Exile's Gate (32 page)

There was not a clan in the hills would have him now. There was nothing going home could offer him.

But this . . . this offered something.

He
had planned this when he drove himself straight at Gault and gotten his
way past Gault's guard by sheer berserk desperation, and driven a
harness-knife for Gault's vitals, even while half a hundred men moved
to stop him.

He kept believing it possible, as the horse fought and jolted under him, and men whipped it and forced it.

War
on different grounds, he thought, you and I, inside, with no escape for
either of us—I shall embrace you, Gault-my-enemy. That leaves us your
hate and mine, and my anger and yours; and what I want and what you
want, and which is stronger, qhalur lord?

Was
Gault-the-Man afraid when you took him? But I am not. I welcome you. I
shall welcome this fight with all my damned soul, Gault-my-enemy. I
came back from Hell once, where you sent me. Do you think I will not
come back again?

"A little farther," someone said.

Or
seemed to say. But it was harder and harder to think at all, in the
jolting steps the horse made under him in its struggles, in the
sensation crawling like insects over his skin. The gate loomed nearer
and nearer, and the horse shied and faltered under him, so that the men
finally stopped it, as it stumbled nearly to its knees. "Get down,"
that voice said, and they pulled him from the saddle, their hands no
longer gentle, everything passing further and further from the familiar
and the known.

He
looked up at the span of the gate and saw that the roan horse had gone
further; but now the men lifted Gault from his saddle and carried him,
while others seized his own arms and started him toward that height,
toward the night sky shimmering like air over fire, within the towering
frame of the gate.

Closer
and closer, until he could see nothing but the sky past those pillars,
and a single star within that arch, a point of light that quivered and
danced in the air. There was a singing in the wind, the thrum of
bowstrings, of voices, spectral and quivering in his bones.

Closer yet. The sky seemed to shift
downward
within
the gate, and the thrumming was in his brain. His bowels turned to
water in him, and his knees quaked, and the men holding him were all
that enabled him to walk. O God, he thought, God, what can a Man hope
to do here, with them?

And again: Fear is Gault's weapon. I must not be open to it. I dare not let fear in. Hate is all I have. Hate greater than his—

They
reached the crest almost together, Gault holding his hand pressed to
his belly, but walking at the last, leaning on the men who attended
him. The black pillars seemed to throw off a kind of light, none for
themselves, but a white hell-glow that played about the ground and that
ran up the legs and the bodies and the faces of men who passed within
its compass. Small sounds were swallowed up. The sky twisted and
writhed like a gaping pit.

As
far as the pillars that dwarfed them, Gault went, and leaned against
the left-hand stone holding to it for his support, laying his hand on
one place and another as if it were a living thing, and himself in
communion with it—qhalur wizardry, Chei thought, breathing with
difficulty, watching with small jerks of his eyes and knowing that his
face betrayed terror; but so was there terror in the grip of hands
which numbed his arms and held him upright despite his failing knees.
They were all afraid, he, the qhal themselves—it was a strange reliance
he began to have on them, who would defend his safety now with their
own lives, who were there to hold him and keep him from failing his
resolution or from tumbling untimely into that place—A little longer, a
little longer, he told himself; and concentrated on the little pain
they caused his arms as the only saving of his sanity:

Help me, do not let me go; we are all flesh, and flesh does not belong next this thing
—

They
gathered him up; they brought him closer, and Gault staggered forth to
meet him in front of that dark archway, on the edge of the sky.

"
Free
him," Gault bade them, and a rough sawing cut the cords on his hands.
They let go their grip on him, and Chei lurched out of balance, staring
at the sky which now had lost all stars, which did not show the hills
beyond, or anything but night—stared helplessly at Gault's face,
suddenly, as Gault caught his arms. Hell-light shimmered over them,
turning flesh dead white; Gault caught him closer, as suddenly the air
began to move about them, stirring Gault's hair, howling with the force
of summer storm.

The gate was opening, greater than the gate the sword had made, louder than the howling of the winds which had taken Bron.

"Have you changed your mind?" Gault asked, and embraced him closer still. "Is it still willingly?"

Chei
fought down his gorge and nodded, and his heart pounded in shock when
he felt Gault seek his hand and press the hilt of a knife into his cold
fingers. "Then you may do what you so much wish so much to do," Gault
said, and slid his hand to the back of his neck, winding fingers into
his hair, holding him tight. "Friend."

Chei rammed upward with the knife in a spasm of outrage, under Gault's jaw, toward the brain.

Someone
pushed him. He felt the hands strike him, and the hill fell away under
him and the man who was locked with him in a sickening fall of cold and
wind and void.

Something
began to go wrong then, his senses going out one by one: he saw things
he could not name, and was blinded by light that was pain. He screamed
and screamed as he fell, alone now, falling slower—a drifting dark, in
which something else walked, and that thing was a thought that waked in
him and called itself Chei, but it was not himself. It remembered
dying, remembered the shock of a blade in its bowels, and one beneath
its jaw, stopping breath and speech; the pain was all for a moment.

Then it ebbed, retreating to the past, safe and bearable.

He
knew then what had happened to him, and that realization itself was
fleeting, shredding away from him in the dark as something he dared not
reconcile, except that he had died—he knew that recent memory had his
death in it, and he did not want to delve into that, here, in the dark,
naked to the winds and the cold.

He
had use for his life. He discovered it and clung to it. He called it
Bron and he called it Jestryn and Pyverrn, and he could not remember
whether it had been brother or friend, or whether the man or the woman
had killed him, but it was one and the same. He had a revenge to take,
and that it was the one thing that had brought him north or south on
that nightbound road, whichever direction he had been traveling,
whichever horse he had been riding.

Then,
having discovered his heart was whole, he was less afraid. He felt
other things slipping away, pieces that might matter, but he was no
longer in doubt where his course was and that the men waiting for him
would follow him.

He
knew all of Morund. He knew the hills. He knew Mante. He saw a hold set
in the mountains, and the great Gate which ruled all gates, and knew
the intricacies of politics which had sent the warders who waited below
the hill: the Overlord Skarrin had received his first message and sent
this handful of his underlings to guard the approach and to discover
what they could, while Skarrin questioned at length the messengers he
had sent. Skarrin's men had tried to bar him from use of the gate,
until he could have permission of the high lord.

They had hoped, perhaps, that he would die.

But
now, in his recollections, he had something indeed to tell them, which
would stir Skarrin out of his lethargy and bring forces south.

Tell
them the urgency of it he would, but he would not tell all he knew—nor
stay for them or wait on Skarrin's pleasure. He had been Qhiverin
Asfelles. He and Pyverrn had fought in these lands between Tejhos and
Mante, against various of the high lord's enemies; he knew the secret
ways into the hills, off the Road and back to it. He had utter freedom
of the land, the high lord himself had cause to fear him and his
connections within the warrior Societies, and he was as likely as any
to profit by the present chaos—by whatever means turned up under his
hand.

He drew a breath.

He felt the winds again, when a moment before had been only cold that numbed all feeling.

He
heard the sounds, when a moment before had been only stillness. It was
as if a ripple were sweeping through the dark, bearing him closer and
closer to the shores of the world.

He
moved his limbs, finding himself weaker than he remembered, lighter of
limb. It was a young body. It was skilled and agile and had a
long-muscled, runner's strength different than the slower, mature power
of the body he recalled as Gault's—was far more like Qhiverin's; was
nearly as fair as a qhal; and that pleased him.

He
had a mature mind, too, that took the skittish thoughts of a younger
and impulsive man and calmed them and spread wider and further into
connections from which he shied back, of a sudden: there was too much
memory, and it needed long meditation to reconcile it.

Witch-mind, a part of him said.

Nature, said the other, nature and knowledge.

God! part of him cried.

The other part said: Nature.

Vision
cleared in a shimmer like the surface of a pond. The hill grew firm
under his feet and the men who gathered anxiously to meet him were all
friendly and familiar to him.

"Hesiyyn," he said, and laid his hand on a tall qhal's shoulder with easy humor, knowing how Hesiyyn loathed humankind.

"Lord Chei," Hesiyyn hailed him with deep irony. It was custom. It was the penalty of the twice-and-three-times-born.

The
Men among them would be confused. They would murmur things about souls,
which Chei dismissed and refused to think about. But tall, elegant qhal
had no hesitation in bowing the head and offering homage to him, to
Chei ep Kantory, lord of Morund—the intimates of his household, his
servants, the remnant of the human levies, even the troublesome and
arrogant warders from Mante, who waited below, with their captain.

He
felt wounds on him. He felt bruises. His knees ached with exhaustion.
That was the penalty this body brought with it. None were unbearable.

He
sought weapons—the sword which the Man had given him: that was one
weapon he did not intend to lose. It was qhalur-work, and foreign—from
further, he was sure, than merely overseas, and he delighted in it when
he tried its balance.

He took his own bow; and the red roan; the lame gelding he turned out to fend for itself: perhaps it would recover.

But
he declined more weapons than that, and declined to go in more than the
breeches and mended boots and light mail that came with the man.

"This is the shape they will expect," he said to Hesiyyn.

"Wake,"
Morgaine's voice whispered out of nowhere, and muscles jumped and body
tensed all in one spasm as on the edge of a fall—But it was stone at
Vanye's back, and he pressed himself against it, controlling his
breaths and blinking at the shadow that stood between him and the
horses. "I might have hit you," he said. "Oh, Heaven—" He caught his
breath and brushed loose hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand. "I
dreamed—" But he did not tell those dreams, that took him back to old
places, old terrors. "I did not mean to sleep."

"Best we move."

"Is there—"

"No. Only shortness of time. A little of the night left. We travel while we can."

He
glanced around to see were Chei and Bron awake then, one instant's
impulse, and remembered everything like a blow to the stomach; he drew
a breath then and rubbed an unshaven face, and quickly gathered himself
to his feet, trying not to think on anything but the road.

Fool, he thought. Do not look back. Look around you.
Look around you.
That is what caused this sorry business, nothing more and nothing less than losing track of things.

He
wanted to weep. He adjusted Arrhan's gear and reached out to hold
Siptah's bridle for Morgaine as she prepared to mount. "Do not be
seeing to
me,"
she said sharply, taking back the reins, by which she meant do not be twice a fool.

It
stung. He was not in a mood to bear her temper, and she was not in a
mood for debating what she wanted. He turned and flung himself to
horse, and waited on her, since she was in such haste.

She
mounted up and rode without a backward look. She was fey and
doom-ridden, and the loss of a comrade and the driving away of
another—the excessive cruelty of it, like her ultimatum to him with
Chei, was all one thing.

It
was because of that blade she bore. It was because of the lives it
took. It was because of the things she knew that he did not, and the
madness—the madness which distracted her, and which, this morning,
beckoned both of them.

Her moods had been tolerable while he had been no more than
ilin
and now were enough to drive him to black, blind rage, anger to match her own.