You do not know how great an evil you are aiding. She lies, she has lied before, to the ruin of Koris. Ilin-oath says betray family, betray hearth, but not the liyo; but does it say betray your own kind?
Come with me, Chya Vanye.
Liell’s words.
“Vanye.” His brother’s hand slipped from him. “Go. I shall have them set you in your own room, your own proper room, in the tower. Sleep. Tomorrow evening you will know sense when you hear it. Tomorrow evening we will talk again, and you will know that I am right.”
• • •
He slept. He had not thought it possible for a man who had been deprived of conscience and reason at once, but his body had its own demands to satisfy and after such a time simply closed off other senses. He slept deeply, in his own bed that he had known from childhood, and awoke aching and bruised from the treatment he had had of the Myya.
And awoke to the more painful misery of realizing that he had not dreamed the night in the basement or that in Erij’s hall; that he had indeed done the things he remembered, that he had broken and wept like a child, and that the best there was left for him was to assume a face of pride and try to wear it before other men.
Even that seemed useless. He knew that it was a lie. So would everyone else in Morij-keep, most especially Erij, with whom it mattered most. He lay abed until servants brought in water for washing, and this time there was a razor for shaving; he made use of it, gratefully, and put off the clothing he had slept in, and washed his minor hurts before he dressed again in the clean clothing the servants provided him. In a morbid turn of mind he considered doing to himself again what Nhi Rijan had done, cutting off what growth of hair had come in the two years of his exile; and suddenly he gathered it back in his hand and did so, under the shocked eyes of the servants, who did not move to stop him. This a warrior decided, and whether it would please their lord, it was a matter among warriors and the uyin. In four uneven handfuls he severed the locks, and cast the razor on the table, for the servants to bear away.
In that attitude he went to his nightly meeting with his brother.
Erij did not appreciate the bitter humor of it.
“What nonsense is this?” Erij snapped at him. “Vanye, you disgrace the house.”
“I have already done that,” Vanye said quietly. Erij stared at him then, displeased, but he had the sense to let him alone upon the matter. Vanye set himself at table and ate without looking up from his plate or saying many words, and Erij ate also, but pushed away his own plate half-eaten.
“Brother,” said Erij, “you are trying to shame me.”
Vanye left the table and went over to stand by the hearth, the only truly warm place in all the room. After a moment Erij followed him and set his hand on his shoulder, making him look at him.
“Am I free to go?” Vanye asked, and Erij swore.
“No, you are not free to go. You are family and you have an obligation here.”
“To what? To you, after this?” Vanye looked up at him and found it impossible to be angry; there was truly misery on Erij’s face at the moment, and he had never known prolonged repentance in his brother. He did not know how to judge it. He walked back to the table and cast himself down there. Erij followed him back and sat down again.
“If I gave you weapons and a horse,” Erij asked him, “what would you? Follow her?”
“I am bound by an oath,” he said, “still.” And then, to see if he could wring it from Erij: “Where is she?”
“Camped near Baien-ei.”
“Will you give me the weapons and the horse?”
“No, I will not. Brother, you are Nhi. I pardon your other offenses. I hold nothing against you.”
“I thank you for that,” said Vanye quietly. “So do I yours against me.”
Erij bit his lip; almost the old temper flared in him, but he restrained it. He bowed his head and nodded: “They have been considerable,” he acknowledged, “of which this latest has been one of the lesser. But I swear to you, you will be my brother, heir next my own children. And it would be a greater Morija than either I or our father ruled, if you came to your senses.”
Vanye reached for the wine cup. Something of the words jarred within him. He set it down again. “What is it you want of me?”
“You know the witch. You are intimate with her. You know what she seeks and I would wager that you know how it is to be had: that is implicit in the commission she gave you. I will warrant you have seen her use whatever powers she holds in those weapons of hers; you have passed together through Koriswood. I would even suspect that you know how they are used. I am not a man that believes in magic, Vanye, and neither, I suspect, are you, for all your Chya heritage. Things happen through the hands of men, not by wishes upon wands and out of thin air. Is that not so?”
“What has this to do with me and you?”
“Show me how these things are done. Keep your oath to kill Thiye if you will: but with my help. Remember that you are of human blood; and remember what loyalties you owe to your own kind.—Listen to me! Listen. Not since Irien has there been a power in Andur-Kursh save that of Hjemur, and this was of her making, out of her lies and her leading. Our father’s kingdom once ranked high in the Middle Realms. The old High Kings are gone now and so is that power we once held, thanks to her. And it is within our hands to win it back again, yours and mine. Look at me, little brother! I swear to you—I swear to you that you will be second only to me.”
“I am still ilin,” he protested, “and I am safe from all your promises. Morgaine’s power is in what she wields, and unless you are a liar, she still holds it. Do not challenge her, Erij, or she will be the death of you: she will kill. And I do not want to see that happen.”
“Listen to me. Whatever she means to do with the Witch-fires, whatever she means to do with Thiye’s power once she has possessed it—she is no friend of ours. We exchange one Thiye for another, she holding what he held, and she more unhuman than ever he was. Look at what Thiye has done with it, and he at least in some part man. But she . . . the use of such powers is like the breath of air to her, the element in which she moves; and she is ambitious, for revenge, for power, for what else we do not know. What were you to her against the ambition that moves her? Think on that, brother.”
“You said that she is camped near Baien-ei,” Vanye answered. “That does not sound to me like what she would do if she had utterly deserted me. She is waiting. She expects me to come if I can.”
Erij laughed, and the grin slowly died in Vanye’s cold, unhappy stare. “You are naive,” said Erij then. “What she is waiting for is not you, not so small a thing as that to her.”
“What, then, would that be?”
“Will you show me the manner of the power she uses?” Erij asked him. “I do not ask you to break oath. If she seeks the death of Thiye and the fall of Hjemur, I have no quarrel with that; but if she seeks power for herself, then has she not used you shamefully, Vanye? Is that the oath you swore to her, that you would help set her in power over your own people? If that were so, it was a shameful oath.”
“She means to break the power of Thiye,” he said, “there was nothing said of creating any other power.”
“Oh, come,” said Erij. “And having rained him . . . what? To live in poverty, to retreat to obscurity? Or to risk being overtaken by the bloodfeuds of so many enemies? Having taken power—she will hold it. You are nothing to her; I offered her to have you back, at the exchange of her word to go south again. She refused.”
Vanye shrugged, for he had known of her that he had no importance when he ceased to serve her purposes: she had never deluded him in that.
“She simply threw you aside,” said Erij. “And what might a heart like that do once in power in Hjemur, when she needs nothing? She will grow the more cold, and the more dangerous. I had rather an enemy with tempers and honest hates. I had rather a h
uman enemy. Thiye is old and half-mad; he muddles about with his beasts and his self-indulgence, and seldom stirs. He has never made war on us, neither he nor his ancestors. But can you see the like of Morgaine being content with things as they are for long?”
“And what would you create of it, Erij?” he asked harshly. “The like of what I have seen in Ra-morij?”
“Look about you at Morija,” said Erij. “Look at its people. It does not fare too badly. Did you see anything amiss, anything in the land or the villages that would be better changed? We have our law, the blessing of church, the peace of our fields and our enemies in Chya fear us. That is my work. I am not ashamed of what I have done here.”
“It is true that Morija is faring well now,” Vanye said. “But you, yourself, you cannot handle the things that Morgaine does; and she will not yield them. Seek her for an ally if you will. That is the best thing you can do for yourself and Morija.”
“Like the ten thousand at Irien that she and her allies helped?”
“She did not kill them. That much is a lie.”
“But that is what came of her help, all the same. And I would not lay Morija and Nhi open to the same kind of thing. I would not trust her. But this—this—I would trust, that she values powerfully.” Excitedly he rose from his place and from the cabinet near the table he drew out a cloth-wrapped bundle. When he took it in his hand the cloth fell away at the top and Vanye saw to his dismay the dragon-hilt of Changeling. “This is what holds her encamped at Baien-ei, her desire for this. And I would wager, brother, that you know something of it.”
“I know that she bids me keep my hands from it,” said Vanye. “Which you had better heed, Erij. She says there is danger in it and that it is a cursed blade, and I believe it.”
“I know that she values this above your life,” said Erij, “and more than all else she possessed. That was plain.” He-jerked it back as Vanye tentatively extended his hand toward it. “No, brother. But I will hear your explanation of what value it bears to her. And if you are my brother, you will tell me this willingly.”
“I will tell you honestly that I do not know,” he said, “and that if you are wise you will let me return this thing to her before it does harm. Of all things she possesses, this is one she herself fears.”
A second time he reached for it, beginning to be frightened for what Erij purposed with the blade: for it was a thing of power; he knew it by the way Morgaine treated it, who never let it leave her. Of a sudden Erij raised his voice in a shout. The door crashed back: the four Myya were with them.
And Erij shook the sheath from the blade one-handed, and held it naked in his hand. The blade went from translucent ice to a shimmer of opalescent fire, and all the air sang in their ears, a horrid shimmer of air at its tip that of a sudden Vanye knew.
“No!” he cried, flung himself aside. The air roared into a darkness and a wind that sucked at them, and the Myya were gone, whipped away into some vast expanse that had opened between them and the door.
Erij flung the blade away, sent it slithering sideways across the floor, ripping ruin after it, and of a sudden Vanye caught the sheath and scrambled for the abandoned blade, caught it up in his hand as other men poured through the door. The same starry dark caught them up, and his arm went numb.
He knew then the sensation that had prompted Erij to drop the blade, gut-deep loathing for such power, and suddenly he heard his brother’s voice shout and felt a hand claw at his arm.
He ran, wiser than to turn and destroy . . . free down the hall and free upon the stairs downward once the uyin there saw the unworldly shimmer of the witchblade in his hand.
He knew his way. There was the outer door. He heaved back the bolt and ran for the stable court, feverishly cursed the weeping stableboy into saddling a good horse for him; and all the while from Ra-morij there was a silence. He kept himself clear from the arrow-slits of the windows, knowing that for his greatest peril, and bade the boy creep down in the shadows and open the gate for him.
Then he sprang to horse, keeping reins and sheath in one hand, holding the shimmering blade in the other, and rode. Arrows hissed about him. One plunged within the well of darkness at Changeling’s tip and was lost. Another scraped his horse’s rump and stung the beast to a near stumble. But he was through. Frightened warders unbarred the gates under the menace of that blade and he was free of the outer gate, clattering down the height of the paved road and onto the soft earth of the slopes.
There was no rush to follow him. He imagined Erij cursing his men to order, trying to find some who would dare it—and that Erij himself would follow he did not doubt. He knew his brother too well to think that he would cease what he had decided to do.
And Erij would well know what road he would ride. If he were not Morij-bred, he would have no chance to evade them, to ride the shorter trails and the quick ones, but he had as fine a knowledge of the web of unmarked roads in the country as did Erij.
It was a matter of reaching Baien-ei and Morgaine, if it were possible, before the Myya and their arrows.
Chapter 8
The pursuit was behind him again. When he looked back against some patch of unmelted snow in the starlight, he could see a dark knot atop a hill or along the road; but the laboring bay kept the same distance between them.
They had not delayed long. There were most of all the arrows to fear. If they had him once within arrow range, he could not survive it; and he did not doubt that they were Myya, and keen on killing him—it was the only way to safely wrest away the thing he carried.
It was the stopping that was the most dangerous. At times he had to stop and rest the horse; and he chose such times as he did not see them behind him and reckoned that they were doing the same, well knowing that at some time he might make an error, or fail to run again in time. They had come a day across the plain of Morija, and the signal fires were still lit: he could see their glow on hilltops, warning the whole land that there was an enemy abroad, a stranger that meant no good to Morija. That net of signals was the countryside’s defense. All good men would turn out to patrol the roads, to challenge any comer near the vital passes, and he had no wish to kill—or whatever it was the witchblade did to them that fell within its power; besides, some of the countrymen, of clans San and Torin, were no mean archers themselves, and he feared any meeting with them.
At their first stopping he had contrived to sheathe the horrid blade, fearing to expose his own flesh to the danger of that fire, which was that about the Gates themselves. He laid the sheath on the ground and eased the point within, fearful that even that could not contain it. But the light ceased the moment the point had gone within, and then it was possible to lift and bear it like any normal sword.
It was the look of the four men of Myya that he could not get from his mind, that awful lostness as they whirled away into that vast and tiny darkness, men who could not understand how they were dying.
If it were possible he would gladly have hurled Changeling from him, have rid himself of that dread weight and let it lie for some other unfortunate master. But it was his in charge, and it was for Morgaine, who had sense enough to keep it sheathed. He himself dreaded the thought of drawing it again, almost more than he dreaded the arrows behind him. There was sinister power about it that was far more lingering than the ugliness of Morgaine’s older—lesser—weapons. His arm still hurt from wielding it.
In the hours’ passing he tried at last just to keep the bay moving, stopping dead only when he must; he knew that the animal was going to fade long before he could make Baien-ei and Morgaine’s camp. There were villages: the Myya could have remounts; they would run him to the bay’s death. His insides hurt from the constant jolting, already bruised from the beating he had had of them. He began to have the taste of blood in his mouth and he did not know if this was from his bruised jaw or from somewhere inside.
And when he looked back of a sudden the Myya w
ere no longer with him.
There was no hope left but to go off the main road, to try to confuse pursuit and hope that he could fight through ambush at the end, at Baien-ei. The next time that he saw the chance of another lane, one already well marred with tracks since the melting of the snow, he took that road and coaxed the poor horse to what pace he could maintain.
He knew the road. A little village lay a distance past the second winding, the hamlet of San-morij, a clan that possessed a score of smaller villages hereabouts—common and unpretentious as the earth they held, kindly folk, but fierce to enemies. There was a farmhouse that he well remembered, that of the old chief armorer of Ra-morij, San Romen; he owed a great debt to that old tutor of his, who alone of men in Ra-morij had shown some sympathy for a lord’s bastard, who had soothed his hurts and treated the hidden wounds with drafts of rough affection.
It was a debt that deserved better payment than he was about to give; but desperation smothered any impulses to honor. He knew where the stable was, around at the back of the little house, a place where he and Erij had watered their mounts once upon a better time. He left the bay tied to a branch by the side of the road, and took Changeling upon his shoulder, and slipped down the ditch by the roadside until he was within sight of the stable.
Then he ran across the yard, skidded into the shadows and flung open the door, already hearing the livestock astir: the men of Romen’s house would be waking, seeking arms at any moment, and running out to see what was among them. He chose the likeliest pony he could in the dark, already haltered in its stall: he put a length of rope in the halter ring, the only thing there was to hand, flung open the stall door and backed the pony out.
Running footsteps pelted up to the door. He expected its opening, swung up to the pony’s bare back with the halter rope for a rein, and as the door was flung open, he rammed his heels into the pony’s flanks and the frightened animal bolted out into the yard—an honest horse and unused to such treatment. It ran for the road, scrambled up the side of the ditch, and he wrapped his legs about its fat ribs and clung, unshakable. He wrenched its head over in the direction he wanted it to go, and when he reached the crossroads over by San-hei, he turned there, heading for Baien-ei by a slightly longer road, but a lonelier one.