The Tale of the Five Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  —and the darkness falls.

  ***

  (—they all do that, we’ve watched them do that since we first came. Yet while they feel for one member of their kind, they still do murder on others.)

  (annikh-e stiheh — )

  (We don’t understand it either. What about this one—)

  ***

  Here’s the last rise before home, with the little rutted track that serves for road. Steelsheen quickens her pace a bit, sensing road’s end. The air is full of the smell of salt: blue-green beach-grass hisses incessantly on either side of the track. She makes the top of the rise—and there it is, spread out blue and wrinkled, glittering and lovely, the Darthene Gulf. The Sun is beginning to pierce through from a silver sky; the black beach glistens as the waves slide back; sandpipers dance daintily after them, poking for whelks in the bubbling crevices and tide pools. She looks across at the lonely stone manor-house built on the headland—Home!

  Steelsheen breaks into a canter. They’ll be so proud. My master’s never before given live steel to anyone so young. And Tegánë has spoken for me to see if I can be in the royal household. To live in Darthis, in a town with walls! And Sheen… Father will be so proud when he sees her! A real Steldene, a silverdust Steldene, and I broke her myself with all the tricks he taught me!

  She punches the mare into a gallop and rides into the demesne, under the old stone arch with the tai-Enraesi arms: lioncelle, passant regardant, sword upraised in the dexter paw. Chickens scatter in all directions. Dogs scramble to their feet and bounce around her, barking, as she rides in to the dooryard with a great clatter of hooves. She dismounts. A yellow cat on the doorstep opens one eye at the noise, says a rude word and closes the eye again.

  Segnbora laughs as she pulls off Steelsheen’s saddle, drops it on the ground, fends off various dogs with pats and scratches, and bends to chuck the cat under the chin. Three weeks, she’s been on the road from Darthis: three weeks of lousy weather, an attack by bandits and a case of the flux. One cat, however grumpy, isn’t going to spoil this splendid homecoming.

  “Mother, Father, I’m back!” she shouts, shoving open the front door and swaggering in.

  She walks through the little main hall with its benches and carvings and hangings and firepit. Secretly she’s a little shocked by the shabbiness of the place; it never looked this run down before she went to the city. Her father’s old complaints about failed crops and the sorry state of family finances suddenly begin to disturb her— “Mama?”

  No answer. She’s in the kitchen, then. Through the hall and out into the big stone-paved kitchen and pantry. Her mother is just stepping in the far door with a string of onions from the buttery shed outside. Close behind is her father, who carries a newly dispatched chicken.

  “Hi!” she shouts.

  “‘Berend!” says her mother, and “Don’t shout,” says her father, both at once.

  She trots over, embraces them both in a huge hug, and pulls her sheathed sword out of her belt to show them. “Mama, look, I named it Charri—”

  “How’s your Fire coming, dear?” her mother says. Her father says nothing, just watches her, waiting for the answer.

  And suddenly it’s all wrong. Don’t they think if I’d finally focused, I’d have come in here streaming blue Fire from every orifice? Why don’t they— “Mother,” she says, “can’t you ever ask me about something else?”

  Her mother looks surprised. “What else would there be?” she says; and, “Don’t talk to your mother in that tone of voice,” her father says.

  “I have to rub down my horse, excuse me.” Segnbora bites the inside of her lip hard to keep from saying anything else, and walks out the way she came—

  —and then darkness falls again.

  ***

  She staggers about, lost in the darkness of her self, beginning to understand madness.

  ( — Stiheh, stiheh-!sta annikh ‘e—) rumbles the voice of storm again. It’s joined by more voices, all intoning the same rushing phrase, a litany of incomprehension and curiosity. They won’t go away. They bump and jostle her roughly when she stumbles into them in the dark, feeling for a way out.

  The place where she walks is walled and domed and floored in adamant, built that way long ago to protect her inner verities. There her memories are stored. Some have been buried by accident, some she’s sealed in stone on purpose; many stand about, smooth and polished from much handling

  It’s the buried ones that chiefly interest her invaders. Stone means nothing to them, it being one of their elements. Cruel claws slice down effortlessly; white fire burns and melts. Delicate talons turn over exposed thoughts—old joys like polished jewels, razory fragments of pain — )

  (Khai-rae tachoi? Sshir’stihe-khai?)

  (No, this moment’s more interesting by far. Look, I hadn’t thought they sang—)

  ***

  —it’s quite dark, but she needs no light to know that the slab of marble is a handspan from her nose The sound of her breathing is loud beneath , and the condensation from her breath drips maddeningly onto her face The sarcophagus-shaped Testing Bath is full of icy water, and Segnbora, naked as a fish, is submerged in it up to her face. Her hands are bound to her sides. On her chest rests a ten-pound stone. Above her is the three-inch-thick lid of the Bath, open only at the end behind her head, just enough to let in air and Saris’s voice.

  This is the final test of a loremistress-Bard, which will determine whether three years of training will desert her under extreme stress. There’s no telling which of the Four Hundred Tales she’ll be required to recite faultlessly tonight, or what song, or poem, or legend. When the lid is removed in the morning, she’ll be expected to take up the kithara and extemporize a poem in tragic-epic meter on the forging of Fórlennh BrokenBlade.

  “Sunset to sunrise?” she’d said to Eftgan this morning, before the last of the orals. “I can do that standing on my head.” Now she’s not so sure. She feels like she’s been in this cold, wet tomb forever. She suspects it’s more like two hours.

  “The Lost Queen’s Ballad,” Saris says from outside the Bath.

  Segnbora closes her eyes, hunting for the memory-tag she uses to remember that ballad, and finds it. She sings softly, in a minor key:

  “Oh, when Darthen’s Queen went riding

  out of Barachael that day,

  she rode up the empty corrie

  and she sang a rondelay;

  and the three Lights shone upon her

  as on Skádhwë’s bitter blade,

  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,

  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…”

  She lies there expecting to be asked for the rest of the history—the suicide of Queen Efmaer’s loved, and her journey up to Glasscastle, where suicides go, to get her inner Name back from him. But no, that would be too easy.

  “Jarrin’s Debt,” says Saris.

  Segnbora sighs. “As long ago as your last night’s dreams, and as far away as tonight’s,” she begins, “the Battle of Bluepeak befell…”

  —and the darkness in the Bath is suddenly the darkness inside her mind.

  ***

  Damn you! Damn you all to Darkness! Get out of here!

  ***

  —the courtyard is fairly large, but its size is no help; there’s nowhere to hide from Shíhan’s sword, which is everywhere at once.

  She dances back and swings her wooden practice sword up in a desperate block—a mistake, for no conscious act can possibly counter one of Shíhan’s moves. He strikes the practice sword aside with a single scornful sweep of Clothespole, then smacks her in the head with the
flat in an elegant backhand—a blow painful enough to let her know she’s in disgrace. Segnbora sits down hard with the shock of it, saying hello to the hard paving of the practice yard for the millionth time.

  “Idiot,” Shíhan growls. He is a Steldene, black-haired, dark-skinned, with a broad-nosed face, a bristly mustache, and fierce brown eyes. He stands right over her—a great brown cat of a man, lithe, muscular, and dangerous-looking. He is utterly contemptuous.

  “When will you learn to stop thinking!” He glares at her. “Save thinking for your bardcraft and your sorcery and the Fire you keep chasing, but don’t bring it here! Sweet Lady of the Forges, why do I waste my time on walking butchers’ meat?”

  She gets up, slowly, resheathes the practice sword in her belt and settles into a ready-stance: one hand gripping the imaginary sheath, the other at her side, relaxed. She’s seething, for the other advanced students, starting to eat their nunch, are watching from the sides of the courtyard. Maryn, around whom she danced with insulting ease this morning, is snickering, damn him.

  Even as her eyes flick away from Maryn, she sees Shíhan drawing. She draws too, spins out of reach as she does so, comes around at him from his momentarily undefended side and hits him—not a hard blow, but so focused that his whole chest cavity seems to jump away from it.

  Quite suddenly, to her absolute amazement, Shíhan is on his left side on the ground, with the point of her practice sword against his ribs. Shíhan’s eyes close with hers like steel touching steel, and bind there, a bladed glance. All around the courtyard people have stopped chewing. No one in her class has ever knocked Shíhan down. Segnbora starts to tremble.

  “Good,” Shíhan says in a voice that all the others can hear. “And wrong,” he adds more quietly, for her alone. “Come and eat.”

  They step off to the far side of the courtyard, apart from the other students, and settle under the plane-tree where Shíhan’s nunch-meal lies ready—blue-streaked sheep’s-milk cheese, crumbly biscuits, sour beer. Shíhan silently casts a few crumbs off to one side and spills a few drops of beer as libation to the Goddess, then starts eating. Between bites, he glances up at her. “You were angry at Maryn,” he says. “Was that what stopped you thinking?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Feeling when you strike is all right,” says her master. “First time I’ve seen you do that. There may be hope for you yet. Provided,” and he glances up again, frowning now, “it’s the right kind of feeling.”

  She sits quiet, not knowing quite how to take this.

  “Listen,” Shíhan says. “Don’t try to figure this out: just hear it, let it in. When you strike another, especially to kill, you’re striking yourself. When you kill, the other takes a little part of you with them, past the Door. If you do it in anger, what they take is the part of you that feels.” Shíhan wipes his mouth on his sleeve. His eyes burn with the intensity of one imparting a sacred mystery to a fellow initiate. “Kill in anger often enough and your aliveness starts running out too. Soon there’s nothing left but a husk that walks and speaks and does skillful murder. Were you angry at me?” He shoots the question at her sudden as a dart.

  “Master! No.”

  “But I’m the one the anger struck down. See how easily it used you?”

  Segnbora stares at the ground, her face burning.

  “Shíhan, I didn’t think—”

  “I noticed,” he says, smiling for the first time. “Keep that up.”

  She shakes her head, confused. “Master, in killing in war or in self-defense, if I’m not supposed to feel angry—what should I be feeling?”

  He looks at her. “Compassion,” he says, gruff-voiced. “Anguish. What else, when you’ve just killed yourself?”

  ***

  ( — Eh-phaa ur-‘tshain-ae ‘wnh-khai — )

  (I don’t know for certain; all I felt there before was a memory of cold dirt. It must be something interesting. See how thick the stone is over it? Several of us will be needed—)

  OH NO YOU DON’T!

  ***

  —Maybe it was the momentary burst of outrage that let her briefly out into the light again. Whatever the reason, suddenly the world was bright and clear, though it seemed very small, and the creatures that moved through it were earthbound and crippled of mind.

  She was not in the Morrowfane country anymore. This was some twilit camp under the lee of a hill. She could feel the warmth of a fire against her side. She lay on her back, her limbs aching so much that she couldn’t move.

  To her left sat Lang, warm in the firelight, gazing down at her with a bleak, helpless expression. Her distress at her immobility fell away at the sight of him. Lang mattered: e was stability, normalcy, all embodied in one stocky blond shape.

  In all her life before this terror she had never cried for help but once, and that time help had been refused. She had never asked since. But now she’d lost her mind, and surely there was nothing else to lose. Oh Lang, she tried to cry, I’m crazy, I’m scared, I can’t find my way out, but I’m here— But the words caught on a blazing place in her throat, got twisted out of shape and came out hoarse and strange. “R ‘mdahé, au ‘Lang, irikhé, stihe-sta ‘ae vehhy ‘t-kej, ssih haa-hté—”

  Not far away Herewiss and Freelorn lay together with their backs against a rock, holding weary conversation with the campfire that burned between them and the place where she lay.

  (—indeed not,) the campfire was saying. Sunspark’s eyes, ember-bright in the flickering fire, threw a glance of mild interest in her direction. (There aren’t many things in this bland little corner of the Pattern that can bother my kind. But we used to come across other travelers among the worlds, and some of them told of being unseated in heart or mind after coming to a world too strange for them to understand. They lost their languages, some of them—)

  “Did they get better?” Freelorn said. His tone indicated that he desperately wanted to hear that they did.

  “Lorn,” Herewiss said gently, putting his arm around his loved and hugging him, “wishful thinking won’t be enough. She can’t ride, or talk, or take care of herself; like it or not, we’re going to have to leave her somewhere safe. The arrow-shot she got from that last batch of bandits would have been the end of her if I hadn’t been to the Fane first and learned what to do.”

  Freelorn didn’t answer.

  “I went as deep as I could last night,” Herewiss said. “I couldn’t hear anything but a confusion of voices, none willing to talk to me….if they heard me at all. There’s nothing more we can do. Look, tomorrow afternoon—tomorrow night, maybe—we’ll be riding through Chavi to get the news. We can leave her there; they’ll be glad to have her. She’ll take her time, get better, and follow us when she can. Face it, Lorn, the Shadow’s after us. We can’t care for an invalid from here to Bluepeak.”

  “She saved my life,” Freelorn said, his voice harsh. He wasn’t angry at his loved, but at the unfairness of the Morrowfane, which had done this to her and left him untouched. “Several times…”

  “She knew what she was doing, all those times,” Herewiss said. “She knew what she was doing when she went up the Morrowfane. Lang told us so. And she’ll know why we’re doing what we’re doing, and understand.”

  But there was little hope in his voice—

  ***

  —the blackness swallowed her again. All around her the rush and swell of inhuman voices was beginning, faintly, as if for the first time the sources of the sound were at some distance from her. But soon enough they would drown her resistance beneath their implacable song, close in on that one untouchable memory, rip it untimely from beneath the rock and make it come as real as the others.

  She shuddered violently. No, oh no. And in any case I won’t be left behind at the next inn like some horse that’s gone lame!

  Her bruised and battered pride got up one more time from the hard floor onto which it had been knocked. I am a tai-Enraesi. If my ancestors could see me they would laugh me to scorn! And I’m a sens
itive trained in the ways of the inner mind. Fire or no Fire. I won’t stand inside here and do nothing!

  Off to one side, distantly, she could still hear Freelorn and Herewiss talking. Gulping with terror, Segnbora turned her back on them, concentrated as best she could, and began making her way toward the huge voices, deeper into the dark…

  FIVE

  Offer an enemy a false show of hospitality in order to damn him, and the fires will fall on your head, not his. Give him the truth with his meat and drink, and trust it not to sour the wine…

  s’Jheren, Advice unasked, 199

  It was a long walk, full of halts, hesitations, and confusions, for the voices seemed to grow no nearer as she walked. Then abruptly she discovered that she had a seeming-body again, by walking into a wall, hard. She staggered back from it, momentarily seeing white with pain—then stepped forward with arms outstretched. Her fingertips bashed into the wall. She pushed close to it, spreading her arms wide, embracing the familiar roughness; she laid her face against it and squeezed her eyes shut against tears of vast relief. At last this place was beginning to behave as it should.

  Any trained sorcerer has an inner milieu into which he or she retreats for contemplation or preparation of sorceries. This, at last, was hers—not an abstraction of blackness and things buried, but the old cavern a mile down the coast from the house at Asfahaeg, her favorite secret place as a child.

  Long ago the coast dwellers had broken a thirty-foot hole through the cavern’s high, domed ceiling, turning it into a rude temple where they performed wreakings and weather sorceries to the sound of the waves crashing just outside. As an adult sorcerer Segnbora had made its image part of her, a great airy cave full of sunlight or moonlight and the smell of the Sea.