“ Liyo!” Vanye said, with all the force in him. “To horse!”
She moved, nothing questioning, turned and sprang to the saddle in a single move. He kept his eye on Fwar in that instant, and saw murder there. In the next moment Morgaine had swung Siptah around to face them, curbing him hard, so that he shied up a little. She unhooked Changeling, held it across the saddlebow.
“Halflings!” someone shouted, like a curse; but from other quarters within the mob there were outcries of terror.
Morgaine rode Siptah a little distance across the face of the crowd, and paced him back again, a gesture of arrogance; and still they feared her, and gave back, keeping the line she drew.
“Fwar!” she cried aloud. “Fwar! What is it you want?”
“Him!” cried Fwar, a beast-shout of rage. “Him, who killed Ger and Awan and Efwy.”
“You led us here,” shouted one of the sons of Haz. “You have no intention of helping us. It was a lie. You will ruin the Wells and ruin us. If this is not so, tell us.”
And there arose a bawling of fear from the crowd, a voice as from one throat, frightening in its intensity. They began to press forward.
A rider broke through the qujal from the rear: Vanye jerked his head about, saw Jhirun, a great untidy bundle on the saddle before her, saw the dark arm of the mob that had broken through the woods attempting to encircle them; Jhirun cried warning of it.
In blind instinct Vanye whirled in the other direction—saw a knife leave Fwar’s hand. He flung up his arm: it hit the leather and fell in the mud, under his horse’s hooves. Jhirun’s cry of warning still rang in his ears.
The mob surged forward and Morgaine retreated. Vanye ripped out his sword, and fire burned from Morgaine’s hand, felling one of the Barrowers. The front rank wavered with an outcry of horror.
“Angharan!” someone cried; and some tried to flee, abandoning their weapons and their courage; but weapons were hurled from another quarter, stones. Siptah shied and screamed shrilly.
“Lord!” Jhirun cried; Vanye reined about as Shiua came at them, seeking to attack the horses. The gelding shied back, and Vanye laid about him with desperate blows, the qujal striking what barehanded blows they could.
Vanye did not turn to see what had befallen his liege; he had enemies of hers enough before him. He wielded the longsword with frenzied strength, spurred the gelding recklessly into the attackers and scattered their undisciplined ranks, only then daring turn, hearing screams behind him.
Bodies lay thickly on the slope; fires burned here and there in the brush; the mob broke in flight, scattering down the hillside in advance of Siptah’s charge.
And Morgaine did not cease: Vanye spurred the gelding and followed her, blind to tactic and strategy save the realization that she wanted the road, wanted the hill clear of them.
Folk screamed and scattered before them, and Vanye felt the gelding avoid a body that had fallen before him, then recover and stretch out running as they gained the level ground, the qujalin road. Morgaine turned, heading out for the causeway across the Suvoj, scattering screaming enemies that had turned the wrong way.
On either side stretched flooded land, a vast expanse of shallow water, and the road ran as a narrow thread across it, toward the flooded crossing, where water swirled darkly over the stones. Here, well out upon that roadway, Morgaine stopped, and he with her, reining about as four riders came after them to the same desperate refuge—three terrified qujal and a Barrows-girl, this all their strength, and the roar of the Suvoj at their backs.
On the hillside that they had left, the Hiua regrouped, gathering their forces and their courage, and there was much of shouting and crying. Torches were waved. The glow of fire lit the center of their rallying place, and on that hillside was a tree, from which dangled objects—the aspect of which filled Vanye with apprehension.
“They have hanged them!” Kithan cried in anguish.
But neither Kithan nor his two men ventured forward against those odds. His people, Vanye understood, reckoning the number of dangling corpses against his memory of the band of qujal that had fled crumbling Ohtij-in, a pitiable group, among them women and old ones. Qujal they might be, but bile rose in his throat as he gazed on that sight.
And of a sudden came a shout from that gathering by the tree, and the wave of a torch, exhorting a new attack against them.
“Get back,” Morgaine bade their companions; and the rush came, a dark surge of bodies pouring out onto the causeway. Changeling came free of its sheath, opal color flickering up and down its blade, that ominous darkness howling at its tip, and the first attacker mad enough to fling himself at Morgaine entered that dark and whirled shrieking away within it, sucked into that oblivion.
The mob did not retreat. Others swept against them, wild-eyed and howling their desperation. Vanye laid about him with his sword, reining tightly to keep the gelding from being pushed over the brink.
And suddenly those men that attacked him were alone. Morgaine spurred Siptah into that oncoming horde, swept the terrible blade in an arc that became vacant of enemies and corpses, a crescent that widened.
With a shout she rode farther, driving them in retreat before her, taking any man that delayed, the blade flickering with the cold opal fire, slow and leisurely as it took man after man into that void, dealing no wound, sparing none.
“ Liyo!” Vanye cried, and spurred after her, shouldering a screaming marshlander over the brink. “ Liyo!” He rode to land’s edge; and there perhaps his voice first reached her. She reined about, and he saw the arc of the sword, the sudden eclipse of the light as it swung toward him. He reined over, hard, and the gelding slid on the wet stones, skidding. He recovered. The horse trembled and fretted under him, Morgaine’s wild face staring at him in the balefire of Changeling.
“Put it up,” he urged her in what of a voice remained to him. “No more. No more.”
“Get back.”
“No!” he cried at her. But she would not listen to him: she turned Siptah’s head toward the people that gathered on the hillside, and spurred forward onto the muddy earth. Women and children cried out and ran, and men held their ground desperately, but she came no farther, circling back and forth, back and forth.
“ Liyo!” Vanye screamed at her; and when she would not come, he rode forward, carefully, reining in a few paces behind, where he was safe from her as well as from the enemy.
She stopped, sat her horse facing the great empty space that she had made between the causeway and their attackers. There was, after that confusion and madness, a terrible silence made. And she kept the sword unsheathed, waiting, while time passed and the silence continued.
A voice broke the stillness, distant and its owner well hidden in the darkness. There were curses spoken against her, who had deceived them; there were viler things shouted. She did not move, nor seem provoked, although at some of the words Vanye trembled with rage and wished the man within reach. Almost he answered back himself; but something there was about Morgaine’s silence and waiting against which such words, either attacking or defending, were empty. He had held Changeling: he knew the agony that grew in one’s arm after long wielding of it, the drain upon one’s very soul. She did not move, and the voice grew still.
And at last Vanye gathered his resolve and toed the gelding forward. “ Liyo,” he said, so that she would know that it was he. She did not protest his approach now; nor did she turn her head from the darkness she was watching.
“It is enough,” he urged her quietly. “ Liyo–put it away.”
She gave no answer, nor moved for a time. Then she lifted Changeling so that the darkness at its tip aimed toward the huddle of tents and shelters, and that one great tree, whereon corpses dangled and twisted above a dying fire.
And then she lowered her arm, as if the weight of the sword suddenly grew too much. “Take it,” she said hoarsely.
He eased close to her, stretched out both his hands and gently disengaged her rigid fingers from the dr
agon grip, taking it into his own hand. The evil of it ran through his bones and into his brain, so that his eyes blurred and his senses wavered.
She did not offer him the sheath, which was all that might damp its fires and render it harmless. She did not speak.
“Go back,” he said. “I will watch them now.”
But she did not answer or offer to move. She sat, straight and silent, beside him—believing, he was sure, that did it come to using the sword he had less willingness than she; lives and nations were on her conscience. His crimes were on a human scale.
And they sat their horses side by side, the two of them, until he found the sword making his arm ache, until the pain of it was hard to bear. He counted only his breaths, and watched the slow passage of Li’s descent; and the horses grew weary and restless under them.
From the camp there was no stirring.
“Give it back,” Morgaine said at last; he did so, terrified in the passing of it, the least touch of it fatal. But her hand was strong and sure as she received it.
He looked behind him, at the rift of the Suvoj, where the others waited. “The waters are lower,” he said. And after a moment: “The Hiua will not dare come. They have given up. Put it away.”
“Go,” she said; and harshly: “Go back!”
He drew his horse’s head about and rode back to the others, the qujal at one side of the roadway, Jhirun at the other, holding the mare’s reins as she sat on the stone edge.
And the girl gathered herself up as she saw him coming, staggered with exhaustion as she went forward to meet him. “Lord,” she said, holding the gelding’s reins to claim his attention, “lord, the halflings say we might perhaps cross. They are talking of trying it.” There was a wild, desperate grief in her face, like something graven there, incapable of changing. “Lord—will she let us go?”
“Go, now,” he bade her on his own, for there was no reasoning with Morgaine; and as he sat watching them mount up and begin to take their horses out onto that dangerous passage, he was dismayed at his own callousness, that he could send men and a woman ahead to probe the way for his liege—in his place, because she valued him and not them.
Such he began to be, obedient to Morgaine. He made his heart cold, though his throat was tight with shame for himself, watching those four lone figures struggling across that dangerous flooded stonework.
And when he saw that they were well past the halfway point and still able to proceed, he turned and rode back to Morgaine’s side.
“Now,” he said hoarsely. “Now, liyo. We can cross.”
Chapter Fifteen
Vanye set himself in the lead, riding the skittish gelding toward the rift that thundered and echoed with flood. The retreating water had left the land glittering with water under the moon. A number of uprooted trees lay about the pool-studded plain, several having rammed the causeway, creating heaps of brush that loomed up on the side where the current had been, skeletal masses festooned with strings of dead grasses and leaves.
Then the causeway arched higher above the rocky shelf, pierced by spans above the water: a bridge that extended in vast arches out across the rift.
Please Heaven, Vanye thought, contemplating what lay before them, let the earth stay still now. The horse slowed, side-stepping; he touched it with his heels gently and kept it moving.
The current thundered and boiled through the spans that had lately been entirely submerged. Vast megaliths formed that structure, that as yet neither quake had dislodged nor flood eroded. A tree hung on the edge of the roadway, itself dwarfed by the spans, so that it seemed only some dangling bit of brush, but its roots thrust up taller than horse and rider. Vanye avoided looking directly down into the current, that dizzied the senses—save once: saw the waters sweeping down on the one side and through into endless water on the other, an expanse that seemed to embrace all creation. In the midst of it hung the thread of the bridge, and themselves small and lost amid the crash and roar that flung up spray as a mist about them.
He turned his head—suddenly, unreasoningly anxious about Morgaine, at once comforted to know her close behind him. She bore Changeling sheathed at her shoulders; her pale hair seemed to glow in the half-light, whipped on the wind as she also turned to look back.
Torches massed at the beginning of the causeway, like so many stars flickering there, beginning to stream out onto it.
What they had loosed on Ohtij-in was still following them, violent and desperate. Morgaine turned forward again; so did he, anxious for their safety on the bridge. The roadway was wide: it would have been possible to run, but the roar of the water and the sight of it had the animals wild-eyed with distress. It was not a place to let them go.
Yet ahead the small party with Jhirun had left the bridge, even now riding the security of the farther causeway and climbing the slope of the far-side road.
Dawn grew as they traversed that last, agonizingly slow distance; light showed them the way ahead more clearly, and the river had sunk yet more, so that it was worse to look down, where white froth rumbled and boiled about the arches of qujalin design and vast size, the water slipping down into a chasm as the Suvoj became a river and no longer a sea.
The brink of the far cliff came within reach. Vanye spurred his horse and it began to gather speed, sending a scatter of water from an occasional puddle. At the last he cast a look over his shoulder, obsessed with the dread that Morgaine might decide to turn and finish on that dizzying bridge what she had begun—for safety’s sake.
She did not. Siptah likewise leaned into a run, following, and Vanye turned his face again, seeing the safety of the mountains ahead, a rise in the stone road that bore them upward to the hills.
To Abarais.
The dawn, breaking over the long slash of the Suvoj, showed a road well-kept that ascended steadily among the hills. For a time they rode hard, until they were within a stone’s cast of the qujal and of Jhirun, and found leisure to walk their horses, until they had caught their breath.
Jhirun, riding somewhat apart from the halflings, looked back as if she might rein back and join them... but she did not; nor did the halflings.
Then of a sudden Morgaine laid heels to Siptah and rode through, startling the weary party and starting the horses to running again, along the ascending road among the hills. Vanye, staying with her, felt the fading strength of the Andurin gelding and the unsureness in his stride, the animal’s shoulders slick with sweat and froth; and by now the others were dropping behind, their horses spent.
“For pity,” he shouted across at Morgaine, when the gelding’s bravest effort could not keep stride, burdened with a man’s weight; and the Baien gray was drenched with sweat “ Liyo, the horses—enough.”
She yielded, slowed; the horses walked again, their breath coming in great lung-tearing puffs, and Morgaine turned in the saddle to look back—not, it was likely, at the qujal, who struggled to stay with them, but dreading the appearance of others on the road behind them.
The light grew, flung misty peaks into outline, a central body of mountains rounded and clustered together, a last refuge. There was a desolation about them that struck to the heart. Vanye recalled the vast chains of his own mountains, reaching sharp ridges at the sky, stretching as far as the eye could see and the heart could imagine. Of these there was immediate beginning and end, and they had a blurred, aged quality, weathering that was of many ages, a yielding likewise toward the sea.
Yet on the hillsides began to be signs of habitations, fields under cultivation, protected by terraces, and stonework to carry away the flooding: recent works, the hand of farmers, small fields and orchards that were flooded in many areas, but a sign that here lay the true strength of Shiuan, a still-solid wealth that had supported the glittering lords and the humanity that had crowded within their walls.
And on the crest of a long hill, from which it was possible to see the road in all directions, Morgaine reined in, leaned on the saddlebow a moment then dismounted. Vanye did likewise, himself
aching in all his bones, and took Siptah’s reins from her nerveless hand.
She stared past him, down the long road where the halflings were only beginning that hill. “A time to rest,” she said.
“Aye,” he agreed gladly enough, and busied himself loosening girths and slipping bits to ease the horses, tending to them while Morgaine withdrew a little to that rocky up-thrust that was the cap of the hill, where flat stones afforded a place to sit other than the damp earth.
He finished his task, and brought the flask of Hiua liquor and a wrapped bit of food, and offered them to her, hoping against expectation to the contrary that she would accept them. She sat with Changeling unhooked and leaning against her shoulder, her right arm cradled in her lap in an attitude of evident pain; but she lifted her head and bestirred herself to take a share of what he offered, as much to avoid dispute with him, he thought, as because she had appetite for anything. He drank and ate a few mouthfuls himself; and by this time the halflings were drawing near them, with Jhirun lagging far behind.
“ Liyo,” Vanye said carefully, “we would do well to take what chance we have to rest now. We have pushed the horses almost as far as possible. We are climbing; there looks to be more of it, and there may be a time ahead that speed will serve us better than it does now.”
She nodded, mutely accepting his argument, whether or not it coincided with her own reasons. Her eyes were void of interest in what passed about her. He heard the approach of the halflings with a private anguish, not wanting strangers near her when this mood was on her. He had seen it before, that soulless energy that seized her and kept her moving, responding only to the necessity that drove her. At the moment she was lost... knew him, perhaps, or confused him with men long since dust; the time was short for her, who had passed Gate and Gate and Gate in her course, and confounded then and now, who but months ago had ridden into a war in which his ancestors had died.
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