Twelve
Laughter in death’s shadow fools no one who understands death. But if you’re moved to it, be assured that the Goddess will smile at the joke.
—found scratched on the wall in the dungeon of the King of Steldin, circa 1200 p.a.d.
“I hate—letting them think they’re driving us,” Herewiss said between gasps. “But it’s better this way.”
He stood in the midst of carnage, the burned and hacked bodies of fifty or sixty Fyrd. Here and there in the rocky field of this latest ambush, Freelorn’s band stood cleaning swords, leaning on one another, nr rubbing down sweating horses and swearing quietly.
Segnbora leaned gasping against Steelsheen’s flank, unwilling yet to sheathe Skadhwe. The last Fyrd to come at her had been one of the new breed of keplian, bigger than the usual sort, with clawed forelimbs and those wickedly intelligent eyes that were becoming too familiar these days.
She had had no trouble immersing herself in the other’s eyes to effect its killing. The problem had been getting out again afterward. She felt soiled, as if she had stepped in a pile of hatred that would have to be scraped off her boots.
“How many times is this?” Lang said, coming up beside her.
“Seventeen, eighteen maybe—”
“I don’t know about you, but I feel driven.” Segnbora nodded. Fifteen days ago they had ridden out of Barachael, and had had nothing for their pains ever since but constant harrying by ever-increasing bands of Fyrd. All had come from the southwest, where Something clearly didn’t want them to venture. Freelorn had suggested world-gating straight to Bluepeak, where they would meet the Queen; but Herewiss, unwilling to tempt the Shadow into direct intervention by too much use of Fire, had vetoed the idea. So they rode, and were harried. Herewiss always took them north, out of the way, after an attack such as today’s. In daylight, anyway. In darkness they turned again and tacked southwest, toward Bluepeak. They were losing time with these detours, and knew it. Everyone’s temper was short, and getting shorter.
“Let’s go,” Herewiss said, sheathing Khavrinen and turning Sunspark’s head northward as he mounted.
There was annoyed muttering among Freelorn’s band, and heads turned toward Lorn in appeal. But Lorn, already up on Blackmane, looked wearily after his loved and shook his head. “Come on,” he said, and rode off after Herewiss.
They rode a brutal trail through country made of the stuff of a rider’s nightmares. They had long since left behind the green plains of southern Darthen. Presently they were crossing the uninhabited rock-tumble of Arlen’s Southpeak country. Glaciers had retreated over this land when the Peaks were born, leaving bizarrely shaped boulders scattered across scant, stony soil. Acres of coarse gravel with a few brave weeds growing out of it might be all one would see from morning ‘til night.
The horses were footsore from being kept at flight-pace on such miserable ground. The grazing was poor, too. After the well-filled mangers of Barachael’s stables, it was hardly surprising that the horses were in no better mood than their riders. Though no one lived in this barren country, it would be only a matter of time before they ran into Reavers, or Arlene regulars in Cillmod’s pay. If not them, there would certainly be Fyrd.
“This is all your fault,” Freelorn grumbled at Segnbora as Steelsheen picked her way along beside Blackmane.
Segnbora looked up in surprise from her contemplation of Skadhwe, which lay ready across the saddlebow. “Huh? ... Oh, well, in a way it is. I caused the Battle of Bluepeak, too. Ask me about it sometime.”
He glowered at her, and nodded toward Herewiss. “All he did was seal up the Shadow’s favorite avenue into the Kingdoms. What do you do but start making love to It ... and then jilt It!”
She started to disagree with Freelorn, and then thought better of it. “So I did.”
“You’re probably in worse trouble with It now than Herewiss is.”
Segnbora frowned at the exaggeration, though it was typical of her liege. “Oh? What do you know about it?”
At that moment Herewiss dropped back to join them, and said, “Considering that he’s read the entire royal Arlene library collection on matters of Power, he probably knows more about it than either of us. Face it, “Berend. The Shadow already knew of the threat that I posed, but at Barachael It became aware of you, too. And as they say, your newest hatred is the most interesting.
“True,” Freelorn added, becoming serious now. “No doubt It believes you’re Its deadliest foe at the moment—”
“Ha! Some foe ...” she said, thinking of her still-unfocused Fire.
The wreaking she had performed with Herewiss had been successful, but now she was almost sorry she had agreed to participate. Ever since, she had not been able to stop brooding about her Fire. Over and over again, Hasai’s words had run through her mind: Your fear cripples you. You must give it up.
Recognizing an old hurt about which they could do nothing, Herewiss and Freelorn fell silent.
Annoyed both at herself and at them, Segnbora took the lead for a while, riding apart and letting the quiet conversation of the others fade beneath her awareness of the surrounding country. Skadhwe’s reassuring blackness soaked up light at her saddlebow. Its weightlessness, at first unsettling, had become second nature. It was very useful in a fight ... And certainly no other sword was all edge and no flat. Likewise, no other sword would, cut anything but the hand of its mistress, as Freelorn had discovered while handling it one morning.
Skadhwe seemed not to care for being used by anyone else. It was delicate, but very definite, about drawing Lorn’s blood. Of her, it had demanded nothing so far, and Segnbora thought of Efmaer’s words with unease, wondering when the weird would take hold. Unease seemed to have overtaken everybody these days. No longer were they simply fugitives on the run from Cillmod’s mercenaries; the Shadow was after them now, too, and the knowledge that their souls were in peril had them all on edge.
Segnbora could feel the Shadow working on them even now, driving the group apart, subtly sapping its effectiveness. Even Herewiss was short of conversation these days. He had drawn closer to Lorn, pulling away from the others. As for Freelorn, although every step toward Bluepeak brought the reality of his true-dream closer, he had a haunted look. His followers turned to him for answers, but as often as not came away with a strong sense of his inner distress. At this rate, she thought morosely, they’d never make it to their rendezvous with the Darthenes, at the place where they were massing to take the Shadow’s attack.
The afternoon dragged the Sun down to eye level and turned the western horizon into a blinding nuisance.
(Sdaha,) Hasai said from way down, (we smell water.)
(You’ve been quiet today. Where?)
(West and south. A league as the Dragon flies.)
She nodded and thumped Steelsheen’s sides, bringing her about in order to inform Herewiss of a place to camp. Hasai had been quiet much of the time since Barachael—a sentient silence with satisfaction at its bottom ... and something else she couldn’t quite underhear.
(You’re finally becoming properly sdahaih,) he had said one evening as she drifted off toward, sleep. (Anything can happen now.)
There had been an ominous overtone to his musing. (What do you see, mdaha?) she had asked sleepily.
But he and the mdeihei had turned their attention away from her, singing wordless foreboding with strange joy woven through, it. They’re crazy, she had thought, and gone to sleep. Dragons were always ambivalent about their foreseeings, as if they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—decide what was good, or bad.
The camp they found three leagues ahead was in a stony, scrubby canyon: shattered, green-white cliffs above and dry watercourse below. Scant rains kept alive the brush and several little spinneys of warped ash and blackthorn, but nothing else. “Where’s the water?” Herewiss said to Segnbora, annoyed.
“There,” she said, speaking Hasai’s words for him, and gestured at the face of the cliff. Herewiss gave her a look and dismounted from Sunspark.
“No rest for the weary,” he said, and advanced on the cliff with eyes closed, checking her perception. Then he opened his eyes, picked a spot, and brought Khavrinen around in a roundhouse swing. Splintered stone shot in various directions, trailing Fire. Water followed it, bursting from the rock in a momentary release of pressure and then subsiding to a steady stream down the cliffs face.
They watered and fed the horses while Herewiss stood gazing around with a wary look, as if expecting trouble. Segnbora went away feeling thoughtful herself, and led Steelsheen to the most distant of the ash spinneys. This place has a bad feeling about it, she thought, and then realized why.
The trees were warped and bent, as if by the wind. But the real cause was something less healthy, a something snarled among the ashes’ branches. She threw the reins over Steelsheen’s head so that the mare would stand, and pulled some of the stuff out. The long strands were white and soft as spun silk, though as unbreakably strong as any rope when she pulled it between her hands—
From behind her, Herewiss reached in and pulled down the main mass of the material. As the white stuff came away from the tree, a whole mort of things came tumbling out to thump or clatter to the ground.
“Look at that,” he said conversationally, bending down to poke with Khavrinen at something jutting from the white swathing. “The point-shard of a sword. Darthene Master-forge steel, see, Lorn? Look at the lines in the metal.”
“It takes a lot to break a sword like that,” Freelorn said from beside his loved, but sounding nowhere near as composed.
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.
Without looking up, Herewiss nodded. He used Khavrinen’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 tooth-marks. 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 make it past her boundaries before nightfall without giving away our position to the Shadow with our noise.”
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 the whole nest, 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. A Rodmistress’s Rod was thus useless against them. They could only be killed with bare hands, and then 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, forbidding herself to tremble. “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 watch it 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 1 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 beside Sunspark’s blazing self, looking out toward the stony darkness. Here and there, 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. Under a gnarled little rowan bush Segnbora sat and tended to herself in the huge silence, which even the horses, hobbled and tethered inside the circle, didn’t break.
Segnbora was running out of things to do in order to get ready. She had 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. She would have tied Skadhwe into its sheath, but it had no peace-strings as Charriselm had had, and all her attempts to bind the shadowblade with cord had been useless. It cut them all. Finally she had just taken it 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, thus forming a 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. 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 a rock, 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 Nhaired. I’ve never heard their version.”
She sighed, suddenly amused by the surroundings. This was no cozy inn or palace hall, for once, but rather a huge night in waste country. Who’d have thought she’d ever play to an audience of kings-by-courtesy, part-time princes, and outlaws?
“It is 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 had 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, while on her way to the market, passing through the wealthy part of town, the austringer saw a sight that was stranger and more lovely than any she had ever seen. Tied to the 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, once 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 anymore!’ the austringer objected. Her wife gave her no peace, however, 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.”
Suddenly 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: the size of a seven-months’ filly. Its silken mane and tail hung to the ground. Slim-legged and clean of line, it 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, it 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 right into those ancient, burning eyes.
“Be thou warned,” she 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 it is my intent to bind thee utterly to my will, and confine thee to the dark from which thou camest 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.”
She held very still. The nightmare now had the option to retreat. It could also answer ritually, or it could attack.
“How should I fear you?” the nightmare said, lifting its head to taunt her sweetly. The voice it used was that of Segnbora’s slain otherself, not piteous as it had been during those last moments in Glasscastle, but mocking and cruel. “Rodmistresses in the full of their Power have passed this way, and you see what has happened to them. You, however, have retired from sorcery, afraid of failure.”‘
“Silence!” 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 little but knowledge. Mere spells and tales and sayings. You have no Power. Or rather, what Power you possess you are afraid to focus.”
Burning with shame, Segnbora clenched her fists and took a step forward, then another, seeking control. (Hasai—!)
“Oh, call up your ghost,” the nightmare said, stepping forward too. “You don’t dare give him the Power he needs, either. You walk on water, and complain that you can’t find anything to drink! Face it, you will never find what you seek. You are too afraid. You are dead!”
Behind her Segnbora could feel Freelorn getting ready 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.
“Some heroine you are!” the chill voice taunted. “Dead on your feet. A rotting corpse. You are a Devourer, like me.” Her head jerked in surprise.
“You don’t believe me? Then look at your slug of a lover there!” The bitter eyes dwelt on Lang with vast amusement. “He no more dares open himself to you than you do to him. He knows that what you call ‘love’ is mere need. If permitted, you’ll suck him dry of his own Power, his own love, and he knows it! Eftgan knew that too ...”
Humiliation seared Segnbora, and terror. She had no problem holding her peace. Her mouth refused to work.
The nightmare chuckled maliciously, enjoying her growing victory. “No wonder you’re such a good storyteller. Everything that comes out of your mouth is a story, especially when you speak of yourself. You haven’t really opened to another person since that day when you became big enough to be taken out in back of the chicken house—”
Segnbora took another slow step forward, drowning in the bitter truth, hanging onto the ritual for dear life. “I may warn thee again—get hence, lest I lay such strictures about thee that from age to age thou shall lie bound in the never-lightening gulfs—”
“Say the words of the sorcery,” the nightmare said, baring her yellow teeth in scorn. “They’ll do no good. You cannot control another aspect of the Devourer, being one yourself! Consider what lies hidden under stone in your heart ... you hate the one who plundered you, and that hate poisons every act of ‘love’ you attempt. You will never properly be able to employ your Power!”
She shook her head, but the awful words of truth would not go away.
“Listen to what I say; to what you know to be fact. Even your friends pity you. Freelorn, for example. He found out what happens to someone who gets closer to you than a sword’s length. You stabbed his heart with something sharper than a knife. No wonder that when you were once faced with yourself, you killed—”
Segnbora leaped at the nightmare head-on, grabbing great handfuls of its mane. Desperately, she attempted to hold its head away from her, but the nightmare plunged, reared and fastened its teeth into Segnbora’s mailshirt, cracking the links like dry twigs and driving them excruciatingly through padding and breastband, into the soft tissue of her breast beneath. Jaws locked, 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. Finally, in agony, she released her right hand and grabbed the nightmare’s nose, 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 a great handful of its silken mane came away in Segnbora’s hand.
Segnbora scrambled to her feet. Her pain was awesome, but she concentrated on twisting the long hank of mane into a rough cord between her hands. The opponents began to circle one another again.
“It was foolish to hold me so close for so long,” she said, gasping. “I know how to bind you, child of our Mother. I 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 a second leap Segnbora found herself astride the nightmare’s back.
The nightmare bucked, 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 stabbed it in the nostril. It screamed, and as it did she 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 would have been a scream. It 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 it 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 had hoped, pulled away. Segnbora fell down on the ground again, but this time 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 again. Her breath came hard, and beneath her mail-shirt her breast was bleeding freely, 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, but as it turned tail Segnbora vaulted up over its rump and onto its back. 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 her torn breast or the hot blurring of her eyes that she had thought at first was confusion and now proved to be tears. She blinked and gasped and hung on as Herewiss and Freelorn and the others ran up and kneeled 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 with the same stupid question, as usual.
“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, she wondered? 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 she stood up, shrinking away from any hand that tried to help her. The pain in her breast was intense, yet she barely felt it. She walked away, then, and her companions stared after her. Their eyes on her retreating back were as unbearable as sun on blistered skin, but still she ignored them. The darkness beyond the camp began to swallow her.
(A nightmare has no weapon to use but your own darkness.) Herewiss’s thought burst into her mind, cold and passionless as a knife. (Resist, and it only cuts deeper.)
She kept walking.
(One night, ’Berend,) he ordered. (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.)
She shut him out and went off into the cool night, looking for an end.