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Not every traveler comes to Darkover in joy; some travel for reasons that are far darker and deadlier. No world is immune from crime, from hatred and exploitation, and therefore there will always be a need for those whose mission it is to prevent harm and bring wrong-doers to justice. But on Darkover, neither is a simple matter, as Steven Harper’s hard-boiled cop discovers.
Steven Harper is the pen name for Steven Piziks, a name no one can reliably spell or pronounce. Marion Zimmer Bradley bought his very first short story for Sword and Sorceress IX way back in 1990, and his keyboard has been clattering ever since. He’s written some twenty novels over the years, including The Silent Empire series and The Clockwork Empire steampunk series. Steven also teaches English in southeast Michigan. When not writing, he plays the folk harp, dabbles in oral storytelling, and spends more time online than is probably good for him. Visit his web page at www.stevenpiziks.com.
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Alone, David North pulled the stupid cloak tighter around his body and slunk through the darkening streets of—what the hell was this city called? Bender? Thunder? Thendara. The name made him think of his ex-girlfriend. Her name was Brenda, though she’d been a damn sight warmer than this godforsaken shithole of a city. The wind slid under his cloak like a cold fish that wanted to get cozy, and a thin sleet pissed all over him. Snow crunched beneath his boots. This was supposed to be spring? Right now, North wanted nothing more than to wrap himself around a space heater, a cup of hot coffee, and a warm lady, and not necessarily in that order. Throw in a rare steak, and he’d ascend a golden staircase to heaven.
With an inward sigh, he crunched past cold buildings of stone, wood, and even thatch. To a cop’s eye, Thendara looked like something out of a bad fairy tale—lots of winding streets, hidden alleys, and overhung second stories that cast purple shadows on the people hurrying through the street below. The place was practically designed to give crooks, cons, and pissant pickpockets easy places to hide. The cloaks that the natives wore disguised body shapes, and the hoods hid faces and hair. You could slice someone in half with one of those swords and vanish into the crowd, and no one would be able to identify you later, no they wouldn’t. On the other hand, the cloaks also hid the identity of a Terran cop who was as out of place as a parrot in a fish tank.
A small tremble grumbled through the ground under North’s boots. Did Thendara get earthquakes? North had no idea, and frankly he didn’t give a flip. He wouldn’t be here long enough for it to matter. He checked his retina display. Twenty yards, then left. A pair of women passed him, baskets under their arms, their cloaks half open against what they probably thought was a fine spring breeze. Beyond the city, the last bit of red sun slid toward a distant horizon. The cold gnawed through North’s bones, and he wondered how anyone survived winter on Cottman IV, where winter clamped down seven or eight months out of its long year. This section of Thendara was given over to a litter of inns and taverns, and most of them hung lanterns and torches over the front doors, but the yellow light only lengthened the shadows and made them stronger.
A laughing, raucous crowd of people in the ubiquitous cloaks and old-fashioned dresses, breeches, and tunics milled about, wandering in and out of the taverns in a gelatinous street party, enjoying the Cottman spring. But for the strange clothing, they looked like any other humans—tall, short, thin, heavy, young, aging. Except all of them were white, with fair hair and pale complexions. No one got a suntan under the weak Cottman sun. In this case, North lucked out. His ash-blond hair and blue eyes blended right in. He hadn’t quite reached forty, so he didn’t even stand out as particularly young or old. North could slip into nearly any crowd, but stay apart from it.
Apart. That seemed to be his lot, alone even in a group or a relationship. Brenda had said he was untouchable, so she had left him for some guy with more touchable qualities. North didn’t blame her. She hadn’t been the first to do this, and she wouldn’t be the last. It was part of the noise that made up North’s life.
A clump of food-sellers washed through the crowd. Two men waved seed cakes for sale. One teenaged girl with a tray around her neck did a brisk business with some kind of dried meat. A woman stood next to an enormous keg, hawking ale to passers-by. She called out to North, but he moved on as if he hadn’t heard her. North didn’t touch the stuff. No alcohol, definitely no drugs. Just the thought of sending a foreign substance through his veins gave him cold shudders.
His cop eye automatically flicked over the crowd, taking in the view. These two men had already drunk too much of the barrel woman’s ale and would end the night with a shiner each. That gal with the four-acre chest was selling more than just the flowers in her basket. The kid over there was sidling too close to the passers-by for North’s comfort, and was probably—there! His hand ghosted under a woman’s cloak and he flicked down an alley with a pouch in his fist. The lady continued on her way, completely oblivious. Outraged, North automatically started after the boy, then checked himself. He had no official status here, wasn’t even supposed to be away from the Terran port. This time, the bad guys would have to win.
At his display’s instruction, North turned down a side street, stepped in something that squished, and found an empty courtyard ringed by tall, shabby houses that wore their thatching like witches’ hats. A blue light burned in one window. North raised his hand to knock, and another little earth grumble made the bottoms of his boots itch. Inside the house, something glassy smashed on the floor, but he heard no outcry. He rapped on the battered door, then slid his hand back under his cloak. The stock of his blaster slid under his palm, slick and comforting. A flick of his thumb could set it to deliver anything from a tooth-jarring jerk to a speedy meeting with the almighty. His hand was steady when he set it to speedy.
The door opened. On the other side was a thin young man with a hook nose and shaggy hair the color of a half-ripe strawberry. A pus-filled boil the size of a small walnut bulged on his left cheek. The sight of the punk tightened North’s hand on the blaster and he half-yanked it out of the holster.
Six days ago, North’s nephew Jake had celebrated his fourteenth birthday by convulsing his way into an early death due to a bloodstream packed with killya, or Kira Ann, or mindblow, or whatever the hell kids called this latest designer drug. Five days ago, North had beaten the snot out of a simpering smear of slime in a back alley and gotten a description (strawberry hair, walnut boil) and the name of a backwater planet: Darkover. Four days ago, North’s captain had refused him permission to follow the trail of suppliers because Darkover—Cottman IV—was in a politically sensitive zone. Three days ago, North had contacted an old buddy of his still in the service and finagled a limited visa. Two days ago, North had taken a leave of absence and boarded a ship. Yesterday, he had arrived on Darkover, where he’d been assigned some cheeky lady as some kind of liaison and told to wait for a visa. But he didn’t want to wait—every hour he delayed meant Kira Ann dug her claws in deeper, addicted more and more people. He had to stop it at the source. Now.
He’d ditched the liaison lady, snuck into the city for look-around, and lucked out almost right away by nearly running over a chick high on mindblow near the spaceport in Thendara and getting her to give him the address of her dealer. Now North was facing the same trickle of piss who had sold Jake a needle full of death, and North’s blaster was cranked to almighty.
“He said you’d come. You better get in here,” Boil Boy said without preamble. He vanished into the dark house and left the door standing open.
It wasn’t the reaction North had been expecting. He blinked once or twice while his brain fought to catch up. His cop instincts told him not to go in there without backup, especially if the guy he was trying to catch was expecting him, but the memory of Jake’s thin body arching on the hospital bed while his sister wept in anguish shoved him forward like a giant hand. North stormed toward the house.
A grip on his elbow brought him up short. North spun, his hand already on the blaster under his cloak. The grip was connected to a woman his own age. Her auburn hair was pulled back with a butterfly clip, and her dark blue cloak fell neatly over an athletic figure. Loret Ridenow-Castamir, the liaison lady. Apparently his ditching skills weren’t what they used to be.
“What in Zandru’s hells are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Read my mind, Loret,” North shot back. “You Cotties are supposed to be good at that.”
Loret slapped him. It was a good slap, thick and meaty. The burst of pain rocked his head back. “I know how you Terranan use that word. Don’t use it again.”
“Yeah, sure.” North put a hand to his stinging cheek. “Look, I work alone, okay? Always alone.”
She ignored this statement and repeated, “What the hells are you doing here? You don’t have permission to leave the port without your liaison. You don’t have permission to wander about Thendara in Darkovan clothing. And you definitely don’t have permission to enter the house of a Comyn lo—”
“I don’t give a red shit,” North hissed at her. “You...Darkovans may not care that Kira Ann has killed at least forty people on my own world, and god knows how many on your own world, but I do care, and I’m going to end it.”
“And how will you do that? Do you know whose property this is?”
“Does it matter?” Normally North would have been frantic to run after Boil Boy, but the kid had actually invited North in and, in contradiction to the generally accepted relationship between cop and perp, hadn’t seemed in any hurry to rush off.
Loret snapped a gesture at the half-open door as if it were a snake. “Ferrick Alton, my second cousin on my mother’s side, owns this house. He is Comyn, just as I am comynara. You can’t barge in there and make unfounded accusations. I was working on getting—”
“Can he use that laran stuff you Darkovans put so much stock in?” North interrupted.
Loret hesitated, and her hand stole to the pendant on the silver chain around her neck. North had done his research. Inside the pendant was a blue starstone, a matrix which focused mental power—laran—and made it stronger, like an amplifier strengthened a guitar. A Darkovan telepath with a matrix could literally bring the house down. But without one? May as well give a rock concert with an unplugged guitar.
“That’s what I thought,” North finished. “Tell me if I’m wrong. Your cousin Ferrick’s laran is as small as his balls. He’s pissed off at being limp-dicked, has been for decades, but now he’s found a way to get it up by building an empire around a new street poison.”
“Crude, but accurate,” Loret agreed.
“Meanwhile, the Comyn Crankheads—”
“Comyn Council.”
“—can’t decide what to do about this guy because he’s nobility and your laws are squeamish about arresting someone whose shit comes out wrapped in plastic.”
“It’s not that simple.” Spring sleet was freezing into a shimmery shield on Loret’s cloak, and North might have found the effect attractive if he weren’t so pissed off. “His brewing houses make him wealthy. He has powerful friends on the Council, and a large part of the army owes allegiance to him. Besides, Thendara does not get earthquakes; the Council is more worried about these little tremors that keep cropping up. Lord Regis has called a meeting of the Council to investigate. They’re meeting tonight, in fact, and once they’ve looked into the earthquake problem, they may or may not talk about Ferrick.”
“Which makes me, a free agent, the perfect person to deal with him.” North turned for the door again, and again Loret took his arm.
“You can’t go in there!” Her face hardened. “We will do things the right way. It will be done perfectly or not at all.”
“His lackey said I should come in,” North said. “An invitation from a Comyn lord to visit his home is the same thing as a visa from the spaceport. Those the rules, yeah? Perfect rules?”
Loret folded her lips in the blue light, but didn’t stop North from crossing the threshold.
The first floor of the house was nothing more than a single large room that stank of chemical sweat, a stench North knew all too well, oh how he knew it. Addiction and overdose dogged the North family like a pair of Dobermans chasing a squirrel. An overdose had taken North’s grandfather long before North’s birth. Alcohol poisoning had drowned his grandmother before he finished kindergarten. North’s dad turned up in a river, his veins filled with coke. North’s sister, the one who had wept over her son’s grinning corpse, had gone through rehab so often, she knew the cafeteria workers’ birthdays. A big dose of fear had kept North clean and sober his entire life, and a bigger dose of obvious psychology had pushed him to become a narcotics cop who worked without a partner. Partners, like family, slowed you down and eventually left you. Best to work alone.
Stone floor. Rotting rushes. Rickety furniture. Dirty windows. Smoky fireplace. Tiny fire. More than a dozen people sprawled on little rugs or on the floor. Some rocked with their hands wrapped around their knees. Most stared blankly at the ceiling. A few more looked wildly about the room at strange visions only they could see. But every one of them was smiling. Teeth glistened in the dim firelight, and saliva dripped down a dozen chins. A chill skittered over North’s skin, and he swallowed acid. These people had sucked seriously weird molecules into their bloodstreams, and those molecules had glommed on to their brain cells like billions of tiny leeches, changing their thoughts, making them into someone—something—else.
“Not even caffeine, man, not even caffeine,” he muttered to himself.
“It’s one piece,” giggled a woman who couldn’t have been more than nineteen. “A great circle. It loops over and over.”
Small vials of glass and ceramic littered the floor in the familiar pile of the addict house. Kira Ann, the bitch kitty who purred in your lap while she unsheathed her fishhook claws. Hatred and distaste fought like a pair of black dogs in North’s stomach. In the last several days, North had become more of an expert on the shit than most doctors. The drug had shown up on Terra barely a month ago, but its white scythe had sliced through the underground culture in what seemed like a few hours. Users drank it or put it in nasal spray, then lay back and let the good times steamroll over them. Reports talked about a feeling of connectedness, oneness, bliss, and other Zen crap.
But when you came out of it, the sense of disconnect, of being utterly alone in your own skull, crashed through you in granite blocks, and you wanted more, and more, and more again, until you weren’t just drinking or huffing—you were jabbing and poking, sending a sweet line straight to your brain. It was the bliss that had killed Jake, and the twisted smile on his dead lips would hover in North’s dreams for the rest of his life.
“One of a oneness,” laughed a man. “Bliss. Love. I’m pure love. It’ll happen again and again and again.”
The drug’s official name was psychotropazol. Its source was the pollen of a particular flower found only on Cottman IV. According to North’s literature, the natives called the flower kireseth, and they were aware of its effects. They even made the pollen into a drink or medicine they called kirian, and they used it to help sick telepaths, or something. Kira Ann, though, was something else, kirian that had been slapped around in a lab until it was mad enough to punch your clock and strong enough to make you beg for more. But no one made it on Terra. Kireseth pollen was too delicate to transport very far. Someone was making the junk on Darkover and smuggling it to Terra.
Loret cautiously followed North into the room, shut the door behind her, and snapped the sleet off her cloak. Boil Boy was waiting with his arms crossed near a staircase against the far wall. What the hell was going on? He seemed to know who North was and why he had come, and he didn’t seem afraid in the slightest.
“The river flows in a circle,” another addict burbled happily. “It’s all one piece. Everything happens over and over again, all at the same time. One direction. One time.”
Loret staggered and wrapped her hand around her matrix locket. “What happened to these people?” she asked. “Their minds are...open. Their channels are functioning. But they have no laran.”
“Let’s ask him.” North picked his way across the room toward Boil Boy, who simply trotted up the stairs. He was the carrot and North was the donkey, but North couldn’t stop himself now. Loret, looking unhappy and puzzled, followed.
The stairs creaked, and North kept his hand on his blaster. In a world of swords and knives, the blaster equalized everything.
Upstairs, he and Loret found a second floor open much like the first, except it was colder. No addicts up here, but several tables piled with laboratory equipment and little gas burners were scattered everywhere. Soft blue lights burned, and the sharp smell of cooking chemicals permeated the air. Incongruously, one table was taken up by several pots of small yellow flowers. Kireseth flowers, no doubt, and North knew a drug lab when he saw one. Handy. Make the stuff up here, sell it down there. His skin crawled with maggots. North wondered where the security guys were. Addicts weren’t known for their ability to follow rules. Loret, meanwhile, drew in a sharp breath.
“What is this?” she gasped in outrage. “It’s against all rules! Such...Terranan technology is strictly—”
“—forbidden, domna?” From the shadow in the corner emerged a whipcord man perhaps a few years older than North. His red hair was combed back, and his blue eyes reminded North of a fish staring up from ice water. He wore no matrix around his neck. “Not at all. Beakers and bottles and such are perfectly allowed, as any alchemist will tell you. Thendara Tower bottles gas for its own experiments with—”
“You bought these from the Terran port, Ferrick,” Loret snapped. “That makes them illegal.”
“Prove they are Terran,” Ferrick replied smoothly. “Glass is glass. And before you cry havoc about my little drug, Detective North, I will remind you that Kira Ann, as you like to call it, is perfectly legal, both here and on Terra. I don’t even have to smuggle the stuff. I can send my nephew Alaric over there with a sackful. His father was Terran, you see, and he can move freely between both worlds. Pity about your own nephew, Mr. North—he was a good customer for those two weeks.”
He was trying to piss North off, and it was working. The words dripped acid into his brain, and he wanted to see the bastard’s head vanish in a little red cloud.
Loret flicked a glance at North. “What does he mean it’s legal?”
North made himself scan the room for Boil Boy—Alaric. There he was, hunkering over a pair of beakers like a scientist’s assistant in a vid from the real old days. Ferrick’s nephew was alive, while North’s was dead. Justice bent over backward, didn’t it? No matter how hard you worked to balance the scales, the blindfolded bitch herself always tipped them back the other way. Alaric sipped from one beaker, sighed, and poured the clear yellow liquid into a separate vial. Kira Ann. North tightened his hand on his weapon. Two flicks of his trigger finger and both of them would be dead as crows in a combine. Jake’s grinning face cried out for him to do it, to make it fair.
“The drug is so new, the law hasn’t kept up,” North told her. “Legislation is working its way through the government on Terra. Your Comyn Council seems hesitant to ban the stuff here because Ferrick here is connected, just like I said before.”
Ferrick smiled, alive and painless, nothing at all like Jake’s death grimace. “Yes. Young Lord Regis is too cowardly to take the reins and actually rule. Getting new laws through the Comyn Council is difficult without his cooperation, and he’s away so often. By the time Regis decides to act, my position will be consolidated, in more ways than you know.” His eyes glittered. “The one who serves the brew will stand at the top of the table instead of the bottom.”
Loret shook her head impatiently. “This can’t go on, Ferrick. Mestre North may have no authority here, but I do. You’ll come with me until Lord Regis has a chance to sort out what you’re doing and decide what to do.”
“No.”
“No?” Loret raised delicate auburn brows. “Kinsman, you have no choice. If you won’t come quietly, I will march you down to Comyn Castle. This will see to that.” She held out her pendant on the end of its loop of chain.
That thin smile danced on Ferrick’s lips. “You haven’t been paying attention, cousin.”
Loret flew backward and slammed against the wall. She hung there like a cartoon character stuck in glue. Her hair came out of its clip and splayed in all directions. Her dress and cloak flapped with unnatural ripples. Contortions crossed her face, but she didn’t scream. Alaric watched with a rapt look on his face.
North was already moving. His blaster leaped into his hand, and he dove behind a table. The blaster was cranked to sucks-to-be-you. “Freeze!” he barked at Ferrick. “Let her down!”
“Speaking of illegal,” Ferrick said mildly. “You’ve violated the Compact, Terranan. No projectile weapons allowed on Darkover. You should be more ready to uphold our laws than worried we’ve broken yours.”
He strolled toward North’s table. North should have warned him a second time, should have given him a second chance. But the enraged family guy inside him overrode the narcotics cop, and he fired a deadly, disintegrating barrage at Ferrick’s head.
Or tried to. His finger refused to move. It had become a wooden stick. North felt like he had turned into a department store manikin. He struggled to move. Panic flopped around his stomach like a beached salmon and a line of icy sweat cracked out along his hairline.
“You...don’t have the laran...for this,” Loret gasped from the wall. “You don’t even have...a matrix.”
“You always were the slowest chervine in the herd, cousin.” Ferrick cocked his head, and North’s body snapped him upright like a toy soldier on a string. Alaric giggled. “Let’s see how much laran I have.”
North’s hand, the one with the blaster in it, cranked around until it was pointed at Loret. North fought it every inch of the way. His teeth clenched and tension hummed in every nerve, but his muscles ignored him. His eyes met Loret’s, and he could read the fear there. It mirrored his own.
“You see what comes of underestimation, Terranan?” Ferrick said to him. “You thought that a bunch of backwater Darkovans who rely on knives and swords would be no match for your ultra-advanced Terran weaponry, that you could just walk in here and kill me. Yes, I know you had no real intention of arresting me. I can see it in your mind, along with everything else about you. So I’ll show you why the Comyn Council created the Compact against projectile weapons.”
North’s finger squeezed the trigger. A red beam of energy cracked through the air and struck Loret’s left hand. It vanished in a cloud of smoke and blood. Now Loret did scream. It was a high, thin sound. North tried to scream with her, but his voice wouldn’t cooperate, and the only sound he made was alone inside his own head. In those long, horrible seconds, he tried to tell himself he hadn’t pulled the trigger, it wasn’t his fault. But if he hadn’t ignored the Compact in the first place, Ferrick wouldn’t have had a blaster to control. The sweet smell of charred meat hung on the air.
“Imagine, Terannan, that I controlled a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand blasters. Oh, the damage one person can do. That’s why the Compact exists.” Ferrick sighed. “But I’m not trying to overthrow the Compact. The humble brewer, the one no one notices, the man who enters at the servant’s door, is thinking much larger, and you arrived at the perfect time. Alaric.”
Loret’s scream faded to a whimper. No blood dripped from the wound. Behind her wrist, the wall was charred black but for a hand-shaped white patch that hung there like a kid glove surrounded by ashes. Alaric scampered over to North with his little glass vial of piss-yellow fluid. North, still kneeling and immobilized, looked down as the boy grabbed North’s lower lip with his fingers. He carefully pulled it out like a bureau drawer. Growing horror mounted, and North struggled to move, but his body wouldn’t obey. He trembled all over and managed a tiny whimper as Alaric carefully emptied the contents of the vial into North’s mouth. The tasteless fluid trickled a warm tentacle across his tongue and down his throat.
“I’ve changed the formula just a bit. This newer version should be much more addictive,” Ferrick said. “Especially when one’s family runs toward addiction. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”
The house turned inside-out with the sound of a rainbow imploding. North’s mind rushed outward in a cherry bomb blast that left a purple symphony coating of sugar on the inside of his skull. He touched a dozen, a hundred, a thousand minds that sang like stars, and they caressed him with warm, supple hands that left him panting and ecstatic and horrified. Even Alaric was there, and for a moment, North was Alaric, a cast-off nedestro child, beaten and abused and looking for a way to escape the daily pain of his life until Ferrick came along with his glass vials and yellow flowers to take the pain away. A great toroid of water rushed in an endless circle, filled with endless minds going about their business, and those minds didn’t understand that they were part of a greater pattern, a pattern that repeated itself endlessly, like a quilt that was a patch of a greater quilt that was itself a patch of an even greater quilt. And through it all, North felt...Ferrick. Ferrick’s mind was everywhere, governing it all, pulling, teasing, yanking the pattern into taffy strands. Power sloshed through it, rushed along channels, out of every mind North felt, including his own, and the power rushed to Ferrick, feeding him a greasy orgy of power. All the minds joined to feed him that power, and it became the vomiting rush. He was losing himself, losing his strength, his mind, his very identity. North struggled against it, hating it, but the power burst out of him in an ecstatic stream. He cast back his head and let it go and go and go even as tears streamed down his face. It felt fantastic.
“One,” he groaned. “It’s all one piece.”
North! Loret’s voice in his head cut through the dreadful bliss with a glass knife. North! You have to listen to me!
The bliss melted like a candle in a bonfire. The sensation was wearing thin now, oh thank god it was wearing thin, becoming pale as water. North became aware of the hard floor digging into his joints. When had he collapsed? His mouth was raisin dry, and his eyeballs were tiny suns in his head. But now hunger roared through him. He needed the caresses, the awful, sweet feeling of oneness.
“No,” he croaked.
“I’m so glad it worked,” Ferrick said. North’s blaster hovered above the man’s open palm. North felt a flicker, like fireflies spinning inside him, and that felt wonderful, too. Not as good as the first rush of bliss, but wonderful nonetheless. A bit of power pulsed through him, and through all the other minds he had sensed before. Ferrick pulled the power into himself. With a popping sound, the blaster crumpled into a tight metal ball. Ferrick let it fall. It dropped toward the floor, tumbling end over end with aching slowness.
The awful need prowled North’s insides like a hungry cheetah. Now that the bliss of oneness had faded, his original feeling of being alone came rushing back at him, but this time it brought an aching void. No one cared about him. He had no children, no wife, not even a casual girlfriend. Not even a partner on the force. He was stranded beneath a weak, foreign sun on a frigid, deadly world. Never had he felt more friendless, more alone.
The ruined blaster crashed to the floor.
Loret had slid to the floor and was now slumped against the wall, cradling her destroyed wrist. Her mental voice touched North again, though it did nothing to dispel the hunger or the loneliness. She was all but a stranger to him, an alien woman from an alien culture.
Ferrick has become a tenérezu, she said. He’s created a Tower matrix made of people instead of crystal. Kireseth pollen opens the mind and clears psychic channels among people who have laran, but this altered form of it opens the minds of people who have no laran at all, and it lets Ferrick use their laran channels for himself. Just like a Keeper in a Tower uses the channels of the telepaths in her circle.
Even her thoughts were alien. Only one word in three made sense. God, he wanted another hit of unity bliss. North dragged himself to his knees. Holy mother of Christ, he was an addict. The long line of North addicts strung out behind him, and he had joined at the head. His stomach flipped over. Vomit spewed over the floor, but it didn’t stop the screaming hunger inside him. That spreading warmth, that feeling of—
North! Loret said again. We have to stop him! Ferrick isn’t a properly trained Keeper. That kind of power in angry, untrained hands could level Thendara or punch a hole through the planet. Those quakes—
“You know I can read your thoughts now, don’t you?” Ferrick said pleasantly. “And you’re absolutely correct, Loret. The number of users in this city alone is growing every day. Each one who joins my matrix gives me a little more power, and a little more, and a little more. No one will push this humble brewer aside again.”
He strode over to Loret and tapped the locket on the chain around her neck. Loret arched her back and screamed. He spat at her feet, and she slumped panting against the wall. North couldn’t think why she hadn’t gone into shock.
“Keep your thoughts to yourself, cousin,” he said in that maddeningly pleasant voice. “My human matrix arcs across Neskaya and Armida and Valeron and three cities on Terra. Soon I’ll make inroads to Arilinn and Carthon.”
“It’s all one piece,” North whispered against his will.
“It will be,” Ferrick replied. He took up another vial of the yellow liquid and poured a measure of it into a series of brown ale bottles on one of the work tables. Alaric followed behind with corks that he pounded into place with a wooden mallet. Then Alaric piled the bottles into a large basket. The clinking was happy, even innocent.
“My own special brew,” Ferrick said. “The Comyn Council are too sharp to accept a drink from any bottle I provide now, but these will arrive in the kitchen before the Council meeting, and a small mental command to the serving staff will ensure my recipe reaches their cups for the traditional toast to Regis. So kind of him to call them here for a meeting this week so they can all drink at once, and so ironic they’ll do so while discussing me.”
“Ferrick, you can’t do this.” Loret’s cripsy wrist was still cradled in her lap. “Those earthquakes we’ve had—they’re a side-effect of what you’re doing. You’re not trained as a Keeper. You’ll kill these people, and the power you’re taking from them is rippling through the very stones.”
North watched the brown bottles with the kind of desire with which a starving rat watched the motherload of Swiss cheese. He wanted more, and he loathed the fact that he wanted more. He knew it was the drug talking, that the shit was bad for him. He told himself it was nothing, that he was in control of his own body, not this drug. It didn’t lessen the need one bit. His skin itched and tongue was going dry. The dose of Kira Ann hadn’t worn off yet, and the rest of him felt warm and floaty, even as he wanted more of the stuff and hated wanting more. Was this how all addicts felt, or was it just him? All his career, all his life, he had been pissed at his family for choosing drink or drugs over everything else. He despised them when they blubbered that they would do better, that they would stop using next time because they knew how awful it was and they really hated being screwed. He hated them for being weak. But after that first rush of Kira Ann, he would have given his right foot for another.
“The quakes have nothing to do with me,” Ferrick said. “They’re a purely natural phenomenon.”
“I won’t let you do this,” Loret said from the floor.
“What do you intend, cousin? To run and tell them? I won’t stop you.”
That was when North’s half-baked mind realized that Loret’s left ankle lay at a bad angle. It must have broken when Ferrick flung her against the wall.
“I’m glad I don’t need to kill you.” Ferrick knelt before her and kissed her cheek. “We swam in the lakes and hunted rabbit-horns together when we were children. And you’re a good enough healer that your injuries won’t kill you or even send you into shock. Once the toast to Regis is over, I’ll send someone for you. By then, the Council will do anything to keep me producing my new kirian, and I’ll be Keeper to the largest matrix in history. The Sharra matrix will fade in comparison.”
“And you’ll tear the planet in half,” Loret whispered.
“I can control it,” Ferrick snapped. “I’m no weakling! Do you understand? I’m not weak!” North heard a tiny echo of the word father after that final sentence. Ferrick took a breath and calmed himself. “Not weak. Come along, Alaric.”
Alaric followed Ferrick down the stairs with the basket of bottles, pausing only long enough to give North a two-fingered salute from the nose. The drug made North’s legs wobbly, or he would have gone after them, and in his own head he had to be honest—he didn’t know whether he wanted more to catch them or take those bottles for himself.
“North,” Loret said from her wall. “North, we need to stop him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“Hell he doesn’t,” North slurred. “Son a bitch, I want more of that. Do you think he left any?” And he hated himself for even saying the words. He was a cop, damnit. He forced himself to get some control and lever himself upright. “You stay here. I’ll run for help.”
He did two steps. The boards under his feet turned to rubber and he found himself back on the floor. It felt nice to lie there and stare up at the ceiling, letting the remnants of good feeling course through him. He could feel the other minds around him, though not as sharply as before. They were all connected to Ferrick’s mind, heavy and sharp as a Claymore sword, which moved steadily away from him with the little speck, that Alaric, sputtering close behind. It was the strangest feeling. Small sparks of energy pulsed from his body into Ferrick’s, like tiny orgasms. It felt nice, and he loathed his own enjoyment.
“You’ll run for help?” Loret repeated. She was only a yard away, but her voice came from a great distance. “You can’t even stand.”
North fought against the need, the desire. It had ripped up his family, but it wouldn’t tear him. The drug was a chemical, a string of molecules, and it had no real power. He told himself he was unique, untouchable, alone. Alone among his family, he had resisted the siren song of drugs and alcohol, and that gave him strength to rise above their weakness. But the more he thought about Kira Ann, the more it beckoned to him, sinuous and sly, and it dragged him back to the desire.
The house rumbled again, harder this time. One of the tables tipped over, sending glassware and crockery smashing to the floor.
David North! Loret’s mental voice slapped him like a nun’s ruler, gave him a small jolt. We can stop him! But you have to help me.
“How?” His voice sounded silky and dry at the same time. The bottles were moving farther and farther away, and he sensed Ferrick’s killer shark eagerness. The bastard who had created the drug that killed Jake was swimming free in dark waters, and not only had North failed to kill him, North had become the very thing he hated most in the process. The bliss faded further, and the gnawing hunger grew. From below came uneasy murmurs like little ghosts. The other addicts were getting restless, too.
I’m a Ridenow. I can communicate and empathize, and I know something of being a Keeper. Now that the drug has shoved your channels open, I might be able to merge us, if you’ll let me. She stretched out her good hand. Concentrate. I can reach through you to Ferrick, and together we can steal his control of this dread matrix.
North automatically grabbed her hand. It was cold and sweaty. At her touch, her presence in him fireworked into full bloom. She was beside him, in him, through him. The layers of his soul peeled away like clothing from a virgin sacrifice, and at the same time, Loret’s own layers peeled back. Thoughts and memories flooded over him. He was Loret as a child, tottering in her first steps in a sunny room and glad that Mama was pleased, then disappointed when Mama corrected her. He was Loret as a girl, trying to perfect her swim stroke in a chilly lake with her cousins Ferrick and Valo, and noticing a strange flutter in her stomach and loins when she saw Valo’s lithe form cut through the water. He was Loret as a teenager, sitting before Mama with the ryll, and wincing when Mama cracked her wrist with a stick at each imperfection in the song. He was Loret as a young woman, concentrating over her cool blue matrix and worrying that she’d never perfect what little healing she had. He was Loret as an adult, storming through the darkening streets of Thendara, desperate to catch up with the foolish Terranan who had slipped away from the space port, unescorted and without a visa, knowing the mistake was on her head for letting him out of her sight. He was Loret now, in pain and terrified that the fate of her entire world was in the hands of this foreigner who knew little and cared less for her beloved Darkover.
But Loret was also North. She stood with him at his grandmother’s tiny funeral after her overdose when he was looking up at his father’s stony face with a child’s incomprehension. She was there when his mother collapsed from drink for the last time, and North frantically shouted for help. She walked with him when he graduated the academy, earned his badge, and got promoted to detective. She watched while young Jake squirmed and grinned himself to death on his hospital bed while North’s sister stole slugs from the bottle in her pocket. The shame of what she saw spread through him, and it was like standing naked in front of a crowd of Lorets, with his slight paunch and his wrinkled genitals and the hair on his back on full display.
“Stop it!” North pulled his hand away and tried to block her out. “Leave me alone!”
We need to pull fully together, North. Let me in. I can’t do it without your cooperation.
But the disgrace was too great. He curled into a ball, covered himself, and he couldn’t tell if it were his mind or his body or both that did the curling. Ferrick was approaching Comyn Castle now, Alaric still carrying his brown, clinking payload. Through the matrix, North felt Ferrick’s every step crunch across the crust of sleet on the street while his once-private shame oozed from every pore and paralyzed him.
We don’t have time to wait, David. Loret’s mental voice was soft, insistent. I already know your shame, and don’t judge you for it it. There is no shame in coming from a family of addicts.
“That’s—” He stopped himself, tried to halt the thought before it formed, but it was too late.
That’s not what you’re ashamed of, Loret finished.
Ferrick and Alaric reached the sprawling stone labyrinth that was Comyn Castle and went round to an entrance for delivering supplies. Ferrick hung back while Alaric pounded on the door.
North stayed wrapped around himself, keeping Loret out. It was the last shred of himself he had left. Meanwhile, the new hunger nipped at him, tugged at him, demanded of him. Fear of what Loret would see kept North’s mind as tight as a fist. He would find a way, a different way. There had to be one. He would fight this problem—
Alone? Loret finished for him. David, you don’t have to be alone. I came here for you. Let me help.
No.
A small pause. Footsteps came from behind the castle door. Jake wouldn’t want Ferrick to get away, Loret said. Jake wouldn’t want you to be alone.
He had never mentioned Jake to her. He tried to be resentful of the way she had read his mind.
Jake loved you. Loret’s mental voice was quietly relentless. He wanted you to be proud of him.
His will cracked. He couldn’t stay like this. A small sound escaped his throat, and he grabbed Loret’s hand. Once again, she was beside him, inside him. The final layer peeled away, and she stood inside his final shame, that his entire family had traveled the addict’s road, and he hadn’t done enough to prevent it. His grandparents, his mother, his father—all filled graves because North hadn’t tried hard enough.
Loret watched while North answered his own front door to see his nephew Jake on the doorstep. She listened while Jake, weaving, slurring, and high as a cloud, begged North for money. Again. She felt both his anger and his sorrow as he firmly closed the door in Jake’s face. The next day, Jake, the boy he loved like a son, was dead.
A hot tear trailed down North’s cheek. He welcomed the gnawing hunger for Kira Ann now. If he had let Jake in, given him money or a place to sleep just one more time, he would still be alive. North deserved every piece of pain and every acre of loneliness. North lay on the unforgiving floor and waited for Loret to draw away in horror so he could die.
But Loret remained, tall and strong. Everyone has their private pain, and there is no shame. I know your pain, just as you know mine. It has killed neither of us.
And he realized that in her mind, there was no disgrace. He felt everything she did, and she felt not one iota of guilt, not one shred of shame. Cautiously, he brought his head up, daring to hope. At Comyn Castle, a servant opened the door.
I’m still here, Loret said, and her voice was warm as cinnamon. I won’t leave you. Join with me now.
Someone else had learned of his secret, and didn’t hate him. The shame dropped away like castoff chains, and, for the first time in his life, North felt light, even free. A bit of happiness sparked in him. Not a lot, but enough to pull North and Loret together and merge their minds. They joined like drops of water, became a single thought, a single being. The rush was greater than anything Kira Ann had shown him.
Together, North and Loret reached outward. Even without the drug, North felt every mind in the living matrix, and he gathered them to him like a spider pulling threads. Loret gave the matrix a sharp jerk. Every mind snapped to attention, including Ferrick.
The castle door opened a crack and a servant peered out. “Yes?”
How dare you? Dog snarls filled Ferrick’s mental voice.
Like this. And through the matrix, Loret smashed Ferrick’s mind. Only barely did Ferrick manage to shield himself and strike back. Then the battle began. Blow and counterblow, so fast that even North, bound with Loret as he was, could barely follow. They tugged the matrix back and forth between them, and addicts on two planets clapped their hands to their heads and howled their pain. The ground bucked hard like a horse, and screams erupted all over Thendara. The servant in the doorway cowered. But Ferrick was forced to give a little ground, then a little more. Loret grimly pressed forward, and Ferrick turned a flicker of attention on North.
Help me, he said hoarsely. Let go of the matrix and I’ll brew you all the new kirian you want.
A thousand addicts on a pair of planets shouted the word kirian at the same moment Ferrick thought it, and need for Kira Ann exploded through North again. His head throbbed and every cell in his body cried for more. He was weak. He was alone. He was—
I’m here, Loret said.
And she was, and the addiction became something he could handle.
Bastard! North cried, and this time he pulled on the matrix as well. He pulled hard. Ferrick screamed, and the addicts in the matrix shuddered with delight as their power rippled in a new direction. Ferrick’s mind flashed in agony red as the sun, and his mind popped out of the matrix. North found both Loret and himself in full charge of more than a hundred minds that fed them power. The ground trembled again, but Loret reached down with a mental hand, and it instantly stilled. North snapped out with a new move of his own, and every bottle in Alaric’s basket shattered with a pop. Shards sliced his arm, and North felt Alaric’s distant pain and fear as his own. The ale—and the drug with it—poured through the basket’s weave. The trembling servant slammed the door. Through Alaric’s eyes, North caught a fleeting image of Ferrick sprawled on the cold street, semi-conscious.
Back in the squalid house, Loret’s body rose from the ground and floated in mid-air. Air whirled about her, swirling her cloak and skirts. The matrix around her neck glowed a blinding blue, and North threw up a hand against the light. Through their bond, he felt the nova burst of her exultation.
So this is real power, she thought, and thrust out her broken ankle. With a wet movement, the bones pulled together and healed. I see it now.
A drunkenness splashed through her—through him. She devoured power from the living matrix now, and the people in it worshiped her in rapt delight. North felt every loving thought. She was beauty and love and kindness and delight. Even his hunger for the drug faded.
The ankle was easy enough. Even perfect. Loret held up her charred wrist. Before North’s eyes, a baby hand pushed out of it like a pink tulip. It pulsed and grew until her hand was whole again.
Also perfect. With this power, we can change the world for the better, North. Like Zandru and Sharra, we can reforge both our worlds. We will perfect them both.
He realized she was talking to him. Her thoughts came to him, a world cleansed of all evil, of all bad thoughts, of all poor intent. No addiction, no crime, no hatred. No one would be allowed to be unhappy or frightened or angry. A smile on every face from sunup to sundown. Always perfect. The image chilled him. North got to his feet and stood before her.
“No,” he said aloud.
You can’t be serious. The pain your own family underwent—
“Was tragic. And it might have been their choice, or it might have been their nature. I don’t know. But no one person should have the power to change everything. That’s the wisdom of the Compact. I see it now.” He came forward and took her newly-healed hand in his. The skin was perfectly smooth. “Let go of the matrix, Loret. Please. You have to let it go.”
She hesitated. He felt her anger toward him, and he feared for his life. Power built within her and he steeled himself for more pain. But then, with a rush of relief, he saw that she was angry that he was right. With a wrench, she released the power into the matrix itself. It burst into a countless starlight pieces and vanished.
Loret dropped to the ground. Her feet touched the rough boards, and North’s hunger snarled back to life. Sweat popped out on his forehead and he staggered under the brunt of it.
“David!” Loret cried, reading his distress in his expression. “I’m so sorry! I could have healed you while I had the matrix. Everything was so overwhelming, I didn’t think—”
“It’s all right,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ll get through it somehow. It’s not like...I can backslide. There’s no new kirian left.”
She put an arm around him to help keep him upright. “It’s the same for those other poor souls from the matrix. Once Ferrick is arrested, I’ll speak to Lord Regis about setting up healing houses to help them through it. We can help you, too. If you want it.”
And then he felt it. A tiny thread of their original bond that remained between them, strong and delicate as spidersilk spun of starlight. He could snap it. He could let it hang between them. It was his decision.
If you want it.
“I want it,” North said, and meant it with every goddam fiber. “God, I want it. I won’t go through this alone.”
Together, they headed down the stairs.
