The Forbidden Circle Read online

  Damon said, “Try to remember everything she said to you.”

  “She told me that the herdsman’s hut where I sheltered from the storm was not more than a few miles from here. What she said was, she wished she were there with me in body, so that when the storm was over, in a little while she could be—” he frowned, again trying to remember a communication which now seemed to be more in thoughts than words—“warm and safe and at home.”

  “I know the place,” Damon said. “Coryn and I slept there, when we were boys, on hunting trips. It is something, that Callista could come there in thought.” He frowned, trying to add it all up. “What else did Callista say to you?”

  It was after that, that I woke and found her sleeping almost in my arms, Andrew thought, but I’m damned if I’m going to tell you about that. That’s strictly between me and Callista. And yet, if some random thing she had said to him might give Damon a clue to her actual whereabouts—He paused, irresolute.

  Damon could clearly see the conflict in his face, and followed it more accurately than Andrew would have believed. He said kindly, trying to spare him, “I can well believe that alone in the dark, and both of you in strange and hostile places, you may well have exchanged—” He paused, and Andrew, sensitized to his mood, knew that Damon was searching for a word which would not trespass too strongly on his emotions. “Exchanged—confi dences. You don’t have to tell us about that.”

  Funny, how these people can get so close to you, know almost what you’re thinking. Andrew was aware of Damon’s attempt not to trespass on his privacy, or on the more intimate things he had shared with Callista. Intimate . . . funny word when I’ve never set eyes on her. To have come so close, so close to a woman I’ve never seen. He was also aware of Ellemir’s sullen face and knew that she, too, sensed something of how close he had come to her twin; and that she did not approve.

  Damon, too, sensed Ellemir’s resentment. “Child, you should be grateful that anyone, anyone at all, could reach Callista. Just because you could not come to her and comfort her, are you going to resent the fact that a stranger could? Would you rather that she should be all alone in her prison?” He turned back to Andrew and said, as if apologizing for Ellemir, “She is very young, and they are twins. But for your kindness to my kinswoman, I am ready to be your friend. Now, if you can tell me anything she said, about her captors—”

  “She said she was in the dark,” Andrew said, “and that she did not know precisely where she was, that if she knew precisely, she could have left the place somehow. I didn’t quite understand that. She said that since she did not know exactly, her body—that’s how she seemed to differentiate it—had to stay where they had confined it. And she cursed them.”

  “Did she say who they were?” Damon asked.

  “What she said made no sense to me,” Andrew answered. “She said that they were not men.”

  “Did she tell you how she knew that? Did she say that she had seen them?” Damon asked eagerly.

  “No,” Andrew answered. “She said that she had not seen them, that she suspected they had kept her in darkness so that she should not see them. But she suspected they were not men because—” Again he hesitated a little, trying to find a way to phrase it, and then thought, Oh hell, if Callista didn’t mind talking about it to a stranger it can’t be anything to be so embarrassed about. “She said she knew they were not men because none of them had attempted to rape her. She took it for granted that any man would have done just that, which says something funny about the men of your planet!”

  Damon said, “We knew already that whoever would stoop to kidnapping a leronis, a Keeper, would be no friend to the people of the Domains. I had surmised that she was stolen, not as any woman might be kidnapped, for revenge, or slavery, but quite specifically because she was a trained telepath. They could not have hoped that she could be forced to use her Keeper’s powers against her own people. But if she was kept a prisoner, and her starstone taken from her, she could not be used against them, either. And kidnappers, if they were men, would know that a Keeper is always a virgin; that there was a simpler, less dangerous way to make a Keeper powerless to use her skills against them. A Keeper in the hands of her people’s enemies would not long remain a virgin.”

  Carr shuddered in revulsion. What a hell of a world, where this kind of war against women is taken for granted!

  Once again Damon followed his thoughts and said, with a little wry twist of his mouth, “Oh, it’s neither that easy nor that one-sided, Andrew. The man who tries to ravish a leronis has no easy or innocent victim, but takes his very life, not to mention his sanity, in his hands. Callista is an Alton, and if she strikes with her full Gift, she can paralyze, if not kill. It can be done, it has been done, but it’s a more equal battle than you would imagine. No sane man lays hands on a Comyn sorceress except at her own desire. But to anyone who has good reason to fear that a Keeper’s powers will be used against him, it may seem worth the danger.”

  “But,” Ellemir said, “she has not been touched, you say.”

  “She said not.”

  “Then,” Damon said, “I think my first surmise is true. Callista is in the hands of the cat-men, and now we know why. I guessed earlier, when I spoke to Reidel, that somewhere in the darkening lands, someone or something is experimenting with unlicensed and forbidden matrix stones, trying to work with telepath powers; to harness these forces outside the wardenship of the Comyn and the Seven Domains. Men have done this before. But as far as I know, this is the first time any nonhuman race has tried to do so.”

  Suddenly Damon shuddered, as if with cold or fear. He reached blindly for Ellemir’s hand, as if to reassure himself of something solid and warm.

  As if, thought Andrew, he were in darkness and fear like Callista’s.

  “And they have done it! They have made the darkening lands uninhabitable to mankind! They can come on us with invisible weapons, and even Leonie could not find Callista when they had hidden her under their darkness! And they are strong, Zandru seize them with scorpions! They are strong. I am Tower-trained, but they flung me out of their level, into a storm I could not overcome. They mastered me as if I were a child! Gods! Gods! Are we helpless against them, then? Is it hopeless?”

  He buried his face in his hands, shuddering. Andrew looked at him in surprise and consternation. Then, slowly, he spoke, reaching out to lay his hand on Damon’s shoulder.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “That doesn’t help anybody. Look, you just pointed out that Callista still has her powers, whatever they are. And she can reach me. Maybe, just maybe—I don’t know anything about this kind of thing, or whatever wars and feuds you have in your world, but I do know about Callista, and I—I care a lot about her. Maybe there’s some way I can find out where she is—help get her back for you.”

  Damon raised his face, white and drawn, and looked at the Earthman in wild surmise. “You know,” he said to Andrew, “you’re right. I hadn’t thought of that. You can still reach Callista. I don’t know why, or how, it happened; or even what we can do with it, but it’s the one hope we have. You can reach Callista. And she can come to you, when another Keeper can’t reach her, when her own twin is barred away from her. It may not be completely hopeless after all.”

  He reached out and gripped Andrew’s hands, and somehow the Terran sensed that for him this was a very unusual thing, that touch, among telepaths, was reserved for close intimacy. It put him almost unendurably in touch with Damon for an instant—Damon’s exhaustion and fear, his desperate worry about his young cousins, his own deeper doubts and terrors about his own inability to meet this challenge, his horror of the overworld, his deep and desperate doubts of his very manhood. . . . For a moment Andrew wanted to withdraw, to reject this undesired intimacy which Damon, at the end of his endurance, had thrust on him; then he met Ellemir’s eyes, and they were so much like Callista’s now, pleading, no longer scornful, so full of fear for Damon (Why, she loves him, Andrew thought in a flash; he doesn
’t seem much of a man to me either, but she loves him, even if she doesn’t know it) that he could not refuse their plea. They were Callista’s people, and he loved Callista, and for better or worse he was entangled in their affairs. I’d better get used to it now, he thought, and in a clumsy surge of something almost like affection, he put his arm around Damon’s shoulders and hugged the other man roughly. “Don’t you worry so much,” he said. “I’ll do what I can. Sit down, now, before you collapse. What in the hell have you been doing to yourself, anyway?”

  He shoved Damon down on the bench before the fire. The unendurable contact lessened, dropped away. Andrew felt confused and a little dismayed at the intensity of the emotion that had surged up. It was like having a kid brother, he thought, cloudily. He’s not strong enough for this kind of thing. It struck him that Damon was older than he was and far more experienced in these curious contacts, but he still felt older, protective.

  Damon said, “I’m sorry. I was out all night in the overworld, searching for Callista. I—I failed.”

  He sighed, with a sense of utter relief. He said, “But now we know where she is, or at least how to get into contact with her. With your help—”

  Andrew warned, “I know nothing about these things.”

  “Oh, that.” Damon shrugged it aside. He looked completely exhausted. He said, “I should have more sense; I’m not used to the overworld anymore. I’ll have to rest and try again. Just now, I haven’t any more strength. But when I can try again”—he straightened his back—“the damned cat-men had better look to themselves! I know, now, I think, what we can do.”

  And that, Andrew thought, is one hell of a lot more than I know. But I guess Damon knows what he’s doing, and that’s enough for me, for now.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Damon Ridenow woke and lay for a moment staring at the ceiling. Day was waning; after the strenuous all-night search within the overworld, and the confrontation with Andrew Carr, he had slept most of the day. His weariness was gone, but apprehension was still there, deep within. The Earthman was their one link with Callista, and this seemed so unlikely, so bizarre, that one of these men from another world should be able to make this subtle telepathic contact with one of their own. Terrans, with Comyn laran powers! Impossible! No, not impossible: it had happened.

  He felt no revulsion for Andrew personally, only for the idea that the man was an alien, an off-worlder. As for the man himself, he was inclined rather to like him. He knew that was, at least in part, a consequence of the mental rapport they had, for an instant, shared. In the telepath caste, it was often the accident of possessing laran, the specific telepath Gift, which determined how close a relationship would come. Caste, family, social position, all these became irrelevant compared to that one compelling fact; one had, or one did not, that inborn power, and in consequence one was stranger or kinsfolk. By that criterion alone, the most important one on Darkover, Andrew Carr was one of them, and the fact that he was an Earthman was a small random fact without any real importance.

  Ellemir, too, had suddenly taken on a new importance in his life.

  Being what he was, born telepath and Tower-trained telepath, the touching of minds created closeness, above and beyond anything else. He had felt this for Leonie—twenty years his senior, pledged by law to remain virgin, never beautiful. During his time in the Tower, and for long after, he had loved her deeply, hopelessly, with a passion that had spoiled him for other women. If Leonie had known this—and she could hardly have helped knowing, being what she was—it had never made any difference to her. Keepers were trained, by methods incomprehensible to normal men or women, to be unaware of sexuality.

  Thinking of that brought him around to thinking again of Callista—and of Ellemir. He had known her most of her life. But he was almost twenty years older than she was. His parents had many times urged him to marry, but the devotion of his first youth had gone up in the white heat of smokeless flame for the unattainable Leonie. Later he had never thought of himself as having much to offer any woman. The intimacy he had known with the others, men and women, in the Tower Circle, minds and hearts open to one another—seven of them come together in a closeness where nothing, however small, could be hidden—and nothing refused or rejected, had spoiled him for any contact lesser than this. Cast out of the Tower, he had known such a desolate loneliness that nothing could dispel it.

  Lonely, lonely, all my life alone. And I never dreamed . . . Ellemir, my kinswoman, but a child, only a little girl. . . .

  Rising swiftly from his bed, he strode to the window and looked down into the courtyard. So young Ellemir was not. She was old enough to care for this vast Domain when her kinsmen were away at Comyn Council. She must be nearly twenty years old. Old enough to have a lover; old enough, if she chose, to marry. She was Comynara in her own right, and her own mistress.

  But young enough to deserve someone better than I; torn by fear and incompetence. . . .

  He wondered if she had ever thought of him as a lover, if perhaps she had known other lovers. He hoped so. If Ellemir cared for him, he hoped it was built on awareness, experience, knowledge of men: not the infatuation of an unawakened girl, which might well dissipate when she knew other men. He wondered. Twin sister to a Keeper, she might somehow have picked up some of Callista’s conditioned unawareness of men.

  In any case, it was now a full-blown thing between them which had to be faced. The sensitivity, the almost-sexual awareness between them, was something they could no longer ignore, and there was not, of course, any reason to ignore it. It would also heighten their ability to work together in whatever lay ahead; they were committed to find Callista, and the rapport between them would only heighten their contact and strength. Afterward—well, they might never be able to get free of one another. Smiling gently, Damon faced the knowledge that they would probably have to marry; they might never be able to remain apart after this. Well, that would not displease him too much either, unless Ellemir was for some reason unhappy about it.

  The awareness of this was still on the surface of his mind when he went downstairs, but the moment he saw Ellemir in the Great Hall it was no longer an apprehension. Even before she raised her serious eyes to his, he knew that all this was something she too had come to realize and accept. She dropped the needlework in her hands and came up to him, snuggling in his arms without a word. He drew a deep breath of absolute relief. After a long time, during which neither of them spoke aloud, standing with linked fingers before the fire, he said, “You don’t mind, breda—that I’m nearly old enough to be your father?”

  “You? Oh, no, no—only if you had been too old to father children, like poor Liriel when they married her off to old Dom Cyril Ardais; that would trouble me a little. But you, no, I’ve never stopped to think whether you were old or young,” she said, very simply. “I do not think I would want a lover who could not give me children. That would be too sad.”

  Damon felt an incongruous ripple of inner laughter. That he had never thought about; trust a woman to think of the important things. It was not an unpleasant thought, and it would please his family. He said, “I think we need not worry about that, preciosa, when the proper time comes.”

  “Father will be displeased,” Ellemir said slowly, “with Callista in the Tower. I think he had hoped I would stay here and keep his house while he lived. But I have completed my nineteenth year, and by Comyn law I am free to do as I will.”

  Damon shrugged, thinking of the formidable old man who was the father of the twins. “I have never heard that Dom Esteban disliked me,” he said, “and if he cannot bear to lose you, it matters little where we choose to live. Love . . .” He broke off, then with swift apprehension, “Why are you crying?”

  She curled closer into his arms. “I had always thought,” she said bleakly, “that when I chose, Callista would be the first I would tell.”

  “You are very close to Callista, beloved?”

  “Not as close as some twins,” Ellemir said, “since whe
n she went to the Tower, and was pledged, I knew we could never, as so many sisters do, share a lover, or a husband. Yet it seems so sad that this thing that means so much to me, she will not know.”

  He tightened his clasp on her.

  “She shall know,” he said. “Be sure of this: she will know. Remember, now we know she is alive, and there is one who can reach her.”

  “Do you really think this Earthman, this Ann’dra, can help us to find her?”

  “I hope so. It won’t be easy, but then we never thought it would be easy,” he said. “Now, at least, we know it’s possible.”

  “How can it be? He’s not one of us. Even if he has some powers or gifts like our laran, he doesn’t know how to use any of it.”

  “We’ll have to teach him,” Damon said. That wouldn’t be easy either, he thought. He closed his hand over the starstone on its cord around his neck. It must be done if they were to have the faintest hope of reaching Callista; and he, Damon, would have to be the one to do it. But he dreaded it, Zandru’s hells, how he dreaded it. But he said calmly, trying to give Ellemir confidence, “Until last night, you yourself never thought you could use laran; yet you used it, you saved my life with it.”

  Her smile wavered, but at least she was smiling again. He said, “So for now let us take what we can have of happiness, and not spoil it with worry, Ellemir. As for the law and the formalities, I expect Dom Esteban will return sometime soon.” As he spoke the cold awareness rushed over him again, so that he caught his breath for a moment. Sooner than I think, and it will not be well for any of us, he thought but he closed his mind to it, hoping Ellemir had not picked up the thought. He continued: “When your father comes, we can tell him our plans. Meanwhile, we will have to teach Andrew what we can. Where is he?”

  “Asleep, I suppose. He, too, was very weary. Shall I send to him?”