Vanye bowed slightly in acknowledgment of that reasoning, then lifted up the sword he carried. “And this, uyo, is a blade I do not want to draw. It is a named-blade, and cursed, and I carry it for someone else, in whose service I am ilin and immune to other law. Ask in Ra-morij and they will tell you what thing you narrowly escaped.”
And he drew Changeling part of the way from its sheath, so that the blade remained transparent, save only the symbols on it. The man’s eyes grew wide and his face pale, and his hands stayed still upon his own blade.
“To whom are you ilin,” he asked, “that you bear a thing like that? It is qujalin work.”
“Ask in Ra-morij,” he said again. “But under ilin-law I have passage, since my Uyo is in Morija, and you may not lawfully execute Rijan’s decree on me. I beg you, get down. Strip your
horse of gear and I will exchange with you: I am a desperate man, but no thief, and I will not ride your beast to the death if I have any choice about it. This pony is of San. If yours knows the way home, I will set him loose again as soon as I can find a chance.”
The man considered the prospects of battle and then wisely capitulated, slid down and busily stripped off saddle and belongings.
“This horse is of Torin,” he said, “and if loosed anywhere in this district can find his way; but I beg you, I am fond of him.”
Vanye bowed, then gripped the dapple’s mane in his hands and vaulted up, turned the animal and headed off at a gallop, for there was a bow among the sai-uyo’s gear, which he reckoned would be shortly strung, and he had no wish for a red-feathered Torin arrow in his back.
And from place to place across the face of Morija, his pursuers would have found ready replacements for their mounts, fine horses, with saddles and all their equipment.
The night was falling again, coming on apace, and the signal fires glowed brighter upon the hilltops, one blaze upon each of the greater hills, from edge to edge of Morija.
And when that uyo managed to reach San-morij with the little pony—Yanye intensely imagined the man’s mortification, his fine gear borne by that shaggy little beast—then there would be two signals ablaze on the hill by San-morij and upon that by San-hei, and no doubt which fork of the road he had gone. There would be the whole of San and now the clan of Torin riding after him, and the Nhi and the Myya upon the other road, to meet him at Baien-ei.
To have stripped the man of weapons and armor which he so desperately needed would likely have meant killing him: but Changeling was not the kind of blade that left a corpse to be robbed. To have killed the man would have been well too, but he had not, would not: it was his nature not to kill unless cornered; it was the only honor he still possessed, to know there was a moral limit to what he would do, and he would not surrender it.
It would not be paid with gratitude when Torin caught him, and least of all when they brought him to Nhi and Myya.
Now he and the whole of Ra-morij—and if messengers had sped in the wake of his pursuers, the whole of the midlands
villages by now—knew where he must run. There was a little pass at Baien-ei, and hard by it a ruined fort where every lad in Morija probably went at some time or another in their farings about the countryside. The best pasturage in all of Morija was in those hills, where ran the best horses; and the ruined fort was often explored by boys that herded for their fathers; and sometimes it served as rendezvous for fugitive lovers. It had had its share of tragedies, both military and private, that heap of stones.
And Morgaine’s guide was a Nhi harper with the imagination of a callow boy on a lovers’ tryst, who would surely know no better than to lead her there for shelter, into a place that had but one way out.