Wall of Shiuan

“It is locked,” she said, speaking above the roar, “wide open. There is a hold upon it that cannot be broken: Roh’s work. I knew that this would be the case if he reached it first.”

“You can do nothing?” he asked of her; and beyond her shoulder saw the pulsing lights that were the power and life of the Gates. He had borne as much as he wished to bear, and more than he wanted to remember; but he knew too what she was telling him—that here was all the hope they had, and that Roh’s hand had sealed it from them. He tried to gather his thoughts amid the noise: sight and sound muddled together, chaos he knew he would not remember, as he could not remember the between of Gates: he did not know how to call what he saw, and his thoughts would not hold it. Once before he had walked such a hall; and he remembered now a patch of blood on the floor, a corridor, a stairway that was different—as if elsewhere in this building a door lay in ruins and at his side stood a brother he had lost.

Who was dust now, long dead, nine hundred years ago.

The confusion became too much, too painful. He watched Morgaine turn and touch the panel again, doing battle with something he did not understand nor want to know. He understood it for hopeless.

“Morgaine!”

Roh’s voice, louder than the noise about them.

Vanye looked up, the sword clenched in his fist; and Roh’s shape drifted amid the light and the sound, pervisible, larger than life.

It spoke: it whispered words in the qujalin tongue, a whisper that outshouted the sounds from the walls. Vanye heard his own name on its insubstantial lips, and crossed himself, loathing this thing that taunted him, that whispered his name to Morgaine, whispered things he could in no wise understand: his cousin Roh. He saw the face that was so nearly his own, alike as a brother’s—the brown eyes, the small scar at the cheek that he remembered. It was utterly Roh.

“Are you there, cousin?” the image asked suddenly, sending cold to his heart. “Perhaps not. Perhaps you remain safe at Ohtij-in. Perhaps only your liege has come, and has forgotten you. But if you are beside her, remember what we spoke of on the rooftop, and know that my warning was true: she is pitiless. I seal the Wells to seal her out, and hope that it may suffice; but, Nhi Vanye, kinsman, you may come to me. Leave her. Her, I will not let pass; I dare not. But you I will accept. For you, there is a way out of this world, as I give it to others, if she would permit it. Come and meet me at Abarais: so long as you can hear this message, there is still a chance. Take it, and come.”

The image and the voice faded together. Vanye stood stricken for a moment; and then he dared look at Morgaine, to find question in the look that she returned him—a deadly mistrust.

“I shall not go,” he insisted. “There was nothing agreed between us, liyo–ever. On my life, I would not go to him.”

Her hand, that had slipped to the weapon at the back of her belt, returned to her side; and of a sudden she reached out and took his arm, drew him to the counter and set his hand there, atop the cold lights.

“I shall show you,” she told him. “I shall show you; and on your life, ilin, on your soul, do you not forget it.”

Her fingers moved, instructing his; he banished to a far refuge in him his threatened soul, that shuddered at the touch of these cold things. She bade him thus and thus and thus, a patterned touch on the colors, upon one and the other and the next; he forced it into his memory, branded it there, knowing the purpose of what he was given, little as it might avail here, with Roh’s touch to seal the power against their tampering.

Again and again she bade him repeat for her the things that she had taught; mindlessly Roh’s ghost overhung them, repeating things that mocked them, endlessly, blind, void of sense. Vanye’s hands shook when that began again, but he did not falter in the pattern. Sweat prickled on him in his concentration; yet more times she bade him do what she had shown him.

He finished yet again, and looked at her, pleading with his look that it be enough, that they quit this place. She gazed at him, face and hair dyed with the bloody light, as if searching him for any fault; and above her yet again Roh’s face began to mouth its words into the throbbing air.

And suddenly she nodded that it was enough, and turned toward that door by which they had come.

They walked the long aisle of the room. Vanye’s nerves screamed at him to take flight, to run; but she did not, and he would not. His nape prickled as Roh’s voice pursued them; he knew that did he turn and look there would be Roh’s face hovering in the air—urging at him with reasonings that no longer had allure: better to sit helpless while the seas rose, than to surrender to that, which had lied to him from the beginning, which for a time had made him believe that a kinsman lived in this forsaken Hell, in this endless exile.

The darkness of the stairway lay before them; Morgaine shut the door and sealed it, shook him from his bewilderment to show him how it was done. He nodded blank, heartless understanding, his senses still filled with the sound and the light, and the terror of knowing what she had fed into his mind.

He held what men and qujal had murdered to possess; and he did not want it, with all his heart he did not. He put out his hand to the wall, still blind, save for the beam that Morgaine carried; he felt rough stone under his fingertips, felt the steps under his feet; and still his mind was dazed with what he had seen and felt. He wished it all undone; and he knew that it was too late, that he had been Claimed in a way that had no release, no freedom.

Down and down the curving stair they went, until he could hear the stamp and blowing of the horses— friendly, familiar sound, native to the man who had ascended the stairs; it was as if a different man had come down, who could not for a moment realize that the things he knew outside that terrible room could still exist, untouched, unshaken by what had shaken him.

Morgaine put out the light she bore as they stepped off the last step, and Jhirun came to them, full of whispered questions—her tearful voice and frightened manner reminding him that she also had endured the terror of this place—and knew nothing of what it held. He envied her that ignorance—touched her hand as she gave the reins of his horse to him.

“Go back,” he told her. “Myya Jhirun, ride back the way we came and hide somewhere.”

“No,” said Morgaine suddenly.

He looked toward her, startled, dismayed; he could not read her face in the darkness.

“Come outside,” she said; and she led Siptah through the doorway, waiting for them in the moonlight. Vanye did not look at Jhirun, having no answers for her; he led the gelding out, and heard Jhirun behind him.

“Jhirun,” said Morgaine, “go watch the road with Kithan.”

Jhirun looked from one to the other of them, but ventured no word in objection: she started away, leading her horse down the long aisle of slanting spires to the place where Kithan sat, a shadow among shadows.

“Vanye,” said Morgaine softly, “would thee go to him? Would thee take what he offers?”

“No,” he protested upon the instant. “No, upon my oath, I would not.”

“Do not swear too quickly,” she said; and when he would have disputed her: “Listen to me: this one order— go to him, surrender—go with him.”

He could not answer for a moment; the words were dammed in his throat, refusing utterance.

“My order,” she said.

“This is a deception of yours,” he said, indignant that she did not take him into her trust, that she thus played games with him. “You are full of them. I do not think that I deserve it, liyo.”

“Vanye—if I cannot get through, one of us must. I am well known; I am disaster to you. But you—go with him, swear to his service; learn what he can teach you that I have not. And kill him, and go on as I would do.”

“ Liyo,” he protested. A shiver set into his limbs; he wound his cold fingers into the black horse’s mane, for all that he had trusted dropped away beneath him, as the mountains had vanished that morning beyond the Gate, leaving an about him naked and ugly.

“You are ilin,” she said. “And you take no guilt for it.”

“To take bread and warmth and then kill a man?”

“Did I ever promise thee I had honor? It was otherwise, I think.”

“Oath-breaking... Liyo, even to him—”

“One of us,” she said between her teeth, “one of us must get through. Remain sworn to me in your mind, but let your mouth say whatever it must. Live. He will not suspect you; he will come to trust you. And this is the service I set on you: kill him, and carry out what I have shown you, without end—without end. Win. Will you do this for me?”