Диана Дуэйн - The Door Into Shadow

come.
He looked across the cavern at her now, head held high, waiting for her to disapprove of him and pronounce a sen-tence worse than death: eternal imprisonment with a sdaha whose opinion of him was not passive placidity, but active scorn. Behind him, the mdeihei were strangely silent. "You ran," Segnbora sang. He said nothing.
"And you are of value nonetheless," she said, weaving around the words a melody that attributed importance to her words. "You did what you did, and here you are. And here am I, too … or should I say, here are we."
Hasai looked at her in amazement. She sighed a little fire and unfolded one emerald-strutted wing, laying it over his back in a gesture of affection.
TOC \o "1–3" \h \z "So where do we go from here?" she asked. i*
He opened his mouth, and nothing came out for a moment A " 'Sithesssch,'you said,"he sang in dubious tones. Nf
She flipped her tail in agreement. *\.
"Then only one matter still troubles me …" "What?" — >
"The mdeihei, and their opinion. As you know, they do not judge, but merely advise. Still, I would like to know that they are not ashamed." Segnbora considered the matter, listening to the utter si-lence in the background where the mdeihei usually sang. "Mdaha, don't worry. If they are truly of the Immanence, as they claim, they will understand."
The doubt fell out of his voice, but Hasai still looked at her strangely. "You're truly sdahaih at last," he said. "It's very odd."
"How so? You knew how it would be." He dropped his jaw, smiling. "Sometimes, for the sake of surprise, we forget a little."
Segnbora spread both wings high and curved her neck around to look at them. "Well, I certainly feel sdahaih. Shall we go test it?" "There's more to being sdahaih, and Dracon, than flight,"
Hasai said, and his song trembled with the joy of one who's found something long lost. "Memory. And its transforma-tion." She shook too, thinking of all the painful experiences she could accept, or remake if she wished. Now that she was sdahaih, the ever-living past was as malleable as the present. There were some things she wouldn't change, experiences that had made her what she was now. Balen, she thought. He stays. There's unfinished business there, somehow. But as for other matters—
For the first time since that afternoon under the willow, her love was clean — and now more than ever before she wanted to give it away. "I remember a place," she sang quietly, look-ing at Hasai, "where stars swirl in the sky like a frozen whirl-pool, and the Sun is red and the stone is as warm as your eyes—"
He met her glance with eyes that blazed. "Toe mnek-e"," he sang. We remember. Wings lifted and beat downward, and the cave was empty.
The soaring began at the Homeworld, and never quite ended. They made the Crossing all over again, together this time. Other Dragons
looked curiously at the one who in fore-memories had been alone, but who now went companioned by some child of the Worldfinder's line, green-scaled and golden-spined, with eyes the fiery yellow of the little star to which they journeyed.
They saw the Winning again, not with guilt this time, but simply as one of the events that would eventually bring them together. Afterwards, they fell to earth like bright leaves drift-ing, and lay basking in the Sun. They glided together through long afternoons, taking their time so that the people below would have something to marvel at. They matched speed for speed in the high air, and tore it to tatters of thunder. They went bathing in the valleys of the Sun, and chased the twilight around the world for sport. He made her a present of the sunset, and she made him one of the dawn, and they both drank them to the dregs until the fire of their throats was stained the red of the vintage.
They lived in fledgling and Dragoncel and Dragon, in child and girl and woman — found memories that were lost, discov-ered past and future. Gazing into one another for centuries, they also found completion. And at the bottom of that, they found Another gazing back. One Who became them as They became It. Goddess-Immanence and peers, Made and Maker, the two Firstborn, They flowed together. Not merely One, not simply the same. They were. For that, even in Dracon, there were no words.
Eventually they remembered the way home, and — living in it — were there. Segnbora, leaning back against the immense forelimb from which she had not moved all night, looked up at her mdaha's silver eyes. "I have to be getting back," she said. "They'll be wonder-ing where I am." "Best hurry and tell them. Sehf'rae, sdaha." "Seht …"
Halfway out the entrance to the cave, she paused, touching her breast in confusion. In the place where the nightmare had bitten her, there was nothing but a pale, crescent-shaped scar.
"Dragons heal fast," Hasai said from behind her. A quiet joy like nothing she had ever heard sang around his words. She knew how he felt. "Sehe'rae, mdaha," she said, and went out.
rf
She opened her eyes on a dawn she could taste as well as see. When she stood up to stretch, she saw the Moon, three days past third quarter, the phase under which she had been born, hanging halfway up the water-blue sky like a smile with a secret behind it. Picking her way back toward the camp, she came across someone waiting for her with his back to the rising Sun. His long black shadow stretched out toward her, the stones within it outlined brightly by the Fire of the sword he leaned upon.
"Welcome back," Herewiss said as she approached. Skadhwe was struck into a nearby rock. She raised a questioning eyebrow at Herewiss as she plucked it out and re— sheathed it. '
"I didn't touch Skadhwe," he said. "I asked it politely, and we reached an accommodation."
"Thank you," she said. She glanced down at the cracked and broken links of her chammail. "This whole thing was a setup— You knew the nightmare was here. You knew twenty miles away. You couldn't no! have known."
He caught the merriment in her voice and grinned. "I'm on other business than just Lom's and Eftgan's," he said. "There's all kinds of power in this world, looking to be freed. I do what I can."
"I could have died," she said, "of what it said to me. I understood it, it spoke the truth, and yet I killed it anyway. The despair could have finished me."

THE DOOR INTO SHADOW
"I know," Herewiss replied. "My decision was not made lightly. If you hadn't been strong enough. . yes, you would have died. And I would have laken responsibility for it."
She looked at him, pitying and loving him, both at once. "'Thanks," she said.
*'I didn't do much of anything," he said, half-bowing gra-ciously. "You seem to have found your own solutions."
He looked past Segnbora with great interest. Turning, she was just as interested to see the long-necked, long-bodied, short-legged Dracon shadow that lay behind her. It was posi-tioned as if the creature that cast it were standing on her hind legs. Experimentally she pointed a finger, and saw the shadow of the forewing barb cock outward.
"Is it true," Herewiss asked with a gentle simile, "what they say about Dragons and maidens?"
She turned back and shrugged slightly. '"You'll have to ask someone who'd know," she said. "I'm not a maiden any-more, ./* She started back toward camp to saddle Steelsheen and hummed a chord.
Fourteen
… the Goddess could not spend all Her time persuading the Kings and Queens of the world of the idiocy of war. Therefore She invented tacticians..
(source unknown)
As they topped the crest of yet another line of foothills they paused, silent in the dusk, and looked down upon ancient history. Forest patches lay on the wrinkled fells and hollows of the land below. Although it was just two nights before Midsummer, the wind ran chill over the land, rustling trees and grass so that the earth seemed to shudder like the flank of a troubled beast.
South of their position the foothills became rougher, their bare stones turning brown, red, and hot gray in the fading light. Farther south still rose the Highpeaks. Off into the crimson distance they marched, mountain after mountain. At their forefront, frozen like a white wave of stone about to break, stood Mount Ndniion, which overshadowed Bluepeak.
"The weather's changing," Freelorn said. He was looking uneasily at the filmy banner of windblown snow that stretched southward over the Peaks from N6mion's major summit. It had a distinct downward curve to it that indicated it was a south wind fighting to get past the moun-tains and slide under the wanner northland air.
"Storm tomorrow, loved. Can't you do something?'' Herewiss's eyes were elsewhere — searching the country west of them for any sign of the Darthenes. Eftgan's last message had said that she and her troops would bivouac a league-and-a-half west of the mouth of Bluepeak valley two nights before Midsummer, well out of the sight of the Reavers encamped in Britfell fields around the town. But the land beneath them had a trampled look, and was empty. "I could," Herewiss said, reaching over his shoulder for Khavrinen to better sense what had been happening there. "It
would be unwise, though. Eftgan may already have done something."
"Or Someone else might have," Segnbora said. She was as troubled as Lorn, for different reasons. Her undersenses clearly brought her a feeling of haste and disruption from the land below, as if plans had gone awry and many minds down there had recently been in turmoil. Worse were Hasai's memories, and those of some of the mdeihei who knew this area well. Something dark and threatening lurked under this land, and was ready to rise up in menace.
She shuddered, as did the mdeihei inside her. Herewiss was sitting still with Khavrinen flaming in his lap, its Fire subdued. "Someone else has been meddling, I think,"he said, glanc-ing over at Freelorn. "There's will behind this weather, and I'd sooner not probe it more closely than that, since I'd be leaving myself open to be probed back. Better to stay low for the moment." He looked down at the Bluepeak highlands. "Eftgan came at this site from the north a day and a half ago—"
"Were they driven back by Arlenes?" Freelorn said, anx-ious. Cillmod had been raiding across the Arlene-Darthene border for nearly a year now, in violation of the Oath. It was unlikely that he would allow a Darthene incursion into his territory to go unchallenged. "No. Reavers — and they were here first. Eftgan had a skir-mish with them and went north again. The Reavers went west. No sign of Arlenes; they must not have received word that Eftgan's in the vicinity."
Dritt looked confused. "Eftgan's a Rodmistress, though. Shouldn't she have been able to sense that the Reavers were here, and avoid them?" Herewiss nodded.
There was uneasy shifting among Freelorn's followers. Lorn himself was bewildered. "How can a Rodmistress's scry-ing go wrong? 1 "' Herewiss swung down from Sunspark and began loosening the girths of its saddle. "The same way mine can, I imagine," he said. Segnbora could feel the great effort he was making lo conceal the trouble in his mind. "1 can't feel where she is