The Forbidden Circle

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  The boy gave a sullen shrug. “Back to where he came from, I suppose, and good riddance!”

  “In this?” Damon stared in consternation at the storm raging beyond the windows. Then he swung on Dezi with a violence that made the boy flinch and shrink away from him.

  “You had something to do with this!” he said, low and furious. “I’ll deal with you later. Now there is no time to lose!”

  He ran, shouting for the servants.

  Andrew woke, slowly, to burning pain in his feet and hands. He was rolled in blankets and bandages. Ferrika was bending over him with something hot. Holding his head, she got him to swallow it. Damon’s eyes swam out of the fog, and groggily Andrew realized that Damon was really worried about him. He cared. It was not true, what Andrew had thought.

  Damon said gently, “We found you just in time, I think. Another hour and we could never have saved your feet and hands; two hours and you would have been dead. What do you remember?”

  Andrew struggled to remember. “Not much. I was drunk,” he said. “I’m sorry, Damon, I must have gone mad for a little. I kept thinking, Go away, Callista doesn’t want you. It was like a voice inside my head, so I tried to do just that, go away. . . . I’m sorry to have caused all this trouble, Damon.”

  “You don’t need to be sorry,” Damon said grimly, and his rage was like a palpable red glow around him. Andrew, sensitized, saw him as an electrical net of energies, not at all like the daily Damon he knew. He glowed, he trembled with fury. “You didn’t cause the trouble. A very dirty trick was played on you, and it nearly killed you.” Then he was Damon again, a slender stooping man, laying a gentle hand on Andrew’s shoulder.

  “Go to sleep and don’t worry. You’re here with us, and we’ll look after you.”

  He left Andrew sleeping, and went in search of Dom Esteban. Rage was pulsing in his mind. Dezi had the Alton gift of forced rapport, of forcing mental links with anyone, even a nontelepath. Andrew, drunk, would be the perfect victim, and knowing Andrew, Damon suspected he had not gotten drunk of his own free will.

  Dezi was jealous of Andrew. That had been obvious all along. But why? Did he feel that with Andrew out of the way, Dom Esteban might acknowledge him as the son he would then so desperately need? Or had he had it in his mind to seek Callista in marriage, hoping that would force the old man’s hand, to admit Dezi was Callista’s brother? It was a riddle beyond Damon’s reading.

  Damon might, perhaps, have forgiven an ordinary telepath under such temptation. But Dezi was Arilinn-trained, sworn by the oath of the Towers, never to meddle with the integrity of a mind, never to force the will of another, or his conscience. He had been entrusted with a matrix, with all the awsome power that entailed.

  And he had betrayed it.

  He had not done murder. Good luck, and Caradoc’s sharp eyes, had found Andrew lying in a snowdrift, partly covered with the blowing snow. In another hour he would have been covered over, his body perhaps found in the spring thaw. And what of Callista, thinking Andrew had forsaken her? Damon shuddered, realizing that Callista might not have lived out the day. Thanks to all the gods at once, she had been deep in drugged sleep at the time. She would have to know—there was no way to keep such things secret in a telepathic family—but not yet.

  Dom Esteban heard the story out with dismay. “I knew there was bad blood in the boy,” he said. “I would have acknowledged him my son years ago, but I never quite felt I could trust him. I did what I could for him, I kept him where I could keep an eye on him, but there seemed something wrong with him somewhere.”

  Damon sighed, knowing the old man’s bluster was mostly guilt. Secure, acknowledged, reared as a Comyn son, Dezi would not have had to bolster his enormous insecurities with envy and jealous spite, bringing him at last to attempt murder. More likely, though Damon tactfully barricaded the thought from the old man, his father-in-law had simply been unwilling to perpetuate, or take responsibility for, a sordid and drunken episode. Bastardy was no disgrace. For a woman to bear a Comyn son was honor, to her and the child, yet the most opprobrious epithet in the casta tongue was translated “six- fathered.”

  And even that could have been avoided, Damon knew, if while the girl was with child, she had been monitored to discover whose seed had kindled her to bear. Damon thought, in something very like despair, that there was something very wrong in the way they were using telepaths on Darkover.

  But it was too late for any of this. For what Dezi had done there was only one penalty. Damon knew it, Dom Esteban knew it, and Dezi, Damon could see plainly, knew it. They brought him, tied hand and foot and half dead of fright, to Damon later that night. They had found him in the stables, making ready to saddle and be gone into the blizzard. It had taken three of Esteban’s Guardsmen to overpower him.

  Damon thought that would have been better. In the storm he would have found the same justice, the same death he had sought for Andrew, and death unmutilated. But Damon was bound by the same oath Dezi had violated.

  Andrew felt that he too would have willingly faced death in the blizzard, rather than the smoldering anger he could feel in Damon now. Just the same, paradoxically, Andrew felt sorry for Dezi when the boy was brought in, thin and frightened, looking younger than he was. He seemed like a boy hardly into his teens, so that the ropes binding him looked like monstrous injustice and torture.

  Why didn’t Damon just leave it to him? Andrew wondered. He would beat hell out of the kid and for somebody his age, that ought to be enough. He had said as much to Damon, but the older man had not even bothered to answer. It had been clear, anyway.

  Andrew would never otherwise be safe again: from the knife in the back, the murderous thought. . . . Dezi was an Alton, and a murderous thought could kill. He had already come close to it. Dezi was not a child. By the law of the Domains, he could fight a duel, acknowledge a son, be held responsible for a crime.

  He looked now at the shrinking Dezi, and at Damon, with dread. Like all men of swift but short-lived anger, Andrew had no experience with the held grudge; nor with the rage which turns inward, devouring the angry man as much as the victim of his wrath. It was this he sensed in Damon now, like a sullen red furnace-glow, dimly visible around him. The Comyn lord looked bleak, his eyes toneless.

  “Well, Dezi, I hardly dare to hope you will make this easy for me or for yourself, but I’ll give you the option, though it’s more than you deserve. Will you match resonances with me willingly and let me take your matrix without a struggle?”

  Dezi did not answer. His eyes blazed out bitter, hating defiance. Damon thought, what a waste it was. He was so strong. He flinched, shrinking from the intimacy that was being forced on him, the least welcome of all intimacies, that of torturer and tortured. I don’t want to kill him, and I probably will have to. Mercy of Avarra, I don’t even want to hurt him.

  Yet, thinking of what he had to do, he could not keep himself from shuddering. His fingers closed, a spasmodic grip, over the matrix in its leather and silk insulation at his throat.

  There, over the pulse, over the glowing center of the main nerve channel. Since it was given to Damon, at fifteen, and the lights in the stone wakened at the touch of his mind, it had never been beyond the reassuring touch of his fingertips. No other human being, except his Keeper, Leonie or, during a brief time in his Tower years, the young under-Keeper Hilary Castamir, had ever touched it. The very thought of having it taken from him, forever, filled him with a cold black terror worse than dying. He knew, with every fiber of the Ridenow gift, the laran of an empath, what Dezi was enduring now.

  It was blinding. It was crippling. It was mutilation. . . .

  It was the penalty invoked by the Arilinn oath for illegal use of a matrix. And it was what he must, by law, inflict now.

  Dezi said, clinging to a last shred of defiance, “With out a Keeper present, it is murder that you do. Is murder penalty for attempted murder, then?”

  Damon, though he felt Dezi’s terror in his own bowels, kept his vo
ice passionless. “Any halfway competent matrix technician—and I am rated a technician—can do this part of a Keeper’s work, Dezi. I can match resonances and take it from you in safety. I won’t kill you. If you try not to fight me, it will be easier for you.”

  “No, damn you!” Dezi spat out, and Damon steeled himself for the ordeal ahead. He could admire the boy’s attempt to pretend courage, some dignity. He had to remind himself that the courage was a sham in a coward who had misused laran against a drunk and unprotected man, who had gotten him drunk for that purpose. To admire Dezi now, simply because he did not break down and plead for mercy—as Damon knew perfectly well he himself would do—made no sense at all.

  He still felt Dezi’s emotions—a trained empath, his laran honed to fine point at Arilinn, he could not block them out—but he steeled himself to ignore them, focusing on the ordeal ahead. The first step was to focus inward on his own matrix, to steady his breathing, let his consciousness expand into the magnetic field of his body. He let the emotions filter through and past him, as a Keeper must do, feeling and accepting them, without entering into them in the slightest.

  Leonie had told him once that if he had been a woman, he would have made a Keeper, but that, as a man, he was too sensitive, that this work would destroy him. Somehow, the remembrance made him angry again, and the anger strengthened him. Why should sensitivity destroy a man, if it was valuable for a woman, if it could have made a woman capable of the most difficult of all matrix work, that of a Keeper? At the time, the words had come close to destroying him; he had felt them an attack on his very manhood. Now they reaffirmed in him the knowledge that he could do this part of a Keeper’s work.

  Andrew, watching, lightly linked with Damon, saw him again as he had seen him for a moment the night before, watching over the sleeping Callista: a swirling field of interconnected currents with pulsing centers, dim colors glowing at the pulse spots. Slowly he began to see Dezi the same way, to sense what Damon was doing, bringing his own rate of vibration close to Dezi’s own, to adjust the flows so that their bodies—and their matrix jewels—were vibrating in perfect resonance. This would, he knew, enable Damon to touch Dezi’s matrix without pain, without inflicting physical or nervous shock strong enough to produce death.

  For someone not keyed into the precise resonance, to touch someone else’s matrix could produce shock, convulsions, even death; at the very least, incredible agony.

  He saw the resonances match, pulse together as if, for a moment, the two magnetic fields blended and became one. Damon got out of his chair—to Andrew, it looked like a cloud of linked energy fields, moving—and went toward the boy. Abruptly Dezi wrenched control of the resonances away from Damon, shattering the blended rapport. It was like a clashing explosion of force. Damon gasped in anguish with the recoil, and Andrew felt the shattering pain that exploded in Damon’s nerves and brain. Automatically, Damon stumbled out of reach of the clashing field, steadied himself to rematch resonances to the new field Dezi had created. He thought, almost in pity, that Dezi had panicked, that when it came to it, he couldn’t quite endure it.

  Again the matched resonances, the energy fields beginning to vibrate in consonance; again the attempt to reach out for Dezi, to remove the matrix physically from the magnetic field of his body. And again the shattering wrench as Dezi broke the resonances, thrust them apart with an explosion of pain cascading through them both.

  Damon said compassionately, “Dezi, I know it’s hard.” Inwardly he thought that the boy could almost be a Keeper himself. Damon could not match resonances that way at his age! But then he had never been as desperate, either, nor as tormented. The breaking of resonances was obviously just as painful for Dezi as it was for Damon himself. “Try not to fight this time, my boy. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  And then—they were open to one another—he felt Dezi’s thrusting contempt for his attempt at pity, and knew this was not a panic reaction at all. Dezi was simply putting up one hell of a fight! Perhaps he thought he could outfight Damon, wear him down. Damon left the room and came back with a telepathic damper, a curious gadget which broadcast a vibration that could damp out telepathic emanations within a broad range of frequencies. Grimly he thought of Domenic’s jest on the night he and Ellemir had been married. Such things were used, sometimes, to blur telepathic leakage, when there were others around, to protect privacy, to permit secret talk or prevent unwilling (or deliberate) telepathic eavesdropping. It was used sometimes in Comyn Council, or to protect others when there was an undeveloped, or uncontrolled, adolescent in psychic upheaval, before learning to control or focus powers. He saw Dezi’s face change, take on real panic through the defiance.

  Tonelessly, he warned Andrew, “Get out of range if you want to. This might hurt. I’m going to have to use it to damp out any frequencies he tries to raise.”

  Andrew shook his head. “I’ll stick.” Damon caught Andrew’s thought: I won’t leave you alone with him. Grateful for his friend’s loyalty, Damon knelt down and began to set up the damper.

  Before long, he had tuned it to damp out Dezi’s assault on his consciousness. After that, it was simply a matter of matching his own resonances to Dezi’s physical field of vibration. This time when he stepped into the interlocking fields, the damper blocked out Dezi’s mental thrust to alter the frequencies, move him away. It was painful and hard to move under the damper, something he thought only a full-fledged Keeper could have done at all, with the damper full strength. It felt, physically, as if he were struggling through some thick, viscous fluid which dragged at his limbs and his brain. Dezi began to struggle like a mad thing as he came near. But it was hopeless, and he knew it. Dezi could exhaust himself with the effort to change frequencies, but he could not alter Damon’s now, and the more he managed to alter his own, the more the ultimate shock would hurt.

  Gently Damon laid his hand on the small silk insulating bag around Dezi’s neck. His fingers fumbled to untie the thong. Dezi had begun to moan and struggle again, and his struggles, like a rabbit in a snare, wrenched at Damon with pity, even though the boy’s terror was barricaded now by the damper. He managed to get the bag open. The blue stone, pulsing, glowing with Dezi’s terror, fell into his fingers. As they closed over it, he felt the bone-cracking spasm within himself, saw Dezi slump as if felled by a crushing blow. He wondered wretchedly if he had killed the boy. He thrust the matrix within the field of the damper, saw it quiet down to a faint pulse, a resting rhythm. Dezi was unconscious, his head lolling to one side, froth on his bitten lips. Damon had to steel himself to remember Andrew, unconscious, in a deathly sleep in the snow, to think of Callista’s agony if she had awakened to find herself abandoned, or widowed by treachery, before he could harden himself to say “That’s done.”

  He thrust the matrix for a few minutes under the damper, saw it fade to dimness, the faintest of pulsing lights. It was still alive, but it had been lowered in strength to where it could not be used for laran.

  He cast a pitying look at Dezi, knowing he had blinded the boy. Dezi was worse off now than Damon was when they sent him from Arilinn. In spite of Dezi’s crime, Damon could not help feeling sorrow for the boy, so gifted, such a powerful telepath, potential higher than many now working in the screens and relays. Zandru’s hells, he thought, what a waste. And he had crippled him.

  He said wearily, “Let’s finish this, Andrew. Hand me that lock-box, will you?”

  He had gotten it from Dom Esteban, who had removed some small jewelry from it. As he thrust the matrix inside, closing the lid, he thought of the old fairy-tale: the giant kept his heart outside of his body, in the most secret place he could find, so that he could not be killed unless they sought out his hidden heart. He explained briefly to Andrew as he fiddled with the small matrix lock on the box, thrusting his own against it. He said, “We can’t destroy the matrix; Dezi would die with it. But it is locked here with a matrix lock so nothing but my own matrix, attuned to this pattern, will ever open this box again.” The
box locked, he put it into a store-room, came back and bent over Dezi, checking the boy’s breathing, his racing heart.

  He would survive.

  Mutilated . . . blinded . . . but he would survive. Damon knew he would rather have died, if it were he.

  Damon straightened, listening to the quieting sound of the storm outside. He drew his dagger and cut the ropes binding the boy, thinking that it might be kinder to cut his throat. He wouldn’t want to live. Was his terrible struggle only a way of attempting suicide?

  He sighed, laying some money in a purse beside the boy. He said heavily to Andrew, “Dom Esteban gave me this for him. He’ll probably go to Thendara, where Domenic promised him a cadet commission. He can’t do much harm there, working in the City Guards and he can make himself some kind of career. Domenic will look after him—there’s some sense of family loyalty, after all. Dezi won’t even have to confess what’s been done to him. He’ll be all right.”

  Later, telling Ellemir what he had done, while Andrew watched over the still-sleeping Callista, he repeated it.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to live. When I stood over him with the dagger, to cut the ropes they had tied him with, I wondered if it would have been kinder to kill him. But I managed to live after they sent me from Arilinn. Dezi should have that chance too.” He sighed, remembering the day he had left Arilinn, blind with pain, dazed with the breaking of the bonds of the Tower circle, the closest bond known to those with laran, closer than kin, closer than the bond of lovers, closer than husband and wife. . . .

  “I got over wanting to die,” he said, “but it was a long time before I wanted to live again.” Holding Ellemir close, he thought: Not till I had you.

  Ellemir’s eyes softened with tenderness, then, her mouth hardening, she said, “You should have killed him.”