Marion Bradley - The Forbidden Tower

Hear, O hear! A strange dark face…

Damon rose silently, beckoned to Dezi to follow him. As they withdrew into the corridor, he said, “Dezi, I know perfectly well that one never asks why someone left a Tower, but would you care to tell me, in complete confidence, why you left Arilinn?”

Dezi’s face was sullen. “No, I wouldn’t. Why should I?”

“Because I need your help. You saw the state those men were in, you know that with nothing more than hot water and herb-salves, there are at least four of them who will never walk again, and Raimon, at least, will die. So you know what I am going to have to do.”

Dezi nodded, and Damon went on: “You know I will need someone to monitor for me. And if you were dismissed for incompetence, you know I could not dare use you.”

There was a long silence. Dezi stared at the slate-colored slabs of the floor, and inside the Great Hall they heard the sound of the harp, and Callista singing:

Why lies my father upon the ground?

Hear, O hear!

Stricken to death with a foeman’s spear…

“It was not incompetence,” Dezi said at last. “I am not sure why they decided I must go.” He sounded sincere, and Damon, enough of a telepath to know when he was being lied to, decided he probably was sincere. “I can only think that they didn’t like me. Or perhaps” — he raised his eyes, with an angry steel glint in them — “they knew I was not even an acknowledged nedestro , not good enough for their precious Arilinn, where blood and lineage are everything.”

Damon thought that no, the Towers didn’t work that way. But he was not so sure. Arilinn was not the oldest of the Towers, but it was the proudest, claiming more than nine hundred generations of pure Comyn blood, claiming too that the first Keeper had been a daughter of Hastur’s self. Damon didn’t believe it, for there was too little history which had survived the Ages of Chaos.

“Oh, come, Dezi, if you could pass the Veil they would know you were Comyn, or of Comyn blood, and I don’t think they would care that much.” But he knew nothing he said could get past the boy’s wounded vanity. And vanity was a dangerous flaw for a matrix mechanic.

The Tower circles depended so much on the character of the Keeper. Leonie was a proud woman. She was when Damon knew her, with all the arrogance of a Hastur, and she had grown no less so in the years between. Perhaps she was personally intolerant of Dezi’s lack of proper pedigree. Or perhaps he was right, and they simply didn’t like him… In any case, it made no difference here. Damon had no choice. Andrew was a powerful telepath, but essentially untrained. Dezi, if he had lasted even half a year in a Tower, would have had meticulous training in the elemental mechanics of the art.

“Can you monitor?”

Dezi said, “Try me.”

Damon shrugged. “Try, then.”

In the hall, Callista’s voice rose mournfully:

What was that cry that rent the air?

Hear, O hear!

What dreadful shriek of dark despair,

A widow’s curse and an orphan’s prayer…

“Zandru’s hells,” Dom Esteban exploded, at the top of his voice, “why such a doleful song, Callista? Weeping and mourning, death and despair. We are not at a funeral! Sing something more cheerful, girl!”

There was a brief harsh sound, as if Callista’s hands had struck a dissonance on the harp. She said, and her voice faltered, “I fear I am not much in the mood for singing, Father. I beg you to excuse me.”

Damon felt the touch on his mind, swift and expert, so perfectly shielded that if Damon had not been watching Dezi, he would not have known by whom he had been touched. He felt the faint, deep probing, then Dezi said, “You have a crooked back tooth. Does it bother you?”

“Not since I was a boy,” Damon said. “Deeper?”

Dezi’s face went blank, with a glassy stare. After a moment he said, “Your ankle — the left ankle — was broken in two places when you were quite young. It must have taken a long time to heal; there are scars where bone fragments must have worked out for some time afterward. There is a fine crack in your third — no, the fourth — rib from the breastbone. You thought it was only a bruise and did not tell Ferrika when you returned from the wars with the catmen last season, but you were right, it was broken. There is a small scar — vertical, about four inches long — along your calf. It was made by a sharp instrument, but I do not know whether knife or sword. Last night you dreamed—”

Damon nodded, laughing. “Enough,” he said, “you can monitor.” How in the name of Aldones had they been willing to let Dezi go? This was a telepath of surpassing skill. With three years of Arilinn training, he would have matched the best in the Domains! Dezi picked up the thought and smiled, and again Damon had the moment of disquiet. Not lack of competence, or lack of confidence. Was it his vanity, then?

Or had it been only some personality clash, someone there who felt unable or unwilling to work with the youngster? The Tower circles were so intimate, a closer bond than lovers or kinfolk, that the slightest emotional dissonance could be exaggerated into torture. Damon knew that Dezi’s personality could be abrasive — he was young, touchy, easily offended — so perhaps he had simply come at the wrong time, into a group already so intimate that they could not adapt to any outsider, and not enough in need of another worker that they would work hard enough at the necessary personal adjustments.

It might not have been Dezi’s fault at all, Damon considered. Perhaps, if he did well at this, another Tower would take him. There was a crying need for strong natural telepaths, and Dezi was gifted, too gifted to waste. He saw the smile of pleasure, and knew Dezi had picked up the thought, but it didn’t matter. A moment’s reproving thought, that vanity was a dangerous flaw for a matrix technician, knowing that Dezi picked that up too, seemed enough.

“All right,” he said, “we’ll try. There’s no time to lose. Do you think you can work with me and Andrew?”

Dezi said sulkily, “Andrew doesn’t like me.”

“You’re too ready to think people don’t like you,” Damon reproved gently, thinking that it was bad enough for Dezi to know he chose him because Callista refused. But he could not betray Callista’s grief. And Ellemir should not try to do this work, so early in pregnancy. Pregnancy was about the only thing which could seriously interrupt a matrix worker’s capability, with its danger to the unborn child. And in the last day or two, linked with Ellemir, he had begun to pick up the first, faintest emanations of the developing brain, still formless, but there , real, enough to make their child a distinct separate presence to him.

He thought that there ought to be a way to compensate for this too, to protect a developing child. But he didn’t know of any, and he wasn’t going to experiment with his own! So it was himself, Andrew, and Dezi.

Andrew, a little while later, when Damon broached the subject, frowned and said, “I can’t say I’m crazy about the idea of working with Dezi.” But, at Damon’s remonstrance, admitted it was hardly worthy of an adult, to hold a grudge against a boy in his teens, a youngster who had, admittedly, been drunk at the time of the offense.

“And Dezi’s young for his age,” Damon told Andrew. “If he’d been acknowledged nedestro , he would have been given responsibilities to equal his privileges, all along. A year or two in the cadets would have made all the difference, or a year of good, hard, monkish discipline at Nevarsin. It’s our fault, not Dezi’s, that he’s turned out the way he has.”

Andrew did not protest further, but he still felt disquiet. No matter whose fault it was, if Dezi had flaws of character, Andrew did not feel right about working with him.