The Forbidden Tower

  They were all almost asleep when the door of the room opened and Damon came in, moving unsteadily. He looked down at them, smiling. “Knew I’d find you all here.” He flung his clothes this way and that. He was still blundering drunk. “Come on, make room, where do I—”

  “Damon, you want to sleep it off,” Callista said. “Won’t you be more comfortable—”

  “Comfortable be damned,” Damon said drowsily. “Nobody ought to have to sleep alone at festival time!”

  Laughing, Callista made room at her side and Damon crawled in, was instantly asleep. Andrew felt a mad laughter blowing away his embarrassment. As he fell asleep he became aware of a dim thread of rapport, weaving among them, as if Damon, even in sleep, reached out for the comfort of their presence, drawing them all close together, intertwined, close-folded, their hearts beating in rhythm, a slow pulse, an infinite comfort. He thought, not knowing whether it was his own thought or another’s, that Damon was there, it was all right now. That was the way it ought to be. He felt Damon’s awareness: All my loved ones… I will never be alone again…

  It was late when they woke, but the drawn curtains made it dark in the room. Ellemir was still folded in his arms. She stirred, turned sleepily toward him, enfolded him with her woman’s warmth. The sense of closeness, of unique sharing, was still there, and he let himself be swept into it, accepting the welcoming of her body. It was not only himself and Ellemir, somehow, but the very awareness, somewhere below conscious level, that they were all part of it, they fitted together, uniquely and without analysis. He felt like shouting to the world, to everyone, “I love you, I love all of you.” In his exultation he did not distinguish his sexual awareness of Ellemir, the tenderness for Callista, the strong, protective warmth he felt for Damon, They were all one emotion, and it was love. He floated in it, he drowned in it, he lay spent, luxuriating in it. He knew they had wakened the others. It didn’t seem to matter.

  Ellemir moved first, stretching, sighing, laughing, yawning. She raised herself a little, kissed him quickly. “I would like to stay here all day,” she said ruefully, “but I am thinking of the chaos downstairs in the hall. If any of our guests are to have breakfast, I must go down and make sure something is done!” She leaned over and kissed Damon and, after a moment, kissed Callista too, then slid from the bed and went to dress.

  Damon, less physically involved, sensed the effort Callista was making to keep herself barriered. So it was not complete, after all. She was still outside. He touched a light fingertip to her closed eyes. Andrew had gone into the bath. They were alone, and he felt the gallant pretense dissolve.

  “Crying, Callie?”

  “No, of course not. Why should I?” But she was.

  He held her, knowing at this moment they shared something from which the others were excluded, that shared experience, that painful discipline, the sense of apartness.

  Andrew had gone to dress. Damon caught a fragment of his thought, contentment mingled with chagrin, and thought how for a little while Andrew was one of them. Now he was apart from them too. He sensed Callista’s emotions too, not begrudging Ellemir anything, but desperately needing to know before she could share it. He sensed her desperate grief, the sudden mad impulse to tear at herself with her nails, beat herself with her fists, turn against this useless mutilated body which was so far from what it should have been. He held her against him, trying to calm and soothe her with his touch.

  Ellemir came back from her bath, the ends of her hair dripping, and sat at Callista’s dressing table. “I will wear one of your housedresses, Callie, there is so much clearing away to be done,” she said. “That is the only bad thing about a party!” She saw Callista, hiding her face against Damon, and for a moment she was wrung by Callista’s grief. Ellemir had been brought up thinking of herself as having a little of the laran of her clan, but now, taking the full impact of her twin’s sorrow, she knew it was more of a curse than a blessing. And when Andrew came back she sensed his sudden apartness.

  Andrew was thinking that you just had to be brought up to that kind of thing. He interpreted Ellemir’s tense silence as shame or regret for what had happened and wondered if he ought somehow to apologize. For what? To whom? Ellemir? Damon? He saw Callista lying in Damon’s arms. Where would he get any right to complain? Turn about was fair play, but he still felt an almost physical queasiness and disgust, or was it only that he had drunk too much the night before?

  Damon saw his eyes on them and smiled.

  “I suppose Dom Esteban has a head worse than mine this morning. I’ll go douse some cold water on mine, and go down and see if I can do something for our father. I haven’t the heart to leave him to his body-servant today.” He added, disentangling himself slowly and without haste from Callista, “Have your Terrans any suitable expression for the morning after the night before?”

  “Dozens,” Andrew said glumly, “and every one as revolting as the thing itself.” Hangovers, he thought.

  Damon went into the bath and Andrew stood jerking a comb through his hair, glowering at Callista. He did not even see that her eyes were red. Slowly she got out of bed and into her flowered chamber robe. “I must go help Ellemir. The maids will hardly know where to start. Why are you staring at me, my husband?”

  The phrase made him angry, quarrelsome. “You will not even let me touch your fingertips, and if I kiss you, you draw away as if I meant rape, yet you were lying in Damon’s arms—”

  She lowered her eyes. “You know why I dare… with him.”

  Andrew remembered the intense awareness, sexuality, he had sensed, shared with Damon. It was disquieting, flooding him with vague unease. “You cannot say that Damon is not a man!”

  “Of course he is,” said Callista, “but he has learned—and in the same hard school as I—when and how not to seem so.”

  That was somehow, to Andrew’s hypersensitive guilt, like a taunt, as if he were some kind of brute, animal, who could not control his sexual urges but must be accommodated. She had literally pushed him into Ellemir’s arms, but Damon needed no such concessions. Suddenly, angrily, he took Callista in his arms, forced his mouth on hers. For a moment she fought him, twisting her mouth away from his, and he could feel the wild upheaveal in her. Suddenly she went wholly passive in his arms, her lips cold, unmoving, so far away she might not have been in the same room with him at all. Her low voice tore at him like fangs.

  “Whatever you feel you must do, I can bear. As I am now, it would make no difference. It will not damage me now, nor stir me to the point where I will react or strike at you. Even if you felt you must… must take me to bed… it would mean nothing to me, but if it gave you any pleasure…”

  Cold, shocked to the very bones, he let her go. Somehow this was more horrible than if she had resisted him madly, torn at him with teeth and fingernails, struck him again with the lightning bolt. Before, she feared her own arousal. Now she knew that nothing would get through her defenses… nothing.

  “Oh, Callista, forgive me! Oh, God, Callista, forgive me!” He fell to his knees before her, gathering up her small fingertips in his, pressing them to his lips in an agony of remorse. Damon came from the bath, standing appalled at the tableau, but neither of them heard or saw him. Slowly Callista laid her hands on either side of Andrew’s face. She said in a whisper, “Ah, love, it is I should ask you to forgive me. I do not want… I do not want to be indifferent to you.” Her voice was filled with such grief that Damon knew he could not wait any longer.

  He knew why he had gotten so drunk last night. It was because, with Midwinter past, he could no longer delay the ordeal. Now he must go into the overworld, into time itself, and search for help there, for a way to bring Callista back to them. Now, before her frantic grief, he felt he would risk more than this for her, for Andrew.

  Very quietly, he withdrew and went out of the suite the other way.

  * * *

  Chapter Fifteen

  « ^ »

  After Midwinter, surprisingly,
the weather moderated and repairs from the great storm went forward rapidly. Within a tenday they were complete, and Andrew felt that he could leave everything in the hands of the coridom for some time.

  He thought he had never seen Damon as overwrought and irritable as during that morning, after Damon had isolated the suite with telepathic dampers and warned the servants not to approach them. Since Midwinter Damon had been edgy, silent, but now, as he adjusted the dampers, prowling around the suite nervously, they could all sense it. Callista finally broke into his nervous fretting with, “That’s enough, Damon! Lie down flat and breathe slowly. You can’t start like this, and you know it as well as I do. Get yourself calmed first. Do you want some kirian?”

  “I don’t want it,” said Damon irritably, “but I suppose I’d better have it. And I want a blanket or something. I always come back half frozen.”

  She gestured to Ellemir to cover him with a blanket and went for the kirian. “Taste it first. My distilling apparatus here isn’t as efficient as what I had at Arilinn, and there may residues, though I filtered it twice.”

  “You can’t be worse at that sort of thing than I am,” Damon said and sniffed carefully, then laughed, remembering Callista doing almost the same thing with the crude tincture he had made. “Never mind, my dear, I don’t suppose we’ll poison one another.” He let her measure a careful dose, adding, “I don’t know what the time-distortion factor is, and you’ll have to stay in phase to monitor me. Hadn’t you better take some yourself?”

  She shook her head. “I have an awfully low tolerance for the stuff, Damon. If I took enough for phasing, I’d have serious trouble. I can key it with you without it.”

  “You’ll get awfully cramped and cold,” Damon warned, but he realized that after so many years as Keeper she probably knew her tolerances for the telepathic drug to the narrowest margin. She smiled, measuring her dose by a few drops. “I’m wearing an extra warm shawl. If I’m monitoring life functions, when do you want me to pull you out?”

  He didn’t know. He had no experience with the stresses of Timesearch. He had no idea what he might be called on to endure in the way of side effects. “Better not pull me back unless I go into convulsions.”

  “That far?” Callista felt a sharp stab of guilt. It was for her he was incurring this terrible risk, returning to this work he so feared and hated. They were already close in linkage. He laid a light hand on her wrist. “Not only for you, darling. For all of us. For the children.”

  And for the Keeper, the one who will come. Callista did not say the words aloud, but time had slipped out of focus, as it did sometimes for an Alton, and she saw herself from a great distance, here, elsewhere, standing knee-deep in a great field of flowers; looking down at a delicate girl lying unconscious before her; standing in the chapel at Armida before the statue of Cassilda, a wreath of crimson flowers in her hand. She laid the flowers on the altar, then she was back with them again, dizzied, flushed, exalted. She whispered, “Damon, you saw…”

  Andrew had seen too, all of them had seen, and he remembered Callista’s look of pity and grief as she removed Ellemir’s forgotten offering from the chapel. “Our women still lay flowers at her shrine…” Damon said gently, “I saw, Callie. But it’s a long way from here to there, you know.”

  She wondered if Andrew would mind very much, then brought herself back, with firm discipline, to her work. “Let me check your breathing.” Lightly she passed her fingertips above his body. “Take the kirian now.”

  He swallowed, making a wry face. “Ugh! What did you flavor it with, horse piss?”

  “Nothing, you’ve forgotten the taste, that’s all. How many years since you took it? Lie back and stop clenching your hands; you’ll only knot your muscles and give yourself cramps.”

  Damon obeyed, looking around the three faces surrounding him: Callista, sober and commanding; Ellemir looking a little scared; Andrew, strong and calm, but he sensed with an undercurrent of dismay. But again his eyes came back to Callista’s confident face. He could absolutely rely on her, Arilinn-trained. His breathing, his life functions, his very life was in her hands, and he was content to have it there.

  Why must she renounce this, because she wanted to live in happiness, and bear children?

  Callista was bringing Ellemir and Andrew into the circle. He felt them slip into the rapport, meshing. Already he was adrift, floating, very distant. He looked at Ellemir as if she were transparent, thinking how much he loved her, how happy she was.

  Callista said quietly, “I’ll let you go as far as crisis, first stage, not as far as convulsions. That wouldn’t do you any good, nor any of us.”

  He didn’t bother to protest. She had been trained at Arilinn; it was her decision to make. Then he was in the over-world, sensing it as their landmark formed around him, a tower like Arilinn, less solid, less brilliant, not a beacon but a shelter, very remote, yet solid around him, a protection, a home here. For a moment, as he looked around the gray world and sheltered, delaying, within its walls, he found himself wondering with an absurd flippancy what the other telepaths who wandered in the gray world would think, to find a new tower there. Or would the others ever notice, ever come to this remote place where Damon and his group were working? Resolutely, he formed his thoughts to bear him swiftly to Arilinn, and found himself standing in the court before Leonie. He saw with relief that her face was veiled and her voice cool and remote, as if the moment of passion had never been.

  “We must first reach the level where motion through time is possible. Have you taken sufficient precaution to keep yourself monitored?” He felt that she was looking through him, to the overworld, to the world behind him where his body lay, Callista silently watching by his side. She looked oddly triumphant, but she said only, “You may be away for a very long time, and it will seem longer than it is. I will guide you as far as the Timesearch level, though I am not sure I will be able to stay there. But we must move through the levels a little at a time. I usually try to think of it as a flight of steps,” she added, and he saw that the grayness around them had lifted enough to reveal a shadowy flight of steps, curving away upward and vanishing into thicker grayness above them, like fog shrouding a riverbed. He noted that the stairs had a gilt banister, and wondered what staircase in Leonie’s childhood, perhaps in Castle Hastur, was revived here in her mental image.

  He knew perfectly well, as he set his foot on the first step behind Leonie, that in actuality only their minds moved through the formless atoms of the universe, but the firm visualization of the staircase felt reassuringly solid under his feet, and gave them a focal point for moving from level to level. Leonie knew this path and he was content to follow.

  The stairs were not steep, but as he climbed it seemed that he began to breathe more heavily, as if climbing in a mountain pass. The stairs still felt firm, even carpeted under foot, though his feet themselves, he knew, were only mental formulations. It became harder and harder to feel them, to lift them from step to step. The stairs felt fuzzier and dimmer, leading into thick gray fog just a little ahead of him. Leonie’s form was only a crimson-veiled wisp.

  The thick fog closed in. He could see a few inches of the staircase under his feet, but he was walking in grayness which made his body disappear. The grayness darkened into a blackness crisscrossed by racing blue lights.

  The level of energy-nets. Damon had worked on this level as a psi technician, and with a sharp effort he managed to solidify it, making it into a dark cavern with narrow lighted trails and footpaths leading upward through a maze of falling water. Leonie was dim and shadowy here, her robes colorless. He did not hear her now in words:

  Go carefully here. We are in the level of monitored matrices. They will watch us so that no harm comes to me. But follow closely, I know where matrix work is being done and we must not intrude.

  Silently Damon threaded his way along the blue-lighted paths. Once there was a burst of blue light, but Leonie’s thought reached him urgently:

  Tu
rn away from it!

  And he knew that somewhere a matrix operation was under way, of such a delicate nature that even a random thought—“looking” at it—could throw it out of balance and endanger the mechanics. He visualized physically turning his back on the light, closing his eyes so that he could not see it even through his eyelids. It seemed a long time before Leonie’s thought-touch recalled him:

  It is safe to go on now.

  Again the staircase formulated beneath his feet, though he could not see it, and he began climbing. Only dogged concentration could now force the illusion of a physical body which could climb, and the stairs were like mist under his feet. His pulse began to labor as he struggled upward,. and his breath came heavily. It was like climbing a mountain pass, like the steep rock-stairs leading upward to Nevarsin Monastery. He felt about in the thick darkness for the ice-rimed rail, felt it burn his fingers, but was grateful for the sensation. It helped him solidify the terrible, chaotic formlessness of this level. He had no idea how Leonie, who was untrained in climbing, was managing here, but he sensed her near him in the darkness, and knew she must have her own mental techniques for coping with the rising levels. His breath was thinning now, and he felt that his heart was pounding in acute, dizzy distress. He felt the vertigo of terrible height beneath him. He could not force himself to go on. He clung to the railing, feeling it numbing his hands with cold.

  I cannot go on, I cannot. I will die here.

  Slowly his breathing began to come more smoothly, his laboring heart calmed. He knew with the remotest consciousness that Callista had gone into phase with him, regulating his heart and breathing, Now he could struggle upward again, although the stairs were gone. As his sense of struggling upward and upward grew more intense he began, desperately, to formulate the memory of the cliff-climbing, ice-and-rock techniques he had learned as a boy at Nevarsin, as if he were dragging himself up rough-cut hand- and footholds, fixing imaginary ropes and pitons to help him haul his reluctant body upward. Then he lost his body again, and all track of levels and effort, moving only by fierce concentration from darkness to darkness. In one of them there were strange, formless cloud masses and he seemed to wallow through bogs of cold slime. In another there were presences everywhere, crowding him, thrusting their intangible shapelessness against him, crowding… The very concept of form was lost. He could not remember what a body was, or what it felt like to have one. He was as shapeless, as everywhere-and-nowhere as they, whatever they were, everywhere interpenetrating. He felt sick and violated, but he struggled on, and after eternities this too was gone.