Диана Дуэйн - The Door Into Fire

It's company, all right.
It's you.
Now you know how Dritt felt this morning. This is the you that you have seen in clear pools and mirrors; but changed. He's about
three inches taller than you are, more regal of carriage. He moves with easy unthinking grace, whereas you just kind of bump along. He doesn't have those ten extraneous pounds on the front of his belly, where you have them; his eyes are bluer; his muscles are lithe under the smooth skin. He doesn't have any of your moles, and his face is unlined where your frown has long since indented itself; he doesn't have the little scar just above the right eye where Herelaf hit you with the fireplace poker when you were three and he was five. His face is serene, wise, joyous. You look at him with awe, reach out to him – and your hand goes through him. He's a dream-Herewiss. You might have suspected as much. (I never looked that good,) you think.
He doesn't really see you; he is interacting with someone else who isn't there. Someone who is dreaming about you. Well, if you follow him, you may get back to the real world again.
He moves away through the mist, and you go along with him, feeling a little unnerved to be in the company of such perfection – even if he is you.
Eventually the fog begins to clear a little, and you find
yourself back in the hold again. Your body is sitting over by the firepit. You glance at it and look away quickly. Two of you at once is a bit much, and three, especially when the third has all the imperfections, is almost more than you can bear. The dream– Herewiss is conversing with a dream-Freelorn over in the corner. Their eyes are warm as they look at one another, and their faces smile as they speak words of love. Freelorn is curled up in his usual ball again, snoring noisily. You might have known it was his dream of you – he never could see those little imperfections of yours, even when you pointed them out. Goddess love him.
You're tired, and sad, and you want to call it a night, so you ease yourself back over toward yourself and melt down into the body, pulling it up and around you like the familiar covers of your own bed—
He woke up with a terrible taste in his mouth, and a raging headache.
Freelorn was gone.
Freelorn's people were all in such a state of embarrassment that Herewiss found it difficult to be in the same room with them, and he went away into other parts of the hold, wandering around, until he heard their horses' hooves clatter out of the courtyard into the Waste. When he came downstairs, though, he found one of them still there. Segnbora was puttering around the hall, checking Herewiss's supplies to make sure he had enough of everything.
'He just left,' she said from the other side of the hall, not stopping what she was doing. 'Very early this morning, he got dressed, saddled Blackmane, and rode out. I don't think he even stopped to pee. His trail will be easy enough to follow.'
Herewiss nodded.
Segnbora stood up, hands on hips, surveying the supplies. 'That should do it. I should go after them, now; he'll miss me, and get mad—'
'I wouldn't want that to happen,' Herewiss said.
Segnbora looked at him with deep compassion. 'He'll get over it.' 'I hope so.'
She went out to the courtyard and spent a few silent minutes saddling Steelsheen. Herewiss followed her outside listlessly. When she was ready, she gave the saddle a final tug of adjustment, then went very quickly to Herewiss; she took his hands in hers, and squeezed them, and standing way up on tiptoe kissed him once lightly on the mouth. 'I'll give it to him for you,' she said. 'He'll be all right; we'll take care of him. Good luck, Herewiss. And your Power to you—'
Then she was up in the saddle and away, pelting off after the others, leaving nothing behind but a small cloud of dust and a
brief taste of warmth.
Herewiss watched her go, then turned back. The hold swallowed him like a mouth.
8
It is perhaps one of life's more interesting ironies that, of the many who beseech the Goddess to send them love, so few will accept it when it comes, because it has come in what they consider the wrong shape, or the wrong size, or at the wrong time. Against our prejudices, even the Goddess strives in vain.
Hamartics, S'Berenh, ch. 6
'Sunspark?'
(?)
'What do you make of this?' (Just a moment.)
Herewiss sat cross-legged before one of the doors, making notes with a stylus on a tablet of wax. Through the door was visible an unbroken vista of golden-green hills, reaching away into unguessable distances and met at the mist-veiled horizon by a violet sky. The brilliant sun that hung over the landscape etched Herewiss's shadow sharply behind him, and struck gray glitters from the wall against which he leaned.
Sunspark padded over to him in the shape of a golden North Arlene hunting cat, the kind kept to course wild pig and the smaller Fyrd varieties on the moor. It peered through the door, its tail twitching (Grass. So?)
'That's not the point. I've been by this door five times today, and the sun hasn't moved.'
(It could be a slow one. You remember that one yesterday that went
by so fast, three or four times an hour. There's no reason this one couldn't be slow.)
'Yes, but there's something else wrong. That grass is bent as if there's wind blowing, but none of it moves.'
(That might just be the way it grows. There are a lot of strange things in the worlds, Herewiss—) It stepped closer to the door. (Then again – Look high in the doorway. Is
there something in the sky there?) It craned its neck. (By the top of the left post.)
Herewiss squinted. 'Hard to tell, with the sun so close –no, wait a moment. Does that have wings?'
(I think so. And it's just hanging there, frozen.) Sunspark shrugged. (That could be your answer. This door may be frozen on one moment – or if it's not, it's moving that moment so slowly that we can't perceive it.)
Herewiss put down the tablet of wax in its wooden frame, and stretched. 'Well, that's something new. What was that one you were looking at?'
(Nothing but empty sea, with four suns, all small and red. They were clustered close together, not spaced apart as most of them have been when they're multiple. And there was something around them, a cloud, that moved with them and glowed. The cloud was all of thin filaments, as if they had spun a web around themselves.)
'So . . .' Herewiss picked up the tablet again. 'That's the nineteenth one with more than one sun, and the eighty-ninth one with water. More than half of these doors have shown lakes or seas or rivers. Who knows … the Morrowfane itself might be through one of these doors. Did you see any people?'
(No.)
'No surprise there . . . people have been much in the minority so
far. Maybe whoever built this place was more interested in other places than other people.'
(What you would call people, anyway.) Sunspark chuckled inside. (Would you call me 'people'?)
Herewiss looked at the elemental. Its cat-face was inscrutable, but his underhearing gave him a sudden impression of hopefulness, wistfulness. 'I think so,' he said. 'You're good company, whatever.'
(Well, 'company' is something I have not had much practice being. There is usually no need for it—) 'Among your kind, maybe. We need it a lot.'
(It is the way your folk were built. It seems strange, to want another's company before it comes time for renewal, for the final union.)
'It has its advantages.'
(In the binding of energies, yes—)
'More than that. There's more than binding. Sharing.'
(I have trouble with that word. Giving away energy willingly, is it?)
'Yes.'
(It seems mad.)
'Sometimes, yes. But you usually get it back.' (Such a gamble.)
'Yes,' Herewiss said, 'it is that.'
(What happens when you don't get it back?)
'Then you've lost energy, obviously. It hurts a little.'
(It should hurt more than a little. Your own substance is riven from you; part of your self —)
'Depends how much of yourself you give away. Most of the time, it's nothing fatal.'
(Well, how could it be?)
'It happens, among our kind. People have given too much, and died of it; but mostly because they convinced themselves that they were going to. In the end it's their own decision.'
(Mad, completely mad. The contract-conflict is safer, I think.)
'Probably. But it doesn't pay off the way sharing does when it turns out right.'
(I don't understand.)
'It's the dare. The gamble, taking the chance. When sharing comes back, it's – an elevation. It makes you want to do it again—'
(—and if it fails the next time, you'll feel worse. A madness.) It shrugged. (Well, there are patterns within the Pattern, and no way to understand them all. How many doors have we counted now?)
Herewiss looked at the tablet. A hundred and fifty-six. Five of the lower halls and half this upper hall. Then there's that east gallery, and the hallways leading from it—'
Sunspark's tone of thought was uneasy. (You know, there is no way that all these rooms could possibly be contained within this structure as we beheld it from outside. There's no room, it's just too small.)
'Yes, I know – but they're all here. What about that row of rooms
between the great hall downstairs and the back wall? They couldn't have been there, either. Of course it was all right; after a few days they weren't. Four doors went missing from this hall alone earlier this week, but here they are again—'
(The next one along was one of the ones that vanished. Let's see what it looks like now.)
Herewiss got up, and they walked together down to the next doorway. It showed them nighttime in a valley embraced by high hills; behind the hills was a golden glow like the onset of some immense Moonrise. The valley floor was patterned with brilliant lights of all colors, laid out in an orderly fashion like a gridwork. Down from the gemmed heights wound a river of white fire, pouring itself blazing down the hillsides into the softly hazed splendor of the valley's floor. There were no stars.
(Now those may be people,) Sunspark said after a moment, (but not my kind, or yours, I dare say. What do you say to a white light?)
'I don't know. What do you say to a horse, or a pillar of fire?' Herewiss grinned a little, and made a note on his
tablet. 'This next one was gone too. Let's look—'
They moved a few steps farther down the hall, and stopped. The door showed them nothing. Nothing at all.
'Sweet Goddess, it came back,' Herewiss said. 'I was wondering what this one might be, and I had a thought – it could be a door that was never set to show anything before the builders left. An unused blank. It appears and disappears like all the other doors in the place, but it doesn't show anything.'
(I don't know.) Sunspark looked at the door dubiously. (It gives me a funny feeling)
'Well, let's see.'
Herewiss blanked everything out, slowed his breathing, and
strained his underhearing toward the door, past the door— —strained—
'Nothing,' he said, and opened his eyes again. 'Can't get into it the way I can some of the others. Spark, would you do a favor and get my grimoire for me? The one with the sealed pages.'
(You're going to try to open this now?)
'Is there a better time? I had a good night's sleep. I ate a big breakfast. Let's try.'
Sunspark went molten and flowed down the hall like a hot wind. A few minutes later he returned, a young red-haired man with hot bright eyes and a tunic the color of fire, carrying the book. Herewiss reached out and took it, unsealed the pages and began riffling through them.
'Damn,' he said after a moment. 'Nothing is going to –well, no, maybe this unbinding – no, that's too concrete, it's for regular doors. This one – no – Dammit.'
He paused a moment, then started running through the pages again. 'This one. Yes. It's a very generalized unbinding, and if I change it here – and here—'
(I thought Freelorn said that it took Flame to open a door.)
'Yes, he did, and he was probably right, dammit, since doors are more or less alive. But this is an unbinding for inanimate objects, and if I make a few changes in the formula, it might work. I have to try something.'
(Will you need me?)
'Just to stand guard.' Herewiss sat down cross-legged against the wall again, breathed deeply and started to compose his mind. It took him a while; his excitement was interfering with his concentration. Finally he achieved the proper state, and turned his eyes downward to read from the grimoire.
'M'herie nai naridh veg baminedrian a phroi,' he began, concentrating on building an infrastructure of openness and nonrestriction, a house made out of holes. The words were slippery and the concepts kept trying to become concrete instead of abstract, but Herewiss kept at it, weaving a cage turned inside out, its bars made of winds that sighed and died as he emplaced them. It was both more delicate a sorcery and more dangerous a one than that which he had worked outside of Madeil. There the formulae had been fairly straightforward, and the changes introduced had been quantitative ones rather than the major qualitative shifts he was employing here. But he persevered, and took the last piece away from the sorcery, an act that should have started it functioning.
It sat there and stared at him, and did nothing.
He looked it over, what there 'was' of it. It should have worked: it was 'complete,' as far as such a word could be applied to such a not-structure. Maybe I didn't push it hard enough against the door, he thought. Well—
He gave it a mighty shove inside his head. It lunged at him and hit him in the back of the inside of his mind, giving an immediate headache.
Dammit-to-Darkness, what did I — did I put a spin on it somehow? The shift could have done that, I guess. Well, then.
He pulled at it, and immediately it slid toward the doorway and partway through it. The sorcery came to a halt, then, and sat there twitching. Nothing came out of the door.
Maybe if I wait a moment, he thought.
He waited. The sorcery stopped twitching and fell into a sullen stillness.
Herewiss lost his temper. (Dark!) he swore, and lashed out at the sorcery, backhanding it across the broad part of the nonstructure instead of disassembling it piece by piece, slowly, as he should have. It fell apart, nothingness collapsing into a higher state of nonexistence—
Something came out the door.
He opened his eyes, and just enough of the Othersight was functioning to give him a horrible dual vision of what was happening. The door itself was still dark to his normal sight; but the Othersight showed him something more tenebrous, more frightening, a hideous murky knotted emptiness, the whole purpose of which was containment and repression. It was a prison. And the prisoner was coming through the door right then; a huge awful bulk that couldn't possibly be fitting through that door, but was: a botched-looking thing, a horrible haphazard combination of bloated bulk and waving, snatching claws, with an uncolored knobby hide that the filtered afternoon light somehow refused to touch. Herewiss caught a brief frozen glimpse of teeth like knives in a place that should not have been a mouth, but was; then the Othersight confused itself with his vision again, and he was perceiving the thing as it was, the embodiment of unsatisfied hungers, a thing that would eat a soul any chance it got, and the attached body as an hors d'oeuvre. He underheard
a feeling like the taste at the back of the throat after vomiting, a taste like rust and acid.
Through the confusion of perceptions, one thought made itself coldly clear: Well, this is it. I tried, and I did wrong, and now I'm going to pay the price. The sorcery had already backlashed, leaving him wobbly and weak, and he watched helplessly as the thing leaned out of the door over him and examined him, assessing the edibility of his self as an epicure looks over a dinner presented him—
Something grabbed him. Herewiss commended his soul to the Goddess, hoping that it would manage to get to Her in the first place, before he realized that Sunspark had him and was running.
'Where—' he said weakly.
(Anywhere, but out of here! I have seen those things before, and there is no containing them—)
'But it was contained. Spark, what is it?'
(The name I heard applied to it was 'hralcin.' If you desire to stay in this body, we had better get you away from here quickly. They eat selves—)
'Your kind too?'
(No-one knows. None of my people have ever had a confrontation with one of the things, as far as I know, and I would rather not be the first.)
Herewiss realized that Sunspark was still in the human form, running with him down the stairs and into the main hall. Behind them there was a great noise of roaring and crashing.
'Do you think it could kill you?'
(I don't know. I don't think so. But I have heard of those things taking souls, and the souls never came back, not that anyone had ever heard in the places where I've traveled. They say that one or two of those can depopulate a whole world, one soul at a time. We could go
through one of the doors until it goes elsewhere—) 'Sunspark, put me down.' (What??) 'Let me go.'
Sunspark put Herewiss down on the floor of the main hall and turned into a tower of white fire, stretching from, floor to ceiling. Herewiss wobbled to his feet.
'I don't know how I managed to call it—'
(You said that the spell you were using was originally for inanimate objects?)
'Yes, but—'
(There's your answer. The thing is not alive. Why do you think it eats souls? When it has gotten enough of them, it gains life—)
'We've got to get it back in there.'
(You are a madman,) Sunspark said. (There is no containing the things within anything short of a world-wall.)
'But it was contained! If it was in there, and bound, it can be gotten in there again, and rebound—'
(Whoever put it in there knew more about it than we do, certainly. This much I know, they don't like light much. I can keep it away from us, I think. But it's only a matter of time until it leaves this place and gets out among your poor fellow men – and then there will be trouble.)
'It mustn't happen. They don't like light?' (No.)
'Maybe we can drive it back in through that doorway. Then I could bind it back in again—'
(But it takes you forever!) Sunspark's flames were trembling; the crashing was coming down the stairs. (And the thing would make a quick meal of you. It's got your scent, and once these things smell soul they pursue it until they catch it—)
Herewiss was sucking in great gulps of air, desperately
fighting off the backlash. 'I can decoy it back into the doorway.
It'll follow me. Then I'll come out again, and you will hold it in with your fires until I can weave the necessary spell—'
Sunspark looked at Herewiss, a long moment's regard .flavored with unease and amazement. (I can hold it off from you—)
'Sunspark, Sunspark, if that thing can empty whole worlds of people, what will it do to the Kingdoms? Come on. We'll let it into the hall, and I'll duck back up behind it, and you drive it up behind me. Then up, and through the door, and you can hold it in—'
(Very well.)
The hralcin came careening down the stairs, all horrible misjointed claws reaching out toward Herewiss as it staggered from the stairwell and across the floor. (I can direct the fire and the light pretty carefully,) Sunspark said, (but try to keep out from in front of me, or else well ahead. I am going to let go.)
'Right.'
Herewiss stumbled off to Sunspark's right, and the hralcin immediately changed direction a little to follow him. At that moment Sunspark went up in a terrible blaze of light and heat, so brilliant that it no longer manifested the appearance of flames at all – it was a fierce eye-hurting pillar of whiteness, like a column carved of lightning. The hralcin screeched, put up several of its claws to shield what might have been eyes, a circlet of irregular glittering protuberances set in the rounded top of its pear-shaped body. Herewiss dodged around it and scrambled up the stairs, slipping and falling on the slime the thing had left.
At the top of the stairs he paused for just a moment, feeling sick, and his eyes dazzled as his body tried to faint; but he wouldn't let it. The stench in the hall was terrible,
as if the hralcin carried around the rotting corpses of its victims as well as their souls. Herewiss went staggering down past doorway after doorway, and finally found the right one. It was
still black, and he quailed at the thought of going in there, maybe being imprisoned there himself, never finding the way out again, and the hralcin coming in after him—
He heard it screaming up the stairs after him. He thought, Lorn, dammit!
He went in.
Immediately darkness closed around him, as if he had crawled back into a womb. There was no smell, no sound, nothing to see; he reached out and could feel nothing at all around him. He turned, looked for the doorway. It was still there, thought hard to see through the murkiness of this other place, and it wavered as if seen through a heat haze.
There was something wrong with his chest. He was breathing, but it was as if there was nothing really there to fill his lungs.
He inched back to the doorway, put his head out to breathe. The hralcin was coming down the hall, backlit brilliantly by the pursuing Sunspark. It saw Herewiss, screamed, and came faster. Herewiss took a long, long breath, like a swimmer preparing for a plunge. It could be your last, he thought miserably, and ducked back into darkness.
Silence, and the doorway was vague before him again. He had a sudden thought. Herewiss edged around to the side of the doorway, until he was seeing it only as a very thin wedge of light, and then as a line, like that of a normal door open just a crack. He put his hand gingerly into the place behind the door, where the hallway would have been in the real world.
Nothing, just more darkness.
He slipped around and hid in it, his pulse thundering in his ears, the only thing to be heard.
There was a rippling, a stirring. Right in front of him, hardly a foot from Herewiss's nose, the hralcin seemed to bloom out from a
flat, irregularly-shaped plane into complete and rounded existence. He started back, then watched it blunder further into the darkness; Sunspark's light washed through the door after it and limned it clearly. Even muted and blurred by the darkness of this other place, Sunspark's brilliance was still blinding. Herewiss could imagine what the heat must be like. But if it let up for so much as a second, the hralcin would only come out again—
Herewiss ducked out from behind the doorway, his lungs screaming for air, and threw himself through, diving and rolling. Behind him he could feel the vibrations of the hralcin's scream through the water-dark space, cut off sharply as he passed through the doorway and crashed to the ground. His face and hands were seared by Sunspark's fires. He dragged himself behind the elemental, and the burning lessened a little, though the air in the hall was still like an oven; the stone was reflecting back much of the heat of its flames.
(Are you all right?)
'Not really. But we have to finish this—'
A claw waved out through the doorway, and Sunspark blazed up more fiercely yet. The reflected heat stung Herewiss's burned face terribly, but the claw and the limb to which it was attached were withdrawn.
(It is building up a tolerance,) Sunspark said. (Hurry up.)
Herewiss found the grimoire half-hidden under a great glob of slime. He grabbed the book, fumbled at the pages. 'I am, I am—'
Another claw came out the door. Sunspark spat a tongue of flame at it, and the claw disappeared. The smell in the hallway became much worse.
Bindings, inanimate – great bindings – they'd better be! Herewiss threatened himself into a semblance of calm, started building the necessary structure around and against the doorway. Luckily it was a very simple and straightforward one, requiring more power than delicacy, and his need was fueling his power more than adequately. '—e n'sradie!' he finished, sealing it, standing away from the structure in his mind. 'All right, Spark, let's see if it holds.'
Sunspark dimmed down its fires, and the hralcin slammed against the binding thrown over the door as if against a stone wall. The binding held, though Herewiss trembled with the reflected shock.
The hralcin hit the wall again. It still held.
And again.
And again.
The wall held.
Herewiss sagged back against the hot stone, regardless of getting burnt. Sunspark was in the man-shape again, helping him. 'My room,' Herewiss said, the backlash hitting him with redoubled force. 'I think I need a nap—'
Before Sunspark had gotten him halfway down the stairs, he was having one.
He woke up in his bed in the tower workroom, a makeshift affair of cushions and blankets that Sunspark had filched for him from one place or another. It was dark; the room was lit only by the two big candles on the worktable. Herewiss looked up and out the window, seeing early evening stars.
(Well. About time.)
He turned his head to the center of the room. Sunspark was there, enfleshed in the form of a tall slender woman with dark eyes and hair the color of a brilliant sunset, long and red-golden. She sat in a big old padded chair, looking at him with slightly unnerving concern. She was gowned all in wine red, and her sleeves were rolled up.
'How long has it been?' Herewiss said, propping himself up on one elbow.
(A night and a day.) 'The hralcin—'
(The binding is holding very nicely.) Sunspark got up, went to Herewiss and laid her hand against his forehead; it burned him slightly, but he bore it. (Better,) she said. (Last night there was little difference between the feel of your skin and mine; but the fever is down now. How are the burns?)
'They sting a little. The skin is tight, but I'll live, I think.' Herewiss looked around him. There was a big bowl on the floor with a sponge in it, and the dark liquid inside it smelled like burn potion.
'Were you using that on me?'
(Yes. The recipe was in your grimoire, and you had most of the herbs in your supplies—)
'But the water, Spark. I thought you couldn't touch it—'
(A minor inconvenience, in quantities that small – I shielded my hand with a cloth, anyway. It makes a feeling like a headache, nothing so terrible. Can you get up and eat?)
My Goddess – it's, she's worried about me, she cares –what a wonder! 'Spark, thank you – I could eat a Dragon raw.'
(No need, really, I could cook it for you.)
Herewiss sat up straight and stretched. He was stiff from the burns, but not too much so, and the backlash had
diminished to the point where he only felt very tired. 'Oh. You brought a new chair?'
(From the little town up north where I've been getting the food.
They've started to leave things out for me at night; some of them leave doors and windows open.) She chuckled and got up, going out of the room and down the hall to another room where supplies were kept. (I guess the news got around when their neighbors started finding pantries empty of food and full of raw gold.)
'I would imagine.' Herewiss was surprised at Sun-spark's initiative on his behalf.
(And not far from here there's a subsurface cavern full of raw gems of all kinds, though mostly rubies. I took the chair and left them a ruby about the size of a melon. Soon the streets will be filling with furniture.)
Sunspark came back in with a few slices of hot venison on a trencher of bread. Under her arm was a skin of Brightwood white, the last of Freelorn's liberated supply.
'Don't carry it like that – you'll warm it up!'
(Oh. Sorry.) She laid the skin on the table with the food, and Herewiss stared at it a little morosely as Sunspark went rummaging through his bags to find the lovers'-cup. I wonder where he is, thought Herewiss. Probably stuck in some damn dungeon in Osta, trying to figure out a way to bribe the guards to send me a message . . .
Sunspark looked at Herewiss as she set the cup on the table and poured the wine. She said nothing.
'I wish he were here,' Herewiss said.
Sunspark shook the skin to get the last few drops out, stoppered it, and put it away. (You would probably quarrel again,) she said.
'How would you know?' Herewiss said, stirred slightly out of his tiredness by anger. 'You're rather new at this sort of thing to be so understanding of it, don't you think?'
(Some aspects of it,) Sunspark answered without rancor. (But some
are much like the ways of my own people. There are still more likenesses between our kinds than there are differences, I think.)
'So what are you basing your feeling on, that we would quarrel again?'
Sunspark sat down among the cushions, hesitated a little. (He's seeking to bind your energies, that one is,) she said.
'As I bound yours? Ridiculous. He's my loved.'
(But that is a binding. Your loved, you said. It's not the same kind of binding as there is between us, true. But you have – commitments, you have set ways in which you treat one another—)
Herewiss remembered the terrible alienness of the last night with Freelorn, the feeling of having a stranger in the bed – all the more terrible because the stranger had been his loved not half an hour before. 'The way he treated me is nothing I ever saw before.'
(Well enough. But when one form of binding doesn't work, an entity tries another—)
Dully, Herewiss began to eat. The food was tasteless. 'And he was doing that?'
(It could be. Your strength is considerable, though. It comes as no surprise that he went away so angry. I think he'll try again, but not the way he did last time—)
'It seems so useless. I need my Power – I thought he understood that—'
(The little one, the shieldmaid,) Sunspark said, (she understands. I think he might envy that a little.)
Herewiss considered it.
(That seems all she does, though; understand,) said Sunspark. (Which may cause problems— But enough. Eat!)
He ate, and began to feel a little less tired and lightheaded – but he could feel depression beginning to creep up on him. Maybe – maybe there was something he could do. There was, after all, the Soulflight drug—
'Sunspark,' he said, 'the bottle of drug, would you get it for me?'
She regarded him with an odd startled look. (Will you hazard it again? I'm not sure this place is good for its use. There are influences here that may have contaminated your use of it the last time—)
'The last time was bad because the argument was fresh, Spark,' Herewiss said. 'I could use a little something to cheer me up, to relax me—'
(Relax you?? Herewiss, you are fresh from a bout of sorcery; you slept for a night and a day! You know how debilitating the drug is! It'll be the end of you if you abuse it!)
'What are you worrying about?' Herewiss said. 'I'd come back.'
Sunspark looked at him, her face still, though Herewiss could feel the roil of emotions that she did not yet know how to make into the proper expressions. She turned and went out of the room very quickly.
A pang of guilt smote him immediately. That was mean of me, he thought. But it is funny that it should be so concerned—
He stopped in midchew. All the little kindnesses that he had been accepting from Sunspark; all the small gentle gestures: the chair, the food it brought back from the villages on the edge of the Waste, the sword blanks it had been fetching all the way from Darthis— But he had been judging it by human standards. No elemental would act like that normally. He compared the Sunspark of his first acquaintance, rough, uncaring, fierce of demeanor, testing him with thoughtless ferocity, with this one – calm, considerate, a tamed power waiting on him at table. A fire elemental, handling water for his sake. And now concerned about his death, where before it had not even believed in it. The feelings he had underheard when it went out of the room: fear? pain?
Maybe love?
Oh, no, he thought again. It couldn't possibly have understood about love, but I did try so hard to teach it. And now it knows. And it wants to try it out, the same way it tried to unite with me before – but this time on my terms—
He put down what was left of the bread, and stared across the table at the lover's-cup. It needs, now, I have taught it loneliness, which it never knew before. And now I'm going to have to teach it pain, because I can't be what it needs, but I will go get what I need—
The cup sat there, full of wine and promise. It was the Goddess's cup, the cup poured for Her at each meal to remind those who ate that all set before them was, one way or another, the product of Her love – as were the people with whom they ate. When the meal was done, if there were lovers there, the youngest of them would drain the cup together in Her name. If one was alone, one said the Blessing for the Sundered and drank it in his own name and the name of his lover, wherever that one might be. Herewiss remembered how it had used to be in the lonely days when he was young. He had been rather ugly, and when he drank the cup and called on the Loved Who Will Be to await his coming, he secretly despaired of its ever happening, of ever finding another part of himself. Now, in these later days, at least he had a name to speak; but most of the time he seemed to be drinking the cup alone, and for the past month or so the ceremony, once a reassurance and a joy, had become bitter to him.
Here, though, was a possibility. To take the Soulflight drug, and step out of the body, and go in search of Freelorn; to meet him outside the flesh, so that they could admire anew each other's
inner beauties, without the bitter base emotions clouding their eyes. To look upon one another transfigured, and share one another in the boundless lands beyond the Door, united in an ecstasy of freedom, of joy and omniscience and incalculable power—
Sunspark came back in with the bottle. Her eyes were shadowed and she would not look at Herewiss directly; her eyes lingered on the lovers'-cup as she came to stand by the table. Herewiss reached out and took the bottle from her.
'Thank you,' he said.
Her eyes glanced about uncomfortably. Herewiss reached out, took her warm hand, looked up and met those eyes and held them. Deep brown-amber eyes, shot with sparks of fire, looked fearfully back at him.
'Sunspark,' he said, 'don't worry, I'll be all right. Please don't worry.'
She squeezed his hand back, but the fear in her eyes was no less. She turned and left.
Herewiss reached for the lovers'-cup, unstoppered the bottle and poured the drug into it, just a little more than he had used the last time. He mixed the wine to dissolve the drug, and drank.
Then he sat back, his eyes closed, and waited.
It was like falling asleep this time. But not falling; rising, rather, a floating feeling, as if he and the chair both were borne upward. After a time this ceased, and silence rang in his ears like a song. He opened his eyes, and raised his hand. It came out of itself, slipping free; his own large hand,
but changed – both more sensitive to what it touched, and more sensitive somehow to its own handness. Just curling it and flexing the fingers outward again was an exquisite feeling. The shell of flesh from which it had emerged was inadequate-looking, a stiff, cold, pitiful thing. Herewiss stood up and came free of himself effortlessly. He did not give his body a second look; he scorned it, and thought himself elsewhere.
Immediately he was away, and the instantaneous transition itself sent a ripple of pure pleasure through him like the first anticipation of the act of love, a deep glad movement at the center of one's self. He was standing in air, as if on some high mountain, and below him was spread all the world known to men, from the Waste in the east to the mountains in the west. More than that, he could sense the lives of the people who lived in those lands, all the lives in the Kingdoms, mens' lives and animals' and Dragons' and other creatures', spun about and through each other, woven into a vast and intricate tapestry of movement and being. It was very like the Pattern that he had glimpsed in Sunspark's mind. Once this vastness would have frightened and confused him, as the Pattern had. Now, though, he could see it, see all of it, comprehend it, predict the motions of men and the intimate doings of their hearts; perceive the deepest motives, the best-hidden dreams and loves, and see how they moved the people who owned them, or thought that they owned them—
He hung there in starlit stillness for a long time, letting his mind range free, tasting thoughts and emotions from a great distance. As he used the ability, it sharpened, deepened, and soon the hardest, coldest minds were yielding up their secrets to him. He walked the hot bright hearts of Dragons and knew what they thought, and why.
He found their secrets, and learned the Draconid Name, which only the Dweller-at-the-Howe knows, and passes on to the new DragonChief when she takes office. Where he sensed resistance, he bent his thoughts against it, and passed through into knowledge. He found himself hearing even the thoughts of mountains and river, until he knew what the trees say to one another in their slow silent tongue, and what Day says to Night when they pass at the border of twilight. And still he listened, and listened, caught up in the intricacies and vastnesses of his own power, drunk with it—
There was a new note. A note at the bottom of things, a deep bass note that somehow wound itself into the fabric of everything that
was, and Herewiss perceived it first with interest, and then with growing horror. By the time he realized what it was that he heard, it was too late. His power was total; as he pushed it, it grew; he had grown into hearing the note, and he could not now grow out of it.
It was the deepest bass note in all the worlds; the sound of the Universe running down.
He heard it everywhere. It twined through the structure of the tiniest blade of grass and dwelt in the hearts of stars; the empty places far above the earth were full of it; the core of the world sang it slowly and softly to itself, the Sea whispered it with every wave, the wind sighed with it and fell silent. Men shook with it as they were pushed out of the womb, and breathed it out as they died. Its long slow rumbling shook mountains into dust. The bright remote satellites of stars fell into their parent suns, and the suns devoured them, and then died themselves, dwindling into nothing, and darknesses deeper than nothing. From these wells of notness the bass note sang loudly as the voice of the earthquake; they were great devouring abysses, wombs of unbirth teeming with potential lost forever.
Herewiss reeled, tried to flee. It was no use. He strode among suns and through glowing clouds that were like violet and golden veils cast across the face of the darkness; he moved like a god through great spiraled treasuries of flaming stars, and knew the thoughts of the inhabitants thereof, from the greatest to the smallest; but the bass note followed him everywhere. It was wound through all the songs, the darkness at the bottom of every light.
He fled back in terror to the silver-blue mote of light that held the Kingdoms, and descending into it, walked the bottoms of the seas, and the rivers of fire beneath the mountains; but the note was there. He passed through the minds of men and Dragons again, and there it dwelt too, though in a more subtle fashion. There was a defense against the death, and that defense was love; it was effective, though only on a small scale, and only temporarily. But unknowing, men flung love away from them with insane regularity, trying to defeat the Death with strength instead. Herewiss moved
from place to place, seeking desperately some place or mind free of the Death but there was none. Despairing, he judged humankind and found them fools and madmen. In their crazy pride they chose to ignore the fact that Death is the ultimate swallower of all strengths, and that only the ephemeral vulnerability of love can hope to combat it at all—
And then he realized what he had been perceiving, and stopped in the middle of a flowering meadow somewhere in Darthen. The place blazed up in the night with a brilliance of green fire, the warm growth of spring, but like all else the fire had the seeds of death in it. Herewiss stood there, and mourned, understanding at last.
This is how the Goddess sees it, he thought. Everywhere She looks, She sees the Error. Against the fall of Night, only Love will suffice – and even that, even Her love, which was
enough to create the worlds, is not enough to keep these worlds from being destroyed – only enough to slow the Death down. She loves Her children, gives them the gift of that love – and they just throw it away. Oh, Mother . . .
He shook his head. I'm forgetting myself. It was for love's sake that I came this journey. Where is Freelorn?
The thought was enough. Herewiss was there, standing by some little creek in eastern Darthen, looking at Freelorn—