The Door Into Fire (21 page)

Herewiss reached out, very slowly, and put his hand through the doorway. After a moment he withdrew it, rubbing his fingers together.

“It’s cooler there,” he said, “and damp. Lorn, this is it.
Doors into Otherwheres—”

They moved on slowly to the next door.

It showed them sand, endless butter-colored sand carved by relentless winds into rippled dunes with crests like knives, stretching from one horizon to the other in perfect straight lines…a corrugated desert, showing not one sign of life, not the tiniest plant or creature. The sky was such a deep pure blue-violet as one sometimes sees in the depths of a lake at evening.

“If you cut our sky with a knife,” Segnbora whispered, “it would bleed that color.”

“Come on—”

The next doorway opened on a hallway of gray stone, crowded with seven people who looked through a doorway at a hallway of gray stone, crowded with seven people who looked through a doorway at a hallway—

“Dear Goddess!” Freelorn said, and spun to look behind him. There was nothing there but another doorway, this one showing a volcano erupting with terrible, silent violence against a night sky. A flying rock fell close to the door as he watched. He flinched back and Herewiss reached out to steady him.

“It’s all right. Let’s go on.”

“What if that had come through?”

“I don’t know if it can. Look at the sun coming out of this one—”

They gathered before the next door. “Suns, you mean,” Dritt said. They looked down on a placid seashore. Out over the dark water, one small red sun was going down in a fury of crimson clouds; another one, larger and fiercely blue, shone higher in the sky.

“Two suns.” Moris’s voice, usually loud and abrasive, was hushed. “Two
suns!
What kind of place is that?”

“Goddess only knows. Look at this one—”

The group relaxed , broke slightly apart as each person went looking through a separate doorway, looking for a wonder of their own.

“—
blue
trees?”

“What the Dark is
this??”

“Look, it’s
our
country. Moris, isn’t that the Eorlhowe? And the North Arlene peninsula—”

“This one is underwater—look, there goes a fish!”

“I didn’t know the Goddess
made
birds that big.”

“It’s snowing here, I can’t see a thing.”

Herewiss was standing before a doorway that showed nothing—nothing at all, a vague blurry darkness. Not the darkness of night, but an absence, an absence of anything at all. He looked at it, and his heart was beating fast.
An unused door? Maybe—

Freelorn came to him from further up the hall, took Herewiss’s arm and began to pull him along. “What?
What?”
Herewiss said, but Lorn wouldn’t answer him.

He pulled Herewiss in front of one door. “Look,” he said.

The door showed them a view from a high place, looking down into a landscape afire with a sunset the color of new love. Below and before them stretched a fantastic growth of crystalline forms, islanded between two rivers; jutting upward against the extravagant sky like prisms of quartz or amethyst or polished amber, but scored and carved and patterned, stark in the sunset light. They grew in all sizes and shapes, a forest of gigantic gems, spears of opal and dark jade and towers of obsidian. They caught the light of day’s end and reflected it back from a thousand different planes and angles, golden, red, orange, pink, smoky twilight blue; a barbaric and magnificent display of a god’s crown-jewels, the diadem of Day set down between the crimson rivers as the Sun retired. One spire reached higher than all the others around it, a masterwork of crystal set in gray stone and topped with a spearing crown of silver steel. On the crown’s peak a single ruby flared, pulsing like a Dragon’s eye, and rays of light struck up from the circlet like pale swords against the deepening blue. In the silences of the upper sky, a crescent Moon smiled at the evening star that flowered beside it.

Beside Herewiss, Freelorn moved softly, as if afraid to break a dream. “What is it?” he whispered. “Is it real?”

“Somewhere it is.”

“Is it really what it looks like, a city? How did they build it? Or did it grow? And is that all glass? How did they make it that way—?”

Herewiss shook his head, and out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Segnbora moving slowly and silently toward the door, like one entranced. He reached out and caught her by the arm, and she pulled at him, wanting to be let go.

“No,” he said. “Segnbora—look at the view. The door opens out onto somewhere very high. There may be ground under it, but there may not be. You could step out onto nothing. And it would be a short flight for someone who doesn’t have wings.”

She stared out the doorway with longing, the colors of the softening sunset catching in her eyes. “It might be worth it,” she said.

“Come on—”

The next doorway was dark, but not as the one Herewiss had seen. In the endless depths of its darkness, stars were suspended. Not the remote cold stars of night in the desert, but great flaming swarms of them, hot and beautiful, cast carelessly across the boundless black reaches of eternity. And close, so close you could surely put your hand out and pluck one like an apple. They spun outward from a blazing common core, burning like the sudden fiery realization of joy—

Freelorn took a step toward the doorway. “This is the real Door,” he said, very softly, “the last Door—”

Alarm stirred in Herewiss, drowning his appreciation of the beauty in sudden concern for Freelorn. “Not the Door into Starlight, no,” he said. “You can’t see that until you’re dead, Lorn, or have the Flame—and you’re in neither condition.”

“But my father—”

“That’s not where he is.” Herewiss took Freelorn by his shoulders, as much from compassion as from fear that he might cast himself through. “Your father is
past
that other Door—down by that Sea of which the Starlight is a faint intimation. They’re lovely, but these are just stars. Not the final Sea.”

Freelorn turned away, but Herewiss was troubled: there had been no feeling of release, of giving up the vision, no feeling of Freelorn accepting what
was
. “Lorn—”

“Let me be.” Freelorn walked away from him, walked down the stairs, oblivious to the wondering comments of his people as they peered through one door or another.

Herewiss stared after him, worrying. He was distracted after a moment by a touch on his arm; Segnbora looked up at him. There was concern in her eyes. “Are we staying the night?” she asked.

“I think so.”

She turned to look through the starry door, and sighed. “That’s been much on his mind lately,” she said.

“It’s
always
on his mind,” Herewiss said sadly. “As you’ll find when you’ve known him as long as I have.”

Segnbora nodded and went off to look through another door.

Damn,
Herewiss thought,
there’s going to be crying tonight...

•

That night they camped in the great hall around the firepit. There was no need to gather firewood, for Sunspark decided to inhabit the deep-set hearth, and burned there the night long. Freelorn and his people made much of it, and Sunspark flamed in unlikely shapes and colors for quite a while, showing off. But Herewiss was vaguely uneasy about something, and found himself bothered by the occasional perception of bright eyes in the fire, watching him with an odd considering look.

They ate hugely that night, and went to sleep early. Dritt and Harald went off to investigate one of another of the doors before they slept. After being gone for not more than a few minutes Dritt came down the stairs again, looking slightly dazed.

Freelorn and Herewiss were sitting with their backs to the firepit, working at a skin of Brightwood that Freelorn had liberated from the Ferry Tavern; the lovers’-cup was halfway through its fifth refill, and both of them looked up at Dritt with slightly addled concern as he went by.

“It was me,” he said. “May I?” He gestured at the cup.

“Sure,” Freelorn said.

Dritt reached down and took a long, long drink. “This morning,” he said, “that was me, just now. I went upstairs, and it was daytime in one of the doors, and there were people coming—the first people that any door showed—and I got excited and walked through it to have a look.”

“What was it like,” Herewiss said, “going through?”

“Like nothing. Like going through a door.” Dritt put the cup down. “Thanks. So I waited there for a while— and of course, it was us. Of course. It shook me at the time, and I stepped back, and then I couldn’t see me any more—”

“Which of you couldn’t see you?”

“Hell,” Dritt said, bemused, “I’m not feeling terribly picky about the details right now. I’m going to bed.”

“G’night.”

“Yeah, good night…”

Dritt wandered away toward Moris’s bedroll, and Herewiss picked up the cup and finished it. “How much more of this is there?” he said.

“There’s another skin.”

“Lorn, you amaze me. What else did you take out of there that wasn’t nailed down?”

“No, no, I was a good boy. Only took the wine. I knew you’d like it, and I don’t think the lady minded.”

“No,” Herewiss said. He chuckled then. “Lorn, this has been some month for me…”

“How?”

“Just the strange things happening—and then seeing you again. It’s good to have you close.” He put an arm around Lorn, hugged him tight.

“Yeah, it’s good to be with you too.... Listen, what are you going to do now?”

“Stay here.”

Freelorn was quiet for a long moment.

“Lorn, I have to. I need this place. You saw the doors, you know what they can do. I have to try to find one that’ll do what I want it to.” Herewiss put out his hand to the lovers’-cup and played with it, turning it around and around.
Please,
he was thinking.
Please, Lorn, don’t start this—not now—

“I wish you wouldn’t stay,” Freelorn said.

Herewiss didn’t answer.

“If you cared,” Freelorn said. “If you did care, about how I feel, the way you say you do, you wouldn’t worry me by staying here. This place isn’t natural—”

“Neither am I, Lorn.”
Damn, I know that phrasing. We’re both going to wind up in tears. And afterwards he’ll get what he wants out of me he wants to, just like he always does—

“But you’ll be all alone here—”

“Sunspark will be here. You saw what it did to the outer wall. I don’t have much to be afraid of with a watchdog like
that
.”

“Herewiss. Listen to me.” Freelorn looked at him, earnestly, his face full of pain and hard-held restraint and the need to make Herewiss understand. Herewiss’s insides went
wrench
at the sound of the pain and fear in Freelorn’s voice. “This place—there’s too much
power
here for other forces not to have taken notice of it. What is it you told me once, that as soon as you came into your Power, or started to, that would be the time to watch out, because new Powers are always noticed? And as soon as they come into being, the old Powers come to challenge them, to test them and see where they fit into the overall pattern?”

“Yes, but—”

“—and here’s this place, there must be incredible power bottled up in it to make it do the things it does. And you’ll sit here, merrily forging swords, and getting stronger and stronger, and Sunspark staying with you, a Power in its own right certainly—you think you won’t attract notice? Doors open both ways, you know. Things can come in those doors as well as go out. If you needed proof, Dritt just gave it to you. Suppose something comes in while your back is turned?”

“Lorn—”
Listen to him fighting for control. Oh, Goddess, how can I refuse him? I don’t want to hurt him but
I have to stay here—

“—listen, you could stay here a few days, a week, two maybe; we’d stay with you. And then you could come with us when we raid the Treasury at Osta, and get the money we need to hire mercenaries— ”

“Lorn, the more I think about it, the more I feel that the whole Osta idea is a bad one. And I really don’t think mercenaries are going to be the right way to handle this. If at all possible, I’d prefer to avoid shedding blood.”

“You’re awfully careful with other people’s blood,” Freelorn said, a touch of anger beginning to creep into his voice now. “And not enough with your own. But maybe that’s it. Have you decided down deep that since Herelaf died by your sword, you should too? Something out of Goddess-knows-where should come up on you while you’re busy working on the one sword that will redeem you, and kill you then? Atonement? Blood shed for blood shed? There is a certain poetic justice to it—”

“Lorn, stop it.”
He’s goading me on purpose, now. He must be so very afraid. But I never thought
he
would hurt me like this— Is he so afraid that he can’t give in a little, let me have my own way? The danger isn’t that great—