Zandru's Forge (50 page)

“If we have no goal in what we do, what is the point of all this?” Eduin gestured to the matrix laboratories, the library, the living quarters of the workers, the Tower itself. The thought of unbridled
laran
experimentation, without direction or limitation, disturbed him. It would be like living without purpose. “Are we not to accomplish any useful work at all, then?”

If Loryn noticed Eduin’s discomfort, he gave no response. “We have not even begun to discover all the ways our Gifts can be used. Do you think we were given talent and intelligence, not to mention the privilege of our caste, to spend our lives making weapons for one petty war after another? Or to light the palaces of kings while peasants live in darkness?” He drew himself up, with that sense of
separateness,
and Eduin remembered that as a Keeper he was ultimately answerable only to his own conscience.

Eduin had never expected to find such sympathy of ideas in a Keeper. Bile rose in his throat at what he must do, how he must betray the trust of these people.

“Forgive me if I spoke out of turn,” Eduin said. “I meant no offense.”

“You are but newly come among us,” Loryn said. “If there is one thing which I wish for this Tower, it is the freedom of each person to discover his own vision. It is no easy task rendering those into a harmonious whole, but it is always worth the effort. We live in a complex world, where there are no simple answers. Every man, from loftiest
Comyn
to lowliest peasant, has his own view of the ills of the world and how to make them right. Do you think that a man’s position grants him any special wisdom above all others? Even if we could all see into the future, as Allan Hastur was said to do, we would never agree on the single best course of action.”

“Then how are men to decide anything?” Eduin burst out. “Why do we not run amok, each man following his own inclination?”

“Because we are men, and not beasts without the power to reason, with no thought past the moment’s gratification,” Loryn said gravely. “Because we can listen to one another, we can exercise our compassion as well as our critical faculties, we can consider the common good. More often than hot, it is what we do before we take action which shapes our fortunes.”

Eduin bowed, not trusting himself to say more, and excused himself.

Only when he was back in his quarters with the telepathic damper turned on, did he allow himself to relax.

He sank down on his bed, waiting for his racing pulse to slow. The breathing exercises he had been first taught as a novice would help, but he could not so easily tame his thoughts.

What Loryn hinted at was impossible, a world where men made decisions cooperatively. It would not work in a Tower and it would mean disaster for the world at large. How could a circle function without willing surrender to its Keeper? How could harvests be gathered, children be raised, justice be served, without the rule of liege lord?

If a man could shape his own life
—

He dared not imagine what his own would look like. His father’s mission had given his life its form and purpose. Without that guiding quest, who was he? What was he? How could he justify the things he had done—the things he would yet do?

Useless thoughts!
He flung them away, lest they leach away his very manhood. That way lay madness as well as paralysis. Only women and cowards indulged in such notions. He must act quickly, before the poison of this place had time to work on him.

The next evening, between the dinner hour and the time when the work of the Tower was to begin, he sought out Felicia. He found her in the common room, sitting by the westward-facing window with a cup of herbal brew. It smelled of mint and honey, with something he could not name. He hoped it was not for some women’s troubles, for that would temporarily prevent her from working in the circle.

In response to his inquiry, she smiled gently. “Thank you, Eduin, I am quite well. I am only a little—well, I am too old to be homesick, so perhaps I should say
nostalgic.
It must be the weather, reminding me of the place I lived as a child. My nurse used to make me a drink like this and I find it comforting, a fairly harmless pleasure. But you yourself have been home, I believe. A family illness, was it not, that took you from us at Arilinn?”

“Yes, my father. But he is well now.”

She smiled again and said she was glad of it. He rushed on to ask about her weather project, and she brightened even more.

“Ah! It is a good thing we are all as stubborn as Durraman’s donkey, or we would have given that up!” she answered. “Poor Marius—one day he can sense the air currents as clearly as his own hand, and then next, they’re gone, or worse yet, he cannot tell the difference between a storm front and a flock of geese. I have been wondering if a matrix lattice might help. If we can construct
laran
batteries to store energy and then deliver it at a controlled rate, then perhaps we could do the same here.”

“That is an intriguing idea,” Eduin said.
A matrix lattice!
He could not have wished for a better opportunity.

It took very little to convince Felicia to accept his offer of help. He was, after all, a highly skilled
laranzu.
At Arilinn and then at Hali, he’d learned to fabricate artificial matrices and assemble them into complex linkages.

“I think we must begin with the specific,” he said, “although once we have discovered the underlying principles, we may be able to design a system which any circle can use.”

“Yes, I think so, too.” Felicia set down her half-drunk cup of tea. “We know little of talents like this, let alone why they are so often inconsistent. Perhaps in learning to modulate Marius’ Gift, we will learn more of the basic processes.”

Her brow furrowed in concentration. “Weather sense is not uncommon, even in ordinary folk. Varzil told me the shepherds at Sweetwater can sense an approaching storm. Perhaps there is some small kernel of
laran
there, or it may simply be unconscious attention to natural details—the pattern of birds in flight, the songs of frogs, I know not what. There are many tales of animals warning of bad weather or earthquakes.”

Eduin nodded. He had wondered if the beasts possessed some special sense akin to
laran
or if people simply took particular notice of the time the dog howled before a forest fire, but not the hundred times it did so when there was no such catastrophe.

He said so aloud and Felicia responded, “That is one reason I am training the boys under my tutelage as I do. Of course, they have little objection to splashing in the river on a hot summer afternoon, and wet, slithery things have always held a special fascination for boys. It seems to me that we know a great deal about rapport with sentry birds, but very little with the far more numerous creatures of the wild.”

“That is because sentry birds are useful in war,” Eduin said, “and there will always be more need for them than for songbirds.”

Felicia glanced out the window, looking pensive. Eduin caught a glimmer of her thoughts, going to Varzil, far away. “If the gods shine upon us,” she said, “we may live to see a time when that is no longer true. A time when songbirds are valued above instruments of war.”

Eduin dared not frame the thought that sprang to his mind, that whatever the future held for the rest of Darkover, she would have no part in it.

Loryn Ardais received their proposal with a gratifying show of interest and support. Within a tenday, they had a laboratory all of their own, access to Hestral’s store of unkeyed starstones, and the equipment for assembling lattice arrays. Felicia, acting as Keeper for the project, began assembling a circle, although most of the work would be shared between her, Eduin, and Marius. Marius, it turned out, was one of the boys Felicia had taken to the river on the day Eduin arrived.

Through the short, bright autumn and into the next winter, they continued the painstaking process of selecting, modifying, and arranging various stones in combination. Each time Eduin tried to link another stone to the one they had selected as anchor, the combination would not resonate with Marius’ personal matrix. There was something in the linkage which created interference patterns. Eduin tried various other stones, both natural and artificial, in every combination he could think of. Felicia tried setting up a bond with Marius unaided by his starstone, and that was a dismal failure, nor could Marius key into a second stone. There was something unique about the way his own enhanced his erratic talent.

By the first warm afternoon of the new year, Eduin began to despair of the project, both for its own purpose and for its usefulness in advancing his own cause. He had hoped that once the lattice was complete and functional, once the circle would use it with Felicia as Keeper, he would be able to strike, and in such a way as to escape obvious suspicion. He must not sacrifice himself or there would be no one to continue the mission against the rest of the Hasturs.

Even isolated as Hestral Tower was, news reached them of armed resistance to Rakhal’s rule, of increasingly punitive measures, and of men turning to Carolin’s cause.

Reluctantly, Eduin began to think of other possibilities. Although still technically an under-Keeper, Felicia now possessed that intense awareness and sympathy of mind necessary for centripolar work in a circle. He could not catch her unawares with any direct attack, as he had long suspected.

The setting sun created a glow like a furnace outside the western window. Marius and Felicia were already in the laboratory. Eduin entered and went to his workbench. Felicia, usually so even-tempered, emitted frustration. Marius cringed as if expecting to be personally blamed for the failure of the project.

“Eduin, come and look. You’re much better at technical details than I am. Marius tried reconnecting the tertiary layer here and here—” she pointed, rattling on, “and now the anchor stone’s gone flat. It doesn’t make sense. The two designs should be equivalent. What do you think? They
shouldn’t
nullify each other, but that’s exactly what seems to be happening.”

Eduin took the slender metal probe and gently brushed the connection between the core stone and one of the ternaries she’d indicated. On impulse, he decided to reroute the connection through one of the secondary nodes, a particularly large and brilliant natural stone. It had, he remembered, been one of the group from Aldaran territory. At Arilinn, it would have already been broken up into small stones, but Loryn had preserved it whole. It was the equivalent of a third-order matrix in a single stone.

The instant the connection was complete, Eduin felt the entire array quiver as if alive. Marius, standing behind him to look over his shoulder, gasped.

“That’s it!” Felicia cried. “The fault was not in the connections, but in the primary stone. It’s a solitary!”

Eduin nodded. He’d never encountered one before, but he had heard about some starstones that, no matter how powerful or sensitive when used alone, lost their connective qualities when linked to others. They sometimes made good talismans when keyed for specific, limited purposes. One this size might well be put to such use.

They spent most of the night working with the new matrix configuration, tuning it to Marius’
laran
signature. Marius, wrought up by their repeated failures, showed signs of fatigue. Despite his attempts to contain them, the boy’s anxieties seeped out, doubts about himself, his talent, what would go wrong next. Before long, all three were snapping at one another.

Behind Felicia’s unguarded thoughts, Eduin caught some deep, formless anxiety. Did she suspect him? No, even under the stress of frustration, her manner was as open and friendly as ever.

I must take care of Marius,
she repeated silently to herself.
He is so young and vulnerable
...

So even if she sensed a threat, or had any foresight of disaster, it was on the boy’s account.
So much the better.

Better?
Felicia responded.

For a terrible instant, Eduin froze. How could he have come this far and then been so careless in his thoughts? She was a
Keeper,
by Zandru’s frozen hells! Telepathic rapport came as naturally to her as breathing. And he had given himself away—

Ice flared, digging claws deep into his gut. He slammed up his psychic barriers and reached for the
laran
trigger his father had implanted. Light washed through his mind, cool and blue as truthspell. All doubt fell away, all emotion quenched.

When he turned toward her, his thoughts were utterly calm. Certainty emanated from his mind.

“Better for Marius, I mean.” How innocent his voice sounded, how untainted by any doubt. “For both of us to watch out for him. To make sure he comes to no harm.”

“We need a break,” Felicia said, getting to her feet and stretching. “Please go, both of you,” Eduin told the two others, “The next part is technical. I don’t need the help and you’ll only distract me. With luck, tomorrow we can try it out.”