“Do you make war on women? Can’t you settle it with me, man to man?”

He was still holding my sword; he shrugged, flung it into a corner. “So much for your lowland toys. I learned long ago to fight my battles with sounder weapons. If you think I’d hurt Marjorie, you’re more of a fool than I ever believed you. We need you both.”

“Do you think I’ll ever work with you again? No, damn you, I’ll die first.”

“Yes, you will,” he said in an almost amiable tone. “There isn’t the slightest use in your heroics, dear boy.”

“What did you do, find you couldn’t handle Sharra alone? How much did you destroy before you found it out?”

“I don’t have to account to you,” he said with sudden brutality. I fought momentarily against the men holding me and at the same time lashed out with a murderous mental assault. I had always been told that the unleashed rage of an Alton can kill, had been disciplined never, neverto let my anger wholly free. Yet now …

I let my rage go, visualizing hands at Kadarin’s throat, my mind raining hatred and fury on him … I felt him wince under the onslaught, saw him go white, sag to his knees …

“Quick,” he gasped in a strangled voice, “knock him—out—”

A fist connected with my jawbone, darkness crashed through my mind. I felt myself go limp, hang helpless between my captors. Kadarin came and took over the beating himself, his ring-laden hands slashing hard at my face, blow after blow until I went down into a blurred, red-shot darkness. Then I realized they were hauling me out into the snowstorm; the cold sleet on my face revived me a little. Kadarin’s face hung in a red mist before my eyes.

“I don’t want to kill you, Lew. Come quietly now.”

I said thickly, through my torn and bleeding mouth, “Better kill me … brave man, who beats a man held helpless by … a couple of others … . Give me two men to hold you and I’ll beat you half dead too … dishonored … ”

“Oh, save your Domain cant,” he said. “I went beyond all that jabber of honor and dishonor long ago. I’ve no use for you dead. You are coming with me, so choose if you will come quietly, like the sensible lad you always were and will be again, or whether you will be carried, after these fellows beat you senseless? They don’t like beating helpless men, either. Or shall I make it easy and immobilize you?” His hand went out toward the matrix on my neck.

No! No! Not again! I screamed, a frenzied cry which actually made him step back a pace. Then quietly—there had never been anything in the world as terrible as his low, even voice—he said, “You can’t endure that again, can you? I’ll do it if I must. But why not spare us both the pain?”

“Better … kill me … instead.” I spat out the blood filling my mouth. It struck him in the face. Unhurriedly, he wiped it away. His eyes glinted like some bird of prey, mad and inhuman. He said, “I hoped you’d save me the worst threat. Nascar, go and get the girl. Get her matrix stone off of her. She carries it in—”

I cursed him, straining. “You devil, you fiend from hell! Do what you damn please with me, but let her alone!”

“Will you come, then, with no more of this?”

Slowly, defeated, I nodded. He smiled, a silky, triumphant smile, and jerked his head at the men to bring me along. I went between them, not protesting. If I, a strong man, could not endure that torment, how could I let them inflict it on Marjorie?

The men shoved us along through the blinding snow. A couple of hundred feet from the house, past the wall of trees, the snow stopped as if a water faucet had been turned off; the woodland road lay green before us. I stared, unbelieving.

Kadarin nodded. “Thyra has always wanted to experiment with storms,” he said, “and it kept you in one place until we were ready for you.”

My instinct had been right. We should have pressed through it. I should have known. Despair took me. A helicopter was waiting for us; they lifted me into one seat, set Marjorie in another. They had tied her wrists with her silk scarf, but had not otherwise harmed her. I reached out to touch her hand. Kadarin, swiftly coming between us, gripped my wrist with fingers of steel.

I jerked away from him as if he had been a cold corpse. I tried to meet Marjorie’s eyes. Together we might master him …

“It’s no use, Lew. I cannot fight you and keep threatening you all the way to Aldaran,” Kadarin said tonelessly. He reached into a pocket, brought out a small red vial, uncapped it. “Drink this. And don’t waste time.”

“No—”

“I said drink it. Quickly. If you contrive to spill it, I shall have no recourse except to tear off your matrices; first Marjorie’s, then yours. I shall not threaten again.”

Glancing at those inhuman eyes—Gods! This man had been my friend! Did he even know what he had become?—I knew we were both defenseless in his hands. Defeated, I raised the flask to my lips and swallowed the red liquid.

The helicopter, the world slid away.

And did not return.

I did not know, then, what drug he had given me. I am still not entirely sure. Nor have I ever known how much of what I remember from the next few days is dream and how much is underlaid by some curious core of reality.

For a long time I saw nothing but fire. Forest fire raging in the hills beyond Armida; fire raining down on Caer Donn; the great form of fire, stretching out irresistible arms and breaking the walls of Storn Castle as if they had been made of dough. Fire burning in my own veins, raging in my very blood.

I stood, once, on the highest point of Castle Aldaran and looked down on a hundred assembled men and felt the fire blazing behind me, sweeping through me with its wild lust and terror. I felt the men’s raw emotions surging up to where I stood, the Sharra sword between my hands, feeding my nerves with crude fear, lust, greed …

Again, a terrified child, I stood between my father’s hands, docilely awaiting the touch that could give me my heritage or my death. I felt the fury rising in me, raving in me, and I let the fire take him. He went up in flames, burning, burning …

I saw Regis Hastur, lying in a small dark hut somewhere on the road between Aldaran and Thendara, and knew he had failed. He lay there dying, his body torn with the last dying convulsions, unable to cross that dark threshold, failed, dying, burning …

I felt Dyan Ardais seize me from behind, felt my arm snap in his hands, felt through his touch the combined cruelty and lust. I turned on him and rained hatred and violence on him, too, and saw him go up under the flame of my hatred, burning, burning …

Once I heard Marjorie crying helplessly and fought up to consciousness again, and then I was in my room in Castle Aldaran, but I was tied down with enormous weights. Someone wedged my jaws open and poured down another dose of the pungent red drug, and I began to lose myself again in the dreams that were not dreams.

I stood atop a great flight of stairs, leading down and down and down forever into a great burning pit of hell, and Marjorie stood before me with the Sharra matrix between her hands and her face white and empty, and the matrix gripped in my hands burned me like fire, burned through my hand. Down below, the faces of the men, upturned to me, poured wave upon wave of raw emotion through me again, so that I burned endlessly in a hell-fire of fury and lust, burning, burning …

Once I heard Thyra crying out “No, no, I can’t, I won’t,” and a terrible sound of weeping. Even at the deathbed of her father she had not wept like this …

And then without transition Marjorie was there in my arms and I threw myself on her as I had done before. I covered her with frenzied and despairing kisses; I plunged gratefully into her warmth, my body and the very blood in my veins, burning, burning, trying in a single act to slake the frenzy of rage and lust which had tormented me, helpless, for days, months, years, eternities … I tried to stop myself, feeling that there was some dimension of realityto this which had not been in most of the other dreams or illusions. I tried to cry out, it was happening again, the thing I feared and I hated, the thing I desired … the thing I dared not see—I was responsible, personally responsible for all this cruelty and violence! It was my own hate, never acknowledged, never admitted, which they were using, channeling through me! I was powerless to stop myself now; a world of frenzy was shaking me, endlessly tearing at me with great claws. Marjorie was crying helplessly, hopelessly, and I could feel her fear and pain burning in me, burning, burning … Lightning ripped through my body, thunder crashing inside and out, a world of lust and fury was pouring through my loins … burning, burning… .