Damia. Part 25

Jeran gave himself a stern shake and, holding his breath, placed his fingers lightly over Isthia's at Afra's temples.

He let his mind be guided by hers in the gentlest of probes, ignoring the mental anguish they experienced at having to touch so torn a mind. Uppermost was the thought that both Larak and Afra had shared: Sodan striking at them and Damia, exhausted, trying to block his final shaft.

He'll kill her! He'll kill her! was the repeated cry of terror, a curious melding of both Larak and Afra, swirling in the pain of Afra's mind. No, Damia! Don't try! I waited too long. No, Damia!

You'll be killed. You mustn't. Why did I wait so long? Too long.

No, Damia. Don't try... and the sequence was repeated.

Damia lives! Damia lives! Isthia accepted the fact that Afra would not care to live if he thought Damia was dead. But she was alive and he must be convinced of this'.

She urged Jeran to reinforce her message. He provided a baritone level to her soprano chant. Damia lives. Damia lives, Afra. Damia lives!

Damia lives? Damia lives, Damia lives. The response was the merest whisper of hope from an overtaxed psyche.

Isthia caught Jeran's eyes, hope widening hers.

Yes, that's exactly what he needed to know. Let's reinforce it.

Together they repeated their encouraging litany. Afra, Damia lives.

She rests. She waits for you. Damia lives, Afra.

She waits for you.

Sleep, Afra, Isthia added then with the most delicate urgency.

Sleep and rest. Damia lives.

Damia lives? Damia lives? Damia lives!

With a shudder, Afra's subconscious finally accepted that rea.s.surance. His body relaxed from its foetal curl.

For one terrifying moment, he was absolutely still. Gasping, Isthia dipped way down into the suddenly tranquil mind before she realized that Afra had merely slipped into deep sleep.

'He's badly hurt, Isthia admitted sadly as they watched the medics wheel Afra away to a tightly shielded room where no mental noise could intrude. 'But he'll live.' Jeran did not try to read whatever reservations she might entertain.

They opened Damia's capsule together. She lay on her side, looking very young, but there were marks that showed the effects of that meeting of minds. She had bitten through her lower lip; a trickle of blood had made a scarlet line across her cheek. Her face was streaked with tears. Her fingernails had cut into her palms when she had clenched her fists. Her closed eyes looked bruised by deep and dark circles.

With great compa.s.sion, Isthia turned the girl on to her back and laid both hands lightly on Damia's temples.

I can't reach them. I can't get there in time. I hurt. I've got to try. I burn. Oh, will I lose them both? Isthia could hear the words, a faint loop of thought in the deepest recesses of a scorched and overstretched mind.

With a sigh of relief, Isthia straightened.

She's badly burned? Jeran asked anxiously, having waited outside Isthia's contact but aware it had been made.

Scorched, overstretched right now, and deeply hurt. Damia '5 been reduced, Isthia remarked ruefully, in the terrible way that only the very bright and very confident can be diminished.

Diminished? Jeran was both Prime and brother at that moment.

In pride and self-confidence, Isthia qualified with a sad smile.

Her Talent is far too robust to suffer any permanent effect. Her ego, however, will. She'll never forget that she underestimated Soda n's potential danger because she became infatuated with her perception of him.

For all of that, if she hadn't touched him first, where would we be with such a menace zeroing in from s.p.a.ce?

That's the Prime in you speaking, Isthia said, but her tone was complimentary. Although let's hope that eventually Damia can see this incident from that perspective. Right now she'll grieve terribly because her lapse in judgement caused Larak's death and has seriously injured Afra.

But, Isthia, once the attack on Sodan began, nothing could have saved Larak as focus-mind. Death is far kinder than being burned out.

She's not to blame for that.

Isthia shook her head sadly. She'll never see it that way.

But I devoutly hope that it never occurs to her that, in the final moment, instinct overrode reason and it was Afra she struggled to save.

Afra? What the h.e.l.l? Jeran stared at her blankly before he followed her thought to its conclusion. Sodan tried to kill Afra?

Wasn't he aiming at the entire focus?

Not from what I gathered from Jeff and Rowan.

Isthia signalled to the medics to administer deep-sleep drugs and intravenous nourishment to Damia.

With great reluctance then, they turned to Larak's sh.e.l.l.

Because they had to, they opened it and saw with some little relief that there was no mark of the violence of his death on the young face. A curiously surprised smile lingered on his lips.

Isthia turned away in tears and Jeran, too numbed by the total tragedy to display his own sorrow, put his arm around her to lead her away.

'Prime,' the captain of the ship said respectfully when they entered the control room, 'we have located the debris of the alien ship. Permission to recover the fragments?' 'Permission granted.

Isthia and I will return to the Tower. Signal when you're ready to be 'ported, Captain.' 'Very good, sir,' the captain said and stiffened to a rigid attention. The unashamed tears in his eyes and his very crisp salute expressed wordlessly his pride, his sympathy and his sorrow.

Struggling against a will determined to keep her asleep, Damia fought her way to semi-consciousness.

'I can't keep her under. She's resisting,' a remote voice rang in peals.

As distant as the sound was, like a far echo in a subterranean cavern, each syllable fell like a hammer on her exposed nerves.

Sobbing, Damia struggled for consciousness, sanity, and a release from this agony. She couldn't seem to trigger the reflexes that would divert pain, and an effort to call Afra to help her met with not only the resistance of increased agony but a vast blackness. Her mind was as stiff as iron, holding each thought firmly to it as though magnetized in place.

'Damia, do not reach. Do not use your mind,' a gentle voice said in her ear. She recognized the voice as Isthia's and her grandmother's presence restored her wavering sanity. She felt the touch of Isthia's cool capable hands on her forehead.

Damia opened her eyes and tried to focus on the face above her.

With trembling, weak hands she pressed Isthia's fingers against her temples in an unconscious plea for relief of pain.

'What happened? Why can't I control my mind?' Damia cried, tears of weakness streaming down her face.

'You rather stretched yourself, destroying Sodan,' Isthia said.

'But you did get him, you know.' 'I can't remember,' Damia groaned, blinking away tears so she could at least see clearly.

'Every rating in FT&T does.' 'Oh, my head. It's all blank and there's something I've got to do, Isthia.' Damia tried to rise but, though Isthia exerted little pressure, she sank weakly back into the bed. 'I've got something I must do only I can't remember what it is.' 'You did do what you must, dear, I a.s.sure you. But you've suffered a tremendous trauma, and you must rest,' Isthia said, her voice in the croon that had soothed Damia as a rebellious child. Cool hands stroked her face and she welcomed the relief for her skin felt so hot and hard.

Each caress seemed to lessen the terrible pain inside her skull.

'I'm putting you back to sleep now, love,' and Damia felt the coolness of an injection pop into her arm. 'We're very proud of you but you must sleep. Only sleep can heal your mind.' "Great nature's second course, that knits the ravelled sleeve of care." What's knitting, Isthia? I've never known.' Even Damia recognized that she was babbling as the cool scalliony taste in her throat heralded the spread of the drug.

Again, after what seemed no pa.s.sage of time at all, Damia was inexorably forced to consciousness by her indefinably relentless need.

'I can't understand it,' came Isthia's voice. This time it did not reverberate across Damia's pained mind like tympani in a closet.

'That last dose was enough to put a city to sleep.' 'She's worrying at something and probably won't rest until she's resolved it.

Let's wake her up and find out.' The second voice was masculine and sounded vaguely familiar, also vaguely annoyed. With a grateful smile, she labelled it 'Dad'. She felt her face gently slapped and, opening her eyes, saw her father's face swimming out of an indistinct background.

'Dad,' she pleaded, not because he had slapped her but because she had to make him understand.

'Dear Damia,' he said with such loving pride that she almost lost the tenuous thought she tried to hold.

Her body strained with the effort to reach out only a few inches a mind that once had blithely coursed light-years, but she soon managed to communicate her crime.

Larak and Afra! They were ahead of me in the focus. I killed them when I had to destroy Sodan. I must have killed them because I'm still alive!

Behind Jeff she heard her mother's cry and Isthia's exclamation.

'No, no,' Jeff said gently, shaking his head. He placed her hands on his forehead to let her feel the honesty of his denial. 'You're not at fault, dear Damia. Yes, you drew power through the Larak-focus to destroy Sodan and succeeded. Only you were capable of such a magnificent thrust! Furthermore, without you to throw us into high gear, Sodan could have destroyed every Prime in FT&T.

And that's the truth your mother will verify.' Damia heard the Rowan murmur affirmatively.

'But I can't hear anything right now,' and in spite of herself, Damia felt her chin quiver and tears of pure terror welled out of her eyes. 'Have I lost my mind?' to 'Of course you haven't,' and the elbowed Jeff her hair back from her flushed and tear-stained face.

'You saved us, you know. You really did.' Isthia moved the Rowan gently but firmly to one side.

'You must go knit some more sleeves of ravelled care, Damia,' Isthia said with therapeutic asperity. 'You knit like this,' and she inserted a visual demonstration of the technique of knitting into Damia's mind. It was an adroit gambit, designed to fragment concentration but Damia saw it for the evasion it was.

'I must be told all that happened, she demanded imperiously. A wisp of memory nagged at her and she caught it. 'I remember. Sodan made one last thrust at us. She closed her eyes against that recall, remembering too, that she had tried to intercept it and, 'Larak died,' she said in a flat voice. 'And Afra. I couldn't shield in time.' 'Afra lives,' the Rowan said in a steady voice.

'But Larak doesn't. Why Larak?' Damia demanded, desperately striving to uncover what she felt they were still hiding from her.

'Your brother was the focus, Damia,' the Rowan said softly, knowing, too, that Damia would never absolve herself of Larak's death.

'Afra was supposed to be the focus, being the experienced mind, but the old bond between you and Larak snapped into effect. You tried to shield Larak but he couldn't draw sufficient help from you. Your father and I also tried to support him but he was the focus. Without you to help, we couldn't even have cushioned Afra in time. Sodan's was truly a powerful mentality.' Damia looked from her mother's face to her father's and knew that they spoke the truth. But a reservation hovered in their eyes and their manner.

'You haven't told me everything,' she said, fighting both immense fatigue and the drugs.

'All right, sceptic,' Jeff said, lifting her into his arms.

'Though there's nothing wrong with your hearing so why it hasn't been a.s.sailed by his snores, I do not know.

Everyone else is using ear plugs,' he added as he carried her down a dim hall.

Pausing at an open door, he swung her so she could see into the room. A night light hung over the bed, illuminating Afra's quiet face, deeply lined with fatigue and pain.

Denying even the physical evidence, Damia reached out, touching just enough for rea.s.surance the distressed mental rumble that meant Afra inhabited his body.

'Damia! Don't do that!' Jeff roared, hurting more than her ears as he bore her back down the hall to her room.

'I won't again but I had to,' she sobbed, her head ballooning with agony.

'And we'll make sure you don't until your mind is completely healed. Out you go, missy,' and she was powerless against the three minds that reinstated the welcome oblivion of sleep.

An insistent whisper nibbled at the corners of her awareness and roused Damia from restorative sleep. Cringing in antic.i.p.ation of the return of pain, she was mildly surprised to feel only the faintest discomfort. Experimentally, Damia pushed a depressant on the ache and that, too, disappeared.

Unutterably pleased by her success, she sat up in bed.

It was night and the gentle breeze wafted scents which she recognized as Denebian. She stretched until a cramp caught her in the side.

Heavens, hasn't anyone moved me in months? she asked herself, noting that her mental tone was firm. She lay back in bed, deliberating. Poor Damia, she said in a self-derisive tone, ever since that encounter with that dreadful alien mind, she's been nothing but a T4. T-9? T-3? Damia tried out the different ratings for size and then discarded them all, along with her melodrama. You idiot. You'll never know till you try.

Tentatively, without apparent effort, she reached out and counted the pulses of another - no, two other sleepers. Afra's was the faint one. But, Damia realized in calm triumph, it was there. Which brought her up sharp against the second fact.

She slid from her bed to stand by the window. Sometime during her last deep slumber, she - and Afra - had been moved to Deneb, to her grandmother's forest retreat. This room looked out on to the back of the clearing in which the house stood. Beyond the lawn of ever gra.s.s, beyond the bank of the ttn, - where the forest began her the trail led And stopped when she saw the white oblong. Instinct told her that Larak was buried there and the thought of Larak buried and his touch forever gone broke her. She wept, biting her knuckles and pressing her arms tightly into her ribs to m.u.f.fle the sound of her mourning.

Out of the night, out of the stillness, the whisper that had roused her tugged at her again. She stifled her tears to listen, trying to identify that sliver of sound. It faded before she caught it.

Resolutely now, she laid her sorrow gently in the deepest part of her soul, a part of her but apart for ever. No matter what Jeff and the Rowan said, she had caused Larak's death, and maimed Afra. Had she been less preoccupied, less self-centred, she would not have been dazzled by the fancy that Sodan was her Prince Charming, her knight in cylindrical armour.

Such a spoiled child she'd been: egotistical, arrogant, proud, making demands she had no right to request, wanting privileges she had not earned, rewards she was too immature to appreciate The whisper again, fainter but somehow surer. With a startled cry of joy, Damia whirled from her room, running on light feet down the hall. Catching at the door frame to break her headlong flight, she hesitated on the threshold.

She caught her breath as she realized that Afra was sitting up.

He was looking at her with a smile of disbelief on his face.

'You've been calling me,' she whispered, half questioning, half-stating.

'In a lame-brained way,' he replied with a wry half-smile.

'I can't seem to reach beyond the edge of the bed.' 'Don't try.

It hurts,' she said quickly, stepping into the room to pause shyly at the foot of the bed.

Afra grimaced, rubbing his temples. 'I know it hurts but I can't seem to find any balance in my skull,' he confessed, his voice uneven, worried. 'Even as a child, I always had that.' 'May I?' she asked formally, unexpectedly timid with him.

Closing his eyes, Afra nodded.