I held all that power, fused like a rope of fire, a twisted cable of force. I focused it all on the matrix in my hand. I smelled burning flesh and knew it was my own hand burning and blackening, as the matrix glowed, flared, flamed, ravened, a fire that filled all the worlds, the gateway between the worlds, the reeling and crashing universes….
I smashed the gateway, pouring all that fire back into it. The form of fire shrank, died, scattered and dimmed. I saw Marjorie, reeling, collapse forward; I leaped to snatch her within the circle of my arm, clinging to the matrix still. I heard her screaming as the fires turned back, flaring, blazing up in her very flesh. I caught her fainting body in my arms and with a final, great thrust of power, hurled myself between space, into the gray world, elsewhere.
Space reeled under me; the world disappeared. In the formless gray spaces we were bodiless, painless. Was this death? Marjorie’s body was still warm in my arms, but she was unconscious. I knew we could remain between worlds only an instant. All the forces of balance tore at me, pulling me back, back to that holocaust and the rain of fire and the ruin at Castle Aldaran, where the men who had spent their powers collapsed and died, blackened and burned, as the fires burned out. Back there, back there to ruin and death? No! No! Some last struggle, some last vitality in me cried out No! and in a great final thrust of focused power, draining myself ruthlessly, I pushed Marjorie and myself through the closing gates and escaped….
My feet struck the floor. It was cool daylight in a curtained, sunlit room; there was hellish pain in my hand, and Marjorie, hanging between my arms, was moaning senselessly. The matrix was still clutched in the blackened, crisped ruin that had been a hand. I knew where I was: in the highest room of the Arilinn Tower, within the safety-field. A girl in the white draperies of a psi-monitor was staring at me, her eyes wide. I knew her; she had been in her first year at Arilinn, my last year there. I gasped “Lori! Quick, the Keeper—”
She vanished from the room and I gratefully let myself fall to the floor, half senseless, next to Marjorie’s moaning body.
We were here at Arilinn. Safe. And alive!
I had never been able to teleport before, but for Marjorie’s sake I had done it.
Consciousness came and went, wavering like a gray curtain. I saw Callina Aillard looking down at me, her gray eyes reflecting pain and pity. She said softly, “I am Keeper here now, Lew. I will do what I can.” Her hand insulated in the gray silk veil, she reached out to take the matrix, thrusting it quickly within the field of a damper. The cessation of the vibration behind the matrix was a moment of almost heavenly comfort, but it also turned off the near-anesthesia of deep focused effort. I had felt hellish pain in my hand before, but now it felt flayed and dipped anew in molten lead. I don’t know how I kept from screaming.
I dragged myself to Marjorie’s side. Her face was contorted, but even as I looked, it went slack and peaceful. She had fainted and I was glad. The fires that had burned my hand to a sickening, charred ruin had struck inward through her, as the fire of Sharra withdrew back through that opened gateway. I dared not let myself think what she must have suffered, what she must still suffer if she lived. I looked up at Callina with terrible appeal and read there what Callina had been too gentle to tell me in words.
Callina knelt beside us, saying with a gentleness I had never heard in any woman’s voice, “We will try to save her for you, Lew.” But I could see the faint, blue-lighted currents of energy pulsing dimmer and dimmer. Callina lifted Marjorie in her arms, kneeling, held her head against her breast. Marjorie’s features flickered for a moment in renewed consciousness and renewed pain; then her eyes blazed into mine, golden, triumphant, proud. She smiled, whispered my name, rested her head peacefully on Callina’s breast and closed her eyes. Callina bent her head, weeping, and her long dark hair fell like a mourning veil across Marjorie’s stilled face.