The Shadow Matrix

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Mikhail caught these thoughts as they crossed Robard's mind, felt the deep sorrow in them, the wounds to body and spirit that the turbulent times had wrought. He wished he could think of something to say, some way to tell the old fighter that the Compact did succeed, in the end. But he dared not.

  How odd it felt to be thought to be this other man, this Mikhal Raven. There was no record of him in present day Darkover, nor of this Margarethe of Windhaven. He had never even heard of Windhaven, but suspected it might be somewhere in the Hellers. Amalie had said something about that Mikhal—that he had died in the dungeons of Storn. Still, he wished he knew the story of that man and

  that woman, if only to prevent himself from making too many mistakes.

  Then he felt another tug at his heart, the link that had formed in the Tower. Varzil, if it was indeed he, was urging him along. They must get going. Mikhail knew that there was not a great deal of time left, though he could not guess how or why. He had to accept it as real, on faith. It was hard to do, wearing away at his feeble confidence, to go forward on a feeling alone.

  Mik, we can't just leave him with any memory of us! It is dangerous for us, and for him, too. It wouldn't be fair! If he goes to some inn—are there inns now?—and gets tipsy and starts saying that he met us, the tale will get out, and people will begin to look for us. That, I think, is the last thing we need.

  Yes, you are right. Go ahead—tell him to forget this meeting!

  Me! You're right, of course. Damn the Voice, the Alton Gift, and Varzil along with it!

  Marguerida closed her golden eyes for a moment, and Mikhail could feel the distaste in her for what she was about to do. Then she looked at Robard, took a sharp breath and said, "You will forget everything after you set out today. We are not here, and you never met us! You will go to your destination and remember only an uneventful ride beside the lake."

  Robard MacDenis did not move. Then his face went slack, his eyes glazed, and he seemed to look right through them. He clucked to his horse, gave the ancient animal a gentle kick, and rode past them as if they did not exist.

  Mikhail and Marguerida waited until the sound of horse and rider was lost in the mist. The expression on her face made him want to hug her, hold her, tell her she would never have to interfere again. He knew that using the Voice made her feel defiled and filthy, and there was nothing he could do about it. She had done no harm, but he knew that it made no difference to her.

  He dared not attempt to comfort her either, for she was seething with rage, barely controlling her feelings. He knew her Well enough to be sure she would snap and snarl at him if he tried. Mikhail sighed. She would have to work it out herself, but he pitied her for the pain she was suffering.

  He reined his roan forward, and they continued through the mist, moving steadily toward a goal he could not see, but only feel.

  Mikhail urged his horse onward, and Marguerida copied his movements. The eerie silence grew as they rode, and neither of them had the energy to break it. It was a terrible feeling, an oppression from the earth itself, and all he could hope was that it would be better somewhere ahead.

  26

  It was close to midday when Mikhail finally turned his horse away from the shores of the Lake and headed north, following a thread of energy like a magnet that ran from his heart and drew him along. It was not as powerful as the calling had been, but he had a sense of urgency all the same.

  Marguerida had barely spoken since their encounter with Robard MacDenis. He could not tell if she was too angry or simply too exhausted. By his own reckoning, they had been riding for nearly six hours, three of them racing from Hali, without a real rest.

  They rode through a tract of land which was less devastated than that around the Tower. There were things growing, some familiar plants and trees, and here and there a bird gave call. A small animal darted across the trail before them. All he saw was a flash of brown fur and dark eyes, gone before he could even think of catching it. Mikhail had a great sense of relief. He had begun to believe the entire countryside was barren. The sight of the familiar plants— pale green shoots of wild millet and the blue flowers of flax—was immensely reassuring.

  Mikhail could sense Marguerida's mood begin to lighten. There was a light breeze, smelling of damp earth and growing things, and the sun was warm on their backs. He could see some clouds coming in from the north, and knew it would probably rain by nightfall. They must find food and shelter by then. His belly had given up complaining, and although he was hungry, it was not uppermost in his mind. All he could really think about was reaching the destination he was sure awaited them.

  "Do you have any idea where we are going, or are you just following your nose, Mik?"

  "I have a sense where we are headed, Marguerida, but no more than that."

  "Good. I hope that wherever it is, there is something to eat. Is it far?"

  "I have no idea, and can't guess. Look, I am really sorry that you had to ..."

  "Don't apologize, Mik. It had to be done, and even

  though I hated it, I am glad that at least I have sufficient

  training now to control the command voice. If this had

  happened before I went to Neskaya, I could just as easily

  have killed both Amalie and that nice old man. Or left

  them witless. It just reminds me of how I was overshadowed. That bothers me most."?

  "I don't follow you."

  "Don't you see that what the voice of command does, in a sense, is overshadow the other person temporarily. I mean, that is essentially what I did to little Donal last summer; I overshadowed his mind and sent him off to the over-world. There are, according to Istvana, several ways to cause overshadowing, but the Voice is the fastest, simplest, and most efficient." She fell silent for a minute. "The worst part, for me, is that it gets easier every time I do it. I can see how it could become so easy that I might be tempted to do it whether I needed to or not. Which, I suspect, is precisely what happened to her. She got accustomed to having her will obeyed, and then . . . addicted, perhaps? At least, when I was meddling with Amalie's mind back there, I sensed that when Ashara was still at Hali, she just ordered everyone around, without any sense of whether it was right or wrong. She lost something ... I don't know what. And I almost think I need to know what, so I won't follow in her footsteps inadvertently."

  "She was the first female Keeper, as far as we know, Marguerida. And, I think, she was the one who instituted the practice of Keepers remaining celibate. Maybe what she lost was any chance to be a woman, to love and have children."

  "Oh, please!" Her voice was a little shrill, irritated and brusque. "You sound like Ariel!" Margaret quieted, thinking. "I will give her this—her timing was extraordinary," she added. She gave a sudden bark of laughter, very like Lew Alton's, but it lacked any real humor. "You could be

  right, though, that the struggle to become a Keeper made her ruthless. Why do you suspect . . .?"

  "Leonie Hastur, who was the last virginal Keeper at Arilinn, was, by all accounts I have heard, a very sad woman. There is a memoir at Armida, that Damon Ridenow wrote in his old age, that I read some of once. It is painful reading, because he felt a lot of guilt for doing what he did, and most of it was for how much Leonie, whom he adored, was damaged by the way we did things back then."

  "I never knew he wrote anything except the journal I read while I was at Arilinn. That did not have much in it that was personal. Uncle Jeff let me have a look at it, and I found it interesting, but not very lively. I never guessed there was anything more. Jeff never mentioned it."

  "No, he wouldn't. The text at Arilinn is public stuff, because it deals with Damon's discoveries about the nature of matrices—though I would give a lot to see what he would have made of yours, dearest. The memoir we have at Armida is quite different. I don't know why he wrote it, or for whom, other than himself. I found it quite by accident, in the library, stuck between a stud book from Kennard Alton's time and a Terran geography book tha
t I suppose Andrew Carr left there. It had no printing on the spine or anything, just a plain volume of pages, with Damon's cramped hand in it. I read it, or most of it, and then I showed it to Liriel. She has it in her lair at Armida, with the rest of her treasures. When we return, ask her about it." As he spoke these words, Mikhail felt chilled. What if they never got back?

  Mikhail knew she was thinking the same thing, but she only asked, "What did he say about Leonie Hastur?"

  "Let me think. He felt that she was denied the opportunity to be all that she could have been, that she never had a choice about being anything except a leronis, because she started so very young. Even today we still have a tendency to think of laran first and people second, you know."

  "All too well, Mik, all too well." There was a bitterness in her words that did not escape him. "I encountered it at Arilinn and I hated it. Sometimes it was as if the only thing that "mattered about me was that I had the Alton Gift—as if nothing I had done or might do was important except that one thing. It made me feel like a footstool!"

  In spite of the seriousness of her tone, he found himself laughing. He saw her frown, then joined in. "You are a very poor footstool, Marguerida. Why did you choose that particular piece of furniture?"

  She thought for a moment. "Why, because a footstool has feet, but it does not walk, I suppose. It just remains in its place and lets people use it! It never tosses off someone with muddy boots, or smelly feet. And because it is an object, which is how I felt most of the mercifully brief time I was there. I was an object of curiosity and envy, and never, never was I a person with my own ideas or ambitions. That is probably overstating it by a lot, but that is how I felt."

  "Hobbled?"

  "Absolutely! My choices seemed limited to either remaining in a Tower for the rest of my life, or marrying and devoting my life to my offspring, in order to preserve the Alton Gift and whatever else I might have lurking in my genes. I started feeling I wasn't really human any longer, but just a vehicle for conveying laran."

  "And at Neskaya?"

  "Istvana is a very subversive woman." Marguerida caught his look of surprise.

  "Odd choice of words."

  "I cannot think of any better description. She does not expect everyone to do exactly what she tells them, and she had some ideas of her own that would probably shock the people at Arilinn. I don't really have enough data to say more than that. I just know that Neskaya and Arilinn are worlds apart."

  "Can you give me an example." He was fascinated, and glad for something other to concentrate on than the persistent worry at the back of his mind. *

  "Istvana encourages innovation and discussion. Can you imagine Camilla MacRoss asking her charges to talk to her about their studies?"

  "No, I can't."

  "There were a lot of discussions, like the ones I had when I was at University, about all sorts of things. There was one, I remember, that went on for three consecutive nights, between me, Caitlin Leynier, and Baird Beltran, about the ethics of telepathy. We never came to any conclu-

  sions, but we really thrashed out the problem. One night Beltran took the position that any form of mental exchange was a violation—he likes to tackle really extreme ideas— of privacy, even if both persons agreed to communicate! And it gave me a lot to think about, since the Alton Gift has a strong element of coercion in it."

  "How could he defend that?" Mikhail was curious, but a little stunned. What sort of Tower was Istvana running up there, anyhow? He realized that, until he encountered Emelda, he had just assumed that the ethics of laran were quite simple and straightforward. He felt more than a little chagrined by his own innocence and naiveté.

  "By arguing that no one knows his own mind well enough to give informed consent to telepathy. He said that there is always a degree of coercion, either hidden or revealed, in it. And what was the most interesting element of the exchange was that part of it was spoken, but much, of it was not. Caitlin and I agreed he had really made us examine all our ideas about laran."

  Mikhail had a momentary stab of jealousy. He had never met the man, but he was envious that Baird had had this intriguing discussion with Marguerida, and that he had not. It did not matter, did it? They were together now, and that was what was important. So why did he feel so forlorn?

  "I am sorry I missed it."

  "I am too, because as we were talking, I kept thinking how nice it would be if you were there. Sometimes I get so frustrated by how close-minded so many Darkovans seem to be. And reactionary," she added darkly.

  "We've had thousands of years to learn about laran, but we are still a little afraid of it, because we know how it can be misused. So we try to do the things that have worked in the past, and not get too fancy." He cleared his throat and went on. "We would like to think we are civilized, not the barbarians the Terranan assume us to be because we refuse to embrace their vaunted technology. We are, for the most part, polite, because a telepathic community could not survive without that." He gestured at the landscape. There was a crater about a hundred yards off the narrow trail, and it glowed faintly, even in the ruddy sunlight. "This is what can happen when we are not polite. The plain truth is that we are simply well-mannered, not civilized in the

  ideal sense. All human beings are wolves pretending to be nice doggies."

  "That is a really depressing notion, Mik. And close to some things that people at University said, too. Maybe it is even true!"

  "Yes, it is. I will be less gloomy when we reach our destination, or get some food into me, whichever comes first."

  They rode on in weary silence for another half an hour, the thought of food occupying both their minds. Then Marguerida said, "Is that a house up ahead?"

  "What?" He stood in the stirrups to get a better view. "It looks like a ruin," he answered, standing in the stirrups to get a better look.

  "Damn!" She put all her disappointment into the word.

  "Hush!" Mikhail peered ahead, his eyes starting to water. One second he saw a burned out structure, and the next he was sure there was smoke coming from an intact chimney. The thing seemed to shift even as he watched, back and forth.

  He sniffed the air, but there was no smell of woodsmoke. Still, he kept seeing glimpses of a building with white stone walls. It was an illusion of some sort, though whether the ruin or the solid structure was the false image he could not guess.

  Mikhail had heard of such things, matrix-generated veils which distorted light and shadow. He had heard of cloaks of illusion, although he had never teen one, .and tended to regard them as legendary. The last thing he wanted was to tangle with some old trap-matrix. And in this here and now, these traps were not ancient, but were active and dangerous.

  Then, in an instant, he was sure this was their final destination. The knowledge flowed through him like warm water, easing his fears. Still, Mikhail swallowed hard. It did not look very inviting.

  He reined the roan off the trail and started riding toward the place. The closer they drew, the more the building appeared empty and deserted. He could see weeds growing from between blackened stones, broken walls, a collapsed chimney and a few smashed kitchen bowls, the pottery charred and dark.

  Mikhail's belly was knotted, and his knuckles were white with tension. He could feel sweat trickling down his back, in spite of the coolness of the day. Had they been dragged across time to this? He felt caught between his own doubts and his sense of fate. It was like being pressed between two stones, and he wanted to break free of the weight. The only way was to go ahead.

  They rode to the broken wall which had surrounded the building, now just a few stones high. When he looked over the wall, all Mikhail saw was an empty piece of earth, with debris on it. Then a mouse started from the weeds that grew at the base of the wall, darted through the foliage, and vanished. The feeling of desolation was enormous.

  It was too quiet. The lack of sound was eerie. And it did not feel like an empty building, or like anything he had ever experienced before. Whatever it was, i
t lacked any sense of reality as he knew it, and he was very puzzled. Before he could decide what to do next, the crow flapped off the pommel of his saddle, and flew across the low stone wall and vanished just as the mouse had.

  One second it was there, and the next it was gone, as if it had never existed. There was nothing to suggest that the bird had crossed the veil of a trap-matrix. Mikhail felt his heart race, and a chill sense of fear crept along" his flesh.

  When the crow reappeared a few moments later, flying across the low wall with its rough caw, he was immensely relieved, then furious at himself. He hated his fear, the closing of his throat, the bumps on his skin, and more the feeling of helplessness that came with it. Anger at his own weakness raced through his blood.

  The bird landed on his shoulder, and turned its bill to his ear. Tenderly it began to nibble with the tip of it. Then it stopped and muttered something in its throat.

  "I think the crow wants us to go over the wall." Mikhail's voice was tense, and his mouth parched. He felt the tugging at his heart, that peculiar link of energy he had had since leaving Hali Tower. It was no longer bearable, as it had been a few minutes before. Now it was a burning point in his chest, not painful, precisely, but not comfortable either. This was their destination. Why did he feel so reluctant to move?

  He dismounted stiffly, his thigh muscles protesting a lit-