Telepathy

Telepathy is a mind-reading ability associated with Sagan, whose use of it is shaped as much by religious scruple as by practical advantage. It can help him uncover what others conceal, yet he regards that access as disturbing and potentially corrosive to trust. Its clearest test comes when it awakens as he is with Valera: the power reveals her magic and, inseparably, the person and intentions behind it. The scene makes telepathy both an instrument of judgment and a challenge to the suspicion that judgment can impose.

Definition and Limits

Sagan calls telepathy his third power and describes himself as a telepath. In practical terms, it allows him to read another person’s mind. Its limits are apparent from the first encounter with Valera: he is too disoriented to use it, even though he expects that condition to pass. Until then, he must decide whether to believe her by less direct means. She tells him that he is in her home and that she is trying to help, but the power cannot immediately certify those claims for him.

This delay gives the ability a specific rather than omnipotent place in the story. Sagan remains dependent on his other strengths and senses, and on judgment formed without direct access to another mind. Even while bound and held close by Valera, he assesses her as someone who means him no immediate harm, despite his deep mistrust of her species. Telepathy could later supply further knowledge, but it is not available at the moment when uncertainty first matters.

Sagan’s Reluctance to Read Minds

Sagan says that he rarely uses telepathy. The reason is ethical as well as personal: reading minds disturbs him and tempts him to distrust what people tell him instead of exercising faith in their honesty. As a priest, he understands trust as part of his responsibility to guide his people. Telepathy threatens that responsibility by making suspicion easy to indulge: a hidden thought can seem to promise firmer knowledge than another person’s word.

The same power, however, has an established professional use. As a penance priest who pursues people who have sinned deeply, Sagan finds telepathy invaluable when they try to hide across the ’scapes. The contrast is not between useful and useless magic, but between contexts in which access to a mind serves his duty and those in which it could undermine his capacity for faith. He is accustomed to using all his strengths and senses, yet his discipline includes choosing not to use one of them routinely. The ability is therefore presented not as neutral convenience but as a power whose value depends on purpose and restraint.

Telepathy and His Recognition of Valera

The power becomes decisive when Sagan’s interest in Valera intensifies. As they speak about his attraction and its conflict with his priestly commitments, his telepathic ability flares to life. He experiences a rush of facts and details from her mind, including what she has kept secret. The immediate discovery is her magic, but the revelation does not stop at identifying what she is: it also makes him aware of the intentions and person behind that magic.

Valera is frightened that Sagan will treat her as one of his people’s enemies. She asks whether he can read her mind and whether that is how he learned about her power. He confirms that he can, but rejects the assumption that he would learn only of the magic and not of the person behind it or her good intentions. Telepathy thus overturns the division she fears: her magical capacity does not, by itself, make her an enemy in Sagan’s eyes. The encounter turns mind-reading from a potential instrument of accusation into a means of distinguishing her from those he considers dangerous.

That recognition matters because Valera has reason to fear what magic can become. She fled other necromancers after seeing them torment Demons and Vampires without proof of wrongdoing, and she fears that the same corruption could overtake her. Her understanding, guided by her grandmother and later reinforced by cats whose thoughts she hears, is that magic’s moral character depends on its intent and use. Sagan’s access to her mind discloses the good intentions that her history makes difficult to trust to ordinary explanation alone; it does not make the danger of corrupt use disappear.

Animal Thoughts and the Boundaries of Knowing

Valera’s experience with the cats provides a related but distinct form of mind-hearing. One spring, after going to town, she found herself followed by a crowd of stray cats and first heard their thoughts. Their inherited feline wisdom came to her sporadically, and the cats eventually lived with her in warmth and comfort, offering guidance that helped her understand that not all magic was bad. The account places thought beyond human conversation, but it does not identify Valera’s experience as the same power Sagan possesses: her ability belongs to the story of her natural-born Witch magic and its moral guidance.

The difference between these encounters clarifies what telepathy does and does not establish. Sagan gains intimate access to Valera’s mind, but the story does not present that access as complete knowledge of every person or every circumstance. Later, he asks why she did not tell him that Ulysses dislikes men; she explains that Ulysses was tormented by the all-male group that seduced his former Witch into becoming a necromancer. The exchange brings knowledge back into conversation: painful history still has to be explained, not merely treated as a fact detached from its circumstances.

Telepathy’s significance lies in this tension between knowing and trusting. Sagan possesses a faculty that can cross the barrier of another person’s unspoken thoughts, yet he fears becoming faithless if he relies on it too readily. With Valera, it reveals a truth that changes his understanding of her; in his religious life, the same capacity risks making concealment seem more important than a person’s word. The power brings hidden intention into view, but its moral meaning depends on the restraint and judgment with which Sagan uses it.