Gate of Ivrel by C. J. Cherryh Page A

both too weary to contest each other, and led them.
     
    She rested a time, then leaned down and bade him stop, offered to take the reins and walk and lead the horses; he looked at her, tired as he was, and had not wit to argue with her. He only turned his back and kept walking, to which she consented by silence.
     
    And eventually she slept, Kurshin-wise, in the saddle.
     
    He walked so far as he could, long hours, until he was stumbling with exhaustion. He stopped then and put his hand on Siptah's neck.
     
    "Lady," he said softly, not to break the hush of the listening wood. "Lady, now you must wake because I must sleep. Things are quiet."
     
    "Well enough," she agreed, and slid down. "I know the road, although this land was tamer then."
     
    "I must tell you," he continued hoarsely, "I think Chya Liell will follow when he can gather the forces. I think he lied to us in much, liyo."
     
    "What was it happened back there, Vanye?"
     
    He sought to tell her. He gathered the words, still could not. "He is a strange man," he said, "and he was anxious that I desert you. He attempted twice to persuade me—this last time in plain words."
     
    She frowned at him. "Indeed. What form did this proposal take?"
     
    "That I should forget my oath and go with him."
     
    "To what?"
     
    "I do not know." The remembering made his voice shake;
     
    he thought that she might detect the tremor, and quickly gathered up the black's reins and flung himself into the saddle. "The first time—I almost went. The second—somehow I preferred your company."
     
    Her odd pale face stared up at him in the starlight. "Many of the house of Leth have drowned in that lake. Or have at least vanished there. I did not know that you were in difficulty. I would not gladly have left you. I did judge that there was some connivance between you and Liell: so when you did not follow—I dared not delay there between two who might be enemies."
     
    "I was reared Nhi," he said. "We do not oath-break. We do not oath-break, liyo." •
     
    "I beg pardon," she said, which liyo was never obliged to say to ilin, no matter how aggrieved. "I failed to understand."
     
    And at that moment the horses shied, exhausted as they were, heads back and nostrils flaring, whites of the eyes showing in the dim light. Something reptilian slithered on four legs, whipping serpentwise into the thicker brush. It had been large and pale, leprous in color. They could still hear it skittering away.
     
    Vanye swore, his stomach still threatening him, his hands managing without his mind, to calm the panicked horse.
     
    "Idiocy," Morgaine exclaimed softly. "Thiye does not know what he is doing. Are there many such abroad?"
     
    "The woods are full of beasts of his making," Vanye said. "Some are shy and harm no one. Others are terrible things, beyond belief. They say the Koris-wolves were made, that they were never so fierce and never man-killers before—" He had almost said, before Irien, but did not, in respect of her. "That is why we must not sleep here, lady. They are made things, and hard to kill."
     
    "They are not made," she said, "but brought through. But you are right that this is no good place to rest. These beasts— some will die, like infants thrust prematurely into too chill or too warm a place: some will be harmless; but some will thrive and breed. Ivrel must be sweeping a wide field. Ah, Vanye, Thiye is an ignorant man. He is loosing things—he knows not what. Either that or he enjoys the wasteland he is creating."
     
    "Where do they come from, such things as that?"
     
    "From places where such things are natural. From other
     
    tonights, and other Gates, and places where that was fair and proper. And there will be no native beasts to survive this onslaught if it is not checked. It is not man that such an attack wars on—it is nature. The whole of Andur-Kursh will find such things straying into its meadows. Come. Come."
     
    But he had lost his inclination to sleep, and