by Diane Duane
—and hit her head.
No, that’s just the usual headache. Up, get up! Freelorn was shaking her, worsening the agony of pins and needles that transfixed every bone and muscle she owned.
Herewiss was already up, sagging against the window. With Freelorn’s help, she staggered over to join him. Segnbora was temporarily blind, but the othersight was working. Above the valley the Moon’s whiteness had diminished to a thin desperate sliver, struggling with the creeping darkness as if with a poison, foredoomed to lose.
The corroded copper taste was as hot in Segnbora’s mouth as if she had been struck there. The Chaelonde seemed to run with blood. Below them the lateral fault burned through stone and earth, moving. Sai khas-Barachael began to shake beneath their feet.
“Put your scales on,” Herewiss whispered, grabbing one of her hands in a grip like a vise, and with the other drawing Khávrinen. Segnbora stumbled and fell down into herself, into the cave where Hasai waited with wings outspread in alarm. There was no time for the usual courtesies. Segnbora matched him size for size, flung his wings about her as she had wrapped herself in his shadow before, and became him.
As the sensation of the stone in the valley became plain again, the mdeihei cried out in a song of terrible alarm. “Shut up, the lot of you!” she shouted in Dracon, and once more gathered the whole valley within the span of her wings, feeling it all.
The pain struck her immediately as the lateral fault came alive inside her, a black-hot line of agony running from chest to shoulder and up her left wing like a heart seizure. Her outer body gasped and clutched at the sill, missed it, and thumped down to her knees with a jolt. Inside, no less clearly, she felt the heave and stutter of the faults as they tried to move, attempting to foul Herewiss’s game before it was fairly started.
But Herewiss had not lost his grip on her hand. Half crouched over and supported desperately by Freelorn, he was beginning to shine like a vision as his soul settled more firmly into the spirit-to-body connection necessary for full Power flow. In his free hand, Khávrinen blazed like chained lightning, impossible to look at with the eyes of either body or mind. Herewiss struck deeper into his Power, tapping what seemed an inexhaustible source, and straightened with refound strength. Then he was inside Segnbora’s perception, as Dracon as she.
The Fire burning in her throat was suddenly blue, an awesome counterpoint to the dark burning of the faults and the rage of the frustrated Shadow. Stirred by Its influence, the player on the Inside made a move. But it was a poorly reasoned one, born of fury and the hope of a quick win. The lateral fault jumped an inch north and south.
Segnbora felt Herewiss smile the satisfied smile of a player whose opponent has fallen into a trap. The burning blue upflow of his Fire seared through her perception and poured in a great flood down into the valley’s stone, binding together three of the vertical faults.
Like diverted lightning, the released energy of the lateral fault stitched whiplash-quick through the strata in several different directions. But Herewiss was quicker. Fire streaked through the strata too, sending fault-blocks up or down, blocking and absorbing forces, setting up piece by piece the final checkmate that would freeze the lateral forever and seal the Eisargir Pass. Two more moves and he would have it—
Bent over double by the fault-pain, harder to handle now than while she’d been out-of-body, Segnbora heard someone a long way off shouting in thought. She couldn’t make out concepts, though.
“They’re not?” Freelorn said, much closer, and very alarmed. “Dusty! They’re not all clear of the pass yet. Sunspark says you have to hold off if you don’t want all those Reavers dead—”
Herewiss said nothing aloud, but Segnbora could feel his resolve. No one dies of this, not even them. Yet the position he had set up in the stone was delicate and couldn’t be maintained for long.
The Shadow, sensing Herewiss’s hesitation, immediately called the attention of the foiled, blocked forces in the stone to the weakest spot in Herewiss’s game: the root of Aulys that was split in two. Pressure played about it like lightning. Half of the massive root twitched, about to shift.
(Hold that position!) Segnbora said to Herewiss. Both inside and outside the stone at once, she anchored herself with rear talons and barbed tail, and reached out to sink diamond fangs into the trembling root. It struggled and tried to tear away from her, vibrating so violently that she was certain she was going to lose teeth. But a Dragon never lets go except when it chooses to. We are the stone. We command. We – will – not – let – go!
She held. Eyes squeezed closed, every muscle pulled taut as a rope, her tail desperately tightening its anchor around a lower stratum as she felt her fore-talons slipping….
“They’re out! They’re out of the pass! Dusty!”
Canny and desperate, the Shadow kicked two of the remotest vertical faults as a distraction. Herewiss was having none of it. Using Segnbora’s Dracon-self as she had, he descended deeper into the stone, deep enough to set his own jaws around his last move, a great marble fault-block half a mile south of Barachael. This was the key to the puzzle. Diamond fangs set hard into the stone. He heaved—
The blow came at her, not at him, and took them both off-guard. Preoccupied with the immensities, neither of them expected the sudden choking darkness at their back in the place where the mdeihei dwelt. A song of madness swept the mdeihei, controlled them, sent them tearing at the floor of Segnbora’s cave. Razor talons and ruthless blasts of Dragonfire ate and sliced down through the stone of her memory, to lay it bare and make it real. For one memory in particular they searched—
(No!) she screamed at them, but they paid her no heed. Stone crumbled away like curd. Even now the memory was coming to birth, coming true: darkness, gravel grinding against her face, that old anguish— And there was no way to stop it, except by breaking the empathy, leaving Hasai, halting the wreaking—
Herewiss held the block of stone in jaws that ran with blue Fire, but he couldn’t move it without her. He strained at it, tapping deeper into his Fire and deeper yet, not giving up. Yet without Segnbora’s unimpeded link to the Dracon perception, he couldn’t go further.
—stone shattered and melted inside her. Don’t suffer, don’t let it come true again! Break the link! the darkness sang to her, consoling, seductive. The memory became more real. A green afternoon under the tree… No, what’s he doing here? What’s he—!!
You don’t want it to happen again? Break the link!
But I can’t!
Then live in the horror, without respite, forever.
The last stone was torn away from the memory. In such anguish that she couldn’t even scream, Segnbora flung herself utterly into the Dracon-self again, into Herewiss, into her own self and her own death. Fire blazed; the terrible stresses Herewiss had been applying to the fault-block gripped, took, pulled it up out of its socket—
The game board rumbled and leaned upward as if a hand had tipped it over. Pieces tried to slide off every which way. Lost in the pain of contact with that memory, Segnbora nonetheless sensed Mount Adínë’s shuddering as the ground at the end of the khas-Barachael spur began to rise, first bulging, then cracking like a snapped stick.
Sai khas-Barachael danced and jittered on its ridge like a knife on a pounded tabletop, held secure only by Herewiss’s Fire and will. The earth on either side of the lateral fault thrust up, then slammed together like a closing door. The fault expended its energies in a noise like the thunderstorms of a thousand summers. Hills crumbled and landslides large and small crawled downward all the length of the Chaelonde valley. The river itself tilted crazily out of its bed and rushed down into a new one as the block Herewiss had triggered shoved its way above ground, making a seedling mountain, a new spur for Adínë.
Behind them, the Houndstooth peak of Aulys seemed to stand up in slow surprise, look over Adínë’s shoulder, and then fall back in a dead faint. The terrible thundering crash of its fall went on for many minutes, a sound so huge it oblit
erated every other and was felt more than heard—the sound of the pass between Eisargir and Aulys being sealed forever by the Houndstooth’s ruin.
***
Hours later, it seemed, the singing roar that encompassed the world began to die down. Segnbora discovered that she was still alive, and was amazed at that. Herewiss was nowhere to be felt in her mind; for her own part, she was on hands and knees on the floor of the cavern. There were great talon-furrowed rents in that floor now; slag lay piled all around them, and everything smoked ominously as if pools of magma lay just beneath the surface. Slowly, aching all over, Segnbora levered herself up and found herself looking at Hasai.
He was droop-winged and weary-looking, dim of eye, crouching in the middle of a badly torn-up and melted stone floor. Behind him, lurking shameful in the shadows, she could just make out the dark forms of the mdeihei. Many eyes watched her, but their voices for once were still as they waited to see what she would do.
“O sdaha,” Hasai said, singing slow and sorrowful, “we betrayed you.” He made no excuse, offered no explanation, merely accepted the responsibility.
She breathed in, breathed out, as weary as the Dragon before her. The mdeihei waited.
There were thousands of things she felt like saying to them, but what she said was, “Ae mdeihei, nht’é’lhhw’ae.” We are forgiven.
The shadowy forms drew away. Segnbora laid a hand for a moment on one of Hasai’s bright talons, looking around at the torn and furrowed floor. “Will you clean this mess up, mdaha?”
Hasai looked at her as if there were something he wanted to say, but dared not. Finally he simply said, “Sdaha, we will do that.”
“Sehé’rae, then—” Segnbora turned her back on him and stepped back up into the outer world.
The tower room still jittered with little aftershocks left over from the quake, and echoed with the voices of all Freelorn’s band. Herewiss leaned wearily by the window, with Freelorn supporting him on one side and Sunspark on the other. Eftgan was in front of him, and all four were talking at a great rate. Segnbora pushed herself up off the floor and rubbed her eyes, looking out the window.
Her normal sight was now clear enough to show her a Chaelonde valley much broken and changed, but with Barachael still mostly intact. The darkened Moon wore a fuzzy line of silver at its edge, first sign of the eclipse’s end. The air that came in the window was astonishingly sweet to the undersenses, as if many years’ worth of trapped death and pain had been finally released.
Leaning against the windowsill, she looked at Herewiss. He was drawn and tired, and all the Fire was gone from about Khávrinen for the moment. For the first time she could remember, it was simply gray steel with an odd blue sheen. But Herewiss’s eyes were alive with a satisfaction too big for all of Barachael valley to have contained—the look of a man who finds out he is what he’s always believed himself to be.
Seeing her, he reached out a hand. Across the open window they clasped forearms in the gesture of warriors after a battle well fought.
“What was it you said?” Segnbora said, thinking back to the old Hold in the Waste, and the night her sleep was interrupted. “‘There was blood on the Moon, and the mountain was falling’—?”
Dog tired as he was, Herewiss’s eyes glittered with the realization that his true-dream might yet prove less disastrous than he’d feared, particularly for the man who stood beside him. “Got it right, didn’t I?”
She nodded, put an arm out and was unsurprised to find Lang there, wary of Skádhwë but ready to support her. “Only one problem, prince—”
“What’s that?”
She grinned. “After this, people are going to say you’ll do anything to avoid a fight…”
TWELVE
Laughter in death’s shadow fools no one who understands death. But if you’re moved to it, be assured that the Goddess will smile at the joke.
—found scratched on a wall in the dungeon of the King of Steldin, circa 1200 p.a.d.
“I hate—letting them think they’re driving us,” Herewiss said between gasps. “But it’s better this way.”
He stood in the midst of carnage, the burned and hacked bodies of fifty or sixty Fyrd. Here and there in the rocky field of this latest ambush, Freelorn’s band stood cleaning swords, leaning on one another, or rubbing down sweating horses and swearing quietly.
Segnbora leaned gasping against Steelsheen’s flank, unwilling to sheathe Skádhwë yet. The last Fyrd to come at her had been one of the new breed of keplian, bigger than the usual sort, with clawed forelimbs and those wickedly intelligent eyes that were becoming too familiar these days. She’d had no trouble immersing herself in the other’s eyes to effect its killing. The problem had been getting out again afterward. She felt soiled, as if she had stepped in a pile of hatred that would have to be scraped off her boots.
“How many times is this?” Lang said, coming up beside her.
“Seventeen, eighteen maybe—”
“I don’t know about you, but I feel driven.”
Segnbora nodded. Fifteen days ago they had ridden out of Barachael, and had had nothing for their pains ever since but constant harrying by ever-increasing bands of Fyrd. All had come from the southwest, where Something clearly didn’t want them to venture. Freelorn had suggested worldgating straight to Bluepeak, where they would meet the Queen; but Herewiss, unwilling to tempt the Shadow’s direct intervention by too much use of Fire, had vetoed the idea. “All It has to do is bring enough power to bear against one worldgating,” he said, “and it can kill us all at once. Do you really want to offer It the opportunity?”
So they rode, and were harried. Herewiss always took them north, out of the way, after an attack such as today’s— in daylight, anyway. In darkness they turned again and tacked southwest, toward Bluepeak. They were losing time with these detours, and knew it. Everyone’s tempers were short, and getting shorter. But there was nothing else to do.
“Let’s go,” Herewiss said, sheathing Khávrinen and turning Sunspark’s head northward as he mounted. There was annoyed muttering among Freelorn’s band, and heads turned toward Lorn in appeal. But Lorn, already up on Blackmane, looked wearily after his loved and shook his head. “Come on,” he said, and rode off after Herewiss.
It was a brutal trail they rode, through country made of the stuff of a rider’s nightmares. They had long since left behind the green plains of southern Darthen for the uninhabited rock-tumble of Arlen’s Southpeak country. Glaciers had retreated over this land when the Peaks were born, leaving bizarrely shaped boulders scattered across scant, stony soil. Acres of coarse gravel with a few brave weeds growing out of it might be all one would see from morning till night.
The horses were footsore from being kept at flight-pace on such miserable ground. And the grazing was poor. After the well-filled mangers of Barachael’s stables, it was hardly surprising that the horses were in no better mood than their riders, who knew that though no one lived in this barren country, it would be only a matter of time before they ran into Reavers, or Arlene regulars in Cillmod’s pay. And no matter when that might happened, for the moment there were always be Fyrd.
“This is all your fault,” Freelorn grumbled at Segnbora as Steelsheen picked her way along beside Blackmane.
Segnbora looked up in surprise from her contemplation of Skádhwë, which lay ready across the saddlebow. “What? …Oh, well, doubtless in a way it is. I caused the Battle of Bluepeak, too. Ask me about it sometime.”
He glowered at her, and nodded toward Herewiss. “Very funny. All he did was seal up the Shadow’s favorite avenue into the Kingdoms. What do you do but start making love to It…and then jilt It!”
She considered, then shrugged, raising her eyebrows. “So I did.”
“You’re probably in worse trouble with It now than Herewiss is.”
Segnbora frowned at the exaggeration, though it was typical of her liege. “Oh? What would you know about it?”
Herewiss had dropped back to join the
m. “Considering that he’s read the entire royal Arlene library collection on matters of Power,” he said, “he probably knows more about it than either of us. Face it, ‘Berend, the Shadow already knew of the threat that I posed, but at Barachael It became aware of you, too. And as they say, your newest hatred is always the most interesting.”
“True,” Freelorn said. “Probably It believes you’re Its deadliest foe at the moment—”
“Some foe,” Segnbora said under her breath. Her participation in Herewiss’s wreaking had been successful enough, but now the thought of what one could do with Fire, if only one could focus it, kept intruding itself. Just when I thought I was done with it all… And though Hasai and the mdeihei were silent on the subject now, she kept hearing her mdaha saying, You fear all strengths, even your own. That fear cripples you. You must give it up.
But if I did, and it still made no difference…then there would really be no hope.
As if hope has ever done me any good…!
Herewiss and Freelorn had both fallen silent too. “Sorry,” Segnbora said. “Sorry. I’m not much in the mood for conversation today. Let me ride point for a while…”
She rode Steelsheen up to the head of the column and let the sound of the others’ quiet conversation fade beneath her concentration on the surrounding country, and her awareness of Skádhwë’s reassuring blackness, soaking up light at her saddlebow. Its weightlessness, at first unsettling, was becoming second nature, and very useful in a fight. And certainly no other sword was all edge and no flat.
Likewise, no other sword would cut everything except the hand of its mistress, as Freelorn had discovered while trying to handle it one morning. Skádhwë seemed not to care for being used by anyone else, and had been delicate, but very definite, about drawing Lorn’s blood. Of her it had demanded nothing so far, and Segnbora thought of Efmaer’s warning to her with unease, wondering when the weird would take hold.