The Door Into Shadow

"Are you going to kill meT" said the child to the Dragon.
"Kill your?" The Dragon smiled at him. "Certainly not until we have been introduced."
fates for Opening Night, Nia d'Eleth
The darkness tears wide, splitting as hewn skin does when the sword strikes.
This is Etachne field, all one gloomy sodden mass of miser)' —lead-gray above with clouds that have been pouring rain for three days now, dun and black and red below with the scat-tered bodies of the slain. The stench is incredible. Those who fight do so with their faces wrapped, and fall as often to the sick miasma of the air as to Reaver arrows. Fyrd are harrying the fringes of the battlefield, devouring the dead. A few hun-dred feet away, a maw and a horwolf and a nadder are busily dismembering a fallen woman. Her surcoat was once Darthene midnight blue. Now it is mostly red-brown.

THE DOOR INTO SHADOW
She gulps down sourness for the hundredth time and stares across the misty valley. Somewhere over there the Reavers have retreated into cover, regrouping for the next attack, There are only about a thousand of them left, but those are more than enough to break the Darthene defense at the other end of the valley and let them out into the open lands, Once that happens they'll begin pillaging at Etachne and leave the country burning behind them as far as Wend wen. Around her the Darthenes holding the gap are huddled, soaked through, hungry, outnumbered, waiting.
The Rodmistress is dead, so they have no idea when rein-forcements may be coming. Segnbora is the only sorcerer left, and over the past few days her sorceries have been going progressively flatter — a starved sorcerer is good for very little. It was all she could do yesterday to stop the miserable rain for a little while; today her head still aches with the backlash. OA, food, she thinks. Just oatcakes and milk— She stops herself, does a brief mind-exercise to calm down.
It doesn't work. Her partner Eftgan has been gone for three days now, ridden off for the reinforcements; and the Goddess only knows whether she lives or not, for there's a great silence where her mind used to be. Oh, Tegdne, loved, be all right, please— She winces away from the painful thought, opening her eyes on the Fyrd again. The sickness comes up in her throat as she sees them tugging at the limbs of the woman in Darthene blue. Then sickness turns to rage and she throws her sodden cloak off savagely and stands up in the rain, fists clenched.
"Ira maehsta in? aehsta," she whispers, as within, so without, and begins a bitter poem in Nhaired, shaping in her mind a construct. Anger— fueled sorcery is dangerous, she knows, but anger and terror are all she has left. Her desperation fuels the sorcery, scansion shapes its skeleton, meter sets the beast-shape, filling it out. Words link in sliding musculature, the hot pelt of intent furs it over, angry purpose glares like eyes beneath a shaggy mane of verse.
Uncaring of the backlash to come, she grips the shape of words and wraps it round her like a cloak — then drops to all fours in the rain, and leaps roaring at the Fyrd— —and the darkness falls.
(—they all do that, we've watched them do that since we first came. Yet while they feel for one member of their kind, they still do murder on others, Sttiuh-std annikh'S—) (We don't understand* it either. What about this one—)
Here's the last rise before home, with the little rutted track that serves for road. Steelsheen quickens her pace a bit, sens-ing road's end. The air is full of the smell of salt: beach-grass hisses incessantly on either side of the track. She makes the top of the rise — and there it is, spread out blue and wrinkled, glittering and lovely, the Darthene Gulf. "The Sun is beginning to pierce through from a silver sky; the black beach glistens as the waves slide back; sandpipers dance daintily after them, poking for whelks in the bubbling crevices and tide pools. She looks across at the lonely stone manor-house built on the headland — Home! Steelsheen breaks into a canter, They 'II be so proud. My master
has never before given live steel to anyone so young. And Tegdne has spoken for me to see if I can be in the royal household. To live in Darthisf in a town with walls f And Sheen, Father mil be so proud when he sees her. A real Steldene, a silverdust Steldene, and I broke her myself with all the tricks he taught me!
She punches the inare into a gallop and rides into the demesne, under the old stone arch with the tai-Enraesi arms, lioncelle, passant
THE DOOR INTO SHADOW
regardant, sword upraised in the dexter paw. Chickens scatter in all directions. Dogs scramble to their feet and bounce around her, barking, as she rides in to the dooryard with a great clatter of hooves. She dismounts. A yellow cat on the doorstep opens one eye at the noise, says a rude word and closes the eye again.
Segnbora laughs as she pulls offSleelsheen's saddle, drops it on the ground, fends off various dogs with pats and scratches, and bends to chuck the rat under the chin. Three weeks she has been on the road from Darthis. Three weeks of lousy wea-ther, an attack by bandits and a case of the flux. One cat, how-ever grumpy, isn't going to spoil this splendid homecoming. "Mother, Father, I'm back!" she shouts, shoving open the front door and swaggering in.
She walks through the little main hall with its benches and carvings and hangings and firepit. Secretly she's a little shocked by the shabbiness of the place; it never looked this run down before she went to the city, Her father's old com-plaints about failed crops and the sorry state of family finances suddenly begin to disturb her— "Mama?"
No answer. She's in the kitchen, then. Through the hall and out into the big stone-paved kitchen and pantry. Her mother is just stepping in the far door with a string of onions from the buttery shed outside. Close behind is her father, who carries a newly dispatched chicken. "Hi!" she shouts.
'" 'Rerend!" says her mother, and ""'Don't shout,'" says her father, both at once.
She trots over, embraces them both in a huge hog, and pulls her sheathed sword out of her belt to show them. "Mama, look, I named it Gharri—"
"How is your Fire coming, dear?" her mother interrupts. Her father says nothing, waiting for the answer, holding him-self aloof. And suddenly it's all wrong. Don't they think if I had finally focused, I'd have come in here streaming blue Fire from every orifice? Why d&n*t they—
"Mother," she says, "can't you ever ask me about some-thing else?"
Her mother looks surprised. "What else is there?" she says; and, "Don't talk to your mother in that tone of voice," her father says. "I have to rub down my horse, excuse me." She bites the inside of her cheek hard to keep from saying anything else, and walks out the way she came— —and then darkness again.
She staggers about, lost in the darkness of her self, and begins to tmderstand madness.
(Stihe'h, stikeh-std annikh'S-!) rumbles the voice of storm again. It's joined by more voices, all intoning the same rushing phrase, a litany of incomprehension and curiosity. They won't go away. They bump and jostle her roughly when she stumbles into them in the dark, feeling for a way out
The p'lace where she walks is walled and domed and floored in adamant, built that way long ago to protect her inner verities. There her1 memories are stored. Some have been buried by accident, some she's seated in stone on purpose; many stand about smooth and polished from much 'handling,
It's the buried ones that chiefiy interest her invaders. Stone means nothing to them, it 'being one. of their elements. Cruel claws slice down effortlessly. White fire bums and melts. Delicate talons turn over exposed thoughts — old joys like polished jewels, razory fragments of pain. (Khai" rae todwt? Sshir'stihe'-khai'?)
(No, this moment's fairer far. Look.! hadn't thought they sang—) —it's quite dark, but she needs no light to know that the slab of marble is a handspan from her nose. The sound of her breathing is loud

beneath it, and the condensation from her
breath drips 'maddeningly onto her face'. The sarcophagus —
shaped Testing Bath is full of icy water, and Segnbora, naked as a fish, is submerged in it up to her face. Her hands are bound to her sides. On her chest rests a ten-pound stone. Above her is the three-inch-thick lid of the Bath, open only at the end behind her head, just enough to let in air and Saris's voice.
This is the final test of a loremistress-Bard, which will deter-m ine whether three years of training will desert her under extreme stress. There's no telling which of the Four Hundred Tales she'll be required to recite faultlessly tonight, or what song, or poem, or legend. When the lid is removed in the morning, she'll be expected to take up the kithara and extem-porize a poem in tragic-epic meter on the forging of F6rlennh BrokenBlade.
"Sunset to sunrise?" she had said to Eftgan this morning, be-fore the last of the orals. "I can do that, standing on my head." Now she's not so sure. She feels like she's been in this cold, wet tomb forever. She suspects it's more like two hours. "The Lost Queen's Ballad," Saris says from outside the Bath.
Segnbora closes her eyes, hunting for the memory-tag she uses to remember that ballad, and finds it. She sings softly, in a minor key:
"Oh, when Darthen's Queen went riding out of Barachael that day, she rode up the empty corrie and she sang a rondelay;
and the three Lights shone upon her as on Skadhwe's bitter blade, and she fared on up that awful trail and little of it made;
She stood laughing on the peak-snows with the new Moon in her hair, and she smiled and set. her foot upon, the Bridge that isn't There;
She took the road right gladly to the Castle in the Sky, and Darthen's sorrel steed came back, but the Queen stayed there for aye. …"
She lies there expecting to be asked for the rest of the history — the suicide of Queen Efmaer's loved, and her jour-ney up to Glasscastle, where suicides go, to get her inner Name back from him. But no, that would be too easy. "Jarrin's Debt," says Saris.
Segnbora sighs. "As long ago as your last night's dreams, and as far away as tonight's," she begins, "the Battle of Blue-peak befell. …" — and the darkness in the Bath is suddenly the darkness inside her mind.
Damn you! Damn you all to Darkness! Get out of here!