Heritage and Exile

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  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 gain 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, re-stimulated, 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 . . .

  I felt Regis, through this, as if he were somehow reaching into my very brain, though I knew it was only my matrix he was touching, disentangling it thread by thread . . . but the more he worked on it, the stronger grew the redoubled call, the pulse of Sharra beating in my brain, till I stood burning in agony. . . .

  The door was flung open and Dio was in the room, rushing to me, physically flinging Callina aside. “What do you think you are doing to him?” she raged.

  The flames diminished and died; Regis caught at some piece of furniture, staggering, hardly able to stand erect.

  “How much do you think he can stand? Hasn’t he been through enough?”

  I collapsed gratefully into a chair. I said, “They were only—”

  “Only stirring up what’s better left alone,” Dio stormed. “I could feel it all the way up to the eighth floor above here . . . I could feel them cutting at you . . .” and she ran her hands over me as if she had expected to see me physically covered in blood.

  “It’s all right, Dio,” I said, knowing my voice was hardly more than an exhausted mumble. “I was trained to—to endure it—”

  “What makes you think you’re able to endure it now?” she demanded angrily, and Regis said, in despair, “If Kadarin draws the Sharra sword . . .”

  “If he does,” Dio said, “he will have to fight; but can’t you let him get together enough strength to fight i
t?”

  I did not know. Rafe had never been farther than the outer layer of the circle we had formed around Sharra; I had been at its very heart, controlling the force and flow of the power of Sharra. I was doomed, and I knew it. I knew what Callina and Regis had been trying to do, and I was grateful, but for me it was too late.

  My eyes rested on Callina, and I saw everything around me with a new clarity. She was everything of the past to me; Arilinn, and my own past; Marjorie had died in her arms, and then I had found in her the first forgetfulness I had known. Kinswoman, Keeper, all the past . . . and I ached with regret that I would not live to take her with me to Armida, to reclaim my own past and my own world. But it was not to be. A darker love would claim me, the wildfire of Sharra surging in my veins, the dark bond to Thyra who had made herself Keeper of that monstrous circle of Sharra, fire and lust and endless burning torture and flame . . . Callina might call me to her, but it was too late, now and forever too late. Dio spoke to me, but I had gone back to a time before she had come into my life, and I hardly remembered her name.

  What were we doing here within these white walls? Someone came into the room. I did not recognize the man although from the way he spoke to me I knew that he was someone I was supposed to know. One of the accursed Terrans, those who would die in the flames of Sharra when the time was ripe. His words were mere sounds without sense and I did not understand them.

  “That woman Thyra! We had her in one of our strongest cells, and she’s gone—just like that, she’s gone out of a maxmimum security cell! Did you witch her out of there somehow?”

  Fool, to think any cell could hold the priestess and Keeper of Sharra the Fire-born. . . .

  Space reeled around me; there was a slamming thunder-clap and I stood braced on the cobblestone of the forecourt of the Comyn Castle, my feet spanning the enlaced symbols there . . . and I knew Kadarin had unsheathed the Sword. Kadarin stood there, his pale hair moving in an invisible wind, his hands on Thyra’s shoulders, his metallic eyes cold with menace, and Thyra . . .

  Thyra! Flames rose upward from her copper hair, sparks trembled at the tips of her fingers. In her hands she held naked the Sharra Sword, cold flames racing from hilt to tip. Thyra! My mistress, my love—what was I doing here, far from her? She raised one hand and beckoned, and I began nervelessly to move forward, without being conscious of the motion. She was smiling as I knelt at her feet on the stone, feeling all my strength going out to her, and to that fire that flowed and flamed in her hands . . .

  Then the flame flared blue and wild to the heights of the castle, and I knew Regis had unsheathed the Sword of Aldones. They were there, there physically, standing across from me, Regis and Callina, and she reached for me, enfolding me in the cold blue of Ashara’s icy limbo, and then we were not in the Castle courtyard at all, but in the gray spaces of the overworld . . . far below I could see our bodies like tiny toys from a great height, but the only reality in the world was those two swords, crimson with flame and cold ice-blue, crossed and straining at one another, and I. . . .

  I was a puppet, a mote of power in the astral world, something stretched to breaking between them . . . Callina’s voice, reminding me of Arilinn and all of my past, Thyra’s crooning call, enticing, seductive, with memories of lust and fire and power . . . I was torn, torn between them as I felt myself a link between the two circles, Regis and Callina with the Sword of Aldones, Thyra and Kadarin, each pulling at me fiercely to make a third, to lend my power. . . .

  And then there was another strength in the linked circles . . . something cold and arrogant and brutal, the harsh touch as of my father’s own strength, the Alton Gift which had opened my own to power, but this was not my father’s touch. . . . Dyan! And he had always disliked me . . . and I was at his mercy . . .

  I did not mind dying, but not like this. . . . Again in my mind was the final cry of my father’s voice, and we were so deeply enlaced that I could see Dyan look past me at Regis with infinite warmth and regret that in the end they should have been on opposite sides. I wanted to stand at your side when you were King over all of Darkover, my gallant Hastur cousin . . . and then, through me, I could feel Dyan’s touch on the memory of my father’s destroying call, the last thought in his dying mind . . .

  And Dyan, in a moment of anguish and grief:

  Kennard! My first, my only friend . . . my cousin, my kinsman, bredu . . . and there is no other, now, living, who bears your blood, and if I strike now I shall have killed you past death or any immortality . . . and then a final, careless thought, almost laughter, this son of yours was never fit for this kind of power . . .

  And abruptly I was free, free of Sharra, thrust entirely away, and in that moment of freedom I was locked into the closing rapport of Regis and Callina, the sealed circle of power . . .

  The fire-form reared high, higher, the size of the castle, the size of the mountain, with a scorching darkness at its heart . . . but from Regis, risen now to giant-size, blazing cold lightning struck at the heart of Sharra as he held the Sword of Aldones, poised to strike . . .

  Sharra was bound in chains by the Son of Hastur who was the Son of Light . . .

  And clothed in his cloak of living light Aldones came!

  Now there was nothing to see, no human form, only fire lapping higher and higher, the spark of the Sharra matrix blazing out from the center of that darkness, and the core of brilliance through the veils clothing the figure of the God, like Regis in form, but Regis looming high, higher, not one of the Hastur-kin but the God himself . . .

  Two identical matrixes cannot exist in one time and space; and once before, so the legend said, Sharra had been chained by the Son of Aldones, who was the Son of Light. . . .

  I cannot explain the legend, even now, although I saw it. I had felt the daemon-touch of Sharra. Infinite good is as terrifying, in its own way, as infinite evil. It was not Regis and Kadarin fighting with identically forged swords, one a copy of the other. It was not even matrix battling against space-twisting matrix, though that was nearer the truth. Something tangible and very real fought behind each sword, something that was not on this plane of reality at all, and could manifest itself and maintain a foothold in this dimension only through the swords. Lightnings streamed between them, wrapped in the rainbow aura that was Regis and Hastur, coiling into the licking flames at the heart of which Thyra glowed like a burning coal.

  And then for an instant I felt that last bright arrogance reach out, Dyan shining across the space, his hawk-face keen and curious. For an instant then I think the linkage broke and the swords were only swords, and for a split second we stood in the courtyard of the Castle again and the cobbles were unsteady under my feet. And in that moment I know that he could have reached out and killed either of us. . . .

  And for a moment Thyra stood before me, only a woman again, although the Form of Fire still licked around her, and the smell of burning beat on the air, and her throat was naked to my knife . . .

  I had sworn their death in vengeance for my hand. But in that moment I could remember only that there had been a time when she stood before me, only a frightened girl, terrified by her own growing powers. If the Gods themselves had put a dagger into my hand at that moment I could not have struck her down, and for a moment it seemed as if a great question vibrated in the overworld, and in this world and through all the universes of my mind;

  Will you have the Love of Power or the Power of Love?

  And everything in me surged toward Kadarin, whom I had once loved as a brother, and to the young and beautiful Thyra whom I, as much as Kadarin, had destroyed. I have never been able to explain this, but I knew in that one searing moment of testing that I would die in Sharra’s fire myself rather than hurt either of them any further than they had already been hurt. Everything in me cried out an enormous and final No!

  And then we were battling again in the gray limbo of the overworld, and the two swords crossed and blazed like interlaced lightnings . . .

  Then the flames
sank and died, and a great darkness blazed at the heart of the Sharra matrix. I saw a blaze of endless fire, and the searing flame strike inward, and then a great vortex seemed to open inwards, into a great whirling nothingness. Into that nothingness were swept away Kadarin and Thyra, two tiny, disappearing figures, whirled away and apart . . . and a great wordless cry of pain and despair and at the last instant, so faint that I never knew whether I heard it or not, a split-second cry of joy and rediscovery which made me hear again in my mind my father’s last cry . . .

  “Beloved—!”

  Silence and nothingness, and darkness . . . and the great and damnable Face that I had seen in Ashara’s overworld of blue ice . . .

  And then I was standing in the gray light of dawn on the cobblestones in Comyn Castle, facing Regis, only a shrinking, hesitant young man again, with the Sword of Aldones half-raised in his hand, and Callina pale as death beside him. There was no sign anywhere of Kadarin or Thyra, but sprawled on the cobbles before us, broken and dying, Dyan Ardais lay, his body blackened as if with fire. The Sword of Sharra lay broken in his hand. There were no jewels in the hilt of the sword now; they lay charred and ugly, burnt pebbles which, even as the first rays of the sun touched them, evaporated into pale gouts of rising smoke, and were gone forever . . . as Sharra’s power was gone forever from this world.

  Regis sheathed the Sword of Aldones and knelt beside Dyan, weeping without shame. Dyan opened pain-filled eyes, and I saw recognition in them for a moment, and pain beyond the point where it ceases to have meaning. But if Regis had hoped for a word, he was disappointed; Dyan’s eyes glinted up at him in a moment, then fell back and stared at something which was not in this world. But for the first time since I had known him, he looked content and at peace.