Hastur stood up, leaning over the long table, and started to speak, then looked up. His mouth dropped open.

Callina froze, motionless.

The floor dipped under my feet and would not stay still.

And above us there was a little shimmering, a distortion of the air.

Dio screamed.

“The — the death sign,” someone faltered, and voices died in deadly stillness.

I stared at the sign that flared like letters of living fire in the air, and I felt my blood freeze and the strength running out of me like water. Twisted space writhed and flared, and the inside me was howling and gibbering, reduced to primal panic. From time out of mind, before Darkover’s sun faded to a dying ember, that sign meant doom and death, bodies and minds seared to ruin.

“Sorceress! She-devil!” It was Dyan’s voice exploding in curses; he took three quick strides toward Callina, caught her by the shoulders, and wrenched her away from her place before the High Seat; flung her, with all the strength in his lean body, out into the room.

And young Regis, through some uncanny sensing, leaped up and caught Callina’s reeling body as she fell. The sight broke the static horror that held me; I whirled to face Dyan. At last I had reason! The man who dared to touch a Keeper had forfeited immunity. Annihilating fury swept from me, taking Dyan unaware. The Alton Gift, even unfocused, can be a vicious thing. His mind lay, in seconds, stripped before mine. I rained vicious mental slaps on it. It was immensely satisfying. I had been holding this in check ever since he picked my mind on the skyliner. He writhed, crumpled and fell, gasping in loud desperate hoarse half-sobs.

The pattern of fire flamed and died and was gone. Space in the room was quiet, normal again.

Callina stood leaning on Regis, pallid and shaken. I still stood over Dyan; his defenses were slashed away, and it would have been easy to snap the thread of his life. But Derik threw himself forward, flinging restraining arms around me.

“What are you about, you madman?”

There is something in a touch which can lay the mind bare. And what I touched then, shook my world. Derik was a weakling; I had always known that; but this — this tumbling, impassible confusion? I drew away, unable to endure even a second of it, letting my savage attack on Dyan relax.

“Hastur’s voice, harsh, and sombre, commanded, “In the name of Aldones! Let us have peace here, at least!”

Dyan stumbled to his feet and backed away. I could not move, though I had no will left to defy Hastur. The Regent looked gravely at Callina.

“A serious occasion, Callina comynara.”

“Serious truly. But only for me?” She freed herself from Regis’ protecting arm. “Oh, I see. You blame me for the — the manifestation?”

“Who else?” Dio cried shrilly. “So innocent, so innocent she looks, but she and Ashara — she and Ashara—”

Callina turned terrible eyes on her.

“Can all your life be told in open council then, Dio Ride-now comynara? You sought Ashara once.”

Dio’s eyes sought mine. 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 cracked it wide open. What now?

I was standing on a high balcony, jutting out over the walls of the Comyn Castle. Below, the land lay spread like a map, daubed in burnt sienna and red and dusty gold and ochre. Around me rose the iridescent castle walls, which gave back the dropping light of the red sun, setting in blood and fire. The bloody sun. That is what the Terrans call the sun of Darkover. A just name — for them, and for us.

And far above me soared the high spire of the Keeper’s Tower, arrogantly aloof from castle or city. I looked up at it, apprehensively. I did not think that Ashara, ancient though she must be, would remain aloof from a holocaust in the Comyn.

Someone spoke my name and I turned, seeing Regis Hastur in the archway.

“I’ve got a message for you,” he said. “I’m not going to give it, though.”