“How could I consent?” Callista cried in despair. “I was a child! I did not even know what it was you asked!”
“Yet you consented, to be trained when you were not yet full-grown and the channels still immature. And so you adjusted easily to the training.”
“I remember,” Callista said, very low. She had been so proud, that she should succeed where so many failed, that she should be Callista of Arilinn, take her place with the great Keepers of legend. She remembered the exhilaration of seizing the direction of the great circles, of feeling the enormous stresses flow unhindered through her body, of seizing and directing the enormous energon rings. . . .
“And you were so young, I thought it unlikely you would ever change. It was pure chance. But, my darling, this can all be yours again. You have only to say the word.”
“No!” Callista cried. “No! I have given back my oath—I do not want it!” And yet in a curious sense she was not sure.
“Callista, I could have forced you to return. You were virgin still, and the law permitted me to require you to come back to Arilinn. The need is still great, and I am old. Yet it is as I said, it is too heavy a burden to be borne unconsenting. I released you, child, even though I am old and this means I must struggle to bear my burden till Janine is old enough and strong enough for this work. Does this sound as if I wished you ill, or lied when I blessed you and bade you live happily with your lover? I thought you already free. I thought that in giving back your oath I bowed to the inevitable; that you were already freed in fact and there was no reason to hold to the word and torture you by the attempt to make you return, to clear your channels and force you to try again.”
Callista whispered, “I hoped . . . I believed I was free. . . .”
She could feel the horror in Leonie, like a tangible thing. “My poor child, what a risk to take? How could you care so much for some man, when you have all this before you? Callista, my darling, come back to us! We will heal all your hurts. Come back where you belong—”
“No!” It was a great cry of renunciation. As if it had reverberated into the other world, she could hear Andrew’s voice, crying out her name in agony.
“Callista, Callista, come back to us . . .”
There was a brief, sharp shock, the shock of falling. Leonie was gone and pain arrowed through her body. She found herself lying in her bed, Andrew’s face white as death above hers.
“I thought I’d lost you for good this time,” he whispered.
“It might be better . . . if you had,” she murmured in torment.
Leonie was right. Nothing binds me to him but words . . . and my destiny is to be Keeper. For a moment, time swam out of focus and she saw herself sheltered behind a strange unfamiliar wall, not Arilinn. She seized the strands of force within her hands, cast the energon rings. . . .
She reached out for Andrew, instinctly shrank away. Then, feeling his dismay, reached for him, disregarding the knifing, warning pain.
She said, “I will never leave you again,” and clung to his hands in desperation.
I can never go back. If there is no answer I will die, but I will never go back.
Nothing binds me to Andrew but words. And yet . . . words . . . words have power. She opened her eyes, looking directly into her husband’s, and repeated the words he had said at their wedding.
“Andrew. In good times and in bad . . . in wealth and in poverty . . . in sickness and health . . . while life shall last,” she said, and closed her hands over his. “Andrew, my love, you must not weep.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Damon felt he had never before been quite so frustrated as now. Leonie had acted for reasons which seemed good to her at the time, and he could, a little, understand her motives.
There must be a Keeper at Arilinn. All during Leonie’s life, that had been the first consideration, nothing could be allowed to supersede it. But there was no way he could explain this to Andrew.
“I’m sure if I were in your place, I should feel much the same,” he said. It was late at night, Callista had dropped into an exhausted, restless sleep, but at least she was sleeping, undrugged, and Damon tried to find a shred of hope in that. “You cannot blame Leonie—”
“I can and I do!” Andrew interrupted, and Damon sighed.
“Try to understand. She did what she thought best, not only for the Towers but for Callista too, to save her the pain and suffering. She could hardly have been expected to foresee that Callista would want to marry—” He had started to say, “to marry an out-worlder.” He caught himself and stopped, but of course Andrew picked up the thought anyway. A dull red flush, half anger, half embarrassment, spread over the Terran’s face. He turned away from Damon, his face looking closed and stubborn, and Damon sighed, thinking that this had to be settled quickly or they would lose Andrew too.
The thought was bitter, almost intolerable. Since that first moment of fourfold meshing within the matrix, while Callista was still prisoner, Damon had found something he had thought irrevocably lost to him when he was sent from the Tower, the telepathic bond of the circle.
He had lost it when Leonie sent him from Arilinn, to resign himself to live without it, and then, beyond hope, he had found it again in his two girl cousins and this out-worlder. . . . Now he would rather die than let the bond be broken again.
He said firmly, “Leonie did this, for whatever reasons, good or bad, and she must bear the responsibility for it. Callista was not strong enough to get the answer from her. But Leonie, and Leonie alone, may hold the key to her trouble.”
Andrew looked out into the black, snow-shot darkness beyond the window. “That’s no help. How far is Arilinn from here?”
“I don’t know how you would reckon the distance. We calculate it at ten days ride,” Damon said, “but I had no thought of going to her there. I shall do as Callista has done and seek her out in the overworld.” His narrowed lips sketched a bleak smile. “With Dom Esteban disabled and Domenic not yet grown, I am her nearest kinsman. I have right and responsibility to call Leonie to account.”
But who could call a Hastur to account, Hastur, and the Lady of Arilinn?
“I feel like going along with you and raising a little hell myself,” said Andrew.
“You wouldn’t know what to say to her. I promise you, Andrew, if there is an answer to be found, I’ll find it.”
“And if there isn’t?”
Damon turned away, not even wanting to think about that. Callista slept restlessly, tossing and moaning in her sleep. Ellemir was doing some needlework in an armchair, frowning over the stitches, her face bright in the oval of the lamp. Damon reached for her, feeling the quick response in her mind, a touch of reassurance and love. I need her with me, and I must go alone.
“In the other room, Andrew, we would disturb them here. Keep watch for me,” he added, leading the way into the other room, arranging himself half lying in a great chair, Andrew at his side. “Watch . . .”
He focused on the matrix, felt the brief, sharp shock of leaving his body, felt Andrew’s strength as he hovered briefly in the room . . . Then he was standing on the gray and formless plain, seeing with surprise that behind him, in the overworld, there was a landmark, a dim structure, still shadowy. Of course, he and Dezi and Andrew had built it for shelter when they worked with the frostbitten men, a refuge, a protection. My own place. I have no other now. Firmly he put that aside, searching in his bodiless formation for the glimmering beacon-light of Arilinn. Then, literally with the speed of thought, he was there, and Leonie before him, veiled.
She had been so beautiful. . . . Again he was struck with the old love, the old longing, but he armored himself with thoughts of Ellemir. But why did Leonie veil herself from him?
“I knew when Callista came that you would not be far behind her, Damon. I know, of course, in a general way, what you want. But how can I help you, Damon?”
“You know that as well as I. It is not for myself that I need help, but for Callista.”
&n
bsp; Leonie said, “She has failed. I was willing to release her—she has had her chance—but now she knows her only place is here. She must come back to us at Arilinn, Damon.”
“It is too late for that,” Damon said. “I think she will die first. And she is near it.” He heard his own voice tremble. “Are you saying you will see her dead before releasing her, Leonie? Is the grasp of Arilinn a death-grip, then?”
He could see the horror in Leonie, like a visible cloud, here where emotions were a solid reality. “Damon, no!” Her voice trembled. “When a Keeper is released it is because she can no longer hold the channels to a Keeper’s pattern, that they are no longer clear for psi work. I thought this could not happen with Callista, but she told me otherwise and I was willing to free her.”
“You knew you had made that impossible!” Damon accused.
“I . . . was not sure,” said Leonie, and the veils stirred in negation. “She said to me . . . she had touched him. She had . . . Damon, what was I to think? But now she knows otherwise. In the days when a girl was trained to Keeper before she was fullgrown, it was taken for granted that the choice was for life and there could be no return.”
“You knew this, and still made that choice for Callista?”
“What else could I do, Damon? Keepers we must have, or our world goes dark with the darkness of barbarism. I did what I must, and if Callista is even reasonably fair to me, she will admit it was with her consent.” And yet Damon heard, like an echo in Leonie’s mind, the bitter, despairing cry:
How could I consent? I was twelve years old!
Damon said angrily, “Are you saying it is hopeless, then? That Callista must return to Arilinn or die of grief?”
Leonie’s voice was uncertain; her very image in the gray world wavered. “I know that once there was a way, and the way was known. Nothing from the past can be wholly concealed. When I myself was young I knew a woman who had been treated so, and she said that a way was known to reverse this fixing of channels, but she did not tell me how and she has been dead more years than you have lived. It was known everywhere in the days when the Towers were as temples, and the Keepers as their priests. I spoke truer than I knew,” she said, abruptly putting the veil back from her ravaged face. “Had you lived in those days, Damon, you would have found your own true vocation as Keeper. You were born three hundred years too late.”
“This does me little good now, kinswoman,” Damon said. He turned aside from Leonie’s face, seeing it waver and change before him, half Leonie as she had been when he was in the Tower, when he loved her, half the aging Leonie of today, as he had seen her at his wedding. He did not want to see her face, wished she would veil herself again.
“In the days of Rafael II, when the Towers of Neskaya and Tramontana were burned to the ground, all the circles died, with the Keepers. Many, many of the old techniques were lost then, and not all of them have been remembered or rediscovered.”
“And I am supposed to rediscover them in the next few days? You have extraordinary confidence in me, Leonie!”
“What thought has ever moved in the mind of humankind anywhere in this universe can never be wholly lost.”
Damon said impatiently, “I am not here to argue philosophy!”
Leonie shook her head. “This is not philosophy but fact. If any thought has ever stirred the stuff of which the universe is made, that thought remains, indelible, and can be recaptured. There was a time when these things were known, and the fabric of time itself remains. . . .”
Her image rippled, shook like a pool into which a stone had been dropped, and was gone. Damon, alone again in the endless, formless gray world, asked, How in the name of all the Gods at once can I challenge the very fabric of time? And for an instant he saw, as from a great height, the image of a man wearing green and gold, the face half concealed, and nothing clear to Damon’s eyes except a great sparkling ring on his finger. Ring or matrix? It began to move, to undulate, to give out great waves of light, and Damon felt his consciousness dimming, vanishing. He clutched at the matrix around his neck, trying desperately to orient himself in the gray overworld. Then it was gone, and he was alone in the blankness, the formless, featureless nothingness. Finally, dim on the horizon, he perceived the faint and stony shape of his own landmark, what they had built there. With utter relief, he felt his thoughts drawing him toward it, and abruptly he was back in his room at Armida, Andrew bending anxiously over him.
He blinked, trying to coordinate random impressions. Did you find an answer? He sensed the question in Andrew’s mind, but he did not know yet. Leonie had not pledged to help, to free Callista from the bondage, body and mind, to the Tower. She could not. In the overworld she could not lie, or conceal her intention. She wanted Callista to return to the Tower. She genuinely felt that Callista had had her chance at freedom and failed. Yet she could not conceal it, either, that there was an answer, and that the answer must lie in the depths of time itself. Damon shivered, with the deathly cold which seemed to lie inside his bones, clutching his warm overtunic around his shoulders. Was that the only way?
In the overworld Leonie could not tell a direct lie. Yet she did not tell him all the truth either, he sensed, because he did not know where to look for all the truth, and there was still much she was concealing. But why? Why should she need to conceal anything from him? Didn’t she know that Damon had always loved her, that—the Gods help him—he loved her still, and would never do anything to harm her? Damon dropped his face in his hands, desperately trying to pull him self together. He could not face Ellemir like this. He knew that his grief and confusion were hurting Andrew too, and Andrew didn’t even understand how.
One of the basic courtesies of a telepath, he reminded himself, was to manage your own misery so that it did not make everyone else miserable. . . . After a moment he managed to calm himself and get his barriers back in shape. He raised his face to Andrew and said, “I think I have a hint at the answer. Not all of it, but if we have enough time, I may manage it. How long was I out?” He stood up and went to the table where the remnants of their supper still stood, pouring himself a glass of wine and sipping it slowly, letting it warm him and calm him a little.
“Hours,” Andrew said. “It must be past midnight.”
Damon nodded. He knew the time-telescoping effect of such travel. Time in the overworld seemed to run on a different scale and was not even consistent, but something else entirely, so that sometimes a brief conversation would last for hours, and at other times a lengthy journey which, subjectively, seemed to endure for days, would flash by in the blink of an eye.
Ellemir appeared in the doorway, saying anxiously, “Good, you are still awake. Damon, come and look at Callista, I don’t like the way she keeps moaning in her sleep.”
Damon set the wineglass down, steadying himself against the table with both hands. He came into the inner room. Callista seemed asleep, but her eyes were half open, and when Damon touched her she winced, evidently aware of the touch, but there was no consciousness in her eyes. Andrew’s face was drawn. “What ails her now, Damon?”
“Crisis. I was afraid of this,” Damon said, “but I thought it would happen that first night.” Quickly he moved his fingertips over her body, not touching her. “Elli, help me turn her over. No, Andrew, don’t touch her, she’s aware of you even in her sleep.” Ellemir helped him turn her, sharing with him a moment of shock as they stripped the blankets from her body. How wasted she looked! Hovering jealously near as the lines of light built up in Callista’s body, Andrew saw the dull, faded currents. But Damon knew he did not completely understand.
“I knew I should have cleared her channels at once,” he said with hopeless anger. How could he make Andrew understand? He tried, without much hope, to put it into words:
“She needs some kind of . . . of discharge of the energy overload. Yet the channels are blocked, and the energy is backing up—leaking, if you like—into all the rest of her system, and is beginning to affect all her life functions: h
er heart, her circulation, her breathing. And before I could—”
Ellemir drew a harsh gasp of apprehension. Damon saw Callista’s body stiffen, go rigid, arch backward with a weird cry. For several seconds a twitching, shuddering tremor shook all her limbs, then she collapsed and lay as if lifeless.
“God!” Andrew breathed. “What was that?”
“Convulsion,” Damon said briefly. “I was afraid of that. It means we’ve really run out of time.” He bent to check her pulse, listen to her breathing.
“I knew I should have cleared her channels.”
“Why didn’t you?” Andrew demanded.
“I told you: I have no kirian for her, and without that I don’t know if she would be able to stand the pain.”
“Do it now, while she’s unconscious,” Andrew said, and Damon shook his head.
“She has to be awake and consciously cooperating with me, or I could damage her seriously. And . . . and she doesn’t want me to,” he said at last.
“Why not?”
Damon said it at last, reluctantly: “Because if I clear the channels, that means she goes back to the normal state for her, a normal state for a Keeper, with the channels completely separated from the normal woman’s state—cleared for psi and fixed that way. Back to the way she was before she ever left the Tower. Completely unaware of you, sexually unable to react. In effect, back to square one.”
Andrew drew a harsh breath. “What is the alternative?”
“No alternative now, I’m afraid,” Damon said soberly. “She can’t live long like this.” He touched the cold hand briefly, then went into his room where he kept the supply of herb medicines and remedies he had been using. He hesitated, but finally chose a small vial, came back, loosened the cap and poured it between Callista’s slack lips, holding her head so that it ran down her throat.
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