The Door Into Fire totf-1 Read online

  He plucked the metal fragment out of his arm and threw it into the grass, grimacing. For a long while Herewiss knelt there, bent over, hugging himself as much against the bitter disappointment as against the cold. I was so sure-it would work this time. So sure .

  Finally he regained some of his composure, and finished picking the splinters out of himself, and turned to make farewell obeisance to the Altar. It seemed to crouch there against the ground, cold white stone, ignoring him. He forgot about the obeisance. He went straight over to Dapple and got dressed, and rode away from there.

  It was several minutes before he passed the marker that indicated the end of the Silent Precincts. Just the other side of it he paused, looking up through the leaves at the starlit sky. 'Dammit,' he yelled at the top of his lungs, 'what am I doing wrong? Why won't You tell me? What am I doing wrong?'

  The stars looked down at him, cold-eyed and uncaring, and the wind laughed at him.

  He kicked Dapple harder than necessary, and rode out of the Wood to Freelorn's rescue.

  2

  If the cat who shares your house will not speak to you, remember first that cats, like the Goddess their Mother, never speak unless there is something worth saying, and someone who needs to hear it.

  Darthene Homilies, Book 3, 581

  They were called the Middle Kingdoms because they were in the middle of the world as men then knew it. To the north was the great Sea, of which little was known. Ships had gone out into it many times, seeking for the Isles of the North mentioned in tale and rumor, but if those Isles existed, no ship had come back to tell about them. To the west, on the far western border of Arlen, was a great impassable range of mountains. Legend said that the demons' country of Hreth lay beyond them, but no-one particularly cared to brave the terrible snow-choked passes and find out. Southward there were more mountains, the Highpeaks or Southpeaks, depending on whether you were speaking Arlene or Darthene; no-one had even ventured far enough into them to find out if they ever ended, though there were stories of the Five Meres hidden among them. Eastward, past the river Stel, the eastern border of Steldin and Darthen and civilized lands in general, the lands stretched into great empty desert wastes. Many had tried to cross them; most came back defeated, and the rest never came back at all. Those who did come back would occasionally speak of uncanny happenings, but most of the time they flatly refused to discuss the Waste. The Dragons might have known more about what went on there, or in the lands over the mountains; but Dragons only talk to the human March– warders who are sometimes their companions, and the

  Marchwarders, when asked, would smile and shake their heads.

  The Kingdoms were four: Arlen, Darthen, Steldin, and North Arlen. Through them were scattered various small independent cities and principalities. The Brightwood was one of these, though like most of the smaller autonomies it had joined itself to a larger Kingdom, Darthen, for purposes of trade and protection. Arlen and Darthen were the two oldest Kingdoms, and the greatest; between them they stretched straight across all the known lands, from the mountains to the Waste Unclaimed, slightly more than three hundred leagues. The border between them was defined by the river Arlid,

  which flows from the High-peaks to the Sea, south to north, a hundred leagues or so. It was not a guarded border, for the two lands had been bound by oaths of peace and friendship for hundreds of years. That, however, might change shortly . . .

  Herewiss rode along through the sparsely wooded, hilly country three days' journey south of the Brightwood, and thought about politics. It seemed that there was nothing in the world that could be depended upon. The Oath of Lion and Eagle had been sworn for the first time nearly twelve hundred years ago, and sworn again every time a king or queen came to the throne in either country – until now. When Freelorn's father King Ferrant had died on the throne six years past, Freelorn had been in Darthen; but it might not have been possible for Freelorn to claim the kingship even if he had been in Prydon city when it happened. Ferrant had not yet held the ceremony of affirmation in which the White Stave was passed on to his son, and Freelorn's status was therefore in question. Power had been seized shortly thereafter by a group of the king's former counsellors, backed by mercenary forces hired by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer; and this

  lord, a man named Cillmod, had declared Freelorn outlawed.

  These occurrences, though personally outrageous to Herewiss, were not beyond belief. Such things had happened before. But six months ago, armed forces, both mercenaries and Arlene regulars, had moved into Darthen and taken land on the east side of the Arlid. Though the Oath had not been sworn again by the ruling junta, that did not make it any less binding on them. In all the years since its first swearing at the completion of the Great Road, neither country had ever attacked the other. Herewiss was nervous; he felt as if lightning were overdue to strike.

  'Listen,' his father had said to him, leaning on the doorpost of Herewiss's room three days before, 'are you sure you don't want some people to take with you?'

  'I'm sure.' Herewiss had been packing; he was standing before his bookshelf, choosing the grimoires he would take with him. 'Notice would be taken — there would be reprisals later. The situation

  would only get worse. And even with the biggest force we could muster, we wouldn't have a third enough people to crack a siege that size. Besides, our people need to be here, putting in crops.' Herewiss took down a thick leatherbound book, filled with notes and spells of illusion.

  'That's so … Have you got food?'

  'Plenty.' Herewiss dropped the book in his saddlebag, along with another that already lay on the bed. The ornate carving of bed and paneling and windows was lost in evening dark, and only an occasional warm highlight showed in the light of the single oil lamp on the bedside table. 'I cleaned out the pantry. I have enough trailfood to last me through four years of famine, and I ate a big dinner.' He went over to a chest, lifted the lid and took out

  a white surcoat emblazoned with the arms of the Bright-wood: golden Phoenix rising from red flame, the oldest arms in the Kingdoms. 'Should I take this, do you think?'

  'Is there some formal occasion out in the wilds that you're planning to attend?'

  'No. But if I need to exert political pull, it might come in handy.'

  'You could take my signet.'

  'What if I lost it? That's the second-oldest thing in the Wood, I'd never forgive myself if something happened to it. No, hang on to it. The surcoat should be enough – the device could be counterfeited, but the gold in the embroidery is real.' He folded up the surcoat, stowed it in the saddlebag.

  'Do you want some mail?'

  'No. I'm going to travel light so I can move fast. Besides, why bother giving anyone the idea that I might be worth robbing? And I'm taking that damn turtleshell of a leather corselet, and I have plenty of padding, and that nice light Masterforge knife you gave me last Opening Night. And the spear; and the cloak is good and thick –Anybody who gets past all that deserves to kill me, I think: and if they do, it'll prove that you and Mard were wasting your talents on me these sixteen years.' Herewiss stood up straight from checking his bags. 'Besides, I inherited your iron britches. Don't worry so much.'

  Hearn looked with concern at his son. Clothed in dark tunic and breeches and riding boots, cloaked in brown, Herewiss seemed one more shadow of the many in the room. The lamplight reflected from his eyes, and from the metal fittings of the empty scabbard hanging from his belt. 'Son,' Hearn said, 'I'm not too worried about you. But the pattern that's been forming bothers me. I worry about Freelorn. Not so much the fact that he's been running

  around the Kingdoms like a crazy person for the past six years, staying at petty kings' courts until someone finds out he's there and tries to poison him. He's pretty alert about such things, usually. Or the business of his running around with his little sword tail and stealing for a living. He seems to steal from people who need it. But lately he's been coming to grief a bit too often, just missing getting caught
– and you've been having to go and get him out of these scrapes. And now this; here he is, stuck in this old keep with a thousand Steldenes waiting to starve him out –and you're going to go get him out of it. Alone. Herewiss, it's not really safe.'

  'I'll manage,' Herewiss said. 'What are you thinking father?'

  'This. What happens when he gets into something that you can't get him out of?'

  'By then I hope I'll have my Power . . .'

  'But you don't have it yet, and if you get killed for Freelorn's sake, you never will. Son of mine—' and Herewiss's underhearing brought him a sudden wash of his father's sorrow, a feeling like eyes filling with tears – 'I have long since reconciled myself to the fact that you're going to die young – by use of the Flame, or more slowly by all this sorcery. Yet I want you to be what you can. Here you are, the first male in an age and a half to have enough of the Fire to use – the first sign that the Kingdoms are getting back to the way things were before the Catastrophe. But you have to live to be what you can. At least for a little longer. And Freelorn is endangering you.'

  'Father,' Herewiss said very softly, 'what good is the Power to me if Lorn dies? He's the only thing I need as much as the Flame. Life would be empty without him, the Fire would mean nothing to me. There are priorities.'

  'Is your life one of them?'

  Herewiss reached out, took his father's hands in his. 'Da, listen. I won't follow Lorn into any of his famous last stands or impossible charges. I'll try not to let him get into them. I'd like to see him king, yes – but I won't let him drag me into some crazy scheme that has a dead Dragon's chance against the Dark of succeeding. However, I also won't let him get killed if there's any way I can help it –and if my life is the price of his continuing, well, there it is. I can't help how I feel.'

  Hearn sighed softly. 'You're a lot like your brother,' he said, 'and just as hard to reason with. I gave you the oak as your tree at your birth, my son, and sometimes I think your head is made of it … '

  'It was a good choice,' Herewiss said, smiling faintly. 'Lightning strikes oak trees more than any other kind. And I have to be crazy sometimes: I have a reputation to uphold. "The only thing sure about the Lords' line of the Wood—'"

  '"—is that there's nothing sure about them,"' his father finished, smiling too. 'Fool.'

  'They told Earn our Father that He was a fool at Bluepeak, and look what happened to Him.'

  'I would sooner be father to a live son,' Hearn said, 'than to a dead legend.'

  'I'll be careful,' said Herewiss.

  'Have a safe journey, then. And good hunting.'

  So Herewiss had taken his leave of his other relatives and friends in the Woodward, and had said goodbye to the Rooftree, and then had stopped in the stable to choose a horse. He had originally been of a mind to take Darrafed, his little thoroughbred Arlene mare, a present from Freelorn – or perhaps Shag, his father's curly-coated bay warhorse. But as he had walked down the aisle between

  the stalls, Dapple had put his head out over his stall's half-door and looked at Herewiss as if he knew something. Herewiss was not one to ignore a sign when it presented itself.

  The horse moved comfortably through the low hill country. As long as he kept to a steady southward course, Herewiss let Dapple have his head. The horse was a wise one. About a hundred years before, a Rodmistress had put her deathword on one of Dapple's ancestors and had decreed that the horses of that line would always have a talent for being in the right place at the right time. The talent had seemed to do their riders good as well. One horse, the third generation down, had carried an unsuspecting lady to the arms of the lover who had searched the Middle Kingdoms for her for twelve years. Another had led its thirteen-year-old mistress to the place where the royal Darthene sword, Forlennh BrokenBlade, had been hidden during the Reavers' invasion of Darthis City. Having Dapple along, Herewiss reasoned, would make his father worry a little less – and might incidentally ease his way as he worked on getting Freelorn out of that keep.

  For three days he had been riding through empty land. It was not bare – Spring had run crazy through the fields, as if drunk on rose wine, flinging wildflowers and garlands of new greenery about with inebriated extravagance. The hills were ablaze with suncandle and Goddess's-delight, tall yellow Lovers'-cup lilies and heartheal. Butterwort and red-and-blue never-say-die clambered up the gullies toward the hillcrests, and white mooneyes covered the ground almost everywhere that grass did not. But there were no people, no homesteads. For one thing, the land was poor for farming. For another, that part of the country was full of Fyrd.

  The Fyrd had always been in the Kingdoms; they were

  said to be children of the Shadow, sent by Him to spread death and misery in the Goddess's despite: or even creations of the Dark itself, changed things which had been made from normal animals when the Dark still covered the world. Whatever the case, most of North Darthen was still full of the major Fyrd species –horwolves, nadders, keplian, lathfliers, maws, hetscold, and destreth. In Herewiss's time, the land around the Wood was free of them – kept that way by constant use of the Power and the cold-eyed accuracy of Brightwood archers. But outside the Wood's environs the Fyrd raided constantly, taking great numbers of livestock, and also men whenever they could get them. Sheep were pastured here in the hill country, but all the shepherds came up together after the Maiden's Day feasts. Both flocks and men stood a better chance in large numbers.

  The hills were thinning out now and farms were beginning to appear. They became more frequent as Herewiss and Dapple descended into the lowlands, and one very large farm with stone markers indicated that Herewiss was close to the town he had been expecting to reach that evening. The farm was the holding of a prominent Darthene house, the Lords Arian. He could have stopped there and received excellent hospitality, being after all the next thing to a prince; but attention drawn to himself was the last thing he wanted at this point.

  He rode on down from the hills, crossing a rude stone bridge over the Kearint, a minor tributary of the river Darst, and came to the forty-house town of Havering Slides just as dusk was falling. Most of the people who lived there were hands on the big Arian farm. Herewiss rode up to the gate in the wooden palisade around the town, identified himself and was admitted without question.

  The inn was as he had remembered it from earlier visits, a motley– looking place with a disjointed feeling to it; new buildings ran headlong into old ones, and afterthought second storeys sagged on their supports over uneasy-looking bay windows. It seemed that some of the artisans who had done carving work in the Woodward had also passed this way. The gutterspouts were fashioned into panting hound-faces and singing frogs; crows stealing cheese in their wooden beaks leered down from the cupolas.

  Herewiss rode up to the stable door and handed Dapple over to the girl in charge. As he strode toward the doorway of the inn, his saddlebags slung over his shoulder, he was greeted by the sudden and beautiful odor of roast beef. After three days of nourishing but tasteless journey rations, the prospect of real food seemed almost an embarrassment of luxury. He paused at the door just long enough to admire the carving over it, a cross-grain bas-relief of a local Rodmistress casting the Shadow out of a possessed cow.

  Herewiss pushed open the door and went in. It took his eyes a few minutes to get used to the dim interior of the place, though there were oil lamps all around. He was standing in a fairly large common room crowded with tables and chairs and long trestled benches. The room was not too full, it still being early in the evening. Several patrons sat about a table, dicing for coppers, and off in one corner a hulking farmer was devouring a steak pie in great mouthfuls.

  The steak pie particularly interested Herewiss. Bags in hand, he went to the kitchen door, which was carved with dancing poultry, and knocked.

  The door opened, and the innkeeper looked out at him cordially. She was a tall slender woman, grayhaired but

  pretty, in a brown robe and a long stained apron. 'Can I help you, si
r?' she said, wiping her hands on a dirty gray towel.

  'Madam,' Herewiss said, bowing slightly, 'food and lodging for the night for myself and my horse would do nicely.'

  'Half an eagle,' the innkeeper said, looking at his clothes, which were in good repair.

  'A quarter,' said Herewiss, smiling his best and most charming smile at her.

  She smiled back at him. 'A quarter eagle and threepence.' 'Two.'

  The innkeeper smiled more broadly. 'Two it is. Your horse is inside?'

  'He is, madam.'

  'Dinner?'

  'Oh, yes,' Herewiss said. The good smells coming out of the kitchen were making his stomach talk. 'Some of what that gentleman is having, if there's another one . . .'

  She nodded. 'Anything to drink? We have wine, red and white and Delann yellow; brown and black ale; and my husband made a fresh barrel of Knight's Downfall yesterday.'

  'Ale sounds good: the black. Which room should I take?'

  'Up the stairs, turn right, third door to your left.' The innkeeper disappeared back into the kitchen's steam.

  Herewiss hurried up the creaking stairs and found the room in question. It was predictably musty, and the floor groaned under him. The shutters screeched in protest when he levered them open to let the sunset in, but he was so glad to have a hot meal in the offing that the place looked as good as any king's castle to him. He dropped his

  bag in the corner, under the window, and changed into another clean dark tunic; then headed for the door. Halfway through the doorway, an afterthought struck him. He raised his hands to draw the appropriate gestures in the air, and since no-one was near,

  spoke aloud the words of a very minor binding, erecting a lockshield around his bags. Then down the stairs he went.

  He sat down at an empty table in a corner and spent a few moments admiring the window nearest him, which was a crazy amalgam of bottle-glass panes and stained vignettes. One of them, done in vivid shades of rose, cobalt, and emerald, showed the ending of the old story about the man who fooled the Goddess into lifting her skirts by confronting Her with an illusion-river. There he lay under the trees at Harvest festival, inextricably stuck to and into an illusionary lover, while the Goddess and the harvesters stood around and laughed themselves weak. The man looked understandably mortified, and very chastened. He had been very lucky in playing his trick on the Mother aspect of the Goddess — had She been manifesting as the Maiden at the time, She might not have been so kind. The Mother tends to be forgiving of Her children's pranks, but the Maiden is sometimes fatally jealous of Her modesty.