They gained upon that man rapidly; and surely by now the traveler must have heard them coming, and might have looked around; but he did not. He moved at the same steady pace, painfully awkward.
There was an eeriness about that deaf persistence; Vanye laid his sword across the saddlebow as they came alongside the man, fearing some plan concealed in this bizarre attitude—a ruse to put a man near Morgaine. He moved his horse between, reining back to match his pace.
Still the man did not look up at them, but walked with eyes downcast, step by agonized step with the staff to support him. He was young, wearing hall-garments; he bore a knife at his belt, and the staff on which he leaned was the broken remnant of a pike. His white hair was tangled, his cheek cut and bruised, blood soaked the rough bandages on his leg. Vanye hailed him, and yet the youth kept walking; he cursed, and thrust his sheathed sword across the youth’s chest.
The qujal stopped, downcast eyes fixed on something other and elsewhere; but when Vanye let fall the sword, he began to walk again, struggling in his lameness.
“He is mad,” Jhirun said.
“No,” said Kithan. “He does not wish to see you.”
Their horses moved along with the youth, slowly, by halting paces; and softly Kithan began to question him, in his own tongue—received an anguished glance of him, and an answer, spoken on hard-drawn breaths, the while he walked. Names were named that touched keenly Vanye’s interest, but no other word of it could he grasp. The youth exhausted his supply of breath and fell silent, walked on, as he had been before.
Morgaine touched Siptah and moved on, Vanye at her side; and Jhirun with them. Kithan followed. Vanye looked back, at the youth who still doggedly, painfully, struggled behind them.
“What did he say?” Vanye asked of Morgaine. She shrugged, not in a mood to answer.
“He is Allyvy,” said Kithan in her silence. “He is of Sotharrn; and he has the same madness as took the villagers: he says that he is bound for Abarais, as all are going, believing this Chya Roh.”
Vanye looked at Morgaine, found her face grim and set; and she shrugged. “So we are too late,” she said, “as I feared.”
“He has promised them,” said Kithan, “another and better land: a hope to live; and they are going to take it. They are gathering an army, to march toward it; holds are burned: they say there is no need of them now.”
He looked again at Morgaine, expecting some answer of her. There was none. She rode with her eyes fixed, no more slowly, no more quickly, passing the ruined fields. He saw in her a tautness that trembled beneath that placid surface, something thin-strung and fragile.
Violence, terror: it flowed to his own taut nerves.
Let us retreat, something in him wanted to say. Let us find a place, lost in the hills, when all of them have passed, when the Wells are sealed. There is life enough for us, peace—once you have lost and can no longer hope to follow him. We could live. We might grow old before the waters rose to take these mountains. We would be alone, and sealed, safe, from all our enemies.
She knew her choices, he reckoned to himself, and chose what she would; but he began to think, in deep guilt, what it would be did they find Roh gone: that that was earnestly to be hoped, else she would hurl herself against an army, taking all with her.
It was a traitorous thought; he realized it, and crossed himself fervently, wishing it away—met her eyes and feared suddenly that she understood his fear.
“ Liyo,” he said in a quiet voice, “whatever wants doing, I will do.”
It seemed to reassure her. She turned her attention back to the way they rode, and to the hills.
Night began to fall, streaks of twilight that shaded into dark among the smokes across the hills, a murky and ugly color. They rode among stones that gathered more and more thickly about the road, until it became clear that here had been some massive structure, foundations that lay naked and exposed in great intersecting rectangles and circles and bits of arches. Constantly the earth bore signs that vast numbers had traveled this way, and lately.
And there was a dead man by the road. The black birds rose up from his body like shadows into the dark, a heavy flapping of wings.
Violence within the army’s own ranks attended them, Vanye reckoned: desperate men, frightened men; and men and halflings massed together. They were not long in coming upon other dead, and one was a woman, and one was a black-robed priest, frail and elderly.
“They are beasts,” Kithan exclaimed in anguish.
None disputed him.
“What shall we do,” asked Jhirun, who had remained silent most of the day, “what shall we do when we reach Abarais, if they are all gathered there?”
It was not a witless question; it was a desperate one... Jhirun, who knew less than they what must be done, and who endured all things patiently in her hope. Vanye looked at her and shook his head helplessly, foreseeing what he thought Jhirun herself began to foresee, what Morgaine had tried earnestly to warn her, weaponless as the Barrows-girl was, and without defenses.
“You also,” said Morgaine, “are still free to leave us.”
“No,” Jhirun said quietly. “Like my lord Kithan, I have nothing to hope for from what follows us; and if I cannot get through where you are going, at least—” She made a helpless gesture, as if it were too difficult a thing to speak. “Let me try,” she said then.
Morgaine considered her a moment as they rode, and finally nodded in confirmation.
The dark fell more and more heavily about them, until there was only the light of the lesser moons and the bow in the sky in which the moons traveled, a cloudy arc across the stars. From one wall of the wide valley to the other were the dark shapes of vast ruins, no longer Standing Stones, but spires, straight on their inner, roadward faces, with a curving slant on their outer. They were aligned with the road on either side, and began to set inward to enclose it.
Their way became an aisle, so that they no longer had clear view of the hills; the stone spires began to set against the very edge of the paving, like ribs along the spine of the road.
The horses’ hooves echoed loudly down that passage, and the shifting perspectives of that vast aisle, lit only by the moons, provided ample cover for ambush. Vanye rode with his sword across the saddlebow, wishing that they might make faster passage through this cursed place, and knowing at the same time the unwisdom of racing blindly through the dark. The road became entirely blind at some points, as it turned and the spires cut off their view on all sides.
And thereafter the road began to climb as well as wind, in long terraced steps that led ultimately to a darkness—a starless shadow that as they neared it began to take on the detail of black stonework, that lay as a wall before them: a vast cube of a building that overtopped the spires, that diverged to form an aisle before it.
“An-Abarais,” murmured Kithan. “Gateway to the Well.”
Vanye gazed at it with foreboding as they rode: for once before he had seen the like; and beside him Morgaine took Changeling into her hand. The gray horse blew nervously, side-stepping, then started forward again, taking the narrowing terraces; Vanye spurred the gelding to make him keep pace, put from his mind their two companions that trailed them.
It was no Gate, but a fortress that could master the Gates; qujal, and full of power. It was a place that Roh would not have neglected.
There was no other way through.
Chapter Seventeen
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, almos
t 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 Changeling’s 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 turn 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.
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