The World Wreckers (2 page)

fractionally.

Suppose, after all this time and all the different people I've been, once I stand again under the four

moons and the light of the bloody sun strikes me, suppose—suppose the old me, the real me, the self I

was before I was Andrea, before I was wanderer, queen, spaceman; courtesan, businesswoman, suppose

the old me came back? What then?

What then? Then at least I would die where I was born, she thought with weary resignation, and pressed

her long hands over her eyes. For the moment, if there had been anybody to see, she looked neither

human nor woman.

Narzain-ye kui
, she thought in a language long dead; exiled child of the Yellow Forest, where have you not traveled? Return once more, see what the treading feet of the long seasons have made of the world

your people could not hold, and then die here; die alone if you must, knowing that not even a memory

remains of the footsteps of your folk in the fastnesses of the Mountains of Light…

Chapter 1

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HE SENSED that there were footsteps behind him again.

It was troubling. They were not the familiar steps and presence of his bodyguard Danilo. Those he heard

everywhere he went and because he loved Danilo and had taken the young man as his paxman and

esquire, he neither resented them nor changed his steps a fraction for them. Dani would not intrude on

his thoughts or his consciousness unless he wanted companionship.

Regis Hastur thought,
I'm too sensitive
, and tried to tune out the footsteps. They probably had nothing to do with him; if he sensed their impact on his consciousness it was only perhaps that the owner of feet

and steps was startled to see a young Hastur of Comyn Council abroad and afoot at this early hour. He

moved along steadily, a slender man in his middle twenties, with the great personal beauty which

marked all the Hasturs and Elhalyns of the Comyn; a striking face made more noteworthy in that the

page-trimmed hair above the narrow face was not flame red, as with all the Comyn, but snow white.

If Dani had his way I'd never go out without armed escort. What kind of life is that?

Yet he knew remotely and with grief that it was true. The old days of Darkover, when the Comyn

walked unhurt through war, armed insurrection, and street riots, were gone forever. He walked now to

pay his last respects to another of his caste, dead at an assassin's hand in his thirty-seventh year; Edric Ridenow of Serrais. I never liked Edric. But must we all die, when so many of us are dead or in exile?

The houses of the Seven Domains are laid waste. All the Altons gone; Valdir dying a hundred years

past; Kennard dead on a distant world; Marius dead in psychic battle with the forces of Sharra; Lew and

his last child, Marja, in exile on a distant world. The Hasturs, the Ridenows, the Ardais—decimated,

gone.
I should go too
. But my people need me here, a Hastur of Hasturs, so they will not feel wholly abandoned to the Terran Empire.

Blast fire is silent. Regis did not hear it but felt the heat, whirled, heard another cry, then silence of a shocking kind; then someone called his name and he saw Danilo come running up to him, drawn

weapon in hand. The younger man stopped a little way off, lowering his weapon.

He said, stubbornly and with concealed anger, "Now maybe you'll listen, Lord Regis. If you go out again without a proper escort I swear by all of Zandru's hells that I will not be responsible; I will ask my oath back and return to Syrtis. If the Council doesn't have me flayed alive first for letting you be killed under my very eyes!"

Regis felt weak and sick; the dead man lying in the street had no ordinary weapon but a nervegun which

would have made him—no, not a corpse but a vegetable, all his neural circuits paralyzed; he might live,

spoon-fed and incommunicado, forty years. He said through suddenly trembling lips, "They're getting

rougher. That's the seventh assassin in eleven moons. Must I become a prisoner in the Hidden City,

Dani?"

"At least they don't send dagger men against you any more."

"I wish they did," Regis said. "I can hold my own with any dagger man on this world; so can you." He looked at Dani sharply; "You're not hurt?"

"A graze. My arms feel dipped in molten lead, but the nerves will heal." He brushed off Regis'

concerned queries, his offers of help. "The only help I need, Lord Regis, is your promise not to walk alone in the city again."

Regis said, "I promise." But his eyes were hard. "Where did you get the weapon, Dani? A Compact-forbidden weapon? Give it to me."

The younger man surrendered the blaster. He said, "It isn't illegal,
vai dom
. I went into the Terran Trade City and applied for a permit to carry it here. And when they knew whose body I guarded they gave it to

me with a good will—and so they should."

Regis looked troubled. He said, "Call a guardsman to bury that," he pointed to the charred corpse of the assassin. "No point in examining the body, I'm afraid; it will be like all the others, a nameless man, no trace of his whereabouts known. But he needn't lie in the street, either."

He stood by, distressed and aloof, while Danilo summoned a green-and-black uniformed City Guard,

and gave orders. Then he turned to Danilo and his eyes were hard.

"You know the Compact." For generations on Darkover war and combat had been unknown; mostly due to the Compact, the law forbidding any weapon which can go beyond the hand's reach of the user; a law

which allowed dueling and raiding but wholly prohibited the wide spread of battle or carnage. The

question, addressed to Danilo, was purely rhetorical—every six-year-old child knew of the Compact—

and the youth did not answer. But even before Regis' angry gaze—and the anger of a Hastur could kill—

Danilo Syrtis did not drop his eyes.

He said, "You're alive and unharmed. That's all I care about, Lord."

"But what, in the name of any god you like, are we living
for
, Dani?"

"I, to keep you alive."

"And what are we living about? We are living, among other things, so that the Compact be kept on

Darkover and the years of chaos and cowardly killing never come back to our people!" Regis sounded

half wild with rage and despair, but Danilo did not quail from his angry stare. He said, "The Compact would be much worse kept with you dead, Lord Regis. I am your most loyal—" the boy's voice suddenly

shook, "you know my life is yours to keep or spend,
vai dom cario
; but do you really know what would become of this world or your people with you dead?"

"
Bredú
." Regis used the word which meant not only friend but sworn brother and reached out with both hands for Danilo's; a rare touch in a telepath caste. He said, "If this is true, my dearest brother, why should seven assassins want me dead?"

He didn't expect an answer and didn't get one. Dando said, his face drawn, "I don't think they come from our people at all."

"Is that—" Regis pointed to where the corpse had lain, "a Terran? Not as I know them."

"Nor I. But face facts, Lord Regis. Seven assassins to you alone; and Lord Edric dead from a strange dirk; Lord Jerome of the Elhalyns dead in his own study and no man's footprints in the snow; three of

the Aillard women dead in mishandled childbirth and the midwives dying of poison before they could be

questioned; and—the gods deal with me for speaking of it—your two children."

Regis' face, hard before, was bleak now, for although he had fathered the children without any love for

their mothers, as a sworn duty to his caste, he had cared deeply for the two sons found dead in their cribs

—from sudden illness, they said—not three months ago. He said, and the terrible control in his voice

was worse than tears, "What can I do, Dani? Must I see a murderer's hand or the hand of conspiracy in every blow of fate?"

"It will be worse for you if you don't than if you do, Lord Regis," said Danilo, but the deep compassion in his voice belied the harshness of the words. He added, still harshly, "You've had a shock. You'd better get along home. Your mourning at Lord Edric's funeral, such mourning as anyone could summon up for

such as he, won't do his memory half as much good as you guarding your life to look after his

womenfolk and people!"

Regis' mouth thinned. "I doubt if they have spare murderers in reserve on one day," was all he said. But he went with Danilo, not protesting further.

So it was a war, then, a complex conspiracy against the telepath caste.

But who was the enemy, and why?

Isolated incidents like this had never been uncommon on Darkover, although it was more common for

an assassin to file what was known as an intent-to-murder; this placed it nominally under the age-old

duello code of Darkover and the slayer enjoyed immunity; a slaying in fair duel was no murder.

His lip curled faintly. He had carefully avoided embroiling himself in any of the warring alignments and

factions on Darkover ever since he knew that Derik Elhalyn, nearest heir to the rulership of Comyn

Council, was mad and could not take office.

Thus, no living man on Darkover could justly claim that Regis Hastur of Hastur had wronged him.

Furthermore, as Danilo had reminded him, there were few who could match him in the use of any legal

dueling weapons.

Who, then? Some of their own people who wanted the Comyn, with its complex hierarchy of telepaths

and psi talents, out of the way?

Or, the Terrans?

Well, that he could verify at once.

Shortly after he had assumed the position as chief liaison man between the Terrans and his own people,

he had come to live in a house near the edge of the Terran Zone. It was a compromise and he hated it;

neither a Terran residence, which, although boxy and cramped, had at least comfort and convenience,

nor a Darkovan one, with space and air and the absence of separating walls, though essentially

comfortless. It was further still from anything like the feel of Castle Hastur where he had spent most of his childhood.

He detested, with a loathing so completely culture bound that it was almost inborn, almost all of the

artifacts of Terran Empire technology and using them daily was one of the most suffocating handicaps

of his liaison position. Making an average visiphone call was a process made lengthier by the need for

overcoming his revulsion and he made it as brief as he could.

"Trade City Headquarters; Section Eight, Medical Research."

When the screen had cleared he requested, "Department of Alien Anthropology," and when that went through he asked for Doctor Jason Allison, and finally the face of a young man, restrained but pleasant,

took form before him.

"Lord Regis. An unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?"

"Forget the formalities, for one thing," Regis said. "You've known me too long for that. But can you come and see me here?"

He could have asked his question easily enough on the screen and been answered. But Regis was a

telepath and had learned young to rely, not on the words of an answer or the face of the speaker, but on

the "feel" of the answer. He did not think Jason Allison would lie to him. Insofar as he could like or trust anyone not of his own caste, he liked and trusted the Darkover-born Jason. But without lying, Jason

might evade or shade the truth to avoid hurting him or talk around what he did not know.

So when Jason had joined him there, and the first few words of formal courtesy and inquiries had

passed, he looked the young Terran straight in the eye and said:

"You've known me a long time; you know I'm no fool. Level with me, Jason; is there some sort of

feeling around the Terran Empire that telepaths are more trouble than they're worth, and that—even

though the Empire may not issue a price on our heads—that no tears would be officially shed if we were

picked off, one by one?"

Jason said, "Good God, no!" but Regis did not even hear the words. What he heard was the perfectly honest shock, denial and outrage in the young Terran scientist's mind.

Not the Terrans, then.

He probed further, just to satisfy his own conscience.

"Maybe something you hadn't heard about? Not your section. I know that Alien Anthropology has been

trying to work with some of us."

"Not the other sections, either," said Jason firmly. "Spaceport authority couldn't care less, of course. The science division—well, they're still exploring your various sciences and they realize that Darkover is

unique, a reservoir of psi talents unequaled anywhere in the galaxy so far as we know. They'd be more

likely to try to round you all up and put you in—well, not in cages, but in protective custody until they could study you to their hearts' content." He laughed.

"Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea," Regis said without humor. "If it goes on like this, there won't be a telepath with
laran
power left alive on Darkover!"

Jason's grin faded. "I heard a rumor months ago that someone had tried to assassinate you and failed," he said. "With all the duels going on, I didn't take it seriously. Was it true, then? Has there been another?"

"You don't know, then," Regis said, and told him. Gradually the color faded from the young Terran's face. "This is frightening. I can only say that nobody official among the Terrans is doing it. And who else would have reason?"

That, of course, was the question, Regis thought. He said, "The most powerful mind in the universe, the greatest psi talents on Darkover, are still vulnerable to knife, bullet or gun. I could name a dozen,

beginning with the Keeper Cleindori and running down to my cousin Marius Alton, two or three years