Varzil had journeyed all the long leagues from his home to Arilinn, along with his father and kinsmen, to be formally presented to the Comyn Council. His older brother, Harald, who was heir to Sweetwater, had passed a similar inspection three years ago, but Varzil had been too young to come along then. His present recognition was clearly a political maneuver to bolster the status of the Ridenow. Many of the other great Houses still regarded them as upstarts, barely more civilized than their Dry Towns ancestors. It galled them to accord any Ridenow the respect of a true equal.
The peace that Allart Hastur had forged between his own kingdom and that of Ridenow was neither so long nor so deep to blur the memory of the bloody conflict that had come before. Dom Felix was never anything but scrupulously polite to the Hasturs, but Varzil sensed their doubt—their fear.
If there had been any other way...
He would not have had to creep from the Hidden City at this scandalous hour, to wait half-frozen for someone inside the Tower to let him in. He hoped that would happen soon, before his absence was discovered and a hunt mounted. The Council session was all but over, with little further business to conduct. Dom Felix would not tarry, not with catmen sighted in the hills near the sheep pastures.
Varzil drew his cloak more tightly and set his teeth to keep them from chattering. The finely woven garment was meant for courtly show instead of protection against the elements.
Praise Aldones, it had been a clear night.
Through the long hours, Varzil felt the swirl and dance of psychic forces behind the Tower walls. The harsh bright energy of the Veil scoured every nerve raw, leaving him sensitive to the slightest telepathic whisper.
Much of the work of a Tower was done during the hours when ordinary men slept, to minimize the psychic static of so many untrained minds. This close to the city, even the occasional stray thought or burst of emotion, hardly worth calling laran, became cumulative, low-grade interference, or so he’d been told. For this reason, Towers like Hali and the now-ruined Tramontana stood apart from other human habitation. In the long quiet hours of darkness, Gifted workers sent messages across hundreds of leagues through the relays, and charged immense laran batteries, used for a myriad of purposes, including powering aircars, lighting the palaces of Kings and mining precious minerals, even performing the delicate healing of minds and bodies.
Varzil had drowsed and woken a dozen times that night, each time resonating to a different pattern. Whenever he roused, it seemed that his senses had grown keener. With his mind, he felt colors and music he had never known existed. He heard voices, a word here and there, phrases shimmering with secret meaning that left him hungry for more. The rainbow Veil no longer glinted from a distance, it reverberated through the marrow of his bones.
Movement caught Varzil’s attention, a shadow among shadows. Slender, gray-furred, bent over like a little wizened man, a figure slipped through the Veil. It halted, an empty basket clutched in its prehensile fingers, and stared at him.
Varzil sat straighter, pulling his thin cloak more tightly around his shoulders. He recognized the creature as a kyrri, although Serrais, seat of the Ridenow, had few of them as servants. They were said to be highly telepathic, but dangerous to approach. His father, in preparing him for the visit to Arilinn, warned him about their protective electrical fields. Nevertheless, he reached out one hand.
“It’s all right,” he murmured. “I won’t hurt you.”
Something brushed against the back of Varzil’s skull, at once feathersoft and grating, as if sand were being rubbed into his skin. But no, it was inside his head. Suddenly, a sensation of curiosity flickered through him and vanished as quickly.
The creature was studying him. Did it want something? He had no food—and then he realized he thought of it as an animal, instead of an intelligent, if nonhuman, being.
Without a sound, the kyrri hurried away. Varzil watched as it crossed the outer courtyard and turned aside at the street. He felt as if he had been tested in some mysterious fashion, and he did not know if he had passed.
“Look down there!” a voice cried from above. “Some ne‘er do-well rascal has camped upon our doorstep!”
Varzil craned his neck back to stare up at a balcony running alongside the Tower to either side of the arch of the Veil. Two older boys leaned over, pointing. They looked to be in their late teens, their voices already deepened, waists and hips slender but with the shoulders of young manhood.
“You there! Boy! What are you doing here?”
Something in the voice rankled Varzil’s nerves, or perhaps lingering irritability from the encounter with the kyrri drove him to snap back, “What business is it of yours? I have come to see the Keeper of Arilinn Tower, and that isn’t you!”
“How dare you speak to us in such a manner!” The youth in the Tower leaned over. “You impudent good-for-nothing!”
The second boy pulled his friend back. “Eduin, you gain nothing in taunting him this way. He can do us no harm where he is, and he is clearly no street beggar. These words are unworthy of you.” He spoke with the accent of a lowland aristocrat.
Varzil scrambled to his feet, heart pounding. A dozen retorts leaped to his mind. His hands curled into fists. He kept his teeth clamped tightly together, though the breath hissed through them. He had not spent the better part of his years shrugging off far worse insults, only to lose his temper now.
What was he doing, to provoke a confrontation this way? What was wrong with him? Courtesy cost nothing, but insults might well create future enemies. If he succeeded, these boys would become his fellow students. Beside, the only person whose opinion mattered was, after all, the Keeper himself.
Not trusting himself to say anything further, Varzil simply bowed to them. It was the only thing he could think of which would not make matters worse.
The boy named Eduin retreated from the balcony, muttering something about proper respect for the dignity of the Tower. Varzil was concentrating too hard on holding his tongue to catch all the words. But the other youth, the one who had cautioned restraint, remained.
Varzil raised his eyes. The sun caught the brilliant red of the other boy’s hair, the luminous gray eyes, the regular features. Both Tower lads wore simple clothing, tunics with wide leather belts, with no clue as to clan or rank.
“Boy,” he called down, and this time the word carried no insult. His voice was strong and clear, as if he’d trained as a singer. “What do you want with the Keeper of Arilinn Tower?”
“I’ve come to—I want to join the Tower.” There it was.
For a long moment, the youth continued to study him. With a nod and, “Wait here,” he disappeared back into the Tower.
Varzil let out the breath he did not know he had been holding. While he tried to calm himself, the Veil shimmered and parted like an iridescent waterfall. A man in a loose white monitor’s robe stepped through. Gray dominated his chestnut-red hair and lines framed his mouth and underscored his eyes. A few paces behind came the youth from the balcony. This close, Varzil was struck by the other boy’s commanding sense of presence.
The man in the white robe paused, his gaze flickering over the colors of Varzil’s cloak, the gold and green of his clan.
“Vai Dom...” Varzil broke the silence. “I am Varzil Ridenow, younger son of Dom Felix of Sweetwater. I have come to seek training here. Will you be so kind as to escort me to the Keeper?”
The taut mouth softened into a glimmer of a smile. “Young sir, I can imagine nothing more appropriate. I certainly wouldn’t presume to decide what to do with you.”
Varzil approached the Veil, as the white-robed man indicated. He’d never been so close to such a powerful matrix device before, only personal starstones or the telepathic damper the Ridenow household leronis had used when his mother had one of her fainting spells.
He held up one hand, fingers extended but not daring yet to touch the Veil. Besides a thing of beauty, what was it? Two people—three if he counted the kyrri—had passed
through it as if it had been a tissue of gauze.
He turned his head to see the monitor watching him intently. Another test, then. He set his jaw and strode ahead.
The Veil looked like a thin rainbow mist, and he had expected it to feel cool and perhaps damp. The instant it touched him, it shifted, engulfing him. He gasped, drawing in breath tainted with the metallic taste of a thunderstorm. The skin of his entire body tingled, each hair erect. The small muscles around his eyes twitched. He could not feel his fingertips.
The next instant, he stood trembling in a windowless cubicle. Although he was no longer directly within a matrix field, he sensed the power in the little room, as if it were itself a laran device. Turning to look behind him, he made out shapes, blurred and shadowy. Was this some kind of trap? Another test?
Then the white-robed monitor stepped through the rainbow shimmer. The youth followed him, grinning.
“I told you so,” the youth said.
Told him what? Varzil wondered.
The man moved his hands as if manipulating something and Varzil’s stomach plummeted to his feet. No, he still stood upon a solid floor, but the room itself was rising. It stopped a moment later and they stepped through an arched doorway that appeared in one wall. The lighted room beyond it opened onto a broad terrace.
Surely not even the ballroom of the greatest castle on Darkover could be so grand, Varzil thought. Tapestries covered the walls, glowing with rich colors, depicting scenes of hunting parties, chieri dancing in the forest beneath the four moons, eagles soaring over the Hellers. The floor tiles formed an intricate mosaic pattern that was at once lavish and soothing to the eye. At the far end of the room, a fire filled the air with warmth and a touch of incense.
Armchairs and a long bench piled with cushions formed a rough half circle around the fireplace. A woman and two men sat there, talking in low tones. The woman met Varzil’s gaze. She was about the age of Varzil’s favorite aunt, short and compact without being fat, the wrinkles around her eyes giving her the appearance of being perpetually on the edge of laughter. She got to her feet and dismissed the men with a gesture, something no woman in Varzil’s family would ever dare to do.
“Off with you, too, Carlo,” she told the red-haired youth.
“But—” he protested.
She folded her arms across her ample, shawl-wrapped chest, silencing him. “What happens now is not your affair.”
The youth delivered an impeccably polite bow and left the room through the archway at the far end, but not without a quick wink at Varzil.
Varzil’s breath caught in his throat. After the years of longing, the months of planning, the night’s escape, and the long hours of waiting, things were happening much too fast.
Once, while climbing the craggy hills near Serrais in search of eagle feathers, Varzil had lost his footing and tumbled down a pebbled slope. Rock and sky had whirled together as stones pelted his body from a dozen different directions at once. He’d slid to a stop and lain there for a long time, panting and bruised, gazing up at the cloudless sky with amazement that he was still alive.
He felt that way now, although his body was unhurt. Dimly, he heard the woman’s voice talking about a hot breakfast. He felt her hands on his shoulders, guiding him to a chair beside the fire.
“Sweet Evanda, you’re half frozen!” she exclaimed. “Not to mention—” Varzil could not follow her next words, “—energon channels—just as if you’ve been working two solid nights without a break!”
The next moment she pressed a cup of steaming jaco into his hands. He felt the heat through the heavy ceramic with its intricate incised pattern, the smoothness of the glaze. The jaco had been sweetened with honey and laced with some herb he did not recognize. He swallowed it obediently, though it burned his tongue. Only then did he realize how badly he was shivering.
“Here, get this into you,” the woman said, handing him a bowl heaped with some kind of nut porridge and topped with cream. “Can you hold the spoon?”
Varzil’s fingers curled around the handle. His hand shook, but he managed a mouthful of the stuff. Whatever happened, he was not going to be fed like a baby.
The porridge turned out to be a mixture of oats, hazelnuts, and dried apples, seasoned with cinnabark. It tasted wonderful, blending the earthiness of the grain, the crunchiness of the nuts, and the chewiness of the fruit.
Varzil’s vision returned to focus and his hands steadied. He thanked the women, adding, “This is very good.”
“It should be,” she said, again reminding him of his aunt. “Eat it all up. Lord of Light, boy, you look as if you haven’t had a decent meal in a tenday!”
Varzil lowered the spoon. “I’m grateful, vai domna, but I didn’t come here to beg a meal.” He handed her back the bowl.
“I won’t hear such prideful nonsense,” she retorted, shoving it back at him. “I’m house mother to all the novices here and when I say eat, they eat. Even the royal ones. Is that clear?”
Varzil had not taken more than another two or three spoons ful when the door at the far end swung open and a tall, heavy-shouldered man strode into the room.
Rust and silver mingled in his neatly trimmed beard and hair. His features were too irregular to be conventionally handsome, with his overlarge ears and crooked mouth. Eyes blue and dark as lapis regarded Varzil. An aura of steely power hung about the man like a mantle.
Yet he wore ordinary clothing, comfortable and warm, a leather vest trimmed with bright embroidery over a belted linex tunic, and loose pants tucked into laced calf-high boots. A chain of dark gray metal hung about his neck, disappearing beneath his shirt.
Two other men entered the room from a door at the opposite end. One was the white-robed man who had taken Varzil into the Tower. The other was robed, too, but in a soft deep green. Yet there was no doubt in Varzil’s mind who held the power here.
Varzil got to his feet and bowed deeply to the heavy-shouldered man.
So you are the Ridenow boy who wants to train at Arilinn Tower? The voice rang out like a sword on the anvil. Never had anyone spoken so directly to Varzil’s mind, or with such crystalline clarity. Even the household leronis, who had given him rudimentary training in the use of his starstone, had sounded muffled, as if in another room, when she used her laran to speak with him. Varzil realized that of all the tests he might face, this was the basic and most crucial one of all. He bowed again.
“Vai dom, I am.”
“Sit down, then, and let us get to know you a little. Do you know who I am?”
“Sir, you are Auster Syrtis, Keeper of Arilinn Tower.”
“One of them, anyway.” A smile flickered at the comer of the man’s mouth. “What makes you think I am he? How can you be sure?” With one hand, he gestured to his clothing, as if to indicate the absence of the traditional crimson robes.
Does he think I’m such a head-blind fool? Varzil wondered. His indignation evaporated as the man tilted his head back in laughter.
For the next hour, Varzil sat before the fragrant fire, answering questions from the three men. The woman, whose name was Lunilla, alternated between sitting quietly in her own chair and offering the men jaco and Varzil food, on some schedule of her own devising. Nobody argued with her.
Varzil showed them the starstone he had been given by the household leronis, a light blue crystal the size of his thumbnail. As he had been taught, he kept it wrapped in layers of silk. When he took it out and held it in his bare fingers, the ribbons of twisting brightness in its heart flared to life. The patterns first appeared when he had keyed into the stone. Now, with the prolonged exposure to the psychic energies of Veil and circle, he sensed it as a living thing, responding to his touch. The stone sang to him, danced with him.
Varzil answered questions and performed a few simple laran exercises very much like those the Ridenow leronis had taught him. Without his starstone, he had very little psychokinesis, although by focusing, he could cause a small feather to quiver. He had no difficul
ty hearing questions in thought form, rather than spoken aloud. The shifts in mood and emotion appeared to him as clear and distinct as musical phrases played on different instruments.
Even as the examination continued, Varzil sensed an undercurrent beneath the innocent-sounding questions. On one or two occasions, he caught the edge of a quickly-guarded thought, and knew it had nothing to do with the quality of his laran.
Again and again, the questions skirted the issue of how he had come, and whether his father knew of this visit and had given his blessing. The Keeper never asked directly, yet suspicion shadowed his words. Perhaps they feared he had come on some purpose other than his own—to penetrate their company, learn their secrets, or somehow weaken them.
But surely they would read the truth in his mind....
Realization dawned slowly. Yes, they were suspicious, but it was because they saw him as sickly and feared he might fall ill under the rigors of training. Since Varzil was a son of Ridenow, there might be serious repercussions if he died. His family might act in retaliation against Hastur or Asturias, destabilizing the balance of power. Political relations continued to be precarious since the last wars. Arilinn itself might be drawn into the conflict....
I will not be a pawn in any lordling’s game!
In the middle of a question from the green-robed man, Varzil got to his feet and bowed.
“Vai dom‘yn,” he said in such a serious tone that the man stopped in midsentence. “I am happy to answer any questions about my background or fitness for Tower work. You have a right to know these things. But—” and here his composure wavered, “—but you must either admit or refuse me based on my talent. I am here on my own behalf, not anyone else’s. Others may use their laran to plot and spy, but I do not,” he said glaring pointedly at Auster.
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