I crossed the courtyard, standing at the edge of the steep embankment where the cliff fell away; a thousand feet below me, the city of Thendara lay sprawled. I leaned on the low stone wall. If one wished to attack the Terrans, one need only choose a stormy night of rain or sleet, so that their planes and rockets were laid up, to meet them on equal terms.
Behind that, the ridge of the mountains were a darker line against the dark sky, and far away, on the high slopes, I saw a gleam of fire. Some hunter’s fire, perhaps; yet the glimmer reminded me that somewhere, a strange white smoke spiraled up through fires that were not ordinary flame, and an incredible tenth-level matrix twisted space around itself.
When once a man has stood at the fires of Sharra, the strange flames call to him, play on his nerves as a heavy hand sweeps harpstrings. But I knew that unless I stilled their harpings I would break completely; so I fought against the maddening live warmth that pulsed somewhere in me, reminding me of things I loathed and feared with all my heart — yet in some strange, shameful way, longed for; loved; desired.
Where could I go to still that harping?
Only-to Callina.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Aillard rooms were spacious and brilliant; shimmering walls diffused delicate colors over Callina, who knelt on the floor, playing with a little striped beast from the rainforests. It leaped on her shoulder, purring, and flickering two-toed claws in and out of her silk sleeves.
Linnell was seated near her, a harp laid flat across her knees, and Regis standing beside Linnell; but they all sensed my presence at once. Linnell put the harp aside and Callina rose hastily, putting the kitten-thing on the floor and pulling at her skirts; but I went to her and took her in my arms. She would never know how precious she had made herself to me by that glimpse of a self less guarded, less aloof. I held her a moment, then the old frustration slipped back, thrusting like an unsheathed sword between us. Careful.
She evaded me by speaking of Linnell. “Poor child, I’m afraid she and Derik have quarreled. She loves him—”
“It’s who you love that interests me!” I interrupted.
She said, “I am Keeper — and comynara!”
“Comynara!” I suppose I sounded as bitter as I felt. “The Comyn would write your death warrant as soon as your marriage, if it would serve any cause!”
“If it would serve any cause, I would write my own,” she said steadily. My arms strained about her.
“Are you going to let them sell you?” I flung the words at her like a curse. “What do we owe the Comyn? They’ve played hell with our lives since we were born!”
“Lew, I don’t think you understand. I was mad, to let you think we could ever belong to each other. We can’t. Not ever.” Her hands went out, blindly, to push me away. “I can marry Beltran — and still keep my power to aid you, and the Comyn — because — because only because I do not love him. Do you understand?”
I did. I let her go and stood back, looking at her in consternation. Matrix work, for a man, has its frustrating aspects. But I had never stopped to think — more accurately I had never cared a damn — what particular refinements of. hellish-ness it might have for a woman. But before I could break out with the outrage I felt, she turned to Regis.
“Ashara has sent for us. Are you coming?”
“Not now,” he said. Regis had changed, in only a few hours; he seemed older, hardened somehow. He smiled in the old easy way, but I was not wholly comfortable in his presence. It hurt to realize that Regis was keeping himself barriered from me, but in a way it was a relief.
A servant folded Callina in a wrap like a gray shadow. As we went out, and down the staircase, Linnell stood between the panels of curtain, watching us, smiling. The colored lights, spilling over her pale dress, made her a rainbow statuette in a golden aureole; suddenly, for an-instant, vague unrest crystallized and fell together into one of those flashes of prevision which touch a telepath in moments of stress.
Linnell was doomed!
“Lew, what’s the matter?”
I blinked. Already the certainty, that sick instant when my mind had slid off the time-track, was fading. The confusion, the sense of tragedy, remained. When I looked up again, the curtains had dropped shut and Linnell was gone;
Outside, a thin fine rain was falling. The lights had faded in the old city, dark in the lee of the cliff below; but further out, in the Terran Zone, a neon glare of wet orange and red and green streaked the night sky with garish colors. I looked over the low wall.
“I would like to be down there tonight,” I said wearily. “Or anywhere away from this hell’s castle.”
“Even in the Terran Zone?”
“Even in the Terran Zone.”
“Why aren’t you, then? No one keeps you here, if that is where you would rather be.”
I turned to Callina. Her cobweb cloak spun out winglike on the wind; her hair blew, like a fine spray, about her face. I turned my back on the distant lights and pulled her close. A moment she held herself away from me, then suddenly she clung wildly, her lips frantic under mine, her arms gripping me with desperate dread. When we pulled apart, she was shaking like a young leaf.
“What now, Lew? What now?”
I gestured violently at the glare of neon. “The Terran Zone. Confront the Comyn with an accomplished fact, and let them find themselves another pawn to play with.”
Slowly, the spark faded in her eyes. Turning her back on the city, she pointed at the distant ridge of the mountains, and again the illusion came; thin white smoke, strange fire…
“Sharra’s fires burn there, still, Lew. You are no freer than I.”
I put my arm around her, returning by slow degrees to sane acceptance. The rain was icy cold on our faces; we turned and went silently toward the dark mass of the tower.
The wind, broken in its sweep by the angles of the castle, flung little spits and slashes of rain at us. We passed through walled courts and pillared passages, and finally stopped before a dark arch. Callina drew me forward, and a shaft began to rise.
Ashara’s Tower — so the story goes — was built for the first Keeper when Thendara was no more than a row of mud huts huddled under Nevarsin peak. It belongs to the strange days before our world writhed in earthquakes and cast off her four spinning moons. The smell of centuries hung between the musty walls with the shadows that slipped past, flitting into darkness. We rose and rose. At last the shaft halted and we stood before a carven door of glass. Not a curtain or panel of light. A door.
We stepped into blueness. Uncanny lights so mirrored and prismed the room that it seemed to have no dimension; to be at once immense and confined. The shimmer of blue glistened in the air, ,and under our feet; it was like swimming in blue waters or in the fire of a blue jewel.
“Come here,” said a low voice, clear as winter water running under ice. “I am waiting for you.”
Then and only then could my eyes focus enough in the frosty dayshine, to make out a great throne of carven glass; and the figure of a woman, seated on the throne. A straight tiny figure, almost as small as a child, in robes which so absorbed and mirrored the light that she appeared transparent.
“Ashara,” I whispered, and bent my head before the Sorceress of the Comyn.
Her pale features, innocent of wrinkles as Callina’s own, seemed almost fleshlessly pure. But they were old for all that, so old that even wrinkles had been smoothed away by the hand of time. The eyes, long and large, were colorless too, although in a normal light they might have been blue. There was a faint, indefinite resemblance between the two Keepers, nevertheless; as if Ashara were a stylized portrait of Calh’na, or Callina an embryo Ashara, not yet what Ashara was but one day to become so.