Fires of Azeroth com-3

  Fires of Azeroth

  ( Chronicles of Morgaine - 3 )

  C. J. Cherryh

  C. J. Cherryh

  Fires of Azeroth

  Prologue

  The qhal found the first Gate on a dead world of their own sun.

  Who made it, or what befell those makers, the qhal of that age never knew or learned. Their interest was in the dazzling prospect it offered them, a means to limitless power and freedom, a means to short-cut space and leap from world to world and star to star-instantaneous travel, once qhalur ships had crossed space at real-time, to carry to each new site the technology of the Gates and establish the link. Gates were built on every qhalur world, a web of eye-blink transport, binding together a vast empire in space.

  And that was their undoing… For Gates led not alone WHERE but WHEN, both forward and backward along the course of world's and suns.

  The qhal gained power beyond their wildest imaginings: they were freed of time. They seeded worlds with gatherings from the far reaches of Gate-spanned space… beasts, and plants, even qhal-like species. They created beauty, and whimsy, and leaped ahead in time to see the flowerings of civilizations they had planned-while their subjects lived real years and died in normal span, barred from the freedom of the Gates.

  Real-time for qhal became too tedious. The familiar present, the mundane and ordinary, assumed the shape of a confinement no qhal had to bear… the future promised escape. Yet once that journey forward had been made, there could be no return. It was too dangerous, too fraught with dire possibilities to open up backtime: there was the deadly risk of changing what was. Only the future was accessible… and qhal went.

  The first venturers found pleasure for a time, learned the age and tired of it, and restlessly migrated again, stage by stage, joined by their own children's children, confounding law and society. In greater and greater numbers they moved on, evading tedium, forever discontent, seeking pleasures and lingering nowhere long-until they crowded into a future where time grew strange and unstable.

  Some went further, pursuing the hope of Gates which might or might not remain where they were predicted to be. More lost their courage utterly and ceased to believe in further futures, lingering until horror overwhelmed them, in a present crowded with living ancestors in greater and greater numbers. Reality began to ripple with unstable possibilities.

  Perhaps some desperate soul fled back; or perhaps the very weight of extended time grew too much. Might-have-been and was were confounded. Qhal went mad, perceiving things no longer true, remembering what had never been.

  Time was ripping loose about them-from ripplings to vast disturbances, the overstrained fabric of time and space undone, convulsed, imploded, hurling all their reality asunder.

  Then all the qhalur worlds lay ruined. There remained only fragments of their past glory… stones strangely immune to time in some places, and in others suddenly and unnaturally victim to it… lands where civilization managed to rebuild itself, and others where all life failed, and only ruins remained.

  The Gates themselves, which were outside all time and space… they endured.

  A few qhal survived, remembering a past which had been/ might have been.

  Last came humans, exploring that vast dark desert of the qhalur worlds… and found the Gates.

  Men had been there before… victims of the qhal and therefore involved in the ruin; Men looked into the Gates, and feared what they saw, the power and the desolation. A hundred went out those Gates, both male and female, a force never meant to know a homecoming. There could only be forward for them: they must seal the Gates from the far side of time, one and the next and the next, destroying them, unweaving the deadly web the qhal had woven… to the very Ultimate Gate or the end of time.

  World after world they sealed… but their numbers declined, and their lives grew strange, stretched over millennia of real-time. Few of them survived of the second and third generations, and some of those went mad.

  Then they began to despair that their struggle was hopeless, for one Gate omitted would begin it all again; one Gate, anywhen misused, could bring down on them the ruin of all they had even done.

  In their fear, they created a weapon, indestructible save for the Gates which powered it: a thing for their own protection, and containing knowledge of Gates, that they had gained-a doomsday force against that paradoxical Ultimate Gate, beyond which was no passage at all-or worse.

  They were five when that Weapon was made.

  There was one who survived to carry it.

  "Records are pointless. There is a strange conceit/ In making them when we are the last-but a race should leave something. The world is going… and the end of the world comes, not for its, perhaps, but soon. And we have always loved monuments.

  "Know that it was Morgaine kri Chya who wrought this man. Morgen-Angharan, Men named her: the White Queen, she of the white gull feather, who was the death that came on us. It was Morgaine who extinguished the last brightness in the north, who cast Ohtij-in dawn to ruin, and stripped the land of inhabitants.

  "Even before this present age she was the curse of our land, for she led the Men of the Darkness, a thousand years before us; her they followed here, to their own ruin; and the Man who rides with her and the Man who rides before her are of the same face and likeness-for now and then are alike with her.

  "We dream dreams, my queen and I, each after our own fashion. All else went with Morgaine."

  –A stone, on a barren isle of Shiuan,

  Chapter One

  The plain gave way to forest, and the forest closed about, but there was no stopping, not until the green shadow thickened and the setting of the sun brought a chill to the air.

  Then Vanye ceased for a time to look behind him, and breathed easier for his safety… his and his liege's. They rode farther until the light failed indeed, and then Morgaine reined gray Siptah to a halt, in a clear space beside a brook, under an arch of old trees. It was a quiet place and pleasant, were it not for the fear which pursued them.

  "We shall find no better," Vanye said, and Morgaine nodded, wearily slid down.

  "I shall tend Siptah," she said as he dismounted. It was his place, to tend the horses, to make the fire, to do whatever task wanted doing for Morgaine's comfort. That was the nature of an ilin,who was Claimed to the service of a liege. But they had ridden hard for more than this day, and his wounds troubled him, so that he was glad of her offer. He stripped his own bay mare down to halter and tether, and nibbed her down and cared for her well, for she had done much even to last such a course as they had run these last days. The mare was in no wise a match for Morgaine's gray stud, but she had heart, and she was a gift besides. Lost, the girl who had given her to him; and he did not forget that gift, nor ever would. For that cause he took special care of the little Shiua bay-but also because he was Kurshin, of a land where children learned the saddle before their feet were steady on the earth, and it sat ill with him to use a horse as he had had to use this one.

  He finished, and gathered an armload of wood, no hard task in this dense forest. He brought it to Morgaine, who had already started a small fire in tinder-and that was no hard task for her, by means which he preferred not to handle.

  They were not alike, she and he: armed alike, in the fashion of Andur-Kursh-leather and mail, his brown, hers black; his mail made of wide rings and hers of links finely meshed and shining like silver, the like of which no common armorer could fashion; but he was of honest human stock, and most avowed that Morgaine was not. His eyes and hair were brown as the earth of Andur-Kursh; her eyes were pale gray and her hair was like morning frost… qhal-faii,fair as the ancient enemies of mankind, as the evil which followed them-thoug
h she denied that she was of that blood, he had his own opinions of it: it was only sure that she had no loyalty to that kind.

  He carefully fed the fire she had begun, and worried about enemies the while he did so, mistrusting this land, to which they were strangers. But it was a little fire, and the forest screened them. Warmth was a comfort they had lacked in their journeyings of recent days; they were due some ease, having reached this place.

  By that light, they shared the little food which remained to them… less concerned for their diminishing supplies than they might have been, for there was the likelihood of game hereabouts. They saved, back only enough of the stale bread for the morrow, and then, for he had done most of his sleeping in the saddle-he would gladly have cast himself down to deep, well-fed as he was, or have stood watch while Morgaine did so.

  But Morgaine took that sword she bore, and eased it somewhat from sheath… and that purged all the sleep from him.

  Changelingwas its name, an evil name for a viler thing. He did not like to be near it, sheathed or drawn, but it was a part of her, and he had no choice. A sword it seemed, dragon-hilled, of the elaborate style that had been fashioned in Koris of Andur a hundred years before his birth… but the blade was edged crystal. Opal colors swirled softly in the lines of the runes which were finely etched upon it. It was not good to look at those colors, which blurred the senses. Whether it was safe to touch the blade when its power was thus damped by the sheath, he did not know nor ever care to learn-but Morgaine was never casual with it, and she was not now. She rose before she drew it fully.

  It slipped the rest of the way from its sheath. Opal colors flared, throwing strange shadows about them, white light. Darkness shaped a well at the sword's tip, and into that it was even less wholesome to look. Winds howled into it, and what that darkness touched, it took. Changelingdrew its power from Gates, and was itself a Gate, though none that anyone would choose to travel.

  It forever sought its source, and glowed most brightly when aimed Gate-ward. Morgaine searched with it, and turned it full circle, while the trees sighed and the howling wind grew, the light bathing her hands and face and hair. An imprudent insect found oblivion there. A few leaves were torn from trees and whipped into that well of darkness and vanished. The blade flickered slightly east and west, lending hope; but it glowed most brightly southward, as it had constantly done, a pulsing light that hurt the eyes. Morgaine held it steadily toward that point and cursed.

  "It does not change," she lamented. "It does not change."

  "Please, liyo,put it away. It gives no better answer, and does us no good."

  She did so. The wind died, the balefire winked out, and she folded the sheathed sword in her arms and settled again, bleakness on her face.

  "Southward is our answer. It must be."

  "Sleep," he urged her, for she had a frail and transparent look. "Liyo,my bones ache and I swear I shall not rest until you have slept. If you have no mercy on yourself, have some for me. Sleep."

  She wiped a trembling hand across her eyes and nodded, and lay down where she was on her face, caring not even for preparing a pallet on which to rest. But he rose up quietly and took their blankets, laid one beside her and pushed her over onto it, then threw the other over her. She nestled into that with a murmur of thanks, and stirred a last time as he put her folded cloak under her head. Then she slept the sleep of the dead, with Changelingagainst her like a lover: she released it not even in sleep, that evil thing which she served.

  They were, he reflected, effectively lost. Four days past, they had crossed a void the mind refused to remember, the between ofGates. That way was sealed. They were cut off from where they had been, and did not know in what land they now were, or what men held it-only that it was a place where Gates led, and that those Gates must be passed, destroyed, sealed.

  Such was the war they fought, against the ancient magics, the qhal-bornpowers. Their journey was obsession with Morgaine, and necessity with him, who served her… not his concern, the reason she felt bound to such a course; his reason was his oath, which be had sworn to her in Andur-Kursh, and beyond which he had stayed. She sought now the Master Gate of this world, which was that which must be sealed; and had found it, for Changelingdid not lie. It was the selfsame Gate by which they had entered this land, by which their enemies had entered, behind them. They had fled that place for their lives… by bitter irony, had fled that which they had come to this world to find, and now it was the possession of their enemies.

  "It is only that we are still within the influence of the Gate we have just left," Morgaine had reasoned in the beginning of their flight northward, when the sword had first warned them. But as the distance widened between them and that power, still the sword gave the same disturbing answer, until there remained little doubt what the truth was. Morgaine had muttered things about horizons and the curving of the land, and other possibilities which he by no means comprehended; but at last she shook her head and became fixed upon the worst of her fears. It was impossible for them to have done other than flee. He tried to persuade her that; their enemies would surely have overwhelmed them. But that knowledge was no comfort to her despair.

  "I shall know for certain," she had said, "if the strength of the sending does not diminish by this evening. The sword can find lesser Gates, and it is possible still that we are on the wrong side of the world or too far removed from any other. But lesser Gates do not glow so brightly. If I see it tonight as bright as last, then we shall know beyond doubt what we have done."

  And thus they knew.

  Vanye eased himself of some of the buckles of his armor. There was not a bone of his body which did not separately ache, but he had a cloak and a fire this night, and cover to hide him from enemies, which was better than he had known of late. He wrapped his cloak about him and set his back against an aged tree. His sword he laid naked across his knees. Lastly he removed his helm, which was wrapped about with me white scarf of the ilin,and set it aside, shaking free his hair and enjoying the absence of that weight. The woods were quiet about them. The water rippled over stones; the leaves sighed; the horses moved quietly at tether, cropping the little grass that grew where the trees were not. The Shiua mare was stable-bred, with no sense of enemies, useless on watch; but Siptah was a sentinel as reliable as any man, war-trained and wary of strangers, and he trusted to the gray horse as to a comrade in his watch, which made all the world less lonely. Food in his belly and warmth against the night, a stream when he should thirst and surely game plentiful for the hunting. A moon was up, a smallish one and unthreatening, and the trees sighed very like those of Andur's lost forests-it was a healing thing, when there was no way home, to find something so much like it. He would have been at peace, had Changelingpointed some other way.

  Dawn came softly and subtly, with singing of birds and the sometime stirring of the horses. Vanye still sat, propping his head on his arm and forcing his blurred eyes to stay open, and scanned the forest in the soft light of day.

  All at once Morgaine moved, reached for weapons, then blinked at him in dismay, leaning on her elbow. "What befell? Thee fell asleep on watch?"

  He shook his head, shrugged off the prospect of her anger, which he had already reckoned on. "I decided not to wake you. You looked over-tired."

  "Is it a favor to me if you fall out of the saddle today?"

  He smiled and shook his head yet again, inwardly braced against the sting of her temper, which could be hurtful. She hated to be cared for, and she was too often inclined to drive herself when she might have rested, to prove the point. It should of course be otherwise between them, ilinand liyo,servant and liege lady .. . but she refused to learn to rely on anyone… expecting I shall die,he thought, with a troubling touch of ill-omen, as others have who have served her; she waits on that.

  "Shall I saddle the horses, liyo?"

  She sat up, shrugged the blanket about her in the morning chill and stared at the ground, resting her hands at her temples. "I have need to t
hink. We must go back somehow. I have need to think."

  "Best you do that rested, then."

  Her eyes flicked to his, and at once he regretted pricking at her-a perversity in him, who was fretted by her habits. He knew that temper surely followed, along with a sharp reminder of his place. He was repared to bear that, as he had a hundred times and more, intended and unintended, and he simply wished it said and done. "It likely is," she said quietly, and that confounded him. "Aye, saddle the horses."

  He rose and did so, troubled at heart. His own moving was painful; he limped, and there was a constant stitch in his side, a cracked rib, he thought. Doubtless she hurt too, and that was expected; bodies mended; sleep restored strength… but most of all he was concerned about the sudden quiet in her, his despair and yielding. They had been travelling altogether too long, at a pace which wore them to nerve and bone; no rest, never rest world and world and world. They survived the hurts; but there were things of the soul too, overmuch of death and war, and horror which still dogged them, hunting them-to which now they had to return. Of a sudden he longed for her anger, for something he understood.

  "Liyo,"he said when he had finished with the horses and she knelt burying the fire, covering all trace of it. He dropped down, put himself on both knees, being ilin. "Liyo,it comes to me that if our enemies are sitting where we must return, then sit they will, at least for a time; they fared no better in that passage than we. For us– liyo, Ibeg you know that I will go on as long as seems good to you, I will do everything that you ask-but I am tired, and I have wounds on me that have not healed, and it seems to me that a little rest, a few days to freshen the horses and to find game and renew our supplies-is it not good sense to rest a little?"

  He pleaded his own cause; did he plead his concern for her, he thought, then that instinctive stubbornness would harden against all reason. Even so he rather more expected anger than agreement. But she nodded wearily, and further confounded him by laying a hand on his arm-a brief touch; there were rarely such gestures between them, no intimacy… never had been.