She didn’t turn a hair when Cholayna was throwing that list of indictments at her. That means one of two things. Either she’s resigned to throwing her career away—or she has no intention of leaving Cholayna alive to testify against her.
Lexie waved the stunner again.
“This way.”
She took Magda across the great cave filled with stalactites, gestured to her to walk down a slippery ramp, wet with falling water from somewhere, and pushed her through into another cave.
This one was lighted by torches stuck in the wall and smoking upwards; randomly Magda noted the direction of the smoke and thought, there must be air coming in somewhere from outside. At the center was a fire burning; at first Magda wondered where they got wood for fire, then realized from the smell it was not a wood fire at all, but a fire of dried chervine dung; a stack of the dried pats was at one side of the fire. Around the fire was a rough circle of hooded figures, and for an instant of awful disillusionment Magda thought, is this the Sisterhood?
Then a slender familiar figure rose from beside the fire.
“Welcome, my dear,” she said. “I’m sorry my messengers had to use so much force. I told you to be ready when you were summoned, and if you had listened to me, you could have saved us a great deal of trouble.”
Magda drew a deep breath, trying to compose herself.
“What do you want, Acquilara?”
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
« ^ »
But Acquilara did not do business that way. Magda should have known.
“You are hurt; let us bandage your wounds. And I am sure you are cold and cramped. Would you like some tea?”
Magda sensed that to accept any offers from the black sorceress would be to yield to her power. She started to say proudly, No, thank you, I want nothing you can give. She never knew what stopped her.
The most serious obligation she had now was to stay as strong as possible, so that she could get away, could help get Vanessa and Cholayna out of this. She said deliberately, “Thank you.” Someone handed her a foaming cup of tea. It was faintly bitter, and smelled of the dung-fire, and a lump of butter had been stirred into it, which gave it a peculiar taste, but added, in the bitter chill, to its strengthening quality. Magda drank it down and felt it warming her all through. She accepted a second cup.
Two women came from the ring around the fire to help bandage her wounds. On the surface they were somewhat more prepossessing than the women of the hermitage of Avarra; they seemed clean enough and wore under their long, hooded cloaks the ordinary dress of village women from the mountains, long tartan skirts, thick overblouses and tunics, heavy felted shawls and hoots. The bandages they used were rough, but seemed clean. Magda realized that skin had been stripped from her leg—she never knew how it happened, though she surmised that in the fight she must have rolled down a slope covered with sharp rocks. There were abrasions on her face too; she had not noticed them before.
With the scrapes and bruises salved and bandaged, she did feel better, and the tea, even with its faintly nauseating taste, had strengthened her so that she felt prepared to meet whatever might come next.
“Feeling better?” Acquilara was almost purring. “Now let us sit down together and discuss this like civilized women. I am sure we can come to some agreement.”
Agreement? When you have murdered my friend, imprisoned my companions, and for all I know you may have killed my freemate and my lover? Never!
But Magda had more common sense than to say this aloud. If this woman was half the leronis she claimed to be, she would sense Magda’s antipathy and know how little likely Magda would be to accede to her plan.
“What do you want with me, Acquilara? Why have you, as you put it, summoned me?”
“I am the servant of the Great Goddess whom you seek—”
Magda started to say, Nonsense, you’re no such thing, but decided not to antagonize her.
“Very well then, tell me what your Goddess wants with me.”
“We should be friends,” Acquilara began. “You are a powerful leronis of the Tower called Forbidden, which has refused to play into the hands of the Hasturs, or to submit to that terrible old teneresteis Leonie of Arilinn, who keeps all the people of the Domains paralyzed under the iron rule of the Arilinn Tower. As one who has helped to free our brothers and our sisters, you are my ally and my comrade and I welcome you here.”
And Marisela? But Magda said nothing. Perhaps if she waited long enough Acquilara would tell her what really was going on. As Camilla had pointed out, even an “evil sorceress” did not go to all this trouble simply to amuse herself.
“Your friend has told me that you are from another world, and she has said something about the Empire,” Acquilara began over again. Magda’s eyes strayed to Lexie where she stood in the corner. She had put the stunner out of sight. “You are a powerful leronis, but you owe nothing to the Comyn. And among your companions are two others of Comyn blood. Am I not right?”
“You have been correctly informed,” she said. Casta was a stiff language and Magda wasted none of its formality.
“Nevertheless, I cannot imagine what all this has to do with the fact that you have murdered one of my friends and imprisoned others.”
“I told you, Acquilara, you wouldn’t get anywhere with her that way,” said a voice from the shadows where Lexie stood. Rafaella n’ha Doria did not have a stunner, or any weapon Magda could see except for the usual long knife of a Renunciate.
“Let me talk to her. In a word, Margali, she knows you have had laran training in your Forbidden Tower, or whatever it may be. But you are Terran. On the other hand, Jaelle, born Comyn, has renounced her Comyn heritage, and as a Renunciate she is free to use her powers as she will.”
She stood waiting for Magda to confirm what she said; instead, Magda burst out in anger.
“I would not have believed it if they had told me, Rafi! You, whom she loves as a sister, to sell her out this way! And Camilla, too, calls you her friend!”
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” Rafaella said angrily. “Sell her out? Never! It is you who have induced her to betray herself, and I am trying to remedy that.” She came all the way forward and stood facing Magda.
“You have not even let Acquilara tell you what she is offering. No harm is intended to Shaya, or even to Camilla—”
“That is the red-headed emmasca?” Acquilara nodded with satisfaction. “She has Comyn powers, perhaps Alton, perhaps Hastur, there is no way of telling but to test her. That’s easily enough done. She may balk a little at the testing, but there are ways of handling that.”
The words of the Monitor’s Oath flashed through Magda’s mind: enter no mind save to help or heal and only by consent. These people had never heard of this obligation. The thought of Camilla, forced unwilling to enter, undesired, that painful openness, made her shake with rage. At that moment, if she had had a weapon, she could cheerfully have killed Rafaella.
Did Rafaella even know what she was proposing or how painful it would be?
“Listen to me, Margali,” said Rafaella earnestly. “We are sisters in Bridge Society—perhaps we haven’t been as good friends sometimes as we might, but just the same, we’re working for the same objectives, aren’t we?”
“Are we? I don’t think so. It seems to me that if your motives are the same as the Bridge Society you would have brought your proposal to Cholayna, or to me, or even to Jaelle or Camilla herself. Lieutenant Anders—” she used Lexie’s official rank deliberately, “is not a member of Bridge. Why go to her?”
“It was she who came to me with this proposal. And if you do not know why she would not come to you or to Cholayna with it—I should have known, of course, you would never admit anything could be done, in Bridge, or in the Empire, without your being a part of it.” Rafaella’s words were an angry torrent, but a brief gesture from Acquilara cut her off.
“Enough. Tell her what the proposal is. I am not int
erested in your personal grievances against her.”
“Jaelle has had some training in the Forbidden Tower but these women can complete her training until she is more powerful than Leonie of Arilinn. Camilla, too, will be trained to the maximum of which she is capable. If she truly has Hastur blood, she may be the most powerful leronis for many years. Real power awaits them—”
“What makes you think that is what they are looking for?”
It was Acquilara who answered. “For what else did they come into these hills in search of the old crow-goddess in her abandoned shrine? Was it not to seek the full potential of what powers they might one day have? They may not know it, but that is what they were doing. This is the end of every quest; to become what you are, and this means power, real power, not philosophy and moral lectures. From the crow-people they will get austerities without number, and at the end, a pledge never to use or indulge their powers. They will be told that the end of all wisdom is to know and to refrain from doing, for actually doing anything would be black sorcery.” Acquilara’s face was savage with contempt. “I can offer them better than that.”
“While if they are taught here by Acquilara,” said Rafaella, “at the end of their training they will be sent back to Thendara, armed with the means to make some real changes in their world, to turn it to their own real advantage. Jaelle on the Council, as she could have been, should have been all along. And Camilla—there’s no end to what Camilla might do. She could rule all the Towers in the Domains.”
“That’s not what Camilla wants.”
“It is what, as a Hastur, she ought to want. And when I am done with her, she will want it,” said Acquilara with unshakable confidence.
This woman had power. Magda could feel it in her very stance, her gestures, Acquilara gestured to Lexie to go on.
“You are very naïve, Lorne,” Lexie added. “That is why you have meddled in so many things and never achieved anything real. Have you seen your file in personnel at HQ? I have. Do you know what they say of you? You could be in a real position of power… ”
Magda found her voice.
“I can’t presume to tell you what Camilla and Jaelle want,” she said, “but I can tell you that power, in that form anyhow, is not what I want.”
“And I can tell you that you are a liar,” Lexie said. “For all the talk, there is really only one real game, only one thing anyone wants, and that is power. Pretend, be a hypocrite if you like, deny it, lie about it, I know better; that is what everybody wants.”
“Do you judge everybody by yourself?”
“Unlike you, Lorne, I don’t pretend to be better than everybody else,” Lexie said, “but it doesn’t matter. When the new cooperation between Terran and Darkovan begins, it will take a whole new turn; and this time it will not be Magdalen Lorne’s name at the head of it, but Alexis Anders’s.”
“Is that what you want more than anything else, Lexie?”
“It’s what you wanted and what you got, isn’t it? Why say it’s unworthy of me?” Lexie demanded.
Again Acquilara brought the talk to a halt with one of those imperative gestures. Magda, watching her carefully, realized that she was uncomfortable whenever the focus of the discussion moved away from herself.
“Enough, I say. Magdalen Lorne—” like all speakers of casta she mangled the pronunciation of the name, diminishing her dignity; she knew it and tried to look all the more imposing, “promise me that you will help me to convince Jaelle n’ha Melora and the other comynara, the red-haired emmasca, to work with me, and I shall find a use for you too among us. It would be a good thing to have a Terran intelligence worker as one of us. This would be a truly powerful Penta Cari’yo, not a ladies’ lodging society and dinner club. Once our influence was entrenched in Thendara, it would be easy to have you as head of Terran Intelligence—”
“What makes you think that is what I want?”
“Damn it, Acquilara, I told you more than once, that is not the way to get anywhere with Lorne,” Lexie interrupted.
“You presume on your importance, terranis,” snarled Acquilara. “Don’t interrupt me! Well, Magdalen Lorne, think it over.”
“I don’t need to,” Magda said quietly. “I’m not interested in your proposition.”
“You cannot afford to refuse me,” Acquilara said. “I am making you a very generous proposal. Terranan are not popular in these hills. I need only reveal who you are in any village to have you torn to pieces. As for your friend, the woman with the black skin, what would they think of her? A pitiful freak, to be exposed on the hills for the banshee and the kyorebni. Yet if you are one of us, you are under my powerful protection anywhere in these hills.”
She motioned to two of the women.
“Take her back, and let her think it over. Tomorrow you will give me your answer.” She signaled to Lexie.
“Guard her with your weapon.”
One of the women stepped up to Acquilara and whispered to her. She nodded.
“You are right. If she is as powerful a leronis as we’ve heard, then she will lose no time in warning the comynaris. Give her some raivannin.”
Raivannin! Magda thought in consternation. It was a drug which paralyzed the psi facilities and laran; sometimes it was used to immobilize a powerful telepath who was ill or delirious and could not control his or her destructive powers. She sought, quickly, to leap into the Overworld, to align herself with Jaelle, to cry out a warning, Jaelle, Camilla, beware … a few words. A few seconds of warning…
She had underestimated these people. Someone seized her—not physically; no hand touched her—but she discovered that she was ice-cold, she could not move or speak. She felt she was falling, falling, though she knew she stood motionless; her body and mind were buffeted by raging ice, wind, as if she stood naked in a blizzard…
She heard Lexie say, “Let me take care of her. I can set the stunner to keep her out for a few hours.”
“No, she needs freedom for the decision,” said Acquilara smoothly. Suddenly Magda was seized by two powerful sets of hands and held motionless, physically this time. Rafaella forced her mouth open and poured something icy and cloyingly sweet down her throat.
“Hold her about half a minute,” Acquilara said from out of the darkness. “It’s very fast-acting. After that she’ll be safe enough.”
An incredible flush of heat pulsed across Magda’s face, making her sinuses pound and a hot flare of pain fill up her head. Only a moment, but she wanted to scream aloud with its impact. Then it ebbed slowly away, leaving her feeling dull and empty, and suddenly deaf. She blinked, letting herself lean on the women who were holding her; she could hardly find her balance; all the peripheral awarenesses were gone, she was shorn and blinded, naked in her five senses, she could see and hear and touch, but how little, how inadequate the world seemed; nothing, nothing outside herself, the universe dead… even her ordinary senses felt dulled, there as a film over her sight, sounds came dulled as if from far away, and even the cold on her skin seemed remote as if she had been dipped in something heavy and greasy, insulating her from the world.
Raivannin. It had sheared away all her expanded senses, leaving her head-blind. A powerful dose; once she had taken it when she was ill and Callista felt she should be shielded from a Tower operation; but it had only blunted her awareness of the matrix work going on around her, so that she could shut it out if she chose. Nothing like this total insulation, this closing and clogging of her senses.
“You gave her too much,” said one of the women holding her—even her voice sounded indistinct, or was this the way ordinary voices sounded, un-enhanced by the psychic awareness of their meaning? “She can hardly stand up. She may never recover her laran, after a dose like that.”
Acquilara shrugged. Magda realized, in despair, that she could not even hear the malice and falseness in Acquilara’s voice any more, it sounded like anybody’s voice, she even sounded pleasant, how did the head-blind ever know whom to trust?
“Small l
oss. We can manage without her, and she might be easier to handle that way. Take her away, back to the others.”
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
« ^ »
As the women hauled her away from the ring of firelight and back to the first cave where she had waked in captivity, Magda was conscious only of despair. She could not even warn Jaelle or Camilla.
She tried to convince herself that she should not be worrying. Jaelle and Camilla did not know where she was, or even where to look. Now that she was drugged with raivannin they could not even hunt for her with laran.
And if Acquilara tried to persuade them to join her plans, they could always refuse. There would be no way to force them, and no danger that Jaelle or Camilla would find Acquilara’s offer tempting enough to be worth deserting their own principles. So why was she worrying?
They dumped her unceremoniously in the first cave and went away. Magda huddled down on the floor in misery.
Lexie is certainly intending to kill Cholayna or have her killed, or she would not have dared to speak that way to her.
Cholayna raised her head as Magda slumped down on the floor.
“Magda, are you all right? What did they want?”
“To make me an offer, of no particular interest to me,” Magda said dully. “Nothing’s wrong. I told them, in essence, to go to hell. Go to sleep, Cholayna.”
She had made a fatal error of strategy. She should have pretended to play along, pretended to be impressed with Acquilara’s plans; then they would have left her free, and she could have put herself in touch with Jaelle or Camilla with her laran. Now it was too late.
“You’re shaking all over,” said Vanessa. “I don’t think you’re all right at all. What did they do to you, really? Here, come under my blanket, get yourself warm. You look like hell.”
“Nothing. Nothing you’d understand. Let me alone, Vanessa.”