Текст книги "Sharra's Exile"

Автор книги: Marion Zimmer Bradley

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It was like struggling under water; I could not reach his mind, his thoughts were blank to me. Zandru’s hells, was this what it was like to be without laran, blind, deaf, mutilated, with nothing left but ordinary sight and hearing? “Is this what Dio wants? Why doesn’t she tell me so herself, then?”

Now there was blind rage exploding in Lerrys’s face; it needed no laranto see that. His face tightened, his fists clenched; for a moment I braced myself, thinking he would strike me, wondering how I could manage, with one hand, to defend myself if he did.

“Damn you, can’t you see that’s what I want to spare her?” he demanded, his voice rising to hysteria. “Haven’t you put her through enough? How much do you think she can stand, you—you—you damned—” His voice failed him. After a time he got control of it again.

“I don’t want her to have to see you again, damn you. I don’t want her left with any memory of what she had to go through!” he said, raging. “Go to the Terran HQ and dissolve your marriage there—and if you don’t, I swear to you, Lew, I’ll call challenge on you and feed your other hand to the kyorebni!”

Through the drugs I was too dulled to feel sorrow. I said heavily, “All right, Lerrys. If that’s what Dio wants, I won’t bother her again.”

He turned and slammed out of the house; Marius stood staring after him. He said, “What, in the name of all the Gods, was that all about?”

I couldn’t talk about it. I said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” and, blindly, struggled up the stairs to my father’s room. Andres came, but I paid no attention to him; I flung myself down on my father’s bed and slept like the dead.

But I dreamed of Dio, crying and calling my name as they took her away from me in the hospital.

When I woke my head was clear; and I seemed, again, to be in possession of it alone. It had assumed the character of any family reunion; Marius came and sat on my bed and talked to me as if he were the young boy I’d known, and I gave him the gifts I’d remembered to bring from Vainwal, Terran lensed goods: binoculars, a camera.

He thanked me, but I suspected he thought them gifts for a child; he referred to them once as “toys.” I wondered what would have been a proper gift for a man? Contraband blasters, perhaps, in defiance of the Compact? After all, Marius had had a Terran education. Was he one of those who considered the Compact a foolish anachronism, the childish ethic of a world stuck in barbarism? I suspected, too, that he felt little grief for our father. I didn’t blame him; father had abandoned Marius a long time ago.

I told them I had business at the Terran HQ, without telling them much about it.

“You’ve got seven days, after all,” Jeff pointed out to me after breakfast. “They deferred the formal transfer of the Domain until ritual mourning for Kennard was completed. And now it’s only a formality—they accepted you as his Heir when you were fifteen.”

There was the question as to whether they would accept Marius.

“Stupid bigots,” Andres grumbled, “to decide a man’s worth on the color of his eyes!”

Or the color of his hair;I could feel Jeff thinking that, remembering a time when, in Arilinn, most Comyn had had hair of the true Comyn red. I said, only half facetiously, “Maybe I should dye mine—and Marius’s—so we’ll look more like Comyn—”

“I couldn’t change my eyes,” Marius said dryly, and I thought, with a pang, of the changeable sea-colors in Dio’s eyes. But Dio hated me now, and that was all past; and who could blame her?

“They’ll challenge me,” I said. “And if they do—hell, I can’t fight them with one hand.”

“Stupid anachronism in this day and age,” Marius said predictably, “to settle anything as important as the Heirship of a Domain with a sword.”

Andres—we had demanded he sit with us at table; coridomor no, he had been guardian and foster-father much of our lives—asked, with equal dryness, “Would it make more sense to fight it out with blasters or invade each other’s Domains and fight a war over it?”

Jeff was leaning back in his chair, a half-empty cup in front of him. “I remember hearing, in the Tower, why it was that the formal challenge with swords was instituted. There was a time when a formal challenge for the rulership of a Domain was made with the Gift of that Domain—and the one whose laranwas the stronger won it. There was a day when the Domains bred men and women like cattle for these Gifts—and the Alton Gift, full strength, can kill. I doubt Gabriel wants to try thatkind of duel against you.”

“I’m not so sure, after last night, that I could win it if he did,” I said. “I had forgotten where Comyn immunity came from.” At Arilinn, matrix mechanics and technicians in training sometimes fought mock battles with laran, but I had been taught control since I was into my teens; real battles with laranwere forbidden.

The Compact was not invented to ban blasters and firearms, but the olderlaran weapons which were as dreadful as anything the Terran empire could produce…

“I don’t think Gabriel will challenge you,” Andres said. “But they’ll ask why, at your age, you’re not married, and whether you have a legitimate child for an Heir.”

I felt the scars at my mouth pull as I grimaced. “Married, yes, but not for long; that was what Lerrys came here about,” I said. “And no children, nor likely to have.”

Marius started to ask questions; Jeff stared him down. He knew what I was talking about. “We were afraid, at Arilinn, that would happen, but the technique of cell-monitoring at that level was lost sometime in the Ages of Chaos. Some of us are working to master it again—it’s quicker and safer than some of the DNA work they do in the Empire. I don’t suppose you fathered any bastards before you went offworld?”

There had been adventures in my youth, but if I had fathered a child—I put it bluntly to myself—the girl involved would have been proud to tell me so. And Marjorie had died, her child unborn.

“They’d accept Marius if I tested him for the Alton Gift, perhaps,” I said. “They might have no choice. Comyn law says there mustbe an Heir named, a succession insured. By letting Kennard take me offworld, they gave tacit consent for Marius as presumptive Heir, I’d think. The law is clear enough.” I didn’t want to test Marius for the Alton Gift—not by the shock tactics my father had used on me, and I knew no others. Not now. And with my matrix in the shape it was in… about all I could do would be to give a demonstration of the powers of Sharra!

It wanted me, the fires sought to call me back…

But there were other things to think about now.

“Marius should be tested before the formal challenge,” I said. “You’re First at Arilinn; you can do that, can’t you?”

“Certainly,” Jeff said. “Why not? I suspect he has some laran, perhaps Ridenow gift—there’s Ridenow in the Alton lineage, and Ardais, too; Kennard’s mother was Ardais and I always suspected he had a touch of catalyst telepathy.”

Marius had been tearing a buttered roll to pieces. He said now, without looking up, “What I have, I think, is—is the Aldaran Gift. I can see—ahead. Not far, not very clearly; but the Aldaran Gift is precognition, and I—I have that.”

That he would have had from our half-Terran mother. In these days the gifts were entangled anyhow, bred out by intermarriage between the Domains. But I stared at him and demanded, “How would you know about the Aldaran Gift?”

He said impatiently, “The Aldarans are all the kin I have! And hell, Lew, the Comyn weren’t very eager to claim me as kin! I spent one summer with Beltran—why not?”

This was a new factor to be reckoned with.

“I know he didn’t treat you well,” Marius went on, defensively, “but your quarrel was a private one, after all. What do you expect, that I should declare blood-feud for three generations because of that? Are we the barbarians the Terrans call us, then?”

There was no answer to that, but I didn’t know what to say.

“We could all use some information about the future,” I said. “If you’ve got thatGift, for the love of Aldones tell me what’s going to happen if I claim the Domain? Will they accept you as my Heir?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed, and once again he seemed young, vulnerable, a boy half his age. “I—I tried to find out. They told me that sometimes that happened, you couldn’t see too clear for yourself or anyone close to you…”

That was true enough, and since it was true, I wondered, not for the first time, what good that Gift was to anyone. Perhaps, in the days when Aldarans could see the fate of rulers, kingdoms, even of the planet… and that was another disquieting thought. Maybe the Aldarans, with their foresight, saw that Darkover would go the way of the Terran Empire and that was why they had joined forces, for so long, with Terra. I wondered if Beltran had entirely broken with them after the Sharra rebellion.

Well, there was one way to find out, but there was no time for it now. I strode restlessly to the window, looked out across the bustle of the cobbled square. Men were leading animals to the market, workmen going about carrying tools; a quiet familiar bustle. Because of the season, there was only a light thin powdering of snow on the stones; Festival, and High Summer, were upon us. Still it seemed cold to me after Vainwal and I dressed in my warmest cloak. Let the Terrans call me barbarianif they liked, I was home again, I would wear the warm clothes my own world demanded. The fur lining felt good even at this season as I drew it round me. Both Marius and Jeff offered to accompany me; but this was private business and I must attend to it by myself, so I refused.

It was a bright day; the sun, huge and red—the Terrans called it Cottman’s Star, but to me it was just the sun, and just the way a sun should be—hung on the horizon, coming free of layers of morning cloud, and there were two small shadows in the sky where Liriel and Kyrddis were waning. Once I could have told you what month we were in, and what tenday of which month, by the position of the moons; as well as what to plant, in season, or what animals would be rutting or dropping their young; there is a month called Horse Month because more than three-quarters of the mares will foal before it fades, and there are all kinds of jokes about Wind Month because that is when the stallions and chervines and other animals run in rut; I suppose, where people live very close to the land, they work too hard to have much time for rutting, like the stallions, except at the proper season, and it becomes an uneasy joke.

But all that land… knowledge was only a dim memory, though I supposed, as I lived here longer, it would come back to me. As I strode through the morning streets, I felt comfortable under morning light and shadowed moons, something in my brain soothed and fed by the familiar lights. I’ve been on several planets, with anywhere from one to six moons—with more than that, the tides make the place uninhabitable—and suns yellow, red and blazing blue-white; at least I knew this one would not burn my skin red or brown!

So Marius, in addition to a Terran education, had the Aldaran Gift. That could be a dangerous combination, and I wondered how the Council would feel when they knew. Would they accept him, or would they demand that I adopt one of Gabriel’s sons?

It was a fairly stiff walk from the quarter of the city where my father and his forefathers had kept their town house, to the gates of the Terran Zone. A high wind was blowing, and I felt stiff. I wasn’t used to this kind of walk, and for six years I had lived on a world, Terra or Vainwal, where urgent business could be settled by mechanical communicators—anywhere in the Empire I could have settled the formalities for the dissolution of a marriage by communicator and video-screens—and where, if personal appearance had really been necessary, I could have all kinds of mechanical transport at a moment’s notice. Darkover has never had much interest in roads—it takes either machine labor, man-hours or matrix work to build good roads, and our world has never wanted to pay the price of any of those three. I’d spent my share of time in a Tower, providing the kind of communication you can get through the relays, telepathically operated; and I’d done my share of mining, too, and chemically purifying minerals. I’d monitored, and trained monitors. But I knew how hard it was to find enough talent for the matrix work, and it was no longer required of my caste, who had laran, that they spend their lives behind Tower walls, working for the people they served.

Were we Comyn the rulers of our people, because of ourlaran …or were we their slaves? And which was which? A slave is a slave, even if, for hislaran work, the people he serves surround him in every luxury and bow to his every word. A protected class quickly becomes an exploited and exploiting class. Look at women.

The gates of the Terran HQ, stark and sombre, loomed before me, a black-leathered spaceman at their gates. I gave my name and the guard used his communicator; they admitted I was on legitimate business, and let me in. My father had gone to some trouble to arrange double citizenship for me, and the Terrans claimed that Darkover was a lost Terran colony anyhow, which meant it was part of their policy to grant citizens rights to anyone who went to the trouble of applying for them. I had never troubled to vote for a representative in the Imperial Senate or Parliament, but I had a shrewd suspicion that Lerrys always did. I don’t have much faith in parliamentary governments—they tend to pick, not the best man, but the one who appeals to the widest mass temperament, and, in general, majorities tend to be always wrong—as the long history of culture and the constant return of certain types of slavery and religious bigotry show us. I didn’t trust the Empire to make decisions for Darkover, and why in all of Zandru’s nine hells—or the four hundred known and inhabited worlds of the Empire—should the Darkovans have any voice in making decisions for such worlds as Vainwal? Even in small groups—such as Comyn Council—politicians are men who want to tell their fellows what to do; and thus criminal at heart. I seldom thought about it much, and preferred it that way. My father had tried, many times, to point out the flaws in that reasoning, but I had better things to do with my life than worry about politics.

Better things? Had I anything to do with my life at all? At the back of my brain it seemed there was a familiar mutter. I kept my thoughts resolutely away from it, knowing that if I focused on it, it would be the clamor of my father’s voice, the nag of the Sharra matrix at my brain– no, I wouldn’t think of it.

The marriage was a line in a computer, hardly more than that. My occupation? When I went offworld, drugged and only half alive after being seared in Sharra’s fires, my father had had to name his occupation and he had put both his and mine down as Matrix mechanic. What a joke that was! He could have called himself rancher—Armida produces about a twentieth of the horses traded in the Kilghard Hills—or, because of his post as commander of the Guards, soldier;or, for that matter, because of his Council seat, claimed equal rank with a Senator or Parliamentarian. But, knowing the mystique the Terrans attach to our matrix technology, he had called himself, Matrix Technician, and me, mechanic. What a joke that was! I couldn’t monitor a pebble from the forge-folk’s cave! Not with my matrix still overshadowed by Sharra—

There were technicians and Keepers on Darkover still. Perhaps I could be freed… but later, later. The business at hand was trouble enough. Lewis-Kennard Montray-Lanart, Lord Alton, resident of Cottman Four—which is what the Empire calls Darkover—occupation, matrix mechanic, residence, Armida in the Kilghard Hills, temporary residence– I gave them the name of the street and the square of the town house. Damned if I wanted Comyn Castle brought into this! Wife’s name: Diotima Ridenow-Montray. Wife’s middle name. I didn’t think she had any, I said. I was sure she did, and probably didn’t use it; half the Ridenow of Serrais named their daughters Cassilda, perhaps because there was some doubt about their status as genuine descendants of Hastur and Cassilda, who probably never existed anyhow. Wife’s residence. Well, she was certainly in the custody of her brother, so I gave the estate of Serrais, where the Ridenow ought to live, and I heartily wished they were all out there. Reason for dissolution of marriage?

Here I stopped, not sure what to say, and the clerk, who acted as if loves like this were disrupted a hundred times a day, and in the anthill population of the Empire they probably were, told me irritably that I must state a reason for dissolving the marriage. Well, I could hardly say that her brother threatened to murder me otherwise!

The clerk prompted: “Barrenness if you both wish for children; impotence; irreconcilable differences in life-styles; desertion…”

That would do; she had certainly deserted me.

But the clerk was yammering on.

“Allergy to the other’s planet or residence; failure to support the children of the marriage; inability to father viable offspring if both wish for children…”

“That will do,” I said, though I knew in principle that this, or barrenness, were seldom actually cited for divorces; usually they cited less offensive reasons by mutual consent, such as desertion or irreconcilable difference of life-styles. But Dio had asked for it, and I would state the real reason.

Slowly he put it into the computer in code; now it was on record that I was incapable of fathering viable offspring. Well, they must have it somewhere in the records of that Terran hospital on Vainwal– what had been born to Dio on that night of disaster. I smothered an agonized picture of Dio, smiling up at me as she talked about our son… no. It was over. She wanted to be free of me, I would not cling to a woman who had every reason to despise me.

While the clerk was finishing up the details, a communicator beeped somewhere, and he answered it, looked up.

“Mr. Montray, if you will stop at the Legate’s office on your way out—”

“The Legate?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. I had seen the Terran Legate once, a stuffy functionary named Ramsay, when he attended a conference where I had been Honor Guard; I was still one of my father’s officers, then. Perhaps he too wished to pay courtesy condolences after my father’s death, the sort of meaningless social formality not limited to Darkover orto Terra. The clerk said, “That’s finished, then,” and I saw our marriage, and our love, reduced to meaningless lines of print, stored somewhere in a computer. The thought filled me with revulsion.

“Is that all there is to it?”

“Unless your wife contests the divorce within a tenday,” said the clerk, and I smiled bitterly. She wouldn’t. I had caused enough havoc in her life; I could not blame her if she wanted no more.

The clerk pointed me in the direction of the Legate’s office, but when I got there, (wishing, because of the stares, that I had worn my hand) I found the Legate was not the man I remembered, but that his name was Dan Lawton.

I had known him briefly. He was actually a distant relative of mine, though closer kin to Dyan—who was, after all, my father’s cousin. Lawton’s story was something like mine; only reversed, Terran father, a mother who was a kinswoman of Comyn. He could have claimed a seat in Comyn Council if he had chosen; he had chosen otherwise. He was tall and lean, his hair nearer to Comyn red than my own. His greeting was friendly, not over-hearty, and he did not, to my great relief, offer to shake hands; it’s a custom I despise, all the more since I had no longer a proper handshake to offer. But he didn’t evade my eyes; there are not many men who can, or will, look a telepath full in the eyes.

“I heard about your father,” he said. “I suppose you’re sick of formal condolences; but I knew him and liked him. So you’ve been on Terra. Like it there?”

I said edgily, “Are you implying I should have stayed there?”

He shook his head. “Your business. You’re Lord Armida now, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so. It’s up to Council to confirm me.”

“We can use friends in Council,” he said. “I don’t mean spies; I mean people who understand our ways and don’t automatically think all Terrans are monsters. Danvan Hastur arranged for your younger brother to be educated here at the Terran HQ; he got the same education a Senator’s son would have had: politics, history, mathematics, languages– you might encourage him to go in that direction when he’s old enough. I always hoped your father would apply for a place in the Imperial Senate, but I had no chance to persuade him. Maybe your brother.”

“That would be one direction for Marius, if the Council won’t accept him as my formal Heir,” I said, temporizing. It did make more sense than putting him at the head of the Guards. Gabriel wanted thatand would be good at it. “I’ll talk to him about it.”

“Before he would be eligible for Imperial Senate,” he said, “he must live on at least three different planets for a year apiece, and demonstrate understanding of different cultures. It’s not too soon to start arranging it. If he’s interested, I’ll put him in the way of a minor diplomatic post somewhere– Samarra, perhaps. Or Megaera.”

I did not know if Marius was interested in politics. I said so, adding that I would ask him. It might be a viable alternative for my brother.

And I need not test him for the Alton Gift, need not risk his death at my hands… as my father had risked mine…

“Is he, too, a matrix mechanic?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t even know how much of a telepath he is.”

“There are telepaths on some worlds,” he said. “Not many, and this is the only culture where they’re really taken for granted. But if he’d be more comfortable on a world where the population accepted telepathic and psi powers as a matter of course—”

“I’ll ask him.” I hoped that when I broached the subject Marius wouldn’t think I was trying to get rid of him. In history, brothers were allies; in fact they had all too often been rivals. Marius ought to know how little I cared to dispute with him for the Domain! I made a move to rise. “Was there anything else?”

“As a matter of fact,” Lawton said, “there was. What do you know about a man named Robert Raymon Kadarin?”

I flinched. I knew too much about the accursed traitor Kadarin, who had—once—been friend, almost brother; who had brought the Sharra matrix from its forges, given it over to me, given me these scars, forced Marjorie to the pole of Sharra’s power– no!I made myself stop thinking about that; my teeth clenched. “He’s dead.”

“We thought so too,” said Lawton. “And even in the course of nature and time, he oughtto be dead. He was on Terran Intelligence considerably before I was born—hell, before my grandfather was born, which means he’s probably about a hundred, or older.”

I remembered the gray eyes, colorless– there was chieriblood in the Hellers, as there had been in Thyra, in Majorie herself and her unknown mother. And the mountain men with the half-human chieriblood were abnormally long-lived, as some of the old Hastur kings had been.

“He’s dead anyway if he crosses my path,” I said. “His life is mine, where, as and how I can; if I see him, I warn you, I will kill him like a dog.”

“Blood-feud—?” Lawton asked, and I said, “Yes.” He was one of the few Terrans who would understand. Unsettled blood-feud outweighs any other obligation, in the hills– I could, if need be, stall the formal proceedings for claiming the Alton Domain by speaking of blood-feud in the old way.

I should have killed him before… I thought he was dead.

I had been offworld, forgetting my duty, my honor– I thought him dead already– and a voice whispered in my mind, but ready to roar again, my last command… return to Darkover, fight for your brother’s rights– the Alton Domain could not survive with the stain of unsettled blood-feud—

“What makes you think he’s alive?” I asked. “And why do you ask me about him anyway? I’ve been offworld, in any case, even if I hadn’t, he’d hardly be likely to hide himself under my cloak!”

“Nobody accused you of sheltering him,” Lawton pointed out. “I understood, though, that you and he were allies during the rebellion and the Sharra troubles, when Caer Donn burned…”

I said quickly, to ward off questions, “No doubt you’ve heard some of the story from Beltran—”

“I haven’t. I’ve never met the present Lord Aldaran,” Lawton said, “though I saw him once. Did you know there’s a very strong resemblance? You’re cousins, aren’t you?”

I nodded. I have seen twins who were less like than Beltran and I; and there had been a time when I had been glad of that resemblance. I said, touching the scars on my face, “We’re not so much alike now.”

“Still, at a quick look, anyone who knew you both might take either of you for the other,” Lawton said. “Half a gram of cosmetic would cover those scars. But that’s neither here nor there… what did Kadarin have to do with Beltran, and with you?”

I gave him a brief, bald, emotionless outline of the story. Spurred on by Beltran of Aldaran, when old Lord Aldaran– who was my great-uncle—lay dying, the old man who called himself Kadarin had brought the Sharra matrix from the forge-folk.

“The name Kadarin is just defiance,” I said. “In the Hellers, any—bastard—is known as a ‘son of the Kadarin’ and he adopted it.”

“He was one of our best intelligence men, before he left the Service,” Lawton said, “or so the records say. I wasn’t out of school then. Anyhow, there was a price on his head—he’d served on Wolf; nobody knew he’d come back to Darkover until the Sharra trouble broke out.”

I fought against a memory: Kadarin, lean, wolfish, smiling, telling me of his travels in the Empire; I had listened with a boy’s fascination. So had Marjorie. Marjorie– time slid, for a moment, I walked the streets of a city which now lay in burned ruins, hand in hand with a smiling girl with amber eyes… and we shared a dream which would bring Terran and Darkovan together as equals.

I told the story flatly, as best I could.

“Beltran, with Kadarin, had a plan, to form a circle around one of the old, high-level matrixes; show the Terrans that we had a technology, a science, of our own. It was one of the matrixes that could power aircraft, mine metals—we thought, when we learned to handle it, we could offer it to the Empire in return for some of the Empire sciences. We formed a circle—a Tower circle, but without a Tower; a mechanic’s circle—”

“I’m no expert at matrix technology,” said Lawton, “but I know something about it. Go on. Just you and Kadarin and Beltran, or were there others?”

I shook my head. “Beltran’s half-sister Thyra; her mother was said to be part chieri, a foundling of the forest-folk. She—the chieriwoman, I don’t remember her name—also had two children by one of Lord Aldaran’s Terran officers, a Captain Scott.”

“I know his son,” said Lawton. “Rafael Scott—do you mean to tell me he was one of you? He wouldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, would he? You’d take a childinto a thing like that?”

“Rafe was twelve,” I said, “and his laranwas awake, or he couldn’t have been one of us. You know enough about Darkover to know that if a child’s old enough to function as a man—or a woman—then he’s old enough, and that’s all there is to it. I know you Terrans tend to keep young men and women in the playroom long after they’re grown; we don’t. Do we have to debate social customs now? Rafe was one of us. And so was Thyra, and so was Rafe’s sister Marjorie.” And then I stopped. There was no way I could talk about Marjorie; not now, with old wounds torn fresh.

“The matrix got out of control. Half of Caer Donn went up in flames. I suppose you know the story. Majorie died. I—” I shrugged, moving the stump of my arm slightly. “Rafe didn’t seem much the worse when I saw him last. But I thought Kadarin, and Thyra, were both dead.”

“I don’t know about the woman,” Lawton said. “I haven’t heard. Wouldn’t know her if she walked into this office. But Kadarin’s alive. He was seen in Thendara, less than a tenday ago.”

“If he’s alive, she’s alive,” I said. “Kadarin would have died before letting her be hurt.” Guilt clawed me again; as I should have died before Marjorie, Marjorie… and then I had a disquieting thought. Thyra was Aldaran as well as chieri. Had she foreseen the return of Sharra to Darkover… and come to Thendara, drawn by that irresistible pull, even before I knew, myself, that I would bring it back?

Were we nothing more than pawns of that damned thing?

Lawton said, “What is Sharra? Just a matrix—”

“It’s that, certainly,” I said. “A very high-level one; ninth or tenth,” and I forestalled his question. “In general, a ninth-level matrix is a matrix which can only be operated or controlled by at least nine qualified telepaths of mechanic level.”

“But I gather it’s more—”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s probably—I’m not sure what it is. The forge-folk thought it was the talisman controlling a Goddess who brought fire to their forges…”

Lawton said, “I was not asking for an account of Darkovan superstitions about Sharra. I’ve heard the stories of the flamehair—”

“They’re not stories,” I said. “You weren’t there when Caer Donn burned, were you? Sharra appeared—and struck fire down on the ships—”

He said restlessly, “Hypnotism. Hallucination.”

“But the fire was real,” I said, “and believe me, the Form of Fire is real.” I shut my eyes as if I could see it there, as if my matrix was keyed to the burning in that older, larger matrix—

Lawton may have had a touch of laran;I have never been sure. Many Terrans do, not knowing what it is or how to use it. He asked, “Do you suppose he came to Thendara because you were here—to try and recover the Sharra matrix?”

That was what I feared. Above all, that was what I feared; the matrix in the hands of Kadarin again…

and I unwilling slave to the matrix, burning, burning, sealed to the form of fire… “I would kill him before that,” I said. ,