Wall of Shiuan

She saw them: and suddenly her face set in anger, such that Vanye felt the force of it to the depth of him; but when he rode to her side, ready to swear that Jhirun’s presence was no planning of his, she said not a word, only caught Siptah’s reins from his hand and set her foot into the stirrup, settling herself into the saddle and at once checking the gray’s forward motion. A cry went up from the crowd. A loose cow darted this way and that in bovine panic through the crowd, and the horses shied and stamped.

“Give me time,” Vanye shouted at Morgaine, “to go back and free the horses in the stalls.”

And of a sudden the earth heaved again, a little shudder, and a portion of the keep wall slid into ruin, another tower toppling, with terrible carnage. The horses plunged, fighting restraint. The wails of frightened people rose above the sound that faded.

From the shaken keep poured other fugitives, the qujal folk, and the black robes of a priest among them—pale folk and conspicuous in the crowd, dazed, ill-clothed for the cold, save for a few house guards in their armor.

“No,” Morgaine answered Vanye’s appeal to her. “No. There is no lingering here. Let us go.”

He did not dispute it, not with the threat of further ruin about them: his Kurshin soul agonized over the trapped horses, and over another ugliness that he had left, half-finished. The collapse of the keep would end it, he thought, burying the dead and the living, ending a thing that should have ended long ago, however the Myya had come through into this land: he took it upon his own conscience, never to tell Morgaine what was pointless to know, never to regret those several lives, that had betrayed her and tried to murder him.

The horses moved, Morgaine riding in the lead, seeking their way through the slow-moving crowd more gently than the war-trained gray would have it. Vanye kept close at Morgaine’s back, watching the crowd, and once, that a sound first drew his attention in that direction, looking at Jhirun, who rode knee to knee with him. He met her eyes, shadowed and fierce, minding him how she had lately urged him to murder—this the frightened child that he had taken back with them, Myya, and living, when he would gladly have known the last of her kind dead.

With all his heart he would have ridden from her now, and with Morgaine have sought some other, unknown way from Ohtij-in; but there was none other, and the Suvoj barred their way within a few leagues. There was no haste, no need of hurrying, only sufficient to clear the walls, where yet a few desperate folk still searched for bodies beneath the massive stones, beyond help and hope.

A line of march stretched out northward from Ohtij-in; and this they joined, moving more quickly than the miserable souls that walked.

And when they were well out on the road came another rumble and shudder of the earth. Vanye turned in his saddle and others turned and looked, seeing the third tower fallen: and even as he gazed, the center of Ohtij-in sank down into ruin. The sound of it reached them a moment later, growing and dying. Jhirun cried out softly, and a wail arose from the people, a sound terrible and desolate.

“It has gone,” Vanye said, sickened to the heart to think of the lives that surely were extinguished there, an unconscious enemy, and the wretched, the innocent, who would not leave off their searching.

Morgaine alone had not turned to see, but rode with her face set toward the north. “Doubtless,” she said after they had ridden some distance further, “the breach at the gate removed stability for the barbican tower; and the fall of the barbican prepared the fall of the next, and so it began—else it might have gone on standing.”

Her doing, who had breached the gate. Vanye heard the hollowness in her voice, and understood what misery lay beneath it. I do not look, she had said, at what I leave behind me.

He wished that he had not looked either.

The rain whispered down into the grass on the hills and into the puddles on the road, and a stream ran the course between the hills, frothing and racing over brush and obstacles. Now and again they rode past a man with his family that had wearied and sat down on the slope to rest. Sometimes they passed abandoned bundles of goods, where some man had cast them down, unable to carry them farther. And once there was an old man lying by the roadside. Vanye dismounted to see to him, but he was dead.

Jhirun hugged her shawl about her and wept. Morgaine shrugged helplessly, nodded for him to get back to horse and forget the matter.

“Doubtless others will die,” she said, and that was all—no tears, no remorse.

He climbed back into the saddle and they kept moving.

Overhead the clouds had begun to show ragged rents, and one of the moons shone through in daylight, wan and white, a piece of the Broken Moon, that passed more quickly than the others; the vast terror that was Li had yet to come.