“They are surely making little better time than we,” he said to Erij. “Ahead of us that they are … still, there is a limit to their horses, and their strength.”
“It is possible that we can overtake them,” said Erij. “It is at least possible.”
Erij seemed soberly sane after the impulses of the night had
run themselves out: for a moment there seemed even implied apology in his tone. Vanye snatched at it instantly.
“I am stronger,” Vanye said. “I could go on. Listen to me. You have made a kind of Claiming; and once I am quit of my oath to her, then I serve your interests at that point, and I will hold Ra-hjemur for you.”
“And of course the witch would let you.”
“She has no ambitions for Ra-hjemur: only to settle with Thiye and then to go her own way. She will not come back. She is no threat to you, none. Erij, I beg you, I earnestly beg you, do not seek to kill her.”
“You have to ask that, of course, being ilin to her; I respect that. But knowing that—of course I have to go with you into Ra-hjemur and above all I will not put this blade into your loyal hands, bastard brother. You had me willing to believe you once, and that cost me, that cost me bitterly in lives and in honor. Do not expect me to make the same mistake twice.”
Then, Vanye concluded, he must obtain the blade from Erij by force or by theft, or somehow deceive Erij so that Erij himself would do what had to be done—oath-breaking and murder at once.
And ever since he had known of Morgaine what must be done, he had begun to suspect what manner of death there would be for him when he had obeyed her orders.
Its field directed at its own source of power would effect the ruin of all the Gates, she had said. And: Cast back within the Gate itself, it would be the same: unsheathe it and hurl it through. Either way should be sufficient.
Changeling fed upon the Witchfires of Ivrel. The black void beyond the Gate was that tiny nothingness that glimmered at Changeling’s tip, to seize whole men and whirl them through, winds howling into skies where men could not survive, as the dragon had perished in the snow … other skies where there was never day. Changeling aimed at the Gate would be void aimed at void, wind sucking into wind, ripping at its own substance and drawing all things in.
And perhaps even Ra-hjemur itself would follow it, and all within it. The force that had taken ten thousand men upon the winds at Irien and left no trace behind could not be so delicate as to take one man, if rent wide open, destroying itself.
He thought with a shudder of the retreating faces of those he
had seen drawn into the field, the horror, the bewilderment, like men new arrived in Hell.
This would be theirs, this ending for the surviving sons of Nhi Rijan, for all their hate and striving against each other.
He kept his face turned from Erij until the wind had dried the tears upon his face, and gave himself up finally to do what he had given oath to do.
There lay before them the greatest valley in the north, and of Hjemur’s hold, a grassy land ringed about by snow-capped peaks, fair to be seen save in one place, and that bare and blighted, even from such a distance.
“That,” said Vanye, pointing to the ugliness, and thinking of the waste the Gates made about them, “that would be Ra-hjemur.” And when he strained his eyes he could see the imagining of a rise there, a hill such as might be Ra-hjemur, hazy in distance.
They had not, after all, overtaken Liell. There lay the road. Nothing moved upon it. They seemed alone in all the land.
“It is too fair,” said Erij, “too open. I should feel naked upon that road, by daylight.”
“By night?”
“That seems the only good sense.”
“I can tell you better,” Vanye said, persistent to the last. “That you let me do this.”