Traitor's Sun (6 page)

She returned to the work, and found a very rough passage that needed attention. Maybe it would be a good idea to delay the thing for another occasion—next year even. Marguerida took a fresh sheet and sorted out the parts on it, found where the problem was, and fiddled with it until she was satisfied. How could she have been so clumsy? She wondered if Korniel, the fine composer of operatic works from Renney, in the previous century, had had these problems. Very likely.
The Deluge of Ys,
his best known work, was her standard of excellence, and she knew she was unlikely to ever achieve anything so grand and moving. Still, there were some bits in what she had done, drawing on the lengthy ballad tradition of Hastur and Cassilde, that were not half bad. She had expanded the lyrics slightly—not enough, she sincerely hoped, to offend the sensibilities of her audience too much—and introduced a few diverse elements she had collected from sources in the north. Erald, the son of the deceased former head of the Musicians Guild, Master Everard, had been very helpful. He was not in Thendara very often, since he lived with the Travelers, the wandering jongleurs of Darkover, but when he was, he always came to the Castle and talked with her. A strange man, but she thought of him as a friend.

Yes, this refrain she had introduced was quite good. Either that, or her eyes were filling with tears for some other reason. Marguerida put down the pen, lifted her left hand, mitted in silk, and now soiled with inkstains, and wiped away the moisture. It was really very silly to be moved by one’s own creation. On the other hand, if it brought tears to her eyes, it would likely have the same effect on her audience. Thus heartened, she returned to the copying with fresh enthusiasm.

But between one stanza and the next something changed. One moment Marguerida was deeply focused on her copying, and the next she felt a chill in her body that made her hand shake violently. The pen sputtered, left several blots, and slipped from her fingers. There was a sharp stab of pain above her left eve, gone so quickly she almost thought she had imagined it. She blinked several times, and the room went from fuzzy to clear at last.

For a few seconds, she just sat there, too surprised to think at all. It had felt like a seizure of some sort, but she had not had one of those in years. It took Marguerida a minute to realize that what she had just experienced had not actually happened to her, but to someone else. Her first thought was of Mikhail, or the children. Her earlier unease, she decided, was almost certainly one of those unwelcome visitations of the Aldaran Gift of foresight. She did not have them often, and they always seemed to center around events that affected her directly.

Then, without any clear understanding of how she knew, Marguerida realized what was wrong. She stood up abruptly, banging against the edge of the desk and knocking the inkwell over. Dark liquid flowed across the blotter, the freshly copied pages, and the front of her gown, but she barely noticed.

Mikhail!
The Alton Gift soared from her mind, breaking into the attention of every telepath in the great building.

A
blast of cold air struck her face, and Katherine Aldaran gasped. After the heated port building, it was a shock. The fear that had gripped her since Herm had awakened her in the middle of the night and told her to pack for Darkover seemed to loosen its hold on her throat for an instant, and anger rushed into the breach. She would never forget the way he looked in the dimness of their bedroom that terrible night, the way his pupils had been constricted even in the inadequate light. The desperate expression on his usually calm, familiar face had terrified her so that she had not even questioned him but just done as she was asked.

She had endured her fear in the tiny cabin on the ship, and through the change at Vainwal. Katherine swallowed hard and opened her mouth to demand an explanation at last, but the frigid wind snatched the words away as it pulled her hair from where it had been coiled. She saw that the porter assigned to them was right behind her, and forced herself not to ask the questions that hovered in her mind. Instead, she swore vividly in her Renney patois, releasing the fear and anger in colorful phrases, not caring if her son learned some bad language. “You might have warned me we were coming into a storm!” The words sounded lame to her when compared with those she would have liked to voice.

Herm watched Katherine capture her long black hair, drawing the strands out like whips around her exhausted face. She had a keen temper, his Kate, and being dragged out of her bed in the middle of the night, then taken halfway across the galaxy with no reasonable explanation had strained her control to its limits. He had caught the questions which rose in her mind a few times—for all telepathic purposes she was practically shouting—and knew what it had cost her to hold them back. Only her own understanding that her diplomat husband was unlikely to speak frankly with the Federation listening had saved him from a grueling cross-questioning thus far. Instead he had been treated to cold silence, which was, in his opinion, even worse.

But Herm laughed in spite of himself, even knowing it would enrage her further, smelling the wonderful clean scent of autumn coming in from the west. He could not help himself. The cold stung his cheeks, bracing and familiar, but it had no hint of snow in it yet. He had forgotten how it felt, and until that moment had not realized how the ache of homesickness had been his daily companion. He had not been home for over two decades, and that was too long a time.

He put his arm around her slender waist, drawing her against him. He could feel the warmth of her flesh, and smell the faint chemical odor from the ship’s fresher. She resisted his touch, and he let her go reluctantly.

“A storm? Nothing like, Katherine. This is merely a refreshing breeze.” He sniffed knowingly, speaking with more ease than he felt. “But I would be surprised if it did not rain before nightfall.”

Amaury, who had his mother’s dark hair and pale skin, gave his stepfather a skeptical glance, while Terése leaned against his leg, shivering. Herm bent down and scooped up the girl, even though she was rather big for that now. She was a pretty thing, with the red hair and green eyes so common in the Aldaran clan. Indeed, she very much resembled his sister Gisela when she was the same age. “Is it always this cold, Daddy?” She huddled against his shoulder trustingly. She had never seen snow, and rain never fell in the controlled climate in which they had lived their lives.

“No, little one. This is nothing compared to winter. But soon we will be in a warm carriage—assuming that Lew got the message I sent from Vainwal—and after that, in a nice warm house.” He pointed across the peaked roofs of Thendara. “Do you see that big building up on the hill? That is where we are going, I believe.” He had never seen it before, but he knew the vast structure must be Comyn Castle.

Even at a distance, it was enormous. The white of the stonework gleamed in the afternoon sun, and he could make out the movement of pennons and flags flapping from the towers and buttresses. On one side there was a dark ruin, as if part of the building had been struck by lightning and never repaired. For no reason he could name, the sight of it gave him a sudden chill of unease.

“That is not a house,” Amaury protested.

“No, it isn’t. It is a castle.”

“Is that the castle you grew up in, Father?” Amaury had stopped calling him Dad a few months earlier, and adopted this more formal means of address. He was almost thirteen now, and was acting just as Herm had at the same age, finding ways to distance himself from his parents and starting to become a separate person.

“No. Aldaran Castle is far away, up in the Hellers—tall, tall mountains—and you cannot even see them from here. Come along. We will be inside soon, and we can have a nice hot bath and some food that did not come from a dispenser.” He signaled to the porter, assigned to him by the Customs officer because he was, it appeared, still a Senator. The man, a civilian employee of the Federation, had a cart piled with the few belongings they had brought.

They had left so much behind! Herm had promised he would have things shipped later, but he knew that this was unlikely to happen. Everything they had not taken would be confiscated. He was still amazed that he had gotten Katherine away without so much as a quarrel, bringing only those things which were precious or irreplaceable. She had not even questioned him after being awakened so abruptly, as if she sensed the urgency of his mood. “I have been called back to Darkover, dearest,” he had said. “I must leave immediately and I don’t want to leave you and the children behind.” It had been enough in the rush to leave, to get her moving and packing. He knew how frightened she must be, unlike the children who seemed to have decided this was a fine adventure. She really was incredible, his Kate.

The meanness of their habitation had prevented the accumulation of much, but their luggage was still considerable. There were Kate’s oil paints and brushes, her sketchbooks and charcoals, Amaury’s collection of Rennian warrior figures, and two of Terése’s rather ragged dolls, as well as a volume of clothing entirely unsuited to Darkover’s climate. The dreadful synthetics they wore in the ever-warm rooms of Terra were no protection against the sharp bite of wind around them. There were holos of Katherine’s enormous family on Renney, and even his own collection of tiny ceramics, little bowls and vases no larger than his thumb. It was a foolish thing to bring, but he had found he could not leave the precious objects behind. Besides, a few of the pieces were rather valuable, and he could not see any purpose in letting them either molder in some warehouse, or be sold on the block for the profit of the Federation.

What there was not were any of the technological gewgaws of the Federation—no communicators, computers, recorders, or broadcasters. These were forbidden by Darkovan statutes, and the only contraband in the bags was a tiny box of lumens, little light-emitting dots that could be applied to any surface. Herm was fond of reading in bed, and the lumens allowed him to do so without disturbing his wife. He spent a moment wondering how the children would react when they finally realized how different Darkover was from what they were accustomed to. All their young lives they had been surrounded with access to enormous amounts of data at the touch of a finger, and instant reports of the planets in the far-flung Federation. He wasn’t sure that he was going to be comfortable himself anymore, without mediafeeds. He shrugged the thought away.

Katherine had managed to collect her hair now, twisting it into a roll at the back of her head. He never failed to be amazed at the cleverness of her fingers. Fortunately, the collar of her Terran tunic came up high on her neck, so she would not seem immodest. After so many years of seeing women wearing low-cut dresses, with their napes exposed in a way which had shocked him when he first came to the Federation, he had almost forgotten that particular custom of Darkovan clothing. With a slight start Herm wondered if he would adjust to things he no longer thought were important—hiding the back of the neck for women or wearing a sword for men. Was he still enough of a Darkovan to survive?

They trudged across the tarnac, heading for the archway that separated the spaceport from the portion of Thendara called the Trade City. It was not a great distance, but they were all thoroughly chilled by the time they reached it. He nodded lazily at the black-clad Terran guards, and flashed his papers and documents, refusing to allow himself to show the slightest hesitation.

Herm had forced Katherine and the children to remain in the small cabin during most of the tedious journey. They only ventured out to get their meals in the first class dining area. Despite its grand title, it was only a narrow galley with plastic tables anchored to the floor, disposable plates and cutlery, and a very limited menu in the food dispensors. The food had been nearly tasteless, although nourishing, he supposed, and he allowed himself to look forward to some real Darkovan cuisine.

When they had gone to Renney almost nine years before, to present Terése to her great-grandmother, there had still been a semblance of amenities on the ships they had traveled on. But the austerity measures that were now commonplace within the Federation had made themselves present on the ship. It seemed to Hermes symptomatic of all that was amiss in the Federation, and he had been vastly relieved to climb down the curving passageway, through second and third class, and out into the port building half an hour before.

The other passengers in first class had been bureaucrats and business people, suspicious and unfriendly. There had been no buzz of civilized conversation in the dining area, as there had been on the earlier trip, but only the steady drone of a mediafeed reporting stale news, and the click of small computer touchboards from the other travelers. Herm had listened more from habit than from anything else, hoping to catch some clue as to what was occurring beyond the void in which they journeyed. There was nothing to suggest that anything monumental was occurring, and he had begun to wonder if he had made a stupid and expensive mistake. But on the third evening of their dull passage, he had caught a tidbit that set his nerves thrumming. There had been a sudden, seemingly inexplicable sell-off on the Intersystem Exchange, one of the large interplanetary stock markets.