Exile's Gate

In front of him, leaning against him, the man gave a racking cough. Disease and plague,Vanye thought. It went with such places. He reined about carefully, following Morgaine as she mounted up on the gray. The stud was fractious too, snorting and working at the reins, but she did not let Siptah have his head. They rode carefully over the bone-littered ground.

"Are they near," Vanye asked the prisoner, "the men who did this to you?"

Perhaps the man understood. Perhaps he did not. He did not answer. Intermittently he underwent spasms of coughing, racking and harsh, then, exhausted, slumped against him, his body rolling more and more to the motion of the horse.

"He is fainting," Vanye said to Morgaine. "I think all his strength is going."

In a little time more, the man's head fell forward, and it was loose weight leaning against him. But when Vanye pressed his hand over the man's heart he felt it beating steadily. It was a strong heart, he thought, of a man stubborn beyond all reason, and such a man might touch his sympathy—might, except such a man might be fair or foul, and he had known more than one enemy and more than one madman on this Road.

Morgaine led them back to the road again, and across it, to a place where a small river ran at woods-edge. In the last light, they rode a pathless track among the trees, in a land where they already knew that there were wolves, and men who had done the like of this. It was enough to know.

They gave him water, they brought him a long dazed ride deep within the twisted forest, laid him on a streamside and there freed his hands, the man of the pair giving him a little waybread soaked in cordial so strong it stung Chei's throat.

After which they let him lie, busy at the making of their camp, and through his slitted, aching eyes, Chei saw them moving here and there in the light of a tiny fire, illusory and ominous. Chei's heart beat in panic when they would come near; it eased whenever they would seem occupied about their own business. Then he knew that he was safe for a while, as he had known that he was safe when the wolves were feeding: and in such intervals, as then, he drifted only scantly waking.

A shadow fell between him and the fire. He came awake, saw the reach toward him, and feigned unconsciousness as a hand rested on his brow. "There is tea," a man's voice said, in the qhalur tongue, "here, drink."

He did not intend to break his pretense. He was still even when a hand slipped beneath his neck, though his heart was hammering in fright; he stayed quite limp as the man lifted his head and slid support under his shoulders.

But the cup which touched his lips smelled of herbs and honey. A little of it trickled between his lips, warm and wholesome, and he swallowed, risking the harm in it—a sip which touched off a spate of coughing and destroyed his pretense of unconsciousness. The cup retreated, came back to his lips. He drank again, eyes shut, tears leaking from between his lids as he fought the rawness in his throat; and drank a third sip, after which his head rested on the man's knee and a gentle hand soothed his brow.

He ventured to open his eyes, and met a face human as his own—but he had learned to doubt appearances.

All about them were twisted trees, the night, the fire. He knew that he had come to Hell, and that this qhalur woman from beyond the gate had laid claim to what the qhal-lord this side of the gate had flung away. These strangers had no use for revenge: there was nothing he personally had done to them save be born. There was nothing he knew that would be valuable to them. There was no cause at all for their mercy to him save that they had use for him, and what use the tall, lordly qhal had for a young and fair-haired human man he knew all too well.

They would take him through the gate with them. He would come back again, but with such a guest in him as Gault had, an old thing, a living hell which spoke with Gault's mouth and looked out through Gault's eyes, and which was a sojourner there. Qhal did not use qhal in that way, or it was rare. A healthy human body would serve, when a qhal outlived the one he was born with.

So they touched him gently, this qhalur woman and this maybe-qhal who did her bidding. So they gave him drink, delicate drink, perhaps because the great qhal-lords gave him what they themselves drank, because it did not occur to them that it was too precious to waste. So the man let his head down to the soft grass and spoke to him reassuringly, looking to the iron that banded his swollen ankle: "This is a simple lock; I can strike it off, have no fear of me, I will take good care." And he fetched a hand-axe and one flat stone and another, to Chei's misgiving—but the axe-blade was for a wedge, the one rock for a brace, the other for striking, and the woman came and with her own hands gave him more of the cordial against the shocks that ran through his nerves, gave him enough that his raw throat was soothed and his head spun while the man worked in soft, steady blows.

Surely they took good care for the body they claimed. There was something terrible in such careless use of their rich things, in the gentle touch of the woman's hand as it rested on his shoulder, and in her soft reassurances: "He will not hurt you."

It was one with the other madness, and Chei's senses spun, so that he was not sure whether the ground was level or not. The soft ringing of the metal resounded in his skull, the pain ran up from the bones of his leg and into his hip, till the iron fell away, and the man very delicately, with his knife, slit the stitching of his boot and said something to the qhal in words which made no sense—but Chei was far gone in the pain that began about his ankle from the moment it was free of its confinement, an ache that made him wish the chain back again, the boot intact, anything but that misery which made him vulnerable. He tried not to show it, he tried not to react when the man probed the joint; but his back stiffened, and he could not help the intake of breath.

The world was dim for a time after that shock. They went away from him. He was glad to lie still and not heave up the moisture they had given him; and he thought that he would, for a time, if he lifted his head at all. But the man brought a wet doth warm from the fire, and washed his face and his neck and his hands with it.

"Do you want more water?" the man asked.

He did. He did not ask. It was a trick, he thought, to make him believe them, and he did not want to talk to them. Somewhere in the distance, wolves howled, and he shivered at the chill of water rolling down under his collar; that small twitch he could not suppress. For the rest he did nothing, lay still and cared as little as possible what they did.

Until he felt the man's hands at his armor buckles, unfastening them.

"No," he said then, and flinched from under that touch.

"Man, I will not hurt you. Let me rid you of this and wash the dirt off—only the worst of it. Then you can sleep till morning."

"No," he said again, and blinked the man clear in his vision—a human face, faintly lit by fire. The place was real, like the woods overhead, branches the fire lit in ghostly ways. He flinched as the touch came at his shoulder again, and struck feebly at it, being desperate.

"Man—"

"No. Let me be."

"As you will. It is your choice." Another touch, this time on his wrist, from which again he moved his hand. "Peace, peace, rest, then. Rest. Whoever did this to you is no friend of ours. You can sleep."

The words made no sense at all to him. He thought of the wolves, the ones he had named—he had known their faces, he had known their ways. They were terrible, but he knew them, what they would do, when they would do it: he had learned his enemy and he had known the limits of his misery.