I fought the Great Cat from outside the Tower, and I triumphed. As if to affirm the act which had brought him the awareness of his own psi power, undiminished by the years he had spent outside the Tower, he called up the Great Cat, pouring their linked minds into the image, sending it out to hover over the heights of Arilinn. While the Great Cat ravaged the Kilghard Hills and brought darkness and terror and hunger to all our people, you sat safe in Arilinn and you did nothing to help them!
The two Towers stood now so close that he could see Leonie’s face through her veil, shining with wrath and despair. In the overworld, Damon thought detachedly, she was still as beautiful as she had ever been. But he could see her for only a moment, for her face vanished in a swirling darkness which wiped out sight of her circle. Where Leonie had stood, a dragon reared upward, roaring and breathing flame. Golden-scaled, golden-clawed, towering to the sky above Arilinn, its fire showered down on the forbidden Tower. Damon felt the blistering heat, felt as if his body were crisping and withering in the fire, heard Callista cry out in agony, felt Ellemir’s terror, and for a moment wondered if Leonie must succeed after all in driving them from the overworld, forcing them back into their physical bodies…
But with the flame he also felt the awareness of a legend in Andrew’s mind: Burn us and we will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes… Reaching with all his last strength through the fire and the burning which threatened to drive them all from the overworld, Damon linked them closer still. Together they poured all their psychic force into the shifting stuff of the overworld, linking into a giant bird, feathers blazing, burning up in the ecstatic union which consumed them, their four linked minds joined. In Andrew’s mind Damon felt them curled naked together, inside a darkness, inside an unhatched egg, while the flames wholly consumed them, burned them down into ash. Then, in an ever-expanding ecstasy, the shell around them broke and they burst upward from the ashes, spreading mighty wings in a single, linked burst of flaming energy, soaring over Arilinn, triumphant… From the phoenix beak came thunder, lightning, shaking and rumbling the Tower of Arilinn. Damon saw, as if far below, the small forms of Leonie and her circle, watching in despair and dread.
Leonie! You cannot destroy us! I ask truce.
Damon knew that he did not wish to destroy Arilinn. It had been his home. He had suffered there unendurably, as Callista had suffered, yet he had been trained there too, disciplined, taught to use the utmost strength and control. His training in Arilinn was at the basis of what he was now, of what he might eventually become. Arilinn should stand forever, in overworld and real world, a home for telepaths, a symbol of what Tower training had been and might some day be again. The strength and power of the Domains.
But Leonie’s voice was shaken, almost inaudible. “No, Damon, strike us down. Destroy us utterly, as you have destroyed all we stand for.”
“No, Leonie.” And now, suddenly, they stood facing one another on the gray plain of the overworld. And he knew — and knew that Leonie shared the thought — that he could never harm her. He loved her, had always loved her, would always love her.
“And I love you too,” Callista said tenderly at his side. She stretched her hands to Leonie, then, as she had never done in the real world, she took Leonie in her arms, holding the woman against her in a tender, loving embrace. “But Leonie, my beloved foster-mother, can you not see what it is that Damon has done?”
Leonie said, shaking, “He has destroyed the Towers. And you, Callista, you have betrayed us all!” She shrank from the girl, staring at her in horror. Damon, linked with her now, knew that she could see what had happened to Callista, that she was a woman, loving, loved, fulfilled — not Keeper in the old sense at all, yet wielding the full power of her training and her strength. “Callista, Callista, what have you done?”
Damon answered, gently but unyielding, “We have discovered the old way of working, where a Keeper need not sacrifice life and all the joy of living.”
Then my life was useless, my sacrifice needless. And, with a despair Damon could neither measure nor endure: Let me die now.
He could see through her, with the new sight of a Keeper, and he saw in horror what she had done to herself. Why had he never guessed? She had sent him from the Tower to remove forever the temptation that he might lose control and reveal his desire for her. But to remove her own temptation? The laws forbade the neutering of a Comyn woman, and she had stopped short of that with Callista.
But for herself?
He said with an anguished compassion, “Not needless, Leonie. You and all those like you have kept the tradition alive, kept the matrix sciences of Darkover alive, so that some day this rediscovery might be made. Your heroism has made it possible for our children and grandchildren to use the old sciences without so much suffering and tragedy. I do not want to destroy the Towers, only to take some of the burden from you, to make it possible to train others outside the Towers, so that you need not give up your lives, so that the price need not be so cruelly high. You, and all of us who have come from Arilinn and the other Towers, have kept the flame alive, even though you fed it with your own flesh and blood.” He stood disarmed before them all, knowing they could strike him down now, but also knowing, with that deep inner knowledge, that now they heard what he said.
“Now the living flame can be rekindled, and it need not feed on your very lives. Leonie” — he turned to her again, his hands held out in pleading — “if you could break under the strain, you, a Hastur, and Lady of Arilinn, then it is surely a burden too heavy for any mortal man or woman. No one alive could have borne it without breaking. Let us work, Leonie, let us go on as we have begun, so that a day will come when once again the men and women who come to the Towers can find joy in their work, not endless sacrifice and a living death!”
Slowly Leonie bowed her head. She said, “I acknowledge you Keeper, Damon. You are beyond harm or vengeance at our hands. We merit any penalty you choose to invoke.”
He said, his heart aching, “I can inflict on you no penalty greater than you have laid on yourself, Leonie, the self-chosen sentence you must continue to bear until another generation is strong enough to carry it. Avarra grant in her mercy that you will be the last Keeper of Arllinn to face such a living death, but Keeper of Arilinn you must remain, until Janine can bear the burden alone.”
And your only punishment will be to know that for you it is too late. Torn with Leonie’s agony, he knew it had always been too late for her. It was too late when, at fifteen, she went into the Dalereuth Tower under the vows of a Keeper. He saw her receding, further and further, like a star dimming out in the morning light. He saw the Tower of Arilinn itself receding on the fluid horizon of the overworld, till it dwindled in the distance, shone with a faint blue light, was gone. Damon and Andrew, Ellemir, and Callista were alone in the forbidden Tower, and then, with a sharp shock, the overworld too was gone, and they were in the suite in Comyn Castle. The peaks beyond the window were flooded with sunlight, but the great red sun had barely cleared the horizon.
Sunrise. And the fate of the four of them, and the fate, perhaps, of all the telepaths on Darkover, had been settled in an astral battle lasting less than a quarter of an hour.