The Door Into Fire (12 page)

Tighter
, he thought. The ring drew inward until it was about a mile across. The men and women within it looked around them and became very uneasy. Herewiss could see the drab greens and blues start to shade down through murky violet as they knew the cloud for something unnatural. There were dark-bright flickers as swords were unsheathed, the brutalized metal living ever so slightly where hands touched it and charged it with disquiet.

Good. Now just a few minutes more—

The last of the sunset light faded from the storm-clouds. Now there were no stars, and no Moon, not even a horizon any more. Fear built in the camps below Herewiss until all the swirling mist was churning dusk-purple in his sight, and people were moving about in increasing agitation.

Good. Now for the real work.

He put forth his will, and shapes began to issue from the wall of cloud. They were vague at first, but as his control and concentration sharpened, so did they, gaining detail and the appearance of reality.

He started small. Fyrd began to slip out of the dark mist, moving down on the besiegers with slow malice. There were great gray-white horwolves snarling softly in their throats, and nadders coiling sinuously down toward the hold, spitting venom and shriveling the grass as they went. There were dark keplian, almost horse-shaped, but clawed and fanged like beasts of prey, and destreth dragging scalded bodies along the ground, and lathfliers beating heavily along on webbed wings, cawing like huge, misshapen battle-crows. Herewiss made sure that his creations were evenly distributed around the army. In a flicker of black humor he added a few beasts that had lurked in his bedroom shadows when he was young, turning them loose to creep down toward the campfires on all those many-jointed legs of theirs.

The temper of the army was shading swiftly darker, the deep purple turning into the black of panic in places. There were still spots, though, where the commanders stood and knew that this was illusion-sorcery. They showed pale against the darkness of their fellows, suspicious green or nervous murky blue as they tried to rally their people.

They’re holding too well. Fyrd are too real, maybe. Legends, then—

A gigantic ravaged figure came tottering through the cloud, a look of ugly rage fixed on his face. It was the Scorning Lover, of whom Arath’s old poem sings. Attracted by his beauty and brilliance, the Goddess had come to him and offered what She always offers, Her self, until the Rival comes to take the Lover’s place. But this young man had had a calculating streak, and as price for sharing himself had asked eternal youth and eternal life. The Bride tried to warn him that not even She could completely defeat Death in this universe, and told him he was foolish to try. He would not listen, and She gave him the gifts he asked and left him, for the Goddess cannot love one who loves life more than Her. And indeed as the centuries passed, the Lover did not die—nor did he grow, frozen as he was in the throes of an eternal adolescence. Time and time again he tried to kill himself, but to no avail; immortality is just that. And over all that time, all thought and hope died in him, leaving him a demon, a terror of waste places, killing all who fell into his hands while bitterly envying their deaths. He stumbled toward the army now, raging with pain from the thousand self-inflicted wounds that can never heal, and never kill him, his clawing hands clutched full of gobbets of his own immortal flesh—

The forces on the eastern side, from which he approached, gave way hurriedly, consolidating with those to the north and south.

Herewiss smiled with grim satisfaction, and out of the cloud to the north summoned the seeming of the Coldwyrm of Arlid-ford, which doomed Béorgan had killed with the help of her husband Ánmod, Freelorn’s ancestor. The thing crawled down the slope, an ugly unwinged caricature of the pure hot beauty of a Dragon. The Wyrm was scaled and plated, but in a thick fishbelly blue-white rather than any Dracon green or gold or red. A smell of cold corruption blew from it, like fetid marshes in the winter, and the ground froze with its stinking slime-ice where it crawled. The Wyrm’s pale blue tongue flickered out, tasting the fear in the air, and the cold black chasms of its eyes dwelt on the huddling troops before it with malice and hungry pleasure.

The commanders were trying hard not to believe in what they saw. But the campfires were too faint to show whether any of the stalking shapes had shadows or not. The army was collecting into a frightened mass of men and women at the southeast side of the keep.

Just a little more pressure,
Herewiss thought,
and they’ll be ready for Sunspark. But first I need something that’ll be sure to panic them all. …Dark, I could—it’s almost blasphemy, and no battle-sorcerer in his right mind would ever try it. That alone makes it worth trying. And, anyway, it
is
for Freelorn’s sake, and I don’t think his Father would mind the use of His seeming—

Herewiss hesitated... then decided.
It’s for love. I just hope Lorn’s watching.

From the south, as might have been expected, pacing slowly out of the cloud, came a great form that cast its own silver-white light about it. It was a Lion, one of the white Arlene breed, longer of mane and tail than the tan Darthene lions which run in prides. But this Lion was twenty times the size of any ordinary one; it towered as tall as the keep. And its eyes held what no earthly lion’s ever had—intelligence, frightening power, towering wrath. It was Héalhra Whitemane, in the shape that He took upon himself at Bluepeak, where the Fyrd were broken and scattered…the Father of the Arlene kings, and one of the two males ever to have use of the Power.

Herewiss halted his other creations where they stood, banished the Fyrd altogether, and poured all his power into making this one illusion as real as it had been in his boyhood dreams. Earn Silverwing should have been there too, the White Eagle companioning the Lion as They had always been together in life. But Herewiss doubted he could handle it and do Them both justice. He poured himself out, and the Lion approached in His majesty, His growl rumbling softly in the air like the thunder waiting in the clouds above. He drew to a halt no more than three or four spearcasts from the tightly clustered army, and looked down at them, towering over them—shining, silvery, His eyes grim and golden—

In the Othersight the army was a black blot of leashed panic, terror with nowhere to run. Now, while they couldn’t move to prevent the damage—

Herewiss gave the sorcery an extra boost, a push of power to keep it alive while he turned his attention away from it. Then he turned to Sunspark, looking at him with the Othersight—

—and was amazed. Sunspark burned beside him, almost intolerable even to his altered vision, blazing as flaming-white as the pain at the bottom of a new wound. Its outline was that of a stallion still, but confined within that outline was the straining heart of a star, an inexpressible conflagration of consuming fires. Now Herewiss began for the first time to understand what an elemental was. This was one note of the song the Goddess sang at the beginning, when She was young and did not know about the great Death. One pure unbearable note of the song, a note to break the brain open through the ears and the burnt eyes—a chained potency looking for a place to happen, a spark of the Sun indeed, whose only purpose was to burn itself out, recklessly, gloriously. One more falling star, one more firebrand flung against the night by the Creatress in Her defiance—

Herewiss slipped warily into Sunspark’s mind, confining himself to the narrow dark bridge that represented his control over it, a sword’s-width of safety arching over unfathomed fires. (Sunspark. Go, take their tents, their wagons, everything, and burn them. I don’t want us being followed.)

(And the men?) Its inward voice was no longer a thing of concepts, but of currents of heat and tangles of light.

(Don’t kill!!)

It resisted him, testing, defying his control, and in his heart Herewiss shuddered. He had not really understood what a terror he had chosen to bind. Its fires ravened around him, barely constrained by its given word. Nothing more than its sense of honor kept him from being consumed, but at the same time it was not above trying to frighten him into releasing it. And it did not understand his scruples at all. (What is death?) it sang, its up-leaping fires dancing and weaving through the timbre of its thought. (Why do you fear? They would come back. So would you. The dance goes on forever, and the fire—)

(Maybe for you. But they have no such assurances, and as for me, you know my reasons. Go do what I told you!)

It laughed at him, mocking his uncertainty, and the flames of its self wreathed up around Herewiss, licking, testing, prying at the cracks in his mind. It was without malice, he realized; it was only trying to make him understand, trying to make him one with it, though that oneness would destroy him. He held his barriers steadfastly, though in some deep part of him there was a touch of longing to be part of that fire, lost in it, burning in nonambivalent brilliance for one bare second before he was no more. The greater part of him, though, respected death too much, and refused the urge.

(Go!) he said again, and withdrew himself. Sunspark gathered itself up, leaped, streamed across the sky like a meteor, a trail of fire crackling behind it and lighting the lowering clouds as if with a sudden disastrous dawn.

The men before the keep, frozen in their silent regard of the Lion, saw Sunspark coming and knew it for something perhaps more real than they were. The few minds still bright with disbelief bent awry and went dark as if blown out by a cold wind. Herewiss, though shaken, turned his thought back to his sorcery, and as Sunspark swept down among the tents of the soldiers, the Lion roared, a sound that seemed to shake the earth clear back to where Herewiss sat.

It was too much. The army broke, scattering this way and that in wild disorder, screaming. Sunspark flitted from place to place in the first camp, the one on the eastern side, leaving explosions of white fire behind it. The flames spread with unnatural speed, leaping from tent to wagon as if of their own volition. Herewiss opened a door in the encircling cloud, parting it to the northward, and people began to flee through it. Sunspark saw this and hurried the process. It dove into the southern camp like a meteor and ignited it all at once into a terrible pillar of flame, driving the stampeding army around the west side of the keep and toward the opening in the cloudwall. They fled, officers and men together, with their screaming horses. Sunspark came behind them, though not too closely, spitting gledes and rockets of fire with joyous abandon.

Herewiss sighed and dissolved his remaining illusions, the Lion last of all. The great white head turned to regard him solemnly for a moment. Herewiss gazed back at it, seeing his own weary satisfaction mirrored in the golden eyes, himself looking at himself through his sorcery; then he withdrew his power from it with a sad smile. The image went out like a blown candle, but Herewiss imagined that those eyes lingered on him for a moment even after they were gone....

He shook his head to clear it. The backlash was getting to him already.

(Sunspark?)

It paused and looked back at him, a tiny intense core of light far down in the field.

(Are they all out?)

(Nearly.)

(Good. Look, the keep door is opening—it’s all fire there, go and part it for Lorn and his people and bring them through.)

(As you say.)

Slowly, hesitantly, six faintly glowing figures rode out of the keep and paused before the flaming eastern camp. The bright blaze that was Sunspark joined them there, and they all headed toward the fire, which ebbed suddenly.

The Othersight departed without warning, in the space of a breath. The sorcery dwindled and died away, the wall of cloud evaporated, emotion dissipating before the wind of relief. Herewiss sagged, feeling empty and drained. The fragile spell-structure swayed and fell and shattered inside him, the bright crystalline fragments littering the floor of his mind, sharp splinters of light hurting the backs of his eyes.
Backlash
… He put his hands behind him and braced himself against the ground, fighting the backlash off. There was one more thing he had to do.

The pain in his head was like hammers on anvils—Herewiss laughed at the thought, and found that it hurt to laugh, so he stopped—but he held himself awake and aware by main force, waiting. It was hard. Presently there were hands on him, helping him up. Herewiss opened his eyes and knew the face that bent over him, even in a night of impending storm and no stars.

“Lorn,” he whispered, reaching out, clinging to him.

“Herewiss. Oh Goddess. Are you all right?” The voice was terrified.

“Yes. No. Get me up, Lorn, I have something to do. When I finish, tie me on Sunspark here—”

“Fine. Up, then, do it, you’ve got to rest.”

“You’re telling me. Where’s Sunspark?”

“The horse, he means. Dritt, give me a hand. Segnbora, help us—”

“Right.” A new voice. Female.
Where did she come from? Oh—the sixth one....
Strong hands stood him up, guided him to Sunspark.

He put out his hands, braced himself against the stallion’s shoulder. “N’stai llan astrev—”, he began, spilling out the simple water-deflecting spell as fast as he. could, for the darkness was reaching up to take him—

He finished it, and sagged back into the supporting arms. “East,” he said, but his voice didn’t seem to be working properly, and he had to push the words out again harder, “—straight east—”