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Andrew struggled to remember. “Not much. I was drunk,” he said. “I’m sorry, Damon, I must havegone mad for a little. I kept thinking,
 
Go away, Callista doesn’t want you
 
. It was like a voice insidemy head, so I tried to do just that, go away… I’m sorry to have caused all this trouble, Damon.”

“
 
You
don’t need to be sorry,” Damon said grimly, and his rage was like a palpable red glow around him. Andrew, sensitized, saw him as an electrical net of energies, not at all like the daily Damon he knew. He glowed, he trembled with fury. “
 
You
didn’t cause the trouble. A very dirty trick was played on you, and it nearly killed you.” Then he was Damon again, a slender stooping man, laying a gentle hand on Andrew’s shoulder.

“Go to sleep and don’t worry. You’re here with us, and we’ll look after you.”

He left Andrew sleeping, and went in search of
Dom
 
Esteban. Rage was pulsing in his mind. Dezi hadthe Alton gift of forced rapport, of forcing mental links with anyone, even a nontelepath. Andrew, drunk,would be the perfect victim, and knowing Andrew, Damon suspected he had not gotten drunk of his ownfree will.

Dezi was jealous of Andrew. That had been obvious all along. But why? Did he feel that with Andrew

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out of the way,
 
Dom
 
Esteban might acknowledge him as the son he would then so desperately need? Or had he had it in his mind to seek Callista in marriage, hoping that would force the old man’s hand, to admit Dezi was Callista’s brother? It was a riddle beyond Damon’s reading.

Damon might, perhaps, have forgiven an ordinary telepath under such temptation. But Dezi was Arilinn-trained, sworn by the oath of the Towers, never to meddle with the integrity of a mind, never toforce the wall of another, or his conscience. He had been entrusted with a matrix, with all the awesomepower that entailed.

And he had betrayed it.

He had not done murder. Good luck, and Caradoc’s sharp eyes, had found Andrew lying in a snowdrift,partly covered with the blowing snow. In another hour he would have been covered over, his bodyperhaps found in the spring thaw. And what of Callista, thinking Andrew had forsaken her? Damonshuddered, realizing that Callista might not have lived out the day. Thanks to all the gods at once, she hadbeen deep in drugged sleep at the time. She would have to know—there was no way to keep such thingssecret in a telepathic family—but not yet.

Dom
Esteban heard the story out with dismay. “I knew there was bad blood in the boy,” he said. “Iwould have acknowledged him my son years ago, but I never quite felt I could trust him. I did what Icould for him, I kept him where I could keep an eye on him, but there seemed something wrong with himsomewhere.”

Damon sighed, knowing the old man’s bluster was mostly guilt. Secure, acknowledged, reared as a Comyn son, Dezi would not have had to bolster his enormous insecurities with envy and jealous spite,bringing him at last to attempt murder. More likely, though Damon tactfully barricaded the thought fromthe old man, his father-in-law had simply been unwilling to perpetuate, or take responsibility for, a sordidand drunken episode. Bastardy was no disgrace. For a woman to bear a Comyn son was honor, to herand the child, yet the most opprobrious epithet in the
 
casta
 
tongue was translated “six-fathered.”

And even that could have been avoided, Damon knew, if while the girl was with child, she had beenmonitored to discover whose seed had kindled her to bear. Damon thought, in something very likedespair, that there was something very wrong in the way they were using telepaths on Darkover.

But it was too late for any of this. For what Dezi had done there was only one penalty. Damon knew it,
 
Dom
 
Esteban knew it, and Dezi, Damon could see plainly, knew it. They brought him, tied hand and footand half dead of fright, to Damon later that night. They had found him in the stables, making ready tosaddle and be gone into the blizzard. It had taken three of Esteban’s Guardsmen to overpower him.

Damon thought that would have been better. In the storm he would have found the same justice, thesame death he had sought for Andrew, and death unmutilated. But Damon was bound by the same oath Dezi had violated.

Andrew felt that he too would have willingly faced death in the blizzard, rather than the smoldering angerhe could feel in Damon now. Just the same, paradoxically, Andrew felt sorry for Dezi when the boy wasbrought in, thin and frightened, looking younger than he was. He seemed like a boy hardly into his teens,so that the ropes binding him looked like monstrous injustice and torture.

Why didn’t Damon just leave it to him? Andrew wondered. He would beat hell out of the kid and forsomebody his age, that ought to be enough. He had said as much to Damon, but the older man had noteven bothered to answer. It had been clear, anyway.

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Andrew would never otherwise be safe again: from the knife in the back, the murderous thought… Deziwas an Alton, and a murderous thought could kill. He had already come close to it. Dezi was not a child. By the law of the Domains, he could fight a duel, acknowledge a son, be held responsible for a crime.

He looked now at the shrinking Dezi, and at Damon, with dread. Like all men of swift but short-livedanger, Andrew had no experience with the held grudge; nor with the rage which turns inward, devouringthe angry man as much as the victim of his wrath. It was this he sensed in Damon now, like a sullen redfurnace-glow, dimly visible around him. The Comyn lord looked bleak, his eyes toneless.

“Well, Dezi, I hardly dare to hope you will make this easy for me or for yourself, but I’ll give you the option, though it’s more than you deserve. Will you match resonances with me willingly and let me take your matrix without a struggle?”

Dezi did not answer. His eyes blazed out bitter, hating defiance. Damon thought, what a waste it was. He was so strong. He flinched, shrinking from the intimacy that was being forced on him, the leastwelcome of all intimacies, that of torturer and tortured.
 
I don’t want to kill him, and I probably willhave to. Mercy of Avarra, I don’t even want to hurt him
 
.

Yet, thinking of what he had to do, he could not keep himself from shuddering. His fingers closed, aspasmodic grip, over the matrix in its leather and silk insulation at his throat.

There, over the pulse, over the glowing center of the main nerve channel
. Since it was given to Damon, at fifteen, and the lights in the stone wakened at the touch of his mind, it had never been beyondthe reassuring touch of his fingertips. No other human being, except his Keeper, Leonie or, during a brieftime, in his Tower years, the young under-Keeper Hilary Castamir, had ever touched it. The very thoughtof having it taken from him, forever, filled him with a cold black terror worse than dying. He knew, withevery fiber of the Ridenow gift, the
 
laran
 
of an empath, what Dezi was enduring now.

It was blinding. It was crippling. It was mutilation…

It was the penalty invoked by the Arilinn oath for illegal use of a matrix. And it was what he must, bylaw, inflict now.

Dezi said, clinging to a last shred of defiance, “Without a Keeper present, it is murder that you do. Ismurder penalty for attempted murder, then?”

Damon, though he felt Dezi’s terror in his own bowels, kept his voice passionless. “Any halfwaycompetent matrix technician—and I am rated a technician—can do this part of a Keeper’s work, Dezi. Ican match resonances and take it from you in safety. I won’t kill you. If you try not to fight me, it will beeasier for you.”

“No, damn you!” Dezi spat out, and Damon steeled himself for the ordeal ahead. He could admire the boy’s attempt to pretend courage, some dignity. He had to remind himself that the courage was a sham in a coward who had misused
 
laran
 
against a drunk and unprotected man, who had gotten him drunk for that purpose. To admire Dezi now, simply because he did not break down and plead for mercy—as Damon knew perfectly well he himself would do—made no sense at all.

He still felt Dezi’s emotions—a trained empath, his
 
laran
 
honed to fine point at Arilinn, he could notblock them out—but he steeled himself to ignore them, focusing on the ordeal ahead. The first step wasto focus inward on his own matrix, to steady his breathing, let his consciousness expand into the magnetic

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field of his body. He let the emotions filter through and past him, as a Keeper must do, feeling and

accepting them, without entering into them in the slightest.

Leonie had told him once that if he had been a woman, he would have made a Keeper, but that, as aman, he was too sensitive, that this work would destroy him. Somehow, the remembrance made himangry again, and the anger strengthened him. Why should sensitivity destroy a man, if it was valuable for awoman, if it could have made a woman capable of the most difficult of all matrix work, that of a Keeper? At the time, the words had come close to destroying him; he had felt them an attack on his verymanhood. Now they reaffirmed in him the knowledge that he could do this part of a Keeper’s work.

Andrew, watching, lightly linked with Damon, saw him again as he had seen him for a moment the nightbefore, watching over the sleeping Callista: a swirling field of interconnected currents with pulsing centers,dim colors glowing at the pulse spots. Slowly he began to see Dezi the same way, to sense what Damonwas doing, bringing his own rate of vibration close to Dezi’s own, to adjust the flows so that theirbodies—and their matrix jewels—were vibrating in perfect resonance. This would, he knew, enable Damon to touch Dezi’s matrix without pain, without inflicting physical or nervous shock strong enough toproduce death.

For someone not keyed into the precise resonance, to touch someone else’s matrix could produceshock, convulsions, even death at the very least, incredible agony.

He saw the resonances match, pulse together as if, for a moment, the two magnetic fields blended andbecame one. Damon got out of his chair—to Andrew, it looked like a cloud of linked energy fields,moving—and went toward the boy. Abruptly Dezi wrenched control of the resonances away from Damon, shattering the blended rapport. It was like a clashing explosion of force. Damon gasped inanguish with the recoil, and Andrew felt the shattering pain that exploded in Damon’s nerves and brain. Automatically, Damon stumbled out of reach of the clashing field, steadied himself to rematch resonancesto the new field Dezi had created. He thought, almost in pity, that Dezi had panicked, that when it cameto it, he couldn’t quite endure it.

Again the matched resonances, the energy fields beginning to vibrate in consonance; again the attempt toreach out for Dezi, to remove the matrix physically from the magnetic field of his body. And again theshattering wrench as Dezi broke the resonances, thrust them apart with an explosion of pain cascadingthrough them both.

Damon said compassionately, “Dezi, I know it’s hard.” Inwardly he thought that the boy could almost bea Keeper himself. Damon could not match resonances that way at his age! But then he had never been asdesperate, either, nor as tormented. The breaking of resonances was obviously just as painful for Dezi asit was for Damon himself. “Try not to fight this time, my boy. I don’t want to hurt you.”

And then—they were open to one another—he felt Dezi’s thrusting contempt for his attempt at pity, andknew this was not a panic reaction at all. Dezi was simply putting up one hell of a fight! Perhaps hethought he could outfight Damon, wear him down. Damon left the room and came back with a telepathicdamper, a curious gadget which broadcast a vibration that could damp out telepathic emanations within abroad range of frequencies. Grimly he thought of Domenic’s jest on the night he and Ellemir had beenmarried. Such things were used, sometimes, to blur telepathic leakage, when there were others around,to protect privacy, to permit secret talk or prevent unwilling (or deliberate) telepathic eavesdropping. Itwas used sometimes in Comyn Council, or to protect others when there was an undeveloped, oruncontrolled, adolescent in psychic upheaval, before learning to control or focus powers. He saw Dezi’sface change, take on real panic through the defiance.

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Tonelessly, he warned Andrew, “Get out of range if you want to. This might hurt. I’m going to have touse it to damp out any frequencies he tries to raise.”

Andrew shook his head. “I’ll stick.” Damon caught Andrew’s thought:
 
I won’t leave you alone withhim
 
. Grateful for his friend’s loyalty, Damon knelt down and began to set up the damper.

Before long, he had tuned it to damp out Dezi’s assault on his consciousness. After that, it was simply amatter of matching his own resonances to Dezi’s physical field of vibration. This time when he steppedinto the interlocking fields, the damper blocked out Dezi’s mental thrust to alter the frequencies, movehim away. It was painful and hard to move under the damper, something he thought only a full-fledged Keeper could have done at all, with the damper full strength. It felt, physically, as if he were strugglingthrough some thick, viscous fluid which dragged at his limbs and his brain. Dezi began to struggle like amad thing as he came near. But it was hopeless, and he knew it. Dezi could exhaust himself with theeffort to change frequencies, but he could not alter Damon’s now, and the more he managed to alter hisown, the more the ultimate shock would hurt.