For a moment I had it. Then, within the stone, there was a wild flaring flame, a rush of savage awareness, a too-familiar surge of fiery violence … flames rising, the great form of fire blotting out consciousness … a woman, dark and vital, bearing a living flame, a great circle of faces pouring out raw emotion…
I heard Marjorie gasp, fought to break the rapport. Sharra! Sharra! We had been sealed to it, we were caught and drawn to the fires of destruction…
“No! No!” Marjorie cried aloud, and I saw the fires thin out and vanish. They had never been there. They were reflected in the dying coals of our ritual marriage-fire; the eerie edge of light around Marjorie’s face was only the last firelight there. She whispered, trembling, “Lew, what was it?”
“You know,” I hesitated to say the name aloud, “Kadarin. And Thyra. Working directly with the sword. Zandru’s hells, Marjorie, they are trying to use it the old way, not with a Keeper-controlled circle of telepaths in an orderly energon ring—and it’s uncontrollable even that way, as we found out—but with a single telepath, focusing raw emotion from a group of untrained followers.”
“Isn’t that terribly dangerous?”
“Dangerous! The word’s inadequate! Would you kindle a forest fire to cook your supper? Would you chain a dragon-fire to roast your chops or dry your boots? I wish I thought they would only kill themselves!”
I strode up and down by the dead fire, restlessly listening to the battering of the storm outside. “And I can’t even warn them at Arilinn!”
“Why not, Lew?”
“So close to—to Sharra—my own matrix won’t work,” I said, and tried to explain how Sharra evidently blanked out smaller matrices.
“How far will that effect reach, Lew?”
“Who knows? Planet-wide, maybe. I’ve never worked with anything that strong. There aren’t any precedents.”
“Then, if it reached all the way to Arilinn, won’t the telepaths there know that something is wrong?”
I brightened. That might be our only hope. I staggered suddenly and she caught at my arm.
“Lew! You’re worn out. Rest here by me, darling.” I flung myself down at her side, dizzy and despairing. I had not even spoken of my other fears, that if I used my personal matrix, I, who had been sealed to Sharra, might be drawn back into that vortex, that savage fire, that corner of hell….
She knew, without my saying it. She whispered, “I can feel it reaching for us. … Can it draw us back, back into itself?”
She clung to me in terror; I rolled over and took her to me, holding her with savage strength, fighting an almost uncontrollable desire. And that frightened hell out of me. I should be drained, spent, exhausted, incapable of the slightest sexual impulse. That was frustrating, but it was normal, and I had long since come to terms with it.
But this wild lust—and it was pure lust, a hateful dark animal thing with no hint of love or warmth—set my pulses racing, made me gasp and fight against it. It was too strong; I let it surge up and overwhelm me, feeling the fire burn up in my veins as if some scalding ichor had replaced the blood in my body. I smothered her mouth under mine, felt her weakly struggling to fight me away. Then the fire took us both.
It is the one memory I have of Marjorie which is not all joy. I took her savagely, without tenderness, trying to slake the burning need in me. She met me with equal violence, hating it equally, both of us gripped with that uncontrollable savage desperation. It was fierce and animal—no! Not animal! Animals meet cleanly, driven only by the life-force in them, knowing nothing of this kind of dark lust. There was no innocence in this, no love, only raw violence, insatiable, a bottomless pit of hell. It was hell, all the hell either of us would ever need to know. I heard her sobbing helplessly and knew I was weeping, too, with shame and self-hatred. Afterward we did not sleep.
Chapter TWENTY-ONE
Even at Nevarsin, Regis thought, it had never snowed so hard, or so persistently. His pony picked its way deliberately along, following in the steps of Danilo’s mount, as mountain horses were trained to do. It was snowing again.