The Door Into Fire (28 page)

And then the multitudes went away, and there was one of him again. Herewiss had never felt so lonely in his life.

First Herelaf gone.

Now Freelorn, abandoning him for the moment, intending to pick him up again later when he was more amenable, more willing to be what Freelorn wanted him to be.
I’m not a loved to him. I’m a tool. I’m a symbol for something else. I’m something to
use—

He wandered away slowly. He had come looking for joy. He had found only misery.
Cheated
—

Eventually he found himself back in the gray place again, isolated in the cold gray fog and glad to be that way. There he stayed for a while, sitting on the damp hard ground, letting his sorrows have free run through him, mourning his losses, sunk in his wounded self.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t make it last. His own wry sense of humor began to betray him—there was no holding it in abeyance for long.
Well,
he thought,
I was a god for awhile, and that was nice—and then I died a little from something my loved did to me. That’s the way the pattern usually runs, isn’t it? So now I should go be reborn, so that the circle can be closed, and all things start again. It’s such a nuisance—

He laughed softly to himself, and the act destroyed the cold place around him, leaving him hanging free again amid the myriad brilliances of the stars.
They look like my mind did,
he thought, his heart slowly opening out to them, rejoicing in them—celebrating the stately passage of their bright-burning companies, the way they opened shining arms to the wide darkness, blown swirling in slow grandeur by winds he could not sense.
But how calm, how serene. Is this what the Goddess’s mind looks like, then?

He hung there for so short a time, it seemed. He had perceived all these families of stars at once, and all the lives upon their worlds, and the knowledge had been as nothing. Now he turned his mind outward and found something that he could not comprehend, though he could feel the currents of it stirring around him— the vast breath of a Life greater than all life, to which all that lived would eventually return. He strove to understand, pushing his mind outward again, and found to his bewildered joy that, no matter how hard he pushed, the Sharer of that greatest Life was always far ahead of him. Herewiss finally gave himself up to the joy, his heart taking him into regions where cold thought could not.

Much later he came back to some knowledge of himself, and sighed, feeling diminished, but not alone.
It’s good to know,
he thought,
that there’s always something bigger than you are...

He hesitated a moment longer, waist-deep in the stars, like a swimmer wondering whether to come out of a warm sea.
Oh, well,
he thought after a moment,
Sunspark was right—I was awfully tired. I shouldn’t stay out much longer; I could die of it. But I could take a little more time. I’ll walk home.

He reached sideways, found the world he was looking for, and stepped into it, passing out of the starstrewn night into a place of endless soft golden mists. Other people also moved through the fog, but they were only faintly perceived shadows going by. He could have conversed with them, but chose not to; he preferred them as silent company on the walk home, reassuring but unintrusive.

After a while the gray stone of the hold appeared through the haze. This surprised Herewiss , for he had expected to be able to find it only by feel—the place affected the worlds into which it reached, making a clearly perceptible bending in the stuff of space, something like the swirl-funnel that forms in stirred water. But the hold itself was manifesting here, and not merely the combined effect of its many doors.

It bulked clearer through the mist as Herewiss approached it. The stone was more silvery than gray, and it glittered and flashed softly with buried highlights, though there was nothing in the even golden mist to make it do so. And somehow the many odd angles and curves of its structure did not look as wrong here as they did in the “real” world. There was a logic to them, a unity of construction and purpose that he had occasionally sensed, but never really seen. Even the hole left when Sunspark had destroyed the outer wall somehow entered the logic of the design and made sense; it was as if it had been a planned addition, which had been predicted and taken into account during the building of the place. Indeed, now that he concentrated on it, Herewiss could perceive changes that were to come later: a tower missing here, a wing added there, a whole section slated to unfold within the heart of the building, protruding partly into an adjoining world…all planned, all accounted for. The hold sang with inevitability like a great piece of music, and Herewiss stood there for a while and admired it for the work of art it was.

Finally he sighed and walked through the gate and across the great hall, heading for the stairs that would take him back up to the worktower and his waiting body. He looked through the doorways as he passed them, and was slightly amused to find that they showed only empty rooms, with windows looking out into the nighttime Waste. Of course, some of the rooms that could not have such views on the desert had them anyway, despite the fact that they should have looked down into the center court of the hold. Herewiss laughed softly; the place had a sense of humor that he appreciated. He trailed his hand along the wall as he went up the stairs, saying an affectionate hello, and the warm stone pushed back against his hand like a cat.

And here was the tower room at last, his tools and materials somewhat vague and hard to see on this plane, and his body sitting phantomlike in the chair, seemingly asleep—

—and standing close by it, as if guarding it—

—sweet Goddess, what was
that?

To categorize it, to describe it, was to do it a disservice—that much he realized even as he tried to do so. Comparisons were unfair to it. It shook and burned with uniqueness, a hymn of piercing singularity; it was a poem wrought of glass and fire and the sudden taste of blood, an impossibility trying to become possible. Something that had never been, trying to
be
. Birth and death both happening at once in the middle of an existence, the pain and loneliness of both assaulting something that had invited them both willingly, though both were outside its experience— (Sunspark?)

It turned and faced him. The comparison Herewiss had been trying to make suddenly made itself. He had perceived Freelorn and Segnbora in their totality, and himself partially, and had been amazed by the complexities he had found. Now he perceived Sunspark in its totality, for the first time. The experience at Madeil had been pallid and misleading compared to this.

Sunspark was a oneness. Not a tangle of warring motivations, not divided against itself…but
one
. A single, driving, driven force, an eternal constant, a being, an IS! And a tightly encapsulated one it had been, wound around and through itself, dwelling within itself completely, needing none other. Of course its kind had no need for love or companionship in any form. They were
themselves
, gloriously self-contained, solitary as stars. When they finally grew tired of themselves—to that extent the great Death could affect them—they found another in the same state and conjoined, united in an ecstasy of renewal, were lost in it forever and both reborn as new identities, a blend of parts of the two that formed them.

But Sunspark—

Sunspark had become unique.

Sunspark was changing. Daring to change.
Trying
to change.

It had managed to conceive of something totally outside of its needs. It had come to understand love, and it was daring to experience it, flying with doomed valor into the face of something that could only cause it infinite pain. But daring it nonetheless, for the sake of the dare, for the possibility of learning something new, of becoming something it had never been or known. Reaching out into the darkness outside of itself, as Herewiss had turned himself outward and sought to grow into the Universe. None of its kind had ever dared so. It knew as much, and trembled with fear even as it bent over Herewiss’s stiff body and feared for
him
, loved
him
. It broke the laws that the Universe had set up for its kind; and it knew what it did, and it feared—
but it loved—

Sunspark faced Herewiss, and perceived him. It feared him; feared that he would inflict pain upon it—pain, that amazing newness, all the more terrible for Sunspark’s inexperience with it. The elemental’s complete horror of pain rippled through its changing fires, plain to see.

Yet it welcomed him—

—and reached out to him—

—
and dared to love him—

Herewiss stood there, torn, daunted, amazed, yet exalted by its courage— (Sunspark—)

(Herewiss,) it said, and its use of his name was wound about with fire and gentleness both. (Thy body—it weakens.)

His emotions were burning through him now like fire themselves. (I was so lonely,) Herewiss said, (and I never knew—never understood that you were like this—the bravery—Sunspark, I’m
sorry!)

It grew, its fires swelling, towering with love, terror, pain—(Oh my loved, don’t be—don’t be—just get back quickly before you die!)

The courage. The sheer daring. He was swept up, carried past his fear and through to the other side—

—
he loved too—

(For this little while,) Herewiss said, exultant, euphoric—loving—(it can wait.)

He reached out. (Shall I dare less than you?) said Herewiss.

Sunspark came to him.

(—embracing the heart of a star, and being embraced by it: part of that fire, lost in it, burning in nonambivalent brilliance forever and forever; being and not-being, victory, surrender, death and birth lying in one another’s arms at last, after long estrangement; the loneliness filled; the insatiable fires satisfied—)

In the morning, Sunspark learned how to cry, and Herewiss remembered how again.

“Now indeed may it be seen,” said Earn, “that our life’s days are ended.” “That were ill seen,” Healhra made answer. “Wherefore,” said Earn, “seeing that we shall meet again by the shore of that Sea of which the Starlight is but a faint intimation?” “’S truth,” said Healhra, “my loved; yet though our Mother waiteth on that Shore, still here would I remain with thee. For life and breath are sweet. And also, She loveth not well those who let Life and Love, Her gifts, slip away through a grip made loose by resignation. Dearly She bought those gifts for us, and dearly shall the children of Night purchase them from me in turn. Well the Goddess loveth the driver of a hard bargain.”

Battle of Bluepeak,
tr. Erard, ch. 16

Herewiss woke up hounded by small urgent voices in the back of his brain, voices that told him to hurry, that gave him just time enough to relieve himself before steering him back in to work, that pushed him so that he found himself at the anvil before he was even fully awake. The day began with a sleep-blurred image of his hands holding the tongs, and the tongs resting on the anvil with nothing held between them, and Herewiss standing there, staring with fuzzy expectant confusion at the pores and dents in the anvil’s metal.
What am I doing here?
he thought, and reached for a sword blank, and called for Sunspark to come dwell in the firepit.

•

The morning fell away in chunks and half-glimpsed pieces, casualties of the insistent rhythms of hammering. Each stroke rang a second away, and every second was just like every other. There was the swing of the hammer, the bunching of muscles, the jolt and clang of the metal ringing and rebounding away from itself, the sword jumping away from the anvil and the hammer from the sword, again and again and again, the old familiar beat renewing itself with the dogged persistence of some hard heart.
Again
and
again
and
again
. A brief pause here when the pressure of his bladder became too much; another moment stolen there when the rawness in his throat made him stop to drink; and always the impatient voice of his fear rustling softly just under his proper hearing, like rats in the walls of his self. Herewiss was slightly aware of Sunspark watching him from the forge, of bright eyes in the fire, looking at him with concern. But he dared not let himself respond to the look; to do so would have been to waste precious time. He let the hammering take him and use him for its own purposes. It was rather pleasant to not think at all, just to be arms at the end of a hammer—

(Herewiss.)

He dared not stop. He kept on hammering.

(Herewiss. You asked me to let you know about that binding at intervals.)

“Mmph.”
Again
and
again
and—

(It’s holding well—under the circumstances, that is. But you’re going to have to try to control your fear a little better. When you discharge so strongly, the binding weakens.)

“I’ll remember.”

(But Herewiss—how can you expect to control yourself properly with as little sleep as you’ve been getting? An hour here, two there—)

“Spark,” he said, pacing his thoughts between the hammer-blows. “My loved. I haven’t
time
. Something is happening. The Fire’s going out. I have to hurry—”