by Diane Duane
She came up hard against the leftmost support, a pillar of Fire-wrought steel easily as thick as Héalhra’s Tree in Orsmernin grove. Even in the dark it shimmered a ghostly blue. “Segnbora!” Herewiss’s voice floated down from above. “What are you doing?”
Segnbora didn’t answer. The others had had enough time to get off safely. She raised Skádhwë and with a great swashing blow sliced right through the steel support. Stone or steel or soul, Efmaer had said— And the Fire in the steel was no hindrance. The pillar cracked and buckled backward, groaning, peeling apart from itself like a wound in metal flesh. Segnbora sliced at it again. The groan grew terrible as the upper part of the pillar came away from the lower, and the span of the bridge began to lean away from the mountainside.
Segnbora scrabbled across rock and snow to the second support, and hewed that too. Far above, the groan grew to a scream of tortured metal. Smiling grimly, taking ferocious pleasure in the sound, Segnbora made her way to the last support, swung Skádhwë back, and struck. The slim shadow of its blade flicked through the metal and out the other side. The immense shadow of the Skybridge above her, shifting, leaned faster and faster away, and suddenly gave way completely to the deepening violet of the evening sky.
The screaming stopped. Silently as a flower petal—as slowly, as gracefully—the huge strip of steel floated down into the abyss of blue air. Then with a crash that shook all Adínë, it struck the south-face glacier halfway down its slope, shattering it. Up and out the broken bridge rebounded, falling again. The air was littered with small, lazily turning splinters of ice and steel as the bridge fell on, broke into more pieces, fell again…until at last only the faint echoes of its fall remained, along with the sound of Segnbora’s gasps, coming through tears of anguish and triumph.
There was a long silence from above, broken after a while by Herewiss’s subdued voice.
“Well,” he said, “that’s one thing less Eftgan has to worry about…”
***
TEN
Fear hissed at me and struck
from beneath a stone.
I crushed its head with a rock.
Though dead, it still squirmed.
(Darthene Rubrics, xxiii)
Segnbora came down from her room the next morning and made her way to the breakfast hall only to find it empty. There was not even a single platter or cup on the table. The great inner court, when she passed through it, however, was lively as a wasps’ nest is after it’s been kicked. People and horses in the courtyard clattered and shouted so loud she could barely hear Hasai’s comments inside her, and the mdeihei were drowned out entirely. Tack was being burnished, weapons readied, and the silver chains of officers were everywhere.
(What is all this?) Hasai inquired, as loudly as was polite.
(How the Dark should I know?) Segnbora said. Up the stairs to the battlements she went, three at a time, Charriselm’s scabbard bouncing at her side, its every bump a reminder of the black non-weight that was sheathed in it now. The place where her sword had been felt like the socket of a lost tooth. She was grateful when she reached the top, but not reassured at all by the sight of Freelorn and Lang and Moris and Dritt and Torve leaning on their elbows, looking over the battlements, calm of face but tense of stance.
As she came up to them, something went rap! through the bright morning air, a sharp sound that raised goosebumps on her arms.
“What is it?” Segnbora said, joining them at the battlement. No one answered, so she looked for herself. Down in the valley, looking remote, a dark blot surrounded the starshaped walls of Barachael town. The blot heaved and moved oddly, separated into smaller pieces, consolidated again. One part of the darkness moved rhythmically backward and then forward again, toward the town’s big brass-studded gates.
The forward movement arrested suddenly, and after several seconds the faint rapping boom of the battering ram came floating across the air.
“Damn, oh damn,” Segnbora said, and out of reflex reached for Charriselm’s hilt in frustration. She snatched her hand away as it fell to the not-hot-not-cold smoothness of Skádhwë’s end.
Torve, beside her, raised his eyebrows idly at Segnbora’s swearing. “It’s silly, really,” he said. “The valley people are all inside khas-Barachael, so there’s no reason for the Reavers to force the gates—if they can. I just hope they don’t decide to fire the fields. It’s late for putting in another crop of wheat…”
There was really nowhere else to put her hand. After a couple seconds of hooking it uncomfortably in her belt, Segnbora sighed and let it fall to Skádhwë’s hilt. It was an odd feeling, neutral, like touching one’s own skin. “The Reavers arrived last night?” she said.
Torve nodded. “Through the pass. I dare say the Queen is wishing she’d had Herewiss seal the pass before taking on Glasscastle.”
“Where is the Queen?”
“Upstairs with Herewiss,” Freelorn said, giving Segnbora a sidewise glance meant to be disciplinary. “If you’d get up earlier, you wouldn’t miss so much.”
Segnbora made a face at her liege and leaned on the battlement like the others, elbows-down, staring at the Reavers’ futile work in the valley. “More are coming?” It was a rhetorical question. There were always more coming.
“Here and elsewhere,” Lang said, not looking at her, in that way he had when he was worried and didn’t care to let his eyes betray it.
“What happened at Orsvier?”
“She won.”
“You said ‘elsewhere’ just now,” Segnbora said, puzzled. “Where’s the new incursion?”
Lang wouldn’t answer her. She looked past him at Dritt. “Bluepeak,” Dritt said.
Segnbora’s stomach began to churn, and inside her the mdeihei sang their own unease in response to hers. Herewiss’s dream was starting to come true, then. Of all the places in the world where the Shadow’s sleeping influence shouldn’t be disturbed, Bluepeak was the foremost.
“How many Reavers?”
“Her scrying wouldn’t come clear on that point,” Torve said. “Maybe three thousand. People, a large supply convoy, beasts…and Fyrd.”
“Oh no,” she whispered. These must be more of the thinking kind, then, the species of Fyrd they had fought en route to the Morrowfane.
“Looks like Bluepeak will be our job,” Moris muttered.
“Looks that way,” Torve said with his usual calm. He turned his eyes back to the Reavers in the valley, who—having had no luck with the town gates—were apparently now sitting down to a late breakfast.
“Idiots,” Harald said under his breath. “Torve, couldn’t you send out a sortie?”
“Without orders? The Queen would hang me up by my privates with my officer’s chain.” He sounded like he was only half joking. “Besides, they’re out of bowshot.”
Wings whistled overhead. Segnbora and the others glanced up and saw what looked like fire flying. Feathers burning like embers, eyes like live coals, a tail like flame streaming back from a torch…
They flinched back from the parapet as the brightness landed there. It stood still long enough to smooth a couple of smoldering feathers back into place, then ruffled itself up in a flurry of red-hot brilliance.
(Levies,) it said, (Strategy and tactics, forced marches, that’s all your soldiers can talk about. I’m bored.)
Segnbora raised an eyebrow at the form Sunspark had adopted. “Shame, Firechild! There’s only one Phoenix!”
(What’s shame?) Sunspark said. (As for the Phoenix—if it’s so fond of this shape, let it come try a couple of falls with me. If it wins, I’ll let it keep the form.) It peered over the battlement at the Reavers below, interested. (Are they with us?)
Segnbora gazed at Sunspark with idle affection. Its tail-feathers were like those of a peacock, but red-golden and bearing eyes like coals, and they were searing the stone against which they lay. She started to get an idea. “No,” she said.
The elemental turned on her fiery eyes that glowed hotter by the momen
t. The others moved down the battlement, all but Torve, who stood his ground. She felt Sunspark examining her state of mind with hot impatient interest. (This is a new kind of joke, perhaps?)
(Yes. And no. Better than a joke.)
(Something for Herewiss? Something to make him glad?)
(Yes.) She considered her thought carefully before sharing it. (Before I tell you, consider this: When he finds out about it, will he be angry, will he be in pain? If he won’t…)
Sunspark looked down at the Reavers, considering carefully. For all its power, it knew it had much to learn yet about being human. (What are they doing?) it said, audible to the others.
Torve looked at it as calmly as if it had been one of his own people. “Breaking the gates of the town,” he said, “to get inside and kill the people, or take their belongings at least.”
Sunspark didn’t look up from the valley. Segnbora caught its thoughts: Herewiss doesn’t care for killing, or for robbing either. He tries to prevent them whenever possible. (And when they’ve done that? What then?)
“They’ll come here and try to kill us, so that no one can stop them from doing as they please in this part of the country,” Torve said.
(Oh, will they now!) Sunspark said, and leapt from the battlement in a swift flash of fire that sent them all staggering back. Segnbora felt her singed face to find out if her eyebrows were still there. Once certain that they were, she looked around hurriedly. Sunspark had vanished. But Harald and Dritt were pointing down at the valley and laughing.
Far down in the depths of air, the group around the battering ram suddenly began to break up. One person after another jumped up to beat frantically at smoldering clothes, their yelps of consternation trailing tardily through the air.
“Can it manage a whole army, though?” Lang asked uncertainly.
Then it was Segnbora’s turn to point and laugh, as a bloom of light erupted before the gates of Barachael, followed by the sound of screaming. The ram—a lopped monarch pine, full of pitch as monarchs are—literally exploded in red-hot splinters and clouds of burning gas. People and ponies were flung in all directions. Then from the explosion site something like a serpent of flame went pouring over the scorched ground. It lengthened and wound right around the walls of Barachael, met its tail and kept on going, coiling around, reaching upward. In moments the town was lost behind burning walls, and the huge head of a coiled fire-serpent wavered lazily above the town. The confused shrieks and yells of routed Reavers mingled with the screaming of their ponies. People and animals ran every which way. A roar of amazed laughter and applause went up from the walls of khas-Barachael.
In response the Reavers, who had moved away from Barachael town and toward the keep, raised a chorus of war shouts. But their shouts had a half-hearted sound to them, as if they had other matters in mind. Sunspark was looking down at them with innocent malice, its fiery head swaying like that of a sleepy viper deciding whether to strike.
“What the—!” someone said from a higher parapet.
Segnbora glanced up and saw Eftgan and Herewiss looking over the rail at Barachael town, very surprised.
“Your idea?” Eftgan said to Herewiss.
“No!” he said, grinning down at Sunspark.
It stretched up its flame-hooded head and blinked at him good-naturedly. (They had torches,) it said, (and might have burned the town. If anybody’s going to do any burning around here, it’s going to be me.)
Herewiss and Eftgan came down to the battlement together and leaned on the parapet with Freelorn’s followers. “I wish that sealing the pass was going to be as simple,” Eftgan said.
Freelorn glanced at her. “It actually can be done?”
Herewiss nodded. “It took me a while to work out the exact method, and it’ll take some hours to attune to the mountain properly… but, yes, I can do it.”
“And survive?”
Herewiss’s glance crossed with Freelorn’s, gently mocking.
“That’s with Her, of course,” he said, “but I have a few things to do yet before I go willingly to death’s Door. I believe I’ll live.”
“It’s risky, though,” Eftgan said, as if resuming an argument with herself. “The earth always moves better on a night when the Moon’s full, but the next time that happens there’s an eclipse. The Shadow will be very strong then—”
Segnbora bit her lip. In a place as bitterly contested as Barachael, where the land was soaked with centuries of blood and violent death, nearly any wreaking could be warped by the built-up negative forces. An eclipse was no help at all. And to attempt a wreaking that involved unconsciousness of the upper mind, as this one surely would—
“I’m strong too,” Herewiss said. The complete assurance in his voice made Segnbora shudder. She had heard such assurance before, and disaster had followed. “The wreaking itself doesn’t worry me; I received more than enough Power to handle it at the Morrowfane. The tricky part will be the survey of the land. That’ll have to be done out-of-body, and it’ll take at least a day. Moreover, it has to be done today, or tomorrow at the latest, in order for me to be properly rested up for the long wreaking.”
Lang raised his eyebrows. “Survey?”
Herewiss nodded and leaned on the parapet. “Can’t seal the pass without checking the valley to see how its stone lies—strata, faults, underground water. Touch the wrong part of landscape and the whole thing could be destroyed.”
“For one so new to this work, your caution’s still insufficient, for this area is quite unstable,” someone said. Heads turned toward Segnbora, confusing her terribly until she realized that it was she who’d spoken; someone had begun using her voice without consulting her on the matter.
“There are two major faults under the valley,” Hasai said. “Additionally, eight minor vertical faults run east-west between Adínë and Aulys, and one runs across the lower Eisargir Pass. One major vertical fault crosses the valley mouth from Swaleback to Aulys’s southern spur—”
(Mdaha? What are you—)
(If he’ll work with stone, here of all places, he’d best learn this, sdaha!) said the great dark voice inside her. “Then beneath those is a lateral fault which runs down the Eisargir Pass from the foot of Mirit into the valley, past the town, and out into the plain. It’s treacherous, and the chief reason we made no Marchward here; it hasn’t moved since before we came. Touch it wrongly and the fault will discharge and fold the valley right in on itself. The mountains may come down too, especially Adíne; its support-spurs are rooted too close to the lateral.”
The others stared at her, particularly Herewiss. He opened his mouth, but paused a moment, unsure how to begin. “Sir—”
“I greet you, Hearn’s son,” she said, and bowed slightly to approximate Hasai’s informal bow within her.
“Sir, how do you know all this?”
The mdeihei indulgently, as one laughs at a child. “We are Dracon,” Hasai said. “We know. Stone is our element.”
“Sir,” Herewiss said, “I’d like to trust what you say, it’d save me a great deal of time, but—”
“—but you don’t understand,” Hasai said, patient. Segnbora was surprised to hear the overtones of his inner song, calm and measured, coming out in her own voice. “Neither do we; what you ask is a mystery. Even we aren’t sure how stone became our element. But in the world from which we came, we were born in the stone, and dwelt in it. These are the very earliest times of which we speak. When food and drink failed us, stone and starlight were all we had left. Over a long time we learned to use them. Those who didn’t understand stone—how it could be moved to make shelter, or melted with Dragonfire to help one find more starlight in dim times—those didn’t survive. Those of us who lived to become as we are now, are born knowing the structure and movement of rock as we know how to use our fire to shape it. We experience stone as if it were part of us. It is part of us. We are the foundations, the roots of the world.”
Herewiss and Freelorn looked at each other. No one o
n the parapet spoke.
From down in Barachael valley, the hot eyes of the blazing serpent that encircled the town looked up with interest. (You’re good with fire, are you?) Sunspark said, its voice lazy, but full of challenge.
Hasai turned Segnbora’s head and looked down at the elemental calmly. “For sport we chase the day around the world and drink it at our leisure; for play we bathe in the world’s blood, or hotter places than that. Yes, we know something about fire.”
Sunspark glanced at Herewiss, as if considering the agreements that bound it, and then back at Segnbora. “Some day,” it said formally, “we’ll match our power, you and I, and see which is greater.”
“Some day,” Hasai said calmly, “we shall.” The words made Segnbora squeeze her eyes shut against a sudden blinding headache, for they were in one of the precognitive tenses, future definite, describing something that had not yet come to pass but most certainly would. A room somewhere, dim and suddenly cold with a frost that bit at the bones, and Skádhwë in her hand: a shadow falling over everything, a shriek of pain—
The memory passed, and the sight of common daylight came back to her. Hasai lifted her head again, as perturbed by the precognition as she, but for different reasons of which Segnbora could make nothing. In any case, he seemed determined not to let it show, for it didn’t matter to the task before them. “Hearn’s son,” he said, “do you desire our aid?”
Herewiss looked at Segnbora as if trying to see past Hasai’s voice. “‘Berend, what do you say?”
She coughed and cleared her throat, getting control back. “I say, if Hasai offers you help, take it.”
“In that case,” Herewiss replied slowly, “I’d like to check his assessment of the faults—” He stopped as if unwilling to go on.
“In my mind?”
“Yes.”
Segnbora considered the idea. “You’re welcome to look in,” she said. “When?”
“As close as possible to the hour when we begin the wreaking. Tomorrow night?”
