“Just sit at home and attend to your own affairs while Darkover falls into Empire hands?” he asked scornfully. “You might as well hide behind Tower walls! Why not go back with Jeff to Arilinn—or did they burn thatout of you too?”
Rage flooded through me. How dared Dyan, under the pretense of kinship and his friendship for my father, probe old, unhealed wounds this way? “I was taught at Arilinn,” I said deliberately, “to speak of such matters only to those who were concerned in them. Are you monitor, mechanic, or technician, Lord Dyan?”
I had always thought that the phrase black with ragewas only a manner of speaking; now I saw it, the blood rising dark and congested in Dyan’s face until I thought he would fall down, stricken by a stroke. Too late, I remembered; Dyan had been briefly in a Tower, and no one, not even my father, knew why he had left it. What I had meant as a freezing rebuke, a way of telling him to keep his distance, had been interpreted as deadly personal insult—an attack on his weakest spot.
“Neither monitor, mechanic nor technician, damn you,” he said at last, his chair going over backward as he rose, “nor power-pole for the forces of Sharra, you damned insolent bastard! Go back to Armida and raise horses, or to a Tower if they’ll have you, or back to the Empire, or to hell if Zandru will take you in, but stay out of Council politics—hear me?”
He turned and strode away, and I stared after him, in shock and dismay, knowing I had made, from a man who had been ready to befriend me, the most dangerous of enemies.
CHAPTER FIVE
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The Comyn Tower rose high above the Castle, part of the great sprawling mass that looked down on Thendara, and yet apart from it, older than any part of it; immeasurably old, built of an ancient reddish sandstone which, otherwise, appeared only in the oldest, ruined houses of the Old Town. Regis had never come here before.
He said to the nonhuman servant, “Will you ask the DomnaCallina Lindir-Aillard if she will receive Regis Hastur?”
It surveyed him for a long moment, the dark eyes alert and responsive; a humanlike form, a humanlike intelligence, but Regis could not dismiss the feeling that he had been speaking to a large and not altogether friendly dog. He had seen the silver-furred kyrriduring his brief training session in Neskaya Tower; but he had never grown used to them. The thing stared at him longer, he thought, than a human would have done. Then it gave a brief graceful nod of its sleek silver head and glided noiselessly away.
Regis wondered, remotely and at the edge of awareness, how the kyrriwould deliver its message to Callina. The origin of the kyrriwas lost in the Ages of Chaos—had they, after all, been part of that monstrous breeding program which the Hastur-kin had carried on for centuries to fix the Comyn gifts in the families of the Seven Domains? Stranger games than the kyrrihad been played with genetics modified by laranpower and matrix technology.
Or did they go back further yet, part of the prehistory of Cottman’s star before a lost Terran colony came to call it Darkover? He suspected that even in the Towers they were not sure what the kyrriwere or how they had come to be traditional servants of the Tower. He took them for granted, had learned to stay out of range of the painful electric shocks they could give when they were excited or threatened, had been tended by their odd thumbless hands when it would have been unendurable to have near him human telepaths who could read his mind or reach it.
But all this was with the surface of his mind and had nothing to do with the underlying unease which had brought him here; and for a moment he wondered if he should have sought out Callina in the Aillard suite, presuming somewhat on his acquaintance with Linnell—who, like himself, had been fostered at Armida and was foster-sister to Lew and Marius. He had never spoken more than a dozen words to Callina, and those formal and ceremonious. He could have talked to Linnell as to a kinswoman, but Callina was something else again… Keeper at Neskaya and then at Arilinn, then sent here to be under-Keeper in the oldest of the Towers, long inactive, but still sheltering the ancient Ashara, who had not been seen outside the Tower in living memory—nor, Danvan Hastur had told him once, in the living memory of anyone hehad ever known; and his grandfather was nearing his hundredth year. He supposed Ashara’s own circle, if she had one, and her attendants, must see her sometime—
She must have been an ordinary woman once; at least as ordinary as any of the Comyn could be said to be ordinary; and not immortal, only long-lived as some of the Hasturs were long-lived. There was chieriblood mixed with the blood of the Domains. Regis knew little of the chieri, but they were said to be immortal and beautiful, still dwelling somewhere in a remote valley where humankind never came. But his own grandfather showed signs of being one of those Hasturs whose reign could span generations …it was a lucky thing for the Comyn, that Danvan Hastur had been there to reign as Regent during these troubled years… Regis found his thoughts sliding into unexpected channels, as if some other mind had briefly touched his own; he started, blinked as if he had fallen asleep on his feet for a moment; his skin crawled, and something touchedhim— Regis felt a faint nausea deep in his body. A shadow had fallen across the doorway and Callina Aillard was standing there.
He had not seen her come. Lord of Light! Regis swore to himself, sweating; had he stood there, sound asleep on his feet, an idiot’s grin on his face, his clothing disarranged or worse? He felt exposed, desperately uncomfortable; Callina was a Keeper, and uncanny. He managed to get out a formal, “ Su serva, Domna…”
She was not now wearing the formal crimson robes she had worn in the Crystal Chamber, the traditional garb which marked out a Keeper as apart, untouchable, sacrosanct. Instead she had on a long, fleecy gown of blue wool, close-cut, high-necked. It was girdled with a copper belt, squared plaques of the precious metal, a large blue semi-precious stone at the center of each plaque; and her hair, coiled low on her neck, was caught into a priceless clasp of copper filigree.
“Come through here, and then we can talk if you wish. Hush; do not disturb the relays.” Her voice was so low it barely stirred the air between them, and Regis followed on tiptoe, as if a normal step would be like a shout. They passed through a large silent chamber, bare, with relay screens staring blank and glassy blue, and other things which Regis did not recognize; before one of the screens a young girl was curled up on a soft seat. Her face had the strange, not-quite-present look of a telepath whose mind was fixed in the relays communicating with other Towers, other telepaths. Regis did not know the girl and Callina of course did not notice her in any way; in fact, only her body was there in the room with them at all.
Callina opened a noiseless door at the far end of the room, and they went through into a small, comfortable private room, with low divans and chairs, and a high window with colored glass, throwing prism lights across the room; but it was dark outside, and if it had not been high summer Regis would have thought it might be snowing. Callina shut the door soundlessly behind them, gestured him to a seat and curled up in one of them herself, tucking her feet under her, and drawing the hem of the blue gown over them. She said in her stilled voice, “Well, Regis, did Old Hastur send you to me to ask if I’d go through the marriage ceremony with Beltran, just to save the Council some embarrassment?”
Regis felt his face burning; had she read his mind while he stood there, asleep on his feet like a gaby? He said truthfully, “No, he didn’t, though he did mention it to me at dinner last night. I don’t think he would have the arrogance actually to ask it, Lady Callina.”