Read The Door Into Fire Online
Authors: Diane Duane
Tags: #fantasy adult adventure, #swordsorcery, #fantasy fiction, #fantasy series, #sword and sorcery, #fantasy adventure
“If you die under conditions like that,” Freelorn said, his anger growing, “your death will mean
nothing
. Herelaf would shake his head at you, and he’d say, ‘Dad was right, your head
is
made of wood, just like everything else in this place—’”
I won’t yell at him. I
won’t
. He’s my
loved
—
“Lorn, I never thought that you—”
“—but you’re determined to die before you forge that sword and reach your Power, because success would mean giving up your guilt—and you haven’t really worked on anything else since Herelaf died. It’s sharper than any sword, by now. You stick it into yourself every chance you get, and bleed a little more of your life and your power away, so that every time there’s a little less of you left to pursue the search, a little less chance that you’ll succeed. Now, though, you’re getting close to success, and so you have to risk your life even more wildly by messing with places like this alone—”
“Lorn,
shut up!
Who brought me this journey, anyway? I would likely never have
heard
about this place if I hadn’t been coming to get you out of that damn keep. And as for nursing guilts, how about you? Maybe it
is
easier to make love than to make kings, but it’s also easier to talk about being a king than it is to be one! You’ve never forgiven yourself for being out of the country when your father died, instead of by his side to do the whole heroic last-stand thing that you always wanted; and you were too damn guilty about it to go back and try to take his throne, because you didn’t think you deserved it! Idiot! Or coward! Which? You could have gone back and tried to make a stand, tried to take the Stave. Maybe you would have died! But is this life? Living in exile, mooching off poor Bort until he died? At least you had the sense to get out of Darthen until Eftgan’s reign was settled, and she remembers the favor; she likes you as much as Bort did, it seems. Lucky for you—otherwise it’d have been all over with you by now. Lately you couldn’t lie your way out of an open field—”
“Dammit, Herewiss—!”
He almost never calls me by name. Sweet
Goddess
, he’s mad. But so am I—
“Shut up, Lorn! And don’t come mouthing to me about deathguilt, because yours has nothing on mine, and even if it did, it’s fairly obvious that you wouldn’t be handling it any better. At least I’m trying to deal with mine—”
Freelorn’s mouth worked, and nothing came out. Herewiss stopped, his satisfaction at Freelorn’s anger suddenly draining out of him.
This is a thing I never knew about us, he thought in shock. We
resent
each other. My Goddess. Can love and resentment like this live in the same person at the same time and not kill each other?
“What are you going to do?” Freelorn said, his voice tight.
“I’m going to stay here.” Herewiss made his voice noncommittal, unemotional. He was trembling.
“Then I’m going to Osta. And I’ll see you when I see you. Good night.” Freelorn got up and went to the corner where his bedroll was laid out; he wrapped himself up in his cloak and lay down with his face to the wall and his back to Herewiss.
Oh, Dark,
Herewiss thought, we’ve
had fights before...
But he couldn’t stop shaking, and something inside him told him that this had been no normal fight.
“Died by your sword,”
Freelorn’s voice said, again and again, echoing like the cold howls of the Shadow’s Hunting through midwinter skies.
He never said anything like that to me before. Never—
He sat there a long time, unmoving, staring at Freelorn’s turned back, or at the lovers’-cup, half-full of wine, sitting on the floor beside him. Sunspark burned low at his back, watching in silence.
(Spark—) he said.
(Do you do that often?) it said very softly.
(Uh—no. Not really.)
(It is a considerable discharge of energies.)
(It, ah, it is that.)
(Such random discharges,) the elemental said, (usually preclude the possibility of union—)
(Yes,) Herewiss said. (They do.)
(He is—no longer your mate?)
The elemental’s thought made it plain that such an occurrence was quite nearly the end of the world; and Herewiss, beginning to sink downward into his pain, was inclined to agree. (I don’t know,) he said. (Oh, I don’t—No, I really don’t know...)
He got up, went over to where Freelorn lay, reached down and touched him. “Lorn—”
Nothing. He might as well have touched the gray stone of the hold and asked it for an answer.
He lay down, wrapping himself up in his cloak too and stretching out beside Freelorn. But he did not need his underhearing to perceive the wall of hostility that lay between them like a sword thrown in the middle of the bedroll. There was a stranger on the other side of the wall, a stranger who wanted fiercely to be left alone, who would strike out if bothered—
It was like trying to lie still on hot coals. Herewiss got up and went away, back to the firepit. He sat on the edge of it and stared into the shifting flames. Bright eyes looked out at him.
(He doesn’t want to talk to me. Maybe he will in the morning. Sleep heals a great many ills, including unfinished quarrels, sometimes—)
(I would not know. I don’t sleep.)
(Tonight, I doubt if I will, either.) Herewiss sighed. (I’m going outside for a bit, Spark.)
It flickered acquiescence at him and cuddled down into the pit, pulling a sheet of fire over itself.
Herewiss paused, looking over his shoulder at Freelorn. His loved lay still unmoving, but Herewiss could feel the space around him prickling with anger and frustration.
Oh, Dark,
he told himself
. Let be. You know how Lorn is. He does a two-day sulk and then everything’s all right again.
But we’ve never fought like
this—
He walked to the front doorway of the hold and looked out. The gray walls of the courtyard were walls of shadow now, hardly to be seen at all except where their tops occluded the sky. Herewiss leaned against the doorsill, sighed again, folded his arms and gazed up at the stars. His brain was jangling like windchimes in a storm of fears and fragmented thoughts; it took him a long few moments to calm down and greet the blazing desert stars, the Mother’s sky, as it deserved to be greeted. It took him a few minutes more to realize that the constellations with which he was familiar were nowhere to be seen.
Uhh—wait a moment—!
Very quietly, so as not to disturb Lorn or anyone else who might have been trying to sleep, Herewiss stepped across the courtyard, past the dozing horses, to the doorway which Sunspark had opened. As he passed through it, the sound of the solano, the relentless spring wind of the Waste, reasserted itself; somewhere to his left he heard the squeaks and chirrups of a colony of bounce-mice going about their nightly business. He looked up at the cold-burning sky. Dragon, Spearman, Maiden, Crown, all the constellations of spring shone unperturbed high in the clear air.
How about that,
Herewiss thought. He went back into the courtyard, and looked up. Within the walls, the sky glittered again with alien stars, strange eyes looking down on him from a nameless night.
This is definitely where I need to be,
he thought as he headed back toward the hall. He sighed again. Part of him was indulging itself in a delicious shivering excitement at the prospect of where he was. The rest of him was weighed down with the aching feeling of the angry, untouchable presence on the other side of the bedroll.
He slowed down.
I don’t really want to go back in there—
—
oh, Goddess, yes, I
do—
—
but—
He stopped still in his indecision, and as he listened to the odd silence that prevailed within the walls, he heard something more. Someone was outside, playing a lute. The individual notes stitched through the quiet like needles through dark velvet, bright, precise; but the pattern they were embroidering was random. There was a pause as Herewiss listened; and then a chord strung itself in silvery lines across the still air, and another after it, gently mournful, though in a major key. When a voice joined the chords, singing in a light contralto, Herewiss was able to localize the sounds better. Whoever it was was somewhere to the left, around the corner of the building.
The tone of the singing, though he could not make out words, had touched Herewiss at the heart of his mood—night-ridden, melancholy. He went quietly over to the corner of the hall, leaned against the warm gray stone, peered around. Segnbora was there; sitting on the smooth paving with her back against the wall, her cloak folded behind her to lean on, a wineskin by her side. Her head was tilted back against the stone, relaxed, and the lute rested easily on her lap. If she noticed Herewiss, she gave no sign of it, but kept on serenading night and stars like a lover beneath some dark window.
“—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—”
Herewiss listened with interest.
With her deep voice, who’d suspect she had a high register? Needs work on her vibrato, but otherwise she sounds lovely—
“Thank you!” said the deep voice, with laughter. The strumming continued as Segnbora looked over at him and smiled. “You going to stand there all night, or will you sit down and have a little wine?”
“Um,” Herewiss said, as he went over to sit against the wall beside her. “I may have had more than I should already.”
She raised an eyebrow at him, at the same time squeezing the lute’s neck and wringing a tortured dissonant chord from it. “That bad, huh?”
“You underheard what went on in there?”
She shook her head. “There’s something about these walls that makes them good insulators. But once you came outside, it felt like someone was trying to beat a dent out of a big pot with a sledgehammer. Noisy.”
“Sorry,” Herewiss said.
“For what? A lot of it was the walls, anyway; they make even a fourth-level ideation echo as if it were being shouted in a cave.” She stroked the lute again, and it purred in minor sevenths. “I take it he doesn’t approve of your staying here.”
“No.”
“I can’t say that I would, either, if I were in his place—but you have to stay. There’s too much possibility here—”
Herewiss looked at her. (You
would
understand,) he said, bespeaking her.
“I’d better. Please, prince, the mindtouch—let’s not and say we did. With these walls all around, the echo is really bad.”
“That’s why you came outside?”
She nodded. “Partly. Every time someone subvocalized, my head felt like a gong being struck.”
“I didn’t feel much of anything. You have sensitivity problems?”
Segnbora chuckled. “Normally—if that’s the word for it—I hear everything from fourth level up. Sometimes, if I’m drunk enough, or tired enough, I’ll only pick up subvocals. But
this
place—” She sighed in exasperation, shook her head. “Or maybe it’s because of my flowering: I’m just past it. Though usually I don’t have that problem with the hormonal surge. But I was getting tired of hearing people’s bladders yelling to be emptied, and stomachs complaining that they weren’t full enough, and neural leakage rattling like gravel in a cup. All multiplied by six…”
“I used to wish I had that kind of sensitivity—”
“Don’t. Unless you also wish to be able to turn it off. I can’t, and it’s awful. I’m tired of hearing Dritt’s conscience chastising him about his weight problem, and Moris wondering if Dritt really loves him when he’s so skinny, and Harald’s arthritis crunching in his knee, and Lorn wanting Hergótha every night when he cleans Súthan , and Lang thinking.... I’m just tired.” She closed her eyes, rubbed the bridge of her nose as if a headache was coming on.
“I’m sorry,” she said then lifting her head. “I hear good things, too: I don’t mean to whine.” She reached down for the wineskin.
—
But even the good things make me feel so lonely,
Herewiss underheard her finish the thought. He closed his eyes in pain.
Segnbora looked at him quickly; her eyes were worried, and then in a tick of time they went regretful. “I leak, too,” she said sadly. “I should have mentioned. Wine?”
“What kind?”
“Blood wine.”
“Which region?” Herewiss asked, interested. The grapes were only grown along the North Arlene coast, where a combination of capricious climate and daily beatings of the vines produced an odd wrinkled grape, and eventually a sweet red liqueur with a hint of salty aftertaste—hence the name.
“Peridëu. My family has a connection with the vintners— one of my great-aunts cured their vines of white rot, oh, years back. They keep sending us the stuff every year or so.”
“I might have a sip of that.”
Segnbora passed Herewiss the wineskin, and he drank a couple of swallows’ worth and restoppered it. “I didn’t know you were a lutenist,” he said.