Gate of Ivrel

Erij laughed, and the grin slowly died in Vanye’s cold, unhappy stare. “You are naive,” said Erij then. “What she is waiting for is not you, not so small a thing as that to her.”

“What, then, would that be?”

“Will you show me the manner of the power she uses?” Erij asked him. “I do not ask you to break oath. If she seeks the death of Thiye and the fall of Hjemur, I have no quarrel with that; but if she seeks power for herself, then has she not used you shamefully, Vanye? Is that the oath you swore to her, that you would help set her in power over your own people? If that were so, it was a shameful oath.”

“She means to break the power of Thiye,” he said, “there was nothing said of creating any other power.”

“Oh, come,” said Erij. “And having ruined him... what? To live in poverty, to retreat to obscurity? Or to risk being overtaken by the bloodfeuds of so many enemies? Having taken power—she will hold it. You are nothing to her; I offered her to have you back, at the exchange of her word to go south again. She refused.”

Vanye shrugged, for he had known of her that he had no importance when he ceased to serve her purposes: she had never deluded him in that.

“She simply threw you aside,” said Erij. “And what might a heart like that do once in power in Hjemur, when she needs nothing? She will grow the more cold, and the more dangerous. I had rather an enemy with tempers and honest hates. I had rather a human enemy. Thiye is old and half-mad; he muddles about with his beasts and his self-indulgence, and seldom stirs. He has never made war on us, neither he nor his ancestors. But can you see the like of Morgaine being content with things as they are for long?”

“And what would you create of it, Erij?” he asked harshly. “The like of what I have seen in Ra-morij?”

“Look about you at Morija,” said Erij. “Look at its people, It does not fare too badly. Did you see anything amiss, anything in the land or the villages that would be better changed? We have our law, the blessing of church, the peace of our fields and our enemies in Chya fear us. That is my work. I am not ashamed of what I have done here.”

“It is true that Morija is faring well now,” Vanye said. “But you, yourself, you cannot handle the things that Morgaine does; and she will not yield them. Seek her for an ally if you will. That is the best thing you can do for yourself and Morija.”

“Like the ten thousand at Irien that she and her allies helped?”

“She did not kill them. That much is a lie.”

“But that is what came of her help, all the same. And I would not lay Morija and Nhi open to the same kind of thing. I would not trust her. But this– this–I would trust, that she values powerfully.” Excitedly he rose from his place and from the cabinet near the table he drew out a cloth-wrapped bundle. When he took it in his hand the cloth fell away at the top and Vanye saw to his dismay the dragon-hilt of Changeling. “This is what holds her encamped at Baien-ei, her desire for this. And I would wager, brother, that you know something of it.”

“I know that she bids me keep my hands from it,” said Vanye. “Which you had better heed, Erij. She says there is danger in it and that it is a cursed blade, and I believe it.”

“I know that she values this above your life,” said Erij, “and more than all else she possessed. That was plain.” He jerked it back as Vanye tentatively extended his hand toward it. “No, brother. But I will hear your explanation what value it bears to her. And if you are my brother, you will tell me this willingly.”

“I will tell you honestly that I do not know,” he said, “and that if you are wise you will let me return this thing to her before it does harm. Of all things she possesses, this is one she herself fears.”

A second time he reached for it, beginning to be frightened for what Erij purposed with the blade: for it was a thing of power; he knew it by the way Morgaine treated it, who never let it leave her. Of a sudden Erij raised his voice in a shout. The door crashed back: the four Myya were with them.

And Erij shook the sheath from the blade one-handed, and held it naked in his hand. The blade went from translucent ice to a shimmer of opalescent fire, and all the air sang in their ears, a horrid shimmer of air at its tip that of a sudden Vanye knew.

“ No!” he cried, flung himself aside. The air roared into a darkness and a wind that sucked at them, and the Myya were gone, whipped away into some vast expanse that had opened between them and the door.

Erij flung the blade away, sent it slithering sideways across the floor, ripping ruin after it, and of a sudden Vanye caught the sheath and scrambled for the abandoned blade, caught it up in his hand as other men poured through the door. The same starry dark caught them up, and his arm went numb.

He knew then the sensation that had prompted Erij to drop the blade, gut-deep loathing for such power, and suddenly he heard his brother’s voice shout and felt a hand claw at his arm.

He ran, wiser than to turn and destroy... free down the hall and free upon the stairs downward once the uyin there saw the unworldly shimmer of the witchblade in his hand.

He knew his way. There was the outer door. He heaved back the bolt and ran for the stable court, feverishly cursed the weeping stableboy into saddling a good horse for him; and all the while from Ra-morij there was a silence. He kept himself clear from the arrow-slits of the windows, knowing that for his greatest peril, and bade the boy creep down in the shadows and open the gate for him.

Then he sprang to horse, keeping reins and sheath in one hand, holding the shimmering blade in the other, and rode. Arrows hissed about him. One plunged within the well of darkness at Changeling’s tip and was lost Another scraped his horse’s rump and stung the beast to a near stumble. But he was through. Frightened warders unbarred the gates under the menace of that blade and he was free of the outer gate, clattering down the height of the paved road and onto the soft earth of the slopes.

There was no rush to follow him. He imagined Erij cursing his men to order, trying to find some who would dare it—and that Erij himself would follow he did not doubt. He knew his brother too well to think that he would cease what he had decided to do.

And Erij would well know what road he would ride. If he were not Morij-bred, he would have no chance to evade them, to ride the shorter trails and the quick ones, but he had as fine a knowledge of the web of unmarked roads in the country as did Erij.

If was a matter of reaching Baien-ei and Morgaine, if it were possible, before the Myya and their arrows.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PURSUIT WAS behind him again. When he looked back against some patch of unmelted snow in the starlight, he could see a dark knot atop a hill or along the road; but the laboring bay kept the same distance between them.

They had not delayed long. There were most of all the arrows to fear. If they had him once within arrow range, he could not survive it; and he did not doubt that they were Myya, and keen on killing him—it was the only way to safely wrest away the thing he carried.

It was the stopping that was the most dangerous. At times he had to stop and rest the horse; and he chose such times as he did not see them behind him and reckoned that they were doing the same, well knowing that at some time he might make an error, or fail to run again in time. They had come a day across the plain of Morija, and the signal fires were still lit: he could see their glow on hilltops, warning the whole land that there was an enemy abroad, a stranger that meant no good to Morija. That net of signals was the countryside’s defense. All good men would turn out to patrol the roads, to challenge any comer near the vital passes, and he had no wish to kill—or whatever it was the witchblade did to them that fell within its power; besides, some of the countrymen, of clans San and Torin, were no mean archers themselves, and he feared any meeting with them.

At their first stopping he had contrived to sheathe the horrid blade, fearing to expose his own flesh to the danger of that fire, which was that about the Gates themselves. He laid the sheath on the ground and eased the point within, fearful that even that could not contain it. But the light ceased the moment the point had gone within, and then it was possible to lift and bear it like any normal sword.

It was the look of the four men of Myya that he could not get from his mind, that awful lostness as they whirled away into that vast and tiny darkness, men who could not understand how they were dying.