Free The Sword of Aldones by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Gift, or whether he would go down in a screaming frenzy when my mind ripped into his.
    But Dyan did not know either, and his face was white before he lowered his eyes.
    “It’s still a bluff,” said Lerrys. “We all know that Sharra’s matrix was destroyed. What bugbear is this you drag out to frighten us, Lew? We are not children, to shiver at shadows! Sharra? That for Sharra!” He snapped his fingers.
    I flung caution to the winds. “Destroyed hell!” I raged, “It’s in my rooms this minute!”
    I heard the gasps that ran round the circle. “You have it?” I nodded, slowly.
    They wouldn’t call me a liar again. But then I caught a glimpse of Dyan’s mocking eyes. And suddenly I realized I had not been clever at all.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Marius leaned across his saddle as I laid the insulated sword across the pommel of my own.
    “Going to unwrap it here?”
    Around us the thin morning air was as expressionless as his face. Behind us the foothills rose; and J caught the thin pungent smell of slopes scorched by forest fire, drifting down from the Hellers. Further back in the clearing, the other Comyn waited.
    My barriers were down, and I could feel the impact of their emotions. Hostility, curiosity, disbelief or contempt from the Ardais and Aillard and Ridenow men; interested sympathy, and disquiet from the Hasturs and strangely, from Lerrys Ridenow.
    I would have preferred to do this thing privately. The thought of a hostile audience unnerved me. Knowing that my brother’s life depended on my own nerves and control didn’t help, either. Suddenly, I shivered. If Marius died—and he very likely would—only these witnesses would stand between me and a charge of murder. We were gambling on something we couldn’t possibly be sure about; and I was scared.
    The Alton focus is not easy. Having both parties aware and willing doesn’t make it easy, even for two mature telepaths; it just makes it possible.
    What we intended was to link minds—not in ordinary telepathic contact; not even in the forced rapport which an Alton—or, sometimes, a Hastur—can impose on another mind. But complete, and mutual rapport; conscious and subconscious mind, telepathic and psychokinetic nerve systems, time-scanning and coordinating consciousness, energonic functions, so that in effect we would function as one hyperdeveloped brain in two bodies.
    My father had done it with me—once, for about thirty seconds—with my full awareness that it would probably kill me. He had known; it was the only thing that would prove to them that I was a true Alton. It had forced the Comyn to accept me. I had been trained for days, and safeguarded by every bit of his skill. Marius was taking it on almost unprepared.
    I seemed to be seeing my brother for the first time. The difference in our ages, his freakish face and alien eyes, had made him a stranger; the knowledge that he might die beneath my mind, a few minutes from now, made him seem somehow less real; shadowy, like someone in a long dream. I made my voice rough.
    “Want to back down, Marius? There’s still time.” He looked amused again.
    “Jealous? Want to keep the laran privilege all to yourself?” he asked softly.
    “Don’t want any more Altons in the Comyn, huh?”
    I put the question point blank. “Do you have the Alton Gift, Marius?”
    He shrugged. “I haven’t the least notion. I’ve never tried to find out. What with one thing and another, I was given to understand that it would be unwarrantable insolence on my part.”
    I felt cold. That sentence outlined my brother’s Me. I’d have to remember that.
    There was a chance that what I gave him would not be death, but full Comyn status as an Alton. If he thought it was worth the gamble, what right had I to deny him? My father had gambled with me, and won. I lowered my head, and started to strip the insulating cloth from the sword.
    “Is it a real sword?” Derik Elhalyn asked, guiding his horse toward us.
    I shook my head,