The Door into Sunset (48 page)

But he was one of her
mdeihei!

Segnbora looked around in astonishment. “Who else is here?” she said. “How did you get out?”
And what in the world is a
hr’sdaha? she thought. The word was not in one of the familiar formations. “Hr-” was one of the augmentative prefixes: it could mean something greater in number than usual, or bigger, or simply different or new—

“There are quite a lot of us,” Rr’nojh said. “All the lineal
mdeihei
you knew are here, as far as I can tell. But suddenly we seem to be
dav’whhesnih.
We were called, we came—”

“Come on,” Segnbora said. She started making her way up the slope again, and Rr’nojh went with her. Before too long they came across Naen in his milkstone livery, and Karalh in her turquoise, and Pheress, Hasai’s egg-father, in his agate-brown; and Ashadh and Dithe and Loej and Trre’ye and many another, familiar voices from the chorus of shadows that had been inside Segnbora for all these months, but were shadows no longer. They followed her, so that shortly Segnbora had the familiar rumbling chorus behind her again.

When she finally came to stand before Dithra, with Skádhwë in her hand, Segnbora saw exactly what she had expected to see in the DragonChief’s
ehhath
: rage. The wing-barbs had been cocked toward her since Segnbora was no better than halfway up the hillside, and the tail-spine was coiled high and poised to strike. Dithra’s mouth was open, and the fire broiled at the back of it. Segnbora just bowed, and said, “
Lhhw’Hreiha
, I was called, and I’m here.”

The soft, restrained roar that came out of the DragonChief, like a volcano threatening to erupt, was horrible to hear. It was the sound of wounded pride, and of a Dragon threatened past endurance. “So I see. And so was I,” Dithra said: “called. Like all these others. And I am here.” Her claws scored the stone she lay on, as they clenched it. “Now you shall tell me who—”

“But surely you know,” said a voice from inside the Howe. All heads turned at that: and Segnbora heard the voice and laughed out loud for joy and relief.

“Hasai!” she said. And winged darkness came stalking out of the entrance to the Howe: the sun struck down on the old familiar livery, black star-sapphire above, pale diamond below. “But you’re bigger,” she said, slightly awed. He was at least a third again the size he had been: as big as Dithra.

“Am I so?” He looked at himself with mild surprise. “I had not noticed. No matter: it’s nothing I did, though it may be the effect of what I bear.” Hasai gazed over at Dithra. Their
ehhath
was totally different—his all ease and calm, hers all spines and defiance: but it was easy to see where the power lay.

“The Draconid Name is mine,” Dithra hissed. “It was given into my keeping: I guard it. And by its virtue, I am DragonChief—until one with a better reason than mine for holding it shall come to take the Name by force.”

Hasai lowered his head and looked at her from under his eye-shields, a lazy look, and a somewhat challenging one. “I make no claims as to ‘better’,” he said, “but as for the other—as you wish.” Quite slowly he lifted his wings, and the shadow of them fell all over that side of the hill, and over Dithra, so that the emerald and topaz of her livery went cold, and the only thing about her that burned any more was her eyes.

“
Bvh’Ohaheia-haa,”
Hasai sang, all on one long simber chord. “This then is Assemblage: here shall there befall hr’
nn’s’raihle
. All the Llhw’hei are here, either
sdahaih
or
mdahaih
: so that what Choice befalls here shall be the Great Choice, binding on all our folk, living and dead—”

“You have no right to convoke Assemblage!” Dithra roared in rage. “Nor to commit others to paying its price! And what is this business of
‘hr’nn’s’raihle
’, you speak nonsense—”

“If I have no right of Convocation,” Hasai said, “what is the whole of Dragonkind doing here in the first place? Dismiss them, if you can.”

Dithra lifted up her head.
“Tteid’i’rae-huw!”
she sang, one long angry note in the future certain:
you shall all depart!
But it was untrue, and choked itself off; and the Dragons looked at one another, distressed.

“As for the other matter,” Hasai said, gazing calmly at Dithra’s furious
ehhath
and no whit troubled by it, “the issue we shall argue here, and decide, is greater than any other since the
hr’nn’s’raihle
called when our people decided to leave the Homeworld. We had a choice too, then, to live or die as a species. That is the issue again today. The Sign has come which M’athwinn spoke of, the day when the cast skin is put on again. Look at me!”

They looked. He was real. Even lately, even at his most corporeal, to Segnbora Hasai had seemed to lack something—not necessarily a physical solidity, but something inner. It was there now: his voice rang with it, and his song, in a richness and complexity of chording that Segnbora had only heard hinted at before. “I was
mdahaih
. But that is all over. The Draconid Name has passed to me; changed, as we have been changed, by the new world we live in. It was given me through my old
sdaha
. But she is my
sdaha
no longer.” A pang went right through Segnbora as he said it, but she held her peace: that feeling of trembling on the edge of something tremendous was with her again. “And I have no
mdeihei
any longer. I am not
sdahaih
, nor
mdahaih
, nor
rdahaih
either. New words will be needed. But
hr’sdahaih
, as in M’athwinn’s old rede, will do. I have been freed: pushed past the point where one must cohabit with the dead to be alive... or with the living, once dead.”

The rustling of uncertainty that went through the Dragons was like the first wind of a storm as it begins to rush through a forest. “Have you forgotten the old songs so completely?” Hasai cried, singing almost in anguish. “How they sang on the Homeworld of the times in the most ancient past when the living lived in their own minds, in freedom, and chose their own actions unadvised except by others of the living, and by
Mn’Stihw?”
Every neck bent, all wings bowed, at the Immanence’s rarely-sung Name. “But our world began to die untimely,” Hasai said, his song going sorrowful: “and here, as in other times and places, the Immanence saw Its making marred by the old Shadow of Its light. But It was not to be foiled so easily that It would let the death of our home kill us too. It conceived a plan.”

The rustle of unsettled wings was getting louder. “It saw our coming here,” Hasai said. “The circumstances, and the troubles that would befall. It knew that many, many of us would die in the Crossing. And indeed that happened—but not as many died, as it turns out, as might have. To spare that needless death, the Immanence invented mda’had. The dead began to pass in-mind to the living, and were sheltered there, safe from the cold of the night between worlds... so that when they had been led at last to the place appointed, they could be released.” His song was anguished, but joyful as well.
“This is the place appointed: this is the day of your release!
The wandering, the fear, the imprisonment of the untimely dead, are truly over at last. All this had to wait till a human was one with us in mind, to remind us from inside of what a single soul feels like... the way one note heard will bring the whole song back to mind. Many unwitting attempts we have made, living and talking with our human Marchwarders over centuries, sensing obscurely that they had something we needed. But none of these attempts came to fruit, until a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time became
sdahaih
to a Dragon. Even that was not quite enough: it was still required that great need should force the bond apart, and love dissolve it willingly. But all conditions are now fulfilled.”

He looked over at Segnbora. “I said I have no
sdaha
,” he said. “I had one, but in her wisdom, or her Goddess’s, she freed me. And now neither of us have
mdeihei
. But look what we have instead!” All eyes turned to the crowd gathered around Segnbora: some three hundred Dragons who had long since “cast the last skin” and become physically unreal. They were real enough now.

Dithra was hissing with rage. “How can you be so sure of yourself?” she sang. “This world has its own creatures, and its own deity: have you asked them whether it approves these plans? And even were all this wild conjecture true, why should we change? Why give up what certainty we have for we know not what madness, an empty aloneness in one’s mind, with no other presence to counsel it against foolhardiness—”

Segnbora laughed, then, and stepped out from among the former
mdeihei
, for this was the moment for which Hiriedh had named her rahiw’sheh, and her advocacy was upon her. “The old argument!” she said. “Listen now! Your coming freed our world from the Dark that lay over it, all those years ago. You’re welcome guests. But you must act to accept the hospitality, or die out of the world, as you’ve begun to do already.
Where are the Dragonets?
You are so careful of this world, so nervous about it, that you haven’t even managed to breed in it! You’re treating it as if it were flawed somehow, or broken—a dying place, like the Homeworld! The way you’re managing matters at present, one by one you’ll slip away and go
mdahaih
, until there’s no one to go
mdahaih
to any more. You’ll go
rdahaih
, the whole species of you together! The Immanence Itself will speak the Draconid Name, and there will be no answer....”

Wings unfolded and furled again all over the Howe, a mass Dracon shudder. “Yes,” Segnbora said, “and that’s exactly what the Shadow wants. We the humans invite you now: come be with us, and of us: come fight on our side!—for there’s no other way we can save you from the fate awaiting you. Let us return the favor you did us, and even the balance!”

Dithra arched her neck at Segnbora in scorn. “What right have
you
to speak for all humankind—”

Segnbora held out Skádhwë. Outside the core of its darkness, it blazed like a star with her certainty. “Oh, I do more than just that. I speak for the Goddess, Who made this world, and who speaks through me as through all humans, for She has no simpler way. Are you going to demand that She come Herself to make Her case? Why should She, when she
has
done? Wasn’t the Messenger enough, to make it plain to you that this was to be your world? How can a people with such eyes be so blind?!”

“
Lhhw’Hreiha
,” Hasai said, in a long low chord that deepened and broadened and built like the wind rising before a storm, “make your choice: and abide it.”

From under the shadow of his wings, Dithra looked up at Hasai from her crouch, her wings rising slowly, the barbs cocked toward him, her jaw dropping. “I will have things as they are,” she sang softly. “With one exception.”

The Dragons began to clear hurriedly out of the way to give them room.

Segnbora moved back too, but not too far. Her eyes were on Hasai: she could feel his uncertainty.
Sithesssch,
she thought,
the price of Assemblage is always the DragonChief’s life.

I know,
he said. He was watching Dithra move down into the center of the space left open for them, watching the way she moved: her
ehhath
was surprisingly calm, all of a sudden, the manner of a Dragon who knows she is superior in fight—or remembers-ahead that she has already won.
Either way, one of us is clearly going to die. But
your
business,
sdaha
, is to make sure that you remember how you managed it last time—

Segnbora stared at him, confused. But Hasai had already turned away, moving down after Dithra.

She leapt at him, and a great dissonance of shock and distress went up from the Dragons who watched, as Dithra ignored the protocols of proper
nn’s’raihle
—no dance, no statement in
ehhath
of her own case, just this bald, rude attack. But Hasai flung himself back, a quick back-raking of wings and a spring of the haunches, and Dithra missed and came down short. Hasai flowed swiftly off to one side, his jaw dropping in a smile, or in preparation of Dragonfire, it was hard to say which.
“Au uuzh’aave’, ha-nnha’mdadahé, ou ylihhaih’errhuw,”
Hasai sang as he circled her in courteous reminder of the dance she had discarded: and one wing was raised over her as he closed in, to prevent her taking to the air. All his
ehhath
was tense and ready, but nonetheless full of cheer, the tail wreathed in amusement and excitement at something that was finally happening.
A bad beginning, Dweller; no matter, it will end well—

All Dithra’s body went tense with rage as Hasai sang in the predictive mode, future definite, and the song was true and did not choke itself. She flung herself at him again, but sidewise this time, fang-sheaths retracted and every topaz fang showing, the great curve of her tail whipping around to pinion Hasai’s tail harmless. They closed, and tangled. Hasai whipped his neck back out of the way of her fangs closing in it: but at the same time Segnbora saw the fire build abruptly behind Dithra’s eyes, knew that a blast of Dragonfire was coming, and lifted Skádhwë.

NO,
Hasai cried into her mind,
do not! Use it now and it will be useless for the most important part—
He lunged with his head like a striking snake, his jaws open, and clamped them down hard around Dithra’s, so that she struggled, impotent to flame at him. From behind, what was left free of her tail came flailing around, the terrible spear-long spine ready to strike. Hasai’s tail writhed itself free and twined with hers, straining against it. The two fell together, rolling over and over on the stones.

Dithra changed her tactic, now not trying to get free, but pulling Hasai closer to her, to savage him with her hind talons. Dragons had few internal organs any more, but if ripped open from keel to vent, a Dracon body would die soon enough, simply from the damage to the tissue-network that carried its energy through it. And Dragons had vulnerable points: the spine, the master-junction behind the head where Dragonfire was spawned, the brain. Disrupt those, and death would be certain, though not swift—Dragons were too tough to die quickly.