said, “the Terrans have no sense of humor. Neither does Rafaella. That’s why she gets along so well with them.”

“Why should anyone carry their sense of humor into the marketplace?”

“It’s a game, love. It all comes out about the same - maybe a few
sekals
difference, but everybody gains face and everybody thinks they get the best of the bargain.”

“I can’t see the fun in that sort of thing. I like to know what I’m being asked, and say yes or no to it, not play games for hours every time I want to buy a basket or a pair of boots!”

Jaelle touched her freemate’s wrist affectionately. “I know. You’re a lot like Rafi, you know? I suspect that’s why you two don’t get along very well.” She pushed away her porridge bowl. “Don’t forget sunglasses. We’ll be traveling on ice once we’re halfway through the Kilghard Hills, even at this season. “

As she made her way through the city, Magda reflected that Jaelle and Camilla seemed to be taking it for granted that they were going on; that there was no question of catching up with Lexie and Rafaella to bring them back from this unsanctioned expedition, but to join it.

It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have told her what I had found out about the Sisterhood. That was what started it
. She too had wanted to know what was behind the mystery. The difference was that she would never have thought of going off on her own to find it.

I’m not adventurous. Maybe that’s why I shouldn’t have come between Jaelle and Rafaella. Jaelle has never been quite content to settle down in one place.

She gave her ident numbers to the Spaceforce man at the gate, and caught herself sounding almost furtive.
What’s the matter with me, I have
clearance
here, I’m an accredited agent, and for all anybody knows I’m going about my regular duties! Actually, it
is
my business to stop Lexie going off into unmapped, unexplored parts of Darkover without authorization
!

In the hostel of the Bridge Society, she had begun keeping a few Standard uniforms: the access codes wired into the collars allowed her to come and go in the Headquarters building without constant identity and security rechecks. She greeted the young Darkovan nurses getting ready for the day shift there, went quickly to the locker she kept, and changed into uniform - the dark tunic and tights with the red piping which cleared her for any area except Medic and Psych. Monitors clicked ACCEPT as she went swiftly along the corridors to the major Mapping room. She found a free terminal and requested a satellite picture taken during overflight past Nevarsin. She could read the picture well enough to purse her lips and whistle silently at the terrain.

And Lexie believes there is some sort of city out there which has managed to screen itself from satellite or radar imaging? The woman’s insane.

If the mysterious city of the Sisterhood existed - and Magda had an open mind about that - it must be in some inaccessible part of the overworld. Yet ever since she had known Jaelle, she had heard tales of Kindra n’ha Mhari, Jaelle’s foster mother, who had guided Lady Rohana into the Dry-Towns. She had been a legendary explorer and mercenary. If she said she had known women who had actually been inside this legendary city, who was Magda to say it didn’t exist?

She touched controls which would generate, from the satellite photograph, a somewhat more detailed computer-diagrammed map, one which, would not require her own expertise with Terran formulations to decipher. She studied it on the screen for a time, requesting slight clarifications here and there until it resembled the Darkovan maps she had seen in Rafaella’s collection, then asked for a hard copy. The laser-directed burst-printer moved silently, and in under half a minute the map slid out. She took it and studied it again for a long time, seeking errors, comparing it with other pictures on the screen; making absolutely certain that it was the very best that she could get.

In her early years with Intelligence, Magda had traveled with Peter Haldane over much of the Seven Domains, and into the foothills of the Hellers. She had made some of of the early maps herself, though Peter had been better at that; her own gift was with languages. As she looked at some of the roads (on any planet but Darkover, they would have been classified as cattle trails), memories began resurfacing from that half-forgotten time… How young she had been then, how boundlessly energetic. Had she and Jaelle actually crossed the Pass of Scaravel, almost four thousand meters high?
Yes
, she thought grimly,
Jaelle has the scars to prove it
. And once, she and Peter had gone in disguise to the City of Snows, Nevarsin of the
cristoforos
… After a moment, she sighed and turned again to the terminal, requesting yet another review of available maps northward from Nevarsin.

She studied the few narrow tracks that led into the wilderness. The plateau was over two thousand meters high; the passes might be expected to be short on oxygen; certainly there would be banshees - those blind, flightless carnivores that moved with a terrible tropism toward anything that breathed, and that could disembowel a horse with a single stroke of those dreadful claws. In the unexplored areas marked in cross-hatching on the maps, there would be unknown dangers. Some of the passes were far higher than Scaravel; most of what was shown was covered in the pale blue cross-hatching that meant.
Unexplored
-
no hard data
. If what they were looking for really existed, it would be somewhere there.

Needles in haystacks, anybody?

There must be more to the legends than that. If women Kindra knew had come and gone, it must be possible, not easy but possible, to track down information, to buy it, bribe those who knew -

But that would all have to be done on the Darkovan side. She had pretty well exhausted Terran sources at this point. She got SUPPLY on the terminal, requisitioned sleeping bags, solid fuel for camp stoves, sunglasses and sunburn cream - none of these items was at all unusual; any agent of Mapping and Exploring, Survey or Intelligence who was going into the field requisitioned the same things. Even if they hadn’t been credited to Magda’s personal account instead of being requested without charge as
work related expenses
, they would hardly have blipped a CAUTION flag at Auditing. Still, as a personal expense, she would never, ever have to explain why she had wanted them.