Exile's Gate (2 page)

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
waterskin. 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.

L
ife
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 sword:
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 waterskin 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.

"Bastards," he taunted
them, but his voice was a croak like the birds', no more distinct. His
legs shot pain through the tendons, his sight came and went. He did not
know why he went on fighting. But he would not let them have his life
unscathed, not do what ep Cnary had done, passing his food and water to
Falwyn, to sit waiting for his death. Ep Cnary had lost a son at
Gyllin-brook. It had been grief that killed him as much as the wolves.
Chei grieved for a brother. But he was not disposed to quit. He worried
at the chain hour by hour of his days, rubbing it back and forth on the
post; he had strained himself against that limit to lay hands on the
rusty links which wolfish quarrels over Desynd's body had pushed a
hand's-breadth nearer: with his belt he had snagged it, some relic of a
previous victim which was now his defense and his hope of freedom. He
battered at the post now with all the force his legs and his failing
strength could muster, and hoped that his weight could avail to snap it
where he had worn it part way through; but it stood firm as the rock in
which it was set: it was weathered oak, and it would not break.

The black-maned wolf moved
closer, jaws agape, a distraction. It was always the notch-eared one
that darted to the flank. He had seen this before, and knew her tricks.
He spun and swung the chain, and Notch-ear dodged: Black-mane then, and
the gray one—he gave them names. He taunted them with a voice that
rasped like the ravens'. "Here, bitch, try again. Try closer—"

They came in twos and
threes this time. He turned with his back against the pole, his right
foot failing him, swollen in the boot and the chain, a lifeless thing
at the end of his leg. It was that which the wolf caught, driving in
with serpent-quickness, and he swung the chain at it, jabbed down onto
its shoulders with the jagged bone and felt it snap on tough hide and
bone. Jaws closed on his armor at knee and elbow, teeth snapping in
front of his face and a wolf dodging with a yelp as he swung the chain
in the limited range he had. The pack closed about him in a snarling
maelstrom, out of which the flap of wings, the thunder of riders—he saw
them in a whirling confusion, the pale horses, the gleam of metal, the
pale banner of hair a-flutter in the wind—