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  "And the rest?"

  Andrea said, "The rest—are none of your business."

  Stannard agreed. He didn't want to know. He had spent a lifetime doing chores of this sort for a thousand principals and he made a good and almost luxurious living by not wanting to know.

  They signed papers and produced numbered identity proxies, and then they went away again, and out of Andrea Closson's life, and out of the story of Darkover forever. They were so forgettable that even she forgot them, as individuals, within five seconds of the time they disappeared into her outer office.

  But the minute they had gone, she pressed the scan reader button again, setting it to STOP. The words blurred there. But she closed her lids the better to see it inside her eyes, in memory.

  High mountains, a familiar skyline, dark against the crimson sky of the lowering sun; a sun like a red and bloody disk. Only the tall buildings of the Trade City, pictured beneath the incredibly familiar mountains and sun, were new and surprising.

  So they call it Darkover now.

  A murmur of music whispered in her mind, the total recall that she had found intolerable for the first hundred years and had done as much as she could to desensitize; now she could not remember the name of the melody, and spent a few split seconds rummaging in a past she had deliberately put away, before emerging with the name of the melody and the odd, dry sound of reed wood flutes:

  "Weary are the hills."

  Yes, that was the name. Another of those intolerable clear pictures came into her mind again, a girl in a brief yellow tunic playing on the flute; then her mouth twisted and she opened her eyes. "A girl," she said grimly aloud, "I wasn't even a girl then. I was—what I was is what I decided not to think about. I've been here, and a woman, for—Evanda and Avarra! How long? It doesn't bear thinking about, how long I've been here!"

  But the memory persisted, running along a track it was impossible to stop, and finally, knowing it was pure self-indulgence, but also knowing it was the only way to put an end to this, Andrea pressed a button and pulled the message unit toward her, speaking softly.

  "Fix me a scan-and-destruct tape on everything which has been written about Cottman's Star IV, called Darkover, a Class D Closed world. I'll handle this one myself."

  The voice on the other end of this line had been extensively trained never to sound surprised, but Andrea, with her sudden supersensitized awareness, heard surprise anyhow:

  "You are going in person? What cover?"

  She considered that briefly. "I will go as an animal handler, considering the transport of small legal quantities of native fur-bearers to nearby worlds for breeding and development there," she said at last. She had been so many things on so many worlds. She understood and liked animals and she need never be on her guard against their intrusive thoughts.

  But when the scan-and-destruct had been absorbed and discarded, when she was packed and ready to board her transit on the first leg of the impossibly long transgalactic journey to that small planet out on the rim of nowhere; which now bore the name of Darkover, a fear roused again in her. A fear centuries buried, rousing deep in the curious convolutions of a brain which, living as a human, she used only fractionally.

  Suppose, after all this time and all the different people I've been, once I stand again under the four moons and the light of the bloody sun strikes me, suppose—suppose the old me, the real me, the self I was before I was Andrea, before I was wanderer, queen, spaceman; courtesan, businesswoman, suppose the old me came back? What then?

  What then? Then at least I would die where I was born, she thought with weary resignation, and pressed her long hands over her eyes. For the moment, if there had been anybody to see, she looked neither human nor woman.

  Narzain-ye kui, she thought in a language long dead; exiled child of the Yellow Forest, where have you not traveled? Return once more, see what the treading feet of the long seasons have made of the world your people could not hold, and then die here; die alone if you must, knowing that not even a memory remains of the footsteps of your folk in the fastnesses of the Mountains of Light . . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  HE SENSED that there were footsteps behind him again.

  It was troubling. They were not the familiar steps and presence of his bodyguard Danilo. Those he heard everywhere he went and because he loved Danilo and had taken the young man as his paxman and esquire, he neither resented them nor changed his steps a fraction for them. Dani would not intrude on his thoughts or his consciousness unless he wanted companionship.

  Regis Hastur thought, I'm too sensitive, and tried to tune out the footsteps. They probably had nothing to do with him; if he sensed their impact on his consciousness it was only perhaps that the owner of feet and steps was startled to see a young Hastur of Comyn Council abroad and afoot at this early hour. He moved along steadily, a slender man in his middle twenties, with the great personal beauty which marked all the Hasturs and Elhalyns of the Comyn; a striking face made more noteworthy in that the page-trimmed hair above the narrow face was not flame red, as with all the Comyn, but snow white.

  If Dani had his way I'd never go out without armed escort. What kind of life is that?

  Yet he knew remotely and with grief that it was true. The old days of Darkover, when the Comyn walked unhurt through war, armed insurrection, and street riots, were gone forever. He walked now to pay his last respects to another of his caste, dead at an assassin's hand in his thirty-seventh year; Edric Ridenow of Serrais. I never liked Edric. But must we all die, when so many of us are dead or in exile? The houses of the Seven Domains are laid waste. All the Altons gone; Valdir dying a hundred years past; Kennard dead on a distant world; Marius dead in psychic battle with the forces of Sharra; Lew and his last child, Marja, in exile on a distant world. The Hasturs, the Ridenows, the Ardais—decimated, gone. I should go too. But my people need me here, a Hastur of Hasturs, so they will not feel wholly abandoned to the Terran Empire.

  Blast fire is silent. Regis did not hear it but felt the heat, whirled, heard another cry, then silence of a shocking kind; then someone called his name and he saw Danilo come running up to him, drawn weapon in hand. The younger man stopped a little way off, lowering his weapon.

  He said, stubbornly and with concealed anger, "Now maybe you'll listen, Lord Regis. If you go out again without a proper escort I swear by all of Zandru's hells that I will not be responsible; I will ask my oath back and return to Syrtis. If the Council doesn't have me flayed alive first for letting you be killed under my very eyes!"

  Regis felt weak and sick; the dead man lying in the street had no ordinary weapon but a nervegun which would have made him—no, not a corpse but a vegetable, all his neural circuits paralyzed; he might live, spoon-fed and incommunicado, forty years. He said through suddenly trembling lips, "They're getting rougher. That's the seventh assassin in eleven moons. Must I become a prisoner in the Hidden City, Dani?"

  "At least they don't send dagger men against you any more."

  "I wish they did," Regis said. "I can hold my own with any dagger man on this world; so can you." He looked at Dani sharply; "You're not hurt?"

  "A graze. My arms feel dipped in molten lead, but the nerves will heal." He brushed off Regis' concerned queries, his offers of help. "The only help I need, Lord Regis, is your promise not to walk alone in the city again."

  Regis said, "I promise." But his eyes were hard. "Where did you get the weapon, Dani? A Compact-forbidden weapon? Give it to me."

  The younger man surrendered the blaster. He said, "It isn't illegal, vai dom. I went into the Terran Trade City and applied for a permit to carry it here. And when they knew whose body I guarded they gave it to me with a good will—and so they should."

  Regis looked troubled. He said, "Call a guardsman to bury that," he pointed to the charred corpse of the assassin. "No point in examining the body, I'm afraid; it will be like all the others, a nameless man, no trace of his whereabouts known. But he needn't lie in the street, either."
>
  He stood by, distressed and aloof, while Danilo summoned a green-and-black uniformed City Guard, and gave orders. Then he turned to Danilo and his eyes were hard.

  "You know the Compact." For generations on Darkover war and combat had been unknown; mostly due to the Compact, the law forbidding any weapon which can go beyond the hand's reach of the user; a law which allowed dueling and raiding but wholly prohibited the wide spread of battle or carnage. The question, addressed to Danilo, was purely rhetorical—every six-year-old child knew of the Compact—and the youth did not answer. But even before Regis' angry gaze—and the anger of a Hastur could kill—Danilo Syrtis did not drop his eyes.

  He said, "You're alive and unharmed. That's all I care about, Lord."

  "But what, in the name of any god you like, are we living for, Dani?"

  "I, to keep you alive."

  "And what are we living about? We are living, among other things, so that the Compact be kept on Darkover and the years of chaos and cowardly killing never come back to our people!" Regis sounded half wild with rage and despair, but Danilo did not quail from his angry stare. He said, "The Compact would be much worse kept with you dead, Lord Regis. I am your most loyal—" the boy's voice suddenly shook, "you know my life is yours to keep or spend, vai dom cario; but do you really know what would become of this world or your people with you dead?"

  "Bredú." Regis used the word which meant not only friend but sworn brother and reached out with both hands for Danilo's; a rare touch in a telepath caste. He said, "If this is true, my dearest brother, why should seven assassins want me dead?"

  He didn't expect an answer and didn't get one. Dando said, his face drawn, "I don't think they come from our people at all."

  "Is that—" Regis pointed to where the corpse had lain, "a Terran? Not as I know them."

  "Nor I. But face facts, Lord Regis. Seven assassins to you alone; and Lord Edric dead from a strange dirk; Lord Jerome of the Elhalyns dead in his own study and no man's footprints in the snow; three of the Aillard women dead in mishandled childbirth and the midwives dying of poison before they could be questioned; and—the gods deal with me for speaking of it—your two children."

  Regis' face, hard before, was bleak now, for although he had fathered the children without any love for their mothers, as a sworn duty to his caste, he had cared deeply for the two sons found dead in their cribs—from sudden illness, they said—not three months ago. He said, and the terrible control in his voice was worse than tears, "What can I do, Dani? Must I see a murderer's hand or the hand of conspiracy in every blow of fate?"

  "It will be worse for you if you don't than if you do, Lord Regis," said Danilo, but the deep compassion in his voice belied the harshness of the words. He added, still harshly, "You've had a shock. You'd better get along home. Your mourning at Lord Edric's funeral, such mourning as anyone could summon up for such as he, won't do his memory half as much good as you guarding your life to look after his womenfolk and people!"

  Regis' mouth thinned. "I doubt if they have spare murderers in reserve on one day," was all he said. But he went with Danilo, not protesting further.

  So it was a war, then, a complex conspiracy against the telepath caste.

  But who was the enemy, and why?

  Isolated incidents like this had never been uncommon on Darkover, although it was more common for an assassin to file what was known as an intent-to-murder; this placed it nominally under the age-old duello code of Darkover and the slayer enjoyed immunity; a slaying in fair duel was no murder.

  His lip curled faintly. He had carefully avoided embroiling himself in any of the warring alignments and factions on Darkover ever since he knew that Derik Elhalyn, nearest heir to the rulership of Comyn Council, was mad and could not take office.

  Thus, no living man on Darkover could justly claim that Regis Hastur of Hastur had wronged him. Furthermore, as Danilo had reminded him, there were few who could match him in the use of any legal dueling weapons.

  Who, then? Some of their own people who wanted the Comyn, with its complex hierarchy of telepaths and psi talents, out of the way?

  Or, the Terrans?

  Well, that he could verify at once.

  Shortly after he had assumed the position as chief liaison man between the Terrans and his own people, he had come to live in a house near the edge of the Terran Zone. It was a compromise and he hated it; neither a Terran residence, which, although boxy and cramped, had at least comfort and convenience, nor a Darkovan one, with space and air and the absence of separating walls, though essentially comfortless. It was further still from anything like the feel of Castle Hastur where he had spent most of his childhood.

  He detested, with a loathing so completely culture bound that it was almost inborn, almost all of the artifacts of Terran Empire technology and using them daily was one of the most suffocating handicaps of his liaison position. Making an average visiphone call was a process made lengthier by the need for overcoming his revulsion and he made it as brief as he could.

  "Trade City Headquarters; Section Eight, Medical Research."

  When the screen had cleared he requested, "Department of Alien Anthropology," and when that went through he asked for Doctor Jason Allison, and finally the face of a young man, restrained but pleasant, took form before him.

  "Lord Regis. An unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?"

  "Forget the formalities, for one thing," Regis said. "You've known me too long for that. But can you come and see me here?"

  He could have asked his question easily enough on the screen and been answered. But Regis was a telepath and had learned young to rely, not on the words of an answer or the face of the speaker, but on the "feel" of the answer. He did not think Jason Allison would lie to him. Insofar as he could like or trust anyone not of his own caste, he liked and trusted the Darkover-born Jason. But without lying, Jason might evade or shade the truth to avoid hurting him or talk around what he did not know.

  So when Jason had joined him there, and the first few words of formal courtesy and inquiries had passed, he looked the young Terran straight in the eye and said:

  "You've known me a long time; you know I'm no fool. Level with me, Jason; is there some sort of feeling around the Terran Empire that telepaths are more trouble than they're worth, and that—even though the Empire may not issue a price on our heads—that no tears would be officially shed if we were picked off, one by one?"

  Jason said, "Good God, no!" but Regis did not even hear the words. What he heard was the perfectly honest shock, denial and outrage in the young Terran scientist's mind.

  Not the Terrans, then.

  He probed further, just to satisfy his own conscience.

  "Maybe something you hadn't heard about? Not your section. I know that Alien Anthropology has been trying to work with some of us."

  "Not the other sections, either," said Jason firmly. "Spaceport authority couldn't care less, of course. The science division—well, they're still exploring your various sciences and they realize that Darkover is unique, a reservoir of psi talents unequaled anywhere in the galaxy so far as we know. They'd be more likely to try to round you all up and put you in—well, not in cages, but in protective custody until they could study you to their hearts' content." He laughed.

  "Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea," Regis said without humor. "If it goes on like this, there won't be a telepath with laran power left alive on Darkover!"

  Jason's grin faded. "I heard a rumor months ago that someone had tried to assassinate you and failed," he said. "With all the duels going on, I didn't take it seriously. Was it true, then? Has there been another?"

  "You don't know, then," Regis said, and told him. Gradually the color faded from the young Terran's face. "This is frightening. I can only say that nobody official among the Terrans is doing it. And who else would have reason?"

  That, of course, was the question, Regis thought. He said, "The most powerful mind in the universe, the greatest psi talents on D
arkover, are still vulnerable to knife, bullet or gun. I could name a dozen, beginning with the Keeper Cleindori and running down to my cousin Marius Alton, two or three years ago."

  "And without the telepaths," Jason said slowly, "we have no key to the matrix sciences of Darkover and no hope of ever finding a key to them."

  "And also without the telepaths," Regis said, "our world and our economy falls apart. Who profits by that?"

  "I don't know. There are plenty of interests who would like to see your planet open to commercial export and import. But that battle's been going on for three or four generations, and the Terran Empire has always held that a planet has the right to decide for itself in the long run. They're not even lobbying on Darkover any more. After all, there are other planets."

  But Regis heard the unspoken part of that sentence, too; There are other planets, but not with a big spaceport and a sizable Terran Zone and colony. Darkover was a crossroad between the upper and lower Galactic Arm and had a spaceport twice as big as most planets its size, five times as big as the ordinary Class B, to handle the traffic. A pivot planet—and it was getting in the way of those who hated to see such a plum unpicked.

  Just the same, Jason said, "I don't honestly think it's anyone in the Empire or the Zone, Regis; they'd go about it differently. If you have a bulldozer, you don't need a snow shovel. This is something undercover and uncommonly nasty."

  "I'm inclined to agree. I'll have to see if there are any more straws in the wind," Regis said. "Picking off the telepaths wouldn't change our stand on the Empire. We don't want to be part of it; and we don't want to become just one more link in the chain; and we don't want your technology to swamp us. And most of the common people agree. If someone's trying to change their minds, I should be able to find it out. Meanwhile—"