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The Ages of Chaos, when laran Gifts were developed and all too often exploited, hold a special fascination for writers and readers alike. Perhaps this is because of the juxtaposition of immense psychic power, political ruthlessness, and deeply human stories.
Robin Wayne Bailey is the author of numerous novels, including the Dragonkin trilogy and the Frost series, as well as Shadowdance and the Fritz Leiber–inspired Swords Against The Shadowland. His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies with numerous appearances in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress series and Deborah J. Ross’s Lace and Blade volumes. His novelette “The Children’s Crusade” was a 2008 Nebula Award nominee. Some of his stories have been collected in two volumes available from Yard Dog Press. He is a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and co-founder of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, now located in Seattle, Washington. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.
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We have never been respected. Among the Seven Domains and the Comyn, the Ridenow are too often ridiculed and denigrated. They dismiss us as the descendants of bandits, barely civilized uplanders. Yet, like the other Great Families, we possess laran, however strong or weak they think we are, so they do not ignore us.
So it was that when, a few short months ago, the Hastur lords called a Grand Council meeting in Thendara, I left my wife and family behind and made the journey by aircar through dark dust storms across the central peaks of the Kilghard Mountains to the City of Trade. The City of Sin and Vice we Ridenow call it, and it was there that I fell into that sin and vice and was swallowed.
On the first evening of the council, as the Darkovan sun slipped below the distant mountains, I spied the Lady Karin Ardais. She stood apart from her husband and all the gathered Family members and leaned on a parapet gazing into the fading light. The chilly wind stirred her chestnut hair and rippled the folds of her dress and thin cloak. Her hair and soft throat glowed in the rays of final daylight. She radiated loneliness and boredom that bordered on despair.
Laran is weak or non-existent in Ridenow men, yet I felt these things from Karin Ardais with an intensity that made them feel like my own. Even before she turned and let me see her perfect face, I wanted to hold her and be with her. Our gazes met only for a moment, and then I hurried from the reception hall, embarrassed by the strength of my physical reaction.
Throughout the night and the next day, she filled my thoughts. The business matters before the Council seemed petty and uninteresting. I listened without hearing, spoke little, and contributed nothing. In my mind’s eye, she still stood waiting for me on that parapet, cloaked in a perpetual twilight, her too-brief glance seeking mine. Feigning some excuse, I left the council meeting early and sought my personal quarters.
Instead, lost in a swirl of troubling emotions, I turned from my intended course, left Comyn Castle, and wandered alone through the city, avoiding the crowds, until I found myself on the docks and then on the grassy bank of the river. I tried to think of my wife as I stared into the water, of my own prestige and reputation, of the danger I courted. She was Karin Ardais, wife of Dyarlis Ardais who headed the Ardais Family.
Among the Comyn, wars had been fought for the deed I considered on that river bank. With an angry growl, I ripped up a handful of grass and cast the blades into the water. The current took them and swept them away. I felt caught up in a similar current and wondered if there was any way to resist it—or if I wanted to resist it.
In the setting sun, the water turned blood red. I took it as an omen, a sign from the god Zandru. My skin felt hot and cold at the same time, as if a sickness had come over me. I clenched my fists and swallowed, and in that moment I resolved to leave Thendara, to make what excuses I could to the Council, and go home at once to my lands and my wife while I still had the strength.
Determination quickened my stride. I walked back along gloomy streets as lights began to burn in the windows of shops and houses. Then I heard music and laughter, and sounds of many voices. When I turned a corner into Lender’s Street, a kaleidoscope of color and lanterns greeted me. I found myself in a carnival atmosphere of dancers and acrobats and celebrants, although what they were celebrating I couldn’t guess. It was the madness of decadent Thendara that they needed no good reason.
I pushed through the throngs, resisting the drinks that were offered me, avoiding the eyes of the men and women who offered themselves for unspeakable services, my senses burning from the smoke of dizzying herbs. I told myself over and over that I was a Ridenow and above such vices, that I could not be tempted.
Yet I felt the excitement, the passion, the heat of every heart around me. The joy and pain of the crowds overwhelmed my carefully maintained defenses, and my façade began to crumble. I stumbled. A young man caught me by the arm, and with that touch came a flood of emotion: confusion, anger, and disgust. He started to push me away, but a young woman by his side stopped him. She stood before me, a shape aswirl in auras of compassion and pity, and she held out a hand.
“Are you all right?” she asked in a sweet voice.
I recoiled. “Don’t touch me!” I shouted as I clambered to my feet. “I—I am a Ridenow! I am...!” Before I could stop myself I blurted my deepest secret. “I am an empath! Get away!”
I ran, turning into empty streets as soon as I found them, avoiding the voices and the stares, fleeing the chaos of emotions, struggling to find my own sense of self again. When I found an alley away from the noise, I cowered down in the darkness against a rain barrel and sorted through my mind in methodical fashion to identify my own thoughts and feelings and to push out those of others. It was hard sometimes to know what was truly mine.
This was my darkest secret. That I possessed laran in some small measure was well-known, but from my earliest youth I had guarded the knowledge of my true strength. For that reason I lived apart in the isolation of the uplands, keeping mostly to my own properties and avoiding extended contact with other Comyn. I had never had any desire to be hauled off to some Tower to be examined and tested or to be pressed into service for some convoluted Darkovan purpose. My life was my own.
And if my secret gave me some edge in business dealings, so much the better.
In the shadows of the alley, my pulse calmed, and I erected my personal barriers one at a time, brick by brick as it were, like a wall to keep out the waves of emotion that surrounded me. I knew who I was again, where my personal world began and ended, what was real to me and what were the echoes of other hearts and minds.
Sure of myself once again, I made my way quietly back to Comyn Castle. Most of the Council members had long since retired for the night, but a servant greeted me at the door. “Dom Viktor,” he said, acknowledging me with a bow. “We are relieved by your return.”
“As am I,” I admitted with a forced smile. “I have sampled enough of Thendara’s pleasures. It’s my intention to leave at morning’s first light. Please prepare my vehicle for my homeward journey.”
The servant regarded me with surprise as he straightened, and I smiled again inwardly as I easily blocked his emotion. I made my way alone through the ancient, lantern-lit halls to my assigned chambers, completely sure of myself and of my decision to depart.
Yet, as I quietly opened my door, stepped inside and closed it again, I saw my own doom. Framed in moonlight, draped in a diaphanous gown of saffron-colored nothingness, Karin Ardais waited for me on my balcony. She turned to face me, her pale exposed breasts blazing with heat, her beating heart a quicksand of need.
I crossed the room without thinking. Her arms encircled me, and her lips lifted to mine. So easily did she ensnare me. Let there be shame or disgrace if we were caught. Let there be war among the families. Nothing mattered in that moment but the possession of her and the fulfillment of our hungers.
“Viktor.” She breathed my name once into my ear, and it sounded like victory. I took her there in the moonlight on the balcony as we both fought not to scream. Then she rode me on the bed until the first signs of approaching dawn. For a few precious moments, we held each other, and I imagined I could hear the lapping of the river.
“Tomorrow night again,” she whispered as she slipped from bed and dressed. That was all, no other words. The door opened and closed, and Karin Ardais departed.
My mind echoed with thoughts of her as I rose. It was almost first light and with a sudden new determination that bordered on manic anger, I dressed and flung my few belongings into my bag, thinking that I could still escape Thendara.
Yet her promise haunted my every step and motion. Tomorrow night again.
I tossed my half-packed bag into a corner and sat down on the bed with my head in my hands. The sheets and pillows bore her perfume. The mattress still bore the imprints of our bodies. Numb, I watched the sky brighten with all the unlikely shades of morning, and when a servant knocked on my door with breakfast, I ate without tasting anything.
I did not go home. I sat through the day’s council meetings saying little, speaking only when necessary, avoiding the eyes of the boisterous Dyarlis Ardais, who never seemed to stop talking and who was, of course, his own favorite subject. He was a man easy to dislike, but I hid that emotion behind my barriers just as I blocked the emotions of the rest. Still, in a moment of fatigue, I felt a small quake from the man. It shivered across the room and touched me: Dyarlis Ardais harbored an intense fear of inadequacy and of being thought a fool.
Without giving myself away, I reinforced my barriers. I wanted no part of Ardais or any of the Comyn in my head. All I wanted was for the day to end and night to fall and Karin Ardais in my arms again. Still, I pushed the thought aside and tried to focus on the business of the council. With so many telepaths in the chamber, I had to be careful.
I took my evening meal alone, apart from the others. For a time afterward, I paced my balcony, taking in the spires and architectural marvels of Thendara, drinking the beauty of Darkover’s star-speckled sky as night fell, the promising brush stroke of moonlight from Idriel, just rising above the line of the roof. Somehow, my mind far from my once-beloved uplands, I felt as if I belonged here now, as if Thendara had claimed me and I had surrendered.
My door opened and closed with the barest draft of a breeze. Karin Ardais did not even bother to knock. The moon and stars disappeared, and she was all there was. I went to her in a rush and buried my face in her shoulder, in her soft hair and hypnotic scent. I understood her loneliness better now, and I wanted—no, needed—to soothe her, to satisfy her even if it meant that she would drown me.
For three more nights, Karin Ardais came to me. By day, I avoided the Council meetings, fearing that my barriers would slip, that I would give us away with a careless thought. I sent a message that I was ill, which wasn’t far from the truth, for I began to look like a man half-dead.
At the end of our last night, with the Council’s business concluded and dawn approaching, Karin Ardais sat astride me, taking her pleasure. “I am leaving Dyarlis,” she declared as she rocked gently. “I will go home with you instead, Viktor Ridenow, and be your wife.”
In five nights, it was the longest sentence she had spoken, and her declaration shocked me. My hands slid from her breasts down to her hips, and I held her still. “I already have a wife,” I answered. A sudden clarity stabbed like a spear of ice through my brain. I lifted Karin Ardais off me and rolled her gently onto the bed. I got up, the stone floor cool against my feet.
“What you said,” I continued, struggling inwardly to remain calm, “what you want cannot be.” My own words tore at my heart. Only a moment before, Karin Ardais had seemed like my entire world, my reality. Yet I had another world, too, and responsibilities. I looked at her and shivered, and the force of her emotions shattered all my barriers. I felt her surprise, her hurt and fear. Then I felt her rage.
“My wife is pregnant,” I tried to explain. “I will be a father soon. That outweighs everything.”
“Of course it does,” she answered in a cold voice as she got up and dressed. I clenched my fists against the power of her sullen anger and squeezed my eyes shut. I heard the door, and when I opened my eyes again, Karin Ardais was gone.
I didn’t try to sleep. Instead, I left before any of the Council members had awakened. Speaking to no one, not even the servants, I found my aircar and left Thendara behind, my mind focused on what lay ahead, my emotions locked behind walls upon walls.
My wife was waiting to greet me when I landed. In a soft white dress, her long red hair stirring lightly in the wind, her belly rounded with our child, she looked more beautiful to me than I had ever seen her. Yet she was not Karin Ardais. Nevertheless, I forced a smile, embraced her, and kissed her cheek.
“I missed you, Valeria,” I lied. It was a mistake. Valeria’s empathic abilities were as strong as my own, and perhaps stronger, for she had been trained at an early age in their uses at Neskaya Tower. I noted the change that came over her face and felt her doubt. Yet she rose on tiptoe and kissed me back.
“What transpired at the Council meeting?” she inquired as she took my hand and led me toward our home. It wasn’t like Valeria to make small talk, and she seldom inquired into business matters.
“Inconsequential twaddle,” I answered as I shouldered my traveling bag and walked at her side. “Some territorial disputes among the families in the north, an appointment at Corandalis Tower, some proposals regarding water rights. The Hastur lords must dip their hands into everything, you know. It makes them feel important.”
I put my free arm around her shoulder and glanced sideways at her. I loved her, despite all that had transpired in the City of Sins, and perhaps she sensed that, for she became more at ease. I tickled her ear. “But I’ve had a week of that. Tell me, instead, how our child fares!”
Valeria put a hand upon her belly as we entered our home, and a warm smile lit up her face. “She kicks a little but seems content.”
“She?”
Valeria nodded as her smile broadened. “I can read that much, Viktor,” she answered. “You’ve planted a daughter in my womb. I hope you are not disappointed.”
Taking Valeria by the shoulders, I turned her and stared into the sparkling blue of her eyes. “Of course I’m not disappointed! We must think of a name!” I drew my wife close, pressed her head upon my shoulder and kissed the top of her head. Another thought occurred to me. “Will she have laran?” I asked. “Can you read that yet?”
Valeria slipped out of my arms and stretched like a cat. “It’s far too early to know,” she said. “Now, Viktor Ridenow, you have been gone a week and come home with no gift for me. How do you intend to make up for that?”
I grinned, sensing her meaning. She was as desirable in her own way as Karin Ardais, and with our child in her body, even more beautiful. “I’ve traveled all day,” I answered as I tilted her chin up. “Let me bathe, and then I’ll think of something.”
She squeezed my hand. “Luckily for you, I’ve thought of everything,” she answered with a soft laugh. “Your bath is warm and waiting. I’ll soap you myself.”
I liked the sound of her laugh and the promise conveyed in the touch of her hand on mine. It felt good to be home.
In the days that followed, Thendara dissolved in my mind like a dream. The events and details, so vivid at first, slipped away little by little until I barely remembered them at all. I busied myself with household matters, tended to my lands and to the affairs of the Ridenow Domain, and contented myself with these. Valeria, with one of our servants, made a nursery of the room next to our bed chamber. I listened to her in secret sometimes as she hummed and sang, and I watched her happy moments when she didn’t know I was looking.
Yet Valeria was an empath. She read my moods in my quiet moments when my guard slipped and knew that something was wrong, that I had changed somehow. Then she would come to me, sit on my lap and put her head on my shoulder and become very still. Those moments became precious to me. I would touch her belly, feel our child inside, and all would become right again.
“Christina.” I whispered the name into Valeria’s ear at such a moment on such an afternoon when I held her.
Valeria shivered, then chuckled as she nuzzled my ear. “Tell Christina to stop kicking me,” she whispered back, and we laughed together. I might have carried her to the bedroom and made love to her again. We both were ready for it. Yet, before I could act upon the impulse, our servant interrupted us.
“An aircar is landing,” she reported with unseemly excitement, forgetting her station. “I saw it from the nursery window as I was sewing curtains!”
Unannounced visits were considered rude among the Ridenow. Valeria gave me a questioning look as she got up, smoothed her dress, and prepared to assume the role of a Ridenow noblewoman. I shrugged, unable to answer her unspoken query.
Then the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. The servant, whose name was Therese, hurried to the door and opened it before I could stop her. Already halfway across the yard and accompanied by two guardsmen, came Karin Ardais.
I knew her at once, despite her black traveling garments and fine, swirling cloak and the dust mask that concealed the lower half of her face. My eyes met hers, and I despaired. All my mental barriers shattered in one unguarded instant.
Close at my side, Valeria gazed at Karin Ardais and then at me. Then she turned cold as ice.
“I’ll send her away,” I promised.
Valeria shook her head without bothering to conceal her bitterness and hurt. “Comyn courtesy requires us to receive her, but when she’s gone, choose another room for your sleeping quarters.” She beckoned to Therese and headed toward the kitchen. “I’ll make some tea.”
With a hand gesture, Karin Ardais ordered her guards to remain in the yard. I watched her from the door, bracing myself for a confrontation, trying to read her, but her passions danced around her like a scalding chaos of fire, beautiful and mesmerizing, but too hot to touch.
“What do you want?” I said, impolitely blunt, when she stood on the threshold of my home. Even then, as she so casually destroyed my life with her mere presence, I felt something for her. My heart began to race as she stood so close; my skin tingled from every remembered touch of her body, and all the dust of the Plains of Valeron could not conceal her perfume from my senses.
Karin Ardais lowered her mask. “I’ve left Dyarlis, as I said I would,” she whispered. “I’m on my way to the Sea of Dalereuth and the Bay of Dreams where I will live out my life, but my course took me over your lands.”
“You took a roundabout course, then,” I answered.
She inclined her head only slightly. “I wanted to see you one more time, Viktor Ridenow, and meet your lovely wife. If you will allow it, I have gifts for her and for your unborn child.” She threw back one side of her cloak to reveal a hand-woven baby blanket draped over her right arm. “I promise not to stay long, and hopefully we can part as friends, at least.”
Every instinct cried out to send her away, yet I stepped aside in silent invite, allowing her entrance. She looked around the hallway with casual interest, then spied the parlor and walked into it as if she knew the house well. I followed her, and in the center of the room, she turned and faced me. She was as beautiful as when I first saw her, but I wanted only to strangle her as she made a show of refolding the pale blue baby blanket. “I’ll put this here, if you like,” she said, setting it upon the seat of a chair.
“You should have brought a pink one.” Valeria came into the room bearing a tray with tea cups and a steaming pot. She looked clean and regal, having taken time to sweep up her hair and apply some minimum of paint.
“Really?” Karin Ardais and Valeria Ridenow regarded one another as enemies in a stand-off. Then Karin Ardais looked to me. “I would have borne you sons.”
The tea cups rattled on the tray. Therese, coming behind Valeria, quickly took it from Valeria’s hands. “Then you should have borne them for your own husband,” Valeria answered. She came to my side and locked my hand in hers with a possessive strength that surprised me.
“But I brought you gifts,” Karin Ardais said as she gestured to the blanket.
My senses began to swirl. Such powerful emotions filled the room that I felt like I was falling. Karin and Valeria were both wide open to me suddenly, and Therese as well, and all of it so intense and raw that I could block none of it.
“The blanket is only one gift,” Karin Ardais continued. “Here is the other.”
Valeria screamed. Therese dropped the tray. “Get away from me!” Valeria shouted. “Viktor, she’s insane! She’s a catalyst!” Valeria screamed a second time, but the sound was different, a note of pure terror. She clutched her stomach.
Then, another scream came, different from all the rest, a high-pitched, primal shriek that echoed Valeria’s terror. It reverberated, not through the room, but through every mind of every adult in the room and across the Ridenow countryside.
Christina!
“What have you done?” Reeling from the psychic assault of my unborn child, I crossed the room and locked my hands around Karin Ardais’s throat. I knew exactly what she had done. The Ardais were catalyst telepaths with the ability to awaken latent laran. She had just used that power on my daughter.
But the surprise was on Karin Ardais, for Christina was the child of not one but two of the most powerful Ridenow empaths on all of Darkover, and I felt her infantile rage. With the full extent of her laran abilities suddenly awakened in the womb, her sense of comfort and security within her mother’s body destroyed, she lashed out in a crippling display of nearly limitless telepathic potential.
Christina screamed again. Valeria crumpled to the floor, bleeding from her nose. Karin Ardais stared in shock, all the color draining from her face. Therese curled up in a catatonic ball. Through the window, I watched the two Ardais guardsmen do the same. I had never felt such power. I doubted that anyone on all of Darkover ever had.
Unable to stand, I sank to all fours and opened my mind to Christina. I had to calm my daughter down; it was the only way to save her and to save my wife. I love you! It’s all right! We’re here!
None of it seemed to soothe Christina. I crawled to Valeria, gathered her in my arms, and rocked her. Her eyes were rolled up in her head, but her lips moved slightly, making a tiny sound, a hum, and I remembered listening to her hum and sing as she worked.
I remembered all those songs and echoed them to Christina. Then some small, weary part of Valeria’s mind joined us as well, and we consoled our daughter together like mother and father, like a family.
The days that followed were not easy ones. Karin Ardais escaped but was found, a suicide, on the shores of the Sea of Dalereuth. She had tried to murder Valeria and Christina; no mother or child had ever survived an in-vitro awakening. Perhaps she thought that I would then be free.
The day after Christina’s awakening, a committee of Comyn arrived on our doorstep, demanding that Valeria be taken to Hali for study. Neither Valeria nor Christina wanted to go, and when Christina became agitated, the committee leader’s legs suddenly shattered. Telekinetics! They whispered in urgent tones before they all rushed back to their aircars. They have left us alone since, but we feel their psychic eyes upon us.
Christina will be born soon, and I dread what may occur on the painful journey from the womb into the new world. Of one thing I am fairly certain, though. All of Darkover will sense it. I don’t know what Christina is. Nobody knows her limits. Perhaps she is something entirely new to Darkover. Time will tell.
But this I know. I am her father, and I will protect her.
We Ridenow have never been respected. Among the Seven Domains and the Comyn, we are too often ridiculed and denigrated. They dismiss us as the descendants of bandits, barely civilized uplanders. Yet, like the other Great Families, we possess the laran, however strong or weak they think we are, so they do not ignore us.
No, they do not ignore us.
