Zandru's Forge (55 page)

Gavin! Lerrys! I need you!
Varzil sent a mental call to the two strongest technicians in the Tower, with a single mental image of what he wanted to do.

He had never been athletic, and by the time he reached the level of the relay chamber, his breath was rasping through his lungs and he’d broken into a hard sweat.

When he shoved the door open, hands trembling, Cerriana was already rising from her place before the relay screens.

“Varzil! What’s wrong?”
Are you ill? Injured?

“It’s Felicia! Something terrible has happened. Cerriana, you must send me through the relays to Hestral Tower.”

“Varzil, I cannot! That hasn’t been done since the Ages of Chaos! We are not nearly strong enough—”

“We have to be strong enough!”

Ah! Gavin is on the way, and Lerrys
—
And 1.
Valentina Aillard stepped through the door. She wore the white robe of a monitor, yet some trick of light, perhaps catching the intense flame color of her hair, tinted the garment red. She looked as fragile as always, slender and pale as a
chieri
of legend, yet the very air around her vibrated with power, steel and silk rather than oak.

Gavin burst into the room an instant later, with Darriel Alton and Richardo on his heels. “Lerrys caught a backlash earlier tonight. Fidelis dosed him with kirian and he’s sleeping it off. Are we enough?”

Varzil, his eyes still on Valentina, nodded. Darriel and Richardo were both highly competent, schooled in Arilinn’s demanding standards.

“I will tell the folk at Hestral to make ready,” Cerriana said.

Using the relay screens as a focus, they placed themselves at equidistant points surrounding Varzil. In an instant, he gathered them into that seamless whole which was a circle. He had worked with all of them before, although less often with Valentina. With the proper training, he realized, she herself could have acted as Keeper of this circle. He wondered if Felicia’s experiment would put an end to the effort to train women as Keepers.

Varzil’s skin tingled with the electrical fields of the workers. Each shimmered like a focal point of swirling power. The screen crackled with energy.

He drew upon the forces surging through the circle and shaped them into a cone of power with himself at the apex. At the same time, he felt an answering resonance in the relay screens hundreds of leagues away, in Hestral Tower. Vision faded as senses overloaded and the reek of ozone filled his nostrils. His awareness of his body drained away, replaced by a flare of energy so bright and potent that for that instant, he seemed to be composed of lightning.

Ice shuddered through him. He gasped, but his lungs drew in no air. A piercing crack and jolt of sound tossed him like a broken doll. It faded to a vast singing silence.

Nausea swept through him and suddenly he had a body again and was kneeling on a stone floor.

“Varzil? Varzil of Arilinn?”

A woman bent over him, the monitor he had glimpsed from Felicia’s shattered telepathic communication. He opened his mouth to reply, sucked in air. The room turned gray and cold around the edges. He tried to rise, but found he had barely the strength to hold up his head.

“It’s all right,” she said, and introduced herself as Oranna MacLean. “The energy drain of traveling through the relays is extreme, but there is nothing wrong with you that food and rest cannot cure. I have studied the procedure in the records.”

As he followed her gaze, he saw more of the room. He recognized it as a relay chamber very much like the one he had left, yet with the differences of architecture, the placement of the screens, the minor ornamental touches, which assured him that he was no longer at Arilinn. The workers who had gathered around him, masking their curiosity under a discreet distance, were strangers.

Varzil accepted a plate of the familiar, heavily-sweetened food suitable for strenuous
laran
work, nut candies and honey-laced dried fruit. His body responded with a rush of mental clarity.

“What need prompted you to travel at such risk?” Oranna asked.

“Not that we are unhappy to see you, but our own Keeper, Loryn Ardais, cannot welcome you properly or, I am afraid, give you any immediate aid. We have a crisis of our own—”

Varzil found his voice. “Where is Felicia? What has happened to her?”

“Oh, Varzil, it was such a terrible accident!” Oranna replied. “Come, if you are able to walk now, and you will see for yourself.”

Varzil was still weak enough to appreciate a shoulder to lean upon, especially when negotiating the stairs. The matrix laboratory had clearly been constructed for some other purpose and later remodeled. Panels of oiled wood partly covered the red stone walls. A worktable dominated the center of the room, and on it sat the shattered ruin of a matrix lattice. Parts of it remained intact, the crystals catching the light like tiny bits of stars. Blackened powder covered one side. A few robed workers stood just inside the door and in one corner a youth scarcely out of boyhood huddled on the floor, weeping. Beyond him—

She lay on the floor beside the worktable, covered by a blanket. A man in the crimson robes of a Keeper crouched at her head, his back to Varzil.

For a heart-stopping moment, Varzil feared he had come too late, that she was already dead. He could not sense her mind and her body appeared as inert as clay.

The Keeper looked up. In the light of the glows, his hair looked black, his eyes pools of shadow. The lineaments of his features conveyed a quick mind, a deep and abiding curiosity.

“Varzil of Arilinn?”

“Vai tenerézu.”
Varzil replied, bowing. To his surprise, his voice did not tremble. “What happened here?”

“I have stablized her as best I can. We will bring her down to the infirmary for a more thorough examination.”

Varzil flinched. But
she still lives!

Varzil, despite his fatigue, insisted upon helping to carry Felicia. Her flesh felt warm and resilient. She was lighter than he’d expected, as if the greater part of her substance had been burned away. Her face was very pale except for the faintest brush of rose across her cheeks, yet her lips curled softly. There was no terror in her expression. The few faint lines that marked her skin only added to her character.

From the placement of its windows, the infirmary had once been a solarium, which now looked out upon darkness. Oranna arrived before them, arranging a cot in the center of the room with ample space for a circle to gather. Around her stood a group of workers, some robed for
laran
work. One of them was Eduin.

Varzil lowered Felicia to the table. “I will take care of her.”

“You will do nothing of the sort,” Loryn said. “You are not yet recovered from your own transit through the screens.”

Loryn had the least invasive psychic presence Varzil had ever experienced, an extraordinary self-sufficiency and flexibility without any apparent need to impose his will on any other. Varzil liked him immediately. He lowered his
laran
barriers, just as if Loryn were his own Keeper.

Ah!
Loryn replied telepathically.
Such is the bond you and Felicia shared. We, too, hold her dear. You did well to come to us. No one who loves her so deeply should be deprived of the chance to bid her farewell.

“She still lives,” Varzil repeated aloud, conscious of how stubborn he sounded. “There must yet be hope.”

“There is always hope,” Loryn agreed. “Come now, let our monitor do her work. I will assist her, but you must not interfere. You are much too close emotionally to Felicia to be objective.”

Reluctantly, Varzil agreed. He himself had said very much the same thing upon occasion. Powerful emotions, love or hate, jealousy or anger, garbled perceptions and warped judgment. Married couples were not allowed to work in the same circle at Arilinn. The demands of celibacy from the intense psychic work were too great for most relationships. He and Felicia had both been Tower-trained before they met; they understood the physical limitations as the natural price of the use of their talents.

As he looked down at Felicia’s tranquil face, Varzil realized that the core of their relationship was neither romantic nor sexual, although these aspects, when they could be enjoyed, were certainly pleasurable. They shared a sympathy of spirit that transcended the flesh.

I will never know anyone like her again,
he found himself thinking, and then recoiled. Surely, she would recover with such competent care. She must.

He stepped back even as Eduin moved to his side. “Varzil, I am sorry to see you again under these circumstances. You are most welcome, though you have come to Hestral at a dark hour.”

Varzil had not expected such kindness. “I did not know you were here at Hestral. We heard only that you had gone to Hali after your visit home. How does your father?”

“He has recovered, thank you. During my time at Hali, I had the chance to consider my own future. Arilinn trained me well, but left me with little room to develop myself. Here at Hestral, there are no such limitations.”

Eduin smiled at Varzil, his eyes steady, his psychic aura unblemished. Perhaps, Varzil thought, he had at last found the place where he no longer needed to hold himself apart, to conceal who he truly was.

Varzil was weaving with exhaustion when, a short time later, an elderly man entered, introduced himself as
coridom
of the Tower, and said that a guest room had been prepared. Hestral Tower had no wards such as Arilinn with its Veil that forbade the entry of non
-Comyn.
Men and women from the village came in daily to clean and cook.

The
coridom
shuffled along the hallways, leading Varzil past the rest of the living quarters to a narrow, poorly lit chamber. Mustiness tinged the air, as if it had been little used, although the bedding was quite clean and the meal laid out on a tray set on the chest of drawers steamed with appetizing aromas. Varzil gulped down the food, scarcely tasting it, and tumbled into bed.

He woke some hours later, ravenously hungry. From the light sifting through the single window, he guessed the time to be an hour or two past sunrise, not more. After several wrong turns, he made his way to the infirmary, where he found Loryn and Oranna beside Felicia’s bed.

“Varzil, I am so sorry.” Oranna’s voice was as thin and gray as her cheeks. “We tried everything we could.”

A shimmering field of
laran
energy surrounded Felicia’s still form. Up close, it was fully transparent, with only a hint of scintillation to betray its presence. All color had drained from her cheeks, leaving only a waxen mask. Varzil watched the shallow, hesitant rise and fall of her chest.

“Yes,” Loryn said, “her heart beats, her lungs breathe. This much we have been able to do, but for how long, we cannot say. She took an immensely powerful stream of energy through her body. Not even her spinal reflexes survived intact. Worst of all, her
laran
centers have been badly damaged.”

So even if she recovered
—Varzil reined in his thoughts. “Surely with time and skilled
laran
healing—” he began.

Oranna shook her head. “I have seen several such cases, and have never found any documentation in the medical records of a true recovery. Certainly not from this severe an injury.” She went on, a little defensively, for she looked much too young to have any depth of experience, “I was fostered near Temora, where there have been a number of outlaw circles over the years. They work without the safeguards of a Tower and take all manner of risks. And too often pay the price. There was one woman—I cringe to name her
leronis
—who was able to keep working. I don’t know how she did it, but I was never part of her Nest and so not privy to the details. I suspect—and Loryn agrees—that her injuries were not as severe as she put about, that she used the circumstance of the accident to her own advantage.”

“That is no justification,” Varzil said tightly, “to abandon Felicia without trying.”

“I have already done my best for her,” the healer responded in a pale, taut voice. She pressed her lips together, holding back tears, wavering on the edge of exhaustion.

“We will have no dissension among ourselves,” Loryn said. The gentleness of his voice masked his sorrow.

She is indeed gone, my friend,
came Loryn’s telepathic
voice. Believe me, we have done all that could be done. Do you think you were the only one who loved her, who would do whatever was necessary to have her back in our midst? We must face reality. Her brain is damaged past repair. All we have been able to do is to keep her body alive.

Varzil closed his eyes as grief washed over him. It came as a wave, built to a peak that left him shivering, and then subsided. Loryn asked his permission to release the energy fields that maintained Felicia’s life.