The Door Into Fire

by Diane Duane

  “I’ll do that,” Freelorn said. “Uh, Lord—”

  “Ask on.”

  “You are my Father, and the head of our Line?”

  “You are My child,” the Lion said, bending His head in assent. “Make no doubt of it.”

  “Lord, I need a miracle.”

  The Lion stretched, a long comfortable cat-gesture, and the terrible steel-silver talons winked on His paws for a second’s space. “I don’t do miracles much any more, son. You’re as much the Lion as I am. You do it.”

  “It’s not for me, Héalhra my Father; it’s for Herewiss here.”

  Herewiss looked up, meeting the gaze of the golden eyes and feeling a tremor of recognition, remembering how his illusion had looked at him even after it was gone from the field at Madeil. “Son of Mine,” the Lion said then, shifting his eyes back to Freelorn, “his Father the Eagle and I managed Our own miracles for the most part. I have faith in you, and in him.”

  Freelorn nodded.

  “Go down to the Arlid, then,” the Lion said, “and follow it till it comes to the Sea. Your father is in the place to which his desire has taken him, but to get there you’ll have to go down to the Shore first. Your friend will go with you.”

  The bowed down, together, and were suddenly out by the river Arlid, which flowed through the palace grounds. It was night, and the water flowed silverly by under a westering Moon.

  “The Sea is a long way off,” Herewiss said. Even as he said it, he perceived something wrong with him. He was being swept away with this dream, losing control. Too much drug! something in him cried, thrilling with horror. But the fearful voice was faint, and though it cried again, Down by the Sea is the land of the dead!, still he walked with Freelorn by the riverbank, through the green reeds, toward the seashore.

  “It’s not that far,” Freelorn said. “Only a hundred miles or so.”

  “It’s a long way to walk,” Herewiss insisted.

  “So we’ll let the water take us. Come on.”

  Together they stepped down through the sedges on the bank and onto the surface of the water. The Arlid was a placid river, smooth-flowing, and bore their weight without complaint. Its current hurried them past little clusters of houses, and moss-grown docks, and flocks of grazing sheep, at a speed which would normally have surprised them but which they both now accepted unquestioningly. Once or twice they walked a little, to help things along, but mostly they stood in silence and let the river flow.

  “You really think your father has the sword?” Herewiss said.

  “He has to.” Freelorn’s voice was fierce. “They never found it after he died. He must have taken Hergótha with him.”

  Herewiss looked at Freelorn and was sad for him, driven as he was even while dreaming. “It takes more than a sword to make a king,” he said, and then was shocked at the words that had fallen out of his mouth.

  Freelorn looked back at him, and his eyes were sad too. “That’s usually true,” he said, “but it’s going to take at least Hergótha to make a king out of me, I’m afraid. I’m not enough myself yet to do it alone.”

  For a while neither of them spoke. The river was branching out now, the marshes of the Arlid delta reaching out northward before them, toward the Sea. Freelorn and Herewiss picked their way from stream to stream as along a winding path, stepping carefully so as not to upset the fish.

  “I’ve never been this way before,” Herewiss said, very quietly. He felt afraid.

  “Maybe it’s time,” Freelorn said. “I was here once, when I was very young. Don’t be scared. I won’t leave you alone.”

  The river bottom was getting shallower and sandier. The stream that bore them turned a bend, past a spinney of stunted willow trees, and suddenly there it was, the Shore.

  Herewiss looked out past the beach and was so torn between terror and awe that he could hardly think. Under the suddenly dark sky the Sea stretched away forever, and it was a sea of light, not water. It was as liquidly dazzling as the noon Sun seen through some clear mountain cataract. But there was no Sun, no Moon, no stars even; only the long vista of pure brilliant light, brighter than any other light that ever was. Herewiss began to understand how the Starlight could only be a faint intimation of this last Sea, for stars are mortal, and bound with the laws and ties of materiality. This was a place that time would never touch, and mere matter was too fragile, too ephemeral, to survive it.

  The waves of white fire came curling in, their troughs as bright as their crests, and broke in foaming radiance on the silver beach, and were drawn in sheets of light back into the Sea. But all silently. There was no sound of combers crashing and tumbling, no hiss of exhausted waves climbing far up the sand: nothing at all. Along the shore there walked or stood many vague forms, shadows passing by in as deep a silence as the waves. Herewiss was very afraid. The fear held his chest in its hand and squeezed, so that the breath couldn’t come in. He thought suddenly of the choking darkness behind the door in the hold, where the hralcin waited and hungered for him, and the fear squeezed harder. But Freelorn stepped from the water, and held out his hand; and Herewiss took that hand and went with him.

  They went down the Shore together, slowly, looking at each of the shadows they passed, but recognizing none. There were men and women of every age, and many young children walking around or playing quietly in the sand. There were couples, some of them young lovers, and some of them old, and some couples where one person ravaged by time walked with one hardly touched by it, but walked all the same with interlaced arms and gentle looks. Freelorn would stop every now and then and question one or another of the people they passed. They always answered quietly, with grave, kindly words, but also with an air of preoccupation.

  Herewiss was not paying attention to either questions or answers. His fear was too much with him. All he perceived with any clarity was the rise and fall of the quiet voices, which arose from the silence and slipped back to become part of it again when the speakers were finished. He began to feel that if he spoke again, the words and the thoughts behind them would be lost forever in that silence, a part of himself gone irretrievably. But no one asked him to speak, and Freelorn led him down the sand as if he had a sure idea of which way they were headed.

  “Are we going the right way?” Herewiss said finally, watching carefully to see if the thought behind the question became lost.

  “I think so. This place will come around on itself, if we give it enough time.”

  They walked, and their feet made no sound on the sand. They passed more people than Herewiss had ever seen or known, some of them looking out over the gently moving brilliance of the Sea, or standing rapt in contemplation of the sand, or of something less obvious. When someone turned to watch them pass, it was with a look of mild, unhurried wonder, a wonder which soon slipped away again. The fear was beginning to ebb out of Herewiss, little by little, when suddenly he saw someone making straight for them across the strand, not quickly, but with purpose.

  He could hear his heart begin hammering in his ears again. “Your father?” he said.

  Freelorn shook his head. “My father was a bigger man—is.”

  Herewiss stopped, still holding Freelorn’s hand. He knew that shadowed form, knew the way it walked, the loose, easy stride. “Oh Goddess,” he whispered into the eternal silence. “Goddess no.”

  Freelorn looked at him with compassion, and said nothing.

  Herewiss stood there, frozen in the extremity of terror. The world was about to end in ice and bitterness, and he would welcome it. He deserved no better. He waited for it to happen.

  And out of the darkness and fixity to which he thought he had completely surrendered himself, a voice spoke: his own voice, not angry or defiant, but matter-of-fact and calm, speaking a truth. If this is the worst thing in the world about to happen, we won’t just stand here and wait. We’ll go meet it.

  He stepped forward, pulling Freelorn with him, and the strain of taking the first step shook him straight through, like a convulsi
on. His bones, his flesh rebelled. But he kept going. The shadowy form approached them steadily, and they walked to meet it. Fear battered Herewiss like a stormwind. He wanted to flee, to hide, anything, but he pushed himself into the teeth of the wind, into the face of his fear. He had been struggling against it, walking into it head down. Now he raised his head, and opened his eyes again. The wind smote tears into his eyes, and he looked up at his brother.

  He was as he had been the day he died. Tall and dark-haired, like most of the Brightwood line, with the droopy eyes that ran in Herewiss’s family, he came and stood before them. His eyes smiled, and his face smiled, and the blood welled softly from the place where Herewiss’s sword had struck him through, an eternity ago.

  “Hello, Herelaf,” Freelorn said.

  Herewiss let go of Freelorn’s hand and sank down to his knees in the sand, trembling with terror and grief. He hid his face in his hands, and began to weep. All the things he had wanted to say to his brother after he died, all the apologies, all the guilt, everything that he had decided to say when they met after his own death, now froze in his throat. And the worst of it was that he felt quite willing to let the tears take him. Anything was better than trying to deal with the person who stood before him.

  But there were hands on his hands, and they pulled gently downward until Herewiss had no choice but to squeeze his eyes shut and turn his head away. “Dusty,” his brother’s voice said, “don’t you have anything to say to me?”

  The old name, so rarely used, so much missed, pierced Herewiss with more pain than he had thought possible to stand without dying—but then, how could he die on these shores? He sobbed and coughed and caught his breath, and finally dared to look up again into his brother’s face. There was no anger there, no hatred, not even any sorrow. Herelaf was glad to see him.

  “Why are you so surprised to see me?” his brother said. “You know how the drug works. I’m as likely to turn up in your realm as you are in mine. And if you walk here, you’re more than likely to run into me.”

  “I—” Herewiss choked, cleared his throat. “I suppose I knew it. But I was so sure that I wouldn’t, wouldn’t lose control—”

  “—and run into me. Yes, I can imagine.” Herelaf held Herewiss’s hands in his, and the touch was warm. “It doesn’t matter. I’m glad you came.”

  “But—but I killed you—!” The words were too much for him, despite all the thousand times he had whispered and moaned and cried them into the darkness in the past. He crumpled back into tears. Freelorn was crouched down beside him, holding him again, and his brother’s hands touched his face to wipe the tears away.

  “Herewiss.” The voice was still young, but there was power in it, and Herewiss was startled out of his weeping. “You didn’t kill me. We were drunk, and messing with swords in a dark room, and you made one of those grand gestures with your sword, and I lost my balance and fell on it, and I died. You didn’t kill me.”

  “But I should have been more careful—I shouldn’t have encouraged you—”

  “Herewiss, I started it.”

  “But—”

  “Dusty, I started it. Listen, little brother mine, did I ever tell you a lie? Ever? Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I’d start trying to lie to you here, where there can be neither lying nor deception?”

  Herewiss scrubbed at his eyes and looked up again. “You’re still bleeding,” he said.

  “So are you, and that’s why. This is a peaceful place, there’s healing to be had here before we go on. But the thoughts of the living have power over those who’ve gone on, just as the dead have some influence over the lives and ways of the living.”

  “But you’re not really dead!” Herewiss cried. “You live, you’re here—”

  “I’m here. But living? Not the same way you are. I finished what I had to do.”

  “But it was so senseless—you were young, and strong, and in line for the Lordship—” The tears broke through again. Herelaf shook his head.

  “Little brother,” he said, and he held Herewiss’s hands hard, “I was all of that. And we loved each other greatly, and I loved my life, and when I first got here I raged and screamed and tried to get back into the poor broken body. But knowledge comes with silence here, and soon I found that it wasn’t senseless. What sense there is to it may seem evil to us, but that’s because we haven’t yet learned all the fact, or recalled them.”

  “I wish I could believe that—”

  “Herewiss, I know this. I did what I was there to do while I was there, and then I came here, and when it’s time, I’ll go on to something else. That’s the way things are.”

  “But—I don’t understand. What did you do?”

  Herelaf smiled at him. “That, like the matter of Names, is between me and the Mother. Besides, I may not be finished yet.”

  “I—oh, what the Dark! Herelaf, I wish I could stay here with you—I’ve failed so miserably with the Flame—”

  Herelaf laughed, and the mingled pain and joy that the sound struck into Herewiss was amazing to feel. “Goddess, Dusty, what a crazy idea. You don’t even know what you’re for yet, and already you want to abandon the battlefield! Idiot. So tell me. If you can tell me, you might be able to stay.”

  “I never really gave it much thought—”

  “A lot of people don’t. I certainly never did.”

  Herewiss frowned in irritation. “I,” he said, “am the first man in a thousand years to have enough of the Flame to use, and know it.”

  “That’s what you are, or what you have been—not what you’re for. You just have to go back and find out the answer. Allow yourself to be what you can, and that will point you toward what you’re for like a compass needle seeking north.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up. You always were a great one for butting around, looking for holes in what you didn’t want to hear. That hasn’t changed, at least. Listen to me, Dusty. I’m only a ghost. No, look at me—” Herewiss had turned his face away, but Herelaf took both his brother’s hands in one of his, while with the other he took Herewiss’s face and turned it to him. “I’m only a ghost, Dusty. I can’t hurt you any more, unless you make me. Since I fell onto your sword, you haven’t been able to use one, not even to fight with—I guess because of me, or what you think you did to me. But the time’s coming when you’re going to need a sword. And you won’t feel right with one, it won’t do you any good, it’ll turn in your hand unless you acquit yourself of my ‘murder.’ You have things to do. Better things than sitting around sorrowing for me. And I have better things to do than walk this shore and bleed.”

  Herewiss knelt there on the sand, and felt Freelorn’s arms around him, and his brother’s eyes upon him, and he shook. He didn’t know what to think, or what to say.

  “I’m not angry, Dusty,” Herelaf said softly. “There’s no anger here after one comes to understand things. I was set free at the appropriate time. How could I be angry about that? But we’re in bondage, both of us, and you can free us both. Turn me loose. Turn yourself loose. You didn’t kill me.”

  “I—” Herewiss looked at his brother, and at the truth in his eyes, and for the first time began to feel something strange and cold curling in his gut. It was doubt, doubt of the crenellated certainties he had walled into his mind, and the doubt twined upward, curling around his heart and squeezing it hard. “I—”

  PAIN. Sudden, terrible, and Herewiss foundering in darkness, the shore and the Sea’s light and Freelorn and his brother’s gentle voice all gone at once, lost, no light, no sound, only an awful tearing pain through his head and his heart and the place where his soul usually slept. Tearing, gnawing, and then just aching, and still the darkness, but there was a floor under him now—at least he thought there was, yes, his hands were against it, that was a pillow, and ohh his head hurt, spun and throbbed—and dear Goddess, what was that noise?

  A howling. A sick ugly howling like an axe being sharpened too long, and mixed with it other sounds, huma
n voices crying out in terror, the sound of scrabbling claws and—

  Herewiss tried to stand up. The binding spell. Broken. A pack of hralcins; the one had gone back for reinforcements. A touch too much stress on the binding somehow. The spell broken, and now all of them loose, hunting. Hunting him. But he hadn’t been in his body. So they couldn’t find him. But they had found something else to hold them until he returned. Freelorn. Freelorn’s people. Downstairs. Defenseless.

  He tried to stand again, and it didn’t work. Too much drug. Out of it too suddenly. His body disobeyed him, and responded to his commands with vengeful stabs of pain. The screaming was louder, voices terrified beyond understanding. He refused to let his body’s punishments stop him. There was a little light now, sickly, the light of the Moon almost gone down. Against the wall was a dim gray blot, the only thing he could really see. He made a hand go out, despite shrieking protests from his head and arm and aching torso, and took hold of the thing. It swayed in his grasp. The other hand, now. He gripped the object hard, and wrenched himself to a sitting position next to it.

  If his voice could have found his throat, he would have screamed. It was the sword, sharpened that morning, and it cut into his hands in icy lines of pain, and the blood flowed. But he had no time, no time for the pain, and he struggled to stand, using the sword as a prop. He moved his hands feebly to the unsharpened tang, where the hilt would go, and pushed himself up, and somehow managed to stand. His legs wobbled under him as if they belonged to a body he had owned in a former life. He made his feet move. He went to the door.

  The stairs were dark, and Herewiss fell and stumbled down them, using the sword as a cane, caroming off the walls with force enough to bruise bones—though he couldn’t feel the blows much through the shell which the drug had made of his body. The cries of men in terror were closer now. They mingled with that awful lusting hunger-howl and were nearly lost in it, faint against it as against the laughter of Death. As Herewiss came to the landing at the foot of the stairs, very faintly he could see some kind of light coming from the main hall, a fitful light, coming in stuttered and flashes. With every flash the hralcins screeched louder in frustration and rage. Segnbora! he thought. She’s holding them off with the light until I can get there. But what can I do? Nothing but Flame would do anything—