Heritage and Exile (83 page)

He said neutrally, “If you need help, Lew, I'm here,” but I shook my head.

“I'm all right; need sleep, that's all. Who is Keeper at Arilinn now?”

“Miranie from Dalereuth; I don't know who her family was—she never talks about them. Janna Lindir, who was Keeper when you were at Arilinn, married Bard Storn-Leynier, and they have two sons; but Janna put them out to foster, and came back as Chief Monitor at Neskaya. We need strong telepaths, Lew; I wish you could come back, but I suppose they'll need you on the Council—”

Again I saw him flinch, slightly, at my reaction to that. I knew the state I was in, as well as he did; every transient emotion was broadcasting at full strength. Andres, Terran and without any visible
laran,
still noticed Marius's distress; he had, after all, lived with a telepath family since before I was born. He said stolidly, “I can find a damper and put it on, if you wish.”

“That won't be—” I started to say, but Jeff said firmly, “Good. Do that.” And before long the familiar unrhythmic pulses began to move through my mind, disrupting it. It blanked it out for the others—at least the specific content—but for me it substituted nausea for the sharper pain. I listened with half an ear to Marius telling Andres what had happened at the Council. Andres, as I had foreseen, understood at once what the important thing was.

“At least they recognized you; your right to inherit was challenged, but for once the old tyrant had to admit you existed,” snorted Andres. “It's a beginning, lad.”

“Do you think I give a damn—” Marius demanded. “All my life I haven't been good enough for them to spit on, and suddenly—”

“It's what your father fought for all his life,” Andres said, and Jeff said quietly, “Ken would have been proud of you, Marius.”

“I'll bet,” said the boy scornfully. “So proud he couldn't come back even once—”

I bent my head. It was my fault, too, that Marius had had no father, no kinsman, no friend, but was left alone and neglected by the proud Comyn. I was relieved when Rafe came back, saying he had found a licensed technician in the street of the Four Shadows, and he had sold him a few ounces of
raivannin.
Jeff mixed it, and said, “How much—”

“As little as possible,” I said. I had had some experience with the chemical damping-drugs, and I didn't want to be helpless, or unable to wake if I got into one of those terrible spiraling nightmares where I was trapped again in horrors beyond horrors, where demons of fire flamed and raged between worlds. . . .

“Just enough so you won't have to sleep under the dampers,” he said. To my cramping shame, I had to let him hold it to my lips, but when I had swallowed it, wincing at its biting astringency, I felt the disruptions of the telepathic damper gradually subsiding, mellowing, and slowly, gradually, it was all gone.

It felt strange to be wholly without telepathic sensitivity; strange and disquieting, like trying to hear under water or with clogged ears; painful as the awareness had been, now I felt dulled, blinded. But the pain was gone, and the clamor of my father's voice; for the first time in days, it seemed, I was free of it. It was there under the thick blankets of the drug, but I need not listen. I drew a long, luxurious breath of calm.

“You should sleep. Your room's ready,” Andres said. “I'll get you upstairs, lad—and don't bother fussing about it; I carried you up these stairs before you were breeched, and I can do it again if I have to.”

I actually felt as if I could sleep, now. With another long sigh, I stood up, catching for balance.

Andres said, “They couldn't do anything about the hand, then?”

“Nothing. Too far gone.” I could say it calmly now; I had, after all, before that ghastly debacle when Dio's child was born and died, learned to live with the fact. “I have a mechanical hand but I don't wear it much, unless I'm doing really heavy work, or sometimes for riding. It won't take much strain, and gets in my way. I can manage better, really, without it.”

“You'll have your father's room,” Andres said, not taking too much notice. “Let me give you a hand with the stairs.”

“Thanks. I really don't need it.” I was deathly tired, but my head was clear. We went into the hallway, but as we began to mount the stairs, the entry bell pealed and I heard one of the servants briefly disputing; then someone pushed past him, and I saw the tall, red-haired form of Lerrys Ridenow.

“Sorry to disturb you here; I looked for you in the Alton suite in Comyn Castle,” he said. “I have to talk to you, Lew. I know it's late, but it's important.”

Tiredly, I turned to face him. Jeff said, “Dom Lerrys, Lord Armida is ill.” It took me a moment to realize he was talking about me.

“This won't take long.” Lerrys was wearing Darkovan clothing now, elegant and fashionable, the colors of his Domain. In the automatic gesture of a trained telepath in the presence of someone he distrusts, I reached for contact; remembered: I was drugged with
raivannin
, at the mercy of whatever he chose to tell me. It must be like this for the head-blind. Lerrys said, “I didn't know you were coming back here. You must know you're not popular.”

“I can live without that,” I said.

“We haven't been friends, Lew,” he said. “I suppose this won't sound too genuine; but I'm sorry about your father. He was a good man, and one of the few in the Comyn with enough common sense to be able to see the Terrans without giving them horns and tails. He had lived among the Terrans long enough to know where we would eventually be going.” He sighed, and I said, “You didn't come out on a rainy night to give me condolences about my father's death.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I didn't. I wish you'd had the sense to stay away. Then I wouldn't have to say this. But here you are, and here I am, and I do have to say it. Stay away from Dio or I'll break your neck.”

“Did she send you to say that to me?”

“I'm saying it,” Lerrys said. “This isn't Vainwal. We're in the Domains now, and—” He broke off. I wished with all my heart that I could read what was behind those transparent green eyes. He looked like Dio, damn him, and the pain was fresh in me again, that the love between us had not been strong enough to carry us through tragedy. “Our marriage ceremony was a Terran one. It has no force in the Domains. No one there would recognize it.” I stopped and swallowed. I had to, before I could say, “If she wanted to come back to me, I'd—I'd welcome it. But I'm not going to force it on her, Lerrys, don't worry about that. Am I a Dry-towner, to chain her to me?”

“But a time's coming when we'll all be Terrans,” Lerrys said, “and I don't want her tied to you then.”

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
laran
to 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;
coridom
or 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
laran
was 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
that
kind 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
laran
were forbidden.

The Compact was not invented to ban blasters and firearms, but the older
laran
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
must
be 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!