Saint Camber

by Katherine Kurtz

  “I thank you more than you can know,” he replied. Releasing one of her hands, he sank back into the chair he had lately vacated, glancing to where the two young men had turned from their labors at the door.

  “Gentlemen, are we warded?”

  Joram nodded, coming with Rhys to stand beside Camber’s chair. “No one will be able to sense our magic from without, especially considering the concentration around you. We’ve shielded against escape of sound, as well. As an added safeguard, I will be on guard throughout.”

  “Good. Have you a plan, in case we’re interrupted?”

  “Dualta has the watch, as you know, and is aware that ‘Brother John’ and I are here.” Joram gestured toward his sister with a wry half-smile. “He’s been led to believe that it’s for disciplinary reasons, so I don’t think he’ll let anyone approach. However, if he should, Evaine and I will simply retire to your private oratory.” He nodded toward a closed door leading off the main room. “We’ll feign some act of penance. Rhys will stay with you and try to keep things from falling apart altogether, depending on what’s happening at that point.”

  “That’s a real danger, you know,” Camber said. “Things falling apart, that is. If we are interrupted, I’m not certain I’ll be able to hold up my end of things.”

  “Then God grant that we will not be put to that test,” Evaine breathed.

  With a nod, Camber leaned his head against the back of his chair and took a deep breath, let it out slowly. He allowed his pale Alister eyes to rest on each of them in turn: daughter, son, and son-in-law. Then he nodded again.

  “Let’s begin.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word, by stretching forth thine hand to heal.

  —Acts 4:29–30

  As Rhys came to stand behind Camber’s chair, Joram moved to the door and set his back against it. Evaine shed her Michaeline mantle and laid it across a vacant chair before sitting on the bench beside her father’s feet. One hand patted the embroidered slippers in affection as she reached into her habit with the other and withdrew a jewellike object the size of a hen’s egg. Candlelight glinted amber on the smoothly polished surface as she burnished it against her sleeve. Deep in the heart of the crystal, tiny inclusions reflected fragmented fire against her Michaeline blue.

  “I wish I had the one you gave me,” she said, breathing on the crystal to warm it. “Unfortunately, I gave it to Cinhil. This was Rhys’s gift, though.”

  As she put it in his hands, she glanced behind him at her husband, her blue eyes mirroring his answering smile. Camber, with a contented smile of his own, held the crystal lightly between his fingers and propped his elbows on the arms of his chair. For a moment he gazed profoundly into its depths, seeking the release from tension which the shiral crystal usually facilitated. Then he shook his head lightly and let his gaze skip back to his daughter.

  “I can’t do it in this form,” he said. “I mean, I could now, but I won’t have the strength to maintain my shape illusion and still accomplish what we must. I’m taking back my own form.”

  As he spoke, a mist seemed to pass across his face and then to clear. For the first time since the clearing at Iomaire, he became Camber MacRorie once more. The familiar face was etched with fatigue and tension, but signs of these began to disappear almost immediately as he sighed and resumed his concentration on the shiral crystal.

  Evaine bit her lip as she watched the beloved gray eyes grow glassy, paler, more otherworldly, though the phenomenon was comfortingly familiar. Camber’s voice, when next he spoke, was a little hollow, flat, indicative of the profound relaxation he had already achieved.

  “That’s better,” he murmured. “Rhys, I’m ready for you now.”

  Behind Camber, Rhys laid his hands gently on the other’s shoulders and let himself sink into the special healing place from which he would keep watch over Camber’s body. At his touch, Camber breathed deeply and exhaled again, the last lines of tension ironing out of his face. The gray eyes, half-lidded now, did not flicker as Evaine, with a steadying breath of her own, stood and spread her arms to either side in readiness, palms turned toward him at shoulder level in an attitude of blessing.

  “I am the key which opens many doors,” she intoned softly.

  Camber could see her through and behind the crystal in his hands, firelight from the candle sconce at his elbow dancing light and shadow on her hands and face. Rhys’s touch was light and unobtrusive as the proper response flowed unbidden into his mind.

  “I am the lock which yields to light alone.”

  “I am a candle burning in the dark,” Evaine countered.

  “I am a twig, for feeding flame from spark.”

  Called forth by the mnemonics of the litany they recited, he could feel new channels opening in his mind. He had rarely been so deep before, and knew he must go deeper still. He sensed Evaine leaning forward to take the now-unnecessary crystal and slip it back inside her robe, but his hands remained at chest level, still cupped around an ovoid space, until she pressed them gently into his lap. His universe was now encompassed by his waiting. He could not seem to think beyond his expectation.

  “I am the light, condensing from the stars,” Evaine whispered, “which brims the silver bowl of consciousness.” She leaned both hands on the arms of his chair to stare deeply into his eyes.

  “I am the vessel, opening my will,” Camber murmured, now almost past speech. “I turn the key, and torch the twig … and fill.”

  His eyes remained open, and his mind was still vaguely aware of his surroundings, but now almost all within his field of vision was obscured by the blue of Evaine’s closeness. He could hear the soft rhythm of his breathing, but all other sound around him seemed suspended. Even the raising of his daughter’s hand toward his face was silent, no rustle of cloth confirming whether the hand actually moved or only appeared to do so.

  You are on the brink now, Evaine’s mind whispered in his. Let go. Let all the memories flow, and live them to the full. Each one must be acknowledged and accepted and become a part of you. Let go now. We will keep you safe.

  He let himself take a deeper breath—though not so deep that it required any great effort—then let it out slowly, feeling himself slide deeper and deeper into a quiet he had never experienced before. As his daughter’s hand touched his forehead, his eyelids closed of their own weight, trembling for only a heartbeat before they were still. Now the shallow sound of his breathing was his only contact with the outside world. He did not even sense the moment when Evaine’s hand left his forehead, and he had long ago lost the sensation of Rhys’s touch.

  Let go … let go …

  He let things slip, starting to obey, and he could feel the tendrils of alien memory brush his own. Part of him was afraid, but he knew he must not shrink away. Abandoning all defenses and resistance, he loosed the final ties and let it happen. Immediately, thoughts not his own began to wash across awareness.

  Sunlight. The warmth and heady perfume of a summery field. His Alister eyes drank in the greens and golds and pinks of summer growth: long-stemmed grasses and fertile soil and colors of a hundred different blossoms. Wildflowers sprang white and pink and lilac by bare toes. The rich blue of his habit was hiked up past his knees as he stepped through a rivulet of chill stream on water-slicked stones. He was a much younger Alister than Camber MacRorie had ever known, and he had abandoned his studies for an hour to celebrate the joy of mere existence.

  He sank down in verdant clover grass and laid his head among pastel blossoms which tickled his ears; plucked a stem and sucked its sweet juice as he watched clouds pile up against a sapphire sky. A grasshopper bounded into his field of vision, and he put out one idle hand to let the creature crawl across his thumb. The delicate touch of the creature’s legs and feelers, the subtle shadings of color, were so beautiful it almost hurt.

  A skip, a beat, and he was no longer lying in the field.

  He was
slightly older now: a newly ordained priest, helping some of his older brethren to dress the altar in the Commanderie chapel at Cheltham. Dust motes shimmered in a shaft of glass-stained sunlight, and a little of the sunshine smell was in the bleached linens which he and another man shook out and laid across the smooth stone of the altar top.

  He sniffed the pungent fragrance of cedar oil as he rubbed and polished the carved-oak Michael at the altar’s right, remembering the feel of each burnished whorl beneath his fingertips. He inhaled the familiar scent, and when he exhaled, he was in darkness.

  Terror! Somehow, he knew that he was on his sleeping pallet, alone in his cell—but he was also struggling with someone or something which was trying to suffocate him! Nightmare hands pressed close around his throat, choking off his breath, and he knew that there were claws attached to those hands which could rip both life and soul from him. He thrashed on the narrow pallet, fighting desperately to escape, to wake up, to overcome the enemy, to save his life!

  A dizzying explosion of blackness, and he was no longer in bed, fighting for his life, though still his breath came tight. He was a grown man, Vicar General of the Order of Saint Michael, and the writing in his hand spelled out the names of possible successors to his office. Four now-familiar names formed the list, penned in the precise hand of the Michaeline grand master.

  Alister knelt at the hearth and held the parchment to the flames, aware that Jebediah was crouched approving at his side. As the parchment caught and blazed, he let it fall into the fire and stood, steadying himself on his friend’s shoulder with an easy familiarity. He was comfortable, contented …

  And troubled. The novice monk kneeling humbly before him and the assembled Order was a bright young man: human, but apparently gifted with a natural empathic intuition which was uncommon even among Deryni, with the possible exception of Healers. From Alister’s abbatial throne, beneath the ribbed vaulting of the chapter house at Cheltham, it would have been easy to let himself react according to his own occasional uneasiness at special abilities, to impose some harsh regiment of regularization which would forever stifle this young man’s talents and make of him an ordinary monk, no different from a dozen of his fellows. The boy gazed up at him with blind, unqualified trust, and Alister knew that the boy would willingly give up the pursuit of his talent if his vicar general commanded it.

  But for the Order to provide proper training and guidance for the development of that talent would be far more difficult, time-consuming, and would require his personal commitment to the task. Dared he make such a decision?

  A blink. A change of time and place. He was a brand-new Michaeline knight, receiving his consecrated sword from a grand master now many years dead. Another shift, and he was tending minor wounds sustained by one of his men in the assault on the keep a year ago, a younger and less worldly-looking King Cinhil looking on in dreadful fascination.

  The memories were coming faster now: shorter, but with a far greater intensity. There was a flash of a woodland clearing which was familiar to Camber as well as to him whose memories he read, but he pushed that aside. Later, for that last memory.

  He was vaguely aware of his own body, as well as the one he was remembering, and that his lungs were filling very shallowly now, his heart rate slowed to a bare minimum. He vaguely consigned himself to Rhys’s careful watch as the next image steadied for his attention.

  He was a much younger Alister, sword in hand, hacking at a pell in the Commanderie training yard; a younger man still, almost a boy, jumping a heavy bay destrier over a succession of obstacles in an open field, five other riders following the same course behind him.

  At night, and he knew this was no training exercise, he and another knight slipped through the shadows of an enemy periphery by moonlight. He knew the dry, metallic tension in his throat as he realized his quarry was also Deryni, though not yet aware of his presence—and the grim satisfaction of drawing dirk across the man’s throat, the body crumpling without a warning sound …

  Sitting beside a night-shielded campfire with Jebediah and two other knights, fishing hot pebbles out of a leather traveling cup, the scent of mulled wine sweet and pungent in his nostrils. The peaceful relaxation of the night, leaning against Jeb’s booted knee to gaze dreamily into the fire as the flames gradually turned to ashes and the four of them talked on and on.

  Suddenly, he was wrenched from his adopted memories and struggling to breathe, and he could feel Rhys’s hands on his face, Rhys’s mouth forcing air into his protesting lungs.

  His ears were ringing, and his fingers tingling, and he was vaguely aware of what seemed like a slow, insistent drumming, pulling him back from wherever he had been. As he forced heavy eyelids apart, he realized that the pounding was coming from the door, that Joram was looking from him and Rhys to the door as though in slow motion. Evaine seemed frozen beside her husband, mouth caught in a surprised O, and Rhys was pulling away to stare urgently into Camber’s eyes as he felt his patient begin to breathe again on his own.

  Camber’s head reeled, pain lancing behind his eyes and at the back of his head as he coughed and time settled back into place. Dimly he could hear the pounding on the door again, and a familiar but dreaded voice calling his adopted name.

  “Father Cullen, may I come in?”

  It was Cinhil.

  With great difficulty, Camber forced himself to focus on Rhys, not needing to tell the Healer of his alarm. Any other man but Cinhil might be denied admission without explanation, but Cinhil would persist until his own need for comfort was satisfied.

  And here sat Camber, in the guise of a man supposedly dead, about to be revealed to the very man for whose sake he had already risked so much. It must not all end now!

  Gathering all his reserves in a massive effort of willpower, Camber gestured for Evaine and Joram to go to the oratory as they had originally planned, his hand aching like lead at even that slight movement. To Rhys he murmured, “I have been very fatigued, and you worry that I may be battling some residue of Ariella’s influence. I’m going to take back my other shape and try to hold it.”

  As Rhys started to protest, Camber was already triggering the return to Alister’s shape, forcing the other’s memories into abeyance with all his might. He did not know how long he dared hold the two together, but he knew he had to try. When he let his eyes flicker open again, he could see Evaine through the open door of the oratory, lying prostrate before the tiny altar. Joram knelt beside her with his golden head bowed. Rhys was striding toward the door, his eyes hardly leaving the now-changed Camber as he laid his hands on the latch and loosed the wards. In all, the delay had not been more than half a minute.

  Camber closed his eyes and hoped.

  “Father Alister …?” Cinhil asked, his voice trailing off as he saw Rhys filling the doorway.

  Dualta was standing at the king’s elbow, and gave Rhys an apologetic nod.

  “Sorry to disturb you, m’lord. I explained to His Grace that the father general was engaged.”

  “You said it was only a disciplinary matter,” Cinhil interjected, trying fruitlessly to peer past Rhys. “I need to talk to him, Rhys. Where is he?”

  Rhys did not move his hand from the doorjamb at Cinhil’s eye level, and the king had to continue trying to look past it.

  “It’s all right, Dualta,” Rhys murmured. “Your Highness, Alister is not really up to seeing any more visitors this evening. I shouldn’t even have let Joram in. He’s extremely tired. I’m trying to get him settled down for the night.”

  Concern sparked the gray Haldane eyes, and then Cinhil pushed his way past Rhys and started toward the bowed gray head, just visible over the top of the high chair back. Rhys managed to keep up, half a pace behind, but even he could not move fast enough to stop the king.

  Dualta, uncertain just what to do under the circumstances, stepped inside the room and waited uncomfortably. As Joram appeared in the doorway of the oratory and signaled with his hand, Dualta closed the door and stayed th
ere at attention, intelligent brown eyes following king and Healer curiously.

  “Sire, he’s drifting in and out of consciousness,” Rhys was saying. “He’ll probably be all right in the morning, if he gets a good night’s sleep, but the important thing now is rest.” He almost caught his breath as Cinhil leaned closer to stare at the still form.

  Camber had managed to return completely to his Alister shape, but now he appeared to have lapsed into real unconsciousness. Quickly Rhys knelt to touch a hand to the older man’s wrist, not daring to look at Cinhil now.

  “I don’t understand. What’s wrong?” Cinhil asked, in a very small, frightened voice. “Ever since we got back, he’s been so weak.”

  “He paid a high price for your safety, Sire,” Joram said, appearing at Cinhil’s side almost without warning. “He would not have told you himself, since he did not wish to trouble you, but his defeat of Ariella cost him a great deal. I was there. I know.”

  Cinhil, his attention momentarily diverted to Joram’s solemn face, swallowed awkwardly and glanced at his feet.

  “I—sensed that something had changed, from that very first night. But I thought he was only exhausted, and that he would get better.”

  “He dreams,” Rhys whispered. “In his mind, he fights her still. It was not a clean kill.”

  Urgently he took Camber’s slack hand between his own and held it hard against his forehead, closed his eyes and tried to will energy through the connection.

  “Hold strong, Father!” he murmured, so low that Cinhil could barely hear. “Fight it! God! Give him strength!”

  As Camber’s eyelids trembled, Joram, too, knelt, crossing himself with a heavy hand. As though a bond had been forged between him and Rhys as well, he laid his hands on Camber’s other arm and bowed his head.

  And Cinhil, opening spontaneously to the emotional currents now flowing in the room, staggered and caught himself against another chair, so shaky that Dualta came rushing to his side to catch him under one elbow and lend support. The king was not picking up the specifics of what was occurring, but the sheer surge of power was coming through. Neither he nor Dualta noticed a small, seemingly frail monk come to stand apprehensively in the doorway of the oratory.