A Flame in Hali (64 page)

Eduin staggered under the onslaught. Pain lanced through his head. He doubled over, clutching his belly. Silently, desperately, he fought back against the compulsion spell that wound all through his guts, entangled his very soul. He clung to the only weapon he had—the only shred of sanity—
Dyannis must live, no matter what the cost.

“Romilla, there is more to this than we previously realized—” Callina began.

“There is no time to waste!” Eduin gasped, hauling himself upright. “While we stand here bickering, the attack may already have begun. At least let me try to bring them back!”

“I have told you,” Callina said in a voice like the tolling of a bell, “there is nothing you or I or any of us can do.” Her eyes softened, and he saw in them the grief she had carried since she watched as her twin brother died in battle, that terrible powerlessness. She could not shut out the memory any more than she could burn away her own
laran
.

If Dyannis dies, I die with her.
He saw his father’s skeletal hands reach for him, trailing rotten flesh and shroud.

He grabbed Callina so roughly that she let out a shriek. “The Tower—the relay screens—take me there now!”

“Release her this instant!” Romilla cried. “How dare you lay hands upon a
leronis
! And to give her orders—insufferable! You shall be whipped for such behavior!”

Callina went rigid, staring at Eduin. The physical closeness created a psychic bond.

Who are you?
she cried.

For an instant he hesitated. Years of hiding, of drawing in upon himself, died hard. He could not bring himself to give her his true name.

I am a
laranzu
, trained at Arilinn Tower, and then at Hali.
Never mind Hestral, and all that had happened there, how he had plotted and brought about the death of Varzil’s Felicia, how he had bespelled the Hastur forces and then fled in Hestral’s destruction.
I seek only to save the life of one
leronis
at Hali. For this, I will storm your own Tower here, I will lie, I will kill anyone—even you—who stands in my way.

You will die.
The words flowed from her mind with quiet certainty. Behind her, another woman spread out her shadowy cloak.

I don’t care—just so long as
she
lives!

Callina pried his fingers from her shoulders. He could not resist her. “I will take you, although it will do no good. We are all of us caught up in this thing, and it will not release us until it has run its course.”

She led the way to the door. Romilla watched aghast for a moment, then rushed after them.

“I will not leave you alone with this madman!”

“We will see,” Callina shot back over her shoulder without missing a step, “who is truly mad.”

Corridors and stairwells sped past in a blur. Callina led them, not through the courtyard where they might be challenged by armed soldiers, but by an inner route. She used her
laran
to project a wall of force, clearing the way ahead of her. Her stride was so determined and her expression so fierce that no one, not even the household guards, challenged them. A few bowed before scurrying out of the way. If anyone spoke, Eduin paid them no heed.

They crossed over a small stretch of yard to the entrance to the Tower itself. A servant in Aillard livery hurried to open the massive outer doors. The wood was dark, almost black, inlaid with fine copper wire with the emblem of a gigantic eagle, wings outstretched. As he passed between the doors, Eduin remembered the old proverb about the prey that walks from the trap to the stewpot.

“Hurry!” Eduin urged Callina. She plunged on, with him on her heels and Romilla gamely following. Romilla had given up asking questions.

Inside, the central room of the Tower was smaller than he expected. It must have housed only a single circle and a small one at that, perhaps a half dozen.

Where is the Keeper?
he asked Callina.

You will not see him,
she replied with such a chill in her mental voice that he wondered for an instant if the Keeper were no longer alive. He did not have time to ask how a circle could function without one, for Callina crossed the room, gathered her skirts, and proceeded up a flight of circular stairs.

In every Tower Eduin had ever known, the working chambers were placed at the highest levels. This close to a bustling castle and city, the circle needed every degree of separation, of insulation. As he climbed, trying to avoid treading upon Callina’s skirts, he felt as if he were leaving the ordinary world behind.

Something waited at the top of the stairs, in the circular chamber at the very top of the Tower. For an instant, Eduin regretted his rash words. It was too late to draw back now.
It
was aware of him, drawing him in. His feet flew over the stairs. Behind him, Romilla started sobbing.

The stairs led to a shallow landing, with a wide slit window to one side and a door to the other. Callina, her chest heaving, took hold of the latch. The door opened inward on soundless hinges. Callina stood back and gestured Eduin forward.

“Go in.”

“The relay screens—”

“Are within.”

He had no choice. He had come too far to turn back.

E
duin’s first impression upon entering the top chamber was one of light and spaciousness, although the floor could not have been more than five or six paces across. The room was round, its unadorned walls following the contours of the turret itself. On the far side, a relay screen sat on a narrow table. A padded bench was drawn up beside it, ready for use.

An intricate metallic armature dominated the center of the room. Silver wires meshed to form a five-legged base, soaring upward, dividing and recombining so that the effect was a frozen, freestanding waterfall. Eduin recognized it as a housing for a matrix device. He had designed and built similar structures, arrays of starstones integrated into higher-order matrices. He knew how to link individual stones, to amplify their powers, to attune them to a particular use. It was such a device he had used to assassinate Felicia Hastur-Acosta.

He had never seen anything like this one before. Instead of resting on a table, it stood alone, reaching as high as his chest. Near the top, surrounded by a mesh of fine fibers, a single starstone had been set. It pulsed blue-white like the beating of a heart, filling the entire chamber with its brilliance. Instinctively, he recoiled from it.

Callina caught him before he could retreat. Her fingers dug into his arms like grappling hooks. With preternatural strength and quickness, she whirled him around to face the matrix.

How could he have been so credulous as to think her a weak maiden, still grieving over the death of her brother—if that had not also been an illusion. At this moment, he would have believed her capable of anything.

Once he had seen resin-trees, caught in a wildfire, send sparks like a horde of glowing eyes into the night sky before the white-gold flames engulfed them. So now her mind, her entire being, flared hotter than any smithy’s furnace.

Before him, the blue light of the starstone intensified. Within its shifting radiance, he sensed a stirring, part psychoactive crystal, part intelligence . . . part hunger. He struggled against Callina’s grasp, but it was no use. His flesh had gone heavy and numb.

What—what is that thing?
And what did it want with him?

Behind him, Romilla whimpered, “What are you doing? What’s happening?”

“Silence!” Callina’s voice, raucous as the cry of a
kyorebni,
shot out. She brought her mouth close to Eduin’s ear. “You know what it is. You know what it wants.”

If his father’s spirit had placed itself into a starstone and condensed all his determination into that crystal lattice, it might have resembled the device Eduin now faced. Only this one was no mere repository of past hatreds; it
sensed
him.

Now he knew why no one had seen the Keeper of Valeron Tower, why the few
leronyn
went mutely about their duties.

The Keeper’s crystal blazed with light. It perceived his nearness, his Gift. Within the depths of his mind, the compulsion command left by his father shrieked out in warning. The crystal vibrated with desire. Like a double image to its brightness, a figure cloaked in shadow stretched out ethereal fingers.

You feel it, don’t you—the curse upon this place?
Callina’s thought jittered across the roiling chaos of his mind.
They sent me here out of concern for my health, or so they told me. A place of safety, they promised! They told me it would be an easy position with nothing more troubling than making possets for babes with the colic. The Lady was kind, and Valeron at peace. No more bloody battles, no more deaths! I could rest and recover my strength, and yet still be of service.

Her mind slammed into his, and for an instant, he watched as a young girl, her brother’s death still raw and fresh in her memory, climbed the stairs to meet her new Keeper. She followed a gray-robed
laranzu,
his hair white, his face incised with lines she assumed were caused by suffering. She thought his absence of telepathic overture was a gesture of respect for her sorrow. She did not yet know how wrong she was.

Callina had stood, even as Eduin did now, gazing at the starstone in its silver mantle and wondering where the Keeper was. Confusion fell away as she sensed the adamantine will encased in crystal, the depth of craft and ingenuity.

The Keeper was here, not in body, but in mind, preserved and sustained in the matrix device. Callina had no idea how long he had been there, perhaps from the height of the Ages of Chaos. There had been no limit to the
laran
experimentation in those days. Perhaps a few extraordinarily powerful
leronyn
had managed to cheat death in this fashion. Fascinated and horrified, she had drawn closer to the crystalline array and watched it brighten at her approach.

The Keeper’s consciousness, part human, part something else, had brushed hers. Years, decades, centuries past unfolded before her.

Long life and
chieri
blood had given the ancient Keeper knowledge of many things that were now but whispered legends. He had been alive a millennium ago, when men dreamed of reaching out into the depths of space with their
laran,
of delving into the very germs of life, of creating talismans to control fire.

As his body failed, he lingered in the twilight shores of death, this Keeper who had outlived his own name. He waited and watched for a successor, someone to carry on his vision, perhaps even someone whose mind he might overshadow, giving him a new life. The wisdom he had won at such hard cost must not be forgotten.

The men who attended him were too small and brittle to contain him; their minds would break under the strain. More and more, he withdrew into his starstone, seeking the perfection of its unchanging, inanimate structure. His circle gathered, and from the stone, he commanded their linked minds.

At last, he knew he could not hold his own death at bay any longer. He was too decrepit by now to even speak. Commanding his circle through his starstone, he directed the construction of a lattice to amplify his mental patterns. Accustomed to unthinking obedience, they hurried to comply. As he felt the last of his life energy dwindle, the Keeper gazed on the device of his immortality. It would sustain him until he could find another living mind to take for his own.

Older
leronyn
died or moved away, and the younger ones, fewer each year, never questioned his absence. At his direction, they willingly poured their mental energies into charging
laran
batteries for aircars and glow-globes.

Unimaginable years later, Callina, newly come to Valeron, had faced the Keeper’s starstone. In its pattern, she had sensed a desperation turned to despair. It had at last found a mind with the necessary strength and pliability—but that mind belonged to a woman!

A useless woman!
stormed the Keeper. Yet, she might serve some purpose. On the brink of thrusting her away, it paused. She might not be able to serve as Keeper, but her life-force could feed his.

In her dreams, it battened upon her like a ghastly leech, feeding off her vitality. From that day forward, she was no better than a chained prisoner. The Keeper’s mind permitted her to go as far as the castle, but not beyond. As she slept, it pillaged her memory. In particular, it fed upon her memories of the battle—the pain, the fear, the killing rage. The blood.

Sometimes she thought she would go mad. She considered taking her own life, but even as she drew her dagger, she knew she could not. If only . . . if only she could give the Keeper what it wanted, it might release her.

Then two strangers arrived, in the entourage of a minor Aillard lord. Rumors had flown before them, stories of healing miracles. She had scoffed at such tales, until she had felt the euphoric touch of the Blessed Sandoval. For the first time since she had come to Valeron, she felt the faint stirrings of hope.

In an unguarded moment, she sensed a trained mind on hers, with power enough to mask her own perceptions for a time. Sandoval’s
laran
was soporific, balm to her tattered nerves. His singing might have even made her life here endurable. But Eduardo, who masqueraded as his brother, was something more. She did not care why he hid who he really was, or what crime he had committed, why he wandered the length of Darkover in such strange company.

Here he is!
she shrieked at the thing in the crystal.
The Keeper you have been waiting for! Take him and let me go!

Too late, Eduin saw his own danger. How could he have missed the subtle wrongness? No one had seen the Keeper . . . he never left the Tower. . . .

He had been so caught up in his own mission, building the case against Varzil, always Varzil, always his father’s whispering voice,
K-k-kill ...