Old ones, deserted, while the young had been carried away with the tide that swept toward Abarais: the young, who looked to live, who would kill to live, like the horde that followed still behind them.
• • •
The land beyond Sotharrn bore more signs of violence, fields and land along the roadway churned to mire, as if the road itself could no longer contain what poured toward the north. Tracks of men and horses were sharply defined beside the road and in mud yet unwashed from the paving stones.
“They passed,” Vanye said to Morgaine, as they rode knee to knee behind Jhirun and Kithan, “since the rain stopped.”
He tried to lend her hope; she frowned over it, shook her head.
“Hetharu delayed here, perhaps,” she said in a low voice. “He would be enough to deal with Sotharrn. But were I Roh, I would not have delayed for such an untidy matter if there were a choice: I would have gone for Abarais. And once there, then no hold will stand. I would be glad to know where Hetharu’s force is; but I fear I know where Roh is.”
Vanye considered that; it was not good to think on. He turned his mind instead to forces that he understood. “Hetharu’s force,” he said, “looks to have gathered considerable number; perhaps two, three thousand by now.”
“There are also the outlying villages,” she said. “—Kithan.”
The halfling reined back somewhat, and Jhirun’s mare, never one to take the lead, lagged too, coming alongside so that they were four abreast on the road. Kithan regarded them placidly, his eyes again vague and hazed.
“He is only half sensible,” Vanye said in disgust. “Perhaps he and that store of his were best parted.”
“No,” said Kithan at once, straightening in his saddle. He made effort to look at them directly, and his eyes were possessed of a distant, tearless sadness. “I have listened to your reckoning; I hear you well . . . Leave me my consolation, Man. I shall answer your questions.”
“Then say,” said Morgaine, “what we must expect. Will Hetharu gain the support of the other holds? Will they move to join him?”
“Hetharu—” Kithan’s mouth twisted in a grimace of contempt. “Sotharrn always feared him . . . that did he succeed to power in Ohtij-in, then attack would come. And they were right, of course. Some of our fields flooded this season; and more would have gone the next; and the next. It was inevitable that the more ambitious of us would reach across the Suvoj.”
“Will the other holds follow him or fight him now?”
Kithan shrugged. “What difference to the Shiua; and to us—Even we bowed and kissed his hand in Ohtij-in. We who wanted nothing but to live undisturbed . . . have no power against whoever does not. Yes, most will be with him: to what purpose anything else? My guards have gone over to him: that is where they are going. There is no question of it. They saw my prospects, and they know defeat when they smell it. So they went to him. The lesser holds will flock to do the same.”
“You may go too if you like,” Morgaine said.
Kithan regarded her, disturbed.
“Be quite free to do so,” she said.
The horses walked along together some little distance; and Kithan looked at Morgaine with less and less assurance, as if she and the drug together confused him. He looked at Jhirun, whose regard of him was hard; and at Vanye, who stared back at him expressionless, giving him nothing, neither of hatred nor of comfort. Once more he glanced the circuit of them, and last of all at Vanye, as if he expected that some terrible game were being made of him.
For a moment Vanye thought that he would go; his body was tense in the saddle, his eyes, through their haze, distracted.
“No,” Kithan said then, and his shoulders fell. He rode beside them sunk in his own misery.
None spoke, Vanye rode content enough in Morgaine’s presence by him, a nearness of mind in which words were needless; he knew her, that had they been alone she would have had nothing to say. Her eyes scanned the trail as they rode, but her mind was elsewhere, desperately occupied.
At last she drew from her boot top a folded and age-yellowed bit of parchment, a map cut from a book; and silently, leaning from the saddle, she indicated to him the road. It wound up from the Suvoj, that great rift clearly recognizable; but the lands of Ohtij-in were shown as wide, plotted fields, that no longer existed. There were fields mapped on this side also, along the road and within the hills; and holds besides that which seemed to be Sotharrn, scattered here and there about the central mountains.
And amid those mountains, a circular mark, lay Abarais: Vanye could not read the runes, but her finger indicated it, and she named it aloud.
He lifted his eyes from the brown ink and yellowed page to the mountains that now loomed before them. Greenish-black evergreen covered their flanks. Their rounded peaks were bald and smooth and their slopes were a tumble of great stones, aged, weather-worn—a ruin of mountains in a dying land.
Above them passed the Broken Moon, in a clear sky; the weather held for them, warm as the sun reached its zenith; but when the sun declined toward afternoon, the hills seemed overlain with a foul haze.
It was not cloud; none wreathed these low hills. It was the smoke of fires, from some far place within the mountains, where other holds had been marked on the map.
“I think that would be Domen,” said Kithan, when they questioned him on it. “That is next, after Sotharrn. On the far side of the mountains lie Marom and Arisith; and Hetharu’s forces will have reached for those also.”
“Still increasing in number,” said Morgaine.
“Yes,” said Kithan. “The whole of Shiuan is within his hands—or will be, within days. He is burning the shelters, I would judge: that is the way to move the humanfolk, to draw them with him. And perhaps he burns the holds themselves. He may want no lords to rival him.”
Morgaine said nothing.
“It will do him no good,” Vanye said, to dispossess Kithan of any hopes he might still hold. “Hetharu may have Shiuan—but Roh has Hetharu, whether or not Hetharu has yet realized it.”
• • •
Stones rose beside the road, Standing Stones, that called to mind that cluster beside the road in Hiuaj, near the marsh; but these stood straight and powerful in the evening light.
And beyond those Stones moved a white-haired figure, leaning on a staff, who struggled to walk the road.
They gained upon that man rapidly; and surely by now the traveler must have heard them coming, and might have looked around; but he did not. He moved at the same steady pace, painfully awkward.
There was an eeriness about that deaf persistence; Vanye laid his sword across the saddlebow as they came alongside the man, fearing some plan concealed in this bizarre attitude—a ruse to put a man near Morgaine. He moved his horse between, reining back to match his pace.
Still the man did not look up at them, but walked with eyes downcast, step by agonized step with the staff to support him. He was young, wearing hall-garments; he bore a knife at his belt, and the staff on which he leaned was the broken remnant of a pike. His white hair was tangled, his cheek cut and bruised, blood soaked the rough bandages on his leg. Vanye hailed him, and yet the youth kept walking; he cursed, and thrust his sheathed sword across the youth’s chest.
The qujal stopped, downcast eyes fixed on something other and elsewhere; but when Vanye let fall the sword, he began to walk again, struggling in his lameness.
“He is mad,” Jhirun said.
“No,” said Kithan. “He does not wish to see you.”
Their horses moved along with the youth, slowly, by halting paces; and softly Kithan began to question him, in his own tongue—received an anguished glance of him, and an answer, spoken on hard-drawn breaths, the while he walked. Names were named that touched keenly Vanye’s interest, but no other word of it could he grasp. The youth exhausted his supply of breath and fell silent, walked on, as he had been
before.
Morgaine touched Siptah and moved on. Vanye at her side; and Jhirun with them. Kithan followed. Vanye looked back, at the youth who still doggedly, painfully, struggled behind them.
“What did he say?” Vanye asked of Morgaine. She shrugged, not in a mood to answer.
“He is Allyvy,” said Kithan in her silence. “He is of Sotharrn; and he has the same madness as took the villagers: he says that he is bound for Abarais, as all are going, believing this Chya Roh.”
Vanye looked at Morgaine, found her face grim and set; and she shrugged. “So we are too late,” she said, “as I feared.”
“He has promised them,” said Kithan, “another and better land: a hope to live; and they are going to take it. They are gathering an army, to march toward it; holds are burned: they say there is no need of them now.”
He looked again at Morgaine, expecting some answer of her. There was none. She rode with her eyes fixed, no more slowly, no more quickly, passing the ruined fields. He saw in her a tautness that trembled beneath that placid surface, something thin-strung and fragile.
Violence, terror: it flowed to his own taut nerves.
Let us retreat, a thing in him wanted to say. Let us find a place, lost in the hills, when all of them have passed, when the Wells are sealed. There is life enough for us, peace—once you have lost and can no longer hope to follow him. We could live. We might grow old before the waters rose to take these mountains. We would be alone, and sealed, safe, from all our enemies.
She knew her choices, he reckoned to himself, and chose what she would; but he began to think, in deep guilt, what it would be did they find Roh gone: that that was earnestly to be hoped, else she would hurl herself against an army, taking all with her.
It was a traitorous thought; he realized it, and crossed himself fervently, wishing it away—met her eyes and feared suddenly that she understood his fear.
“Liyo,” he said in a quiet voice, “whatever wants doing, I will do.”
It seemed to reassure her. She turned her attention back to the way they rode, and to the hills.
• • •
Night began to fall, streaks of twilight that shaded into dark among the smokes across the hills, a murky and ugly color. They rode among stones that gathered more and more thickly about the road, until it became clear that here had been some massive structure, foundations that lay naked and exposed in great intersecting rectangles and circles and bits of arches. Constantly the earth bore signs that vast numbers had traveled this way, and lately.
And there was a dead man by the road. The black birds rose up from his body like shadows into the dark, a heavy flapping of wings.
Violence within the army’s own ranks attended them, Vanye reckoned: desperate men, frightened men; and men and halflings massed together. They were not long in coming upon other dead, and one was a woman, and one was a black-robed priest, frail and elderly.
“They are beasts,” Kithan exclaimed in anguish.
None disputed him.
“What shall we do,” asked Jhirun, who had remained silent most of the day, “what shall we do when we reach Abarais, if they are all gathered there?”
It was not a witless question; it was a desperate one . . . Jhirun, who knew less than they what must be done, and who endured all things patiently in her hope. Vanye looked at her and shook his head helplessly, foreseeing what he thought Jhirun herself began to foresee, what Morgaine had tried earnestly to warn her, weaponless as the Barrows-girl was, and without defenses.
“You also,” said Morgaine, “are still free to leave us.”
“No,” Jhirun said quietly. “Like my lord Kithan, I have nothing to hope for from what follows us; and if I cannot get through where you are going, at least—” She made a helpless gesture, as if it were too difficult a thing to speak. “Let me try.”
Morgaine considered her a moment as they rode, and finally nodded in confirmation.
• • •
The dark fell more and more heavily about them, until there was only the light of the lesser moons and the bow in the sky in which the moons traveled, a cloudy arc across the stars. From one wall of the wide valley to the other were the dark shapes of vast ruins, no longer Standing Stones, but spires, straight on their inner, roadward faces, with a curving slant on their outer. They were aligned with the road on either side, and began to set inward to enclose it.
Their way became an aisle, so that they no longer had clear view of the hills; the stone spires began to encroach the very edge of the paving, like ribs along the spine of the road.
The horses’ hooves echoed loudly down that passage, and the shifting perspectives of that vast aisle, lit only by the moons, provided ample cover for ambush. Vanye rode with his sword across the saddlebow, wishing that they might make faster passage through this cursed place, and knowing at the same time the unwisdom of racing blindly through the dark. The road became entirely blind at some points, as it turned and the spires cut off their view on all sides.
And thereafter the road began to climb as well as wind, in long terraced steps that led ultimately to a darkness—a starless shadow that as they neared it began to take on the detail of black stonework, that lay as a wall before them: a vast cube of a building that overtopped the spires, that diverged to form an aisle before it.
“An-Abarais,” murmured Kithan. “Gateway to the Well.”
Vanye gazed at it with foreboding as they rode: for once before he had seen the like; and beside him Morgaine took Changeling into her hand. The gray horse blew nervously, side-stepping, then started forward again, taking the narrowing terraces; Vanye spurred the gelding to make him keep pace, put from his mind their two companions that trailed them.
It was no Gate, but a fortress that could master the Gates; qujal, and full of power. It was a place that Roh would not have neglected.
There was no other way through.
Chapter 17
The road met the fortress of An-Abarais: and it vanished into a long archway, black and cheerless, with night and open sky at its other end. But the slanted spires shaped another road, fronting the fortress; and in that crossing of ways Morgaine reined in, scanning all directions.
“Kithan,” she said, as their two companions overtook them. “You watch the road from here. Jhirun: come. Come with us.”
Jhirun cast an apprehensive look at all of them, left and right; but Morgaine was already on her way down that right-hand aisle, a pale-haired ghost on a pale horse, almost lost in shadow.
Vanye reined aside and rode after, heard Jhirun clattering along behind him in haste. What Kithan would do, whether he would stay or whether he would flee to their enemies—Vanye refused to reckon: Morgaine surely tempted him, dismissed him for good or for ill; but her thoughts would be set desperately elsewhere at the moment, and she needed her ilin at her back.
He overtook her as she stopped in that dark aisle, where she had found the deep shadow of a doorway; she dismounted, pushed at that door with her left hand, bearing Changeling in her right.
It yielded easily, on silent hinges. Cold breathed forth from that darkness, wherein the moonlight from the doorway showed level, polished stone. She led Siptah forward, within the door, and Vanye bent his head and rode carefully after, shod hooves ringing irreverently in that deep silence. Jhirun followed, afoot, tugging at the reluctant mare, a third clatter of hooves on the stone. When she was still, there was no sound but the restless shift of leather and the animals’ hard breathing.
Vanye slid his sword from its sheath and carried it naked in his hand; and suddenly light glimmered from Morgaine’s hands as she began to do the same, baring Changeling’s rune-written blade. The opal shimmer grew, flared into brilliance enough to light the room, casting strange shadows of slanting spires, a circular chamber, a stairway that wound its way among the spires.
From Changeling came a pulsing sound, sof
t at first, then painful to the senses, that filled all the air and made the horses shy. The light brightened when Morgaine swept its tip up and leftward; and by this they both knew the way they must go, reading the seeking of the blade toward its own power.
And did they meet, unsheathed blade and living source, it would end both: whatever madness had made Changeling had made it indestructible save by Gates.
Morgaine sheathed it as quickly as might be; and the horses stood trembling after. Vanye patted the gelding’s sweating neck and slid down.
“Come,” Morgaine said, looking at him. “Jhirun—watch the horses. Cry out at once if something goes in the least amiss; put your back against solid stone and stay there. Above all else do not trust Kithan. If he comes, warn us.”
“Yes,” she agreed in a thin voice; and half a breath Vanye hesitated, thinking to lend her a weapon—but she could not use it.
He turned, overtook Morgaine, emptied his mind of all else—watching her back, watching the shadows on whatever side she was not watching. Right hand and left the shadows passed them, and as soon as the darkness became absolute, a light flared in Morgaine’s hand, a harmless, cold magic, for it only guided them: little as he liked such things, he trusted the hand that held it. Nothing she might do could fright him here, in the presence of powers eldritch and qujalin: the sword of metal that he bore was a useless thing in such a place, all his arts and skills valueless—save against ambush.
A door faced them; it yielded noisily to Morgaine’s skilled touch, startling him; and light blazed suddenly in their faces, a garish burst of color, of pulsing radiance. Sound gibbered at them; he heard the echo of his own shameful outcry, rolling through the halls.
It was the heart of the Gates, the Wells, the thing that ruled them: and though he had seen the like before and knew that no mere noise or light could harm him, he could not shame away the clutch of fear at his heart, his traitor limbs that reacted to the madness that assailed them.
“Come,” Morgaine urged him: the suspicion of pity in her voice stung him; and he gripped his sword and stayed close at her heels, walking as briskly as she down that long aisle of light. Light redder than the sunset dyed her hair and her skin, glittered bloodily off mail and stained Changeling’s golden hilt: the sound that roared about them drowned their footfalls so that she and he seemed to drift soundlessly in the glow. Morgaine spared not a glance for the madness on either side of them: she belongs here, he thought, watching her—who in Andurin armor, of a manner a hundred years older than his own, paused before the center of those blazing panels. She laid hands on them with skill, called forth flurries of lights and sound that drowned all the rest and set him trembling.