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

spark that everyone has, can have it awakened by someone else already focused. Now here I am... and one of the things She told me was that I was to be a catalyst, to start to spread Her Fire around again, and among men as well as women.” He breathed out, hard. “Apparently it’s working, even with just that slight spark. I don’t know why I was surprised. She knows what She’s doing.”
    “Dusty,” Freelorn said, with great feeling, “I don’t want the Fire. I don’t even want the underhearing, particularly. It makes me walk into things when it hits.”
    Herewiss looked for help at the sky. “Nine-tenths of the human race prays to have the Fire restored to it, and you don’t want it—”
    “The other tenth are all Rodmistresses,” Freelorn said, “and sometimes they don’t want it either! I can’t control this, I don’t have time to learn how, and if it gets me in trouble—”
    “I can’t block it,” said Herewiss. “It’s involved with the parts of your mind where intuition and hunches live, and if I tried meddling with those, I might just as well chop off your arms and legs and send you to Arlen in a cart: you’d have as much chance of surviving the next couple of months.”
    Freelorn took the cup back. “I know, I know.” He drank about half of the wine at once.
    “And the only way to stop the Power waking up any further—”
    Herewiss fell silent. Freelorn looked at him. “We won’t be doing much of that for the next couple of months, anyway,” he whispered.
    “Don’t remind me.”
    There was silence for a few minutes, as they passed the cup back and forth.
    “I wish you could come with me.”
    “Even if it meant—”
    “Dusty, it’s just, just that... I don’t want to be a god.” Freelorn looked south. It was easy to fantasize the presence of mountain peaks white in the shimmer of moonlight on the edge of the horizon, even though Bluepeak was hundreds of miles too far away. “Everybody I know is turning into one, all of a sudden. I always wanted you to have your Fire, you worked and suffered and struggled so hard for it, you couldn’t be you without it... but I thought everything else would stay ordinary. Now your Power’s slopping over on everything it touches. And there’s so much of it. The mountains down south aren’t shaped the way they used to be, because of you.” He laughed. “A month around you and Segnbora picks up Skádhwë, four thousand Dragons and enough fire for any fifty Rodmistresses. Pretty soon Dritt and Moris and Wyn and everybody else are going to break through and catch Fire just from breathing your used air.” The laugh had a slightly desperate sound about it this time. “And where does it all leave me, when I want to stay the way I am? Can the you that you are now, love a mere mortal?”
    Herewiss looked at him for a few seconds in silence, and then lifted the cup and looked at him over the rim.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s find out.” And he drank, and held the cup out to Freelorn.
    Lorn took it and finished it. “I have to finish packing,” Herewiss said. “Come to bed?”
    “In a while.”
    Herewiss nodded, hugged him one-armed, and headed down the stairs.

    *

    Lorn leaned there and looked southward for some time, while his mind settled out of turmoil. He had been looking for words to tell Herewiss what was bothering him for days and days; now he wasn’t at all sure that the words he’d found had been the right ones. Underhearing didn’t do you much good when it only went one way. It would be nice if loving was what he had thought it would be when he was young and stupid: perfect understanding, perfect union, effortlessly arrived at. But there was only one lover from whom that could be expected....
    His gaze dropped again to that white road, running eastward into night. Nearly four months ago, it had been. He and his people and Herewiss had been hot on the trail of the old Hold in the western Waste, a place surrounded by