The Spell Sword (14 page)

"Not a word of it," Andrew confessed.

"It is the ancient knowledge-science, you would say- of this world. The matrix
stones, starstones we call them among ourselves, can be attuned to the human
mind, and amplify what you call psi powers. They can be used to change the form
of energy. All matter, all energy and force, is nothing but vibration, and if
you change the rate at which it vibrates, then it takes another form."

Andrew nodded. He could follow that. It sounded as if she were trying, without
the scientific training of the Terran Empire, to explain the atomic field theory
of matter and energy; and doing it better than he could do it with the
scientific training he had had. "And you can use these stones?"

"Yes. I am a Keeper, and Tower-trained; the leader of a circle of trained
telepaths who use these stones for the transmutation of energy. And all the
stones we use, keyed to our own individual brains, are monitored from one or
another of the Towers; no one is allowed to use them unless he has been
personally trained by an older Keeper or technician, and we are sure he will
damage nothing. The stones are very, very powerful, Andrew. The higher-level
ones, the larger ones, could shatter this planet like a roasting bird bursting
in the oven. This is why we were frightened when we discovered that someone, or
something, in the darkening lands was probably using a very powerful stone, or
stones, unmonitored and without training."

Andrew was trying to recall Damon's words. "He said men have done this before,
but nonhumans never."

"Damon has forgotten his history," Callista said. "It is well-known that our
ancient forebears first received the stones from the chieri folk, who knew how
to use them when we were savages, and have gone so far beyond them that they no
longer need them. But the chieri have little to do with mankind these days, and
few men living have so much as seen one. I wish I might say the same of the
cat-things, curse them!" She drew a long, exhausted breath. "Oh, I am weary,
weary, Andrew. Would to Evanda I might touch you. I think I shall go mad, alone
in the darkness. No, I have not been ill-treated, but I am so tired, so tired of
the cold stone, and the dripping water, and my eyes ache with the darkness, and
I cannot eat the food or drink the water they give me, it is foul with their
stink-"

It drove Andrew half mad to hear her sobbing, and to be unable to reach her,
touch her, comfort her somehow. He wanted to take her in his arms, hold her
close, quiet her crying. And she stood there before him, looking so real, so
solid, he could see her breathing and the tears that kept rolling down her face,
and yet he could not so much as touch her fingertips. He said helplessly, "Don't
cry, Callista. Somehow Damon and I will find you, and if he won't, I'll damn
well try it myself!"

Raising his eyes suddenly, he saw Damon standing in the doorway. Damon's eyes
were wide. He said, on an indrawn breath of amazement, "Is Callista here?"

"I can't believe you can't see her," Andrew said, and felt again that strange,
tentative outreach of contact, like a touch directly on his mind-he didn't
resent it. At least Damon could know that he was telling the truth.

"I never really doubted you," Damon said, and his eyes were wide with wonder and
dismay.

"Damon is here? Damon!" Callista said, and her lips trembled. "You say he is
here and I cannot see him. Like a ghost, a ghost in my own house and my
brother's room-" She made a desperate attempt to control her weeping. Andrew
felt the desperation of her struggle to stay calm. "Tell Damon he must find my
starstone. They did not find it; I was not wearing it. Tell him I do not wear it
around my neck as he does his own."

Andrew repeated this aloud to Damon. He felt uncomfortably like a trance medium
supposedly relaying messages from a disembodied spirit. The thought made him
shudder; they were usually dead.

Damon touched the thong around his neck and said, "I had forgotten she knew
that. Tell her Ellemir has it, she found it beneath her pillow, and ask-"

Andrew repeated his words, and Callista interrupted him. "That explains why-I
knew someone had touched it, but if it was Ellemir-" Her shadowy form wavered
and flickered, as if the effort to stay present with them had taxed her beyond
endurance. To Andrew's quick cry of concern she whispered, "I am very weak-I
feel as if I were dying-or perhaps. Watch the stone," and she was gone. Andrew
stood looking, in terror, at the place where she had disappeared. When he
repeated her words Damon ran down the corridor, shouting for Ellemir.

"Where were you?" he demanded irascibly, when finally she appeared.

She looked at him in astonishment and annoyance. "What is the matter with you?

My clothes were soaked in blood; I have been tending wounded men. Have I no
right to a bath and clean garments? I sent the very servants for so much!"

How like and how unlike Callista, Andrew thought, and felt a completely
irrational resentment, that this one was walking around free, enjoying a bath
and fresh clothes and Callista was alone and crying in the dark somewhere.

"The starstone, quickly," Damon demanded. "We can see in it if Callista is alive
and well." He explained to Andrew, quickly, that when a trained matrix worker
died, his starstone "died" too, losing color and brilliance. Ellemir drew it
out, handling it gingerly through the insulating silk, but it pulsed as brightly
as ever.

Damon said, "She is exhausted and frightened, it may be, but she is physically
very strong, or the stone could not shine so brightly. Andrew! When she comes to
you again, tell her that she must somehow force herself to eat and drink, to be
strong, to keep her strength up until we can somehow come to her! I wonder why
she was so insistent that we must find her starstone?"

Andrew stretched out his hand to it, and said, "May I-?"

"It is hardly safe," Damon said hesitantly. "No one can use a stone keyed to
another." Then he remembered. Callista was a Keeper, and they were so highly
trained that, sometimes, they could key themselves in to someone else'stone.

Leonie had held his in her hands many times, and while Ellemir's lightest touch
on it, even though it had saved his life, had been agony, Leonie's had hurt him
no more than the touch of Leonie's hand on his cheek. During his training,
before they taught him how to key his own starstone to the rhythm of his own
brain and energies, he had been trained with his Keeper's stone; and for that
time he had been so in touch with Leonie that they were wide open to one
another. Even now a thought will bring her to me, he thought.

Andrew knew what Damon was thinking. It's as if he were broadcasting his
thoughts to me. I wonder if he knows it? He said quietly, "If Callista and I
weren't awfully close in touch somehow, I don't think she'd keep coming back to
me." He hesitated a moment, reluctant to reveal more, then realized that for
Callista's sake, for all their sakes, it was unfair to keep back even what
should have been private and highly personal. He said, trying to keep his voice
even, "I-I love her, you know. I'll do whatever you think is best for her, no
matter what it takes. You know more about this kind of thing than I do. I'm
completely in your hands."

For an instant Damon felt a sting of revulsion (This alien, this stranger, even
his thoughts defile a Keeper), then he made himself be fair. Andrew was not a
stranger. However it had happened, however it came about, this alien, this
Earthman, had laran. As for loving a Keeper, he himself had loved Leonie all his
life, and she had never been angry about it or felt it an intrusion, even though
she had never responded even a breath to his desire; his love she had accepted,
although in an entirely sexless way. Callista was probably equally capable of
defending herself, if she wished, against this stranger's emotions.

Andrew was getting very tired of seeing everything that happened through Damon's
eyes. "One thing I don't understand," he said. "Why must a Keeper necessarily be
a virgin? It it a law? Something religious?"

"It has always been so," said Ellemir, "from the most remote past."

That, of course, Andrew thought, wasn't a reason.

Damon sensed his dissatisfaction and said, "I don't know if I can explain it
properly-it's a matter of nerve energies. People have only so much. You learn to
protect your energy currents, how to use them most effectively, how to relax, to
safeguard your strength. Well, what uses most human energy? Sex, of course. You
can use it, sometimes, to channel energy, but there are limits to that sort of
thing. And when you're keyed into the matrix jewels- well, the energy they will
carry is limitless, but human flesh and blood and brainwaves can stand only so
much. For a man it's fairly simple. You can't overload with sex because if
you're too heavily overloaded, you simply can't function sexually at all. Matrix
telepaths find that out fairly early in the game. You have to go on short
rations of sex if you want to keep enough energy to do your work. For a woman,
though, it's easy to-well, to overload. So most of the women have to make up
their minds to stay chaste, or else be very, very careful not to key into the
more complex matrix patterns. Because it can kill them, very quickly, and it's
not a nice death."

He remembered a story Leonie had told him, early in the training. "I told you,
once, that it wasn't easy to ravish a Keeper, unwilling-but that it could be
done, it had been done. There was a Keeper once-she was a princess of the House
of Hastur-and it was during one of the wars, when such women could be used as
pawns. So the Lady Mirella Hastur was kidnapped, and they flung her out at the
city gates, believing she was now useless to work against them. But the other
Keeper in the Tower had been killed outright, and there was no one to act
against the invaders who were storming Arilinn. So the Lady Mirella concealed
what had been done to her, and went into the screens, and fought for hours
against the forces mustered against them. But when the battle was over and the
invaders lay, all of them, dying or dead at the city gates, she came down from
the screens, and fell dead at their feet, burned out like a spent torch.

Leonie's grandmother was a rikhi, and Under-Keeper, at that time, and she saw
the Lady Mirella die, and she said that not only was her starstone blasted and
blackened, but that the Lady's hands were burned as with fire and her body
scorched by the energies she could no longer control. There is a monument to her
in Arilinn," he concluded. "We pay our respects to her memory each year at
Festival Night, but I still believe it is there as a warning to any Keeper who
trifles with her powers-or her chastity."

Andrew shuddered, thinking, Maybe it's just as well I couldn't touch Callista
even for a moment. I wonder, though, if Damon told this story to keep me from
getting ideas later on!

Damon gestured to Ellemir and said, "Give him the stone, child. Touch it lightly
at first, Andrew. Very lightly. Your first lesson," he added wryly. "Never grasp
a starstone hard in your hands. Handle it, always, as if it were a living
thing." Must I, too, work as a Keeper? To train him, as Leonie trained me?

Andrew took the stone from Ellemir's outstretched fingers. He had caught Damon's
resentful thought and wondered what the slender Comyn Lord was angry about. Were
all the telepaths women here, so Damon felt that being one made him less of a
man? No, it couldn't be that, or he wouldn't have one of the stones himself, but
Andrew felt there was something. The starstone felt faintly warm, even through
the silk. He had somehow expected it to feel like any other jewel, cold and
hard. Instead it had the warmth of a live thing in his palm.

Damon said, in a low voice, "Now take off the silk. Very gently and slowly.

Don't look at the stone right away."

He unwrapped the insulating silk, and saw Ellemir flinch. She said in a low
voice, "I felt that."

Damon said swiftly, "Cover it again, Andrew." He obeyed, and Damon asked, "Did
it hurt when he touched it?"

Can we use Ellemir as a barometer to Callista's reactions? Andrew thought.

"It didn't exactly hurt," Ellemir said, her brow knitted, evidently trying to be
very exact about her reactions. "Only-I felt it. Like a hand touching me. I'm
not sure where. It wasn't even really unpleasant. Just-somehow, intimate."

Damon frowned slightly. "You're developing laran," he said. "That's evident.

That may be helpful."

She looked frightened and said, "Damon! Is it-dangerous for me? I am no virgin."

Twin to a Keeper and so ignorant? Damon thought in exasperation, then saw that
she was really afraid. He said quickly, "No, no, breda. Only for those women who
work at the highest levels in the screens or with the most powerful stones. You
might, if you overworked-and you were exhausted with lovemaking, or pregnant-get
a bad headache or a fainting fit. Nothing worse. There are women, Tower-trained,
working among us there, who need not live by a Keeper's laws."

She looked relieved and faintly embarrassed. It was evidently not, Andrew
thought, the kind of thing girls here usually blurted out in front of strangers.

Although sexual taboos here seemed to be different than they were among Terrans,
they seemed to have plenty of them.

Damon said, "Ellemir, touch my stone a moment. Lightly-careful," he said,
gritting his teeth as he unwrapped the stone.

Andrew, watching, thought he was braced as if for a low blow. Ellemir laid her
fingertip lightly on the stone, and Damon only sighed a little.

So Ellemir and I are keyed together somehow, he thought. It's understandable. It
always happens in sympathy like this. If we came closer still, if I took her to
my bed, perhaps she could even learn to use it. Well, if I needed a good reason
. He laughed a little, harshly, aware that once again he was broadcasting his
thoughts both to the woman who was their subject and to the man who was still,
by ordinary standards, a stranger. Well, they'd all better get used to it. It
would be worse before it was better.