Sharra's Exile

  Am I going to authorize… who does he think I am? Then, in the sudden humility of power recognized and feared, Regis knew that he could no longer avoid the responsibility. He said, “Yes. I’ll authorize it.” He managed to write his name, though his hand shook, on the form Lawton held out to him. Lawton spoke into some kind of communicator.

  “All right; Hastur authorized it. Let the copter go.”

  “I want to—” I should go with the copter. Maybe I can still do something for Lew…or his matrix if it’s sealed to Sharra…

  Lawton shook his head. “Too late. They’ve taken off. All you can do now is wait.”

  They waited, while the sun sank slowly behind the mountain pass. Waited, while time wore away and dragged, and finally Regis saw the helicopter, a tiny black speck hovering over the mountain pass, coming nearer, nearer.

  Dio rose and cried out, “He’s hurt! I—I have to go to him—” and dashed for the lift. Lawton simultaneously answered some kind of blinking light, listened, and his face changed.

  “Well,” he said grimly to Regis, “I waited too long, or you did, or somebody. They’ve got Kadarin, yes, but it looks as if he’s managed to commit another murder while everybody stood by and watched. They’re going to take him down to Medic. You’d better come along.”

  Regis followed, through the sterile white walls of the Medical division. An elevator whined softly to a stop and Spaceforce men hauled out prisoners. Dio had eyes only for Lew, carried between two of the uniformed men. Regis could not tell whether he was alive or dead; his face was ghastly, his head lolled lifeless, and the whole front of his shirt was covered in blood.

  Bredu! Regis felt shock and grief surging over him. Dio was clinging to Lew’s lax hand, crying now without trying to hide it. Behind, Kadarin moved manacled between two guards. Regis barely recognized him, he was so much older, so much more haggard, as if something were consuming him from within. Thyra, too, was handcuffed. Kathie looked pale and frightened, and one of the guards was carrying Callina, who appeared to have fainted; they set her in a chair and gestured to someone to bring smelling-salts, and after a minute Callina opened her eyes; but she swayed, holding to the chair. Kathie went swiftly to her and held her up. One of the Medic personnel said something and she frowned and said, “I’m a nurse; I’ll look after her. You’d better look after Mr. Montray-Alton; the woman stabbed him, and it looks as if it may have finished him—he was still alive when the helicopter landed, but that’s not saying much.”

  But Regis looked at the long sword Kathie had let slide to the floor; and something inside him, something in his blood, suddenly awoke and shouted inside his veins.

  THIS IS MINE!

  He went and picked it up; it felt warm and right in his hands. Callina opened her eyes, staring, a strange, cold, blue gaze.

  The moment Regis had the sword in his hands, looking at the curling letters written on the scabbard, all at once he seemed to be everywhere, not just where his body was, but as if the edges of his body had spread out to encompass everything in the room. He touched Callina and saw her with a strange double sight, the woman he knew, the plain quiet Keeper, still and prim and gentle, and at the same time she was overlaid with something else, cold and blue and watchful, like ice, strange and cold as stone. He touched Dio and felt the flood of her love and concern and dread; he touched Kadarin and drew back, THIS IS THE ENEMY, THIS IS THE BATTLE… NOT YET, NOT YET! He touched Lew.

  Pain. Cold. Silence. Fear and the consuming flame…

  Pain. Pain at the heart, stabbing pain… Regis spread out into the pain, that was the only way to explain it, felt the broken torn cells, the bleeding out of the life— NO! I WILL NOT HAVE IT SO! The trickling silence that was Lew was suddenly flooded with terrible pain, and then with heat and life and then Lew opened his eyes, and sat up, staring at Regis. His lips barely moved and he whispered, “What—what are you?”

  And Regis heard himself say, from a great distance, “Hastur.”

  And the word meant nothing to him. But the gaping wound had closed, and all around him the Terran medics were standing and staring; and in his hand was this sword which seemed, now, to be more than half of himself.

  And suddenly Regis was terrified and he slid the sword back into its sheath, and suddenly the world was all in one piece again and he was back in his body. He was shaking so hard that he could hardly stand.

  “Lew! Bredu—you’re alive!”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  « ^ »

  Lew Alton’s narrative, concluded

  I have never remembered anything about that helicopter ride to the Terran HQ, or how I got to the Legate’s office; the first awareness was of hellish pain and its sudden cessation.

  “Lew! Lew, can you hear me?”

  How could I help it? She was shouting right in my ear! I opened my eyes and saw Dio, her face wet with tears.

  “Don’t cry, love,” I said, “I’m all right. That hell-cat Thyra must have stabbed me, but she seems not to have hurt me much.”

  But Kathie motioned Dio back when she would have bent to me, saying with professional crispness, “Just a moment; his pulse was nearly gone.” She took some kind of instrument and cut away my shirt; then I heard her gasp.

  Where Thyra’s knife had gone in—perilously near the heart—was only a small, long-healed scar, paler and more perfectly cicatrized than the discolored scars on my face.

  “I don’t believe this,” she protested. “I saw it, and still I don’t believe it.” She took something cold and wet and washed off the still-sticky smears of half-dried blood which still clung to the skin. I looked ruefully at the ruined shirt.

  “Get him a uniform shirt, or something,” said Lawton, and they brought me one, made out of paper or some similar unwoven fiber. It had a cold and rather slippery texture which I found unpleasant, but I wasn’t in a position to be picky; besides, the medical smells were driving me out of my mind. I said, “Do we have to stay down here? I’m not hurt—” and only then did I see Regis, the Sword of Aldones belted around his waist, an unbelieving look of awe on his face. Later I learned what he had done; but at the moment—everything was so mad already—I simply took it for granted and was grateful that the Sword had come to the hands of the one person on this world who could handle it. I think, originally, I had supposed that Callina, or perhaps Ashara, would have to take it, as Keeper. Now I saw it in Regis’s custody, and all I could think was, oh, yes, of course, he is Hastur.

  “Where is Thyra? Did she get away?”

  “Not likely,” said Lawton, grimly, “She’s in a cell downstairs, and there she’ll stay.”

  “Why?” Kadarin asked. His voice was calm, and I stared, unable to believe my eyes; on the shores of Hali he had appeared to me as something very far from human; now, curiously, he looked like the man I had first known, civilized and urbane, even likable. “On what charges?”

  “Attempted murder of Lew Alton here!”

  “It would be hard to make a charge like that stick,” Kadarin said. “Where is the alleged wound?”

  Lawton stared irritably at the blood-soaked shirt which had been cut from me. He said, “We’ve got eyewitnesses to the attempt. Meanwhile we’ll hold her for—oh, hell!—breaking and entering, trespass, carrying concealed weapons, indecent language in a public place—indecent exposure if we have to! The main thing is that we’re holding her, and you too; we need to ask you some questions about a certain murder and the burning of a townhouse in Thendara…”

  Kadarin looked directly at me. He said, “Believe what you like, Lew; I did not murder your brother. I did not know your brother by sight; I did not know who he was until afterward, when I heard in the street who it was that had been killed. To me he was simply a young Terran I did not know; and for what it is worth, it was not I who killed him but one of my men. And I am sorry; I gave no orders that anyone should be killed. You know what it was that I came for, and why I had to come.”

  I looked at this man
and knew that I could not hate him. I too had been compelled to do things I would never have dreamed of doing, not in my right mind; and I knew what had compelled him. It was belted, now, around his waist; but through that I could see the man who had been my friend. I turned my face away. There was too much between us. I had no right to condemn him, not now, not when through my own matrix I could feel the pull, irresistible, of that unholy thing.

  Return to me and live forever in undying reviving fire… and behind my eyelids the Form of Fire, between me and what I could see with my physical eyes. Sharra, and I was still a part of it, still damned. I took one step toward him; I do not know even now whether I meant to strike him or to join hands with him on the hilt of the Sharra matrix concealed in its sword.

  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…