The Door Into Shadow

— and the next moment, her head burst open from the inside. Segnbora knew how it felt to share her mind with another consciousness, but this was nothing like her experi-ences in the Precincts; those decorous, sliding melds of one Rodmistress-novice with another, each always wary of dis-turbing the delicately balanced economy of the other's mind. This was like a boulder dropping into a bucket — a brutal invasion that smashed her against the borders of her self and threatened to.smother her.

Strangling, agonized, she flailed about inside for room to think. There was none. Her inner spaces, were crowded with otherness, a multitude of ruthless presences straining and seething in intolerable confinement — minds that beat at her, 'buffeting' her like wings; thoughts that gnawed at her like alien jaws; strange memories that stalked through, her past, promis-ing her a horrifying and incomprehensible future. The Dra-Igon's imminent death— AW Segnbora screamed. She pushed desperately away

without knowing for sure what she was pushing back from, but ready to do anything, even die, to avoid it. She fell and fell, yet the images followed her inexorably as a doom, becoming more and more real. / don 't want to remember! she screamed, but the words wouldn't even come out right. In-stead, a white-hot burning and a strange language took her by the throat, twisting the plea into a wracking curse: ste, taueh-sta 'ae mnek-kej, mnek—!

A roar of condemnation went up in he stifling, crowded darkness; the damp cold dirt rushed toward her face. Then mercifully the fall ended in a pain-colored flash that killed the presences, and the memories, and, Segnbora hoped, her too. .