“You are Lewis-Kennard Lanart—”
Quickly, I was troubled, knowing something was wrong, braced for more tragedy. “My father—what is wrong with my father?”
“He is not in danger now,” the masseur said, fidgeting with the towel in his hands, “but the heat of the steam room was too much for him, and he collapsed. I sent for a medic,” he added defensively. “They wanted to take him to the Terran hospital, but he would not go. He said all he wanted was a few minutes of rest, and for you to come and take him home.”
They had sent for a valet to help him dress, and he was sipping a glass of strong brandy. He looked very pale, thinner than I had noticed. Pain and compunction struck me. I said, “Let me take you home, Father,” and sent for one of the little skycabs which lifted us directly to the roof-platform of our own building.
I had not felt his distress, nor his collapse; I had been watching the stupid dancers!
“It’s all right, Lew,” he said gently. “You’re not my keeper.” And somehow that made me feel raw-edged too, troubled. For once, instead of staying on his feet, he was willing to lie down on a piece of furniture, a soft flotation couch in the apartment, though he would not go to bed.
“Father, you’re not planning, surely, to travel to Darkover in five days? You’ll never be able to endure the trip! And the climate of Thendara—”
“I was born there,” he said tightly. “I can endure it. And I have no choice, unless you choose to go and save me the trouble.”
I said, anger and pity fighting in me, “That’s not fair! You can’t ask it—!”
“I do ask it,” he said. “You’re strong enough, now, to do it. I didn’t ask it of you before you were ready. But now there is no reason you should not—”
I considered it. Or tried to. But everything in me flinched away. Return; walk back on my own two feet into that corner of hell where I had found death and mutilation, rebellion, love and treachery. . . .
No. No. Avarra’s mercy, no. . . .
He sighed, heavily. “You’ll have to face it some day, Lew. And I don’t want to face the Council alone. I can count on only one ally there—”
“Dyan,” I said, “and he’ll do more for you if I’m not there. He hates my guts, Father.”
My father shook his head. “I think you’re mistaken. He promised—” and then he sighed. “Still, be that as it may, you’ll have to go back some day. . . .”
You cannot live like this, Lew. On Darkover there are some experts in matrix technology who might be able to find a way to free you from Sharra. . . .
“They tried,” I said. “You told me they tried before you brought me offworld, and they couldn’t; which is why we had to bring the matrix offworld, you couldn’t separate me from it without killing me—”
“You were weaker then. That was years ago. You could survive it, now.”
A thousand regrets, terrors, agonies flooded me; if it had not been for my ill-fated attempt to monitor her, perhaps Dio would not have gone into premature labor . . .
And that monstrous horror might have lived, breathed . . .
But Dio might have understood. Might not have—loathed me. Might not have shrunk in horror from the monster I had fathered, the monster I had become. . . .
Free of Sharra, might the damage somehow have been reversed? The link with that giant matrix which had somehow damaged my very cells . . . if I had had the courage to endure it, being freed of Sharra, perhaps the horror would not have reached out and touched our child . . . at least I could have been monitored, to know enough, beforehand, avoid fathering a child . . . could have warned Dio, so she need not have suffered that loss. . . .
“I don’t think it would have made any difference. The damage was done before ever I met Dio.” I knew he shared the image in my mind, of that monstrous failure with my hand . . . but we would never be sure.
“Some day. Some day. Maybe.”
He started to speak; then shut his mouth, and although I could hear the words he did not speak, clearly in his mind . . . I need you, Lew, I cannot go alone . . . I was grateful that he did not use that last weapon, his weakness, to persuade me. I felt guilty that I did not offer it, unasked. But I could not, I could not. . . .
He shut his eyes. “I would like to rest.” I went out and left him alone.
I paced the apartment, debating whether or not I should go down into the multiformed world of the pleasure planet below me, get myself blind drunk; too drunk to know or care what horrors pulled at my mind, what guilt and self-blame. My father needed me; he had done, unsparing, whatever I needed when I was sick and helpless, and now
I would not, could not force myself to give to him as generously as he had given to me. But I would not leave him alone. I could not do what he wished of me; but I would do what I could.
I do not know how long it was before I heard his voice, that cry of terrible pain, ringing and echoing in my mind and crashing through the rooms. I know, now, that there was no cry, it had been so swift that he could never have uttered a sound, but it was a scream of agony. Even as I ran toward his room, stumbling in haste, his voice crashed through my mind as it had done in that first rapport where he had shocked my laran awake when I was eleven years old; pain like death and the harsh command, inflexible, that
I could not shut out.
LEW! YOU MUST GO, I CANNOT—YOU MUST GO BACK TO DARKOVER, FIGHT FOR YOUR BROTHER ’S RIGHTS AND FOR THE HONOR OF ALTON AND THE DOMAIN—YOU MUST GO BACK AND FREE YOURSELF FROM SHARRA—LEW, I COMMAND YOU. IT IS MY DYING WISH, THE LAST WISH—
And then a flood of love and tenderness and a moment of pure joy.
“Elaine,” he cried out in my mind. Yllana. Beloved.
Then I broke into his room, and he lay there, quite dead. But on his face was a tender smile of happiness.
BOOK TWO
The Form of Fire
CHAPTER ONE
Darkover: The end of exile
There was someone at the door. Regis Hastur struggled up through confused dreams and found himself in his own rooms in Comyn Castle, his body-servant arguing in dogged whispers with someone who stood at the door, insisting. Regis threw a furred bedgown about his shoulders and went to see what it was.
“Via dom, this—this person is insisting on seeing you, even at this godforgotten hour. . . .”
“Well, I’m awake now anyhow,” he said, blinking. For a moment he did not recognize the sturdy, dark-eyed youngster who stood there, and the youngster’s wry smile told Regis that he knew it.
“We haven’t met many times and I don’t think we’ve ever been formally introduced,” he said. “Not since I was eight or nine years old, anyhow. My name is Marius, and I won’t argue about the rest of it when I’m here to ask a favor of you.”
Now Regis recognized Kennard’s younger son. He had seen him, briefly, somewhere in Thendara, about three years ago; perhaps in the company of Lerrys Ridenow? He said, “Of course I remember you, kinsman.” And when he had spoken that word, kinsman, a formal recognition as to an equal, he thought, tardily, how vexed his grandfather would have been. The Council, after all, had gone to considerable lengths to avoid extending that formal recognition to Kennard’s younger son.
Yet they had placed Regis himself in Kennard’s hands for fostering between the ages of nine and twelve. Regis and Lew had been bredin, sworn brothers. How could he now refuse that recognition to Kennard’s son and Lew’s brother, who, by all standards of honor and decency, was Regis’s foster-brother too. But he had neglected that obligation. Even now, his body-servant was staring at Marius as if the youngster were something with a hundred legs which the man had found in his porridge-bowl.
Regis said, “Come in, Marius; what can I do for you?”
“It’s not me,” Marius said, “but for my friend. I have been living, this season, in my father’s town house in Thendara. I haven’t been made to feel exactly welcome in Comyn Castle.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, Marius. What can I say? I do
n’t make Council decisions, but that doesn’t mean I agree with them, either. Come in, won’t you? Don’t stand here in the hallway. A drink? Erril, take his cloak.”
Marius shook his head. “There’s no time for that, I’m afraid. My friend—you know him; he told me, once, you were prisoners together at Aldaran, and you know something of—” Marius fidgeted, lowered his voice as if he spoke a gutter obscenity—“of Sharra.”
Now Regis remembered his dream, the monstrous fire-form flaring and ravaging in his nightmare, ships bursting in flame. . . . “I remember,” he said, “all too well. Your friend—Rafe Scott, isn’t it?” He remembered, too, that he had seen them together in Thendara. Yes; in the company of Lerrys Ridenow, who liked the society of Terrans. “What’s happened, Marius?”
And yet his mind was running quick counterpoint, this can’t happen, all these years I have not even dreamed of Sharra, and now . . . this is more than coincidence.
“He was my guest,” Marius said, “and the servants heard him crying out and came and wakened me; but when I went to him he didn’t know me, just kept crying out, raving about Sharra. . . . I couldn’t make him hear me. Could you—could you come?”
“What you want is a healer,” Regis said. “I don’t have any skill at that kind of thing . . .” and he found himself wondering if Danilo, who had been prisoner with him during those weeks at Aldaran, who also had been touched by the fire-form, had wakened in terrifying nightmares of Sharra. And what did it mean?
“Lord Regis,” said the body-servant in outrage, “you’re not thinking of going out with this—at this hour of night, at the beck and call of just anybody?”
Regis had been thinking of refusal. What Marius needed was a healer or a licensed matrix technician. Regis had spent a season in a Tower, learning to manage to own laran so that it would not make him ill or drive him mad, but he had none of the advanced skills for matrix healing of mind or body, and what he knew of Sharra was very little. Only that for all that time his own matrix had been overshadowed, so that he could not touch it without seeing that ravaging form of fire. . . . but the servant’s words made him angry again.
“I don’t know if I can help you very much, Marius, and I don’t know the Scott youngster at all. I haven’t seen him since then, not to speak to. But I’ll come as a friend,” he said, disregarding his servant’s look of outrage. “Get me my clothes, Erril, and my boots. If you’ll excuse me while I get dressed—”
Hurrying into his clothes, he thought that he was perhaps the only telepath still in the Domains who had had even that much indirect experience with Sharra. What little he knew of it did not tempt him to learn more.
But what can this mean? The matrix is not even on Darkover! It went with Lew and Kennard into exile . . .
He splashed his face with icy water, hoping to clear his confusion. And then he realized what could have happened . . .
I am responsible for this. I sent the message, and my grandfather will be very angry when he finds out that it was I. And already I am suffering the consequences of my actions.
It flashed through his mind, relived in an instant as it had happened. It had been a score of tendays ago; and he had, as Heir to Hastur, been privy to a decision made by the cortes, the ruling body of Thendara. He was in honor bound not to discuss their decisions with any outsider; but what to do when honor conflicts with honor? And in the end he had gone to the one man on Darkover who might have a stake in reversing this decision.
Dyan Ardais had heard him out, a faint smile playing ironically over his lips, as if he could sense how Regis hated this . . . the necessity that he, Regis, should come as a suppliant, begging favors of Dyan. Regis had concluded, angrily, “Do you want to see them do this to Kennard?”
Dyan had frowned, then, and made him go all over it again. “What exactly are they intending to do?”
“At the first session of Council, this year, they are going to declare Kennard’s estates forfeit because he has abandoned Darkover; and they are going to give Armida into the hands of Gabriel Lanart-Hastur! Just because he commands the Guards and because he’s married to my sister!”
“I don’t see what choice they have.”
“Kennard must come home,” Regis said angrily. “They shouldn’t do this behind his back! He should have a chance to protest this! And Kennard has another son!”
After a long silence, Dyan had said, “I’ll make certain that Kennard knows, at least. Then, if he chooses not to return and press his claim—well, I suppose the law must take its course. Leave it to me, Regis. You’ve done all you can.”
And now, weeks later, hurrying to join Marius, Regis wondered about that. Even if Kennard had returned, he would not be fool enough to bring the Sharra matrix back to Darkover, would he?
Perhaps, he thought, perhaps it is only nightmare . . . perhaps it is not the frightening coincidence I think. Perhaps Rafe’s nightmare reached out to the one person in Thendara who had been touched by Sharra and so I, too, dreamed. . . .
He slung his cloak about his shoulders and said to Marius, “Let’s go. Erril, call my bodyguard.” He didn’t want the man; but he also knew, even at this hour, he could not walk the streets of Thendara wholly unattended; and even if he could, he had been forced to promise his grandfather that he would not.
I am past twenty and a grown man. Yet as my grandfather’s Heir, the Heir to Hastur, I am forced to do his will. . . . He waited for the man in Guardsman’s uniform to come, and went down through the hallways of Comyn Castle and down into the empty streets of Thendara, Marius moving quietly at his side.
It had been many years since Regis had entered Kennard Alton’s Thendara town house. It stood at the edge of a wide cobbled square, and tonight it was all dark except for a single light at the back. Marius led him to a side door; Regis said to the Guardsman, “Wait here.” The man argued a little in an undertone—the Vai Dom should be careful, it might be a trap—but Regis said wrathfully that such a statement was an offense to his kinsman, and the Guardsman, who had, after all, known Kennard as his Commander, and probably Lew too as cadet and officer, growled and subsided.
But after he had left them Regis thought he would have been glad of the man’s company after all. He tended to trust Marius, but Rafe Scott was a Terran, and they were noted for their indifference to codes of honor. And Rafe was also blood kin somehow, to that arch-traitor Kadarin, who had been Lew’s sworn friend, but had betrayed him, beaten and tortured him, drugged him and forced him, unwilling, to serve Sharra. . . .
From inside the darkened house rose a cry, a scream, a howl of terror, as if no human throat could quite compass that cry. For a moment, behind Regis’s eyes he felt the blaze of fire—the primal terror of the fire-form, raging, ravening. . . . then he shut it out, knowing it was the terror in the other’s mind that he picked up and read. He managed to barrier his mind, and turned to Marius, white with dread, at his side. He wondered if the younger man had enough laran to pick up the image, or whether it was Rafe’s distress that troubled him.
Kennard had proved to the Council that Lew had the Alton gift and they had accepted him. They had not accepted Marius; did that mean that Kennard’s younger son was wholly without laran?
“Remember, Marius, I don’t know if I can do anything at all for him. But I ought to see him.”
Marius nodded, and led the way into an inner room. A frightened servant stood shaking by the door, afraid to go in. “There hasn’t been any change, dom Marius. Andres is with him.”
Regis just flicked the barest glance of recognition at the burly, graying man in Darkovan clothing—though Regis knew he was a Terran—who had been chief coridom, or steward, at Armida when Regis was there as a child. Rafe Scott was sitting bolt upright, staring at nothing Regis could see, and as Regis came into the room, again there was that infernal, animal howl of terror and dread. Even through his strong barriers, Regis could sense the blaze of heat, fire, torment . . . a woman, locks of fiery hair blazing, tossing. . . .
“I wish Lerrys was in the city,” Marius said. “The Ridenow are trained to deal with alien intelligences—presences that aren’t on this dimension at all.”
Regis looked at the terrified face of the young man before him. He had seen Rafe only once, and that briefly; he remembered him best as a child, a boy of thirteen, at Aldaran. He had thought, then, that the boy was young to be admitted into one of the matrix circles. He must be nineteen or twenty now—
Not a boy, then. A young man. But, living among Terrans, he has not had the training which would teach him to cope with such things.
. . . but Lew was trained at Arilinn, and the best they could do could not keep him unburned by the fires of Sharra. . . .
It would do no good to send for an ordinary matrix technician. They could do many things—unfasten locks without a key, trace lost objects through clairvoyance matrix-amplified, set truthspell for business dealings where ordinary trust would not serve, diagnose obscure complaints, even perform simple surgery without knife or blood. But Sharra would be beyond their knowledge or their competence. For better or for worse, Regis, who knew little, knew as much of Sharra as anyone.
He felt the most terrible revulsion against touching that horror; but he reached out, steadying his mind by gripping the matrix around his neck, and tried to make a light contact with Rafe’s mind. At the strange touch, Rafe convulsed all over, as if in the grip of horror again, and cried out, “No! No, Thyra! Sister, don’t—”
For just a fraction of a second Regis saw and recognized the picture in Rafe’s mind, a woman, not the flame-haired horror that was Sharra, but a woman, red-haired, red-lipped, with eyes of a curious golden color. . . .
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