Endless, a never-ending loop battering my mind… It seemed, for a moment, impossible that they did not hear.
Gabriel said finally, “All my life he’s been there; bigger than life. I simply can’t believe he’s gone.”
“Nor I,” said Jeff. Abruptly he looked at me, and I saw my face mirrored in his mind and was shocked. “Zandru’s hells, Lew! Did you come here directly from the spaceport?” I nodded and he asked, “When did you eat last?”
I thought about that and said at last, “I can’t remember. They shot me so full of drugs aboard ship…I’m still fuzzy.”
… My last command…go back… it was to drown that unending clamor in my mind, that I put my hand to my head, but Jeff put his hand under my arm. He said, “You can’t think straight in this condition, and thinking straight is the first thing you have to be able to do. Besides, you ought not to appear before Council wearing Terran clothes. It made a dramatic point, perhaps, for a few minutes, but it would start people thinking the wrong things. Dyan—?”
The Ardais lord nodded, and Jeff said, “I am guested here in the Ardais quarters—I don’t know who, if anyone, is living in the Alton ones—”
“Caretakers,” said Gabriel, with a wry twist of his mouth. “I may be presumptuous, but not thatpresumptuous!”
“Come along,” Jeff said. “We can find you something to eat, and some decent clothes—”
Dyan said, “Yours would go round him twice, Jeff.” He looked me up and down. “You’re thinner than you used to be. Tell them to find something of mine for him.”
Jeff led me quickly along the corridor; I was glad to get away, for some others of the Comyn and the others in the Crystal Chamber had come out into the hallway. I saw someone wearing Ridenow colors, and the flash of golden and green made me think of Dio.
Was she here, would she confront me at any moment, shriekingMonster! Would she think I had come to force her back as if the Terran ceremony had made her my prisoner?…
Her touch, her understanding…it might even have quieted the shrieking in my mind…yet the love between us had not been strong enough to hold through tragedy. How could I ask it…that horriblething… no man had any right to do that to a woman…
“Steady,” said Jeff. “There in a minute. Sit down.” He shoved me onto a piece of furniture. It was dreamlike, déjà vu, for I could not remember ever being in the Ardais apartments before. Yet my father had known them well, I supposed, Dyan had been his closest friend when they were young… Zandru’s hells, would I never again be sure which thoughts, feelings, emotions were mine, which my father’s? The forced rapport which had wakened my Alton gift when I was eleven years old had been bad enough, but that last dying death-grip on my mind… I shuddered, and when Dyan thrust a drink into my hand I leaned for a moment against his shoulder, letting him support me. Memories of a younger Dyan flooded me with an affection warm, almost sensual, which shocked me to the bone, and I slammed the barrier shut, straightening up and easing free of his support. I drained the glass without noticing the taste. It was the strong firicordial of the Kilghard Hills.
“Thanks. I needed that, but some soup would be better, I suppose, or something solid—”
“If I remember rightly,” Dyan said, “your father was allergic to the Terran drugs too.” He used the Terran word “allergic”; there wasn’t one in casta. “I wouldn’t try to eat anything solid for a few hours, if I were you. They’ll bring you something to eat in a few minutes, but you don’t really have that much time. We could call for a day or two delay, if you want.” He looked around, saw Marius hovering, and asked, “Where’s Gabriel?”
Marius said, “He’s honor guard there; he had to go back, he said.”
“Damn.” Jeff scowled. “We need a family conference of some kind.”
Dyan’s lip curled. “Keep Gabriel out of it,” he said. “He’s a Hastur lackey. I’ve always suspected that’s why old Hastur married him to the girl… his granddaughter. I don’t suppose you had sense enough to get yourself married and father a son, did you, Lew?”
With an effort that made me tremble, I slammed down a barrier. It was enough that I would never be free of the memory of that inhuman thingwhich should have been my son. If it were ever to be shared, it would not be with Dyan. He might have been my father’s chosen friend and confidant; he was not mine. I shrugged off his supporting arm as I rose.
“Let’s see about those clothes. No, I don’t mind wearing Ardais colors…”
But it turned out Marius had sent a servant at a run to the townhouse, with orders to fetch a cloak and Domain colors for me. I glanced in the mirror, saw myself transformed. And I could hide the missing hand in a fold of the cloak, if I wished. Marius gave me my father’s sword and I fastened it at my side, trying not to think of the Sharra matrix.
It wasn’t too far; I could tolerate that much distance…
I had tried, again, to leave it on Vainwal. Had thought, this time, I could be free… and then the burning, the blurring clamor…1 had nearly missed the ship because I had realized I could not abandon it, to abandon it would be death… not that I would have minded death… better dead than enslaved this way…
“At least now you look proper Comyn,” said Jeff. “You have to fight them on their own ground, Lew.”
I hurried with the tunic-laces, making a little extra display of my one-handed skill because I was still damnably sensitive about Marius watching. Dyan’s eyes flicked over the empty sleeve.
“I told Kennard that hand would have to come off,” he said. “They should have had it off at Arilinn. He kept on hoping the Terrans could do something. Terran science was one of the few things he kept on believing in, even after he lost faith in damned near everything else.”
The silence stretched, came to a full stop. Jeff, who had seen the hand at Arilinn, and had tried to save it, would have spoken, but I mentally commanded him to be silent. I might manage to discuss it, some day, with Jeff; but not with Dyan; and not with anyone here, not yet.
Dio had accepted it…I cut off that train of thought, afraid of what it would lead to.
Sooner or later, I supposed, I would see her again, and I would have to make it clear… she was free, not my prisoner or slave, not bound to me—
There was a tentative knock at the door, and one of Hastur’s servants, liveried in blue and silver, came in to convey the Regent’s compliments and request that the Ardais and Alton lords would return to Council.
Dyan said, with a faint curl of his lip, “At least there is now no reason to declare the Domain vacant.”
That was true. At first there had been no rightful claimant; now there were four. I asked Marius, as we went down the hallway toward the Crystal Chamber, “Do you have the Alton Gift?”
Marius had the dark eyes of our Terran mother. I have always thought dark eyes were expressionless, unreadable.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said. “What with one thing and another, I’ve been given to understand that it would be… insufferable insolence… to try and find out. I’m fairly sure Gabriel doesn’t, though.”
“The reason I asked,” I said, exasperated, “is that they’ll be badgering me to declare an Heir.” And I knew he could pick up the part of that I did not speak aloud; that I would prefer to assume he had it, without the shock tactics my father had had to use on my own Gift.
“It’s probably irrelevant,” Dyan said. “Everyone knew I didn’t have the Ardais Gift; it didn’t stop them from declaring me as Heir and Regent to my father.” The Ardais gift—catalyst telepathy, the gift of awakening latent laran—had been thought extinct, until it had been discovered in Danilo. That made me think about Regis, and wonder why he had not come to greet me. Well, if there was a plot to take the Alton Domain under Hastur wardship, I wasn’t surprised he didn’t care to face me just yet.