The Forbidden Tower

Chapter Fifteen

After Midwinter, surprisingly, the weather moderated and repairs from the great storm went forward rapidly. Within a tenday they were complete, and Andrew felt that he could leave everything in the hands of the coridom for some time.

He thought he had never seen Damon as overwrought and irritable as during that morning, after Damon had isolated the suite with telepathic dampers and warned the servants not to approach them. Since Midwinter Damon had been edgy, silent, but now, as he adjusted the dampers, prowling around the suite nervously, they could all sense it. Callista finally broke into his nervous fretting with, “That’s enough, Damon! Lie down flat and breathe slowly. You can’t start like this, and you know it as well as I do. Get yourself calmed first. Do you want some kirian?”

“I don’t want it,” said Damon irritably, “but I suppose I’d better have it. And I want a blanket or something. I always come back half frozen.”

She gestured to Ellemir to cover him with a blanket and went for the kirian. “Taste it first. My distilling apparatus here isn’t as efficient as what I had at Arilinn, and there may residues, though I filtered it twice.”

“You can’t be worse at that sort of thing than I am,” Damon said and sniffed carefully, then laughed, remembering Callista doing almost the same thing with the crude tincture he had made. “Never mind, my dear, I don’t suppose we’ll poison one another.” He let her measure a careful dose, adding, “I don’t know what the time-distortion factor is, and you’ll have to stay in phase to monitor me. Hadn’t you better take some yourself?”

She shook her head. “I have an awfully low tolerance for the stuff, Damon. If I took enough for phasing, I’d have serious trouble. I can key it with you without it.”

“You’ll get awfully cramped and cold,” Damon warned, but he realized that after so many years as Keeper she probably knew her tolerances for the telepathic drug to the narrowest margin. She smiled, measuring her dose by a few drops. “I’m wearing an extra warm shawl. If I’m monitoring life functions, when do you want me to pull you out?”

He didn’t know. He had no experience with the stresses of Timesearch. He had no idea what he might be called on to endure in the way of side effects. “Better not pull me back unless I go into convulsions.”

“That far?” Callista felt a sharp stab of guilt. It was for her he was incurring this terrible risk, returning to this work he so feared and hated. They were already close in linkage. He laid a light hand on her wrist. “Not only for you, darling. For all of us. For the children.”

And for the Keeper, the one who will come. Callista did not say the words aloud, but time had slipped out of focus, as it did sometimes for an Alton, and she saw herself from a great distance, here, elsewhere, standing knee-deep in a great field of flowers; looking down at a delicate girl lying unconscious before her; standing in the chapel at Armida before the statue of Cassilda, a wreath of crimson flowers in her hand. She laid the flowers on the altar, then she was back with them again, dizzied, flushed, exalted. She whispered, “Damon, you saw…”

Andrew had seen too, all of them had seen, and he remembered Callista’s look of pity and grief as she removed Ellemir’s forgotten offering from the chapel. “Our women still lay flowers at her shrine…” Damon said gently, “I saw, Callie. But it’s a long way from here to there, you know.”

She wondered if Andrew would mind very much, then brought herself back, with firm discipline, to her work. “Let me check your breathing.” Lightly she passed her fingertips above his body. “Take the kirian now.”

He swallowed, making a wry face. “Ugh! What did you flavor it with, horse piss?”

“Nothing, you’ve forgotten the taste, that’s all. How many years since you took it? Lie back and stop clenching your hands; you’ll only knot your muscles and give yourself cramps.”

Damon obeyed, looking around the three faces surrounding him: Callista, sober and commanding; Ellemir looking a little scared; Andrew, strong and calm, but he sensed with an undercurrent of dismay. But again his eyes came back to Callista’s confident face. He could absolutely rely on her, Arilinn-trained. His breathing, his life functions, his very life was in her hands, and he was content to have it there.

Why must she renounce this, because she wanted to live in happiness, and bear children?

Callista was bringing Ellemir and Andrew into the circle. He felt them slip into the rapport, meshing. Already he was adrift, floating, very distant. He looked at Ellemir as if she were transparent, thinking how much he loved her, how happy she was.

Callista said quietly, “I’ll let you go as far as crisis, first stage, not as far as convulsions. That wouldn’t do you any good, nor any of us.”

He didn’t bother to protest. She had been trained at Arilinn; it was her decision to make. Then he was in the over-world, sensing it as their landmark formed around him, a tower like Arilinn, less solid, less brilliant, not a beacon but a shelter, very remote, yet solid around him, a protection, a home here. For a moment, as he looked around the gray world and sheltered, delaying, within its walls, he found himself wondering with an absurd flippancy what the other telepaths who wandered in the gray world would think, to find a new tower there. Or would the others ever notice, ever come to this remote place where Damon and his group were working? Resolutely, he formed his thoughts to bear him swiftly to Arilinn, and found himself standing in the court before Leonie. He saw with relief that her face was veiled and her voice cool and remote, as if the moment of passion had never been.

“We must first reach the level where motion through time is possible. Have you taken sufficient precaution to keep yourself monitored?” He felt that she was looking through him, to the overworld, to the world behind him where his body lay, Callista silently watching by his side. She looked oddly triumphant, but she said only, “You may be away for a very long time, and it will seem longer than it is. I will guide you as far as the Timesearch level, though I am not sure I will be able to stay there. But we must move through the levels a little at a time. I usually try to think of it as a flight of steps,” she added, and he saw that the grayness around them had lifted enough to reveal a shadowy flight of steps, curving away upward and vanishing into thicker grayness above them, like fog shrouding a riverbed. He noted that the stairs had a gilt banister, and wondered what staircase in Leonie’s childhood, perhaps in Castle Hastur, was revived here in her mental image.

He knew perfectly well, as he set his foot on the first step behind Leonie, that in actuality only their minds moved through the formless atoms of the universe, but the firm visualization of the staircase felt reassuringly solid under his feet, and gave them a focal point for moving from level to level. Leonie knew this path and he was content to follow.

The stairs were not steep, but as he climbed it seemed that he began to breathe more heavily, as if climbing in a mountain pass. The stairs still felt firm, even carpeted under foot, though his feet themselves, he knew, were only mental formulations. It became harder and harder to feel them, to lift them from step to step. The stairs felt fuzzier and dimmer, leading into thick gray fog just a little ahead of him. Leonie’s form was only a crimson-veiled wisp.

The thick fog closed in. He could see a few inches of the staircase under his feet, but he was walking in grayness which made his body disappear. The grayness darkened into a blackness crisscrossed by racing blue lights.

The level of energy-nets. Damon had worked on this level as a psi technician, and with a sharp effort he managed to solidify it, making it into a dark cavern with narrow lighted trails and footpaths leading upward through a maze of falling water. Leonie was dim and shadowy here, her robes colorless. He did not hear her now in words:

Go carefully here. We are in the level of monitored matrices. They will watch us so that no harm comes to me. But follow closely, I know where matrix work is being done and we must not intrude.

Silently Damon threaded his way along the blue-lighted paths. Once there was a burst of blue light, but Leonie’s thought reached him urgently:

Turn away from it!

And he knew that somewhere a matrix operation was under way, of such a delicate nature that even a random thought — “looking” at it — could throw it out of balance and endanger the mechanics. He visualized physically turning his back on the light, closing his eyes so that he could not see it even through his eyelids. It seemed a long time before Leonie’s thought-touch recalled him:

It is safe to go on now.

Again the staircase formulated beneath his feet, though he could not see it, and he began climbing. Only dogged concentration could now force the illusion of a physical body which could climb, and the stairs were like mist under his feet. His pulse began to labor as he struggled upward,. and his breath came heavily. It was like climbing a mountain pass, like the steep rock-stairs leading upward to Nevarsin Monastery. He felt about in the thick darkness for the ice-rimed rail, felt it burn his fingers, but was grateful for the sensation. It helped him solidify the terrible, chaotic formlessness of this level. He had no idea how Leonie, who was untrained in climbing, was managing here, but he sensed her near him in the darkness, and knew she must have her own mental techniques for coping with the rising levels. His breath was thinning now, and he felt that his heart was pounding in acute, dizzy distress. He felt the vertigo of terrible height beneath him. He could not force himself to go on. He clung to the railing, feeling it numbing his hands with cold.

I cannot go on, I cannot. I will die here.

Slowly his breathing began to come more smoothly, his laboring heart calmed. He knew with the remotest consciousness that Callista had gone into phase with him, regulating his heart and breathing, Now he could struggle upward again, although the stairs were gone. As his sense of struggling upward and upward grew more intense he began, desperately, to formulate the memory of the cliff-climbing, ice-and-rock techniques he had learned as a boy at Nevarsin, as if he were dragging himself up rough-cut hand- and footholds, fixing imaginary ropes and pitons to help him haul his reluctant body upward. Then he lost his body again, and all track of levels and effort, moving only by fierce concentration from darkness to darkness. In one of them there were strange, formless cloud masses and he seemed to wallow through bogs of cold slime. In another there were presences everywhere, crowding him, thrusting their intangible shapelessness against him, crowding… The very concept of form was lost. He could not remember what a body was, or what it felt like to have one. He was as shapeless, as everywhere-and-nowhere as they, whatever they were, everywhere interpenetrating. He felt sick and violated, but he struggled on, and after eternities this too was gone.

Finally they reached a curious, thin darkness, and Leonie, close beside him in the nowhere spaces, said, but not in words:

This is the level where we can slip loose of linear time. Try to think of moving along a river upstream. It will be easier if we find a single fixed place and move back from there. Help me find Arilinn.

Damon thought Is Arilinn here too? and knew he was being absurd. Every place which physically existed must stretch upward through all the levels of the universe. Intangibly, a hand gripped his and Damon felt his own hand materializing where it might have been if, here, he had one. He focused his mind on Arilinn, saw a dim shadow and found himself in Leonie’s room there.

Once, in his last year there, Leonie had collapsed inside the relays. He had carried her to her room and laid her on her bed. He had not at the time consciously noted a single detail of that chamber, yet he saw it now, dimly outlined on his mind and memory…

No, Damon! Avarra have pity, no!

He had had no notion of calling up that forgotten day, no desire to remember — Zandru’s hells, no! The memory had been Leonie’s, and he knew it, but he accepted blame for it and sought a more neutral memory. In the matrix chamber at Arilinn he watched Callista, at thirteen, her hair still down her back. He guided her fingers gently, touching the nodes where the nerves surfaced against the skin. He could see the embroidered butterflies on the wrists of her smock; he had not noticed them then. Dimly, but with a realness which unnerved him — were these revived thoughts of years ago or was the present-day Callista remembering? — he saw that she was docile, but frightened of this stern man who had been her dead brother’s sworn friend but now seemed impassive, old, alienated, distant. A stranger, not the familiar kinsman.

Was I so harsh with her, so distant? Were you frightened of me, Callie? Zandru’s hells, why are we so harsh with these children!

Leonie’s hands touched him across Callista’s. How austere she had been, even then, how stern and lined her face had grown in a few years. But time swept backward and Callista was gone, had never been there. He stood before Leonie for the first time, a young psi monitor seeing for the first time the face of the Keeper of Arilinn. Evanda! How beautiful she had been! All Hastur women were beautiful, but she had the legendary beauty of Cassilda. He felt again the agony of first love, the despair of knowing it was hopeless, but time was still flowing backward with merciful swiftness. Damon lost awareness of his body, it had never existed, he was a dim dream in a dimmer darkness, seeing the faces of Keepers he had never known. (Surely that fair-haired woman was a Ridenow of his own clan.) He saw a monument built in the courtyard to honor Marelie Hastur, and knew with a spasm of terror that he was watching an event which had taken place three centuries before his own birth. He kept on, moving upstream, felt Leonie swept away from him, tried to fight his way to her…

I can go no further, Damon. The Gods guard you, kinsman.

He reached for her in panic, but she was gone, would not be born for hundreds of years. He was alone, dazed, wearied, in a vast twinkling foggy darkness, only the shadow of Arilinn behind. Where can I go? I could wander forever through the Ages of Chaos and learn nothing.

Neskaya. He knew that Neskaya was the center of the secret. He let Arilinn dissolve, felt himself move with thought to the Tower of Neskaya, outlined against the Kilghard Hills. It was like fording a cold mountain stream against a current which was trying to sweep him downstream to his own time. In the dim struggle he had almost lost track of his objective. Now, desperately, he reformed it: to find a Keeper in Neskaya before it was destroyed in the Ages of Chaos and then rebuilt. He struggled backward, backward, and saw Neskaya Tower lying in ruins, destroyed in the last of the great wars of that age, burned to ashes, the Keeper and all her circle slaughtered.

It was there again, not the sturdy cobblestone structure he had seen rising behind the walls of Neskaya City, but a tall, luminous, dim-glowing tower of pallid blue stone. Neskaya! Neskaya in the ages of its glory, before the Comyn had fallen to the poor remnant of today. He felt himself shuddering somewhere at the knowledge that he saw what no living man or woman of his time had ever seen, the Tower of Neskaya in the heyday of the Comyn.

A twinkling light began to dawn in the courtyard, and by its sparkle Damon saw a young man and remembered, in startlement and welcome, that he had seen this once before. He chose to interpret it as a sign. The young man was wearing green and gold, with a great sparkling ring on his finger — ring or matrix? Surely that delicate face, the green and gold clothing of an ancient cut, marked the young man as a Ridenow? Yes, Damon had seen him before, though briefly. He felt himself formulate with a curious emotional sense of relief. He knew that the body he wore on this complicated astral level was only an image, the shadow of a shadow. He was briefly aware of his own body, cold, comatose, cramped, a gasping tormented piece of flesh unimaginably elsewhere. The body he wore here in the higher level was unfettered, calm, easy. After such exhausting eternities of formlessness, even the shadow of form was a release of tension, almost an explosion of pleasure. A solid weight, blood he could feel pulsing in his veins, eyes that could see… The young man wavered, became firm. Yes, he was a Ridenow, a lot like Damon’s brother Kieran, the only brother Damon loved rather than tolerated with civility for their common blood.

Damon felt a rush of love for the stranger, who must have been one of his own remote forebears. He wore a long loose golden robe, cinctured with green, and surveyed Damon with a calm, kindly stare. He said, “By your face and your garments you are surely one of my own clan. Do you wander in a dream, kinsman, or do you seek me from another Tower?”

Damon said, “I am Damon Ridenow.” He began to say that he was not now a Tower worker, but it occurred to him that on this level time had no meaning. If all time co-existed — as it must — then the time when he had been psi technician was as real, as present, as the time when he lay in Armida, searching. “Damon Ridenow, Third in Arilinn Tower, technician by grade, under Wardship of Leonie of Arilinn, Lady Hastur.”

The young man said gently, “Surely you dream, or you are mad, or astray in time, kinsman. All the Keepers from Nevarsin to Hali are known to me, and there is no Leonie among them, nor no Hastur woman.” He smiled, not unkindly. “Shall I dismiss you to your own place, cousin, and your own time? These levels are dangerous, and no mere technician can tread them in safety. You may return when you have won the strength of Keeper, cousin, and that you have come here now shows me you have already that strength. But I can send you to a level that is safe for you, and wish for you as much caution as you have courage.”

“I am neither mad nor dreaming,” Damon said, “nor am I astray in time, though truly I am far from my own day. My Keeper sent me here, and it may be that you are whom I seek. Who are you?”

“I am Varzil,” said the young man, “Varzil of Neskaya, Keeper of the Tower.”

Keeper. Damon had been told of times when men were made Keepers. The young man used the word in a form he had never heard, however, tenerézu. When Leonie had told him of male Keepers, she had used the common form of the word, which was invariably feminine. Coming from Varzil, the word was a shock. Varzil! The legendary Varzil, called the Good, who had redeemed Hali after the Cataclysm destroyed the lake there. “In my day you are a legend, Varzil of Neskaya, remembered best as Lord of Hali.”

Varzil smiled. He had a calm, intelligent face, but it was alive with curiosity, without the withdrawn, remote, isolated quality of every Keeper Damon had ever known. “A legend, cousin? Well, I suppose legends lie in your day as in mine, and it might be well for me to know nothing of what lies ahead, lest I grow afraid, or arrogant. Tell me nothing, Damon. Yet one thing you have told already. For if a woman is Keeper in your day, then has my work succeeded and those who refused to believe a woman strong enough for Keeper have been silenced. So I know my work is not futile and will succeed. And since you have given me a gift, Damon, a gift of confidence, what can I give you in return? For you would not undertake a journey so far without some terrible need.”

“The need is not mine but my kinswoman’s,” Damon said. “She was trained to be Keeper at Arilinn, but has been released from her vows, to marry.”

“Need she be released for that?” Varzil asked. “But what is your need? Even in my day, kinsman, a Keeper is no longer surgically mutilated, or do you think me a eunuch?” He laughed with a gaiety which for some reason reminded Damon of Ellemir.

“No, but she is held halfway between Keeper and normal woman,” Damon said. “Her channels were fixed to the Keeper’s pattern when she was too young, before maturing, and she cannot readjust the channels to select for normal use.”

Varzil looked thoughtful. He said, “Yes, this can happen. Tell me, how old was she when she was trained?”

“Between thirteen and fourteen, I think.”

Varzil nodded. “I thought so. The mind writes deeply in the body, and the channels cannot readjust with the imprint of many, many years as a Keeper in her mind. You must lead her mind back to the days when her body was free, before the channels were altered and locked, and many years as Keeper froze the imprint into her nerve channels. Her mind once free, her body will free itself. When you take her through the sacrament next — But wait, are you sure the channels have not been surgically altered, nor the nerves cut?”

“No, it seems to have been done in pattern training with a matrix—”

Varzil shrugged. “Unnecessary, but not serious,” he said. “There are always some of the women who let their channels lock that way, but at the Year’s End festival the release comes. Some of our early Keepers were chieri, neither man nor woman, emmasca, and they too found themselves locked or frozen into that pattern. This, of course, is why we instituted the old sacramental rite of Year’s End. How you must love her, cousin, to come so far! May she bear you children who will be as much credit to your clan as their brave father.”

“She is not my wife,” Damon said, “but wedded to my sworn brother…” As soon as he had said that, he felt confused, for the words seemed to have no meaning to Varzil, who shook his head dismissingly.

“You are her Keeper; it is for you to be responsible.”

“No, it is she who is Keeper,” Damon protested, feeling a sudden frightening irritability, and Varzil looked at him sharply. The overworld shook, trembled, and for a moment Damon lost sight of Varzil, even the great sparkle of his ring dimming out into a faint, distant point of blue. Was it a matrix? He felt as if he was smothering, drowning in the darkness. He heard Varzil in the distance, calling his name, then with relief felt Varzil’s hand close faintly upon the image of his hand. His body came into focus again, but he felt faint and sick. He could only see Varzil dimly, and beyond him a circle of faces, a glittering ring of stones, faces of Comyn who must have been his forgotten ancestors. Varzil sounded deeply concerned.

“You must not remain here longer, cousin, this level is death for the untrained. Come back, if you must, when you have won your full strength as Tenerézu. Do not fear for your cherished one, Damon. It is for you, as her Keeper, to take her into the ancient sacrament of Year’s End, as if she were half-chieri, and emmasca. I fear you must wait for the festival, if she must work as Keeper in the time between, but after that, all will be well. And not in three hundred years or a thousand will any child of the Towers forget the festival.” Damon swayed, dizzy, and Varzil steadied him again, saying with kindly concern, “Look into my ring. I will return you to a level that is safe for you. Do not fear, this ring has none of the dangers of the ordinary matrix. Farewell, kinsman, bear my love and greetings to the one you cherish.”

Damon said, feeling his consciousness thinning and groping, “I do not… do not understand.” Nothing remained clear now but Varzil’s ring, glowing, coruscating, wiping out the darkness. I saw this before, like a beacon. . Speech had gone. He could no longer formulate words. But Varzil was close beside him in the darkness. Yes, I shall go now and set a beacon to guide you here… this ring.

Damon thought, confusedly, I saw it before.

Do not struggle with definitions for time, cousin. When you are Keeper you will understand.

Men are not Keepers in my day.

Yet you are Keeper, or could never have come here without death. Now I may delay no longer for your safe return, cousin, brother…

The glow of the ring filled Damon’s consciousness. Sight vanished, light left him, his body went formless. He was floating, struggling to maintain balance over a gulf of nothingness. He fought to cling to some foothold, felt himself swept away, falling. All those levels I climbed so painfully, must I fall down them all…?

He fell, and knew he would go on falling, falling, for hundreds of years.

Darkness. Pain. Formless weariness. Then Callista’s voice, saying, “I think he’s coming around now. Andrew, lift his head, will you? Elli, if you don’t stop crying, I’ll send you out of here, I mean that!” He felt the sting of firi on his tongue, and then Callista’s face moved into his range of vision. He whispered, and knew his teeth were chattering, “Cold… I’m so cold…”

“No you aren’t, love,” Callista said gently. “You’re wrapped in all the blankets we have, and there are hot bricks at your feet, see? The cold is inside you, don’t you think I know? No, no more firi. We’ll have hot soup for you in a minute.”

He could see now, and every detail of his journey, of the conversation with Varzil, came flooding back into his mind. Did he truly meet an ancestor so long dead that even his bones were dust by now? Or did he dream, dramatize knowledge deep in his unconscious? Or did his mind reach deep into time to see what was written on the fabric of the past? What was reality?

But what festival did Varzil mean? He had said that not in three hundred years or a thousand would the Comyn forget the festival and the sacrament, but Varzil had not counted on the Ages of Chaos, on the destruction of Neskaya Tower.

Still, the answer was there. As yet it was obscure, but he could already see where it was leading. The mind writes deeply in the body. Somehow, then, he must lead Callista’s mind back to a time when her body was free of the cruel constraints of the years as Keeper. It is for you as her Keeper to lead her into the ancient sacrament of Year’s End, as if she were half-chieri and emmasca.

Whatever the lost festival, it could be recaptured or reconstructed somehow — a ritual to free the mind of its constraints? If all else failed — what had Varzil said? Come back when you have won your full strength as Keeper.

Damon shuddered. Must he, then, continue this frightening work, outside the safety of a Tower, to make himself Keeper in truth, as well as in the potential Leonie had seen in him? Well, he was pledged, and for Callista there was, perhaps, no other way.

It might not be that bad, he thought hopefully. There must be records of the festival of Year’s End in the other Towers, or perhaps at Hali, in the rhu fead, the holy place of the Comyn.

Ellemir looked over Callista’s shoulder. Her eyes were red with crying. He sat up, clutching the blankets about him. “Did I frighten you, my dearest love?”

She gasped. “You were so cold, so stiff, you didn’t even seem to be breathing. And then you would start gasping, moaning — I thought you were dying, dead — oh, Damon!” Her hands clutched at him. “Never do this again! Promise me!”

Forty days ago he would have promised her, with pleasure. “My darling, this is the work I was trained for, and I must be free to do it at need.” Varzil had hailed him as Keeper. Was that his destiny?

But not at a Tower again. They had made an art of deforming the lives of their workers. In seeking to free Callista, would he free all his sons and daughters to come?

Callista raised her head at a slight sound. “That will be the food I sent for. Go and fetch it, Andrew, we don’t want outsiders in here.” When he returned, she poured hot soup into a mug. “Drink it down as quickly as you can, Damon. You are as weak as a bird newly hatched.”

He grimaced, saying, “Next time I think I’ll stay inside the egg.” He began to drink in hesitant sips, not sure, at first, that he could swallow. His hands would not hold the mug, and Andrew steadied it for him.

“How long was I out?”

“All day, and most of the night,” Callista said. “And of course I could not move during that time either, so I’m stiff as planks nailed into a coffin!” Wearily she stretched her cramped limbs, and Andrew, leaving Ellemir to hold Damon’s mug, came and knelt before her, pulling off her velvet slippers and rubbing her feet with his strong hands. “How cold they are!” he said in dismay.

“About the only advantage the higher levels have over winter in Nevarsin is that you don’t get frostbite,” Callista said, and Damon grinned wryly. “You don’t get frostbite in the hells, either, but I never heard that advanced as a good reason not to stay out of them.” Andrew looked puzzled, and Damon asked, “Or do your people have a hot hell, as I heard the Dry-Towners do?”

Andrew nodded, and Damon finished his soup and held out his mug for more. He explained, “Zandru supposedly rules over nine hells, each colder than the last. When I was in Nevarsin they used to say that the student dormitory was kept about the temperature of the fourth hell, as a way of showing us what might be in store for us if we broke too many rules.” He glanced at the harsh darkness outside the window. “Is it snowing?”

Andrew asked, “Does it ever do anything else here at night?”

Damon cradled his cold fingers around the stoneware mug. “Oh, yes, sometimes in summer we have eight, ten nights without snow.”

“And I suppose,” Andrew said, straight-faced, “that people start to collapse with sunstroke and die of heat exhaustion.”

“Why, no, I never heard that—” Callista began, then, seeing the twinkle in Andrew’s eyes, broke off and laughed. Damon watched them, exhausted, weary, at peace. He wriggled his toes. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find I had frostbite, after all. On one level I was climbing on ice — or thought I was,” he added, with a reminiscent shiver.

“Take off his slippers and look, Ellemir.”

“Oh, come, Callie, I was joking—”

“I wasn’t. Hilary was caught once on a level where there seemed to be fire, and came back with burns and blisters on the soles of her feet. She could not walk for days,” Callista said. “Leonie used to say, ‘The mind writes deeply in the body.’ Damon, what is it?” She bent to look at the bare feet, smiled. “No, there seems no physical injury, but I am sure you feel half frozen. When you have finished your soup, perhaps you should get into a hot bath. It will make certain your circulation is not really impaired.”

She sensed Andrew’s questioning look, and went on. “Truly, I do not know if it is the cold of the levels reflected in his body, or something in the mind, or whether the kirian makes it easier for the mind to reflect into the body, or whether kirian slows down the circulation and makes it easier to visualize cold. But whatever it is, the subjective experience in the overworld is cold, icy cold, chill to the bone, and without arguing where the cold comes from, I have experienced it often enough to know that hot soup, hot bricks, hot baths, and plenty of blankets should be all ready for anyone who returns from such a journey.”

Damon felt unwilling to be alone, even in his bath. While lying flat he felt fine, but when he tried to sit up, to walk, it seemed that his body thinned to insubstantiality, his feet did not feel the floor, he walked bodiless and fading in empty space. He heard, ashamed, his own soft wail of protest.

He felt Andrew’s strong arm under his, holding him up, making him solid, real again to himself. He said, half in apology, “I’m sorry. I keep feeling as if I’m disappearing.”

“I won’t let you fall.” In the end Andrew almost had to carry him to his bath. The hot water brought Damon back to consciousness of his physical self again. Andrew, warned of this reaction by Callista, looked relieved as Damon began to look like himself. He sat on a stool beside the tub, saying, “I’m here if you need me.”

Damon was filled with overflowing warmth, gratitude. How good they all were to him, how kind, how loving, how careful of his well-being! How he loved them all! He lay in his bath, floating, euphoric, an elation as great as his former misery, until the water began to cool. Andrew, disregarding the request to send for his body-servant, lifted him bodily out of the tub, dried him, wrapped him in a robe. When they came back to the women he was still floating in euphoria. Callista had sent for more food, and Damon ate slowly, cherishing every bite, feeling that food had never tasted so fresh, so sweet, so good.

At the back of his mind he knew that his present elation was simply part of the reaction and would sooner or later give way to enormous depression, but he clung to it, enjoying it, trying to savor every moment of it. When he had eaten as much as he could possibly hold (Callista, too, had eaten like a horse-drover, after the exhaustion of the long monitoring session) he begged, “I don’t want to be alone. Can’t we all stay together as we did at Midwinter?”

Callista hesitated, then said, with a glance at Andrew, “Certainly. None of us will leave you while you need us close to you.”

Knowing that the presence of nontelepathic servants would be intensely painful to Damon and Callista in their present state, Andrew went to carry the dishes and the remnants of the supper from the room. When he came back they were all in bed, Callista already asleep next to the wall, Damon holding Ellemir in his arms, his eyes closed. Ellemir looked up, drowsily making room for him at her side, and Andrew unhesitatingly joined them. It seemed right, natural, a necessary response to Damon’s need.

Damon, Ellemir held close to him, felt Andrew and then Ellemir drop off to sleep, but he lay awake, unwilling to leave them even in sleep. He felt no hint of desire — knew that under present conditions he would feel none for some days — but he was content simply to feel Ellemir in his arms, her hair against his cheek, to reassure himself that he, himself, was real. He could hear and sense Andrew, just beyond, a strong bulwark against fear. I am here with my loved ones, I am not alone. I am safe.

Gently, without desire, he fondled her, his fingers caressing her soft hair, her warm bare neck, her soft breasts. His awareness was tuned so high that he could feel through her sleep her awareness of the touch, the new tingle there. As he had been taught long ago when he was a monitor, he let his awareness sink down through her body, feeling the changes in the breasts, deep in the womb, without surprise. He had been so careful since she lost their child, it must have been of Andrew’s making. It was just as well, he felt. She and he were such close kin. He kissed the nape of her neck, so warmed and filled with love that he felt he would burst with its weight. He had by instinct guarded Ellemir from the danger of a child of long generations of inbreeding, and now she could have the child she hungered for, without fear. He knew, with a deep inner knowledge, that this child would not be lost too soon to live, and rejoiced for Ellemir, for all of them. He reached past Ellemir to touch Andrew’s hand in the darkness. Andrew did not wake, but clasped his fingers on Damon’s in his sleep. My friend. My brother. Do you know, yet, of our good fortune? Clasping Ellemir tightly, he realized with a shudder that he could have died out there on the higher levels of the overworld, that he might never again have seen any of these whom he so loved, but even that thought did not long disturb him.

Andrew would have cared for them, all their lives. But it was good to be with them still, to share this warmth, to think of the children who would be born to them here, of the life before them, the endless warmth. He would never be alone again. Falling asleep, he thought, I have never been so happy in my life.

When Damon woke hours later, the last dregs of warmth and euphoria had been squeezed from his mood. He felt cold and alone, his body dim and vanishing. He could not feel his own body, and clutched at Ellemir in a spasm of panic. His touch woke her at once, and she reacted to his hungry need for contact, folding herself against him, warm, sensual, alive against his cold deathliness. He knew, rationally, that he had nothing sexual for her now, but he still clung, desperately trying to stir in himself some flicker, some shadow, some hint of the love he felt for her. It was an agony of need, and Ellemir knew in despair that it was not really sexual at all. She held him and soothed him, and did what she could, but in his drained state of exhaustion he could not sustain even the momentary flickers of arousal that came and went. She was terribly afraid that he would exhaust himself still more in this despairing attempt, but she could think of nothing to say which would not hurt him still more. Under that frenzied tenderness, she felt her heart would break. At last, as she had known he must, he sighed, releasing her. She wanted to say that it did not matter, that she understood, but it mattered to Damon, and she knew it, and there would never be any way to change that. She simply kissed him, accepting the failure and his desperation, and sighed.

But now he sensed that the others were awake. He reached out gently, gathering the fourfold rapport around him, reassuring him more than the desperate attempt at sex. Intense, aware, closer than the touch of bodies, beyond words, beyond sex, they felt themselves blending into one. Andrew, feeling Damon’s need in himself, reached for Ellemir, who came eagerly into his arms. The blended excitement grew, spreading out shivering ripples through all of them, engulfing even Callista, melting them into a single entity, touching, enfolding, surging, responding. Whose lips touched and crushed, whose thighs clasped, whose arms held which body in a fierce embrace? It overflowed, spread like a wave, a flood of fire, a scalding, shivering explosion of pleasure and fulfillment. As the excitement subsided — stabilized, rather, at a less intense level — Ellemir slipped out of Andrew’s arms, caught Callista close, holding her, generously opening her mind to her sister. Callista clung to the mental contact hungrily, trying to hold something of that closeness, that togetherness she could share only this way, at second hand. For a moment she was actually unaware of her own unresponding body, so closely circled in the unbroken chain of emotion.

Andrew, sensing when Callista’s mind opened wholly, so that in a sense it had been Callista in his arms, felt a dizzy exaltation. He felt as if he overflowed, spread out so that he seemed to occupy all the space in the room, to encircle all four of them in his arms, and both Damon and Callista picked up his impulsive thought: I wish I could be everywhere at once! I want to make love to all of you at once! Damon moved close to Andrew, holding him in a confused desire to share, somehow, in this intense delight and closeness, sharing, actually participating in the slow repeated rise of excitement, the gentle, intense caresses…

Then shock, dismay — What the hell is going on? — as Andrew realized whose were the caressing hands. The fragile web of contact shattered like breaking glass, smashed with harsh physical shock. Callista gave a short, shaking cry, like a sob, and Ellemir almost cried it aloud: Oh, Andrew, how could you …!

Andrew lay very still, rigidly forcing himself not to move physically apart from Damon. He is my friend. It isn’t that important. But the moment was gone. Damon turned away, burying his face in the pillow, and his voice came hoarsely:

“Zandru’s hells, Andrew, how long do you and I have to be afraid of each other?”

Andrew, blinking, surfaced slowly from the confusion. He realized only dimly what had happened. He turned and laid a hand on Damon’s shaking shoulder, saying awkwardly, “I’m sorry, brother. You startled me, that’s all.”

Damon had control of himself again, but he had been caught at the deepest moment of vulnerability, wholly open to all of them, and the rebuff had hurt unimaginably. Even so, he was a Ridenow, and an empath, and he grieved at Andrew’s regret and guilt. “Another of your cultural taboos?”

Andrew nodded, shaken. It had never occurred to him that anything he could do, anything, could hurt Damon so enormously. “I’m — Damon, I’m sorry. It was just sort of… sort of a reflex, that’s all.” Awkward, still scared at the immensity of what he had done to Damon, he bent and hugged him a little. Damon laughed, returned the hug, and sat up. He felt drained, aching, but the disorientation was gone.

Shock treatment, he realized. Soothing was effective in hysteria. So was a good hard slap. When he got up to wash and dress he felt gratifyingly solid, real to himself again. He thought, soberly, that it was not so bad, after all. This time, when Andrew received a shock to one of his ingrained taboos, he didn’t run away or try to shake loose. He knew he’d hurt Damon, and accepted it.

They both lingered a moment in the outer room of the suite when the women had dressed and gone. Andrew glanced at Damon with constraint, wondering if Damon was still angry with him.

“Not angry,” Damon said aloud. “I should have expected it. You have always been afraid of male sexuality, haven’t you? That first night, when you and Callista went into rapport with Ellemir and me, I sensed that. There was so much else to worry about that night, I’d forgotten, but when we touched by accident, in the link, you panicked.” He felt again Andrew’s tentative response, his troubled withdrawal. “Is it culturally necessary to regard all male sexuality except your own as a threat?”

“Not afraid,” said Andrew, with a glint of anger, “repelled when it’s directed at me.”

Damon shrugged. “Humans are not herd animals who regard every other male as a rival or a threat. Is it impossible for you to take pleasure in male sexuality?”

Andrew said, with distaste, “Hell, yes. Do you?”

“Of course,” Damon said, bewildered. “I cherish the… the awareness of your maleness as I cherish the femininity of the women. Is that so hard to understand? It makes me more aware of my own… own manhood—” He broke off with an uneasy laugh. “How can we get into a tangle like this? Even telepathy is no good, there are no mental images to go with the words.” He added, more gently, “I’m not a lover of men, Andrew. But I find it hard to understand that kind of… fear.”

Andrew muttered, not looking at him, “I guess it doesn’t matter all that much. Not here.”

Damon felt dismay that something so simple to him should cause such enormous self-doubt, real fear, in his friend. He said, troubled, “No, but Andrew, we’re married to twin sisters. We will probably spend a lot of our lives together. Am I always going to have to fear that a moment of… of affection will alienate you, upset you to the point where all of us, even the women, are hurt by it? Are you always going to fear that I will… will overstep some invisible boundary, try to force something on you which… which repels you like this? How long” — his voice broke — “how long are you going to be on guard against me?”

Andrew felt intense discomfort. He wished he were a thousand miles away, that he need not stand like this, exposed to Damon’s intensity, his closeness. He had never realized what it was to be a telepath and part of a group like this, where there was no way to hide. Every time they tried to hide from each other they got into trouble. They had to face things. Abruptly he raised his head and looked straight at Damon. He said in a low voice, “Look, you’re my friend. Anything you want is… is always going to be okay with me, I’ll try not to… get so upset about things. I” — not even their hands touched, but it felt somehow as if he and Damon were close together, embracing like brothers — “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, Damon, and if you don’t know it, you ought to.”

Damon looked up at him, tremendously touched and moved, sensing the enormous courage it had taken for Andrew to say this. An outsider; and he had come so far. Knowing that Andrew had gone more than halfway to heal the rift he had made, he touched him lightly on the wrist, the feather-touch telepaths used among themselves to intensify closeness. He said, very gently, “And I’ll try and remember that this is still strange to you. You are so much one of us now that I forget to make allowances. And now enough of that. There is work to be done. I must look everywhere in the archives of Armida to find if there is any record of the old Year’s End festival before the Ages of Chaos and the burning of Neskaya. Failing that, I must look in the records of all the other Towers, and some of that must be done through the telepath relays. I cannot travel to Arilinn and to Neskaya and to ‘Dalereuth, but truly, I think now that we will some day have the answer.”

He began to tell Andrew about it. He still felt weary and depressed, the residual fatigue from the long overworld journey overwhelming him with the inevitable reaction. He told himself that he must not blame Andrew for his own state of mind. It would be easier when they were all back to normal.

But at least, he thought, there was now something like a hope for that.