Exile's Gate (30 page)

We will lose everything we
have done, he thought, everything she has suffered this far—lost, for a
fool who mishandled the sword. I should have sheathed it when it went
amiss. I should have ridden back. I should have—

—should have—known what I struck—

O God, it could as well have been her.

"Vanye!"

He caught himself before he
pitched. He braced himself against the saddlehorn and felt Siptah's
body hit his right leg, Morgaine holding him by the straps of his
armor, though he was upright now without that.

"Can thee stay the saddle? Shall I take the reins?"

"I am well enough," he
murmured, and took the reins in his left hand and let his numbed right
rest braced between him and the saddlebow. If he could do one thing
right this cursed night it was to dispose himself where he could not
fall off and compound his liege's troubles.

Siptah took to the lead then; and the mare lengthened her stride to match him, struggling now, on heart alone.

Where are we going? he wondered. Is it enemies she fears? Or do we go toward the gate, to hold it?

His very teeth ached now
with the emanations, and he felt a pain like knives driven into every
joint of his right arm, an ache that crept across his chest and into
his vitals. He wished he had respite to faint away or to rest; and
dutifully fought not to, for what use he was. The pain reached his
spine and his skull, one with the pounding of the mare's gait, the
jolts which threatened to take him from the saddle.

Hold on, he told himself, slumped over the saddle when other thought had ceased, hold on, hold on.

The roan horse came to a
slow halt where the battle had been, and Gault clutched after its ties
and its stirrup, letting himself down by painful degrees to stand amid
the field. He did not know the weapon that had struck him, which had
pierced through his left arm and burned across his back. But here he
had fallen in the battle, here his ranks had broken in terror of the
gate-weapon, and there were appallingly few corpses remaining.

Here he had flung himself
at the roan horse as the slaughter started and managed to get back
astride—when the gate-force broke loose and sane men quit the field as
quickly as they could.

Such of them as survived
had rallied again—qhal, and a scattering of terrified humans—most of
all, that the squad he had sent wide before they came to Arunden's
camp, had overtaken them now, having swept up the deserters; and had
found him on the road.

Now they walked as he did,
probing among the dead that were thickest here, where only the red fire
had come, where the woman had wielded what they had mistakenly thought
the chiefest of weapons they faced.

That was the fire that had
touched him. He understood that much. He stumbled among cooling bodies
and found one living, who hoarsely called his name—"Rythys!" Gault
called out, "your cousin!"—and Rythys left his desperate searching and
came in haste, one of the few fortunate.

But Gault sought Jestryn on
the field, and found him finally—Pyverrn the wit, Pyverrn the
prankster, Pyverrn who had done an unhumorous thing at the last, and
flung himself and his horse between Gault and the killing fire.

"Pyverrn," Gault-Qhiverin said, feeling after a
heartbeat, and finding none, finding Jestryn's face already cold in the
night wind. "Pyverrn!" he cried, for that was the oldest name, the name
by which they had been friends in Mante, and fought the Overlord's
battles and intrigued in the Overlord's court through their last life.
"Pyverrn!"

He hugged the body to him,
but it was only cooling human clay against his own borrowed flesh, a
body Pyverrn had worn, but never truly mastered.

This was the last death,
the irrecoverable one: not Tejhos-gate nor any other could save a life,
once the life was gone; and Gault would have murdered one of his own
men to have hosted Pyverrn's self again—he would have taken one of his
own kind; his other and dearest friends.

He would have—such was the
bond between them—accepted what only a few had dared to save a fading
life: he would have gone into the gate with his friend and taken him
into his own self, risking madness, or obliteration.

That was his love for Pyverrn.

But there was nothing left
to love. There was only the cold flesh that Pyverrn had wrested from
its previous owner, and no way to restore it.

His men came round him where he knelt and wept. None ventured a word to him, until he himself let the body go and stood up.

"Tejhos-gate," he said.
"We are going after them!"

Doubtless there were some
few who would have fled, had they had a choice. He knew the cowardice
of some of them, that had had to be herded back. But in the southern
lands there was nothing to hide them should they fail him—and now they
knew he was alive.

"Two of you will go to
Mante," he said when they were mounted again. "The rest of us will ride
after these invaders. We will have them. I will have them, him and her,
and they will wish they had been stillborn."

"Better?" Morgaine asked;
and Vanye, sitting with his back against a standing stone, leaned his
head against that unforgiving surface and nodded with his eyes shut. He
did not remember much of the ride that had brought them this far. He
knew that he had been upright in the saddle, but so much of it had been
that kind of pain which the mind would not believe could last so
keenly, so long. All that time seemed compressed; yet he knew it was
leagues beyond that place where he had almost fallen. Tejhos-gate was
far behind them.

And the cessation of that force left him drained, void, as if he had been gutted.

Beside them the horses
caught their breath and began to show a little interest in the grass
under their feet, now they had drunk of the little creek and had their
legs rubbed down. He had done that much for his horse, while Morgaine
saw to the Baien gray. He was a horseman from his birth: he would have
done that for the brave mare with his heart's blood, after the course
she had run; and Morgaine—whatever she was—had no less care for the
gray.

Now she leaned against
another such stone facing him—not stones of power, mere markers along
the roadside. One knee propped the sword on which she leaned, the sight
of which he could hardly bear and the weight of which he remembered in
his bones: not balanced like an ordinary blade, the crystal length
within that sheath rune-written with the secrets of the gates—for the
sake of a successor, she had told him once. She had taught him writing
and ciphering more than a lord's bastard needed—for what purpose he
knew, and loathed, and thought about no more than he had to.

But he could read those runes. They were burned into his soul like the light into his eyes.

"Water?" she asked him.

He drank from the flask she
gave him, struggled with his left hand and his right to hold it without
shaking. The pain was still there, but only a dull ache, against the
memory of the living blade in his hand. He gave the flask back, drew a
breath and looked about him at the rolling hills, the stones, the road
pale in the starlight.

"We should have gone over to Tejhos," he murmured.

"Thee could not," she said.

It was bitter truth. He
would have left her to hold the place alone, would have fallen—Heaven
knew where he would have fallen, or how long the fire would run in his
bones if he lay within that influence.

The drawing of the sword
was a dice-throw, a power either felt in Mante, if they were wary; or
was mistaken for ordinary—O Heaven—
ordinary
use
of the gate, in which case Mante would do nothing, until their enemies
reached it and passed it and told Mante otherwise—which they would,
assuredly.

Therefore they ran. Therefore they paced themselves to last now, with all the speed they could make, while they might make it.

He had a cold lump of fear
at his gut. Coward, he had heard from his brothers, and from his
father, and most of Morija—You think too much, his brother had told
him. He had never been like them. In all too many respects.

If a man thought—if a man let himself think—backward or forward—

"It is not the first friend the sword has taken," she said finally. "Vanye, it was not your fault."

"I know," he said, and saw
in his mind the harper-lad of Ra-morij, who had thrown himself between
that blade in her hand and his threatened kin—had flung himself there
to be a hero, and discovered Hell in the unstoppable swing of
Morgaine's hand.

"They rode to your right," she said, "against all our warnings."

The excuses she made for
him were doubtless those which armored her, the only and best wisdom
she had to give him. He sensed the pain it cost her to expose that. And
there was nothing to say against those excuses that she did not,
beneath those reasonings, know—

—except the harper had known the report of the sword: who in Morija had not?

But Bron had not known, had not guessed how far its danger extended. They had never told him.

He
shut his eyes, clenched them shut, as if it could banish the terrified
face that was burned across his vision; or bring back the sun, and end
this terrible night where visions were all too easy. The priest, he
thought, had cursed him, cursed Bron, cursed Chei.

He
did not say that to Morgaine. But he feared it. Heaven had answered
that creature, and he did not know why, except Heaven judged them worse—

Harness
jingled, the sudden lifting of Siptah's head, the clink of slipped bit
and snaffle ring that his ears knew before his eyes lifted. The
stallion stood with ears pricked, gazing toward the road.

Morgaine rose instantly and moved to take the horses in hand and lead them inward of the stones for cover from the road.

He
rose shakily to his feet and held the reins, soothing them, stroking
one nose and the other—"Quiet, quiet," he said to them in the Kurshin
tongue, and Siptah strained at his grip and shivered, one long twitch
up his foreleg.

"One rider," Morgaine said, venturing a quick look from the edge of the stone.

"One man makes no sense."

"A good many have cause to follow us."

"Past the gate at Tejhos? Alone?"

She
drew the black weapon. It was a dead man rode that track, and did not
know it. He leaned his shoulders against the stone and looked out past
it, as the stone was canted at an angle to the road.

The rider came on a dark horse. Mail glinted about him in the starlight.

Vanye's
heart leapt and jolted against his ribs. For a moment he could not
breathe. "Chei," he said, and reached for Morgaine's arm. "It is Chei."

"Stay here!"

He turned his head in dismay to look at her, at the weapon still in her hand.
"Liyo,
for the love of Heaven—"

"We do not know that it is Chei. Stay here. Wait."

He waited, leaning against the rock and breathing in shorter and shorter breaths as the faltering hoofbeats came closer.

"Liyo,"
he whispered in horror, seeing her arm lift.

She
fired as the rider came past them, a red fire breaking out in the
meadow-grass; and the exhausted horse shied and fought for balance as
the rider reined up and about, facing them.

Chei slid down, holding to the saddlehorn and clinging to the reins.

"Chei," Vanye said, and left the horses, walking out from between the stones.

"Stop," Morgaine said; and he stopped.

Chei only stood there, as if he were numb.

"Bring your horse in," Morgaine said. "Sit down."

Chei staggered toward them and led the horse as far as the first stone. "Where is my brother?" he asked. "Where did Bron go?"

It was not the question Vanye had expected. It took the breath out of him.

"Bron is dead," Morgaine said.

"Where did he
go?"

"Changeling's
gate has no other side."

Chei slid down the face of the stone and leaned against it, his head resting against the rock. Vanye sank down facing him.

"Chei—I could not stop it. I did not know him—Chei?"

Chei
neither moved nor lifted his head. There was only silence, long and
deep, in which Morgaine at last moved and retrieved her flask from
Siptah's saddle.

"Here," she said, offering it.

Chei
looked up and took it as if his hands and his mind were far separate.
He fumbled after the stopper and drank, and slowly, as if it were a
thoroughly unfamiliar task, stopped it again and gave it back.

"I feared," Vanye said desperately, "that it was the both of you. I could not see, Chei."

"Rest," Morgaine said, and came close and stood with
Changeling
folded in her arms. "So long as we rest. After that, go back to your own land."

"No," Chei said with a shake of his head.