Eleven

“Choose,” She said to the cruel king. “For I am bound by My own law, and what you desire shall be given you, until you shall ask Me for something beyond My power to grant.”

He told her his desires, and she granted them all—until at last, alone, desolate King of an empty city, he cried out to Her in anguish, “Change my heart!”

“I shall leave you now,” the Goddess said, “for you have asked a boon past My power. Only one has the power to fulfill that wish ... and you are doing so.”

from “The King Who Caught the Goddess,” in Tales of old Steidin, ed. s’Lange,n-’Viirendir, 1055 p.a.d.

 

Segnbora was wide awake. She swung her feet off the pallet and stood up with Skadhwe in her hand. The room around her was foggy and hard to see—Herewiss’s spellweb had already slowed her time sense considerably. Dust and convection currents moved around her at what seemed many times their normal speed. Her othersenses were wide awake too, and showed her strange blurs going swiftly about the room: one yellow-bright as fire, one dark with an odd tangle of potential at its heart: Sunspark and Freelorn.

Herewiss still lay in his body, the blue-white core that was his soul struggling yet with the shell that surrounded it. Tense with the sensation of his difficulty, Segnbora turned away from him to gaze down at herself where she lay on her pallet.

(Mdaha?) she said. No answer came back; evidently the mdeihei were tied to her body, and must stay there, silenced, when she left it.

Sorrowful and nostalgic, she looked down at her still form, drowned in a repose deeper than any sleep. It had been a long time since the Precincts, when she had last been out-of-body and able to see herself so clearly. A lot had changed since then. There was a wincing fierceness about the corners of the eyes now that hadn’t been there when she was younger. There was also a tension in her posture, as if her body was prepared to move in a hurry. Too much time alone, she thought, with the curious soulwalker’s objectivity. Too much time on the run.

(It’s not that bad,) Herewiss said from behind her. She turned, and in sheer appreciation didn’t move or speak for a few thoughts’ time.

In general, Herewiss still looked like his body. He was still lean and tall, wearing the no-nonsense musculature of a smith: hands both powerful and delicate; a fine-featured face made handsome by sleepy, gentle eyes. But in his wreaking form shone a child’s innocent joy in life. Fire, with its incredible potential for creation and destruction, blazed in him like the Sun held captive in a crystal. He was dangerous, and utterly magnificent.

(Well met,) she said, and meant it.

(You speak for me too,) Herewiss said.

Segnbora realized how oddly he was looking at her, and wondered what he saw.

(We’re short of time,) he said. (But for the moment, look at that!)

He pointed at something behind her. Segnbora looked over her shoulder, away from the quick-flickering light of the Fire-web. Laid out along the floor, long and dark behind her, was her shadow.

(That’s impossible!) she said in momentary indignation, turning to see it better. (You can’t have a shadow out of the body!) Yet there the darkness lay, stretching to the wall and right through it, blandly contradicting what had been taught to her in the Precincts. Experimentally Segnbora raised an arm, and was dumbfounded to see the serrated shape of a Dragon’s wing lift away from the shadow-body.

Behind her she felt Herewiss restraining his laughter.

(My mdaha is truly becoming part of me,) she said, amused in spite of herself.

(Where is he? I thought he’d be here with us.)

(So did I. He’s with my body, it looks like.)

Herewiss felt dubious for a moment. (How are you going to tell me what’s happening in the stone, then? If he’s not here—)

She started to lean on Skadhwe, then aborted the gesture as the sword’s point began to pierce the stone they stood on.

(Well, I have my memories of what it’s like to be one of the mdeihei. All I have to do is live in them completely enough and we’ll be fine.) She wished she was as certain of that as she made it sound. (Now, where do we have to go?)

Herewiss nodded at the room’s north wall, laying Khavrinen over his shoulder. Segnbora did the same with Skadhwe, and together they walked through the wall and into the clear air over Barachael. The stars wheeled visibly in the paling sky above them, moving a little faster each moment as Herewiss’s wreaking further slowed their time sense.

(How about that, it works,) Herewiss said, pausing. (A moment. Lorn?)

The answer came not in words, but in swift-passing impression of concern, relief, encouragement. All was well in the tower, though Freelorn wondered why Herewiss had waited so long to check in with him. Hours had passed.

(We’re all right, loved,) Herewiss said. (The pauses may get pretty long, but don’t worry about us unless the web fails.) He broke contact and walked down the air toward Barachael valley. Segnbora followed.

Their othersight was stimulated by the wreaking, and the Chaelonde valley bubbled like a cauldron with normally unseen influences. The Reavers’ emotions were clearly visible, a stew of frustrated violence and fear. Barachael town crouched cold and desolate behind the invaders. As the low threshold of her underhearing dropped lower still, Segnbora heard the slow bitter dirge of the town’s bereaved stones, which were certain that once more the children of their masons had been slaughtered. The other lives of the valley, birds and beasts, showed themselves only as cautious sparks of life, aware of an ingathering of Power and lying low in order not to attract attention.

The sky to the east went paler by the moment. The Moon slid down the sky and faded in the face of day, looking almost glad to do it. While they watched, the Sun leapt into the sky too quickly, as if it wanted to put distance between itself and the ground.

The ground was a problem. Dark negative energies seethed within it the way thoughts of revenge seethe within an angry mind. Though the faults weren’t yet very clear, it was plain that these negative energies ran down most of them, draining toward the foundations of the valley, where they collected in a great pool of ancient, festering hatred.

(We have to get into empathy with that!) Segnbora said, revolted.

(I’d sooner sit in a swamp, myself,) Herewiss said, and he strode down the air toward the reeking morass. (Still, the sooner we do it, the sooner we can get out and get clean again. Come on, down here ... )

He led the way around toward the base of the easternmost spur of Adine. There one of the vertical faults followed the spur’s contour, a remnant of a day long before when the earth had shrugged that particular jagged block of stone above the surface. The fetid swirling of emotion in the valley broke against the spur as a wave breaks, flowing around it and up the pass. Herewiss stepped carefully down onto a high ridge of the spur and waited there for Segnbora. She arrived shortly after him, and they both paused to watch the way the shadows in the valley shrank and changed. The few moments’ walk down from Sai khas-Barachael had begun at sunrise, and now it was nearly noon.

(Now what?)

Herewiss lifted Khavrinen. Fire ran down from it and surrounded him until he blazed like someone drenched with oil and set alight. (In,) he said, and glanced down at the ridge he stood on.

Without further ado he stepped down into the earth as if walking down stairs.

(Show-off,) Segnbora thought affectionately. She walked down the outer surface of the ridge, seeking the way into the mountain that would best suit her. Turning, she saw her incongruous shadow against the ridgewall behind her. Reaching behind her with both hands, she grasped it and pulled it forward about her shoulders like a cloak, becoming what she couldn’t be.

It was astonishingly easy. There was fire in her throat again, and she had wings to feel the air, one of which was barbed not with a claw of white diamond but with a sliver of night made solid. She dug her talons into the naked stone. Without moving, Segnbora knew what lay beneath her. The deep, slow, scarce-moving selfness of the rock, the secret burning at the roofs, the earth’s heavy veins running with the mountain’s blood ... they were her veins, her blood, her life.

It was hard to think, immersed in the ancient nonconscious musings of stone. The transience of thought, or any concern for the insignificant doings of the ephemerals at the outer edge of Being, seemed pointless.

Internal affairs were much more important. Leisurely, the conflict between the black flowing fires of the Inside, and the cold nothing of the Outside, was played out upon the board of the world. The player Outside blanketed the board close, wearing away its opponent with wind and rain; grinding it down with glaciers; cracking its coastlines with the pressure of the hungry seas. The Inside raised up lands and threw them down; tore continents apart; broke the seabottoms and made new ones; hunched up fanged mountain ranges to bite at the wind, and be bitten in return.

This particular range had hardly been in the game long enough to prove its worth as a move. Understandably, the huge nonconsciousness wondered idly—as the Sun went down again—why this area was suddenly such a cause for concern ...

Segnbora breathed stone deeply and strove to remember herself. There was something lulling for a Dragon in this perception of stone, as there was for humans in the presence of the Sea: It was both the call of an ancient birthplace and the restful comfort of the last Shore.

(Herewiss?) she said, singing a chord of quandary around his name.

(Here,) his answer came back, darkness answering darkness.

She couldn’t feel him except indirectly. He had chosen to leave his physical imagery behind for the time being, and was manifesting himself only as a mobile but greatly restrained stress in the stone, staying quite still until he got his bearings. Khavrinen was evident too, seeming like the potential energy which that stress would release when it moved.

(I feel you. Aren’t you coming in?)

(I am in,) she sang, delighted by the truth of it. (I’m outside, too. Both at once. I can feel you inside me; you’re like a muscle strain. And I can feel the other side of the world from here. What do you feel?)

(Granite, mostly. Marble. Iron—that’s the mines.) He paused to feel around. (They haven’t come near the great lodes, even after centuries of work. I’ll have to tell Eftgan where the good metal is ...) He trailed off, sounding uneasy.

Segnbora felt what Herewiss felt and found everything much as it had been when Hasai had done the first survey; but the assessment didn’t satisfy her. (I need more precision. I’m going to narrow down a good deal and make this perception clearer. Will the valley and ten miles on all sides be sufficient?)

(Those were the boundaries that Hasai was using. Yes.)

She felt closely into the valley floor itself for ten or twelve miles down, absorbing and including into herself the sensations of pressures and unreleased strains, strata trying to shear upward or sink down.

Whole mountains she embraced as if with encircling wings: Aulys, Houndstooth, Eisargir and Adine, then east to Whitestack, Esa and Mirit, south to Ela and Fyfel, west to Mesthyn, Teleist and the Orakhmene range. They were a restless armful. Rooted they might be, but they were alive as trees—shifting, trembling, pushing.

The whole Highpeak region, far into the unnamed south, was shivering, about to bolt like a nervous horse. The cause of its nervousness was at the heart of her perception. With ruthless diligence she absorbed it all, missing no detail: the vertical faults lying stitched across the valley in a row, south to north, angry and frightened. The treacherous lateral fault, its line running from the pass between Adine and Eisargir into the valley, through Barachael and out the narrow gate to lower land. And under it all, the old dark sink of negative energies.

(I see it,) Herewiss said, his thought thick with revulsion. She caught a quick taste of his perception. It was rather different from hers, and primarily concerned with the Shadow’s influence. He felt it everywhere, particularly in the lateral fault, where the accumulated hatred made it appear to crouch and glare like a cornered rat. It knew who he was, what he had come for, and the whole valley trembled with its malice.

Segnbora trembled too, revolted and suddenly afraid. They were fools to try to tamper with this dynamism, so delicately balanced that a talon’s weight applied to the wrong spot might bring down mountains. The Dweller-at-the-Howe had been wise to forbid the Dragons from delving here. Worse, she could feel the murky sink of hatred swell, growing aware of their presence.

(Herewiss!) she said. He didn’t answer, and she began to grow angry, the Fire burning hotter in her throat. He was so damn sure of himself! (Herewiss!)

(What do you want?) he snapped.

Her othersenses told her that he was as angry as she was, and the knowledge enraged her further.

(Don’t meddle!) he said. (I’m in the middle of a wreaking, and if you distract me—)

Typically, he was paying no attention to her; he was sunk in his own concerns. (Your wreaking has barely begun. I’m not distracting and you know it. Listen, I’m Precinct-trained, and—)

(They don’t know everything in the Precincts,) he said, bitter and superior. There was a touch of jealousy in his mind, too, which caused her to start. Jealousy ... didn’t that mean something specific in this situation?

She brushed away the irrelevant thought—doubtless it was the maundering of some mdaha long dead and out of touch with life. Herewiss had slighted her, and her patience was wearing thin.

(Do you want my aid or not?) she demanded.

(Not particularly, no! I have more than enough Power to handle this business myself, and you know it! I thought you might have appreciated the kindness I was doing you by letting you come along on a wreaking, but I see it was wasted.) He was a stress in the darkness, one close to release, spiteful and certain of his own utter potency. The burning began to swell in her throat, and sweet it was to let the passions rise. She had been patient long enough.

The forefingers of her wings—the terrible black diamond razors that could tear even Dragonmail—cocked forward and down at him. (Little man,) she said, (it’s time you found out what you have been toying with!)

Slowly she bent down, waiting for him to attack, her. She savored, the moments, wondering how she would finish him. A quick slash? A forepaw brought smashing down? A breath of her fire? But he wasn’t physical now. He dwelt in the stone as she did, and the stress he wore as form began to warp and change. He was lifting up Khavrinen to kill her.

Let him try, the fool! she thought.

The mdaha who had spoken before now cried out again ... something unintelligible about not seeing, about a presence creeping up from behind, about an ambush ... Segnbora snarled at the interruption, a sound that woke rumblings in the stone. She arched herself upward to come crashing down on the pitiful little weapon raised against her—

—and then she understood, she saw. As she watched in horror, the darkness in the stone drew together to one spot. At the lateral fault it stood, staring at her. Dracon though she was—immense, terrible—she abandoned her pounce and crouched down like a bird under a serpent’s eye.

The Shadow smiled at her, baleful, and waited.

Herewiss didn’t waste his opportunity. Swollen with rage, he towered over her in the stone with Khavrinen upraised, ready to destroy her. (Come on!) he cried in an ecstasy of fury. (Stop me, if you’re such a power! Try to stop me!)

Segnbora didn’t answer. It was impossible to look away from the one Whose essence lay concentrated in the fault, waiting for Herewiss to strike and bring the valley down around their ears.

Herewiss’s rage didn’t diminish. He merely lowered Khavrinen a bit to savor her fear, to prolong the sweet conflict—and in that moment abruptly felt what she did. Immediately his tone changed. (Beware! We have company!)

It flowed out into the stone again, surrounding him, unwilling to give up such a splendid tool. Segnbora felt Herewiss founder and go down, and couldn’t stir so much as a thought to help him. The Shadow was after her too, flowing into the dark, places in, her soul that had belonged to It since she was very small. Relentlessly, It inflamed them all: her anger at a life that, didn’t go exactly as she wished; her old feelings of impotence and insignificance ...

She fought, back. If she let It, it would enter her and cause her to trigger the fault, which in turn would bury the valley, killing her friends and enemies alike. That couldn’t be allowed. Desperately, she thought of Lang, of Eftgan—lovers who had taught her laughter. She pictured Freelorn, beautiful Freelorn, who demanded so much and gave so much in return ... She wasn’t alone!

The realization was dangerous. Her opponent changed its tactics from persuasion to direct attack: a blast of hatred and pain that would have killed her in a second had she been in her own body. Fortunately, she was not. She pulled her Dracon-self closer about her, wearing it like mail. Hatred, even the vast hatred of an embittered God, meant little to a Dragon who had experienced the Immanence from the inside, with all its joys and rages regarding all things mortal and divine.

And as for the pain, Segnbora simply opened herself to it as a Dragon would. She spread her wings wide and took it all, drank it like Sunfire, made it hers as she had made the stone and the mountains hers. She was not its tool.

(Herewiss!)

A tide of blackness was almost all she could perceive of Its attack against him. Within it, however, she saw something moving—a disembodied force, the essence of Khavrinen and the Power it focused, slashing the dark into ribbons. Always the Shadow resealed Itself, but always the fierce blueness pushed It aside again, widening the breach for the man who fought his way upward out of the Shadow’s heart.

I’m Hers, not Yours! he gasped, forcing the darkness aside and pushing himself higher into the stone. And even for Her, I’m not a thing to be used! (’Berend?)

(Here!)

With terrible abruptness, both attacks ceased. Segnbora reeled.

(Pull yourself together!) Herewiss shouted at her instantly. (It can’t get us to trigger the fault, but It’ll be glad to do that Itself!)

So It was doing. Segnbora could see all Its power, all Its hate, flowing back into the lateral fault—concentrating, burning, stinging the stone into the beginnings of movement. A low rumble spread through the strata. There was one spot in particular, a thousand feet or so south of Barachael, that was almost ready to fracture. In a matter of seconds its stone would reduce itself to powder with explosive force, releasing the vertical faults on either side of it.

(There!) she cried, and as she did the Shadow poured Itself fully into that spot, an irresistible blast of destruction—

—but Herewiss was already there, dwelling in the stone, being it, holding it together. It was granite and marble, but he was diamond, unshatterable by Goddess or Shadow—for the moment.

(I’ll hold it!) he said, the thought tasting of gritted teeth. (You distract It!)

With what? she thought, fumbling desperately for an idea.

Distant as if one of the mdeihei sang it, seemingly irrelevant, a scrap of verse spoke itself in her. No shadow so deep that light cannot sound it, no hatred so hard that love cannot loose it—Beorgan’s old ballad, the alliterative one. It told how she had taken the Shadow within herself, and her courage had defeated It. She had drained Its power so that her daughter could challenge the Shadow in her turn and slay It. And that gave Segnbora a mad, dangerous idea ...

Though still wearing her Dracon-self, Segnbora brought her human nature to bear as strongly as she could, and began exposing her dark sides to the Shadow’s influence. Intent on Herewiss, It perceived only an augmentation of Its power in the area, and therefore let her darknesses gather from It and grow, becoming small likenesses of Itself. Sensing a chance to turn her vulnerabilities into weapons, she missed not a one of them: hatreds, petty jealousies, desires gone sour, procrastinations; laziness that would let others languish in pain while she lay idle; envy that smiled at the misfortunes of her peers. It was a disgusting collection, but in itself presented no danger. Loss of a sense of sickness—acceptance of the state—that was to be feared. And that was creeping up on her fast ...

As swiftly as she dared, Segnbora slipped close to the Shadow and let loose her tarnished parts. They melded with It, becoming part of Its substance. Terrible power rushed through them and back into her. She dared not fight it, lest she betray her presence. As she had become Dracon, and as Dracon had become stone, she now became the Shadow.

Mortal, and therefore limited even out of her body, Segnbora could contain only a small part of Its being in herself ... but it was enough. In a sickening flash she experienced the incalculable rage of One Who had possessed Godhead and for jealousy’s sake had then thrown it away. She also experienced pain: an anguish deeply colored with blame for the Goddess Who had let the pain happen—

There was no time to look further. Segnbora didn’t speak, didn’t even truly think, but merely held her control as best she could and looked at the painful memories, living inside the old story, wordlessly recreating it with a Dragon’s immediacy and a storyteller’s skill. It was an easy story to tell. She knew it by heart. It was the same story she had dreamed that night in the old Hold: the story of the Maiden, of Death, and of Her children, the Two, Who had loved one another.

The hatred that was the rest of herself still strove without pause to destroy Herewiss—but It did so a little less vehemently. It was distracted by old memories. Gradually, the story changed, becoming less a narrative and more an invitation.

Do You remember how it was? The two of You loving outside the constraints of existence, taking eons to learn and love one another’s infinite depths ? Do You remember the divine passion—how Your loving invented time and space—a place to love and explore together, in all the bodies that ever lived? Do You remember the Loved, and how there was always One Who understood? Your sister, Your brother, Your beloved ... O remember!

It was in Nhaired she sang now, as if weaving a spell, silently recalling the Song of the Lost. Normally that Song was never voiced except during the Dreadnights, in the depths of the Silent Precincts, to beseech the Shadow to remember Its ancient joy and be merciful to the world. Segnbora sang it now without the fearful intonations the Rodmistresses used, but winding poignant Dracon motifs of compassion and forgiveness around the words. She was calling to herself as much as to the other. Vile though her darknesses were, they were rooted in light, just as the Shadow’s malice was founded in the pain of Its ancient loss, the memory of love discarded forever. If it could not be saved, neither could she ...

The Shadow held still in the stone, Its malice wavering, half forgotten. A hasty flicker of perception stolen through It showed Herewiss, hanging on in the stone, shuddering with pity and also with fear for her. No one had ever before been so foolhardy as to sing the Song of the Lost in first person, and tempt the Shadow. But he didn’t waste more than one shudder. He began examining the strata around him, and found the spot where the Shadow’s consciousness had rooted Itself most concretely into the stone.

But yet will come that time when Time is done, the world begun again, aright, she sang, pouring herself into the promise. And once again We shall be as We were—

She drew away, singing. The Shadow surrounded her, towering above, about to drown her in deadly consummation. Without warning Khavrinen’s essence flicked through the earth like a white-hot thought burning through a brain. Instantly it severed the linkage of the Shadow’s consciousness to the stone.

There was only one wild shriek of rage and betrayal before the dark presence faded, temporarily banished, but that cry was enough. All around Herewiss an unstoppable tremor stirred in the stone. As if that weren’t enough, an ominous coppery feeling with an aftertaste of blood began sliding through Segnbora’s self. The Moon was eclipsing.

(Goddess! Herewiss, get out of there. We have to get back to our bodies or you won’t be able to control this!)

(Right,) Herewiss said, sounding abstracted. Khavrinen swept again and again through the bedrock, and its unseen Fire wavered with Herewiss’s alarm as he tried to cut himself loose from his empathy with the stone. (I seem to have gotten kind of attached, you go ahead—)

(Are you crazy? This is your wreaking and I’m stuck in it!)

Precious seconds were slipping by. Herewiss laid about harder and harder with Khavrinen, and didn’t move. (Dammit! My own Fire won’t cut my own Fire—)

(Watch out!) Segnbora said. Furiously, she whipped down one wing at the stone, a wing lipped with the black razor-diamond that was Skadhwe. Through fathoms of marble and granite it sliced, the shadow of a shadow, until it reached the rock under Herewiss.

He shot upward and out of the strata, free. Shrugging off her Dracon-self, she followed him up and out of the empathy—

They broke the surface of the valley, gasped for the dear familiarity of breath like swimmers down too long, and began running up the air in frantic haste. The Moon’s face, full now, was stained half red against the early evening sky. The stain grew larger as they raced for the tower window with the light in it. Under them, red fire dove and swooped about the valley, driving massed darknesses before it. They spared the sight hardly a glance and dove through the tower wall. Segnbora threw herself down on the cot where her body lay——and hit her head.

No, that’s just the usual headache. Up, get up! Freelorn was shaking her, worsening the agony of pins and needles that transfixed every bone and muscle she owned.

Herewiss was already up, sagging against the window. With Freelorn’s help, she staggered over to join him. Segnbora was temporarily blind, but the othersight was working. Above the valley the Moon’s whiteness had diminished to a thin desperate sliver, struggling with the creeping darkness as if with a poison, and foredoomed to lose.

The corroded copper taste was as hot in Segnbora’s mouth as if she had been struck there. The Chaelonde seemed to run with blood. Below them the lateral fault burned through stone and earth, moving. Sai khas-Barachael began to shake beneath their feet.

“Put your scales on,” Herewiss whispered, grabbing one of her hands in a grip like a vise, and with the other drawing Khavrinen. Segnbora stumbled and fell down into herself, into the cave where Hasai waited with wings outspread in alarm. There was no time for the usual courtesies. Segnbora matched him size for size, flung his wings about her as she had wrapped herself in his shadow before, and became him.

As the sensation of the stone in the valley became plain again, the mdeihei cried out in a song of terrible alarm. “Shut up, the lot of you!” she shouted in Dracon, and once more gathered the whole valley within the span of her wings, feeling it all.

The pain struck her immediately as the lateral fault came alive inside her, a black-hot line of agony running from chest to shoulder and up her left wing like a heart seizure. Her outer body gasped and clutched at the sill, missed it, and thumped down to her knees with a jolt. Inside, no less clearly, she felt the heave and stutter of the faults as they tried to move, attempting to foul Herewiss’s game before it was fairly started.

Fortunately, Herewiss had not lost his grip on her hand. Half crouched over and supported desperately by Freelorn, he was beginning to shine like a vision as his soul settled more firmly into the spirit-to-body connection necessary for full Power flow. In his free hand, Khavrinen blazed like chained lightning, impossible to look at with the eyes of either body or mind. Herewiss struck deeper into his Power, tapping what seemed an inexhaustible source, and straightened with re-found strength. Then he was inside Segnbora’s perception, as Dracon as she.

The Fire burning in her throat was suddenly blue, an awesome counterpoint to the dark burning of the faults, and the rage of the frustrated Shadow. Stirred by Its influence, the player on the Inside made a move. But it was a poorly reasoned move, born of fury and the hope of a quick win. The lateral fault jumped an inch north and south.

Segnbora felt Herewiss smile the satisfied smile of a player whose opponent has fallen into a trap. The burning blue upflow of his Fire seared through her perception and poured in a great flood down into the valley’s stone, binding together three of the vertical faults.

Like diverted lightning, the released energy of the lateral fault stitched whiplash-quick through the strata in several different directions. But Herewiss was quicker. Fire streaked through the strata too, sending fault-blocks up or down, blocking and absorbing forces, setting up piece by piece the final checkmate that would freeze the lateral forever and seal the Eisargir Pass. Two more moves and he would have it! Bent over double by the fault-pain, which was harder to handle now than while she had been out-of-body, Segnbora heard someone a long way off shouting in thought. She couldn’t make out concepts, though.

“They’re not?” Freelorn said, much closer, and very alarmed. “Dusty! They’re not all clear of the pass yet. Sunspark says you have to hold off if you don’t want all those Reavers dead—”

Herewiss said nothing aloud, but Segnbora could feel his resolve. No one dies of this, not even them, Yet the position he had set up in the stone was delicate and couldn’t be maintained for long.

The Shadow, sensing Herewiss’s hesitation, immediately called the attention of the foiled, blocked forces in the stone to the weakest spot in Herewiss’s game: the root of Aulys that was split in two. Pressure played about it like lightning. Half of the massive root twitched, about to shift ...

(Hold your position,) Segnbora said.

Both inside and outside the stone at once, she anchored herself with rear talons and barbed tail, and reached out to sink diamond fangs into the trembling root. It struggled and tried to tear away from her, vibrating so violently that she was certain she was going to lose teeth. But a Dragon never lets go except by its own decision.

She held. Eyes squeezed closed, every muscle pulled taut as a rope, her tail desperately tightening its anchor around a lower stratum as she felt her fore-talons slipping. She held, using her mind, feeling the rock as a whole.

“They’re out! They’re out of the pass! Dusty!”

Canny and desperate, the Shadow kicked two of the remotest vertical faults as a distraction. Herewiss was having none of it. Using Segnbora’s Dracon-self as she had, he descended deeper into the stone, deep enough to set his jaws around his last move, a great marble fault-block half a mile south of Barachael. This was the key to the puzzle. Diamond fangs set hard into the stone. He heaved—

The blow came at her, not at him, and took them both off-guard. Preoccupied with the immensities, neither of them expected the sudden choking darkness at their back in the place where the mdeiha dwelt. A song of madness swept the mdeihei, controlled them, sent them tearing at the floor of Segnbora’s cave. Razor talons and ruthless blasts of Dragonfire ate and sliced down through the stone of her memory, to lay it bare and make it real. For one memory in particular they searched ...

(No!) she screamed at them, but they paid her no heed. Stone crumbled away like curd. Even now the memory was coming to birth, coming true: darkness, gravel grinding against her face, that old anguish ... There was no way to stop it, except by breaking the empathy, leaving Hasai, halting the wreaking—

Herewiss held the block of stone in jaws that ran with blue Fire, but he couldn’t move it without her. He strained at it, tapping deeper into his Fire and deeper yet, not giving up. Yet without her link to the Dracon perception, he could not go further.

—stone shattered and melted. Don’t suffer, don’t let it come true again! Break the link! the darkness sang to her, consoling, seductive. The memory became more real. A green afternoon, under the tree ... No, what’s he doing here? What’s he—no! No! Break the link! (I can’t.)

Then live in the horror, without respite, forever. The last stone was torn away from the memory. In such anguish that she couldn’t even scream, Segnbora flung herself utterly into the Dracon-self, into Herewiss, into her own self and her own death. Fire blazed; the terrible stresses Herewiss had been applying to the fault-block gripped, took, pulled it up out of its socket—

The gameboard rumbled and leaned upward as if a hand had tipped it over, Pieces tried to slide off every which way. Lost in the pain of contact with that memory, Segnbora could nevertheless sense Mount Adine’s shuddering as the ground at the end of the khas-Barachael spur began to rise, first bulging, then cracking like a snapped stick.

Sai khas-Barachael danced and jittered on its ridge like a knife on a pounded tabletop, held secure only by Herewiss’s Fire and will The earth on either side of the lateral fault thrust up, then slammed together like a closing door. The fault expended its energies in a noise like the thunderstorms of a thousand summers. Hills crumbled and landslides large and small crawled downward all the length of the Chaelonde valley. The river itself tilted crazily out of its bed and rushed down into a new one as the block Herewiss had triggered shoved its way above ground, making a seedling mountain, a new spur for Adine.

Behind them, the Houndstooth peak of Aulys seemed to stand up in surprise, look over Adine’s shoulder, and then fall back in a dead faint. The terrible thundering crash of its fall went on for many minutes, a sound so huge it obliterated every other sound and was felt more than heard. It was a sound never to be forgotten: the sound of the pass between Eisargir and Aulys being sealed by the Houndstooth’s ruin.

Hours later, it seemed, the singing roar that encompassed the world began to die down. Segnbora found herself still alive, and was amazed at that. Herewiss was nowhere to be felt in her mind. She was on hands and knees on the floor of her cavern. Slowly, aching all over, she levered herself up and found herself looking at Hasai.

He was droop-winged and weary-looking, dim of eye, crouching in the middle of a badly torn-up and melted stone floor. Behind him, lurking shameful in the shadows, she could just make out the dark forms of the mdeihei. Many eyes watched her, but their voices for once were still as they waited to see what she would do.

“O sdaha,” Hasai said, singing slow and sorrowful, “we betrayed you.” He made no excuse, offered no explanation, merely accepted the responsibility.

She breathed in, breathed out, as weary as the Dragon before her. The mdeihei waited.

There were thousands of things she felt like saying to them, but what she said was, “Ae mdeihei, Nht’e’lhhw’ae.” We are forgiven.

The shadowy forms drew away. Segnbora laid a hand for a moment on one of Hasai’s bright talons. There were great talon-furrowed rents in the floor. They had slag piled all around them that smoked ominously like pools of magma. “Will you clean this mess up, mdaha?”

He looked at her as if he wanted very much to say something more. At last, he said only, “Sdaha, we will do that.”

“Sehe’rae, then—” She turned her back on him and stepped back up into the outer world.

The room still jittered with little aftershocks left over from the quake, and echoed with the voices of all Freelorn’s band. Herewiss leaned wearily by the window, with Freelorn supporting him on one side and Sunspark on the other. Eftgan was in front of him, and all four were talking at a great rate. Segnbora pushed herself up off the floor and rubbed her eyes, looking out the window.

Her normal sight was now clear enough to show her a Chaelonde valley much broken and changed, but with Barachael still mostly intact. The darkened Moon wore a fuzzy line of silver at its edge, first sign of the eclipse’s end. The air that came in the window was astonishingly sweet to the under-senses, as if many years’ worth of trapped death and pain had been finally released.

Leaning against the windowsill, she looked at Herewiss. He was drawn and tired, and all the Fire was gone from about Khavrinen for the moment. For the first time she could remember, it was simply gray steel with an odd blue sheen. But Herewiss’s eyes were alive with a satisfaction too big for all of Barachael valley to have contained—the look of a man who finds out he is what he’s always believed himself to be.

Seeing her, he reached out a hand. Across the open window they clasped forearms in the gesture of warriors after a battle well fought.

“What was it you said?” Segnbora said, thinking back to the old Hold in the Waste, and the night her sleep was interrupted. “‘There was blood on the Moon, and the mountain was falling’—?”