Heritage and Exile (37 page)

Her face blanched and she gave a low, stricken cry. He felt the pain in it but he did not look away, and finally she said, her voice wavering, “Is there no other way?”

He tried to make it a feeble joke. “I have no time to get one in the usual way, sister, even if I could find some woman to help me at such short notice.”

Her laughter was almost hysterical; it cut off in the middle, leaving stark silence. He saw slow acceptance dawning in her eyes. He had known she would agree. She was Hastur, of a family older than royalty. She had of necessity married beneath her, since there was no equal, and she had come to love her husband deeply, but her duty to the Hasturs came first. She only said, her voice no more than a thread, “What shall I say to Gabriel?”

“He has known since the day he took you to wife that this day might come,” Regis said. “I might well have died before coming to manhood.”

“Come, then, and choose for yourself.” She led the way to the room where her three sons slept in cots side by side. By the candlelight Regis studied their faces, one by one. Gabriel, sturdy and swarthy and taller than his brother; Rafael, slight and dark, close-cropped curls tousled around his face, Mikhail, who was four, was still pixie-small, fairer than the others, his rosy cheeks framed in light waving locks, almost silvery white. Grandfather must have looked like that as a child, Regis thought. He felt curiously cold and bereft. Javanne had given their clan three sons and two daughters. He might never father a son of his own. He shivered at the implications of what he was doing, bent his head, groping through an unaccustomed prayer. “Cassilda, blessed Mother of the Domains, help me choose wisely. . . .”

He moved quietly from cot to cot. Rafael was most like him, he thought. Then, on some irresistible impulse, he bent over Mikhail, lifted the small sleeping form in his arms.

“This is my son, Javanne.”

She nodded, but her eyes were fierce. “And if you do not return he will be Hastur of Hastur; but if you
do
return, what then? A poor relation at the footstool of Hastur?”

Regis said quietly, “If I do not return, he will be
nedestro,
sister. I will not pledge you never to take a wife, even in return for this great gift. But this I swear to you: he shall come second only to my first legitimately born son. My second son shall be third to him, and I will take oath no other
nedestro
heir shall ever displace him. Will this content you.
breda
?”

Mikhail opened his eyes and stared about him sleepily, but he saw his mother and did not cry. Javanne touched the blond head gently. “It will content me, brother.”

Holding the child awkwardly in unpracticed arms, Regis carried him out of the room where his brothers slept. “Bring witnesses,” he said, “I must be gone soon. You know this is irrevocable, Javanne, that once I take this oath, he is not yours but mine, and must be sealed my heir. You must send him to Grandfather at Thendara.”

She nodded. Her throat moved as she swallowed hard, but she did not protest. “Go down to the chapel,” she said. “I will bring witnesses.”

It was an old room in the depths of the house, the four old god-forms painted crudely on the walls, lights burning before them. Regis held Mikhail on his lap, letting the child sleepily twist a button on his tunic, until the witnesses came, four old men and two old women of the household. One of the women had been Javanne's nurse in childhood, and his own.

He took his place solemnly at the altar, Mikhail in his arms.

“I swear before Aldones, Lord of Light and my divine forefather, that Hastur of Hasturs is this child by unbroken blood line, known to me in true descent. And in default of any heir of my body, therefore do I, Regis-Rafael Felix Alar Hastur y Elhalyn, choose and name him my
nedestro
heir and swear that none save my first-born son in true marriage shall ever displace him as my heir; and that so long as I live, none shall challenge his right to my hearth, my home or my heritage. Thus I take oath in the presence of witnesses known to us both. I declare that my son shall be no more called Mikhail Regis Lanart-Hastur, but—” He paused, hesitating among old Comyn names for suitable new names which would confirm the ritual. There was no time to search the rolls for names of honor. He would commemorate, then, the desperate need which had driven him to this. “I name him Danilo,” he said at last. “He shall be called Danilo Lanart Hastur, and I will so maintain to all challenge, facing my father before me and my sons to follow me, my ancestry and my posterity. And this claim may never be renounced by me while I live, nor in my name by any of the heirs of my body.” He bent and kissed his son on the soft baby lips. It was done. They had a strange beginning. He wondered what the end would be. He turned his eyes on his old nurse.

“Foster-mother, I place you in charge of my son. When the roads are safe, you must take him to the Lord Hastur at Thendara, and see to it that he is given the Sign of Comyn.”

Javanne was dropping slow tears, but she said nothing except, “Let me kiss him once more,” and allowed the old woman to carry the child away. Regis followed them with his eyes. His son. It was a strange feeling. He wondered if he had
laran
or the unknown Hastur gift; he wondered if he would ever know, would ever see the child again.

“I must go,” he said to his sister. “Send for my horse and someone to open the gates without noise.” As they waited together in the gateway, he said, “If I do not return—”

“Speak no ill-omen!” she said quickly.

“Javanne, do you have the Hastur gift?”

“I do not know,” she said. “None knows till it is wakened by one who holds it. We had always thought that you had no
laran
. . . .”

He nodded grimly. He had grown up with that, and even now it was too sore a wound to touch.

She said, “A day will come when you must go to Grandfather, who holds it to waken in his heir, and ask for the gift. Then, and only then, you will know what it is. I do not know myself,” she said. “Only if you had died before you were declared a man, or before you had fathered a son, it would have been wakened in me so that, before my own death, I might pass it to one of my sons.”

And so it might pass, still. He heard the soft clop-clopclop of hooves in the dark. He prepared to mount, turned back a moment and took Javanne briefly in his arms. She was crying. He blinked tears from his own eyes. He whispered, “Be good to my son, darling.” What more could he say?

She kissed him quickly in the dark and said, “Say you'll come back, brother. Don't say anything else.” Without waiting for another word, she wrenched herself free of him and ran back into the dark house.

The gates of Edelweiss swung shut behind him. Regis was alone. The night was dark, fog-shrouded. He fastened his cloak about his throat, touching the small pouch where the matrix lay. Even through the insulation he could feel it, though no other could have, a small live thing, throbbing. . . . He was alone with it, under the small horn of moon lowering behind the distant hills. Soon even that small light would be gone.

He braced himself, murmured to his horse, straightened his back and rode away northward, on the first step of his unknown journey.

Until the day I die, I am sure I shall return in dreams to that first joyous time at Aldaran.

In my dreams, everything that came after has been wiped out, all the pain and terror, and I remember only that time when we were all together and I was happy, wholly happy for the first and last time in my life. In those dreams Thyra moves with all her strange wild beauty, but gentle and subdued, as she was during those days, tender and pliant and loving. Beltran is there, too, with his fire and the enthusiasm of the dream from which we had all taken the spark, my friend, almost my brother. Kadarin is always there, and in my dreams he is always smiling, kind, a rock of strength bearing us all up when we faltered. And Rafe, the son I shall never have, always beside me, his eyes lifted to mine.

And Marjorie.

Marjorie is always with me in those dreams. But there is nothing I can say about Marjorie. Only that we were together and in love, and as yet the fear was only a little, little shadow, like a breath of chill from a glacier not yet in sight. I wanted her, of course, and I resented the fact that I could not touch her even in the most casual way. But it wasn't as bad as I had feared. Psi work uses up so much energy and strength that there's nothing much left. I was with her every waking moment and it was enough.
Almost
enough. And we could wait for the rest.

I wanted a well-trained team, so I worked with them day by day, trying to shape us all together into a functioning circle which could work together, precisely tuned. As yet we were working with our small matrices; before we joined together to open and call forth the power of the big one, we must be absolutely attuned to one another, with no hidden weaknesses. I would have felt safer with a circle of six or eight, as at Arilinn. Five is a small circle, even with Beltran working outside as a psi monitor. But Thyra and Kadarin were stronger than most of us at Arilinn—I knew they were both stronger than I, though I had more skill and training—and Marjorie was fantastically talented. Even at Arilinn, they would have chosen her the first day as a potential Keeper.

Deep warmth and affection, even love, had sprung up among all of us with the gradual blending of our minds. It was always like this, in the building of a circle. It was closer than family intimacy, closer than sexual love. It was a sort of
blending,
as if we all melted into one another, each of us contributing something special, individual and unique, and somehow all of us together becoming more than the sum of us.

But the others were growing impatient. It was Thyra who finally voiced what they were all wanting to know.

“When do we begin to work with the Sharra matrix? We're as ready as we'll ever be.”

I demurred. “I'd hoped to find others to work with us; I'm not sure we can operate a ninth-level matrix alone.”

Rafe asked, “What's a ninth-level matrix?”

“In general,” I said dryly, “it's a matrix not safe to handle with less than nine workers. And that's with a good, fully trained Keeper.”

Kadarin said, “I told you we should have chosen Thyra.”

“I won't argue with you about it. Thyra is a very strong telepath; she is an excellent technician and mechanic. But no Keeper.”

Thyra asked, “Exactly how does a Keeper differ from any other telepath?”

I struggled to put it into language she could understand. “A Keeper is the central control in the circle; you've all seen that. She holds together the forces. Do you know what
energons
are?”

Only Rafe ventured to ask, “Are they the little wavy things that I can't quite see when I look into the matrix?”

Actually that was a very good answer. I said, “They're a purely theoretical name for something nobody's sure really exists. It's been postulated that the part of the brain which controls psi forces gives off a certain type of vibration which we call energons. We can describe what they do, though we can't really describe them. These, when directed and focused through a matrix—I showed you—become immensely amplified, with the matrix acting as a transformer. It is the
amplified
energons which transform energy. Well, in a matrix circle, it is the Keeper who receives the flow of energons from all members of the circle and weaves them all into a single focused beam, and this, the focused beam, is what goes through the large matrix.”

“Why are Keepers always women?”

“They aren't. There have been male Keepers, powerful ones, and other men who have taken a Keeper's place. I can do it myself. But women have more positive energon flows, and they begin to generate them younger and keep them longer.”

“You explained why a Keeper has to be chaste,” Marjorie said, “but I still don't understand it.”

Kadarin said, “That's because it's superstitious drivel. There's nothing to understand; it's gibberish.”

“In the old days,” I said, “when the really enormous matrix screens were made, the big synthetic ones, the Keepers
were
virgins, trained from early childhood and conditioned in ways you wouldn't believe. You know how close a matrix circle is.” I looked around at them, savoring the closeness. “In those days a Keeper had to learn to be part of the circle and yet completely,
completely
apart from it.”

Marjorie said, “I should think they'd have gone mad.”

“A good many of them did. Even now, most of the women who work as Keepers give it up after a year or two. It's too difficult and frustrating. The Keepers at the towers aren't required to be virgins any more. But while they are working as Keepers, they stay strictly chaste.”

“It sounds like nonsense,” Thyra said.

“Not a bit of it,” I said. “The Keeper takes and channels all that energy from all of you. No one who has ever handled these very high energy-flows wants to take the slightest chance of short-circuiting them through her own body. It would be like getting in the way of a lightning-bolt.” I held out the scar again. “A three-second backflow did that to me. Well, then. In the body there are clusters of nerve fibers which control the energy flows. The trouble is that the same nerve clusters carry two kinds of energy: they carry the psi flows, the energons which carry power to the brain; they also carry the sexual messages and energies. This is why some telepaths get threshold sickness when they're in their teens: the two kinds of energy, sexual energies and
laran,
are both wakening at once. If they aren't properly handled, you can get an overload, sometimes a killer overload, because each stimulates the other and you get a circular feedback.”