Well of Shiuan

  Socha had smiled the morning she parted from them; Jhirun recalled her wrapped in sunlight, the boat gliding from the landing as it parted into that golden light: Socha had taken such a leave, at Hnoth, when madness swelled as the waters swelled in their channels. Jhirun let herself wonder the darker thoughts that she had always chased from her mind, whether Socha had lived long, swept out into the great gray sea-what night might have been for her, adrift in so much water, what horrid plunging of great monsters sporting near the shell of a boat; and in what mind Socha had come to the end,-whether she had wept for Barrows-hold and a life such as Cil had accepted. Jhirun did not think so.

  She drew the gull amulet from between her breasts, safe to see it now in daylight, safe where no one would take it from her; and she thought of the king under the hill, and the stranger-himself driven by a nightmare as her own drove her.

  The white rider, the fair rider, the woman behind him: day and white mist, as he was of the dark. In the night she had shuddered at his ravings, thinking of white feathers and of what lay against her heart, that seventh and unfavorable power-that once had prisoned him, before a Barrows-girl had come where she ought not.

  The gull glittered coldly in her hand, wings spread, a thing of ancient and sinister beauty, emblem of the blankness at the edge of the world, out of which only the white gulls came, like lost souls: Morgen-Angharan, that the marshlanders cursed, that the Kings had followed to their ruin-the white Queen, who was Death. A nagging fear urged her to throw the amulet far into the marsh. Hnoth was coming, as it had come for Socha, when earth and sea and sky went mad and the dreams came, driving her where no sane person would go. But her hand closed firmly about it, possessing it, and in time she slipped it back into her bodice to stay.

  She could not see what lay about her in the mist. The pony’s hooves rang sometimes on bare stone, sometimes splashed through water or trod on slick mud. The dim shapes of the hills loomed in the thick air and passed her slowly like humps of some vast serpent, submerged in the marsh, now on this side of the Road and now on the other.

  Something tall and thin stood beside the roadway. The pony clopped on toward it, and Jhirun’s heart beat faster, her fingers clenched upon the rein, the while she assured herself that the pony would not so blithely approach any dangerous beast. Then it took shape clearly, one of the Standing Stones, edgewise. She knew it now, and had not realized how far she had ridden in the mist.

  More and more of such stones were about her now. She well knew where she was: the ruined khalin hold of Nia’s Hill was nearby, stones which had stood before the Moon was broken. She rode now on the border of the marshlands.

  The little pony walked stolidly on his way, small hooves ringing on stone and now muffled by earth; and all that she could see in the gray world were the nearest stones and the small patch of earth on which the pony trod, as if creation itself were unravelled before and behind, and only where she rode remained solid. So it might be if one rode beyond the edge of the world.

  And riding over soft ground, she looked down and saw the prints of larger hooves.

  The Road rose again from that point, so that earth no longer covered it, and the ancient stone surface lay bare. Three Standing Stones made a gathering of shadows in the mist just off the Road. Distantly came an echo off the Stones, slow and doubling the sound of the pony’s hooves. Jhirun little liked the place, that was old before the Barrows were reared. Her hands clenched on the pony’s short mane as well as on the rein, for he walked warily now, his head lifted and with the least uncertainty in his gait The echoes continued; and of a sudden came the ring of metal on stone, a shod horse.

  Jhirun drove her heels into the pony’s fat sides, gathering her courage, forcing the unwilling animal ahead.

  The black horse took shape before her, horse and rider, awaiting her. The pony balked. Jhirun gave him her heels again and made him go, and the warrior stayed for her, a dark shadow in the fog. His face came clear; he wore a peaked helm, a white scarf about it now. She stopped the pony.

  “I came to find you,” she said, and his lack of welcome was already sending uncertainties winding about her heart, a sense of something utterly changed.

  “Who are you?” he asked, which totally confounded her; and when she stared at him: “Where do you come from? From that hold atop the hill?”

  She began to reckon that she was in truth going mad, and pressed her chilled hands to her face and shivered, her shaggy pony standing dwarfed by that tall black horse.

  With a gentle ripple of water, a ring of shod hooves on stone, a gray horse appeared out of the mist. Astride him was a woman in a white cloak, and her hair as pale as the day, as white as hoarfrost.

  A woman, the warrior had breathed in his nightmare, a rider all white, the woman that follows me-

  But she came to a halt beside him, white queen and dark king together, and Jhirun reined aside her pony to flee the sight of them.

  The black horse overrushed her, the warrior’s hand tearing the rein from her fingers. The pony shied off from such treatment, and the short mane failed her exhausted fingers. His body twisted under her and she tumbled down his slick back, seeing blind fog about her, up or down she knew not until she fell on her back and the Dark went over her.

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 4

  It was not, even within the woods, like Kursh or Andur. Water flowed softly here, a hostile whisper about the hills. The moon that glowed through the fog was too great a moon, a weight upon the sky and upon the soul; and the air was rank with decay.

  Vanye was glad to return to the fire, bearing his burden of gathered branches, to kneel by that warmth that drove back the fog and overlay the stench of decay with fragrant smoke.

  They had within the ruin a degree of shelter at least, although Vanye’s Kurshin soul abhorred the builders of it: ancient stones that seemed once to have been the corner of some vast hall, the remnant of an arch. The gray horse and the black had pasturage on the low hill that lay back of the ruin, and the shaggy pony was tethered apart from the two for its safety’s sake. The black animals were shadow-shapes beyond the trees, and gray Siptah seemed a wraith-horse in the fog: three shapes that moved and grazed at leisure behind a screen of moisture-beaded branches.

  The girl’s brown shawl was drying on a stone by the fire. Vanye turned it to dry the other side, then began to feed branches into the fire, wood so moisture-laden it snapped and hissed furiously and gave off bitter clouds of smoke. But the fire blazed up after a moment, and Vanye rested gratefully in that warmth-took off the white-scarfed helm and pushed back the leather coif, freeing his brown hair, that was cut even with his jaw: no warrior’s braid-he had lost that right, along with his honor.

  He sat, arms folded across his knees, staring at the girl who lay in Morgaine’s white cloak, in Morgaine’s care. A warm cloak, a dry bed, a saddlebag for a pillow: this was as much as they could do for the child, who responded little. He thought that the fall might have shaken her forever from her wits, for she shivered intermittently in her silence, and stared at them both with wild, mad eyes. But she seemed quieter since he had been sent out for wood-a sign, he thought, either of better or of worse.

  When he was wanned through, he arose, returned quietly to Morgaine’s side, from which he had been banished. He wondered that Morgaine spent so much attention on the child-little enough good that she could do; and he expected now that she would bid him go back to the fire and stay there.

  “You speak with her,” Morgaine said quietly, to his dismay; and as she gave place for him, rising, he knelt down, captured at once by the girl’s eyes-mad, soft eyes, like a wild creature’s. The girl murmured something in a plaintive tone and reached for him; he gave his hand, uneasily feeling the gentle touch of her fingers curling round his.

  “She has found you,” she said, a mere breath, accented, difficult to understand. “She has found you, and are you not afraid? I thought you were enemies.”

  He knew, then. He was chilled by
such words, conscious of Morgaine’s presence at his back. “You have met my cousin,” he said. “His name is Chya Roh-among others.”

  Her lips trembled, and she gazed at him with clearing sense in her dark eyes. “Yes,” she said at last “You are different; I see that you are.”

  “Where is Roh?” Morgaine asked.

  The threat in Morgaine’s voice drew the girl’s attention. She tried to move, but Vanye did not loose her hand. Her eyes turned back to him.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Who are you?”

  “Nhi Vanye,” he answered in Morgaine’s silence, for he had struck her down, and she was due at least his name for it: “Nhi Vanye i Chya. Who are you?”

  “Jhirun Ela’s-daughter,” she said, and added: “I am going north, to Shiuan-”as if this and herself were inseparable.

  “And Roh?” Morgaine dropped to her knee and seized her by the arm. Jhirun’s hand left his. For a moment the girl stared into Morgaine’s face, her lips trembling.

  “Let be,” Vanye asked of his liege. “Liyo-let be.”

  Morgaine thrust the girl’s arm free and arose, walked back to the fireside. For some little time the girl Jhirun stared in that direction, her face set in shock. “Dai-khal,” she murmured finally.

  Dai-khal: high-clan qujal, Vanye understood that much. He followed Jhirun’s glance back to Morgaine, who sat by the fire, slim, clad in black leather, her hair a shining pallor in the firelight. Here too the Old Ones were known, and feared.

  He touched the girl’s shoulder. She jerked from his fingers. “If you know where Roh is,” he said, “tell us.”

  “I do not.”

  He withdrew his hand, unease growing in him. Her accents were strange; he hated the place, the ruins-all this haunted land. It was a dream, in which he had entrapped himself; yet he had struck flesh when he rode against her, and she bled, and he did not doubt that he could, that it was well possible to die here, beneath this insane and lowering sky. In the first night, lost looking about him at the world, he had prayed; increasingly he feared that it was blasphemy to do so in this land, that these barren, drowning hills were Hell, in which all lost souls recognized each other.

  “When you took me for him,” he said to her, “you said you came to find me. Then he is on this road.”

  She shut her eyes and turned her face away, dismissing him, weak as she was and with the sweat of shock beading her brow. He was forced to respect such courage-she a peasant and himself once a warrior of clan Nhi. For fear, for very terror in this Hell, he had ridden against her and her little pony with the force he would have used against an armed warrior; and it was only good fortune that her skull was not shattered, that she had fallen on soft earth and not on stone.

  “Vanye,” said Morgaine from behind him.

  He left the girl and went to the side of his liege-sat down, arms folded on his knees, next the fire’s warmth. She was frowning at him, displeased, whether at him or at something else, he was not sure. She held in her hand a small object, a gold ornament

  “She has dealt with him,” Morgaine said, thin-lipped. “He is somewhere about-with ambush laid, it may well be.”

  “We cannot go on pushing the horses. Liyo, there is no knowing what we may meet”

  “She may know. Doubtless she knows.”

  “She is afraid of you,” he objected softly. “Liyo, let me try to ask her. We must rest the horses; there is time, there is time.”

  “What Roh has touched,” she said, “is not trustworthy. Remember it. Here. A keepsake.”

  He held out his hand, thinking she meant the ornament. A blade flashed into her hand, and to his, sending a chill to his heart, for it was an Honor-blade, one for suicide. At first he thought it hers, for it was, like hers, Koris-work. Then he realized it was not

  It was Roh’s.

  “Keep it,” she said, “in place of your own.”

  He took it unwillingly, slipped it into the long-empty sheath at his belt. “Avert,” he murmured, crossing himself.

  “Avert,” she echoed, paying homage to beliefs he was never sure she shared, and made the pious gesture that sealed it, wishing the omen from him, the ill-luck of such a blade. “Return it to him, if you will. That pure-faced child was carrying it. Remember that when you are moved to gentility with her.”

  Vanye sank down from his crouch to sit crosslegged by her, oppressed by foreboding. The unaccustomed weight of the blade at his belt was cruel mockery, unintended, surely unintended. He was weaponless; Morgaine thought of practicalities-and of other things.

  Kill him, her meaning was: it is yours to do. He had taken the blade, lacking the will to object. He had abandoned all right to object. Suddenly he felt everything tightly woven about him: Roh, a strange girl, a lost dagger-a net of ugly complexities.

  Morgaine held out her hand a second time, dropped into his the small gold object, a bird on the wing, exquisitely wrought. He closed his hand on it, slipped it into his belt. Return that to her, he understood, and consented. She is yours to deal with.

  Morgaine leaned forward and fed bits of wood into the fire, small pieces that charred rapidly into red-edged black. Firelight gleamed on the edge of silver mail at her shoulder, bathed her tanned face and pale eyes and pale hair: in one unnatural light in the gathering dark. Qujal-faii she was, although she disclaimed that unhuman blood. He himself was of the distant mountains of Andur-Kursh, of a canton called Morija; but that was not her heritage. Perhaps her birthplace was here, where she had brought him. He did not ask. He smelled the salt wind and the pervading reek of decay, and knew that he was lost, as lost as ever a man could be. His beloved mountains, those walls of his world, were gone. It was as if some power had hurled down the limits of the world and shown him the ugliness beyond. The sun was pale and distant from this land, the stars had shifted in their places, and the moons-the moons defied all reason.

  The fire grew higher as Morgaine fed it. “Is that not enough?” he asked, forcing that silence that the alien ruins held, full of age and evil. He felt naked because of that light, exposed to every enemy that might be abroad this night; but Morgaine simply shrugged and tossed a final and larger stick onto the blaze. She had weapons enough. Perhaps she reckoned it was her enemies’ lives she risked by that bright fire. She was arrogant in her power, madly arrogant at times- though there were moments when he suspected she did such things not to tempt her enemies, but in some darker contest, to tempt fate.

  The heat touched him painfully as a slight breeze stirred, the first hint they had had of any wind that might disperse the mist; but the breeze died and the warmth flowed away again. Vanye shivered and stretched out his hand to the fire until the heat grew unbearable, then clasped that hand to his ribs and warmed the other.

  There was a hill beyond the flood, and a Gate among Standing Stones, and this was the way that they had ridden, a dark, unnatural path. Vanye did not like to remember it, that moment of dark dreaming in which he had passed from there to here, like the fall at the edge of sleep: he steadied himself even in thinking of it.

  Likewise Morgaine had come, and Chya Roh before them, into a land that lay at the side of a vast river, under a sky that never appeared over Andur-Kursh.

  Morgaine unwrapped their supplies, and they shared food in silence. It was almost the last they had, after which they must somehow live off this bleak land. Vanye ate sparingly, wondering whether he should offer to Jhirun, or whether it was not kinder to let her rest. Most of all he doubted Morgaine would favor it, and at last he decided to let matters be. He washed down the last mouthful with a meager sip of the good wine of Baien, saving some back; and sat staring into the fire, turning over and over in his mind what they were to do with the girl Jhirun. He dreaded knowing. No good name had Morgaine among men; and some of it was deserved.

  “Vanye. Is thee regretting?”

  He looked up, saw that Morgaine had been staring at him in the ruddy light, eyes that were in daylight sea-gray, world-gray, qujal-gray. That gentle, anci
ent accent had power more than the wind to chill him, reminding him that she had known more Gates than one, that she had learned his tongue of men long dead; she forgot, sometimes, what age she lived in.

  He shrugged.

  “Roh,” she said, “is no longer kin to you. Do not brood on it”

  “When I find him,” he said, “I will kill him. I have sworn that.”

  “Was it for that,” she asked him finally, “that you came?”

  He gazed into the fire, unable to speak aloud the unease that rose in him when she began to encircle him with such questions. She was not of his blood. He had left his own land, abandoned everything to follow her. There were some things that he did not let himself reason to their logical end.

  She left the silence on him, a stifling weight; and he opened his hand, twice scarred across the palm with the Claiming by blood and ash. By that, he was kin to her, bound in service, without conscience, honorless save for her honor, which he served. This parting-gift his clan had bestowed on him, like the shorn hair that marked him felon and outlaw, a man fit only for hanging. Brother-slayer, bastard-born: no other liege would have wanted such a man, only Morgaine, whose name was a curse wherever she was known. It was irony that in-service, penance for murder, had left him far more blood-guilty than ever he had come to her.