The Door into Shadow by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page B

powerful commodity even after its owner’s death, useful to lend power to various spells and wreakings, and the Name of one who worked with Fire even more so. Great Rodmistresses’ names were passed down through generations; in Segnbora’s own family, Efmaer d’Seldun’s Name was preserved, though the Queen herself was long lost. Now Segnbora exhaled in sudden amusement at the notion that someday sorcerers and Rodmistresses would pay great treasures for the true Name of one Herewiss, a slim dark young man with a tendency toward creative swearing in dead languages. And other tendencies that will matter far more—
    The path went right out from under her. It was not her own clumsiness this time, but the Morrowfane itself trembling under her feet. Segnbora looked up. The blaze on the hilltop, hidden till now by the bulk of the hill, was hidden no longer. A narrow, sword-shaped core of blue-white Fire swung up into view, and then a light of impossible brilliance broke the night open from end to end. Like lightning burning in steel, it turned the dark into sudden day and extinguished the stars. The Fane shook to its roots as outpoured Firelight smote into everything, illuminating every leaf and tree trunk and stone with fierce clarity. On the surface of the shivering lake, the light shattered into countless knives and splinters of dazzle.
    Blinded, Segnbora turned away and rubbed her eyes. When they saw clearly again, she started once more down the trail. She had no trouble finding her way; the Fane was lit like midmorning. At one point she paused for breath, looked around, and saw something she had missed in the dimness on the way up—a huge crevasse or cavern around on the southern face of the hillside, an opening into darkness that even Herewiss’s Fire didn’t illumine. How about that. The World’s Heart has a secret in it—
    Above her Herewiss’s Flame dimmed and faded, leaving her looking at where the cave entrance had been. He’s taking a rest, I suppose. I bet I could have a closer look at that before he starts shaking things around again—
    Scrabbling up off the trail, Segnbora used scrubby bushes and trees to climb across the eroded face of the Fane. It took her a few minutes to scramble up a ravine that ran down between two folds of the hillside, but finally the cave opening loomed huge before her, dark as uncertainty. There Segnbora halted, uneasy. Her undersenses were still blunted from the onslaught of Power and joy at the top of the hill, but not so much so that she couldn’t catch an odd underheard flavor that grew stronger the closer she came to the cave mouth. Something hot. Metal? Stone?
    Segnbora drew Charriselm; the whisper of steel sounded very loud. With care she stepped over and around the boulders that lay about the great cave entrance, and slipped a few feet inside where she paused to listen again.
    Nothing. I must have imagined that feeling. Cautiously, keeping her left hand against the cave wall, Segnbora took another step in. The faint crunch of her footstep echoed away into the dark. She took another step. That echoed too. The place was huge, filling most of the mountain from the sound of it. One step more—
    A voice spoke, and Segnbora froze, her fist clenching on Charriselm’s hilt, her heart pounding.
    For a moment she thought the cave was going to fall in on her. The voice was huge, and incredibly deep. It thundered, rumbling, shaking the air; yet there was music in it, a slow and terrible song of pain. The hair stood up all over Segnbora. She could make nothing of the words the voice seemed to be speaking. At the end of the sentence, the silence that fell was plainly waiting for her answer.
    She swallowed hard. “I don’t know that language,” she said, her voice sounding amazingly small despite the echoes it awoke. “Do you speak Arlene or Darthene?”
    There was a long pause; then the voice spoke once more. It used Darthene, but the timbre was that of a storm on the Sea.