The Door Into Sunset

  “You’ll learn to do it soon enough yourself,” Hasai said. “There is Aired Marchward, see, there not too far from Prydon.”

  “Another hour,” Segnbora said.

  “At this speed,” Hasai said after a moment. He was still having trouble with the human idea of hours, the “divided day”, as he called it; but having Segnbora as sdaha, he was getting the idea quickly enough.

  “There are no human MarchWarders there, are there....”

  “None,” Hasai said. “The rhhw’ehhrveh have been dwindling away, in recent times. When we first came, the Dwellers at the Howe thought it would be good to know humans from youth, and live with them, to see what kind of world this was and how we might live in it best. And indeed some humans sought us out. But the human MarchWarders’ houses have not prospered, by and large. Some said this was because our minds were not meant to work in the same way, and we damaged the humans by living and associating with them.”

  There was a rumble of agreement from some of the mdeihei; Segnbora could feel others, back in the deeps of her mind, looking on silent and uncertain, an uneasy shifting of shadow and subdued gemlight. “The only Marchwards that have rhhw’ehhrveh as well as lhhw’ehhrveh any more are High Cirr and dra’Mincarrath,” Hasai said. “No point in going down there just now. The Warders at Aired have ties with the DragonChief; our energies are better spent there, I think.”

  “All the same, I should like to meet one or two of the rhhw’ehhrveh,” Segnbora said. She was curious about what it must be like to have learned the ways and language of Dragons slowly, over a childhood, instead of suddenly, over a matter of days, as she had done it. What could it be like to be a companion to Dragons, but still human? She started to make a wry face at the thought that any days of simple humanity, for better or worse, were behind her now. But her Dragon’s face wouldn’t do it, and simply dropped its jaw in the gesture that meant humor, and invited another Dragon nearby to inquire as to the source.

  Hasai, being mdahaih, didn’t need to inquire, but dropped his jaw as well. “How are you doing?” he said. “Sdaha or not, that form can’t be quite comfortable for you yet.”

  She snorted, a shrug, felt the cushioning of an updraft increasing under her, and stretched her wings out a bit more to get the best out of it. “Learning,” she said. “This is a lazy body.”

  “Lazy!” Hasai said, and laughed, in an indignant basso profundo rumble like a distant earthquake.

  “Very lazy! You saw that, just then. There’s plenty of sun even with the cloud today, no need to use anything but force to fly; but come any updraft stronger than a sneeze, and ‘aha!’, says the body, ‘a chance not to have to work!”

  “Why waste energy?” Hasai said, putting his wings out more fully as well, and absently gaining some tens of ells of altitude, so that Segnbora had to grasp force and pull herself up beside him again. “See that?” Hasai said. “You had to work to catch me up. And I did nothing but add some extension. You simply have this idea that flying is work, or ought to be. You’re going to have to get rid of that, if you’re to be a Dragon in truth, and not some kind of hybrid... as the gossip will have it if we’re not careful.”

  Segnbora cocked her head at Hasai. “What’s wrong with being some kind of hybrid?” she said.

  A long low rumbling chord of protest went up from some of the mdeihei. “Oh, be still,” Segnbora said, annoyed. “When I want your advice, you lot, I’ll ask for it.” The mdeihei might be wise with the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years, but they also tended to be conservative—too much so for Segnbora’s taste, sometimes. “New things are happening here, and none of you have had a new idea since you were last sdahaih! So listen to this end of history for a change, and see if you can’t learn something!”

  A shocked silence fell within her, for the mdeihei were not used to being told off by one sdahaih to them. The sdaha, the physically alive Dragon at the “near” end of the ancestry, was supposed to be properly submissive to the mdeihei, and appreciative of their advice. Well, about time they learned that I don’t intend to handle things that way, Segnbora thought. “Sithesssch,” she said to Hasai, who was laughing softly, “hybrid may be the word that fits, whether we like it or not. Are the Dragons, the live dragons, really likely to find it so much of a problem?”

  Hasai laughed softly, being amused himself by the sudden silence, but did not answer directly. He tilted his wings off leftward, banking suddenly, and Segnbora did the same and followed him around and downward. “One of our line was at the last nn’s’raihle,” he said. “You remember.”

  Segnbora looked back into the dark place at the back of her mind, the “cave” where the mdeihei lived, and saw burning red-amber eyes looking back at her, the Dragon in question. “Ashadh, of course,” she said, and reached back in mind and folded Ashadh’s dark wings and star-ruby hide around her, and lived in the memory again. Against a night sky all torn with flying moonlit cloud and fitful stars, the mountain-shape of the Eorlhowe reared up, and its stones were washed with Dragonfire as two bright shapes at its base circled one another in stately dance—or dance that looked stately until the claws flashed out to tear. The old Dweller-at-the-Howe leapt, talons out, flaming, and was met halfway by the slender, big-winged form that seized him about the throat and let him thrash and struggle. Then a vicious flurry of motion— Nothing but Dracon talons can rip a Dragon’s stony hide; but rip it will. Llunih, the old Dweller, came crashing to the ground, and then came the fire. A moment later his body was ash and charred bone, he himself was gone mdahaih, and Dithra d’Kyrin was llhw’Hreiha in his place.

  Part of Segnbora wanted to shudder at the matter-of-fact way the Dragons assembled there took it all. But Ashadh, who had been there, and the parts of her mind that were beginning to think in the Dracon fashion, saw nothing at all unusual in this. Llunih had begun an argument, and had been unable to prove his case beyond reasonable doubt. His dance had been insufficiently complex, his song too simplistic; and one with a more subtle argument had found the heart of his error, and ended it. That was the way Dracon logic perceived the change in leadership. The fittest, the wisest, came inevitably to lead. All Llunih’s knowledge passed to Dithra, and all his power as DragonChief.

  “And the argument,” Segnbora said to Hasai, “was about whether it might not be wiser to cast the human Marchwarders out of the Wards altogether....”

  “So it was.”

  “So weird mixtures of Dragon and human are unlikely to be welcome when even plain humans aren’t. ... I thank you for the memory, Ashadh,” Segnbora said, and Ashadh slipped free of her, and bowed and veiled himself in shadow again.

  “Dithra was always a hard reasoner,” Hasai said, as he straightened out his line of flight again, passing by a great bank of thundercloud on one side, and Segnbora matched him. “Now that she is lhhw’Hreiha, nothing has changed in that regard. And she has the power of the office to make her feel that much more certain of her opinions. Dangerous enough, that situation. But the DragonChief’s certainty is not entirely a matter of her own strength of character. Much of it comes from the mdeihei—not only her own, but those of all the rest of Dragonkind. She knows the Draconid Name, the Name by which the Immanence called our people when we were first made, passed down through all these years from Chief to Chief. Every mdaha is mdahaih to her, as well as to its own sdaha.”

  “Even you,” Segnbora said.

  “Even I,” Hasai said. “At least, so it ought to be. I—” the human personal pronoun was coming easier to him of late, and Segnbora was not sure whether to be pleased at this, or alarmed— “I am no longer quite what I was even a few ‘tendays’ ago. But for the moment, my connection to the Hreiha feels as it did. I remain, as before, one of her memories—if a living one—as I am one of yours. She can call me up at will, live in my life as you lived in Ashadh’s just now, and dismiss me when she pleases. Any DragonChief might do as much, of course. Not that a Hreiha tends ever to do much of anything... except when in nn’s’
raihle, as you just saw. She will argue for or against what concerns her—and one in possession of the Draconid Name can ‘kill’ the mdahaih as easily as the sdahaih.” Rda-é was the word he used, the active verb form of the rarely used Dracon word for permanent death. It was the only time Segnbora had ever heard him use it in connection with himself or any other Dragon. Even mdahhej, the death of the physical body, only meant shifting one’s mode of living in the world. To go rdahaih was to become nothing, to be utterly destroyed: or to die as humans were considered to die.

  She shook her head. “And you think we might be on the wrong side of the argument from the start....”

  Hasai sighed, a long single note of uncertainty and concern. “We will not be able to tell until we start having it,” he said, “and by that time, it will be too late. But the signs don’t seem good.”

  They flew in silence for a while. Segnbora cast an eye down on the fields, now shading from the green of late-planted barley and oats to stands of yellower corn as they began to come out of the wetter lowlands of southern Arlen into the drier country to the north. “Do you think it would be wiser to stay out of the argument entirely?” Segnbora said. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “I think perhaps we are in the argument already,” Hasai said. “Already a Dragon has interfered in human affairs... as you pointed out.” He sounded rueful. “Anyone sdahaih to me has only to live in my memories to discover that.”

  “Such as the Dweller.”

  Hasai shrugged his wings in agreement. “Word will have come to her by now, from other sources. Sd’hirrin and Lhhaess, the MarchWarders at Aired, keep a close eye on the doings in Prydon since things changed seven years ago; and they are close in the counsels of the Dweller because of it. Also, they are related. They come of Dahiric’s line, as does she.”

  Segnbora sang a low note that was as close as a Dragon came to a sigh. The Worldwinner’s line were not directly descended from Dahiric, of course, since he had died at the end of the Crossing, scarcely more than a dragonet. The line was collateral, descended from other children of his parents, most of whom had borne the same livery of green scales and golden underbelly. And an oddly high percentage of Dwellers had been of his line—

  Then Segnbora shut her jaws with a snap, and looked over at Hasai. He was looking at her with an odd expression somewhere between amusement and unease. “Yes,” he said. “I was going to ask you why you had chosen that particular livery to embody in when you flew. Some might call it impertinence. Especially Dithra.”

  Segnbora shook her head, a totally human gesture which the mdeihei derided good-naturedly in the background. “It seemed natural,” she said. “I don’t know. It happened accidentally, the first time—”

  Fire rose in her throat, the closest Dracon equivalent to blushing. “When you first became truly one of us,” Hasai said, “and got me with child. Yes.” He looked sidelong at her, tilted sideways, and abruptly dropped beneath her, doing the first quarter of a most precise hesitation roll, so that they briefly flew belly-to-belly in what for Dragons was a slightly naughty gesture. “Well, we shall assume that the Immanence had a hand in it, and say no more. And let those who say ‘hybrid’ look to their own liveries, none of them so noble as mine, or yours. As for the rest of it—” He righted himself and sang the same sighing notes Segnbora had. “We shall make ourselves known to Sd’hirrin and Lhhaess as best we can, and answer their questions. Sooner or later they will discuss us with the Dweller. We cannot just fly up to the Eorlhowe and melt our way in, after all. We will be sent for. And then—”

  “We try to survive, and get help for Lorn,” Segnbora said. Suddenly it sounded less likely than it had in Blackcastle.

  “Yes,” Hasai said, gazing ahead of them. Another thunderstorm reared up there in their path, towering upward in piles of blinding white until it flattened out into a tattering anvil of gray a thousand yards higher. “And meanwhile,” he said, grasping force and folding his wings back for better airspeed, “we live.” And he shot straight ahead into the storm, vanishing into the threatening whiteness as if through a wall.

  The cloud flickered abruptly from inside—a hotter white within the chill dead-white of the mist—with the crash of provoked thunder following a second later. Segnbora’s jaw dropped in a smile; she folded her wings, sank the claws of them into the forces of the world, and like a second arrow fired from the same bow, followed him in.

  *

  She already knew what Aired Marchward looked like, for various of her mdeihei had been there on business, or socially. The Arlid this far north was an old gentled-down river like the Darst, slow and oxbowed, bending on itself again and again in loop after loop, detouring around many small hills. One bend of the river held a particularly high hill in it, tall and conical, grassy-sloped, with a cracked stony head where even the grass gave out in a slope of gray granite and scree. Down at the hill’s foot, above the river, was a great dark vertical rift in the hillside, some ten or twenty ells wide. Water trickled down to the river from it from some spring inside the mountain, and growing things made a green tongue trailing down the watercourse from the hill’s open mouth.

  They circled the hill several times, knowing they were watched, letting themselves be well seen. There was nothing in the world that was big enough to be a threat to a Dragon, of course, but all the same old traditions established on the Homeworld had to be observed. For creatures who might live some thousands of years before dwindling away into the final silence of the oldest mdeihei, courtesy was all-important; and for a species that had come so close to extinction, survival was more important even than courtesy.

  Segnbora gazed down at Aired with interest. For some reason, those of her mdeihei who had visited there had done so in winter—perhaps to avoid too many humans seeing them. All their memories of that part of the Arlid valley were of a river frozen and buried under snow, a mere curving hint that water lay underneath, mostly traceable by where plants and trees were not, and by the faint dark scratch-lines of frozen reeds upthrust through the snow. But now birds perched and sang in those reeds, and the water glittered, and warm sun and cool shade slid over the hillside as the quick clouds went by on the wind.

  “I think we’re seen enough,” Hasai said. “Let us go down.”

  Segnbora tilted her head in agreement. Together they planed down, matching movements without effort, being sdaha and mdaha after all, but still with some care, with the turns of wing and limb that said they were on joint business, and in agreement with one another. This was another of the matters of being Dracon that Segnbora was still handling with some care: movement, and its many complex meanings. She might talk lightly to Lorn of nn’s’raihle being dance and argument and legislation all in one, but there was a bit more to it than that. Dragons had not always had speech. In their earliest days, there had been only movement as sign of intention or desire. Sung language might have been invented since, and then later yet the speech of the mind discovered—but the older mode of communication had never been supplanted by them, only augmented. Nn’s’raihle itself came originally of that oldest tongue, the speech-by-dance, ehhath; the acts of love were conducted in it, and the acts of death. Segnbora was new to it, despite all her mdeihei, and consciously kept her motions and positions in ehhath’s older and more classical modes, just for safety’s sake. They landed with little fuss—a quick flare of wing to keep it elegant, a proper moment of preening and then a leisurely fold of the webbing to say that their business was important, but not instantly so—at least not by Dracon standards. Segnbora looked over at Hasai; his spines were all roused forward, an indication of general good humor. She wasn’t nearly so certain herself, but she roused spines back at him regardless.

  He dropped his jaw, then turned away and sang greeting at the cave-opening, a long low simple chord, nothing too complex about it. Then they waited together. Segnbora did her best not to rustle.

  There was movement inside the cave, and then a head put itself out the ope
ning, scattering rainbows in the sunshine from scales of the deepest blood-ruby Segnbora had ever seen. Eyes the same color as the stars in the sapphire upper scales, a fierce glowing crimson, looked at them both with some interest.

  Hasai shrugged wings and bowed his head in the greeting-mode that matched what he had sung; casual respect. Segnbora did likewise.

  The other Dragon returned the gesture with an interested flick of wing added. “Be greeted,” she said, the song winding around her words speaking of a bored host glad of visitors. “Come in, if you will.”

  “Gladly,” Segnbora said. The other Dragon—Lhhaess, she knew from her mdeihei—gave her a considering look as she turned back toward the cave, having noticed the “thumb” spine to Segnbora’s right wing, the “false primary”. It was a black too deep for any normal coloration, and doubtless looked odd with the rest of her green-and-gold livery. Segnbora merely tilted her head a bit to one side, to acknowledge the look, and followed their hostess in.

  The inside of the hill was not as dark as it might have been. There were crevasses high up in the hillside, which had been quite effectively hollowed out and reinforced by melting the remaining stone into place, and long shafts of light came down to strike on the bare smooth floor. The other Marchwarder, Sd’hirrin, lay curled there in one shaft of light, and rose courteously to greet them; a Dragon of unusual size, almost a quarter again as big as Hasai, and liveried in star-amethyst and onyx, with violet-burning eyes.

  “Sd’hirrin,” Hasai said, “well met again.”

  Sd’hirrin looked at Hasai mildly. “Surely we have not met,” he said. “Perhaps our mdeihei have.”

  “Oh, no,” Hasai said. “I came here last some ninety rounds of the sun ago. Surely you remember; it was after Dithra took office.”