The Sword of Aldones by Marion Zimmer Bradley Page B

Then, with the quick desperate move of one deserted, she threw herself into the arms of her brother Lerrys and burrowed her bright head in his shoulder.
    Callina faced them all with aloof dignity. “I need not defend myself from your silly panic, Dio,” she said. “But you, Dyan Ardais, I ask no courtesies of you, but you touch me again at your life’s risk. Let everyone hear, and let him beware of a finger’s weight laid on me; I am Keeper. And no man lives to maul me three times.”
    She turned toward the door. And until the curtains had folded down softly behind her, there was silence.
    Then Dyan laughed, low and ugly. “In six years you have not changed, Lew Alton.
    Still you have a passion for witches. You stand here defending our sorceress, even as you once threw away all your Comyn honor for that mountain hellion of Kadarin’s, trying to lure a Comyn lord to her bed—”
    But that was all he got to say. “Zandru’s hells!” I shouted, “she was my wife and you keep your filthy tongue from her name!” I smashed my flat hand, hard, across that sneering mouth. He yelped and staggered back, then his hand swept like lightning into his shirt—
    And Regis was on him like lightning, seizing the small deadly thing he raised to his lips. The boy flung it to the floor in disgust. “A poison-pipe—in the Crystal Chamber! And you spoke of honor, Dyan Ardais?”
    The two Hasturs held Dyan back between them. One of the Ridenow brothers had a restraining hand on my arm, but he didn’t need it.
    I’d had all I could stand.
    I turned my back on them all and left.
    I’d have strangled if I’d stayed there another minute.
    Not knowing or caring where my steps led, I went up and up toward the height of the Comyn Castle. I found bitter relief in climbing flight after flight of stairs; head bent and aching, but a need for physical action driving me on.
    Why the hell hadn’t I stayed on Terra?
    That damnable sign! Half the Comyn would take it for a supernatural apparition, a warning of danger. It meant danger, all right, but there was nothing supernatural about it. It was pure mechanics, and it scared me more than any ghostly visitation.
    It was a trap-matrix; one of the old, illegal ones, which worked directly on the mind and emotions, rousing racial memories, atavistic fears—all the horrors of the freed subconscious of the individual and the race, throwing man back to the primal, reasonless beast.
    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