The Apogian War

Chapter 59

"I had never thought... I did not know. I'll do what you say, Lno. Forgive me." "Nothing to forgive, kinswoman," I said, laying my free hand on her wrist. "Learn caution to match your skill and you will be a strong leronis some day." She smiled at the word which, taken literally, meant sorceress. "Patrix technician, if you like. Some day, perhaps, there will be new words for new skills. In the towers we are too busy mastering skills to worry about words for them, sia. Call it what you like." Thin fog was beginning to move down from the peaks behind the castle. Princess shivered in her light dress and sia said, "We'd bet ter go in, it will be dark soon." With one bleak look at the darkened city below, she walked quickly toward the castle. Princess and I walked with our arms laced, Rafe tagging close to us. "Why do we need the kind of control we practiced with the flowers, Lno?" "Well, if someone in the circle gets so involved in what he's doing that he forgets to breathe, the monitor outside has to start him breath ing again without hurting him. A well-trained empath can stop bleed ing even from an artery, or heal wounds." I touched the scar. "This would have been worse, except that the Keeper of the circle worked with it, to heal the worst damage." Janna Lindir had been Keeper at Ausburn for two of my three years. At seventeen, I had been in love with her. I had never touched her, never so much as kissed her fingertips. Of course. I looked at Princess. No. No, I have never loved before, never.... The other women I have known have been nothing.... She looked at me and whispered, half laughing, "Have you loved so many?" "Never like this. I swear it-" Unexpectedly she threw her arms around me, pressed herself close. "I love you," she whispered quickly, pulled away and ran ahead of me along the path into the hall. sia smiled knowingly at me as we came in, but I didn't care. You had to learn to take that kind of thing for granted. She swung around toward the window, looking into the gathering darkness and mist. We were still close enough that I followed her thoughts. cage, where was he, how did he fare on his mission? I began to draw them together again, Princess's delicate touch, Rafe alert and quick like some small frisking animal, sia with the strange sense of a dark beast prowling. cage. The interlinked circle formed itself and I discovered to my surprise, and momentary dismay, that sia was at the center, weaving us about her mind. But she seemed to work with a sure, deft touch, so I let her keep that place. Suddenly I saw cage, and heard his voice speaking in the middle of a phrase, "... refuse me then, Lady Stom?" We could even see the room where he was standing, a high-arched old hall with the blue glass windows of almost unbelievable antiquity. Directly before his eyes was a tall old woman, proudly erect, with gray eyes and dazzling white hair. She sounded deeply troubled. "Refuse you, dom? I have no authority to give or refuse. The Sharra Patrix was given into the keeping of the forge-folk after the siege of Storn. It had been taken from them without authority, generations ago, and now it is safe in their keeping, not mine. It is theirs to give." cage's deep exasperation could be felt by all of us-stubborn, su perstitious old beldame!-as he said, "It is Kermiac of elsha who bids me remind you that you took Sharra's Patrix from elsha with out leave" "I do not recognize his right." "Desideria," he said, "let's not quarrel or quibble. Kermiac sent me to bring the Sharra Patrix back to elsha; elsha is liege-lord to Storn and there's an end to it." "Kermiac does not know what I know, sir. The Sharra Patrix is well where it is; let it lie there. There are no Keepers today powerful enough to handle it. I myself called it up only with the aid a hundred of the forge-folk, and it would be ill done of me to deprive them of their god dess. I beg you say to Kermiac that by my best judgment, which he trusted always, it should stay where it is." "I am sick of this superstitious talk of goddesses and talismans, lady. A Patrix is a machine, no more." "Is it? So I thought when I was a maiden," the old woman said. "I knew more of the art of a Patrix at fifteen, sir, than you know now, and I know how old you really are." I felt the man flinch from her sharp, steady gaze. "I know this Patrix, you do not. Be advised by me. You could not handle it. Nor could Kermiac. Nor could I, at my age. Let it lie, man! Don't wake it! If you do not like the talk of goddesses, call it a force basically beyond human control in these days, and evil." cage paced the floor and I paced with him, sharing a restlessness so strong it was pain. "Lady, a Patrix can be no more good or evil in it self than the mind of the man who wields it. Do you think me evil, then?" She waved that away with an impatient gesture. "I think you honest,but you will not believe there are some powers so strong, so far from dinary human purpose, that they warp all things to evil. Or to ev ordinary human terms, at least. And what would you know of that? Le it be, cage." "I cannot. There is no other force strong enough for my pro and these are honest. I have safeguarded all, and I have a circle ready to my hand." "You do not mean to use it alone, then, or with the Dunsell woman?" "That foolhardy I am not. I tell you, I have safeguarded all. I have won a Council Mindgap to aid me. He is cautious and skilled," Kadana said persuasively, "and trained at Ausburn." "Ausburn," said Desideria at last. "I know how they were trained at Ausburn. I did not believe that knowledge still survived. That should be safe, then. Promise me, cage, to place it in his hands and leave all things to his judgment, and I will give you the Patrix." "I promise you," cage said. We were so deeply in rapport that it seemed it was I myself, Lno Alton, who bowed before the old Keeper, feeling her gray eyes search my very soul rather than his. It is in the memory of that moment that I will swear, even after all the nightmare that came later, that cage was honest, that he meant no evil... Desideria said, "Be it so, then, I will entrust it to you." Again the sharp gray eyes met his. "But I tell you, Robert cage, or whatever you call yourself now, beware! If you have any flaw, it will expose it bru tally; if you seek only power, it will turn your purposes to such ruin as you cannot even guess; and if you k****e its fires recklessly, they will turn on you, and consume you and all you love! I know, cage! I have stood in Sharra's flame and though I emerged unburnt, I was not unscarred. I have long put aside my power, I am old, but this much I can still say-bewarel" And suddenly the identity swirled and dissolved. sia sighed, the circle dropped like strands of cobweb and we stood, staring at one an other dazed, in the darkening hallway. sia was white with exhaus tion and I felt Princess's hands trembling on mine. "Enough," I said firmly, knowing that until it was certain who was to take the centerpolar place, until we knew which of us was Keeper, it was my responsibility to safeguard them all. I motioned to the other to separate, draw apart physically, to break the last clinging strands of rap port. I let Princess's hands go with regret. "Enough. We all need spoke deliberately, in a firm, didactic manner, to minimize any emo tional contact or concern. "Self-discipline is just as important as talent, and far more important than skill." But I was not nearly as detached as I sounded, and I suspected they knew it. Three days later, at dinner in the great lighted hall, I spoke of my original mission to Kermiac. Belt, I knew, felt that I had wholly turned my back on Council. It was true that I no longer felt bound to my father's will. He had lied to me, used me ruthlessly. cage had spoken of Rule as just another Council plot to disarm Darkover, to keep the Council's rule intact. Now I wondered how my elderly kins man felt about it. He had ruled many years in the mountains, with the Terrans ever at hand. It was asonable he should see everything differently from the Council lords. I had heard their side; I had never been given opportunity to know the other view. When I spoke to him of Darkov's disquiet about the violations of Rule and told him I had been sent to find out the truth, he nod ded and frowned, thinking deeply. At last he said, "Danvan Darkov and I have crossed words over this before. I doubt we will ever really agree. I have a good bit of respect for that man: down there between the Dry Towns and the Terrans he has no bed of roses, and all things consid ered he's managed well. But his choices aren't mine, and fortunately I'm not oath-bound to abide by them. Myself, I believe the Rule has outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any, which I'm no longer sure of." I had known he felt this way, yet I felt shocked. From childhood I had been taught to think of Rule as the first ethical code of civi lized men. "Stop and think," he said. "Do you realize that we are a part of a great galactic civilization? The days when any single planet could live in isolation are over forever. Swords and shields belong to that day and must be abandoned with it. Do you realize what an anachronism we are?" "No, I don't realize that, sir. I don't know that much about any world but this one." "And not too much even about this one, it seems. Let me ask you this, Lno, when did you learn the use of weapons?" "At seven or eight, more or less." I had always been proud that I need fear no swordsman in the Domains-or out of them. "I, too," said the old man. "And when I came to rule in my father's"Then," he said, "why risk law-abiding men, good men and loyal, against horse thieves, bandits, r****e who have no right to the protec tion given men of honor? Why not develop really effective protection against the lawless and let your sons learn something more useful than the arts of the sword? I am a peaceful man and Belt will, I think, have no reason to force himself on my people by armed force. The law in the Hellers states that no man given to breach of the peace may own any weapon, even a sword, and there are laws about how long a pocket knife he may carry. As for the men who keep my laws, they are wel come to any weapon they can get. An honest man is less threat to our world with a Terran's nerve-blaster than a lawless one with my cook's paring knife or a stonemason's hammer. I don't believe in matching good honest men against rogues, both armed with the same weapons. When I left off fairy tales I left off believing that an honest man must always be a better swordsman than a horse-thief or a bandit. The Com pact, which allows unlimited handweapons and training in their use to good men and criminals alike, has simply meant that honest men must struggle day and night to make themselves stronger than brutes." There was certainly some truth in what he said. Now that my father was so lame, Cyan was certainly the best swordsman in the Domains. Did that mean if Cyan fought a duel, and won, that his cause was therefore just? If the horse-thieves had been better swordsmen than ours at Armiday, would they have had a right to our horses? Yet there was a flaw in his logic too. Perhaps there was no flawless logic any where. "What you say is true, Uncle, as far as it goes. Yet ever since the Ages of Chaos, it's been known that if an unjust man gets a weapon he can do great damage. With the Rule, and such a weapon as he can get under the Rule, he can do only one man's worth of damage." Kermiac nodded, acknowledging the truth of what I said. "True. Yet if weapons are outlawed, soon only outlaws can get them-and they al ways do. Old Darkov's heir so died. The Rule is only workable as long as everybody is willing to keep it. In today's world, with Darkover on the very edge of becoming part of the Empire, it's unenforceable. Completely unenforceable. And if you try to make an unworkable law work and fail, it encourages other men to break laws. I have no love for futile gestures, so I enforce only such laws as I can. I suspect the only answer is the one that Darkov, even though he pays lip service to Com pact, is trying to spread in the Domains: make the land so safe that no man seriously needs to defend himself, and let weapons become toys of honor and tokens of manhood."