Damon thought, confusedly, I saw it before.
Do not struggle with definitions for time, cousin. When you are Keeper you will understand.
Men are not Keepers in my day.
Yet you are Keeper, or could never have come here without death. Now I may delay no longer for your safe return, cousin, brother…
The glow of the ring filled Damon’s consciousness. Sight vanished, light left him, his body went formless. He was floating, struggling to maintain balance over a gulf of nothingness. He fought to cling to some foothold, felt himself swept away, falling. All those levels I climbed so painfully, must I fall down them all…?
He fell, and knew he would go on falling, falling, for hundreds of years.
Darkness. Pain. Formless weariness. Then Callista’s voice, saying, “I think he’s coming around now. Andrew, lift his head, will you? Elli, if you don’t stop crying, I’ll send you out of here, I mean that!” He felt the sting of firi on his tongue, and then Callista’s face moved into his range of vision. He whispered, and knew his teeth were chattering, “Cold… I’m so cold…”
“No you aren’t, love,” Callista said gently. “You’re wrapped in all the blankets we have, and there are hot bricks at your feet, see? The cold is inside you, don’t you think I know? No, no more firi. We’ll have hot soup for you in a minute.”
He could see now, and every detail of his journey, of the conversation with Varzil, came flooding back into his mind. Did he truly meet an ancestor so long dead that even his bones were dust by now? Or did he dream, dramatize knowledge deep in his unconscious? Or did his mind reach deep into time to see what was written on the fabric of the past? What was reality?
But what festival did Varzil mean? He had said that not in three hundred years or a thousand would the Comyn forget the festival and the sacrament, but Varzil had not counted on the Ages of Chaos, on the destruction of Neskaya Tower.
Still, the answer was there. As yet it was obscure, but he could already see where it was leading. The mind writes deeply in the body. Somehow, then, he must lead Callista’s mind back to a time when her body was free of the cruel constraints of the years as Keeper. It is for you as her Keeper to lead her into the ancient sacrament of Year’s End, as if she were half-chieri and emmasca.
Whatever the lost festival, it could be recaptured or reconstructed somehow — a ritual to free the mind of its constraints? If all else failed — what had Varzil said? Come back when you have won your full strength as Keeper.
Damon shuddered. Must he, then, continue this frightening work, outside the safety of a Tower, to make himself Keeper in truth, as well as in the potential Leonie had seen in him? Well, he was pledged, and for Callista there was, perhaps, no other way.
It might not be that bad, he thought hopefully. There must be records of the festival of Year’s End in the other Towers, or perhaps at Hali, in the rhu fead, the holy place of the Comyn.
Ellemir looked over Callista’s shoulder. Her eyes were red with crying. He sat up, clutching the blankets about him. “Did I frighten you, my dearest love?”
She gasped. “You were so cold, so stiff, you didn’t even seem to be breathing. And then you would start gasping, moaning — I thought you were dying, dead — oh, Damon!” Her hands clutched at him. “Never do this again! Promise me!”
Forty days ago he would have promised her, with pleasure. “My darling, this is the work I was trained for, and I must be free to do it at need.” Varzil had hailed him as Keeper. Was that his destiny?
But not at a Tower again. They had made an art of deforming the lives of their workers. In seeking to free Callista, would he free all his sons and daughters to come?
Callista raised her head at a slight sound. “That will be the food I sent for. Go and fetch it, Andrew, we don’t want outsiders in here.” When he returned, she poured hot soup into a mug. “Drink it down as quickly as you can, Damon. You are as weak as a bird newly hatched.”
He grimaced, saying, “Next time I think I’ll stay inside the egg.” He began to drink in hesitant sips, not sure, at first, that he could swallow. His hands would not hold the mug, and Andrew steadied it for him.
“How long was I out?”
“All day, and most of the night,” Callista said. “And of course I could not move during that time either, so I’m stiff as planks nailed into a coffin!” Wearily she stretched her cramped limbs, and Andrew, leaving Ellemir to hold Damon’s mug, came and knelt before her, pulling off her velvet slippers and rubbing her feet with his strong hands. “How cold they are!” he said in dismay.
“About the only advantage the higher levels have over winter in Nevarsin is that you don’t get frostbite,” Callista said, and Damon grinned wryly. “You don’t get frostbite in the hells, either, but I never heard that advanced as a good reason not to stay out of them.” Andrew looked puzzled, and Damon asked, “Or do your people have a hot hell, as I heard the Dry-Towners do?”
Andrew nodded, and Damon finished his soup and held out his mug for more. He explained, “Zandru supposedly rules over nine hells, each colder than the last. When I was in Nevarsin they used to say that the student dormitory was kept about the temperature of the fourth hell, as a way of showing us what might be in store for us if we broke too many rules.” He glanced at the harsh darkness outside the window. “Is it snowing?”
Andrew asked, “Does it ever do anything else here at night?”
Damon cradled his cold fingers around the stoneware mug. “Oh, yes, sometimes in summer we have eight, ten nights without snow.”
“And I suppose,” Andrew said, straight-faced, “that people start to collapse with sunstroke and die of heat exhaustion.”
“Why, no, I never heard that—” Callista began, then, seeing the twinkle in Andrew’s eyes, broke off and laughed. Damon watched them, exhausted, weary, at peace. He wriggled his toes. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find I had frostbite, after all. On one level I was climbing on ice — or thought I was,” he added, with a reminiscent shiver.
“Take off his slippers and look, Ellemir.”
“Oh, come, Callie, I was joking—”
“I wasn’t. Hilary was caught once on a level where there seemed to be fire, and came back with burns and blisters on the soles of her feet. She could not walk for days,” Callista said. “Leonie used to say, ‘The mind writes deeply in the body.’ Damon, what is it?” She bent to look at the bare feet, smiled. “No, there seems no physical injury, but I am sure you feel half frozen. When you have finished your soup, perhaps you should get into a hot bath. It will make certain your circulation is not really impaired.”
She sensed Andrew’s questioning look, and went on. “Truly, I do not know if it is the cold of the levels reflected in his body, or something in the mind, or whether the kirian makes it easier for the mind to reflect into the body, or whether kirian slows down the circulation and makes it easier to visualize cold. But whatever it is, the subjective experience in the overworld is cold, icy cold, chill to the bone, and without arguing where the cold comes from, I have experienced it often enough to know that hot soup, hot bricks, hot baths, and plenty of blankets should be all ready for anyone who returns from such a journey.”
Damon felt unwilling to be alone, even in his bath. While lying flat he felt fine, but when he tried to sit up, to walk, it seemed that his body thinned to insubstantiality, his feet did not feel the floor, he walked bodiless and fading in empty space. He heard, ashamed, his own soft wail of protest.