Текст книги "Heritage Of Hastur"

Автор книги: Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Lew paused at an ornate double door, scowling at the guard stationed there. “You guard a guest, sir?”

“Safeguard, DomLewis. Lord Beltran ordered me to see that no one disturbed him. Everybody’s not friendly to the valley folk here. See?” the guard said, thrusting the door open. “He’s not locked in.”

Lew went in and called, “Danilo?” Regis, following him, took in at a glance the luxurious old-fashioned surroundings. Danilo came from an inner room, stopped short.

Regis felt overwhelming relief. He couldn’t speak. Lew smiled. “You see,” he said, “alive and well and unharmed.”

Danilo flung back his head in an aggressive gesture. He said, “Did you send to have him captured, too?”

“How suspicious you are, Dani,” Lew said. “Ask him yourself. I’ll send servants to look after you.”

He touched Regis lightly on the arm. “My own honor pledged on it, no harm shall come to either of you, and you shall depart unharmed when you are able to travel.” He added, “Take good care of him, Dani,” and withdrew, closing the door.

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Chapter EIGHTEEN

When I came back to the fireside room, Thyra was still playing her harp, and I realized how short a time I had been away; she was still singing the ballad of the outlaw berserker.

And when will you come back again,

Brother, tell me, tell me?

When the sun and the moon rise together in the West,

And that shall never be.

It must be immeasurably old, I thought, and alien, to speak of one moon instead of four! Beltran had returned and was gazing into the fire, looking angry and remote. He must have gotten the scolding he deserved from Kermiac. Before this, the old man’s illness had kept any of us from telling Kermiac what Beltran had done. I was distressed because Beltran was distressed—I couldn’t help it, I liked him, I understood what had prompted his rash orders. But what he had done to Danilo was unforgivable, and I was angry with him, too.

And he knew it. His voice, when he turned to me, was truculent.

“Now that you’ve put the child to bed—”

“Don’t mock the lad, cousin,” I said. “He’s young, but he was man enough to cross the Hellers alone. I wouldn’t.”

Beltran said, “I’ve had that already from Father; he had nothing but praise for the boy’s courage and good manner! I don’t need it from you, too!” And he turned his back on me again. Well, I had little sympathy for him. He might well have lost us any chance of Danilo’s friendship or help; and Danilo’s help, as I saw it now, was all that could save this circle. If Beltran’s larancould be fully opened, if with Danilo’s aid we could discover and open up a few more latent telepaths, there was a chance, a bare chance but one I was willing to take, that we might somehow control the Sharra matrix. Without that it seemed hopeless.

Marjorie smiled and said, “Your friend wouldn’t speak to me or look at me. But I would like to know him.”

“He’s a valley man, love, he’d think it rude and boorish to stare at a maiden. But he is my good friend.”

Kadarin’s lip curled in amusement. “Yet it wasn’t for yoursake he crossed the mountains, but for the Syrtis boy.”

“I came here of my free will, and Regis knew it,” I retorted, then laughed heartily. “By my probably nonexistent forefathers, Bob, do you think I am jealous? I am no lover of boys, but Regis was put in my charge when he was a little lad. He’s dearer to me than my own brother born.”

Marjorie smiled her heart-stopping smile and said, “Then I shall love him, too.”

Thyra looked up and taunted, through the chords of her harp, “Come, Marjorie, you’re a Keeper! If a man touches you you’ll go up in smoke or something!”

Icy shudders suddenly racked me. Marjorie, burning in Sharra’s flame … I took one stride toward the fire, wrenched the harp from Thyra’s hands, then caught myself, still rigid. What had I been about to do? Fling the harp across the room, bring it down crashing across that mocking face? Slowly, deliberately, forcing my shaking muscles to relax, I brought the harp down and laid it on the bench.

“ Breda,” I said, using the word for sister, not the ordinary one but the intimate word which could also mean darling, “such mockery is unworthy of you. If I had thought it possible, or if I had had the training of you from the first, don’t you think I would have chosen you rather than Marjorie? Don’t you think I would rather have had Marjorie free?” I put my arm around her. For a moment she was defiant, gazing angrily up at me.

“Would you really have trusted me to keep your rule of chastity?” she flung at me. I was too shocked to answer. At last I said, “ Breda, it isn’t you I don’t trust, it’s your training.”

She had been rigid in my arms; suddenly she went limp against me, her arms clinging around my neck. I thought she would cry. I said, still trembling with that mixture of fury and tenderness, “And don’t make jests about the fires! Evanda have mercy, Thyra! You were never at Arilinn, you have never seen the memorial, but have you, who are a singer of ballads, never heard the tale of Marelie Hastur? I have no voice for singing, but I shall tell it you, if you need reminding that there is no jesting about such matters!” I had to break off. My voice was trembling.

Kadarin said quietly, “We all saw Marjorie in the fire, but it was an illusion. You weren’t hurt, were you, Margie?”

“No. No, I wasn’t. No, Lew. Don’t, please don’t. Thyra didn’t mean anything,” Marjorie said, shaking. I ached to reach out for her, take her in my arms, keep her safe. Yet that would place her in more danger than anything else I could possibly do.

I had been a fool to touch Thyra.

She was still clinging to me, warm and close and vital. I wanted to thrust her violently away, but at the same time I wanted—and she knew it, damn it, she knew it!—I wanted what I would have had as a matter of course from any woman of my own circle who was not a Keeper. What would have dispelled this hostility and tension. Any woman tower-trained would have sensed the state I was in and felt responsible …

I forced myself to be calm, to release myself from Thyra’s arms. It wasn’t Thyra’s fault, any more than it was Marjorie’s. It wasn’t Thyra’s fault that Marjorie, and not herself, had been forced by lack of any other to be Keeper. It wasn’t Thyra who had roused me this way. It wasn’t Thyra’s fault, either, that she had not been trained to the customs of a tower circle, where the intimacy and awareness is closer than any blood tie, closer than love, where the need of one evokes a real responsibility in the others.

I could impose the laws of a tower circle on this group only so far as was needed for their own safety. I could not ask more than this. Their own bonds and ties went far back, beyond my coming. Thyra had nothing but contempt for Arilinn. And to come between Thyra and Kadarin was not possible.

Gently, so she would not feel wounded by an abrupt withdrawal, I moved away from her. Beltran, staring into the fire, as if hypnotized by the darting flames, said in a low voice, “Marilie Hastur. I know the tale. She was a Keeper at Arilinn who was taken by mountain raiders in the Kilghard Hills, ravaged and thrown out to die by the city wall. Yet from pride, or fear of pity, she concealed what had been done to her and went into the matrix screens in spite of the law of the Keepers … And she died, a blackened corpse like one lightning-struck.”

Marjorie shrank, and I damned Beltran. Why did he have to tell that story in Marjorie’s hearing? It seemed a piece of gratuitous cruelty, very unlike Beltran.

Yes. And I had been about to tell it to Thyra, and I had come near to breaking her own harp across her head. That was very unlike me, too.

What in all the Gods had come to us!

Kadarin said harshly, “A lying tale. A pious fraud to scare Keepers into keeping their virginity, a bogeyman to frighten babies and girl-children!”

I thrust out my scarred hand. “Bob, thisis no pious fraud!”

“Nor can I believe it had anything to do with your virginity,” he retorted, laughing, and laid a kind hand on my shoulder. “You’re giving yourself nightmares, Lew. For your Marelie Hastur I give you Cleindori Aillard, who was kinswoman to your own father, and who married and bore a son, losing no iota of her powers as Keeper. Have you forgotten they butchered her to keep thatsecret? That alone should give the lie to all this superstitious drivel about chastity.”

I saw Marjorie’s face lose a little of its tension and was grateful to him, even if not wholly convinced. We were working here without elementary safeguards, and I was not yet willing to disregard this oldest and simplest of precautions.

Kadarin said, “If you and Marjorie feel safer to lie apart until this work is well underway, it’s your own choice. But don’t give yourselves nightmares either. She’s well in control. I feel safe with her.” He bent down, kissing her lightly on the forehead, a kiss completely without passion but altogether loving. He put a free arm around me, drew me against him, smiling. I thought for a moment he would kiss me too, but he laughed. “We’re both too old for that,” he said, but without mockery. For a moment we were all close together again, with no hint of the terrible violence and disharmony that had thrust us apart. I began to feel hope again.

Thyra asked softly, “How is it with our father, Beltran?” I had forgotten that Thyra was his daughter too.

“He is very weak,” Beltran said, “but don’t fret, little sister, he’ll outlive all of us.”

I said, “Shall I go to him, Beltran? I’ve had long experience treating shock from matrix overload—”

“And so have I, Lew,” Kadarin said kindly, releasing me. “ Allthe knowledge of matrix technology is not locked up at Arilinn, bredu. I can do better without sleep than you young people.”

I knew I should insist, but I did not have the heart to face down another of Thyra’s taunts about Arilinn. And it was true that Kermiac had been training technicians in these hills before any of us were born. And my own weariness betrayed me. I swayed a little where I stood, and Kadarin caught and steadied me.

“Go and rest, Lew. Look, Rafe’s asleep on the rug. Thyra, call someone to carry him to bed. Off with you now, all of you!”

“Yes,” said Beltran, “tomorrow we have work to do, we’ve delayed long enough. Now that we have a catalyst telepath—”

I said somberly, “It may take a long time now to persuade him to trust you, Beltran. And you cannot use force on him. You know that, don’t you?”

Beltran looked angry. “I won’t hurt a hair of his precious little head, kinsman. But you’d better be damned good at persuading. Without his help, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

I didn’t either. We needed Danilo so terribly. We separated quietly, all of us sobered. I had a terrible feeling of weight on my heart. Thyra walked beside the burly servant who was carrying Rafe to bed. Kadarin and Beltran, I knew, were going to watch beside Kermiac. I should have shared that vigil. I loved the old man and I was responsible for the moment’s lack of control which had struck him down.

I was about to leave Marjorie at the foot of her tower stairway, but she clung hard to my hand.

“Please, Lew. Stay with me. As you did the other day.”

I started to agree, then realized something else.

I didn’t trust myself.

Whether it was the brief disturbing physical contact with Thyra, whether it was the upsetting force of the quarrel, or the old songs and ballads … I didn’t trust myself!

Even now, it took all my painfully acquired discipline, all of it, to keep from taking her into my arms, kissing her senseless, carrying her up those stairs and into her room, to the bed we had shared so chastely …

I stopped myself right there. But we were deeply in contact; she had seen, felt, sharedthat awareness with me. She was blushing, but she did not turn her eyes from mine. She said at last, quietly, “You told me that when we were working like this, nothing could happen that would harm or … or endanger me.”

I shook my head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand it either, Marjorie. Normally, at this stage,” and here I laughed, a short unmirthful sound, “you and I could lie down naked together and sleep like brothers or unweaned babies. I don’t know what’s happened, Marjorie, but I don’t dare. Gods above!” I almost shouted at her. “Don’t you think I want to?”

Now she did avert her eyes for a moment. She said in a whisper, “Kadarin says it’s only a superstition. I’ll … I’ll risk it if you want to, Lew. If you need to.”

Now I really felt ashamed. I was better disciplined than this. I made myself take a long breath, unclench my hands from the railings of the stair. “No, beloved. Perhaps I can find out what’s gone wrong. But I have to be alone.”

I heard her plea, not aloud but straight to my mind, straight to my heart: Don’t leave me! Don’t go, Lew, don’t… I broke the contact harshly, cutting her off, shutting her out. It hurt horribly, but I knew that if this went on I would never be able to leave her, and I knew where it would end. And her discipline held. She closed her eyes, drawing a deep breath. I saw that curious look of distance, withdrawnness, isolation, slip down over her features. The look Callina had had, that Festival Night. The look I had seen so often on Janna’s face, my last season at Arilinn. She had known I loved her, wanted her. It hurt, but I felt relieved, too. Marjorie said quietly, “I understand, Lew. Go and sleep, my darling.” She turned and went away from me, up the long stairs, and I went away, blind with pain.

I passed the closed door of the suite where Regis and Danilo had been lodged. I knew I should speak to Regis. He was ill, exhausted. But my own misery made me shrink from the task. He had made it clear he did not want my solicitude. He was reunited with his friend, why should I disturb them now? He would be asleep, I hoped, resting after that terrible journey alone through the Hellers.

I went to my own room and threw myself down without bothering to undress.

Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

I had felt a disruption like this once before, like a vortex of fury, lust, rage, destruction, surging up through us all. It should not be like this. It couldnot be like this!

Normally, matrix work left the workers drained, spent, without anything left over for any violent emotion. Above all, I had grown accustomed to the fact that there was nothing left over for sexuality. It wasn’t that way now.

I had been angry with Thyra at first, not aroused by her. I had been angry when it seemed she mocked Marjorie, and then suddenly I’d been so overcome by my own need that it would have been easy for me to tear off her clothes and take her there before the fire!

And Marjorie. A Keeper. I shouldn’t have been capable even of thinkingabout her this way. Yet I hadthought about it. Damn it, I still ached with wanting her. And she had wanted me to stay with her! Was she weeping now, alone in her room, the tears she had been too proud to shed before me? Should I have risked it? Sanity, prudence, long habit, told me no; no, I had done the only thing it was safe to do.

I glanced briefly at the wrapped bundle of the matrix and felt the faintest thrill of awareness along my nerves. Insulated like that, it should have been wholly dormant. Damn it, I trained at Arilinn and any first-year telepath learns to insulate a matrix! What I insulate stays insulated! I must be dreaming, imagining. I was living on my nerves and by now they were raw, hypersensitive.

That damned thing was responsible for all our troubles. I’d have liked to heave it out the window, or better, send it out on a Terran rocket and let it work its mischief on cosmic dust or something! I heartily wished that Beltran and the Sharra matrix and Kadarin and old Desideria, with all her forge-folk about her, were all frying together on one of their own forges.

I was still in accord with Beltran’s dream, but standing between us and the accomplishment of the dream was this ravening nightmare of Sharra. I knew, I knew with the deepest roots of my self, that I could not control it, that Marjorie could not control it, that nothing human could ever control it. We had only stirred the surface of the matrix. If it was roused all the way it might never be controlled again, and tomorrow I would tell Beltran so.

Clutching this resolve, I fell into an uneasy sleep. For a long time I wandered in confused nightmares through the corridors of Comyn Castle; whenever I met someone, his or her face was veiled or turned away in aversion or contempt. Javanne Hastur refusing to dance with me at a children’s ball. Old Domenic di Asturien with his lifted eyebrows. My father, reaching out to me across a great chasm. Callina Aillard, turning away and leaving me alone on the rain-swept balcony. It seemed I wandered through those halls for hours, with no single human face turned to me in concern or compassion.

And then the dream changed. I was standing on the balcony of the Arilinn Tower, watching the sunrise, and Janna Lindir was standing beside me. I was dreamily surprised to see her. I was back again where I had been happy, where I had been accepted and loved, where there was no cloud on my mind and heart. But I had thought my circle had been broken and scattered, the others to their homes, I to the Guards where I was despised, Janna married … no, surely that had been only a bad dream! She turned and laid her hand in mine, and I felt a deep happiness.

Then I realized it was not Janna but Callina Aillard, saying softly, mockingly, “You do know what’s really wrong with you,” taunting me from the safe barrier of what she was, a Keeper, forbidden, untouchable … Maddened by the surge of need and hunger in me, I reached for her, I tore the veils from her body while she screamed and struggled. I threw her down whimpering on the stones and flung myself atop her, naked, and through her wild cries of terror she changed, she began to flame and glow and burn, the fires of Sharra engulfing us, consuming us in a wild spasm of lust and ecstasy and terror and agony …

I woke up shuddering, crying out with the mingled terror and enchantment of the dream. The Sharra matrix lay shrouded and dormant.

But I dared not close my eyes again that night.

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Chapter NINETEEN

After Lew had gone away, closing the door behind him, it was Regis who moved first, stumbling across the floor as if wading through a snowdrift, to clasp Dani’s shoulders in a kinsman’s embrace. He heard his own voice, hoarse in his ears.

“You’re safe. You really are here and safe.” He had doubted Lew’s word, though never in all his life had he reason to doubt. What kind of evil was here?

“Yes, yes, well and safe,” Danilo said, then drew a harsh breath of dismay. “My lord Regis, you’re soaked through!”

For the first time Regis became aware of the heat from the fireplace, the hangings sealing off drafts, the warmth after the icy blasts of the corridors. The very warmth touched off a spasm of shivering, but he forced himself to say, “The guards. You are really a prisoner, then?”

“They’re here to protect me, so they say. They’ve been friendly enough. Come, sit here, let me get these boots off, you’re chilled to the bone!”

Regis let himself be led to an armchair, so ancient in design that until he was in the seat he was not sure what it was. His feet came out of the boots numb and icy-cold. He was almost too weary to sit up and unlace his tunic; he sat with his hands hanging, his legs stretched out, finally with an effort put his stiff fingers to the tunic-laces. He knew his voice sounded more irritible than he meant.

“I can manage for myself, Dani. You’re my paxman, not my body-servant!”

Danilo, kneeling before the fire to dry Regis’ boots, jerked upright as if stung. He said into the fire, “Lord Regis, I am honored to serve you in any way I may.” Through the stiff formality of the words, Regis, wide open again, feltsomething else, a wordless resonance of despair: He didn’t mean it, then, about accepting my service. It was, it was only a way of atoning for what his kinsman had done…

Without stopping to think, Regis was out of the chair, kneeling beside Dani on the hearth. His voice was shaking, partly with the cold which threatened to rip him apart with shudders, partly with that intense awareness of Dani’s hurt.

“The Gods witness I meant it! It’s only … only … ” Suddenly he knew the right thing to say. “You remember what a fuss it caused, when I expected anyone to wait on me, in the barracks!”

Their eyes caught and held. Regis had no idea whether it was his own thought or Danilo’s: We were boys then. And now … how long ago that seems! Yet it was only last season!It seemed to Regis that they were looking back, as men, across a great chasm of elapsed time, at a shared boyhood. Where had it gone?

With a sense of fighting off unutterable weariness—it seemed he had been fighting off this weariness as long as he could remember—he reached for Danilo’s hands. They felt hard, calloused, real, the only firm anchor-point in a shifting, dissolving universe. Momentarily he felt his hands going throughDanilo’s as if neither of them were quite solid. He blinked hard to focus his eyes, and saw a blue-haloed form in front of him. He could see through Danilo now, to the wall beyond. Trying to focus against the swarming fireflies that spun before his eyes, he remembered Javanne’s warning, fight it, move around, speak. He tried to get his voice back into his throat

“Forgive me, Dani. Who should serve me if not my sworn man … ?”

And as he spoke the words he felt, amazed, the texture of Danilo’s relief: My people have served the Hasturs for generations. Now I too am where I belong.

No! I do not want to be a master of men … !

But the swift denial was understood by both, not as a personal rejection, but the very embodiment of what they both were, so that the giving of Danilo’s service was the pleasure and the relief it was, so that Regis knew he must not only accept that service, but accept it fully, graciously.

Danilo’s face suddenly looked strange, frightened. His mouth was moving but Regis could no longer hear him, floating bodiless in the sparkling darkness. The base of his skull throbbed with ballooning pain. He heard himself whisper, “I am … in your hands … ” Then the world slid side-wise and he felt himself collapse into Danilo’s arms.

He never knew how he got there, but seconds later, it seemed, he felt searing pain all over his naked body, and found himself floating up to the chin in a great tub of boiling water. Danilo, kneeling at his side, was anxiously chafing his wrists. His head was splitting, but he could see solid objects again, and his own body was reassuringly firm. A servant was hovering around with clean garments, trying to attract Danilo’s attention long enough to get his approval of them.

Regis lay watching, too languid to do anything but accept their ministrations. He noticed that Danilo unobtrusively kept his own body between Regis and the Aldaran servant. Danilo chased the man out quickly, muttering under his breath, “I’m not going to trust any of them alone with you!”

At first the water had seemed scalding to his chilled body; now he realized it was barely warm, in fact it must have been drawn for some time, was probably a bath prepared for Danilo before he came in. Danilo was still bending over him, his face tight with worry. Suddenly Regis was filled with such intolerable anxiety that he cut off the intense, sensuous pleasure of the hot water soothing his chilled and stiffened body—eleven nights on the trail and not warm once!—and drew himself upright, hauling himself out of the hot tub, reaching for a towel to wrap himself in. Danilo knelt to dry him, saying, “I sent the servant for a healer-woman, there must be someone of that sort here. Regis, I never saw any-one faint like that before; your eyes were open but you couldn’t hear me or see me … ”

“Threshold sickness.” Briefly he sketched in an explanation. “I’ve had a few attacks before. I’m over the worst.” I hope, he added to himself. “I doubt if the healer could do anything with this. Here, give me that, I can dress myself.” Firmly he took the towel away from Danilo. “Go and tell her not to bother, and find out if there’s anything hot to drink.”

Skeptically Danilo retreated. Regis finished drying himself and clambered into the unfamiliar clothing. His hands were shaking almost too hard to tie the knots of his tunic. What’s the matter with me, he asked himself, why didn’t I want Dani to help me dress? He looked at his hands in cold shock, as if they belonged to someone else. I didn’t want him to touch me!

Even to him that sounded incongruous. They had lived together in the rough intimacy of the barracks room for months. They had been close-linked, even thinking one another’s thoughts.

This was different.

Irresistibly his mind was drawn back to that night in the barracks, when he had reached out to Danilo, torn by an almost frenzied desire to share his misery, the spasm of loathing and horror with which Danilo had flung him away …

And then, shaken and shamed and terrified, Regis knew what had prompted that touch, and why he was suddenly shy of Danilo now. The knowledge struck him motionless, his bare feet cold through the wolfskin rug on the tile floor.

To touch him. Not to comfort Dani, but to comfort his own need, his own loneliness, his own hunger …

He moved deliberately, afraid if he remained motionless another instant the threshold sickness would surge up over him again. He knelt on the wolfskin, drawing fur-lined stockings up over his knees and deliberately tying the thongs into intricate knots. On the surface of his mind he thought that fur clothing was life-saving here in the mountains. It felt wonderful.

But, relentless, the memory he had barricaded since his twelfth year burst open like a bleeding wound; the memory he had let himself lose consciousness before recovering on the northward trail: Lew’s face, alight with fire, his barriers down in the last extremity of exhaustion and pain and fear.

And Regis had shared it all with him, there were no barriers between them. None. Regis had known what Lew wanted and would not ask, was too proud and too shy to ask. Something Regis had never felt before, that Lew thought he was too young to feel or to understand. But Regis had known and had shared it.

And afterward, perhaps because Lew had never spoken of it, Regis was too ashamed to remember. And he had never dared open his mind again. Why? Why? Out of fear, out of shame? Out of … longing?

Until Danilo, without even trying, broke that barricade.

And now Regis knew why it was Dani who could break it …

He doesn’t know, Regis thought, and then with a bleak and spartan pride, He must never know.

He stood up, felt the splitting pain at his forehead again. He knew a frightened moment of disquiet. How could he keep this from him? Dani was a telepath too!

Lew had said it was like living with your skin off. Well, his skin was off and he was doubly naked. Taking a grip on himself, he walked out into the other room, decided his boots weren’t dry. Inside he felt cold and trembly, but physically he was quite warm and calm.

How could be face Lew again, knowing this? Coldly, Regis told himself not to be a fool. Lew had always known. He wasn’t a coward, he didn’t lie to himself! Lew remembered, so no wonder he was astonished when Regis had said he did not have laran!

Lew had asked him why he could not bear to remember …

“You should have gone straight to bed and let me bring you supper there,” Danilo said behind him, and Regis, firmly taking mastery of his face, looked around. Danilo was looking at him with friendly concern, and Regis remembered, with a shock, that Danilo knew nothing, nothing of the memory and awareness that had flooded him in the scant few minutes they had been parted. He said aloud, trying for a casual neutral tone, “I collapsed before I saw anything of the suite but this room. I have no idea where I’m going to be sleeping.”

“And I’ve had days with nothing to do but explore. Come, I’ll show you the way. I told the servant to bring your supper in here. How does it feel to be quartered in a royal suite, after the student dormitory at Nevarsin?”

There was room enough for a regent and all his entourage in this guest suite: enormous bedrooms, servants quarters in plenty, a great hall, even a small octagonal presence chamber with a throne and footstools for petitioners. It was more elaborate than his grandfather’s suite in Thendara. Danilo had chosen the smallest and least elaborate bedroom, but it looked like a royal favorite’s chamber. There was a huge bed on a dais which would, Regis thought irreverently, have held a Dry-Towner, three of his wives and six of his concubines. The servant he had seen before was warming the sheets with a long-handled warming pan, and there was a fire in the fireplace. He let Danilo help him into the big bed, put a tray of hot food beside him. Danilo sent the man away, saying gravely, “It is my privilege to wait on my lord with my own hands.” Regis would have laughed at the solemn, formal words, but knew even a smile would hurt Danilo unspeakably. He kept his composure, until the man was out of earshot, then said, “I hope you’re not going to take that formal my-lord tone all the time now, bredu.”

There was relief in Danilo’s eyes too. “Only in front of strangers, Regis.” He came and lifted covers off steaming bowls of food, clambered up on the bed and poured hot soup from a jug. He said, ‘The food’s good. I had to ask for cider instead of wine the first day, that’s all. I see they brought both tonight, and the cider’s hot.”

Regis drank the soup and the hot cider thirstily; but although it was his first hot meal in days, he found it almost too hard to chew and swallow.

“Now tell me how you found me here, Regis.”

Regis’ hand went to the matrix on the thong around his neck. Danilo shrank a little. “I thought such things were to be used only by technicians, with proper safeguards. Isn’t it dangerous?”