The path went right out from under her. It was not her own clumsiness this time, but the Morrowfane itself trembling under her feet. Segnbora looked up. The blaze on the hilltop, hidden till now by the bulk of the hill, was hidden no longer. A narrow, sword-shaped core of blue-white Fire swung up into view, and then a light of impossible brilliance broke the night open from end to end. Like lightning burning in steel, it turned the dark into sudden day and extinguished the stars. The Fane shook to its roots as outpoured Firelight smote into everything, illuminating every leaf and tree trunk and stone with fierce clarity. On the surface of the shivering lake, the light shattered into countless knives and splinters of dazzle.
Blinded, Segnbora turned away and rubbed her eyes. When they saw clearly again, she started once more down the trail. She had no trouble finding her way; the Fane was lit like midmorning. At one point she paused for breath, looked around, and saw something she had missed in the dimness on the way up—a huge crevasse or cavern around on the southern face of the hillside, an opening into darkness that even Herewiss’s Fire didn’t illumine. How about that. The World’s Heart has a secret in it—
Above her Herewiss’s Flame dimmed and faded, leaving her looking at where the cave entrance had been. He’s taking a rest, I suppose. I bet I could have a closer look at that before he starts shaking things around again—
Scrabbling up off the trail, Segnbora used scrubby bushes and trees to climb across the eroded face of the Fane. It took her a few minutes to scramble up a ravine that ran down between two folds of the hillside, but finally the cave opening loomed huge before her, dark as uncertainty. There Segnbora halted, uneasy. Her undersenses were still blunted from the onslaught of Power and joy at the top of the hill, but not so much so that she couldn’t catch an odd underheard flavor that grew stronger the closer she came to the cave mouth. Something hot. Metal? Stone?
Segnbora drew Charriselm; the whisper of steel sounded very loud. With care she stepped over and around the boulders that lay about the great cave entrance, and slipped a few feet inside where she paused to listen again.
Nothing. I must have imagined that feeling. Cautiously, keeping her left hand against the cave wall, Segnbora took another step in. The faint crunch of her footstep echoed away into the dark. She took another step. That echoed too. The place was huge, filling most of the mountain from the sound of it. One step more—
A voice spoke, and Segnbora froze, her fist clenching on Charriselm’s hilt, her heart pounding.
For a moment she thought the cave was going to fall in on her. The voice was huge, and incredibly deep. It thundered, rumbling, shaking the air; yet there was music in it, a slow and terrible song of pain. The hair stood up all over Segnbora. She could make nothing of the words the voice seemed to be speaking. At the end of the sentence, the silence that fell was plainly waiting for her answer.
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know that language,” she said, her voice sounding amazingly small despite the echoes it awoke. “Do you speak Arlene or Darthene?”
There was a long pause; then the voice spoke once more. It used Darthene, but the timbre was that of a storm on the Sea. “You were a long time coming,” it said. “But you’re thrice welcome nevertheless.”
Segnbora leaned against the wall of the cave, bewildered. Her eyes were getting used to the darkness, and in the faint starlight from the doorway she could make out a great lumpy mass lying on the floor of the cave before her. The hot stone smell she had noticed before was coming from it, though there was little actual warmth in the place. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What are you?”
“Lhhw’ae,” the voice said, a rumbling growl and a sigh.
Segnbora gripped Charriselm even tighter, for that single word of the strange language, the species’s own name for itself, she did recognize. A Dragon—
The voice began to speak again, and was suddenly choked off. Rocks cracked and rattled about in the cave, rolling, shattering. The Dragon had abruptly begun to thrash around. Segnbora leaped for the cave entry, as afraid of being attacked as of a cave-in, but after a few moments the uncontrolled motion subsided and the immense half-seen bulk of the Dragon lay quiet again. She stared at it fearfully.
“I am about to lose this body,” the Dragon said, an anguished-sounding melody winding about the words. “The seizures are a symptom....”
“You’re dying?” Segnbora said, and then had to grab for balance once more as another convulsion threw rocks in all directions. When the Dragon had settled again, she saw that it was looking at her from great round eyes, each of which was at least four feet across, globed and pupilless. Segnbora shuddered as she realized how big the rest of the beast must be, and was glad she couldn’t see it.
“Going rdahaih.” The Dragon whispered the word, but even its whisper sounded like a thunderstorm. “My time is upon me.”
The pain in its voice confused Segnbora. No one but Marchwarders, the humans who lived with Dragons in their high places, knew much about Dragons; but the one thing everybody said about them was that they never died. Even more confusing was the undercurrent of joy that ran under the Dragon’s pain, growing stronger by the moment.
“No matter,” it said. “You are here. At last, what will have been, is—”
The ominous tone made her consider leaving right then. Yet she’d been curious about Dragons ever since the first and only time she had seen one, at the age of seven, soaring over the blue Darthene Gulf, and that old curiosity was raging again. Slowly Segnbora sheathed Charriselm, then began picking her way toward the Dragon’s head among the fallen stones, watching carefully in case it should start having another seizure. Lying flat on the rubble, the head from lower jaw to upper faceplate was twice her height. Above it, the spine in which the shielding faceplate terminated speared up into the gloom for another ten or fifteen feet. Segnbora reached out gingerly and touched the edge of the plate between nose and eyes. It was hard and rough as stone, and warm. The eye on that side regarded her steadily, but she couldn’t read its expression. It looked dimmer than it had—
“Are you sure you’re not just ill?” Segnbora said.
“I know my time,” said the Dragon. “I welcome it. I always have.”
She shook her head, perplexed. With her hands on the Dragon, she could feel its weary sorrow as if it were her own—but also that peculiar joy, both frightened and expectant at once. “Is there anything I can do for you?” Segnbora said.
The Dragon’s eyes flared brighter, and a tremor ran up and down its body. “Arhe-sta rdaheh q’ae hfyn’tsa!” the Dragon whispered in a great rush of fulfillment, as if its last fear had been lifted from it. “If you truly ask,” it said in Darthene, “don’t let me—die—uncompanioned.”
Segnbora shivered, having misgivings. The urge to get out of there was strong, but she rejected it. “I’ll stay with you.”
“Yes,” the Dragon said. The light of its eye ebbed again. “You always did.”
That was when the last and worst convulsion started. Walls shook. Stone chips and splinters rained from the ceiling. The floor danced. There was nothing for Segnbora to grab for support but the Dragon’s head. A brief feeling of hot stone—
—and the next moment, her head burst open from the inside. Segnbora knew how it felt to share her mind with another consciousness, but this was nothing like her experiences in the Precincts; those decorous, sliding melds of one Rodmistress-novice with another, each always wary of disturbing the delicately balanced economy of the other’s mind. This was like a boulder dropping into a bucket—a brutal invasion that smashed her against the borders of her self and threatened to smother her.
Strangling, agonized, she flailed about inside for room to think. There was none. Her inner spaces were crowded with otherness, a multitude of ruthless presences straining and seething in intolerable confinement—minds that beat at her, buffeting her like wings; painful thoughts that gnawed at her like alien jaws; strange memories that stalked through her past, promi
sing her a horrifying and incomprehensible future. The Dragon’s imminent death—
No! Segnbora screamed. She pushed desperately away without knowing for sure what she was pushing back from, but ready to do anything, even die, to avoid it. She fell and fell, yet the images followed her inexorably as a doom, becoming more and more real, happening again, happening forever. I don’t want to remember! she screamed, but the words wouldn’t even come out right. Instead, a white-hot burning and a strange language took her by the throat, twisting the plea into a wracking curse: ‘sta, tauëh-stá ‘ae mnek-kej, mnek-kej...!
A roar of condemnation went up in the stifling, crowded darkness; the damp cold dirt rushed up toward her face. Then mercifully the fall ended in a pain-colored flash that killed the presences, and the memories, and, Segnbora hoped, her too....
***
FOUR
“Are you going to kill me?” said the child to the Dragon.
“Kill you?” The Dragon smiled at him. “Certainly not until we have been introduced.”
Tales for Opening Night, Nia d’Eleth
The darkness tears wide, splitting as hewn skin does when the sword strikes.
This is Etachnë field, all one gloomy sodden mass of misery—lead-gray above with clouds that have been pouring rain for three days now, dun and black and red below with the scattered bodies of the slain. The stench is incredible. Those who fight do so with their faces wrapped, and fall as often to the sick miasma of the air as to Reaver arrows. Fyrd are harrying the fringes of the battlefield, devouring the dead. A few hundred feet away, a maw, a horwolf and a nadder are busily dismembering a fallen woman. Her surcoat was once Darthene midnight blue. Now it’s mostly red-brown.
She gulps down sourness for the hundredth time and stares across the misty valley. Somewhere over there the Reavers have retreated into cover, regrouping for the next attack. There are only about a thousand of them left, but those are more than enough to break the Darthene defense at the other end of the valley and let them out into the open lands. Once that happens they’ll begin their pillaging at Etachnë and leave the country burning behind them as far as Wendwen. Around her, the other Darthenes holding the gap are huddled, soaked through, hungry, outnumbered, waiting.
The Rodmistress is dead, so they have no idea when reinforcements may be coming. Segnbora is the only sorcerer left, and over the past few days her sorceries have been going progressively flatter—a starved sorcerer is good for very little. It was all she could do yesterday to stop the miserable rain for a little while; today her head still aches with the backlash. Oh, food, she thinks. Just oatcakes and milk— She stops herself, does a brief mind-exercise to calm down.
It doesn’t work. Her partner Eftgan has been gone for three days now, ridden off for the reinforcements; and the Goddess only knows whether she lives or not, for there’s a great silence where her mind used to be. Oh, Tegánë, loved, be all right, please— She winces away from the painful thought, opening her eyes on the Fyrd again. The sickness comes up in her throat as she sees them tugging at the limbs of the woman in Darthene blue. Then sickness turns to rage and she throws her sodden cloak off savagely and stands up in the rain, fists clenched.
“Irn maehsta irn aehsta,” she whispers, as within, so without, and begins a bitter poem in Nhàired, shaping a spell-construct in her mind. Anger-fueled sorcery is dangerous, she knows, but anger and terror are all she has left. Desperation fuels the sorcery, scansion shapes its skeleton, meter sets the beast-shape, filling it out. Words link in sliding musculature, the hot pelt of intent furs it over, angry purpose glares like eyes beneath a shaggy mane of verse.
Uncaring of the backlash to come, she grips the shape of words and wraps it round her like a cloak—then drops to all fours in the rain and leaps roaring at the Fyrd—
—and the darkness falls.
***
(—they all do that, we’ve watched them do that since we first came. Yet while they feel for one member of their kind, they still do murder on others.)
(annikh-e stiheh -- )
(We don’t understand it either. What about this one—)
***
Here’s the last rise before home, with the little rutted track that serves for road. Steelsheen quickens her pace a bit, sensing road’s end. The air is full of the smell of salt: blue-green beach-grass hisses incessantly on either side of the track. She makes the top of the rise—and there it is, spread out blue and wrinkled, glittering and lovely, the Darthene Gulf. The Sun is beginning to pierce through from a silver sky; the black beach glistens as the waves slide back; sandpipers dance daintily after them, poking for whelks in the bubbling crevices and tide pools. She looks across at the lonely stone manor-house built on the headland—Home!
Steelsheen breaks into a canter. They’ll be so proud. My master’s never before given live steel to anyone so young. And Tegánë has spoken for me to see if I can be in the royal household. To live in Darthis, in a town with walls! And Sheen… Father will be so proud when he sees her! A real Steldene, a silverdust Steldene, and I broke her myself with all the tricks he taught me!
She punches the mare into a gallop and rides into the demesne, under the old stone arch with the tai-Enraesi arms: lioncelle, passant regardant, sword upraised in the dexter paw. Chickens scatter in all directions. Dogs scramble to their feet and bounce around her, barking, as she rides in to the dooryard with a great clatter of hooves. She dismounts. A yellow cat on the doorstep opens one eye at the noise, says a rude word and closes the eye again.
Segnbora laughs as she pulls off Steelsheen’s saddle, drops it on the ground, fends off various dogs with pats and scratches, and bends to chuck the cat under the chin. Three weeks, she’s been on the road from Darthis: three weeks of lousy weather, an attack by bandits and a case of the flux. One cat, however grumpy, isn’t going to spoil this splendid homecoming.
“Mother, Father, I’m back!” she shouts, shoving open the front door and swaggering in.
She walks through the little main hall with its benches and carvings and hangings and firepit. Secretly she’s a little shocked by the shabbiness of the place; it never looked this run down before she went to the city. Her father’s old complaints about failed crops and the sorry state of family finances suddenly begin to disturb her— “Mama?”
No answer. She’s in the kitchen, then. Through the hall and out into the big stone-paved kitchen and pantry. Her mother is just stepping in the far door with a string of onions from the buttery shed outside. Close behind is her father, who carries a newly dispatched chicken.
“Hi!” she shouts.
“‘Berend!” says her mother, and “Don’t shout,” says her father, both at once.
She trots over, embraces them both in a huge hug, and pulls her sheathed sword out of her belt to show them. “Mama, look, I named it Charri—”
“How’s your Fire coming, dear?” her mother says. Her father says nothing, just watches her, waiting for the answer.
And suddenly it’s all wrong. Don’t they think if I’d finally focused, I’d have come in here streaming blue Fire from every orifice? Why don’t they— “Mother,” she says, “can’t you ever ask me about something else?”
Her mother looks surprised. “What else would there be?” she says; and, “Don’t talk to your mother in that tone of voice,” her father says.
“I have to rub down my horse, excuse me.” Segnbora bites the inside of her lip hard to keep from saying anything else, and walks out the way she came—
—and then darkness falls again.
***
She staggers about, lost in the darkness of her self, beginning to understand madness.
( -- Stiheh, stiheh-!sta annikh ‘e—) rumbles the voice of storm again. It’s joined by more voices, all intoning the same rushing phrase, a litany of incomprehension and curiosity. They won’t go away. They bump and jostle her roughly when she stumbles into them in the dark, feeling for a way out.
The place where she walks is wall
ed and domed and floored in adamant, built that way long ago to protect her inner verities. There her memories are stored. Some have been buried by accident, some she’s sealed in stone on purpose; many stand about, smooth and polished from much handling
It’s the buried ones that chiefly interest her invaders. Stone means nothing to them, it being one of their elements. Cruel claws slice down effortlessly; white fire burns and melts. Delicate talons turn over exposed thoughts—old joys like polished jewels, razory fragments of pain -- )
(Khai-rae tachoi? Sshir’stihe-khai?)
(No, this moment’s more interesting by far. Look, I hadn’t thought they sang—)
***
—it’s quite dark, but she needs no light to know that the slab of marble is a handspan from her nose The sound of her breathing is loud beneath , 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 determine 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 extemporize a poem in tragic-epic meter on the forging of Fórlennh BrokenBlade.