Exile's Gate (54 page)

The
arrhendur mare came to none, only stopped, confused, her feet striking
echoes from polished pavement, in a hall supported by columns much lest
vast than those of Neisyrrn Neith, but vast for all that, shaped of
green stone and black.

A table was set there, set with pitchers and platters bearing fruit and bread and what else his eye did not trouble to see.

Skarrin's ghost hung before them, welcomed them, smiled at them with all beneficence and no little amusement.

"My
guests," he said; then, and with less mockery: "My lady Morgaine
Anjhuran, my youngest cousin—sit, take your ease. You can trust my
table. Surely you know that. And you might indeed leave the horses
outside my hall."

"My
lord Skarrin," Morgaine said, "forgive me. I have known so many and so
bizarre things in my travels—I have found folk do things for remarkable
reasons, some only because they can, some only for sport—I do not know
you, my lord. So I keep my horse and my arms—and my servants. My
father's friends may, for all I know, be no less mad than some others I
have met on the way."

The drifting image laughed, a soft sound, like the hissing of wind in grass. "And thus you decline my hospitality?"

"I
do not sit at table with shadows, my lord. Our mistrust is mutual—else
you would not hesitate to come and meet me face to face—if you can."

"My lady of outlaws and rebels—should I trust myself to your companions, when they think so ill of me?"

Morgaine
laughed, let fall Siptah's reins, and walked over to the table, to pull
out a chair and sit down. She picked up a pitcher and poured a cup of
red wine.

Vanye
let Arrhan stand alone too, and went and stood at the side of her chair
as she lifted it and sipped it in courtesy to their shadowy host.

Whereupon Skarrin laughed softly, and drifted amid their table, severed at the waist. "You are trusting."

"No, my lord of Mante. Only interested. I knew when I heard your name from young Chei—who is host to my lord of Morund—what you
might
be.
I took your gate-wardens' behavior for yours—to our mutual
discomfiture. No one saw fit to apprise me of the truth—in which I do
fault you, my lord of Mante. So much could have been saved, of affairs
in the south, if I had known. Now I leave you a humankind in war and
disorder—an inconvenience, at the least, for which I do apologize."

"There are other lands. The world is wide. I weary of Mante."

"I took this for the greatest of your cities. Are there others? Truly, this one is a wonder to see."

"Ah,
there are hundreds. Everywhere—there are cities, as unvarying as the
worlds. Everywhere is boredom, my lady of light, until you
came—traveling, as you say. With a human servant, no less—what is his
name?"

"Nhi Vanye i Chya. Nhi Vanye, if you please."

"My
lord," Vanye said. To say something seemed incumbent on him, when the
image turned its cold eyes in his direction and the face seemed to gaze
straight at him. He was in danger. He knew beyond a doubt that he was
in peril of his life, only for being human, and for standing where he
stood, and for more than that: it was the look a man gave a man where a
woman was in question—and blood was.

The glass-gray stare passed from him and turned slowly to the others, and back again to Morgaine.

"Why have you come?"

"Why
should I not?" Morgaine said. "I take my father's lesson, who found one
world and a succession of worlds—far too small for him.
That
was
Anjhurin." She leaned back, posing the chair on its rearmost legs, and
stared up at the image. "From all you say, you have arrived at the same
place as he—you have wielded power over world and world and world—am I
right? And you have found this world much the same as the last."

"And the one before," Skarrin said. "And before that. You are young."

"As you see me."

"Very young," Skarrin said softly, this young man with gray, gentle eyes.

"You knew Anjhurin," Morgaine said.

"A
very, very long time ago." The image became merely a face, drifting in
the shadow, a handsome face, with Morgaine's own look, so like her
among qhal it might have been a brother. "Anjhurin dead! Worlds should
shake."

"They have," Morgaine said softly. "And things
change,
my lord of dust and stability. You do not love your life. Come risk it with me. Come join me."

"To what purpose?"

"The changing of worlds, my lord, change that sweeps through space and time."

"Even
this, I have seen. I have ties in many ages, many worlds. I will
survive even the next calamity. What new can you offer me?"

"Have you
risked
that
hope, elder cousin? It is risk makes immortality bearable—to know that
personal calamity is possible, oh, very possible, and tranquility, what
time it exists, is precious. Anjhurin is dead. Does that not tell you
that fatality is possible? Come with me. There are worlds full of
chances."

"Full
of cattle. Full of same choices and same tragedies and same small
hearts and smaller minds which lead to them. Full of stale poets who
think their ideas are a towering novelty in the cosmos. Full of rebels
who think they can change worlds for the better and murderers who see
no further than the selfish moment. Mostly, full of cattle, content
with their mouthful of grass and their little herd and endless
procreation of other cattle. And we are finite, calamity endlessly
regenerate, disaster in a bubble. One day it will burst of sheer
tedium. And the universe will never notice."

"No," Morgaine said, and reached and took Vanye by the arm, drawing him to the table edge. "I have news to give you, my lord.
Qhal
reached outside. They stole
his
ancestors in real-space, and his cousins voyage there,
not
with the gates,
not
within them so far as they know—"

"It will not save them."

"No.
But they are widening the bubble, my lord who sees no change. They are
involving all who meet them—and all who meet their allies. Do you see,
my lord of shadows? There is chance and change.
His
kind—humankind—have realized the trap. They have refused it. More, they have set out to prick the bubble themselves."

There was long silence.

"It would doom them," Skarrin said.

"Perhaps.
Their
threads reach far beyond their own world, but they were not that deeply entangled."

"If they have taken it on themselves to do this, by that very act they are entangled."

"And they know
other
races who know others still."

Vanye
listened through that silence, his heart beating harder and harder.
Morgaine's light hand upon his elbow held him fast, by oath and by the
surety that somewhere in this exchange he had become all humanity, and
that existence was the prize of this struggle—
What must I do, what must I say, what is she telling him
—
of threads and bubbles?

This
man can kill us all. He has stripped this house of its servants, its
goods, its cattle. He has destroyed them or he has sent them through
the gate before him
—
and means to follow.

—
Humankind
—
has refused the trap.

What is she telling him?

"Change," Morgaine said, "is very possible. That is the work I do."

"And
this
—for heir," Skarrin said. "This for companion. His get—for inheritors."

"Come
with me," Morgaine said, "down the thread that leads to infinity. Or
bind yourself more and more irrevocably to the one you have followed
thus far. Eventually change
may
become impossible. But you will not find it inside the patterns; you find it linked to these—to qhal, and to humankind. And to
me,
lord Skarrin, and to those with me."

"So I should serve your purposes."

"Follow
your own. Did I ever say I wished to share more than a road and the
pleasure of your company? We will bid one another farewell—in time, in
time I cannot predict, my lord Skarrin, nor can you. That is
chance,
my
lord Skarrin. Have you grown too attached to this age and to what is?
Have you found your own end of time, and are you content with solitude
among your subjects—or do I tempt you?"

"You tempt me."

"We
have a horse to spare." She held Vanye's arm the tighter, and laughed
softly. "What want you, an entourage, a clutter of servants, lord
Skarrin? I have my few, who will serve you the same as me. A horse, a
bedroll, and the sky overhead
—
your bones are still young, and your heart is not that cold. Come and learn what a younger generation has learned."

The image smiled, slowly and fondly. "Was Anjhurin—fate's way of creating you—who see no wider than that?"

"Perhaps that is all there is worthwhile, my lord kinsman.
Freedom. "

"Freedom! Oh, young cousin, lady, you mistake the roof for the sky. We are prisoners, all.
Inside
the
bubble we work what we will and we shift and change. The gates end and
the gates begin. And all the hope you bring me is that the contagion is
spreading and the bubble widens. Is
that
cause to hope? I think not. In the wide universe we are still without significance."

"You are melancholy, my lord of shadows."

"I am a god. The cattle have made me so." There came laughter, soft and terrible. "Tell me, is that not cause for melancholy?"

"They
name me Death. Is it not reasonable that I am the youngest of us, and
the most cheerful?" Again she laughed, and stood and leaned against
Vanye's shoulder, clasping his arm. "Few of humankind love me. But,
lord of shadows, I shall live longest, and so will those who ride with
me. It is helpers I seek. Come ride the wave with me, down to the last
shore. Or do you want eternity in Mante, with shapes of your own
devising, in a world of your own making? Another stone palace and more
worshippers? Come, let us see if we can shake the worlds."

The
image faded abruptly to dark. The hall was very still, except the
random shift of a horse's foot, which rang like doom on the pavings.

"What are you saying?" Chei asked, suddenly breaking that peace. "What
are
you, what are you talking about—waves and shores? Who
are
you?"

"I
have said," Morgaine said quietly, and her hand never left Vanye's
shoulder, a calming touch. If it had not been there he would have
reached for a weapon for comfort. It was; and he felt himself numb like
a bird in the eye of the serpent—not afraid, not capable, he thought,
of fear at all any longer. He knew her lies, even when they were told
with the truth. Even when they were entirely the truth. He trusted.
That was all there was left to do.

"Perhaps you can flee," Morgaine said to the others. "It seems likely. I do not think he will trouble himself with you."

Rhanin
edged away. And stopped, as if he did not know what to do, or as if he
had expected the others would, or as if he had had second thoughts. He
only stood there.

Then distantly, softly echoing, came footsteps in the corridors.

This
time, Vanye thought, it was substance which came to them; it was
substance which appeared in the shadows of the corridor which let into
this hall.

It
was Skarrin himself who walked out into the light which was always
available in such places, that power drawn of gate-force, come full in
the room.

"My lady of mysteries," Skarrin said, halted there in that entry. "Am I in truth welcome?"

"Oh,
indeed," Morgaine said in a still, hushed voice. "Good day to you,
shadow-lord." She walked a few paces closer, and stopped, and Vanye
stood with a shiver running through his limbs, a twitch that was the
impulse to follow her, stay with her instantly; but that was a fool's
move, to show hostility to this lord, and useless. He watched Morgaine
stop and stand, hands on hips, head tilted cheerfully. "You are smaller
than I thought."

For
the least instant he frowned, then laughed in offended surprise. "We
are well-matched." His gaze swept the room. "And this, the company you
ask me to keep. You—Man. Come here."

Vanye's
heart turned over. He measured the separation between him and Morgaine
and between him and Skarrin with a nervous sweep of his eye, and used
that small chance to bring himself even with Morgaine.

"I take my lady's orders," he said as mildly as he could, while his heart beat in panic.

"Defiance from a human?"

"From
me,"
Morgaine
said, and walked a little forward, to stop again with hand on hip. "Not
that I am discourteous, my lord, but I do not lend my servants; I will
reckon you have your own, and I will trust there are loyal folk among
them. Or has this kingship of yours gotten too old and the intrigues
too many? Or have you ceased to care? My folk will serve you. Bring
your own servants—I care not, only so they are strong enough to last
the course and honest enough to guard our backs. Let us set the gate
and quit this tedious place. Keep to my path a while. I shall at very
least value your company—and your advice. I am, after all, youngest.
You can teach me—very much. And I can teach
you,
lord of dusty Mante—that there are new things under new suns, I am sufficient guarantee of that."