Well of Shiuan (19 page)

Roh regarded him warily, hand on the hilt. He shook his head and showed no inclination to come near him now. "You do not seem to understand," Roh said. "I have secured your life, and your person, from some considerable danger. I have a certain authority here—while they fear me. It does not serve your own cause to fight against me."

"It is your own life you have secured," Vanye said, and arose to stand with his back to the fire, "so that they will not try me too severely and find your kinsman is only human."

"That too," said Roh. He started to open the door, and hesitated, looking back. "I wish that I could persuade you to common sense."

"I will go back to the room where I was," Vanye said. "I found it more comfortable."

Roh grinned. "Doubtless."

"Do not touch her," Vanye said. Roh's grin faded; he faced him entirely, regarded him with an earnest look.

"I have said," Roh said, "that she would be safe. And she will be safer—apart from you. I think you understand this."

"Yes," Vanye said after a moment

"I would help you if you would give me the means."

"Good night," Vanye said.

Roh delayed, a frown twisting his face. He extended his hand, dropped it in a helpless gesture. "Nhi Vanye—my life will end if your liege destroys the Wells—not suddenly, but surely, all the same. So will everything in this land... die. But that is nothing to her. Perhaps she cannot help what she is or what she does. I suspect that she cannot. But you at least have a choice. These folk—will die, and they need not"

"I have an oath to keep. I have no choice at all."

"If you had sworn to the devil," Roh said, "would it be a pious act to keep your word?"

Unthought, his hand moved to bless himself, and he stopped, then with deliberation completed the gesture, in this place of qujal, where priests worshipped devils. He was cold, inside.

"Can she do as you have done?" asked Roh. "Vanye, is there any land where she has traveled where she is not cursed, and justly? Do you even know whether you serve the side of Men in this war? You have an oath; you have made yourself blind and deaf because of it; you have left kinsmen dead because of it. But to what have you sworn it? Do you wonder what was left in Andur-Kursh? You will never know what you wrought there, and perhaps that is well for your conscience. But here you can see what you do, and you will live in it. Do you think the Wells have kept these folk in misery? Do you think the Wells are the evil? It was the loss of them that ruined this land. And this is the likeness of Morgaine's work. This is what she does, what she leaves behind her wherever she passes. There is nothing more terrible that could befall you than to stay behind where she has passed. You and I know it; we were born in the chaos she wrought in our own Andur-Kursh, Kingdoms fell and clans died under her guidance. She is disaster where she passes, Nhi Vanye. She kills. That is her function, and you cannot prevent her. To destroy is her whole purpose for being."

Vanye turned his face aside and gazed at the barren walls, at the single slit of a window, slatted with a wooden shutter.

"You are determined not to listen," said Roh. "Perhaps you are growing like her."

Vanye glanced back, face set in anger. "Liell," he named Roh, the name that had been his last self, that had destroyed Roh. "Murderer of children. You offered me haven too, in Ra-leth; and I saw what a gift that was, what prosperity you brought those that came under your hand."

"I am not Liell any longer."

Vanye felt a tightness about his heart, himself caught and held by that level gaze. "Who is talking to me?" he asked in a still voice. "Who are you, qujal? Who were you?"

"Roh."

Bile rose into his throat. He turned his face away. "Get out of here. Get away from me. Do me that grace at least. Let me alone."

"Cousin," said Roh softly. "Have you never wondered who Morgaine was?"

The question left silence after it, a numbness in which he could be aware of the sounds of the fire, the wind outside the narrow window. He found it an effort to draw breath in that silence.

"You have wondered, then," said Roh. "You are not entirely blind. Ask yourself why she is qujal to the eye and not to the heart. Ask whether she always tells the truth... and believe me, that she does not, not where it is most essential, not where it threatens the thing she seeks. Ask how much of me is Roh, and I will tell you that the essence of me is Roh; ask why you are kept safe, hostile to me as you are, and I will tell you it is because we are—truly—cousins. I feel that burden; I act upon it because I must. But ask yourself what she became, this liege of yours. My impulses are human. Ask yourself how human she is. Less than any here—whose blood is only halfling. Ask yourself what you are sworn to, Nhi Vanye."

"Out!" he cried, so that the door burst open and armed guards were instant with lowered weapons. But Roh lifted his hand and stopped them.

"Give you good night," Roh murmured, and withdrew.

The door closed. A bolt shot into place outside.

Vanye swore under his breath, cast himself down on the bench by the fire.

A log crashed, glowing ruin, stirring a momentary flame that ran the length of the charred edge and died. He watched the shifting patterns in the embers, heart pounding, for it seemed to his blurring senses that the floor had shifted minutely, a fall like the Between of Gates.

Animals bleated outside. He heard the distant murmur of troubled voices. The realization that it had been no illusion sent sweat coursing over his limbs, but the earth stayed still thereafter.

He let go his pent breath, stared at the fire until the light and heat wearied his eyes and made him close them.

CHAPTER Nine

Guards intruded in the morning, servants bringing food and water, a sudden flurry of footsteps, crashing of bolts and doors; savory smells came with the dishes that rattled in the servants' hands.

Vanye rose to his feet by the dying fire. He ached; the pain of his swollen, chafed feet made him stagger violently, brace himself against the stonework. The pikes in the hands of the guards lowered toward him a threatening degree. The servants stared at him, soft-footed men, marked on the faces by the sign of a slashed circle—marked too in the eyes by a fear that was biding and constant

"Roh," he asked of the servants, of the guards, his voice still hoarse. "Send for Roh. I want to see him." For this morning he recalled a lost dagger, lost with Morgaine, and a thing that he had sworn to do; and things he had said in the night, and not said.

None answered him now. The servants looked away, terrified. The demon-helms shadowed the eyes of the halfling guards, making their faces alike and expressionless toward him.

"I need a change of clothing," he said to the servants; they flinched from him as if he had a devil, and made haste to put themselves in the shadow of the guards, beginning to withdraw.

"The firewood is almost gone," he shouted at them, irrational panic taking him at the thought of dark and cold in the room thereafter. "It will not last the day."

The servants fled; the guards withdrew, closing the door. The bolt went home.

He was trembling, raging at what he knew not: Roh, the lords of this place—at himself, who had walked willingly into it He stood now and stared at the door, knowing that no force would avail against it, and that no shouting would bring him freedom. He limped over to the table and sat down on the end of the bench, reckoning coldly, remembering every door, every turning, every detail of the hold inside and out. And somewhere within Ohtij-in—he tried to remember that room too—was Jhirun, whom he could not help.

He drank of what the servants had left—sparingly, reckoning that if his hosts were unwilling to give him firewood to keep him warm they would likely bring him nothing else for the day; he ate, likewise sparingly, and turned constantly in his mind the image he could shape of the hold, its corridors, its gates, the number of the men who guarded it, coming again and again to the same conclusion: that he could not pass so many barriers and remain a fugitive across a land that he did not know, afoot, knowing no landmark but the road—on which his enemies could swiftly find him.

Only Roh came and went where he would.

Roh might set him upon that road. There would be a cost for that freedom. The food went tasteless in his mouth the while he considered what it might cost him, to be set at Abarais, to obtain Roh's trust.

To destroy Roh: this was the thing she had set him last to do, a matter as simple as his given word, from which there was no release and no appeal, be it an act honorable or dishonorable: honor was not in question between ilin and liyo.

It was not necessary to wonder what would befall him thereafter; it did not matter thereafter to what he had sworn—it was a weight no longer on his conscience, a last discharge of obligations.

He became strangely comfortable then, knowing the limits of his existence, knowing that it was not necessary any longer to struggle against Roh's reasoning. He had, for the first time in his life, accounted for all possibilities and understood all that was necessary to understand.

None came near the room. The long day passed. Vanye went earliest to the window, that he thought a mercy of his jailers, narrow though it was, a kindness to allow him access to the sky—until he eased back the wooden slat that covered it. There was nothing beyond but a stone wall that he could almost touch with outstretched arm; and when he leaned against the sill and tried to see downward, there was a ledge below. On the left was a buttress of the tower, that cut off his view; on the right was another wall, likewise near enough to touch.

He left the window unshuttered, despite the blindness of it and despite the occasional chill draft. So long accustomed to the sky above him, he found the closeness of walls unbearable. He watched the daylight grow until the sun shone straight down the shaft, and watched it fade into shadow again as the sun declined in the sky. He listened to the wailing of children, the sounds of livestock, the squealing of wheels, as if the gates of Ohtij-in were open and some manner of normal traffic had begun. Men shouted, accented words that he did not recognize, but he was glad to hear the voices, which seemed coarsely ordinary and human.

A shadow began to fall, more swiftly than the decline of the day; thunder rumbled. Drops of rain spattered the tiny area of ledge visible beneath the window—drops that ceased, began again, pattering with increasing force as the sprinkling became a shower.

And the last of the wood burned out, despite his careful hoarding of the last small logs and pieces. The room chilled. Outside, the rain whispered steadily down the shaft.

Metal clattered up the hall, the sound of armed men. It was not the first time in the day: occasionally there had come sounds from within the tower, distant and meaning nothing. Vanye only stirred when he realized they were growing nearer—rose to his feet in the almost-darkness, hoping for such petty and precious things as firewood and food and drink, and fearing that their business might be something else.

Let it be Roh, be thought, trembling with anxiety, the anticipation of all things at an end, only so the chance presented itself.

The bolt went back. He blinked in the flare of torches that filled the opening door, that made shadows of the guards and the men until they were within the room: light glittered on brocade, gleamed on bronze helms and on pale hair.

Bydarra, he recognized the elder man; and with him, Hetharu. The combination jolted against the memory of the night—of furtive meetings within this prison of his, of young lordlings and secrecies.

Vanye stood still by the fireplace, while the guards set their torches in place of the stubs in the brackets. The room outside those interlocked circles of light was dark by comparison, the rainy daylight a faint glow in the recess, less bright than the torches. The character of the room seemed changed, a place unfamiliar, where qujal intervened, contrary to all his own intentions. He looked at the guards that waited in the doorway, the light limning demon-faces and outlandish scale. He looked on them with a slowly growing terror, the consciousness of things outside the compass of himself and Roh.

"Nhi Vanye," Bydarra hailed him, not ungently.

"Lord Bydarra," he answered. He bowed his head slightly, responding to the soft courtesy, though the guards about them denied that any courtesy was meant, though Hetharu's thin, wolfish face beside his father's held nothing of good will. Vanye looked up again, met the old lord's pale eyes directly. "I had thought that you would have sent for me to come to you."

Bydarra smiled tautly, and answered nothing to that insolence. Of a sudden there was about this gathering too the hint of secrecies, the lord of Ohtij-in intriguing within his own hold, not wishing a prisoner moved about the halls with what noise and notice would attend such moving. Bydarra asked no questions, proposed nothing immediate, only waited on his prisoner, with what purpose Vanye felt hovering shapeless and ominous among the lords of Ohtij-in.

And in that realization came a horrid suspicion of hope: that of ruining Roh, there was a chance here present. It was not the act of a warrior: he felt shame for it, but he did not think that he could reject whatever means offered itself. He made himself numb to what he did.

"Have you come," Vanye asked of the qujal, "to learn of me what things Roh would not tell you?"