The Sword of Aldones

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Aillard rooms were spacious and brilliant; shimmering walls diffused delicate colors over Callina, who knelt on the floor, playing with a little striped beast from the rainforests. It leaped on her shoulder, purring, and flickering two-toed claws in and out of her silk sleeves.

Linnell was seated near her, a harp laid flat across her knees, and Regis standing beside Linnell; but they all sensed my presence at once. Linnell put the harp aside and Callina rose hastily, putting the kitten-thing on the floor and pulling at her skirts; but I went to her and took her in my arms. She would never know how precious she had made herself to me by that glimpse of a self less guarded, less aloof. I held her a moment, then the old frustration slipped back, thrusting like an unsheathed sword between us. Careful.

She evaded me by speaking of Linnell. “Poor child, I’m afraid she and Derik have quarreled. She loves him—”

“It’s who you love that interests me!” I interrupted.

She said, “I am Keeper — and comynara!”

“Comynara!” I suppose I sounded as bitter as I felt. “The Comyn would write your death warrant as soon as your marriage, if it would serve any cause!”

“If it would serve any cause, I would write my own,” she said steadily. My arms strained about her.

“Are you going to let them sell you?” I flung the words at her like a curse. “What do we owe the Comyn? They’ve played hell with our lives since we were born!”

“Lew, I don’t think you understand. I was mad, to let you think we could ever belong to each other. We can’t. Not ever.” Her hands went out, blindly, to push me away. “I can marry Beltran — and still keep my power to aid you, and the Comyn — because — because only because I do not love him. Do you understand?”

I did. I let her go and stood back, looking at her in consternation. Matrix work, for a man, has its frustrating aspects. But I had never stopped to think — more accurately I had never cared a damn — what particular refinements of. hellish-ness it might have for a woman. But before I could break out with the outrage I felt, she turned to Regis.

“Ashara has sent for us. Are you coming?”

“Not now,” he said. Regis had changed, in only a few hours; he seemed older, hardened somehow. He smiled in the old easy way, but I was not wholly comfortable in his presence. It hurt to realize that Regis was keeping himself barriered from me, but in a way it was a relief.

A servant folded Callina in a wrap like a gray shadow. As we went out, and down the staircase, Linnell stood between the panels of curtain, watching us, smiling. The colored lights, spilling over her pale dress, made her a rainbow statuette in a golden aureole; suddenly, for an-instant, vague unrest crystallized and fell together into one of those flashes of prevision which touch a telepath in moments of stress.

Linnell was doomed!

“Lew, what’s the matter?”

I blinked. Already the certainty, that sick instant when my mind had slid off the time-track, was fading. The confusion, the sense of tragedy, remained. When I looked up again, the curtains had dropped shut and Linnell was gone;

Outside, a thin fine rain was falling. The lights had faded in the old city, dark in the lee of the cliff below; but further out, in the Terran Zone, a neon glare of wet orange and red and green streaked the night sky with garish colors. I looked over the low wall.

“I would like to be down there tonight,” I said wearily. “Or anywhere away from this hell’s castle.”

“Even in the Terran Zone?”

“Even in the Terran Zone.”

“Why aren’t you, then? No one keeps you here, if that is where you would rather be.”

I turned to Callina. Her cobweb cloak spun out winglike on the wind; her hair blew, like a fine spray, about her face. I turned my back on the distant lights and pulled her close. A moment she held herself away from me, then suddenly she clung wildly, her lips frantic under mine, her arms gripping me with desperate dread. When we pulled apart, she was shaking like a young leaf.

“What now, Lew? What now?”

I gestured violently at the glare of neon. “The Terran Zone. Confront the Comyn with an accomplished fact, and let them find themselves another pawn to play with.”

Slowly, the spark faded in her eyes. Turning her back on the city, she pointed at the distant ridge of the mountains, and again the illusion came; thin white smoke, strange fire…

“Sharra’s fires burn there, still, Lew. You are no freer than I.”

I put my arm around her, returning by slow degrees to sane acceptance. The rain was icy cold on our faces; we turned and went silently toward the dark mass of the tower.

The wind, broken in its sweep by the angles of the castle, flung little spits and slashes of rain at us. We passed through walled courts and pillared passages, and finally stopped before a dark arch. Callina drew me forward, and a shaft began to rise.

Ashara’s Tower — so the story goes — was built for the first Keeper when Thendara was no more than a row of mud huts huddled under Nevarsin peak. It belongs to the strange days before our world writhed in earthquakes and cast off her four spinning moons. The smell of centuries hung between the musty walls with the shadows that slipped past, flitting into darkness. We rose and rose. At last the shaft halted and we stood before a carven door of glass. Not a curtain or panel of light. A door.

We stepped into blueness. Uncanny lights so mirrored and prismed the room that it seemed to have no dimension; to be at once immense and confined. The shimmer of blue glistened in the air, ,and under our feet; it was like swimming in blue waters or in the fire of a blue jewel.

“Come here,” said a low voice, clear as winter water running under ice. “I am waiting for you.”

Then and only then could my eyes focus enough in the frosty dayshine, to make out a great throne of carven glass; and the figure of a woman, seated on the throne. A straight tiny figure, almost as small as a child, in robes which so absorbed and mirrored the light that she appeared transparent.

“Ashara,” I whispered, and bent my head before the Sorceress of the Comyn.

Her pale features, innocent of wrinkles as Callina’s own, seemed almost fleshlessly pure. But they were old for all that, so old that even wrinkles had been smoothed away by the hand of time. The eyes, long and large, were colorless too, although in a normal light they might have been blue. There was a faint, indefinite resemblance between the two Keepers, nevertheless; as if Ashara were a stylized portrait of Calh’na, or Callina an embryo Ashara, not yet what Ashara was but one day to become so.

And I began to believe that she was immortal indeed, as they whispered; that she had lived on Darkover since before the coming of the Sons of Light.

She said softly, “So you have been beyond the stars, Lew Alton?”

It would not be fair to say the voice was unkind. It was not human enough for that. It only sounded as if the effort of conversing with actual, living persons, was too much for her; as if our life disturbed the cool crystalline peace that should always reign here. Callina, accustomed to this — or so I suppose — answered gently.

“You see all things, Mother. You know what we have seen.”

A flicker of life crossed the ancient face. “No, not even I can see all things. And you refused my only chance to aid you, Callina. You know I have no power now, outside this place.” Her voice had more vitality now, as if she were wakening to our living presence.

Callina’s head bowed low. “Yet aid me with your wisdom, Ashara,” she whispered. The ancient sorceress smiled remotely.

“Tell me,” she said.

We sat together on a carven glass bench at Ashara’s feet, and told her of the events of the last few days. I asked her at last, “Can you duplicate the Sharra matrix?”

“Even I cannot alter the laws of matter and energy,” she said. “Yet, I wish you knew less Terran science, Lew.”

“Why?”

“Because, knowing, you look for explanations. Your mind would be steadier if you could call them Gods, demons, sacred talismans, as the Comyn did long ago. Sharra — a demon? No more than Aldones is a God,” she said, and smiled. “Yet they are living entities, of a kind. Nor are they good or evil, though they may seem so in their contacts with men. What says the old legend?”

Callina whispered, “Sharra was bound in chains, by the Son of Hastur, who was the Son of Aldones, who was the Son of Light…”

“Ritual,” I said impatiently. “Superstition!”

The still old face turned to me. “You think so? What do you know of the Sword of Aldones?”

I swallowed. “It is — the weapon against Sharra,” I said. “I suppose it’s a matrix, and, like the Sharra one, it’s set in a sword for camouflage.”

It was a hypothetical discussion anyhow, and I -said so. The Sword of Aldones was in the rhu fead, the holy place of the Comyn, and might as well have been in another Galaxy.

There are things like that on Darkover. They can’t be destroyed; but they are so powerful, and so deadly dangerous, even the Comyn, or the Keepers, can’t be trusted with them.

The rhu fead was so keyed and so activated by matrices that no one can enter it but the Comyn who have been sealed into council. It is physically impossible for an outsider to get inside without stripping his mind bare. By the time he got through the force-layer, he would be an imbecile without enough directive power to know why he had come.

But inside — the Comyn of a thousand years ago had put them out of our own reach. They are guarded in the opposite fashion. No Comyn can touch them. An outsider could have picked them up freely, but no Comyn can come near the force-field surrounding them.

I said, “Every unscrupulous Comyn for three hundred generations has been trying to figure that one out.”

“But none of them have had a Keeper on their side,” Callina said. She looked at Ashara. “A Terran?”

“Perhaps,” Ashara said. “At least, an outsider. Not a Terran born on Darkover, with a mind adjusted to the forces here, but a real alien. Such a one would pass where we never could. His mind would be locked off and sealed against those forces, because he wouldn’t even know they were there.”

“Fine,” I said. “All I have to do is go some fifty light years, and bring one back, without telling him anything about this planet, or what we want him for, and hope he has enough telepathic talent to co-operate with us.”

Ashara’s colorless eyes held a flicker of scorn. “You are a matrix technician. What about the screen?”

Abruptly, I remembered the strange, shimmering screen I had seen in Callina’s matrix laboratory. So it was one of the legendary psychokinetic transmitters, then? Vaguely, I began to see what they were aiming at. To transmit matter, animate or inanimate, instantaneously through space —

“That hasn’t been done for hundreds of years!”

“I know what Callina can do,” Ashara said with her strange smile. “Now. You and Callina touched minds, at the council—”

“Surface contact. It exhausted us both.”

Ashara nodded. “Because all your energy — and hers — went into maintaining the contact. But I could put the two of you into focus as you and Marius were linked.”

I whistled soundlessly. That was drastic; normally only the Altons can endure that deep focus.

“The Altons — and the Keepers.”

I looked dubiously at Callina, but her eyes were averted. I understood; that sort of rapport is the ultimate intimacy. I wasn’t any too eager myself. I had my own private hell that would not bear the light of day; could I open it for Callina’s clear seeing?

Callina’s hand twitched in a shuddering denial.

“No!”

The refusal hurt. If I could steel myself to this, why should she refuse?

“I will not!” There was anger in her voice, but terror, too. “I am mine — I belong to myself — No one, no one, least of all you, shall violate that!”

I was not sure whether she spoke to me or to Ashara,, but I tried to calm her with tenderness. “Callina, do this for me? We can’t be lovers yet, but you can belong to me this way—”

I needed her so, why did she go rigid in my arms as if my touch were shameful? She sobbed wildly, stormily. “I can’t, I won’t, I can’t! I thought I could, but I cannot!” She faced Ashara at last, her face white, burning. “You made me so — I’d give my life if I had never seen you, I’d die to be free of you, but you made me so, and I cannot change!”

“Callina—”

“No!” Her voice vibrated with passionate refusal. “You don’t know everything! You wouldn’t want it, either, if you knew!”

“Enough!” Ashara’s voice was a cold bell, recalling us to the silence in the tower; it seemed that even the flame in Callina’s eyes died. “Be it so, then; I cannot force it. I will do what I can.”

She rose from the glass throne. Her tiny, blue-ice form hardly reached to Callina’s shoulder. She looked up and met my eyes for the first time; and that icy, compelling stare swallowed me…

The room vanished. For a moment I looked on blank emptiness, like the starless chasms past the rim of the universe; a shadow among shadows, I drifted in tingling mist. Then a stream of force pulsed in me; deep in my brain a spark, a core waked to life, charging me with power that stung through my whole being. I could feel myself as a network of live nerves, a sort of lacework of living force.

Then, suddenly, a face sketched itself on my mind.

I cannot describe that face, although I know, now, what it was. I saw it three time, but there are no human words to describe it. It was beautiful beyond imagining; and it was terrible beyond all conception. It was not even evil. But it was damnable and damned. Only a fraction of a second it swam in my eyes, then it burned out in the darkness. But in that instant, I looked straight in at the gates of hell.

I struggled back to reality. I was in Ashara’s blue-ice tower room again. Again? Had I left it? I felt giddy and confused, disoriented; but Callina threw herself at me, and the convulsive pressure of her arms, the damp fragrance of her hair and her wet face against mine, brought me back to sanity.

Over her shoulder I saw that the carven throne was empty. “Where is Ashara?” I asked numbly.

Callina straightened, her sobs vanishing without trace. Her face held a sudden, uncanny stillness. “You had better not ask me,” she murmured. “You would never believe the answer.”

I frowned. I could only guess at the bond between the Keepers. Had we seen Ashara at all, or only her semblance? Had Callina seen that face?

Outdoors the lights had faded; we walked through the rainy courtyard and the echoing passages without once speaking. In Callina’s matrix laboratory it was warm; I pulled off my cloak, letting the heat soak into my chilled body and aching arm, while Callina busied herself adjusting the telepathic dampers. I crossed the room to the immense screen I had seen the day before, and stared, frowning, into its cloudy depths. Transmitter.

At its side, cradled in the silk shock-absorber, was the largest matrix I had ever seen. An ordinary matrix mechanic operates the first sis. levels. A telepath can manipulate the seventh and eighth. Sharra was ninth or tenth — I had never been sure — and demanded at, least three linked minds, one of them a telepath. I could not even guess at the level of this one.

Sorcery? Unknown laws of science? They were one. But the freak Gift born in my blood, a spark in my nerves — I was Comyn, and for such things as this the Comyn had been bred.

To explain the screen fully would be impossible outside the Comyn. It captured images. It was a duplicator; a trap for a desired pattern. An automatic assembly of a set of predetermined requisites — no, I can’t explain and I won’t try.

But with my telepathic force, augmented by the matrix, I could search, without space limitation, for such a mind as we wanted. Of all the billions of human and nonhuman minds in the million worlds in spacetime, somewhere was one exactly suited to our purpose, having a certain awareness — and a certain lack of awareness.

With the screen, we could attune that mind’s vibration to this sector in spacetime; here, now, between the poles of the screen. Then, space annihilated by the matrix, we could shift the energons of mind and body and bring them here.

My brain played with words like hyperspace and dimension-travel and matter-transmitter, but those were only words.

I dropped into the chair below the screen, bending to calibrate the controls to my own cerebral pattern. I fiddled fussily with the dial, not looking up. “You’ll have to cut out the monitor screen, Callina.”

She crossed the room and touched a series of studs; the bank of lights winked out, shunting every matrix on Dark-over out of this monitor. “There’s a bypass relay through the Arilinn tower,” she explained.

A grill crackled and sent out a tiny staccato signal. Callina listened a moment, then said, “Yes, I know, Maruca. But we have cut out the main circuits. You’ll have to hold the energons in Arilinn tonight.”

She waited; then rapped out, “Put up a third-level barrier around Thendara! That is a command from Comyn; acknowledge and comply!” She turned away, sighing.

“That girl is the noisiest telepath on the planet,” she said. “I wish any other Keeper had been at Arilinn tonight. There are a few who can cut through a third-level barrier, but if I asked for a fourth—” she sighed. I understood; a fourth-level barrier would have alerted every telepath on the planet to the fact that something was going on in the Comyn Castle.

We’d chance it. She took her place before the matrix, and I blanked my mind against the screen. I shut out sense impressions, reaching to adjust the psychokinetic waves into the pattern we wanted. What sort of alien would suit us? But without volition on my part, a pattern laid itself down.

I saw, in the instant before my optic nerve overloaded and went out, the dim symbols of a pattern in the matrix; then I went blind and deaf in that instant of overload that is always terrifying.

Gradually, without external senses, I found orientation in the screen. My mind, extended to astronomical proportions, swept incredible distances; traversed, in fractional seconds, whole parsecs and galaxies of subjective spacetime. There came vague touches of consciousness, fragments of thought, emotions that floated like shadows — the flotsam of the mental universe.

Then, before I felt contact, I saw the white-hot flare in the screen. Somewhere another mind had fitted into the pattern. We had cast it out through time and space, like a net, and when we met a mind that fitted, it had been snared.

I swung out, bodiless, divided into a billion subjective fragments, extended over a vast gulf of spacetime. If anything happened, I would never get back into my body, but would float in the spacetime curve forever.

With infinite caution, I poured myself into the alien mind. There was a short but terrible struggle; it was embedded, enlaced in mine. The world was a holocaust of molten-glass fire and color. The air writhed with cold flames, and the glow on the screen was a shadow and then a clearing darkness and then an image, captive in my mind, and then-Light tore at my eyes. A ripping shock slammed through my brain, the floor seemed to rock and the walls to crash together and apart, and Callina was flung, reeling, against me as the energons seared the air and my brain.

Half stunned, but conscious, I looked up at Callina. The alien mind was torn free of mine. The screen was blank.

And in a crumpled heap on the floor, at the base of the Screen, where she had fallen, lay a slender, dark-haired girl.