The Door Into Fire (26 page)

Herewiss had a sudden thought. He edged around to the side of the doorway, until he was seeing it only as a very thin wedge of light, and then as a line, like that of a normal door open just a crack. He put his hand gingerly into the place behind the door, where the hallway would have been in the real world.

Nothing, just more darkness.

He slipped around and hid in it, his pulse thundering in his ears, the only thing to be heard.

There was a rippling, a stirring. Right in front of him, hardly a foot from Herewiss’s nose, the hralcin seemed to bloom out from a flat, irregularly-shaped plane into complete and rounded existence. He started back, then watched it blunder further into the darkness; Sunspark’s light washed through the door after it and limned it clearly. Even muted and blurred by the darkness of this other place, Sunspark’s brilliance was still blinding. Herewiss could imagine what the heat must be like. But if it let up for so much as a second, the hralcin would only come out again—

Herewiss ducked out from behind the doorway, his

lungs screaming for air, and threw himself through, diving and rolling. Behind him he could feel the vibrations of the hralcin’s scream through the water-dark space, cut off sharply as he passed through the doorway and crashed to the ground. His face and hands were seared by Sunspark’s fires. He dragged himself behind the elemental, and the burning lessened , though the air in the hall was still like an oven; the stone was reflecting back much of the heat of its flames.

(Are you all right?)

“Not really. But we have to finish this—”

A claw waved out through the doorway, and Sunspark blazed up more fiercely yet. The reflected heat stung Herewiss’s burned face terribly, but the claw and the limb to which it was attached were withdrawn.

(It’s building up a tolerance,) Sunspark said. (Hurry!)

Herewiss found the grimoire half-hidden under a great glob of slime. He grabbed the book, fumbled at the pages. “I am, I am—”

Another claw came out the door. Sunspark spat a tongue of flame at it, and the claw disappeared. The smell in the hallway became much worse.

Bindings, inanimate—great bindings—they’d better be! Herewiss threatened himself into a semblance of calm, started building the necessary structure around and against the doorway Luckily it was a very simple and straightforward one, requiring more power than delicacy, and his need was fueling his power more than adequately “—e n’sradië!” he finished, sealing it, standing away from the structure in his mind. “All right, Spark, let’s see if it holds.”

Sunspark dimmed down its fires, and the hralcin slammed against the binding thrown over the door as if against a stone wall The binding held, though. Herewiss trembled with the reflected shock.

The hralcin hit the wall again. It still held

And again.

And again.

The wall held.

Herewiss sagged back against the hot stone, regardless of getting burnt. Sunspark was in the man-shape again, helping him.

“My room,” Herewiss said, the backlash hitting him with redoubled force. “I think I need a nap—”

Before Sunspark had gotten him halfway down the stairs, he was having one.

•

He woke up in his bed in the tower workroom, a makeshift affair of cushions and blankets that Sunspark had filched for him from one place or another. It was dark; the room was lit only by the two big candles on the worktable. Herewiss looked up and out the window, seeing early evening stars.

(Well. About time.)

He turned his head to the center of the room. Sunspark was there, enfleshed in the form of a tall slender woman with dark eyes and hair the color of a brilliant sunset, long and red-golden. She sat in a big old padded chair, looking at him with slightly unnerving concern. She was gowned all in wine-red, and her sleeves were rolled up.

“How long has it been?” Herewiss said, propping himself up on one elbow.

(A night and a day.)

“The hralcin—”

(The binding is holding very nicely.) Sunspark got up, went to Herewiss and laid her hand against his forehead; it burned him slightly, but he bore it. (Better,) she said. (Last night there was little difference between the feel of your skin and mine; but the fever is down now. How are the burns?)

“They sting. The skin is tight, but I’ll live, I think.” Herewiss looked around him. There was a big bowl on the floor with a sponge in it, and the dark liquid inside it smelled like burn potion.

“Were you
using
that on me?”

(Yes. The recipe was in your grimoire, and you had most of the herbs in your supplies—)

“But the water, Spark. I thought you couldn’t touch it—”

(A minor inconvenience, in quantities that small—I

shielded my hand with a cloth, anyway. It makes a feeling like a headache, nothing so terrible. Can you get up and eat?)

My Goddess—it’s, she’s worried about me, she cares—what a wonder!
“Spark, thank you—I could eat a Dragon raw.”

(No need, really. I could cook it for you.)

Herewiss sat up straight and stretched. He was stiff from the burns, but not too much so, and the backlash had diminished to the point where he only felt very tired. “Oh. You brought a new chair?”

(From the little town up north where I’ve been getting the food. They’ve started to leave things out for me at night; some of them leave doors and windows open.) She chuckled and got up, going out of the room and down the hall to another room where supplies were kept. (I guess the news got around when their neighbors started finding pantries empty of food and full of raw gold.)

“I would imagine.” Herewiss was surprised at Sunspark’s initiative on his behalf.

(And not far from here there’s a subsurface cavern full of raw gems of all kinds, though mostly rubies. I took the chair and left them a ruby about the size of a melon. Soon the streets will be filling with furniture.)

Sunspark came back in with a few slices of hot venison on a trencher of bread. Under her arm was a skin of Brightwood white, the last of Freelorn’s liberated supply.

“Don’t carry it like that—you’ll warm it up!”

(Oh. Sorry.) She laid the skin on the table with the food, and Herewiss stared at it morosely as Sunspark went rummaging through his bass to find the lovers’-cup.
I wonder where he is,
thought Herewiss.
Probably stuck in some damn dungeon in Osta, trying to figure out a way to bribe the guards to send me a message…

Sunspark looked at Herewiss as she set the cup on the table and poured the wine. She said nothing.

“I wish he were here,” Herewiss said.

Sunspark shook the skin to get the last few drops out, stoppered it, and put it away. (You would probably quarrel again,) she said.

“How would you know?” Herewiss said, stirred slightly out of his tiredness by anger. “You’re rather new at this sort of thing to be so understanding of it, don’t you think?”

(Some aspects of it,) Sunspark answered without rancor. (But some are much like the ways of my own people. There are still more likenesses between our kinds than differences, I think.)

“So what are you basing your feeling on, that we would quarrel again?”

Sunspark sat down among the cushions, hesitated . (He’s seeking to bind your energies, that one is,) she said.

“As I bound yours? Ridiculous. He’s my loved.”

(But that
is
a binding.
Your
loved, you said. It’s not the same kind of binding as there is between us, true. But you have—commitments, you have set ways in which you treat one another—)

Herewiss remembered the terrible alienness of the last night with Freelorn, the feeling of having a stranger in the bed—all the more terrible because the stranger had been his loved not half an hour before. “The way he treated me is nothing I ever saw before.”

(Well enough. But when one form of binding doesn’t work, an entity tries another—)

Dully, Herewiss began to eat. The food seemed tasteless. “And he was doing that?”

(It could be. Your strength is considerable, though. It comes as no surprise that he went away so angry. I think he’ll try again, but not the way he did last time—)

“It seems so useless. I need my Power—I thought he understood that—”

(The little one, the shieldmaid,) Sunspark said, (
she
understands. I think he might envy that a little.)

Herewiss considered it.

(That seems all she does, though; understand,) said Sunspark. (Which may cause problems— But enough. Eat!)

He ate, and began to feel less tired and lightheaded…but he could feel depression beginning to creep up on him. Maybe there was something he could do. There was, after all, the Soulflight drug—

“Sunspark,” he said, “the bottle of drug, would you get it for me?”

She regarded him with an odd startled look. (Will you hazard that again? I’m not sure this place is good for its use. There are influences here that may have contaminated your use of it the last time—)

“The last time was bad because the argument was fresh, Spark,” Herewiss said. “I could use something to cheer me up, to relax me—”

(
Relax
you?? Herewiss, you are fresh from a bout of sorcery; you slept for a night and a day! You’ve said how debilitating the drug can be! It’ll be the end of you if you abuse it!)

“What are you worrying about?” Herewiss said. “I’d come back.”

Sunspark looked at him, her face still, though Herewiss could feel the roil of emotions that she did not yet know how to make into the proper expressions. She turned and went out of the room very quickly.

A pang of guilt smote him immediately. That
was mean of me,
he thought.
But it is funny that it should be so concerned—

He stopped in midchew. All the little kindnesses that he had been accepting from Sunspark; all the small gentle gestures: the chair, the food it brought back from the villages on the edge of the Waste, the sword blanks it had been fetching all the way from Darthis— But he had been judging it by human standards. No elemental would act like that normally. He compared the Sunspark of his first acquaintance, rough, uncaring, fierce of demeanor, testing him with thoughtless ferocity, with this one—calm, considerate, a tamed power waiting on him at table. A fire elemental, handling water for his sake. And now concerned about his death, where before it had not even believed in it. The feelings he had underheard when it went out of the room: fear? pain?

Maybe love?

Oh, no,
he thought again.
It couldn’t possibly have understood about love, but I did try so hard to teach it. And now it knows. And it wants to try it out, the same way it tried to unite with me before—but this time on my terms—

He put down what was left of the bread, and stared across the table at the lover’s-cup.
It needs, now. I’ve taught it loneliness, which it never knew before. And now I’m going to have to teach it pain, because I can’t be what it needs, but I will go get what I need—

The cup sat there, full of wine and promise. It was the Goddess’s cup, the cup poured for Her at each meal to remind those who ate that all set before them was, one way or another, the product of Her love—as were the people with whom they ate. When the meal was done, if there were lovers there, the youngest of them would drain the cup together in Her name. If one was alone, one said the Blessing for the Sundered and drank it in his own name and the name of his loved, wherever that one might be. Herewiss remembered how it had used to be in the lonely days when he was young. He had been rather ugly, and when he drank the cup and called on the Loved Who Will Be to await his coming, he secretly despaired of its ever happening, of ever finding another part of himself. Now, in these later days, at least he had a name to speak; but most of the time he seemed to be drinking the cup alone, and for the past month or so the ceremony, once a reassurance and a joy, had become bitter to him.

Here, though, was a possibility. To take the Soulflight drug, and step out of the body, and go in search of Freelorn; to meet him outside the flesh, so that they could admire anew each other’s inner beauties, without the bitter base emotions clouding their eyes. To look upon one another transfigured, and share one another in the boundless lands beyond the Door, united in an ecstasy of freedom, of joy and omniscience and incalculable power—

Sunspark came back in with the bottle. Her eyes were shadowed and she would not look at Herewiss directly; her glance lingered on the lovers’-cup as she came to stand by the table. Herewiss reached out and took the bottle from her.

“Thank you,” he said.

Her eyes glanced about uncomfortably. Herewiss reached out, took her warm hand, looked up and met those eyes and held them. Deep brown-amber eyes, shot with sparks of fire, looked fearfully back at him.

“Sunspark,” he said, “don’t worry, I’ll be all right. Please don’t worry.”

She squeezed his hand back, but the fear in her eyes was no less. She turned and left.