The image made him cringe, unwanted harbinger of reality that it was. The fragrance of the wine crept up his nose, fruity and sweet, and glad of the distraction he drank again.
As he did, a moth came flickering in the window. It fluttered around in confusion, bouncing and wobbling around the square of moonlight on the floor, until it saw one of the candlesticks. It flew straight toward the flame, and with a directness that surprised Herewiss, circled it twice, three times, and dove headlong into the flame. There was a fizzing sound. The candle burned low for a moment, then sprang up again.
Herewiss sat there and felt the drug begin to work. He laughed, but the sound didn't seem to be coming from his own throat, though he could hear it plainly enough. The detachment extended itself to his thoughts as well. Part of him was sad for the moth, but the rest was uninvolved, though alert and observant. A small thing, a small thing, it seemed to be singing to itself, though in a minor key.
Disorientation came quickly. There was a spinning, a confusion, everything was subtly wrong, and Herewiss struggled to his feet, or tried to. He had a bad time of it, his muscles didn't work, he seemed tied down to something. Then, with an abrupt slight rending sensation, he found himself no longer tied to anything. He rose up. He stretched, and though there was no feeling of moving muscles, his mind slipped outward and filled his form. He was himself, totally.
Herewiss looked down at his body, where it lay among the pillows. There was no sickening feeling of entrapment, this time, nor was there the limitless rapture he had felt with the second use of the drug, a feeling of being free of a decrepit prison. He looked down now and felt pride, and an odd kind of tenderness. Unfulfilled and incomplete he might be in many ways, but he had a fine body: slim and long and graceful, with the muscles corded hard in it from the strain of his disciplines and the forging of swords. It lay there, eyes closed, one arm outstretched toward the wine cup. It looked relaxed and innocent, and beautiful in an angular kind of way. I always knew that a person's personality imprints itself to some extent on the body he wears, he thought, but I never thought to look at myself in that light
-or if I did, I refused to believe what I saw. I am beautiful, Lorn and Sunspark have been right when they've told me so. How curious it is that I never felt that way when I've been awake and in it. Must be a matter of viewpoint . . .
He turned away and looked around him. The walls of the room glowed softly with a subdued rose-golden radiance. It seemed that his guesses were right, that some kind of life did sleep in the stone.
The sword lay up against the wall near him, a long dark oblong blot against the light. Herewiss held up his hands before him. In shape they were the same as always, but there was a difference about them, a subtle transparency, and below that the muted glow of suppressed Flame. The moonlight had an added piquancy to it, a feeling like the cold taste of bitten metal, and Herewiss marveled as he breathed it in.
He looked down at the wine cup. The wine left within it was a white blaze of light, an expression of all the sunlight and moonlight that had become part of the grapes. Faintly he could hear the cries of ecstatic agony uttered by the vines as their burden was ripped from them, and he felt at a distance the silver touch of rain. He caught the languorous thoughts of one of the young girls who had helped to press out the vintage, and he felt how it had been for her, the night before, under the pomegranate trees with her lover. All that experience was too much for Herewiss to leave untasted. He knelt down by the shell of himself, took up the essence of the cup and drank off the joy and sorrow and time within it at one draft. The tangled, vivid selfhoods of bees and vintners and young girls flowed down his throat like cinnamon fire, and left an aftertaste like a summer dawn. I will never call a wine 'ordinary' again, he thought. Never—
Herewiss looked over his shoulder at the candle, and got up and went to it, amused and curious. The candle flame was an intricate web of bright energies, an entangled tracery of heat and light, in constant motion. Wobbling in earnest circles around and around it was the moth, a soft golden flicker, like a little flame itself. Apparently it had not noticed that it had died. Herewiss put out his hands and caught it carefully. It fluttered within his caging fingers, leaving here and there a wing scale like pale golddust, and finally sat on one of his fingers and looked up at him with confused dark eyes.
He carried it to the window and opened his hands, offering it to the night. The moth sat bewildered for a moment or so. Then it caught sight of the flood of silver light pouring in the window, and fluttered out of Herewiss's hands, bobbling upward into the night, straight for the transfigured Moon.
He smiled up at the moth, wishing it well, and looked out at the night and the stars. They blazed, blue and brilliant, as if seen through one of the doors down the hall. The world seemed to be hanging breathless in the midst of a clustered cloud of them. Their light was not cold, now, nor were they mocking him. They were singing, a song almost too high for him to hear, like the song of the bat. The song had words, but the multitude of voices drowned out the meaning in a million blended assonances. Herewiss contented himself with a few minutes of standing there in that inexpressible glory of sound and light, taking it all in, hoping that he would remember it tomorrow, through the headache.
Lorn is waiting for me, he thought at last, and so are my other guests, all of them, past the Door. I perhaps slighted them a little earlier. Let me make up for that now. Downstairs—
He exerted himself, and was there, standing in the midst of the silent main hall. Nearly all the people were asleep now, curled in dark silent bundles or stretched out beneath their cloaks. Dritt and Moris were still awake, unmoving, caring about each other in the darkness. Herewiss could feel the texture of their waking thoughts moving softly between them, as they rested in the twilit borderland between love and sleep. Herewiss smiled at them. Later, he thought, he might ask to share himself with them.
He looked around, identifying Freelorn's people one by one. Most of them were dreaming, in some cases quite vividly, so that faint images of their minds' wanderings were apparent. Segnbora lay curled in one corner, dreaming more loudly than the rest, her dream towered against the ceiling, some huge gossamer creature under a firefly sun. Herewiss was intrigued, and went to where she lay.
He knelt beside her, studying her for a moment before he would enter the dream. A clear sight like that of the last drug experience was on him again, but this time it was a more intimate and kindly vision, informed with compassion, very unlike the coldly clinical evaluation of the last time. Segnbora's hand lay out on her cloak, and he looked at it and shook his head sadly. Under the frail casing of the skin, such a violence and potency of untapped Power raged that it should have burned her out from within. But he also saw the barrier that sealed it away from her use, a wall of old frozen fears that all the inner fires couldn't melt. And the rules forbade him to tell her what to do about it. He sighed, and entered in.
There was the smell of salty spray, and black pockmarked rocks worn smooth by the sea, and a hot white midsummer sun, and Segnbora sat atop a boulder festooned with clambering strands of kelp. A sea ouzel was building a nest in a cranny of the boulder, and Segnbora was watching it intently. So was the Dragon that towered over her, a huge one, at its full growth but still young — no more than six or seven hundred years old. They watched the bird fly down to the surf line of the black beach to pick up pieces of dead seaweed. Another ouzel appeared, carrying something in its beak that was not seaweed. Segnbora clucked to it, and with a whirring of wings the bird went up to where she sat. It alighted on her outstretched hand, dropping the object in her palm. Herewiss, standing next to the Dragon, looked at the thing. It was a gem, like a diamond but more golden, finely cut into a sparkling oval.