Varzil strained to make out the shape, vast and murky, on the lake floor. The waters hid it too well.
Suddenly, the sky above crackled to life. Thunder rolled. The heavens went white. Clouds, gray with fury, came boiling out of the north. Though he had no physical form, Varzil quailed with the suddenness and wildness of the storm. He knew thunder and lightning and downpour, the sudden nerve-tearing terror of rock-slide and flood. But this, this was another thing entirely.
Focused as they were on the form beneath the lake, would the workers at Hali recognize the imminent danger? Or would they think themselves invulnerable in their Tower of unburn able stone?
Hali! he called again. HAA-LL-11-11-11!!
A sound like an avalanche filled the sky. Unlike natural thunder, it did not break and subside, but grew deeper and louder with every passing heartbeat. In the city, people streamed from their homes to throng the wide avenues. Varzil could not hear their cries nor the explosions as wooden structures burst into flame, but he felt them nevertheless.
The waters rose, whipped to froth. The banks of the lake were laid bare, though the depths remained inviolate, a fortress. All around, trees toppled. Stone walls cracked and shattered. The smell of blood and burning rose from the city.
Varzil held his breath, praying for the clouds to break and release their burden of rain, put out the fires, dissipate the awful tension. There would be no downpour of water from this storm, he realized, but something far worse.
Still the Tower stood, mute and inaccessible. And still the thing in the lake grew. Above it, in the belly of the densest, an griest cloud, darkness condensed into a knot.
The sky reached down to the land. Light exploded over the Tower. In an instant, all color fled. The city turned to whitened ashes and nothing moved as the light bled away.
Still no response came from the Tower. The focus of the circle turned frantic, as if racing for time.
They think they can hold out through the attack and complete their own weapon, the thing beneath the lake. And which, Varzil, wondered, would be the worse fate for the entire world?
Thunder crescendoed, but now there came a response. At first, it was only an echo, a resonance. The sky had reached down to the land and now the land itself answered. From all around Tower and city and lake, something rumbled up from the very core of bedrock and even deeper.
The lake began to boil. Steam rose in spurts from the surface. A shape surged through the waves, huge and black as moonless night, misshapen in its hurried birth. It shrieked as it came, the sound rising above the clamor of sky and land. Any creature left alive below would surely be rendered deaf. Flesh was not made to withstand such raging inhuman power, and even Varzil’s tenuous mental form reverberated with it.
For a time—a heartbeat, an hour, he couldn’t tell—Varzil lost all sense of where and when he was. He shrank to a kernel of himself, formless and adrift, without bearings or senses.
Invisible winds tore at him, raked across the mote of personality that was Varzil. He no longer witnessed the clash of elemental forces from afar. He was caught up in the maelstrom itself. Battered and tossed, he clung to the tatters of thought. Each moment stripped away some part of him—his name went whipping away in the torrent, echoing as it went, Varzil, Varzil, Varzil ... until the syllables disappeared into chaos.
Memory shredded, bits of images like petals crushed in a landslide—the feel of his arms and legs—food warm in his belly—the gleam in the catman’s eyes—Carolin’s quick smile—Dyannis prancing through the kitchen, carrying the Midsummer bouquet he’d gathered for her—his father’s voice, rough with emotion—
Sound shaped itself into harmonics—a voice—a word—
“Varzil!”
Response stirred from far away. There was something he should know. Should do.
Gray drifted around him, the only world he had ever known, the only world which had ever existed. Timeless, eternal floating. Stillness.
“Varzil, you’ve got to breathe!”
Tinny and meaningless, the words swept over him, through him. They left little eddies of discord, quickly settling back into calm.
So quiet, so gray ... All he ever wanted. All he ever was.
“Breathe, damn you!”
Something wet and soft clamped over his mouth. Air forced into his lungs. Gray receded. Pounding shook him—lub—DUB, lub-DUB. Then the racket subsided again into blessed stillness. He drifted once more toward the grayness, serene and eternal.
Another breath and then another. Solidness coalesced around him, hands on his shoulders, fingers digging into his flesh. Head and legs and cramping belly. Coughing racked him, wetness sputtering between his lips. He drew another breath, heard the rasp and wheeze in his chest.
Gray ... yes, there was gray, but beyond him, misty currents that thinned and parted as he passed through them, half-walking, half-floating. A strong arm wrapped around his waist, propelling him forward.
“Come on, you can make it.” The voice sounded muddy through the mist-water. “Keep going, that’s it. We’re almost there.”
Varzil nodded, his throat too strange for speech. He staggered up the slope, toward the sunlight. He pushed with his feet, slipped on something, struggled up again. The ground steepened, but the light grew stronger. Long waving grasses gave way to sand pocked with rocks. He stumbled again, landed on hands and knees, and crawled the rest of the way.
Varzil’s head broke the surface of the cloud-water just as his strength failed him. He sobbed a breath before sinking down. This time he knew who it was who caught him, who dragged him the rest of the way and laid him out on the shore, who bent over him, gray eyes dark with concern.
Carolin knelt by his side and turned him over. His skin and clothes were dripping, his face flushed except for the paleness around his eyes and mouth. Moisture darkened his red hair, slicking it against his skull. Varzil knew that he himself looked even worse.
When Varzil tried to talk, his teeth chattered. “Did you—see—” The words came out in a jumble of fractured sounds.
“Lie still.”
Another man now bent over him as well. Lean, raw-boned, eyes burning. Orain.
“I don’t know what happened,” Carolin was saying, his voice muffled as if from a distance. “He started screaming and went into convulsions. Then he stopped breathing. I got him out as quick as I could.”
“He looks like he’s been to Zandru’s coldest hell and isn’t all back yet,” Orain said.
Zandru’s coldest hell. Very nearly.
Varzil broke into racking coughs. He felt consumed with weariness, drained in spirit as well as body.
I saw—I saw what happened. The Cataclysm!
“... soaking wet,” said Orain. “Put my cloak around him. Get him up and on the horse ... take him to the Tower ... they’ll know what to do.”
The Tower! No!
But the other Hali Tower lay in the far past, unimaginable years ago, the workers who summoned the thing in the lake long dead, as were their counterparts at Aldaran. Weak as a baby, Varzil allowed himself to be wrapped in Orain’s thick dry cloak and hauled onto the back of a horse.
14
By the time Carolin and Orain had gotten Varzil on the rented horse, he was shivering too hard to hold the reins. If anything, Carolin thought, Varzil looked even paler than when he’d pulled him from the lake, with an odd gray-green cast around his mouth and eyes. The horses moved off smoothly, picking their way back along their own tracks in the snow. Varzil slumped over the pommel of the saddle, holding on with both hands.
They had not gone far when Varzil’s horse stumbled on a stone hidden beneath the snow. It was only a slight misstep, quickly recovered. Carolin heard the break in the rhythm of the horse’s gait and turned to see Varzil swaying in the saddle, making no effort to right himself.
Carolin vaulted off his mount and dashed up just in time to catch Varzil before he toppled to the ground. Orain cried out. Carolin staggered under his friend’s w
eight, for though Varzil was slightly built, his body had gone inert, dense. Carolin feared he had fainted, or worse. A moment later, Orain put his own strong arms beneath Varzil and together they lowered Varzil to the snowy road.
“Varzil! Varzil!” Carolin shook him, feeling the muscles lax beneath the thickness of the borrowed cloak
Varzil’s head rolled with the movement. His eyes remained closed, lashes dark against cheeks barely darker than the snow. Blue veins showed through skin so pale and fine-grained it was almost transparent.
Orain laid his palm flat on Varzil’s chest. “He breathes!”
Varzil stirred, though his eyes did not open. Ashen lips shaped words—a name. “Hali ... Got to warn them ...”
Warn them? Carolin and Orain exchanged glances. Hali was not under attack, not this deep into Hastur territory. Uneasy peace still held across the Hundred Kingdoms though there were no lack of enemies, but none on the brink of actual war. This much Carolin had ascertained from his uncle’s generals.
Varzil! What has happened? If only, Carolin thought, he had the training of a full laranzu. Then surely he could reach his friend’s mind.
With Orain’s help, Carolin heaved Varzil in front of him in the saddle. As quickly as they dared, they made their way to Hali Tower.
When Carolin had first arrived at Arilinn Tower the summer before, he had felt as if he were penetrating a mystery by degrees. The outer courtyards and wooden gate gave way to the arch of the Veil and narrow, enclosed rising-shaft. Like the Tower, the town of Arilinn was walled for defense. In the season he had studied there, he had never quite adjusted to the feeling of living in a series of nested fortresses.
But Hali was an unwalled city, broad and open. A city, he’d always thought, which welcomed the world without fear. A city built upon the presumption of peace. This was not, in fact, true—as he well knew. But the city gave the illusion of such tranquillity that he sometimes wondered, as he did now, what it would be like to live in a time when neither invading armies nor psychic assaults posed any threat.
As they neared the Tower, two men in the familiar, loosely belted working robes emerged. One of them introduced himself as a monitor of the First Circle.
“My friend—” Carotin began.
“What has befallen him?” the other man interrupted. “We sensed a great disturbance from the lake.”
“We must get this one inside,” the first man said, “where he can be warmed and treated properly.”
What was wrong with Varzil was not the cold, Carolin thought. He made no protest as the two leronyn carried Varzil within. He followed, feeling the rush of awe as he passed the outer gates. As Comyn and Hastur, descended from that Hastur who was the son of Aldones, Lord of Light, he had been granted admittance to the Tower on several occasions, had seen the rhu fead and the holy things. He did not think he would ever take this place for granted. Hali was not the oldest Tower on Darkover or even the most powerful, but it was a place like no other.
Orain stayed in the outer hall, shifting from one foot to the other. If this place was a source of awe to Carolin, who had been bred to it, how much more intimidating it must be to his commoner foster-brother.
They laid Varzil in a guest chamber and placed wrapped, heated stones at his feet and a mustard plaster on his chest. A second monitor, a tall woman whose white-gray hair gave no hint of its original color, came in to assist.
Carolin was dismissed to wait in the hallway outside. Although there was a bench, plain wood with a satiny finish, he preferred to stand, arms crossed over his chest, hands curled into fists and jammed into his arm pits. Actually, he would rather have waited downstairs with Orain. Then at least he would have had someone to talk to.
Whatever happened to Varzil, whatever hurt he had taken from the lake, Carolin knew it was his own responsibility. If only he had not insisted on a wild and carefree morning. If only he had stayed in the castle, like anyone of proper sense and decorum. Rakhal or Lyondri would not have gone off on a lark, risking a friend’s life if not his sanity. Why, why had he thought it a grand adventure to ride to Hali and the lake?
If you keep thinking like this, we will have two patients to tend to, and what benefit will there be in that?
Stung, Carolin whirled to see a slender robed figure that had come up, noiselessly, to stand beside him. For an instant, the hair and slight build reminded him of Varzil, but this was clearly a young woman, looking up at him with dancing eyes.
“Excuse me—damisela, but should I know you?”
She smiled, showing dimples, and tilted her head toward inside the room.
“I am Dyannis Ridenow and that’s my big brother they’ve got in there. Whatever did you do to him?”
The words were spoken lightly, without malice, but Carolin flinched. If Varzil died or lived on as an invalid, it would be his doing, his!
“Oh, my dear!” Dyannis said with unusual maturity, for she could not be more than fourteen. She laid one hand lightly on his arm. “I had no intention of distressing you! ‘Twas banter, nothing more! Varzil is always getting himself into one scrape after another. Many a time, Father would rant and tear at his hair and say Varzil would put him into an early grave for certain, but no harm ever came of it.” She tossed her head, looking very much like the young girl she was. “Varzil’s like a cat. He always lands on his feet.”
Carolin removed her hand. ‘This was no childish escapade.“
“Whatever it was,” she replied, taking no offense, “neither of us can help him by standing out here giving ourselves vapors.”
He suppressed a grin as she led him to Hali’s common room. This felt very much like the central chamber at Arilinn although it was quite different in furnishings. When Carolin had visited Hali Tower before, he had never penetrated this far into the heart of its community. The place had an air of ancient wealth, of layers of dust and polish, all the precious things brought here over the centuries. It was said that once students donated their entire inheritances to the Tower and pledged themselves to lifelong study there, as if they were cristoforos entering Nevarsin. Carolin had never before given any credence to such stories. No one today would think of turning over all his worldly goods, as well as any prospect of future wealth, just to enter a Tower. Except ... Varzil would.
Now he wondered, just because things were not done in this manner now did not mean that they might have been different in the past. What everyone looked at as the way things are done, had, in fact, no more true substance than a mayfly. The thought teased him, how might things be even more different still in the future?
A servant brought jaco and meat buns. Dyannis refused both, but Carolin ate with a sudden appetite. The hot drink chased the morning’s chill from his bones. While he ate, Dyannis talked of inconsequential things. She was clearly making an effort to put him at his ease, playing hostess although she had but lately arrived at Hali. Her chatter was inoffensive, her kindness evident. She had not yet adopted the aloofness of so many leronyn. He thought of Maura, and how skillfully she blended the demands of her profession and the Sight with warmth and easy good humor.
A short while later, Carolin’s own kinswoman, LirielHastur, came to greet him and to prepare Dyannis for the trip to the castle. They, along with several other Hastur cousins from the Tower, were to spend Midwinter Festival and the preceding days of merrymaking at King Felix’s court.
Lady Liriel was not only a skilled leronis in her own right, but Comynara. She was tall for a woman, slender and flame-haired like many of the Hasturs, and wore her rank like a coronet. No one, seeing her hair and her carriage, would have any doubts that she was to be obeyed without hesitation.
At Liriel’s words, Carolin recalled his situation. By now, his absence would be noticed. Even without the disaster at the lake, his morning of freedom was over. His uncle would expect him. Yet he could not leave without knowing how Varzil fared.
Without missing a beat of the conversation, Liriel said that the young laranzu was recovering w
ell from his unfortunate contact with an object so highly charged with laran. The effects were undoubtedly amplified by the cloud-waters of the lake, much as an ordinary water transmitted the energies of lightning. The monitors were clearing his channels and he was expected to make a full recovery. At present, she added in an offhand manner, the young man was too drained to permit even such a short journey, so regrettably he must remain behind and would join the festivities when he was able.
Liriel spoke as if it had already been arranged for Carolin and his man Orain to join her cortege. She made it seem as if nothing could be more natural than the royal heir riding out to the Tower to provide her a suitable escort.
The small party made its way back to the castle. Liriel rode at the head, riding sidesaddle on a beautiful white mare. The horse’s trappings were blue-dyed leather with silver medallions fashioned in the Hastur fir tree motif. She wore a cloak of wine-colored velvet lined with silvery rabbit-horn fur. For an instant, the light reflected crimson off the fabric, as if, against all tradition and sense, she wore a Keeper’s robes.
Watching Liriel’s bearing and utter self-confidence, the thought came to Carolin that she would make an extraordinary queen. It was impossible, of course. Even if he were not betrothed to Alianora Ardais, Liriel was too old for him. Moreover, she had long ago made it clear that one of the prerogatives of her rank was the freedom to choose her own destiny, and that did not include marriage at the whim of her family. She was of the blood of Hastur of Hastur, a leronis of Hali Tower, and who was truly worthy of her?
But I, I have no such choice. I must marry and father sons.
Carolin sighed. His would be a union of state. If Evanda smiled on him, he would be granted a bride he could love. He tried to conjure up an image of the young Ardais heiress. He’d never seen her likeness, although his family and hers would exchange miniature portraits so the bride and groom might recognize one another on their wedding day. All he knew of her was that she was a year older and the Comyn Council had approved the match. Presumably, she was fertile and capable of bearing sons with /aran. He had no idea what she was like or what her interests were—probably music, embroidery, and gossip.