Kithan walked to the end of the table, steady in his bearing; his delicate features were composed and cold.
“They are leaving,” Kithan said softly.
“I did not,” Vanye protested, “kill your father. It was Hetharu.”
There was no reaction, none. Kithan stood still and stared at him, and outside there was the sound of horses clattering out the gates. Then those gates closed, booming, inner and outer.
Kithan drew a long, shuddering breath, expelled it slowly, as if savoring the air. He had shut his eyes, and opened them again with the same chill calm. “In a little time we shall have buried my father. We do not make overmuch ceremony of our interments. Then I will see to you.”
“I did not kill him.”
“Did you not?” Kithan’s cloud-gray eyes assumed that dreaming languor that formerly possessed them, but now it seemed ironical, a pose. “Hetharu would have more than Ohtij-in to rule. Do you think that Roh of the Chya will give it to him?”
Vanye answered nothing, not knowing where this was tending, and liking it little. Kithan smiled.
“Would this cousin of yours take vengeance for you?” asked Kithan.
“It might be,” Vanye answered, and Kithan still smiled.
“Hetharu was always tedious,” Kithan said.
Vanye drew in a breath, finally reading him. “If you aim at your brother—free me. I am not Roh’s ally.”
“No,” said Kithan softly. “Nor care I. It may be that you are guilty; or perhaps not. And that is nothing to me. I see no future for any of us, and I trust you no more than Hetharu should have trusted your kinsman.”
“Hetharu,” Vanye said, “killed your father.”
Kithan smiled and shrugged, turned his shoulder to him. He made a signal to one of the men with him, toward the door. That man summoned others, who held between them a small and tattered shadow.
Jhirun.
He could not help her. She recognized him as he moved a little into the torchlight. Her shadowed face assumed a look of anguish. But she said nothing, seeing him, nor cried out. Vanye lowered his eyes, apology for all things between them, lifted them again. There was nothing that he could say to ease her plight, and much that he could say to make it worse, making clear his regard for her.
He turned from the sight of her and of them, and walked back to stare out the window.
“Make a fire in the west tower hall,” Kithan bade one of the guards.
And they withdrew, and the door closed.
Chapter Ten
The thunder rumbled almost constantly, and in time the torches, whipped by the wind that had free play through the small cell, went out, one by one, leaving dark. Vanye sat by the window, leaning against the stones, letting the cold wind and spattering rain numb his face as his hands long since were numb. The cold eased the pain of bruises; he reckoned that if it also made him fevered, if they delayed long enough, then that was only gain. He blinked the water from his eyes and watched the pattern of lightning on the raindrops that crawled down the stones opposite the narrow window. So far as it was possible, he concentrated entirely on that slow progress, lost in it.
Somewhere by the gate a bell began to ring, monotone and urgent. Voices shouted, lost in the thunder. The burial party had returned, he thought, and sharper fear began to gather in him; he fought it with, anger, but the taste of it was only the more bitter, for he was angry most of all that he was without purpose in his misery, that he was seized into others’ purposes, to die that way: child-innocent, child-ignorant—he had trusted, had expected, had assumed.
Likewise Roh was being slowly ensnared, carefully maneuvered, having taken to himself allies without law, adept in treacheries of a breed unimagined in Andur-Kursh. Best that Roh perish—and yet he did not entirely wish it: rather that Hetharu would find himself surprised, that Roh would repay them—bitterly.
There was nothing else.
The bell still rang. And now there came the tread of many men in the corridors, echoing up and down the winding halls—a scrape of stone in the hall outside, the bolt crashing back.
There were guards, rain still glistening on their demon-faced helms and the scale of their armor in the torchlight they brought with them. Vanye gathered himself to his feet on the second try, came with them of his own accord as far as the hall, where he might reckon their number.
There were eight, ten, twelve of them. So many? he wondered bitterly, astonished that they could so fear him, reckoning how his hands were tied and his legs, numb with cold, unsteady under him.
They seized him roughly and brought him down the corridor, and down and down the spirals, past the staring white faces of delicate
Outside was rain and torchlight, and a confused rabble, a mass of faces shouting, drowning the noise of the bell.
Vanye set his feet, resisted desperately being brought out into that; but the guards formed about him with pikes levelled, and others forced him down the steps. Mad faces surrounded them, rocks flew: Vanye felt an impact on his shoulder and jerked back as fingers seized on his shirt and tried to pull him away from the guards. A man went down then with a pike through his belly, writhing and screaming, and the men-at-arms hurried, broke through the mass: Vanye no longer resisted the guards, fearing the mob’s violence more.
And the bell at the gate still tolled, adding its own mad voice to the chaos. A door in the barbican tower opened, more guards ready to take them into that refuge, a serried line of weapons to defend it.
A pikeman went down, stone-struck. The mob surged inward. Vanye recoiled into the hands of his guards as the rabble seized on him, almost succeeding this time in taking him. There was a skirmish, sharp and bloody, peasants against armored pikemen, and the guards moved forward over wounded and dying.
The insanity of it was beyond comprehension, the attack, the hatred, whether they aimed it at him or at their own lords... knowing that Bydarra was slain, that the greater force of the hold had departed. The guards seemed suddenly fearfully few; the power that Kithan held was stretched thin in Ohtij-in amid this violence that surged within the court, outside its doors. The madness cared no longer what it attacked.
There was a sound, deep and rumbling, that shook the walls, that wrung horrified screams from the surging mob—that stopped the guards in their tracks.
And the gate vanished in a second rumbling of stones: the arch that had spanned it collapsed, the stones whirling away like leaves into darkness, so that little rubble remained. It was gone. The mob shrieked and scattered, abandoned improvised weapons, a scatter of staves and stones on the cobbles; and the guards levelled futile weapons at that incredible sight.
In that darkness where the gate had been was a shimmer, and a rider, white-cloaked, on a gray horse, a shining of white hair under the remaining torches; and the glimmering was a drawn sword.
The blade stayed unsheathed. It held darkness entrapped at its tip, darkness that eclipsed the light of torches where it was lifted. The gray horse moved forward a pace; the crowd shrieked and fled back.
Morgaine.
She had come to this place, come after him. Vanye struggled to be free, feeling a wild urge to laughter, and in that moment his guards cast him sprawling and fled.
He lay still, for a moment dazed by his impact on the wet paving. He saw Siptah’s muddy hooves not far from his head as she rode to cover him, and he did not fear the horse; but above him he saw Morgaine’s outstretched hand, and Changeling unsheathed, shimmering opal fires and carrying that lethal void at its tip: oblivion uncleaner than any the
He feared to move while that hovered over him. “Roh—” he tried to warn her; but his hoarse voice was lost in the storm and the shouting.
“
