The thought was bitter, almost intolerable. Since that first moment of fourfold meshing within the matrix, while Callista was still prisoner, Damon had found something he had thought irrevocably lost to him when he was sent from the Tower, the telepathic bond of the circle.
He had lost it when Leonie sent him from Arilinn, to resign himself to live without it, and then, beyond hope, he had found it again in his two girl cousins and this out-worlder… Now he would rather die than let the bond be broken again.
He said firmly, “Leonie did this, for whatever reasons, good or bad, and she must bear the responsibility for it. Callista was not strong enough to get the answer from her. But Leonie, and Leonie alone, may hold the key to her trouble.”
Andrew looked out into the black, snow-shot darkness beyond the window. “That’s no help. How far is Arilinn from here?”
“I don’t know how you would reckon the distance. We calculate it at ten days ride,” Damon said, “but I had no thought of going to her there. I shall do as Callista has done and seek her out in the overworld.” His narrowed lips sketched a bleak smile. “With Dom Esteban disabled and Domenic not yet grown, I am her nearest kinsman. I have right and responsibility to call Leonie to account.”
But who could call a Hastur to account, Hastur, and the Lady of Arilinn?
“I feel like going along with you and raising a little hell myself,” said Andrew.
“You wouldn’t know what to say to her. I promise you, Andrew, if there is an answer to be found, I’ll find it.”
“And if there isn’t?”
Damon turned away, not even wanting to think about that. Callista slept restlessly, tossing and moaning in her sleep. Ellemir was doing some needlework in an armchair, frowning over the stitches, her face bright in the oval of the lamp. Damon reached for her, feeling the quick response in her mind, a touch of reassurance and love. I need her with me, and I must go alone.
“In the other room, Andrew, we would disturb them here. Keep watch for me,” he added, leading the way into the other room, arranging himself half lying in a great chair, Andrew at his side. “Watch…”
He focused on the matrix, felt the brief, sharp shock of leaving his body, felt Andrew’s strength as he hovered briefly in the room… Then he was standing on the gray and formless plain, seeing with surprise that behind him, in the overworld, there was a landmark, a dim structure, still shadowy. Of course, he and Dezi and Andrew had built it for shelter when they worked with the frostbitten men, a refuge, a protection. My own place. I have no other now. Firmly he put that aside, searching in his bodiless formation for the glimmering beacon-light of Arilinn. Then, literally with the speed of thought, he was there, and Leonie before him, veiled.
She had been so beautiful… Again he was struck with the old love, the old longing, but he armored himself with thoughts of Ellemir. But why did Leonie veil herself from him?
“I knew when Callista came that you would not be far behind her, Damon. I know, of course, in a general way, what you want. But how can I help you, Damon?”
“You know that as well as I. It is not for myself that I need help, but for Callista.”
Leonie said, “She has failed. I was willing to release her — she has had her chance — but now she knows her only place is here. She must come back to us at Arilinn, Damon.”
“It is too late for that,” Damon said. “I think she will die first. And she is near it.” He heard his own voice tremble. “Are you saying you will see her dead before releasing her, Leonie? Is the grasp of Arilinn a death-grip, then?”
He could see the horror in Leonie, like a visible cloud, here where emotions were a solid reality. “Damon, no!” Her voice trembled. “When a Keeper is released it is because she can no longer hold the channels to a Keeper’s pattern, that they are no longer clear for psi work. I thought this could not happen with Callista, but she told me otherwise and I was willing to free her.”
“You knew you had made that impossible!” Damon accused.
“I… was not sure,” said Leonie, and the veils stirred in negation. “She said to me… she had touched him. She had… Damon, what was I to think? But now she knows otherwise. In the days when a girl was trained to Keeper before she was fullgrown, it was taken for granted that the choice was for life and there could be no return.”
“You knew this, and still made that choice for Callista?”
“What else could I do, Damon? Keepers we must have, or our world goes dark with the darkness of barbarism. I did what I must, and if Callista is even reasonably fair to me, she will admit it was with her consent.” And yet Damon heard, like an echo in Leonie’s mind, the bitter, despairing cry:
How could I consent? I was twelve years old!
Damon said angrily, “Are you saying it is hopeless, then? That Callista must return to Arilinn or die of grief?”
Leonie’s voice was uncertain; her very image in the gray world wavered. “I know that once there was a way, and the way was known. Nothing from the past can be wholly concealed. When I myself was young I knew a woman who had been treated so, and she said that a way was known to reverse this fixing of channels, but she did not tell me how and she has been dead more years than you have lived. It was known everywhere in the days when the Towers were as temples, and the Keepers as their priests. I spoke truer than I knew,” she said, abruptly putting the veil back from her ravaged face. “Had you lived in those days, Damon, you would have found your own true vocation as Keeper. You were born three hundred years too late.”
“This does me little good now, kinswoman,” Damon said. He turned aside from Leonie’s face, seeing it waver and change before him, half Leonie as she had been when he was in the Tower, when he loved her, half the aging Leonie of today, as he had seen her at his wedding. He did not want to see her face, wished she would veil herself again.
“In the days of Rafael II, when the Towers of Neskaya and Tramontana were burned to the ground, all the circles died, with the Keepers. Many, many of the old techniques were lost then, and not all of them have teen remembered or rediscovered.”
“And I am supposed to rediscover them in the next few days? You have extraordinary confidence in me, Leonie!”
“What thought has ever moved’in the mind of humankind anywhere in this universe can never be wholly lost.”
Damon said impatiently, “I am not here to argue philosophy!”
Leonie shook her head. “This is not philosophy but fact. If any thought has ever stirred the stuff of which the universe is made, that thought remains, indelible, and can be recaptured. There was a time when these things were known, and the fabric of time itself remains…”
Her image rippled, shook like a pool into which a stone had been dropped, and was gone. Damon, alone again in the endless, formless gray world, asked, How in the name of all the Gods at once can I challenge the very fabric of time? And for an instant he saw, as from a great height, the image of a man wearing green and gold, the face half concealed, and nothing clear to Damon’s eyes except a great sparkling ring on his finger. Ring or matrix? It began to move, to undulate, to give out great waves of light, and Damon felt his consciousness dimming, vanishing. He clutched at the matrix around his neck, trying desperately to orient himself in the gray overworld. Then it was gone, and he was alone in the blankness, the formless, featureless nothingness. Finally, dim on the horizon, he perceived the faint and stony shape of his own landmark, what they had built there. With utter relief, he felt his thoughts drawing him toward it, and abruptly he was back in his room at Armida, Andrew bending anxiously over him.