City of Sorcery Read online

  “It’s my own fault. After all these years using laran I should have known enough to demand something to eat,” Magda said, “but I wanted to get away, I couldn’t wait to get away. Cholayna did offer—”

  Camilla’s eyebrows went up in the dark. “You were using laran in the Terran HQ? And you don’t want to talk about it. That does not sound like what I would expect of Cholayna n’ha Chandria.” She slid out of bed and drew a heavy woolen wrapper over her warm nightgown, scuffed her long narrow feet into fur slippers. “Let’s go down to the kitchen for something hot for you.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Magda said wearily.

  “Nevertheless, if you have been using laran—you know you must eat and regain your strength—”

  “What in all of Zandru’s hells do you know about it?” Magda snarled. Camilla shrugged.

  “I know what all the world knows. I know what the little children in the marketplace know. I know you. Come downstairs; at least you can have some hot milk, after that long walk in the cold. Take your boots off, though, and put on your slippers.”

  “Damnation, Camilla, don’t fuss at me.”

  Again the indifferent shrug. “If you want to sit in wet clothes all night, please yourself. I suppose one of the young nursing trainees would be delighted at the chance to nurse you through lung-fever. But it is hardly fair to go clumping around through the halls after midnight in heavy boots waking everyone who sleeps on the corridor because you’re too lazy to pull them off. If you’re simply too tired, I’ll help you.”

  Wearily, Magda roused herself to pull off her boots and soaked jacket. “I’ll borrow one of your nightgowns; I don’t want to wake Jaelle.” Somehow she took off the wet clothes and got herself into a heavy gown of thick flannel.

  “We’d better take these down and dry them; there will be a fire in the kitchen,” Camilla said. Magda was too weary to argue; she put her wet clothes over her arm and followed Camilla.

  She was still shivering as they went down the corridors and the silent stairs, but in the Guild-house kitchen, the fire was banked, and near the fireplace it was warm. A kettle of hot water was hissing softly on its crane; Camilla found mugs on a shelf while Magda raked up the fire and spread out her wet garments. Camilla poured Magda some bark-tea, then went into the pantry and cut cold meat and bread, laying them on the kitchen table next to the bowls of rolled grains and dried fruits, soaking for the breakfast porridge.

  Magda sipped listlessly at the hot bitter tea, too tired to look for honey on the shelves. She did not touch the food, sitting motionless on the bench before the table. Camilla made herself some tea, but instead of drinking it, she came around behind Magda. Her strong hands kneaded the tight muscles in the younger woman’s shoulders and neck; after a long time Magda reached out and took up a piece of the buttered bread.

  “I’m not really hungry, but I suppose I should eat something,” she said wearily, and put it to her lips. After a bite or two, as Camilla had expected, the ravenous hunger of anyone who has been working with laran took over, and she ate and drank almost mechanically. She finished the bread and meat, and got up to ransack the pantry for some leftover cakes with spice and sugar.

  When her hunger was satisfied, she leaned back, turning the bench round so that she could put her feet up on the rail that guarded the fireplace. Camilla came and sat beside her, putting up her own feet— long, narrow, somehow aristocratic—on the rail beside Magda’s. They sat together, neither speaking, looking into the bed of coals. After a time, Magda got up restlessly and put more wood on the fire, causing flames to flare up so that flickering shadows played on the walls of the cavernous kitchen.

  She said, at last, “I’m not really a psi-tech, not the way they think of it in the Terran Zone. I’m not a therapist. The work I do at Armida is—is different. What I had to do tonight was to go into someone’s mind, someone who’s normally head-blind, and try to—” She wet her lips with her tongue and said, “It’s not easy to explain. There aren’t words.”

  She looked around hesitantly at Camilla. She had known the woman at her side for years, and had long known that Camilla had, or had once had, laran, though Camilla herself denied it. Magda was one of the few people living who knew all of Camilla’s story: born of Comyn blood—no trace of which was visible now except for the faded, sandy hair which had once flamed with the same Comyn red as Jaelle’s—Camilla had been kidnapped when barely out of childhood, and so savagely raped and abused that her mind had broken. Magda did not know all of the details; only that for many years, Camilla had lived as a mercenary soldier, even her closest associates unaware that she was not the rough-spoken, rough-living man she seemed. After some years of this, Camilla, wounded and near death, had revealed herself to a Renunciate: Kindra, Jaelle’s own foster-mother. She had found herself able, in the Guild of Free Amazons, to take up again, painfully and with great self-doubt, the womanhood she had tried so long and so hard to renounce or conceal.

  Once or twice, when their barriers were down to one another, Magda had become certain that Camilla retained some of her family’s heritage of laran, whatever that family might be. She was sure that Camilla bore the blood of one of the Seven Domains, the great families of Darkover, even though she concealed her laran.

  It was not impossible that Camilla knew, without being told, how difficult the thing was that the Terrans had asked her to do.

  “Do you remember meeting Lexie Anders at the special orientation meeting they gave for the new women working in the Terran Zone?”

  “I do. She was very scornful of the notion that the Penta Cori’yo had anything to offer Terran women. Even when the other women in the Bridge Society pointed out that, after all, Terran women could hardly go to the Spaceport bars for recreation in the City, and that this would give her friends and associates, and a place to go when she could not stand being cooped up in the HQ anymore—”

  “And I know, if Lexie doesn’t, that that’s one reason women employees haven’t been very fortunate on Darkover, unless they were brought up here and feel comfortable with the language and the way women are expected to behave,” Magda said. “I remember how rude and casual Lexie was at the reception. She made us all feel like—well, like natives, crude aboriginals; that we should all have been wearing skin loincloths and bones in our hair.”

  “And you had to go into her mind? Poor Margali,” said Camilla, “I do not imagine her mind is a pleasant place to be. Not even, I should imagine, for her. As for you—”

  “It wasn’t only that,” Magda said. Briefly, she repeated to Camilla what Cholayna had told her about the lost plane, and about Lexie’s mysterious reappearance. “—So I told her, I’m not a trained psi-tech, and don’t blame me if I make things worse,” she said, “and then we went down to Isolation, in Medic, where they had been keeping her.”

  Magda had not remembered that Lexie Anders was such a little woman. She was loud-voiced and definite, with such an assertive stance and manner that it was shocking to see her lying flat against her cot, pale and scrubbed like a sick child. Her hair was fair, cut short and curly; her face looked almost bruised, the blue veins showing through the skin. More distressing than this was the emptiness in her face; Magda felt that even Lexie’s aggressive rudeness was preferable to this passive, childish pliancy.

  Magda had learned a little of the dialect of Vainwal during her years in training on Planet Alpha, in the Intelligence Academy. “How are you feeling, Lieutenant Anders?”

  “My name’s Lexie. I don’t know why they’re keeping me here, I’m not sick,” Lexie said, in a childish, complaining tone. “Are you going to stick more needles in me?”

  “No, I promise I won’t stick you with any needles.” Magda lifted a questioning eyebrow at Cholayna, who said in an undertone, “The Medics tried pentothal; they thought if this was simply emotional shock, it might help her to relive it and talk about it. No result.”

  Magda thought about that for a moment. If Lexie Anders had been, at one moment
, in a plane about to crash in the frozen wastelands surrounding the Wall Around the World, and in the next moment, was outside the Spaceport gates of Thendara HQ, the emotional shock alone could have reduced her to this condition.

  “Do you know where you are, Lexie?”

  “Hospital. They told me,” she said, laying her curly head down tiredly on the pillow. “I don’t feel sick at all. Why am I in a hospital? Are you a doctor? You don’t look like a doctor, not in those clothes.”

  “Then—you don’t remember anything that happened?” Magda had once watched Lady Callista deal with a case of shock: a man who had seen four members of his family killed in a freak flood. “Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”

  “ ’Member—a kitten,” said Lexie with a childish grin. “It ran away.”

  “You don’t remember the plane?”

  “Plane? My dad flies a plane,” she said. “I want to fly one when I grow up. My cousin says girls don’t fly planes, but Dada says it’s all right, some girls fly planes, they even pilot starships.”

  “Certainly they do.” Magda remembered a brief ambition of her own (about the time she found out the difference between her parents and the parents of the Darkovan children around her, with whom she had grown up) to be a starship pilot. She supposed most tomboy girls had similar ambitions, and briefly it created a bond of sympathy.

  “Lexie, suppose I were to tell you that you have forgotten many things; that you are all grown up, and that you did fly a plane; that you are here because your plane crashed. Will you think about that, please? What would you say to that?”

  Lexie did not even stop to think. Her small face was already crinkled up in a jeering laugh. “I’d say you were crazy. Crazy woman, what are you doing in a hospital, trying to act like a doctor? Is it a crazy hospital?”

  Magda’s brief moment of liking and sympathy for Lexie evaporated. An unpleasant child, she thought, who grew up into an even more unpleasant woman…

  Yet she remembered what Callista, training her in the arts of matrix work, had said about this kind of thing:

  They abuse us because they are afraid of us. If anyone is rude and unpleasant when you are trying to help them, it is out of fear, because they are afraid of what you will try and make them see or understand. No matter how deeply their reason is hidden, something in them knows and understands, and fears leaving the protection of shock.

  (In the Guild-house, before the fire, hours later, Magda again recalled and repeated these words, so deeply absorbed in her own memories that she did not see Camilla’s facial muscles tauten, nor the tense nod with which she acquiesced. There were many things Camilla could not, or chose not to remember, of her own ordeal. )

  Magda ignored Lexie’s rudeness. From around her neck, she took her matrix stone, carefully unwrapping the layers of shielding. She rolled the blue stone, hidden fires flashing from its depth, out into her palm. Lexie’s eyes followed the moving colors in the jewel.

  “Pretty,” she said in her babytalk voice. “Can I see it?”

  “In a minute, perhaps. But you must not touch it, or you might be hurt.” For an out-of-phase person, particularly a nontelepath, to touch a keyed matrix could produce a serious and painful shock; worse, it could throw the operator of the matrix, keyed to the stone, into shock that could be fatal. She held the psi-sensitive crystal away from Lexie’s childishly grasping fingers and said, “Look into the stone, Lexie.”

  Lexie twisted her face away. “Makes my head ache.”

  That was normal enough. Few untrained persons could endure to look into a keyed matrix, and Lexie’s psi potential was evidently very slight. Magda realized she should at least have asked for a look at Personnel Records on Lieutenant Alexis Anders, to know her determined level of psi ability. They did test Terrans for such things now. It would have been useful to know.

  But they had not, and there was no way to do it now. She held the matrix before Lexie’s eyes. “I want you to look into the stone, so that we can see what is the matter with you, and why you are in the hospital here.” Magda spoke deliberately, her voice friendly but firm. Lexie pouted like a child, but under Magda’s commanding voice and posture, finally fixed her eyes on the shifting colors of the stone.

  Magda watched until her face relaxed. She was not sure how an ordinary psi-tech would handle this, but for the best part of seven years she had been intensively trained in the uses of a matrix. The words of the Monitor’s Oath, demanded of any telepath soon after being entrusted with a matrix, briefly resonated in her mind: Enter no mind save to help or heal, and never for power over any being.

  Then she made contact, briefly, with Lexie Anders’s mind.

  On the surface, it was a jumble, a confused child not knowing what had happened. On a deeper level, something shivered and quaked, not wanting to know. Gently Magda touched the child-mind (a hand confidingly tucked into hers, as a little girl holds the hand of an older sister; she let the warmth linger for a moment, wanting Lexie to trust her).

  Who are you? It’s scary, I can’t remember.

  I’m your friend, Lexie. I won’t let anyone hurt you. You’re a big girl now. You wanted to fly a plane, remember? Let’s go, let’s find the plane. The first time your hands touched the controls. Look at the plane. The controls are under your hands. Where are you, Lexie?

  The young woman’s hands curved reminiscently as if over the controls she had mastered…

  Abruptly the childish plaintive voice lisping the dialect of Vainwal changed; became crisp, accurate, Terran Standard spoken with the precision of those to whom it was an acquired second language.

  “Anders, Alexis, Cadet Recruit, reporting as ordered, Ma’am.”

  It was no use to try to bring her along with verbal commands. Simple hypnotic suggestion would have brought a less traumatized subject to present time; but Magda had already seen how Lexie’s conscious intellect and even the unconscious mind refused the level of mere suggestion. With the matrix, Magda could bypass that resistance. Again she slipped into the younger woman’s mind, seeking the child who had walked with her hand in hand, trustingly.

  Lieutenant Anders. When did you get your promotion?

  A tenday after I was moved to Cottman Four. I decided to move over to Mapping and Exploring.

  Magda was prepared to ask, directly in Lexie’s mind, why the younger woman had made the transfer application. Surely Cholayna had done her, Magda, a monstrous injustice when she had spoken of the Lorne legend and the inability of Lexie to compete with the more famous older woman. But she stopped herself. Was this truly relevant to Lexie’s problem, or was she, Magda, simply indulging a desire to explain and justify herself? Gently she re-established the rapport; but the childish acceptance was gone. She regretted it, regretted the image of the little sister walking beside her, hand in hand.

  Tell me about your work in Mapping and Exploring, Lieutenant. Do you like your work?

  Yes. 1 love it. I can work alone and nobody bothers me. I didn’t like it in Intelligence. There were too many women. I don’t like women. I don’t trust them. Always ready to stab you in the back. You can trust a plane. Does what you tell it to, and if anything goes wrong it’s your own damn fault. Her face was almost animated.

  Slowly, carefully, Magda insinuated herself into Lexie’s memory. This was not ordinary amnesia, where selectively the mind chooses to reject an intolerable burden. It was total rejection. Magda’s mind intertwined with Lexie’s; she had never held the controls of a plane, large or small, but now her hands covered Lexie’s and she shared the full-round vision to all points of the compass, the frozen mountains spread below, the precise definiteness of every motion and idea. She was moving farther north, she was about to set a record if the damned plane would cooperate. Her skill was such that the maddening surges of crosswinds and updrafts only bounced her a little where any other pilot would have been battered. Then—

  Lexie Anders screamed and sat bolt upright in bed. Magda, knocked out of the rapport, stood s
taring, her eyes wide.

  “I crashed,” Lexie said, in her most precise Terran Standard. “The last thing I remember was going down. And then I was here, at the HQ gates. Hellfire, Lorne, are you involved in Medic too? Isn’t there any pie on this whole planet you don’t have your fingers into?”

  “So what did you tell them?” Camilla asked at last.

  “I didn’t have any reasonable explanation,” Magda said. “I grasped at the usual straws. I told Cholayna that it was just possible that when the plane went down, Anders developed a sudden surge of previously unguessed-at psi-potential, and teleported herself back here. It’s not at all unheard-of, under life-and-death threat like that, to find someone doing something they’d never have believed a remote possibility. I did something like that once, myself—not physically but mentally.”

  She and Jaelle, in a cave on a hillside, with Jaelle desperately ill, after miscarrying Peter Haldane’s child. Escape had seemed impossible. Somehow, she never knew how, she had reached out and touched rescue— had called for help and had, somehow, been answered.

  “That kind of thing doesn’t show up in test labs because you can’t fool the subconscious mind; hypnosis, or what-have-you, may make their conscious mind think they’re in danger, but down underneath, they know perfectly well there’s no real threat.” She sighed, thinking of how, for a brief time, she had actually liked the child Lexie had been.

  “But you don’t believe that explanation,” Camilla said.

  “Camilla, I knew it was a lie when I said it.”

  “But why should you lie? What had really happened to Lexie Anders?”

  Before she answered, Magda reached for Camilla’s hand. She said, “My fourth night in this house, my very first Training Session as a Renunciate, do you remember? That same night there was a meeting of a society called the Sisterhood. Do you remember that I lost track of what you asked me, and you scolded and bullied me for not paying attention to what was going on?”