A Flame in Hali Read Free Page B

threadbare patches. He found his boots shoved into a corner. As he pulled them on, he reflected that for all appearances, the room was his, and yet he had no memory of ever being here before. Certainly, if he had come upon the few reis for rent, he would long since have spent them at the ale shops.
    Again, he remarked on the clearness of his head and the unwonted silence in his mind. He felt no craving for drink, although there was every reason why he should. His memory presented him with numberless mornings in which his first and only thought was how he was going to get drunk again. In his time in Thendara and before that on the road, he had known many men who lived as he had, stumbling from one stupor to the next. They swore the only cure for the nausea, the headaches, and the nightmarish visions was more of the same.
    Eduin had never drunk to escape the aftermath of drinking. This was what he had sought, this blessed stillness. Was it some property of this room, although it seemed ordinary and shabby? He saw no trace of a telepathic damper. From experience, he knew how useless a damper was against his inner tormentor. Properly attuned, it would keep psychic energy from entering or emanating from the room. It could not protect him from what already lay within his own mind. He had used one when he lived in a Tower, first at Arilinn, where he was trained, and later at Hali for a brief time, and then Hestral until its destruction.
    Hali. Only a short half-day’s ride from Thendara, it might have been on another world. At the far end of the city, at the foot of the mysterious cloud-filled lake, a Tower lifted toward the heavens, a finger of graceful alabaster. In it, as in every other Tower, psychically-Gifted men and women joined their minds to work unimaginable feats, everything from the creation of weapons to the healing of hurts. Relays sent messages across the reaches of plain and mountain; laran- charged batteries powered aircars, lighted palaces, and guarded the secrets of kings.
    Hali. She had once been there. Might still be, for all he knew.
    Pain washed through him, but not from any physical cause.
    Eduin sank down on the pallet and buried his face in his hands. His breath came ragged as he struggled for the control he had learned in his years as a laranzu, a master of the psychic force called laran. Images flashed behind his closed eyes, bits of memory he had washed away with the bottle. The pale translucent stone walls that created the sense of light and endless space . . . the ever-restless mists of Lake Hali . . . Dyannis warm and supple in his arms.
    Sweet and bitter, feelings he had thought long dead stirred in him—longing and loss and things he could not put a name to. He lay back upon the pallet. Soundless weeping racked him. Some long time later, it seemed that someone held him, rocked him, stroked his matted hair.
    For this pain, too, there will be a healing.
    Again, he slept.

    He wandered through a dreamy landscape of gently rolling hills and a knoll overlooking a river. Although he could not remember ever having been here before, something about the place tugged at his heart. The air was almost luminous, the warmth hypnotic. Time itself seemed to be holding its breath. Tree branches stirred and dappled brilliance danced across his face. Around him drifted transparent shapes, like figures of the Overworld. They drifted in and out of his sight. He felt no sense of threat.
    He thought he heard singing in sweet bell-like tones, so faint it might have been only the breeze through the leaves. Shapes took on substance. Out of the corners of his eyes, he glimpsed slender bodies and cascades of silvery hair. Eyes and skin glowed with colorless radiance, as if sculpted from moonlight.
    No humans moved with such grace, for these people were chieri, of the race that was already ancient in the times lost to memory, when humans first came to Darkover. It was said that in the madness of the Ghost Wind, they left their