C J Cherryh – Morgaine 02 – Well Of Shiuan

Somewhere by the gate a bell began to ring, monotone and urgent. Voices shouted, lost in the thunder. The burial party had returned, he thought, and sharper fear began to gather in him; he fought it with, anger, but the taste of it was only the more bitter, for he was angry most of all that he was without purpose in his misery, that he was seized into others’ purposes, to die that way: child-innocent, child-ignorant—he had trusted, had expected, had assumed.

Likewise Roh was being slowly ensnared, carefully maneuvered, having taken to himself allies without law, adept in treacheries of a breed unimagined in Andur-Kursh. Best that Roh perish—and yet he did not entirely wish it: rather that Hetharu would find himself surprised, that Roh would repay them—bitterly.

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 hail, 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.

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