“I’ll race you,” Segnbora said as quietly. She slipped past them and started climbing.
The trail wasn’t too difficult. Part of it followed old gullies or slide-paths; part of it seemed to have been cut into the hillside, but only lightly, so that rockfall or deadwood frequently blocked the way. In the starlight it was hard to see where to put one’s feet. Each of them fell and slid at least once. By the time they reached the flattened hilltop five hundred feet above the lakeshore, they were all bruised, and breathing hard.
But the gasping for breath didn’t last. It was replaced almost immediately by a sensation of being anchored, centered, secured past any dislodging. Freelorn and Herewiss stood as still as Segnbora, feeling their pulses become tranquil, their breath come more gently. The three of them stood poised at the apex of the world’s Heart. The Universe swung around them, slow and silent, waiting. After a few moments Segnbora sank to one knee, bending to touch the gullied ground with one hand, the ground where Raela and Efmaer and Béorgan had stood. She could feel the Power, bound, waiting, alive. Her own Fire strained downward to reach it, and, unfocused, could not. But that seemed unimportant as she knelt there, feeling the ages run through her. This place was more important than the needs of any one human being.
“Loved,” Freelorn said to Herewiss, his voice uncertain, “something’s strange inside me—”
“Of course there is.” Herewiss reached out to Freelorn and drew him close, not so much in compassion as in exultation. “It’s your Fire. You have a spark of it like everyone else; here at the heart of Fire, how could you not feel it? The Fane is reaching up to you.”
“I thought so.” Freelorn sounded almost in pain. “It wants me. But I don’t know what to do.”
“Listen to what it has to say to you,” Herewiss said. “Just feel it. Few enough people ever do.”
Herewiss let go of Freelorn with his right arm, then reached around behind to let Khávrinen’s scabbard down from the back-sling. He drew the sword slowly, with relish and ease and much tenderness, as he might have drawn himself from his loved after passion spent. The sword swept out and down before him, Fire trailing behind the blade. Even now, before the wreaking had begun, the Flame was too bright to look at directly.
“So much,” Lorn said, soft-voiced, blinking and tearing in the light. “You can do anything now…”
“For the moment.” Freelorn looked puzzled: Herewiss laughed gently. “Lorn, just how did you think I was able to destroy those hralcins? Under normal circumstances twenty Rodmistresses, fifty, couldn’t have done it. I was in ‘breakthrough,’ as they call it in the Precincts, and I will be for maybe another tenday or so. After that the Power begins to drop to more normal levels. That’s why She wants me to hurry.”
He gazed down at the Flame-flowing sword in his hand. “I’ll give back what was given to me,” he said, resting Khávrinen’s point on the ground. “As much as I can. Standing where we stand, every power for good between the mountains and the Sea will feel this happening, and know me for an ally.”
“The Shadow and the dark things will hear you too,” Freelorn said, “and know you for an enemy. They hate defiance….”
“They hate me already. Let them. I have something better.” The Flame about the blade burned brighter, lighting the hilltop more brilliantly with every breath Herewiss took. “The Shadow’s had Its way in the Kingdoms long enough. Its child the Dark strangled the Fire in half the human race—but that’s done now. I’m the proof. And It’s had Its way too long in Arlen, killing the land slowly with blight and famine and a usurper on the throne. That’s done too, Lorn, I promise you—”
The light was becoming like an otherworldly Sun now, a blaze of determination and joy that dazzled the mind as much as it did the eyes, transfiguring what it touched. Segnbora had a brief vision through the brilliance of a young god raising His arms, offering His loved, across His two hands, the thunderbolt He wielded. In her vision the other, blasted by the overpowering magnificence into another shape, yet somehow still unchanged, reached out hands to lay them, fearless, in the Fire…
For long seconds Segnbora could not move. Once not long ago, when Herewiss had been away and Lorn had seemed to need consoling, she had entered a little way into the relationship between these two—sharing herself with Lorn, offering her friendship. At the time she’d thought her motives benevolent enough. But recent events had made her suspect that, in fact, she had been the one in need of consoling. Now, by this light in which any untruth withered and fell away, she clearly saw the shape of her own loneliness and sorrow. Likewise she saw the essential twoness of Herewiss and Freelorn—something even Sunspark had perceived more clearly than she did. They are their own, thought. They don’t need me. There was no sadness about the realization: it came almost triumphantly.
Unsteadily—for the forces being freed on the hilltop had made her a bit light-headed—Segnbora turned her back on the ferocious glory raging there. By the time one of the Lovers began speaking Nhàired in invocation, she was descending from the hilltop, sliding and stumbling down the path. “Ae, hn’Hláfedë, ir úntaye Lai –”
Sweet Mother of Everything, Segnbora thought as she reached the end of the steepest part of the path, the first wreaking he tries is the Naming of Names? I wish I had his faith. If some dark power should slip close enough to hear—
The possibility briefly so unnerved her that Segnbora lost her balance, and she had to grab at nearby branches of brush to steady herself. An inner Name was a powerful commodity even after its owner’s death, useful to lend power to various spells and wreakings, and the Name of one who worked with Fire even more so. Great Rodmistresses’ names were passed down through generations; in Segnbora’s own family, Efmaer d’Seldun’s Name was preserved, though the Queen herself was long lost. Now Segnbora exhaled in sudden amusement at the notion that someday sorcerers and Rodmistresses would pay great treasures for the true Name of one Herewiss, a slim dark young man with a tendency toward creative swearing in dead languages. And other tendencies that will matter far more—
The path went right out from under her. It was not her own clumsiness this time, but the Morrowfane itself trembling under her feet. Segnbora looked up. The blaze on the hilltop, hidden till now by the bulk of the hill, was hidden no longer. A narrow, sword-shaped core of blue-white Fire swung up into view, and then a light of impossible brilliance broke the night open from end to end. Like lightning burning in steel, it turned the dark into sudden day and extinguished the stars. The Fane shook to its roots as outpoured Firelight smote into everything, illuminating every leaf and tree trunk and stone with fierce clarity. On the surface of the shivering lake, the light shattered into countless knives and splinters of dazzle.
Blinded, Segnbora turned away and rubbed her eyes. When they saw clearly again, she started once more down the trail. She had no trouble finding her way; the Fane was lit like midmorning. At one point she paused for breath, looked around, and saw something she had missed in the dimness on the way up—a huge crevasse or cavern around on the southern face of the hillside, an opening into darkness that even Herewiss’s Fire didn’t illumine. How about that. The World’s Heart has a secret in it—
Above her Herewiss’s Flame dimmed and faded, leaving her looking at where the cave entrance had been. He’s taking a rest, I suppose. I bet I could have a closer look at that before he starts shaking things around again—
Scrabbling up off the trail, Segnbora used scrubby bushes and trees to climb across the eroded face of the Fane. It took her a few minutes to scramble up a ravine that ran down between two folds of the hillside, but finally the cave opening loomed huge before her, dark as uncertainty. There Segnbora halted, uneasy. Her undersenses were still blunted from the onslaught of Power and joy at the top of the hill, but not so much so that she couldn’t catch an odd underheard flavor that grew stronger the closer she came to the cave mouth. Something hot. Metal? Stone?
Segnbora drew Charriselm; the whisper of steel so
unded very loud. With care she stepped over and around the boulders that lay about the great cave entrance, and slipped a few feet inside where she paused to listen again.
Nothing. I must have imagined that feeling. Cautiously, keeping her left hand against the cave wall, Segnbora took another step in. The faint crunch of her footstep echoed away into the dark. She took another step. That echoed too. The place was huge, filling most of the mountain from the sound of it. One step more—
A voice spoke, and Segnbora froze, her fist clenching on Charriselm’s hilt, her heart pounding.
For a moment she thought the cave was going to fall in on her. The voice was huge, and incredibly deep. It thundered, rumbling, shaking the air; yet there was music in it, a slow and terrible song of pain. The hair stood up all over Segnbora. She could make nothing of the words the voice seemed to be speaking. At the end of the sentence, the silence that fell was plainly waiting for her answer.
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know that language,” she said, her voice sounding amazingly small despite the echoes it awoke. “Do you speak Arlene or Darthene?”
There was a long pause; then the voice spoke once more. It used Darthene, but the timbre was that of a storm on the Sea. “You were a long time coming,” it said. “But you’re thrice welcome nevertheless.”
Segnbora leaned against the wall of the cave, bewildered. Her eyes were getting used to the darkness, and in the faint starlight from the doorway she could make out a great lumpy mass lying on the floor of the cave before her. The hot stone smell she had noticed before was coming from it, though there was little actual warmth in the place. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What are you?”
“Lhhw’ae,” the voice said, a rumbling growl and a sigh.
Segnbora gripped Charriselm even tighter, for that single word of the strange language, the species’s own name for itself, she did recognize. A Dragon—
The voice began to speak again, and was suddenly choked off. Rocks cracked and rattled about in the cave, rolling, shattering. The Dragon had abruptly begun to thrash around. Segnbora leaped for the cave entry, as afraid of being attacked as of a cave-in, but after a few moments the uncontrolled motion subsided and the immense half-seen bulk of the Dragon lay quiet again. She stared at it fearfully.
“I am about to lose this body,” the Dragon said, an anguished-sounding melody winding about the words. “The seizures are a symptom….”
“You’re dying?” Segnbora said, and then had to grab for balance once more as another convulsion threw rocks in all directions. When the Dragon had settled again, she saw that it was looking at her from great round eyes, each of which was at least four feet across, globed and pupilless. Segnbora shuddered as she realized how big the rest of the beast must be, and was glad she couldn’t see it.
“Going rdahaih.” The Dragon whispered the word, but even its whisper sounded like a thunderstorm. “My time is upon me.”
The pain in its voice confused Segnbora. No one but Marchwarders, the humans who lived with Dragons in their high places, knew much about Dragons; but the one thing everybody said about them was that they never died. Even more confusing was the undercurrent of joy that ran under the Dragon’s pain, growing stronger by the moment.
“No matter,” it said. “You are here. At last, what will have been, is—”
The ominous tone made her consider leaving right then. Yet she’d been curious about Dragons ever since the first and only time she had seen one, at the age of seven, soaring over the blue Darthene Gulf, and that old curiosity was raging again. Slowly Segnbora sheathed Charriselm, then began picking her way toward the Dragon’s head among the fallen stones, watching carefully in case it should start having another seizure. Lying flat on the rubble, the head from lower jaw to upper faceplate was twice her height. Above it, the spine in which the shielding faceplate terminated speared up into the gloom for another ten or fifteen feet. Segnbora reached out gingerly and touched the edge of the plate between nose and eyes. It was hard and rough as stone, and warm. The eye on that side regarded her steadily, but she couldn’t read its expression. It looked dimmer than it had—
“Are you sure you’re not just ill?” Segnbora said.
“I know my time,” said the Dragon. “I welcome it. I always have.”
She shook her head, perplexed. With her hands on the Dragon, she could feel its weary sorrow as if it were her own—but also that peculiar joy, both frightened and expectant at once. “Is there anything I can do for you?” Segnbora said.
The Dragon’s eyes flared brighter, and a tremor ran up and down its body. “Arhe-sta rdaheh q’ae hfyn’tsa!” the Dragon whispered in a great rush of fulfillment, as if its last fear had been lifted from it. “If you truly ask,” it said in Darthene, “don’t let me—die—uncompanioned.”
Segnbora shivered, having misgivings. The urge to get out of there was strong, but she rejected it. “I’ll stay with you.”
“Yes,” the Dragon said. The light of its eye ebbed again. “You always did.”
That was when the last and worst convulsion started. Walls shook. Stone chips and splinters rained from the ceiling. The floor danced. There was nothing for Segnbora to grab for support but the Dragon’s head. A brief feeling of hot stone—
—and the next moment, her head burst open from the inside. Segnbora knew how it felt to share her mind with another consciousness, but this was nothing like her experiences in the Precincts; those decorous, sliding melds of one Rodmistress-novice with another, each always wary of disturbing the delicately balanced economy of the other’s mind. This was like a boulder dropping into a bucket—a brutal invasion that smashed her against the borders of her self and threatened to smother her.
Strangling, agonized, she flailed about inside for room to think. There was none. Her inner spaces were crowded with otherness, a multitude of ruthless presences straining and seething in intolerable confinement—minds that beat at her, buffeting her like wings; painful thoughts that gnawed at her like alien jaws; strange memories that stalked through her past, promising her a horrifying and incomprehensible future. The Dragon’s imminent death—
No! Segnbora screamed. She pushed desperately away without knowing for sure what she was pushing back from, but ready to do anything, even die, to avoid it. She fell and fell, yet the images followed her inexorably as a doom, becoming more and more real, happening again, happening forever. I don’t want to remember! she screamed, but the words wouldn’t even come out right. Instead, a white-hot burning and a strange language took her by the throat, twisting the plea into a wracking curse: ‘sta, tauëh-stá ‘ae mnek-kej, mnek-kej…!
A roar of condemnation went up in the stifling, crowded darkness; the damp cold dirt rushed up toward her face. Then mercifully the fall ended in a pain-colored flash that killed the presences, and the memories, and, Segnbora hoped, her too….
FOUR
“Are you going to kill me?” said the child to the Dragon.
“Kill you?” The Dragon smiled at him. “Certainly not until we have been introduced.”
Tales for Opening Night, Nia d’Eleth
The darkness tears wide, splitting as hewn skin does when the sword strikes.
This is Etachnë field, all one gloomy sodden mass of misery—lead-gray above with clouds that have been pouring rain for three days now, dun and black and red below with the scattered bodies of the slain. The stench is incredible. Those who fight do so with their faces wrapped, and fall as often to the sick miasma of the air as to Reaver arrows. Fyrd are harrying the fringes of the battlefield, devouring the dead. A few hundred feet away, a maw, a horwolf and a nadder are busily dismembering a fallen woman. Her surcoat was once Darthene midnight blue. Now it’s mostly red-brown.
She gulps down sourness for the hundredth time and stares across the misty valley. Somewhere over there the Reavers have retreated into cover, regrouping for the next attack. There are only about a thousand of them left, but those are more than enough to break the Dar
thene defense at the other end of the valley and let them out into the open lands. Once that happens they’ll begin their pillaging at Etachnë and leave the country burning behind them as far as Wendwen. Around her, the other Darthenes holding the gap are huddled, soaked through, hungry, outnumbered, waiting.
The Rodmistress is dead, so they have no idea when reinforcements may be coming. Segnbora is the only sorcerer left, and over the past few days her sorceries have been going progressively flatter—a starved sorcerer is good for very little. It was all she could do yesterday to stop the miserable rain for a little while; today her head still aches with the backlash. Oh, food, she thinks. Just oatcakes and milk— She stops herself, does a brief mind-exercise to calm down.
It doesn’t work. Her partner Eftgan has been gone for three days now, ridden off for the reinforcements; and the Goddess only knows whether she lives or not, for there’s a great silence where her mind used to be. Oh, Tegánë, loved, be all right, please— She winces away from the painful thought, opening her eyes on the Fyrd again. The sickness comes up in her throat as she sees them tugging at the limbs of the woman in Darthene blue. Then sickness turns to rage and she throws her sodden cloak off savagely and stands up in the rain, fists clenched.
“Irn maehsta irn aehsta,” she whispers, as within, so without, and begins a bitter poem in Nhàired, shaping a spell-construct in her mind. Anger-fueled sorcery is dangerous, she knows, but anger and terror are all she has left. Desperation fuels the sorcery, scansion shapes its skeleton, meter sets the beast-shape, filling it out. Words link in sliding musculature, the hot pelt of intent furs it over, angry purpose glares like eyes beneath a shaggy mane of verse.
Uncaring of the backlash to come, she grips the shape of words and wraps it round her like a cloak—then drops to all fours in the rain and leaps roaring at the Fyrd—