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I said hoarsely, drawing her into my arms again, "Let's not waste any of it."

Neither of us was strong enough for much physical love-making. Most of that night we spent resting ineach other's arms, sometimes talking a little, more often caressing one another in silence. From longtraining at disciplining unwelcome or dangerous thoughts, I was able to put away almost completely allthought of what awaited us tomorrow. Strangely enough, my worst regret was not for death, but for thelong, quiet years of living together which we would never know, for the poignant knowledge that Mariorie would never know the hills near Armida, that she would never come there as a bride. Towardmorning Marjorie cried a little for the child she would not live long enough to bear. Finally, cradled in myarms, she fell into a restless sleep. I lay awake, thinking of my father and of my unborn son, thattoo-fragile spark of life, barely kindled and already extinguished. I wished Marjorie had been spared thatknowledge, at least. No, it was right that someone should weep for it, and I was beyond tears.

Another death to my account...

At last, when the rising sun was already staining the distant peaks with crimson, I slept too. It was like afinal grace of some unknown goddess that there were no evil dreams, no nightmares of fire, only amerciful darkness, the dark robe of Avarra covering our sleep.

I woke still clasped hi Marjorie's arms. The room was full of sunlight; her golden eyes were wide, staringat me with fear.

"They will come for us soon," she said.

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I kissed her, slowly, deliberately, before I rose. "So much the less time of waiting," I said, and went todraw back the bolt. I dressed myself hi my best, defiantly digging from my packs my finest silkunder-tunic, a jerkin and breeches of gold-colored dyed leather. A Comyn heir did not go to his deathlike a common criminal being hanged! Some such emotion must have been in Marjorie yesterday, for shehad evidently put on her finest gown, pale-blue, woven of spider-silk and cut low across the breasts. Instead of her usual plaits, she coiled her hair high atop her head with a ribbon. She looked beautiful andproud. Keeper, comynara.

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Servants brought us some breakfast. I was grateful that she could smile proudly, thanking them in herusual gracious manner. There were no traces in her face of the tears and terror of yesterday; we held ourheads high and smiled into each other's eyes. Neither of us dared speak.

As I had known he would, Kadarin came in as we were silently sharing the last of the fruits on the tray. Idid not know how my body could contain such hate. I was physically sick with the lust to kill him, to feelmy fingers meeting in the flesh of his throat.

And yet-how can I say this?-there was nothing left there to hate. I looked up just once and quicklylooked away. He was not even a man any more, but something else. A demon? Sharra walking like aman? The real man Kadarin was not there any more. Killing him would not stop the thing that used him.

Another score against Sharra: this man had been my friend. The destruction of Sharra would not only killhim, it would avenge him, too.

He said, "Have you managed to make him see sense, Mar-jorie? Or must I drug him again?"

Her fingertips touched mine out of his sight. I knew he did not see, though he would always have noticedbefore. I said, "I will do what you ask me." I could not bring myself to call him Bob or even Kadarin. Hewas too far from what I had known.

As we walked through the corridors, I looked sidewise at Marjorie. She was very pale; I felt the life hiher flaring fitfully. Sharra had drained her, sapped her life-forces nearly to the death. One more reasonnot to go on living. Strange, I was thinking as if I had a choice.

We stepped out onto the high balcony overlooking Caer Donn and the Terran airfield. On a lower level Isaw them all assembled, the faces I had seen in my ... what? Dream, drugged nightmare? Or had thatpart been real? It seemed I knew the faces. Some ragged, some in rich garments, some knowing andsophisticated, some dulled and ignorant, some not even entirely human. But one and all, their eyesgleamed with the same glassy intensity.

Sharra! Their eagerness burned at me, tearing, ravaging.

I looked down at Caer Donn. My breath stuck in my throat. Marjorie had told me, but no words couldhave prepared me for this kind of destruction, ruin, desolation.

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Only after the great forest fire that had ravaged the Kilghard Hills near Armida had I seen anything likethis. The city lay blackened; for wide areas not one stone remained upon another. All the old city layblasted, wasted, the damage spreading far into the Terran Zone.

And I had played a part hi this!

I had thought I knew how dangerous the great matrices could be. Looking down on this wastelandwhich had been a beautiful city, I knew I had never known anything at all. And all these deaths were onmy single account. I could never expiate or atone. But perhaps, perhaps, I might live long enough to endthe damage.

Beltran stood on the heights. He looked like death. Rafe was nowhere to be seen. I did not think Kadarin would have hesitated to destroy him now, but I hoped, with a deep-lying pain, that the boy wasalive and safe somewhere well away from this. But I had no hope. If the Sharra matrix was actuallysmashed, no one who had been sealed into it was likely to live.

Kadarin was unwrapping the long, bundled length of the sword which contained the Sharra matrix. Beyond him I saw Thyra, her eyes burning into mine with an ineradicable hatred. I had hurt her beyondbearing, too. And, unlike Marjorie, she had not even consented to her death. I had loved her, and shewould never know.

Kadarin placed the sword in my hand. The matrix, throbbing with power at the junction of hilt and blade,made my burned hand stab blindly with a pain that reached all the way up my arm, made me feel sick. But I must be in physical contact with it, not mental touch alone. I took it from the sword, held it in myhand. I knew my hand would never be usable again after this, but what matter? What did a dead mancare for a hand burned from his corpse? I had been trained to endure even such terrible pain, and it couldnot last long. If I could endure just long enough for what I had to do ...

We know what you are trying to do, Lew. Stand firm and we will help.

I felt my whole body twitch. It was my father's voice!

It was cruel, a stabbing hope. He must be very near or he could never have reached us through theenormous blanking-out field of the Sharra matrix.

Father! Father! It was a great surge of gratitude. Even if

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we all died, perhaps his strength added to mine could help us live long enough to destroy this thing. I locked firmly with Marjorie, made contact through the Sharra matrix, felt the old rapport flame into life: Kadarin's enormous sustaining strength, Thyra like a savage beast, giving the linkage claws, savagery, a wild prowling frenzy. And it all flooded through me....

It was not the way we had used it before, the closed circle of power. As I raised the matrix this time Ifelt a mighty river of energy flooding through Kadarin, the vast floods of raw emotion from the menstanding below: worship, rage, anger, lust, hatred, destruction, the savage power of fire, burning, burning

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. . .

This was what I had felt before, the dream, the nightmare.

Marjorie was already etched in the aureole of light. Slowly, as the power grew, pouring into my mindthrough the linked focus, then channeling through me into Marjorie, I saw her begin to change, take onpower and height and majesty. The fragile girl hi the blue dress merged, moment by moment, into thegreat looming goddess, arms tossed to the sky, flames shaking exultantly like tossed tresses, a greatfountain of flame ...

Lew, hold steady for me. I cannot do this without your full cooperation. It will hurt, you know it may killyou, but you know what hangs on this, my son. . . .

My father's touch, more familiar than his voice. And almost the same words he had spoken before.

I knew perfectly well where I was, standing in the matrix circle of Sharra on the heights of Castle Aldaran, the great form of fire towering over me. Marjorie, her identity lost, dissolved in the fire and yetcontrolling it like a torch-dancer with her torches in her hands, swooped down to touch the old spaceportwith a fingertip of fire. Far below us there was a vast booming explosion; one of the starships shatteredlike a child's toy, vanishing skyward in flames. And yet, though all of me was here, now, still I stood againin my father's room at Armida, waiting, sick with that terrible fear-and elation! I reached for him with awild and reckless confidence. Go on! Do it! Finish what you started! Better at your hands than Sharra's!

I felt it then, the deep Alton focused rapport, blazing alive in me, spreading into every corner of my brainand being, filling my veins. It was such agony as I had never known, the

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fierce, violent traumatic tearing rapport, a ripping open of every last fiber of my brain. Yet this time I was in control. I was the focus of all this power and I reached out, twisting it life a steel rope in my hand, a blazing rope of fire. The hand was searing with flame but I barely felt it. Kadarin was motionless, arched backward, accepting the stream of emotions from the men below, transforming them into energons, focusing them through me and into Sharra. Marjorie ... Marjorie was there somewhere in the midst of the great fire, but I could see her face, confident, unafraid, laughing. I looked at her for a brief instant, wishing in anguish that I could bring her, even for a fraction of a second, out and free from Sharra, see her again-no time. No time for that. I saw the goddess pause to strike. I must act now, quickly, before I too was caught up in that mindless fire, that rage for violence and destruction. I looked for a last instant of anguish and atonement into my father's loving eyes.

I braced myself against the terrible throbbing agony in the hand that held the matrix. Just a little more. Just a moment more, I spoke to the screaming agony as if it were a separate living entity, you can bear itjust an instant more. I focused on the black and wavering darkness behind the form of fire where, insteadof the parapets and towers of Castle Aldaran, a blurring darkness grew, out of focus, a monstrousdoorway, a gate of fire, a gate of power, where something hovered, swayed, bulged as if trying to breakthrough that gateway. I gathered all the power of the focused minds, all of them, my father's strength, myown, Kadarin's and all the hundred or so mindless, focused believers behind him pouring out all their rawlust and emotion and strength....

I held all that power, fused like a rope of fire, a twisted cable of force. I focused it all on the matrix in my

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hand. I smelled burning flesh and knew it was my own hand burning and blackening, as the matrix glowed, flared, flamed, ravened, a fire that filled all the worlds, the gateway between the worlds, the reeling and crashing universes....

I smashed the gateway, pouring all that fire back into it. The form of fire shrank, died, scattered anddimmed. I saw Marjorie, reeling, collapse forward; I leaped to snatch her within the circle of my arm,clinging to the matrix still. I heard her screaming as the fires turned back, flaring, blazing up in her veryflesh. I caught her fainting body in my arms

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and with a final, great thrust of power, hurled myself between space, into the gray world, elsewhere.

Space reeled under me; the world disappeared. In the formless gray spaces we were bodiless, painless. Was this death? Marjorie's body was still warm in my arms, but she was unconscious. I knew we couldremain between worlds only an instant. All the forces of balance tore at me, pulling me back, back to thatholocaust and the rain of fire and the ruin at Castle Aldaran, where the men who had spent their powerscollapsed and died, blackened and burned, as the fires burned out. Back there, back there to ruin anddeath? No! No! Some last struggle, some last vitality in me cried out No! and in a great final thrust offocused power, draining myself ruthlessly, I pushed Marjorie and myself through the closing gates andescaped....

My feet struck the floor. It was cool daylight in a curtained, sunlit room; there was hellish pain in myhand, and Marjorie, hanging between my arms, was moaning senselessly. The matrix was still clutched inthe blackened, crisped ruin that had been a hand. I knew where I was: in the highest room of the Arilinn Tower, within the safety-field. A girl in the white draperies of a psi-monitor was staring at me, her eyeswide. I knew her; she had been in her first year at Arilinn, my last year there. I gasped "Lori! Quick, the Keeper-"

She vanished from the room and I gratefully let myself fall to the floor, half senseless, next to Marjorie'smoaning body.

We were here at Arilinn. Safe. And alive!

I had never been able to teleport before, but for Marjorie's sake I had done it.

Consciousness came and went, wavering like a gray curtain. I saw Callina Aillard looking down at me,her gray eyes reflecting pain and pity. She said softly, "I am Keeper here now, Lew. I will do what Ican." Her hand insulated in the gray silk veil, she reached out to take the matrix, thrusting it quickly withinthe field of a damper. The cessation of the vibration behind the matrix was a moment of almost heavenlycomfort, but it also turned off the near-anesthesia of deep focused effort. I had felt hellish pain in my handbefore, but now it felt flayed and dipped anew in molten lead. I don't know how I kept from screaming.