Sharra's Exile (6 page)

A waiter came, bowing, and asked if the
vai domyn
had any other pleasure: wine, sweets, young entertainers— He weighted this last heavily, and Danilo could not conceal a grimace of distaste.

“No, no, nothing more.” He hesitated, glancing at Regis. “Unless you—”

Regis said wryly, “I am a libertine only with women, Dani, but no doubt I have given you cause to think otherwise.”

“If we have to quarrel,” Dani said, with a gulp, “Let us at least do it in clean air and not in a place like this!”

Regis felt a great surge of enormous bitterness. Dyan had done this, damn it! He said, “Oh, no doubt, this is the place for lovers’ quarrels of this kind—and I suppose if the Heir to Hastur and his favorite must quarrel, better here than in Comyn Castle, where all the Domains, sooner or later, will hear!”

And again he felt, it is more of a burden than I can bear!

CHAPTER TWO

Vainwal: Terran Empire

Fifth year of exile

Dio Ridenow saw them first in the lobby of the luxury hotel serving humans, and humanoids, on the pleasure-world of Vainwal. They were tall, sturdy men, but it was the blaze of red hair on the elder of them that drew her eyes; Comyn red. He was past fifty and walked with a limp: his back was bent, but it was easy to see that once he had been a large and formidable man. Behind him walked a younger man in nondescript clothing, dark-haired and black-browed, sullen, with steel-gray eyes. Somehow he had the look of deformity, of suffering, which Dio had learned to associate with lifetime cripples; yet he had no visible defect except for a few ragged scars along one cheek. The scars drew up one half of his mouth into a permanent sneer, and Dio turned her eyes away with a sense of revulsion; why would a Comyn lord have such a person in his entourage?

For it was obvious that the man was a Comyn lord. There were redheads in other worlds of the Empire, and plenty on Terra itself; but there was a strong facial stamp, an ethnic likeness; Darkovan, Comyn, unmistakable. And the older man’s hair, flame-red, now dusted with gray. But what was he doing here?

For that matter, who was he? It was rare to find Darkovans anywhere but on their home world. The girl smiled; someone might have asked her that question, as well, for she was Darkovan and far from home.

Her brothers came here because, basically, neither of them was interested in political intrigue; but they had had to defend and justify their absence often enough.

The Comyn lord moved across the great lobby slowly limping, but with a kind of arrogance that drew all eyes; Dio framed it to herself, in an unfocused way; he moved as if he should have been preceded by his own drone-pipers, and worn high boots and a swirling cloak—not the drab, featureless Terran clothing he actually wore.

And having identified his Terran clothing, suddenly Dio knew who he was. Only one Comyn lord, as far as anyone knew, had actually married,
di catenas
and with full ceremony, a Terran woman. He had managed to live down the scandal, which in any case had been before Dio was born. Dio herself had not seen him more than twice in her life; but she knew that he was Kennard Lanart-Alton, Lord

Armida, self-exiled Head of the Alton Domain. And now she knew who the younger man must be, the one with the sullen eyes; this would be his half-caste son Lewis, who had been horribly injured in a rebellion somewhere in the Hellers a few years ago. Dio took no special interest in such things, and in any case she had still been playing with dolls when it happened. But Lew’s foster-sister Linnell Aillard had an older sister, Callina, who was Keeper in Arilinn; and from Linnell Dio had heard about Lew’s injuries, and that Kennard had taken him to Terra in the hope that Terran medical science could help him.

The two Comyn were standing near the central computer of the main hotel desk; Kennard was giving some quietly definite order about their luggage to the human servants who were one of the luxury touches of the hotel. Dio herself had been brought up on Darkover, where human servants were

commonplace and robots were not; she could accept this kind of service without embarrassment. Many people could not overcome their shyness or dismay at being waited on by people rather than

servomechs or robots. Dio’s poise about such things had given her status among the other young people on Vainwal, many of them among the new-rich in an expanding Empire, who flocked to the pleasure worlds like Vainwal, knowing little of the refinements of good living, unable to accept luxury as if they had been brought up to it. Blood, Dio thought, watching Kennard and the exactly right way he spoke to the servants, would always tell.

The younger man turned; Dio could see now that one hand was kept concealed in a fold of his coat, and that he moved awkwardly, struggling one-handed to handle some piece of their equipment which he seemed not to want touched by anyone else. Kennard spoke to him in a low voice, but Dio could hear the impatient tone of the words, and the young man scowled, a black and angry scowl which made Dio shudder. Suddenly she realized that she did not want to see any more of that young man. But from where she stood she could not leave the lobby without crossing their path.

She felt like lowering her head and pretending they were not there at all. After all, one of the delights of pleasure worlds like Vainwal was to be anonymous, freed of the restraints of class or caste on one’s own home world; she would not speak to them, she would give them the privacy she wanted for

herself.

But as she crossed their path, the young man, not seeing Dio, made a clumsy movement and banged full into her. Whatever he was carrying slid out of his awkward one-handed grip and fell to the floor with a metallic clatter; he muttered some angry words and stooped to retrieve it.

It was long, narrow, closely wrapped; more than anything else it looked like a pair of dueling swords, and that alone could explain his caution; such swords were often precious heirlooms, never entrusted to anyone else to handle. Dio stepped away, but the young man fumbled with his good hand and

succeeded only in sending it skidding farther away across the floor. Without thinking, she bent to retrieve it and hand it to him—it was right at her feet—but he actually reached out and shoved her away from it.

“Don’t touch that!” he said. His voice was harsh; raw, with a grating quality that set her teeth on edge.

She saw that the arm he had kept concealed inside his coat ended in a neatly folded empty sleeve. She stared, open-mouthed with indignation, as he repeated, with angry roughness, “Don’t touch that!”

She had only been trying to help!

“Lewis!” Kennard’s voice was sharp with reproof; the young man scowled and muttered something like an apology, turning away and scrambled the dueling swords, or whatever the untouchable package was, into his arms, turning ungraciously to conceal the empty sleeve. Suddenly Dio felt herself shudder, a deep thing that went all the way to the bone. But why should it affect her so? She had seen wounded men before this, even deformed men; surely a lost hand was hardly reason to go about as this one did, with an outraged, defensive scowl, a black refusal to meet the eyes of another human being.

With a small shrug she turned away; there was no reason to waste thought or courtesy on this graceless fellow whose manners were as ugly as his face! But, turning, she came face to face with Kennard.

“But surely you are a countrywoman,
vai domna
? I did not know there were other Darkovans on Vainwal.”

She dropped him a curtsy. “I am Diotima Ridenow of Serrais, my lord, and I am here with my brothers Lerrys and Geremy.”

“And Lord Edric?”

“The Lord of Serrais is at home on Darkover, sir, but we are here by his leave.”

“I had believed you destined for the Tower, mistress Dio.”

She shook her head and knew the swift color was rising in her face. “It was so ordained when I was a child; I—I was invited to take service at Neskaya or Arilinn. But I chose otherwise.”

“Well, well, it is not a vocation for everyone,” said Kennard genially, and she contrasted the charm of the father with the sneering silence of the son, who stood scowling without speaking even the most elementary formal phrases of courtesy! Was it his Terran blood which robbed him of any vestige of his father’s charm? No, for good manners could be learned, even by a Terran. In the name of the blessed Cassilda, couldn’t he even
look
at her? She knew that it was only the scar tissue pulling at the corner of his mouth which had drawn his face into a permanent sneer, but he seemed to have taken it into his very soul.

“So Lerrys and Geremy are here? I remember Lerrys well from the Guards,” Kennard said. “Are they in the hotel?”

“We have a suite on the ninetieth floor,” Dio said, “but they are in the amphitheater, watching a contest in gravity-dancing. Lerrys is an amateur of the sport, and reached the semi-finals; but he tore a muscle in his knee and the medics would not permit him to continue.”

Kennard bowed. “Convey them both my compliments,” he said, “and my invitation, lady, for all three of you to be my guests tomorrow night, when the finalists perform here.”

“I am sure they will be charmed,” Dio said, and took her leave.

She heard the rest of the story that evening from her brothers.

“Lew? That was the traitor,” said Geremy, “Went to Aldaran as his father’s envoy and sold Kennard out, to join in some kind of rebellion among those pirates and bandits there. His mother’s people, after all.”

“I had thought Kennard’s wife was Terran,” Dio said.

“Half Terran; her mother’s people were Aldarans,” Geremy said. “And believe me, Aldaran blood isn’t to be trusted.”

Dio knew that; the Domain of Aldaran had been separated from the original Seven Domains, so many generations ago that Dio did not even know how long it had been, and Aldaran treachery was

proverbial. She said, “What were they doing?”

“God knows,” Geremy said. “They tried to hush it up afterward. It seems they had some kind of super-matrix back there, perhaps stolen from the forge-folk; I never heard it all, but it seems Aldaran was experimenting with it, and dragged Lew into it—he’d been trained at Arilinn, after all, old Kennard gave him every advantage. We knew no good would come of it; burned down half of Caer Donn when the thing got out of hand. After that, I heard Lew switched sides again and sold out Aldaran the way he sold us out; joined up with one of those hill-woman bitches, one of Aldaran’s bastard daughters, half-Terran or something, and got his hand burned off. Served him right, too. But I guess Kennard couldn’t admit what a mistake he’d made, after all he’d gone through to get Lew declared his Heir. I wonder if they managed to regenerate his hand?” He wiggled three fingers, lost in a duel years ago and

regenerated good as new by Terran medicine. “No? Maybe old Kennard thought he ought to have

something to remember his treachery by.”

“No,” Lerrys said. “You have it wrong way round, Geremy. Lew’s not a bad chap; I served with him in the Guards. He did his damnedest, I heard, to control the fire-image when it got out of hand but the girl died. I heard he’d married her, or something. I heard from one of the monitors of Arilinn, how hard they’d worked to save her. But the girl was just too far gone, and Lew’s hand—” He shrugged. “They said he was lucky to have gotten off that easy. Zandru’s hells, what a thing to have to face! He was one of the most powerful telepaths they ever had at Arilinn, I heard; but I knew him best in the Guards.

Quiet fellow, standoffish if anything, nice enough when you got to know him; but he wasn’t easy to know. He had to put up with a lot of trouble from people who thought he had no right to be there, and I think it warped him. I liked him, or would have if he’d let me; he was touchy as the devil, and if you were halfway civil to him, he’d think he was being patronized, and get his back up.” Lerrys laughed soundlessly.

“He was so standoffish with women that I made the mistake of thinking he was—shall we say—one

who shared my own inclinations, and I made him a certain proposition. Oh, he didn’t
say
much, but I never asked him
that
again!” Lerrys chuckled. “Just the same, I’ll bet he didn’t have a good word for you, either? That’s a new thing for you, isn’t it, little sister, to meet a man who’s not at your feet within a few minutes?” Teasing, he chucked her under the chin.

Dio said, pettishly, “I don’t like him; he’s rude. I hope he stays far away from me!”

“I suppose you could do worse,” Geremy mused. “He
is
Heir to Alton, after all; and Kennard isn’t young, he married late. He may not be long for this world. Edric would like it well if you were to be Lady of Alton, sister.”

“No.” Lerrys put a protecting arm around Dio. “We can do better than that for our sister. Council will never accept Lew again, not after that business with Sharra. They never accepted Kennard’s other son, in spite of the best Ken could do; and Marius’s worth two of Lew. Once Kennard’s gone, they’ll look elsewhere for a Head of the Alton Domain—there are claimants enough! No, Dio—” gently he turned her around to look at him—“I know there aren’t many young men of your own kind here, and Lew’s Darkovan, and, I suppose, handsome, as women think of these things. But stay away from him. Be polite, but keep your distance. I like him, in a way, but he’s trouble.”

“You needn’t worry about that,” Dio said. “I can’t stand the sight of the man.”

Yet inside, where it hurt, she felt a pained wonder. She thought of the unknown girl Lew had married, who had died to save them all from the menace of the fire-Goddess. So it had been Lew who raised those fires, then risked death and mutilation to quench them again? She felt herself shivering again in dread. What must his memories be like, what nightmares must he live, night and day? Perhaps it was no wonder that he walked apart, scowling, and had no kind word or smile for man or woman.

Around the ring of the null-gravity field, small crystalline tables were suspended in midair, their seats apparently hanging from jeweled chains of stars. Actually they were all surrounded by energy-nets, so that even if a diner fell out of his chair (and where the wine and spirits flowed so freely, some of them did), he would not fall; but the illusion was breathtaking, bringing a momentary look of wonder and interest even to Lew Alton’s closed face.