The Door into Sunset (27 page)

“You have no proof of this,” said the DragonChief. “You have no ahead-memory of it.”

“No,” Segnbora said. “I have what humans use instead. We call it reason. ... The darkness trying to fall over this world, wants it dead. Wants
all
things in it dead, for Its own purposes. If you will let It destroy us and do nothing when good courses of action are laid out for you, then you are no guests of ours. And Dragons lie about our ‘protection’, and have lied ever since they came here first.”

The roar that went up from the walls around would have shaken down loose rock, had there been any in the smooth-melted surfaces. The Dweller sat upright, slowly, and spread her wings; and the barbs of them were cocked toward Segnbora and Hasai.

“Dragons do not lie,” said the Dweller, slowly, in the lowest rumble.

“We’ll see about that,” Segnbora said, “in a year, or ten, or a hundred; when there are no humans left, and there are Dragons. If we are wiped out, then all your denials will not make it less true. And you will wish you had died with us.”

It took a long while for the silence to settle down again. “Here is your choice,” Hasai said. “Be with us now, and be with us later. Otherwise—” He shrugged his wings. “There is little help for any of us.”

“As for you, ehs’Pheress,” said the Dragonchief, looking at him, “you have already broken the ban.
Mdahaih
you were, and yet somehow you managed to rise up and go
dav’whnesshih
. That alone we would not have grudged you, strange though it seems. But then you interfered in the humans’ battle at Bluepeak. What your Dragonflame wrought there, few of them will now forget. We thought you might ask pardon while you were here; but it seems not. How did you so far forget yourself, and our law? How many of them might you have killed?”

“What matters, Dweller, is how many he did kill, which is none: because he and I were one,” Segnbora said. Gently, gently she had worked to within about a tail-length of Dithra. “Killing was the last thing on our minds, that night. He saved my life; should it be wrong for
mdaha
to save
sdaha
? How many of you have been saved by your own
mdeihei
from one folly or danger or another?”

“It does not matter,” said the Dweller. “Hasai was outcast before, by his own choice. He is more so now than even then, when he took a human for his
sdaha
.”

“I took what the Immanence sent me,” Hasai said, “and have not been too ill-served. In fact, there is a certain likeness between the way I am here, and the way
you
are.”

Silence fell again, at that. Many eyes were turned to Hasai, noticing that even by darklight, Hasai’s physicality had acquired a certain edge: a feeling that it too, like the Dweller’s, might become abruptly more than it was. Segnbora welcomed the momentary distraction. The Gate was dark again, but she gazed into it, and called the Fire up inside her, and willed, willed for something to happen.
Something—anything—whatever You will, Goddess, or Immanence, whichever—let what’s trying to happen, now
happen!

“Nevertheless,” said the DragonChief, “we may give you no aid. Whatever your nature is, it is not in the Draconid Name. Dracon one of you may have been—but that nature has been perverted—”

“But our
mdeihei
are in you, DragonChief,” Hasai said, feeling Segnbora’s struggle, taking up the thread as she would have. “If they’re not Dracon, then what are they doing there? And that being the case—I will have them back, thank you.”

He swept his wings out and gathered their
mdeihei
about them. For a moment, he was surrounded by shadow as the DragonChief was; and dim shapes filled it—twenty, thirty, a hundred, five hundred ancestors—eyes ruby gemfire, emerald, onyx, burning. Some of the threat went out of the Dweller’s wings, and the barbs swung away. “How can you—” she said.

“The same way I can remember what you cannot,” Segnbora said. “The Gate no longer shows you its counsel clearly, does it? Nor on your command, as it used to do.”
More,
she willed,
tell me what I need—
“
Llhw’Hreiha
, Dweller-at-the-Howe, I can feel the tragedy about to come upon us. You can avert much of it if you give us your people’s help. Even your own help, though that’s not necessary. Your countenance alone would be enough. Otherwise—”

She turned away from the Dweller, unable to bear the horror in her eyes and her
ehhath
, and looked at the Gate.

And
saw
—

The seeing struck Segnbora near senseless. It was not like seeing, but more like
being
seen, and utterly known, by a million eyes and the minds behind them. In a thunder of Dracon voices and the wind of countless wings, she stood transfixed, struggling, blinded. Something poured into her, but Segnbora had no slightest idea of what it was. The pouring felt the way it had felt to have Hasai’s huge self poured into her small cramped soul... but this was worse, endlessly worse. It went on forever.

When it stopped, Hasai was looking at her expectantly. Segnbora felt ready to slump down and die, but was astonished to find that somehow her Dracon body was still working.
What was that?
she thought
. I thought lightning struck me
....

“Otherwise?” said the Dweller, seeming to have noticed nothing.

She sought about for her thread of thought, and found it, though her head was reeling with other things. “Otherwise, with us, you will be swept away,” she said. “And worse will come.”

“No more of this,” said the DragonChief, looking at Segnbora most peculiarly. “Here is my rede. We will do you no harm. We will give you no aid. Go now.”

Slowly Segnbora returned to Hasai’s side. He looked at her, and she felt a gingerly touch from him on the borders of her mind. Used to his contact, she threw the gates open, let him in.

He flinched with his whole body, his eyes and all his
ehhath
full of consternation and astonishment. Then Hasai looked at the Dweller, and bowed his wings right down to the ground—a gesture of mourning.

“We will see you again, Dweller,” he said, “once only.
Sdaha
, come.”

They made their way back up to the light of day. No Dragon went with them; none spoke to them as they left. Segnbora and Hasai raised wings, grasped force and flew.

When they were some miles away, Segnbora sang, barely louder than a whisper, “
Sithesssch
...
what was that?”

Hasai looked at her in terror... but there was an edge of anticipation on it, like the sharpened edge of a sword. “I am not sure,” he said. “But I have an idea. We must have time to find out if I’m right.”

“Time is what we’re shortest of,
sdaha
,” Segnbora said. She was too weary to think, too weary to try to figure out what Hasai’s strange elation was about.

“Not as short as some others,” Hasai said, and actually dropped his jaw in a smile. “To Aired,
sdaha
. Come.”

This tale they tell, of a Cat that went to

Courte, to see the King as was its ryght;

and half a tendaie later, itt came away

agayne in haste, saying, ‘The cream is

very fine, but I am half deafn’d with the

compliments of mice, and well stick’d with

their knives’.

—d’Kelic,
A conceit

Herewiss had always had a fondness for getting all dressed up. His family had been teasing him about it since he was small—since the day, at the age of nine, when they caught him, upstairs in his parents’ bedchamber, wearing the chain of Principality of the Brightwood. Being that it was rather too large for him, he had been wearing it around his waist, with a table knife stuck in it. Since then they had given him no peace over his fondness for ornate ceremony, and the clothes you got to wear for it, silk and brocade, the look of good leather and bright swords and jewels. It’s not my fault, he thought as he dressed.
It comes of all those stories they told me when I was young
.... His mother, City Rodmistress that she had been before she married his father, had told him endless stories of the fine life in Darthis; and he had taken them all much to heart and decided, when he was young, that some day he was going to be one of those people who dressed in velvets and gilded mail, and had a page to go before him to announce his name.

Now, of course, he had become one of those people... and discovered that he didn’t particularly care for it.
At least the dressing up is still enjoyable,
he thought.

He had spent the past seven days settling into Prydon, doing nothing official as yet—for until he was presented tonight, his status was still in question. He moved gently about the old streets of the town: went up to the walls, and looked down to the plain and the river. In between times, he went to meet people that Andaethen felt he should see, members of the Four Hundred. Most of them greeted him kindly; the rest treated him with that kind of reserve that suggests the person is wary of entertaining a spy, or of entertaining a man who the present government was likely to consider a traitor. For his own part, he had caged his mind around with Fire, to be wholly certain that no one, either Rodmistress or sorcerer, could hear what he was thinking. He was, though, beginning to feel as weary as if he was in the cage himself, for he dared not let the protection go, even when he slept.

Andaethen was sorry for his weariness, but she wanted Herewiss to be seen meeting these people. “You may as well,” she said to him one morning over breakfast. “There’s no point in being covert about it. People know you’re here to feel out support for Freelorn. So why waste your time? Let Cillmod see you doing what he
thinks
you should be doing. If you sat quiet, and seemed to do nothing, then he’d become suspicious, perhaps of some intervention with the Fire. No, no,” she said, “you just do the expected thing, and go about and be vaguely treasonable… in the right company, of course. Your Fire will teach you readily enough who’s reliable and who’s not. Though I can give you some hints.” And she did. Some of the names surprised him.

The monarchy of Arlen, when it was functioning correctly, was not a monolithic one. The King ruled, and his word was final; but also taken into the reckoning were the Four Hundred. These were the great landowners or Arlen—if “owners” was precisely the right word, for all of them were considered to have the land in fee or gift from the Throne, as the King had it, in trust only, from the Goddess. The King or Queen saw to it that the royal magics were performed, to keep the land fertile and bearing. The Four Hundred, in return, submitted a certain amount of the incomes and produce of that land to the Throne; saw the rest distributed among their people, and kept a fair proportion for themselves as organizers.

That was in theory, of course. Human nature being what it was, the actuality was sometimes quite different. The Four Hundred tended to perceive any action of the Staveholder as dangerous if it seemed about to endanger their livelihoods, or the status quo, in any way at all. They were not above squabbling amongst one another for larger pieces of land—prevailing on the present ruler for increases in their own appanage, for example, at another’s expense. They were also aware that the people living on their land, if its fertility failed, would correctly surmise that their chances of being able to plow in the King or Queen to rectify the problem were less than good—so that the tenants would be quite willing to sacrifice the local Lord or Lady, instead, as a possibly useful second-best measure. So a ruler who seemed to be failing at keeping the land bearing regularly would make the Four Hundred nervous indeed. Cillmod was more or less in this position, since it was uncertain whether or not he had been able to do anything useful about the Royal Magics. The Four Hundred looked at him with only slightly less joy than they looked at the prospect of Freelorn seven years earlier. An untried, nonInitiate heir was a problem. Worse still was a ruler who came into his power without the usual forms being fulfilled—especially when they were not just mere forms, but vital religious necessity, deeply involved with the process of making the land bear fruit in the first place. There had been those first four shaky years of real hardship: then, slowly, the seeming recovery, as if things were getting better. Those members of the Four Hundred who had backed Cillmod on Ferrant’s death, formerly perceived as a shady bunch and ones that might come to no good, now were perceived as the upholders of law and order—at least, of some mind of law and order. And those who had pushed for Freelorn’s recall and enthronement, or at least a search for some other Initiate who could take the throne under more regular circumstances, were now seen as dangerous rebels, and possibly in need of being unseated from their properties.

This, of course, even the most enthusiastic of their detractors were reluctant to actually suggest in the open. To completely dispossess one of the ruling Four Hundred—the dispossessors might themselves become the dispossessed if the mood of certain people at court should change: the more powerful, those closer to Cillmod, or to Rian. So nothing was being done yet. There were always rumors that, after Cillmod’s proper enthronement—after the Regalia were recovered, as well as Hergótha the Great, and most specifically the White Stave, without which nothing could be done—then many old scores against Freelorn’s supporters would be redressed. It was the potential redressees that Herewiss found himself visiting in those first few days: some of them muted and cautious, some of them openly scornful of Cillmod, some of them staying quiet, feeling that their best chance for themselves and their people was to lie low and see what happened.

“It’s worked for a long while now,” said one of them. “Those bad years we had, anyone who spoke too loud might be dead suddenly, for one reason or another. Your own people—someone else’s—spies, counterspies were everywhere.”

Orfen laughed and shook his head. He was a small, dry, wry man, sharp-eyed, like a hawk that sits up on a bough that looks at you, unreachable, unconcerned, and amused. Orfen’s lands were some of the most extensive up north, near the North Arlene borders. Those lands were always assumed to be disaffected from the Arlene throne, because of distance if not a different set of political needs.