The Sword of Aldones

  But I had learned to fight when I had two hands and I was wearing only a light dress-sword. Idiot that I was! I'd smelled danger, the air had been rotten with it--and I hadn't even worn a serviceable weapon!

  Marius was fighting at my back with one of the nonhuman Trailmen, a lean crouched thing in rags with a long evil knife. The pattern of his strokes beat through our linked minds, and I cut the contact roughly; I had enough trouble with one fight. My steel clashed against Kadarin's.

  He'd improved. In a matter of seconds he had me off balance, unable to attack, able only to keep up, somehow, a hard defense. Yet there was a kind of pleasure in it, even though my breath came short and blood dripped down my face with the sweat; he was here, -and this time there was no man--or woman--to pull us apart.

  But a defensive fight is doomed to lose. My mind worked, fast and desperately. Kadarin had one weakness; his temper. He would go into a flaming rage, and for a few minutes, that keen judgment of his went, and he was a berserk animal. If I could make him lose his temper for half a second, his acquired skill at swordplay would go with it. It was a dirty way to fight. But I wasn't in any shape to be fastidious.

  "Son of the River!" I shouted at him in the Cahuenga dialect, which has nuances of filth unsurpassed in any other language. "Sandal-wearer! You can't hide behind your little sister's petticoats this time!"

  There was no change in the fast, slashingly awkward-- but deadly--sword strokes. I hadn't really hoped there would be.

  But for half a second he dropped the barriers around his mind.

  And then he was my prisoner.

  His mind gripped in the unique, Jocked-on paralysis of an Alton Telepath. And his body rigid--paralyzed. I reached out, taking his sword from the stiff fingers. I lost consciousness of the battle round us. We might have been alone on the forest road, Kadarin and I--and my hate. In a minute I would kill him.

  But I waited a second too long. I was exhausted already from the struggle with Marius; a flicker of faltering pressure, and Kadarin, alert, leaped free with a savage cry. He outweighed me by half; the impact knocked me full-length to the ground, and the next minute something crashed and struck my head and I plunged miles into darkness.

  A million years later, Old Hastur's face swam out of nowhere into focus before my aching eyes. "Lie still, Lew. You've been shot. They're gone."

  I struggled to raise myself; subsided to the hands that forced me gently back. Through a swollen eye I counted the faces that swung around me in the red, murky sunset. Very far away, I heard Lerrys' voice, harsh and muted, mourning,) "Poor boy."

  I was bruised and in pain, but there was a worse ache, a great gaping emptiness torn loose, that made me deathly alone.

  They didn't have to tell me that Marius was dead.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I had concussion. Kadarin's second bullet had knocked loose a splinter of bone; and Marius' death had been a shattering shock to the cells of my brain. The neuronic and synaptic links so recently made had all been torn apart again when he died, and for days my life--and sanity--hung in the balance.

  I remember only shattering light and cold and shock, jolting movement, the pungency of drugs. Without any apparent sense of transition, one day I opened my eyes and found myself in my old rooms in the Comyn Castle in Thendara, and Linnell Aillard was sitting beside me.

  She was very like Callina, only taller, darker, somehow gentler, with a sweet and childish face--although she was not really much younger than I. I suppose she was pretty. Not that it mattered. In every man's Me there are a few women who simply don't register on his libido. Linnell was never a woman to me; she was my cousin. I lay contentedly watching her for some minutes, until she sensed my look and smiled.

  "I thought you'd know me this time. Head ache?"

  It did. I felt awkwardly at the ache, discovered bandages. Linnell caught my hand gently away.

  "How long have I been here?"

  "Here in Thendara? Only two days. You've been unconscious for days and days, though."

  "And--Marius?"

  Her eyes filled with tears. "He is buried at the Hidden City: The Regent gave him full Comyn honors, Lew."

  I freed my hand gently from hers and lay for a long time staring at lie pattern of light on the translucent walls. Finally I asked, "The council?"

  "They rushed it through, before we came here to Thendara. The marriage ceremony will be Festival Night."

  Life went on, I was thinking. "Yours to Derik?"

  "Oh, no." She smiled, shyly. "There's no hurry about that. Callina's, to Beltran of Aldaran."

  I sat bolt upright, disregarding knifing pain. "Do you mean they're still going through with that alliance? You're joking, Linnelll Or is everyone mad?"

  She shook her head, looking troubled. "I think that's why they rushed it through; they were afraid you'd recover, and try to block them again. Derik and the Hasturs wanted to wait for you; the others overruled them."

  I didn't doubt that a bit. There was nothing the Comyn wanted less than a capable Alton in council. I threw back the covers. "I want to see Callina!"

  "I'll ask her to come to you; you needn't get up."

  I vetoed that. These rooms had been assigned to the Altons, during council season, for generations; they were probably well-monitored with telepathic traps and dampers. The Comyn had never trusted the male adult Altons too much. I wanted to see Callina somewhere else.

  Her servants told me where to find her. I swung back an innocent-looking panel of curtain and a flood of searing light literally exploded in my face. Swearing, I flung my hands over my tormented eyes; the closed lids dripped red and yellow after-images, and a surprised voice spoke my name. The lights died down and Callina's face swam into focus.

  "I am sorry. Can you see now? I must protect myself, you know, when I work."

  "Don't bother apologizing." A Keeper among the matrix screens is vulnerable in ways ordinary people know nothing about. "I should have had more sense than to come in like that."

  She smiled and held the curtain aside for me to pass through. "Yes. They told me you were a matrix worker."

  And as she let the curtain fall, I suddenly became conscious of the subtle wrongness in her beauty.

  One can tell everything about a woman by the way she walks. The very step of a wanton is suggestive. Innocence proclaims itself in carefree romping. Callina was young and lovely; but she did not move like a beautiful woman. There was something both very young and very old about her movements, as if the gawkiest stage of adolescence and the staid dignity of great old age had met, with no intermediary stage in her.

  She let the curtains close, and the sense of strangeness vanished. I looked around the patterned walls, feeling the soothing effect of the even, diffused sonics. I had had an old, small matrix laboratory in the old wing, but nothing like this.

  There was the regular monitor system, flashing with tiny star-like glimmers, one for every licensed matrix on every level in this section of Darkover. There was a specially modulated telepathic damper which filtered out telepathic overtones without confusing or inhibiting ordinary thought. And there was an immense panel with a molten-glass shimmer whose uses I could only guess; it might have been one of the almost legendary psychokinetic transmitters. Curiously prosaic, an ordinary screw driver and some glittering scraps of insulating cloth lay on a table.

  She said, "You know, of course, that they got away with the Sharra matrix?"

  "If I'd had the brains of a mule," I said violently, "I'd have tossed it into a converter somewhere on Terra, and been well rid of it--and Darkover well rid of it too!"

  "That would have put things out of control, forever; at best, Sharra was only dormant while the matrix was off-world. Destroying the matrix would have ended any hope of putting the activated sites out of action. Sharra isn't on the master banks, you know. It's an illegal matrix--unmonitored. We can't monitor it until all the loose sites, and the free energy, is located and controlled. What was the
pattern?"

  I let her tune out the dampers, and tried to project the pattern on a monitor screen; but only blurs swirled against the crystal surface. She was contrite; "I shouldn't have let you try that, so soon after a head injury! Come out of here and rest!"

  In a smaller room, whose open sky-wall looked down into the valley, I relaxed in a soft chair, while Callina watched me, aloof and reflective. I asked finally, "Callina, if you knew the pattern, could you duplicate the matrix and monitor the focal sites with the duplicate?"

  She didn't even have to think it over. "No. I can duplicate a first or second level matrix like this--" She touched the tiny crystals that held her blue dress together over her breast. "And I might be able to construct a matrix lattice of complexity equal to the Sharra one--although I wouldn't care to try it alone. But two identical matrices of fourth level or higher can't exist simultaneously, in one universe and in time, without space distortion."

  "Cherillys' Law," I recalled. "A matrix is the only unique thing in spacetime, and thus existing without any equilibrium point, has the power to shift energy."

  She nodded. "Any attempt to make an exact molecular duplicate of a matrix like the one commanding Sharra--is it ninth level or tenth?--would warp half the planet right out of spacetime."

  "I was afraid of that," I said, "but I told myself only a Keeper would really know."

  "Keeper!" She gave a short, wry little laugh.

  At last she said, "Linnell told you, I suppose? Lew, it isn't Just the alliance that bothers me. If they're determined to put me out of the way, make sure I won't seize council power-well, they will. I can't stand against them all, Lew. If' they think the alliance will help the Comyn, who am I to argue? Hastur is no fool. They could be right. I don't know anything about politics. If I weren't a Keeper, they wouldn't even have asked my consent as a formality; they would say marry, and I would marry! I suppose one husband is as good as another," she said, and again I had the curious impression of extreme and naive youth, superimposed on the beautiful woman who sat watching me. She spoke of her own marriage as a passive little girl, married by proxy to a doll, might speak. Yet she was a beautiful and desirable woman. It was uncanny!

  "It's the rest of it," she went on after a minute. "I can't believe ordinary Trailmen would know enough to attack you, just then, and steal the Sharra matrix. Who set them on?"

  I stared. "Didn't Hastur tell you who set them on?"

  "I don't think he knew."

  Trailmen," I said with angry emphasis, "would steal weapons, food, clothing--jewelry, perhaps--they would never dare to touch a matrix! And that matrix--why am I still alive, then?" I demanded. "Callina, I was keyed into that thing, body and brain! Even when it was insulated, if any out-of-phase person so much as laid a hand on it, it hurt! There are three people on the planet who could handle it, without killing me! Didn't they tell you it was Kadarin himself?"

  Her face went white. "I don't think Hastur would know Kadarin by sight," she said. "But how did Kadarin know you had the matrix?"

  I did not want to think Rafe Scott would have betrayed me to Kadarin. The fires of Sharra had singed him, too. I'd rather believe that Kadarin could still read my mind, even from a distance. Suddenly, my loss hit me with overwhelming pain. Now I was absolutely alone.

  "Don't grieve," Callina said softly. But I knew; to her, Marius had been only an alien, a half-caste, despised for his difference. How could I explain to Callina? We had been in total rapport, Marius and I, for perhaps three hours, with all that implies. I had known Marius as I knew myself; his strengths and weaknesses, his desires and dreams, hopes and disappointments. Years of living together could have told me no more. Until the moment of rapport I had never known a brother and until his dying mind ripped from mine I had never known loneliness. But there was no way to explain this to her.

  Finally she asked, "Lew, how did you first get yourself involved with--" She started to say, with Sharra, looked at my twisting face and didn't. "With Kadarin? I never knew?"

  "I don't want to talk about it," I said curtly. Again and again--must those old wounds be torn?

  "I know it's not easy," she said. "It's not easy for me to be handed over to Aldaran." She did not look at me again. She took a cigarette from a crystal dish, and sparked it alight with the jewel in her ring. I reached for one and fumbled it; she raised her head and frankly stared, and I looked at her defiantly.

  "Men smoke on some planets."

  "I don't believe it!"

  "They do." Still defiant, I took one, remembered I had no light, and reached clumsily for her hand, raising her ring to light it. "And no one laughs. .Or considers them effeminate. It is an accepted custom which causes no curiosity. And I learned to like it. Do you think you can endure the sight, Callina comynara?" We looked at each other in a blaze of hostility which had nothing to do with the small and silly argument over the cigarette.

  Her lip curled. "One would expect it of the Terranan," she said scornfully. "Please yourself."

  I was still holding her hand and the ring. I let them go, drawing in a deep breath of the thin sweetish smoke. "You asked me a question," I said, staring at the distant snowcapped peaks. "I'll try to answer.

  "Kadarin was Aldaran's foster brother, I've heard. No one knows who, or what, his parents were. Some say he's the son of a Terran renegade, Zeb Scott, by one of the nonhuman chieri, back in the hills. Whatever he is, or isn't, he has the mind of a clever man. He learned some matrix mechanics-- don't ask me how. He worked a while in Terran intelligence, got deported from two or three worlds, finally settled in the Hellers. Some of the Terrans back there have Darkovan, even nonhuman blood. He started organizing the rebels, the malcontents. Then he found me."

  I got up and walked away from her. "You know what my life had been. Here--a bastard, an alien. Among the Terrans--a telepath, a freak. Kadarin, at least, made me feel that I belonged somewhere."

  Not even to myself did I want to admit that once I had liked the man. I sighed.

  "I spoke about a renegade, Zeb Scott."

  The flood of memory rushed on, resistless, only a few bald words escaping to fill in years of adventure and the long search. "Zeb Scott died drunk, raving, in a wineshop in Carthon, babbling about the blue sword with the power of a hundred demons. We guessed that it was Sharra.

  "The Aldarans, centuries ago--so the legend ran--had summoned Sharra to this world; but the power had been sealed off again, and the Aldarans exiled for their crime. Only after that had the Aldarans played traitor to Darkover, and sold-the Terrans a foothold on our world.

  "Kadarin went after the Sharra sword, found it, and experimented with the power. He needed a telepath. I was right at hand, and too young, too damned reckless to know what I was doing. And there were the Scotts. Rafe was just a child then. But there were the girls; Thyra, and Marjorie--"

  I quit there. It was no use. There was no way, no way at all to tell her about Marjorie. I flung my cigarette savagely from the window and watched it spinning away on a little eddy of wind.

  Callina said softly, when I had almost forgotten her, "What was he trying to do?"

  This was safe ground. "Why does any traitor steal or betray? The Terrans have been trying for centuries to beg, borrow or steal some secrets of matrix mechanics. The Comyn were incorruptible, but Kadarin knew the Terrans would pay well. Experimenting with the power, he activated some of the focal points, showed them what he could do. But at the end he betrayed the Terrans too, and opened up a--a hole in space, a Gate between worlds, to take on all that power--"

  My voice cracked like a boy's. "Damn him! Damn him waking and sleeping, living and dead, here and here after!" I fought suddenly back to self-control and said quietly, "He got what he wanted” But Marjorie and I were at the poles of power, and--"

  I shook my head. What more could I say? The monstrous terror that had flamed and ravened between worlds, the hellfire. Marjorie, confident and unafraid at the pole of power, suddenly crumpling in agony, under the backlash o
f that awful thing--

  "I broke out of the matrix lock, and somehow managed to slam the Gate again. But Marjorie was already--"

  I broke there, unable to say another word, and slumped into a chair, hiding my face on my arm. Callina came swiftly to me, kneeling, her arms around my bent shoulders. "I know, Lew. I know."

  I jerked away from her touch. "You know! Thank your Gods you don't know!" I said savagely. Then, gripped in the fist of memory, I let my head fall forward on her breast. She did know. She had tried to save us both. Marjorie had died in her arms. "Yes," I muttered, "you know the rest."

  My head was throbbing, and I could feel the echoing throb-throb of her heart through the soft silk of her dress. Her hair was like the dust of flowers against my face. I raised my good hand to clasp her soft fingers in mine.

  She threw back her head and looked at me.

  "We're alone with this, Lew. Hastur's bound by Compact to obey the council. Derik's an imbecile, and Regis is only a boy. The Ridenow, the Ardais--they want anything that will keep them in power; they'd sell out to Sharra themselves if they thought they could do it safely! You're powerless alone. And I--" her mouth worked, but no sound came.

  Finally she said, "I'm a Keeper, and I could hold all the power of Ashara if I would. Ashara would give me strength enough to rule the whole council if I would let her, but I--I won't be a puppet, Lew, I don't want to be only her pawn! I won't! The council pulling me one way, Ashara the other. Beltran couldn't be worse!"

  We were clinging together like children frightened by the darkness. She was soft in my arms. I tightened my clasp on her; then her half-breathed protest went lax in the middle of a kiss. She made no resistance when I lifted her to her feet and drew back her head beneath my own.

  Outside the last red trace of the sun dropped behind Nevarsin Peak and the stars began to wink in the denuded sky.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIX