The Door into Sunset (26 page)

She and Hasai landed together near the chief of the cave entrances, at the base of the Howe. Hiriedh was waiting for them there. The gold and green of her were pale in the cool silver light; the mist was not yet burned off, and everything around them looked slightly indistinct. Greetings were exchanged, and Hiriedh led the way into the caves.

The tunnels were large and wide. Three or four dragons abreast could have passed through them. The ceilings were high. No shafts had been cut to let the light in, for there was more than enough ambient heat for a Dragon to see by, and the seeing got better as the tunnels sloped downward.

A long while, they walked into the mountain. Other Dragons passed them, though there were surprisingly few. They nodded courtesy here, paused for a word of recognition there. There were some whom Hasai had not seen for many years. They looked at him most strangely, as if they saw someone risen from the dead. The tunnels turned and twisted, and delved downward; the air got hotter. The feeling of power, stifled, waiting for something, got stronger as they went. Several tunnels came together, then; the one they were in grew wide and high, and then abruptly opened out. They paused at the brink of it.

Segnbora looked around, and determined as she was not to be amazed, was amazed regardless. All the tunnels they had been in, all the sloping downward and twisting and turning, had served only to bring them through the outer skin of the mountain. Now they were come to the center of it, the heart of the Howe—a cavern nearly half a mile across, under the roots of the mountain itself and reaching high up into the core of it, perhaps an eighth of a mile. The air was hot and still. Many Dragons, a couple of hundred at least, were gathered, crouched or perched, around the edges of the rough circle that was the floor. And in the center, in shadow, lay the Dweller.

She was stretched at her ease. The shadow about
her
, Segnbora recognized immediately. It was like that which came and went about her when the
mdeihei
were manifesting more clearly than usual. But the sight of it surprised her, for normal Dragons, living Dragons, did not manifest such. Their
mdeihei
lived inside their heads, or whatever part of them it was that Dragons kept thought in. Here, though, the shadows lay thick, even seen by darklight. They pooled about the Dweller, lay over her to a great height, like the fog outside that would not burn off. But this was dark, and wings moved in it, and eyes; and eyes looked out at Segnbora. And the looks—

She paused where she was.
They yearn. They yearn toward us. But they hate, as well—and dear Goddess, the virulence of it—!
That she couldn’t understand, for what harm had she and Hasai ever done them? Less still could Segnbora understand the greater darkness she now perceived behind the Dweller. The shadows within which Dithra’s
mdeihei
moved, seemed thickest about it. The darklight of heat which illuminated everything else in the cavern, even to some slight extent the
mdeihei
, did not affect that dark shape at all. Yet—held in that tall darkness—was there some trace of motion?—

“Greetings, Hasai ehs’Pheress,” said the voice. Segnbora’s attention was drawn back to the figure that lay in the midst of the shadows. She was not there the way a living Dragon would have been there. There was an uncertainty about her shape and color, which was by itself curious, for livery is the commonest way a Dragon defines itself; colors and combinations of colors have temperaments associated with them, and family traits. Overtly, the Dweller was of one of the less assertive, quieter lines, to judge by the main color, a dark star-amethyst above, the eyes a paler violet to match the crusting of hyacinth diamond beneath. But at the same time, hints of other colors came and went in her hide, making it seem that briefly she was amber-scaled, was ruby, was hided in onyx or emerald. She was insubstantial, but not from a lack of substance; from a surplus of it. She could
be
any Dragon or any of its
mdeihei
. She was Dragonkind, in one form, one shape; and if that shape was troubled around the edges, that was because of an excess of available choices, not from lack of them.

Hasai bent low and greeted the Dweller. “And to you, Segnbora Welcaen’s daughter,” the Dweller said, and paused, “greeting.”

The phrasing, in Dracon, was rude, only one utterance-name being given. Nonetheless, Segnbora kept her
ehhath
quite proper, and bowed greeting to the Dweller, and said, “Well met, Lady of the Dragons.” And if the Dweller’s address to Segnbora had been a bit on the abrupt side, so was hers; the bare human phrase, and none of the long string of honorifics normally used by one who was meeting the Dweller for the first time.

They looked at one another, she and Hasai, and the Dweller. It was a brief look on Dithra’s side. Dithra’s
mdeihei
, though—
and were they all hers,
Segnbora thought,
or were some of them her own and Hasai’s?—
looked at Segnbora and Hasai out of the darkness, unswerving. Segnbora paused for a moment, reached back inside herself and felt about for the presences of her own
mdeihei
. They were subdued, and some of them indeed were looking back at her out of Dithra’s darkness—unwilling, constrained to it, but having no choice.

No use leaving the offensive to her—

“Offense and defense are all one to us,” said Dithra. “Or at least to me, in this time and place. Do you know why we bade you here?”

It was a “royal” we, but with more cause for the plurality than usual, even among Dragons. Segnbora bowed again slightly, letting her
ehhath
speak irony for her. “Perhaps the DragonChief will be so good as to tell us. We thought that we had reasons of our own. Perhaps we will now find that they were
hers?”

A soft rustling went through the gathered Dragons. They were not used to such insolence to the
lhhw’Hreiha
, especially from a human. “You made your causes plain enough to Lhhaess and Sd’hirrin,” said Dithra, “and to Hiriedh and Aivuh, who were sent to bid you here. Your
mdaha
there has made it plain as well.”

Segnbora glanced over at Hasai. He had lain down—unusual for a Dragon in uncomfortable state—and was gazing at the Dweller thoughtfully. “Your motives and your goals are unimportant to us. But what you are—that is of some interest.” Just once, Dithra herself gazed at Segnbora; only for a moment. Segnbora,
ehhath
forgotten for a moment, caught that look with her Fire and tried to feel what was at the bottom of it. Just a flash came strongly as it had come with Hiriedh; fear. But also that yearning, all tangled about with some ahead-memory, vague even to the
lhhw’Hreiha
. That startled Segnbora. Dithra’s precognition should have been clearer than anyone else’s. But on this matter it was not.
Still—that fear, that yearning
....
I must not frighten her any worse,
Segnbora thought.
A frightened Dragon is a bad enemy
...
and this one more so than usual.
“What we are,” Segnbora said, “is
sdaha
and
mdaha
. Surely even by darklight, the DragonChief can see that.”

“That’s the seeming,” Dithra said. “Your friend there,
dav’whnesshih.
And yourself—less so than usual, perhaps? For one who’s egg-laden?”

Segnbora laughed. It was a backhanded sort of joke.
Mdeihei
could be pregnant only in the abstract sense; the business of clutching was left to the
sdahaih
. Dithra was implying that she was not spending enough time in her “true” form. “Maybe so,” she said. “But the babe, or egg, is well enough for the moment. Though your solicitousness is appreciated, DragonChief. However, my child is not the issue here. Your lives are, and your children’s lives.” She glanced around her. “Speaking of whom—” —and she tried to make the question sound innocent, though it was not— “where
are
the Dragonets?” For the Howe was sacred not only to Dahiric for what he had done, but for the age at which he had done it, being barely grown past the Dragonet stage himself. As a result, since ancient times the area had become a favored one for clutching, and the
mdeihei
were increasingly troubled by the utter absence of any young in this place.

Everything got quite still at the question.
Yes indeed,
Segnbora thought,
I’ve sat on the tail-spine now. Let’s see if it was to any purpose.

Dithra regarded her at length. “Your solicitousness is appreciated as well,” the Dweller said at last. “And having established it, let us move on to particulars. What is this small matter of kingship you desire to consult us about?”

Hasai lifted his head in a gesture graceful but tense with some barely-managed concern. “Dweller-in-the-Howe,” he said, “very well you know what kings and queens have ruled this peninsula, and the lands south of it, all this long while. We saw their fathers come down out of the mountains. We saw the battle they fought at Bluepeak, and what happened there. The power that rose up and moved there to save its own— Can the Dragonchief deny that that power is worth cultivating, and supporting? Seeing that it is native to this world?”

“As we are not,” said Dithra. “There is no question that this is your world,” she said to Segnbora. “You have a right, insofar as your own powers enable you, to determine how it shall be run. We are merely guests here. You know the way we fled.” A flash of eyes this time, for Segnbora, and away again. And this time there came again that paired feeling of fear and desire; tied up now with Segnbora’s brief vision of the arrival of the Dragons in the world. “In matters of the welfare of this world, we have an interest. In its life, its death. But matters of... government....” She used the word as lightly as Segnbora might have mentioned housecleaning. “We do not involve ourselves with such.”

“Madam,” Segnbora said, “it is precisely the life or death of this world that we are discussing. You have seen many a ruler rise and fall before, and so you think that the rise and fall of queens and kings is not necessarily associated with the wellbeing of humans as a whole. But the rules have changed around you,
lhhw’Hreiha
. You’re in danger of being swept away by them.”

There was another rustle in the crowd of living Dragons at this, and many of the
mdeihei
stared at her. “And you know it,” Segnbora said. “That memory, there—that one, the one you cannot perceive, that none of you can clearly see—” This time it was the burning eyes of the Dweller’s
mdeihei
that began looking at one another. And the looks were uneasy. “That one, that you can’t fully grasp, that’s been eluding you. I am in it somehow, aren’t I? And the man on whose behalf I’ve come to you—he’s in it, too.” Her voice got fierce. She had seen none of these things before, but she was seeing them now. Her Fire? She thought not. Segnbora glanced past the Dweller’s
mdeihei
, catching some obscure motion there—and her attention fell again on that deeper darkness, the tall irregular oblong not-shape all wrapped about in shadows.

The Gate,
she realized. The
Eorlhowe Gate—

She slid a few steps closer to the DragonChief, and to the tantalizing darkness. It held something in it, a promise or potential, the way a dark room may be full of darker shapes, ready to be revealed when someone brings in a light.
But how to find out what?
“You fear my coming,” she said, “and Hasai’s... for now you will find out what that memory is about. And you’ll find it out the worst way: in reality... without having had any warning of its content.”

There was an uneasy rumbling of voices. “That ahead-memory that you can’t see,” Segnbora said, “that is a result of the change that’s upon you. That is the Shadow reaching out its claw toward you. Your seeings are clouded, you have no certainty—and uncertainty is Its tool of old. It is carefully hiding from you what will happen if you do
not
become involved in this matter.”

“Who then is hiding knowledge of what will happen if we do?” the Dweller said. “For we are no more certain of that.” She looked full at Segnbora and Hasai again, and away, as if she could not bear the sight. And not from loathing: but from anticipation, and fear, and desire all rolled together again— Segnbora, more bemused than ever, stretched her feelings out into that sense, pinned it to the stone with the black wing-barb of Skádhwë, tried to hold it— Nothing. Nothing.

And then a flash, and an obscure image—not inside Segnbora’s mind, but there in the darkness of the Eorlhowe Gate. Afternoon, as if seen through mist; and the answering blaze of Dragonfire. But not Llunih dying, this time. Someone else’s fangs in
her
throat—Dithra’s. This time—

It was gone. The Dweller lay there, seeming unmoved. Segnbora knew better. Beside her, Hasai began slowly to rise.
Don’t frighten her,
Segnbora said privately to him.

Her? She is the least of our worries—

Segnbora had no time to ask him what he meant. Gently she began to pace, not trying to make it obvious that she was drawing closer to the Gate. “As to that matter, I can’t say. But guests, indeed,” she said gently, her wings and tail moving in the restrained sort of way that could be the beginning of
nn’s’raihle
, or simply a statement, an essay. “‘Marchwarder’, then. You will have to find a new word for the role... for the thing you watched the borders for has slipped through them while your attention was turned elsewhere. You were looking outward, assuming the danger would come from beyond the world’s bourne, as it did before. But that’s an old tactic. The Shadow doesn’t repeat its tactics, any more than the Goddess does.” Here she bowed for a moment to that other Element in the equation, as she had bowed to Dithra on naming her first. “It’s here, in the hearts of the creatures you said you would protect. So you have failed your charge. And if you are Marchwarders no more, then what are you? Say I have a guest in my house: and that guest sees a dangerous beast walk in, but does nothing about it... being a guest. What should be done with such guests? Maybe they should be asked to leave—”

There was a murmur of astonishment and subdued anger from the Dragons standing around. She paid it no heed, working gently closer to the darkness of the Gate. “But that’s what you’ve done,” Segnbora said. “And now when someone comes to you and says, ‘Help me get rid of the beast’, you say ‘It’s no affair of ours.’ It will be your affair, quite soon, when all of us are dead, and the land is bare, and the weather changes, and the air gets thin and cold, and this world is a bare rock like yours was once; and the Shadow reaches out its intention to the little star that gives you all the food you have, and it flares up and dies one day, as your last one did.... You will wish then that you’d helped us get rid of the beast that came in our back door.”