C. J. Cherryh - Morgaine 2 - Well of Shiuan

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Well of Shiuan

PROLOGUE

Whoever first built the Gates that led from time to time and space to space surely gained

from them no good thing.

The qhal found the first Gate in the strange ruins of Silen on a dead world of their own

sun. They used the pattern, built other Gates, spanned worlds, spanned stars, spanned time

itself. Therein they fell into the trap, and ensnared others-for qhal experimented in time,

experimented in worlds, gathered beings and beasts from the whole of Gate-spanned space.

They built civilizations, leaped ahead to see their progress, while their subjects, denied access

to the Gates, inched through the centuries at real-time.

At the end of time gathered those who had been through all ages, experienced all things,

lived most desperately. There were ominous ripplings in reality itself, backtime violated,

accelerating disturbance. Some qhal felt it coming; some went mad, recalling truths that were no

longer true, or might have been and would not, and were again-matter and time and space

undone, ripped loose, finally imploded.

Worlds lay devastated. There were only the remnants of qhalur works and the worlds

qhal-tampered; and there were the Gates, flotsam up out of time, untouched by the

catastrophe.

And humans arrived on the ruined worlds, in that patch of space that still bore the scars.

Humans were among the victims of the qhal, scattered on the ruined worlds, with other

species also qhal-like. For this reason alone humans distrusted the Gates, and feared them.

A hundred men and women passed the qhalur Gates, bound they knew not where, armed

to seal the dangerous portals from the far side of space and time, to the very ultimate Gate.

There was a weapon devised for that ultimate passage, an end-all force of Gate-drawn power;

and until that Gate, it was necessary to seal world after world, age after age-a battle perhaps

endless or fatally circular, perhaps limited to qhalur space or cast to Gates the qhal themselves

never made.

There were a hundred at the beginning.

The Gates exacted their toll.

BOOK ONE

". . . Last of all only the woman Morgaine survived, skilled in qujalin witchcrafts and bearing

still that Sword that casts to death. Much of evil she did in Morija and Baien, rivaling all other

evils she had committed . . . but she fled thereafter, taking with her Nhi Vanye i Chya, once of

this house, who was ilin to her and therefore bound by his oath."

-Nhi Erij i Myya, in the Book of Ra-morii

"Chya Roh i Chya, lord of Ra-koris . . . followed the witch Morgaine, for his cousin's sake . .

. but Nhi Erij in his writing avows that Chya Roh perished on that journey, and that the Soul that

possessed the likeness of Roh thereafter was qujal, and hostile to every Godly man...."

-the Book of Baien-an

Chapter One

Seven moons danced across the skies of the world, where there had been one in the days

of the ancients. In those days the Wells of the Gods had been open, providing power and

abundance to the khal who had governed before the time of the Kings. Now the Wells were

sealed, beyond the power of men or khal to alter. Long ago there had been vast lands on all

sides of Shiuan and Hiuaj; but the world now was slowly drowning.

These were the things that Mija Jhirun Ela's-daughter believed for truth.

For all of Jhirun's young life, she had known the waters encroaching relentlessly on the

margin of the world, and she had watched Hiuaj diminish by half and the gray sea grow wider.

She was seventeen, and looked to see Hiuaj vanish entirely in her lifetime.

When she had been a child, the village of Chadrih had stood near the Barrow-hills of

Hiuaj; and beyond that had stood a great levee and a sea wall, securing fields that gave good

crops and pasturage for sheep and goats and cattle. Now there was reed-grown waste. The

three parcels of land that had supported Chadrih were gone, entirely underwater save for the

boundary posts of stacked stone and the useless remnant of the ancient sea wall. The gray

stone buildings of the village had become a ruin, with water trickling even at low tide through

what had been its streets, and standing window-high at Hnoth, when the moons combined. The

roofless houses had become the nesting places of the white birds that wheeled and cried their

lonely pipings over the featureless sea.

The people of Chadrih had moved on, those who survived the collapse of the sea wall

and the fever and the famine of that winter. They had sought shelter, some among the marsh

dwellers at Aren, a determined few vowing to go beyond into Shiuan itself, seeking the security

of holds like fabled Abarais of the Wells, or Ohtij-in, among the halfling lords. The Barrows

had heard tidings of those that had reached Aren; but what had befallen the few who had gone

the long road to Shiuan, none had ever heard.

The breaking of the sea wall had happened in Jhirun's tenth year. Now there was little dry

land in all Hiuaj, only a maze of islets separated by marsh, redeemed from the killing salt only by

the effluence of the wide Aj, that flowed down from Shiuan and spread its dark, sluggish waters

toward the gray sea. In storm the Aj boiled brown with silt, the precious earth washed

seaward, in flood that covered all but the hills and greater isles. At high tide, when the moons

moved together in Hnoth, the sea pressed inland and killed areas of the marsh, where green

grass died and standing pools reeked of decay, and great sea fishes prowled the Aj. Now

throughout Hiuaj, there remained only sparse pasturage for goats and for the wild marsh ponies.

The sea advanced in the face of the Barrows and the widening marsh ate away at their flank,

threatening to sever Hiuaj from Shiuan and utterly doom them. Land that had been sweet and

green became a tangle of drowned trees, a series of small hummocks of spongy earth, reed-

choked passages that were navigable only by the flat-bottomed skiffs used by marsh folk and

Barrowers.

And the Barrow-hills became islands in these last years of the world.

It was Men that had reared these hills, just after the days of the Darkness. They were the

burials of the kings and princes of the Kingdoms of Men, in those long-ago days just after the

Moon was broken, when the khal had declined and Men had driven the khalin halflings into

their distant mountains. In those days, Men had had the best of the world, had ruled a wide,

rich plain, and there had been great wealth in Hiuaj for human folk.

Men had buried their great ones in such towering mounds, in cists of stone: warrior-kings

proud with their gold and their gems and their iron weapons, skillful in war and stern in their rule

over the farmer-peasantry. They had sought to restore the ancient magics of the Wells, which

even the halfling khal had feared. But the sea rose and destroyed their plains, and the last Kings

of Men fell under the power of the halflings of Shiuan. So the proud age of the Barrow-kings

passed, leaving only their burial places clustered about the great Well called Anla's Crown, that

had swallowed up their wealth and returned them only misery.

In the end there were only scattered villages of Men, farmer-folk who cursed the

memory of the Barrow-kings. The old fortresses and burial places were piously avoided by

later generations on the river-plain. Chadrih had been nearer the Barrows than any other village

wished to be; but it had perished last of all the villages in Hiuaj, for all that-which gave Chadrih

folk a certain arrogance, until their own fate took them. And the Barrow-hills themselves

became the last refuge of all; the Barrow-folk had always lived beyond the pale of lowland

respectability-tomb-robbers now, sometimes herders and fishermen, accused (while Chadrih

stood) of stealing livestock as well as buried gold. But Chadrih died and the despised Barrow-

folk lived, southernmost of all Men, in a hold that was a Barrow-king's ruined fortress atop the

last and greatest rock in all Hiuaj, save Anla's Crown itself.

This was Jhirun's world. Sunbrowned and warm, she guided her flat skiff with practiced

thrusts of the pole against the bottom of the channels that, at this cycle of the tides, were hardly

knee deep. She was barefoot, knowing shoes only in winter, and she wore her fringe-hemmed

skirt tucked above the knees because there was none to see her. A stoppered jar of bread and

cheese and another of beer was nestled in the prow; and there was also a sling and a handful of

smooth stones, for she was skillful with the sling to bring down the brown marsh fowl.

There had been rain last night and the Aj was up somewhat, enough to fill some of the

shallower channels, making her progress through the hills quicker. There would be rain again

before evening, to judge by the gathering of haze in the east, across the apricot sun; but high

tide, Hnoth, was some days off. The seven moons danced in order across the watery sky and

the force of the Aj was all that sighed against the reeds. The Barrows that were almost entirely

awash at Hnoth were bravely evident despite the rains, and the Standing Stone at Junai was out

of the water entirely.

It was a holy place, that hewn stone and its little isle. Nearby was a finger of the deep

marshes, and marsh-folk came here to Junai's stone to meet on midcycle days with Barrow-

folk to trade-her tall kinsmen with the surly small men of the deep fens. Meat and shell and

metals were their trade to the marshes; wood and Ohtija gram out of Shiuan and well-made

boats and baskets were what the marshlanders brought them. But more important than the

trade itself was the treaty that let the trade happen regularly, this seasonal commerce that

brought them together for mutual gain and removed occasion for feuds, so that any Barrower

could come and go in Barrows-land in safety. There were outlaws, of course, men either human

or halfling, cast out of Ohtij-in or Aren, and such were always to be feared; but none had been

known this far south for four years. The marshlanders had hanged the last three on the dead

tree near the old khalin ruin at Nia's Hill, and Barrows-men had given them gold for that good

service. Marshlanders served as a barrier to the folk of Barrows-hold against every evil but the

sea, and returned them no trouble. Aren was far into the marsh, and marshlanders kept to it;

they would not even stand in a Barrows-man's shadow when they came to trade, but uttered

loud prayers and huddled together under the open sky as if they dreaded contamination and

feared ambush. They preferred their dying forests and their own observances, that made no

mention of Barrow-kings.

Out here on the edge of the world lay Barrows-land, wide and empty, with only the

conical hills above the flood and the wide waters beyond, and the flight of the white birds

above. Jhirun knew each major isle, each stone's-throw expanse of undrowned earth, knew

them by the names of kings and heroes forgotten outside the lore of Barrows-folk, who claimed

the kings for ancestors and could still sing the old words of the chants in an accent no

marshlander could comprehend. Some few of these hills were hollow at their crest, caps of

stone, earth-covered, that had long ago yielded up their treasure to the plundering of Jhirun's

ancestors. Other mounds still defied efforts to discover the cists buried there, and so protected

their dead against the living. And some seemed to be true hills, that had no hollow heart of man-

made chambers, with king-treasures and weapons. Such as did give up treasure sustained the

life of Barrows-hold, providing gold that Barrows-folk remade into rings and sold anew to

marshlanders, who in turn bought grain of Shiuan and sold it at Junai. Barrows-folk had no fear

of the angry ghosts, their own ancestors, and hammered off the ancient symbols and melted

down the gold, purifying it

And besides the grain the gold bought, they kept goats and hunted, and thus secured a

small source of food independent of that trade. Daily Jhirun and her cousins cut grass and

loaded it on skiffs or on the back of the black marsh pony that they used in the inner hills. By

such means they stored up against the days of Hnoth, and fed their livestock, and had surplus of

cheeses and domestic meat that the marshlanders valued as much as the gold.

The little skiff reached a stretch of faster-moving water, that place where the current of

the Aj reached into the bordering islets, and Jhirun maneuvered into the shallows, holding that

margin with care. Afar off she could see the edge of the world, where the Aj met the devouring

sea, and horizon and sky merged in gray haze. Hereabouts, a great rolling expanse above the

flood, was the hill of Anla's Crown.

She did not mean to go near that place, with its ring of Standing Stones. None ever

approached that hill save at Midyear's Day, when the priests came-her grandfather for

Barrows-hold, and aged Haz for the folk of Aren. Once even Shiua priests had come to it,

down the long road from Ohtij-in: it was that important, one of the two true Wells. But none

had come since the sea wall broke. The rites were now only the concern of Hiua, but they were

by no means neglected. And even on that day the priests remained fearful and ventured no

closer than a stone's cast, Haz of Aren and her grandfather approaching separately because of

their differences. In the old days, Barrow-kings had given men to the Wells there, but that

custom had lapsed when the Barrow-kings fell. The sacrifices had not enlivened the Wells nor

healed the Moon. The Standing Stones stood stark and empty against the sky, some crazily

tilted; and that vast hill that none dared approach save on the appointed day remained a place

of power and tainted beauty, no refuge for men or halflings. Each priest spoke a prayer and

retreated. It was not a place to be alone; it was such that the senses prickled with unease even

when one was coming with many kinsfolk, and the two priests and the chanting-a stillness that

underlay the singing and made every noise of man seem a mere echo. Here was the thing the

Barrow-kings had sought to master, the center of all the eeriness of the Barrows, and if

anything would remain after the waters had risen and covered all Hiuaj, it would be this hill and

those strange stones.

Jhirun skirted widely away from that place, working out of the current, among

other isles. Marks of the Old Ones as well as the Barrow-kings were frequent here,

scattered stones upstanding in the water and on the crests of hills. Here was her

favorite place when she worked alone, here on the margin of Anla's Crown, far, far

beyond the limit that any marshlander would dare to come save on Midyear's Day;

and out of the convenient limits that her kinsmen cared to work. She enjoyed the

silence, the solitude, apart from the brawling chaos of Barrows-hold. Here was

nothing but herself and the whisper of reeds, the splash of water, and the lazy song

of insects in the morning sun.

The hills glided past, closing in again, and she tended now toward the righthand bank of

the winding channel, to the hill called Jiran, after which she was named. It had a Standing Stone

at its crest, like others just downstream at water's edge, and Jiran, like the other hills that

clustered here, was green with grass fed by the sweet water of the Aj. She stepped out as the

skiff came to ground, her bare feet quick and sure on the damp landing. She seized the

mooring rope and hauled the skiff well up on the bank so that no capricious play of current

could take it. Then she set to work.

The insect-song stopped for a time when she began to swing her sickle, then began again

as the place accepted her presence. Whenever she had done sufficient for a sheaf, she

gathered the grasses and bound them with a twist of their own stalks, leaving neat rows behind

her. She worked higher and higher on the hill in a wheel-pattern of many spokes, converging at

the Standing Stone.

From time to time she stopped and straightened her hack and stretched in pain from the

work, although she was young and well-accustomed to it. At such times she scanned the whole

horizon, with an eye more to the haze gathering in the east than to the earth. From the hilltop, as

she neared the end of her work, she could see all the way to Anla's Crown and make out the

ring of stones atop it, all hazy with the distance and the moisture in the air, but she did not like

to look toward the south, where the world stopped. When she looked north, narrowing her

eyes in the hope-as sometimes happened on the clearest of days-of imagining a mountain in the

distant land of Shiuan, all she could see was gray-blue, and a dark smudge of trees against the

horizon along the Aj, and that was the marsh.

She came here often. She had worked alone for four years-since her sister Cil

had wed-and she cherished the freedom. For now she had her beauty, still was

straight and slim and lithe of muscle; she knew that years and a life such as Cil's

would change that. She tempted the gods, venturing to the edge of Anla's hill; she

flaunted her choice of solitude even under the eye of heaven. She had been the

youngest- Cil was second-born, and Socha had been eldest-three sisters. Cil was

now Ger’s wife and always heavy with child, and began to have that leaden-eyed

look that her aunts had. Their mother Ewon had died of birth-fever after Jhirun, and

their father had drowned himself, so the men said-and therefore the aunts had

reared them, added duty, to bow these grim women down with further self-pity. The

three sisters had been close, conspirators against their cousins and against the

female tyranny of their aunts. Socha had been the leader, conniving at pranks and

ventures constantly. But Cil had changed with marriage, and grew old at twenty-two;

only Socha remained, in Jhirun's memory, unchanged and beautiful. Socha had

been swept away that Hnoth when the great sea wall broke; and Jhirun's last

memory of her was of Socha setting out that last morning, standing in that frail,

shallow skiff, and the sunlight streaming about her. Jhirun had dreamed ill dreams

the night before-Hnoth always gave her nightmares-and she had told her dreams to

Socha and wept, in the dark. But Socha had laughed them away, as she laughed at

all troubles, and set out the next morning, thus close to Hnoth.

Still happier Socha than Cil, Jhirun thought, when she reckoned Cil's life, and how few

her own months of freedom might be. There was no husband left for her in Barrows-hold but

her cousins, and the one that wanted her was Fwar, brother of Cil's man Ger and of the same

stamp. Fwar was becoming anxious; and so Jhirun was the more insistent on working apart

from her cousins, all of them, and never where Fwar might find her alone. Sometimes in bitter

fancy she thought of running off into the deep marsh, imagining Fwar’s outrage at being robbed

of his bride, Ela's fey daughter, the only unwed woman in Barrows-hold. But she had seen the

marshlanders' women, that came behind their men to Junai, women as grim and miserable as her

aunts, as Cil; and there were Chadrih folk among them, that she feared. Most pleasant imagining

of all, and most hopeless, she thought of the great north isle, of Shiuan, where the gold went,

where halfling lords and their favored servants lived in wealth and splendor while the world

drowned.

She thought of Fwar while she attacked the grass with the sickle, putting the strength of

hate into her arm, and wished that she had the same courage against him; but she did not,

knowing that there was nothing else. She was doomed to discontent. She was different, as all

Ewon's fair children had been, as Ewon herself had been. The aunts said that there was some

manner of taint in Ewon's blood: it came out most strongly in her, making her fey and wild.

Ewon had dreamed dreams; so did she. Her grandfather Keln, priest of Barrows-hold, had

given her sicha wood and seeds of azael to add to the amulets she wore about her neck,

besides the stone Barrow-king's cross, which were said to be effective against witchery; but it

did not stop the dreams. Halfling-taint, her aunt Jinel insisted, against which no amulets had

power, being as they only availed for human-kind. It was told how Ewon's mother had met a

halfling lord or worse upon the Road one Midyear's Eve, when the Road was still open and the

world was wider. But Ela's line was of priests; and grandfather Keln had consoled Jhirun once

by whispering that her father as a youth had dreamed wild dreams, assuring her that the curse

faded with age.

She wished that this would be so. Some dreams she dreamed waking; that of Shiuan was

one, in which she sat in a grand hall, among halflings, claimed by her halfling kindred, and in

which Fwar had perished miserably. Those were wish-dreams, remote and far different from the

sweat-drenched dreams she suffered of doomed Chadrih and of Socha, drowned faces beneath

the waters-Hnoth-dreams that came when the moons moved close and sky and sea and earth

heaved in convulsions. The tides seemed to move in her blood as they did in the elements,

making her sullen and prone to wild tempers as Hnoth drew near. During the nights of Hnoth's

height, she feared even to sleep by night, with all the moons aloft, and she put azael sprigs under

her pillow, lying sleepless so long as she could.

Her cousins, like all the house, feared her speaking of such things, saying that they were

ill-wishes as much as they were bad dreams. Only Fwar, who respected nothing, least of all

things to which his own vision did not extend, and liked to make mock of what others feared,

desired her for a wife. Others had proposed more immediate and less permanent things, but

generally she was left alone. She was unlucky.

And this was another matter that held her to Barrows-hold, the dread that the

marshlanders, who had taken in the Chadrih folk, might refuse her and leave her outlawed from

every refuge, to die in the marsh. One day she might become resolved enough to risk it, but that

day was not on her yet She was free and solitary, and it was, save when she had had both

Socha and Cil, the best time of her life, when she could roam the isles at will. She was not,

whatever the rumors of her gossiping aunts, born of a halfling lord, nor of the little men of Aren,

born neither to dine off gold nor to trade in it-but Barrows-born, to dig for it. The sea might

have all Hiuaj in her lifetime, drowning the Barrow-hills and all within them; but that was distant

and unthreatening on so warm a day.

Perhaps, she thought, with an inward laugh, she was only slightly and sometimes mad,

just as mad as living on world's-edge ought to make one. Perhaps when she dreamed her

terrible dreams, she was sane; and on such days as this when she felt at peace, then she was

truly mad, like the others. The conceit pleased her.

Her hands kept to their work, swinging the sickle and binding the grasses neatly. She was

aware of nothing about her but the song of the insects. At early afternoon she carried all her

load down to the bank and rested, there on the slope near the water; and she ate her meal,

watching the eddies of the water swirling past the opposing hill. It was a place she knew well.

And the while she gazed she realized that a new and curious shadow lay on that other

bank, that indeed there was a gaping wound in that hill, opened just beneath that outcrop of

rock. Suddenly she swallowed down a great mouthful of her meal and left everything lying-jars,

sickle, sheaves of grass-and gathered up the rope and boat-pole.

Cist. A burial chamber, torn open by last night's rain. She found her hands sweating with

excitement as she pushed the boat out and poled it across the narrow channel.

The other hill was perfectly conical, showing scars about its top as most such suspicious

hills did thereabouts, wounds made by earlier Barrow-folk probing to see whether burial had

been made there. Those searchers had found nothing, else they would have plundered it and left

it gaping open to the sky.

But the waters, searching near the base, had done what men had failed to do and found

what men never had: treasure, gold, the purchase of luxuries here at world's end.

The skiff scraped bottom among the reeds and Jhirun waded ashore up to the knees in

water until she could step up on the clay bank. She heaved the skiff onto solid ground, there

near the shelf that overshadowed the breach. She trembled with excitement seeing how that

apparent rock outcrop was squared on the edge, proving it no work of nature; the rain had

exposed it for the first time to light, for she had been here hardly a hand of days ago and had

not seen it She flung herself down by the opening and peered in.

There was a cold chill of depth about that darkness-no cist at all, but one of the great

tombs, the rich ones. Jhirun swallowed hard against the tightness in her throat, wiped her hands

on her skirt and worked her shoulders in, turning so that she could fit the narrow opening. For a

moment she despaired, reckoning such a find too much for her alone, sure that she must go

back and fetch her cousins; and those thieving cousins would leave her only the refuse-if it were

still intact when she brought them back. She remembered the haze across the east, and the

likelihood of rain.

But as her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she could see that there was light breaking

in from some higher aperture; the top of the tomb must have been breached too, the dome

broken. She could not see the interior from this tunnel, but she knew that it must surely be a

whole, unrobbed tomb; no ancient robber would have entered a dome-tomb from the top, not

without winning himself a broken neck. The probing of some earlier searcher seeking only a cist

atop the hill had likely fallen through, creating the wash at the lower level. And that chance had

given her such a prize as generations of Barrowers dreamed in vain of finding, a tale to be told

over and over in the warm security of Barrows-hold so long as the world lasted.

She clutched the amulets on the cord about her neck, protection against the ghosts. With

them, she did not fear the dark of such places, for she had been in and about the tombs from

childhood. The dangers she did fear were a weak ceiling or an access tunnel collapsing. She

knew better than to climb that slope outside, weakened as it was. She had heard a score of

times how great-uncle Lar had fallen to his death among the bones in the opening of the king-hill

called Ashrun. She expelled her breath and began to wriggle through where she was, dragging

her body through, uncaring for the tender skin of her arms in her eagerness.

Then she lay in what had been the approach to the tomb, a stone-paved access that

seemed to slant up and up to a towering door, the opening of which was faintly discernible in

the dim light. She rose and felt with her hands the stones she knew would be about her. The first

joining was as high as her head, and she could not reach the top of the next block. By this she

became certain that it was a tomb of one of the First Kings after the Darkness, for no other men

ever built with such ambition or buried in such wealth.

Such a hill this was, without even the name of a King. It was old and forgotten, among the

first to be reared near Anla's hill, in that tradition that ringed the Kings' burials nearest the forces

they had wished to master, from which legend said they had come and to which they always

sought to return. A forgotten name: but he had been a great one, and powerful, and surely,

Jhirun thought with a pounding of her heart, very, very rich.

She walked the access, feeling her way in the dark, and another fear occurred to her, that

the opening might have given some wild thing a lair. She did not think such was the case, for the

air held no such taint; but all the same she wished that she had brought the boat-pole, or better

yet the sickle; and most of all that she had a lamp.

Then she came into the area of the dome, where sunlight shafted down, outlining the

edges of things on the floor, the ray itself an outline in golden dust. It fell on stone and

mouldering ruin. Her least stirring echoed fearsomely in the soaring height above her head.

Many a tomb had she seen, the little cists often hardly larger than the king buried there,

and two great dome-tombs, that of Ashrun and that of Anla, and those long-robbed, Ashrun a

mere shell open to the sky. She had been at the opening of one cist-tomb, watching her uncles

work, but she had never been alone, the very first to breach the silence and the dark.

The stone-fall from the dome had missed the bier, and the slanting light showed what

must have been the king himself, only rags and bones. Against the arching wall were other

huddled masses that must once have been his court, bright ladies and brave lords of Men: in her

imaginings she saw them as they must have been the day that they followed their king into this

place to die, all bedight in their finest clothing, young and beautiful, and the dome rang with their

voices. In another place would be the mouldering bones of their horses, great tall beasts that

had stamped and whinnied in fear of such a place, less mad than their doomed masters-beasts

that had run plains that now were sea; she saw the glint of gilded harness in the dust

She knew the tales. The fables and the songs in the old language were the life and

livelihood of the Barrows, their golden substance the source of the bread she ate, the fabric of

her happier dreams. She knew the names of kings who had been her ancestors, the proud Mija,

knew their manners, though she could not read the runes; she knew their very faces from the

vase paintings, and loved the beauty of the golden art they had prized. She was sorry when

these precious things must be hammered and melted down; she had wept much over seeing it

when she was a child, not understanding how such beautiful objects were reckoned unholy and

unlucky by marshlanders, and that without that purifying, the gold was useless in trade. The

fables were necessary for the house to teach the children, but there was no value for beauty in

the existence of the Barrows, only for gold and the value that others set on having it

She moved, and in doing so, nudged an object beside the doorway. It fell and shattered,

a pottery sound, loud in that vast emptiness. The nape of her neck prickled, and she was

overwhelmingly aware of the silence after the echo, and of the impudence of Jhirun Ela's-

daughter, who had come to steal from a king.

She thrust herself out from the security of the wall and into the main area, where the light

streamed down to the bier of the king and gleamed on dusty metal.

She saw the body of the king, his clothes in spidery tatters over his age-dark bones. His

skeletal hands were folded on his breast, on mail of rusted rings, and over his face was a mask

of gold such as she had heard was the custom of the earliest age. She brushed at the dust that

covered it, and saw a fine face, a strong face. The eyes were portrayed shut, the high

cheekbones and delicate moulding of the lips more khalin than man. The long-dead artist had

graven even the fine lines of the hair of brows and lashes, had made the lips and nostrils so

delicate it was as if they might suddenly draw breath. It was a young man's face, the stern

beauty of him to haunt her thereafter, she knew, when she slept beside Fwar. Cruel, cruel, that

she had come to rob him, to strip away the mask and reveal the grisly ruin of bun.

At that thought she drew back her hand, and shivered, touching the amulets at her throat;

and retreated from him, turning to the other hapless dead that lay along the wall. She plundered

them, rummaging fearlessly among their bones for golden trinkets, callously mingling their bones

to be sure the ghosts were equally muddled and incapable of vengeance on Midyear's Eve.

Something skittered among them and frightened her so that she almost dropped her

treasure, but it was only a rat, such as sheltered in the isles and fed on

wreckage and drowned animals, and sometimes housed in opened tombs.

Cousin, she saluted him in wry humor, her heart still fluttering from panic. His nose

twitched in reciprocal anxiety, and when she moved, he fled. She made haste, filling her skirts

with as much as she could carry, then returning to the access and laboriously bringing bit after

bit down that narrow tunnel and out into daylight She crawled out after, and loaded the pieces

in the skiff, looking all about the while to be sure that she was atone: wealth made her suspect

watchers, even where such were impossible. She covered over everything with grass in the

skiffs bottom and hurried again to the entrance, pausing to cast a nervous glance at the sky.

Clouds filled the east. She knew well how swiftly they could come with the wind behind

them, and she hurried now doubly, feeling the threat of storm, of flood that would cover the

entrance of the tomb.

She wriggled through into the dark again, and felt her way along until her eyes

reaccustomed themselves to the dark. She sought this time the bones of the horses, wrenching

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WellofShiuanPROLOGUEWhoeverfirstbuilttheGatesthatledfromtimetotimeandspacetospacesurelygainedfromthemnogoodthing.TheqhalfoundthefirstGateinthestrangeruinsofSilenonadeadworldoftheirownsun.Theyusedthepattern,builtotherGates,spannedworlds,spannedstars,spannedtimeitself.Thereintheyfellintothetrap,andens...

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C. J. Cherryh - Morgaine 2 - Well of Shiuan

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