Gate of Ivrel

"I beg pardon," she said, which liyowas never obliged to say to ilin,no matter how aggrieved. "I failed to understand."

And at that moment the horses shied, exhausted as they were, heads back and nostrils flaring, whites of the eyes showing in the dim light.

Something reptilian slithered on four legs, whipping serpentwise into the thicker brush. It had been large and pale,-leprous in color. They could still hear it skittering away.

Vanye swore, his stomach still threatening him, his hands managing without his mind, to calm the panicked horse.

"Idiocy," Morgaine exclaimed softly. "Thiye does not know what he is doing. Are there many such abroad?"

"The woods are full of beasts of his making," Vanye said. "Some are shy and harm no one. Others are terrible things, beyond belief. They say the Koris-wolves were made, that they were never so fierce and never man-killers before—" He had almost said, before Irien, but did not, in respect of her. "That is why we must not sleep here, lady. They are made things, and hard to kill."

"They are not made," she said, "but brought through. But you are right that this is no good place to rest. These beasts— some will die, like infants thrust prematurely into too chill or too warm a place: some will be harmless; but some will thrive and breed. Ivrel must be sweeping a wide field. Ah, Vanye, Thiye is an ignorant man. He is loosing things— he knows not what. Either that or he enjoys the wasteland he is creating."

"Where do they come from, such things as that?"

"From places where such things are natural. From other tonights,and other Gates, and places where thatwas fair and proper. And there will be no native beasts to survive this onslaught if it is not checked. It is not man 79

Gate of Ivrel

that such an attack wars on— it is nature. The whole of Andur-Kursh will find such things straying into its meadows. Come. Come."

But he had lost his inclination to sleep, and kept the reins in his own hand.

He closed his eyes as Morgaine set them on their way again, still saw the pale lizard form, large as a man, ru

Reports told of worse. Sometimes, legend said, carcasses were found near Irien, things impossible, abortions of Thiye's art, some almost formless and baneful to the touch, and others of forms so fantastical that none would imagine what aspect the living beast had had.

His only comfort in this place was that Morgaine herself was horrified; she had that much at least of human senses to her. Then he remembered her coming to him, out of the place she called between,washed up, she said, on this shore.

He began to have dim suspicion what she was, although he could not say it in words: that Morgaine and the pale horror had reached Andur-Kursh in the same way, only she had come by no accident, had come with purpose.

Aimed at Gates, at Thiye's power.

Aimed at dislocating all that lay on this shore, as these u

And Liell had said she lied. One of the twain lied: that was certain. He wondered in an agony of mind how it should be if he learned of a certainty, that it was Morgaine.

Something else fluttered in the dark— honest owl, or something sinister; it passed close overhead. He tautened his grip upon his nerves and patted the nervous black's neck.

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It was long until the morning, until in a clear place upon the trail they dared stop and let sleep take them by turns. Morgaine's was the first sleep, and he paced to keep himself awake, or chose an uncomfortable place to sit, when he must sit, and at last fell to meddling with the black horse's gear, that the horse still bore, for in such place they dared not unsaddle, only loosened the girths. It shamed him, to have stolen a second time; and he felt the keeping of more than he needed of the theft was not honorable, but all the same it was not sense to cast things away. He searched the saddlebags and kit to learn what he had possessed and, it was in the back of his thoughts, to learn something of the man Liell.

He found an object which answered the question, such that set his stomach over.

It was a medal, gold, set in the hilt of a saddle knife, the sort many a man bore beneath the skirt of his saddle; and on it was a symbol of the blockish, ugly look he had seen graven on the Stones. It was qujalin.

Whenever any strange and long-ago things were found, folk called them qujalinand avoided them, or burned them, or cast them into deeps and tried to lose them. Most such were likely only forgotten oddities, Kurshin and harmless. Somehow he did not think this was such as that.

He showed it to Morgaine when she wakened to take her turn at watch.

"It is an irrhn," she said to him. "A luck-piece. It has no other significance." But she turned it over and over in her hands, examining it.

"It is no luck," said Vanye, "to a human man."

"There is qujalinblood mixed in Leth," she said, "and Liell is its tutor.

Tutors have ruled there nigh a hundred years. Each of the heirs of Leth has produced a son and drowned within the year. If Kasedre is capable of siring a son, he will most probably join his ancestors, and Liell will still be tutor to the son. I wonder—" she added irrelevantly, looking at the blade,

"who sired Hshi and Tlin."

"And on what," Vanye muttered sourly. "Keep the blade, liyo.I do not want to carry it, and perhaps it may bring luck to you."

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"I am not qujal," she said.

That assertion, he reflected, might have filled him with either doubt or relief some days ago, at their meeting; now it fitted uncomfortably well with the thing he had begun to suspect of her.

"Whatever you are," he said, "spare me the knowing of it."

She nodded, accepting his attitude without apparent offense. She slipped the knife within her belt and rose.

A green-feathered arrow hit the ground between her feet.

She reached to her back, hand to weapon, quick as the arrow itself. And as quick, Vanye seized her and pushed her, heedless of hurting: Chya warning, that arrow. If she fired, they would both be green-feathered in an instant.

"Do not," he appealed to her, and turned, both arms wide, toward their unseen observers. "Hai, Chya! Chya! will you put kin-slaying on your souls? We are clan-welcome with you, cousins."

Brush rustled. He watched the fair, tall men of his own mother's kindred slip out of the shadows, where surely a few more kept arrows trained upon their hearts; and he set himself deliberately between them and Morgaine's own arrogance, which was like a Myya's for persistence, and likely to be the death of her.

They did not even ask names of them, but stood there waiting for them to speak and identify themselves. Looking at the living person of one who had been minutely described in ballads a century ago, wondering perhaps if they were not mad— he could estimate what passed in their minds. They only stared at Morgaine, and she at them, furiously, in her hand a weapon that could deal death faster than their arrows.

They would kill her of course, if she could die; but she would have done considerable damage: and her ilinwho was her shield would be quite dead. He had heard of a certain Myya who strayed the border and was 82