Zandru's Forge

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Come on.” Gesturing to Varzil, Carolin walked into the lake.

  Varzil exclaimed as the cloud-water billowed against his boots, more like dew than liquid. He pulled back, trembling. Chest-deep, Carolin turned. “What is it?”

  “Can you not feel it?” Varzil asked. “This place—how did you say the lake was formed?”

  “We don’t know. The event is called the Cataclysm. There may have been records once, but if any still exist, they are lost.” And a good thing, too, or someone would surely have resurrected whatever terrible weapon changed an ordinary lake into this ghostly place.

  Varzil shook his shoulders and the waters around him quivered with the movement. “It’s gone... ”

  “What?”

  “For a moment, I thought ... You know that physical objects can retain laran impressions, particularly of strong emotions. Well,” with a brightening smile, “we’ve come this far. Let’s go on, so that I can tell the folk back at Arilinn about the bird-fish the minstrels sing of.”

  They went on. Carolin took a breath and ducked his head beneath the surface. The sun, full up now, filled the waters with its brilliance. Against all his instincts, he opened his mouth and inhaled. It was like breathing thick fog.

  The rocks of the shore gave way to sloping, sandy banks. The atmosphere grew denser. Carolin forced himself to breathe regularly and the sensation of suffocation eased.

  Below, shimmering green and orange objects flickered in and out of the cloud currents. Carolin touched Varzil’s sleeve and pointed.

  “Bird-fish. ” The mist-water muffled his words.

  Near the flat bottom, long green grasses waved in an intricate, undulating dance, some longer than the height of a man. Carolin stumbled on a stone beneath the surface of the sand. The light was dimmer here. The brilliantly colored creatures swam or flew in schools, darting and diving in unison. Their hides flashed luminescent whenever a stray beam of sun, light touched them.

  Varzil held his hands out to the bird-fish, calling gently to them with his laran. The Ridenow were said to have a particular empathy with animals and it must be so, for they clustered around him, the tiny red ones slipping through his outstretched fingers like living ribbons. Varzil’s delight rippled through the waters, and, through their faint rapport, Carotin found his own heart lightening.

  Carolin would have been content to turn back, but now Varzil took the lead, leading them even deeper. The bird-fish followed them for a distance, darting in and out to nibble at their hair or stare with curious, unblinking eyes. The waters darkened as less light penetrated its depths. Just beyond the limit of vision, pale lights flickered in and out.

  More bird-fish? Carolin wondered, or something even stranger? The skin along his spine crawled and the sense of freedom faded. Shadows pressed in on him, and the currents created shadowy, inconstant figures among the grasses.

  He reached out to Varzil, to draw him back toward the light, but his friend shook his head and went on.

  What was he to do, leave him here? Varzil knew nothing of the dangers of the lake at Hali; the need to keep breathing even when the urge was absent, the warning signals of fatigue and confusion.

  Just a little more, and then we will leave, if I have to drag him out by force!

  Varzil halted, so suddenly that Carolin bumped into him. Varzil pointed, creating swirls of cloud-water with the movement. Ahead, half-seen through the dim currents, lay a huge shape, many times the length of a man. Carolin could not be sure if it really existed or was some trick of the light and turbulent mist.

  As they approached, however, he saw solid stone, a single fallen column. Sand and water weeds laced its surface. He could not make out its original color. Even worn by time and the surging cloud-waters, the contours looked smooth, as if they had been worked by matrix technology. There were markings, so obscured he could not decipher them.

  Somehow, he did not want to touch it.

  Varzil, in his usual fearless way, went right up to the fallen column. It came to the level of his knees. With one arm outstretched for balance, he reached down with the other and laid his palm flat on the stone.

  And screamed.

  13

  A scream resounded through Varzil’s mind, drowning out sound and sight. It raced along his nerves, filled the hollow of his bones, shivered through his blood. The dark currents of the cloud-water faded from his vision. All he could see was white haze. Within moments, he lost all awareness of his body and surroundings. He could not even feel his heart beating or remember his name. Like a frozen particle in a vast and nebulous sea, he drifted. The last echoes of the scream died to silence.

  As his unblinking eyes cleared, shapes appeared before him. At first they were but silverpoint tracings against the stippled whiteness. Gradually, they took on form and substance. Their outlines remained blurred as if he were peering through a cracked lens.

  He looked down upon a Tower as if from a great height, one he had never seen before. The translucent stone shone as if lit from within, but the color was subtly wrong, an uneasy ashen gray.

  Then, in the strange way of dreamers, Varzil descended. He passed through the stone walls as if he were no more than a bodiless wraith. Radiance suffused the space in which he found himself. It burned along his ghostly skin.

  Laran. The air trembled with it, a type and intensity he had never felt before, not in his work at Arilinn, not even as a child newly-awakened to his powers, listening to the Ya-men wailing out their songs beneath the four moons.

  Varzil traced the source of the laran. He was inside the Tower now, looking down at a circular room. It appeared subtly wrong, out of focus. The room was a large one, judging by the people gathered there. Seated on their benches, they looked very much like a working circle. A table occupied the center of the room, dominated by a huge artificial matrix.

  The matrix was octagonal in shape, easily double the arm span of a man, and so layered as to be half that tall. Pinpoints of blue light sparkled in a frame like a weaving of spiderwebs. The table on which it sat glowed with tiny bits of iridescence, which resonated with the power of the matrix.

  Varzil had never seen an artificial matrix of such size and power before. At Arilinn, circles worked up to sixth or seventh level. A sixth-level matrix required six trained workers plus a Keeper in order to operate it safely, and the conservative Arilinn circles rarely exceeded that number. Theoretically, it was possible to construct matrices of any order—nine, ten, even more—but the higher the level, the greater the potential for disaster. A single weak link in the circle, a faltering heart or lapse in concentration, could unleash the power of the matrix in some uncontrollable direction. Neither Auster nor any other ethical Keeper would countenance the risk.

  By the energies which surged through it, this must be a twelfth-level matrix, or possibly higher. Varzil counted fifteen people in the room, most of them robed in muddied gray, plus a single man in the crimson that had been reserved, from time immemorial, for Keepers.

  Where on the face of Darkover could such a thing be? How had it remained hidden?

  And what did this nameless circle intend to do with it?

  Power crackled through the lattice, threads of brightness that lingered in his vision like phosphorescent vapors. It made him uneasy to look at them. Visceral-level revulsion to the thing built inside him.

  Varzil could not understand his reaction, unless it was some effect of the strange condition in which he found himself. He had encountered laran power before—in the matrices at Arilinn, in the circles there, within himself. He respected it but did not fear it.

  Suddenly, he realized why this matrix was different. All of the other devices and natural uses of laran he had known had been, in their very essence, human. Starstones worked by concentrating and focusing natural mental talent. They did not generate it of their own, nor did they draw power from any other source. Laran energy, created by individual leronyn or by circles working together, could be stored in batteries and other appa
ratus constructed of smaller, individual starstones.

  But this one—somehow, against all his experience and everything he had been taught, it tapped into another source. The origin of the power was not human, of that he was certain. He was not sure it was even alive. It both terrified and fascinated him.

  Although it was the last thing he wanted to do, he forced himself to open to the enormous matrix. Sensory impressions flooded his mind, too intense and brief to identify. He caught the ozone reek of lightning, of water, of ashes, and yet none of these was right.

  “Va‘acqualle—spies! ’imyn! ...”

  “... kiarren ... put an end to it.... ”

  From the circle of workers below came voices, muffled and oddly cadenced. The fleeting contact with the matrix had brought Varzil more firmly into this world. They had become aware of him. One woman, her hair now visible as a wash of pale red against the misty gray, glanced up in his direction. Varzil drew back, suddenly reluctant to make himself known before he understood what was going on here. The woman’s gaze continued across the room without stopping. Her mental query slipped past him as if he was not there. The feeling of dislocation, of seeing and hearing echoes, sharpened. This leronis was both alert and skillful, yet she could not see him.

  What was going on?

  Was he looking into the past, into events imprinted into the very substance of the stone pillar?

  Yes, that must be it. Those words he had been able to distinguish were strangely accented and archaic in pattern. But if he were glimpsing some ancient circle at work, did that mean a Tower once stood here, in the middle of the lake? Why was there no record of it, not even in the archives of Arilinn?

  Where was he? When was he?

  Below, the woman who had glanced up now returned to her work. Varzil felt the Keeper reach out for his circle and begin forming them into a single unit. The Keeper’s laran felt dim and distant. With a technique completely unfamiliar to Varzil, he joined the individual members. If Varzil was not very much mistaken, this Keeper wove their human minds into the pattern of the matrix itself. Not only that, he was doing this with an offhanded ease that suggested he had done it many times before, nor was there any hint of resistance from the circle. They, too, accepted this melding of their human minds with the inorganic, mechanical structure of the matrix lattice as normal.

  What Varzil was witnessing should not have been possible—starstones, even joined and tuned at a very high level, could only amplify the natural mental energies that passed through them. It was the stones that served the humans, not the other way around.

  Lord of Light! What unholy thing was taking place? And what did they intend to do next?

  It took all his Arilinn discipline to hold himself immobile, not to take some precipitous action and by doing so, reveal himself. He must not risk an emotional but ineffective outburst.

  As the circle members dropped, one by one, into unity with the matrix, their individual personalities dissipated. The stones of the lattice pulsated, at first slowly, then gaining speed and brightness as more minds were added. The outlines of the men and women blurred and the room darkened, but perhaps that was only in contrast to the increasing brilliance of the matrix. Each new burst of radiance cast a wash of blue-gray on the faces of the workers.

  The room itself seemed to slip and distort. Outside, mountains like jagged fangs rose treeless and dim under a single moon. Varzil knew only one place on Darkover where such bleak, lifeless peaks reached their lonely heads to the empty sky.

  This cannot be Hali, Varzil realized. It must be somewhere deep in the Hellers. But since the destruction of Tramontana Tower a generation ago, there was no working circle in all that mountain range.

  No wonder his senses kept unsettling, no wonder the odd echo of sight and sound. He was not only looking into the past, but across the distance of half a continent. A thought crept through the back reaches of his mind, one he did not like at all.

  Aldaran.

  The thought brought a sickening realization. For the circle below him was now complete, in obscene union with the gigantic matrix. The impression of lightning and ashes escalated until it permeated every fiber of his presence. Yet the focus of the energies was not skyward, toward cloud or rain, but down. The circle reached toward the core of the planet, seeking the lines of its magnetic fields.

  To gather those vast inhuman forces—and do what? Send them where?

  Hali. The Tower at Hali?

  The thought rang out in his mind like the clanging of bells.

  Hali ! Hali ! Hali!

  A surge of alertness answered him, a break in the concentration of the circle below. They had heard him.

  “Half-daemon! Spy!” Like sickly green fire, laran burst from the circle toward him. Reflexively, he threw himself back.

  No! I come as afriend!

  “Hold thair imyn!”

  The next lash of power, following a heartbeat after the first attack, spread out like a burning net. In horror, Varzil watched it speed toward him. The room twisted around him.

  The first of the tendrils touched him. It lanced through his astral form, as caustic as acid. Agony shocked through him. Breath burst from his lungs. His vision went white, then gray. He could not see the circle below him, not even the once-brilliant pulsations of the matrix nor his own ghostly form. He shriveled to a mote of pain, a mote that was moving, slowly and inexorably, downward. A maw of darkness gaped wide to swallow him.

  No!

  His mental cry sounded feeble and tinny, but at least he had a voice. He threw all his determination into the next outburst.

  “NO!”

  The echoes beat back the grayness. Dimly, he made out the circle, the dots of overshadowed light, the pallid walls. Power gathered below him, murky and swollen.

  Hali—I must warn them at Hali—

  Varzil pulled away, backward through the Tower walls. He glimpsed the mountains for an instant before they faded into mist. For a moment, he feared he had entered the Overworld, that strange realm of mind where neither time nor distance had any meaning. But no, there was no smooth gray footing, no unbroken colorless sky, no directionless watery light, none of the markers he remembered from his brief, guided introduction.

  He floated in a world of shifting vapors, curling faintly into eddies and currents ... like the cloud-waters of the lake.

  The Lake at Hali.

  Air, heavy with moisture brushed his skin, gaining substance with each passing instant. He felt the stomach-wrenching dislocation of time—

  No! 1 cannot go back, not yet! Not before I warn them!

  Hall. Though he had never been inside the ancient Tower, he pictured it in his mind just as he had seen it this morning, a tall slender structure, graceful and adamant. He knew the minds of those who now worked the relays at Hali, but he must not think of them now, least he be drawn even more firmly into the present.

  He must concentrate on Hali as it had once been, the age-smoothed stones newly cut, their edges sharp and clean, the translucent panels still fresh from their shaping. A lake of ordinary water skimmed by a morning breeze, motes of reflected light dancing in the sunlight. A city between lake and Tower, white like alabaster splashed with the brilliance of pennants and banners, arbors, gardens, bejeweled fountains. A city of peace and splendor like none he had ever seen, and everywhere the mark of laran workmanship, minds harnessed to create a paradise.

  The images came to him fresher and stronger now, with an urgency he could not contain. His inner senses came alert, resonating with the tension lying like an invisible pall over the Tower and all the lands around.

  Hali! The Tower! Surely there must be leronyn awake at this hour who could hear him, even unaided by relay screens.

  As his mind reached out in wordless greeting, he slammed against a mental wall so solid, the impact stunned him. Only the concerted action of a full circle could produce so complete a barrier. Not even a hint of presence escaped from within.

  Listen to me! He thre
w all his power into the silent cry. You are about to be attacked! Watch out! Prepare yourselves!

  For a long moment, he sensed no response. He might as well have been shouting at the wind. There were laran workers within, gathered in a circle, minds focused, of that he was certain. They had turned away from the outside world and armored themselves against intrusion. Perhaps they already knew of the imminent attack and were preparing for it.

  It came to him that the events which would create the present-day lake had already happened. His warnings must go unheeded because they already had gone unheeded. There was nothing he could do to change the past.

  How easy it would be to give himself over to that thought, to simply imagine himself back in his own place and time. These people were long dead. Why exert himself to save them when they must inevitably perish from age or disease, even if they escaped whatever monstrous weapon Aldaran was even now preparing.

  Even now ...

  Varzil could not turn away. He knew, and with knowledge came responsibility.

  Perhaps his own actions here had saved Hali and all its people from an even greater catastrophe. Perhaps he would have no effect. Whatever the outcome, he would still have his own conscience to deal with ... if he survived.

  He hovered above the lake, the clear waters kissed into the lightest ruffles by the morning breeze. Moment by moment, he sensed a pressure build in its cerulean depths. At first, there was no visible sign, yet he never doubted it.

  Pressure ... imminence ... The sense of something huge and terrible condensing. Forming, building. He had not realized how dark and cold the depths of the lake were.

  Cold ... but not the brittle burning cold of ice, the familiar cold of winter. It was a cold that no fire could warm. The lake, which had seemed so pleasant, now became a womb for something unspeakable, a thing beyond human imagining, conceived in Zandru’s frozen hells.

  The morning dimmed, all brightness quenched. The surface of the lake surged, turbulent, like a living thing writhing in the agonies of birth. The Tower itself called to it, summoned it, pulled it forth into day like an unholy midwife.