Exile's Gate (29 page)

Chei's face was stark and
wide-eyed in the twilight. Bron had frozen in place. Vanye withdrew the
sword and laid it back across his saddlebow, with a second and
challenging glance toward one and the other brother.

"The dark will help us,"
Morgaine said quietly. Vanye did not see her face. He did not want to
see it. There was in his vision a boy, staring up at him from a dusty
road as if death had greatly astonished him. He saw candles and a
nightmare room in Ra-Morij, his brother's face all white and still.

He concentrated instead on
the rolling land in front of them and on the hills about them, a
constant pass of the eyes, lest the riders arrive at their flank or
bring archery to bear from the hill nearest.

"I hear them," Morgaine
said, and a moment later he heard them too, horses coming at
considerable speed for horses long on the trail. Their own blew and
shifted, and Arrhan's ribs worked less strenuously between his legs.
That was the simple strategy of their position: the enemy chose to
exhaust their horses overtaking on the uphill; they rested theirs by
waiting.

It was a small band, ten to
twenty, that crested the hill. Where are the rest of them? Vanye
thought in a moment's cold panic. Then the rest poured over the
hilltop, forty, eighty, a hundred and more riders sweeping out on
either side of the road.

Steel rang as Bron began to draw.

"No," Morgaine said calmly. "Wait. Both of you keep constantly to Vanye's left. Do
nothing
until
I tell you. I have scant patience and less charity today. Vanye—" She
changed suddenly to Kurshin accents. "Do not attempt the stone. Here!"

He had reached after his bow. She flung him
Changeling.
He
caught it one-handed across its sheath, in a rush of cold fear, first
because she had thrown it; then that it was in his keeping—the one of
her weapons that he knew how to use. He had only to look at the odds
and know why.

"Chei!" he said, and flung
his own arrhendur sword to Chei in the same fashion, as accurately
caught, while a familiar panic loosened his joints.

He drew several breaths
more, hoping neither man saw; hoping more that Morgaine did not. It was
his besetting weakness, that set his palms sweating on
Changeling's
hilt and gray sheath, and his heart pounding to the hoofbeats of the oncoming riders.

Heaven save us, he thought as the line began to spread wide.

Beside him, Morgaine signaled. He reined over, and Bron and Chei took a place at equal separation in their meager line.

The centermost riders drew to a halt. The rest kept moving, a half-ring about them, still closing.
Move us,
he thought,
for the love of Heaven, backward, forward,
liyo,
one or the other!

Morgaine leveled her hand
toward their center, where the most of the qhalur riders were. "Halt!"
a man called out, and that envelopment ceased on the instant,
everything stopped, except the breathing and stamping of the horses and
the leathery creak and jingle of armored riders.

Morgaine's hand did not lower. It stayed aimed at the center of the qhalur ranks.

"My lady," the man said to her, human face, human voice.

"Gault," Chei's voice rasped. "That is Gault, on the roan. The man by him is Jestryn ep Desiny—he was one of our company—"

"My lord Gault," Morgaine shouted back. "What have we to say to each other that you follow me so far from home?"

"We might have discovered
that had you come to me." Gault rode forward a few paces and drew the
roan to a halt again. "You take strange allies, my lady. Brigands.
Rebels. You set them free from my justice. You burn my lands and kill
my game. Am I to take this for a friendly gesture?"

"I rarely practice justice. Outright slaughter, yes. I do not call it pretty names, my lord Gault."

"What is that you hold?" Gault's big roan surged forward and he curbed it, reining aside.

"That which seems to make you prudent, my lord. Justifiably so. I see you have talked to my enemies."

"And is your report of me
so foul?" Again Gault paced the horse the other direction, weaving a
slow, distracting course in the deepening dusk, which Morgaine's hand
followed constantly.

"It is your death, my lord. My patience is lessening with every step you take. Do you want to discover which is the fatal one?"

Another three paces. "He is
delaying," Vanye muttered, scanning the hills with constant attention.
"There is something else out there, and he is waiting for the dark."

"My lady," Gault called
out. "You and I might have more to speak of than you think likely. And
perhaps more in common than you think." Gault's voice grew gentler, and
he curbed his horse's straying. "I take it that it is you I deal with
and not this gentleman by you."

"It is myself," she said. "Have no doubt of that."

"What is he?"

"This is delay," Vanye said.
"Liyo,
seek no more of him. Let us be out of here."

"My companion," Morgaine answered Gault. "So—you do not know everything about me."

"Should I?" Again the horse
surged forward and Gault reined it back. "You are no visitor out of
Mante. Your name is Morgaine. So the humans say. Mine is Qhiverin—among
others."

"Liyo.
Break away—now! Do not listen to this serpent."

"You are a stranger here,"
Gault said. "A wayfarer of the gates. You see I am not deceived. You
have threatened Mante. Now you will kill me and all my men, lest I
reach Tejhos. You think that you have no choice. But here am I, come to
parley with you when I might have stayed safe in Morund—or turned
prudently south to Morund-gate, once I learned what you are. I did not.
I have risked my life and my lord's favor to find you. Is this the
action of an implacable enemy?"

"Do not believe him," Bron said. "My lady, do not listen!"

Gault held up one hand,
took his sword from its hangings and dropped it ringing to the ground.
"There. Does that relieve your suspicions?"

"Withdraw your men," Morgaine said.

Gault hesitated, seeming uncertain, then lifted his hand to the darkened sky.

A black and moving hedge crested the hill eastward.

"Riders on our left!"
Vanye cried, and ripped
Changeling
from its
sheath.

The air went numb and
Arrhan shied under him as that the blade came free, an opal blaze till
its tip cleared the sheath and whirled free.

Then a darkness greater than the night formed at
Changeling's
point,
and drew in the air all about them. Wind shrieked and keened; men cried
out in panic, and the dark lines went to chaos, some breaking forward
to meet him, some turning to flee.

"Gate,"
he heard cry throughout the enemy ranks,
"Gate!"
—for
gate it was, leading to Hell itself. He swung it and a horse and rider
together went whirling away into dark, screaming with one terror.
Others collided with each other in their attempt to escape his attack,
and them he took in one stroke and the next, merciless, for there was
no stopping it, there was no delicacy in it—it ate substance and spun
it out again, streaming forms of living men away into Hell and cold—

—one and the next and the next as Arrhan cut a curving swath through attackers who trampled each other trying to flee it.

"Archers!" he heard cry. It
was for his liege and his comrades he had concern. He reined aside to
bring the hell-thing to the defense of his own—taking missiles askew
with the wind, trying to shield his liege if he could find her in the
unnatural light and the blinding wind.

"Liyo!"
he
shouted, desperate, fighting when he must, when some rider rushed him.
The gate-force quivered through his arm and his shoulder and deafened
him with its screaming; his eyes grew full of the hell-light and the
sights and the faces till he was numb and blinded.

"Liyo!"

"Vanye!"
he heard, and went to that thin sound, turning Arrhan, forcing her with his heels as the mare faltered in blind confusion.

Riders swept toward him. He
swung the sword up at the nearest and saw the horrified face in the
light of the blade, saw the mouth open in a cry of disbelief.

"Bron!"
he cried, wrenching the blade aside, veering so that Arrhan skidded and fought wildly for balance.

Bron was gone. The bartered horse thundered past riderless.

He guided Arrhan about in a stumbling turn, and saw Morgaine beyond, silver and black, and Siptah's eyes wild in the opal fire.

"Follow!" she ordered him, and reined about and rode for the dark and the road.

He did not even think then;
he followed. He drove his heels into Arrhan's flanks and swept to her
right and behind, to keep Morgaine safe from what he did not know and
could not see for the shock to his soul and the blinding of his eyes.
If there were enemies still behind he did not know. He held
Changeling
naked to his right, protecting them both, for in that howling wind no arrow could reach them.

Up, up and up the steep
slope, until horses faltered on the wet grass, and Siptah came about
and Arrhan slowed, blowing froth back from her bit.

"Sheathe it," Morgaine cried. "Sheathe it!"

He discovered the sheath
safe in its place at his side: he had done that much before he lost
himself, reflexive and unremembered act. He took the sheath in a
trembling hand and turned the other numbed and aching wrist to wobble
the point toward safety, the only thing that would contain
Changeling's
fire.

That small aperture was a goal he suddenly feared he could not make without calamity. His hand began to shake.

"Give over!" Morgaine said in alarm.

He made it. He slid the
point home and the fire dimmed and died, so that he was truly blind.
His right arm ached from fingers to spine. He had no strength in it nor
feeling in his fingers. "I killed Bron," he said with what voice he
could manage, quite calmly. "Where is Chei?"

"I do not know," Morgaine
said, reining Siptah close to him. There was hardness in her voice, was
very steel. He could not have borne any softer thing. "We did not take
them all. Some escaped. I do not know which ones."

"Forgive—" His breath seemed dammed up in him. "I—"

"We are near Tejhos. There
is a chance that Mante will mistake one gate-fire for the other. At
least for the hour." She turned Siptah on the slope and rode, Arrhan
followed by her own will, dazed and blind as he.

"Too near the gate," he heard her say. "Too cursed near. We must be nearly
on
Tejhos-gate. I should
never
have given it to you."

"Bron is dead," he said
again, in the vague thought that she might not have understood him. He
had to say it again to believe it. The fabric of the world seemed
thinned and perilously strained about him and what he had done seemed
done half within some other place, unlinked and without effect here.
Things that Were could not be mended piece to piece if he did not say
it till it took hold of him. "Chei may have gone with him—O God. O
God!"

He began to weep, a leakage from his eyes that became a spasm bowing him over his saddle.

"Is thee hurt?" Morgaine asked him sharply, grasping Arrhan's rein. They had stopped somehow. He did not recall. "Is thee hurt?"

"No," he managed to say.
"No." He felt Siptah brush hard against his leg and felt Morgaine touch
him, a grip on his shoulder which he could hardly feel through the
armor. He was alone inside, half deaf with the winds, blinded by the
light which still swung as a red bar passing continually in his vision.
He was drowning in it, could not breathe, and he was obliged to say:
"No. Not hurt," when next he could draw a breath, because she had no
time for a fool and a weakling who killed a comrade and then could not
find his wits again. He pushed himself up by the saddlebow and groped
after the reins.

"Give me the sword," she said. "Give it!"

He managed to wind the reins about his numbed right hand and to pass
Changeling
back to her with his left.

"Brighter," he remembered,
competent in this at least, that his mind recollected something so
difficult amid the chaos. He indicated with a lifting of his left hand
toward the northeast, as the road ran. "There. There will be Tejhos
gate."

She stared in that direction; she hooked
Changeling
to
her belt and they rode again at all the pace the horses could bear. His
right arm ached in pulses that confused themselves with the rhythm of
the horses or with his heartbeats, he could not tell which. He worked
the fingers desperately, knowing the likelihood of enemies. He scanned
darkened hills the crests of which swam with the blurring of his eyes.

"Gate-force," Morgaine said in time. "We are very near. Vanye, is thee feeling it?"

"Aye," he murmured. "Aye,
liyo."
It
was inside the armor with him, was coiled about his nerves and his
sinew, it crept within his skull and corrupted sight and reason. They
must go near that thing. Perhaps ambush waited for them.