Dyannis Ridenow loosened the scarf that covered her copper-colored hair and gazed out over the Lake of Hali. A spring breeze, chill and laden with moisture, rippled through her cloak. She inhaled, welcoming the reflexive shiver.

Aldones, it was good to be outside again. The winter had seemed interminable, each tenday of confinement more tedious and unbearable than the last. She stretched out her arms. The old women of both sexes who made it their business to mind everyone else's would work themselves halfway to apoplexy if they knew she was here, unchaperoned and dressed in the scullery maid's borrowed cloak and overskirt.

Let them cluck over her; it wouldn't be the first time or the last. She might just spend the rest of the day abroad and give them even more to talk about.

One sacrifice Dyannis had not been willing to make for the sake of disguise was her own boots, fine leather worn to butter softness and fitted exactly to her small feet, which now rested at the very edge of the golden sand. Just beyond, the cloud-water of the lake curled and receded. Instead of the usual gentle waves, the surface looked choppy, torn.

Above, the sky hid behind a blanketing overcast. For an instant, her fancy seized upon the image and she saw not only herself, but all of Darkover, caught and pressed like dried flowers.

Pressed. Yes, the analogy was apt. Her nerves tingled with the electrical tension that had been growing daily. She could almost see the unborn lightning, taste its metallic trail.

The storms had been growing worse since winter's end, both in frequency and intensity. The fire brigades in Hali and nearby Thendara had been run to the point of exhaustion, for the storms never brought rain. Nor did the lightning discharge the electrical tension. Instead, each one seemed to feed upon the one before.

Something had to be done. Even with maximum shielding, the circles at the affected Towers struggled for the concentration that usually came so readily. Sometimes, half the workers were incapacitated due to overload of their energon channels.

So far, the city of Hali was peaceful, but reports arrived daily of increasing unrest in Thendara. What began as a mere spark of temper or drunken quarrel would erupt into a riot filling the streets. Sometimes the City Guards could not restore order and had to let the outburst run its course. Dyannis, who had not worked as a monitor in some time, was called into service along with the other senior leronyn, to tend to the wounded.

Many times over the years, since Dyannis had first arrived at Hali Tower as a bewildered adolescent novice, she had sought the lake for the calm that the fresh air and rhythmic motion of the waves always evoked. Now she found the irritation was, if anything, worse here in the open than within the confines of the Tower. It seemed to permeate both air and land, sizzling over her skin. She wanted to lash out at something, to put her pent-up frustration into action. Even as her hands curled into fists, she knew how irrational that was. As a trained leronis, she recognized her own increasingly volatile temper as a response to the atmospheric disturbance, but as a human woman, she was still subject to its nerve-grating effects.

Impatiently, she kicked out with one foot, scattering grains of sand into the cloud-waves. The toe of her boot caught on a buried rock and she stumbled.

She cursed, brushed damp sand off the leather, then bent to rinse her hands.

The instant her bare skin touched the mist, a jolt of psychic energy surged through her. Gasping, she tripped on the skirts that were two sizes too big for her and sat heavily on the sand. She drew breath, trying to calm herself, staring at the lake that had once been so familiar and soothing.

What in Zandru's Seven Frozen Hells was that?

She felt as if she'd brushed an enormous bank of laran batteries, of the sort used to power an aircar or light an entire city, only unstable, so that the merest contact released a burst of discharge.

Impossible! She had touched the cloud-water many times, had even descended a short distance down the lakebed, but never experienced anything like this. Nor had she heard any report of anything untoward or unusual at the lake; but then, it had been a long cold winter, and few had ventured outdoors without need.

The lake was filled with a mist that was neither liquid nor gaseous. It curled and drifted, always in motion, and could be breathed like air, although to do so carried its own dangers. At the same time, the cloud-water conducted sound and light very much like ordinary water.

Dyannis, her heart still racing, forced herself to think, to reason things through. Water also conducted electricity, and so did the lake substance.

From what source? Why would the curling mists feel like an overcharged laran battery?

She tilted her head to stare at the sweep of sullen, gray overcast sky. Her nerves tingled. Although she could not have put it into words, she sensed a connection between the electrical tension of the sky and what she had felt in that brief moment of contact with the lake waters. She did not believe the unusual storms were the source, but rather the effect.

If the lake were generating psychic energy that bled off into the air and manifested as electrical storms, why had no one noticed before now?

Dyannis frowned, considering the problem. The lake bottom was largely unexplored, true, and for good reason. The cloud-water sustained life, but something in it suppressed the breathing reflex after a time, so that it was not safe to remain submerged for more than the briefest excursion.

Perhaps, too, this phenomenon was new, beginning during a particularly harsh winter and growing slowly in strength. She could very well be the first person to walk the lake shore for pleasure since last autumn.

Moments slipped by. The cloud-waves plashed gently. The diffuse overcast light continued unbroken. Somewhere behind Dyannis, a bird called out a three-note song and then fell still.

Dyannis pushed herself to her feet. A step or two carried her halfway to the water's edge. She drew out a locket of filigreed copper on its chain around her neck. Within its silk-insulated interior lay a brilliant blue-white starstone. Without slipping it from its anchoring clasp, she pressed her fingertips to the stone and felt the answering surge of power.

Dyannis placed one palm on sand left damp by a receding wave. Again she sensed the strange psychic energy. Every nerve screamed to jerk away, but she shifted her weight, thrusting her fingers through the coarse grains of sand. Shivering, she forced herself to hold still as the wave returned.

Warmer than water, the cloud-stuff swept over her hand.

Her vision went white, as if she had plunged through ice into a winter river.

Then the discipline of her years of Tower training took over. Even as part of her conscious mind reeled with the overload, she diverted it, restoring the integrity of her own laran systems.

Her first impression, she realized, had been correct. The cloud-water acted as a conducting medium. Just as ordinary water evaporated from the surface of a lake or river, so this energy bled off as electrical potentials, manifesting as worsening storms.

Dyannis found it less difficult to hold still for the next wave. The power came in ripples like the waves themselves, each one building, cresting, and then subsiding. The pulses functioned to collect and direct the energy. With a shudder, she realized that this could not be a natural phenomenon.

Dyannis returned her focus to the rhythmic pattern. By using what her first Keeper had called, "the back door of her mind," she sensed the telltale residue of a matrix lattice. It was faint enough so that, no matter how hard she tried, she could not get more than a general impression.

One inescapable fact emerged. Within the depths of the lake lay a source of immense artificial psychic power that radiated through the cloud-water.

How long it had been there, she could not guess. Quiescent, it might have been created at the very beginning of the world, only to awaken in these perilous times.

Despite her training, Dyannis shuddered away from contact with it. The muscles of her belly clenched and bile rose in her throat, pulling her back into her physical body. By now, the drain on her body and mind that accompanied intense laran work began to shred her concentration. She had no monitor to safeguard her.

I hadn't planned on doing a little unauthorized laran work out here!

With an effort, she raised her laran barriers and crawled backward beyond the reach of the water. She'd only touched the surface of what was going on in the lake, but she was not going to solve its mysteries all by herself. She dared not delay. Gathering her strength, she clambered to her feet.

As Dyannis rushed back to Hali Tower, she sent a mental signal ahead to alert her fellow leronyn. At this hour, after a night of intense work, many were asleep or resting, their laran barriers raised. With the sensitivity necessary to join with other trained telepaths in a circle came an exquisite vulnerability to the intrusion of random thoughts and passions. Experience had shown this could be not only distracting, but destructive when dealing with immensely powerful matrix systems. Many leronyn learned to shield themselves with special techniques. For this reason, too, the Tower had been built at the far end of the lake, well away from the city of Hali.

She found one mind awake and receptive to her call, that of a brilliant young laranzu from Carcosa. He was younger than she by a few years, in his mid twenties, and of all the matrix workers at Hali, they shared a special kinship of spirit.

Rorie!

Dyannis, he replied in greeting.What has happened?

Behind Rorie's thoughts, she heard the fear that her impetuous adventures might have brought her to harm at last.

I am well enough, she quickly reassured him. I have discovered something-at the lake-and I fear it bodes ill for more than just the Tower. I must tell the Keeper!

With a wordless acknowledgment, Rorie withdrew to prepare for her arrival.

Raimon Lindir, the Keeper of Hali Tower, was waiting for her beside the outer gates, along with Rorie and Lewis-Mikhail. His appearance, tall and thin, unselfconsciously graceful, suggested the chieri blood that was said to run in his family. Sometimes his eyes had an almost silvery cast. The deep crimson of his formal Keeper's robe and his fiery red hair contrasted with the paleness of his skin, but there was nothing anemic about his personality or powers. He might be one of the youngest Keepers to hold sole power over a major Tower, but his proficiency was beyond question.

He reached out his hands and Dyannis placed hers on them, his palms cool under her fingertips. The physical touch catalyzed the mental contact. She needed no words of description, no explanation, no interpretation of what had happened. She poured forth the memory of her experience at the lake, knowing that he sensed every detail as vividly as if he had been there himself.

The sharing took only an instant. Raimon shivered as he broke the physical link.

"What you have seen is indeed of grave importance," he said aloud. "We must find out what is going on down there. I will reschedule tonight's work."

Dyannis nodded. The short distance from Tower to lake meant nothing to a full working circle under the guidance of a Keeper, particularly one as strong as Raimon. Together they had mined precious metals from deep within the earth and shifted cloud patterns in the skies above. Moreover, every one of them was familiar with the lake under normal conditions.

Surely, their combined mental talents would unravel this puzzle.

That night, Raimon summoned the circle of Hali Tower. Halfway up the stairs leading from the common room, Dyannis swore gently under her breath. The hem of her robe had pulled loose again and she'd almost tripped and broken her fool head.

She bent to inspect the offending stitches. After all this time, you'd think I could sew a decent seam, she thought ruefully. She knew it was her own doing, that she would not take the trouble to learn properly. There was always something to do that was more interesting or important than sewing.

Some of the older women in the Tower had maidservants to do such tasks, but Dyannis found their constant fussing an even greater burden. As she had so many times before, she simply tucked an extra fold under her belt and went on.

Dyannis had already forgotten the torn hem as she swept past the corridor that led to the Keepers' wing. Only one of the three suites was currently occupied, and since the death of Dougal DiAsturian, no one had the heart to even broach the subject of turning his rooms to other uses.

A narrow stair took her up two flights to the smallest and most heavily shielded workroom in the Tower. Through the open door, she heard the murmur of voices. She paused for a moment to collect herself. On her heels came little Ellimara, wearing a thick shawl over her long white monitor's robe. At thirteen, she was the youngest full member of Hali Tower, but she was of pure Aillard blood and strongly Gifted.

Raimon looked up as they entered. "Ah, there you are."

Dyannis shot Ellimara a quick smile. Thanks to you, sweetling, I am not the last to arrive. Her disregard for punctuality had long been the source of jokes.

Ellimara blushed prettily and went to take her place on the benches along the far wall. As monitor, she would remain apart from the circle itself.

Immersed in the mental unity, the workers lost track of their own physiological functions. It was her responsibility to keep them healthy and their channels clear, free to pour all their concentration and power into the joining of minds. No tense muscle or stuttering heartbeat, no fall in oxygen or fluctuation in hormonal levels must interrupt that unity, lest the backlash endanger them all.

Dyannis slipped into her place around the oval table. In the center sat the matrix lattice, an array of linked star-stones, which would focus and amplify their natural laran. It glittered as if lit from within, a crystalline fairywork of tiny starstones, linked and attuned to their purpose.

The circle was at full strength tonight, six workers plus Raimon as Keeper. Two more made up Hali's community, but a circle of nine was beyond his present skill, and they had not enough for two circles, even if they had a second Keeper. They often worked with only five, when others were needed for the relays or were barred from active work due to illness, exhaustion, or in the case of the women, the onset of their monthly cycles.

Hali is not the only Tower to be reduced to a single working circle, Dyannis reflected. Her glance met that of Alderic, who had lately come to Hali. He had ridden with King Carolin in his struggle to regain the throne, and in his thoughts, she sometimes heard the echoes of the dying minds of those leronyn who had fought on both sides.

Too many lost, and too many demands on those of us who are left. Hali had once housed a dozen or more young novices, as well as those Comyn youth in need of training beyond what their household leronis could provide. Now that Ellimara had finished her training, the novices' wing lay empty.

All things come and go in their season, her brother Varzil had said. Nothing lasts forever, neither the good times nor the bad.

Dyannis shuddered and as quickly, swept away any hint of gloom. Such vaporish maunderings were dangerous to bring to a working circle.

After a brief introduction, Dyannis repeated for the circle what had happened to her at the lake, both in words and telepathically. They were already in light rapport from their intense work together. As she spoke, she felt the individual members shift toward a working unity.

"Now, let us take a closer look at this thing," Raimon said. He gave the signal to begin.

Dyannis set her starstone before her, closed her eyes, and lowered her mental barriers. Already she felt Rorie's strength as a steady warmth, like the sun of high summer on the rocks by the river at Sweetwater, where she had lived as a girl. Raimon's mind brushed hers and she settled even deeper.

Drifting layers of color swept by her, blues fading into shades of green and then gold. It always felt this way when Raimon was weaving the individual members of the circle into a single whole. Once, she'd asked Lewis-Mikhail about the colors, only to be met with puzzlement.

"For me, it's like singing in a Nevarsin choir," he'd said, "many voices, some high, some low, all blending together until I can't hear them separately."

A hint of wildflowers shifted her awareness and she felt her shoulder muscles soften and her belly relax as she drew in a deeper breath. Ellimara was settling them all for a long session. Dyannis floated on the sensation of relief and contentment. She was no longer one solitary person facing the daunting mystery of the lake, but joined into a greater whole, with strength and wisdom beyond her own. At that moment, no challenge seemed beyond their combined abilities.

Raimon began his work, taking an imprint of the pattern in her mind and channeling it to the circle. Memories rose to the surface, the things she had felt and thought that day on the lake shore. This time they seemed distant, as if glimpsed through frosted glass. She felt him sifting, setting aside her own physiological reactions, her emotions, then refining and drawing out her direct perceptions.

A ripple passed around the circle and Dyannis knew that every one of them had shared those sensations, just as if they had all been there with her, put their own hands into the cloud-water, felt the jolt of electrical power.

A faint humming, little more than a vibration, swept through her. It was familiar, if artificial-the matrix lattice resonating to the pattern that Raimon fed through it. At this point, her entire work would be to concen- trate on the lattice, to feed her own laran energy into it.

Of them all, only the Keeper in centripolar position directed, controlled those energies.

When she first came to Hali, old Dougal DiAsturian had been Keeper, and most of what he did was a mystery to her. More than once, she'd been chastised for resisting his command. Raimon's touch was far more subtle, and his mind had a transparent, almost pellucid quality. She retained some degree of separate awareness as he established an anchor point here in the physical Tower and began to create a resonant bridge to the lake below.

There were many functions a Keeper performed that Dyannis understood and could well imagine herself doing, but not this. For such a spatial leap of consciousness to work accurately and safely, the Keeper must be supremely confident of his destination. He must hold the image in his mind as clearly as if he were looking at his own hand. Raimon never hesitated.

The next instant, she felt a gust of chill air, just as she had on that morning, although now it was night and her physical body was safely immured behind the Tower walls. Through the circle's power, she heard the soft splash of the waves and smelled the mingled odors of wet sand and river-weed.

Now, she floated above the lake, rocked by the movement of the waves. In a moment, she would feel their peculiar misty wetness. In one corner of her mind, she braced herself for the surge of eerie power- But it never came. She remained suspended, untouched, just beyond the reach of the topmost crests. Following the stream of laran energy from her own mind through Raimon's and then the lattice, she touched a dense barrier at the surface of the water. Trying to move through it was like forcing her way through a thicket of interwoven reeds, resilient and yet impassable. Even the joined minds of the circle could not penetrate the energy layer. Clearly, whoever had created the artificial power source did not want anyone investigating it.

All the more reason to do so, she thought.

The direct way was blocked to them. Determination and curiosity flared up in Dyannis, despite Ellimara's soothing contact. She felt Raimon move to withdraw.

Just give up and go away? Not if I have anything to say about it!

Dyannis! Regain your focus! Do not break the unity!

With an effort, Dyannis stilled her thoughts arid submerged her consciousness once more in the circle. Her emotions were not so easy to control, but she managed with an effort. She had years of experience in struggling with her unruly temper.

The resonance of the circle continued, unbroken. Her lapse had done no serious damage. For a long moment, the interwoven consciousness of the circle hovered above the lake surface. Then, with silken smoothness, Raimon lifted them into the Overworld.

Dyannis found herself standing on a plain of unbroken gray beneath an equally featureless sky. Around her rose the ghostly manifestation of Hali Tower, as insubstantial as if it had been made of water. Glancing down, she saw herself as she had appeared here many times before, in a body very like her own, clad in a soft gray robe that barely reached her ankles. Her hands hovered near those of her neighbors in the circle. Some of them looked younger or older-Ellimara appeared as a woman in her forties, and her robes were not the white of a monitor but rosy, as if the Keeper's crimson had seeped into them.

Raimon appeared as he always did, almost androgynous, glimmering like an ageless, nonhuman chieri. His eyes met hers, and his mouth curved in a smile.

With a movement of his mind, he called the lake to them. Here in the Overworld, distance and time lost their meaning, becoming mere products of the mind. Even the Tower around them had been shaped by the thoughts of the Hali workers over the centuries, simply because they were accustomed to working within walls and felt more comfortable with a familiar landmark.

The lake, too, retained much of its physical appearance, a depression filled with roiling mists. As Dyannis looked, it seemed not only greatly reduced in diameter, but much deeper. She could not see the bottom, even as Raimon turned the cloud-waters transparent, layer after layer. The strange creatures that lived in the lake waters, half fish and half bird, flashed by as brightly colored shapes and as quickly disappeared.

To casual inspection, the Overworld lake appeared as it always had. Under any other circumstances, Dyannis would have accepted it as normal and turned away. Now that very smoothness deepened her curiosity. Raimon brought the circle's focus closer.

A layer of psychic energy lay over the lake. It had been shaped to reflect the expectations of anyone approaching from the Overworld. A worker would see only what he thought should be there. It looked so normal that only someone with reason to be suspicious would be able to tell the difference.

Dyannis realized the mirrorlike pattern would also repulse any incoming energy. She'd studied devices like this before and had even constructed them. The barrier would use an attacker's own energy, so that the harder he pushed, the harder he was thrown back. Only a trained Tower circle could have created it.

Who? Who would do such a thing? And why?

Raimon, too, was no stranger to such a strategy. He shaped the circle's energy into a spear point, long and slender. Then, instead of aiming in a perpendicular manner at the barrier, he sent them skimming across it, dipping down at the narrowest angle. The tip of the point slipped beneath the outer edge. There was almost no resistance. He increased their angle of descent. A few minutes later, the barrier suddenly gave way. They had broken through.

The lake lay beneath them. Gathering the circle's forces, Raimon shifted the thought-stuff of the Overworld. Grays darkened, contrast intensified. The mists grew thicker, lapping the shores of the lake. At the same time, shapes appeared at the bottom. They were blurred and indistinct, yet present.

Dyannis felt a surge of elation. There was something there!

Wordlessly, Rairnon drew upon them for more power. She gave it freely and felt the others do the same. They moved through the ethereal waters, deep and deeper.

Below, Dyannis glimpsed a vast jagged shape. Instinct recoiled, urging her to flee. She held fast. Though it took every particle of discipline she possessed, she forced herself to examine it.

It had no physical form, neither darkness nor light. With her laran senses, Dyannis felt it as a rending, a disruption in the continuity of time.