The Forbidden Tower

But he could not linger here, and even as he was aware of it he felt himself move through the impalpable walls of the shelter. His thoughts provided exit, though no outsider could ever enter, and he was out on the gray and featureless plain of the overworld. In the distance he could see the peaks of the Arili

For a thousand years, perhaps, the thoughts of every psi-technician who moved into the overworld had created Arili

He had been driven forth. Could he get in now if he tried? With the thought he was inside, standing on the steps of the outer court, Leonie before him in her crimson robes, veiled.

“I know why you have come, Damon. I have searched everywhere for the records you want, and I have learned, in these days, more of the history of Arili

“And not needed,” Damon said. “Any halfway competent psi-technician can do most of a Keeper’s work, and pay no higher price than a few days of impotence.”

Leonie smiled faintly and said, “There are many men who think even that price too high, Damon.”

Damon nodded, thinking of his brother Lorenz, and the contempt in his voice when he said of Damon: “Half monk, half eunuch.”

“And for women,” Leonie said, “it was discovered that a Keeper need not be neutered, though they had not yet discovered the training techniques we use. It was sufficient to fix the cha

Damon said, in a low voice, “It also meant that a woman who thought as a young girl that she wished to be Keeper need not make a lifetime choice before she fully knew the burden it demanded.”

Leonie dismissed that. “You are a man, Damon, and I do not expect you to understand. It was to spare the women this heavy burden of choice.” Suddenly her voice broke. “Do you think I would not rather have had all that cut cleanly from me in childhood, rather than going all my life imprisoned, knowing I held the key to my prison, and that only my own oath, my own honor, the word of a Hastur, kept me so… so prisoned.” He could not tell whether it was grief or anger that made her voice tremble. “If I had my way, if you men of Comyn were not so concerned with a woman’s precious fertility, any girl-child coming to the Tower would be neutered at once, and live her life as Keeper happy, and free of the burden of womanhood. She would be free of pain and the never-ending reminders of choice — that she can never choose once and for all, but must make that choice anew every day of her life.”

“You would make them slaves lifelong to the Tower?”

Leonie’s voice was almost inaudible, but to Damon it was like a cry. “Do you think we are not slaves?”

“Leonie, Leonie, if you felt it so, why did you bear it all these years? There were others who could have taken it from your shoulders when it grew too heavy to be borne.”

“I am a Hastur,” she said, “and I have given oath never to lay down my burden until I had trained another to take it from me. Do you think I did not try?” She looked straight at him, and Damon tensed with remembered anguish, for as his thoughts formed her, so she was in the pverworld, and it was the Leonie of his first years in the Tower who stood before him. He would never know if any other man thought her beautiful, but to him she was infinitely beautiful, desirable, holding the very strings of his soul between her slender hands… He turned away, fighting to see her only as he had seen her last in the flesh, seen her at his wedding: a woman calm, aging, controlled, past rage or rebellion.

“I thought you content with power and reverence, Leonie, with the highest place of all, equal to any Comyn lord — Leonie of Arili

She said, the words coming from immense distances, “Had you known I rebelled, then would I have been a failure, Damon. My very life, my sanity, my place as Keeper, depended on that, that I should hardly know it myself. Yet I tried again and again to train another to take my place, so I could lay down a burden too heavy for me. Always when I had trained a Keeper, some other Tower would discover that their Keeper had chosen to leave them, or that her training had failed and she was fit for nothing but to leave and marry. A fine lot of weak and aimless women they were, none with the strength to endure. I was the only Keeper in all the Domains who held my office past twenty years. And even when I began to grow old, three times I gave up my own successor, twice to go to Dalereuth and once to Neskaya, and I who had trained a Keeper for every Tower in the Domains wished to train one for Arili

“And you made sure she would not fail,” Damon said, enraged, “by altering her cha

“I am a Keeper,” Leonie said angrily, “and responsible only to my own conscience! And she consented to what was done. Could I foresee that her fancy would light on this Terranan, and her oath would be as nothing to her?”

Before Damon’s accusing silence she added, defensively, “And even so, Damon, I love her, I could not bear her unhappiness! Had I believed it only a childish fancy, I would have brought her back here to Arili

Now that he had seen her, if only reflected in Leonie’s mind, as she might have been, undamaged, unchanged — having once seen Callista like that — he knew he would never be content until he had seen her so again. He said quietly, “I ca

“I am a Keeper,” she repeated indomitably, “and responsible only to my own conscience.”

This was true. By the law of the Towers, a Keeper was infallible, her lightest word law where every member of her circle was concerned. Yet Damon persisted.