“I don’t know anything about it, Regis. Rafael said something, and the way I heard it, it was some bastard son of my own,” said Gabriel good-humoredly, while I found myself thinking: if I had a sharp-tongued wife like the lady Javanne, I would make damned sure she never found out anything about any bastard child I had fathered! Gabriel’s smile was rueful. “I could assure my son that it was none of mine, but there are other Alton kinsmen in the Domains. No doubt, if there’s anything to it, whoever’s backing him will bring the child forward when Council meets again.” His eyes apologized to me as he said, “You’re not all that popular anymore, Lew. The Guardsmen would follow you to hell—they still talk about how good an officer you were—but that’s a long way from being Warden of Alton.”
And for a moment I was heartily sick of the whole business. It occurred to me that the best thing to do, when I reached Thendara, was to come to some understanding with Gabriel about the Domain, then find a ship and take passage out, away from Darkover and Sharra and all of it… but I thought of Armida, far in the Kilghard Hills, and my homeland there. And I remembered, like a pain gripping me in the vitals.
Kadarin had the Sharra matrix. Twice I had tried to leave it behind, on another planet. Twice I had been drawn back to it… I was slave and exile for Sharra and it would never let me go, and somehow I must fight it and destroy it…fight Kadarin, too, if need be, and all his wild-eyed madman and followers—
Fight them? Alone? As soon face, with my single ceremonial sword, and my one hand, all of Beltran’s armies… and I was no legendary Comyn hero, armed with a magical spell-sword out of legend!
I twisted my head, looking back toward the Lake of Hali and the low, gleaming chapel on the shore. I could feel Regis and Gabriel thinking that I was saying farewell to the last resting place of my brother. But instead I was wondering if, in all the history of the Comyn, there was a weapon against Sharra.
Ashara must know. And if she knew, perhaps, my kinswoman Callina would know.
I said, “Gabriel, Regis, excuse me, I must go and speak to Linnell. She loved Marius and she is crying again.” I rode forward, feeling the prickling again in my back as if I were being watched, and I knew, that from somewhere, whether with some small band of ruffians or through the matrix, Kadarin was watching me… but because Regis and Dyan had brought a detachment of the Guard, with swordsmen, he would not, quite, dare attack us now.
He had access to Terran weapons. Marius had died with a bullet through his head. But even so, he could not face a whole detachment of Guardsmen… so for the moment I was safe.
Maybe.
Disregarding the pricking of warning, I rode forward to speak to Linnell, to try to comfort my foster-sister.
Linnell’s eyes were red and her face blotched, but she had begun to look peaceful again. She tried to smile at me.
“How your head must ache, Lew—it’s a bad cut, isn’t it? Jeff told me he put ten stitches in it. You should be in bed.”
“I’ll manage, little sister,” I said, using the word bredilla as if she were the child she had been. But Linnell must be two or three and twenty now, a tall poised young woman, with soft brown hair and blue eyes. I supposed she was pretty; but in every man’s life there are two or three women—his mother, his sisters—who simply don’t register on his mind as women. Linnell was, always, no more to me than my little sister. Before her big, sympathetic eyes, I wished suddenly that I could tell her about Dio. But I would not burden her with that dreadful story; she was still sick with grief about Marius.
She said, “At least he was buried as a full member of the Comyn, with all honors; even Lord Ardais came to do him honor, and Regis Hastur.” I started to say something bitter— what good is the honor of the dead?—then held my peace; if Linnell could find comfort in that, I was glad. Life went on.
“Lew, would you be very upset if Derik and I were married soon after Festival?”
“Upset? Why, breda? I would be glad for you.” That marriage had been in the air since Linnie put away her dolls. Derik was slow-witted and not good enough for her, but she loved him, and I knew it.
“But—I should still do mourning for—for Kennard, and for my brother—”
I reached over, clumsily, letting go of the reins for a moment, to pat her on the shoulder. “Linnie, if Father or Marius is anywhere where they can know about it—” which I did not believe, at least not most of the time, but I would not say that to Linnell—“do you think their ghosts could be jealous of your happiness? They loved you and would be glad to see you happy.”
She nodded and smiled at me.
“That’s what Callina told me; but she is so unworldly. I wouldn’t want people to think I wasn’t paying proper respect to their memory—”
“Don’t you worry about that,” I said. “You need kinsmen and family, and now more than ever; without foster-father or brother, you should have a husband to look after you and love you. And if anyone says anything suggesting you are not properly respecting them, you send that person to me and I will tell them so myself.”
She blinked back tears and smiled, like a rainbow through cloud. “And you are the Lord of the Domain now,” she said, “and it is for you to say what mourning shall be held. And Callina is Head of my Domain. So if both of you have given permission, then I will tell Derik. We can be married the day after Festival. And at Festival, Callina’s to be handfasted to Beltran—”
I stared at her, open-mouthed. In spite of all, was the Council still bent on this suicidal madness?
I must certainly see Callina, and there was no time for delay.
Andres asked me, as we rode through the gates of the city, if I would come and speak to the workmen who had been hired to repair the town house. I started to protest—I had always obeyed him without question—and suddenly I recalled that I need not, now, even explain myself.
“You see to it, foster-father,” I said. “I have other things I must do.”
Something in my voice startled him; he looked up, then said in a queerly subdued voice, “Certainly, Lord Armida,” and inclined his head in what was certainly a bow. As he rode away, I identified what had been in his tone; he had spoken to me as he had always spoken to my father.
Linnell’s eyes were still red, but she looked peaceful. I said, “I must see Callina, sister. Will she receive me?”
“She’s usually in the Tower at this time, Lew. But you could come and dine with us—”
“I would rather not wait that long, breda. It’s very urgent.” Even now I could still feel the prickling, as if Kadarin were watching me behind some clump of trees or from some dark and narrow alleyway. “I will seek her out there.”
“But you can’t—” she began, then stopped, remembering: I had spent three years in a Tower.
I had never been in the Comyn Tower before, though I had come to the Castle every summer of my life except for the Arilinn years. I had spoken to the technicians in the relays, but I did not think there were many living telepaths who had actually stepped through the insulating veils. And even among those who kept the relays going, I did not think there were many who had ever seen the ancient Keeper, Ashara. Certainly my father said she had not been seen in the memory of anyone he had ever known. Maybe, I thought, there was no such person!
Perhaps Callina knew I was coming; she met me and beckoned me softly through the relay chamber—I noted that there was a young girl at the screen, but I did not recognize her— and through an inner chamber into what must have been the ancient matrix laboratory—at least that is what we would have called it at Arilinn. I could believe it had been built long before that, in the Ages of Chaos or before; there were matrix monitor screens, and other equipment the use of which I had not the foggiest notion. I found I did not like to think of the level of matrix it would have taken to use some of these things. I could feel the soothing vibrations of a specially modulated telepathic damper which filtered out telepathic overtones without inhibiting ordinary thought. There was an immense pa
nel about whose molten-glass shimmer I could not even make guesses; it might have been one of the almost-legendary psychokinetic screens. Among all these things were the ordinary prosaic tools of the matrix mechanic’s art; cradles, lattices, blank crystals, a glass-blower’s pipe, screwdrivers and soldering irons, odd scraps of insulating cloth. Beyond them she motioned me to a seat.
“I’ve been expecting you,” she said, “ever since I heard that they got away with the Sharra matrix. I suppose it was Kadarin?”
“I didn’t see him,” I said, “but no one else could have touched it without killing me. I’m still here—worse luck!”
“You’re still keyed into it, then? It’s an illegal matrix, isn’t it?”
“It’s not on the screens at Arilinn,” I said. They had found that out when Marjorie died. But this was an older Tower; some memory of it might linger here. She said, “If you can give me the pattern, I’ll try to find it.” She led me to the monitor screen, flashing with small glimmers, one for every known and licensed matrix on Darkover. She made a gesture I remembered; I fumbled one-handed with the strings of the matrix crystal around my neck, averted my eyes as it dropped into her hand, seeing the crimson fires within…It still resonated to the Sharra matrix; it was no good to me.
And while I bore it, anyone with the Sharra matrix could find me… and it seemed, though it could have been my imagination, that I could feel Kadarin, watching me through it…
She took it from me, matching resonances so carefully that there was no shock or pain, and laid it in a cradle before the screen. The lights on the screen began to wink slowly; Callina leaned forward, silent, intent, her face shut-in and plain. At last she sighed. “It’s not a monitored matrix. If we could monitor and locate it, we might even destroy it—though destroying a ninth-level matrix is not a task I am eager to attempt, certainly not alone. Perhaps Regis—” she looked thoughtfully at my matrix, but she did not explain and I wondered what Regis had to do with it. “Can you give me the pattern? If the others—Kadarin, Thyra—were using matrixes which resonated to Sharra—”
“Thyra, at least, was a wild telepath. I don’t know where she got her matrix, but I’m sure it’s not a monitored one,” I said. I supposed she had it from old Kermiac of Aldaran; he had been training telepaths back in those hills since before my father was born. If he had lived, the whole story of the Sharra circle would have been different. I tried to show her the pattern against the blank screen, but only blurs swirled against the blue surface, and she gestured me to take up my own matrix and put it away.
“I shouldn’t have let you try that, so soon after a head injury. Come through here.”
In a smaller, sky-walled room, I relaxed, in a soft chair, while Callina watched me, aloof and reflective. She said at last, “Why did you come here, Lew? What did you want from me?”
I wasn’t sure. I did not know what, if anything, she could do about the ghost-voice in my mind, my father’s voice. Whether a true ghost or a reverberation from brain-cells injured in his dying grip on my mind, it would fade away at last; of that I was certain. Nor could she do anything much about the fact that the Sharra matrix was in the hands of Kadarin and Thyra, and that they were here in Thendara. I said harshly, “I should never have brought it back to Darkover!”
“I don’t know what choice you had,” she pointed out reasonably. “If you are keyed into it—”
“Then I shouldn’t have come back!”
And this time she did not argue with me, only shrugged a little. I was here on Darkover and so was the matrix. I said, “Do you suppose Ashara knows anything about it? She goes back a long way…” and paused, hesitant. Callina’s voice rebuked: “No one asks to see Ashara!”
“Then maybe it’s time they did.”
Her voice was still, stony and remote. “Perhaps she would consent to see you. I will inquire.” For a moment she was nothing like the girl I had known, my cousin and kinswoman. I was almost afraid of her.
“There must have been a time when telepaths knew how to handle things like the Sharra matrix. I know it was used by the forge-folk to bring metal to their forges; and it was used as a weapon. If the weapon wasn’t destroyed, why would they have destroyed the defenses against it?”
Callina started a little, as if she had been very far away and the sound of my voice had brought her back from whatever distance she had inhabited. I remembered that look on Marjorie’s face, the heart-breaking isolation of a Keeper, alone even at the center of a great circle. Somehow it made me lonely for my days at Arilinn. Callina and I had not been there at the same time, but she was part of it, she remembered, we were comfortable together.
“What can Kadarin do with the matrix?” she asked.
“Nothing, himself,” I said, “but he has Thyra to control it.” Even at the beginning, he had wanted Thyra to control the matrix; she was more pliant to his will than Marjorie, who had, at the last, rebelled and tried to close the gate into that other world or dimension from which Sharra came into this world in raging fire… I said, “If he wanted to, he could burn Thendara around the heads of the Comyn, or go to the Trade City and bring one of their damned spaceships down out of the sky! The matrix is that powerful; and the thing is, he doesn’t have enough telepaths to control it as if it were a proper ninth-level matrix. Which it isn’t: it’s something unholy, a weapon, a force—” I stopped myself. Like Callina I had been Tower-trained, I should know better. Old tales made matrixes magical, called them gates to sorcery and alien magic. I knew the science of which they were a part. A matrix is a tool, no more good or evil than the one who uses it; a device to amplify and direct the laran, the special hyper-developed psychic powers of the Comyn and those of their blood. The superstitious might speak of Gods and magical powers. I knew better. And yet the form of fire blazed in my mind, a woman, tall and imposing, overshadowing… and now she bore Marjorie’s face. Marjorie, competent and unafraid in the midst of the rising illusion-flames of Sharra, and then—then crumpling, screaming in agony as the flames struck inward—my hand burning like a torch beneath the matrix—
Callina reached out one hand, lightly touched my forehead, where Jeff had stitched the sword cut. Under her touch the fire went out. I found that I was kneeling at her feet, my head bent under the weight of it.
She said “But would he dare? Surely no sane man—”
I said, hearing the bitterness in my own voice, “I’m not sure he’s a man—and I’m even less sure he is sane.”
“But what could he hope to accomplish, unless he is simply mad for destruction?” she asked. “Surely he would not risk the woman—Thyra, you called her?—She was his—” she hesitated, and I shook my head. I had never understood the relationship between Kadarin and Thyra. It was not the ordinary relationship of lovers, but something at once less and more. I bent my head; I too had been glamored by the dark, glowing beauty of Thyra, so like and so unlike Marjorie. I had chosen. And Marjorie had been destroyed…I turned on her in rage. She said softly, “I know, Lew. I know.”
“You know! Thank the Gods you don’t know—” I flung at her, in a blind fury. What could she know of that, that raging fire, that fury, ravening between the worlds—
But under her steady eyes my rage dissolved. Yes, she did know. On that dreadful day when I had turned on Kadarin with the desperation of a man who knows himself already condemned to death, smashed the gate between the worlds and closed away Sharra from this world, I had thrust forth with my last strength and brought Marjorie and myself between the world-gates. The Terrans called it teleportation. I had brought us both to the matrix chamber in Arilinn, both of us terribly wounded, Marjorie dying. Callina had fought to save her; Marjorie had died in her arms. I bent my head, haunted again by that memory burned into my brain; Callina, holding Marjorie in her arms, the moment of peace that had descended in that last minute over her face. Yes, she knew.
I said, trying to think about it calmly without going into the horror again, “I don’t think, if he was sane, he
would risk Thyra; but I’m not sure he understands the danger, and if the matrix has them both in its grip— I don’t know if he would have any choice.” I knew how the matrix could control a worker, how it had seized control even from our carefully balanced circle, going forth to do its ravening work of destruction.
“It—wants to destroy,” I said unsteadily. “I think it was made in the Ages of Chaos, to burst forth from control, to kill as much as it could, burn, destroy…I don’t think anyone alive now knows how to control it.” For years, I knew, the Sharra matrix had lain harmlessly on the altars of the forge-folk, a talisman invoking their fire Goddess, to light their altars. To bring fire to their forges and fires, and the Goddess within, content with her worshippers and their fires, had not been roused into this world—
And I had loosed it on Darkover; I, a complacent puppet in Kadarin’s hands. And he had used my own rage, my own lust, my own inner fires…
This was superstitious nonsense. I drew a deep breath and said, “In the Ages of Chaos there were many such weapons, and somewhere there must be defenses, or the memory of defenses against them. Maybe, then, Ashara would know.” But would she care, if she had withdrawn so far from the world?
Callina picked up the unspoken question and said, “I do not know. I—I am afraid of Ashara—” I could see her shaking. She said, “You think I am here, safe, isolated—out of the troubles in the Council and the Comyn—Merryl hates me, Lew, he will do anything to keep me from having power in Comyn Council. And now there is this alliance with Aldaran—you do know Beltran is bringing an army to the very gates of Thendara, and if at the last, they refuse him this alliance—do you suppose he knows about Sharra, or will use it as a weapon?”
I didn’t know. Beltran was my kinsman; there had been a time when I had trusted him, even as I had trusted and liked Kadarin. But Sharra had seized on him, too, and I still felt that was why he had this lust for power… and he, too, would have been alerted to its presence.
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