— the blackness swallowed her again. AU around her the rush and swell of inhuman voices was beginning, faintly, as if for the first time the sources of the swnd were at some distance from her. But soon enough they would drown her resistance beneath their implacable song, close in on thai one untouchable 'memory, rip it untimely from beneath the rock
and make it come as real as the others.
She shuddered violently. No, oh no. And in any case I won't be left behind at the next inn as if I were a lamed horse!
Her bruised and battered pride got up one more time from the hard floor to which it had 'been knocked, and made itself useful. I am a tai —
Enraiesi. If my ancestors could see me they would laugh
roe to scorn! And I'm a sensitive trained in the ways of the inner mind, Fire or no Fire. I won't stand inside here and do nothing!
Off to one side, distantly, she could still hear Freelorn and Herewiss talking. Gulping with terror, Segnbora turned her back on them, con-centrated as best s'he could, and began making her way toward the huge
voices, deeper into the dark. .
Five
Offer an enemy a fatse show of hospitality in order to damn him. and the fires will fall on your head, not his. Give him the truth with his meat and drink, and trust it not to sour the wine. .,
s'Jheren, Advice unasked, 199
It was a long walk, full of halts, hesitations, and confusions, for the voices seemed to grow no nearer as she walked. Then abruptly she discovered that she had a seeming-body again, by walking into a wall, hard. She staggered back from it, momentarily seeing white with pain — then stepped forward with arms outstretched, and bashed her fingertips into the wall. She pushed close to it, spreading her arms wide, embrac-ing the familiar roughness; she laid her face against it and squeezed her eyes shut against tears of vast relief. At last this place was beginning to behave as it should.
Any trained sorcerer has an inner milieu into which he or she retreats for contemplation or preparation of sorceries. This, at last, was hers — not an abstraction of blackness and things buried, but the old cavern a mile down the seacoast from the house at Asfahaeg, her favorite secret place as a child.
Long ago the coast dwellers had broken a thirty-foot hole through the cavern's high, domed ceiling, turning it into a rude temple where they performed wreakings and weather-sorceries to the sound of the waves crashing just outside. As an adult sorcerer Segnbora had made its image part of her, a great airy cave full of sunlight or moonlight and the smell of the ocean.
She opened her eyes again, pushed back cautiously from the wall and looked up, trying to find the shaft-hole in the ceiling. After a moment she located it, though the shaft was
distinguishable from the rest of the ceiling only by two or three faint stars that shone through. Odd. The cavern had never been this dark before. . She turned and looked the
other way, trying to get herself oriented somehow. The faint rumble of the Sea bounced all around her, difficult to localize, but at last she thought she detected a slight difference in sound right across from her, a deadness that might mean the cave's opening onto the beach. She stepped cautiously away from the wall, then started to walk.
She touched something, It wasn't the wall. It was smooth, and dry, and hot. In her shock she stumbled forward instead of jerking back, and the something clamped down on her outstretched right hand, hard. She cried out wordlessly in rage and horror at the frighten-ing violation.
"It seems rude to put your hand in the Dragon's mouth and then scream before you know whether you've been injured," said a huge, slow, deep bass viol of a voice, from right in front of her.
Whatever had been holding her hand released it. Segnbora backed away and stood there rubbing the hand, which had been held tightly but not hurt. She was bitterly angry at her-self for having shown fear, "What the Dark are you doing in here?" she yelled, "We were invited," said the voice, puzzled. "Your accent is poor,"it added. "Speak more slowly."
"Accent—" She stopped and realized that she hadn't been speaking Darthene, or any human language, but the odd and terrible one that the voices in the darkness had been using. "'Never mind that! You can't be in here, this is me!" "'What is *me"?" the voice said without curiosity. "Rather, say "We are here/" There was a pause.
'"'May we ask why you keep it so dark in here? Were you keeping it so because the place where we met was dark?"
"I can remedy that," Segnbora said, annoyed. She lifted a hand, called up a memory of noon sunlight pouring in through the shaft—
•—and nothing happened. """'You are leaving us out of the reckoning," said the deep, slow voice as calmly as before. "Perhaps you would assist me then," Segnbora, said, an
noyed and uneasy. She concentrated again. "Sunlight …"
This time the light came, streaming down through the shaft from a sky that seemed bluer and deeper than usual. Segn-bora looked down and away from the blinding light — and was blinded instead by the intruder.
The rough dark textures of the face she had touched in the Fane were dark no longer. The sunlight spilling down from above shattered and rainbowed from scales like black sap-phires, every one with its shifting star. The Dragon blazed and glittered like a queen's ransom, his every breath and move-ment creating a shower of dazzle around him.
Now, Segnbora thought in wonder, / begin to understand that old story about Dragons spending their time lying on piles of jewels. .
His head hung above and before her, no longer an inert, half-perceived shape as it had been in the Morrowfane cave. It was an elongated head: sleeker and more slender than a snake's. Its mouth was a beak, like that of a snapping turtle. It was the point of the beak, at the very end of the immense serrated jaw, that had closed on her hand.
Her gaze travelled upward. From the beak to the place where the jaw met the neck was twenty feet at least The eyes were great pupilless globes filled with liquid fire, blazing a brilliant white even in the full sunlight. In the iron braziers of the nostrils the same light glowed though not so brightly
The Dragon was watching her with no less interest. "Cast-ing one's skin for the last time is always a nuisance," it said, "but it's still one of the more pleasant things about going mdahaih. You like this body better than the one you saw in the cave?"