Exile's Gate (13 page)

It was not alone Myya deer
he had hunted when he had been an outlaw. The instincts came back, with
the memory of Myya arrows and hunger: a desperate Nhi-Chya boy had
learned of the only tutors he had, his enemies, and was still alive,
when some of his Myya kinsmen were not.

He heard them, as quiet as
half a score of riders could be, all drawn aside into brushy cover—no
one of them so quiet as a single Kurshin hunter could stalk them. He
saw them, himself motionless and themselves as still as they could hold
their horses, vague shadows in the starlight. He moved carefully beyond
them. The horses knew he was there. They jerked at the reins and
fretted. The men cast about them anxiously, beginning to look back the
way they had come, at the woods about them.

In moves soft and still he
set his bow against his instep and strung it; he uncapped his quiver
and took out three arrows, brushing the protected fletchings to be sure
of them in the dark. There was not an arrow he had he did not know as
sound. There was not a crooked shaft or a marred feather in the lot.

He nocked the first and
chose the clearest and the nearest target, rising from the thicket:
there was no mail forged might stand against an arrhendur longbow
full-bent at that range. His bruised shoulder held sound. The arrow
flew, thumped in a solid hit and the man fell.

The others turned to look.
He had another arrow nocked while they were amazed, and a second man
went down with an outcry as a horse broke free and went shying off into
the road.

Third arrow: the men scrambled to mount and ride, and one of them cried out and fell even as he made the saddle.

Vanye snatched another
arrow from the quiver braced against his leg. He took a fourth man in
the back as the troop bolted away from his fire, toward Morgaine.

Then he snatched up his
quiver and ran past the fallen, caring nothing for concealment as he
raced down the road after them, his heart hammering against his ribs.

He heard the outcries and
the crash of brush before he reached the turning; and beyond it as he
rounded the bend was Siptah and his rider in the moonlight and horses
still shying off from the calamity that had spilled their masters
lifeless in the dust. He saw Chei scramble from cover, bent on seizing
one of the loose horses, saw Morgaine with deadly aim wheel instead
toward himself and knew a moment of stark terror.

"Liyo,"
he called out, holding the bow wide.

Then she knew him, and spun
the stallion about to ride after Chei as he swung up onto the captured
horse with more strength than a sick man ought to show.

He thought then that she
would kill Chei outright or shoot the horse under him, and he ran with
a dread like ice in his gut—he could not cry out, not stay her from
what had to be: he was afoot, and Chei escaping on horseback, and she
had no strength to grapple with him hand to hand—there was no way that
Morgaine could stop him, else. He ran, breathless and armor-weighted,
down the middle of the roadway.

But Chei was reining hard
about, the panicked horse going wide on the turn and fighting the bit;
and Morgaine reined back, bringing Siptah to a stop facing him.

Chei rode back to join
them, of his own will. Vanye reached Morgaine's side with a stitch in
his side and a roaring in his ears, sweat running beneath his armor. He
saw the terror on Chei's face, the terror of a man who had just seen
the deaths he had seen—and knew what might have overtaken him an
instant ago and what might befall him now. But Chei had made his
decision. By riding back—he had declared something, at least.

And there were eight dead
back there, four dark lumps in the roadway, others where he had left
them beyond the turning. There were seven horses headed wherever those
horses thought to go—home and stable, eventually, with empty saddles
and trodden reins.

"Did any escape?" Morgaine asked, not taking her eyes from Chei.

"No," Vanye said, "if none passed you."

"None," she said in that
hard, clipped tone, "but we have horses loose and dead men lying here
with marks on them that will raise questions in Morund—Chei! Whose are
they? Are they Gault's?"

"Gault's," Chei said in a low voice.

Vanye drew a ragged breath.
"The marks I can care for." The blood was still up in him. In an hour
he would be shaking. Now the grisliest tasks seemed possible. "If it is
the sword Chei's people favor."

"It will not hide the burning well enough," Morgaine said; and coldly:
"Fire
will.
Fire
in these woods will occupy them no little time. Move the bodies deep into the brush."

"God," Chei murmured in a tone of horror. "Burn the woods? Burn the land?"

"Vanye," Morgaine said flatly.

Vanye set the bow against
his foot and unstrung it; and handed that and the quiver to Morgaine's
left hand, the while she hardly took her eyes from Chei.

"Help him," she bade Chei in a voice still colder. "You seem fit enough."

"If any are alive—" Vanye
said. The numbness was still about him. It frayed suddenly; and he
tried to hold onto it, tried not to think at all except in terms of
what he must do.

"Find that out," she said.

Beyond that she did not
give him orders. Beyond that, surely, was her own numbness, as
essential as his own. It was cowardice to ask what he should do in that
case, cowardice to cast the necessity onto his liege by asking for
instruction, when he knew as well as she that they could afford no
delays and no second and hostile encumbrance. He walked back toward the
men on the ground, slipping his sword to his side, unhooking and
drawing it. He heard the two horses walking at his back, heard one
rider dismount and delay a moment; he had no attention for anything but
the supposed dead—men armored much as Chei had been, in leather and
chain.

There was no doubt of the
four Morgaine had taken. He went into the woods where Arrhan stood
fretting—the white mare, the cause of so many deaths. He recovered his
helm from where he had left it, freed the mare and rode back beyond the
curve of the road where he had left the rest of the company, those his
arrows had accounted for.

One of them was qhal. All of them were dead.

Thank Heaven, he thought; and was horrified at his own blasphemy.

He tied Arrhan by the road
and dragged the dead men as far into the brush as he could manage; and
rode back to Morgaine and Chei, where Chei tried to do the same,
staggering and panting with the effort of hauling yet another armored
corpse off into the brush of the roadside.

Vanye lent his help, himself staggering by the time that they had laid out the last of the bodies well within the woods.

Chei said not a word in all
of it—worked with his face averted and grim, his gasps after breath the
only sound except the breaking of brush as they trod back to the open
road.

"Wind to the east,"
Morgaine said as they mounted up. Under her, Siptah sidled toward Chei
or his horse and she curbed that. "I trust this road tends north,
Chei—rapidly."

"Yes," Chei answered.

"On your life," Morgaine
said then, and lifting her arm toward the roadside fired the black
weapon she carried, taking no trouble now to conceal it, from a man who
had seen it and seen the wounds it made, burning through flesh and bone.

Now it was the dry leaves
it burned, and a thin line of fire traced itself along the ground where
it aimed. The fire increased with a dry crackling. The horses fretted
and complained at the smell of smoke, and they let them move.

All along that curve of the
road as they went, Morgaine raised fire. That behind them blazed bright
when Vanye looked over his shoulder.

The dawn itself was not so
bright. It was well beyond the fire that they could see the sun coming,
a lightening of the east that had nothing to do with that ominous glare
in the woods behind them.

"It is Gault's woods," Chei
muttered when they let the horses breathe, looking back from a height
and a turning of the wooded road. "It is his woods we are burning, and
the wind will bring the fire to his fields."

Vanye stared at the line of
fire below them that now rolled smoke into a dim but increasingly
sunlit sky. For himself he wanted clean water, in which he could wash
his hands and wash his face and take the stink of death and burning out
of his nostrils.

Lord in Heaven, there were
horses loose down there, in that, no knowing whether the road would
take them to safety. And the land itself—

Burn the woods? Burn the land?

He was not sure where it
weighed, against ambush and murder of unsuspecting men who might,
Heaven knew, have run from the sight of them; or a lord who fed his
enemies to wolves; or the obscure terrors which Morgaine feared, which
involved the gates and things which she tried in vain to make him
comprehend.

The gates opened too far,
into too much, and it was possible, Morgaine had said, that they could
unravel all that was and take it into themselves. Perhaps that was so.
He did not conceive of things in the way Morgaine did—he did not want
to conceive of them, in the same way he did not want to know why the
stars shifted, or where they were when they were between the gates and
there were neither stars nor substance.

But he had felt the
gate-force in his bones. He had stared into the void often enough to
know it was hell itself that beckoned there.

He knew what made a man
like Gault. He knew that there was, for himself and his liege, no honor
such as the world counted it, and that the most irresponsible thing in
the world was to have let a man of that company back there escape
alive, to bring pursuit on them, for if they should fall—Morgaine had
told him—the deaths would be ... everything: all that had ever been and
might be. In this she was telling the truth as she believed it, though
she had lied to him in lesser things. On this one item of faith he
committed himself body and soul. He even hoped—in the secrecy of his
heart—that God might forgive him. For all the murder, God might forgive
him and forgive her, if it was somehow right, what they did, and they
were not deceived.

But he wished with all his
soul, that he could feel as keen a remorse as once he might have felt
for the men he had killed back there. He could not find it again. There
was only horror. There was keenest anguish—but that mostly for the
horses; and very little for the men, even of his own kind. He was
afraid when he knew that, as if something were slipping irrevocably
away from him, or he from it, and he did not know his way back from
this point.

"Where have we gotten to?"
Morgaine asked their guide when they had come still a little higher up
the road, up where the road bent again away from the dawn and toward
the still-shadowed sky; and the fire below them was a rolling of white
smoke across the tops of trees. "Can we get off this road and onto the
old one?"

"It is not safe," Chei
said. His face by the dawning light was haggard and his hair wild, with
bits of dead leaves stuck in it. His eyes held a feverish look, as well
a man's might, which had seen what they had. "If you want ambush, lady,
that is where to find it."

"Where were they going
before dawn?" Vanye asked harshly, for that was the thing that made no
sense to him; it outraged him, that men had been so foolish, and he had
had to pay them for it. He felt
that,
when he wished to Heaven he could feel something like conscience.

One of them, Mother of God,
had been hardly more than sixteen; and tears stung his eyes, at the
same time he could have struck anything in his path.

"I do not know," Chei said. "I do not know."

"We assume they had
reason," Morgaine said shortly. "We assume it was on this road and we
may yet meet it, to someone's sorrow—do you understand me, Chei?"

"I do not know," Chei protested, shaking his head.

"You took a great chance,"
Morgaine said, "running for that horse back there in the woods. If not
for that white shirt, you would be dead. Eight men are—lest they betray
us. Do you still understand me, Chei?"

"Yes, lady," Chei said in a faint voice.

"Are we yet off Gault's land? Where is his border?"

"I do not know.—It is
truth! We fought north of here. My lord Ichandren—is dead. Gault's
forces are on the road at night—God knows, God only knows, lady, what
they were doing, or where more of them are—That fire will draw them,
but it will draw other attention too—God knows who, or whether they
will think it an accident or set. It is Gault's land down there. His
men would not burn his own land. Neither—" He hesitated a breath.
"Neither have we ever fired the land we move in. That road will be
Gault's when it has burned out. It will be black sticks and open to the
eye, and it will be so much more land he can march through."

It was indignation, that
last. Vanye leaned on the saddlebow and frowned—it was a change in
Chei's voice and bearing, was even daring of a Man toward a qhal who
threatened him, and with corpses a-smolder in the forest to prove it.
"What," Vanye said, " 'we'? Friends of yours? And how will
we
fare with them?"