He looked up at the span of the gate and saw that the roan horse had gone further; but now the men lifted Gault from his saddle and carried him, while others seized his own arms and started him toward that height, toward the night sky shimmering like air over fire, within the towering frame of the gate.
Closer and closer, until he could see nothing but the sky past those pillars, and a single star within that arch, a point of light that quivered and danced in the air. There was a singing in the wind, the thrum of bowstrings, of voices, spectral and quivering in his bones.
Closer yet. The sky seemed to shift downward within the gate, and the thrumming was in his brain. His bowels turned to water in him, and his knees quaked, and the men holding him were all that enabled him to walk. O God, he thought, God, what can a Man hope to do here, with them?
And again: Fear is Gault’s weapon. I must not be open to it. I dare not let fear in. Hate is all I have. Hate greater than his—
They reached the crest almost together, Gault holding his hand pressed to his belly, but walking at the last, leaning on the men who attended him. The black pillars seemed to throw off a kind of light, none for themselves, but a white hell-glow that played about the ground and that ran up the legs and the bodies and the faces of men who passed within its compass. Small sounds were swallowed up. The sky twisted and writhed like a gaping pit.
As far as the pillars that dwarfed them, Gault went, and leaned against the left-hand stone holding to it for his support, laying his hand on one place and another as if it were a living thing, and himself in communion with it—qhalur wizardry, Chei thought, breathing with difficulty, watching with small jerks of his eyes and knowing that his face betrayed terror; but so was there terror in the grip of hands which numbed his arms and held him upright despite his failing knees. They were all afraid, he, the qhal themselves—it was a strange reliance he began to have on them, who would defend his safety now with their own lives, who were there to hold him and keep him from failing his resolution or from tumbling untimely into that place—A little longer, a little longer, he told himself; and concentrated on the little pain they caused his arms as the only saving of his sanity: Help me, do not let me go; we are all flesh, and flesh does not belong next this thing—
They gathered him up; they brought him closer, and Gault staggered forth to meet him in front of that dark archway, on the edge of the sky.
“Free him,” Gault bade them, and a rough sawing cut the cords on his hands. They let go their grip on him, and Chei lurched out of balance, staring at the sky which now had lost all stars, which did not show the hills beyond, or anything but night—stared helplessly at Gault’s face, suddenly, as Gault caught his arms. Hell-light shimmered over them, turning flesh dead white; Gault caught him closer, as suddenly the air began to move about them, stirring Gault’s hair, howling with the force of summer storm.
The gate was opening, greater than the gate the sword had made, louder than the howling of the winds which had taken Bron.
“Have you changed your mind?” Gault asked, and embraced him closer still. “Is it still willingly?”
Chei fought down his gorge and nodded, and his heart pounded in shock when he felt Gault seek his hand and press the hilt of a knife into his cold fingers. “Then you may do what you so much wish so much to do,” Gault said, and slid his hand to the back of his neck, winding fingers into his hair, holding him tight. “Friend.”
Chei rammed upward with the knife in a spasm of outrage, under Gault’s jaw, toward the brain.
Someone pushed him. He felt the hands strike him, and the hill fell away under him and the man who was locked with him in a sickening fall of cold and wind and void.
Something began to go wrong then, his senses going out one by one: he saw things he could not name, and was blinded by light that was pain. He screamed and screamed as he fell, alone now, falling slower—a drifting dark, in which something else walked, and that thing was a thought that waked in him and called itself Chei, but it was not himself. It remembered dying, remembered the shock of a blade in its bowels, and one beneath its jaw, stopping breath and speech; the pain was all for a moment.
Then it ebbed, retreating to the past, safe and bearable.
He knew then what had happened to him, and that realization itself was fleeting, shredding away from him in the dark as something he dared not reconcile, except that he had died—he knew that recent memory had his death in it, and he did not want to delve into that, here, in the dark, naked to the winds and the cold.
He had use for his life. He discovered it and clung to it. He called it Bron and he called it Jestryn and Pyverrn, and he could not remember whether it had been brother or friend, or whether the man or the woman had killed him, but it was one and the same. He had a revenge to take, and that it was the one thing that had brought him north or south on that nightbound road, whichever direction he had been traveling, whichever horse he had been riding.
Then, having discovered his heart was whole, he was less afraid. He felt other things slipping away, pieces that might matter, but he was no longer in doubt where his course was and that the men waiting for him would follow him.
He knew all of Morund. He knew the hills. He knew Mante. He saw a hold set in the mountains, and the great Gate which ruled all gates, and knew the intricacies of politics which had sent the warders who waited below the hill: the Overlord Skarrin had received his first message and sent this handful of his underlings to guard the approach and to discover what they could, while Skarrin questioned at length the messengers he had sent. Skarrin’s men had tried to bar him from use of the gate, until he could have permission of the high lord.
They had hoped, perhaps, that he would die.
But now, in his recollections, he had something indeed to tell them, which would stir Skarrin out of his lethargy and bring forces south.
Tell them the urgency of it he would, but he would not tell all he knew—nor stay for them or wait on Skarrin’s pleasure. He had been Qhiverin Asfelles. He and Pyverrn had fought in these lands between Tejhos and Mante, against various of the high lord’s enemies; he knew the secret ways into the hills, off the Road and back to it. He had utter freedom of the land, the high lord himself had cause to fear him and his connections within the warrior Societies, and he was as likely as any to profit by the present chaos—by whatever means turned up under his hand. He drew a breath.
He felt the winds again, when a moment before had been only cold that numbed all feeling.
He heard the sounds, when a moment before had been only stillness. It was as if a ripple were sweeping through the dark, bearing him closer and closer to the shores of the world.
He moved his limbs, finding himself weaker than he remembered, lighter of limb. It was a young body. It was skilled and agile and had a long-muscled, runner’s strength different than the slower, mature power of the body he recalled as Gault’s—was far more like Qhiverin’s; was nearly as fair as a qhal; and that pleased him.
He had a mature mind, too, that took the skittish thoughts of a younger and impulsive man and calmed them and spread wider and further into connections from which he shied back, of a sudden: there was too much memory, and it needed long meditation to reconcile it.
Witch-mind, a part of him said.
Nature, said the other, nature and knowledge.
God! part of him cried.
The other part said: Nature.
Vision cleared in a shimmer like the surface of a pond. The hill grew firm under his feet and the men who gathered anxiously to meet him were all friendly and familiar to him.
“Hesiyyn,” he said, and laid his hand on a tall qhal’s shoulder with easy humor, knowing how Hesiyyn loathed humankind.
“Lord Chei,” Hesiyyn hailed him with deep irony. It was custom. It was the penalty of the twice-and-three-times-born.
The Men among them would be confused. They would
murmur things about souls, which Chei dismissed and refused to think about. But tall, elegant qhal had no hesitation in bowing the head and offering homage to him, to Chei ep Kantory, lord of Morund—the intimates of his household, his servants, the remnant of the human levies, even the troublesome and arrogant warders from Mante, who waited below, with their captain.
He felt wounds on him. He felt bruises. His knees ached with exhaustion. That was the penalty this body brought with it. None were unbearable.
He sought weapons—the sword which the Man had given him: that was one weapon he did not intend to lose. It was qhalur-work, and foreign—from further, he was sure, than merely overseas, and he delighted in it when he tried its balance.
He took his own bow; and the red roan; the lame gelding he turned out to fend for itself: perhaps it would recover.
But he declined more weapons than that, and declined to go in more than the breeches and mended boots and light mail that came with the man.
“This is the shape they will expect,” he said to Hesiyyn.
• • •
“Wake,” Morgaine’s voice whispered out of nowhere, and muscles jumped and body tensed all in one spasm as on the edge of a fall—But it was stone at Vanye’s back, and he pressed himself against it, controlling his breaths and blinking at the shadow that stood between him and the horses. “I might have hit you,” he said. “Oh, Heaven—” He caught his breath and brushed loose hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand. “I dreamed—” But he did not tell those dreams, that took him back to old places, old terrors. “I did not mean to sleep.”
“Best we move.”
“Is there—”
“No. Only shortness of time. A little of the night left. We travel while we can.”
He glanced around to see were Chei and Bron awake then, one instant’s impulse, and remembered everything like a blow to the stomach; he drew a breath then and rubbed an unshaven face, and quickly gathered himself to his feet, trying not to think on anything but the road.
Fool, he thought. Do not look back. Look around you. Look around you. That is what caused this sorry business, nothing more and nothing less than losing track of things.
He wanted to weep. He adjusted Arrhan’s gear and reached out to hold Siptah’s bridle for Morgaine as she prepared to mount. “Do not be seeing to me,” she said sharply, taking back the reins, by which she meant do not be twice a fool.
It stung. He was not in a mood to bear her temper, and she was not in a mood for debating what she wanted. He turned and flung himself to horse, and waited on her, since she was in such haste.
She mounted up and rode without a backward look. She was fey and doom-ridden, and the loss of a comrade and the driving away of another—the excessive cruelty of it, like her ultimatum to him with Chei, was all one thing.
It was because of that blade she bore. It was because of the lives it took. It was because of the things she knew that he did not, and the madness—the madness which distracted her, and which, this morning, beckoned both of them.
Her moods had been tolerable while he had been no more than ilin and now were enough to drive him to black, blind rage, anger to match her own.
She spoke finally. It was to remark on the land, as if there had never been a quarrel.
“Aye,” he said, and: “Aye, my liege,” choking down his temper—for hers was gone, vanished. That was the way of her. He was Nhi on one side of the blanket and Chya on the other and temper once it rose was next to madness, it blinded and it drove him—even to fratricide; after which he had learned to smother it under ilin-law. O Heaven, he thought, ilin to a temper-prone woman was one thing. Both lover and shieldman to a woman half-mad and geas-driven was another.
He had the warrior’s braid back. The cool air on his neck, the high-clan honor that forever reminded him he could take another path, the ilin’s oath that bound him to a liege he could in no wise leave—unwise, unwise, ever to tangle matters further, unwise to have drifted closer and closer until she could wound him, and drive him mad, and then absently forget she had struck at him at all.
But it had happened. He was snared. He had been enspelled from the beginning.
And she left him with his ghosts—thinking at one time he heard more horses than their two, thinking at another moment that Chei and Bron were behind him. They haunted the tail of his eye so that a bit of brush, a stone, a trick of the rising sun, persuaded his sight that they were there.
Both.
Chei is dead, he thought with a chill, and crossed himself. Chei is dead.
And he could not say why he suddenly believed this, or why it was two riders that haunted him, except it was guilt, or foreknowledge what they had sent Chei to, in a land where he had qhal-taint on him.
He wept, the tears running down his face, without expression. Beside him, Morgaine said some word.
“Vanye,” she said then.
There was no place for a man to go, except to turn his face away.
She was silent after. The wind dried his face. There seemed nothing to say, that would not lead to things he did not want to discuss. He only gave a sigh and shifted in his saddle and looked at her, so that she would know that he was all right.
The sun came up by degrees in the sky and showed them other ghosts, the heights of hills which had not been there, showed them a land of crags and rough land ahead of them, all painted in shadows of gold and cloud.
“Rest,” she said again, when they had come to water, a little pond between two hills, and this time again he took Siptah’s bridle as she dismounted.
She laid her hand on his back as she walked past him, as he slipped the horses’ bits to let them graze and rest a little. He felt it faintly through the armor, and it set the thoughts moiling in him, a little of relief, a great deal of reluctance to do or say anything with her. It was not a quarrel of woman and man. It was, he decided finally, that their blood was up, both, that they had killed, that she had fighting in her mind and so did he, and to expect any gentleness or to offer any was unwise.
He went and washed his hands and his face and his neck in the pond, wetting his boots in the boggy grass.
“Do not drink,” she said from behind him, reminding him of cautions that he knew as well as she, and he turned half about with a sudden, trapped fury in him.
He said nothing, and rose and walked back to sit down on his heels and press his wet hands to the back of his neck and to his brow.
“Sleep,” he said without looking at her. “You are due that.”
“I should not have chided thee.”
“No, you should have let a fool drink from standing water. It is not Kursh, or Andur, liyo. I know that. I was not that much fool.”
“Thee can take the rest. Thee has more need.”
“Why, because I am short-tempered? I have killed a man. I have killed one man I held for a friend. And we have lost the other. No matter.” He wiped the hair back from his stubbled face, the wisps that had come loose from his braid and trailed about brow and ears, and he had not the will left to do more than wipe them out of his way. “I am learning.”
Then the reach of what he had said shot through him. He glanced up at her face. My God, why did I say that?
The mask had come back over her countenance, pale as it was. She shrugged and looked aside at the ground. “Well that we save our shafts for our enemies.”
“Forgive me.” He went to his knees and she moved so suddenly he thought she would strike him in the face, but it was his shoulder she caught, hard, with the heel of her hand, before he could even think to bow to the ground as reflex made natural. He met her angry stare and there was nothing woman-gentle in the blow that had stopped him from the obeisance. He had meant to make peace. Now he only stared at her.
She looked dismayed too, finally, the anger fading. Her hand went gentle on his shoulder and trailed down his arm.
“There is no way back,” she said. “If you learn anything of me, learn that.”
He felt his throat tighten. He drew breaths to find an adequate one and finally shook his head, and turned aside and got up clumsily, since she gave him no room.
“I am sorry,” he said with his back to her. The arm that had wielded the sword ached again, and he rubbed at the shoulder she had struck. “I have my wits about me, better than you see. God knows, we are going to need our rest. And I do you no service to rob you of yours. I am not the first man mistook a friend in a fight, God knows I am not—” He remembered the harper, with a wince. He could not but wound her, no matter what he did or said; no more than she with him. He could not think where they would find rest, or where he would shake the phantoms in the tail of his eye, and of a sudden panic came over him, thinking what odds mounted against their passing those mountains ahead.
It was speed they needed. And human bodies and exhausted horses could only do so much before hearts broke and flesh failed.
“They are my mistakes,” she said. He heard her move, and her shadow fell past him and merged with his on the thin grass, “to have taken them with us, to have given thee the sword. It was thy own strength betrayed thee, that thee kept using it. Never—never bear it till it wields thee. That is what happened. That, I did not make thee understand. It has happened to me. Thee learns. And sometimes even then—”
She did not finish. He looked half around at her and nodded, and refused to regard the phantom that beckoned him from the tail of his eye, a shadow on the horizon of the road. Her hand rested on his arm and his pressed hers.
Until that phantom insisted, and this time he must look, seeing a horseman atop the ridge.
“Liyo!” he hissed. “On the road—”
He leapt up and she did; and hurried for the horses, to tighten cinches and refit bridles: he caught Siptah first, his duty to his liege, and she left him to that for economy of motion and did the same for Arrhan, still working as he led Siptah to her.
A last buckle and she was done. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw the oncoming riders, twenty, thirty or more.