I braced myself against the terrible throbbing agony in the hand that held the matrix. Just a little more. Just a moment more,I spoke to the screaming agony as if it were a separate living entity, you can bear it just an instant more.I focused on the black and wavering darkness behind the form of fire where, instead of the parapets and towers of Castle Aldaran, a blurring darkness grew, out of focus, a monstrous doorway, a gate of fire, a gate of power, where somethinghovered, swayed, bulged as if trying to break through that gateway. I gathered all the power of the focused minds, all of them, my father’s strength, my own, Kadarin’s and all the hundred or so mindless, focused believers behind him pouring out all their raw lust and emotion and strength …
I held all that power, fused like a rope of fire, a twisted cable of force. I focused it all on the matrix in my hand. I smelled burning flesh and knew it was my own hand burning and blackening, as the matrix glowed, flared, flamed, ravened, a fire that filled all the worlds, the gateway between the worlds, the reeling and crashing universes …
I smashed the gateway, pouring all that fire back into it. The form of fire shrank, died, scattered and dimmed. I saw Marjorie, reeling, collapse forward; I leaped to snatch her within the circle of my arm, clinging to the matrix still. I heard her screaming as the fires turned back, flaring, blazing up in her very flesh. I caught her fainting body in my arms and with a final, great thrust of power, hurled myself between space, into the gray world, elsewhere.
Space reeled under me; the world disappeared. In the formless gray spaces we were bodiless, painless. Was this death? Marjorie’s body was still warm in my arms, but she was unconscious. I knew we could remain between worlds only an instant. All the forces of balance tore at me, pulling me back, back to that holocaust and the rain of fire and the ruin at Castle Aldaran, where the men who had spent their powers collapsed and died, blackened and burned, as the fires burned out. Back there, back there to ruin and death? No! No!Some last struggle, some last vitality in me cried out No!and in a great final thrust of focused power, draining myself ruthlessly, I pushed Marjorie and myself through the closing gates and escaped…
My feet struck the floor. It was cool daylight in a curtained, sunlit room; there was hellish pain in my hand, and Marjorie, hanging between my arms, was moaning senselessly. The matrix was still clutched in the blackened, crisped ruin that had been a hand. I knew where I was: in the highest room of the Arilinn Tower, within the safety-field. A girl in the white draperies of a psi-monitor was staring at me, her eyes wide. I knew her; she had been in her first year at Arilinn, my last year there. I gasped “Lori! Quick, the Keeper—”
She vanished from the room and I gratefully let myself fall to the floor, half senseless, next to Marjorie’s moaning body.
We were here at Arilinn. Safe. And alive!
I had never been able to teleport before, but for Marjorie’s sake I had done it.
Consciousness came and went, wavering like a gray curtain. I saw Callina Aillard looking down at me, her gray eyes reflecting pain and pity. She said softly, “I am Keeper here now, Lew. I will do what I can.” Her hand insulated in the gray silk veil, she reached out to take the matrix, thrusting it quickly within the field of a damper. The cessation of the vibration behind the matrix was a moment of almost heavenly comfort, but it also turned off the near-anesthesia of deep focused effort. I had felt hellish pain in my hand before, but now it felt flayed and dipped anew in molten lead. I don’t know how I kept from screaming.
I dragged myself to Marjorie’s side. Her face was contorted, but even as I looked, it went slack and peaceful. She had fainted and I was glad. The fires that had burned my hand to a sickening, charred ruin had struck inward through her, as the fire of Sharra withdrew back through that opened gateway. I dared not let myself think what she must have suffered, what she must still suffer if she lived. I looked up at Callina with terrible appeal and read there what Callina had been too gentle to tell me in words.
Callina knelt beside us, saying with a gentleness I had never heard in any woman’s voice, “We will try to save her for you, Lew.” But I could see the faint, blue-lighted currents of energy pulsing dimmer and dimmer. Callina lifted Marjorie in her arms, kneeling, held her head against her breast. Marjorie’s features flickered for a moment in renewed consciousness and renewed pain; then her eyes blazed into mine, golden, triumphant, proud. She smiled, whispered my name, rested her head peacefully on Callina’s breast and closed her eyes. Callina bent her head, weeping, and her long dark hair fell like a mourning veil across Marjorie’s stilled face.
I let consciousness slip away, let the fire in my hand take my whole body. Maybe I could die too.
But there was not even that much mercy anywhere in the universe.
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Epilogue
The Crystal Chamber, high in Comyn Castle, was the most formal of all the meeting places for Comyn Council. An even blue light spilled through the walls; flashes of green, crimson, violet struck through, reflected from the prisms everywhere in the glass. It was like meeting at the heart of a rainbow, Regis thought, wondering if this was in honor of the Terran Legate. Certainly the Legate looked suitably impressed. Not many Terrans had ever been allowed to see the Crystal Chamber.
“ … in conclusion, my lords, I am prepared to explain to you what provisions have been made for enforcing the Compact on a planet-wide basis,” the Legate said, and Regis waited while the interpreter repeated his words in castafor the benefit of the Comyn and assembled nobles. Regis, who understood Terran Standard and had heard it the first time around, sat thinking about the young interpreter, Dan Lawton, the redheaded half-Darkovan whom he had met at the spaceport.
Lawton could have been on the other side of the railing, listening to this speech, not interpreting it for the Terrans. Regis wondered if he regretted his choice. It was easy enough to guess: no choice ever went wholly unregretted. Regis was mostly thinking of his own.
There was still time. His grandfather had made him promise three years. But he knew that for him, time had run out on his choices.
Dan Lawton was finishing up the Legate’s speech.
“ … every individual landing at any Trade City, whether at Thendara, Port Chicago or Caer Donn, when Caer Donn can be returned to operation as a Trade City, will be required to sign a formal declaration that there is no contraband in his possession, or to leave all such weapons under bond in the Terran Zone. Furthermore, all weapons imported to this planet for legal use by Terrans shall be treated with a small and ineradicable mark of a radioactive substance, so that the whereabouts of such weapons can be traced and they can be recalled.”
Regis gave a faint, wry smile. How quickly the Terrans had come around, when they discovered the Compact was not designed to eliminate Terran weapons but the great and dangerous Darkovan ones. They had had enough of Darkovan ones on the night when Caer Donn burned. Now they were all too eager to honor the Compact, in return for a Darkovan pledge to continue to do so.
So Kadarin accomplished something. And for the Comyn. What irony!
A brief recess was called after the Legate’s speech and Regis, going to stretch his legs in the corridor, met Dan Lawton briefly face to face.