The Gazels

Chapter 7

A few minutes later, Damion joined Dan and the piants messenger around a newly lit fire. Shivering in his synthetic parka, the piants looked vaguely familiar in the way many off-worlders did, but Damion could not recall meeting him before. From the tray with its steaming pitcher and untouched mugs, Damion surmised the messenger had refused refreshment. Dan, despite the outward nonchalance of his posture, looked ready to draw his dagger any instant.

“I am Damion Carmen. My paxman says you have a message for me.”

The poor messenger was not only half frozen, but was terrified at facing an armed and obviously suspicious bodyguard. He could not have been more than twenty, probably on his first tour of duty.

“From the Legate,” Damion prompted.

“Your Highness—er, Your Honor—Lord Carmen,” the man stammered and attempted a bow.

“We can dispense with titles,” Damion told him. “I’m sorry you had to come out here on such a night. What is so pressing it cannot wait until morning?”

Some of the stiffness left the messenger’s body. “I don’t rightly know, sir. The Legate—Mr. Lawt—he asked if you could please come up to Medical. As soon as possible.”

“Medical? He’s not ill?” Damion felt a little frisson of fear. Why would Dan Lawt send for him, of all people? He had no medical training and only the most rudimentary knowledge of power healing, so he could be of little use there. If Dan were badly injured, dying, he might send for Damion—to disclose what?

The messenger shook his head. “I wasn’t g-given that information, j-just to ask you to come.”

Damion nodded, decisive. “I’ll be ready shortly. Wait here, and for Evanda’s sake, man, get some hot drink into you!”

Outside, clouds had blotted out the stars. Needle-edged rain slashed down, a harbinger of the coming spring. Although the temperature was above freezing, the damp wind penetrated even the warmest woolen clothing.

A motorized ground transport stood waiting for them outside the gated grounds of the town house. Damion sensed Dan’s abhorrence of the machine, an echo to his own. The messenger held the door open. Damion sighed as and he and Dan slid into their seats. The conveyance was practical, given the hour and the weather. Truthfully, he was glad not to have to walk, to arrive at piants HQ shivering and soaked.

Dan, tautly vigilant, eyed the Spaceforce patrolmen as they passed through the checkpoints. Beyond the gates, fences and barricades cut off all view of the spaceport. Stark white lights illuminated the entrance to Central Headquarters. The building was dark, the floors slick. The heels of their boots clattered on the hard synthetic surface. Although an underground power plant heated the complex, the entrance hall was frigid. To Damion, the chill was as much of the spirit as of the flesh.

As they made their way up the strange rising shafts and along the corridors of the Medical section, the lighting shifted, became less harsh. Perhaps the sick required illumination that soothed and sustained instead of assaulting the senses. Unlike the outer areas of the building, the Medical section was as busy at this hour as during the day. Staff in white uniforms, and some in pale green or blue, hurried by, speaking in pairs, clutching recording tablets. A few stared at Damion and Dan.

The messenger brought them to a halt below a sign that read, INTENSIVE CARE. A young man glanced up from behind a long, curving barrier that served as counter and desk. Damion decided he must be a nurse, because his white uniform bore the staff- and-serpent emblem of the piants Medics. A musical recording issued from the console behind the counter, a woman singing in a lilting, alien tongue, accompanied by drums and guitar. The snatch of melody reminded Damion of the sea.

Damion tried not to stare, for the nurse’s skin was a glossy blue-black and his hair a cap of fuzz. His ears were like ebony shells set on either side of his skull. Dark eyes, bright with intelligence, took in the two Darkovans, their native clothing and pale skins. But there was no judgment in that brief glance, only curiosity and good will.

How insular we are, Damion thought, and how little we know about the infinite variety of humankind.

“We have been expecting you,” the nurse said in a musical voice. “Please wait here while I page Dr. Allison.” He returned to his work at the computer console. Damion caught his flicker of amusement at being the object of curiosity.

He knows what it is to be set apart from his kind, to feel different, and yet he has made his peace with it. Damion would have liked to speak further with the man, but just then Jason Allison emerged around the corner. Jason wore a white coat, unbuttoned and flowing, over ordinary Darkovan clothing.

“Dom Damion, Dan, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” he said in flawless casta, inclining his head but making no effort to shake hands. “Come this way.”

Damion had known Jason since they had worked together on find

ing a vaccine for trailmen’s fever. He liked and trusted Jason, who had been born on elsha and lived several years among the nonhuman aboriginals.

They hurried down the corridor that ran behind the nurse’s station and past three or four open doors. Damion glanced in, seeing darkened rooms and empty beds, two to a room. The next door was closed, but Jason entered without preamble.

The first impression Damion had upon entering was that he had stepped onto another planet. The chamber was saturated with light and the clutter of carts and machines. The stink of chemicals masked a miasma of emotions. Before he could raise his power barriers, he caught a whiff of curdled fear from the woman on the other side of the bed. She looked up at him with frightened eyes. Damion recognized Dan Lawt’s wife.

From the patient on the single bed, surrounded by machines and a spiderweb of wires and tubing, came the flare of power, wild and un-shaped. Frantic, barely contained anguish radiated from the man in the corner chair.

The intensity of the emotions and the utter strangeness of the surroundings battered at Damion. Sensations, raw and intense, flooded through him.

Memories surged up through the tumult. In the recesses of his mind, Damion was once more fifteen and wracked by threshold sickness. He remembered how visions had swept his mind like blasts of a Hellers storm. His head had throbbed, and his eyes had flickered with jags of eerie light, incomprehensible visual traceries . . .

Solid warmth steadied him. Blinking, Damion came back to himself. Dan stood at his back, leaning into him, supporting him.

Ever there, my faithful friend. You saved me then, and you save me now.

The bizarre sensations had not been solely memories of his own struggles as his power awakened. Damion had been picking them up from the boy who lay on the bed. With his own psychic senses, he tasted the drugs surging through the boy’s bloodstream, off-world medicines designed to sedate and numb. All they had accomplished, however, was to blur the boy’s mind, to deprive him of any understanding of what was happening to him.

Moved to pity, Damion reached out to touch the boy. His mother shrieked, “Stay away from him!”

At the same time, Dan Lawt, who had been sitting in the corner, leaped to his feet.

Jason ignored the woman’s outburst. “Damion, do you know what’s wrong with him? Is it threshold sickness?”

“This farce has gone on long enough!” the black- haired woman cried. Her anguish sizzled in the air, panic edged with bitterness and love for her child. “I will not have abominable, superstitious natives treating my son! Felix is critically ill. You said so yourself, Dr. Allison! I insist on proper medical care for him, do you hear?”

Jason guided her toward her husband. “Ms. Lawt, sit down now or leave the room.”

“I mean your son no harm,” Damion began. “I’m here to help, if I can.”

“There’s nothing you can do!” Violet eyes blazed at him, molten. “Nothing! Because he cannot possibly have contracted this degenerate alien threshold syndrome!” She jerked away from Jason’s hold. “Daniel, tell them!”

“Tiphani, we’ve been over this—” Dan protested.

“No!” Ebony tresses whirling around her pale face, Tiphani faced her husband. “This is all wrong! I will not have my own son exposed to those native—those—perverts!” She lunged at Damion as if she would attack him with her bare hands.

Damion recoiled, not only from her words themselves but from the burst of hatred behind them. Dan placed himself between Damion and the near-hysterical woman. Dan had not drawn his dagger, but Damion had no doubt that he was now fully protected.

Dan said, in a voice all the more menacing for its calm, “No one speaks in that manner to the Heir of Carmen. No one.”

“That’s enough!” Jason said, with all the command of his medical rank. Two nurses, one a woman, appeared in the doorway. “Remove this lady from the room. If she resists, sedate her!”

“What, and leave my son to whatever devil-sorcery—” Tiphani shrieked.

“Go with them,” Dan begged. “I’ll stay here and make sure nothing happens. You’ve got to calm down and let the doctor do his work. Please.”

“It’s all your fault,” she raged at her husband. “If you hadn’t let him run wild in the gutters, he’d be fine!”

Damion reminded himself that this mother was almost beside herself with worry for her critically ill child. At such times, people often looked for someone to blame.

By this time, the nurses had taken her arms. She tensed, ready to resist. She glanced from her husband’s pleading face to Jason Allison’s stern authority, to Dan’s poised suspicion. Damion held his silence, believing that anything he said would only provoke the woman further.

As Tiphani disappeared through the doorway, flanked by the nurses, Damion wondered at her reaction. What in Zandru’s Seven Frozen Hells was wrong with her? Surely Dan, who was devoted to elsha, would have chosen a wife who felt the same.

Instead, Tiphani had made a poor adaptation to the world her husband loved and served. Had she been so blinded by love that she did not consider what she was committing herself to, a life on a remote, low-technology planet? Or had she thought she could persuade Dan Lawt to relocate elsewhere, perhaps her own world—what was it called, Temperance? That was obviously not a quality it bestowed upon its inhabitants.

Was happiness in marriage a matter of chance if left to the rages of infatuation? Damion could not help comparing Dan’s relationship with his own. He and Dan were so many things to one another; bredhin and companions, lovers and lord and paxman. In Linnea Storn, Damion had found a woman of his own caste who was a trained and powerful telepath as well as a loving person. It was too bad things had not worked out, since he did not know if he would ever find such a good match again.

After a moment of embarrassed silence, Damion bent over the bed. The boy appeared to be eleven or twelve, with the wiry slenderness of adolescence. Reddish tints shone in his brown hair. Sweat covered his skin, which was pale from growing up beneath the crimson sun. He opened his eyes, and Damion thought he looked simultaneously terrified and unaware of his surroundings.

“Is it threshold sickness?” Dan asked.

Carefully, Damion lowered his power shields and touched the boy’s mind. Damion had never studied in a Tower, but over the years he had learned not only to master his own psychic powers but to use them in ways no other living council could. To the best of his knowledge, he was the only bearer of the rare and powerful Carmen Gift, that of being a living matrix in himself.