Exile's Gate

"Give me the sword," she said. "Give it!"

He managed to wind the reins about his numbed right hand and to pass Changelingback to her with his left.

"Brighter," he remembered, competent in this at least, that his mind recollected something so difficult amid the chaos. He indicated with a lifting of his left hand toward the northeast, as the road ran. "There. There will be Tejhos gate."

She stared in that direction; she hooked Changelingto her belt and they rode again at all the pace the horses could bear. His right arm ached in pulses that confused themselves with the rhythm of the horses or with his heartbeats, he could not tell which. He worked the fingers desperately, knowing the likelihood of enemies. He sca

"Gate-force," Morgaine said in time. "We are very near. Vanye, is thee feeling it?"

"Aye," he murmured. "Aye, liyo."It was inside the armor with him, was coiled about his nerves and his sinew, it crept within his skull and corrupted sight and reason. They must go near that thing. Perhaps ambush waited for them.

We will lose everything we have done, he thought, everything she has suffered this far—lost, for a fool who mishandled the sword. I should have sheathed it when it went amiss. I should have ridden back. I should have—

—should have—known what I struck—

O God, it could as well have been her.

"Vanye!"

He caught himself before he pitched. He braced himself against the saddlehorn and felt Siptah's body hit his right leg, Morgaine holding him by the straps of his armor, though he was upright now without that.

"Can thee stay the saddle? Shall I take the reins?"

"I am well enough," he murmured, and took the reins in his left hand and let his numbed right rest braced between him and the saddlebow. If he could do one thing right this cursed night it was to dispose himself where he could not fall off and compound his liege's troubles.

Siptah took to the lead then; and the mare lengthened her stride to match him, struggling now, on heart alone.

Where are we going? he wondered. Is it enemies she fears? Or do we go toward the gate, to hold it?

His very teeth ached now with the emanations, and he felt a pain like knives driven into every joint of his right arm, an ache that crept across his chest and into his vitals. He wished he had respite to faint away or to rest; and dutifully fought not to, for what use he was. The pain reached his spine and his skull, one with the pounding of the mare's gait, the jolts which threatened to take him from the saddle.

Hold on, he told himself, slumped over the saddle when other thought had ceased, hold on, hold on.

The roan horse came to a slow halt where the battle had been, and Gault clutched after its ties and its stirrup, letting himself down by painful degrees to stand amid the field. He did not know the weapon that had struck him, which had pierced through his left arm and burned across his back. But here he had fallen in the battle, here his ranks had broken in terror of the gate-weapon, and there were appallingly few corpses remaining.

Here he had flung himself at the roan horse as the slaughter started and managed to get back astride—when the gate-force broke loose and sane men quit the field as quickly as they could.

Such of them as survived had rallied again—qhal, and a scattering of terrified humans—most of all, that the squad he had sent wide before they came to Arunden's camp, had overtaken them now, having swept up the deserters; and had found him on the road.

Now they walked as he did, probing among the dead that were thickest here, where only the red fire had come, where the woman had wielded what they had mistakenly thought the chiefest of weapons they faced.

That was the fire that had touched him. He understood that much. He stumbled among cooling bodies and found one living, who hoarsely called his name—"Rythys!" Gault called out, "your cousin!"—and Rythys left his desperate searching and came in haste, one of the few fortunate.

But Gault sought Jestryn on the field, and found him finally—Pyverrn the wit, Pyverrn the prankster, Pyverrn who had done an unhumorous thing at the last, and flung himself and his horse between Gault and the killing fire.

"Pyverrn," Gault-Qhiverin said, feeling after a heartbeat, and finding none, finding Jestryn's face already cold in the night wind. "Pyverrn!" he cried, for that was the oldest name, the name by which they had been friends in Mante, and fought the Overlord's battles and intrigued in the Overlord's court through their last life. "Pyverrn!"

He hugged the body to him, but it was only cooling human clay against his own borrowed flesh, a body Pyverrn had worn, but never truly mastered.

This was the last death, the irrecoverable one: not Tejhos-gate nor any other could save a life, once the life was gone; and Gault would have murdered one of his own men to have hosted Pyverrn's self again—he would have taken one of his own kind; his other and dearest friends.

He would have—such was the bond between them—accepted what only a few had dared to save a fading life: he would have gone into the gate with his friend and taken him into his own self, risking madness, or obliteration.

That was his love for Pyverrn.

But there was nothing left to love. There was only the cold flesh that Pyverrn had wrested from its previous owner, and no way to restore it.

His men came round him where he knelt and wept. None ventured a word to him, until he himself let the body go and stood up.

"Tejhos-gate," he said. "We are going after them!"

Doubtless there were some few who would have fled, had they had a choice. He knew the cowardice of some of them, that had had to be herded back. But in the southern lands there was nothing to hide them should they fail him—and now they knew he was alive.

"Two of you will go to Mante," he said when they were mounted again. "The rest of us will ride after these invaders. We will have them. I will have them, him and her, and they will wish they had been stillborn."

"Better?" Morgaine asked; and Vanye, sitting with his back against a standing stone, leaned his head against that unforgiving surface and nodded with his eyes shut. He did not remember much of the ride that had brought them this far. He knew that he had been upright in the saddle, but so much of it had been that kind of pain which the mind would not believe could last so keenly, so long. All that time seemed compressed; yet he knew it was leagues beyond that place where he had almost fallen. Tejhos-gate was far behind them.

And the cessation of that force left him drained, void, as if he had been gutted.

Beside them the horses caught their breath and began to show a little interest in the grass under their feet, now they had drunk of the little creek and had their legs rubbed down. He had done that much for his horse, while Morgaine saw to the Baien gray. He was a horseman from his birth: he would have done that for the brave mare with his heart's blood, after the course she had run; and Morgaine—whatever she was—had no less care for the gray.

Now she leaned against another such stone facing him—not stones of power, mere markers along the roadside. One knee propped the sword on which she leaned, the sight of which he could hardly bear and the weight of which he remembered in his bones: not balanced like an ordinary blade, the crystal length within that sheath rune-written with the secrets of the gates—for the sake of a successor, she had told him once. She had taught him writing and ciphering more than a lord's bastard needed—for what purpose he knew, and loathed, and thought about no more than he had to.