by Diane Duane
“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 la
nguages, 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 sensitive 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.
She opened her eyes again, pushed cautiously away from the wall and looked up, trying to find the shaft-hole in the ceiling. After a moment she located it, though the shaft was distinguishable from the rest of the ceiling only by two or three faint stars that shone through. Strange. It’s never been this dark in here before… She turned and looked around, trying to get herself oriented. The faint rumble of the Sea bounced all around her, difficult to localize, but at last she thought she detected a slight difference in sound right across from her, a deadness that might mean the cave’s opening onto the beach. She stepped cautiously away from the wall, then started to walk.
She touched something. It wasn’t the wall. It was smooth, and dry, and hot. In her shock she stumbled forward instead of jerking back, and the something clamped down on her outstretched right hand, hard. The shock of violation, of being attacked by something that had no business being here in the first place, made her cry out in rage.
Before she even had time to struggle, from right in front of her, a huge, slow, deep bass viol of a voice spoke. “It seems excessive to put your hand in the Dragon’s mouth,” it said, “and then scream before you even know whether you’ve been injured.”
Whatever had been holding her hand released it. Segnbora backed away and stood there rubbing the hand, which had been held tightly but not hurt. She was furious at herself for having shown fear. “What the Dark are you doing in here?” she yelled.
“We were invited,” said the voice, puzzled. “But your accent is poor. Perhaps for now you should speak more slowly.”
“Accent—” She stopped and realized that she hadn’t been speaking Darthene, or any human language, but the odd and terrible one that the voices in the darkness had been using. “Never mind that! You can’t be in here, this is me!”
“‘Me?’” the voice said. “‘We,’ surely. But may we ask why you’re keeping it so dark in here? Unless it’s because the place where we met was dark.”
“I can remedy that,” Segnbora said, annoyed. She lifted a hand, called up a memory of noon sunlight pouring in through the shaft—
—and nothing happened.
“You are leaving us out of the reckoning,” said the deep slow voice.
“Perhaps you’d assist me, then,” Segnbora said, uneasy, but annoyed enough to be intent on not showing it. She concentrated again. “Sunlight…”
This time the light came, streaming down through the shaft from a sky that seemed bluer and deeper than usual. Segnbora looked down and away from the blinding light—and was blinded instead by the intruder.
The rough dark textures of the face she had touched in the Fane were dark no longer. The sunlight spilling down from above shattered and rainbowed from scales like black sapphires, every one with its shifting star. The Dragon blazed and glittered like a queen’s ransom, his every breath and movement creating a shower of dazzle around him.
Now, Segnbora thought in wonder, I begin to understand that old story about Dragons spending their time lying on piles of jewels....
His head hung above and before her, no longer an inert, half-perceived shape as it had been in the Morrowfane cave. It was an elongated head under the upper faceplate, and slender like a snake’s, though heavier-jawed. Its mouth ended in a beak like that of a snapping turtle’s; the point of the beak, the very end of the immense serrated jaw, was what had closed on her hand.
Segnbora’s gaze traveled upward. From the beak to the place where the jaw met the neck was twenty feet at least. The eyes were great pupilless globes filled with liquid fire, blazing brilliant white even in the full sunlight. In the iron braziers of the nostrils the same light glowed, though nowhere near so brightly.
The Dragon was watching her with no less interest. “Casting one’s skin for the last time is always a nuisance,” it said, “but it’s still one of the more pleasant things about going mdahaih. You like this body better than the one you saw in the cave?”
“No!” Segnbora started to say, but the thought snagged on the new language li
ving in her throat, and wouldn’t move. The Dracon tongue, she realized then, put a great emphasis on accuracy of expression, and the one, bald, angry word was apparently insufficient.
“You look absolutely beautiful,” she said at last, “and I wish to the Dark you’d go away.”
“It wasn’t my idea to become mdahaih in a human, believe me,” the Dragon said. “Nor that of the rest of the mdeihei. They’ve been making endless noise about it.” Though Segnbora had never heard the words before, she understood them instantly. Mdahaih: indwelling within a host body and mind. Mdeihei: the indwellers, the souls of linear ancestors, the thousand-voiced consensus, the eternal companions.
The thought made her hair stand up. Segnbora realized then that the sound she had been hearing in the background wasn’t the Sea, but a chorus of other voices, all like that of the Dragon. It’s a pleasant enough sound, she thought. A single Dragon sounded like a bass viol talking to itself, a deep breathy voice full of hisses and rumbles and vocal bow-scrapes. But Dragons in a group seemed to prefer speaking together, and had been doing just that ever since she walked back into her cavern. The result was a constant quiet murmur and mutter of seemingly sourceless voices: scores of them, maybe hundreds, coiling together words and meaning-melodies in decorous, dissonant musics.
And they were growing louder. They didn’t approve of Segnbora, of her clumsy gropings and her rudeness to them in the darkness into which they had been thrust. Nor did they approve of the abnormal singleness of her mind, and they were saying so, in a dark-hued melody that sounded like a consort of bass instruments upbraiding its audience.