World after world they sealed . . . but their numbers declined, and their lives grew strange, stretched over millennia of real-time. Few of them survived of the second and third generations, and some of those went mad.
Then they began to despair, for all their struggle seemed hopeless: one Gate omitted anywhere across the web would begin it all again; one Gate, anywhen misused, could bring down on them the ruin of all they had ever done and make meaningless all their sacrifice.
In their fear they created a weapon, indestructible save by the Gates which powered it: a thing for their own protection, and containing all the knowledge they had ever gained of the Gates—a doomsday force against that paradoxical Ultimate Gate, beyond which was no passage at all—or a truth worse than all their nightmares.
They were five when that dreadful Weapon was made.
There was one who survived to carry it.
Chapter 1
Vision of horses, one gray and shadow, one star-white, both shod for war . . . one dark rider, one pale, across void and night—
• • •
In gray lines, horses and riders appear along the river-ridge, concealed in mist and the uncertainties of dawn. Weapons bristle up, lower, all in one nightmare movement of the charge. It is ambush, and below them, humans ride along the sedge-rimmed river, Ichandren’s men, their weapons laid across saddlebows. Ichandren looks up aghast at the first thin shout, the thunder that comes down on them in morning mist, the hedge of weapons that materializes out of the fog. The promised truce is broken, the valley has become a trap into which shadowy riders pour off either slope.
“Back!” Ichandren yells, wheeling his horse about.
The hindmost of his men shriek and die, pierced by lances, and the riderless horses splash along the reed-edged banks. The mist is full of shadows, shadows of enemies, of human riders fleeing in confusion, small bands battling in isolation. Even sound is distorted, echo mingling with present orders, screams and the clash of weapons ringing off the hills.
Some attempt retreat; but other shadows come pouring out of the mist behind, and horns sound in wild confusion. Ichandren shouts orders, but there is no relief, the enemy is too numerous, and his voice is lost in the confusion.
In despair he rallies such of his guard as he can, and turns and drives back the way he has come, in a world of shades and ghosts.
• • •
Vision of horses, the gray and the white, hooves descending, slowly, all of time and existence suspended upon that single motion—
• • •
In the opal dawn, in the mist, arrows fall like black sleet on flesh and steel, and thunder on wooden shields, finding chinks in the failing defense. Hammer and hammer again, blow after blow. Horses are down, threshing and screaming, crushing the wounded and the dead. Men flee afoot, cut down by the sweep of riders on the perimeters.
There is no more hope. Ichandren has met ambush. The fox has been out-foxed, and the enemy riders circle, cutting down those few who evade that last sweep.
But most rally around Ichandren, as horses go down, as men fall.
No arrows now. At the last it is swords and a battle afoot, humans against humans, Ichandren’s men against those who have sold their souls to Morund.
“Bron!” Chei ep Kantory cries, seeing his brother fall, his place suddenly vacant in the defensive circle and Morund crests surging against it. He tries to gain those few feet, in that desperate knot about Ichandren, to die shielding his brother, for it is only a question of place now: weight of numbers bows their slight defense and breaks their shield-ring.
But thunder breaks behind him. Chei turns and lifts his sword, but there are two of them, helmed and masked, who come thundering toward him across the brook, throwing a fine spray in the first breaking of the sunlight.
• • •
Third stride, the gray horse and the white, stately slow, inexorable as fate—
• • •
The solemn procession reaches the killing-ground, the place of execution. They have walked this far, these last survivors of Gyllin-brook. Ichandren is not among them. The fox’s head stands on a pike outside Morund-gate, his countenance strangely tranquil after so much he has suffered; and by now the crows will have claimed the eyes, as the crows and the kites have claimed so many, many others.
Carrion crows rise up here, at this end of all roads, black shapes against a pale, sickly sun, dull clap of startled wings that recalls the thunder of hooves on sand—
But that day is done, Ichandren is dead, his men have seen him die, and seen the things done to him, which made his death a mercy.
Now is their own turn. And disturbed birds settle back to the field, one solitary raven pacing on the roadside in the important way of his kind.
“Halt,” lord Gault calls out, Gault ep Mesyrun, but this is not the Gault Ichandren knew, the brother in arms he once trusted. This is a different creature, who now holds lordship over Morund Keep. Qhal serve him, though his hair is human-dark and his body heavy and of no remarkable stature; the humans in his command fear him greatly. That is the kind of man he has become. And Gault has brought the prisoners here, to this place where crows gather, where the woods grow strange and twisted. He has cause to know this vicinity. In a place not far hence the woods grow strange indeed: no beast will go there, and no bird will fly above the heart of it. By that place Gault holds power over the south.
But they will go no further than this, for this purpose, for the disposal of enemies, here on the boundaries of law and reason. Horses shy and snort at the carrion smell of the place. White bits of bone, scattered by animals, litter the dust of the roadway, beside a bald hill—and on that hill stakes and frames stand against the sky, some vacant, some holding scraps of flesh and bone.
Blows and curses drive the prisoners staggering toward their fate, blows more cruel than the others they have suffered on this march, for even the guards fear this place and are anxious to be away. The prisoners go, bewildered; they climb most of the way up that hill before something, be it courage, be it only the breaking of a fragment of skull under a man’s foot, or the regard of one black, beadlike raven eye lifting from its fixation on carrion—breaks the spell, breaks the line, and a man attempts escape. Then horses cut him off, two riders gather him up by the arms and haul him screaming to the hilltop. Other riders, humans with staffs and pikes, rain blows on the rebellion that follows, and drive the remainder to the stakes.
“I shall not leave you destitute,” lord Gault follows them to say, riding his red roan horse to the crest, bones breaking under its hooves. “I leave you food. And an abundance of water. Can I do more?”
Chei ep Kantory is one who hears him, but dimly, as a voice among other voices, for the executioners have laid hands on him, as already they have taken Eranel, ep Cnary, Desynd, and red-haired Falwyn who is Ichandren’s youngest cousin. He resists, does Chei, as he has been trouble on the march; but repeated blows of a pikestaff bring him down, at the last without a struggle, stunned and waiting only for whatever the enemy will do. The carrion stench is everywhere, his groping hand feels the brittle shards of bone among the silky dust on which he lies, the sky is a white, burning fire and the shadows of devils move across it, press at his body, drag at his booted ankle and clamp a grip about it which does not relax when they let him go.
A man curses. Chei recognizes it for Desynd’s voice, distant and strained. Gault’s laughter follows it. And because breath has come back to him and the shadows have gone he rolls over onto his hands, flinching from the bones, and tries the chain. Finally, because it is a solidity in so much that is flux, and a protection should the riders have some sport in mind, he huddles against the stake to which he is chained.
By each of them is set a water-skin. By each a parcel of food. And the lord Gault wishes them well, before he and his servants ride away.
Each of the condemned is secured alike,
by the ankle to separate weathered posts; and at the fullest stretch of each chain a man is within reach of the man next at the fullest stretch of his. Their hands are not bound and they have their armor, but that is only to prolong matters.
In the evening the wolves come, dilatory, to a prey they have learned to expect when the riders are about. There is no haste. They are a bastard breed, and much of the dog is in them. It is in their eyes, in that way they creep forward, like hounds at hearth seeking some tidbit, with a kind of cunning and bravado neither breed alone would have. They retreat from such missiles as bone-chips and even handfuls of dust, they slink from shouts and threats, but in the long hours of the night they come closer, and rest, tongues lolling, one of them rising now and again to pace the line and to try the temper of this offering, whether any of them has yet weakened or determined to surrender.
By the second evening patience is rewarded. And at full stretch of the chain, in the night, the wolves and the survivors can reach truce, of sorts, while the terrible sounds proceed, of quarrels and the tearing of flesh and the crack of bone.
For the remaining nights, the wolves have leisure.
• • •
The horses stride into the world, the dapple gray and the white, in an opal shimmering, stride for stride. Their hooves touch the leafy mold of a forested hillside and their legs stretch, take their weight—like the riders, they are bemazed by the gulf, and chilled by the bitter winds.
The riders let them run. They have no knowledge where they are . . . but they have taken such strides before.
• • •
The sun came mottled through a grove of twisted shapes, saplings, trees, blighted as by some perpetual wind . . . such places as this, they had seen before, and they had passed gates before the one which hove up on the hill above them, still powerful, still baneful and flinging power into the heavy air.
The horses ran out their terror, slowed as the trees grew thicker, and walked a gentler course in a forest where, among the trees, stood stones half again taller than horse and rider together. They snorted their acquaintance with a foreign wind and the smell of this world, while the riders went in silence.
But in time they stopped of their own accord, and the riders only listened to the world, the whispering of wind and branch, and looked about them at this strangely twisted place.
“I do not like this,” Vanye said, and gave a twitch of his shoulders as he leaned forward against his saddle.
Horses dapple-gray and white, male and female, like the riders: Morgaine in black and silver, Vanye in forester’s gray and green, her hair qhal-silver and his hair human-hued, pale brown beneath a peaked steel helm, wrapped round the rim with a white scarf . . . that was the look of them. They were lost, except for the road which led them—which they trusted they would find again: for qhal whenever they had built, had built much of the same pattern; and to leave the Gate and its confusion was the only thing that mattered, across such a gulf as that void at their backs, that cold nightmare which lay between them and a yesterday—Heaven knew how long lost.
They went armored and armed. Morgaine was liege and Vanye was liegeman; she was—what she was, and he was Man; that was the way of things between them.
“Nor do I care for it,” said Morgaine, and started the gray stud moving, a gentle, careful pace.
There was no retreat for them. That, they neither one mentioned. Vanye cast a quick look back, where the thin, spiral-twisted trees hid all view of that great span which was a qhalur Gate—little different than other gates they had seen, very like one he had known, in a land like this one—but this was not that land: he knew that well enough, knew it in the patterns of the rare leaves which grew in dispirited clumps at the end of limbs, lit by a wan and (he thought, and time proved) westering sun.
Although the gate behind them stood still powerful, and disturbed the air and worked at the nerves, it could not carry them back, and it could not carry them where they had now to go, or tell them their direction. For now, it was only downslope, from standing stone to standing stone, in a woods as unwholesome as the feeling in the air.
Life here—struggled. What had feet to flee, fled; what rooted, grew twisted and strange, from the trees to the brush, the shoots of which were tormented and knotted, the leaves of which were deformed and often curled upon themselves. And the horses laid back their ears and shook themselves from time to time, likeliest with that same feeling that made the fine hair stand up on the body and made the ears think that there was sound where no sound existed, until they had put more and more of the hill between them and the gate.
They rode in amid a jumble of stones and trees, finally, a leaning conspiracy of broken stone walls and twisted saplings none of which attained great age, but many of which lay rotten or broken by winds.
Vanye looked about him as his white mare danced and fretted beneath him, hooves ringing on half-buried paving in quick, nervous steps, echoing out of time to the pace of the iron-shod dapple gray. “This was a keep of some sort,” he murmured, and crossed himself anxiously, forgetting as he forgot in such moments, that his soul was damned.
“A great one,” Morgaine answered him, whether that was surmise or sure knowledge; and Vanye blinked and stared round him a second time as the horses moved and the ruin of walls unfolded. “We have found our road again.”
Hooves on stone. Buried pavings. Vanye conceived of the Road as a thing of all places, all gates, all skies: it was one Road, and the gates inevitably led to it.
“No sign of men,” he murmured.
“Perhaps there are none,” Morgaine answered him. “Or perhaps there are.”
He took nothing for granted. He gazed about him with a warrior’s practiced eye, looking for recognizable points, things by which he could make order out of this jumbled buff and white stone. These flat stretches, these narrower places were the foundations of houses, craftshops, warehouses. People—uncountable numbers of people would have dwelt in such a place, and plied their crafts; but how much land must they till, how feed so great a number in so rough a land, except they take their provender from war and tribute? It did not suggest peace.
He tried to imagine these ruins near him as they might have stood, bare foundations rising into forms which (he could not help it) very greatly resembled the keep and the barracks and the guesting-house of Ra-morij of his birth, in distant Andur-Kursh, a courtyard cobbled and usually having a standing puddle down the middle of it, where the scullery dumped its dirty water. It was gray cobbles in his vision, not the buff stone under the mare’s hooves—was an aching touch of home, however cruel it had been in his living there.
He remembered other crossings of that gulf they had just passed, the night he had looked up to see two moons, and constellations strangely warped; that night he had first looked on a sea of black water, among drowning hills; a dawn that had risen and showed him a land unwalled by mountains for the first time in his life, horizons that went on forever and a sky which crushed him beneath its weight. He blinked this ruin about him clear again, in its desolation; and the cries of birds brought back keen memory, a presentiment of danger in the sea and the omen of the gray gulls, and the threat of moons unnaturally large.
A third blink, and it was forest, and they were black ravens that cried, and the stones held no present threat.
Behind them was dust, friends were long dead, and all they had known was changed and beyond recall, although the pain of parting was for them as recent as this morning and keen as a knife. He tried to be wise as his liege and not to think on it.
But when they rode over the shoulder of that hill, the ruin and the forest gave way to barren plains on their right hand, and sunset on their left. A wolf cried, somewhere beyond the hills.
Morgaine let slip the ring of her sword-belt, letting the dragon-hilted weapon which rode between her shoulders slide down to her side.
It had a name, that swor
d: Changeling. His own nameless blade was plain arrhendur steel. Besides his sword he had a bow of arrhendur make, and a quiver of good arrows, and a stone next his heart, in a small gray pyx, as a great lord had given it to him—as memory went, it had been very recent. But the worlds shifted, the dead went to dust; and they were in a place which made that small box no comfort to him, no more than that ill-omened blade his liege handled, on the hilt of which her hand rested.
Birds rose up from that horizon, black specks against the setting sun at that hour when birds would flock and quit the field; but not birds of the field, nothing so wholesome, gathered in hills so barren.
“Death,” Morgaine murmured at his side. “Carrion birds.”
A wolf howled, and another answered it.
• • •
They were there again in the twilight, yellow-eyed and slope-shouldered, and Chei ep Kantory gathered himself on his knees and gathered up the weapons he had, which were a human bone in one hand and a length of rusty chain in the other; he gathered himself to his feet and braced his back against the pole which his efforts and the abrasion of the chain had cut deeply but not enough. The iron held. The food was gone, the water-skin wrung out to its last drops of moisture.
It would end tonight, he thought, for he could not face another day, could not lie there racked with thirst and fever, listening to the dry rustle of wings, the flutter and flap and the wafts of carrion-stench as a questing beak would delve into some cranny where flesh remained. Tonight he would not be quick enough, the jaws that scored his armor, the quick, darting advances that had circled him last night, would find his throat and end it. Falwyn was gone, last but himself. The pack had dragged Falwyn’s body to the length of the chain and fed and quarreled and battled while Chei sank against the post that was the pivot and the center of all his existence. They had worried the armor to rags among the bones; the ravens helped by day, till now there was nothing but the bones and shreds of flesh, too little, perhaps, to content them.