The Forbidden Circle Read online

  “No more I can do, com’ii. It’s a bad place.”

  “Lord Damon, you’re Tower-trained. I have seen the leronis stop worse wounds than this with her jewel-stone. Can’t you do anything?” Eduin pleaded. He had withstood all attempts to get him to rest, or eat, or leave his friend for a moment.

  “Oh, God,” Damon muttered. “I haven’t the skill or the strength—it’s delicate work. I could just as easily stop his heart, kill him—”

  “Try, anyway,” begged Eduin. “He’ll die, anyhow, in a few minutes if you can’t stop the bleeding.”

  No, damn it, Damon wanted to lash out. Let me be, I’ve done as much as I can. . . .

  Caradoc didn’t run from the cat-men. He probably saved Esteban’s life. Thanks to him Ellemir is not this moment fatherless. Is he still alive? I have had not even an instant to go and see! Reluctantly, he said, “I’ll try. But don’t hope for too much. It’s just a bare chance.”

  He fumbled with tense fingers for the jewel around his neck, drew it out. Now I must do the work of a sorceress, he thought bitterly. Leonie said it, as a woman I would have made a Keeper. . . .

  He stared into the blue stone, concentrating savagely on controlling the magnetic fields. Slowly, slowly, he focused his heightened psi awareness, carefully down and down, to the molecular level and beyond, feeling the pulsing blood cells, the fumbling heart . . . careful, careful. . . . For an instant his mind merged with the unconscious man’s, a dim swirl of fear and agony, a growing weakness as the precious life’s blood oozed away . . . down and down, into the cells, the molecules . . . the blood vessel severed, broken, the gush, the pressure. . . .

  Pressure, now, directly against the severed vessel . . . telekinetic psi force, to hold together, together . . . cells knitting; careful, don’t stop the heart; ease up just there . . . . He knew he had not moved a muscle, but it felt as if his hands were inside the man’s body, gripping tight on the severed vessel. He knew he was holding pure energy against the flowing blood. . . .

  With a long sigh, he withdrew. Eduin whispered, “I think the bleeding’s stopped.”

  Damon nodded, exhausted. He said hoarsely, “Don’t move him for an hour or so, until the clot’s strong enough to hold by itself. Put sandbags around him to keep him from moving accidentally.” Once the bleeding was stopped, the wound was no great matter. “Bad place, but it could be worse. Half an inch to one side and he’d have been castrated. Keep him from moving, now, and he’ll be all right. In hell’s name, man, get up. What are you about—”

  Eduin had dropped to his knees. He murmured the ritual formula, “There is a life between us, vai dom.”

  Damon said sharply, “There may be times coming when we’re going to need brave men like the pair of you. Save your life for that! Now, damn it, if you don’t go and get yourself some food and rest, I’ll knock you down and sit on you. Go on, teniente—that’s an order!”

  Eduin muttered groggily, “Dom Istvan—”

  “I’ll see what’s with him. Go and have your own wound seen to,” Damon ordered, and looked around, coming up to sharp focus again. Ellemir, white-faced, was still supervising the placing of beds and coverings for the wounded men, and the bringing of food to the less severely wounded. The healer-woman still sat beside Dom Esteban. Damon went slowly toward her, and noticed, as if his body belonged to someone else, that he swayed as he walked. I’m not used to this anymore, damn it.

  The healer-woman raised her head at Damon’s question. “He’s sleeping; he won’t answer any questions this day. The wound missed his kidneys, by just a fraction; but I think something’s hurt in the nerves of the spine. He can’t move his legs at all, not even wriggle a toe. It could be shock, but I fear it’s something worse. When he wakes—well, either he’ll be perfectly all right, or else he’ll spend the rest of his life dead from the waist down. Wounds in the spine don’t heal.”

  Damon walked away from the healer-woman in a daze, slowly shaking his head. Not dead, no. But if, indeed, he was paralyzed from the waist, he might as well be, would probably rather be. He didn’t envy whoever it was that would have the task of telling the formidable old man that his daughter’s rescue must be left in other hands.

  Whose hands? Mine? Damon realized, with shock, that ever since he had realized that Esteban lived, he had hoped that his older kinsman who, after all, was Callista’s father, her nearest kinsman, and thus in honor bound to avenge any hurt or dishonor to her—would be able to take over this frightful task. But it hadn’t happened like that.

  It was still up to him—and to the Earthman, Andrew Carr.

  He turned resolutely and left the Great Hall to go in search of Andrew Carr.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  What kind of a world is this, anyway? Swords and knives—bandits, battles, kidnappings. Carr had seen the wounded men, but had quickly discovered that he was only in the way, that his hosts had no time or thought for him now, and had retreated upstairs to the room where they had taken him. He had felt strange about not offering to help, but the place was crawling with people and they all knew more about what to do than he did. He decided the best thing he could do was to keep out of the way.

  What was going to happen now? He had gathered, from what little he could understand of the servants’ talk—mostly in a dialect he could barely follow—that this was the Lord of this estate: Ellemir’s father. With the owner returned, would Damon still be in charge of whatever arrangements could be made for Callista’s rescue? It was Callista he was thinking about, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Then, almost as if his thoughts had drawn her to him (maybe they had, she seemed to think there was some such bond between them), he saw her standing before his bed.

  “So you are safe, safe and well now, Andrew. Have my kinsfolk been hospitable to you?”

  “They couldn’t have been kinder,” Andrew said. “But if you can come into their house, why can’t they see you?”

  “I wish I knew. I cannot see them, I cannot feel their thoughts; it is as if the house were empty, without even a ghost to haunt it! Or as if I were the ghost haunting it—my own house!” Her face crumpled with sobbing. “Somehow, someone has been able to barricade me from everyone, everyone I know. I wander in the overworld and I see only strange, drifting faces, never even a glance from any familiar face. I wonder if I have gone mad . . . ?”

  Andrew said slowly, trying to explain the things Damon had told him, “Damon believes you are in the hands of the cat-men; it seems that they have attacked others, and that they keep you prisoner so that you cannot use your starstone against them.”

  Callista said slowly, “Before I left the Tower, Leonie said something of this. She said that something was amiss is the darkening lands and she suspected that some unmonitored stones were being used—or misused—there. You are a Terran—do you know what I mean by the stones?”

  “Not a word of it,” Andrew confessed.

  “It is the ancient knowledge—science, you would say—of this world. The matrix stones, starstones we call them among ourselves, can be attuned to the human mind, and amplify what you call psi powers. They can be used to change the form of energy. All matter, all energy and force, is nothing but vibration, and if you change the rate at which it vibrates, then it takes another form.”

  Andrew nodded. He could follow that. It sounded as if she were trying, without the scientific training of the Terran Empire, to explain the atomic field theory of matter and energy; and doing it better than he could do it with the scientific training he had had. “And you can use these stones?”

  “Yes. I am a Keeper, and Tower-trained; the leader of a circle of trained telepaths who use these stones for the transmutation of energy. And all the stones we use, keyed to our own individual brains, are monitored from one or another of the Towers; no one is allowed to use them unless he has been personally trained by an older Keeper or technician, and we are sure he will damage nothing. The stones are very, very powerful, Andrew. The higher-level ones, the larger on
es, could shatter this planet like a roasting bird bursting in the oven. This is why we were frightened when we discovered that someone, or something, in the darkening lands was probably using a very powerful stone, or stones, unmonitored and without training.”

  Andrew was trying to recall Damon’s words. “He said men have done this before, but nonhumans never.”

  “Damon has forgotten his history,” Callista said. “It is well-known that our ancient forebears first received the Stones from the chieri folk, who knew how to use them when we were savages, and have gone so far beyond them that they no longer need them. But the chieri have little to do with mankind these days, and few men living have so much as seen one. I wish I might say the same of the cat-things, curse them!” She drew a long, exhausted breath. “Oh, I am weary, weary, Andrew. Would to Evanda I might touch you. I think I shall go mad, alone in the darkness. No, I have not been ill-treated, but I am so tired, so tired of the cold stone, and the dripping water, and my eyes ache with the darkness, and I cannot eat the food or drink the water they give me, it is foul with their stink—”

  It drove Andrew half mad to hear her sobbing, and to be unable to reach her, touch her, comfort her somehow. He wanted to take her in his arms, hold her close, quiet her crying. And she stood there before him, looking so real, so solid, he could see her breathing and the tears that kept rolling down her face, and yet he could not so much as touch her fingertips. He said helplessly, “Don’t cry, Callista. Somehow Damon and I will find you, and if he won’t, I’ll damn well try it myself!”

  Raising his eyes suddenly, he saw Damon standing in the doorway. Damon’s eyes were wide. He said, on an in-drawn breath of amazement, “Is Callista here?”

  “I can’t believe you can’t see her,” Andrew said, and felt again that strange, tentative outreach of contact, like a touch directly on his mind—he didn’t resent it. At least Damon could know that he was telling the truth.

  “I never really doubted you,” Damon said, and his eyes were wide with wonder and dismay.

  “Damon is here? Damon!” Callista said, and her lips trembled “You say he is here and I cannot see him. Like a ghost, a ghost in my own house and my brother’s room—” She made a desperate attempt to control her weeping. Andrew felt the desperation of her struggle to stay calm. “Tell Damon he must find my starstone. They did not find it; I was not wearing it. Tell him I do not wear it around my neck as he does his own.”

  Andrew repeated this aloud to Damon. He felt uncomfortably like a trance medium supposedly relaying messages from a disembodied spirit. The thought made him shudder; they were usually dead.

  Damon touched the thong around his neck and said, “I had forgotten she knew that. Tell her Ellemir has it, she found it beneath her pillow, and ask—”

  Andrew repeated his words, and Callista interrupted him. “That explains why—I knew someone had touched it, but if it was Ellemir—” Her shadowy form wavered and flickered, as if the effort to stay present with them had taxed her beyond endurance. To Andrew’s quick cry of concern she whispered, “I am very weak—I feel as if I were dying—or perhaps . . . Watch the stone,” and she was gone. Andrew stood looking, in terror, at the place where she had disappeared. When he repeated her words Damon ran down the corridor, shouting for Ellemir.

  “Where were you?” he demanded irascibly, when finally she appeared.

  She looked at him in astonishment and annoyance. “What is the matter with you? My clothes were soaked in blood; I have been tending wounded men. Have I no right to a bath and clean garments? I sent the very servants for so much!”

  How like and how unlike Callista, Andrew thought, and felt a completely irrational resentment, that this one was walking around free, enjoying a bath and fresh clothes and Callista was alone and crying in the dark somewhere.

  “The starstone, quickly,” Damon demanded. “We can see in it if Callista is alive and well.” He explained to Andrew, quickly, that when a trained matrix worker died, his starstone “died” too, losing color and brilliance. Ellemir drew it out, handling it gingerly through the insulating silk, but it pulsed as brightly as ever.

  Damon said, “She is exhausted and frightened, it may be, but she is physically very strong, or the stone could not shine so brightly. Andrew! When she comes to you again, tell her that she must somehow force herself to eat and drink, to be strong, to keep her strength up until we can somehow come to her! I wonder why she was so insistent that we must find her starstone?”

  Andrew stretched out his hand to it, and said, “May I—?”

  “It is hardly safe,” Damon said hesitantly. “No one can use a stone keyed to another.” Then he remembered. Callista was a Keeper, and they were so highly trained that, sometimes, they could key themselves in to someone else’s stone. Leonie had held his in her hands many times, and while Ellemir’s lightest touch on it, even though it had saved his life, had been agony, Leonie’s had hurt him no more than the touch of Leonie’s hand on his cheek. During his training, before they taught him how to key his own starstone to the rhythm of his own brain and energies, he had been trained with his Keeper’s stone; and for that time he had been so in touch with Leonie that they were wide open to one another. Even now a thought will bring her to me, he thought.

  Andrew knew what Damon was thinking. It’s as if he were broadcasting his thoughts to me. I wonder if he knows it? He said quietly, “If Callista and I weren’t awfully close in touch somehow, I don’t think she’d keep coming back to me.” He hesitated a moment, reluctant to reveal more, then realized that for Callista’s sake, for all their sakes, it was unfair to keep back even what should have been private and highly personal. He said, trying to keep his voice even, “I—I love her, you know. I’ll do whatever you think is best for her, no matter what it takes. You know more about this kind of thing than I do. I’m completely in your hands.”

  For an instant Damon felt a sting of revulsion (This alien, this stranger, even his thoughts defile a Keeper), then he made himself be fair. Andrew was not a stranger. However it had happened, however it came about, this alien, this Earthman, had laran. As for loving a Keeper, he himself had loved Leonie all his life, and she had never been angry about it or felt it an intrusion, even though she had never responded even a breath to his desire; his love she had accepted, although in an entirely sexless way. Callista was probably equally capable of defending herself, if she wished, against this stranger’s emotions.

  Andrew was getting very tired of seeing everything that happened through Damon’s eyes. “One thing I don’t understand,” he said. “Why must a Keeper necessarily be a virgin? Is it a law? Something religious?”

  “It has always been so,” said Ellemir, “from the most remote past.”

  That, of course, Andrew thought, wasn’t a reason. Damon sensed his dissatisfaction and said, “I don’t know if I can explain it properly—it’s a matter of nerve energies. People have only so much. You learn to protect your energy currents, how to use them most effectively, how to relax, to safeguard your strength. Well, what uses most human energy? Sex, of course. You can use it, sometimes, to channel energy, but there are limits to that sort of thing. And when you’re keyed into the matrix jewels—well, the energy they will carry is limitless, but human flesh and blood and brainwaves can stand only so much. For a man it’s fairly simple. You can’t overload with sex because if you’re too heavily overloaded, you simply can’t function sexually at all. Matrix telepaths find that out fairly early in the game. You have to go on short rations of sex if you want to keep enough energy to do your work. For a woman, though, it’s easy to—well, to overload. So most of the women have to make up their minds to stay chaste, or else be very, very careful not to key into the more complex matrix patterns. Because it can kill them, very quickly, and it’s not a nice death.”

  He remembered a story Leonie had told him, early in the training. “I told you, once, that it wasn’t easy to ravish a Keeper, unwilling—but that it could be done, it had been done.
There was a Keeper once—she was a princess of the House of Hastur—and it was during one of the wars, when such women could be used as pawns. So the Lady Mirella Hastur was kidnapped, and they flung her out at the city gates, believing she was now useless to work against them. But the other Keeper in the Tower had been killed outright, and there was no one to act against the invaders who were storming Arilinn. So the Lady Mirella concealed what had been done to her, and went into the screens, and fought for hours against the forces mustered against them. But when the battle was over and the invaders lay, all of them, dying or dead at the city gates, she came down from the screens, and fell dead at their feet, burned out like a spent torch. Leonie’s grandmother was a rikhi, and Under-Keeper, at that time, and she saw the Lady Mirella die, and she said that not only was her starstone blasted and blackened, but that the Lady’s hands were burned as with fire and her body scorched by the energies she could no longer control. There is a monument to her in Arilinn,” he concluded. “We pay our respects to her memory each year at Festival Night, but I still believe it is there as a warning to any Keeper who trifles with her powers—or her chastity.”

  Andrew shuddered, thinking, Maybe it’s just as well I couldn’t touch Callista even for a moment. I wonder, though, if Damon told this story to keep me from getting ideas later on!

  Damon gestured to Ellemir and said, “Give him the stone, child. Touch it lightly at first, Andrew. Very lightly. Your first lesson,” he added wryly. “Never grasp a starstone hard in your hands. Handle it, always, as if it were a living thing.” Must I, too, work as a Keeper? To train him, as Leonie trained me?