“I did find out one thing,” Danilo said. “I could see and feel things. There’s a kind of … of energy. Look.” He bent over Regis, running his fingertips lightly above his body, not touching him. “I can feel it this way, without touching you, and certain places it’s strong, and others I feel it ought to be and isn’t…I don’t know how to explain it. Do you feel it?
Regis remembered the very little the leronis had told him when she tested him, unsuccessfully, for laran, “There are certain … energy centers in the body, which waken with the wakening of laran. Everybody has them, but in a telepath they’re stronger and more … perceptible. If that’s true, you should have them, too.” He reached out toward Danilo, running his hands over his face, feeling the definite, tangible flow of power. “Yes, it’s like an … an extra pulsebeat here, just above your brow.” He had once been shown a drawing of these currents, but at that time he had no reason to believe it applied to him. Now he struggled to remember, sensing it must be important. “There’s one at the base of the throat.”
“Yes, I can see it,” Danilo said, touching it lightly with a fingertip. The touch was not painful, but Regis felt it like a faint, definite electric shock. Yet once he was fully aware of the pulse, his perceptions cleared and the dizziness which had been with him for weeks now seemed to clear and shift somehow. He felt that he had discovered something very important, but he didn’t know what. Danilo went on, trying to trace out the flows of power with his fingertips. “I don’t really have to touch you to feel them. I seem to know—”
“Probably because you’ve got them yourself,” Regis said. “Matrix work needs training, but it must be possible to learn to control laran, or the techniques couldn’t have evolved. Unless you want to believe all those old stories about gods and demigods coming down to teach the Comyn how to use them, and I don’t.” It was very dark, but he could see Danilo clearly, as if his body were outlined with the pale, pulsing energy flows. Danilo said, “Then maybe we can find out how to keep you from going into that kind of … of crisis again.”
Regis said, “I seem to be in your hands, Dani. Quite literally. I don’t know if I could live through another attack like that one.” He knew that the physical shock Danilo had given him by touching his matrix had revived him, but that he was drained, dangerously weak. “You had threshold sickness? And got over it?”
“Yes. Though, as I say, I had no idea what it was. But finding out about these energy currents helped. I could make them flow smoothly, most of the time, and it seemed that I could use that energy. I’m not saying this very well, am I? I don’t know the right words.”
Regis smiled ruefully and said, “Maybe there aren’t any.” He lay watching the energy flows in Danilo’s body and had the strange sensation that, although they were both heavily clothed against the cold, they were both, somehow, naked, a different kind of naked. Maybe this is what Lew meant: living with your skin off. He could feel the energy flows in Danilo, too, pulsing, moving smoothly and steadily with the forces of life. Danilo went on, gently searching out the flows, not touching him; even so, the touch that was not a touch stirred physical awareness again. Regis had not heard Lew explain how the same currents carried telepathic force and sexual energy, but he sensed just enough to be self-conscious about it. He gently reached out and held Danilo’s hand away from him.
“No,” he said, not angry now, but honestly, facing it—they could not lie to each other now. “You don’t want to stir that up, do you, Dani?”
There was a frozen instant while Danilo almost stopped breathing. Then he said, in a smothered whisper, “I didn’t think you knew.”
“So when you called me names—you were nearer right than you knew yourself, Dani. I didn’t know it then, either. But I would rather not … approach you as Dyan did. So take care, Dani.”