Sharra's Exile

Hate and love mingled, as they had mingled for my father, whose voice even now pulsed in my mind, Return… return…

Then Kadarin shrugged a little and the spell broke. He said, “If you want to throw me in a cell, that’s all right with me, but it’s only fair to warn you I probably won’t stay there long. I have—” he touched the hilt of the Sharra sword and said lightly, “a pressing engagement elsewhere.”

“Take him away,” Lawton said. “Put him in maximum security, and let him see if he can talk himself out of there.”

Kadarin saved them the trouble of taking him; he rose and went amiably with the guards. One of them said, “I’ll have that sword first, if you please.”

Kadarin said, still with that impeccable grin, “Take it, if you want it.”

Watching, I wanted to cry out a warning to the Spaceforce men; I knew it was not a sword. One of them thrust out his hand… and went flying across the room; he struck his head against the wall and sank down, stunned. The other stood staring at Lawton and turning back to Kadarin; afraid and I didn’t blame him.

“It’s not a sword, Lawton,” I said. “It’s a matrix weapon.”

“Is that—?” Lawton stared, and I nodded. There was no way, short of killing Kadarin first, that they could get it away from him; and I was not even sure that he could be killed while he wore it, not by any ordinary weapon anyhow. I did warn them, “Don’t put him and Thyra in the same cell.”

Not that distance would make any difference, when that sword was drawn. And would I go with them? Just the same, I was glad to have Kadarin, and the Sharra matrix, out of my sight. I started to rise, only to have the young doctor push me down again on a seat.

“You’re not going anywhere, not yet!”

“Am I a prisoner, then?”

The doctor looked at Lawton, who said, scowling, “Hell no! But if you try to walk out of here, you’ll fall flat on your face! Stay put and let Doctor Allison go over you, why don’t you? What’s the hurry?”

I tried to stand up, but for no discernible reason I found myself as weak as a newborn rabbithorn. I could not get my legs under me.

I let the young doctor go over me with his instruments. I hated hospitals, and the smell was getting to me, reviving memories of other hospitals on other worlds, memories I would rather not have to face just now; but there seemed no alternative. I noticed Kathie talking to one of the doctors and, as on Festival Night, I wondered if she would accuse us of kidnapping or worse. Well, if she did, the story was so unlikely on the face of it that probably no one would believe her; Vainwal was half a Galaxy away!

There were times when I didn’t believe it myself…

Before the doctor had finished listening to my heart and checking every function of my body—he even had me unstrap the mechanical hand, looked at it and asked if it was working properly—Regis had come back into the room. He looked grave and remote. At his side was Rafe Scott.

“I’ve seen Thyra,” he said abruptly.

So had I, I thought, and I wish I had not. Even though her attempt to kill me had been thwarted, I found I could not bear to think of her. It was not all her fault; she was Kadarin’s victim as much as I, a more willing victim, perhaps, eager for the power of Sharra. But thinking of the woman made me remember the child, and I saw Regis’s face change. I was not used to this, Regis had never been so sensitive a telepath as that… but I was beginning to realize that this new Regis, with the sudden opening of the Hastur Gift, was a different Regis from the youngster I had known most of my life.

Regis said, “I have bad news for you, Lew; the very worst. Andres—” his voice caught, almost choking, and I knew. During those carefree years at Armida, Andres had been like a father to him, too.

My father, Marius, Linnell… now Andres. Now, more than ever, I was wholly alone. I was afraid to ask, but I asked anyhow.

“Marja?”

“He—defended her with his life,” Regis said. “Beltran— would have taken her into Sharra; she has the Alton Gift. But Dyan…”

I was braced to hear that Dyan had been party to this; I was not prepared for what Regis told me next.

“Somehow—he thrust her out—elsewhere. I could find no trace of her, even telepathically. I do not know where he has her hidden; but somewhere, she is safe from Sharra. And Dyan—did you know he has the Alton Gift, Lew?”

In the confusion I had forgotten. But I should have known, of course. Power to force his will on another mind, even unwilling… and Dyan had Alton blood; he and my father had been first cousins. My father’s mother was own sister to Dyan’s father, and there were other kin-ties, further generations back.

Once, under terrible pressure—I had used a little-known power of the Altons, I had teleported from Aldaran to the Arilinn Tower. Dyan might, for some reason, have done this to Marja—but he could have sent her anywhere on Darkover, from Armida itself to Castle Ardais in the Hellers—or to the Spaceman’s Orphanage in Thendara where she had been brought up.

When there was time, I would have to make a search for her, physical and telepathic; I did not think Dyan could hide her from me permanently, or even that he would want to. But before that, Kadarin held the Sharra matrix, and if he chose to draw it, I knew I could never trust myself again. I tried to warn Regis of this. He touched the Sword of Aldones, and he looked grim. “This is the weapon against Sharra. Since I belted it on… there are many things I know,” he said, strangely, “things I had not learned. I have known for days that I have a strange power over Sharra, and now, with this—” it was as if something spoke behind and through the Regis I knew; he looked haggard and worn, years older than he was. But now and then, as I looked into his eyes, the other Regis, the youngster I knew, would peep through; and he looked frightened. I didn’t blame him.

“Show me your matrix,” he said.

I balked at that. Not without the presence of a Keeper. I said, “If Callina is there,” and he turned to one of the doctors and asked what had happened to her.

“She was faint,” said Kathie, “I took her into one of the cubicles to lie down. It must have been all the blood.”

That alerted me to danger. Darkovan women don’t faint at trifles, or at the sight of blood. I had to shout and create a scene, though, before they would take me to her; and I found her in one of the small cubicles, seated stone-still, her eyes withdrawn and pallid, as if she were Ashara’s self, gazing at nothing in the world we could see…

Regis shouted at her, and so did I, but she was motionless, her eyes gazing into nowhere unfathomable distances. At last I reached out, tried to touch her mind—I felt her, very far away, some cold icy otherness… then she gasped, stared at me, and came back to herself.

“You were in trance, Callina,” I told her, and she looked at us in consternation. I believe that even then, if she had taken us into her confidence, it might have been different… but she made light of the curious trance, saying lightly, “I was resting, no more… half asleep. What is it, what do you want?”

Regis said quietly, “I want to see if we can clear his matrix and free him from the…the Sharra one. I did it for Rafe. I think I could have done it for Beltran if he had asked me.” I picked up the unspoken part of that: Beltran was still eager to use Sharra, he had regarded it as the ultimate weapon against subjection to the Terrans… blackmail to get them off our world forever.

And Dyan, wrong-headed and desperately anxious for power the weakening Comyn Council would not yield to him, had followed him into subjection to Sharra— I could feel Regis’s grief and sorrow at that, and suddenly for a moment I saw Dyan through Regis’s eyes; the older kinsman, handsome, worldly, whom the younger Regis had liked and admired… then feared, with still the extreme fascination that was closely akin to love… the only kinsman who had wholly accepted him. I had seen Dyan only cruel, threatening, harsh; a martinet, a man eager for power and using it in brutally unsubtle ways; a man sadistically misusing his power over cadets and younger kinsmen. This other side of Dyan was one I had never seen, and it gave me pause. Had I, after all, misjudged the man?

No; or else even his love of power would never have misled him into the attempt to that ultimate perversion of the Comyn powers: Sharra’s fire… I had been burned by that fire, and Dyan had seen the scars. But in his supreme arrogance, he thought he could succeed where I had failed, make Sharra serve him; be master, rather than slave to Sharra’s fire… and Dyan was not even Tower-trained?

“All the more reason, Lew, that you must be freed,” Regis argued. After a moment I slipped the leather thong off over my head and fumbled one-handed to unwrap the silks. Finally I let it roll out into my palm, seeing the crimson blaze overlaying the blue interior shimmer of the matrix—

Callina focused her attention on me, matching resonances, until she could take it into her hand; the trained touch of a Keeper, and not overwhelmingly painful. Then I felt something like a tug-o-war in my mind, the call, restimulated, of Sharra, Return, return and live in the life of my fires… and through it I felt Marjorie… or was it Thyra? In my embrace you shall burn forever in passion undiminished…

I felt Regis, through this, as if he were somehow reaching into my very brain, though I knew it was only my matrix he was touching, disentangling it thread by thread… but the more he worked on it, the stronger grew the redoubled call, the pulse of Sharra beating in my brain, till I stood burning in agony…

The door was flung open and Dio was in the room, rushing to me, physically flinging Callina aside. “What do you think you are doing to him?” she raged.

The flames diminished and died; Regis caught at some piece of furniture, staggering, hardly able to stand erect.

“How much do you think he can stand? Hasn’t he been through enough?”

I collapsed gratefully into a chair. I said, “They were only—”

“Only stirring up what’s better left alone,” Dio stormed. “I could feel it all the way up to the eighth floor above here… I could feel them cutting at you…” and she ran her hands over me as if she had expected to see me physically covered in blood.

“It’s all right, Dio,” I said, knowing my voice was hardly more than an exhausted mumble. “I was trained to—to endure it—”

“What makes you think you’re able to endure it now?” she demanded angrily, and Regis said, in despair, “If Kadarin draws the Sharra sword…”

“If he does,” Dio said, “he will have to fight; but can’t you let him get together enough strength to fight it?”

I did not know. Rafe had never been farther than the outer layer of the circle we had formed around Sharra; I had been at its very heart, controlling the force and flow of the power of Sharra. I was doomed, and I knew it. I knew what Callina and Regis had been trying to do, and I was grateful, but for me it was too late.

My eyes rested on Callina, and I saw everything around me with a new clarity. She was everything of the past to me; Arilinn, and my own past; Marjorie had died in her arms, and then I had found in her the first forgetfulness I had known. Kinswoman, Keeper, all the past… and I ached with regret that I would not live to take her with me to Armida, to reclaim my own past and my own world. But it was not to be. A darker love would claim me, the wildfire of Sharra surging in my veins, the dark bond to Thyra who had made herself Keeper of that monstrous circle of Sharra, fire and lust and endless burning torture and flame… Callina might call me to her, but it was too late, now and forever too late. Dio spoke to me, but I had gone back to a time before she had come into my life, and I hardly remembered her name.

What were we doing here within these white walls?

Someone came into the room. I did not recognize the man although from the way he spoke to me I knew that he was someone I was supposed to know. One of the accursed Terrans, those who would die in the flames of Sharra when the time was ripe. His words were mere sounds without sense and I did not understand them.

“That woman Thyra! We had her in one of our strongest cells, and she’s gone—just like that, she’s gone out of a maximum security cell! Did you witch her out of there somehow?”

Fool, to think any cell could hold the priestess and Keeper of Sharra the Fire-born—

Space reeled around me; there was a slamming thunderclap and I stood braced on the cobblestone of the forecourt of the Comyn Castle, my feet spanning the enlaced symbols there…and I knew Kadarin had unsheathed the Sword. Kadarin stood there, his pale hair moving in an invisible wind, his hands on Thyra’s shoulders, his metallic eyes cold with menace, and Thyra…

Thyra! Flames rose upward from her copper hair, sparks trembled at the tips of her fingers. In her hands she held naked the Sharra Sword, cold flames racing from hilt to tip. Thyra! My mistress, my love—what was I doing here, far from her? She raised one hand and beckoned, and I began nervelessly to move forward, without being conscious of the motion. She was smiling as I knelt at her feet on the stone, feeling all my strength going out to her, and to that fire that flowed and flamed in her hands…

Then the flame flared blue and wild to the heights of the castle, and I knew Regis had unsheathed the Sword of Aldones. They were there, there physically, standing across from me, Regis and Callina, and she reached for me, enfolding me in the cold blue of Ashara’s icy limbo, and then we were not in the Castle courtyard at all, but in the gray spaces of the overworld… far below I could see our bodies like tiny toys from a great height, but the only reality in the world was those two swords, crimson with flame and cold ice-blue, crossed and straining at one another, and I…

I was a puppet, a mote of power in the astral world, something stretched to breaking between them… Callina’s voice, reminding me of Arilinn and all of my past, Thyra’s crooning call, enticing, seductive, with memories of lust and fire and power… I was torn, torn between them as I felt myself a link between the two circles, Regis and Callina with the Sword of Aldones, Thyra and Kadarin, each pulling at me fiercely to make a third, to lend my power…

And then there was another strength in the linked circles… something cold and arrogant and brutal, the harsh touch as of my father’s own strength, the Alton Gift which had opened my own to power, but this was not my father’s touch—Dyan! And he had always disliked me… and I was at his mercy…

I did not mind dying, but not like this— Again in my mind was the final cry of my father’s voice, and we were so deeply enlaced that I could see Dyan look past me at Regis with infinite warmth and regret that in the end they should have been on opposite sides. I wanted to stand at your side when you were King over all of Darkover, my gallant Hastur cousin… and then, through me, I could feel Dyan’s touch on the memory of my father’s destroying call, the last thought in his dying mind…

And Dyan, in a moment of anguish and grief:

Kennard! My first, my only friend… my cousin, my kinsman, bredu… and there is no other, now, living, who bears your blood, and if I strike now I shall have killed you past death or any immortality… and then a final, careless thought, almost laughter, this son of yours was never fit for this kind of power…

And abruptly I was free, free of Sharra, thrust entirely away, and in that moment of freedom I was locked into the closing rapport of Regis and Callina, the sealed circle of power…

The fire-form reared high, higher, the size of the castle, the size of the mountain, with a scorching darkness at its heart… but from Regis, risen now to giant-size, blazing cold lightning struck at the heart of Sharra as he held the Sword of Aldones, poised to strike…

Sharra was bound in chains by the Son of Hastur who was the Son of Light…

And clothed in his cloak of living light Aldones came!

Now there was nothing to see, no human form, only fire lapping higher and higher, the spark of the Sharra matrix blazing out from the center of that darkness, and the core of brilliance through the veils clothing the figure of the God, like Regis in form, but Regis looming high, higher, not one of the Hastur-kin but the God himself…

Two identical matrixes cannot exist in one time and space; and once before, so the legend said, Sharra had been chained by the Son of Aldones, who was the Son of Light…

I cannot explain the legend, even now, although I saw it. I had felt the daemon-touch of Sharra. Infinite good is as terrifying, in its own way, as infinite evil. It was not Regis and Kadarin fighting with identically forged swords, one a copy of the other. It was not even matrix battling against space-twisting matrix, though that was nearer the truth. Something tangible and very real fought behind each sword, something that was not on this plane of reality at all, and could manifest itself and maintain a foothold in this dimension only through the swords. Lightnings streamed between them, wrapped in the rainbow aura that was Regis and Hastur, coiling into the licking flames at the heart of which Thyra glowed like a burning coal.

And then for an instant I felt that last bright arrogance reach out, Dyan shining across the space, his hawk-face keen and curious. For an instant then I think the linkage broke and the swords were only swords, and for a split second we stood in the courtyard of the Castle again and the cobbles were unsteady under my feet. And in that moment I know that he could have reached out and killed either of us…

And for a moment Thyra stood before me, only a woman again, although the Form of Fire still licked around her, and the smell of burning beat on the air, and her throat was naked to my knife…

I had sworn their death in vengeance for my hand. But in that moment I could remember only that there had been a time when she stood before me, only a frightened girl, terrified by her own growing powers. If the Gods themselves had put a dagger into my hand at that moment I could not have struck her down, and for a moment it seemed as if a great question vibrated in the overworld, and in this world and through all the universes of my mind;

Will you have the love of Power or the Power of Love?

And everything in me surged toward Kadarin, whom I had once loved as a brother, and to the young and beautiful Thyra whom I, as much as Kadarin, had destroyed. I have never been able to explain this, but I knew in that one searing moment of testing that I would die in Sharra’s fire myself rather than hurt either of them any further than they had already been hurt. Everything in me cried out an enormous and final No!

And then we were battling again in the gray limbo of the overworld, and the two swords crossed and blazed like interlaced lightnings…

Then the flames sank and died, and a great darkness blazed at the heart of the Sharra matrix. I saw a blaze of endless fire, and the searing flame strike inward, and then a great vortex seemed to open inwards, into a great whirling nothingness. Into that nothingness were swept away Kadarin and Thyra, two tiny, disappearing figures, whirled away and apart… and a great wordless cry of pain and despair and at the last instant, so faint that I never knew whether I heard it or not, a split-second cry of joy and rediscovery which made me hear again in my mind my father’s last cry…

“Beloved—!”

Silence and nothingness, and darkness… and the great and damnable Face that I had seen in Ashara’s overworld of blue ice—

And then I was standing in the gray light of dawn on the cobblestones in Comyn Castle, facing Regis, only a shrinking, hesitant young man again, with the Sword of Aldones half-raised in his hand, and Callina pale as death beside him. There was no sign anywhere of Kadarin or Thyra, but sprawled on the cobbles before us, broken and dying, Dyan Ardais lay, his body blackened as if with fire. The Sword of Sharra lay broken in his hand. There were no jewels in the hilt of the sword now; they lay charred and ugly, burnt pebbles which, even as the first rays of the sun touched them, evaporated into pale gouts of rising smoke, and were gone forever… as Sharra’s power was gone forever from this world.

Regis sheathed the Sword of Aldones and knelt beside Dyan, weeping without shame. Dyan opened pain-filled eyes, and I saw recognition in them for a moment, and pain beyond the point where it ceases to have meaning. But if Regis had hoped for a word, he was disappointed; Dyan’s eyes glinted up at him in a moment, then fell back and stared at something which was not in this world. But for the first time since I had known him, he looked content and at peace.

If he had been willing to kill us all, Sharra would have triumphed… I knelt, too, beside his body, conceding his hero’s death, as Regis laid his own cloak over Dyan’s body. He still held the Sword of Aldones, but from that, too, all glow and power had faded; the blade was blackened all along its length as if with the strange fire in which it had been quenched. After a moment Regis laid the Sword of Aldones on Dyan’s breast, as a fallen hero’s sword is laid to be buried with him. None of us protested. Then Regis rose, and the rays of the rising sun touched his hair… snow white.

It was over; and beyond hope I was free, and alive… beyond countless, measureless havoc, I had come free. I turned to Callina, and at last, knowing we were free, caught her for the first time in my arms and pressed her lips hungrily to mine.

And all desire died in my heart and mind as I looked down into the chill eyes of Ashara.

I should have known, all along.

Only a moment and she was Callina again, clinging to me and crying, but I had seen. I let her go, in horror… and as my arms released her, Callina crumpled very slowly to the pavement and lay there unmoving, beside Dyan.

I knelt again, turning her over, catching her up in my arms, uncaring; but she was still, unmoving, already cold. And now I knew—

Generations ago, a powerful Keeper, of the Hastur line, had held all the power of the Comyn… and as she grew older, had been reluctant to set aside her power; and so she had concentrated power in the Aillard line, and many of those women had been her under-Keepers, giving their own powers to Ashara, so that Ashara, whose flesh had failed and who lived now within the matrix, went abroad in the body and personality, like a garment, of her newest Keeper… and of these, my young kinswoman had been the last. I had wondered why I could never touch her mind, nor come near, except now and again for a moment…

And again the terrifying question from the overworld seemed to beat in my heart; the Love of Power or the Power of Love?

I will swear to my dying day that Callina had loved me…

Otherwise, would that ancient Hastur sorceress have risked the end of her undying mind and all her power, to risk all for my freedom from Sharra’s bondage? Regis and I, alone, could never have faced that last undying blaze of Sharra’s fire. But with Callina recklessly throwing all of Ashara’s powers into the fray, through the body of the young Hastur who was her far kinsman, so that the strength of the first Hastur, whoever and whatever He was, manifested itself through the Sword of Aldones… so that Regis took on the majesty and power of the Son of Light, even as the one who held Sharra took on the Form of Fire…

Dyan, too, in the end, had not been able to strike with Sharra to wipe out his kin. All his life he had fought for the honor of the Comyn, though in strange ways, and in the end he had acted first to protect my daughter, then to protect me, and finally he could not strike down Regis…

The Love of Power or the Power of Love? I wonder if that question had beat in his mind, too, during the final moments of that battle?

Somewhere above me in the castle, I heard a sound, not with my physical ears, but in the recesses of my mind; cleared now from the searing presence of Sharra, I was conscious of it all through me; the sound of a child crying, a telepath child, alone, hungry, frightened, wailing for her mother who was dead and the father she half feared, half loved. And I knew where she was. I saw Regis, his shoulders bowed beneath his new and terrible burden, his hair incredibly turned white in that all-consuming battle, and saw him turn wearily toward the Castle. Had his grandfather survived that battle which must have rung in the minds of all the Comyn?

Yes; Danilo went to him and cared for him, lent him strength…

Regis heard the crying too, and turned to me, with a weary smile.

“Go and look after your daughter, Lew; she needs you, and—” unbelievably he smiled again, “she’s old enough to have the Gift but not old enough to hold it within reasonable bounds. Unless you go and comfort her, she’ll drive everyone in the Castle—everyone in the City—mad with her wailing!”

And I went in and ran unerringly up the stairs to the one place where Dyan had known I would not search for Marja and where she would be safely concealed; the Ridenow apartments which Lerrys and Dio had shared. And as I burst in through the great outer doors, hurrying to the empty room, I saw Dio holding Marja on her lap, but she could not silence her wailing and struggling until I bent over them and clasped them both in my arms.

Marja stopped crying and turned to me, the telepathic shrieking suddenly quieted, only soft hiccuping sobs remaining as she clung to me, sobbing. “Father! Father! I was so scared, and you didn’t come and you didn’t come and I was all alone, all alone and there was a fire, and I cried and cried and nobody heard me except this strange lady came and tried to pick me up…”

I quieted the hysterical outburst, pulling her to me.

“It’s all right, chiya,” I crooned, holding her in one arm and Dio in the other. “It’s all right, Father’s here—” I could not give Dio a child of her own. But this child of my own blood had somehow survived out of all the holocaust that had raged in the Comyn… and never again would I mock at the power of love which had saved us both. I had wanted to die; but I was alive, and miraculously, beyond all, I was glad to be alive and life was good to me.

Laughing, I set Marja down, drawing Dio into my arms again. Never once did she ask a question about Callina. Perhaps she knew, perhaps she had been a part of all that great battle which, even now, I was beginning to doubt—had it ever happened except in my own mind? I never knew.

“We have just time,” I said, “to file a stop on that Terran divorce action. I think it hasn’t been ten days yet—or have I lost track of the time?”

She laughed, a wavering smile. “Ten days? No, not quite.”

Marja interrupted us, setting up her telepathic demand again. I’m hungry! And scared! Stop kissing her and hold me!

Dio drew her close between us. “We’ll get you a big breakfast right away, chiya,” she said softly, “and then someone will have to try teaching you the elementary manners of living in a telepathic family. If you are going to do that every time I kiss your father—or anything else, little daughter— I am afraid that I will start making noises like a wicked stepmother from the old fairy tales! So you will have to learn some manners, first thing!”

Incredibly, that made all three of us laugh. And then we went back to the Terran Zone to withdraw an unnecessary divorce decree. Somewhere along the way—I forget just where—we stopped and ate fresh hot bread and porridge at a cookstall, and everyone who looked at us took it for granted that I was out for an early breakfast with my wife and daughter. And I found I liked the feeling. I no longer felt them staring only at my scars.

If Dio had not accepted Marja… but she was not that kind of person. She had wanted my child, and now I had put my child in her care. The hurt would never leave her, for that pitiful monstrosity which should have been our son; but Dio never lived in the past. And now we had all the future before us.

Marja held on to my hand and Dio’s as we went into the Terran Zone. I looked back, just once, at the Comyn Castle which lay behind us.

I knew we would never go back.

But I did go back, just once more. It was only a few days later, but Marja had already begun to call Dio “Mother.”

Epilogue

« ^

Crowned King? King of what?” Regis said, shaking his head gently at his grandfather. “Sir, with all respect, the Comyn effectively do not exist. Lew Alton survives, but he does not wish to remain at Armida—and I cannot see any reason why he should. The Ridenow have already bowed to the inevitable, and applied for their status as Terran citizens. Dyan is dead—and his son is a child three years old. The Lady of Aillard is dead, and so is her sister; no one remains among the Aillard but Merryl… and his twin sister, who is the mother of Dyan’s son. The Elhalyn are gone… do you still think we must treat the Terrans as enemies, sir? I think it is time to accept that we are what they say—one of their lost colonies—and apply for protected status, to keep our world as it should be… immune to being overrun by Empire technology, but still part of the Empire.”

Danvan Hastur bowed his head. He said, “I knew it would come to this in the end. What is it that you want to do, Regis?”

With that new and terrible sensitivity, Regis knew what his grandfather was feeling, and so his voice was very gentle as he spoke to the old man.

“I have asked Lawton to come and see you, sir. Remember he is blood kin to the Ardais and to the Syrtis, sir; he might have been among the Comyn.”

Dan Lawton came into the room, and to Regis’s surprise he bowed deeply and knelt before Danvan Hastur.

“Z’par servu, vai dom,” he said quietly.

“What mockery is this?” demanded Hastur.

“Sir, no mockery,” said Lawton without rising. “I am here to serve you in any way I can, Lord Hastur, to be certain that your ancient ways will not suffer.”

“I thought we were now no more than a Terran colony…”

“I do not think you understand what it is to be an Empire world, vai dom,” said Lawton quietly. “It means that you have the right to define what Darkover will become; you who inhabit Darkover alone. You may share or not share your own fields of learning—though I hope we will be allowed to know something of matrix technology, so that nothing like this Sharra episode may ever arise again without our knowledge. You and you alone—you people of Darkover, I mean, not you personally, with all respect, sir—may determine how many Terrans and on what terms may be employed here or may settle here. And because your interests must be protected in the Federation of worlds that is the Empire, you have the right to appoint, or to elect, a representative in the Empire’s Senate.”

“A fine thought,” said Danvan Hastur wearily, “but who is left that we could trust, after all the deaths in the Comyn? Do you think I am going to appoint that scamp Lerrys Ridenow, just because he knows Empire ways?”

“I would gladly serve you myself,” said Lawton, “because I love my home world-—it is my home world as well as yours, Lord Hastur, even though I have chosen to live as a Terran; I too was born beneath the Bloody Sun, and there is Comyn blood in my veins. But I think my task is here, so that there may be a Darkovan voice in the Terran Trade City. Regis has found a candidate, however.”

He gestured to the door, and Lew Alton came in.

His scarred face looked calm now, without the tension and torment which had inhabited it for so long; Regis, looking at him, thought: here is a man who has laid his ghosts. Would that I could lay mine! Within him the memory blurred, a time when he had been more than human, reaching from the center of the world to the sky, wielding monstrous power… and now he was no more than human again and he felt small, powerless, shut up inside a single mind and skull…

“A man who knows Darkover and Terra alike,” said Regis quietly, “Lewis-Kennard Montray-Alton of Armida, first Representative to the Imperial Senate from Cottman Four, known as Darkover.” And Lew came and bowed before Lord Hastur.

“By your leave, sir, I am going out on the ship which takes to the stars at sunset, with my wife and daughter. I will gladly serve for a term, after which you will be able to educate the people of Darkover to choose their own representatives…”

Danvan Hastur held out his hand. He said, “I would gladly have seen your father in this post, Dom Lewis. The people of Darkover—and I myself—have cause to be grateful to the Altons.”

Lew bowed and said, “I hope I may serve you well,” and Hastur said, “All the Gods bless you and speed you on your way.”

Regis left his grandfather talking with Lawton—he was sure a time would come when they would like and respect one another, if not yet—and went out into the anteroom with Lew. He took him into a kinsman’s embrace. “Will you come back when your term is over, Lew? We need you on Darkover—”

A momentary look of pain crossed Lew’s face, but he said, “I don’t think so. Out there—on the edge of the Empire— there are new worlds. I—I can’t look back.”

There have been too many deaths here…

Regis wanted to cry out, “Why should you go into exile again?” But he swallowed hard and bent his head, then raised it, after a moment, and said, “So be it, bredu. And wherever you go, the Gods go with you. Adelandeyo.”

He knew he would never see Lew again, and his whole heart went after him as he went out of the room. The Empire is his, and a thousand million worlds beyond worlds.

But my duty lies here. I am—Hastur.

And that was enough. Almost.

As the red sun was setting behind the high pass, Regis stood with Danilo on a balcony overlooking the Terran Zone, watching as the great Terran ship skylifted, bound outward to the stars. Where I can never go. And he takes with him the last of my dreams of freedom, and of power—

Do I want the love of Power or the Power of Love?

And suddenly he knew that he did not really envy Lew. No woman had ever loved him as Lew had been loved, no. But Dyan had left, in his death, a shining legacy of another kind of love; something he had heard, and only half remembered from his years in St. Valentine-of-the-Snows, returned suddenly to his mind,

“Dani, what is that thing the cristoforos say… greater love hath none…”

Danilo returned, in the most ancient dialect of casta, the one they had spoken at the monastery:

“Greater love no man knoweth than he who will lay down his life for his fellow.”

Dyan had laid his life down for them all, and in his death, Regis had come to a new understanding; love was love, no matter whence it came or in what form. Some day he might love a woman in this way; but if that day never came, he would accept the love that was his without shame or regret.

“I will not be King,” he said, “I am Hastur; that is enough.” An echo stirred in his mind, a memory that would never wholly surface.

Who are you ?

Hastur… it was gone, like a stilled ripple in the Lake. He said, “I’m going to need a lot of—a lot of help, Dani.”

And Danilo said, still in the most ancient dialect of Nevarsin, “Regis Hastur, I am your paxman, even to life or death.”

Regis wiped his face… the evening fog was condensing into the first drops of rain, but it felt hot on his eyes. “Come,” he said, “my grandfather must not be left too long alone, and we must take counsel how to educate our sons—Mikhail, and Dyan’s little son. We can’t stand here all night.”

They turned and went side by side into the Castle. The last light faded from the sky, and the great ship, outward bound into the Empire, was only a star among a hundred thousand other stars.

—«»—«»—«»—

A note from the publisher concerning:

THE FRIENDS OF DARKOVER

So popular have been the novels of the planet Darkover that an organization of readers and fans has come into being, virtually spontaneously. Several meetings have been held at major science fiction conventions, and more recently specially organized around the various “councils” of the Friends of Darkover, as the organization is now known.

The Friends of Darkover is purely an amateur and voluntary group. It has no paid officers and has not established any formal membership dues. What it does have is an offset journal called Darkover Newsletter, published from four to six times a year, which carries information on meetings, correspondence concerning the aspects and problems raised in the Darkover works, and news of future Darkover novels and critical commentaries.

Contact may be made by writing to the Friends of Darkover, Thendara Council, Box 72, Berkeley, CA 94701, and enclosing a dollar for a trial subscription.

(This notice is inserted gratis as a service to readers. DAW Books is in no way connected with this organization professionally or commercially.)

—«»—«»—«»—

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[August 20, 2003—v1 html proofed and formatted by Agent99 for the 3S group]