Диана Дуэйн - The Door Into Shadow

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People who live in the Highpeaks find it easy to believe the old story that the Maiden creates the World anew, every day, for the sheer joy of it. Astonishing dawns come there. Later, the face of a mountain changes as the shadows swing across it, revealing a new countenance every quarter hour. Still later come sunsets that run blood down cornices of snow, or light a whole range as if from within, until it all seems one great burning opal. Then twilight dissolves everything, leaving only shadows where peaks have been; cut-out patches on the sky, from which the mischievous Maiden has removed the moun-tains so She can rework them for the next day.
Huddled in her cloak, Segnbora leaned on her elbows on a battlement of Sai khas-Barachael at dawn, watching the mountains come back. The Sun was up, though not yet visible past the eastern peaks. Beneath her Barachael valley was still hidden in shadow and morning mist. The valley was nearly circular. The walls broke only at the far northern end, where a quarter-arc of the circle was missing and the land
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sloped down northward toward the rest of Darthen. Khas-Barachael fortress stood on the northernmost spur of high ground, on the western side of the break, commanding a view of both the Darthene plains and the valley.
Segnbora gazed across the gap, though which the little braided Chaelonde River ran down from its glacier, toward the mountains that reached long spurs to each other and made the rest of the ring. First came Aulys, right across the gap, like an eagle with bowed head and drooping wings. South and west of it Houndstooth reared, smooth and pol-ished-looking, and armed with avalanches. West of Hounds —
tooth, between it and the next mountain, was a shadowy spot — the north end of the Eisargir Pass, through which Reavers lad been raiding for food and metal since time immemorial. Tien Eisargir himself, like a great stone rose unfolding with lis down-spiraling spurs. Westward again lay a low col or [saddle between mountains, over which looked red Tamien. Tien came rising ground that grew into the long northeast— jointing Adine massif.
Segnbora looked over her shoulder, scanning the long crest line. It was scarred on both sides with old glacial cirques; jscraped-out bowls of stone. One such bowl was still full: the [South Face cirque beneath the lesser, southern peak of Adine. lice spilled over from it to feed the glacial lake which in turn fed the Chaelonde. Every now and then the morning stillness ld be broken by a remote groan or a huge crashing snap, lade tiny by distance, as the glacier calved off an iceberg into [the lake.
Above the glacier, and above the eminence of Sai khas-larachael two thousand feet above the valley floor, Mount idine loomed like a crooked, ruined tower. Its greater peak fstood two miles higher than khas-Barachael and a sheer league above town in the valley's depths. Segnbora shud-lered, though whether from morning's cold or a feeling of threat she didn't know. A breath later, the Sun rose through the gap between Aulys and Houndstooth and touched on the lesser Adine summit. There, tiny and sharp, a line of some-thing silvery glittered; the Skybridge, bright even against the)linding white of the peak on which it stood.
Segnbora shuddered again, this time knowing why. Uncon-:erned, Hasai said from inside her, (We thought about living there, once. .) (Under the bridge? I thought Dragons didn't care to live fhere the shadowed powers are.)
(We don't. When we saw what happened at certain times of ('ear, we abandoned plans to make a Marchward there. Also there are weaknesses in the valley, and we were afraid we fould disrupt the land if we worked as deep into that main lassif as we normally would.) (This was how long ago?)
Hasai looked at his memories and counted the passing suns backward in his mind. (Fifteen hundred years or so.) (That long. .)
Segnbora moved away from the wall and walked along it, southward, to a corner where she could better see the Eisargir Pass. The increasing light was already revealing the reddish tinge to the rocks where they were bare of snow. There under Eisargir lay the oldest mines in Darthen. From them came the finest iron in the Kingdoms; iron from which the people of Barachael made the matchless Masterforge steel. Goddess only knew how many times Barachael had been raided, burned, and razed by the Reavers, who came down the Eisargir Pass again and again on their forays into the Kingdoms.
Those forays had been one of the deadlier aspects of life in the South for a long, long time. No one knew much about the Reavers; their language was utterly different from any spoken in the Kingdoms. But prisoners taken in battle had revealed a little of their lives. The countries overmountain were short of iron. Indeed, one had merely to examine the Reaver bodies on any battlefield to see that: Their weapons were largely flint-tipped spears and arrows. Some were not tipped at all, but were mere sharpened sticks blackened and hardened in fire. Because of their lack of metal the overmountain tribes were small and poor. In the high cold South few crops grew and little game
could flourish. So it had been until twelve or thirteen hundred years before, when some desperately hun-gry Reaver tribe had followed a
game migration northward instead of southward … and had discovered the Eisargir Pass, and Darthen, and steel.
Those first Reavers were no fools. They saw that the rich-ness of the farmland below them was not all to the credit of the warmer climate.
They discovered the plow and the sword. They stole as many of both as possible, and fled back over-mountain with them to change their
world.
The tribes that followed grew swiftly in, power, becoming more successful as both hunters and warriors. In no time the old balance of power was upset. Tribes skirmished, merged, conquered, or dominated one another, grew more numerous, extended their hunting grounds. Game became scarce as they
overhunted their lands. Their agriculture languished, as it usually does in lands where war has become a profitable pas-time. Already a nomadic people during their short summer, the Reavers took wholeheartedly to a raiding lifestyle in order to survive in their unbalanced world. When the weather broke in the spring and the passes opened, they would raid north-ward, spending the spring and summer raiding for loot and cattle, but most of all for steel to use in their endless tribal quarrels. Time and again Barachael was attacked, looted, and burned— Again and again the town was rebuilt, too. Neither the stubborn smith-sorcerers who lived there, nor the Darthene crown that ruled them, would give up the Eisargir mines. Sai khas-Barachael was built on the northernmost Adine spur to keep an eye on the Eisargir incursion route, but even its formidable presence did not deter the Reavers. They con-tinued to raid, though more circumspectly, and in greater numbers, so that the battle for the Chaelonde valley was never over. Only Bluepeak had ever seen more blood shed on its behalf.
The thought of battle, of blood, was not a welcome one that morning. Segnbora turned her back on the southern prospect and walked north along the wall. But that view held no com-fort for her either. Northward the highlands fell away to the green and golden plains. On the plains, far out of sight but clear in her mind, was Darthis, her family's formal home, and the only one remaining, now that Asfahaeg was sold and Wasten Beeches sacked by Reavers.
There in Darthis, on Potboilers' Street just outside the old second wall, stood the little stone house with doors and win-dows shuttered blind, and the tai-Enraesi lioncelle carved over the passage to the horseyard. Her mother wouldn't be singing in the armory anymore, her father wouldn't be re-hanging the bedroom shutter that was always falling down. There was only one person left to carry the lioncelle; and how long even that one would survive she couldn't tell. Ice and darkness. . (Those who sired you?) Hasai said diffidently, (is that question what concerns you? Since last night there's been a— I don't know what you would call it — an opening in the depths—)
She blinked back sudden tears, and her mouth was grim. (Mdaha, forget it, they're rdahaih. They're gone and I'll never see them again, not till I pass the last Door. Maybe not even then.)
She felt him turn his head away, a gesture of shock and sorrow at her hard words and her pain. (Their souls live yet, don't they?)
(They do. It might have been otherwise if we hadn't found them in time.) Her rage at the murdering innkeeper, which had been gnawing at her like an ulcer all the night before, flared up hot again. She turned her back to the wall, to the wind.
After a long time Hasai said, (We didn't understand this business — or believe it.) In his voice there was distress. Far back in her inner darkness, the mdeihei were singing a mourn-ful bass cadence, both dirge and apology. (You humans throw yourselves so willingly into strifes and dangers that we thought surely you must go mdahaih somehow. Otherwise it seemed a madness—)
(We don't get the same life twice. Or know the same people twice. So in this life we fight for what matters. Herewiss fights for Lorn, and Lorn for his kingship. All of us fight for our own happiness, as best we can. Once past the Door, it's done forever.) Hasai fell silent again. The same fear, of not-being, and not-remembering, was at the heart of the terror of going rdahaih, and nothing could frighten a Dragon more. She heard Hasai wondering what would become of him and the mdeihei when her time came to change bodies. Perhaps this human death would be more final and terrible, in its way, than going rdahaih. Segnbora's pain turned to sorrow for