City of Sorcery (9 page)

“Stay if you wish. But I can’t imagine wanting to stay in the City when you could be out in the country, at Armida.”

Jaelle looked up toward the skyline, where the Venza Mountains overshadowed the pass that led down into the city. “You feel it too? I would like to be out again on the trail. I have done my duty to clan and family, and when Dori is only a little older, I shall send her to be fostered as a daughter of Aillard. And then - oh, Magda, aren’t you eager to be in the field again, traveling in the mountains? Rafaella wants me to come back to work with her; she’s talking about some new special project for the Terrans, but won’t tell me any details until I promise I’ll join her. It would be hard to leave the Tower, and I would miss it, but - couldn’t I take a year away, just to travel again? It’s been so long! I never spent so long in one place in my whole life as I have spent at Armida! Five years, Magda!”

Magda smiled indulgently. “I’m sure they would give you leave to spend a year in the mountains if you wished.”

“I heard the other day that there is an expedition going to climb High Kimbi. It’s never been climbed - “

“And probably never will be,” Magda said. “Not by cither of us, in any case. You know as well as I do they wouldn’t have women along, not even as guides. If there are still men who think women unfit to be part of anything facing danger or demanding courage, they are the men who go out climbing mountains.”

Jaelle snorted. “I led a trade caravan over the Pass of Scaravel when I was not yet eighteen!”

“
Breda
, I know what you can do on the trail. And Rafaella is listed in Intelligence Services as the best mountain guide in the business! But there are still men who won’t use women guides. The more fools they.”

Jaelle shrugged philosophically. “I guess if we want to climb High Kimbi, or Dammerung Peak, we’ll have to organize our own expedition.”

Magda laughed. “Forget the
we
part, Jaelle.
You
would have to do it. That one trip across Scaravel was enough to last me a lifetime.” Even remembering, she shivered at the thought of the cliffs and chasms of the Pass of Scaravel.

“Talk to Camilla. She’d probably be delighted to go out and climb anything inaccessible you can find.”

“And knowing you, you’ll be right beside her.” Jaelle laughed. “You talk about being timid, but when you’re actually in the field - I know you better than you know yourself.”

“Whether or no,” Magda said, “for the moment we are in Thendara, and here we will stay, for the next few days, at least.”

“We should relay a message to Armida, though. They’ll be expecting us,” Jaelle reminded her. “They should be told that we are all right - not murdered by bandits on the trail, or something of that sort.”

“No,” Magda said morosely, “only murdered here in Thendara, by bureaucratic nonsense! Shall we get in touch with them tonight?”

“You do it, Magda, you’re a far better telepath than I am.”

“But they will want to hear from us both,” Magda said, and Jaelle nodded soberly.

“Tonight, then, when it’s quiet.”

But that night there was an Oath-taking in the house. Although neither the new Renunciate nor her Oath-sisters were known to Magda or Jaelle, they could not in decency absent themselves from such festivities in their own house. Afterward there was a party with cakes and wine; Magda, knowing what lay ahead of her, drank sparingly. She spent most of the evening with Camilla and Mother Lauria, and found herself agreeing how very young the new Renunciates appeared. It seemed that the woman who had taken the Oath tonight, and her friends who had witnessed the Oath, were just children. Had she and Jaelle ever been as young as that? Apart from the Oath-mother, an older woman was always chosen to witness the ceremony, and it seemed incredible to see Doria, whom Magda remembered as a girl of fifteen sharing her own housebound time, described as an older woman.

Rafaella was there, and spent much of the latter part of the evening talking with Jaelle; Magda did not begrudge Jaelle the company of her old friend and partner, but, watching Rafi drinking heavily of the pale wine from the mountain vineyards, she hoped Jaelle would not be led into drinking. It was late before they could get away to the room they shared - but that was just as well. The atmosphere was quieter at night, with most people sleeping; much matrix work, in the Towers and outside them, was done between sunset and sunrise.

“What was Rafi talking about?”

“Some new project from Mapping and Exploring - a survey in the mountains. She wanted me to promise I’d come.” Jaelle looked regretful as she pulled off her low indoor boots and untied the laces of her tunic. Magda sat on the bed to remove her own.

“Did you promise?”

“How could I? I told her I would have to consult you, and also the folk in the Tower. I do not think she knows we have sworn oath as freemates, and I had no opportunity to tell her.”

“Perhaps it is as well not to tell her.”

“You told Camilla.”

“But Camilla is not jealous. Rafaella and I have worked out a pact for mutual co-existence - we even manage to like each other most of the time - but she is jealous of our closeness, Jaelle.”

“Rafi and I were never lovers, Margali. At least, not since I was a little girl. She was really not much more. And now, at least, Rafaella is certainly a lover of men. What may have been between us when we were young girls does not seem that important to me, and I cannot believe it is important to her.” Jaelle shivered, standing barefoot on the icy floor, and quickly pulled her nightgown over her head.

“That is not what she is jealous of.” Magda wondered why Jaelle could not see it. “What she envies is that we work together, that we share
laran
. And that is closer than any other bond.” She hurried into her warm nightgown and warmer robe, for the Guild-house was not well-heated at night. “Will you monitor, Jaelle, or do you want me to do it?”

“I will. That’s about my level of skill.” Jaelle had no illusions about her competence working with
laran
. She had spent half a lifetime blocking away her psychic gift, submitting to the training only when the
laran
could not be excluded from her consciousness. Now, she knew, she could achieve only the minimal level of training: sufficient to keep her from being, in the phrase so often used about untrained telepaths, a menace to herself and everyone around her.

Jaelle was, and was glad to be, an integral part of the group of telepaths and psi workers, loosely allied, who worked outside the ordinary structure of matrix workers on Darkover, and in defiance called themselves the Forbidden Tower. But she would never achieve sufficient competence to call herself matrix mechanic or technician. Sometimes when she watched Magda, born a Terran, and now the most skillful of technicians, she was painfully aware that she had cast away that birthright, and could now never recover it.

They were both wearing warm, fur-lined robes, fur-lined slippers. Magda wrapped herself in an extra blanket. Psychic work withdrew heat from the body. If the worker stayed out too long on the astral planes known collectively as the overworld, it could result in painful chill.

Jaelle took her matrix, from the tiny leather bag around her neck, and carefully stripped away the protecting silks. The blue stone, no larger than the nail of her little finger, glinted with pallid fires.

She spoke aloud, though it was not really necessary; from the moment Magda had taken out her matrix, they had been in contact.

“Match resonances - “

Magda was aware first of the physical heat and mass of Jaelle’s body, though she did not look at the other woman; her eyes were fixed within the matrix, seeing only the moving lights in the stone. She sensed the living energy fields of Jaelle’s body near her, the pulsing spots where the life currents moved. Then, delicately, she moved to match the vibration of her stone to Jaelle’s, feeling it as a point of - was it heat, light, some indefinable energy moving in the room? Nothing so tangible as these. She felt her heartbeat altering slightly, pulsing with the ebb and flow of the energies of the matched stones, knew that the very blood in her veins and arteries moved in cadence with the other woman’s.

She sensed, like a hand passing over her body, the monitoring touch of Jaelle, scanning her to make certain that all was well in her body before she withdrew her consciousness from it, aware of everything, even noticing the graze on her ankle where she had skidded the other day on a pebble, the slight clogging of her sinuses - she must have encountered something in the HQ today to which she was mildly allergic; she noticed it, as Jaelle moved energies to clear the condition.

Neither spoke, but she picked it up as Jaelle finished:

Ready?

I’m going out.

Magda let her consciousness slip free of her body and looked down, seeing herself lying apparently unconscious on the bed they shared. Jaelle, blanket-wrapped, sat beside her. With total irrelevance, she thought.
That old robe of mine is really getting too old and grubby, I shall have to have a new one before long. What a pity I hate sewing so much
. She could have requisitioned a new one from Supplies, in the Terran HQ, but she had lived in the Guild-house too long to see that as a workable solution.

Then she was up and out of the room, finding herself alone in the gray and featureless plain of the overworld. After a moment, Jaelle stood beside her. As always in the overworld, Jaelle seemed smaller, slighter, more fragile, and Magda wondered, as she had wondered before, whether what she saw was a projection of the way Jaelle saw herself, or whether it reflected the way in which, for some reason, she had always felt protective, as if Jaelle were younger and weaker than herself.

Around them stretched grayness in every direction, colorless and without, form. In the distance, figures drifted. Some of them, Magda knew, were their fellow pilgrims on the non-physical planes of existence; some had merely strayed from their bodies in dreams or meditation. She could see none of them clearly as yet, for she had not yet marked her own path with will and purpose.

Now, in the clearing dimness as what looked like fog dispersed, she could see faint landmarks in the gray. First, foremost, she saw a shining structure, rising tall on the plain, which she knew to be the landmark made on these planes by the thought-form called the Forbidden Tower - shelter from the nothingness of the astral world. Her home, the home she had found for her spirit, shared with those who meant more to her even than the Sisterhood of the Guild-house. She still observed meticulously every provision of the Renunciate Oath; she was a Free Amazon not only in word but in spirit. But the Guild-house could no longer contain the fullness of her being.

With the speed of thought - for what she imagined in the overworld was literally true - she was standing beside the Tower itself. Simultaneously she was inside it, in what appeared to be, complete in every detail, the upstairs suite in the Great House of Armida. She had come so late to this work that she had never quite accustomed herself to how time and space behaved on this plane.

All four of the rooms were empty - she could see them all at once, in a way she did not understand - but somewhere, there was the blue glow of a matrix where someone of the Tower kept watch. And then, without a moment of transition, Callista Lanart-Carr was beside her.

Magda knew rationally that Callista was not as beautiful in body as she looked in the overworld. In this case at least she was seeing Callista through the eyes of the spirit and through the eyes of her love and veneration for this woman who was at the center of the heart and spirit of the Forbidden Tower. In reality (but what, after all, was reality, and which was the illusion?) - on the material plane of existence, Callista Lanart-Carr, once Keeper at Arilinn, was a tall, frail-looking woman, her red hair faded almost to silvery gray, though she was not much past thirty; her body was sagging from the three children she had borne, and her face was lined and careworn. Yet on this plane, at least for Magda, Callista had the radiant beauty of early youth.

Magda knew that she did not speak, but speech and sound were irrelevant here. It seemed to her that Callista cried out a joyful greeting.

“Magda! Jaelle! Oh, we have been expecting to see you - “

And suddenly they were surrounded by the others of the Tower circle, Ellemir and Andrew and Damon, summoned quickly from dreams or sleep. Damon’s brother Kieran was there too, and Kieran’s son Kester, and Lady Hilary Castamir-Syrtis, who like Callista had once been Keeper in Arilinn. It seemed to both Magda and Jaelle that for a moment they were encompassed in an instant love-feast of greeting, made up of all the kisses and embraces and tenderness they had ever known, without time or the limits of the body, and it lasted (in reality, Magda knew, a spirt second or less) a long time.