Exile's Gate (56 page)

"I
do not know," Vanye said, biting his lip, and looked toward the door
which lay open at the end, where red light flashed, and the wailing
grew. "Hold our retreat open!"

He
ran. He trusted the men for what they might be worth and raced down the
slick stone hall at all the speed he could manage, down the hall and
through the gaping doors and into such a place as he had seen more than
once in his travels—where light dyed everything the color of blood, and
inhuman voices wailed and thundered and shrieked from overhead and all
about.

"Liyo!" he shouted into that overpowering racket.
"Liyo!
—"

She
turned, red-dyed with the light from silver hair to metal of her black
armor, with the light flaring about her and behind her as the boards
blinked alarm.

"He
is not dead," she cried. "Vanye, he has stored his essence inside the
gate—he is still alive, for the next poor soul that ventures that gate."

He tried to understand that. He stood there staring at her and thought it through twice and three times.

"For us, "
she
shouted. "He has trapped us and I cannot dislodge him!—That is the
wrongness we have felt in the gates—he has kept his pattern there
continually, kept it bound to him, day and night—He will
take
the
next living man that enters the World-gate! He will go through, he will
be free, there is no way we can stop him!" She came to him and caught
at his arm, turning him for the door, not running, but walking quickly,
by which and by the flashing of the lights at their back and the
uncomfortable prickling in the air, he knew that the gate of Mante was
set on its own destruction, on some near time which—he hoped to
Heaven—she had chosen. "He had a snare set that would have sealed the
gate once he was free. I broke that lock easily enough. I set it to a
new time, a few hours hence. I dare not leave it longer. There is too
much knowledge in this place,—and the chance of someone re-opening it,
except I build destruction into its pathways—that, I dare not risk."

It
was old Kurshin she spoke, awkward in the things for which the qhalur
language had ready words, which conjured the inner workings of the
gates and the things she had showed him, how to redirect the power like
damming one stream and opening another, to flood throughout the
channels and destroy the means to reactivate it.

"I
have set it to destroy the core-tap," she said in the qhalur tongue,
meaning the line of power which ran from the earth's deep heart.

And everything round about it. Such a thing, she had told him—might cause havoc with a world, involving gate-force and the
power in the earth itself.
I do not know what happens thereafter,
she had said.
No one comes through such a gate again
—
or
any of the gates linked with it. It is no good thing for the world. And
I would not willingly do it. Time itself closes in on a gate once it is
shut. Ordinarily, time itself will destroy one as thoroughly in a few
years without touching the core, and there is no need for such a
catastrophe. And I do as little as I dare.

He
thought on the city spread about the hill of Neneinn, the countless
lives, the city on the brink of a well only gate-force or cataclysm
could have shaped; and his gut and his knees went to water.

It
was a death-sentence. That was the wailing, that he had never heard,
the threat to life all about this world's gates—Morund and Tejhos and
Mante and wherever else gates had their veins of power sunk into this
world's heart.

"How much time do we have?" he asked.

"Three
hours," she said, qhalur-reckoning. He measured it against the daylight
and the sun, Kurshin-fashion, and there was ice about his heart. "I
dared not give it more time," she said. "This is a qhalur city. And
there is the warden down at Seiyyin Neith,
if
he is still there and not fled with the rest—"

"One
of his guards might solve matters for us," he said, reckoning—O Heaven,
what was he become—to think cold-bloodedly where they should get a
victim?

"We cannot know it if they do. Do not speak of it to our comrades. Does thee hear?"

He saw Chei and Hesiyyn waiting for them at the intersection of the corridors, saw their anxious faces.

'Does thee hear?'

"Aye," he said, clutching the remnants of his soul to him; and no likelihood that fate would offer better.

Like
the men who had surrendered; like the forty on the road; like the city
spread below them, doomed with the gate, men and women and babes in
cradle—

For the sake of all the worlds, she told him.
All
the
worlds was too large a thing for a man's heart to understand, when it
was the one under his feet and the lives around him and the murder and
the choices were his.

Not tell them—not offer even the chance to choose or to fight—

"Come,"
she said to Chei and Hesiyyn, gathering them up as they strode along
toward the hall where they had left the horses and where Rhanin stood
guard. "We are bound for the gate. Hurry. There is not that much time.
I have set it to seal behind us and there will be no following after
us."

They
did not question. They kept pace with weapons still in their hands, and
Chei whistled to Rhanin and called to him as they came into the hall.

"We
are bound for the gate," Chei told Rhanin as the archer lowered his bow
and met them there, where he had herded the horses into a corner of the
hall. "Quickly. Come, man. The lady is keeping her promises."

But from Rhanin there was no such eagerness. "My lord Chei," he said. "My lady—I have a wife—"

O Heaven, Vanye thought.

"—I beg your leave," Rhanin said. "Let me go bring her."

Chei looked to Morgaine.

"No," Morgaine said. "There is no time. That gate will
seal,
and there will be no more passages; and if we do not get there in time, there will be none for us."

"How long?" Chei asked.

"An hour," Morgaine said. "Perhaps. Skarrin has done damage I cannot correct. We have no
time,
man,
and your lord has need of you and I do—where we go is no place for a
hallbred woman. A hard trail and a long one in sun and storm and
lightning; and war, man, that I can promise you. Come with your lord,
and hurry about it."

"I cannot." There was torment in Rhanin's brown eyes. "Lord Chei—I cannot leave her."

He turned and went to the horses. Morgaine lifted the black weapon in threat. "Stop!" she cried; and: "My lady!" Chei exclaimed.

Rhanin stopped, but he did not turn. After a few heartbeats he started walking again.

Morgaine let fall her hand. She stood in silence as Rhanin mounted up. "Fare well," she said quietly then. "Fare well, Rhanin."

Rhanin
cut the tether of the remount he led, gave it to Hesiyyn, and saluted
his lord and the rest of them, before he swung up to the saddle and
rode, black shadow against the light, for the stable-court and the city
below.

"Mount up!" Morgaine bade them.

Vanye
swallowed against the knot in his throat and went first for Siptah's
reins, to bring the gray horse to his liege while the others sought
their own. He held her stirrup for her. He did not look in her eyes.
She did not, for all he knew, try to meet his.

She said no word at all, nor quarreled with him that he did her these courtesies.

He must, he thought. He had no words to tell her he was with her.

He
felt the shorn hair about face and neck, and it seemed apt, of a
sudden, the felon's mark, the mark of an honorless man, penance for
Mante, for Rhanin and his wife, for lies and for murder yet to do.

Honest men, Morgaine had said, must fight us. Brave men must.

"We have to
find
the way out in this warren," Morgaine said shortly. "And hope the stable court leads to some road up the hill—"

"No need to search for it," Chei said, drawing his horse alongside in the hall. "There is a way from the stable court.
Gault's
memory is clear enough on that. I came up from the city—but Gault was here. Follow me."

It
was leftward Chei led, beyond the fountain. The blaze-faced bay lipped
up some meager spillage of grain on the dirt by the stables nearby: "I
will get him," Vanye said, distractedly—to leave the poor brave beast
to Mante's fate seemed impossible to him, was, at least, one death he
could prevent. He rode wide of the group, leaned from his saddle and
snagged the reins that had fallen as the animal lowered his head. It
did not want to come. It jolted his arm, then surrendered, of habit,
perhaps, and followed.

He
overtook the others before they had gotten to the stable-gate, never
having taken his eyes off them, and Morgaine acknowledged the rescue
with a worried frown, a flicker of the eyes which understood him
entirely, as Chei got down from his horse and pushed at the latch. "Let
it free outside," she said. "It will balk at the gate. We cannot afford
difficulties."

It
was true. He knew that it was. He held onto the reins as the
stable-gate swung wide on a long colonnade, and Chei mounted up again.
He drew the horse along with them as they rode that long course to a
second gate, the latch of which was high enough for Chei to trip from
horseback; and that gate opened out on a road and a barren hill, where
standing stones made an aisle leading upward.

"At
least the saddle," he said, then, outside; and slid down while the
whole company waited, and hastily loosed the bay's girth and tumbled
the saddle off; unbuckled the bridle and threw it away, and sent the
confused horse off with a hard slap on the rump. He did the same for
the horse Hesiyyn led, then, and sent it off after its fellow.

He came close to tears, then. He turned and flung himself to the saddle, and swallowed down that impulse.

Fool, he told himself, to weep for a pair of horses, when there is so much else we do. It belongs to this world, that is all.

And there may indeed be trouble—at the Gate.

O
God,
are we right? If only I knew that we were right.

He
kept close at Morgaine's side as they struck out up the road which
wound about the rocky hill, Chei and Hesiyyn close on his left.

"A
great many horses," Hesiyyn said, of the trampled ground ahead of them,
of the sparse brush about them, that was broken and trodden down.

"Everyone in Neneinn," Chei said.

But not,
Vanye thought, heart-heavy,
not enough for all of Mante. There is no escape for them.

He
thought that if he turned, high as they climbed now, he could truly see
a wondrous sight, a vantage over all Mante, over Neisyrrn Neith and
Seiyyin Neith and perhaps the plains and the hills beyond, to all the
distance a clear day would afford them.

But the sight of him would haunt him.
I do not look back,
Morgaine
was wont to say; and he clung to that wisdom now: once through the
world on a single track, a single purpose, without touching more lives
than they must.

Too
much knowledge here: he understood that. It had been unconscionable
hazard to have left his own cousin near a faded gate, except there were
warders to prevent him coming near it until it was dead beyond recall.

Here—there
were no warders they could trust: a corrupt gate-warden and a twisted
gate, and all too many who would rush to enliven the gate and seize
power for themselves—not Skarrin's measure, it was sure, but equally
deadly, in the affairs of worlds and stars and suns which Morgaine
understood, and which he did not.

Now he wept over two doomed horses, and longed with all his heart for enemies.

But
none presented themselves, and the storm-sense grew in the air, making
the hair prickle. Arrhan sidestepped and worked at the bit, so ready to
run she hardly seemed to walk on the earth; and the rest of the horses
rolled their eyes and threw their heads, snorting their dislike of the
place.

Skarrin's
presence—a man warded from assassination and accidents because he had
stored—whatever of him mattered, in such fashion that the ordinary
traffic of the gates would deliver him a host virtually instantly, were
it ever needed: different than qhalur knowledge, Morgaine had said.

Different—root and branch.

My father's legacy,
Morgaine had said.

And called Skarrin kinsman—whatever Skarrin's true name was.

Or hers.

The
great Gate came slowly from the unfolding of the hill, the screening of
the standing stones—a towering arch of stone, within which the blue sky
shimmered like fever-vision. Hesiyyn's horse fought the bit wild-eyed,
and the red roan Chei rode threw his head and fretted in distress; but
Siptah went with his ears laid flat and pricked up by turns, trying to
get rein to go, knowing where he was bound, what he must do, and all
too anxious to make that jump, till Morgaine reined him down and patted
his shoulder.

Closer
and closer then, at a careful pace. There were no enemies at hand. They
were alone at the height, on this Road which led to a place where the
very air had sound and substance; and smaller sounds, those of hoof and
harness, lost themselves.