Traitor's Sun Read Online Free Page B

The system accepted it without query, and he had the booking arranged. They had six hours to get their things together and go to the port. It was not a great deal of time, and he prayed that Katherine would not argue too much.
    He allowed his shoulders to slump a little, exhausted from the tension of his efforts. As he relaxed, he heard the voices in his dream return, and realized that he still had not thought about the second one, the unknown voice, fainter than Nagy’s. Frustrated, he struggled to hear it. Herm forced himself to take several deep breaths, to create some patience when what he most desired was action. He had only deciphered half the puzzle, and the second voice was likely as important as the first. He must not be hasty. It was hard. Focus, particularly when he was tired, was a difficult discipline. He shut his eyes and balled his fists, willing his mind to bring back the faint, distant words. There was nothing for a moment, and then a flood of images danced across his eyelids. He saw sheets of paper with neat lines on them, and then a bottle of ink fell over, spreading across the pages. Something has happened to Regis!
    The words made him tremble. Herm forced himself to remain seated for a minute, calming his mind as well as he could. Perhaps his false message from Darkover was truer than he had imagined. He had no idea whose voice it was, reaching through time and space, across untold light-years, to find him in dream and rouse him to action. He was chilled to the bone, and the sweat on his chest was cold on his skin.
    Inertia seemed to paralyze him briefly, as his mind spun in tangles of fruitless speculation. Then he made himself stand up, noticing that his knees protested a little, and cross the common room. He poured himself another half glass of juice, then put the container back into the cool box. He placed his empty glass in the rack for the sterilizer, took a deep breath, and prepared to go wake up Katherine. He would have to rush her, not give her time to think, to ask questions—or else abandon her and the children, and that was unthinkable. If only he was not so weary!

1

    M arguerida Alton-Hastur sat at her desk and stared out the narrow window, unsettled for no reason she could put a name to. A glorious early autumn sky, with several interesting cloud shapes in it, filled the opening. She decided one resembled a camel, an animal that had never existed on Darkover and was now alive only in a few wild-life refuges, and remembered how much fun she had had when the children were little, trying to decide what clouds looked like. Once, several clouds had seemed to her gaze to be a pod of delfins frolicking in the seas of Thetis, the planet on which she had grown up. Marguerida had been unable to explain her sudden flood of tears, nor the nature of the images. Her children had never seen the sea, let alone bathed in it, and they could not understand her aching desire for warm oceans and balmy breezes. Funny—she had not thought of that day in ages. She must be getting old, wallowing in memories.
    The children were all much too grown up for cloud-gaz ing now, even Yllana, the youngest, at eleven, and she rather missed the innocent game. Last Midsummer, Domenic, her eldest, had been declared his father’s heir designate, despite the very vocal protects of Javanne Hastur, her difficult mother-in-law. It hardly seemed possible—the time had passed so quickly. Before long she might become a mother-in-law herself, and then a grandmother! She hoped that she would like her yet undiscovered daughter-in-law more than Javanne liked her, that she would be kinder, or at least more polite. But not too soon, she whispered to herself. As difficult as being a parent had turned out to be, she was in no hurry to have her children leave her.
    She looked around the small office she kept in her suite of rooms in Comyn Castle. The hearth was ablaze, and the cozy room was fragrant with the smell of burning balsam. The