Exiles Gate

She laughed. 'We do not share a world. My father taught me that much. I will find a place. Or do you give this one up, my lord of shadows, and come wander the worlds with us.'

'With a rebel, a killer, a doggerel poet and a human lordling?'

Skarrin laughed in his own turn. 'Come ahead into my courtyards, my lady of light. Wash off the dust. Take my hospitality.' The drifting face became melancholy, even wistful. 'Go with you. That is a thought. That is indeed a thought. You will sit with me, my lady, and tell me where you have traveled and the things you have seen—convince me there is something different than one finds . . . everywhere. …'

The image faded.

The voice drifted into silence, leaving the stillness of the tomb behind it.

Old, Vanye thought with a chill, old —more than a Man can reckon.

And he found himself staring into Morgaine's eyes, lost, beyond understanding what she did or what she meant to do any longer, and with the least and dreadful fear—that she had found something in common with this lord who contemned everything he ruled, who despised the qhal, who themselves used human folk for cattle—

She had had to defend her companying with a human man. He had sensed that. He imagined the questions which had gone by him, and fitted her answers to them, his liege, his lover . . . defiant, in the beginning—toward a man of her own kind, who could speak with her, trade words with her in a language she had never taught him, quickly and unexpectedly draw the sort of laugh and light answer from her such as had taken him—oh, so long to win.

'We will do as he asks,' Morgaine said.

'Aye,' he said. He was too far into strange territory to say anything more. He did not even agree for loyalty or love or out of common sense. He was only lost, on ground which continually shifted and threatened to shift again. They stood in a foreign lord's elegant forecourt with three confused horses in their charge, and three men awaiting their fate outside who were, surely, no less bewildered.

Then: a clear target, he thought, like a shock of cold water.

How else do we come at him—except she draw him out?

And how can she persuade him?

'Call Chei and the rest,' she bade him in the Kurshin tongue. 'Quickly.'

He left Arrhan to stand and went back to the sunlight. 'My lord,' he said to Chei at the doorway, and lowered his voice. He was determined to observe courtesy with the man and forestall argument. 'We are going ahead. We do not know into what. Be aware: the Overlord brought up the matter of your exile. My lady claimed you for her own and Skarrin gave you to her. So if you have any scruples, I think you are honorably quit of debts to him, but I do not know what favor this wins of him if things go amiss.'

Chei looked at him and gnawed at his lip. It was young Chei's expression for the instant. It was doubt; and then amusement. 'I was quit of debts to him when he failed to kill me,' Chei-Qhiverin said. 'That was his mistake.'

Chei led his horse forward. Hesiyyn and Rhanin followed, Rhanin with his bow strung and slung over his shoulder. Vanye cleared the doorway, gathered up Arrhan's reins, and led the white mare up alongside Siptah as Morgaine began that course Skarrin chose for them.

Ambush was in his thoughts, constantly. But Morgaine went, with Changeling slung at her hip, and walked the long court in which the horses' pacing made a forlorn and lonely sound.

'Games,' she said to the air. 'I do not like games, my lord Skarrin.'

At the end a door whisked open, in that way which doors could move, in such places of gate-force—on a sunlit court.

Vanye cut the lead next the bay's bridle and sent it ambling past them with one slap and another on its dusty rump. It came to no grief in the doorway. And they came through into afternoon sunlight, into a stable court clean and well-supplied with straw and haystack, rows of stables, with well and stone trough. The bay went straightway to the water, and Siptah and Arrhan flared their nostrils and pricked up their ears and approached the trough with keen interest.

'Hospitality,' Vanye muttered, for the first time beginning to wonder was there good will in this beckoning of doors and corridors and ghosts. 'Dare we trust it?'

'He needs no ambush,' Morgaine said, and bent and washed her hands and her face, and let the water wash black, clean trails over her dusty armor. She drank from the demon-mouth that poured fresh water continually into the trough.

He took the chance for himself, doused face and hands in cool water, wiped his hair back from his eyes, washed and drank as Chei and the others arrived.

There was no one to threaten them. There was not a horse other than theirs in all the stable-court. There was no servant and no groom to serve them. Vanye stood, with the wind chilling the water on his face, scanning the walls around them, looking for some sign of life and seeing nothing but bare stone.

'Ghosts,' he said aloud. 'And of them this Skarrin seems chief.'

'More than ghosts,' Morgaine whispered in the Kurshin tongue, and caught his shoulder and leaned close to him. 'We may be overheard. I do not know how many languages he may have known or where he may have traveled.'

His heart leapt in him and fell again. 'Even Kursh?'

'There are tracks among the Gates: thee knows. No knowing which path he has come to arrive here. There are a handful of the old blood, in all the worlds gates reach. They have no congress with one another. They are too proud. Each settles to a world—for a while—using a knowledge of the gates the qhal do not have—They rule. There is no likelihood that they will fail to rule. They direct affairs, they make changes at their pleasure. And inevitably they grow bored—and they move on, through time or space or both. Some are older than the calamity, older than the one before it. My father claimed to be.'

'What 'one before it,' what—'

'—And some are born into this age—of one whose life has stretched across ages. Some are born of events which cannot be duplicated, events on which vast changes depend—Some lives, in that way, anchor time itself. So the lords assure themselves of continuance—in more than one way. Such am I—but not what my father planned. I exist. Therefore other things do not. Therefore he does not.'

'I do not understand. You have left me.' He felt a shiver despite the sun. 'What shall we do?'

'I shall court this man,' she hissed softly. 'By any means, Vanye, any means, and thee must not object, does thee understand that?'

'Let us take the sword, let us go through this place until we find him—' He felt cold to the heart now. 'That is the only sense.'

'He will not be there. He can retreat within the gate. He can leave us here. Has thee forgotten?'

'You cannot fight him hand to hand, liyo, in the name of Heaven, you cannot think of—'

'I will do what I have to do. I tell thee now: do not attempt anything with this man. I beg thee. I do not want help in this. Or hindrance. Thee says thee is still ilin. Nothing have I asked of thee by that oath—in very long. This I ask. For my sake. For thine.'

'Tell me what we shall do!'

'On thy oath. Nothing. I will do it.'

'And I tell you—if you hang my soul and my salvation on it—I will throw them away, if it comes to harm —'

'Thee will take the sword if it comes to that. Thee will bear it. Thee will trust Chei and the rest if it comes to that. All these things—I ask thee, as thee loves me,—do. Does thee love me? Does thee understand what I ask?'

It reached him, then, the thing that she was asking of him, and the sense of it. It shook the breath from him for a moment. It was not the sort of thing a man wanted to agree to, who loved a woman. It was harder than dying for her, to agree to leave her to die.