Gently Damon laid his hand on the small silk insulating bag around Dezi’s neck. His fingers fumbled to untie the thong. Dezi had begun to moan and struggle again, and his struggles, like a rabbit in a snare, wrenched at Damon with pity, even though the boy’s terror was barricaded now by the damper. He managed to get the bag open. The blue stone, pulsing, glowing with Dezi’s terror, fell into his fingers. As they closed over it, he felt the bone-cracking spasm within himself, saw Dezi slump as if felled by a crushing blow. He wondered wretchedly if he had killed the boy. He thrust the matrix within the field of the damper, saw it quiet down to a faint pulse, a resting rhythm. Dezi was unconscious, his head lolling to one side, froth on his bitten lips. Damon had to steel himself to remember Andrew, unconscious, in a deathly sleep in the snow, to think of Callista’s agony if she had awakened to find herself abandoned, or widowed by treachery, before he could harden himself to say “That’s done.”
He thrust the matrix for a few minutes under the damper, saw it fade to dimness, the faintest of pulsing lights. It was still alive, but it had been lowered in strength to where it could not be used for laran.
He cast a pitying look at Dezi, knowing he had blinded the boy. Dezi was worse off now than Damon was when they sent him for Arilinn. In spite of Dezi’s crime, Damon could not help feeling sorrow for the boy, so gifted, such a powerful telepath, potential higher than many now working in the screens and relays. Zandru’s hells, he thought, what a waste. And he had crippled him.
He said wearily, “Let’s finish this, Andrew. Hand me that lock-box, will you?”
He had gotten it from Dom Esteban, who had removed some small jewelry from it. As he thrust the matrix inside, closing the lid, he thought of the old fairy-tale: the giant kept his heart outside of his body, in the most secret place he could find, so that he could not be killed unless they, sought out his hidden heart. He explained briefly to Andrew as he fiddled with the small matrix lock on the box, thrusting his own against it. He said, “We can’t destroy the matrix; Dezi would die with it. But it is locked here with a matrix lock so nothing but my own matrix, attuned to this pattern, will ever open this box again.” The box locked, he put it into a store-room, came back and bent over Dezi, checking the boy’s breathing, his racing heart.
He would survive.
Mutilated… blinded… but he would survive. Damon knew he would rather have died, if it were he.
Damon straightened, listening to the quieting sound of the storm outside. He drew his dagger and cut the ropes binding the boy, thinking that it might be kinder to cut his throat. He wouldn’t want to live. Was his terrible struggle only a way of attempting suicide?
He sighed, laying some money in a purse beside the boy. He said heavily to Andrew, “Dom Esteban gave me this for him. He’ll probably go to Thendara, where Domenic promised him a cadet commission. He can’t do much harm there, working in the City Guards and he can make himself some kind of career. Domenic will look after him — there’s some sense of family loyalty, after all. Dezi won’t even have to confess what’s been done to him. He’ll be all right.”
Later, telling Ellemir what he had done, while Andrew watched over the still-sleeping Callista, he repeated it.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to live. When I stood over him with the dagger, to cut the ropes they had tied him with, I wondered if it would have been kinder to kill him. But I managed to live after they sent me from Arilinn. Dezi should have that chance too.” He sighed, remembering the day he had left Arilinn, blind with pain, dazed with the breaking of the bonds of the Tower circle, the closest bond known to those with laran, closer than kin, closer than the bond of lovers, closer than husband and wife…
“I got over wanting to die,” he said, “but it was a long time before I wanted to live again.” Holding Ellemir close, he thought: Not till I had you.
Ellemir’s eyes softened with tenderness, then, her mouth hardening, she said, “You should have killed him.”
Damon, thinking of the sleeping Callista, who had come, not knowing it, so close to death, thought this was merely bitterness. Andrew was her sister’s husband, she had been linked to him by matrix during the long search for Callista, and they had all come together in that brief, spontaneous, fourfold moment of sharing, before the frightening reflex Callista could not control had ripped them apart. Like Ellemir, Damon too had been linked to Andrew, feeling his strength and gentleness, his tenderness and passion… and this was the man Dezi had tried, out of spite, to kill. Dezi, who had himself been linked with Andrew when they healed the frostbite cases, knew him too, knew his quality and his goodness.
Ellemir repeated implacably, “You should have killed him.”
Not for months did Damon know that this was not merely bitterness, but precognition.
In the morning the storm had quieted, and Dezi, taking with him the money Damon had left at his side, his clothing and his saddle horse, had gone from Armida. Damon hoped, almost with guilt, that he would somehow manage to live, to find his way safely to Thendara where he would be under Domenic’s protection. Domenic, heir to Alton, was after all Dezi’s half brother. Damon was sure of it, now; no one not full Comyn could have put up a fight like that.
Domenic would look after him, he thought. But it was like a weight on his heart, and it did not lift.
Chapter Ten
Andrew was dreaming…
He was wandering in the blizzard he could hear outside, flinging heavy snow and sleet, driven by enormous winds, around the heights of Armida. But he had never seen Armida. He was alone, wandering in a trackless, houseless, shelterless wilderness, as he had done when the mapping plane went down and abandoned him on a strange world. He was stumbling in the snow and the wind tore at his lungs and a voice whispered like an echo in his mind: There is nothing for you here.
And then he saw the girl.
And the voice in his mind whispered. This has all happened before. She was wearing a flimsy and torn nightdress, and he could see her pale flesh dimly through the rents in the gown, but it did not flutter or move in the raging winds that tore him, and her hair was unstir-ring in the raging storm. She was not there at all, she was a ghost, a dream, a girl who never was, and yet he knew, on another level of reality, she was Callista, she was his wife. Or had that been only a dream within a dream, dreamed while he was lying in the storm, and he would lie there and follow the dream until he died… ? He began to struggle, heard himself cry out…
And the blizzard was gone. He was lying in his own bedroom at Armida. The storm was raging and dying away outside, but the bedroom fire had burned to dim coals. By its light he could dimly see Callista — or was it Ellemir, who had slept at her side ever since the night when the psi reflex she could not control had blasted them both down, in the midst of their love?
For the first few days after Dezi’s attempted murder he had done little except sleep, suffering from the aftereffects of mild concussion, shock, and explosure. He touched the unhealed cut on his forehead. Damon bad taken out the stitches a day or two ago, and the edges were beginning to scab cleanly. There would be a small scar. He needed no scar to remind him of how he had been torn from Callista’s arms, a force like lightning striking through her body. He recalled that it used to be a favorite form of torture, in the old days on Terra, an electrode to the genitals. It hadn’t been Callista’s fault though, the shock of knowing what she had done had nearly killed her too.