The Sword of Aldones (11 page)

Who would build a pattern like that?

I could have, but I hadn’t. Callina? No Keeper alive would blaspheme her office that way. Lerrys? He might think it a perverted joke, but I didn’t think he had the training. Dyan? No, it had scared him. Dio, Regis, Derik? Now we were getting silly; I’d be accusing Old Hastur, or my little Linnell, next!

Dyan, now. I couldn’t even have the relief of killing him in fair fight.

Even with one hand, I wasn’t afraid to fight him. Not a man Dyan’s age. I don’t read my antagonist’s mind, like a telepath in a bad scare-story, to figure out his sword strokes. That sort of stuff takes intent, motionless concentration, Nobody—not the legendary Son of Aldones—could fight a duel that way.

But now I could fight him before a hundred witnesses, and they’d still cry murder. After today and what they’d seen me do to Kadarin. I couldn’t do that to anyone else, Kadarin and I had once been in rapport through Sharra, and we had—

however little we liked it—a foothold in each other’s minds.

But Dyan didn’t know that.

Dyan didn’t know this either, but he’d had his revenge already.

Six years of knocking around the Empire had cured me, as far as cure was possible. I am not, now, the shattered youngster who had fled Darkover years ago. I am not the young idealist who found, in Kadarin, a hope of reconciling his two warring selves, or saw in a girl with amber eyes everything he wanted in this world or the next.

Or I thought I wasn’t. But the first knock on my shell had cracked it wide open.

What now?

I was standing on a high balcony, jutting out over the walls of the Comyn Castle. Below, the land lay spread like a map, daubed in burnt sienna and red and dusty gold and ochre. Around me rose the iridescent castle walls, which gave back the dropping light of the red sun, setting in blood and fire. The bloody sun. That is what the Terrans call the sun of Darkover. A just name—for them, and for us.

And far above me soared the high spire of the Keeper’s Tower, arrogantly aloof from castle or city. I looked up at it, apprehensively. I did not think that Ashara, ancient though she must be, would remain aloof from a holocaust in the Comyn.

Someone spoke my name and I turned, seeing Regis Hastur in the archway.

“I’ve got a message for you,” he said. “I’m not going to give it, though.”

I smiled grimly. “Don’t, then. What is it?”

“My grandfather sent me to call you back. As a matter of fact, I wanted an excuse to get out myself.”

“I suppose I ought to thank you for pulling that blow-pipe away from Dyan. Right now, I’m inclined to think you’d have saved us all trouble if you’d let him use it.”

“Are you going to fight him?”

“How can I? You know what they say about the Altons.”

The youngster joined me at the railing. “Want me to fight him as your proxy?

That’s legal, too.”

I tried to hide how much the offer had touched me. “Thanks. But you’d better keep out of this business.”

“It’s too late for that. I’m in it already. Waist-deep.”

I asked, on impulse, “Did you know Marius well?”

“I wish, now, that I could say yes.” His face held a queer sort of shame.

“Unfortunately—no, I never did.”

“Did anybody?”

“I don’t think so. Although he and Lerrys were friends, in a way.” Regis traced an idle pattern in the dust, with his bootheel. After a minute he rubbed his toe over it and said, “I spent a few days in the Ridenow forst before coming to council, and—” he paused. “This is difficult—I heard it by chance, and the only honorable thing I could do, was to pledge not to repeat it. But the boy is dead now, and I think you have a right to know.”

I said nothing. I had no right to insist that a Hastur violate his word. I waited for him to decide. At last he said, “It was Lerrys who suggested the alliance with Aldaran, and Marius himself went to Castle Aldaran as ambassador.

Do you think Beltran would have had the insolence to offer marriage to a Keeper, unsolicited?”

I should have realized that. Someone must have told Beltran that such an offer would meet with serious consideration. But was Regis breaking his pledge, just to tell me my brother had been pawn-hand in a mildly treasonable intrigue?

“Can’t you see?” Regis demanded. “Why Callina? Why a Keeper? Why not Dio, or Linnell, or my sister Javanne, or any of the other comynara? Beltran wouldn’t care. In fact, he’d probably have an ordinary girl, provided she could give him laran rights in council. No. Listen, you know the law—that a Keeper must remain a virgin, or she loses her power to work in the screens?”

“That’s nonsense,” I said.

“Nonsense or not, they believe it. The point is, this marriage launches two ships on one track. Beltran allied to them, and Callina out of the council’s way by good, fair, safe, legal means.”

“It begins to fit together,” I said. “Dyan and all.” There was, after all, something Dyan wanted less than a capable, adult male Alton in council; a Comyn Keeper might be, even more of a threat to him. “But that marriage will take place only over my dead body.”

He knew immediately what I meant. “Then marry her yourself, now, Lew! Do it illegally, if you have to, in the Terran Zone.”

I grinned ironically and held out my mutilated arm. I could not marry, by Darkovan law, while Kadarin lived. An unsettled blood-feud takes precedence over every other human obligation. But by Terran law we could marry.

I shook my head, heavily. “She’d never consent.”

“If only Marius had lived!” Regis said, and I was moved by the sincerity of his words; the first honest regret I had heard from anyone, though they had all expressed formal condolences. I liked it better that he did not pretend to any personal sorrow, but simply said, “The Comyn needed him so. Lew, could you use any other telepath—me, for instance— for a focus like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. I’d rather not try. You’re a Hastur, and it probably wouldn’t kill you, but it wouldn’t be fun.” My voice suddenly turned hard. “Now tell me what you really came here to tell me!”

“The death sign,” he blurted, then his face crumpled in panic. “I didn’t mean that, I didn’t—”

I could have had his confidence if I had waited. Instead I did something that still shames me. I caught one of his wrists with my good hand, and with a quick twist, a trick hold I’d learned on Vialles, forced him against the railing. He started to leap at me, then I caught his thought.

I can’t fight a man who has only one hand.

That hardened my rage; and in that instant of black wrath I lashed out and forced rapport on him; I drew into his mind roughly, with a casual swift searching that took what it wanted, then withdrew.

Stark white, shaking, Regis slumped against the railing; and I, the taste of triumph bitter on my tongue, turned my back on him. To justify my own self-contempt, I made my voice hard. “So you built the sign! You—a Hastur!”

Regis swung around, shaking with wrath. “I’d smash your face for that, if you weren’t—why the hell did you do that?”

I said harshly, “I found out what I wanted to know.”

He muttered, “You did.”

Then, his eyes blazing but his voice unsteady, he said, “That’s what scared me.

That’s why I came to you. You’re an Alton, I thought you’d know. At the council, something hit me. I—I don’t know anything about matrix mechanics, surely you must know that now? I don’t know how I did it, or why. I just bridged the gap and threw the sign. I thought I could tell you—ask you—” His voice broke, on the ragged edge of hysteria; I heard him swear, chokingly, like a child trying not to cry. He was shaking all over.

At last he said, “All right. I’m still scared. And I could kill you for what you did. But there’s no one else to ask for help.” He swallowed. “What you did, you did openly. I can stand that. What I can’t stand is not knowing what I might do next.”

Shamed and unnerved, I walked away from him. Regis, who had tried to befriend me, had received the same treatment I’d given my worst enemy. I couldn’t face him.

After a minute he followed me. “Lew. I said, we’ll have to forget it. We can’t afford to fight. Did it occur to you?

We’re both in the same fix, we’re both doing things we’d never do in our right mind,”

He knew, and I knew, it wasn’t the same; but it made me able to look round and face him.

“Why did I do it, Lew? How, why?”

“Steady,” I said. “Don’t lose your head. We’re all scared. I’m scared, too. But there must be a reason.” I paused, trying to muster my memory of the Comyn Gifts. They are mostly recessive now, bred out by intermarriage with outsiders, but Regis was physically atavistic, a throwback to the pure Comyn type; he might also be a mental throwback. “The Hastur Gift, whatever that is, is latent in you,” I said. “Perhaps, unconsciously, you knew the council should be broken up, and took that drastic way of doing it. I added, diffidently, “If what had happened—hadn’t happened, I’d offer to go into your mind and sift it.

But—well, I don’t think you’d trust me now.

“Probably not. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I said roughly. “I don’t even trust myself, after that. But Ashara or Callina, for that matter, either of the Keepers, could deep-probe and find out for you.”

“Ashara—” He looked up thoughtfully toward the Keeper’s Tower. “I don’t know.

Maybe.”

We leaned across the railing, looking down into the valley, dulled now and darkened by the falling night. A baritone thunder suddenly shook the castle, and a silver dart sped bullet-wise across the sky, trailing a comet’s tail of crimson, and was lost.

“Mail-rocket,” I said, “from the Terran Zone.”

“Terra and Darkover,” said a voice behind us, “the irresistible force, and the immovable object.”

Old Hastur came out on the balcony. “I know, I know,” he said, “you young Altons don’t like being ordered around here and there. Frankly, I don’t enjoy doing it; I’m too old.” He smiled at Regis. “I sent you out to keep you from jumping into the mess along with Lew. But I wish you’d managed to keep your temper, Lew Alton!”

“My temper!” The unfairness of that left me speechless. “I know. You had provocation. But if you had controlled your righteous wrath—” he spoke the words with a flavor of sour irony— “Dyan would have been clearly in the wrong.

As it is—well, you broke Comyn immunity - first, and that’s serious. Dyan swears he’ll write a writ of exile on you.”

I said, almost indulgently, “He can’t. The law requires at least one laran heir from every Domain—or why did you go to such trouble to have me recalled? I am the last living Alton, and childless. Even Dyan can’t break up the Comyn that way.”

Hastur scowled. “So you think you can break all our laws—being irreplaceable?

Think again, Lew. Dyan swears he’s found a child of yours.”

“Mine? It’s a stinking, sneaking lie,” I said angrily. “I’ve lived off-world for six years. And I’m a matrix mech. You know what that means. And it’s common knowledge I’ve lived celibate.” Mentally I absolved myself for the single exception. If Dio had borne my child, after that summer on Vainwal, I would have known. Known? I’d have been murdered for it!

The Regent looked at me skeptically. “Yes, yes, I know. But before that? You weren’t too young to be physically capable of fathering a child, were you? The child is an Alton, Lew.”

Regis said slowly, “Your father wasn’t exactly a recluse. And I suppose—how old was Marius? He might have fathered a chance-child somewhere.”

I thought it over. It seemed unlikely that I should have a son. Not impossible, certainly, remembering certain adventures of my early manhood, but improbable.

On the other hand, no Darkovan woman would dare swear me, or my dead kinsmen, father to her child unless she were sure past all human doubts. It takes more courage than most women have, to lie about a telepath.

“And suppose I call Dyan’s bluff? To produce this alleged child, prove his paternity, set him up where I am now, write his writ of exile and be damned to him? I never wanted to come back anyhow. Suppose I say go right ahead?”

“Then,” said Hastur, gravely, “we’d be right back where we started.” He laid his lined old hand on my arm. “Lew, I fought to have you recalled, because your father was my friend and because we Hasturs were pretty desperately outnumbered in council. I thought the Comyn needed you. Downstairs just now, when you were raking them out for their squabbles—like children in a playground, you said—I had high hopes. Don’t make a fool of me by breaking the peace at every turn!”

I bent my head, feeling grieved and unhappy. “I’ll try,” I said at last, bleakly, “but by the sword of Aldones, I wish you’d left me out in space.”

After the Hasturs left me, I went back to my rooms and thought over what I’d learned.

I had walked into Dyan’s trap and it had snapped shut on me. I had Hastur to thank if I hadn’t been already exiled. All along—I could see now—they had been goading me into open defiance. Then there was this child of mine, or my father’s or Marius’, a docile puppet; not a grown man with power in his own hands.

And Callina. That idea that a Keeper must be a virgin-superstitious drivel, but there must be some grain of scientific truth behind it, as with all other fables and Comyn traditions.

The superstitious could believe what they liked. But out of my own experience I knew this; any telepath working among the monitor screens will discover that his nervous and physical reflexes are all keyed into the matrix patterns. A matrix technician undergoes some prolonged periods of celibacy—strictly involuntary.

This impotence is nature’s safeguard. A matrix mech who upsets his nerve reactions, or through physical or emotional excesses, upsets his endocrine balance, pays for it. He can overload his nervous system to the point where he will short-circuit and blow out like a fuse; nervous depletion, exhaustion and usually death.

A woman does not have the physical safeguard of impotence. The Keepers have always been severely cloistered. Once a girl has been aroused, once that first sensual response is awakened, so disastrously physical in its effect on nerves and brain, there is no way to determine the limit of safety. For a woman the picture is black or white. Absolute chastity, or giving up her work in the screens.