The Tale of the Five Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Uhh—wait a moment—!

  Very quietly, so as not to disturb Lorn or anyone else who might have been trying to sleep, Herewiss stepped across the courtyard, past the dozing horses, to the doorway which Sunspark had opened. As he passed through it, the sound of the solano, the relentless spring wind of the Waste, reasserted itself; somewhere to his left he heard the squeaks and chirrups of a colony of bounce-mice going about their nightly business. He looked up at the cold-burning sky. Dragon, Spearman, Maiden, Crown, all the constellations of spring shone unperturbed high in the clear air.

  How about that, Herewiss thought. He went back into the courtyard, and looked up. Within the walls, the sky glittered again with alien stars, strange eyes looking down on him from a nameless night.

  This is definitely where I need to be, he thought as he headed back toward the hall. He sighed again. Part of him was indulging itself in a delicious shivering excitement at the prospect of where he was. The rest of him was weighed down with the aching feeling of the angry, untouchable presence on the other side of the bedroll.

  He slowed down. I don’t really want to go back in there—

  —oh, Goddess, yes, I do—

  —but—

  He stopped still in his indecision, and as he listened to the odd silence that prevailed within the walls, he heard something more. Someone was outside, playing a lute. The individual notes stitched through the quiet like needles through dark velvet, bright, precise; but the pattern they were embroidering was random. There was a pause as Herewiss listened; and then a chord strung itself in silvery lines across the still air, and another after it, gently mournful, though in a major key. When a voice joined the chords, singing in a light contralto, Herewiss was able to localize the sounds better. Whoever it was was somewhere to the left, around the corner of the building.

  The tone of the singing, though he could not make out words, had touched Herewiss at the heart of his mood—night-ridden, melancholy. He went quietly over to the corner of the hall, leaned against the warm gray stone, peered around. Segnbora was there; sitting on the smooth paving with her back against the wall, her cloak folded behind her to lean on, a wineskin by her side. Her head was tilted back against the stone, relaxed, and the lute rested easily on her lap. If she noticed Herewiss, she gave no sign of it, but kept on serenading night and stars like a lover beneath some dark window.

  “—and she fared on up that awful trail

  and little of it made:

  She stood laughing on the peak-snows

  with the new Moon in her hair—”

  Herewiss listened with interest. With her deep voice, who’d suspect she had a high register? Needs work on her vibrato, but otherwise she sounds lovely—

  “Thank you!” said the deep voice, with laughter. The strumming continued as Segnbora looked over at him and smiled. “You going to stand there all night, or will you sit down and have a little wine?”

  “Um,” Herewiss said, as he went over to sit against the wall beside her. “I may have had more than I should already.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him, at the same time squeezing the lute’s neck and wringing a tortured dissonant chord from it. “That bad, huh?”

  “You underheard what went on in there?”

  She shook her head. “There’s something about these walls that makes them good insulators. But once you came outside, it felt like someone was trying to beat a dent out of a big pot with a sledgehammer. Noisy.”

  “Sorry,” Herewiss said.

  “For what? A lot of it was the walls, anyway; they make even a fourth-level ideation echo as if it were being shouted in a cave.” She stroked the lute again, and it purred in minor sevenths. “I take it he doesn’t approve of your staying here.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t say that I would, either, if I were in his place—but you have to stay. There’s too much possibility here—”

  Herewiss looked at her. (You would understand,) he said, bespeaking her.

  “I’d better. Please, prince, the mindtouch—let’s not and say we did. With these walls all around, the echo is really bad.”

  “That’s why you came outside?”

  She nodded. “Partly. Every time someone subvocalized, my head felt like a gong being struck.”

  “I didn’t feel much of anything. You have sensitivity problems?”

  Segnbora chuckled. “Normally—if that’s the word for it—I hear everything from fourth level up. Sometimes, if I’m drunk enough, or tired enough, I’ll only pick up subvocals. But this place—” She sighed in exasperation, shook her head. “Or maybe it’s because of my flowering: I’m just past it. Though usually I don’t have that problem with the hormonal surge. But I was getting tired of hearing people’s bladders yelling to be emptied, and stomachs complaining that they weren’t full enough, and neural leakage rattling like gravel in a cup. All multiplied by six…”

  “I used to wish I had that kind of sensitivity—”

  “Don’t. Unless you also wish to be able to turn it off. I can’t, and it’s awful. I’m tired of hearing Dritt’s conscience chastising him about his weight problem, and Moris wondering if Dritt really loves him when he’s so skinny, and Harald’s arthritis crunching in his knee, and Lorn wanting Hergótha every night when he cleans Súthan , and Lang thinking…. I’m just tired.” She closed her eyes, rubbed the bridge of her nose as if a headache was coming on.

  “I’m sorry,” she said then lifting her head. “I hear good things, too: I don’t mean to whine.” She reached down for the wineskin.

  —But even the good things make me feel so lonely, Herewiss underheard her finish the thought. He closed his eyes in pain.

  Segnbora looked at him quickly; her eyes were worried, and then in a tick of time they went regretful. “I leak, too,” she said sadly. “I should have mentioned. Wine?”

  “What kind?”

  “Blood wine.”

  “Which region?” Herewiss asked, interested. The grapes were only grown along the North Arlene coast, where a combination of capricious climate and daily beatings of the vines produced an odd wrinkled grape, and eventually a sweet red liqueur with a hint of salty aftertaste—hence the name.

  “Peridëu. My family has a connection with the vintners— one of my great-aunts cured their vines of white rot, oh, years back. They keep sending us the stuff every year or so.”

  “I might have a sip of that.”

  Segnbora passed Herewiss the wineskin, and he drank a couple of swallows’ worth and restoppered it. “I didn’t know you were a lutenist,” he said.

  “I’m not, usually.” She smiled in the dark, leaned her head back against the stone, looking up. “But it’s a good excuse. No one goes outside just to look at the stars, you know. So I take the lute with me some times.”

  Herewiss chuckled, jerked a thumb at the sky. “You noticed.”

  “How not? But what do you think I’d do, run in and shout, ‘Hey, look, everybody, the stars are all wrong’? Lorn would love that.” She laughed too. “I was going to tell you before we left, in case you hadn’t seen it already.” She touched the lute strings again, tickling them into a brief bright spill of notes like laughter, a half-scale in the Hakrinian mode.

  Herewiss settled back against the wall, and looked at the sky once more, regarding the bright eyes of the elsewhere night as they regarded him. “So what else aren’t you,” he said, “besides a lutenist?”

  The scale modulated into the chords Herewiss had heard while peeking around the corner. “I’m not a poet,” Segnbora said, “and not a singer, and not a dancer, and not a loremistress….” She laughed softly. “Better not to be too many things at once: it scares people. Besides, in the case of the dancing, better they shouldn’t see. I love to dance, but I’m afraid I’ll look funny—so I don’t, unless I’m very drunk … and then in, the morning, I don’t remember it anyway….”

  She keeps laughing, Herewiss thought. As if she has to convince herself it’s funny. But it’s
not working… Aloud he said, “So how’s your dancing when you’re drunk?”

  “No one else remembers,” she said. “They’re all drunk too.”

  “Then it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No, I guess it doesn’t.” She smiled at him, a more relaxed look, almost a benediction. “You do understand.”

  “I’d better,” he said. “I’m about singing the way you are about dancing. Goddess knows why—they tell me I have a good voice—but I’m just shy…. What was that you were singing before? I didn’t recognize it.”

  “Huh? Oh. ‘Efmaer’s Ride.’ It’s south Darthene, came north with my mother’s side of the family. We were related to Efmaer, remotely.” Again the chords, soft and sad for all that they were in a major key.

  “Wasn’t she the queen who disappeared?”

  “Well, according to the song, she didn’t just disappear. You know the stories about Sai Ebássren in the mountains, south of Barachael?”

  “Sounds familiar. Maybe it has another name I know it by—”

  “In Darthen they call it Méni Auärdhem.”

  “Glasscastle, yes. The place in the sky that appears every so often—”

  “Not very often, really. There are Moon phases and lighting conditions involved, it’s very complicated. But anyway, Efmaer’s loved killed himself, and since suicides go to Glasscastle, Efmaer went to get her Name back from him. She took the sword Shadow with her— Skádhwë, it was called then—”

  “How much of this is true?”

  Segnbora shrugged. “It was a long time ago. But we know that Shadow existed, and the queen went missing. It’s a nice song, anyway—”

  “Does it have a happy ending?”

  “It depends,” Segnbora said. “See, here’s the last verse – “ The lute whispered the sorrowing chords, and Segnbora’s voice was hardly louder—

  “‘She stood laughing on the peak-snows

  with the new Moon in her hair,

  and she smiled and set her foot upon

  the Bridge that isn’t There:

  She took the road right gladly

  to the Castle in the sky,

  and Darthen’s sorrel steed came back,

  but the Queen stayed there for aye…’”

  “So,” Segnbora said, modulating out of the last chord into a minor arpeggio, “who knows? No one came back to tell whether Efmaer found what she was looking for, or whether she was happy…”

  “Glasscastle is where you go when you’re tired of trying, isn’t it? I remember hearing something like that.” Herewiss sighed.

  Segnbora looked at him sharply. “Don’t you dare even think of it,” she said. The anger in her voice caught Herewiss by surprise, and Segnbora too, after a moment. More gently she said, “You’ll get where you’re going, prince. They’ll be singing about you for centuries.”

  “The question is, will they be happy songs? …And besides, even when you’re in the middle of a song, you don’t always feel like singing. I don’t right now…”

  She reached out a hand and touched his where they lay folded in his lap. “He’ll come through it,” she said. “He’s in love with you, that’s all.”

  “Then why can’t he see why I need to be here?!” Herewiss said, surprised again by anger, this time his own. More softly he added, “He knows how much the Fire means to me—”

  “He’s in love with you,” Segnbora said again, almost too softly to be heard.

  Herewiss held very still. Not even the lute broke the silence.

  “Yes,” he said. “I see what you mean.”

  “If I were you,” Segnbora said, “I’d get some sleep.”

  Herewiss nodded, stood up, stretched. “Thanks for the wine,” he said.

  He headed back toward the courtyard and the hall. Her voice stopped him.

  “Brother—” she said.

  Herewiss turned to look back at her. She was a shadowy shape, dark against the dark wall, surprisingly bright where starlight touched her— sword hilt, belt buckle, finger-ring, cloak clasp, and the half-seen eyes. In the stillness he felt the air go suddenly thick and sharp with power, mostly hers, partly his. She was having a surge, hormonal or not, and it had touched his own Fire, roused it—

  —his precognition came alive, as it had once or twice before. The image was blurred and vague, and out of context, strange-feeling. Darkness, and cold; somewhere a bright light, but bound up, concealed; and over all, a looming shadow, eyed with silver fire—

  She’s hiding, something in him told him suddenly. But why? From what?

  The feeling ebbed, drained away, leaving the air just air again, and Segnbora was just a young woman sitting against a wall, not a numinous shadow-wrapt figure gazing at him through darkness and silence She looked back and shuddered all over. Herewiss wondered what she had seen.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I didn’t see anything clearly. That wasn’t what I was going to say. Prince, you will do it. I’ll help any way I can.”

  She cares a little, he thought in quiet surprise. More than a little.

  Well, she would.

  He bowed to her, the deep bow of greeting or farewell from one veteran of the Silent Precincts to another. “Sister,” he said; and there was nothing else to say. He went around the corner and back inside.

  Nothing had changed. Lorn’s people were all asleep, and Lorn was still rolled up in his cloak, in a tight angry-looking ball. He was snoring.

  Herewiss stopped by the firepit, sank down wearily into his chair. The flames flurried momentarily higher, and Sunspark was looking at him again.

  (So how is the night?)

  (Strange,) Herewiss said, (but then that could be expected.) He sat there for a while and avoided looking in Freelorn’s direction.

  (I’m never going to get to sleep by myself,) he said eventually. (Maybe I should take something—)

  He stopped short. (The Soulflight drug—)

  (?)

  (The innkeeper at the Ferry Tavern gave it to me. If I took a little, I could probably drop right off into pleasant dreams—though with the smaller doses you sometimes don’t remember what happens to you—)

  (You could probably use some pleasant dreams tonight,) Sunspark said.

  Herewiss went and got the little bottle out of his saddlebag, then sat down by the firepit again and regarded it. He unstoppered it and put his nose to the opening. There was a faint sweet odor, like honey. He stuck his finger in, took a little and licked it off.

  The taste was extremely bitter; he choked as he put the stopper back in the bottle and set it aside. Well, he thought, let’s see what happens— He leaned back and closed his eyes, and waited.

  ***

  —an easy, drifting passage into—

  CRASH!!

  —and he looked around him, terribly shaken. All was still, nothing was wrong anywhere that he could see. It had been one of those falling-dreams that slams one suddenly into the wall between sleep and waking, and out the other side.

  False alarm. One more time—

  —drifting easily downward into empty lightless places, filled with uncaring as if with smoke; spiraling down, sailing on wings feathered with fear, and now suddenly the—

  WHAT?! NO!!

  Cold dusk, a gray evening, no sunset pouring crimson-gold through treetops and touching the Woodward with fire; torches quarreling weakly with the evening mist; and silence, deadly silence. No children running and playing, though even on chill evenings they would be out this late, resisting their mothers’ attempts to get them back inside. Little sound, little movement. Walk quietly up to the great carven door, pass silently through it. Greet the Rooftree with reserve, and go by; up the stairway, left at the top of the stairs and down through the east gallery, but softly, softly. Someone is dying. Turn right into the north corridor, one of the more richly carven ones, and keep going. There on the walls is carved the story of Ferrigan, your ancestress, and the panels show her rebuilding the Woodward after its burning, with the he
lp of creatures not wholly human. You always loved her story, that of a person who mastered her own powers and went her own way, disappearing into the Silent Precincts one day, never to be seen again. Herelaf liked that one too. But very shortly now Herelaf will be past liking anything at all, at least in this life. Walk softly, and go on in: last room on the right, the corner room, the room that is the heir’s by tradition.

  There is the bed, there is Herelaf, the sword out of him, now; your father standing there, not looking at either of you, not daring to. For fear that he will see one of you die, and the other of you live. Oh, he loves you well enough, that much is certain. But right now Hearn is finding it hard to love you at all, who were so stupid as to play with swords while drunk.

  Herelaf is lying very still, looking very pale. How strange. He was always the darkest one in the family; you used to tease him about it sometimes, saying that there must be Steldene blood in him somewhere; and he would grin and say, “Mother never told us half of what she did while she was out Rodmistressing. You can sleep with some strange sorts in that business. Maybe something rubbed off.” That was the way he always was: big, gentle, inoffensive, easygoing; no one had a bad word for him, not a single person anywhere, most especially not the many people he called loved. There were enough of them in the Wood, men and women both, and people used to marvel that he never took one loved with an eye to marriage. “I like to spread myself around,” he would always say. “So far there’s nobody that special that I’d want to give all of me to just them. But maybe…”

  Forget that. He’s going to die tonight, and all the chances close down forever. You did that to him. Yes you did. Don’t try to deny it.

  DAMMIT LET ME OUT OF HERE!!!

  Hearn stands there, looking like he wishes he were anywhere else than this—facing down the Shadow Himself, anywhere but here. But he cannot desert either of you; he knows that you both need him now, both of you need him there desperately, and Hearn was always brave. Maybe not prudent; certainly if he were prudent he would go out of here. But brave.