Eduin! There are you, come at last!
A woman strode toward him, a basket swinging from one hand and two adolescent boys in tow. Except for her crown of tangled flame-red curls, she could have been any of the townswomen, out to buy a few last vegetables for dinner.
For a moment, Eduin did not recognize her. When he’d last seen her at Arilinn, she had been thin and pale, only lately recovered from illness. Now she walked with a long, free stride, kicking the damp hems of her skirts. Sun and exercise in the fresh air brought color to her cheeks, and health had softened the angles of her body.
His stomach curdled. It was her.
“Eduin, don’t you know me?” She’d reached him and stood at the head of his horse, shading her eyes with one hand.
He inclined his head. “Domna Felicia.”
One of the boys giggled and the other hushed him up.
“You must forgive their manners,” Felicia said in an easy way. “We’ve been down by the river, communing with frogs. They’re not back to human level yet.”
Her words and manner were disarmingly friendly, yet he sensed in her an awareness of the world around her. Any overt attack, physical or mental, would surely fail.
Quickly, he reined his thoughts under control. “Are you heading back to the tower? I must present myself to the Keeper.”
“We have looked for you this last tenday,” she replied. “I will return with you, for it’s clear we’ll get no more work from these two today.”
Felicia refused Eduin’s offer of his horse, walking beside him. The guards followed.
“The Keeper of Hestral must be an unusual man, to train novices in such a way,” Eduin said, searching for some neutral topic. “We certainly did nothing like that at Arilinn.”
“Arilinn is the very embodiment of tradition,” Felicia said. “Loryn Ardais, who is Keeper here in Hestral, does not subscribe to the theory that nothing should be ever done for the first time. As he is so fond of saying, ‘Innovation does not necessarily portend deterioration.’ As for the frogs—well, perhaps there is more than a little playfulness in that exercise. How else can we expect boys to sit still for their indoor lessons, except by rewarding them with warty, slimy things?”
“You do not object?” You, who are Comynara and leronis?
Though Felicia’s expression was perfectly serious, Eduin caught the undertone of merriment in her voice. “I have always thought that the best use of our Gifts is to create harmony with the world around us, not separation.”
“So you would oppose using laran to move a storm from a place where it would create a flood to one where it would relieve a drought?”
“Hardly that. In fact, one of the projects in which I hope you will join us involves some new ways of detecting those weather conditions that can give rise to forest fires so that we can intervene. One of the workers in my circle has Rockraven ancestry that gives him a very strong weather sense, though it’s erratic. But enough for now! You are not here an hour, and already I am giving you a dissertation on my work!”
They neared the gates. Eduin felt the shimmer of power. Felicia passed her free hand over the laran-keyed lock and the spell shifted but did not dissipate. One half of the gate swung open and she gestured for him to enter.
The two guards nudged their horses forward. Ears back, tails held at an angle eloquent with reluctance, the beasts shuffled a pace or two. “Good masters, you must leave your weapons outside,” Felicia told them.
“We go armed by the orders of His Majesty, King Rakhal,” the senior of them said, glaring at her.
“It is by the orders of the Keeper of this Tower that no one shall enter bearing arms.” She spoke the words as simple fact.
“You have fulfilled your mission in escorting me here,” Eduin intervened. “Surely you are not required to go within.”
Unless you suspect the Keeper of Hestral Tower of harboring fugitives. Were that the case, he added, there would be little which steel could accomplish.
Eduin dismounted, untied his saddlebags, and handed the reins of his horse to the nearer guard. He took out the small purse that he had been given for expenses on the trail. It still held a few silver coins. “Here’s for your trouble.”
The guard took the purse, weighing it for an instant before tucking it inside his jacket. “No trouble, my lord. We will leave you here, then, and wish you good fortune.”
Felicia watched them ride back down the hill.
“What would have happened if they had tried to take their swords inside?” Eduin asked.
“Hmm?” She sounded a little distracted as she turned to close the gate. “Metal acts as a conductor of energy, somewhat like lightning, so it heats up. The last time anyone tried was ten years ago. A thief, the story goes. He’d only a dagger, which he carried in a sheath filled with spring water because someone had told him it would protect the weapon against magic. I’m told it made a spectacular explosion. The towns-folk still sing a drinking ballad about it.”
Inside lay a little courtyard with a well and rows of dwarfed fruit trees, and a tiny kitchen garden. Beneath a trellis of yellow rosalys, a young woman sat playing a rryl. The sound had not carried beyond the gates.
The girl set down the rryl and darted toward them. She was barely in her teens, with a fresh innocence that reminded Eduin of Dyannis when they had first met. As Felicia introduced them, the girl lowered her eyes.
“You must forgive our Alys,” Felicia said, “for she is new-come to Hestral and has not lost her shy ways. Ah!” she turned toward the portal of the Tower, where a man in the flowing crimson robe of a Keeper emerged. “Loryn, here is Eduin of Hali, come at last to join us!”
Loryn Ardais seemed to float above the ground, so smooth was his stride, his feet hidden beneath the rippling folds of his robes. His hair was a dark, intense red, almost black, and his gaze entirely too penetrating as he inclined his head in greeting. “Come inside and meet the others,” he said gravely. “We are very happy to welcome you to our fellowship.”
The introductions went smoothly, for Hestral was far smaller than Hali. Even the common and dining rooms had been framed on a more modest scale.
Left alone at last, Eduin surveyed his own chamber on the second floor facing the river. It looked comfortable enough. Beside the fireplace stood a washstand holding a basin, an ewer of water scented with petals from those very rosalys he had seen in the garden, and a bar of fine soap. Best of all, it possessed only a single wall in common with another inhabited room. He unpacked his few belongings, beginning with the telepathic damper he had brought from Hali. Setting it on a table beside the door, he tuned it to its highest setting. The familiar buzz and wash of deadness reassured him that it had survived the journey intact.
His cloak went on one of the hooks, his extra shirt and linens into the small, exquisitely carved chest at the foot of the bed. He listened for a moment before checking to make sure the corridor outside was empty. Then he closed the door once more. Though there was no lock, he did not think anyone could enter unawares.
From the pocket sewn into the lining of his winter cloak, he drew out a pouch of triple-layered silk. With a tug on the drawstrings, he turned it upside down, so that its contents, a single blue gem, fell into the opened palm of his hand.
Such a small thing it was, so harmless in appearance. It looked like nothing so much as an unkeyed matrix, and one of only mediocre quality. He had carried it from his father’s cottage, hidden it at Hali, and now ...
Holding it to the light from the river view window, he marveled again at his father’s consummate skill. He himself, or any qualified matrix technician could have constructed such a device, but it would have been many times this size and used multiple stones. This one caught the light only dully, as if a twist of fog marred its center. He had carried it, undetected, through the warded gates of Hestral. With it, he would at last fulfill his oath and bring about the destruction of the last remaining heir of Taniquel Hastur!
34
/> The next months passed uneventfully as Eduin settled into life at Hestral Tower. Loryn Ardais ruled with a light hand, not only allowing but actually encouraging his people to develop new ideas. He was, he told Eduin, very much in sympathy with the ideas of Varzil of Arilinn. Laran was at its best and noblest when used for peaceful purposes. War not only demeaned but tarnished the Gifts.
Eduin had countered with the list of new developments in laran weaponry. He steered the conversation toward the topic of the use of a trap-matrix keyed to an individual’s signature for selective assassination. Had the news of Gwynn’s failed attempt—and the device he’d used—reached this far? He needed to know how suspicious the folk here at Hestral were before he set his own plans into motion.
Loryn brushed the topic aside. “Innovation in the service of a single goal—the destruction of fellow human beings—may result in a few new devices, but the very process of creativity is stifled. You see, once you define your goal so narrowly, once you say, I must have a weapon against an invading army, or I must target a single leader for assassination, then you close your mind to all else. Your creativity becomes so tightly funneled, you cannot follow your spontaneous impulses, your curiosity.”
“If we have no goal in what we do, what is the point of all this?” Eduin gestured to the matrix laboratories, the library, the living quarters of the workers, the Tower itself. The thought of unbridled laran experimentation, without direction or limitation, disturbed him. It would be like living without purpose. “Are we not to accomplish any useful work at all, then?”
If Loryn noticed Eduin’s discomfort, he gave no response. “We have not even begun to discover all the ways our Gifts can be used. Do you think we were given talent and intelligence, not to mention the privilege of our caste, to spend our lives making weapons for one petty war after another? Or to light the palaces of kings while peasants live in darkness?” He drew himself up, with that sense of separateness, and Eduin remembered that as a Keeper he was ultimately answerable only to his own conscience.
Eduin had never expected to find such sympathy of ideas in a Keeper. Bile rose in his throat at what he must do, how he must betray the trust of these people.
“Forgive me if I spoke out of turn,” Eduin said. “I meant no offense.”
“You are but newly come among us,” Loryn said. “If there is one thing which I wish for this Tower, it is the freedom of each person to discover his own vision. It is no easy task rendering those into a harmonious whole, but it is always worth the effort. We live in a complex world, where there are no simple answers. Every man, from loftiest Comyn to lowliest peasant, has his own view of the ills of the world and how to make them right. Do you think that a man’s position grants him any special wisdom above all others? Even if we could all see into the future, as Allan Hastur was said to do, we would never agree on the single best course of action.”
“Then how are men to decide anything?” Eduin burst out. “Why do we not run amok, each man following his own inclination?”
“Because we are men, and not beasts without the power to reason, with no thought past the moment’s gratification,” Loryn said gravely. “Because we can listen to one another, we can exercise our compassion as well as our critical faculties, we can consider the common good. More often than hot, it is what we do before we take action which shapes our fortunes.”
Eduin bowed, not trusting himself to say more, and excused himself.
Only when he was back in his quarters with the telepathic damper turned on, did he allow himself to relax.
He sank down on his bed, waiting for his racing pulse to slow. The breathing exercises he had been first taught as a novice would help, but he could not so easily tame his thoughts.
What Loryn hinted at was impossible, a world where men made decisions cooperatively. It would not work in a Tower and it would mean disaster for the world at large. How could a circle function without willing surrender to its Keeper? How could harvests be gathered, children be raised, justice be served, without the rule of liege lord?
If a man could shape his own life—
He dared not imagine what his own would look like. His father’s mission had given his life its form and purpose. Without that guiding quest, who was he? What was he? How could he justify the things he had done—the things he would yet do?
Useless thoughts! He flung them away, lest they leach away his very manhood. That way lay madness as well as paralysis. Only women and cowards indulged in such notions. He must act quickly, before the poison of this place had time to work on him.
The next evening, between the dinner hour and the time when the work of the Tower was to begin, he sought out Felicia. He found her in the common room, sitting by the westward-facing window with a cup of herbal brew. It smelled of mint and honey, with something he could not name. He hoped it was not for some women’s troubles, for that would temporarily prevent her from working in the circle.
In response to his inquiry, she smiled gently. “Thank you, Eduin, I am quite well. I am only a little—well, I am too old to be homesick, so perhaps I should say nostalgic. It must be the weather, reminding me of the place I lived as a child. My nurse used to make me a drink like this and I find it comforting, a fairly harmless pleasure. But you yourself have been home, I believe. A family illness, was it not, that took you from us at Arilinn?”
Damn her to have remembered!
“Yes, my father. But he is well now.”
She smiled again and said she was glad of it. He rushed on to ask about her weather project, and she brightened even more.
“Ah! It is a good thing we are all as stubborn as Durraman’s donkey, or we would have given that up!” she answered. “Poor Marius—one day he can sense the air currents as clearly as his own hand, and then next, they’re gone, or worse yet, he cannot tell the difference between a storm front and a flock of geese. I have been wondering if a matrix lattice might help. If we can construct laran batteries to store energy and then deliver it at a controlled rate, then perhaps we could do the same here.”
“That is an intriguing idea,” Eduin said. A matrix lattice! He could not have wished for a better opportunity.
It took very little to convince Felicia to accept his offer of help. He was, after all, a highly skilled laranzu. At Arilinn and then at Hali, he’d learned to fabricate artificial matrices and assemble them into complex linkages.
“I think we must begin with the specific,” he said, “although once we have discovered the underlying principles, we may be able to design a system which any circle can use.”
“Yes, I think so, too.” Felicia set down her half-drunk cup of tea. “We know little of talents like this, let alone why they are so often inconsistent. Perhaps in learning to modulate Marius’ Gift, we will learn more of the basic processes.”
Her brow furrowed in concentration. “Weather sense is not uncommon, even in ordinary folk. Varzil told me the shepherds at Sweetwater can sense an approaching storm. Perhaps there is some small kernel of laran there, or it may simply be unconscious attention to natural details—the pattern of birds in flight, the songs of frogs, I know not what. There are many tales of animals warning of bad weather or earthquakes.”
Eduin nodded. He had wondered if the beasts possessed some special sense akin to laran or if people simply took particular notice of the time the dog howled before a forest fire, but not the hundred times it did so when there was no such catastrophe.
He said so aloud and Felicia responded, “That is one reason I am training the boys under my tutelage as I do. Of course, they have little objection to splashing in the river on a hot summer afternoon, and wet, slithery things have always held a special fascination for boys. It seems to me that we know a great deal about rapport with sentry birds, but very little with the far more numerous creatures of the wild.”
“That is because sentry birds are useful in war,” Eduin said, “and there will always be more need for them than for songbirds.”
Felici
a glanced out the window, looking pensive. Eduin caught a glimmer of her thoughts, going to Varzil, far away. “If the gods shine upon us,” she said, “we may live to see a time when that is no longer true. A time when songbirds are valued above instruments of war.”
Eduin dared not frame the thought that sprang to his mind, that whatever the future held for the rest of Darkover, she would have no part in it.
Loryn Ardais received their proposal with a gratifying show of interest and support. Within a tenday, they had a laboratory all of their own, access to Hestral’s store of unkeyed starstones, and the equipment for assembling lattice arrays. Felicia, acting as Keeper for the project, began assembling a circle, although most of the work would be shared between her, Eduin, and Marius. Marius, it turned out, was one of the boys Felicia had taken to the river on the day Eduin arrived.
Through the short, bright autumn and into the next winter, they continued the painstaking process of selecting, modifying, and arranging various stones in combination. Each time Eduin tried to link another stone to the one they had selected as anchor, the combination would not resonate with Marius’ personal matrix. There was something in the linkage which created interference patterns. Eduin tried various other stones, both natural and artificial, in every combination he could think of. Felicia tried setting up a bond with Marius unaided by his starstone, and that was a dismal failure, nor could Marius key into a second stone. There was something unique about the way his own enhanced his erratic talent.
By the first warm afternoon of the new year, Eduin began to despair of the project, both for its own purpose and for its usefulness in advancing his own cause. He had hoped that once the lattice was complete and functional, once the circle would use it with Felicia as Keeper, he would be able to strike, and in such a way as to escape obvious suspicion. He must not sacrifice himself or there would be no one to continue the mission against the rest of the Hasturs.