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 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 warmed 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 around 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 to 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-fair 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 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 it 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, ancient 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 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 ilin 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 ilin-service, penance for murder, had left him far more blood-guilty than ever he had come to her.
And Roh remained yet to deal with.
“I came,” he said, “because I swore it to you.”
She thrust at the fire with a stick, sending sparks aloft like stars on the wind. “Mad,” she judged bitterly. “I set thee free, told thee plainly thee had no possible place outside Kursh, outside the law and the folk thee knows. I wish thee had believed it.”
He acknowledged this truth with a shrug. He knew the workings of Morgaine’s mind better than any living; and he knew the Claim she had set on him, that had nothing to do with his scarred hand; and the Claim that someone else had set on her, crueller than any oath. Her necessity lay sheathed at her side, that dragon-hilted sword that was no true sword, but a weapon all the same. It was the only bond that had ever truly claimed her, and she hated it above all other evils, qujal or human.
I have no honor, she had warned him once. It is unconscionable that I should take risks with the burden I carry. I have no luxury left for virtues.
Another thing she had told him that he had never doubted: I would kill you too if it were necessary.
She hunted qujal
, she and the named-blade Changeling. The qujal she hunted now wore the shape of Chya Roh i Chya. She sought Gates, and followed therein a compulsion more than half madness, that gave her neither peace nor happiness. He could understand this in some part: he had held Changeling in his own hands, had wielded its alien evil, and there had come such a weight on his soul afterward that no penance of ilin-service could ever cleanse him of remembering.
“The law is,” he said, “that you may bid me leave your service, but you cannot order it. If I stay, I remain ilin, but that is my choice and not yours.”
“No one ever refused to leave service.”
“Surely,” he said, “there have been ilinin before me that found no choice. A man is maimed in service, for instance; he might starve elsewhere, but while he stays ilin, his liyo must at least feed him and his horse, however foul the treatment he may receive in other matters. You cannot make me leave you, and your charity was always more generous than my brother’s.”
“You are neither halt nor blind,” Morgaine retorted; she was not accustomed to being answered with levities.
He made a gesture of dismissal, knowing for once he had touched through her guard. He caught something bewildered in her expression in that instant, something terrified. It destroyed his satisfaction. He would have said something further, but she glanced aside from him with a sudden scowl, removing his opportunity.
“There was at least a time you chose for yourself,” she said at last. “I gave you that, Nhi Vanye. Remember it someday.”
“Aye,” he said carefully. “Only so you give me the same grace, liyo, and remember that I chose what I wanted.”
She frowned the more deeply. “As you will,” she said. “Well enough.” And for a time she gazed into the fire, and then the frown grew pensive, and she was gazing toward their prisoner, a look that betrayed some inner war. Vanye began to suspect something ugly in her mind, that was somehow entangled with her questions to him; he wished that he knew what it was.