The Door Into Fire Read Free Page A

blue Fire. To strike the whole besieging army stiff and helpless with the Flame, and break the walls of the keep in the fullness of his Power, and bring Freelorn out of there. To strike terror into the army just by being what he was—the first man to bear Flame since the days of Lion and Eagle! And the look in Freelorn’s eyes. It would be so—
    Herewiss sighed. I never learn, do I. Let’s see what happens.
    Delicately, carefully, he set the sword’s point on the white stone of the altar, and took hold of the rough hilt with both hands. Herewiss became aware of a change, a stirring; something in the air around him moved, waited expectantly. His underhearing, that inner sensitivity that anyone experienced in sorcery develops, whispered that the Power of the place was moving about him, surrounding him, watching. His own Power rose up in him, a cold restless burning all through his body, demanding to be let out.
    Herewiss lifted the sword away from the stone, and held it straight up before him, point upward, watching moonlight and shadow tremble along the length of the blade with the trembling of his hands. And he reached down inside him, where the Flame was running hot now, molten, seething like silver in the crucible, and he channeled it up through his chest and down through his arms and out through his hands—
    The sound was terrible, a thunderous silent shout of frustration and screaming anger as the blue Fire, the essence of life, smote against something that had never lived, had never even been fooled into thinking that it lived. A silly idea, Herewiss thought in the terribly attenuated moment between the awful unsound and the sword’s destruction. As if plain sorcery could ever mix successfully with the Flame. Stupid idea.
    And the sword blew apart. Fragments and flying splinters shot up and out with frightening force, gleamed sporadically as they flew through light and shadow, ripping leaves off branches, burying themselves in the grass. One of them struck itself into Herewiss’s upper arm, and another into his leg just above the knee, though not too deeply. A third went by his ear like the whisper of death. He held in his cry of terror, remembering where he was, and dropped the hilt-end of the shattered sword in the grass.
    He plucked the metal fragment out of his arm and threw it into the grass, grimacing. For a long while Herewiss knelt there, bent over, hugging himself as much against the bitter disappointment as against the cold. I was so sure it would work this time. So sure.
    Finally he regained some of his composure, and finished picking the splinters out of himself, and turned to make farewell obeisance to the Altar. It seemed to crouch there against the ground, cold white stone, ignoring him.
    He forgot about the obeisance. He went straight over to Dapple and got dressed, and rode away from there.
    It was several minutes before he passed the marker that indicated the end of the Silent Precincts. Just the other side of it he paused, looking up through the leaves at the starlit sky. “Dammit,” he yelled at the top of his lungs, “what am I doing wrong? Why won’t You tell me? What am I doing wrong?”
    The stars looked down at him, cold-eyed and uncaring, and the wind laughed at him.
    He kicked Dapple harder than necessary, and rode out of the Wood to Freelorn’s rescue.

    •

TWO

    If the cat who shares your house will not speak to you, remember first that cats, like the Goddess their Mother, never speak unless there is something worth saying, and someone who needs to hear it.
    Darthene Homilies , Book 3, 581

    They were called the Middle Kingdoms because they were in the middle of the world as men then knew it. To the north was the great Sea, of which little was known. Ships had gone out into it many times, seeking for the Isles of the North mentioned in tale and rumor, but if those Isles existed, no ship had found them and returned to tell the tale. To the west, beyond the far western border of