The Tale of the Five Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  They held each other for a long time, and then drew closer. Outside the memory, Herewiss looked on with quiet amusement, and with reverence, feeling as if he was watching an enactment of some old legend being staged by well-meaning amateurs. In a way, of course, he was: the Goddess’s Lovers always discover each other after being initiated by Her—one of the things which makes for the tragedy of Opening Night, when the Lovers, male or female as the avatar dictates, destroy one another in Their rivalry. But this was an enactment of the birth of that new relationship, and the freshness and innocence of it easily compensated for whatever ineptitude there may have been as well.

  “Oops—”

  “Huh? Did it hurt?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  “Well, let’s try this instead—”

  “Ohhh…”

  “Hmmm?”

  “No, no, don’t stop. It feels so good.”

  Silence, and further joinings: warm hands, warm mouths, growing comfort, trust flowing. A slow climb on smooth wings, easing into the upper reaches, then gliding into the updraft, soaring, daring, higher, higher—

  —sudden and not to be denied, the brilliance that is not light, the dissolution of barriers that cannot possibly break—

  —a brief silence.

  “Oh, Dark, I’m sorry. I hurried you.”

  “Oh, no, don’t be. It was—it was—oh, my…”

  “I saw your face.” A warm arm reaches around to pillow Herewiss’s head; gentle fingers stroke his jawline, his lips, his closed eyes. “You looked—so happy. I was glad I could make you feel that way.”

  “I felt… so cherished.”

  “It was something I always wished somebody would…do for me…”

  “You mean you haven’t —”

  “Oh, my dear loved. —Can I call you that?”

  “Why not? It’s true—oh, Dusty—!”

  “Lorn, you’re crying—? Are you all right, did I say something wrong—”

  “No, no—it’s just—nobody ever called me their loved before—and it’s—I always wanted—I’m happy—”

  “Oh, Lorn! Come here. No, come on, if we’re going to share ourselves with each other, that means the tears too. My loved, my Lorn, it’s all right, you’re happy—”

  “But, but my face gets—gets funny when I cry—”

  “So does mine. Who cares? You’re beautiful. I love you, Lorn—”

  “Oh, Goddess, Dusty, I love you too. I was just scared—I didn’t see how someone as gorgeous as you could ever want to share with me—”

  “Me? Gorgeous? Oh, Lorn—”

  “But you are, you are, don’t you see it? And inside, too.” A chuckle through passing tears. “It’s almost unfair that anyone should be so beautiful as you are inside. But it makes me so happy— Am I making sense?”

  “Yes. Oh, Lorn, I want you to feel what I felt, I want to give you the joy—you deserve it so much … and it makes me so happy to make you happy…”

  —and again the slow dance, stately circlings on wings of light—

  —and much later, the long drift down.

  Silence, and falling stars.

  Outside the memory, Herewiss wept.

  Inside the memory, Freelorn held Herewiss, and Herewiss held Freelorn, and their hearts slowed.

  “Again?”

  “I don’t know if I could…”

  A chuckle. “Neither do I.” Another silence.

  “Hey, maybe we should get married some day.”

  “Are you thinking of us, or of marriage alliances?”

  “It could be good both ways. Hasn’t been an alliance between our two Houses since the days of Béorgan.”

  “And you know how that turned out. I don’t want to be history, Lorn, I just want to be me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So think about us, then, and leave politics out of it.”

  “Can we?”

  Herewiss thought about it. “At least until our fathers leave us their lands. …I’m tired, Lorn.”

  “Yeah. We’ve got a long ride tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.”

  They held each other against the cold, and fell asleep.

  Herewiss dwelt on the scene for a while, and then reluctantly changed it again. Another night, another place out in the cold: the battlefield where they fought the Reaver incursion, far to the south of the Wood….the night after the battle, and Herewiss wounded in the shoulder with the blow that he took for the king’s daughter of Darthen. Later on that blow had gotten him awarded the WhiteMantle. But at this point Herewiss lay huddled on the ground, wrapped in his own tattered campaigning cloak, innocent of honors and just trying to get some sleep. He was cold and

  tired, and in pain from the wound. The hurt of it kept waking him up every time he drifted off. During one hazy time of almost-sleep, a figure came softly toward him in the dark, and Herewiss didn’t move, didn’t particularly care who it was—

  “Dusty?”

  He tried to get up, and Freelorn was down beside him, helping him. “Quiet, quiet—do you know how long I’ve been looking for you?” His voice was frightened.

  “No.”

  “I couldn’t find you. I was beginning to think you were—”

  “Well, I’m not. I heard you were all right and so I just found a spot out of the way where I could get some sleep.”

  “That’s interesting,” Freelorn hissed. “Because you’re behind the lines. Do you mind coming with me now before they find out who we are and carve the blood-eagle on us?”

  “Behind the lines?”

  “The Reaver lines! It’s obvious you’re being saved for something besides dying in battle. If you haven’t managed it by now— Oh, Dusty, come on!!”

  “I lost a lot of blood. I think I need a horse. Oh, poor old Socks, he got killed right out from under me—”

  “Blackmane is here, I brought him. Come on, for Goddess’s sake—”

  The next while was a nightmare, an interminable period of jouncing and wincing and nearly falling out of the saddle. The wound reopened, and Herewiss bit back his moans with great difficulty. Blackmane was stepping softly; he seemed to have something tied around his feet. Herewiss later found out they had been pieces of Freelorn’s best clothes—his Lion surcoat, the one embroidered in silver and satin, that he had loved so well. But in the midst of the hurt and the fresh bleeding, as they passed back through the enemy lines and slipped softly past the guards, Herewiss heard himself thinking, like a chant to put distance between one and one’s pain, He really must care about me. He really must—

  The slow wave of love that had been building in Herewiss was coming to a crest. He let it grow, let it build power. He would need it. Holding himself still in the twilight inside him, he reached out a tendril of thought to Sunspark.

  (What?) it said. Its voice seemed distant, and he could perceive no more of the elemental than a vague sensation of warmth.

  (Warn away anything that approaches. Don’t hurt it, just keep it away.)

  (It would be easier to kill.)

  (It would disturb the influences I’m working with. Take care of me, Spark. If I have to drop what I’m doing suddenly, the backlash may catch you as well.)

  (Whatever.)

  He returned fully to the awareness of his inner self, and watched with approval as his building emotion began to shade toward anger. He encouraged it. This is my friend; my loved; a part of me: this is the one they want to take and kill! Will it happen? Will it? Will it?

  The answer was building like a thunderhead, piling threateningly high. He turned his attention away from the building storm of emotion and started to work on the sorcery proper. The spell had to be built, word by cautious word, each word placed delicately against another, stressed and counterstressed, pronunciations clean and careful, intentions plain. The words were sharp as knives, and could cut deeper than any sword if they were mishandled. A word set here, and another one against it there: this one placed with care atop two others, taking care alway
s to keep the whole structure in mind—too much attention to one part could collapse others. Here a jagged word like cutting crystal, faceted, many-syllabled, with a history to it—don’t pause too long to admire the glitter of it; the others will resent the partiality and turn on you. There a word fragile as a butterfly’s wing—indeed, the word has lineal ties with the Steldene word for butterfly, but don’t think of that now; this winged word has teeth too. Now the next—

  Herewiss was doing what few sorcerers care to do—building a spell without reference to the actual words written in the grimoire. It requires a good memory, and considerable courage. The mind has a way of shaping words to its liking, and that can be fatal to a sorcery and the one who works it. But keeping himself conscious enough to actually read the words from his books would have meant a diversion of needed power, and Herewiss was worried enough to forgo the safer method. He was making no passes, drawing no diagrams to help him; those measures would have cost him energy too. The greatest sorceries are always those done without recourse to anything but the words themselves, and the effect they have on the minds of the user and the hearer. But Herewiss didn’t think about that just now. It would have scared him too much.

  He built with the words, making a structure both like and unlike the towering concentration of love and anger within him. The structure had to be big enough to let the emotions flow freely, strong enough to contain them—but it also had to be small enough not to scrape the barriers of Herewiss’s self and damage him, and light enough for him to break easily if the sorcery got out of hand. It was a perilous balance to maintain, and once or twice he almost lost it as a word shifted under another’s weight. Another one turned on the word next to it—they were too much alike—and savaged it before Herewiss could remove the offender and put another, less violent, but also less effective, in its place He had to make up for the loss of power elsewhere, at the top of the structure He wasn’t sure whether it would stand up to the strain or not, and the whole crystalline framework swayed uncertainly for a moment, chiming like frozen bells in the wind, like icy branches, brittle, metallic—

  It held, and he surveyed it for a moment to be sure that nothing was left out. Satisfied, he took a long moment’s rest.

  (Sunspark?)

  (Yes?)

  (Almost ready.)

  (It’s getting ready to rain.)

  (In here, too. Hang on.)

  He composed himself and examined the structure one last time. It was ready; all it was missing was the tide of emotion that had to be imprisoned inside of it, and the last three words that were the keys, the starting-words. He had them ready to hand, and the emotion had built to the point that it rolled like a red-golden haze all about the insides of his self, looking for an outlet. He began to direct it into the structure. It was hard work; it wanted to expand, to dissipate, as is the way of most emotion. But he forced it in, packed it tighter. It billowed and churned within the caging words, blood-color, sun-color, alive with frustration. He took two of the words of control in his hands. One of them was simple, smooth and opaque, though of a shape that could not exist in the outer world without help. He tucked it into the structure at an appropriate point,. and then placed the other near it, a yellow word with a confused etymology and a lot of legs.

  The third one was in his hands, ready; the gold-and-red storm seethed, rumbling to be let out. Now all that remained was for him to become conscious enough to direct the course of the sorcery, while remaining unconscious enough to set it working. Herewiss shifted about in his mind, found the proper balance point. Then with one hand he took the last word and shoved it into the structure. With the other he grabbed hold of his outer self and pulled his mind behind his eyes again. He looked out.

  The Othersight, the perception of the hidden aspects of things, is a side effect of most large sorceries, caused by the intense concentration involved. It was on Herewiss now; he looked out of himself and saw things transfigured. The old keep was made of the bones of the earth, and a sort of life throbbed in it still, a deep gray light like the glow behind closed eyelids on a cloudy day. All around it the men and women of the Steldene army shone, a myriad of colors from boredom to fear—mostly weighted toward the blues and greens, smoky shades of people who wished themselves somewhere else. Many of them also showed the furry outlines of those who have become willing to let others do their thinking for them. Well, army types, after all, Herewiss thought. Now for it.

  Behind him, in the back of his mind, the pressure was becoming alarming. He let it build just a little longer, the red haze beating within the glittering framework like a second heart, throbbing, pulsing—

  Go free! he thought, and the sorcery flowed away and outward from him, sliding down the hill. He could see it now with the Othersight, instead of just sensing it as a construct inside him. Though it flowed like water, it still bore the marks of his structuring, faint traceries of words and phrases gleaming through it like stars through stormswept clouds. The sorcery rolled down and away, expanding, slipping slowly and silently over the besieging forces, over the hold and the surrounding land. Finally it slowed, finding the boundaries that Herewiss had set for it in the spell. It stopped and waited, moving restlessly. To Herewiss’s eyes the whole valley was filled like a cauldron with slowly boiling mist, and the men and the hold shone faintly through it.

  All right, he thought. First, boundaries that they can see—

  In a wide ring around the keep, the air began to darken. Within a short time a wall of cloud half a league in diameter surrounded the hold and the Steldene forces, a threatening roiling cloud that walled away the last of the sunset, leaving the field illuminated only by the lurid choked light at the bases of the thunderheads. Herewiss looked down at the cloudwall, watched it pulse and curl in time with his heartbeat.

  Tighter, he thought. The ring drew inward until it was about a mile across. The men and women within it looked around them and became very uneasy. Herewiss could see the drab greens and blues start to shade down through murky violet as they knew the cloud for something unnatural. There were dark-bright flickers as swords were unsheathed, the brutalized metal living ever so slightly where hands touched it and charged it with disquiet.

  Good. Now just a few minutes more—

  The last of the sunset light faded from the storm-clouds. Now there were no stars, and no Moon, not even a horizon any more. Fear built in the camps below Herewiss until all the swirling mist was churning dusk-purple in his sight, and people were moving about in increasing agitation.

  Good. Now for the real work.

  He put forth his will, and shapes began to issue from the wall of cloud. They were vague at first, but as his control and concentration sharpened, so did they, gaining detail and the appearance of reality.

  He started small. Fyrd began to slip out of the dark mist, moving down on the besiegers with slow malice. There were great gray-white horwolves snarling softly in their throats, and nadders coiling sinuously down toward the hold, spitting venom and shriveling the grass as they went. There were dark keplian, almost horse-shaped, but clawed and fanged like beasts of prey, and destreth dragging scalded bodies along the ground, and lathfliers beating heavily along on webbed wings, cawing like huge, misshapen battle-crows. Herewiss made sure that his creations were evenly distributed around the army. In a flicker of black humor he added a few beasts that had lurked in his bedroom shadows when he was young, turning them loose to creep down toward the campfires on all those many-jointed legs of theirs.

  The temper of the army was shading swiftly darker, the deep purple turning into the black of panic in places. There were still spots, though, where the commanders stood and knew that this was illusion-sorcery. They showed pale against the darkness of their fellows, suspicious green or nervous murky blue as they tried to rally their people.

  They’re holding too well. Fyrd are too real, maybe. Legends, then—

  A gigantic ravaged figure came tottering through the cloud, a look of ugly rage fixed on his f
ace. It was the Scorning Lover, of whom Arath’s old poem sings. Attracted by his beauty and brilliance, the Goddess had come to him and offered what She always offers, Her self, until the Rival comes to take the Lover’s place. But this young man had had a calculating streak, and as price for sharing himself had asked eternal youth and eternal life. The Bride tried to warn him that not even She could completely defeat Death in this universe, and told him he was foolish to try. He would not listen, and She gave him the gifts he asked and left him, for the Goddess cannot love one who loves life more than Her. And indeed as the centuries passed, the Lover did not die—nor did he grow, frozen as he was in the throes of an eternal adolescence. Time and time again he tried to kill himself, but to no avail; immortality is just that. And over all that time, all thought and hope died in him, leaving him a demon, a terror of waste places, killing all who fell into his hands while bitterly envying their deaths. He stumbled toward the army now, raging with pain from the thousand self-inflicted wounds that can never heal, and never kill him, his clawing hands clutched full of gobbets of his own immortal flesh—

  The forces on the eastern side, from which he approached, gave way hurriedly, consolidating with those to the north and south.

  Herewiss smiled with grim satisfaction, and out of the cloud to the north summoned the seeming of the Coldwyrm of Arlid-ford, which doomed Béorgan had killed with the help of her husband Ánmod, Freelorn’s ancestor. The thing crawled down the slope, an ugly unwinged caricature of the pure hot beauty of a Dragon. The Wyrm was scaled and plated, but in a thick fishbelly blue-white rather than any Dracon green or gold or red. A smell of cold corruption blew from it, like fetid marshes in the winter, and the ground froze with its stinking slime-ice where it crawled. The Wyrm’s pale blue tongue flickered out, tasting the fear in the air, and the cold black chasms of its eyes dwelt on the huddling troops before it with malice and hungry pleasure.

  The commanders were trying hard not to believe in what they saw. But the campfires were too faint to show whether any of the stalking shapes had shadows or not. The army was collecting into a frightened mass of men and women at the southeast side of the keep.