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 qujalin ladies, the averted eyes of servants. Cold air struck him as the door at the bottom of the spiral opened, and there before them was the barred iron gate, the keeper running back the chain to let them out.
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 qujal could deal.
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.
“ Dai-khal,” he heard cry from the distance. “Angharan... Angharan!” He heard the cry repeated, echoed off the walls, warning carried strangely by the wind; and thereafter quiet settled in the courtyard, among humans and qujal alike.
Siptah swung aside; Vanye struggled to reach his knees, did so with a tearing pain in his side that for a moment took his breath away. When his sight cleared, he saw Kithan and the other lords in the unbarred doorway of the keep, abandoned by the guards. There was no sound, no movement from the qujal. Their faces, their white hair whipping on the wind, made a pale cluster in the torchlight.
“This is my companion,” Morgaine said softly, above the rush of rain; and it was likely that there was no place in the courtyard that could not hear her. “Poor welcome have you given him.”
There was for a moment only the steady beat of the rain into the puddles, the restless stamp of Siptah’s feet, and came the sound of hooves behind, another rider coming through the ruined gate: the black gelding, ridden by a stranger, who swung down from the saddle and waited.
Vanye gathered his feet under him, careful of the fire of Changeling, that gleamed perilously near him. “ Liyo,” he said, forcing sound into his raw throat, trying to shout “Roh, by the north road, before the sun set. He has not that much start—”
She whipped her Honor blade from her belt left-handed, letting Siptah stand. ‘Turn,” she said, and leaned from the saddle behind him, slashed the cords that held his hands. His arms fell, leaden and painful; he looked at her, turning, and she gestured toward his horse, and the man that held it.
Vanye drew a deep breath and made what effort he could to run, reached the waiting horse and hauled himself into the saddle, head reeling and hands too stiff to feel the reins that the man thrust into his possession. He looked down into that stranger’s scarred face, stung with irrational resentment, rage that this man had been given his belongings, had ridden at her side: he saw that resentment answered in the peasant’s dark eyes, the grim set of scarred lips.
Stone rattled. Dark shapes moved in the misting rain, creeping over the massive stones of the shattered gateway, the ruined double walls: men—or less than men. Vanye saw, and felt a prickling at his neck, beholding the dark shapes that moved like vermin amid the vast, tumbled stones.
With a sudden shout at him, Morgaine reined about and rode for that broken gateway, sending the invaders scrambling aside; and Vanye jerked feebly at the reins, the black gelding already turning, accustomed to run with the gray. He caught his balance in the saddle as the horses cleared the ruined gate and hit even stride again, down the rain-washed stones, passing a horde of those small, dark men. Downhill they rode, clattering along the paving, faster and faster as the horses found clear road ahead. Morgaine led, and never yet had she sheathed the sword, that was danger to all about it; Vanye had no wish to ride beside her while she bore that naked and shimmering in her hand.
Stonework yielded to mud, to brush, to stonework again, and the jolting drove pain into belly and lungs, and the rain blinded and the lightning redoubled: Vanye ceased to be aware of where he rode, only that he must follow. Pain ate at his side, a misery that clutched at muscle and spread over all his mind, blotting out everything but the sense that kept his hand on the rein and his body in the saddle.
The horses spent their first wind, and slowed: Vanye was aware when Changeling winked out, going into sheath—and Morgaine asked things to which he gave unclear answer, not knowing the land or the tides. She laid heels to Siptah and the gray leaned into renewed effort, the gelding following. Vanye used his heels mercilessly when the animal began to flag, fearful of being left behind, knowing that Morgaine would not stop. They rounded blind turns, downslope and up again, through shallow water and over higher ground.
And as they mounted a crest where the hills opened up, a wide valley spread before them, black waters as far as the eye could see, froth roaring and crashing about the rocks and the stonework, swallowing up the road.
Morgaine reined in with a curse, and Vanye let the gelding stop, both horses standing with sides heaving. It was over, lost. Vanye bowed upon the saddlehorn with the rain beating at his thinly clad back, until the pain of his side ebbed and he could straighten.
“Send he drowns,” Morgaine said, and her voice trembled.
“Aye,” he answered without passion, coughed and leaned again over the saddle until the spasm had left him.
Siptah’s warmth shifted against his leg, and he felt Morgaine’s touch on his shoulder. He lifted his head. The lightning showed her face to him, frozen in a look of concern, the rain like jewels on her brow.
“I thought,” he said, “that you would have left, or that you were lost.”
“I had my own difficulties,” she said; and with anguish she slammed her fist against her leg. “Would you could have found a chance to kill him.”
The accusation shot home. “When the rain stops—” he offered in his guilt.
“This is the Suvoj,” she said fiercely, “by the name that I have heard, and that is not river-flood: it is the sea, the tide. After Hnoth, after the moons—”
She drew breath. Vanye became aware of the malefic force of the vast light that hung above the lightning, that lent the boiling clouds strange definition. And when next the flashes showed him Morgaine clearly, she had turned her head and was gazing at the flood with an expression like a hunting wolf. “Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps there are barriers that will hold him, even past the Suvoj.”
“It may be, liyo,” he said. “I do not know.”
“If not, we will learn it in a few days.” Her shoulders fell, a sigh of exhaustion; she bowed her head and threw it back, scattering rain from her hair. She drew Siptah full about.
And perhaps the lightning showed him clearly for the first time, for her face took on a sudden look of concern. “Vanye?” she asked, reaching for him. Her voice reached him thinly, distantly.