How came this blood on your right hand,
Brother, tell me, tell me . . .
It is the blood of my own brothers twain
Who sat at the drink with me.
Ellemir had spoken more truly than she knew: It was ill-luck for a sister to sing that song in a brother’s hearing. But, looking at the women, Damon thought that like the sister in the old ballad, who had condemned the brotherslayer to outlawry, they would not shrink from the sentence.
It was only a few steps into another part of the suite, but to Damon it seemed a long journey, across a gulf of misery, before they stood before Dom Esteban, who looked at them in bewilderment.
“What means this? Why are you all so solemn? Callista, what is wrong with you, chiya? Elli, have you been crying?”
“Father,” said Callista, white as death, “where is Valdir? And is Dezi near?”
“They are together, I hope. I know you have a grudge against him, Damon,” he said, “but after all, the lad has right on his side. I should have done years ago what I propose to do now. He is not old enough to be regent of the Domain, of course, or Valdir’s guardian, the idea is preposterous, but once acknowledged he will see reason. And then he will be such a brother to Valdir as he was to my poor Domenic.”
“Father,” Ellemir said in a low voice, “that is what we fear.”
He turned to her in anger. “I thought you, at least, would show a sister’s forebearance, Ellemir!” Then he met the eyes of Damon and Andrew, fixed steadily on him. He looked from one to the other and back again, in growing distress and annoyance.
“How dare you!” Then, impatiently, he reached out for contact, read directly from them what they knew. Damon felt the knowledge sink into the old man’s mind in one great surge of pain. It was like death, a blinding moment of physical agony. He felt the old man’s last thought: My heart, my heart is surely breaking. I thought that was only an idle word, but I feel it there, before he slipped into merciful unconsciousness. Andrew, moving swiftly, caught the limp body in his arms as he pitched out of his wheeled chair.
Too shocked to think clearly, he laid him on his bed. Damon was still paralyzed with the, backlash of the Alton lord’s pain.
“I think he’s dead,” Andrew said, shocked, but Callista came and felt his pulse, laid her ear briefly against his chest. “No, the heart still beats. Quickly, Ellemir! Run and fetch Ferrika, she is nearest, but one of you men must go down to the Guard Hall and search for Master Nicol.”
She waited beside her father, remembering that Ferrika had warned her about his weakening heart. When the woman came, she confirmed Callista’s fear.
“Something has gone wrong in the heart, Callista.” In her sympathy she forgot the formal “my lady,” remembering that they had played together as children. “He has had too many shocks to endure.” She brought stimulant drugs and when Master Nicol came, between them they managed to get a dose into him.
“It’s touch and go,” the hospital officer warned. “He might die at any moment, or linger like this till Midsummer. Has he had a shock? With respect, Lord Damon, he should have been guarded from the slightest stress or bad news.”
Damon felt like demanding how do you guard a telepath against evil news. But Master Nicol was doing his best, and he would have had no more answer than Damon himself.
“We will do what we can, Lord Damon, but for now . . . it is fortunate he had already chosen you regent.”
It was like a flood of ice water. He was regent of Alton, with wardship and sovereignty over the Domain, till Valdir was declared a man.
Regent. With power of life and death.
No, he thought, flinching with revulsion. It was too much. He did not want it.
But looking down at the stricken old man, he knew that duty lay on him. Confronted with proof of Dezi’s treachery, the Alton lord would have acted unflinchingly to protect the children, young boy and unborn babe, who were the next heirs to. Alton. As Damon must act. . . .
When Dezi came back with Valdir, he found them all waiting for him.
“Valdir,” said Ellemir gently, “our father lies very ill. Go and find Ferrika and ask news of him.” To their great relief, the child ran off at once, and Dezi stood waiting, defiant.
“So now you have your will, Damon. You are regent of Alton. Or are you? I wonder.”
Damon found his voice. “I am warned. Dezi. You cannot serve me as you served Domenic. As regent of Alton I demand that you give up to me the matrix you stole from Domenic’s body.”
He saw comprehension sweep over Dezi’s face. Then, to Damon’s horror, he laughed. Damon thought he had never heard a sound so shocking as that laughter.
“Come and take it, you Ridenow half-man,” he taunted. “You will not find it so easy this time! You could not take me that way now, even with your Nest about you!” Damon flinched at the ancient obscenity, for the women’s sake. “Come, I called your challenge in Council, let us have it here and now! Which of us is to be regent of Alton? Have you that much strength? Half monk, half eunuch, they call you!”
Damon knew he had picked up the taunt from Lorenz, or was it from Damon himself? He found his voice. “If you kill me, you prove yourself even less fit to be regent. It is not strength alone, but right and responsibility.”
“Oh, have done with that cant!” Dezi scoffed. “Such responsibility, I suppose, as my loving father took for me?”
Damon wanted to say that the dom had truly loved Dezi enough for his treachery almost to kill him too. But he wasted no words, grasping his own matrix, focusing, striking to alter the resonances of the one Dezi wore. Had stolen.
Dezi felt the touch, struck out a blinding mental blow. Damon went physically to his knees before the impact. Dezi had the Alton gift, the anger which could kill. Fighting panic, he realized that Dezi had grown, was stronger. Like a wolf with a taste for man’s flesh, he had to be destroyed at once, lest this ravening beast get among the Comyn. . . .
The room began to cloud, thicken with swirling lines of force between them. He felt himself falter, felt Andrew’s strength behind him, even as Andrew was physically holding him upright. Dezi glowed within the fog. He hurled lightnings at the men. Damon felt the ground thinning beneath his feet, felt himself beaten down toward the floor.
Callista stepped between them. She seemed to tower above them all, tall and commanding, her matrix blazing at her throat. Damon saw the matrix in Dezi’s hand glow like a live coal, felt it burn through his tunic and into his flesh. Dezi yelled in pain and rage, and for an instant Damon saw Callista as she had been in Arilinn, flickering with the crimson of a Keeper’s robes. With the small dagger she wore at her waist she struck at the thong about Dezi’s throat. The matrix fell to the floor, blazed like fire when Dezi grabbed for it. Damon felt with Dezi the flare of agony as Dezi’s hand began to burn in the flame. The matrix rolled to one side, a useless black dead thing.
And Dezi disappeared! Andrew, for a fraction of a second, watched the place where Dezi had vanished, the air still trembling behind him. Then it rang in all their minds, a terrible dying scream of despair and rage. And they saw it, as if they had been physically present in that room at Armida.
When Callista had destroyed Domenic’s stolen matrix, Dezi could not face being without one again. With his last strength he had teleported himself through the overworld, to materialize at that place where Damon had placed his own for safekeeping—a panic reaction, without rational thought. A moment of considering would have told him it was safely locked away inside a solid, metal-bound strongbox. Two solid objects could not occupy the same space at the same time, not in the solid universe. And Dezi—they all saw it and shuddered with horror—had materialized half in, half out of the box holding the matrix. And even before that despairing dying scream died away, they had all heard the echo in Damon’s mind. Dezi lay on the floor of the strong-room at Armida, very completely and very messily dead. Even through his horror Damon found a moment to pity whoever would have to deal wit
h that dreadfully materialized corpse, half in and half out of a solidly locked strongbox which had split his skull like a piece of rotten fruit.
Ellemir had sunk to the floor, moaning with shock and dread. Andrew’s first thought was for her. He hurried to her, holding her, trying to pour his strength into her as he had poured it into Damon. Damon slowly picked himself up, staring into nowhere. Callista was staring at her matrix, in horror.
“Now I am truly forsworn . . .” she whispered. “I had given back my oath . . . and I used it to kill. . . .” She began to scream wildly, beating at herself with her fists, tearing at her face with her nails. Andrew thrust Ellemir gently into a low chair, ran to Callista. He tried to grasp her flailing arms. There was a shower of blue sparks and he landed, stunned, against the opposite wall. Callista, looking at him, her eyes wide and half mad with horror, shrieked again, and her nails ripped down her cheeks, blood following them in a thin, scarlet line.
Damon sprang forward. He grasped her wrists in one hand, held the struggling, screaming woman immobile, and with his open hand slapped her, hard, across the face. The screams died in a gasp. She slumped and he held her upright, cradling her head on his shoulder.
Callista began to sob. “I had given back my oath,” she whispered. “I could not refrain. . . . I moved against him as Keeper. Damon, I am still Keeper despite my oath . . . my oath!”
“Damn your oath!” said Damon, and shook her. “Cal lista! Stop that! Don’t you even know you saved all our lives?”
She stopped crying, but her face, ghastly with streaked blood and tears, was drawn into a mask of horror. “I am forsworn. I am forsworn.”
“We’re all forsworn,” Damon said. “It’s too late for that! Damn it, Callie, pull yourself together! I have to see if that bastard has managed to kill your father too. And Ellemir—” His breath caught in his throat. Shocked into compliance, Callista went quickly to where Ellemir lay motionless in the chair.
After a moment she raised her head. “I do not think the child has suffered. Go, Damon, and see if all is well with our father.”
Damon moved toward the other rooms of the suite. But he knew without moving that Dom Esteban was so near death that nature had provided its own shield. He had been spared all knowledge of that battle to the death. Damon, however, needed a moment alone, to come to terms with this new knowledge.
Without thought, he had moved against a Keeper, an Alton, had moved, automatically, to shake her out of her hysteria, to take the full responsibility.
It is I who am Keeper of these four. Whatever we may do, it is on my responsibility.
Before long, he knew, he would be called to account for what he had done. Every telepath from Dalereuth to the Hellers must have witnessed that death.
And already he had alerted them to what was happening among the four of them, when with Andrew and Dezi he had built that landmark in the overworld, to heal the frostbitten men. Sorrow gnawed at him again, for the boy so terribly and tragically dead. Aldones, Lord of Light . . . Dezi, Dezi, what a waste, what a tragic waste of all his gifts. . . .
But even sorrow gave way to the knowledge of what he had done, and what he had become.
Exiled from Arilinn, he had built his own Tower. And Varzil had hailed him as tenerézu. Keeper. He was Keeper, Keeper of a forbidden Tower.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Damon had known it would not be long in coming, and it was not.
Ellemir had quieted. She sat in the chair where Andrew had laid her, only gasping a little with shock. Ferrika, summoned, looked at her with dismay.
“I don’t know what you have been doing, my lady, but whatever it is, unless you want to lose this baby too, you had better go to bed and stay there.” She began gently to move her hands over Ellemir’s body. To Damon’s surprise, she did not touch her, keeping an inch or two between Ellemir’s body and her fingertips, finally saying with a faint frown, “The baby is all right. In fact, you are in worse case than he is. I will send for a hot meal for you, and you eat it and go to—” She broke off, staring at her hands in astonishment and awe.
“In the name of the Goddess, what am I doing!”
Callista, recalled to responsibility, said, “Don’t worry, Ferrika, your instinct is good. You have been around us so much, it is not surprising. If you had a trace of laran it would surely have wakened. Later I will show you how to do it very precisely. On a pregnant woman it is a little tricky.”
Ferrika blinked, staring at Callista. Her round, snub-nosed face looked a little bewildered, and she took in the dreadfully bloody scratches down Callista’s face, blinking. “I am no leronis.”
“Nor am I now,” Callista said gently, “but I have been taught, as you shall be. It is the most useful of skills for a midwife. I am sure you have more laran than you know.” She added, “Come, let us take Ellemir to her room. She must rest, and,” she added, raising her hands to her bleeding face, “I must see to these, too. And when you send for food for Ellemir, Damon, send for some for me too; I am hungry.”
Damon watched them go. He had long suspected Ferrika had some laran, but he was grateful it was Callista who had decided to take the responsibility for teaching her.
There was no reason that any person with the talent should not have the training, Comyn or no. Because things had been done this way since the Ages of Chaos was no reason they must continue to be done this way till Darkover sank into the Last Night! Andrew had become one of them, and he was a Terran. Ferrika had been born on the Alton estates, a commoner and, worse, a Free Amazon. But she had everything that was needful to make her one of them too: she had laran.
Comyn blood? Look what it had done for Dezi!
Aware that after the terrific matrix battle he too was famished, he sent for some food and when it came he ate it without caring what it was, watching Andrew do the same. Neither spoke of Dezi. Damon thought that at some future time Dom Esteban would have to know that the bastard son he had cherished and defended had died for his crimes. But he need never know the dreadful details.
Andrew ate without tasting, aware of the terrible hunger and draining of matrix linking, but he felt sick even while his starved body put away the food with mechanical intensity. His thoughts ran bitter counterpoint; he saw again Damon shaking Callista, holding her against self-mutilation. The memory of Callista’s bleeding face made him sick.
He had left it to Damon to care for her, thinking of no one but Ellemir. Elli, bearing his child. He had touched Callista and she had thrown him across the room. Damon had grabbed her like a caveman, and she had quieted right down. He wondered, despairing, if they had both married the wrong women.
After all, he thought, his mind plodding miserably along an all too familiar track, they were both Tower-trained, both top-rank telepaths, understanding each other. Elli and he were on a different level, just ordinary people, not understanding these things. He glanced at Damon with a sense of resentful inferiority.
He killed a boy this morning. Horribly. And he sat there calmly eating his dinner!
Damon was aware of Andrew’s resentment, but did not try to follow his thoughts. He knew and accepted that there were times, perhaps there would always be times, when Andrew, for no reason he could understand, suddenly went apart from them, no longer a beloved brother but a desperately alienated stranger. He knew it was part of the price they both paid for the attempt to extend their brotherhood across two conflicting worlds, two very different societies. It might always be this way. He had tried to bridge the gap, and it always made things worse. Now all he could do, and he knew it sadly, was to leave it to run its course.
When the door opened again, Damon raised his head in irritation which he quickly controlled—the servant, after all, had his work to do. “Do you want to take the dishes? A moment . . . Andrew, have you finished?”
“Su serva, dom,” the man said, “the Lady of Arilinn and her leroni from the Tower have begged the favor of a word with you, Lord Damon.”
Begged? Damon t
hought skeptically, not likely. “Tell them I will see them in the outer chamber in a few minutes.” Privately he thanked whatever God might be listening that Callista was with Ellemir and they had not asked for her. If Leonie saw those scratches on her face . . . “Come along, Andrew,” he said. “They probably want all four of us, but they don’t know it yet.”
Leonie led the group. Margwenn Elhalyn was with her, and a couple of telepaths from Arilinn who had come since Damon’s time, and one, a man named Rafael Aillard, who had been there with him, though he was now stationed at Neskaya. It was incredible, Damon thought, that at one time this man was part of his circle, closer to Damon than blood kin, a beloved friend. Leonie was veiled and this struck Damon with irritation. Surely it was seemly for a comynara and Keeper to go veiled among strangers. He could have understood it if Margwenn had veiled herself. But Leonie?
But he spoke as if it were an ordinary thing to have his chamber invaded by four strange telepaths and the Keeper of Arilinn. “Kinswoman, you lend me grace. How may I serve you?”
Leonie said bluntly, “Damon, you were sent from Arilinn years ago. You have laran, and you have been trained in the use of a matrix, so you may not be forbidden to use it for such personal purposes as are lawful. But the law forbids that any serious matrix operations shall be undertaken outside the safeguards of a Tower. And now you have used your matrix to kill.”
As a matter of fact, he thought, it had been Callista who killed Dezi. But that didn’t matter. It was his responsibility. He said so.
“I am regent of Alton. I put to death, lawfully, a murderer who had killed one and attempted to kill another within the Domain. I claim privilege.”
“Privilege denied,” Margwenn said. “You should have slain him in a lawful duel, with legitimate weapons. You are not empowered, outside a Tower, to use a matrix for an execution.”
“The attempted murder, and the murder, were both done by matrix. Being Tower-trained, I am sworn to prevent such misuse.”
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