“You knew you had made that impossible!” Damon accused.

“I… was not sure,” said Leonie, and the veils stirred in negation. “She said to me… she had touched him. She had… Damon, what was I to think? But now she knows otherwise. In the days when a girl was trained to Keeper before she was fullgrown, it was taken for granted that the choice was for life and there could be no return.”

“You knew this, and still made that choice for Callista?”

“What else could I do, Damon? Keepers we must have, or our world goes dark with the darkness of barbarism. I did what I must, and if Callista is even reasonably fair to me, she will admit it was with her consent.” And yet Damon heard, like an echo in Leonie’s mind, the bitter, despairing cry:

How could I consent? I was twelve years old!

Damon said angrily, “Are you saying it is hopeless, then? That Callista must return to Arilinn or die of grief?”

Leonie’s voice was uncertain; her very image in the gray world wavered. “I know that once there was a way, and the way was known. Nothing from the past can be wholly concealed. When I myself was young I knew a woman who had been treated so, and she said that a way was known to reverse this fixing of channels, but she did not tell me how and she has been dead more years than you have lived. It was known everywhere in the days when the Towers were as temples, and the Keepers as their priests. I spoke truer than I knew,” she said, abruptly putting the veil back from her ravaged face. “Had you lived in those days, Damon, you would have found your own true vocation as Keeper. You were born three hundred years too late.”

“This does me little good now, kinswoman,” Damon said. He turned aside from Leonie’s face, seeing it waver and change before him, half Leonie as she had been when he was in the Tower, when he loved her, half the aging Leonie of today, as he had seen her at his wedding. He did not want to see her face, wished she would veil herself again.

“In the days of Rafael II, when the Towers of Neskaya and Tramontana were burned to the ground, all the circles died, with the Keepers. Many, many of the old techniques were lost then, and not all of them have teen remembered or rediscovered.”

“And I am supposed to rediscover them in the next few days? You have extraordinary confidence in me, Leonie!”

“What thought has ever moved’in the mind of humankind anywhere in this universe can never be wholly lost.”

Damon said impatiently, “I am not here to argue philosophy!”

Leonie shook her head. “This is not philosophy but fact. If any thought has ever stirred the stuff of which the universe is made, that thought remains, indelible, and can be recaptured. There was a time when these things were known, and the fabric of time itself remains…”

Her image rippled, shook like a pool into which a stone had been dropped, and was gone. Damon, alone again in the endless, formless gray world, asked, How in the name of all the Gods at once can I challenge the very fabric of time? And for an instant he saw, as from a great height, the image of a man wearing green and gold, the face half concealed, and nothing clear to Damon’s eyes except a great sparkling ring on his finger. Ring or matrix? It began to move, to undulate, to give out great waves of light, and Damon felt his consciousness dimming, vanishing. He clutched at the matrix around his neck, trying desperately to orient himself in the gray overworld. Then it was gone, and he was alone in the blankness, the formless, featureless nothingness. Finally, dim on the horizon, he perceived the faint and stony shape of his own landmark, what they had built there. With utter relief, he felt his thoughts drawing him toward it, and abruptly he was back in his room at Armida, Andrew bending anxiously over him.

He blinked, trying to coordinate random impressions. Did you find an answer? He sensed the question in Andrew’s mind, but he did not know yet. Leonie had not pledged to help, to free Callista from the bondage, body and mind, to the Tower. She could not. In the overworld she could not lie, or conceal her intention. She wanted Callista to return to the Tower. She genuinely felt that Callista had had her chance at freedom and failed. Yet she could not conceal it, either, that there was an answer, and that the answer must lie in the depths of time itself. Damon shivered, with the deathly cold which seemed to lie inside his bones, clutching his warm overtunic around his shoulders. Was that the only way?

In the overworld Leonie could not tell a direct lie. Yet she did not tell him all the truth either, he sensed, because he did not know where to look for all the truth, and there was still much she was concealing. But why? Why should she need to conceal anything from him? Didn’t she know that Damon had always loved her, that — the Gods help him — he loved her still, and would never do anything to harm her? Damon dropped his face in his hands, desperately trying to pull himself together. He could not face Ellemir like this. He knew that his grief and confusion were hurting Andrew too, and Andrew didn’t even understand how.

One of the basic courtesies of a telepath, he reminded himself, was to manage your own misery so that it did not make everyone else miserable… After a moment he managed to calm himself and get his barriers back in shape. He raised his face to Andrew and said, “I think I have a hint at the answer. Not all of it, but if we have enough time, I may manage it. How long was I out?” He stood up and went to the table where the remnants of their supper still stood, pouring himself a glass of wine and sipping it slowly, letting it warm him and calm him a little.

“Hours,” Andrew said. “It must be past midnight.”

Damon nodded. He knew the time-telescoping effect of such travel. Time in the overworld seemed to run on a different scale and was not even consistent, but something else entirely, so that sometimes a brief conversation would last for hours, and at other times a lengthy journey which, subjectively, seemed to endure for days, would flash by in the blink of an eye.

Ellemir appeared in the doorway, saying anxiously, “Good, you are still awake. Damon, come and look at Callista, I don’t like the way she keeps moaning in her sleep.”

Damon set the wineglass down, steadying himself against the table with both hands. He came into the inner room. Callista seemed asleep, but her eyes were half open, and when Damon touched her she winced, evidently aware of the touch, but there was no consciousness in her eyes. Andrew’s face was drawn. “What ails her now, Damon?”

“Crisis. I was afraid of this,” Damon said, “but I thought it would happen that first night.” Quickly he moved his fingertips over her body, not touching her. “Elli, help me turn her over. No, Andrew, don’t touch her, she’s aware of you even in her sleep.” Ellemir helped him turn her, sharing with him a moment of shock as they stripped the blankets from her body. How wasted she looked! Hovering jealously near as the lines of light built up in Callista’s body, Andrew saw the dull, faded currents. But Damon knew he did not completely understand.

“I knew I should have cleared her channels at once,” he said with hopeless anger. How could he make Andrew understand? He tried, without much hope, to put it into words:

“She needs some kind of… of discharge of the energy overload. Yet the channels are blocked, and the energy is backing up — leaking, if you like — into all the rest of her system, and is beginning to affect all her life functions: her heart, her circulation, her breathing. And before I could—”

Ellemir drew a harsh gasp of apprehension. Damon saw Callista’s body stiffen, go rigid, arch backward with a weird cry. For several seconds a twitching, shuddering tremor shook all her limbs, then she collapsed and lay as if lifeless.