Free The Door into Shadow by Diane Duane Page A

opening onto the beach. She stepped cautiously away from the wall, then started to walk.
    She touched something. It wasn’t the wall. It was smooth, and dry, and hot. In her shock she stumbled forward instead of jerking back, and the something clamped down on her outstretched right hand, hard. The shock of violation, of being attacked by something that had no business being here in the first place, made her cry out in rage.
    Before she even had time to struggle, from right in front of her, a huge, slow, deep bass viol of a voice spoke. “It seems excessive to put your hand in the Dragon’s mouth,” it said, “and then scream before you even know whether you’ve been injured.”
    Whatever had been holding her hand released it. Segnbora backed away and stood there rubbing the hand, which had been held tightly but not hurt. She was furious at herself for having shown fear. “What the Dark are you doing in here?” she yelled.
    “ We were invited,” said the voice, puzzled. “But your accent is poor. Perhaps for now you should speak more slowly.”
    “ Accent—” She stopped and realized that she hadn’t been speaking Darthene, or any human language, but the odd and terrible one that the voices in the darkness had been using. “Never mind that! You can’t be in here, this is me!”
    “‘ Me?’” the voice said. “‘We,’ surely. But may we ask why you’re keeping it so dark in here? Unless it’s because the place where we met was dark.”
    “ I can remedy that,” Segnbora said, annoyed. She lifted a hand, called up a memory of noon sunlight pouring in through the shaft—
    — and nothing happened.
    “ You are leaving us out of the reckoning,” said the deep slow voice.
    “ Perhaps you’d assist me, then,” Segnbora said, uneasy, but annoyed enough to be intent on not showing it. She concentrated again. “Sunlight…”
    This time the light came, streaming down through the shaft from a sky that seemed bluer and deeper than usual. Segnbora looked down and away from the blinding light—and was blinded instead by the intruder.
    The rough dark textures of the face she had touched in the Fane were dark no longer. The sunlight spilling down from above shattered and rainbowed from scales like black sapphires, every one with its shifting star. The Dragon blazed and glittered like a queen’s ransom, his every breath and movement creating a shower of dazzle around him.
    Now, Segnbora thought in wonder, I begin to understand that old story about Dragons spending their time lying on piles of jewels....
    His head hung above and before her, no longer an inert, half-perceived shape as it had been in the Morrowfane cave. It was an elongated head under the upper faceplate, and slender like a snake’s, though heavier-jawed. Its mouth ended in a beak like that of a snapping turtle’s; the point of the beak, the very end of the immense serrated jaw, was what had closed on her hand.
    Segnbora’s gaze traveled upward. From the beak to the place where the jaw met the neck was twenty feet at least. The eyes were great pupilless globes filled with liquid fire, blazing brilliant white even in the full sunlight. In the iron braziers of the nostrils the same light glowed, though nowhere near so brightly.
    The Dragon was watching her with no less interest. “Casting one’s skin for the last time is always a nuisance,” it said, “but it’s still one of the more pleasant things about going mdahaih. You like this body better than the one you saw in the cave?”
    “ No!” Segnbora started to say, but the thought snagged on the new language living in her throat, and wouldn’t move. The Dracon tongue, she realized then, put a great emphasis on accuracy of expression, and the one, bald, angry word was apparently insufficient.
    “ You look absolutely beautiful,” she said at last, “and I wish to the Dark you’d go away.”
    “ It wasn’t my idea to become mdahaih in a human, believe me,” the Dragon said. “Nor