"Or lied to us."
"—had never traveled much in all his life, except the hills, except forest trails and winding roads. Straight distances bewildered him. He lived his life in so small a place. And he did not know anything beyond it. The distance between Morund and Herot, is less than he thought. Sethys and Stiyesse abut against marsh he did not know existed. These are little places. These are holds humans once had. Qhal have moved in, those exiled, those out of favor—like Qhiverin, who became Gault. The south has no resource against the north, not if the north realized its danger. And by now, since Tejhos—Skarrin does, though Chei does swear—for what it is worth—that he did not tell Skarrin our purpose here. That is the only grace we may have, if we can believe it."
He leaned his hands on his knees and bowed his head a moment. "We should have gone to Morund, the way you wanted to. We would have learned this. We could have dealt with whatever we found there—whatever we found there. This is my fault, liyo, it is all my—"
"It was my decision. It was my judgment. Do not be so cursed free with blame. It is still my decision, and all of this may be wrong. Chei has the notion we can come close before they will take alarm."
"With our horses—"
"Or his. That roan of his is no unremarkable beast, in itself. No, they will surely know us: they will have gotten the description from their watchers afield. It is a question of keeping them uncertain what we intend." She looked at the ground in front of her and seemed lost for a moment. "Chei says if they have thrown no great number of men into the field since yesterday, they are taking a cautious path. He talked at some length of his own difficulties with his Overlord—he was high-born, was a member of a martial order that lost its influence at court: disastrously for him, though more so for others. Connections saved his life and sent him to Morund, to redeem himself, if ever he could—The arrangement by which human lords were permitted to rule in the south was collapsing, on evidence of human Gault's complicity with the rebels in Mante—that was how they lured the original Gault into their trap: and sentenced him and Qhiverin to one conjoined existence—on that point Qhiverin's friends intervened virtually to kidnap Gault from his jailers and coerce the gate-wardens to join them, to forestall enemies who would have preferred not to have Qhiverin at Morund."
"Where he served their interests well enough—" "So he has done. So he fully intended to come home, someday. Except—as thee says, possibly we could have persuaded him to go against his lord from the beginning. He says so. Certainly he is quick enough to commit treason. I do not know. At least—he has had some little credit with Skarrin for setting affairs in the south in order, if, as he says, they do not take that for too much success, and if his connections in Mante have not lost all influence. That we have arrived in the south without a force about us—that they have lost contact with him, whom they do not trust, under uncertain circumstances, after he has faithfully sent them a report from Tejhos and seemed, there, under the witness of the wardens there, to be fighting us—all of this, he thinks, might create some debate among Skarrin's advisers. The question is whether we should attempt stealth—or bewilder them further. Recall that there is one way in, that we must pass within that, that thing they call Seiyyin Neith, the Gate of Exiles, and within this league-wide pit of stone, that they call Death's-gate—they can kill us with a thought. As you did say: a man who thinks he is winning—will not flee."
"No, he will send us straightway to Hell, liyo, and we will hardly see it coming!"
"Chei will get us to Exile's Gate. There is where they will be vulnerable."
"God in Heaven, are we leaning on this man's word?" She lifted her eyes to him. "This man—wants to live. So do the men with him. Did I not say I trusted him more than honest men? They have no cause, no cause for which they would give up their lives. Skarrin cannot promise them anything they would believe. Not as deeply as they have tangled themselves. They know that."
For a moment he truly could not breathe. His eyes went involuntarily to see where Chei and the others were, but they were not in earshot, even for Hesiyyn's qhalur hearing, and it was the Kurshin tongue they spoke.
"The sword—" he said. "If we use it at this Gate of Exiles—will be very near those standing stones."
"The sword is unstable. Like the gate. We cannot predict. There is no way to predict—what will happen."
"Aye," he said, and wiped at the sweat which gathered on his lip, and wiped his hands on his knees.
She scratched through the map once, twice. "Go, rest, take whatever sleep thee can. Thee will need it."
He went back and lay down again, staring at the sky through the branches, counting leaves, that being better than other thoughts that pressed on him. He put the stone about his neck, and lay with his hand closed about the pyx to shield it, to be certain of its safety.
And when the sun started below the hill he rose up and dressed methodically, laced up the padding tight and worked the mail shirt on: that was worst. Morgaine came to help him with it; and with the buckles beneath the arm.
"I will saddle up," she said. "No arguments from thee. Hear?"
"Aye," he said, though it fretted him. "Pull it tight, liyo. It can take another notch there."
"Thee has to get on the horse."
"I have to stay there," he said.
To that she said nothing. She only tightened the strap.
They mounted up while there was still a little light beyond the hills. It was Hesiyyn who rode farthest point, Hesiyyn with his brown cloak about him, his pale hair loose about his shoulders, his weapons all covered. His horse was a fine blood bay with no white markings.
It was Hesiyyn's own reasoning that he should ride foremost, to forestall any ambushes: "It is likely the only company in which I shall ever find myself the most respectable."
With which the qhal-lordling put his horse well out to the fore, passing out of sight around the bending of the stream, while Chei and Rhanin went a distance behind. "Come," Morgaine said, and chose her own distance from that pair—herself cloaked in black; and Vanye swept his own cloak about him when he had gotten up, and threw up the hood over the white-scarfed helm.
Ambush was possible. Hesiyyn might betray them, signaling to some band out from Mante. Everything, henceforward, was possible—
Even that they should come to the verge of the starlit plain unmolested—a last hillside, a trail down a steep, rocky slope, on which Hesiyyn sat waiting for them, resting his horse, spinning and spinning a curious object on the surface of the slab of rock on which he sat.
"The lots come up three, three, and three: are you superstitious?"
"Curse your humor," Chei said, reining back his horse from the descent.
They changed about with the remounts, one to the three qhal, the blaze-faced bay going turn and turn with Siptah and Arrhan: and again Hesiyyn went to the lead, but not so far separated from them now.
Down and down to the plain, a difficult slope, a long and miserable jolting. Hang on, Vanye told himself, cursing every step the bay made under him. Sweat broke out, wind-chilled on his face. He clenched the saddlehorn and thought of the red packet in his belt-pocket.
Not yet, he thought. Not for this. To every jolt and every uneven spot: not for this, not for this—
Across the plain, the mountains—not the peaks of a range like the Cedur Maje of his homeland, but a wall of rock which giants might have built, as if the world had broken, and that were the breaking-point, under a sky so brilliant with stars and moon it all but cast a shadow.
"They are not preventing us this far," he said to Morgaine.
He wished in one part of his reeling mind that the enemy would turn up, now, quickly, before they were committed to this—that somehow something would happen to send them on some other and better course.
But there was no sign of it.
They came down onto the plain at last, a gradual flattening of the course they rode. Vanye turned as best he could and looked back at the track they had made as the
y entered the grassy flat, a trail too cursed clear under the heavens. "As well blaze a trail," he muttered. If there had been the choice of skirting the hills instead of taking Chei's proposed course across the plain, it was rapidly diminishing.
They drew their company together now, Hesiyyn riding with them as they struck out straight across.
And the cliffs which had been clear from the hillside showed only as a rim against the horizon.
Then was easier riding. Then he finally seized hold of his right leg by the boot-top and hauled it with difficulty over the saddlehorn, wrapped his arms about his suffering ribs and with a look at Morgaine that assured him she knew he was going to rest for a while, bowed his head, leaned back against the cantle and gave himself over to the bay's steady pace in a sickly exhaustion.
He roused himself only when they paused to trade mounts about. "No need," Morgaine said, sliding down from Arrhan's back. "That horse is fit enough to go on carrying you, and I will take Siptah: I weigh less."
He was grateful. He took the medicines she carried for him, washed them down with a drink from her flask, and sat there ahorse while others stretched their legs. It was not sleep, that state of numbness he achieved. It was not precisely awareness either. He knew that they mounted up again; he knew that they moved, he trusted that Morgaine watched the land around them.
No other did he trust . . . except he reasoned if betrayal was what Chei and his men intended, it did not encompass losing their own lives, not lives so long and so dearly held; and that meant some warning to them.
Some warning was all his liege needed. And half-asleep and miserable as he was, he continually rode between her and them: it was a well-trained horse, if rough-gaited, and Siptah, he thanked Heaven, tolerated it going close by him.
He did truly sleep for a while. He jerked his head up with the thought that he was falling, caught his balance, and saw the cliffs no nearer.
Or they were vaster than the eye wanted to see. His leg had gone numb. He hauled it back over, and his eyes watered as the muscles extended. Everything hurt.
And the riding went on and on, while a few clouds drifted across the stars and passed, and a wind rose and rippled through the endless grass.
Another change of horses. This time he did dismount, and walked a little, as far as privacy to relieve himself, discovering that he could, which did for one long misery; and saw to Arrhan's girth and the bay's.
But facing the necessity to haul himself up again, he stood there holding the saddlehorn and trying, with several deep breaths, to gather the wind and the courage to make that pull.
"Vanye!" Morgaine said, just as he had found it. He stopped, unnerved, with a jolt that brought tears to his eyes; and: "Chei," she said, "one of you give him a hand up."
"My lady," Chei said. And came and offered his hands for a stirrup.
Shame stung him. But he set his foot in Chei's linked hands and let Chei heave him up like some pregnant woman.
"For a like favor," Chei said to him.
He recalled it. And flinching from Chei's hand on his knee, he backed Arrhan out of his reach.
The cliffs cut off the sky before them, against the dimming stars, and they had left a trail a child could follow, the swath of passage in tall grass. The horses caught mouthfuls now and again: there was no time to give them more than that.
Morgaine rode the bay now; it was Siptah due the rest. And the sky above the eastern hills was showing no stars: the sun was coming.
We are beyond recall now. That was the thought that kept gnawing at him. Wise or not, we are beyond any change of mind.
God save us.
By sunlight, at the lagging pace of weary horses, the rock face in front of them rose and filled all their view—a plain of dry grass, a wall of living stone, so abrupt and so tall it defied the eye's logic.
It had one gap, shadow-blued within the yellow stone, in noon sunlight, and closing it—the gatehouse that Chei had named to them. Seiyyin Neith.
Doors—the size of which a Kurshin eye refused to understand, until a hawk flew near them, a mote against their height.
Exile's Gate.
Chei turned the roan back a half-circle as they rode, reined in alongside and lifted a hand toward it. "There," he said, "there, you see what we propose to assault. That is merely the nethermost skirt of Mante." He leaned on his saddlebow and gave a twitch of his shoulders, a shiver. "A man forgets it, whose eyes are used to Morund's size. And the boy, my friends, ... is terrified."
He gave a flick of the reins and sent his horse thundering on ahead to join his men.
Chapter 17
Another space of riding. This time it had measure, that vision of the towering cliffs which rose steadily before them. Vanye looked up at the doors, whose valves were iron, whose surface held twelve bronze panels each, of figures far more than life-size, the actions of which he could not at first understand, until he saw the detail. They were scenes of execution, and torment.
"Can such things open?" he wondered aloud, and his voice was less steady than he wished. He expected some sally-port: he looked for it among the panels, and saw no joint.
"Oh, indeed," Chei said, "when Mante wishes to diminish its vassals—and its exiles. They do open."
"Mante has a taste for excess," Morgaine said.
"They want a man to remember," Hesiyyn said, "the difficulty of return."
Vanye looked at Rhanin, who rode alone ahead of them, weary man riding one exhausted horse, leading another, dwarfed by the scenes of brutal cruelty looming over them.
He felt something move in him then, toward all of these his enemies, a pang that went to the heart.
He saw not Seiyyin Neith, of a sudden, but a steep road down from gray stone walls, and on it, beneath those walls which had seemed so high and dreadful, a grief-stricken boy in a white-scarfed helm, with exile in front of him.
This at least they had in common. And they were brave men who did not flinch now, in the face of this thing.
This barrier, Mante reared in the name of justice. This was the face it turned to its damned and its servants. This was what the power of the world held as honorable dealings with its own subjects—men hanged, and gutted and burned alive, and what other things, higher up the doors, he had no wish to see.
He drew a copper-edged breath and leaned on the saddle, a shift of weight that sent a wearying, monotonous pain through his sides and his gut, a cursed, always-present misery. He was not certain there was life left in his legs. He had found a few positions that hurt less, and kept shifting between them. But the approach to this place meant different necessities, meant—Heaven knew what. If they must fight here, he could do that, he thought, as long as they stayed mounted.
"How is thee faring?" Morgaine asked him.
"I will manage," he said.
She looked at him, long, as they rode. "On thy oath, Nhi Vanye."
That shook him. He was much too close to judgment to trifle with damnation. It was unfairly she dealt with him—but she had no conscience in such matters, he had long known it.
"Vanye, does thee leave me to guess?"
"I will stay ahorse," he said, half the truth. "I can defend myself." But he could imagine her relying on him in some rush to cover, or doing something foolish to rescue him if he should fall. He sweated, feeling a coldness in the pit of his stomach. He had not used the qhalur medicines. He abhorred such things. More, he did not think they could deal with a numbness that had his right leg all but useless, prickling like needles all up the inside. "It is walking I am not sure of. But my head is clear."
She said nothing then. She was thinking, he decided—thinking through things he did not know, thinking what to do, how far to believe him, and what of her plans she must now change—all these things, because he had been a fool and brought them to this pass, and now began to be a burden on her.
I shall not be, he would have protested. But he already was. And knew it.
He let Arrhan fall a little back then—the hor
ses fretted and snorted, having the scent of strangeness in the wind, the prospect of a fight—always, always, the prospect of war wherever they came to habitations of any kind. The qhal cared little what he did. And Morgaine had her eyes set on the thing in front of them.
He slipped the red paper from its place and carefully, with fingers which trembled, managed to get one of the tiny pellets beneath a fingernail, and then, losing his resolve and his trust of the gift, dislodged it and let it roll back into the paper. He folded it up again, and put it back.
Fool, he thought again. Coward.
But he knew that he would take care for her. He was not sure what the stuff in the red paper cared for. And there was too much and too delicate hazard to deal with, which needed clear wits and good judgment.
He gained leverage as he could, took his weight mostly on his arms, hands on the saddlebow, and let the pain run as it would, while he made the right leg move, and bend, and the feeling come back in tingling misery. Sweat fell from his face and spattered his hands, white-knuckled on the horn.
He watched Chei ride up to the very doors, draw the red roan alongside that door-rim and pound with a frail human fist against that towering mass of metal, which hardly resounded to his blows.
"I am Chei ep Kantory," he shouted, in a voice that seemed far too small. "I am Chei lord of Morund, Warden of the South! I have brought visitors to the Overlord! Open the doors!"