Free The Forbidden Circle by Marion Zimmer Bradley Page B

butterfly clasp, and felt it cold and solid between his fingers. He said, and heard his own voice strangely thinned, “I am looking for Callista. She is gone, and her twin cannot find her anywhere. Have you seen her here?”
    Leonie looked troubled. She said, “No, my dear. We, too, have searched, and she is nowhere on any plane we can reach. From time to time I can feel her somewhere, her living presence, but no matter where I look I cannot come to her.”
    Damon felt deeply disquieted. Leonie was a powerful, trained telepath, and all the accessible levels of the overworld were known to her. She walked in that world as readily as in the solid world of the body. The fact that Callista’s distress was known to her, and that she herself could not locate her pupil and friend, was ominous. Where, in any world, was Callista hiding?
    “Perhaps you can find her where I cannot,” said Leonie gently. “Blood kin is a deep tie, and may link kindred when friendship or affinity fails. Somehow I think she is there.” Leonie raised a shadowy arm and pointed. Damon turned in the direction indicated, and saw only a thick, foggy darkness.
    “The darkness is new on this plane,” Leonie said, “and none of us can breach it, at least not yet. When we move in that direction we are flung back, as if by force. I do not know what new minds move on this level, but they have not come here by our leave.”
    “And you think Callista may have strayed into that level and be held there, unable to penetrate that shadow with her mind?”
    “I fear so,” Leonie said. “If she were kept drugged, or entranced; or if her starstone had been taken from her, or she had been so ill-treated that her mind had been darkened by madness; then it might appear to us, on this level, as if she were imprisoned in a great and impenetrable darkness.”
    Quickly, with the swiftness of thought, Damon told Leonie what he knew of the abduction of Callista, from her very bed at Armida.
    “I do not like it,” Leonie said. “What you tell me frightens me. I have heard that there are strange men from another world at Thendara, and that they have come there by permission of the Hasturs. Now and again one of them strays in a dream on to the overworld, but their forms and their minds are strange and mostly they vanish if one speaks to them. They are only shadows here, but they seem harmless enough, men like any others, without much skill at moving in the realms of the mind. I find it hard to believe that these Terrans—that is what they call themselves—can have had any part in what has happened to Callista. What reason could they have had? And since they are on our world by sufferance, why would they antagonize us by such conduct? No; there seems more purpose to it than that.”
    Damon became conscious that he was cold again, and shivering. The plain seemed to tremble under his feet. He knew that if he wished to remain in the overworld, he must move on. Speaking to Leonie had been a comfort, but he must not linger here if he hoped to carry on his search for Callista. Leonie seemed to follow his resolution, and said, “Search, then. Take my blessing.” even as she raised her hand in the ritual gesture, her form faded and Damon discovered that he had receded a great distance and was no longer standing on the familiar courtyard stones of the Tower, but had come a long way over the gray plain toward the darkness.
    The cold grew and he shuddered with the recurrent blasts, like icy winds, that beat out from that dark place. The darkening lands, he thought grimly, and against the cold he quickly visualized himself dressed in a thick gold and green cloak. The cold lessened, but only slightly, and his motion toward the darkness grew ever slower, as if some pressure from that darkness were flowing out, pushing him backward, backward. He struggled against it, calling out Callista’s name again. If she’s anywhere out on the planes, she’ll hear that , he thought. But if