The Tale of the Five Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  (You are really strange,) it said. (Why bother drinking water if you’re just going to throw it away again? And what is this ‘vain’ business? I’m gorgeous, you’ve said so. I don’t understand why you can tell me that I’m beautiful, but I can’t tell myself—)

  “Spark, shut up, please.”

  Sunspark strolled away a few paces and began cropping the grass in silence, leaving little scorched places where it had bitten through. Herewiss settled himself comfortably on the ground and began to compose himself for the evening’s work.

  Sorcery, like all the other arts, is primarily involved with the satisfaction of one’s own needs. Though a sorcerer may mend a pot or raise a storm or set a king on his throne with someone else’s benefit in mind, still he is first serving his own needs, his own joys or fears or sorrows. To work successful sorcery one must first know with great certainty what he wants, and why. Otherwise the dark secretive depths of his mind may take the unleashed forces and use them for something rather different than what he thinks he wants.

  In addition, sorcery is affected by how completely the sorcerer’s needs are filled before he begins—whether he’s hungry or tired, secure in his place in life, whether he is loved or has someone to love. It’s easy for a hungry sorcerer to find food by his art, since the need fuels his skill. But it’s much harder for that same starving sorcerer to, say, open death’s Door and sojourn in the places past it. And only the mightiest of sorcerers could manage to conjure powers or potentialities if he hadn’t eaten for a week, or felt his life was in danger for some reason. Sorcery is ridiculously easy to sabotage. Beat your sorcerer, frighten him, deprive him of food, ruin his love life—destroy one of his fulfillments, and he’ll be lucky to be able to dowse for water.

  So Herewiss sat there in the grass, as the Sun went down and the thunderclouds rolled in, and strove to shut out all external things and evaluate his inner self. A brief flicker of thought went across his mind like lightning, a white line of discomfort and irritation: If I had the Flame, I wouldn’t need to go through this rigmarole. Will alone is enough to fuel the blue Fire, you think a thing and it’s done. But he put the thought aside. Freelorn was waiting for him.

  Herewiss sounded himself. He was well-fed, not thirsty or cold or tired. He was the Lord’s son of the Brightwood, had a home and family and people that he could call his own. Love—there was his father, and Freelorn of course, and the knowledge of their feelings for him was a warm steady support at the back of his mind.

  Then after a moment Herewiss reached out and took hold of the thought he would have liked to banish, the lack of Flame, the lack of completion. Oh, he was so empty in that one place inside of him. It should have been full of blue Fire and prowess and shouting joy. Instead it ached with emptiness, as parts of him sometimes did after lovemaking. It was a vast stony cavern that echoed coldly when he walked there. Nothing but a faint flicker illuminated it, a single tongue of blue.

  Herewiss turned wholly inward, walked in the still, dry air of that place, listened to the sound of his passage as it bounced back from the walls, a distant, hollow step. He went toward the little blue tongue of Fire, crouched down beside it where it sprang from a crack in the bare rough rock. Though there was no wind passing through the darkness, the Flame trembled. It was a sad fire, afraid of dying before it was unleashed to burn through the rest of him, terrified of going out forever. Herewiss was surprised, and pierced with sorrow. He had never really pictured the Flame as anything but a possession of his, no more emotional than an arm or leg. Yet here it was, frightened of endings as he himself was, lonely in the dark.

  He spent a little time there, trying to comfort it with his presence, and finally stood up again and gazed down at the tiny tongue of cold fire. If it would die some day, then that was the Goddess’s will. It was better to have treasured the wonder this long than never to have had it in him at all.

  Finally Herewiss got up, turned his back on the Flame, and went out of that dark place, looking for Freelorn’s image inside him. Besides need, sorcery was also fueled by emotion. He would summon up his emotion as a smith might beat out iron, slowly, with care and skill and calculated brutality. Then he would turn it loose, take it in hand like the weapon it was and scatter an army with it.

  He didn’t have to walk far. The path to where Freelorn dwelt was a wide one, one that Herewiss traveled often when his friend was gone. It was a bright place. A lot of the memory looked like the halls of Kynall castle in Prydon, where they had lived together for a while, all white marble and sunlit colonnades— very different from the dark, carven walls of the Woodward. Some of it looked like Freelorn’s old room in the castle, cream-colored walls veined in green, Freelorn’s old teak four-poster bed with the hack-marks in it from Súthan , armor and clothes scattered around in adolescent disorder. They had had good times there together, lounging around and tossing off horns full of red Archantid as they talked about the things that the future might hold.

  But there was a lot of the memory that looked like the Brightwood, too, and it was there that Herewiss finally found him The image of a dead spring day was there, all sun on green leaves, and there was Lorn; newly arrived with his father King Ferrant on a visit of state. Herewiss, of course, was both within that memory and without it. From the outside he looked at Freelorn and marveled that he had ever really been that young. Lorn didn’t even have a mustache yet, and he looked laughably unfinished without it. And he was little, so very small for his age.

  Freelorn was as nervous as a new-manned hawk, trying to look in all directions at once. He hung onto the golden-hilted sword at his belt with one white-knuckled hand, and spurred his sorrel charger till it danced, meanwhile staring around him trying to see if any of the Wood people had clothes as grand as his, or such a sword, or such a father. From within the memory Herewiss, fourteen years old, looked with mixed disdain and jealousy at the newcomer. He was loud and flashy and arrogant, the way Herewiss had imagined a city princeling would probably be. He had disliked Freelorn immediately, and he saw himself frown and turn away from Hearn’s side to stalk back into the Woodward, fuming quietly at this foreign invasion.

  Then suddenly the scene changed, faded into darkness and stars seen through leaves and branches. The Moon sifted down through silvered limbs to pattern the smooth grass around one of the Forest Altars, and shone full and clear on the altarstone in the midst of the clearing. On the low slab of polished white marble Freelorn sat, huddled up with his head on his knees, shaking as if with cold. Beneath the trees at the edge of the clearing Herewiss stood very still, confused, wondering why the prince was crying. At the same time he was resisting the urge to laugh; the idea of the Prince of Arlen sitting on one of the Forest Altars and weeping was ludicrous. But disturbing—it wasn’t right for a prince to be seen crying, and Herewiss wanted him to stop….

  The scene shifted again, ever so slightly, and Herewiss was sitting next to his friend-to-be, trying to help, his arm around him; and Freelorn put his head against Herewiss and cried as if his world was ending. “No one likes me,” Freelorn was saying, in choked sobs, “and I don’t, don’t know why—”

  They began to see through each other that night. Herewiss had been playing cold and silent and mature, and Freelorn merry and uncaring and free; that night they began coming to the conclusion that there was at least one more person with whom the games and false faces were unnecessary. The next morning they looked at one another shyly, each studying the other’s weak places as he himself knew he was being studied, and decided that there would be no attack. They spent the next month teaching each other things, and savoring that special joy that comes of having someone to listen, and care. Their friendship became a settled thing.

  Herewiss gave the scene a nudge of adjustment. They were in rr’Virendir, the King’s Archive in Prydon castle, sitting with their backs against one of the huge shelves filled with rune rolls and musty tomes. It was dark and cool, and the air was laced with the dry dusty smell of a great old
library. The summer sun burned down outside, and in this weather the Archive was one of the few comfortable places to be. The assistant keeper was snoring softly in his little office down at one end of the long room; Freelorn, who due to a hereditary title was the Keeper of the Archive, was hunched up against the very last row of shelves with Herewiss.

  “I don’t want to learn all this stuff,” he was saying. “I’ll never learn it all. I’m a slow reader anyway; it would take me the rest of my life.”

  “Lorn, you’ve got to.” Herewiss was fifteen now, and feeling terribly broadened by his travels; this was his first trip to Prydon, and the first time he had ever been more than ten miles from the Wood.

  “I don’t need it!” Freelorn said, scowling at a pile of parchments that lay on the ground next to him. “Look at all this stuff. Half of it is so rotted away I can hardly read it, and the rest of it is in some obscure dialect so full of thees and thous that I can’t make sense of it.”

  “Lorn,” Herewiss said with infinite patience, “that one on top there is a rede that’s been copied over more times than either of us know, because no one knows what it means, and it’s tied to the history of your Line somehow. It’s Lion’s business, Lorn. That makes it your business. This whole place is your business. That’s why you’re its Keeper.”

  “Dammit, Dusty, I love my family’s history. Descent from the Lion is something to be proud of. But I don’t want to sit around reading when I could be out doing great things!”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  Freelorn made an irritated face. “I don’t know what kind of great things. But they’re there, waiting for me to get to them, I know it! I want to see the Kingdoms. I want to take ship for the Isles of the North, and talk to Dragons. I want to climb in the Highpeaks and see what the lands beyond the mountains look like. I want to go into Hreth and kill Fyrd. I want to find out what the Hildimarrin countries are like, I want to—oh, Dark, everything! And you know what I get to do?”

  “You get to stay home and be prince for a while. Listen, Lorn, it’s not that long ago you were in the Wood with me. That’s not traveling? Almost two hundred leagues away? What about the mare’s nest we saw on the way back? That’s not adventure? You wanted the nightmare, maybe? She would have had you for breakfast. We saw three wind demons and a unicorn, and heard the Shadow’s Hunting go overhead, and you want more? Goddess, Lorn, what’s it take to make you happy?”

  “Danger. Intrigue. Hopeless quests. Last stands. Heroism! Courage against all odds! Valor in defeat!”

  “You remember when we used to play Lion and Eagle?”

  “Yes, but—Dusty, what’s that got to do with this?”

  “How many times did we stage Bluepeak out behind the Ward?”

  “Every day for a month at least, but—”

  “Did you notice something interesting? We always got up again afterwards. Earn and Héalhra didn’t.”

  “Yes, They did. They come back once every five hundred years—”

  “—and the last two times no one recognized Them until they were dead, because They didn’t come back as Lion and Eagle. That’s not important here, though. Lorn, I’m not—oh, Dark.” Herewiss reached over and took Freelorn’s hand, slowly, shyly.

  “My father,” he went on, looking at his boots, “keeps saying, ‘A king is made for fame and not for long life.’ Which is all right as long as it’s some other king—but Lorn, it’s going to be you some day, and I’m not sure I want to see you die. No matter how damn heroic your last stand is.” He closed his eyes. “I’m probably going to go the same way; Brightwood people never die in bed. They vanish, or get eaten by Fyrd, or get turned into rocks, or something weird like that. All the old ballads make my ancestors sound just wonderful, but they have to be divorcing the emotion from the reality in places. I don’t want to find out how it feels to vanish.”

  Freelorn nodded. “I don’t really want to end up lying on a battlefield bleeding, either—but on the other hand, it’d be great to be a hero. Even a common robber baron, putting down oppressors and giving money to the common people. Or a wandering sorcerer, doing good deeds and slipping away unnoticed—”

  Herewiss sighed, and a wild impulse compounded of both daring and humor rose up in him. “All right,” he said. “Hopeless quests are what you want? Valiant absurdity? Something that the Goddess would approve of?”

  “What the Dark are you talking about?”

  “Lorn, I’m on a quest.”

  “What?”

  Herewiss grinned at the sudden confusion in Freelorn’s face. He considered and discarded several possible ways of explaining things, and finally simply held out his hands. Usually he had to close his eyes when he made the little tongue of external Flame that was all he could manage. But he strained twice as hard as usual this time for the sake of keeping his eyes open. He didn’t want to miss the look on Freelorn’s face.

  It was an amazing thing. It was so amazing that Herewiss broke out laughing like a fool, and lost his concentration and the Flame both a moment later. He laughed so hard that he had to hold his stomach against the pain, and all the while Freelorn stared at him in utter amazement.

  Finally Herewiss calmed down, caught his breath, wiped his eyes.

  “You have it,” Freelorn said softly. “You have it.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “You have it! Dusty!!”

  “That’s me.”

  “MY GODDESS, YOU HAVE IT!!!”

  “Sssh, you’ll wake up Berlic.”

  “But you have it!” Freelorn whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  And then Freelorn looked at Herewiss, and the joy in his eyes dimmed and flickered low.

  “But a focus—”

  “I tried. Can’t use a Rod.”

  There was a long, long silence.

  “Lorn,” Herewiss said. “This is my secret. And yours, now. My mother taught me a lot of sorcery when I was younger, but there was always something else I could feel in the background that I knew wasn’t anything to do with that. I didn’t know what it was until last year—I made Flame accidentally in the middle of a scrying spell. I thought it might have been a fluke, but it’s not; it’s there, and it’s getting stronger. If I can channel it, I can use it. And the Goddess only knows what I’m going to use for a focus. Will this do for a hopeless quest?”

  Freelorn was silent for a while. Then he looked at Herewiss again.

  “I am the Keeper of the Archive,” he said solemnly, as if he were summoning Powers to hear him. “There must be something in here that would help you. I’m going to start looking. And when I find it—”

  Herewiss smiled . “When you find it,” he said.

  They hugged each other, stirring up dust.

  The memories were making Herewiss feel warm inside. The analytical parts of him approved: he was heading in the right direction. The warmth was building, washing through him— He shifted the scene again, and it was night out in the eastern Darthene wastelands, a hundred miles or so from the Arlene border. They were on their way to Prydon again after a trip to the Wood, and the day’s riding had left them exhausted; Freelorn was anxious to get home, and they had spared neither themselves nor the horses. It was cold, for Opening Night was approaching, and they lay close to their little fire and shivered. The stars were beginning to fall thickly, as they do at Midwinter when the Goddess is angriest—when She remembers Her own thoughtlessness at the Creation, and flings stars burning across the night in defiance of the great Death. Herewiss lay on his back gazing up at the sky, watching the distant firebrands trace their silent paths out of the heart of the Sword, the constellation that stands highest on those deep winter nights. Freelorn lay curled up in a tight bundle next to him, facing west.

  “Dusty—”

  Herewiss turned his head to him.

  “You want to share?”

  Within the memory, Herewiss, now sixteen, went both warm with surpris
e and pleasure, and cold with fear. It was a thought that had occurred to him more than once. But Freelorn was younger than he was inside, and easily frightened. He wouldn’t want to scare Lorn, ever—

  —yet no one in the world knew him as well as Lorn did, no one else cared as much about all the little things in Herewiss’s life and how he felt about them. He could share things with Lorn that he would never dare say to anyone else, and never be afraid of the consequences. And Lorn mattered so much to him. His loved. Yes. And he was beautiful outside, too, small and strong and fine to look at—

  I’ve paid off the Responsibility. I can love whom I please—

  “You want to?” he said aloud.

  “Yeah.”

  Herewiss felt at the knot of fear inside him, wondering what to do about it. If Lorn wanted to—

  But—

  “I had to think about it for a while before I could say it,” Freelorn said quietly, from inside the blankets. “If you don’t want to, it’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not that—”

  Freelorn chuckled , so adult a sound coming out of him that it startled Herewiss. He identified it as one of Ferrant’s laughs, which Freelorn had borrowed. “I should have asked,” Freelorn said. “Your first time?”

  “No! —I mean, yes. With a man.”

  They were quiet for a while. Freelorn turned over on his back and looked up at the sky, watching a particularly bright star blaze out of the Sword and clear across the night to the Moonsteed before it went out. “There’s not much difference,” he said, “except that, instead of being different, we’re alike. Some things are easier— some are harder—”

  The voice was still suspiciously adult, and Herewiss looked at Freelorn for a moment and then smiled. “Your first time too, huh?”

  Freelorn’s face went shocked, then irritated, and finally sheepishly smiling. “Yeah.”

  Herewiss laughed softly to himself, and reached out to hug Freelorn to him. “You twit!” he said, laughing into Freelorn’s blankets until the tears came.