“Beltran,” I said at last, cutting off the flow of enthusiastic ideas, “there’s one serious flaw in your plans. There just aren’t enough telepaths. We haven’t enough trained men and women even to keep all nine of the towers operating. For such a galactic plan as you’re contemplating, we’d need dozens, hundreds.”

“But even a latent telepath can learn matrix mechanics,” he said. “And many who have inherited the gifts never develop them. I believed the tower-trained could awaken latent laran.”

I frowned. “The Alton gift is to force rapport. I learned to use it in the towers to awaken latents if they weren’t too barricaded. I can’t always do it. That demands a catalyst telepath. Which I’m not.”

Thyra said sharply, “I told you so, Bob. Thatgene’s extinct.”

Something in her tone made me want to contradict her. “No, Thyra,” I said, “I know of one. He’s only a boy, and untrained, but definitely a catalyst telepath. He awakened laranin a latent, even after I failed.”

“Much good that does us,” Beltran said in disgust. “Comyn Council has probably bound him so tight, with favors and patronage, that he’ll never see beyond their will! They usually do, with telepaths. I’m surprised they haven’t already bribed and bound you that way.”

I thought, but did not say, that they had tried.

“No,” I said, “they have not. Dani has no reason at all to love the Comyn … and reason enough to hate.”

I smiled at Marjorie and began to tell them about Danilo and the cadets.

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Chapter THIRTEEN

Regis lay in the guest chamber at Edelweiss, tired to exhaustion, but unable to sleep. He had come to Edelweiss through a late-afternoon fall of snow, still too stunned and sickened to talk, or to eat the supper Javanne had had prepared for him. His head throbbed and his eyes flickered with little dots of light which remained even when his eyes were shut, crawling, forming odd visual traceries behind the eyelids.

Dyan, he kept thinking. In charge of cadets, misusing power like that, and no one knew, or cared, or interfered.

Oh, they knew, he realized. They must have known. He would never believe Dyan could have deceived Kennard!

He remembered that curious unsatisfactory talk in the tavern with Dyan and his head throbbed harder, as if the very violence of his emotions would burst it asunder. He felt all the worse because he had, in truth, liked Dyan, had admired him and been flattered by his attention. He had welcomed the chance to talk to a kinsman as an equal … like a stupid, silly child! Now he knew what Dyan was trying to find out, so subtle it was never even an invitation.

It was not the nature of Dyan’s desires that troubled him so greatly. It was not considered anything so shameful to be an ombredin, a lover of men. Among boys too young for marriage, rigidly kept apart by custom from any women except their own sisters or cousins, it was considered rather more suitable to seek companionship and even love from their friends than to consort with such women as were common to all. It was eccentric, perhaps, in a man of Dyan’s years, but certainly not shameful.

What sickened Regis was the kindand typeof pressure used against Danilo, the deliberate, sadistic cruelty of it, the particularly subtle revenge Dyan had taken for the wound to his pride.

Petty harrassment would have been cruel but understandable. But to use laranagainst him! To force himself on Danilo’s mind, to torment him that way! Regis felt physically ill with disgust.

Besides, he thought, still tossing restlessly, there were enough men or young lads who would have welcomed Dyan’s interest. Some, perhaps, only because Dyan was a Comyn lord, rich and able to give presents and privileges to his friends, but others, certainly, would find Dyan a charming, pleasing and sophisticated companion. He could have had a dozen minions or lovers and no one would have thought of criticizing him. But some perverse cruelty made him seek the one boy in the cadets who would have none of him. A cristoforo.

He turned on his side, thrust a pillow over his face to shut out the light of the single candle he was too weary to get up and extinguish, and tried to sleep. But his mind kept going back to the frightening, disturbingly sexual nightmares which had preceded the wakening of his own laran. He knew now how Dyan had pursued Danilo even in sleep, enjoying the boy’s fright and shame. And he knew now the ultimate corruption of power: to make another person a toy to do your will.

Was Dyan mad, then? Regis considered. No, he was very sane, to choose a poor boy, one without powerful friends or patrons. He played with Dani as a cat plays with a captive bird, torturing where he could not kill. Regis felt sick again. Pleasure in pain. Did it give Dyan that kind of pleasure to batter him black and blue at swordplay? With the vivid tactile memory of a telepath he relived that moment when Dyan had run his hands over his bruised body, the deliberate sensual quality of the touch. He felt physically used, contaminated, shamed. If Dyan had been physically present then, Regis would have struck him and dared the consequences himself.

And Dani was a catalyst telepath. That terrible force, that loathsome compulsion, against the rarest and most sensitive of telepaths!

Again and again, compulsively, he returned to that night in the barracks when he had tried—and failed—to reach out to Danilo and comfort him. He felt again and again the pain, the physical and mental shock of that wild rejection, the flood of guilt, terror, shame which had flooded him from that brief and innocent touch on Danilo’s bare shoulder. Cassilda, blessed Mother of the Comyn! Regis thought in scalding shame, I touched him! Is it any wonder he thought me no better than Dyan?

He turned over on his back and lay staring at the vaulted ceiling, feeling his body ice over with dread. Dyan was a member of Council. They could not be so corrupt that they would know what Dyan had done, and say nothing. But who could tell them?

The single candle near his bed wavered, flickered in and out of focus; colors looped and spun across his visual field and the room swelled up, receded and shrank until it seemed to lie far away, then loom enormously around him in great echoing space.

He recognized the feeling from when Lew gave him kirian, but he was not drugged now!

He clutched at the bedclothes, squeezing his eyes shut. He could still see the candleflame, a dark fire printed inside his eyelids, the room around him lit with blazing brilliance, reversed afterimages, dark to bright and bright to dark, and a roaring in his ears like the distant roaring of a forest fire

… The fire-lines at Armida! For an instant it seemed that he saw Lew’s face again, crimson, gazing into a great fire, drawn with terror and wonder, then the face of a woman, shining, ecstatic, crowned with fire, burning, burning alive in the flames … Sharra, golden-chained Forge-Goddess. The room was alive with the fire and he burrowed beneath the blankets, sunk, battered, swirled. The room was dissolving around him, tilting … every thread in the smooth fine linen of the blankets seemed to cut into him, hard and rough, the twisted fibers of blanket trying to curl and frizzle and dig painfully into his skin, like cutting edges. He heard someone moan aloud and wondered who was there moaning and crying like that. The very air seemed to separate itself and come apart against his skin as if he had to sort it out into little droplets before he could breathe. His own breath hissed and whistled and moaned as it went in and out, like searing fire, to be quenched by the separate droplets of water in his lungs …