The Door Into Sunset Read online

  THE DOOR INTO SUNSET

  Diane Duane

  Lionhall Press

  County Wicklow, Ireland

  Other books by Diane Duane:

  The Tale of the Five

  (also sometimes known as the Middle Kingdoms Sequence):

  Book 1: The Door Into Fire

  Book 2: The Door into Shadow

  The Young Wizards novels:

  So You Want to Be a Wizard

  Deep Wizardry

  High Wizardry

  A Wizard Abroad

  The Wizard’s Dilemma

  A Wizard Alone

  Wizard’s Holiday

  Wizards at War

  A Wizard of Mars

  Works in the Star Trek TM universe:

  The Wounded Sky

  My Enemy, My Ally

  Swordhunt

  Honor Blade

  The Empty Chair

  Spock’s World

  Doctor’s Orders

  Intellivore

  Dark Mirror

  For info on other books by the author,

  please visit

  www.DianeDuane.com

  Lionhall Press ePub ebook edition

  copyright 2010 Diane Duane

  *

  This edition of The Door into Sunset

  is dedicated with affection

  to the many patient readers

  still waiting for one final Door to open.

  Courage!

  A note on this edition’s text:

  The Door into Sunset was first published by Corgi Books in the UK in 1991, as a paperback original. This edition was followed by the Tor hardcover and paperback editions of 1992/3, which were printed from the UK plates and therefore also feature British spellings and punctuation (single quotes instead of double quotes, etc).

  In this version of the text—which was originally intended to open the second of a pair of omnibus volumes from the now sadly defunct publisher Meisha Merlin—some slight alterations have been made to the book as it appeared in the print editions. Occasional lines cut from earlier editions or the author’s final draft have been restored, and the book as a whole has been corrected back to the author’s preferred American English format.

  Cover design is by the author. The sword is from the collection of Peter Morwood. It is a reproduction of a 14th-century sword in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an Oakeshott Type XIV.1 of unknown provenance. The reproduction was forged for Mr. Morwood by Fulvio Del Tin of Del Tin Armi Antiche, Maniago, Italy.

  How many heroes gather then

  when the Lion wakes again?

  When the Eagle leaves the Tree,

  how many warriors will there be?

  One to give despite the cost:

  one to find the one that’s lost:

  one to wear the maiden’s crown,

  one to bring the lightning down:

  one a shadow, one a fire,

  one a son and one a sire;

  one that’s dead, and one alive:

  one that’s One, and one that’s Five....

  (rope-jumping song,

  Arlene, current 1480 p.a.d.)

  PROLOGUE

  What then shall be done to save Thy people? saith Héalhra. Canst Thou not put forth Thy power?

  Nay, saith the Goddess: in this I am bound by My own law: this is My creatures’ world. My creatures must themselves preserve and master it.

  A hard saying, Héalhra saith. Yet shall we do so. How shall it be done?

  In the time of thy need, the Goddess saith, shalt thou be overshadowed by My power: thou shalt be filled with My Fire, that hath been long lost to man, and kingship and mastery of the land shall be given thee. A god’s power shalt thou have, and with it strike down thine enemy and Mine: great shall be thy glory.

  Then when this thing is done shall we go north and found a realm, saith Héalhra in joy: and all things shall go well.

  Thou shalt not go, saith the Goddess. For all this there is a price: godhead once so assumed may not be put off. The Savior of thy people thou shalt be: but no man again. And She looked on him narrowly, and said, Wilt thou pay the price?

  Then Héalhra was silent a long while in sorrow. I will pay it, and all shall be as Thou wilt, saith he. But can Godhead yet be sweeter than work, and bread and wine, and love of the body, and sleep after love?

  And the Goddess turned away, Her eyes downcast, and made him no answer.

  Héalhra his Dreme,14

  The thing that surprised him most about dying was how very much it hurt.

  For a moment after he knew he was hit, Freelorn s’Ferrant stai-Héalhrästi had no time to waste on the arrow standing feather-deep in his chest. He was busy doing a magic, the one that would give his land new life from his blood. It was one of the few sorceries a royal person could do without being a king and Initiate as well, and too many lives rode on it for Lorn to let himself be distracted. But in the next moment, as he finished weaving the binding-spell around his fistful of dirt and blood, and would have sagged and gasped with relief, the whole world immediately constricted itself to the size and shape of the alien object sticking out under his collarbone. He would never forget it, he thought—that ashwood arrow, with its peculiar spiral Reaver fletching, and the double-banded tribal hatchmark crudely scratched on the shaft. The striped brown and black fletch-feathers were split where the archer had hastily grabbed the arrow by the fletching in the draw. A miracle it hit me at all, Freelorn thought—and then the pain tore him open like a talon from horrified gut to brain.

  Consciousness of his surroundings failed him in the fire of pain. He lost the surrounding battlefield, shrouded in unnatural darkness at afternoon; lost the wind and unseasonable snow howling around the friends who had followed him here, as they crouched among the tumbled cliff-rocks, waiting for the attacking Reavers to come and make an end of them. He lost the slender mail-clad woman standing alone in the snow and staring at him in horror, a shadow in her hand; he lost the man behind him who reached out to him in a blaze of blue Fire, crying his name. Only emotion remained to Freelorn now... dread of what was happening, loathing of the alien thing lodged in his flesh—both bizarrely replaced, a second later, by shame. How unnatural, how terrible to die! Life wasn’t meant to end this way, in blood and anguish. And something else had gone wrong too. It hadn’t hurt like this, the last time he’d died—

  In the crucible of pain, this moment melted into that one, becoming it. How old had he been? —seven, or eight, when the half-broken filly mule panicked in the palace stable and kicked him in the face? He had lain for days, they told him, burning with fever and concussion; not moving, sometimes not breathing. Lorn knew nothing of that. All he remembered were a few long moments of slanting red light—some window full of early evening sky, glimpsed uncomprehending through the brain fever—and then the bright place where he had found himself. At least it had started out bright. Later it had changed.

  It changed now. The agony still had its claws in him, but it didn’t matter, and Freelorn ignored it and looked out upon the Door that once again stood open for him. Black lintels reared up out of sight into forever; a doorsill carved out of night lay before him. Past the Door flamed endless depths of stars, faint intimations of that Sea that burned beyond mortal light and darkness, washing the long silent Shore where the Dead walk.

  Lorn had company at the Door again—the same company as last time, when he had walked here in dream, looking for his ancestor Healhra Whitemane to demand a miracle of Him. But dreams didn’t really count. This was the second time he had done the true journey to the Door. It was getting to be a habit... a dangerous one, even for a king. You could make the trip one time too many, and not come back.

  That had ac
tually been his intention on his first trip, after the mule-kick... when he found the Other standing in the Door, and complained bitterly to Her that he didn’t like the place where he’d been sent, and wanted to come back home. She had told him he wasn’t finished, and had made him go back... and since She had never let him have his way before, he hadn’t been surprised. What did surprise him, now, was his companion tugging at him from behind, pulling at the hand he was trying to loosen from its grip, and saying the same kinds of things She had said before—

  Lorn, no!!

  It disturbed Freelorn that She wasn’t here. Though Her dismissal last time had been swift and bitterly disappointing, he longed for another sight of Her. Or had it been a Him?—the memory grew vague as he grasped after it. Power, that he did remember, and a joy that would break the heart and heal it, both at once. That joy had been part of what convinced him to go back the last time. He had been promised more of it—

  Lorn! You have things to do!

  —and the promise had been kept. But this time his business was with Someone else. Last time he walked here, he’d come to ask his ancient Father the White Lion about the whereabouts of Hergótha the Great, the kings’ sword of Arlen. But the Lion had fobbed him off with demigodly hints and riddles, and then Freelorn had gotten involved and distracted in business of Herewiss’s. That was what came of trying to get work done in dreams. Now, however, he was not going to be distracted. He took another step forward—tugging along the one behind, who wouldn’t let go—and cried into the void, Father? Where are you?

  Here, the answer came. I heard you were looking for me.

  —and for once things were working right, for it wasn’t Healhra his line-father, the ancestor of all the Kings of Arlen, Who answered: it was Ferrant his blood-father. Ferrant was simply there, leaning on one lintel of the Door, his arms folded, gazing at his son with humorous calm. It was utterly like his father to be so casual on Death’s literal threshold. But then his father was seven years dead.

  Later, if he made it back to life, Lorn would weep at the memory of this moment, of the calm regard of a ghost. But here, in the shadowy place between the world’s reality and the soul’s, he was as matter-of-fact as his father. Slowly he pulled his hand quite out of the grip that held him from behind, and said, without preamble, Why didn’t you Initiate me before you died?

  Because it would have killed you, Ferrant said.

  How? Why? I was ready!

  If you have to ask, Ferrant said, explaining it wouldn’t help.

  Freelorn had to laugh at that; it was his father’s exact turn of phrase, remembered from a thousand childhood arguments. A lot of good that does me now! he said. Father, don’t you realize the trouble Arlen’s in? Seven years now there’s been no king on the Throne but the bastard who bought his way there and hunted me across the Kingdoms after you died. The royal magics that keep the Shadow bound are going to pieces for lack of maintenance! Darthen’s Queen and I just bound the Dark One again, but the rope is rotten—I won’t have a king’s whole power to use until I’m Initiate! You were the only one in Arlen who knew the rite—and you died before you told me! For our people’s sake, and Darthen’s, what do I do now?

  What I will tell you to do now, Ferrant said, looking serious.

  Freelorn listened with all of him.

  What I did, his father said, and my mother, and her mother and grandfather before her. —Make it up as you go along.

  Father!!

  His father looked at him with a tired but compassionate expression. For all the generations I was ever told of, each King or Queen who took a son or daughter to Lionhall for the Nightwalk at day’s end has pointed that prince or princess at the door of the Hall, and said to them, ‘Our Father bids you make your way through old Night to the morning, unguided and alone, as He did’. And then the King or Queen leaves, and comes back in the morning, to be greeted at the door by a new ruler-Initiate, or else to carry out the corpse. There’s no other way.

  You mean the original rite’s been lost?!

  His father said nothing.

  Father, Freelorn said desperately, if I die in the Nightwalk, the land dies with me, and all our people starve! My people! I can’t afford to take the chance! What do I do? Give me a hint!!

  His father looked at him gravely.

  Go to Arlen, and learn the rite.

  But Eftgan’s army won’t be ready for—

  I said nothing of armies. Go to Arlen, alone, and become Initiate.

  But they’ll kill me if they catch me!

  His father shrugged.

  Freelorn was chilled by his calmness. For a little while he could say nothing. What finally came out was, I miss you.

  But you miss Hergótha as much, said Ferrant, and there was a ghost’s lean smile on his face.

  For the first time, Freelorn became aware of still having a body, there so close to souls’ country; his eyes began to burn. Why did you have to die?! he cried.

  His father said nothing.

  I can’t stay here much longer, Freelorn said. You know that no one rules Arlen without Hergótha. I need it, and you had it last. Where is it?!

  His father gazed at him, and shook his head.

  I’ll deal with you later, Freelorn said, and turned away.

  Yes, his father said, you will. And he was gone.

  Freelorn rubbed his eyes briefly, then turned back to Herewiss and found him gazing at him with an expression anguished and helpless. Immediately he went to him and took Herewiss’s hands. Come on. You didn’t really think I was going to leave you, did you?

  Wordless, Herewiss pulled him close and simply held him for a moment. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and not enough time to do it in, and no way to tell how it’s to be done, Freelorn said. So let’s get to it.

  Together they turned away from death’s Door, back toward the battlefield.

  *

  Lorn rose up to find that a miracle had happened. Not so much that he was still alive. If you’re willing to live, and your loved is the first man in a thousand years to control the blue Flame of Power, dying of a mere arrow through the heart is difficult business. As they came back to consciousness of the world again and helped each other sit up in the snow, Herewiss merely reached out and touched the arrow; and shaft and barbed point and the place where they had gone in all vanished together in a flicker of Flame. Lorn spent a long moment looking down at his chest, still somehow expecting to see feathers.

  Then someone else crunched over to kneel in the snow beside them, and they looked up. It was Segnbora. She was mail-clad still, though the mail had a great rent in it, with a healed wound at the bottom. If she had before been alone on the cliff’s edge, she wasn’t any longer. Over her loomed a huge thunder-winged shape, burning in iron and diamond. And as for the long sharp shadow in her hand, now it was a shadow set on Fire; it streamed and burned like a windblown torch with the blue Flame she had pursued so long. The suddenly empty battlefield made it plain she had done something that had saved all their lives. But her expression, that of someone who has found her heart’s desire, made such an undertaking seem prosaic and small.

  “You’ve got it,” Freelorn said. “You’ve got it!”

  Much babbling followed—explanations, and cries of delight as Lorn’s other friends, his little personal army, five strong, came out of their hiding-places in the rocks and rejoiced. Only half an hour ago hope had been dead: Herewiss’s Power crippled, all of them doomed to quick deaths on the stricken field or slow ones by torture. Now it was all changed. Even the Queen of Darthen was sitting up again, healed in an instant of her own wounds by knife and arrow: and the low midsummer sun was coming out again, leaning golden toward evening. At such a time, anything seemed possible. The seven were already speaking of the throne of Arlen as if it was a thing achieved. And in the middle of them all, silent, there sat Lorn: one small mustachioed man, now suddenly brother to Queens, companion to Dragons, and the most wanted man in the Middle Kingdoms... wanted primarily
by the Power that had taught all Creation death. Freelorn thought wistfully of the days when he could have died with a clean conscience... then got up, brushed the melting snow off him, and once again started to work on becoming what he had been trained to be, a king. He did it reluctantly. Sooner or later kingship would kill him, as it had killed all his line from Healhra down to Ferrant.

  It now only remained to see how long he could make it take.

  ONE

  “It hath more the look of a collar than of a

  crown,” said one who looked on.

  “Ay,” quoth the young King, “but if a collar,

  ‘tis for my throat, not thine.”

  Darthene Tales: “Of Bron the Young”

  The morning after the second Battle of Bluepeak, Freelorn found himself suddenly awake in bed, gazing up at the ceiling with the feeling that the past seven years had never happened, were all a dream. Under the covers, he was as warm as he might have been on any of those early days, in his bed strewn with furs and velvets. Outside the room’s unseen windows were sunlight, and city noises, and on the sill, brown sparrows chattering. This was Prydon, certainly. His father was the King, and he himself the Prince, and everything at peace. A very odd, very bad dream, it had been. He lay there purposely not remembering it.

  Then he noticed that there was a crack in the ceiling; and though his bedroom ceiling had a crack in it, it wasn’t this crack. Regretfully he closed his eyes so as not to see: but it was too late, the crack was in his mind as well, and widening. For one thing, he was in bed, a real bed with a mattress, and good lawn sheets, and no bugs. How many years now had it been since he had been safe in any place with a bed? Hundreds of nights spent in the wet, in the cold, with only stars or clouds for ceiling, remembered themselves to him. No, it had all happened. Especially the bugs.