Wall of Shiuan

“Go on,” he shouted at her, overwhelmed with fear for her. Her lighter weight was more vulnerable to the current that tore at them, her strength perilously burdened by the armor she wore. But she refused vehemently, and he realized then that he was asking something impossible of her: she was too light to dare let go; she clung to the saddle on the other side, Siptah laboring in the strong current. Vanye himself fought the current almost shoulder-deep of a sudden, and the horses began to swim, great desperate efforts of their tired bodies.

“Lord!” Jhirun screamed.

He turned his head to look back at her, turned again in the direction of her gaze to see a great mass coming down on them in the lightning-lit waters, a tree uprooted and coming down the current end toward them.

“ Liyo !” he cried warning.

It hit, full into the gelding’s side, drove against his armor and tore him from the reins, driving him against the gray. Siptah swung under the impact, spilling him under, drove at him with threshing hooves. Roots speared at him, tangled and snagged at his armor. He fought upward against them, had purchase on the jagged mass itself. It rolled with him, spilling him under again, pulling him down with it.

There was a moment of cold, of dark, an impact.

He embraced the obstacle, the tree stabbing at his back with all the force of the current, roots snapping against his armored back. He felt stone against his face. He could breathe for a moment, inhaling air and foaming water. Then the tree tore past, ripping at him, and he slipped, pi

In desperation he loosed his hold, helpless to swim at the best of times, fighting without skill and weighted by armor and exhaustion. At once he knew it had been a mistake. He could not make it so far against the current. The rush of water dragged him down and whirled him like a leaf around the bend—belly-on to the rock, breath driven from him, skull battered by a second impact as he slipped into yet another stone, numb legs tucked, realizing dully that they were bent because he was aground. He moved, heavy with water and without strength in his limbs, drove again through shallow water and a maze of reeds to sprawl at the bank, to crawl ashore among the stones. For a moment he was numb, the force of the pelting rain painful against his back even through the armor.

There was a time of dark, and at last the rain seemed less violent. He moved, rolled over and stared up, with a sudden clutch of fear as he recognized the cursed stones in the lightning—Standing Stones, qujalin ruins that had intercepted his body and saved his life. The monoliths leaned over him like a gathering of giants in the dark and the rain.

“ Liyo !” he shouted into the roar of waters and the wind. “Morgaine!”

There was no answer.

Chapter Six

The dawn was begi

There was only the persistent roar of the flood, the patter of gentle rain on the leaves, always the water, numbing the senses.

“Morgaine!” he cried. How many times he had called, what ground he had covered, he did not remember. He had searched the night long, through ruins and from one islet to another, between moments that he had to sink down and rest. His voice was all but gone. His armor pressed on his shoulders with agonizing weight, and now it would have been far, far easier for his knees to bend, letting him sink down into the cold and the mud and the waters that were likely to have him in the end.

But he would not give way without knowing what had become of his liege. Other trusts in his life he had failed: to kinsmen, to friends, and some of those were dead, but they had had others on whom to rely—Morgaine had no other, none at all.

He leaned forward, elbows tucked against his belly and the log, dragged his feet one and then the other from the mud, that pulled at tendons and muscles and claimed him whenever he rested at all. The rotting trunk became his bridge to higher ground. He climbed it to the bank, used brush for a handhold and struggled to the crest of the hill. Dark gathered about him, his pulse loud in his ears, pressure in his temples. He walked. All that he knew at times was touch, the rough wetness of bark, the stinging slap of leaves and branches he could not see to avoid, the slickness of wet leaves beneath his fingers as he fought his way up yet another rise.

He thought himself in Morija once more, Myya archers on his trail; or something pursued him. He could not remember where this place was, why he was so cruelly tried, whether he pursued or was pursued; it was like a thousand other nightmares of his life.

And then he would remember, when the ghosts flitted mockingly through his memory, so that it was impossible to sort out image from reality. He knew that he was beyond Gates, and that he was lost.

That Morgaine was dead occurred to him; he rejected the possibility not with logic, but with belief. Men died, armies perished, but Morgaine survived, survived when others could not, when she herself wished otherwise; she might be lost, might be hurt, might be stranded alone and afoot in this land: these images tormented him. Anything else was impossible.

She would have guarded herself first when the mass came down upon them, would have done that while he tried to guard her, the girl Jhirun forgotten. Siptah had been between Morgaine and the impact, and so had the gelding. She would—his mind began at last to function more clearly on this track now that he had convinced himself of a means by which she might have lived—she would instinctively have let him go down, sought the bank at once, for she carried Changeling, and therefore she would have fought to live. Such were the reflexes by which she lived. For her there was one law: to seek the Gates at whatever cost. Panic would direct her simply to live, all else forgotten.

And perhaps when that panic passed, she might have delayed to seek him, as long as she thought it likely he might have survived. But she knew also that he did not swim, and she would not search forever. He pictured her shedding a tear or two—he flattered himself by that—and when morning came and there was no sign of him, then she would take her bearings anew and heed the geas that drew her.

And that would set her face northward, toward the Master Gate, and a leavetaking from this sad, drowning earth.

Suddenly he realized that she would have trusted him to understand her obligations, to trust that she would do the rational, the necessary thing—and make for the one landmark in all this quaking marsh as soon as possible: the one place where all travelers met.

The qujalin road. She would be there, confident that her ilin would be there, would follow if he could, knowing what she would do.

He cursed himself: his driving fear was suddenly that she would have found the road before him, that in the night and the storm she would have gone on—that she might have saved one of the horses, while he was afoot, incapable of overtaking a rider.

He reckoned by the flow of the current which way the road must lie, and walked, tearing his way through the brush on as straight a course as his strength could make him.

He came upon the first stones at midmorning, and everything lay smooth as an unwritten page, no marks at all on the new sheet of mud laid by the flood, only the crooked trail of a serpent and the track of a lizard.

He cast about with all his skill to find any smallest remnant of a track left during the ebb of the flood, and found nothing. Exhausted, he leaned against a low branch and wiped thickly mudded hands on his sodden breeches, trying to think clearly. There was such desperation welling up in him now, his best hope disappointed, that he could have cried his anger and grief aloud to the listening woods. But now that he thought it unlikely that she was nearby to hear, he could not even find the courage to call her name aloud, knowing that there would be silence.

She was moving ahead of him, joining the road further on; or she was yet to come. The other possibility occurred this time with frightening force. He thrust it quickly from his mind.

His one hope, that answered either eventuality, was to be at the place she sought, to reach Abarais as quickly as human strength could carry him and pray—if prayers were heard in this Hell, and for Morgaine—that she would either stay for him or overtake him. He would wait, if he reached Abarais, holding the Gate for her, against men, against Roh, against whatever threat, until she came or until he died.

He gathered himself, fought dizziness as he did at each sudden move, coughed and felt a binding pain in his chest. His throat was raw. Fever burned in him. He had been ill on the run before, and then, with his kinsmen on his trail, it had been possible to sweat the fever out, to keep moving, relying on the horse’s strength to carry him.

This time it was his own shaking limbs that must bear him, and the waters and the inhabitants of them waited for his fall below that dark surface.

He walked a staggering course down the road, seeking some sign on the earth—and then he realized that he should leave one of his own, lest she take his track for Roh’s, and hang back. He tore a branch from a tree, snapped it and drove its two ends into the mud, a slanting sign that any who had ranged Andur-Kursh could read like the written word: Follow! And by it he wrote in the mud the name-glyph of clan Nhi.

It would last until the waters rose again, which in this cursed land gave the life of the message to be short indeed; and with this in mind, he carried a stone from the paving of the buried road and cut a mark now and again upon a tree by the road.

Every caution he had learned in two years of outlawry, fleeing clan Myya, cried out that he guided none but enemies at his back. Men lived in this land, and they were furtive and fearful and would not show themselves; and therefore there were things in this land that men should rightly fear.

Nevertheless he held the center of the road, fearing more being missed than being found.

And came the time that he ran out of strength, and what had been a tightness in his chest swelled and took his breath away. He sank down in his tracks and drew breath carefully, feeling after ribs that might well be cracked; and at times the haze came over his mind again. He found a time when he had not been aware what passed about him, and some moments later he was afoot and walking with no memory of how he had risen or how far he had come.