"Now we shall meet the subject for exorcism," Kade said stiffly. He snapped his fingers again. "Advise the Lady of our approach," he said to the servant who appeared.
They proceeded to an upper room. Kade lifted a heavy fiber bar from its crude catch which freed the door to swing open. So the Lady was a captive!
Inside, a small figure stood facing the narrow window. She did not turn or react as they entered. To Herald she conveyed an impression of forlorn indifference rather than anger or fear. She wore a sleek tunic shaped to be subtly feminine, and light slippers on her dainty feet. A female child, reminiscent of Smallbore of Metamorphic, but somewhat older. Certainly no demon!
"My daughter, the Lady Kade," the Duke said.
The figure turned, and Herald saw that she was indeed a lady, albeit a young one, barely nubile by the standards of the species.
"Herald the Healer, the exorcist," Kade said tightly. "Whirl of Dollar, Enemy Witness." His irony verged on discourtesy, but no one took overt notice. "If I may now absent myself from these proceedings...."
Now the Lady reacted, albeit timorously. "Father...." Her voice was thin and sweet, tinged with fear. The breast of her tunic pulsed slightly with the beat of her human heart beneath it, another hint of the tension that gripped her.
"Herald is a Cluster-famous healer," the Duke told her, his voice abruptly softening. "He would not destroy his reputation by harming you. The Earl is a creature of honor; he rests in judgment of the proceedings, not of you. When these two entities ascertain that you are innocent, they will make their reports and depart, and all will be well again."
"It has never been well," she said. But she seemed reassured.
Kade turned an inscrutable look upon Herald and the Witness. Without further word, he spun on his feet and departed.
Whirl settled on his side wheels. "I merely witness," he said. "I do not interfere."
Herald understood that there was a great deal he had not been told. But he preferred to obtain his information in his own fashion.
"Lady, may I touch you?" he asked, unsmiling. A smile was a stretching of the human mouth to suggest happiness or good intent, but at this stage it would have been hypocritical. He had been presented as an agent of the enemy, tolerated only because of terms imposed. Already he knew that the social or political situation was a large part of the problem. This girl might be an innocent focus, attacked by the enemy because she was dear to the Duke.
She put out one delicate hand as though suffering its amputation, while averting her gaze. Herald extended his own hand slowly, so as not to startle her into flight, and touched the tips of her small fingers.
She had a respectable but not remarkable aura of twenty-five, its type typical of a rare but established aural family. It exhibited the patina of stress, but was essentially normal and healthy. She was certainly not possessed by any alien aura.
She felt the tremendous healing power of his own aura, like none known in the Cluster for three thousand years—and melted. Her face turned to him, the large eyes focusing. They were orange, like her father's. The sunrise of hope emerged from the vacant gaze and seemed to illuminate her golden hair. In that slow moment she expanded from the forlorn child into a shining young woman, a truly regal Lady.
The Earl lifted on his wheels. "Supercircular!" he exclaimed. "With one touch you have transformed her! Even I, alien to your form, can perceive the miracle!" Then he broke off, stopping his communication wheel. And spun it again, momentarily. "Apology. I promised not to interfere."
The Lady turned to the Sador, but retained contact with Herald. "How is it that you, the Enemy Witness, react so positively to my pleasure? Do you not wish to burn me?"
"No, Lady, no!" the Earl exclaimed. "I wish you cured, that this unhealthy strife may be gone from fair Keep. Kastle Kade was ever the bulwark against deceit and oppression, the strongest and truest wheel of the King. Only this—this misfortune prevents it from being so again. I am enemy not to you or to your father, but to the demon possession that took your illustrious mother and threatens you. Be as you are at this instant, and we are all friends."
There was no mistaking the sincerity of the Earl's expression. Yet this was strange, for there should have been no need to summon a healer if the opposing factions were so eager to settle their differences.
"This girl suffers no possession," Herald said. "Her aura is rare but normal."
But now the Sador became adamant. "She is normal now, Healer. And perhaps with your help she will be normal always. But she has been possessed, and this is our concern."
"Perhaps we suffer a confusion of terms," Herald said. "By 'possession' I refer to the inhabitation of a host by a hostile, malevolent aura, what was historically termed 'hostaging.' "
"Precisely."
"This is not the case, here. Since an aura can be removed from a given host only by Transfer, the Lady cannot have been possessed—unless there is a Transfer unit in this castle. Then of course the hostile aura could have directed her to that instrument, and departed. But normally a good host is not given up so readily. And of course a foreign aura cannot control a host without the acquiescence of that host—"
"A demon can," Whirl said. "We of Keep know of cases."
Local superstition, Herald was sure. "Still, the other restrictions remain. Without a Transfer unit—"
"There is no Transfer unit here," the Earl said. "As Witness, I brought equipment to verify this."
"Exactly my point, sir. Since an alien aura could not have departed, and since there is none present now, possession cannot have been the case."
Still the Sador wheeled his ground. "It has been the case. I do not attempt to explain it, I merely affirm that it is so."
Herald returned to the girl, whose hand he still held. "Do you know whereof he speaks, Lady?"
"No, sir," she said. "I have never suffered siege by a hostile aura, though it is true that here on Keep such things can occur. My father believes that our enemies seek to harm him through me; to terminate the lineage of Kade, that they may accede to the spoils. Therefore this charge."
Herald nodded; the same suspicion had occurred to him. Heraldic manner often accompanied heraldic politics, the other face of the coin.
"False!" the Earl cried, his wheel seeming almost to fly off with his vehemence. "We are no part of such dishonor. We care only for the repute and welfare of our fine planet!"
Herald removed his hand from the Lady and stepped toward Whirl. "May I touch you again, Dollar?"
"I insist!" And the Sador extended his front wheel.
The contact showed considerable agitation of aura, but there was no deceit in it. The Earl was completely sincere.
"This is a problem," Herald said. "Your position seems unreasonable, yet you uphold it honestly. Is this typical of the forces you represent?"
"It is typical, Healer. It is not unreasonable. We have had experience. There is a demon among us, and the Lady Kade is now its focus. We do not profess to comprehend its mechanism; that is why we summoned you."
There might be a demon about, Herald thought, but it seemed to have possessed the enemy, not the Lady! He returned to her. "I cannot heal what needs no healing. Unless this demon manifests itself for me—"
"It will," the Sador said. "You have merely to remain here until it happens."
"I had expected to return within hours to my own Galaxy."
"If you do, and the demon manifests again, we shall have to burn the Lady," the Sador said. "Please do not force this course upon us; we regard it as an abomination."
"Burn her! In the Lady's presence, the Enemy Witness speaks thus!" Herald remarked with edged reproach. "Burning is characteristic of demons, not of Ladies."
"The Enemy Witness is a creature of honor," the girl said coldly. Much of her glow had faded when Herald's contact ceased, but she retained some spirit and now regarded him as an ally, not an alien technician. "They burned my mother."
"Not we!" the Earl cried. "That was an act of
dishonor. We executed the perpetrators. Now we seek to abate the problem positively, amicably."
Herald raised his two hands. "This is too much for me to comprehend in fragments. Allow me to speak with the Lady more gently."
"Yes! Yes!" the Sador cried. "I remain only because I must. I shall be silent, as I am supposed to be."
"Talk with me as long as you want," the Lady said to Herald. "Only hold my hand while you do. It drives away the fear."
Herald took her hand again. "This is because I am a healer." He led her to the couch, and they sat down together. "What is your given name?"
"Psyche." She smiled, and her face shone; the light blue complementing the gold. "Oh, I know you do this for money, Herald, but I wish you could stay with me always. Then the horror could never come near."
The horror of burning—or of possession? There was certainly something strange here, and it reminded him again uncomfortably of Smallbore's warning. What dread was he about to encounter? But he concealed his doubt. "When you are healed, you will not require such support," he told her. "Please tell me, in your own way, how this situation came about. I am an outsider, and there is much I do not know."
Without further ado, the Lady told her story.
"I was aged twelve years of Sol when the demon came to Kastle Kade. It possessed the body of my mother, the Duchess of Kade. She was a striking woman, with fair tresses falling to her buttocks and a piercing orange gaze, her skin the delicate color of our world of derivation, Planet Kade. Men said she was the most beautiful human female of Keep, and that I would one year resemble her.
"But when the demon took her, she flashed fire. She took a laser sword and slew our steward, saying he had made improper advances to her. My father believed her, for otherwise he would have had to put her on trial. But I knew the steward was innocent; he had a mistress who would have slain him herself had he considered another woman. I think it was my mother who made the advances—and I know she would never have done it had she not been possessed. The demon, for what purpose we cannot grasp, had desired to compromise the man.
"Possession is a very real threat here on Planet Keep, for we have many powerful and malignant auras. We are a kind of prison planet. Political criminals and the incorrigible partisans of dangerous sects are Transferred here and given animal hosts. It was once thought to be impossible for a sapient to occupy a subsapient host, but modern techniques have made it possible. If the sentence is death, the prisoners are allowed to remain in their animal hosts until their auras fade entirely. If it is merely exile, they are recovered shortly before their auras expire, assuming their hosts have not been killed by other animals. Sometimes a Pretender will be renovated when the political situation on his home planet changes to favor him. It can take years for a high-Kirlian mind to fade.
"There is little proof of this, but circumstantial evidence suggests that some of these prisoners learn to control their animal hosts, perhaps by conditioning their inferior minds to obey directives that make life easier and safer for the animals. Our legends claim that a few of these high-aura entities are capable of Transferring spontaneously from their animal hosts to human hosts, and that they then condition the sapient minds in much the fashion as they did the subsapient minds. Since these entities are desperate schemers, often criminals, such possession leads to much mischief. This would have explained what happened to my mother. But my father would not hear of it. He has ever been blindly loyal to his own. He treated her with even greater deference than before; indeed, it seemed he preferred her this way, for she did have much enhanced personality and will.
"For two years my mother's machinations continued. I had been very close to her, but now I was not. There was no doubt her character had altered. She conspired almost openly to gain the crown itself. My father tried to restrain her from such treachery, but she had woven such a tangled web of deceit and promise that he had little effect. Perhaps the spirit that possessed her was fading, for there were brief moments when her old personality manifested itself and I could feel close to her again. In its desperation that spirit resorted to ever-harsher measures to obtain its objectives before it was rendered defunct by time and its alien host. Only the return to its natural body could restore it, and if that body were hidden from the knowledge of man, perhaps imprisoned in some oubliette far from the light of day, that return would be pointless until by political machination that body were freed. So the full power of the Throne of Keep might have been necessary to its purpose.
"Then my father was summoned for a conference with the King. The reason was not stated, but everyone knew it was to answer privately to a charge of treason. My father was known to be loyal to the King, so the matter was circumspectly handled. If he should turn over his wife for trial, no onus would attach to him.
"My mother—I call her that, though I know she was no longer that—knew the peril she was in. She waited only until my father was safely on his way, then she departed for another castle, intent on further mischief. I wished there were something I could do to stop her and save him, but I was restricted to the castle. She had bribed and threatened our servants, and in his absence they obeyed her unwillingly but certainly.
"Then her party was ambushed, and she was captured by an outlaw band of knights with covered shields. They took her and burned her at the stake.
"When my father returned and discovered what had happened, he organized his forces for vengeance. Kade is the most powerful dukedom on the planet. Only the Duke of Qaval can marshal similar forces, and Qaval is far away. No one in this region could stand against Kade. But just before he marched, the outlaws were trapped by the Marquis of Maryland and slaughtered to a creature. Their heads were impaled on lances and set before Kastle Kade by way of apology for the act.
"I became Lady of the estate, and there was peace. It was whispered that my father, knowing of his wife's treachery, had permitted himself to be called away so that the execution could occur without his seeming sanction, and that the Marquis of Maryland had further acted to protect the reputation of Kade by preventing any possible interrogation of those who had done the King's business. I do not think my father would lend himself to such deceit, but I do not know for sure. Perhaps it was planned without his knowledge, and he lacked the means to substantiate his suspicion, so held his tongue. But I am quite sure he would not suffer himself to be so manipulated a second time.
"A few months ago the mutterings began again. Now they said the demon had not died, but had somehow Transferred itself to a new host—to me. Perhaps this is the way of such possession: The alien aura can move only on the death of its prior host. My father never speaks now of my mother; I believe the King showed him such evidence of her treason as could not be denied, and that my father was returning to yield her up for trial when she was killed. But now he is freed from the onus of doing that, and will not admit that there was ever a shadow on the House of Kade. He knows that there is no demon in me, and he protects me more closely than he did my mother. He locks me in my room at night, that no one may even suspect me of mischief, but he does this from his great love for me. Perhaps the enemy did have cause against my mother, but they have no cause against me.
"Yet they have persisted, and when my father refused to let me be interrogated by their experts, they took up arms against him, a coalition controlled by Prince Circlet of Crown. The King did not actually commit himself. But before it came to battle, a compromise was reached: The leading Healer of the Cluster, one whose expertise could not be questioned by either faction, would be summoned to perform an exorcism in this castle, abolishing the demon. If he were successful, all would be well again. If not, I would be delivered to the King for interrogation and treatment. If that proved I was subject to demon Possession, I would be destroyed, for such potential hosts cannot be tolerated in our society."
She turned to face the Earl of Dollar. "Witness, have I omitted aught?"
Whirl spun his wheel in momentary confusion, taken aback by the sudden question. "N
aught, Mistress," he said, embarrassed. "You have spoken more than I preferred to have you know."
Herald considered this remarkable history, delivered so lucidly despite the aspect of innocence of the narrator. The young Lady of Kade was neither stupid nor ignorant!
"But I am that healer—and you are not possessed," he said.
She smiled. "I think I am possessed—by you."
Now he was on better ground. "There are perturbations of aura that occur in Transfer hosts," Herald said. "I have analyzed such cases many times. It is not an effect that is deleterious to the host, merely an involuntary signature left behind, the imprint of the visiting aura upon the host-aura. This occurs regardless of the comparative strength of the two auras, or who controls the body. Your own aura has no such imprint. I speak as an expert in this regard: You have never been host to a foreign aura."
Psyche turned to the Sador. "How say you now, Witness?"
"I regret to say the expert is mistaken," Whirl declared.
Herald made a human shrug. "You are free to summon another exorcist. I doubt his verdict will differ."
"We are not free to do this," Whirl said. "By the covenant, your verdict governs. Yet you are mistaken. On your wheels be the onus."
"In my Sphere of Slash, such a statement would constitute a challenge to laser combat," Herald said. "Still I am aware you mean no offense. How may I satisfy you as to the validity of my verdict?"
"Only remain long enough to perceive the nature of your error. Perhaps a few days will suffice."
"A few days! I intend to be home in Andromeda in hours!"