[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Magda sat on the bed to remove her own.“Did you promise?”“How could I? I told her I would have to consult you, and also the folk in the Tower.I do not thinkshe knows we have sworn oath as freemates, and I had no opportunity to tell her.”“Perhaps it is as well not to tell her.”“You told Camilla.”“But Camilla is not jealous.Rafaella and I have worked out a pact for mutual co-existence—we evenmanage to like each other most of the time—but she is jealous of our closeness, Jaelle.”“Rafi and I were never lovers, Margali.At least, not since I was a little girl.She was really not muchmore.And now, at least, Rafaella is certainly a lover of men.What may have been between us when wewere young girls does not seem that important to me, and I cannot believe it is important to her.” Jaelleshivered, standing barefoot on the icy floor, and quickly pulled her nightgown over her head.“That is not what she is jealous of.” Magda wondered why Jaelle could not see it.“What she enviesis that we work together, that we share laran.And that is closer than any other bond.” She hurried intoher warm nightgown and warmer robe, for the Guild-house was not well-heated at night.“Will youmonitor, Jaelle, or do you want me to do it?”“I will.That’s about my level of skill.” Jaelle had no illusions about her competence working withlaran.She had spent half a lifetime blocking away her psychic gift, submitting to the training only whenthe laran could not be excluded from her consciousness.Now, she knew, she could achieve only theminimal level of training: sufficient to keep her from being, in the phrase so often used about untrainedtelepaths, a menace to herself and everyone around her.Jaelle was, and was glad to be, an integral part of the group of telepaths and psi workers, looselyallied, who worked outside the ordinary structure of matrix workers on Darkover, and in defiance calledthemselves the Forbidden Tower.But she would never achieve sufficient competence to call herselfmatrix mechanic or technician.Sometimes when she watched Magda, born a Terran, and now the mostskillful of technicians, she was painfully aware that she had cast away that birthright, and could nownever recover it.They were both wearing warm, fur-lined robes, fur-lined slippers.Magda wrapped herself in an extrablanket.Psychic work withdrew heat from the body.If the worker stayed out too long on the astralplanes known collectively as the overworld, it could result in painful chill.Jaelle took her matrix, from the tiny leather bag around her neck, and carefully stripped away theprotecting silks.The blue stone, no larger than the nail of her little finger, glinted with pallid fires.She spoke aloud, though it was not really necessary; from the moment Magda had taken out hermatrix, they had been in contact.“Match resonances—”Magda was aware first of the physical heat and mass of Jaelle’s body, though she did not look at theother woman; her eyes were fixed within the matrix, seeing only the moving lights in the stone.Shesensed the living energy fields of Jaelle’s body near her, the pulsing spots where the life currents moved.Then, delicately, she moved to match the vibration of her stone to Jaelle’s, feeling it as a point of—was itheat, light, some indefinable energy moving in the room? Nothing so tangible as these.She felt herheartbeat altering slightly, pulsing with the ebb and flow of the energies of the matched stones, knew thatthe very blood in her veins and arteries moved in cadence with the other woman’s.She sensed, like a hand passing over her body, the monitoring touch of Jaelle, scanning her to makecertain that all was well in her body before she withdrew her consciousness from it, aware of everything,even noticing the graze on her ankle where she had skidded the other day on a pebble, the slightclogging of her sinuses— she must have encountered something in the HQ today to which she was mildlyallergic; she noticed it, as Jaelle moved energies to clear the condition.Neither spoke, but she picked it up as Jaelle finished:Ready?I’m going out.Magda let her consciousness slip free of her body and looked down, seeing herself lying apparentlyunconscious on the bed they shared.Jaelle, blanket-wrapped, sat beside her.With total irrelevance, shethought.That old robe of mine is really getting too old and grubby, I shall have to have a new onebefore long.What a pity I hate sewing so much.She could have requisitioned a new one fromSupplies, in the Terran HQ, but she had lived in the Guild-house too long to see that as a workablesolution.Then she was up and out of the room, finding herself alone in the gray and featureless plain of theoverworld.After a moment, Jaelle stood beside her.As always in the overworld, Jaelle seemed smaller,slighter, more fragile, and Magda wondered, as she had wondered before, whether what she saw was aprojection of the way Jaelle saw herself, or whether it reflected the way in which, for some reason, shehad always felt protective, as if Jaelle were younger and weaker than herself.Around them stretched grayness in every direction, colorless and without, form.In the distance,figures drifted.Some of them, Magda knew, were their fellow pilgrims on the non-physical planes ofexistence; some had merely strayed from their bodies in dreams or meditation.She could see none ofthem clearly as yet, for she had not yet marked her own path with will and purpose.Now, in the clearing dimness as what looked like fog dispersed, she could see faint landmarks in thegray.First, foremost, she saw a shining structure, rising tall on the plain, which she knew to be thelandmark made on these planes by the thought-form called the Forbidden Tower—shelter from thenothingness of the astral world.Her home, the home she had found for her spirit, shared with those whomeant more to her even than the Sisterhood of the Guild-house.She still observed meticulously everyprovision of the Renunciate Oath; she was a Free Amazon not only in word but in spirit.But theGuild-house could no longer contain the fullness of her being.With the speed of thought—for what she imagined in the overworld was literally true—she wasstanding beside the Tower itself.Simultaneously she was inside it, in what appeared to be, complete inevery detail, the upstairs suite in the Great House of Armida.She had come so late to this work that shehad never quite accustomed herself to how time and space behaved on this plane.All four of the rooms were empty—she could see them all at once, in a way she did not understand—but somewhere, there was the blue glow of a matrix where someone of the Tower kept watch.Andthen, without a moment of transition, Callista Lanart-Carr was beside her.Magda knew rationally that Callista was not as beautiful in body as she looked in the overworld.Inthis case at least she was seeing Callista through the eyes of the spirit and through the eyes of her loveand veneration for this woman who was at the center of the heart and spirit of the Forbidden Tower
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
