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….