But Marius was up the steps, calling out in excitement as if he were younger than I remembered him.
“Andres! Andres!” and a moment later the old coridomfrom Armida, friend, tutor, foster-father, was staring at me in astonishment and welcome.
“Young Lew! I—” he stopped, in shock and sorrow, as he saw my scarred face, the missing hand. He swallowed, then said gruffly, “I’m glad you’re here.” He came and took my cloak, managing to give my shoulder an awkward pat of affection and grief. I suppose Marius had sent word about father; mercifully, he asked no questions, just said “I’ve told the housekeeper to get a room ready for you. You too, sir?” he asked Jeff, who shook his head.
“Thank you, but I am expected elsewhere—I am here as Lord Ardais’s guest, and I don’t think Lew is in any shape for any long family conferences tonight.” He turned to me and said, “Do you mind?” and held his hand lightly over my forehead in the monitor’s touch, the fingers at least three inches away, running his hand down over my head, all along my body. The touch was so familiar, so reminiscent of the years at Arilinn—the only place I could remember where I had been wholly happy, wholly at peace—that I felt my eyes fill with tears.
That was all I wanted— to go back to Arilinn. And it was forever too late for that. With the hells in my brain that would not bear looking into, with the matrix tainted by Sharra… no, they would not have me in a Tower now.
Jeff’s hand was solid under my arm; he shoved me down in a seat. Through the remnant of the drugs which had destroyed my control, I felt his solicitude, Andres’s shock at my condition, and turned to face them, clenching my hand, aware of phantom pain as by reflex I tried to clench the missing hand too; wanting to scream out at them in rage, and realizing that they were all troubled for me, worrying about me, sharing my pain and distress.
“Keep still, let me finish monitoring you.” When he finished Jeff said, “Nothing wrong, physically, except fatigue and drug hangover from that damned stuff the Terrans gave him. I don’t suppose you have any of the standard antidotes, Andres?” At the old man’s headshake he said dryly, “No, I don’t suppose they’re the sort of thing that one can buy in an apothecary shop or an herb-seller’s stall. But you need sleep, Lew. I don’t suppose there’s any raivanninin the house—”
Raivanninis one of the drugs developed for work among Tower circles, linked in the mind of a telepathic circle…There are others: Kirian, which lowers the resistance to telepathic contact, is perhaps the most common. Raivanninhas an action almost the opposite of that of Kirian. It tends to shut down the telepathic functions. They’d given it to me, in Arilinn, to quiet, a little, the torture and horror which I was broadcasting after Marjorie’s death… quiet it enough so that the rest of the Tower circle need not share every moment of agony. Usually it was given to someone at the point of death or dissolution, or to the insane, so that they would not draw everyone else into their inner torment—”
“No,” Jeff said compassionately. “That’s not what I mean. I think it would help you get a night’s sleep, that’s all. I wonder—There are licensed matrix mechanics in the City, and they know who I am; First in Arilinn. I will have no trouble buying it.”
“Tell me where to go,” said a young man, coming swiftly into the room, “and I will get it; I am known to many of them. They know I have laran. Lew—” he came around and stood directly before me. “Do you remember me?”
I focused my eyes with difficulty, saw golden-amber eyes, strange eyes… Marjorie’s eyes! Rafe Scott flinched at the agony of that memory, but he came up and embraced me. He said, “I’ll find some raivanninfor you. I think you need it.”
“What are you doing in the city, Rafe?” He had been a child when I had drawn him, with Marjorie, into the circle of Sharra. Like myself, he bore the ineradicable taint, fire and damnation… no! I slammed my mind shut, with an effort that turned me white as death.
“Don’t you remember? My father was a Terran, Captain Zeb Scott. One of Aldaran’s tame Terrans.” He said it wryly, with a cynical lift of his lip, too cynical for anyone so young. He was Marius’s own age. I was beyond curiosity now; though I had heard Regis describing what he had seen, and knew that he was Marius’s friend. He didn’t stay, but went out into the rainy night, shrugging a Darkovan cloak over his head.
Jeff sat on one side of me; Marius on the other. We didn’t talk much; I was in no shape for it. It took all my energy for me to keep from curling up under the impact of all this.
“You never did tell me, Jeff, how you came to be in the city.”
“Dyan came to bring me,” he said. “I don’t want the Domain and I told him so; but he said that having an extra claimant would confuse the issue, and stall them until Kennard could return. I don’t think he was expecting you.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t,” Marius said.
“That’s all right, brother, I can live without Dyan’s affection,” I said. “He’s never liked me…” but still I was confused by that moment of rapport, when for a moment I had seen him through my father’s eyes…
… dear, cherished, beloved, sworn brother… even, once or twice, in the manner of lads, lovers… I slammed the thought away. In a sense the rejection was a kind of envy. Solitary in the Comyn, I had had few bredin, fewer to offer such affection even in crisis. Could it be that I envied my father that? His voice, his presence, were a clamor in my mind…
I should tell Jeff what had happened. Since Kennard had awakened the latent Alton gift, the gift of forced rapport, by violence when I was hardly out of childhood, he had been there, his thoughts overpowering my own, choking me, leaving me all too little in the way of free will, till I had broken free, and in the disaster of the Sharra rebellion, I had learned to fear that freedom. And then, dying, his incredible strength closing over my mind in a blast I could not resist or barricade…
Ghost-ridden; half of my brain burnt into a dead man’s memories…
Was I never to be anything but a cripple, mutilated mind and body? For very shame I could not beg Jeff for more help than he had given me already…
He said neutrally, “If you need help, Lew, I’m here,” but I shook my head.
“I’m all right; need sleep, that’s all. Who is Keeper at Arilinn now?”
“Miranie from Dalereuth; I don’t know who her family was—she never talks about them. Janna Lindir, who was Keeper when you were at Arilinn, married Bard Storn-Leynier, and they have two sons; but Janna put them out to foster, and came back as Chief Monitor at Neskaya. We need strong telepaths, Lew; I wish you could come back, but I suppose they’ll need you on the Council—”
Again I saw him flinch, slightly, at my reaction to that. I knew the state I was in, as well as he did; every transient emotion was broadcasting at full strength. Andres, Terran and without any visible laran, still noticed Marius’s distress; he had, after all, lived with a telepath family since before I was born. He said stolidly, “I can find a damper and put it on, if you wish.”
“That won’t be—” I started to say, but Jeff said firmly, “Good. Do that.” And before long the familiar unrhythmic pulses began to move through my mind, disrupting it. It blanked it out for the others—at least the specific content— but for me it substituted nausea for the sharper pain. I listened with half an ear to Marius telling Andres what had happened at the Council. Andres, as I had foreseen, understood at once what the important thing was.