The single candle near his bed wavered, flickered in and out of focus; colors looped and spun across his visual field and the room swelled up, receded and shrank until it seemed to lie far away, then loom enormously around him in great echoing space.
He recognized the feeling from when Lew gave him kirian, but he was not drugged now!
He clutched at the bedclothes, squeezing his eyes shut. He could still see the candleflame, a dark fire printed inside his eyelids, the room around him lit with blazing brilliance, reversed afterimages, dark to bright and bright to dark, and a roaring in his ears like the distant roaring of a forest fire
… The fire-lines at Armida! For an instant it seemed that he saw Lew’s face again, crimson, gazing into a great fire, ‘ drawn with terror and wonder, then the face of a woman, shining, ecstatic, crowned with fire, burning, burning alive in the flames … Sharra, golden-chained Forge-Goddess. The room was alive with the fire and he burrowed beneath the blankets, sunk, battered, swirled. The room was dissolving around him, tilting … every thread in the smooth fine linen of the blankets seemed to cut into him, hard and rough, the twisted fibers of blanket trying to curl and frizzle and dig painfully into his skin, like cutting edges. He heard someone moan aloud and wondered who was there moaning and .crying like that. The very air seemed to separate itself and come apart against his skin as if he had to sort it out into little droplets before he could breathe. His own breath hissed and whistled and moaned as it went in and out, like searing fire, to be quenched by the separate droplets of water in his lungs….
Pain crashed through his head. He felt his skull smashing, shattering into little splinters; Another blow sent him flying high, falling into darkness.
“Regis!” Again the crashing, reeling sickness of the blow and the long spin into space. The sound was only meaningless vibration but he tried to focus on it, make it mean something. “Regis!” Who was Regis? The roaring candleflame died to a glimmer and Regis heard himself gasp aloud. Someone was standing over him, calling his name, slapping him hard and repeatedly. Suddenly, noiselessly, the room fell into focus.
“Regis, wake up! Get up and walk around, don’t drift with it!”
“Javanne …” he said, struggling fuzzily upright to catch her hand as it was descending for another blow. “Don’t, sister …”
He was surprised at how weak and faraway his voice sounded. She gave a faint cry of relief. She was standing beside his bed, a white shawl slipping from her shoulders above her long nightgown. “I thought one of the children cried out, then heard you. Why didn’t you tell me you were likely to have threshold sickness?”
Regis blinked and dropped her hand. Even without the touch he could feel her fear. The room was still not quite solid around him. “Threshold sickness?” He thought about it a moment. He’d heard of it, of course, born into a Comyn family: a physical and psychic upheaval of awakening telepaths in adolescence, the inability of the brain to cope with sudden overloads of sensory and extrasensory data, resulting in perceptual distortions of sight, sound, touch. … “I never had it before. I didn’t know what it was. Things seemed to thin out and disappear, I couldn’t see properly, or feel…”
“I know. Get up now and walk around a little.”
The room was still tilting around him; he clung to the bed-frame. “If I do, I’ll fall….”
“And if you don’t, your balance centers will start drifting out of focus again. Here,” she said with a faint laugh, tossing the white shawl to him, looking courteously away as he wrapped it around his body and struggled to his feet. “Regis, did no one warn you of this when your laran wakened?”
“Didn’t -who warn me? I don’t think anyone knew,” he said, taking a hesitant step and then another. She was right; under the concentrated effort of getting up and moving, the room settled into solidity again. He shuddered and went toward the candle. The little lights still danced and jiggled behind his eyes, but it was candle-sized again. How had it grown to a raging forest fire out of childhood? He picked it up, was amazed to see how his hand shook. Javanne said sharply, “Don’t touch the candle when your hand’s not steady, you’ll set something afire! Regis, you frightened me!”