Regis frowned and said, “I heard Captain Lanart-Hastur give orders that no one should be allowed to speak with Aldaran—”
“I didn’t hear him say that, sir, I only came on at dawn,” Ruyven said, “and anyhow—” he looked down at his boots, but Regis knew perfectly well what the man was thinking; was he supposed to give orders to a Lord of Comyn, and, moreover, one who had been his own superior officer for many years? Regis said, “Never mind, then, Ruyven, but you’ll have to let us in to see him, too.”
When Regis was small, he had been curious about the locked, empty Aldaran apartments. As the Guardsman let him in, he noticed that a dank and empty smell still clung about the walls and the embroidered hangings with the Aldaran double-headed eagle. They found Beltran in the main presence-chamber; someone had brought him some breakfast and he was eating porridge and nut-bread from a tray on his lap. Dyan sat at ease in a nearby chair, drinking something hot from a mug.
He looked up curiously at the younger men, but Beltran grinned widely. Regis had forgotten how much alike he and Lew really were, even through Lew’s scars.
“Well, Regis,” he said, “at last we are even; you came as kinsman to my castle and I imprisoned you—and now I come as kinsman to yours, and you imprison me. I suppose it’s only fair you should have your day.”
It was like Beltran, Regis supposed, to put him immediately on the defensive. He said stiffly, “A word with you, if you please, Lord Ardais.” He was not going to discuss Comyn business with Beltran present.
“Lord Aldaran is party to Comyn business,” Dyan reminded them.
“Not this,” Regis said coldly. “Are you aware, Lord Dyan, that Prince Derik died during the night?”
“Good riddance,” said Dyan.
“Kinsman!” Danilo protested, and Dyan turned fiercely on him.
“Zandru’s hells, must you be such a hypocrite? We all know that Derik was a weakling, about as fit to rule as my three-year-old son! Now, perhaps, there will be some force in the Comyn, and we can talk to these Terrans as they deserve!”
Regis said stiffly, “It will be my business now to talk with the Terrans, Lord Dyan. It was for that I came here—I wish you to act as my embassy to them, with a message—”
Dyan interrupted, “There is only one message I will bear to the Terrans, Lord Regis, and you as a Hastur know what that message will be: get out! Off our world, off our planet, and take your Empire along with you!”
Lord of Light! It is worse than I thought! Dyan went on fiercely, “We made a good start, you and I, Regis, when we destroyed the Terran weapons! Now let us have the courage to follow up that message with a stronger one, aimed directly at Thendara!”
Does he truly believe that I destroyed Beltran’s weapons as a message to the Terrans? Regis said, “Lord Dyan, this is not the place to discuss long-range Comyn policy. At the moment, the Legate has sent Spaceforce into the city; I have written a formal request that they be withdrawn, so that the Guards may do their own work in looking for a wanted criminal— and murderer, or are you not aware that Kadarin’s attack last night cost us Prince Derik and Linnell, and came close to destroying Lord Alton?”
“That would be a smaller loss than any,” said Dyan coldly. “With Derik gone, we have a chance at a show of strength. Your grandfather has played both sides too long, Regis, and the Altons have tried to back him up. Now it is time to make it very clear to the Terrans where we stand, and now we have Beltran on our side, with a stronger message than any…”
Regis realized that he should have known this all along. He said, in a whisper—he could not make his voice work— “Kinsman, are you seriously advocating the use of Sharra against the Terrans?”
“Not advocating; stating a fact,” Dyan said. “Those who do not join with us—” he looked up, gave Regis a hard, unequivocal stare, “are traitors to Comyn, and should, for the sake of our whole world, for the survival of Darkover, be silenced! Zandru’s hells, Regis, don’t you realize this is the only chance for Darkover to survive without becoming what they call us—just another Terran colony?”
“The existence of the Comyn,” Regis said quietly, trying not to show the horror he felt, “is based upon the Compact. Sharra when used as a weapon is in defiance of Compact—”
“And while we go on observing the forever-be-damned Compact,” said Dyan fiercely, “they surround us, they will bury us! We are like rabbithorns before a pack of wolves— and you sit here peacefully saying ‘B-a-a-a’ while the wolves open their jaws! Do you really think that we can fight the Empire with our swords and a scant six dozen Guardsmen?”
“Why do you assume that we need to fight the Empire?”
“Regis, I cannot believe that you, a Hastur, are saying this! Are you going to hand us meekly over to the Terrans?”
“Of course not,” said Regis, “but there has not been a real war on Darkover for generations. My father died in an illegal war with Terran weapons—”
“Isn’t that reason enough to get them right off our world?”
Regis drew a long breath, clenching his fists to keep quiet and not shout out his defiance. He wondered if Dyan was mad, or if he really believed all this. Dyan looked at him and his face softened somewhat. He said, “You have had no sleep; and a lot has happened in this one night. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss what we must do about the Terrans. Have you had anything to eat since last night?”
Regis shook his head, and Beltran said, “Sit down and join us at breakfast, won’t you? We can discuss politics later. Rogan—” he beckoned his servant, “plates for Lord Hastur and Lord Danilo.” And before they knew what had happened, they were seated around the breakfast table, being served porridge and broiled rabbithorn. Regis did not feel hungry, but he knew enough of matrix mechanics to know that last night’s battle with Sharra had left him drained and exhausted. He ate hungrily, while Beltran, putting hostility aside, became the gracious host.
When the Terrans are gone, then we can enforce Compact again without their vicious example—
But if we seriously use Sharra against them, then we must stand, not against the Terrans who are here, but against the whole Terran Empire and all their multitudes of worlds…
And Sharra is not to be tamed thus, it will turn on those who use it, and destroy…
Beltran said aloud, “I don’t wish my cousin of Alton any harm. I would like to make peace with him. His Gift is necessary to the use of Sharra, and he is Tower-trained; he is the safety factor for the use of Sharra, his control and strength. Can you arrange for me to put this to him, Regis?”
“I think it would be no use,” said Regis quietly. “I think he would rather die.”
“That,” said Dyan harshly, “would be his choice, not ours! But if he chooses to stand with the Terrans, then he must take the consequences—”
“No,” said Beltran. “I think he is the only living man who holds the Alton Gift.”
“No,” Dyan said, “there is an Alton child. Lew’s daughter.” Beltran waved that away. “A girl child. It’s a man we need, with Alton strength.”
So I must keep that secret. Dyan, untrained, does not know the nature of his own Gift. He knows he does not have the Ardais Gift…he adopted Danilo because he found the Ardais Gift had passed to Dani through one of Dyan’s father’s nedestro daughters. But he does not know, and he must never know, his own Alton Gift—Regis looked helplessly at Dyan, only now fully aware of what Dyan had always meant to him. He knew Dyan’s cruelty, and yet he had never been able to blame him altogether, knowing what powerful forces drove Dyan; knowing Dyan a haunted man, and a desperately unhappy one.
Dyan is myself, myself as I might all too easily have been. How can I condemn him? But I cannot let him destroy the Domains in loosing this mad business of a Holy War on the Terrans, even if I must kill him—
Last night, forced by bitter necessity, I struck at Lew, who is more than friend, more than brother to me. Now it seems that I must condemn Dyan, who is no more
than what I might have been, to a madman’s death. What right have I to do all this?
He set down his fork, feeling that Beltran’s hospitality would choke him. He held himself tightly barriered lest either of the older men pick up even a hint of his thoughts. “Forgive me, vai dom’yn, I have business elsewhere. Danilo, attend me,” he said, rising, and turned away. “We will speak of this at the proper time, Lord Dyan.”
I must see what is left of the Comyn after last night. Perhaps there is nothing left for me to rule!
* * *
CHAPTER TWO
« ^ »
Lew Alton’s narrative
The sullen red of another day was dying when I woke; my head throbbed with the half-healed wound Kadarin had given me, and my arm was afire with the long slash from Regis’s dagger. I lay and wondered for a moment if the whole thing had been a delirious nightmare born of concussion. Then Andres came in, and the deep lines of grief in his face told me it was real. He had loved Linnell, too. He came and scowled at me, taking off the bandage on my head and inspecting the stitches, then looked at the wound in the arm.
“I suppose you are the only man on Darkover who can go to a Festival Night ball and come home with something like this,” he grumbled. “What sort of fight was it?”
So he had heard only that Linnell was dead—not of the monstrous visitation of Sharra. The cut hurt, but it was no more than a flesh wound. I’d have trouble using the arm for a while, but I held no resentment; Regis had done the only thing he could, releasing me from the call of Sharra. I said, “It was an accident, he didn’t mean to hurt me,” and let him think what he liked. “Get me something to eat and some clothes. I have to find out what’s happening—”
“You look as if you needed a tenday in bed,” Andres said crossly. Then his very real concern for me surfaced in a harsh, “Lad, I’ve lost two of you! Don’t send yourself after Marius and Linnell! What’s going on that you can’t wait until tomorrow for it?”
I yielded and lay quiet. Somewhere out there Sharra raged, I supposed… but I would know if they came into the Comyn Castle (was I altogether freed? I did not dare look at my matrix to see) and there was nothing to be gained by going out and looking for trouble. I watched Andres grumbling around the room, a soothing sound I remembered from boyhood. When Marius or I had raced our horses at too breakneck a pace and tumbled off, breaking a finger or a collarbone on the way down, he had grumbled in exactly the same way.
Marius and I had never had the boyhood squabbles and fistfights of most brothers I knew; there had been too many years between us. By the time he was out of pinafores and able to assert himself, I was already grown and into the cadet corps. I had only begun to know what kind of man my brother was, and then he was gone from me, the furthest distance of all. I had dragged him, too, into the inexorable fates pursuing me. But at least he had had a clean death, a bullet through the brain, not the death in fire that waited for me.
For now that Kadarin was loose with the Sharra sword, I knew how I would die, and made up my mind to it. Ashara’s plan, and the help of Regis Hastur’s new and astonishing Gift, which seemed somehow to hold power over Sharra, might destroy the Sharra matrix; but I knew perfectly well that I would go with it into destruction.
Well, that was what had awaited me for all these years, bringing me back to Darkover at the appointed time, to the death appointed, which I should have shared with Marjorie.
We had planned our death…I remembered that morning in Castle Aldaran when, hostages to the destruction Sharra was sowing in the country round, showering on the Terran spaceport in Caer Donn, I had been allowed to waken from the drugs that had kept me, passive prisoner, chained to the destruction and feeding power into Sharra. I never knew why I had been allowed to come free of the drugs; certainly it had not been any lingering tenderness on Kadarin’s part for either of us. But Marjorie and I had been prepared to die… knew we must die in closing the gateway into this world that was Sharra. And so she and I, together, had smashed the gateway…
But then I, using all the power of that matrix, had taken her, and the Sword, and flung us through space bodily—the Terrans called it teleportation, and I had never done it before or since—to Arilinn; where Marjorie had died from her terrible burns, and I…
… I had survived, or some part of me had survived, and all these years had despised myself because I had not followed her to death. Now I knew why I had been spared: Kadarin and Thyra still lived, and somehow they would have recovered the matrix and ravaged Darkover again with its fire. This time there would be no respite; and when Sharra was destroyed, none of us would be left alive. And so I must set my affairs in order.
I called Andres back to me, and said, “Where is the little girl?”
“Rella—that’s the cook’s helper—looked after her today, and put her to bed in the room Marius had when he was a little tyke,” Andres said.
“If I live, I may be able to take her to Armida,” I said, “but if anything should happen to me—no, foster-father, listen; nothing’s certain in this life. Now that my father and brother are gone—you have served us all faithfully for a quarter of a century. If something should happen to me, would you leave Darkover?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it,” the old man said. “I came here with Dom Kennard when we were young men, and it’s been a good life; but I think I might go back to Terra in the end.” He added, with a mirthless grin, “I’ve wondered what it would be like, to be under my own blue sky again, and have a moon like a moon ought to be, not those little things.” He pointed out the window at the paling face of Idriel, greenish like a gem through water.
“Bring me something to write on.” When he complied, I scribbled with my good hand, folded the paper and sealed it.
“I can’t leave Armida to you,” I said. “I suppose Gabriel will have it after me; it’s in the Alton Domain. I would if I could, believe me. But if you take this to the Terran Legate in the Trade City, this will take you to Terra, and I’d rather you would foster Marja yourself than turn her over to Gabriel’s wife.” Domna Javanne Hastur has never liked me; no doubt she would do her best by Gabriel’s kinsman, but it would be a cold and dutiful best; and Andres, at least, would care for my daughter for my father’s sake and Linnell’s if not for mine. “My mother—and my father after her—owned some land there; it had better go to you, then.”
He blinked and I saw tears filling his eyes, but all he said was, “God forbid I should ever have to use it, vai dom. But I’ll do my best for the little girl if anything happens. You know I’d guard her with my life.”
I said soberly, “You might have to.” I did not know why, but I was filled suddenly with icy shivers; my blood ran cold in my veins, and for a moment, even in the dying light which turned the whole room crimson, it seemed that blood lay over the stones around me. Is this then the place of my death? Only a moment, and it was gone. Andres went to the window, drew the curtains with a bang.
“The bloody sun!” he said, and it sounded like a curse. Then he tucked the paper I had given him, without looking at it, into a pocket, and went away.
That was settled. Now there was only Sharra to face. Well, it must come when it would. Tomorrow Katie and I would ride to Hali, and the plan I had made, for finding the Sword of Aldones and using this last weapon against Sharra, would either succeed or it would fail. Either way, I would probably not see another sunset. My head was afire with the stitches in my forehead. Scars to match those Kadarin had made on my face… well, there’s an old saying that the dead in heaven is too happy to care what happens to his corpse, be it beautiful or ugly, and the dead in hell has too much else to worry about! As for me, I had never believed in either heaven or hell; death was no more than endless nothingness and darkness.
Yet it seemed I could hear again my father’s last cry, directly to my mind— Return to Darkover and fight for your rights and your brother’s! This is my last command… and then, past that, as the life was leaving him, that
last cry of joy and tenderness:
Yllana! Beloved—!
Had he, at the last moment, seen something beyond this life, had my half-remembered mother been waiting for him at that last gateway? The cristoforos believe something like that, I know; Marjorie had believed. Would Marjorie be waiting for me beyond Sharra’s fire? I could not, dared not, let myself think so. And if it were so—I let myself smile, a sour little smile—what would we do when Dio turned up there? But she had already loosed her claim on me… if love were the criterion, perhaps she would seek Lerrys beyond the gates of death. And what of those husbands or wives given in marriage who hated their spouses, married out of duty or family ties or political expediency, so that married life was a kind of hell and death a merciful release, would any sane or just God demand that they be tied together in some endless afterlife as well? I dismissed all this as mad rubbish and tried, through the fierce pain in my head and the fiery throbbing of my wounded arm, to compose myself for sleep.
The last red light dimmed, faded and was gone. A chink of the curtains showed me pallid greenish moonlight, lying like ice across my bed; it looked cool, it would cool my fever… there was a step and a rustle and soft whisper.
“Lew, are you asleep?”
“Who’s there?”
The dim light picked out a gleam of fair hair, and Dio, her face as pale as the pallid moon, looked down at me. She turned and pulled the curtains open where Andres had closed them, letting the moonlight flood the room and the waning moons peep over her shoulder.
The chill of the moonlight seemed to cool my feverish face. I even wondered, incuriously, if I had fallen asleep and was dreaming she was there, she seemed so quiet, so muted. Her eyes were swollen and flushed with tears.
“Lew, your face is so hot…” she murmured, and after a minute she came and laid something cold and refreshing on my brow. “Do you mean they left you alone here like this?”