by Диана Дуэйн
Holmaern looked relieved. With a nod of thanks, he gath-ered Herewiss close, passed through, and was gone.
Khavrinen's Fire went out, and the circle faded to a blue smolder and died. Beside his now-dark sword Herewiss went slowly to his knees, and sobbed once, bitterly.
"That's not the way it is supposed to be." He gasped again. "Lorn, it was supposed to be life I give—"
Freelorn went to him, and held him close. "And what kind of life would they have had, dead and on the wrong side of the Door?" Segnbora stood still, seeing behind her eyes, with the im-mediacy that came of Hasai's presence, old lost times: sum-mer mornings in Asfahaeg, rich with the smell of sunlight and the Sea; winter nights by the old hearthside in Darthis; after-noons weaving with her father, riding with her mother; laugh-ter, anger, argument, joy, the sounds of life. She turned and walked away, back toward town. The purpose behind her stride caught up with her at about the same time that Freelorn and Herewiss did, in the middle of the hayfield. They stopped her, looked at her as if expect-ing her to lapse again into a state of madness like that she had experienced after the Fane. "Well? What's the problem?" she asked, her anger hot and quick.
"What are you going to do?" Freelorn asked warily. Charriselm's grip was sweaty in her hand as she thought of the innkeeper — hurried, merry, sharp-faced, with eyes that wouldn't meet hers.
"I'm going to kill someone," she said, and shook out of their grasp. " 'Berend—" Freelorn said.
She ignored him, hurrying off through the hay. Didn't he realize that it wasn't only because of her parents that she had
to do this? Lorn's people might easily have been the next victims, bringing — as might be thought — news from the South. She at least would have to be killed, since she wore the same arms as two others who were silenced, and was thus probably in search of them. Behind her she could feel Fire stirring again. Herewiss had begun another wreaking. She understood why. He was a strategist. He would count it folly to kill a spy, and thus alert the spy's superiors to the fact that that someone had discov-ered the game they played. He was building around the inn-keeper a wreaking that would later cause the man to believe he had murdered those whom he was duty-bound to murder, when in fact they would go on their way, unnoticed and un-harmed. It was all perfectly sensible, and Segnbora despised the idea.
(My way is more efficient,) she said, silent and bitter. (He won't know what's happened to him until a second after I hit him, when he tries to move and falls over in two pieces. And as for his wife—)
She went quietly through the postern, expecting an empty street. Instead, Moris and Dritt were there. So was Harald, standing about silently with their horses. Lang had just joined them, along with Eftgan, who had her cloak about her shoul-ders and her unsheathed white Rod in her hand.
Segnbora would have brushed past the Queen to take care of her unfinished business in the inn, but Eftgan's hand on her arm, together with her look of deepening concern at the taste of Segnbora's mind, stopped Segnbora as if she had walked into a wall.
" 'Berend? What happened?" Segnbora looked down at Eftgan's brown eyes, so like her mother's, and flinched away, unable to bear it.
"Oh, my Goddess," Eftgan said. "Herewiss?" A breath's worth of silence sufficed for Herewiss to show Eftgan what Segnbora had found, what he had done for her parents, and the dream-wreaking he had woven and im-planted in the innkeeper, and afterward in his wife.
"Can we get out of here now?" he said, sounding deadly tired. Sunspark paced to him in its stallion shape, and Herewiss leaned on it, sagging like a man near exhaustion. It looked at him in concern.
"Done," said the Queen, and gestured with her Rod at the ground where she stood. The wreaking she had been main-taining until they arrived leaped upward from the stone and wove itself on the air, a warp and weft of blue Fire that out-lined a small squarish doorway. The doorway flashed com-pletely blue for a moment and then blacked out — but the black was that of a different night, a long way off. The Door sucked in air. On the other side they could see smooth paving, a better road than that of the damp cobbles of Chavi. "Hurry up," Eftgan said. "It's a strain to hold it for this many, and the Kings' Door is unpredictable."
One by one they went through, each leading a horse. Eftgan stood to one side of the Door, Flame running down her Rod and keeping the lintels alight. Lang stepped through before Segnbora, his eyes on her, looking worried. Numb, she fol-lowed him. The one step took her from the wet lowland air of Chavi, air stinking of death, into air colder, purer, but not entirely clean of the taste. Her ears popped painfully. The night was perhaps an hour further along here; the stars had shifted, in one part of the sky they were missing entirely. She looked around the paved courtyard where Freelorn's people milled, among horses and men and women in the midnight blue of Darthen. Over the low northward wall she could see faintly, in the starshine, the valley where she had sometimes lived as a child, with the braided Chaelonde run-ning through it. Many a time she had stood down there look-ing up at the place where she stood now — Sai khas-Barachael Fortress, the black sentinel perched on an outthrust root of one of the Highpeaks.
Dully, she looked southward to where the stars were blocked from the sky. Looming over khas-Barachael, shadowy dark below and pale with starlight above, the snows of Mount Adine brooded, impassive and cruel.
THE DOOR INTO SHADOW
"It's late," Freelorn was saying. "We'll meet in the morn-ing, all of us. Meanwhile, does the Queen's hospitality extend to a drink?" Segnbora saw to Steelsheen's stabling and made sure her
corncrib was full, then followed Lang (who seemed to be beside her every time she turned around) to a warmly lit room faced in black stone. There was hot wine, and she drank a great deal of it. The explanations went on and on around her, but she was never as dead to them as she wanted to be.
Snatches of conversation and random thoughts faded in and out of hearing, as they had when she had first come down from the Morrowfane. She would have welcomed Hasai's darkness to flee to again, but she couldn't find it. He and the mdeihei were, for once, too remote. They wanted nothing to do with her, the mdeihei. She was too familiar with the kind of death to which they couldn't admit. She was carrier of a conta-gion of terror and impossibility. The more she tried to ap-proach, the more they fled her, afraid of any death in which one could lose oneself.
Somehow she found her way off to the tower room they had given her, and to bed. Lang was there too. He held her, and she clutched him, but she found no comfort in his presence. Her thoughts were full of graves, bare dirt, eyes that looked right through her. Her mind talked constantly, again and again making the most terrible admission a sensitive could make: / never felt you die. I never felt it. Tears were a long time coming, but they found her at last; and Lang, more hero than she had ever been, held her and bore the brunt of her blows and cries and impotent rage. Bitterness and a shameful desire for vengeance; they were all still tangled in her at the end, but she knew at least she would be able to sleep. For tonight.
Over the bed and the room and the fortress, like a great weight, loomed the thought of Adme, and a line from the old family rede, which now might have a chance to come true: There will come a time of ice and darkness, and then the last of the tai-Enraesi will die. Flee the fate as you may, you shall know no peace until the blade Jinds your own heart, and lets the darkness in. …
Darkness. That was the key. One Whose sign and chosen hiding place was darkness was coming after Herewiss and Freelorn. She had chosen to ride with them, and to defy It. And It hated defiance, and never failed to reward it with pain of one kind or another.
She could leave Lorn now, and her troubles would cease, or she could stay with him, and they would almost certainly get worse. The Dark One obviously had it in for her. But what could be worse than a head full of Dragons, and to suddenly find oneself orphaned, she couldn't imagine.
Beside her, Lang turned over and started to snore. She lay there for a long time with the tears running down the sides of
her face into her ears. And chose again.
Shadow, she thought at last, it's war between us from now on. I'll die soon enough. But You won't get Lorn — or anybody else, if I can help it. The darkness about her teemed with silent, derisive laugh-ter. She turned her back on it and went to sleep.
Eight
Kings build the bridges from earth to heaven. But it is their subjects' decision whether or not to cross — and if they do, there is no guaranteeing the nature of the result. On tfre Royal Priesthood, Arien d'Lhared
'Iff-1
People who live in the Highpeaks find it easy to believe the old story that the Maiden creates the World anew, every day, for the sheer joy of it. Astonishing dawns come there. Later, the face of a mountain changes as the shadows swing across it, revealing a new countenance every quarter hour. Still later come sunsets that run blood down cornices of snow, or light a whole range as if from within, until it all seems one great burning opal. Then twilight dissolves everything, leaving only shadows where peaks have been; cut-out patches on the sky, from which the mischievous Maiden has removed the moun-tains so She can rework them for the next day.
Huddled in her cloak, Segnbora leaned on her elbows on a battlement of Sai khas-Barachael at dawn, watching the mountains come back. The Sun was up, though not yet visible past the eastern peaks. Beneath her Barachael valley was still hidden in shadow and morning mist. The valley was nearly circular. The walls broke only at the far northern end, where a quarter-arc of the circle was missing and the land
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sloped down northward toward the rest of Darthen. Khas-Barachael fortress stood on the northernmost spur of high ground, on the western side of the break, commanding a view of both the Darthene plains and the valley.
Segnbora gazed across the gap, though which the little braided Chaelonde River ran down from its glacier, toward the mountains that reached long spurs to each other and made the rest of the ring. First came Aulys, right across the gap, like an eagle with bowed head and drooping wings. South and west of it Houndstooth reared, smooth and pol-ished-looking, and armed with avalanches. West of Hounds —
tooth, between it and the next mountain, was a shadowy spot — the north end of the Eisargir Pass, through which Reavers lad been raiding for food and metal since time immemorial. Tien Eisargir himself, like a great stone rose unfolding with lis down-spiraling spurs. Westward again lay a low col or [saddle between mountains, over which looked red Tamien. Tien came rising ground that grew into the long northeast— jointing Adine massif.
Segnbora looked over her shoulder, scanning the long crest line. It was scarred on both sides with old glacial cirques; jscraped-out bowls of stone. One such bowl was still full: the [South Face cirque beneath the lesser, southern peak of Adine. lice spilled over from it to feed the glacial lake which in turn fed the Chaelonde. Every now and then the morning stillness ld be broken by a remote groan or a huge crashing snap, lade tiny by distance, as the glacier calved off an iceberg into [the lake.
Above the glacier, and above the eminence of Sai khas-larachael two thousand feet above the valley floor, Mount idine loomed like a crooked, ruined tower. Its greater peak fstood two miles higher than khas-Barachael and a sheer league above town in the valley's depths. Segnbora shud-lered, though whether from morning's cold or a feeling of threat she didn't know. A breath later, the Sun rose through the gap between Aulys and Houndstooth and touched on the lesser Adine summit. There, tiny and sharp, a line of some-thing silvery glittered; the Skybridge, bright even against the)linding white of the peak on which it stood.
Segnbora shuddered again, this time knowing why. Uncon-:erned, Hasai said from inside her, (We thought about living there, once. .) (Under the bridge? I thought Dragons didn't care to live fhere the shadowed powers are.)
(We don't. When we saw what happened at certain times of ('ear, we abandoned plans to make a Marchward there. Also there are weaknesses in the valley, and we were afraid we fould disrupt the land if we worked as deep into that main lassif as we normally would.) (This was how long ago?)
Hasai looked at his memories and counted the passing suns backward in his mind. (Fifteen hundred years or so.) (That long. .)
Segnbora moved away from the wall and walked along it, southward, to a corner where she could better see the Eisargir Pass. The increasing light was already revealing the reddish tinge to the rocks where they were bare of snow. There under Eisargir lay the oldest mines in Darthen. From them came the finest iron in the Kingdoms; iron from which the people of Barachael made the matchless Masterforge steel. Goddess only knew how many times Barachael had been raided, burned, and razed by the Reavers, who came down the Eisargir Pass again and again on their forays into the Kingdoms.
Those forays had been one of the deadlier aspects of life in the South for a long, long time. No one knew much about the Reavers; their language was utterly different from any spoken in the Kingdoms. But prisoners taken in battle had revealed a little of their lives. The countries overmountain were short of iron. Indeed, one had merely to examine the Reaver bodies on any battlefield to see that: Their weapons were largely flint-tipped spears and arrows. Some were not tipped at all, but were mere sharpened sticks blackened and hardened in fire. Because of their lack of metal the overmountain tribes were small and poor. In the high cold South few crops grew and little game
could flourish. So it had been until twelve or thirteen hundred years before, when some desperately hun-gry Reaver tribe had followed a
game migration northward instead of southward … and had discovered the Eisargir Pass, and Darthen, and steel.
Those first Reavers were no fools. They saw that the rich-ness of the farmland below them was not all to the credit of the warmer climate.
They discovered the plow and the sword. They stole as many of both as possible, and fled back over-mountain with them to change their
world.
The tribes that followed grew swiftly in, power, becoming more successful as both hunters and warriors. In no time the old balance of power was upset. Tribes skirmished, merged, conquered, or dominated one another, grew more numerous, extended their hunting grounds. Game became scarce as they
overhunted their lands. Their agriculture languished, as it usually does in lands where war has become a profitable pas-time. Already a nomadic people during their short summer, the Reavers took wholeheartedly to a raiding lifestyle in order to survive in their unbalanced world. When the weather broke in the spring and the passes opened, they would raid north-ward, spending the spring and summer raiding for loot and cattle, but most of all for steel to use in their endless tribal quarrels. Time and again Barachael was attacked, looted, and burned— Again and again the town was rebuilt, too. Neither the stubborn smith-sorcerers who lived there, nor the Darthene crown that ruled them, would give up the Eisargir mines. Sai khas-Barachael was built on the northernmost Adine spur to keep an eye on the Eisargir incursion route, but even its formidable presence did not deter the Reavers. They con-tinued to raid, though more circumspectly, and in greater numbers, so that the battle for the Chaelonde valley was never over. Only Bluepeak had ever seen more blood shed on its behalf.
The thought of battle, of blood, was not a welcome one that morning. Segnbora turned her back on the southern prospect and walked north along the wall. But that view held no com-fort for her either. Northward the highlands fell away to the green and golden plains. On the plains, far out of sight but clear in her mind, was Darthis, her family's formal home, and the only one remaining, now that Asfahaeg was sold and Wasten Beeches sacked by Reavers.
There in Darthis, on Potboilers' Street just outside the old second wall, stood the little stone house with doors and win-dows shuttered blind, and the tai-Enraesi lioncelle carved over the passage to the horseyard. Her mother wouldn't be singing in the armory anymore, her father wouldn't be re-hanging the bedroom shutter that was always fall
ing down. There was only one person left to carry the lioncelle; and how long even that one would survive she couldn't tell. Ice and darkness. . (Those who sired you?) Hasai said diffidently, (is that question what concerns you? Since last night there's been a— I don't know what you would call it — an opening in the depths—)
She blinked back sudden tears, and her mouth was grim. (Mdaha, forget it, they're rdahaih. They're gone and I'll never see them again, not till I pass the last Door. Maybe not even then.)
She felt him turn his head away, a gesture of shock and sorrow at her hard words and her pain. (Their souls live yet, don't they?)
(They do. It might have been otherwise if we hadn't found them in time.) Her rage at the murdering innkeeper, which had been gnawing at her like an ulcer all the night before, flared up hot again. She turned her back to the wall, to the wind.
After a long time Hasai said, (We didn't understand this business — or believe it.) In his voice there was distress. Far back in her inner darkness, the mdeihei were singing a mourn-ful bass cadence, both dirge and apology. (You humans throw yourselves so willingly into strifes and dangers that we thought surely you must go mdahaih somehow. Otherwise it seemed a madness—)
(We don't get the same life twice. Or know the same people twice. So in this life we fight for what matters. Herewiss fights for Lorn, and Lorn for his kingship. All of us fight for our own happiness, as best we can. Once past the Door, it's done forever.) Hasai fell silent again. The same fear, of not-being, and not-remembering, was at the heart of the terror of going rdahaih, and nothing could frighten a Dragon more. She heard Hasai wondering what would become of him and the mdeihei when her time came to change bodies. Perhaps this human death would be more final and terrible, in its way, than going rdahaih. Segnbora's pain turned to sorrow for
THE DOOR INTO SHADOW
the fear she had planted in him.
(Mdaha,) she said, (I'm sorry. But you and I, we're an exper-iment, it seems. If it'll make you feel better, I intend to put off my death as long as possible.)
