A bay horse rushed past him, a flash of bare legs as he turned, lifting the sword: Jhirun reined in hard and slid down. “Lord!” she cried, thrusting the reins into his hand, and, “Go!” she shouted at him, her voice breaking.
He flung himself for the saddle, felt the surge of the horse as life itself; but he delayed, taut-reined, offered his bloody hand to her.
She stumbled back, hand behind her, the shying horse putting paces between them as she backed away on the corpse-littered slope.
“Go!” she screamed furiously, and cursed him.
Dazed, he reined back; and then he looked upslope, where Morgaine delayed, enemies broken before her. She shouted something at him; he could not hear it but he knew.
He spurred the mare forward, and Morgaine reined about and joined with him in the climb. Ohtija forces wavered before them, broke as horses went
down under Morgaine’s fire. Peasants scattered screaming, confounding the order of cavalry.
They mounted the crest of the hill, toward an enemy that fled their path in disorder, peasants and lords together, entering into that great circle that was the Well of Abarais, where opal lights surged and drifted among the Stones, where a vast blue space yawned bottomlessly before them, drinking in men and halfling riders, seeming at once to hurtle skyward and downward, out of place in the world that beheld it, a burning blue too terrible against Shiuan’s graying skies.
Siptah took the leap in one long rush; the bay mare tried to shy off, but Vanye rammed his spurs into her and drove her, cruel in his desperation, as they hurtled up and into that burning, brighter sky.
There was a moment of dark, of twisting bodies, of shadow-shapes, as they fell through the nightmare of Between, the two of them together; and then the horses found ground beneath them again, the two of them still running, dreamlike in their slowness as the legs extended into reality, and then rapidly, cutting a course through frightened folk that had no will to stop them.
None pursued, not yet; the arrows that flew after them were few and ill-aimed; the cries of alarm faded into the distance, until there was only the sound of the horses under them, and the view of open plains about them.
They drew rein and began to walk the exhausted animals. Vanye looked back, where a horde massed at the foot of Gates that still shimmered with power: Roh’s to command, those who gathered there, still lost, still bewildered.
About them stretched a land as wide and flat as the eye could reach, a land of grass and plenty. Vanye drew a deep breath of the air, found the winds clean and untainted, and looked at Morgaine, who rode beside him, not looking back.
She would not speak yet. There was a time for speaking. He saw the weariness in her, her unwillingness to reckon with this land. She had run a long course, forcing those she could not lead.
“I needed an army,” she said at last, a voice faint and thin. “There was only one that I could manage, that could breach his camp. And it was very good to see thee, Vanye.”
“Aye,” he said, and thought it enough. There was time for other things.
She drew Changeling, by it to take their bearings in this wide land.
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER Nineteen
The men passed, carts and wagons and what animals could be forced, unwilling, into that terrible void. Jhirun lay between the cooling body of the black horse and the jumble of rocks, and gazed with horror up that hill, at the swirling fires that were the Well, that drank in all that came. Straggling horsemen on frightened mounts; peasants afoot; rank on rank they came, all the host of Shiuan and Hiuaj, women of the Shiua peasants and of the glittering qujal, men that worked the fields and men that bleached their hair and wore the black robes of priests, fingering their amulets and invoking the blind powers that drank them in. Some came with terror and some few with exaltation; and the howling winds took them, and they passed from view.