The Forbidden Circle Read online

  “But I’ve had no training, I know so little,” Ellemir said hopefully, “and you were Tower-trained—”

  The man sighed. “That’s true. And I’ll try,” he said. “I always meant to try. But don’t hope for too much, breda.”

  “Will you try now?” she pleaded.

  “I’ll do what I can. First, bring me something of Callista’s—jewelry she wears a good deal, a garment she has often worn, something of that sort.”

  While Ellemir went to fetch it, Damon drew his starstone from the protective silk wrappings about it, and gazed at it, broodingly. Telepath, yes, and Tower-trained in the old telepath sciences of Darkover—for a little while. And the hereditary Gift, the laran or telepathic power of the Ridenow family, was the psychic sensing of extrahuman forces, bred into the genetic material of the Ridenow Domain for just such work as this, centuries ago. But in these latter days, the old Darkovan noncausal sciences had fallen into disuse; because of intermarriage, inbreeding, the ancient laran Gifts rarely bred true. Damon had inherited his own family Gift in full measure, but all his life he had found it a curse, not a blessing, and he shied away from using it now.

  As he had shied away from using it—he faced the fact squarely now, and his own guilt—to save his men. He had sensed danger. The trip which should have been peaceful, routine, a family mission, had turned into a nightmare, reeking with the feel of danger. Yet he had not had the courage to use his starstone, the matrix stone given him during his Tower training, and too intimately keyed to the telepath patterns of his mind to be used or even touched by anyone else.

  Because he feared it . . . he had always feared it.

  Time reeled, slid momentarily away, annihilating fifteen years that lay between, and a younger Damon stood, with bowed head, before the Keeper Leonie, that same Leonie now aging, whose place Callista was to have taken. Not a young woman even then, Leonie, and far from beautiful, her flame-colored hair already fading, her body flat and spare, but her gray eyes gentle and compassionate.

  “No, Damon. It is not that you have failed, or displeased me. And all of us—I myself—love you, and value you. But you are too sensitive, you cannot barricade yourself. Had you been born a woman, in a woman’s body,” she added, laying a light hand on his shoulder, “you would have been a Keeper, perhaps one of the greatest. But as a man”—faintly, she shrugged—“you would destroy yourself, tear yourself apart. Perhaps, free of the Tower, you may be able to surround yourself with other things, grow less sensitive, less”—she hesitated, groping for the exact word—“less vulnerable. It is for your own good that I send you away, Damon; for your health, for your happiness, perhaps for your very sanity.” Lightly, almost a breath, her lips brushed his forehead. “You know I love you; for that reason I do not want to destroy you. Go, Damon.”

  From that there was no appeal, and Damon had gone, cursing the vulnerability, the Gift he carried like a curse.

  He had made a new career for himself in Comyn Council, and although he was no soldier and no swordsman, had taken his turn at commanding the Guardsmen: driven, constantly needing to prove himself. He never admitted even to himself how deeply that hour with Leonie had torn at his manhood. From any work with the starstone (although he carried it still, since it had been made a part of him), he had shied away in horror and panic.

  And now he must, though his mind, his nerves, all his senses, were screaming revolt. . . .

  He jolted back to present time as Ellemir said tentatively, “Damon, are you asleep?”

  He shook his head to clear it of the phantoms of past failure and fear. “No, no. Preparing myself. What have you for me of Callista’s?”

  She opened her hand; a silver filigree butterfly lay within, daintily starred with multicolored gemstones. “Callista always wore this in her hair,” Ellemir said, and indeed a strand or two of long, silken hair was still entangled in the clasp.

  “You are sure it is hers? I suppose like all sisters you share your ornaments—my own sisters used to complain of that.”

  Ellemir turned to show him the butterfly-shaped clasp at the nape of her own neck. She said, “Father always had her ornaments fashioned in silver and mine in gilt, so that we could tell them apart. He had these made for us in Carthon years ago, and she has worn it in her hair every day since then. She does not care much for jewelry, so she gave me the bracelet to match it, but the clasp she always wears.”

  That sounded circumstantial and convincing. Damon took the silver clasp between his fingers, closing his eyes, tentatively trying to sense what he could from it. “Yes, this is Callista’s,” he said after a moment, and she said, “Can you really tell?”

  Damon shrugged. “Give me yours for a moment,” he said, and Ellemir turned and drew the matching clasp from her own hair, turning modestly aside so that he caught only the faintest glimpse of her bare neck. He was so sensitized to her at that moment that even that momentary and fleeting glimpse jerked a string of sensual awareness and response deep in his body; firmly he put it away on a deeper level of consciousness. No time for that now. Ellemir laid the gilded ornament in his hand. It tingled with the feel of her very self. Damon drew a deep breath and forced the awareness below conscious level again. He said, “Close your eyes.”

  Childishly, she screwed them up tight.

  “Hold out your hands. . . .” Damon laid one of the ornaments in each small pink palm. “Now, if you cannot tell me which is your own, you are no child of the Alton Domain. . . .”

  “I was tested for laran as a child,” Ellemir protested, “and told I had none, compared with Callista—”

  “Never compare yourself with anyone,” Damon said, with a sudden rough thrust of anger. “Concentrate, Ellemir.”

  She said, with a queer strange note of surprise in her voice, “This is mine—I am sure.”

  “Look and see.”

  She opened her blue eyes, and gazed in astonishment at the gilt butterfly clasp in her hand. “Why, it is! The other one felt strange, this one—How did I do that?”

  Damon shrugged. “This one—yours—has the impress of your personality, your vibrations, on it,” he said. “It would have been simpler still if you and Callista were not twins, for twins share much in vibration. That was why I wanted to be quite, quite sure you had never worn hers, since it is difficult enough to tell twin from twin by their telepathic imprint alone. Of course, since Callista is a Keeper, her imprint is more definite.” He broke off, feeling a sudden surge of anger. Ellemir had always lived in her twin’s shadow. And she was too good, too gentle and good, to resent it. Why should she be so humble?

  Forcibly, he calmed the irrational surge of rage. He said quietly, “I think you have more laran than you realize, although it is true that, in twins, one seems always to get more than her fair share of the Gift, and the other rather less. This is why the best Keepers are often one of a twin-pair, since she has her own and a part of her sister’s share of the psi potentials.”

  He cupped the starstone between his hands; it winked back at him, blue and enigmatic, little ribbons of fire crawling in its depth. Fires to burn his soul to ashes. . . . Damon clamped his teeth against the cold nausea of his dread. “You’ll have to help,” he said roughly.

  “But how? I know nothing of this.”

  “Haven’t you ever kept watch for Callista when she went out?”

  Ellemir shook her head. “She never said anything to me of her training or her work. She said it was difficult and she would rather forget it when she was here.”

  “A pity,” Damon said. He settled himself comfortably in his chair. He said, “Very well, I’ll have to teach you now. It would be easier if you were experienced in this, but you have enough to do what you must. It is simple. Here. Lay your hands against my wrists, so that I can still see the starstone, but—yes, there, at the pulse spots. Now—” He reached out, tentatively, trying to make a light telepathic contact. She flinched physically, and he smiled. “Yes, that’s right, you can perceive the contact. No
w all you must do is to keep watch over my body while I am out of it hunting for Callista. When I first go out, I will feel cold to your touch, and my heart and pulse will slow slightly. That is normal; don’t be afraid. But if we are interrupted, don’t let anyone touch me; Above all, don’t let anyone move me. If my pulse begins to quicken and race, or if the veins at my temples swell, or my body begins to grow either deathly cold or very waxen, then you must wake me.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Call my name, and put your whole force behind it,” Damon said. “You don’t have to speak aloud, just project your thoughts at me, calling my name. If you cannot wake me, and it gets worse—for instance, if I show any difficulty in breathing—wake me at once; don’t delay any further. At the last, but only if you cannot wake me any other way, touch the stone.” He winced as he said it. “Only as a last desperate expedient, though; it is painful and might throw me into shock.” He felt her hands tremble as they gripped his wrists, and felt her fear and hesitation like a faint fog obscuring the clarity of his own thought.

  Poor child. I shouldn’t have to do this to her. Damn the luck. If Callista had to get herself into trouble—He forced himself to be fair, and tried to still his pounding heart. This wasn’t Callista’s fault either. He should save his curses for her kidnappers.

  Ellemir said timidly, “Don’t be angry, Damon,” and he thought, It’s a good sign she can feel that I’m angry. He said aloud, “I’m not angry at you, breda.” He used the intimate word which could mean simply kinswoman or, more closely, darling. He settled himself as comfortably as he could, sensitizing himself to the feel of Callista’s hair-clasp between his hands, the starstone above it, pulsing gently in unconscious rhythm with his own nerve currents. He tried to blur everything else, every other sensation, the feel of Ellemir’s cold hands on his wrists and her warm breath against his throat, the faint woman-scent of her closeness; he blotted these out, blotted out the flicker of fire and candle beyond them, dimmed the shadows of the room, let vision sink into the blue pulsing of the starstone. He sensed, rather than physically felt, the relaxing of his muscles as his body went insensible. For an instant nothing existed except the vast blue of the starstone, pulsing with the beating of his heart, then his heart stopped, or at least he was no longer conscious of anything except the expanding blueness: a glare, a blue flame, a sea rushing in to drown him. . . .

  With a brief, tingling shock, he was out of his body and standing over it, looking down from above, with a certain ironic detachment, on the thin, slumped body in the chair, the frail, frightened-looking girl kneeling and grasping its wrists. He was not really seeing, but perceiving in some strange, dark way through closed eyelids.

  In the overlight forming around him he cast a swift downward look. The body in the chair had been wearing a shabby jerkin and leather riding breeches, but as always when he stepped out he felt taller, stronger, more muscular, moving with effortless ease as the walls of the great hall thinned and moved away. And this body, if it could be called a body, was wearing a glimmering tunic of gold and green that flickered with a faint firelight glow. Leonie had told him once, “this is how your mind sees itself.” He was bare-armed and barefoot, and he felt an incongruous flicker of amusement. To go out in the blizzard like this? But of course the blizzard was not here, not at all, although if he listened, he could hear the faint howl of the wind, and he knew the violence of the storm must be intense indeed if even its echo could penetrate into the overworld. As he formulated that thought he felt himself begin to shiver and quickly dismissed the thought and memory of the blizzard; his consciousness of it could solidify it on this plane and bring it here.

  He moved, gliding, not conscious of separate steps. He was conscious of Callista’s jeweled butterfly still between his hands, fluttering like a live thing, beating with the impress of her mental “voice.” Or rather, since the jewel itself was in the hands of his body, “down there,” the mental counterpart of the ornament, which he bore “here.” He tried to sensitize himself to the special reverberations of that “voice,” adding to it his call, a shout that felt to him like a commanding bellow.

  “Callista!”

  There was no answer. He had not really expected an answer; if it had been that simple, Ellemir would have already made contact with her twin. Around him the overworld was as still as death, and he looked around, all the time aware that the world, and himself, were only comfortable visualizations, for some intangible level of reality. . . . That he saw it as a “world” because it was more convenient to see and feel it that way than as an intangible mental realm; that he visualized himself as a body, striding across a great barren empty plain, because it was easier and less disconcerting than visualizing himself as a bodiless point of thought adrift in other thoughts. At the moment it looked to him like an enormous flat horizon, stretching away dim and bare and silent into endless spaces and skies. In the far distance shadows drifted, and as his curiosity was roused about them, he moved rapidly, without the need to take steps, in their direction.

  As he came nearer, they became clearer, human forms which looked oddly gray and unfocused. He knew that if he spoke to them, they would immediately vanish—if they had nothing to do with him or his quest—or immediately come into sharp focus. The overworld was never empty: there were always minds out on the astral for one reason or another, even if they were only sleepers out of their bodies, their minds crossing his in the formless realm of thought. He saw a few faces, dimly, like reflections in water, of people he vaguely recognized. He knew that these were kinsmen and acquaintances of his who were sleeping or deep in meditation, and that he had somehow come into their thoughts; that some of them would wake with a memory of having seen him in a dream. He passed them without any attempt to speak. None of them could have any bearing on his search.

  Far in the distance he saw a great shining structure which he recognized from previous visits to this world, and knew it was the Tower where he had been trained, years before. Usually he bypassed it, in such journeys, without passing near; now he felt himself drifting nearer and nearer to it. As he came closer it took on form and solidity. Generations of telepaths had been trained here, exploring the overworld from this base and background. No wonder the Tower stood firm as a landmark in the overworld. Surely Callista would have come here, if she was out on the planes and was free, he thought.

  Now he stood on the plain, just below the looming structure of the Tower. Grass, trees, and flowers had begun to formulate around him, his own memory and the joint visualizations of everyone who came into the overworld from the Tower keeping them relatively solid here. He walked amid the familiar trees and scented flowers now with an aching sense of loss, of nostalgia, almost of homesickness. He passed through the dimly shining gateway, and stood briefly on the remembered stones. Suddenly, before him, stood a veiled woman, but even through her veils he knew her: Leonie, the sorceress-Keeper of the Tower during his years there. Her face was a little blurred: half, he knew, the face he remembered; half, the face she wore now.

  “Leonie,” he said, and the dim figure solidified, took on more definite and clear form, even to the twin copper bracelets, formed like serpents, which she always wore. “Damon,” she said, with gentle reproach, “what are you doing out here on this plane tonight?”

  He held out the silver butterfly clasp, and felt it cold and solid between his fingers. He said, and heard his own voice strangely thinned, “I am looking for Callista. She is gone, and her twin cannot find her anywhere. Have you seen her here?”

  Leonie looked troubled. She said, “No, my dear. We, too, have searched, and she is nowhere on any plane we can reach. From time to time I can feel her somewhere, her living presence, but no matter where I look I cannot come to her.”

  Damon felt deeply disquieted. Leonie was a powerful, trained telepath, and all the accessible levels of the overworld were known to her. She walked in that world as readily as in the solid world of the body. The fact that Callista’s dist
ress was known to her, and that she herself could not locate her pupil and friend, was ominous. Where, in any world, was Callista hiding?

  “Perhaps you can find her where I cannot,” said Leonie gently. “Blood kin is a deep tie, and may link kindred when friendship or affinity fails. Somehow I think she is there.” Leonie raised a shadowy arm and pointed. Damon turned in the direction indicated, and saw only a thick, foggy darkness.

  “The darkness is new on this plane,” Leonie said, “and none of us can breach it, at least not yet. When we move in that direction we are flung back, as if by force. I do not know what new minds move on this level, but they have not come here by our leave.”

  “And you think Callista may have strayed into that level and be held there, unable to penetrate that shadow with her mind?”

  “I fear so,” Leonie said. “If she were kept drugged, or entranced; or if her starstone had been taken from her, or she had been so ill-treated that her mind had been darkened by madness; then it might appear to us, on this level, as if she were imprisoned in a great and impenetrable darkness.”

  Quickly, with the swiftness of thought, Damon told Leonie what he knew of the abduction of Callista, from her very bed at Armida.

  “I do not like it,” Leonie said. “What you tell me frightens me. I have heard that there are strange men from another world at Thendara, and that they have come there by permission of the Hasturs. Now and again one of them strays in a dream on to the overworld, but their forms and their minds are strange and mostly they vanish if one speaks to them. They are only shadows here, but they seem harmless enough, men like any others, without much skill at moving in the realms of the mind. I find it hard to believe that these Terrans—that is what they call themselves—can have had any part in what has happened to Callista. What reason could they have had? And since they are on our world by sufferance, why would they antagonize us by such conduct? No; there seems more purpose to it than that.”