Another death to my account …

At last, when the rising sun was already staining the distant peaks with crimson, I slept too. It was like a final grace of some unknown goddess that there were no evil dreams, no nightmares of fire, only a merciful darkness, the dark robe of Avarra covering our sleep.

I woke still clasped in Marjorie’s arms. The room was full of sunlight; her golden eyes were wide, staring at me with fear.

“They will come for us soon,” she said.

I kissed her, slowly, deliberately, before I rose. “So much the less time of waiting,” I said, and went to draw back the bolt. I dressed myself in my best, defiantly digging from my packs my finest silk under-tunic, a jerkin and breeches of gold-colored dyed leather. A Comyn heir did not go to his death like a common criminal being hanged! Some such emotion must have been in Marjorie yesterday, for she had evidently put on her finest gown, pale-blue, woven of spider-silk and cut low across the breasts. Instead of her usual plaits, she coiled her hair high atop her head with a ribbon. She looked beautiful and proud. Keeper, comynara.

Servants brought us some breakfast. I was grateful that she could smile proudly, thanking them in her usual gracious manner. There were no traces in her face of the tears and terror of yesterday; we held our heads high and smiled into each other’s eyes. Neither of us dared speak.

As I had known he would, Kadarin came in as we were silently sharing the last of the fruits on the tray. I did not know how my body could contain such hate. I was physically sick with the lust to kill him, to feel my fingers meeting in the flesh of his throat.

And yet—how can I say this?—there was nothing left there to hate. I looked up just once and quickly looked away. He was not even a man any more, but something else. A demon? Sharra walking like a man? The real man Kadarin was not there any more. Killing him would not stop the thing that used him.

Another score against Sharra: this man had been my friend. The destruction of Sharra would not only kill him, it would avenge him, too.

He said, “Have you managed to make him see sense, Marjorie? Or must I drug him again?”

Her fingertips touched mine out of his sight. I knew he did not see, though he would always have noticed before. I said, “I will do what you ask me.” I could not bring myself to call him Bob or even Kadarin. He was too far from what I had known.

As we walked through the corridors, I looked sidewise at Marjorie. She was very pale; I felt the life in her flaring fitfully. Sharra had drained her, sapped her life-forces nearly to the death. One more reason not to go on living. Strange, I was thinking as if I had a choice.

We stepped out onto the high balcony overlooking Caer Donn and the Terran airfield. On a lower level I saw them all assembled, the faces I had seen in my … what? Dream, drugged nightmare? Or had that part been real? It seemed I knew the faces. Some ragged, some in rich garments, some knowing and sophisticated, some dulled and ignorant, some not even entirely human. But one and all, their eyes gleamed with the same glassy intensity.

Sharra!Their eagerness burned at me, tearing, ravaging.

I looked down at Caer Donn. My breath stuck in my throat. Marjorie had told me, but no words could have prepared me for this kind of destruction, ruin, desolation.

Only after the great forest fire that had ravaged the Kilghard Hills near Armida had I seen anything like this. The city lay blackened; for wide areas not one stone remained upon another. All the old city lay blasted, wasted, the damage spreading far into the Terran Zone.

And I had played a part in this!

I had thought I knew how dangerous the great matrices could be. Looking down on this wasteland which had been a beautiful city, I knew I had never known anything at all. And all these deaths were on my single account. I could never expiate or atone. But perhaps, perhaps, I might live long enough to end the damage.

Beltran stood on the heights. He looked like death. Rafe was nowhere to be seen. I did not think Kadarin would have hesitated to destroy him now, but I hoped, with a deeplying pain, that the boy was alive and safe somewhere well away from this. But I had no hope. If the Sharra matrix was actually smashed, no one who had been sealed into it was likely to live.

Kadarin was unwrapping the long, bundled length of the sword which contained the Sharra matrix. Beyond him I saw Thyra, her eyes burning into mine with an ineradicable hatred. I had hurt her beyond bearing, too. And, unlike Marjorie, she had not even consented to her death. I had loved her, and she would never know.

Kadarin placed the sword in my hand. The matrix, throbbing with power at the junction of hilt and blade, made my burned hand stab blindly with a pain that reached all the way up my arm, made me feel sick. But I must be in physical contact with it, not mental touch alone. I took it from the sword, held it in my hand. I knew my hand would never be usable again after this, but what matter? What did a dead man care for a hand burned from his corpse? I had been trained to endure even such terrible pain, and it could not last long. If I could endure just long enough for what I had to do …

We know what you are trying to do, Lew. Stand firm and we will help.

I felt my whole body twitch. It was my father’s voice!

It was cruel, a stabbing hope. He must be very near or he could never have reached us through the enormous blanking-out field of the Sharra matrix.

Father! Father!It was a great surge of gratitude. Even if we all died, perhaps his strength added to mine could help us live long enough to destroy this thing. I locked firmly with Marjorie, made contact through the Sharra matrix, felt the old rapport flame into life: Kadarin’s enormous sustaining strength, Thyra like a savage beast, giving the linkage claws, savagery, a wild prowling frenzy. And it all flooded through me …

It was not the way we had used it before, the closed circle of power. As I raised the matrix this time I felt a mighty river of energy flooding through Kadarin, the vast floods of raw emotion from the men standing below: worship, rage, anger, lust, hatred, destruction, the savage power of fire, burning, burning …

This was what I had felt before, the dream, the nightmare.

Marjorie was already etched in the aureole of light. Slowly, as the power grew, pouring into my mind through the linked focus, then channeling through me into Marjorie, I saw her begin to change, take on power and height and majesty. The fragile girl in the blue dress merged, moment by moment, into the great looming goddess, arms tossed to the sky, flames shaking exultantly like tossed tresses, a great fountain of flame …

Lew, hold steady for me. I cannot do this without your full cooperation. It will hurt, you know it may kill you, but you know what hangs on this, my son …

My father’s touch, more familiar than his voice. And almost the same words he had spoken before.

I knew perfectly well where I was, standing in the matrix circle of Sharra on the heights of Castle Aldaran, the great form of fire towering over me. Marjorie, her identity lost, dissolved in the fire and yet controlling it like a torch-dancer with her torches in her hands, swooped down to touch the old spaceport with a fingertip of fire. Far below us there was a vast booming explosion; one of the starships shattered like a child’s toy, vanishing skyward in flames. And yet, though all of me was here, now, still I stood again in my father’s room at Armida, waiting, sick with that terrible fear—and elation! I reached for him with a wild and reckless confidence. Go on! Do it! Finish what you started! Better at your hands than Sharra’s!

I felt it then, the deep Alton focused rapport, blazing alive in me, spreading into every corner of my brain and being, filling my veins. It was such agony as I had never known, the fierce, violent traumatic tearingrapport, a ripping open of every last fiber of my brain. Yet this time I was in control. I was the focus of all this power and I reached out, twisting it like a steel rope in my hand, a blazing rope of fire. The hand was searing with flame but I barely felt it. Kadarin was motionless, arched backward, accepting the stream of emotions from the men below, transforming them into energons, focusing them through me and into Sharra. Marjorie … Marjorie was there somewhere in the midst of the great fire, but I could see her face, confident, unafraid, laughing. I looked at her for a brief instant, wishing in anguish that I could bring her, even for a fraction of a second, out and free from Sharra, see her again—no time. No time for that. I saw the goddess pause to strike. I must act now, quickly, before I too was caught up in that mindless fire, that rage for violence and destruction. I looked for a last instant of anguish and atonement into my father’s loving eyes.