The Ages of Chaos

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “We shall see, Dorilys,” he said, drawing her close for a minute. “When Cassandra tells me that you are old enough to bear a child without danger, then, if you still wish for it, Dorilys, it shall be as you desire.”

  He bent down and would have kissed her on the forehead, but she clung to him with surprising strength, pulling him down so that their lips met, with passion that was not at all childlike. When at last she released him Donal was dizzy. He straightened up and left the room quickly, but not before Dorilys, with her erratic telepathic sense, still unreliable, had picked up his thought, No, Dorilys is a child no more.

  Quiet. Quiet. All was silent in Castle Aldaran… all was silent in the camp of the besiegers below. All day the dreadful silence hung over the land. Allart, high in the watchtower, setting again a binding-spell on the castle walls, wondered what new devilry this quiet presaged. So sensitized had he become by this prolonged warfare by matrix that he could almost feel them plotting—or was it an illusion?—and his laran continued to present pictures of the castle falling in ruins, the very world trembling. Toward midday, all over the castle, all at once, men began shrieking and crying out, with nothing visible the matter with them. Allart, in the tower room with Renata, Cassandra, and the old sorceress Margali—Dorilys had kept her bed, for her arm still throbbed with pain, and Margali had given her a strong sleeping draft—had his first warning when Margali raised her hands to her head and began to weep aloud.

  “Oh, my baby, my little one, my poor lamb,” she cried. “I must go to her!” She ran out of the room, and almost at the same moment Renata caught her hands against her breast, as if struck by an arrow there, and cried out, “Ah! He is dead!” While Allart stared at her in amazement, at the slammed door still quivering behind Margali, he heard Cassandra screaming. All at once it seemed to him that she was gone, that the world grew dark, that somewhere behind a locked door she fought a deathly battle with his brother, that he must go to her and protect her. He had actually risen and taken a step to the door on a mad dash to rescue Cassandra from the ravisher, when he saw her across the room, kneeling, swaying in anguish and tearing at herself, keening as if she knelt above a corpse.

  A tiny shred of rationality struggled for what felt like hours inside Allart. Cassandra is in no need of rescue, if yonder she sits wailing as if the one she loved best lay dead before her… . Yet within his mind it still seemed that he heard screams of terror and anguish, that she was calling to him, crying out.

  Allart! Allart! Why do you not come to me? Allart, come come quickly… and a long, terrified shriek of desperate anguish.

  Renata had risen, and was making her way on faltering feet to the door. Allart caught her around the waist.

  “No,” he said. “No, kinswoman, you must not go. This is bewitchment. We must fight it; we must set the binding-spell.”

  She fought and struggled in his arms like a mad thing, kicking, scratching at his face with her nails as if he were not Allart at all but some enemy bent on murder or rape, her eyes rolled inward in some wholly interior terror, and Allart knew she neither saw nor heard him.

  “No, no, let me go! It’s the baby! They’re murdering our baby! Can’t you see where they have him there, ready to fling him from the wall? Ah, merciful Avarra… let me go, you murdering devils! Take me first!”

  Icy chills chased themselves up and down Allart’s spine as he realized that Renata, too, fought against some wholly internal fear, that she saw Donal, or the child who was not yet even born, in deadly danger…

  Even while he held her he struggled against the conviction that, somewhere, Cassandra was screaming his name, weeping, pleading, begging him to come to her… Allart knew that if he did not quickly still this he would succumb also and run wildly down the stairs seeking her in every room of the castle, even though his mind told him she knelt there across the room, wholly caught up into some such internal ritual of terror as held Renata.

  He snatched out his matrix, focused into it.

  Truth, truth, let me see truth… earth and air and water and fire… let Nature prevail free of illusion… earth and air and water and fire… He had no strength for anything but this, the most basic of spells, the first of prayers. He strove to drive out the nonexistent, dying sound of Cassandra’s screams for mercy in his ears, the terrible guilt that he lingered here while she struggled somewhere with a ravisher…

  Quiet spread through his mind, the silence of the healing-spell, the silence of the chapel at Nevarsin. He entered into the silence and, for a timeless moment, was healed. Now he saw only what was there in the room, the two women in the grip of terrifying illusion. He focused first on Renata, willing her to quiet with the pulse of the healing-spell. Slowly, slowly, he felt it enter her mind, calm her, so that she stopped struggling, stared around her with a great amazement.

  “But none of it was true,” she said in a whisper. “Donal— Donal is not dead. Our child—our child is not even born. Yet I saw Allart, I saw where they held them and I could not reach them.”

  “A spell of terror,” Allart said. “I think everyone saw what he or she most feared. Come quickly—help me to break it!”

  Shaken, but strong again, Renata took her matrix, and at once they focused on Cassandra. After a moment her smothered cries of terror stopped, and she looked at them, dazed with dread, then blinked, realizing what had happened. Now with three minds and three matrixes focused, they sent the healing-spell beating out through all the castle, and from cellar to attic and everywhere in the crowded courtyard, servants and soldiers and guardsmen and stableboys came out of the dazed trance wherein each had heard the cries of whoever he loved best and fought blindly to rescue that one from the hands of a nameless enemy.

  At last all the castle lay under the rhythm of the healing-spell, but now Allart was shaking in dread. Not, this time, the dread of nameless persecution, but something all too real and frightful.

  If they have begun to fight us this way, how can we hold them at bay? Here within the castle Allart had only the two women, old Margali, the still older Dom Mikhail, and Donal, if he could dare to take him from the defense of the castle against attackers who were all too tangible. In fact, Allart feared that this was just the tactic they would use—to distract the fighting men while they attacked, under cover of the great fear they could project. He hurried in search of Dom Mikhail, for a council of war.

  “You know what we have had to fight,” he said. The old lord nodded, his face grim, his eyes hawk-bright, menacing.

  “I thought I stood and watched my best-loved die again,” he said. “In my ears was the curse of a sorceress I hanged from these walls thirteen years gone by, jeering at me that a day would come when I would cry out to the gods in grief that I had not died childless.” Then he seemed to start awake and shake himself like a mantling hawk on the block. “Well, she is dead and her malice with her.”

  He pondered for a time.

  “We must attack,” he said. “They can wear us down quickly, if we must be alert night and day for that kind of attack, and we cannot be ever on the defense. Somehow we must send them howling. We have only one weapon strong enough to rout them.”

  “I did not know that we had any such weapon,” Allart said. “Of what do you speak, my lord?”

  Dom Mikhail said, “I speak of Dorilys. She commands the lightning. She must strike them with storm, and utterly destroy their camp.”

  Allart looked at him in consternation.

  “My lord Aldaran, you must be mad!”

  “Kinsman,” Aldaran said, his eyes flaring displeasure, “I think you forget yourself!”

  “If I have angered you, sir, I beg your pardon. Let my love for your foster-son—yes, and for your daughter, too—be my excuse. Dorilys is only a child, and the lady Renata—yes— and my wife also have done their utmost to teach her to master and control her gift, never to use it unworthily. If you ask her now to direct it in rage and destruction on the armies below us, can you not see, my lord, you wipe out all
we have done? As a young child, twice, she killed, striking with a child’s uncontrolled anger. Can you not see, if you use her this way—” Allart stopped, trembling with apprehension.

  Dom Mikhail said, “We must use such weapons as we have to hand, Allart.” He raised his head and said, “You did not complain when she struck down the evil bird your brother sent against you! Nor did you hesitate to ask her to use her gift to move the storm which had you trapped in the snow! And she struck down the air-cars which would have spread enough clingfire here to burn Castle Aldaran into a smoking ruin!”

  “All this is true,” Allart said, shaking with earnestness, “but in all this she was defending herself or others against the violence of another. Can you not see the difference between defense and attack, sir?”

  “No,” Aldaran said, “for it seems to me that in this case attack is the only defense, or we may be struck down at any moment by some weapon even more frightful than those they have loosed on us already.”

  Sighing, Allart made his last plea.

  “Lord Aldaran, she has not yet even recovered from her threshold sickness. I saw, when we were at the fire station, how over use of her laran left her sick and weak, and then she was not yet come to the threshold of maturity this way. I am really afraid of what may happen if you put further strain on her powers just now. Will you wait, at least, until we truly have no other choice? A few days, even a few hours—”

  The father’s face contracted with fear, and Allart knew that for the moment, at least, he had won his victory.

  “Cassandra and I will go again to the watchtower and keep vigil so they will not take us unaware again. No matter how many leroni they have down there, they must have exhausted themselves with that spell of terror. I think they must rest before they try anything more like that, or worse.”

  Allart’s prediction proved true, for all during that day and night, only a few flights of arrows flew against the walls of the castle. But at dawn the next morning, Allart, who had snatched a few hours of sleep, leaving Cassandra on watch in the tower room, was wakened by ominous rumbling far away. Confused, trying to flood away sleep by splashing cold water on his face, he tried to identify the sound. Cannon? Thunder? Was Dorilys angered or frightened again? Had Aldaran broken his pledge not to use her except in extremity? Or was it something else?

  He hurried up the stairs to the watchtower, but as he went, the stairs seemed to sway under his feet and he had to clutch at the handrail, his laran suddenly envisioning the cracks spreading in the tower walls, the tower splitting and crumbling, falling.

  He burst into the tower room, his face white, and Cassandra, seated before the matrix, looked up at him in sudden terror, picking up his dread.

  “Come down,” he said quickly. “Come out of here, at once, my wife.” As she hurried down the stairs he saw again the great cracks widening in the staircase, the rumbling… They fled down the stairs, hand in hand, Cassandra stumbling on her lame knee, and at last Allart turned back, caught her up in his arms and carried her down the last few steps, not stopping even to breathe, hurrying along the hall. Out of breath, he set her on her feet and stood clinging to a doorframe in the corridor, her arms around him. Then the floor beneath their feet swayed and rumbled, there was a great sound like the splitting asunder of the world, and the floor of the tower they had just left heaved and buckled upward. The stairs broke away from the wall, stones fell outward, crumbling, and then the whole tower split and fell, crashing in heavy thunder down upon the roofs of the keep, stones cascading into the courtyards, falling into the valley below, touching off rockfalls and landslides. … Cassandra buried her face in Allart’s chest and clung to him, shaking with dread. Allart felt his knees buckling and they slid together to the floor, as it swayed and shook under them. Finally the noise died away, leaving only silence and strange, ominous grumbles and crunching sounds from the ground under them.

  Slowly they clambered to their feet. Cassandra had injured her lame knee freshly in their fall; she had to cling to Allart to stand. They stared up at the great gap and thick foggy dawn where once a tall tower had risen, by a near-miracle of matrix engineering, three flights of stairs toward the sun. Now there was nothing but a great pile of stone and rubble and plaster fallen inward, and a huge gap through which the morning rain was drizzling in.

  “What, in the name of all the gods was that?” Cassandra finally inquired, stunned. “An earthquake?”

  “Worse, I fear,” Allart said. “I do not know what kind of leroni they have down there, or what they are using against us, but I am afraid it is something worse than even Coryn would invent.”

  Cassandra scoffed, “No matrix known could do that!”

  “No single matrix, no,” Allart said, “and no technician. But if they have one of the great matrix screens, they could explode this planet to its core, if they dared.” His mind clamored, Would even Damon-Rafael risk laying waste this land he seeks to rule? But his mind provided him with a grim answer.

  Damon-Rafael would not be at all averse to showing his power over a part of the world for which he had no immediate need and which he considered expendable. And after this, no one would dare to challenge him.

  Scathfell might be malicious and eager to rule in his brother’s shoes, but Damon-Rafael was the culprit this time. Scathfell wished to rule in Castle Aldaran, not to destroy it.

  Now they became aware, through the gap in the castle walls, of cries and commotion below, and Allart recalled himself to duty.

  “I must go and see if anyone has been hurt by falling stones, and how it fares with Donal, my sworn brother,” he said, and hurried away. But even as he went he felt the castle trembling again beneath him, and wondered what new devilry was afoot. Well, Cassandra could warn the women without his help. He hurried down into the courtyard, where he found chaos unbelievable. One of the outbuildings had been buried entirely beneath the falling stones of the tower, and a dozen men and four times as many animals were dead in the ruins; others had been crushed by falling debris.

  Dom Mikhail was there, leaning heavily on Donal’s arm. He was still in his furred bed-gown, his face gray and fallen in; Allart thought he looked twenty years older in a single night. He clung to his foster-son as he moved carefully among the ruin in his courtyard. As he saw Allart his thin mouth stretched in a travesty of a smile.

  “Cousin, the gods be thanked, I feared that you and your lady had fallen with the tower and been killed. Is the lady Cassandra safe? What, in the name of all Zandru’s demons, have they done to us now? It will take us half a year to clear away this chaos! Half the dairy animals have been killed; the children will go wanting milk this winter…”

  “I am not certain,” Allart said soberly, “but I must have every man or woman in this stronghold who is able to use a matrix, and organize our defenses against it. We are but ill prepared, I fear, for this kind of warfare.”

  “Are you sure of that, my brother?” Donal asked. “Surely earthquakes have been known in the mountains before this!”

  “It was no earthquake! I am as sure of that as if Damon-Rafael stood before me laughing at what he had done!”

  Dom Mikhail knelt beside the body of a fallen man, only crushed legs protruding from a block of fallen stone larger than a man. “Poor fellow,” he said. “At least his death must have been swift. I fear that those buried in the stables had a death more fearful. Donal, leave the guardsmen to bury the dead: Allart has more need of you now. I will send everyone with laran to you, so that you can see what has been sent us.”

  “We cannot meet in the tower now,” Allart said grimly. “We must have a room somewhat isolated from the grief and fright of those who are clearing away the ruin, Lord Aldaran.”

  “Take the women’s conservatory; perhaps the peace of the flowering plants there will create an atmosphere you can use.”

  As Donal and Allart entered the castle once again, Allart could feel, through the soles of his feet, a renewed faint tremor. Again he wondered what happen
ed. He felt a spasm of dread, remembering how near Cassandra had come to being trapped in the falling tower.

  Donal said, “I wish that our friends in Tramontana were here. They would know how to deal with this!”

  “I am glad that they are not,” Allart replied. “I would not have the Towers drawn into the wars in this land!”

  The sun was just coming through the clouds as they entered the conservatory, and the calm brilliance of the sun light, the solar collectors spreading light, the faint, pleasant damp smell of herbs and flowering leaves, felt strangely at odds with the dread and fear Allart could feel from the men and women who were joining him there. Not only Cassandra, Renata, Margali, and Dorilys, but two or three of the women he had not seen before, and half a dozen of the men. Each one bore a matrix, though Allart sensed that more than half of these had only minimal talent and could do little more than open a matrix-lock or operate some such toy as the gliders. After a time Dom Mikhail, too, came in.

  Allart glanced at Cassandra. She had been in a Tower longer than he, she was, perhaps, better trained, and he was willing to allow her to conduct this search, but she shook her head.

  “You are Nevarsin-taught; you are less subject to fear and confusion than I.”

  Allart was not so sure, but he accepted her decision and looked around the circle of men and women.

  “I have no time to test you one by one and assess the level of your training; I must trust you,” he said. “Renata, you were four years a monitor. You must set a guard around us, for we expose ourselves to those who are trying to destroy this castle and all those in it, and we are vulnerable. I must find what they are using against us, and if there is any defense against it. You must lend us your strength, and our lives are in all of your hands.”