Exiles Gate

inconvenience, at the least, for which I do apologize.'

'There are other lands. The world is wide. I weary of Mante.'

'I took this for the greatest of your cities. Are there others? Truly, this one is a wonder to see.'

'Ah, there are hundreds. Everywhere—there are cities, as unvarying as the worlds. Everywhere is boredom, my lady of light, until you came—traveling, as you say. With a human servant, no less—what is his name?'

'Nhi Vanye i Chya. Nhi Vanye, if you please.'

'My lord,' Vanye said. To say something seemed incumbent on him, when the image turned its cold eyes in his direction and the face seemed to gaze straight at him. He was in danger. He knew beyond a doubt that he was in peril of his life, only for being human, and for standing where he stood, and for more than that: it was the look a man gave a man where a woman was in question—and blood was.

The glass-gray stare passed from him and turned slowly to the others, and back again to Morgaine.

'Why have you come?'

'Why should I not?' Morgaine said. 'I take my father's lesson, who found one world and a succession of worlds—far too small for him. That was Anjhurin.' She leaned back, posing the chair on its rearmost legs, and stared up at the image. 'From all you say, you have arrived at the same place as he—you have wielded power over world and world and world—am I right? And you have found this world much the same as the last.'

'And the one before,' Skarrin said. 'And before that. You are young.'

'As you see me.'

'Very young,' Skarrin said softly, this young man with gray, gentle eyes.

'You knew Anjhurin,' Morgaine said.

'A very, very long time ago.' The image became merely a face, drifting in the shadow, a handsome face, with Morgaine's own look, so like her among qhal it might have been a brother. 'Anjhurin dead! Worlds should shake.'

'They have,' Morgaine said softly. 'And things change, my lord of dust and stability. You do not love your life. Come risk it with me. Come join me.'

'To what purpose?'

'The changing of worlds, my lord, change that sweeps through space and time.'

'Even this, I have seen. I have ties in many ages, many worlds. I will survive even the next calamity. What new can you offer me?'

'Have you risked that hope, elder cousin? It is risk makes immortality bearable—to know that personal calamity is possible, oh, very possible, and tranquility, what time it exists, is precious. Anjhurin is dead. Does that not tell you that fatality is possible? Come with me. There are worlds full of chances.'

'Full of cattle. Full of same choices and same tragedies and same small hearts and smaller minds which lead to them. Full of stale poets who think their ideas are a towering novelty in the cosmos. Full of rebels who think they can change worlds for the better and murderers who see no further than the selfish moment. Mostly, full of cattle, content with their mouthful of grass and their little herd and endless procreation of other cattle. And we are finite, calamity endlessly regenerate, disaster in a bubble. One day it will burst of sheer tedium. And the universe will never notice.'

'No,' Morgaine said, and reached and took Vanye by the arm, drawing him to the table edge. 'I have news to give you, my lord. Qhal reached outside. They stole his ancestors in real-space, and his cousins voyage there, not with the gates, not within them so far as they know—'

'It will not save them.'

'No. But they are widening the bubble, my lord who sees no change. They are involving all who meet them —and all who meet their allies. Do you see, my lord of shadows? There is chance and change. His kind—humankind—have realized the trap. They have refused it. More, they have set out to prick the bubble themselves.'

There was long silence.

'It would doom them,' Skarrin said.

'Perhaps. Their threads reach far beyond their own world, but they were not that deeply entangled.'

'If they have taken it on themselves to do this, by that very act they are entangled.'

'And they know other races who know others still.'

Vanye listened through that silence, his heart beating harder and harder. Morgaine's light hand upon his elbow held him fast, by oath and by the surety that somewhere in this exchange he had become all humanity, and that existence was the prize of this struggle—What must I do, what must I say, what is she telling him —of threads and bubbles?

This man can kill us all. He has stripped this house of its servants, its goods, its cattle. He has destroyed them or he has sent them through the gate before him —and means to follow.

—Humankind —has refused the trap.

What is she telling him?

'Change,' Morgaine said, 'is very possible. That is the work I do.'

'Andthis —for heir,' Skarrin said. 'This for companion. His get—for inheritors.'

'Come with me,' Morgaine said, 'down the thread that leads to infinity. Or bind yourself more and more irrevocably to the one you have followed thus far. Eventually change may become impossible. But you will not find it inside the patterns; you find it linked to these—to qhal, and to humankind. And to me, lord Skarrin, and to those with me.'

'So I should serve your purposes.'

'Follow your own. Did I ever say I wished to share more than a road and the pleasure of your company? We will bid one another farewell—in time, in time I cannot predict, mylord skarrin, nor can you. thatis chance, my lord Skarrin. Have you grown too attached to this age and to what is? Have you found your own end of time, and are you content with solitude among your subjects—or do I tempt you?'

'You tempt me.'

'We have a horse to spare.' She held Vanye's arm the tighter, and laughed softly. 'What want you, an entourage, a clutter of servants, lord Skarrin? I have my few, who will serve you the same asme. a horse, a bedroll, and the sky overhead—your bones are still young, and your heart is not that cold. come and learn what a younger generation has learned.'

The image smiled, slowly and fondly. 'Was Anjhurin—fate's way of creating you—who see no wider than that?'

'Perhaps that is all there is worthwhile, my lord kinsman. Freedom.'

'Freedom! Oh, young cousin, lady, you mistake the roof for the sky. We are prisoners, all. Inside the bubble we work what we will and we shift and change. The gates end and the gates begin. And all the hope you bring me is that the contagion is spreading and the bubble widens. Is that cause to hope? I think not. In the wide universe we are still without significance.'

'You are melancholy, my lord of shadows.'

'I am a god. The cattle have made me so.' There came laughter, soft and terrible. 'Tell me, is that not cause for melancholy?'

'They name me Death. Is it not reasonable that I am the youngest of us, and the most cheerful?' Again she laughed, and stood and leaned against Vanye's shoulder, clasping his arm. 'Few of humankind love me. But, lord of shadows, I shall live longest, and so will those who ride with me. It is helpers I seek. Come ride the wave with me, down to the last shore. Or do you want eternity in Mante, with shapes of your own devising, in a world of your own making? Another stone palace and more worshippers? Come, let us see if we can shake the worlds.'

The image faded abruptly to dark. The hall was very still, except the random shift of a horse's foot, which rang like doom on the pavings.

'What are you saying?' Chei asked, suddenly breaking that peace. 'What are you,