Текст книги "Exile's Gate "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

This was Hell, and he had come to it of his own accord. They left the warders behind, he and the men who led his horse and surrounded him with force. The gate loomed above them. There was no way back and no way of escape, and he had done everything knowing that such would be the case, knowing himself now, that he was not a man who could die simply or easily, or lay down his life of his own accord.

At every step of this he had planned that they would take care of the matter for him: they would shoot him down on the road—Gault would be dead or refuse to fight him, and the whole band would ride against him—he would find them scattered on the road and kill a few of them before the odds ran out—or he would ride all the way to Morund-keep itself, and hail out qhal one after the other till they killed him.

Or his first purpose would succeed, Gault would answer his challenge and Gault would skewer him outright or he would kill Gault before Gault's men killed him—

And last of all they might take him prisoner and use him as they planned to now, if there was desperate need—

That was the bargain he ventured. He had heard while he was in Gault's prisons, that when they took a body, sometimes the qhal who tried it lost, and utter madness was the end; or now and again (so they whispered, devising vague hopes and schemes in that stinking dark) the war inside that body went on for years, mind and mind in the same flesh.

There was not a clan in the hills would have him now. There was nothing going home could offer him.

But this . . . this offered something.

He had planned this when he drove himself straight at Gault and gotten his way past Gault's guard by sheer berserk desperation, and driven a harness-knife for Gault's vitals, even while half a hundred men moved to stop him.

He kept believing it possible, as the horse fought and jolted under him, and men whipped it and forced it.

War on different grounds, he thought, you and I, inside, with no escape for either of us—I shall embrace you, Gault-my-enemy. That leaves us your hate and mine, and my anger and yours; and what I want and what you want, and which is stronger, qhalur lord?

Was Gault-the-Man afraid when you took him? But I am not. I welcome you. I shall welcome this fight with all my damned soul, Gault-my-enemy. I came back from Hell once, where you sent me. Do you think I will not come back again?

"A little farther," someone said.

Or seemed to say. But it was harder and harder to think at all, in the jolting steps the horse made under him in its struggles, in the sensation crawling like insects over his skin. The gate loomed nearer and nearer, and the horse shied and faltered under him, so that the men finally stopped it, as it stumbled nearly to its knees. "Get down," that voice said, and they pulled him from the saddle, their hands no longer gentle, everything passing further and further from the familiar and the known.

He looked up at the span of the gate and saw that the roan horse had gone further; but now the men lifted Gault from his saddle and carried him, while others seized his own arms and started him toward that height, toward the night sky shimmering like air over fire, within the towering frame of the gate.

Closer and closer, until he could see nothing but the sky past those pillars, and a single star within that arch, a point of light that quivered and danced in the air. There was a singing in the wind, the thrum of bowstrings, of voices, spectral and quivering in his bones.

Closer yet. The sky seemed to shift downwardwithin the gate, and the thrumming was in his brain. His bowels turned to water in him, and his knees quaked, and the men holding him were all that enabled him to walk. O God, he thought, God, what can a Man hope to do here, with them?

And again: Fear is Gault's weapon. I must not be open to it. I dare not let fear in. Hate is all I have. Hate greater than his—

They reached the crest almost together, Gault holding his hand pressed to his belly, but walking at the last, leaning on the men who attended him. The black pillars seemed to throw off a kind of light, none for themselves, but a white hell-glow that played about the ground and that ran up the legs and the bodies and the faces of men who passed within its compass. Small sounds were swallowed up. The sky twisted and writhed like a gaping pit.

As far as the pillars that dwarfed them, Gault went, and leaned against the left-hand stone holding to it for his support, laying his hand on one place and another as if it were a living thing, and himself in communion with it—qhalur wizardry, Chei thought, breathing with difficulty, watching with small jerks of his eyes and knowing that his face betrayed terror; but so was there terror in the grip of hands which numbed his arms and held him upright despite his failing knees. They were all afraid, he, the qhal themselves—it was a strange reliance he began to have on them, who would defend his safety now with their own lives, who were there to hold him and keep him from failing his resolution or from tumbling untimely into that place—A little longer, a little longer, he told himself; and concentrated on the little pain they caused his arms as the only saving of his sanity:

Help me, do not let me go; we are all flesh, and flesh does not belong next this thing—

They gathered him up; they brought him closer, and Gault staggered forth to meet him in front of that dark archway, on the edge of the sky.

"Free him," Gault bade them, and a rough sawing cut the cords on his hands. They let go their grip on him, and Chei lurched out of balance, staring at the sky which now had lost all stars, which did not show the hills beyond, or anything but night—stared helplessly at Gault's face, suddenly, as Gault caught his arms. Hell-light shimmered over them, turning flesh dead white; Gault caught him closer, as suddenly the air began to move about them, stirring Gault's hair, howling with the force of summer storm.

The gate was opening, greater than the gate the sword had made, louder than the howling of the winds which had taken Bron.

"Have you changed your mind?" Gault asked, and embraced him closer still. "Is it still willingly?"

Chei fought down his gorge and nodded, and his heart pounded in shock when he felt Gault seek his hand and press the hilt of a knife into his cold fingers. "Then you may do what you so much wish so much to do," Gault said, and slid his hand to the back of his neck, winding fingers into his hair, holding him tight. "Friend."

Chei rammed upward with the knife in a spasm of outrage, under Gault's jaw, toward the brain.

Someone pushed him. He felt the hands strike him, and the hill fell away under him and the man who was locked with him in a sickening fall of cold and wind and void.

Something began to go wrong then, his senses going out one by one: he saw things he could not name, and was blinded by light that was pain. He screamed and screamed as he fell, alone now, falling slower—a drifting dark, in which something else walked, and that thing was a thought that waked in him and called itself Chei, but it was not himself. It remembered dying, remembered the shock of a blade in its bowels, and one beneath its jaw, stopping breath and speech; the pain was all for a moment.

Then it ebbed, retreating to the past, safe and bearable.

He knew then what had happened to him, and that realization itself was fleeting, shredding away from him in the dark as something he dared not reconcile, except that he had died—he knew that recent memory had his death in it, and he did not want to delve into that, here, in the dark, naked to the winds and the cold.

He had use for his life. He discovered it and clung to it. He called it Bron and he called it Jestryn and Pyverrn, and he could not remember whether it had been brother or friend, or whether the man or the woman had killed him, but it was one and the same. He had a revenge to take, and that it was the one thing that had brought him north or south on that nightbound road, whichever direction he had been traveling, whichever horse he had been riding.

Then, having discovered his heart was whole, he was less afraid. He felt other things slipping away, pieces that might matter, but he was no longer in doubt where his course was and that the men waiting for him would follow him.

He knew all of Morund. He knew the hills. He knew Mante. He saw a hold set in the mountains, and the great Gate which ruled all gates, and knew the intricacies of politics which had sent the warders who waited below the hill: the Overlord Skarrin had received his first message and sent this handful of his underlings to guard the approach and to discover what they could, while Skarrin questioned at length the messengers he had sent. Skarrin's men had tried to bar him from use of the gate, until he could have permission of the high lord.

They had hoped, perhaps, that he would die.

But now, in his recollections, he had something indeed to tell them, which would stir Skarrin out of his lethargy and bring forces south.

Tell them the urgency of it he would, but he would not tell all he knew—nor stay for them or wait on Skarrin's pleasure. He had been Qhiverin Asfelles. He and Pyverrn had fought in these lands between Tejhos and Mante, against various of the high lord's enemies; he knew the secret ways into the hills, off the Road and back to it. He had utter freedom of the land, the high lord himself had cause to fear him and his connections within the warrior Societies, and he was as likely as any to profit by the present chaos—by whatever means turned up under his hand.

He drew a breath.

He felt the winds again, when a moment before had been only cold that numbed all feeling.

He heard the sounds, when a moment before had been only stillness. It was as if a ripple were sweeping through the dark, bearing him closer and closer to the shores of the world.

He moved his limbs, finding himself weaker than he remembered, lighter of limb. It was a young body. It was skilled and agile and had a long-muscled, runner's strength different than the slower, mature power of the body he recalled as Gault's—was far more like Qhiverin's; was nearly as fair as a qhal; and that pleased him.

He had a mature mind, too, that took the skittish thoughts of a younger and impulsive man and calmed them and spread wider and further into connections from which he shied back, of a sudden: there was too much memory, and it needed long meditation to reconcile it.

Witch-mind, a part of him said.

Nature, said the other, nature and knowledge.

God! part of him cried.

The other part said: Nature.

Vision cleared in a shimmer like the surface of a pond. The hill grew firm under his feet and the men who gathered anxiously to meet him were all friendly and familiar to him.

"Hesiyyn," he said, and laid his hand on a tall qhal's shoulder with easy humor, knowing how Hesiyyn loathed humankind.

"Lord Chei," Hesiyyn hailed him with deep irony. It was custom. It was the penalty of the twice-and-three-times-born.

The Men among them would be confused. They would murmur things about souls, which Chei dismissed and refused to think about. But tall, elegant qhal had no hesitation in bowing the head and offering homage to him, to Chei ep Kantory, lord of Morund—the intimates of his household, his servants, the remnant of the human levies, even the troublesome and arrogant warders from Mante, who waited below, with their captain.

He felt wounds on him. He felt bruises. His knees ached with exhaustion. That was the penalty this body brought with it. None were unbearable.

He sought weapons—the sword which the Man had given him: that was one weapon he did not intend to lose. It was qhalur-work, and foreign—from further, he was sure, than merely overseas, and he delighted in it when he tried its balance.

He took his own bow; and the red roan; the lame gelding he turned out to fend for itself: perhaps it would recover.

But he declined more weapons than that, and declined to go in more than the breeches and mended boots and light mail that came with the man.

"This is the shape they will expect," he said to Hesiyyn.

"Wake," Morgaine's voice whispered out of nowhere, and muscles jumped and body tensed all in one spasm as on the edge of a fall—But it was stone at Vanye's back, and he pressed himself against it, controlling his breaths and blinking at the shadow that stood between him and the horses. "I might have hit you," he said. "Oh, Heaven—" He caught his breath and brushed loose hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand. "I dreamed—" But he did not tell those dreams, that took him back to old places, old terrors. "I did not mean to sleep."

"Best we move."

"Is there—"

"No. Only shortness of time. A little of the night left. We travel while we can."

He glanced around to see were Chei and Bron awake then, one instant's impulse, and remembered everything like a blow to the stomach; he drew a breath then and rubbed an unshaven face, and quickly gathered himself to his feet, trying not to think on anything but the road.

Fool, he thought. Do not look back. Look around you. Look around you.That is what caused this sorry business, nothing more and nothing less than losing track of things.

He wanted to weep. He adjusted Arrhan's gear and reached out to hold Siptah's bridle for Morgaine as she prepared to mount. "Do not be seeing to me,"she said sharply, taking back the reins, by which she meant do not be twice a fool.

It stung. He was not in a mood to bear her temper, and she was not in a mood for debating what she wanted. He turned and flung himself to horse, and waited on her, since she was in such haste.

She mounted up and rode without a backward look. She was fey and doom-ridden, and the loss of a comrade and the driving away of another—the excessive cruelty of it, like her ultimatum to him with Chei, was all one thing.

It was because of that blade she bore. It was because of the lives it took. It was because of the things she knew that he did not, and the madness—the madness which distracted her, and which, this morning, beckoned both of them.

Her moods had been tolerable while he had been no more than ilinand now were enough to drive him to black, blind rage, anger to match her own.

She spoke finally. It was to remark on the land, as if there had never been a quarrel.

"Aye," he said, and: "Aye, my liege," choking down his temper—for hers was gone, vanished. That was the way of her. He was Nhi on one side of the blanket and Chya on the other and temper once it rose was next to madness, it blinded and it drove him—even to fratricide; after which he had learned to smother it under ilin-law. O Heaven, he thought, ilinto a temper-prone woman was one thing. Both lover and shieldman to a woman half-mad and geas-driven was another.

He had the warrior's braid back. The cool air on his neck, the high-clan honor that forever reminded him he could take another path, the ilin'soath that bound him to a liege he could in no wise leave—unwise, unwise, ever to tangle matters further, unwise to have drifted closer and closer until she could wound him, and drive him mad, and then absently forget she had struck at him at all.

But it had happened. He was snared. He had been enspelled from the beginning.

And she left him with his ghosts—thinking at one time he heard more horses than their two, thinking at another moment that Chei and Bron were behind him. They haunted the tail of his eye so that a bit of brush, a stone, a trick of the rising sun, persuaded his sight that they were there.

Both.

Chei is dead,he thought with a chill, and crossed himself. Chei is dead.

And he could not say why he suddenly believed this, or why it was two riders that haunted him, except it was guilt, or foreknowledge what they had sent Chei to, in a land where he had qhal-taint on him.

He wept, the tears running down his face, without expression. Beside him, Morgaine said some word.

"Vanye," she said then.

There was no place for a man to go, except to turn his face away.

She was silent after. The wind dried his face. There seemed nothing to say, that would not lead to things he did not want to discuss. He only gave a sigh and shifted in his saddle and looked at her, so that she would know that he was all right.

The sun came up by degrees in the sky and showed them other ghosts, the heights of hills which had not been there, showed them a land of crags and rough land ahead of them, all painted in shadows of gold and cloud.

"Rest," she said again, when they had come to water, a little pond between two hills, and this time again he took Siptah's bridle as she dismounted.

She laid her hand on his back as she walked past him, as he slipped the horses' bits to let them graze and rest a little. He felt it faintly through the armor, and it set the thoughts moiling in him, a little of relief, a great deal of reluctance to do or say anything with her. It was not a quarrel of woman and man. It was, he decided finally, that their blood was up, both, that they had killed, that she had fighting in her mind and so did he, and to expect any gentleness or to offer any was unwise.

He went and washed his hands and his face and his neck in the pond, wetting his boots in the boggy grass.

"Do not drink," she said from behind him, reminding him of cautions that he knew as well as she, and he turned half about with a sudden, trapped fury in him.

He said nothing, and rose and walked back to sit down on his heels and press his wet hands to the back of his neck and to his brow.

"Sleep," he said without looking at her. "You are due that."

"I should not have chided thee."

"No, you should have let a fool drink from standing water. It is not Kursh, or Andur, liyo.I know that. I was not that much fool."

"Thee can take the rest. Thee has more need."

"Why, because I am short-tempered? I have killed a man. I have killed one man I held for a friend. And we have lost the other. No matter." He wiped the hair back from his stubbled face, the wisps that had come loose from his braid and trailed about brow and ears, and he had not the will left to do more than wipe them out of his way. "I am learning."

Then the reach of what he had said shot through him. He glanced up at her face. My God, why did I say that?

The mask had come back over her countenance, pale as it was. She shrugged and looked aside at the ground. "Well that we save our shafts for our enemies."

"Forgive me." He went to his knees and she moved so suddenly he thought she would strike him in the face, but it was his shoulder she caught, hard, with the heel of her hand, before he could even think to bow to the ground as reflex made natural. He met her angry stare and there was nothing woman-gentle in the blow that had stopped him from the obeisance. He had meant to make peace. Now he only stared at her.

She looked dismayed too, finally, the anger fading. Her hand went gentle on his shoulder and trailed down his arm. "There is no way back," she said. "If you learn anything of me, learn that."

He felt his throat tighten. He drew breaths to find an adequate one and finally shook his head, and turned aside and got up clumsily, since she gave him no room.

"I am sorry," he said with his back to her. The arm that had wielded the sword ached again, and he rubbed at the shoulder she had struck. "I have my wits about me, better than you see. God knows, we are going to need our rest. And I do you no service to rob you of yours. I am not the first man mistook a friend in a fight, God knows I am not—" He remembered the harper, with a wince. He could not but wound her, no matter what he did or said; no more than she with him. He could not think where they would find rest, or where he would shake the phantoms in the tail of his eye, and of a sudden panic came over him, thinking what odds mounted against their passing those mountains ahead.

It was speed they needed. And human bodies and exhausted horses could only do so much before hearts broke and flesh failed.

"They are my mistakes," she said. He heard her move, and her shadow fell past him and merged with his on the thin grass, "to have taken them with us, to have given thee the sword. It was thy own strength betrayed thee, that thee kept using it. Never– neverbear it till it wields thee. That is what happened. That, I did not make thee understand. It has happened to me. Thee learns. And sometimes even then—"

She did not finish. He looked half around at her and nodded, and refused to regard the phantom that beckoned him from the tail of his eye, a shadow on the horizon of the road. Her hand rested on his arm and his pressed hers.

Until that phantom insisted, and this time he must look, seeing a horseman atop the ridge.

"Liyo!"he hissed. "On the road—"

He leapt up and she did; and hurried for the horses, to tighten cinches and refit bridles: he caught Siptah first, his duty to his liege, and she left him to that for economy of motion and did the same for Arrhan, still working as he led Siptah to her.

A last buckle and she was done. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw the oncoming riders, twenty, thirty or more.

"They are Gault's or they are out of the gate," Morgaine said, and set her foot in Siptah's stirrup. "If the latter, we have no knowledge whatweapons they have, and I do not like this ground—Ride!"

He sprang to the saddle and reined to her left as they made the road. There was no question but that they were seen by now, but the narrowing of the road left them little choice—and that in itself put a fear into him. Many things about the gates bewildered him, but crossing from hereto theredid not, and if Gault's men had gone from Tejhos to Mante and back, Mante itself was warned and might have riders coming south to head them off.

It was more and more of narrow passage ahead of them: the rising sun had limned rougher land stretching eastward and north, and that meant fewer and fewer choices of any sort.

They had won so many battles. The odds grew and the land shaped itself against them. "Get off the road," he shouted at Morgaine as he rode alongside. "For Heaven's own sake, liyo,we cannot win straight through—we cannot outride them behind and before! Let us get into the hills, let them hunt us there, let them hunt us the winter long, if that is what it takes to let them grow careless—"

It was an outlaw's counsel. He had that to give. He looked at Morgaine and saw her face set and pale in that unreason that drove her. He despaired then.

"We make as much ground as we can," she called across to him, "as long as we can."

He looked back over his shoulder, where their pursuers made a darkness on either margin of the road, running beside the sporadic white stone.

"Then stop and fight them," he said. "Liyo,in Heaven's name, one or the other!"

"There might be others," she shouted back, meaning overland, through the hills; and he caught the gist of her fears and reckoned as she reckoned, on Mante, and stones, and gates.

The riders so easily seen might be a lure to delay or herd them.

Still, still, she was the elder and warier of them.

They crested a hill and for a time they were running alone, at an easier gait, for a long enough time that he looked back once and twice looking for their pursuers; and Morgaine looked, her silver hair whipping in the wind.

They were gone.

"I do not like this," she said as they rode.

The road which had held straight so far, through so much of the land, took a bend toward the east which Chei had never mapped.

And his own instincts cried trap.

"Liyo,I beg you, let us get off this!"

Morgaine said nothing, but of a sudden turned Siptah aside into a fold of the hills, keeping a quick pace on grassy and uneven ground, down the course the hills gave them.

Deeper and deeper into land in which they no longer had a guide.

They rode more quietly at last, finding their way by the sun in a wandering course through grassy hills, brush and scrub forest.

They watched the hilltops and the edges of the thickets, and from time to time looked behind them or stopped and listened and watched the flight of birds for omens of pursuers.

Morgaine did not speak now. He rode silent as she, senses wide and listening, for any hint of other presence.

Only as the sun sank: "The dark is their friend tonight," Morgaine said, "more than ours, in a land we do not know. We had best find ourselves a place and lie quiet a while."

"Thank Heaven," he muttered; and when they had found that place, a deep fold of the hills well-grown with brush, and when they had gotten the horses sheltered up against an overhang of the hills and rubbed them down and fed them, then he felt that he could breathe again and he had a little appetite for the fireless supper they made.

"Tomorrow," he said anxiously, "we will camp here, and I will go a little down the way and bring back forage for the horses—I do not think we ought to stir out of here for a few days. Listen to me!" he said, as she began to answer him. "Whatever you ask, I will do, you know that. But hear me out. Time will serve us. If it takes us months—we will live to get to Mante."

"No," she said. "No. We have no months. We have no days. Does thee understand me? This Skarrin—this lord in Mante—" She fell silent again, leaning her chin on her arm, resting on her knee, and there was a line between her brows, in the fading of the light. "There are qhal and there are qhal, and Skarrin's is an old name, Vanye, a very old name."

"Do you know him?"

"If he is what I think he is—I know whathe is; and I tell thee there is no risk we have ever run—" Her fist clenched. "Only believe what I tell thee: we have no time with this man."

"Whatis he?"

"Something I hoped did not exist. Perhaps I am wrong." She sighed and worked the fingers of that hand. "Talk of something else."

"Of what?"

"Of anything."

He drew a breath. He cast back. It was Morija came to mind. It always did. But darker things overshadowed it—a keep surrounded with flood. A forest, haunted with things which did not love human or qhal. Of his cousin. But that was a memory too fraught with dark things too.

"At least we are warmer," he said, desperate recourse to the weather.

"And dry," she said.

"Good grazing here. A few days," he said. "Liyo,—we can rest a few days. The horses will not take more of this."

"Vanye—"

"Forgive me."

"No, thee is right, but we have no choice. Vanye—I hadno choice."

It was not their moving on that she meant. Her voice trembled.

"I know that," he said, no steadier.

She looked at him and reached out to his arm, a light touch which jolted him like hot iron, drew him out of despair and absorbed his attention so thoroughly a score of enemies could have ridden down on them and come second in his mind.

No,he had wit to think, but not much beyond that. Her arms clenched about him. Her mouth met his. There was precious little more to do, surrounded by enemies, under arms, with no rest to be had and no leisure to spend unwary.

There will never be a time,he thought, in a chill of panic, and held her the tighter, as she held him, in an armored grip become harsh and desperate, with nothing of gentleness about it. Everyone else has failed her. Too much she has lost, too many dead– For that reason she armed me more than herself, gave me her chiefest weapon; and what did it win us but calamity to our friends, and rage at each other?

They slept finally, turn and turn about, on the sloping, stony ground where the brush afforded them cover. He watched her as she slept. He wished—but there was no hope.

Only they managed to heal what was torn, there was that much.

Morgaine waked him toward dawn, a shadow between him and the day. He heard her voice telling him there was breakfast and he murmured an answer, rolled over and favored an aching arm, holding it across him.

"We should move," she said, "a little ways this morning."

"Oh, Heaven," he moaned, and bowed his head between his knees, arms over his neck.

She did not stay to argue. She went back to sit on her saddle, where she had laid out a cold breakfast on the leather wrappings they used for foodstuffs, knowing matters would go her way.

He followed, and sat down on the grass, and ate in silence no different than other silences.

And did not give way to temper, or venture in headlong.

"Liyo,"he said when he was toward finishing: "Listen to me. This enemy of yours—whoever he is. You think he will run. But a man will not run, who thinks himself winning. No one can be that cautious."

She said nothing. It was not a frown on her face, only thought.

"Let them lose us," he said. "Let this Skarrin marshal some defense against us. Let him think he has turned us. A man in power—he will not want to give up what he has. He will go nowhere at all. In the meanwhile we will learn this land, we will go slowly—we will gather strength, rest, find a way to him—am I not right?"

Her lips made a taut line. There was warfare in her eyes, unbelief and consideration. "Possibly. Possibly. But being wrong, Vanye—"

"What will a man do who is cornered? He is far more apt to use the gate at Mante and escape us."

He argued for their lives, for sanity and safety.

And she gathered that thinginto her lap in silence, the sword, that weapon which was constantly beside her, day and night, and which gave them no peace.

"Liyo,you drive this man and you force this man, and what will he do? You will unseat him: his own vassals will question his power; or you will make him desperate—you always strike too hard, liyo,—listen to me: you know no moderation with your enemies. You give them no choices and while they have no warning, that serves you well—but you have no subtlety in the field. You are the kind of lord who loses lives—forgive me." His heart beat hard and he gazed up into her eyes in a dread of the things he had to say with brutal force, that the numbness of recent sleep let him say without stumbling, and the quiet of the dawn let her hear without preventing him. "If it were an army with us I should never question you: if you told me to go against any odds, then, I would do that, and trust there was good cause. But you have no army. You have one man. And he is bound, liyo,to cover your back and your side, as long as he can; and he will do that. But he is one man, all the same, and someday, if you keep on as you are, you will lose him, because he will die before he lets you go down first."