settled into his seat. Vanyel made a fist and gave it a good rap between the ears; the nag stopped trying to rid itself of its rider and settled down.
The spine of his saddle was broken; the horse itself was sway backed, and its gait was as rough as he'd ever had the misfortune to encounter. He hoped, as Tylendel took the lead and they headed down Exile's Road into the west, that they wouldn't be riding for too very long.
* * *
The wind had died down - at least momentarily - when Tylendel finally stopped. It was so dark that the only way he really knew that Tylendel had pulled up was because the sound of hooves on the hard surface of the road ahead of him stopped. They'd trusted to the fact that Exile's Road was lined on either side with hedges to keep their sorry beasts on the roadway. He kicked at his own mount and forced it forward until he could feel the presence of Tylendel and his horse bulking beside him.
There was a flare of light; Vanyel winced away from it - it was quite painful after the near-total darkness of the last candlemark or so. When he could bear to look again, he saw that Tylendel had dismounted and was leading his horse, a red ball of mage-light bobbing along above his head.
He scrambled off of his own mount, glad enough to be out of that excruciatingly uncomfortable saddle, snatched the reins of the beast over its head, and hastened to catch up.
'Are we far enough away yet?' he asked, longing for even a single word from the trainee to break the silence and tension. Tylendel's face was drawn and fey, and strained; Tylendel's attention was plainly somewhere else, his whole aspect wrapped up in the kind of terrifying concentration that had been all too common to him of late.
'Almost,' he replied, after a long and unnerving silence. His voice had a strange quality to it, as if Tylendel was having to work to get even a single word out past whatever it was he was concentrating on. 'I'm - looking for something…'
Vanyel shivered, and not from the cold. 'What?'
'A place to put the Gate.' They came to a break in the hedge. No - not a break. When Tylendel stopped and led his horse over to it, Vanyel could see that it was the remains of a gated opening in the hedge, long since overgrown. Beyond the gap something bulked darkly in the dim illumination provided by the mage-light. Tylendel nodded slightly. 'I thought I remembered this place,' .he muttered. He didn't seem to expect a response, so 'Vanyel didn't make one.
It was obvious that the horses were not going to be able to force themselves through so narrow a passage; Tylendel stripped the bridle from his, hung it on the saddlebow, and gave the gelding a tremendous slap on the hip that made it snort with surprise and sent it cantering off into the darkness. Vanyel did the same with his, not sorry to see it go, and turned away from the road to see that Tylendel had already forced his way past the gap in the hedge and was now out of sight. Only the reddish glow of the mage-light through the leafless branches of the hedgerow showed where he had gone.
Vanyel shoved his way past the branches, cursing as they caught on his cloak and scratched at his face. When he emerged, staggering, from the prickly embrace of stubborn bushes, he found that he was standing knee- deep in weeds, in what had been the yard of a small building. It could have been anything from a shop to a cottage, but was now going to pieces; the yard was as overgrown as the gate had been. The building seemed to be entirely roofless and the door and windows were mere holes in the walls. Tylendel was examining the remains of the door with care.
The gap where the door had been was a large one, easily large enough for a horse and rider to pass through. Tylendel nodded again, and this time there was an expression of dour satisfaction on his face. 'This will do,' he said softly. 'Van, think you're ready?'
Vanyel took a deep breath, and tried to relax a little. 'As ready as I'm ever likely to get,' he replied.
Tylendel turned and took both Vanyel's hands in his; he looked searchingly into Vanyel's eyes for a long moment. 'Van, I'm going to have to force that link between us wide open for this to work. I may hurt you. I'll try not to, but I can't promise. Are you still willing to help me?'
Vanyel nodded, thinking, I've come this far; it would be stupid to back out at this point. Besides - he needs this. How can I not give it to him?
Tylendel closed his eyes; his face froze into as impassive a mask as Vanyel had ever worn. Vanyel waited, trembling a little, for something to happen.
For a long while, nothing did. Then -
Rage flamed up in him; a consuming, obsessive anger that left very little room for anything else. One thing mattered: Staven was dead. One goal drove him: deal the same painful death to Staven's murderers. There was still a tiny corner of his mind that could think for itself and wonder at the overwhelming power of Tylendel's fury, but that corner had been locked out of any position of control.
The truism ran 'Pain shared is pain halved' - but this pain was doubled on being shared.
He turned to face the ancient doorway without any conscious decision to do so, Tylendel turning even as he did. He saw Tylendel raise his arms and cast a double handful of something powderlike on the ground before the door; heard him begin a chant in some strange tongue and hold his now empty hands, palm outward, to face that similarly empty gap.
He felt something draining out of him, like blood draining from a wound; and felt that it was taking his strength with it.
The edges of the ruined doorway were beginning to glow, the same sullen red as the mage-light over Tylendel's head; like the muted red of embers, as if the edge of the doorway smoldered. As more and more of Vanyel's energy and strength drained from him, the ragged border' brightened, and tiny threads of angry scarlet wavered from them into the space where the door had stood. More and more of these threads spun out, waving like water-weeds in a current, until two of the ends connected across the gap.
There was a surge of force out of him, a surge that nearly caused his knees to collapse, as the entire gap filled with a flare of blood-red light -
Then the light vanished - and the gap framed, not a shadowed blackness, but a garden; a formal garden decorated for a festival, and filled with people, light and movement.
He had hardly a chance to see this before Tylendel grabbed his arm and pulled him, stumbling, across the threshold. There was a moment of total disorientation, as though the world had dropped from beneath his feet,
