C. Cherryh - Exiles Gate

It was old Kurshin she spoke, awkward in the things for which the qhalur language had ready words, which conjured the inner workings of the gates and the things she had showed him, how to redirect the power like damming one stream and opening another, to flood throughout the channels and destroy the means to reactivate it.

"I have set it to destroy the core-tap," she said in the qhalur tongue, meaning the line of power which ran from the earth's deep heart.

And everything round about it. Such a thing, she had told him—might cause havoc with a world, involving gate-force and the power in the earth itself. I do not know what happens thereafter, she had said. No one comes through such a gate again — or any of the gates linked with it. It is no good thing for the world. And I would not willingly do it. Time itself closes in on a gate once it is shut. Ordinarily, time itself will destroy one as thoroughly in a few years without touching the core, and there is no need for such a catastrophe. And I do as little as I dare.

He thought on the city spread about the hill of Neneinn, the countless lives, the city on the brink of a well only gate-force or cataclysm could have shaped; and his gut and his knees went to water.

It was a death-sentence. That was the wailing, that he had never heard, the threat to life all about this world's gates—Morund and Tejhos and Mante and wherever else gates had their veins of power sunk into this world's heart.

"How much time do we have?" he asked.

"Three hours," she said, qhalur-reckoning. He measured it against the daylight and the sun, Kurshin-fashion, and there was ice about his heart. "I dared not give it more time," she said. "This is a qhalur city. And there is the warden down at Seiyyin Neith, if he is still there and not fled with the rest—"

"One of his guards might solve matters for us," he said, reckoning—O Heaven, what was he become—to think cold-bloodedly where they should get a victim?

"We cannot know it if they do. Do not speak of it to our comrades. Does thee hear?"

He saw Chei and Hesiyyn waiting for them at the intersection of the corridors, saw their anxious faces.

'Does thee hear?'

"Aye," he said, clutching the remnants of his soul to him; and no likelihood that fate would offer better.

Like the men who had surrendered; like the forty on the road; like the city spread below them, doomed with the gate, men and women and babes in cradle—

For the sake of all the worlds, she told him. All the worlds was too large a thing for a man's heart to understand, when it was the one under his feet and the lives around him and the murder and the choices were his.

Not tell them—not offer even the chance to choose or to fight—

"Come," she said to Chei and Hesiyyn, gathering them up as they strode along toward the hall where they had left the horses and where Rhanin stood guard. "We are bound for the gate. Hurry. There is not that much time. I have set it to seal behind us and there will be no following after us."

They did not question. They kept pace with weapons still in their hands, and Chei whistled to Rhanin and called to him as they came into the hall.

"We are bound for the gate," Chei told Rhanin as the archer lowered his bow and met them there, where he had herded the horses into a corner of the hall. "Quickly. Come, man. The lady is keeping her promises."

But from Rhanin there was no such eagerness. "My lord Chei," he said. "My lady—I have a wife—"

O Heaven, Vanye thought.

"—I beg your leave," Rhanin said. "Let me go bring her."

Chei looked to Morgaine.

"No," Morgaine said. "There is no time. That gate will seal, and there will be no more passages; and if we do not get there in time, there will be none for us."

"How long?" Chei asked.

"An hour," Morgaine said. "Perhaps. Skarrin has done damage I cannot correct. We have no time, man, and your lord has need of you and I do—where we go is no place for a hallbred woman. A hard trail and a long one in sun and storm and lightning; and war, man, that I can promise you. Come with your lord, and hurry about it."

"I cannot." There was torment in Rhanin's brown eyes. "Lord Chei—I cannot leave her."

He turned and went to the horses. Morgaine lifted the black weapon in threat. "Stop!" she cried; and: "My lady!" Chei exclaimed.

Rhanin stopped, but he did not turn. After a few heartbeats he started walking again.

Morgaine let fall her hand. She stood in silence as Rhanin mounted up. "Fare well," she said quietly then. "Fare well, Rhanin."

Rhanin cut the tether of the remount he led, gave it to Hesiyyn, and saluted his lord and the rest of them, before he swung up to the saddle and rode, black shadow against the light, for the stable-court and the city below.

"Mount up!" Morgaine bade them.

Vanye swallowed against the knot in his throat and went first for Siptah's reins, to bring the gray horse to his liege while the others sought their own. He held her stirrup for her. He did not look in her eyes. She did not, for all he knew, try to meet his.

She said no word at all, nor quarreled with him that he did her these courtesies.

He must, he thought. He had no words to tell her he was with her.

He felt the shorn hair about face and neck, and it seemed apt, of a sudden, the felon's mark, the mark of an honorless man, penance for Mante, for Rhanin and his wife, for lies and for murder yet to do.

Honest men, Morgaine had said, must fight us. Brave men must.

"We have to find the way out in this warren," Morgaine said shortly. "And hope the stable court leads to some road up the hill—"

"No need to search for it," Chei said, drawing his horse alongside in the hall. "There is a way from the stable court. Gault's memory is clear enough on that. I came up from the city—but Gault was here. Follow me."

It was leftward Chei led, beyond the fountain. The blaze-faced bay lipped up some meager spillage of grain on the dirt by the stables nearby: "I will get him," Vanye said, distractedly—to leave the poor brave beast to Mante's fate seemed impossible to him, was, at least, one death he could prevent. He rode wide of the group, leaned from his saddle and snagged the reins that had fallen as the animal lowered his head. It did not want to come. It jolted his arm, then surrendered, of habit, perhaps, and followed.

He overtook the others before they had gotten to the stable-gate, never having taken his eyes off them, and Morgaine acknowledged the rescue with a worried frown, a flicker of the eyes which understood him entirely, as Chei got down from his horse and pushed at the latch. "Let it free outside," she said. "It will balk at the gate. We cannot afford difficulties."

It was true. He knew that it was. He held onto the reins as the stable-gate swung wide on a long colonnade, and Chei mounted up again. He drew the horse along with them as they rode that long course to a second gate, the latch of which was high enough for Chei to trip from horseback; and that gate opened out on a road and a barren hill, where standing stones made an aisle leading upward.

"At least the saddle," he said, then, outside; and slid down while the whole company waited, and hastily loosed the bay's girth and tumbled the saddle off; unbuckled the bridle and threw it away, and sent the confused horse off with a hard slap on the rump. He did the same for the horse Hesiyyn led, then, and sent it off after its fellow.

He came close to tears, then. He turned and flung himself to the saddle, and swallowed down that impulse.

Fool, he told himself, to weep for a pair of horses, when there is so much else we do. It belongs to this world, that is all.

And there may indeed be trouble—at the Gate.