The Door Into Shadow totf-2 Read online

  She was not in the Morrowfane country anymore. This was some twilit camp under the lee of a hill. She could feel the warmth of a fire against her side. She lay on her back, her limbs aching so much that she couldn't move. To her left sat Lang, warm in the firelight, gazing down at;

  her with a bleak, helpless expression. Her distress at her im-mobility fell away at the sight of him. Lang mattered: He was stability, normalcy, all embodied in one stocky blond shape.

  In all her life before this terror she had never cried for help but once, and that time help had been refused. She had never asked since. But now she had lost her mind, and surely there was nothing else to lose. Oh Lang, she tried to cry, I'm crazy, I'm scared, I can't find my way out, but I'm here—

  But the words caught on a blazing place in her throat, got twisted out of shape and came out hoarse and strange. "R'mdahe, au'Lang, irikhe', stihe-sta 'ae vehhy't-kej, ssih haa-htЈ—" Not far away Herewiss and Freelorn lay together with their backs against a rock, holding weary conversation with the campfire that burned between them and the place where she lay.

  (—indeed not,) the campfire was saying. Sunspark's eyes, ember-bright in the flickering fire, threw a glance of mild interest in her direction. (There aren't that many things in this bland little corner of the Pattern that can bother my kind. But we used to come across other travellers among the worlds, and some of them told of being unseated in heart or mind after coming to a world loo strange for them to understand. They lost their languages, some of them—)

  "Did they get better?" Freelorn said. His tone indicated that he desperately wanted to hear that they did.

  "Lorn," Herewiss said gently, putting his arm around his loved and hugging him, "we're going to have to leave her somewhere safe. She can't ride, she can't talk, she can't take care of herself. The arrow-shot she got from that last batch of bandits would have been the end of her if I hadn't been to the Fane first and learned what to do." Freelorn didn't answer.

  "I went as deep as I could last night," Herewiss said. "I couldn't hear anything but a confusion of voices, and if I can't reach her there's nothing more we can do. Look, tomorrow afternoon — tomorrow night, maybe — we'll be riding through Chavi to get the news. We can leave her there; they'll be glad to have her. She'll take her time, get better, and follow us

  when she can. Face it, Lorn, the Shadow's after us. We can't care for an invalid from here to Bluepeak."

  "She saved my life," Freelorn said, his voice breaking harshly out of him. He wasn't angry at his loved, but at the unfairness of the Morrowfane, which had done this to her and left him untouched. "Several times. ."

  "She knew what she was doing, all those times,"Herewiss said. "She knew what she was doing when she went up the Morrowfane. Lang told us so. And shell know why we're doing what we're doing, and understand." But there was little hope in his voice—

  — the blackness swallowed her again. AU around her the rush and swell of inhuman voices was beginning, faintly, as if for the first time the sources of the swnd were at some distance from her. But soon enough they would drown her resistance beneath their implacable song, close in on thai one untouchable 'memory, rip it untimely from beneath the rock

  and make it come as real as the others.

  She shuddered violently. No, oh no. And in any case I won't be left behind at the next inn as if I were a lamed horse!

  Her bruised and battered pride got up one more time from the hard floor to which it had 'been knocked, and made itself useful. I am a tai —

  Enraiesi. If my ancestors could see me they would laugh

  roe to scorn! And I'm a sensitive trained in the ways of the inner mind, Fire or no Fire. I won't stand inside here and do nothing!

  Off to one side, distantly, she could still hear Freelorn and Herewiss talking. Gulping with terror, Segnbora turned her back on them, con-centrated as best s'he could, and began making her way toward the huge

  voices, deeper into the dark. .

  Five

  Offer an enemy a fatse show of hospitality in order to damn him. and the fires will fall on your head, not his. Give him the truth with his meat and drink, and trust it not to sour the wine. .,

  s'Jheren, Advice unasked, 199

  It was a long walk, full of halts, hesitations, and confusions, for the voices seemed to grow no nearer as she walked. Then abruptly she discovered that she had a seeming-body again, by walking into a wall, hard. She staggered back from it, momentarily seeing white with pain — then stepped forward with arms outstretched, and bashed her fingertips into the wall. She pushed close to it, spreading her arms wide, embrac-ing the familiar roughness; she laid her face against it and squeezed her eyes shut against tears of vast relief. At last this place was beginning to behave as it should.

  Any trained sorcerer has an inner milieu into which he or she retreats for contemplation or preparation of sorceries. This, at last, was hers — not an abstraction of blackness and things buried, but the old cavern a mile down the seacoast from the house at Asfahaeg, her favorite secret place as a child.

  Long ago the coast dwellers had broken a thirty-foot hole through the cavern's high, domed ceiling, turning it into a rude temple where they performed wreakings and weather-sorceries to the sound of the waves crashing just outside. As an adult sorcerer Segnbora had made its image part of her, a great airy cave full of sunlight or moonlight and the smell of the ocean.

  She opened her eyes again, pushed back cautiously from the wall and looked up, trying to find the shaft-hole in the ceiling. After a moment she located it, though the shaft was

  distinguishable from the rest of the ceiling only by two or three faint stars that shone through. Odd. The cavern had never been this dark before. . She turned and looked the

  other way, trying to get herself oriented somehow. The faint rumble of the Sea bounced all around her, difficult to localize, but at last she thought she detected a slight difference in sound right across from her, a deadness that might mean the cave's opening onto the beach. She stepped cautiously away from the wall, then started to walk.

  She touched something, It wasn't the wall. It was smooth, and dry, and hot. In her shock she stumbled forward instead of jerking back, and the something clamped down on her outstretched right hand, hard. She cried out wordlessly in rage and horror at the frighten-ing violation.

  "It seems rude to put your hand in the Dragon's mouth and then scream before you know whether you've been injured," said a huge, slow, deep bass viol of a voice, from right in front of her.

  Whatever had been holding her hand released it. Segnbora backed away and stood there rubbing the hand, which had been held tightly but not hurt. She was bitterly angry at her-self for having shown fear, "What the Dark are you doing in here?" she yelled, "We were invited," said the voice, puzzled. "Your accent is poor,"it added. "Speak more slowly."

  "Accent—" She stopped and realized that she hadn't been speaking Darthene, or any human language, but the odd and terrible one that the voices in the darkness had been using. "'Never mind that! You can't be in here, this is me!" "'What is *me"?" the voice said without curiosity. "Rather, say "We are here/" There was a pause.

  '"'May we ask why you keep it so dark in here? Were you keeping it so because the place where we met was dark?"

  "I can remedy that," Segnbora said, annoyed. She lifted a hand, called up a memory of noon sunlight pouring in through the shaft—

  •—and nothing happened. """'You are leaving us out of the reckoning," said the deep, slow voice as calmly as before. "Perhaps you would assist me then," Segnbora, said, an

  noyed and uneasy. She concentrated again. "Sunlight …"

  This time the light came, streaming down through the shaft from a sky that seemed bluer and deeper than usual. Segn-bora looked down and away from the blinding light — and was blinded instead by the intruder.

  The rough dark textures of the face she had touched in the Fane were dark no longer. The sunlight spilling down from above shattered and rainbowed f
rom scales like black sap-phires, every one with its shifting star. The Dragon blazed and glittered like a queen's ransom, his every breath and move-ment creating a shower of dazzle around him.

  Now, Segnbora thought in wonder, / begin to understand that old story about Dragons spending their time lying on piles of jewels. .

  His head hung above and before her, no longer an inert, half-perceived shape as it had been in the Morrowfane cave. It was an elongated head: sleeker and more slender than a snake's. Its mouth was a beak, like that of a snapping turtle. It was the point of the beak, at the very end of the immense serrated jaw, that had closed on her hand.

  Her gaze travelled upward. From the beak to the place where the jaw met the neck was twenty feet at least The eyes were great pupilless globes filled with liquid fire, blazing a brilliant white even in the full sunlight. In the iron braziers of the nostrils the same light glowed though not so brightly

  The Dragon was watching her with no less interest. "Cast-ing one's skin for the last time is always a nuisance," it said, "but it's still one of the more pleasant things about going mdahaih. You like this body better than the one you saw in the cave?"

  "No!" Segnbora started to say, but the thought snagged on the new language living in her throat, and wouldn't move. The Dracon tongue, she realized then, put a great emphasis on accuracy of expression, and her one, bald, angry word was therefore insufficient. "You look absolutely beautiful," she said at last, "and I wish to the Dark you'd go away."

  "It wasn't my idea to become mdahaih in a human, believe me," the Dragon said. "Nor was it that, of the rest of the mdeihei. They've been making a great deal of noise about it."

  She had never heard the words before, and she under-stood them instantly. Mdahaih: indwelling within a host body and mind. Mdeihei: the indwellers, the souls of linear ancestors, the thousand-voiced consensus, the eternal com-panions.

  The thought made Segnbora's hair stand up. She realized then that the sound she had been hearing in the background was not the Sea. It was other voices, like that of the Dragon. It's a pleasant enough sound, she thought. A single Dragon sounded like a bass viol talking to itself — a deep breathy voice full of hisses and rumbles and vocal bow-scrapes. But Drag-ons in a group seemed to prefer speaking together, and had been doing just that ever since she walked back into her cav-ern. The result was a constant quiet mutter of seemingly sourceless voices: scores of them, maybe hundreds, coiling together words and meaning-melodies in decorous, dissonant musics. Now they were growing louder, They didn't approve of Segnbora, of her clumsy gropings and, her rudeness to them in the darkness into which they had been thrust. Nor did they approve of the abnormal singleness of her mind, and they said so, in a dark-hued melody that sounded like a consort of bass instruments upbraiding its audience.

  "I don't much care whose idea this whole thing was," Segn-bora. said, "But won't you, creatures please—" She fumbled for the right word, but there was no word for undoing the mdahaik relationship. "Won't you just go away?" she said finally, feeling uneasy about, the vagueness of the term.

  '"'Where?" the Dragon, said, puzzled. "Out of us!" She stopped, then, annoyed. In this language there seemed to be no singular pronouns. The only singular forms in the language were for1 inanimate objects, and human beings, and other such crippled, single-minded, entities.

  "That is impossible," the Dragon explained patiently. It had. lowered its voice into its deepest register, the one used for addressing the very young. "You are mdeihei, and will be until you die,'*'*

  The word it used was res *uu>: lose-the-old-body-and-move-into-a-new-one. Segnbora rubbed at her aching head in bewil-deimenl.

  "Listen," the Dragon said, "if you were one of us, you'd bring about hatchlings in time, and the soulbond between you and them would be established once they broke shell The bond would grow stronger in them as they grew, and weaker in you as you became old. Finally, when you left your body, you would be drawn into them: become mdahaih. And so it would be with their hatchlings, on through the generations, forever …"

  "Forever," Segnbora whispered, feeling weak. "But all those voices — they can't all be your ancestors…. we wouldn't be able to hear for the noise!"

  "The ones furthest back are hardest to hear. They fade out in time — which may be as well. The mddhm are for advice, among other things, and what kind of advice can someone gone mdahaih fifty generations ago give to the sdaha, the out-dweller? The strongest voices are the newest, the first four generations or so."

  Segnbora sat down on the floor, miserable. The great head inclined slightly to watch her, causing another brief storm of rainbows. "What happens," she said eventually, "if I die, and there are no children, and no one is close by to accept the linkage, the soulbond, as I seem to have done for you?"

  She could see no change of expression in the iron-and-diamond face, but the Dragon's tone went grave. "A few have died and gone rdahaih," he said: not "indwelling" or "out-dwelling," but "und welling." "They are lost. They and their mdeihei vanished completely, and from the mdnhei of every Dragon everywhere. They cease to be. ." Segnbora shuddered.

  The Dragon's wings rustled in its own unease. "Yourpeo-ple have a word," he said. "A Marchwarder taught it to us: 'immortality." He said that humans desire it the way we desire doing-and-being. We have '"immortality' already; only rarely do we lose it. Had you not come to the Fane, we would have gone rdahaih. Mercifully the Immanance at the heart of what-was-and-is saw to it that you were there." I'll never get married, then, Segnbora thought, heavy-hearted. Humans had a Responsibility: They had to reproduce tfaem —

  selves at least once, and until the Responsibility was fulfilled she was not free to marry any man or woman or group. She couldn't take the chance of passing this curse along to a child. She couldn't! It was going to be hard to die without knowing whether she would see the Shore—

  "O sdaha," the Dragon said quietly, "since we're going to be together for a long time — regardless of your plans for hatchlings — perhaps we might know your name?"

  She stared upward, angry again in the midst of her pain. "I don't remember asking you to listen to me think!"

  "Among sda'tdae, there's no use in asking for permission or refusing it," the Dragon said. "One hears. You'll find there's little I will hide from you. Nor do I understand why so many of your memories are lying here sealed in stone, though doubtless, answers will become plain in time."

  The pattern of notes the Dragon wove around them said plainly that he considered her something of a disappoint-ment. Still, there was compassion in the song behind the words, and amusement mixed with wry distaste at the situa-tion he found himself in. Segnbora rose slowly, She was finding it difficult to be angry for long with someone so relentlessly polite — espe-cially when, he was. so large. She was also getting the uneasy feeling that all the courtesy and precision built into the Dra-con language was there to control a potential for terrible savagery.

  "Segnbora d'Welcaen tai-Enraesi," she said, giving him the eyes-up half bow due a peer.

  "Hasai s'Vheress d'Naen s'Dithe d'Rr'nojh d'Karalh mes'-en-Dhaa'lhhw'ae," the Dragon said, giving his name only to the nearest five generations.

  The named ancestors sang quiet acknowledgment from the shadows beyond the sunlight. Hasai lowered his head almost to the floor' and raised his wings in greeting, spreading them fully upward and outward in an awesome double canopy. Membranes, like polished onyx stretched between batlike finger-struts, and the sunlight was blocked suddenly away.

  Her breath went out of her again, in sheer amazement. "Oh, my," she said., awed, "you are big. May I look at you?"

  "Certainly."

  Segnbora walked around to her left, putting some fifteen yards between herself and Hasai so she could see more of him at once. Fifty feet of jeweled neck led down to two immense double shoulders, from which sprang both the backward-bent forelimbs, now folded underneath Hasai, and the first * "upper arm" strut of the wings. Each of these struts ended at the first bend of the wing in
a curved crystalline spur, as sharp as the diamond talons on each forelimb's four claws, but much longer.

  Segnbora walked the length of the Dragon, out of the shadow of his wings, past the great corded hindlimbs, which were taloned as the forelimbs were. Slowly she walked along the crystal-spined tail, scaled in sapphires above, crusted in diamond below — and walked, and walked, and walked. Finally she came to the end of it, where the sapphires were small enough to be set in an arm-ring, and the last crystalline barb, sharp as a sword, lanced out ten feet or so from the foot-thick tailtip.

  She looked back up the length of the body between the wings. It was like looking at a hill wrought of gems and black metal. Even supine on the stony floor, the slenderest part of Hasai's body, his abdomen, was at least fifteen feet high and perhaps forty around. His upper shoulders were at least thirty feet across. There was just too much of him. "I can't understand how you fly," Segnbora said, starting back up the other side.

  "The proper frame' of mind," Hasai said, arching his head backwards to watch her. "After all, our people aren't built like the flying things you have here. We are light. Observe." Hasai lifted up the last ten feet of his tail and dropped it on her. Reflexively, knowing she was about to be crushed, Segn-bora threw her arms up to ward the tail away — and found herself supporting it on her hands. It was very heavy, but not at all the crushing weight she had expected.

  "See?" Hasai said, flicking the tail away to lie at rest again.. Segnbora shook her head in wonder. The rough under-crusting looked like diamond, the' scales, looked like sapphire— "What are you made of?" she said, starting' to walk again.

  "Flesh, bone, hide. And you?" Segnbora blinked. "About the same. …" "You're not quite as tough, however," the Dragon said, sounding mildly rueful. "1 remember the beast you will be riding, biting you there—" The glittering tail snaked up at Segnbora again, prodding her delicately in the chest. "You will be bleeding, and wishing for hide more like mine, that the beast would have broken its teeth on—"