The Door into Sunset (38 page)

It was a long few moments before its eyes opened, squinting and wincing, and a low sound like a moan came from it.

“Are you hurt?”

Oh, I am. I could do nothing.

He cradled it.
Nothing,
it said, sounding as if it wanted to weep.
That power that almost put me out before—stronger, now. It almost did it again, though I came at it with all my strength. And even that silly form of flesh It wore, I couldn’t burn.
Sunspark had lifted its head: now it let it drop back into Herewiss’s lap again.
What will you do? It will be waiting for us, at the battle.

Herewiss shook his head and stroked it. “What kind of healing do you need?” he said.

Time. But that we don’t have, I think.

“No,” Herewiss said, “we don’t.” He looked down at it, trying to put on a brave face. “All the same, you were clever to do what you did.”

You see,
Sunspark said, sounding afraid, that I have come to understand something about love.
Enough, now, to use it as a weapon....
It coughed, and the sound struck terror into Herewiss. Sunspark had never shown any sign of illness or weakness: it had either been dead, or in the full of its strength
. At least that worked
, it said.
I was of no other use.

Herewiss just held it. All around him, the stink of burning, the sharp reports of cracking cooling stone, made a bitter counterpoint to his thoughts.
I was so sure I could solve this problem. Well, now we see the truth. My Power is far from being enough to ‘do away with’ this threat. It will need Segnbora, and Eftgan, and every Rodmistress in the Silent Precints... if even all of them together will be enough to handle Rian.

And what other help is there for us if they’re not?

He scrubbed at his eyes. He was weary unto death... but not quite dead yet. And in two days, the Darthene levies would be within a day’s ride of Arlen. A great deal could happen in two days.

It had better,
Sunspark said.

The picture of the loved,

Long we hold in heart:

then come home to find

the two have grown apart:

Which to keep, and which to kill:

Should there be a doubt?

But how we clip the dead to us

and throw the living out...

(from
Laeran’s Song
,

anonymous, c. 2300 p.a.d))

West of Prydon, about half a mile beyond the outer wall, stands a grove of trees called Orsmernin. The trees there are all pale-barked whitestaves, and they grow in concentric circles. The one in the midst is the tallest and broadest, and no wonder, it being now almost seventeen hundred years old—Berlemetir Silverstock, the whitestave tree from which the Stave of the rulers of Arlen comes. Ambyr, Héalhra’s wife, planted it in memory of him, the year that Kynall was built and Prydon was founded. When Healhra’s son King Frelic, who built Kynall, died, his son Fórlen buried him near the Silverstock, and planted another tree of the same kind over his grave. Fórlen himself, and Queen Tíla his daughter, and Hleon her son, were buried there, with trees over them; that finished the first circle, and another was started outside it. One by one the rulers of Arlen came to lie there, however they died. The trees rise up out of their graves, giving their bodies back to the world.

Seventy-four trees, in eight circles, the outermost one with many places still left unfilled; they stand there by the little stream Nalash that waters the Orsmernin meadow on its way down to the Arlid. None of the trees have ever died, though some of them have gone green-rotten at the heart. Seventy-four trees: but there have been seventy-five rulers of Arlen.

There was a man standing under one of the outermost trees that morning. Nearby, his two horses were drinking leisurely from a pool of the Nalash stream, but the man’s attention was turned away from them, inward, toward the Grove. The early sun struck slantwise through the leaves, which had gone that tired green that many trees acquire toward the end of summer. Only the tallest of them, Berlemetir, reared up out of the whispering canopy and showed its topmost leaves had gone golden. The warmth in the air, and the heat of even this early sun, said summer: but the tree knew the truth.

Freelorn looked at the slight mound in the grass before him. Off to his left was Fréol’s tree. He remembered the day Ferrant had planted it, a handsome young whitestave sapling about three years old. Now it was well along in growth, some forty feet tall after twenty years—whitestaves didn’t waste their time getting their height. There was no tree on the slight rise of ground in front of Lorn, however. There had been no one around, after they buried Ferrant, who was entitled to plant it.

There will be shortly, though,
Freelorn thought, and looked toward the walls of Prydon. He walked away from the Grove, clucking to the horses.

*

At the gates of Prydon, the usual guard was mounted. The day had dawned bright and clear, hot already and promising to be hotter still. Such weather was common enough just before the harvest, but the oddity was that the town, for a change, was not full of country people having their last big fling before going out to the townlands and beginning the serious work of getting the crops in. Things were quiet that morning.

One of the guards looked at the other as a horseman passed through, and a woman carrying a basket of eggs. “You smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“Smelled like rain for a moment. It was cool.”

“Send it over here,” said the other guard, fanning himself and looking the other way.

The first guard yawned and looked down toward the river, where the engineers were making their third attempt of the morning to get a bridge of lashed-together boats to hold against the rush of water. The boats broke away again, and one string of them went wavering downstream, like a string of weed in the fierce flow of the water. The guard’s counterpart looked over suddenly and said, “Hey, I felt that just then.”

“Nice,” the first guard said, luxuriating in the breeze as it went by him and through the gates into the city, smelling of wheatfields under rain, and of cool stone with a cool wind over it....

*

Herewiss peered out the back window of the boarding house, most cautiously.

“Come on, you,” Segnbora said from behind him: “eat your breakfast, do. You’ll ruin the rest of the day.”

Herewiss said nothing, since he held out no great hopes for the day as things stood at the moment. Sunspark had not completely destroyed the Darthene Embassy last night—most of the walls were still standing, and some of the upstairs rooms had been spared. The banquet hall, though, was a dead loss—rather like the Bridge, Herewiss thought with a spark of satisfaction—and Andaethen had suggested to him that it might be more politic for him to make himself scarce. Herewiss, therefore, had betaken himself privily off to the boarding-house near the second wall, with Sunspark in tow, and had found Segnbora already there.

Or rather, he had found her less there than he expected. When dealing with the annoyed old man who ran the house, or with his suspicious staff, she looked quite normal. “It’d be a poor sort of day that I couldn’t manage to keep an illusion in place,” she said to Herewiss, with good-natured scorn, when he first came up to the suite of rooms she had engaged. But for one who could see through such things, though Segnbora was there enough to support her clothes, her face and hands and anything else of flesh that showed were more like a pale thin stained glass than muscle and bone. One thing was new: she now wore a front-and-back tabard of the shed black dragonhide that she had been working on when Herewiss saw her last. Herewiss almost coveted it, and Segnbora was pleased enough with it on her own part, for reasons that had nothing to do with the gemmy beauty of it. The dragonmail would turn any sword that hit it, and blunt anything else, arrow, dart or spear.

The rooms she had taken at the top of the boarding-house were large, for Segnbora had anticipated the possibility of guests: there were three bedrooms and a sitting room. But they weren’t large enough to keep Herewiss from pacing, and looking worriedly at her, and out the window onto the back garden. All the roses were in bloom in a riot of gold and red, but Herewiss’s attention was mostly for the view over the garden wall. The white dome of Lionhall was visible there, over many intervening roofs.

Herewiss leaned against the frame of the hinged iron window in the whitewashed wall, looking over toward the dome, eyeing the hard, hot blue sky. “Where’s Hasai?” he said.

“Over on the coast,” Segnbora said, sitting down by the couch on which Sunspark was dozing in its young-woman shape. “He keeps coming real suddenly, the past few days... he can’t control it. When I came into town, I told him to keep himself nearby and out of sight. The first night I was here, he tried to sneak in, and almost wrecked the whole back wall.” Segnbora looked amused, but worried. “His physicality is getting assertive....”

“And yours unassertive.”

Segnbora would not meet his eyes. She breathed out, looked over at Sunspark and carefully stroked a stray bit of that fiercely red hair out of the handsome young woman’s face. “She’s resting a lot, isn’t she. He. It.”

Herewiss nodded. Hooves rang in the archway under the window: someone coming into the innyard.”

“It wasn’t this bad after Midsummer,” Segnbora said. “Only a few hours, it took, before it was back to normal.... ”

Herewiss nodded, his eyes on the newcomer. Scraggly-looking man, bearded—some kind of tradesman, just in from the countryside, from the look of him. The man glanced up at the courtyard windows in the sunlight, a cool, cautious look—

Herewiss froze.

My Goddess—!!

Only the kind of discipline that adepts learn kept him still. “‘Berend,” he said.

Her eyes widened as she caught his thought, even through his heart-mail of Fire.
“Lorn—?!”

Herewiss was suffering such a rush of relief and terror and desire and confusion that his legs simply gave out on him, and he sat down hard on the wooden stool by the window. Segnbora looked abstracted for a moment, then got up and strolled over to the window, glanced out it casually. “He knows,” she said. “Give him a while to sort out his room and deal with the householder. After that, I can hold the protection for all our minds for a while.” She turned back to him and smiled. “I think you could use a few hours off.”

It was a harder fifteen minutes, in many ways, than those Herewiss had spent dueling with Rian and the Shadow last night. When the door finally creaked softly open, he hardly knew what he did—

How long they held each other, he had no idea. He held Lorn away from him, and looked at him; but Lorn, after a moment of standing with his head scrunched down against Herewiss’s shoulder, was looking around the room. That cautious expression again. “Where’s Segnbora?” he said.

Herewiss glanced around and saw that she had slipped into the next room. “And Spark,” Freelorn said. “No one else here?”

“Moris is still up with Andaethen,” Herewiss said. “Dritt got here earlier: he has a room of his own downstairs. Harald is elsewhere in town—he’ll be along tonight. The rest are with Eftgan’s levies. Lorn, the Embassy—”

“I heard,” Freelorn said, looking with a tight, amused expression at the sleeping Sunspark. “Neither sorcery nor Fire could have done a job quite
that
way.” He looked at Herewiss.

Herewiss was shocked. Freelorn was radiating certainty, and a sort of solid fierceness that Herewiss had never seen in him before. “Oh, I missed you,” Freelorn said: but even that longing had an edge and a hunger to it that Herewiss hadn’t ever heard. It was a joy to hear... and rather frightening.

“Lorn,” Herewiss said, holding him away, “for Goddess’s sake, how did you get in here? What happened to the seeming Eftgan put on you?
How did you just walk in?”

“I have a lot to tell you,” Freelorn said. “As for the walking in—” He smiled. “I may have a trick or two to show you, once we’ve been in Lionhall.” His glance went out the window, to that high dome shining against the blue. “Tomorrow night, aye?”

Herewiss nodded.

“But it can wait,” Freelorn said.

*

Very much later, Freelorn turned over and stretched, and said: “What about Rian?”

Herewiss lay on the bed in a mixed state: satisfaction, and worry, and exhaustion—the sudden tiredness had hit him after the first flush of their lovemaking. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to feel any working of his mind since last night. Possibly he feels the same way I do... “

“But it’s unsafe to assume that,” Freelorn said.Herewiss nodded. “I told you about his seeming immunity to backlash. His linkage to the Shadow—it seems almost to be a conscious thing, a being in its own right—all the backlash hits that and seems to be absorbed.” He thought about that a moment. “I have a feeling that it may become Rian’s own death, personified, if he slips.”

“Or ours,” Lorn muttered, “if he doesn’t.”

Herewiss rolled over. “Yes, I thought about that. The connection of Iriv the Mad, at Bluepeak, to the Gnorn—not precisely the Shadow Itself, but a creation made out of Iriv’s mortality, and insanity: an attempt to harness that power. But it didn’t work too well, and caused the uprising of the Lion and Eagle.... so that the Shadow failed badly. Now we have this new sort of linkage... something different, more controllable, or so the Shadow thinks. Rian, providing the connection to human calculation, and righteousness, and blindness... “

“And power.”

Herewiss nodded, though reluctantly. It still chafed him that he had not been able to do anything about Rian, even something so simple and unsubtle as killing him.

“Stop that,” Freelorn said, sounding gentle, but exasperated. “It’s not helping you work out what to do next... and that’s what we’d better be concentrating on.” Lorn sighed. “A sorcerer whose backlash is being stored... “

“Bind enough energy in one place for long enough,” Herewiss said, “and it’ll start to ‘wake up’ the matter or other matrix it’s bound into. A pattern of energy will do well enough for such a matrix. So would a sorcery, if it were complex enough, and strong enough to hold the energy in question....” He thought about that for a moment. “The backlash of all Rian’s sorceries... his weather magics, and whatever else he’s been doing... all directed into this ‘being’, and stored for some use later. Against what?”