A Flame in Hali (3 page)

“Friend.”

Sound shaped into word, repeated now, along with a gentle shake of the shoulders. Eduin’s head felt as if it had swollen to several times its normal size, and with each pounding of his pulse, an answering jolt erupted behind his eyes. Hands slipped beneath his arms, lifting him. He opened his mouth to protest, for the slightest movement only intensified his headache. He realized his eyes were still closed, and a bright light shone directly on his face.

Day.

He mumbled a curse. It had been day when he found oblivion beneath the tavern bench, but now it was day again. Probably not the same one, but he neither knew nor cared.

“Come on, sit up, that’s the way,” came the voice again.

Thought came slowly, as if the cheap ale still flooded his veins. Somehow, he found himself on his feet, eyes slitting against the brightness. He made out the blurred shape of a man—one head, two arms, two legs—enough to convince him this was probably real and not another drunken hallucination.

“Aldones, you stink,” the stranger said. “But you’re soaking wet and I can’t let you stay out here. Night’s coming on. It’ll be a cold one, enough to freeze Zandru’s bones.”

To freeze. It was a painless death, he’d heard. To sleep and never wake, not with some interfering stranger yammering at him. It sounded wonderful.

No more forcing down ale so raw a dog wouldn’t touch it, guzzling the stuff until the knot in his belly finally eased and the voice in his head fell silent. No more petty, demeaning jobs or stealing small coins, begging for the next round. He’d long since ceased to care about a bed or food or the taunts of the gutter urchins. The only thing that mattered was the next drink, and the next. And stillness, blessed stillness.

His body was moving now, partly by its own reflexes, partly propelled by the gentle, uncompromising hands. About him, an alley came into focus. He didn’t recognize it; he could have been anywhere in the poorer areas of Thendara. Or Dalereuth or Arilinn, for that matter.

No, not Arilinn. For in that place, he could not hide. They would know him, no matter how dirty or drunk he was. They would know his mind, the
leronyn
of the Tower. Even with the psychic shields that long ago had become as automatic as breath, they would know him because he had once been one of them.

Here in the anonymous squalor of Darkover’s largest city, no one would think to look for him. Here he could drown himself in a river of ale. No one would know if he lived or died. No one would care. Only in the bitter winter would some passerby or alehouse keeper pull a nameless drunkard out of the snow, for no one could survive such nights.

“We’re almost there,” said the voice.

“Wh—where?” His voice came out in a croak.

He felt rather than saw the stranger’s smile. “Someplace safe.”

They passed between two buildings, deep in shadow. A wind, ice-tipped, gusted down the narrow space. It would snow again tonight. His body shivered, and he thought how he might crawl into a drift and pull it over himself like a blanket of costly wool, gather it to him until it turned warm and dreamy. He would have to be thoroughly drunk to do it, almost in a stupor, or the pressure in his head would stop him. He had tried several times to seek permanent oblivion, but each time, his second conscience, like an old and evil companion, kept him alive, chained to its own purposes.

A door swung open and warmer air surrounded him. He put out one hand to catch his balance and touched the cracked, weather-splintered planks. Inside, light flared. He staggered free of the stranger’s grasp and slumped into a crudely wrought chair.

He was in some sort of servants’ quarters, an old scullery perhaps, though he could not make out anything beyond a rickety table along one wall. A pitcher, its rim cracked and jagged, sat beside an equally decrepit bowl. He couldn’t make out the rest of the room’s contents without turning his head, and that meant risking another wave of nauseating pain.

“Drink,” he pleaded, gesturing with one hand.

The stranger bent over him, and it seemed a mantle of blue light rested across his shoulders. The hood of his cloak hid his face. He placed one hand on Eduin’s forehead.

Eduin woke again to a dim, watery light. He had been drifting in and out of strange, restless dreams in which faceless men pursued him, and each time he tried to hide, he was discovered. Now he lay on a crude pallet on the floor of a room that should have been strange, but felt familiar.

Aside from his physical discomforts, the urgency of his bladder and the thick cottony film in his mouth, he could not remember a time when he felt more at ease. More inwardly still. It was as if a voice that had been raging at him, night and day, had suddenly fallen quiet.

He sat up, his spine crackling, muscles stiff. The light came through a window, layers of oiled cloth instead of glass. A candle, thick and irregular, shone from the other side of the room. On the floor beside his pallet, he spied a mug. It contained water rather than wine or even rotgut ale, but he drank it down. There was a faint lemony taste that cleared his head and eased the dryness of his throat. It gave him the strength to haul himself to his feet, to the door and outside. The drifted snow burned his bare feet. The alley was deserted, and he discovered with some surprise that this mattered to him. He relieved himself against the side of the building.

As quickly as he could, he scurried back inside. There was no fireplace, only a small stone brazier filled with ashes. Still, the walls kept out the worst of the wind.

Heartened, he explored his surroundings. The pitcher contained more of the lemony water, and beside it was bread, only slightly moldy on one side, and hard cheese. He could not remember when he had last eaten. Chewing slowly, he finished it all, except for the moldy part. Once he would have eaten that, too, but now the smell disgusted him.

Several circuits of the room revealed no trace of its owner’s personal effects. The floor was bare wood, stained and gritty with dried mud. The sleeping pallet was of the poorest sort, layers of straw and blankets too tattered for any other use, laid over a frame of wooden slats to keep it off the floor. The back of the door bore a row of wooden pegs, some broken off like rotten teeth, and here his own jacket hung. The worst of the surface filth had been brushed off and the padding stuck out in threadbare patches. He found his boots shoved into a corner. As he pulled them on, he reflected that for all appearances, the room was his, and yet he had no memory of ever being here before. Certainly, if he had come upon the few
reis
for rent, he would long since have spent them at the ale shops.

Again, he remarked on the clearness of his head and the unwonted silence in his mind. He felt no craving for drink, although there was every reason why he should. His memory presented him with numberless mornings in which his first and only thought was how he was going to get drunk again. In his time in Thendara and before that on the road, he had known many men who lived as he had, stumbling from one stupor to the next. They swore the only cure for the nausea, the headaches, and the nightmarish visions was more of the same.

Eduin had never drunk to escape the aftermath of drinking. This was what he had sought, this blessed stillness. Was it some property of this room, although it seemed ordinary and shabby? He saw no trace of a telepathic damper. From experience, he knew how useless a damper was against his inner tormentor. Properly attuned, it would keep psychic energy from entering or emanating from the room. It could not protect him from what already lay within his own mind. He had used one when he lived in a Tower, first at Arilinn, where he was trained, and later at Hali for a brief time, and then Hestral until its destruction.

Hali. Only a short half-day’s ride from Thendara, it might have been on another world. At the far end of the city, at the foot of the mysterious cloud-filled lake, a Tower lifted toward the heavens, a finger of graceful alabaster. In it, as in every other Tower, psychically-Gifted men and women joined their minds to work unimaginable feats, everything from the creation of weapons to the healing of hurts. Relays sent messages across the reaches of plain and mountain;
laran-
charged batteries powered aircars, lighted palaces, and guarded the secrets of kings.

Hali.
She
had once been there. Might still be, for all he knew.

Pain washed through him, but not from any physical cause.

Eduin sank down on the pallet and buried his face in his hands. His breath came ragged as he struggled for the control he had learned in his years as a
laranzu,
a master of the psychic force called
laran.
Images flashed behind his closed eyes, bits of memory he had washed away with the bottle. The pale translucent stone walls that created the sense of light and endless space . . . the ever-restless mists of Lake Hali . . . Dyannis warm and supple in his arms.

Sweet and bitter, feelings he had thought long dead stirred in him—longing and loss and things he could not put a name to. He lay back upon the pallet. Soundless weeping racked him. Some long time later, it seemed that someone held him, rocked him, stroked his matted hair.

Again, he slept.

He wandered through a dreamy landscape of gently rolling hills and a knoll overlooking a river. Although he could not remember ever having been here before, something about the place tugged at his heart. The air was almost luminous, the warmth hypnotic. Time itself seemed to be holding its breath. Tree branches stirred and dappled brilliance danced across his face. Around him drifted transparent shapes, like figures of the Overworld. They drifted in and out of his sight. He felt no sense of threat.

He thought he heard singing in sweet bell-like tones, so faint it might have been only the breeze through the leaves. Shapes took on substance. Out of the corners of his eyes, he glimpsed slender bodies and cascades of silvery hair. Eyes and skin glowed with colorless radiance, as if sculpted from moonlight.

No humans moved with such grace, for these people were
chieri,
of the race that was already ancient in the times lost to memory, when humans first came to Darkover. It was said that in the madness of the Ghost Wind, they left their forests to take human women as lovers, appearing as fair, proud elfin lords, and from that time, the blood of the
chieri
—and their
laran
—flowed through
Comyn
veins.

Their voices came clearer now as they sang through the slow, stately movements of their dance. Four moons swung through the pellucid sky, drenching it in multihued pastel light.

Part lament, part joy, the words resonated through Eduin. His body felt strangely light, as if the
chieri’s
song transmuted his mortal flesh into glass. He found himself moving among them, these people whom no man had seen for hundreds of years, known only by legend. Their blood flowed in his veins, sang in his
laran,
his very soul. They turned to him with those knowing, luminous eyes, and held out their hands in welcome.