Sharra's Exile

“No, he couldn’t plot it,” Callina said, and a faint smile stirred her lips, “but he could sit back while Merryl and that fool of a Derik create such a situation that I must fall into place or seriously embarrass the Comyn.”

“Callina, even Hastur cannot marry off the Head of a Domain without her own consent. And you are Keeper for Ashara; what will she say to that?”

“Ashara…” Callina was silent for a moment, as if the very sound of the name stirred unease in her calm face. She looked troubled. “I seldom see Ashara. She spends much of her time in meditation. I could hold all her power in the Council, but I am afraid—” she stopped herself in mid-sentence. “You are not Tower-trained, Regis?”

He shook his head. “I had enough training so that I could manage my Gift without becoming ill, but I’m not that powerful a telepath, and Grandfather needed me in Thendara, he said.”

“I think you are more of a telepath than you believe, kinsman,” Callina said, with a skeptical look.

The quiet, assured statement somehow made him uneasy; he frowned, ready to protest. “I’m useless in the relays, and they couldn’t teach me much about monitoring—”

“That may be,” she said. “In the Towers we test only for those gifts which are useful to their functions; monitoring, the skill to stay in rapport with a matrix screen for mining and manipulating power— in this day and age, that seems the only kind of laran the Towers find useful. But you are finding out that there is more to your laran than you believed—is it not so, cousin?”

Regis flinched as if she had put her fingers directly on a bruise he did not know he had.

“You had better tell me about it,” she said, “I saw how you had picked up the presence of Sharra, in Council. Let me see your matrix, Regis.”

Apprehensively, Regis touched the small velvet bag, undid the strings, tilted the small blue crystal into his palm. It lay there blue and placid, small distant lights glimmering inside the stone; no sign of fire, no sign of the ravening Form of Fire…

“It’s gone!” he said in surprise.

“And you expected it to be there,” Callina said. “Really, I think you had better tell me everything about it.”

Regis was still staring at his matrix in disbelief. After a moment he managed to blurt out something about it; how Javanne had been trapped by the image, how he had, without thinking about it, freed her mind from the matrix.

“It was like—I watched her, once, unpicking a design that had gone wrong in her tapestry—I think it must have felt like that, though I don’t know how to do tapestry—”

“I do,” Callina said, “and that’s just what it would have felt like.”

“What did I do?” Regis had not known how frightened he was until he heard his own voice trembling. “How could I do that? I thought—it would take a powerful telepath, perhaps a Keeper—to match resonances like that—”

“There have been male Keepers in history,” Callina said abstractedly. “Good ones, powerful ones. Only for the last few hundred years have Keepers been women. And until a few generations ago, they were locked up, treated like sorceresses, sacred virgins, ritual objects of great power and veneration.” Her face was cool, ironic. “Now, of course, in these enlightened days, we know better… a Keeper today need be no more than centerpolar—the center of their matrix circles, the one who holds the energon rings. Regis, have you had enough Tower training to have the faintest idea what I’m talking about?”

“I think so. I know the language, though I don’t think I really understand it all. They never thought I had had enough strength as a telepath to let me work in a circle, and besides, I was needed here. But if I wasn’t even able to work as a monitor, I couldn’t have done a Keeper’s work, not completely untrained, not like that, could I?” His voice cracked, but he was not quite so afraid; Callina had talked about it as a technical problem, not some strange and terrifying flaw in himself.

“But a Keeper’s work, in these days, is no more than any well-trained technician can do, as I said,” she told him. “Kennard was a technician, and he could do almost everything Elorie of Arilinn could do, except actually hold the center of a circle. I think Jeff could do that if he had to, if tradition would let him. And you’re a Hastur, and your mother was Hastur of Elhalyn—what do you know about the Hastur Gift, Regis?”

“Not much,” he said frankly. “When I was a boy, a leronis told me I had not even the ordinary laran.” The memory of that, as always, was multiple layers of pain, the sense that he was unworthy to follow in the steps of the forefather Hasturs who had come before him; and at the same time freedom, freedom from the path laid out for the Hastur sons, a path he must walk whether he would or no…

“But your laran wakened…” she said, half a question, and he nodded. Danilo Syrtis, friend, paxman, sworn brother, and the last known to hold the almost-extinct gift of catalyst telepathy—Danilo had wakened Regis’s laran, given him the heritage of the Comyn; but it was not altogether a blessing, for it had meant the loss of his freedom. Now he must shoulder the burden, take up the heritage of all the Hasturs, and abandon his dream of freedom from those unendurable bonds—

I have been a good Heir to the Hasturs; I have done my duty, commanded in the Guard, sat in the Council, adopted the son of my sister for an Heir in turn. I have even given sons and daughters to the Hastur clan, even though I would not marry the women who bore them to me…

“I know something of those bonds,” she said, and it seemed to him that her passionless voice was sympathetic. “I am a Keeper, Regis, not a Keeper in the new way, only a highly specialized technician, but Keeper in the old way; I was trained under Elorie of Arilinn. She was Dyan’s half-sister, you know… Cleindori, Dorilys of Arilinn, freed the Keepers by reducing the old superstition to what they now call the science of matrix mechanics, and now the Keepers need not give up their lives, and live cloistered, virgin… but I had been trained in the old fashion, Regis, and after I had served at Arilinn and Neskaya, then I came here, just because I was the only woman in the Domains who had been trained in the ancient way. Ashara demanded it, and I, who had had the ancient training and was still virgin, because I had never felt any wish to marry, or leave my post even for a few years to marry or take a lover—” her smile was faint, almost absent. “I was content with my work, nor had I ever met any man who would tempt me to leave my calling. So I was sent, willy-nilly, to serve under Ashara, I who was ruler of a Domain in my own right… simply because I was what I was.” For a moment it seemed that there was terror in her eyes, and he wondered: is she so afraid of Ashara? Fear seemed an unlikely emotion for a Keeper.

What had women to be afraid of? They didn’t have to fight in the coming wars, they would be safe and protected…

She said, “What do you know of the Hastur Gift?” again, insistently.

“Not much, as I told you. I grew up thinking I didn’t even have ordinary laran…”

“But whatever it may be, it’s latent in you,” she mused.

He asked her point-blank, “Do you know what the Hastur Gift is?”

She said, biting her lip, “Ashara must know…” and he wondered what that had to do with it. As if speaking to herself, she said, “The Ardais Gift; catalyst telepathy, the ability to awaken laran in others. The Ridenow make the best monitors because they are empaths… the Gifts are all so muddled, now, by inbreeding, by marriage with non-telepaths, it’s rare to find the full strength of any of the old Gifts. And there is so much superstition and tradition cluttering any clear knowledge of the Gifts… there is a tradition that the original Gift of the Hasturs may have been what was trained into the Keepers: the ability to work with other matrixes, without the elaborate safeguards a Keeper must have. Originally the word Keeper—” she used the casta, teneresteis— meant one who holds, one who guards… a Keeper, in the simplest terms, putting aside a Keeper’s function of working at the center of the energon rings, is one who keeps the other matrixes in the group resonating together; it’s a special skill of working with other matrixes, not just her own. As I say, some high-level technicians can do it. I wonder…” she hesitated a little, then said, “Hasturs, in general, are long-lived and mature late. Ordinary laran waked in you late—you were fifteen, weren’t you? And perhaps that was only a first stirring of the laran you will eventually have. How old are you now? Twenty-one? That would mean your matrix was wakened at about the time as the Sharra troubles—”

“I was in the mountains then; and my matrix was overshadowed, like all the matrixes in the vicinity of the Sharra matrix,” Regis said.

And he had, furthermore, been going through an intolerable personal crisis with the wakening of his heritage; his decision to accept himself as he was, and not as his grandfather and the Comyn wanted him to be; to accept self-knowledge and the unwanted burden of the Hasturs, or to bury it all, live a life without either, an uncomprehending, unburdened life without laran, without responsibility. But now there was this new dimension to his laran, and he could not even guess what further burdens it would demand of him.

“Let me be sure about this,” Callina said. “While you were in the mountains during the Sharra rebellion, your matrix was overshadowed; you could not use it because of—of what I saw in Lew’s at that time: the Form of Fire. But later, when Sharra was offworld—”

“It was clear,” he said, “and I learned to use it, my matrix I mean, without any sign of Sharra. Only when Lew brought the Sharra matrix back to Darkover—”

She nodded. “And yet, you cleared your matrix,” she said. “It will be easy enough to see if you have natural talent for a Keeper’s skills.” She unrolled her own from the tiny leather bag at her throat. She held it naked on her palm and said, “Can you match resonances and touch it without hurting me?”

Regis looked away, gulping; his mind was full of that day in Castle Aldaran, when he had seen Kadarin strip away Lew’s matrix and send Lew to the floor in violent convulsions, a shrieking mindless wreck… He muttered, “I wouldn’t know where to start. And I’d be afraid to try. I could—I could kill you.”

She shook her head. “No, you couldn’t, not here, not safeguarded as I am,” she said. “Try it.”

Her voice was low and indifferent, but it was a command, and Regis, sweating, tried to think himself into the blue crystal that lay in Callina’s palm. He tried to remember how he had gone into Javanne’s mind, reaching out to unpick her mind from the matrix as if it were interwoven threads of tapestry…He felt a strange, unpleasant force against his mind and moved squeamishly against it. Was that Callina? He glanced up, hesitant, unable to reconcile that cold stony force with the smiling, gentle woman before him.

“I—can’t,” he said.

“Forget about me! Match resonances with the matrix, I said!”

This is foolish. I have known Callina most of my life. It is absurd to be afraid of her! He reached out again, tentative, feeling the pulsing life-force, her guarded thoughts—she had the strongest barrier he had ever touched; he supposed it had something to do with being a Keeper. He caught only fragments, the light hurting her eyes from a window, subliminal awareness of him, Regis, he’s a good-looking boy, how tired he was of that reaction from women—Again he felt the pulsing of the matrix, tried to match his breathing against it…A face sketched itself lightly on his mind, cold, distant, making him shiver as if he stood naked in frost… beautiful, terrible, alien— He banished that, too, and the fear, and forced himself into the matrix, feeling the resonance, the cold life of stone, the glowing lights in tune with his breathing, the blood in his veins… He felt himself reach out, not conscious of movement, and closed his fingers over it, lifting it lightly from her hand…distant cold eyes, gray and colorless as metal— Cold seas washing over his mind—

Pain splintered through Callina’s head and Regis quickly let the matrix go, tilting it back into her hand. She blinked and he felt her controlling the stab of pain. She said, “Well, you have the talent for that… but I don’t know how much further it goes. I saw something, like a vision…” She was fumbling for words; she felt him share the fumbling and stopped it cold.

It was not at all like his contact with Javanne; it was not at all like the contact he had had with any of the women who had briefly been his lovers— was it because she was a Keeper, that cold stony alien thing in her mind, a leronis of the old kind, vowed to virginity, to touch no man with even a hint of sexuality? Or had it been Callina at all? His own head was aching.

She said, “If you can do that, and if you could clear a matrix which had touched Sharra—” She bit her lip and he saw the pain move across her face again. “You have a gift we don’t know about. Maybe it can be helpful…” and he picked up the words she was hesitant to speak, perhaps it could help to control the Sharra matrix, free Kennard’s son from the domination of that—that terrible thing—

A second of terror; something greedy, ravenous, reaching out…

Then it was gone, or had it ever been there? “Go and tell Lew Alton that he should bring the Sharra matrix here, where it will be safe…there is no time to lose. Perhaps you can help to free him…”

“I’d be afraid to try,” he said, shaking.

“But you must not be afraid,” she said, demanding. “If you have such a Gift as that…” and Regis felt she was not seeing him as a human being, not as Regis at all, just as a Gift, a strange and puzzling problem for a matrix technician, something to be solved and unraveled. It troubled him; for a moment he wanted to force her to see him as a human, a man standing before a woman; she was all cool aloofness, the woman in her subdued, her features cold and static, and for an instant Regis remembered the curious stony face that had briefly crossed his mind like a vision in the matrix— Was that Callina too? Which was real? Then, so swiftly he could not be sure of it, it was gone, and Callina was only a frail-looking woman, slender, troubled, in a fuzzy blue robe, looking up at him and pressing her temples with her two hands as if they hurt her.

She said, “You must go now, but make sure the Sharra matrix is brought here…” and opened the door into the relay chamber. But as they went through, the young girl curled up before the relay screen raised her head and beckoned, and Callina, motioning Regis to go out into the outer chamber, stole on silent feet to her side. After a few minutes she joined him in the outer chamber. Her face was white, and she looked dazed.

“It is worse than I thought,” she said. “Lilla has had word from the relays— Beltran has set forth. And he is traveling with an escort so great that it could be called an army. He will be here by Festival Night, here at our gates in Thendara. Merciful Avarra,” she whispered, “this will mean war in the Domains! How could Hastur allow this to happen? How could even Merryl do this to me? Does he really hate me that much?”

And Regis had no answer for her.

Because there was nothing else to do, he went back to his own rooms, half intending to face his grandfather, to tell him that Derik’s plan had borne unexpected fruit; that it could indeed mean war in the Domains if Callina refused to do their will. But his grandfather’s steward told him that the Regent had gone to confer with the cortes, and Regis set out for the Alton town house. At least he could convey the message that the Sharra matrix would be safer in the Comyn Tower.

But as he neared the house, he saw a familiar figure in the green and black of the Alton Domain. Lew had changed in the intervening years; Regis had barely recognized him in Council; but his walk was unchanged, and Regis recognized him now, though his back was turned. Regis walked faster to catch up with him, hesitant about reaching out for the old touch of minds.

But Lew must have sensed a presence behind him, for he turned and waited for Regis to come up with him.

“Well, Regis, it’s been a long time.”

“It has, cousin,” said Regis, and took him into a kinsman’s embrace, pressing his cheek to the scarred face. He stood back and smiled. “I was coming to find you, and here you are in my pathway… where are you going so early?”

“Not as early as all that,” Lew said, looking into the sky with a practiced eye. “Not too early for Dyan to offer me a drink, or for a quarrel—damn him!”

“Dyan’s not a good man to quarrel with,” said Regis soberly, “How did you get into that?”

Lew sighed. “I hardly know. Something he said to me—I suppose what he really meant was, go to hell, some version of, you’ve offended me, but it sounded like a declaration of war. I—” he broke off, troubled. “Will you walk with me to my house? I’m uneasy, for no reason at all. But I wanted to talk to you.”

“And I had a message for you from the leronis,” Regis said. He started to speak, then stopped, overcome by an overpowering conviction that he should not speak that ill-omened name, Sharra, here in the street. That was for privacy, and a well-shielded room. Instead he said, “You should move back into the Comyn Castle, into the Alton suite. It’s expected at Council season, and if you’re actually inhabiting the proper quarters, they’ll have a harder time challenging your rights…”

“I’ve thought of that,” Lew said, “The Terrans have a saying; possession is nine points of the law. Though I don’t think I have to worry about Jeff, and the main problem may be to get them to accept Marius as my Heir. I don’t know if he’s even had the regular testing when he was thirteen or so— we haven’t had any time to talk about such things.”

“It may not mean anything,” Regis said, “even if he has; remember, they told me I had no laran at all.” Briefly, there was an old memory of bitterness. “At least if Marius turns out not to have laran, you won’t send him to Nevarsin, will you, to be brought up there?”

“Not unless he wants to go,” Lew said amiably. “A lad who’s of a scholarly turn and wants a good education might enjoy the chance to study there, but Marius, I’ve heard, has already had the best education the Terrans could give. I owe your grandfather thanks for arranging that.”

“He didn’t do it to please you. On the contrary.” It had been, and they both knew it, a way of emphasizing that Marius must seek his destiny among Terrans, not his father’s people. “While you were away, I suppose you learned much of what the Terrans had to offer—”

“Not as much as I’d have liked to; I was in hospitals a good deal of the time,” Lew said, and behind his scarred face Regis sensed much of what Lew would never tell him, pain and final acceptance of mutilation. “But while I was convalescing, yes, I’d have gone mad without something to do. I tried some surveying, map-making; there are parts of the Kilghard Hills, and most of the Hellers, that have never been properly mapped. Better to do it ourselves than to let the Terrans do it because we can’t be bothered to teach our own people measurements. It seems preposterous, that they have a Mapping and Survey unit on Darkover, and we don’t!”

Regis said, “I’ve thought of having my sons educated by the Terrans. Though, I suppose, I’d have to fight grandfather every step of the way. It might be better to have someone who’s had a Terran education—like Marius, or you—educate them, instead of sending them offworld, or into the Trade City—”

Lew said, with that sudden irradiating smile which made Regis, finally and forever, forget the gargoyle scarring of the face, “I’ve lived in the Empire too long; you seem young to me to have a family. But you’re twenty-one now, I should have known Hastur would have married you off long since. I’d be proud to foster your sons. Who is your wife? How many children—”

Regis shook his head. “That’s been a constant argument with Grandfather, too. But I adopted my sister’s son, just before you went offworld—” He paused, hesitant, remembering; Lew had been in no state to remember that. But Lew nodded and said, “I remember. You told me at Aldaran.”

“I have a nedestro son and two daughters,” Regis said. “The oldest is past three; in a couple more years, I shall bring him before the Council. And Mikhail is already eleven. When he is twelve, I shall bring him to Thendara and take his education into my own hands.” He grinned and said, “I’ve had a lot of experience fighting Grandfather on that subject; I suppose I can supervise my son’s education. I won’t let him grow up ignorant.”

“You’re right, we’ve kept to the old ways too long,” Lew said. “I remember my father saying that when he was fifteen, he was an officer in the Guards, but he could neither read nor write, and was proud of it; when he went among the Terrans, they thought him an idiot because no one with a sound mind is allowed to let it lie fallow—”

“The monks at Nevarsin deplore it just as much as a Terran would,” Regis said. “I ought to be grateful to Grandfather that he made certain I had that much education at least.” In Nevarsin monastery, he had at least learned to read and write, done some elementary ciphering, and read such Darkovan history as was available, which wasn’t much.

“Kennard had me taught to read and write, though I must admit I wasn’t tremendously apt at either,” Lew said. “Lying in the hospital, I made up for lost time; but boys are still being brought up as if it was unmanly—I imagine it’s because a scholar hasn’t enough time to master weapons, and of course when the Domains were one constant battleground year after year, that was the most important thing in a boy’s education, to be good with a sword and weapons. Even when I was a boy, there were bandits enough in the Kilghard Hills. For centuries Armida had to be kept like an armed camp. Kennard would never have been criticized, if he’d kept me there to defend his lands instead of sending me into a Tower—”

Regis picked up the unspoken part of that too: that Lew’s work in the Arilinn Tower, his skill at matrix technology, had led to the Sharra rebellion, and to the sword that was not a sword, the sword which concealed Sharra—

And he saw it growing, blossoming behind Lew’s eyes, the look of horror that slid over Lew’s face, felt his own hair rising as the flames flared in his mind…Sharra! He looked at Lew. The smiling man, the kinsman with whom he had been calmly discussing the merits of Darkovan versus Terran education, was gone; Lew’s face was dead white, so that the scars stood out like crimson brands, and his eyes were—blank horror, staring at nothing Regis could see. But they could both see it, the raging, ravening form of the fire-Goddess, straining against the chains, fire-locks tossing high against the sky… She was not in the quiet street around them, she was not in this world at all, but she was there, there in their minds, horribly present for both of them…

Regis breathed hard, forcing himself to control the trembling of his hands, reached out for Lew’s mind, tried to do what he had done with Javanne’s, to pick the fire-form out of the texture of Lew’s thoughts… and found something he had never touched. Javanne had seen Sharra only in his mind; Rafe had only seen the matrix… this was something else, something more dangerous; he saw a face, lean, wolfish, colorless hair, colorless gray eyes, and a woman’s face like a restless flame—

“Kadarin—” he gasped, and never knew whether he had spoken aloud or not. The frozen, static horror left Lew’s eyes. He said grimly, “Come on. I’ve been afraid of this—”

He began to run, and Regis, following, could feel the jolting pain, like fire in Lew’s hand—a hand that was not there, a phantom fire… but real enough to make sweat stand out on Lew’s forehead as he ran, jolting, uneven, his good hand gripping a dagger in his belt—

They turned into an open square, heard shrieks, cries. Regis had never been inside the Alton town house, though he had seen it from the outside. Half a dozen of the uniformed City Guard were fighting in the center of the square; Regis could not see who they were fighting. Lew cried out, “Marius!” and ran up the steps. The door suddenly burst open, and at the same time Regis saw flames shooting from an upper window. One of the Guardsmen officers was trying to organize people into a fire-fighting line, water being passed from hand to hand from the nearest well and from a smaller well in the garden behind the house, but it was utter confusion.

Lew was fighting, on the steps, with a tall man whose face Regis could not see, fighting one-handed with his knife. Gods! He has only one hand! Regis ran, whipping his sword from its sheath; saw Andres struggling with a bandit who wore the garb of the mountains… but what are mountain men doing here in Thendara? The Guards flowed up the steps, an officer shouting to rally them. It was hard, in the press, to tell friend from foe; Regis managed to get himself back to back with Lew, covering him, and for a moment, as his sword went up, he saw a face he recognized—

Gaunt, gray-eyed, lips drawn back in a feral scowl…The man Kadarin looked older, more dangerous. His face was bleeding; Lew had somehow slashed him with his dagger. Behind Regis there was a great cracking roar, like an explosion; then Guardsmen were hurrying everyone down the steps, shouting urgently, and the house buckled slowly and erupted skyward. Regis was driven to his knees by the force of the blast. And then there was a high, clear call, in a woman’s voice, and suddenly the bandits were gone, melting away across the square, evaporating like mountain mist into the labyrinth of streets. Dazed, Regis picked himself up, watching the Guardsmen struggling with the remains of the burning house. A cluster of scared servant women were crying in a corner of the garden. Andres, his jacket unlaced, his face streaked and grimed with smoke, one boot unlaced, limped down the stairs and bent over Lew. Jeff came and helped Lew to sit up.

Lew said in a sick, dazed voice, “Did you see him?”

Regis bent and pressed him back. “Don’t try to sit up.” Blood was flowing down Lew’s face from a cut on his forehead; he tried to wipe it out of his eyes with his good hand. Lew said, “I’m all right,” and tried to struggle to his feet. “What happened?”

Jeff Kerwin stared at the knife in his hand. It was not even bloody. “It all happened so fast. One minute all was quiet, the next, there were bandits all over the place and one of the serving-women shouted that the house was on fire… and I was fighting for my life. I haven’t held a knife since my first year in Arilinn!”

Lew said urgently, “Marius! Gods of hell, Marius! Where is my brother?” Again he started up, disregarding Andres’s restraining hands. The horror was in his eyes again, and Regis could see in his mind the great flaming image, Sharra, rising higher and higher over Thendara… but there was nothing there. The street was quiet, the Guardsmen had the fire out; though there had been something like an explosion in the upstairs floors and there was a great gaping hole in the roof. Regis thought, with wild irrelevancy, that now Lew had no choice but to move into the suite in Comyn Castle which had, from time out of mind, been reserved for the Alton Domain. Jeff was touching, with careful hands, the cut on Lew’s head.

“Bad,” he said, “it will need stitches—”

But Lew struggled away from them. Regis grabbed him; laid his hand urgently over his eyes, and reached out with his mind, struggling to banish the ravening form of fire from his mind— slowly, slowly, the flames died in Lew’s mind and his eyes came back to reality; he staggered, letting himself lean on Jeff’s arm.

“Did you see him?” he asked again urgently. “Kadarin! It was Kadarin! Do they have the Sharra matrix?”

Regis, staggering with that thought, compelled by Lew’s horror, suddenly knew this was what Callina had feared. Lew demanded, “Marius! Marius—” and stopped, his voice strangling and catching in a sob.

Merciful Gods! Not this too! My brother, my brother…He collapsed on the steps like a puppet whose strings are cut, his shoulders shaking with grief and shock. Jeff came and held him as if he were a child; with Andres, somehow they got him up the steps. But Regis stood still, looking at horror beyond horror.

Kadarin had the Sharra matrix.

And Marius Alton lay dead somewhere inside the burning house, with a Terran bullet through his heart.

CHAPTER SIX

« ^ »

Lew Alton’s narrative

Here.” Jeff shoved a mirror into my hand. “Not as good as a Terran medic might have done—I’m out of practice—but it’s stopped the bleeding, anyhow, and that’s what counts.”

I shoved the mirror away. I could—sometimes—make myself look at what Kadarin had left of my face; but not now. But none of it was Jeff’s fault; and he had done his best. I said, trying to be flippant, “Just what I needed—another scar, to balance the top and the bottom of my face.”

He had gone all over me very carefully, to make sure that the blow to the head had left no aftereffects; but the cut was only a surface wound and fortunately had missed my eye. I had a headache roughly the size of Comyn Castle, but otherwise there seemed to be no damage.

Through it all was the haunting cry that would not be silenced, like a roaring in my mind; … to Darkover, fight for your brother’s rights… and now would never be stilled. Marius was gone, and my grief was boundless; not only for the little brother I had lost, for the man he was beginning to be, that I would never, now, know. Grief, and guilt too, for while I had stayed away, Marius was neglected, perhaps, but alive. He might have lost the Domain; but as a Terran he might have made a good life somewhere, somehow. Now life and choice were gone. (And beneath grief and guilt a deeper layer of ambivalence I would not let myself see; a trickle of relief, that I need never, now, risk that frightful testing for the Alton gift, never risk death for him as my father had risked it for me…)

“You have no choice, now, but to move into the Alton apartments in Comyn Castle,” Jeff said, and I nodded, with a sigh. The house, at least for the moment, was uninhabitable. Gabriel had come, with the final crew of Guards who had gotten the fire out. He offered to arrange for men to guard the ruins and prevent looting until we could get workmen to repair the roof and make the place weatherproof again. Every room was filled with smoke, furniture lying blackened and ruined. I tried without success to close my eyes and nostrils to the sight and smell. I have… a horror of fire, and now, I knew, somewhere at the back of my mind, if I gave it mental lease, the form of fire was there, raging, ravening, ready to destroy…and destroy me with it.

Not that I cared a damn, now—

Andres looked twenty years older. He came to me now and said, hesitantly, “Where—where shall we take Marius?”

It was a good question, I thought; a damned good question, but I didn’t know the answer. There had never been any room for him in the Comyn Castle, not since he was old enough to notice his existence; they had never noticed it, in life, and now, in death, they would not care.

Gabriel said quietly, “Have him carried to the chapel in Comyn Castle.” I looked up, startled and ready to protest, but he went on: “Let him have that much in death, kinsman, even though he didn’t have it in life.”

I looked on his dead face only once. The bullet that had smashed out his life had somehow left his face unmarked; and he looked, dead, like the little brother I remembered.

Now indeed I was alone. I had laid my father to rest on Vainwal, near my son, who had never lived except in the dreams I had shared with Dio before his birth. Now my brother would lie in an unmarked grave, as the custom was, on the shores of the Lake of Hali, where all the Hastur-kin were laid to rest. A thousand legalities separated me from Dio.

I should never have come back here! I stared at the lightly falling snow in the street outside, and realized that it did not matter where I was, here or elsewhere. Andres, crushed and old; Jeff, who had left his adopted world behind for Darkover; and Gabriel, who had his own family, but who, now, in default of any other, was Alton. Let him have the Domain; I should have sent for Marius, taken him away before it came to this…

No. That way lay only endless regret, a time when I would listen and hunger for my father’s voice in my mind because it was all I had left of the past, live complacently with ghosts and grief and guilt… no. Life went on, and someday, perhaps, I would give a damn— for now there were two things that must be done.

“Kadarin is somewhere in the City,” I said to Gabriel. “He must be found. I can’t possibly emphasize it enough—how dangerous he is. Dangerous as a banshee, or a wolf maddened by hunger—”

And he had the Sharra matrix! And somehow he might manage to raise it again, the raging form of fire which would break the Comyn Castle and the walls of Thendara like kindling-sticks in a forest fire…

And there was worse…I too had been sealed to Sharra…

I could not speak of that to Gabriel. Not even to Jeff. I tried to tell myself; Kadarin could do nothing, nothing alone. Even if he managed to raise the Sharra forces, alone or with Thyra… who must, somehow, be alive too— the fires would turn on them and consume them, as they had burned and ravaged me. I could feel my hand burning again, burning in the fires of Sharra— could feel it now, the burning that the Terran medics had called phantom pain— haunted, I told myself at the edge of hysteria, haunted by the ghost of my father and the ghost of my hand…and stopped myself, hard.

That way I could go mad, too. I said grimly to Andres, “Get me something to eat, find us all some dinner. Then we will take Marius to the chapel at Comyn Castle, and go there for the rest of the Council. The caretakers there will be Alton men; they’ll know me as my father’s Heir. And there’s one more person who has to be told. Linnell.”

Andres’s eyes softened. “Poor Linnie,” he muttered. “She was the only person in Comyn who cared about him. Even when no one else remembered he was alive, he was always her foster-brother. She sent him Festival gifts, and went riding with him on holidays— She had promised him, when they were children, that if he married first she would be his wife’s bride-woman and if she married first he should give her away. She came here last not a tenday ago, to tell him that her wedding with Derik had been set, and they were laughing together and talking about the wedding—” and the old man stopped, quite overcome.

I had not seen Linnell to speak to since I came back. I had thought, when I went to speak with Callina about making the Sharra matrix safe, I would pay Linnell my respects— she was nearer to Marius’s age, but we had been friends, brother and sister. But there had been no time. Now time was running out for us; and I must speak with Callina too, not only as kinswoman but as Keeper.

I too had been sealed to Sharra… they could draw me into that unholy thing, at any moment—

I bent over Marius’s body; took the little dagger from his waist. I had given it to him when he was ten years old; I had not realized that he had borne it all these years. In the years on Vainwal, I had not remembered to wear side-arms. I slipped it into the empty sheath in my boot, startled at how easily the gesture came after all these years.

Before Sharra can draw me again into itself, this dagger will find my heart…

“Take him to the Castle,” I said, and followed slowly behind the small, weary procession through the lightly falling summer snow. I was almost glad for the roaring pain in my head, which kept me from thinking, too much, about Linnell’s face when I must tell her of this death.

Marius rested that night in the Comyn Castle, in the chapel, beneath the old stone arches, the paintings on the wall; from her silent niche the blessed Cassilda, clad in blue and with a starflower in her hand, watched forever over her children. My father had cared little for the Gods, and brought me up the same way. Marius in death was closer to the Comyn than ever he had been in life. But I looked up at the Four Gods portrayed at the four corners of the Chapel—Avarra, dark mother of birth and death, Aldones, Lord of Light, Evanda, bright mother of life and growth, Zandru, the dark lord of the Nine Hells…and, like pressing a sore tooth, felt the burning touch of Sharra somewhere in my mind—

Sharra was bound in chains, by Hastur, who was the son of Aldones, who was the Son of Light—

Fables, fairy tales to frighten children or console them in the dark. What had the Gods to do with me, who bore Sharra’s fires like a raging torrent that might some day burn out my brain… as she had burned my hand away—

But as I went out of the Chapel, I thought: the fire is real, real enough to burn away the city of Caer Donn, real enough to destroy Marjorie, to sear my hand to scars that would never heal; and in the end to destroy me, cell-deep, so that even the child I fathered came forth a monstrous, nonhuman thing… that much is no fable. Something must lie behind the legends. If there is any answer anywhere under the four moons, it must be known to the Keepers, or it will not be known anywhere. As I came out, I looked up at the night sky, which had cleared somewhat, and at the darkness of the Tower behind the Castle. Ashara, oldest of the Keepers on Darkover, might know the answer. But first I would see my brother buried. And I must go and tell his foster-sister, so that she could weep for him the tears I could no longer shed.

Marius was buried two days later. It was a small procession that rode to Hali; Gabriel and I, Linnell, Jeff and Andres; and, to my surprise, Lerrys Ridenow. At my questioning look he said roughly, “I was fond of the boy. Not as you might think, damn you, but he was a good lad, and he didn’t have many kinsmen who’d give him such a kind word as they’d throw to a dog. We needed him as Heir to Alton; he would have had some sense on the Council, and all the Gods know, in these days we can use some plain good sense!”

He said something like that at the graveside, where it was traditional to speak good memories of the dead; words that would transcend grief and give everyone something else to remember of the one who was buried. I remembered my father’s bitterness when my mother had not been buried here; it was almost my first memory. Elaine gave two sons to the Comyn, and yet they would not let her body rest among the children of Hastur. Now, standing by the grave of my mother’s son, who had been accepted in death though never in life, I found myself remembering my father’s dying cry, ripping through my mind; but afterward… afterward, too, I had heard his last thought, the surprised cry of joy; Elaine! Yllana… beloved! Had his dying mind seen a vision, was there that kind of mercy in death, or was there, somehow, something beyond death? I had never thought so; death was the end. Yet, though my father had never believed, either, but in his last moments he had cried out to greet someone, something, and his last emotion had been astonishment and joy. What was the truth? Marius, too, even though his death had been terribly sudden, had looked peaceful.

Perhaps, then, somewhere, in spite of the galaxy of stars that lay between, somewhere beyond time and space, Marius knew that my father’s last thought had been of him….fight for your brother’s rights… or even that now, somewhere, he was with the mother whose life he had taken in birth…

No, this was morbid nonsense, fables to comfort the bereaved.

Yet, that cry of joy, delight…

I thought, cynically, Well, I will know when I am dead, or I will never know the difference.

Lerrys finished his short speech and stepped back. I could not bring myself to speak, save for a brief sentence or two. “My father’s last words or thoughts were of his younger son. He was greatly loved, and it is my sorrow that he never knew it.”

Linnell wore a dark cloak, thick gray, almost too heavy for her slight body. She said, in a voice thick with tears, “I never knew my own brothers; they were fostered away from me. When Marius and I were very little, before we knew we were boy and girl, or what that means, he said to me once, ‘Linnie, I’ll tell you what, you can be my brother and I’ll be your sister.’ ” Even weeping, she laughed through it.

No doubt, I thought, Marius was more a brother to her than that arrogant young scamp Merryl!

It was near noon; the red sun stood high in the sky, casting sharp shadows across the clouds which covered the surface of the Lake of Mali. Here on this shore, so legend among the Comyn said, the forefather of all the Comyn, Hastur, son of the Lord of Light, had fallen to earth, and here he had met with Cassilda the Blessed, and here she had borne the son who had fathered all of the Comyn… what was the truth of the legend? The hills rose beyond Hali, distant, shadowed, and above them a small shadow of moon, pale blue in the colored sky. And on the far shore the chapel of Hali, where rested the sacred things of the Comyn, from the days when the fullest powers of their minds were known… we were a shadow; a remnant; an echo of the powers that had been known in the Seven Domains in the old days. Once many Towers had risen over the Domains, telepaths in the relays had sped messages back and forth more quickly than the mechanical signals of the Terran Empire; the powers of mind allied to matrix had flown air-cars, brought metal to the ground from deep within the core of the planet, look deep within the body and cure disease, heal wounds, control the minds of animals and birds, look deep within the cell plasm and know whether the unborn child would be gifted with laran of a specific kind… yes, and in those days there had been wars fought with strange and terrible weapons, ranging into other dimensions, and of these weapons Sharra was one of the least… somewhere within the white gleaming walls of that chapel were there other weapons, one which could be effective against Sharra…?

I would never know. In the days of the Compact, knowledge of those weapons had been destroyed, too, and perhaps it was as well that it should be so. Who could have foreseen, in those days, that descendants of the Comyn should somehow discover the ancient talisman of Sharra, and raise that raging fire?

I looked around the shores of the Lake with a sudden shiver.

Kadarin! Kadarin had the Sharra matrix, and he would try, perhaps, to force me back within it—

In the old days at Aldaran, Kadarin and Beltran had raised dozens of fanatical believers, ready to let their own raw emotion rage forth, be drawn into the raging fires of Sharra, feeding all that raw hungry mind power into the destroying flames to be loosed on the city… could he bring such a force to Thendara, could he recapture me to loose that destroying power in my mind?… I trembled, looking at the hills, feeling that somehow I was being watched, that Kadarin lurked somewhere, waiting to seize me, force me back to the power-pole of Sharra, feeding that unholy flame!

And Sharra will rise and destroy and burn me wholly away in ftre…all my hate, all my rage and torment…

Rafe Scott was not at the graveside. Yet he had been one of my brother’s few friends. Had Kadarin seized him too, drawn him back into Sharra? Dizziness seized me, I saw men riding, an army on the road, marching on Thendara—

Andres’s hand on my shoulder steadied me. “Easy, Lew,” he muttered. “There’s not much more. We’ll be away from here soon, and then you can rest.”

Rest be damned! With all this closing in on us, Sharra’s matrix free and in Kadarin’s hands once more, there would be no rest for me for some time.

Hoofbeats! I tensed, my hand gripping the hilt of the light ceremonial sword I had been persuaded to wear for this occasion. Kadarin with his rabble, ready to capture me and drag me into slavery to Sharra once more? But the riders came slowly to the graveside, and I saw they wore the uniform of the Castle Guard. Regis Hastur slid from his horse and came slowly to the graveside. I had wondered what had happened to him; he had been there when Marius died and the house was burned…

He stood for a moment over the grave and said quietly, “I did not know Marius well, and it is my sorrow. But once I heard him speak, in a tavern, the kind of words which we need in Council. His death is upon all our heads here; and here I promise that I will have the courage to speak the words he never had a chance to say in Council.”

He looked up expectantly, and behind Regis I saw the tall, lean figure of Dyan Ardais, in the ceremonial gray and black of his Domain. He came to the graveside, and looked at the open grave; but he did not speak, merely picked up a handful of soil and cast it quietly into the grave. Then, after a long silence, he said, “Rest well, kinsman; and may all the folly and wrong which brought you to birth rest here with you.” He turned away from the grave and said, “Lord Regis persuaded me that it was well to guard you; in these days there are enemies and Comyn should not ride unguarded. We will escort you in safety back to the Castle.”

In silence, then, I turned from my brother’s grave, and we went to our horses. As Lerrys mounted, I said quietly, “It was good of you to come, kinsman. Thank you.”

His fair face darkened and he said fiercely, “It wasn’t for you, damn you, it was for Marius!” He turned his back on me, pulling himself up, with a dancer’s agile movement, into the saddle. He wore Darkovan dress and was heavily cloaked against the fierce cold of the hills, in wool and leather, not the elegant silks and synthetics of the pleasure worlds.

I hauled myself, awkwardly, one-handed, into the saddle. Regis said from his horse, “I would have come sooner. But I felt it necessary to get leave to bring guards. I never had a chance to tell you; Beltran is on the road, and he brings what could almost be called an army. Beltran has no love for you. And if Kadarin’s at large—”

I said, grimacing, “Don’t tell me Hastur wouldn’t be relieved if Beltran caught up with me—or I broke my neck!”

He looked down at his saddlehorn. Then he said very quietly, “I am Hastur too, Lew. My grandfather and I have had differences before this, and we will have them afterward. But you must believe me: he would not wish you to fall into Kadarin’s hands. That would be true no matter what he felt about you personally. And he bears you no ill will. He was stupid and wrong-headed about Marius, perhaps. But whatever he may have felt, you are Lord Armida, and head of the Alton Domain, and there is nothing he can do about that; and he will accept it with such grace as he must. Your father was his friend.”

I looked away across the hills. Danvan Hastur had never been unkind to me. I took up the reins, and we rode, side by side, for a little while. Mist from the Lake of Hali floated in wisps on our trail, covered Marius’s silent grave, where he lay among the Comyn before him. Their troubles were over; mine lay ahead of me, on the trail. My hand was busy about the reins; I could not let it go to grip at the hilt of my sword, and I felt uneasy, as if somewhere at the back of my mind I could see Kadarin, surrounded by his fanatics, could see Thyra’s strange golden eyes so much like Marjorie’s. Where was Rafe? Had Kadarin seized on him too? Rafe feared Sharra, almost as much as I, but could he stand against Kadarin?

Could I? Would I let them force me back again into those fearful fires? I had not had the courage to die, before— Would I live, craven, in Sharra, without courage to die…?

Gabriel was riding at the head of the Guards, and in the small detachment I noticed he had brought both his sons; the slender, dark, gray-eyed Rafael, like a younger, darker Regis, and sturdy young Gabriel, whose reddish hair made me think of my father. I supposed that sooner or later I would have to adopt one of them as my Heir, since I would father no more sons—

I heard Regis speaking and realized I had drifted very far away.

“Do you know if Marius had a son, Lew?”

“Why, no,” I said. “If he did, he never told me—” But there had been so many things he had never had any time to tell me. He had not been a boy, though Lerrys had called him so; when he died he was twenty, and at that age I had been three years at Arilinn, three years as cadet and officer in the Guard, had sold myself into slavery and fire in Sharra. “I suppose it’s possible. Why?”

“I’m not sure,” Regis said. “But my foster-son, Mikhail— Javanne’s son—told me that his brother Gabriel said something about a rumor going round among the Guards, just before Council. Everybody knew, of course, that the Alton Domain was to be declared forfeit, and—forgive me, Lew— that they wouldn’t hear of Kennard’s younger son taking it, because of his Terran education. But that the Council, or somebody, had found an Alton child, and they were going to declare it Head of the Domain, under Hastur Regency. Something of that sort. You know what sort of rumors get around in the cadet corps; but this seemed more persistent than most.”

I shook my head. “I suppose it’s not impossible Marius could have fathered a son. Or, for that matter, that my father might have left a bastard or two; he didn’t tell me everything about his life. Though, I should think, I would have known—”

“It’s possible that someone might have had his child, from a casual love affair, and not told anyone till he was gone,” Regis said, and I caught the unspoken part of that, that there were women enough who would enjoy the status of bearing a laran child to Comyn, he should know—

“And,” I finished, “no woman would dare lie about it, not to a telepath, not to Comyn. But I’d think if it were true, your grandfather would have acted before this.”

“I’d think so too,” Regis said, and raised a hand to motion to Gabriel Lanart-Hastur to ride beside us. I think I myself would have questioned the boys, who had passed the rumor around, but perhaps Regis thought it beneath his dignity to interrogate boys in their teens. When Gabriel came riding close to us he said, “Brother-in-law, what’s this tale going about in the cadets about an Alton child?”

“I don’t know anything about it, Regis. Rafael said something, and the way I heard it, it was some bastard son of my own,” said Gabriel good-humoredly, while I found myself thinking: if I had a sharp-tongued wife like the lady Javanne, I would make damned sure she never found out anything about any bastard child I had fathered! Gabriel’s smile was rueful. “I could assure my son that it was none of mine, but there are other Alton kinsmen in the Domains. No doubt, if there’s anything to it, whoever’s backing him will bring the child forward when Council meets again.” His eyes apologized to me as he said, “You’re not all that popular anymore, Lew. The Guardsmen would follow you to hell—they still talk about how good an officer you were—but that’s a long way from being Warden of Alton.”

And for a moment I was heartily sick of the whole business. It occurred to me that the best thing to do, when I reached Thendara, was to come to some understanding with Gabriel about the Domain, then find a ship and take passage out, away from Darkover and Sharra and all of it… but I thought of Armida, far in the Kilghard Hills, and my homeland there. And I remembered, like a pain gripping me in the vitals.

Kadarin had the Sharra matrix. Twice I had tried to leave it behind, on another planet. Twice I had been drawn back to it… I was slave and exile for Sharra and it would never let me go, and somehow I must fight it and destroy it…fight Kadarin, too, if need be, and all his wild-eyed madman and followers—

Fight them? Alone? As soon face, with my single ceremonial sword, and my one hand, all of Beltran’s armies… and I was no legendary Comyn hero, armed with a magical spell-sword out of legend!

I twisted my head, looking back toward the Lake of Hali and the low, gleaming chapel on the shore. I could feel Regis and Gabriel thinking that I was saying farewell to the last resting place of my brother. But instead I was wondering if, in all the history of the Comyn, there was a weapon against Sharra.

Ashara must know. And if she knew, perhaps, my kinswoman Callina would know.

I said, “Gabriel, Regis, excuse me, I must go and speak to Linnell. She loved Marius and she is crying again.” I rode forward, feeling the prickling again in my back as if I were being watched, and I knew, that from somewhere, whether with some small band of ruffians or through the matrix, Kadarin was watching me… but because Regis and Dyan had brought a detachment of the Guard, with swordsmen, he would not, quite, dare attack us now.

He had access to Terran weapons. Marius had died with a bullet through his head. But even so, he could not face a whole detachment of Guardsmen… so for the moment I was safe.

Maybe.

Disregarding the pricking of warning, I rode forward to speak to Linnell, to try to comfort my foster-sister.

Linnell’s eyes were red and her face blotched, but she had begun to look peaceful again. She tried to smile at me.

“How your head must ache, Lew—it’s a bad cut, isn’t it? Jeff told me he put ten stitches in it. You should be in bed.”

“I’ll manage, little sister,” I said, using the word bredilla as if she were the child she had been. But Linnell must be two or three and twenty now, a tall poised young woman, with soft brown hair and blue eyes. I supposed she was pretty; but in every man’s life there are two or three women—his mother, his sisters—who simply don’t register on his mind as women. Linnell was, always, no more to me than my little sister. Before her big, sympathetic eyes, I wished suddenly that I could tell her about Dio. But I would not burden her with that dreadful story; she was still sick with grief about Marius.

She said, “At least he was buried as a full member of the Comyn, with all honors; even Lord Ardais came to do him honor, and Regis Hastur.” I started to say something bitter— what good is the honor of the dead?—then held my peace; if Linnell could find comfort in that, I was glad. Life went on.

“Lew, would you be very upset if Derik and I were married soon after Festival?”

“Upset? Why, breda? I would be glad for you.” That marriage had been in the air since Linnie put away her dolls. Derik was slow-witted and not good enough for her, but she loved him, and I knew it.

“But—I should still do mourning for—for Kennard, and for my brother—”

I reached over, clumsily, letting go of the reins for a moment, to pat her on the shoulder. “Linnie, if Father or Marius is anywhere where they can know about it—” which I did not believe, at least not most of the time, but I would not say that to Linnell—“do you think their ghosts could be jealous of your happiness? They loved you and would be glad to see you happy.”

She nodded and smiled at me.

“That’s what Callina told me; but she is so unworldly. I wouldn’t want people to think I wasn’t paying proper respect to their memory—”

“Don’t you worry about that,” I said. “You need kinsmen and family, and now more than ever; without foster-father or brother, you should have a husband to look after you and love you. And if anyone says anything suggesting you are not properly respecting them, you send that person to me and I will tell them so myself.”

She blinked back tears and smiled, like a rainbow through cloud. “And you are the Lord of the Domain now,” she said, “and it is for you to say what mourning shall be held. And Callina is Head of my Domain. So if both of you have given permission, then I will tell Derik. We can be married the day after Festival. And at Festival, Callina’s to be handfasted to Beltran—”

I stared at her, open-mouthed. In spite of all, was the Council still bent on this suicidal madness?

I must certainly see Callina, and there was no time for delay.

Andres asked me, as we rode through the gates of the city, if I would come and speak to the workmen who had been hired to repair the town house. I started to protest—I had always obeyed him without question—and suddenly I recalled that I need not, now, even explain myself.

“You see to it, foster-father,” I said. “I have other things I must do.”

Something in my voice startled him; he looked up, then said in a queerly subdued voice, “Certainly, Lord Armida,” and inclined his head in what was certainly a bow. As he rode away, I identified what had been in his tone; he had spoken to me as he had always spoken to my father.

Linnell’s eyes were still red, but she looked peaceful. I said, “I must see Callina, sister. Will she receive me?”

“She’s usually in the Tower at this time, Lew. But you could come and dine with us—”

“I would rather not wait that long, breda. It’s very urgent.” Even now I could still feel the prickling, as if Kadarin were watching me behind some clump of trees or from some dark and narrow alleyway. “I will seek her out there.”

“But you can’t—” she began, then stopped, remembering: I had spent three years in a Tower.

I had never been in the Comyn Tower before, though I had come to the Castle every summer of my life except for the Arilinn years. I had spoken to the technicians in the relays, but I did not think there were many living telepaths who had actually stepped through the insulating veils. And even among those who kept the relays going, I did not think there were many who had ever seen the ancient Keeper, Ashara. Certainly my father said she had not been seen in the memory of anyone he had ever known. Maybe, I thought, there was no such person!

Perhaps Callina knew I was coming; she met me and beckoned me softly through the relay chamber—I noted that there was a young girl at the screen, but I did not recognize her— and through an inner chamber into what must have been the ancient matrix laboratory—at least that is what we would have called it at Arilinn. I could believe it had been built long before that, in the Ages of Chaos or before; there were matrix monitor screens, and other equipment the use of which I had not the foggiest notion. I found I did not like to think of the level of matrix it would have taken to use some of these things. I could feel the soothing vibrations of a specially modulated telepathic damper which filtered out telepathic overtones without inhibiting ordinary thought. There was an immense panel about whose molten-glass shimmer I could not even make guesses; it might have been one of the almost-legendary psychokinetic screens. Among all these things were the ordinary prosaic tools of the matrix mechanic’s art; cradles, lattices, blank crystals, a glass-blower’s pipe, screwdrivers and soldering irons, odd scraps of insulating cloth. Beyond them she motioned me to a seat.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she said, “ever since I heard that they got away with the Sharra matrix. I suppose it was Kadarin?”

“I didn’t see him,” I said, “but no one else could have touched it without killing me. I’m still here—worse luck!”

“You’re still keyed into it, then? It’s an illegal matrix, isn’t it?”

“It’s not on the screens at Arilinn,” I said. They had found that out when Marjorie died. But this was an older Tower; some memory of it might linger here. She said, “If you can give me the pattern, I’ll try to find it.” She led me to the monitor screen, flashing with small glimmers, one for every known and licensed matrix on Darkover. She made a gesture I remembered; I fumbled one-handed with the strings of the matrix crystal around my neck, averted my eyes as it dropped into her hand, seeing the crimson fires within…It still resonated to the Sharra matrix; it was no good to me.

And while I bore it, anyone with the Sharra matrix could find me… and it seemed, though it could have been my imagination, that I could feel Kadarin, watching me through it…

She took it from me, matching resonances so carefully that there was no shock or pain, and laid it in a cradle before the screen. The lights on the screen began to wink slowly; Callina leaned forward, silent, intent, her face shut-in and plain. At last she sighed. “It’s not a monitored matrix. If we could monitor and locate it, we might even destroy it—though destroying a ninth-level matrix is not a task I am eager to attempt, certainly not alone. Perhaps Regis—” she looked thoughtfully at my matrix, but she did not explain and I wondered what Regis had to do with it. “Can you give me the pattern? If the others—Kadarin, Thyra—were using matrixes which resonated to Sharra—”

“Thyra, at least, was a wild telepath. I don’t know where she got her matrix, but I’m sure it’s not a monitored one,” I said. I supposed she had it from old Kermiac of Aldaran; he had been training telepaths back in those hills since before my father was born. If he had lived, the whole story of the Sharra circle would have been different. I tried to show her the pattern against the blank screen, but only blurs swirled against the blue surface, and she gestured me to take up my own matrix and put it away.

“I shouldn’t have let you try that, so soon after a head injury. Come through here.”

In a smaller, sky-walled room, I relaxed, in a soft chair, while Callina watched me, aloof and reflective. She said at last, “Why did you come here, Lew? What did you want from me?”

I wasn’t sure. I did not know what, if anything, she could do about the ghost-voice in my mind, my father’s voice. Whether a true ghost or a reverberation from brain-cells injured in his dying grip on my mind, it would fade away at last; of that I was certain. Nor could she do anything much about the fact that the Sharra matrix was in the hands of Kadarin and Thyra, and that they were here in Thendara. I said harshly, “I should never have brought it back to Darkover!”

“I don’t know what choice you had,” she pointed out reasonably. “If you are keyed into it—”

“Then I shouldn’t have come back!”

And this time she did not argue with me, only shrugged a little. I was here on Darkover and so was the matrix. I said, “Do you suppose Ashara knows anything about it? She goes back a long way…” and paused, hesitant. Callina’s voice rebuked: “No one asks to see Ashara!”

“Then maybe it’s time they did.”

Her voice was still, stony and remote. “Perhaps she would consent to see you. I will inquire.” For a moment she was nothing like the girl I had known, my cousin and kinswoman. I was almost afraid of her.

“There must have been a time when telepaths knew how to handle things like the Sharra matrix. I know it was used by the forge-folk to bring metal to their forges; and it was used as a weapon. If the weapon wasn’t destroyed, why would they have destroyed the defenses against it?”

Callina started a little, as if she had been very far away and the sound of my voice had brought her back from whatever distance she had inhabited. I remembered that look on Marjorie’s face, the heart-breaking isolation of a Keeper, alone even at the center of a great circle. Somehow it made me lonely for my days at Arilinn. Callina and I had not been there at the same time, but she was part of it, she remembered, we were comfortable together.

“What can Kadarin do with the matrix?” she asked.

“Nothing, himself,” I said, “but he has Thyra to control it.” Even at the beginning, he had wanted Thyra to control the matrix; she was more pliant to his will than Marjorie, who had, at the last, rebelled and tried to close the gate into that other world or dimension from which Sharra came into this world in raging fire… I said, “If he wanted to, he could burn Thendara around the heads of the Comyn, or go to the Trade City and bring one of their damned spaceships down out of the sky! The matrix is that powerful; and the thing is, he doesn’t have enough telepaths to control it as if it were a proper ninth-level matrix. Which it isn’t: it’s something unholy, a weapon, a force—” I stopped myself. Like Callina I had been Tower-trained, I should know better. Old tales made matrixes magical, called them gates to sorcery and alien magic. I knew the science of which they were a part. A matrix is a tool, no more good or evil than the one who uses it; a device to amplify and direct the laran, the special hyper-developed psychic powers of the Comyn and those of their blood. The superstitious might speak of Gods and magical powers. I knew better. And yet the form of fire blazed in my mind, a woman, tall and imposing, overshadowing… and now she bore Marjorie’s face. Marjorie, competent and unafraid in the midst of the rising illusion-flames of Sharra, and then—then crumpling, screaming in agony as the flames struck inward—my hand burning like a torch beneath the matrix—

Callina reached out one hand, lightly touched my forehead, where Jeff had stitched the sword cut. Under her touch the fire went out. I found that I was kneeling at her feet, my head bent under the weight of it.

She said “But would he dare? Surely no sane man—”

I said, hearing the bitterness in my own voice, “I’m not sure he’s a man—and I’m even less sure he is sane.”

“But what could he hope to accomplish, unless he is simply mad for destruction?” she asked. “Surely he would not risk the woman—Thyra, you called her?—She was his—” she hesitated, and I shook my head. I had never understood the relationship between Kadarin and Thyra. It was not the ordinary relationship of lovers, but something at once less and more. I bent my head; I too had been glamored by the dark, glowing beauty of Thyra, so like and so unlike Marjorie. I had chosen. And Marjorie had been destroyed…I turned on her in rage. She said softly, “I know, Lew. I know.”

“You know! Thank the Gods you don’t know—” I flung at her, in a blind fury. What could she know of that, that raging fire, that fury, ravening between the worlds—

But under her steady eyes my rage dissolved. Yes, she did know. On that dreadful day when I had turned on Kadarin with the desperation of a man who knows himself already condemned to death, smashed the gate between the worlds and closed away Sharra from this world, I had thrust forth with my last strength and brought Marjorie and myself between the world-gates. The Terrans called it teleportation. I had brought us both to the matrix chamber in Arilinn, both of us terribly wounded, Marjorie dying. Callina had fought to save her; Marjorie had died in her arms. I bent my head, haunted again by that memory burned into my brain; Callina, holding Marjorie in her arms, the moment of peace that had descended in that last minute over her face. Yes, she knew.

I said, trying to think about it calmly without going into the horror again, “I don’t think, if he was sane, he would risk Thyra; but I’m not sure he understands the danger, and if the matrix has them both in its grip— I don’t know if he would have any choice.” I knew how the matrix could control a worker, how it had seized control even from our carefully balanced circle, going forth to do its ravening work of destruction.

“It—wants to destroy,” I said unsteadily. “I think it was made in the Ages of Chaos, to burst forth from control, to kill as much as it could, burn, destroy…I don’t think anyone alive now knows how to control it.” For years, I knew, the Sharra matrix had lain harmlessly on the altars of the forge-folk, a talisman invoking their fire Goddess, to light their altars. To bring fire to their forges and fires, and the Goddess within, content with her worshippers and their fires, had not been roused into this world—

And I had loosed it on Darkover; I, a complacent puppet in Kadarin’s hands. And he had used my own rage, my own lust, my own inner fires…

This was superstitious nonsense. I drew a deep breath and said, “In the Ages of Chaos there were many such weapons, and somewhere there must be defenses, or the memory of defenses against them. Maybe, then, Ashara would know.” But would she care, if she had withdrawn so far from the world?

Callina picked up the unspoken question and said, “I do not know. I—I am afraid of Ashara—” I could see her shaking. She said, “You think I am here, safe, isolated—out of the troubles in the Council and the Comyn—Merryl hates me, Lew, he will do anything to keep me from having power in Comyn Council. And now there is this alliance with Aldaran—you do know Beltran is bringing an army to the very gates of Thendara, and if at the last, they refuse him this alliance—do you suppose he knows about Sharra, or will use it as a weapon?”

I didn’t know. Beltran was my kinsman; there had been a time when I had trusted him, even as I had trusted and liked Kadarin. But Sharra had seized on him, too, and I still felt that was why he had this lust for power… and he, too, would have been alerted to its presence.

I said, “They can’t marry you off to Beltran, just like that! You are Head of a Domain and Keeper—”

“So I thought,” she said dispassionately. “But if I were not Head of a Domain, he would not want me—I do not think it is me he wants. If he simply wanted to marry into the Comyn, there are other women as close to the center of power; Derik’s sister Alanna was widowed last year. As for my being Keeper—I do not think the Council wants a Keeper in power there, either. And if I marry—” she shrugged. “There’s the end of that.”

I remembered the old stories that a Keeper maintains her power only through her chastity. It’s drivel, of course, superstitious rubbish, but like all superstitions, it has a core of truth. Laran, in a Comyn telepath, is carried in the same channels as the sexual forces of the body. The main side effect, for men, is that prolonged or heavy work in the matrixes temporarily closes off the channels to sex, and the man undergoes a prolonged period of impotence. It’s the first thing a man, working in the Towers, has to get used to, and some people never learn to handle it. I suppose for many people it would seem a high price to pay.

A woman has no such physical safeguard. While a woman is working at the center of a circle, holding the tremendous forces of the amplified linked matrixes, she must keep the physical channels clear for that work, or she can burn up like a torch. A three-second backflow, when I was seventeen years old, had burned a scar in my hand that had never really healed, the size of a silver coin. And the Keeper is at the very center of those flows. While she is working at the center of the screens, a Keeper remains chaste for excellent and practical reasons which have nothing to do with morality. It’s a heavy burden; few women want to live with it, more than a year or two. In the old days, Keepers were vowed to hold their office lifelong, were revered and treated almost as Goddesses, living apart from anything human. In this day and age, a Keeper is simply required to retain her chastity while she is actively working as a Keeper, after which she may lay down her post, conduct her life as she pleases, marry and have children if she wishes. I had always assumed that Callina would elect to do this; she was, after all, the female Head of the Domain, and her oldest daughter would hold the Domain of Aillard.

She followed my thoughts and shook her head. She said wryly, “I have never had any wish to marry, nor met any man who would tempt me to leave the Tower. Why should I bear a double burden? Janna of Arilinn—she was your Keeper, was she not?—left her post and bore two sons, then fostered them away, and came back to her work. But I have served my Domain well; I have sisters, Linnell will soon be married, even Merryl, I suppose, will some day find a woman who will have him. There is no need…” but she sighed, almost in despair. “I might marry if there was another who could take my place— but not Beltran. Merciful Avarra, not Beltran!”

“He’s not a monster, Callina,” I said. “He’s very like me, as a matter of fact.”

She turned on me with wild anger, and her voice caught in her throat. “So you’d have me marry him too? A man who would bring an army against Thendara, and blackmail my kinsmen into giving him the most powerful woman in the Council for his own purposes? Damn you! Do you think I am a thing, a horse to be sold in the market, a shawl to be bartered for?” She stopped, bit her lip against a sob, and I stared at her; she had seemed so cold, remote, dispassionate, more like a mechanical doll than a woman; and now she was all afire with passion, like a struck harp still vibrating. For the first time I knew it; Callina was a woman, and she was beautiful. She had never seemed real to me, before this; she had only been a Keeper, distant, untouchable. Now I saw the woman, trapped and frantic behind that barricade, reaching out— reaching out to me.

She dropped her face into her hands and wept. She said, through her tears, “They have put it to me that if I do not marry Beltran it will plunge the Domains into war!”

I could not stop myself; I reached out, drew her into my arms.

“You shall not marry Beltran,” I said, raging. “I will kill him first, kinswoman!” And then, as I held her against me I knew what had happened to us both. It was not as kinswoman that I had vowed to shelter and protect her. It went deeper than that; it went back to the time when she had been the only woman in the Comyn who understood my rebellion against my father, to the time when she had fought to save Marjorie’s life and had shared my agony and despair. She was Tower-trained, she was a memory of the one good time in my entire life, she was home and Arilinn and a time when I had been happy and real and felt my life worthy; a time when I had not been damned.

I held her, trembling with fright, against me; clumsily, I touched her wet eyes. There was something else, some deeper, more terrible fear behind her.

I murmured, “Can’t Ashara protect you? She is Keeper of the Comyn. Surely she would not let you be taken from her like this.”

We were deeply in rapport now; I felt her rage, her dread, her outraged pride. Now there was terror. She whispered, her voice only a thread, as if she feared that she would be heard, “Oh, Lew, you don’t know—I am afraid of Ashara, so afraid… I would rather marry Beltran, I would even marry him to be free of her…” and her voice broke and strangled. She clung to me in terror and despair, and I held her close.

“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered, and felt the shaking tenderness I had thought I would never know again. Burned and ravaged as I was, scarred, mutilated, too deeply haunted by despair to lift my one remaining hand to save myself—still, I felt I would fight to the death, fight like a trapped animal, to save Callina from that fate.

… still there was something between us. I dared not kiss her; was it only that she was still Keeper and the old taboo held me? But I held her head against my breast, stroking her dark hair, and I knew I was no longer rootless, alone, without kin or friends. Now there was some reason behind my desperate holding on. Now there was Callina, and I promised myself, with every scrap of will remaining to me, that for her sake I would fight to the end.

CHAPTER SEVEN

« ^ »

There’s only one good thing about Council season,” said Regis sleepily, “I get to see you now and then.”

Danilo, barefoot and half-dressed at the window, grinned back at him. “Come now, is that the spirit in which to face the final day of Council?”

Regis groaned and sat up. “I suppose you had to remind me. Shall I send for breakfast?”

Danilo shook his head, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I can’t stay; Lord Dyan asked me to dine with him last night, he even said I could bring you if I wished; but I told him I’d be engaged elsewhere.” He smiled at his friend. “So he said breakfast would do. I suppose, too, that I’ll have to wear Council robes.” He made a wry face. “Without disrespect to our worthy forefathers, did you ever see any robes as ugly as full Council ceremonial dress? I am sure the cut and fashion have not changed since the days of Stephen the Fourth!”

Regis chuckled, swinging his feet out of bed. “Longer than that, surely—I am certain they were designed by Zandru’s great-grandmother.”

“And she made him wear them as punishment when he was more wicked than usual,” laughed Danilo. “Or do you suppose they were designed by cristoforos, so that while we sit at Council we will be doing suitable penance for our sins?”

“Sitting in Council is penance enough,” said Regis glumly.

“And the Ardais colors—gray and black, how dismal! Do you suppose that is why Dyan is so morose—the result of wearing black and silver in Council for so many years? If I were no more than your paxman, at least I could wear blue and silver!”

“We shall have to design you a special robe for your divided loyalties,” said Regis, mock-serious. “Patchwork of black and blue. Suitable enough, I suppose, for anyone who comes under Dyan’s influence—like my ribs when he was my arms-master!” After all these years, Regis could make a joke of it. But Danilo frowned.

“He spoke again of my marriage, a day or two ago. It seems his nedestro son is three years old, and looks healthy, and likely to live to grow up; he wants me to foster the boy, he said. He has neither time nor inclination to bring him up himself—and to do this I must have a household and wife. He said that he understood why I was reluctant—”

“He should, after all,” said Regis dryly.

“Nevertheless, he said it was my duty, and he would take care to find me a wife who would not trouble me too much.”

“Grandfather speaks in the same vein—”

“I think,” Danilo said, “that I shall take one who will find herself a devoted Lady-companion; and after I have given her a child or two to raise, she will not weep if I absent myself from her bed and fireside. Then we should both be content.”

Regis pulled on tunic and breeches, slid his feet into indoor boots. “I must breakfast with Grandfather; time enough to haul myself into ceremonials later. There seems little sense in attending Council—most of the speeches I will hear today I could say over from memory!”

Danilo sighed. “There are times when I think Lord Dyan— and some others I could mention—would rather see the Ages of Chaos come again than wake up to realities! Regis! Does your grandsire really think the Terrans will go away if we pretend they are not there?”

“I don’t know what my grandfather thinks, but I know what he will say if I do not breakfast with him,” Regis said, fastening his tunic-laces. “And now that I think of it, Council may not be so predictable as all that—it seems we are to have seven Domains again, after all. Did you know Beltran has brought and quartered an army above Thendara?”

“I heard he was calling it an honor-guard,” said Danilo. “I would not have thought, when we were his guests—” he gave the word an ironic inflection,— “at Aldaran, that he had so much honor as all that to guard.”

“I would say, rather, he needs an army to keep what little honor he has from escaping him,” said Regis, remembering the time when he and Danilo had been imprisoned in Castle Aldaran. “Are they really going to accept him in Council, I wonder?”

“I don’t think they have much choice,” said Danilo. “Whatever his reasons, I don’t like it.”

“Then, if you are given a chance to speak in Council you had better say so,” Regis said. “Dyan is expecting you, and Grandfather, no doubt, awaiting me. You had better go.”

“Is this the hospitality of the Hasturs?” Danilo teased. But he gave Regis a quick, hard hug, and went. Regis stood in the door of his room, watching Danilo cross the outer hallway of the suite, and briefly come face to face with Lord Hastur.

Danilo bowed and said cheerfully, “A good morning to you, my lord.”

Danvan Hastur scowled in displeasure, grunting the barest of uncivil greetings; it sounded like “H’rrumph!” He went on without raising his head. Danilo blinked in surprise, but went out the door without speaking. Regis, his mouth tightening with exasperation, went to comb his hair and ask his valet to lay out his ceremonial garb for Council.

Through the window the fog was lifting; high across the valley he could see the Terran HQ, a white skyscraper reddened with the glint of the red sun. His body-servant was fussing with the robes. Regis looked at them in distaste.

I am weary of doing things for no better reason than that the Hasturs have always done them that way, he thought, and the man flinched nervously as if Regis’s uneasy thoughts could reach him. Maybe they could.

He stared morosely at the skyscraper, thinking: if his grandfather had been wise, he should have had the same kind of Terran education as poor Marius. If his grandfather indeed perceived the Terrans as the enemy, all the more so, then— a wise man will take the measure of his enemy, and know his powers.

Regis stopped, the comb halfway to his hair. Suddenly he knew why Danvan Hastur had not done just that.

Grandfather is sure that anyone who had a Terran education would, of necessity, choose the ways of Terra. He does not trust me, or the strength of what I have been taught. Are the Terrans and their ways so attractive, then?

His grandfather, in the little breakfast room, was still scowling as Regis drew up his chair. Regis said a polite good morning and waited until the servant had gone.

“Grandsire, if you cannot be courteous to my sworn man, I will find quarters elsewhere.”

“Do you expect me to approve?” asked the old man in frigid displeasure.

“I expect you to admit I am a grown man with the right to choose my own companions,” Regis said hotly. “If I brought a woman here for the night, and she was any sort of respectable woman, you would show her civility, at least. Danilo is as well born as I—or you yourself, sir! If I spoke like that to one of your friends, you would say I deserved a beating!”

Old Hastur clamped his lips tight, and even a non-telepath could have read his thoughts: that was different.

Regis said angrily, “Grandfather, it is not as if I were carousing in common taverns, disgracing the Hastur name by letting myself be seen in brothels and such places as the Golden Cage, or keeping a perfumed minion as the Dry-towners do—”

“Silence! How dare you speak of such things to me?” Hastur clamped his lips in anger. He gestured to the breakfast table. “Sit down and eat; you will be late for Council.” As Regis hesitated he commanded dryly, “Do as you are told, boy. This is no time for tantrums!”

Regis clenched his fists. The quick wave of anger almost dizzied him. He said icily, “Sir, you have spoken to me as if I were a child for the last time!” He turned and went out of the room, disregarding his grandfather’s shocked “Regis!”

As he walked through the labyrinthine corridors of Comyn Castle, his fists were clenched, and he felt as if a weight were pressing inward on his chest. It had been only a matter of time; this quarrel had been building for years, and it was just as well it should be in the open.

In all save this I have been an obedient grandson, I have done everything he asked of me; I am sworn to obey him as the Head of the Domain. But I will not be spoken to as if I were ten years old—never again. When he entered the Ardais apartments he was still fighting back a wholly uncharacteristic fury. The servant who let him in said an automatic, “Su serva, dom…” and broke off to ask, “Are you ill, sir?”

Regis shook his head. “No—but ask Lord Danilo if he will see me at once.”

The message was carried, but answered by Danilo himself coming to the outer room. “Regis! What are you doing here?”

“I came to ask if I may join you at breakfast,” said Regis, more calmly than he felt, and Dyan, appearing in the doorway, already in the ceremonial black and silver of Council, said quickly, “Yes, come and join us, my dear fellow! I wanted a chance to speak with you, in any case.”

He went back toward the breakfast room, and Danilo murmured in an undertone, “What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you later, if I may. Grandfather and I had words,” Regis muttered, “Leave it for now, will you?”

“Set another place for Dom Regis,” Dyan ordered. Regis took a seat. Danilo looked at him, a swift questioning look, as he unfolded a napkin, but asked nothing aloud, and Regis was grateful.

He must know that I quarreled with Grandfather, and why. But he said nothing more, except for a complimentary remark about the food. Dyan himself ate sparingly, a little bread and fruit, but he had provided an assortment of hot breads, broiled meat and fried cakes; when Danilo commented on this, Dyan said, with a comical emphasis, “I am quite experienced at judging the—appetites—of young men.” He caught Regis’s eye for a moment, and Regis looked at his plate.

When they had finished and were idling over some fruits, Dyan said, “Well, Dani, I’m glad Regis joined us; I really wanted to talk to both of you. Most of the business of the Council has finished; this will be the final session, and because of the mourning for Kennard, everything’s been put off to this last session. And there’s much to be done. The heritage of Alton has to be settled—”

“I thought it was settled when Lew came back,” Regis said, his heart sinking as he realized what Dyan was driving at.

Dyan sighed. “I know he is your friend, Regis, but look at realities, will you, without sentiment? It’s a pity Kennard died without formally disinheriting him—”

“Why would he do that?” Regis asked, resentfully.

“Don’t be a fool, lad! If he hadn’t been mortally wounded and ill, you know as well as I that he’d have stood trial before the Comyn for treason, for that Sharra business, and been formally exiled. I don’t have any ill will toward him—” but Dyan’s glance slid uneasily away as Regis faced him, “and I’ve no desire to see Kennard’s son cast out or stripped of wealth and power. Lew has no son, nor is likely to have, from something I heard—no, don’t ask me where. A compromise might be worked out whereby he could have Armida, or its revenues, or both, for his lifetime, but—”

“I suppose you want to set up Gabriel in his place,” Regis said. “I heard that song from Grandfather; I didn’t think you would sing it too!”

“With Marius dead, it seems reasonable, doesn’t it? I have no wish to see Alton heritage in Hastur hands. But there is an Alton child. Fostered in a good, loyal Domain—perhaps even in the care of Prince Derik and Linnell—that child could be trusted to bring back the honor of the Alton Domain.”

“A child of Marius? Or of Kennard?”

“I’d rather not say anything about it until arrangements have been made,” Dyan evaded, “but I give you my word of honor, the child’s an Alton, and with potential laran. Regis, you are Lew’s friend; can’t you persuade him to step down and hand over the Domain in return for an assurance that during his lifetime he’ll have Armida unquestioned? What do you think of that plan?”

It stinks to high heaven, Regis thought, but he cast about for some more diplomatic way of saying it. “Why not put it up to Lew? He’s never been ambitious, and if this child is an Alton, he might perfectly well agree to adopt him and name the youngster his Heir.”

“Lew’s too damned much of a Terran,” Dyan said. “He’s lived in the Empire for years. I wouldn’t trust him, now, to bring up a Comyn Heir.”

“Kinsman,” said Danilo, in the most formal mode; then he paused and walked restlessly to the window. Regis and Danilo were lightly in rapport, and Regis could see, through his friend’s eyes, the view of the high mountain pass above Thendara and the scattered watch-fires of Beltran’s army. Abruptly Danilo swung around and said to Dyan angrily, “You pretend to be afraid of Lew because of his Terran education and because of Sharra! Have you forgotten that Beltran, out there, was part of the Sharra rebellion too? And that’s the man you’re trying to bring into the Comyn as full partner?”

“Beltran’s devoted himself to undoing what his father did. Kermiac was a Terran lackey; but when Beltran became Lord Aldaran, he renounced that—”

“And renounced honor, decency and the laws of hospitality,” said Danilo angrily. “You weren’t there, sir, when he last decided to take action! I saw Caer Donn burning!”

Dyan shrugged slightly. “A Terran city. What a pity he didn’t burn one or two more while he was at it! Don’t you see, Beltran can use Sharra against the Terrans, to give us the upper hand if they continue to—encroach—on our good will and our world.”

Regis and Danilo stared at him in horror. Finally Regis said, “Kinsman, I think you speak this way because you do not know much about Sharra. It cannot be tamed that way, and used as a weapon—”

“We would not have to use it,” Dyan said. “The Terrans, too, remember Caer Donn and the burning of the spaceport there. The threat would be enough.”

Why should we need such a threat against the Terrans? We live in the same world! We cannot destroy them without destroying ourselves!

Dyan asked angrily, “Have you too, Regis, been seduced by the Empire? I never thought to see the day when a Hastur would speak treason!”

“I think what you say is worse than treason, Dyan,” Regis said, struggling for calm. “I cannot believe that you would do what you censured Lew for doing—make compromise with Beltran to bring back all those old terrors out of the Ages of Chaos! I know Beltran. You do not.”

“Don’t I?” asked Dyan, his eyes glinting strangely.

“If you do, and you still wish this alliance—”

“Look here,” said Dyan harshly, interrupting him, “what we face now is the very survival of the Comyn—you know that. We need a strong Comyn, firmly allied against those who would hand us over to the Terrans. The Ridenow have already gone over—or haven’t you heard Lerrys’s favorite speech? Write off the Ridenow. Write off Lew—a cripple, half Terran, with nothing to lose! Write off the Elhalyn—” and as Danilo began a formal protest he gestured him imperatively to silence. “If you don’t know that Derik’s a halfwit, you’re the only one in Council who doesn’t. Forget about the Aillard—Domna Callina is a sheltered woman, a Keeper, a Tower-dweller; she can’t do much, but I do have some influence, praise to Aldones, on Dom Merryl.” His grin was wolfish. “What does that leave? The three of us in this room, Merryl, and your grandfather—who’s over a hundred, and although he’s still sharp-witted enough, he can’t go on forever! In the name of all of Zandru’s frozen hells, Regis, need I say anything more?”

And this is the burden of being a Hastur, Regis thought wearily. This is only the beginning. More and more they will come to me for such decisions.

“You think that means we must make an alliance with Aldaran, even at the cost of betraying the legitimate Heads of two Domains?” he asked.

“Two Domains? Lew would have been exiled six years ago, and it seems to me we are being generous with him,” Dyan said.

“And Domna Callina? Is a Keeper nothing more than a woman to be married off for a political alliance?”

“If she wished to remain a Keeper,” said Dyan savagely, “she should have remained within her Tower and refrained from trying to meddle in Council affairs! Tell me, Regis, will you stand with me in Council, or are you going to side with the Ridenow and hand us over to the Terrans without making a fight for Darkover?”

Regis bent his head. Put starkly like that, it seemed to give him no choice. Dyan had neatly mousetrapped him into seeming to agree, and either way, he betrayed someone. Lew was his sworn friend from childhood. Painfully he remembered the years he had spent at Armida, running about like a puppy at Lew’s heels, wearing his outgrown clothes, riding, hawking, fighting at his side in the fire-lines when the Kilghard Hills went up in flame; remembered a tie even stronger, even older than that with Danilo; the first fierce loyalty of his life. Lew, his sworn friend and foster-brother.

Maybe this was best after all. Lew had said, again and again, that he wants no power in Comyn. Certainly Regis could not allow Dyan to believe that he would side against the Hasturs, and for the Terrans. Regis swallowed hard, trying to weigh loyalties. For all of Dyan’s harshness, he knew that the older man was a shrewd judge of political reality. The thought of Darkover and the Domains in the hands of the Terrans, one more colony in a star-spanning Empire, came hard. But there seemed no middle way.

“I will never compromise with Sharra,” he said wearily. “I draw the line there.”

“If you stand firmly with me,” said Dyan, “we will never need to use it. If we take a firm line, the threat is enough—”

“I don’t believe that,” said Danilo. “Sharra—” he stopped and Regis knew Danilo was seeing what he saw, the monstrous form of fire, blanking every matrix in the vicinity, drawing power even from those who hated it… death, destruction, burning!

Dyan shook his head. “You were children then, both of you, and you had a scare. The Sharra matrix is no more than a weapon— a mighty weapon. But nothing worse. Surely—” he grinned his wolfish grin—“you do not believe that it is a God from some other dimension, or the old legends that Hastur bound Sharra in chains and that she should be loosed only at the end of the world—or maybe you do” Dyan grinned again, “and maybe, Regis, you will have to be the Hastur to bind her this time!”

He is making fun of me, Regis knew it, and yet a terrifying chill made every hair on his body stand again on end.

Hastur the God, father and forefather of all the Hastur-kin, bound Sharra in chains…and I am Hastur. Is this my task?

Shaking his head to clear it, he reached out to pour himself another cup of jaco, and sipped it slowly, hardly tasting the bitter-chocolate fragrance. He told himself angrily not to be superstitious. The Sharra matrix was a matrix, a mechanical means of amplifying psychic powers; it had been made by human minds and hands, and by other human minds and hands it could be contained and made harmless. In Beltran’s hands—and Kadarin’s—it would be a fearful weapon, but then, there was no reason Beltran should be allowed to use it. Kadarin was human; and both Comyn and Terran had put a price on his head. Surely it was not as bad as he feared.

He said steadily to Dyan, “On the word of a Hastur, kinsman, I will never sit by and see our world handed over to the Terrans. We may not agree on the methods taken to avoid this; but we are in agreement otherwise.”

And as he said it, he realized that he was trying to placate Dyan, as if he were still a boy and Dyan his cadet-master.

Dyan and his grandfather were on the same side, aiming at the same goal. Yet he had quarreled with his grandfather; and he was trying hard to agree with Dyan. Why? he wondered. Is it only because Dyan understands and accepts me as I am?

He said abruptly, “Thank you for a fine breakfast, cousin, I must go and get myself into those damnable Council ceremonials, and try to persuade my grandfather that Mikhail is still too young to sit through an entire Council session, Heir to Hastur or no—he is nevertheless only a boy of eleven! Dani, I will see you in the Crystal Chamber,” and he went out of the room.

But it was Lerrys who caught up with him on the threshold of the Crystal Chamber. He was wearing the colors of his Domain, but not the full ceremonial robes, and he looked mockingly at Regis.

“Full fancy dress, I see. I hope Lew Alton has sense enough to turn up this morning wearing something like Terran clothes.”

“I wouldn’t call that very sensible,” Regis said. “They wouldn’t fit the climate, and it would just offend people without any reason. Why should it matter what we wear to Council?”

“It doesn’t. That’s the point. That’s why it makes me so damnably angry to see a dozen or so grown men and women behaving as if it made a difference whether we wore one kind of dress or another!”

Regis had been thinking something rather like this himself, as he got into the cumbersome and archaic robes, but for some reason it exasperated him to hear Lerrys say it. He said, “In that case, what are you doing wearing your clan colors?”

“I’m a younger son, if you remember,” said Lerrys, “and neither Head nor Heir to Serrais; if I did it, all they’d do would be to send me away for not following custom, like a horrid small boy who’s dressed up for the fun of it. But if you, Heir to Hastur, or Lew, who’s head of Armida by default— there’s literally no one else now—should refuse to follow that custom, you might be able to change things… things which will never be changed unless you, or somebody like you, has the brains and the guts to change them! I heard that Lord Damon, what-do-they-call-him, Jeff, went back to Arilinn. I wish he’d stayed. He’d been brought up on Terra itself, and yet he was telepath enough to become a technician at Arilinn—that would have let some fresh air into Arilinn, and I think it’s time to break a few windows in the Crystal Chamber, too!”

Regis said soberly, ignoring the rest of Lerrys’s long speech, “I wish I were as sure as you that they’d accept Lew by default. Have you heard anything about a rumor that they’ve found a child of one of the Altons and they’re going to set it up, like a figurehead, in Lew’s place?”

“I know there’s supposed to be such a child,” said Lerrys. “I don’t know all the details. Marius knew, but I don’t think he ever got the chance to tell Lew. You got him first, didn’t you?”

Regis stared at him in dismay and anger. “Zandru’s hells! Are you daring to say that I had anything to do with Marius’s death?”

“Not you personally,” said Lerrys, “but I don’t think we’d have to look too far for the murderer, do you? It’s just too convenient for that group of power-mad old freaks in Council.”

Regis shuddered but tried not to let Lerrys see his consternation. “You must be mad,” he said at last. “If my grand-sire—and I suppose it’s Lord Hastur you’re accusing—had intended to send assassins to deal with Marius, why would he have waited this long? He arranged it with the Terrans to have Marius given the best education they could provide, he always knew where Marius was—why in all the hells should he send anyone round to murder him now?”

“You’re not going to tell me a boy Marius’s age had any personal enemies, are you?” Lerrys demanded.

Not in the Comyn—no more than he had any personal friends there, Regis thought, and said stiffly, “That touches the honor of Hastur, Lerrys. I warn you not to repeat that monstrous slander beyond this room, or I will—”

“You’ll what? Whip out your little sword and cut me to pieces with it? Regis, you’re acting like a boy of twelve! Do you honestly believe all this stable-sweepings about the honor of Hastur?” Even through his rage, something in Lerrys’s voice got through to Regis. His hand had gone to his dagger, without being fully aware of it; now he let go the hilt, and said, “Don’t mock that honor, Lerrys, just because you don’t know anything about it.”

“Regis,” said Lerrys, and now his voice was deadly serious, “believe me, I’m not implying that you are personally anything but a model of integrity. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a Hastur had stood by and watched someone murdered, or worse, because that person didn’t fit into the Comyn plan. Ask Jeff sometime who murdered his mother, because she dared to hint that a Comyn Keeper was not a sacrosanct virgin locked up in Arilinn to be worshipped. He himself had two or three narrow escapes from being murdered out of hand because the Council didn’t find him too convenient to their long-range plans. We can’t even blame the Terrans—assassination has been a favorite weapon here on Darkover since the Ages of Chaos. Do you know what the Terrans think of us?”

“Does it matter what the Terrans think of us?” Regis evaded.

“Damn right it matters! Whether you like it or not—” he broke off. “Ah, why should I waste this on you? You’re no better than your grandfather, and why should I give you the full speech I’m going to try to make in Council, if they don’t shut me up first?” He started to push on by Regis, who caught his arm and held him.

“My grandfather may not have mourned very much for Marius,” he said, “but I’d swear with my hand in the fires of Hali that he had nothing to do with his murder! I was there when the Alton’s town house was burned. Marius was killed by men trying to get the Sharra matrix—and they did get it, you know. You don’t think my grandfather had anything to do with that, certainly?”

Lerrys stared at him for a moment; then said contemptuously, “You’re worse than Lew—or you’ve been talking to him. He sees Sharra as the bogeyman under every bed! Damned convenient, isn’t it?” He pushed past Regis and went into the Council Chamber.

Thoughtfully, Regis followed. Most of the Council members were inside their railed enclosures, and his grandfather had already risen for the roll call of the Domains. He scowled at Regis, seeing him enter almost with Lerrys Ridenow, but they parted and went to their separate enclosures.

Was Marius’s death not the accidental death he had thought, killed in defending his father’s house and home against invaders searching for something he did not even know about? Certainly Marius knew nothing about the Sharra matrix except its danger—he thought of the night Marius had come to seek his help for Rafe Scott.

I wonder where he is? Maybe Lew would know. If I were young Scott, I think I would be hiding inside the Terran Zone and never put my nose outside it while Kadarin is loose with the Sharra matrix; and I think if Lew had any sense he would do the same. But Lew is not that kind of person. Terrans are cowards, he thought, his mind sliding over what he had taken for granted all his life; his own father had been killed in a war because some coward had trusted to Terran weapons which kill at a distance; and then he stopped and began to think about that.

They can’t all be cowards, any more than all Comyn lords are honorable and proud— he thought. And, as Derik began to call the roll of the Domains, he thought: I will have to go to the Terran Zone and find out what Rafe Scott knows about the Sharra matrix. Unless he’s joined forces with Kadarin— and that was not the idea I got of Rafe Scott!

One by one, from their enclosures, the Comyn of the Seven Domains answered for their Houses. When “Alton” was called, Regis saw Lew, dressed in the ceremonial robes of his house, step forward, and answer, “I am here for Alton of Armida.” Regis had been braced for a challenge, but it did not come, not even from where Dyan sat beside Danilo beneath the Ardais banner. Was the challenge to be more insidious than this, simply pressure on Lew to remain quietly at Armida and adopt the Alton son they had found somewhere? Were they allowing him to keep the nominal leadership of Alton in return for some other concession? Regis discovered that he could not even guess. And why was Dyan so certain that Lew would have no children?

Even Dyan himself, who is a lover of men, has a son; and he lost another in childhood. I have fathered several children. Why should Lew not marry and have as many children as he wants? He turned to look at Lew, and saw, as Callina Aillard rose to answer for her Domain, that Lew was watching her intently, so intently that it seemed, even through the thick disturbance of the telepathic dampers in the Crystal Chamber, that for an instant he could read Lew’s thoughts.

But Callina is a Keeper. Nevertheless, she would not be the first Keeper to lay down her high office and marry— not the first nor the last. She would have to train her successor first, but Lew is not an impulsive boy; he could wait long enough for that. I think they might even be happy. It would be good to see Lew happy again.

They had finished the roll-call of the Domains, without reference to Aldaran. It seemed to Regis that there was someone in that enclosure, behind the curtains, and he wondered at that, but Derik, his task finished, had stepped back, and Hastur was taking his place to preside over the session. Supposedly, this final session of Council was to complete any unfinished matters, anything left unsettled during the Council season. In actuality, Regis knew, any small time-consuming triviality would be brought up, anything to fill time until weariness, or even hunger, brought Council to an end; after which, the matter would be closed till next year. He supposed that was why Hastur had not challenged Lew when he spoke for Armida; the real problem of the Alton heritage would be settled quietly by personal pressures, behind the scenes, not argued out in Council.

He had seen those tactics used before. And now, ignoring Dyan’s signal, Hastur gestured to Lerrys Ridenow, who had risen for recognition.

Lerrys came down into the central space where the rainbows from the prisms in the roof cast colored lights over the pale floor and walls. He bowed, and Regis thought, dispassionately, that the young man was beautiful as a cat; red-haired, slender, lithe, with the delicate chiseled features of the Ridenow; more beautiful, he thought, than any of the women in the Crystal Chamber. He wondered why he was noticing this in this solemn setting.

“My lords,” Lerrys said, “I’ve heard a lot in this Chamber since Council began. All of you—” with one of those quick catlike movements, he swiveled his head to look around the room, “have been talking about such serious matters as marriages, and heritages, and repairs to the Castle roof—oh, not literally, perhaps, but that’s what it amounts to, discussing things seriously which could be settled in three minutes by a little common sense. I want to know when we are going to talk about serious things. For instance—” and this time the sweep of his eyes around the Chamber was hard and challenging, “when are we going to send our proper representative to the Empire Senate? When are we going to appoint a Senator with proper credentials? I want to know when, or if, we are going to launch a real investigation of who murdered Marius Alton and burned the Alton house over his head? And I want to know when we are going to take our part as an equal in the Empire Senate, instead of being under a Terran protectorate as a primitive, barbarian world with a feudal culture which mustn’t be touched, as if we were savages just evolving to the point where we rub two sticks together and worship the god of fire who makes the spark!”

The contempt in his voice was scathing.

“They let us alone, when they ought to be honoring us as the first and most prestigious of their colonies!”

“That kind of honor—” it was a whiplash from Dyan— “we can well do without!”

Lerrys turned on him. He said, “What in hell do you know about the Terrans? Have you ever gone far enough to take a walk inside the Terran Zone and go through one of their buildings? Have you ever done anything in the Terran Zone except visit one of their exotic whorehouses? With all due respect—which isn’t much, Lord Dyan—you ought to shut your mouth until you know what you’re talking about!”

“I know you are trying to make us all Terrans—” said Dyan, and Lerrys said, “Make us Terrans? Hell! We areTerrans, or has that significant fact been kept from you by your crazy father, and all our forefathers? If there’s anyone here who doesn’t know that we were a Terran colony once, it’s time that sheltered idiot learned the truth!”

Danvan of Hastur said repressively, “This matter has been discussed before, by your elders, Dom Lerrys. We are all in agreement that we want no part of Terra—”

“You are all in agreement,” mocked Lerrys. “How many of you are in agreement—all fifteen or sixteen of you? What’s the population of Thendara, at the last census, or have we been too backward to number our people? What do you think they would say, if you asked them whether they wanted to go on worshipping you aristocrats as the Hastur-kin, the children of Gods, and all that balderdash? Or whether they preferred to be free citizens of the Empire, with a voice in their own government, and no need to bow down to you lofty Comyn? Just ask them sometime!”

Edric Ridenow, Lord Serrais, rose ponderously from his seat. He said, “We have ruled these lands from time out of mind and we know what our people want. Get back to your place, Lerrys; I did not give you leave to speak!”

“No, you didn’t,” retorted Lerrys at white heat, “and I spoke anyway. It needs saying! I am a citizen of the Empire, I want some real voice in what’s happening!”

“Do you really believe that will give you such a voice?” inquired Lord Hastur. Regis thought he sounded genuinely curious. “You have accused Lord Dyan of speaking without real knowledge of the Terrans. Can you accuse me of the same? I have dealt with the Terrans during most of my long life, Lerrys, and I can assure you, they have nothing worth wanting. But I cannot sit here and let you speak out of turn in Council. I beg you, sit until your brother and lord gives you leave to speak.”

“Who in all of Zandru’s hells gave him godship over my voice?” demanded Lerrys in a rage. “I am Comyn, though you may not want to admit it, and I have a right to be heard—”

“Gabriel,” said Hastur quietly, “your duty.”

Regis said, “Let him speak, Grandfather. I want to hear what he has to say.” But he was shouted down, and Gabriel, drawn sword of the honor-guard in hand, strode to Lerrys and said quietly, “Sit, dom Lerrys. Silence.”

Lerrys said, “Like hell—”

“You leave me no choice, sir. Forgive me,” Gabriel gestured to the Guardsmen, who collared Lerrys roughly; he elbowed and shoved, but he was lightly built and the Guards were two huge hefty men, and they had no trouble at all in restraining him. They frog-marched him toward his seat. Abruptly, with a swift kick or two well-placed, he managed to free himself, and stood defiant.

“Never mind. I’m not going to upset your precious fool’s Council any more,” he said. “You’re not worth it. Now have me assassinated as you did with Marius Alton, because I’m on the wrong side of the political fence! Damned fools, all of you, and murderers, because you’re afraid to listen to the facts! You’re a damned bloody anachronism, all of you, sitting there playing at lords and ladies with a star-spanning Empire at your feet! All right, damn it, go to hell in your own way, and I’ll stand there and watch while you do it!” He laughed, loud and mocking, swirled with a great flying toss of his cape and his long light hair, and turned his back, striding out of the Council Chamber.

Regis sat there, aghast. Lerrys had voiced the thoughts he had never dared, before, to voice—and he had sat there, like a lump, not daring to speak aloud, not challenging Gabriel. Damn it, I should have stepped down there beside him and demanded some of those answers! I am Heir to Hastur, they could not have silenced me so easily!

He told himself that he had had no choice; that Lerrys had been excluded because of his disregard of Council custom and courtesies, not because of what he was saying.

He all but accused them of murder, and no one spoke to deny it, Regis thought, with a sudden shiver. Was it only because they felt it too ridiculous to answer? He did not like to think about the alternative.

One of the lesser nobles, a Di Asturien from the shores of Lake Mirien—Regis knew him slightly; he had had a brief affair with one of the man’s daughters—rose and gestured to Lord Hastur for recognition. Hastur nodded, and the man came down to the speaker’s place.

“My lords,” he said, “I do not question your wisdom, but I feel it needs explaining. In these days, when we in Council are so few, why should Prince Derik be married inside of Comyn? Their children will be divided between the two Domains involved; would it not be better for Prince Derik to marry outside the Council, and thus bring in a strong alliance? Linnell Lindir-Aillard, too, should be married to some man who will bring new blood into Council. I also wish to point out that the two of them are very closely akin. With all respect, sir, I point out that the inner circle of Comyn has already been thinned overmuch by inbreeding. I’m not asking that we go back to the old days of keeping stud-books on laran, my lord, but any horse-breeder can tell you that too much inbreeding brings out bad things in the blood lines.”

Yes, it does, Regis thought, looking at Callina, who looked so frail it seemed a puff of air would waft her off her feet; at Derik’s shallow foolish face. Javanne had been lucky, being married outside direct Comyn lines. Her sons were all healthy and strong. Derik—looking at the young prince, Regis wondered if Derik would father anything but a string of halfwits like himself. And suddenly his blood iced; he looked at Derik and saw nothing, nothing but a grinning skull… a skull, laughing… he rubbed his hands over his eyes and Derik was simply sitting there with his good-natured dimwitted grin.

Hastur said quietly, “You have a good point, sir. But Prince Derik and comynara Linnell were childhood sweethearts, and it would be cruel to part them now. There are others who can bring fresh blood into Council.”

Regis thought, cynically, maybe that’s a good name for what I am doing, fathering nedestro sons wherever I wish… the women don’t seem to object, and neither do their fathers, since I am Hastur of Hastur.. .and his thoughts slid aside, as he saw Lady Callina rise, looking tall and stately in her crimson ceremonial robes.

“This matter is not for Council meddling,” she said, pale as death, “Linnell is my ward! I have given consent to her marriage and that is enough!”

“Meddling, lady?” asked Di Asturien, “That’s a strange way to put it. Marriages in Comyn are supposed to be settled by the Council, aren’t they?”

“I am Head of Aillard. Linnell’s marriage is not for the Council to agree or disagree.”

“But the prince’s is,” the old man insisted. “I protest it, and I’m sure there are others!”

Derik said amiably, “Can’t you trust me to choose my own wife, sir? Or am I to imitate a Dry-Towner and have half a dozen wives and barraganas? Even a prince should have a few areas of private choice.”

“What does the lady say about it?” asked old Di Asturien, and Linnell, sitting in Callina’s shadow, colored and shrank away.

“This marriage was approved by the Council a long time ago,” she said, almost in a whisper. “If somebody was going to protest against it, they should have done so years ago. Derik and I were handfasted when I was fourteen and he was twelve. There’s been time enough to protest it before this, and before we—before we had our hearts set on each other.”

“That was a long time ago, and the Council was stronger then,” said the old man, grumpily. “There are plenty of women in the Domains with good blood in ’em. He didn’t have to choose a sister of another Domain Head.”

“With respect, sir,” said Lord Hastur, “we have heard what you have to say. Is there anyone within Comyn who wants to speak on this?”

“I will not hear,” said Callina, in pale rage. “I have given consent to this marriage, and there is no other with the power by law to change it.”

“And if anyone tries,” said Derik, “I will challenge him anywhere.” He laid his hand to sword-hilt.

And for a moment it seemed to Regis that he saw the Council as Lerrys had seen it: children, squabbling over toys, that contemptuous You’ll whip out your little sword and cut me to pieces with it. Derik had spoken as honor and Comyn law demanded, yet he sounded like a blustering fool. Derik was a fool, of course. But had he ever had a chance to be anything else? Were they all, in Comyn, just such fools?

But Hastur was going, calmly, along with custom. He said to Di Asturien, “Sir, are you ready to accept Prince Derik’s challenge?”

The old man shrank.

“All Gods forbid, sir! I, challenge Hastur of Elhalyn and my lawful prince? I was just putting the question, Lord Hastur, no more than that.” He bowed to Derik. “Su serva, Dom.” And Regis, watching the dignified old man retreat, almost servile, heard again Lerrys’s question.. .playing at lords and ladies… why, because of his ancestry, should a fool like Derik make an old and honorable man, of excellent lineage and long service to his country, cringe like that?

I get it too. From the time I was ten years old, Guards following me around like so many governesses, for fear I would break a toenail—why, in heaven’s name?

Preoccupied again, he missed the next words of Hastur, and roused suddenly to shock when Hastur called out, “The Seventh Domain! Aldaran!”

Then Regis heard a voice he had never thought to hear again, speaking from behind the curtain; then the curtain rings clashed with a small metallic clamor, and a tall man came and stood at the edge of the railing.

He looked like Lew; older, and unscarred, but the resemblance was still there; he might have been Lew’s elder brother. He said, “I am here for Aldaran; Beltran-Kermiac, Lord of Aldaran and Scathfell.”

And the shocked silence in the Crystal Chamber was shattered by Lew’s loud cry.

“I protest!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

« ^ »

Lew Alton’s narrative

I didn’t know I was going to protest until I heard myself doing it.

I heard them call Aldaran’s name, and realized that this was actually happening; it was not a nightmare. I had heard the voice in nightmares, often enough. He was still so much like me that I have seen twins less alike; although now, no one could mistake us… bitterness overwhelmed me. It was he who had worked to summon Sharra; and there he stood, unscathed; while I, who had suffered to stem the fire-storm he had raised, and contain Sharra again, so that it should not ravage our world from the Bay of Storms to the Wall Around the World—I stood here, scarred and mutilated, more of an outcaste than he.

“I protest!” I shouted again, leaping down until I stood at the center of the open space, facing him.

Hastur said mildly, “We have not yet called for a formal challenge. You must state the reasons for your protest.”

I fought to steady my voice. Whatever my own hate—and I felt that it would rise and swallow me—I must speak now calmly. Hysteria would only harm my cause; no matter what protests, incoherent accusations, were tumbling over one another in my mind, I must plead my cause with quiet rationality. I grasped at the presence in my mind, the alien memories I carried; how would my father have spoken? He had usually been able to make them do his will.

“I declare—” I began, trying to steady my voice against the flood, “I declare—the existence—of an unsettled blood feud.” Blood feud was held, everywhere in the Domains, to be an obligation surmounting every other consideration. “His life is—is mine; I have claimed it.”

To this moment our eyes had not met; now he raised his head, and looked at me, skeptical, concerned. I turned my own away. I did not want to remember that once I had called this man cousin and friend. Gods above, how could the man stand there and look me calmly in the eye and say, as he was saying now, “I did not know you felt that way, Lew. Do you blame me for everything then? How can I make amends? Certainly I was not aware of any such quarrel as that.”

Amends! I clenched the stump of my arm with my good hand, wanting to shout, can you make amends for this? Can you give me back six years of my life, can you bring back— Marjorie? For once in my life I was grateful for the presence of the telepathic dampers without which all this would have blasted through the room with the full force of the hyper-developed Alton rapport—but I said doggedly, “Your life is mine; when, where and as I can.”

Beltran spread his hands slightly, as if to say, “What is this all about?” Before the puzzled look in his eyes, I swear that for a moment I doubted my own sanity. Had I dreamed it all? My fingernails clenched in my wrist, and I reminded myself; this was no nightmare.

Hastur said sternly, “Your words are nothing here, Lord Armida.” I remembered, after a shocked second; this was my name, not my father’s; I was Lord Armida now.

“You have forgotten,” Hastur went on, “blood feud is forbidden here in Comyn as among equals.” The word was a counterplay on words; the word comyn meant, simply, equals in rank or status.

“And I state,” said Beltran calmly, “that I have no grudge against my cousin of Alton; if he believes there is a blood-feud between us, it must arise from a time in his life when he was—” and I could see everyone in Council saying what he seemed, so kindly, to forbear saying: from a time when he was mad—

The very existence of Comyn, the Seven Domains of the Hastur’s kin, was predicated on an alliance prohibiting blood-feud, Comyn immunity. Which Beltran, damn him, now enjoyed. Zandru send him scorpion whips! Was there no way to stop this farce?

Where I was standing I could not see her; but Callina rose and came forward, her crimson Keeper’s veils fluttering as if in an invisible breeze. I turned as she spoke; she stood there, strange, distant, remote, not at all like the woman I had held in my arms and pledged to support. Her voice, too, sounded faraway and overly distinct, as if it came, not from her, but somehow through her.

“My lord Aldaran, as Keeper of Comyn I have the right to ask this of you. Have you sworn allegiance to Compact?”

“When I am pledged Comyn,” Beltran said, “I am ready to swear.”

She gestured and said, “Your army stands out there, bearing Terran weapons, in defiance of Compact. Are we to allow you in Comyn when you have not yet sworn to observe the first law of Comyn, in return for welcoming you among us?”

“When I swear to Comyn,” said Beltran with silken suaveness, “my Honor Guard shall give up those weapons into the hands of my promised wife.”

I saw Callina flinch at the words. There were telepathic dampers all over the room, but still it seemed that I could read her thoughts.

If I do not agree to this marriage, it means war. The last war in the Domains decimated the Comyn. Beltran could wipe us out altogether.

She raised her eyes and looked at him. She said, her words dropping into deathly silence, “Why, then, my lord of Aldaran, if you are content with an unwilling bride—” she hesitated; I knew she did not turn or look at me, but I sensed the trapped despair behind her words—“then I agree. Let the handfasting be held on Festival Night.”

“Be it so,” said Beltran, with that smile that was like a mask over his true feelings, and bowed. I stood, without moving, as if my feet were rooted to the floor of the Crystal Chamber. Were they really going to do this? Were they going to sell Callina to Beltran, to prevent war? Was there no one who could lift a hand against this monstrous injustice?

In a final appeal I cried out, “Will you have him in Council, then? He is sealed to Sharra!”

He turned directly to me, then, and said, “So are you, cousin.”

To that, there was nothing I could say. I felt at that moment like doing what Lerrys had done, and storming out of the Council, cursing them all.

I have never been quite sure what happened next. I know that I made a move to resume my seat, had taken a few steps toward the Alton enclosure, when I heard a cry, in a woman’s voice. For a moment it sounded so like Dio’s that I stood frozen; then Derik cried out, too, and I turned to see Beltran take a step back and thrust out his hands, as if to guard himself.

Then there were cries everywhere, shouts of dread and terror; backing a little away into the enclosure, I saw it, hanging in the air above us, growing, menacing—

The form of a chained woman, hair of flame, tossing, ravening, growing higher, higher, with the crackling sound of forest-fire… Sharra! The fire-form, Sharra— Now I knew it was a nightmare from hell, I backed away, too, from the rising flames licking at us, the smell of burning, the flood of terror, of hate, the corner of hell which had opened up for me six years ago…

I clutched at vanishing self-control before I could cry out again and disgrace myself by screaming like a woman. The Form of Fire was there, yes; it hovered and flickered and trembled above us, the shape of a woman, her head thrown back, three times the height of a tall man, the flames licking at her hair. Marjorie! Marjorie, burning, overshadowed by Sharra… then I caught at vanishing rationality.

No, this was not Sharra as I had known it. My heart was beating fast from fright, but there was no true smell of burning in the room, the curtains of the enclosures did not smolder or catch into flame where the fire touched them… this was illusion, no more, and I stood, clenching the fist of my good hand, feeling the nails cut into the flesh, feeling the old burning pain in the hand that was not there…phantom pain, as this was no more than a phantom, an image of Sharra—I would have known the real thing, I would feel my whole body and soul tied into that monstrous overshadowing…

The Form of Fire thrust out an arm… a woman’s arm lapped in fire… and Beltran broke, backed away… bolted from the Crystal Chamber. Now that I knew what it was, I stood my ground, watching him go, wondering who had done it. Kadarin, wherever he was, drawing the Sword, evoking the Form of Fire? No. I was sealed to Sharra, body and soul; if Kadarin, who had also been sealed to that unholy thing, had summoned, I too would have been consumed in the flame— I gripped my hand hard on the railing, wondering. The Comyn were milling around, crying out in confusion. Two or three others bolted, too, through their private entrances at the back of the enclosures.

Callina? No Keeper would profane her office that way, using it to terrify. I could have done it—even now I could feel the heat of flame in my useless matrix—but I knew I had not. Beltran, who also was Sharra-sealed? He had been the most frightened of all, for he had seen Caer Donn burning.

The Form of Fire flamed and died and was gone, like a candle blown out by the wind.

Danvan of Hastur, Regent of the Comyn, had stood his ground, but he was white as death, and he was holding the rail before him as he spoke, ritual words almost without significance.

“I declare… Council Session… closed for this year and all matters before it, adjourned until another year shall bring us together…”

One by one, those members who had not already run away went silently out of the Chamber, already shocked and ashamed of their terror. I, who had faced the reality of Sharra, found myself wondering how they would react to the real thing. Yet my own heart was still pounding a little; a fear bred in the bone, a gateway just dimly ajar between worlds to let in that monstrous shadow— I had seen those gates open halfway, and knew that they opened into fire and hell, like the living heart of a volcano.

Then, behind Danvan Hastur, I saw Regis standing very still, his hand just touching his matrix. He did not look at me, he was not looking at anything, but I knew, as clearly as if I had spoken:

Regis! Regis had summoned that image! But why? Why and how!

He lowered his hand. I could see fine beads of sweat around his hairline, but his voice sounded normal. “Will you have my arm, Grandfather?”

The old man snarled, “When I need help I will be dressed in my shroud!” and, throwing his head erect, marched out of the Chamber. Now only Regis and I remained.

I found my voice, bitterly.

“You did that. I don’t know how or why, but you did that! Cousin—can you play with such things as a joke?”

His hand fell away from his matrix, hanging limp at his side as if it hurt him. Maybe it did; I was too agitated to care. At last he said in a strained voice, only a whisper, “It gave us—time. Another year. They cannot—cannot challenge your right to the Alton Domain, or pledge Beltran to Council, for another year. Council has been—closed.” Then he swayed, and caught weakly at the railing where he stood. I pushed him down in a chair.

“Put your head between your knees,” I said roughly, and watched him as he sat there, his head bent, while a little color began to come back into his cheeks. At last he sat upright again.

“I am sorry if the—the image—frightened you,” he said. “It was the only thing I could think of to stop this Council. This farce. I wanted them to see what it was that they had to fear. So many of them don’t know.”

I remembered Lerrys saying, You see Sharra as the bogeyman under every bed…no. He had not said that to me, but to Regis. I looked at him, dazed. I said, “There are supposed to be telepathic dampers in here. I should not be able to read your mind, nor you mine. Zandru’s hells, Regis, what is going on?”

“Maybe the dampers aren’t working,” he said, in a stronger voice, and now he sounded completely rational; only afraid, as he had every right to be. I was afraid myself.

“The image didn’t frighten me,” I said, “except for a moment at first. I have seen the reality of Sharra. What frightens me, now, is the fact that you could do that, with dampers all over the room. I didn’t know you had that much laran, though I knew, of course, that you had some. What sort of laran can do that?” I went to the nearest of the telepathic dampers and twisted dials until it was gone, the unrhythmic waves vanished. Now I could feel Regis’s agitation and fear, full scale, and wished I could not. He said, in a strained voice, “I don’t know how I did it. Truly I don’t. I was standing here behind Grandfather, listening to Beltran talk so calmly, and wishing there was some way to show them what it had been— and then—” he wet his lips with his tongue, and said shakily, “then it was there. The—the Form of Fire.”

“And it scared Beltran right out of the room,” I said. “Do you think he knows that Kadarin has the Sharra matrix?”

“I couldn’t read him. I wasn’t trying, of course. I—” his voice broke again. “I wasn’t trying to do anything. It just— just happened!”

“Something in your laran you don’t know about? We know so little of the Hastur Gift, whatever it was,” I said, trying to calm him. “Hang on to the good part; it scared Beltran out of here. I wish it had scared him all the way back into the Hellers! I’m afraid there’s no such luck!”

I was willing to leave it at that. But as I turned to the doorway, Regis caught at my shoulder.

“But how could I do that? I don’t understand! You—you accused me of playing with it, like a joke! But I didn’t, Lew, I didn’t!”

I had no answer for him. I moved aimlessly around the room, turning out the rest of the dampers. I could feel his fear, mounting almost to panic, rising as the dampers were no longer there to interfere with telepathic contact. I even wondered, angrily, why he should be so afraid. It was I who was bound to Sharra, I who must live night and day with the terror that one day Kadarin would draw the Sword of Sharra and with that gesture summon me back into that terrible gateway between worlds, that corner of hell that I once had opened, which had swept away my hand, my love—my life…

Firmly I clamped down on the growing panic. If I did not stop this now, my own fear and Regie’s could reinforce each other and we would both go into screaming hysterics. I caught at what I could remember of the Arilinn training, managed to steady my breathing, felt the panic subside.

Not so Regis; he was still sitting there, in the chair where I had shoved him, white with dread. I turned around and was surprised to hear my own voice, the steady, detached voice of a matrix mechanic, dispassionate, professionally soothing, as I had not heard it in more years than I liked to think about.

“I’m not a Keeper, Regis, and my own matrix, at the moment, is useless, as you know. I could try to deep-probe you and find out—”

He flinched. I didn’t blame him. The Alton gift is nothing to play games with, and I have known experienced technicians, Tower-trained for many years, refuse to face that fully focused gift of rapport. I can manage it, if I must, but I was not eager. It is not, I suppose, unlike rape, the deliberate overpowering of a mind, the forced submission of another personality, the ultimate invasion. Only the probably nonexistent Gods of Darkover know why such a Gift had been bred into the Alton line, to force rapport on an unwilling other, paralyze resistance. I knew Regis feared it too, and I didn’t blame him. My father had opened my own Gift in that way, when I was a boy—it had been the only way to force the Council to accept me, to show them that I, alien and half Terran, had the Alton Gift—and I had been ill for weeks afterward. I didn’t relish the thought of doing the same thing to Regis.

I said, “It might be that they could tell you in a Tower; some Keeper, perhaps—” and then I remembered that here in Comyn Castle was a Keeper. I tended to forget; Ashara of the Comyn Tower must be incredibly old now, I had never seen her, nor my father before me… but now Callina was there as her surrogate, and Callina was my kinswoman, and Regis’s too.

“Callina could tell you,” I said, “if she would.”

He nodded, and I felt the panic recede. Talking about it, calmly and detached, as if it were a simple problem in the mechanics of laran, had defused some of the fear.

Yet I too was uneasy. By the time I left the Crystal Chamber, even the halls and corridors were empty; the Comyn Council had scattered and gone their separate ways. Council was over. Nothing remained except the Festival Night ball, tomorrow. On the threshold of the Chamber, we encountered the Syrtis youngster; he almost ignored me, hurrying to Regis.

“I came back to see what had happened to you!” he demanded, and, as Regis smiled at him, I quietly took my leave, feeling I made an unwelcome third. As I went off alone, I identified one of my emotions; was I jealous of what Regis shared with Danilo? No, certainly not.

But I am alone, brotherless, friendless, alone against the Comyn who hate me, and there is none to stand by my side. All my life I had dwelt in my father’s shadow; and now I could not bear the solitude when that was withdrawn. And Marius, who should have stood at my side—Marius too was dead by an assassin’s bullet, and no one in the Comyn except Lerrys had even questioned the assassination. And—I felt myself tensing as I identified another element of my deep grief for Marius. It was relief; relief that I would not have to test him as my father had tested me, that I need not invade him ruthlessly and feel him die beneath that terrible assault on identity. He had died, but not at my hands, nor beneath my laran.

I had known my laran could kill, but I had never killed with it.

I went back to the Alton rooms, thoughtfully. They were home, they had been home much of my life, yet they seemed empty, echoing, desolate. It seemed to me that I could see my father in every empty corner, as his voice still echoed in my mind. Andres, puttering around, supervising the other servants in placing the belongings which had been brought here from the town house, broke off what he was doing as I came in, and hurried to me, demanding to know what had happened to me. I did not know that it showed on my face, whatever it was, but I let him bring me a drink, and sat sipping it, wondering again about what Regis had done in the Crystal Chamber. He had scared Beltran. But, probably, not enough.

I did not think Beltran was eager to plunge the Domains into war. Yet I knew his recklessness, and I did not think we could gamble on that; not when his outraged pride was at stake, the pride of the Aldarans.

I said to Andres, “You hear servants’ gossip; tell me, has Beltran moved into the Aldaran apartments here in Comyn Castle?”

Andres nodded glumly, and I hoped that he would find them filled with vermin and lice; they had stood empty since the Ages of Chaos. It said something about the Comyn that they had never been converted to other uses.

Andres stood over me, grumbling, “You’re not intending to go and pay a call on him there, I hope!”

I wasn’t. There was only one way in the world I would ever come again within striking range of my cousin, and that was if he had me bound and gagged. He had betrayed me before; he would have no further chance. Sunk in the misery of that moment, I confess, to my shame, that for a moment I played with the escape that Dan Lawton, in the Terran Zone, had offered me, to hide there out of reach of Sharra— but that was no answer, and it left Regis and Callina at the mercy of whatever unknown thing was working in the Comyn.

I was not altogether alone. The thought of Callina warmed me; I had pledged to stand beside her. And I had not yet spoken alone with my kinswoman Linnell, except over the grave of my brother. It was the eve of Festival Night, when traditionally, gifts of fruit and flowers are sent to the women of every family, throughout the Domains. Not the meanest household in Thendara would let tomorrow morning pass without at least a few garden flowers or a handful of dried fruits for the women of the household; and I had done nothing about a gift for Linnell. Truly, I had been too long away from Darkover.

There would be flower sellers and fruit vendors doing business in the markets of the Old Town, but as I stepped toward the door, I hesitated, unwilling again to show myself. Damn it, during the time I had lived with Dio, I had almost forgotten my scarred face, my missing hand, and now I was behaving as if I were freshly maimed—Dio! Where was Dio, had I truly heard her voice in the Crystal Chamber? I told myself sternly that it did not matter; whether Dio was here or elsewhere, if she chose not to come to me, she was lost to me. But still I could not make myself go down to ground level of the enormous castle, go out into the Old Town through Beltran’s damnably misnamed Honor Guard.

Some of them would have known me, remembered me…

At last, hating myself for the failure, I told Andres to see about some flowers for Linnell tomorrow. Should I send some to Dio too? I truly did not know the courtesies of the situation. Out there in the Empire, I knew, a separated husband and wife can meet with common courtesy; here on Darkover, it was unthinkable. Well, I was on Darkover now, and if Dio wanted nothing from me, she would probably not want a Festival gift either. With surging bitterness I thought, she has Lerrys to send her fruits and flowers. If Lerrys had been before me, at that moment, I think I would have hit him. But what would that settle? Nothing. After a moment I picked up a cloak, flung it about my shoulders; but when Andres asked where I was going, I had no answer for him.

My feet took me down, and down into courtyards and enclosed gardens, through unfamiliar parts of the castle. At one point I found myself in a court beneath the deserted Aldaran apartments—deserted all my life, till now. Half of me wanted to go in there and face Beltran, demand—demand what? I did not know. Another part of me wanted, cravenly, to walk through the city, take refuge in the Terran Zone, and then— then what? I could not leave Darkover, not while the Sharra matrix was here; I had tried. And tried again. It would mean death, a death neither quick nor easy.

Maybe I would be better dead, even that death, so that I was free in death of Sharra… and again it seemed to me that the Form of Fire raged before my eyes, a thrilling in my blood, cold terror and raging, ravening flame like ichor in my veins—

No; this was real. I tensed, looking up at the hills behind the city.

Somewhere there, strange flames burned, an incredible ninth-level matrix twisted space around itself, a gateway opened, and the fire ran in my veins— There was fire before my eyes, fire all through my brain—

No! I am not sure that I did not scream that furious denial aloud; if I did no one heard me, but I heard the echoes in the courtyard around me, and slowly, slowly, came back to reality. Somewhere out there, Kadarin ran loose, and with him the Sharra matrix, and Thyra whom I had hated, loved, desired and feared… but I would die before they dragged me back into that again. Deliberately, fighting the call in my mind, I raised the stump of my arm and slammed it down, hard, on stone. The pain was incredible; it made me gasp, and tears came to my eyes, but that pain was real; outraged nerves and muscles and bones, not a phantom fire raging in my brain. I set my teeth and turned my back on the hills, and that call, that siren call which throbbed seductively in my mind, and went into the Castle.

Callina. Callina could drive these devils from my mind.

I had not been inside the Aillard wing of Comyn Castle for many years, not since I was a child. A silent servant met me, managed not to blink more than once at the ruin of my face. He showed me into a reception room where, he said, I would find Domna Callina and Linnell with her.

The room was spacious and brilliant, filled with sunshine and silken curtains, green plants and flowers growing in every niche, like an indoor garden. Soft notes of a harp echoed through the room; Linnell was playing the rryl. But as I came in she pushed it aside and ran to me, taking an embrace and kiss with the privilege of a foster-sister, drawing back, hesitant, as she touched the stump of an arm.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You can’t hurt me. Don’t worry about it, little sister.” I looked down at her, smiling. She was the only person on this world who had truly welcomed me, I thought; the only one who had had no thought of what my coming would mean. Even Marius had had to think of what it would mean in terms of Domain-right. Even Jeff; he might have had to leave Arilinn and take his place in Council.

“Your poor hand,” she said. “Couldn’t the Terrans do anything for it?”

Even to Linnell I didn’t want to talk about it. “Not much,” I said, “but I have a mechanical hand I wear when I don’t want to be noticed. I’ll wear it when I dance with you on Festival Night, shall I?”

“Only if you want to,” she said seriously. “I don’t care what you look like, Lew. You’re always the same to me.”

I hugged her close, warmed as much by her accepting smile as by the words. I suppose Linnell was a beautiful woman; I have never been able to see her as anything but the little foster-sister with whom I’d raced breakneck over the hills; I’d spanked her for breaking my toys or borrowing them without leave, comforted her when she was crying with toothache. I said, “You were playing the rryl… play for me, won’t you?”

She took up the instrument again and began to play the ballad of Hastur and Cassilda:

The stars were mirrored on the shore,

Dark was the lone immortal moor,

Silent were rocks and trees and stone—

Robardin’s daughter walked alone,

A web of gold between her hands

On shining spindle burning bright…

I had heard Dio singing it, though Dio had no singing voice to speak of—I wondered, where was Callina? I should speak with her—

Linnell gestured, and I saw, in a niche beyond the fireplace, Callina and Regis Hastur, seated on a soft divan and so absorbed in what they were saying that neither had heard me come into the room. I felt a momentary flare of jealousy— they looked so comfortable, so much at peace with each other—then Callina looked up at me and smiled, and I knew I had nothing to fear.

She came forward; I wanted to take her in my arms, into that embrace which was so much more than the embrace I would have given a kinswoman; instead she reached out and touched my wrist, the feather touch with which a working Keeper would have greeted me, and with that automatic gesture, frustration slipped between us like an unsheathed sword.

A Keeper. Never to be touched, never to be desired, even by a defiling thought… angry frustration, and at the same time, reassurance; this is how she would have greeted me if we were both back in Arilinn, where I had been happy… even had we been acknowledged lovers for years, she would no more have touched me than this.

But our eyes met, and she said gravely, “Ashara will see you, Lew. It is the first time, I think, in more than a generation, that she has agreed to speak with anyone from outside. When I spoke to her of the Sharra matrix, she said I might bring you.”

Regis said, “I would like to speak with her, too. It may be that she would know something of the Hastur Gift…” but, he broke off at Callina’s cold frown.

“She has not asked for you. Even I cannot bring anyone into her presence unless she wishes it.”

Regis subsided as if she had struck him. I blinked, staring aghast at this new Callina, the impassive mask of her face, the eyes and voice of a cold, stony stranger. Only a moment, and she was again the Callina I knew, but I had seen, and I was puzzled and dismayed. I would have said something more, even to reassure Regis that we would ask the ancient leronis to grant him an audience, but Linnell claimed me again.

“Are you going to take him away at once? When we have not seen each other for so many years? Lew, you must tell me about Terra, about the worlds in the Empire!”

“There will be time enough for that, certainly,” I said, smiling, looking at the fading light. “It is not yet nightfall… but there’s nothing good to tell of Terra, chiya; I have no good memories. Mostly I was in hospitals…” and as I said the word I remembered another hospital in which not I, but Dio had been the patient, and a certain dark-haired, sweet-faced young nurse. “Did you know, Linnie-—no, of course, you couldn’t know; you have a perfect double on Vainwal; so like you that at first I called her by your name, thought it was you yourself!”

“Really? What was she like?”

“Oh, efficient, competent—even her voice was like yours,” I said. And then I stopped, remembering the horror of that night, the shockingly deformed, monstrous form that should have been my son… I was strongly barriered, but Linnell saw the twitching of my face and put up her hand to stroke my scarred cheek.

“Foster-brother,” she said, giving the word the intimate inflection that made it a term of endearment, “don’t talk about hospitals and sickness and pain. It’s all over now, you’re here at home with us. Don’t think about it.”

“And there are enough troubles here on Darkover to make you forget whatever troubles you may have had in the Empire,” said Regis, with a troubled smile, joining us at the window, where the sun had faded, blurred by the evening clouds. “Council was not properly adjourned; I doubt we’ve heard the last of that. Certainly not the last of Beltran…” and Callina, hearing the name, shuddered. She said, looking impatiently at the clouds, “Come, we must not keep Ashara waiting.”

A servant folded her into a wrap that was like a gray shadow. We went out and down the stairs, but at the first turning, something prompted me to turn back; Linnell stood there, framed in the light of the doorway, copper highlights caught in her brown hair, her face serious and smiling; and for a moment, that out-of-phase time sense that haunts the Alton gift, a touch perhaps of the precognition I had inherited from the Aldaran part of my blood, made me stare, unfocused, as past, present, future all collapsed upon themselves, and I saw a shadow falling on Linnell, and a dreadful conviction—

Linnell was doomed…the same shadow that had darkened my life would fall on Linnell and cover her and swallow her—

“Lew, what’s the matter?”

I blinked, turning to Callina at my side. Already the certainty, that sick moment when my mind had slid off the time track, was fading like a dream in daylight. The confusion, the sense of tragedy, remained; I wanted to rush up the stairs, snatch Linnell into my arms as if I could guard her from tragedy… but when I looked up again the door was closed and Linnell was gone.

We went out through the archway and into a courtyard. The light rain of early summer was falling, and though at this season it would not turn to snow, there were little slashes of sleet in it. Already the lights were fading in the Old City, or could not come through the fog; but beyond that, across the valley, the brilliant neon of the Trade City cast garish red and orange shadows on the low clouds. I went to the railed balcony that looked down on the valley, and stood there, disregarding the rain in my face. Two worlds lying before me; yet I belonged to neither. Was there any world in all the star-spanning Empire where I would feel at home?

“I would like to be down there tonight,” I said wearily, “or anywhere away from this Hell’s castle—”

“Even in the Terran Zone?”

“Even in the Terran Zone.”

“Why aren’t you, then? There is nothing keeping you here,” Callina said, and at the words I turned to her. Her cobweb cloak spun out on the wind like a fine mist as I pulled her into my arms. For a moment, frightened, she was taut and resisting in my arms; then she softened and clung to me. But her lips were closed and unresponsive as a child’s under my demanding kiss, and it brought me to my senses, with the shock of dйjа vu…somewhere, sometime, in a dream or reality, this had happened before, even the slashes of rain across our faces…She sensed it too, and put up her hands between us, gently withdrawing. But then she let her head drop on my shoulder.

“What now, Lew? Merciful Avarra—what now?”

I didn’t know. Finally I gestured toward the crimson smear of garish neon that was the Trade City.

“Forget Beltran. Marry me—now—tonight, in the Terran Zone. Confront the Council with an accomplished fact and let them chew on it and swallow it—let them solve their own problems, not hide behind a woman’s skirts and think they can solve them with marriages!”

“If I dared—” she whispered, and through the impassive voice of a trained Keeper, I felt the tears she had learned not to shed. But she sighed, putting me reluctantly away again. She said, “You may forget Beltran, but he will not go away because we are not there. He has an army at the gates of Thendara, armed with Terran weapons. And beyond that— she hesitated, reluctant, and said, “Can we so easily forget— Sharra?”

The word jolted me out of my daydream of peace. For the first time in years, Sharra had not even been a whisper of evil in my mind; in her arms I had actually forgotten. Callina might be bound to the Tower by her vows as Keeper, but I was not free either. Silent, I turned away from the balconied view of the twin cities below me, and let her lead me down another flight of stairs and across another series of isolated courtyards, until I was all but lost in the labyrinth that was Comyn Castle.

Both of us, lost in the maze our forefathers had woven for us…

But Callina moved unerringly through the puzzling maze, and at last led me into a door where stairways led up and up, then through a hidden door, where we stood close together as, slowly, the shaft began to rise.

This Tower—so the story goes—was built for the first of the Comyn Keepers when Thendara was no more than a village of wicker-woven huts crouching in the lee of the first of the Towers. It went far, far into our past, to the days when the fathers of the Comyn mated with chieri and bred strange nonhuman powers into our line, and Gods moved on the face of the world among humankind, Hastur who was the son of Aldones who was the son of light… I told myself not to be superstitious. This Tower was ancient indeed, and some of the old machinery from the Ages of Chaos survived here, no more than that. Lifts that moved of themselves, by no power I could identify, were commonplace enough in the Terran Zone, why should it terrify me here? The smell of centuries hung between the walls, in the shadows that slipped past, as if with every successive rising we moved further back into the very Ages of Chaos and before— at last the shaft stopped, and we were before a small panel of glass that was a door, with blue lights behind it.

I saw no handle or doorknob, but Callina reached forward and it opened. And we stepped into… blueness.

Blue, like the living heart of a jewel, like the depths of a translucent lake, like the farther deeps of the sky of Terra at midday. Blue, around us, behind us, beneath us. Uncanny lights so mirrored and prismed the room that it seemed to have no dimensions, to be at once immeasurably large and terribly confined, to be everywhere at once. I shrank, feeling immense spaces beneath me and above me, the primitive fear of falling; but Callina moved unerringly through the blueness.

“Is it you, daughter and my son?” said a low clear voice, like winter water running under ice. “Come here. I am waiting for you.”

Then and only then, in the frosty dayshine, could I focus my eyes enough in the blueness to make out the great carven throne of glass, and the pallid figure of a woman seated upon it.

Somehow I would have thought that in this formal audience Ashara would wear the crimson robes of ceremonial for a Keeper. Instead she wore robes that so absorbed and mirrored the light that she was almost invisible; a straight tiny figure, no larger than a child of twelve. Her features were almost fleshlessly pure, as unwrinkled as Callina’s own, as if the very hand of time itself had smoothed its own marks away. The eyes, long and large, were colorless too, though in a more normal light they might have been blue. There was a faint, indefinable resemblance between the young Keeper and the old one, as if Ashara were a Callina incredibly more ancient, or Callina an embryo Ashara, not yet ancient but bearing the seeds of her own translucent invisibility. I began to believe that the stories were true; that she was all but immortal, had dwelt here unchanged while the worlds and the centuries passed over her and beyond her…

She said, “So you have been beyond the stars, Lew Alton?”

It would not be fair to say the voice was unkind. It was not human enough for that. Detached, unbelievably remote; it was all of that. It sounded as if the effort of conversing with real, living persons was too much for her, as if our coming had disturbed the crystalline peace in which she dwelt.

Callina, accustomed to this—or so I suppose—murmured, “You see all things, Mother Ashara. You know what we have to face.”

A flicker of emotion passed over the peaceful face, and she seemed to solidify, to become less translucent and more real. “Not even I can see all things. I have no power, now, outside this place.”

Callina murmured, “Yet aid us with your wisdom, Mother.”

“I will do what I must,” she said, remotely. She gestured. There was a transparent bench at her feet—glass or crystal; I had not seen it before, and I wondered why. Maybe it had not been there or maybe she had conjured it there; nothing would have surprised me now. “Sit there and tell me.”

She gestured at my matrix. “Give it to me, and let me see—”

Now, remembering, telling, I wonder whether any of this happened or whether it was some bizarre dream concealing reality. A telepath, even an Arilinn-trained telepath, simply does not do what I did then; without even thinking of protest, I slipped the leather thong on which my matrix was tied over my head with my good hand, fumbled a little with the silken wrappings, and handed it to her, without the slightest thought of resisting. I simply put it into her hand.

And this is the first law of a telepath; nobody touches a keyed matrix, except your own Keeper, and then only after a long period of attunement, of matching resonances. But I sat there at the feet of the ancient sorceress, and laid the matrix in her hand without stopping to think, and although something in me was tensed against incredible agony… I remembered when Kadarin had stripped me of my matrix, and how I had gone into convulsions…nothing happened; the matrix might have been safely around my neck.

And I sat there peacefully and watched it.

Deep within the almost-invisible blue of the matrix were fires, strange lights… I saw the glow of fire, and the great raging shimmer… Sharra! Not the Form of Fire which had terrified us in Council, but the Goddess herself, raging in flame—Ashara waved her hand and it disappeared. She said, “Yes, that matrix I know of old… and yours has been in contact with it, am I right?”

I bowed my head and said, “You have seen.”

“What can we do? Is there any way to defend against—”

She waved Callina to silence. “Even I cannot alter the laws of energy and mechanics,” she said. Looking around the room, I was not so sure. As if she had heard my thoughts, she said, “I wish you knew less science of the Terrans, Lew.”

“Why?”

“Because now you look for causes, explanations, the fallacy that every event must have a preceding cause… matrix mechanics is the first of the non-causal sciences,” she said, seeming to pick up that Terran technical phrase out of the air or from my mind. “Your very search for structure, cause and reality produces the cause you seek, but it is not the real cause… does any of this make sense to you?”

“Not very much,” I confessed. I had been trained to think of a matrix as a machine, a simple but effective machine to amplify psi impulses and the electrical energy of the brain and mind.

“But that leaves no place for such things as Sharra,” Ashara said. “Sharra is a very real Goddess— No, don’t shake your head. Perhaps you could call Sharra a demon, though She is no more a demon than Aldones is a God— They are entities, and not of this ordinary three-dimensional world you inhabit. Your mind would find it easier to think of them as Gods and Demons, and of your matrix, and the Sharra matrix, as talismans for summoning those demons, or banishing them…They are entities from another world, and the matrix is the gateway that brings them here,” she said. “You know that, or you knew it once, when you managed to close the gateway for a time. And for such a summoning Sharra will always have Her sacrifice; so she had your hand, and Marjorie gave up her life—”

“Don’t!” I shuddered.

“But there is a better weapon of banishing,” Ashara said. “What says the legend…”

Callina whispered, “Sharra was bound in chains by the son of Hastur, who was the Son of Aldones who was the Son of Light…”

“Rubbish,” I said boldly. “Superstition!”

“You think so?” Ashara seemed to realize she was still holding my matrix; she handed it carelessly back to me and I fumbled it into the silken wrappings and into its leather bag, put it back around my neck. “What of the shadow-sword?”

That too was legend; Linnell had sung it tonight, of the time when Hastur walked on the shores of the lake, and loved the Blessed Cassilda. The legend told of the jealousy of Alar, who had forged in his magical forge a shadow-sword, meant to banish, not to slay. Pierced with this sword, Hastur must return to his realms of light… but the legend recounted how Camilla, the damned, had taken the place of Cassilda in Hastur’s arms, and so received the shadow-blade in her heart, and passed away forever into those realms—

I said, hesitating, “The Sharra matrix is concealed in the hilt of a sword… tradition, because it is a weapon, no more—”

Ashara asked, “What do you think would happen to anyone who was slain with such a sword as that?”

I did not know. It had never occurred to me that the Sword of Sharra could be used as a sword, though I had hauled the damnable thing around half the Galaxy with me. It was simply the case the forge-folk had made to conceal the matrix of Sharra. But I found I did not like thinking of what would happen to anyone run through by a sword possessed and dominated by Sharra’s matrix.

“So,” she said, “you are beginning to understand. Your forefathers knew much of those swords. Have you heard of the Sword of Aldones?”

Some old legend… yes. “It lies hidden among the holy things at Hali,” I said, “spelled so that none of Comyn blood may come near, to be drawn only when the end of Comyn is near; and the drawing of that sword shall be the end of our world—”

“The legend has changed, yes,” said Ashara, with something which, in a face more solid, more human, might have been a smile. “I suppose you know more of sciences than of legend— Tell me, what is Cherilly’s Law?”

It was the first law of matrix mechanics; it stated that nothing was unique in space and time except a matrix; that every item in the universe existed with one and only one exact duplicate, except for a matrix; a matrix was the only thing which was wholly unique, and therefore any attempt to duplicate a matrix would destroy it, and the attempted duplicate.

“The Sword of Aldones is the weapon against Sharra,” said Ashara. But I knew enough of the holy things at Hali to know that if the Sword of Aldones was concealed there, it might as well be in another Galaxy; and I said so.

There are things like that on Darkover; they can’t be destroyed, but they are so dangerous that even the Comyn, or a Keeper, can’t be trusted with them; and all the ingenuity of the great minds of the Ages of Chaos had been bent to concealing them so that they cannot endanger others.

The rhu fead, the holy Chapel at Hali… all that remained of Hali Tower, which had burned to the ground during the Ages of Chaos… was such a concealment. The Chapel itself was guarded like the Veil at Arilinn; no one not of Comyn blood may penetrate the Veil. It is so spelled and guarded with matrixes and other traps that if any outsider, not of the true Comyn blood, should step inside, his mind would be stripped bare; by the time he or she got inside, he would be an idiot without enough directive force to know or remember why he had come there.

But inside the Chapel, the Comyn of a thousand years ago had put them out of our reach forever. They are guarded in the opposite fashion. An outsider could have picked them up freely; but the outsider couldn’t get into the Chapel at all. No one of Comyn blood could so much as lay a hand on them without instant death.

I said, “Every unscrupulous tyrant in a thousand years of Comyn has been trying to figure that one out.”

“But none of them has had a Keeper on their side,” said Ashara. Callina asked, “A Terran?”

“Not one reared on Darkover,” Ashara said. “An alien, perhaps who knew nothing of the forces here. His mind would be locked and sealed against any forces here, so that he wouldn’t even know they were there. He would pass them, guarded by ignorance.”

“Wonderful,” I said with sarcastic emphasis. “All I have to do is go thirty or forty light-years to a planet out there, force or persuade someone there to come back with me to this planet, without telling him anything about it so he won’t know what he ought to be afraid of, then figure a way to get him inside the Chapel without being fried to idiocy, and hope he’ll hand over the Sword of Aldones when he gets it into his enthusiastic little hand!”

Aahara’s colorless eyes held a flicker of scorn, and suddenly I felt ashamed of my sarcasm.

“Have you been in the matrix laboratory here? Have you seen the screen?”

I remembered, and suddenly knew what it was; one of the almost-legendary psychokinetic transmitters… instantaneously, through space, perhaps through time…

“That hasn’t been done for hundreds of years!”

“I know what Callina can do,” said Ashara with her strange smile. “And I shall be with you…”

She stood up, extended her hands to us both. She touched mine; she felt cold as a corpse, as the surface of a jewel— Her voice was low, and for a moment it seemed almost menacing.

“Callina…”

Callina shrank away from the touch and somehow, though her face was molded in the impassive stillness of a Keeper, it seemed to me that she was weeping. “No!”

“Callina—” the low voice was soft, inexorable. Slowly, Callina held out her hands, let herself touch, join hands with us—

The room vanished. We drifted, fathomless, in blueness, measureless space; blank emptiness like starless space, great bare chasms of nothingness. In Arilinn I had been taught to leave my body behind, go into the overworld of reality where the body is not, where we exist only as thoughts making form of the nothingness of the universe, but this was no region of the overworld I had ever known. I drifted, bodiless, in tingling mist. Then the emptiness between stars was charged with a spark, a flare of force, a stream of life, charging me; I could feel myself as a network of live nerves, lacework of living force. I clenched again the hand that had been cut from me, felt every nerve and sinew in it.

Then, suddenly in the emptiness, a face sketched itself on my mind.

I cannot describe that face, though I know, now, what it was. I saw it three times in all. There are no human words to describe it; it was beautiful beyond imagining, but it was terrible past all conception. It was not even evil, not as men in this life know evil; it was not human enough for that. It was—damnable. Only a fraction of a second it burned behind my eyes, but I knew I had looked straight in at the gates of hell.

I struggled back to reality. I was again in Ashara’s blue-ice room; had I ever left it? Callina’s hands were still clasped in mine, but Ashara was gone. The glass throne was empty, and as I looked on it the throne, too, was gone, vanished into the mirrored shimmer of the room. Had she ever been there at all? I felt giddy and disoriented, but Callina sagged against me, and I caught her, and the feel of her fainting body in my arms brought me back sternly to reality. The touch of her soft robes, of the end of her hair against my hand, seemed to touch some living nerve in me. I clasped her against me, burying my face against her shoulder. She smelled warm and sweet, with a subtle fragrance, not perfume or scent or cosmetic, just the soft scent of her skin, and it dizzied me; I wanted to go on holding her, but she opened her eyes and swiftly was aware again, holding herself upright and away from me. I bent my head. I dared not touch her, and would not against her will, but for that dizzying moment I wanted her more than I had ever wanted any woman living. Was it only that she was Keeper and so forbidden to me? I stood upright again, cold and aching, my face icy where it had lain against her heart; but I had control of myself again. She seemed unaware, immune to the torrent of feeling that raged in me. Of course, she was a Keeper, she had been taught to move beyond all this, immune to passion—

“Callina,” I said, “cousin, forgive me.”

The faintest flicker of a smile moved on her face. “Never mind, Lew. I wish—” she left the rest unspoken, but I realized she was not quite so insulated from my own torment as I had believed.

“I am no more than human,” she said, and again the faint feather-touch to my wrist, the touch of a Keeper, reassured me. It was like a promise, but we drew apart, knowing that there must remain a barrier between us.

“Where is Ashara?” I asked.

Once again the flicker of a troubled smile on her face. “You had better not ask me,” she murmured. “You would never believe the answer.”

I frowned, and again the uncanny resemblance troubled me, the stillness of Ashara in Callina’s quiet face—I could only guess at the bond between the Keepers. Abruptly, Callina moved toward some invisible door and we were outside, on the stone landing, solid, and I wondered if the blue-ice room had ever existed, or if the whole thing had been some kind of bizarre dream.

A dream, for there I was whole and I had two hands— Something had happened. But I did not know what it could have been.

We returned another way to the Tower, and Callina led me through the relay chamber, into the room filled with the strange and mysterious artifacts of the Ages of Chaos. It was warm, and I pulled off my cloak and let the heat soak into my chilled body and aching arm, while Callina moved softly around the laboratory, adjusting specially modulated dampers, and finally gestured to the wide, shimmering glass panel, whose depths made me think of the blue-ice room of Ashara. I stared, frowning, into the cloudy depths. Sorcery? Unknown laws, non-casual sciences? They mingled and were one. The Gift I had borne in my blood, the freak thing in my heredity that made me Comyn, telepath, laranzu, matrix technician—for such things as this I had been bred and trained; why should I fear them? Yet I was afraid, and Callina knew it.

I was trained at Arilinn, oldest and most powerful of the Towers, and had heard something—not much—about screens like this. It was a duplicator—it transmitted a desired pattern; it captured images and the realities behind them—no; it’s impossible to explain, I didn’t—and don’t—know enough about the screens. Including how they were operated; but I supposed Callina knew and I was just there to strengthen her with the strength of the Alton Gift, to lend her power as—the thought sent ice through my veins—I had lent power for the raising of Sharra. Well, that was fair enough; power for power, reparation for betrayal. Still I was uneasy; I had allowed Kadarin to use me for the raising of Sharra without knowing enough about the dangers, and here I was repeating the same mistake. The difference was that I trusted to Callina. But even that frightened me; there had been a time when I had trusted Kadarin, too, called him friend, sworn brother, bredu.

Again I stopped myself. I had to trust Callina; there was no other way. I went and stood before the screen.

Augmented by the screen, I could search, with telepathic forces augmented hundredfold, thousandfold, for such a one as we wanted. Of all the millions and billions of worlds in space and time, somewhere there was a mind such as we wanted, with a certain awareness—and a certain lack of awareness. With the screen we could attune that mind’s vibrations to this particular place in time and space; here, now, between the two poles of the screen. The space annihilated by the matrix, we could shift the—well, we call them energons, which is as good a name as any—shift the energons of that particular mind and the body behind it, and bring them here. My mind played with words like matter-transmitter, hyperspace, dimension-travel; but those were only words. The screen was the reality.

I dropped into one of the chairs before the screen, fiddling with a calibration which would allow me to match resonances between myself and Callina—more accurately, between her matrix and mine. I said, not looking up, “You’ll have to cut out the monitor screen, Callina,” and she nodded.

“There’s a bypass relay through Arilinn.” She touched controls and the monitor surface, a glassy screen—large, but half the size of the giant screen before me—blinked fitfully and went dark, shunting every monitored matrix on Darkover out of this relay. A grill crackled, sent out a tiny staccato signal; Callina listened attentively to no sound that I could hear—the message was not audible, and I was too preoccupied to merge into the relays. Callina listened for a moment, then spoke—aloud, perhaps as a courtesy to me, perhaps to focus her own thoughts for the relay.

“Yes, I know, Maruca, but we have cut out the main circuits here in Thendara; you’ll have to monitor from there.” Again the listening silence, then she rapped out, “Put up a third-level barrier around Thendara! That is a direct order from Comyn; observe and comply!” She turned away, sighing.

“That girl is the noisiest telepath on the planet! Now everyone with a scrap of telepathy on the whole planet will know something is going on in Thendara tonight!”

We had had no choice; I said so. She took her own place before the screen, and I blanked my mind against it, ready for whatever she should demand of me. What sort of alien would suit us? But without volition, at least on my part, a pattern shaped itself on the screen. I saw the dim symbols in the moment before my optic nerve overloaded and I went out; then I was blind and deaf in that instant of overload which is always terrifying, however familiar it may become.

Gradually, without external senses, I found orientation within the screen. My mind, extended through astronomical distances, traversed in fractional seconds whole galaxies and parsecs of subjective spacetime. Vague touches of consciousness, fragments of thought, emotions that floated like shadows—the flotsam of the mental universe.

Then before I felt contact, I saw the white-hot flare in the screen. Somewhere another mind had fitted into the pattern which we had cast out like a net, and when we found the fitting intelligence it had been captured.

I swung out, bodiless, divided into a billion subjective fragments, extended over a vast gulf of spacetime. If anything happened, I would never get back to my body now, but would drift on the spacetime curve forever.

With infinite caution I poured myself into the alien mind. There was a short, terrible struggle. It was embedded-enlaced in mine. The world was a holocaust of molten-glass fire and color. The air writhed. The glow on the screen was a shadow, then solid, then a clearing darkness—

“Now!” I did not speak, simply flung the command at Callina, then light tore at my eyes, there was a ripping shock tearing at my brain, the floor seemed to rock and Callina was flung, reeling, into my arms as the energons seared the air and my brain.

Half stunned, but conscious, I saw that the screen was blank, the alien mind torn free of mine.

And in a crumpled heap on the floor, where she had fallen at the base of the screen, lay a slight, dark-haired woman.

I realized after a moment that I was still holding Callina in my arms; I let her go at the very instant that she moved to free herself of me. She knelt beside the strange woman, and I followed her.

“She’s not dead?”

“Of course not.” With the instincts of the Arilinn-trained, Callina was already feeling for a pulse, though her own was still thready and irregular. “But that—transition—nearly killed us, and we knew what to expect. What do you think it must have been like for her?”

Soft brown hair, falling across her face, hid her features. I brushed it gently back, and stopped, my hand still touching her cheek, in bewilderment.

“Linnell—” I whispered.

“No,” said Callina, “She sleeps in her own room…” but her voice faltered as she looked down at the girl. Then I knew who it must be; the young nurse I had seen on that dreadful night in the Terran hospital in Vainwal. Even knowing, as I did, what had happened, I thought my mind would give way. That transition had taken its toll of me too and I had to take a moment to quiet my own pulses and breathing.

“Avarra be merciful,” Callina whispered. “What have we done?”

Of course, I thought. Of course. Linnell was near to us both; sister, foster-sister. We had spoken with her just tonight. The pattern was at hand. Yet I still wondered, why Linnell, why not duplicate myself, or Callina?…

I tried to put it into simple words, more for myself than Callina.

“Cherilly’s Law. Everything in the universe—you, me, that chair, the drinking fountain in Port Chicago spaceport— everything exists in one, and only one, exact duplicate. Nothing is unique except for a matrix; even atoms have minute differences in the orbit of their electrons… there are equations to calculate the number of possible variations, but I’m not enough of a mathematician to calculate them. Jeff could probably reel them all off to you.”

“So this is… Linnell’s identical twin… ?”

“More alike than that; only once in a million times or so would a twin be the duplicate under Cherilly’s Law. This is her real twin; same fingerprints, same retinal patterns and brainwave patterns, same betagraphs and blood type. She won’t be much like Linnell in personality, probably, because the duplicates of Linnell’s environment are duplicated all over the Galaxy.” I pointed to the small scar beside her chin; turned over the limp wrist where the mark of Comyn was embedded in the flesh. “Probably a birthmark,” I said, “but it’s identical with Linnell’s Seal, see? Flesh and blood are identical; same blood type, and even her chromosomes, if you could monitor that deeply, would be identical with Linnell’s.”

Callina stared and stared. “She can live in this—this alien environment, then?”

“If she’s identical,” I said. “Her lungs breathe the same ratio of oxygen in the air as ours do, and her internal organs are adjusted to the same gravity.”

“Can you carry her?” Callina asked, “She’ll get a dreadful shock if she wakes up in this place.”

I grinned humorlessly. “She’ll get one anyhow.” But I managed to scoop her up one-handed; she was frail and light, like Linnell. Callina went ahead of me, pulled back curtains, showed me where to lay her down on a couch in a small bare room—I supposed the young men and women who worked in the relays sometimes took a nap here instead of returning to their own rooms. I covered her, for it was cold.

“I wonder where she comes from?” Callina murmured.

“From a world with about the same gravity as Darkover, which narrows it a little,” I evaded. I could not remember the nurse’s name, some barbaric Terran syllables. I wondered if she would recognize me. I should explain it all to Callina. But her face was lined with exhaustion, making her look gaunt, twice her age. “Let’s leave her to sleep off the shock— and get some sleep ourselves.”

We went down to the foot of the Tower. Callina stood in the doorway with me, her hands lightly resting in mine. She looked haggard, worn, but lovely to me after the shared danger, the intimacy created by matrix work, a closeness greater than family, greater than that of lovers— I bent and kissed her, but she turned her head so that my kiss fell only on a mouthful of soft, fine, sweet-scented hair. I bowed my own head and did not press her. She was right. It would have been insanity; we were both exhausted.

She murmured, as if finished a sentence I had started “… and I must go and see if Linnell is really all right…”

So she, too, had shared that sense of portent, of doom? I put her gently away, and went out of the Tower, but I did not go to my rooms to sleep as I meant to do. Instead I paced in the courtyard, like a trapped animal, battling unendurable thoughts, until the red sun came up and Festival dawned in Thendara.

CHAPTER NINE

« ^ »

The morning of Festival dawned red and misty; Regis Hastur, restless, watched the sun come up, and asked his body-servant to arrange for flowers to be sent to his sister Javanne.

I should send gifts, too, to the mothers of my children—

It was simple enough to arrange that baskets of fruits and flowers should be sent, but he felt profoundly depressed and, paradoxically, lonely.

There is no reason I should be lonely. Grandfather would be only too happy to arrange a marriage for me, and I could choose any woman in Thendara for wife, and have as many concubines as a Dry-Towner, and no one could criticize me, not even if I chose to keep a male favorite or two on the side.

I suppose, when it comes to that, I am alone because I would rather be alone, and responsible to no one…

… except the whole damned population of the Domains! I cannot call my life my own… and I will not marry so that they will approve of me!

There was only one person in Thendara, he reflected, whom he really wished to send a gift; and because of custom, he could not do that. He would not degrade what was between Danilo and himself by the pretense that it was the more conventional tie. He sat at his high window, looking out over the city, pondering yesterday’s end to the Council, frightened because he had done what he had done, manifested the Form of Fire before them all. Somehow, without training more than the barest minimum, so that he could use his laran without becoming ill, he had acquired a new Gift he did not know he had, nor did he know what to do with it. He knew so little of the Hastur Gift and he suspected that his grandfather knew little more.

If only Kennard had still been alive, he would have gone to the kindly kinsman he had learned to call “Uncle” and set his puzzlement before him. Kennard had spent years in Arilinn and knew everything that was known about the Comyn powers. But Kennard was dead, under a faraway alien sun, and Lew seemed to know little more than himself. Moreover, Lew had his own troubles.

At this point he was summoned to breakfast with his grandfather. For a moment he considered sending a message that he was not hungry—he had made a point with his grandfather and was not inclined to give way on it—but then he remembered that it was, after all, Festival, and kinsmen should put aside their quarrels for the day. In any case he would have to confront his grandfather at the great ball tonight; he might as well meet him in private first.

Danvan Hastur bowed to his grandson, then embraced him and as Regis took a seat before the laden table, he noticed that his grandfather had ordered all his favorite delicacies. He supposed this was as near to an apology as he would ever have from the old man. There was coffee from the Terran Zone, in itself a great luxury, and various honey cakes and fruits, as well as the more traditional fare of porridge and nut breads. As he helped himself, Danvan Hastur said, “I ordered a basket of fruits and candies sent to Javanne in your name.”

“You might have trusted me to remember, sir,” said Regis, smiling, “but with that brood of children, the sweets won’t go to waste.”

But thinking of Javanne set him to remembering again the eerie power he had somehow acquired over Javanne’s matrix when it had been possessed by Sharra— He did not understand and there was no one to ask. Should he go and demand the audience with Ashara which Callina had denied him? Lew’s matrix was overshadowed by Sharra; perhaps I would have power over that too—

But he feared to try and fail. And then he remembered that there was another matrix, and one within his own reach, which had been overshadowed by Sharra; though at a greater distance than Lew’s; Lew had been in the very heart of Sharra’s flames… Rafe Scott was concealed in the Terran Zone, and Regis didn’t blame him. But did Rafe even know that Beltran was here, threatening all of them? Yes, he would pay a call upon Rafe this morning.

He declined another cup of coffee… although he was grateful for the gesture his grandfather had made, he did not really like it… and pushed his chair back, just as the servant announced:

“Lord Danilo, Warden of Ardais.”

Hastur greeted Danilo with affable courtesy, and invited him to join them at the table; Regis knew that his grandfather was underlining a conceded point. But Danilo, bowing to them both, said, “I am here with a message from Lord Ardais, sir. Beltran of Aldaran has brought his honor guard within the city walls and has invited you to witness his formal giving up of Terran weapons into the hands of his promised wife, Lady Aillard.”

“Send a messenger to tell him I will be there within a few moments,” said Hastur, rising. “Regis, will you join me?”

“Please excuse me, Grandfather, I have an errand elsewhere,” Regis said, and though his grandfather did not look pleased, he did not question Regis.

“I’ll leave you two alone, then,” he said, and withdrew. Regis discovered his appetite had returned; he poured himself the coffee he had refused and some for Danilo too, and passed the platter of honey cakes. Danilo took one, and said, sipping curiously at the coffee, “This is a Terran luxury, no? If Lord Dyan has his way, there will be no more of this…”

“I can well do without it,” Regis said. He took a handful of candied blackfruit and offered it silently to Danilo; Danilo, accepting the sweetmeats, smiled at him and said, “No, and I have no Festival gift for you, either— I am not Dyan, to send presents to his favorites as I would do to my sister if I had one.”

We do not need to gift one another…

Still, it is a sign I wish I might show…

Regis said aloud, breaking the moment of intimacy that was more intense than any physical caress, “I must go to the Terran Zone, Dani; I must see if Captain Scott knows what is going on…”

“I will go with you, if you wish,” Danilo offered.

“Thank you, but there is no need to anger your foster-father,” Regis said, “and if you go there against his will, he will take it as defiance. Keep the peace, Dani; there are enough quarrels within Comyn, we need no more.” He put his honey-cake aside, suddenly losing his appetite again. “Grandfather will be angry enough that I am not there to witness the Aldaran men giving up their Terran weapons. But Beltran will never love me, no matter what I do, and I would as soon not be there to see this—” he searched for a word, considered and rejected “farce,” then shrugged.

“Dyan may trust Beltran; I will not,” he said, and left.

Some time after, he gave his name and business to the Spaceforce guard, black-leathered, at the gates of the Terran Zone. The Spaceforce man stared, as well he might—one of the powerful Hasturs here with no more escort than a single Guardsman? But he used his communicator, and after a moment said, “The Legate will see you in his office, Lord Hastur.”

Regis was not Lord Hastur—that was his grandfather’s title—but there was no use expecting Spaceforce men to know proper courtesy and protocol. Lawton, in the Legate’s office, rising to greet him, used his proper address and got his title right, even saying it with the proper inflection, which was not all that easy for a Terran. But then, of course, Lawton was half Darkovan.

“You honor me, Lord Regis,” Lawton said, “but I hadn’t expected to see you here. I suspect I’ll be at the ball in Comyn Castle tonight—the Regent sent me a formal invitation.”

“It’s Rafe Scott I came to see,” Regis said, “but I didn’t want to do it behind your back and be accused of spying, or worse.”

Lawton waved that aside.

“Would you rather see him here? Or in his own quarters?”

“In his quarters, I think.”

“I’ll send someone to show you the way,” Lawton said. “But first, a question. Do you know the man they call Kadarin by sight?”

“I think I’d know him if I saw him.” Regis remembered the picture he had seen in Lew’s mind, the day the Alton townhouse had burned.

“What kind of chance would we have of finding him, if we sent Spaceforce into the Old Town? Is there anyone there who would try and hide him from justice?”

“He’s wanted by the Guardsmen there too,” Regis said. “It’s fairly certain that he was responsible for a fire and explosion with contraband explosives…” Briefly, he outlined to Lawton what he had seen.

“Spaceforce could find him faster than your guards,” the Terran Legate suggested. Regis shook his head.

“I’m sure they could,” he said, “but, believe me, I wouldn’t advise sending them.”

“There ought to be a treaty that we could at least look for a wanted criminal,” Lawton said grimly. “As it is, once he sets foot in the Old Town he’s safe from our men—and if he somehow sneaks into the Trade City, safe from your Guardsmen. I’d like to know why we can’t have that much cooperation at least.”