I went to my own room and threw myself down without bothering to undress.
Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.
I had felt a disruption like this once before, like a vortex of fury, lust, rage, destruction, surging up through us all. It should not be like this. It could not be like this!
Normally, matrix work left the workers drained, spent, without anything left over for any violent emotion. Above all, I had grown accustomed to the fact that there was nothing left over for sexuality. It wasn’t that way now.
I had been angry with Thyra at first, not aroused by her. I had been angry when it seemed she mocked Marjorie, and then suddenly I’d been so overcome by my own need that it would have been easy for me to tear off her clothes and take her there before the fire!
And Marjorie. A Keeper. I shouldn’t have been capable even of thinking about her this way. Yet I had thought about it. Damn it, I still ached with wanting her. And she had wanted me to stay with her! Was she weeping now, alone in her room, the tears she had been too proud to shed before me? Should I have risked it? Sanity, prudence, long habit, told me no; no, I had done the only thing it was safe to do.
I glanced briefly at the wrapped bundle of the matrix and felt the faintest thrill of awareness along my nerves. Insulated like that, it should have been wholly dormant. Damn it, I trained at Arilinn and any first-year telepath learns to insulate a matrix! What I insulate stays insulated! I must be dreaming, imagining. I was living on my nerves and by now they were raw, hypersensitive.
That damned thing was responsible for all our troubles. I’d have liked to heave it out the window, or better, send it out on a Terran rocket and let it work its mischief on cosmic dust or something! I heartily wished that Beltran and the Sharra matrix and Kadarin and old Desideria, with all her forge-folk about her, were all frying together on one of their own forges.
I was still in accord with Beltran’s dream, but standing between us and the accomplishment of the dream was this ravening nightmare of Sharra. I knew, I knew with the deepest roots of my self, that I could not control it, that Marjorie could not control it, that nothing human could ever control it. We had only stirred the surface of the matrix. If it was roused all the way it might never be controlled again, and tomorrow I would tell Beltran so.
Clutching this resolve, I fell into an uneasy sleep. For a long time I wandered in confused nightmares through the corridors of Comyn Castle; whenever I met someone, his or her face was veiled or turned away in aversion or contempt. Javanne Hastur refusing to dance with me at a children’s ball. Old Domenic di Asturien with his lifted eyebrows. My father, reaching out to me across a great chasm. Callina Aillard, turning away and leaving me alone on the rain-swept balcony. It seemed I wandered through those halls for hours, with no single human face turned to me in concern or compassion.
And then the dream changed. I was standing on the balcony of the Arilinn Tower, watching the sunrise, and Janna Lindir was standing beside me. I was dreamily surprised to see her. I was back again where I had been happy, where I had been accepted and loved, where there was no cloud on my mind and heart. But I had thought my circle had been broken and scattered, the others to their homes, I to the Guards where I was despised, Janna married … no, surely that had been only a bad dream! She turned and laid her hand in mine, and I felt a deep happiness.
Then I realized it was not Janna but Callina Aillard, saying softly, mockingly, “You do know what’s really wrong with you,” taunting me from the safe barrier of what she was, a Keeper, forbidden, untouchable. . . . Maddened by the surge of need and hunger in me, I reached for her, I tore the veils from her body while she screamed and struggled. I threw her down whimpering on the stones and flung myself atop her, naked, and through her wild cries of terror she changed, she began to flame and glow and burn, the fires of Sharra engulfing us, consuming us in a wild spasm of lust and ecstasy and terror and agony….