Riders were already starting after him. Tumult and shouting were in his wake, though no arrows flew. He did not even seek the hill, to brave that weight of air, that awful climb, not with pursuit and enemies and a frightened horse to confound matters. He headed back along their trail.
If the Gate were barred to him, there was still Ra-hjemur, where Thiye ruled. There was Changeling under his knee, its dragon-hilt familiar to his anxious fingers. With that in hand and the power of the Gate to feed it, he could force his way to
the heart of Thiye’s power, destroy its source, whatever it was, destroy the Gate—destroy himself and Morgaine too, he knew.
And Liell.
• The world had not yet seen what Liell could do with the power of Morgaine added to his own. Thiye was small compared to that evil.
He rode the horse without mercy, whipped the poor beast down snowy slopes and across trails and down, doing all he could to clear Ivrel
Even Liell must have care of him now. Even Morgaine’s other weapons were nothing to the power of the opal blade, that drank attack and cast it elsewhere, that drank lives and cast them into nothing. And armed as he was, with that power in his hands, it was madness to kill the horse that was his best hope of reaching Hjemur: he came to his senses when he had cleared the steepest portion of the road, and come to the main trail. There he slowed his pace at last, let the horse breathe.
Around the limb of the lower slope the main road led, bending toward Ra-hjemur. It must be. There was no other place in Hjemur that could even boast a road.
He kept the horse to a holding pace. Lethen might be reluctant to follow, but Liell would drive them to it—timid as Morgaine avowed herself to be, able to spend others’ lives before her own, she was capable of fearful risks when it became necessary; and Liell surely would prove no different: when caution would not serve, then there would be nothing reserved, nothing. When Liell knew finally that the Gates themselves were at stake, he would surely follow. The only hope was that he had yet to understand what Changeling was, or that a Morij ilin might understand what had to be done with the blade.
A shadow thundered out at him. The black screamed shrilly and shied, and an impact hit his shoulder, tumbling him inexorably over the black’s rump, head over heels, and into snow and hard ice.
Joints moved, bones unbroken, but shaken; he tried to gain command of his battered limbs and move, but a shortsword pressed under his chin, forcing his head down again into the numbing snow. A body hovered over him, the arm that rested across the figure’s knee ending abruptly.
“Brother,” said Erij, whispering.
CHAPTER 10
“Erij.” Vanye tried a second time to rise, and in a sudden move Erij moved back and let him. Then he snapped the Honor blade back into his belt and stalked up the road a space where his horse stood, along with Vanye’s black.
Vanye stumbled up from the ditch, limping, trying vainly to overtake him and prevent him, saw to his dismay that Erij had already found what the black horse bore on its saddle.
A fierce grin spread over Erij’s face as he took the sheathed blade in hand, and with the sheath in the crook of his arm and his hand upon its hilt, he waited Vanye’s coming.
Vanye stopped short of the threat he posed him, still shaking in all his limbs, trying to gather his breath and his wits and frame some reasonable argument.
“There is a qujal out of Leth,” he began, his voice hardly audible. “Erij, Erij, there are Lethen and the devil himself behind me. We are both in danger. I will go with you clear of this road—not try at escape, at least that far. I swear, I swear it, Erij.”
Erij considered, his dark eyes fluid in the dark. Then he nodded abrupt decision, hooked the sheath of Changeling to his own belt—one-handed as he was, he wore it at his hip, not his back—and swung up to mount.