Undead though she was, the Queen still managed to show shock and dismay that a stranger knew her greatest secret, the word that described who she was. But her distress lasted hardly a breath. “Tell me quickly!”
Segnbora swallowed, looked Efmaer in the eye, and whispered it—one long, cadenced, beautiful word in very old Darthene. Efmaer’s eyes filled with it, filled with life, and tears.
“Kinswoman,” she choked, the word carrying a great weight of thanks and wild hope. “Go. Don’t stay for me. I’ll meet you by the doors if I can. I have to see about something before I go.”
Off Efmaer went into the unchanging dusk. Segnbora turned and ran after her friends. They were almost out of sight, near the outwall, where the twilight was thickest.
(Mdaha, what’s the time?)
(There’s a little left yet.)
She ran, harder than before, somehow feeling relieved of a great burden. She could feel the backlash of her sorcery creeping up on her, a hammering in her head and a weakness in the limbs. But her sorcery was holding, the others were still bound by her will. She caught sight of them now, not too far ahead, right up against—
“Oh Dark!” she whispered in complete despair, not caring what the swearing might invoke.
The great doors were shut. The faint light of the lying Moon shone high as before, but its light looked dimmer somehow. Freelorn and Herewiss were standing there looking dully up at the doors with the others. There was someone else there too, backed up against the entrance. She pushed past Herewiss and stopped short, horrified.
There was more energy bound up in that waiting figure than in anyone else she had seen in Glasscastle. It was someone slender, a blade of a woman with about as much curve; someone with a slight curvature of the back that made for an odd stance, balanced forward as if perpetually about to lunge; someone with a sword like the sharpened edge of the young Moon, and short straight hair shockingly white at the roots; someone wearing a surcoat with Enra’s lioncelle on it, passant regardant in blood and gold. Her dark eyes had a dazzlement about them, a terrible placidity. The One with Still Hands looked out of them. She was not defeated yet.
“No,” Segnbora whispered. Her other self gazed at her with eyes tranquil and deadly, and hefted another Charriselm, making sure of her grip.
“You’re not leaving,” her own voice said.
Segnbora stepped closer, fascinated by the sight of herself. The other watched her unperturbed, wearing the aura of calm that Shíhan had taught her was better far than armor.
(Mdaha, do you suppose she has you too?)
(As far as I can tell, I’m only here once. Is she truly you?)
(I don’t know—) Segnbora took another step forward.
“Save yourself some trouble,” said the Segnbora who guarded the door, “and don’t bother.”
(I think so,) she said to Hasai. Queasiness started to rise inside her. The backlash was starting, and that meant she would soon be unable to hold together the sorcery. The others would start to drift away.
Her other self took a step forward. There was no question about her purpose. Segnbora raised Charriselm to guard, two-handed, and for the first time eyed her own stance as other opponents must have eyed it, seeking a weakness to exploit for the kill. What frightened her most was that so far, all those who had attempted what she must now attempt were dead.
They started to circle one another. “What I don’t understand,” the other said in a calm, reasonable voice, “is why you’re trying to leave.”
“I have my reasons,” Segnbora said, shuddering at the strangeness of answering her own voice. “And I have my oaths—”
“Your oaths are vain,” said her other self, edging closer in that particular sideways fashion that was Segnbora’s favorite for closing inconspicuously with an enemy. “Who’ll notice if you break them?”
“She will—”
“Oh, indeed. And what has She done for you lately, besides graciously allowing you a night in bed with Her? Just Her sneaky way of telling you that you’re about to die. Oh, come, didn’t you realize?” The other looked scornful. “Oaths! The way Freelorn’s behaving, he’ll never make it anywhere near Prydon: you at least know that! He’ll get himself killed, along with the rest of you, on that cold dark ledge. Ice and darkness, that’s what oaths get you—”
Segnbora slid closer, trembling. It was hard to think of this as just another fight. The necessary immersion in the other’s eyes—that act of becoming the opponent in order to counter her moves before they happened—was impossible when those eyes had the mad Maiden’s dreadful stillness in them. Her every glance made Segnbora afraid she would be caught by those eyes, drown in their blank dazzle, drop Charriselm and surrender. To make matters worse, the backlash was hitting her harder now—not by accident, Segnbora suspected.
(Mdaha!) Hasai said. (Let us fight for you!)
Segnbora blinked at this, and her other self moved in fast, striking high at her head with Charriselm’s twin. Segnbora whirled out of range toward the other’s right, taking advantage of her own slightly weak backhand recovery, and came about again. There was a stir of movement among the silent watchers. For a moment her will to keep them in one place wavered, and they started drifting back toward Glasscastle’s center, where the Maiden waited.
(Don’t answer, sdaha. The mdeihei and I have been here long enough to be able to work your body; and your memories of your training are now for us. Tend to the sorcery. We’ll deal with this other you.)
The other Segnbora was inching in again, waiting for an unguarded moment—evidently Shíhan’s injunctions about not wasting time on showy but ineffective swordplay were binding on her too. Segnbora didn’t much want to give her body to the mdeihei, but even now the sorcery was unraveling. (Mdaha, if you get me killed—!)
(Killed? Here?) Hasai said, gently ironic.
The other leaped in to the attack again. While she was still in midair Segnbora felt other muscles, other wills, strike through her body and wear it as she had worn Hasai’s earlier. Without her volition she saw Charriselm twist up and slash out in the hardein move, the edge-on stroke and backstroke that opens the kier sequence.
Normally, the feint of the first stroke and the vicious backhand cut of the second would have been enough to disembowel her opponent, but Segnbora’s sword met its mate halfway through the first cut. The two swords together sang a tormented note like a bell having its tongue cut out. Charriselm glanced down and out of the bind, and white Darthene steel sliced air where Segnbora would have been, had not the mdeihei twisted her impossibly sideways.
(Ow! My back!)
(You’re still alive, aren’t you? Tend to the sorcery!)
There was no more time for discussion. In the back of her mind the hard-stressed words of the sorcery were turning on one another, blades cutting blades, striving to undo themselves from her constraints. Ignoring her roiling insides, Segnbora shoved words back into place, reinforced them, threatened them, cajoled them in heartfelt Nhàired. It was like carrying water in a sieve, for all the while the power of the wreaking wore away at her outer mind, letting the twilight seep in again.
While she stopped up hole after hole of the sieve to keep her sorcery from running out, Segnbora watched the mdeihei inside her skin using her to turn and cut and thrust, attacking high and low, using all-out routines like sekek and ari’th. Nothing came of it. Every time, Charriselm met its otherself in her twin’s hand, and the steel cried out. Every time she felt her own leverages, her own moves, being used against her. Again and again the mdeihei saved her life with dives and dodges that nearly snapped her spine, but the situation got no better.
(I had—no idea you were so—difficult in a fight, sdaha,) Hasai said, breathing hard from Segnbora’s exertion. He lunged her forward in the dangerous hilt-first “mutiny” maneuver, but her otherself twisted nimbly away.
(Neither did I.) Segnbora pushed a couple of words frantically back into the weave of the spell. As she did, she remembered some
thing Efmaer had said. I could not kill myself, and so I am less than dead. Was this what had happened to her? Had she fought herself here at the gates and lost?
Hasai backed Segnbora up a step, raised Charriselm and stood poised in her body like a dancer, waiting for imprudence to tempt her adversary within range. The other Segnbora took the bait, stepping in suddenly and swinging—the edelle slash that could open her opponent up like an oyster if it connected.
The Dragon sucked Segnbora’s stomach in and struck downward with Charriselm to stop the edelle, then whirled the blade up in a blur to strike at the other’s unprotected throat. But her otherself came up to block, and Segnbora’s stroke was slightly off angle. The two swords met, and this time there was no scrape, but rather a sudden snap that went right to the pit of Segnbora’s stomach. A handsbreadth above the hilt, Charriselm broke in two. The blade-shard went spinning away through the air to fall ringing on the crystal floor.
“No!” she cried, staring in anguish at the broken-off stump that had once been whole and beautiful. Before the doors, her otherself relaxed into guard, knowing Segnbora would think three times about trying a passage armed with only half a sword. At the back of her mind, words began falling away from one another—
A quick motion off to one side brought her around. It was Efmaer. The Queen came to her with her hands extended, and nothing in them…or not quite nothing. She held a long slim darkness, like a slice of the utter darkness beyond the world, like a splinter of night made solid—
“You gave me my Name,” Efmaer said, urgent. “This is all I have to give you. Take it!”
Only for a second Segnbora hesitated as she stared at the uncanny thing. It was impossible to focus on it despite its razor-sharp outline, but Segnbora seized it out of Efmaer’s hands by the end that was slightly thicker, and swung it up. There was no weight of hilt or blade; no feeling of actually holding anything, not even coolness or warmth or resistance to the air.
(Hasai—)
(Trust us, we’ll do well enough with it.)
“Kinswoman, be warned,” Efmaer said, “it’ll demand a life of you some day—it did of me!”
Segnbora nodded absently. She was already busy with the sorcery again, shoring it up. Her otherself dropped once more into a wary crouch, waiting, watching Skádhwë. Hasai saw his advantage and moved in on the other, not waiting.
“So,” said the other, “now you’ll kill me—”
Segnbora wrought a long word in Nhàired and wove it into a spot in the sorcery that was going bare. “You’re in my way,” she said, remotely feeling the strange heft of the sword as Hasai lifted it. Legend said it would cut anything, but would it work here, inside another legend?
“That’s only part of it,” her otherself said. “You like to kill.”
Angry, Segnbora couldn’t help looking into the other’s eyes then, and seeing the placid regard of the Maiden. The power that had almost drowned her before stirred again.
Hasai danced in close, striking with Skádhwë. (I can’t—!) Segnbora whispered in mind. Her resistance made the mdeihei guiding her body miss the stroke. Her otherself slipped out of range, whirling to come at her on her weak side. The mdeihei spun Segnbora about too, so that the face-off stood again as it had.
Down in Segnbora’s mind a word unraveled itself from her sorcery and slithered away like a serpent of light, followed by another, and another. Herewiss turned away, and Freelorn, and Lang—
(Sdaha!)
“Yes!” Segnbora said aloud. The regard the other brought to bear on her wasn’t that of her Maiden, not the Lady of the White Hunt, defender of life and growth. The occupant of her otherself was a counterfeit of Her, as committed to stagnation as Hasai was to doing and being. The mdeihei felt her resolve and leaped again.
The other Segnbora, perhaps thinking Segnbora wouldn’t kill or hurt her, was slow about retreating. A second later she danced back with a cry. Red showed high up on her arm, pumping fast. Segnbora flinched, for she’d felt nothing, no bite of sword into flesh at all.
“If you kill Me, you’re killing part of yourself!” the other cried, sounding afraid for the first time.
Hasai pressed in, following his advantage. Segnbora felt tears coming, but didn’t argue as she patched the spell again and realized what she was going to have to do. It would have been easiest to let Hasai win the fight, but she refused to allow him sole responsibility for that. The spell would hold for this long, if no longer—
Segnbora moaned out loud, took back her muscles, slid in and struck with Skádhwë at the Charriselm being raised against her.
With no more feeling than if it had been cutting air, the shadowblade sheared effortlessly upward through Charriselm and then downward to take off her otherself’s arm at the elbow. The thick sound that the arm made in striking the floor, like so much dead meat, turned Segnbora’s stomach. The agony in the other’s eyes was beyond words as she fell to her knees.
Segnbora would gladly have dropped Skadhwë, but it seemed to be holding her hand closed about it. Her otherself reached down to work the broken Charriselm out of the severed hand, and struggled to her feet. She lifted the useless sword left-handed, and faced Segnbora with tears streaming down her face.
“Why couldn’t you have stayed?” the other Segnbora screamed at her. “Why couldn’t you just let it happen! You always wanted—”
Segnbora swung Skádhwë again, and felt nothing as that head with the silver showing in its hair went rolling away across the crystal floor, trailing red. The slender trunk dropped, pumping out what seemed too much blood for so slight a frame.
One more body. That’s all it is. One more body. Oh, Goddess help me—!
Time was short, and the sorcery was unraveling, assaulted by her revulsion at what she had done. Segnbora lurched toward the doors, aware of Efmaer off to one side, of Herewiss and Freelorn drifting away. The doors were sheer, without any latch, and fitted so closely together that a thin knifeblade couldn’t have been pushed between them. There was no hope of swinging open their massive weight.
Unless, perhaps—
She raised Skádhwë over her head and struck down, a great hewing blow. The sword sank half its depth into the crystal, as if into air. Again she struck, and a shard of the thick glass peeled away and shattered on the floor. Again, and again—
A great prism-slice the size of an ordinary doorway leaned out toward her, slow as a dream, and fell. It smashed thunderously right at her feet.
“Come on, get out!” she shouted at the others, yanking in her mind at the compulsion-sorcery.
Like hounds on leashes they all came stumbling after her, Freelorn and Herewiss, Lang and Dritt and Moris, Harald and Torve and Sunspark, out the jagged hole into the true twilight. The Moon was telling the truth again, and the truth was awful. Its lower curve had dipped behind the wall of the Adínë glacier’s cirque. Only the crescent’s two horns still showed in the sky. West of the Moon, the Evenstar balanced precariously on the ridge of the cirque, a trembling, narrowing eye of light.
Behind Segnbora, Herewiss shook his head as the wind hit him, and glanced around like a man roused from reverie. Then he glanced up at where the Moon should have been, and wasn’t. “My Goddess, it’s almost gone, the bridge—!”
Segnbora stood poised by the door, peering in desperately. “Efmaer!” she cried.
Just inside the door Efmaer stood, looking over her shoulder, trying to catch a last glimpse of her loved through the twilight.
“Efmaer!”
The Queen turned to Segnbora, reached out a hand. Segnbora took it and pulled, and Efmaer stepped through the jagged portal—
—She had not even time to look surprised. She simply stopped in midmotion and went to dust, the dust of a woman five hundred years dead. In seconds the relentless wind howling down from the mountain took her and whirled her away.
Segnbora stared stupidly at her empty hand, then turned and ran through the group, who stood watching her with confusion and fear on th
eir faces. “Come on,” she yelled through her sobs, “the wind is back, the bridge is going to vanish! You want to try standing on air?”
She ran out onto the phantom part of the Skybridge, half-hoping it would give way under her and wipe out the sickening memory of the Queen’s hand going to dust in hers. Oh, Efmaer—!
Footsteps pounded close behind her. The Moon’s horns looked across the cirque ridge at her, far apart, growing shorter. The Evenstar wavered. Segnbora ran, gasping and terrified. Freelorn came pounding past her, showing off his sprinter’s stride to good advantage. Hard behind him came Herewiss, with Khávrinen once more afire on his back. Then came Sunspark, streaming fire like a runner’s torch from mane and tail. Torve and Lang and Harald and Moris and Dritt passed her too, wheezing.
Segnbora saw them all make the solid part of the bridge just at the moment the Moon pulled its horns completely beneath the ridge, and the Evenstar closed its eye and went out. With ten yards to go, the bridge of air dissolved beneath her, and she began to fall….
But Hasai was doing something. The fall simply went no farther, as if she had wings. In the moment of time he bought her, hands grabbed at her frantically and pulled her up onto the steel.
Segnbora shook them off and headed down the bridge, fast, only slowing when the angle of the arch made footing difficult. Tears blinded her, burning cold in the icy wind. She struck them out of her eyes, raging at heart, and plunged down to the end of the span, down to rock and snow. There Segnbora ducked around to one side of the Skybridge, and slid on her rear end toward one of the huge supports rooted in the mountainside.
The others were out of sight. Above her she heard them calling her, confused, frightened, relieved; and she ignored them. Poor crippled One, I pity You—but You’ll have no more company in Your exile. Nor am I going to let Herewiss give up a piece of his life to bind this grave closed. Enough life’s been wasted here. I have a better way—