The Door into Shadow (28 page)

Mortal, and beset by mortality’s limitations even out of her body, Segnbora could contain only a small part of Its being in herself—but it was enough. In a sickening flash she experienced the incalculable rage of One Who had possessed Godhead and for jealousy’s sake had then thrown it away. There was pain, too, an anguish deeply colored with blame for the Goddess Who’d let the pain happen—

There was no time for more. Segnbora didn’t speak, didn’t even truly think, but merely held her control as best she could and looked at the painful memories, living inside the old story, wordlessly recreating it with a Dragon’s immediacy and a storyteller’s skill. It was an easy story to tell, for she knew it by heart. It was the same story she’d dreamed that night in the old Hold: the story of the Maiden, of Death, and of Her children, the Two, Who had loved one another.

The hatred that was the rest of herself still strove to reach out and destroy Herewiss—but It did so less vehemently, distracted by memories ancient beyond telling. Ever so gradually Segnbora shifted the story’s focus, making it less a narrative, more an invitation.

Do You remember how it was? The two of You loving outside the constraints of existence, taking eons to learn and love one another’s infinite depths? Do You remember the divine passion, how Your loving invented time and space—a place to love and explore together, in all the bodies that ever lived? Do You remember the Loved, and how there was always One Who understood? Your sister, Your brother, Your beloved… O remember!

It was in Nhàired she sang now, as if weaving a spell, silently recalling the Song of the Lost. Normally that Song was never voiced except during the Dreadnights, in the depths of the Silent Precincts, to beseech the Shadow to remember Its ancient joy and be merciful to the world. Segnbora sang it now without the fearful intonations the Rodmistresses used, but winding poignant Dracon motifs of compassion and forgiveness around the words. She was calling to herself as much as to the other. Vile though her darknesses were, they were rooted in the memory of the loss of joy, just as the Shadow’s malice was founded in the pain of Its ancient loss, the memory of love discarded forever. And if It could not be saved, neither could she….

The Shadow held still in the stone, Its malice wavering, half forgotten. A hasty flicker of perception stolen through It showed Herewiss, hanging on in the stone, shuddering with pity and also with fear for her. No one had ever before been so foolhardy as to sing the Song of the Lost in first person, and tempt the Shadow. But Herewiss was already examining the strata around him, and Segnbora felt him find the spot where the Shadow’s consciousness had rooted Itself most concretely into the stone.

But yet will come that time when Time is done, the world begun again, aright,
she sang, pouring herself into the promise.
And once again We shall be as We were—

She drew away, singing. The Shadow surrounded her, towering above, about to drown her in deadly consummation. She dared not react, but only looked up into the darkness, arms open wide –

Without warning Khávrinen’s essence flicked through the earth like a white-hot thought burning through a brain, instantly severing the linkage of the Shadow’s consciousness to the stone.

There was time for just one wild shriek of rage and betrayal before the dark presence faded, temporarily banished.

But that single cry was enough. All around Herewiss an unstoppable tremor stirred in the stone….and as it did, an ominous coppery feeling with an aftertaste of blood began sliding through Segnbora’s self. The Moon was eclipsing.

(Goddess!
Herewiss, get out of there. We have to get back to our bodies or you won’t be able to control this!)

(Right,) Herewiss said, sounding distracted. Khávrinen swept again and again through the bedrock, and its unseen Fire wavered with Herewiss’s alarm as he tried to cut himself free of his empathy with the stone. (I seem to have gotten kind of attached here, you go ahead—)

(Are you
crazy
? This is your wreaking and I’m stuck in it!) Precious seconds slipped away as Herewiss laid about him harder and harder with Khávrinen, and still didn’t move. (Dammit! My own Fire won’t cut my own Fire—)

(Watch out!) Segnbora said. Furiously, she whipped down her right wing at the stone, the wing tipped with the black razor-diamond that was Skádhwë. Through fathoms of marble and granite it sliced, the shadow of a shadow, until it reached the rock under Herewiss, passed through it—

He shot upward and out of the strata, free. Shrugging off her Dracon-self, Segnbora followed him up and out of the empathy.

They broke the surface of the valley, gasped for the dear familiarity of breath like swimmers down too long, and began running up the air in frantic haste. The Moon’s face, full now, was stained half red against the early evening sky. The stain grew larger as they raced for the tower window with the light in it. Under them, red fire dove and swooped about the valley, driving massed darknesses before it. They spared the sight hardly a glance, diving through the tower wall. Segnbora threw herself down on the cot where her body lay—

—
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 obliterated 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.