A Flame in Hali (12 page)

But it never came. She remained suspended, untouched, just beyond the reach of the topmost crests. Following the stream of
laran
energy from her own mind through Raimon’s and then the lattice, she touched a dense barrier at the surface of the water. Trying to move through it was like forcing her way through a thicket of interwoven reeds, resilient and yet impassable. Even the joined minds of the circle could not penetrate the energy layer. Clearly, whoever had created the artificial power source did not want anyone investigating it.

All the more reason to do so,
she thought.

The direct way was blocked to them. Determination and curiosity flared up in Dyannis, despite Ellimara’s soothing contact. She felt Raimon move to withdraw.

With an effort, Dyannis stilled her thoughts and submerged her consciousness once more in the circle. Her emotions were not so easy to control, but she managed with an effort. She had years of experience in struggling with her unruly temper.

The resonance of the circle continued, unbroken. Her lapse had done no serious damage. For a long moment, the interwoven consciousness of the circle hovered above the lake surface. Then, with silken smoothness, Raimon lifted them into the Overworld.

Dyannis found herself standing on a plain of unbroken gray beneath an equally featureless sky. Around her rose the ghostly manifestation of Hali Tower, as insubstantial as if it had been made of water. Glancing down, she saw herself as she had appeared here many times before, in a body very like her own, clad in a soft gray robe that barely reached her ankles. Her hands hovered near those of her neighbors in the circle. Some of them looked younger or older—Ellimara appeared as a woman in her forties, and her robes were not the white of a monitor but rosy, as if the Keeper’s crimson had seeped into them.

Raimon appeared as he always did, almost androgynous, glimmering like an ageless, nonhuman
chieri
. His eyes met hers, and his mouth curved in a smile.

With a movement of his mind, he called the lake to them. Here in the Overworld, distance and time lost their meaning, becoming mere products of the mind. Even the Tower around them had been shaped by the thoughts of the Hali workers over the centuries, simply because they were accustomed to working within walls and felt more comfortable with a familiar landmark.

The lake, too, retained much of its physical appearance, a depression filled with roiling mists. As Dyannis looked, it seemed not only greatly reduced in diameter, but much deeper. She could not see the bottom, even as Raimon turned the cloud-waters transparent, layer after layer. The strange creatures that lived in the lake waters, half fish and half bird, flashed by as brightly colored shapes and as quickly disappeared.

To casual inspection, the Overworld lake appeared as it always had. Under any other circumstances, Dyannis would have accepted it as normal and turned away. Now that very smoothness deepened her curiosity. Raimon brought the circle’s focus closer.

A layer of psychic energy lay over the lake. It had been shaped to reflect the expectations of anyone approaching from the Overworld. A worker would see only what he thought
should
be there. It looked so normal that only someone with reason to be suspicious would be able to tell the difference.

Dyannis realized the mirrorlike pattern would also repulse any incoming energy. She’d studied devices like this before and had even constructed them. The barrier would use an attacker’s own energy, so that the harder he pushed, the harder he was thrown back. Only a trained Tower circle could have created it.

Raimon, too, was no stranger to such a strategy. He shaped the circle’s energy into a spear point, long and slender. Then, instead of aiming in a perpendicular manner at the barrier, he sent them skimming across it, dipping down at the narrowest angle. The tip of the point slipped beneath the outer edge. There was almost no resistance. He increased their angle of descent. A few minutes later, the barrier suddenly gave way. They had broken through.

The lake lay beneath them. Gathering the circle’s forces, Raimon shifted the thought-stuff of the Overworld. Grays darkened, contrast intensified. The mists grew thicker, lapping the shores of the lake. At the same time, shapes appeared at the bottom. They were blurred and indistinct, yet present.

Dyannis felt a surge of elation. There
was
something there!

Wordlessly, Raimon drew upon them for more power. She gave it freely and felt the others do the same. They moved through the ethereal waters, deep and deeper.

Below, Dyannis glimpsed a vast jagged shape. Instinct recoiled, urging her to flee. She held fast. Though it took every particle of discipline she possessed, she forced herself to examine it.

It had no physical form, neither darkness nor light. With her
laran
senses, Dyannis felt it as a rending, a disruption in the continuity of time.

The thing drew her, repelled her. It reeked of
laran.

A
fter they had rested and replenished energies drained by the long session, Raimon brought the circle back together, this time in council. They must understand what they had seen, gather more information, and decide what to do next. The final decision belonged to Raimon, as Keeper, but nothing like this situation had come up within memory. They all were acutely aware of the importance of their next actions.

As they discussed what they had seen, Dyannis suddenly recognized an undercurrent of memory, like an itch at the back of her skull, which had been nagging her all day.

“I don’t know if this has any relevance to our present situation,” she said aloud, “but this isn’t the first time I know of when something strange has happened at the lake. Years ago, my brother Varzil and I spent Midwinter season at the court of old King Felix in Hali.”

In her mind, she returned to that time, and the others, still in light rapport after their long session together, followed her thoughts. She’d been very young, newly arrived at Hali Tower and in a state of constant over-excitement. Memory flooded through her, rippling through the circle, the texture of the stone wall she’d been concentrating on while practicing her breathing exercises, the jarring clatter from below, voices raised, people running. She’d rushed outside to see two men easing her brother’s limp body from the back of a horse. Once the commotion had sorted itself out, the story emerged.

This is what had happened,
she spoke to the circle with her mind.

The two men were Prince Carolin and his friend, Orain, and the drenched, bedraggled, half-drowned wretch was her own brother. The healers tended him for hours while Carolin paced the hallways, driving everyone else half-mad with his worry. At first, Dyannis assumed, as did everyone else, that Varzil had wandered into the depths of the lake and stayed too long. She’d been warned about the consequences as a novice.

But something happened to Varzil,
she said,
something beyond exposure to cold and lack of air.
She’d known that the moment she saw him. There was a strangeness about his eyes that astonished her. This was her big brother Varzil, after all, who could hear Ya-men singing under the four moons and other things that sent her scurrying under the bedcovers just to hear of them.

Dyannis withdrew into the privacy of her own thoughts for a moment. Shortly after the incident at the lake, Varzil had tried to interfere with her first love affair, with a young
laranzu
from Arilinn. It had taken her a long time to forgive him.

Dyannis found it strange that she should think of Eduin now, for he had not crossed her mind in years, not since that disaster at Hestral Tower. She still believed that the entire story might never be known. One thing was certain, Eduin had been unfairly blamed. He had no powerful friends among the
Comyn
besides Carolin Hastur, and at that time, Carolin had been an exile, running for his life in the wild lands beyond the Kadarin.

Dyannis turned her thoughts once more to the current problem.

“What exactly did Varzil find?” Raimon asked.

Varzil had not said so explicitly, Dyannis explained, but she believed he had stumbled upon some relic of the Cataclysm, that ancient disaster that had turned an ordinary lake into the eerie marvel of today. Perhaps the psychic residue of that event still lingered in the mists, perceptible only in the depths. Varzil with his extraordinary
laran
might have sensed what other men, even Tower-trained, missed.

The others glanced at one another with apprehensive expressions, and even Raimon looked somber. She couldn’t blame them. Varzil was generally regarded as the most powerful
laranzu
of their day. How could they handle something that had almost overpowered him?

“Of course,” Dyannis said aloud to reassure herself as well as the others, “Varzil was very young then. I don’t think he’d been at Arilinn for a full year. He wasn’t expecting what he found.”

We’ll be prepared,
she added mentally, with a confidence she did not entirely feel.

Raimon caught her undertone of bravado.
We are not prepared yet. First we must gather information and resources. If this thing is connected to the Cataclysm event, it will be neither simple nor easy to deal with.

There it was,
Dyannis thought. He had put into unspoken words the fear that stirred within all of them.

“We must do two things,” Raimon said temperately. “First, we must discover as much as we can about the energy source and, most particularly, whether it is causing the atmospheric disturbances, as we suspect.”

“Anything that powerful cannot be left for anyone to use or misuse,” Lewis-Mikhail said.

“Exactly so,” Raimon said. “Therefore, the second thing is to find out who created the energy shield and for what purpose. We must go carefully here.”

Raimon sent word that night through the relays of what they had discovered. He made plans to confer with King Carolin, for Hali Lake was within the Hastur realm. Whatever harm came to his people or lands from the presence of such a powerful and unregulated energy source was ultimately his responsibility. If another Tower were involved, this might well be a suitable occasion to extend the Compact.

Hali Tower had already sworn to abide by the Compact, that oath of honor that forbade the use of all weapons that killed at a distance. It might be one of the oldest Towers on Darkover, but it derived much of its prestige from the
rhu fead,
site of the ancient holy things, and its proximity to the royal seat. It had no power to compel any other Tower. In these uncertain times, with armed conflict ever a possibility, no Tower maintained true neutrality. The
Comyn
Council exerted great influence, but its meeting season was still some time off; like all institutions, it moved slowly.

A few days later, storm clouds gathered and poured down a spring torrent. Thunder crackled as waves of lightning bridged sky and earth. Only the fact that the rain had already drenched every tree and hut, house and field, prevented a rash of fires. The stone walls of Hali Tower vibrated with the ferocity of the winds.

When the rains eased and the great red sun appeared once more, the Tower community immediately noticed a great lessening of the electrical tension. Raimon decided to take advantage of the respite, for no one knew how long it might last. He sent Dyannis down to the lake, along with Rorie and Alderic, to take a closer look. The day was sunny and surprisingly mild for the season, as if spring had sent a perfumed herald to tease them. There were no clouds in the sky. Even so, she approached the cloud-water with some trepidation.

The three of them were in light rapport; linked in this way, the two men would search the lakebed while she would watch both of them, monitoring their breathing.

Dyannis found a place to sit on a tumble of weather-smoothed stones. She gathered her skirts around her and composed herself, using her deep breathing practice to settle her body. The sun warmed her face and made patterns through her closed eyelids. She smelled wet sand and the faintly pungent odor of river-weed. Behind her, small birds cheeped.

Her mind descended with the men, as if they were carrying her, silent and invisible, along with them. Mist, gossamer-white, swirled past her. Time itself seemed to slow. Light rained down in sheets of brilliance. Balls of color, like a patterning of bright yellow and orange-black stripes, darted across her vision. She exclaimed aloud, delighted by the strangely illuminated creatures that were neither bird nor fish. They clustered around the explorers, benign and beautiful, always beyond reach.

As the men went deeper, the colors shifted. Yellow gave way to tones of inky blue. The temperature dropped. Dyannis shivered in the sun, then found herself gasping for air.