Immediately he was away, and the instantaneous transition itself sent a ripple of pure pleasure through him like the first anticipation of the act of love, a deep glad movement at the center of one's self. He was standing in air, as if on some high mountain, and below him was spread all the world known to men, from the Waste in the east to the mountains in the west. More than that, he could sense the lives of the people who lived in those lands, all the lives in the Kingdoms, mens' lives and animals' and Dragons' and other creatures', spun about and through each other, woven into a vast and intricate tapestry of movement and being. It was very like the Pattern that he had glimpsed in Sunspark's mind. Once this vastness would have frightened and confused him, as the Pattern had. Now, though, he could see it, see all of it, comprehend it, predict the motions of men and the intimate doings of their hearts; perceive the deepest motives, the best-hidden dreams and loves, and see how they moved the people who owned them, or thought that they owned them—
He hung there in starlit stillness for a long time, letting his mind range free, tasting thoughts and emotions from a great distance. As he used the ability, it sharpened, deepened, and soon the hardest, coldest minds were yielding up their secrets to him. He walked the hot bright hearts of Dragons and knew what they thought, and why.
He found their secrets, and learned the Draconid Name, which only the Dweller-at-the-Howe knows, and passes on to the new DragonChief when she takes office. Where he sensed resistance, he bent his thoughts against it, and passed through into knowledge. He found himself hearing even the thoughts of mountains and river, until he knew what the trees say to one another in their slow silent tongue, and what Day says to Night when they pass at the border of twilight. And still he listened, and listened, caught up in the intricacies and vastnesses of his own power, drunk with it—
There was a new note. A note at the bottom of things, a deep bass note that somehow wound itself into the fabric of everything that was, and Herewiss perceived it first with interest, and then with growing horror. By the time he realized what it was that he heard, it was too late. His power was total; as he pushed it, it grew; he had grown into hearing the note, and he could not now grow out of it.
It was the deepest bass note in all the worlds; the sound of the Universe running down.
He heard it everywhere. It twined through the structure of the tiniest blade of grass and dwelt in the hearts of stars; the empty places far above the earth were full of it; the core of the world sang it slowly and softly to itself, the Sea whispered it with every wave, the wind sighed with it and fell silent. Men shook with it as they were pushed out of the womb, and breathed it out as they died. Its long slow rumbling shook mountains into dust. The bright remote satellites of stars fell into their parent suns, and the suns devoured them, and then died themselves, dwindling into nothing, and darknesses deeper than nothing. From these wells of notness the bass note sang loudly as the voice of the earthquake; they were great devouring abysses, wombs of unbirth teeming with potential lost forever.
Herewiss reeled, tried to flee. It was no use. He strode among suns and through glowing clouds that were like violet and golden veils cast across the face of the darkness; he moved like a god through great spiraled treasuries of flaming stars, and knew the thoughts of the inhabitants thereof, from the greatest to the smallest; but the bass note followed him everywhere. It was wound through all the songs, the darkness at the bottom of every light.
He fled back in terror to the silver-blue mote of light that held the Kingdoms, and descending into it, walked the bottoms of the seas, and the rivers of fire beneath the mountains; but the note was there. He passed through the minds of men and Dragons again, and there it dwelt too, though in a more subtle fashion. There was a defense against the death, and that defense was love; it was effective, though only on a small scale, and only temporarily. But unknowing, men flung love away from them with insane regularity, trying to defeat the Death with strength instead. Herewiss moved from place to place, seeking desperately some place or mind free of the Death but there was none. Despairing, he judged humankind and found them fools and madmen. In their crazy pride they chose to ignore the fact that Death is the ultimate swallower of all strengths, and that only the ephemeral vulnerability of love can hope to combat it at all—
And then he realized what he had been perceiving, and stopped in the middle of a flowering meadow somewhere in Darthen. The place blazed up in the night with a brilliance of green fire, the warm growth of spring, but like all else the fire had the seeds of death in it. Herewiss stood there, and mourned, understanding at last.
This is how the Goddess sees it, he thought. Everywhere She looks, She sees the Error. Against the fall of Night, only Love will suffice — and even that, even Her love, which was enough to create the worlds, is not enough to keep these worlds from being destroyed — only enough to slow the Death down. She loves Her children, gives them the gift of that love — and they just throw it away. Oh, Mother . . .
He shook his head. I'm forgetting myself. It was for love's sake that I came this journey. Where is Freelorn?
The thought was enough. Herewiss was there, standing by some little creek in eastern Darthen, looking at Freelorn—
—and at Segnbora, with whom Lorn was moving gently under the blankets.
Herewiss wanted to leave on the instant, but by the time he had conceived of the idea, it was too late: he had already perceived the situation in its entirety with his heightened sight. The bitter shock and loneliness that washed over him could not obscure it. Here was Freelorn, sleeping with Segnbora. Well, that was not entirely unexpected, or terribly unusual. Herewiss had gathered some time back that Segnbora often slept with one or another of the men, for her own pleasure, or theirs. But he looked at the two of them, and saw their thoughts and motivations from top to bottom. Segnbora's were pleasant enough, at least on the top levels. Under the long slow swells of her passion, he could feel pity, compassion, gentleness, a desire to console, to reach out and touch and straighten a hurt and angry mind, to support until the status quo should reassert itself; the desire to give Freelorn back to Herewiss in a few months, tuned, as it were — made gentle again, gotten over his anger, grown into some kind of realization of his own problems and what he did to himself to cause some of them. A present, a thank-you to Herewiss for trust given and received. Under that, though, the motives were darker. Control. She looked at Herewiss and Freelorn and envied them. She had no lover of her own, had tried once or twice, but her own fears had stifled the loves; she could not give, and did not understand why; she thought she trusted, but dared not open the deepest places. Love which has no roots in the depths, often dies when commitment runs shallow; such had been the case with her. She saw the trust between Freelorn and Herewiss, and coveted it, and tried to take a little of it for herself by intruding into the relationship ever so slightly. Leaving behind her a message, something to remember her by: I may be incomplete, but there is something I did that you could not. And below that, more primitive levels, where her passions raged in fire and ice, old angers, old fears, cruelly bound up past her present ability or desire to undo them.