“It was Sharra,” Javanne said in a whisper. “But what did you do?”
And Regis could only mumble, shocked, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
CHAPTER FOUR
(Lew Alton’s narrative)
I’ve never been sure how I got out of the Crystal Chamber. I have the impression that Jeff half-carried me, when the Council broke up in discord, but the next thing I remember clearly, I was in the open air, and Marius was with me, and Jeff. I pulled myself upright.
“Where are we going?”
“Home,” said Marius, “The Alton town-house; I didn’t think you’d care for the Alton apartments, and I’ve never been there—not since Father left. I’ve been living here with Andres and a housekeeper or two.”
I couldn’t remember that I’d been to the town house since I was a very young child. It was growing dark; thin cold rain stung my face, clearing my mind, but fragments of isolated thought jangled and clamored from the passersby, and the old insistent beat:
. . . last command. . . . return, fight for your brother’s rights . . . Would I never be free of that? Impatiently I struggled to get control as we came across the open square; but I seemed to see it, not as it was, dark and quiet, with a single light somewhere at the back, a servant’s night-light; but I saw it through someone else’s eyes, alive with light and warmth spilling down from open doors and brilliant windows, companionship and love and past happiness . . . I realized from Jeff’s arm around my shoulders that he was seeing it as it had been, and moved away. I remembered that he had been married, and that his wife had died long since. He, too, had lost a loved one. . . .
But Marius was up the steps, calling out in excitement as if he were younger than I remembered him.
“Andres! Andres!” and a moment later the old coridom from Armida, friend, tutor, foster-father, was staring at me in astonishment and welcome.
“Young Lew! I—” he stopped, in shock and sorrow, as he saw my scarred face, the missing hand. He swallowed, then said gruffly, “I’m glad you’re here.” He came and took my cloak, managing to give my shoulder an awkward pat of affection and grief. I suppose Marius had sent word about father; mercifully, he asked no questions, just said “I’ve told the housekeeper to get a room ready for you. You too, sir?” he asked Jeff, who shook his head.
“Thank you, but I am expected elsewhere—I am here as Lord Ardais’s guest, and I don’t think Lew is in any shape for any long family conferences tonight.” He turned to me and said, “Do you mind?” and held his hand lightly over my forehead in the monitor’s touch, the fingers at least three inches away, running his hand down over my head, all along my body. The touch was so familiar, so reminiscent of the years at Arilinn—the only place I could remember where I had been wholly happy, wholly at peace—that I felt my eyes fill with tears.
That was all I wanted—to go back to Arilinn. And it was forever too late for that. With the hells in my brain that would not bear looking into, with the matrix tainted by Sharra . . . no, they would not have me in a Tower now.
Jeff’s hand was solid under my arm; he shoved me down in a seat. Through the remnant of the drugs which had destroyed my control, I felt his solicitude, Andres’s shock at my condition, and turned to face them, clenching my hand, aware of phantom pain as by reflex I tried to clench the missing hand too; wanting to scream out at them in rage, and realizing that they were all troubled for me, worrying about me, sharing my pain and distress.
“Keep still, let me finish monitoring you.” When he finished Jeff said, “Nothing wrong, physically, except fatigue and drug hangover from that damned stuff the Terrans gave him. I don’t suppose you have any of the standard antidotes, Andres?” At the old man’s headshake he said dryly, “No, I don’t suppose they’re the sort of thing that one can buy in an apothecary shop or an herb-seller’s stall. But you need sleep, Lew. I don’t suppose there’s any raivannin in the house—”
Raivannin is one of the drugs developed for work among Tower circles, linked in the mind of a telepathic circle. . . . There are others: Kirian, which lowers the resistance to telepathic contact, is perhaps the most common. Raivannin has an action almost the opposite of that of kirian. It tends to shut down the telepathic functions. They’d given it to me, in Arilinn, to quiet, a little, the torture and horror which I was broadcasting after Marjorie’s death . . . quiet it enough so that the rest of the Tower circle need not share every moment of agony. Usually it was given to someone at the point of death or dissolution, or to the insane, so that they would not draw everyone else into their inner torment. . . .
“No,” Jeff said compassionately. “That’s not what I mean. I think it would help you get a night’s sleep, that’s all. I wonder—There are licensed matrix mechanics in the City, and they know who I am; First in Arilinn. I will have no trouble buying it.”
“Tell me where to go,” said a young man, coming swiftly into the room, “and I will get it; I am known to many of them. They know I have laran. Lew—” he came around and stood directly before me. “Do you remember me?”
I focused my eyes with difficulty, saw golden-amber eyes, strange eyes . . . Marjorie’s eyes! Rafe Scott flinched at the agony of that memory, but he came up and embraced me. He said, “I’ll find some raivannin for you. I think you need it.”
“What are you doing in the city, Rafe?” He had been a child when I had drawn him, with Marjorie, into the circle of Sharra. Like myself, he bore the ineradicable taint, fire and damnation. . . . no! I slammed my mind shut, with an effort that turned me white as death.
“Don’t you remember? My father was a Terran, Captain Zeb Scott. One of Aldaran’s tame Terrans.” He said it wryly, with a cynical lift of his lip, too cynical for anyone so young. He was Marius’s own age. I was beyond curiosity now; though I had heard Regis describing what he had seen, and knew that he was Marius’s friend. He didn’t stay, but went out into the rainy night, shrugging a Darkovan cloak over his head.
Jeff sat on one side of me; Marius on the other. We didn’t talk much; I was in no shape for it. It took all my energy for me to keep from curling up under the impact of all this.
“You never did tell me, Jeff, how you came to be in the city.”
“Dyan came to bring me,” he said. “I don’t want the Domain and I told him so; but he said that having an extra claimant would confuse the issue, and stall them until Kennard could return. I don’t think he was expecting you.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t,” Marius said.
“That’s all right, brother, I can live without Dyan’s affection,” I said. “He’s never liked me . . . ” but still I was confused by that moment of rapport, when for a moment I had seen him through my father’s eyes . . .
. . . dear, cherished, beloved, sworn brother . . . even, once or twice, in the manner of lads, lovers . . . I slammed the thought away. In a sense the rejection was a kind of envy. Solitary in the Comyn, I had had few bredin, fewer to offer such affection even in crisis. Could it be that I envied my father that? His voice, his presence, were a clamor in my mind. . . .
I should tell Jeff what had happened. Since Kennard had awakened the latent Alton gift, the gift of forced rapport, by violence when I was hardly out of childhood, he had been there, his thoughts overpowering my own, choking me, leaving me all too little in the way of free will, till I had broken free, and in the disaster of the Sharra rebellion, I had learned to fear that freedom. And then, dying, his incredible strength closing over my mind in a blast I could not resist or barricade . . .
Ghost-ridden; half of my brain burnt into a dead man’s memories . . .
Was I never to be anything but a cripple, mutilated mind and body? For very shame I could not beg Jeff for more help than he had given me already . . .
He said neutrally, “If you need help, Lew, I’m here,” but I shook my head.
“I’m all right; need sleep, that’s all. Who is Keeper at Arilinn now?”
“Miranie from Dalereuth; I don’t know who her fam
ily was—she never talks about them. Janna Lindir, who was Keeper when you were at Arilinn, married Bard Storn-Leynier, and they have two sons; but Janna put them out to foster, and came back as Chief Monitor at Neskaya. We need strong telepaths, Lew; I wish you could come back, but I suppose they’ll need you on the Council—”
Again I saw him flinch, slightly, at my reaction to that. I knew the state I was in, as well as he did; every transient emotion was broadcasting at full strength. Andres, Terran and without any visible laran, still noticed Marius’s distress; he had, after all, lived with a telepath family since before I was born. He said stolidly, “I can find a damper and put it on, if you wish.”
“That won’t be—” I started to say, but Jeff said firmly, “Good. Do that.” And before long the familiar unrhythmic pulses began to move through my mind, disrupting it. It blanked it out for the others—at least the specific content—but for me it substituted nausea for the sharper pain. I listened with half an ear to Marius telling Andres what had happened at the Council. Andres, as I had foreseen, understood at once what the important thing was.
“At least they recognized you; your right to inherit was challenged, but for once the old tyrant had to admit you existed,” snorted Andres. “It’s a beginning, lad.”
“Do you think I give a damn—” Marius demanded. “All my life I haven’t been good enough for them to spit on, and suddenly—”
“It’s what your father fought for all his life,” Andres said, and Jeff said quietly, “Ken would have been proud of you, Marius.”
“I’ll bet,” said the boy scornfully. “So proud he couldn’t come back even once—”
I bent my head. It was my fault, too, that Marius had had no father, no kinsman, no friend, but was left alone and neglected by the proud Comyn. I was relieved when Rafe came back, saying he had found a licensed technician in the street of the Four Shadows, and he had sold him a few ounces of raivannin. Jeff mixed it, and said, “How much—”
“As little as possible,” I said. I had had some experience with the chemical damping-drugs, and I didn’t want to be helpless, or unable to wake if I got into one of those terrible spiraling nightmares where I was trapped again in horrors beyond horrors, where demons of fire flamed and raged between worlds. . . .
“Just enough so you won’t have to sleep under the dampers,” he said. To my cramping shame, I had to let him hold it to my lips, but when I had swallowed it, wincing at its biting astringency, I felt the disruptions of the telepathic damper gradually subsiding, mellowing, and slowly, gradually, it was all gone.
It felt strange to be wholly without telepathic sensitivity; strange and disquieting, like trying to hear under water or with clogged ears; painful as the awareness had been, now I felt dulled, blinded. But the pain was gone, and the clamor of my father’s voice; for the first time in days, it seemed, I was free of it. It was there under the thick blankets of the drug, but I need not listen. I drew a long, luxurious breath of calm.
“You should sleep. Your room’s ready,” Andres said. “I’ll get you upstairs, lad—and don’t bother fussing about it; I carried you up these stairs before you were breeched, and I can do it again if I have to.”
I actually felt as if I could sleep, now. With another long sigh, I stood up, catching for balance.
Andres said, “They couldn’t do anything about the hand, then?”
“Nothing. Too far gone.” I could say it calmly now; I had, after all, before that ghastly debacle when Dio’s child was born and died, learned to live with the fact. “I have a mechanical hand but I don’t wear it much, unless I’m doing really heavy work, or sometimes for riding. It won’t take much strain, and gets in my way. I can manage better, really, without it.”
“You’ll have your father’s room,” Andres said, not taking too much notice. “Let me give you a hand with the stairs.”
“Thanks. I really don’t need it.” I was deathly tired, but my head was clear. We went into the hallway, but as we began to mount the stairs, the entry bell pealed and I heard one of the servants briefly disputing; then someone pushed past him, and I saw the tall, red-haired form of Lerrys Ridenow.
“Sorry to disturb you here; I looked for you in the Alton suite in Comyn Castle,” he said. “I have to talk to you, Lew. I know it’s late, but it’s important.”
Tiredly, I turned to face him. Jeff said, “Dom Lerrys, Lord Armida is ill.” It took me a moment to realize he was talking about me.
“This won’t take long.” Lerrys was wearing Darkovan clothing now, elegant and fashionable, the colors of his Domain. In the automatic gesture of a trained telepath in the presence of someone he distrusts, I reached for contact; remembered: I was drugged with raivannin, at the mercy of whatever he chose to tell me. It must be like this for the head-blind. Lerrys said, “I didn’t know you were coming back here. You must know you’re not popular.”
“I can live without that,” I said.
“We haven’t been friends, Lew,” he said. “I suppose this won’t sound too genuine; but I’m sorry about your father. He was a good man, and one of the few in the Comyn with enough common sense to be able to see the Terrans without giving them horns and tails. He had lived among the Terrans long enough to know where we would eventually be going.” He sighed, and I said, “You didn’t come out on a rainy night to give me condolences about my father’s death.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I didn’t. I wish you’d had the sense to stay away. Then I wouldn’t have to say this. But here you are, and here I am, and I do have to say it. Stay away from Dio or I’ll break your neck.”
“Did she send you to say that to me?”
“I’m saying it,” Lerrys said. “This isn’t Vainwal. We’re in the Domains now, and—” He broke off. I wished with all my heart that I could read what was behind those transparent green eyes. He looked like Dio, damn him, and the pain was fresh in me again, that the love between us had not been strong enough to carry us through tragedy. “Our marriage ceremony was a Terran one. It has no force in the Domains. No one there would recognize it.” I stopped and swallowed. I had to, before I could say, “If she wanted to come back to me, I’d—I’d welcome it. But I’m not going to force it on her, Lerrys, don’t worry about that. Am I a Dry-towner, to chain her to me?”
“But a time’s coming when we’ll all be Terrans,” Lerrys said, “and I don’t want her tied to you then.”
It was like struggling under water; I could not reach his mind, his thoughts were blank to me. Zandru’s hells, was this what it was like to be without laran, blind, deaf, mutilated, with nothing left but ordinary sight and hearing? “Is this what Dio wants? Why doesn’t she tell me so herself, then?”
Now there was blind rage exploding in Lerrys’s face; it needed no laran to see that. His face tightened, his fists clenched; for a moment I braced myself, thinking he would strike me, wondering how I could manage, with one hand, to defend myself if he did.
“Damn you, can’t you see that’s what I want to spare her?” he demanded, his voice rising to hysteria. “Haven’t you put her through enough? How much do you think she can stand, you—you—you damned—” His voice failed him. After a time he got control of it again.
“I don’t want her to have to see you again, damn you. I don’t want her left with any memory of what she had to go through!” he said, raging. “Go to the Terran HQ and dissolve your marriage there—and if you don’t, I swear to you, Lew, I’ll call challenge on you and feed your other hand to the kyorebni!”
Through the drugs I was too dulled to feel sorrow. I said heavily, “All right, Lerrys. If that’s what Dio wants, I won’t bother her again.”
He turned and slammed out of the house; Marius stood staring after him. He said, “What, in the name of all the Gods, was that all about?”
I couldn’t talk about it. I said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” and, blindly, struggled up the stairs to my father’s room. Andres came, but I paid no attention to him; I flung mysel
f down on my father’s bed and slept like the dead.
But I dreamed of Dio, crying and calling my name as they took her away from me in the hospital.
When I woke my head was clear; and I seemed, again, to be in possession of it alone. It had assumed the character of any family reunion; Marius came and sat on my bed and talked to me as if he were the young boy I’d known, and I gave him the gifts I’d remembered to bring from Vainwal, Terran lensed goods: binoculars, a camera.
He thanked me, but I suspected he thought them gifts for a child; he referred to them once as “toys.” I wondered what would have been a proper gift for a man? Contraband blasters, perhaps, in defiance of the Compact? After all, Marius had had a Terran education. Was he one of those who considered the Compact a foolish anachronism, the childish ethic of a world stuck in barbarism? I suspected, too, that he felt little grief for our father. I didn’t blame him; father had abandoned Marius a long time ago.
I told them I had business at the Terran HQ, without telling them much about it.
“You’ve got seven days, after all,” Jeff pointed out to me after breakfast. “They deferred the formal transfer of the Domain until ritual mourning for Kennard was completed. And now it’s only a formality—they accepted you as his Heir when you were fifteen.
There was the question as to whether they would accept Marius.
“Stupid bigots,” Andres grumbled, “to decide a man’s worth on the color of his eyes!”
Or the color of his hair; I could feel Jeff thinking that, remembering a time when, in Arilinn, most Comyn had had hair of the true Comyn red. I said, only half facetiously, “Maybe I should dye mine—and Marius’s—so we’ll look more like Comyn.”
“I couldn’t change my eyes,” Marius said dryly, and I thought, with a pang, of the changeable sea-colors in Dio’s eyes. But Dio hated me now, and that was all past; and who could blame her?
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