The Children of Kings

  Hayat stumbled as he lost his grip. The crowd responded with a burst of shouting. Adrenaline and dust saturated the air.

  The sudden lack of resistance almost broke Gareth’s balance. He recovered more quickly than Hayat did, tossing aside the entangled whips. His right hand was now free to grab the sword.

  An instant later, Hayat regained his feet, blocking the way.

  Gareth swiped at Hayat. The claws slashed through empty air. Hayat reeled backward, but now Gareth had the measure of his reach. He followed, striving to close the distance before Hayat recovered.

  The oblique angle of Hayat’s leap took him beyond the arc of Gareth’s claws. With surprising speed, he jabbed his claws at Gareth, aiming for Gareth’s unprotected side. Gareth whirled, blocking with his glove. The two sets of claws gave a nerve-jangling shriek as they collided and slid past one another.

  Hayat grabbed Gareth’s mask, bearing down with his greater weight. The mask twisted askew, partly blocking Gareth’s vision.

  Gareth floundered, trying to escape the sudden, crushing load on his neck. He couldn’t see, and in another moment, Hayat would slam him into the ground. A muffled roaring filled his skull. The pounding of his heart and his labored breath mixed with the screaming of the onlookers.

  Desperate, Gareth reached around with his free hand. Something cold lanced across his forearm. His fingers slipped over a rounded surface—Hayat’s mask?—and then found an opening, a hole.

  Suddenly Gareth lost his balance. As he fell, he hooked his fingers into the opening. Hayat came down on top of him in a sprawling jumble of arms and legs and thrashing claws. Gareth dug his heels into the sand, fighting for traction, and tried to worm out from under his opponent. His fingertips met something soft and moist. With what little traction he had, he pushed as hard as he could.

  Shrieking, Hayat arched backwards.

  Gareth felt the lifting of Hayat’s weight. Rolling in the opposite direction, Gareth scrambled to his feet. He could see a little through one edge of the eyehole, enough to make out Hayat’s position. Gareth risked trying to shift his mask and by luck managed to get it more or less back in place.

  Hayat clambered to his feet, his free hand covering his eye. Gareth judged the distance to the sword. He had only a fraction of a moment, a heartbeat, nothing more, before Hayat reacted.

  Overhead, the night sky exploded in light.

  32

  Gareth staggered under the sudden brightness, as if the heavens had burst apart. His vision, adapted to the torchlit dark, hazed into gray. Muffled, his laran senses caught the onslaught of minds shrilling in terror and pain. Around him, as if in counterpoint, scattered voices howled.

  “Aiie!” cried one and then another of the onlookers. “Sorcery! Devil-magic!”

  By far the greater portion of the crowd had fallen silent.

  Blinking, Gareth straightened up. The glare overhead faded. He made out the brightest of the stars and the glimmering violet crescent of Liriel . . . then a starburst of white-gold . . . and another, and a quick series of explosions . . . two, five, each overlapping the other.

  A hush fell over the audience, except for a man here and there blubbering in fear.

  Poulos was right to warn us.

  “You brought this on us!” came a scream from behind him. “Die, witch spawn!”

  Gareth spun around just as Hayat charged, sword extended. If they’d been any closer, Gareth would have been run through before he could react. As it was, the sword ripped through his shirt, slicing open his side. He felt a line of burning cold along his ribs, but his body was already in motion, pivoting as he had been drilled by the best swordmasters in Thendara.

  Gareth stepped outside the sweep of Hayat’s sword and let the other man rush past him. Hayat had swung wildly, and the stroke had pulled him off-balance. Now he was committed, for the sword had too much momentum to easily reverse direction. Gareth sidled in closer. He reached for Hayat’s shoulder, thinking to control the other man’s sword arm.

  Another explosion whitened the sky. Hayat’s eyes glittered in the harsh light. His lips drew back from his teeth. He jabbed his claws at Gareth’s face.

  Gareth ducked. One of the claws caught in the stiff leather of his mask. Unbalanced, he toppled to one side. He twisted as he fell, trying to keep Hayat from landing on top of him.

  They rolled over one another, thrashing and struggling. For a hideous moment, Gareth felt himself pinned against the sand. His side flared into agony. A wildfire ignited in his flesh. Claws caught the light from overhead, then passed out of his limited range of vision.

  Gareth’s lungs ached, and his breath came hoarse and heavy. A faint, distant ringing filled his ears, blotting out all other sound. Dimly, he felt his arms and legs thrusting. With each second, his movements grew weaker, his muscles less responsive. He heard a sickening snap! above the sounds of the struggle. The pain in his side receded, as if it were happening to someone else.

  He yearned, with every fiber of mind and body, to let go. To sink into the darkness. To have it all be over. No one would expect him to keep fighting, not against such odds, not when he was already wounded, perhaps fatally. Not when he had never thought he would survive.

  Always, always, he had lived his life according to the expectations of others—his Grandmother Javanne, his parents, the Comyn, Mikhail, Domenic, Danilo, Grandmother Linnea.

  Everyone except himself.

  He had sworn himself to this last deed. Not aloud, in words, but where it mattered even more, in his heart. And now, he would give up because it was difficult?

  Aldones, Lord of Light, father of my fathers, help me finish this fight!

  With an inarticulate cry, Gareth redoubled his struggle. Strength flowed into him, strength he had not known he owned. Hayat’s body was as dense, as weighty as ever, but somehow Gareth managed to find a hold here, a leverage there. He shoved and twisted and pulled as if all of Darkover and everyone he held dear depended upon it. His lungs burned. His heart pounded as if set upon by a demented drummer. His vision went from gray to white to incandescent blue.

  He was no longer seeing with his physical eyes, but with deeper senses. Above him hovered two ships, elongated teardrops of metal. He sensed the men and women onboard, their desperate fear, felt the creak of warping steel, tasted acrid smoke, shuddered with impact after blasting impact . . .

  Images wavered in and out of focus, not visual pictures but impressions, all haloed in blue-white, heat and chemical reeks and taut determination, thoughts rather than words,

  Captain, we’re hit—

  We’ve got to surrender, send a message—

  No prisoners.

  Fire! Fire! Fire!

  Flames racing down corridors, oxygen spilling out into space, fueling the blaze . . . muttered prayers, a man’s face lit by flashing lights—red, blue, red . . .

  Blue.

  And then a terrible glory burst across his mind, across the heavens, blotting out the sweep of moon and stars . . .

  A single point of brightness, trailing cometary mists . . . slowly dropping, slowly disappearing in the direction of Thendara.

  Sobbing brought Gareth back to himself. He was standing, although he had no memory of having gotten to his feet. By the rush of wet heat down his side, he knew he was bleeding hard. Between one blink of his eyes and the next, the blue-white aura died away. His mouth tasted of ashes.

  He swayed with sudden, overwhelming weakness. Someone caught him. A voice whispered in his ear, tickling the fine hairs on his neck. He could not understand the words.

  Overhead, the stars glimmered, serene in their beauty, as if nothing had happened.

  The arena blurred with overlapping images, like oddly doubled sight. A short distance away, a man bent over a rounded shape. Was it he who wept? Or had Gareth only imagined that sound?

  “Lord Hayat,”
said the man who held Gareth upright.

  Gareth found his balance and took a step toward the crouching man. It was Dayan, and at his feet lay his son, stretched across the fallen sword. No, Dayan still sat in his chair, anchored there by pride and custom. It was his spirit that had rushed to his son’s side, while the demands of authority held him fast.

  Gently, the guard who had stood as Hayat’s aide rolled him on to his back. Blood saturated Hayat’s shirt. His left arm was bent at an unnatural angle. The tips of his glove were snug against his chest.

  Again, Gareth caught a wail of loss, a keening too intense for words, and this time he knew he did not hear it with his ears but with his inner senses. With his unamplified laran.

  He should not be listening, for there was something overwhelmingly private in Dayan’s grief. Yet before Gareth could raise his barriers and shut out the older man’s emotions, he sensed something else . . . from Hayat.

  Gareth held out his gloved hand, fumbling at the laces. Merach yanked at the knots and then Gareth pulled free.

  His side throbbed, but he had not lost too much blood, not yet. He had just enough strength to do what must be done.

  The guard looked up, dry-eyed, hard-eyed, as Gareth knelt. Gareth placed his right hand flat on Hayat’s chest beside the embedded claws. Ribs lifted, too shallowly to be seen, only felt. Gareth closed his eyes in relief.

  He reached for the Nebran amulet, but his fingers were too slippery with blood to manage the chain. The guard slipped it over Hayat’s head and handed it to Gareth. By sheer luck, Gareth found the clasp right away. The locket popped open and his starstone fell into the palm of his hand.

  The starstone flared like a miniature blue-white sun, more brilliant than Gareth had ever seen it. Its light bleached Hayat’s ashen features. The guard said nothing, but his eyes went wide. Someone behind him spat out a curse before Merach motioned to clear the arena.

  Fingers curled around his matrix stone, Gareth focused his mind on the psychoactive gem. For an instant, he had the sensation of squeezing himself into the rigid confines of a prism. He had become so accustomed to the unaided use of his laran that he had almost forgotten how to attune his mind to the stone. A moment later, he settled into its pattern and felt the surge as it amplified the natural psychic energy of his mind.

  Although his eyes were closed, the arena leapt into vivid detail, the sand, the onlookers, the guards, the city with its taverns and walled gardens, livestock yards and market squares, women weeping in their chains and men imprisoned by their pride. Closer, he felt Merach’s intricate mind, the loyalty that burned like a steady flame, and Dayan whose world had just shattered . . . and Hayat, his mind gone blank and dark, his body a web of dying colors. . . .

  Gareth dropped into those sluggishly pulsing strands. He had not been trained as a healer, and yet he had managed to bring not one but two men back from the edge of death. Now, as then, he must let instinct, the strength and nature of his own Gift, guide him.

  He must allow it to use him, to work through him, rather than force it to obey his will.

  With that thought, his awareness shifted once again. He sensed the infinitesimal sparks of living cells and the clusters of blood-starved tissues, the cool mineral of bone, the gossamer threads of nerves . . . the choked darkness of torn flesh, sliced blood vessels . . . the eerie resonances of metal, some of it very old and from some other world—

  Was it true that the Dry Towners descended not from the lost colony ships but from another planet, perhaps Wolf, during the Ages of Chaos?

  —the outlines of cartilage and connective tissue. Gareth had got his bearings now. The claws had slipped between the attachments of ribs to sternum. They had pierced the membrane covering the lungs and severed a number of small blood vessels. The luck of Aldones, or perhaps Nebran, had been with Hayat, for the claws had missed his heart and the big artery. However, blood was pooling between his chest wall and his lung. The next moment, the lung collapsed. Hayat’s entire body shuddered. The pattern of life energy dimmed.

  Fighting off the urge to act quickly, Gareth studied the area around the tips of the claws. He did not know if it would be better to leave the claws in place, hoping that they were exerting pressure to limit the bleeding, or to remove them. If he did that, he might damage the lung tissue even more and precipitate a massive hemorrhage.

  Try as he might, Gareth could not get a clear appraisal of the risks of removing the claws. He knew with growing certainty, however, that although the trauma of dragging them out might well end Hayat’s life, to leave them would certainly mean his death. Dayan believed his son was already gone—what was there to lose?

  Only Gareth’s own integrity, because he had wished Hayat ill, because he had intended to kill him, and now he must act with such clarity of purpose that he would never look back and see himself as murdering a gravely injured man.

  Gareth remembered what he had been like as an adolescent, how he had demanded the throne, insisting on his right to be king. He could not blame Grandmother Javanne entirely. The truth was that he and Hayat were not all that unlike, both having weak temperaments rendered arrogant by circumstance and rank.

  With one hand, he pressed the starstone against Hayat’s chest wall, close to the entry point of the claws. The fingers of his other hand closed around the glove, sodden with blood. He sensed Hayat’s pulse, its thready rhythm growing weaker as Hayat descended further into shock.

  Bracing his body, Gareth pulled. At first, nothing happened. The claws seemed fused to Hayat’s chest. Gareth eased up on the traction, trying for a smooth, slow draw. The glove resisted, then something gave way. Blood rushed into the space around the claws. The curving metal knives slipped free.

  Gareth jerked back into his normal senses. He had not expected so much blood. He yanked his shirt over his head. Wadding the fabric, he pressed it over the dripping wound. At least, the blood was flowing evenly, not gushing from an artery.

  Hands closed over his, taking over the pressure. He turned his head to see Merach.

  “I’ve stanched wounds far worse than this,” Merach said.

  Gareth eased back on his haunches, still holding the starstone. Hayat’s blood, sticky now that it was beginning to clot, made it adhere to the palm of his hand. When he closed his fingers around the crystal, it flared again. He felt as if he were standing inside one gem and holding another. Blue-white light reflected from the faceted surfaces, amplified so that he could not tell where it originated.

  Gareth began shaping the light, the power that ran through the brilliance. His laran senses sharpened, as if he were looking through the most powerful magnifying lens imaginable. Effortlessly, he surveyed Hayat’s body, the wound, the bleeding, the distorted tissue of the collapsed lung . . . and old injuries, too, not of bone and sinew but of mind. The physical damage was simple enough to repair, now that he could see it. But the warping of Hayat the boy, Hayat the youth, the thousand times he had been told be this and do that when all he had wanted was his father’s love, the indulgences, the privileges he had never earned, the callous disregard for any feelings but his own—those could be mended as well. Or if not mended, then amended.

  Changed.

  Hayat, near death, was incapable of asking to be healed; the assumption in such cases was that the person wanted to live.

  Every Tower worker took an oath never to enter the mind of another without permission, and then only to help. Gareth had never formally sworn, although the precept ran like a living stream through Linnea’s teachings.

  He could change Hayat in any way he wanted, expunge the braggart and give him modesty and a burning drive to serve his people. He could shape Hayat into a leader committed to peace with the Domains and prosperity for both their peoples. He could implant an abiding horror for Compact-forbidden weapons, indeed, for all warfare. Then it would not matter how many blasters were smuggled into the Dry Lands, for
the next Lord of Shainsa would never use them.

  The cause was just—the current threat eliminated, peace for the future, peace for all their children. Still, Gareth hesitated. If he used his laran to remake Hayat’s character, who would then be the tyrant, who the victim? Did the resulting good justify such an action? Was it not Gareth’s duty as heir to the throne, as Hastur, to save his people by any means possible?

  If he did not do this thing, if Hayat recovered and invaded the Domains with his blasters, on whose head would be the blood of the slain? Hayat’s, when it was his training to be ruthless? Or Gareth’s, because he could have stopped Hayat and did not?

  He had come to the Dry Lands to prevent the great lords from obtaining banned military technology—was this not the purpose of his journey, the reason for everything he had endured? Why then did he hesitate?

  The first thought that came to him was that he could be wrong. He had been in error about so many things in his life, could he trust any decision made under circumstances like these? This notion quickly gave way to the realization that once he gave way to the seductive lure of meddling with another man’s mind, no matter how justified the cause at the time, there would always be another good reason to do it again, another crisis, another irresistible cause. In the end, the thought that shook him to his core was that he would rather die than have this same thing done to him. His life was a pathetic thing, but it was his own. For good or ill, he had made choices, tried or not tried, acted in ways that mostly brought shame but sometimes a morsel of pride.

  He, and no other.

  He had made his choices, but if he took that same freedom away from Hayat, he would become far worse.

  The light began to fade, as if the blue-white flame at its heart were burning itself out. He was near the limit of his strength. In his spasm of indecision, he had delayed almost too long.

  Gareth gathered his waning energies and set about repairing the most critical damage to Hayat’s chest. First, he sealed off torn vessels so that no more blood pooled in the pleural cavity. The strands of light carrying Hayat’s vital energies brightened, but as Gareth poured forth his psychic energy, gray lapped at the edges of his senses.