Authors: Marion Z. Bradley
She curled closer into his arms. "I had always thought," she said bleakly, "that
when I chose, Callista would be the first I would tell."
"You are very close to Callista, beloved?"
"Not as close as some twins," Ellemir said, "since when she went to the Tower,
and was pledged, I knew we could never, as so many sisters do, share a lover, or
husband. Yet it seems so sad that this thing that means so much to me, she will
not know."
He tightened his clasp on her.
"She shall know," he said. "Be sure of this: she will know. Remember, now we
know she is alive, and there is one who can reach her."
"Do you really think this Earthman, this Ann'dra, can help us to find her?"
"I hope so. It won't be easy, but then we never thought it would be easy," he
said. "Now, at least, we know it's possible."
"How can it be? He's not one of us. Even if he has some powers or gifts like our
laran, he doesn't know how to use any of it."
"We'll have to teach him," Damon said. That wouldn't be easy either, he thought.
He closed his hand over the starstone on its cord around his neck. It must be
done if they were to have the faintest hope of reaching Callista; and he, Damon,
would have to be the one to do it. But he dreaded it, Zandru's hells, how he
dreaded it. But he said calmly, trying to give Ellemir confidence, "Until last
night, you yourself never thought you could use laran; yet you used it, you
saved my life with it."
Her smile wavered, but at least she was smiling again. He said, "So for now let
us take what we can have of happiness, and not spoil it with worry, Ellemir. As
for the law and the formalities, I expect Dom Esteban will return sometime
soon." As he spoke the cold awareness rushed over him again, so that he caught
his breath for a moment. Sooner than I think, and it will not be well for any of
us, he thought but he closed his mind to it, hoping Ellemir had not picked up
the thought. He continued: "When your father comes, we can tell him our plans.
Meanwhile, we will have to teach Andrew what we can. Where is he?"
"Asleep, I suppose. He, too, was very weary. Shall I send to him?"
"I suppose you must. We have little time to lose," Damon said, "although now we
have found each other, I would rather be alone with you a while." But he smiled
as he said it. They already shared more than he had ever known with any other
woman, and for the rest, there was no urgency. He was no raw youth clutching his
girl in haste, and they could wait for the rest. Briefly he picked up a shy
thought from Ellemir, But not too long, and it warmed him; but he let her go,
and said, "There is time enough. Send a steward to bid him come down to us, if
he is rested enough. And now, I must think." He moved away from Ellemir and
stood looking into the blue-green flames that shot up from the piled
resin-treated fuel in the fireplace.
Carr was a telepath, and a potentially powerful one. He had found and held
rapport with a stranger, not even blood-kin. A part of the overworld barred even
to the Tower-trained might be accessible to him. Yet he was wholly untrained,
wholly untaught, and not even inclined to believe very much of these strange
powers. With all his heart Damon wished someone else were here to teach this
man. The awakening of latent psi powers was not an easy task even for those
trained to it, and for an off-worlder, with an unthinkably strange background,
without even belief and confidence to help him, it was likely to be a difficult
and painful business. Damon had shied away from such contacts ever since he had
been dismissed from the Tower Circle. It wouldn't be easy to take them up again,
to drop his barriers for this stranger. Yet there was no one else.
He looked around the room, searching. He said, "Have you kirian here?" Kirian, a
powerful drug compounded of the pollen of a rare plant from the mountains, had a
tendency, in carefully regulated dosage, to lower the barriers against
telepathic rapport. He was not sure whether he meant to give it to Andrew Carr
or take it himself, but one way or the other it might make it easier to get
through to a stranger. Most deliberate telepathic training was done by the
Keepers themselves, but kirian could heighten the psi powers, temporarily,
enough to make contact possible even with non-telepaths.
Ellemir said doubtfully, "I don't think so. Not, at least, since Domenic outgrew
the threshold sickness. Callista never needed it, nor I. I will look and see,
but I fear not."
Damon felt the cold shudder of fear, gnawing deep in his belly. Blurred a little
by the drug, he might have been able to endure the difficult business of
directing and disciplining the arousal of laran in a stranger. The thought of
going through it without some help was almost unendurable. Yet, if it was
Callista's only chance-
"You have a starstone," Ellemir said. "You used it to show me what little I
could do-"
"Child, you are my blood-kin and we are close enough emotionally-even so, when
you gripped the stone, it was agony, more than I can tell you," Damon said
gravely. "Tell me. Has Callista any other of the matrix jewels, unused?" If he
could get for Carr a blank, unkeyed jewel, perhaps he could work more easily
with him.
"I am not sure," Ellemir said. "She has many things I have never seen, nor asked
about, because they have to do with her work as Keeper. I wondered why she had
brought them here rather than leaving them in the Tower."
"Perhaps because-" Damon hesitated. It was hard to speak of his own days in the
Tower Circle; his mind kept shying and skittering away like a frightened horse.
Yet somehow he must overcome this fear. "Perhaps because a leronis, or even a
matrix technician, prefers to keep his, or her, working gear close at hand. I
don't quite know how to explain it, but it feels better, somehow, to have it
within reach. I do not use my own starstone twice in a year," he added, "yet I
keep it here, around my neck, simply because it has been made into a-a part of
me. It is uncomfortable, even physically painful, to have it too far from me."
Ellemir whispered, verifying swiftly his guess about her own fast-developing
sensitivity: "Oh, poor Callista! And she told Andrew that they had taken her
starstone from her-"
Grimly, the man nodded. "So even if she has not been ravished or ill-treated,
she is suffering now," he said. Why should I shrink from a little pain or
trouble, to spare her worse? he thought. "Take me to her room; let me look
through her things."
Ellemir obeyed, without question, but when they stood in the center of the room
the twin sisters shared, with the two narrow beds at opposite ends of the room,
she said in a frightened whisper, "What you said-won't it hurt Callista for you
to touch her-the things she uses as a Keeper?"
"It's a possibility," said Damon, "but no worse than she has been hurt already,
and it may be our only chance."
My men died because I was too cowardly to accept the thing that I was: a
Tower-trained telepath. If I let Callista suffer because I fear to use my
skills. then am I worthless of Ellemir, then am I a lesser thing than any
off-worlder - but, God, I am afraid, afraid. Blessed Cassilda, mother of the
Seven Domains, be with me now.
His even, neutral voice betrayed nothing. "Where does Callista keep her
belongings? I can tell yours from hers by their feel, but I would rather not
waste time or strength on that."
"The dressing table there, with the silver brushes, is hers. Mine is the other,
with the embroidered scarves and the ivory-backed brushes and combs." He could
feel the tension and fear in Ellemir's voice, but she was trying to match his
cool, dispassionate manner. Damon looked on the dressing table, and rummaged
briefly in the drawers. "Nothing here but rubbish," he said. "One or two small
matrix jewels, first-level or less, good for fastening buttons, no more. You're
sure you never saw where she keeps anything of the kind?" But even before he saw
her shake her head, he knew the answer.
"Never. I tried not to-to intrude on that part of her life."
"What a pity I'm not the Terran," Damon said sourly. "I could ask her directly."
He clasped his hand, reluctantly, over the starstone which hung on its cord,
slowly drew it from the leather pouch, closing his eyes, trying to sense
something. As always when he touched the cold, smooth jewel he felt the strange
sting of fear. After a moment, hesitantly, he moved toward Callista's bed. It
lay still tangled and the bedclothing crumpled, as if no one, servant or
mistress, had had the heart to disturb the last imprint of her body there. Damon
wet his lips with his tongue, bent and reached under the pillow, then drew back,
lifting the pillow gingerly. Beneath it, against the fine linen sheet, lay a
small silk envelope, almost-but not quite-flat. He could see the shape of the
jewel through the silk.
"Callista's starstone," he said slowly. "So her captors did not take it from
her."
Ellemir was trying to remember Andrew's exact words. "He said-Callista did not
say her starstone had been taken from her," she repeated slowly. "She said,
`They could only take my jewels from me lest one of them should be my
starstone.' Something like that. So it has been here all along."
"If I had had it, maybe I could have seen her in the overworld," Damon mused
aloud, then shook his head. No one but Callista could use her stone. Yet it
explained one thing. Without her starstone, she could be concealed in the
darkness. If she had been touching it, he could probably have located her; he
could have focused his own stone on it. No good thinking about that now. He
stretched out his hand to take it, then drew back.
"You take it," he directed, and as she hesitated, "You are her blood-kin, her
twin; your vibrations are closer to hers. You can handle it with less pain to
her than anyone living. Even through the silk insulation there is some danger,
but less from you than anyone else."
Gingerly, Ellemir picked up the silk envelope and slipped it into the bosom of
her dress. For all the good that would do, Damon thought. Callista, with her
starstone, might have been better able to resist her captors. Or maybe not. He
was beginning to surmise that it could be she was held prisoner by someone using
one of these matrix jewels, someone stronger than herself, who wished mostly to
hold her powerless; someone who knew that, free and armed, she would be a
danger.
The cat-men. The cat-men, Zandru help them all! But how, and where, did the
cat-men get together enough skill and power even to experiment with the matrix
jewels? The truth is, he thought, none of us knows a damn thing about the
cat-men, but we've made the bad mistake of underestimating them. A fatal
mistake? Who knows?
Well, at least the starstone was not in nonhuman hands.
They were halfway down the stairs when they heard the commotion in the
courtyard, the sounds of riders, the great bell in the court. Ellemir gasped and
her hand flew to her heart. Damon felt for an instant that prickle of tense
fear; then he relaxed.
"It cannot be another attack," he said. "I think it is friends or kinsfolk, or
an alarm would have been rung." Besides, he thought grimly, I felt no warning!
"I think it is Lord Alton come home," he said, and Ellemir looked startled.
"I sent a message to Father when I sent to you," she said, "but I did not
believe he would come during Comyn Council, whatever the need." She ran down the
stairs, picking up her gray skirt about her knees; Damon followed more slowly
through the great doors into the bricked-in courtyard.
It was a scene of chaos. Armed men, covered in blood, swaying in their saddles.
Too few men, Damon thought swiftly, for Dom Esteban's bodyguard, any time.
Between two horses, a litter rudely woven of evergreen boughs had been slung,
and on the litter lay the motionless body of a man.
Ellemir had stopped short on the courtyard steps, and as Damon came up, the
pallor of her face struck him like a blow. Her hands were clenched into fists at
her sides, nails driven into the palms. Damon took her gently by the arm, but
she seemed not to know he was there, frozen into herself with shock and horror.
Damon went down the steps, looking quickly around the pale, strained faces of
the wounded men. Eduin. Conan. Caradoc. where is Dom Esteban? Only over their
dead bodies ... Then he caught a glimpse of the swarthy aquiline profile and
iron-gray hair of the man in the litter, and it was like a blow to the solar
plexus, so painful that he physically swayed with the shock of it. Dom Esteban!
By all the hells-what a time to lose the best swordsman and commander in all the
Domains!
Servants were running about in what looked like confusion; two of the
blood-soaked men had slid from their horses, and were cautiously unstrapping the
litter. The horses carrying it shied away-The smell of blood, they never get
used to it!-and there was a sharp cry; the man in the litter began to curse,
fluently, in four languages.
Not dead, then, but very much alive. But how badly hurt? Damon thought.
"Father!" Ellemir cried out, and began to run toward the litter. Damon caught
and held her before she banged into it. The cursing stopped, like a faucet
turned off.
"Callista, child-" The voice was harsh with pain.
"Ellemir, Father-" she murmured. They had managed to get the litter down to the
ground now, and Damon saw the healer-woman pushing her way through the crowding
servants. She said, in her crisp voice, "Move back, this is my business.
Domna"-to Ellemir-"this is no place for you, either." Ellemir disregarded the
woman, kneeling beside the wounded man. His lips drew back harshly in a grimace
meant for a smile.
"Well, chiya, I'm here." The bushy eyebrows writhed. "I should have brought more
men, though." Damon, looking down over Ellemir's bent back, could see on his
face the marks of a long struggle with pain, and something worse. Something like
fear. Although, since no one living had ever seen fear on the face of
Esteban-Gabriel-Rafael Lanart, Lord Alton, no one knew how fear would have
looked on that grim and controlled face.