The Forbidden Tower

Chapter Ten

Andrew was dreaming…

He was wandering in the blizzard he could hear outside, flinging heavy snow and sleet, driven by enormous winds, around the heights of Armida. But he had never seen Armida. He was alone, wandering in a trackless, houseless, shelterless wilderness, as he had done when the mapping plane went down and abandoned him on a strange world. He was stumbling in the snow and the wind tore at his lungs and a voice whispered like an echo in his mind: There is nothing for you here.

And then he saw the girl.

And the voice in his mind whispered. This has all happened before. She was wearing a flimsy and torn nightdress, and he could see her pale flesh dimly through the rents in the gown, but it did not flutter or move in the raging winds that tore him, and her hair was unstir-ring in the raging storm. She was not there at all, she was a ghost, a dream, a girl who never was, and yet he knew, on another level of reality, she was Callista, she was his wife. Or had that been only a dream within a dream, dreamed while he was lying in the storm, and he would lie there and follow the dream until he died… ? He began to struggle, heard himself cry out…

And the blizzard was gone. He was lying in his own bedroom at Armida. The storm was raging and dying away outside, but the bedroom fire had burned to dim coals. By its light he could dimly see Callista — or was it Ellemir, who had slept at her side ever since the night when the psi reflex she could not control had blasted them both down, in the midst of their love?

For the first few days after Dezi’s attempted murder he had done little except sleep, suffering from the aftereffects of mild concussion, shock, and explosure. He touched the unhealed cut on his forehead. Damon bad taken out the stitches a day or two ago, and the edges were beginning to scab cleanly. There would be a small scar. He needed no scar to remind him of how he had been torn from Callista’s arms, a force like lightning striking through her body. He recalled that it used to be a favorite form of torture, in the old days on Terra, an electrode to the genitals. It hadn’t been Callista’s fault though, the shock of knowing what she had done had nearly killed her too.

She was still abed, and it seemed to Andrew that she grew no better. Damon, he knew, was worried about her. He dosed her with odd-smelling herbal potions, discussing her condition at length in words of which Andrew understood perhaps one in ten. He felt like the fifth leg on a horse. And even when he began to mend, to want to be out and about, he could not even lose himself in the normally heavy work of the horse ranch. With the blizzard season, all had come to a dead halt. A handful of servants, using underground tunnels, tended the saddle horses and the dairy animals which provided milk for the household. A handful of gardeners cared for the greenhouses. Andrew was nominally in charge of all these, but there was nothing for him to do.

Without Callista, he knew, there was really nothing to hold him here, and he had not been alone with Callista for a moment since the fiasco. Damon had insisted that Ellemir sleep at her side, that she must never, even in sleep, be allowed to feel herself alone, and that her twin was better for this purpose than any other.

Ellemir had nursed her tirelessly, night and day. On one level Andrew was grateful for Ellemir’s tender care, there being so little he could do for Callista now. But at the same time he resented it, resented his isolation from his wife, the way in which it emphasized the fragility of the thread that bound him to Callista.

He would have cared for her, nursed her, lifted her… but they would never leave him alone with her for a moment, and this too, he resented. Did they really think that if they left Callista alone, Andrew would fall on her again like a wild animal, that he would rape her? Damn it to hell, he thought, it was more likely that he was always going to be scared to touch her even with a fingertip. I just wanted to be with her. They told him she needed to know that he still loved her, and then they acted as if they didn’t dare leave them together for a minute…

Realizing that he was merely going over and over, obsessionally, frustrations about which he could do nothing, he turned over restlessly and tried to sleep again. He heard Ellemir’s quiet breathing, and Callista’s restless sigh as she turned over. He reached for her with his thoughts, felt the touch dimly on his mind. She was deep asleep, drugged with another of Damon’s or Ferrika’s herb medicines. He wished he knew just what they were giving her, and why. He trusted Damon, but he wished Damon would trust him a little more.

And Ellemir’s presence too was a low-keyed irritation, so like her twin, but healthy and rosy where Callista was pale and ill… Callista as she should have been. Pregnancy, even though frustrated so soon, had softened her body, emphasizing the contrast to Callista’s sharp thinness. Damn it, he shouldn’t think about Ellemir. She was his wife’s sister, his best friend’s wife, the one woman of all women forbidden to him. Besides, she was a telepath, she’d be picking up the thought, and it would embarrass hell out of her. Damon had told him once that among a telepathic family a lustful thought was the psychological equivalent of rape. He didn’t care a damn about Ellemir — she was just his sister-in-law — it was just that she made him think of Callista as she might be if she were healthy and well and free of the grip of the for-ever-be-damned Tower.

She was so gentle with him…

After a long time he drifted off to sleep and began to dream again.

He was in the little herdsman’s shelter where Callista, moving through the overworld, the world of thought and illusion, had led him through the blizzard, after the crash of the plane. No, it was not the herdsman’s shelter; it was the strange illusory walled structure that Damon had built up in their minds, not real except in their visualization, but having its own solidity in the realm of thought, so he could see the very bricks and stones of it. He woke, as he had done then, in dim light, to see the girl lying beside him, a shadowy form, stilled, sleeping. As he had done then, he reached for her, only to find that she was not there at all, that she was not on this plane at all, but that her form, through the overworld, which she had explained as the energy-net double of the real world, had come to him through space and perhaps time as well, taking shape to mock him. But she had not mocked him.

She looked at him with a grave smile, as she had done then, and said with a glimmer of mischief, “Ah, this is sad. The first time, the very first time, I lie down with any man, and I am not able to enjoy it.”

“But you are here with me now, beloved,” he whispered, and reached for her, and this time she was there in his arms, warm and loving, raising her mouth for his kiss, pressing herself to him with shy eagerness, as once she had done, but only for a moment.

“Doesn’t this prove to you that it is time, love?” He drew her against him, and their lips met, their bodies molded one to the other. He felt again all the ache and urgency of need, but he was afraid. There was some reason why he must not touch her… and suddenly, at the moment of tension and fear, she smiled up at him and it was Ellemir in his arms, so like and so unlike her twin.

He said “No!” and drew away from her, but her hands, small and strong, drew him down close to her. She smiled at him and said, “I told Callista to tell you that I am willing, as it was told in the ballad of Hastur and Cassilda.” He looked around, and he could see Callista, looking at them and smiling…

And he woke with a start of shock and shame, sitting up in bed and staring wildly around to reassure himself that nothing had happened, nothing. It was daylight, and Ellemir, with a sleepy yawn, slid from the bed, standing there in her thin nightgown. Andrew quickly looked away from her.

She did not even notice — he was not a man to her at all — but would continue to walk around in front of him half dressed or undressed, keeping him continually on edge with a low-keyed frustration that was not really sexual at all… He reminded himself that he was on their world, and it was for him to get used to their customs, not force his own on them. It was only his own state of frustration, and the shaming realism of the dream, which made him almost painfully aware of her. But as the thought clarified in his mind, she turned slowly and looked full at him. Her eyes were grave, but she smiled, and suddenly he remembered the dream, and knew that she had shared it somehow, that his thoughts, his desire, had woven into her dreams.

What the hell kind of man am I, anyhow? My wife’s lying there sick enough to die, and I’m going around with a lech for her twin sister.… He tried to turn away, hoping Ellemir would not pick up the thought. My best friend’s wife.

Yet the memory of the words in the dream hung in his mind: I told Callista to tell you that I am willing.…

She smiled at him, but she looked troubled. He felt that he ought to blurt out an apology for his thoughts. Instead she said, very gently, “It’s all right, Andrew.” For a moment he could not believe that she had actually spoken the words aloud. He blinked, but before he thought what to say, she had gathered up her clothes and gone away into the bath.

He went quietly to the window and looked at the dying storm. As far as he could see, everything lay white, faintly reddened with the light of the great red sun, peering faintly through the stained edges of the clouds. The winds had whipped the snow into ice-cream ridges, lying like waves of some hard white ocean, sweeping back all the way to the distant blurring hills. It seemed to Andrew that the weather reflected his mood: gray, bleak, insufferable.

How fragile a tie, after all, bound him to Callista! And yet he knew he could never go back. He had discovered too many depths within himself, too many alien strangenesses. The old Carr, the Andrew Carr of the Terran Empire, had wholly ceased to exist on that faraway day when Damon placed them all in rapport through the matrix. He closed his fingers on it, hard and chill in the little insulated bag around his neck, and knew it was a Darkovan gesture, one he had seen Damon make a hundred times. In that automatic gesture, he knew again the strangeness of his new world.

He could never go back. He must make a new life for himself here, or go through what years remained to him as a ghost, a nothingness, a nonentity.

Until a few nights ago he had believed himself well on the way to building his new life. He had worthwhile work to do, a family, friends, a brother and sister, a second father, a loving and beloved wife. And then, in a blast of unseen lightning, his whole new world had crumbled around him and all the alienness had closed over him again. He was drowning in it, sinking in it… Even Damon, usually so close and friendly, his brother, had turned cold and strange.

Or was it Andrew himself who now saw strangeness in everything and everyone?

He saw Callista stir, and, suddenly apprehensive lest his thoughts should disturb her, gathered up his clothes and went away to bathe and dress.

When he came back, Callista had been wakened, and Ellemir had readied her for the day, dressing her in a clean nightgown, washing her, braiding her hair. Breakfast had been brought, and Damon and Ellemir were there, waiting for him around the table where the four of them had taken their meals during Callista’s illness.

But Ellemir was still standing over Callista, troubled. As Andrew came in, she said, and her voice held deep disquiet, “Callista, I wish you would let Ferrika look at you. I know she is young, but she was trained in the Amazon’s Guild-house, and she is the best midwife we have ever had at Armida. She—”

“The services of a midwife,” said Callista, with a trace of wry amusement, “are of all things the last I need, or am likely to need!”

“All the same, Callista, she is skilled in all manner of women’s troubles. She could certainly do more for you than I. Damon,” she appealed, “what do you think?”

He was standing at the window, looking out into the snow. He turned and looked at them, frowning a little. “No one has more respect than I for Ferrika’s talents and training, Elli. But I do not know if she would have the experience to deal with this. It is not commonplace, even in the Towers.”

Andrew said, “I don’t understand this at all! Is it still only the onset of menstruation? If it is as serious as this, perhaps,” and he appealed directly to Callista, “could it do any harm for Ferrika to look you over?”

Callista shook her head. “No, that has ended, a few days ago. I think” — she looked up at Damon, laughing — “I am simply lazy, taking advantage of a woman’s weakness.”

“I wish it were that, Callista,” Damon said, and he came and sat down at the table. “I wish I thought you would be able to get up today.” He watched her slowly, with lagging fingers, buttering a piece of the hot nut-bread. She put it to her mouth and chewed it, but Andrew did not see her swallow.

Ellemir broke a piece of bread. She said, “We have a dozen kitchen maids, and if I am out of the kitchen for a day or two, the bread is not fit to eat!”

Andrew thought the bread was much as usual: hot, fragrant, coarse-textured, the flour extended with the ground nut-meal which was the common staple food on Darkover. It was fragrant with herbs, and tasted good, but Andrew found himself resenting the strange coarse texture, the unfamiliar spices. Callista was not eating either, and Ellemir seemed troubled. She said, “Can I send for something else for you, Callista?”

Callista shook her head. “No, truly, I can’t, Elli. I am not hungry—”

She had eaten almost nothing in days. In God’s name, Andrew thought, what ails her?

Damon said, with sudden roughness, “You see, Callista? It is what I told you! You have been a matrix worker how long — nine years? You know what it means when you cannot eat!”

Her eyes looked frightened. She said, “I’ll try, Damon. Really I will,” and took a spoonful of the stewed fruit on her plate, choking it down reluctantly. Damon watched her, troubled, thinking that this was not what he had intended, to force her to pretend hunger when she had none. He said, staring out over the whipped-cream ridges of snow, purpling with the light, “If the weather would clear, I would send to Neskaya. Perhaps the leronis could come to look after you.”

“It looks like clearing now,” Andrew said, but Damon shook his head.

“It will be snowing harder than ever by tonight. I know the weather in these hills. Anyone setting forth this morning would be weathered in by midday.”

And indeed, soon after midday the snow began to drift down from the sky again in huge white flakes, slowly at first, then more and more heavily, in a resistless flood that blotted out the landscape and the ridge of hills. Andrew watched it, as he went from barn-tunnels to greenhouses, going through the motions of supervising stewards and handymen, with outrage and disbelief. How could any sky hold so much snow?

He came up again in late afternoon, as soon as he had completed the minimal work which was all that could be done these days. As always when he had been away from Callista for a little while, he was dismayed. It seemed that even since this morning she had grown whiter and thinner, that she looked ten years older than her twin. But her eyes blazed at him with welcome, and when he took her fingertips in his, she closed them over his hand, hungrily.

He said, “Are you alone, Callista? Where is Ellemir?”

“She has gone to spend a little time with Damon. Poor things, they have had so little time together lately, one or the other of them is always with me.” She shifted her body with that twinge of pain which seemed never to leave her. “Avarra’s mercy, but I am weary of lying in bed.”

He stooped over her, lifted her in his arms. “Then I will hold you for a little while in my arms,” he said, carrying her to a chair near the window. She felt like a child in his arms, loose and limp and light. Her head leaned wearily against his shoulder. He felt an aching tenderness, without desire — how could any man trouble this sick girl with desire? He rocked her back and forth, gently.

“Tell me what is going on, Andrew. I have been so isolated; the world could have come to an end and I would hardly have known.”

He gestured at the white featureless world of snow beyond the window. “Nothing much has been happening, as you can see. There is nothing to tell, unless you are interested in knowing how many fruits are ripening in the greenhouse.”

“Well, it is good to know that they have not yet been destroyed by the storm. Sometimes the windows break, and the plants are killed, but it would be early in the year for that,” she said, and leaned wearily back against him, as if the effort of talking had been too much for her.

Andrew sat holding her, content that she did not draw away from him, that she seemed now to crave contact with him as much as she had feared it before. Perhaps she was right: now that her normal mature cycles had begun again, with time and patience, the conditioning of the Tower could be overcome. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed asleep.

They sat there for some time, until Damon, abruptly coming into the room, stopped, in dismay and shock. He opened his mouth to speak, and Andrew caught directly from his mind the frightened urgency:

Andrew! Put her down, quickly, get away from her!

Andrew raised his head angrily, but at the very real distress in Damon’s thought he acted quickly, rising and carrying Callista to her bed. She lay still, unconscious, unmoving.

“How long,” Damon said evenly, “has she been like this?”

“Only a few minutes. We were talking,” Andrew said defensively.

Damon sighed. He said, “I thought I could trust you, I thought you understood!”

“She is not afraid of me, Damon, she wanted me to hold her!”

Callista’s eyes flickered open. In the room’s pale snowlight they looked colorless. “Don’t scold him, Damon, I was weary of lying in bed. Truly, I am better. I thought tonight I would send for my harp and play a little. I am so tired of having nothing to do.”

Damon looked at her skeptically. But he said, “I will send for it, if you ask.”

“Let me go for it,” Andrew said. Surely, if she felt well enough to play her harp, she must be better indeed! He went down into the Great Hall, found a steward and asked for the Lady Callista’s harp. The man brought the small instrument, not much larger than a Terran guitar, in its carved wood case.

“Shall I carry it up for you, Dom Ann’dra?”

“No, I will take it”

One of the woman servants, behind the steward, said, “Bear our congratulations to the lady, and say that we hope she will soon be well enough to accept them in person.”

Andrew swore, unable to stop himself. Quickly he apologized — the woman had meant no harm. And what else could they have thought? She had been abed for ten days, and no one had been asked to come and nurse her, only her twin sister being allowed near. Could anyone blame them if they thought that Callista was pregnant, and that her sister and her husband were taking great care that her child did not meet the fate of Ellemir’s? At last he said, and knew his voice was unsteady, “I thank you for your… your kind wishes, but my wife has no such good fortune…” and he couldn’t go on. He accepted their murmured sympathy, and escaped quickly upstairs.

In the outer room of the suite, he stopped, hearing Damon’s voice raised in anger.

“It’s no good, Callista, and you know it. You can’t eat, you don’t sleep unless I drug you. I hoped it would all sort itself out, after your cycles came on of their own accord. But look at you!”

Callista murmured something Andrew could not hear the words, only the protest in them.

“Be honest, Callista. You were leronis at Arilinn. If someone had been brought to you in this state, what would you do?” A brief pause. “Then you know what I must do, and quickly.”

“Damon, no!” It was a cry of despair.

“Breda, I promise you, I will try—”

“Oh, Damon, give me a little more time!” Andrew heard her sobbing. “I’ll try to eat, I promise you. I am feeling better, I sat up today for more than an hour, ask Ellemir. Damon, can’t you give me a little more time?”

A long silence, then Damon swore and came out of the room. He started to stride past Andrew without speaking, but the Terran grasped his arm.

“What’s wrong? What were you saying to get her so upset?”

Damon stared past him and Andrew had the unsettling thought that to Damon he was not really there at all. “She doesn’t want me to do what I have to do.” He caught sight of the harp in the case and said scornfully, “Do you really think she is well enough for that?”

“I don’t know,” Andew said angrily. “I only know that she asked me for it.” Abruptly, remembering what the servants had said, he felt he could endure no more.

“Damon, what is wrong with her? Every time I have asked, you have evaded me.”

Damon sighed and sat down, leaning his head on his hands. “I doubt if I can explain. You’re not matrix-trained, you haven’t the language, you don’t even have the concepts.”

Andrew said grimly, “Just put it in words of one syllable.”

“There aren’t any.” Damon sighed and was silent, thinking. Finally he said, “I showed you the channels, in Callista and in Ellemir.”

Andrew nodded, remembering those glowing lines of light and their pulsing centers, so clear in Ellemir, so inflamed and sluggish in Callista.

“Basically, what ails her is overload of the nerve channels.” He saw that Andrew did not understand. “I told you how the same channels carry sexual energies and psi forces, not at the same time, of course. When she was trained as Keeper, Callista was taught techniques which prevented her from being capable of — or even aware of — the slightest sexual response. Is that clear so far?”

“I think so.” He pictured her whole sexual system made nonfunctional so that she could use her whole body as an energy-transformer. God, what a thing to do to a woman!

“Well, then. In the normal adult the channels function selectively. Turning off the psi forces when the channels are needed for sexual energies, turning off sexual impulses when psi is being used. After matrix work you were impotent for a few days, remember? Normally, when a Keeper gives up her work, it is because the channels have reverted to normal levels, and normal selectivity. Then she is no longer able, as a Keeper must be able, to remain totally and completely free of the slightest trace of sexual energy remaining in the channels. Evidently Callista must have thought this had already happened in her channels, because she could feel herself reacting to you. She did for a moment, you know,” he said, looking at Andrew hesitantly, and Andrew, unwilling to remember that fourfold moment of contact, to acknowledge that Damon could have been part of it, could not raise his eyes. He only nodded, without looking up.

“Well, then, if an ordinary Keeper — a fully functioning Keeper, with conditioning intact and channels clear — is attacked, she can protect herself. If, for instance, you had not been Callista’s husband, someone to whom she had given the right, if you had been a stranger attempting rape, she would have blasted straight through you. And you would have been very, very dead, and Callista would have been… well, I suppose she would have been shocked and sick, but after a good meal and some sleep she would not have been much the worse. But that didn’t happen.”

Andrew said numbly “God!”

It isn’t you I don’t trust, my husband…

“She must have believed she was ready, or she would never have risked it. And when she realized she was not ready — in that split second before she blasted you with the reflex she couldn’t control — she took a backflow through her own body. And that saved your life. If that whole flow of energy had gone through you, can you imagine what would have happened?”

Andrew could, but discovered he would much rather not.

“It must have been that shock which brought on her menstruation. I watched her carefully until I knew she wasn’t going into crisis, but after that I thought the bleeding, and the normal energy drain of that time in women, would carry off the overloading and clear the channels. But it hasn’t.” He frowned. “I wish I knew precisely what Leonie had done to her. Meanwhile, I asked you not to touch her. And you must not.”

“Are you afraid she will blast me again?”

Damon shook his head. “I don’t think she has the strength for that now. In a way it’s worse. She is reacting to you physically, but the channels are not clear so there is no way to carry off the sexual energies through the channels in the normal way. There are two sets of reflexes operating at once, each jamming the other, inhibiting either of the normal functions.”

“I feel more muddled than ever,” Andrew said, dropping his head in his hands, and Damon set to work to simplify further.

“A woman trained as Keeper sometimes has to coordinate eight or ten telepaths. Working in the energon rings, she has to channel all that force through her own body. They handle such enormous psi stresses, like” — he picked up the analogy neatly from Andrew’s mind — “an energy-transformer. So they can’t, they dare not, rely on the normal selectivity of the ordinary adult. They have to keep those channels totally, completely, and permanently cleared for the psi forces. Do you remember what my sister Marisela said?”

They heard it together, an echo in Damon’s mind: In the old days the Keepers of Arilinn could not leave their posts if they would… The Keepers of Arilinn are not women but emmasca…

“Keepers aren’t neutered anymore, of course. They rely on vows of virginity, and intensive antisexual conditioning, to keep the channels totally free. But a Keeper is, after all, a woman, and if she falls in love, she is likely to begin to react sexually, because the channels have returned to normal selectivity, for psi or for sex. She has to stop functioning as a Keeper, because her channels are no longer completely clear. She could handle ordinary psi, but not the enormous stresses of a Keeper, the energon rings and relays — well, you don’t know much about that, never mind it. In practice, a Keeper whose conditioning has failed usually gives up laran work altogether. I think that’s foolish, but it’s our custom. But this is what Callista was expecting: that once she had begun to react to you, she would begin to use the channels selectively, like any normal mature telepath.”

“So why didn’t she?” Andrew demanded.

“I don’t know,” Damon said, in despair. “I have never seen anything like it before. I would not like to believe that Leonie had altered the channels so they could never function selectively, but I cannot think of anything else it could be. Since Leonie evidently altered her channels in some way, to keep her physically immature, I can only think it was that. But do you understand now why you must not touch her, Andrew? It’s not because she would blast you again — and probably kill you this time — for she would let herself die before she would do that. It would be so easy for her that it terrifies me to think about it. But it’s because the reflexes are still there, and she’s fighting them, and it’s killing her.”

Andrew covered his face with his hands. “And I begged her…” he said almost inaudibly.

“You couldn’t know,” said Damon gently. “She didn’t know either. She believed she was deconditioning normally, or she would never have risked it. She was willing to give up the psi function of the channels entirely, for you. Do you know what that meant to her?”

Andrew muttered, “I’m not worth it. All that suffering.”

“And so damned unnecessary!” Damon broke off. He was talking blasphemy. No law was stricter than that which prevented a Keeper, her oath once given back, her virginity lost or even suspect, from ever again doing any serious matrix work. “It was what she wanted, Andrew. To give up her work as Keeper, for you.”

“So what’s to be done?” Andrew demanded. “She can’t go on like this, it will kill her!”

Damon said reluctantly, “I will have to clear her channels. And this is what she does not want me to do.”

“Why not?”

Damon did not answer at once. Finally he said, “It’s usually done under kirian, and I have none to give her. Without it, it’s hellishly painful.” This made Callista sound like a simple coward, and he was reluctant to give that impression, but he did not feel capable of explaining to Andrew what Callista’s real objection was. His eyes fell with relief on the rryl in its case.

“But if she is well enough to ask for that, perhaps she is really better,” he said with a glimmer of hope. “Take it to her, Andrew. But,” and he paused, said at last, reluctantly, “don’t touch her. She’s still reacting to you.”

“But isn’t that what we want?”

“Not with the two systems overloading and jamming,” Damon said, and Andrew bent his head, saying in a low voice, “I promise.”

He went past Damon, into the room where Callista lay — and stopped in shock. Callista lay silent, unmoving, and for a dreadful moment he could not see her breathing. Her eyes were open, but she did not see him, and her eyes did not move to follow him as his shadow fell between her and the light. A terrible fear gripped him; he felt a soundless scream tightening his throat. He whirled to shout for Damon, but Damon had already picked up the telepathic impact of his panic and was running into the room. Then a great sigh of relief, almost a sob, burst from Damon.

“It’s all right,” he said, catching at Andrew as if dizzy, “she’s not dead, she’s… she’s left her body. She’s in the overworld, that’s all.”

Andrew whispered, staring at the wide-open sightless eyes, “What can we do for her?”

“In her present physical state she won’t be able to stay long,” Damon said, trouble, concern, and hope mingling in his voice. “I did not even know she was strong enough for this. But if she is…” He did not say it aloud, but they could both hear what he did not say: If she is, perhaps it is not as bad as we fear.

Moving in the gray spaces of the overworld, Callista sensed their cries and their fear, but dimly, like a dream. For the first time in an eternity, she was free from pain: she had left her racked body behind, stepping out of it like a too-large garment, slipping on to the familiar realms. She felt herself formulate in the gray spaces of the overworld, her body cool and quiet and at peace as it had been before… She saw herself wrapped in the airy translucent folds of her Keeper’s robe, a leronis, a sorceress. Do I still see myself like this? she wondered, deeply troubled. I am not a Keeper, but a wedded woman, in thought and heart if not in fact…

The emptiness of the gray world frightened her. She reached out, almost automatically, for a landmark, and saw in the gray distance faint glimmer that was the energy-net equivalent, in this world, of the Arilinn Tower.

I cannot go there, she thought, I have renounced it, yet with the thought she felt a passionate longing for the world she had left forever behind her. As if the longing had created its own answer, she saw it brighten, then, almost with the swiftness of thought, and she was there, within the Veil, in her own secret retreat, the Garden of Fragrance, the Keeper’s Garden.

Then she saw the veiled form before her, slowly taking shape. She did not need to see Leonie’s face to recognize her here.

“My darling child,” Leonie said. Callista knew it was only a tenuous contact in thought, but so real was their presence to one another in this familiar realm that Leonie’s voice sounded rich, warm, tenderer than ever in life. Only on this nonphysical plane, she knew, could Leonie risk this kind of emotion. “Why have you come to us? I had thought you gone forever beyond our reach, chiya. Or have you strayed here in a dream?”

“It is no dream, Kiya.” Anger washed through her, like a cold shock bathing every nerve. She controlled it, as she had been taught from childhood, for the anger of the Altons could kill. Her voice cold and demanding, rejecting Leonie’s tenderness, she stated, “I came to seek you, to ask you why you spoke a blessing without truth! Why did you lie to me?” Her own voice was like a scream in her ears. “Why did you bind me in bonds I could not break, so that when you gave, me in marriage it was mockery? Do you grudge me happiness, who knew none of your own?”

Leonie flinched. Her voice was filled with pain. “I had hoped you happy and already a bride, chiya.”

“You know what you had done to make that impossible! Can you swear that you have not neutered me, as was done in old days to the lady of Arilinn?”

Leonie’s face was filled with horror. She said, “The Gods witness it, child, and the holy things at Hali, you have not been neutered. But Callista, you were very young when you came to the Tower…”

Time seemed to flow backward as Leonie spoke and Callista felt herself dragged back to a time half forgotten, her hair still curling about her cheeks instead of braided like a woman’s, felt again the frightened reverence she had felt for Leonie before she had become mother, guide, teacher, priestess…

“You succeeded as Keeper when six others had failed, my child. I thought you proud of that.”

“I was,” Callista murmured, bending her head.

“But you misled me, Callista, or I would never have let you go. You made me believe — though I hardly felt it possible — that already you were responding to your lover, that if you had not lain with him it would only be a little while. And so I thought perhaps I had not really succeeded, that perhaps your success as Keeper came because you believed yourself free of such things as tormented the other women. Then, when love came into your life and you found where your heart lay, then, as has happened with many Keepers, it was no longer possible to remain unawakened. And so I blessed you, and gave you back your oath. But if this is not true, Callista, if it is not true…”

Callista remembered Damon flinging the angry taunt at her: Will you spend your life counting holes in linen towels and making herbs for spice-bread, you who were Callista of Arilinn? And Leonie heard it too, in her mind, an echo. “I said it before, my darling, now I offer it again. You can return to us. A little time, a little retraining, and you would be one of us again.”

She gestured, the air rippled, and Callista was clothed in the crimson of a Keeper, ritual ornaments at her brow and her throat.

“Come back to us, Callista. Come back.”

She said, faltering, “My husband—”

Leonie gestured that away as nothing. “Freemate marriage is nothing, Callista, a legal fiction, meaningless until consummated. What binds you to this man?”

Callista started to say “Love,” and under Leonie’s scornful eyes could not get the word out. She said, “A promise, Leonie.”

“Your promise to us came first. You were born to this work, Callista, it is your destiny. Do you remember, you consented to what was done to you? You were one of seven who came to us that year. Six young women failed, one after another. They were already grown, their nerve channels matured. They found the clearing of the channels and the conditioning against response too painful. And then there was Hilary Castamir, do you remember? She became Keeper, but every month, when her woman’s cycles came upon her, she went into convulsions, and the cost seemed too great. I was desperate, Callista, do you remember? I was doing the work of three Keepers, and my own health began to suffer. And for this reason I explained it to you, and you consented—”

“How could I consent?” Callista cried in despair. “I was a child! I did not even know what it was you asked!”

“Yet you consented, to be trained when you were not yet full-grown and the channels still immature. And so you adjusted easily to the training.”

“I remember,” Callista said, very low. She had been so proud, that she should succeed where so many failed, that she should be Callista of Arilinn, take her place with the great Keepers of legend. She remembered the exhilaration of seizing the direction of the great circles, of feeling the enormous stresses flow unhindered through her body, of seizing and directing the enormous energon rings…

“And you were so young, I thought it unlikely you would ever change. It was pure chance. But, my darling, this can all be yours again. You have only to say the word.”

“No!” Callista cried. “No! I have given back my oath — I do not want it!” And yet in a curious sense she was not sure.

“Callista, I could have forced you to return. You were virgin still, and the law permitted me to require you to come back to Arilinn. The need is still great, and I am old. Yet it is as I said, it is too heavy a burden to be borne unconsenting. I released you, child, even though I am old and this means I must struggle to bear my burden till Janine is old enough and strong enough for this work. Does this sound as if I wished you ill, or lied when I blessed you and bade you live happily with your lover? I thought you already free. I thought that in giving back your oath I bowed to the inevitable, that you were already freed in fact and there was no reason to hold to the word and torture you by the attempt to make you return, to clear your channels and force you to try again.”

Callista whispered, “I hoped… I believed I was free…”

She could feel the horror in Leonie, like a tangible thing. “My poor child, what a risk to take! How could you care so much for some man, when you have all this before you? Callista, my darling, come back to us! We will heal all your hurts. Come back where you belong—”

“No!” It was a great cry of renunciation. As if it had reverberated into the other world, she could hear Andrew’s voice, crying out her name in agony.

“Callista, Callista, come back to us…”

There was a brief, sharp shock, the shock of falling. Leonie was gone and pain arrowed through her body. She found herself lying in her bed, Andrew’s face white as death above hers.

“I thought I’d lost you for good this time,” he whispered.

“It might be better… if you had,” she murmured in torment.

Leonie was right. Nothing binds me to him but words… and my destiny is to be Keeper. For a moment, time swam out of focus and she saw herself sheltered behind a strange unfamiliar wall, not Arilinn. She seized the strands of force within her hands, cast the energon rings…

She reached out for Andrew, instinctly shrank away. Then, feeling his dismay, reached for him, disregarding the knifing, warning pain.

She said, “I will never leave you again,” and clung to his hands in desperation.

I can never go back. If there is no answer I will die, but I will never go back.

Nothing binds me to Andrew but words. And yet… words… words have power. She opened her eyes, looking directly into her husband’s, and repeated the words he had said at their wedding.

“Andrew. In good times and in bad… in wealth and in poverty… in sickness and health …while life shall last,” she said, and closed her hands over his. “Andrew, my love, you must not weep.”