“We would not have to use it,” Dyan said. “The Terrans, too, remember Caer Donn and the burning of the spaceport there. The threat would be enough.”
Why should we need such a threat against the Terrans? We live in the same world! We cannot destroy them without destroying ourselves!
Dyan asked angrily, “Have you too, Regis, been seduced by the Empire? I never thought to see the day when a Hastur would speak treason!”
“I think what you say is worse than treason, Dyan,” Regis said, struggling for calm. “I cannot believe that you would do what you censured Lew for doing—make compromise with Beltran to bring back all those old terrors out of the Ages of Chaos! I know Beltran. You do not.”
“Don’t I?” asked Dyan, his eyes glinting strangely.
“If you do, and you still wish this alliance—”
“Look here,” said Dyan harshly, interrupting him, “what we face now is the very survival of the Comyn—you know that. We need a strong Comyn, firmly allied against those who would hand us over to the Terrans. The Ridenow have already gone over—or haven’t you heard Lerrys’s favorite speech? Write off the Ridenow. Write off Lew—a cripple, half Terran, with nothing to lose! Write off the Elhalyn—” and as Danilo began a formal protest he gestured him imperatively to silence. “If you don’t know that Derik’s a halfwit, you’re the only one in Council who doesn’t. Forget about the Aillard—Domna Callina is a sheltered woman, a Keeper, a Tower-dweller; she can’t do much, but I do have some influence, praise to Aldones, on Dom Merryl.” His grin was wolfish. “What does that leave? The three of us in this room, Merryl, and your grandfather—who’s over a hundred, and although he’s still sharp-witted enough, he can’t go on forever! In the name of all of Zandru’s frozen hells, Regis, need I say anything more?”
And this is the burden of being a Hastur, Regis thought wearily. This is only the beginning. More and more they will come to me for such decisions.
“You think that means we must make an alliance with Aldaran, even at the cost of betraying the legitimate Heads of two Domains?” he asked.
“Two Domains? Lew would have been exiled six years ago, and it seems to me we are being generous with him,” Dyan said.
“And Domna Callina? Is a Keeper nothing more than a woman to be married off for a political alliance?”
“If she wished to remain a Keeper,” said Dyan savagely, “she should have remained within her Tower and refrained from trying to meddle in Council affairs! Tell me, Regis, will you stand with me in Council, or are you going to side with the Ridenow and hand us over to the Terrans without making a fight for Darkover?”
Regis bent his head. Put starkly like that, it seemed to give him no choice. Dyan had neatly mousetrapped him into seeming to agree, and either way, he betrayed someone. Lew was his sworn friend from childhood. Painfully he remembered the years he had spent at Armida, running about like a puppy at Lew’s heels, wearing his outgrown clothes, riding, hawking, fighting at his side in the fire-lines when the Kilghard Hills went up in flame; remembered a tie even stronger, even older than that with Danilo; the first fierce loyalty of his life. Lew, his sworn friend and foster-brother.
Maybe this was best after all. Lew had said, again and again, that he wants no power in Comyn. Certainly Regis could not allow Dyan to believe that he would side against the Hasturs, and for the Terrans. Regis swallowed hard, trying to weigh loyalties. For all of Dyan’s harshness, he knew that the older man was a shrewd judge of political reality. The thought of Darkover and the Domains in the hands of the Terrans, one more colony in a star-spanning Empire, came hard. But there seemed no middle way.
“I will never compromise with Sharra,” he said wearily. “I draw the line there.”
“If you stand firmly with me,” said Dyan, “we will never need to use it. If we take a firm line, the threat is enough—”
“I don’t believe that,” said Danilo. “Sharra—” he stopped and Regis knew Danilo was seeing what he saw, the monstrous form of fire, blanking every matrix in the vicinity, drawing power even from those who hated it… death, destruction, burning!
Dyan shook his head. “You were children then, both of you, and you had a scare. The Sharra matrix is no more than a weapon— a mighty weapon. But nothing worse. Surely—” he grinned his wolfish grin—“you do not believe that it is a God from some other dimension, or the old legends that Hastur bound Sharra in chains and that she should be loosed only at the end of the world—or maybe you do” Dyan grinned again, “and maybe, Regis, you will have to be the Hastur to bind her this time!”
He is making fun of me, Regis knew it, and yet a terrifying chill made every hair on his body stand again on end.
Hastur the God, father and forefather of all the Hastur-kin, bound Sharra in chains…and I am Hastur. Is this my task?
Shaking his head to clear it, he reached out to pour himself another cup of jaco, and sipped it slowly, hardly tasting the bitter-chocolate fragrance. He told himself angrily not to be superstitious. The Sharra matrix was a matrix, a mechanical means of amplifying psychic powers; it had been made by human minds and hands, and by other human minds and hands it could be contained and made harmless. In Beltran’s hands—and Kadarin’s—it would be a fearful weapon, but then, there was no reason Beltran should be allowed to use it. Kadarin was human; and both Comyn and Terran had put a price on his head. Surely it was not as bad as he feared.
He said steadily to Dyan, “On the word of a Hastur, kinsman, I will never sit by and see our world handed over to the Terrans. We may not agree on the methods taken to avoid this; but we are in agreement otherwise.”
And as he said it, he realized that he was trying to placate Dyan, as if he were still a boy and Dyan his cadet-master.
Dyan and his grandfather were on the same side, aiming at the same goal. Yet he had quarreled with his grandfather; and he was trying hard to agree with Dyan. Why? he wondered. Is it only because Dyan understands and accepts me as I am?
He said abruptly, “Thank you for a fine breakfast, cousin, I must go and get myself into those damnable Council ceremonials, and try to persuade my grandfather that Mikhail is still too young to sit through an entire Council session, Heir to Hastur or no—he is nevertheless only a boy of eleven! Dani, I will see you in the Crystal Chamber,” and he went out of the room.
But it was Lerrys who caught up with him on the threshold of the Crystal Chamber. He was wearing the colors of his Domain, but not the full ceremonial robes, and he looked mockingly at Regis.
“Full fancy dress, I see. I hope Lew Alton has sense enough to turn up this morning wearing something like Terran clothes.”
“I wouldn’t call that very sensible,” Regis said. “They wouldn’t fit the climate, and it would just offend people without any reason. Why should it matter what we wear to Council?”
“It doesn’t. That’s the point. That’s why it makes me so damnably angry to see a dozen or so grown men and women behaving as if it made a difference whether we wore one kind of dress or another!”
Regis had been thinking something rather like this himself, as he got into the cumbersome and archaic robes, but for some reason it exasperated him to hear Lerrys say it. He said, “In that case, what are you doing wearing your clan colors?”
“I’m a younger son, if you remember,” said Lerrys, “and neither Head nor Heir to Serrais; if I did it, all they’d do would be to send me away for not following custom, like a horrid small boy who’s dressed up for the fun of it. But if you, Heir to Hastur, or Lew, who’s head of Armida by default— there’s literally no one else now—should refuse to follow that custom, you might be able to change things… things which will never be changed unless you, or somebody like you, has the brains and the guts to change them! I heard that Lord Damon, what-do-they-call-him, Jeff, went back to Arilinn. I wish he’d stayed. He’d been brought up on Terra itself, and yet he was telepath enough to become a technician at Arilinn—that would have let some fresh air into Arilinn, and I think it’s time to break a few windows in the Crystal Chamber, too!”