Heritage and Exile (54 page)

“Do you make war on women? Can't you settle it with me, man to man?”

He was still holding my sword; he shrugged, flung it into a corner. “So much for your lowland toys. I learned long ago to fight my battles with sounder weapons. If you think I'd hurt Marjorie, you're more of a fool than I ever believed you. I'll die first.”

“Do you think I'll ever work with you again? No, damn you, I'll die first.”

“Yes, you will,” he said in an almost amiable tone. “There isn't the slightest use in your heroics, dear boy.”

“What did you do, find you couldn't handle Sharra alone? How much did you destroy before you found it out?”

“I don't have to account to
you,
” he said with sudden brutality. I fought momentarily against the men holding me and at the same time lashed out with a murderous mental assault. I had always been told that the unleashed rage of an Alton can kill, had been disciplined never,
never
to let my anger wholly free. Yet now . . .

I let my rage go, visualizing hands at Kadarin's throat, my mind raining hatred and fury on him . . . I felt him wince under the onslaught, saw him go white, sag to his knees . . .

“Quick,” he gasped in a strangled voice, “knock him—out—”

A fist connected with my jawbone, darkness crashed through my mind. I felt myself go limp, hang helpless between my captors. Kadarin came and took over the beating himself, his ring-laden hands slashing hard at my face, blow after blow until I went down into a blurred, red-shot darkness. Then I realized they were hauling me out into the snowstorm; the cold sleet on my face revived me a little. Kadarin's face hung in a red mist before my eyes.

“I don't want to kill you, Lew. Come quietly now.”

I said thickly, through my torn and bleeding mouth, “Better kill me . . . brave man, who beats a man held helpless by . . . a couple of others. . . . Give me two men to hold you and I'll beat you half dead too . . . dishonored . . .”

“Oh, save your Domain cant,” he said. “I went beyond all that jabber of honor and dishonor long ago. I've no use for you dead. You are coming with me, so choose if you will come quietly, like the sensible lad you always were and will be again, or whether you will be carried, after these fellows beat you senseless? They don't like beating helpless men, either. Or shall I make it easy and immobilize you?” His hand went out toward the matrix on my neck.

No! No! Not again! I screamed, a frenzied cry which actually made him step back a pace. Then quietly—there had never been anything in the world as terrible as his low, even voice—he said, “You can't endure that again, can you? I'll do it if I must. But why not spare us both the pain?”

“Better . . . kill me . . . instead.” I spat out the blood filling my mouth. It struck him in the face. Unhurriedly, he wiped it away. His eyes glinted like some bird of prey, mad and inhuman. He said, “I hoped you'd save me the worst threat. Nascar, go and get the girl. Get her marix stone off of her. She carries it in—”

I cursed him, straining. “You devil, you fiend from hell! Do what you damn please with me, but let her alone!”

“Will you come, then, with no more of this?”

Slowly, defeated, I nodded. He smiled, a silky, triumphant smile, and jerked his head at the men to bring me along. I went between them, not protesting. If I, a strong man, could not endure that torment, how could I let them inflict it on Marjorie?

The men shoved us along through the blinding snow. A couple of hundred feet from the house, past the wall of trees, the snow stopped as if a water faucet had been turned off; the woodland road lay green before us. I stared, unbelieving. Kadarin nodded. “Thyra has always wanted to experiment with storms,” he said, “and it kept you in one place until we were ready for you.”

My instinct had been right. We should have pressed through it. I should have known. Despair took me. A helicopter was waiting for us; they lifted me into one seat, set Marjorie in another. They had tied her wrists with her silk scarf, but had not otherwise harmed her. I reached out to touch her hand. Kadarin, swiftly coming between us, gripped my wrist with fingers of steel.

I jerked away from him as if he had been a cold corpse. I tried to meet Marjorie's eyes. Together we might master him . . .

“It's no use, Lew. I cannot fight you and keep threatening you all the way to Aldaran,” Kadarin said tonelessly. He reached into a pocket, brought out a small red vial, uncapped it. “Drink this. And don't waste time.”

“No—”

“I said drink it. Quickly. If you contrive to spill it, I shall have no recourse except to tear off your matrices; first Marjorie's, then yours. I shall not threaten again.”

Glancing at those inhuman eyes—Gods! This man had been my friend! Did he even know what he had become?—I knew we were both defenseless in his hands. Defeated, I raised the flask to my lips and swallowed the red liquid.

The helicopter, the world slid away.

And did not return.

 

I did not know then, what drug he had given me. I am still not entirely sure. Nor have I ever known how much of what I remember from the next few days is dream and how much is underlaid by some curious core of reality.

For a long time I saw nothing but fire. Forest fire raging in the hills beyond Armida; fire raining down on Caer Donn; the great form of fire, stretching out irresistible arms and breaking the walls of Storn Castle as if they had been made of dough. Fire burning in my own veins, raging in my very blood.

I stood, once, on the highest point of Castle Aldaran and looked down on a hundred assembled men and felt the fire blazing behind me, sweeping through me with its wild lust and terror. I felt the men's raw emotions surging up to where I stood, the Sharra sword between my hands, feeding my nerves with crude fear, lust, greed. . . .

Again, a terrified child, I stood between my father's hands, docilely awaiting the touch that could give me my heritage or my death. I felt the fury rising in me, raving in me, and I let the fire take him. He went up in flames, burning, burning. . . .

I saw Regis Hastur, lying in a small dark hut somewhere on the road between Aldaran and Thendara, and knew he had failed. He lay there dying, his body torn with the last dying convulsions, unable to cross that dark threshold, failed, dying, burning. . . .

I felt Dyan Ardais seize me from behind, felt my arm snap in his hands, felt through his touch the combined cruelty and lust. I turned on him and rained hatred and violence on him, too, and saw him go up under the flame of my hatred, burning, burning. . . .

Once I heard Marjorie crying helplessly and fought up to consciousness again, and then I was in my room in Castle Aldaran, but I was tied down with enormous weights. Someone wedged my jaws open and poured down another dose of the pungent red drug, and I began to lose myself again in the dreams that were not dreams.

I stood atop a great flight of stairs, leading down and down and down forever into a great burning pit of hell, and Marjorie stood before me with the Sharra matrix between her hands and her face white and empty, and the matrix gripped in my hands burned me like fire, burned through my hand. Down below, the faces of the men, upturned to me, poured wave upon wave of raw emotion through me again, so that I burned endlessly in a hell-fire of fury and lust, burning, burning. . . .

Once I heard Thyra crying out “No, no, I can't, I won't,” and a terrible sound of weeping. Even at the deathbed of her father she had not wept like this. . . .

And then without transition Marjorie was there in my arms and I threw myself on her as I had done before. I covered her with frenzied and despairing kisses; I plunged gratefully into her warmth, my body and the very blood in my veins, burning, burning, trying in a single act to slake the frenzy of rage and lust which had tormented me, helpless, for days, months, years, eternities. . . . I tried to stop myself, feeling that there was some dimension of
reality
to this which had not been in most of the other dreams or illusions. I tried to cry out, it was happening again, the thing I feared and I hated, the thing I desired . . . the thing I dared not see—I was responsible for all this cruelty and violence! It was my own hate, never acknowledged, never admitted, which they were using, channeling through me! I was powerless to stop myself now; a world of frenzy was shaking me, endlessly tearing at me with great claws. Marjorie was crying helplessly, hopelessly, and I could feel her fear and pain burning in me, burning, burning. . . . Lightning ripped through my body, thunder crashing inside and out, a world of lust and fury was pouring through my loins . . . burning, burning. . . .

I was alone. I lay spent, drained, still confused with the dreams. I was alone. Where was Marjorie? Not here, thanks to all the Gods, not here, not here! None of it had been real.

My mind and body at peace, I slept, but far away in the blackness, someone was crying. . . .

“It's not threshold sickness this time,
bredu,
” Regis said, raising his head from the matrix. “This time I'm doing it right, but I can't see anything but the . . . the image that struck me down on the northward road. The fire and the golden image.
Sharra.
”

Danilo said, shuddering, “I know. I saw it too.”

“At least it didn't strike me senseless this time.” Regis covered the matrix. It roused no sickness in him now, just an overwhelming sense of heightened perception. He should have been able to reach Kennard, or someone at Arilinn, but there was nothing—nothing but the great, burning, chained image he knew to be Sharra.

Yes, something terrible was happening in the hills.

Danilo said, “I'd think every telepath on Darkover must know it by now, Regis. Don't they keep a lookout for such things in the towers? No need for you to feel guilty because you can't do it alone, without training.”

“I don't feel exactly guilty, but I am dreadfully worried. I tried to reach Lew, too. And couldn't.”

“Maybe he's safe at Arilinn, behind their force-field.”

Regis wished he could think so. His head was clear and he knew the sickness would not return, but the reappearance of the image of Sharra troubled him deeply. He had heard stories of out-of-control matrices, most of them from the Ages of Chaos, but some more recent. A cloud covered the sun and he shivered with cold.

Danilo said, “I think we should ride on, if you've finished.”

“Finished? I didn't even start,” he said ruefully, tucking the matrix into his pocket again. “We'll go on, but let me eat something first.” He accepted the chunk of dried meat Danilo handed him and sat chewing it. They were sitting side by side on a fallen tree, their horses cropping grass nearby through the melting snow. “How long have we been on the road, Dani? I lost count while I was sick.”

“Six days, I think. We aren't more than a few days from Thendara. Perhaps tonight we'll be within the outskirts of the Armida lands and I can send word somehow to my father. Lew told Beltran's men to send word, but I don't trust him to have done it.”

“Grandfather always regarded Lord Kermiac as an honorable man. Beltran is a strange cub to come from such a den.”

“He may have been decent enough until he fell into the hands of Sharra,” Danilo said. “Or perhaps Kermiac ruled too long. I've heard that the land which lives too long under the rule of old men grows desperate for change at any cost.”

Regis wondered what would happen in the Domains when his grandfather's regency ended, when Prince Derik Elhalyn took his crown. Would his people have grown desperate for change at any cost? He was remembering the Comyn Council where he and Danilo had stood watching the struggle for power. They would not be watching, then, they would be part of it. Was power always evil, always corrupt?

Dani said, as though he knew Regis' thoughts, “But Beltran didn't just want power to change things, he wanted a whole world to play with.”

Regis was startled at the clarity of that and pleased again to think that if the fate of their world ever depended on the Hasturs he would have someone like Dani to help him with decisions! He reached out, gave Danilo's hand a brief, strong squeeze. All he said was, “Let's get the horses saddled, then. Maybe we can help make sure he doesn't get it to play with.”

They were about to mount when they heard a faint droning, which grew to a sky-filling roar. Danilo glanced up; without a word, he and Regis drew the horses under the cover of the trees. But the helicopter, moving steadily overhead, paid no attention to them.

“Nothing to do with us,” said Danilo when it was out of sight, “probably some business of the Terrans.” He let out his breath and laughed, almost in apology. “I shall never hear one again without fear!”

“Just the same, a day will come when we'll have to use them too,” Regis said slowly. “Maybe the Aldaran lands and the Domains would understand each other better if it were not ten days' ride from Thendara to Caer Donn.”

“Maybe.” But Regis felt Danilo withdraw, and he said no more. As they rode on, he thought that, like it or not, the Terrans were here and nothing could ever be as it was before they came. What Beltran wanted was not wrong, Regis felt. Only the way he chose to get it. He himself would find a safer way.

He realized, with astonishment and self-disgust, the direction his thoughts were taking. What had he to do with all that?

He had ridden this road from Nevarsin less than a year ago, believing then that he was without
laran
and free to shrug his heritage aside and go out into space, follow the Terran starships to the far ends of the Empire. He looked up at the face of Liriel, pale-violet in the noonday sky, and thought how no Darkovan had ever set foot even on any of their own moons. His grandfather had pledged to help him go, if Regis still wanted to. He would not break his word.