The Forbidden Tower

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “The weather is not mine to command, my friend. What would you have me do?”

  “There was a time—so my grandsire told me—when the folk of the Comyn, the Tower-folk, sorceresses and warlocks, could use their starstones to heal wounds. Eduin”—he gestured to the Guardsman at Dom Esteban’s side—“saw you heal Caradoc so he didna’ bleed to death when his leg was cut to the bone by a catman sword. Can’t you do something for us too, vai dom?”

  Without conscious thought, Damon’s fingers closed over the small leather bag strung-round his neck which held the matrix crystal he had been given at Arilinn, as a novice psi technician. Yes, he could do some of those things. But since he had been sent from the Tower—he felt his throat close in fear and revulsion. It was hard, dangerous, frightening, even to think of doing these things outside of the Tower, unprotected by the electromagnetic Veil which protected the matrix technicians from intruding thoughts and dangers…

  Yet the alternative was death or crippling for these men, indescribable suffering, at the very least, hunger and famine in the villages.

  He said, and knew his voice was trembling, “It has been so long, I do not know if I can still do anything. Uncle…?”

  Dom Esteban shook his head. “Such skills I never had, Damon. My little time there was spent working relays and communications. I had thought most of those healing skills were lost in the Ages of Chaos.”

  Damon shook his head. “No, some of them were taught at Arilinn even when I was there. But I can do nothing much alone.”

  Raimon said, “The domna Callista, she was a leronis… ”

  That was true too. He said, trying to control his voice, “I will see what we can do. For now, the important thing is to see how much of the circulation can be restored naturally. Ferrika,” he said to the young woman who had come back, carrying vials and flasks of herb salves and extracts, “I will leave you to care for these men, for now. Is Lady Callista still upstairs with my wife?”

  “She is in the still-room, vai dom, she helped me to find these things.”

  It was in a small back passage near the kitchens, a narrow, stone-floored room, lined with shelves. Callista, a faded blue cloth tied over her hair, was sorting bunches of dried herbs. Others hung from the rafters or were stuffed into bottles and jars. Damon wrinkled his nose at the pungent herb-smell of the place, as Callista turned to him.

  “Ferrika tells me you have some bad cases of frostbite and freezing. Shall I come help put hot-packs about them?”

  “You can do better than that,” Damon said, and laid his hand, with that involuntary gesture, over his insulated matrix. “I am going to have to do some cell-regeneration with the worst ones, or Ferrika and I will end by having to cut off a dozen fingers and toes, or worse. But I can’t do it alone; you must monitor for me.”

  “To be sure,” she said quickly, and her hands went automatically to the matrix at her throat. She was already replacing the jars on the shelf. Then she turned—and stopped, her eyes wide with panic.

  “Damon, I cannot!” She stood in the doorway, tense, a part of her already poised for action, a part stricken, drooping, remembering the real situation.

  “I have given back my oath! I am forbidden!”

  He looked at her in blank dismay. He could have understood it if Ellemir, who had never lived in a Tower and knew little more than a commoner, had spoken this old superstition. But Callista, who had been a Keeper?

  “Breda,” he said gently, with the feather-light touch on her sleeve that the Arilinn people used among themselves, “it is not a Keeper’s work I ask of you. I know you can never again enter the great relays and energon rings—that is for those who live apart, guarding their powers in seclusion. I ask only simple monitoring, such work as any woman might do who does not live by the laws of a Keeper. I would ask it of Ellemir, but she is pregnant and it would not be wise. Surely you know you have not lost that skill; you will never lose it.”

  She shook her head stubbornly. “I cannot, Damon. You know that everything of this sort which I do will reinforce old habits, old… old patterns which I must break.” She stood unmoving, beautiful, proud, angry, and Damon inwardly cursed the superstitious taboos she had been taught.

  How could she believe this nonsense? He said angrily, “Do you realize what is at stake here, Callista? Do you realize the kind of suffering to which you condemn these men?”

  “I am not the only telepath at Armida!” she flung at him. “I have given years of my life to this, now it is enough! I thought you, of all men living, would understand that!”

  “Understand!” Damon felt rage and frustration surge up inside him. “I understand that you are being selfish! Are you going to spend the rest of your life counting holes in linen towels and making spices for herb-breads? You, who were Callista of Arilinn?”

  “Don’t!” She flinched as if he had struck her. Her face was drawn with pain. “What are you trying to do to me, Damon? My choice has been made, and there is no way to go back, even if I would! For better or worse, I have made my choice! Do you think—” Her voice broke, and she turned away so that he would not see her weeping. “Do you think I have not asked myself—asked myself again and again—what it is that I have done?” She dropped her face into her hands with a despairing moan. She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t even raise her head, her whole body convulsing with the terrible grief he could feel, tearing her apart. Damon felt it, the agony which was threatening to overwhelm her, which she kept at bay only with desperate effort:

  You and Ellemir have your happiness, already she is bearing your child. And Andrew and I, Andrew and I… I have never been able even to kiss him, never lain in his arms, never known his love…

  Damon turned, blindly, and went out of the still-room, hearing the sobs break out behind him. Distance made no difference; her grief was there, with him, inside him. He was wrung and wrenched by it, fighting to get his barriers together, to cut off that desperate awareness of her anguish. Damon was a Ridenow, an empath, and Callista’s emotions struck so deep that for a time, blinded by her pain, he stumbled along the hall, not knowing where he was or where he was going.

  Blessed Cassilda, he thought, I knew Callista was unhappy, but I had no idea it was like this… The taboos surrounding a Keeper are so strong, and she has been reared on tales of the penalties for a Keeper who breaks her vow… I cannot, I cannot ask anything of her which would prolong her suffering by a single day…

  After a time he managed to cut off the contact, to withdraw into himself a little—or had Callista managed to rebuild her taut control?—and to hope against hope that her anguish had not reached Ellemir. Then he began to think what alternatives he had. Andrew? The Terran was untrained, but he was a powerful telepath. And Dezi—even if he had been sent from Arilinn after only a season or so, he would know the basic techniques.

  Ellemir had come downstairs and was helping Dezi with the work of washing and bandaging the feet of the less seriously hurt men in the lower hall. The men were groaning and crying out in pain as the circulation was restored in their frostbitten limbs, but, although their sufferings were dreadful, Damon knew they were far less seriously injured than the other men.

  One of the men looked up at him, his face contorted with pain, and begged, “Can’t we even have a drink, Lord Damon? It might not help the feet any, but it sure would dull the pain!”

  “I’m sorry,” Damon said regretfully. “You can have all the soup or hot food you want, but no wine or strong drink; it plays hell with the circulation. In a little while, Ferrika will bring you something to ease the pain and help you sleep.” But it would take more than this to help the other men, the ones whose feet were seriously frozen.

  He said, “I must go back and see to your comrades, the ones who are worst hurt. Dezi—”

  The red-haired boy looked up, and Damon said, “When these men are taken care of, come and talk to me, will you?”

  Dezi nodded, and bent over the man whose feet he was smearing with str
ong-smelling salve and bandaging. Damon noticed that his hands were deft and that he worked quickly and with skill. Damon stopped beside Ellemir, who was winding a length of bandage around frozen fingers, and said, “Be careful not to work too hard, my darling.”

  Her smile was quick and cheery. “Oh, it is only early in the morning that I am ill. Later in the day, like this, I have never felt better! Damon, can you do anything for those poor fellows in there? Darrill and Piedro and Raimon played with Callista and me when we were little girls, and Raimon is Domenic’s foster-brother.”

  “I did not know that,” Damon said, shaken. “I will do all I can for them, love.”

  He came back to where Ferrika was working with the worst of the hurt men, and joined her in the preliminary bandaging and soaking, giving them strong drugs to ease or blunt the worst of the pain. But this, he knew, was only a beginning. Without more help than Ferrika and her herb-medicines could give, they would die or be crippled for life. At the very best they would lose toes, fingers, lie helpless and lamed for months.

  Callista had recovered her cool self-possession now, and was working with Ferrika, helping to put hot-packs about the injured men. Restoring the circulation was the only way to save any of their feet, and if feeling could be restored in any part of their limbs, it was a victory. Damon watched her with a remote sadness, not really blaming her. He found it hard to overcome his own disquiet at the need for returning to matrix work.

  Leonie had told him that he was too sensitive, too vulnerable, that if he went on, it would destroy him.

  She also said that if he had been a woman, he would have made a good Keeper.

  He told himself firmly that he hadn’t believed it then and that he refused to believe it now. Any good matrix mechanic could handle a Keeper’s work, he reminded himself. He felt a chill of dread at doing this work outside the safe confines of a Tower.

  But here was where it was needed, and here was where it must be done. Perhaps there was more need for matrix mechanics outside a Tower than within… Damon realized where his random thoughts were taking him, and shuddered at the blasphemy. The Towers—Arilinn, Hali, Neskaya, Dalereuth, the others scattered about the Domains—were the way in which the ancient matrix sciences of Darkover had been made safe after the terrible abuses of the Ages of Chaos. Under the safe supervision of the Keepers—oath-bound, secluded, virgin, passionless, excluded from the political and personal stresses of the Comyn—every matrix worker was trained carefully and tested for trustworthiness, every matrix monitored and guarded against misuse.

  And when a matrix was used illegally, outside a Tower and without their leave, then such things happened as when the Great Cat cast darkness through the Kilghard Hills, madness, destruction, death…

  He let his fingers stray to his own matrix. He had used it, outside a Tower, to destroy the Great Cat and cleanse the Hills of their terror. That had not been misuse. And this healing he was about to do, this was not misuse; it was legitimate, sanctioned. He was a trained matrix worker, yet he felt queasy and ill at ease.

  At last all the men, slightly or seriously hurt, had been salved, bandaged, fed, and put to bed in the back halls. The worst ones had been dosed with Ferrika’s pain-killing potions, and Ferrika, with some of her women, stayed to watch over them. But Damon knew that while many of the men would recover, with no more treatment than good nursing and healing oils, there were a few who would not.

  A noonday hush had settled over Armida. Ferrika watched over the hurt men; Ellemir came to play cards with her father, and at Dom Esteban’s request, Callista brought her harp, laid it across her lap and began tuning the strings. Damon, watching her closely, saw that while she seemed calm, her eyes were still red, and her fingers less steady than usual as she struck the first few chords.

  What sound was that upon the moor?

  Hear, O hear!

  What sound was that in the darkness here?

  It was the wind that rattled the door,

  Child, do not fear.

  Was that the noise of a horseman’s hoof,

  Hear, O hear!

  Was it the sound of a rider near!

  It was but branches, astrike on the roof,

  Child, do not fear!

  Was that a face at the window there?

  Hear, O hear! A strange dark face…

  Damon rose silently, beckoned to Dezi to follow him. As they withdrew into the corridor, he said, “Dezi, I know perfectly well that one never asks why someone left a Tower, but would you care to tell me, in complete confidence, why you left Arilinn?”

  Dezi’s face was sullen. “No, I wouldn’t. Why should I?”

  “Because I need your help. You saw the state those men were in, you know that with nothing more than hot water and herb-salves, there are at least four of them who will never walk again, and Raimon, at least, will die. So you know what I am going to have to do.”

  Dezi nodded, and Damon went on: “You know I will need someone to monitor for me. And if you were dismissed for incompetence, you know I could not dare use you.”

  There was a long silence. Dezi stared at the slate-colored slabs of the floor, and inside the Great Hall they heard the sound of the harp, and Callista singing:

  Why lies my father upon the ground?

  Hear, O hear!

  Stricken to death with a foeman’s spear…

  “It was not incompetence,” Dezi said at last. “I am not sure why they decided I must go.” He sounded sincere, and Damon, enough of a telepath to know when he was being lied to, decided he probably was sincere. “I can only think that they didn’t like me. Or perhaps”—he raised his eyes, with an angry steel glint in them—“they knew I was not even an acknowledged nedestro, not good enough for their precious Arilinn, where blood and lineage are everything.”

  Damon thought that no, the Towers didn’t work that way. But he was not so sure. Arilinn was not the oldest of the Towers, but it was the proudest, claiming more than nine hundred generations of pure Comyn blood, claiming too that the first Keeper had been a daughter of Hastur’s self. Damon didn’t believe it, for there was too little history which had survived the Ages of Chaos.

  “Oh, come, Dezi, if you could pass the Veil they would know you were Comyn, or of Comyn blood, and I don’t think they would care that much.” But he knew nothing he said could get past the boy’s wounded vanity. And vanity was a dangerous flaw for a matrix mechanic.

  The Tower circles depended so much on the character of the Keeper. Leonie was a proud woman. She was when Damon knew her, with all the arrogance of a Hastur, and she had grown no less so in the years between. Perhaps she was personally intolerant of Dezi’s lack of proper pedigree. Or perhaps he was right, and they simply didn’t like him… In any case, it made no difference here. Damon had no choice. Andrew was a powerful telepath, but essentially untrained. Dezi, if he had lasted even half a year in a Tower, would have had meticulous training in the elemental mechanics of the art.

  “Can you monitor?”

  Dezi said, “Try me.”

  Damon shrugged. “Try, then.”

  In the hall, Callista’s voice rose mournfully:

  What was that cry that rent the air?

  Hear, O hear!

  What dreadful shriek of dark despair,

  A widow’s curse and an orphan’s prayer…

  “Zandru’s hells,” Dom Esteban exploded, at the top of his voice, “why such a doleful song, Callista? Weeping and mourning, death and despair. We are not at a funeral! Sing something more cheerful, girl!”

  There was a brief harsh sound, as if Callista’s hands had struck a dissonance on the harp. She said, and her voice faltered, “I fear I am not much in the mood for singing, Father. I beg you to excuse me.”

  Damon felt the touch on his mind, swift and expert, so perfectly shielded that if Damon had not been watching Dezi, he would not have known by whom he had been touched. He felt the faint, deep probing, then Dezi said, “You have a crooked back tooth. Does it bother you?
”

  “Not since I was a boy,” Damon said. “Deeper?”

  Dezi’s face went blank, with a glassy stare. After a moment he said, “Your ankle—the left ankle—was broken in two places when you were quite young. It must have taken a long time to heal; there are scars where bone fragments must have worked out for some time afterward. There is a fine crack in your third—no, the fourth—rib from the breastbone. You thought it was only a bruise and did not tell Ferrika when you returned from the wars with the catmen last season, but you were right, it was broken. There is a small scar—vertical, about four inches long—along your calf. It was made by a sharp instrument, but I do not know whether knife or sword. Last night you dreamed—”

  Damon nodded, laughing. “Enough,” he said, “you can monitor.” How in the name of Aldones had they been willing to let Dezi go? This was a telepath of surpassing skill. With three years of Arilinn training, he would have matched the best in the Domains! Dezi picked up the thought and smiled, and again Damon had the moment of disquiet. Not lack of competence, or lack of confidence. Was it his vanity, then?

  Or had it been only some personality clash, someone there who felt unable or unwilling to work with the youngster? The Tower circles were so intimate, a closer bond than lovers or kinfolk, that the slightest emotional dissonance could be exaggerated into torture. Damon knew that Dezi’s personality could be abrasive—he was young, touchy, easily offended —so perhaps he had simply come at the wrong time, into a group already so intimate that they could not adapt to any outsider, and not enough in need of another worker that they would work hard enough at the necessary personal adjustments.

  It might not have been Dezi’s fault at all, Damon considered. Perhaps, if he did well at this, another Tower would take him. There was a crying need for strong natural telepaths, and Dezi was gifted, too gifted to waste. He saw the smile of pleasure, and knew Dezi had picked up the thought, but it didn’t matter. A moment’s reproving thought, that vanity was a dangerous flaw for a matrix technician, knowing that Dezi picked that up too, seemed enough.