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THE BLOODY SUN
A World Divided 03 - A Darkover Novel
To Keep the Oath
a renunciate short story
Marion Zimmer Bradley
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Contents
THE BLOODY SUN - A Darkover Novel
o
Prologue: Darkover
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Chapter One: The Terran
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Chapter Two: The Matrix
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Chapter Three: The Strangers
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Chapter Four: The Search
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Chapter Five: The Technician
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Chapter Six: Re-Exile
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Chapter Seven: Homecoming
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Chapter Eight: The World Outside
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Chapter Nine: Challenge to Arilinn
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Chapter Ten: The Way of Arilinn
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Chapter Eleven: Shadows on the Sun
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Chapter Twelve: The Trap
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Chapter Thirteen: Exile
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Chapter Fourteen: Doorway to the Past
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Chapter Fifteen: Through the Barrier
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Chapter Sixteen: The Broken Tower
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Chapter Seventeen: The Conscience of a Keeper
TO KEEP THE OATH -
a Renunciate short story
Jeff Kerwin walked swiftly now through the dark, deserted streets of Thendara. He heard a step behindhim—a slow, purposeful step, but told himself not to be suspicious; he wasn’t the only man who mighthave a good reason to be out in the rain tonight! The step kept pace with him, then quickened toovertake him, and Kerwin stepped side to let the follower pass in the narrow street.
That was a mistake. Kerwin felt a searing pain; then the top of his head exploded and from somewherehe heard a voice crying out strange words:
Say to the son of the barbarian that he shall come no more to the plains of Arilinn! The
Forbidden Tower is broken and the Golden Bell is avenged!
THE BLOODY SUN
Page 1
PLUS
To Keep the Oath
—a new Free Amazon story never before published anywhere!
Ace Books by
MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
ENDLESS UNIVERSE
FALCONS OF NARABEDLA
The Darkover Novels:
THE BLOODY SUN
STAR OF DANGER
THE WINDS OF DARKOVER
THE SWORD OF ALDONES
THE PLANET SAVERS
THE WORLD WRECKERS
From Ace Science Fiction
THE BLOODY SUN
Copyright © 1964 by Ace Books, Inc.
Material new to this edition copyright © 1979 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
TO KEEP THE OATH
Copyright © 1979 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except forthe inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purelycoincidental.
An ACE Book
Cover art by Michael Whelan
This Ace printing: April 1980
Printed inU.S.A.
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For showing me universes without number; in loving memory, Henry Kuttner.
The stranger who comes home does not make himself at home but makes home strange.
Prologue: Darkover
^»
The Leronis
Leonie Hastur was dead.
The ancient
leronis
, sorceress of the Comyn, Keeper of Arilinn, telepath, trained with all the powers ofthe matrix sciences of Darkover, died as she had lived, alone, sequestered high in theTowerofArilinn .
Not even her priestess-novice-apprentice, Janine Leynier of Storn, knew the hour when death camequietly into the Tower and took her away into one of the other worlds she had learned to walk asskillfully as within her own enclosed garden.
She died alone; and she died unmourned. For, although Leonie was feared, revered, worshipped almostas a Goddess throughout all the Domains of Darkover, she was not loved.
Once she had been greatly loved. There had been a time when Leonie Hastur had been a young woman,beautiful and chaste as a distant moon, and poets had written of her glory, comparing her to theexquisitely shining face of Liriel, the great violet moon of Darkover; or to a Goddess come down to liveamong men. She had been adored by those who lived under her rule atArilinnTower . Once, despite theausterity of the vows under which she lived (which would have made it blasphemy unspeakable for anyman to touch her fingertips) Leonie had been loved. But that had been long ago.
And now, as the years had passed over her head, leaving her more and more alone, further fromhumanity, she was loved less; and feared and hated more. The old Regent Lorill Hastur, her twin brother (for Leonie had been born into the royal house of the Hasturs of Hastur, and if she had not chosen the Tower, she would have stood higher than any Queen in the land), was long dead. A nephew she hadseen but a few times stood behind the throne of Stefan Hastur-Elhalyn and was the real power in the Domains. But to him Leonie was a whisper, an old tale and a shadow.
And now she was dead and lay, as the custom was, in an unmarked grave within the walls of Arilinn,where no human being save those of Comyn blood might ever come; in death no more secluded than inlife. And there were few left alive to weep.
One of the few who wept was Damon Ridenow, who had married years ago into the Domain of Alton,and briefly been Warden of that Domain for the young Heir to Alton, Valdir of Armida.*This story is toldin
The Forbidden Tower
. When Valdir had come of age and taken a wife, Damon and all hishousehold, which was large, had removed to the estate ofMariposaLake , which lay in the pleasantupland country in the foothills of the Kilghard Hills. When Leonie was young, and Damon was young,and he a mechanic in theTowerofArilinn , he had loved Leonie; loved her chastely, with never a touch ora kiss or any thought of breaking the vows that bound her. But he had loved her, nonetheless, with apassion that had given form and color to all his life afterward; and when he heard of her death, he went
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apart to his own study and there he shed the tears he would not shed before his wife or his wife’s sister, who had once been Leonie’s novice-Keeper at Arilinn, or before any of his household. But if they knew of his grief—and in a household of Comyn telepaths such things could not well be hidden—no one would speak of it; not even his grown sons and daughters asked why their father grieved in secret. Leonie, to them, of course, was only a legend with a name.
And so, when the news spread throughout the Domains, there was much excited speculation, even in thismost distant of remote corners in the Domains, about the question that now quickened and burned allover the Domains, from the Hellers to the Plains of Arilinn:
Who now will be Keeper of Arilinn
?
And to Damon, one day soon after that, in the privacy of his own study, came his youngest daughter