He’d improved. In a matter of seconds he had me off balance, unable to attack, able only to keep up, somehow, a hard defense. Yet there was a kind of pleasure in it, even though my breath came short and blood dripped down my face with the sweat; he was here, -and this time there was no man — or woman — to pull us apart.
But a defensive fight is doomed to lose. My mind worked, fast and desperately. Kadarin had one weakness; his temper. He would go into a flaming rage, and for a few minutes, that keen judgment of his went, and he was a berserk animal. If I could make him lose his temper for half a second, his acquired skill at swordplay would go with it. It was a dirty way to fight. But I wasn’t in any shape to be fastidious.
“Son of the River!” I shouted at him in the Cahuenga dialect, which has nuances of filth unsurpassed in any other language. “Sandal-wearer! You can’t hide behind your little sister’s petticoats this time!”
There was no change in the fast, slashingly awkward — but deadly — sword strokes. I hadn’t really hoped there would be.
But for half a second he dropped the barriers around his mind.
And then he was my prisoner.
His mind gripped in the unique, Jocked-on paralysis of an Alton Telepath. And his body rigid — paralyzed. I reached out, taking his sword from the stiff fingers. I lost consciousness of the battle round us. We might have been alone on the forest road, Kadarin and I — and my hate. In a minute I would kill him.
But I waited a second too long. I was exhausted already from the struggle with Marius; a flicker of faltering pressure, and Kadarin, alert, leaped free with a savage cry. He outweighed me by half; the impact knocked me full-length to the ground, and the next minute something crashed and struck my head and I plunged miles into darkness.
A million years later, Old Hastur’s face swam out of nowhere into focus before my aching eyes. “Lie still, Lew. You’ve been shot. They’re gone.”
I struggled to raise myself; subsided to the hands that forced me gently back. Through a swollen eye I counted the faces that swung around me in the red, murky sunset. Very far away, I heard Lerrys’ voice, harsh and muted, mourning,) “Poor boy.”
I was bruised and in pain, but there was a worse ache, a great gaping emptiness torn loose, that made me deathly alone.
They didn’t have to tell me that Marius was dead.
CHAPTER FIVE
I had concussion. Kadarin’s second bullet had knocked loose a splinter of bone; and Marius’ death had been a shattering shock to the cells of my brain. The neuronic and synaptic links so recently made had all been torn apart again when he died, and for days my life — and sanity — hung in the balance.
I remember only shattering light and cold and shock, jolting movement, the pungency of drugs. Without any apparent sense of transition, one day I opened my eyes and found myself in my old rooms in the Comyn Castle in Thendara, and Linnell Aillard was sitting beside me.
She was very like Callina, only taller, darker, somehow gentler, with a sweet and childish face — although she was not really much younger than I. I suppose she was pretty. Not that it mattered. In every man’s Me there are a few women who simply don’t register on his libido. Linnell was never a woman to me; she was my cousin. I lay contentedly watching her for some minutes, until she sensed my look and smiled.
“I thought you’d know me this time. Head ache?”
It did. I felt awkwardly at the ache, discovered bandages. Linnell caught my hand gently away.
“How long have I been here?”
“Here in Thendara? Only two days. You’ve been unconscious for days and days, though.”
“And — Marius?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “He is buried at the Hidden City: The Regent gave him full Comyn honors, Lew.”
I freed my hand gently from hers and lay for a long time staring at lie pattern of light on the translucent walls. Finally I asked, “The council?”
“They rushed it through, before we came here to Thendara. The marriage ceremony will be Festival Night.”
Life went on, I was thinking. “Yours to Derik?”
“Oh, no.” She smiled, shyly. “There’s no hurry about that. Callina’s, to Beltran of Aldaran.”
I sat bolt upright, disregarding knifing pain. “Do you mean they’re still going through with that alliance? You’re joking, Linnelll Or is everyone mad?”
She shook her head, looking troubled. “I think that’s why they rushed it through; they were afraid you’d recover, and try to block them again. Derik and the Hasturs wanted to wait for you; the others overruled them.”
I didn’t doubt that a bit. There was nothing the Comyn wanted less than a capable Alton in council. I threw back the covers. “I want to see Callina!”
“I’ll ask her to come to you; you needn’t get up.”
I vetoed that. These rooms had been assigned to the Altons, during council season, for generations; they were probably well-monitored with telepathic traps and dampers. The Comyn had never trusted the male adult Altons too much. I wanted to see Callina somewhere else.
Her servants told me where to find her. I swung back an innocent-looking panel of curtain and a flood of searing light literally exploded in my face. Swearing, I flung my hands over my tormented eyes; the closed lids dripped red and yellow after-images, and a surprised voice spoke my name. The lights died down and Callina’s face swam into focus.
“I am sorry. Can you see now? I must protect myself, you know, when I work.”
“Don’t bother apologizing.” A Keeper among the matrix screens is vulnerable in ways ordinary people know nothing about. “I should have had more sense than to come in like that.”
She smiled and held the curtain aside for me to pass through. “Yes. They told me you were a matrix worker.”
And as she let the curtain fall, I suddenly became conscious of the subtle wrongness in her beauty.
One can tell everything about a woman by the way she walks. The very step of a wanton is suggestive. Innocence proclaims itself in carefree romping. Callina was young and lovely; but she did not move like a beautiful woman. There was something both very young and very old about her movements, as if the gawkiest stage of adolescence and the staid dignity of great old age had met, with no intermediary stage in her.
She let the curtains close, and the sense of strangeness vanished. I looked around the patterned walls, feeling the soothing effect of the even, diffused sonics. I had had an old, small matrix laboratory in the old wing, but nothing like this.
There was the regular monitor system, flashing with tiny star-like glimmers, one for every licensed matrix on every level in this section of Darkover. There was a specially modulated telepathic damper which filtered out telepathic overtones without confusing or inhibiting ordinary thought. And there was an immense panel with a molten-glass shimmer whose uses I could only guess; it might have been one of the almost legendary psychokinetic transmitters. Curiously prosaic, an ordinary screw driver and some glittering scraps of insulating cloth lay on a table.
She said, “You know, of course, that they got away with the Sharra matrix?”
“If I’d had the brains of a mule,” I said violently, “I’d have tossed it into a converter somewhere on Terra, and been well rid of it — and Darkover well rid of it too!”
“That would have put things out of control, forever; at best, Sharra was only dormant while the matrix was off-world. Destroying the matrix would have ended any hope of putting the activated sites out of action. Sharra isn’t on the master banks, you know. It’s an illegal matrix — unmonitored. We can’t monitor it until all the loose sites, and the free energy, is located and controlled. What was the pattern?”