It was a trap-matrix; one of the old, illegal ones, which worked directly on the mind and emotions, rousing racial memories, atavistic fears — all the horrors of the freed subconscious of the individual and the race, throwing man back to the primal, reasonless beast.
Who would build a pattern like that?
I could have, but I hadn’t. Callina? No Keeper alive would blaspheme her office that way. Lerrys? He might think it a perverted joke, but I didn’t think he had the training. Dyan? No, it had scared him. Dio, Regis, Derik? Now we were getting silly; I’d be accusing Old Hastur, or my little Linnell, next!
Dyan, now. I couldn’t even have the relief of killing him in fair fight.
Even with one hand, I wasn’t afraid to fight him. Not a man Dyan’s age. I don’t read my antagonist’s mind, like a telepath in a bad scare-story, to figure out his sword strokes. That sort of stuff takes intent, motionless concentration, Nobody — not the legendary Son of Aldones — could fight a duel that way.
But now I could fight him before a hundred witnesses, and they’d still cry murder. After today and what they’d seen me do to Kadarin. I couldn’t do that to anyone else, Kadarin and I had once been in rapport through Sharra, and we had — however little we liked it — a foothold in each other’s minds.
But Dyan didn’t know that.
Dyan didn’t know this either, but he’d had his revenge already.
Six years of knocking around the Empire had cured me, as far as cure was possible. I am not, now, the shattered youngster who had fled Darkover years ago. I am not the young idealist who found, in Kadarin, a hope of reconciling his two warring selves, or saw in a girl with amber eyes everything he wanted in this world or the next.
Or I thought I wasn’t. But the first knock on my shell had cracked it wide open. What now?
I was standing on a high balcony, jutting out over the walls of the Comyn Castle. Below, the land lay spread like a map, daubed in burnt sienna and red and dusty gold and ochre. Around me rose the iridescent castle walls, which gave back the dropping light of the red sun, setting in blood and fire. The bloody sun. That is what the Terrans call the sun of Darkover. A just name — for them, and for us.
And far above me soared the high spire of the Keeper’s Tower, arrogantly aloof from castle or city. I looked up at it, apprehensively. I did not think that Ashara, ancient though she must be, would remain aloof from a holocaust in the Comyn.
Someone spoke my name and I turned, seeing Regis Hastur in the archway.
“I’ve got a message for you,” he said. “I’m not going to give it, though.”
I smiled grimly. “Don’t, then. What is it?”
“My grandfather sent me to call you back. As a matter of fact, I wanted an excuse to get out myself.”
“I suppose I ought to thank you for pulling that blow-pipe away from Dyan. Right now, I’m inclined to think you’d have saved us all trouble if you’d let him use it.”
“Are you going to fight him?”
“How can I? You know what they say about the Altons.”
The youngster joined me at the railing. “Want me to fight him as your proxy? That’s legal, too.”
I tried to hide how much the offer had touched me. “Thanks. But you’d better keep out of this business.”
“It’s too late for that. I’m in it already. Waist-deep.”
I asked, on impulse, “Did you know Marius well?”
“I wish, now, that I could say yes.” His face held a queer sort of shame. “Unfortunately — no, I never did.”
“Did anybody?”
“I don’t think so. Although he and Lerrys were friends, in a way.” Regis traced an idle pattern in the dust, with his bootheel. After a minute he rubbed his toe over it and said, “I spent a few days in the Ridenow forst before coming to council, and—” he paused. “This is difficult — I heard it by chance, and the only honorable thing I could do, was to pledge not to repeat it. But the boy is dead now, and I think you have a right to know.”
I said nothing. I had no right to insist that a Hastur violate his word. I waited for him to decide. At last he said, “It was Lerrys who suggested the alliance with Aldaran, and Marius himself went to Castle Aldaran as ambassador. Do you think Beltran would have had the insolence to offer marriage to a Keeper, unsolicited?”
I should have realized that. Someone must have told Belt-ran that such an offer would meet with serious consideration. But was Regis breaking his pledge, just to tell me my brother had been pawn-hand in a mildly treasonable intrigue?
“Can’t you see?” Regis demanded. “Why Callina? Why a
Keeper? Why not Dio, or Linnell, or my sister Javanne, or any of the other comynara? Beltran wouldn’t care. In fact, he’d probably have an ordinary girl, provided she could give him laran rights in council. No. Listen, you know the law — that a Keeper must remain a virgin, or she loses her power to work in the screens?”
“That’s nonsense,” I said.
“Nonsense or not, they believe it. The point is, this marriage launches two ships on one track. Beltran allied to them, and Callina out of the council’s way by good, fair, safe, legal means.”
“It begins to fit together,” I said. “Dyan and all.” There was, after all, something Dyan wanted less than a capable, adult male Alton in council; a Comyn Keeper might be, even more of a threat to him. “But that marriage will take place only over my dead body.”
He knew immediately what I meant. “Then marry her yourself, now, Lew! Do it illegally, if you have to, in the Terran Zone.”
I grinned ironically and held out my mutilated arm. I could not marry, by Darkovan law, while Kadarin lived. An unsettled blood-feud takes precedence over every other human obligation. But by Terran law we could marry.
I shook my head, heavily. “She’d never consent.”
“If only Marius had lived!” Regis said, and I was moved by the sincerity of his words; the first honest regret I had heard from anyone, though they had all expressed formal condolences. I liked it better that he did not pretend to any personal sorrow, but simply said, “The Comyn needed him so. Lew, could you use any other telepath — me, for instance — for a focus like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. I’d rather not try. You’re a Hastur, and it probably wouldn’t kill you, but it wouldn’t be fun.” My voice suddenly turned hard. “Now tell me what you really came here to tell me!”
“The death sign,” he blurted, then his face crumpled in panic. “I didn’t mean that, I didn’t—”
I could have had his confidence if I had waited. Instead I did something that still shames me. I caught one of his wrists with my good hand, and with a quick twist, a trick hold I’d learned on Vialles, forced him against the railing. He started to leap at me, then I caught his thought.
I can’t fight a man who has only one hand.
That hardened my rage; and in that instant of black wrath I lashed out and forced rapport on him; I drew into his mind roughly, with a casual swift searching that took what it wanted, then withdrew.
Stark white, shaking, Regis slumped against the railing; and I, the taste of triumph bitter on my tongue, turned my back on him. To justify my own self-contempt, I made my voice hard. “So you built the sign! You — a Hastur!”
Regis swung around, shaking with wrath. “I’d smash your face for that, if you weren’t — why the hell did you do that?”