The Complete Morgaine (68 page)

Came also the last stragglers of the Aren-folk, women and children and old ones, and a few youths to protect them. She saw one of her tall cousins of Barrows-hold, who moved into the light and vanished, bathed in its shimmering fires. The sun reached its zenith and declined, and still the passage
continued, some last few running in exhausted eagerness, or limping with wounds, and some lingered, needing attempt after attempt to gather their courage.

Jhirun wrapped her shawl about her and shivered, leaning her cheek against the rock, watching them, unnoticed, a peasant girl, nothing to those who had their minds set on the Well and the hope beyond it.

At last in the late afternoon the last of them passed, a lame halfling, who spent long in struggling up the trampled slope, past the bodies of the slain. He vanished. Then there was only the unnatural heaviness of the air, and the howling of wind through the Well, the fires that shimmered there against the gray-clouded sky.

She was the last. On stiff and cramped legs she gathered herself up and walked, conscious of the smallness of herself as she ascended that slope, into air that seemed too heavy to breathe, the wind pulling at her skirts. She entered that area of light, the maelstrom of the fires, stood within the circle of the Well and shuddered, blinking in terror at the perspective that gaped before her, blindingly blue. The winds urged at her.

Her cousins had gone; they had all gone, the Aren-folk, the Barrowers, Fwar, the lords of Ohtij-in.

This she had set out to find; and Fwar had possessed it instead, he and the Aren-folk. They would shape the dream to their own desires, seeking what they would have.

She wept, and turned her back on the Well, lacking courage—hugged her shawl about her, and in doing so remembered a thing that she had carried far from its origin.

She drew it from between her breasts, the little gull-figure, and touched the fine work of its wings, her eyes blurring the details of it. She turned, and hurled it, a shining mote, through the pillars of the Wells. The winds took it, and it never fell. It was gone.

He was gone, he at least, into a land that would not so bewilder him, where there might be mountains, and plains for the mare to run.

They would not take him, Fwar and his enemies. She believed that.

She turned and walked away, out of the fires and into the gray light. Halfway down the hill the winds ceased, and there was a great silence.

She turned to look; and even as she watched, the fires seemed to shimmer like the air above the marsh; and they shredded, and vanished, leaving only the gray daylight between the pillars of the Well, and those pillars only gray and ordinary stone.

Jhirun blinked, finding difficulty now even to believe that there had been magics there, for her senses could no longer hold them. She stared until the tears dried upon her face, and then she turned and picked her way downhill,
pausing now and again to plunder the dead: from this one a waterflask, from another a dagger with a golden hilt.

A movement startled her, a ring of harness, a rider that came upon her from beyond the rocks, slowly: a bay horse and a man in tattered blue, white-haired and familiar at once.

She stood still, waiting; the
khal
-lord made no haste. He drew to a halt across her path, his face pale and sober, his gray eyes clear, stained with shadow. A bloody rag was about his left arm.

“Kithan,” she said. She gave him no titles. He ruled nothing. She saw that he had found a sword; strangely she did not fear him.

He moved his foot from the stirrup, held out a slender, fine-boned hand; his face was stern, but the gray eyes were anxious.

He needed her, she thought cynically. He was not prepared to survive in the land. She extended her hand to him, set her foot in the stirrup, surprised that there was such strength in his slender arm, that drew her up.

There were villages; there were fields the water would not reach in their lifetime. There were old ones left, and the timid, and those who had not believed.

The bay horse began to move; she set her arms about Kithan, and rested, yielding to the motion of the horse as they descended the hill. She shut her eyes and resolved not to look back, not until the winding of the road should come between them and the hill.

Thunder rumbled in the heavens. There were the first cold drops of rain.

“Records are pointless. There is a strange conceit in making them when we are the last—but a race should leave something. The world is going . . . and the end of the world comes, not for us, perhaps, but soon. And we have always loved monuments.

“Know that it was Morgaine kri Chya who wrought this ruin. Morgen-Angharan, Men named her: the White Queen, she of the white gull feather, who was the death that came on us. It was Morgaine who extinguished the last brightness in the north, who cast Ohtij-in down to ruin, and stripped the land of inhabitants.

“Even before this present age she was the curse of our land, for she led the Men of the Darkness, a thousand years before us; her they followed here, to their own ruin; and the Man who rides with her and the Man who rides before her are of the same face and likeness—for now and then are alike with her.

“We dream dreams, my queen and I, each after our own fashion. All else went with Morgaine.”

—A stone, on a barren isle of Shiuan.

Chapter 1

The plain gave way to forest, and the forest closed about, but there was no stopping, not until the green shadow thickened and the setting of the sun brought a chill to the air.

Then Vanye ceased for a time to look behind him, and breathed easier for his safety . . . his and his liege's. They rode further until the light failed indeed, and then Morgaine reined gray Siptah to a halt, in a clear space beside a brook,
under an arch of old trees. It was a quiet place and pleasant, were it not for the fear which pursued them.

“We shall find no better,” Vanye said, and Morgaine nodded, wearily slid down.

“I shall tend Siptah,” she said as he dismounted. It was his place, to tend the horses, to make the fire, to do whatever task wanted doing for Morgaine's comfort. That was the nature of an
ilin,
who was Claimed to the service of a liege. But they had ridden hard for more than this day, and his wounds troubled him, so that he was glad of her offer. He stripped his own bay mare down to halter and tether, and rubbed her down and cared for her well, for she had done much even to last such a course as they had run these last days. The mare was in no wise a match for Morgaine's gray stud, but she had heart, and she was a gift besides. Lost, the girl who had given her to him; and he did not forget that gift, nor ever would. For that cause he took special care of the little Shiua bay—but also because he was Kurshin, of a land where children learned the saddle before their feet were steady on the earth, and it sat ill with him to use a horse as he had had to use this one.

He finished, and gathered an armload of wood, no hard task in this dense forest. He brought it to Morgaine, who had already started a small fire in tinder—and
that
was no hard task for her, by means which he preferred not to handle. They were not alike, she and he: armed alike, in the fashion of Andur-Kursh—leather and mail, his brown, hers black; his mail made of wide rings and hers of links finely meshed and shining like silver, the like of which no common armorer could fashion; but he was of honest human stock, and most avowed that Morgaine was not. His eyes and hair were brown as the earth of Andur-Kursh; her eyes were pale gray and her hair was like morning frost . . .
qhal
-fair, fair as the ancient enemies of mankind, as the evil which followed them—though she denied that she was of that blood, he had his own opinions of it: it was only sure that she had no loyalty to that kind.

He carefully fed the fire she had begun, and worried about enemies the while he did so, mistrusting this land, to which they were strangers. But it was a little fire, and the forest screened them. Warmth was a comfort they had lacked in their journeyings of recent days; they were due some ease, having reached this place.

By that light, they shared the little food which remained to them . . . less concerned for their diminishing supplies than they might have been, for there was the likelihood of game hereabouts. They saved back only enough of the stale bread for the morrow, and then, for he had done most of his sleeping in the saddle—he would gladly have cast himself down to sleep, well-fed as he was, or have stood watch while Morgaine did so.

But Morgaine took that sword she bore, and eased it somewhat from sheath . . . and that purged all the sleep from him.

Changeling
was its name, an evil name for a viler thing. He did not like to be near it, sheathed or drawn, but it was a part of her, and he had no choice. A sword it seemed, dragon-hilted, of the elaborate style that had been fashioned in Koris of Andur a hundred years before his birth . . . but the blade was edged crystal. Opal colors swirled softly in the lines of the runes which were finely etched upon it. It was not good to look at these colors, which blurred the senses. Whether it was safe to touch the blade when its power was thus damped by the sheath, he did not know nor ever care to learn—but Morgaine was never casual with it, and she was not now. She rose before she drew it fully.

It slipped the rest of the way from its sheath. Opal colors flared, throwing strange shadows about them, white light. Darkness shaped a well at the sword's tip, and into that it was even less wholesome to look. Winds howled into it, and what that darkness touched, it took.
Changeling
drew its power from Gates, and was itself a Gate, though none that anyone would choose to travel.

It forever sought its source, and glowed most brightly when aimed Gate-ward. Morgaine searched with it, and turned it full circle, while the trees sighed and the howling wind grew, the light bathing her hands and face and hair. An imprudent insect found oblivion there. A few leaves were torn from trees and whipped into that well of darkness and vanished. The blade flickered slightly east and west, lending hope; but it glowed most brightly southward, as it had constantly done, a pulsing light that hurt the eyes. Morgaine held it steadily toward that point and cursed.

“It does not change,” she lamented. “It does not change.”

“Please,
liyo,
put it away. It gives no better answer, and does us no good.”

She did so. The wind died, the balefire winked out, and she folded the sheathed sword in her arms and settled again, bleakness on her face.

“Southward is our answer. It must be.”

“Sleep,” he urged her, for she had a frail and transparent look. “
Liyo,
my bones ache and I swear I shall not rest until you have slept. If you have no mercy on yourself, have some for me. Sleep.”

She wiped a trembling hand across her eyes and nodded, and lay down where she was on her face, caring not even for preparing a pallet on which to rest. But he rose up quietly and took their blankets, laid one beside her and pushed her over onto it, then threw the other over her. She nestled into that with a murmur of thanks, and stirred a last time as he put her folded cloak under her head. Then she slept the sleep of the dead, with
Changeling
against her like a lover: she released it not even in sleep, that evil thing which she served.

 • • • 

They were, he reflected, effectively lost. Four days past, they had crossed a void the mind refused to remember, the
between
of Gates. That way was sealed. They
were cut off from where they had been, and
did not know in what land they now were, or what men held it—only that it was a place where Gates led, and that those Gates must be passed, destroyed, sealed.

Such was the war they fought, against the ancient magics, the
qhal
-born powers. Their journey was obsession with Morgaine, and necessity with him, who served her . . . not his concern, the reason she felt bound to such a course; his reason was his oath, which he had sworn to her in Andur-Kursh, and beyond which he had stayed. She sought now the Master Gate of this world, which was that which must be sealed; and had found it, for
Changeling
did not lie. It was the selfsame Gate by which they had entered this land, by which their enemies had entered, behind them. They had fled that place for their lives . . . by bitter irony, had fled that which they had come to this world to find, and now it was the possession of their enemies.

“It is only that we are still within the influence of the Gate we have just left,” Morgaine had reasoned in the beginning of their flight northward, when the sword had first warned them. But as the distance widened between them and that power, still the sword gave the same disturbing answer, until there remained little doubt what the truth was. Morgaine had muttered things about horizons and the curving of the land, and other possibilities which he by no means comprehended; but at last she shook her head and became fixed upon the worst of her fears. It was impossible for them to have done other than flee. He tried to persuade of her that; their enemies would surely have overwhelmed them. But that knowledge was no comfort to her despair.

“I shall know for certain,” she had said, “if the strength of the sending does not diminish by this evening. The sword can find lesser Gates, and it is possible still that we are on the wrong side of the world or too far removed from any other. But lesser Gates do not glow so brightly. If I see it tonight as bright as last, then we shall know beyond doubt what we have done.”

And thus they knew.

Vanye eased himself of some of the buckles of his armor. There was not a bone of his body which did not separately ache, but he had a cloak and a fire this night, and cover to hide him from enemies, which was better than he had known of late. He wrapped his cloak about him and set his back against an aged tree. His sword he laid naked across his knees. Lastly he removed his helm, which was wrapped about with the white scarf of the
ilin,
and set it aside, shaking free his hair and enjoying the absence of that weight. The woods were quiet about them. The water rippled over stones; the leaves sighed; the horses moved quietly at tether, cropping the little grass that grew where the trees were not. The Shiua mare was stablebred, with no sense of enemies, useless on watch; but Siptah was a sentinel as reliable as any man, war-trained and wary of strangers, and he trusted to the gray horse as to a comrade in his watch, which made all
the world less lonely. Food in his belly and warmth against the night, a stream when he should thirst and surely game plentiful for the hunting. A moon was up, a smallish one and unthreatening, and the trees sighed very like those of Andur's lost forests—it was a healing thing, when there was no way home, to find something so much like it. He would have been at peace, had
Changeling
pointed some other way.

 • • • 

Dawn came softly and subtly, with singing of birds and the sometime stirring of the horses. Vanye still sat, propping his head on his arm and forcing his blurred eyes to stay open, and scanned the forest in the soft light of day.

All at once Morgaine moved, reached for weapons, then blinked at him in dismay, leaning on her elbow. “What befell? Thee fell asleep on watch?”

He shook his head, shrugged off the prospect of her anger, which he had already reckoned on. “I decided not to wake you. You looked overtired.”

“Is it a favor to me if you fall out of the saddle today?”

He smiled and shook his head yet again, inwardly braced against the sting of her temper, which could be hurtful. She hated to be cared for, and she was too often inclined to drive herself when she might have rested, to prove the point. It should of course be otherwise between them,
ilin
and
liyo,
servant and liege lady . . . but she refused to learn to rely on anyone . . .
expecting I shall die,
he thought, with a troubling touch of ill-omen,
as others have who have served her; she waits on that.

“Shall I saddle the horses,
liyo?
”

She sat up, shrugged the blanket about her in the morning chill and stared at the ground, resting her hands at her temples. “I have need to think. We must go back somehow. I have need to think.”

“Best you do that rested, then.”

Her eyes flicked to his, and at once he regretted pricking at her—a perversity in him, who was fretted by her habits. He knew that temper surely followed, along with a sharp reminder of his place. He was prepared to bear that, as he had a hundred times and more, intended and unintended, and he simply wished it said and done. “It likely is,” she said quietly, and that confounded him. “Aye, saddle the horses.”

He rose and did so, troubled at heart. His own moving was painful; he limped, and there was a constant stitch in his side, a cracked rib, he thought. Doubtless she hurt too, and that was expected; bodies mended; sleep restored strength . . . but most of all he was concerned about the sudden quiet in her, this despair and yielding. They had been travelling altogether too long, at a pace which wore them to nerve and bone; no rest, never rest, world and world and world. They survived the hurts; but there were things of the soul too, overmuch of death and war, and horror which still dogged them, hunting them—to
which now they had to return. Of a sudden he longed for her anger, for something he understood.