The completeness of his concentration, and the economy and elegance of the structure itself, delighted Segnbora. Lady, he’s good, she thought, admiring the perfect match between the inner symmetry-ratios of the wreaking and the meter of the spell-poem he was reciting under his breath. They were fools to throw him out of the Precincts just because he was male…
Segnbora’s glance fell on the lifeline he’d just drawn, noticing its brilliance. “If you leave my pulse running that fast,” she said, “I’ll be in bad shape when we get back.”
“Nervous, huh?” he said, glancing at her and lifting Khávrinen away from the description of a parabola. He touched the sword’s tip to the pulse line, draining it of some Fire. “Better?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Sunspark?”
Hot light flowered in one corner of the room and consolidated into a slim red-haired young woman with cheerful golden eyes. (They’re impatient down there, loved,) she said, amused. (They keep testing me.)
“Fine, just so long as they don’t get too interested in khas-Barachael. You know what to do?”
(This being the fourth time you’ve asked me,) Sunspark said, folding her arms in good-natured annoyance, (I dare say I do. None of them will leave the valley. They’ll find the way into the plains barred, just as Barachael town is barred to them. On the night of full Moon, immediately before the eclipse starts, I’ll begin driving the lot of them back up the pass. None will die.)
Herewiss nodded, narrow-eyed, completing the interconnection of several lines. “I hate to admit it,” he said, “but there’s a possibility that something’ll go wrong with all this. If the pass fails to seal properly, and I’ve exhausted myself, and they get down into the valley again—”
(Loved,) Sunspark said, (if that happens I’ll be quick with them. Their bodies will be consumed before the pain has a chance to start.)
Herewiss looked gratefully at the elemental from inside the shimmering blue web of the wreaking. “Thanks, loved. I’ll do my best to make it unnecessary.” He rested Khávrinen point-down on the floor and gazed around at the finished spellweb. “Lorn?”
“The Moon’s right,” Freelorn said, turning away from the window. “Let’s go.”
Trembling a bit with excitement, Segnbora unbuckled her swordbelt, drew Skádhwë from it, and tossed the belt in one corner. Herewiss walked out through the web and then turned inward to face, from the outside, the part of it specifically concerned with his body.
“A little to the left, ‘Berend,” he said as she moved into position. “Lorn, you’re fine.” They each stood at one corner of an equilateral triangle. “All together: step—”
Segnbora walked through the part of the Fireweb sympathetic to her, feeling the charged-cobweb crackle of it as it brushed against her face and hands. The hair stood up all over Segnbora as the spell passed through her body and rooted in flesh and bone. At the same time came an astonishing wave of lethargy that spread through her as quickly as blood beats outward from the heart. Hurriedly Segnbora lay down on the left-hand pallet, settling herself as comfortably as she could. She laid Skádhwë down the length of her, folded both hands about its hilt at heart level, and began relaxing muscles one by one.
Across the circle, Herewiss was settling himself with Khavrinen, while Freelorn bent over him. “My head aches,” Lorn said. “Is it supposed to do that?”
“That’s the part of your mind that’s slowing down to keep up with us,” Herewiss said, starting to sound drowsy as the wreaking took hold of him too. His eyes lingered on Freelorn for a moment.
“Don’t even think it,” Lorn said, and bent lower to kiss Herewiss good night. Herewiss’s eyebrows went up for a second, then down again as his eyes closed.
(Mdaha,) Segnbora said to her inner depths, closing her own eyes, (see you when I’m out of the body!)
(I think not,) the answer came back, faint but amused.
(What?) She tried to hold off the wreaking long enough for Hasai to explain, but it was no use. Briefly the spell fought with her lungs, then conquered them and slowed her breathing. That done, the Firework wound deeper into her brain, altering her thought rhythms toward the profound unconsciousness of wreaking suspension. For a second of mindless panic Segnbora fought that too, like a drowning swimmer….and then thought, What am I doing? I chose this danger. I choose it now!
The phrasing of the thought was Dracon, and out of Dracon reflex, scared but determined, she took a long breath of the Fire. It burned. But as with Hasai’s fire, she matched with it, meshed with it, felt it sink in – and everything, even Hasai and the mdeihei, fell away….
***
ELEVEN
“Choose,” She said to the cruel king. “For I am bound by My own law, and what you desire shall be given you, until you shall ask Me for something beyond My power to grant.”
One by one he told her his desires, and one by one she granted them all—until at last, alone, desolate King of an empty city, he cried out to Her in anguish, “Change my heart!”
“I shall leave you now,” the Goddess said, “for you have asked a boon past My power. Only one has the power to fulfill that wish….and you are doing so.”
from “The King Who Caught the Goddess,” in Tales of old Steldin,
ed. s’Lange, rr’Virendir, 1055 p.a.d.
Segnbora was wide awake. She swung her feet off the pallet and stood up with Skádhwë in her hand. The room around her was foggy and hard to see—Herewiss’s spellweb had already slowed her time sense considerably. Dust and convection currents moved around her at what seemed many times their normal speed. Her othersenses were wide awake too, and showed her strange blurs going swiftly about the room—one yellow-bright as fire, one dark with an odd tangle of potential at its heart: Sunspark and Freelorn.
Herewiss still lay in his body, the blue-white core that was his soul struggling yet with the shell that surrounded it. Tense with the sensation of his difficulty, Segnbora turned away from him to gaze down at herself where she lay on her pallet.
(Mdaha?) she said. No answer came back; evidently the mdeihei were tied to her body, and must stay there, silenced, when she left it.
She looked down at her still form, drowned in a repose deeper than any sleep. It had been a long time since the Precincts, when she had last been out-of-body and able to see herself so clearly. A lot had changed since then. There was a wincing fierceness about the corners of the eyes now that hadn’t been there when she was younger, and even in this sleep the body looked tense, as if prepared to move in a hurry. Too much time alone, she thought, with the curious objectivity of the soulwalker. Too much time on the run…
(It’s not that bad,) Herewiss said from behind her. She turned, and was quietly astonished by what she saw. It wasn’t that Herewiss’s inner self didn’t look like his outer one. It kept that tall lean look, a smith’s no-nonsense musculature, and the fine-featured face made handsome by sleepy, gentle eyes. But through it, like sunlight through crystal, blazed the Fire, potent for creation and destruction, all wound about with a straightforward joy in the Fire that was more blinding than the Flame itself. He looked dangerous, and utterly magnificent.
(Well met,) Segnbora said, and meant it.
His expression was thoughtful. (You speak for me too,) Herewiss said. Maybe he caught her bemused look, for he said, (We’re short of time, but have you noticed that?)
He pointed behind her. Segnbora looked over her shoulder, away from the quick-flickering light of the Fire-web. Laid out along the floor, long and dark behind her, was her shadow.
(That’s impossible!) she said in momentary indignation, turning. (You can’t have a shadow out of the body!) Yet there the darkness lay, stretching to the wall and right through , blandly contradicting what she’d been taught in the Precincts. Experimentally Segnbora raised an arm, and was dumbfounded to see the serrated shape of a Dragon’s wing lift away from the shadow-body.
Behind her Herewiss was restraining his laughter. (Seems my mdaha’s tru
ly becoming part of me,) Segnbora said, amused in spite of herself.
(Where is he? I thought he’d be here with us.)
(So did I. He’s with my body, looks like.)
Herewiss felt dubious for a moment (How are you going to tell me what’s happening in the stone, then? If he’s not here—)
Segnbora started to lean on Skádhwë, then aborted the gesture as the sword’s point began to pierce the stone they stood on. (Well, I have my memories of what ’s like to be one of the mdeihei. All I have to do is live in them completely enough and we’ll be fine.) She wished she was as certain of that as she made sound, especially since she’d spent enough time lately resisting that very thing. (Now, where do we have to go?)
Herewiss nodded at the room’s north wall, laying Khávrinen over his shoulder. Segnbora did the same with Skádhwë, and together they walked through the wall and into the clear air over Barachael. The stars wheeled visibly in the paling sky above them, moving a little faster each moment as Herewiss’s wreaking further slowed their time sense.
(How about that, it works,) Herewiss said, pausing. (A moment. Lorn?)
The answer came not in words, but in swift-passing impression of concern, relief, encouragement. All was well in the tower, though Freelorn wondered why Herewiss had waited so long to check in with him; nearly an hour had passed.
(We’re all right, loved,) Herewiss said. (The pauses may get pretty long, but don’t worry about us unless the web fails.) He broke contact and walked down the air toward Barachael valley. Segnbora followed.
Their othersight was stimulated to unusual clarity by the wreaking, and the Chaelonde valley bubbled like a cauldron with normally unseen influences. The Reavers’ emotions were clearly visible, a stew of frustrated violence and fear. Barachael town crouched cold and desolate behind the invaders. As the low threshold of her underhearing dropped lower still, Segnbora heard the slow bitter dirge of the town’s bereaved stones, which were certain that once more the children of their masons had been slaughtered. The other lives of the valley, birds and beasts, showed themselves only as cautious sparks of life, aware of an ingathering of Power and lying low in order not to attract attention.
The sky to the east went paler by the moment, and the Moon slid down the sky and faded in the face of day, looking almost glad to do it. While they watched, the Sun leapt into the sky too quickly, as if it wanted to put distance between itself and the ground.
The ground was a problem. Dark negative energies seethed in it the way thoughts of revenge might seethe in an angry mind. Though the faults weren’t yet very clear, it was plain that these negative energies ran down most of them, draining toward the foundations of the valley, where they collected in a great pool of ancient, festering hatred.
(We have to get into empathy with that?) Segnbora said, revolted.
(I’ll grant you, I’d sooner sit in a swamp,) said Herewiss, striding down the air toward the reeking morass. (Still, the sooner we do it, the sooner we can get out and get clean again. Come on down this way…)
He led the way around toward the base of the easternmost spur of Adínë. There one of the vertical faults followed the spur’s contour, a remnant of a day long before when the earth bad shrugged that particular jagged block of stone above the surface. The fetid swirl of emotion in the valley broke against the spur as a wave breaks, flowing around it and up the pass. Herewiss stepped carefully down onto a high ridge of the spur and waited there for Segnbora. When she caught up, they both paused to watch the way the shadows in the valley shrank and changed. The few moments’ walk down from Sai khas-Barachael had begun at sunrise, and now it was nearly noon.
(Now what?)
Herewiss lifted Khávrinen. Fire ran down from it and surrounded him until he blazed like someone drenched with oil and set alight. (In,) he said. Glancing down at the ridge they stood on, he stepped down into the earth as if walking down stairs.
(Show-off,) Segnbora thought, though with affection. She walked down the outer surface of the ridge, seeking the way into the mountain that would best suit her. Turning, she saw her incongruous shadow against the ridgewall behind her. Impossible… as impossible as a human becoming a Dragon. So why not? Reaching behind her with both hands, Segnbora grasped it and pulled it forward about her shoulders like a cloak, becoming what she couldn’t be.
It was astonishingly easy. There was fire in her throat again, and she had wings to feel the air, one of which was barbed not with a claw of white diamond but with a sliver of night made solid. She dug her talons into the naked stone. Without moving, Segnbora knew what lay beneath her, felt it as if it was her…for it was. The deep, slow, scarce-moving selfness of the rock, the secret burning at the roots, the earth’s heavy veins running with the mountain’s blood… they were her veins, her blood, her life.
…It was hard to think, immersed in the ancient nonconscious musings of stone. The transience of thought, or any concern for the doings of the ephemerals at the outer edge of Being, seemed pointless. Internal affairs were much more important—the perpetual leisurely conflict between the black flowing fires of the Inside, and the cold nothing of the Outside, played out on the interface between them, the board of the shifting world. The player Outside blanketed the board close, wearing away its opponent with wind and rain; grinding it down with glaciers, cracking its coastlines with the pressure of the hungry seas. The Inside raised up lands and threw them down, tore continents apart, broke the seabottoms and made new ones; hunched up fanged mountain ranges to bite at the wind and be bitten in return. The game went on in move and countermove, upthrust, subsistence and slide, while overhead, hardly remarked, the Poles changed stars.
This particular range had hardly been in the game long enough to prove its worth as a move. Now the huge nonconsciousness wondered idly—as the Sun went down again—why this area was suddenly such a cause for concern.
Segnbora breathed stone deeply and strove to remember herself. There was something lulling for a Dragon in this perception of stone, as there was for humans in the presence of the Sea: it suggested the solace of an ancient birthplace as the Sea intimated the peace of the Shore. But the lulling, here and now, was dangerous. (Herewiss?) she said, singing a chord of quandary around his name.
(Here,) his answer came back, darkness answering darkness.
She couldn’t feel him except indirectly. He had chosen to leave his physical imagery behind for the time being, and was manifesting himself only as a mobile but greatly restrained stress in the stone, staying quite still until he got his bearings. Khávrinen was evident too, seeming like the potential energy which that stress would release when it moved. (I feel you. Aren’t you coming in?)
(I am in,) she sang, delighted by the truth of it. (I’m outside, too. Both at once. I can feel you inside me; you’re like a muscle strain. And I can feel the other side of the world from here. What do you feel?)
(Granite, mostly. Marble. Iron—that’s the mines.) He paused to feel around. (They haven’t come near the main lodes, even after centuries of work. I’ll have to tell Eftgan where the good metal is. Then further down, the faults…) He trailed off, sounding uneasy.
Segnbora felt what Herewiss felt and found everything much as it had been when Hasai had done the first survey, but the assessment didn’t satisfy her. (I need more precision. I’m going to narrow down a good deal and make this perception clearer. Will the valley and ten miles on all sides be sufficient?)
(Those were the boundaries that Hasai was using. Yes.)
Segnbora felt closely into the valley floor itself for ten or twelve miles down, absorbing and including into herself the sensations of pressures and unreleased strains, strata trying to shear upward or sink down. Whole mountains she embraced as if with encircling wings: Aulys, Houndstooth, Eisargir and Adínë, then east to Whitestack, Esa and Mint, south to Ela and Fyfel, west to Mesthyn, Teleist and the Orakhmene range. They were a restless armful. Rooted they might be, but they were alive as trees—shifting trembling, pushing on
e another with quick covert nudges.
The whole Highpeak region far into the unnamed south was shivering, ready to bolt like a nervous horse. The cause of its nervousness was at the heart of her perception. With ruthless diligence Segnbora absorbed all, missing no detail—the vertical faults lying stitched across the valley in a row, south to north, angry and frightened; the treacherous lateral fault, its line running from the pass between Adínë and Eisargir into the valley, through Barachael and out the narrow gate to lower land; and under it all, that old dark sink of negative energies.
(I see ,) Herewiss said, his thought thick with revulsion. Segnbora caught a quick taste of his perception, different from hers, and primarily concerned with the Shadow’s influence. Herewiss felt it everywhere here, particularly in the lateral fault, where the accumulated hatred made the fault seem to crouch and glare like a cornered rat. The darkness inhabiting it knew who he was and what he had come for, and the whole valley trembled with its malice.
Segnbora trembled too, revolted and suddenly afraid. They were fools to try to tamper with this dynamism, so delicately balanced that a talon’s weight applied to the wrong spot might bring whole mountains down. The Dweller-at-the-Howe had been wise to forbid the Dragons from delving here. Worse, she could feel the murky sink of hatred swelling, growing aware of their presence.
(Herewiss!) she said. He didn’t answer, and she began to grow angry, the Fire burning hotter in her throat. He was so damn sure of himself! (Herewiss!)
(What do you want?) he snapped, as angry as she was. (Don’t meddle! Can’t you see I’m in the middle of a wreaking? If you distract me—)
Typical of him to pay no attention to her, all sunk in his own concerns as he was; as he always was. (Your wreaking’s barely begun, and I’m no great distraction. Will you listen to me? I’m Precinct-trained, and—)
(They don’t know everything in the Precincts,) Herewiss said, bitter and superior. He felt jealous, too, which briefly made Segnbora wonder. Jealousy…shouldn’t that suggest something in this situation?