The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page A

bluff good, and turned his attention to the page before him. “Faslie anrástüw oi velien—”
    “No, no, wait!” She looked around fearfully. “It’s unlucky even to talk about it—”
    “Being a goat isn’t unlucky?”
    “Uh—well. Out in the Waste Unclaimed, about forty miles or so into the desert, there’s an Old Place—they say it’s the oldest of all the Old Places in the world.” She gulped. “It’s full of the ancient kind of wreaking, and ghosts and monsters walk there. Sometimes the desert around it— changes somehow, and becomes other places. I don’t know how…”
    “Go on.”
    “They say that the rocks roll uphill, and water flows sideways along the hills there, or up the sides of valleys—and it rains scorpions and stones instead of water. Even the Dragons won’t go near it; they say it’s too dangerous. There are doors into Otherwheres—”
    “Doors?” Herewiss echoed.
    “That’s all I know,” the girl said. “It’s not lucky to talk about it. It’s a cursed place.”
    “No,” Herewiss said, “just Old, I would imagine. We don’t know enough about the Old people’s wreaking to know their curses from their blessings. Forty miles into the desert. Near where?”
    “North of the pass above Dra’Mincarrath,” she said, “about sixty miles or so, they say. But it really is cursed—”
    Herewiss stood there silently for a long few moments, holding the backlash away while reading the spell in the book, readying it. “That’ll do, I think,” he said. “But one thing only.”
    She looked at him in fear. “I don’t trust any promises you might make about your future behavior,” he said. “So I’m going to give you a conscience of sorts.”
    He spoke the last word of the spell under his breath, and immediately the girl groaned and doubled over, clutching at her stomach. “The next time you sleep with a man or woman for whom you don’t care, that will take you,” Herewiss said. “Don’t bother trying to rid yourself of it; if you meddle, you may find that particular avenue of pleasure permanently closed. And let me give you advice—don’t play around with sorcery. It shortens the life.”
    He cut the air with one hand in a short quick motion, and the girl staggered to her feet and lurched without another word out the door.
    Herewiss closed and sealed his book, fetched the other one from the bed, and put them back in his bag again. His head was aching violently, and his stomach churned, threatening to reject the steak pie.
    Suddenly a dark shape loomed at the window. It was the smoke-creature, peering in curiously.
    “Oh Dark, I forgot,” Herewiss said. He gestured at the window, the same quick cutting motion. “Go free! And thank you.”
    The creature bent sideways in a passing breeze, and dissipated silently.
    “Oh, my head,” Herewiss groaned as he headed back to bed. “Shortens the life indeed. I wish I were dead.”
    He pulled the covers up around him again, and laid his throbbing head down on the lumpy pillow as tenderly as he could. The darkness was almost peaceful for a few moments—until the sound of a drunken countertenor began to float up from the stable, half a tone flat, singing of what the King of Darthen did with the shepherdess and her brother.
    “Oh Goddess,” Herewiss moaned, and buried his face in the pillow.
    •

 

THREE

    Opening Night is not so much a time of year as it is a state of mind. It can be invited, by no more difficult a measure than keeping one’s eyes and heart open all the time. There are Rodmistresses who could not share in the Opening if they stood at the Heart of the World on Nineteen-Years’ Night; and there are children, and the eager of heart, who can break the walls between the Worlds in broad day, and call the wonders through. Those who do not close their hearts to Possibility soon find their lives full of it.
    Reflections in the Silent Precincts,
    Leoth d’Elthed, ch.7

    The next day was gray and overcast,