The Door into Shadow (30 page)

Why now? Why now!
Segnbora thought, as Herewiss bent to pick something else out of the whiteness. He came up holding a piece of pale wood, badly warped: It was smoothly rounded at one end, broken off jaggedly at the other. “A Rod,” Herewiss said. “Or it used to be.”

Dritt and Moris had come up and were staring nervously at this spectacle. “I thought the only thing that could break a Rod was the Rodmistress’s death,” Moris said.

Herewiss nodded, using Khávrinen’s point to turn over other oddments tangled in the haphazard white weave: bits of broken jewelry, tatters of what might have been brocade. A bone from a human forearm poked out of the mass, ivory-yellow and scored by toothmarks. It had been cracked for the marrow, and sucked clean.

“
Mare’s nest,” Herewiss sad, turning to the others and glancing at them one after another. “And recent. We’re probably right at the heart of her territory.”

“
Then this is no place for us,” Freelorn said. He turned to go take the hobbles off Blackmane, but Herewiss didn’t follow him. Freelorn looked back over his shoulder, confused.

“
Lorn, it’s sunset,” Herewiss said. “We’d never get past her boundaries before nightfall.”

Freelorn stared at Herewiss as if he had taken leave of his senses. “Loved, that’s a busted Rod there! Fire obviously doesn’t do much good against a nightmare – “

“
There are other defenses,” Herewiss said absently. It was as if he were reading about the problem from a book rather than seeing it in front of him. He looked up at Segnbora. “How about it?”

Segnbora walked around to the other side of the spinney as if to examine where the nest had been, waiting until the tree hid her before she swallowed, hard. Nightmares—minor demonic aspects of the Goddess’s dark side—typically nested in barren places like this. They fell upon travelers, sucked them dry of the spark of Power they possessed, then fed the dead flesh to their fledgling nightfoals. Since they were Shadowbred, Fire was food and drink to them. They could only be killed with one’s bare hands, and only if those hands were a woman’s.

Segnbora walked around to face the others. “It’s getting toward Midsummer,” she said, amazed at how calmly her voice came out. “Her brood will be gone now, and she’ll have eaten the nightstallion—”

Freelorn’s face twisted. “They—
eat
their—”

“
They are the Devourer,” Segnbora said, very low. “That aspect of the Dark One trusts nothing She hasn’t consumed.” She glanced over at Herewiss. “Well, I broke Steelsheen with my bare hands. I think I can manage this.”

Behind Herewiss, Lang’s face was white with shock. She refused to look at him after that first glance. “I’ll make a circle,” Herewiss said. “You’ll have warning. What else will you want?”

Last rites, probably.
“A fire,” she said.

Herewiss smiled slightly. “I think I know where to get some. Sunspark!”

Segnbora walked toward the sudden campfire, wishing there were such a thing as luck, so she could curse it.

***

For once, night came down too suddenly for her taste. Segnbora sat with the others near Sunspark’s blazing self, looking out toward the stony darkness. Here and there, maybe at a hundred yards’ distance, a flicker of Herewiss’s Fire showed blue between the boulders, indicating the ward-circle he had laid down. Firelight danced on the face of the cliff as Segnbora sat near a gnarled little rowan bush and tended to herself in the huge silence, which even the horses, hobbled and tethered inside the circle, didn’t break.

She was running out of things to do in order to get ready, having gone through all the small personal bindings that a sorcerer would perform to further the larger binding she intended. Her swordbelt’s hanging end was tucked in. Her hair, too short to braid, she had tied with a thong into a stubby tail and bound close to her head. Her sleeves were rolled up. The buckles on her boots and her mailshirt were tight. Segnbora would have tied Skádhwë into its sheath, but it had no peace-strings such as Charriselm had had, and all her attempts to bind the shadowblade with cord had been useless; it cut them all. Finally she’d just taken Skádhwë out of the scabbard and stuck it into a handy rock.

Now she thought of one more binding to add. Rummaging around in her belt-pouch for a bit of thread, she bound it around her left thumb nine times: the soul-cord that would keep her soul within her body until a pyre’s blaze freed it. She tied the ninefold knot, and glanced up as she bit it off. Freelorn was holding a cup for her. It was of light wood, with a design of leaves carved around it below the lip. She recognized it: his and Herewiss’s lovers’-cup.

“
Hot wine,” Lorn said, sitting down with his back against a nearby boulder. Warmed by the gesture, she took it and drank, hoping the shaking of her hands wouldn’t show too much.

“
It shows. Forget it,” Herewiss said, sitting down beside Freelorn.

She extended the cup to him, leaning back against the knobby little rowan as Herewiss drank in turn. Afterward, he poured some wine into the fire, which had acquired eyes, and then passed the cup back to Freelorn.

Lorn leaned back against the boulder, and Herewiss leaned back too, resting his head against Lorn’s chest. “You
sure
there’s nothing you can do?” Freelorn said, sounding sorrowful.

Herewiss glanced up at him. “Swords don’t bite on nightmares, loved. I’m sorry.”

Freelorn nodded, still looking uneasy. “This business of the Lady’s ‘dark side,’” he said, “I’ve never really understood how She can
have
a dark side…”

“
It is this way,” Segnbora started, mostly out of reflex, and then stopped herself. Embarrassed, she took the cup back and drank again.

“
No, go ahead,” Herewiss said, with a wry look. “If you’re going to become something’s dinner tonight, we might as well get one more story out of you. Tell it as they tell it at Nháiredi. I’ve never heard their version.”

She sighed, suddenly amused by the surroundings – no cozy inn or palace hall, but the huge and empty night of waste country; and here she sat playing to an audience of kings-by-courtesy, part-time princes, and outlaws
. And you too,
she thought, as from down in the darkness within her an interested rumbling floated up – the
mdeihei
, eager to hear a memory, even a made-up one.

“
It’s this way,” she said. “Because the Goddess bound Herself at the Making into everything She had made, the great Death became bound into Her too, and She into It. Though She’d brought It life, the Shadow still hated Her and did Her all the harm It could, causing each of Her fair aspects to cast a dark shadow of its own. Therefore the Devourer exists, and the One with Still Hands…” She shivered. “…and the Pale Winnower. Their Power is terrible, and the Goddess cannot banish them; in this Making, They are part of Her.

“
But in the south of Steldin, people explain our Lady’s dark side differently. They tell how, on the plain north of Mincar, there lived an austringer and her wife. The austringer was a placid woman, easily pleased and as calm as one of her hawks after a feeding. The austringer’s wife, on the other hand, was never content with anything, and sharpened her tongue continually on her spouse.

“
There came a day when the austringer took a good catch of pheasant and barwing. The next morning she set out for Mincar market to sell the game.

“
Now, on her way to the market square, as she passed through the wealthy part of town, the austringer saw a sight stranger and more lovely than any she had ever seen. Tied to a reining-post was a great, tall silver-white steed, shining in the morning. When she drew near to it, it turned its head to gaze at her with eyes as dark as the missing half of the Moon. It was tethered with a bridle of woven silver.

“
She recognized it then. It was one of the Moonsteeds, aspects of the Maiden that mirror the Moon in its changes, and which cannot be caught by any means except with a bridle that is wrought of noon-forged silver in such a fashion as to have no beginning and no end. Some lord or lady had caused the bridle to be made, and had managed to catch the Steed. And as the austringer stood there and pitied the poor creature, free from time’s beginning and now bound, it lowered its head and said to her, ‘Free me, and I’ll do you a good turn when I may.’

“
So she cut the bridle with her knife, and the Moonsteed reared and pawed the air and said, ‘If you want for anything, go out into the fields and call me, and I will be with you.’ And it vanished.

“
The austringer thought it well to vanish from the area herself. She went to market and sold her birds, and then went home in a hurry in order to tell her wife what she had seen. That was a mistake. ‘Surely,’ her wife said, ‘the Steed will grant you anything you want. Go out and ask it to make us rich.’

“
She nagged the austringer unmercifully until at last she gave in and went out into the night, under the first-quarter Moon, to call the Steed. It came, saying ‘What can I do for you?’

“‘
My wife wants to be rich. Wants
us
to be rich, rather,’ said the austringer.

“‘
The first was closer to the truth, I think,’ the Steed said, ‘but go home, it has happened already.’ And the austringer went home to find her wife happily running her fingers through bags of Moon-white silver, chuckling to herself about the fine robes and elegant food she would soon have in place of her brown homespun and coarse bread.

“
For about a week things went well. But folk nearby began to ask questions, and then the tax collectors arrived, leaving with more silver than pleased the austringer’s wife. ‘This isn’t working,’ she said to the austringer. ‘Go ask the Steed to make
me
the tax collector. And I want a house befitting my station.’

“‘
No one will talk to us any more!’ the austringer said. But her wife gave her no peace, and sent her off to the fields at nightfall.

“
The austringer called the Moonsteed, and there it came in a white blaze of light, for the Moon was near to full. ‘What can I do for you?’ it asked. ‘Though I have a feeling I know.’

“‘
My wife wants to be a tax collector, and have a tax collector’s fine house,’ the austringer said.

“‘
Go home, it’s done,’ said the Steed. And the austringer went home and found their thatched cottage changed to a tall house of rr’Harich marble; and her wife was twenty times as rich as she had been before.

“
After that things went as you might imagine. A week later the austringer’s wife wanted to be mayor, and so she was. Afterward she became bailiff, and Dame, and Head of House, one after another. Her house became golden-pillared and roofed with crystal, filled with rich stuffs and things out of legend—feather-hames and charmed weapons and even the silver chair that later belonged to the Cat of Aes Aradh—but none of it gave her joy for more than a day. Each night she sent the austringer out to ask for another boon, and the austringer grew sad and pale, seeing that her wife loved her possessions more than she loved
her.

“
And as the days passed the aspect of the Moonsteed grew darker, for the old Moon was waning. White-silver the Steed had been at first, like moonlight on snow. Now it waxed darker each night, and frightened the austringer.

“
The boons grew greater and greater. Head of the Ten High Houses, the austringer’s wife became; then Chief of them, then High Minister, then Priestess-Consort. And still she wanted more.

“
Finally the night came of the dark of the Moon—”

Segnbora broke off for a moment, fumbling for the wine cup. Her mouth had gone suddenly dry. It was only three nights from Moondark now, that time when a nightmare would be strongest.

“—
the dark of the Moon, and the austringer went out to the fields to call on the Moonsteed for the last time. It came, burning with awful dark splendor and wrath, and said in its gentle voice, ‘What is it now? Your wife has asked, and I have granted, even to the last times when she asked to be Queen of Steldin, and then High Queen of all the Kingdoms. What more might she want?’

“
The austringer trembled, and said, ‘She wants to rule the Universe.’”

Segnbora lifted the cup again and finished the wine.

There was silence. Freelorn glanced down expectantly at Herewiss, whose eyes were turned away, then back at Segnbora. “So?”

“
So She
does.”
She handed back the empty cup. “Now you tell one.”

Behind them, Blackmane screamed. Herewiss jerked upright as if he had been kicked. All around the camp heads turned out toward the darkness.

The nightmare stood for a moment among the boulders that had fallen from the cliff, and then stepped forward delicately. It was small, no bigger than a seven-months’ filly. Its silken mane and tail hung to the ground. Slim-legged and clean of line, seemed at first as elegant and graceful as a unicorn. But Its eyes were evil, red and bottomless, full of old cruelties and insatiable hunger. From a coat the color of the rolled-up whites of a dead man’s eyes, the nightmare cast a faint yellowish corpse-light that illuminated nothing.

Segnbora got up, dry-mouthed again. She took a few steps forward and folded her arms, staring into those ancient, burning eyes.
It’s just like Nhàirëdi, with that demon they caught. No different. Hold the eyes—

“
Be thou warned,” Segnbora said in the formal manner reserved for the laying of dooms, “that I am well informed of thee and thy ways, of thy comings and goings, thy wreakings and undoings; and that my intent is to bind thee utterly to my will, and confine thee to the dark from which thou cam’st at the birth of days. So unless thou wish to try thy strength with me, and be compelled by the binding I shall work upon thee, then get thee hence and have no more to do with me and mine.”