The Door into Shadow (36 page)

“
This is crazy,” Lang said, beside Segnbora.

“
Maiden’s madness, I hope,” Eftgan said, and shook Scoundrel’s reins. He stalled, snorting, until Eftgan laid her crop gently below his left ear and touched him with heels again. Up Scoundrel went in a nervous rush, scattering pebbles and small stones. One by one the others followed him, reining their horses in to keep them stepping lightly and minimize the damage done to the path.

The ride was like something out of an old tale or a bad dream, full of long terrifying pauses during which Freelorn lost the way and found it again, dismounted to heave fallen boulders off the narrow track or to lead Blackmane where he thought it too dangerous to burden a horse with a rider’s weight. The path, if it could be dignified with such a name, wound back and forth along the face of the cliff, switching back at wildly irregular intervals, the switches often barely enough for one horse to negotiate. Always there were heartstopping drops below.

Segnbora kept her elbows in as she rode, once again very glad of Steelsheen’s breed—Steldenes, bred in mountainous country, were frequently accused of being part goat. The mare picked her way delicately along ledges of rotten, sliding stone with only an occasional snort of protest at the poor quality of the trail. Other horses behind, flatland breeds, weren’t doing as well. The sound of whispered swearing came drifting up from riders down below.

As they climbed, the night got blacker, if that was possible. A feeling began to grow among the riders that Something with no good intent was watching the silent climb. Tense minutes stretched into an hour, then two and three. Segnbora began to feel as if she had been climbing up this miserable wall forever, as if her whole life had been spent fighting with eggshell-fragile stone, squinting at it, terrified of every step.

At the same time, she had to admit that this feat would be sung of for years, if any of them finished the climb and survived the battle that waited just the other side of Britfell. She maneuvered Steelsheen cautiously around another treacherous switchback, not looking down.

Inside her, in their own darkness that now seemed bright by comparison, Hasai and the
mdeihei
hissed laughter at her fear of heights, and then began singing (in sixteen-part harmony of the kind Dragons used when feeling playful) their memory of the ballad which the bards would later write for Freelorn:
When Fyrd came over the Darthene border / and Reavers moved at the Shadow’s order...
Segnbora almost felt like smiling, until she remembered that just because her
mdeihei
had a memory of the ballad, that was still no guarantee that any of them were going to survive.

As she was thinking that, one of Sheen’s hooves slipped, and Segnbora’s heart seized as she leaned with the mare so she could regain her balance. For an instant they came close to a perilous drop, but Steelsheen recovered and went on, sweating and trembling, but knowing what her mistress wanted. Unconcerned, the
mdeihei
were singing in unison now, a calm chorus.
They climbed the Fell and they crossed the water, the Lion’s Son and the Eagle’s Daughter—

The riders pressed on. Several hours before dawn it began to snow, the wind rising to a howling blast. Snow that grew blizzard-fine drove stinging into faces, numbing hands on the reins. The horses whickered in complaint and tried to walk with eyes averted toward the cliff, which only caused them to miss their footing more often. Their riders, who had more or less expected the change of weather, broke out extra clothing and muffled themselves up as best they could. The sky got infinitesimally lighter as day broke above the storm, though not enough to lighten anyone’s spirits.

There’s will behind this weather,
Herewiss had said. That will could be felt watching them more strongly every minute. The head of the column was fairly close to the top of the fell now, but that was no comfort: the thought of having to take a similar path downhill, on an icy trail, was on everyone’s mind. The storm was blowing from the south, and had been abated somewhat by striking the fell and having to pour over it. Matters would be much worse on the other side.

The trail leveled so abruptly that Segnbora was taken completely by surprise. It led westward here, going around the edge of a west-pointing backbone of the fell. A pause to look out that way would have been pleasant, but there was no time for it—the column was still coming up the far side of the fell, and there was little standing room. Besides, they had entered the cloud cover, and visibility was low.

Even so, Eftgan dismounted long enough to stretch her cramped arms and legs and look ahead hopefully. Herewiss, beside her, looked unhappy. “Can you feel anything?” he said.

Eftgan shook her head. “I can hardly hear myself think in this wind, let alone anyone else. That one”—she glanced upward at the slate-dark cloud cover—”has settled Itself down snug. It’s muffling all thought but Its own. The main force is going to have to rely on riders for messages, and there’ll be no way for us to know what’s going on until we rejoin it.”

“
Sunspark can assist,” Herewiss said. But he sounded uncertain. “When will they move?”

“
Noon. We should be well finished with our business at the Heugh by then, and they can go ahead and have a battle without worrying about what it might raise.” She was chewing on her lower lip, a sign of hidden fright that Segnbora recognized.

Segnbora had no time to indulge her own nervousness. There was barely enough time to dismount and feed Steelsheen some grain. By the time she got back in the saddle, Lorn was already picking his way down the trail on the other side, with Eftgan in back of him and Herewiss behind her.

“
Let’s move, slowcoach,” Lang said as he nudged his dapplegray, Gyrfalcon, past her. “Going to lose your place up front.”

Dubious honor that it is,
Segnbora thought, swinging up into the saddle and following him.

Now the pace of the climb slowed to an agonized creep, for the stone was not only iced, it was rotten. Rock crumbled maddeningly under foot, and the horses rebelled—shaking their heads, snorting, testing the footing at every step. The blinding cold snow turned the world into a featureless gray room through which vaguely seen figures led the way, and others, hunched against the wind, followed behind. The ordeal was endless.

In front of her, Gyrfalcon shied, and then Steelsheen did too. Segnbora had another of those terrifying long looks down.
Ice and darkness. Oh, damn!
The mare recovered her balance. Segnbora squinted at Lang’s shadowy back and then squeezed her eyes shut for just a moment, looking down among the
mdeihei
for an answer to her growing terror.

The cave was full of memories, much easier of access than they had been before the evening with the nightmare. Overlaid on her perception of the trail as it was now, she saw Bluepeak valley as it would look from Britfell on a clear day toward sunset.

But the season was fall, not summer, and some of the fields below, yellow with wheat, stirred in the south wind. Other fields burned, and the black smoke was carried north, occasionally obscuring the bodies of the slain and the trampled, bloody ground.

High in the surrounding peaks, on scarps and steeples of rock, winged figures watched, frozen with horror, as the frightful dark shape of the Gnorn went tottering about the battlefield, killing with Its look. Scrabbling Fyrd came after It in hungry terror to devour the dead. Behind It, Bluepeak town was burning. And westward on a lone height at Britfell’s far end, two men with drawn swords stood watching the terror with tears running down their faces. A Dragon’s eyes, keener than any hawk’s, could make them out plainly. One man was huge and broad as a bear, with a shaggy mane of fair hair, hazel eyes, and Freelorn’s prominent nose. The other was tall and angular, with dark hair threaded with silver, and kind downturned eyes as blue as Herewiss’s, blue as Fire.

She saw them throw down their swords at practically the same moment, desperately making the Choice; saw them take hands there, while the Gnorn came weaving toward them through the screams and death of Bluepeak; saw them give up what they had been and gaze into one another’s eyes to find out what they could be—

—
and she fell out of that memory and into another one: this time, the memory of some nameless
mdaha
in the ancient time on the Homeworld, one who sat perched on a dark red stone in a violet twilight with another, while the starpool came up over the horizon. The Dragon turned to look into the other’s eyes, which were silver fire set in a hide of turquoise and lapis. The Dragon fell a great depth into those eyes, into a timeless, merciless, fathomless love which held the whole Universe within it as a person awake holds the memory of a dream—

Our line often soared with the Immanence,
she remembered Hasai saying.
One gets used to It.
But no Dragon ever got used to the Other’s regard. The more one looked into that Other’s eyes, the more powerful, and the more unbearable, the experience became.

In a blinding moment of realization, Segnbora understood what she had seen in Hasai’s eyes on the night of unearthed memories. She understood, too, why she always averted her gaze after looking too long into the eyes of another human being—

The agonized joy of the discovery threw her out into the world again, back into whirling snow, ice and darkness. But the cold didn’t matter anymore. Not even her own exhaustion, nor Steelsheen’s panic, bothered her now. All she needed was a moment to put it into words, and the secret would be hers forever…

Ahead of her, hearing Steelsheen’s hooves scrape and clatter on the slippery rock, Lang twisted around in the saddle to look at her. “‘Berend?” he called anxiously through the screaming wind.

Their eyes met.

She
saw
him—saw
Her.
Lang looked no different. His voice still came out in a drawl. She could still underhear his mind lurching back and forth between indecision and placid acceptance. He still hated some things without reason, and loved others unreasonably. He still judged and criticized by provincial standards. He still smelled from not washing enough . . .
yet he was She.
The
One.
And when Segnbora looked ahead at Herewiss or Eftgan, or back at any of the nameless five hundred following behind, or even at their horses, the result was the same.
All of them, everyone who lives. Every one the Goddess—

“
Lang,” she said. It was almost a whisper, for she had little breath to spare in the grip of this painful ecstasy. This was the man to whom she’d too often behaved with casual callousness, refusing intimacy just because she felt like it. Yet there within him the Goddess looked out at her—not judging, as She certainly had the right to do, and not angry, either— simply loving her totally, without hesitation. She had always known that the Goddess indwelt in every man and woman, but
experiencing
it this way, now, was something else again.

Joy, laced with bitterness at her years of disregard of the One she loved, rose until it choked her. Tears spilled over and froze on her face in the icy wind. Her voice wouldn’t work anymore. Knowing it was useless, but driven by an overwhelming need to communicate what was happening to her
somehow,
she bespoke him. (Lang!)

He stared at her in sheer disbelief. “‘Berend?”

He had heard her!

The pain fell away from her joy like a cast-off cloak. Segnbora sobbed, sagging in her saddle, and drew in a long breath. She had a great deal to tell him. (Loved—)

—
and Gyrfalcon missed his footing, going down on his knees on a patch of ice. His hindquarters slipped off the path to the left, and the rest of him followed. Segnbora had a quick glimpse of Lang reaching for the ledge, more surprised than frightened, and that was all.

“
LANG!” she screamed.

Almost before the scream had left her throat, Sunspark had leaped away from the ledge and plunged down into the snow-swirling emptiness like a thunderbolt, streaming fire. The line of riders behind her halted as she, like Freelorn and Eftgan in front of her, peered down into the whiteness, dumb with shock. A long time they waited there for the bloom of fire through the snow. Then, slowly, the brightness came walking up through the air and stood again before the ledge. Herewiss was alone on Sunspark’s back.

(‘Berend,) Herewiss said, and had to pause. She could feel his eyes filling. (He’s… It was quick. I share your grief.)

All behind her, starting with Dritt, Moris, Harald, and the foremost of the Darthene riders, she could feel sorrow and fear spreading like ripples in a pool. She was numb, having fallen from such a height to such a depth so quickly. Yet still she could see Who consoled her as she looked at Herewiss.

(May our sorrow soon pass,) she said silently. A knife turned slowly within her at the memory of the last time she had said those words.

Herewiss broke their gaze. (We’ll come back for him as soon as we can,) he said. Looking thoughtful as well as grieved, he reined Sunspark about and took the path again.

It took two more hours to complete the rest of the ride down. The slope grew gradually less steep, and the ledges a bit wider, but the snow continued. Lang was not the only rider who was lost. Just minutes after his death, one of another horse and rider, of Eftgan’s troop, came plummeting down past Segnbora. The falling rider’s glance locked with Segnbora’s in the second of her passing. Still weeping, Segnbora could do nothing but pour herself into the look, see Who was falling, and aid Her in accepting what was happening. In that second, the woman’s fear-twisted face calmed. Then she was gone.

Segnbora rode on, trembling. She turned a switchback and found herself at the top of a long skirt of scree and rough stones, which lead down to a slope carpeted in snow-covered grass. Glancing at the sky, Segnbora knew the storm wasn’t going to let up. In front of her, Eftgan was checking her saddlebags to make sure the Regalia were safe. Herewiss had drawn Khávrinen and was pointing at the snow. There were prints in it: the big splayed tracks of a horwolf, and a keplian’s pad-and-claw set. Both trails were only minutes old. Both led to the cliff’s foot and away again, westward.