The Tale of the Five Omnibus

  “…But if I speak with yon Lady bright,

  I wis my heart will bryst in three;

  Now shall I go with all my might

  Her for to meet beneath Her tree…”

  “Tegánë,” Segnbora whispered, smiling. Moon-bright, the nickname said in Darthene. Eftgan had liked it; she had never been terribly fond of her right name, which tradition forced to begin with either the eat-rune or the bay-rune like all the other Darthene royal names. She had returned the favor, turning segnbora, “standard-bearer,” into ‘berend, a verb, and one usually used in old tales about the Maiden: “swift-rushing”, impetuous, always in a hurry, sometimes too much of one—as when the Maiden had let Death into the worlds by accident. And as their names, so they had been together while they were in love: Eftgan swinging slow and steady through her moods, like the Moon, waxing and waning, giving and withholding, Segnbora pushing, urging, not sure what she wanted but not willing to wait long for .

  The senior Rodmistresses had paired them off to work together in hopes that Eftgan’s Fire, unusually intense for a sixteen year old, might influence Segnbora’s enough to make her focus. They expected the play-sharing that usually took place between work partners to make the two novices’ patterns match more closely, and break the stuck one loose. No one, however had expected two who were so unlike—the tall, loud, spindly daughter of hedge-nobility, and the small, compact, quiet daughter of the Eagle—to fall in love…

  “He kneeléd down upon his knee,

  underneath that greenwood spray,

  Saying, Lovely Lady, ha’ pity on me,

  Queen of Heaven, as well Thou may!…”

  The distant muffled music twined itself with the memory of the day Eftgan had suddenly had to leave the Precincts. Her brother Bryn had been killed by Fyrd while hunting. “They’re going to make me be Queen,” she’d said, bitter, standing in the green shade with her face averted from Segnbora. She had been trying not to cry.

  “Tegánë—”

  “‘Berend, you can’t do anything for me. Any more than I’ve been able to do anything for you, all this while. Perhaps it’s better that I’m leaving now. You can’t focus, and I can’t be happy around you while you can’t. If this kept on much longer, we’d start hating each other.”

  This was true, and it reduced anything Segnbora could have said in reply to a meaningless noise. The two of them stood in the shade, hardly able to look at one another. Finally each of them laid a kiss in the palm of the other’s hand, the restrained and formal farewell between kinsfolk of the Forty Houses. Then Eftgan turned away and vanished among the green leaves of the outer Precincts; and Segnbora went in deeper, and didn’t come out till her soul was cried dry, a matter of some days…

  Now Segnbora stood bemused for a moment as a dark head seemed to loom just over her shoulder, though of course there was nothing between her and the stars of late spring. (When you forget to struggle, when you let us be one, it can be this way,) Hasai said, dispassionately. (Do you prefer discomfort, apartness?)

  She almost said yes. “It was a very private memory,” Segnbora said.

  (Sdaha, you still don’t understand. You must be who you have been to be who you are.)

  Segnbora shook her head, weary. Every time I think I understand the mdeihei, I find I don’t at all… She looked out across the field into which she had ducked when she came through the hedge. It was tall with green hay that whispered in the starlight. On an impulse she tucked her robe up into her swordbelt and started across it, wading waist-deep, enjoying the sensations: the rasp and itch of the hay against her legs, the darkness, the cool wind. Hasai said nothing, his mind resting alongside hers, tasting the night as she did—

  Segnbora stopped short in the middle of the field. Something was teasing at her undersenses, a whiff of wrongness that was out of tune with the clean night. She stood there with eyes closed to “see” better—

  —and there, sharp as a jab with a spear, came the clear perception of a place just to the east that felt like an unhealed wound. A hidden thing meant to stay that way, and failing.

  (Hasai?)

  (I’m here. I feel it also.)

  (Come on.)

  SEVEN

  “You are cruel beyond belief,” Efmaer said. “As cruel as the legends tell.”

  “But legends are made by humans,” the Shadow said. “And humans, who make a precious jewel of hope and hoard it past its use, are themselves more cruel to themselves than ever I could be.”

  Then the Shadow vanished, and Efmaer filled the air where It had been with curses, and rode away after the soul of her loved…

  (Efmaer’s Ride, traditional: part the Second)

  Segnbora unsheathed Charriselm and went off eastward through the standing hay. Another hedge loomed up before her, without stile or hedge-gate. With Charriselm she cut an opening, making certain that it would be too small for a cow to escape through in the morning, and squeezed through.

  The sour mind-stench she had smelled got stronger by the second, becoming so terrible that Segnbora wondered how she could have missed it from fifty miles away, let alone from the town. How could I have been so distracted? At the edge of the field the ground under her feet seemed to be burning with it. Her inner hearing buzzed and roared as if two powerful hands were choking her. She stopped and held still, trying not to gag. The stench was coming from beneath an old yew with peeling bark and drooping branches.

  She walked under the tree and went to her knees. The fallow ground had been plowed almost up to the tree trunk. The furrows lay neat and seemingly undisturbed, yet when Segnbora thrust her hands into the still soft ground and turned it over, she sat back on her heels, sick to her stomach and sicker at heart. There is no mistaking the smell of a grave, especially a shallow one.

  Nor was it the only grave. When she found strength to stand again, the death-taint led her to four others scattered around the edges of the field. All were deeper and better concealed, and all were older: the oldest perhaps three months old, the newest about three weeks.

  So much for Eftgan’s messenger, Segnbora thought, standing over the last grave. From the intelligencer’s grave and three others, the souls were long flown, despite the brutality of their deaths. But from the one under the yew tree came a sensation of vague, scattered, helpless loss. There were two souls trapped there, shattered by their murder, trying to coalesce in time to find the Door into Starlight before the strength to pass it was lost.

  Segnbora swore bitterly, torn with pity for the struggling dead and her own inability to do anything for them. Sorcery has no power over the opening or closing of that final Door. She knew the protocols for the laying of the dead. Without the Fire, they were beyond her. But not beyond Herewiss, or Eftgan—

  She headed back for town at a run, pausing outside the postern gate to remove the sticktights and hay blades from her clothes. The inn’s common room was, if possible, noisier than it had been. There were perhaps a hundred people in there, laughing, joking, singing…and Segnbora’s hair stood up at the thought that any one of them might be a murderer several times over.

  She found Freelorn relieving the barmaid of another bottle of potato wine, and swung him aside to a spot where they couldn’t be overheard. “Lorn, where’s Herewiss gone?”

  “He’s still out talking to you know who—” Lorn looked more closely at Segnbora. “You’re shaking!”

  “Lorn, never mind. Smile! Something’s very wrong, and we’re not supposed to know about it. Take your time, but find Herewiss—!”

  “—so if the others agree, we’ll go to Barachael,” Herewiss’s voice said softly as he came up behind Freelorn from the other side. “It’s as good a place to hide as any, and it’s a lot closer to Arlen than we are now… What’s wrong?” he said, looking at Segnbora.

  Before she could say a word, his underhearing brought him the answer. His eyes went wide with shock. “Show us,” he said. “Lorn, go out the front way. I’ll take the side. By the postern gate?”
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  Segnbora nodded and went out the way she had come, doing her best not to seem like she was hurrying anywhere. Freelorn and Herewiss were through the postern and into the hay ahead of her. She tied up her gown again and hurried after.

  “Eftgan’s gone to readjust her Door,” Herewiss said when she reached them. “It may take her a little while—seven people, six horses, and Sunspark are a larger group than usually uses that gateway.” He lowered his voice. “I think she’s ready to openly back Lorn against Cillmod. She’ll give us the details tomorrow, at Barachael.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Segnbora said, “but with the problems she’s been having, she’s hardly in a position to leave Barachael for a campaign in Arlen.”

  “True. But I think I can help her, and free her to help us in return. Though the Reavers are pouring through the Chaelonde Pass, it’s a simple enough matter to close that avenue—”

  “Close it how?” Segnbora said. “The Queen’s Rodmistresses have been doing illusion-wreakings there for years, but to less and less purpose all the time since so many people have died in that pass over the centuries. The built-up negative energies there are enough to ruin even the best Rodmistress’s work, and it’s doing nothing to stop the Reavers any more—”

  “I’m not planning to waste time with illusions. It’s time for something less subtle. A sealing.”

  “You mean physically closing the pass?” Freelorn said, stunned. “As in knocking down a few mountains?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you call that simple?”

  “Yes. Dangerous, too. It’ll require a lot of power, but it’s also less likely to go wrong.”

  “Then what you saw in that dream—”

  As they approached the spot Segnbora had sensed, Herewiss shook his head. “Later, Lorn.” To Segnbora he said, “How long have the people in that last grave been dead?”

  “Grave?”

  “A week or so, I think. They’re weak – they were getting along in years to begin with, I think, and shock of their death was considerable. You have the protocols—”

  “I have them.”

  “Protocols, what protocols?” Freelorn said.

  “For raising the dead,” Herewiss said. “Stay close, Lorn, I’m going to need you. …Oh, sweet Mother,” he added as the full force of the sour smell of murder hit him. Segnbora was already tearing—the psychic residue of violent death became not easier, but harder to handle with repeated exposure.

  “Goddess, what is that,” Freelorn said, and coughed.

  Both Segnbora and Herewiss looked at him, surprised. “You smell something?” Herewiss said.

  “Don’t you? Like a charnel pit.” Freelorn coughed again. Herewiss looked most thoughtful, for the graves were covered and the night air was sweet even here; the stench was purely a matter of the undersenses.

  They came to the yew tree, and stopped. Quickly, for the stench was becoming overwhelming, Herewiss reached over his shoulder and drew Khávrinen. Its Fire, suppressed all through the evening, now flared up, a hot blue-white. Concerned, Segnbora threw a look over her shoulder at the walls of Chavi.

  “Only our own people and Eftgan will be able to see the Fire,” Herewiss said, quiet-voiced, slipping into the calm he would need for his wreaking. “Now then…”

  The wavering of Flame about Khávrinen grew less hurried as its master calmed, yet there was still a great tension in every curl and curve of Fire. With the tip of the sword, Herewiss drew a circle around the tree, the graves, Freelorn, and Segnbora. Where Khávrinen’s point cut the fallow ground, Fire remained, until at the circle’s end it flowed into itself, a seamless circle of blue Flame that licked and wreathed upward. Finally, when he had stepped into the circle to join the others, Herewiss thrust Khávrinen span-deep into the soft dirt, laid his hands, one over the other, on the sword s fiery hilt, and began the wreaking. “Erhn tai ‘mis kuithen, ástehae sschüur; usven kes uibren—”

  The words were in a more ancient dialect of Nhàired than any Segnbora had been taught. Even in Nhàired, which held within many odd rhythms, the scansion of this wreaking-rhyme was bizarre. Freelorn fidgeted, watching his loved with unease as Herewiss reassured the trembling yew and the murder-stained earth that he was about to end their pain, not make it worse. He stood and called the Power up out of him, sweating. The circle’s Fire reached higher, twisting, wreathing, matching the interlock of word with word, of thought with rhyme—

  Herewiss poured out the words, poured out the Flame, profligate. Power built and built in the circle until it numbed the mind, until the eyes saw nothing anywhere but blue Fire, and a man-shaped shadow at the heart of it, the summoner.

  Segnbora was overwhelmed. She did the only thing safe to do—turned around inside herself and fled down to the dark place in search of Hasai. His Power, thought, he has too much! No one can have that much! Even in her own depths she could see nothing but burning blue light, but at last she stumbled into Hasai and flung her arms around one hot, stony talon. Concerned, the Dragon lowered his head protectively over her.

  Outside, after what seemed an eternity of blueness, tension ebbed. Segnbora dared to look out of herself again and saw the pillar of Fire that wreathed about Herewiss diminish slightly as he released his wreaking to seek outside the circle for the fragments of the murdered people’s souls. He spoke on, in a different rhythm now, low and insistent, urging outward the unseen web the Fire had woven of itself, moving it as an ebb tide pushes a thrown net away from shore. When the web had drifted across the entire field, he reversed the meter of his poetry and began pulling it in again.

  Segnbora swallowed hard. Light followed the blue-glittering weave; dusts and motes and sparkles drifted inward, small coalescing clouds of pallid light. They drifted inward faster now, coiling into two separate sources; these grew brighter and brighter, tightening to cores of light that pulsed in time with Herewiss’s verse. A last sharp word from Herewiss, a last burst of blue light, dazzling—

  The Fire of the circle died down to a twilight shimmer, though about Herewiss and Khávrinen, Flame still twined bright. Segnbora found herself looking at two solid-seeming people—a man, shorter than herself, middle-aged, stocky, with a blunt, worn face; a woman of about the same age, still shorter, but more slender for her height. They both looked weary and confused. Segnbora gazed at them pityingly in that first second or so, seeing strangers—

  —and then knew them.

  She couldn’t move. “‘Kani, what happened?” the man said, looking at the woman with distress. “We were in bed…”

  His voice, the voice that had frightened her, praised her, laughed with her. The woman turned to him. Her face. The sight of it made Segnbora weak behind the knees, as if struck by a deadly blow.

  “Mother,” she whispered.

  “Hol, no,” Welcaen said. “The innkeeper woke us up, he said the horses were loose—” She broke , horrified by the memory. Segnbora was stunned. That beautiful, sharp, lively voice was dulled now, like that of anyone who died by violence. “They tricked us into coming out here,” she said at last. “He had an axe. His wife had—”

  Her husband’s eyes hardened, a flash of life left. “Why did they bother with such illusions? We have no money—”

  Herewiss stood unmoving, seemingly dispassionate; but even through her shock Segnbora saw that he had to swallow several times before he could get his voice to work. “Sir,” he said, “madam… It was no illusion, what was done to you.”

  “Hol,” Segnbora’s mother said, stepping forward to get a better look at Herewiss. She moved like a sleepwalker. “Hol, this isn’t one of them—”

  Holmaern looked not at Herewiss’s face, but at his sword, and his face went angry and scornful just for a flash. “This is ridiculous. It’s more illusion. Men don’t have Fire!”

  “This man has it,” her mother said, a touch of wonder piercing the sleepy sound of her voice. “Sir, did you save us?”

  “Lady Welcaen,” Herewiss said. “I didn’t
save you. Of your courtesy, tell me what brought you to the inn here.”

  “Reavers,” she said, dreamy voiced, as if telling of a threat years and miles gone. “They came down through the mountains at Onther, looking for food, and overran the farmsteads. We and a few of our neighbors had warning. We got away north before the burnings and told our news here to the innkeeper so he could spread it elsewhere in the countryside. And tonight he woke us up—”

  Holmaern turned to his wife, slow realization changing his expression to a different kind of dullness. “‘Kani,” he said. He reached out to touch her, but it was plain from his expression that she didn’t feel as he expected her to. “‘Kani, we’re dead.”

  Segnbora saw her mother’s eyes go terrible with the truth. “You’re—” She fought for words. “If we’re— But where’s the last Shore?”

  Though Herewiss’s face was very still, something moving gleamed there in the light of his Flame: tears. He gazed down at Khávrinen, and Segnbora felt him calling up the Power again, a great wash of it. This time the framework he built with it took a strange and frightening shape, one she didn’t know.

  “I am the way,” he said, speaking another’s words for Her. He let go of Khávrinen and lifted his arms, opening them to her mother and father. They gazed at him in wonder. Freelorn, across the circle, went pale as if with some old fear.

  Herewiss was still there as much as any of them, but within the outlines of his body the stars blazed, more brilliant than they had been even in Hasai’s memory of the gulf between worlds. Within Herewiss, about those stars, was a darkness deeper than that gulf could ever be. Segnbora trembled at the sight of him. Herewiss trembled too, but his voice was steady. “Who will be first?” he said.

  Holmaern held Welcaen close. “Can’t we go together?”

  Herewiss shook his head sorrowfully. “I’m too narrow a Door,” he said. “Besides, even at the usual Door, everyone goes through alone…”