Leonie had told him once that if he had been a woman, he would have made a Keeper, but that, as a man, he was too sensitive, that this work would destroy him. Somehow, the remembrance made him angry again, and the anger strengthened him. Why should sensitivity destroy a man, if it was valuable for a woman, if it could have made a woman capable of the most difficult of all matrix work, that of a Keeper? At the time, the words had come close to destroying him; he had felt them an attack on his very manhood. Now they reaffirmed in him the knowledge that he could do this part of a Keeper’s work.

Andrew, watching, lightly linked with Damon, saw him again as he had seen him for a moment the night before, watching over the sleeping Callista: a swirling field of interconnected currents with pulsing centers, dim colors glowing at the pulse spots. Slowly he began to see Dezi the same way, to sense what Damon was doing, bringing his own rate of vibration close to Dezi’s own, to adjust the flows so that their bodies — and their matrix jewels — were vibrating in perfect resonance. This would, he knew, enable Damon to touch Dezi’s matrix without pain, without inflicting physical or nervous shock strong enough to produce death.

For someone not keyed into the precise resonance, to touch someone else’s matrix could produce shock, convulsions, even death at the very least, incredible agony.

He saw the resonances match, pulse together as if, for a moment, the two magnetic fields blended and became one. Damon got out of his chair — to Andrew, it looked like a cloud of linked energy fields, moving — and went toward the boy. Abruptly Dezi wrenched control of the resonances away from Damon, shattering the blended rapport. It was like a clashing explosion of force. Damon gasped in anguish with the recoil, and Andrew felt the shattering pain that exploded in Damon’s nerves and brain. Automatically, Damon stumbled out of reach of the clashing field, steadied himself to rematch resonances to the new field Dezi had created. He thought, almost in pity, that Dezi had panicked, that when it came to it, he couldn’t quite endure it.

Again the matched resonances, the energy fields beginning to vibrate in consonance; again the attempt to reach out for Dezi, to remove the matrix physically from the magnetic field of his body. And again the shattering wrench as Dezi broke the resonances, thrust them apart with an explosion of pain cascading through them both.

Damon said compassionately, “Dezi, I know it’s hard.” Inwardly he thought that the boy could almost be a Keeper himself. Damon could not match resonances that way at his age! But then he had never been as desperate, either, nor as tormented. The breaking of resonances was obviously just as painful for Dezi as it was for Damon himself. “Try not to fight this time, my boy. I don’t want to hurt you.”

And then — they were open to one another — he felt Dezi’s thrusting contempt for his attempt at pity, and knew this was not a panic reaction at all. Dezi was simply putting up one hell of a fight! Perhaps he thought he could outfight Damon, wear him down. Damon left the room and came back with a telepathic damper, a curious gadget which broadcast a vibration that could damp out telepathic emanations within a broad range of frequencies. Grimly he thought of Domenic’s jest on the night he and Ellemir had been married. Such things were used, sometimes, to blur telepathic leakage, when there were others around, to protect privacy, to permit secret talk or prevent unwilling (or deliberate) telepathic eavesdropping. It was used sometimes in Comyn Council, or to protect others when there was an undeveloped, or uncontrolled, adolescent in psychic upheaval, before learning to control or focus powers. He saw Dezi’s face change, take on real panic through the defiance.

Tonelessly, he warned Andrew, “Get out of range if you want to. This might hurt. I’m going to have to use it to damp out any frequencies he tries to raise.”

Andrew shook his head. “I’ll stick.” Damon caught Andrew’s thought: I won’t leave you alone with him. Grateful for his friend’s loyalty, Damon knelt down and began to set up the damper.

Before long, he had tuned it to damp out Dezi’s assault on his consciousness. After that, it was simply a matter of matching his own resonances to Dezi’s physical field of vibration. This time when he stepped into the interlocking fields, the damper blocked out Dezi’s mental thrust to alter the frequencies, move him away. It was painful and hard to move under the damper, something he thought only a full-fledged Keeper could have done at all, with the damper full strength. It felt, physically, as if he were struggling through some thick, viscous fluid which dragged at his limbs and his brain. Dezi began to struggle like a mad thing as he came near. But it was hopeless, and he knew it. Dezi could exhaust himself with the effort to change frequencies, but he could not alter Damon’s now, and the more he managed to alter his own, the more the ultimate shock would hurt.

Gently Damon laid his hand on the small silk insulating bag around Dezi’s neck. His fingers fumbled to untie the thong. Dezi had begun to moan and struggle again, and his struggles, like a rabbit in a snare, wrenched at Damon with pity, even though the boy’s terror was barricaded now by the damper. He managed to get the bag open. The blue stone, pulsing, glowing with Dezi’s terror, fell into his fingers. As they closed over it, he felt the bone-cracking spasm within himself, saw Dezi slump as if felled by a crushing blow. He wondered wretchedly if he had killed the boy. He thrust the matrix within the field of the damper, saw it quiet down to a faint pulse, a resting rhythm. Dezi was unconscious, his head lolling to one side, froth on his bitten lips. Damon had to steel himself to remember Andrew, unconscious, in a deathly sleep in the snow, to think of Callista’s agony if she had awakened to find herself abandoned, or widowed by treachery, before he could harden himself to say “That’s done.”

He thrust the matrix for a few minutes under the damper, saw it fade to dimness, the faintest of pulsing lights. It was still alive, but it had been lowered in strength to where it could not be used for laran.

He cast a pitying look at Dezi, knowing he had blinded the boy. Dezi was worse off now than Damon was when they sent him for Arilinn. In spite of Dezi’s crime, Damon could not help feeling sorrow for the boy, so gifted, such a powerful telepath, potential higher than many now working in the screens and relays. Zandru’s hells, he thought, what a waste. And he had crippled him.

He said wearily, “Let’s finish this, Andrew. Hand me that lock-box, will you?”

He had gotten it from Dom Esteban, who had removed some small jewelry from it. As he thrust the matrix inside, closing the lid, he thought of the old fairy-tale: the giant kept his heart outside of his body, in the most secret place he could find, so that he could not be killed unless they, sought out his hidden heart. He explained briefly to Andrew as he fiddled with the small matrix lock on the box, thrusting his own against it. He said, “We can’t destroy the matrix; Dezi would die with it. But it is locked here with a matrix lock so nothing but my own matrix, attuned to this pattern, will ever open this box again.” The box locked, he put it into a store-room, came back and bent over Dezi, checking the boy’s breathing, his racing heart.

He would survive.

Mutilated… blinded… but he would survive. Damon knew he would rather have died, if it were he.

Damon straightened, listening to the quieting sound of the storm outside. He drew his dagger and cut the ropes binding the boy, thinking that it might be kinder to cut his throat. He wouldn’t want to live. Was his terrible struggle only a way of attempting suicide?

He sighed, laying some money in a purse beside the boy. He said heavily to Andrew, “Dom Esteban gave me this for him. He’ll probably go to Thendara, where Domenic promised him a cadet commission. He can’t do much harm there, working in the City Guards and he can make himself some kind of career. Domenic will look after him — there’s some sense of family loyalty, after all. Dezi won’t even have to confess what’s been done to him. He’ll be all right.”