The Ages of Chaos Read online

  Now, crouching on the battlements of Castle Aldaran and watching the clear sky so inexplicably filled with lightning, Donal extended his consciousness outward, outward—he could almost see the lines of electricity and the curious shimmer of the magnetic fields of the storm in the air. At times he had been able to call the lightning; once he had amused himself when a storm raged by diverting the great bolt where he would. He could not always do it, and he could not do it too often or he would grow sick and weak; once when he had felt through his skin (he did not know how) that the next bolt was about to strike the tree where he had sheltered, he had somehow reached out with something inside him, as if some invisible limb had grasped the chain of exploding force and flung it elsewhere. The lightning bolt had exploded, with a sizzle, into a nearby bush, crisping it into blackened leaves and charring a circle of grass, and Donal had sunk to the ground, his head swimming, his eyes blurred. His head had been splitting in three parts with the pain, and he could not see properly for days, but Aliciane had hugged and praised him.

  “My brother Caryl could do that, but he died young,” she told him. “There was a time when the leroni at Hali tried to breed storm-control into our laran, but it was too dangerous. I can see the thunder-forces, a little; I cannot manipulate them. Take care, Donal; use that gift only to save a life. I would not have my son blasted by the lightnings he seeks to control.” Aliciane had hugged him again, with unusual warmth.

  Laran. Talk of it had filled his childhood, the gifts of extrasensory powers which were so much a preoccupation with the mountain lords—yes, and far away in the lowlands, too. If he had had any truly extraordinary gift, telepathy, the ability to force his will upon hawk or hound or sentry-bird, he would have been recorded in the breeding charts of the leroni, the sorceresses who kept records of parentage among those who carried the blood of Hastur and Cassilda, legendary forebears of the Gifted Families. But he had none. Merely storm-watch, a little; he sensed when thunderstorms or even forest fire struck, and someday, when he was a bit older, he would take his place on the fire-watch, and it would help him, to know, as he already knew a little, where the fire would move next. But this was a minor gift, not worth breeding for. Even at Hali they had abandoned it, four generations before, and Donal knew, not knowing precisely how he knew, that this was one reason why the family of Rockraven had not prospered.

  But this storm was far beyond his power to guess. Somehow, without clouds or rain, it seemed to center here, over the castle. Mother, he thought, it has to do with my mother, and wished that he dared run to seek her, to assure himself that all was well with her, through the terrifying, growing awareness of the storm. But a boy of ten could not run like a babe to sit in his mother’s lap. And Aliciane was heavy now and ungainly, in the last days of waiting for Lord Aldaran’s child to be born; Donal could not run to her with his own fears and troubles.

  He soberly picked up the hawk again, and carried it down the stairs; in air so heavy with lightning, this strange and unprecedented storm, he could not loose it to fly. The sky was blue (it looked like a good day for flying hawks) but Donal could feel the heavy and oppressive magnetic currents in the air, the heavy crackle of electricity.

  Is it my mother’s fear that fills the air with lightning, as sometimes my grandsire’s anger did? Suddenly Donal was overwhelmed with his own fear. He knew, as everyone knew, that women sometimes died in childbirth; he had tried hard not to think about that, but now, overwhelmed with terror for his mother, he could feel the crackle of his own fear in the lightning. Never had he felt so young, so helpless. Fiercely he wished he were back in the shabby poverty of Rockraven, or ragged and unregarded as a poor cousin in some kinsman’s stronghold. Shivering, he took the hawk back to the mews, accepting the hawkmaster’s reproof with such meekness that the old man thought the boy must be sick!

  Far away in the women’s apartments, Aliciane heard the continuing roll of thunder; more dimly than Donal, she sensed the strangeness of the storm. And she was afraid.

  The Rockravens had been dropped from the intensive breeding program for laran gifts; like most of her generation, Aliciane thought that breeding program outrageous, a tyranny no free mountain people would endure in these days, to breed mankind like cattle for desired characteristics.

  Yet all her life she had been reared in loose talk of lethal genes and recessives, of bloodlines carrying desired laran. How could any woman bear a child without fear? Yet here she was, awaiting the birth of a child who might well be heir to Aldaran, knowing that his reason for choosing her had been neither her beauty—although she knew, without vanity, that it had been her beauty which first caught his eye—nor the superb voice which had made her Lady Deonara’s favorite ballad-singer, but the knowledge that she had born a strong and living son, gifted with laran; that she was of proven fertility and could survive childbirth.

  Rather, I survived it once. What does that prove, but that I was lucky?

  As if responding to her fear, the unborn child kicked sharply, and Aliciane drew her hand over the strings of her rryl, the small harp she held in her lap, pressing the sidebars with her other hand and sensing the soothing effect of the vibrations. As she began to play, she sensed the stir among the women who had been sent to attend her, for Lady Deonara genuinely loved her singing-woman, and had sent her own most skillful nurses and midwives and maids to attend her in these last days. Then Mikhail, Lord Aldaran, came into her room, a big man, in the prime of life, his hair prematurely grayed; and indeed he was far older than Aliciane, who had turned twenty-four but last spring. His tread was heavy in the quiet room, sounding more like a mailed stride on a battlefield than a soft-shod indoor step.

  “Do you play for your own pleasure, Aliciane? I had thought a musician drew most of her pleasure from applause, yet I find you playing for yourself and your women,” he said, smiling, and hitched a light chair around to sit in it at her side. “How is it with you, my treasure?”

  “I am well but weary,” she said, also smiling. “This is a restless child, and I play partly because the music seems to have a calming effect. Perhaps because the music calms me, and so the child is calm, too.”

  “It may well be so,” he said, and when she put the harp from her, said, “No, sing, Aliciane, if you are not too tired.”

  “As you will, my lord.” She pressed the strings of the harp into chords, and sang, softly, a love song of the far hills:

  “Where are you now?

  Where does my love wander?

  Not on the hills, not upon the shore, not far on the sea,

  Love, where are you now?

  “Dark the night, and I am weary,

  Love, when can I cease this seeking?

  Darkness all around, above, beyond me,

  Where lingers he, my love?”

  Mikhail leaned toward the woman, drew his heavy hand gently across her brilliant hair. “Such a weary song,” he said softly, “and so sad; is love truly such a thing of sadness to you, my Aliciane?”

  “No, indeed not,” Aliciane said, assuming a gaiety she did not feel. Fears and self-questioning were for pampered wives, not for a barragana whose position depended on keeping her lord amused and cheery with her charm and beauty, her skills as an entertainer. “But the loveliest love songs are of sorrow in love, my lord. Would it please you more if I choose songs of laughter or valor?”

  “Whatever you sing pleases me, my treasure,” Mikhail said kindly. “If you are weary or sorrowful you need not pretend to gaiety with me, carya.” He saw the flicker of distrust in her eyes, and thought, I am too sensitive for my own good; it must be pleasant never to be too aware of the minds of others. Does Aliciane truly love me, or does she only value her position as my acknowledged favorite? Even if she loves me, is it for myself, or only that I am rich and powerful and can make her secure? He gestured to the women, and they withdrew to the far end of the long room, leaving him alone with his mistress: present, to satisfy the decencies of the day that dictated a childbearing woman s
hould never be unattended, but out of earshot. “I do not trust all these women,” he said.

  “Lord, Deonara is truly fond of me, I think. She would not put anyone among my women with ill will to me or my child,” Aliciane said.

  “Deonara? No, perhaps not,” Mikhail said, remembering that Deonara had been Lady of Aldaran for twice ten years and shared his hunger for a child to be heir to his estate. She could no longer promise him even the hope of one; she had welcomed the knowledge that he had taken Aliciane, who was one of her own favorites, to his bed and his heart. “But I have enemies who are not of this household, and it is all too easy to plant a spy with laran, who can relay all the doings of my household to someone who wishes me ill. I have kinsmen who would do much to prevent the birth of a living heir to my line. I marvel not that you look pale, my treasure; it is hard to credit wickedness that would harm a little child, yet I have never been sure that Deonara was not victim to someone who killed the children unborn in her womb. It is not hard to do; even a little skill with matrix or laran can break a child’s fragile link to life.”

  “Anyone who wished you ill, Mikhail, would know you have promised me that my child will be legitimated, and would turn her evil will to me,” Aliciane soothed. “Yet I have borne this child without illness. You fear needlessly, my dear love.”

  “Gods grant you are right! Yet I have enemies who would stop at nothing. Before your child is born, I will call a leronis to probe them; I will have no woman present at your confinement who cannot swear under truthspell that she wishes you well. An evil wish can snap a newborn child’s fight for life.”

  “Surely that strength of laran is rare, my dearest lord.”

  “Not as rare as I could wish it,” Mikhail, Lord Aldaran, said. “Yet of late I have strange thoughts. I find these gifts a weapon to cut my own hand; I who have used sorcery to hurl fire and chaos upon my enemy, I feel it now that they have strength to hurl them upon me, too. When I was young I felt laran as a gift of the gods; they had appointed me to rule this land, and dowered me with laran to make my rule stronger. But as I grow old I find it a curse, not a gift.”

  “You are not so old, my lord, and surely no one now would challenge your rule!”

  “No one who dares do so openly, Aliciane. But I am alone among those who hover waiting for me to die childless. I have meaty bones to pick… all gods grant your child is a son, carya.”

  Aliciane was trembling. “And if it is not… oh, my dear lord…”

  “Why, then, treasure, you must bear me another,” he said gently, “but even if you do not, I shall have a daughter whose dower will be my estate, and who will bring me the strong alliances I need; even a woman-child will make my position that much stronger. And your son shall be foster-brother and paxman, shield in trouble and strong arm. I truly love your son, Aliciane.”

  “I know.” How could she have been trapped this way… finding that she loved the man whom, at first, she had simply thought to ensnare with the wiles of her voice and her beauty? Mikhail was kind and honorable, he had courted her when he might have taken her as lawful prey, he had assured her, unasked, that even if she failed to give him a living son, Donal’s future was secure. She felt safe with him, she had come to love him, and now she feared for him, too.

  Caught in my own trap!

  She said, almost laughing, “I need no such reassurance, my lord. I have never doubted you.”

  He smiled, accepting that, the courtesy of a telepath. “But women are fearful at such times, and it is sure now that Deonara will bear me no child, even if I would ask it of her after so many tragedies. Do you know what it is like, Aliciane, to see children you have longed for, desired, love even before they were born, to see them die without drawing breath? I did not love Deonara when we were wed; I had never seen her face, for we were given to one another for family alliances; but we have endured much together, and although it may seem strange to you, child, love can come from shared sorrow as well as shared joy.” His face was somber. “I love you well, carya mea, but it was neither for your beauty nor even for the splendor of your voice that I sought you out. Did you know Deonara was not my first wife?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “I was wed first when I was a young man; Clariza Leynier bore me two sons and a daughter, all healthy and strong… Hard as it is to lose children at birth, it is harder yet to lose sons and daughter grown almost to manhood and womanhood. And yet I lost them—one after another, as they grew to adolescence. I lost them all three, with the descent of laran; they died in crisis and convulsions, all of them, of that scourge of our people. I myself was ready to die of despair.”

  “My brother Caryl died so,” Aliciane whispered.

  “I know; yet he was the only one of your line, and your father had many sons and daughters. You yourself told me that your laran did not descend at adolescence, playing havoc with mind and body, but that you grew slowly into it from babyhood, as with many of the Rockraven folk. And I can see that this is dominant in your line, for Donal is barely ten years old, and though I do not think his laran is full developed yet, still he has much of it, and he at least is not like to die on the threshold. I knew that for your children, at least, I need not fear. Deonara, too, came from a bloodline with early onset of laran, but none of the children she bore me lived long enough for us to know whether they had laran or no.”

  Aliciane’s face twisted in dismay and he laid his arm tenderly about her shoulders. “What is it, my dear one?”

  “All my life I have felt revulsion for this—to breed men like cattle!”

  “Man is the only animal that thinks not to improve his race,” Mikhail said fiercely. “We control weather, build castles and highways with the strength of our laran, explore greater and greater gifts of the mind—should we not seek to better ourselves as well as our world and our surroundings?” Then his face softened. “But I understand that a woman as young as you thinks not in terms of generations, centuries; while one is yet young, you think only of self and children, but at my age it is natural to think in terms of all those who will come after us when we and our children are many centuries gone. But such things are not for you unless you wish to think of them; think of your child, love, and how soon we will hold her in our arms.”

  Aliciane shrank, whispering, “You know, then, that it is a daughter I am to bear you—you are not angry?”

  “I told you I would not be angry; if I am distressed it is only that you did not trust me enough to tell me this when first you knew,” Mikhail said, but the words were so gentle they were hardly a reproof. “Come, Aliciane, forget your fears; if you give me no son, at least you have given me a sturdy foster-son, and your daughter will be a powerful strength in bringing me a son-in-law. And our daughter will have laran.”

  Aliciane smiled and returned his kiss; but she was still taut with apprehension as she heard the distant crackle of the unprecedented summer thunder, which seemed to come and go in time with the waves of her fear. Can it be that Donal is afraid of what this child will mean to him? she wondered, and wished passionately that she had the precognitive gift, the laran of the Aldaran clan, so that she might know that all would be well.

  Chapter Two

  Here is the traitor!”

  Aliciane trembled at the anger in Lord Aldaran’s voice as he strode wrathfully into her chamber, thrusting a woman ahead of him with his two hands. Behind him the leronis, his household sorceress, bearing the matrix or blue starstone which somehow amplified the powers of her laran, tiptoed; a fragile pale-haired woman, her pallid features drawn with terror of the storm she had unleashed.

  “Mayra,” Aliciane said in dismay, “I thought you my friend, and friend to Lady Deonara. What has befallen that you are my enemy and my child’s?”

  Mayra—she was one of Deonara’s robing-women, a sturdy middle-aged dame—stood frightened but defiant between Lord Aldaran’s hard hands. “No, I know nothing of what that sorceress-bitch has said of me; is she jealous of my place here, hav
ing no useful work but to meddle with the minds of her betters?”

  “It will not serve you to put ill names on me,” said the leronis Margali. “I asked all these women but one question, and that under the truthspell, so that I would hear in my mind if they lied. Is your loyalty to Mikhail, Lord Aldaran, or to the vai domna, his lady Deonara? And if they said me no, or said yes with a doubt or a denial in their thoughts, I asked only, again under truthspell, if their loyalty were to husband or father or home-lord. From this one alone I got no honest answer, but only the knowledge that she was concealing all. And so I told Lord Aldaran that if there was a traitor among his women it could be only she.”

  Mikhail let the woman go and turned her around to face him, not ungently. He said, “It is true that you have been long in my service, Mayra; Deonara treats you with the kindness of a foster-sister. Is it me you wish evil, or my lady?”

  “My lady has been kind to me; I am angered to see her set aside for another,” said Mayra, her voice shaking. The leronis behind her said, in passionless tone, “No, Lord Aldaran, there she speaks no truth, either; she holds no love for you nor for your lady.”

  “She lies!” Mayra’s voice rose to a half-shriek. “She lies—I wish you no ill save what you have brought on yourself, lord, by taking the bitch of Rockraven to your bed. It is she who has put a spell on your manhood, that bitch-viper!”

  “Silence!” Lord Aldaran quivered as if he would strike the woman, but the word was enough; everyone within range was smitten dumb, and Aliciane trembled. Only once before had she heard Mikhail use what was called, in the language of laran, the command-voice. There were not many who could summon enough control over their laran to use it; it was not an inborn gift, but one that required both talent and skilled training. And when, in that voice, Mikhail, Lord Aldaran, commanded silence, none within earshot could form an audible word.