“You may be sure of it, Lord Regis.” He stood staring after Regis as the boy mounted and rode away, and Regis could sense his confusion and gratitude. As he rode slowly down the hill to rejoin his bodyguard, he realized what he had, in substance, pledged himself to do: to restore Danilo’s good name and make certain that Dyan could not again misuse power this way. What it meant was that he, who had once sworn to renounce the Comyn, now had to reform it from inside out, single-handedly, before he could enjoy his own freedom.
Chapter TWELVE
(Lew Alton’s narrative)
The hills rise beyond the Kadarin, leading away into the mountains, into the unknown country where the law of the Comyn does not run. In my present state, as soon as I had forded the Kadarin I felt that a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
In this part of the world, five days’ ride north of Thendara, my safe-conducts meant nothing. We slept at night in tents, with a watch set. It was a barren country, long deserted. Only perhaps three or four times in a day’s ride did we see some small village, half a dozen poor houses clustered in a clearing, or some small-holding where a hardy farmer wrested a bare living from the stony and perpendicular forest There were so few travelers here that the children came out to watch us as we passed.
The roads got worse and worse as we went further into the hills, degenerating at times into mere goat-tracks and trails. There are not many good roads on Darkover. My father, who lived on Terra for many years, has told me about the good roads there, but added that there was no way to bring that system here. For roads you needed slave labor or immense numbers of men willing to work for the barest subsistence, or else heavy machinery. And there have never been slaves on Darkover, not even slaves to machinery.
It was, I thought, small wonder that the Terrans were reluctant to move their spaceport into these hills again,
I was the more surprised when, on the ninth day of traveling, we came on to a wide road, well-surfaced and capable of handling wheeled carts and several men riding abreast. My father had also told me that when he last visited the hills near Aldaran, Caer Donn had been little more than a substantial village. Reports had reached him that it was now a good-sized city. But this did not diminish my astonishment when, coming to the top of one of the higher hills, we saw it spread out below us in the valley and along the lower slopes of the next mountain.
It was a clear day, and we could see a long distance. Deep in the lowest part of the valley, where the ground was most even, there was a great fenced-in area, abnormally smooth-surfaced, and even from here I could see the runways and the landing strips. This, I thought, must be the old Terran spaceport, now converted to a landing field for their aircraft and the small rockets which brought messages from Thendara and Port Chicago. There was a similar small landing field near Arilinn. Beyond the airfield lay the city, and as my escort drew to a halt behind me, I heard the men murmuring about it.
“There was no city here when I was a lad! How could it grow so fast?”
“It’s like the city which grew up overnight in the old fairytale!”
I told them a little of what Father had said, about prefabricated construction. Such cities were not built to stand for ages, but could be quickly constructed. They scowled skeptically and one of them said, “I’d hate to be rude about the Commander, sir, but he must have been telling you fairy tales. Even on Terra human hands can’t build so quick.”
I laughed. “He also told me of a hot planet where the natives did not believe there was such a thing as snow, and accused him of tale-telling when he spoke of mountains which bore ice all year.”
Another pointed. “Castle Aldaran?”
There was nothing else it could have been, unless we were unimaginably astray: an ancient keep, a fortress of craggy weathered stone. This was the stronghold of the renegade Domain, exiled centuries ago from Comyn—no man alive now knew why. Yet they were the ancient Seventh Domain, of the ancient kin of Hastur and Cassilda.