One evening, Eduin and Saravio sat working out the next speeches in the back room of The White Feather. The evening was mild and they’d left the narrow window cracked open, admitting a thread of fresh air. The remains of a simple meal—wooden trenchers still damp with stew juices, crumbs of coarse nutbread, and an empty beaker—covered the battered table. A single lantern filled the room with tawny light.
A knock sounded at the door. Eduin’s muscles tightened and he hesitated before calling, “Who is it?”
One of their most devoted followers, the farmer whose arm had been crippled by clingfire, stood outside. He bowed as if they were nobility.
Eduin gestured him in. Excitement brought a flush to the man’s face and he stammered a little.
“Masters, I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour. I’ve been fretting all day since I heard this thing, and I wasn’t sure if it had ought to wait, but then I says to myself, ’tis better to make a fool of myself than let it slip.”
Eduin was about to snap out a reply, when Saravio said in his most soothing voice, “If you have come on Naotalba’s business, friend, then you need have no fear. We are all her servants.”
The man’s eyes flashed white in the lantern light. “Don’t know about Naotalba, but I do know the wickedness of the Towers. It’s on account of them I’ve come.”
“Do you have word of some new doings of the Tower?” Eduin asked, his irritation fading into curiosity. “Tell us, man!”
“I just come from Moran’s place—his sister’s cousin knows one of the scullions up at the Tower—and he says the greatest sorcerer of them all—Varzil, him they call the Good—is to come to Hali. The whole Tower’s agog with it. But he can’t be good, can he, if he’s one of them? None of them can be trusted!”
For a heartbeat, Eduin could not believe what he’d heard. Varzil, who he’d thought beyond his reach, coming here!
“Why does Varzil come here?” the words tumbled out of Eduin’s mouth. “What does he mean to do? Is there any word of that?”
“Moran’s sister’s cousin says he’s to meet with the other demon spawn at Hali to work some sorcery at the lake, I know not what. I’ve heard the very waters are bewitched.” The farmer trembled visibly. “No decent folk go that way without cause.”
“The Hali leronyn cannot do any greater damage to the lake than has already been done,” Saravio said grimly, “not even with so strong a Keeper as Varzil.”
“Are you sure—sure it was Varzil?” Eduin said. “And they are to work outside, at the lake?”
“Aye, I’m not mistaken in that. That’s why I came to you, to see if there’s aught we must do to prevent it. Who knows what they’ll do next? Pull down the moons over our heads?”
“Not with Naotalba to protect you,” Saravio said. “Of that, you may be certain. You have served her well in all things. Go now in peace.”
The farmer left them, laden with praise that brought an even deeper flush to his cheeks.
Eduin lowered himself to the rickety bench, his mind reeling. Varzil, in the open, undefended by walls or the immensely powerful shielding of a matrix screen! Varzil—here!
It was not certain, of course—the farmer’s sources could have been mistaken. Yet the mention of the lake granted it credibility. If the news were true . . .
Varzil, coming here? Within his reach—within the reach of the army of common folk he had been shaping into Naotalba’s army!
Naotalba, bringing his enemy, unaware, to his doorstep . . .
A sensation bordering upon awe swept through Eduin. He had never considered himself a religious man, for what gods would permit the atrocities done to his family, the tragedy of his own exile? Aldones, the so-called Lord of Light, was a sop to the credulous, and the only thing Zandru had ever granted him was a temporary numbing of pain. He had thought Saravio’s devotion to Naotalba a delusion, the workings of a mind diseased. The breath of Zandru’s Bride now brushed his skin, trailing icy shivers that spread to the core of his bones.
“My friend, are you in distress?” Saravio asked. The question was politeness only, for although Eduin had long since established that Saravio could not receive telepathy, his empathic abilities were extraordinary. He could “read” a crowd better than the most highly trained Keeper.
Now Eduin roused himself. “Not distress, no. I am struck dumb by the glory of our goddess.”
“Naotalba has again spoken to you?” Saravio’s eyes flared with eagerness.
“Can you not see it? She has brought us together and placed us at the head of her army, ready to attack upon her command. And now she has brought her enemy within our reach. All is in readiness.”
“Her enemy? Who would Naotalba have us strike down?”
“Who else have we been speaking of? None but that same Varzil Ridenow, Keeper of Neskaya and Lord of Hali.” Eduin could not keep the bitterness from his voice and he did not try. “Betrayer, toady to the Hasturs, embodiment of all that is rotten among the Comyn.”
“Then, if it is the will of Naotalba, we shall triumph.” Saravio’s voice trembled on the border of laughter. “Even as they gather at the lake to do their unholy work, we will fall upon them. We will cleanse the earth of this accursed menace. With our triumph, people everywhere will rise up against the witch-kings. A new day will begin!”
Saravio continued on, but his words swept over Eduin, unheeded. Instead, Eduin was thinking that he would have to move carefully, keeping his laran barriers tighter than ever before. Varzil was a crafty one, and a strong telepath. Varzil must have no hint of warning, not even of Eduin’s presence. Eduin had no plan to reveal himself. His army—Naotalba’s faceless, irresistible army, led by the unsuspecting Saravio—they would do his work.
9
All night, the crowd had been building. Every few hours, Carolin’s guards ordered their dispersal, but they reformed, like a multiheaded beast, in some other part of the city, each time more angry and adamant than before.
Eduin watched the scene from the rooftop of the house of a sympathizer. Along the twisting lanes and plazas, the open markets, he saw men carrying torches, streaks of brilliance against the inky night, but for every one that was visible, he knew there were dozens or more still hidden, shadow upon shadow, flowing and coalescing.
Since dusk, Saravio had worked tirelessly among them. He had gone hoarse repeating the phrases as Eduin had instructed him, until the words came back amplified a hundredfold by the simmering frustration of the gutter. Many of these people had been torn from their homes and families by Hastur wars, but far more of them simply scrabbled out their lives in unending, mindless despair. Now when they looked up at the shimmering palaces of the Comyn, the fairytale spires glowing with light and warmth, they saw the reason for their misery.
They idle while we starve . . . their sorcery has blighted our farms, rendered our beasts barren, crippled our sons, sent our babes deformed into the world . . .
The heavens cry out against their evil . . .
All the while, Saravio shaped their anger as a baker kneading a lump of dough, pushing it here, drawing it out there, leavening it with yeast and tears until at last its time had come.
With the rising of the sun, the gates to Thendara opened. Naotalba’s army left the city in small groups. The appointed gathering place, a crossroads, was far enough beyond the Hali Gate to be beyond easy reach of Carolin’s men. The City Guards made no move to stop them as they left. They wanted troublemakers out of the city.
Eduin followed, wrapping himself in the anonymity of the crowd. He’d slept little that night, and Saravio not at all, but this irritation was nothing compared to the bloodshot madness he saw in the eyes of the crowd. He felt their anger like tinder awaiting a spark.
“No more witch-kings!” they cried. The slanting dawn touched pitchforks, staves, wood-axes. A few had brought weapons, bows and arrows and knives, and looked as if they knew how to use them.
“An end to the Towers! Perversion of nature!”
&n
bsp; Saravio stood on a little rise above the crossroads. As they’d planned, he wore a belted white robe with a hood. Eduin cast a faint glamour so that Saravio’s form glittered as he raised his arms.
“Down with the devils of the Tower! No more tyrants!”
On their own, a handful of men had shaped a figure from dirty straw upon a pole and wrapped it in strips of red cloth. The bag around its head had been painted with a crude, almost obscene leer, and a chunk of broken glass hung from a cord around its neck.
Eduin recoiled. Saravio had succeeded beyond his expectations. He had shaped these people into a weapon as potent as any clingfire. Their minds, painted across the psychic space, surged in frantic patterns, veering toward madness. They had gone beyond rational thought. Nothing would stop them, not reasoned argument nor hunger nor physical wounds, for when one fell, ten would take his place. They would not stop until they had torn down the very stones of Hali Tower, not as long as they had life and breath.
For a moment, the men stood back from the mockery of a Keeper they had made. Eduin clenched his starstone for focus and used his laran to ignite the straw. Dry and powdery, it burst into flame. The mob cried out in an instant of terror. Then cheers rose, building to a wordless, mindless roar.
Several of the strongest men seized the pole and lifted it aloft, carrying it forward. At Saravio’s mental urging, they began crying out, “Hali! Down with Hali!”
Within moments, the entire throng rushed headlong down the road that led to the Tower. To get there, they would have to pass the lake where, if the latest reports were true, Varzil would be waiting.
The circle felt familiar to Dyannis, for all that they were standing in the open air instead of sitting in a shielded matrix chamber. Raimon and Varzil had chosen a stretch of level sand within a few paces of the upper reaches of the waves. She breathed in dew-moist air, scented the grasses and low-growing skyflowers that had established a tenacious hold upon the dunes. The morning lay soft around them, and she found that the occasional cry of a bird, instead of offering a distraction, only enhanced her readiness.
Dyannis closed her eyes to better focus her mind. Like the others, she wore her starstone unshielded, against her bare skin. Raimon gave the signal to begin. He wove them together with his cool, light mental touch. She quelled her excitement, reached out to the people she had worked with so long and so intimately, and dropped into rapport. Her breathing deepened. The physical world receded, so that she no longer knew whether she stood or sat, whether in day or night, winter or summer, outdoors or cloistered within her Tower.
When Varzil and Alderic stepped away from the circle, only a ripple disturbed the unity. Raimon had bonded them in such a way that the physical separation might shift the tonal dynamics, but could not change the essential link. Dyannis stood on the lake shore, merged with the others of the circle, and at the same time, she journeyed with her brother and friend through the layers of cloud-water.
Dyannis felt herself floating, as if the universe held its breath. The only reality was the rhythm and texture of the circle’s psychic pulse.
Through the lens of her Keeper’s thoughts, she sensed the progress of the party below. Power shimmered through the web that joined them. So intense was her concentration that she lost all sense of time passing.
Varzil reached the columns and, through them, the energy rift. Dyannis felt it as a laceration, a tearing of the flesh of the world. The waters in their strangely altered form seemed like tears, as if Darkover itself wept for what had been done here.
We are here to heal that wound.
Hope rose in her, an unspoken prayer that such a healing would be possible, that she might be granted the power to do it. She yearned to see the lake sparkle with true water under the great ruby sun, and beyond it, Hali Tower soaring upward to unite earth and heaven.
It came to her in a moment of wordless understanding that this was the meaning of her laran Gift—to see the invisible, to grasp the immaterial, to repair the agonies of the world itself. The very word, donas, betokened something granted in a state of grace. Had not Hastur, son of the Lord of Light, from whom those gifts flowed, been both god and mortal?
The bond of the circle deepened as their joined minds focused through one Keeper and linked to the other Keeper below. As one being, they breathed in air and cloud-water. As one, life and time flowed through them. As one, they stretched across the gap of wrongness into a place beyond the Overworld.
Images drifted through their shared consciousness, pale as glass, fluid as water. Dyannis saw another circle bent over a matrix larger than anything that existed today, faces awash in eerie blue light. Layered over them, lightning danced over snowy peaks.
In the vision, waters rose, storm-whipped. Something dark moved beneath the surface. Dyannis shrank from looking closer, but had no power to withdraw, joined as she was to her circle at the most elemental level of her being. Granite determination swept through her and she recognized the touch of her brother’s mind. With him, she descended further, not only through the physical lake, but into the visions of the past.
With only a moment’s hesitation, Varzil approached the misshapen darkness.
Holy Mother, Blessed Cassilda, Aldones Lord of Light—be with him now!
Though Dyannis was not accustomed to formal prayer, the thought burst from her. She clung to it as a talisman against terror.
In the next heartbeat, the darkness closed around him. All sense of physical reality—the rocky floor, the pale shape of the fallen columns, the chill of the cloud-water—vanished.
She sensed utter, inhuman emptiness. Not even a pulse beat disturbed the void.
She floated through it, paralyzed, impotent.
Breathe . . . whispered through her mind, perhaps from the deepest recesses of her self or from the merged awareness of the circle. Breathe for Varzil ...
The slightest hint of a shudder passed through the circle and in the next moment the darkness shifted, growing thinner. She moved through it and felt it draw apart, separating the darkness of this world and time from the darkness of another.
Breathe . . .
With each inhalation, the circle drew in energy and with each exhalation, divided the emptiness. How Varzil accomplished this, she could not tell, parting something as insubstantial and essential as darkness, each portion to its proper place.
Breathe . . .
The wrongness receded with each breath. The current of energy that had leaked into the Overworld dwindled to a trickle, a thread, and then nothing. The breach was sealed, the worlds once more separate.
They had done it. He had done it.
Yet Varzil made no move to withdraw. He held his position, listening and sensing. The circle became a fisher’s net, gossamer thin and strong as spider’s silk, spread wide to catch the waters themselves.
Elation sparked—he was going to change the waters back!
The net tensed as the pressure inside built. Mist churned, currents surging back upon themselves. Power, freely given, flowed from the circle and through the linked Keepers. Instead of froth, bubbles of transparency formed, taking on the clearness of natural water.
“Death! Death! Death!”
A jagged arc of pain shot through the circle, shattering the interwoven unity. The net frayed, severed strands of laran power whipping free. Hearts raced, stumbled. Lungs gasped for air.
Dyannis swayed on her feet. Light seared her—whitened sky, robed shapes she should know—twisting in a vision caught between psychic and material realms. Colors warped and shapes fused together—sand and growing plants, the crimson of a Keeper’s garments. Sound buffeted her, cries so distorted they seemed inhuman.
She caught a hint of trained laran, a flash of recognition, but only for an instant.
Eduin—how could it be—after all these years—
“Kill the demon-spawn!” “No more sorcery!” “Down with Hali!”
Again came the rumble, like a drum roll—“Death! Death! Death!”—and
overlaying it all, a looming shadow like a woman veiled in black. Eyes like shards of luminous ice glowed with pale, inhuman malice.
“Death! Death! Death!”
Dyannis whirled, staggering, to face a wall of men, faces red, eyes wild, clubs and sticks upraised. She had dropped her barriers completely, merged in the circle, and now her mind was utterly open. A boiling chaos of emotion overran her inner senses—the metallic heat of hatred run wild, smears of festering bitterness, curdled despair, the white, exhilarating shock of victory.
NA—O—TAL—BA! Death! Death! Death!
For a terrible moment, Dyannis was overwhelmed, swept away, torn into a hundred pieces. Each fragment was a thrum of agony and rage, the taste and smell of a separate life. She did not know these men, and yet in that instant, she became each of them. Most were a blur, a resonance of stories told or minds touched in her healing work or her childhood years at the ranch at Sweetwater. Some she had no reference for, they might have been Ya-men for their strangeness. For an instant, something flashed across her jumbled mind like the pure high note of a flute—laran!—trained like tempered steel—familiar, haunting—
Hold! Raimon’s mental command shocked through the circle.
Hold? Hold what? she caught the dazed response.
Hands seized her. Fingers dug into her arm. Her muscles went powdery at the sudden physical contact, callused skin against her own.
She gasped. Air seared her throat.
Instinct took over. The laran coursing through her during the circle work erupted into coruscating energy. White-blue traceries shot across the exposed skin of her arm, held in the rough grasp of her assailant.
With a shriek, the man hurled himself backward, releasing her. In place of a hand, he clutched a blackened claw to his breast.