The Forbidden Circle (37 page)

“It was not incompetence,” Dezi said at last. “I am not sure why they decided I must go.” He sounded sincere, and Damon, enough of a telepath to know when he was being lied to, decided he probably was sincere. “I can only think that they didn’t like me. Or perhaps”—he raised his eyes, with an angry steel glint in them—“they knew I was not even an acknowledged
nedestro
, not good enough for their precious Arilinn, where blood and lineage are everything.”

Damon thought that no, the Towers didn’t work that way. But he was not so sure. Arilinn was not the oldest of the Towers, but it was the proudest, claiming more than nine hundred generations of pure Comyn blood, claiming too that the first Keeper had been a daughter of Hastur’s self. Damon didn’t believe it, for there was too little history which had survived the Ages of Chaos.

“Oh, come, Dezi, if you could pass the Veil they would know you were Comyn, or of Comyn blood, and I don’t think they would care that much.” But he knew nothing he said could get past the boy’s wounded vanity. And vanity was a dangerous flaw for a matrix mechanic.

The Tower circles depended so much on the character of the Keeper. Leonie was a proud woman. She was when Damon knew her, with all the arrogance of a Hastur, and she had grown no less so in the years between. Perhaps she was personally intolerant of Dezi’s lack of proper pedigree. Or perhaps he was right, and they simply didn’t like him. . . . In any case, it made no difference here. Damon had no choice. Andrew was a powerful telepath, but essentially untrained. Dezi, if he had lasted even half a year in a Tower, would have had meticulous training in the elemental mechanics of the art.

“Can you monitor?”

Dezi said, “Try me.”

Damon shrugged. “Try, then.”

In the hall, Callista’s voice rose mournfully:

“Zandru’s hells,”
Dom
Esteban exploded, at the top of his voice, “why such a doleful song, Callista? Weeping and mourning, death and despair. We are not at a funeral! Sing something more cheerful, girl!”

There was a brief harsh sound, as if Callista’s hands had struck a dissonance on the harp. She said, and her voice faltered, “I fear I am not much in the mood for singing, Father. I beg you to excuse me.”

Damon felt the touch on his mind, swift and expert, so perfectly shielded that if Damon had not been watching Dezi, he would not have known by whom he had been touched. He felt the faint, deep probing, then Dezi said, “You have a crooked back tooth. Does it bother you?”

“Not since I was a boy,” Damon said. “Deeper?”

Dezi’s face went blank, with a glassy stare. After a moment he said, “Your ankle—the left ankle—was broken in two places when you were quite young. It must have taken a long time to heal; there are scars where bone fragments must have worked out for some time afterward. There is a fine crack in your third—no, the fourth—rib from the breastbone. You thought it was only a bruise and did not tell Ferrika when you returned from the wars with the catmen last season, but you were right, it was broken. There is a small scar—vertical, about four inches long—along your calf. It was made by a sharp instrument, but I do not know whether knife or sword. Last night you dreamed—”

Damon nodded, laughing. “Enough,” he said, “you can monitor.” How in the name of Aldones had they been willing to let Dezi go? This was a telepath of surpassing skill. With three years of Arilinn training, he would have matched the best in the Domains! Dezi picked up the thought and smiled, and again Damon had the moment of disquiet. Not lack of competence, or lack of confidence. Was it his vanity, then?

Or had it been only some personality clash, someone there who felt unable or unwilling to work with the youngster? The Tower circles were so intimate, a closer bond than lovers or kinfolk, that the slightest emotional dissonance could be exaggerated into torture. Damon knew that Dezi’s personality could be abrasive—he was young, touchy, easily offended—so perhaps he had simply come at the wrong time, into a group already so intimate that they could not adapt to any outsider, and not enough in need of another worker that they would work hard enough at the necessary personal adjustments.

It might not have been Dezi’s fault at all, Damon considered. Perhaps, if he did well at this, another Tower would take him. There was a crying need for strong natural telepaths, and Dezi was gifted, too gifted to waste. He saw the smile of pleasure, and knew Dezi had picked up the thought, but it didn’t matter. A moment’s reproving thought, that vanity was a dangerous flaw for a matrix technician, knowing that Dezi picked that up too, seemed enough.

“All right,” he said, “we’ll try. There’s no time to lose. Do you think you can work with me and Andrew?”

Dezi said sulkily, “Andrew doesn’t like me.”

“You’re too ready to think people don’t like you,” Damon reproved gently, thinking that it was bad enough for Dezi to know he chose him because Callista refused. But he could not betray Callista’s grief. And Ellemir should not try to do this work, so early in pregnancy. Pregnancy was about the only thing which could seriously interrupt a matrix worker’s capability, with its danger to the unborn child. And in the last day or two, linked with Ellemir, he had begun to pick up the first, faintest emanations of the developing brain, still formless, but
there
, real, enough to make their child a distinct separate presence to him.

He thought that there ought to be a way to compensate for this too, to protect a developing child. But he didn’t know of any, and he wasn’t going to experiment with his own! So it was himself, Andrew, and Dezi.

Andrew, a little while later, when Damon broached the subject, frowned and said, “I can’t say I’m crazy about the idea of working with Dezi.” But, at Damon’s remonstrance, admitted it was hardly worthy of an adult, to hold a grudge against a boy in his teens, a youngster who had, admittedly, been drunk at the time of the offense.

“And Dezi’s young for his age,” Damon told Andrew. “If he’d been acknowledged
nedestro
, he would have been given responsibilities to equal his privileges, all along. A year or two in the cadets would have made all the difference, or a year of good, hard, monkish discipline at Nevarsin. It’s our fault, not Dezi’s, that he’s turned out the way he has.”

Andrew did not protest further, but he still felt disquiet. No matter whose fault it was, if Dezi had flaws of character, Andrew did not feel right about working with him.

But Damon must know what he was doing. Andrew watched Damon making his preparations, remembering when he had first been taught to use a matrix. Callista had been part of the linkage of minds then, though she was still prisoner in the caves, and he had never seen her with his physical eyes. And now she was Keeper no more, and his wife. . . .

Damon held his own matrix cradled between his hands, finally saying aloud, with an ironic smile, “I am always afraid to do this outside a Tower. I never lose the fear that it is not safe. An absurd fear, perhaps, but a real one.”

Dezi said gently, “I am glad you are afraid too, Damon. I am glad to know it is not only me.”

Damon said, in a shaking voice, “I think anyone who is not afraid to use this kind of force probably should not be trusted with it at all. The forces were so misused in the Ages of Chaos that Regis Hastur the Fourth decreed that from his day, no matrix circle should presume to use the great screens and relays outside the established Towers. That law was not made for such work as this, but there is still the sense of . . . of violating a taboo.” He turned to Andrew and said, “How would they treat frostbite in
your
world?”

Andrew answered thoughtfully, “The best treatment is arterial injection of neural stimulators: acetylcholine or something similar. Possibly transfusion, but medicine isn’t really my field.”

Damon sighed and said, “I seem to have been thrust into such work more often than I intended. Well, let us get on with it.” He let his mind sink deep into the matrix, reaching out for contact with Andrew. They had been linked before, and the old rapport quickly reestablished itself. For a moment there was a shadow-touch from Ellemir, only a hint, like the faint memory of a kiss, then she dropped gently out of the rapport at Damon’s admonition: she must guard herself and their child. For an instant Callista too lingered, a fragmentary touch, in the old closeness, and Andrew clung to the contact. For so long she had not touched even his hand, and now they were linked together, close again—then, with a poignant sharpness, she broke the link, dropping away. Andrew felt empty and cold without the touch of her mind, and he sensed the wrenching aftertaste of grief. He was glad, for a moment, that Dezi was not yet in the rapport. Then Damon reached out and Andrew felt Dezi in the linkage, was momentarily aware of him, barriered, yet very much
there
, a cool firm strength, like a handclasp.

The threefold link persisted for a moment, Damon getting the feel of the two men with whom he must work so closely linked. With his eyes closed as always in a circle, he saw behind them the blue crystalline structure of the matrix gems which held them linked together, amplifying and sending out the individual, definite, electronic resonances of their brains, and beyond that, the purely subjective feel of them. Andrew was rocklike and strong, protective, so that Damon felt with a sigh of relief that his own lack of strength did not matter, Andrew had plenty for both of them. Dezi was a quick, darting precision, an awareness flicking here and there like reflections of light playing from a prism. Damon opened his eyes and saw them both; it was difficult to reconcile the actual physical presence with the mental
feel
within the matrix.

Dezi was so much—physically—the image of Coryn, his long-dead friend, his sworn brother. For the first time Damon let himself wonder how much of his love for Ellemir arose from that memory, the brother-friend he had loved so deeply when they were children, whose death had left him alone. Ellemir was like Coryn, and yet unlike, uniquely herself—He cut off the thought. He must not think of Ellemir in this strong link or he would be picking her up telepathically, and this strong rapport, this flow of energons, could overpower and deform their child’s developing brain. Quickly, picking up the contact with Dezi and Andrew, he began to visualize—to create on the thought-level where they would work—a strong and impregnable wall around them, so that no other person within Armida could be affected by their thoughts.

When we work with the men, healing them, we will bring them one by one behind this wall, so that nothing will overflow to damage Ellemir or the child, or trouble Callista’s peace, or disturb the sleep of
Dom
Esteban
.

It was only a psychological device, he knew, nothing like the strong electrical-mental net around Arilinn, strong as the wall of the Tower itself, to keep out intruders in body or mind. But it had its own reality on the level where they would be working: it would protect them from outside interference, shielding those in Armida who might pick up their thoughts, and dilute or distort them. It would also focus the healing on the ones who needed it.

“Before we start, let’s have it clear what we’re going to do,” he said. Ferrika had some rather well drawn anatomical charts. She had been giving classes in basic hygiene to the women in the villages, an innovation of which Damon completely approved, and he had borrowed the charts she used, discarding the ones she used to teach pregnant women, but keeping the one which diagramed the circulation. “Look here, we have to restore circulation and healthy blood flow into the legs and feet, liquefy the frozen lymph and sluggish blood, and try to repair the nerve fibers damaged by freezing.”

Andrew, listening to the matter-of-fact way in which Damon spoke, in much the same way as a Terran medic would have described an intravenous injection, looked uneasily at the matrix between his hands. He did not doubt that Damon could do everything he said he could, and he was perfectly willing to help. But he thought they were a most unlikely hospital team.

The men were lying in the room where they had been taken. Most of them were still in their drugged sleep, but Raimon was awake, his eyes bright with fever, flushed and pain-racked.

Damon said gently, “We have come to do what we can for you, my friend.”

He bared the matrix in his hands; the man flinched.

“Sorcery,” he muttered, “such things are for the Hali’imyn. . . .”

Damon shook his head. “A skill which anyone with the inborn talent can use. Andrew here is no Comyn-born, nor of the race of Cassilda, yet he is skilled in this work, and has come to help.”

Raimon’s feverish eyes fixed on the matrix. Damon saw the twisting sickness pass over his face, and even through his own growing euphoric rapport with the jewel, he somehow found enough separateness and detachment to say gently, “Do not look directly into the matrix, friend, for you are not trained to the sight, and it will trouble your eyes and brain.”

The man averted his eyes, making a superstitious gesture, and Damon felt annoyed again, but he controlled it. He said, “Lie down, try to sleep, Raimon,” and then, firmly, “Dezi, give them another dose of Ferrika’s sleeping medicine. If they can sleep while we work, they will not interfere with the healing.” And if they slept, they would feel no fear, and thoughts of fear could interfere with the careful, delicate work they would be doing.

It was a pity Ferrika could not be taught this work, Damon thought. He wondered if she had even minimal
laran
. With her knowledge of healing, and the ability to use matrix skills, she would indeed be valuable to all the people on the estate.

That was what Callista ought to be doing, he decided, not work any stupid housewife could do!

As Raimon swallowed the sleeping medicine and sank back drowsily against his pillows, Damon gently reached out with his mind and picked up the threads of contact. Andrew, watching the lights in his matrix brightening and dimming in pulse with his breathing, felt Damon reach out, center his consciousness between himself and Dezi. To Andrew, subjectively, though Damon did not move or touch any of them, it was as if he leaned on them both, carefully supported, and then lowered his awareness into the wounded man’s body. Andrew could sense, could feel, the tension in the damaged flesh, the broken blood vessels, the blood which lay thick and sluggish in the bruised and torn tissues, distended or flaccid, pulpy, like meat frozen and then thawed. He felt Damon’s awareness of this, felt him search out, with something like the fingers of his mind, the damaged nerve sheathing in the bundles of fibers in ankle, toes, arches, tendons. . . .
Not much to be done there
. As if they were against his own fingertips, Andrew could feel the tight tendons, feel the way in which Damon’s pressure relaxed them, feel impulses streaming again through the fibers, brokenly, damaged. The surface of the fibers would never wholly heal, but once again the impulses were moving, feeling had been restored. Damon flinched at the awareness of pain in the restored nerve fibers.
It is a good thing I had them give Raimon sleeping medicine; he could never have endured the pain if he were awake
. Then, with delicate, rhythmic pulsations, he began to stimulate the pulse of blood, the flow through arteries and veins nearly choked by the thick blood. Andrew felt Damon, intent on the delicate work deep in the layers of cells, falter and hesitate, his breathing ragged. He felt Dezi reach out and steady Damon’s heartbeat. Andrew felt himself reach out—the image in his mind was of a rock, strong behind Damon where the other man could lean his weight against him—and was conscious of something around them. Walls? Thick walls, enclosing them? Did it matter? He concentrated on lending strength to Damon, seeing, with his eyes shut, the blackened feet slowly changing color, reddening, paling. Finally Damon sighed, opened his eyes. Letting the rapport drop, except for a slender thread of contact, he bent over Raimon, who lay somnolent, touching the feet carefully with his fingers. The blackened skin was sloughing off in patches; below it lay reddened flesh, whealed and bruised-looking, but, Andrew knew, free of gangrenous taint or poison.