They kept on waiting, so he braced himself and stepped through the trembling rainbow.
It felt faintly electric, like a thousand pins and needles, as if his whole body were a foot that had gone to sleep, and when he looked back he could not see the others except as the vaguest of shadows. Suddenly he began to shake; had this all been an elaborate build-up to some kind of trap? He stood alone in a tiny windowless cubicle, a cul-de-sac, only the rainbow behind him showing the faintest of lights.
Then Taniquel stepped through the rainbow shimmer, Auster and Kennard following. Kerwin let out a sigh of foolish relief… if they’d meant him any harm, they wouldn’t have had to bring him this far!
Taniquel made signals with her fingers, not unlike those Auster had used controlling the aircraft, and the cubicle shot upward, with such suddenness that Kerwin swayed and almost fell again. It shivered and stopped and they stepped out through another open archway into a lighted room that opened, in turn, on a broad terrace.
The room was huge, rising to echoing space, yet paradoxically gave an impression of warmth and intimacy. The floor was laid with old tiles worn uneven, as if they had seen many feet walking on them. At the far end of the room was a fire that smelled of fragrant smoke and incense, and something furry and dark and not human crouched there, doing something to the fire with a long, oddly-shaped bellows. As Kerwin came in, it turned large pupilless green eyes on him, fixing him with an intelligent stare of question.
To the right of the fire was a heavy carven table of some glossy wood, a few scattered armchairs, and a big dais or divan covered with heaps of cushions. Tapestries hung on the walls. A middle-aged woman rose out of one of the chairs and came toward them. She stopped a step away from Kerwin, regarding him with cool, intelligent grey eyes.
“The barbarian,” she said. “Well, he looks it, with blood on his face. Any more fighting, Auster, and you can go back to the Nevarsin House of Penitence for a full season.” She added, considering, “In winter.”
Her voice was husky and harsh; there was grey liberally salted in hair that had once been gingery red. Her body was thick and compact beneath the heavy layers of skirts and shawls she wore, but was too sturdy to look fat. Her face was humorous and intelligent, wrinkled around the eyes.
“Well, what name did the Terranan give you?”
Kerwin told the woman his name, and she repeated it, her lip curling slightly.
“Jeff Kerwin. I suppose that was to be expected. My name is Mesyr Aillard, and I am your very remote cousin. Don’t think I’m proud of the relationship. I’m not.”
Among telepaths, polite social lies would be meaningless. Don’t judge their manners by Terran standards. Kerwin thought that in spite of her rudeness, there was something about this hearty old lady that he rather liked. He only said courteously, “Perhaps, one day, I can change your mind, Mother.” He used the Darkovan word that meant, not precisely mother, nor yet foster-mother, but a general term for any female relative of a mother’s generation.
“Oh, you can call me Mesyr,” she snapped. “I’m not that old! And close your face, Auster, the hole in it would swallow a banshee! He hasn’t the faintest notion that he’s being offensive, he doesn’t know our customs, how would he?”
“If I have given offense when I intended courtesy— ” Kerwin began.
“At that you call me Mother if you want to,” Mesyr said. “I never go near the screens any more, not since my cub Corus was old enough to work in them; that much of a taboo I still observe. My son, Corus; what do we call you, Jefferson— ” She stumbled a little over the name. “Jeff?”
A long-limbed youngster in his teens came and gave Kerwin his hand, as if it were a formal act of defiance. He grinned quirkily in a way that reminded Kerwin of Taniquel and said, “Corus Ridenow. Have you been off-world, in space?”
“Four times. Three other planets, including Terra itself.”
“Sounds interesting,” Corus said, almost wistfully. “I’ve never been further than Nevarsin, myself.”
Mesyr scowled at Corus and said, “This is Rannirl. Our technician.”
Rannirl was about Kerwin’s own age, a thin, tall competent-looking fellow with a shadow of red beard, and heavy callused muscular hands. He did not offer to shake hands with Jeff, but bowed formally and said, “So they found you. I didn’t expect it, and I didn’t expect you could make it through the Veil. Kennard, I owe you four bottles of Ravnet wine.”
Kennard said with a cordial grin, “We’ll drink it together next holiday—all of us. I believe you made a wager with Elorie, too? Your passion for a bet will ruin you some day, my friend. And where is Elorie? She should be on hand to claim the hawk she wagered, if nothing more.”
“She will be down in a few minutes,” said a tall woman, whom Kerwin decided to be about Mesyr’s age. “I am Neyrissa.” She was redheaded, too, red glints on rusty-brown hair, tall and angular and plain, but she met Jeff’s eyes with a quick, direct stare. She didn’t look friendly, but she wasn’t hostile, either. “Are you going to be working as monitor here? I don’t like to work outside the circle, it’s a waste of my time.”
“We haven’t tested him yet, Rissa,” Kennard said, but the older woman shrugged.
“He has red hair, and he made it through the Veil without being hurt, and that’s enough test for me; he’s Comyn,” she said. “But I suppose you have to find out which donas he has. Cassilda grant he’s Alton or Ardais, we need the power of that. We’re overbalanced on Ridenow gifts—”
“I resent that,” said Taniquel gaily. “Are you going to stand there and let her say that, Corus?”
The teenager laughed and said, “In these days we can’t afford to be choosy; that’s what this is all about, isn’t it, that we can’t find enough people to work at Arilinn? If he has Cleindori’s talents, that’s splendid, but don’t forget he has Ridenow blood, too.”
“We won’t know for a while whether he will make monitor or mechanic, or even a technician,” Kennard said. “That will be for Elorie to say. Here’s Elorie now.”
They turned to the door; and then Kerwin realized that the silence in the room was his own imagination, for Mesyr and Rannirl and Neyrissa were still talking, and only in his own mind did a silence move around the girl who stood framed in the doorway. In that instant, as her grey eyes lifted to his, he recognized the face he had seen in the matrix crystal.
She was small and delicately made, and Kerwin realized that she was very young; perhaps even younger than Taniquel. Copper hair, sunrise gold, lay in straight pale strands around her sun-browned cheeks. Her dress was a formal robe of heavy crimson, pinned at the shoulders with clasps of heavy metal; dress and clasps seemed too weighty for her slenderness, as if the slim shoulders drooped under their burden; a child burdened with the robes of a princess or a priestess. She had the long-legged walk of a child, too, and a child’s full sulky underlip, and. her eyes, framed in long lashes, were grey and dreamy.
She said, “This is my barbarian, I suppose?”
“Yours?” Taniquel lifted her eyebrows at the girl in the crimson robe and giggled, and the grey-eyed girl said in her soft light voice, “Mine.”
“Don’t fight over me,” Kerwin said. He couldn’t help feeling a little amused.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Auster snarled. Elorie raised her head and gave Auster one sharp, direct look, and to Kerwin’s astonishment Auster lowered his head like a whipped dog.
Taniquel looked at Kerwin with that special smile —it was, Kerwin thought, as if they shared some secret—and said, “And this is our Keeper, Elorie of Arilinn. And now that’s really all of us, so you can sit down and have something to eat and drink and recover your wits a little. I know this has been a long night, and hard for you.”
Kerwin accepted the drink she put into his hand. Kennard lifted his glass to Kerwin and said, with a smile, “Welcome home, my lad.” The others joined in, gathering around him, Taniquel with her kittenish grin, Corus with that odd mixture of c
uriosity and diffidence, Rannirl with a reserved, yet friendly smile, Neyrissa openly studying and appraising him. Only Elorie neither spoke nor smiled, giving Kerwin a grave direct glance over the rim of her goblet, then lowering her eyes. But he felt as if she, too, had said, “Welcome home.”
Mesyr set her glass down firmly.
“That’s that. And now, since we all stayed up all night to see whether they’d be able to get you back safely, I suggest we all get to bed and have some sleep.”
Elorie rubbed her eyes with childish doubled fists and yawned. Auster moved to Elorie’s side and said angrily, “You’ve exhausted yourself again! For him,” he added, with a furious glance at Kerwin. He went on speaking, but he had switched to a language Kerwin couldn’t understand.
“Come along,” Mesyr said, jerking her head at Kerwin. “I’ll take you upstairs and find you a room. Explanations can come later, when we’ve all had some sleep.”
One of the nonhumans went before them, bearing a light, as Mesyr led the way through a wide echoing hallway, up a long flight of mosaic stairs.
“One thing we’re not short of is houseroom,” she said. “So if you don’t like this one, look around and find one that’s empty and move into it. This place was built to hold twenty or thirty, they used to have three complete circles here, each with its own Keeper, and there are eight of us—nine, with you. Which, of course, is why you’re here. One of the kyni will bring you anything you want to eat, and if you need someone to help you dress, or anything like that, ask it for help. I’m sorry we have no human servants, but they can’t come through the Veil.”
Before he could ask any more questions, Mesyr said, “I’ll see you at sunset. I’ll send someone to show you the way,” and went away. Kerwin stood and looked around the room.
It was huge and luxurious, not just a room but a suite of rooms. The furnishings were old, and the hangings on the walls were faded. In an inner room was a great bed on a dais; the prints of generations of feet had worn depressions in the tiles, but the bedding was fresh and white and smelled faintly of incense. There were some old books and scrolls on shelves, and a couple of musical instruments on a shelf. Kerwin wondered who had last lived in this room, and how long ago. The little furry nonhuman was opening curtains to let in the light in the outer room, closing them to shade the inner room, turning down the bed. Exploring the suite, Kerwin found a bath of almost sybaritic luxury, with a sunken tub deep enough to swim in; and other fixtures to match, alien-looking, but, he discovered, provided with everything a human could want and a few things he wouldn’t have thought of for himself. There were a few small, carved ivory-and-silver jars on a shelf; curiously he opened one. It was empty, except for a little dried, resinous paste at the bottom. Cosmetic or perfume, a ghost of some long-dead Comyn leronis who had once inhabited these rooms. Was the room filled with ghosts? The perfume stabbed another of those half-memories buried in his mind; he supposed he must have smelled it when he was very young, and he stood very still, fumbling for the memory; but it eluded him… he shook his head resolutely, closed the jar. The memory receded, a dream within a dream.
He went back into the sitting-room of the suite. A painting hung there—a slender copper-haired woman struggling in the grip of a demon. Kerwin’s childhood memories of Darkovan legend identified the mythical figures, the ravishment of Camilla by the demon Zandru. There were other paintings from Darkovan legend; he recognized some from the Ballad of Hastur and Cassilda, the legendary Cassilda at her golden loom, bending over the unconscious form of the Son of Light on the shores of Hali, Camilla bringing cherries and fruits to him, Cassilda with a starflower in her hand, Alar at his forge, Alar chained in hell with the she-wolf gnawing at his heart, Sharra rising in flames… Camilla pierced with the shadow-sword. Vaguely he remembered that the Comyn claimed to be descended from the mythical Hastur, Son of Light. He wondered what the God of the legends had to do with the present-day Hasturs of the Comyn. But he was too tired to wonder for long, or ask any more questions. He went and threw off his clothes and crawled into the big bed, and after a time he fell asleep.
When he woke the sun was declining, and one of the soft-footed nonhumans was moving around in the bathroom, drawing water from which came a faint perfume. Remembering what Mesyr had said about a meeting at sunset, Kerwin bathed, shaved, ate some of the food the nonhuman brought him. But when the furry creature gestured toward the bed, where he had laid out some Darkovan clothing, Kerwin shook his head and dressed in the dark uniform of Terran Civil Service. He was sourly amused at himself. Among Terrans he felt a need to emphasize his Darkovan blood, but here he felt a sudden compulsion not to deny his Terran heritage. He wasn’t ashamed of being the son of a Terran, whatever Auster said, and if they wanted to call him barbarian, well, let them!
Without a knock, or the slightest word of warning, the girl Elorie came into his room. Kerwin started, taken aback by the intrusion; if she’d come in two minutes earlier, she’d have caught him in his bare skin! Even though he was dressed, except for his boots, it disconcerted him!
“Barbarian,” she said with a low laugh. “Of course I knew! I’m a telepath, remember?”
Flushing to the roots of his hair, Kerwin put his foot into his other shoe. Obviously the conventions of life in a group of telepaths wouldn’t be what he was accustomed to.
“Kennard was afraid you’d get lost, trying to come down to the big hall; and I told him I’d come and show you the way.”
Elorie was no longer wearing the heavy formal robe, but a filmy gown, embroidered with sprays of starflowers and bunches of cherries. She was standing just beneath one of the legendary paintings, and the resemblance was immediately apparent. He looked from the painting to the girl and asked, “Did you sit for your portrait?”
She glanced up indifferently. “No; that was my great-great-grandmother,” she said. “The women of the Comyn, a few generations ago, had a passion for being painted as mythological characters. I copied the dress from the painting, though. Come along.”
She wasn’t being very friendly, or even very polite; but she did seem to take him for granted, as they all had done.
At the end of the hallway, about to lead the way down a flight of long stairs, Elorie paused and went to a window where a deep embrasure in the wall looked over a sunset landscape.
“Look,” she said, and pointed. “From here you can see just the tip of the mountain peak at Thendara —if your eyes are trained to look. There is another Comyn Tower there. Though most of them are empty now.“
Kerwin strained his eyes but could see only plains and the faraway foothills dying into bluish haze. He said, “I’m still confused. I don’t really know what the Comyn is, or what the Towers are, or what a Keeper is—aside,” he added, smiling—“from being a very beautiful woman.”
Elorie simply looked at him, and before the direct, leveled stare, Kerwin lowered his own eyes; she made him feel that the compliment had been both rude and intrusive.
Then she said, “It would be easier to explain what we do than what we are. What we are… There are so many legends, old superstitions, and somehow we have to live up to them all…” She looked into the distance for a moment, then she said, “A Keeper, basically, works in the central position, centerpolar if you wish, of a circle of matrix technicians. The Keeper—” A faint frown appeared between Elorie’s pale eyebrows, as she obviously considered how to put it into words he could understand. “A Keeper is, technically, no more than a specially trained matrix worker who can gather up all of her circle of telepaths into a single unit, act as a kind of central coordinator to make the mental linkages. The Keeper is always a woman. We spend our entire childhood training for it, and sometimes—” She turned to the window, looking out over the mountains—“We lose our powers after only a few years. Or give them up of our own accord.”
“Lose them? Give them up? I don’t understand,” Kerwin said, but Elorie only shrugged slightly and did not answer. Kerwin was not to know until a long
time later just how much Elorie overestimated his telepathic abilities. She had never in her life known any man, or for that matter anyone at all, who could not read at such close quarters any thought she chose. Kerwin knew nothing, as yet, of the fantastic seclusion in which the young Keepers lived.
At last she went on. “The Keeper is always a woman—not since the Ages of Chaos have men lawfully worked as Keeper. The others—monitors, mechanics, technicians—can be men or women. Although in these days it is easier to find men for the work. But not very easy, even then. I hope that you will accept me as Keeper and that you will be able to work very closely with me.”
“That sounds like nice work,” Kerwin said, looking appreciatively at the lovely girl before him. Elorie whirled and stared at him, her mouth wide open in disbelief. Then, her eyes blazing, her cheeks aflame, she said, “Stop it! Stop it! There was a day on Darkover, you barbarian, when I could have had you killed for looking at me like that!”
Kerwin, dismayed and amazed, backed away a step. He said, feeling numb, “Take it easy, miss— Miss Elorie! I didn’t mean to say anything to offend you. I’m sorry— ” he shook his head, not comprehending—“but remember, if I offended you, I haven’t the slightest idea how, or why!”
Her hands gripped on the rail, so hard that he could see the white knobs of her knuckles. They looked so frail, those white hands, narrow, with delicate tapered fingers. After a moment of silence, a long moment that stretched, she let go of the rail, tossing her head with a little impatient movement.
She said, “I had forgotten. I heard you insulted Mesyr, too, without the slightest idea that you had done so. If Kennard is to stand as your foster-father here, he had better teach you something of elementary courtesy! Enough of that, then. You said you didn’t even know what the Comyn were—”
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