“Well, Dezi, I hardly dare to hope you will make this easy for me or for yourself, but I’ll give you the option, though it’s more than you deserve. Will you match resonances with me willingly and let me take your matrix without a struggle?”
Dezi did not answer. His eyes blazed out bitter, hating defiance. Damon thought, what a waste it was. He was so strong. He flinched, shrinking from the intimacy that was being forced on him, the least welcome of all intimacies, that of torturer and tortured. I don’t want to kill him, and I probably will have to. Mercy of Avarra, I don’t even want to hurt him.
Yet, thinking of what he had to do, he could not keep himself from shuddering. His fingers closed, a spasmodic grip, over the matrix in its leather and silk insulation at his throat.
There, over the pulse, over the glowing center of the main nerve channel. Since it was given to Damon, at fifteen, and the lights in the stone wakened at the touch of his mind, it had never been beyond the reassuring touch of his fingertips. No other human being, except his Keeper, Leonie or, during a brief time, in his Tower years, the young under-Keeper Hilary Castamir, had ever touched it. The very thought of having it taken from him, forever, filled him with a cold black terror worse than dying. He knew, with every fiber of the Ridenow gift, the laran of an empath, what Dezi was enduring now.
It was blinding. It was crippling. It was mutilation…
It was the penalty invoked by the Arilinn oath for illegal use of a matrix. And it was what he must, by law, inflict now.
Dezi said, clinging to a last shred of defiance, “Without a Keeper present, it is murder that you do. Is murder penalty for attempted murder, then?”
Damon, though he felt Dezi’s terror in his own bowels, kept his voice passionless. “Any halfway competent matrix technician — and I am rated a technician — can do this part of a Keeper’s work, Dezi. I can match resonances and take it from you in safety. I won’t kill you. If you try not to fight me, it will be easier for you.”
“No, damn you!” Dezi spat out, and Damon steeled himself for the ordeal ahead. He could admire the boy’s attempt to pretend courage, some dignity. He had to remind himself that the courage was a sham in a coward who had misused laran against a drunk and unprotected man, who had gotten him drunk for that purpose. To admire Dezi now, simply because he did not break down and plead for mercy — as Damon knew perfectly well he himself would do — made no sense at all.
He still felt Dezi’s emotions — a trained empath, his laran honed to fine point at Arilinn, he could not block them out — but he steeled himself to ignore them, focusing on the ordeal ahead. The first step was to focus inward on his own matrix, to steady his breathing, let his consciousness expand into the magnetic field of his body. He let the emotions filter through and past him, as a Keeper must do, feeling and accepting them, without entering into them in the slightest.
Leonie had told him once that if he had been a woman, he would have made a Keeper, but that, as a man, he was too sensitive, that this work would destroy him. Somehow, the remembrance made him angry again, and the anger strengthened him. Why should sensitivity destroy a man, if it was valuable for a woman, if it could have made a woman capable of the most difficult of all matrix work, that of a Keeper? At the time, the words had come close to destroying him; he had felt them an attack on his very manhood. Now they reaffirmed in him the knowledge that he could do this part of a Keeper’s work.
Andrew, watching, lightly linked with Damon, saw him again as he had seen him for a moment the night before, watching over the sleeping Callista: a swirling field of interconnected currents with pulsing centers, dim colors glowing at the pulse spots. Slowly he began to see Dezi the same way, to sense what Damon was doing, bringing his own rate of vibration close to Dezi’s own, to adjust the flows so that their bodies — and their matrix jewels — were vibrating in perfect resonance. This would, he knew, enable Damon to touch Dezi’s matrix without pain, without inflicting physical or nervous shock strong enough to produce death.
For someone not keyed into the precise resonance, to touch someone else’s matrix could produce shock, convulsions, even death at the very least, incredible agony.
He saw the resonances match, pulse together as if, for a moment, the two magnetic fields blended and became one. Damon got out of his chair — to Andrew, it looked like a cloud of linked energy fields, moving — and went toward the boy. Abruptly Dezi wrenched control of the resonances away from Damon, shattering the blended rapport. It was like a clashing explosion of force. Damon gasped in anguish with the recoil, and Andrew felt the shattering pain that exploded in Damon’s nerves and brain. Automatically, Damon stumbled out of reach of the clashing field, steadied himself to rematch resonances to the new field Dezi had created. He thought, almost in pity, that Dezi had panicked, that when it came to it, he couldn’t quite endure it.
Again the matched resonances, the energy fields beginning to vibrate in consonance; again the attempt to reach out for Dezi, to remove the matrix physically from the magnetic field of his body. And again the shattering wrench as Dezi broke the resonances, thrust them apart with an explosion of pain cascading through them both.
Damon said compassionately, “Dezi, I know it’s hard.” Inwardly he thought that the boy could almost be a Keeper himself. Damon could not match resonances that way at his age! But then he had never been as desperate, either, nor as tormented. The breaking of resonances was obviously just as painful for Dezi as it was for Damon himself. “Try not to fight this time, my boy. I don’t want to hurt you.”
And then — they were open to one another — he felt Dezi’s thrusting contempt for his attempt at pity, and knew this was not a panic reaction at all. Dezi was simply putting up one hell of a fight! Perhaps he thought he could outfight Damon, wear him down. Damon left the room and came back with a telepathic damper, a curious gadget which broadcast a vibration that could damp out telepathic emanations within a broad range of frequencies. Grimly he thought of Domenic’s jest on the night he and Ellemir had been married. Such things were used, sometimes, to blur telepathic leakage, when there were others around, to protect privacy, to permit secret talk or prevent unwilling (or deliberate) telepathic eavesdropping. It was used sometimes in Comyn Council, or to protect others when there was an undeveloped, or uncontrolled, adolescent in psychic upheaval, before learning to control or focus powers. He saw Dezi’s face change, take on real panic through the defiance.
Tonelessly, he warned Andrew, “Get out of range if you want to. This might hurt. I’m going to have to use it to damp out any frequencies he tries to raise.”
Andrew shook his head. “I’ll stick.” Damon caught Andrew’s thought: I won’t leave you alone with him. Grateful for his friend’s loyalty, Damon knelt down and began to set up the damper.
Before long, he had tuned it to damp out Dezi’s assault on his consciousness. After that, it was simply a matter of matching his own resonances to Dezi’s physical field of vibration. This time when he stepped into the interlocking fields, the damper blocked out Dezi’s mental thrust to alter the frequencies, move him away. It was painful and hard to move under the damper, something he thought only a full-fledged Keeper could have done at all, with the damper full strength. It felt, physically, as if he were struggling through some thick, viscous fluid which dragged at his limbs and his brain. Dezi began to struggle like a mad thing as he came near. But it was hopeless, and he knew it. Dezi could exhaust himself with the effort to change frequencies, but he could not alter Damon’s now, and the more he managed to alter his own, the more the ultimate shock would hurt.