Free The Door into Shadow by Diane Duane Page B

that of the rest of the mdeihei. They’ve been making endless noise about it.” Though Segnbora had never heard the words before, she understood them instantly. Mdahaih: indwelling within a host body and mind. Mdeihei: the indwellers, the souls of linear ancestors, the thousand-voiced consensus, the eternal companions.
    The thought made her hair stand up. Segnbora realized then that the sound she had been hearing in the background wasn’t the Sea, but a chorus of other voices, all like that of the Dragon. It’s a pleasant enough sound, she thought. A single Dragon sounded like a bass viol talking to itself, a deep breathy voice full of hisses and rumbles and vocal bow-scrapes. But Dragons in a group seemed to prefer speaking together, and had been doing just that ever since she walked back into her cavern. The result was a constant quiet murmur and mutter of seemingly sourceless voices: scores of them, maybe hundreds, coiling together words and meaning-melodies in decorous, dissonant musics.
    And they were growing louder. They didn’t approve of Segnbora, of her clumsy gropings and her rudeness to them in the darkness into which they had been thrust. Nor did they approve of the abnormal singleness of her mind, and they were saying so, in a dark-hued melody that sounded like a consort of bass instruments upbraiding its audience.
    “ I don’t much care whose idea this whole thing was,” Segnbora said. “But won’t you creatures please—” She fumbled for the right word, but there was no word for undoing the mdahaih relationship. “Won’t you just go away?” she said finally, feeling uneasy about the vagueness of the term.
    “ Where?” the Dragon said, puzzled.
    “ Out of us!” Then she hissed with annoyance at the choice of pronoun. But in this language there seemed to be no true singular pronouns: even what she had been using for first person singular was a plural, me-and-the-rest-of-me, that implied the mdeihei . The only genuine singular forms in the language were either for inanimate objects, or human beings and other such crippled, single-minded entities.
    “ That’s impossible,” the Dragon said, lowering its voice into its deepest register, the one used for addressing the very young. “You’re sdahaih, and will be until you die.” The word it used was res‘uw: lose-the-old-body-and-move- into-a-new-one. Segnbora rubbed her aching head in bewilderment.
    “ If you were one of us,” the Dragon said, “you’d bring about hatchlings in time, and the soulbond between you and them would be established once they broke shell. The bond would grow stronger in them as they grew, and weaker in you as you became old. Finally, when you left your body, you would be drawn into them: become mdahaih. And so it would be with their hatchlings, on through the generations, forever…”
    “ Forever,” Segnbora whispered, feeling weak. “But all those voices—they can’t all be your ancestors…we wouldn’t be able to hear for the noise!”
    “ The ones furthest back are hardest to hear. They fade out in time—which may be for the best. The mdeihei are for advice, among other things; and advice from someone gone mdahaih fifty generations ago may not much benefit the sdaha, the out-dweller. At any rate, the strongest voices are the newest, the first four generations or so.”
    Segnbora sat down on the floor, miserable. The great head inclined slightly to watch her, causing another brief storm of rainbows.
    “ What happens,” she said eventually, “if I die, and there are no children, and no one is close by to accept the linkage, the soulbond, as I seem to have done for you?”
    She could see no change of expression in the iron-and-diamond face, but the Dragon’s tone went grave. “A few have died and gone rdahaih,” he said: not “indwelling” or “out-dwelling,” but “undwelling.” “They are lost. They and their mdeihei vanished completely, and from the mdeihei of every Dragon everywhere. They