Heritage and Exile (29 page)

It was not the nature of Dyan's desires that troubled him so greatly. It was not considered anything so shameful to be an
ombredin,
a lover of men. Among boys too young for marriage, rigidly kept apart by custom from any women except their own sisters or cousins, it was considered rather more suitable to seek companionship and even love from their friends than to consort with such women as were common to all. It was eccentric, perhaps, in a man of Dyan's years, but certainly not shameful.

What sickened Regis was the
kind
and
type
of pressure used against Danilo, the deliberate, sadistic cruelty of it, the particularly subtle revenge Dyan had taken for the wound to his pride.

Petty harrassment would have been cruel but understandable. But to use
laran
against him! To force himself on Danilo's mind, to torment him that way! Regis felt physically ill with disgust.

Besides, he thought, still tossing restlessly, there were enough men or young lads who would have welcomed Dyan's interest. Some, perhaps, only because Dyan was a Comyn lord, rich and able to give presents and privileges to his friends, but others, certainly, would find Dyan a charming, pleasing and sophisticated companion. He could have had a dozen minions or lovers and no one would have thought of criticizing him. But some perverse cruelty made him seek the one boy in the cadets who would have none of him. A
cristoforo
.

He turned on his side, thrust a pillow over his face to shut out the light of the single candle he was too weary to get up and extinguish, and tried to sleep. But his mind kept going back to the frightening, disturbingly sexual night-mares which had preceded the wakening of his own
laran
. He knew now how Dyan had pursued Danilo even in sleep, enjoying the boy's fright and shame. And he knew now the ultimate corruption of power: to make another person a toy to do your will.

Was Dyan mad, then? Regis considered. No, he was very sane, to choose a poor boy, one without powerful friends or patrons. He played with Dani as a cat plays with a captive bird, torturing where he could not kill. Regis felt sick again. Pleasure in pain. Did it give Dyan that kind of pleasure to batter him black and blue at swordplay? With the vivid tactile memory of a telepath he relived that moment when Dyan had run his hands over his bruised body, the deliberate sensual quality of the touch. He felt physically used, contaminated, shamed. If Dyan had been physically present then, Regis would have struck him and dared the consequences himself.

And Dani was a catalyst telepath. That terrible force, that loathsome compulsion, against the rarest and most sensitive of telepaths!

Again and again, compulsively, he returned to that night in the barracks when he had tried—and failed—to reach out to Danilo and comfort him. He felt again and again the pain, the physical and mental shock of that wild rejection, the flood of guilt, terror, shame which had flooded him from that brief and innocent touch on Danilo's bare shoulder. Cassilda, blessed Mother of the Comyn! Regis thought in scalding shame, I touched him! Is it any wonder he thought me no better than Dyan!

He turned over on his back and lay staring at the vaulted ceiling, feeling his body ice over with dread. Dyan was a member of Council. They could not be so corrupt that they would know what Dyan had done, and say nothing. But who could tell them?

The single candle near his bed wavered, flickered in and out of focus; colors looped and spun across his visual field and the room swelled up, receded and shrank until it seemed to lie far away, then loom enormously around him in great echoing space.

He recognized the feeling from when Lew gave him
kirian,
but he was not drugged now!

He clutched at the bedclothes, squeezing his eyes shut. He could still see the candleflame, a dark fire printed inside his eyelids, the room around him lit with blazing brilliance, reversed afterimages, dark to bright and bright to dark, and a roaring in his ears like the distant roaring of a forest fire . . .

. . . The fire-lines at Armida! For an instant it seemed that he saw Lew's face again, crimson, gazing into a great fire, drawn with terror and wonder, then the face of a woman, shining, ecstatic, crowned with fire, burning, burning alive in the flames . . . Sharra, golden-chained Forge-Goddess. The room was alive with the fire and he burrowed beneath the blankets, sunk, battered, swirled. The room was dissolving around him, tilting . . . every thread in the smooth fine linen of the blankets seemed to cut into him, hard and rough, the twisted fibers of blanket trying to curl and frizzle and dig painfully into his skin, like cutting edges. He heard someone moan aloud and wondered who was there moaning and crying like that. The very air seemed to separate itself and come apart against his skin as if he had to sort it out into little droplets before he could breathe. His own breath hissed and whistled and moaned as it went in and out, like searing fire, to be quenched by the separate droplets of water in his lungs. . . .

Pain crashed through his head. He felt his skull smashing, shattering into little splinters; another blow sent him flying high, falling into darkness.

“Regis!” Again the crashing, reeling sickness of the blow and the long spin into space. The sound was only meaningless vibration but he tried to focus on it, make it mean something.
“Regis!”
Who was Regis? The roaring candleflame died to a glimmer and Regis heard himself gasp aloud. Someone was standing over him, calling his name, slapping him hard and repeatedly. Suddenly, noiselessly, the room fell into focus.

“Regis, wake up! Get up and walk around, don't drift with it!”

“Javanne . . .” he said, struggling fuzzily upright to catch her hand as it was descending for another blow. “Don't, sister . . .”

He was surprised at how weak and faraway his voice sounded. She gave a faint cry of relief. She was standing beside his bed, a white shawl slipping from her shoulders above her long nightgown. “I thought one of the children cried out, then heard you. Why didn't you tell me you were likely to have threshold sickness?”

Regis blinked and dropped her hand. Even without the touch he could feel her fear. The room was still not quite solid around him. “Threshold sickness?” He thought about it a moment. He'd heard of it, of course, born into a Comyn family: a physical and psychic upheaval of awakening telepaths in adolescence, the inability of the brain to cope with sudden overloads of sensory and extrasensory data, resulting in perceptual distortions of sight, sound, touch. . . . “I never had it before. I didn't know what it was. Things seemed to thin out and disappear, I couldn't see properly, or feel . . .”

“I know. Get up now and walk around a little.”

The room was still tilting around him; he clung to the bed-frame. “If I do, I'll fall. . . .”

“And if you don't, your balance centers will start drifting out of focus again. Here,” she said with a faint laugh, tossing the white shawl to him, looking courteously away as he wrapped it around his body and struggled to his feet. “Regis, did no one warn you of this when your
laran
wakened?”

“Didn't
who
warn me? I don't think anyone knew,” he said, taking a hesitant step and then another. She was right; under the concentrated effort of getting up and moving, the room settled into solidity again. He shuddered and went toward the candle. The little lights still danced and jiggled behind his eyes, but it was candle-sized again. How had it grown to a raging forest fire out of childhood? He picked it up, was amazed to see how his hand shook. Javanne said sharply, “Don't touch the candle when your hand's not steady, you'll set something afire! Regis, you frightened me!”

“With the candle?” He set it down.

“No, the way you were moaning. I spent half a year at Neskaya when I was thirteen, I saw one of the girls go into convulsions in crisis once.”

Regis looked at his sister as if for the first time. He could sense, now, the emotion behind her cross, brisk manner, real fear, a tenderness he had never guessed. He put his arm around her shoulders and said, wonderingly, “Were you really afraid?” The barriers were wholly down between them and what she heard was,
Would you really care if something happened to me?
She reacted to the wondering amazement of that unspoken question with real dismay.

“How can you doubt it? You are my only kinsman!”

“You have Gabriel, and five children.”

“But you are my father's son and my mother's,” she said, giving him a short, hard hug. “You seem to be all right now. Get back into that bed before you take a chill and I must nurse you like one of the babies!”

But he knew now what the sharpness of her voice concealed and it did not trouble him. Obediently he got under the covers. She sat on the bed.

“You should spend some time in one of the towers, Regis, just to learn control. Grandfather can send you to Neskaya or Arilinn. An untrained telepath is a menace to himself and everyone around him, they told me so when I was your age.”

Regis thought of Danilo. Had anyone thought to warn him?

Javanne drew the covers up under his chin. He recalled now that she had done this when he was very small, before he knew the difference between elder sister and a never-known mother. She was only a child herself, but she had tried to mother him. Why had he forgotten that?

She kissed him gently on the forehead and Regis, feeling safe and protected for the moment, toppled over the edge of a vast gulf of sleep.

The next day he felt ill and dazed, but although Javanne told him to keep to his bed, he was too restless to stay there.

“I must return at once to Thendara,” he insisted. “I've learned something which makes it necessary to talk to Grandfather. You said, yourself, I should arrange to go to one of the towers. What can happen to me with three Guardsmen for escort?”

“You know perfectly well you're not able to travel! I should spank you and put you to bed as I'd do with Rafael if he were so unreasonable,” she said crossly.

His new insight into her made him speak with gentleness. “I'd like to be young enough for your cosseting, sister, even if it meant a spanking. But I know what I must do, Javanne, and I've outgrown a woman's rule. Please don't treat me like a child.”

His seriousness sobered her, too. Still unwilling, she sent for his escort and horses.

All that long day's ride, he seemed to move through torturing memories, repeating themselves over and over, and a growing unease and uncertainty: would they believe him, would they even listen? Danilo was out of Dyan's reach, now; there was time enough to speak if he endangered another. Yet Regis knew that if he was silent, he connived at what Dyan had done.

In midafternoon, still miles from Thendara, wet snow and sleet began to fall again, but Regis ignored the suggestions of his escort that he should seek shelter and hospitality somewhere. Every moment between him and Thendara now was a torture; he yearned to be there, to have this frightening confrontation over. As the long miles dragged by, and he grew more and more soggy and wretched, he drew his soaked cape around him, huddling inside it like a protective cocoon. He knew his guards were talking about him, but he shut them firmly away from his consciousness, withdrawing further and further into his own misery.

As they came over the top of the pass he heard the distant vibration from the spaceport, carried thick and reverberating in the heavy, moist air. He thought with wild longing of the ships taking off, invisible behind the wall of rain and sleet, symbols of the freedom he wished he had now.

He let the thickening storm batter him, uncaring. He welcomed the icy wind, the sleet freezing in layers on his heavy riding-cloak, on his eyelashes and hair. It kept him from sliding back into that strange, hypersensitive, hallucinatory awareness.

How did you face the Regent of Comyn and tell him his most trusted counselor was corrupt, a sadistic pervert using his telepathic powers to meddle with a mind placed in his charge?

How do you tell the Commander of the Guard, your own commanding officer, that his most trusted friend, holding the most trusted and responsible of posts, has ill-treated and shamefully misused a boy in his care. How do you accuse your own uncle, the strongest telepath in Comyn, of standing by, indifferent, watching the rarest and most sensitive of telepaths being falsely accused, his mind battered and bruised and dishonored, while he, a tower-trained psi technician, did nothing?

The stone walls of the Castle closed about them, cutting off the biting wind. Regis heard his escort swearing as they led their horses away. He knew he should apologize to them for subjecting them to this cold, wearying ride in such weather. It was a totally irresponsible thing to do to loyal men and the fact that they would never question his motives made it worse. He gave them brief formal thanks and admonished them to go quickly for supper and rest, knowing that if he offered them any reward they would be offended beyond measuring.

The long steps to the Hastur apartments seemed to loom over him, shrinking and expanding. His grandfather's aged valet rushed at him, blurred and out of focus, clucking and shaking his head with the privilege of long service. “Lord Regis, you're soaked through, you'll be ill, let me fetch you some wine, dry clothes—”

“Nothing, thank you.” Regis blinked away the drops of ice melting on his eyelashes. “Ask the Lord Regent if he”—he tensed to keep his teeth from chattering—“if he can receive me.”

“He's at supper, Lord Regis. Go in and join him.”

A small table had been laid before the fire in his grandfather's private sitting room, and Danvan Hastur looked up, dismayed, almost comically echoing the elderly servant's dismay.