The Tale of the Five Omnibus

  Segnbora glanced over at Hasai. He had lain down—unusual for a Dragon in uncomfortable state—and was gazing at the Dweller thoughtfully. “Your motives and your goals are unimportant to us. But what you are—that is of some interest.” Just once, Dithra herself gazed at Segnbora; only for a moment. Segnbora, ehhath forgotten for a moment, caught that look with her Fire and tried to feel what was at the bottom of it. Just a flash came strongly as it had come with Hiriedh; fear. But also that yearning, all tangled about with some ahead-memory, vague even to the lhhw’Hreiha. That startled Segnbora. Dithra’s precognition should have been clearer than anyone else’s. But on this matter it was not. Still—that fear, that yearning…. I must not frighten her any worse, Segnbora thought. A frightened Dragon is a bad enemy… and this one more so than usual. “What we are,” Segnbora said, “is sdaha and mdaha. Surely even by darklight, the DragonChief can see that.”

  “That’s the seeming,” Dithra said. “Your friend there, dav’whnesshih. And yourself—less so than usual, perhaps? For one who’s egg-laden?”

  Segnbora laughed. It was a backhanded sort of joke. Mdeihei could be pregnant only in the abstract sense; the business of clutching was left to the sdahaih. Dithra was implying that she was not spending enough time in her “true” form. “Maybe so,” she said. “But the babe, or egg, is well enough for the moment. Though your solicitousness is appreciated, DragonChief. However, my child is not the issue here. Your lives are, and your children’s lives.” She glanced around her. “Speaking of whom—” —and she tried to make the question sound innocent, though it was not— “where are the Dragonets?” For the Howe was sacred not only to Dahiric for what he had done, but for the age at which he had done it, being barely grown past the Dragonet stage himself. As a result, since ancient times the area had become a favored one for clutching, and the mdeihei were increasingly troubled by the utter absence of any young in this place.

  Everything got quite still at the question. Yes indeed, Segnbora thought, I’ve sat on the tail-spine now. Let’s see if it was to any purpose.

  Dithra regarded her at length. “Your solicitousness is appreciated as well,” the Dweller said at last. “And having established it, let us move on to particulars. What is this small matter of kingship you desire to consult us about?”

  Hasai lifted his head in a gesture graceful but tense with some barely-managed concern. “Dweller-in-the-Howe,” he said, “very well you know what kings and queens have ruled this peninsula, and the lands south of it, all this long while. We saw their fathers come down out of the mountains. We saw the battle they fought at Bluepeak, and what happened there. The power that rose up and moved there to save its own— Can the Dragonchief deny that that power is worth cultivating, and supporting? Seeing that it is native to this world?”

  “As we are not,” said Dithra. “There is no question that this is your world,” she said to Segnbora. “You have a right, insofar as your own powers enable you, to determine how it shall be run. We are merely guests here. You know the way we fled.” A flash of eyes this time, for Segnbora, and away again. And this time there came again that paired feeling of fear and desire; tied up now with Segnbora’s brief vision of the arrival of the Dragons in the world. “In matters of the welfare of this world, we have an interest. In its life, its death. But matters of… government…. ” She used the word as lightly as Segnbora might have mentioned housecleaning. “We do not involve ourselves with such.”

  “Madam,” Segnbora said, “it is precisely the life or death of this world that we are discussing. You have seen many a ruler rise and fall before, and so you think that the rise and fall of queens and kings is not necessarily associated with the wellbeing of humans as a whole. But the rules have changed around you, lhhw’Hreiha. You’re in danger of being swept away by them.”

  There was another rustle in the crowd of living Dragons at this, and many of the mdeihei stared at her. “And you know it,” Segnbora said. “That memory, there—that one, the one you cannot perceive, that none of you can clearly see—” This time it was the burning eyes of the Dweller’s mdeihei that began looking at one another. And the looks were uneasy. “That one, that you can’t fully grasp, that’s been eluding you. I am in it somehow, aren’t I? And the man on whose behalf I’ve come to you—he’s in it, too.” Her voice got fierce. She had seen none of these things before, but she was seeing them now. Her Fire? She thought not. Segnbora glanced past the Dweller’s mdeihei, catching some obscure motion there—and her attention fell again on that deeper darkness, the tall irregular oblong not-shape all wrapped about in shadows.

  The Gate, she realized. The Eorlhowe Gate—

  She slid a few steps closer to the DragonChief, and to the tantalizing darkness. It held something in it, a promise or potential, the way a dark room may be full of darker shapes, ready to be revealed when someone brings in a light. But how to find out what? “You fear my coming,” she said, “and Hasai’s… for now you will find out what that memory is about. And you’ll find it out the worst way: in reality… without having had any warning of its content.”

  There was an uneasy rumbling of voices. “That ahead-memory that you can’t see,” Segnbora said, “that is a result of the change that’s upon you. That is the Shadow reaching out its claw toward you. Your seeings are clouded, you have no certainty—and uncertainty is Its tool of old. It is carefully hiding from you what will happen if you do not become involved in this matter.”

  “Who then is hiding knowledge of what will happen if we do?” the Dweller said. “For we are no more certain of that.” She looked full at Segnbora and Hasai again, and away, as if she could not bear the sight. And not from loathing: but from anticipation, and fear, and desire all rolled together again— Segnbora, more bemused than ever, stretched her feelings out into that sense, pinned it to the stone with the black wing-barb of Skádhwë, tried to hold it— Nothing. Nothing.

  And then a flash, and an obscure image—not inside Segnbora’s mind, but there in the darkness of the Eorlhowe Gate. Afternoon, as if seen through mist; and the answering blaze of Dragonfire. But not Llunih dying, this time. Someone else’s fangs in her throat—Dithra’s. This time—

  It was gone. The Dweller lay there, seeming unmoved. Segnbora knew better. Beside her, Hasai began slowly to rise. Don’t frighten her, Segnbora said privately to him.

  Her? She is the least of our worries—

  Segnbora had no time to ask him what he meant. Gently she began to pace, not trying to make it obvious that she was drawing closer to the Gate. “As to that matter, I can’t say. But guests, indeed,” she said gently, her wings and tail moving in the restrained sort of way that could be the beginning of nn’s’raihle, or simply a statement, an essay. “‘Marchwarder’, then. You will have to find a new word for the role… for the thing you watched the borders for has slipped through them while your attention was turned elsewhere. You were looking outward, assuming the danger would come from beyond the world’s bourne, as it did before. But that’s an old tactic. The Shadow doesn’t repeat its tactics, any more than the Goddess does.” Here she bowed for a moment to that other Element in the equation, as she had bowed to Dithra on naming her first. “It’s here, in the hearts of the creatures you said you would protect. So you have failed your charge. And if you are Marchwarders no more, then what are you? Say I have a guest in my house: and that guest sees a dangerous beast walk in, but does nothing about it… being a guest. What should be done with such guests? Maybe they should be asked to leave—”

  There was a murmur of astonishment and subdued anger from the Dragons standing around. She paid it no heed, working gently closer to the darkness of the Gate. “But that’s what you’ve done,” Segnbora said. “And now when someone comes to you and says, ‘Help me get rid of the beast’, you say ‘It’s no affair of ours.’ It will be your affair, quite soon, when all of us are dead, and the land is bare, and the weather changes, and the air gets thin and cold, and this world is a bare rock like yours
was once; and the Shadow reaches out its intention to the little star that gives you all the food you have, and it flares up and dies one day, as your last one did…. You will wish then that you’d helped us get rid of the beast that came in our back door.”

  “You have no proof of this,” said the DragonChief. “You have no ahead-memory of it.”

  “No,” Segnbora said. “I have what humans use instead. We call it reason. … The darkness trying to fall over this world, wants it dead. Wants all things in it dead, for Its own purposes. If you will let It destroy us and do nothing when good courses of action are laid out for you, then you are no guests of ours. And Dragons lie about our ‘protection’, and have lied ever since they came here first.”

  The roar that went up from the walls around would have shaken down loose rock, had there been any in the smooth- melted surfaces. The Dweller sat upright, slowly, and spread her wings; and the barbs of them were cocked toward Segnbora and Hasai.

  “Dragons do not lie,” said the Dweller, slowly, in the lowest rumble.

  “We’ll see about that,” Segnbora said, “in a year, or ten, or a hundred; when there are no humans left, and there are Dragons. If we are wiped out, then all your denials will not make it less true. And you will wish you had died with us.”

  It took a long while for the silence to settle down again. “Here is your choice,” Hasai said. “Be with us now, and be with us later. Otherwise—” He shrugged his wings. “There is little help for any of us.”

  “As for you, ehs’Pheress,” said the Dragonchief, looking at him, “you have already broken the ban. Mdahaih you were, and yet somehow you managed to rise up and go dav’whnesshih. That alone we would not have grudged you, strange though it seems. But then you interfered in the humans’ battle at Bluepeak. What your Dragonflame wrought there, few of them will now forget. We thought you might ask pardon while you were here; but it seems not. How did you so far forget yourself, and our law? How many of them might you have killed?”

  “What matters, Dweller, is how many he did kill, which is none: because he and I were one,” Segnbora said. Gently, gently she had worked to within about a tail-length of Dithra. “Killing was the last thing on our minds, that night. He saved my life; should it be wrong for mdaha to save sdaha? How many of you have been saved by your own mdeihei from one folly or danger or another?”

  “It does not matter,” said the Dweller. “Hasai was outcast before, by his own choice. He is more so now than even then, when he took a human for his sdaha.”

  “I took what the Immanence sent me,” Hasai said, “and have not been too ill-served. In fact, there is a certain likeness between the way I am here, and the way you are.”

  Silence fell again, at that. Many eyes were turned to Hasai, noticing that even by darklight, Hasai’s physicality had acquired a certain edge: a feeling that it too, like the Dweller’s, might become abruptly more than it was. Segnbora welcomed the momentary distraction. The Gate was dark again, but she gazed into it, and called the Fire up inside her, and willed, willed for something to happen. Something—anything—whatever You will, Goddess, or Immanence, whichever—let what’s trying to happen, now happen!

  “Nevertheless,” said the DragonChief, “we may give you no aid. Whatever your nature is, it is not in the Draconid Name. Dracon one of you may have been—but that nature has been perverted—”

  “But our mdeihei are in you, DragonChief,” Hasai said, feeling Segnbora’s struggle, taking up the thread as she would have. “If they’re not Dracon, then what are they doing there? And that being the case—I will have them back, thank you.”

  He swept his wings out and gathered their mdeihei about them. For a moment, he was surrounded by shadow as the DragonChief was; and dim shapes filled it—twenty, thirty, a hundred, five hundred ancestors—eyes ruby gemfire, emerald, onyx, burning. Some of the threat went out of the Dweller’s wings, and the barbs swung away. “How can you—” she said.

  “The same way I can remember what you cannot,” Segnbora said. “The Gate no longer shows you its counsel clearly, does it? Nor on your command, as it used to do.” More, she willed, tell me what I need— “Llhw’Hreiha, Dweller-at-the-Howe, I can feel the tragedy about to come upon us. You can avert much of it if you give us your people’s help. Even your own help, though that’s not necessary. Your countenance alone would be enough. Otherwise—”

  She turned away from the Dweller, unable to bear the horror in her eyes and her ehhath, and looked at the Gate.

  And saw—

  The seeing struck Segnbora near senseless. It was not like seeing, but more like being seen, and utterly known, by a million eyes and the minds behind them. In a thunder of Dracon voices and the wind of countless wings, she stood transfixed, struggling, blinded. Something poured into her, but Segnbora had no slightest idea of what it was. The pouring felt the way it had felt to have Hasai’s huge self poured into her small cramped soul… but this was worse, endlessly worse. It went on forever.

  When it stopped, Hasai was looking at her expectantly. Segnbora felt ready to slump down and die, but was astonished to find that somehow her Dracon body was still working. What was that? she thought. I thought lightning struck me….

  “Otherwise?” said the Dweller, seeming to have noticed nothing.

  She sought about for her thread of thought, and found it, though her head was reeling with other things. “Otherwise, with us, you will be swept away,” she said. “And worse will come.”

  “No more of this,” said the DragonChief, looking at Segnbora most peculiarly. “Here is my rede. We will do you no harm. We will give you no aid. Go now.”

  Slowly Segnbora returned to Hasai’s side. He looked at her, and she felt a gingerly touch from him on the borders of her mind. Used to his contact, she threw the gates open, let him in.

  He flinched with his whole body, his eyes and all his ehhath full of consternation and astonishment. Then Hasai looked at the Dweller, and bowed his wings right down to the ground—a gesture of mourning.

  “We will see you again, Dweller,” he said, “once only. Sdaha, come.”

  They made their way back up to the light of day. No Dragon went with them; none spoke to them as they left. Segnbora and Hasai raised wings, grasped force and flew.

  When they were some miles away, Segnbora sang, barely louder than a whisper, “Sithesssch… what was that?”

  Hasai looked at her in terror… but there was an edge of anticipation on it, like the sharpened edge of a sword. “I am not sure,” he said. “But I have an idea. We must have time to find out if I’m right.”

  “Time is what we’re shortest of, sdaha,” Segnbora said. She was too weary to think, too weary to try to figure out what Hasai’s strange elation was about.

  “Not as short as some others,” Hasai said, and actually dropped his jaw in a smile. “To Aired, sdaha. Come.”

  NINE

  This tale they tell, of a Cat that went to Courte, to see the King as was its ryght; and half a tendaie later, itt came away agayne in haste, saying, ‘The cream is very fine, but I am half deafn’d with the compliments of mice, and well stick’d with their knives’.

  — d’Kelic, A conceit

  Herewiss had always had a fondness for getting all dressed up. His family had been teasing him about it since he was small—since the day, at the age of nine, when they caught him, upstairs in his parents’ bedchamber, wearing the chain of Principality of the Brightwood. Being that it was rather too large for him, he had been wearing it around his waist, with a table knife stuck in it. Since then they had given him no peace over his fondness for ornate ceremony, and the clothes you got to wear for it, silk and brocade, the look of good leather and bright swords and jewels. It’s not my fault, he thought as he dressed. It comes of all those stories they told me when I was young…. His mother, City Rodmistress that she had been before she married his father, had told him endless stories of the fine life in Darthis; and he had taken them all much to heart and decided, when
he was young, that some day he was going to be one of those people who dressed in velvets and gilded mail, and had a page to go before him to announce his name.

  Now, of course, he had become one of those people… and discovered that he didn’t particularly care for it. At least the dressing up is still enjoyable, he thought.

  He had spent the past seven days settling into Prydon, doing nothing official as yet—for until he was presented tonight, his status was still in question. He moved gently about the old streets of the town: went up to the walls, and looked down to the plain and the river. In between times, he went to meet people that Andaethen felt he should see, members of the Four Hundred. Most of them greeted him kindly; the rest treated him with that kind of reserve that suggests the person is wary of entertaining a spy, or of entertaining a man who the present government was likely to consider a traitor. For his own part, he had caged his mind around with Fire, to be wholly certain that no one, either Rodmistress or sorcerer, could hear what he was thinking. He was, though, beginning to feel as weary as if he was in the cage himself, for he dared not let the protection go, even when he slept.

  Andaethen was sorry for his weariness, but she wanted Herewiss to be seen meeting these people. “You may as well,” she said to him one morning over breakfast. “There’s no point in being covert about it. People know you’re here to feel out support for Freelorn. So why waste your time? Let Cillmod see you doing what he thinks you should be doing. If you sat quiet, and seemed to do nothing, then he’d become suspicious, perhaps of some intervention with the Fire. No, no,” she said, “you just do the expected thing, and go about and be vaguely treasonable… in the right company, of course. Your Fire will teach you readily enough who’s reliable and who’s not. Though I can give you some hints.” And she did. Some of the names surprised him.