Just a note: if I hear the phrase "The Door into Starlight" in any correspondence relating to this, I’ll probably run around the house for a while screaming. Just so you know.
--Diane Duane, on the philosophy of works in progress.
Herewiss s'Hearn peered through the Door again and frowned. "I feel like I've been making backwards progress."
Next to him there was a sound like a puff of steam escaping a sealed pot - Sunspark the fire elemental, sitting cross-legged next to him in the form of a red-haired, bronze-skinned woman, and snorting in derision. "Well, maybe that means it's time for you to take a step forward."
"Patience," Herewiss told her. "You can't blame me for being cautious about walking blithely through a Door into starlight."
"But it's not that Door," Sunspark reminded him. "We've both visited there, we'd know if it was. And we've already run every check either of us could think of. You won't find any more answers without going through."
Herewiss and Sunspark had come back, at last, to that Hold in the Waste, the Hold that was full of Doors into Otherwheres. He'd decided it was worth another try at his old idea of finding a Door that led to a world where all men could use the Goddess's blue Fire. Herewiss had his own Fire now, the first male in the Middle Kingdoms with the Power since Earn and Healhra, but he didn't think he'd be the only one for long, not with the Goddess's promise that he was to spread it, not with Freelorn still glowing sometimes with the Lion's power. Even Wyn - Wyn, of all people - was starting to catch underhearing from their spillover. And then there were the children: with himself and Segnbora as parents, not to mention Lorn and Eftgan and Sunspark and Hasai, it was nearly foredoomed that the Princes, sooner or later, would need the sort of training that Herewiss had wanted so badly, and never found, in his youth. Finding someone or somewhere else to give him guidance was only becoming more urgent, not less, and the Doors to Otherwheres still seemed like his best chance.
Unlike his last visit here, Herewiss could theoretically control the Doors, now that he could use his Flame. The difficulty, he had quickly learned, was not in controlling the Doors, but in knowing what to ask them for. After a few weeks' work he could call up, or at least find, a particular Door, and the first thing he'd figured out how to do was seal them permanently. But there were so many doors, so many that Herewiss had filled a folio with an attempt at an index and only made the merest start; and even the semi-stable patterns that he'd noticed during his first stay at the Hold were shifting faster now that his Fire had started to wake the place from its long slumber.
And even when he had found possibilities, there was very little that he could learn about a world by just the view through a Door. He and Sunspark had made a few cautious trips into the Otherwheres that seemed most like home, making sure that they could survive there and return to the Hold. But after a day spent on a tiny, sun-drenched island with no animate inhabitants, and then three weeks' hiking through lush forests of ferns and finding nothing but giant bird-like creatures which paid them no notice, it had become clear to them both that simply trying one door after another would get them nowhere.
"I suppose I could go visit Dad and borrow Dapple again," Herewiss said hopefully.
Sunspark laid a warm hand on his shoulder. "Dapple will forever have my gratitude, if only for bringing you to me, but you know he won't be able to tell you anything that Flame and the Goddess can't."
Herewiss had spent the past few weeks on a Flame-fueled wreaking to convince the Hold itself to show them the Door they needed. The basic wreaking had been simple enough, the Hold seeming almost eager to help them; it had been much harder to figure out how to describe what Herewiss wanted in terms it could understand, even with Sunspark's nonhuman perspectives to guide them. For the past three days, however, no matter how they tuned the working, the Hold would only show them one Door.
It was not a Door that had been on Herewiss's list of possibilities. It was a variation on one of the earliest they had found, in fact, on their first visit to the Hold years ago: the door's perspective was high above a broad plain. Across the plain was scattered a myriad of steady white lights, like stars growing up from the earth. Some were set in an irregular grid pattern; some rose above the plain like great mountains framed with diamonds; wide streams of them poured through channels in cascades of white fire; there was an uneasy order to them that wandered back into chaos whenever it started to make sense. They seemed to be densest below where the Door was was positioned, but spread to the horizon in all directions, except where they shimmered into wavery ripples like the light of the final Sea. It was night, or seemed like night, but there were no stars in the sky to match those below; only around the horizon there was a constant red-gray glow, like the start of an endless and eternal dawn.
It might have been life; but it was no life Herewiss was familiar with. And yet this was the Door his Flame told him was his best chance of finding someone like himself.
"Well," he said, and mentally girded his loins, "As Dahiric said when he burned away the Dark, here goes nothing. You coming, 'Spark?"
"Of course," Sunspark replied. Herewiss felt the hand on his shoulder shift as the woman's form flowed and shrank into the shape of a gold-and-red grass snake from the Steldene plains, which burrowed under the collar of his tunic. He could feel the dry heat of the fire elemental coiled around his neck, noticeably warmer than his own blood, like a living golden torc that had been baking in the summer sun.
Herewiss brought up the Wreaking that a Rodmistress from Darthis had taught him, which would ensure that whatever he found on the other side, he would have air to breathe, heat to warm him, strength to keep him from ending up a flattened smear, and other basic necessities: standard precautions when crossing between worlds, she had told him through disbelieving laughter, after hearing the story of his first venture through a Door.
As it happened, and much to his surprise, he didn't need the wreaking. He stepped out onto firm ground. It was the edge of some sort of precipice that overlooked the forest of stars; or perhaps, as he noticed the signs of deliberate manufacture and the stubby wall along the rim, more of a parapet. The air was breathable if not exactly sweet, and warm as a summer's eve, with a taste of something like a distant burning to it.
"I didn't know there was a Way up here," said a voice to his left, the 'Samespeech' learned by all Flame users interpreting for Herewiss in his underhearing, and he turned to see a figure, who looked for all the worlds like a man, crouched beside him on the parapet.
"We didn't come through a Way, we came through a Door," Herewiss said cautiously.
The light from below them cast the other man as no more than a vague shadow, until he lifted his hand and an amulet at his throat began to glow with blue Fire. Herewiss sucked in a breath of sudden hope, and sent an apology to the Goddess. As usual, he had been thinking too small. Why shouldn't another man with the Flame also be a walker between worlds?
The man was assessing him frankly by the light of his Flame. Herewiss knew all too well what he would see: a man, neither old nor young, tall nor short, with the sort of muscles that came to one who lived much around swords; a plain, dark tunic and breeches; the sword Khávrinen strapped to his back and thrumming softly with power, and Sunspark, who had poked its snake's head from under Herewiss' collar and was tasting the air.
Herewiss gave frankness for frankness and looked the stranger over in turn. He was a tall man, and thin; young, but with the marks of hard pain and a few interesting scars across his face. He wore a long, dark leather coat, a glove on one hand, and a white surcoat in some soft fabric. The surcoat bore an unfamiliar device, a sphere made of triangles, above the slogan "Natural Twenty," which must have had some meaning beyond the capacity of the Samespeech to clarify.
"You're not from around here, are you?" the man asked.
"Not at all," Herewiss said. "I'm on something of a quest. Herewiss stareiln Hearn," he offered, giving one of the shortened versions of his full name, "Prince-elect of the Brightwood, Comrade of the WhiteCloak, and husband of the Royal Houses. And Rodmistress, if only because of the expression on the Chief Wardress's face whenever I use the title."
The man laughed softly and said, "That sounds like something I would say. Harry Dresden. Wizard of the White Council and Regional Commander of the Wardens." He extended the un-gloved hand to Herewiss, and Herewiss took it.
Shaking hands, are you? Sunspark asked him in the mindspeech, tinged with smoky amusement.
With a little knuckle-work, Herewiss agreed. Not going to introduce yourself?
The two of you seem well-matched enough on your own...
Is that jealousy? Herewiss wondered in a private corner of his mind. The fire elemental had rather jumped in the deep end, agreeing to marry the rest of them when it was still working on the human concept of 'love' to begin with, but it was always fascinating to watch 'Spark figure things out-- when there weren't more urgent matters going at the same time.
Their old reference to 'knuckle-work', comparing a handshake to the matching of power that happened between two beings such as Sunspark when they met, was a joke in its way, but not entirely inaccurate: there were many things that could be learned from a person's handshake. Harry Dresden's was firm, confident, guarded, and yes, there was some knuckle-work, the tall man letting him know that he was ready take on a challenge, if necessary, but was not threatened, and Herewiss returned it in kind. The touch of skin-to-skin between two people of Power was more than that, however. Even through that slightest sharing Herewiss could sense the other man's power, and knew he was testing Herewiss in turn. And he did have power, an endless sea of anger and passion skilfully restrained under bindings of fear and love. And he had the Flame, and he had the control to use it.
Harry Dresden was giving him an indecipherable look as he let go. Herewiss broke the pause by saying, "I have to admit, the last things I expected to find through this Door were people like me."
Harry raised his eyebrows. "No? What else did you expect?"
Herewiss gestured at the forest of white light below them. "I don't know. Lights that could speak, maybe. People made of heat or gas. A civilization of stars. Or something so foreign I couldn't even begin to imagine."
Harry opened his mouth, closed it. "Your world is pretty far down on the tech level, isn't it?" he said slowly.
"I don't know that I'd say that--" Herewiss said.
"From the clothing, not to mention the sword, I'd guess tech level three. No gunpowder or printing presses? Mostly agricultural economy, limited trade, low population density?"
"Well, we're working on the population density part," Herewiss said, still trying to make sense of the Samespeech's interpretation of the rest of it.
By that do you mean you personally? In that case you should be spending more time with 'Berend and Eftgan and less time with Lorn--
If you're going to participate in the conversation, Sunspark, talk where everyone can hear. Otherwise be quiet.
Harry gestured him over to the edge of the parapet. "Look down there. Really look - you must have enough power to have the Sight. Look beyond what your mind thinks it sees."
Herewiss joined Harry beside the low wall. He though he knew what the other man was describing: the underhearing, the ability that among other things let him speak silently with Sunspark, was the commonest of the extra senses that came with Power, but someone skilled in the flame could open up all of the Othersenses, and experience the world at a level deeper than reality. A Rodmistress with all of her Othersenses in full play would see souls, would feel lines of power, know the history of a thing from its inception to its final fate ...
"Ah, you might want to be sitting down," Harry said, at the same time Sunspark said Are you sure this is a good idea?
If it's not, I'm sure you can handle whatever happens, Herewiss told him, Stay alert. He sat down and Harry folded himself up beside him, tucking the coat's skirts around him.
Even from the lower vantage point, Herewiss had a clear view of the web of crystalline lights below them. He started to open up his Othersenses one by one, the way Eftgan and Segnbora had shown him on one long sunny afternoon on a hill above the Eorlhowe, and as he did, everything shifted.
The lights weren't people; they were things, they were objects crafted by hands not unlike his own. Or crafted by other hands made by people like him, or onward in histories that stretched farther than he had ever imagined existed on one world; they were connected to each other by a tangle of threads of copper, and they burned with a fire that was older than humankind. He pulled his senses back from the wrought lamps that sparked with ancient fire before he became lost in the stories they told him of mountains being worn away by rivers, of endless forests of ferns taller than the Rooftree, of a sun bursting into life for the first time--
But what he had seen through the Door was the least of the light he saw now. Because to his Othersenses, this world was lit up by souls: the energy of each life, birth and loving and living and dying, was its own spark; spots where great events had happened, wonderful and terrible, stained the land in a kaleidoscopic multitude of glowing colors, the emotions and thoughts of the living people dancing among and around them. This place had centuries of life, of people, of endless humanity, and before that, millennia of paths crossing at this spot, of hopes being treasured, lost, gained. Thick streams of bright power, only given greater strength by all the humans living among them, ran below and welled up through the earth.
It felt like nothing so much as the second time Herewiss had taken the Soulflight drug, when he had felt himself expand to encompass all the world, and every last being in it; but he was seeing no farther than his ordinary eyes might have reached, only deeper. And there was so much, and it was all beautiful, even the terrible parts ...
He wrenched himself away before he forgot how, dialed down his othersenses just enough to keep from getting caught forever in the endless, countless souls below him.
"It's really something, isn't it?" Harry said softly, with the pride of a new father showing off his sleeping baby.
"It's a city," Herewiss breathed. "It's all one city, one city with more people than live in my entire world."
"Ten million people, more or less," Harry said. "I Saw something terrible here, not long enough ago. It reminded me that sometimes it's important to See the city when it's beautiful, too, to store up against when it isn't. And it is beautiful, more often than not."
I think I might have been here before, Spark said thoughtfully. It was a lot smaller then, and no electric lights, but it smells familiar even without the burning; that silent threat in the wind off the lake. There was some good feeding that week. A lot of us dropped in.
"Of course," Harry added, "Andi keeps threatening to get me a Batsignal if I don't cut out the brooding-on-rooftops routine."
The Samespeech choked on that one, too, so Herewiss just asked, "Do you live here?"
Harry nodded. "Live here, and I'm pretty much the official go-to guy if anything unusual involving magic happens here." He caught Herewiss's eyes and grinned, the light from below sparking in his. "For my si--" he started to add, but Herewiss's Underhearing was still far more sensitive than usual, and Harry must have left himself open as well, because almost as soon as their eyes met, Herewiss found himself falling into the other man's mindscape.
His host crouched in front of him, immediately recognizable, but betrayed no sign that he had noticed Herewiss's intrusion. Herewiss realized belatedly that he must be in Herewiss's mind in return, that they had crossed each other in passing. He wished Harry the luck of the Hold and then turned to get his bearings.
Harry Dresden, Wizard of the White Council, was crouched over a small silvery-blue Flame, trying to shelter and smother it at the same time, and Herewiss winced in sympathy; there had been years upon years when his own Flame had looked like that. In the darkness of night the Fire cast a shadow behind him, huge, monstrous, and wavering; almost alive in its own right. Like a great black scar it darkened most of one wall of the ruined cottage where Harry was crouched; looming over the cottage were the jagged remains of a great tower, like a broken tooth. The tower was on the top of a hill, and the hill reigned over a small island surrounded by dark water and whitecaps. The rest of the island was forested.
The forest was on fire.
A storm of heat and smoke, angry red-orange in contrast to the silvery Flame, surrounded the hilltop on all sides, kept back only by a few dozen yards of bare ground on the hill that it was still continually trying to conquer, whipping great streams of flame and red-hot coals around. The light of the forest fire surrounding them gave Harry a dozen more flickering, inconstant shadows all around him, even as it flushed red rage through the great dark one.
Harry wasn't concentrating on the one silver-blue Flame for its own sake, Herewiss realized. He was using all the strength and concentration he had to keep the firestorm outside from overtaking the hilltop Sanctum, to keep a ward of desperate love and fear around the ruined cottage, protecting the people inside.
Because there were other people inside. Herewiss hadn't noticed them at first, because most of them were huddled in dark places within the ruin, and because it was very uncommon for a person's mindscape to have others in it, but there they were. A lovely, blonde woman with empty eyes propped against a dark bearded man with the same stick-thin height as Harry; a handsome, tall, middle-aged man and woman who leaned toward each other even as they looked away; a glowering, monstrous figure with a twisted leg. But beyond them, more, vaguer, wilder figures, working into the fabric of the mindscape itself, established as only a few strokes of impression: a long fall of red hair, a storm contained in a lovers'-cup, two blurs of women like sunlight and fire, a man wielding beauty like a weapon and a man wielding a sword like a crutch, a dog and a cat and a tiger and a huddle of wolves, a man with a black staff and a woman with blood in her heart and a woman with chains on hers, even more and more, until Herewiss began to realize that if he looked deep enough, sheltered inside this tiny circle of calm, he might eventually find all the souls he had seen in the city outside, all of its streets walked one-by-one--
Their gaze broke and Herewiss was thrown back into his own head, looking into a reasonably ordinary face, those eyes still lit by the city but no longer hiding endless depth and fire. Herewiss wondered for a second what Harry had found in his own mindscape while he wasn't paying attention, whether it had been frightening or joyful or both, or as he sometimes secretly feared, just the endless, empty, blank stone halls of the Hold in the Waste that was often all he found on his own dark nights of soul-searching.
He braced himself to answer some question about his inner Self when Harry looked away and seemed about to speak, but all he did was scrub his gloved hand across his eyes and say, "Sorry. I didn't-- Anyway. Why did you say you'd come to Chicago? Something about a quest?"
"I'm searching for other men who can use the Flame, like us," Herewiss said, drawing Khavrinen to demonstrate and laying the sword across his knees, wound about with the flickering Fire. Harry reached a hand toward it, involuntarily, but pulled back.
"You bound your soulfire to a sword?" he asked.
"I needed a focus," Herewiss said. "And the sword was meaningful to me. Do you not use a focus?" he asked.
"Well, yes, of course I use focuses," Harry said, producing a Rod from somewhere in his coat, and Herewiss sighed silently.
At least you know men can theoretically use Rods, Sunspark pointed out.
I knew that already. I was hoping to find evidence that they don't have to--
"--but I'm not particularly interested in burning up my soul and dying, so," Harry was continuing.
"I figure I have a decade more at most, I might as well burn brightly when I burn out," Herewiss shrugged.
Harry frowned at him. "A decade? You can't be more than middle-aged. Are you sick? We might have medical treatment here--"
Herewiss cut him off. "I'm not sick, but I use the Flame. You know what happens to Flame users."
"No," Harry said slowly. "I don't."
"...You don't know?" Herewiss said. "No-one in my world is certain why, but it shortens the life. The more Flame you use, the less time to use it - Rodmistresses only rarely make it to forty. You said you were being careful of burning up your soul - some people say that's how it eats at you."
"I was told that if I used too much Soulfire all at once, I would have no soul left for myself, and it would kill me," Harry said. "Nobody mentioned it was cumulative."
"Flame not all that common on this world?" Herewiss asked, with a twinge of disappointed hopes.
Harry smiled with a lot of teeth. "Not as such, no."
"Perhaps it doesn't work that way here," Herewiss said. "Rules can change between worlds. Where I'm from, they say it used to be that Rodmistresses wouldn't die young; but then the Shadow came, and since we fought our way back from the Dark, it's been so. Maybe one of the things I'm meant to do here is start learning how to change that."
"I can assure you that whatever else you can say about my world, we're not in some mythical golden age of light and innocence," Harry said dryly. "Listen - can you stick around here for a few days?"
Herewiss spread his hands. "I'm not on a schedule."
"Good. Apparently there's some people I need to talk to about Soulfire, projected lifespans, and things I haven't been told. And I think you might want to be there too."