The road met the fortress of An-Abarais: and it vanished into a long archway, black and cheerless, with night and open sky at its other end. But the slanted spires shaped another road, fronting the fortress; and in that crossing of ways Morgaine reined in, scanning all directions.
“Kithan,” she said, as their two companions overtook them. “You watch the road from here. Jhirun: come. Come with us.”
Jhirun cast an apprehensive look at all of them, left and right; but Morgaine was already on her way down that righthand aisle, a pale-haired ghost on a pale horse, almost lost in shadow.
Vanye reined aside and rode after, heard Jhirun clattering along behind him in haste. What Kithan would do, whether he would stay or whether he would flee to their enemies- Vanye refused to reckon: Morgaine surely tempted him, dismissed him for good or for ill; but her thoughts would be set desperately elsewhere at the moment, and she needed her ilin at her back.
He overtook her as she stopped in that dark aisle, where she had found the deep shadow of a doorway; she dismounted, pushed at that door with her left hand, bearing Changeling in her right.
It yielded easily, on silent hinges. Cold breathed forth from that darkness, wherein the moonlight from the doorway showed level, polished stone. She led Siptah forward, within the door, and Vanye bent his head and rode carefully after, shod hooves ringing irreverently in that deep silence. Jhirun followed, afoot, tugging at the reluctant mare, a third clatter of hooves on the stone. When she was still, there was no sound but the restless shift of leather and the animals’ hard breathing.
Vanye slid his sword from its sheath and carried it naked in his hand; and suddenly light glimmered from Morgaine’s hands as she began to do the same, baring Changeling’s rune-written blade. The opal shimmer grew, flared into brilliance enough to light the room, casting strange shadows of slanting spires, a circular chamber, a stairway that wound its way among the spires.
From Changeling came a pulsing sound, soft at first, then painful to the senses, that filled all the air and made the horses shy. The light brightened when Morgaine swept its tip up and leftward; and by this they both knew the way they must go, reading the seeking of the blade toward its own power.
And did they meet, unsheathed blade and living source, it would end both: whatever madness had made Changeling had made it indestructible save by Gates.
Morgaine sheathed it as quickly as might be; and the horses stood trembling after. Vanye patted the gelding’s sweating neck and slid down.
“Come,” Morgaine said, looking at him. “Jhirun-watch the horses. Cry out at once if something goes in the least amiss; put your back against solid stone and stay there. Above all else do not trust Kithan. If he comes, warn us.”
“Yes,” she agreed in a thin voice; and half a breath Vanye hesitated, thinking to lend her a weapon-but she could not use it.
He turned, overtook Morgaine, emptied his mind of all else-watching her back, watching the shadows on whatever side she was not watching. Right hand and left the shadows passed them, and as soon as the darkness became absolute, a light flared in Morgaine’s hand, a harmless, cold magic, for it only guided them: little as he liked such things, he trusted the hand that held it. Nothing she might do could fright him here, in the presence of powers eldritch and qujalin: the sword of metal that he bore was a useless thing in such a place, all his arts and skills valueless-save against ambush.
A door faced them; it yielded noisily to Morgaine’s skilled touch, startling him; and light blazed suddenly in their faces, a garish burst of color, of pulsing radiance. Sound gibbered at them; he heard the echo of his own shameful outcry, rolling through the halls.
It was the heart of the Gates, the Wells, the thing that ruled them: and though be had seen the like before and knew that no mere noise or light could harm him, he could not shame away the clutch of fear at his heart, his traitor limbs that reacted to the madness that assailed them.
“Come,” Morgaine urged him: the suspicion of pity in her voice stung him; and he gripped his sword and stayed close at her heels, walking as briskly as she down that long aisle of light. Light redder than the sunset dyed her hair and her skin, glittered bloodily off mail and stained Changelings golden hilt: the sound that roared about them drowned their footfalls so that she and he seemed to drift soundlessly in the glow. Morgaine spared not a glance for the madness on either side of them: she belongs here, he thought, watching her- who in Andurin armor, of a manner a hundred years older than his own, paused before the center of those blazing panels. She laid hands on them with skill, called forth flurries of lights and sound that drowned all the rest and set him trembling.
Qujal, he thought, as they were.
As they would wish to be.
She looked sharply back at him, beckoned him; he came, with one backward look, for in that flood of sound anyone might steal upon them from the doorway unawares. But she touched his arm and commanded his attention upon the instant.
“It is locked,” she said, speaking above the roar, “wide open. There is a hold upon it that cannot be broken: Roh’s work. I knew that this would be the case if he reached it first.”
“You can do nothing?” he asked of her; and beyond her shoulder saw the pulsing lights that were the power and life of the Gates. He had borne as much as he wished to bear, and more than he wanted to remember; but he knew too what she was telling him-that here was all the hope they had, and that Roh’s hand had sealed it from them. He tried to gather his thoughts amid the noise: sight and sound muddled together, chaos he knew he would not remember, as he could not remember the between of Gates: he did not know how to call what he saw, and his thoughts would not hold it. Once before he had walked such a hall; and he remembered now a patch of blood on the floor, a corridor, a stairway that was different-as if elsewhere in this building a door lay in ruins and at his side stood a brother he had lost.
Who was dust now, long dead, nine hundred years ago.
The confusion became too much, too painful. He watched Morgaine turn and touch the panel again, doing battle with something he did not understand nor want to know. He understood it for hopeless.
“Morgaine!”
Roh’s voice, louder than the noise about them.
Vanye looked up, the sword clenched in his fist; and Roh’s shape drifted amid the light and the sound, pervisible, larger than life.
It spoke: it whispered words in the qujalin tongue, a whisper that outshouted the sounds from the walls. Vanye heard his own name on its insubstantial lips, and crossed himself, loathing this thing that taunted him, that whispered his name to Morgaine, whispered things he could in no wise understand: his cousin Roh. He saw the face that was so nearly his own, alike as a brother’s-the brown eyes, the small scar at the cheek that he remembered. It was utterly Roh.
“Are you there, cousin?” the image asked suddenly, sending cold to his heart. “Perhaps not. Perhaps you remain safe at Ohtij-in. Perhaps only your liege has come, and has forgotten you. But if you are beside her, remember what we spoke of on the rooftop, and know that my warning was true: she is pitiless. I seal the Wells to seal her out, and hope that it may suffice; but, Nhi Vanye, kinsman, you may come to me. Leave her. Her, I will not let pass; I dare not. But you I will accept. For you, there is a way out of this world, as I give it to others, if she would permit it. Come and meet me at Abarais: so long as you can hear this message, there is still a chance. Take it, and come.”
The image and the voice faded together. Vanye stood stricken for a moment; and then he dared look at Morgaine, to find question in the look that she returned him-a deadly mistrust.
“I shall not go,” he insisted. “There was nothing agreed between us, liyo-ever. On my life, I would not go to him.”
Her hand, that had slipped to the weapon at the back of her belt, returned to her side; and of a sudden she reached out and took his arm, drew him to the counter and set his hand there, atop the cold lights.
“I shall show you,” she told him. “I shall show you; and on your life, ilin, on your soul, do you not forget it.”
Her fingers moved, instructing his; he banished to a far refuge in him his threatened soul, that shuddered at the touch of these cold things. She bade him thus and thus and thus, a patterned touch on the colors, upon one and the other and the next; he forced it into his memory, branded it there, knowing the purpose of what he was given, little as it might avail here, with Roh’s touch to seal the power against their tampering.
Again and again she bade him repeat for her the things that she had taught; mindlessly Roh’s ghost overhung them, repeating things that mocked them, endlessly, blind, void of sense. Vanye’s hands shook when that began again, but he did not falter in the pattern. Sweat prickled on him in his concentration; yet more times she bade him do what she had shown him.
He finished yet again, and looked at her, pleading with his look that it be enough, that they quit this place. She gazed at him, face and hair dyed with the bloody light, as if searching him for any fault; and above her yet again Roh’s face began to mouth its words into the throbbing air.
And suddenly she nodded that it was enough, and turned toward that door by which they had come.
They walked the long aisle of the room. Vanye’s nerves screamed at him to take flight, to run; but she did not, and he would not. His nape prickled as Roh’s voice pursued them; he knew that did he torn and look there would be Roh’s face hovering in the air-urging at him with reasonings that no longer had allure: better to sit helpless while the seas rose, than to surrender to that, which had lied to him from the beginning, which for a time had made him believe that a kinsman lived in this forsaken Hell, in this endless exile.
The darkness of the stairway lay before them; Morgaine shut the door and sealed it, shook him from his bewilderment to show him how it was done. He nodded blank, heartless understanding, his senses still filled with the sound and the light, and the terror of knowing what she had fed into his mind.
He held what men and qujal had murdered to possess; and he did not want it, with all his heart he did not. He put out his hand to the wall, still blind, save for the beam that Morgaine carried; he felt rough stone under his fingertips, felt the steps under his feet; and still his mind was dazed with what he had seen and felt. He wished it all undone; and he knew that it was too late, that he had been Claimed in a way that had no release, no freedom.
Down and down the curving stair they went, until he could hear the stamp and blowing of the horses-friendly, familiar sound, native to the man who had ascended the stairs; it was as if a different man had come down, who could not for a moment realize that the things he knew outside that terrible room could still exist, untouched, unshaken by what had shaken him.
Morgaine put out the light she bore as they stepped off the last step, and Jhirun came to them, full of whispered questions-her tearful voice and frightened manner reminding him that she also had endured the terror of this place-and knew nothing of what it held. He envied her that ignorance-touched her hand as she gave the reins of his horse to him.
“Go back,” he told her. “Myya Jhirun, ride back the way we came and hide somewhere.”
“No,” said Morgaine suddenly.
He looked toward her, startled, dismayed; he could not read her face in the darkness.
“Come outside,” she said; and she led Siptah through the doorway, waiting for them in the moonlight. Vanye did not look at Jhirun, having no answers for her; he led the gelding out, and heard Jhirun behind him.
“Jhirun,” said Morgaine, “go watch the road with Kithan.”
Jhirun looked from one to the other of them, but ventured no word in objection: she started away, leading her horse down the long aisle of slanting spires to the place where Kithan sat, a shadow among shadows.
“Vanye,” said Morgaine softly, “would thee go to him? Would thee take what he offers?”
“No,” he protested upon the instant. “No, upon my oath, I would not.”
“Do not swear too quickly,” she said; and when he would have disputed her: “Listen to me: this one order-go to him, surrender-go with him.”
He could not answer for a moment; the words were dammed in his throat, refusing utterance.
“My order,” she said.
“This is a deception of yours,” he said, indignant that she did not take him into her trust, that she thus played games with him. “You are full of them. I do not think that I deserve it, liyo.”
“Vanye-if I cannot get through, one of us must. I am well known; I am disaster to you. But you-go with him, swear to his service; learn what he can teach you that I have not. And kill him, and go on as I would do.”
“Liyo,” he protested. A shiver set into his limbs; he wound his cold fingers into the black horse’s mane, for all that he had trusted dropped away beneath him, as the mountains had vanished that morning beyond the Gate, leaving an about him naked and ugly.
“You are Ilin,” she said. “And you take no guilt for it”
‘To take bread and warmth and then kill a man?”
“Did I ever promise thee I had honor? It was otherwise, I think.”
“Oath-breaking... Liyo, even to him-”
“One of us,” she said between her teeth, “one of us must get through. Remain sworn to me in your mind, but let your mouth say whatever it must. Live. He will not suspect you; he will come to trust you. And this is the service I set on you: kill him, and carry out what I have shown you, without end-without end. Win. Will you do this for me?”
“Aye,” he said at last; and in his bitterness: “I must”
Take Kithan and Jhirun; make some tale that Ron will believe, how Ohtij-in has fallen, of your release by Kithan- omitting my part in it. Let him believe you desperate. Bow at his feet and beg shelter of him. Do whatever you must but stay alive, and pass the Gate, and carry out my orders-to the end of your life, Nhi Vanye, and beyond if thee can contrive it.”
For a long moment he said nothing; he would have wept if he had tried to speak, and in his anger he did not want that further shame. Then he saw a trail of moisture shine on her cheek, and it shook him more than all else that she had said.
“Be rid of the Honor-blade,” she said. “It will raise a question with him you cannot answer.”
He drew it and gave it to her. “Avert,” he murmured, the word almost catching in his throat; she echoed the wish, and slipped it through her belt.
“Beware your companions,” she said.
“Aye,” he answered.
“Go. Make haste.”
He would have bowed himself at her feet, an Ilin taking final, unwilling leave; but she prevented him with a hand on his arm. The touch numbed: for a moment he hesitated with a thing spilling over in him that wanted saying, and she, all unexpected, leaned forward and touched her lips to his, a light touch, quickly gone. It robbed him of speech; the moment passed, and she turned to take up the reins of her horse. What he would have said seemed suddenly a plea for himself, and she would not hear it; there would be dispute, and that was not the parting he wanted.
He hurled himself into the saddle, and she did likewise, and rode with him as far as the crossing of the road and the aisle, the arch that led through into
Abarais, where Jhirun and Kithan awaited them.
“We are going on,” he said to them, the words strange and ugly to him, “we three.”
They looked puzzled, dismayed. They said nothing, asked nothing; perhaps the look of the two of them, ilin and liyo, made a barrier against them. He turned his horse into the passage, into the dark, and they went with him. Suddenly he looked back, in dread that Morgaine would already be gone.
She was not. She was a shadow, she and Siptah, against the light behind them, waiting.
Fwar and his kind, whatever remained of them, would be coming. Suddenly he realized the set of her mind: the Barrows-folk, that she once had led-ages hence. There was a bond between them, an ill dream that was recent in her mind, a geas apart from Changeling. He remembered her at the Suvoj, sweeping man after man away into oblivion-and the thing that he had seen in her eyes.
They were your own, Kithan had protested, even a qujal appalled at what she had done. They followed her; she waited for them this time, as time after time he had feared she might turn and face them, her peculiar nightmare, that would not let her go.
She waited, while the Gate prepared to seal. Here she stopped running; and laid all her burden upon him. Tears blurred his eyes; he thought wildly of riding back, refusing what she had set him to do.
And that she would not forgive.
They exited the passage into the light of rising Li, saw the valley of Abarais before them, the jagged spires of ruins, and in the far distance-campfires scattered like stars across the mountains: the host of all Shiuan.
He looked back; he could not see Morgaine any longer.
He rammed the spurs into the gelding’s flanks and led his companions toward the fires.