Exiles Gate

the mare's gait, the jolts which threatened to take him from the saddle.

Hold on, he told himself, slumped over the saddle when other thought had ceased, hold on, hold on.

The roan horse came to a slow halt where the battle had been, and Gault clutched after its ties and its stirrup, letting himself down by painful degrees to stand amid the field. He did not know the weapon that had struck him, which had pierced through his left arm and burned across his back. But here he had fallen in the battle, here his ranks had broken in terror of the gate-weapon, and there were appallingly few corpses remaining.

Here he had flung himself at the roan horse as the slaughter started and managed to get back astride—when the gate-force broke loose and sane men quit the field as quickly as they could.

Such of them as survived had rallied again—qhal, and a scattering of terrified humans—most of all, that the squad he had sent wide before they came to Arunden's camp, had overtaken them now, having swept up the deserters; and had found him on the road.

Now they walked as he did, probing among the dead that were thickest here, where only the red fire had come, where the woman had wielded what they had mistakenly thought the chiefest of weapons they faced.

That was the fire that had touched him. He understood that much. He stumbled among cooling bodies and found one living, who hoarsely called his name—'Rythys!' Gault called out, 'your cousin!'—and Rythys left his desperate searching and came in haste, one of the few fortunate.

But Gault sought Jestryn on the field, and found him finally—Pyverrn the wit, Pyverrn the prankster, Pyverrn who had done an unhumorous thing at the last, and flung himself and his horse between Gault and the killing fire.

'Pyverrn,' Gault-Qhiverin said, feeling after a heartbeat, and finding none, finding Jestryn's face already cold in the night wind. 'Pyverrn!' he cried, for that was the oldest name, the name by which they had been friends in Mante, and fought the Overlord's battles and intrigued in the Overlord's court through their last life. 'Pyverrn!'

He hugged the body to him, but it was only cooling human clay against his own borrowed flesh, a body Pyverrn had worn, but never truly mastered.

This was the last death, the irrecoverable one: not Tejhos-gate nor any other could save a life, once the life was gone; and Gault would have murdered one of his own men to have hosted Pyverrn's self again—he would have taken one of his own kind; his other and dearest friends.

He would have—such was the bond between them—accepted what only a few had dared to save a fading life: he would have gone into the gate with his friend and taken him into his own self, risking madness, or obliteration.

That was his love for Pyverrn.

But there was nothing left to love. There was only the cold flesh that Pyverrn had wrested from its previous owner, and no way to restore it.

His men came round him where he knelt and wept. None ventured a word to him, until he himself let the body go and stood up.

'Tejhos-gate,' he said. 'We are going after them!'

Doubtless there were some few who would have fled, had they had a choice. He knew the cowardice of some of them, that had had to be herded back. But in the southern lands there was nothing to hide them should they fail him—and now they knew he was alive.

'Two of you will go to Mante,' he said when they were mounted again. 'The rest of us will ride after these invaders. We will have them. I will have them, him and her,and they will wish they had been stillborn.'

'Better?' Morgaine asked; and Vanye, sitting with his back against a standing stone, leaned his head against that unforgiving surface and nodded with his eyes shut. He did not remember much of the ride that had brought them this far. He knew that he had been upright in the saddle, but so much of it had been that kind of pain which the mind would not believe could last so keenly, so long. All that time seemed compressed; yet he knew it was leagues beyond that place where he had almost fallen. Tejhos-gate was far behind them.

And the cessation of that force left him drained, void, as if he had been gutted.

Beside them the horses caught their breath and began to show a little interest in the grass under their feet, now they had drunk of the little creek and had their legs rubbed down. He had done that much for his horse, while Morgaine saw to the Baien gray. He was a horseman from his birth: he would have done that for the brave mare with his heart's blood, after the course she had run; and Morgaine—whatever she was—had no less care for the gray.

Now she leaned against another such stone facing him—not stones of power, mere markers along the roadside. One knee propped the sword on which she leaned, the sight of which he could hardly bear and the weight of which he remembered in his bones: not balanced like an ordinary blade, the crystal length within that sheath rune-written with the secrets of the gates—for the sake of a successor, she had told him once. She had taught him writing and ciphering more than a lord's bastard needed—for what purpose he knew, and loathed, and thought about no more than he had to.

But he could read those runes. They were burned into his soul like the light into his eyes.

'Water?' she asked him.

He drank from the flask she gave him, struggled with his left hand and his right to hold it without shaking. The pain was still there, but only a dull ache, against the memory of the living blade in his hand. He gave the flask back, drew a breath and looked about him at the rolling hills, the stones, the road pale in the starlight.

'We should have gone over to Tejhos,' he murmured.

'Thee could not,' she said.

It was bitter truth. He would have left her to hold the place alone, would have fallen—Heaven knew where he would have fallen, or how long the fire would run in his bones if he lay within that influence.

The drawing of the sword was a dice-throw, a power either felt in Mante, if they were wary; or was mistaken for ordinary—O Heaven—ordinary use of the gate, in which case Mante would do nothing, until their enemies reached it and passed it and told Mante otherwise—which they would, assuredly.

Therefore they ran. Therefore they paced themselves to last now, with all the speed they could make, while they might make it.

He had a cold lump of fear at his gut. Coward, he had heard from his brothers, and from his father, and most of Morija—You think too much, his brother had told him. He had never been like them. In all too many respects.

If a man thought—if a man let himself think—backward or forward—

'It is not the first friend the sword has taken,' she said finally. 'Vanye, it was not your fault.'

'I know,' he said, and saw in his mind the harper-lad of Ra-morij, who had thrown himself between that blade in her hand and his threatened kin—had flung himself there to be a hero, and discovered Hell in the unstoppable swing of Morgaine's hand.

'They rode to your right,' she said, 'against all our warnings.'

The excuses she made for him were doubtless those which armored her, the only and best wisdom she had to give him. He sensed the pain it cost her to expose that. And there was nothing to say against those excuses that she did not, beneath those reasonings, know—

—except the harper had known the report of the sword: who in Morija had not?

But Bron had not known, had not guessed how far its danger extended. They had never told him.

He shut his eyes, clenched them shut, as if it could banish the terrified face that was burned across his vision; or bring back the sun, and end this terrible night where visions were all too easy. The priest, he thought, had cursed him, cursed Bron, cursed Chei.

He did not say that to Morgaine. But he feared it. Heaven had answered that creature, and he did not know why, except Heaven judged them worse—

Harness jingled, the sudden lifting of Siptah's head, the clink of slipped bit and snaffle ring that his ears knew before his eyes lifted. The stallion stood with ears pricked, gazing toward the road.

Morgaine rose instantly and moved to take the horses in hand and lead them inward of the stones for cover from the road.

He rose shakily to his feet and held the reins, soothing them, stroking one nose and the other—'Quiet, quiet,'