Gate of Ivrel

alone into Hjemur... he perhaps feared to die less than he feared to be proved weak.

Vanye bowed an awkward respect to his brother. “Likely we will die,” he said, that sure knowledge a weight of guilt at his heart. “Erij, lend me Changeling instead. I do swear to you, I will go through with it myself. Whatever can be done by a man carrying that thing, I will do. I will hand you Ra-hjemur if I live, and if I do not, then it was impossible anyway. Erij, I mean it. I owe you to do that.”

Erij gave a short and uneasy laugk, tucked his handless arm behind him. “Your gratitude is unnecessary, bastard brother. The fact is, I dropped the sword-sheath and came back after it.”

“You came back in time,” Vanye insisted doggedly. “Erij, do not make it nothing. I know what you did; and I say I would do this.”

“You are expert in treachery, and I am not about to trust you, especially where she is concerned. You are trying to delay me now, and there is an end of it. Get mounted.”

He could not hold the course Erij set. He came near to falling as they took a slippery downslope, hung on grimly, but dropped a rein. The horse stopped at the bottom as a consequence, well-trained, stood with its own sides heaving between his knees, and Vanye slowly bent over the saddle, trying to clear his vision and making no effort to recover the lost rein.

Erij rode close to him, hit his horse and started it forward. He clung, but the horse stopped again, and he disregarded Erij and used his remaining strength to climb down and walk, leading his horse, toward a place where a flat rock promised a place to sit. He walked like a drunken man, and ached so that he more fell down than sat down when he reached it He lay over on his side, tucked his limbs up against the cold and simply ignored Erij’s attempts to rouse him: a time to let the pain leave his gut—it was all he asked.

Erij pulled at him roughly, and Vanye realized finally that Erij was attempting to lift his head upon his maimed arm; and himself took the wine flask and drank.

“You are chilled,” Erij said distantly. “Sit, sit up.”

He understood then that Erij was trying to put his cloak about him, and leaned against his brother, warmed against him so that finally he began to shiver and abused muscles began to knot up in reaction to cold.

“Drink,” said Erij again. he drank. Then, briefly, he slept

He meant it to be brief, only a closing of his eyes. But he awoke with the sun warming him, and Erij sitting nearby with Changeling tucked within his arms as Morgaine was wont to rest. Erij did not sleep: Vanye’s first move brought him alert and sharp-eyed with suspicion.

“There is food,” said Erij after a moment. “Get to horse and we will eat in the saddle. We have wasted enough time.”

He did not contest the order, but dragged his aching limbs up and obeyed. There was an edge to the wind when they were out of the fold of the hill; he was glad of the little bit of wine Erij shared with him, and the coarse, crumbling bread and strong cheese. Food put strength into him. He looked at his brother in the daylight and saw a man equally haggard, shadow-eyed, hollow-cheeked, unshaven; but at a sane pace and with provisions to last them, he reckoned their chances of reaching Ra-hjemur better, at least, than he had reckoned them last night.

“They are surely making little better time than we,” he said to Erij. “Ahead of us that they are... still, there is a limit to their horses, and their strength.”

“It is possible that we can overtake them,” said Erij. “It is at least possible.”

Erij seemed soberly sane after the impulses of the night had run themselves out: for a moment there seemed even implied apology in his tone. Vanye snatched at it instantly.

“I am stronger,” Vanye said. “I could go on. Listen to me. You have made a kind of Claiming; and once I am quit of my oath to her, then I serve your interests at that point, and I will hold Ra-hjemur for you.”

“And of course the witch would let you.”

“She has no ambitions for Ra-hjemur: only to settle with Thiye and then to go her own way. She will not come back. She is no threat to you, none. Erij, I beg you, I earnestly beg you, do not seek to kill her.”

“You have to ask that, of course, being ilin to her; I respect that. But knowing that—of course I have to go with you into Ra-hjemur and above all I will not put this blade into your loyal hands, bastard brother. You had me willing to believe you once, and that cost me, that cost me bitterly in lives and in honor. Do not expect me to make the same mistake twice.”

Then, Vanye concluded, he must obtain the blade from Erij by force or by theft, or somehow deceive Erij so that Erij himself would do what had to be done—oath-breaking and murder at once.

And ever since he had known of Morgaine what must be done, he had begun to suspect what manner of death there would be for him when he had obeyed her orders.

Its field directed at its own source of power would effect the ruin of all the Gates, she had said. And: Cast back within the Gate itself, it would be the same: unsheathe it and hurl it through. Either way should be sufficient.

Changeling fed upon the Witchfires of Ivrel. The black void beyond the Gate was that tiny nothingness that glimmered at Changeling’s tip, to seize whole men and whirl them through, winds howling into skies where men could not survive, as the dragon had perished in the snow... other skies where there was never day. Changeling aimed at the Gate would be void aimed at void, wind sucking into wind, ripping at its own substance and drawing all things in.

And perhaps even Ra-hjemur itself would follow it, and all within it The force that had taken ten thousand men upon the winds at Irien and left no trace behind could not be so delicate as to take one man, if rent wide open, destroying itself.

He thought with a shudder of the retreating faces of those he had seen drawn into the field, the horror, the bewilderment, like men new arrived in Hell.

This would be theirs, this ending for the surviving sons of Nhi Rijan, for all their hate and striving against each other.

He kept his face turned from Erij until the wind had dried the tears upon his face, and gave himself up finally to do what he had given oath to do.

There lay before them the greatest valley in the north, and of Hjemur’s hold, a grassy land ringed about by snow-capped peaks, fair to be seen save in one place, and that bare and blighted, even from such a distance.

“That,” said Vanye, pointing to the ugliness, and thinking of the waste the Gates made about them, “that would be Ra-hjemur.” And when he strained his eyes he could see the beginning of a rise there, a hill such as might be Ra-hjemur, hazy in distance.

They had not, after all, overtaken Liell. There lay the road. Nothing moved upon it. They seemed alone in all the land.

“It is too fair,” said Erij, “too open. I should feel naked upon that road, by daylight.”

“By night. That seems the only good sense.”

“I can tell you better,” Vanye said, persistent to the last. “That you let me do this.”

Erij stared at him and seemed to estimate him, so fearful in his own expression that fear of discovery wound itself through Vanye’s belly. Almost he expected some harsh words, some flaring suspicion.

“What is it?” Erij asked, his tone curiously earnest “What is it you expect down there? Has she warned you?”

“Brother,” said Vanye, “the both of you have me by oath; and if my proper liyo is alive and with them... I have one responsibility to Morgaine, another to you. Between the two of you, you will be the death of me, and I could think more clearly if there were not the two of you in one place, about to go for each other’s throats.”

“I will give you this much,” said Erij, “that if she does not seem to need killing, I will not. I have never killed a woman. I do not like the idea.”

“Thank you for that” Vanye said earnestly.

And then, thinking of Liell: “Erij. If it comes to being captured—die. Those tales of Thiye’s long life are true. If they took you, your body would go on ruling either in Ra-hjemur or Morija, but it would not be your soul in it.”

Erij swore softly. ‘Truth?”

“For my sake, you have an ally if Morgaine is alive. Help me set her free and our chances of living become a thousandfold better.”

Erij merely stared at him, hard-eyed.

“I am almost as ignorant as you are,” Vanye protested. “I do not know the half of what is contained down