“What are you doing in the city, Rafe?” He had been a child when I had drawn him, with Marjorie, into the circle of Sharra. Like myself, he bore the ineradicable taint, fire and damnation…no! I slammed my mind shut, with an effort that turned me white as death.
“Don’t you remember? My father was a Terran, Captain Zeb Scott. One of Aldaran’s tame Terrans.” He said it wryly, with a cynical lift of his lip, too cynical for anyone so young. He was Marius’s own age. I was beyond curiosity now; though I had heard Regis describing what he had seen, and knew that he was Marius’s friend. He didn’t stay, but went out into the rainy night, shrugging a Darkovan cloak over his head.
Jeff sat on one side of me; Marius on the other. We didn’t talk much; I was in no shape for it. It took all my energy for me to keep from curling up under the impact of all this.
“You never did tell me, Jeff, how you came to be in the city.”
“Dyan came to bring me,” he said. “I don’t want the Domain and I told him so; but he said that having an extra claimant would confuse the issue, and stall them until Kennard could return. I don’t think he was expecting you.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t,” Marius said.
“That’s all right, brother, I can live without Dyan’s affection,” I said. “He’s never liked me…” but still I was confused by that moment of rapport, when for a moment I had seen him through my father’s eyes…
… dear, cherished, beloved, sworn brother… even, once or twice, in the manner of lads, lovers… I slammed the thought away. In a sense the rejection was a kind of envy. Solitary in the Comyn, I had had few bredin, fewer to offer such affection even in crisis. Could it be that I envied my father that? His voice, his presence, were a clamor in my mind…
I should tell Jeff what had happened. Since Kennard had awakened the latent Alton gift, the gift of forced rapport, by violence when I was hardly out of childhood, he had been there, his thoughts overpowering my own, choking me, leaving me all too little in the way of free will, till I had broken free, and in the disaster of the Sharra rebellion, I had learned to fear that freedom. And then, dying, his incredible strength closing over my mind in a blast I could not resist or barricade…
Ghost-ridden; half of my brain burnt into a dead man’s memories…
Was I never to be anything but a cripple, mutilated mind and body? For very shame I could not beg Jeff for more help than he had given me already…
He said neutrally, “If you need help, Lew, I’m here,” but I shook my head.
“I’m all right; need sleep, that’s all. Who is Keeper at Arilinn now?”
“Miranie from Dalereuth; I don’t know who her family was—she never talks about them. Janna Lindir, who was Keeper when you were at Arilinn, married Bard Storn-Leynier, and they have two sons; but Janna put them out to foster, and came back as Chief Monitor at Neskaya. We need strong telepaths, Lew; I wish you could come back, but I suppose they’ll need you on the Council—”
Again I saw him flinch, slightly, at my reaction to that. I knew the state I was in, as well as he did; every transient emotion was broadcasting at full strength. Andres, Terran and without any visible laran, still noticed Marius’s distress; he had, after all, lived with a telepath family since before I was born. He said stolidly, “I can find a damper and put it on, if you wish.”
“That won’t be—” I started to say, but Jeff said firmly, “Good. Do that.” And before long the familiar unrhythmic pulses began to move through my mind, disrupting it. It blanked it out for the others—at least the specific content— but for me it substituted nausea for the sharper pain. I listened with half an ear to Marius telling Andres what had happened at the Council. Andres, as I had foreseen, understood at once what the important thing was.
“At least they recognized you; your right to inherit was challenged, but for once the old tyrant had to admit you existed,” snorted Andres. “It’s a beginning, lad.”
“Do you think I give a damn—” Marius demanded. “All my life I haven’t been good enough for them to spit on, and suddenly—”
“It’s what your father fought for all his life,” Andres said, and Jeff said quietly, “Ken would have been proud of you, Marius.”
“I’ll bet,” said the boy scornfully. “So proud he couldn’t come back even once—”
I bent my head. It was my fault, too, that Marius had had no father, no kinsman, no friend, but was left alone and neglected by the proud Comyn. I was relieved when Rafe came back, saying he had found a licensed technician in the street of the Four Shadows, and he had sold him a few ounces of raivannin. Jeff mixed it, and said, “How much—”
“As little as possible,” I said. I had had some experience with the chemical damping-drugs, and I didn’t want to be helpless, or unable to wake if I got into one of those terrible spiraling nightmares where I was trapped again in horrors beyond horrors, where demons of fire flamed and raged between worlds…
“Just enough so you won’t have to sleep under the dampers,” he said. To my cramping shame, I had to let him hold it to my lips, but when I had swallowed it, wincing at its biting astringency, I felt the disruptions of the telepathic damper gradually subsiding, mellowing, and slowly, gradually, it was all gone.
It felt strange to be wholly without telepathic sensitivity; strange and disquieting, like trying to hear under water or with clogged ears; painful as the awareness had been, now I felt dulled, blinded. But the pain was gone, and the clamor of my father’s voice; for the first time in days, it seemed, I was free of it. It was there under the thick blankets of the drug, but I need not listen. I drew a long, luxurious breath of calm.
“You should sleep. Your room’s ready,” Andres said. “I’ll get you upstairs, lad—and don’t bother fussing about it; I carried you up these stairs before you were breeched, and I can do it again if I have to.”
I actually felt as if I could sleep, now. With another long sigh, I stood up, catching for balance.
Andres said, “They couldn’t do anything about the hand, then?”
“Nothing. Too far gone.” I could say it calmly now; I had, after all, before that ghastly debacle when Dio’s child was born and died, learned to live with the fact. “I have a mechanical hand but I don’t wear it much, unless I’m doing really heavy work, or sometimes for riding. It won’t take much strain, and gets in my way. I can manage better, really, without it.”
“You’ll have your father’s room,” Andres said, not taking too much notice. “Let me give you a hand with the stairs.”
“Thanks. I really don’t need it.” I was deathly tired, but my head was clear. We went into the hallway, but as we began to mount the stairs, the entry bell pealed and I heard one of the servants briefly disputing; then someone pushed past him, and I saw the tall, red-haired form of Lerrys Ridenow.
“Sorry to disturb you here; I looked for you in the Alton suite in Comyn Castle,” he said. “I have to talk to you, Lew. I know it’s late, but it’s important.”
Tiredly, I turned to face him. Jeff said, “Dom Lerrys, Lord Armida is ill.” It took me a moment to realize he was talking about me.
“This won’t take long.” Lerrys was wearing Darkovan clothing now, elegant and fashionable, the colors of his Domain. In the automatic gesture of a trained telepath in the presence of someone he distrusts, I reached for contact; remembered: I was drugged with raivannin, at the mercy of whatever he chose to tell me. It must be like this for the head-blind. Lerrys said, “I didn’t know you were coming back here. You must know you’re not popular.”
“I can live without that,” I said.
“We haven’t been friends, Lew,” he said. “I suppose this won’t sound too genuine; but I’m sorry about your father. He was a good man, and one of the few in the Comyn with enough common sense to be able to see the Terrans without giving them horns and tails. He had lived among the Terrans long enough to know where we would eventually be going.” He sighed, and I said, “You didn’t come out on a rainy night
to give me condolences about my father’s death.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I didn’t. I wish you’d had the sense to stay away. Then I wouldn’t have to say this. But here you are, and here I am, and I do have to say it. Stay away from Dio or I’ll break your neck.”
“Did she send you to say that to me?”
“I’m saying it,” Lerrys said. “This isn’t Vainwal. We’re in the Domains now, and—” He broke off. I wished with all my heart that I could read what was behind those transparent green eyes. He looked like Dio, damn him, and the pain was fresh in me again, that the love between us had not been strong enough to carry us through tragedy. “Our marriage ceremony was a Terran one. It has no force in the Domains. No one there would recognize it.” I stopped and swallowed. I had to, before I could say, “If she wanted to come back to me, I’d—I’d welcome it. But I’m not going to force it on her, Lerrys, don’t worry about that. Am I a Dry-towner, to chain her to me?”
“But a time’s coming when we’ll all be Terrans,” Lerrys said, “and I don’t want her tied to you then.”
It was like struggling under water; I could not reach his mind, his thoughts were blank to me. Zandru’s hells, was this what it was like to be without laran, blind, deaf, mutilated, with nothing left but ordinary sight and hearing? “Is this what Dio wants? Why doesn’t she tell me so herself, then?”
Now there was blind rage exploding in Lerrys’s face; it needed no laran to see that. His face tightened, his fists clenched; for a moment I braced myself, thinking he would strike me, wondering how I could manage, with one hand, to defend myself if he did.
“Damn you, can’t you see that’s what I want to spare her?” he demanded, his voice rising to hysteria. “Haven’t you put her through enough? How much do you think she can stand, you—you—you damned—” His voice failed him. After a time he got control of it again.
“I don’t want her to have to see you again, damn you. I don’t want her left with any memory of what she had to go through!” he said, raging. “Go to the Terran HQ and dissolve your marriage there—and if you don’t, I swear to you, Lew, I’ll call challenge on you and feed your other hand to the kyorebni!”
Through the drugs I was too dulled to feel sorrow. I said heavily, “All right, Lerrys. If that’s what Dio wants, I won’t bother her again.”
He turned and slammed out of the house; Marius stood staring after him. He said, “What, in the name of all the Gods, was that all about?”
I couldn’t talk about it. I said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” and, blindly, struggled up the stairs to my father’s room. Andres came, but I paid no attention to him; I flung myself down on my father’s bed and slept like the dead.
But I dreamed of Dio, crying and calling my name as they took her away from me in the hospital.
When I woke my head was clear; and I seemed, again, to be in possession of it alone. It had assumed the character of any family reunion; Marius came and sat on my bed and talked to me as if he were the young boy I’d known, and I gave him the gifts I’d remembered to bring from Vainwal, Terran lensed goods: binoculars, a camera.
He thanked me, but I suspected he thought them gifts for a child; he referred to them once as “toys.” I wondered what would have been a proper gift for a man? Contraband blasters, perhaps, in defiance of the Compact? After all, Marius had had a Terran education. Was he one of those who considered the Compact a foolish anachronism, the childish ethic of a world stuck in barbarism? I suspected, too, that he felt little grief for our father. I didn’t blame him; father had abandoned Marius a long time ago.
I told them I had business at the Terran HQ, without telling them much about it.
“You’ve got seven days, after all,” Jeff pointed out to me after breakfast. “They deferred the formal transfer of the Domain until ritual mourning for Kennard was completed. And now it’s only a formality—they accepted you as his Heir when you were fifteen.”
There was the question as to whether they would accept Marius.
“Stupid bigots,” Andres grumbled, “to decide a man’s worth on the color of his eyes!”
Or the color of his hair; I could feel Jeff thinking that, remembering a time when, in Arilinn, most Comyn had had hair of the true Comyn red. I said, only half facetiously, “Maybe I should dye mine—and Marius’s—so we’ll look more like Comyn—”
“I couldn’t change my eyes,” Marius said dryly, and I thought, with a pang, of the changeable sea-colors in Dio’s eyes. But Dio hated me now, and that was all past; and who could blame her?
“They’ll challenge me,” I said. “And if they do—hell, I can’t fight them with one hand.”
“Stupid anachronism in this day and age,” Marius said predictably, “to settle anything as important as the Heirship of a Domain with a sword.”
Andres—we had demanded he sit with us at table; coridom or no, he had been guardian and foster-father much of our lives—asked, with equal dryness, “Would it make more sense to fight it out with blasters or invade each other’s Domains and fight a war over it?”
Jeff was leaning back in his chair, a half-empty cup in front of him. “I remember hearing, in the Tower, why it was that the formal challenge with swords was instituted. There was a time when a formal challenge for the rulership of a Domain was made with the Gift of that Domain—and the one whose laran was the stronger won it. There was a day when the Domains bred men and women like cattle for these Gifts—and the Alton Gift, full strength, can kill. I doubt Gabriel wants to try that kind of duel against you.”
“I’m not so sure, after last night, that I could win it if he did,” I said. “I had forgotten where Comyn immunity came from.” At Arilinn, matrix mechanics and technicians in training sometimes fought mock battles with laran, but I had been taught control since I was into my teens; real battles with laran were forbidden.
The Compact was not invented to ban blasters and firearms, but the older laran weapons which were as dreadful as anything the Terran empire could produce…
“I don’t think Gabriel will challenge you,” Andres said. “But they’ll ask why, at your age, you’re not married, and whether you have a legitimate child for an Heir.”
I felt the scars at my mouth pull as I grimaced. “Married, yes, but not for long; that was what Lerrys came here about,” I said. “And no children, nor likely to have.”
Marius started to ask questions; Jeff stared him down. He knew what I was talking about. “We were afraid, at Arilinn, that would happen, but the technique of cell-monitoring at that level was lost sometime in the Ages of Chaos. Some of us are working to master it again—it’s quicker and safer than some of the DNA work they do in the Empire. I don’t suppose you fathered any bastards before you went offworld?”
There had been adventures in my youth, but if I had fathered a child—I put it bluntly to myself—the girl involved would have been proud to tell me so. And Marjorie had died, her child unborn.
“They’d accept Marius if I tested him for the Alton Gift, perhaps,” I said. “They might have no choice. Comyn law says there must be an Heir named, a succession insured. By letting Kennard take me offworld, they gave tacit consent for Marius as presumptive Heir, I’d think. The law is clear enough.” I didn’t want to test Marius for the Alton Gift—not by the shock tactics my father had used on me, and I knew no others. Not now. And with my matrix in the shape it was in… about all I could do would be to give a demonstration of the powers of Sharra!
It wanted me, the fires sought to call me back…
But there were other things to think about now.
“Marius should be tested before the formal challenge,” I said. “You’re First at Arilinn; you can do that, can’t you?”
“Certainly,” Jeff said. “Why not? I suspect he has some laran, perhaps Ridenow gift—there’s Ridenow in the Alton lineage, and Ardais, too; Kennard’s mother was Ardais and I always suspected he had a touch of catalyst telepathy.”
Marius ha
d been tearing a buttered roll to pieces. He said now, without looking up, “What I have, I think, is—is the Aldaran Gift. I can see—ahead. Not far, not very clearly; but the Aldaran Gift is precognition, and I—I have that.”
That he would have had from our half-Terran mother. In these days the gifts were entangled anyhow, bred out by intermarriage between the Domains. But I stared at him and demanded, “How would you know about the Aldaran Gift?”
He said impatiently, “The Aldarans are all the kin I have! And hell, Lew, the Comyn weren’t very eager to claim me as kin! I spent one summer with Beltran—why not?”
This was a new factor to be reckoned with.
“I know he didn’t treat you well,” Marius went on, defensively, “but your quarrel was a private one, after all. What do you expect, that I should declare blood-feud for three generations because of that? Are we the barbarians the Terrans call us, then?”
There was no answer to that, but I didn’t know what to say.
“We could all use some information about the future,” I said. “If you’ve got that Gift, for the love of Aldones tell me what’s going to happen if I claim the Domain? Will they accept you as my Heir?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed, and once again he seemed young, vulnerable, a boy half his age. “I—I tried to find out. They told me that sometimes that happened, you couldn’t see too clear for yourself or anyone close to you…”
That was true enough, and since it was true, I wondered, not for the first time, what good that Gift was to anyone. Perhaps, in the days when Aldarans could see the fate of rulers, kingdoms, even of the planet… and that was another disquieting thought. Maybe the Aldarans, with their foresight, saw that Darkover would go the way of the Terran Empire and that was why they had joined forces, for so long, with Terra. I wondered if Beltran had entirely broken with them after the Sharra rebellion.
Well, there was one way to find out, but there was no time for it now. I strode restlessly to the window, looked out across the bustle of the cobbled square. Men were leading animals to the market, workmen going about carrying tools; a quiet familiar bustle. Because of the season, there was only a light thin powdering of snow on the stones; Festival, and High Summer, were upon us. Still it seemed cold to me after Vainwal and I dressed in my warmest cloak. Let the Terrans call me barbarian if they liked, I was home again, I would wear the warm clothes my own world demanded. The fur lining felt good even at this season as I drew it round me. Both Marius and Jeff offered to accompany me; but this was private business and I must attend to it by myself, so I refused.