You cannot live like this, Lew. On Darkover there are some experts in matrix technology who might be able to find a way to free you from Sharra—
“They tried,” I said. “You told me they tried before you brought me offworld, and they couldn’t; which is why we had to bring the matrix offworld, you couldn’t separate me from it without killing me—”
“You were weaker then. That was years ago. You could survive it, now.”
A thousand regrets, terrors, agonies flooded me; if it had not been for my ill-fated attempt to monitor her, perhaps Dio would not have gone into premature labor…
And that monstrous horror might have lived, breathed…
But Dio might have understood. Might not have—loathed me. Might not have shrunk in horror from the monster I had fathered, the monster I had become—
Free of Sharra, might the damage somehow have been reversed? The link with that giant matrix which had somehow damaged my very cells…if I had had the courage to endure it, being freed of Sharra, perhaps the horror would not have reached out and touched our child…at least I could have been monitored, to know enough, beforehand, avoid fathering a child… could have warned Dio, so she need not have suffered that loss—
“I don’t think it would have made any difference. The damage was done before ever I met Dio.” I knew he shared the image in my mind, of that monstrous failure with my hand… but we would never be sure.
“Some day. Some day. Maybe.”
He started to speak; then shut his mouth, and although I could hear the words he did not speak, clearly in his mind… I need you, Lew, I cannot go alone… I was grateful that he did not use that last weapon, his weakness, to persuade me. I felt guilty that I did not offer it, unasked. But I could not, I could not—
He shut his eyes. “I would like to rest.” I went out and left him alone.
I paced the apartment, debating whether or not I should go down into the multiformed world of the pleasure planet below me, get myself blind drunk; too drunk to know or care what horrors pulled at my mind, what guilt and self-blame. My father needed me; he had done, unsparing, whatever I needed when I was sick and helpless, and now I would not, could not force myself to give to him as generously as he had given to me. But I would not leave him alone. I could not do what he wished of me; but I would do what I could.
I do not know how long it was before I heard his voice, that cry of terrible pain, ringing and echoing in my mind and crashing through the rooms. I know, now, that there was no cry, it had been so swift that he could never have uttered a sound, but it was a scream of agony. Even as I ran toward his room, stumbling in haste, his voice crashed through my mind as it had done in that first rapport where he had shocked my laran awake when I was eleven years old; pain like death and the harsh command, inflexible, that I could not shut out.
LEW! YOU MUST GO, I CANNOT—YOU MUST GO BACK TO DARKOVER, FIGHT FOR YOUR BROTHER’S RIGHTS AND FOR THE HONOR OF ALTON AND THE DOMAIN—YOU MUST GO BACK AND FREE YOURSELF FROM SHARRA—LEW, I COMMAND YOU. IT IS MY DYING WISH, THE LAST WISH—
And then a flood of love and tenderness and a moment of pure joy.
“Elaine,” he cried out in my mind. Yllana. Beloved.
Then I broke into his room, and he lay there, quite dead. But on his face was a tender smile of happiness.
BOOK TWO: The Form of Fire
CHAPTER ONE
« ^ »
Darkover. The end of exile
There was someone at the door. Regis Hastur struggled up through confused dreams and found himself in his own rooms in Comyn Castle, his body-servant arguing in dogged whispers with someone who stood at the door, insisting. Regis threw a furred bedgown about his shoulders and went to see what it was.
“Vai dom, this—this person is insisting on seeing you, even at this godforgotten hour—”
“Well, I’m awake now anyhow,” he said, blinking. For a moment he did not recognize the sturdy, dark-eyed youngster who stood there, and the youngster’s wry smile told Regis that he knew it.
“We haven’t met many times and I don’t think we’ve ever been formally introduced,” he said. “Not since I was eight or nine years old, anyhow. My name is Marius, and I won’t argue about the rest of it when I’m here to ask a favor of you.”
Now Regis recognized Kennard’s younger son. He had seen him, briefly, somewhere in Thendara, about three years ago; perhaps in the company of Lerrys Ridenow? He said, “Of course I remember you, kinsman.” And when he had spoken that word, kinsman, a formal recognition as to an equal, he thought, tardily, how vexed his grandfather would have been. The Council, after all, had gone to considerable lengths to avoid extending that formal recognition to Kennard’s younger son.
Yet they had placed Regis himself in Kennard’s hands for fostering between the ages of nine and twelve. Regis and Lew had been bredin, sworn brothers. How could he now refuse that recognition to Kennard’s son and Lew’s brother, who, by all standards of honor and decency, was Regis’s foster-brother too. But he had neglected that obligation. Even now, his body-servant was staring at Marius as if the youngster were something with a hundred legs which the man had found in his porridge-bowl.
Regis said, “Come in, Marius; what can I do for you?”
“It’s not for me,” Marius said, “but for my friend. I have been living, this season, in my father’s town house in Thendara. I haven’t been made to feel exactly welcome in Comyn Castle.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, Marius. What can I say? I don’t make Council decisions, but that doesn’t mean I agree with them, either. Come in, won’t you? Don’t stand here in the hallway. A drink? Erril, take his cloak.”
Marius shook his head. “There’s no time for that, I’m afraid. My friend—you know him; he told me, once, you were prisoners together at Aldaran, and you know something of—” Marius fidgeted, lowered his voice as if he spoke a gutter obscenity— “of Sharra.”
Now Regis remembered his dream, the monstrous fire-form flaring and ravaging in his nightmare, ships bursting in flame— “I remember,” he said, “all too well. Your friend—Rafe Scott, isn’t it?” He remembered, too, that he had seen them together in Thendara. Yes; in the company of Lerrys Ridenow, who liked the society of Terrans. “What’s happened, Marius?”
And yet his mind was running quick counterpoint, this can’t happen, all these years I have not even dreamed of Sharra, and now… this is more than coincidence.
“He was my guest,” Marius said, “and the servants heard him crying out and came and wakened me; but when I went to him he didn’t know me, just kept crying out, raving about Sharra— I couldn’t make him hear me. Could you—could you come?”
“What you want is a healer,” Regis said. “I don’t have any skill at that kind of thing…” and he found himself wondering if Danilo, who had been prisoner with him during those weeks at Aldaran, who also had been touched by the fire-form, had wakened in terrifying nightmares of Sharra. And what did it mean?
“Lord Regis,” said the body-servant in outrage, “you’re not thinking of going out with this—at this hour of night, at the beck and call of just anybody?”
Regis had been thinking of refusal. What Marius needed was a healer or a licensed matrix technician. Regis had spent a season in a Tower, learning to manage his own laran so that it would not make him ill or drive him mad, but he had none of the advanced skills for matrix healing of mind or body, and what he knew of Sharra was very little. Only that for all that time his own matrix had been overshadowed, so that he could not touch it without seeing that ravaging form of fire— but the servant’s words made him angry again.