Savage Empire

His eyes became even more stricken as he stared at her, and Lenardo Read that her words were being twisted by Linus' wounded mind into the same incoherent nonsense that he was uttering. The couple's son, who had stayed to help his mother, cried out, "No! The lightning addled his brain!"

"He can be helped!" Lenardo quickly assured them. "At the academy, Readers can reach his mind." The symptoms were similar to those of a stroke. Readers could touch the unspoken desires of such a victim and help lead him back to communication.

Lenardo sat on the edge of the bed, looking into Linus' face, not speaking lest he frighten the man further. Linus stared at him in confusion. Then he spoke-the words were nonsense, but beneath them Lenardo Read, //Magister Lenardo?//

Lenardo smiled and nodded, taking the man's left hand and squeezing it as additional assurance that he understood.

//Help me?// This time Linus made no effort to speak aloud.

Again Lenardo nodded, then reached out to close the man's eyes, urging him to rest. Relieved that there was someone who understood, Linus relaxed and drifted toward sleep.

"He recognizes people," Lenardo assured the man's wife and son. "I don't think his intelligence is impaired. Let him sleep through the night here, and in the morning we'll take him to the academy. One of the Readers will come back and spend the night, in case he needs anything."

"You can make him well?" Linus' wife asked.

"I've seen others with the same problem cured," Lenardo replied. No sense telling her now that a few never improved and that almost every victim retained some impairment.

"Thank you for saving his life," she said fervently.

"You can thank Galen," Lenardo began.

"I should have let him die!" the boy burst out. "You knew what would happen! Why didn't you make me stop?"

The boy had not yet been to Gaeta, where Readers studied in the great hospital. He had not seen the seeming miracles Readers could perform in curing afflictions of the mind, or the skill they had developed in curing the body when they could Read the cause of the illness.

"Galen, yon did the right thing," Lenardo said aloud, for Linus' family to hear. "Linus will recover." //Will you be quiet and stop frightening these people?// he added, but Galen was stubbornly closed to Reading. -

"It was too long!" the boy insisted. "You knew! We couldn't save him with our hands. Only an Adept could have revived him in time!"

That again. "Galen, stop it! Do you want these good people to think you're a fool? You're not thinking."

"I've thought it out before, and no one will listen! Healing is the one thing we can trade with the savages-a place to start. Why won't the emperor even try?"

"Shut up, boy," growled Linus' son. "You don't talk treason in my father's house!"

"Your father almost died! Now he'll suffer for-the rest of his life-but if there'd been a savage Adept with us-"

Lenardo grabbed Galen in anger and fear, shaking him soundly. "The savages kill. They don't cure; they Ml! Stop this before you get yourself exiled so they can kill you!"

But it was too late. Linus" son reported Galen's words to the commander of the local army. Lenardo often thought it was the horror of his father's condition that caused the younger man to take a kind of revenge on Galen. Had Linus either died or recovered with only minor problems, his son would probably have ignored Galen's outburst. But visiting his father day after day, finding him still unable to understand or communicate, he had to take out his frustration somehow.

Galen was no help to his own cause. He took his trial as a forum to propose that the empire sue for peace by offering the savages the services of Readers. Nothing Lenardo or Master Clement could say about the folly of youth did the least good. Galen was condemned to exile. His words upon being sentenced were a final defiance: "Then perhaps I shall have to bring about peace by myself!"

Lenardo had feared then that the sentence would be changed to death. But no, Readers had been exiled before, and none had ever succeeded in ingratiating themselves with the Adepts. The empire knew that, for a Reader, exile did mean death. He wondered if any non-Reader could understand. Even if a Reader did not give himself away, being cut off from the rapport with other Readers would make death seem preferable to such a life.

Galen was to be sent into exile the next morning. Lenardo spent the night in a fruitless attempt to teach the boy the technique of leaving his body, so he could avoid the pain of branding. It was a lesson Galen would have begun on his eighteenth birthday, less than a month away-but it was a rare Reader who learned it on his first attempt. Lenardo knew there was little hope that Galen could achieve it in his state of emotional turmoil, but he had to try.

What he learned was that Galen thought himself incapable of that final test-that he expected to fail and be removed from the academy. And that he thought it was not fair.