Диана Дуэйн - The Door Into Shadow

beneath it, and the condensation from her
breath drips 'maddeningly onto her face'. The sarcophagus —
shaped Testing Bath is full of icy water, and Segnbora, naked as a fish, is submerged in it up to her face. Her hands are bound to her sides. On her chest rests a ten-pound stone. Above her is the three-inch-thick lid of the Bath, open only at the end behind her head, just enough to let in air and Saris's voice.
This is the final test of a loremistress-Bard, which will deter-m ine whether three years of training will desert her under extreme stress. There's no telling which of the Four Hundred Tales she'll be required to recite faultlessly tonight, or what song, or poem, or legend. When the lid is removed in the morning, she'll be expected to take up the kithara and extem-porize a poem in tragic-epic meter on the forging of F6rlennh BrokenBlade.
"Sunset to sunrise?" she had said to Eftgan this morning, be-fore the last of the orals. "I can do that, standing on my head." Now she's not so sure. She feels like she's been in this cold, wet tomb forever. She suspects it's more like two hours. "The Lost Queen's Ballad," Saris says from outside the Bath.
Segnbora closes her eyes, hunting for the memory-tag she uses to remember that ballad, and finds it. She sings softly, in a minor key:
"Oh, when Darthen's Queen went riding out of Barachael that day, she rode up the empty corrie and she sang a rondelay;
and the three Lights shone upon her as on Skadhwe's bitter blade, and she fared on up that awful trail and little of it made;
She stood laughing on the peak-snows with the new Moon in her hair, and she smiled and set. her foot upon, the Bridge that isn't There;
She took the road right gladly to the Castle in the Sky, and Darthen's sorrel steed came back, but the Queen stayed there for aye. …"
She lies there expecting to be asked for the rest of the history — the suicide of Queen Efmaer's loved, and her jour-ney up to Glasscastle, where suicides go, to get her inner Name back from him. But no, that would be too easy. "Jarrin's Debt," says Saris.
Segnbora sighs. "As long ago as your last night's dreams, and as far away as tonight's," she begins, "the Battle of Blue-peak befell. …" — and the darkness in the Bath is suddenly the darkness inside her mind.
Damn you! Damn you all to Darkness! Get out of here!

the Forges, why do I waste my time on walking butchers' meat?"
She gets up, slowly, resheathes the practice sword in her belt and settles into a ready stance: one hand gripping the imaginary sheath, the other at her side, relaxed. She's seeth-ing, for the other advanced students, starting to eat their nunch, are watching from the sides of the courtyard. Maryn, around whom she danced with insulting ease this morning, is snickering, damn him.
Even as her eyes flick away from Maryn, she sees Shihan drawing. She draws too, spins out of reach as she does so, comes around at him from his momentarily undefended side and hits him — not a hard blow, but so focused that his whole chest cavity seems to jump away from it. Quite suddenly, to her absolute amazement, Shihan is on his left side on the ground, with the point of her practice sword leaning delicately against his ribs. Shihan's eyes close with hers like steel touching steel, and bind there, a bladed glance. All around the courtyard people have stopped chew-ing. No one in her class has ever downed Shihan. Segnbora starts to tremble.
"Good," Shihan says in a voice that all the others can hear. "And wrong," he adds more quietly, for her alone. "Come and eat." They step off to the far side of the courtyard, apart from the other students, and settle under the plane-tree where Shi-han's nunch-meal lies ready — blue-streaked sheepVmilk cheese, crumbly biscuits, sour beer. Shihan silently casts a few crumbs off to one side and spills a few drops of beer as libation to the Goddess, then starts eating.
"Was it your anger at Maryn that caused you to stop think-ing?" Shihan asks. "Yes, sir."
"Feeling when you strike is all right," says her master. "First time I've seen you do that. There may be hope for you yet. Provided," and he glances up with a frown, "that it's the right kind of feeling." She sits quiet while he eats. "Listen," Shihan says. "Don't try to figure this out: just
hear it, let it in. When you strike another, especially to kill, you're striking yourself. When you kill, the other takes a little part of you with them, past the Door. If you do it in anger, what they take is the part of you that feels." Shihan wipes his mouth on his sleeve. His eyes burn with the intensity of one imparting a sacred mystery to a fellow initiate. "Kill in anger often enough and your aliveness starts running out too. Soon there's nothing left but a husk that walks and speaks and does skillful murder. Were you angry at me?" He shoots the ques-tion at her sudden as a dart. "Master! No."
"But I'm the one that anger struck down. See how easily it used you?" Segnbora stares at. the ground, her face burning. "Shihan, I didn't think—" "I noticed," he says, for the first time smiling. "Keep that up.*"
She shakes her head, confused. "Master, in killing in war or in self-defense, if I'm not supposed to feel angry — what should I be feeling?" He looks at her. "Compassion," he says, gruff-voiced. "An-guish. What else, when you've just killed yourself?"
(-ae" wnh khai-pfaaa ur'ts'shatiineh rahiw?) (I dm "t know for certain; all I fell there before was a memory of cold dirt. It must be something interesting. See how thick the stone is over it? Several of us wiU be needed—) OH NO YOU DON'T!
•—maybe it was the momentary burst of outrage that let her briefly out into the light again.
Whatever the reason, suddenly the world was bright and clear, though it seemed, very small, and the creatures that moved through it were earthbound and crippled of mind.
She was not in the Morrowfane country anymore. This was some twilit camp under the lee of a hill. She could feel the warmth of a fire against her side. She lay on her back, her limbs aching so much that she couldn't move. To her left sat Lang, warm in the firelight, gazing down at;
her with a bleak, helpless expression. Her distress at her im-mobility fell away at the sight of him. Lang mattered: He was stability, normalcy, all embodied in one stocky blond shape.
In all her life before this terror she had never cried for help but once, and that time help had been refused. She had never asked since. But now she had lost her mind, and surely there was nothing else to lose. Oh Lang, she tried to cry, I'm crazy, I'm scared, I can't find my way out, but I'm here—
But the words caught on a blazing place in her throat, got twisted out of shape and came out hoarse and strange. "R'mdahe, au'Lang, irikhe', stihe-sta 'ae vehhy't-kej, ssih haa-htЈ—" Not far away Herewiss and Freelorn lay together with their backs against a rock, holding weary conversation with the campfire that burned between them and the place where she lay.
(—indeed not,) the campfire was saying. Sunspark's eyes, ember-bright in the flickering fire, threw a glance of mild interest in her direction. (There aren't that many things in this bland little corner of the Pattern that can bother my kind. But we used to come across other travellers among the worlds, and some of them told of being unseated in heart or mind after coming to a world loo strange for them to understand. They lost their languages, some of them—)
"Did they get better?" Freelorn said. His tone indicated that he desperately wanted to hear that they did.
"Lorn," Herewiss said gently, putting his arm around his loved and hugging him, "we're going to have to leave her somewhere safe. She can't ride, she can't talk, she can't take care of herself. The arrow-shot she got from that last batch of bandits would have been the end of her if I hadn't been to the Fane first and learned what to do." Freelorn didn't answer.
"I went as deep as I could last night," Herewiss said. "I couldn't hear anything but a confusion of voices, and if I can't reach her there's nothing more we can do. Look, tomorrow afternoon — tomorrow night, maybe — we'll be riding through Chavi to get the news. We can leave her there; they'll be glad to have her. She'll take her time, get better, and follow us
when she can. Face it, Lorn, the Shadow's after us. We can't care for an invalid from here to Bluepeak."
"She saved my life," Freelorn said, his voice breaking harshly out of him. He wasn't angry at his loved, but at the unfairness of the Morrowfane, which had done this to her and left him untouched. "Several times. ."
"She knew what she was doing, all those times,"Herewiss said. "She knew what she was doing when she went up the Morrowfane. Lang told us so. And shell know why we're doing what we're doing, and understand." But there was little hope in his voice—