A Flame in Hali (7 page)

The door lay only a step or two away. Eduin could be gone in a moment, out into the streets and their familiar anonymity. Every instinct shrilled at him to run, to hide. He might have a few hours or days before the compulsion returned. Yet, he hesitated.

Saravio’s next breath came as a hoarse gasp. His spine bowed upward, so that he rested on the back of his skull and his hips.

Eduin had trained as a monitor at Arilinn, one of the oldest and most prestigious of all the Towers on Darkover. Although he had not done the delicate work of diagnosis and healing by
laran
in many years, he had not forgotten the techniques.

Do nothing to draw attention to yourself,
urged his years of living as an outlaw.
Hide who you are and what you can do.

Shudders ran the length of Saravio’s frame, each wave peaking in a spasm. Eyeballs rolled up in their sockets, parted lids revealing crescents of white. Arms and legs flailed wildly, fell still for a moment, then began twitching again. Teeth snapped together. No breath came from between the lips pulled back in a rictus.

Even through his psychic barriers, Eduin sensed the wild chaos of the other man’s nervous system, the agony of his straining muscles, the lungs screaming for air, the frenzied beating of his heart.

Eduin took a deep breath. This man had pulled him from certain death in the snow, had given him a gift beyond imagining. He could not walk away now.

He threw himself down beside the pallet and fumbled at his belt for the starstone in its wrappings. The crystal warmed instantly upon contact with his bare hand.

The world shifted. He had been living without using his
laran
for so long, he had grown blind. Now every detail, every radiant nuance of color and texture, of sound and smell and inner sensing glowed incandescent across his conscious mind. He closed his eyes, ignoring the sting of renewed tears.

Without visual sight, using his starstone to amplify his
laran
senses, Eduin narrowed the focus of his concentration. Saravio’s energy body burned like a flame. The channels and nodes that conducted psychic forces appeared as a spectrum of colors—reds and oranges, searing white and dull brown. The brilliance indicated the strength of the man’s
laran,
which was considerable.

Rarely had Eduin seen such disorder, such a breakdown of the normal balances. Colors clashed, especially at the centers at the base of the brain. The node at the bottom of the skull pulsed wildly, throwing off sparks that bore a sickening resemblance to
clingfire.
Wherever they touched, they left gaping holes of darkness in Saravio’s energy body.

Eduin searched his memory for a similar pattern. Once, in his first year as a fully qualified matrix technician, he had assisted in the treatment of a woman with falling-sickness. At unpredictable intervals, she would become unconscious and her body would jerk uncontrollably, leaving her battered and exhausted, but with no memory of what had happened to her. Otherwise, she appeared normal, except for the odd neural cross-circuits.

Eduin opened his eyes. Saravio’s skin had turned blue around his mouth. He could not survive much longer without air, nor could his heart withstand the strain.

Spreading his fingers wide, Eduin reached out his free hand to scan the other man more deeply. Normally, he would avoid actual contact with the patient he was examining. It was too easy to be misled by direct physical touch.

Just then, Saravio’s torso heaved upward, contorting so that his arms wrapped around Eduin’s neck. Hands dug into the back of Eduin’s shoulders with iron strength, pulling him down. Desperately, Eduin pushed away. It was no use. He was held fast. Panic seared him. He struggled for breath. The mingled rankness of sweat and terror filled his nostrils.

Somehow, Eduin managed to slide his free hand in front of his own shoulders. Gasping, he shoved as hard as he could. His hands slipped upward along the slope of Saravio’s rib cage. Under his fingers, he felt the hard line of jawbone. He curled his fingers around Saravio’s lower face. If only he could make contact with the brain centers that controlled the other man’s muscles. Even a moment of relaxation would allow him to pull free—

He shaped his
laran
like a spear point to pierce the tumult.

Almost without effort, Eduin swept through the other man’s chaotic barriers. Images flooded him, stark and vivid. He caught a flash of a Tower illuminated by lightning against a night sky, then a blizzard of swirling gray and white, a river in full flood, a figure in a long dark cloak. The eddies died, leaving only the figure turning slowly toward him.

Hands pale as snow drew back the hood and he saw it was a woman. She lifted her face. Framed by hair the color of jet that dipped in a peak between her flawless brows, her skin glimmered like pearl. The faintest tracery of rose on her cheeks and lips was the only color. Gray eyes searched his, yet he knew she could not see him.

Hers was a beauty to break men’s hearts, and yet as Eduin looked upon her in that moment, he felt only pity. Pity that such a human woman walked the earth no more, but must descend into the Seven Frozen Hells.

She shaped a word, perhaps
Adelandeyo,
“walk with the gods,” a formal phrase of parting among the
Comyn
.

Walk with the gods, she must.

Eduin repeated her name to himself. He thought that if she answered him, if she called his own name, then his heart would shatter.

A gust sprang up at that moment. It whipped Naotalba’s gray cloak, churning the snow at her feet into glittering billows. First her body disappeared, then the pale oval of her face. The dark outline of her cloak flared outward, growing in size like a giant maw, opening to engulf the whole world. Around it, the wind raged, streams of sleet and darkness, far worse than any Hellers blizzard. He looked upon a tempest against which no man could stand, a maelstrom straight from Zandru’s coldest hell. And it was coming for him . . .

Claws like frozen darkness pierced him. In a spasm of terror, he hurled himself backward. The psychic substance of his body stretched and tore. A brassy din reverberated through him.

Eduin found himself back in his physical body, sprawled on the wooden floor. His outstretched legs convulsed for an instant. Then he scrambled to his feet. He ran trembling fingers over his face, feeling the skin damp and hot, as if with fever. He snatched up the filthy scrap of silk and tucked his starstone away. Chest heaving, he looked down upon the man on the pallet.

Saravio lay back on the bed, his breath deep and even. The blue tinge had faded from his lips and as Eduin watched, the iron tension seeped from his muscles. His face relaxed, giving him the aspect of a sleeping child.

Eduin’s heart pounded in his ears and sweat ran freely down the sides of his neck and across his chest and back. Gradually, his terror gave way to pity. He knew very well the taste and weight of obsession, the bitterness of enslavement. What must it be like to live, day by day, with such visions, cast out by the very Tower that was his best hope of healing?

If Eduin were to have any chance at ending his father’s curse, he must find some way to help this poor, crazed man. Murmuring a prayer he thought long forgotten, Eduin slipped out the door.

Eduin returned to Saravio’s quarters late in the day, as the early dusk engulfed the canyons of the city. The place was very much as he had left it, with Saravio lying on his side, knees bent toward his chest, head resting on his outstretched arm, breathing deep and regular. Eduin sensed rather than saw all this. The battered lantern that he had purchased with part of his day’s earnings cast an uncertain light across the room. In his other hand, he clutched a packet of nutbread, the cheapest he could find, and a skin of water. It had taken all of his ragged determination not to fill it with ale instead.

Sighing with weariness, he set the lantern on the crude table and lowered himself to the pallet. He placed one hand on Saravio’s shoulder. The physical contact flooded him with
laran
sensations. As Saravio slept, his brain had continued its recovery. Waves of energy rippled through the overlapping systems of nervous tissue and energon channels, slow but steady.

Eduin sent out a mental probe, a simple telepathic thought. It ought to have been as clear as spoken word to the man’s awakening mind, but there was no response, not even a flicker of awareness. He had not expected one.

He shook the shoulder gently. Saravio’s eyes opened.

“It’s you. I dreamed . . . Naotalba . . .”

“Yes, you’re all right now. Here, you must eat something.” Gently, Eduin helped the other man to sit up.

Like an obedient child, Saravio accepted morsels of bread and sips of water. He took the first few bites tentatively, as if he had forgotten how to chew and swallow. When Eduin sent a gentle telepathic message, Saravio gave no sign, overt or mental, that he’d sensed anything.

The little experiment confirmed Eduin’s suspicions. All through the day, as he had labored at mucking out stalls at the livery stables at the city’s edge, he had mulled over the morning’s events.

Whatever Saravio’s talents while he was still at Cedestri Tower, before Naotalba had “visited” him, he was now as head-blind to telepathic contact as any commoner. Coupled with his delusions and unpredictable temper, that would certainly render him unfit for work in a matrix circle.

Eduin thought it likely that whatever caused the seizures had also damaged that part of Saravio’s brain responsible for receptive telepathy. Saravio seemed to have no idea of his extraordinary projective empathy, his ability to temporarily override the compulsion spell.

We are two of a kind,
Eduin thought with a touch of unfamiliar compassion,
each crippled through no fault of our own. Perhaps together we can make one whole patched-up man and limp through the world.
No, he realized, he would no longer have to settle for a half-existence in the shadows. Life held the promise of much more.

Emotion, hot and bright, came singing up behind Eduin’s throat. For the first time in his years of hiding, he had a friend, an ally. He would know moments of freedom, and in them, a chance to think, to plan, to reach beyond the gutters. Perhaps, too, he could help Saravio find peace and a use for his unusual talent. It would be a fair trade.

T
he last of the snow clung to the alleys and back streets of Thendara long after it had melted everywhere else. Here in the poorest sections, shadows clung, chill and secretive, to the broken walls. Grime scummed pools of slushy water. Half-starved children picked through the piles of refuse for scraps of moldy bread.

Eduin, now close friends with Saravio, had moved to roomier quarters. Saravio sang to him whenever he could not bear the internal pressure of his father’s dying curse, and he would know a few days of release before the cycle, remorseless and inexorable, began again. Saravio sometimes lapsed into seizures after an episode, although the fits were never as severe as the first. Eduin dared not leave him, for fear that Saravio might stop breathing again. This only increased Eduin’s exposure to the euphoria of the song. His craving for drink abated, but at the same time he found himself longing for the moments of physical pleasure that accompanied Saravio’s
laran
manipulations, finding ways to draw them out. The allure frightened him, for it was, both in its power and its purity, far more seductive than ale.

With the lifting of the numbing effects of drink, Eduin experienced a renewal of other emotions as well. Whenever Saravio suffered his fits, Eduin felt a mixture of pity, disgust, and guilt. Guilt that he himself had brought this malady upon the friend who sought only to help him. He never inquired about Saravio’s willingness to pay this price. Indeed, Saravio always responded cheerfully to his request and afterward, seemed unaware of what had happened. Then Eduin felt shame, as if he were taking advantage of the innocent trust of a child. He thrust the unpleasant feelings from his mind. What choice did he have? Silently, he promised himself that he would use the respite from the compulsion in a good cause. He swore he would find a way to do without the soporific effect. Usually he would feel better for a while, until he was forced to ask Saravio to sing again.

As one tenday blended into the next and the sun swung higher in the sky, heralding the end of winter, Eduin began to wonder if he had exchanged one form of imprisonment for another. As far as he could tell, Saravio’s
laran
manipulation did not place his life and health at risk the way drink had, but he was no less chained to it. Sooner or later, the compulsion within his own mind returned, the scorpion roused to spread its poison in his mind and drove him to beg another song. Eduin grew to resent his dependence. Only his quick thinking in representing himself as Naotalba’s messenger prevented him from deteriorating into Saravio’s abject slave, willing to do anything for yet another ecstatic moment.