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Chapter Fifteen

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

He thought he had never seen Damon as overwrought and irritable as during that morning, after Damonhad 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 suitenervously, 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. Getyourself 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 distillingapparatus here isn’t as efficient as what I had at Arilinn, and there may residues, though I filtered ittwice.”

“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 mightbe 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 slippedout 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 beforeher; standing in the chapel at Armida before the statue of Cassilda, a wreath of crimson flowers in herhand. She laid the flowers on the altar, then she was back with them again, dizzied, flushed, exalted. Shewhispered, “Damon, you saw…”

Andrew had seen too, all of them had seen, and he remembered Callista’s look of pity and grief as sheremoved Ellemir’s forgotten offering from the chapel. “Our women still lay flowers at her shrine…”

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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 herwork. “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 haveit 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 howmuch 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 doyou 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 inthe over-world, sensing it as their landmark formed around him, a tower like Arilinn, less solid, lessbrilliant, not a beacon but a shelter, very remote, yet solid around him, a protection, a home here. For amoment, as he looked around the gray world and sheltered, delaying, within its walls, he found himselfwondering with an absurd flippancy what the other telepaths who wandered in the gray world wouldthink, 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 hervoice 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 mindsmoved through the formless atoms of the universe, but the firm visualization of the staircase feltreassuringly solid under his feet, and gave them a focal point for moving from level to level. Leonie knewthis path and he was content to follow.

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The stairs were not steep, but as he climbed it seemed that he began to breathe more heavily, as ifclimbing 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 stepto step. The stairs felt fuzzier and dimmer, leading into thick gray fog just a little ahead of him. Leonie’sform 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 ingrayness which made his body disappear. The grayness darkened into a blackness crisscrossed by racingblue lights.

The level of energy-nets. Damon had worked on this level as a psi technician, and with a sharp effort hemanaged to solidify it, making it into a dark cavern with narrow lighted trails and footpaths leadingupward through a maze of falling water. Leonie was dim and shadowy here, her robes colorless. He didnot hear her now in words:

Go carefully here. We are in the level of monitored matrices. They will watch us so that no harmcomes to me. But follow closely, I know where matrix work is being done and we must notintrude.

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:

Turn away from it!

And he knew that somewhere a matrix operation was under way, of such a delicate nature that even arandom thought—“looking” at it—could throw it out of balance and endanger the mechanics. Hevisualized physically turning his back on the light, closing his eyes so that he could not see it even throughhis 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. Onlydogged concentration could now force the illusion of a physical body which could climb, and the stairswere like mist under his feet. His pulse began to labor as he struggled upward,. and his breath cameheavily. 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 wasgrateful for the sensation. It helped him solidify the terrible, chaotic formlessness of this level. He had noidea how Leonie, who was untrained in climbing, was managing here, but he sensed her near him in thedarkness, and knew she must have her own mental techniques for coping with the rising levels. His breathwas thinning now, and he felt that his heart was pounding in acute, dizzy distress. He felt the vertigo ofterrible height beneath him. He could not force himself to go on. He clung to the railing, feeling it numbinghis 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 theremotest 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 upwardand 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

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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.

Finally they reached a curious, thin darkness, and Leonie, close beside him in the nowhere spaces, said,but not in words:

This is the level where we can slip loose of linear time. Try to think of moving along a riverupstream. It will be easier if we find a single fixed place and move back from there. Help me find Arilinn.

Damon thought
Is Arilinn here too
 
? and knew he was being absurd. Every place which physicallyexisted must stretch upward through all the levels of the universe. Intangibly, a hand gripped his and Damon felt his own hand materializing where it might have been if, here, he had one. He focused his mindon Arilinn, saw a dim shadow and found himself in Leonie’s room there.

Once, in his last year there, Leonie had collapsed inside the relays. He had carried her to her room andlaid her on her bed. He had not at the time consciously noted a single detail of that chamber, yet he saw itnow, dimly outlined on his mind and memory…

No, Damon! Avarra have pity, no!

He had had no notion of calling up that forgotten day, no desire to remember—Zandru’s hells, no! Thememory had been Leonie’s, and he knew it, but he accepted blame for it and sought a more neutralmemory. In the matrix chamber at Arilinn he watched Callista, at thirteen, her hair still down her back. Heguided her fingers gently, touching the nodes where the nerves surfaced against the skin. He could see theembroidered butterflies on the wrists of her smock; he had not noticed them then. Dimly, but with arealness which unnerved him—were these revived thoughts of years ago or was the present-day Callistaremembering?—he saw that she was docile, but frightened of this stern man who had been her deadbrother’s sworn friend but now seemed impassive, old, alienated, distant. A stranger, not the familiarkinsman.

Was I so harsh with her, so distant? Were you frightened of me, Callie? Zandru’s hells, why arewe so harsh with these children!

Leonie’s hands touched him across Callista’s. How austere she had been, even then, how stern andlined her face had grown in a few years. But time swept backward and Callista was gone, had neverbeen there. He stood before Leonie for the first time, a young psi monitor seeing for the first time the faceof the Keeper of Arilinn.
 
Evanda! How beautiful she had been! All Hastur women were beautiful,but she had the legendary beauty of Cassilda
 
. He felt again the agony of first love, the despair ofknowing it was hopeless, but time was still flowing backward with merciful swiftness. Damon lostawareness of his body, it had never existed, he was a dim dream in a dimmer darkness, seeing the facesof Keepers he had never known. (Surely that fair-haired woman was a Ridenow of his own clan.) Hesaw a monument built in the courtyard to honor Marelie Hastur, and knew with a spasm of terror that hewas watching an event which had taken place three centuries before his own birth. He kept on, movingupstream, felt Leonie swept away from him, tried to fight his way to her…