The Door into Shadow (31 page)

She held very still. The nightmare now had the option to retreat. It could also answer ritually, or could attack –

“
How should I fear
you?”
the nightmare said, sweetly taunting – and its voice was that of Segnbora’s slain otherself, not piteous as during those last moments in Glasscastle, but mocking and cruel. “Rodmistresses in the full of their Power have tried conclusions with me, and you see what happened to
them.
Fear
you?—
not even focused, and retired from sorcery lest you fail at that too?” It laughed, a sound like bells and poison.

“
Be still!” Segnbora said in a voice like a whipcrack. But no power was behind the order, and the nightmare laughed at her, a sound ugly with knowledge.

“
You make a fine noise,” it said, flicking its tail insolently. “But all your years’ studies have left you with nothing but knowledge. Spells and tales and sayings – but no Power. Or Power enough – if you dared to use it. Which you don’t!”

She clenched her fists and took a step forward, then stopped, desperately seeking control. (Hasai—!)

“
Oh, by all means call up your ghost,” the nightmare said, stepping forward too, and laughing with the cold merriment of a damned thing. “You don’t dare accept what he has to offer, either. There you are, walking on water, complaining that there’s nothing to drink! And you can’t even make use of what little power you do have. Battles and wars and wreakings pass over you, the earth moves, Glasscastle falls about your ears, and none of it is enough to free you. You’re
dead!”

Behind her Segnbora could feel Freelorn wanting to move, and Herewiss holding him still with that same vise-grip in which he had held her at Barachael. The others were frozen, eyes glittering, muscles bound still. Even Sunspark’s flames flowed more slowly than usual. “What a heroine you are,” said the scornful voice. “And dead past all denying. Life gives life.
You
devour as surely as I do! Just look at your slug of a leman there.”

The malicious black eyes dwelt on Lang with vast amusement. “He no more dares open himself to you than you do to him. He knows what Eftgan knew: that what you call ‘love’ is nothing but shrieking need. He knows that if he once let down his guard, you’d eat him down to the bones like a starving beggar at a banquet and come away unsatisfied, moaning for more.” The nightmare chuckled, the red eyes burning with amusement. “And any hopes he might have of
you
are vain, for you haven’t opened up to another human being since you were big enough to be stumbled over out in back of the chicken house. Everything that comes out of your mouth is storytelling—everyone’s story but your own. You don’t trust anybody. You don’t trust yourself. And especially you don’t trust yourself with
that
—what feels like the Fire, and isn’t—”

Humiliation and rage seared through her. Segnbora took another slow step forward, hanging onto the words of the ritual for dear life and not daring to look at Lang. “I may warn thee again: get hence, lest I lay such strictures about thee that from age to age shalt thou lie bound in the never-lightened gulfs—”

“
Oh, say the words of the sorcery, for all the good they’ll do,” the nightmare said, baring her yellow teeth in scorn. “As if
you
of all people could control another aspect of the Devourer! You can’t even manage what lies under the stone at the bottom of your self, festering at the bottom of all your ‘loves’, hating the one who plundered you, taking revenge on anyone else who tries to get in. Freelorn there, he found out what happens to someone who gets closer to you than a sword’s length. There are sharper things to stab a heart with than knives. Why, you even ran across yourself, and didn’t speak six sentences to her before you killed yourself. Pity it didn’t take. There would have been celebrations.” It grinned. “No matter. Shortly there
will
be—”

Segnbora leaped at the nightmare head-on, grabbing great handfuls of its mane and trying to hold its head away from her. The nightmare plunged and reared, and after a second fastened its teeth into Segnbora’s mailshirt, cracking the links like dry twigs and driving them excruciatingly through padding and breastband, into the breast beneath. It shook her viciously from side to side, as a dog shakes a rat.

With every jerk of its head Segnbora cried out in pain, yet she managed to hold on for some seconds—then let go her right hand’s hold in the mane and grabbed the nightmare’s nose instead, digging her thumbnail deep into the nostril. Now it was the nightmare’s turn to scream: once as she let Segnbora fall, and once again as its backward plunge tore out a great handful of its silken mane.

Segnbora scrambled to her feet, tearing with the pain, doing her best to concentrate on twisting the long hank of mane into a rough cord between her hands. “Are you—so sure?” she gasped as she and the nightmare began to circle one another. “Foolish—letting me get so close. I know how to bind you, child of our Mother. And know how to make an end of you, Power or not. Shortly you’re going to be seeing more of the dark places than you’ll like—”

She sprang again, this time for the nightmare’s flank. It danced hurriedly to one side, but with the second leap Segnbora got astride the nightmare’s back. The nightmare bucked and kicked and reared, leaping in the air and coming down with all four feet together, as a horse does to kill a snake. But Segnbora hung on, legs locked, hands twined in the long mane.

She got one hand down over the nightmare’s nose again, and dug her nails once more into the nostrils. The nightmare screamed, and as it did Segnbora whipped the corded length of mane down and into its mouth. Quickly she brought the ends under its chin and up around its muzzle, and knotted them tight, binding its mouth closed.

The nightmare made a horrendous strangled sound that wanted to be a scream; then turned and raced headlong toward the jagged face of the cliff, intending to buck Segnbora off against the stone. The onlookers scattered out of the way, and Segnbora jumped from its back, rolled, and was on her feet again before the nightmare had time to realize what had happened. Turning to face her again, it reared, menacing her with its hooves. Segnbora ducked to one side and fastened her hands in its mane, pulling. The nightmare grunted and, as she’d hoped it would, jerked away. Too late: Segnbora fell down on the ground again, once again with her hands full of mane.

The nightmare turned and reared. By the time its hooves hit ground, Segnbora had rolled out from under them, and was afoot once more. Her breath came hard, and beneath her mail-shirt the blood was running down her side from a breast bleeding freely and white-hot with pain. But her fear was gone. Nothing was left but wild anger, and the urge to destroy. “I told you,” she said, winding the length of mane between her fists like a garrote. “First the binding—”

The nightmare turned to flee. As it turned tail Segnbora vaulted up over its rump and onto its back, locking her legs tight around it again. Frenzied, the nightmare bucked wildly, but it was no use. This time the cord went around its throat and was pulled mercilessly tight. It plunged and slewed from side to side and tossed its head violently, trying to breathe.

Segnbora hung on, and twisted the cord tighter. The nightmare began to stagger, its eyes bulging out in anguish. Its forelegs gave way next, so that it knelt choking and swollen-tongued on the ground. Segnbora held her seat even at that crazy angle, and pulled the cord tighter still. Finally the rear legs gave, and the nightmare fell on its side. Segnbora slipped free, never easing her stranglehold. The nightmare moved feebly a few times, then lay still.

Holding that cord tight became the whole world, more important even than the agony of Segnbora’s torn breast or the hot blurring of her eyes. She blinked and gasped and hung on as Herewiss and Freelorn and the others ran up and knelt around her.

Lang reached out to her, but Herewiss stopped the gesture. “Is it dead?”

“
I don’t know. Probably not.” She could still feel a pulse thrumming feebly through the cord.

“
Are you all right?” That was Lang.

“
No. Let me be.” The nightmare’s pulse was irregular now, leaping and struggling in its throat like a bird in a snare.
How can they look at me?
Segnbora thought.
It’s all true. How can they bear
to—

One last convulsive flutter ran through the nightmare’s veins. Then there was stillness under her hands.

Slowly and carefully Segnbora stood up, shrinking away from any hand that tried to help her. The pain in her breast was intense, yet she barely felt it through the pain that hurt worse.
Torn again.
Torn like – no!
Tauëh-stá ‘ae mnek-kej,
I don’t want to remember—

She turned and walked away into the darkness beyond the firelight. Her companions stared after her. Their eyes on her retreating back were as unbearable as sun on blistered skin, but still she ignored them.

(A nightmare has no weapon to use but your own darkness.) Herewiss said in her mind, his thought passionless as a leech’s knife. (Resist, and it only cuts deeper.)

She kept walking.

(One night, ‘Berend,) he said. (One night’s pain is all we can spare you. We’ve lost too much time already. Be finished by dawn, or we won’t wait.)

Segnbora shut him out and went off into the bitter night, looking for an end.

***

“
Well,” the Goddess said, “your heart didn’t heal straight the last time it broke. So we’ll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.”

Children’s Tales of North Arlen,
ed. s’Lange

How long she walked, she had no idea. The stony valley all looked the same. Eventually, she simply sat down and began to weep for life wasted.

At some point the rocky night turned into the night that lay inside her, with stars showing through the great shaft in the roof of her cavern, and the much-muted song of the
mdeihei
rumbling in the shadows. She didn’t care about them in the slightest, or about the starlight, or the sound of the Sea, or the huge obscure shape of Hasai towering over her in the darkness. She sat hunched up and waited for life to go away.

It wouldn’t, annoyance that it was. A solution occurred to her, but she had no energy for it. And anyway, everything she’d ever done, she’d botched—surely she’d only botch a suicide, too. A life of study without use, learning without wisdom, action without satisfaction, Power without focus, lust without love: what use was any of it? She sat there and tried to bleed to death through the wound above her heart.

“
Death is some days ahead of you yet,” said the subdued voice of the Dragon above her, using the precognitive tense.

Annoyed, she leaned gingerly back against the great forelimb, trying not to disturb the blood clotting on her breast, and closed her eyes, squeezing out useless hot tears. “Drop dead,” she said.

“
We have done so.”

“
Try it again. You missed something the first time.”

“
Speak for yourself,
sdaha,”
the voice of thunder said, its own annoyance and discomfort quite audible.

Tonight, as occasionally happened, she didn’t have to look up at Hasai in order to see him. His eyes burned silver, but they burned low. His talons clenched the stone floor in a painful gesture that made her remember the cave at the Morrowfane.

“
I sorrow for your pain,” he said. “But that thing spoke some truth, and you know it. You will not permit us to have what we need, so that we, in turn, may give you what
you
need. You believe you must do everything yourself. But such perfect self-sufficiency is impossible.”

She shook her head, confused, thinking of what her father used to tell her:
You’ll never be able to depend on others, if you can’t first depend on yourself—

Hasai winced at her in Dracon disagreement. “You cannot depend on yourself if you cannot first trust others.”

The words made no sense. Hasai gazed down without moving for a long while, and at last shuffled one huge forelimb back and forth along the floor.
“We are you,”
he said with terrible intensity. “If you cannot trust us, your trust of yourself will be betrayed every time.”

It was no use. It made no sense.

“
Sdaha,” Hasai said, so low it could have passed for a whisper. “What lies beneath your stone that you dare not lay open? What frightens and pains you so that the Shadow would resurrect the memory in the hope you would die of it?”

That
got her attention.
Lorn was right,
she thought.
For some reason It genuinely sees me as a threat
.
If that means I truly have a chance to do It some harm, however small, at Bluepeak
—

She leaned sideways and put one hand down upon the smoothed-over stone at the bottom of her mind. It burned hot as flesh beneath a half-healed wound, warning her off. Her insides flinched at the touch of it, and she began to tremble. Under there—

Pain. And the alternative.

Pain, experienced, would stop hurting, she knew. Paradoxical as it seemed, the
mdeihei
had taught her the truth of that
. But will it be so with this pain? Or is the Shadow right to think it will kill me?

She leaned there, shaking.
Yet what if It’s wrong?
…And there was yet another reason to look under the stone, for if she shied away from this weak spot now, the vulnerability would become deeper still. The Shadow would strike her there again, almost certainly at Bluepeak, when Lorn needed her service the most. She would fail, and fall, perhaps taking her friends with her. Her liege-oath would be broken; the Kingdoms could founder for lack of the enactment of the Royal Bindings, and it would all be down to her.

It’s not fair!
She smashed one fist down on the stone.
Damn! Damn!
Why
me?
Tauëh-stá ‘ae mnek-kej!