The Door into Shadow (32 page)

Hasai bent low over her. The dark forms in the shadows leaned in all around her, hearing what passed among them for blasphemy, saying nothing in a darkness that was growing. They could do nothing, be nothing, until she chose. It was all down to her, as she knelt there for what seemed like a long time, in the cold.

“
Mdaha,” Segnbora said at last, shaking all over. Slowly, she leaned forward until she was on her hands and knees on the stone.
“Mdeihei—”

They leaned in close, the huge form above her, the many indistinct forms in the shadows. She reached behind her, toward Hasai. Wings reached down to shelter her, but it wasn’t shelter she was interested in. Segnbora’s hand found the burning mouth, and jaws closed over it. She pulled those wings down around her, into her, wore them and their body and their heart.

Under the stone, darkness burned. She cocked forward the terrible diamond razors of the wings’ forefingers, intent on the place where her deepest anguish lay. “My
mdeihei,
this is what you wanted. And what I want now. If we die of it…”

A roar of defiance and challenge went up from the gathered generations.

“
Mnek-é,” she whispered:
I remember.
Her talons raked down and laid her soul bare at last. Stone peeled away, and her control went with it. Night fell.

***

Her nuncle, of course. Nuncle Bal was in and out of the old house at Asfahaeg all the time, busy around the land—gardening, cutting trees, planting new ones. She had watched him about his business often enough, and sometimes she’d noticed him looking at her for a long time. She wondered sometimes whether he was lonely and wanted to play, but she never quite got around to making friends with him. There was too much else to do.

She had the Fire, a lot of it, and pretty soon they were going to send her away to a real school where you learned to do magic with it, instead of just simple body-fixings and underspeech, which were all the Rodmistress down in town would teach her. At the school they’d make her a Rod of her own, and she’d be able to do all kinds of things.

In the meantime, there were lessons and exercises to make the Fire grow, and she was busy with those. In fact, she had stumbled by herself on one special exercise that gave her the same tingling excitement that the Fire did, though in a slightly different way. When she showed her new method to Welcaen, her mother had laughed and praised her, and told her it was fine to enhance the Fire thus, but that she shouldn’t forget to be private when she did it. The most private spot she could think of was the hiding place behind the old chicken house, where the willows’ branches hung down all around, making a dusky green cave. And that was where she had spent most of that warm spring day, delightedly touching herself in that special secret place—until Nuncle Bal came brushing through the downhanging branches and stopped in surprise, to stand there staring at her.

Her mother had told her that usually it was not polite to be naked with someone unless you had agreed on it beforehand. Not knowing how Nuncle Bal felt about it, she pulled her smock back down and smiled at him.

“
Hi,” she said.

He smiled back, and all of a sudden she felt cold inside, because there was something wrong with the way he was smiling. Confused, she put out her underhearing and listened.

What she heard made her so scared that she couldn’t pull it back again, couldn’t even move. She never heard anything like
this
before. Her mother and father when they shared—she knew that feeling. It was warm: a filling-and-being-filled feeling. She wasn’t sure what they were doing, exactly, but it wasn’t
this.
The feeling that went with
this
was cold: a wanting, and wanting-to-be-in-something. It was hungry, just hungry enough to
take—

He was letting the rake fall against the willow trunk, and she was getting really scared now, so that she started to jump up and run away. But he was right in front of her already, and he grabbed her hard around the throat with one hand, and covered her mouth with the other. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to scream, to cry, but there wasn’t any air. Her ears started to ring and everything went red in front of her.

Nuncle Bal seemed to be saying something, but she couldn’t tell what it was through the red, the black, the roaring. She fell backward into the darkness, silently begging
oh please, let it be a bad dream. Let me wake up, please!

After a while the roaring went away some.
It was a dream,
she began to think, and then heard his voice, thick, low and hungry. “You want it,” he said. Her eyes came open. She saw his twisted smile, shuddered, and squeezed them shut again. “You want it. Sure you want it.”

He was doing something to her smock. What was he— “Mamaaaaa!” she started to scream, tears starting to her eyes. But before she could get the scream out that hand came down on her throat again. The red, the roaring,
oh no, pleeeeeeeease –

Her back was cold. She was on the ground again, and her smock was off. So were Nuncle Bal’s britches, and she squirmed and fought but couldn’t get out from under his hands. His breath was on her face and he leaned in and pushed her legs far apart, too far. It hurt, and what was he doing, he was rubbing her secret place, the wrong way! And what, what—

NOOOOO!!

The scream wouldn’t come out of her throat. It was all inside her head, a shrieking pain, but not as bad as how he was hurting her down there. He was in her secret place that was supposed to be for her to share with her loved some day, and he was pushing himself inside. There was a horrible burning pain, again, and again, until she felt herself being torn open. There was a white-hot line of relief, then, and new agony stitching itself through the rest of the burning. It was sickening. She wanted to retch but couldn’t, his hand—

Tears rolled down the sides of her face, into her hair. After a while she couldn’t feel them or anything else, it hurt so bad— Inside she yelled and yelled for help, but no help came. They weren’t sensitives and they couldn’t hear her, any of them! He was pushing it in and out, hard. It hurt worse and worse, and he was breathing fast and hot right in her face. She was breathing his wet stale breath and that made her want to be sick too—and it hurt, it
hurt, somebody make it stop! Somebody, Mama, Daddy, Goddess, please, please
make it stop!

He slumped forward, and she thought she felt something shoot inside her, but she wasn’t sure because of the pain, the way it burned, her secret place that had always felt so nice. Broken, torn, she’d never be able to use it again. No one would love her, ever,
hers
was broken—and the Fire, when he hurt her, it came out, it was in the pain, part of the pain,
no more, never, it hurt, horrible—

She lay there and sobbed for air, all the screams in her stifled by horror; and when he came around and knelt over her face and pushed the hard thing, all bloody, into her slack mouth, and rubbed it in and out, she let him. At least he wasn’t hurting her anymore. But when he turned her over and started to put it against that other place, she realized that he was going to hurt her even worse this time. No one was going to come help her now, either. She pushed her face down against the cold harsh dirt and tried with all her might to die.

It didn’t work. When her first scream broke free, he strangled it again. The terrible strength of his hand turned the world red and then black once more. The last thing she heard as she pitched forward into blackness was, very remote, the sound of some little girl screaming as the size of him tore her open the other way, too.

Eventually her hearing came back. She heard him pick up his rake and hurry away, pushing the rustling branches aside. Some while later, lying as she was with her face on the hard ground, she felt-heard hoofbeats, cantering, then galloping. He was gone. Very slowly she got up. It hurt, especially when she moved her legs at all. She pulled down her smock and scrubbed at her face to try to get the dirt off: her father didn’t like her to be dirty.

That roaring stayed with her all that day, as confusion and rage shouted all around her. It was in her thoughts now, dazed, shocked, going around and around in her head and coming back again to what she’d felt tangled up with the agony—the Fire—and shying away from the thought and coming back, endlessly.

When they finally put her to bed, full of some bitter herbal potion the Rodmistress had made her drink so she’d sleep, still her head roared behind the steady flow of her tears. Only later, after she had been staring for hours at the vague circles the candles made on the ceiling, did the tears flow more slowly. Gradually, the pain between her legs began to feel far away. The roar died to a whisper. But the whisper said the same thing she had been hearing all day, and by the sound of it, she fell asleep:
No more. Horrible. All wrong. Never again.

And there was a quieter whisper beneath that, one so soft that she hadn’t heard it then, never heard it afterward, only heard it now with a Dragon’s impossibly sharp underhearing—a seed of rage, taking root in blood and battered flesh, burning dark with hate.
Some day, when I’m big, I’ll kill him.

***

The pain, experienced at last, slowly fell away and left her among her
mdeihei
with the fiery tears running down her face. They held their silence, waiting to hear what she would sing before beginning to weave counterpoint or dissonance about it.

She was exhausted. It was fifteen years since that afternoon under the willow. Fifteen years since she had shown herself any more than Balen’s terrible smile, or thought of the experience as more than “the rape.” She had thought she was over it, past it all.

What idiocy.

As she grew, she had quickly given up thinking much about sharing her body with others. Her agemates indulged in all the delightful anticipation of adolescence—the feeling that something magical awaited them when sharing began. But she had already been plunged into an experience that had about it nothing whatsoever of magic. When she came of age, every sharing, however innocent, had a touch of the sordid about it, a taste of fear which made her want to get it over with quickly. Afterwards, she would inevitably plunge into another sharing, in search of what had been missing. She never found it. Nor, as she got close to the brink of focusing, had she ever managed that, either. How could she, when sharing felt so much like Fire?

It’s so simple. Since the Fire feels like loving, allow yourself only sharings that can’t work, or won’t last. Reject those who love you, pursue the uninterested. That way you’ll never have to do much of what feels like the Fire, but isn’t. And let that furious, hating part of your mind betray your Fire every time it’s close to focus, forcing it to starve away to nothing, so you won’t have to spend the rest of your life with that inside you
—
what feels like loving, and isn’t.

She could just hear the Shadow laughing.

Slowly Segnbora lifted her gemmed head, and sang relief and grief and weary regret at the walls. From the shadows her
mdeihei
took up the dark melody and shared it with her in compassionate plainsong. “Oh Immanence,” she sang, “I’m full of Power, and in danger of running forever dry; I’ve shared a hundred times, and I’m virgin still; I walk on water, and yet thirst…” She brought her wings down against the floor in a gesture of bitterness.

“
And the nightmare was right, too. I’m a killer. The Shadow has merely to touch that memory ever so lightly, and I kill yet again. Is this my destiny, then? To be a clockwork toy that can be set to killing by anyone who happens to find the key?”

In ruthless but regretful honesty her
mdeihei
answered her in one long note that shook the cave.
“Yes!”

“
Or so it seems...” Hasai said.

She looked over at her
mdaha,
catching for the first time the unease that had always been in his voice. Segnbora had never before been Dracon enough to hear it. He gazed back, gentle-eyed, huge, terrible as a thundercloud with wings. And yet, to Dracon eyes, he too was frightened, crippled, shadowed. Looking at him now, a question Segnbora had idly toyed with once or twice before suddenly changed its shape and became essential.

“
Mdaha,” she said, bending her head down close to his. “Hasai
sithesssch
—
what were you doing at the Morrowfane?”

He made as if to back away and then stopped, apparently unwilling to disturb the tiny human figure that rested against his right forelimb, watching them. “Going
rdahaih
, I thought. Until you came along—”

“
But a Dragon always knows the details of when he’ll go
mdahaih
. It’s the first scene one sees when one becomes able to remember ahead.” She leaned closer still, curled her tail around to pinion the other’s and stop its unnerved lashing. Whose body was this she was wearing, scaled in star-emeralds fiery green as new spring growth, spined in yellow diamond? And why did the sight of it make Hasai so nervous? “
Mdaha
,” she sang, staring at him golden eyes to silver ones, “your becoming mdahaih in me, it was no accident! You knew! You
always
knew, from when you were a Dragoncel.” She looked at him more closely. “And Dragon or human,” Segnbora said, “those who climb the Fane are given what they need…”

Hasai turned his head away. Segnbora arched her neck around, not allowing him the evasion. “‘Share our memories,’ you’re always saying. But even for you, there are memories that are only words: no images.
Ihr’Hhaossia,”
she said.
The Worldwinning
—

Hasai winced, negation again. The
mdeihei
were as still as a held breath.

“
You knew this would come,” she said. “Now you have no choice either. You strove for us to be one, Hasai, and now we are. You are me, and at Bluepeak the Shadow will strike at you too. If you succumb, so do I. Then Lorn dies, and the Kingdoms founder, and I’m forsworn. And far worse than that will follow. The green place you fought for, the world you treasure so, will fall under the Shadow’s domination, and not even Dragons will be safe. We must settle what’s under your stone, now, or the Shadow will settle it for us!”