The Complete Morgaine (30 page)

“No!” Erij cried in fury, but bit off further protest as Morgaine smoothly gathered the sheathed blade up, yet keeping the black weapon trained upon them. Then she lowered it.

“Vanye,” said Morgaine. “Well met.”

And she joined them, and began to descend the stairs from which they had
come, carefully, trusting Vanye at her back; of a sudden he surmised what she sought thus cautiously.

“Thiye is dead,” he said.

Her gray eyes cast back an unexpected look of agony. “Your doing?”

“No. Roh's.”

“Not Roh's,” she said. “Thiye freed me—that being his only hope of defeating Liell and keeping his life. He gave me this slim chance. I would have saved his life if I could. Is Roh down there?”

“He ran,” said Vanye, “saying you meant to destroy this place.” Horrid suspicion came over him. “It was not Roh, was it?”

“No,” said Morgaine. “Roh died at Ivrel, in your place.”

And she raced them down the stairs, pausing only to be careful at the turning, and came into that dread hall of
qujalin
design.

It was empty, save for Thiye's sprawled corpse in a widening pool of blood.

Morgaine ran, her footsteps echoing upon the floor, and Vanye followed, knowing that Erij was still with them, and little caring at the time. Anger seethed in him for Liell's mocking treachery with him; and dread was in him too for what Morgaine might intend with these strange powers.

She reached the very end of the hall, where there rose a vast double pillar of lights, and her hand abandoned the sword upon the counter an instant, while she wove a sure, practiced pattern among the lights. Noise thundered from the walls, voices gibbered ghostlike in unknown languages. Lights flared up and down the pillars, and began to pulse in increasing agitation.

She made it all cease, as quick as a move of her hand, and leaned against the counter, head bowed, like one who had suffered some mortal blow.

Then she turned and lifted her head, her eyes fixed earnestly on Vanye's.

“You and your brother must quit this place as quickly as you can,” she said. “Liell spoke the truth in one thing: it will be destroyed. The machine is locked in such a way I cannot free it, and Ra-hjemur will be rubble in the time a rider could reach Ivrel. You are free of your oath. You have paid it all. Good-bye.”

And with that she brushed past him and walked quickly down the long aisle alone, headed for the stairs.

“Liyo!”
he cried, stopping her. “Where are you going?”

“He has locked the Gate open on a place of his choosing, and I am going after him. I have not much time: he has a good start on me, and surely he has allowed only what he thinks enough time for himself. But he is timid, this Liell: I am hoping that he has given himself too much grace, too much margin.”

And with that she turned again, and began to walk and more quickly, and at last to run.

Vanye started forward a pace. “Brother,” Erij reminded him. He stopped. She vanished down the stairs.

When the last sound of her footsteps was gone he turned again, of necessity, to face the anger in his brother's face. He went down upon the chill floor and pressed his forehead to it, making the obeisance his oath made due Erij.

“Your humility is a little late,” said Erij. “Get up. I like to see your eyes when you answer questions.”

He did so.

“Did she tell the truth?” Erij asked then.

“Yes,” said Vanye. “I think it was the truth. Or if you doubt it, at least doubt it from a day's-ride distance from here. If you see it still standing after that, then it was not the truth.”

“What is this of Gates?”

“I do not know,” he said, “only that sometimes there is another side to the Witchfires and sometimes not, and that once she goes, she will be nowhere we can reach. I am sorry. It was not a thing she explained clearly. But she will not be back. Ivrel is a Gate that will close when this place dies, and after that there will be no more Witchfires, no more Thiyes, no more magics in the world.”

He looked around him at the place, for that complexity was like the living insides of some great beast, though its veins were conduits of lights and its heart and pulse glowed and faded slowly.

“If you do not want to die, Erij,” he said, “I suggest we take her advice and be as far from here as possible when it happens.”

 • • • 

The horses were where they had left them, patiently waiting in the gray dawn, cropping the sparse grass as if there were nothing unusual in the day. Vanye checked the girths and heaved himself up, and Erij did the same. They rode the open and faster road this time, pausing for a view of the great cube of Ra-hjemur, which looked, with its breached gate, like a creature with a mortal wound.

Then they set out together for Morija.

“There is no more lord of Hjemur,” said Vanye at last. “You and Baien are all the clan-lords left of any stature at all. It is within your reach to gain the High Kingship without Hjemurn magics after all, and perhaps that will be better for human folk.”

“Baien's lord is old,” said Erij, “and has a daughter. I do not think that he will want a war to cloud his old age and ruin his land. I will perhaps be able to make an alliance with him. And Chya Roh left no heirs. His people will be less trouble to us. Pyvvn's lady is Chya, and with Chya in Koris in our hands, Pyvvn will submit.” Erij sounded almost cheerful, counting his prospects and reckoning lightly of a few wars.

But Vanye gazed to the road ahead, where it wound out of sight and into view again toward the south, hoping earnestly to see her, seeing her in his mind, at least, as she had ridden that evening out of Aenor-Pyvvn's Gate.

“You are not listening,” Erij accused.

“Aye,” he said, blinking and breaking the spell, and looking again toward Erij.

And ever and again after that, he saw Erij look curiously at him. There was a growing sourness on Erij's face, as if whatever alliance there had been to make them brothers this dawn in Ra-hjemur was fast shredding asunder. He held out little hope for his peace as he saw that sullen estimation grow more and more grim.

“There is none of the high-clan blood in Morija left, but us,” said Erij that noon, when the sun was almost warm, and they rode still knee to knee.

Oh Heaven
, Vanye thought, looking out upon the sunlight and the hills with regret,
now it comes;
for he had long since come to the conclusion he was sure would occur to Erij: that, enemies as they were, Erij was mad to flaunt a high-clan prisoner in Morija. Without Ra-hjemur from which to rule, he had not power enough to bear a taint of dishonor—or a rival. Politics and ambitions would swarm about a bastard Chya like flies to honey. Such conclusions as Erij had no doubt reached were dishonorable, better meditated in the dark of night than in such a fair day.

“Bastard that you are,” said Erij, “you could make yourself a threat to me, if you were minded to do so. There is no lord in Chya. It comes to me, bastard brother, that you are heir to Chya, if you were to claim it, and that no lord can be claimed as
ilin.”

“I have not laid any claim to Chya,” said Vanye. “I do not think I could, and I do not intend to.”

“They had rather own you than me, I do not doubt it at all,” said Erij. “And you are still the most dangerous man to me in all of Andur-Kursh, so long as you live.”

“I am not,” said Vanye, “because I regard my oath. But you do not regard your own honor enough to trust mine.”

“You did not regard your oath in Ra-hjemur.”

“You were not in danger from Morgaine. I did not have to.”

Erij gazed long at him, then reached across. “Give me your hand,” he said, and Vanye, puzzling, yielded it to his left-handed handclasp. His brother pressed it in almost friendly fashion.

“Leave,” said Erij. “If I hear of you after this I will hunt you down . . . or if you come to Morija. I will set Claim on you and let you work off that year you owe me. But I do not think you will come to Morija.”

And he gestured with a nod to the road ahead.

“If she will have you—go.”

Vanye stared at him, then gripped his brother's strong, dry hand the more tightly before he broke the clasp.

Then he set heels to the horse, dismissing from his mind every thought that he was weaponless and that Morgaine would have opened a wide lead on them during the morning.

He would gain that distance back. He would find her. He realized much later to his grief that he had not even looked back once at his brother, that he had severed that tangled tie without half the pain he thought it must have cost Erij to let him go.

In that loosing, he thought, Erij had paid for everything; he wished that he had spoken some word of thanks.

Erij would have sneered at it.

 • • • 

He did not find her on the road. In the second day, he cut off the track the two had used, and took the one on which Liell had come from Ivrel, the one he thought Morgaine would surely choose. Ivrel was close and there was no more time left for stopping, though he was aching from the ride and the horse's breath came in great gasps, such that he must dismount and half pull the beast up the steeper places of the trail. The delay tormented him and he began to fear that he had lost the way, that he would lose her once for all.

And yet, finally, finally, when he came out upon the height, there stood Ivrel's great side to be seen, and the barren shoulder of the mountain where the Gate would be. He urged the black to what speed the horse could bear and climbed, sometimes losing sight of his goal, sometimes finding it again, until he entered the forest of twisted pines and lost it altogether.

In the snow were footprints, the old ones of many men, and some of animals, and some of those not good to imagine what had made them; but now and again he could sort out new ones.

Roh-Liell-Zri, upon the black mare, most likely, and Morgaine upon his trail.

Breath hung frozen in the sunlight, and air cut the lungs. He had at last to walk the horse, out of mercy, and scanned the black sickly pines about him, remembering all too keenly that he had no weapons at all, and a horse too weary for headlong fight.

Then through those pines he caught a glimmer of movement, a white movement amid the blaze of sun on snow, and he whipped up his horse and made what speed he could on the trail.

“Wait!” he cried.

She waited for him. He came in beside her breathless with relief, and she leaned from the saddle and reached for his hand.

“Vanye, Vanye, you ought not to have followed me.”

“Are you going through?” he asked.

She looked up at the Gate, shimmering dark again, stars and blackness above them in the daylight. “Yes,” she said, and then looked down at him. “Do not delay me further. This following me is nonsense. I do not know how the Gate is behaving, whether that will bring me through to the same place that Zri has fled or whether it will fling me out elsewhere. And you do not belong. You were useful for a time. You with your
ilin
-codes and your holds and your kinships . . . this is your world, and I needed a man who could maneuver things as I needed them. You have served your purpose. Now there is an end of the matter. You are free, and be glad of it.”

He did not speak. He supposed finally that he merely stared at her, until he felt her hand slip from his arm, and she moved away. He watched her begin the long slope, Siptah refusing it at first. She took firm grip on the reins and began to force the animal against his will, driving him brutally until he decided to go, gathering himself in a long climb into the dark.

And was gone.

We are not brave, we that play this game with Gates; there is too much we can lose, to have the luxury to be virtuous, and to be brave.

He sat still a moment, looked about the slope, and considered the tormented trees and the cold, and the long ride to Morija, cast off by her, begging Erij to bear his presence in Andur-Kursh.

And there was pain in every direction but one: as the sword had known the way to its own source, his senses did.

Of a sudden he laid heels to his horse and began to drive the beast upslope. There was only a token refusing. Siptah had gone: the black understood what was expected of him.

The gulf yawned before him, black and starry, without the wind that had howled there before. There was only enough breeze to let him know it was there.

And dark, utter dark, and falling. The horse heaved and twisted under him, clawing for support.

And found it.

They were running again, on a grassy shore, and the air was warm. The horse snorted in surprise, then extended himself to run.

A pale shape was on the hill before them, under a double moon.

“Liyo!”
he shouted. “Wait for me!”

She paused, looking back, then slid off to stand upon the hillside.

He rode in alongside and slid down from his exhausted horse even before the animal had quite stopped moving. Then he hesitated, not knowing whether he would meet joy or rage from her.

But she laughed and flung her arms about him, and he about her, pressing her tightly until she flung back her head and looked at him.

It was the second time he had ever seen her cry.

“. . . Last of all only the woman Morgaine survived, skilled in qujalin witchcrafts and bearing still that Sword that casts to death. Much of evil she did in Morija and Baien, rivaling all other evils she had committed . . . but she fled thereafter, taking with her Nhi Vanye i Chya, once of this house, who was ilin to her and therefore bound by his oath.”

—Nhi Erij i Myya, in the Book of Ra-morij

“Chya Roh i Chya, lord of Ra-koris . . . followed the witch Morgaine, for his cousin's sake . . . but Nhi Erij in his writing avows that Chya Roh perished on that journey, and that the Soul that possessed the likeness of Roh thereafter was qujal, and hostile to every Godly man. . . .”

—the Book of Baien-an

Chapter 1

Seven moons danced across the skies of the world, where there had been one in the days of the ancients. In those days the Wells of the Gods had been open, providing power and abundance to the
khal
-lords who had governed before the time of the Kings. Now the Wells were sealed, beyond the power of men or
khal
to alter. Long ago there had been vast lands on all sides of Shiuan and Hiuaj; but the world now was slowly drowning.

These were the things that Mija Jhirun Ela's-daughter believed for truth.

For all of Jhirun's young life, she had known the waters encroaching
relentlessly on the margin of the world, and she had watched Hiuaj diminish by half and the gray sea grow wider. She was seventeen, and looked to see Hiuaj vanish entirely in her lifetime.

When she had been a child, the village of Chadrih had stood near the Barrow-hills of Hiuaj; and beyond that had stood a great levee and a sea wall, securing fields that gave good crops and pasturage for sheep and goats and cattle. Now there was reed-grown waste. The three parcels of land that had supported Chadrih were gone, entirely underwater save for the boundary posts of stacked stone and the useless remnant of the ancient sea wall. The gray stone buildings of the village had become a ruin, with water trickling even at low tide through what had been its streets, and standing window-high at Hnoth, when the moons combined. The roofless houses had become the nesting places of the white birds that wheeled and cried their lonely pipings over the featureless sea.

The people of Chadrih had moved on, those who survived the collapse of the sea wall and the fever and the famine of that winter. They had sought shelter, some among the marsh dwellers at Aren, a determined few vowing to go beyond into Shiuan itself, seeking the security of holds like fabled Abarais of the Wells, or Ohtij-in, among the halfling lords. The Barrows had heard tidings of those that had reached Aren; but what had befallen the few who had gone the long road to Shiuan, none had ever heard.

The breaking of the sea wall had happened in Jhirun's tenth year. Now there was little dry land in all Hiuaj, only a maze of islets separated by marsh, redeemed from the killing salt only by the effluence of the wide Aj, that flowed down from Shiuan and spread its dark, sluggish waters toward the gray sea. In storm the Aj boiled brown with silt, the precious earth washed seaward, in flood that covered all but the hills and greater isles. At high tide, when the moons moved together in Hnoth, the sea pressed inland and killed areas of the marsh, where green grass died and standing pools reeked of decay, and great sea fishes prowled the Aj. Now throughout Hiuaj, there remained only sparse pasturage for goats and for the wild marsh ponies. The sea advanced in the face of the Barrows and the widening marsh ate away at their flank, threatening to sever Hiuaj from Shiuan and utterly doom them. Land that had been sweet and green became a tangle of drowned trees, a series of small hummocks of spongy earth, reed-choked passages that were navigable only by the flat-bottomed skiffs used by marsh folk and Barrowers.

And the Barrow-hills became islands in these last years of the world.

It was Men that had reared these hills, just after the days of the Darkness. They were the burials of the kings and princes of the Kingdoms of Men, in those long-ago days just after the Moon was broken, when the
khal
had declined and Men had driven the
khalin
halflings into their distant mountains. In
those days, Men had had the best of the world, had ruled a wide, rich plain, and there had been great wealth in Hiuaj for human folk.

Men had buried their great ones in such towering mounds, in cists of stone: warrior-kings proud with their gold and their gems and their iron weapons, skillful in war and stern in their rule over the farmer-peasantry. They had sought to restore the ancient magics of the Wells, which even the halfling
khal
had feared. But the sea rose and destroyed their plains, and the last Kings of Men fell under the power of the halflings of Shiuan. So the proud age of the Barrow-kings passed, leaving only their burial places clustered about the great Well called Anla's Crown, that had swallowed up their wealth and returned them only misery.

In the end there were only scattered villages of Men, farmer-folk who cursed the memory of the Barrow-kings. The old fortresses and burial places were piously avoided by later generations on the river-plain. Chadrih had been nearer the Barrows than any other village wished to be; but it had perished last of all the villages in Hiuaj, for all that—which gave Chadrih folk a certain arrogance, until their own fate took them. And the Barrow-hills themselves became the last refuge of all; the Barrow-folk had always lived beyond the pale of lowland respectability—tomb-robbers now, sometimes herders and fishermen, accused (while Chadrih stood) of stealing livestock as well as buried gold. But Chadrih died and the despised Barrow-folk lived, southernmost of all Men, in a hold that was a Barrow-king's ruined fortress atop the last and greatest rock in all Hiuaj, save Anla's Crown itself.

This was Jhirun's world. Sunbrowned and warm, she guided her flat skiff with practiced thrusts of the pole against the bottom of the channels that, at this cycle of the tides, were hardly knee deep. She was barefoot, knowing shoes only in winter, and she wore her fringe-hemmed skirt tucked above the knees because there was none to see her. A stoppered jar of bread and cheese and another of beer were nestled in the prow; and there was also a sling and a handful of smooth stones, for she was skillful with the sling to bring down the brown marsh fowl.

There had been rain last night and the Aj was up somewhat, enough to fill some of the shallower channels, making her progress through the hills quicker. There would be rain again before evening, to judge by the gathering of haze in the east, across the apricot sun; but high tide, Hnoth, was some days off. The seven moons danced in order across the watery sky and the force of the Aj was all that sighed against the reeds. The Barrows that were almost entirely awash at Hnoth were bravely evident despite the rains, and the Standing Stone at Junai was out of the water entirely.

It was a holy place, that hewn stone and its little isle. Nearby was a finger of the deep marshes, and marsh-folk came here to Junai's stone to meet on
midcycle days with Barrowfolk to trade—her tall kinsmen with the surly small men of the deep fens. Meat and shell and metals were their trade to the marshes; wood and Ohtija grain out of Shiuan and well-made boats and baskets were what the marshlanders brought them. But more important than the trade itself was the treaty that let the trade happen regularly, this seasonal commerce that brought them together for mutual gain and removed occasion for feuds, so that any Barrower could come and go in Barrows-land in safety. There were outlaws, of course, men either human or halfling, cast out of Ohtij-in or Aren, and such were always to be feared; but none had been known this far south for four years. The marshlanders had hanged the last three on the dead tree near the old
khalin
ruin at Nia's Hill, and Barrows-men had given them gold for that good service. Marshlanders served as a barrier to the folk of Barrows-hold against every evil but the sea, and returned them no trouble. Aren was far into the marsh, and marshlanders kept to it; they would not even stand in a Barrows-man's shadow when they came to trade, but uttered loud prayers and huddled together under the open sky as if they dreaded contamination and feared ambush. They preferred their dying forests and their own observances, that made no mention of Barrow-kings.

Out here on the edge of the world lay Barrows-land, wide and empty, with only the conical hills above the flood and the wide waters beyond, and the flight of the white birds above. Jhirun knew each major isle, each stone's-throw expanse of undrowned earth, knew them by the names of kings and heroes forgotten outside the lore of Barrows-folk, who claimed the kings for ancestors and could still sing the old words of the chants in an accent no marshlander could comprehend. Some few of these hills were hollow at their crest, caps of stone, earth-covered, that had long ago yielded up their treasure to the plundering of Jhirun's ancestors. Other mounds still defied efforts to discover the cists buried there, and so protected their dead against the living. And some seemed to be true hills, that had no hollow heart of man-made chambers, with king-treasures and weapons. Such as did give up treasure sustained the life of Barrows-hold, providing gold that Barrows-folk remade into rings and sold anew to marshlanders, who in turn bought grain of Shiuan and sold it at Junai. Barrows-folk had no fear of the angry ghosts, their own ancestors, and hammered off the ancient symbols and melted down the gold, purifying it.

And besides the grain the gold bought, they kept goats and hunted, and thus secured a small source of food independent of that trade. Daily Jhirun and her cousins cut grass and loaded it on skiffs or on the back of the black marsh pony that they used in the inner hills. By such means they stored up against the days of Hnoth, and fed their livestock, and had surplus of cheeses and domestic meat that the marshlanders valued as much as the gold.

The little skiff reached a stretch of faster-moving water, that place where the
current of the Aj reached into the bordering islets, and Jhirun maneuvered into the shallows, holding that margin with care. Afar off she could see the edge of the world, where the Aj met the devouring sea, and horizon and sky merged in gray haze. Hereabouts, a great rolling expanse above the flood, was the hill of Anla's Crown.

She did not mean to go near that place, with its ring of Standing Stones. None ever approached that hill save at Midyear's Day, when the priests came—her grandfather for Barrows-hold, and aged Haz for the folk of Aren. Once even Shiua priests had come to it, down the long road from Ohtij-in: it was that important, one of the two true Wells. But none had come since the sea wall broke. The rites were now only the concern of Hiua, but they were by no means neglected. And even on that day the priests remained fearful and ventured no closer than a stone's cast, Haz of Aren and her grandfather approaching separately because of their differences. In the old days, Barrow-kings had given men to the Wells there, but that custom had lapsed when the Barrow-kings fell. The sacrifices had not enlivened the Wells nor healed the Moon. The Standing Stones stood stark and empty against the sky, some crazily tilted; and that vast hill that none dared approach save on the appointed day remained a place of power and tainted beauty, no refuge for men or halflings. Each priest spoke a prayer and retreated. It was not a place to be alone; it was such that the senses prickled with unease even when one was coming with many kinsfolk, and the two priests and the chanting—a stillness that underlay the singing and made every noise of man seem a mere echo. Here was the thing the Barrow-kings had sought to master, the center of all the eeriness of the Barrows, and if anything would remain after the waters had risen and covered all Hiuaj, it would be this hill and those strange stones.

Jhirun skirted widely away from that place, working out of the current, among other isles. Marks of the Old Ones as well as the Barrow-kings were frequent here, scattered stones upstanding in the water and on the crests of hills. Here was her favorite place when she worked alone, here on the margin of Anla's Crown, far, far beyond the limit that any marshlander would dare to come save on Midyear's Day; and out of the convenient limits that her kinsmen cared to work. She enjoyed the silence, the solitude, apart from the brawling chaos of Barrows-hold. Here was nothing but herself and the whisper of reeds, the splash of water, and the lazy song of insects in the morning sun.

The hills glided past, closing in again, and she tended now toward the righthand bank of the winding channel, to the hill called Jiran, after which she was named. It had a Standing Stone at its crest, like others just downstream at water's edge, and Jiran, like the other hills that clustered here, was green with grass fed by the sweet water of the Aj. She stepped out as the skiff came to ground, her bare feet quick and sure on the damp landing. She seized the
mooring rope and hauled the skiff well up on the bank so that no capricious play of current could take it. Then she set to work.