This is it, then, Herewiss thought. The excitement began to rise in him. “I can’t let you live either,” he said, trembling with anger and pity of his own. “You’ve bought the Shadow’s story of a world that needs recreating, but you can’t see Its real intent, which is to recreate nothing, to destroy everything that is, to leave nothing but a void filled with Itself and bloated with Its hate and triumph.” He shook his head. “The only question becomes: when shall we have it out?”
Right now will do, the voice said, abruptly, from inside his head; and the force came crashing down.
It came so suddenly that for a moment Herewiss stood paralyzed, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth, the breath stopped in his lungs. There was another power in his head with him, groping for control, feeling at his mind’s connection to his Fire, and his Fire’s connection to the Firework outside him, the distant but clearly perceived image of the Great Bridge, all its joints and mortar perfused with a webwork of blue Flame. The other power ran down the conduits of his Fire like some burning spirit down a resisting throat, scalding as it went.
Idiot, Herewiss thought, as he did his best to bear up against the invasion of himself. Your courtesy will be the end of you. Sunspark was right— He bore up, bore up, like a man bearing the whole huge weight of a mountain on his shoulders. That weight was familiar to Herewiss, and the burdens he had borne before were much more solidly set than what attacked him now—one man’s mind, with a great weight of evil behind it, yes, but manageable, to someone who had shifted a whole massif at its roots not too long ago. Slowly he forced that resisting, tearing presence up out of his mind, back to the surface again. Khávrinen flamed ferociously at his back, while Rian resisted being pushed out, and tore and ripped at Herewiss’s connection to his Firework at the bridge. Once it was pried loose, Herewiss knew, the other would be able to set such sorceries there as would make even the Fire ineffective against the bridge for some days. But not if I can help it—
—the trouble was, it was slipping. He could breathe again, now, but that pressure on him was increasing. Moving—mountains—may not have been enough practice, he thought in utter shock. But this was only one man—
—one wholly and consciously given over to the Shadow, and used by It as Its tool. He caught Its bitter tang of hate, like the taste at the back of the throat after vomiting—a scalding rage, a crushing weight, determined to make Herewiss suffer before he died—
I told you. Your treacherous Mistress leaves you to your own devices. But my Master is glad to come when I call—
Herewiss stood there, frozen, oblivious to the outside world—seeing nothing but the bridge, and his link to it weakening, being torn loose from him by the slow glacier- scrape of hatred that was the Shadow, working through Rian. No, he thought, and ran Fire down the his linkage to the wreaking, to set it off—
A great weight of icy darkness came down on the line of light, and snuffed it out.
NO, Herewiss thought, and reforged the link, and pushed blue Flame down it again, hotter, fiercer. Once again the darkness came down and snuffed the light, but it had more trouble this time. Not quite omnipotent yet, Herewiss thought, not while It must deal through a human being. Last chance, though— Herewiss thought desperately of lightning, Her spear: and he fastened his Flame to that image, let it become it, and struck at the the bridge—
The bridge in his mind went up in Flame, hesitated for a long moment, and then, slowly, began to bend over the middle two piers. A long three or four breaths, it spent, bending, and he could feel the groaning of the stones. And then, slow as a falling leaf, it seemed, the arch of the bridge buckled, and folded, and broke at the fold. The middle of the span slid in two pieces down toward the Arlid: Herewiss felt the spray go up, felt the almighty crash of tons of rock as the span went down in ruin. He could still hear the maimed scream of it as it finished breaking, as the last stones fell.
He opened his eyes. Rian was staring at him, and for all the Shadow’s bitter hatred that was living inside him at the moment, the expression on his face was that of simple shock.
Herewiss pulled in a long gasp of air, like a man under water too long, and another. Inside, in the banqueting hall, the music and the dancing went on, and the eating and drinking and laughter. “So,” he said.
Herewiss gripped Rian’s mind and pulled it right down into his own, in one swift brutal yank. Rian struggled and struck back, frightened and angry, slightly weakened. That was the problem—slightly. The backlash from his interference just now should have left him prostrate, Herewiss thought. But there was another force, hovering nearby, absorbing the backlash for Rian, untroubled by it, and Herewiss knew what that was. Rian struggled, and Herewiss let him. A moment, just a moment would be all it would take—and Rian gave it to him, a second in which he tried to compose the groundwork for a sorcery. Herewiss pulled, hard, and they fell together into his mind.
A moment they both stood in the black-stone halls of the old Hold down at the bottom of Herewiss’s self: and the odd and terrible aura of that place, to which Herewiss was long accustomed, froze Rian where he stood. It was nothing to do with humans, the Hold, or Dragons either, or anything else that lived in the world any more. There was no guessing the shapes of its builders’ bodies, or of their minds, and the feel of those minds, patient, unfathomable, and bizarre, still permeated the Hold. The place could throw awry any sorcery until you were used to it, as Herewiss well knew, and he could feel the razory framework half-built in Rian’s mind start falling apart. That was his moment to move.
Shapechange in the body was one thing: you had the rules of matter in the real world to deal with, and if you bent them too far, they would kill you after the change was over. But here, in mind, shapechange was both more flexible and more dangerous… and Herewiss had become fluent in it. Fire swirled about him for a moment, his back bent, his face and arms and legs hurt briefly; but when the Flame died away, he was looking at Rian out of the body of a tan Darthene lion, smelling the smell of his fear with a lion’s senses. Rian backed away, unable to do anything to help himself: they were in Herewiss’s mind now, trapped there together, and no sorcery would avail him.
He turned and ran down the dark hall.
Herewiss loped after him, going easily. All the doors were dark: he would allow his enemy no passage out of here by that means. He would hunt him down those halls until he was exhausted. And when he caught Rian, he would burn out the man’s mind and will, which would render him useless to the Shadow. A sorrow, about his wife and daughter: they would have a mute, moveless cripple to deal with for the rest of his life. But better a cripple than a corpse—
He paused at a meeting of two halls, looked around him. Scent led leftward: he padded after it. Another meeting of halls, and one of those strange stairways, with two broad shallow steps for every one tall narrow one, the pattern repeating. He went down it, the scent stronger.
But then fading. Herewiss stood still for a moment. A little stronger off to the right, and ahead, he thought.
He turned, walked down that hallway. Turned —
— and the dragon-eagle leapt at him, slashing, and buried its beak in its throat.
Shapechange! He can’t have!
They rolled together over the smooth floor, tumbled down another of the staircases, still locked together. Herewiss kicked vainly for the dragon-eagle’s guts: it buffeted him with its huge wings, half-blinding him, while one of those terrible talons closed its fist about his throat, seeking to pierce the windpipe or one of the great arteries. Though they were inside his mind, Herewiss was not invulnerable: a fatal injury here would kill his outer body as well. The wall was nearby. Herewiss staggered to his feet, hauling the dragon-eagle that was Rian with him, and slammed headfirst into the wall, turning his head at the last minute.
The eagle screamed, but didn’t let go. Herewiss slammed it into the wall again as the beak let go and stabbed at his eyes. Will I die of this? he thought, as he strained to bring a paw up between
the eagle’s head and his own. Not just this fight—but this battle, this war: will it kill me? What use is it all? When every wreaking strips months of life off me, when the whole purpose of all this was to be alive afterwards, to live long years with Lorn in peace—
He caught himself, fury growing hot. That was not the purpose at all.
Leave my soul alone, damn you! he cried at Rian and the Shadow together, as he pinned the eagle’s head to the ground. But there was hardly a difference between Rian and the Shadow at this point. Herewiss recognized again the sweetly plausible force that had almost turned him against Segnbora, once, while the two of them strove with the Shadow beneath the roots of Mount Nomion. It loved to worm Its way into your thoughts gradually, so that Its ideas seemed your own, and you went ahead and did Its will without even thinking first. But Herewiss had been in that trap once. You won’t catch this rat that way again, he thought. Do something original. Not that You can. All you could ever do was imitate and warp and mimic —
—until it first received a human soul in free gift, consciously. The dragon-eagle’s wings buffeted him again. Herewiss and Rian reeled back and forth about the black floor together, but the exertion didn’t lessen Herewiss’s horror. This was what the Shadow had done at Bluepeak, all those years ago. It had had a human accomplice, and had accepted a bitter madwoman’s sacrifice of herself to the Great Dark, and used her to become the Gnorn. Not even Earn and Héalhra in their strength had been able to defeat It in that shape with anything less than the loss of their humanity, and then their lives. But this time the Shadow had found another willing host, one this time who was not mad, but in full possession of his reason—maybe too much of it. But it won’t be that way forever. The Shadow will burn him out yet—reduce his will to just the right amount, so that It has access both to Its own full power, and to a human being’s blindness. Against which there is no defense: from such, even the Goddess staggers back in vain….
Herewiss struggled, terrified even through his exertion. He will be even more powerful than the Shadow by Itself was at Bluepeak, Herewiss thought. He almost is now.
I am going to die here.
That awful dark strength was piling up against him again, and he bore up under it as best he could. But it was forcing him out of his mind. Herewiss resisted, tried to dig his claws into the stone, scrabbled for purchase—in vain. Their two souls were being forced out into the real world, the shapechange was beginning to impinge into it as well, and Rian was making no move to stop it. Lion and dragon-eagle, they rolled over and over together on the stone of the terrace, Herewiss getting the barest glimpse of the open doors of the banqueting hall, the lights, the sound of song and laughter. No one had even noticed them sliding out of Herewiss’s mind into physical reality. And then something said to him, silently, eagerly, Now?
For a moment he had no idea what it was talking about—but he knew that mind. YES!
— and his next glance showed him how fire burst out everywhere. The rich hangings in the banqueting hall, the tables and the food on them, burst into flame: doors slammed shut, and burned, the glass in them melting; decanters exploded with sudden heat, dancers screamed and beat at their clothes, sackbuts and olhorns fell to the ground, their wood afire, the metal melting off them. More screams pierced the air, and the stone of the outer embassy walls itself began to glow, some of it to melt down to lava: some simply burst into flame.
Herewiss felt Rian’s mind, so certain and focused until now, suddenly teeter away from the dark and the certainty that held it. Olaiste! Paka—
Not quite inhuman yet, Herewiss thought, with bitter satisfaction. And you have no hope now. It would take your Master in the full of Its strength to deal with Sunspark quickly.
The darkness was hammering on Rian to turn back to It, to finish Herewiss’s destruction. But still he wavered. He cast a quick sharp sorcery, fierce and swift as an arrow, toward his wife and daughter—
Herewiss blocked it—that much he could do—and went back to struggling against the weight of the dark.
Another arrow of words Rian cast, at Cillmod this time, inside the banqueting hall. Herewiss couldn’t stop it: he was still recovering from the last blockage. Cillmod vanished away in a simple transport spell. So he doesn’t want to throw his own tools away—
Their minds still bound together, Herewiss caught the answer. Especially not one that’s almost manned to the fist already, Rian said, preparing another arrow, quicker, sharper, to take his wife and daughter the same way.
So you plan to keep a King around after the battle.
Well, not the present kind of king. Something better. And through Rian’s distraction, while he used his connection with Herewiss’ mind to undo his own shapechange, and prepared his third sorcery, Herewiss saw what Rian and his Master had in mind. It was a kingship without will, without power except as authorized by another: a thing that would perform the royal magics, and then lie idle, unalive, like a run-down clockwork toy, until needed again. It was a black kingship: a king who was no spouse of the Goddess’s, a king in isolation. Herewiss saw Rian’s thought of Cillmod as a tool, and one that needed to be further ground down—one that had entirely too much will of its own for Rian’s tastes or needs. He would have preferred someone much younger. Better still, someone unborn—
Herewiss flinched away from the image. Rian, and the Shadow working through him, meant to take a babe or child of the royal blood, in which the potential for power descended, and make from it a thing in human shape that walked and spoke but had no mind, and no will. And best of all for this purpose were the unborn—
Herewiss carefully, carefully kept his mind away from any further thoughts on that subject—
So there is one! came the triumphant cry. Then came the thrust of power, piercing through the woven Fire that lay about Herewiss’s inner mind, hunting for names, locations—
Herewiss smashed right back. For a long minute or two they simply struggled together in mind like two wrestlers. Herewiss’s revulsion was in danger of interfering with his ability to fight: and the pressure bore down on his brain from all sides, like iron bands, to squeeze the truth out of him. No, he thought. Goddess, I’m on your business, but I must die before they find that out—
The pain became excruciating, but not so much so that Herewiss couldn’t see the bright line of Fire that bound his soul permanently into his body. The pressure increased. Before he lost the ability to do so, he reached out to that line, to snap it—
The next thing Herewiss knew, the world dissolved in fire. Only a faint wash of it hit Herewiss, but all his skin felt like he was roasting on a spit, and Rian screamed. The scream was more rage than pain, however, and that blazing figure somehow managed to totter to its feet, lurched around the garden, batting frenziedly at itself. The fire was fastened on it hard, ravening: the air stank of ozone, the pavement melted and bubbled: but Rian still stood, and screamed, and fought, while Sunspark wrapped itself around him as it had around the sorcerer at Eftgan’s Hammering.
The sorcerer, though, had gone to dust in seconds. Rian did no such thing.
The screams from inside the banqueting hall wound together with his. One of them at least was a child’s, too high-pitched to be any other: “Da! DA!”
This, said the fierce voice that Herewiss knew well, for her, for both of them, if you do not submit.
The next moment there was a roar and thunder like lightning striking, and the fire went out. Exhausted, in desperate haste, Herewiss dove back down into himself, back into the black halls of the Hold, and made the change to his own soul-form: then burst up and out of himself and back into the real world. He knelt gagging on the paving stones for a moment, meanwhile fumbling over his shoulder for Khávrinen. He drew it and looked for his enemy. No sign of him: but no sign of Sunspark either.
Khávrinen burned desperately dim, barely a tongue or two of Fire flickering about it. Much brighter were the burning tapestries in the banqueting hall, flickering through the smoke that billo
wed out of the broken, burnt doors. Herewiss could see no one inside; by sorcery or Fire, or just plain running, the place was empty. No sign of Rian. But off on the paving, to one side, by one of the stone jars, lay a loose-limbed form, terribly still—an Arlene hunting cat, three times its normal size, in a scatter of once-white rose petals, now scorched black.
Herewiss staggered over to it, dropped to his knees, and pulled the great fanged head into his lap. “Firechild,” he said. “Sunspark!”
It was a long few moments before its eyes opened, squinting and wincing, and a low sound like a moan came from it.
“Are you hurt?”
Oh, I am. I could do nothing.
He cradled it. Nothing, it said, sounding as if it wanted to weep. That power that almost put me out before—stronger, now. It almost did it again, though I came at it with all my strength. And even that silly form of flesh It wore, I couldn’t burn. Sunspark had lifted its head: now it let it drop back into Herewiss’s lap again. What will you do? It will be waiting for us, at the battle.
Herewiss shook his head and stroked it. “What kind of healing do you need?” he said.
Time. But that we don’t have, I think.
“No,” Herewiss said, “we don’t.” He looked down at it, trying to put on a brave face. “All the same, you were clever to do what you did.”