Zandru's Forge (19 page)

Carolin felt ashamed at his temper. Love, not the scheming of the court, had sent Orain after him. It was cruel to mock such loyalty.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Orain, “it was a lark, just like when we were boys together. I never meant to cause any worry, least of all for you.”

“We aren’t children any longer,” Orain said stiffly.

Carolin’s horse shifted uneasily beneath him, catching his wave of emotion. He had only wanted to extend the holiday a little longer before taking on the mantle of the Hasturs, waiting until the time he would be King. At Arilinn, it had been easy to forget, to be simply Carolin.

“Since you’ve come this far,” Carolin said, shaking off the mood, “let’s go on together. Your sword and Varzil’s thunder-bolts will be more than enough protection!” He turned his horse toward the lake and set heels to its sides, not waiting for an answer.

“My what?” Varzil cried, kicking his reluctant horse to keep pace.

“Can’t you shoot lightning out of your fingertips? I thought all
leronyn
could do that!” Carolin chuckled at Varzil’s outraged expression.

It occurred to him later, much later, that was not a thing to joke about.

The lake came into view, just as Carolin remembered it. From a distance, it resembled a ground-fog that never lifted or moved, despite the winds and clearness of the sky. The sun was now full up and glimmered on the misty surface. At the far end, the Tower stretched upward, a slender structure of the pale, translucent stone so treasured by the
Comyn.

They pulled their horses to a halt near the shore, and heard the soft splashing of the waves that spilled onto the banks. Varzil dismounted to scoop up a handful of the hazy stuff.

“It’s neither water nor cloud,” Carolin said, repeating what his tutors had said. He swung down from the saddle. “You can walk right through it to the bottom. Orain and I tried that once—what, six years ago?”

Orain nodded. He remained on his horse, his eyes scanning the horizon. That was so like Orain, to keep apart, watchful. In a rush, Carolin resented the reminder of danger.

“Come on.” Gesturing to Varzil, Carolin walked into the lake.

Varzil exclaimed as the cloud-water billowed against his boots, more like dew than liquid. He pulled back, trembling. Chest-deep, Carolin turned. “What is it?”

“Can you not feel it?” Varzil asked. “This place—how did you say the lake was formed?”

“We don’t know. The event is called the Cataclysm. There may have been records once, but if any still exist, they are lost.” And a good thing, too, or someone would surely have resurrected whatever terrible weapon changed an ordinary lake into this ghostly place.

Varzil shook his shoulders and the waters around him quivered with the movement. “It’s gone... ”

“What?”

“For a moment, I thought ... You know that physical objects can retain
laran
impressions, particularly of strong emotions. Well,” with a brightening smile, “we’ve come this far. Let’s go on, so that I can tell the folk back at Arilinn about the bird-fish the minstrels sing of.”

They went on. Carolin took a breath and ducked his head beneath the surface. The sun, full up now, filled the waters with its brilliance. Against all his instincts, he opened his mouth and inhaled. It was like breathing thick fog.

The rocks of the shore gave way to sloping, sandy banks. The atmosphere grew denser. Carolin forced himself to breathe regularly and the sensation of suffocation eased.

Below, shimmering green and orange objects flickered in and out of the cloud currents. Carolin touched Varzil’s sleeve and pointed.

“Bird-fish.
” The mist-water muffled his words.

Near the flat bottom, long green grasses waved in an intricate, undulating dance, some longer than the height of a man. Carolin stumbled on a stone beneath the surface of the sand. The light was dimmer here. The brilliantly colored creatures swam or flew in schools, darting and diving in unison. Their hides flashed luminescent whenever a stray beam of sun, light touched them.

Varzil held his hands out to the bird-fish, calling gently to them with his
laran.
The Ridenow were said to have a particular empathy with animals and it must be so, for they clustered around him, the tiny red ones slipping through his outstretched fingers like living ribbons. Varzil’s delight rippled through the waters, and, through their faint rapport, Carotin found his own heart lightening.

Carolin would have been content to turn back, but now Varzil took the lead, leading them even deeper. The bird-fish followed them for a distance, darting in and out to nibble at their hair or stare with curious, unblinking eyes. The waters darkened as less light penetrated its depths. Just beyond the limit of vision, pale lights flickered in and out.

More bird-fish?
Carolin wondered, or
something
even stranger? The skin along his spine crawled and the sense of freedom faded. Shadows pressed in on him, and the currents created shadowy, inconstant figures among the grasses.

He reached out to Varzil, to draw him back toward the light, but his friend shook his head and went on.

What was he to do, leave him here? Varzil knew nothing of the dangers of the lake at Hali; the need to keep breathing even when the urge was absent, the warning signals of fatigue and confusion.

Varzil halted, so suddenly that Carolin bumped into him. Varzil pointed, creating swirls of cloud-water with the movement. Ahead, half-seen through the dim currents, lay a huge shape, many times the length of a man. Carolin could not be sure if it really existed or was some trick of the light and turbulent mist.

As they approached, however, he saw solid stone, a single fallen column. Sand and water weeds laced its surface. He could not make out its original color. Even worn by time and the surging cloud-waters, the contours looked smooth, as if they had been worked by matrix technology. There were markings, so obscured he could not decipher them.

Somehow, he did not want to touch it.

Varzil, in his usual fearless way, went right up to the fallen column. It came to the level of his knees. With one arm outstretched for balance, he reached down with the other and laid his palm flat on the stone.

And screamed.

A scream resounded through Varzil’s mind, drowning out sound and sight. It raced along his nerves, filled the hollow of his bones, shivered through his blood. The dark currents of the cloud-water faded from his vision. All he could see was white haze. Within moments, he lost all awareness of his body and surroundings. He could not even feel his heart beating or remember his name. Like a frozen particle in a vast and nebulous sea, he drifted. The last echoes of the scream died to silence.

As his unblinking eyes cleared, shapes appeared before him. At first they were but silverpoint tracings against the stippled whiteness. Gradually, they took on form and substance. Their outlines remained blurred as if he were peering through a cracked lens.

He looked down upon a Tower as if from a great height, one he had never seen before. The translucent stone shone as if lit from within, but the color was subtly wrong, an uneasy ashen gray.

Then, in the strange way of dreamers, Varzil descended. He passed through the stone walls as if he were no more than a bodiless wraith. Radiance suffused the space in which he found himself. It burned along his ghostly skin.

Laran.
The air trembled with it, a type and intensity he had never felt before, not in his work at Arilinn, not even as a child newly-awakened to his powers, listening to the Ya-men wailing out their songs beneath the four moons.

Varzil traced the source of the
laran.
He was inside the Tower now, looking down at a circular room. It appeared subtly wrong, out of focus. The room was a large one, judging by the people gathered there. Seated on their benches, they looked very much like a working circle. A table occupied the center of the room, dominated by a huge artificial matrix.

The matrix was octagonal in shape, easily double the arm span of a man, and so layered as to be half that tall. Pinpoints of blue light sparkled in a frame like a weaving of spiderwebs. The table on which it sat glowed with tiny bits of iridescence, which resonated with the power of the matrix.

Varzil had never seen an artificial matrix of such size and power before. At Arilinn, circles worked up to sixth or seventh level. A sixth-level matrix required six trained workers plus a Keeper in order to operate it safely, and the conservative Arilinn circles rarely exceeded that number. Theoretically, it was possible to construct matrices of any order—nine, ten, even more—but the higher the level, the greater the potential for disaster. A single weak link in the circle, a faltering heart or lapse in concentration, could unleash the power of the matrix in some uncontrollable direction. Neither Auster nor any other ethical Keeper would countenance the risk.

By the energies which surged through it, this must be a twelfth-level matrix, or possibly higher. Varzil counted fifteen people in the room, most of them robed in muddied gray, plus a single man in the crimson that had been reserved, from time immemorial, for Keepers.

Where on the face of Darkover could such a thing be? How had it remained hidden?

Power crackled through the lattice, threads of brightness that lingered in his vision like phosphorescent vapors. It made him uneasy to look at them. Visceral-level revulsion to the thing built inside him.

Varzil could not understand his reaction, unless it was some effect of the strange condition in which he found himself. He had encountered
laran
power before—in the matrices at Arilinn, in the circles there, within himself. He respected it but did not fear it.

Suddenly, he realized why this matrix was different. All of the other devices and natural uses of
laran
he had known had been, in their very essence, human. Starstones worked by concentrating and focusing natural mental talent. They did not generate it of their own, nor did they draw power from any other source. Laran energy, created by individual
leronyn
or by circles working together, could be stored in batteries and other apparatus constructed of smaller, individual starstones.

But this one—somehow, against all his experience and everything he had been taught, it tapped into another source. The origin of the power was not human, of that he was certain. He was not sure it was even alive. It both terrified and fascinated him.

Although it was the last thing he wanted to do, he forced himself to open to the enormous matrix. Sensory impressions flooded his mind, too intense and brief to identify. He caught the ozone reek of lightning, of water, of ashes, and yet none of these was right.

From the circle of workers below came voices, muffled and oddly cadenced. The fleeting contact with the matrix had brought Varzil more firmly into this world. They had become aware of him. One woman, her hair now visible as a wash of pale red against the misty gray, glanced up in his direction. Varzil drew back, suddenly reluctant to make himself known before he understood what was going on here. The woman’s gaze continued across the room without stopping. Her mental query slipped past him as if he was not there. The feeling of dislocation, of seeing and hearing echoes, sharpened. This leronis was both alert and skillful, yet she could not see him.

What was going on?

Was he looking into the past, into events imprinted into the very substance of the stone pillar?

Yes, that must be it. Those words he had been able to distinguish were strangely accented and archaic in pattern. But if he were glimpsing some ancient circle at work, did that mean a Tower once stood here, in the middle of the lake? Why was there no record of it, not even in the archives of Arilinn?

Where was he?
When
was he?

Below, the woman who had glanced up now returned to her work. Varzil felt the Keeper reach out for his circle and begin forming them into a single unit. The Keeper’s
laran
felt dim and distant. With a technique completely unfamiliar to Varzil, he joined the individual members. If Varzil was not very much mistaken, this Keeper wove their human minds into the pattern of the matrix itself. Not only that, he was doing this with an offhanded ease that suggested he had done it many times before, nor was there any hint of resistance from the circle. They, too, accepted this melding of their human minds with the inorganic, mechanical structure of the matrix lattice as normal.

What Varzil was witnessing should not have been possible—starstones, even joined and tuned at a very high level, could only
amplify
the natural mental energies that passed through them. It was the stones that served the humans, not the other way around.