Sharra's Exile d-21 Read online

  Sharra's Exile

  ( Darkover - 21 )

  Marion Zimmer Bradley

  The sequel to Heritage of Hastur, perhaps the single most popular of Bradley's spectacular Darkover novels, Sharra's Exile is the story of Lew Alton's return to Darkover and his battle to destroy the deadly Sharra matrix.

  Marion Zimmer Bradley

  SHARRA’S EXILE

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

  Like all previous Darkover novels, this story is complete in itself and does not depend on knowledge of any other. More than any other Darkover book, however, this one was written by popular demand.

  One result of writing novels as they occurred to me, instead of following strict chronological order, was that I began with an attempt to solve the final problems of the society; each novel thus suggested one laid in an earlier time, in an attempt to explain how the society had reached that point. Unfortunately, that meant that relatively mature novels, early in the chronology of Darkover, were followed by books written when I was much younger and relatively less skilled at storytelling; and of all these, the least satisfactory was The Sword of Aldones, perhaps because this book was, in essence, dreamed up at the age of fifteen.

  In 1975 I made a landmark decision; that in writing The Heritage of Hastur, I would not be locked into the basically immature concepts set forth in Sword, even at the sacrifice of consistency in the series. After Heritage appeared in print, Sword of Aldones seemed even less satisfactory—for years, it seemed that everyone I met asked me when I was going to rewrite it. For years I replied “Never,” or “I don’t want to go back to it.” But I finally decided that I had, in Sword of Aldones, developed a basically good idea, without the skill or maturity to handle it as well as it deserved; and that the characters deserved serious treatment by a matured writer. I decided not to rewrite, but to write an entirely new book based on events in the same time frame as Sword. The present book is the result.

  —MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  Chapter Two of Book One appeared in a slightly different form, as a short story entitled “Blood Will Tell” in the volume The Keeper’s Price, DAW 1980.

  Prologue: The second year of exile

  ^ »

  This was the home of my ancestors.

  But I knew, now, that it would never be my home.

  My eyes ached as I stared at the horizon where the sun sank out of sight—a strange yellow sun, not red as a sun should be, a glaring sun that hurt my eyes. But now, for a moment just before twilight, it was suddenly red and huge and sinking behind the lake in a sudden crimson glory that made me ache with homesickness; and across the water a streak of crimson— I stood staring until the last gleams of crimson faded; and over the lake, pale and silver, the solitary moon of Terra showed the thinnest of elegant crescents.

  Earlier in the day there had been rain, and the air was heavy with alien smells. Not alien, really; they were known, somehow, in the very depth of my genes. My ancestors had climbed down from the trees of this world, had lived out the long evolution which had patterned them into human, and had later sent out the seedling ships, one of which—I had heard the tale—had crash-landed on Darkover and settled there, rooting into the new world so deeply that I, exiled from my race’s homeworld and returning, found homeworld alien and longed for the world of my people’s exile.

  I did not know how long ago, or for how long my people had dwelt on Darkover. Travel among the stars has strange anomalies; the enormous interstellar distances play strange tricks with time. There would never be any way for the folk of the Terran Empire to say, three thousand years ago, or fifteen thousand years ago, which particular colony ship founded Darkover— The elapsed time on Terra was something like three thousand years. Yet elapsed time on Darkover was somehow more like ten thousand, so that Darkover had a history nearly as long as Earth’s own history of civilization and chaos. I knew how many years ago Terra, in the days long before the Terran Empire had spread from star to star, had sent out the ship. I knew how many years had elapsed on Darkover. And there was no way for even the most accurate historian to reconcile them: I had long ago stopped trying.

  Nor was I the only one with hopelessly torn loyalties, as deep as the very DNA in my cells. My mother had been earth born under this impossibly blue sky and this colorless moon; yet she had loved Darkover, had married my Darkovan father and borne him sons and, at last, been laid to rest in an unmarked grave in the Kilghard Hills on Darkover.

  And I wish I were lying there beside her…

  For a moment I was not sure that the thoughts were not my own. Then I shut them out, savagely. My father and I were too close… not the ordinary closeness of a Comyn telepath family (though that in itself would have been freakish enough to the Terrans around us) but entangled by common fears, common loss… shared experience and pain. Bastard, rejected by my father’s caste because my mother had been half Terran, my father had gone to endless pains to have me accepted as a Comyn Heir. To this day I did not know whether it was for my sake or his own. My futile attempts at rebellion had entrapped us all in the abortive rebellion under the Aldarans, and Sharra—

  Sharra. Flame burning in my mind…the image of a woman of flame, chained, restless, tresses of fire rising on a firestorm wind, hovering… rising, ravening… Marjorie caught in the fires, screaming, dying…

  No! Merciful Avarra, no—

  Black dark. Shut out everything. Close my eyes, bend my head, go away, not there at all, nowhere at all—

  Pain. Agony flaming in my hand—

  “Pretty bad, Lew?” Behind me I felt the calming presence of my father’s mind. I nodded, clenching my teeth, slamming the painful stump of my left hand against the railing, letting the cold strangeness of the white moon-rim flood me.

  “Damn it, I’m all right. Stop—” I fought for the right word and came up with “stop hovering.”

  “What am I supposed to do? I can’t shut it out,” he said quietly. “You were—what shall I say? Broadcasting. When you can keep your thoughts to yourself, I’ll leave you alone with them. In the name of all the Gods, Lew, I was a technician in the Arilinn Tower for ten years!”

  He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. For three years, the happiest years of my life, perhaps, I too had been matrix mechanic in the Arilinn Tower, working with the complex matrix crystals which linked telepaths and minds in linkages to provide communication, technology to our metal-poor, machinery-poor world. I had learned, in Arilinn, what it was to be a telepath, Comyn of our caste, gifted or cursed with the linking of minds and the hypersensitivity to the other minds around me. You learned not to pry; you learned not to let your own thoughts entangle with others, not to be hurt too much by the pain, or the needs, of others, to remain exquisitely sensitive and at the same time to live without intruding or demanding.

  I had learned this, too. But my own control had been burned out by the ninth-level matrix which I had tried, insanely, to handle with a circle of half-trained telepaths, we had hoped, vainly, to restore the old, high-level Darkovan technology, handed down as legend from the Ages of Chaos. And we had nearly done it, too, experimenting with the old Darkovan crafts, called sorcery and magic by the commoners. We knew that in truth they were a complex technology, which could have done anything—powered spaceships for Darkover to stand equal to the Empire, rather than remain poor relations, dependents of the Terran Empire, a cold, metal-poor planet.

  We had nearly done it… but Sharra was too powerful for us, and the matrix which for years had been chained, peacefully bringing fire to the forges of the mountain smiths, had been freed, ravening and raging in the hills. A city had been destroyed. And I, I had been destroyed too, burnt in those monstrous fires, and Marjorie, Marjorie was dead…r />
  And now within my matrix, now I could see nothing but flame and destruction and Sharra—

  A telepath keys himself into the matrix stone he uses. At eleven I had been given such a matrix: if it had been taken from me, I would swiftly have died. I do not know what the matrix stones are. Some people say they are crystals which amplify the psychoelectrical emanations of the brain’s activity in the “silent” areas where the Comyn powers reside. Others call them an alien life-form, symbiotic with the special powers of the Comyn. Whatever the truth, a Comyn telepath works through his own matrix; the larger matrixes, multilevel, are never keyed to the body and brain of the individual matrix worker, but relayed and transformed through his stone.

  But Sharra had reached out for us all, and taken us into the fire…

  “Enough!” My father spoke with the particular force of an Alton, forcing his mind on mine, wresting the image away. Grateful darkness descended behind my eyes; then I could see the moon again, see something other than flames.

  He said quietly, as I rested my eyes, covering them with my good hand, “You don’t believe it now, but it is better, Lew. It comes when you let your guard down, yes. But there are long periods when you can break the domination of the Sharra matrix—”

  “When I don’t talk about it, you mean,” I interrupted angrily.

  “No,” he said, “when it isn’t there. I’ve been monitoring you. It’s not nearly as bad as it was that first year. In the hospital, for instance… I couldn’t get you out of it for more than a few hours at a time. Now there are days, even weeks—”

  Yet I would never be free. When we went offworld, from Darkover, hoping to save the hand burned in Sharra’s fires, I had taken the Sharra matrix, hidden in its elaborate sword; not because I wished to take it, but because after what had happened, I could no more be separated from it than parted from my own matrix. My own matrix hung around my neck; it had hung there since my twelfth year, and I could not remove it without pain and probably brain damage. Once it had been taken from me—a kind of deliberate torture—and I had come nearer to death than I like to think. Probably if it had been kept from me another day, I would have died, of heart failure or cerebral accident.

  But the Sharra matrix… somehow it had overpowered my own. I need not wear it hanging round my neck, or be in physical contact with it, but I could not go beyond a certain critical distance, or the pain would begin, and the fire images surge in my brain, like static blurring out all else. My father was a competent technician, but he could do nothing; the technicians in the Arilinn Tower, where they had tried to save my hand, could do nothing. Finally they had taken me offworld, in a vain hope that Terran science could do more. It was illegal for the Warden of the Alton Domain, my father, Kennard Alton, to leave Darkover at the same time as his Heir. He had done it anyway, and for that I knew that I should have been grateful to him. But all I felt was weariness, rage, resentment.

  You should have let me die.

  My father stepped out into the light of the dim moon and stars. I could only barely see his outline; tall, once heavy and imposing; now stooped with the bone disease which had crippled him for many years; but still powerful, dominating. I was never sure whether I saw my father’s physical presence or the mental, commanding force which had overpowered my life since, at eleven, he had forced my mind open to the telepathic Alton Gift—the gift of forced rapport even with non-telepaths, which characterizes the Alton Domain. He had done it because there was no other way to prove to the Comyn Council that I was worthy to be the Alton Heir. But I had had to live with it—and with his domination—ever since.

  My hand throbbed where I had slammed down what was left of the arm. Peculiar, that ache; I could feel it in my fourth and sixth fingers…as if I had burned off a nail. And yet there was nothing there, nothing but the empty scar… they had explained it to me; phantom pain, nerves remaining in the rest of the arm. Damned real for a phantom. At least the Terran medics, and even my father, now realized there was nothing more to be done for the hand, and they had done what they should have done at first, and taken it off. Nothing to be done, even with their (rightly) fabled medical science. My mind still flinched away from the memory of the twisted, terrifying thing which had crowned their latest, experimental technique at regeneration. Whatever it is in the cells of the body which bids a hand be a hand, with palm and fingers and nails, and not a claw or a feather or an eye, had been burned away by Sharra, and once, through the drugs, I had seen what my hand had become—

  Force my mind away from that too… was there anything safe to think about? I stared into the quiet sky from which the last lingering trace of crimson had faded.

  He said quietly “It’s worse at twilight, I think. I wasn’t even full-grown yet when I came first to Terra; I used to come here at sunset so that my cousins and foster-brothers wouldn’t see. You get so tired—” His back was to me, and in any case it was too dark to see anything but the dark loom of his presence, but still, somewhere in my mind, I could see the wry deprecating half-smile, “of the same old moon. And my Terran cousins thought it shameful for anyone my age to cry. So I made sure, after the first time, that they wouldn’t see it.”

  There is a saying on Darkover; only men laugh, only men dance, only men weep.

  But it had been different for my father, I thought in fierce envy. He had come here of his free will, and for a purpose; to build a bridge between our peoples, Terran and Darkovan. Larry Montray, his Terran friend, remaining on Darkover to be fostered in the Alton Domain: Kennard Alton coming here for a Terran education in the sciences of this world.

  But I?

  I had come here an exile, broken, maimed, my beloved Marjorie dead because I, like my father before me, had tried to build a bridge between Terran Empire and Darkover. And I had better reason: I was a son of both worlds, because Kennard, all Comyn, had married Montray’s half-sister, Elaine. So I tried; but I had chosen the wrong instrument—the Sharra matrix—and failed, and lived on, with everything that made life real for me dead or abandoned on a world half a Galaxy away. Even the hope which had persuaded my father to bring me here—that my hand, burned in the fires of Sharra, might somehow be salvaged or regenerated—had proved worse than a mirage; even after all I had endured, that was gone too. And I was here on a hated world, alien and familiar at once.

  My eyes were growing used to the darkness; I could see my father now, a man in late middle age, stooped and lame, his once-blazing hair all gray; his face was deeply lined with pain and conflict.

  “Lew, do you want to go back? Would it be easier? I was here for a reason; I was an exchange student, on a formal mission. It was a matter of honor. But nothing binds you here. You can take ship and return to Darkover whenever you will. Shall we go home, Lew?” He did not glance at my hand; he didn’t need to. That had failed, there was no reason to stay here hoping for a miracle.

  (But I could still feel that dull pain like a torn-off nail around the thumb. And the sixth finger ached as if I had pinched it in a vise, or burnt it. Strange. Haunted by the ghost of a hand that wasn’t there.)

  “Lew, shall we go home?” I knew he wanted it; this alien land was killing him, too. But then he said the wrong thing.

  “The Council wants me back. They know, now, I will father no other sons. And you are acknowledged Heir to Alton; when I went away, they said it was unlawful for the lord of Alton Domain and his Heir to leave the Domains at the same time. If you returned, the Council would be forced to acknowledge—”

  “Damn the Council!” I said, so loudly that my father flinched. The same damned old political maneuvering. He had never stopped trying to get the Council to acknowledge me—it had made a nightmare of my childhood, forced him into the painful and dangerous step he had taken, forcing premature awakening of my laran gift. Later it had driven me to my Aldaran kinsfolk, and the ill-fated attempt to raise power through Sharra, and Marjorie…I slammed the door shut in my mind, a closed place, black, blank. I would not think about th
at, I would not— I wanted no part of their damned Council, nor of the Comyn, nor Darkover— I turned my back and walked away toward the lake cabin, feeling him behind me, close, too close—

  Get out of my mind! Get—out! Leave me alone! I slammed my mind shut like the cabin door, heard the door open and close, felt him there though I stood with closed eyes. I did not turn or look.

  “Lew. No, damn it, don’t shut me out again, listen to me! Do you think you are the only one in the world who has known what it is to lose a loved one?” His voice was rough but it was a roughness I knew; it meant that if his voice had been less rough he might have wept. It had taken me twenty-two years to know that my father could weep.

  “You were two years old; and your sister died at birth. We both knew there should be no more. Elaine—” he had never before spoken her name in my hearing, though I knew it from his friends; always it had been the distant, formal your mother. “Yllana,” he said again, saying the Darkovan version of the name this time. “She knew as well as I, how fragile is the rule of a man with only one son. And you were not a hardy child. Believe me, I did not demand it of her. It was her free choice. And for fifteen years I have borne that burden, and tried never to let Marius feel it… that I grudged him life at the cost of Yllana’s—”

  He had never said so much before. I could feel in his harsh voice what it had cost him to say it.

  But it had been my mother’s free choice, to risk her life in bearing my brother Marius. Marjorie had had no choice—

  Fire. Ravening flames shooting into the sky, the great hovering wings of flame. Marjorie, burning, burning in the flames of Sharra…CaerDonn, the world, Darkover, all in flames—

  I slammed the barrier and the blackness down into my mind, heard myself shouting “No!” at the top of my voice, and once again brought up my maimed arm and slammed it down on anything, anything that would send pure physical pain crashing through my mind to the point where I could think of nothing else. He should not make me look at this, that I had killed the only thing I had ever loved or would ever love—