The Forbidden Circle (45 page)

I should have died when the plane went down. Callie doesn’t need me. . . . I’m never going to do anything but hurt her
.

Damon said behind him, “Andrew, come and talk to me. Don’t go off like this alone and try to shut it all out.”

“Oh, God,” Andrew said, drawing a breath like a sob, “I have to. I can’t talk any more. I can’t take it any more. Let me alone, damn it, can’t you just let me alone for a little while?”

He felt Damon’s presence like a sharp physical pain, a pressure, a compulsion. He knew he was hurting Damon; refused to know, to turn, to look. . . . Finally Damon said very gently, “All right, Ann’dra. I know you’ve had all you can take. A little while, then. But not too long.” And Andrew knew without turning that Damon was gone. No, he thought with a shudder of horror, Damon had never been there at all, was still back in the little stone-floored still-room.

He stood in the courtyard, heavy snow blowing around him, its fury only a little abated by the enclosing walls.
Callista
. He reached for the reassurance of her touch, but she was not there, only a faint pulse, restless, and he dared not disturb her drugged sleep.

What can I do? What can I do?
To his dismay and horror he began to weep, alone in the wilderness of snow. He had never felt so alone in his life, not even when the plane went down and he found himself alone on a strange planet, beneath a strange sun, in trackless unmapped mountains. . . .

Everything I ever knew is gone, useless, meaningless or worse. My friends are strangers, my wife the most alien of all. My world is gone, renounced. I can never go back; they think me dead
.

He thought,
I hope I catch pneumonia and die,
then, aware of the childishness of that, realized he was in very real danger. Drearily, not from any sense of self-preservation, but the remnant of vague duty, he turned and went inside. The house looked alien, strange, not a place where any Terran could manage to live. Had it ever seemed welcoming, home? He looked with profound alienation around the empty hall, glad it was empty.
Dom
Esteban must be taking his midday rest. The maids were gossiping in soft voices. He sank down wearily on a bench, let his head rest in his arms, and stayed there, not asleep, but in retreat, hoping that if he stayed very quiet it would all go away somehow and not be real.

A long time later someone put a drink in his hands. He swallowed it gratefully, found another, and another, blurring his senses. He heard himself babbling, pouring it all out to a suddenly sympathetic ear. There were more drinks. He knew, and welcomed it, when he passed out.

There was a voice in his mind, worming its way past his barriers, deep into his unconscious, past his resistance.

No one wants you here. No one needs you here. Why not go away now, while you can, before something dreadful happens. Go away now, back where you came from, back to your own world. You’ll be happier there. Go now. Go away now. No one will know or care
.

Andrew knew there was some flaw in his reasoning. Damon had given him some good reason why he should not go, then he remembered that he was angry with Damon.

The voice persisted, gentle, cajoling:

You think Damon is your friend. Don’t trust Damon. He will use you, when he needs help, and then turn on you
. There was something familiar about the voice, but it wasn’t a voice at all. It was somehow inside his mind! He tried in panic to shut it out, but it was so soothing.
Go away now. Go away now. No one needs you here. You will be happy when you go back to your own people. You will never be happy here
.

With fumbling steps, Andrew went out into the side hall. He found his riding cloak, fastened it around his shoulders. Someone was helping him, buckling it around him. Damon, was it? Damon knew he couldn’t stay. He couldn’t trust Damon. He would be happy with his own people. He would get back to Thendara, back to the Trade City and the Terran Empire where his mind was his own. . . .

Go now. No one wants you here
.

Even thickly drunk and blurred as he was, the violence of the storm struck him hard enough to take his breath away. He was about to turn back, but the voice pounded inside his head.

Go now. Go away. No one wants you here. You’ve failed. You’re only hurting Callista. Go away, go to your own people
.

His boots floundered in the snow, but he kept on, lifting and dropping them with dogged determination.
Callista doesn’t need you
. He was drunker than he realized. He could hardly walk. He could hardly breathe, or did the flurrying snow take his breath away, snatch it, refuse to give it back?

Go away. Go back to your own people. No one needs you here
.

He came a little to himself, with a final desperate attempt at self-preservation. He was alone in the storm, and the lights of Armida had vanished in the darkness. He turned desperately, stumbling, falling to his knees, realizing he was drunk, or mad. He stumbled to his feet, felt his mind blurring, fell full length in the snow. He must get up, go on, go back, get to shelter—but he was so tired.

I will just rest here for a minute . . . just a minute
. . . .

Darkness covered his mind and he lost consciousness.

CHAPTER NINE

Damon worked for a long time in the narrow, stone-floored still-room, finally giving up in disgust. There was no way that he could make
kirian
as it was made in Arilinn. He had neither the skill nor, he suspected from a relatively thorough investigation of the equipment here, the proper materials. He regarded the crude tincture which he had managed to produce without enthusiasm. He didn’t think he would care to experiment with it himself, and he was sure Callista would not. There was, however, a considerable amount of the raw material, and he might be able to do better another day. Perhaps he should have begun with an ether extraction. He would ask Callista. As he washed his hands and carefully disposed of the residues, he thought suddenly of Andrew. Where had he gone? But when he went upstairs again, to find Callista still sleeping, Ellemir answered his concerned question with surprise.

“Andrew? No, I thought him still with you. Shall I come—”

“No, stay with Callista.” He thought Andrew must have gone down to talk to the men, or out to the stables through the underground tunnels. But
Dom
Esteban, alone at his frugal supper with Eduin and Caradoc, frowned when questioned.

“Andrew? I saw him drinking in the lower hall with Dezi. From the way they were pouring it down, I suppose he has passed out somewhere.” The old man’s gray eyebrows bristled with scorn. “Nice behavior, with his wife ill, to go off and get himself sodden drunk! How is Callista?”

Damon said, “I don’t know.” and thought suddenly that the old
Dom
knew. What else could it be, with Callista ill in bed and Andrew going off to get drunk? But one of the strongest sexual taboos on Darkover was that which separated the generations. Even if
Dom
Esteban had been Damon’s own father instead of Ellemir’s, custom would have forbidden him to discuss this.

Damon searched the house, in all the likely places, then, in growing panic, all the unlikely ones. Finally he summoned the servants, to hear that no one had seen Andrew since midafternoon, when he and Dezi had been drinking in the lower hall.

He sent for Dezi, suddenly afraid lest Andrew, drunk and not yet accustomed to Darkovan weather, should have gone out into the blizzard, underestimating its power. When the youngster came into the room, he asked, “Where is Andrew?”

Dezi shrugged. “Who knows? I’m not his guardian or his foster-brother!”

But at the unconcealable flash of triumph, a momentary glint before Dezi’s eyes evaded his, suddenly Damon
knew
. “All right,” he said grimly. “Where is he, Dezi? You were the last to see him.”

The boy gave a sullen shrug. “Back to where he came from, I suppose, and good riddance!”

“In
this
?” Damon stared in consternation at the storm raging beyond the windows. Then he swung on Dezi with a violence that made the boy flinch and shrink away from him.

“
You
had something to do with this!” he said, low and furious. “I’ll deal with you later. Now there is no time to lose!”

He ran, shouting for the servants.

 

Andrew woke, slowly, to burning pain in his feet and hands. He was rolled in blankets and bandages. Ferrika was bending over him with something hot. Holding his head, she got him to swallow it. Damon’s eyes swam out of the fog, and groggily Andrew realized that Damon was really worried about him. He cared. It was not true, what Andrew had thought.

Damon said gently, “We found you just in time, I think. Another hour and we could never have saved your feet and hands; two hours and you would have been dead. What do you remember?”

Andrew struggled to remember. “Not much. I was drunk,” he said. “I’m sorry, Damon, I must have gone mad for a little. I kept thinking,
Go away, Callista doesn’t want you
. It was like a voice inside my 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 had the 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 own free will.

Dezi was jealous of Andrew. That had been obvious all along. But why? Did he feel that with Andrew 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 to force the will of another, or his conscience. He had been entrusted with a matrix, with all the awsome power 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 body perhaps found in the spring thaw. And what of Callista, thinking Andrew had forsaken her? Damon shuddered, realizing that Callista might not have lived out the day. Thanks to all the gods at once, she had been deep in drugged sleep at the time. She would have to know—there was no way to keep such things secret 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. “I would have acknowledged him my son years ago, but I never quite felt I could trust him. I did what I could for him, I kept him where I could keep an eye on him, but there seemed something wrong with him somewhere.”

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 from the old man, his father-in-law had simply been unwilling to perpetuate, or take responsibility for, a sordid and drunken episode. Bastardy was no disgrace. For a woman to bear a Comyn son was honor, to her and 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 been monitored to discover whose seed had kindled her to bear. Damon thought, in something very like despair, 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 foot and half dead of fright, to Damon later that night. They had found him in the stables, making ready to saddle 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, the same 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 anger he could feel in Damon now. Just the same, paradoxically, Andrew felt sorry for Dezi when the boy was brought 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 for somebody his age, that ought to be enough. He had said as much to Damon, but the older man had not even bothered to answer. It had been clear, anyway.

Andrew would never otherwise be safe again: from the knife in the back, the murderous thought. . . . Dezi was 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.