Stormqueen!

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “I will tell you that when I know more of what lies within her genes and heritage,” Renata said. “I will do what I can for her, I swear it, and so will Allart. But I must know what I am facing.”

  “Well, I have no particular objection to being monitored.” Lord Aldaran said, “although it is a technique with which I am not familiar.”

  “Deep monitoring of this sort was developed for the matrix circles working on the higher levels,” Renata said. “When we had done using it for that, we found it had other uses.”

  “What must I do, then?”

  “Nothing,” Renata said. “Simply make your mind and body as quiet and relaxed as you can, and try to think of nothing at all. Trust me; I shall not intrude into your thoughts, but only into your body and its deeper secrets.”

  Aldaran shrugged. “Whenever you like,” he said.

  Renata reached out, beginning the slow monitoring process; first monitoring his breathing, his circulation, then going deeper and deeper into the cells of body and brain. After a long time she gently withdrew, and thanked him, but she looked troubled and abstracted.

  “What is the verdict, damisela?”

  “I would rather wait until I have seen the archives, and worked with Donal,” she said, and bowed to him, leaving the room.

  A few days later, Renata sent word asking if Lord Aldaran could receive her again.

  When she came into his presence this time, she wasted no words.

  “My lord, is Dorilys your only living child?”

  “Yes, I told you that.”

  “I know she is the only child you acknowledge. But is that only a manner of speaking, or the literal truth? Have you any unacknowledged bastards, by-blows, any child at all born of your blood?”

  Aldaran shook his head, troubled.

  “No,” he said. “Not one. I had several children by my first marriage, but they died in their adolescence, of threshold sickness; and Deonara’s babes all died before they were weaned. In my youth I fathered a few sons here and there, though none survived adolescence. As far as I know, Dorilys alone, on the face of this world, bears my blood.”

  “I do not want to anger you, Lord Aldaran,” Renata said, “but you should get you another heir at once.”

  He looked at her, and she saw the dismay and panic in his eyes.

  “Are you warning me that she, too, will not survive adolescence?”

  “No,” said Renata. “There is every reason to hope she will survive it; she may even become something of a telepath. But your heritage should not rest on her alone. She might, as Aliciane did, survive the bearing of a single child. Her laran, as near as I can tell, is sex-linked; one of the few gifts that are. It is recessive in boys; Donal has the ability to read air currents and air pressure, to feel the winds and sense the movement of storms, and even to control the lightning a little, though not to draw it or to generate it. But this gift is dominant in females. Dorilys might survive the birth of a son. She could not survive the birth of a daughter gifted unborn with such laran. Donal, too, should be warned to father only sons, unless he wishes to see their mothers struck down by this laran in their unborn daughters.”

  Aldaran took this in slowly. At last he said, his face gray with torment, “Are you saying that Dorilys killed Aliciane?”

  “I thought you knew that. This is one reason the Rockraven gift was abandoned by the breeding program. Some daughters, without the full strength of laran themselves, nevertheless had it to pass on to their daughters. I think Aliciane must have been one of these. And Dorilys had the full laran… During her birth—tell me—was there a storm?”

  Aldaran felt his breath catch in his throat, recalling how Aliciane had cried out, in terror, “She hates me! She doesn’t want to be born!”

  Dorilys killed her mother! She killed my beloved, my Aliciane… Desperately, struggling for fairness, he said, “She was a newborn child! How can you blame her?”

  “Blame? Who speaks of blame? A child’s emotions are uncontrolled; they have had no training in controlling them. And birth is terrifying for a child. Did you not know that, my lord?”

  “Of course! I was present when all of Deonara’s babes were born,” he said, “but I could calm them to some extent.”

  “But Dorilys was stronger than most babes,” Renata said, “and in her fear and pain, she struck—and Aliciane died. She does not know this; I hope she will never know. But, knowing this, you can see why it is not safe to rely on her, alone, to pass your blood to future generations. Indeed, it would be safer for her never to marry, though I shall teach her, when she comes to womanhood, how to conceive sons only.”

  “Would Aliciane had had such teaching,” said Lord Aldaran, with great bitterness. “I did not know this technique was known in the Domains.”

  “It is not very commonly taught,” Renata said, “although those who breed riyachiyas know it, to breed nothing but females. It has not been taught lest the lords of great estates, hungry for sons, should upset the balance nature has given us, so that there would be too few women born. Yet, in such a case as this, I think, where such a frightful laran can strike the unborn, I think it justified. I will teach Dorilys, and Donal, too, if he wishes.”

  The old man bowed his head. “What am I to do? She is my only child!”

  “Lord Aldaran,” Renata said quietly, “I would like your permission, if I think it needful, to burn out her laran in adolescence to destroy her psi centers within the brain. It might save her life—or her reason.”

  He stared at her in horror. “Would you destroy her mind?”

  “No. But she would be free of laran” Renata said.

  “Monstrous! I refuse absolutely!”

  “My lord,” Renata said, and her face was drawn, “I swear to you. If Dorilys were the child of my own womb, I would ask you the same. Do you know she has killed three times?”

  “Three? Three? Aliciane; Darren, my brother’s son—but that was justified, he attempted to ravish her!”

  Renata nodded. She said, “She was handfasted once before, and the child died, did he not?”

  “I thought that was an accident.”

  “Why, so it was,” said Renata. “Dorilys was not six years old. She knew only that he had broken her doll. She had blocked it from her mind. When I forced her to remember it, she cried so pitifully, I think it would have melted the heart of Zandru’s self! So far she strikes only in panic. She would not, I think, even have killed the kinsman who tried to rape her, but she had no control. She could not stun, only kill. And she may kill again. I do not know if anyone living can teach her enough control over this kind of laran. I would not burden her with guilt, if she strikes again in a moment of fear or panic.”

  Renata hesitated. Finally she said, “It is well known: power corrupts. Even now, I think, she knows no one dares to defy her. She is headstrong and arrogant. She may like the knowledge that everyone fears her. A girl on the threshold of adolescence has many troubles; at such times girls dislike their faces, their bodies, the color of their hair. They think others dislike them, because they have so many anxieties they cannot yet focus. If Dorilys comforts herself for these anxieties with the knowledge of her power—well, I know I would be frightened of her under these conditions!”

  Aldaran stared at the floor of the room, black and white and inlaid with a mosaic of birds. “I cannot consent to having her laran destroyed, Renata. She is my only child.”

  “Then, my lord,” Renata said bluntly, “you should marry again and get you another heir before it is too late; and at your age you should lose no time.”

  “Do you think I have not tried that?” Aldaran said bitterly. Then, hesitating, he told Renata of the curse.

  “My lord, surely a man of your intelligence knows that the power of such a curse is upon your mind, not your manhood.”

  “So I told myself for many years. Yet I felt no desire for any woman, for many years after Aliciane died. After Deonara died, and I knew I had only a single nedestro girl-chi
ld surviving, I took others to my bed; yet none of them quickened. Of late I have begun to believe the curse had struck me before the sorceress voiced it, for while Aliciane was heavy with my child I took no other. For me that was unknown, that I should live half a year with no woman for my bed.” He shook his head, apologetically. “Forgive me, damisela. Such talk is unseemly to a woman of your years.”

  “Speaking of such things I am not a woman but a leronis, my lord. Don’t trouble yourself about that. Have you never been monitored to test this, my lord?”

  “I did not know such a thing was possible.”

  “I will test it, if you will,” Renata said matter-of-factly. “Or if you would rather—Margali is your kinswoman, and nearer to your years—if it would trouble you less…”

  The man stared at the floor. “I would feel less shamed before a stranger, I think,” he said in a low voice.

  “As you will.” Renata quieted herself and sank deep into the monitoring of body and brain; cell deep.

  After a time she said regretfully, “You are cursed, indeed, my lord. Your seed bears no spark of life.”

  “Is such a thing possible? Did the woman merely know my shame, or did she cause this—this—” His voice died, between rage and dismay.

  Renata said quietly, “I have no way of knowing, my lord. I suppose it is possible that some enemy could have done this to you. Although no one trusted with a matrix in the Towers would be capable of such a thing. We are sworn with many oaths against such abuse of our powers.”

  “Can it be reversed? What the powers of sorcery have done, can they not undo?”

  “I fear not, sir. Perhaps if it had been known at once, something—but after so many years, I fear it is an impossible task.”

  Aldaran bowed his head. “Then I must pray to all the gods that you can somehow bring Dorilys undamaged through adolescence. She alone bears the heritage of Aldaran.”

  Renata pitied the old man; he had had to face some painful and humiliating truths today. She said gently, “My lord, you have a brother, and your brother has sons. Even if Dorilys should not survive this—although, indeed, I pray Avarra may guard her from all harm—the Aldaran heritage will not be wholly lost. I beg you, sir, be reconciled to your brother.”

  Aldaran’s eyes blazed with sudden, terrible exploding rage.

  “Have a care, my girl! I am grateful for all you have done, and all you will do, for my child, but there are some things even you cannot say to me! I have sworn that I will tear down this castle stone by stone ere it falls to any son of Scathfell! Dorilys will reign here after me, or none!”

  Cruel, arrogant old man! Renata found herself thinking. It would serve you right if that came, indeed, to pass! His pride is stronger than his love for Dorilys, or he would spare her this terrible destiny!

  She bowed. “Then there is no more to be said, my lord. I will do what I can for Dorilys. Yet I beg you to remember, sir, that the world will go as it will, and not as you or I would have it go.”

  “Kinswoman, I beg you, be not angry. I beg you not to let your anger at this sharp-tongued old man make you any less a friend to my little girl.”

  “Nothing could do that,” Renata said, softening against her will to the old man’s charm. “I love Dorilys, and I will guard her as much as I may, even against herself.”

  When she had left Aldaran, she walked for a long time on the battlements, troubled. She faced a very serious ethical problem. Dorilys probably could not survive childbirth. Could she reconcile it to her own strict code, to let the girl come unknowing to womanhood with that shocking curse? Should she warn Dorilys of what lay ahead for her?

  She thought, angry again, that Lord Aldaran would expose Dorilys to such a death rather than accept the knowledge that his brother of Scathfell might inherit his domain.

  Cassilda, blessed mother of the Hastur kin, she thought All gods be praised that I am not lord of a Domain!

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  « ^ »

  Summer in the Hellers was beautiful; the snows receded to the highest peaks, and even at dawn there was little rain or snow.

  “A beautiful season, but dangerous, cousin Allart,” Donal said, standing at the height of the castle. “We have fewer fires than the Lowland Domains, for our snows remain longer, but our fires rage longer because of the resin-trees, and in the heat of these days they give off the volatile oils which ignite so quickly when the summer lightning storms rage. And when the resin-trees ignite—” He shrugged, spreading his hands, and Allart understood; he, too, had seen the volatile trees catch fire and go up like torches, throwing off showers of sparks which fell in liquid rain, spreading flame through the whole forest.

  “It is a miracle that there are any resin-trees left, if this happens year after year!”

  “True; I think if they grew less swiftly, these hills would be bare and the Hellers a wasteland from the Kadarin to the Wall around the World. But they grow swiftly, and in a year the slopes are re-covered.”

  Allart said, fastening the straps of the flying-harness around his waist, “I have not flown in one of these since I was a boy. I hope I have not lost the knack!”

  “You never lose it,” Donal said. “When I was fifteen and ill with threshold sickness, I could not fly for almost a year. I was dizzy and disoriented and when I was well again I thought I had forgotten how to fly. But my body remembered, as soon as I was airborne.”

  Allart drew the last buckle tight. “Have we far to fly?”

  “Riding, it would be more than most animals could do in two days; it lies by paths mostly straight up and down. But as the kyorebni fly, it is little more than an hour’s flight.”

  “Would it not be simpler to take an air-car?” Then Allart remembered he had seen none in the Hellers.

  Donal said, “The folk of Darriel experimented with such things. But there are too many crosscurrents and cross-drafts among the peaks here; even with a glider you must pick your day carefully for flying, and be wary of storms and changes in the wind. Once I had to sit on a crag for hours, waiting for a summer storm to subside.” He chuckled with the memory. “I came home as bedraggled and sad as a rabbithorn who has had to yield his hole to a tree-badger! But today, I think, we will have no such trouble. Allart, you are Tower-trained, do you know the folk at Tramontana?”

  “Ian-Mikhail of Storn is Keeper there,” Allart said, “and I spoke with all of them in the relays, from time to time, during my half-year at Hali. But I have never been to Tramontana in the flesh.”

  “They have always welcomed me there; indeed, I think they are always glad of visitors. They sit like hawks in their aerie, seeing no one from midsummer festival to midwinter night. It will be a pleasure for them to welcome you, cousin.”

  “And for me,” Allart said. Tramontana was the most distant and farthest northward of the Towers, in almost total isolation from the others, though its workers passed messages through the relay-nets and exchanged information about the work they had done in developing new uses for matrix science. It had been the workers at Tramontana, he remembered, who devised the chemicals for fire-fighting, where they could be found in the deep caves under the Hellers, refining them, devising new ways to use them, all with the matrix arts.

  “Is it not true that they have worked with matrixes to the twenty-fifth level?”

  “I think so, cousin. There are thirty of them there, after all. It may be the farthest of the Towers, but it is not the smallest.”

  “Their work with chemicals is brilliant,” Allart said, “although I think I would be afraid to do some of the things they have done. Yet their technicians say that once the lattices are mastered, a twenty-sixth-level matrix is no more dangerous than a fourth-level. I do not know if I would wish to trust myself to the concentration of twenty-five other people.”

  Donal smiled ruefully. “I wish I knew more of these things. I know only what Margali has taught me, and what little they have had leisure to tell me, when I visit there, and I
have seldom been given leave to stay more than a single day.”

  “Indeed, I think you would have made a mechanic, or perhaps even a technician,” Allart said, thinking of how swiftly the lad had responded to his teaching, “but you have another destiny.”

  “True; I would not abandon my father, nor my sister, and they need me here,” Donal said. “So there are many things I shall never do with a matrix, for they need the safety of a Tower. But I am glad to have learned what I could, and for nothing am I more glad than this,” he added, touching the leather-and-wood struts of the glider. “Are we ready to go, cousin?”

  He stepped to the edge of the parapet, fluttered the long extended leather flaps of the glider wings to catch the air current, then stepped off into the air, soaring upward. Allart, his senses extended, could just feel the edge of the current; he stepped to the parapet edge, feeling an inner cramping at the height, the glimpse of the fearful gulf below him. Yet if a boy like Donal could fly without fear over that height… He focused on the matrix, stepped free, and felt the sudden dizziness of the long drop and swoop outward, the tug of the current that bore him upward. His body swiftly balanced itself, lying along the inner struts, leaning this way and that as he mastered the balance of the toy. He saw Donal’s glider, soaring hawklike above him, and caught an updraft carrying him along until they, flew side by side.

  For the first minutes Allart was so preoccupied with the mastery of the glider that he did not look down at all, his entire consciousness caught up into the delicate balances, the pressure of the air and the energy currents he could dimly sense, all around him. Somehow it made him think of his days at Nevarsin, when he had first mastered his laran and had learned to see human beings as swirls, energy-nets of force like streaming currents, without the awareness of flesh and blood, of his solid body. Now he sensed that the insubstantial air was filled with the same streaming currents of force. If I have taught Donal much, he has given me no less in return, teaching me this mastery of air currents and the streams of force which permeate the air as they do the land and the waters… Allart had never before been aware of these currents in the air; now he could almost see them, could pick and choose among them, riding them up, up to a height where the winds dashed against the frail glider, racing along on the tremendous airstream, then picking a convenient current to dip down again to a safer height. He began, as he lay along the struts now, leaving a fragment of his consciousness to control the glider, to look down at the mountain panorama laid out below him.