He had wrapped himself in a warm robe against the cold of the overworld. Callista had done the same, and had wrapped a fluffy shawl around Ellemir’s shoulders. Andrew, shrugging into his fur riding cloak, asked, “What exactly is going to happen, Damon?”
“Exactly? There’s no way I can tell you that,” Damon said. “It is the old test for a Keeper: we will build our Tower in the overworld, and they will try to destroy it, and us with it. If they cannot destroy it, they must acknowledge that it is lawful and has a right to be there. If they destroy it… well, you know what will happen then. So we must not allow them to destroy it.”
Callista was looking pale and frightened. He took her face gently between his hands.
“Nothing can hurt us in the overworld unless you believe that it can.” Then he knew what was troubling her: all her life she had been conditioned to believe that her power rested in her ritual virginity.
“Take your matrix,” he commanded gently.
She obeyed hesitantly.
“Focus on it. See?” he told her, as the lights slowly gathered in the stone. “And you know your channels are clear.”
They were. And it was not only the kireseth. Freed of the enormous tensions and armoring of the Keeper’s training, the channels were no longer frozen. She could command their natural selectivity. But why had no instinct told her this?
“Damon, how and why could they allow a secret like this to be forgotten?”
It meant that no one ever had to make the cruel choice Leonie had forced on her as a child, which other Keepers for ages past had accepted in selfless loyalty to Comyn and Towers.
“How could they abandon this” — her words took in all the wonder and discovery of the night just past — “for that!”
“I do not know,” Damon said sadly, “nor do I know if they will accept it now. It threatens what they have been taught, makes their sacrifices and their suffering useless, an act of folly.”
And he felt a clutch of pain at his heart, knowing that in what he did, as with all great discoveries, there were the seeds of bitter conflict. Men and women would die to champion one or the other side in this great struggle, and he knew, with a great surge of anguish, that a daughter of his own, with the face and the name of a flower, a daughter born to him by neither of these women here in this room, would be brutally murdered for daring to try to bring this knowledge into Arilinn itself. Mercifully the knowledge blurred again; the time was now, and he dared not concern himself with past or future.
“Arilinn, as all the other Towers, is locked into a decision our forefathers made. They may have been guided by reasons which were valid then, but are not valid now. I am not forcing the Tower circles to abandon their choice, if it is truly their choice and if, after knowing the cost, knowing there is now an alternative, they choose to keep to their own ways. But I want them to know that there is an alternative, that if I, working alone and outcast, have found one alternative, then there may be others, dozens of others, and some of these others might even be more acceptable to them than the one I have found. But I am claiming the right, for myself and my circle, to work in my own way, under such laws as seem right and proper to us.”
It seemed so simple and so rational. How could others threaten them with death or mutilation for that? Yet Callista knew that they had threatened and they would carry out the threat.
Andrew said to Ellemir, “I am not concerned for you, but I wish I could be sure this would not threaten your child.”
He knew he had hit on Ellemir’s own fear. But she said steadfastly, “Do you trust Damon or not? If he felt there was danger, he would have explained it to me, and let me make the choice in full knowledge.”
“I trust him.” But, Andrew wondered, did Damon simply feel that if they lost the coming battle it would be useless for any of them to survive anyway, including Ellemir and the baby? Firmly he cut off that line of thought. Damon was their Keeper. Andrew’s only responsibility was to decide whether or not Damon was worthy of trust and then to trust him and follow his directives, without mental reservations. So he asked, “What do we do first?”
“We build the Tower, and we establish it firmly with all our strength. It has been there for a long time, but it is what we imagine it to be.” He added to Ellemir, “You have never been in the overworld; you have only kept watch for me here. Link with me, and I will bring you there.”
With a strong mental thrust he was in the overworld, Ellemir beside him in the featureless grayness. Dimly at first, but with more clarity moment by moment in the overlight, he could make out the sheltering walls of their landmark.
At first it had been a rude shelter, like a herdsman’s hut, visualized almost accidentally. But with each successive use it had grown and strengthened, and now a true, declared Tower rose around them, with great lucent blue-shining walls, as real to his touch and step as the room in Comyn Castle where they had consummated their fourfold bond. Indeed they had brought much of that world with them, because, Damon thought, the fourfold bond and its completion was in a way the most important thing that had ever happened to any of them.
As always in the overworld he felt taller, stronger, more confident, which was the essence of it all. Ellemir, at his side, did not resemble Callista nearly as much as she did in the solid world. Physically, she and Callista were very much alike, but here where the mind determined the physical appearance, they were very unlike. Damon knew enough of genetics to wonder briefly if they were not identical twins after all. If they were not, it might mean that Callista could bear him a child without as much risk as Ellemir. But that was a thought for another time, another level of consciousness.
After an instant Callista and Andrew joined them in the overworld. He noticed that Callista had not clothed herself in the crimson robe of a Keeper. As the thought reached her she smiled and said, “I leave that office to you, Damon.”
For a duel between Keepers, perhaps he should be clothed in the ritual crimson sacrosanct to a Keeper, but he shrank from the blasphemy and suddenly knew why.
He would not fight this battle by Arilinn’s laws! He was not Keeper by their cruel life-denying laws, but he was tenerézu of an older tradition, defending his right to be so! He would wear the colors of his Domain and no more.
Andrew took up the stance of a paxman or bodyguard, just two steps behind him. Damon reached for Ellemir’s hand on his right, for Callista’s on his left, felt their fingertips lightly as a touch in the overworld always felt. He said in a low voice, “The sun rises over our Tower. Feel its strength around us. We built it here for shelter. Now it must stand here, not only for us, but as a symbol for all matrix mechanics who refuse the cruel constraints of the Towers, a shelter and a beacon for all those who will come after us.”
It seemed to Andrew, although the lucent blue walls of the Tower rose around him, that he could see the sun of the overworld through its walls. Callista had once explained it to him:
In the world of the overlight, where they were now, there was no such thing as darkness, because the light did not come from a solid sun. It came from the energy-net body of the sun, which could shine right through the energy-net body of the planet. To Andrew the red sun was enormous, a pale rim rising beyond and somehow through the Tower, shedding scattered crimson light, dripping bloody clouds.