Hastur Lord

Hastur Lord

 

Above the ancient city of Thendara, the great crimson sun of Dark over crept toward midday. Winter was drawing to a close, yet even at this hour, shadows stretched across the narrow, twisting streets of the Old Town. Snowfall had been light for the last tenday, and the market places surged with renewed life, anticipating the approach of spring.

Regis Hastur, the Heir of his Domain, stood on a balcony of Comyn Castle and wrapped his fur-lined cloak more tightly around his shoulders. He was a tall man in his mid thirties, with startling white hair and the intense masculine beauty of his clan. His gaze slowly swept from the spires and towers of Thendara to the Terran Trade City, the rising steel edifice of the Empire Headquarters complex and, still farther, the spaceport.

Throughout this past winter, he had divided his time between attending sessions of the Cortes, negotiating disputes and trade agreements between city magistrates and various guilds, and meeting with representatives of the Terran Empire and diplomatic envoys from the Seven Domains that once had formed Darkover’s ruling Council.

Oddly, Regis found himself nostalgic for the days when the Comyn gathered together, debating and discussing, scheming and plotting, planning marriages and trading gossip, even those times when a traditional evening of dancing and music was punctuated by the occasional formal duel.

Those days, he reflected, would never come again. Between a low birth rate, natural decline, and the targeted assassinations of the World Wreckers, the Comyn had been decimated, their remnants scattered. These last ten years had been an unbroken struggle to restore the ecology of the planet while trying to develop a new system of government. In his more pessimistic moments, Regis admitted that his idea for a new ruling Council, one open to telepaths of any caste, had been a singularly lame-brained scheme. What had he been thinking, to exchange men who had been educated for leadership since birth for a patched-together assembly that was inexperienced, sometimes illiterate, often pathologically independent? Even the Keepers, with years of rigorous discipline in the use of their psychic powers, had little training in matÂters beyond their own Towers.

The only saving grace, he thought ruefully, was that the Telepath Council was so disparate and disorganized, it was unlikely to do anything effective on a large scale. What would happen if a crisis demanded unified action? He supposed the remains of the Comyn would rally; certainly, the people would, if he asked.

HASTUR LORD © Copyright 2009 by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross.