“So,” she said, “you are beginning to understand. Your forefathers knew much of those swords. Have you heard of the Sword of Aldones?”
Some old legend… yes. “It lies hidden among the holy things at Hali,” I said, “spelled so that none of Comyn blood may come near, to be drawn only when the end of Comyn is near; and the drawing of that sword shall be the end of our world—”
“The legend has changed, yes,” said Ashara, with something which, in a face more solid, more human, might have been a smile. “I suppose you know more of sciences than of legend— Tell me, what is Cherilly’s Law?”
It was the first law of matrix mechanics; it stated that nothing was unique in space and time except a matrix; that every item in the universe existed with one and only one exact duplicate, except for a matrix; a matrix was the only thing which was wholly unique, and therefore any attempt to duplicate a matrix would destroy it, and the attempted duplicate.
“The Sword of Aldones is the weapon against Sharra,” said Ashara. But I knew enough of the holy things at Hali to know that if the Sword of Aldones was concealed there, it might as well be in another Galaxy; and I said so.
There are things like that on Darkover; they can’t be destroyed, but they are so dangerous that even the Comyn, or a Keeper, can’t be trusted with them; and all the ingenuity of the great minds of the Ages of Chaos had been bent to concealing them so that they cannot endanger others.
The rhu fead, the holy Chapel at Hali… all that remained of Hali Tower, which had burned to the ground during the Ages of Chaos… was such a concealment. The Chapel itself was guarded like the Veil at Arilinn; no one not of Comyn blood may penetrate the Veil. It is so spelled and guarded with matrixes and other traps that if any outsider, not of the true Comyn blood, should step inside, his mind would be stripped bare; by the time he or she got inside, he would be an idiot without enough directive force to know or remember why he had come there.
But inside the Chapel, the Comyn of a thousand years ago had put them out of our reach forever. They are guarded in the opposite fashion. An outsider could have picked them up freely; but the outsider couldn’t get into the Chapel at all. No one of Comyn blood could so much as lay a hand on them without instant death.
I said, “Every unscrupulous tyrant in a thousand years of Comyn has been trying to figure that one out.”
“But none of them has had a Keeper on their side,” said Ashara. Callina asked, “A Terran?”
“Not one reared on Darkover,” Ashara said. “An alien, perhaps who knew nothing of the forces here. His mind would be locked and sealed against any forces here, so that he wouldn’t even know they were there. He would pass them, guarded by ignorance.”
“Wonderful,” I said with sarcastic emphasis. “All I have to do is go thirty or forty light-years to a planet out there, force or persuade someone there to come back with me to this planet, without telling him anything about it so he won’t know what he ought to be afraid of, then figure a way to get him inside the Chapel without being fried to idiocy, and hope he’ll hand over the Sword of Aldones when he gets it into his enthusiastic little hand!”
Aahara’s colorless eyes held a flicker of scorn, and suddenly I felt ashamed of my sarcasm.
“Have you been in the matrix laboratory here? Have you seen the screen?”
I remembered, and suddenly knew what it was; one of the almost-legendary psychokinetic transmitters… instantaneously, through space, perhaps through time…
“That hasn’t been done for hundreds of years!”
“I know what Callina can do,” said Ashara with her strange smile. “And I shall be with you…”
She stood up, extended her hands to us both. She touched mine; she felt cold as a corpse, as the surface of a jewel— Her voice was low, and for a moment it seemed almost menacing.
“Callina…”
Callina shrank away from the touch and somehow, though her face was molded in the impassive stillness of a Keeper, it seemed to me that she was weeping. “No!”
“Callina—” the low voice was soft, inexorable. Slowly, Callina held out her hands, let herself touch, join hands with us—
The room vanished. We drifted, fathomless, in blueness, measureless space; blank emptiness like starless space, great bare chasms of nothingness. In Arilinn I had been taught to leave my body behind, go into the overworld of reality where the body is not, where we exist only as thoughts making form of the nothingness of the universe, but this was no region of the overworld I had ever known. I drifted, bodiless, in tingling mist. Then the emptiness between stars was charged with a spark, a flare of force, a stream of life, charging me; I could feel myself as a network of live nerves, lacework of living force. I clenched again the hand that had been cut from me, felt every nerve and sinew in it.
Then, suddenly in the emptiness, a face sketched itself on my mind.
I cannot describe that face, though I know, now, what it was. I saw it three times in all. There are no human words to describe it; it was beautiful beyond imagining, but it was terrible past all conception. It was not even evil, not as men in this life know evil; it was not human enough for that. It was—damnable. Only a fraction of a second it burned behind my eyes, but I knew I had looked straight in at the gates of hell.
I struggled back to reality. I was again in Ashara’s blue-ice room; had I ever left it? Callina’s hands were still clasped in mine, but Ashara was gone. The glass throne was empty, and as I looked on it the throne, too, was gone, vanished into the mirrored shimmer of the room. Had she ever been there at all? I felt giddy and disoriented, but Callina sagged against me, and I caught her, and the feel of her fainting body in my arms brought me back sternly to reality. The touch of her soft robes, of the end of her hair against my hand, seemed to touch some living nerve in me. I clasped her against me, burying my face against her shoulder. She smelled warm and sweet, with a subtle fragrance, not perfume or scent or cosmetic, just the soft scent of her skin, and it dizzied me; I wanted to go on holding her, but she opened her eyes and swiftly was aware again, holding herself upright and away from me. I bent my head. I dared not touch her, and would not against her will, but for that dizzying moment I wanted her more than I had ever wanted any woman living. Was it only that she was Keeper and so forbidden to me? I stood upright again, cold and aching, my face icy where it had lain against her heart; but I had control of myself again. She seemed unaware, immune to the torrent of feeling that raged in me. Of course, she was a Keeper, she had been taught to move beyond all this, immune to passion—
“Callina,” I said, “cousin, forgive me.”
The faintest flicker of a smile moved on her face. “Never mind, Lew. I wish—” she left the rest unspoken, but I realized she was not quite so insulated from my own torment as I had believed.
“I am no more than human,” she said, and again the faint feather-touch to my wrist, the touch of a Keeper, reassured me. It was like a promise, but we drew apart, knowing that there must remain a barrier between us.
“Where is Ashara?” I asked.
Once again the flicker of a troubled smile on her face. “You had better not ask me,” she murmured. “You would never believe the answer.”
I frowned, and again the uncanny resemblance troubled me, the stillness of Ashara in Callina’s quiet face—I could only guess at the bond between the Keepers. Abruptly, Callina moved toward some invisible door and we were outside, on the stone landing, solid, and I wondered if the blue-ice room had ever existed, or if the whole thing had been some kind of bizarre dream.