Exile's Gate (8 page)

"I swear to you—" The eyes
stayed fixed beyond her. "I swear to you—every word is true. I will
guide you. I will guide you away from all harm. On my soul I will not
lie to you, lady. Whatever you want of me."

Vanye drew in a breath and wrapped his arms about him, staring down at the man. Such terms he had sworn, himself,
ilin
-oath,
by the scar on his palm and the white scarf about the helm—outcast
warrior, taken up by a lord, an oath without recourse or exception. And
hearing that oath, he felt something swell up in his throat—memory of
that degree of desperation; and a certain remote jealousy, that of a
sudden this man was speaking to Morgaine as his liege, when he knew
nothing of her; or of him; or what he was undertaking.

God in Heaven,
liyo,
do you trust this man, and do you take him on
my
terms
—
have I trespassed too far, come too close to you, that now you take in another stray dog?

"I will take your oath," Morgaine said. "I will put you in Vanye's charge."

"Do you believe him?"
Morgaine asked him later, in the Kurshin tongue, while Chei lay naked
in the sun on a blanket, sleeping, perhaps—far enough for decency on
the grassy downslope of the riverside, but still visible from the
campfire—sun is the best thing for such wounds, Morgaine had said. Sun
and clean wind.

Not mentioning the salve
and the oil and the matter of the man's fouled armor, which there was
some salvaging, perhaps, with oil and work.

"A man swears," Vanye said.
"The oath is as good as the man. But," he said after a moment, kneeling
there beside the dying fire, "a man might sell his soul, for something
of value to him. Such as his life."

She looked at him for a long time. "The question then, is for what coin, would it not be?"

"He believes," Vanye said, "in witchcraft."

"Does thee not, now?"

Vanye lifted his shoulders,
a small, uncomfortable movement, and shifted his eyes momentarily
toward the dragon sword, which had never left her side, not in all this
perilous day. Its ruby eyes gleamed wickedly in the gold hilt; it
reminded him of that stone which he carried against his own heart, a
foreign, a dangerous thing. "I have never seen any witch-working. Only
things qhal have made, most of which I can manage—" A sense of
dislocation came on him, a sense of panic, fear of what he had become,
remorse for the things that he had lost. "Or I have become a witch
myself," he murmured. "Perhaps that is what witchcraft is. Chei ep
Kantory would think so."

There was a great deal, he
thought, on Morgaine's mind. But for a moment he had distracted her,
and she looked at him in that way that once had made him vastly
uncomfortable. Her eyes were gray and clear to the depths of that gray
like the devouring sea; her lashes were, like no human and no qhal he
had ever seen at such range, dark gray next the lid and shading to pale
at the tips, and that shading was on her brows but nowhere about her
hair, which was altogether silver. Halfling, she had said. Sometimes he
thought it true. Sometimes he did not know at all.

"Thee regrets?"

He shook his head finally. It was the most that he could say. He drew a great breath. "I have learned your lesson,
liyo.
I look around me. That is all. Never back."

Morgaine hissed between her
teeth and flung a bit of burned stick, that with which Chei had drawn
the map. It was more than her accustomed restlessness. She rested with
her arms about her knees, and shifted to hunch forward, her arms tucked
against her chest, gazing into nothing at all.

He was silent. It seemed wisest.

It was their lives she was
thinking on. He was sure of that. She was wiser than he—he was
accustomed to think so. He missed things, not knowing what he should
see, things which Morgaine did not miss. She had taught him—skills
which might well horrify their prisoner: the working of gates, the
writing of qhal, the ideas which qhal held for truth—who swore by no
god and looked (some of them) back toward a time that they had ruled
and (some of them) forward to a time that they should recover their
power, at whatever cost to the immortal souls they disavowed.

Qhal in most ancient times
had taken Men, so Morgaine had told him, and changed them, and
scattered them through the gates, along with plants and creatures of
every sort, until Time itself abhorred their works and their confusing
what Was, and mixed all elements in one cataclysmic Now—the which
thought chilled his much-threatened soul, and unhinged the things Holy
Church had taught him and which he thought he knew beyond any doubt.

Qhal had taken Men to serve
them because they were most qhal-like . . . and thereby the ancient
qhal-lords had made a dire mistake: for Men in their shorter lives,
multiplied far more rapidly, which simple fact meant that Men
threatened them.

In
his own land, in Kursh and Andur, divided by the mountain ridge, the
snowy Mother of Eagles—there qhal had been reduced virtually to rumor,
hunted for the most part, tolerated in a few rare cases—so frost-haired
Morgaine had been tolerated by the High Kings a hundred years before
his birth, while in his own ruined age even his own hair had been too
light a brown for Nhi clan's liking. And in this place—

In this place, qhal had adjusted that balance.
The lords from the
north come dawn and kill a number of them
—Chei had said of qhalur raids
on the hillfolk. To prove whatever that proves. Who knows?

Vanye knew. He knew it
along with the other things that a man like Chei would not, he hoped,
comprehend. That understanding of callous murder, that perspective
which allowed him to fathom qhalur motives—seemed to Vanye a gulf like
the gulf of life and death, the knowledge that everything behind them
was dust.

What became of your cousin?
Chei had asked. But he could not answer that either: he could explain
to no one, except the likes of lord Gault, behind whose human eyes,
Chei had said, resided a qhal—

—an old one, Vanye thought.
Or one wounded or sick to death. A qhal who had learned a single way to
overcome humankind, by the gates and the power they had to conserve a
dying mind in a body not its own.

Qhal who use the gates,
he thought suddenly, and felt a touch of ice about his heart.

"Liyo,"
he said. "If qhal are using the gates here—what will prevent them going where they will?"

"Nothing prevents them,"
Morgaine said, and looked toward him, a sharp, quick look. "Thee
understands—nothing—prevents them. It is possible they know we are
here, it is possible they are tracking us already, since we disturbed
the gate. These are not gentle folk. We have seen the proof of that. I
will tell you what I notice: that our friend yonder is not much amazed
at our horses or our gear or our companying together. Nor astonished
that we should come from the gates, the precise location of which he
does not know. Now, that he is not astonished may be that he knows
nothing of the gates, but if the qhal in this world do come and go by
that one gate, then they have considerable mastery of the other one."
She gestured about them. "There are the trees, do you see? That
twisting does not happen in one use of the gates. It is frequent that
this one gate throws out power. It is not working well. But that they
cannot mend it does not mean that they do not use it."

It was not a comforting thought. "Then they might come behind us."

"If what our friend
believes is true, yes. They can. And if by chance someone in Mante or
Tejhos was warding that gate when we came through, then they do know
that it was used."

He cast a sharp look toward the man sleeping in the sun, and experienced a feeling of panic.

It was a guide
he
did
not trust, a burden to slow the horses. Easiest to abandon the man,
trust to speed, remembering that the man was lame in one foot and
incapable of running.

—There were, to be sure, the wolves.

There was no pain
finally—nothing but the wind and the sun on his bare skin, and Chei lay
with his eyes shut, the light glowing red through his lids, the
delirious play of sun-warmth alternate with the cool wind—in
abandonment and safety unimaginable in all his life. He ought to feel
shame at his nakedness, but there was little left in a man who had
suffered Gault's dungeons. He ought not to be so well content, but he
had learned to put all his mind into a moment, even into the trough
between two waves of pain, and to find his comfort there, trusting that
another such respite would come—if he ignored the pain between.

So with this day. Hell was
on either side. But the day was the best he had known since the other
side of Gyllin-brook, and if there was hell to come, perhaps—only
perhaps—it would be like the waves of pain, the first signal of a
rhythm he only now discovered in his life.

That was how he reasoned
with himself. Perhaps he had grown mad on his hilltop, conversing with
the wolves and calling them by name. But he was very sure that his life
was better now; and that tomorrow might well be the same. He had grown
comfortable indeed if he could plan for two whole days at once.

Beyond that he refused to
think at all. There was danger in such thoughts—danger the moment he
began to believe the earnestness in the man's eyes or the easy way this
man and this qhalur woman spoke together, argued, shrugged and
gestured—everything about them being the way of two comrades in the
field, except the little frowns, or the small gestures that said male
and female—

As if that could be. As if a human man could willingly go to a qhal—

That a qhal could laugh and
trade barbs with her servant, and that a qhalur woman sat here in the
woods, secret from Gault and all his doings—a qhalur witch with one
human servant and a power which could burn iron—this was a matter that
ranged far beyond the things that Chei wanted to think about.

It was only certain that
they meant him to go with them; and for the moment that meant he had
hope of evading Gault's patrols and a return to that hilltop. That was
worth the
lady
and the bowing of his head, and
even—more dangerously—the least small wondering if there was not
another kind of qhal, and if the bargain this qhalur lady offered might
be real—or if her human servant might wish to be his friend.

The most perilous thing,
the most dangerous thing, was to give way to that manner of thinking
and even once, even a moment—think that the qhal might take him on the
same terms as her servant, or that in her—in the slender person of this
qhalur woman—might be safety without compromise, safety such as he
experienced now—even power such as a Man could have. If a man could
find a qhal-lord so free with her servants—was a man not a fool to
refuse to shelter in that shadow, when he had come to the point he
would not have lived, otherwise? Was there shame in that?

He did not want to think of
that overmuch either. The comfort he was in was sufficient for the day,
sufficient for many days. He should turn onto his face and avoid
burning his skin. That was the most onerous decision he needed make.

In
a little while he moved to the shade and was content to lie still,
wrapped in his blanket, his head pillowed on his arm. He slept, and
waked to find the smell of cooking on the breeze, at which he wept, a
foolish leaking of tears from his eyes and a desire to gather his
courage and walk up the hill to them and sit down at their fire and be
welcomed there—but he lay there weeping instead, and shaking with fear
of trying that, fear that there would be no welcome for him, and that
they would only tie him again and his aching shoulders could not bear
the pain of another night like the last.

And he did not know why he
should weep and shiver like a fool over the smell of cakes on the fire,
except he was still alive; and others were not, his brother was not,
which thoughts ranged back to the hill and the noise of wolves feeding
in the dark—a safe sound, a sound with nothing at all of grief in it,
because life shrank to the night, the moment, the instant ... in which
the wolves were fed and he was still alive.

That was the safe thing to
remember. That was a cold time, a numb, down-to-the-rock time, when a
man learned that only life was valuable, and only his own life was
truly valuable. His comrades kept the wolves from him. That was all.
They were there to talk to and fill the silence while they were alive,
but a man only wanted to be alive a little longer at the last; and if a
friend was the price of that, then a man learned he would pay that,
would pay the wolf-price with his dearest friend or with his own
brother. That was the safe thing to remember . . . when the smell of
bread and the sound of voices waked something so painful, so terribly
painful it might shatter him and make him a man again.

So quickly then, the aching
knot untied itself, and the tears dried in the wind, and he lay
smelling that cooking and thinking that he would sell his soul for a
morsel of fresh bread and a little of human laughter. There was so
little of it left to sell, so very little of what he had been. He was
damned as the qhal and as this man who served her, and if they would
take another soul for a little ease and a little food and a betrayal of
his own kind, then he was apt enough for that trade.