Again the matched resonances, the energy fields beginning to vibrate in consonance; again the attempt to reach out for Dezi, to remove the matrix physically from the magnetic field of his body. And again the shattering wrench as Dezi broke the resonances, thrust them apart with an explosion of pain cascading through them both.
Damon said compassionately, “Dezi, I know it’s hard.” Inwardly he thought that the boy could almost be a Keeper himself. Damon could not match resonances that way at his age! But then he had never been as desperate, either, nor as tormented. The breaking of resonances was obviously just as painful for Dezi as it was for Damon himself. “Try not to fight this time, my boy. I don’t want to hurt you.”
And then — they were open to one another — he felt Dezi’s thrusting contempt for his attempt at pity, and knew this was not a panic reaction at all. Dezi was simply putting up one hell of a fight! Perhaps he thought he could outfight Damon, wear him down. Damon left the room and came back with a telepathic damper, a curious gadget which broadcast a vibration that could damp out telepathic emanations within a broad range of frequencies. Grimly he thought of Domenic’s jest on the night he and Ellemir had been married. Such things were used, sometimes, to blur telepathic leakage, when there were others around, to protect privacy, to permit secret talk or prevent unwilling (or deliberate) telepathic eavesdropping. It was used sometimes in Comyn Council, or to protect others when there was an undeveloped, or uncontrolled, adolescent in psychic upheaval, before learning to control or focus powers. He saw Dezi’s face change, take on real panic through the defiance.
Tonelessly, he warned Andrew, “Get out of range if you want to. This might hurt. I’m going to have to use it to damp out any frequencies he tries to raise.”
Andrew shook his head. “I’ll stick.” Damon caught Andrew’s thought: I won’t leave you alone with him. Grateful for his friend’s loyalty, Damon knelt down and began to set up the damper.
Before long, he had tuned it to damp out Dezi’s assault on his consciousness. After that, it was simply a matter of matching his own resonances to Dezi’s physical field of vibration. This time when he stepped into the interlocking fields, the damper blocked out Dezi’s mental thrust to alter the frequencies, move him away. It was painful and hard to move under the damper, something he thought only a full-fledged Keeper could have done at all, with the damper full strength. It felt, physically, as if he were struggling through some thick, viscous fluid which dragged at his limbs and his brain. Dezi began to struggle like a mad thing as he came near. But it was hopeless, and he knew it. Dezi could exhaust himself with the effort to change frequencies, but he could not alter Damon’s now, and the more he managed to alter his own, the more the ultimate shock would hurt.
Gently Damon laid his hand on the small silk insulating bag around Dezi’s neck. His fingers fumbled to untie the thong. Dezi had begun to moan and struggle again, and his struggles, like a rabbit in a snare, wrenched at Damon with pity, even though the boy’s terror was barricaded now by the damper. He managed to get the bag open. The blue stone, pulsing, glowing with Dezi’s terror, fell into his fingers. As they closed over it, he felt the bone-cracking spasm within himself, saw Dezi slump as if felled by a crushing blow. He wondered wretchedly if he had killed the boy. He thrust the matrix within the field of the damper, saw it quiet down to a faint pulse, a resting rhythm. Dezi was unconscious, his head lolling to one side, froth on his bitten lips. Damon had to steel himself to remember Andrew, unconscious, in a deathly sleep in the snow, to think of Callista’s agony if she had awakened to find herself abandoned, or widowed by treachery, before he could harden himself to say “That’s done.”
He thrust the matrix for a few minutes under the damper, saw it fade to dimness, the faintest of pulsing lights. It was still alive, but it had been lowered in strength to where it could not be used for laran.
He cast a pitying look at Dezi, knowing he had blinded the boy. Dezi was worse off now than Damon was when they sent him for Arilinn. In spite of Dezi’s crime, Damon could not help feeling sorrow for the boy, so gifted, such a powerful telepath, potential higher than many now working in the screens and relays. Zandru’s hells, he thought, what a waste. And he had crippled him.
He said wearily, “Let’s finish this, Andrew. Hand me that lock-box, will you?”
He had gotten it from Dom Esteban, who had removed some small jewelry from it. As he thrust the matrix inside, closing the lid, he thought of the old fairy-tale: the giant kept his heart outside of his body, in the most secret place he could find, so that he could not be killed unless they, sought out his hidden heart. He explained briefly to Andrew as he fiddled with the small matrix lock on the box, thrusting his own against it. He said, “We can’t destroy the matrix; Dezi would die with it. But it is locked here with a matrix lock so nothing but my own matrix, attuned to this pattern, will ever open this box again.” The box locked, he put it into a store-room, came back and bent over Dezi, checking the boy’s breathing, his racing heart.
He would survive.
Mutilated… blinded… but he would survive. Damon knew he would rather have died, if it were he.
Damon straightened, listening to the quieting sound of the storm outside. He drew his dagger and cut the ropes binding the boy, thinking that it might be kinder to cut his throat. He wouldn’t want to live. Was his terrible struggle only a way of attempting suicide?
He sighed, laying some money in a purse beside the boy. He said heavily to Andrew, “Dom Esteban gave me this for him. He’ll probably go to Thendara, where Domenic promised him a cadet commission. He can’t do much harm there, working in the City Guards and he can make himself some kind of career. Domenic will look after him — there’s some sense of family loyalty, after all. Dezi won’t even have to confess what’s been done to him. He’ll be all right.”
Later, telling Ellemir what he had done, while Andrew watched over the still-sleeping Callista, he repeated it.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to live. When I stood over him with the dagger, to cut the ropes they had tied him with, I wondered if it would have been kinder to kill him. But I managed to live after they sent me from Arilinn. Dezi should have that chance too.” He sighed, remembering the day he had left Arilinn, blind with pain, dazed with the breaking of the bonds of the Tower circle, the closest bond known to those with laran, closer than kin, closer than the bond of lovers, closer than husband and wife…
“I got over wanting to die,” he said, “but it was a long time before I wanted to live again.” Holding Ellemir close, he thought: Not till I had you.
Ellemir’s eyes softened with tenderness, then, her mouth hardening, she said, “You should have killed him.”
Damon, thinking of the sleeping Callista, who had come, not knowing it, so close to death, thought this was merely bitterness. Andrew was her sister’s husband, she had been linked to him by matrix during the long search for Callista, and they had all come together in that brief, spontaneous, fourfold moment of sharing, before the frightening reflex Callista could not control had ripped them apart. Like Ellemir, Damon too had been linked to Andrew, feeling his strength and gentleness, his tenderness and passion… and this was the man Dezi had tried, out of spite, to kill. Dezi, who had himself been linked with Andrew when they healed the frostbite cases, knew him too, knew his quality and his goodness.
Ellemir repeated implacably, “You should have killed him.”
Not for months did Damon know that this was not merely bitterness, but precognition.
In the morning the storm had quieted, and Dezi, taking with him the money Damon had left at his side, his clothing and his saddle horse, had gone from Armida. Damon hoped, almost with guilt, that he would somehow manage to live, to find his way safely to Thendara where he would be under Domenic’s protection. Domenic, heir to Alton, was after all Dezi’s half brother. Damon was sure of it, now; no one not full Comyn could have put up a fight like that.
Domenic would look after him, he thought
. But it was like a weight on his heart, and it did not lift.
Chapter Ten
Andrew was dreaming…
He was wandering in the blizzard he could hear outside, flinging heavy snow and sleet, driven by enormous winds, around the heights of Armida. But he had never seen Armida. He was alone, wandering in a trackless, houseless, shelterless wilderness, as he had done when the mapping plane went down and abandoned him on a strange world. He was stumbling in the snow and the wind tore at his lungs and a voice whispered like an echo in his mind: There is nothing for you here.
And then he saw the girl.
And the voice in his mind whispered. This has all happened before. She was wearing a flimsy and torn nightdress, and he could see her pale flesh dimly through the rents in the gown, but it did not flutter or move in the raging winds that tore him, and her hair was unstir-ring in the raging storm. She was not there at all, she was a ghost, a dream, a girl who never was, and yet he knew, on another level of reality, she was Callista, she was his wife. Or had that been only a dream within a dream, dreamed while he was lying in the storm, and he would lie there and follow the dream until he died… ? He began to struggle, heard himself cry out…
And the blizzard was gone. He was lying in his own bedroom at Armida. The storm was raging and dying away outside, but the bedroom fire had burned to dim coals. By its light he could dimly see Callista — or was it Ellemir, who had slept at her side ever since the night when the psi reflex she could not control had blasted them both down, in the midst of their love?
For the first few days after Dezi’s attempted murder he had done little except sleep, suffering from the aftereffects of mild concussion, shock, and explosure. He touched the unhealed cut on his forehead. Damon bad taken out the stitches a day or two ago, and the edges were beginning to scab cleanly. There would be a small scar. He needed no scar to remind him of how he had been torn from Callista’s arms, a force like lightning striking through her body. He recalled that it used to be a favorite form of torture, in the old days on Terra, an electrode to the genitals. It hadn’t been Callista’s fault though, the shock of knowing what she had done had nearly killed her too.
She was still abed, and it seemed to Andrew that she grew no better. Damon, he knew, was worried about her. He dosed her with odd-smelling herbal potions, discussing her condition at length in words of which Andrew understood perhaps one in ten. He felt like the fifth leg on a horse. And even when he began to mend, to want to be out and about, he could not even lose himself in the normally heavy work of the horse ranch. With the blizzard season, all had come to a dead halt. A handful of servants, using underground tunnels, tended the saddle horses and the dairy animals which provided milk for the household. A handful of gardeners cared for the greenhouses. Andrew was nominally in charge of all these, but there was nothing for him to do.
Without Callista, he knew, there was really nothing to hold him here, and he had not been alone with Callista for a moment since the fiasco. Damon had insisted that Ellemir sleep at her side, that she must never, even in sleep, be allowed to feel herself alone, and that her twin was better for this purpose than any other.
Ellemir had nursed her tirelessly, night and day. On one level Andrew was grateful for Ellemir’s tender care, there being so little he could do for Callista now. But at the same time he resented it, resented his isolation from his wife, the way in which it emphasized the fragility of the thread that bound him to Callista.
He would have cared for her, nursed her, lifted her… but they would never leave him alone with her for a moment, and this too, he resented. Did they really think that if they left Callista alone, Andrew would fall on her again like a wild animal, that he would rape her? Damn it to hell, he thought, it was more likely that he was always going to be scared to touch her even with a fingertip. I just wanted to be with her. They told him she needed to know that he still loved her, and then they acted as if they didn’t dare leave them together for a minute…
Realizing that he was merely going over and over, obsessionally, frustrations about which he could do nothing, he turned over restlessly and tried to sleep again. He heard Ellemir’s quiet breathing, and Callista’s restless sigh as she turned over. He reached for her with his thoughts, felt the touch dimly on his mind. She was deep asleep, drugged with another of Damon’s or Ferrika’s herb medicines. He wished he knew just what they were giving her, and why. He trusted Damon, but he wished Damon would trust him a little more.
And Ellemir’s presence too was a low-keyed irritation, so like her twin, but healthy and rosy where Callista was pale and ill… Callista as she should have been. Pregnancy, even though frustrated so soon, had softened her body, emphasizing the contrast to Callista’s sharp thinness. Damn it, he shouldn’t think about Ellemir. She was his wife’s sister, his best friend’s wife, the one woman of all women forbidden to him. Besides, she was a telepath, she’d be picking up the thought, and it would embarrass hell out of her. Damon had told him once that among a telepathic family a lustful thought was the psychological equivalent of rape. He didn’t care a damn about Ellemir — she was just his sister-in-law — it was just that she made him think of Callista as she might be if she were healthy and well and free of the grip of the for-ever-be-damned Tower.
She was so gentle with him…
After a long time he drifted off to sleep and began to dream again.
He was in the little herdsman’s shelter where Callista, moving through the overworld, the world of thought and illusion, had led him through the blizzard, after the crash of the plane. No, it was not the herdsman’s shelter; it was the strange illusory walled structure that Damon had built up in their minds, not real except in their visualization, but having its own solidity in the realm of thought, so he could see the very bricks and stones of it. He woke, as he had done then, in dim light, to see the girl lying beside him, a shadowy form, stilled, sleeping. As he had done then, he reached for her, only to find that she was not there at all, that she was not on this plane at all, but that her form, through the overworld, which she had explained as the energy-net double of the real world, had come to him through space and perhaps time as well, taking shape to mock him. But she had not mocked him.
She looked at him with a grave smile, as she had done then, and said with a glimmer of mischief, “Ah, this is sad. The first time, the very first time, I lie down with any man, and I am not able to enjoy it.”
“But you are here with me now, beloved,” he whispered, and reached for her, and this time she was there in his arms, warm and loving, raising her mouth for his kiss, pressing herself to him with shy eagerness, as once she had done, but only for a moment.
“Doesn’t this prove to you that it is time, love?” He drew her against him, and their lips met, their bodies molded one to the other. He felt again all the ache and urgency of need, but he was afraid. There was some reason why he must not touch her… and suddenly, at the moment of tension and fear, she smiled up at him and it was Ellemir in his arms, so like and so unlike her twin.
He said “No!” and drew away from her, but her hands, small and strong, drew him down close to her. She smiled at him and said, “I told Callista to tell you that I am willing, as it was told in the ballad of Hastur and Cassilda.” He looked around, and he could see Callista, looking at them and smiling…
And he woke with a start of shock and shame, sitting up in bed and staring wildly around to reassure himself that nothing had happened, nothing. It was daylight, and Ellemir, with a sleepy yawn, slid from the bed, standing there in her thin nightgown. Andrew quickly looked away from her.
She did not even notice — he was not a man to her at all — but would continue to walk around in front of him half dressed or undressed, keeping him continually on edge with a low-keyed frustration that was not really sexual at all… He reminded himself that he was on their world, and it was for him to get used to their customs, not force his own on them. It was only his own state of frustration, and the shaming reali
sm of the dream, which made him almost painfully aware of her. But as the thought clarified in his mind, she turned slowly and looked full at him. Her eyes were grave, but she smiled, and suddenly he remembered the dream, and knew that she had shared it somehow, that his thoughts, his desire, had woven into her dreams.
What the hell kind of man am I, anyhow? My wife’s lying there sick enough to die, and I’m going around with a lech for her twin sister.… He tried to turn away, hoping Ellemir would not pick up the thought. My best friend’s wife.
Yet the memory of the words in the dream hung in his mind: I told Callista to tell you that I am willing.…
She smiled at him, but she looked troubled. He felt that he ought to blurt out an apology for his thoughts. Instead she said, very gently, “It’s all right, Andrew.” For a moment he could not believe that she had actually spoken the words aloud. He blinked, but before he thought what to say, she had gathered up her clothes and gone away into the bath.
He went quietly to the window and looked at the dying storm. As far as he could see, everything lay white, faintly reddened with the light of the great red sun, peering faintly through the stained edges of the clouds. The winds had whipped the snow into ice-cream ridges, lying like waves of some hard white ocean, sweeping back all the way to the distant blurring hills. It seemed to Andrew that the weather reflected his mood: gray, bleak, insufferable.
How fragile a tie, after all, bound him to Callista! And yet he knew he could never go back. He had discovered too many depths within himself, too many alien strangenesses. The old Carr, the Andrew Carr of the Terran Empire, had wholly ceased to exist on that faraway day when Damon placed them all in rapport through the matrix. He closed his fingers on it, hard and chill in the little insulated bag around his neck, and knew it was a Darkovan gesture, one he had seen Damon make a hundred times. In that automatic gesture, he knew again the strangeness of his new world.
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