The Limbreth Gate

FOURTEEN

'What do you make of it?' Vandien asked the black warhorse that plodded easily beside the wagon. The horse snorted. His ears were pitched forward and Vandien saw a sudden tension shiver across his muscles. Giving an anxious whicker, he broke into a trot. The greys tried to copy him, but Vandien held them in. He peered forward through the dusk to where some bulky object had been dumped squarely in the middle of the road. The black horse was snuffling at it when he reached it, and Vandien took the wagon around it in a swerve. First team and then wagon left the smooth roadbed for the deep turf with a sway and a jounce. Vandien pulled them in sharply as he realized what he was passing.

It was not Ki. As he knelt over the body, he was torn between relief that she was not dead in the road, and vexation that he had not caught up with her. Surprise had made him recoil from the strange body when he first touched it. But now he bent to look closer. A Brurjan. Starved to death, by the look of her. The softly expelled breath of the creature before him sent a shudder through him. His common sense urged him to back softly away, remount the wagon and continue his search for Ki. A starved Brurjan was no business of his; wise Humans did not intrude themselves on Brurjan affairs. He drew softly away from her. She twitched, swallowing with a gulping noise. Unwillingly he paused to watch as she moved her blackened lips and crinkled her eyelids in an effort to pry them open. Then he sprinted back to the wagon to fetch the waterskin.

Her large head filled his lap. The quills of her crest rattled dryly when he raised her shoulders. Gingerly he pried open her jaws to bare her razor teeth clenched in a death mask. One sudden chop of those jaws! Vandien silenced the thought and trickled a little water between her teeth. It vanished, some leaking out the corners of her mouth. Her thick tongue moved behind her teeth, but the rest of her remained still. It was too late for her. Suddenly she choked, sending a spray of water into his face. He supported her shoulders as she struggled to clear her throat. She was feebler than he had imagined a Brurjan could be. His only prior attempt to match strength with one had proved that one didn't need to open a tavern door to leave by it. He had breathed softly around cracked ribs after that meeting. But this one was also thinner than he had ever seen a Brurjan, and the more he looked into her wasted face, the more subtly wrong it appeared.

Thin as she was, she was too large a limp body for him to drag into the cuddy with any sort of gentleness. So he covered her and pillowed her where she lay upon the road. She didn't move again, but her breathing seemed steadier. And each time he poured water into her, she resisted him a bit more. The black horse hung over her like a ponderous guardian as he went about making a simple camp. Vandien guessed she was the mysterious rider, and the gear in the back of the wagon was hers. But how it hadcome to be there, and where Ki was now, were questions still to be answered.

Fire, Vandien found, was damned hard to make here. For one thing, he could find no tinder. If any sort of bush had ever dropped a branch near the road, then someone had eaten it. There wasn't a dry twig to be found, nor even a bush that smelled resinous enough to kindle. Vandien in desperation took the dried meat out of its storage box and wrapped it in a clean cloth. The box became firewood. Then he struggled long before he could persuade sparks to jump from his flint and kindle the box shavings. When the fire did burn, it did so grudgingly, giving out little light and less heat. Vandien coaxed a pan of water to a fickle boil and warmed in it bits of dried meat and finely chopped roots, hanging over it impatiently as the stew simmered. A mug of tea he brewed for himself, taking a sort of strength from its warmth, trying to resign himself to the delay. The greys, freed from harness, cropped grass beside the road.

At last the stew was ready. With a thick wooden spoon he stirred and mashed until it was a lumpy gruel. He let the pot sit on the ground and cool a bit while he gathered his courage and energies. He thought longingly of sleep, then took up his stew pot and closed in on the Brurjan resolutely. He set the pot on the ground and sat down close beside her, propping her head and shoulders against him so she would not choke. 'Eat,' he told her softly, wondering if she was alive enough to hear.

Her lips parted stickily. 'No,' she groaned.

'It will make you feel better. Try. Here.'

A feeble flop of her arm knocked the spoon from his grasp. 'No.' It was a growl now. 'Let me die as I am. You have filled my mouth with water gone bad, and I can smell what you would give me now. Stewed flesh. Gah.'

Vandien retrieved the spoon from the grass and sniffed at the pot. Nothing smelled spoiled to him. He knew Brurjans ate meat; she was raving, or he had heard her wrong. He brought the spoon to her mouth again.

Her teeth snapped, taking off the wooden bowl of the spoon. He thought it a dying reflex, until she spat it out at him. She broke her crusted eyes open to glare at him balefully through the slits. 'Leave me to die in peace!' she gasped. 'If I cannot come to the Limbreth, at least let me know I died trying. Ki shall carry my name to them.'

'What of Ki?' Vandien demanded, but with a last glare she shut her eyes and would say no more.

While he was not a patient man, he was seldom moved to violence against the helpless. But not only his logic but his curiosity had been strained to their limits, and impulsively he acted. He lowered her head to the ground and rose to stand over her. He flipped the spoon handle off into the darkness as he measured her, then took a breath and stepped across her prone form to straddle her body. She was big, and she didn't seem as weak as when he had poured the water into her. Maybe that had done her some good, though it would make his task harder now. Her eyes were sunken deep in her face and her flesh stretched over her bones in planes and angles. Well, live or die, he told himself and her. He dropped a knee neatly on each of her shoulders, pinning her to the earth.

Her huge jaws opened, the double row of teeth far too close to his flesh, but Vandien was ready and he set the edge of the bowl atop her lower teeth and tipped it. She closed her jaws with a snap, but the bowl was wedged in her mouth and Vandien had the leverage.

'Drink or choke, dammit!' he heard himself roar. She chose choking, and soup spattered them both; buthe was adamant. He tipped the bowl up higher, and it was only when he saw the bottom of it that he released his grip on it and sprang clear of her.

Her arms, no longer pinned at her sides, came up at him in claws. Her eyes blazed red as she rolled onto her belly and tried to come after him. But she got no farther than her hands and knees before falling again. She spat at him and then sank down, gagging and gasping. 'Bastard!' she hissed at him. 'Nameless whelp of toothless parents! Bird bait!'

'Glad to see you're feeling better.' Vandien brushed stew from his shirt front. For one so weak, her spitting accuracy was remarkable. He squatted down a cautious distance from her. 'Where's Ki?'

'Gone on to better things than you, dropping of a sickly goat! My mouth stinks of carrion in my throat! You poisoned me with that warmed-over filth! And cheated me of an honorable death. Damn you, damn you, damn you! When I choked, I couldn't close my throat against it and it went down. I won't die!'

'Thank me later. Where's Ki?'

'Gone to the Limbreth. I told you that. Gone to better things than you or I shall ever know. Gah! Carrion all through my mouth and up my nose. I can't stand the taste. And only one thing to chase it away. Black!'

The horse came to her willingly, far more so than the greys ever moved to Ki's command. Nor did it shy away when she gripped its stocky foreleg and hauled herself up by it. She leaned against it, standing only by its strength. Vandien watched her with some curiosity. If she thought she was going to mount and ride off, he was betting against her. She'd never haul herself up onto its back with no harness.

She pressed her face against its neck. The animal gave a start, snorted, and then stood stoically again. Vandien stared at the motionless Brurjan, wondering if she wept, until he heard the soft sounds of lapping. He turned away and went back to his fire. Was taking blood from a horse that different from taking milk from a cow? Warm blood was a Brurjan need and he had heard their beasts were trained for its taking. Still.

'You said to thank you later.' Her voice was gruff. 'Now is later. Thank you.'

'Welcome,' Vandien told her shortly. He poured himself more tea and didn't watch her as she went to the water cask. She opened the spigot and let water fill her hands, scrabbling it over her face and snorting in it. She shook the water from her hands and closed the spigot. All Vandien's muscles tightened as he heard her coming back to the fire. But she only folded herself up and held her hands out to its puny warmth.

'It is nippy out, isn't it? This the best you could do for a fire? No, don't move, it's fine.'

'Your clothing is in the back of the wagon.'

'I know. Why do you bring it up, do I bother you?' She rubbed her hands over her face again. 'What do you have to eat?'

Typical Brurjan, Vandien told himself. Rude, callous, and self-centered, but always honest. 'Dried meat and fish.' He didn't bother to list fruits and grains; Brurjans didn't take much interest in them.

'More of the cooked crap you tried to poison me with?' Vandien shook his head. 'Dried in the sun, salted and twisted into strips.'

She gave a brief nod. 'I'll take that, then. All you can spare. I'm famished.'

When he came back out of the wagon, she had donned the linen padding she wore under her armor. It made her seem more massive. She took the cloth-wrapped meat from him without a word, crouched where she had stood, and began on it. Vandien poked without hope at his pathetic little fire and warmed himself a final cup of tea over it. He was still sipping it when she shook out the cloth and began to fold it neatly.

'I'm Hollyika, man. And I'm alive, and now that I know it, I do thank you for it. But, damn it, never again pour slop like that down any Brurjan. If I'd been any stronger and you a little slower, I'd have killed you. Boiled meat. That's one thing wrong with Humans, you know - the shit they eat.'

'I'm Vandien. And one thing wrong with Brurjans is that I've never yet met one with any courtesy.' He spoke recklessly, and then shrank back as she stepped up to him, but she only put the folded cloth into his hands.

'What the hell do you want of me? I didn't ask you to do it, so you did it because you wanted to. I've said my thanks - twice, even. Shall I grovel and kiss your feet? Or am I supposed to offer to lie with you in my gratitude?'

'You could answer my damn questions, damn it!' Vandien found his language matching hers. 'Where in hell is Ki? I thought I'd find you two together.'

'Oh. Her.' Hollyika fell silent for a moment. 'You know, it's peculiar. I was so set on going with her, and now she looks like a damn fool to me. Yet I'm the one that spurred her on. She's gone to the Limbreth; those blinky lights on the horizon. She's gone to get a gut load of peace and fulfillment and enlightenment. Isn't that a fist in the throat?'

'Yes,' Vandien agreed morosely. 'Why'd she go?'

'I just told you. Oh, you mean why does she think they have buckets of goodwill up there. Damned if I know. I thought they did too, and was all set to lie down and die because I'd never get there.'

'It's in the water,' Vandien surmised, recalling Jace's warning.

'Could be. That's likely, now that I think of it. But how the hell did I get here? And when is dawn?'

'How you got here I don't know. I came through a Gate. Dawn doesn't seem to happen here. It goes from grey to black to grey again.'

'Oh. Well, the road got me here, so the road can take me back. I'll go a lot faster on Black. I'll take that fish with me, if you don't mind. After I get a bit of sleep.' Hollyika started to move to the freight bed of the wagon where her possessions were. She paused at Vandien's silence and turned back to him. 'What are you going to do?'

He shrugged. The whole grey roof of this world pressed down on his shoulders. 'I guess I'll sleep. I'm tired enough to die. I've been chasing her for - well, I've lost track of the days, with no light to go by. When I wake up, I'll hitch up and go after her.' 'Why?'

Vandien rubbed his hands over his face. His eyes were sandy and the skin of his face felt like a hide left to dry in the sun. 'Because we're partners. Because, like you, I don't think she'd choose to do what she's doing, if she had her own mind about it. Because I promised some folks on the other side to bring her back to the Gate. Because I want to.'

Hollyika shook her head with a clatter of plumes. 'You poor fool.'

'Right.' Vandien rose stiffly, to clamber into the wagon. He let his clothes drop straight to the floor and clambered into the bed to worm under the covers. 'You poor fool,' he sympathized once with himself, and then the pillows and darkness claimed him.

Some time had passed, but by the aching of his head and muscles, it hadn't been much. A heavy bulk settled onto the bed beside him. It was dark, but he sensed her looming over him. 'What?' he demanded uneasily.

'Maybe I'm more grateful than I thought. Move over. Let's see if there's anything about you different from any other Human I've had.'

Vandien took a shallow breath. All he could picture in his mind was her maw of teeth adjacent to his throat. It wasn't erotic. 'Thank you, but ...'

'But what? Put off by a little extra fur?'

'No. Just tired. I've been following Ki on foot, you know. And ...'

'Boiled meat,' Hollyika commented in disgust. She turned her back to him and settled in beside him. 'This is a hell of a lot better than the grass or the wagon bed.'

He could think of no reply. Her stentorian breathing filled the cuddy. After she had shouldered in beside him, her smell reminded him of new puppies in clean straw. She slept, but when he did, he dreamed of lionesses.