“I don’t want it,” said Damon irritably, “but I suppose I’d better have it. And I want a blanket or something. I always come back half frozen.”
She gestured to Ellemir to cover him with a blanket and went for the kirian. “Taste it first. My distilling apparatus here isn’t as efficient as what I had at Arilinn, and there may residues, though I filtered it twice.”
“You can’t be worse at that sort of thing than I am,” Damon said and sniffed carefully, then laughed, remembering Callista doing almost the same thing with the crude tincture he had made. “Never mind, my dear, I don’t suppose we’ll poison one another.” He let her measure a careful dose, adding, “I don’t know what the time-distortion factor is, and you’ll have to stay in phase to monitor me. Hadn’t you better take some yourself?”
She shook her head. “I have an awfully low tolerance for the stuff, Damon. If I took enough for phasing, I’d have serious trouble. I can key it with you without it.”
“You’ll get awfully cramped and cold,” Damon warned, but he realized that after so many years as Keeper she probably knew her tolerances for the telepathic drug to the narrowest margin. She smiled, measuring her dose by a few drops. “I’m wearing an extra warm shawl. If I’m monitoring life functions, when do you want me to pull you out?”
He didn’t know. He had no experience with the stresses of Timesearch. He had no idea what he might be called on to endure in the way of side effects. “Better not pull me back unless I go into convulsions.”
“That far?” Callista felt a sharp stab of guilt. It was for her he was incurring this terrible risk, returning to this work he so feared and hated. They were already close in linkage. He laid a light hand on her wrist. “Not only for you, darling. For all of us. For the children.”
And for the Keeper, the one who will come. Callista did not say the words aloud, but time had slipped out of focus, as it did sometimes for an Alton, and she saw herself from a great distance, here, elsewhere, standing knee-deep in a great field of flowers; looking down at a delicate girl lying unconscious before her; standing in the chapel at Armida before the statue of Cassilda, a wreath of crimson flowers in her hand. She laid the flowers on the altar, then she was back with them again, dizzied, flushed, exalted. She whispered, “Damon, you saw…”
Andrew had seen too, all of them had seen, and he remembered Callista’s look of pity and grief as she removed Ellemir’s forgotten offering from the chapel. “Our women still lay flowers at her shrine…” Damon said gently, “I saw, Callie. But it’s a long way from here to there, you know.”
She wondered if Andrew would mind very much, then brought herself back, with firm discipline, to her work. “Let me check your breathing.” Lightly she passed her fingertips above his body. “Take the kirian now.”
He swallowed, making a wry face. “Ugh! What did you flavor it with, horse piss?”
“Nothing, you’ve forgotten the taste, that’s all. How many years since you took it? Lie back and stop clenching your hands; you’ll only knot your muscles and give yourself cramps.”
Damon obeyed, looking around the three faces surrounding him: Callista, sober and commanding; Ellemir looking a little scared; Andrew, strong and calm, but he sensed with an undercurrent of dismay. But again his eyes came back to Callista’s confident face. He could absolutely rely on her, Arilinn-trained. His breathing, his life functions, his very life was in her hands, and he was content to have it there.
Why must she renounce this, because she wanted to live in happiness, and bear children?
Callista was bringing Ellemir and Andrew into the circle. He felt them slip into the rapport, meshing. Already he was adrift, floating, very distant. He looked at Ellemir as if she were transparent, thinking how much he loved her, how happy she was.
Callista said quietly, “I’ll let you go as far as crisis, first stage, not as far as convulsions. That wouldn’t do you any good, nor any of us.”
He didn’t bother to protest. She had been trained at Arilinn; it was her decision to make. Then he was in the over-world, sensing it as their landmark formed around him, a tower like Arilinn, less solid, less brilliant, not a beacon but a shelter, very remote, yet solid around him, a protection, a home here. For a moment, as he looked around the gray world and sheltered, delaying, within its walls, he found himself wondering with an absurd flippancy what the other telepaths who wandered in the gray world would think, to find a new tower there. Or would the others ever notice, ever come to this remote place where Damon and his group were working? Resolutely, he formed his thoughts to bear him swiftly to Arilinn, and found himself standing in the court before Leonie. He saw with relief that her face was veiled and her voice cool and remote, as if the moment of passion had never been.
“We must first reach the level where motion through time is possible. Have you taken sufficient precaution to keep yourself monitored?” He felt that she was looking through him, to the overworld, to the world behind him where his body lay, Callista silently watching by his side. She looked oddly triumphant, but she said only, “You may be away for a very long time, and it will seem longer than it is. I will guide you as far as the Timesearch level, though I am not sure I will be able to stay there. But we must move through the levels a little at a time. I usually try to think of it as a flight of steps,” she added, and he saw that the grayness around them had lifted enough to reveal a shadowy flight of steps, curving away upward and vanishing into thicker grayness above them, like fog shrouding a riverbed. He noted that the stairs had a gilt banister, and wondered what staircase in Leonie’s childhood, perhaps in Castle Hastur, was revived here in her mental image.
He knew perfectly well, as he set his foot on the first step behind Leonie, that in actuality only their minds moved through the formless atoms of the universe, but the firm visualization of the staircase felt reassuringly solid under his feet, and gave them a focal point for moving from level to level. Leonie knew this path and he was content to follow.
The stairs were not steep, but as he climbed it seemed that he began to breathe more heavily, as if climbing in a mountain pass. The stairs still felt firm, even carpeted under foot, though his feet themselves, he knew, were only mental formulations. It became harder and harder to feel them, to lift them from step to step. The stairs felt fuzzier and dimmer, leading into thick gray fog just a little ahead of him. Leonie’s form was only a crimson-veiled wisp.
The thick fog closed in. He could see a few inches of the staircase under his feet, but he was walking in grayness which made his body disappear. The grayness darkened into a blackness crisscrossed by racing blue lights.
The level of energy-nets. Damon had worked on this level as a psi technician, and with a sharp effort he managed to solidify it, making it into a dark cavern with narrow lighted trails and footpaths leading upward through a maze of falling water. Leonie was dim and shadowy here, her robes colorless. He did not hear her now in words:
Go carefully here. We are in the level of monitored matrices. They will watch us so that no harm comes to me. But follow closely, I know where matrix work is being done and we must not intrude.