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They ca
As quickly as thought they were standing together on the highest battlement of their Tower. To Andrew it felt like rock beneath his feet. He was clothed, as always in the over-world, in the grayish silvery fabric of a Terran Empire uniform, and as he became aware of it, he felt it alter. No, I am really not Terran now. He realized, with just a flicker of consciousness, that he was wearing the saddle-rubbed leather breeches and the furred riding jacket he wore for work around the estate. Well, that was now his truest self; he belonged to Armida now.
As they stood at the top of the Tower they could see the loom of Arili
They perceive us as a threat to them! Why?
Only a moment, and the thunder was crashing around them again, a fierce duel of lightning bolts, hurled and intercepted, and he felt a random thought — it must be Andrew’s — I feel like Jove hurling his thunders. He wondered with an infinitesimal fragment of his consciousness who or what Jove was.
I can batter down the Tower of Arili
I fought the Great Cat from outside the Tower, and I triumphed. As if to affirm the act which had brought him the awareness of his own psi power, undiminished by the years he had spent outside the Tower, he called up the Great Cat, pouring their linked minds into the image, sending it out to hover over the heights of Arili
The two Towers stood now so close that he could see Leonie’s face through her veil, shining with wrath and despair. In the overworld, Damon thought detachedly, she was still as beautiful as she had ever been. But he could see her for only a moment, for her face vanished in a swirling darkness which wiped out sight of her circle. Where Leonie had stood, a dragon reared upward, roaring and breathing flame. Golden-scaled, golden-clawed, towering to the sky above Arili
But with the flame he also felt the awareness of a legend in Andrew’s mind: Burn us and we will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes… Reaching with all his last strength through the fire and the burning which threatened to drive them all from the overworld, Damon linked them closer still. Together they poured all their psychic force into the shifting stuff of the overworld, linking into a giant bird, feathers blazing, burning up in the ecstatic union which consumed them, their four linked minds joined. In Andrew’s mind Damon felt them curled naked together, inside a darkness, inside an unhatched egg, while the flames wholly consumed them, burned them down into ash. Then, in an ever-expanding ecstasy, the shell around them broke and they burst upward from the ashes, spreading mighty wings in a single, linked burst of flaming energy, soaring over Arili
Leonie! You ca
Damon knew that he did not wish to destroy Arili
But Leonie’s voice was shaken, almost inaudible. “No, Damon, strike us down. Destroy us utterly, as you have destroyed all we stand for.”
“No, Leonie.” And now, suddenly, they stood facing one another on the gray plain of the overworld. And he knew — and knew that Leonie shared the thought — that he could never harm her. He loved her, had always loved her, would always love her.
“And I love you too,” Callista said tenderly at his side. She stretched her hands to Leonie, then, as she had never done in the real world, she took Leonie in her arms, holding the woman against her in a tender, loving embrace. “But Leonie, my beloved foster-mother, can you not see what it is that Damon has done?”
Leonie said, shaking, “He has destroyed the Towers. And you, Callista, you have betrayed us all!” She shrank from the girl, staring at her in horror. Damon, linked with her now, knew that she could see what had happened to Callista, that she was a woman, loving, loved, fulfilled — not Keeper in the old sense at all, yet wielding the full power of her training and her strength. “Callista, Callista, what have you done?”
Damon answered, gently but unyielding, “We have discovered the old way of working, where a Keeper need not sacrifice life and all the joy of living.”
Then my life was useless, my sacrifice needless. And, with a despair Damon could neither measure nor endure: Let me die now.
He could see through her, with the new sight of a Keeper, and he saw in horror what she had done to herself. Why had he never guessed? She had sent him from the Tower to remove forever the temptation that he might lose control and reveal his desire for her. But to remove her own temptation? The laws forbade the neutering of a Comyn woman, and she had stopped short of that with Callista.
But for herself?
He said with an anguished compassion, “Not needless, Leonie. You and all those like you have kept the tradition alive, kept the matrix sciences of Darkover alive, so that some day this rediscovery might be made. Your heroism has made it possible for our children and grandchildren to use the old sciences without so much suffering and tragedy. I do not want to destroy the Towers, only to take some of the burden from you, to make it possible to train others outside the Towers, so that you need not give up your lives, so that the price need not be so cruelly high. You, and all of us who have come from Arili