The Forbidden Circle (13 page)

“Asleep, I suppose. He, too, was very weary. Shall I send to him?”

“I suppose you must. We have little time to lose,” Damon said, “although now we have found each other, I would rather be alone with you a while.” But he smiled as he said it. They already shared more than he had ever known with any other woman, and for the rest, there was no urgency. He was no raw youth clutching his girl in haste, and they could wait for the rest. Briefly he picked up a shy thought from Ellemir,
But not too long
, and it warmed him; but he let her go, and said, “There is time enough. Send a steward to bid him come down to us, if he is rested enough. And now, I must think.” He moved away from Ellemir and stood looking into the blue-green flames that shot up from the piled resin-treated fuel in the fireplace.

Carr was a telepath, and a potentially powerful one. He had found and held rapport with a stranger, not even blood-kin. A part of the overworld barred even to the Tower-trained might be accessible to him. Yet he was wholly untrained, wholly untaught, and not even inclined to believe very much of these strange powers. With all his heart Damon wished someone else were here to teach this man. The awakening of latent psi powers was not an easy task even for those trained to it, and for an off-worlder, with an unthinkably strange background, without even belief and confidence to help him, it was likely to be a difficult and painful business. Damon had shied away from such contacts ever since he had been dismissed from the Tower Circle. It wouldn’t be easy to take them up again, to drop his barriers for this stranger. Yet there was no one else.

He looked around the room, searching. He said, “Have you
kirian
here?”
Kirian
, a powerful drug compounded of the pollen of a rare plant from the mountains, had a tendency, in carefully regulated dosage, to lower the barriers against telepathic rapport. He was not sure whether he meant to give it to Andrew Carr or take it himself, but one way or the other it might make it easier to get through to a stranger. Most deliberate telepathic training was done by the Keepers themselves, but
kirian
could heighten the psi powers, temporarily, enough to make contact possible even with non telepaths.

Ellemir said doubtfully, “I don’t
think
so. Not, at least, since Domenic outgrew the threshold sickness. Callista never needed it, nor I. I will look and see, but I fear not.”

Damon felt the cold shudder of fear, gnawing deep in his belly. Blurred a little by the drug, he might have been able to endure the difficult business of directing and disciplining the arousal of
laran
in a stranger. The thought of going through it without some help was almost unendurable. Yet, if it was Callista’s only chance—

“You have a starstone,” Ellemir said. “You used it to show me what little I could do—”

“Child, you are my blood-kin and we are close enough emotionally—even so, when you gripped the stone, it was agony, more than I can tell you,” Damon said gravely. “Tell me. Has Callista any other of the matrix jewels, unused?” If he could get for Carr a blank, unkeyed jewel, perhaps he could work more easily with him.

“I am not sure,” Ellemir said. “She has many things I have never seen, nor asked about, because they have to do with her work as Keeper. I wondered why she had brought them here rather than leaving them in the Tower.”

“Perhaps because—” Damon hesitated. It was hard to speak of his own days in the Tower Circle; his mind kept shying and skittering away like a frightened horse. Yet somehow he must overcome this fear. “Perhaps because a
leronis
, or even a matrix technician, prefers to keep his, or her, working gear close at hand. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it feels better, somehow, to have it within reach. I do not use my own starstone twice in a year,” he added, “yet I keep it here, around my neck, simply because it has been made into a—a part of me. It is uncomfortable, even physically painful, to have it too far from me.”

Ellemir whispered, verifying swiftly his guess about her own fast-developing sensitivity: “Oh, poor Callista! And she told Andrew that they had taken her starstone from her—”

Grimly, the man nodded. “So even if she has not been ravished or ill-treated, she is suffering now,” he said.
Why should I shrink from a little pain or trouble, to spare her worse?
he thought. “Take me to her room; let me look through her things.”

Ellemir obeyed, without question, but when they stood in the center of the room the twin sisters shared, with the two narrow beds at opposite ends of the room, she said in a frightened whisper, “What you said—won’t it hurt Callista for you to touch her—the things she uses as a Keeper?”

“It’s a possibility,” said Damon, “but no worse than she has been hurt already, and it may be our only chance.”

My men died because I was too cowardly to accept the thing that I was: a Tower-trained telepath. If I let Callista suffer because I fear to use my skills . . . then am I worthless to Ellemir, then am I a lesser thing than any off-worlder . . . but, God, I am afraid, afraid. . . . Blessed Cassilda, mother of the Seven Domains, be with me now
. . . .

His even, neutral voice betrayed nothing. “Where does Callista keep her belongings? I can tell yours from hers by their feel, but I would rather not waste time or strength on that.”

“The dressing table there, with the silver brushes, is hers. Mine is the other, with the embroidered scarves and the ivory-backed brushes and combs.” He could feel the tension and fear in Ellemir’s voice, but she was trying to match his cool, dispassionate manner. Damon looked on the dressing table, and rummaged briefly in the drawers. “Nothing here but rubbish,” he said. “One or two small matrix jewels, first-level or less, good for fastening buttons, no more. You’re sure you never saw where she keeps anything of the kind?” But even before he saw her shake her head, he knew the answer.

“Never. I tried not to—to intrude on that part of her life.”

“What a pity I’m not the Terran,” Damon said sourly. “I could ask her directly.” He clasped his hand, reluctantly, over the starstone which hung on its cord, slowly drew it from the leather pouch, closing his eyes, trying to sense something. As always when he touched the cold, smooth jewel he felt the strange sting of fear. After a moment, hesitantly, he moved toward Callista’s bed. It lay still tangled and the bedclothing crumpled, as if no one, servant or mistress, had had the heart to disturb the last imprint of her body there. Damon wet his lips with his tongue, bent and reached under the pillow, then drew back, lifting the pillow gingerly. Beneath it, against the fine linen sheet, lay a small silk envelope, almost—but not quite—flat. He could see the shape of the jewel through the silk.

“Callista’s starstone,” he said slowly. “So her captors did not take it from her.”

Ellemir was trying to remember Andrew’s exact words. “He said—Callista did not say her starstone had been taken from her,” she repeated slowly. “She said, ‘
They
could only take my jewels from me lest one of them should be my starstone.’ Something like that. So it has been here all along.”

“If I had had it, maybe I could have seen her in the overworld,” Damon mused aloud, then shook his head. No one but Callista could use her stone. Yet it explained one thing. Without her starstone, she could be concealed in the darkness. If she had been touching it, he could probably have located her; he could have focused his own stone on it. . . . No good thinking about that now. He stretched out his hand to take it, then drew back.

“You take it,” he directed, and as she hesitated, “You are her blood-kin, her twin; your vibrations are closer to hers. You can handle it with less pain to her than anyone living. Even through the silk insulation there is some danger, but less from you than anyone else.”

Gingerly, Ellemir picked up the silk envelope and slipped it into the bosom of her dress.
For all the good that would do
, Damon thought. Callista, with her starstone, might have been better able to resist her captors. Or maybe not. He was beginning to surmise that it could be she was held prisoner by someone using one of these matrix jewels, someone stronger than herself, who wished mostly to hold her powerless; someone who knew that, free and armed, she would be a danger.

The cat-men. The cat-men, Zandru help them all! But how, and where, did the cat-men get together enough skill and power even to experiment with the matrix jewels?
The truth is
, he thought,
none of us knows a damn thing about the cat-men, but we’ve made the bad mistake of underestimating them. A fatal mistake? Who knows?

Well, at least the starstone was not in nonhuman hands.

They were halfway down the stairs when they heard the commotion in the courtyard, the sounds of riders, the great bell in the court. Ellemir gasped and her hand flew to her heart. Damon felt for an instant that prickle of tense fear; then he relaxed.

“It cannot be another attack,” he said. “I think it is friends or kinsfolk, or an alarm would have been rung.”
Besides
, he thought grimly,
I felt no warning!

“I think it is Lord Alton come home,” he said, and Ellemir looked startled.

“I sent a message to Father when I sent to you,” she said, “but I did not believe he would come during Comyn Council, whatever the need.” She ran down the stairs, picking up her gray skirt about her knees; Damon followed more slowly through the great doors into the bricked-in courtyard.

It was a scene of chaos. Armed men, covered in blood, swaying in their saddles.
Too few men
, Damon thought swiftly,
for Dom Esteban’s bodyguard, any time
. Between two horses, a litter rudely woven of evergreen boughs had been slung, and on the litter lay the motionless body of a man.

Ellemir had stopped short on the courtyard steps, and as Damon came up, the pallor of her face struck him like a blow. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, nails driven into the palms. Damon took her gently by the arm, but she seemed not to know he was there, frozen into herself with shock and horror. Damon went down the steps, looking quickly around the pale, strained faces of the wounded men.
Eduin . . . Conan . . . Caradoc . . . where is Dom Esteban? Only over their dead bodies
. . . Then he caught a glimpse of the swarthy aquiline profile and iron-gray hair of the man in the litter, and it was like a blow to the solar plexus, so painful that he physically swayed with the shock of it.
Dom Esteban! By all the hells—what a time to lose the best swordsman and commander in all the Domains!

Servants were running about in what looked like confusion; two of the blood-soaked men had slid from their horses, and were cautiously unstrapping the litter. The horses carrying it shied away—
The smell of blood, they never get used to it!
—and there was a sharp cry; the man in the litter began to curse, fluently, in four languages.

Not dead, then, but very much alive. But how badly hurt?
Damon thought.

“Father!” Ellemir cried out, and began to run toward the litter. Damon caught and held her before she banged into it. The cursing stopped, like a faucet turned off.

“Callista, child—” The voice was harsh with pain.

“Ellemir, Father—” she murmured. They had managed to get the litter down to the ground now, and Damon saw the healer-woman pushing her way through the crowding servants. She said, in her crisp voice, “Move back, this is my business. Domna”—to Ellemir—“this is no place for you, either.” Ellemir disregarded the woman, kneeling beside the wounded man. His lips drew back harshly in a grimace meant for a smile.

“Well,
chiya
, I’m here.” The bushy eyebrows writhed. “I should have brought more men, though.” Damon, looking down over Ellemir’s bent back, could see on his face the marks of a long struggle with pain, and something worse. Something like fear. Although, since no one living had ever seen fear on the face of Esteban-Gabriel-Rafael Lanart, Lord Alton, no one knew how fear would have looked on that grim and controlled face. . . .

“Away with you now, child. Battle scenes and blood—no place for a little maiden. Damon, is it you? Kinsman, take the child away from here.”

And, besides, you can’t curse until she’s gone
, Damon thought wryly, seeing the old man’s teeth worrying his lip and knowing Dom Esteban’s iron prejudices. He laid his hand on Ellemir’s shoulder as the healer-woman knelt down beside Lord Alton, and after a moment she permitted him to draw her away.

Damon looked swiftly around the courtyard. Dom Esteban was not the only wounded, he saw; not even the most gravely wounded. One of the men was helped down from his horse and supported, half carried, by two men, toward the stone seat at the center, where they laid him out full length. His leg was wrapped with a crude bandage, blood soaking through; Damon’s stomach turned at the thought of what must lie beneath.

Ellemir, pale but controlled now, was quickly giving orders for hot water, bandage linen, cushions. “The Guardroom is too cold,” she said to Dom Cyril, the grizzled old
coridom
, or chief steward. “Carry them into the Great Hall; have beds moved in there from the Guardroom. They can be tended there more easily.”

“A good thought,
vai domna
,” said the old man, and hobbled toward the leader of the Guard—now that Esteban was out of it—the
seconde
, or chief officer of the Armida Guardsmen; Eduin the man’s name was. He was small and gnarled in stature, broad-shouldered and hawk faced, a long bloody gash now lending a fierce, wild look to his features. There were rips and slashes in the sleeve of his tunic.

“—invisible!” Damon heard him saying. “Yes, yes, I
know
it’s not possible, but I swear, you couldn’t see them until they were killed, and then they just—they—well, they fell out of the air. Sir, I swear it’s true. You could hear them moving, you could see the marks they left in the snow, you could see them
bleeding
—but they weren’t
there!
” The man was shaking all over with reaction, and under the smeared blood his face was dead white. “If it hadn’t been for the
vai dom
—” He spoke Dom Esteban’s name in his own far-mountain dialect, calling him
Istvan
. “Except for the Lord Istvan, we’d all have been killed.”