Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Regis wondered, remotely and at the edge of awareness, how the
kyrri
would deliver its message to Callina. The origin of the
kyrri
was lost in the Ages of Chaos—had they, after all, been part of that monstrous breeding program which the Hastur-kin had carried on for centuries to fix the Comyn gifts in the families of the Seven Domains? Stranger games than the
kyrri
had been played with genetics modified by
laran
power and matrix technology.
Or did they go back further yet, part of the prehistory of Cottman’s star before a lost Terran colony came to call it Darkover? He suspected that even in the Towers they were not sure what the
kyrri
were or how they had come to be traditional servants of the Tower. He took them for granted, had learned to stay out of range of the painful electric shocks they could give when they were excited or threatened, had been tended by their odd thumbless hands when it would have been unendurable to have near him human telepaths who could read his mind or reach it.
But all this was with the surface of his mind and had nothing to do with the underlying unease which had brought him here; and for a moment he wondered if he should have sought out Callina in the Aillard suite, presuming somewhat on his acquaintance with Linnell—who, like himself, had been fostered at Armida and was foster-sister to Lew and Marius. He had never spoken more than a dozen words to Callina, and those formal and ceremonious. He could have talked to Linnell as to a
kinswoman, but Callina was something else again… Keeper at Neskaya and then at Arilinn, then sent here to be under-Keeper in the oldest of the Towers, long inactive, but still sheltering the ancient Ashara, who had not been seen outside the Tower in living memory—nor, Danvan Hastur had told him once, in the living memory of anyone
he
had ever known; and his grandfather was nearing his hundredth year. He supposed Ashara’s own circle, if she had one, and her attendants, must see her sometime—
She must have been an ordinary woman once; at least as ordinary as any of the Comyn could be said to be ordinary; and not immortal, only long-lived as some of the Hasturs were long-lived. There was
chieri
blood mixed with the blood of the Domains. Regis knew little of the
chieri
, but they were said to be immortal and beautiful, still dwelling somewhere in a remote valley where humankind never came.
But his own grandfather showed signs of being one of those Hasturs whose reign could span
generations
…it was a lucky thing for the Comyn, that Danvan Hastur had been there to reign as
Regent during these troubled years
… Regis found his thoughts sliding into unexpected channels, as if some other mind had briefly touched his own; he started, blinked as if he had fallen asleep on his feet for a moment; his skin crawled, and something
touched
him— Regis felt a faint nausea deep in his body. A shadow had fallen across the doorway and Callina Aillard was standing there.
He had not seen her come.
Lord of Light
! Regis swore to himself, sweating; had he stood there, sound asleep on his feet, an idiot’s grin on his face, his clothing disarranged or worse? He felt exposed, desperately uncomfortable; Callina was a Keeper, and uncanny. He managed to get out a formal, “
Su
serva, Domna
…”
She was not now wearing the formal crimson robes she had worn in the Crystal Chamber, the
traditional garb which marked out a Keeper as apart, untouchable, sacrosanct. Instead she had on a long, fleecy gown of blue wool, close-cut, high-necked. It was girdled with a copper belt, squared plaques of the precious metal, a large blue semi-precious stone at the center of each plaque; and her hair, coiled low on her neck, was caught into a priceless clasp of copper filigree.
“Come through here, and then we can talk if you wish. Hush; do not disturb the relays.” Her voice was so low it barely stirred the air between them, and Regis followed on tiptoe, as if a normal step would be like a shout. They passed through a large silent chamber, bare, with relay screens staring blank and glassy blue, and other things which Regis did not recognize; before one of the screens a young girl was curled up on a soft seat. Her face had the strange, not-quite-present look of a telepath whose mind was fixed in the relays communicating with other Towers, other telepaths. Regis did not know the girl and Callina of course did not notice her in any way; in fact, only her body was there in the room with them at all.
Callina opened a noiseless door at the far end of the room, and they went through into a small, comfortable private room, with low divans and chairs, and a high window with colored glass, throwing prism lights across the room; but it was dark outside, and if it had not been high summer Regis would have thought it might be snowing. Callina shut the door soundlessly behind them, gestured him to a seat and curled up in one of them herself, tucking her feet under her, and drawing the hem of the blue gown over them. She said in her stilled voice, “Well, Regis, did Old Hastur send you to me to ask if I’d go through the marriage ceremony with Beltran, just to save the Council some embarrassment?”
Regis felt his face burning; had she read his mind while he stood there, asleep on his feet like a gaby?
He said truthfully, “No, he didn’t, though he did mention it to me at dinner last night. I don’t think he would have the arrogance actually to ask it, Lady Callina.”
Callina said, sighing, “Derik is an accursed fool. And I had no idea what that foolish brother of mine was doing behind my back, or that Derik was stupid enough to listen to him. Linnell loves Derik; it would break her heart to separate them now. How she can care for such a fool—!” Callina shook her head in exasperation. “Merryl’s never reconciled himself to being born an Aillard, and subject to the female Head of the Domain. And I doubt he ever will.”
“Grandfather did suggest that you might go through the ceremony—no more than that—as a matter of form,” Regis said.
“It might be easier than telling Beltran what he otherwise must say to him,” Callina said, “that this marriage was contrived by a young man greedy for power and a prince too dull to see how he’s being manipulated.”
“Don’t forget,” Regis said dryly, “a Regent too lazy or forgetful to keep a strong hand over his not-too-intelligent princeling.”
“Do you really think it was only laziness or forgetfulness?” Callina asked, and Regis said, “I don’t like to think my grandfather would have plotted against the Head of a Domain—”
Then he remembered a conversation he had had with Danilo three years ago, as fresh as today: so
Domain after Domain falls into Hastur hands; the Elhalyn is already under Hastur Regency, then the
Aillard with Derik married to Linnell
, Regis thought, all the easier if Callina was married off and exiled in distant Aldaran. And he had watched his grandfather’s machinations against the Altons.
“No, he couldn’t plot it,” Callina said, and a faint smile stirred her lips, “but he could sit back while Merryl and that fool of a Derik create such a situation that I must fall into place or seriously embarrass the Comyn.”
“Callina, even Hastur cannot marry off the Head of a Domain without her own consent. And you are Keeper for Ashara; what will she say to that?”
“Ashara…” Callina was silent for a moment, as if the very sound of the name stirred unease in her calm face. She looked troubled. “I seldom see Ashara. She spends much of her time in meditation. I could hold all her power in the Council, but I am afraid—” she stopped herself in mid-sentence. “You are not Tower-trained, Regis?”
He shook his head. “I had enough training so that I could manage my Gift without becoming ill, but I’m not that powerful a telepath, and Grandfather needed me in Thendara, he said.”
“I think you are more of a telepath than you believe, kinsman,” Callina said, with a skeptical look.
The quiet, assured statement somehow made him uneasy; he frowned, ready to protest. “I’m useless in the relays, and they couldn’t teach me much about monitoring—”
“That may be,” she said. “In the Towers we test only for those gifts which are useful to their functions; monitoring, the skill to stay in rapport with a matrix screen for mining and manipulating power— in this day and age, that seems the only kind of
laran
the Towers find useful. But you are finding out that there is more to your
laran
than you believed—is it not so, cousin?”
Regis flinched as if she had put her fingers directly on a bruise he did not know he had.
“You had better tell me about it,” she said, “I saw how you had picked up the presence of Sharra, in Council. Let me see your matrix, Regis.”
Apprehensively, Regis touched the small velvet bag, undid the strings, tilted the small blue crystal into his palm. It lay there blue and placid, small distant lights glimmering inside the stone; no sign of fire, no sign of the ravening Form of Fire…
“It’s gone!” he said in surprise.
“And you expected it to be there,” Callina said. “Really, I think you had better tell me everything about it.”
Regis was still staring at his matrix in disbelief. After a moment he managed to blurt out something about it; how Javanne had been trapped by the image, how he had, without thinking about it, freed her mind from the matrix.
“It was like—I watched her, once, unpicking a design that had gone wrong in her tapestry—I think it must have felt like that, though I don’t know how to do tapestry—”
“I do,” Callina said, “and that’s just what it would have felt like.”
“What did I do?” Regis had not known how frightened he was until he heard his own voice trembling.
“How could I do that? I thought—it would take a powerful telepath, perhaps a Keeper—to match
resonances like that—”
“There have been male Keepers in history,” Callina said abstractedly. “Good ones, powerful ones. Only for the last few hundred years have Keepers been women. And until a few generations ago, they were locked up, treated like sorceresses, sacred virgins, ritual objects of great power and veneration.” Her face was cool, ironic. “Now, of course, in these enlightened days, we know better… a Keeper today need be no more than centerpolar—the center of their matrix circles, the one who holds the energon rings. Regis, have you had enough Tower training to have the faintest idea what I’m talking about?”
“I think so. I know the language, though I don’t think I really understand it all. They never thought I had had enough strength as a telepath to let me work in a circle, and besides, I was needed here. But if I wasn’t even able to work as a monitor, I couldn’t have done a Keeper’s work, not completely untrained, not like that, could I?” His voice cracked, but he was not quite so afraid; Callina had talked about it as a technical problem, not some strange and terrifying flaw in himself.
“But a Keeper’s work, in these days, is no more than any well-trained technician can do, as I said,” she told him. “Kennard was a technician, and he could do almost everything Elorie of Arilinn could do, except actually hold the center of a circle. I think Jeff could do that if he had to, if tradition would let him. And you’re a Hastur, and your mother was Hastur of Elhalyn—what do you know about the
Hastur Gift, Regis?”
“Not much,” he said frankly. “When I was a boy, a
leronis
told me I had not even the ordinary
laran
.”
The memory of that, as always, was multiple layers of pain, the sense that he was unworthy to follow in the steps of the forefather Hasturs who had come before him; and at the same time freedom, freedom from the path laid out for the Hastur sons, a path he must walk whether he would or no…
“But your laran wakened…” she said, half a question, and he nodded. Danilo Syrtis, friend, paxman, sworn brother, and the last known to hold the almost-extinct gift of catalyst telepathy—Danilo had wakened Regis’s
laran
, given him the heritage of the Comyn; but it was not altogether a blessing, for it had meant the loss of his freedom. Now he must shoulder the burden, take up the heritage of all the Hasturs, and abandon his dream of freedom from those unendurable bonds—
I have been a good Heir to the Hasturs; I have done my duty, commanded in the Guard, sat in the
Council, adopted the son of my sister for an Heir in turn. I have even given sons and daughters to the
Hastur clan, even though I would not marry the women who bore them to me
…
“I know something of those bonds,” she said, and it seemed to him that her passionless voice was sympathetic. “I am a Keeper, Regis, not a Keeper in the new way, only a highly specialized technician, but Keeper in the old way; I was trained under Elorie of Arilinn. She was Dyan’s half-sister, you know… Cleindori, Dorilys of Arilinn, freed the Keepers by reducing the old superstition to what they now call the science of matrix mechanics, and now the Keepers need not give up their lives, and live cloistered, virgin… but I had been trained in the old fashion, Regis, and after I had served at Arilinn and Neskaya, then I came here, just
because
I was the only woman in the Domains who had been trained in the ancient way. Ashara demanded it, and I, who had had the ancient training and was still virgin, because I had never felt any wish to marry, or leave my post even for a few years to marry or take a lover—” her smile was faint, almost absent. “I was content with my work, nor had I ever met any man who would tempt me to leave my calling. So I was sent, willy-nilly, to serve under Ashara, I who was ruler of a Domain in my own right… simply because I was what I was.” For a moment it
seemed that there was terror in her eyes, and he wondered:
is she so afraid of Ashara
? Fear seemed an unlikely emotion for a Keeper.
What had women to be afraid of? They didn’t have to fight in the coming wars, they would be safe and
protected
…
She said, “What do you know of the Hastur Gift?” again, insistently.
“Not much, as I told you. I grew up thinking I didn’t even have ordinary
laran
…”
“But whatever it may be, it’s latent in you,” she mused.