The Door into Shadow (29 page)

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…”

***

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 them. “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.

But then unease seemed to have overtaken everybody these days. No longer were they simply fugitives on the run from Cillmod’s mercenaries; the Shadow was after them now, too, and the knowledge that their souls were in peril had them all on edge. Even Herewiss was short of conversation at the moment, drawing closer to Lorn and pulling away from the others, as every step closer to Bluepeak, where the Darthenes were massing to meet the Shadow’s challenge, brought the reality of his true-dream closer.

His anxiety had been affecting Freelorn in turn. Increasingly Lorn wore a haunted expression, and when his people looked to him for answers, his attempts to reassure them mostly left them with an even stronger sense of his inner distress.
The Shadow doesn’t need to threaten us from without to make us ineffective,
Segnbora thought, morose, as the afternoon dragged the Sun down to eye level, turning the western horizon into a blinding nuisance.
Using our own fears to drive us apart, and make us less able to protect Lorn, will serve Its purposes well enough.

(Sdaha,)
Hasai said from way down, (we smell water.)

(Where?)

(West and south. A league as the Dragon flies.)

Segnbora nodded and drew rein, waiting for Herewiss to catch up so she could tell him about the potential place to camp, and considering Hasai had been a lot quieter than usual since Barachael. At first embarrassment had been the cause, but within a few days the reason had seemed to shift, and under his silence Segnbora kept sensing an odd satisfaction. (You’re finally becoming properly
sdahaih
,) was all he would say when she asked him about it— though his approval was strangely counterbalanced by the
mdeihei,
behind him, singing wordless and nonspecific foreboding that nonetheless had an odd joy woven through it. They were no more forthcoming than Hasai was, and finally Segnbora had given up trying to work out what was going on. She’d find out eventually.

The campsite they found three leagues ahead was in a stony, scrubby canyon: shattered, green-white cliffs above, and a dry watercourse below. Scant rains kept alive the brush and several little spinneys of warped ash and blackthorn, but nothing else. “Where’s the water?” Herewiss said to Segnbora, annoyed.

“
There,” she said, speaking Hasai’s words for him, and gestured at the face of the cliff. Herewiss gave her a look and dismounted from Sunspark.

“
No rest for the weary,” he said, and advanced on the cliff with eyes closed, checking her perception. Then he opened his eyes, picked a spot, and brought Khávrinen around in a roundhouse swing. Splintered stone shot in various directions, trailing Fire. Water followed it, bursting from the rock in a momentary release of pressure and then subsiding to a steady stream down the cliff’s face.

They watered and fed the horses while Herewiss stood gazing around with a wary look, as if expecting trouble. Segnbora went away feeling thoughtful herself, and led Steelsheen to the most distant of the ash spinneys.
This place feels wrong somehow,
she thought, preparing to tether Steelsheen to one of the ash trees.

The mare snorted, stamped, threw her head up. Segnbora looked up too.

Oh no…

The trees were warped and bent as if by the wind. Snarled among the branches of the nearest one was a blowing, filmy mass of something white. “Easy, easy…” Segnbora said to Steelsheen, backing the mare well away from the trees and throwing the reins over her head so she’d stand. Then she went back to the tree, reached up and pulled some of the white stuff away from the tangle. The long strands were white and soft as spun silk, though as unbreakably strong as any rope when she pulled a hank of the stuff between her hands—

From behind Segnbora, Herewiss reached up and pulled down the main mass of the material. As the pale, cubit-wide tangle came away from the tree, a whole mort of things came tumbling out of it to thump or clatter to the ground.

“
Look at that,” Herewiss said conversationally, bending down to poke with Khávrinen at something jutting from the white swathing. “The point-shard of a sword. Darthene Master-forge steel, see, Lorn? Look at the lines in the metal.”

“
It takes a lot to break a sword like that,” Freelorn said from beside his loved, but sounding nowhere near as composed.