Zandru's Forge

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  They separated after the meal, each to his own activities. With the morning’s storm still muttering outside, there was little to do beyond the amusements provided by the court. Varzil, who had little taste for dancing lessons or ladies singing endless ballads about star-crossed lovers, wished he could ride out again to Hali.

  Eduin had been right about the value of being useful. Besides the work done in circles and the healing of those sick and injured brought to the Tower, there were the archives. Hali was in constant need of librarians to tend to the ancient documents or transcribe those damaged by age and elements. However, the weather would not permit him to travel to Hali.

  In the end, Varzil made his way back to the kitchen and from there, the still room, where a harried herbalist and her assistant welcomed an extra pair of willing hands. He spent a cheerful afternoon with them, trading stories of livestock and folk cures.

  That evening, Varzil excused himself early from the evening’s modest entertainment to pack the few belongings he had brought. His little bag was heavier than when he’d arrived. The night before, Carolin had given him a parting gift, a cloak pin of silver fashioned in the shape of a running deer. The artisan had shaped the beast’s antlers into a semicircle ending at its tail and then filled in the space with a filigree of leafy branches. A tiny ruby glinted in the animal’s single visible eye. As a gift from Carolin, the piece was doubly precious. It was just—

  Just too much. Too costly, too beautifully wrought, for a simple laranzu.

  As Varzil held the brooch in his hand, sitting on the edge of the bed in the richly ornamented rooms which had been his, he felt as he had that first night—apart, a stranger. Not even Carolin‘s love or the easy friendship of Jandria could change the fact that he did not and never would belong here.

  I am a laranzu, not a courtier. I have never wanted to be anything else.

  Meanwhile, he would have to talk to Carolin about the silver pin and find a graceful way of refusing it without giving offense. He wrapped it back up in the lace-trimmed brocade square of Hastur blue and silver in which it had come. Then he opened the door and headed down the hallway in the direction of Carolin’s chambers.

  Since the morning at the lake, he and Carolin had often been in rapport, sometimes no more than a tenuous awareness of the other’s presence somewhere in the castle. Carolin was a weak telepath at best, and his duties, both official and unofficial, dancing attendance upon his uncle and sitting judgment at the cortes, occupied the greater portion of his attention. Knowing this could be the last private moments between them for many years at least, Varzil sent out a questing thought.

  Carlo? Are you finished with—

  The answering jolt of pain ripped through his body and stopped the breath in his lungs. The hallway vanished in the wash of searing fire that blasted through him, obliterating even his awareness of himself.

  19

  Varzil doubled over, hands clutching his chest. His vision swam and his throat closed up. His heart pounded in his ears, drowning out all other sound.

  A second wave of agony swept through him. The world twisted sickeningly. He felt his body, his mind, his very self turn to ashes until only an empty husk remained.

  Denial rushed up from some deep, stubborn core. This pain was not his own.

  Even as the thought echoed through his mind, he reached out for the image of a wall, the barrier Auster had drilled into him for so many hours. With the first outlines of the stones came a lessening of the tearing pain in his chest.

  Not mine—

  The wall slammed into place, every seam and gritty mote of dust. He straightened up, grateful for the steadiness of his legs and the air rushing into his lungs. A surge of warmth replaced the pain, except for a lingering throb in his right hand. Looking down at the wrapped pin, he saw that the cloth had somehow come loose and the sharpened tongue of the brooch dug into the flesh of his palm. There was only a drop or two of blood.

  With his uninjured hand, he rubbed his chest where only a few moments ago, pain fiercer than a red-hot brand had bored into him. Not over his heart, but where his wrapped starstone hung. The braided cord was longer than most, for he preferred to keep his matrix jewel hidden from not only the casual touch, but the very sight of strangers. His fingers closed around the pouch of insulating silk, felt the hard edges of the stone. On impulse, he slipped it out, cupped it in his palm. The blue jewel instantly came alive, as it always did in direct contact with his flesh. Deep within its faceted heart, blue fire sprang up, flashing in eye-searing brilliance. As it subsided, a feeling of warmth remained. The edges of the cut from the brooch tongue sealed together, as if a week or more had passed. Varzil hadn’t deliberately focused his laran for healing, but he had used the stone in that manner many times.

  Varzil gazed into the gem, caught as always in the play and dance of blue light. He felt himself slip into the crystalline pattern that would enhance his own natural talent.

  Not my pain ... whose?

  An image flashed into his mind—Carolin’s face, contorted, eyes rolled up in his skull, fingers hooked into claws, limbs shaking as in unnatural palsy—

  He bolted down the corridor. The guard outside Carolin’s door looked up, his face awash in surprise and then alarm.

  “Halt! Stand where you are!” Steel whispered as the guard drew his sword.

  “Sean! It’s me, Varzil!”

  The guard raised his sword. “Come slowly into the light, so I can see you. What’s your business here?”

  Damned explanations! Varzil touched his starstone and sent a burst of laran through the gem. It flared, searing blue-white across the whole section of corridor.

  The guard pawed at his eyes, momentarily blinded. Varzil moved him aside, murmuring, “It’s all right, you know who I am.”

  He jerked the latch and hurried inside. There was no one in the outer chamber, where they had all spent so many hours together.

  Carlo! He sent out a mental call even as he rushed for the inner door, leading to the bedroom. Light from a single candle filled the room with a dim orange haze. A huge bed on a dais dominated the center. Shadows clung to the dark velvet hangings. The bedclothes were mussed, sheets like tangled ghosts. A small table lay on its side, with a second candle, visible as no more than an ember-tipped wick, spilled over the carpet. Beside it, half-hidden in the clotted darkness, a man crouched. His back was to Varzil, but he lifted his head.

  Eduin!

  Carolin lay there, his body contorted and quivering, fingers like claws moving in odd jerks as if trying to grasp something, hold it to his chest. He wore a shirt of fine white cloth, gathered around the sleeves and yoke. The ties had been loosened so that the neckline fell open halfway down his belly. And his starstone, which he had always worn in a pouch of Hastur-blue silk, lay bare on his chest.

  “What’s going on?” Varzil demanded. “What have you done to him?”

  “I—I—”

  “Never mind!” Varzil pushed Eduin aside with more roughness than he’d ever used against another Tower worker.

  Varzil took Carolin’s hands in his own. Carolin was in shock, clearly psychic in origin. His fingers were stiff and cold. They twitched under his touch. Through them, Varzil felt the deep shudders racking Carolin’s entire body. Another convulsion was already building.

  Varzil wrapped his arms around Carolin. He wasn’t prepared for the reaction. It was like trying to hold a dying fish as it bucked and fought. The muscles of Carolin’s body had locked in spasm, so that Varzil had to lift the other man’s inert weight. They fell over sideways against the chair.

  “Carlo!” Varzil cried, praying that somehow he’d get through. “Carlo!”

  Varzil strained to reach his friend’s mind but met only roiling blackness, as if all coherent thought, all sense of Carolin’s personality, had been swallowed up in a mountain storm.

  Carlo! Carolin Hastur!

  Still clutching his friend’s twitching, palsied hands, Varzil threw all the power of
his laran into the call. Chaos answered him, fragments of thought blown against the raging tumult.

  Varzil’s own panic receded as he began to make sense of the howling madness of Carolin’s mind. Something must have happened to sever Carolin’s consciousness from his body, something so traumatic, so unbearable as to tear an otherwise sound mind loose from its moorings. Carolin had laran, enhanced by a full season at Arilinn, and if someone other than a Keeper had touched his starstone, even inadvertently ...

  Using his breath to summon his strength, Varzil forced Carolin’s hands together around the starstone. Breath burst from Carolin’s lungs with a percussive sound, followed by gasping sobs. The iron rigidity of his body gave way. He sprawled, limp except for the grip, hard as rigor, on his starstone.

  Varzil heaved himself to a sitting position with Carolin’s head and shoulders across his lap. Eduin had set the table to rights and relit the second candle. He bent over Carolin, face taut with concern. Together they lifted Carolin to the bed.

  “We had best send for a monitor from Hali,” Eduin said. “What happened to him?”

  “I thought you could tell me that!” Varzil glared at Eduin. “What did you do to him? Did you handle his starstone? Is that what put him in this state?”

  Eduin held up both hands in a placating gesture. “No, no, he was like this when I came upon him. I didn’t do anything except try to help. You’ve got to believe me. I love Carlo like a brother, even as you do. I would never—”

  Varzil thrust himself against Eduin’s mind, determined to learn the truth. Eduin’s barriers were as complete and reflective as a mirror of steel.

  “I found him like this only moments before you came in,” Eduin said. “I didn’t know what was wrong, and there was no time to summon anyone from Hali or perform a proper examination. I did what I thought was necessary under the circumstances. It was an emergency.”

  Varzil managed to rein his own temper under control, enough to see the sense in Eduin’s words. There were certain unusual cases, a crisis in threshold sickness, the backlash from certain psychic assaults, in which death was imminent. The only hope the victim had of surviving, or surviving with half a mind, was direct physical contact with his or her matrix stone. The risks were tremendous. Such a shock could stop a man’s heart or leave him alive but insane. The only people who could safely handle a starstone, once it had become keyed into the mental patterns of its owner, were the person himself or a trained Keeper.

  “You are no Keeper,” Varzil said. He had not intended the comment as cruelly blunt as it came out.

  Eduin’s gaze lowered for a fraction and his color darkened minutely in the light of the two candles. “I hoped that because Carlo and I are close, and I do have the potential to become a Keeper, that I might be able to reach him without harm.”

  “And did you?”

  Eduin met Varzil’s gaze, his expression smooth and cool. “I used the lightest possible contact. It made no—it didn’t make him any worse. I was about to try again when you interrupted us. Varzil, you must believe me—”

  Eduin’s next words were cut off by a moan from the other side of the room. As one, they turned and rushed back to the bed. Carolin struggled to sit up. His hair was disheveled, his eyes white and staring like those of a madman. For a stomach-churning instant, Varzil feared that his own action had been too late. Carolin’s mental presence had returned, ragged and confused, but resonant with the force of his personality.

  “What in the name of all the gods hit me?” Groaning again, Carolin raised both hands to the sides of his head.

  “What happened?” Varzil asked.

  Carolin bent over, his bright red hair falling across his face. His voice was muffled. “I have no idea. I can’t remember. One moment I was standing there, getting ready to take off my boots. The next, I’m here on the bed with you two looking as if—as if—Oh, my head hurts.”

  That’s because Eduin’s been manhandling your starstone. Varzil clamped down the accusation.

  “It’s all right,” Eduin said. “We’ll send for a healer. You’ll be fine.”

  Varzil bent over Carolin, easing him back on the pillows. After searching for a few minutes, he found the embroidered pouch for Carolin’s starstone. He held it in his hand for a moment, feeling the lightness of it, the layers of insulating silk, trying to summon a memory of it in Eduin’s hand.

  Carolin reached for the pouch and slipped it over his starstone. His color brightened visibly, but he looked weary. He lay back with little objection while Eduin departed and Varzil monitored him.

  The work gave Varzil something to do, a focus for his own unsettled feelings. Had he interrupted an assassination or a well-meant attempt at help? It made no sense that Eduin would wish to harm Carolin, who had befriended him, included him in these royal festivities, and taken his part with Dyannis.

  To his relief, Varzil sensed little lasting damage to Carolin’s nervous system and laran channels. Carolin was young and healthy, with a mental resilience that allowed him to adapt as easily to being a student at Arilinn as to his duties as the royal heir. He had been disoriented by the shortcircuiting of the energy systems of his body and resulting muscle spasms. Carolin was going to have Durraman’s own headache.

  With his innate strength and a few gentle nudges from Varzil smoothing the disrupted channels, Carolin quickly returned to normal. In a short time, only a Tower-trained monitor would be able to tell he had suffered anything worse than an exhausting holiday season.

  At one point, Carolin reached down and took Varzil’s hand.

  Do not fear, my friend. No evil will befall me as long as we are together.

  “We will not be together forever,” Varzil murmured aloud. “I hope you did not concoct this episode to delay my leaving.”

  Carolin’s grip tightened. “Listen to me, Varzil. Whatever suspicions you have of Eduin, you must lay them to rest. You cannot go on like this. It will poison your mind.”

  “You would think the best of every man, Carlo. Not everyone is so trusting. Nor, perhaps, should you be.”

  Carolin shook his head. “That’s the old way of thinking, that every man must be your enemy or your rival. We were brought up on it, like mother’s milk. But we have seen beyond the old ways, haven’t we? We have dreamed a time when men no longer rain unquenchable fire from the skies on their neighbors, where honor prevails instead of self-interest.”

  “Carlo, this is no time to be making speeches. I know you mean well, but you’re not thinking clearly. You need rest—”

  “Then stop arguing with me! If you will not make peace with Eduin for the sake of harmony at Arilinn or for your sister’s happiness, then let it be for the dream we share. If that future is to be made real, we must treat all men as our brothers.”

  Varzil looked away. Truth rang through Carolin’s words. He could not dismiss them as the ravings of a man who had just been through a near-fatal ordeal. His instinct was to temporize, to say that after he had wrung the truth out of Eduin, then he would consider this proposal of brotherly love. For Carolin’s dream to come to fruition, there could be no exclusions, no matters to be settled first.

  “If a crime had been committed, by Eduin or any other man, let him answer for it according to custom and law,” Carolin said gently. “And not in the court of your opinion. I forbid you to take any action on your own.”

  With an effort, Varzil nodded. After everything Carolin had done for him, even setting aside their friendship, he owed him no less. Besides, tomorrow he and Eduin would be returning to Arilinn, leaving Carolin safely behind at Hali.

  Very shortly thereafter, Eduin arrived with the castle healer. After examining Carolin, he agreed that no lasting harm had been taken, said he thought it unnecessary to summon anyone from the Tower, and prescribed an herbal tonic to be taken in wine at bedtime.

  The next morning, Carolin was well enough to bid his farewells in person, although he was still a bit pale around the mouth and eyes. The cold weather held
, with rumblings of another storm in the next day or so, and an aircar had been arranged to take them back to Arilinn.

  The pilot was a different one this time, a man of few words. Neither Varzil nor Eduin had much to say until the very end of the journey, when Eduin turned to Varzil. His jaw was tight but his gaze steady.

  “For the sake of Arilinn and the circles where we must work together, Varzil, there must be an end to your suspicions of me. If you think I have done wrong, you must go to Auster and lay your charges before him. I will submit myself to his judgment.”

  Varzil heard the certainty behind Eduin’s words. Surely a guilty man would not make such an offer. The relationship between each member of a circle and his Keeper was uniquely intimate. With a pang of guilt, Varzil realized that he himself had come perilously close to taking over as guardian of Eduin’s conscience, a thing he had no right to do.

  What purpose would be gained by humiliating Eduin with accusations?

  It is not necessary to like every man personally in order to deal honorably with him. It was something, he realized with a start, that Carolin would have said.

  “If I have wronged you, by thought or deed,” Varzil said, “then I am truly sorry.”

  Eduin murmured a few gracious comments and the two fell silent again until the Twin Peaks of Arilinn, framing the gleaming Tower that was their home, came into view.

  20

  Spring came early with a flurry of rainstorms, each overlapping the one before. In the course of a month, the thick drifts of snow melted into slush. Moisture clung to the stone walls of Hastur Castle, and the smell of boiled laundry and mildew permeated the lower levels. Nothing seemed to dry out properly. Carolin’s favorite horse developed a bad case of thrush in its hind hooves. As soon as the roads were open to travel, Jandria left for home and Maura returned to Hali Tower. Carolin missed them more than he expected.

  But it was Varzil’s absence which cut the keenest. Carolin found himself thinking of Varzil at odd moments, between hearings at the cortes, while washing his hands after a mom ing’s ride, when he picked up Roald McInery’s Military Tactics. Sometimes a feeling would pass over him, like a shadow of warmth, and he knew that across the leagues at Arilinn, Varzil was thinking of him too. He would remember the certainty he felt since their first meeting that somehow their lives were interwoven, that they shared a destiny.