The Door Into Fire (25 page)

Herewiss looked at the tablet. “A hundred and fifty-six. Five of the lower halls and half this upper hall. Then there’s that east gallery, and the hallways leading from it—”

Sunspark’s tone of thought was uneasy. (You know, there is no way that all these rooms can possibly be contained within this structure as we beheld it from outside. There’s no room, it’s just too small.)

“Yes, I know—but they’re all here. What about that row of rooms between the great hall downstairs and the back wall? They couldn’t have been there, either. Of course it was all right; after a few days they weren’t. Four doors went missing from this hall alone earlier this week, but here they are again—”

(The next one along was one of the ones that vanished. Let’s see what it looks like now…)

Herewiss got up, and they walked together down to the next doorway. It showed them nighttime in a valley embraced by high hills; behind the hills was a golden glow like the onset of some immense Moonrise. The valley floor was patterned with brilliant lights of all colors, laid out in an orderly fashion like a gridwork. Down from the gemmed heights wound a river of white fire, pouring itself blazing down the hillsides into the softly hazed splendor of the valley’s floor. There were no stars.

(Now
those
may be people,) Sunspark said after a moment, (but not my kind, or yours, I dare say. What do you say to a white light?)

“I don’t know. What do you say to a horse, or a pillar of fire?” Herewiss grinned, and made a note on his tablet. “This next one was gone too. Let’s look—”

They moved a few steps farther down the hall, and stopped. The door showed them nothing. Nothing at all.

“Sweet Goddess, it came back,” Herewiss said. “I was wondering what this one might be, and I had a thought—it could be a door that was never set to show anything before the builders left. An unused blank. It appears and disappears like all the other doors in the place, but it doesn’t show anything.”

(I don’t know.) Sunspark looked at the door dubiously. (It gives me an odd feeling—)

“Well, let’s see.”

Herewiss blanked everything out, slowed his breathing, and strained his underhearing toward the door,
past
the door—

—strained—

“Nothing,” he said, and opened his eyes again. “Can’t get into it the way I can some of the others. Spark, would you do a favor and get my grimoire for me? The one with the sealed pages.”

(You’re going to try to open this
now?
)

“Is there a better time? I had a good night’s sleep. I ate a big breakfast. Let’s try.”

Sunspark went molten and flowed down the hall like a hot wind. A few minutes later he returned, a young red-haired man with hot bright eyes and a tunic the color of fire, carrying the book. Herewiss reached out and took it, unsealed the pages and began riffling through them.

“Damn,” he said after a moment. “Nothing is going to—well, no, maybe this unbinding—no, that’s too concrete, it’s for regular doors. This one—no… Dammit.”

He paused a moment, then started running through the pages again. “This one. Yes. It’s a very generalized unbinding, and if I change it here—and here—”

(I thought Freelorn said that it took Flame to open a door.)

“Yes, he did, and he’s probably right, since doors are more or less alive. But this is an unbinding for inanimate objects, and if I make a few changes in the formula, it might work. I have to try something.”

(Will you need me?)

“Just to stand guard.” Herewiss sat down cross-legged against the wall again, breathed deeply and started to compose his mind. It took him a while; his excitement was interfering with his concentration. Finally he achieved the proper state, and turned his eyes downward to read from the grimoire.

“M’herie nai naridh veg baminédrian a phrOi,” he began, concentrating on building an infrastructure of openness and nonrestriction, a house made out of holes. The words were slippery, and the concepts kept trying to become concrete instead of abstract, but Herewiss kept at it, weaving a cage turned inside out, its bars made of winds that sighed and died as he emplaced them. It was both more delicate a sorcery and more dangerous a one than that which he had worked outside of Madeil. There the formulae had been fairly straightforward, and the changes introduced had been quantitative ones rather than the major qualitative shifts he was employing here. But he persevered, and took the last piece away from the sorcery, an act that should have started it functioning.

It sat there and stared at him, and did nothing.

He looked it over, what there “was” of it. It should have worked: it was “complete,” as far as such a word could be applied to such a not-structure.
Maybe I didn’t push it hard enough against the door,
he thought.
Well—
He gave it a mighty shove inside his head. It lunged at him and hit him in the back of the inside of his mind, giving him an immediate headache.

Dammit-to-Darkness, what did I—did I put a spin on it somehow? The shift could have done that, I guess. Well, then.

He pulled at it, and immediately it slid toward the doorway and partway through it. There the sorcery came to a halt, and sat twitching. Nothing came out of the door.

Maybe if I wait a moment,
Herewiss thought.

He waited. The sorcery stopped twitching and fell into a sullen stillness.

Herewiss lost his temper. (Dark!) he swore, and lashed out at the sorcery, backhanding it across the broad part of the nonstructure instead of disassembling it piece by piece, slowly, as he should have. It fell apart, nothingness collapsing into a higher state of nonexistence—

Something came out the door.

He opened his eyes, and just enough of the Othersight was functioning to give him a horrible dual vision of what was happening. The door itself was still dark to his normal sight; but the Othersight showed him something more tenebrous, more frightening, a hideous murky knotted emptiness, the whole purpose of which was containment and repression. It was a prison. And the prisoner was coming through the door right then: a huge awful bulk that couldn’t possibly be fitting through that door, but was—a botched-looking thing, a horrible haphazard combination of bloated bulk and waving, snatching claws, with an uncolored knobby hide that the filtered afternoon light somehow refused to touch. Herewiss caught a brief frozen glimpse of teeth like knives in a place that should not have been a mouth, but was. Then the Othersight confused itself with his vision again, and he was perceiving the thing as it was, the embodiment of unsatisfied hungers, a thing that would eat a soul any chance it got, and the attached body as an hors d’oeuvre. He underheard a feeling like the taste at the back of the throat after vomiting, a taste like rust and acid.

Through the confusion of perceptions, one thought made itself coldly clear:
Well, this is it. I tried, and I did wrong, and now I’m going to pay the price.
The sorcery had already backlashed, leaving him wobbly and weak, and he watched helplessly as the thing leaned out of the door over him and examined him, assessing the edibility of his
self
as an epicure looks over a dinner presented him—

Something grabbed him. Herewiss commended his soul to the Goddess, hoping that it would manage to get to Her in the first place, before he realized that Sunspark had him and was running.

“Where—” he said weakly.

(
Anywhere
, but out of
here
! I have seen those things before, at a distance, and there’s no containing them—)

“But it was contained. Spark, what is it?”

(The name I heard applied to it was ‘hralcin.’ If you desire to stay in this body, we must get you away from here quickly. They eat
selves
—)

“Your kind too?”

(No one knows. None of my people have ever had a confrontation with one of the things, as far as I know, and I would rather not be the first!)

Herewiss realized that Sunspark was still in the human form, running with him down the stairs and into the main hall. Behind them there was a great noise of roaring and crashing.

“Do you think it could kill you?”

(I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I have heard of those things taking souls, and the souls never came back, not that anyone had ever heard in the places where I’ve traveled. They say that one or two hralcins can depopulate a whole world, one soul at a time. We could go through one of the doors until it goes elsewhere—)

“Sunspark, put me down.”

(What??)

“Let me go.”

Sunspark put Herewiss down on the floor of the main hall and turned into a tower of white fire that reached from floor to ceiling. Herewiss wobbled to his feet.

“I don’t know how I managed to call it—”

(You said that the spell you were using was originally for inanimate objects?)

“Yes, but—”

(There’s your answer. The thing’s not alive. Why do you think it eats souls? When it has gotten enough of them, it gains life—)

“We’ve got to get it back in there.”

(You are a madman,) Sunspark said. (There is no containing the things within anything short of a worldwall.)

“But it
was
contained! If it was in there, and bound, it can be gotten in there again, and rebound—”

(Whoever put it in there knew more about it than we do, certainly. This much
I
know, hralcins don’t like light much. I can keep it away from us, I think. But it’s only a matter of time until it leaves this place and gets out among your poor fellow creatures—and then there’ll be little time left to them.)

“It mustn’t happen. They don’t like light?”

(No.)

“Maybe we can drive it back in through that doorway. Then I could bind it back in again—”

(But it takes you forever!) Sunspark’s flames were trembling; the crashing was coming down the stairs. (And the thing would make a quick meal of you. It’s got your scent, and once these things smell soul they pursue it until they catch it—)

Herewiss was sucking in great gulps of air, desperately fighting off the backlash. “I can decoy it back into the doorway. It’ll follow me. Then I’ll come out again, and you will hold it in with your fires until I can weave the necessary spell—”

Sunspark looked at Herewiss, a long moment’s regard flavored with unease and amazement. (I can hold it off from you—)

“Sunspark, if that thing can empty whole worlds of people, what will it do to the Kingdoms? Come on. We’ll let it into the hall, and I’ll duck back up behind it, and you drive it up behind me. Then up, and through the door, and you can hold it in—”

(Very well.)

The hralcin came careening down the stairs, all horrible misjointed claws reaching out toward Herewiss as it staggered from the stairwell and across the floor. (I can direct the fire and the light pretty carefully,) Sunspark said, (but try to keep out from in front of me, or else well ahead. I’m going to let go.)

“Right.”

Herewiss stumbled off to Sunspark’s right, and the hralcin immediately changed direction to follow him. At that moment Sunspark went up in a terrible blaze of light and heat, so brilliant that it no longer manifested the appearance of flames at all—it was a fierce eye-hurting pillar of whiteness, like a column carved of lightning. The hralcin screeched, put up several of its claws to shield what might have been eyes, a circlet of irregular glittering protuberances set in the rounded top of its pear-shaped body. Herewiss dodged around it and scrambled up the stairs, slipping and falling on the slime the thing had left.

At the top of the stairs he paused for just a moment, feeling sick, and his eyes dazzled as his body tried to faint; but he wouldn’t let it. The stench in the hall was terrible, as if the hralcin carried around the rotting corpses of its victims as well as their souls. Herewiss went staggering down past doorway after doorway, and finally found the right one. It was still black, and he quailed at the thought of going in there, maybe being imprisoned there himself, never finding the way out again, and the hralcin coming in after him—

He heard it screaming up the stairs after him. He thought,
Lorn, dammit!

He went in.

Immediately darkness closed around him, as if he had crawled back into a womb. There was no smell, no sound, nothing to see; he reached out and could feel nothing at all around him. He turned, looked for the doorway. It was still there, thought hard to see through the murkiness of this other place, and it wavered as if seen through a heat haze.

There was something wrong with his chest. He was breathing, but it was as if there was nothing really there to fill his lungs. Herewiss inched back to the doorway, put his head out to breathe.

The hralcin was coming down the hall, backlit brilliantly by the pursuing Sunspark. It saw Herewiss, screamed, and came faster. Herewiss took a long, long breath, like a swimmer preparing for a plunge.
It could be your last,
he thought miserably, and ducked back into darkness.

Silence, and the doorway was vague before him again.