Rafael’s expression shifted to questioning. “And as their Queen, how did you answer them?”
“How must I, in all honor? When Padrik placed the catenas on my wrist, I promised myself to the land as well as the man. My son is the only rightful King of Acosta, and I have pledged my life to restore him. If I cannot rule as a woman, am I no less a daughter of the Lord of Light? Does my duty compel me any less than a man’s? Was I not born for this, bred for it, raised for it?”
“You were, indeed, but not many men could match your courage.” After a moment, he said in a thoughtful voice, “You did not mention this to me.”
“What, and begin the argument we had already been over a dozen times?” she flared. “I myself had answered them. What cause was there to make you responsible for my freely given oath?”
“I have wronged you, niece. I thought you spoke only from vengefulness, that with a lusty new husband, you would give up your wild schemes of reconquest and be content. It would have been foolhardy to risk a single Hastur soldier in such a personal cause. But now the stakes have shifted.”
Taniquel flushed with pleasure at his apology. Then she remembered the trap at the Acosta gates. “Deslucido will not give up easily. I have seen this man in action and I fear to underestimate him. If it is war with Hastur he wants, he will bring it here, right to your doorstep, no matter how you wish to avoid it.”
“We shall see,” Rafael replied. “I am not as easy an opponent as those he has met before.”
A delicate tracing of ice laced the back of Taniquel’s neck. She remembered her dream from the morning of the messengers’ arrival. Coryn, standing surrounded in blue flames.
“Through water, you came to me,” he had said. “Through fire, I will come to you.”
She had no reason to think she might ever see him again. But one thing was sure. The fire would come.
22
Twilight shrouded Ambervale Castle in a pearly aura and then gave way to ever-deepening shadow. Servants darted across the courtyard from the kitchen, bearing steaming platters, baskets of round loaves, soup tureens, and pitchers of hot mulled wine. Torchlight and the bustle of the evening’s meal filled the central hall.
Rumail paused at the bottom of the steps leading to a little-used wing of the castle and took two practiced breaths to still his rising excitement. The others were waiting for him, above. His first circle. His circle. For this he had dreamed and trained all his life.
The training room was small, its stone walls unadorned and rough-cut, following the general contours of the surrounding turret. Rumail found it a fit setting for his own Tower, austere and honest. He’d had it prepared, floor and walls scrubbed, every cobweb swept away, furnished simply but comfortably.
The two teenagers he had found on his search and the one trained leronis, a monitor who’d been dismissed from Arilinn some years back on some pretext or another, sat on padded benches around a bank of fine beeswax candles. Other candles in freestanding candelabra, placed at precise distances, gently illuminated the room. They provided enough light to see, but not enough to distract.
Rumail greeted them all and took his place on the last empty bench, facing Ginevra, the monitor. Together they would form the anchor points for the circle. Rumail suppressed a frown, for she refused to wear the gray robes he selected for them as emblem of their uniqueness, outward tokens of the things which would set them apart from all other Towers.
Ginevra’s white robe shone in the muted light. Now, she nodded to him—challenged him. He refused to be provoked. It was, after all, her prerogative to wear the robes of her rank, but if she saw herself as only a monitor, that’s all she would be. He hoped—no, he needed—her to be much more.
Rumail lowered his eyes to sharpen his own concentration. He had instructed his students to prepare themselves with breathing and muscle-relaxation exercises, and then to focus on the candle flames. Since the beginning of their training, he had used a candle flame as a focal point, so that ought to make the evening’s task easier.
When he dropped into a state of deeper awareness, reaching out to each of them with his laran, he was pleased with what he found. Each sat in a balanced way, spinal muscles relaxed, eyes unmoving on the candles, comfortable with Ginevra’s light contact. After achieving rapport with them individually, he would be ready to link them into a single unity, one which he could mold and direct as he wished.
He would be a Keeper at last.
The girl, a sullen creature he’d found in a brothel using her talents to convince each customer she was a virgin, swayed gently with the flickering of the candles. With a start, Rumail realized there was no movement of air in the room; she was manipulating the fire by adding energy to the air above it.
Darna, no. You must focus on the light, not play with it. He mind-spoke her gently, for he did not want to discourage her. Such a talent could be valuable later. First she must learn discipline and fundamental techniques. She could not hear him clearly, not yet, but she felt his mental nudge.
I’m bored. How long are we going to sit here?
Nor was she aware how easily he could pick up her thoughts. She had not yet learned to trust him as her Keeper, she barely knew what a Keeper was. And how should she, who’d led a life in which people saw her only as a thing to be used? He intensified the rapport, felt her tighten in resistance. She was sixteen, older than most Tower novices, and she had lived alone and in fear since the awakening of her talent. Any contact from outside, he knew, would be painful, but not unbearably so. He was no Alton to smash her defenses, forcing rapport.
That will hold her attention.
Then, still retaining his mental grasp of the girl, he turned his attention to the boy. Kyril’s attention had also wandered, but not from boredom. The boy was simply undisciplined, had never tried to do anything more complicated than carve a piece of meat for his dinner. He was some Comyn lord’s by-blow, raised in a comfortable but ignorant cloth-merchant’s shop in Temora. Aldones only knew who his father was or why he’d ignored such an obviously gifted son. Maybe he’d never thought to ask or even known he’d fathered a child.
Rumail himself had never gone cold or hungry; his laran had been identified and trained. He had everything a nedestro could expect—a place in the world, training for his gift, a brother’s love. When he’d seen the boy, something had stirred in him, so that he could not have turned away even if he’d wanted to.
Kyril. As with the girl, he kept his touch light, soothing. Concentrate. Use the light to gather yourself. See only the point of brilliance, nothing else.
Not the itch on your backside, nor the curve of Darna’s rump, he thought to himself.
The boy squirmed on his bench, but his mind, a blur of colors, grew clearer. Rumail envisioned his own laran as a net, settling softly over the luminous colored globe of Kyril’s mind and Darna’s sharp-edged crystalline facets. Slowly, he gathered up the strands.
Easy, easy . . . There is nothing to fear. He knew this next part wouldn’t be easy. Normally, by the time novices joined in a circle, they’d had years of Tower discipline. They’d studied matrix theory and the fundamentals of monitoring, they knew what their own laran talents were and the basics of their use. Even the youngest had extensive training in controlling their own breathing, body temperature, and muscular tension. But Rumail had to accelerate the process for these two. Ever since the lungrot plague, everything seemed to be happening ahead of schedule.
Well, Rumail thought, he’d done the best he could in this short a time. For all he knew, the traditional, lengthy methods of Tower training were unnecessary. If anyone could find a simple, direct way of creating a working unit, he knew he could. Once joined in a circle, he’d be able to directly manipulate the minds of his workers and eliminate the mental rubble that usually took years to clear away.
As Rumail began to draw them closer, Darna stiffened. Her mind recoiled, and she gasped audibly. Rumail felt her response in both mind and body. He sent out a wave of re
assurance.
Trust me. No harm will befall you.
In response, she pulled back harder. He sensed her pain increase as the muscles in her shoulders and belly tightened. She caught her breath and held it. Ginevra moved in, easing the girl’s muscles, shifting her posture, and smoothing her breathing. Panic flared as Darna realized that she was no longer in control of her body. Ginevra held her fast.
Rumail had rarely seen a monitor take such agressive action, but he himself had only the basic level of skills. He could serve as a monitor, just as any other technician of his rank—Keeper, he reminded himself—but he was no expert.
Darna no longer offered any physical resistance, but her mind was as turbulent as before. Rumail had to admire Ginevra’s deftness. But why did she ignore the girl’s pain level? It was no matter, for once included in the unity of the circle, it would abate along with her psychic friction.
Kyril . . . The boy’s mind opened to Rumail almost lazily. He had some natural barriers, but they were haphazard and easily diverted. By far, the greater problem would be that the boy himself would be unable to sustain his part of the contact. Kyril, you must concentrate. You must hold on.
Oh . . . all right. The thought came slurred, like a yawn.
Satisfied, Rumail deepened his rapport with the minds of his circle. Ginevra—practiced, easily flowed with him, observed the other two, and held the girl immobile. The girl’s mind darted this way and that like a hunted animal. Rumail bore down on her, caught her. For a moment, she continued to twist in his mental grasp. Then, with a flicker of mixed pain and despair, she surrendered.
Yes!
The boy, the last—whatever focus he’d achieved was already shredding into bits of daydreams, memories, body sensations.
Hold! Rumail commanded, and in the next instant, he had them all. The unity poised, currents shifting uneasily, pulling his energy in three different directions at once.
He hesitated, unsure of how to proceed. Although he’d intended this first rapport to be an initiation, a cleansing ritual, he hadn’t anticipated how fragile, how unstable a circle might be. Gathering up the minds of the members had always seemed so easy when Bernardo of Neskaya did it. There was nothing for it but to go ahead. Between the two of them, he and Ginevra had more than enough strength to control the youngsters. First, though, he needed to move them all on to a more ethereal astral plane. He signaled Ginevra to support him as he shifted the circle to the Overworld. She fed him energy and tightened her hold on the girl.
In his mind, Rumail visualized the chill gray place that lay beyond material existence. It had terrified him the first time his own Keeper had taken him there, although he knew the many safeguards in place. Its vastness, its utter lack of features had engulfed him as if he were no more than an insect. But he had learned to build structures there, using only his own thoughts, to sculpt and shape mind-stuff beyond anything material.
He saw himself lifting the circle, straining with very little movement. The girl felt like a leaden weight, the boy a sack of jelly. He would have to leap, to blast through their inertia with raw power—
Darna shrieked as if doused with liquid fire. Her agony reverberated on both physical and psychic planes.
The circle shattered. Gasping, Rumail jerked back to his own body. His eyes snapped open. Darna bent over, arms wrapped around her ample breasts, screaming over and over, scarcely pausing to draw breath. The boy lolled back, propped on one arm, blinking in confusion. Ginevra gave a little shiver, collecting herself, and glided over to the girl. She put her hands on the girl’s shoulders, but did not attempt to raise her.
Rumail tried to get to his feet, but his knees had turned to powder and gave way beneath him. He fell heavily back on the padded bench.
What—what happened? He did not know if he spoke the words aloud, or merely thought them. What was wrong with him? He was Keeper, by all of Zandru’s frozen hells, and he ought to know!
“Some kind of backlash,” Ginevra murmured. She sounded drunk, or in a half-trance. “I’ve never seen it before. . . .”
Summoning the rags of his strength, Rumail hauled himself upright and stumbled the two strides to Darna’s bench. She was still hunched over, face covered by shadow and the fall of loose red-black hair. Her screams continued, raw now as if torn from a bloody throat.
Then he saw Ginevra’s expression. She’d knelt before the girl, eyes half-closed, whites glinting, lips curved and partly opened. In pleasure, he realized.
In pleasure so intense, it bordered on sexual ecstacy.
Rumail shuddered, his stomach seething. Acid filled his mouth and cold sweat broke out on his forehead.
She—she was feeding on the girl’s pain.
Rumail grabbed Ginevra and pulled her backward, not caring whether she fell. He took Darna’s face in both his hands and lifted it to the light. Her face and hands were streaked with crimson, where mental energy had burned along the channels, searing the smaller nodes beneath the skin. He could only guess at the internal damage. But her eyes . . .
They were no longer soft brown-green set off by sweetly curving lashes. Nothing of the structure of lid or eyeball remained. Both sockets, from brow to cheekbone, were lightless, charred black.
“Ginevra!” he roared, whirling on her. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”
The monitor picked herself up from where she had stumbled, brushing the folds of her white robes. She met his gaze with her own, insolent glare. “And if it is? What are you going to do about it? You are the Keeper here. Don’t you know the first thing about being a Keeper is that you are solely responsible for whatever happens in the circle?”
She pushed past him toward the door. In shock, he made no move to hinder her.
Darna’s cries died rapidly into whimpers. She seemed to crumple in on herself as she fell sideways and then slipped to the floor. Stiffly, he bent over her. Before he could touch her, her muscles jerked in spasm and then loosened. She lay very, very still.
The boy stretched and yawned, his jaw popping audibly. “Is it dinnertime yet?”
Rumail lowered himself to Darna’s bench and buried his face in his hands. Never in all his years, not even when he stood before the Keeper at Neskaya for the pronouncement of his dismissal, had he ever felt such utter failure. Tonight’s experiment had been doomed from the start.
And these were the best I could find! It’s hopeless! Hopeless!
His shoulders sagged. He realized he was in shock, or he would surely have wept, and done so without shame.
Only men laugh, only men weep, only men dance. The old proverb whispered through his mind.
Bitter laughter burst from him. What more could he do, except to get up and dance?
As quickly, the black mood lifted. What did he expect, with such raw materials—two flawed teenagers, already too old for proper novice training and damaged by their short lives—and a perverted, sadistic monitor? The failure had nothing to do with him. No one, not even Aldones himself, could have turned them into a decent circle.
But there was already a fully trained, functional Tower out there . . . Tramontana. It had not yet fully acknowledged its fealty to Ambervale, and it might not. Even after death, Kieran’s influence was powerful. If not Tramontana, then some other Tower. Perhaps even Neskaya would bend to his will.
He would be Keeper some day. He must. It was his destiny, the means by which he would shape the future of Darkover, even as Damian dreamed.
Some tendays later, after the ambassadors returning from their mission to Hastur had made their report and bowed themselves out of the King’s private quarters at Ambervale Castle, Damian Deslucido turned to his brother with an exultant grin.
“That old fox, Rafael! Because he sees the trap, he thinks he can avoid putting his foot into it. But we have him now. He must deal with us.”
Rumail stood uneasily and watched his brother begin pacing, as he so often did when feeling expansive. “Consider the situation,” Damian went on, gesturing as he
thought aloud. “We have put forth our claims based on right and custom. And no man may say we do not have sufficient cause. Now is the time to strike, and strike decisively!”
Damian paused, eyes blazing with inner vision. What Rumail had once seen as the certainty of a true mission now turned to brassy, empty blustering.
Rumail frowned. I must find a way to slow him down, before he rushes us into disaster.
Their original plan had called for consolidation of resources, including Tramontana Tower, before taking on the might of Hastur. Prospects had not looked good until the emmasca from Aillard, that bastion of neutrality, had died, presumably of extreme old age. Even then, the Tower resisted the legitimate claims of fealty as unclear and conflicting. Tomas, Keeper of the First Circle and now by seniority and personality the leader of the Tower, might be a distant Ardais cousin, but he was the fourth son of a third son, coming from a small holding with few defenses. With only a little effort, Damian was able to bring Tomas’ mother and only sister to Linn, where he could keep them under watch along with the Storn girl. It had not taken much further suggestion to enlist the Keeper’s cooperation.
The original timetable had begun to disintegrate with the lungrot plague at Verdanta. Despite their victory at Tramontana, Rumail’s attempt at forming his own circle had ended in disaster, one of his students dead and the other little more than a drooling idiot unable to accept the discipline of a circle. The memory still had the power to shake him.
There was no point in moaning, If only we had waited, we could have controlled the plague, if only I had taken the time. . . . Rumail was pragmatic enough to know that the only problem which mattered was the one they were facing. And right now, that was his brother’s unbridled confidence.
Rumail picked his words carefully. “Is this a war you could win? Have we grown that strong?”
The Fall of Neskaya Page 24