Wall of Shiuan

He thought of the falling towers of Ohtij-in: only a hand’s breadth closer to the sea, Jhirun had laughed, attempting humor. Somewhere the child was still crying. Among the rabble there were the innocent, the harmless.

“Their land,” he said, “is dying. It will come in the lifetime of some that are now alive. And to open the Gates for them—would that not—?”

“Their time is finished, that is all. It comes to all worlds.”

“In Heaven’s good name, liyo–”

“Vanye. Where should we take them?”

He shook his head helplessly. “Are we not to leave this land?”

“There are no sureties beyond any Gate.”

“But if there is no other hope for them—”

Morgaine set Changeling across her knees. The dragon eyes of the hilt winked gold in the firelight, and she traced the scales with her fingers. “Two months ago, Vanye, where were you?”

He blinked, mind thrust back across Gates, across mountains: a road to Aenor, a winter storm. “I was an outlaw,” he said, uncertain what he was bidden remember, “and the Myya were close on my trail.”

“And four?”

“The same.” He laughed uneasily. “My life was much of the same, just then.”

“I was in Koris,” she said. “Think of it.”

Laughter perished in him, in a dizzying gap of a hundred years. Irien: massacre—ancestors of his had served Morgaine’s cause in Koris, and they were dust. “But it was a hundred years, all the same,” he said. “You slept; however you remember it, it was still a hundred years, and what you remember cannot change that.”

“No. Gates are outside time. Nothing is fixed. And in this land—once—an unused Gate was flung wide open, uncontrolled, and poured men through into a land that was not theirs. That was not theirs, Vanye. And they took that land... men that speak a common tongue with Andur-Kursh; that remember me.”

He sat very still, the pulse beating in his temples until he was aware of little else. “I knew,” he said at last, “that it might be; that Jhirun and her kindred are Myya.”

“You did not tell me this.”

“I did not know how. I did not know how to put it together; I thought how things would stray the Gate into Andur-Kursh, lost—to die there; and could not men—”

“Who remember me, Vanye.”

He could not answer; he saw her fold her arms about her knees, hands locked, and bow her head, heard her murmur something in that tongue that was hers, shaking her head in despair.

“It was a thousand years,” he objected.

“There is no time between Gates,” she answered him with an angry frown; and saw his puzzlement, his shake of the head, and relented. “It makes no difference. They have had their time, both those that were born to this land and those that invaded it. It is gone. For all of them, it is gone.”

Vanye frowned, found a stick in his hands, and broke it, once, twice, a third time, measured cracks. He cast the bits into the fire. “They will starve before they drown. The mountains will give them ground whereon to stand, but the stones will not feed them. Would it be wrong, liyo, would it be wrong—once, to help them?”

“As once before it happened here? Whose land shall I give them, Vanye?”

He did not have an answer. He drew a breath and in it was the stench of the rotting land. Down in the camp the tumult had never ceased. Shrieks suddenly pierced the heavier sounds, seeming closer.

Morgaine looked in that direction and frowned. “Jhirun has been gone overlong.”

His thoughts leaped in the same direction. “She would have had more sense,” he said, gathering himself to his feet; but in his mind was the girl’s distraught mood, Morgaine’s words to her, his dismissal of her. The horses grazed, the bay mare with them, still saddled, although the girths were loosened.

Morgaine arose, touched his arm. “Stay. If she has gone, well sped; she survives too well to fear she would have gone that way.”

The shouting drew nearer: there was the sound of horses on the road, of wild voices attending. Vanye swore, and started of a sudden for their own horses. There was no time left: riders were coming up their very hill, horses struggling on the wet slope.

And Jhirun raced into the firelight, a wild flash of limbs and ragged skirts. The riders came up after, white- haired lord and two white-haired house guards.

Jhirun raced for the shelter, as Vanye slipped the ring of his longsword and took it in hand: but Morgaine was before him. Red fire leaped from her hand, touching smoke in the drenched grass. Horses shied: Kithan—first of the three—flung up his arm against the sight and reined back, stopping his men. And at that distance he faced Morgaine. He shouted a word in his own tongue at her, in an ugly voice, and then in a shriek of desperation: “Stop them, stop them!”

“From what,” she asked, “Kithan?”

“They have murdered us,” the qujal cried, his voice shaking. “The others—stop them; you have the power to stop them if you will.”

There was ugly murmuring in the camp; they could hear it even here: it grew nearer—men, coming toward the slope.

“Get the horses,” Morgaine said.

Two lights appeared behind the screen of young trees, lights that moved; and a dark mass moved behind them. The halflings turned to look, terror in their faces. Vanye spun about, encountered Jhirun, seized her and thrust her again toward the shelter. “Pack up everything!” he shouted into her dazed face.

She moved, seized up blankets, everything that lay scattered, while he ran for the horses, adjusted harness, that of their own horses and Jhirun’s bay mare as well. The stubborn gelding shied as he started to mount: he seized the saddle-horn and swung up in a maneuver he had hardly used since he was a boy, armored as he was: and he saw to his horror that Morgaine had made herself a shield for the three qujal, they at her back, the mob advancing not rapidly, but with mindless force.

He grasped Siptah’s reins, leaning from the saddle, and spurred forward, through the qujal, reined in with Siptah just behind Morgaine.

She stood still, with him at her back; and faced the oncoming men afoot. Vanye stared at what came, panic surging in him, memory of the courtyard—of a beast without reason in it.

And in the torchlight at the head of them he saw Barrows-folk, and Fwar... Fwar, his scarred face no better for a dark slash across it They came with knives and with staves; and with them, panting in his haste, came the priest Ginun.

“ Liyo!” Vanye said, with all the force in him. “To horse!”

She moved, nothing questioning, turned and sprang to the saddle in a single move. He kept his eye on Fwar in that instant, and saw murder there. In the next moment Morgaine had swung Siptah around to face them, curbing him hard, so that he shied up a little. She unhooked Changeling, held it across the saddlebow.

“Halflings!” someone shouted, like a curse; but from other quarters within the mob there were outcries of terror.

Morgaine rode Siptah a little distance across the face of the crowd, and paced him back again, a gesture of arrogance; and still they feared her, and gave back, keeping the line she drew.

“Fwar!” she cried aloud. “Fwar! What is it you want?”

“Him!” cried Fwar, a beast-shout of rage. “Him, who killed Ger and Awan and Efwy.”

“You led us here,” shouted one of the sons of Haz. “You have no intention of helping us. It was a lie. You will ruin the Wells and ruin us. If this is not so, tell us.”

And there arose a bawling of fear from the crowd, a voice as from one throat, frightening in its intensity. They began to press forward.

A rider broke through the qujal from the rear: Vanye jerked his head about, saw Jhirun, a great untidy bundle on the saddle before her, saw the dark arm of the mob that had broken through the woods attempting to encircle them; Jhirun cried warning of it.

In blind instinct Vanye whirled in the other direction—saw a knife leave Fwar’s hand. He flung up his arm: it hit the leather and fell in the mud, under his horse’s hooves. Jhirun’s cry of warning still rang in his ears.