The Door Into Shadow

She felt like telling him no, but Hasai, gazing silently down at her, felt about in her memories and brought one in particu-lar: night outside the old Hold, and her voice saying to Here-wiss, "You'll find your Power, prince. . I'll help if I can." "Yes," she said. "Dark, it's been years since I last moved a mountain."
Herewiss, hand in hand with Freelorn, gave her an approv-ing look. "Later, then," he said. Fire from Khavrinen blazed up and swirled about them. They vanished.
Segnbora folded her arms and looked up at the silver eyes gazing placidly down on her. "You're up to something," she said.
Hasai flicked his wings open, a humorous gesture that made cool wind a second later. "When one knows what's going to be," he said, "one
tends to make it happen that way."
"So what's going to happen?" Hasai slowly dropped his jaw at her. "Live, sdaha, and find out."
He vanished into a memory. Segnbora sat for a moment on the bench, listening to the amused song of the mdeihei — then grinned with anticipation, felt her way out of the embrasure, and went to bed.
"How are the stars?" Herewiss said from behind her.
"Almost right," said Freelorn. He was beside her, leaning on the sill of the tower window. "Another quarter-hour and the Moon'11 be in the Sword." "Great. I'm almost done."
The Moon, just past its first quarter and standing nearly at the zenith, looked down on a valley that flickered with campfires and the minute shiftings of Reavers going to and fro. Around Barachael's walls, a lazy ring of fire smoldered, flaring up every now and then when some skeptical Reaver got too close. Segnbora, feeling a touch naked without sur-coat and mail, turned her back on the valley vista and watched Herewiss at work.
The tower room had been emptied of everything but two narrow pallets and a chair. Around these, in what had been the empty air in the middle of the room, Herewiss was build-ing his wreaking — the support web that would both protect him and Segnbora and slow their perception of time long enough for his Fire to do its work. He stood in britches and shirt, as Segnbora did, with one hand on his hip. With the other hand he wielded Khavrinen as lightly as an artist's sty-lus, adding line after delicate line of blue Flame to what had become a dome of pulsing webwork with him at its center.
The completeness of his concentration, and the economy and elegance of the structure itself, delighted Segnbora. Lady, he's good, she thought, admiring the perfect match between the inner symmetry-ratios of the wreaking and the meter of the spell-poem he was reciting under his breath. It had been foolishness to dismiss him from the Precincts simply because he was male. "If you leave my pulse running that fast," she said, noticing
the brilliance of the last lifeline Herewiss had drawn, "I'll be in bad shape when we get back."
"Nervous, huh?" he said, glancing at her and lifting Khav-rinen away from the description of a parabola. He touched the sword's tip to the pulse line, draining it of some Fire. "Bet-ter?" "Yes."
"Good. Sunspark?"
Hot light flowered in one corner of the room and con-solidated into a slim red-haired young woman with merry golden eyes. (They're impatient down there, loved,) she said, pleased. (They keep testing me.)
"Fine, just so long as they don't get too interested in khas-Barachael. You know what to do?"
(This being the fourth time you've asked me,) Sunspark said, folding her arms in good-natured annoyance, (I dare say I do. None of them will leave the valley. They'll find the way into the plains barred, just as Barachael town is barred to them. On the night of full Moon, immediately before the eclipse starts, I'll begin driving the lot of them back up the pass. None will die.)
Herewiss nodded, narrow-eyed, completing the intercon-nection of several lines. "I hate to admit it," he said, "but there's a possibility that something'll go wrong with all this. If the pass fails to seal properly, and I've exhausted myself, and they get down into the valley again—" (Loved,) Sunspark said, (in that case I'll be very quick with them. Their bodies will be consumed before the pain has a chance to start.) Herewiss looked gratefully at the elemental from inside the shimmering blue web of the wreaking. "Thanks, loved. I'll do my best to make it unnecessary." He rested Khavrinen point-down on the floor and gazed around at the finished spellweb. "Lorn?" "The Moon's right," Freelorn said, turning away from the window. "Let's go."
Trembling a bit with excitement, Segnbora unbuckled her swordbelt, drew Skadhwe from it, and tossed the belt in one corner. Herewiss walked out through the web and then
turned inward to face, from the outside, the part of it specifi-cally concerned with his body.
"A little to the left, 'Berend," he said as she moved into position. "Lorn, you're fine." They each stood at one corner of an equilateral triangle. "All together: step—"
Segnbora walked through the part of the Fireweb sympa-thetic to her, feeling it crackle with charge as it brushed against her face and hands. The hair stood up all over her as the spell passed through her body and rooted in flesh and bone. At the same time came an astonishing wave of lethargy. Hurriedly Segnbora lay down on the left-hand pallet, settling herself as comfortably as she could. She laid SkadhwЈ down the length of her, folded both hands about its hilt at heart level, and began relaxing muscles one by one. Across the circle, Herewiss was settling himself with Khav-rinen, while Freelorn bent over him. "My head aches," Lorn said. "Is it supposed to do that?"
"That's the part of your mind that's slowing down to keep up with us," Herewiss explained drowsily as the wreaking took hold of him too. His eyes lingered on Freelorn for a moment.
"Don't even think it," Lorn said, and bent lower to kiss Herewiss good night. Herewiss's eyebrows went up for a sec-ond, then down again as his eyes closed.
(Mdaha,) Segnbora said to her inner depths, closing her own eyes, (see you when I'm out of the body!)
(I think not,) the answer came back, faint, amused. (What?) She tried to hold off the wreaking long enough for Hasai to explain, but it was no use.
Briefly, the spell fought with her lungs, then conquered them and slowed her breathing. That done, the Firework wound deeper into her brain, altering her thought rhythms toward the profound unconsciousness of wreaking suspen-sion. For a second of mindless panic Segnbora fought that too, like a drowning swimmer, but then everything, even Hasai and the mdeihei, fell away. .
Eleven
"Choose," She said to the cruel king. "For I am bound by My own law, and what you desire shall be given yoy, until you shall ask Me for something beyond My power to grant." He told her his desires, and she granted them all — until at last, alone, desolate King of an empty city, he cried out to Her in anguish, "Change my heart:!"
"I shall leave you now," the Godd>ess said, "for you have asked a boon past My power. Only one has the power to fulfill that wish. . and you are doing so."
from "The King Who Caught the Goddess," in Tales of old Steidin, ed. s'Lange, n-'Viirendir, 1055 p.a.dL
Segnbora was wide awake. She swung her feet off the pallet and stood up with Skadhwe in her hand. The room around her was foggy and hard to see — Herewiss's spellweb had al-ready slowed her time sense considerably. Dust and convec-tion currents moved around her at what seemed many times their normal speed. Her othersenses were wide awake too, and showed her strange blurs going swiftly about the room: one yellow-bright as fire, one dark with an odd tangle of potential at its heart: Sunspark and Freelorn.