The Legends of Camber of Culdi Trilogy

by Katherine Kurtz

  Then Joram was laying the sleeping Rhys Michael at their feet, and the process must be repeated yet a third time. When that was done, Rhys laid his hand on Alroy’s forehead once more and then relinquished all control to Joram.

  Bishop Alister was also in the center of the room, quite near now as he exchanged a few words with the king; but Rhys had slipped into a meditative, neutral state, and was not paying attention to what they were saying. After a moment, Alroy opened his eyes, dreamy and slightly glazed, and Rhys and Joram helped him sit up and then stand.

  Then Rhys was striding quickly to where Evaine waited with a candle in her hand to kiss him and let him pass to where the other two boys slept. As Rhys settled between them, taking up monitoring functions, Tavis was aware that his view of what went on in the center of the room was now obscured by a faint haze, and that Joram was walking a circle of magic around those within!

  Stunned, Tavis almost withdrew, for of all the things he had imagined, he had never even considered magic; it had never occurred to him that another Healer might have decidedly different views than himself on the propriety of ritual magic.

  And yet, as he followed what happened next, he realized that this was not only ritual magic, but high Deryni magic—that these four Deryni, plus Cinhil and his sons, had gathered that night for that very purpose, though the boys had been made to forget very thoroughly what had happened. No wonder he and Javan had not been able to retrieve the memory!

  Three times, once for each of the boys, some strange working was done within the warded circle, followed by a quiet time when Cinhil would lay his hands on each boy’s head as though in blessing and do—something. After that, each boy would collapse unconscious, to be brought out of the magical circle to Rhys and be replaced by the next one.

  Javan was the second to undergo whatever happened there, but Tavis could read no more detail of his rite than he could of those for Alroy and Rhys Michael. With each working, Cinhil got weaker; and after each, Rhys must push strength into his failing body, even though both men knew that this was but hastening the end. After the third time Cinhil collapsed, even Rhys could do no more. The king was dying, and wanted only Alister and Joram to attend him.

  When all had left the circle save the two priests and the dying Cinhil, the bishop and Joram gave Cinhil the Last Rites. Alister and Cinhil seemed to talk for a little while, until Alister finally told Joram to open a gateway in the circle with his sword—and then the circle disappeared and he knew that Cinhil was dead.

  But that last part was strange and hazy, and Tavis had the feeling that there was something very special that he had missed. He withdrew from Rhys’s mind with a shake of his head, oddly disturbed and yet awed by what he had read. All that magic—and yet.…

  As he blinked and came back to reality, he was aware of Javan staring at him, and remembered that the boy had seen none of what he had seen. Nor could he even begin to tell him, he realized, though at least he knew now where to look in the boy’s memory and how he might guide a fuller remembering on Javan’s part.

  “What was it, Tavis?” the prince whispered.

  Tavis had to swallow before he could breathe the single word.

  “Magic.”

  “Magic?” Javan gasped. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” said Tavis, drawing a deep, careful breath, “that the ones we suspected—Rhys, Evaine, Joram, and Bishop Alister—worked a ritual of magic with your father on the night he died.” He took another deep breath. “You, Alroy, and Rhys Michael were all involved. That’s why you were drugged—to make you receptive, and so you wouldn’t remember until it was—time.”

  Javan swallowed noisily and stared at Tavis with an even more apprehensive expression.

  “Time for what?”

  With an explosive sigh, Tavis shrugged. “That, I couldn’t begin to tell you. Even his memory is hazy on the whys of what I read. He was outside the magic circle, keeping watch over you and your brothers, while the others did—whatever it was they did.” He glanced down at the still, calm face of Rhys, whose consciousness was now sunk fast in drug-induced sleep, then shook his head again. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to get too much more detail on that from him.”

  “Why not? Can’t you probe deeper?”

  “Not without great risk to both of us. Reading memories is one thing; probing for concepts, for explanations, ideas, is something else again. You did say you didn’t want him permanently harmed.”

  “I don’t. But how will we ever find out what happened to me, if he can’t or won’t tell us?” Javan asked plaintively.

  Tavis rubbed his chin thoughtfully with his stump. “Maybe it isn’t Rhys’s memory of this particular incident that’s important anymore,” he said. “Don’t you see? I’ve read what he remembers, but you’re the one it happened to. He was outside the circle, and preoccupied with other things. He didn’t really see the details, so of course, he’s not able to give them to us.”

  “But, Tavis, I can’t remember—”

  “Not now, you can’t,” Tavis replied. “But I may know how to help you reach your own memory now. Who knows better than yourself what really happened to you.”

  Javan stared at the Healer in awe, then scrambled out of his chair to grasp Tavis’s arm.

  “When, Tavis? When can we do it? Now?”

  “No, later. In a few days, when you’ve had a chance for the drugs to get out of your system.”

  “But the drugs help you with Rhys,” Javan murmured, sinking back on the edge of his seat and beginning to pout. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s going to take some conscious effort and control on your part,” Tavis said. “There are things that I can use to help you—and I will, when the time is right—but they’re different from what I gave Rhys. Be still for a moment now. I want to check a few more things before his shields start coming back.”

  And this time, as he submerged himself in Rhys’s mind, he sought out memories of Davin MacRorie, who had been Rhys’s nephew by marriage—found that Rhys had known of Davin’s imposture and had even helped in setting it up, though Tavis could not penetrate to other identities involved, no matter how hard he pressed for answers.

  But the setting up—by God, it was Rhys who had made Davin seem not to have been Deryni! Rhys had discovered a way to block Deryni abilities in anyone!

  He gasped at the revelation, reading hints of tries to teach the skill to others, the repeated failures, and then—the key itself!

  Gingerly he reached out and probed the key, weighed the strength needed, found the cognate in his own mind and knew, without having to try it out, that he could do what Rhys could do!

  But more important than that was the reason Rhys had sought to teach the skill in the first place. He read of Revan, who waited with the detested Willimites in the hills above Valoret for a Healer to come to him—a Healer who would be able to fulfill the plan which Rhys and—others—had laid out just after Cinhil’s death: to help hide away at least some of the Deryni race from the ravening extinction of the regents who even tonight had begun their destruction of the Deryni religious orders. Tavis himself had given Rhys that information, and saw that it was to be acted upon by Bishop Alister and Joram and Jebediah, though whether in time or not, neither Rhys nor Tavis knew.

  There was more, so much more …

  Finally Tavis withdrew completely from Rhys’s mind, leaving him to unviolated sleep. He opened his eyes to find Javan standing barefooted at his side, slender hands resting on his forearm as the wide grey eyes gazed at him in alarm.

  Slowly, too stunned to speak, Tavis let his hand slip down the side of Rhys’s head to his shoulder, let his stump fall away with Javan’s hands still gripping it. When Javan would have questioned him, he could not answer, only reassuring the prince that all was well and bidding him go to bed now, that he would explain in the morning.

  He sat in the other chair, watching Rhys for many hours after Javan slept.

  CHAPTE
R TWENTY-SIX

  So they set a fair mitre upon his head, and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the Lord stood by.

  —Zechariah 3:5

  Christmas of 917 dawned grey and cold, with a light snow drifting down over much of the Gwynedd plain. Camber watched the dawning from the window of his quarters in the cathedral complex at Valoret and wondered about his daughter, now making her way through that same snow toward Saint Mary’s in the Hills and safety.

  He drew some comfort from the knowledge that Ansel and Queron travelled with her for protection and medical assistance, but he did not envy her this trip in winter, heavy in her pregnancy and with the worst of the winter storms still to come. If only she could have been safely delivered of the child before necessity forced her to flee. If only the flight could have been delayed until the spring.

  If only, if only.… He found himself playing the same old game over and over again. If only Cinhil had lived longer; if only the king had chosen less avaricious and close-minded men to govern his minor sons; if only the regents had proved to be endowed with better understanding and tolerance.

  But he had not, and they had not, and now Camber and those who aided him must play out the movements of this mad, macabre dance, knowing that a head-to-head confrontation was as inevitable as breathing, as was the regents’ eventual triumph, dealing from their position of legal strength, moving toward a massive reaction against all Deryni. Had it not already begun with the tragic retaliation at Saint Neot’s and the two former Michaeline houses? And God and the regents alone knew whether there had been others as well. Suppose he were wrong in trusting that Saint Mary’s was forgotten, and it had suffered the same destruction as Saint Neot’s? Was Camber sending his daughter and the children to their deaths?

  Brooding on that, he glanced through the rippled glass at the more immediate situation building here in Valoret. Though it was early yet, he could see a growing trickle of the faithful making their way through the outer gates of the cathedral complex and into the church itself, their footsteps gradually darkening the snow and turning it to mud. Cathedral guards, now under the supervision of Jebediah, stood unobtrusively along the way and at the main gates, not interfering but watchful. The Michaeline grand master himself was out there somewhere. He had left to see to the defense of the cathedral complex almost as soon as Joram returned from Sheele, in the early morning hours.

  Rhys, however, had not yet returned, though Camber and Joram had waited up past Matins, the great Office of the Night. Finally, Camber had forced himself to nap for the last few hours before dawn, reinforced by deep Deryni trancing to restore what there was no time for normal sleep to do; but even then, his rest had not been easy. He had expected Rhys at least to send word, even though he had said that they should not wait up for him. Could Javan be as sick as all of that, and further word not have come? Javan was the heir-presumptive, after all.

  Shaking his head, Camber turned away from the window, beginning to admit real misgivings about Rhys’s safety. He had no official obligations until the noon Mass—Robert Oriss and Dermot O’Beirne had offered to take the two earlier services, as Niallan had taken the one at midnight—but he dared not initiate personal action to find out what had happened to Rhys. The quarters of the heir-presumptive would be off-limits to the Deryni bishop who had taken away Hubert’s coveted office.

  He heard a stirring in the next room, and shortly Joram joined him with a sheaf of documents which required his signature for issuance after his enthronement; after that, he and Joram must both attend to their morning toilette, in the absence of any servants to assist them—for Ansel was gone, and they did not wish to call attention to that fact.

  Camber was kept busy; but as the morning wore on, and he still received no word from Rhys, he became more and more uneasy. It was not like Rhys to be so thoughtless. He must know that Camber and Joram would be worrying. Why did he not at least send word?

  And at about the same time that Camber was watching in the dawn, Rhys slowly began to regain consciousness—though it was of a hazy, two-dimensional sort that was not at all familiar or reassuring. He became aware that his neck was stiff, his head lolling heavily against his chest and slightly to the right; but when he started to ease it, simultaneously trying to raise his hands, he could not. His wrists were restrained against the arms of the chair in which he sat, and something bound him upright at mid-chest level. Memory of the night before surged back into his mind so quickly that he almost moaned aloud with the terror, but he managed to choke it back and make no sound.

  Forcing himself to breathe slowly in the patterns of sleep, he willed his body to relax against its restraints again and tried to evaluate his present condition. He knew at once that he was not recovered from the effects of the drugs Tavis had given him; his head was pounding behind his closed eyes and at the base of his skull, and his stomach was only just short of rebellion; but neither was he totally under their influence anymore. Unless Tavis worked very hard at it, Rhys did not think his shields could be breached again—though that did not necessarily mean that Rhys could do anything active to defend himself. And of course, if Tavis should dose him anew—

  Fighting down a momentary wave of mindless panic, he ordered his mind as best he could and tried to evaluate how much Tavis might have done to him. His Healing functions had been among the first of his faculties to go, and would remain blocked the longest, being most delicately balanced; and he knew that he had lost motor function and shielding ability for a time, though rudimentary levels were now restored. But he could not remember what memories Tavis might have touched, and that frightened him. Since the other Healer had probed him with the specific purpose of reading his memory of the night of Cinhil’s death, Rhys had to assume that the foray had been successful, and that Tavis now knew the full story of the other drugged wine—God, how could Rhys have been so blind as to fall into so similar a trap!—and that he had followed it, as well as he could, to its logical conclusion: the rituals in Cinhil’s chapel.

  In that lay at least a measure of comfort, however; for of all of them who had participated that night, Rhys’s actual knowledge of what had gone on inside the circle was the least complete. Oh, intellectually he knew approximately what had occurred; but he had not seen it clearly, and he had heard very little, from the outside looking in. He gained further comfort from the guess that Tavis probably had not understood a great deal of what he had seen through Rhys’s memory—though Javan’s part in it would surely provide a key for eventually digging it out with Javan himself. By the jangled state of his mind, he was forced to surmise that he was still all but at the mercy of whatever Tavis decided to do with him.

  Without warning, something touched his temple. Somehow, even in his drug-befogged state, he knew it was Tavis’s hand. He tried to block his reaction, to play at being still unconscious, but he knew, even as he tried it, that he could not fool the other Healer. He heard Tavis’s snort of amusement at his sluggish response and knew it would do no good to keep feigning sleep. He opened his eyes and raised his head, focusing on Tavis with rather more difficulty than he had hoped for.

  “Well, I’m glad that you decided not to play games with me,” Tavis said. “How do you feel?”

  Tentatively moistening his lips with a tongue which felt at least three sizes too large for his mouth, Rhys peered at Tavis through what appeared to be a tunnel and tried to swallow. It was the wrong thing to do.

  “Damn you and your drugged wine!” he managed to gasp, his sudden paleness apparently giving Tavis ample warning to get one of last night’s water basins under his chin before he began retching.

  Memory blurred for a few moments then, and the next thing he was aware of was Tavis wiping his mouth with a cloth. He sat with his eyes closed for a few seconds when Tavis had finished, fighting down the still rampant nausea and abhorring the awful, metallic taste in his mouth, until he felt Tavis’s steadying touch on the side of his neck again, something cool held to his lips.


  “What is that?” he managed to croak, opening his eyes to draw away from the cup Tavis was holding.

  The other Healer’s eyes were pale, washed-out aquamarines in the weary-looking face, the firm mouth set in a line of almost bemused tolerance.

  “It’s something for the nausea, nothing more. I promise.”

  “Of course it is,” Rhys whispered. “And last night’s little refreshment was only wine.”

  “I never promised you anything about last night’s wine,” Tavis said patiently. “I do promise you about this. And if you won’t drink it willingly, I know several good techniques for making you drink it, that I learned from you. I won’t even have to hit you in the stomach first. Now, which is it to be? I’m in no mood to clean up after you again.”

  It was obvious that Tavis meant what he said; and Rhys had no doubts that the other Healer had, indeed, learned from his own experience. Another queasy roll of Rhys’s stomach convinced him that acquiescence was the better part of wisdom in this case, so he gave a slight nod, leaned forward slightly, and made himself swallow the contents of the cup in four determined gulps. The slightly minty taste was familiar—a decoction of herbs which was a mainstay of any Healer’s pharmacopoeia.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated on making his stomach accept what he had just put into it, even relaxing a little as the cramping eased. When he opened his eyes again, vaguely sensing that he might have dozed, Tavis was standing in the window alcove across the room with Javan. The prince apparently had just awakened, for his hair was tousled and his eyes were a little sleepy-looking above the thick, fur-lined robe he clutched around himself. Tavis was telling him something in very emphatic terms, though his voice was too low for Rhys to catch the words in his still-drugged state. The boy kept glancing over at Rhys appraisingly.

  After a few minutes, Javan and then Tavis came back over to him. The prince stared down at him quite dispassionately for one so young, almost as if revelation of the previous night’s work had given him an extra measure of maturity which had not been there before. The expression sent a little chill of apprehension through Rhys’s aching body.