Exile's Gate

"If any are alive—" Vanye said. The numbness was still about him. It frayed suddenly; and he tried to hold onto it, tried not to think at all except in terms of what he must do.

"Find that out," she said.

Beyond that she did not give him orders. Beyond that, surely, was her own numbness, as essential as his own. It was cowardice to ask what he should do in that case, cowardice to cast the necessity onto his liege by asking for instruction, when he knew as well as she that they could afford no delays and no second and hostile encumbrance. He walked back toward the men on the ground, slipping his sword to his side, unhooking and drawing it. He heard the two horses walking at his back, heard one rider dismount and delay a moment; he had no attention for anything but the supposed dead—men armored much as Chei had been, in leather and chain.

There was no doubt of the four Morgaine had taken. He went into the woods where Arrhan stood fretting—the white mare, the cause of so many deaths. He recovered his helm from where he had left it, freed the mare and rode back beyond the curve of the road where he had left the rest of the company, those his arrows had accounted for.

One of them was qhal. All of them were dead.

Thank Heaven, he thought; and was horrified at his own blasphemy.

He tied Arrhan by the road and dragged the dead men as far into the brush as he could manage; and rode back to Morgaine and Chei, where Chei tried to do the same, staggering and panting with the effort of hauling yet another armored corpse off into the brush of the roadside.

Vanye lent his help, himself staggering by the time that they had laid out the last of the bodies well within the woods.

Chei said not a word in all of it—worked with his face averted and grim, his gasps after breath the only sound except the breaking of brush as they trod back to the open road.

"Wind to the east," Morgaine said as they mounted up. Under her, Siptah sidled toward Chei or his horse and she curbed that. "I trust this road tends north, Chei—rapidly."

"Yes," Chei answered.

"On your life," Morgaine said then, and lifting her arm toward the roadside fired the black weapon she carried, taking no trouble now to conceal it, from a man who had seen it and seen the wounds it made, burning through flesh and bone.

Now it was the dry leaves it burned, and a thin line of fire traced itself along the ground where it aimed. The fire increased with a dry crackling. The horses fretted and complained at the smell of smoke, and they let them move.

All along that curve of the road as they went, Morgaine raised fire. That behind them blazed bright when Vanye looked over his shoulder.

The dawn itself was not so bright. It was well beyond the fire that they could see the sun coming, a lightening of the east that had nothing to do with that ominous glare in the woods behind them.

"It is Gault's woods," Chei muttered when they let the horses breathe, looking back from a height and a turning of the wooded road. "It is his woods we are burning, and the wind will bring the fire to his fields."

Vanye stared at the line of fire below them that now rolled smoke into a dim but increasingly sunlit sky. For himself he wanted clean water, in which he could wash his hands and wash his face and take the stink of death and burning out of his nostrils.

Lord in Heaven, there were horses loose down there, in that, no knowing whether the road would take them to safety. And the land itself—

Burn the woods? Burn the land?

He was not sure where it weighed, against ambush and murder of unsuspecting men who might, Heaven knew, have run from the sight of them; or a lord who fed his enemies to wolves; or the obscure terrors which Morgaine feared, which involved the gates and things which she tried in vain to make him comprehend.

The gates opened too far, into too much, and it was possible, Morgaine had said, that they could unravel all that was and take it into themselves. Perhaps that was so. He did not conceive of things in the way Morgaine did—he did not want to conceive of them, in the same way he did not want to know why the stars shifted, or where they were when they were between the gates and there were neither stars nor substance.

But he had felt the gate-force in his bones. He had stared into the void often enough to know it was hell itself that beckoned there.

He knew what made a man like Gault. He knew that there was, for himself and his liege, no honor such as the world counted it, and that the most irresponsible thing in the world was to have let a man of that company back there escape alive, to bring pursuit on them, for if they should fall—Morgaine had told him—the deaths would be ... everything: all that had ever been and might be. In this she was telling the truth as she believed it, though she had lied to him in lesser things. On this one item of faith he committed himself body and soul. He even hoped—in the secrecy of his heart—that God might forgive him. For all the murder, God might forgive him and forgive her, if it was somehow right, what they did, and they were not deceived.

But he wished with all his soul, that he could feel as keen a remorse as once he might have felt for the men he had killed back there. He could not find it again. There was only horror. There was keenest anguish—but that mostly for the horses; and very little for the men, even of his own kind. He was afraid when he knew that, as if something were slipping irrevocably away from him, or he from it, and he did not know his way back from this point.

"Where have we gotten to?" Morgaine asked their guide when they had come still a little higher up the road, up where the road bent again away from the dawn and toward the still-shadowed sky; and the fire below them was a rolling of white smoke across the tops of trees. "Can we get off this road and onto the old one?"

"It is not safe," Chei said. His face by the dawning light was haggard and his hair wild, with bits of dead leaves stuck in it. His eyes held a feverish look, as well a man's might, which had seen what they had. "If you want ambush, lady, that is where to find it."

"Where were they going before dawn?" Vanye asked harshly, for that was the thing that made no sense to him; it outraged him, that men had been so foolish, and he had had to pay them for it. He felt that,when he wished to Heaven he could feel something like conscience.

One of them, Mother of God, had been hardly more than sixteen; and tears stung his eyes, at the same time he could have struck anything in his path.

"I do not know," Chei said. "I do not know."

"We assume they had reason," Morgaine said shortly. "We assume it was on this road and we may yet meet it, to someone's sorrow—do you understand me, Chei?"

"I do not know," Chei protested, shaking his head.

"You took a great chance," Morgaine said, "ru

"Yes, lady," Chei said in a faint voice.

"Are we yet off Gault's land? Where is his border?"

"I do not know.—It is truth! We fought north of here. My lord Ichandren—is dead. Gault's forces are on the road at night—God knows, God only knows, lady, what they were doing, or where more of them are—That fire will draw them, but it will draw other attention too—God knows who, or whether they will think it an accident or set. It is Gault's land down there. His men would not burn his own land. Neither—" He hesitated a breath. "Neither have we ever fired the land we move in. That road will be Gault's when it has burned out. It will be black sticks and open to the eye, and it will be so much more land he can march through."