“Lady,” he said, “this—this thing that was done at Irien, killing men without a blow being struck … when we go there, could not Thiye send this wind down on us too?”
“If he knew the moment of our coming, yes. The wind—the wind was the very air rushing into that open Gate, a field cast to the Standing Stone in Irien. It opened some gulf between the stars. To maintain it extended more than a moment as it was would have been disaster to Hjemur. Even he could not be that reckless.”
“Then, at Irien—he knew.”
“Yes, he knew.” Morgaine’s face grew hard again. “There was one man who began to go with us, who never stood with us at Irien—he that wanted Tiffwy’s power, that betrayed Tiffwy with Tiffwy’s wife—that later stood tutor of Edjnel’s son, after killing Edjnel.”
“Chya Zri.”
“Aye, Zri, and to the end of my days I will believe it, though if it was so he was sadly paid by Hjemur. He aimed at a kingdom, and the one he had of it was not the one he planned.”
“Liell.” Vanye uttered the name almost without thinking it, and felt the sudden impact of her eyes upon his.
“What makes you think of him?”
“Roh said that there was question about the man. That Liell is … that he is old, liyo, that he is old as Thiye is old.”
Morgaine’s look grew intensely troubled. “Zri and Liell. Singularly without originality, to have drowned all the heirs of Leth—if drowned they were.”
He remembered the Gate shimmering above the lake, and knew what she meant. Doubts assailed him. He ventured a question he fully hated to ask. “Could you—live by this means, if you wished?”
“Yes,” she answered him.
“Have you?”
“No,” she said. And, as if she read the thing in his mind: “It is by means of the Gates that it is done, and it is no light thing to take another body. I am not sure myself quite how it is done, although I think that I know. It is ugly: the body must come from someone, you see. And Liell, if that is true, is growing old.”
He shivered, remembering the touch of Liell’s fingers upon his arm, the hunger—he read it for hunger even then—within his eyes. Come with me and I will show you, he had said. She will have the soul from you before she is done. Come with me, Chya Vanye. She lies. She has lied before.
Come with me.
He breathed an oath, a prayer, something, and stumbled to his feet, to stand apart a moment, sick with horror, Sensitive for the first time to his youth, his trained strength, as something that had been the object of covetousness.
He felt unclean.
“Vanye,” she said, concern in her voice.
“They say,” he managed then, turning to look at her, “that Thiye is aging too—that he has the look of an old man.”
“If,” she said levelly, “I am dead or lost and you go against Hjemur alone—do not consider being taken prisoner there. I would not by any means, Vanye.”
“Oh Heaven,” he murmured. Bile rose in his throat. Of a sudden he began to comprehend the stakes in these wars of qujal and men, and the prize there was for losing. He stared at her—he knew, like the veriest innocent, and met a lack of all proper horror.
“Would you do this?” he asked.
“I think that one day,” she said, “to do what I must do, I would have to consider it.”
He swore. For a very little he would have left her in that
moment. She began at last to show concern of it, the smallest impulse of humanity, and it was that which held him.
“Sit down,” she said. He did so.
“Vanye,” she said then, “I have no leisure to be virtuous. I try, I try, with what of me there is left. But there is very little. What would you do, if you were dying, and you had only to reach out and kill—not for an extended old age, with pain, and sickness, but for another youth? For the qujal there is nothing after, no immortality, only to die. They have lost their gods, or lost whatever belief they ever had. That is all there is for them—to live, to enjoy pleasure—to enjoy power.”