We know what you are trying to do, Lew. Stand firm and we will help.
I felt my whole body twitch. It was my father’s voice!
It was cruel, a stabbing hope. He must be very near or he could never have reached us through the enormous blanking-out field of the Sharra matrix.
Father! Father! It was a great surge of gratitude. Even if we all died, perhaps his strength added to mine could help us live long enough to destroy this thing. I locked firmly with Marjorie, made contact through the Sharra matrix, felt the old rapport flame into life: Kadarin’s enormous sustaining strength, Thyra like a savage beast, giving the linkage claws, savagery, a wild prowling frenzy. And it all flooded through me….
It was not the way we had used it before, the closed circle of power. As I raised the matrix this time I felt a mighty river of energy flooding through Kadarin, the vast floods of raw emotion from the men standing below: worship, rage, anger, lust, hatred, destruction, the savage power of fire, burning, burning…
This was what I had felt before, the dream, the nightmare.
Marjorie was already etched in the aureole of light. Slowly, as the power grew, pouring into my mind through the linked focus, then channeling through me into Marjorie, I saw her begin to change, take on power and height and majesty. The fragile girl in the blue dress merged, moment by moment, into the great looming goddess, arms tossed to the sky, flames shaking exultantly like tossed tresses, a great fountain of flame …
Lew, hold steady for me. I cannot do this without your full cooperation. It will hurt, you know it may kill you, but you know what hangs on this, my son…
My father’s touch, more familiar than his voice. And almost the same words he had spoken before.
I knew perfectly well where I was, standing in the matrix circle of Sharra on the heights of Castle Aldaran, the great form of fire towering over me. Marjorie, her identity lost, dissolved in the fire and yet controlling it like a torch-dancer with her torches in her hands, swooped down to touch the old spaceport with a fingertip of fire. Far below us there was a vast booming explosion; one of the starships shattered like a child’s toy, vanishing skyward in flames. And yet, though all of me was here, now, still I stood again in my father’s room at Armida, waiting, sick with that terrible fear—and elation! I reached for him with a wild and reckless confidence. Go on! Do it! Finish what you started! Better at your hands than Sharra’s!
I felt it then, the deep Alton focused rapport, blazing alive in me, spreading into every corner of my brain and being, filling my veins. It was such agony as I had never known, the fierce, violent traumatic tearing rapport, a ripping open of every last fiber of my brain. Yet this time I was in control. I was the focus of all this power and I reached out, twisting it like a steel rope in my hand, a blazing rope of fire. The hand was searing with flame but I barely felt it. Kadarin was motionless, arched backward, accepting the stream of emotions from the men below, transforming them into energons, focusing them through me and into Sharra. Marjorie … Marjorie was there somewhere in the midst of the great fire, but I could see her face, confident, unafraid, laughing. I looked at her for a brief instant, wishing in anguish that I could bring her, even for a fraction of a second, out and free from Sharra, see her again—no time. No time for that. I saw the goddess pause to strike. I must act now, quickly, before I too was caught up in that mindless fire, that rage for violence and destruction. I looked for a last instant of anguish and atonement into my father’s loving eyes.
I braced myself against the terrible throbbing agony in the hand that held the matrix. Just a little more. Just a moment more, I spoke to the screaming agony as if it were a separate living entity, you can bear it just an instant more. I focused on the black and wavering darkness behind the form of fire where, instead of the parapets and towers of Castle Aldaran, a blurring darkness grew, out of focus, a monstrous doorway, a gate of fire, a gate of power, where something hovered, swayed, bulged as if trying to break through that gateway. I gathered all the power of the focused minds, all of them, my father’s strength, my own, Kadarin’s and all the hundred or so mindless, focused believers behind him pouring out all their raw lust and emotion and strength…