“I was once,” she said, still with that deadly indifference. “They cut me off from the main relays years ago. Oh, I can still do some work, but it’ll cost you. If it was legal, you wouldn’t be here.”
“What I want’s not illegal, as far as I know. But maybe it’s impossible.”
A faint spark of interest flickered behind the dull eyes. “Come in.” She motioned him into the room. Inside it was clean enough; it had a pungent-familiar smell, herbs burning in a brazier; the woman stirred the fire, sending up fresh clouds of the pungent smoke, and when she turned, her eyes were more alert.
But Kerwin thought he had never seen so colorless a person. Her hair, coiled loose on her neck, was the same faded grey as her bundled shawl; she walked wearily, stooping a little as if in some chronic pain. She lowered herself carefully into a chair and gestured him, with a tired, abrupt motion of her head, to sit.
“What do you want,
Terranan
?” At his look of surprise, her faded lips stretched faintly, not quite a smile. “Your speech is perfect,” she said, “but remember what I am. There is another world in your walk and the set of your head, in what you do with your hands. Don’t waste our time in lies.”
At least she hadn’t mistaken him for his mysterious double somewhere, Kerwin thought thankfully, and pushed back his headgear. He thought,
Maybe if I level with her, she’ll level with me.
He fumbled at his neck and laid down the crystal in front of her.
“I was born on Darkover,” he said, “but they sent me away. My father was Terran. I thought it would be very simple to find out more about myself.”
“It should be, with this,” she said. “Fit for a Keeper, it is.” She leaned forward; unlike the other mechanics, she did not shroud her hand when she touched it. Kerwin flinched; he hated to have it touched, for some reason. She saw the gesture and said, “So you know
that
much. Is it keyed?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She raised her eyebrows. Then she said, “Don’t worry; I can guard against it, even if it is. I’m not superstitious, and I learned a long time ago, from the old man himself, that any halfway-competent technician can do a Keeper’s work. I’ve done it enough. Let me take it.” She picked it up; he felt only a faint shock. The hands were beautiful, younger than the rest of her, smooth and supple and the nails well-kept; he had expected them, somehow, to be gnawed and dirty. Again the gesture seemed familiar.
“Tell me about it,” she said, and Kerwin told her everything, feeling suddenly secure; the way in which he had been mistaken for some mysterious
other
, the attack in the street, the failure to find records in the orphanage, the refusal of the two matrix mechanics to tell him anything. At that she frowned scornfully.
“And they say they are free of superstition! Fools,” she said.
“What can you tell me?”
She touched the crystal with one beautifully manicured fingertip. She said, “This much: It’s not on the main banks. It may have come from one of the Forbidden Tower people. I don’t recognize it offhand,” she said. “But it’s hard to believe you have any Terran blood at all. Though there have been a few, and once I saw old
Dom Ann’dra
. . . . But that’s neither here nor there.” She went to a cupboard and rummaged in it, taking out something wrapped in a length of the insulating silk. Before her on the table she placed a small wicker-wood frame, then carefully untwisting the silks, she laid something in the frame. It was a small matrix; smaller than his own, but considerably larger than the one Ragan had showed him. Small lights played in it; Kerwin, looking at them, felt sick and nauseated. The woman looked into her own matrix, then into Kerwin’s, rose, stirred the brazier again so that clouds of the choking smoke rose, and Kerwin’s head began to swim. The smoke seemed to contain some potent drug, for the woman, inhaling it deeply, stared at him with a sudden live glitter in her eyes.
“You,” she said, “you are not what you seem.” Her words slurred strangely. “You will find what you seek, but you will destroy it too. You were a trap that missed its firing, they sent you away to safety, from the blizzard to feed the banshee. ... You will find the thing you desire, you will destroy it but you will save it, too. ...”
Kerwin said rudely, “I didn’t come here to have my fortune told.”
She seemed not to hear, muttering almost incoherently. It was dark in the room, except for the dim glow of the brazier, and very cold. Impatient, Kerwin stirred; she made an imperative gesture and he sank back, surprised at the authority of the movement.
Muttering, drugged old witch! What the hell was she doing now?
The crystal on the table, his own crystal, glowed and shimmered; the crystal in the wicker frame, between the woman’s slender hands, began slowly to glow with blue fire.
“The Golden Bell,” the woman muttered thickly, slurring the words and making them one,
Cleindori.
“Oh yes, Cleindori was beautiful, long, long they sought her in the hills across the river, but she had gone where they could not pursue, the proud superstitious fools preaching the Way of Arilinn. ...”
All the light in the room, now, was focused on the woman’s face, the light that seemed to pour from the blue center of the crystal. Kerwin sat there a long, long time, while the woman stared into the crystal and muttered something to herself. Finally he wondered if she had gone into a trance, if she were a clairvoyant who could answer his questions.
“Who am I?”
“You are the one they managed to send away, the brand snatched from the burning,” she said thickly. “There were others, but you were the most likely. They didn’t know, the proud Comyn, that you had been snatched away from them. That they had hidden the prey inside the hunter’s door, hidden the leaf inside the forest. All of them, Cleindori, Cassilde, the
Terran
, the Ridenow boy. ...”
The lights in the crystal seemed to coagulate into a brilliant flash of flame. Kerwin flinched as it knifed through his eyes, but he could not move.
And then a scene rose before his eyes, clear and distinct, as if imprinted on the inside of his eyelids:
Two men and two women, all of them in Darkovan clothing, all seated around a table on which lay a matrix crystal in a cradle; and one of the women, very frail, very fair, was bending over it, gripping the cradle so tightly that he could see the knuckles of her hands whitened by that desperate grip. Her face, framed in paling reddish hair, seemed eerily familiar. . . . The men watched, intent, unmoving. One of them had dark hair and dark eyes, animal eyes, and Kerwin heard himself thinking,
The Terran,
and knew at the back of his mind that he looked on the face of the man whose name he would bear, and they all watched spellbound while the cold lights played on the woman’s face like some strange aurora; and then the tall redheaded man suddenly wrenched the woman’s hands from the cradle; the blue fires died and the woman sank back senseless in the dark man’s arms. ...
The scene swept away; Kerwin saw moving clouds, cold drenching rain falling in a courtyard, a man in a jeweled cloak fastened high at the neck; a tall arrogant man, and Kerwin gasped, recognizing the dream-face of his earliest memories. The scene narrowed again to a high-walled chamber. The women were there, and one of the men. Kerwin seemed to see the scene from a strange perspective, as if he were either up very high or down very low, and he realized that he was
there
, horror and sudden dread making him tremble. He seemed to look away from the four grouped around the matrix, at a closed door, a turning door-handle that moved slowly, very slowly, then was suddenly flung back, blotted out by dark forms that filled the doorway and blotted out the light, rushing forward ...
Kerwin screamed. It was not his own voice, but the voice of a child, thin and terrible and terrifying, a shriek of utter despair and panic. He slumped forward across the table, the scene darkening before his eyes, remembered screams ringing and ringing on and on in his ears long after his cry had jolted him up to consciousness again.
Dazed, he straightened and passed his hand slowly across his eyes. His hand came away wet with clammy sweat—or tears? Confused, he shook his head. He was
not
in that high-walled room filled with vague shapes of terror. He stood in the stone-walled cottage of the old matrix technician; the fire in the brazier had burned out, and the room was dark and cold. He could just see the woman; she had collapsed forward, her body lying across the table and atop the wicker frame, which had turned sidewise and spilled the crystal out on to the table. But there was no blue light in her crystal now. It lay blank, grey, a featureless piece of glass.
Kerwin looked down at the woman, angry and puzzled. She had shown him
something
—but what did it mean? Why had he screamed? He felt cautiously at his throat. His voice felt frayed.
“What the hell was that all about? I suppose the dark man was my father. But who were the others?”
The woman neither stirred nor spoke, and Kerwin scowled. Drunk, drugged? Not gently, he reached to shake her shoulder. “What was that? What did it mean? Who were they?”
With nightmarish, slow grace, the woman slid down and toppled sideways to the floor. Swearing, Kerwin vaulted the table and knelt at her side, but he already knew what he would discover.
The woman was dead.
CHAPTER SIX
Re-Exile
Kerwin’s throat still hurt, and he felt a ragged hysteria gripping at him.
All the doors keep closing in my face!
Then he looked down at the dead woman with pity and a painful guilt. He had dragged her into this, and now she was dead. This unknown unlovely woman, whose name he didn’t even know, and he had involved her in the mysterious fate that was tracking him.
He looked at her matrix, lying grey and featureless on the table. Had it died when the woman died, then? Gingerly, he picked up his own and put it into his pocket, looked down at the dead woman again with regret and futile apology, and then, turning away, he went and called the police.
They came, green-clad, cross-belted Darkovans of the City Guard—equivalent of metropolitan police, what there was of it on Darkover—not at all happy to see a Terran there, and they showed it. Reluctantly, with rigid politeness, they allowed him the legal privilege of summoning a Terran consul before questioning, a privilege Kerwin would just as soon have waived. He wasn’t at all eager for the HQ to know he had been making inquiries down here.
They asked him questions, and then they didn’t like the answers. Kerwin held back nothing, except the fact of his own matrix, or why he had been there to consult the woman in the first place. But in the end, because there wasn’t a mark on her, and because the woman had obviously not been sexually molested, and because a Terran medic and a Darkovan both gave their independent opinion that she had died of a heart attack, they let him go, and escorted him formally to the edge of the spaceport. They said goodbye to him there with a certain grim formality that warned him, without words, that if he was found in that part of the city again, they wouldn’t be responsible for what happened.
He thought, then, that he had seen the worst of it, when the blind alley led to a dead end and a dead woman. Alone in his quarters, pacing the floor like a caged animal, he reviewed it again and again, trying to make sense of it.
Damn it, there was
purpose
behind it! Some one, or something, was
determined
he should not trace down his own past. The man and woman, refusing to help him, had said, “It is not for us to meddle in the affairs of the
vai leroni.
”
That word was unfamiliar to him; he tried to puzzle out the component parts.
Vai
, of course, was simply an additional honorific, meaning something like
worthy
or
excellent
; as in
vai dom
, which meant, roughly,
worthy lord, good sir, your Excellency,
depending on context.
Leroni
he found under
leronis
(singular; mountain dialect) and defined as “probably derived from
laran
, meaning power or inheritance right, especially inherited psychic power;
leronis
can usually be translated
sorceress
.”
But, Kerwin wondered, frowning, who then were the
vai leroni
, the worthy sorceresses, and why in the world—
any
world—should anyone believe he was entangled in their affairs?
An intercom buzzer struck through his preoccupation; he growled response into it, then braced himself, for the face of the Legate, in the screen, looked very grim indeed.
“Kerwin? Get yourself up to Administration—on the double!”
Kerwin did as ordered, riding the long elevators to the high, glass-walled penthouse that was the Legate’s staff quarters. As he waited outside Administration, he stiffened, seeing through the open door two of the green cross-belted uniforms of City Guardsmen; they came out, walking stiffly on either side of a tall, straight, silver-haired man whose rich dress and short, jeweled, blue-and-silver cloak betokened high Darkovan aristocracy. All three of them looked straight through Kerwin, and Kerwin felt a nagging sensation that the worst had yet to come.
The receptionist motioned him in. The Legate scowled at him and this time did not ask him to sit down.
“So, it’s the Darkovan,” he said, not kindly. “I might have known. What the hell have you been getting yourself into now?”
He didn’t wait for Kerwin’s answer.
“You were warned,” he said. “You got yourself into trouble before you’d been here a full twenty-eight hours. That wasn’t enough; you had to go looking for trouble.”
Kerwin opened his mouth to answer, but the Legate gave him no time. “I called your attention to the situation on Darkover; we live here under an uneasy truce at best; and, such as it is, we have agreements with the Darkovans. Which includes keeping nosey tourists out of the Old Town.”