Free The Door into Shadow by Diane Duane

tomorrow afternoon—tomorrow night, maybe—we’ll be riding through Chavi to get the news. We can leave her there; they’ll be glad to have her. She’ll take her time, get better, and follow us when she can. Face it, Lorn, the Shadow’s after us. We can’t care for an invalid from here to Bluepeak.”
    “ She saved my life,” Freelorn said, his voice harsh. He wasn’t angry at his loved, but at the unfairness of the Morrowfane, which had done this to her and left him untouched. “Several times…”
    “ She knew what she was doing, all those times,” Herewiss said. “She knew what she was doing when she went up the Morrowfane. Lang told us so. And she’ll know why we’re doing what we’re doing, and understand.”
    But there was little hope in his voice—
     
    ***
     
    — the blackness swallowed her again. All around her the rush and swell of inhuman voices was beginning, faintly, as if for the first time the sources of the sound were at some distance from her. But soon enough they would drown her resistance beneath their implacable song, close in on that one untouchable memory, rip it untimely from beneath the rock and make it come as real as the others.
    She shuddered violently. No, oh no. And in any case I won’t be left behind at the next inn like some horse that’s gone lame!
    Her bruised and battered pride got up one more time from the hard floor onto which it had been knocked. I am a tai-Enraesi. If my ancestors could see me they would laugh me to scorn! And I’m a sensitive trained in the ways of the inner mind. Fire or no Fire. I won’t stand inside here and do nothing!
    Off to one side, distantly, she could still hear Freelorn and Herewiss talking. Gulping with terror, Segnbora turned her back on them, concentrated as best she could, and began making her way toward the huge voices, deeper into the dark…
     
     
    ***
     

FIVE
     
    Offer an enemy a false show of hospitality in order to damn him, and the fires will fall on your head, not his. Give him the truth with his meat and drink, and trust it not to sour the wine…
    s’Jheren, Advice unasked , 199
     
     
     
    It was a long walk, full of halts, hesitations, and confusions, for the voices seemed to grow no nearer as she walked. Then abruptly she discovered that she had a seeming-body again, by walking into a wall, hard. She staggered back from it, momentarily seeing white with pain—then stepped forward with arms outstretched. Her fingertips bashed into the wall. She pushed close to it, spreading her arms wide, embracing the familiar roughness; she laid her face against it and squeezed her eyes shut against tears of vast relief. At last this place was beginning to behave as it should.
    Any trained sorcerer has an inner milieu into which he or she retreats for contemplation or preparation of sorceries. This, at last, was hers—not an abstraction of blackness and things buried, but the old cavern a mile down the coast from the house at Asfahaeg, her favorite secret place as a child.
    Long ago the coast dwellers had broken a thirty-foot hole through the cavern’s high, domed ceiling, turning it into a rude temple where they performed wreakings and weather sorceries to the sound of the waves crashing just outside. As an adult sorcerer Segnbora had made its image part of her, a great airy cave full of sunlight or moonlight and the smell of the Sea.
    She opened her eyes again, pushed cautiously away from the wall and looked up, trying to find the shaft-hole in the ceiling. After a moment she located it, though the shaft was distinguishable from the rest of the ceiling only by two or three faint stars that shone through. Strange. It’s never been this dark in here before… She turned and looked around, trying to get herself oriented. The faint rumble of the Sea bounced all around her, difficult to localize, but at last she thought she detected a slight difference in sound right across from her, a deadness that might mean the cave’s