Heritage and Exile (31 page)

Kennard's hands, hot and swollen, touched his temples; he felt for an instant that Kennard was holding him upright. Gradually the seething flood of emotion, foreknowledge, memory, receded. He heard Kennard say, “Threshold sickness. Not crisis, but he's pretty sick. Speak to him, sir.”

“Regis . . .”

Regis struggled, whispered, “Grandfather, Lord Hastur . . . I swear, I will swear . . .”

His grandfather's arms enfolded him gently. “Regis, Regis, I know. But I cannot accept any pledge from you now. Not in your present state. The Gods know I want to, but I cannot. You must leave this to us. You
must,
child. We will deal with Dyan. You have done all you need to do. Just now your task is to go, as Kennard says, to Neskaya, to teach yourself to control your gift.”

He tried again to fight his way upright . . . kneeling on cold stones, crystal lights around him. Words came slowly, painfully, yet he could not escape them:
I pledge my life and honor . . . to Hastur, forever . . .
and terrible pain, knowing he spoke into a closing door, he gave away his life and his freedom. He could not get a word out, not a syllable, and he felt his body and brain would explode with the words bursting in him. He whispered and knew no one could hear him, as his senses slipped away, “. . . swear . . . honor . . .”

His grandfather's eyes met his briefly, a momentary anchor over a swaying darkness where he hung. He heard his grandfather's voice, deep and compassionate, saying firmly,

“The honor of the Comyn has been safe in my hands for ninety years, Regis. You can leave it to me now.”

Regis let them lay him, nearly senseless, on the stone bench.

He let himself slip away into unconsciousness like a little death.

For three days a blizzard had raged in the Hellers. On the fourth day I woke to sunshine and the peaks behind Castle Aldaran gleaming under their burden of snow. I dressed and went down into the gardens behind the castle, standing atop the terraces and looking down on the spaceport below where great machines were already moving about, as tiny at this distance as creeping bugs, to shift the heavy layers of snow. No wonder the Terrans didn't want to move their main port here!

Yet, unlike Thendara, here spaceport and castle seemed part of a single conjoined whole, not warring giants, striding toward battle.

“You're out early, cousin,” said a light voice behind me. I turned to see Marjorie Scott, warmly wrapped in a hooded cloak with fur framing her face. I made her a formal bow.

She smiled and stretched her hand to me. “I like to be out early when the sun's shining. It was so dark during the storm!”

As we walked down the terraces she grasped my cold hand and drew it under her cloak. I had to tell myself that this freedom did not imply what it would mean in the lowlands, but was innocent and unaware. It was hard to remember that with my hand lying between her warm breasts. But damn it, the girl was a telepath, she had to know.

As we went along the path, she pointed out the hardy winter flowers, already thrusting their stalks up through the snow, seeking the sun, and the sheltered fruits casting their snow-pods. We came to a marble-railed space where a waterfall tumbled, storm-swollen, away into the valley.

“This stream carries water from the highest peaks down into Caer Donn, for their drinking water. The dam above here, which makes the waterfall, serves to generate power for the lights, here and down in the spaceport, too.”

“Indeed,
damisela
? We have nothing like this in Thendara.” I found it hard to keep my attention on the stream. Suddenly she turned to face me, swift as a cat, her eyes flashing gold. Her cheeks were flushed and she snatched her hand away from mine. She said, with a stiffness that concealed anger, “Forgive me, Dom Lewis. I presumed on our kinship,” and turned to go. My hand, in the cold again, felt as chilled and icy as my heart at her sudden wrath.

Without thinking, I reached out and clasped her wrist.

“Lady, how have I offended you? Please don't go!”

She stood quite still with my hand clasping her wrist. She said in a small voice, “Are all you valley men so queer and formal? I am not used to being called
damisela,
except by servants. Do you . . . dislike me . . . Lew?”

Our hands were still clasped. Suddenly she colored and tried to withdraw her wrist from my fingers. I tightened them, saying, “I feared to be burned . . . too near the fire. I am very ignorant of your mountain ways. How should I address you, cousin?”

“Would a woman of your valley lands be thought too bold if she called you by name, Lew?”

“Marjorie,” I said, caressing the name with my voice. “Marjorie.” Her small fingers felt fragile and live, like some small quivering animal that had taken refuge with me. Never, not even at Arilinn, had I known such warmth, such acceptance. She said my hands were cold and drew them under her cloak again. All she was telling me seemed wonderful. I knew something of electric power generators—in the Kilghard Hills great windmills harnessed the steady winds—but her voice made it all new to me, and I pretended less knowledge so she would go on speaking.

She said, “At one time matrix-powered generators provided lights for the castle. That technique is lost.”

“It is known at Arilinn,” I said, “but we rarely use it; the cost is high in human terms and there is some danger.” Just the same, I thought, in the mountains they must need more energy against the crueler climate. Easy enough to give up a luxury, but here it might make the difference between civilized life and a brutal struggle for existence.

“Have you been taught to use a matrix, Marjorie?”

“Only a little. Kermiac is too old to show us the techniques. Thyra is stronger than I because she and Kadarin can link together a little, but not for long. The techniques of making the links are what we do not know.”

“That is simple enough,” I said, hesitating because I did not like to think of working in linked circles outside the safety of the tower force-fields. “Marjorie, who is Kadarin, where does he come from?”

“I know no more than he told you,” she said. “He has traveled on many worlds. There are times when he speaks as if he were older than my guardian, yet he seems no older than Thyra. Even she knows not much more than I, yet they have been together for a long time. He is a strange man, Lew, but I love him and I want you to love him too.”

I had warmed to Kadarin, sensing the sincerity behind his angry intensity. Here was a man who met life without self-deception, without the lies and compromises I had lived with so long. I had not seen him for days; he had gone away before the blizzard on unexplained business.

I glanced at the strengthening sun. “The morning's well on. Will anyone be expecting us?”

“I'm usually expected at breakfast, but Thyra likes to sleep late and no one else will care.” She looked shyly up into my face and said, “I'd rather stay with you.”

I said, with a leaping joy, “Who needs breakfast?”

“We could walk into Caer Donn and find something at a food-stall. The food will not be as good as at my guardian's table. . . .”

She led the way down a side path, going by a flight of steep steps that were roofed against the spray from the waterfall. There was frost underfoot, but the roofing had kept the stairway free of ice. The roaring of the waterfall made so much noise that we left off trying to talk and let our clasped hands speak for us. At last the steps came out on a lower terrace leading gently downslope to the city. I looked up and said, “I don't relish the thought of climbing back!”

“Well, we can go around by the horse-path,” she said. “You came up that way with your escort. Or there's a lift on the far side of the waterfall; the Terrans built it for us, with chains and pulleys, in return for the use of our water power.”

A little way inside the city gates Marjorie led the way to a food-stall. We ate freshly baked bread and drank hot spiced cider, while I pondered what she had said about matrices for generating power. Yes, they had been used in the past, and misused, too, so that now it was illegal to construct them. Most of them had been destroyed, not all. If Kadarin wanted to try reviving one there was, in theory at least, no limit to what he could do with it.

If, that was, he wasn't afraid of the risks. Fear seemed to have no part in that curious enigmatic personality. But ordinary prudence?

“You're lost somewhere again, Lew. What is it?”

“If Kadarin wants to do these things he must know of a matrix capable of handling that kind of power. What and where?”

“I can only tell you that it's not on any of the monitor screens in the towers. It was used in the old days by the forge-folk to bring their metals from the ground. Then it was kept at Aldaran for centuries, until one of Kermiac's wards, trained by him, used it to break the siege of Storn Castle.”

I whistled. The matrix had been outlawed as a weapon centuries ago. The Compact had not been made to keep us away from such simple toys as the guns and blasters of the Terrans, but against the terrifying weapons devised in our Ages of Chaos. I wasn't happy about trying to key a group of inexperienced telepaths into a really large matrix, either. Some could be harnessed and used safely and easily. Others had darker histories, and the name of Sharra, Goddess of the forge-folk, was linked in old tales with more than one matrix. This one might, or might not, be possible to bring under control.

She said, looking incredulous, “Are you afraid?”

“Damn right,” I said. “I thought most of the talismans of Sharra-worship had been destroyed before the time of Regis Fourth. I
know
some of them were destroyed.”

“This one was hidden by the forge-folk and given back for their worship after the siege of Storn.” Her lip curled. “I have no patience with that kind of superstition.”

“Just the same, a matrix is no toy for the ignorant.” I stretched my hand out, palm upward over the table, to show her the coin-sized white scar, the puckered seam running up my wrist. “In my first year of training at Arilinn I lost control for a split second. Three of us had burns like this. I'm not joking when I speak of risks.”

For a moment her face contracted as she touched the puckered scar tissue with a delicate fingertip. Then she lifted her firm little chin and said, “All the same, what one human mind can build, another human mind can master. And a matrix is no use to anyone lying on an altar for ignorant folk to worship.” She pushed aside the cold remnants of the bread and said, “Let me show you the city.”

Our hands came irresistibly together again as we walked, side by side, through the streets. Caer Donn was a beautiful city. Even now, when it lies beneath tons of rubble and I can never go back, it stands in my memory as a city in a dream, a city that for a little while
was
a dream. A dream we shared.

The houses were laid out along wide, spacious streets and squares, each with plots of fruit trees and its own small glass-roofed greenhouse for vegetables and herbs seldom seen in the hills because of the short growing season and weakened sunlight. There were solar collectors on the roofs to collect and focus the dim winter sun on the indoor gardens.

“Do these work even in winter?”

“Yes, by a Terran trick, prisms to concentrate and reflect more sunlight from the snow.”

I thought of the darkness at Armida during the snow-season. There was so much we could learn from the Terrans!

Marjorie said, “Every time I see what the Terrans have made of Caer Donn I am proud to be Terran. I suppose Thendara is even more advanced.”

I shook my head. “You'd be disappointed. Part of it is all Terran, part of it all Darkovan. Caer Donn . . . Caer Donn is like you, Marjorie, the best of each world, blended into a single harmonious whole . . .”

This was what our world could be. Should be. This was Beltran's dream. And I felt, with my hands locked tight in Marjorie's, in a closeness deeper than a kiss, that I would risk anything to bring that dream alive and spread it over the face of Darkover.

I said something about how I felt as we climbed together upward again. We had elected to take the longer way, reluctant to end this magical interlude. We must have known even then that nothing to match this morning would ever come again, when we shared a dream and saw it all bright and new-edged and too beautiful to be real.

“I feel as if I were drugged with
kirian
!”

She laughed, a silvery peal. “But the
kireseth
no longer blooms in these hills, Lew. It's all real. Or it can be.”

 

I began as I had promised later that day. Kadarin had not returned, but the rest of us gathered in the small sitting room.

I felt nervous, somehow reluctant. It was always nerve-racking to work with a strange groups of telepaths. Even at Arilinn, when the circle was changed every year, there was the same anxious tension. I felt naked, raw-edged. How much did they know. What skills, potentials, lay hidden in these strangers? Two women, a man and a boy. Not a large circle. But large enough to make me quiver inside.

Each of them had a matrix. That didn't really surprise me since tradition has it that the matrix jewels were first found in these mountains. None of them had his or her matrix what I would call properly safeguarded. That didn't surprise me either. At Arilinn we're very strict in the old traditional ways. Like most trained technicians, I kept mine on a leather thong around my neck, silk-wrapped and inside a small leather bag, lest some accidental stimulus cause it to resonate.