Read Online The Spell Sword by Marion Z. Bradley - Free Book Online Page A

forced himself to be fair, and tried to still his
pounding heart. This wasn't Callista's fault either. He should save his curses
for her kidnappers.
    Ellemir said timidly, "Don't be angry, Damon," and he thought, It's a good sign
she can feel that I'm angry. He said aloud, "I'm not angry at you, breda." He
used the intimate word which could mean simply kinswoman or, more closely,
darling. He settled himself as comfortably as he could, sensitizing himself to
the feel of Callista's hair-clasp between his hands, the starstone above it,
pulsing gently in unconscious rhythm with his own nerve currents.
    He tried to blur everything else, every other sensation, the feel of Ellemir's
cold hands on his wrists and her warm breath against his throat, the faint
woman-scent of her closeness; he blotted these out, blotted out the flicker of
fire and candle beyond them, dimmed the shadows of the room, let vision sink
into the blue pulsing of the starstone. He sensed, rather than physically felt,
the relaxing of his muscles as his body went insensible. For an instant nothing
existed except the vast blue of the starstone, pulsing with the beating of his
heart, then his heart stopped, or at least he was no longer conscious of
anything except the expanding blueness: a glare, a blue flame, a sea rushing in
to drown him.
    With a brief, tingling shock, he was out of his body and standing over it,
looking down from above, with a certain ironic detachment, on the thin, slumped
body in the chair, the frail, frightened-looking girl kneeling and grasping its
wrists. He was not really seeing, but perceiving in some strange, dark way
through closed eyelids.
    In the overlight forming around him he cast a swift downward look. The body in
the chair had been wearing a shabby jerkin and leather riding breeches, but as
always when he stepped out he felt taller, stronger, more muscular, moving with
effortless ease as the walls of the great hall thinned and moved away. And this
body, if it could be called a body, was wearing a glimmering tunic of gold and
green that flickered with a faint firelight glow. Leonie had told him once,
"this is how your mind sees itself." He was bare-armed and barefoot, and he felt
an incongruous flicker of amusement. To go out in the blizzard like this? But of
course the blizzard was not here, not at all, although if he listened, he could
hear the faint howl of the wind, and he knew the violence of the storm must be
intense indeed if even its echo could penetrate into the over-world. As he
formulated that thought he felt himself begin to shiver and quickly dismissed
the thought and memory of the blizzard; his consciousness of it could solidify
it on this plane and bring it here.
    He moved, gliding, not conscious of separate steps. He was conscious of
Callista's jeweled butterfly still between his hands, fluttering like a live
thing, beating with the impress of her mental "voice." Or rather, since the
jewel itself was in the hands of his body, "down there," the mental counterpart
of the ornament which he bore "here." He tried to sensitize himself to the
special reverberations of that "voice," adding to it his call, a shout that felt
to him like a commanding bellow.
    "Callista!"
    There was no answer. He had not really expected an answer; if it had been that
simple, Ellemir would have already made contact with her twin. Around him the
over-world was as still as death, and he looked around, all the time aware that
the world, and himself, were only comfortable visualizations for some intangible
level of reality. That he saw it as a "world" because it was more convenient to
see and feel it that way than as an intangible mental realm; that he visualized
himself as a body, striding across a great barren empty plain, because it was
easier and less disconcerting than visualizing himself as a bodiless point of
thought adrift in other thoughts. At the moment it looked to him like an
enormous flat horizon, stretching away dim and bare and silent