The Forbidden Circle

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Oh, Callista, forgive me! Oh, God, Callista, forgive me!” He fell to his knees before her, gathering up her small fingertips in his, pressing them to his lips in an agony of remorse. Damon came from the bath, standing appalled at the tableau, but neither of them heard or saw him. Slowly Callista laid her hands on either side of Andrew’s face. She said in a whisper, “Ah, love, it is I should ask you to forgive me. I do not want . . . I do not want to be indifferent to you.” Her voice was filled with such grief that Damon knew he could not wait any longer.

  He knew why he had gotten so drunk last night. It was because, with Midwinter past, he could no longer delay the ordeal. Now he must go into the overworld, into time itself, and search for help there, for a way to bring Callista back to them. Now, before her frantic grief, he felt he would risk more than this for her, for Andrew.

  Very quietly, he withdrew and went out of the suite the other way.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After Midwinter, surprisingly, the weather moderated and repairs from the great storm went forward rapidly. Within a tenday they were complete, and Andrew felt that he could leave everything in the hands of the coridom for some time.

  He thought he had never seen Damon as overwrought and irritable as during that morning, after Damon had isolated the suite with telepathic dampers and warned the servants not to approach them. Since Midwinter Damon had been edgy, silent, but now, as he adjusted the dampers, prowling around the suite nervously, they could all sense it. Callista finally broke into his nervous fretting with, “That’s enough, Damon! Lie down flat and breathe slowly. You can’t start like this, and you know it as well as I do. Get yourself calmed first. Do you want some kirian?”

  “I don’t want it,” said Damon irritably, “But I suppose I’d better have it. And I want a blanket or something. I always come back half frozen.”

  She gestured to Ellemir to cover him with a blanket and went for the kirian. “Taste it first. My distilling apparatus here isn’t as efficient as what I had at Arilinn, and there may be residues, though I filtered it twice.”

  “You can’t be worse at that sort of thing than I am,” Damon said and sniffed carefully, then laughed, remembering Callista doing almost the same thing with the crude tincture he had made. “Never mind, my dear, I don’t suppose we’ll poison one another.” He let her measure a careful dose, adding, “I don’t know what the time-distortion factor is, and you’ll have to stay in phase to monitor me. Hadn’t you better take some yourself?”

  She shook her head. “I have an awfully low tolerance for the stuff, Damon. If I took enough for phasing, I’d have serious trouble. I can key it with you without it.”

  “You’ll get awfully cramped and cold,” Damon warned, but he realized that after so many years as Keeper she probably knew her tolerances for the telepathic drug to the narrowest margin. She smiled, measuring her dose by a few drops. “I’m wearing an extra warm shawl. If I’m monitoring life functions, when do you want me to pull you out?”

  He didn’t know. He had no experience with the stresses of Timesearch. He had no idea what he might be called on to endure in the way of side effects. “Better not pull me back unless I go into convulsions.”

  “That far?” Callista felt a sharp stab of guilt. It was for her he was incurring this terrible risk, returning to this work he so feared and hated. They were already close in linkage. He laid a light hand on her wrist. “Not only for you, darling. For all of us. For the children.”

  And for the Keeper, the one who will come. Callista did not say the words aloud, but time had slipped out of focus, as it did sometimes for an Alton, and she saw herself from a great distance, here, elsewhere, standing knee-deep in a great field of flowers; looking down at a delicate girl lying unconscious before her; standing in the chapel at Armida before the statue of Cassilda, a wreath of crimson flowers in her hand. She laid the flowers on the altar, then she was back with them again, dizzied, flushed, exalted. She whispered, “Damon, you saw . . .”

  Andrew had seen too, all of them had seen, and he remembered Callista’s look of pity and grief as she removed Ellemir’s forgotten offering from the chapel. “Our women still lay flowers at her shrine. . . .” Damon said gently, “I saw, Callie. But it’s a long way from here to there, you know.”

  She wondered if Andrew would mind very much, then brought herself back, with firm discipline, to her work. “Let me check your breathing.” Lightly she passed her fingertips above his body. “Take the kirian now.”

  He swallowed, making a wry face. “Ugh! What did you flavor it with, horse piss?”

  “Nothing, you’ve forgotten the taste, that’s all. How many years since you took it? Lie back and stop clenching your hands; you’ll only knot your muscles and give yourself cramps.”

  Damon obeyed, looking around the three faces surrounding him: Callista, sober and commanding; Ellemir looking a little scared; Andrew, strong and calm, but he sensed with an undercurrent of dismay. But again his eyes came back to Callista’s confident face. He could absolutely rely on her, Arilinn-trained. His breathing, his life functions, his very life was in her hands, and he was content to have it there.

  Why must she renounce this, because she wanted to live in happiness, and bear children?

  Callista was bringing Ellemir and Andrew into the circle. He felt them slip into the rapport, meshing. Already he was adrift, floating, very distant. He looked at Ellemir as if she were transparent, thinking how much he loved her, how happy she was.

  Callista said quietly, “I’ll let you go as far as crisis, first stage, not as far as convulsions. That wouldn’t do you any good, nor any of us.”

  He didn’t bother to protest. She had been trained at Arilinn; it was her decision to make. Then he was in the overworld, sensing it as their landmark formed around him, a tower like Arilinn, less solid, less brilliant, not a beacon but a shelter, very remote, yet solid around him, a protection, a home here. For a moment, as he looked around the gray world and sheltered, delaying, within its walls, he found himself wondering with an absurd flippancy what the other telepaths who wandered in the gray world would think, to find a new tower there. Or would the others ever notice, ever come to this remote place where Damon and his group were working? Resolutely, he formed his thoughts to bear him swiftly to Arilinn, and found himself standing in the court before Leonie. He saw with relief that her face was veiled and her voice cool and remote, as if the moment of passion had never been.

  “We must first reach the level where motion through time is possible. Have you taken sufficient precaution to keep yourself monitored?” He felt that she was looking through him, to the overworld, to the world behind him where his body lay, Callista silently watching by his side. She looked oddly triumphant, but she said only, “You may be away for a very long time, and it will seem longer than it is. I will guide you as far as the Timesearch level, though I am not sure I will be able to stay there. But we must move through the levels, a little at a time. I usually try to think of it as a flight of steps,” she added, and he saw that the grayness around them had lifted enough to reveal a shadowy flight of steps, curving away upward and vanishing into thicker grayness above them, like fog shrouding a riverbed. He noted that the stairs had a gilt bannister, and wondered what staircase in Leonie’s childhood, perhaps in Castle Hastur, was revived here in her mental image.

  He knew perfectly well, as he set his foot on the first step behind Leonie, that in actuality only their minds moved through the formless atoms of the universe, but the firm visualization of the staircase felt reassuringly solid under his feet, and gave them a focal point for moving from level to level. Leonie knew this path and he was content to follow.

  The stairs were not steep, but as he climbed it seemed that he began to breathe more heavily, as if climbing in a mountain pass. The stairs still felt firm, even carpeted under foot, though his feet themselves, he knew, were only mental formulations. It became harder and harder to feel them, to lift them from step to step. The sta
irs felt fuzzier and dimmer, leading into thick gray fog just a little ahead of him. Leonie’s form was only a crimson-veiled wisp.

  The thick fog closed in. He could see a few inches of the staircase under his feet, but he was walking in grayness which made his body disappear. The grayness darkened into a blackness crisscrossed by racing blue lights.

  The level of energy-nets. Damon had worked on this level as a psi technician, and with a sharp effort he managed to solidify it, making it into a dark cavern with narrow lighted trails and footpaths leading upward through a maze of falling water. Leonie was dim and shadowy here, her robes colorless. He did not hear her now in words:

  Go carefully here. We are in the level of monitored matrices. They will watch us so that no harm comes to me. But follow closely, I know where matrix work is being done and we must not intrude.

  Silently Damon threaded his way along the blue-lighted paths. Once there was a burst of blue light, but Leonie’s thought reached him urgently:

  Turn away from it!

  And he knew that somewhere a matrix operation was under way, of such a delicate nature that even a random thought—“looking” at it—could throw it out of balance and endanger the mechanics. He visualized physically turning his back on the light, closing his eyes so that he could not see it even through his eyelids. It seemed a long time before Leonie’s thought-touch recalled him:

  It is safe to go on now.

  Again the staircase formulated beneath his feet, though he could not see it, and he began climbing. Only dogged concentration could now force the illusion of a physical body which could climb, and the stairs were like mist under his feet. His pulse began to labor as he struggled upward, and his breath came heavily. It was like climbing a mountain pass, like the steep rock-stairs leading upward to Nevarsin Monastery. He felt about in the thick darkness for the ice-rimed rail, felt it burn his fingers, but was grateful for the sensation. It helped him solidify the terrible, chaotic formlessness of this level. He had no idea how Leonie, who was untrained in climbing, was managing here, but he sensed her near him in the darkness, and knew she must have her own mental techniques for coping with the rising levels. His breath was thinning now, and he felt that his heart was pounding in acute, dizzy distress. He felt the vertigo of terrible height beneath him. He could not force himself to go on. He clung to the railing, feeling it numbing his hands with cold.

  I cannot go on, I cannot. I will die here.

  Slowly his breathing began to come more smoothly, his laboring heart calmed. He knew with the remotest consciousness that Callista had gone into phase with him, regulating his heart and breathing, Now he could struggle upward again, although the stairs were gone. As his sense of struggling upward and upward grew more intense he began, desperately, to formulate the memory of the cliff-climbing, ice-and-rock techniques he had learned as a boy at Nevarsin, as if he were dragging himself up rough-cut hand- and footholds, fixing imaginary ropes and pitons to help him haul his reluctant body upward. Then he lost his body again, and all track of levels and effort, moving only by fierce concentration from darkness to darkness. In one of them there were strange, formless cloud masses and he seemed to wallow through bogs of cold slime. In another there were presences everywhere, crowding him, thrusting their intangible shapelessness against him, crowding. . . . The very concept of form was lost. He could not remember what a body was, or what it felt like to have one. He was as shapeless, as everywhere-and-nowhere as they, whatever they were, everywhere interpenetrating. He felt sick and violated, but he struggled on, and after eternities this too was gone.

  Finally they reached a curious, thin darkness, and Leonie, close beside him in the nowhere spaces, said, but not in words:

  This is the level where we can slip loose of linear time. Try to think of moving along a river upstream. It will be easier if we find a single fixed place and move back from there. Help me find Arilinn.

  Damon thought Is Arilinn here too? and knew he was being absurd. Every place which physically existed must stretch upward through all the levels of the universe. Intangibly, a hand gripped his and Damon felt his own hand materializing where it might have been if, here, he had one. He focused his mind on Arilinn, saw a dim shadow and found himself in Leonie’s room there.

  Once, in his last year there, Leonie had collapsed inside the relays. He had carried her to her room and laid her on her bed. He had not at the time consciously noted a single detail of that chamber, yet he saw it now, dimly outlined on his mind and memory. . . .

  No, Damon! Avarra have pity, no!

  He had had no notion of calling up that forgotten day, no desire to remember—Zandru’s hells, no! The memory had been Leonie’s, and he knew it, but he accepted blame for it and sought a more neutral memory. In the matrix chamber at Arilinn he watched Callista, at thirteen, her hair still down her back. He guided her fingers gently, touching the nodes where the nerves surfaced against the skin. He could see the embroidered butterflies on the wrists of her smock; he had not noticed them then. Dimly, but with a realness which unnerved him—were these revived thoughts of years ago or was the present-day Callista remembering?—he saw that she was docile, but frightened of this stern man who had been her dead brother’s sworn friend but now seemed impassive, old, alienated, distant. A stranger, not the familiar kinsman.

  Was I so harsh with her, so distant? Were you frightened of me, Callie? Zandru’s hells, why are we so harsh with these children?

  Leonie’s hands touched him across Callista’s. How austere she had been, even then, how stern and lined her face had grown in a few years. But time swept backward and Callista was gone, had never been there. He stood before Leonie for the first time, a young psi monitor seeing for the first time the face of the Keeper of Arilinn. Evanda! How beautiful she had been! All Hastur women were beautiful, but she had the legendary beauty of Cassilda. He felt again the agony of first love, the despair of knowing it was hopeless, but time was still flowing backward with merciful swiftness. Damon lost awareness of his body, it had never existed, he was a dim dream in a dimmer darkness, seeing the faces of Keepers he had never known. (Surely that fair-haired woman was a Ridenow of his own clan.) He saw a monument built in the courtyard to honor Marelie Hastur, and knew with a spasm of terror that he was watching an event which had taken place three centuries before his own birth. He kept on, moving upstream, felt Leonie swept away from him, tried to fight his way to her. . . .

  I can go no further, Damon. The Gods guard you, kinsman.

  He reached for her in panic, but she was gone, would not be born for hundreds of years. He was alone, dazed, wearied, in a vast twinkling foggy darkness, only the shadow of Arilinn behind. Where can I go? I could wander forever through the Ages of Chaos and learn nothing.

  Neskaya. He knew that Neskaya was the center of the secret. He let Arilinn dissolve, felt himself move with thought to the Tower of Neskaya, outlined against the Kilghard Hills. It was like fording a cold mountain stream against a current which was trying to sweep him downstream to his own time. In the dim struggle he had almost lost track of his objective. Now, desperately, he reformed it: to find a Keeper in Neskaya before it was destroyed in the Ages of Chaos and then rebuilt. He struggled backward, backward, and saw Neskaya Tower lying in ruins, destroyed in the last of the great wars of that age, burned to ashes, the Keeper and all her circle slaughtered.

  It was there again, not the sturdy cobblestone structure he had seen rising behind the walls of Neskaya City, but a tall, luminous, dim-glowing tower of pallid blue stone. Neskaya! Neskaya in the ages of its glory, before the Comyn had fallen to the poor remnant of today. He felt himself shuddering somewhere at the knowledge that he saw what no living man or woman of his time had ever seen, the Tower of Neskaya in the heyday of the Comyn.

  A twinkling light began to dawn in the courtyard, and by its sparkle Damon saw a young man and remembered, in startlement and welcome, that he had seen this once before. He chose to interpret it as a sign. The young man was wearing
green and gold, with a great sparkling ring on his finger—ring or matrix? Surely that delicate face, the green and gold clothing of an ancient cut, marked the young man as a Ridenow? Yes, Damon had seen him before, though briefly. He felt himself formulate with a curious emotional sense of relief. He knew that the body he wore on this complicated astral level was only an image, the shadow of a shadow. He was briefly aware of his own body, cold, comatose, cramped, a gasping tormented piece of flesh unimaginably elsewhere. The body he wore here in the higher level was unfettered, calm, easy. After such exhausting eternities of formlessness, even the shadow of form was a release of tension, almost an explosion of pleasure. A solid weight, blood he could feel pulsing in his veins, eyes that could see. . . . The young man wavered, became firm. Yes, he was a Ridenow, a lot like Damon’s brother Kieran, the only brother Damon loved rather than tolerated with civility for their common blood.

  Damon felt a rush of love for the stranger, who must have been one of his own remote forebears. He wore a long loose golden robe, cinctured with green, and surveyed Damon with a calm, kindly stare. He said, “By your face and your garments you are surely one of my own clan. Do you wander in a dream, kinsman, or do you seek me from another Tower?”

  Damon said, “I am Damon Ridenow.” He began to say that he was not now a Tower worker, but it occurred to him that on this level time had no meaning. If all time co-existed—as it must—then the time when he had been psi technician was as real, as present, as the time when he lay in Armida, searching. “Damon Ridenow, Third in Arilinn Tower, technician by grade, under Wardship of Leonie of Arilinn, Lady Hastur.”

  The young man said gently, “Surely you dream, or you are mad, or astray in time, kinsman. All the Keepers from Nevarsin to Hali are known to me, and there is no Leonie among them, nor no Hastur woman.” He smiled, not unkindly. “Shall I dismiss you to your own place, cousin, and your own time? These levels are dangerous, and no mere technician can tread them in safety. You may return when you have won the strength of Keeper, cousin, and that you have come here now shows me you have already that strength. But I can send you to a level that is safe for you, and wish for you as much caution as you have courage.”