The Complete Morgaine (155 page)

It spoke. It spoke words he could not understand, but he knew, whatever they were, that they were not meant for him, or for Chei, or any of them other than Morgaine. He heard Morgaine answer in that tongue, and saw the man's figure grow dimmer as it retreated down that aisle.

She walked forward.

Vanye caught at her arm, the barest touch, before she reached that threshold. She looked at him. That was all; and she turned and hit Siptah a resounding blow on the rump.

The Baien gray sprang through the door, hooves echoing on stone, off high walls, and stopped inside, unscathed.

She went, then, through the doorway, in a single step and a second one which cleared a path for him to follow. He did so, in a motion so quick he did not think of it: he was there, Arrhan was behind him, and he whipped the arrhendur blade from its sheath, for what it was worth against this illusion and the more substantial things it might call down on them.

A question then, from the man of light and shadow. The voice echoed about them, rang off the walls of this long, narrow passage.

“He does not understand you,” Morgaine said.

“He is human,” the image said then. “I have read everything—in the gate-field. I know what you carry. Yes. How could I fail to remark—a thing like that forming in the patterns? I read his suffering. I intervened, against my habit, to save him. I trusted there
was
a pattern—if you valued him. And I was not mistaken.”

“I thank you for that,” Morgaine said.

“I wished to please you—who come wandering the worlds. Anjhurin's daughter. It is likely that we are kin—remote as that kinship may be. How does Anjhurin fare?”

“He is dead,” Morgaine said shortly.

“Ah.” The regret seemed genuine. The image murmured something in the other language.

“Perhaps,” Morgaine said, “he was weary of living. He said as much.”

Again it spoke.

“No,” Morgaine said. And to another query: “No.” And: “I travel, my lord.”

A harder voice then.

“For my companion's sake,” she said. “Speak so he can understand.” And after another such: “Because he understands it and because I wish it.” And again: “That may be. I would be glad of it.” She lapsed for a moment into the other tongue. Then, gently: “It has been a long time, my lord, since I have spoken the language. It has been a long time—since I have had the occasion.”

“You bring me felons and rebels.” The mouth of the image quirked upward slightly at the corners. “As well as this human warrior. You have turned my court upside down, lifted every rotten log and sent the vermin scurrying forth—from Morund-gate to the highest houses in Mante. What shall I do for you in return?”

“Why, give me the three rebels in question,” Morgaine said, “and the pleasure of your company, and in due time, the freedom of your gate. I am a wanderer. I seek no domain of my own.”

“Nor to share one?”

She laughed. “We do not
share
a world. My father taught me that much. I will find a place. Or do you give this one up, my lord of shadows, and come wander the worlds with us.”

“With a rebel, a killer, a doggerel poet and a human lordling?” Skarrin laughed in his own turn. “Come ahead into my courtyards, my lady of light. Wash off the dust. Take my hospitality.” The drifting face became melancholy, even wistful. “Go with you. That is a thought. That is indeed a thought. You will sit with me, my lady, and tell me where you have traveled and the things you have seen—convince me there is something different than one finds . . .
everywhere. . . .”

The image faded.

The voice drifted into silence, leaving the stillness of the tomb behind it.

Old
, Vanye thought with a chill,
old—more than a Man can reckon.

And he found himself staring into Morgaine's eyes, lost, beyond understanding what she did or what she meant to do any longer, and with the least and dreadful fear—that she had found something in common with this lord who contemned everything he ruled, who despised the
qhal
, who themselves used human folk for cattle—

She had had to defend her companying with a human man. He had sensed that. He imagined the questions which had gone by him, and fitted her answers to them, his liege, his lover . . . defiant, in the beginning—toward a man of her own kind, who could speak with her, trade words with her in a language she had never taught him, quickly and unexpectedly draw the sort of laugh and light answer from her such as had taken him—oh, so long to win.

“We will do as he asks,” Morgaine said.

“Aye,” he said. He was too far into strange territory to say anything more. He did not even agree for loyalty or love or out of common sense. He was only lost, on ground which continually shifted and threatened to shift again. They stood in a foreign lord's elegant forecourt with three confused horses in their charge, and three men awaiting their fate outside who were, surely, no less bewildered.

Then:
a clear target
, he thought, like a shock of cold water.

How else do we come at him—except she draw him out?

And how can she persuade him?

“Call Chei and the rest,” she bade him in the Kurshin tongue. “Quickly.”

He left Arrhan to stand and went back to the sunlight. “My lord,” he said to Chei at the doorway, and lowered his voice. He was determined to observe courtesy with the man and forestall argument. “We are going ahead. We do not know into what. Be aware: the Overlord brought up the matter of your exile. My lady claimed you for her own and Skarrin gave you to her. So if you have any scruples, I think you are honorably quit of debts to him, but I do not know what favor this wins of him if things go amiss.”

Chei looked at him and gnawed at his lip. It was young Chei's expression for the instant. It was doubt; and then amusement. “I was quit of debts to him when he failed to kill me,” Chei-Qhiverin said. “That was
his
mistake.”

Chei led his horse forward. Hesiyyn and Rhanin followed, Rhanin with his bow strung and slung over his shoulder. Vanye cleared the doorway, gathered up Arrhan's reins, and led the white mare up alongside Siptah as Morgaine began that course Skarrin chose for them.

Ambush was in his thoughts, constantly. But Morgaine went, with
Changeling
slung at her hip, and walked the long court in which the horses' pacing made a forlorn and lonely sound.

“Games,” she said to the air. “I do not like games, my lord Skarrin.”

At the end a door whisked open, in that way which doors could move, in such places of gate-force—on a sunlit court.

Vanye cut the lead next the bay's bridle and sent it ambling past them with one slap and another on its dusty rump. It came to no grief in the doorway. And they came through into afternoon sunlight, into a stable court clean and well-supplied with straw and haystack, rows of stables, with well and stone trough. The bay went straightway to the water, and Siptah and Arrhan flared their nostrils and pricked up their ears and approached the trough with keen interest.

“Hospitality,” Vanye muttered, for the first time beginning to wonder was there good will in this beckoning of doors and corridors and ghosts. “Dare we trust it?”

“He needs no ambush,” Morgaine said, and bent and washed her hands and
her face, and let the water wash black, clean trails over her dusty armor. She drank from the demon-mouth that poured fresh water continually into the trough.

He took the chance for himself, doused face and hands in cool water, wiped his hair back from his eyes, washed and drank as Chei and the others arrived.

There was no one to threaten them. There was not a horse other than theirs in all the stable-court. There was no servant and no groom to serve them. Vanye stood, with the wind chilling the water on his face, scanning the walls around them, looking for some sign of life and seeing nothing but bare stone.

“Ghosts,” he said aloud. “And of them this Skarrin seems chief.”

“More than ghosts,” Morgaine whispered in the Kurshin tongue, and caught his shoulder and leaned close to him. “We may be overheard. I do not know how many languages he may have known or where he may have traveled.”

His heart leapt in him and fell again. “Even Kursh?”

“There are tracks among the Gates: thee knows. No knowing which path he has come to arrive here. There are a handful of the old blood, in all the worlds gates reach. They have no congress with one another. They are too proud. Each settles to a world—for a while—using a knowledge of the gates the
qhal
do not have—They
rule.
There is no likelihood that they will fail to rule. They direct affairs, they make changes at their pleasure. And inevitably they grow bored—and they move on, through time or space or both. Some are older than the calamity, older than the one before it. My father claimed to be.”

“
What
‘one before it', what—”

“—And some are born into
this
age—of one whose life has stretched across ages. Some are born of events which cannot be duplicated, events on which vast changes depend—Some lives, in that way, anchor time itself. So the lords assure themselves of continuance—in more than one way. Such am I—but not what my father planned.
I
exist. Therefore other things do not. Therefore
he
does not.”

“I do not understand. You have left me.” He felt a shiver despite the sun. “What shall we do?”

“I shall court this man,” she hissed softly. “By any means, Vanye,
any
means, and thee must not object, does thee understand that?”

“Let us take the sword, let us go through this place until we find him—” He felt cold to the heart now. “That is the only sense.”

“He will not be there. He can retreat
within
the gate. He can leave us here. Has thee forgotten?”

“You cannot fight him hand to hand,
liyo
, in the name of Heaven, you cannot think of—”

“I will do what I have to do. I tell thee now: do not attempt
anything
with this man. I beg thee. I do not want help in this. Or hindrance. Thee says thee is
still
ilin.
Nothing have I asked of thee by that oath—in very long.
This
I ask. For my sake. For thine.”

“
Tell
me what we shall do!”

“On thy oath. Nothing.
I
will do it.”

“And I tell you—if you hang my soul and my salvation on it—I will throw them away, if it comes to harm—”

“Thee will take the sword if it comes to that. Thee will bear it. Thee will trust Chei and the rest if it comes to that. All these things—I ask thee, as thee loves me—do. Does thee love me? Does thee understand what I ask?”

It reached him, then, the thing that she
was
asking of him, and the sense of it. It shook the breath from him for a moment. It was not the sort of thing a man wanted to agree to, who loved a woman. It was harder than dying for her, to agree to leave her to die.

“That much,” he said, because anything less was betrayal, “yes, I understand. On my oath, I will.” He looked up uncomfortably at their comrades, who did not understand what passed—their comrades, who expected, perhaps, betrayal prepared for themselves, in this exchange in another language.

“We will go on,” Morgaine said to them, and drew Siptah away from the water.

“
Where
do we go?” Chei asked.

“Did I promise I knew?” Morgaine answered, and led the gray horse on, through the stable-court, down the empty rows.

“It makes no sense,” Hesiyyn said. “There should be servants—there should be attendants.
Where
are the people?”

 • • • 

“Heaven knows,” Chei answered him, and found no incongruity in saying so. There was an angry young man in the center of his being, as lost as he was, in this place which had dominated both their lives and ruined their separate families—and which proved, after all, only hollow and full of echoes. “People come here,” he said, half to the lady, who seemed some old acquaintance of Skarrin's. “People serve the Overlord. What has become of them?”

She offered them no answer.

“Perhaps he is holding them elsewhere,” Hesiyyn said under his breath, and with an anxious look toward Chei.

Death, the lady had said; and in this court which should, at least, have horses, have some evidence of occupancy and life—Chei found a scattering of memory which was human and adult and frightened—

Gault
had been imprisoned here, had been hailed up from the outskirts of this fortress by his kidnappers, to the gate above these walls.
Gault
remembered. And there had been others in that dark hour, there had been servants, there had been abundant life in this court, torchlit and echoing with confused
shouts as Qhiverin's friends dragged him struggling and resisting toward the hell above these walls.

“Even the horses,” Chei-Gault-Qhiverin said aloud, finding a shiver down his spine and a terrible feeling of things gone amiss in this daylit, sterile vacancy, “even the horses—No.” He quickened his pace, tugging at the weary roan he led, and caught Vanye's arm. “There were people here. Now even the horses are gone.
Something
is direly wrong here. It is a trap. Make the lady listen.”

Vanye had rescued his arm at once. There was on his sullen face, a quick suspicion and a dark threat. The shorn hair blew across his eyes and reminded them both of things past, of miscalculations and mistakes disastrously multiplied. A muscle clenched in his jaw.

But if there was at the moment a voice of caution and reason in their company it was this Man, Chei believed it: the boy's experience told him so and Qhiverin's instincts went to him, puzzling even himself—except it was everywhere consonant with what the boy knew: a man absolute in duty, absolute enough and sane enough to lay aside everything that did not pertain to the immediate problem.