The Saga of the Renunciates

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Magda ignored Lexie’s rudeness. From around her neck, she took her matrix stone, carefully unwrapping the layers of shielding. She rolled the blue stone, hidden fires flashing from its depth, out into her palm. Lexie’s eyes followed the moving colors in the jewel.

  “Pretty,” she said in her babytalk voice. “Can I see it?”

  “In a minute, perhaps. But you must not touch it, or you might be hurt.” For an out-of-phase person, particularly a nontelepath, to touch a keyed matrix could produce a serious and painful shock; worse, it could throw the operator of the matrix, keyed to the stone, into shock that could be fatal. She held the psi-sensitive crystal away from Lexie’s childishly grasping fingers and said, “Look into the stone, Lexie.”

  Lexie twisted her face away. “Makes my head ache.”

  That was normal enough. Few untrained persons could endure to look into a keyed matrix, and Lexie’s psi potential was evidently very slight. Magda realized she should at least have asked for a look at Personnel Records on Lieutenant Alexis Anders, to know her determined level of psi ability. They did test Terrans for such things now. It would have been useful to know.

  But they had not, and there was no way to do it now. She held the matrix before Lexie’s eyes. “I want you to look into the stone, so that we can see what is the matter with you, and why you are in the hospital here.” Magda spoke deliberately, her voice friendly but firm. Lexie pouted like a child, but under Magda’s commanding voice and posture, finally fixed her eyes on the shifting colors of the stone.

  Magda watched until her face relaxed. She was not sure how an ordinary psi-tech would handle this, but for the best part of seven years she had been intensively trained in the uses of a matrix. The words of the Monitor’s Oath, demanded of any telepath soon after being entrusted with a matrix, briefly resonated in her mind: Enter no mind save to help or heal, and never for power over any being.

  Then she made contact, briefly, with Lexie Anders’s mind.

  On the surface, it was a jumble, a confused child not knowing what had happened. On a deeper level, something shivered and quaked, not wanting to know. Gently Magda touched the child-mind (a hand confidingly tucked into hers, as a little girl holds the hand of an older sister; she let the warmth linger for a moment, wanting Lexie to trust her).

  Who are you? It’s scary, I can’t remember.

  I’m your friend, Lexie. I won’t let anyone hurt you. You’re a big girl now. You wanted to fly a plane, remember? Let’s go, let’s find the plane. The first time your hands touched the controls. Look at the plane. The controls are under your hands. Where are you, Lexie?

  The young woman’s hands curved reminiscently as if over the controls she had mastered…

  Abruptly the childish plaintive voice lisping the dialect of Vainwal changed; became crisp, accurate, Terran Standard spoken with the precision of those to whom it was an acquired second language.

  “Anders, Alexis, Cadet Recruit, reporting as ordered, Ma’am.”

  It was no use to try to bring her along with verbal commands. Simple hypnotic suggestion would have brought a less traumatized subject to present time; but Magda had already seen how Lexie’s conscious intellect and even the unconscious mind refused the level of mere suggestion. With the matrix, Magda could bypass that resistance. Again she slipped into the younger woman’s mind, seeking the child who had walked with her hand in hand, trustingly.

  Lieutenant Anders. When did you get your promotion?

  A tenday after I was moved to Cottman Four. I decided to move over to Mapping and Exploring.

  Magda was prepared to ask, directly in Lexie’s mind, why the younger woman had made the transfer application. Surely Cholayna had done her, Magda, a monstrous injustice when she had spoken of the Lorne legend and the inability of Lexie to compete with the more famous older woman. But she stopped herself. Was this truly relevant to Lexie’s problem, or was she, Magda, simply indulging a desire to explain and justify herself? Gently she re-established the rapport; but the childish acceptance was gone. She regretted it, regretted the image of the little sister walking beside her, hand in hand.

  Tell me about your work in Mapping and Exploring, Lieutenant. Do you like your work?

  Yes. 1 love it. I can work alone and nobody bothers me. I didn’t like it in Intelligence. There were too many women. I don’t like women. I don’t trust them. Always ready to stab you in the back. You can trust a plane. Does what you tell it to, and if anything goes wrong it’s your own damn fault. Her face was almost animated.

  Slowly, carefully, Magda insinuated herself into Lexie’s memory. This was not ordinary amnesia, where selectively the mind chooses to reject an intolerable burden. It was total rejection. Magda’s mind intertwined with Lexie’s; she had never held the controls of a plane, large or small, but now her hands covered Lexie’s and she shared the full-round vision to all points of the compass, the frozen mountains spread below, the precise definiteness of every motion and idea. She was moving farther north, she was about to set a record if the damned plane would cooperate. Her skill was such that the maddening surges of crosswinds and updrafts only bounced her a little where any other pilot would have been battered. Then—

  Lexie Anders screamed and sat bolt upright in bed. Magda, knocked out of the rapport, stood staring, her eyes wide.

  “I crashed,” Lexie said, in her most precise Terran Standard. “The last thing I remember was going down. And then I was here, at the HQ gates. Hellfire, Lorne, are you involved in Medic too? Isn’t there any pie on this whole planet you don’t have your fingers into?”

  “So what did you tell them?” Camilla asked at last.

  “I didn’t have any reasonable explanation,” Magda said. “I grasped at the usual straws. I told Cholayna that it was just possible that when the plane went down, Anders developed a sudden surge of previously unguessed-at psi-potential, and teleported herself back here. It’s not at all unheard-of, under life-and-death threat like that, to find someone doing something they’d never have believed a remote possibility. I did something like that once, myself—not physically but mentally.”

  She and Jaelle, in a cave on a hillside, with Jaelle desperately ill, after miscarrying Peter Haldane’s child. Escape had seemed impossible. Somehow, she never knew how, she had reached out and touched rescue— had called for help and had, somehow, been answered.

  “That kind of thing doesn’t show up in test labs because you can’t fool the subconscious mind; hypnosis, or what-have-you, may make their conscious mind think they’re in danger, but down underneath, they know perfectly well there’s no real threat.” She sighed, thinking of how, for a brief time, she had actually liked the child Lexie had been.

  “But you don’t believe that explanation,” Camilla said.

  “Camilla, I knew it was a lie when I said it.”

  “But why should you lie? What had really happened to Lexie Anders?”

  Before she answered, Magda reached for Camilla’s hand. She said, “My fourth night in this house, my very first Training Session as a Renunciate, do you remember? That same night there was a meeting of a society called the Sisterhood. Do you remember that I lost track of what you asked me, and you scolded and bullied me for not paying attention to what was going on?”

  “Not particularly,” Camilla said. “Why? And what has the Sisterhood to do with Lexie Anders?” She reached across the bench and picked up her cold tea, sipping at it.

  Magda said, “Let me make you a fresh cup,” took both mugs, and poured the tea. She went to refill the kettle.

  At last, knowing she was delaying, she said, “During that meeting, I saw—something. I didn’t know then what to call it, I thought it was a—a thought-form of the Goddess Avarra. Of course, at the time, I thought I was hallucinating, that it wasn’t really there.”

  Camilla said, “I have seen it too, during meetings of the Sisterhood. You know that the Renunciates were formed from two societies: the Sisterhood of the Sword, who were a soldier-caste,
and the priestesses of Avarra, who were healers. I believe the Sisterhood invokes Avarra in their meetings. Again—what have their religious practices to do with Lexie Anders?”

  Magda stood braced against the table, leaning on her fists. Her face was drawn and distant, remembering. She said, and it was no more than a whisper of horror, “Twice more, I saw—something. Not the Goddess Avarra. Robed figures. A whisper of—of a sound like crows calling. Once I asked: Who are you?”

  Camilla asked, her voice dropping in response to the frozen dread in Magda’s, “Did they—was there any answer?”

  “None that made any sense to me. I seemed to hear—not quite to hear, to sense—the words, The Dark Sisterhood. Something—” Magda wrinkled up her face, tensely; it was tenuous, like trying to remember a dream in daylight. “Only that they were guardians of some sort, but couldn’t interfere. And just as I was about to reach the point where Lexie relived and remembered the crash, I saw that. Again.”

  Her throat closed, her voice was reduced to a thready whisper. “Walls. A city. Robed figures. Then the sound of crows calling. And nothing. After that—nothing.”

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  Camilla turned away and banked the fire. She felt carefully about the legs of Magda’s breeches to see if they were dry.

  “Leave them for a few minutes more,” she said.

  “Camilla! You know something of the Sisterhood; what are they?”

  Camilla was still fussing with the half-dried clothing.

  “If I knew,” she said, “I would be like Marisela— sworn to secrecy. Why do you think those people don’t make it, whatever it is that they know, part of the regular Training sessions? Secrets, bah! Once Marisela tried to get me to join them. When I would not, she was very annoyed with me. Weren’t you angry when Lexie refused to join the Penta Cori’yo?

  That was different, Magda thought, even though she could not define how. She was not accustomed to defending herself against Camilla, not anymore.

  “You don’t like Marisela?”

  “Certainly I like her. But I refused to make her the keeper of my conscience and of course she has never forgiven me for that. But when first she insisted I should join them, she did tell me something of the original purposes of the Sisterhood. Most of it is what you would expect from the Oath, the usual business about women as sisters, Men dia pre’ zhiuro, sister and mother and daughter to all women—but there is more; it is to give teaching in laran to those who were not born Comyn and thus are not eligible for training in the ordinary Towers. She even tried to frighten me— threatened me with all kinds of dreadful consequences if I was not willing to swallow her kind of medicine for my ills. ”

  “That does not sound like Marisela,” Magda said.

  “Oh, believe me, she did not say it in those words. She didn’t bully me, or say do what I suggest or you will have to suffer all kinds of things—no, it was more a matter of being afraid for me. More a matter of—Let me help you, you poor thing, or you cannot imagine how dreadful it will be. You know the kind of thing I mean.” Magda heard the unspoken part of that, and you know how much I would hate that kind of thing, just as clearly as she had heard what Camilla had said aloud. She knew Camilla trusted her enough not to take advantage, or she would never have allowed that.

  “Among other things, Marisela tried to tell me that an untrained telepath is a danger to herself and to everyone around her.” Camilla’s scornful look showed what she thought of that.

  But that is perfectly true, Magda thought, remembering her own training. And the attempt to block her own laran had all but destroyed Jaelle. If Camilla had done so unharmed, it would have taken such iron control, such perfect self-discipline—

  But Camilla did have both iron control and perfect self-discipline; she had had to have them, or she could never have survived what had happened to her. And if she had the strength to survive all that—not unscarred, but simply to survive—then she had the control and discipline for that too. But Magda was not surprised that Marisela did not believe it.

  “At that time—after I was—changed, and recovered,” Camilla said, almost inaudibly, “Leonie offered me this. She said something of the same sort—that I had been born into the caste with laran and therefore could not survive without that teaching. I honor Leonie—she was kind to me when I greatly needed that kindness. She saved more than my life; she saved my reason. For all that, I would have been more comfortable with the bandits who so misused me; at least, when they violated me, they didn’t pretend they were doing it for my own good.”

  Magda did not say a word. Only twice in the years they had known each other had Camilla referred to the trauma of her girlhood, which had made her what she was; Magda had some idea what it had cost Camilla to say this much, even to her. Abruptly, Camilla jerked the drying tunic and undervest off the rack and began vigorously to fold them.

  “Like Jaelle, I was asked to join the Sisterhood. And like Jaelle, I refused. I have no love for secret societies and sisterhoods, and what I know, I reserve the right to tell as I choose, to whomever I choose. I think most of what they believe they know is superstition and nonsense.” She pursed her mouth and looked grim.

  “Then how do you explain what happened to me, Camilla? Out there in the Kilghard Hills, in that cave. I know what happened, because it happened to me. We were marooned. Jaelle was dying. We would both have died there in that cave in the hills—I cried out for help. And I—I was answered. Answered, I tell you!”

  “You have laran,” Camilla said, “and I suppose the Terran from the Forbidden Tower—what is his name, Andrew Carr? I suppose this Andrew Carr heard you and answered.”

  “Ann’dra.” Magda deliberately used Carr’s Darkovan name. “Yes, he has laran. But what prompted him to go looking for me in the first place? For all he knew, I was in Thendara, snug in the Guild-house as a bug in a saddlebag. Instead he sent out a search party for us and found us in time to save Jaelle’s life.”

  “Ferrika,” said Camilla. “She is a member of the Sisterhood. And so is Marisela. Marisela knew you had gone, and knew the state Jaelle was in. And Ferrika is midwife at Armida—”

  “She is more than that,” Magda said. “She is a full member of the Tower Circle.”

  Camilla looked skeptical, and Magda insisted, “She is, I tell you, as much as I am myself.”

  Camilla shrugged. “Then, there is your answer.”

  “And the vision I had? Robed women—crows calling—”

  “You said it yourself. You were desperate. You believed Jaelle was dying. Desperate people see visions. I don’t believe there was anything supernatural about your answer at all.”

  “You don’t believe that a—a cry for help of that kind can be answered?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Camilla’s lips were set in a hard line. “Don’t you suppose that I—prayed? I cried out for help with all my strength. Not only for human help, I cried out to all the Gods and to any supernatural forces that might have been hanging around to help me. If they could have heard you, where were they when I cried out to heaven, or even hell, for help? If they heard you, why did they not hear me? And if they heard me, and did not answer— what sort of Gods or helpers were they?”

  Magda flinched before the unanswerable bitterness of that.

  Camilla went on, without interruption, “You had a vision, bredhiya.” She used the word, which meant originally sister, in the intimate inflection which could make it mean darling or beloved, and was used only in close family intimacy or to a sworn lover.

  “You had a vision, a dream; it was your Ann’dra who heard you. Or perhaps, Marisela, who sent word to Ferrika that a sister was in peril.”

  Since that was certainly possible, and was in any case more rational than her own belief, Magda did not try further to convince her. Camilla’s face relaxed a little; she went on.

  “The Sisterhood, I have heard, was designed to do for women what the c
ristoforo brethren at Nevarsin do for men. But unlike the Nevarsin brotherhood or the Comyn, the Sisterhood—so I am told—do not exact piety nor conformity in return for their instruction. There is an old tale, a fable if you will, but some of the Comyn believe it, that the laran of the Seven Domains is because they are the descendants of Gods.” Camilla’s scornfully arched eyebrows told Magda what the emmasca thought of that. “It did not suit them that the common folk should have this gift, or believe they have it, or be trained to use it if, as sometimes happens, they have it though they were born outside the sacred caste. I do not know what will happen to the Comyn when they fully get it through their minds that laran appears even in Terrans like your Andrew Carr. To do them credit, if it is brought to the attention of Comyn that a commoner possesses laran, they will sometimes have him trained— usually in one of the lesser Towers like Neskaya. I don’t doubt at all that your Andrew could—”

  “You keep calling him my Andrew. He isn’t, Camilla.”

  Camilla shrugged. She said, “Do you want more tea? This is cold.” And indeed, despite the fire on the hearth, a thin skin of ice had begun to form on Magda’s tea. “Or would you rather go up and sleep?”

  “I am not sleepy.” Magda shivered; the memory of what she had seen in Lexie’s mind was still alive in her, and she wondered how she would ever manage to sleep. She got up and poured boiling water into her mug; tilted the spout toward Camilla. The older woman shook her bead.

  “If I drink any more, I will never sleep! Nor will you.”

  “Why should I sleep? I had hoped to be away at daybreak, and now I cannot. Cholayna has asked me to stay until this is resolved.”

  “And of course you must do as Cholayna commands?”

  “She is my friend. I would stay if you asked me; why not for her? But I would like to get back to my child.”