Sharra's Exile

“He was my guest,” Marius said, “and the servants heard him crying out and came and wakened me; but when I went to him he didn’t know me, just kept crying out, raving about Sharra— I couldn’t make him hear me. Could you—could you come?”

“What you want is a healer,” Regis said. “I don’t have any skill at that kind of thing…” and he found himself wondering if Danilo, who had been prisoner with him during those weeks at Aldaran, who also had been touched by the fire-form, had wakened in terrifying nightmares of Sharra. And what did it mean?

“Lord Regis,” said the body-servant in outrage, “you’re not thinking of going out with this—at this hour of night, at the beck and call of just anybody?”

Regis had been thinking of refusal. What Marius needed was a healer or a licensed matrix technician. Regis had spent a season in a Tower, learning to manage his own laran so that it would not make him ill or drive him mad, but he had none of the advanced skills for matrix healing of mind or body, and what he knew of Sharra was very little. Only that for all that time his own matrix had been overshadowed, so that he could not touch it without seeing that ravaging form of fire— but the servant’s words made him angry again.

“I don’t know if I can help you very much, Marius, and I don’t know the Scott youngster at all. I haven’t seen him since then, not to speak to. But I’ll come as a friend,” he said, disregarding his servant’s look of outrage. “Get me my clothes, Erril, and my boots. If you’ll excuse me while I get dressed—”

Hurrying into his clothes, he thought that he was perhaps the only telepath still in the Domains who had had even that much indirect experience with Sharra. What little he knew of it did not tempt him to learn more.

But what can this mean? The matrix is not even on Darkover! It went with Lew and Kennard into exile…

He splashed his face with icy water, hoping to clear his confusion. And then he realized what could have happened…

I am responsible for this. I sent the message, and my grandfather will be very angry when he finds out that it was I. And already I am suffering the consequences of my actions.

It flashed through his mind, relived in an instant as it had happened. It had been a score of tendays ago; and he had, as Heir to Hastur, been privy to a decision made by the cortes, the ruling body of Thendara. He was in honor bound not to discuss their decisions with any outsider; but what to do when honor conflicts with honor? And in the end he had gone to the one man on Darkover who might have a stake in reversing this decision.

Dyan Ardais had heard him out, a faint smile playing ironically over his lips, as if he could sense how Regis hated this… the necessity that he, Regis, should come as a suppliant, begging favors of Dyan. Regis had concluded, angrily, “Do you want to see them do this to Kennard?”

Dyan had frowned, then, and made him go all over it again. “What exactly are they intending to do?”

“At the first session of Council, this year, they are going to declare Kennard’s estates forfeit because he has abandoned Darkover; and they are going to give Armida into the hands of Gabriel Lanart-Hastur! Just because he commands the Guards and because he’s married to my sister!”

“I don’t see what choice they have.”

“Kennard must come home,” Regis said angrily. “They shouldn’t do this behind his back! He should have a chance to protest this! And Kennard has another son!”

After a long silence, Dyan had said, “I’ll make certain that Kennard knows, at least. Then, if he chooses not to return and press his claim—well, I suppose the law must take its course. Leave it to me, Regis. You’ve done all you can.”

And now, weeks later, hurrying to join Marius, Regis wondered about that. Even if Kennard had returned, he would not be fool enough to bring the Sharra matrix back to Darkover, would he?

Perhaps, he thought, perhaps it is only nightmare…perhaps it is not the frightening coincidence I think. Perhaps Rafe’s nightmare reached out to the one person in Thendara who had been touched by Sharra and so I, too, dreamed—

He slung his cloak about his shoulders and said to Marius, “Let’s go. Erril, call my bodyguard.” He didn’t want the man; but he also knew, even at this hour, he could not walk the streets of Thendara wholly unattended; and even if he could, he had been forced to promise his grandfather that he would not.

I am past twenty and a grown man. Yet as my grandfather’s Heir, the Heir to Hastur, I am forced to do his will— He waited for the man in Guardsman’s uniform to come, and went down through the hallways of Comyn Castle and down into the empty streets of Thendara, Marius moving quietly at his side.

It had been many years since Regis had entered Kennard Alton’s Thendara town house. It stood at the edge of a wide cobbled square, and tonight it was all dark except for a single light at the back. Marius led him to a side door; Regis said to the Guardsman, “Wait here.” The man argued a little in an undertone—the Vai Dom should be careful, it might be a trap—but Regis said wrathfully that such a statement was an offense to his kinsman, and the Guardsman, who had, after all, known Kennard as his Commander, and probably Lew too as cadet and officer, growled and subsided.

But after he had left them Regis thought he would have been glad of the man’s company after all. He tended to trust Marius, but Rafe Scott was a Terran, and they were noted for their indifference to codes of honor. And Rafe was also blood kin somehow, to that arch-traitor Kadarin, who had been Lew’s sworn friend, but had betrayed him, beaten and tortured him, drugged him and forced him, unwilling, to serve Sharra…

From inside the darkened house rose a cry, a scream, a howl of terror, as if no human throat could quite compass that cry. For a moment, behind Regis’s eyes he felt the blaze of fire—the primal terror of the fire-form, raging, ravening…then he shut it out, knowing it was the terror in the other’s mind that he picked up and read. He managed to barrier his mind, and turned to Marius, white with dread, at his side. He wondered if the younger man had enough laran to pick up the image, or whether it was Rafe’s distress that troubled him.

Kennard had proved to the Council that Lew had the Alton gift and they had accepted him. They had not accepted Marius; did that mean that Kennard’s younger son was wholly without laran?

“Remember, Marius, I don’t know if I can do anything at all for him. But I ought to see him.”

Marius nodded, and led the way into an inner room. A frightened servant stood shaking by the door, afraid to go in. “There hasn’t been any change, dom Marius. Andres is with him.”

Regis just flicked the barest glance of recognition at the burly, graying man in Darkovan clothing—though Regis knew he was a Terran—who had been chief coridom, or steward, at Armida when Regis was there as a child. Rafe Scott was sitting bolt upright, staring at nothing Regis could see, and as Regis came into the room, again there was that infernal, animal howl of terror and dread. Even through his strong barriers, Regis could sense the blaze of heat, fire, torment… a woman, locks of fiery hair blazing, tossing—

Regis felt the hair on his forearms, every separate hair on his body bristling and standing upright; like some animal in the presence of a primordial enemy. Marius had asked Andres something in a low, concerned tone, and the man shook his head. “All I could do was hold him so he wouldn’t hurt himself.”

“I wish Lerrys was in the city,” Marius said. “The Ridenow are trained to deal with alien intelligences—presences that aren’t on this dimension at all.”

Regis looked at the terrified face of the young man before him. He had seen Rafe only once, and that briefly; he remembered him best as a child, a boy of thirteen, at Aldaran. He had thought, then, that the boy was young to be admitted into one of the matrix circles. He must be nineteen or twenty now—

Not a boy, then. A young man. But, living among Terrans, he has not had the training which would teach him to cope with such things.

… but Lew was trained at Arilinn, and the best they could do could not keep him unburned by the fires of Sharra—

It would do no good to send for an ordinary matrix technician. They could do many things—unfasten locks without a key, trace lost objects through clairvoyance matrix-amplified, set truthspell for business dealings where ordinary trust would not serve, diagnose obscure complaints, even perform simple surgery without knife or blood. But Sharra would be beyond their knowledge or their competence. For better or for worse, Regis, who knew little, knew as much of Sharra as anyone.

He felt the most terrible revulsion against touching that horror; but he reached out, steadying his mind by gripping the matrix around his neck, and tried to make a light contact with Rafe’s mind. At the strange touch, Rafe convulsed all over, as if in the grip of horror again, and cried out, “No! No, Thyra! Sister, don’t—”

For just a fraction of a second Regis saw and recognized the picture in Rafe’s mind, a woman, not the flame-haired horror that was Sharra, but a woman, red-haired, red-lipped, with eyes of a curious golden color…

And then Rafe blinked and in the twinkling of an eye it was gone and he looked at Regis with intelligence in his eyes. Regis noted, with mild surprise, that his eyes too were golden, like the woman he had seen. Rafe said, “What’s the matter, why are you staring at me? What are you doing here—” He blinked again and looked round him wildly. “Marius, what happened?”

“You tell me that,” said Marius angrily. “All I know is that you wakened the whole house screaming and raving of—of—” Again the hesitation and Rafe finally, matter-of-factly, supplied the word. He said “Sharra,” and Regis was relieved, obscurely, as if a deadlock had been broken.

Marius said, “I couldn’t make you hear me; you didn’t know me.”

Rafe frowned and said, “I’m sorry for having disturbed you—in hell’s name, did you go and fetch the Hastur out of bed at this hour of the night?” He looked at Regis in apology and dismay. “I’m sorry. It must have been a bad dream, no more.”

Outside the dawn was graying into pale light. Marius said, embarrassed, “Will you honor my house, Lord Regis, and take some breakfast here? It is a poor apology for disturbing your rest—”

“It will be my pleasure, cousin,” Regis said, using the word just a trace more intimate than the formal kinsman, not quite as intimate as foster-brother. His grandfather would be very angry when he heard; but all the smiths in Zandru’s forges can’t mend a broken egg, and done was done. Marius gave orders to Andres, and Regis added, “Ask the servants to feed my Guardsman in the kitchens, will you?”

When the servants were gone, Marius said, “What happened, Rafe? Or don’t you really know?”

Rafe shook his head. “I don’t think it was a dream,” he said. “I saw my sister Thyra, and she—she turned into Sharra again. I was afraid—”

Regis demanded, “But why should it happen now, of all times, when nothing like it has happened for six years?”

Rafe said, “I’m almost afraid to find out. I thought Sharra was gone—dormant, at least here on Darkover—”

“But it isn’t here on Darkover,” Regis said, “The Altons took it offworld; perhaps to Terra. I’ve never known why—”

“Perhaps,” Rafe said, “because, here on Darkover, it could never be controlled and might do more harm—” and he was silent, but Regis, seeing the picture in his mind, remembered that the old Terran spaceport at Caer Dorm, in the mountains, had gone up in flames. “If it had been here, Kadarin might have gotten it back.”

“I didn’t know he was still alive,” said Regis.

Rafe sighed. “Yes. Though I haven’t seen either of them for years. They were—in hiding for a long time.” He seemed about to say something more, then shrugged and said, “Under ordinary circumstances, I would have been glad to know that Thyra was still alive, but now—”

With shaking fingers he fumbled at the matrix around his neck. “I was only a child when the Sharra circle was broken, and then I—I was in shock. I was ill for a long time. When I recovered, they told me Marjorie was dead, that Lew had taken the matrix offworld and would never return, and I—I found I could not use my starstone; I had been part of it, and when the link with the Sharra matrix was broken, my own starstone was—was burned out, I thought. But now I am not sure—”

He unwrapped the stone. It was, Regis thought dispassionately, a very small one, a blue jewel, faceted, flawed. He bent his eyes on it; it flamed crimson within, so clearly that even Regis and Marius could see the form of fire. He put the stone away, with fingers that wobbled as he tried to draw the strings of the little leather pouch.

“What does it mean?” he asked in a whisper.

“There’s only one thing it can mean,” Regis said. “It means that Kennard has come home. Or Lew. Or both. And that, for some reason or other, they have brought the Sharra matrix home with them.”

On the first day of Council season, Regis Hastur came early to the Crystal Chamber. He debated, for a moment, going in through the Hastur entrance—in the hallway around the Chamber, there was a private entrance for each Domain, and a small antechamber to each railed-off segment, so that the members of the Domain might meet privately for a moment before making formal appearance in Council—but then shrugged, and, pausing for a friendly word with the Guardsman at the door, went into the main entrance.

Outside it was a day of brilliant sun, and the light streamed through the prisms in the ceiling which gave the chamber its name; it was like standing at the multicolored heart of a rainbow. The Crystal Chamber was eight-sided, and spacious—at least, Regis thought, it seemed spacious now; at the height of Comyn powers it must have seemed small for all those who had Domain-right in the Comyn. Where Regis stood was a central dais, the wide double doors at the back protected by trusty Guardsmen; the other seven sides were allotted, each to one of the Domains, and each was a section divided off by wooden railings and lined with benches, boxes, and a few curtained-off enclosures so that the lords and ladies of each Domain might watch unseen or maintain their privacy until the time came fur the full Council session. One segment was empty, and had been empty since Regis, or any of his living relatives, could remember; and he remembered that his grandfather had told him once, when he was a boy, that the Domain of Aldaran had been untenanted since he, or any of his relatives, could remember. The old Seventh Domain, Aldaran, had been exiled from the Comyn for so long that no one could remember why; the reasons, if indeed there were reasons, had been lost in the Ages of Chaos. He had seen it every year since he was old enough to attend Council; empty, dusty benches and seats, a bare space on the wall where once the double-eagle banner of Aldaran had hung.

The curtains were drawn around the Alton Domain’s enclosure too. It had been empty for the last five seasons; now, at the beginning of the sixth, Regis supposed that either Lew or Kennard or both would be there, to head off the threatened action—to declare the Alton Domain vacant and place it formally in the hands of Gabriel Lanart-Hastur as Warden of the Domain. But had either of them returned? He could not believe that Kennard would return without paying at least a courtesy call on Lord Hastur, and there had been no such call. On the other hand, if Lew had returned, Regis found it unlikely that he would not have sent some word to Regis himself.

We were friends. I think Lew would have let me know.

But there had been no word, and Regis was beginning to be troubled. Perhaps Lew and Kennard had decided to let the Domain go by default. In the days that were inevitable, a feudal lordship over an enormous Domain might have no meaning. Marius was well-to-do; Kennard owned a good deal of property aside from the Great House at Armida. Perhaps, Regis thought, he was better spared that kind of feudal Wardenship of the ancient Domain, as Regis himself would as soon have been spared the changes that were certainly coming in Darkovan society; let Gabriel have the thankless task of dealing with them.

He looked around the Chamber. He could see someone stirring behind the partially closed curtains of the Ridenow enclosure; perhaps Lord Edric’s wife or any of her grown daughters. Well, there were enough Ridenow sons and daughters; they were not, apparently, cursed by the barrenness which plagued some of the older Domains. The direct line of the Aillard was extinct; a collateral line, the Lindir-Aillard family, ruled that house, with Lady Callina as formal head of the Domain; she had a younger sister Linnell, who had been another of Kennard’s fosterlings, and a brother who was one of Dyan Ardais’s circle, though Regis was not sure (and did not care) whether the boy was Dyan’s lover and favorite, or simply a hanger-on. Latterly, Merryl Lindir-Aillard had been seen more often in the company of young Prince Derik Elhalyn. On one occasion Regis’s grandfather, Danvan, Lord Hastur, had expressed some distress at the company the prince kept.

“I don’t think you need to worry, sir,” Regis had said, a little wryly. “No matter what Merryl is, Derik’s a lover of women. Merryl flatters him, that’s all.”

And because of what he was, telepath—and, although there were telepathic dampers all around the Crystal Chamber, they had not yet been set or adjusted—Regis was not surprised to hear the Guardsman at the door, his voice changed from the friendly, though respectful tone he had used with Regis to a flat deference.

“No, vai dom, you have come early; there is no one here but the Lord Regis Hastur.”

“Oh, good,” said the high voice of the young prince. “I haven’t seen Regis since last season,” and Regis turned and bowed to Derik Elhalyn. But Derik disregarded that and came to give Regis a kinsman’s embrace.

“Why have you come so early, cousin?”

Regis smiled and said, “I might ask the same of you, my lord. I wasn’t aware I was all that early—I hadn’t expected to be the first one here.” There were one or two, even in the Comyn, to whom he might have said, forthrightly, Grandfather was badgering me again about letting my marriage be arranged this season, and I walked out because I didn’t want to quarrel with him again. But, although Derik was three years older than Regis himself, tall and good-looking, such adult affairs seemed out of place when talking to Derik.

The Domain of Elhalyn had once been a Hastur sept—although, in fact, all the Domains had once been descended from the legendary Hastur and Cassilda, the Elhalyn had retained their kinship to Hastur longer than the rest. A few hundred years ago, the Hastur kings had ceded their ceremonial functions, and the throne itself, to the Hasturs of Elhalyn. Regis’s mother had been a sister of King Stephen, and so the “cousin” was not courtesy alone. Regis had known Derik since they were little children; but by the time Regis was nine years old, it was already apparent that Regis was quicker and more intelligent, and he had begun to treat Derik almost as a younger brother. The adult Regis wondered sometimes if that was why they had separated them and sent Regis to be fostered at Armida, so that the young prince might not feel his inferiority too much. As they all grew older, it had become painfully obvious that Derik was dull-witted and slow. He might have been crowned at fifteen, the age at which a boy was legally a man; at that age, Regis had been declared Heir to Hastur, and given all the responsibilities that went with that position; but Derik’s crowning had been delayed, first until he was nineteen, then till he should reach twenty-five.

And what then, Regis wondered. What will my grandfather do when it becomes painfully obvious that Derik is no readier to rule at five-and-twenty than he was at fifteen? Most likely he would crown the youngster, retaining the unofficial Regency in the eyes of all Darkover, as many Hasturs had done over the centuries.

“We should have a new banner when I am crowned,” said Derik, standing outside the rails of the Elhalyn enclosure. “The old one is threadbare.”

Merryl Lindir-Aillard, standing behind him, said softly, “But the old one has seen the crowning of a hundred Elhalyn kings, sir. It holds all the tradition of the past.”

“Well, it’s time we had some new traditions around here,” said Derik. “Why aren’t you in uniform, Regis? Aren’t you in the Guards anymore?”

Regis shook his head. “My grandfather needs me in the cortes.”

“I don’t think it was fair that they never let me serve in the cadets as all the Comyn sons do,” said Derik. “There are so many things they don’t let me do! Do they think I haven’t the wit for them?”

That, of course, was exactly what they thought; but Regis had not the heart to say so. He said, “My grandfather told me once that he was cadet-master for a few seasons, but they had to replace him because all the young cadets were too much in awe of him as a Hastur.”

“I’d have liked to wear a cadet uniform, though,” said Derik, still sulky, and Merryl said smoothly, “You wouldn’t have liked it, my prince. The cadets resent having Comyn among them—they made your life miserable, didn’t they, Dom Regis?”

Regis started to say, only during the first year, only until they knew I wasn’t trying to use the privileges of rank to get special favors I hadn’t worked for. But he supposed that was beyond Derik’s understanding. He said, “They certainly gave me a lot of trouble,” and left it at that.

“Even if they’ve delayed my crowning, they won’t delay my marriage again,” said Derik. “Lord Hastur said that he would speak to Lady Callina about announcing the betrothal with Linnell at this Council. I think I should ask you instead, Merryl. You are her guardian—aren’t you?”

Merryl said, “As the Comyn is now arranged, sir, the Aillard line is ruled by the female line. But Lady Callina is very busy with her work in the Towers; perhaps it can be arranged so that the lady need not be troubled with such minor matters as this.”

Regis asked, “Is Callina still Keeper at Neskaya—no— Arilinn, Dom Merryl?” He used the formal address, annoyed by the way in which the youngster was planting the thought in Derik’s mind that perhaps he, Merryl, should be consulted before the rightful Warden of the Domain. Merryl scowled and said, “No, I believe she has been brought here to serve as Keeper to work with the Mother Ashara.”

“Merciful Avarra, is old Ashara still alive?” Derik asked. “She was a bogey for my nurse to frighten me with when I was six years old! Anyway, Callina won’t be there long, will she, Merryl?” He smiled at his friend, and Regis thought there was some secret understanding there. “But I’ve never seen Ashara, and I don’t think anyone else has—my great-aunt Margwenn was under-Keeper for her a long time ago, before I was born; she said she had hardly seen her. Ashara must be as old as Zandru’s grandmother!”

Regis was trying to remember what he had heard of the ancient Keeper of the Comyn Tower. “I think we would have heard if she was dead,” he said. “But surely she is too old to take any real part in Comyn affairs. Is she Hastur, or Elhalyn? I don’t think I ever knew.”

Derik shook his head. “For all I know,” he said, “she could have been foster-sister to the Cassilda of the legends! I suppose she has chieri blood—I have heard they are incredibly long-lived.”

“I have never seen a chieri,” Regis said. “Nor has anyone, I think, in our lifetimes; though Kennard told me once that once, on a journey into the mountains with his foster-brother, he had been guested in a chieri dwelling; he was not out of his teens then. For that matter, our grandfather seems likely to live as long as a chieri,” and he smiled. “That is fine as far as I am concerned—may his reign be long! I am not at all eager to take over the Domain of Hastur!”

“But I am ready for the Domain of Elhalyn,” said Derik sullenly. “My first act will be to find you a noble wife, Regis.”

But before they could pursue it further, there was a stir in the Ardais sector, and Dyan Ardais came in through the entrance at the back of the Ardais section, and went into one of the private boxes. Danilo was with him, and Regis went to speak to him, briefly, while he saw Derik and Merryl separate and go to their individual Domains.

“Dom Regis.” As always before strangers, Danilo was excessively formal. “Is your Heir to sit in Council today?”

“No; Mikhail’s only eleven. Time enough for that when he’s declared a man,” said Regis. Six years ago, under the spur of danger, he had adopted the youngest son of his sister Javanne for his Heir.

Mikhail is eleven. In two more years he will be old enough for the Cadet corps, and then for all the responsibilities of a Comyn son. Javanne’s elder sons, Gabriel and Rafael, are in the cadets now—fifteen and fourteen. If their father, the older Gabriel, is made Warden of the Alton Domain, will they be Alton or Hastur? Rank follows the higher parent; they are Hastur, then…

He glanced at Dyan Ardais. Today the Ardais lord wore, not his usual unrelieved black, but the glimmering black and silver of his Domain, somber and elegant. He said to Dyan, not quite a question:

“There is no one in the Domain of Alton—”

Dyan, if anyone, would know if Kennard had returned—

Perhaps I should tell him about—about what happened two nights ago, about Marius, and Rafe Scott—and Sharra.

But Dyan said, “Regis, the Domain will not fall unchallenged into the hands of the Hasturs. I promise you that.” And Regis, looking at the flat, metallic eyes of the Ardais lord, unreadable as if shuttered, knew he could not ask Dyan exactly what he had arranged. He bowed and went to his own place in the railed-off section, beneath the blue and silver fir-tree banner of the Hasturs.

Other men and women were coming in now, arranging themselves under the banners of the different Domains. A faint distant hum told him that someone was setting the telepathic dampers; when the Comyn Castle and the Crystal Chamber were built, it had been assumed that everyone here, everyone with blood-right in the Domains, was laran-gifted, and by tradition there were telepathic dampers set all about the Chamber at strategic intervals, to prevent involuntary (or voluntary) telepathic eavesdropping.

Everyone here, Regis thought, is my kinsman, or should be. Everyone in the Comyn held descent from the legendary seven sons of Hastur and Cassilda. Legend, all of that; legend called Hastur a god, son of Aldones who was Lord of Light. Hastur the god, so they said, had put off his godhead for love of a mortal woman. Whatever truth might lie behind the legend was veiled in time and prehistory, before ever the Ages of Chaos came down to split the country of the Domains into a hundred little kingdoms, and at the end of those ages, though the Hastur-kin had reclaimed their powers, all but a few Towers lay shattered and the laran of the Comyn had never recovered.

And yet, he thought, the Terrans claim, and say they can prove it that we here on Darkover, Seven Domains, Comyn and all, are descended from a colony ship which crashed here, Terran colonists. What is the truth? Even more, what does the truth mean? Whence came the legends? If we are all Terrans, where had the laran come from, the Comyn powers? In the Ages of Chaos, Regis knew from the history he had read at Nevarsin, there had been a time of great tyranny, when the Comyn Council had ruled over a breeding program which would fix the gifts of each Domain into their sons and daughters; matrix technology had reached its height, even meddling with the genes of the Comyn children.

And we are suffering still from that great inbreeding and genetic meddling. Look at Derik. And many of the Ardais are unstable; Dyan’s father was mad for decades before his death, and there are those in Council who think Dyan himself is none too sane.

Javanne Lanart-Hastur, with her husband, Gabriel, came in through the rear doors of the Hastur enclosure. She embraced Regis, in a flurry of scent, curls, ruffles, and took her seat. Gabriel—tall, burly, wearing the uniform of the Castle Guard as Commander—nodded good-naturedly to Regis as he took his place. Their oldest son, Rafael, a scrawny, darkhaired youngster of fifteen, who reminded Regis of his own mirrored face at that age, bowed to Regis and sat down on one of the back benches. He wore cadet uniform and side-arms.

Two more years and I will be expected to enroll Mikhail in the cadet corps. And in the name of Aldones, Lord of Light, and Zandru, lord of all the hells, what sense does it make for me to send the Heir to Hastur into the cadets, as I was sent, as Javanne is dutifully sending her sons? Yes, of course, if Mikhail is one day to inherit the power and might of the Hasturs—and I have never seen the woman I wish to marry, so it’s likely Mikhail will inherit—he must learn to command himself, and others. But with the Empire on Darkover, with the inevitability of an interstellar empire at our very doorstep, surely there is a better way to educate the Heir to Hastur than sending him to be schooled in swordplay and the code duello, and taught unarmed combat and the best way to keep drunks off the streets! Regis sighed, thinking of the inevitable outcry it would cause if he, Heir to Hastur, should choose to have his son given the Terran education which Marius, Kennard’s son, had had.

And where was Marius? Surely he should have come into the Alton Domain’s enclosure! He was old enough, now, and if he wished to lay claim to the Domain, before it was declared vacant, surely it should be now!

Perhaps he too has bowed to the inevitable, or decided he would rather leave the Wardenship of the Domain to Gabriel. Again, Regis sighed, remembering a time when he had told his grandfather that he would as soon leave the Domain to Javanne’s sons.

One, at least, of my sons, should have a Terran education. If not Mikhail, he thought, then his son by Crystal di Asturien. It was early to think about that—the boy was a hearty toddler not yet two years old, and Regis had seen him fewer than a dozen times. He had two other children, too, daughters, through similar liaisons. Terrans educate their daughters. I will see that the girls, at least, are educated, though I suppose there will be trouble about it; their mothers are conventional enough to think it an honor to bear a child to a Hastur Heir. He knew perfectly well the women had not had much interest in him aside from that, and his undoubted good looks— women pursued him for that and it grew a little wearying.

At this point his train of thought was interrupted by a loud cry from the Guardsmen at the door.

“Danvan Hastur of Hastur, Warden of Hastur, Regent of Elhalyn and of the Comyn!”

Regis rose with the rest as his grandfather—Hastur of Hastur, an aging man, his light hair still retaining some gold among the gray, clad in the ceremonial blue and silver of the Hasturs—came into the Crystal Chamber and went slowly to his seat. He seated himself in the front row and looked round the Crystal Chamber.

“Kinsmen, nobles, Comynari,” he said, in his rich voice. “I welcome you to Council. Highness—” he bowed to Derik— “will it please you to call the roll of the Domains?”

So Lord Hastur had decided that he must give Derik some privileges and responsibilities, however empty and ceremonial! Derik rose and came forward; like the Hasturs, he was wearing blue and silver with the golden crown of the Elhalyns across the fir-tree emblem.

“I speak for Hastur of Elhalyn,” he said. “Hastur of Hastur?”

Danvan Hastur rose and bowed. He said, “I am here at your service, my lord Derik.”

“Ardais?”

Dyan Ardais stood up and bowed. “Dyan-Gabriel, Warden of Ardais.”

“Aillard?”

There was a small stir behind the curtains of one of the boxes in the enclosure of the Aillards, and Callina Aillard, thin and pale, in the formal gray and crimson draperies of the Aillards, said quietly, “Para servirte, vai dom.” Regis saw Merryl, looking sullen, in a seat somewhat below his half-sister; then a handful of loosely related families, Lindir, Di Asturien, Eldrin. Regis did not know most of them by sight at all.

“Ridenow of Serrais.”

This was out of order, Regis thought; the Alton Domain was higher in rank than the Ridenow. But perhaps he was giving them ample time to answer.

“I speak for Ridenow, and I am here at your command, vai dom,” said Edric Ridenow. An enormously fat man, well into middle age, he sat with his half-grown sons and a small herd of his brothers; Regis recognized Lerrys, and Auster who had been in the Guards as officers. There were others he didn’t know. There were a few women behind the curtains in the private boxes; the Ridenow lived at the very borders of the Dry Towns and were of Dry-town blood, and while they did not follow Dryland customs and chain their women, they did keep them in somewhat greater seclusion than most of the mountain Domains.

“Alton?” Derik called, and for some reason he looked pleased.

Silence.

“Alton of Armida, Alton of Mariposa—”

Gabriel Lanart-Hastur rose within the Hastur enclosure and said, “For the sixth time I answer for the Domain of Alton, as Regent during the absence of the rightful claimants.”

Derik bowed and then he turned toward Lord Hastur. He asked, “Do I ask him now?”

Regis saw his grandfather flinch slightly. But he nodded and Derik said, “This answer has been acceptable for five years. On the sixth year it is time to declare the Domain of Alton of Armida vacant, and accept the claim of the next Heir. Gabriel Lanart-Hastur of Edelweiss, come forward.”

Regis tightened his lips. Gabriel, or Old Hastur himself, had put Derik up to this; the young prince had not the wit to think it out for himself. Gabriel stood up and went forward into the center of the room, the rainbow lights playing over him. He was, Regis thought, a reasonable claimant. He was an honorable man; he was the grandson of one of the sisters of Kennard’s father, giving him Ridenow and Alton blood; he had commanded the Guards for six years in Kennard’s absence; he was married and had fathered several sons.

Dyan promised it should not go unchallenged. What is he waiting for? Regis looked over at the Ardais enclosure, but Dyan sat without moving, unsmiling, his face blank and grim.

Danvan Hastur made his way slowly down into the central area and stood before Gabriel. Regis could see that Javanne was hugging herself with excitement.

“Gabriel Lanart-Hastur, Alton of Mariposa,” said Hastur quietly, “for six years you have ruled the Domain of Alton in the absence of Kennard-Gwynn Lanart-Alton of Armida, and of his lawful heir Lewis-Kennard. In the continuing absence of these two, I call upon you to relinquish the state of Regent-Heir to the Domain, and assume that of Warden of Alton and Lord Alton of Armida, over the entire Domain of Alton and those who owe them loyalty and allegiance. Are you prepared to assume wardship over your people?”

“I am prepared,” said Gabriel quietly.

“Do you solemnly declare that to your knowledge you are fit to assume this responsibility? Is there any man who will challenge your right to this solemn wardship of the people of your Domain?”

Gabriel made the correct ritual answer: “I will abide the challenge.”

Ruyven di Asturien, second-in-command of the Guardsmen, commander of the Honor Guard, strode to Gabriel’s side and drew his sword. He cried out in a loud voice, “Is there any here to challenge the worth and rightful wardship of Gabriel-Alar, Lord Alton?”

There was a minute of silence. Regis looked at Dyan, but he was as impassive as ever. Young Gabriel, on the back benches of the Hastur enclosure, was watching his father with excitement. Regis wondered, will Gabriel declare young Gabriel his Heir? Or will he do the decent thing and declare himself willing to adopt Marius as his Heir, giving him Council recognition? I swear by the Lord of Light, if he does not, I shall do so myself…

Then, from two corners of the room, there were two answers.

“I challenge.”

“And I.”

Slowly, Marius came forward from the curtained box in the empty Alton enclosure. He said, “None could challenge my cousin Gabriel’s worth, my lords; but I challenge his rightful wardship. I am Marius-Gwynn Lanart Alton y Aldaran, son of Kennard Alton, and his rightful Heir in the absence of my elder brother, Lewis-Kennard, and I claim the Domain of Alton and the household of Armida.”

And from the rear of the Ardais enclosure came a man Regis did not recognize: a tall, broad-shouldered man with flaming red hair just touched with gray. He came slowly down the steps and said, “I challenge Gabriel-Alar Lanart-Hastur, worth and wardship; he is Regent, not Heir. I can rightfully claim the Domain of Alton, though many years ago I renounced it in favor of Kennard Alton: now I claim it as Regent for Kennard, since Dom Gabriel has violated his Regency by making claim to the Domain on his own part.”

Danvan Hastur said formally, “I do not recognize you; state the nature of your claim.” Yet Regis knew from the look on his grandfather’s face that he knew the man, or at least knew who he was. A quick look at Dyan, and in spite of the telepathic dampers he picked up the thought, you see, Regis, I promised you the Domain should not go unchallenged, and now I have confused them with not one claimant but two.

The strange red-haired man said, “My mother was Cleindori Aillard; my father was Lewis Lanart-Alton, elder son of Valdir, Lord Alton. And my name, though I have never used it, in all my years at Arilinn, is Damon Lanart-Aillard; and for twenty years I have been Second in the Arilinn Tower as Technician and tenerezu.” He used the archaic word which could mean Keeper or Guardian. “I can claim Council-right, both through my mother and my father; and I was married to Elorie Ardais, daughter of Lord Kyril, and half-sister to Lord Dyan.”

“We do not recognize this man as Aillard!” shouted Merryl, half leaping down the steps almost into the central space. “He is a Terran imposter!”

“Silence, sir!” said Lord Hastur sharply. “You do not speak for your Domain! Lady Callina?”

She said quietly, “I have known Jeff—Dom Damon—for many years at Arilinn. His heritage is Alton and Aillard; if he had had a daughter, she would stand where I stand now. It is true that he was fostered on Terra; yet he has come within the Veil at Arilinn and I am here to witness that he has the Alton gift in full measure.”

“Are we going to let a woman testify about this kind of thing?” demanded Merryl. And Derik said, “Dom Merryl has the right to speak for Aillard—”

“Not in the presence of Lady Callina, but only in her absence,” said Hastur sharply. “So here we have two claimants to Alton, and the day when such claims could be settled by the sword is over forever.” Regis, unwilling, remembered the last time such a challenge had been made in this room; Dyan had been challenged, and he, a superb swordsman, could have settled it at once that way; but he had wisely refused to do so. It seemed that Dyan had set a precedent. “For Gabriel’s claim we have his Regency of the affairs of the Domain for the last six years, and his command of the Castle Guard, and certainly there is none can say he has commanded unworthily. Marius Lanart-Montray—” he said, turning to Marius and speaking directly to him, and Regis reflected that this was the first time Lord Hastur had admitted that Marius existed. He had not given him his title claimed as Kennard’s heir, Lanart-Alton, but he had acknowledged his existence, and that was more than he had ever done before. “Marius Lanart-Montray, since you have appealed to justice here before Comyn, we are required by law to hear the nature of your claim.”

Marius had dressed himself in the green and black of his Domain; he wore a ceremonial cloak bearing the device of the Altons and their standard. He had, Regis noticed, Kennard’s own sword. No doubt Andres had kept it for him till this day.

He said, and his voice was not entirely steady, “I declare that I am the true and lawful son of Kennard, Lord Alton, and Elaine Aldaran-Montray.”

Hastur said, “We do not recognize the Domain of Aldaran as having any claims among the Comyn.”

“But that is due to change,” said Prince Derik, stepping forward, “for on this day I have betrothed the sister of my dear friend and cousin and loyal paxman, Merryl Lindir-Aillard, to Lord Beltran of Aldaran; and through his marriage to the Lady Callina, who will be my sister-in-law after my marriage to Linnell Lindir-Aillard, the Domain of Aldaran will be restored to the Comyn.”

Callina made a short, sharp exclamation; Regis realized that she had been told nothing of this! Merryl was grinning like a housecat which has just devoured a cagebird and is pretending to lick nothing more than cream from his whiskers. Dyan leaned forward, with a dismayed stare.

Dan van Hastur said, and he could not keep the reproach from his voice, “My prince, you should have informed me privately about this!”

“Why?” Derik demanded, not even trying to conceal his insolent stare. “You have delayed my crowning well past the age when every other King in Thendara has taken his throne, my Lord Hastur, but you cannot refuse me the right to make a good marriage for my loyal paxman.”

Hastur muttered something under his breath. It sounded like an oath—or was it a prayer? He could not openly refuse the Heir to the throne, and, Regis thought, it serves him right for never facing the fact that Derik simply is not fit to be crowned—and that he should have tried to have him legally set aside.

He said, sharply reproving, “We will speak of this later, my prince; may I venture to remind you that it is the Alton Domain now at stake?”

“But Marius is part Aldaran, and the Aldaran claim is legitimate now—” said Derik, insisting. Hastur was at a point where he was, Regis could see, ready to tell Derik that if he did not sit down and be quiet, he would have him removed, and that, Regis realized, would blow the pretense of Derik’s competence sky-high. But Linnell Aillard, leaning over the railing, said something softly to Derik, and he fell silent.

Marius was obviously trying to collect his thoughts. He said, “I challenge Gabriel’s wardship; he has not the Alton gift and he has not arranged to have me tested to prove whether or not I have it.”

Gabriel asked, staring directly at Marius, “Do you claim to have the Alton gift?”

“I don’t know,” said Marius. “I have not been tested. Do you claim to have it?”

Gabriel said, “In these days—” but was interrupted by a cry of surprise from the Guardsman at the door.

“Gods above! Is it you, sir?”

And then a tall, gaunt man strode into the Crystal Chamber. He was wearing Terran clothing; one arm ended in a folded sleeve at his wrist. His dark hair, thick and curling, was streaked with gray, and his face was scarred and emaciated.

“I am Lewis-Kennard, Lord Alton, Warden of Armida,” he said in a harsh voice that sounded raw and strained, “and I claim your indulgence, my lords, for coming late to this assembly; as you can see, I have but just landed here, and have come at once without even delaying to clothe myself in the ceremonial colors of my Domain.”

General uproar, exploding in all directions from the walls of the Crystal Chamber. In the middle of it, Old Hastur’s voice crying out uselessly for order; and finally he spoke urgently to Gabriel, who bellowed in his best drill-sergeant voice, “Council is recessed for half an hour! We will reconvene then and make some sense out of all this!”

CHAPTER TWO

« ^ »

Lew Alton’s narrative

I’m no good at handling crowds; no telepath is, and I’m worse than most. Within seconds after Hastur called a recess, they were all around me, and despite the telepathic dampers, the blend of curiosity, horror, shock—malice from somewhere—was more than I could take. I elbowed a way into the corridor outside, and moments later, Marius was beside me.

“Lew,” he said, and we hugged each other. I stood back a little to look at him.

“I wouldn’t have recognized you. You were just a skinny little tadpole—” I said. Now he was tall, almost as tall as I, sturdy, broad-shouldered—a man. I could see the shock in his eyes as he took in the scars on my face, the arm that ended in the folded sleeve. I don’t know what, if anything, my father had told him—and he had only been a child when it happened—but God only knows what gossip he had heard in the Comyn. Well, I was used to that shock in people’s faces when they saw me first; I only had to remember the first time I’d looked in a mirror after it all happened. They got used to it, and if they didn’t, they weren’t likely to stay around in my life long enough for it to matter. So I didn’t say anything except, “It’s good to see you, brother. Where’s Andres?”

“Home,” Marius said. “Waiting. I wouldn’t let him come with me this morning. Whatever happened, I didn’t want him mixed up in it. He’s not as young as he used to be.” I caught the unspoken part of that, too. He didn’t want it thought that the claimant for the Alton Domain wanted, or needed, a Terran bodyguard. I never thought of Andres as Terran anymore; he’d been a second father to me, and all the father Marius had had during these crucial years between boy and man.

That had been my fault, too. Then, angrily, I put that thought aside. No law had required our father to spend all his attention on his elder son. It was not my doing, but Marius had been neglected for me, and I wondered, even as we embraced, just how much he resented it. Even now, he might feel that I had turned up just in time to snatch the Domain from his hands.

But there were those in the Comyn who would see nothing in Andres but his Terran background and name. Andres was one of the half dozen or less people here on Darkover that I cared to see.

One of the others was waiting quietly behind Marius until our embrace loosened and we stood back from each other. I said, “Well, Gabriel?”

“Well, Lew?” he replied, in almost the same inflection. “You certainly picked one hell of a moment to walk in!”

“I’m sure you’d have preferred him to wait a day or two, until you had the Domain neatly tied up in your own wallet,” Marius retorted sharply.

“Don’t be a fool, youngster,” Gabriel said without heat, and I remembered that Gabriel’s oldest son must be close to Marius’s own age; a bit younger, perhaps, but not much. “What was I to think, with no word from Kennard? And by the way, Lew, where is the old man? Not well enough to travel?”

I hadn’t wanted Marius to find it out that way, but Gabriel picked it up from my mind before I spoke and so did Marius. Gabriel said something shocked and sympathetic, and Marius began to cry. Gabriel put an arm around him as Marius struggled for self-control. He was still young enough to be ashamed of weeping in public. But behind him my other kinsman made no attempt to conceal the tears streaming down his face.

I hadn’t seen him since I’d left Arilinn, and there, though everyone knew that he was the son of my father’s elder brother and could have been the rightful claimant, before my father or me, to Armida, he had made a great thing, a point of honor, of bearing the name of his Terran foster-father; he was Lord Damon only on ceremonial occasions. The rest of the time we knew him—and thought of him—only as Jeff Kerwin. As he looked at me, tears falling down his face, I remembered the close ties among the Arilinn circle. It was the only time, perhaps, I had been truly happy, truly at peace, in my entire life. He asked now, “Did you—did you at least bring him home to rest here on Darkover, cousin?”

I shook my head. “You know the Terran law,” I reminded him. “I came as soon as I had—had buried him.”

Jeff sighed and said, “He was like a father to me, too, or an elder brother.” He turned to Marius, embracing him, and said, “I have not seen you since you were a child—a baby, really.”

“So here we have all four claimants for the Alton Domain,” said a harsh, musical voice behind us. “But instead of disputing manfully for the Domain as one would expect of hill-men, they are indulging in a love-feast! What a touching spectacle, this reunion!”

Marius whirled on him and said, “Listen, you—” His fists clenched, but I touched his arm with my good hand. “Let it go, brother. He doesn’t know. Lord Dyan, you were my father’s friend, you’ll want to know this. He is buried on Vainwal. And on the last day of his life, a few minutes before his death—which was very sudden and unexpected—he spoke kindly of you and said you had been a good friend to my brother.”

But as I spoke of that last day, remembering—my head was ringing.

—My last command! Go back, Lew, go back and fight for your brother’s rights—

With that final command still ringing in my mind, drowning out everything else, I was even prepared to be civil to Lord Dyan.

Dyan stared straight ahead, his jaw tight, but I saw the muscles in his throat move. At that moment I came closer to liking Dyan Ardais than ever before, or ever again. Somehow his struggle not to weep, as if he were a boy still young enough to be ashamed of tears, touched me as no display could have done. Jeff actually dared to lay a compassionate hand on Dyan’s shoulder. I remembered that Jeff had been married to Dyan’s half-sister—I had never seen her; she had died before I came to Arilinn—and watching them, I knew how Jeff had been persuaded to leave Arilinn and come here, when Jeff had about as much interest in the Regency of Alton—or the politics of the Comyn—as he had in the love life of the banshee. Less, really; he might have had some intellectual curiosity about the banshee.

The silence stretched.

… back and fight for your rights, your brother’s rights… last command…

Endless, a never-ending loop battering my mind… It seemed, for a moment, impossible that they did not hear.

Gabriel said finally, “All my life he’s been there; bigger than life. I simply can’t believe he’s gone.”

“Nor I,” said Jeff. Abruptly he looked at me, and I saw my face mirrored in his mind and was shocked. “Zandru’s hells, Lew! Did you come here directly from the spaceport?” I nodded and he asked, “When did you eat last?”

I thought about that and said at last, “I can’t remember. They shot me so full of drugs aboard ship…I’m still fuzzy.”

… My last command…go back… it was to drown that unending clamor in my mind, that I put my hand to my head, but Jeff put his hand under my arm. He said, “You can’t think straight in this condition, and thinking straight is the first thing you have to be able to do. Besides, you ought not to appear before Council wearing Terran clothes. It made a dramatic point, perhaps, for a few minutes, but it would start people thinking the wrong things. Dyan—?”

The Ardais lord nodded, and Jeff said, “I am guested here in the Ardais quarters—I don’t know who, if anyone, is living in the Alton ones—”

“Caretakers,” said Gabriel, with a wry twist of his mouth. “I may be presumptuous, but not that presumptuous!”

“Come along,” Jeff said. “We can find you something to eat, and some decent clothes—”

Dyan said, “Yours would go round him twice, Jeff.” He looked me up and down. “You’re thinner than you used to be. Tell them to find something of mine for him.”

Jeff led me quickly along the corridor; I was glad to get away, for some others of the Comyn and the others in the Crystal Chamber had come out into the hallway. I saw someone wearing Ridenow colors, and the flash of golden and green made me think of Dio.

Was she here, would she confront me at any moment, shrieking Monster! Would she think I had come to force her back as if the Terran ceremony had made her my prisoner?…

Her touch, her understanding…it might even have quieted the shrieking in my mind…yet the love between us had not been strong enough to hold through tragedy. How could I ask it…that horrible thing…no man had any right to do that to a woman…

“Steady,” said Jeff. “There in a minute. Sit down.” He shoved me onto a piece of furniture. It was dreamlike, dйjа vu, for I could not remember ever being in the Ardais apartments before. Yet my father had known them well, I supposed, Dyan had been his closest friend when they were young…Zandru’s hells, would I never again be sure which thoughts, feelings, emotions were mine, which my father’s? The forced rapport which had wakened my Alton gift when I was eleven years old had been bad enough, but that last dying death-grip on my mind… I shuddered, and when Dyan thrust a drink into my hand I leaned for a moment against his shoulder, letting him support me. Memories of a younger Dyan flooded me with an affection warm, almost sensual, which shocked me to the bone, and I slammed the barrier shut, straightening up and easing free of his support. I drained the glass without noticing the taste. It was the strong firi cordial of the Kilghard Hills.

“Thanks. I needed that, but some soup would be better, I suppose, or something solid—”

“If I remember rightly,” Dyan said, “your father was allergic to the Terran drugs too.” He used the Terran word “allergic”; there wasn’t one in casta. “I wouldn’t try to eat anything solid for a few hours, if I were you. They’ll bring you something to eat in a few minutes, but you don’t really have that much time. We could call for a day or two delay, if you want.” He looked around, saw Marius hovering, and asked, “Where’s Gabriel?”

Marius said, “He’s honor guard there; he had to go back, he said.”

“Damn.” Jeff scowled. “We need a family conference of some kind.”

Dyan’s lip curled. “Keep Gabriel out of it,” he said. “He’s a Hastur lackey. I’ve always suspected that’s why old Hastur married him to the girl… his granddaughter. I don’t suppose you had sense enough to get yourself married and father a son, did you, Lew?”

With an effort that made me tremble, I slammed down a barrier. It was enough that I would never be free of the memory of that inhuman thing which should have been my son. If it were ever to be shared, it would not be with Dyan. He might have been my father’s chosen friend and confidant; he was not mine. I shrugged off his supporting arm as I rose.

“Let’s see about those clothes. No, I don’t mind wearing Ardais colors…”

But it turned out Marius had sent a servant at a run to the townhouse, with orders to fetch a cloak and Domain colors for me. I glanced in the mirror, saw myself transformed. And I could hide the missing hand in a fold of the cloak, if I wished. Marius gave me my father’s sword and I fastened it at my side, trying not to think of the Sharra matrix.

It wasn’t too far; I could tolerate that much distance…

I had tried, again, to leave it on Vainwal. Had thought, this time, I could be free… and then the burning, the blurring clamor…1 had nearly missed the ship because I had realized I could not abandon it, to abandon it would be death… not that I would have minded death… better dead than enslaved this way…

“At least now you look proper Comyn,” said Jeff. “You have to fight them on their own ground, Lew.”

I hurried with the tunic-laces, making a little extra display of my one-handed skill because I was still damnably sensitive about Marius watching. Dyan’s eyes flicked over the empty sleeve.

“I told Kennard that hand would have to come off,” he said. “They should have had it off at Arilinn. He kept on hoping the Terrans could do something. Terran science was one of the few things he kept on believing in, even after he lost faith in damned near everything else.”

The silence stretched, came to a full stop. Jeff, who had seen the hand at Arilinn, and had tried to save it, would have spoken, but I mentally commanded him to be silent. I might manage to discuss it, some day, with Jeff; but not with Dyan; and not with anyone here, not yet.

Dio had accepted it…I cut off that train of thought, afraid of what it would lead to.

Sooner or later, I supposed, I would see her again, and I would have to make it clear… she was free, not my prisoner or slave, not bound to me—

There was a tentative knock at the door, and one of Hastur’s servants, liveried in blue and silver, came in to convey the Regent’s compliments and request that the Ardais and Alton lords would return to Council.

Dyan said, with a faint curl of his lip, “At least there is now no reason to declare the Domain vacant.”

That was true. At first there had been no rightful claimant; now there were four. I asked Marius, as we went down the hallway toward the Crystal Chamber, “Do you have the Alton Gift?”

Marius had the dark eyes of our Terran mother. I have always thought dark eyes were expressionless, unreadable.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said. “What with one thing and another, I’ve been given to understand that it would be… insufferable insolence… to try and find out. I’m fairly sure Gabriel doesn’t, though.”

“The reason I asked,” I said, exasperated, “is that they’ll be badgering me to declare an Heir.” And I knew he could pick up the part of that I did not speak aloud; that I would prefer to assume he had it, without the shock tactics my father had had to use on my own Gift.

“It’s probably irrelevant,” Dyan said. “Everyone knew I didn’t have the Ardais Gift; it didn’t stop them from declaring me as Heir and Regent to my father.” The Ardais gift—catalyst telepathy, the gift of awakening latent laran— had been thought extinct, until it had been discovered in Danilo. That made me think about Regis, and wonder why he had not come to greet me. Well, if there was a plot to take the Alton Domain under Hastur wardship, I wasn’t surprised he didn’t care to face me just yet.

… fight for your brother’s rights… last command…

I shook my head to clear it of the insistent jangling, and, between my kinsmen, walked back into the Crystal Chamber.

Some kind of hurried conference was going on behind the curtained enclosure of the Hastur Domain. For once in my life I was glad of the telepathic dampers, which lessened the jangle in my head to a manageable ache. When they called us to order again, Danvan Hastur rose and said, “From having no rightful claimant to the Alton Domain, we now have four, and the situation must be investigated further. I ask that we delay the formal investiture of Lord Alton for another seven days, until the period of Council mourning for Kennard Alton is finished.”

I could hardly protest it, that they should give my father his due.

Marius had taken a seat beside me in the Alton enclosure; I noticed that Gabriel’s wife, Javanne Hastur, had seated herself among the Hasturs, with a dark, slender boy who looked like Gabriel and was, I supposed, Gabriel’s elder son. Gabriel himself, down with the honor Guard, was thus spared any confusion about whether he should seat himself among Hasturs or Altons, and I supposed he had planned it that way. I had always liked Gabriel; I preferred to think that he meant precisely what he said. My own whereabouts and my father’s being unknown, he had claimed the Domain on Hastur’s orders. I didn’t think I needed to worry about Gabriel. My eyes sought old Hastur, a small squarish unbending figure, graying, upright, like the rock of the castle itself, and just as unchanging. Was this the real enemy I must face?

And why? I know he had never cared much for me, but I had done him the courtesy, before this, to believe it was not personal; I was simply an uncomfortable reminder of my father’s stubbornness in marrying the wrong woman, and he had acted as if my Terran and Aldaran blood were simply a mistake for which I was not to blame. But now all was in confusion; Hastur was behaving like my enemy, and Dyan, who had always disliked me, as a kinsman and friend. I couldn’t figure it out. Near the back of the Hastur enclosure I saw Regis. He did not seem to have changed much; he was taller, and his shoulders somewhat broader, and the fresh boyish face was now shadowed by faint reddish beard, but he still had the Hastur good looks. The change must have been inside; I would have expected him to come and greet me, and the boy I had known would have done it, even more quickly than Marius. I had, after all, been closer to Regis than to the little brother from whom six years had separated me.

Hastur was calling us all to order again, and I saw Prince Derik, in the Elhalyn enclosure with some people whom I did not know. I supposed they were his elder sisters and their families, or some of the Elhalyn connections: Lindirs, perhaps, Di Asturiens, Dellerays. Mentally I counted on my fingers; why had Derik not been crowned? I remembered that he had been somewhat too immature at sixteen, but now he must be well into his twenties. There was so much I did not know; I was being thrown into Council without any time to find out what had happened! Why, in the name of all the probably nonexistent Gods of the Comyn, had I agreed to come?

— last command—fight for your brother’s rights—despite the dampers, the mental command kept reverberating in my mind till I began seriously to wonder, as I had done several times on the ship which brought me from Vainwal, if there had been damage to the brain! The unbridled anger of an Alton can kill—I had always known that; and my father’s mental Gift was unusually powerful. Now, when he was dead and I should have been free of that dominating voice in my mind, I seemed more bound than ever, more hag-ridden. Would I ever be free of it?

Marius saw the nervous gesture, hand to head, and leaned close to whisper, “What’s wrong, Lew?” But I shook my head restlessly and muttered, “Nothing.” I had that eerie sense of being watched from somewhere. Well, I had always had that, in Council. I tried to pull myself together and focus on what was going on.

Hastur said gravely, “My lord Derik, before the Council was interrupted—” I could hear him saying what he had started to say, disrupted, “—by the arrival of an unexpected Heir to Alton—” at least he admitted I was that—“you had spoken of an alliance which you had made. Will it please you to explain it to us, vai dom?”

“I think I should let Merryl do that,” Prince Derik said, “since it concerns the Aillards.”

Merryl came down slowly from the enclosure; but was stopped by a clear feminine voice.

“I object to this,” said the voice, which I recognized. “Dom Merryl does not speak for the Aillards.” And I looked up and saw my cousin Callina coming slowly down the center of the enclosure. She paused at the rails and waited. That clear voice troubled me; I had heard it last when Marjorie… died. She had died in Callina’s arms. And I… once again it seemed that I could feel the old agony in my wounded hand, tearing through every nerve and finger and nail which had been long gone… This was madness; I caught at vanishing self-control and listened to what Callina was saying.

“In courtesy, Lord Hastur, if something concerns the Domain of the Aillards, I should be asked to give my consent before Dom Merryl speaks.”

She was slight and slender; she wore the ceremonial regalia and the crimson veils of a Keeper in Council, and I, who had spent years on Vainwal seeing women who looked as if they were free and alive, thought that she looked like a prisoner, with the heavy robes, the ceremonial ornaments weighing down her slight body so that she appeared fettered, like a child trying to wear the garments of an adult. Her hair was long and dark as spun black glass, what little I could see of it shining through the veil.

Merryl turned on her, with a look of pure hatred. He said, “I have been left to manage the affairs of the Domain while you were isolated at Neskaya and then at Arilinn, my lady; am I now to turn all these things over to you again at your whim? I think my management of the Domain speaks for my competence; what of yours?”

“I do not question your competence,” she said, and her voice was like molten silver. “But where your arrangements for the Domain alliances concern me, I have a legitimate right to question, and if need be, to veto. Answer what Hastur has asked you, my brother.” She used the most formal and distant mode of that word. “I cannot comment until I know what is being proposed.”

Merryl looked disconcerted. I didn’t know him; I didn’t know most of the younger Aillards, even though Callina’s younger sister Linnell was my foster-sister. Now he stood shifting nervously from foot to foot, glanced at Derik, who was grinning and gave him no help, and finally said, “I have made arrangements that the Lady Callina should consolidate a new alliance by marriage with Dom Beltran of Aldaran.”

I saw shock come over Callina’s face, but I could not keep silent. I burst out, “You people must all have gone mad! Did you say—alliance with Aldaran? Beltran of Aldaran?”

Hastur glanced repressively at me, and Derik Elhalyn said, “I see no reason against it.” He sounded defensive, very young. “The Aldarans are already allied to one major Domain by marriage, as you of all people should know, Dom Lewis. And in this day and age, with the Terrans at our very doorstep, it seems well to me that we should take this opportunity to line up their allegiance with the Comyn.”

He repeated this as a child repeats his lesson. I wondered who had schooled him in that theory. Glancing at Merryl, I decided that the answer was not far to seek.

But—ally with Aldaran? With that damned renegade clan—?

Callina said, “When before this has a Keeper been subjected to the whims of the Council? I am the head of the Aillard Domain in my own right; and not subject to Dom Merryl. I think there need be no further discussion of this—” I could almost hear her sorting through her mind for an inoffensive adjective, and she finally compromised—“this ill-advised plan. I am sorry, my prince; I refuse.”

“You—refuse?” Derik turned to stare at her. “On what grounds, lady?”

She made an impatient gesture; her veil fell back, revealing dark hair braided with gems. She said, “I have no will to marry at this time. And if I should, and when I do, I shall, no doubt, be capable of finding myself a husband who will be suitable. And I do not think I will look for him among the Aldaran Domain. I know more of that Domain than I wish to know, and I tell you, we might as well hand ourselves over here and now to the accursed Terrans than ally with that—” again the mental sorting, the visible search for a word—“with that renegade, exiled Domain.”

Dyan said, “Domna, you have been misinformed.” His voice held that exquisite, indifferent courtesy which he always had when speaking to women. “The Aldaran are no longer in the laps of the Terrans. Beltran has broken that alliance to Terra, and for that reason, if for no other, I do not think we can afford to hold aloof from Aldaran.” He turned to the Council and explained: “Alliance with Aldaran would give us more strength, and that is what we need now, to stand united against the pull of the Terran Empire. Granted, there are those among us who would turn us over to the Terrans—” His eyes moved toward the Ridenow enclosure—“but there are also those who remain loyal to our world and to the old ways. And of these, I am convinced, Beltran of Aldaran is one. Our forefathers—for reasons which seemed good to them, no doubt—cast out the Domain of Aldaran from the Comyn. But there were seven Domains; there should be seven Domains again, and this move, I am sure, would catch the imagination of the common people.”

She said, “I am a Keeper—”

He shrugged and said, “There are others. If Beltran has asked for alliance to the Aillard Domain—”

“Then I say for the Aillards that we will have none of it,” said Callina. And, unexpectedly she turned to me.

“And here sits one who can prove the truth of what I say!”

“You damned, incredible fools!” I heard my own voice, and as Hastur turned to me, there was first a stir of voices, then a mutter, then a clamor, and I realized that once again I had disrupted Council, that I had jumped head-first into an argument I really knew nothing about. But I had started and I must go on.

“The Terrans are bad enough. But what the Aldarans got us into—” I fought for control. I would not, I would not speak the name of that ravening terror, which had flared and raged in the hills, which had sent Caer Donn up in flames, which had burned away my hand and my sanity—

“You ought to be in favor of this alliance,” said Derik. “After all, if we recognize the Aldarans, there won’t be so much question about whether you are legitimate or not, will there?”

I stared at him, wondering if Derik were really this much of a fool, or whether the statement had a profundity that somehow escaped me; no one else seemed inclined to question it. It was like some nightmare, where perfectly ordinary people said the most outrageous things and they were taken for granted.

Dyan Ardais said bluntly, “There’s no question of legitimacy. Council accepted Kennard’s eldest son, and that’s that. Sit down and listen, Lew. You’ve been away a long time, and when you know what’s been happening while you were away, you may change your mind. It might not change your status, but it could change your brother’s.”

I glanced at Marius. It was certain that the recognition of Aldaran would do a great deal to alter his legitimacy or otherwise. But did Dyan honestly think that would make the rest of the Council overlook his Terran blood? Dyan went on, his rich musical voice persuasive and kind, “I think it’s your hate speaking, not your good sense. Comyn—” he said, looking around, “I think we can all agree that Dom Lewis has reason for prejudice. But it was a long time ago. Listen to what we have to say, won’t you?”

There was a general murmur of approval. I could have dealt with hostility from Dyan, but this—! Damn him! He had hinted—no, he had said right out—that I was to be pitied, a cripple with an old grudge, coming back and trying to take up the old feud where I left off! By skillfully focusing all the unspoken feelings, their pity, the old admiration and friendship for my father, he had given them a good reason to disregard what I said.

The worst of it was, I wasn’t sure he was wrong. The rebellion at Aldaran, in which I had played so disastrously wrong-headed a part, had been, like all civil wars, a symptom of something seriously wrong in the culture; not an end in itself. The Aldarans were not the only ones on Darkover who had been lured by the Terran Empire. The Ridenow brothers had almost given up pretending loyalty to the Comyn… and they were not the only ones. The Comyn, officially at least, had stood out almost alone against the lure of the Terran Empire, promising a world made easier, simpler, with Terran technology and a star-spanning alliance. I had been an easy scapegoat for both sides, with my Terran blood on the one hand and, on the other, the fact that Kennard, educated on Terra, had nevertheless turned his back on the Empire and become one of the staunchest supporters of the Comyn conservatives. Maybe all sons rebel against their fathers as a matter of course, but few can have had their personal rebellion escalated into such tragedy, or brought down such disaster on their own heads or their families’. I had been drawn into the rebellion, and my tremendous laran, trained at Arilinn, had been put to the service of Beltran’s rebellion and to… even now I flinched and could not say the name to myself. My good hand clutched at the matrix and let it go as if it burned me.

Sharra. Ravening, raging, a city in flames…

What the hell was I doing here, twice haunted, hag-ridden by my father’s voice…

Lerrys Ridenow stood up, turning to Lord Edric for formal permission to speak; Edric gave him the slightest gesture of recognition. He said, “By your leaves, my lords, I would like to say that perhaps this whole argument is futile. The day is past when alliances can be cemented by marriages with unwilling women. Lady Callina is a Keeper, and the independent head of a Domain. If Aldaran wishes to marry into Comyn—”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” said Merryl. “Make this fine alliance for one of your own, and line Aldaran up with the rest of the toadies licking Terran arses—”

“Enough!” Callina spoke sharply, but I could see the faint stain of color etching her cheek. She was too old, and too well-bred, to reprove him for the obscenity directly, but she said, “I did not give you leave to speak!”

“Zandru’s hells,” shouted Merryl. “Will you silence that woman, Lord Hastur? She knows nothing about this—she has spent her life shut up in one Tower after another—now she is here as a puppet of old Ashara, but are we to keep up this nonsensical farce that a cloistered professional virgin knows anything at all about the conduct of her Domain? Our world is on the edge of destruction. Are we going to sit and listen to a girl squalling that she doesn’t want to marry this one or that?”

Callina was white to the lips; she stepped forward, her hand clasped at her throat where I knew her matrix was concealed. She said, very low, but her voice carried to the heights of the Crystal Chamber, “Merryl, the rulership of the Domain is not at issue here. A time may come when you wish to dispute it. I cannot keep it by force of arms, perhaps—but I shall keep it by any means I must.” She laid her hand on the matrix, and it seemed to me that somewhere there was a dim rumble as of distant thunder. Without taking the slightest notice, she turned her face to Gabriel and said, “My lord commander, you are charged with keeping peace in this chamber. Do your duty.”

Gabriel laid his hand on Merryl’s arm and spoke to him, in a low, urgent voice. Despite the telepathic dampers, I had no trouble in following the general import of what Gabriel said: that if Merryl didn’t sit down and shut up, he would have him carried out by force. Teeth clenched, Merryl glanced at Dyan Ardais, as if for support, then at Prince Derik.

Derik said uneasily, “Come, come, Merryl, that’s no way to talk before ladies. We’ll discuss it later, my dear fellow. Let’s have peace and quiet here, by all means.”

Merryl sank into a seat, glowering.

Callina said quietly, “As for this marriage, I think everyone here knows that it is not marriage which is being discussed. It is power, my lords, power in the Comyn. Why should we not call things by their right names? The question before us, and I think my brother knows it as well as I do, is this: do we want to put that kind of power within Comyn in the hands of the Aldarans? I think not. And there sits one who can attest to the truth of what I say. Would you like to tell them, Dom Lewis, why it would be—unwise—to put that much power in the hands of Aldaran, or to trust him with it.”

I felt my forehead breaking out in cold sweat. I knew I should explain myself, calmly and quietly, how at one time I had trusted Beltran, and how I had been—betrayed. Now I must speak calmly, without undue emotion.

Yet, to drag it all out here, in Council, before all those kinsmen who had tried to deny me my very place in this room… I could not. My voice failed me, I felt it strangle in my throat, and knew if I spoke aloud I would crack completely. My father’s voice, the ravening flames of Sharra, the continuous unrhythmic waves of the telepathic jangle—my head was pandemonium. Yet Callina was standing there, waiting for me to speak, and I opened my mouth, trying to force myself to find words. I heard only a raw meaningless croak. I finally managed to say, “You—know. You were there at Arilinn—”

And I cringed before the pity in her eyes. She said, “I was there when Lew came to Arilinn with his wife, after they both risked their lives to break the link with Sharra.”

“Sharra is not relevant here,” said Dyan harshly. “The link was broken and the matrix controlled again. We are talking now of Beltran of Aldaran. And he, too, has a strong interest in seeing that nothing like that ever happens again. As for Lew—” his eyes turned on me. “I am sorry to say this, kinsman, but those who meddle with forces as strong as Sharra should not complain if they are—hurt. I cannot but think that Lew brought his trouble upon himself, and he has had his lesson—as Beltran has had his.”

I bent my head. Perhaps he was right, but that made it no easier. I had learned to live with what had happened, after a fashion. That did not mean I was willing to hear Dyan lecture me about it.

Regis Hastur rose to his feet within the Hastur enclosure. He said, not looking at me, “I cannot see that Lew was so much to blame. But whether or nor, I do not think we can trust Beltran. It was Beltran’s doing, and Kadarin’s. And Lew was Beltran’s kinsman, his guest and under the safeguard of hospitality. He imprisoned him; he imprisoned me; he kidnapped Danilo and attempted to force him to use his laran for the Sharra circle. And if Beltran did this to a kinsman—” he turned and gestured, with what seemed mute apology for turning all eyes to me—“how could anyone trust him?”

I could read the horror in the eyes turned on me; even through the telepathic damper their horror surged into my mind, the shock and horror… the scars on my face, the arm ending abruptly at the wrist, the horror that had surged into my mind from Dio when she saw in my mind the horror that had been our child… Merciful Avarra, was there no end to this agony? I dropped my forehead on my arms, hiding my face, hiding my mutilated arm. Marius laid his hand on my shoulder; I hardly felt it there.

Danilo’s voice, shaken with emotion, took up the tale where Regis had left off.

“It was Beltran’s doing; he had Lew tied and beaten. He stripped him of his matrix. All of you Comyn who have been in a Tower know what that means! And why? Because Lew begged him to use caution with Sharra, to turn it over to one of our own Towers and see if a safe way could be found for its harnessing! And look at Lew’s face! This—this torturer is the man you want to invite courteously into Comyn, to marry the head of a Domain and Ashara’s Keeper?”

Dyan’s voice lashed. “I did not give you leave to speak!”

Danilo turned to him. He was very pale. “My Lord, with all respect, I am testifying only to the truth of what I witnessed with my own eyes. And it is relevant to what is being discussed in the Comyn. I have Council-right; am I to sit silent?”

Hastur said, his displeasure evident in his voice, “It seems this is the day for all the unruly younger members of the Domains to speak in Council without leave of their elders!” His eyes rested on Merryl, on Danilo, then on Regis, and the younger man drew a deep breath.

“By your leave, sir, I can only repeat what my paxman said: I am testifying to what I myself saw and witnessed. When we see our elders and—and our betters, about to take a step which they could not honorably take if all the facts were known to them, then, for the—” again he hesitated, almost stammering—“for the honor of the Comyn, we must bring it to the light. Or are we to believe, sir, that the Comyn consider it of no importance that Beltran was capable of betraying, and torturing, a kinsman?” The words were impeccably courteous, and the tone; but his eyes were blazing.

“All this,” said Dyan, “took place a long time ago.”

“Still,” said Regis, “before we bring Beltran of Aldaran into Comyn itself—whether by marriage-right or any other way—should we not first assure ourselves that he has come to think otherwise about what has happened?” And then he said what I knew I should have said myself. “In the names of all the Gods, do we want the kind of thing that happened in Caer Donn to happen in Thendara? Do we want—Sharra?”

Lerrys Ridenow came down to the center of the dais. I had not seen him since shortly after my marriage to Dio; but he had not changed: slender, elegant, dressed now in Darkovan clothing, the green and gold of the Ridenow Domain, but exhibiting the same foppish grace as he had had in the clothing he had worn on the pleasure world.

He said, “Are you going to raise the bogey of Sharra again? We all know the link was broken and the matrix controlled again. The Sharra matrix is no trouble to anyone now—or rather,” he said, raising his head and cocking it a little to one side with a calculating glance at me, “it may be very grave trouble to Lew Alton, but he asked, after all, for his trouble.”

How could he have known that? Dio must have told him! How could she… how could she have betrayed to him what was so personal to me? And what else had she told him, what else had she betrayed? I had trusted her implicitly— My hand clenched and I bit back a rising surge of nausea. I did not want to believe that Dio could have betrayed me this way.

But next to me, Marius rose to his feet. I was startled, almost turned to him to remind him sharply that he had no voice here—then I remembered. He was one of the official claimants for the Alton Domain; they could no longer refuse to acknowledge his existence.

He said, and his voice was only a shred of sound. “That’s not true, Dom Lerrys. The matrix is—is active again. Lord Regis, tell that what you saw… in my father’s house, not three days ago.”

“It’s true,” Regis said, and he was very pale. “The Sharra matrix is alive again. But I did not know, at that time, that Lew Alton had returned to Darkover. I think he must have brought it back with him.”

I had had no choice, but there was no way I could tell them that. While Regis spoke, I listened, transfixed with horror. I clutched at Marius’s sleeve and said, “Rafe. He is in Thendara—”

But I hardly heard Marius’s reply.

Rafe was in Thendara.

That meant Kadarin and Thyra were—somewhere.

And so was the Sharra matrix.

And so—all the Gods of Darkover be merciful—so was I.

CHAPTER THREE

« ^ »

Even as he told the story of what he had seen in Kennard’s house the night Marius had come in panic to summon him, Regis watched Lew, thinking that he would hardly have known the older man, who had been like a brother in his childhood. Lew looked, he formed the thought without volition, like something hung up in a field to scare the birds! Not so much the gauntness, though he was thin enough, and looked worn, nor even the dreadful scars. No, it was something in the eyes, something haunted and terrible.

In six years, has he found no peace?

Surely it was only that Lew was travel-worn, still suffering with the shock of his father’s sudden death. Regis knew that when he could stop to think, he too would mourn the kindly and genial man who had been foster-father and friend, who had trained him in swordplay and given him the only family and home he had ever known. But this was no time for mourning. Tersely, he completed the tale.

“… and when I tried to look within my own matrix, it was as it had been in the Hellers, during that time when Sharra was freed and Lew was—enslaved. I saw nothing but the Form of Fire.”

From his place among the Altons, the big red-headed man who had come from Arilinn, and who was one of Lew’s kinsmen—Regis had only heard his name briefly and did not remember it—said, “I find this disturbing, Lord Regis. For look, my own matrix is free of any taint.” With the big fingers which looked better suited to the hilt of a sword—or to a blacksmith’s hammer—he deftly untwisted the silk about the cord at his neck; briefly, Regis saw a glow of pallid blue before the man covered it again.

“And mine,” said Callina quietly but without moving. Regis assumed that, as a Keeper, she would know the condition of her matrix without touching it. Sometimes he wished he had chosen to remain in a Tower, to be trained in the skills of using all of his latent laran, whatever it was. Usually, when this wish came upon Regis, it was when he saw a trained technician working with a matrix. It had not been strong enough to hold him in a Tower against the other claims of clan and caste, and he supposed that for a true mechanic or technician, that call must supersede other claims and needs.

Callina said quietly to Lew, “What of yours?”

He shrugged, and to Regis it seemed like the last hopeless movement of a man so defeated that there was no longer strength in him to fight this ultimate shame and despair. He wanted to cry out to Callina, Can’t you see what you are doing to him? At last Lew said tonelessly, “I have never been—free of it.”

But the others in the Crystal Chamber were growing restless. Already the quality of the light had altered, as the Bloody Sun beyond the windows sank toward the horizon and was lost in the evening mists; now the light was cold, chill and austere. At last someone, some minor noble somewhere within the Ardais Domain, called out, “What has this to do with the Council?”

Callina said in her sombre voice, “Pray to all the Gods you never find out how much this can have to do with us, comynari. There is nothing that can be done here, but we must investigate this—” She looked at Lew’s kinsman from Arilinn and said, “Jeff, are there any other technicians here?”

He shook his head. “Not unless the mother Ashara can supply some.” He turned back to the Hasturs and addressed himself to Regis’s grandfather.

“Vai Dom, will you dismiss the Council for a few days, until we can look into this and find out why there has been this—this outbreak of a force we thought safely controlled.”

Hastur frowned, and Derik said shrilly, “It is too late to stop this alliance, Lord Hastur, and anyway I don’t think Beltran has anything to do with the Sharra people—not now. I think he’s had his lesson about that! Don’t you think so, Marius?”

Regis saw Lew start and stare in dismay at Marius, and wondered if Lew had not known about the ties between his brother and Rafe Scott—ties that probably meant with the Aldarans too. Well, they were Marius’s kinsmen, his mother’s people. We made a great mistake, he thought drearily, we should have kept Marius allied to us in bonds of friendship, kin-ties. We cast him out; where could he turn, save to the Terrans, or Aldarans, or both? And now it seems we must deal with him as Heir to Alton. It seemed fairly obvious that Lew was in no shape to take upon himself the rulership of the Alton Domain, even if the Council could be brought to accept him there.

There was once a laran which could foretell the future, Regis thought, and it was among the Hasturs. Would that I had some of that gift!

He had missed what Marius had said, but his grandfather looked distressed. Then he said, “There can be no question of alliance with Aldaran until we know something of this—” he hesitated and Regis saw the old man’s lip curl in fastidious distaste—“this—reappearance of Sharra.”

“But that’s what I am trying to tell you,” said Derik in exasperation. “We have sent the message to Beltran, and he will be here on Festival Night!” And, as he read the anger and dismay in old Hastur’s face, Derik added, defensive, petulant, like a small boy who has been caught at some mischief, “Well, I am Lord of Elhalyn! It was my right—wasn’t it?”

Danvan Hastur took the cup of warmed spiced wine that his body-servant had set in his hand, and propped his feet up on a carven footstool. Around him the servants were moving quietly, lighting lamps. Night had fallen; the same night after which he had had no choice but to dismiss the Council.

“I should send a message to see how Lew does,” Regis said, “or go and greet him. Kennard was my friend and foster-father; Lew and I were bredin.”

Hastur said with asperity, “You could surely find yourself a less dangerous friend in these days. That alliance won’t do you any good.”

Regis said angrily, “I don’t choose my friends for their political expediency, sir!”

Hastur shrugged that away. “You’re still young enough for the luxury of friendships. I remained convinced that Kennard was a good friend—perhaps for too long.” As Regis stirred, he said, “No, wait. I need you here. I have sent for Gabriel and Javanne. The question before us is this: what are we going to do about Derik?” As Regis looked blank he said impatiently, “Surely you don’t still think we can have him crowned! The boy’s not much better than a halfwit!”

Regis shrugged. “I don’t see what choice you have, Grandfather. It’s worse than if he were a halfwit; then everyone would agree that he can’t be crowned. The trouble is that Derik has nine-tenths of his wits, and he’s missing only the most important tenth.” He smiled, but knew there was no mirth in the joke.

But Danvan Hastur did not smile, he said, “In some lesser walk of life—even as the ordinary Head of a Domain—it wouldn’t be so important; he’s going to marry Linnell Lindir-Aillard, and she’s no fool. Derik loves her, he’s grown up with the knowledge that the Aillard women are the Heads of Council in their own right, and he would let himself be guided by her. I remember when my father married off one of the less stable Ardais to an Aillard woman; Lady Rohana was the real head of that clan well into Dyan’s time. But—to wear the crown of the Hasturs of Elhalyn—” he shook his head slowly, “and in the days that are coming now? No, I can’t risk it.”

“I don’t know that you have the power to risk it or not risk it, sir,” Regis pointed out. “If you had faced the fact, years ago, that Derik would never be fit for his crown, perhaps when he was twelve or fifteen, and instead had him put under Guardianship and had him set aside—who is the next Heir to Elhalyn?”

Danvan Hastur scowled, lines running down sharply from his jaw to his chin. “I can’t believe you are that naпve, Regis.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Grandfather.”

Danvan Hastur sighed and said heavily, as if he were explaining a thing to a child with the use of colored pictures, “Your mother, Regis, was King Stephen’s sister. His only sister.” Just in case Regis might have missed the implications of that, he added baldly, “You are nearest to the crown—even before the sons of Derik’s sisters. The oldest of those sons is three years old. There is also an infant at the breast.”

“Aldones! Lord of Light!” Regis muttered, and the imprecation was nevertheless a prayer. Words he had said, joking, to Danilo years before, came back to him now. “If you love me, Dani, don’t wish a crown upon me!”

“If I had had him set aside,” his grandfather said, “who would have believed that I was not simply trying to consolidate power in my own hands? Not that it would have been such a bad thing, in these days—but it would have lost me the popular support that I needed to keep order in a crownless realm. I delayed, hoping it would become clear to everyone that Derik was really unfit.”

“And now,” said Regis, “everyone will think that you are trying to depose Derik the first time he makes a decision contrary to yours.”

“The trouble is,” his grandfather said, and he sounded despondent, “this proposed alliance with Aldaran might not be such a bad idea, if we could be absolutely certain that the Aldarans are once and for all out of the Terran camp. What happened during that Sharra business seemed to have broken off the closeness between Terrans and Aldaran. If we could get the Aldarans firmly on our side—” he considered for a moment.

“Grandfather, do you honestly think that the Terrans are going to pack up their spaceport and go away?”

The old man shook his head. “I want us to turn our backs on them completely. I think my father made a very great mistake when he allowed Kennard to be educated on Terra, and I think I compounded that mistake when I recognized Lew for Council. No, of course the Terran Empire won’t go away. But the Terrans might have respected us, if we hadn’t kept looking over the wall. We should never have let the Ridenow go offworld. We should have said to the Terrans, ‘Build your spaceport if you must, but in return for that, let us alone. Leave us with our own way of life, and go about your business without involving us.’”

Regis shook his head. “It wouldn’t have worked. You can’t ignore a fact, and the Terran Empire is a fact. It’s there. Sooner or later it’s going to affect us one way or the other, no matter how strictly we try to pretend it doesn’t exist. And you can’t ignore the fact that we are Terran colonists, or that we were once—”

“What we were once doesn’t matter,” Danvan Hastur said. “Chickens can’t go back into eggs.”

“The very point I’m trying to make, sir. We were cut off from our roots, and we found a way of life which meant we accepted ourselves as belonging to this world, compelled to live within its restrictions. That worked while we were still isolated, but once we had come back into contact with a—” he stopped, and considered—“with an empire which spans the stars, and takes world-hopping for granted, we can’t pretend to continue as we were.”

“I don’t see why not,” Hastur said. “The Terrans have nothing that we want.”

“Nothing you want, perhaps, sir.” Regis made a point of not staring markedly at the silver coffee service on his grandfather’s table, but the old man saw his look anyhow and said, “I am willing to do without any Terran luxuries, if it will encourage the rest of our people to do likewise.”

“Once again, sir, won’t work. We had to turn to the Terrans during the last epidemic of Trailmen’s fever. There’s some evidence the climate’s changing, too, and we need some technological help there. People will die if they don’t see an alternative, but if we let them die when Terran medicine can help them, are we anything but tyrants? Sir, one thing no one can control is knowledge. We can use it or misuse it— like laran,” he added grimly, remembering that his own laran had brought him such unendurable self-knowledge that, at one time, he would willingly have had it burned forever from his brain. “But we can’t pretend it’s never happened, or that it’s our destiny to stay on this one world as if it was all there would ever be in the universe.”

“Are you trying to say that we must inevitably become part of the Terran Empire?” his grandfather asked, scowling so furiously that Regis wished he had never started this.

“I am saying, sir, that whether we join into it or not, the Terran Empire is now a fact of our existence, and whatever decisions we make, must be made in the full knowledge that the Terrans are there. If we had refused them permission to build their spaceport, at first, they might—I say they might, not that they would—have turned their backs, gone away and built it somewhere else. I doubt it. Most likely they would have used just enough force to stop our open rebellion against it, and built it anyhow. We could have tried to resist—and perhaps, if we still had the weapons of the Ages of Chaos, we might have been able to drive them away. But not without destroying ourselves in the process. You remember what happened in a single night when Beltran turned Sharra against them—” He stopped, shivering. “That is not the worst of the Ages of Chaos weapons, but I pray I will never see a worse one. And we do not, now, have the technology of the Ages of Chaos, so that those weapons, are uncontrollable. And even you, sir, don’t think we can drive away the Terrans with the swords of the Guardsmen—not even with every swordsman on Darkover under arms.”

His grandfather sat silent, head on handa, for so long that Regis wondered if he had said the unforgivable, if the next thing Danvan Hastur did would be to disown and disinherit him as a traitor.

But everything I said was true, and he is honest enough to know it.

“That’s right,” said Danvan Hastur, and Regis was, guiltily, startled; he had grown used to the knowledge that his grandfather was only the most minimal of telepaths, and never used mindspeech if he could possibly help it; so little, in fact, that sometimes he forgot there was any laran they shared.

“I should be as witless as Derik if I tried to pretend that Darkover alone could stand out against anything the size of the Terran Empire. But I absolutely refuse to let Darkover become a Terran colony, and nothing more. If we can’t retain our integrity in the face of Terran culture and technology, perhaps we don’t deserve to survive at all.”

“It’s not that bad,” Regis pointed out. “That’s one reason Kennard was educated on Terra in the first place—to point out that our way of life is viable, even for us, and that we don’t need the worst of their technology—that we needn’t adopt it, for instance, to the level where our own ecology suffers. We can’t support the kind of technology they have on some of the city worlds, for instance; we’re metal-poor, and even too-intensive agriculture would strip our topsoil and forests within two generations. I was brought up with that fact and so were you. The Terrans know it, too. They have laws against world-wrecking, and they’re not going to give us anything we don’t demand. But with all respect, Grandfather, I think we’ve gone too far in the other direction and we’re insisting that we keep our people in a state—” he groped for words—“a state of barbarism, a feudal state where we maintain hold over people’s very minds.”

“They don’t know what’s good for them,” Hastur said despairingly. “Look at the Ridenow! Spending half their time on places like Vainwal—deserting our people when they most need responsible leadership! As for the common people, they look at the luxuries Terran citizenship would give them— they think—and forget the price that would have to be paid.”

“Maybe I trust people more than you do, sir. I think that if we gave them more education, more knowledge—maybe they’d know what they were fighting and know why you were refusing it.”

“I’ve lived longer than you have,” pointed out the old man dryly, “long enough to know that most people want what’s going to give them the most profit and the least effort, and they won’t think about the long-range consequences.”

“That’s not always true,” said Regis. “Look at the Compact.”

Hastur said, “That was forced on the people by one singleminded fanatic, when they were already frightened and exhausted by a series of suicidal wars. And it was kept only because the keepers of those old weapons destroyed them before they could be used again, and took the knowledge to their graves. Look how it’s been kept!” His lip curled. “Every now and then someone digs up an old weapon and uses it— or so they say—in self-defense. You’re not old enough to remember the time when the catmen darkened all the lands of the Kilghard Hills, or when some of the forge-folk—I suppose—raised Sharra against some bandits a couple of generations ago. If the weapons are there, people are going to use them, and to hell with the long-range consequences! Your own father was blown to pieces by smuggled contraband weapons from the Terran Zone. So much for the strength of our way of life against the Terrans!”

“I still think that could have been avoided if people had been dully warned against the consequences,” Regis said, “but I’m not saying we must become a Terran colony. Even the Terrans aren’t demanding that.”

“How do you know what they want?”

“I’ve talked with some of them, sir. I know you don’t really approve, but I feel it’s better to know what they’re doing—”

“And as a result,” said his grandfather coldly, “you stand here and defend them to me.”

Regis fought back a surge of exasperation. He said at last, “We were speaking of Derik, Grandfather. If he can’t be crowned, what’s the alternative? Why can’t we just marry him to Linnell and rely on her to keep him within bounds?”

“Linnell’s too good for him,” Danvan Hastur said, “and I hate to see him come any further under the influence of Merryl. I don’t trust that man.”

“Merryl’s a fool and a hothead,” said Regis, “and dangerously undisciplined. But I imagine Lady Callina can help there—if you don’t tie her hands by letting Merry marry her off. I don’t, and won’t, trust the Aldarans. Not with Sharra loose again.”

“I cannot go directly against the heir to the Throne, Regis. If I cause him to lose kihar—” deliberately, Danvan Hastur used the untranslatable Dry-Town word meaning personal integrity, honor, dignity—less and more than any of these, “before the Council. How can he ever rule over them after that?”

“He can’t anyway, Grandfather. Will you let him marry off Callina to save his face before Council? If you have to crown him—and I think perhaps you do—you must let him know before he’s crowned that the Council can always veto his decisions, or you’ll have him playing the tyrant over us in all kinds of foolish ways. Callina Lindir is Head of a Domain in her own right, and has been Keeper of Neskaya and Arilinn, and now here under Ashara. What about Callina’s loss of kihar?”

His grandfather scowled; Regis knew, though it was not— quite—telepathy, that Hastur was reluctant to allow Callina also that much Council power.

Not unless he’s sure she’ll support him and his isolationist notions. Otherwise he’ll marry her off just to get her out of the Council!

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to marry her yourself?”

“Callina?” he asked in horror, “She must be twenty-seven!”

“Hardly senile,” said the old man dryly, “but I was speaking of Linnell. She’s too good for that fool Derik.”

Evanda’s mercy, is the old man harping on that string again? “Sir, Derik and Linnell have been sweethearts since Linnie’s hair was too short to braid! And you’ve encouraged it. She’s the only woman Derik would, perhaps, consent to be ruled by. You’d break both their hearts! Why separate them now?”

“I’d like to be firmly allied to the Aillards—”

“We’re that already, sir, with Linnell handfasted to Derik. But we won’t be if you alienate them by losing face for Callina by marrying her off against her will—and to Aldaran,” Regis said. “And you’re forgetting the most important thing, Grandfather.”

“What’s that?” The old man snorted, getting up and pacing the room restlessly. “All this business about Sharra?”

“Don’t you see what’s happening, Grandfather? Derik did this behind our backs, and Beltran will be here on Festival Night. Which means he’s already on the road, unless he’s patched things up enough with the Terrans to get an aircraft or two, and it’s not very easy to fly through the Hellers.” He remembered someone telling him that they had been, profanely, dubbed worse things than that by the only Terrans to try to fly over them in anything slower and lower than a rocketplane; they were a nightmare of updrafts, down-drafts and wild thermal patterns. “So when he gets here, what do you say? Please, Lord Aldaran, turn around and go home again, we’ve changed our minds!”

Old Hastur grimaced. “Wars have been fought for a lot less than that on Darkover.”

“And the Aldarans haven’t always observed the Compact that well,” Regis pointed out. “Either we have to let him marry Callina—or we have to insult Beltran by saying, maybe in public, ‘Sorry, Lord, Aldaran, the woman won’t have you,’ or by telling him that our Prince and Ruler is a ninny who can’t be entrusted even with the making of a marriage for his paxman! Either way, Beltran will have a grievance! Grandfather, I find it hard to believe you couldn’t have foreseen this day!”

Hastur came and dropped in his carved and gilded presence-chair. He said, “I knew Derik couldn’t be trusted to make any important decision. I said again and again that I didn’t like him going about with Merry! But could I have foreseen that Merryl would have the insolence to speak for the head of his Domain—or that Aldaran would listen?”

“If you had faced the fact that Derik was witless—well, not witless, not a ninny who should be in leading-strings with a he-governess to look after him, but certainly without the practical judgment of a boy of ten, let alone the presumptive Heir to the Throne—” Regis began, then sighed. He said, “Sir, done is done. There’s no point in arguing what we should have done. The question now is, how do we get out of this without a war?”

“I don’t suppose Callina would consent to marry him, just to go through the ceremony as a formality—” Hastur began, but broke off as his servant entered and stood near the door.

“Yes?”

“Domna Javanne Lanart-Hastur and her consort, Dom Gabriel.”

Regis went to kiss his sister’s hand and draw her into the room. Javanne Hastur was a tall, handsome woman, well into her thirties now, with the strong Hastur features. She glanced at both of them and said, “Have you been quarreling with Grandfather again, Regis?” She spoke as if reproving him for climbing trees and tearing his best holiday breeches.

“Not quarreling,” he said lightly. “Simply exchanging views on the political situation.”

Gabriel Lanart grimaced and said, “That’s bad enough.”

“And I was reminding my grandson and Heir,” said Dan-van Hastur sharply, “that he is old to be unmarried, and suggesting that we might even marry him to Linnell Aillard-Lindir, if that will convince him to settle down. In Evanda’s name, Regis, what are you waiting for?”

Regis tried to control the anger surging up in him and said, “I am waiting, sir, to meet a woman with whom I can contemplate spending the rest of my life. I’m not refusing to marry—”

“I should hope not,” his grandfather snorted. “It’s—undignified for a man your age, to be still unmarried. I don’t say a word against the Syrtis youngster; he’s a good man, a suitable companion for you. But in the times that are coming, one of the things we don’t need is for anyone to name the Heir to Hastur in contempt as a lover of men!”

Regis said evenly, “And if I am, sir?”

His grandfather was denying too many unpalatable facts this evening. Now let him chew on this one. Javanne looked shocked and dismayed. Granted, it was not the right thing to say before one’s sister, but after all, Regis defended himself angrily, his grandfather knew perfectly well what the situation was.

Danvan Hastur said, “Nonsense! You’re young, that’s all. But if you’re old enough to have such pronounced views, and if I’m supposed to take them seriously, then you ought to be willing to convince me you’re mature enough to be worth hearing. I want you married, Regis, before this year is out.”

Then you will be in want for a long time, Grandfather, Regis thought, but he did not say it aloud. Javanne frowned, and he knew that she, who had somewhat more telepathic sensitivity than his grandfather, had followed the thought. She said, “Even Dyan Ardais has provided his Domain with an Heir, Regis.”

“Why, so have I,” said Regis. “Your own son, Javanne. Would it not please you if he were Hastur-lord after me? And I have other sons by other women, even though they are nedestro. I am perfectly capable of—and willing—to father sons for the Domain. But I do not want a marriage which will simply be a hoax, a sham, to please the Council. When I meet a woman I wish to marry, I wish to be free to marry her.” And as he spoke, it seemed to him that he walked side by side with someone, and the overpowering emotion that surged up in him was like nothing he had ever felt, except in the first sudden outpouring of love and gratitude when Danilo had awakened his laran and he had allowed himself to accept it, and himself. But although he knew there was a woman by his side, he could not see her face.

“You are a romantic fool,” said Javanne. “Marriage is not like that.” But she smiled and he saw the kindly look she gave Gabriel. Javanne was fortunate; she was well content in her marriage.

“When I find a woman who suits me as well as Gabriel suits you, sister, then I will marry her,” he said, and tried to keep his voice light. “And that I pledge to you. But I have not found such a woman yet, and I am not willing to marry just because it would please the Council, or you, or grandfather.”

“I don’t like hearing it said,” Javanne said, frowning, “that the Heir to Hastur is a lover of men. And if you do not marry soon, Regis, it will be said, and there will be scandal.”

“If it is said, it will be said and there’s an end to it,” Regis said, in exasperation. “I will not live my life in fear of Council tongues! There are many things that would trouble me more than Council’s speculation on my love life—which, after all, is none of their affair! I thought we came here to discuss Derik, and the other troubles we had in Council! And to have dinner—and I’ve seen no sign of food or drink! Are we to stand about wrangling over my personal affairs while the servants try to keep dinner hot, afraid to interrupt us while we are quarreling about when to hold my wedding?”

He was ready to storm out of the apartments, and his grandfather knew it. Danvan Hastur said, “Will you ask the servants to set dinner, Javanne?” As she went to do it, he beckoned a man to take Gabriel’s cloak. “You could have brought your son, Gabriel.”

Gabriel smiled and said, “He has guard duty this night, sir.”

Hastur nodded. “How does he do in the cadets, then? And Rafael, he’s in the first year, isn’t he?”

Gabriel grinned and said, “I’m trying hard not to notice Rafael, kinsman. He’s probably having the same trouble any lad of rank does in the cadets—young Gabe last year, or Regis, or Lew Alton—I still remember having to give Lew some extra skills in wrestling. They really had it in for him, they made his life miserable! I suppose Kennard himself had the same trouble when he was a first-year cadet. I didn’t, but I was out of the direct line of Comyn succession.” He sighed and said, “Too bad about Kennard. We’ll miss him. I’ll go on commanding the Guardsmen until Lew is able to make decisions—he’s really ill, and this business of Sharra hasn’t helped. But when he recovers—”

“You certainly don’t think Lew’s fit to rule the Alton Domain, do you?” Hastur asked, shocked. “You saw it as well as I did! The boy’s a wreck!”

“Hardly a boy,” Regis said. “Lew is six years older than I, which means he is halfway through his twenties. It’s only fair to wait until he’s recovered from the loss of his father, and from the journey from Vainwal. Kennard told me, once, that most long passages have to be made under heavy sedation. But when he recovers from that—”

Hastur opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, Javanne said, “Dinner is on the table. Shall we go in?” and took her husband’s arm. Regis followed, with his grandfather. Dinner had been laid on a small table in the next room, with elegant cloths and the finest dishes and goblets; Javanne, at her grandfather’s nod, signaled for service and poured wine. But Gabriel said, as he spread his napkin on his knees, “Lew’s sound enough, I think.”

“He has only one hand; can he command the Guards as a cripple?”

“Precedent enough for that too,” said Gabriel. “Two or three generations ago, Dom Esteban—who was my greatgrandfather and Lew’s too, I think—commanded the Guards for ten years from a wheelchair after he lost the use of his legs in the Catmen’s War. For that matter, there was Lady Bruna, who took up her sword and made a notable commander, once, when the Heir was but a babe—” he shrugged. “Lew can dress himself and look after himself one-handed— I saw him. As for the rest—well, he was a damned good officer once. And if he wants me to go on commanding the Guards—well, he’s the head of my Domain, and I’ll do what he says. And the boys coming up—and there’s Marius. He hasn’t had military training, but he’s perfectly well-educated.”

“Terran education,” Hastur said dryly.

Regis said, “Knowledge is knowledge, Grandfather.” He remembered what he had been thinking in Council, that it made more sense to have Mikhail, perhaps, instructed under the Terrans than to shove him into the cadets for military discipline and training in swordplay. “Marius is intelligent—”

“And has some unfortunate Terran friends,” said Javanne scornfully. “If he hadn’t involved himself with the Terrans, he wouldn’t have brought out all that business about Sharra today at Council!”

“And then we wouldn’t know what was going on,” said Regis. “When a wolf is loose in the pastures, do we care if the herdsman loses a night’s sleep? And whose fault is it that Marius was not given cadet training? I’m sure he would have done as well there as I did. We chose to turn him over to the Terrans, and now, I’m afraid, we have to live with what we have made of him. We made certain that one Domain, at least, would remain allied to the Terrans!”

“The Altons have always been too ready to deal with the Terrans,” said Hastur. “Ever since the days when Andrew Carr married into that Domain—”

“Done is done,” Gabriel said, “there’s no need to hash it over now, sir. I didn’t see any signs that Lew was so happy among the Terrans that he can’t rule the Altons well—”

“You’re acting as if he were going to be Head of the Domain,” said Hastur.

Gabriel laid down his spoon, letting the soup roll out on the tablecloth. “Now look here, Grandfather. It’s one thing for me to claim the Domain when we had no notion whether Lew was alive or dead. But Council accepted him as Kennard’s Heir, and that’s all there is to it. It’s up to him, as head of the Domain, to say what’s to be done about Marius, but I suppose he’ll name him Heir. If it were Jeff Kerwin I might challenge—he doesn’t want the Domain, he wasn’t brought up to it—”

“A Terran?” asked Javanne in amazement.

“Jeff isn’t a Terran. I ought to say, Dom Damon—he has no Terran blood at all. His father was Kennard’s older brother. He was fostered on Terra and brought up to think he was Terran, and he bears his Terran foster-father’s name, that’s all,” Gabriel explained, patiently, not for the first time. “He has less Terran blood than I do. My father was Domenic Ridenow-Lanart, but it was common knowledge that he was fathered by Andrew Carr. Twin sisters married Andrew Carr and Damon Ridenow—”

Danvan Hastur frowned. “That was a long time ago.”

“Funny, how a generation or two wipes out the scandal,” said Gabriel with a grin. “I thought that had all been hashed over, back when they tested Lew for the Alton Gift. He had it, I didn’t, and that was that.”

Danvan Hastur said quietly “I want you at the head of the Alton Domain, Gabriel. It is your duty to the Hastur clan.”

Gabriel picked up his spoon, frowned, rubbed it briefly on the napkin and thrust it back into his soup. He took a mouthful or two before he said, “I did my duty to the Hastur clan when I gave them two—no, three—sons, sir, and one of them to be Regis’s Heir. But I swore loyalty to Kennard, too. Do you honestly think I’m going to fight my cousin for his rightful place as Alton Heir?”

But that, Regis thought, watching the old man’s face, is exactly what Danvan Hastur does think. Or did.

“The Altons are allied to Terra,” he said. “They’ve made no secret of it. Kennard, now Lew, and even Marius, have Terran education. The only way we can keep the Alton Domain on the Darkovan side is to have a strong Hastur man in command, Gabriel. Challenge him again before the Council; I don’t even think he wants to fight for it.”

“Lord of Light, sir! Do you honestly think—” Gabriel broke off. He said, “I can’t do it, Lord Hastur, and I won’t.”

“Do you want a half-Terran pawn of Sharra at the head of the Alton Domain?” Javanne demanded, staring at her husband.

“That’s for him to say,” said Gabriel steadily. “I took oath to obey any lawful command you gave me, Lord Hastur, but it isn’t a lawful command when you bid me challenge the rightful Head of my Domain. If you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, that’s a long way from being a lawful command.”

Old Hastur said impatiently “The important thing at this time is that the Domains should stand fast. Lew’s unfit—”

“If he’s unfit, sir—” and Gabriel looked troubled—“it’ll be apparent soon enough.”

Javanne said shrilly, “I thought they had deposed him as Kennard’s successor after the Sharra rebellion. And now both he and his brother are still tied up with Sharra—”

Regis said, “And so am I, sister; or weren’t you listening?”

She raised her eyes to him and said, disbelieving, “You?”

Regis reached, with hesitant fingers, for his matrix; fumbled at taking it from its silk wrapping. He remembered that Javanne had, years ago, taught him to use it, and she remembered too, for she raised her angry eyes and suddenly softened, and smiled at him. There was the old image in her mind, as if the girl she had been—herself motherless, trying to mother her motherless baby brother—had bent over him as she had so often done when he was small, swung him up into her arms—For a moment the hard-faced woman, the mother of grown sons, was gone, and she was the gentle and loving sister he had once known.

Regis said softly, “I am sorry, breda, but things don’t go away because you are afraid of them. I didn’t want you to have to see this.” He sighed and let the blue crystal fall into his cupped hand.

Raging, flaming in his mind, the form of fire…a great tossing shape, a woman, tall, bathed in flame, her hair rising like restless fires, her arms shackled in golden chains… Sharra!

When he had seen it six years ago at the height of the Sharra rebellion, his laran had been newly waked; he had been, moreover, half dead with threshold sickness, and Sharra had been only another of the horrors of that time. When he had seen it briefly in Marius’s house, he had been too shocked to notice. Now something cold took him by the throat; his flesh crawled on his bones, every hair on his body rose slowly upright, beginning with his forearms, slowly moving over all his body. Regis knew, without knowing how he knew, that he looked upon a very ancient enemy of his race and his caste, and something in his body, cell-deep, bone-deep, knew and recognized it. Nausea crawled through his body and he felt the sour taste of terror in his mouth.

Confused, he thought, but Sharra was used and chained by the forge-folk, surely I am simply remembering the destruction of Sharra loosed, a city rising in flame…it is no worse than a forest fire—but he knew this was something worse, something he could not understand, something that fought to draw him into itself… recognition, fear, a fascination almost sexual in its import…

“Aaahh—” It was a half-drawn breath of horror; he heard, saw, felt Javanne’s mind, her terror reaching out, entangled. She clutched at the matrix under her own dress as if it had burned her, and Regis, with a mighty effort, wrenched his mind and his eyes from the Form of Fire blazing from his matrix. But Javanne clung, in terror and fascination…

And something in Regis, long dormant, unguessed, seemed to uncoil within him; as a skilled swordsman takes the hilt in his hand, without knowing what moves he will make, or which strokes he will answer, knowing only that he can match his opponent, he felt that strangeness rise, take over what he did next. He reached out into the depths of the fire, and delicately picked Javanne’s mind loose, focusing so tightly that he did not even touch the Form of Fire… as if she were a puppet, and the strings had been cut, she slumped back fainting in her chair, and Gabriel caught her scowling.

“What did you do?” he demanded, “What have you done to her?”

Javanne, half-conscious, was blinking. Regis, with careful deliberation, wrapped up his matrix. He said, “It is dangerous to you too, Javanne. Don’t come near it again.”

Danvari Hastur had been staring, bewildered, as his grandson and granddaughter stared in terror, paralyzed, then, as they withdrew. Regis remembered, wearily, that his grandfather had little laran. Regis himself did not understand what he had done, only knew he was shaking down deep in the bones, exhausted, as weary as if he had been on the fire-lines for three days and three nights. Without knowing he was doing it, he reached for a plateful of hot rolls, smeared honey thickly on one and gobbled it down, feeling the sugar restoring him.

“It was Sharra,” Javanne said in a whisper. “But what did you do?”

And Regis could only mumble, shocked, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

CHAPTER FOUR

« ^ »

Lew Alton’s narrative

I’ve never been sure how I got out of the Crystal Chamber. I have the impression that Jeff half-carried me, when the Council broke up in discord, but the next thing I remember clearly, I was in the open air, and Marius was with me, and Jeff. I pulled myself upright.

“Where are we going?”

“Home,” said Marius, “The Alton town-house; I didn’t think you’d care for the Alton apartments, and I’ve never been there—not since Father left. I’ve been living here with Andres and a housekeeper or two.”

I couldn’t remember that I’d been to the town house since I was a very young child. It was growing dark; thin cold rain stung my face, clearing my mind, but fragments of isolated thought jangled and clamored from the passersby, and the old insistent beat:

… last command— return, fight for your brother’s rights… Would I never be free of that? Impatiently I struggled to get control as we came across the open square; but I seemed to see it, not as it was, dark and quiet, with a single light somewhere at the back, a servant’s night-light; but I saw it through someone else’s eyes, alive with light and warmth spilling down from open doors and brilliant windows, companionship and love and past happiness… I realized from Jeff’s arm around my shoulders that he was seeing it as it had been, and moved away. I remembered that he had been married, and that his wife had died long since. He, too, had lost a loved one—

But Marius was up the steps, calling out in excitement as if he were younger than I remembered him.

“Andres! Andres!” and a moment later the old coridom from Armida, friend, tutor, foster-father, was staring at me in astonishment and welcome.

“Young Lew! I—” he stopped, in shock and sorrow, as he saw my scarred face, the missing hand. He swallowed, then said gruffly, “I’m glad you’re here.” He came and took my cloak, managing to give my shoulder an awkward pat of affection and grief. I suppose Marius had sent word about father; mercifully, he asked no questions, just said “I’ve told the housekeeper to get a room ready for you. You too, sir?” he asked Jeff, who shook his head.

“Thank you, but I am expected elsewhere—I am here as Lord Ardais’s guest, and I don’t think Lew is in any shape for any long family conferences tonight.” He turned to me and said, “Do you mind?” and held his hand lightly over my forehead in the monitor’s touch, the fingers at least three inches away, running his hand down over my head, all along my body. The touch was so familiar, so reminiscent of the years at Arilinn—the only place I could remember where I had been wholly happy, wholly at peace—that I felt my eyes fill with tears.

That was all I wanted—to go back to Arilinn. And it was forever too late for that. With the hells in my brain that would not bear looking into, with the matrix tainted by Sharra… no, they would not have me in a Tower now.

Jeff’s hand was solid under my arm; he shoved me down in a seat. Through the remnant of the drugs which had destroyed my control, I felt his solicitude, Andres’s shock at my condition, and turned to face them, clenching my hand, aware of phantom pain as by reflex I tried to clench the missing hand too; wanting to scream out at them in rage, and realizing that they were all troubled for me, worrying about me, sharing my pain and distress.

“Keep still, let me finish monitoring you.” When he finished Jeff said, “Nothing wrong, physically, except fatigue and drug hangover from that damned stuff the Terrans gave him. I don’t suppose you have any of the standard antidotes, Andres?” At the old man’s headshake he said dryly, “No, I don’t suppose they’re the sort of thing that one can buy in an apothecary shop or an herb-seller’s stall. But you need sleep, Lew. I don’t suppose there’s any raivannin in the house—”

Raivannin is one of the drugs developed for work among Tower circles, linked in the mind of a telepathic circle…There are others: Kirian, which lowers the resistance to telepathic contact, is perhaps the most common. Raivannin has an action almost the opposite of that of Kirian. It tends to shut down the telepathic functions. They’d given it to me, in Arilinn, to quiet, a little, the torture and horror which I was broadcasting after Marjorie’s death… quiet it enough so that the rest of the Tower circle need not share every moment of agony. Usually it was given to someone at the point of death or dissolution, or to the insane, so that they would not draw everyone else into their inner torment—”

“No,” Jeff said compassionately. “That’s not what I mean. I think it would help you get a night’s sleep, that’s all. I wonder—There are licensed matrix mechanics in the City, and they know who I am; First in Arilinn. I will have no trouble buying it.”

“Tell me where to go,” said a young man, coming swiftly into the room, “and I will get it; I am known to many of them. They know I have laran. Lew—” he came around and stood directly before me. “Do you remember me?”

I focused my eyes with difficulty, saw golden-amber eyes, strange eyes… Marjorie’s eyes! Rafe Scott flinched at the agony of that memory, but he came up and embraced me. He said, “I’ll find some raivannin for you. I think you need it.”

“What are you doing in the city, Rafe?” He had been a child when I had drawn him, with Marjorie, into the circle of Sharra. Like myself, he bore the ineradicable taint, fire and damnation…no! I slammed my mind shut, with an effort that turned me white as death.

“Don’t you remember? My father was a Terran, Captain Zeb Scott. One of Aldaran’s tame Terrans.” He said it wryly, with a cynical lift of his lip, too cynical for anyone so young. He was Marius’s own age. I was beyond curiosity now; though I had heard Regis describing what he had seen, and knew that he was Marius’s friend. He didn’t stay, but went out into the rainy night, shrugging a Darkovan cloak over his head.

Jeff sat on one side of me; Marius on the other. We didn’t talk much; I was in no shape for it. It took all my energy for me to keep from curling up under the impact of all this.

“You never did tell me, Jeff, how you came to be in the city.”

“Dyan came to bring me,” he said. “I don’t want the Domain and I told him so; but he said that having an extra claimant would confuse the issue, and stall them until Kennard could return. I don’t think he was expecting you.”

“I’m sure he wasn’t,” Marius said.

“That’s all right, brother, I can live without Dyan’s affection,” I said. “He’s never liked me…” but still I was confused by that moment of rapport, when for a moment I had seen him through my father’s eyes…

… dear, cherished, beloved, sworn brother… even, once or twice, in the manner of lads, lovers… I slammed the thought away. In a sense the rejection was a kind of envy. Solitary in the Comyn, I had had few bredin, fewer to offer such affection even in crisis. Could it be that I envied my father that? His voice, his presence, were a clamor in my mind…

I should tell Jeff what had happened. Since Kennard had awakened the latent Alton gift, the gift of forced rapport, by violence when I was hardly out of childhood, he had been there, his thoughts overpowering my own, choking me, leaving me all too little in the way of free will, till I had broken free, and in the disaster of the Sharra rebellion, I had learned to fear that freedom. And then, dying, his incredible strength closing over my mind in a blast I could not resist or barricade…

Ghost-ridden; half of my brain burnt into a dead man’s memories…

Was I never to be anything but a cripple, mutilated mind and body? For very shame I could not beg Jeff for more help than he had given me already…

He said neutrally, “If you need help, Lew, I’m here,” but I shook my head.

“I’m all right; need sleep, that’s all. Who is Keeper at Arilinn now?”

“Miranie from Dalereuth; I don’t know who her family was—she never talks about them. Janna Lindir, who was Keeper when you were at Arilinn, married Bard Storn-Leynier, and they have two sons; but Janna put them out to foster, and came back as Chief Monitor at Neskaya. We need strong telepaths, Lew; I wish you could come back, but I suppose they’ll need you on the Council—”

Again I saw him flinch, slightly, at my reaction to that. I knew the state I was in, as well as he did; every transient emotion was broadcasting at full strength. Andres, Terran and without any visible laran, still noticed Marius’s distress; he had, after all, lived with a telepath family since before I was born. He said stolidly, “I can find a damper and put it on, if you wish.”

“That won’t be—” I started to say, but Jeff said firmly, “Good. Do that.” And before long the familiar unrhythmic pulses began to move through my mind, disrupting it. It blanked it out for the others—at least the specific content— but for me it substituted nausea for the sharper pain. I listened with half an ear to Marius telling Andres what had happened at the Council. Andres, as I had foreseen, understood at once what the important thing was.

“At least they recognized you; your right to inherit was challenged, but for once the old tyrant had to admit you existed,” snorted Andres. “It’s a beginning, lad.”

“Do you think I give a damn—” Marius demanded. “All my life I haven’t been good enough for them to spit on, and suddenly—”

“It’s what your father fought for all his life,” Andres said, and Jeff said quietly, “Ken would have been proud of you, Marius.”

“I’ll bet,” said the boy scornfully. “So proud he couldn’t come back even once—”

I bent my head. It was my fault, too, that Marius had had no father, no kinsman, no friend, but was left alone and neglected by the proud Comyn. I was relieved when Rafe came back, saying he had found a licensed technician in the street of the Four Shadows, and he had sold him a few ounces of raivannin. Jeff mixed it, and said, “How much—”

“As little as possible,” I said. I had had some experience with the chemical damping-drugs, and I didn’t want to be helpless, or unable to wake if I got into one of those terrible spiraling nightmares where I was trapped again in horrors beyond horrors, where demons of fire flamed and raged between worlds…

“Just enough so you won’t have to sleep under the dampers,” he said. To my cramping shame, I had to let him hold it to my lips, but when I had swallowed it, wincing at its biting astringency, I felt the disruptions of the telepathic damper gradually subsiding, mellowing, and slowly, gradually, it was all gone.

It felt strange to be wholly without telepathic sensitivity; strange and disquieting, like trying to hear under water or with clogged ears; painful as the awareness had been, now I felt dulled, blinded. But the pain was gone, and the clamor of my father’s voice; for the first time in days, it seemed, I was free of it. It was there under the thick blankets of the drug, but I need not listen. I drew a long, luxurious breath of calm.

“You should sleep. Your room’s ready,” Andres said. “I’ll get you upstairs, lad—and don’t bother fussing about it; I carried you up these stairs before you were breeched, and I can do it again if I have to.”

I actually felt as if I could sleep, now. With another long sigh, I stood up, catching for balance.

Andres said, “They couldn’t do anything about the hand, then?”

“Nothing. Too far gone.” I could say it calmly now; I had, after all, before that ghastly debacle when Dio’s child was born and died, learned to live with the fact. “I have a mechanical hand but I don’t wear it much, unless I’m doing really heavy work, or sometimes for riding. It won’t take much strain, and gets in my way. I can manage better, really, without it.”

“You’ll have your father’s room,” Andres said, not taking too much notice. “Let me give you a hand with the stairs.”

“Thanks. I really don’t need it.” I was deathly tired, but my head was clear. We went into the hallway, but as we began to mount the stairs, the entry bell pealed and I heard one of the servants briefly disputing; then someone pushed past him, and I saw the tall, red-haired form of Lerrys Ridenow.

“Sorry to disturb you here; I looked for you in the Alton suite in Comyn Castle,” he said. “I have to talk to you, Lew. I know it’s late, but it’s important.”

Tiredly, I turned to face him. Jeff said, “Dom Lerrys, Lord Armida is ill.” It took me a moment to realize he was talking about me.

“This won’t take long.” Lerrys was wearing Darkovan clothing now, elegant and fashionable, the colors of his Domain. In the automatic gesture of a trained telepath in the presence of someone he distrusts, I reached for contact; remembered: I was drugged with raivannin, at the mercy of whatever he chose to tell me. It must be like this for the head-blind. Lerrys said, “I didn’t know you were coming back here. You must know you’re not popular.”

“I can live without that,” I said.

“We haven’t been friends, Lew,” he said. “I suppose this won’t sound too genuine; but I’m sorry about your father. He was a good man, and one of the few in the Comyn with enough common sense to be able to see the Terrans without giving them horns and tails. He had lived among the Terrans long enough to know where we would eventually be going.” He sighed, and I said, “You didn’t come out on a rainy night to give me condolences about my father’s death.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I didn’t. I wish you’d had the sense to stay away. Then I wouldn’t have to say this. But here you are, and here I am, and I do have to say it. Stay away from Dio or I’ll break your neck.”

“Did she send you to say that to me?”

“I’m saying it,” Lerrys said. “This isn’t Vainwal. We’re in the Domains now, and—” He broke off. I wished with all my heart that I could read what was behind those transparent green eyes. He looked like Dio, damn him, and the pain was fresh in me again, that the love between us had not been strong enough to carry us through tragedy. “Our marriage ceremony was a Terran one. It has no force in the Domains. No one there would recognize it.” I stopped and swallowed. I had to, before I could say, “If she wanted to come back to me, I’d—I’d welcome it. But I’m not going to force it on her, Lerrys, don’t worry about that. Am I a Dry-towner, to chain her to me?”

“But a time’s coming when we’ll all be Terrans,” Lerrys said, “and I don’t want her tied to you then.”

It was like struggling under water; I could not reach his mind, his thoughts were blank to me. Zandru’s hells, was this what it was like to be without laran, blind, deaf, mutilated, with nothing left but ordinary sight and hearing? “Is this what Dio wants? Why doesn’t she tell me so herself, then?”

Now there was blind rage exploding in Lerrys’s face; it needed no laran to see that. His face tightened, his fists clenched; for a moment I braced myself, thinking he would strike me, wondering how I could manage, with one hand, to defend myself if he did.

“Damn you, can’t you see that’s what I want to spare her?” he demanded, his voice rising to hysteria. “Haven’t you put her through enough? How much do you think she can stand, you—you—you damned—” His voice failed him. After a time he got control of it again.

“I don’t want her to have to see you again, damn you. I don’t want her left with any memory of what she had to go through!” he said, raging. “Go to the Terran HQ and dissolve your marriage there—and if you don’t, I swear to you, Lew, I’ll call challenge on you and feed your other hand to the kyorebni!”

Through the drugs I was too dulled to feel sorrow. I said heavily, “All right, Lerrys. If that’s what Dio wants, I won’t bother her again.”

He turned and slammed out of the house; Marius stood staring after him. He said, “What, in the name of all the Gods, was that all about?”

I couldn’t talk about it. I said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” and, blindly, struggled up the stairs to my father’s room. Andres came, but I paid no attention to him; I flung myself down on my father’s bed and slept like the dead.

But I dreamed of Dio, crying and calling my name as they took her away from me in the hospital.

When I woke my head was clear; and I seemed, again, to be in possession of it alone. It had assumed the character of any family reunion; Marius came and sat on my bed and talked to me as if he were the young boy I’d known, and I gave him the gifts I’d remembered to bring from Vainwal, Terran lensed goods: binoculars, a camera.

He thanked me, but I suspected he thought them gifts for a child; he referred to them once as “toys.” I wondered what would have been a proper gift for a man? Contraband blasters, perhaps, in defiance of the Compact? After all, Marius had had a Terran education. Was he one of those who considered the Compact a foolish anachronism, the childish ethic of a world stuck in barbarism? I suspected, too, that he felt little grief for our father. I didn’t blame him; father had abandoned Marius a long time ago.

I told them I had business at the Terran HQ, without telling them much about it.

“You’ve got seven days, after all,” Jeff pointed out to me after breakfast. “They deferred the formal transfer of the Domain until ritual mourning for Kennard was completed. And now it’s only a formality—they accepted you as his Heir when you were fifteen.”

There was the question as to whether they would accept Marius.

“Stupid bigots,” Andres grumbled, “to decide a man’s worth on the color of his eyes!”

Or the color of his hair; I could feel Jeff thinking that, remembering a time when, in Arilinn, most Comyn had had hair of the true Comyn red. I said, only half facetiously, “Maybe I should dye mine—and Marius’s—so we’ll look more like Comyn—”

“I couldn’t change my eyes,” Marius said dryly, and I thought, with a pang, of the changeable sea-colors in Dio’s eyes. But Dio hated me now, and that was all past; and who could blame her?

“They’ll challenge me,” I said. “And if they do—hell, I can’t fight them with one hand.”

“Stupid anachronism in this day and age,” Marius said predictably, “to settle anything as important as the Heirship of a Domain with a sword.”

Andres—we had demanded he sit with us at table; coridom or no, he had been guardian and foster-father much of our lives—asked, with equal dryness, “Would it make more sense to fight it out with blasters or invade each other’s Domains and fight a war over it?”

Jeff was leaning back in his chair, a half-empty cup in front of him. “I remember hearing, in the Tower, why it was that the formal challenge with swords was instituted. There was a time when a formal challenge for the rulership of a Domain was made with the Gift of that Domain—and the one whose laran was the stronger won it. There was a day when the Domains bred men and women like cattle for these Gifts—and the Alton Gift, full strength, can kill. I doubt Gabriel wants to try that kind of duel against you.”

“I’m not so sure, after last night, that I could win it if he did,” I said. “I had forgotten where Comyn immunity came from.” At Arilinn, matrix mechanics and technicians in training sometimes fought mock battles with laran, but I had been taught control since I was into my teens; real battles with laran were forbidden.

The Compact was not invented to ban blasters and firearms, but the older laran weapons which were as dreadful as anything the Terran empire could produce…

“I don’t think Gabriel will challenge you,” Andres said. “But they’ll ask why, at your age, you’re not married, and whether you have a legitimate child for an Heir.”

I felt the scars at my mouth pull as I grimaced. “Married, yes, but not for long; that was what Lerrys came here about,” I said. “And no children, nor likely to have.”

Marius started to ask questions; Jeff stared him down. He knew what I was talking about. “We were afraid, at Arilinn, that would happen, but the technique of cell-monitoring at that level was lost sometime in the Ages of Chaos. Some of us are working to master it again—it’s quicker and safer than some of the DNA work they do in the Empire. I don’t suppose you fathered any bastards before you went offworld?”

There had been adventures in my youth, but if I had fathered a child—I put it bluntly to myself—the girl involved would have been proud to tell me so. And Marjorie had died, her child unborn.

“They’d accept Marius if I tested him for the Alton Gift, perhaps,” I said. “They might have no choice. Comyn law says there must be an Heir named, a succession insured. By letting Kennard take me offworld, they gave tacit consent for Marius as presumptive Heir, I’d think. The law is clear enough.” I didn’t want to test Marius for the Alton Gift—not by the shock tactics my father had used on me, and I knew no others. Not now. And with my matrix in the shape it was in… about all I could do would be to give a demonstration of the powers of Sharra!

It wanted me, the fires sought to call me back…

But there were other things to think about now.

“Marius should be tested before the formal challenge,” I said. “You’re First at Arilinn; you can do that, can’t you?”

“Certainly,” Jeff said. “Why not? I suspect he has some laran, perhaps Ridenow gift—there’s Ridenow in the Alton lineage, and Ardais, too; Kennard’s mother was Ardais and I always suspected he had a touch of catalyst telepathy.”

Marius had been tearing a buttered roll to pieces. He said now, without looking up, “What I have, I think, is—is the Aldaran Gift. I can see—ahead. Not far, not very clearly; but the Aldaran Gift is precognition, and I—I have that.”

That he would have had from our half-Terran mother. In these days the gifts were entangled anyhow, bred out by intermarriage between the Domains. But I stared at him and demanded, “How would you know about the Aldaran Gift?”

He said impatiently, “The Aldarans are all the kin I have! And hell, Lew, the Comyn weren’t very eager to claim me as kin! I spent one summer with Beltran—why not?”

This was a new factor to be reckoned with.

“I know he didn’t treat you well,” Marius went on, defensively, “but your quarrel was a private one, after all. What do you expect, that I should declare blood-feud for three generations because of that? Are we the barbarians the Terrans call us, then?”

There was no answer to that, but I didn’t know what to say.

“We could all use some information about the future,” I said. “If you’ve got that Gift, for the love of Aldones tell me what’s going to happen if I claim the Domain? Will they accept you as my Heir?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed, and once again he seemed young, vulnerable, a boy half his age. “I—I tried to find out. They told me that sometimes that happened, you couldn’t see too clear for yourself or anyone close to you…”

That was true enough, and since it was true, I wondered, not for the first time, what good that Gift was to anyone. Perhaps, in the days when Aldarans could see the fate of rulers, kingdoms, even of the planet… and that was another disquieting thought. Maybe the Aldarans, with their foresight, saw that Darkover would go the way of the Terran Empire and that was why they had joined forces, for so long, with Terra. I wondered if Beltran had entirely broken with them after the Sharra rebellion.

Well, there was one way to find out, but there was no time for it now. I strode restlessly to the window, looked out across the bustle of the cobbled square. Men were leading animals to the market, workmen going about carrying tools; a quiet familiar bustle. Because of the season, there was only a light thin powdering of snow on the stones; Festival, and High Summer, were upon us. Still it seemed cold to me after Vainwal and I dressed in my warmest cloak. Let the Terrans call me barbarian if they liked, I was home again, I would wear the warm clothes my own world demanded. The fur lining felt good even at this season as I drew it round me. Both Marius and Jeff offered to accompany me; but this was private business and I must attend to it by myself, so I refused.

It was a bright day; the sun, huge and red—the Terrans called it Cottman’s Star, but to me it was just the sun, and just the way a sun should be—hung on the horizon, coming free of layers of morning cloud, and there were two small shadows in the sky where Liriel and Kyrddis were waning. Once I could have told you what month we were in, and what tenday of which month, by the position of the moons; as well as what to plant, in season, or what animals would be rutting or dropping their young; there is a month called Horse Month because more than three-quarters of the mares will foal before it fades, and there are all kinds of jokes about Wind Month because that is when the stallions and chervines and other animals run in rut; I suppose, where people live very close to the land, they work too hard to have much time for rutting, like the stallions, except at the proper season, and it becomes an uneasy joke.

But all that land… knowledge was only a dim memory, though I supposed, as I lived here longer, it would come back to me. As I strode through the morning streets, I felt comfortable under morning light and shadowed moons, something in my brain soothed and fed by the familiar lights. I’ve been on several planets, with anywhere from one to six moons—with more than that, the tides make the place uninhabitable—and suns yellow, red and blazing blue-white; at least I knew this one would not burn my skin red or brown!

So Marius, in addition to a Terran education, had the Aldaran Gift. That could be a dangerous combination, and I wondered how the Council would feel when they knew. Would they accept him, or would they demand that I adopt one of Gabriel’s sons?

It was a fairly stiff walk from the quarter of the city where my father and his forefathers had kept their town house, to the gates of the Terran Zone. A high wind was blowing, and I felt stiff. I wasn’t used to this kind of walk, and for six years I had lived on a world, Terra or Vainwal, where urgent business could be settled by mechanical communicators—anywhere in the Empire I could have settled the formalities for the dissolution of a marriage by communicator and video-screens—and where, if personal appearance had really been necessary, I could have all kinds of mechanical transport at a moment’s notice. Darkover has never had much interest in roads—it takes either machine labor, man-hours or matrix work to build good roads, and our world has never wanted to pay the price of any of those three. I’d spent my share of time in a Tower, providing the kind of communication you can get through the relays, telepathically operated; and I’d done my share of mining, too, and chemically purifying minerals. I’d monitored, and trained monitors. But I knew how hard it was to find enough talent for the matrix work, and it was no longer required of my caste, who had laran, that they spend their lives behind Tower walls, working for the people they served.

Were we Comyn the rulers of our people, because of our laran…or were we their slaves? And which was which? A slave is a slave, even if, for his laran work, the people he serves surround him in every luxury and bow to his every word. A protected class quickly becomes an exploited and exploiting class. Look at women.

The gates of the Terran HQ, stark and sombre, loomed before me, a black-leathered spaceman at their gates. I gave my name and the guard used his communicator; they admitted I was on legitimate business, and let me in. My father had gone to some trouble to arrange double citizenship for me, and the Terrans claimed that Darkover was a lost Terran colony anyhow, which meant it was part of their policy to grant citizens rights to anyone who went to the trouble of applying for them. I had never troubled to vote for a representative in the Imperial Senate or Parliament, but I had a shrewd suspicion that Lerrys always did. I don’t have much faith in parliamentary governments—they tend to pick, not the best man, but the one who appeals to the widest mass temperament, and, in general, majorities tend to be always wrong—as the long history of culture and the constant return of certain types of slavery and religious bigotry show us. I didn’t trust the Empire to make decisions for Darkover, and why in all of Zandru’s nine hells—or the four hundred known and inhabited worlds of the Empire—should the Darkovans have any voice in making decisions for such worlds as Vainwal? Even in small groups—such as Comyn Council—politicians are men who want to tell their fellows what to do; and thus criminal at heart. I seldom thought about it much, and preferred it that way. My father had tried, many times, to point out the flaws in that reasoning, but I had better things to do with my life than worry about politics.

Better things? Had I anything to do with my life at all? At the back of my brain it seemed there was a familiar mutter. I kept my thoughts resolutely away from it, knowing that if I focused on it, it would be the clamor of my father’s voice, the nag of the Sharra matrix at my brain— no, I wouldn’t think of it.

The marriage was a line in a computer, hardly more than that. My occupation? When I went offworld, drugged and only half alive after being seared in Sharra’s fires, my father had had to name his occupation and he had put both his and mine down as Matrix mechanic. What a joke that was! He could have called himself rancher—Armida produces about a twentieth of the horses traded in the Kilghard Hills—or, because of his post as commander of the Guards, soldier; or, for that matter, because of his Council seat, claimed equal rank with a Senator or Parliamentarian. But, knowing the mystique the Terrans attach to our matrix technology, he had called himself, Matrix Technician, and me, mechanic. What a joke that was! I couldn’t monitor a pebble from the forge-folk’s cave! Not with my matrix still overshadowed by Sharra—

There were technicians and Keepers on Darkover still. Perhaps I could be freed… but later, later. The business at hand was trouble enough. Lewis-Kennard Montray-Lanart, Lord Alton, resident of Cottman Four—which is what the Empire calls Darkover—occupation, matrix mechanic, residence, Armida in the Kilghard Hills, temporary residence— I gave them the name of the street and the square of the town house. Damned if I wanted Comyn Castle brought into this! Wife’s name: Diotima Ridenow-Montray. Wife’s middle name. I didn’t think she had any, I said. I was sure she did, and probably didn’t use it; half the Ridenow of Serrais named their daughters Cassilda, perhaps because there was some doubt about their status as genuine descendants of Hastur and Cassilda, who probably never existed anyhow. Wife’s residence. Well, she was certainly in the custody of her brother, so I gave the estate of Serrais, where the Ridenow ought to live, and I heartily wished they were all out there. Reason for dissolution of marriage?

Here I stopped, not sure what to say, and the clerk, who acted as if loves like this were disrupted a hundred times a day, and in the anthill population of the Empire they probably were, told me irritably that I must state a reason for dissolving the marriage. Well, I could hardly say that her brother threatened to murder me otherwise!

The clerk prompted: “Barrenness if you both wish for children; impotence; irreconcilable differences in life-styles; desertion…”

That would do; she had certainly deserted me.

But the clerk was yammering on.

“Allergy to the other’s planet or residence; failure to support the children of the marriage; inability to father viable offspring if both wish for children…”

“That will do,” I said, though I knew in principle that this, or barrenness, were seldom actually cited for divorces; usually they cited less offensive reasons by mutual consent, such as desertion or irreconcilable difference of life-styles. But Dio had asked for it, and I would state the real reason.

Slowly he put it into the computer in code; now it was on record that I was incapable of fathering viable offspring. Well, they must have it somewhere in the records of that Terran hospital on Vainwal— what had been born to Dio on that night of disaster. I smothered an agonized picture of Dio, smiling up at me as she talked about our son… no. It was over. She wanted to be free of me, I would not cling to a woman who had every reason to despise me.

While the clerk was finishing up the details, a communicator beeped somewhere, and he answered it, looked up.

“Mr. Montray, if you will stop at the Legate’s office on your way out—”

“The Legate?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. I had seen the Terran Legate once, a stuffy functionary named Ramsay, when he attended a conference where I had been Honor Guard; I was still one of my father’s officers, then. Perhaps he too wished to pay courtesy condolences after my father’s death, the sort of meaningless social formality not limited to Darkover or to Terra. The clerk said, “That’s finished, then,” and I saw our marriage, and our love, reduced to meaningless lines of print, stored somewhere in a computer. The thought filled me with revulsion.

“Is that all there is to it?”

“Unless your wife contests the divorce within a tenday,” said the clerk, and I smiled bitterly. She wouldn’t. I had caused enough havoc in her life; I could not blame her if she wanted no more.

The clerk pointed me in the direction of the Legate’s office, but when I got there, (wishing, because of the stares, that I had worn my hand) I found the Legate was not the man I remembered, but that his name was Dan Lawton.

I had known him briefly. He was actually a distant relative of mine, though closer kin to Dyan—who was, after all, my father’s cousin. Lawton’s story was something like mine; only reversed, Terran father, a mother who was a kinswoman of Comyn. He could have claimed a seat in Comyn Council if he had chosen; he had chosen otherwise. He was tall and lean, his hair nearer to Comyn red than my own. His greeting was friendly, not over-hearty, and he did not, to my great relief, offer to shake hands; it’s a custom I despise, all the more since I had no longer a proper handshake to offer. But he didn’t evade my eyes; there are not many men who can, or will, look a telepath full in the eyes.

“I heard about your father,” he said. “I suppose you’re sick of formal condolences; but I knew him and liked him. So you’ve been on Terra. Like it there?”

I said edgily, “Are you implying I should have stayed there?”

He shook his head. “Your business. You’re Lord Armida now, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so. It’s up to Council to confirm me.”

“We can use friends in Council,” he said. “I don’t mean spies; I mean people who understand our ways and don’t automatically think all Terrans are monsters. Danvan Hastur arranged for your younger brother to be educated here at the Terran HQ; he got the same education a Senator’s son would have had: politics, history, mathematics, languages— you might encourage him to go in that direction when he’s old enough. I always hoped your father would apply for a place in the Imperial Senate, but I had no chance to persuade him. Maybe your brother.”

“That would be one direction for Marius, if the Council won’t accept him as my formal Heir,” I said, temporizing. It did make more sense than putting him at the head of the Guards. Gabriel wanted that and would be good at it. “I’ll talk to him about it.”

“Before he would be eligible for Imperial Senate,” he said, “he must live on at least three different planets for a year apiece, and demonstrate understanding of different cultures. It’s not too soon to start arranging it. If he’s interested, I’ll put him in the way of a minor diplomatic post somewhere— Samarra, perhaps. Or Megaera.”

I did not know if Marius was interested in politics. I said so, adding that I would ask him. It might be a viable alternative for my brother.

And I need not test him for the Alton Gift, need not risk his death at my hands… as my father had risked mine…

“Is he, too, a matrix mechanic?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t even know how much of a telepath he is.”

“There are telepaths on some worlds,” he said. “Not many, and this is the only culture where they’re really taken for granted. But if he’d be more comfortable on a world where the population accepted telepathic and psi powers as a matter of course—”

“I’ll ask him.” I hoped that when I broached the subject Marius wouldn’t think I was trying to get rid of him. In history, brothers were allies; in fact they had all too often been rivals. Marius ought to know how little I cared to dispute with him for the Domain! I made a move to rise. “Was there anything else?”

“As a matter of fact,” Lawton said, “there was. What do you know about a man named Robert Raymon Kadarin?”

I flinched. I knew too much about the accursed traitor Kadarin, who had—once—been friend, almost brother; who had brought the Sharra matrix from its forges, given it over to me, given me these scars, forced Marjorie to the pole of Sharra’s power— no! I made myself stop thinking about that; my teeth clenched. “He’s dead.”

“We thought so too,” said Lawton. “And even in the course of nature and time, he ought to be dead. He was on Terran Intelligence considerably before I was born—hell, before my grandfather was born, which means he’s probably about a hundred, or older.”

I remembered the gray eyes, colorless— there was chieri blood in the Hellers, as there had been in Thyra, in Majorie herself and her unknown mother. And the mountain men with the half-human chieri blood were abnormally long-lived, as some of the old Hastur kings had been.

“He’s dead anyway if he crosses my path,” I said. “His life is mine, where, as and how I can; if I see him, I warn you, I will kill him like a dog.”

“Blood-feud—?” Lawton asked, and I said, “Yes.” He was one of the few Terrans who would understand. Unsettled blood-feud outweighs any other obligation, in the hills— I could, if need be, stall the formal proceedings for claiming the Alton Domain by speaking of blood-feud in the old way.

I should have killed him before…I thought he was dead.

I had been offworld, forgetting my duty, my honor—I thought him dead already— and a voice whispered in my mind, but ready to roar again, my last command… return to Darkover, fight for your brother’s rights— the Alton Domain could not survive with the stain of unsettled blood-feud—

“What makes you think he’s alive?” I asked. “And why do you ask me about him anyway? I’ve been offworld, in any case, even if I hadn’t, he’d hardly be likely to hide himself under my cloak!”

“Nobody accused you of sheltering him,” Lawton pointed out. “I understood, though, that you and he were allies during the rebellion and the Sharra troubles, when Caer Donn burned…”

I said quickly, to ward off questions, “No doubt you’ve heard some of the story from Beltran—”

“I haven’t. I’ve never met the present Lord Aldaran,” Lawton said, “though I saw him once. Did you know there’s a very strong resemblance? You’re cousins, aren’t you?”

I nodded. I have seen twins who were less like than Beltran and I; and there had been a time when I had been glad of that resemblance. I said, touching the scars on my face, “We’re not so much alike now.”

“Still, at a quick look, anyone who knew you both might take either of you for the other,” Lawton said. “Half a gram of cosmetic would cover those scars. But that’s neither here nor there… what did Kadarin have to do with Beltran, and with you?”

I gave him a brief, bald, emotionless outline of the story. Spurred on by Beltran of Aldaran, when old Lord Aldaran— who was my great-uncle—lay dying, the old man who called himself Kadarin had brought the Sharra matrix from the forge-folk.

“The name Kadarin is just defiance,” I said. “In the Hellers, any—bastard—is known as a ‘son of the Kadarin’ and he adopted it.”

“He was one of our best intelligence men, before he left the Service,” Lawton said, “or so the records say. I wasn’t out of school then. Anyhow, there was a price on his head—he’d served on Wolf; nobody knew he’d come back to Darkover until the Sharra trouble broke out.”

I fought against a memory: Kadarin, lean, wolfish, smiling, telling me of his travels in the Empire; I had listened with a boy’s fascination. So had Marjorie. Marjorie— time slid, for a moment, I walked the streets of a city which now lay in burned ruins, hand in hand with a smiling girl with amber eyes… and we shared a dream which would bring Terran and Darkovan together as equals.

I told the story flatly, as best I could.

“Beltran, with Kadarin, had a plan, to form a circle around one of the old, high-level matrixes; show the Terrans that we had a technology, a science, of our own. It was one of the matrixes that could power aircraft, mine metals—we thought, when we learned to handle it, we could offer it to the Empire in return for some of the Empire sciences. We formed a circle—a Tower circle, but without a Tower; a mechanic’s circle—”

“I’m no expert at matrix technology,” said Lawton, “but I know something about it. Go on. Just you and Kadarin and Beltran, or were there others?”

I shook my head. “Beltran’s half-sister Thyra; her mother was said to be part chieri, a foundling of the forest-folk. She—the chieri woman, I don’t remember her name—also had two children by one of Lord Aldaran’s Terran officers, a Captain Scott.”

“I know his son,” said Lawton. “Rafael Scott—do you mean to tell me he was one of you? He wouldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, would he? You’d take a child into a thing like that?”

“Rafe was twelve,” I said, “and his laran was awake, or he couldn’t have been one of us. You know enough about Darkover to know that if a child’s old enough to function as a man—or a woman—then he’s old enough, and that’s all there is to it. I know you Terrans tend to keep young men and women in the playroom long after they’re grown; we don’t. Do we have to debate social customs now? Rafe was one of us. And so was Thyra, and so was Rafe’s sister Marjorie.” And then I stopped. There was no way I could talk about Marjorie; not now, with old wounds torn fresh.

“The matrix got out of control. Half of Caer Donn went up in flames. I suppose you know the story. Majorie died. I—” I shrugged, moving the stump of my arm slightly. “Rafe didn’t seem much the worse when I saw him last. But I thought Kadarin, and Thyra, were both dead.”

“I don’t know about the woman,” Lawton said. “I haven’t heard. Wouldn’t know her if she walked into this office. But Kadarin’s alive. He was seen in Thendara, less than a tenday ago.”

“If he’s alive, she’s alive,” I said. “Kadarin would have died before letting her be hurt.” Guilt clawed me again; as I should have died before Marjorie, Marjorie… and then I had a disquieting thought. Thyra was Aldaran as well as chieri. Had she foreseen the return of Sharra to Darkover… and come to Thendara, drawn by that irresistible pull, even before I knew, myself, that I would bring it back?

Were we nothing more than pawns of that damned thing?

Lawton said, “What is Sharra? Just a matrix—”

“It’s that, certainly,” I said. “A very high-level one; ninth or tenth,” and I forestalled his question. “In general, a ninth-level matrix is a matrix which can only be operated or controlled by at least nine qualified telepaths of mechanic level.”

“But I gather it’s more—”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s probably—I’m not sure what it is. The forge-folk thought it was the talisman controlling a Goddess who brought fire to their forges…”

Lawton said, “I was not asking for an account of Darkovan superstitions about Sharra. I’ve heard the stories of the flame-hair—”

“They’re not stories,” I said. “You weren’t there when Caer Donn burned, were you? Sharra appeared—and struck fire down on the ships—”

He said restlessly, “Hypnotism. Hallucination.”

“But the fire was real,” I said, “and believe me, the Form of Fire is real.” I shut my eyes as if I could see it there, as if my matrix was keyed to the burning in that older, larger matrix—

Lawton may have had a touch of laran; I have never been sure. Many Terrans do, not knowing what it is or how to use it. He asked, “Do you suppose he came to Thendara because you were here—to try and recover the Sharra matrix?”

That was what I feared. Above all, that was what I feared; the matrix in the hands of Kadarin again…

and I unwilling slave to the matrix, burning, burning, sealed to the form of fire… “I would kill him before that,” I said. ,

Lawton’s eyes dwelt a moment past courtesy on my one hand. Then he said, “There is a price on his head in the Empire. And you are an Empire citizen. If you like, I will issue you a weapon, to protect yourself against a known criminal under sentence of death, and give you the legal right to execute him.”

To my eternal shame, I considered it; I was afraid of Kadarin. And the ethics of the Compact—my father said it cynically once—crumble in the face of fear or personal advantage. Regis Hastur’s father had died, twenty years ago, leaving the Domains to be ruled by an unborn son, because some band of rebels had accepted contraband weapons with what, I am sure, they thought were reasons important enough to overthrow their allegiance to Compact.

Then I said, with a shudder, “Forget it. I may not be much good with a sword just now, but I doubt if I can shoot well enough to make it worth the trouble. I’ll fight him if I must. He’ll have the Sharra matrix only over my dead body.”

“Your dead body wouldn’t do any of us a damned bit of good if Kadarin had the Sharra matrix,” said Lawton impatiently, “and I’m not concerned at this moment with your honor or the Compact. Would you consider moving the matrix—and yourself—into the Terran Zone so that we could protect you with effective weapons?”

This was a Darkovan affair. Should I hide behind the hem of a Terran’s robe, guarded by their guns and blasters, coward’s weapons?

“Stubborn damned fool,” Lawton said without heat. “I can’t force you, but be careful, damn it, be careful, Lew.” It was the first time he had called me by my name, and even through my anger, I was warmed; I needed friends, even Terran friends. And I respected this man. He said, “If you change your mind, or want a gun, or a bodyguard with a gun, tell me. We need friends in Council, remember.”

I said reluctantly, “I can’t promise to be your friend, Lawton.”

He nodded and said, “I understand. But—” he hesitated and looked me straight in the eye, “I can promise to be yours. Remember that if you need it. And my offer stands.”

I thought about that, as I went out, and down the long elevators and lifts to the ground level. Outside the wind was chilly, and the sky was covered with cloud; later it would snow. I was amazed how quickly my weather skills returned to me. Snow, at high summer! Not unprecedented. Once a summer snow had saved Armida, in a terrifying forest fire when half our buildings had gone up in the backfire. But not common, either, and perhaps an omen of ill-luck. Well, that would be no surprise.

I didn’t tarry to look at the starships. I had seen enough of them. Quickly, drawing my cloak close about my shoulders against the chill, I walked through the streets. I should move as quickly as possible, back into the Alton apartments in Comyn Castle, establish possession; show that I regarded myself as legitimate head of the Alton Domain, Lord Armida. The Sharra matrix too, left alone in the town house, safeguarded only by the fact that no one knew where it was—it too would be safer in Comyn Castle. Better yet, take it to the Comyn Tower and ask my cousin Callina, who was Keeper now for the incredibly ancient keeper there, old Ashara, to put it in the Tower matrix laboratory under a matrix lock. Kadarin could break into the town house, he might even manage to break into the Castle, but I did not believe he could break into a matrix-locked laboratory in Comyn Tower, in the hands and under the wardship of a Keeper. But if he could do that, then we were all dead anyhow and it did not matter.

Having made this resolve, I felt better. It was good to breathe, not the mechanical smells of the Terran Zone, but the clean natural smells of my own part of the city; spices from a cookshop, heat from a forge where someone was shoeing a string of pack animals; a group of Renunciates, their hair cut so short it was hard to tell whether they were men or women, dressed in bulky trail clothing, readying an expedition into the hills; a shrouded and heavily veiled lady in a sedan chair in the midst of them. The clean smell of animals, fresh smells of garden plants. Thendara was a beautiful city, though I would rather have been out in the Kilghard Hills…

I could go. I owned estates that needed me. Armida was mine now… my home. But it was Council season and I was needed here…

Across a square I heard a soft call and challenge; a patrol of young Guardsmen. I looked up, and Dyan Ardais left the patrol and came striding toward me, his military cloak flying briskly behind him.

This encounter was the last thing I wanted. As a boy I had detested Dyan with a consuming hatred; older, I had wondered whether a part of my dislike might not be that he had been my father’s friend, and I, bastard, lonely, friendless, had envied every attention that my father had paid to anyone else. The unhealthy closeness between my father and myself had not all been his doing, and I knew that now. In any case, Kennard was dead and, one way or another, I must free myself of his influence, the real or imagined voice in my mind.

Dyan was my kinsman, he was Comyn, and he had befriended my brother and my father. So I greeted him civilly enough, and he returned the formal greeting, Comyn to Comyn, the first time in my life that he had greeted me as an equal.

Then he dropped formality and said, “I need to talk to you, cousin.” The word, a degree more intimate than “kinsman,” seemed to come as hard to him as to me. I shrugged, though I wasn’t pleased. The talk with Lawton had made me, even more than before, desperately uneasy about the Sharra matrix; I wanted it put into a safe place before anyone—for anyone read Kadarin, who was the only one I knew who could get it—could know its presence on Darkover through the reawakening of his matrix—and if that had happened to my matrix, it would certainly have happened to his. And once he knew the matrix was back on Darkover, what would he do? I didn’t have to ask; I knew.

“There’s a tavern; will you drink with me? I need to talk with you, cousin.”

I hesitated; I’m not that much of a drinker at any time. “It’s early for me, thank you. And I am rather in a hurry. Can it wait?”

“I’d rather not,” said Dyan. “But I’ll walk with you, if you like.” Too late I realized: it had been meant as a friendly gesture. I shrugged. “As you like. I don’t know this end of the city so well.”

The tavern was clean enough, and not too dark, though my spine prickled a little as I went into the unlighted room, Dyan behind me. He evidently knew the place, because the potboy brought him a drink without asking. He poured some for me; I put out my hand to stop him.

“Only a little, thanks.” It was more a ritual than anything else; we drank together, and at the back of my mind I thought, if my father knew, he would have been pleased to see me drinking in all amiability with his oldest friend. Well, I could do that much homage to his memory. He caught my eye and I knew he shared the thought; we drank silently to my father’s peace.

“We’ll miss him in Council,” Dyan said. “He knew all the Terran ways and wasn’t seduced by them. I wonder—” and his eyes dwelt on me a moment past courtesy, looking at the scar, the folded sleeve. But I was enough used to that. I said, “I’m not exactly enthralled by the Terran—more strictly, by the Empire ways. Terra itself—” I shrugged. “I suppose it’s a beautiful world, if you can stand living under a yellow sun and having the colors all wrong. There’s a certain—status— in being of old Terran stock, or living there, but I didn’t like it. As for the Empire—”

“You lived on Vainwal a long time,” he said, “and you’re not a decadent like Lerrys, bound on pleasure and—exotic entertainment.”

It was half a question. I said, “I can live without Empire luxuries. Father found the climate good for his health. I—” I broke off, wondering just why I had stayed. Inertia, deadly lassitude, one place no worse than another to me, until I met Dio, and then any place as good as another, as long as she was with me. If Dio had asked me, would I have come back to Darkover? Probably, if the subject had been broached before it became impossible for her to travel. Why had we not come before she became pregnant? At least, here, she could have been monitored, we would have had some forewarning of the tragedy—I stopped myself. Done was done; we had done the best we could, unknowing, and I would not carry that burden of guilt along with all the rest.

“I stayed with Father. After he died, he wanted me to come back; it was his dying wish.” I said it gingerly, afraid the clamor in my mind would begin again, once invoked, but it was only a whisper.

“You could hold Kennard’s place in Council,” he said, “and have the same kind of power he held.”

My face must have flinched, because he said half angrily, “Are you a fool? You are needed in Council, provided you don’t take the part of the Ridenow and try to pull us all into the Empire!”

I shook my head. “I’m no politician, Lord Dyan. And— without offense—I’d like a little time to size it up on my own, before being told what to think by each of the interested parties!”

I had expected him to fly into a rage at the rebuke, but he only grinned, that fierce and wolfish grin which was, in its own way, handsome. “Good enough; at least you’re capable of thinking. While you’re sizing up the situation, try and take the measure of our prince. There’s precedent enough—Council knew my own father was mad as a kyorebni in the Ghost wind, and they took care to draw his fangs.”

They had appointed Dyan his father’s regent, and in one of the old man’s lucid intervals, old Dom Kyril had agreed to it. But I said, “Derik has no near kinsman; isn’t he the only adult Elhalyn?”

“His sisters are married,” Dyan said, “though not, perhaps, as near to nobility as they would have been if we had known one of their husbands might have to be regent of the Elhalyns. Old Hastur wants to set Regis up in Derik’s place, but the boy’s kicking about that, and who can blame him? It’s enough to rule over Hastur, without a crown as well. A crown is nonsense in these days, of course; what we need is a strong Council of equals. And there’s the Guard—not that a few dozen men carrying swords can do much against the Terrans, but they can keep our own people on the right side of the wall.”

“Who’s commanding the Guard now?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“Anybody. Nobody. Gabriel, mostly. I took it myself for the first two years—Gabriel seemed a bit young.” I remembered Dyan had been one of the best officers. “After that it went to him.”

“He’s welcome to it,” I said. “I never had much taste for soldiering.”

“It goes with the Domain,” Dyan said fiercely. “I suppose you would be willing to do your duty and command it?”

“I’ll have to get my bearings first,” I said, and then I was angry. “Which is more important? To get someone who’s competent at commanding the Guards, and likes it, or to get someone who has the right blood in his veins?”

“They’re both important,” he said, and he was deadly serious. “Especially in these times. With the Hasturs gobbling up one Domain after another, Gabriel’s exactly the wrong man to command the Guards; you should force the issue and take them away from him as soon as possible.”

I almost laughed. “Force the issue? Gabriel could tie me up into a bow for his wife’s hair, and do it with one hand tied—” I broke off; that particular figure of speech was, to say the least, unfortunate. “I could hardly fight a duel with him; are you suggesting assassination?”

“I think the Guard would be loyal to you for your father’s sake.”

“Maybe.”

“And if you don’t take over the Guard? What are you intending to do? Go back to Annida and raise horses?” He put all his scorn into the words. Pain flooded through me, remembering how I had wanted to take my son there. “I could probably do worse.”

“Just sit at home and attend to your own affairs while Darkover falls into Empire hands?” he asked scornfully. “You might as well hide behind Tower walls! Why not go back with Jeff to Arilinn—or did they burn that out of you too?”

Rage flooded through me. How dared Dyan, under the pretense of kinship and his friendship for my father, probe old, unhealed wounds this way? “I was taught at Arilinn,” I said deliberately, “to speak of such matters only to those who were concerned in them. Are you monitor, mechanic, or technician, Lord Dyan?”

I had always thought that the phrase black with rage was only a manner of speaking; now I saw it, the blood rising dark and congested in Dyan’s face until I thought he would fall down, stricken by a stroke. Too late, I remembered; Dyan had been briefly in a Tower, and no one, not even my father, knew why he had left it. What I had meant as a freezing rebuke, a way of telling him to keep his distance, had been interpreted as deadly personal insult—an attack on his weakest spot.

“Neither monitor, mechanic nor technician, damn you,” he said at last, his chair going over backward as he rose, “nor power-pole for the forces of Sharra, you damned insolent bastard! Go back to Armida and raise horses, or to a Tower if they’ll have you, or back to the Empire, or to hell if Zandru will take you in, but stay out of Council politics—hear me?”

He turned and strode away, and I stared after him, in shock and dismay, knowing I had made, from a man who had been ready to befriend me, the most dangerous of enemies.

CHAPTER FIVE

« ^ »

The Comyn Tower rose high above the Castle, part of the great sprawling mass that looked down on Thendara, and yet apart from it, older than any part of it; immeasurably old, built of an ancient reddish sandstone which, otherwise, appeared only in the oldest, ruined houses of the Old Town. Regis had never come here before.

He said to the nonhuman servant, “Will you ask the Domna Callina Lindir-Aillard if she will receive Regis Hastur?”

It surveyed him for a long moment, the dark eyes alert and responsive; a humanlike form, a humanlike intelligence, but Regis could not dismiss the feeling that he had been speaking to a large and not altogether friendly dog. He had seen the silver-furred kyrri during his brief training session in Neskaya Tower; but he had never grown used to them. The thing stared at him longer, he thought, than a human would have done. Then it gave a brief graceful nod of its sleek silver head and glided noiselessly away.

Regis wondered, remotely and at the edge of awareness, how the kyrri would deliver its message to Callina. The origin of the kyrri was lost in the Ages of Chaos—had they, after all, been part of that monstrous breeding program which the Hastur-kin had carried on for centuries to fix the Comyn gifts in the families of the Seven Domains? Stranger games than the kyrri had been played with genetics modified by laran power and matrix technology.

Or did they go back further yet, part of the prehistory of Cottman’s star before a lost Terran colony came to call it Darkover? He suspected that even in the Towers they were not sure what the kyrri were or how they had come to be traditional servants of the Tower. He took them for granted, had learned to stay out of range of the painful electric shocks they could give when they were excited or threatened, had been tended by their odd thumbless hands when it would have been unendurable to have near him human telepaths who could read his mind or reach it.

But all this was with the surface of his mind and had nothing to do with the underlying unease which had brought him here; and for a moment he wondered if he should have sought out Callina in the Aillard suite, presuming somewhat on his acquaintance with Linnell—who, like himself, had been fostered at Armida and was foster-sister to Lew and Marius. He had never spoken more than a dozen words to Callina, and those formal and ceremonious. He could have talked to Linnell as to a kinswoman, but Callina was something else again… Keeper at Neskaya and then at Arilinn, then sent here to be under-Keeper in the oldest of the Towers, long inactive, but still sheltering the ancient Ashara, who had not been seen outside the Tower in living memory—nor, Danvan Hastur had told him once, in the living memory of anyone he had ever known; and his grandfather was nearing his hundredth year. He supposed Ashara’s own circle, if she had one, and her attendants, must see her sometime—

She must have been an ordinary woman once; at least as ordinary as any of the Comyn could be said to be ordinary; and not immortal, only long-lived as some of the Hasturs were long-lived. There was chieri blood mixed with the blood of the Domains. Regis knew little of the chieri, but they were said to be immortal and beautiful, still dwelling somewhere in a remote valley where humankind never came. But his own grandfather showed signs of being one of those Hasturs whose reign could span generations …it was a lucky thing for the Comyn, that Danvan Hastur had been there to reign as Regent during these troubled years… Regis found his thoughts sliding into unexpected channels, as if some other mind had briefly touched his own; he started, blinked as if he had fallen asleep on his feet for a moment; his skin crawled, and something touched him— Regis felt a faint nausea deep in his body. A shadow had fallen across the doorway and Callina Aillard was standing there.

He had not seen her come. Lord of Light! Regis swore to himself, sweating; had he stood there, sound asleep on his feet, an idiot’s grin on his face, his clothing disarranged or worse? He felt exposed, desperately uncomfortable; Callina was a Keeper, and uncanny. He managed to get out a formal, “Su serva, Domna…”

She was not now wearing the formal crimson robes she had worn in the Crystal Chamber, the traditional garb which marked out a Keeper as apart, untouchable, sacrosanct. Instead she had on a long, fleecy gown of blue wool, close-cut, high-necked. It was girdled with a copper belt, squared plaques of the precious metal, a large blue semi-precious stone at the center of each plaque; and her hair, coiled low on her neck, was caught into a priceless clasp of copper filigree.

“Come through here, and then we can talk if you wish. Hush; do not disturb the relays.” Her voice was so low it barely stirred the air between them, and Regis followed on tiptoe, as if a normal step would be like a shout. They passed through a large silent chamber, bare, with relay screens staring blank and glassy blue, and other things which Regis did not recognize; before one of the screens a young girl was curled up on a soft seat. Her face had the strange, not-quite-present look of a telepath whose mind was fixed in the relays communicating with other Towers, other telepaths. Regis did not know the girl and Callina of course did not notice her in any way; in fact, only her body was there in the room with them at all.

Callina opened a noiseless door at the far end of the room, and they went through into a small, comfortable private room, with low divans and chairs, and a high window with colored glass, throwing prism lights across the room; but it was dark outside, and if it had not been high summer Regis would have thought it might be snowing. Callina shut the door soundlessly behind them, gestured him to a seat and curled up in one of them herself, tucking her feet under her, and drawing the hem of the blue gown over them. She said in her stilled voice, “Well, Regis, did Old Hastur send you to me to ask if I’d go through the marriage ceremony with Beltran, just to save the Council some embarrassment?”

Regis felt his face burning; had she read his mind while he stood there, asleep on his feet like a gaby? He said truthfully, “No, he didn’t, though he did mention it to me at dinner last night. I don’t think he would have the arrogance actually to ask it, Lady Callina.”

Callina said, sighing, “Derik is an accursed fool. And I had no idea what that foolish brother of mine was doing behind my back, or that Derik was stupid enough to listen to him. Linnell loves Derik; it would break her heart to separate them now. How she can care for such a fool—!” Callina shook her head in exasperation. “Merryl’s never reconciled himself to being born an Aillard, and subject to the female Head of the Domain. And I doubt he ever will.”

“Grandfather did suggest that you might go through the ceremony—no more than that—as a matter of form,” Regis said.

“It might be easier than telling Beltran what he otherwise must say to him,” Callina said, “that this marriage was contrived by a young man greedy for power and a prince too dull to see how he’s being manipulated.”

“Don’t forget,” Regis said dryly, “a Regent too lazy or forgetful to keep a strong hand over his not-too-intelligent princeling.”

“Do you really think it was only laziness or forgetfulness?” Callina asked, and Regis said, “I don’t like to think my grandfather would have plotted against the Head of a Domain—”

Then he remembered a conversation he had had with Danilo three years ago, as fresh as today: so Domain after Domain falls into Hastur hands; the Elhalyn is already under Hastur Regency, then the Aillard with Derik married to Linnell, Regis thought, all the easier if Callina was married off and exiled in distant Aldaran. And he had watched his grandfather’s machinations against the Altons.