Vanye knew. He knew it along with the other things that a man like Chei would not, he hoped, comprehend. That understanding of callous murder, that perspective which allowed him to fathom qhalur motives—seemed to Vanye a gulf like the gulf of life and death, the knowledge that everything behind them was dust.
What became of your cousin? Chei had asked. But he could not answer that either: he could explain to no one, except the likes of lord Gault, behind whose human eyes, Chei had said, resided a qhal—
—an old one, Vanye thought. Or one wounded or sick to death. A qhal who had learned a single way to overcome humankind, by the gates and the power they had to conserve a dying mind in a body not its own.
Qhal who use the gates, he thought suddenly, and felt a touch of ice about his heart.
"Liyo," he said. "If qhal are using the gates here—what will prevent them going where they will?"
"Nothing prevents them," Morgaine said, and looked toward him, a sharp, quick look. "Thee understands—nothing—prevents them. It is possible they know we are here, it is possible they are tracking us already, since we disturbed the gate. These are not gentle folk. We have seen the proof of that. I will tell you what I notice: that our friend yonder is not much amazed at our horses or our gear or our companying together. Nor astonished that we should come from the gates, the precise location of which he does not know. Now, that he is not astonished may be that he knows nothing of the gates, but if the qhal in this world do come and go by that one gate, then they have considerable mastery of the other one." She gestured about them. "There are the trees, do you see? That twisting does not happen in one use of the gates. It is frequent that this one gate throws out power. It is not working well. But that they cannot mend it does not mean that they do not use it."
It was not a comforting thought. "Then they might come behind us."
"If what our friend believes is true, yes. They can. And if by chance someone in Mante or Tejhos was warding that gate when we came through, then they do know that it was used."
He cast a sharp look toward the man sleeping in the sun, and experienced a feeling of panic.
It was a guide he did not trust, a burden to slow the horses. Easiest to abandon the man, trust to speed, remembering that the man was lame in one foot and incapable of running.
—There were, to be sure, the wolves.
There was no pain finally—nothing but the wind and the sun on his bare skin, and Chei lay with his eyes shut, the light glowing red through his lids, the delirious play of sun-warmth alternate with the cool wind—in abandonment and safety unimaginable in all his life. He ought to feel shame at his nakedness, but there was little left in a man who had suffered Gault's dungeons. He ought not to be so well content, but he had learned to put all his mind into a moment, even into the trough between two waves of pain, and to find his comfort there, trusting that another such respite would come—if he ignored the pain between.
So with this day. Hell was on either side. But the day was the best he had known since the other side of Gyllin-brook, and if there was hell to come, perhaps—only perhaps—it would be like the waves of pain, the first signal of a rhythm he only now discovered in his life.
That was how he reasoned with himself. Perhaps he had grown mad on his hilltop, conversing with the wolves and calling them by name. But he was very sure that his life was better now; and that tomorrow might well be the same. He had grown comfortable indeed if he could plan for two whole days at once.
Beyond that he refused to think at all. There was danger in such thoughts—danger the moment he began to believe the earnestness in the man's eyes or the easy way this man and this qhalur woman spoke together, argued, shrugged and gestured—everything about them being the way of two comrades in the field, except the little frowns, or the small gestures that said male and female—
As if that could be. As if a human man could willingly go to a qhal—
That a qhal could laugh and trade barbs with her servant, and that a qhalur woman sat here in the woods, secret from Gault and all his doings—a qhalur witch with one human servant and a power which could burn iron—this was a matter that ranged far beyond the things that Chei wanted to think about.
It was only certain that they meant him to go with them; and for the moment that meant he had hope of evading Gault's patrols and a return to that hilltop. That was worth the lady and the bowing of his head, and even—more dangerously—the least small wondering if there was not another kind of qhal, and if the bargain this qhalur lady offered might be real—or if her human servant might wish to be his friend.
The most perilous thing, the most dangerous thing, was to give way to that manner of thinking and even once, even a moment—think that the qhal might take him on the same terms as her servant, or that in her—in the slender person of this qhalur woman—might be safety without compromise, safety such as he experienced now—even power such as a Man could have. If a man could find a qhal-lord so free with her servants—was a man not a fool to refuse to shelter in that shadow, when he had come to the point he would not have lived, otherwise? Was there shame in that?
He did not want to think of that overmuch either. The comfort he was in was sufficient for the day, sufficient for many days. He should turn onto his face and avoid burning his skin. That was the most onerous decision he needed make.
In a little while he moved to the shade and was content to lie still, wrapped in his blanket, his head pillowed on his arm. He slept, and waked to find the smell of cooking on the breeze, at which he wept, a foolish leaking of tears from his eyes and a desire to gather his courage and walk up the hill to them and sit down at their fire and be welcomed there—but he lay there weeping instead, and shaking with fear of trying that, fear that there would be no welcome for him, and that they would only tie him again and his aching shoulders could not bear the pain of another night like the last.
And he did not know why he should weep and shiver like a fool over the smell of cakes on the fire, except he was still alive; and others were not, his brother was not, which thoughts ranged back to the hill and the noise of wolves feeding in the dark—a safe sound, a sound with nothing at all of grief in it, because life shrank to the night, the moment, the instant … in which the wolves were fed and he was still alive.
That was the safe thing to remember. That was a cold time, a numb, down-to-the-rock time, when a man learned that only life was valuable, and only his own life was truly valuable. His comrades kept the wolves from him. That was all. They were there to talk to and fill the silence while they were alive, but a man only wanted to be alive a little longer at the last; and if a friend was the price of that, then a man learned he would pay that, would pay the wolf-price with his dearest friend or with his own brother. That was the safe thing to remember . . . when the smell of bread and the sound of voices waked something so painful, so terribly painful it might shatter him and make him a man again.
So quickly then, the aching knot untied itself, and the tears dried in the wind, and he lay smelling that cooking and thinking that he would sell his soul for a morsel of fresh bread and a little of human laughter. There was so little of it left to sell, so very little of what he had been. He was damned as the qhal and as this man who served her, and if they would take another soul for a little ease and a little food and a betrayal of his own kind, then he was apt enough for that trade.
He might have tamed the wolves, finally, and if they would let him be a wolf, then he need not fear Gault, or anything in the world—for a while. They might well be Gault's enemies: rumor was that the thing which was Gault had no love lost with his Overlord. They might be from Mante, or from somewhere—the woman had said it—that he did not understand; but if they let him be a wolf, if they took him among themselves and there was a kind of man who could walk among the qhal free as that one walked, and still in his own right mind—then there was hope. . . .