Exile's Gate Read Free Page A

of moons unnaturally large.

    A third blink, and it was forest, and they were black ravens that cried, and the stones held no present threat.

    Behind them was dust,
friends were long dead, and all they had known was changed and beyond
recall, although the pain of parting was for them as recent as this
morning and keen as a knife. He tried to be wise as his liege and not
to think on it.

    But when they rode over the
shoulder of that hill, the ruin and the forest gave way to barren
plains on their right hand, and sunset on their left. A wolf cried,
somewhere beyond the hills.

    Morgaine let slip the ring
of her sword-belt, letting the dragon-hilted weapon which rode between
her shoulders slide down to her side.

    It had a name, that sword: Changeling. His
own nameless blade was plain arrhendur steel. Besides his sword he had
a bow of arrhendur make, and a quiver of good arrows, and a stone next
his heart, in a small gray pyx, as a great lord had given it to him—as
memory went, it had been very recent. But the worlds shifted, the dead
went to dust; and they were in a place which made that small box no
comfort to him, no more than that ill-omened blade his liege handled,
on the hilt of which her hand rested.

    Birds rose up from that
horizon, black specks against the setting sun at that hour when birds
would flock and quit the field; but not birds of the field, nothing so
wholesome, gathered in hills so barren.

    "Death," Morgaine murmured at his side. "Carrion birds."

    A wolf howled, and another answered it.

     

    They were there again in
the twilight, yellow-eyed and slope-shouldered, and Chei ep Kantory
gathered himself on his knees and gathered up the weapons he had, which
were a human bone in one hand and a length of rusty chain in the other;
he gathered himself to his feet and braced his back against the pole
which his efforts and the abrasion of the chain had cut deeply but not
enough. The iron held. The food was gone, the waterskin wrung out to
its last drops of moisture.

    It would end tonight, he
thought, for he could not face another day, could not lie there racked
with thirst and fever, listening to the dry rustle of wings, the
flutter and flap and the wafts of carrion-stench as a questing beak
would delve into some cranny where flesh remained. Tonight he would not
be quick enough, the jaws that scored his armor, the quick, darting
advances that had circled him last night, would find his throat and end
it. Falwyn was gone, last but himself. The pack had dragged Falwyn's
body to the length of the chain and fed and quarreled and battled while
Chei sank against the post that was the pivot and the center of all his
existence. They had worried the armor to rags among the bones; the
ravens helped by day, till now there was nothing but the bones and
shreds of flesh, too little, perhaps, to content them.

    "Bastards," he taunted
them, but his voice was a croak like the birds', no more distinct. His
legs shot pain through the tendons, his sight came and went. He did not
know why he went on fighting. But he would not let them have his life
unscathed, not do what ep Cnary had done, passing his food and water to
Falwyn, to sit waiting for his death. Ep Cnary had lost a son at
Gyllin-brook. It had been grief that killed him as much as the wolves.
Chei grieved for a brother. But he was not disposed to quit. He worried
at the chain hour by hour of his days, rubbing it back and forth on the
post; he had strained himself against that limit to lay hands on the
rusty links which wolfish quarrels over Desynd's body had pushed a
hand's-breadth nearer: with his belt he had snagged it, some relic of a
previous victim which was now his defense and his hope of freedom. He
battered at the post now with all the force his legs and his failing
strength could muster, and hoped that his weight could avail to snap it
where he had worn it part way through; but it stood firm as the rock in
which it was set: it was weathered oak, and it would not