The Tale of the Five Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “That’s where we’re off to. Coming?”

  Freelorn shook the reins and went after the rest of the van.

  ***

  Two hours later they had made three miles’ more progress, but at a cost. The Darthenes had pushed into Laeran’s Ridings, the wide flat meadowlands on either side of the Road, about two miles from Prydon. Some of the forces which had been lying in front of the city had come out to meet them about about the three-mile point, though unwillingly—the positions nearer the city were better defended—and had engaged them: but the most part of the Arlene forces were still arranged in a long crescent with its left resting against the small steep hill called Vintner’s Rise, and its right against the small humpy wooded ridge leading up to the hill called Hetasb. There the main force stayed, four thousand foot, horsemen, and well-emplaced pikes: and nothing would budge them—which Eftgan considered wise, if extremely annoying. The Queen was staying with the Darthene forward right wing, still concerned about some threat from the northward side. Her own army was still about six thousand, about half horse and half foot, and her whole desire was to break through or past the Arlenes to one or another of the fords, cross the Arlid, and then come at Prydon from its undefended side. But she had to get past them first—and even if she took the city, there would still remain the army to be reduced afterwards.

  “Better sooner than later,” she said to Herewiss. “I would much rather go through them than around. But I’m not going to attack into their strength.” She was standing near her horse Rascal, looking down the long slope of ground that followed the path of the Road to where it began to bottom out near Vintner’s Rise. It was the way Herewiss had ridden in with Moris, but much changed from that pleasant morning. Down near the eastern foot of the Rise, a dark, shifting tangle of people and horses moved and worked from side to side. Beyond, about parallel with the other side of the Rise, and a mile from the river, the main bulk of the Arlenes could be seen, drawn up in their ordered ranks, waiting patiently.

  “Well, I’ve dragged the straw in front of them,” Eftgan said, “but they won’t play cat today, more’s the pity. Damn Meveld anyway.” She sighed. “We’re going to have to budge them somehow.”

  Herewiss glanced over at Sunspark. I’ve discomfited an army or so in my time, it said. I might be of help.

  “I’m not letting you go down there unassisted, though,” Herewiss said. “Rian hasn’t been heard from all this day, so far, and he’s waiting for something. I suspect you’re one thing he’s waiting for. And he knows that where you are, I’ll be somewhere nearby. No, not just yet.” Herewiss thought for a moment, leaning against Sunspark and gazing off to the left, where he could see the Lion banner resting in the middle of the Darthene center. Far off into the left wing, he could just make out the Brightwood’s banner, and past it, the eastern-leaning slopes of Hetasb. Everything looked bizarrely peaceful in the hot sunshine, under blue sky and fat white clouds. More a day for a picnic than a battle. Certainly a day for getting the hay in, except that any hay there had been in this part of the world was now burnt or trampled—

  He stood up straighter. “That might do… !” he said to himself.

  Sunspark’s eyes rolled. Oh no, it said. You leave me out of this!

  “What? Out of what? Herewiss—!” the Queen said. He was already unsheathing Khávrinen. Sunspark was sidling away from him with a slightly nervous look. “You want them to move?” Herewiss said. “Which way would you prefer?”

  “Why, why I’d like them to break right and left, ideally. String them out around the Rise and Hetasb— What are you thinking of!”

  You keep me dry, Sunspark said. I’m not going to leave you, but if you get me wet—

  Herewiss folded his hands around Khávrinen’s hilts and set himself, gazing off westward. “Look at those clouds,” Herewiss said. “You can see what they’re trying to do even from here. Look at that anvil on the one just past the city, there. This is weather that we shouldn’t be seeing this time of year: midsummer weather rather than anything proper for the first of Autumn. Someone’s been helping it. Someone had plans for those clouds. The same kind of trick he played on Lionhall last night.” The smile got broader. “I think I have a better idea.”

  Eftgan’s eyes widened, and she patted Sunspark. “I’ll keep you dry, my dear. I think we’d better leave him to his own devices.”

  Herewiss’s attention was on those clouds. He had been water, and the river Arlid: he had been the earth, and the fires under the earth: he had been fire itself, through Sunspark and other methods of his own. Air he had not yet attempted. It was the most unmanageable of the elements, the least predictable. But also the most easily disrupted—as Rian would shortly find—

  Blue Fire ran around him in a circle, shutting other influences out. Herewiss closed his eyes to better shut away more distracting influences.

  What Herewiss began to wreak now was another shapechange of the mind, as he had used with Rian before. Nothing would happen to his physical body, but the “body” of his mind, the way he saw himself internally, would change. He took a deep breath, held it, considered it. A human being was several parts air already, what with the lungful that went in and out on a regular basis and the small amount that never exhaled itself completely, no matter how you breathed out. In the image of himself in his mind, that lungful became all shot through with the Fire, became part of him, did not leave. When he breathed out, since something had to be exhaled, it was some of his own solidity that vanished invisibly. The Fire-and-air of his last breath spread to replace the solidity that was gone. He breathed in again, felt the air swirl in, felt the corporeal nature in him attenuate, flow out with his exhalation. Two breaths, three—

  — and there was nothing solid of him left: only a movement all sparked through with Fire. Other forces were there, too. It was with those that his business lay. Currents of heat and cold flowed all about him, pushing one another aside. He was part of them. He felt in his own bodilessness the way the heat stored in the land bubbled out of it, stirred the lower airs, pushed them against the cooler, higher winds. The cooler winds, trying to sink, resisted, arched their backs up, curled and doubled on themselves. It was the lower, warmer airs in which Herewiss chiefly invested himself, feeling the mass and potential destructiveness of the water that they bore. He pushed them up into the clouds already there, shouldering more water into them. Already he could feel the tension there, as the currents in the clouds roiled and pushed against one another, trying to release their energy, preventing one another from doing so.

  Good, he thought, and chose for his purposes one cloud over the river that was particularly heavy-laden, already hunched and growling, dim flickers of menace sparking in its roiling innards as its own cloud-stuff fretted sullenly against itself. Herewiss rose up under it, pushed more dissolved water up into it, giving the air even more substance to chafe together. The cloud’s irritable tension grew worse, and the muttering grew to a growl. Herewiss felt the slight shift in energy that meant it was looking for somewhere to turn and attack.

  Right there, he said, all helpfulness, and traced a path of least resistance to one particular place on the ground. And Herewiss made the slight, slight change in the ground’s own energy that was all that was needed—

  The lightning came down in the very middle of the Arlene center-battle. Somewhere he could hear something like a shout of rage, but he paid no attention to it, and shifted the energy in a couple of more spots—then slid away to find another cloud, pressed water into it too.

  In a matter of some minutes the whole sky was full of irritable thunderheads, blundering into one another, roaring, and goring one another with lightning like a field full of angry bulls. He opened his eyes to a vista as horrifying as it was satisfying: the sky black with lowering cloud, lightning scourging the ground like whips, and the Arlenes running higgledy-piggledy north and south, but mostly east.

  Eftgan, next to him, had her Rod out and was gripping Sunspark’s saddle, in
reassurance of the elemental or of herself, Herewiss couldn’t quite tell. “Is that what you had in mind?” he said, gasping: odd how hard it was to breathe again, when you had just been nothing but air. The rest of the body, aggrieved for the perceived loss of its corporality, punished you for it.

  Eftgan opened her mouth to answer him—but that was when the screaming started all around them. It didn’t last long: it was cut off short, in every case, almost as soon as it started. In a great wave it swept across the Darthene force drawn up around them, and people fell to the ground, motionless, eyes open, blind, deaf, mouths working with screams that would no longer come out.

  Warfetter! Eftgan cried to her Rodmistresses, and anyone else who could hear. Find the sorcerer’s mind! But Herewiss knew what mind was fueling this huge effort, and what sorcerer would not die of the backlash of it, no matter how many of his puppets had built the sorceries proper. Herewiss might have taken the other’s waiting weapon away, but Rian had had another one ready. If the sorcery were not broken quickly, all these people would die of the fear that comes of being trapped in one’s own mind, separated from every sense and not even able to feel heartbeat or breath. Amid the crash and stink of the lightnings, Herewiss lifted Khávrinen twohanded, and it blazed with his wrath. Find him for me, he said. Bring us together. Let’s finish it now.

  Only laughter answered.

  There was not even any point in swearing. And he had broken his own wreaking too soon: there was now no way to point one last bolt of lightning at Lorn’s old bedroom, just to see what it might strike. He was surrounded by a thousand Darthenes, stricken down, dying—quickly in some cases, slowly where the tougher-minded were concerned.

  Eftgan stared at him, horror in her eyes. “Sunspark,” Herewiss said, and mounted up. It tossed its head. It was shivering, but it leaped into the air and was gone across the field like disaster’s own self, trailing fire behind it.

  ***

  Freelorn stood and watched the lightnings in astonishment. His hair stood on end with them, for this was part of his own magic, or what he was coming to think of as his own. The danger of it horrified him. But Herewiss seemed to be in control—

  He looked over at Segnbora, who was standing by Steelsheen, leaning on the Lion banner. She looked nervous. “You feel it too?” he said.

  “Not just that.” She gripped Skádhwë, and Freelorn saw that her hands were shaking. “Something’s going to happen.”

  “Sorcery?”

  “Yes, but that’s not what I’m feeling—!” Her expression was strange. The fear in Segnbora’s face was getting worse, but at the same time, there was the beginning of a smile fighting with it. “It’s something else. Something of mine—my—”

  She paled, and stared at him, her face working with terror and delight. “My Name—”

  And she was gone, just that suddenly. The Lion banner fell over against Steelsheen, who squealed and shied away from it. Freelorn grabbed it before it fell.

  And then the screaming started, and he had other things to think about, as the darkness came down on him and left him blind and deaf and dumb.

  Herewiss!!

  No answer: nothing but the silence, and the dark.

  They lasted forever.

  ***

  She had spent the whole day with a feeling of things wrong inside and going rapidly more so. The oppressive silence in her mind was the most obvious symptom. I used to beg the mdeihei to shut up, she thought, and now that they have, I can’t bear the stillness—

  But there was more to it, this sense of impending doom—doom in the old sense, of some prophecy coming true, some change long predicted and not recognizable now that it was finally arriving. She rode distracted through the bright sun of the day, and though she fought in the battle near Elsbede, and killed in it, none of it seemed to matter. What mattered was still coming.

  And then it came. She heard her Name called in Dracon: and since calling the inner Name with authority gives power over the being who wears it, she had no choice but to answer. Her Fire leaped in her and burst away to find what had called, dragging her body along, irresistible. She vanished from the battlefield—

  —a moment’s whirling confusion, and then the blaze of blue light cleared; she looked around her. Rocks: and the smell of the Sea was in the air. Sunlight—

  —and Dragons—more Dragons than she had ever seen before. She stood on a stony slope that ran down a shoulder of the Eorlhowe to the Sea: and clinging to the rocks, pouring among them, landing on them, lying on the beach, perching among the crags, were hundreds and hundreds of Dragons in every livery she had ever seen, and many she had not, the storm of their color shot through everywhere with the black of spread wing-webs. Through the shift and glitter of radiance, Segnbora gazed around her and tried to count. Possibly twenty-five hundred. Is that how many Dragons there are alive today?…. It seemed likely. The DragonChief had called the Draconid Name, and they had all responded. So had she: and Segnbora smiled slightly, for if Dithra still maintained that she was not Dracon, it would be in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

  She looked around, saw a flash of emerald and gold up near the entrance to the Howe. The livery was hardly exclusive to the lhhw’Hreiha, but Segnbora knew no other Dragons of quite that size. Slowly she made her way up the slope, greeting the Dragons she passed as she went: they gazed at her thoughtfully, and returned the greetings, but with fear. Segnbora shook her head, and kept on climbing through the crowd: a courteous word here, a bow there, another greeting—

  In the middle of that one, she stopped. The big he- Dragon she had spoken to, blood-ruby scales and garnet eyes, bowed its wings to her, a gesture friendly if uncertain, and said, “Rui’i-sta’ae, hr’sdaha?”

  She stared at him. “Rr’nojh!” she said. “Of course I know you, but—”

  But he was one of her mdeihei!

  Segnbora looked around in astonishment. “Who else is here?” she said. “How did you get out?” And what in the world is a hr’sdaha? she thought. The word was not in one of the familiar formations. “Hr-” was one of the augmentative prefixes: it could mean something greater in number than usual, or bigger, or simply different or new—

  “There are quite a lot of us,” Rr’nojh said. “All the lineal mdeihei you knew are here, as far as I can tell. But suddenly we seem to be dav’whhesnih. We were called, we came—”

  “Come on,” Segnbora said. She started making her way up the slope again, and Rr’nojh went with her. Before too long they came across Naen in his milkstone livery, and Karalh in her turquoise, and Pheress, Hasai’s egg-father, in his agate-brown; and Ashadh and Dithe and Loej and Trre’ye and many another, familiar voices from the chorus of shadows that had been inside Segnbora for all these months, but were shadows no longer. They followed her, so that shortly Segnbora had the familiar rumbling chorus behind her again.

  When she finally came to stand before Dithra, with Skádhwë in her hand, Segnbora saw exactly what she had expected to see in the DragonChief’s ehhath: rage. The wing-barbs had been cocked toward her since Segnbora was no better than halfway up the hillside, and the tail-spine was coiled high and poised to strike. Dithra’s mouth was open, and the fire broiled at the back of it. Segnbora just bowed, and said, “Lhhw’Hreiha, I was called, and I’m here.”

  The soft, restrained roar that came out of the DragonChief, like a volcano threatening to erupt, was horrible to hear. It was the sound of wounded pride, and of a Dragon threatened past endurance. “So I see. And so was I,” Dithra said: “called. Like all these others. And I am here.” Her claws scored the stone she lay on, as they clenched it. “Now you shall tell me who—”

  “But surely you know,” said a voice from inside the Howe. All heads turned at that: and Segnbora heard the voice and laughed out loud for joy and relief.

  “Hasai!” she said. And winged darkness came stalking out of the entrance to the Howe: the sun struck down on the old familiar livery, black star-sapphire above, pale diamond bel
ow. “But you’re bigger,” she said, slightly awed. He was at least a third again the size he had been: as big as Dithra.

  “Am I so?” He looked at himself with mild surprise. “I had not noticed. No matter: it’s nothing I did, though it may be the effect of what I bear.” Hasai gazed over at Dithra. Their ehhath was totally different—his all ease and calm, hers all spines and defiance: but it was easy to see where the power lay.

  “The Draconid Name is mine,” Dithra hissed. “It was given into my keeping: I guard it. And by its virtue, I am DragonChief—until one with a better reason than mine for holding it shall come to take the Name by force.”

  Hasai lowered his head and looked at her from under his eye-shields, a lazy look, and a somewhat challenging one. “I make no claims as to ‘better’,” he said, “but as for the other—as you wish.” Quite slowly he lifted his wings, and the shadow of them fell all over that side of the hill, and over Dithra, so that the emerald and topaz of her livery went cold, and the only thing about her that burned any more was her eyes.

  “Bvh’Ohaheia-haa,” Hasai sang, all on one long simber chord. “This then is Assemblage: here shall there befall hr’nn’s’raihle. All the Llhw’hei are here, either sdahaih or mdahaih: so that what Choice befalls here shall be the Great Choice, binding on all our folk, living and dead—”

  “You have no right to convoke Assemblage!” Dithra roared in rage. “Nor to commit others to paying its price! And what is this business of ‘hr’nn’s’raihle’, you speak nonsense—”