Exile's Gate Read Free

thin, spiral-twisted trees hid all view of that great span
which was a qhalur Gate—little different than other gates they had
seen, very like one he had known, in a land like this one—but this was
not that land: he knew that well enough, knew it in the patterns of the
rare leaves which grew in dispirited clumps at the end of limbs, lit by
a wan and (he thought, and time proved) westering sun.

    Although the gate behind
them stood still powerful, and disturbed the air and worked at the
nerves, it could not carry them back, and it could not carry them where
they had now to go, or tell them their direction. For now, it was only
downslope, from standing stone to standing stone, in a woods as
unwholesome as the feeling in the air.

    L ife
here—struggled. What had feet to flee, fled; what rooted, grew twisted
and strange, from the trees to the brush, the shoots of which were
tormented and knotted, the leaves of which were deformed and often
curled upon themselves. And the horses laid back their ears and shook
themselves from time to time, likeliest with that same feeling that
made the fine hair stand up on the body and made the ears think that
there was sound where no sound existed, until they had put more and
more of the hill between them and the gate.

    They rode in amid a jumble
of stones and trees, finally, a leaning conspiracy of broken stone
walls and twisted saplings none of which attained great age, but many
of which lay rotten or broken by winds.

    Vanye looked about him as
his white mare danced and fretted beneath him, hooves ringing on
half-buried paving in quick, nervous steps, echoing out of time to the
pace of the iron-shod dapple gray. "This was a keep of some sort," he
murmured, and crossed himself anxiously, forgetting as he forgot in
such moments, that his soul was damned.

    " A
great one," Morgaine answered him, whether that was surmise or sure
knowledge; and Vanye blinked and stared round him a second time as the
horses moved and the ruin of walls unfolded. "We have found our road
again."

    Hooves on stone. Buried
pavings. Vanye conceived of the Road as a thing of all places, all
gates, all skies: it was one Road, and the gates inevitably led to it.

    "No sign of men," he murmured.

    "Perhaps there are none," Morgaine answered him. "Or perhaps there are."

    He took nothing for
granted. He gazed about him with a warrior's practiced eye, looking for
recognizable points, things by which he could make order out of this
jumbled buff and white stone. These flat stretches, these narrower
places were the foundations of houses, craftshops, warehouses.
People—uncountable numbers of people would have dwelt in such a place,
and plied their crafts; but how much land must they till, how feed so
great a number in so rough a land, except they take their provender
from war and tribute? It did not suggest peace.

    He tried to imagine these
ruins near him as they might have stood, bare foundations rising into
forms which (he could not help it) very greatly resembled the keep and
the barracks and the guesting-house of Ra-morij of his birth, in
distant Andur-Kursh, a courtyard cobbled and usually having a standing
puddle down the middle of it, where the scullery dumped its dirty
water. It was gray cobbles in his vision, not the buff stone under the
mare's hooves—was an aching touch of home, however cruel it had been in
his living there.

    He remembered other
crossings of that gulf they had just passed, the night he had looked up
to see two moons, and constellations strangely warped; that night he
had first looked on a sea of black water, among drowning hills; a dawn
that had risen and showed him a land unwalled by mountains for the
first time in his life, horizons that went on forever and a sky which
crushed him beneath its weight. He blinked this ruin about him clear
again, in its desolation; and the cries of birds brought back keen
memory, a presentiment of danger in the sea and the omen of the gray
gulls, and the threat