She must have been an ordinary woman once; at least as ordinary as any of the Comyn could be said to be ordinary; and not immortal, only long-lived as some of the Hasturs were long-lived. There was chieri blood mixed with the blood of the Domains. Regis knew little of the chieri, but they were said to be immortal and beautiful, still dwelling somewhere in a remote valley where humankind never came. But his own grandfather showed signs of being one of those Hasturs whose reign could span generations …it was a lucky thing for the Comyn, that Danvan Hastur had been there to reign as Regent during these troubled years… Regis found his thoughts sliding into unexpected channels, as if some other mind had briefly touched his own; he started, blinked as if he had fallen asleep on his feet for a moment; his skin crawled, and something touched him— Regis felt a faint nausea deep in his body. A shadow had fallen across the doorway and Callina Aillard was standing there.
He had not seen her come. Lord of Light! Regis swore to himself, sweating; had he stood there, sound asleep on his feet, an idiot’s grin on his face, his clothing disarranged or worse? He felt exposed, desperately uncomfortable; Callina was a Keeper, and uncanny. He managed to get out a formal, “Su serva, Domna…”
She was not now wearing the formal crimson robes she had worn in the Crystal Chamber, the traditional garb which marked out a Keeper as apart, untouchable, sacrosanct. Instead she had on a long, fleecy gown of blue wool, close-cut, high-necked. It was girdled with a copper belt, squared plaques of the precious metal, a large blue semi-precious stone at the center of each plaque; and her hair, coiled low on her neck, was caught into a priceless clasp of copper filigree.
“Come through here, and then we can talk if you wish. Hush; do not disturb the relays.” Her voice was so low it barely stirred the air between them, and Regis followed on tiptoe, as if a normal step would be like a shout. They passed through a large silent chamber, bare, with relay screens staring blank and glassy blue, and other things which Regis did not recognize; before one of the screens a young girl was curled up on a soft seat. Her face had the strange, not-quite-present look of a telepath whose mind was fixed in the relays communicating with other Towers, other telepaths. Regis did not know the girl and Callina of course did not notice her in any way; in fact, only her body was there in the room with them at all.
Callina opened a noiseless door at the far end of the room, and they went through into a small, comfortable private room, with low divans and chairs, and a high window with colored glass, throwing prism lights across the room; but it was dark outside, and if it had not been high summer Regis would have thought it might be snowing. Callina shut the door soundlessly behind them, gestured him to a seat and curled up in one of them herself, tucking her feet under her, and drawing the hem of the blue gown over them. She said in her stilled voice, “Well, Regis, did Old Hastur send you to me to ask if I’d go through the marriage ceremony with Beltran, just to save the Council some embarrassment?”
Regis felt his face burning; had she read his mind while he stood there, asleep on his feet like a gaby? He said truthfully, “No, he didn’t, though he did mention it to me at dinner last night. I don’t think he would have the arrogance actually to ask it, Lady Callina.”
Callina said, sighing, “Derik is an accursed fool. And I had no idea what that foolish brother of mine was doing behind my back, or that Derik was stupid enough to listen to him. Linnell loves Derik; it would break her heart to separate them now. How she can care for such a fool—!” Callina shook her head in exasperation. “Merryl’s never reconciled himself to being born an Aillard, and subject to the female Head of the Domain. And I doubt he ever will.”
“Grandfather did suggest that you might go through the ceremony—no more than that—as a matter of form,” Regis said.
“It might be easier than telling Beltran what he otherwise must say to him,” Callina said, “that this marriage was contrived by a young man greedy for power and a prince too dull to see how he’s being manipulated.”
“Don’t forget,” Regis said dryly, “a Regent too lazy or forgetful to keep a strong hand over his not-too-intelligent princeling.”
“Do you really think it was only laziness or forgetfulness?” Callina asked, and Regis said, “I don’t like to think my grandfather would have plotted against the Head of a Domain—”
Then he remembered a conversation he had had with Danilo three years ago, as fresh as today: so Domain after Domain falls into Hastur hands; the Elhalyn is already under Hastur Regency, then the Aillard with Derik married to Linnell, Regis thought, all the easier if Callina was married off and exiled in distant Aldaran. And he had watched his grandfather’s machinations against the Altons.
“No, he couldn’t plot it,” Callina said, and a faint smile stirred her lips, “but he could sit back while Merryl and that fool of a Derik create such a situation that I must fall into place or seriously embarrass the Comyn.”
“Callina, even Hastur cannot marry off the Head of a Domain without her own consent. And you are Keeper for Ashara; what will she say to that?”
“Ashara…” Callina was silent for a moment, as if the very sound of the name stirred unease in her calm face. She looked troubled. “I seldom see Ashara. She spends much of her time in meditation. I could hold all her power in the Council, but I am afraid—” she stopped herself in mid-sentence. “You are not Tower-trained, Regis?”
He shook his head. “I had enough training so that I could manage my Gift without becoming ill, but I’m not that powerful a telepath, and Grandfather needed me in Thendara, he said.”
“I think you are more of a telepath than you believe, kinsman,” Callina said, with a skeptical look.
The quiet, assured statement somehow made him uneasy; he frowned, ready to protest. “I’m useless in the relays, and they couldn’t teach me much about monitoring—”
“That may be,” she said. “In the Towers we test only for those gifts which are useful to their functions; monitoring, the skill to stay in rapport with a matrix screen for mining and manipulating power— in this day and age, that seems the only kind of laran the Towers find useful. But you are finding out that there is more to your laran than you believed—is it not so, cousin?”
Regis flinched as if she had put her fingers directly on a bruise he did not know he had.
“You had better tell me about it,” she said, “I saw how you had picked up the presence of Sharra, in Council. Let me see your matrix, Regis.”
Apprehensively, Regis touched the small velvet bag, undid the strings, tilted the small blue crystal into his palm. It lay there blue and placid, small distant lights glimmering inside the stone; no sign of fire, no sign of the ravening Form of Fire…
“It’s gone!” he said in surprise.
“And you expected it to be there,” Callina said. “Really, I think you had better tell me everything about it.”
Regis was still staring at his matrix in disbelief. After a moment he managed to blurt out something about it; how Javanne had been trapped by the image, how he had, without thinking about it, freed her mind from the matrix.
“It was like—I watched her, once, unpicking a design that had gone wrong in her tapestry—I think it must have felt like that, though I don’t know how to do tapestry—”
“I do,” Callina said, “and that’s just what it would have felt like.”
“What did I do?” Regis had not known how frightened he was until he heard his own voice trembling. “How could I do that? I thought—it would take a powerful telepath, perhaps a Keeper—to match resonances like that—”
“There have been male Keepers in history,” Callina said abstractedly. “Good ones, powerful ones. Only for the last few hundred years have Keepers been women. And until a few generations ago, they were locked up, treated like sorceresses, sacred virgins, ritual objects of great power and veneration.” Her face was cool, ironic. “Now, of course, in these enlightened days, we know better… a Keeper today need be no more than centerpolar—the cen
ter of their matrix circles, the one who holds the energon rings. Regis, have you had enough Tower training to have the faintest idea what I’m talking about?”
“I think so. I know the language, though I don’t think I really understand it all. They never thought I had had enough strength as a telepath to let me work in a circle, and besides, I was needed here. But if I wasn’t even able to work as a monitor, I couldn’t have done a Keeper’s work, not completely untrained, not like that, could I?” His voice cracked, but he was not quite so afraid; Callina had talked about it as a technical problem, not some strange and terrifying flaw in himself.
“But a Keeper’s work, in these days, is no more than any well-trained technician can do, as I said,” she told him. “Kennard was a technician, and he could do almost everything Elorie of Arilinn could do, except actually hold the center of a circle. I think Jeff could do that if he had to, if tradition would let him. And you’re a Hastur, and your mother was Hastur of Elhalyn—what do you know about the Hastur Gift, Regis?”
“Not much,” he said frankly. “When I was a boy, a leronis told me I had not even the ordinary laran.” The memory of that, as always, was multiple layers of pain, the sense that he was unworthy to follow in the steps of the forefather Hasturs who had come before him; and at the same time freedom, freedom from the path laid out for the Hastur sons, a path he must walk whether he would or no…
“But your laran wakened…” she said, half a question, and he nodded. Danilo Syrtis, friend, paxman, sworn brother, and the last known to hold the almost-extinct gift of catalyst telepathy—Danilo had wakened Regis’s laran, given him the heritage of the Comyn; but it was not altogether a blessing, for it had meant the loss of his freedom. Now he must shoulder the burden, take up the heritage of all the Hasturs, and abandon his dream of freedom from those unendurable bonds—
I have been a good Heir to the Hasturs; I have done my duty, commanded in the Guard, sat in the Council, adopted the son of my sister for an Heir in turn. I have even given sons and daughters to the Hastur clan, even though I would not marry the women who bore them to me…
“I know something of those bonds,” she said, and it seemed to him that her passionless voice was sympathetic. “I am a Keeper, Regis, not a Keeper in the new way, only a highly specialized technician, but Keeper in the old way; I was trained under Elorie of Arilinn. She was Dyan’s half-sister, you know… Cleindori, Dorilys of Arilinn, freed the Keepers by reducing the old superstition to what they now call the science of matrix mechanics, and now the Keepers need not give up their lives, and live cloistered, virgin… but I had been trained in the old fashion, Regis, and after I had served at Arilinn and Neskaya, then I came here, just because I was the only woman in the Domains who had been trained in the ancient way. Ashara demanded it, and I, who had had the ancient training and was still virgin, because I had never felt any wish to marry, or leave my post even for a few years to marry or take a lover—” her smile was faint, almost absent. “I was content with my work, nor had I ever met any man who would tempt me to leave my calling. So I was sent, willy-nilly, to serve under Ashara, I who was ruler of a Domain in my own right… simply because I was what I was.” For a moment it seemed that there was terror in her eyes, and he wondered: is she so afraid of Ashara? Fear seemed an unlikely emotion for a Keeper.
What had women to be afraid of? They didn’t have to fight in the coming wars, they would be safe and protected…
She said, “What do you know of the Hastur Gift?” again, insistently.
“Not much, as I told you. I grew up thinking I didn’t even have ordinary laran…”
“But whatever it may be, it’s latent in you,” she mused.
He asked her point-blank, “Do you know what the Hastur Gift is?”
She said, biting her lip, “Ashara must know…” and he wondered what that had to do with it. As if speaking to herself, she said, “The Ardais Gift; catalyst telepathy, the ability to awaken laran in others. The Ridenow make the best monitors because they are empaths… the Gifts are all so muddled, now, by inbreeding, by marriage with non-telepaths, it’s rare to find the full strength of any of the old Gifts. And there is so much superstition and tradition cluttering any clear knowledge of the Gifts… there is a tradition that the original Gift of the Hasturs may have been what was trained into the Keepers: the ability to work with other matrixes, without the elaborate safeguards a Keeper must have. Originally the word Keeper—” she used the casta, teneresteis— meant one who holds, one who guards… a Keeper, in the simplest terms, putting aside a Keeper’s function of working at the center of the energon rings, is one who keeps the other matrixes in the group resonating together; it’s a special skill of working with other matrixes, not just her own. As I say, some high-level technicians can do it. I wonder…” she hesitated a little, then said, “Hasturs, in general, are long-lived and mature late. Ordinary laran waked in you late—you were fifteen, weren’t you? And perhaps that was only a first stirring of the laran you will eventually have. How old are you now? Twenty-one? That would mean your matrix was wakened at about the time as the Sharra troubles—”
“I was in the mountains then; and my matrix was overshadowed, like all the matrixes in the vicinity of the Sharra matrix,” Regis said.
And he had, furthermore, been going through an intolerable personal crisis with the wakening of his heritage; his decision to accept himself as he was, and not as his grandfather and the Comyn wanted him to be; to accept self-knowledge and the unwanted burden of the Hasturs, or to bury it all, live a life without either, an uncomprehending, unburdened life without laran, without responsibility. But now there was this new dimension to his laran, and he could not even guess what further burdens it would demand of him.
“Let me be sure about this,” Callina said. “While you were in the mountains during the Sharra rebellion, your matrix was overshadowed; you could not use it because of—of what I saw in Lew’s at that time: the Form of Fire. But later, when Sharra was offworld—”
“It was clear,” he said, “and I learned to use it, my matrix I mean, without any sign of Sharra. Only when Lew brought the Sharra matrix back to Darkover—”
She nodded. “And yet, you cleared your matrix,” she said. “It will be easy enough to see if you have natural talent for a Keeper’s skills.” She unrolled her own from the tiny leather bag at her throat. She held it naked on her palm and said, “Can you match resonances and touch it without hurting me?”
Regis looked away, gulping; his mind was full of that day in Castle Aldaran, when he had seen Kadarin strip away Lew’s matrix and send Lew to the floor in violent convulsions, a shrieking mindless wreck… He muttered, “I wouldn’t know where to start. And I’d be afraid to try. I could—I could kill you.”
She shook her head. “No, you couldn’t, not here, not safeguarded as I am,” she said. “Try it.”
Her voice was low and indifferent, but it was a command, and Regis, sweating, tried to think himself into the blue crystal that lay in Callina’s palm. He tried to remember how he had gone into Javanne’s mind, reaching out to unpick her mind from the matrix as if it were interwoven threads of tapestry…He felt a strange, unpleasant force against his mind and moved squeamishly against it. Was that Callina? He glanced up, hesitant, unable to reconcile that cold stony force with the smiling, gentle woman before him.
“I—can’t,” he said.
“Forget about me! Match resonances with the matrix, I said!”
This is foolish. I have known Callina most of my life. It is absurd to be afraid of her! He reached out again, tentative, feeling the pulsing life-force, her guarded thoughts—she had the strongest barrier he had ever touched; he supposed it had something to do with being a Keeper. He caught only fragments, the light hurting her eyes from a window, subliminal awareness of him, Regis, he’s a good-looking boy, how tired he was of that reaction from women—Again he felt the pulsing of the matrix, tried to match his breathing against it…A face sketched itself li
ghtly on his mind, cold, distant, making him shiver as if he stood naked in frost… beautiful, terrible, alien— He banished that, too, and the fear, and forced himself into the matrix, feeling the resonance, the cold life of stone, the glowing lights in tune with his breathing, the blood in his veins… He felt himself reach out, not conscious of movement, and closed his fingers over it, lifting it lightly from her hand…distant cold eyes, gray and colorless as metal— Cold seas washing over his mind—
Pain splintered through Callina’s head and Regis quickly let the matrix go, tilting it back into her hand. She blinked and he felt her controlling the stab of pain. She said, “Well, you have the talent for that… but I don’t know how much further it goes. I saw something, like a vision…” She was fumbling for words; she felt him share the fumbling and stopped it cold.
It was not at all like his contact with Javanne; it was not at all like the contact he had had with any of the women who had briefly been his lovers— was it because she was a Keeper, that cold stony alien thing in her mind, a leronis of the old kind, vowed to virginity, to touch no man with even a hint of sexuality? Or had it been Callina at all? His own head was aching.
She said, “If you can do that, and if you could clear a matrix which had touched Sharra—” She bit her lip and he saw the pain move across her face again. “You have a gift we don’t know about. Maybe it can be helpful…” and he picked up the words she was hesitant to speak, perhaps it could help to control the Sharra matrix, free Kennard’s son from the domination of that—that terrible thing—