“Put your head between your knees,” I said roughly, and watched him as he sat there, his head bent, while a little color began to come back into his cheeks. At last he sat upright again.
“I am sorry if the—the image—frightened you,” he said. “It was the only thing I could think of to stop this Council. This farce. I wanted them to see what it was that they had to fear. So many of them don’t know.”
I remembered Lerrys saying, You see Sharra as the bogeyman under every bed…no. He had not said that to me, but to Regis. I looked at him, dazed. I said, “There are supposed to be telepathic dampers in here. I should not be able to read your mind, nor you mine. Zandru’s hells, Regis, what is going on?”
“Maybe the dampers aren’t working,” he said, in a stronger voice, and now he sounded completely rational; only afraid, as he had every right to be. I was afraid myself.
“The image didn’t frighten me,” I said, “except for a moment at first. I have seen the reality of Sharra. What frightens me, now, is the fact that you could do that, with dampers all over the room. I didn’t know you had that much laran, though I knew, of course, that you had some. What sort of laran can do that?” I went to the nearest of the telepathic dampers and twisted dials until it was gone, the unrhythmic waves vanished. Now I could feel Regis’s agitation and fear, full scale, and wished I could not. He said, in a strained voice, “I don’t know how I did it. Truly I don’t. I was standing here behind Grandfather, listening to Beltran talk so calmly, and wishing there was some way to show them what it had been— and then—” he wet his lips with his tongue, and said shakily, “then it was there. The—the Form of Fire.”
“And it scared Beltran right out of the room,” I said. “Do you think he knows that Kadarin has the Sharra matrix?”
“I couldn’t read him. I wasn’t trying, of course. I—” his voice broke again. “I wasn’t trying to do anything. It just— just happened!”
“Something in your laran you don’t know about? We know so little of the Hastur Gift, whatever it was,” I said, trying to calm him. “Hang on to the good part; it scared Beltran out of here. I wish it had scared him all the way back into the Hellers! I’m afraid there’s no such luck!”
I was willing to leave it at that. But as I turned to the doorway, Regis caught at my shoulder.
“But how could I do that? I don’t understand! You—you accused me of playing with it, like a joke! But I didn’t, Lew, I didn’t!”
I had no answer for him. I moved aimlessly around the room, turning out the rest of the dampers. I could feel his fear, mounting almost to panic, rising as the dampers were no longer there to interfere with telepathic contact. I even wondered, angrily, why he should be so afraid. It was I who was bound to Sharra, I who must live night and day with the terror that one day Kadarin would draw the Sword of Sharra and with that gesture summon me back into that terrible gateway between worlds, that corner of hell that I once had opened, which had swept away my hand, my love—my life…
Firmly I clamped down on the growing panic. If I did not stop this now, my own fear and Regie’s could reinforce each other and we would both go into screaming hysterics. I caught at what I could remember of the Arilinn training, managed to steady my breathing, felt the panic subside.
Not so Regis; he was still sitting there, in the chair where I had shoved him, white with dread. I turned around and was surprised to hear my own voice, the steady, detached voice of a matrix mechanic, dispassionate, professionally soothing, as I had not heard it in more years than I liked to think about.
“I’m not a Keeper, Regis, and my own matrix, at the moment, is useless, as you know. I could try to deep-probe you and find out—”
He flinched. I didn’t blame him. The Alton gift is nothing to play games with, and I have known experienced technicians, Tower-trained for many years, refuse to face that fully focused gift of rapport. I can manage it, if I must, but I was not eager. It is not, I suppose, unlike rape, the deliberate overpowering of a mind, the forced submission of another personality, the ultimate invasion. Only the probably nonexistent Gods of Darkover know why such a Gift had been bred into the Alton line, to force rapport on an unwilling other, paralyze resistance. I knew Regis feared it too, and I didn’t blame him. My father had opened my own Gift in that way, when I was a boy—it had been the only way to force the Council to accept me, to show them that I, alien and half Terran, had the Alton Gift—and I had been ill for weeks afterward. I didn’t relish the thought of doing the same thing to Regis.
I said, “It might be that they could tell you in a Tower; some Keeper, perhaps—” and then I remembered that here in Comyn Castle was a Keeper. I tended to forget; Ashara of the Comyn Tower must be incredibly old now, I had never seen her, nor my father before me… but now Callina was there as her surrogate, and Callina was my kinswoman, and Regis’s too.
“Callina could tell you,” I said, “if she would.”
He nodded, and I felt the panic recede. Talking about it, calmly and detached, as if it were a simple problem in the mechanics of laran, had defused some of the fear.
Yet I too was uneasy. By the time I left the Crystal Chamber, even the halls and corridors were empty; the Comyn Council had scattered and gone their separate ways. Council was over. Nothing remained except the Festival Night ball, tomorrow. On the threshold of the Chamber, we encountered the Syrtis youngster; he almost ignored me, hurrying to Regis.
“I came back to see what had happened to you!” he demanded, and, as Regis smiled at him, I quietly took my leave, feeling I made an unwelcome third. As I went off alone, I identified one of my emotions; was I jealous of what Regis shared with Danilo? No, certainly not.
But I am alone, brotherless, friendless, alone against the Comyn who hate me, and there is none to stand by my side. All my life I had dwelt in my father’s shadow; and now I could not bear the solitude when that was withdrawn. And Marius, who should have stood at my side—Marius too was dead by an assassin’s bullet, and no one in the Comyn except Lerrys had even questioned the assassination. And—I felt myself tensing as I identified another element of my deep grief for Marius. It was relief; relief that I would not have to test him as my father had tested me, that I need not invade him ruthlessly and feel him die beneath that terrible assault on identity. He had died, but not at my hands, nor beneath my laran.
I had known my laran could kill, but I had never killed with it.
I went back to the Alton rooms, thoughtfully. They were home, they had been home much of my life, yet they seemed empty, echoing, desolate. It seemed to me that I could see my father in every empty corner, as his voice still echoed in my mind. Andres, puttering around, supervising the other servants in placing the belongings which had been brought here from the town house, broke off what he was doing as I came in, and hurried to me, demanding to know what had happened to me. I did not know that it showed on my face, whatever it was, but I let him bring me a drink, and sat sipping it, wondering again about what Regis had done in the Crystal Chamber. He had scared Beltran. But, probably, not enough.
I did not think Beltran was eager to plunge the Domains into war. Yet I knew his recklessness, and I did not think we could gamble on that; not when his outraged pride was at stake, the pride of the Aldarans.
I said to Andres, “You hear servants’ gossip; tell me, has Beltran moved into the Aldaran apartments here in Comyn Castle?”
Andres nodded glumly, and I hoped that he would find them filled with vermin and lice; they had stood empty since the Ages of Chaos. It said something about the Comyn that they had never been converted to other uses.