Well of Shiuan (31 page)

She stopped, sat her horse facing the great empty space that she had made between the causeway and their attackers. There was, after that confusion and madness, a terrible silence made. And she kept the sword unsheathed, waiting, while time passed and the silence continued.

A voice broke the stillness, distant and its owner well hidden in the darkness. There were curses spoken against her, who had deceived them; there were viler things shouted. She did not move, nor seem provoked, although at some of the words Vanye trembled with rage and wished the man within reach. Almost he answered back himself; but something there was about Morgaine's silence and waiting against which such words, either attacking or defending, were empty. He had held Changeling: he knew the agony that grew in one's arm after long wielding of it, the drain upon one's very soul. She did not move, and the voice grew still.

And at last Vanye gathered his resolve and toed the gelding forward. "Liyo," he said, so that she would know that it was he. She did not protest his approach now; nor did she turn her head from the darkness she was watching.

"It is enough," he urged her quietly. "Liyo—put it away."

She gave no answer, nor moved for a time. Then she lifted Changeling so that the darkness at its tip aimed toward the huddle of tents and shelters, and

that one great tree, whereon corpses dangled and twisted above a dying fire.

And then she lowered her arm, as if the weight of the sword suddenly grew too much. 'Take it," she said hoarsely.

He eased close to her, stretched out both his hands and gently disengaged her rigid fingers from the dragon grip, taking it into his own hand. The evil of it ran through his bones and into his brain, so that his eyes blurred and his senses wavered.

She did not offer him the sheath, which was all that might damp its fires and render it harmless. She did not speak.

"Go back," he said. "I will watch them now."

But she did not answer or offer to move. She sat, straight and silent, beside him—believing, he was sure, that did it come to using the sword he had less willingness than she; lives and nations were on her conscience. His crimes were on a human scale.

And they sat then- horses side by side, the two of them, until he found the sword making his arm ache, until the pain of it was hard to bear. He counted only his breaths, and watched the slow passage of Li's descent; and the horses grew weary and restless under them.

From the camp there was no stirring.

"Give it back," Morgaine said at last; he did so, terrified in the passing of it, the least touch of it fatal. But her hand was strong and sure as she received it.

He looked behind him, at the rift of the Suvoj, where the others waited. "The waters are lower," he said. And after a moment: "The Hiua will not dare come. They have given up. Put it away."

"Go," she said; and harshly: "Go back!"

He drew his horse's head about and rode back to the others, the qujal at one side of the roadway, Jhirun at the other, holding the mare's reins as she sat on the stone edge.

And the girl gathered herself up as she saw him coming, staggered with exhaustion as she went forward to meet him. "Lord," she said, holding the gelding's reins to claim his attention, "lord, the halflings say we might perhaps cross. They are talking of trying it." There was a wild, desperate grief in her face, like something graven there, incapable of changing. "Lord—will she let us go?"

"Go, now," he bade her on his own, for there was no reasoning with Morgaine; and as he sat watching them mount up and begin to take their horses out onto that dangerous passage, he was dismayed at his own callousness, that he could send men and a woman ahead to probe the way for his liege—in his place, because she valued him and not them.

Such he began to be, obedient to Morgaine. He made his heart cold, though his throat was tight with shame for himself, watching those four lone figures struggling across that dangerous flooded stonework.

And when he saw that they were well past the halfway point and still able to proceed, he turned and rode back to Morgaine's side.

"Now," he said hoarsely. "Now, liyo. We can cross."

CHAPTER Fifteen

Vanye set himself in the lead, riding the skittish gelding toward the rift that thundered and echoed with flood. The retreating water had left the land glittering with water under the moon. A number of uprooted trees lay about the pool-studded plain, several having rammed the causeway, creating heaps of brush that loomed up on the side where the current had been, skeletal masses festooned with strings of dead grasses and leaves.

Then the causeway arched higher above the rocky shelf, pierced by spans above the water: a bridge that extended in vast arches out across the rift.

Please Heaven, Vanye thought, contemplating what lay before them, let the earth stay still now. The horse slowed, side-stepping; he touched it with his heels gently and kept it moving.

The current thundered and boiled -through the spans that had lately been entirely submerged. Vast megaliths formed that structure, that as yet neither quake had dislodged nor flood eroded. A tree hung on the edge of the roadway, itself dwarfed by the spans, so that it seemed only some dangling bit of brush, but its roots thrust up taller than horse and rider. Vanye avoided looking directly down into the current, that dizzied the senses—save once: saw the waters sweeping down on the one side and through into endless water on the other, an expanse that seemed to embrace all creation. In the midst of it hung the thread of the bridge, and themselves small and lost amid the crash and roar that flung up spray as a mist about them.

He turned his head—suddenly, unreasoningly anxious about Morgaine, at once comforted to know her close behind him. She bore Changeling sheathed at her shoulders; her pale hair seemed to glow in the half-light, whipped on the wind as she also turned to look back.

Torches massed at the beginning of the causeway, like so many stars flickering there, beginning to stream out onto it.

What they had loosed on Ohtij-in was still following them, violent and desperate. Morgaine turned forward again; so did he, anxious for their safety on the bridge. The roadway was wide: it would have been possible to run, but the roar of the water and the sight of it had the animals wild-eyed with distress. It was cot a place to let them go.

Yet ahead the small party with Jhirun had left the bridge, even now riding the security of the farther causeway and climbing the slope of the far-side road.

Dawn grew as they traversed that last, agonizingly slow distance; light showed them the way ahead more clearly, and the river had sunk yet more, so that it was worse to look down, where white froth rumbled and boiled about the arches of qujedin design and vast size, the water slipping down into a chasm as the Suvoj became a river and no longer a sea.

The brink of the far cliff came within reach. Vanye spurred his horse and it began to gather speed, sending a scatter of water from an occasional puddle. At the last he cast a look over his shoulder, obsessed with the dread that Morgaine might decide to turn and finish on that dizzying bridge what she had begun—for safety's sake.

She did not. Siptah likewise leaned into a run, following, and Vanye turned his face again, seeing the safety of the mountains ahead, a rise in the stone road that bore them upward to the hills.

To Abarais.

The dawn, breaking over the long slash of the Suvoj, showed a road well-kept that ascended steadily among the hills. For a time they rode hard, until they were within a stone's cast of the qujal and of Jhirun, and found leisure to walk their horses, until they had caught their breath.

Jhirun, riding somewhat apart from the halflings, looked back as if she might rein back and join them... but she did not; nor did the halflings.

Then of a sudden Morgaine laid heels to Siptah and rode through, startling the weary party and starting the horses to running again, along the ascending road among the hills. Vanye, staying with her, felt the fading strength of the Andurin gelding and the unsureness in his stride, the animal's shoulders slick with sweat and froth; and by now the others were dropping behind, their horses spent.

"For pity," he shouted across at Morgaine, when the gelding's bravest effort could not keep stride, burdened with a man's weight; and the Baien gray was drenched with sweat "Liyo, the horses—enough."

She yielded, slowed; the horses walked again, their breath coming in great lung-tearing puffs, and Morgaine turned in the saddle to look back—not, it was likely, at the qujal, who struggled to stay with them, but dreading the appearance of others on the road behind them.

The light grew, flung misty peaks into outline, a central body of mountains rounded and clustered together, a last refuge. There was a desolation about them that struck to the heart Vanye recalled the vast chains of his own mountains, reaching sharp ridges at the sky, stretching as far as the eye could see and the heart could imagine. Of these there was immediate beginning and end, and they had a blurred, aged quality, weathering that was of many ages, a yielding likewise toward the sea.

Yet on the hillsides began to be signs of habitations, fields under cultivation, protected by terraces, and stonework to carry away the flooding: recent works, the hand of fanners, small fields and orchards that were flooded in many areas, but a sign that here lay the true strength of Shiuan, a still-solid wealth that had supported the glittering lords and the humanity that had crowded within then- walls.

And on the crest of a long hill, from which it was possible to see the road in all directions, Morgaine reined in, leaned on the saddlebow a moment then dismounted. Vanye did likewise, himself aching in all his bones, and took Siptah's reins from her nerveless hand.

She stared past him, down the long road where the halflings were only beginning that hill. "A time to rest" she said.

"Aye," he agreed gladly enough, and busied himself loosening girths and slipping bits to ease the horses, tending to them while Morgaine withdrew a little to that rocky up-thrust that was the cap of the hill, where flat stones afforded a place to sit other than the damp earth.

He finished his task, and brought the flask of Hiua liquor and a wrapped bit of food, and offered them to her, hoping against expectation to the contrary that she would accept them. She sat with Changeling unhooked and leaning against her shoulder, her right arm cradled in her lap in an attitude of evident pain; but she lifted her head and bestirred herself to take a share of what he offered, as much to avoid dispute with him, he thought, as because she had appetite for anything. He drank and ate a few mouthfuls himself; and by this time the halflings were drawing near them, with Jhirun lagging far behind.

"Liyo," Vanye said carefully, "we would do well to take what chance we have to rest now. We have pushed the horses almost as far as possible. We are climbing; there looks to be more of it, and there may be a time ahead that speed will serve us better than it does now."

She nodded, mutely accepting his argument, whether or not it coincided with her own reasons. Her eyes were void of interest in what passed about her. He heard the approach of the halflings with a private anguish, not wanting strangers near her when this mood was on her. He had seen it before, that soulless energy that seized her and kept her moving, responding only to the necessity that drove her. At the moment she was lost... knew him, perhaps, or confused him with men long since dust; the time was short for her, who had passed Gate and Gate and Gate in her course, and confounded then and now, who but months ago had ridden into a war in which his ancestors had died.

A hundred years lay in that gap for him. For Jhirun… He gazed upon her distant figure with a sudden and terrible understanding. A thousand years. He could not conceive of a thousand years. A hundred were sufficient to bring a man to dust; five hundred reached into a time when nothing had stood in Morija.

Morgaine had ridden across a century to enter his age, had gathered him to her, and together they had crossed into a place a thousand years removed from Jhirun's beginnings, whose ancestors lay entombed in the Barrows... men that Morgaine might have known, young, and powerful in that age of the world.

He had crossed such a gap, not alone of place, but of time.

O God, his lips shaped.

Nothing that he had known existed. Men, kinsmen, all that he had ever known was aged, decayed, gone to sifting dust. He knew then what he had done, passing the Gate. It was irrevocable. He wanted to pour out questions to Morgaine, to have them answered, to know beyond doubt what things she had never told him, for pity.

But the qujal were with them. Horses drew up on the margin. Lord Kithan, armorless, bareheaded, swung down from his saddle and walked toward

them with one of his men, while the other attended the horses.

Vanye rose and slipped the ring that held his sword at his shoulder, setting himself between Kithan and Morgaine; and Kithan stopped—no longer the elegant lord, Kithan: his thin face was weary; his shoulders sagged. Kithan lifted a hand, gestured no wish to contend, then sank down on a flat stone some distance from Morgaine; his men likewise settled to the ground, pale heads bowed, exhausted.

Jhirun rode in among the qujals’ horses, slid from the saddle and held to it. In a moment she made the effort to loosen the girth of her horse, then led the animal to a patch of grass, too unsure of it to let it go. She sat down, holding the reins in her lap, and stayed apart from them all, tired, seeming terrified of everything and everyone about her.