I felt Dyan Ardais seize me from behind, felt my arm snap in his hands, felt through his touch the combined cruelty and lust. I turned on him and rained hatred and violence on him, too, and saw him go up under the flame of my hatred, burning, burning….
Once I heard Marjorie crying helplessly and fought up to consciousness again, and then I was in my room in Castle Aldaran, but I was tied down with enormous weights. Someone wedged my jaws open and poured down another dose of the pungent red drug, and I began to lose myself again in the dreams that were not dreams.
I stood atop a great flight of stairs, leading down and down and down forever into a great burning pit of hell, and Marjorie stood before me with the Sharra matrix between her hands and her face white and empty, and the matrix gripped in my hands burned me like fire, burned through my hand. Down below, the faces of the men, upturned to me, poured wave upon wave of raw emotion through me again, so that I burned endlessly in a hell-fire of fury and lust, burning, burning….
Once I heard Thyra crying out “No, no, I can’t, I won’t,” and a terrible sound of weeping. Even at the deathbed of her father she had not wept like this….
And then without transition Marjorie was there in my arms and I threw myself on her as I had done before. I covered her with frenzied and despairing kisses; I plunged gratefully into her warmth, my body and the very blood in my veins, burning, burning, trying in a single act to slake the frenzy of rage and lust which had tormented me, helpless, for days, months, years, eternities…. I tried to stop myself, feeling that there was some dimension of reality to this which had not been in most of the other dreams or illusions. I tried to cry out, it was happening again, the thing I feared and I hated, the thing I desired … the thing I dared not see—I was responsible, personally responsible for all this cruelty and violence! It was my own hate, never acknowledged, never admitted, which they were using, channeling through me! I was powerless to stop myself now; a world of frenzy was shaking me, endlessly tearing at me with great claws. Marjorie was crying helplessly, hopelessly, and I could feel her fear and pain burning in me, burning, burning…. Lightning ripped through my body, thunder crashing inside and out, a world of lust and fury was pouring through my loins . .. burning, burning. …
I was alone. I lay spent, drained, still confused with the dreams. I was alone. Where was Marjorie? Not here, thanks to all the Gods, not here, not here! None of it had been real.
My mind and body at peace, I slept, but far away in the blackness, someone was crying….
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
“It’s not threshold sickness this time, bredu,” Regis said, raising his head from the matrix. “This time I’m doing it right, but I can’t see anything but the … the image that struck me down on the northward road. The fire and the golden image. Sharra.”
Danilo said, shuddering, “I know. I saw it too.” “At least it didn’t strike me senseless this time.” Regis covered the matrix. It roused no sickness in him now, just an overwhelming sense of heightened perception. He should have been able to reach Kennard, or someone at Arilinn, but there was nothing—nothing but the great, burning, chained image he knew to be Sharra.
Yes, something terrible was happening in the hills. Danilo said, “I’d think every telepath on Darkover must know it by now, Regis. Don’t they keep a lookout for such things in the towers? No need for you to feel guilty because you can’t do it alone, without training.” “I don’t feel exactly guilty, but I am dreadfully worried. I tried to reach Lew, too. And couldn’t.”
“Maybe he’s safe at Arilinn, behind their force-field.”
Regis wished he could think so. His head was clear and he knew the sickness would not return, but the reappearance of the image of Sharra troubled him deeply. He had heard stories of out-of-control matrices, most of them from the Ages of Chaos, but some more recent. A cloud covered the sun and he shivered with cold.