VI
Anyara woke in a sweat, with a soft cry and a racing heart. In her dreams she had been pursued by a twisted, bestial form of herself, driven wild by fear and anger and grief. The roiling darkness that had been all about her had thickened and churned to prevent her escape, holding her for her own clawed fingers to rend. She wiped her brow, pulled her cloyingly damp nightgown away from her skin. These cruel dreams had ebbed a little in the first few days of her enforced sojourn in Vaymouth. Now they had returned with renewed and hungry vigour. Each night she spent in the Palace of Red Stone, they came more fiercely than the last. A few tears ran down her face, the echo of the unconstrained, fevered emotions of her sleep. She brushed them away and rose, feeling heavy, from the bed. In the night, the palace was perfectly silent. Faint moonlight fell through the windows. The air was cool and still. Anyara settled a heavy robe about her shoulders and pulled its fur collar tight about her throat. She slipped her feet into soft hide sandals and went out into the passageway. “All you all right?” The voice startled her. Coinach stepped forward into the soft pool of silver shed by a little skylight. “I forgot you were here.” Anyara smiled. “Always. I thought I heard you but was not sure. I should have come in to check.” “No, no.” Anyara waved her shieldman’s self-doubt away. “I’m fine. Can’t sleep, that’s all.” She glanced at the simple wooden chair let into an alcove where Coinach spent each night. “You can’t get much sleep either, I imagine,” she said. “I am not here to sleep, my lady. But I’ve had much worse beds in my time, in any case.” They both spoke in whispers. The heavy silence of the palace felt insistent, as if it would resent any attempt to disturb it. “Will you walk with me a little?” Anyara asked. “My head needs clearing.” They went together along the corridor, the sound of their careful footsteps sighing along the stone walls ahead of them. From each narrow window high in those walls a diffuse beam of moonlight descended to illuminate them as they passed beneath it. There was the faintest lingering scent on the air, like a memory of warmer days. “What is that smell?” Anyara murmured. “It never seems to quite go away.” “The Shadowhand’s wife roasts spices on her braziers,” Coinach whispered. “Oh. I never thought to ask her.” Anyara led the way into a long, thin room that ran along the side of the palace. Facing them were tall, barred doors inlaid with patterns of pearl and dark wood. Anyara went to one and lifted the thin beam that held it closed. “I’d like to see the moon,” she said. But Coinach gently interposed himself. “They sometimes have guards out on the terraces. Best to let me go first.” He pulled open the great shutter, and the cold night air swept in. Anyara closed her eyes for a moment, savouring its cleansing flow over her face, through her hair. “Come,” Coinach said. “There’s no one here.” They stepped out onto the narrow terrace. Before them Vaymouth was a dark ocean, speckled with just a few faint points of light, bounded by the smooth, dark curve of its walls as they swept away into the distance. The Moon Palace rose, a lambent mass, above the city’s heart, as if some wan, sickly giant had hunched his shoulders up out of dark earth. Anyara turned about, searching instead for the true moon. It stood just above the city wall, bright and large. She gazed up at it, letting its light fill her eyes and her mind for a moment. Then she dropped her head, and looked back to the sleeping city. “Vaymouth’s bigger than I ever imagined,” she said. “I knew but didn’t know. That sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” “No, my lady.” “I’m afraid,” Anyara said abruptly, surprising herself. She had not meant to say that, yet the sound of the words seemed right. Fitting. “I thought I could bear everything, anything, if I had to. I thought I’d mastered it, but now it’s growing heavy again, all the fear and the sorrow. I don’t want to be frightened. I hate it.” Coinach was looking at her, but his face was in shadow and she could not be sure what expression he wore. She did not know quite what she wanted from him. Still, she felt an unexpected easing within her, now that she had permitted this small fraction of her fragility to show itself. Out in Vaymouth’s great darkness: a blooming orange glow, much stronger and larger than any of the other tiny lights shining there. Anyara frowned at it, puzzled. Coinach followed her gaze. The glow spread, and splayed itself outwards and upwards, a fiery fist swelling and then unfurling thick fingers of flame that reached for the star-strewn sky. “That’ll be an unpleasant waking for someone,” Coinach said softly. There was another, further off, in an entirely different quarter of the city: another seed of fire that flickered into being and then built and built. The nocturnal silence that had seemed so natural before now felt out of place. The flames clambered ferociously higher and higher, their hearts turning white, but no sound reached the Palace of Red Stone. There was scent, though, the first bitter trace of smoke in the air. “Look, there’s a third,” Coinach said, pointing out into the night. “And there,” said Anyara. It seemed that every part of Vaymouth had its own eruption of consuming flame. The Moon Palace was growing dimmer, obscured by drifting smoke, its reflected moonlight outshone by a wilder, more sinister light. And the first sounds reached Anyara’s ears: a murmur of calamity, anguished cries blunted and flattened by distance, the roaring of delirious firestorms made into a whisper. “What’s happening?” she wondered. “I don’t know.” Anyara shifted uneasily. There was too much of the quality of her dreams about this. Too much of the madness she felt running beneath the skin of the world, like a black river under a carapace of ice. “We should never have come,” she said, staring out at the beacons of destruction that marked out the whole territory of the city. “I thought we could serve best by letting Aewult have his way. I thought there might be opportunity… but none of it’s turning out as I hoped. We should have fought our way out of Aewult’s camp rather than let him make us prisoners.” “I would gladly have made the attempt, my lady, had you asked it of me. He had some ten thousand warriors, so I fear it might have proved difficult. Still, I would have made the attempt.”
*
“I will see it!” Gryvan oc Haig snapped at Kale. That flare of anger was enough to make the shieldman nod curtly and avert his eyes. “As you wish, sire,” the lean warrior said, nudging his horse on ahead. “I will see what’s done to my city!” Gryvan shouted after his guardian. “It is my right, my duty!” His own vehemence shocked him, and made him a little ashamed. He glanced uncomfortably around. Many in the mass of riders were looking at him. All, at least, had the grace to turn away when his own gaze fell upon them. It was unwise, Gryvan knew, to flaunt his anger—his confusion, if he was honest—so brazenly, before so many eyes, but his grip on his emotions grew daily less sure. They tore their way up through him, every setback bringing them closer to boiling over. He imagined them as some pack of beasts clawing at his innards, consuming him from within. A hundred of his warriors, led by Kale and the rest of his Shield, surrounded him. He was within the walls of his own impregnable, wondrous city. Yet despite all of this, Gryvan felt exposed. Assailed. The faces of his people, who thronged the streets this morning and watched his passing from every window and doorway, seemed inimical to him. But he could no longer tell whether that was their true character, or whether he only painted them with his own bitter bewilderment at the course of events. “The Captain of your Shield is quite right, sire,” Mordyn Jerain said, settling his own horse into step with Gryvan’s. “The city’s mood is fragile. Caution would be wise.” “They set a dozen fires,” Gryvan hissed, wrestling his voice into submission. “Ten people dead, I hear. Someone thinks they can torch my city with impunity. Well, I’ll see their handiwork. And then I’ll see them, whoever they are, broken on wheels, and spitted on stakes and have their heads rolled in the dirt at my feet.” “Quite so. I wish we could have spoken before riding out, though. There is much I wanted to discuss with you today. Had you not been already mounted when I reached the palace…” “Now, suddenly, you want to talk? Well, it can wait an hour or two yet. Gods, does this not sicken you with fury? How can you be so unmoved? We made this city what it is together, you and I. It’s your child as much as mine.” “Children heal quickly, sire.” Gryvan heard—or imagined, he could not be sure which—dismissive insolence in that reply and twisted in his saddle to snarl at his Chancellor. But Mordyn was looking away, angling his head up towards the rooftops. “What’s that?” Mordyn muttered. Gryvan’s anger faltered. He crushed the reins in his frustrated hands. But there was a sound, clattering in over the tiled roofs. Gryvan listened for a moment or two, teasing it out from amongst the rattle of hoofs on cobbles. He did not know what to make of it at first. Its nature was elusive, as if it both belonged and did not belong in the city. Then he had it. Riot. Mob. “Swords,” he cried at once. He bared his own blade. Kale was riding towards him, shouting at the lines of warriors as he came. “You should turn back, sire,” the shieldman said to his Thane, quite calm. “There is disorder up ahead.” “No,” said Gryvan flatly. In this, suddenly, he found an answer to all the tumultuous ire that had been building in him for so long. His body knew what kind of release it required, and already his heart was pounding in anticipation. He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and the great beast sprang forward. A crowd was surging through a little marketplace. It tore at shuttered windows, rendered barrels, stalls, even an old abandoned wagon, down to fragments of wood, and then sent that debris flying up in a cloud of useless missiles. It surged around the well at the centre of the square, and crushed its human bodies against the stone parapet. It overturned a massive watering trough and broke in the door of a long-empty hovel. Down upon this ravening beast, the High Thane’s hundred warriors fell like thunder. Gryvan himself was in the midst of the storm, seized by a bloodthirsty rage. He and his father, and his grandfather before that, had made this city and its people all that they now were. That there should be arson, that mobs should rampage through the streets—these things were an affront to the Haig line. They wounded him as surely as any blow to his own flesh. He would wet the streets of his wondrous city with the blood of those who offered such grievous offence. Gryvan’s sword rose and fell. He felt the shiver of its impact upon bone tingling up his arm. He felt the breaking of bodies that went down beneath his huge horse. A thousand voices, crying out in anguish, or anger, or pain, or terror, washed over him and he revelled in the fierce noise. He cut and slashed and barged his way to the heart of the square. A youth was standing on the rim of the well, lashing out with a length of wood. Gryvan cut his legs from under him, sent him tumbling back and down into the dark, stone-clad gullet. The crowd fell away beneath the onslaught. What the city’s Guard had been unable to quell, the hundred trained warriors on their warhorses snuffed out quickly and brutally. The passions that had burned in the breasts of the rioters twisted into terror. They scattered, and the riders went after them and cut them down in side streets and doorways. Gryvan sat astride his mount, sword still naked in his hand, surrounded by gore and corpses. Kale dismounted and tore something from the neck of one of the bodies. He held it up to the High Thane. “Most of them are Craftsmen, sire. Apprentices, at least.” He dropped the clasp into Gryvan’s outstretched palm. It bore the impressed image of a tiny hammer and scales. “Goldsmith,” Gryvan murmured. He was weary now. Drained. “Yes.” Kale nodded. “Many bear the same badge, or that of other Crafts. A number of their buildings were amongst those burned last night. They seek those responsible, perhaps.” “And they think that gives them leave to run rampant through my city?” Gryvan growled. “There are too many who think they need no longer ask our leave to do anything,” Mordyn Jerain said, coming—now that the slaughter was done—to his master’s side. “The world ever seeks to test the will of great men. Now is the time of your testing.” “And you’ve a thought on how I should meet it. Is that it?” Mordyn Jerain dipped his head in knowing assent. “Very well,” Gryvan said, casting a last, simmering eye over the bodies littering the market square. “All of this must be answered. I’ll hear you.” “No.” Gryvan shook his head. It was part denial, part disbelief, part astonishment at the thought that what his Shadowhand was saying might be true. “Yes,” insisted Mordyn quietly. “Have I ever failed you, sire?” “Not in anything of consequence,” Gryvan muttered. “Indeed. Then trust me in this: a corruption has entered the heart of your domains. That which threatens to consume us comes not from without, but within.” Gryvan paced up and down over the thick mottled rug. The beaker of wine in his hand was forgotten. “Why did you not tell me all of this at once, immediately on your return?” he cried. “I doubted it, sire. How could I not? Such things strain the sinews of belief. I thought it prudent to conduct certain investigations of my own. Now I have the sad proofs.” The Chancellor unfurled a roll of parchments from a tube at his belt. “Copies of letters I was shown in Anduran, during my captivity. messages the Black Road discovered there. Others I have found for myself since my return. And all sing the same foul melody, sire.” Gryvan slammed his cup down on an ornate little table. He ignored the manuscripts that Mordyn held out to him. “I’ll not trust a single word that comes from the mouth of the Black Road,” he snarled. “A wise precaution.” Mordyn nodded placidly. The tumultuous emotions that raged within Gryvan found no reflection in his Chancellor. There was a calmness about the man that would better suit reports of the weather. “They no doubt take delight in pointing out the rot within our own house. Yet whether or not you choose to trust their intent in sharing their discoveries with me, there is a truth to be discerned. A pattern.” Gryvan threw himself down into a chair so violently that it rocked back on its legs. “Conspiracy against me? Against Haig?” The Shadowhand rolled the parchments up once more and slipped them back into their tube. He set it down beside the High Thane’s discarded wine cup. “I will leave these for you to examine at your leisure, if you see fit. But yes: conspiracy. The Crafts conspired with the Dornach Kingship, promising to deliver up the Dargannan Blood even as they were trying to buy its future Thane. They urged Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig to throw off his duties to you, and he in his turn promised them free rein if they could foster war between us and Dornach, and raise him up to be High Thane in your stead.” “This is insanity,” breathed Gryvan. “Of a kind,” the Chancellor nodded. “Madness born of hatred and ambition and greed. We have been slowly, quietly betrayed, sire. For many years. Until the Black Road entered the fray, the treacheries were discreet and careful. Now… now, our enemies have been intoxicated by the chaos, mistaking it for our weakness. They become incautious. Aewult’s every effort against the Black Road was hindered—blatantly, fragrantly—by Lannis and Kilkry.” “I thought his accusations absurd,” Gryvan growled. “Flailings born of humiliation.” “As might I, sire, had I not witnessed some of it for myself. You know I would not absolve the Bloodheir of blame had he earned it. He did not. I saw the contempt, the defiance, with which he was treated. How else but by treachery can we explain his defeat, when he had ten thousand of your finest warriors at his back? And you’ve heard the same tale I have, of what happened to Aewult’s messengers when they sought out the Lannis boy?” “In Ive. Yes. Murdered.” Gryvan rubbed his brow. He felt overwhelmed. And his head ached. “Indeed. Neither Lannis nor Kilkry Bloods has ever acceded, in their hearts, to your family’s rule. And the Crafts… well, your rule has swelled their coffers, yet they have learned not gratitude, but ambition. Arrogance. The Goldsmiths stir up discontent; they send their mobs raging through the streets of your city like wild animals. My people have already heard it whispered in taverns and workshops that the Crafts set those fires themselves, as pretext. But a man whose enemies assemble to assail him is as much benefited as beset, for they reveal themselves.” Gryvan frowned at his Chancellor. “You begin to see, do you not?” murmured Mordyn, stepping closer. There was an eager edge to him suddenly. His eyes burned with a passion Gryvan had not seen there since his return from the north. “See what?” the High Thane asked. “A thousand years of history have taught us that it takes great men, strong men, to impose order upon this world. It takes men with the will to seize whatever opportunities chaos offers up; the will to bend events to the shape of their own desires. Grey Kulkain did it, forging the Bloods from the horrors of the Storm Years. Your own family has done it, rising from the disasters of the Black Road’s very birth to overthrow Kilkry’s dominion. Such momentous times are come again, sire. Your time.” Gryvan rose once more to his feet. He clasped his hands behind his back and went to the nearest of the tall windows, through which a bleak light fell. There was his city, his precious city, arrayed before him in all its expansive wonder. His gaze fell upon the gaudy tower the Gemsmiths had recently chosen to adorn their Crafthouse with. A prideful statement, that. Perhaps one of intent also. He chewed his lip. “The opportunity is here,” he heard Mordyn saying behind him. “If we but have the courage to imagine it.” “You doubt my mettle?” Gryvan asked darkly without turning round. “No, sire. Never.” Gryvan stared down at his black boots. His sons were flawed—he knew that—yet still they were his sons, and entitled to receive from him the same legacy he had inherited from his father: the ascendancy of the Haig Blood; order and security, imposed upon the turbulent peoples of these lands through strength, and through force of will. He could feel his cheeks colouring, a hot flush of rage at the thought that those who dwelled beneath the protective aegis of Haig power would dare to conspire against it. “I was released by Ragnor oc Gyre’s Captains as a token of their benign intent,” Mordyn said. “The influence of the most bellicose factions within the Black Road is dwindling. They had slipped from Ragnor’s control for a time, it’s true, but that has changed. They understand that they cannot prevail against our martial strength, whatever minor victories they might have won thus far.” Gryvan closed his eyes against the pounding ache that was building in his skull. His hands, still clasped behind his back, tightened, the fingers bars of steel locked around one another. “They will retire from all the lands they have occupied,” Mordyn continued. “They will withdraw across the Stone Vale, and make over to you all the territory they have seized. To you personally, sire, not to Kilkry or Lannis. They pledge a permanent peace, on condition that you rule those lands directly and unmake the Bloods that formerly held them. Ragnor knows that without Kilkry and Lannis to stir up these ancient, dry troubles, there can be peace between our peoples. In pursuit of the same quarry, he pledges in his turn to wipe away the Horin Blood.” “Peace…” rasped Gryvan. “The better to deal with those enemies that lie more nearly at hand. The Crafts. Dornach. The time is ripe. Everything you have long dreamed of lies before you now, sire. It is all possible, now that they have revealed themselves. We have only to reach out and grasp the future, to make it real.” “I need…” Gryvan’s tongue stumbled over his own words. There was some part of him that feared the fell anger, the grasping hunger, roiling in his breast. Yet the larger part rejoiced in the scent of crisis, the anticipation of long-held ambitions upon the brink of realisation. Kilkry, Dargannan, Lannis, all swept away. The Crafts humbled. Dornach bloodied, perhaps even subjugated. And King, perhaps? Perhaps even that? “I need more certainty,” the stubbornly cautious fraction of him said as he turned back to face his Chancellor. “I need to know.” “We have a day or two,” Mordyn said with a flat smile. He seemed entirely unsurprised by Gryvan’s hesitancy. “No more, I would suggest. And no time at all, perhaps, for one or two matters.” “Such as?” Gryvan asked. He wanted this to end now. His mind seethed, his temples throbbed. Why was it so difficult to think clearly? He wanted only to retire to his chambers. “I hear rumours of a plot—fostered by the Goldsmiths, perhaps—to seize Igryn and return him to his lands, in the hope of stirring up yet more enfeebling trouble for us. Allow me to have him removed to In’Vay. Once he is there, out of sight and mind, he can be quietly killed. None will mourn his passing. None who are true friends to the Haig Blood, at least.” “Very well. My wife no longer finds him amusing, in any case.” “And recall the Bloodheir from Kilvale, sire. Send word at once. Have him bring a few thousand of his men back here. The greater threat now is from Dornach, perhaps Dargannan; perhaps still closer to home, if the Crafts and those they have suborned think us weak. The people of the city grow more restive with every passing day. We may need Aewult’s swords to cure them of that ill. “The forces of the Black Road lack both the vigour and the inclination to test him again, and I can set them on the path back to their own lands with a single message. Better yet, if we but halt all movement of ships in and out of Kolkyre, they might yet wipe away the last vestiges of the Kilkry Blood on our behalf, even as they retire. Roaric will quickly fail, if we close the sea to him.” “I need to know,” the High Thane repeated. “I believe we can clear away whatever doubts you harbour, sire,” Mordyn said, nodding sympathetically. “There is one here in Vaymouth who surely knows the truth of it, and might be compelled to share it. The Dornachman. Alem T’anarch.” “The Ambassador?” Gryvan murmured, faintly incredulous. “You must have the truth. You said as much yourself. Such truths cannot be won easily, or without daring. T’anarch… he has no supporters here, sire, no mobs to rise up in his name. And his masters have never concealed their contempt for us, their envy of our strength.” “Would you have open war with the Kingship?” “If this comes to nothing, whatever wounds we open may be healed. But there is war already, I think, open or otherwise. A great many will be rendered carrion by the end of it: those who shy away from the demands of the moment or yield the initiative to their opponents.” Carrion, thought Gryvan, his weariness briefly pierced by lances of bitter anger. Yes, if there are those who think to test my resolve, that is their destiny. I shall not meekly surrender all that I hold, all that I have won. Let those who imagine otherwise learn the harsh lessons of their error. The weak, the foolhardy, the traitorous, become carrion. Such is the world.
VII
The scout came back into the copse on a lame horse. There was a bloody welt across its hamstring. “Crossbow,” the rider said by way of explanation as he swung out of the saddle. In the gathering darkness it was difficult to see much, but the man’s voice sounded strained to Orisian. “And you?” he asked. “Are you hurt?” “Nothing serious, sire. The woman with the crossbow: my knee met her helmet when I rode her down.” “Were you followed?” Taim demanded. He was holding the horse’s reins, stroking its neck while another warrior examined its wound. “No.” The scout shook his head emphatically. “It was just the two of them stumbled across me. Both dead. They were careless, wandering around looking for a deer or hare for the pot, I think, not someone to fight.” “And Ive Bridge?” Orisian asked. “Not more than three score spears to hold it, sire, as far as I could see. And only half of those look to be trained warriors.” “No Inkallim?” asked Taim. “None that I could see. Couldn’t go too close, but no, I don’t think so.” “Good enough,” Taim grunted. “We’ve likely got them overmatched, then.” “We should wait until the night’s got a firm hold,” said Orisian quietly. “Let them get bleary with sleep. K’rina and Eshenna and Yvane can stay hidden here, with a dozen men.” He half-expected Taim to demur, to try to persuade him to remain behind with the na’kyrim, but the warrior said nothing. Orisian glanced up through the leafless branches towards the bruised sky. The cloud was thin; the moon, risen long ago, a diffuse disc. “There should be enough light to see by. And if there isn’t, we’ll have Kyrinin with us. They won’t.” They had not made camp in the little patch of woodland. No tents were set up, no fires were lit, despite the searing cold. They merely sheltered there, from the desultory snow and from the revelatory daylight. Men and horses were crowded into the heart of the copse, all made listless and irritable by the enervating tension. Some sat on the damp ground, dicing or muttering softly to one another, or chewing on cured meats and oatcakes. Most stood by their horses, keeping them quiet. Sentries were scattered through the fringes of the thicket, watching the snow-dusted fields and rough slopes all around. Low hills rolled their way westwards, sinking into the huge coastal plain. There were scattered farms and villages, fading in the distance into a flat haze of grey. Snow showers had come and gone all day, by turns revealing and obscuring grim signs of unrest and ruin. For a time a dark smear of smoke marked the site of some burning barn or farmhouse; later a dozen twisting, frail columns rose elsewhere, betraying the campfires of some roving band of reavers; once a great company of riders could be seen, sweeping across the very lowest slopes. All within that concealing stand of trees felt the calm and quiet that currently embraced them to be a treacherously fragile, even deceptive, thing. A lie, told by a world that had turned into a savage and cruel mockery of itself, and could betray at any moment those who forgot how much had changed. Orisian squatted down beside Ess’yr, holding his water pouch out to her. She blinked the offer away. “We’ll be moving soon,” he said quietly. “Once it’s as dark as it’s going to get.” The Kyrinin rolled her head, stretching her long neck. “When you choose,” she said. “I’m grateful for your aid in this,” Orisian murmured. Grateful for many things, in truth, few of which he could easily put into words. “This opens the way north, yes?” Ess’yr said. “We move closer now, to the place we belong. To the war we must fight.” She meant the White Owls, he knew. She and her brother believed they were travelling towards their own personal renewal of the brutal contest between Fox and White Owl; towards the discharge of a lethal duty that had been upon them ever since the fighting at Koldihrve. Vengeance, Yvane would no doubt dismissively call it, as Orisian himself might once have called it. He thought—he felt—a little differently now, though those feelings were imprecise, as hard to grasp and examine as vapours. “Where did it come from?” he asked. “The hatred between Fox and White Owl, I mean.” “From the beginning,” Ess’yr said softly, without inflection. “From the shape of things. From the pattern the Walking God made. He spoke with many animals, not one, as he walked. Without difference, there is no pattern at all.” It was an answer that gave him nothing, but he had not really expected otherwise. To his surprise, though, Ess’yr had a little more to offer. “It is not thought amongst my people,” she murmured, “that strife, and pain, and hate came to us only with the leaving of the Gods. These things have always been in the world, in its differences. They are part of what was made. When the Gods left, it was balance that was lost; not suffering that was found.” Orisian nodded, though Ess’yr was not looking at him, and though her words gave rise to an inchoate sorrow in him. “But there was no balance, even before the Gods departed, was there?” he said. “We killed the wolfenkind. Every one of them.” “Still, it was balance the Gods sought,” Ess’yr said. She sat there cross-legged, straight-backed, with her hands upon her knees and now she did fix him with a steady gaze. “They chose to make us many, not one. They chose to put unlikeness into the world, where before there had been none. It must be, I think, that they believed such difference could bring balance. If it brings strife also, it must be that they thought that a fair price.” Her eyes held him. The richness of her voice held him. He felt himself drawing nearer to her, to her life and her people. It took him, for a moment, out of the chill, fearful present; took him somewhere safer, better. “My dreams have lost their balance,” he said, as much to himself as to Ess’yr. “When I manage to sleep at all. It’s cruel to find sleep so hard when the nights are at their longest.” “They become shorter.” “The nights? Do they?” He fell silent for a moment. Grief came up in him, rising in his throat, through his cheeks, touching his eyes. “Winter grows old, then. I missed its turning.” Ess’yr said nothing. The last fading light that reached into the heart of the copse caught the tattoos that crossed her cheekbone, set the slightest glint in her soft grey eyes. “We used to celebrate on the longest night,” Orisian said thickly. “In Kolglas. It’s the night when winter’s strongest, but also when it begins to lose its grip. There was feasting and dancing. And my mother sang.” The immediacy of the memories was frightening, their intricate weight—grief and comfort too inextricably entwined to tell one from the other—so great that he felt himself buckling. But her voice was there, in his mind, coming to him across an impassable chasm of loss. He heard it, and at once it was gone, melting away into the sounds of the cold dusk, the accumulating darkness. The losing of it robbed him of whatever comfort it had offered; left him only with the grief. The bitter anger. “Time to go,” he said through trembling lips. Ive Bridge huddled in stony silence on the south bank of the river. Orisian remembered passing it as he made his first journey to Highfast, and he had thought it an unappealing place then. Now, it appeared ominous in its bleak isolation: squat houses crowded in on what little flat ground the terrain offered, and the bridge itself, hooking over the river like a bent finger. All of it was indistinct and menacing in the darkness, with only the faintest of moonlight to pick out its inanimate forms. A few lamps or torches burned in windows, but most of the village was all greys and blacks and imagined danger. He could just catch the soft scent of woodsmoke on the breeze. That smell too spoke to him with a threatening cadence these days. Orisian could hear the River Ive down there in the crevasse it had made for itself on the far side of the houses, grinding and foaming in its mountain bed under the bridge. Somewhere beyond that noise, out in the utterly impenetrable darkness, lay the road that led on and up into the Karkyre Peaks, to Highfast. If he thought of that too clearly or carefully, doubt came crowding in upon him. He did not know how much trust to put in his own thoughts and instincts now, and chose instead—as much as he could—to hold his attention upon the present, the immediate. Figures were moving down the rugged slope towards Ive Bridge: Ess’yr and Varryn, and a dozen warriors led by Torcaill. They did not follow the main trail that snaked its way into the village, but descended instead over steep, boulder-strewn ground, creeping from moonshadow to moonshadow. It would not be long before they reached the first outlying cottage. Orisian rolled away and scuttled like a beetle—bent almost double, with his shield strapped across his back—to join Taim and the others. They waited in a cutting through which the trail passed before it began its descent into Ive Bridge. A fell sight: dark forms with a dusting of moonlight upon them, gouts of steaming breath rising from the horses, bared blades. Orisian hauled himself up astride his mount. “They’re almost there,” he said quietly to Taim Narran. The warrior nodded, and eased his way to the front of the column. “Go carefully,” Taim said as he rode on. “Keep your reins tight until you’re told otherwise.” The horses were wary at first, distrusting the dark road. It made them careful and quiet, at least, but still Orisian felt the tension of possible discovery. The slightest rattle of harness or slip of hoof on a loose pebble sounded loud, punctuating the background rumble of the river. No new lights were lit in Ive Bridge, though. No alarm went up. He could see no sign of movement down there. Even Ess’yr and the others had disappeared from sight, as if they had been swallowed by the rock or the shadows. They covered perhaps half the way down to the village before a sudden strangulated cry broke the night’s skin. Even as its last anguished echo trailed away, Taim Narran was kicking his horse on. The long blade of his sword flashed once, a shaft of captured moonlight, as he flourished it, and then he was pounding off down the road. Orisian and the others followed. After that, it was a chaos of thudding hoofs, a jolting, jarring charge in which Orisian saw almost nothing but his horse’s neck pumping up and down before him. They burst into the heart of Ive Bridge before anticipation or fear had any chance to take root in him. The darkness made everything sudden and bewildering. Figures—men and horses—jostled all about him. Shouts and the clatter of hoofs and ringing of blades echoed from every stone surface, shivering back and forth on the cold still air until they lost all form and became a single raucous accompaniment to the slaughter. And slaughter it was, rather than battle. Orisian glimpsed Torcaill’s little band of warriors spilling from the door and windows of one of the cottages, rushing on without pause, breaking into another house to slay those asleep—or coming blearily awake—within. Spearmen came stumbling out from a long, low building into the roadway, half-dressed, bare-headed, fumbling with weapons and shields as if still all but blinded by sleep. Someone rode straight into them, not even bothering to swing with his sword, using the weight and strength of his horse to batter them aside. Others, already dismounted, darted in behind and set to work with blades. There was a fast and fierce efficiency to the bloody work of Taim’s men. The killing went on all around Orisian, and he felt himself strangely divorced from it, like an uncomprehending spectator at some mad and cruel revels. Indistinct forms lurched this way and that all around him. His horse turned itself about in a tight circle, tossing its head in agitation. He let it carry him, and carry his gaze in a sweeping arc. He saw Varryn and Ess’yr, improbably perched atop the slate roof of a hut. Their Kyrinin faces seemed bright in the moonlight, almost shining, the blue swirls of their tattoos almost luminous. The arrows that left their bows were so fast that they vanished into the darkness as if snapping out of existence in the very moment they were loosed. And as his horse swung Orisian about, cloud must have taken the moon, for the darkness deepened. He saw a knot of figures running for the bridge: Torcaill, he hoped, going as intended to block any escape. He saw an unmounted horse staggering, something trailing from beneath it, and only after a moment did he realise that it had been disembowelled. He saw two men rolling across the cobblestones, punching or stabbing one another in a frenzy. Then the moon was unveiled once more, and in its sudden, muted light he saw the point of a spear lancing up towards his face. He instinctively knocked it aside with his sword, turning it across his horse’s shoulders, then jerked his arm back to cut his assailant across the side of the head. It was a woman, he realised as she fell silently and limply away. Another figure veered towards him, another spear coming in at hip height, but then there was a wet thud and the spear was falling aside, the Black Roader pawing at an arrow in his neck. Orisian knocked him down with a single blow. He looked up. Ess’yr was there on the roof, already reaching to her quiver for another arrow. She turned away as soon as their eyes met. Orisian kicked his horse towards the largest of the buildings. It must, he thought, be a tavern of some sort. His warriors were rushing in as he drew up before it. He heard screams and feet pounding on wooden stairs. There was a crash of splintering wood and a figure tumbled from one of the upper, shuttered windows, blurring down and hitting the ground a few paces from Orisian. He heard the crack of leg bones break in the impact. The man howled, but began to crawl at once, seeking shadows. Orisian dismounted and walked over to him. The man rolled onto his back. His face was contorted by pain, but he had strength and sense enough to curse Orisian in a northern accent so thick the words were almost unintelligible. There was venom in the voice, hatred and bile. Orisian hefted his sword, began to raise it. The man did not shrink away. He bared his teeth through his short dark beard and spat out vitriolic contempt. Orisian hesitated, suddenly thinking of Ive. There had been an abandoned, almost accusatory, air about Erval as the Guard Captain had watched them ride out. The town had been a shell by then, all but empty. Only a few dozen left behind, likely to soon follow all the others who had already scattered into the east, into the frigid wilds. If they had been too slow to flee, this same terrible thing might be happening in Ive even now, Orisian thought. Killings in the street, the abrupt, unthinking ending of lives. Someone came in from the side and planted a spear firmly into the chest of the Black Roader, who growled and cursed and coughed as he died. It did not last long. Those who had held Ive Bridge were not, it turned out, the ferocious, faith-inspired warriors Orisian had expected. They were instead the drunk, the sick and the hungry; gaunt and frail many of them, others injured. All dead, soon enough. “I’ll take Ess’yr and Varryn, Torcaill and three men back to fetch Yvane and the others,” Orisian said, watching with Taim as his men dragged the corpses to the river’s edge and heaved them into the torrent. “Be quick,” Taim said. “These were just deserters or looters, but it doesn’t mean there’s nothing worse around.” “I doubt it,” Orisian murmured. “There’s nothing here for anyone. The lowlands, the towns; that’s what they’ll want. But yes. I’ll be quick. Don’t let anyone get too settled. We should press on as soon as I’m back.” “Nothing to settle with,” Taim grunted. “There’s hardly enough food here for a quarter our number.” They went more slowly back up the trail, Ess’yr and Varryn running ahead, disappearing into the darkness. Orisian watched them go with a twinge of regret. He had wanted to thank Ess’yr for her arrow, but there was a strange lassitude in him now. He felt faintly dizzy, and when he blinked saw inside his eyes the spittle-flecked lips of that hate-filled, broken-legged man working over crooked teeth. He rode beside Torcaill. The warrior’s head dipped lower, bit by bit. His hands rested loosely on his horse’s neck. The animal began to slow. “There’s something I want to ask of you,” Orisian said quietly. Torcaill jerked upright and blew out his cheeks. “Forgive me, sire,” he said. “It’s all right. We’re all tired. Listen, there’s something I’d like you to do for me.” “Whatever you command, of course.” “No,” Orisian shook his head. “I’ll not command you in this. Only ask. It’s… it will be difficult. I’d like you to try to reach Vaymouth. Just you and a couple of men: whoever you’d want to choose. If you stay away from the main roads until you get into Ayth-Haig lands…” The words trailed away as he became guiltily aware of how inadequate they were; how blandly unequal they were to the magnitude of what he was asking. “Of course, sire,” Torcaill said levelly. “If it’s what you wish.” “I want… I’d like you to try to find my sister, if you can. I’m not sure what’s going to happen here, to me, but I think… I think Anyara might need help. Protect her. Get her out of Vaymouth, if you can. And give her a message from me.” “I’ll do everything —” “Rider!” someone shouted, and a moment later Orisian could hear it too: the hammering of hoofs coming wildly, dangerously up the road towards them. “Spread out,” Torcaill hissed, drawing his sword. “It’s all right,” Orisian said. “Whoever it is, I doubt they would have got past Ess’yr and Varryn if they were a threat.” It was one of the warriors who had remained hidden in the copse. He was fraught and dishevelled. There were wounds on his face, the blood black in the gloom. Orisian felt a dull dread in his gut. “We were attacked, sire,” the man gasped as he hauled his mount to an ungainly halt in the middle of the road. “Tarbains, just a handful.” Orisian hung his head. “Who’s dead?” he asked quietly. “Four men, sire. We killed all of the savages, though.” “And the na’kyrim?” “There was much confusion. We… Some of the horses ran wild. We were scattered, for a time, all of us. In the darkness…” “The na’kyrim?” Orisian asked again, that dread now a hard, cold fist rising in his chest, making it difficult to breathe. “Two of them are safe, sire. We found them. But the mute one, the mad one: she’s gone. Not killed, but gone. In the confusion, she slipped away.” Beyond the man, the two Kyrinin were drifting back out of the night, pale shapes slowly coalescing amongst the silent boulders on either side of the road. Orisian slumped in his saddle, abruptly and profoundly exhausted.
VIII
In the Vare Waste, amongst the mule-stubborn masterless men who scraped a living from its labyrinthine canyons and gorges, feuds long-forgotten or forgiven were reborn. Along the goat trails, through the scrublands, raiding parties ran. Men sent their wives and children to hide in caves while they waged petty wars over the boulder-fields. And still they found time to prey, as well, upon the Kilkry folk who came stumbling into that wind-blasted wasteland, fleeing the slaughter wrought by the Black Road. In Dun Aygll there was no war, but minds still foundered: the people seized Rot-scarred beggars from the streets and burned them alive on pyres built amidst the ruins of ancient royal residences; a Tal Dyreen merchant, accused by rumour of using shaved weights, was dragged from his house and carried to the Old Market, and killed there, more than a hundred hands sharing in the deed. On distant Tal Dyre itself, the households of two merchant princes elevated quarrel to murder. They hunted one another with knives through the lanes of the island’s palace-encrusted slopes, until the nights grew deadly and the people fearful. A Huanin trader, arriving as he had many times before at a Snake vo’an to exchange knives for furs, offered insult with an ill-judged remark implying them to be subservient to the Taral-Haig Marchlords. Some of the older women, even the vo’an’tyr herself, counselled tolerance; it was not the first, and would not be the last, time that the ignorance and stupidity of a slow-minded Huanin had led them to abuse the clan’s hospitality. But younger, hotter hearts demurred. There was debate and then argument, and then threat and accusation. It might have gone further had the elders not stepped aside, the better to preserve the clan’s peace. The young warriors broke the trader’s wrists and ankles with stones, and set their hunting dogs on him. On the Nar Vay shore, west of Vaymouth, two brothers—long of dark inclination, guilty of innumerable small cruelties in their childhoods—went one night, without cause, from house to house in their fishing village and took blades to their friends, and their family and their lovers. They killed six, injured more, before the menfolk gathered and pursued them to the gravel beach. One died beneath the cudgels and harpoons and scaling knives of the villagers; the other waded into the sea, going on and out with the moonlimned waves breaking across his shoulders, laughing madly until he was taken under. And in Vaymouth—huge, jostling, choking, loud Vaymouth—the sickness rose, day by day, closer to the surface. The city so long accustomed to singing itself songs woven from chinking coins, hammers in workshops, the seductive cries of hawkers and pedlars, the gossip of washerwomen, found another more corrosive strand entering its harmonies. It found another voice with which to whisper its tales of itself. Anger murmured in its alleys and inns, bitter distrust and doubt sighing coldly through its marketplaces and potteries. In sleep and in waking, a dark imagination took hold of its inhabitants, and many succumbed to it. The Craft apprentices rioted, each death of one of their number inciting the survivors to greater outrage. The Captain of the Guard in the Tannery Ward was killed by his wife’s lover. His men took their vengeance upon the man, his parents, his sister, but found that bloodletting insufficient to sate their hunger and went on to the next house, and the next, and the next, looting and killing and feasting until they fell exhausted or drunk. Three women were killed in as many nights, their dismembered bodies found in dank dawns within sight of the Moon Palace’s walls. Fear stalked the city, and bred the violence that it fed upon.
*
Anyara found the terrace from which she and Coinach had watched the fires burgeoning across Vaymouth a convenient and quiet refuge whenever the increasingly oppressive atmosphere in the Palace of Red Stone grew intolerable, and she needed the touch of cold, cleansing air on her face or a glimpse of the sky. The denizens of the palace never seemed to use it—not in this season, at least—and though there were sometimes guards upon it at night, during the day it was empty and silent. On this particular day it was cold too. “Could you bring me a cloak from my chambers?” she asked Coinach quietly. He nodded and disappeared into the body of the palace. As soon as he was out of sight, Anyara felt guilty. It was hardly respectful, of either his standing or his capabilities, to treat a shieldman as if he were a maidservant. Yet Coinach had raised no protest. He never would, she suspected, almost irrespective of what she asked of him. She was aware that the two of them were acting less and less like a Thane’s sister and her loyal bodyguard; more and more like companions—exiles—who found in one another the only friendship and support they could rely upon. Still, there was a sharp chill on the air and she did need the cloak. And Eleth, the maid assigned to her, had been mysteriously absent for the last two days. Sick, the others had told Anyara when she asked after her, but their curt replies had an evasive impatience about them that did not inspire belief. Perhaps, she told herself, they were just unsettled by the general confusion and nervous mood that had taken hold of all Vaymouth. There had been other fires since those first bright beacons of destruction blooming in the night. More riots. Anyara had heard the crowds roaring along the streets of the city even through the thick walls of the palace. Now she could see a distant pillar of smoke climbing into the sky. Some ruin, still smouldering. She folded her arms, tucking her hands into her sleeves. She blew a long, slow breath upwards and watched the mist of it drifting and fading away. Voices reached her from somewhere below the terrace. She knew there was a long narrow walled garden down there, where nothing but a few harshly pruned and trained fruit trees grew. The voices were instantly recognisable: Tara and Mordyn. Yet both had a strident edge she had never heard in them before. “You took her riding, I hear,” the Chancellor was saying. “Well, no more. She is to be confined within these walls, on Gryvan’s command.” “As you wish, of course, but tell me why, at least. I find no harm in the girl.” “That’s not for you to judge.” “Not for me to judge? Don’t speak to me as if I were one of your lackeys. I’m your wife, or have you truly forgotten that as thoroughly as it seems?” Anyara, shrinking back from the terrace’s balustrade, winced at the anguish in Tara’s voice. There was much pain there, though it was so intimately entangled with anger that the two were hardly distinguishable. “I forget nothing,” Mordyn said, suddenly gentle. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” “Then tell me why. I’ve never pried into any of your dealings needlessly, but now you set such briars about yourself I cannot even draw near. Tell me what this child’s done. I’ve seen nothing in her save sorrow and strength, and loyalty to her family.” “Have a care you don’t align yourself with treacherous friends.” A sound behind her had Anyara spinning about, raising her hands to fend off some assault. It was only Coinach, though, stepping out onto the terrace, carrying her cloak. He wore a questioning expression, but she held a palm out to him and pressed a finger to her lips. He came carefully closer. “Treacherous friends?” Tara was crying out below. Her distress must be profound—all-consuming—to permit this kind of indiscretion, Anyara knew. There would surely be servants and guards who could hear all of this just as clearly as she could herself. “You know,” Tara went on, her tone moderating a touch, veering back towards grief and confusion, “you used to know, at least, that I would not allow so much as a feather’s width of distance to separate us, but this talk of Lannis and Kilkry treachery is absurd. Whatever their failings, they would never do anything to weaken our resistance to the Black Road. Lannis owes its very existence to the struggle against them. They’re obsessed with it. You know all this far better than I. Why can’t you explain to me what’s changed? “Please! Don’t turn away from me. Listen to me. Explain to me. I need to understand.” She was begging him now. “Surely it’s Aewult’s clumsiness, his ineptitude, that’s caused this confusion. You said from the start he should not have been sent north. You said —” “What I said does not matter.” The Shadowhand’s voice was leaden. All Tara’s desperate longing evidently moved him not at all. “What is: that’s our concern now. There is conspiracy against us, against the High Thane. That is all you need to know.” “All I need to know? How can you say such things?” “I have no time for this. There is conspiracy. I have shown Gryvan the proofs of it, and he acts upon them as he sees fit. The girl, and her Blood, stand condemned in his eyes, along with many others. Her brother killed Aewult’s messengers. He is to be outlawed.” Coinach was pulling gently at Anyara’s sleeve. She glanced at him, and his concern was clear. With good reason, Anyara knew: if they were known to have overheard this fraught exchange, troubles could flock about them as thickly as crows on a carcass. But then, as was abundantly clear, they were already beset by plentiful troubles. “Proofs?” Tara snapped. “What proofs?” “My own report of what I discovered while in the hands of the Black Road. Letters. Messages I’ve uncovered since then. Enough, woman!” “Messages? Those you wrote yourself?” Then, suddenly, the sharp sound of palm on flesh. A stinging blow. “Don’t question me,” cried Mordyn Jerain. “Never question me. And never speak such an accusation again, to me or anyone else.” Too forcefully to be resisted, Coinach drew Anyara back and led her into the shadows of the long room at the back of the terrace. As she retreated, she thought she could just hear, almost too faint for her to catch, Tara’s soft gasps of shock, and horror, and betrayal. Perhaps they were the choked remnants of sobs. “We should get back to your chambers,” Coinach whispered. “They must find us safely there, and safely ignorant, should anyone wonder where we are.” Anyara nodded. They went quickly and quietly back through the corridors.
*
Alem T’anarch liked to think of himself as a man of refined but modest tastes. The thin cord with which he tied his long pale hair had gold thread braided into it, but the strand was so delicate as to be almost invisible. His sword, which he wore only on the most important of occasions, had small diamonds set into its scabbard. They were discreet, though. Certainly not as boorishly indulgent as so much of the wealth on display in Vaymouth had become. Alem had been ambassador of the Dornach Kingship to the Haig Blood for long enough to acquire a grudging respect for the vigour of his hosts, but this was increasingly overlaid by much less charitable sentiments. The overbearing self-confidence of Gryvan oc Haig, his family and his entire Blood had become tedious; all the more so since it had started to express itself in the ever more ostentatious adornment of Vaymouth with palaces and grand Craft establishments and pointless ceremonial. And in recent times there had been growing hostility towards Alem’s own Kingship. It had become absurdly acute since Gryvan’s discovery of Dornachmen fighting in the service of the rebellious Dargannan-Haig Blood. Alem had found himself treated without even the faint respect his position had previously commanded. He had been denied any contact with Gryvan or any of his high officials. He now strode through the echoing corridors of the Moon Palace with, therefore, a mix of anticipation and trepidation. That he should at last be granted the audience he had long sought was a relief, but the manner of his summoning to it—abrupt, discourteous—did not bode well. His attendants, hurrying in his wake, looked worried. No one wanted war with the Haig Bloods—not yet, at least—but the possibility hung in the air like the stench of an approaching corpse-ship. It was regrettable, Alem recognised, that Jain T’erin had sold his warband to Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig, but the Dornach Kingship had always produced a supply of stubbornly independent adventurers: sons disinherited by the fall of their fathers in one of the regular reorderings that swept through the nobility; warriors cut loose when the excessive popularity or success of their commanders led to the disbanding of whole armies. It was the way of things, and it was absurd to hold the King responsible for the deeds of those spawned by such developments. In truth, Alem’s own subsequent demand for compensatory payments to the families of those dead mercenaries had probably been misjudged, but the instruction had come from Evaness and his doubts had been overruled. The late Jain T’erin—or his family, at least—evidently still had influential friends at court. Alem and his party drew to a halt before the massive double doors of Gryvan’s Great Hall. The guards standing there regarded them with the disdain which Alem had come to expect. He ignored them. The doorkeeper, a slight and ageing man, raised the ancient staff that was his symbol and pounded its gnarled, polished head against the door. The arrival of anticipated visitors thus announced, there was nothing to do but wait, which everyone did in tense silence. That wait was, unsurprisingly, longer than was dignified. Alem studied the intricate carvings on the panels of the door. It was supposedly a relic of the Aygll Kingship, removed from Dun Aygll by some warlord during the Storm Years. Whether that tale of its origin was true or not, it betrayed the instincts of the Haig family. They sought to accrue to themselves some of the glamour once attached to the extinct Kingship. There were notches and scars here and there, but the quality of the craftsmanship remained evident. Alem’s gaze traced the intertwining coils of ivy and the elegantly depicted warriors. There were figures high up on the door whose faces had been cut away, leaving ugly wounds that marred the otherwise balanced compositions. Those, Alem knew, had been images of Kyrinin, once allies of the Kingship, later its avowed enemies. The doors swung belatedly open, ending Alem’s bitter musings. He advanced into the Great Hall, holding his head up and wearing a carefully neutral expression. His footsteps rang in the cavernous vaulted and columned hall. It was unusually empty, and the journey from the door to the Throne Dais at the far end felt uncomfortably exposed. Gryvan oc Haig was waiting there, his crimson cloak drawn across his chest. That was seldom a good sign, Alem thought as he drew near. Whenever that cloak was upon the High Thane’s shoulders, it swelled his sense of his own grandeur. It was no more pleasing to see Abeh, Gryvan’s wife, sitting in her own throne at his side. Alem could barely recall a single well-judged word ever having passed her lips. The Ambassador was more encouraged by the sight of Mordyn Jerain standing close by the Thane of Thanes. The Chancellor’s head was bowed, so Alem was unable to make the eye contact he would have desired, but still he felt a hint of hope. For all the dubious games Jerain undoubtedly played, Alem had always found him to be, if nothing else, intelligent and considered. It had been a relief to hear that he was safely returned to the city, and to Gryvan’s side, after his prolonged absence. If anyone in this increasingly turbulent city might be prevailed upon to see the wisdom of a return to civility, it would surely be Mordyn Jerain. Alem came to a halt before the dais, and bowed to the Thane of Thanes. He put a little more depth into the gesture than was usually his wont, for though he served a true King, and this man merited none of the respect such a title conferred, a conciliatory demeanour seemed the wisest course. “I am grateful for the opportunity to present myself, sire,” he said, head still bent. “Perhaps you should await developments before deciding how grateful you are,” Gryvan oc Haig replied, and Alem noted with unease the chill that ran through the words. Slowly, the Ambassador lifted his head, attempting a faint, relaxed smile. He caught the eye of Kale, the Captain of the High Thane’s Shield, as he did so, and wondered at the dead, reptilian quality of the man’s gaze. No, not even reptilian; the lizards that basked amongst the sand dunes of his homeland’s coast had more life in their regard. “It is fortunate that you reached us here without coming to any harm,” Gryvan said. “The streets are somewhat dangerous.” Alem was uncertain how best to respond to that. It seemed an odd gambit for a ruler to draw such attention to his inability to keep order in his own city. “The masses ever find ways to test the will of their masters, I find,” he said smoothly. “I think they will remember soon enough how unwise it is to so taunt the mighty, no?” “Three nights of trouble, we’ve had,” Gryvan mused, his hands clutching the edges of his lurid cloak ever more tightly. “Fires. Riot. Murders.” “They will keep to their houses once it snows, or rains,” Alem said. He found it difficult to maintain a buoyant strand of levity in his voice, particularly as he had the strong impression Gryvan did not care what he said. Was, in fact, barely even listening. And the Chancellor still had not raised his head. Mordyn looked thinner than Alem remembered, his shoulders a little narrower. “There is such a fervour in the people,” Gryvan said, “one cannot help but wonder about its source. We are no strangers to discontent and dispute here, yet never—not in my lifetime, nor my father’s—has it found such… shameful expression. Why is that, do you suppose? What has changed, Ambassador?” Alem’s hopes of a successful audience had been slender from the start. Now they withered like a blighted vine. Gryvan’s soft-spoken words were laced with threat, with malice. Alem wondered whether the Shadowhand’s studied disengagement was a silent message: a warning that he could expect no succour from that quarter. He cleared his throat. “A man would have to be rich in presumption, I think, to advise a High Thane upon the rule of his own city. No? The one who stands before you now, sire, is not such a man. Not at all. The matters I hoped to discuss are entirely —” “See how he seeks to slither out from under your boot,” hissed Abeh venomously. Alem blinked in surprise at her outburst. “My lady, I intend no slithering. I mean only that it is not my place to make comment on these unfortunate disturbances. In knowing that, I show only respect.” “Unfortunate?” Abeh sneered. “Do you pretend you don’t rejoice in this ruining of Vaymouth? Do you claim your spirits aren’t lifted by the sight of everything we have built here being torn down?” Alem smiled. A stupid gesture, he knew, as likely to antagonise as to assuage the High Thane’s tempestuous wife. It was born of bemusement. He smothered it as quickly as he could beneath a bland mask of—hopefully—foolish puzzlement. “This was the fairest of cities,” Abeh snarled at him. “Now it’s being fouled. All this discord, all this damage. Ugly!” Alem began to wonder if the woman had finally lapsed into the frothing, idiot decline that had always seemed her most likely fate, but he was saved from having to find a coherent response to her rantings by Gryvan himself. “Hush,” the Thane of Thanes said, with a glance at his wife. “Hush. We’ll have no answers from him like that.” “Answers?” Alem echoed. “I came in expectation of… not such questions, at least. I am too slow, perhaps. It might be so. Yet I admit, I do not understand.” It was cold in this cursed hall, he thought. They could not even keep the winter chill from their own palaces, these fools. “Be quiet,” said Gryvan. “Mordyn?” The Chancellor now at last lifted his head and took a step forward. There was not even a glimmer of recognition in his eyes as he regarded Alem; not a hint at the years of careful sparring that lay between them, the grudging respect the Ambassador thought had grown. It was a stranger who now looked down upon him from the dais, and an unfriendly one at that. “I have seen,” Mordyn intoned, “in Kolkyre and Anduran, evidence of conspiracy between Lannis and Kilkry, the Crafts and this man’s Kingship. I was given letters that the Gyre Bloods found. I have uncovered more since my return.” “This is absurd,” Alem protested. “Silence!” Kale came striding forward as he shouted, halting halfway down the steps at the front of the dais. The lean warrior glared at Alem with contempt. “The High Thane has been shown proofs,” Mordyn Jerain was saying levelly. “The patterns, the tracks left by those who seek to undermine the rule of Haig, have been revealed to him. He sees clearly now, and all your lies and your pretences will not serve to cloud his sight again.” “I tell no lies,” said Alem. “If you accuse me of this, you are much in error. And giving great offence to me and my master.” His unease was transforming itself incrementally into fear. This discourse might wear a cloak of eloquence and be housed in a grand hall, but its substance was that of the alleyway, the knife fight. “Do you deny, Ambassador,” Mordyn said, “that your Kingship has conspired with the Goldsmiths to foment disorder? That you covet the lands of the Free Coast, and of the Dargannan Blood, and even up to the gates of Vaymouth itself? Do you deny that even now your armies assemble along your northern borders, at your ports, imagining us weak? Do you pretend that Dornach coin is not lining the pockets of the mobs tormenting Vaymouth’s slumber every night?” “All that, I deny,” Alem said. “And if you have more, that I deny too, but will not tarry to hear it. You invite these imagined dangers of yours into reality by your insults, and I will give no aid to you in that. Therefore, I remove myself from your presence, sires and lady.” He bowed, feeling the weight of his pounding heart in his chest, and backed away. He turned and saw Gryvan’s men spread across the distant doorway, blocking it; others advancing down the echoing length of the hall. “I must have the truth in this, Ambassador,” Gryvan said, almost sorrowfully, behind him. “You will understand that. You understand power. Its necessities. The requirement—absolute, unwavering—to defend it, and preserve it. I cannot stand idly by when all that I have inherited, all that I will pass on to my son, is threatened.” Alem turned back to face the throne. The servants and scribes who had accompanied him into this trap were clustering tightly together, looking nervously about as the Haig warriors drew slowly closer. “I must act,” said Gryvan. “I must. If the dangers that crowd about me prove illusory, so be it. Whatever harm is done can be undone in time. I will regret it, and endure that regret. But if I fail to act, and those dangers prove real, I will have wilfully squandered the labour of generations. You can understand, surely, that when I see signs of sickness in my body, however faint, however uncertain, it is better to examine them, to excise them even, than to pay them no heed?” “Gryvan, I implore you —” Alem reached out his hands, unashamed by the supplicatory gesture and by the pleading in his voice, knowing in his mounting despair that nothing mattered save somehow reaching the High Thane, making him understand “—give thought to the consequences of this. Where has your sense gone? Whatever lies have been dripped into your ear, you…” Alem could hear jostling behind him, cries of outrage. The High Thane’s shieldmen were seizing his attendants or pushing them aside. Kale, the rangy leader of this pack of hounds, was stepping down from the Throne Dais, coming towards him with an air of malicious, eager intent. “Thane, there is no sense in this,” Alem shouted, his voice climbing a shrill ladder of alarm. “You must see that! You cannot truly believe we would play such crude games against you. You invite disaster!” Kale had hold of his shoulders. He could feel the warrior’s iron-hard fingers grinding into his muscles through the cloth. Beyond, Alem saw that Gryvan was no longer looking at him. The High Thane gazed up into the vaulted roof of the hall, detached, as if his presence were merely accidental. “Disaster,” Gryvan muttered, so softly that Alem barely heard it, “as I have been recently reminded, comes to those who allow events to precede them. I, Ambassador —” he said this into the great cavern of the hall’s roof “—I choose to walk ahead of events. I choose to shape them, not be shaped by them. I am Thane of Thanes, and I am fierce enough still to hold my throne.” They took the Ambassador from the Great Hall and bore him into the bowels of the Moon Palace. They followed seldom-used passages, and bundled him down dark and tight spiralling stairways. There was no glory or elegance there. No marble, no carvings, no fine and graceful tapestries. Only bare rock and rough-hewn steps; torches giving out tarry smoke and walls streaked with grime. They took him as deep as it was possible to go, to places few ever visited, and fewer wished to visit. There they showed him cruel instruments. They showed him branding irons and hammers; water-filled barrels big enough to hold a manacled man; iron-tipped whips and flaying knives. Though his mind cowered in disbelieving horror, he denied them the words—the confession—they desired. They tore his clothes from him. They ripped his finery into pieces and cast it into braziers. They cut away his hair with knives, so roughly that some of it tore from his scalp, and he felt blood on his head. Though he knew nothing would come of it, he begged them to think again, to turn aside from this terrible course their Thane had set them upon. There was only hatred in their eyes, only abuse on their lips. They asked him again to confess his crimes, and those of his people, and those of his King. And he could see how they craved his refusal. They wanted it, above all else, so that they should have the chance to break him. There was something unnatural, excessive in their eager ferocity. He gave them what they wanted, for he would not betray his people with falsehoods. He would not invite the consequences such lies would have. His captors turned gladly to the tools that hung on the walls about them, that rested against stands and waited in the seething braziers. And in time, bloodily, they broke the Ambassador of the Dornach Kingship in that deep and dark place, and he assented to every accusation that was relentlessly put to him. He gave truth to every falsehood the Shadowhand had uttered. And once that truth was given, and his purpose served, the High Thane’s men put a knife into Alem T’anarch’s heart and sent his corpse to be burned on the pyres, in Ash Pit, reserved for the bodies of murderers and thieves and traitors.
IX
Anyara was afraid. She sought for all the old, stubborn determination with which she had learned to resist fear and doubt and grief. But that determination was frayed, almost eaten away like some moth-discovered robe. The fear and hopelessness leaked through it. Her only other defence was distraction, and that she turned to willingly and with all the vigour she could muster. “Could we steal horses and slip out of the city?” she wondered. Coinach looked dubious. The two of them were sequestered in her chambers, the door locked from the inside, the shutters closed across the great windows. They conspired by candlelight, though outside it was a bright if cold afternoon. “Nothing’s impossible,” the warrior said carefully. His doubt was ill concealed. “There must be Lannis merchants in the city, aren’t there?” she said. “Visiting Craftsmen? Someone who could help us, perhaps smuggle us out.” “I don’t know. I could try to find out…” He sounded doubtful. “Yes. I’m forbidden to leave this gilded gaol cell, but you… No one actually said you couldn’t go out into the city, did they?” “Not that I’ve heard, lady, no. Seems unlikely they’d —” “It’s no use anyway,” Anyara said. “What good are we to anyone, running away, sneaking off into hiding like some masterless bandit with a price on his head?” She clapped her hands together in irritation, and in doing so snapped out the flame of the closest candle. She growled at it, and lit a taper at one of the others to restore it. “We should be trying to find a way to undo some of this madness,” she muttered, frowning at the wick while she waited for it to take the flame. “Change things, not flee from them. I didn’t come here just to be locked away. If we can’t unpick the Shadowhand’s lies, Orisian, our whole Blood, everything is at risk. We need help.” “Yes, though Vaymouth is hardly the most fertile ground to search —” A hesitant, almost furtive, knocking at the door interrupted them. It startled Anyara. She almost dropped the still-burning taper, but swiftly recovered herself and gently blew it out. Coinach was already moving towards the door. “Who is it?” called Anyara. “Eleth, my lady. I have… I have clean bedding.” Anyara nodded to Coinach, and the shieldman opened the door. The maidservant entered, her arms piled with sheets. She looked curiously from Anyara to Coinach and back again, clearly wondering what kind of business they had been engaged in, locked away together in a darkened room. The suspicion might have amused Anyara once, perhaps embarrassed her, but now she spared it no more than a moment’s thought. She noticed the change in Eleth at once. Gone were the girl’s open, friendly expression, her casual chatter. She seemed smaller, more withdrawn. That alone Anyara might simply have ascribed to the fraught and fractious atmosphere in the palace, and the change in her own status from tolerated guest to prisoner. But there was more, she sensed. Eleth’s cheeks drooped, her mouth was set in limp misery. She looked as if she had been crying recently. “Are you all right?” Anyara asked as the maid opened the great chest at the foot of the bed and began putting in the fine sheets, one after another in neat, luxuriant layers. “Yes, lady,” Eleth murmured, and the fluttering of her words betrayed the lie. “I’ve not seen you for days. They told me you were sick.” “Yes, lady.” There were tears there, so close to the surface: a loosely lidded pot simmering towards a cold and sorrowful boil. Anyara toyed absently with the sleeve of her dress, wondering whether to press the matter. She felt a glimmer of concern for the girl, but it was overlaid by other, more urgent, preoccupations. “Do you know where the Chancellor’s wife is, Eleth?” she asked as the maid softly closed the chest. “She is in the bath chamber, lady. Ensuring it has been cleaned as it should, I think.” “I need to talk to her, Eleth. It’s very important. Would you take me to her, please.” “I am not sure we are supposed to…” “I only want to talk to her. No harm can come of it. Please, Eleth.” The door to the bathing chamber was open. As they drew near, a metallic crash and a skittering clatter rang out. The sudden noise, so obtrusively violent amidst the marmoreal quiet of the palace, halted Eleth in her tracks, and had her shrinking away. Whatever troubled the girl, it was pervasive, rendering her delicate. “Wait here,” Anyara whispered to Eleth and Coinach, and she went alone, cautiously, to the doorway of the chamber. The bath was set into the floor, its polished stone darkly gleaming. There was a soft, persistent scent of perfume on the air, perhaps in the tiles themselves. Heat washed over Anyara’s face, for there were braziers burning in each corner of the room. One of them lay on its side, its glowing contents fanned out across the floor, a sprawl of fiercely luminous coals. Tara Jerain stood beside it, staring down at her hands. “My lady?” Anyara said. Tara did not respond. She seemed fixated, to the exclusion of all else, upon her hands and the angry red welts that were already appearing there. “My lady?” Anyara repeated. “Is everything all right?” Slowly, Tara looked up. Her exquisite features had none of their usual lustre. She looked almost plain, as if her beauty had been washed out of her. At first, she gave no sign that she even recognised Anyara. She stared at her blankly. “What do you want?” she asked at length, blinking like someone waking from sleep. “I had hoped to talk to you about —” “No, no. Not now. I’m sorry.” Tara waved a limp hand as she spoke. Desolate sadness; weeping, blistering burns laid across her fingers and palm. Anyara stepped back, reluctantly dipping her head, disappointed to find her intentions thwarted. But Tara spoke again after a moment. “Wait. Wait. I have… I seem to have burned my hands.” “Eleth’s here,” Anyara said. “I’ll send her for a healer. For bandages and salves.” “Yes. Thank you.” Anyara glanced at Eleth, who nodded and rushed away with evident relief. Turning back into the moist, scented heat of the bathing room, Anyara carefully advanced. Tara’s arms hung loose at her sides now. The spilled charcoal murmured in fiery whispers on the floor. The orange light of those braziers that still stood danced across the innumerable tiles, the smooth stone. “We have nothing like this where I come from,” Anyara observed. “No? No, well I suppose we are privileged to enjoy such indulgences here.” “Perhaps we should find some water, to cool…” “No,” Tara said. She wiped sweat from her brow with the back of one of her marred hands. “The healer will bring some, no doubt. The pain is… the pain is only pain.” Anyara nodded. There was a depth of sorrow in this woman she recognised. Remembered. Loss was the only thing she knew that could at once so fill and so empty someone. “You saw him in Kolkyre, did you not?” Tara asked. “Before he was captured?” “Your husband. Yes, I did.” “Was he then as he is now?” “I am not sure I know what you mean, lady.” “Has he changed? Is he as you remember him?” Anyara had no idea what it would be best to say. She should be calculating how to win Tara’s favour. That had been her intent, after all, in seeking her out. There was no one else she could think of—no one with any influence—in whose ear she might find even a trace of sympathy. Yet calculation felt tawdry and futile in the face of such aching, familiar distress. “He seems… distracted. Graceless, if you will forgive me, in a way he was not before. He frightened me even then, my lady, if I am honest, but now… now he frightens me still, but in different ways.” Tara stared at her in silence. Anyara feared she had forfeited whatever connection might have been possible between the two of them. But then the Chancellor’s wife nodded and hung her head. “It is not true, what is being said—what he has said—about my Blood,” Anyara ventured. “About my brother.” “Truth is a rare currency these days,” Tara said dully. “If you find it in short supply, you are far from the only one. What was it you wanted? My help?” “I thought…” Anyara hesitated. She felt sweat upon her forehead, at her temples. A drop of it traced a crooked path down over her cheekbone. “You know it’s not true, I think. You understand that there is something wrong in all of this.” “It is not my concern,” said Tara. A sad, reflective smile tugged at one corner of her mouth, bunched her cheek for a moment. She stared at the blank wall, and the smile faded. Anyara could hear rapidly approaching footsteps: soft-slippered feet padding along the corridor. In a moment, she would no longer be alone with the Chancellor’s wife. “Something has gone wrong,” she said again. “And whatever’s happening, it can’t be just about my Blood, or Kilkry. These lies must have a greater purpose. I don’t know what your husband saw… I don’t know what happened to him when he was captured by the Black Road —” “Enough,” said Tara sharply. “Don’t you feel that everything’s going wrong? Doesn’t this all feel as if everything’s getting twisted out of shape?” Anyara persisted, beyond fear or caution now, hearing Coinach saying something to those arriving outside the chamber; delaying them, on her behalf. “Your husband… he said something strange to me, the other day. He said I had been in the forest, in Anduran, as if he was there with me, though I never met him until Kolkyre. He hasn’t… he hasn’t mentioned a na’kyrim to you, has he? A man called Aeglyss?” The Shadowhand’s wife shook her head slowly. She kept watching Anyara, intelligent eyes unblinking, as Eleth came hurrying in, half a dozen others with her: maids and healers. One carried a slopping bucket of water, another great rolls of bandages, a third armfuls of vials and stoppered bottles. The eldest of the men bustled over to Tara Jerain, casting a puzzled glance at the overturned brazier, carefully skirting its scattered contents. “What happened, my lady?” “I pushed it over,” said Tara faintly, holding her hands out for examination. “It was very stupid of me. I felt in need of… noise.” Anyara backed away, step by step, towards the doorway. Tara’s thoughtful gaze never left her, even as the healers muttered over her wounds, and began to spread salves over them.
*
The carriage had an escort of thirty men when it left Vaymouth. It rattled through the city streets in a cacophony of clattering wheels and hoofs. Half the lancers raced ahead, ruthlessly sweeping the streets clear of bystanders. There was urgency, for they had been late leaving the barracks beside the Moon Palace. The Captain in charge of the escort had been unexpectedly summoned to attend upon the Chancellor himself, and then kept waiting, frustrated and listless, while the morning sank into a grey and muted afternoon. The audience, when it came, had been mysteriously pointless: a fierce repetition of previous orders, an insistent emphasis on the need for haste. The Captain left the meeting feeling both somewhat battered and thoroughly puzzled that he had lost so much time for no discernible purpose beyond being forcefully reminded of the urgency of his mission. The column burst from Vaymouth’s northern gate like a hound loosed in pursuit of a stag. The horses pounded up the road, shadowing the winding course of the Vay River upstream. The carriage shook, rocking from side to side. The great expanse of the Vaywater lay at least two days’ journey to the north-east. There, on the lake’s only island, was the village of In’Vay, and its ancient, crenellated tower. It was a place with a bloody history, a place of execution and slaughter. More than three centuries ago, the warlords of the Taral plains had taken Lerr, the Boy King, there when they betrayed his trust to seize him at parley. It was there he had died, last of his line, strangled in the Lake Tower, his body weighted with stones and sunk into the Vaywater’s embrace. It was there the Aygll Kingship had been finally, irretrievably extinguished and the Storm Years birthed. Now another fallen lord was being carried to the Lake Tower. Those who rode in escort whipped their horses to a lather in hope of making up the time that had been lost in Vaymouth. The winter days were brief, though. In the shadows cast by its last light of the sun, they had parted from the great road that drove north to Drandar; their path was less travelled, taking an easterly curve. There was only one great inn to offer shelter on this stretch. They stopped there to feed and water their horses, and get what rest they could before the next dawn. The carriage stood, square and silent, in the yard to one side of the inn all through the night. Eight men guarded it and the prisoner it contained, some sitting atop its flat roof, others leaning against its wheels, others walking in long, careful circuits of the yard, the inn and the whole hamlet. Those who did not keep watch ate well beside roaring ashwood fires, and drank well. Yet their spirits were not greatly lightened by such comforts. They felt the burden of their grave duty, and knew they would have need of punishing haste if they were not to come late to In’Vay. Many of them slept poorly, and some worse than that. By the morning, eighteen of them were crippled by twisting cramps in their guts. They could not sit straight astride their horses, let alone attempt the pace required that day. Acutely mindful of the Chancellor’s wrath, the Captain barely hesitated: he beat the inn’s master into unconsciousness, then left the sick behind and went with his eleven remaining men on up the road. In the low hills that marked the northern limits of Haig lands, they came to a ford. The eyeless man within the carriage heard the wheels splashing through the water, grinding over pebbles. He was shaken roughly back and forth, clinging to his chains to keep himself from being thrown from his hard seat. His thighs and arms were already bruised from the violence of his journey. There were no gentle surfaces within this cold box, and he had no blankets or cushions to soften the blows. There was a pause once the wagon came out from the river. He savoured the moments of comparative quiet. His ears still rang from the clamour that had filled his moving prison, every harsh sound that had been trapped in there with him, but now at least he could hear too the soft chuckling of the river, the distant call of some bird circling overhead. Then, too soon, they were moving again, the carriage rumbling slowly up an incline. The noise gathered strength, shaping itself slowly into the formless sense-numbing roar he had come to know. This time, though, it was interrupted. Other sounds—sounds that did not fit—intruded and broke the rhythm of wheels and hoofs. Shouts. A horse’s scream. Something falling, something thudding against the side of the carriage. Something cracking and breaking under a wheel. He was thrown onto his side as the carriage veered suddenly. He felt it tipping, one set of wheels lifting from the road, then it crashed back and went unsteadily on. More cries. More confusion. Then silence. The prisoner pushed himself upright, angled his head to try to catch some revealing sound. The horses hauling the wagon had stopped moving, or they were gone. He heard footsteps and the bar on the door being lifted, the creak of hinges. There would be light, he supposed, flooding in, but he could not see it. He felt a chill breeze. “You’d be the very blind man I’m seeking, then,” someone said, in a voice straight from the backstreets or the harbour taverns. Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig lifted his head towards the words, empty eye sockets hidden behind a linen band. His manacles clanked as he tried to stand. “Out with you,” the rough voice said. Igryn felt his chains suddenly tighten, hauling him towards the bitterly cold, fresh air. “You’ve some travelling yet to do. What use you’d be to anyone, I can’t imagine, but it’s back to the city for you.”
CHAPTER 3
____
The Broken Man
Break a man’s bones, and he will heal, and cultivate hatred of you. Break a man’s spirit, and he is unmendable.
From To My Sons and His Sons Thereafter by Kulkain oc Kilkry
I
For more than a century, Kan Avor had rotted in the watery chains of the Glas Water. They had fallen away with the breaking of Sirian’s Dyke, but the city had entered another kind of bondage: ice encrusted it. Every pool in its pitted and silt-layered streets was frozen. Icicles fringed each protrusion of its gnarled and knotted ruins. Whatever feeble thaw might begin during the day was undone and reversed in the succeeding night. Snow fell, and persisted in every shadow. Winter possessed the city. And there were other masters sharing dominion of the courtyards and squares and broken towers. A febrile vigour that threw out on occasion eruptive gouts of madness and brutality, and by communal consent made sudden savagery the most natural, the most basic, expression of the state of being. And the na’kyrim, who resided at the heart of this great ruin, and about whom everything turned, and by whose will all things were deemed to happen. They came in their scores and their hundreds, drawn by rumour or by other, silent, far deeper instincts: men and women, those who were warriors and those who were not. Gyre, Gaven, Wyn, Fane. Even Horin. They came, many, without knowing precisely what drew them there, to the shattered city squatting amidst marsh and mud in the centre of the Glas Valley. Some died, in fights or of sickness or hunger. Others found a ruin for shelter, a fire for warmth, and slowly came to an understanding: that they had reached the axis about which the world now turned, the spring from which a terrible, cleansing flood was flowing out across the world. The lever that was overturning every now-outdated law and rule. And some sought to set eyes upon the lord of this cruelly transformative domain. Some sought out the na’kyrim himself. In a dank, columned chamber where, in the very infancy of the Black Road, Avann oc Gyre had once held court, Aeglyss sat slumped upon a massive stone bench. He wore a plain linen robe. Bandages about his wrists concealed wounds that never quite healed. Meltwater dripped from holes up amongst the half-rotten roof beams. It spread dark stains across the great oaken floorboards of the hall. Hothyn and three other White Owls stood behind Aeglyss. A dozen Battle Inkallim, silent and still and dark, were scattered down the length of the chamber, leaning against the crumbling pillars, staring out from the windows whose shutters had long since been torn away. Shraeve herself met the small groups of the na’kyrim’s adherents emerging from the winding stairway that coiled its way up from the street below. If she found no threat in their manner or possessions, they were permitted to approach him, to bathe in the flows of certainty, of conviction, that emanated from him. “I am tired,” Aeglyss croaked to Shraeve as she escorted a pair of awed votaries up to his crude throne. “These are the last two,” she told him. “Afterwards, I have messengers to instruct before they depart for our armies, so you will be left in peace.” “Peace,” Aeglyss said, with a crooked laugh. Then: “Messengers. Kilvale?” “Yes. In four days, as you instruct.” “Good. Good. The ground will be prepared by then. You’re sure, though? They must be ready. I will exert myself at dawn, but it will test me. The Shadowhand is a turbulent slave; I already pay a heavy price for his continued obedience. To reach so far… so many… it will not last long. They must move quickly, if my strength is to be added to their own.” “It will be made clear,” Shraeve nodded. “Dawn, four days from now. Our messengers will kill as many horses as it takes to get the word there in time.” “Good. And once I give them Kilvale… I’ll be safe, then. I’ll have them. All of them. None would betray the man who offers such gifts.” His skin hung slack from his face, as if slowly coming unfixed from the bones beneath. His hair was thin. Bare, blotched scalp showed through here and there. Blood veined the slate of his eyes; the rims of his eyelids were red and moist. Yet the man and the woman now crouching before him regarded him with wonder. They felt, rather than saw, his potency. “What do they want?” Aeglyss asked. He would not look at them. He angled his gaze away, towards the pale square of one of the windows. “Only this,” Shraeve said. “To draw near. To know for themselves that their hopes have been answered in you.” “And do they?” Aeglyss asked, still averting his gaze. “Do they feel the truth of it, if I say to them that I can give them what them want?” “Yes,” breathed the man at once, and smiled an exultant smile.
*
Orisian’s horse baulked at the steep, rocky slope plunging down into the huge gully. He did not blame it. The hillside fell away, swooping down into a wide band of trees that curved west like a broad, dark river. Looking on it from above, it was impossible to see the stream that had cut this valley, only the tangled, leafless canopy of the countless trees that clustered about its course. Orisian leapt to the ground and led his horse over to Ess’yr. The Kyrinin was crouched down, running a hand over the short, snow-speckled turf. “You’re certain?” he asked her. She nodded towards the wooded ravine. “She descended.” “And the others?” “Still follow, or pursue. Perhaps by sight, more likely by track. Six or seven. We are very close behind.” Orisian hissed in frustration and beckoned the nearest warrior. He pushed his reins into the man’s hands. “Two of you watch over the horses here. The rest of us’ll go down on foot.” He saw the briefest flicker of reluctance on one or two faces, but none of the nine men hesitated. Torcaill was gone, bearing Orisian’s hopes and fears for Anyara into the south. It left Orisian reliant upon the instinctive loyalty of these men and whatever leadership or authority he could muster himself. So far, those bonds had held firm. They dismounted and clustered about him. Eshenna and Yvane were slower, struggling stiffly down from the back of the horse they shared. Yvane glowered ominously at the animal as she walked away from it. “You’d best call your brother back,” Orisian said to Ess’yr. Varryn was some way along the lip of the gully. As they looked towards him, he stretched out his spear, pointing down towards the woodland. Ess’yr narrowed her eyes, and then closed them for a moment or two. “They are there,” she murmured as she rose. “Not far. They move quickly, make much noise.” “They might have seen us already,” said Orisian, imagining how starkly silhouetted his company must be against the dull white clouds. Ess’yr sniffed. “Perhaps. Most likely not. They hunt; look ahead, not behind.” “Let’s go, then,” Orisian said. They scrambled down, slipping and stumbling as they went, and the woods embraced them. The floor of the vale was flat, but the vegetation was so dense and tangled that it was impossible for any save Ess’yr and Varryn to move either quietly or easily. The two Kyrinin rushed ahead, one on either flank. Orisian led the rest through the thickets, trusting Ess’yr to give warning of any ambush. Had those pursuing K’rina been White Owls, he might have felt more caution, but both Ess’yr and Varryn were certain that the booted feet they tracked in the na’kyrim’s wake belonged to mere Huanin. Yvane was labouring along close by. “They might not harm her,” Orisian said to her as they ran. “They might only want to find her, as the White Owls did before.” “Maybe,” she gasped. “If they know her. But she’s empty—gone—so Aeglyss cannot sense her, cannot guide anyone to her. Chances are, they have no idea who she is. Just crossed her trail by accident. If they reach her first, it won’t go well.” The effort of speaking was too much for her, and she fell behind him. Orisian surged onwards, battering his way through trailing ivy and snagging, thorned stems. Panic clamoured within him, but he denied it. To lose K’rina now would be unthinkable. It would leave him—all of them—utterly lost. He would not surrender to that outcome yet. There was no snow down here beneath the woodland’s roof, but the ground was wet and studded with exposed rocks. A warrior coming up alongside Orisian, then moving ahead of him, went down with a gasp as his leading foot skidded away. A shrill scream came from up ahead, piercing through the rumble of running feet and panted breaths. Orisian stumbled at the sound of it, slowed and unbalanced by a crippling fear for Ess’yr. But even as the grating cry was cut off, he recognised that it had not been born of a Kyrinin throat. The ground shook. No, not the ground. The thin grass, the mat of dead leaves strewn through it, the low bare shrubs: they stirred. A spreading web of disturbance went across the woodland floor like the waves fleeing a stone dropped into water. The thinnest twigs in the canopy trembled, a palsy running through the outermost extremity of every tree. Orisian discovered the flavour of loam and leaf and wood in his mouth and nostrils, cloying, almost overpowering. He staggered from a run into a walk, looking this way and that. “What is it?” he shouted over his shoulder to Yvane, already guessing the answer. “Anain,” she rasped from some way behind him. There was a roaring in the branches overhead, as if storm winds blew through them, but the air was still, the clouds glimpsed beyond, flat and unmoving. Orisian looked to his left. His warriors were rushing on past him. As one darted by, and then another, Orisian glimpsed beyond them a subtler movement. Out in the dim depths of the woodland, there was change: a blunt, misshapen form that drew itself together for a moment out of trailing creepers and twisting briars, like a half-formed idea in clay beneath the hands of a potter. A knot of stems turned as he watched, and he had the potent, brief sense of being observed. Then a flashing, green blushing of fresh leaf burst forth, and the stems and branches fell apart, and with a rattle of wood something went racing away ahead of them, leaving a trail of impossible greenery breaking out from every bough in its wake.
*
“Wait.” Aeglyss lifted a single hooked finger. His cracked tongue flicked over his lips. “I… hear. Movement. Movement. I catch the scent of…” His head tipped back. A long sibilant hiss escaped him. “Ah. See? The great beasts come out to play. They don’t fear me enough yet, then. Not yet.” His eyes went glassy, their bloodshot grey overlaid with a wet film. A string of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. There was the faintest whisper from his lips before they went slack: “We’ll see, then. We’ll see what I’ve become.” “What’s happening to him?” whispered the man crouching down beside Shraeve. Aeglyss swayed, and for a moment might have overbalanced and tumbled from the bench. He steadied, and sat there, sunken down onto his bones. His eyes closed. “He reaches out,” the Inkallim said flatly. There was a clearing of sorts, and at its furthest edge lay K’rina, curled into a little hollow between the roots of a great tree. One hand was clasped to her shoulder; blood spread across the skin. The spear that had wounded her lay by her side. There were bodies scattered across the grass: warriors of the Black Road. Some had Kyrinin arrows in them. One of Orisian’s own men was going from one to another, ensuring that they were dead. To one side, Ess’yr and Varryn stood motionless, staring at the scene before them. For once, their blue-lined faces betrayed powerful emotion: awestruck fear. All of this Orisian saw as soon as he stepped into the pool of cold light falling through the gap in the canopy. None of it held his attention, for he saw the same wonders as the Kyrinin, and was similarly awed by them. Beneath his feet, and spreading out in every direction, lush green grass covered the ground, and he could smell its newness and the earth it had broken in bursting forth. Every tree wore a verdant cloak of leaves, every fern had unfurled bright new, fragile fronds. The scattered clumps of moss all but glowed with the vigour of fresh spring growth. Life, in delirious, impossible abundance, had come to this place. And death, too. One of the men lying in the centre of the clearing was all but obscured by the mat of long, binding grass that had overgrown him, and by the coil of briars that had engulfed his head, tearing the skin away from his face, pushing down into his mouth, his throat, so violently that his jaw was forced unnaturally wide, his lips shredded. Looming over K’rina’s huddled form was a Black Road warrior, a woman, who stood erect not by the strength of her own legs but by the two lances of wood that impaled her, one through her stomach, another through her neck. Her dead eyes were wide with shock, her mouth gaping. The tree beneath which K’rina now lay had reached out those unnatural, spiralling spars from the mass of its trunk and punched them through the Black Roader. As it had done to another, a man, who lay on the other side of the na’kyrim. A spear of a branch—too smooth and formed to be a true branch—had come out from the tree’s bole, and arced down and punched into the notch between shoulder and neck, transfixing the man, collapsing him down into a broken heap, erupting from his groin and pinning him into the soft, damp soil. Orisian took a couple of stunned paces forward, fearing to tread upon the luxuriant growth that should not exist yet did. A similar unease afflicted his warriors, for they moved cautiously and hesitantly, afraid to disturb whatever fell power had worked this transformation. Orisian felt Yvane at his shoulder. She was breathing heavily. “Can you still feel it?” he asked her. “The Anain?” “Yes,” she said. “It came to save K’rina?” Orisian whispered, half-questioning, half-marvelling. “He’s here,” wailed Eshenna behind them. Yvane slumped against Orisian, one hand pressed to her temple, the other clawing at his shoulder for support. He dropped his sword and struggled to hold her up. The trees shook. They creaked and groaned. A painful beat throbbed in Orisian’s skull, each pulse tugging at the corner of his eye, sending a hot tingle through his scalp. “He’ll see us,” Eshenna moaned. “He’ll see us.” “Yvane…” Orisian murmured. Her legs had gone loose beneath her. She slipped down his flank onto her knees. “Aeglyss is here,” she whispered. “He’s here. Gods, he’s…” A spasm seized her, and she vomited across Orisian’s feet. He made to kneel down beside her, to put a protective arm about her hunched shoulders, but sudden sound distracted him. A harsh, fast rattle like breaking ice. A thousand splintering cracks rushed through the boughs; deeper ruptures rang in the bellies of the great trees; a mist of wood dust and fragments of bark filled the air. Rustling filled the undergrowth, as if an invisible army of mice was suddenly on the move. Before Orisian’s eyes, a wave of death swept through the woods. He watched the grass that had so recently flushed green now die and wither into countless brittle, brown curls. Leaves that had burst out, bright and fresh, only moments ago abruptly rusted and fell. Branches broke. Splits ran noisily up tree trunks. Saplings bowed and shrank. Out, out into the undergrowth ran tendrils of destruction, cutting grey pathways through the woodland. Every bush or tree they touched, every blade of grass or clump of fern, died in the blinking of an eye. Eshenna was groaning. Orisian turned to her, and saw her fall to her hands and knees, then roll onto her back. He breathed, and felt the dry grit of dead vegetation in his throat. It filled the air, like the frailest veil of smoke. He coughed, and spat to clear his mouth. Silence descended. A stillness, like the space between two heartbeats. Ess’yr was kneeling. She reached for the sear, dead grass before her, and it fell apart in her hand. Her brother stood beside her, his face now unreadable. But his chest, Orisian saw, rose and fell. Rapid, alarmed breaths fluttered in and out of the Kyrinin warrior. He stared, unblinking, at the great tree, now dead, beneath which K’rina lay. “He killed it,” Yvane said. “Impossible. Impossible. He’s killed one of the Anain.” “Is he gone?” Orisian bent and shook Yvane, made rough by his fear. “Is he still here, in you or Eshenna? Did he see you?” She was limp and unresisting in his grasp. “No, no. He’s gone. It wasn’t us… He didn’t… He came for the Anain. It… it rose too close to the surface. He felt its presence, and he hunted it. He wasn’t looking for anything else.” “He didn’t find K’rina?” Yvane shook her head. “Nothing to find. There’s nothing left of her. He cannot feel her any more than I can.” Orisian released her and straightened. Eshenna lay unconscious on the pale carpet of dead moss and grass. The blight stretched out in all directions. Beyond its bounds, Orisian could just see stands of trees that still lived. Closer to hand, there was only the skeleton of a forest: greys and sickly browns, everything withered, everything bare and angular and bleak. Where the bark had fallen away from tree trunks, it revealed dry, flaking wood that held not the faintest memory of life. Orisian walked towards K’rina. His feet crunched across dead stalks and fallen twigs. As he drew near, the two limbs that had impaled the Black Road woman cracked and crumbled, falling away into brittle fragments of dead wood. The corpse thumped to the ground.
*
They waited in silence in the musty hall in Kan Avor. Not a word, hardly a breath, escaped Kyrinin or human. Every one of them watched the na’kyrim trembling upon the stone bench. They watched great dark stains spread across the bandages around his wrists. So suffused were they with blood that it oozed out onto the backs of his hands. All felt the surging of his power. They felt it in their skin: a shivering born of no cold. They felt it in the place behind their eyes where their self resided, in the blurring there, the sensation of their own minds melting into some vast, accumulative flow that cared nothing for them, did not even recognise them, yet was so immensely potent that it nevertheless gathered them into it. And they exulted in it. It filled them with the liberation of surrender to something far greater than themselves. This awful, wonderful torrent overwhelmed them, and they grew thinner and thinner beneath its onslaught, until at any moment it felt as though they might be carried off, and parted entirely from the world and from their crude bodies. And then Aeglyss sucked in a huge wet breath and coughed. He bent forward, almost touching his forehead to his knees. Strands of bloody mucus ran from his nostrils down across his mouth. He licked it away as he staggered to his feet. He brushed past the dazed man and the woman, who still abased themselves before him. Droplets of blood fell from his wrists as he moved. He wheezed, and out of the wheezing came laughter: an attenuated, cold mirth. “So,” he gasped. “So. They tried to kill me before, but now they learn… now they see what I am. I am too much for them, even for them. Now we know whose land this is. Whose world.” As he spoke, the movement of his jaw freed flakes of dead skin from his cheeks. They drifted down like tiny withered leaves. He fell to his knees with a bony crack. Shraeve and Hothyn both came quickly to his side. They eased him up. So frail had he become that the Inkallim could almost completely enclose his arm with her hand. “The flesh is too weak,” he murmured. “Send them away. I don’t want them to see me like this.”
II
Kanin led a company of four hundred into Glasbridge: every man and woman of his Blood he had been able to assert any kind of control over. Many he had wrested away from other roving bands, cowing their rebelliousness through displays of anger and violence. Most wanted nothing more than to wander on south in search of slaughter. He gave them slaughter of a different kind—the execution of those most vocally resistant to his command—and with it exerted a measure of fragile control, over some of them at least. He did not expect to maintain his authority for long. So turbulent had every heart and mind become that he could not imagine any sentiment, or rule, or order, lasting. But he did not need much time. In his dark calculation, he could see no further than a few days, weeks perhaps, ahead. Beyond that, nothing. Glasbridge was half ruin, half armed camp. All squalor. Even in the short time since Kanin had last ridden its streets, much of the town had slumped still further into decrepitude. It lay now beneath a covering of snow, yet still there was a soft, warm hint of rot on the air. Under the white shroud, decay and corpses lurked. Those houses that had been damaged by fire when Glasbridge was taken by the Black Road, or abandoned since, were miserable sights, crumbling and sodden. There were, amidst the wreckage, pockets of life and habitation. They found a sprawling stable yard near the centre of the town, with a travellers’ inn and workshops—blacksmith, wheelwright—attached to it. A dozen or more sullen-looking horses were shut up in stalls, but it was the people that caught Kanin’s attention: a hundred at least, milling about in incomprehensible activity. It all struck him as formless, chaotic. There were warriors amongst the crowds. Kanin saw badges and standards from Gyre, Gaven and Wyn, all mixing, keeping to no settled companies. Most of those who had occupied the yard were not fighters at all, though. They were ordinary villagers and townsfolk and farmers, fragments of the host of commoners that had come surging down through the Stone Vale in answer to the call of victory, the promise of restored lands and triumphant faith. Kanin dismounted, and seized the closest man roughly by the arm. “Who commands here?” he demanded. “Commands?” the man repeated vacantly. Kanin felt dizzy and disoriented. He found himself wondering, absurdly, whether he had changed so much, whether his isolation had become so complete, that he could no longer be understood. “Whose camp is this?” he shouted in the man’s face. “Mine. Yours. It belongs to the Road.” Kanin growled in contempt and thrust him away. Others were coming close now, drawn by curiosity or suspicion. He recognised no one. The faces came to him indistinctly, as if softened and disguised by the veil of his anger. He surged forward and seized the collar of another man’s jerkin in both hands. “Who claims Glasbridge?” he cried. The man made no show of resistance. There was an odd, confused expression on his face. “Fate claims us all, in these times. The Kall is upon us…” Kanin threw the man to the ground, trampled over him to reach others. The thickening crowd made him feel enclosed, beset, and his rage flared in response. He pushed a woman aside. “Has the halfbreed sent you?” she asked as she stumbled, and the hope in her words broke the last shreds of Kanin’s restraint. He spun, and brought his sword out from its scabbard and round in a rising arc that caught the woman on the shoulder. Someone rushed at him, lunging at his upper chest with a blunt pole. He dipped his shoulders enough to send the stave glancing away off his mail, straightened and brought his sword hacking up into the armpit of his assailant. And then horses were all about, clattering and barging; his own warriors pouring in on all sides and pushing the throng back, cutting into it and splaying it apart like a ship’s prow punching into the surf. Kanin ran to his own horse and sprang into the saddle. A great fury, and a great excitement, had hold of him. “I am Kanin oc Horin-Gyre,” he cried as his horse turned around and around, as his warriors surged across the stable yard, scattering men and women, overturning cooking cauldrons and stalls and racks of weapons. “My Blood sprang from this town, before our exile, and I claim it. I will hold it, in my own name, and that of the High Thane. No one else. No one else!” In time, Kanin’s anger abated. It left behind it that familiar raw bitterness that was always there now, that sense of solitary anguish. He gave no orders, made no plans. He merely watched in silence from the back of his horse while Igris and the rest of his Shield took charge, silencing with their blades any show of dissent amongst those gathered in the yard, then sending out bands of thirty or forty riders at a time to impose Horin authority upon the rest of the town. It was all necessary, Kanin knew, but it was only a prelude. Without rage to buoy him up, the present could not hold his interest; it was the future that constantly called upon his impatient attention. Only the future could offer him any release. Once a sullen peace had descended, he went with his Shield towards the harbour. There had been barns and storehouses there, still holding unspoiled food, when last he had been in this town. He needed them, for if he could not feed his little army, it would turn to bones and dust in his hands. And without it, that future he dreamed of would never come, and he might never escape the horrors of the present. “We are followed,” Igris muttered, riding at his side. Kanin did not look round. “I know,” he said. “Hunt Inkallim?” “Three of them. A few dozen paces back.” “They’ve been watching us since yesterday,” Kanin said. He drew his horse to a halt and hauled it around. The three Inkallim—two men, one woman—were standing in the middle of the street, flanked by three great dogs that had settled onto their haunches and sat there, their breath steaming out from their massive jaws. “Wait here,” Kanin said to Igris, and rode back the way they had come. The Inkallim watched his approach impassively. Kanin’s horse mistrusted the hounds, and he had to wrestle its head up with the reins to hold it steady before them. He stared down at the Inkallim. “What do you want?” he asked. “By whose command do you follow so obviously in my footsteps?” “Cannek’s,” said the woman, taking a pace forward. She wore simple leather and hide clothes, carried a crossbow slung across her back and leaned her weight on a spear with a subtly barbed point. Her face was plain, her manner casual. She regarded Kanin with all the presumed equality he had come to expect of the Inkallim. “The dead make poor captains,” Kanin said. “Yet we often find ourselves serving them. Do we not, Thane?” He glared at her and curled his lip. She was unmoved, her placid gaze unwavering. “What’s your name?” he asked her. “Eska. We were instructed, in the event of Cannek’s death, to preserve your life, if possible. To give you what aid we could.” Kanin smiled at that. “The Road I mean to follow will make that a thankless task.” Eska gave a laconic shrug. “Follow, then, if that’s your wish,” Kanin said, and turned his horse away from them. “I may find a use for your talents in the days to come.” “What is it you intend to do, Thane?” she asked him as he rode back towards his Shield. “What Cannek couldn’t.”
*
The Corpseway that ran from Kan Dredar’s market square, past the great trading hall and on up the long ramp to the gates of Ragnor oc Gyre’s castle was living up to its name. Evenly spaced along its length were forty gibbets, a score on either side. Each bore a naked corpse. Crows and ravens lifted casually into the air as Theor’s party approached, then settled back to their stubborn, patient work upon the frozen bodies. Theor glanced out from his litter. His bearers were tiring and their pace had slowed. The snow was thinner on the road than elsewhere, but churned into ruts and ridges by the constant passage of wheel and hoof, it made for hard work. The sight of the exemplary dead along the road did not greatly interest him. A great many were coming to their end this winter. Such times, periods when death gorged itself, came now and again, in the form of war or disease or famine. As if this failing world strove vainly to cleanse itself. He grunted and sank back against his chair. His difficulty was that what was happening now felt entirely unlike cleansing to him. Quite the reverse, in fact. He felt the ground rising. He could hear the bearers gasping for breath as they laboured up the incline towards Ragnor’s stronghold. A horn blew somewhere within the outer palisade. It irritated him, if only because he could imagine Ragnor, alerted by that signal, already rehearsing his false friendship, his offhand threats. Theor leaned out once more, and shouted towards the troop of Battle Inkallim riding ahead. “Quicker! I grow cold.” There were forty of them up there, and another sixty riding two abreast behind. All were dressed for war, in cuirasses of rigid black leather, carrying raven pennants and lances. Their horses were the finest left in Nyve’s capacious stables. An impressive sight, but in truth Theor and Nyve alike had hoped for a still more assertive display of the Battle’s strength. Nothing, it seemed, was fated to follow the course mere mortals might hope for in these times. Wild Tarbains, unyoked to the creed, had been raiding out of the Tan Dihrin; two hundred Inkallim had been sent to quell this resurgence of the tribesmen’s long-quiescent martial ardour. In the disputed pine forests between Gaven-Gyre and Wyn-Gyre lands, woodsfolk had started bloody feuds; another hundred of Nyve’s swords had departed to impose a peace the rival Thanes seemed reluctant, or unable, to enforce. It all left Theor with a lesser escort than he had anticipated, but that disappointment he could easily accommodate. What he found troubling was the pattern of it all, the constant sense of incipient, aimless chaos. He was shaken uncomfortably from side to side as his litter-bearers struggled to keep up with the riders ahead. Another of the roadside corpses swung across his rocking field of vision. These grim ornaments that Ragnor had hung along his road were another token of insidious decay. Three riots there had now been in Kan Dredar. None of them difficult for the High Thane’s warriors to put down; all of them surprising. Such rebellious, rampant demonstrations were unusual amongst the Bloods of the Black Road. Internecine violence was far from unknown, but these random eruptions of mindless strife were something new. Could this be what the Kall felt like? Did the fated, promised destruction of this world begin in petty violence and murder? Mobs in the street, a na’kyrim raising himself up out of the chaos in the south? The wooden gate in the palisade stood open. Behind it was a great ditch. Nyve’s ravens clattered across the bridge that led to the inner, stone gatehouse. Theor closed his eyes briefly, willing his mind to clear itself of doubt and distraction. He did not know quite what to expect from this audience, but recognised that he would be ill prepared to meet it if he could not shed his gnawing uncertainty. He heard the next huge iron gate clank open, and breathed out. He was, he forcefully reminded himself, no child, no callow youth or novice of the creed. He was the First of the Lore. There could be, should be, no one more capable of meeting such turbulent times with resolution. It was difficult, though, when lack of sleep blunted every thought. The gigantic pitched roof of Ragnor’s Great Hall held no snow. Water dripped from its every eave. It would be hot inside, Theor knew as he clambered a little stiffly out from his litter. Ragnor kept his fires burning day and night. The First of the Lore stood before the mighty doors of the hall and stretched, digging his fingers into the muscles at the small of his back. The Battle Inkallim arrayed themselves across the hard earthen courtyard. He glanced at them, and adjudged them suitably stern and ordered. They made tidy ranks, and maintained a meticulous silence. A valuable demonstration for the dozens of Ragnor’s warriors who had gathered to watch that there were some, amidst the chaos, who still understood and practised discipline. Ragnor’s silver-haired Master of the Hall came down the steps from the doorway to greet Theor, his fluid movements belying his advanced age. Theor suppressed a momentary twinge of jealousy. His own bones seemed to carry the clear memory, and weight, of every year he had lived. He made a point of ascending the steps slowly, with dignity, as he was ushered within. Three great open hearths lay down the centre of the Great Hall. Fires roared in them, sending smoke billowing up into the roofspace, coiling its way around the multitudinous interwoven rafters. The fumes and the heat stung Theor’s eyes at first. He blinked and wrinkled his nose as he advanced towards the platform at the far end of the hall. All the benches and couches and rugs he passed by were unoccupied. This was unusual. More often than not, a good proportion of the High Thane’s household could be found in here, whether or not their presence was needful or useful. Theor glanced up at the antlers and bearskins that adorned the walls. Ragnor oc Gyre was a man who liked to hunt, and many of these trophies were his own. The greatest of them, though—a vast splayed set of many-tined antlers that put Theor in mind of a pair of gigantic needle-clawed hands—were a legacy of the High Thane’s grandfather, who had won them after a hunt that famously had lasted a full day. The huge stag that once bore them had been a beast of some superstitious import to the Tarbains whose territories it roamed, and its death had done as much to subdue them as any number of burned villages and executed chieftains. A good day’s work in the service of the creed, that had been. Better than any Theor could remember Ragnor performing. He cleared his throat, trying to cough away the dry taste of smoke, as he drew near the group assembled around the High Thane’s empty throne. It was a vainglorious confection, that great seat, draped in wolfskins. The sight of it always jarred with Theor’s instinct for austerity. But then there was much associated with Ragnor oc Gyre that jarred with Theor’s instincts. The High Thane himself was absent. Theor was only slightly surprised to see with whom he would be awaiting Ragnor’s appearance: Vana oc Horin-Gyre stood there, with her arms folded, surrounded by a small group of attendants and maids. “I heard a rumour that you might be in attendance today, my lady,” Theor said, inclining his head respectfully. “The Hunt keeps you well informed, no doubt,” she replied with distant formality. The Horin Blood—and Vana’s late husband Angain in particular—had long been a most resolute and valued ally to the Inkallim, and to the creed. Indeed Vana herself had secretly delivered one of the High Thane’s own messengers into the hands of the Hunt, and thereby confirmed Ragnor’s connivance with the enemies of the Black Road. Theor wondered if his troubled mood led him to imagine the antipathy he now, unexpectedly, detected in Vana’s manner. He favoured her with a black-lipped smile, giving it a curl of apology. “Avenn has many eyes, indeed. Their attention is often benign. They watch friends as closely as any.” “If you say so.” Vana had always been a fiercely independent woman, Theor knew. This, though, was more than that. There was hostility there, he was sure. His ruminations were interrupted by the loud and expansive entrance of Ragnor oc Gyre. The High Thane came from a small door behind the throne, in mid-laugh as he burst into his Great Hall, the massive warriors of his Shield sharing in whatever jest so amused him. He wore a cloak of thick fur, a breastplate of polished nut-brown leather, a belt with a bright silver buckle the size of a man’s palm. And an expression that shed all its mirth in an instant as his eyes fell upon Theor and Vana standing there awaiting him. He said nothing as he removed his sheathed sword from his belt and settled heavily onto the throne. He rested the metal-shod tip of the scabbard on the planking of the dais and leaned forward a little, both hands clasped about the hilt of the great weapon. “I have had enough,” he said. “I have had enough of my people rioting in the streets of Kan Dredar. Of my farmers and smiths and miners and fishermen abandoning their labours and marching off into the south to fight your precious sacred war. Of bickering Thanes suddenly plaguing me with demands they be granted this piece of the Glas Valley, this town, that village, while they cannot even maintain order in their own lands.” Theor looked from side to side. “I would be grateful for a chair or bench,” he said placidly. “My old bones —” “This will not take long, First,” snapped Ragnor. Theor had expected the High Thane to at least wear a skin of respect. Apparently it was not to be, and that was unsettling. “I am going to tell you what I want,” Ragnor said. He was rocking his sword back and forth very slightly on its tip, his glinting eyes fixed first upon Theor and then Vana oc Horin-Gyre. “You, lady, are going to send word to your son beseeching him to return at once. Beseech, or implore, or command, or entreat. Whatever is required. I want him back here, with every man or woman of your Blood he can shepherd along with him.” Vana drew breath to reply, but Ragnor flashed a warning hand towards her, palm outward. “I am not done. Your husband started this madness. From what I hear, your son has become the least of the horses still running the race, but I want him out of it altogether. Perhaps if the people see those who set all of this in motion retiring from the fray, a flame of sense might be lit in their heads. “And you, First,” Ragnor turned to Theor. He had the grace to moderate his tone a little, but still it was menacing. “You, I want to see exercising some of your vaunted authority in the service of the Bloods rather than the narrow interest of the Children of the Hundred.” “The faith,” said Theor quickly. He could not keep a trace of resentment from his voice. “We serve the faith. Nothing else. The Bloods created us for that purpose, and we adhere to it.” “Well, I say the faith is stumbling towards disaster. The people talk of the Kall; they churn themselves up into a frenzy. Why does the Lore remain silent? I want you to speak, First. Shed this unaccustomed shyness, and speak loud and clear to the people. Tell them that this is not the Kall. Tell them that the world is not about to be unmade. Tell them we are not fated to fritter away everything we have built here in this doomed war against an enemy we cannot yet defeat.” Theor pursed his black lips. There was, he suspected, no response he could make save unequivocal submission that would satisfy the Thane of Thanes, and submission had played no part in the century-and-a-half history of the Lore. Whatever doubts, whatever unease he wrestled with, he had no intention of absolving Ragnor of his responsibility to advance the creed, whatever the odds, whatever the cost. “And have Nyve rein in this she-raven of his who seems to be set upon causing as much trouble as possible,” Ragnor muttered. “I should never have permitted Shraeve to go south with Kanin in the first place.” “Permitted?” said Theor softly. Ragnor glowered at him. “Am I the only one who sees the ruin we rush towards?” cried the High Thane in exasperation. “Grain rots in barns because there aren’t enough hands to mend the roofs. Cattle fall sick because half the herdsmen who should be watching over them have gone off in some mad trance believing they can storm Kolkyre single-handedly. We run short of furs. Furs! Because the Tarbains who should be hunting for them have rushed off in search of loot, and those who remain are suddenly possessed of an urge to relearn the banditry of their forefathers.” He sprang to his feet and stamped towards the door behind his throne. “There are brawls in the quietest of villages. The slightest of arguments erupts into murder. The orders I send south go unanswered or unheard. My messengers fall silent or disappear. Why? What madness has taken root?” He threw open the portal and gestured, beckoning some unseen attendants beyond it. Theor glanced sideways at Vana, but the woman maintained a stern and dignified stillness, gazing ahead impassively. If she was troubled or distressed, she concealed it well. In answer to the High Thane’s summons, three prisoners were hauled out onto the dais by guards: two men and a woman. They were forced to kneel in a line, facing Theor and Vana. Theor frowned, and then raised his eyebrows in startled anticipation of might follow. “This man,” said Ragnor, jabbing a finger at the first of the dishevelled captives, “was passing through Kan Dredar on his way to the Stone Vale. He’s one of yours, lady. He took it upon himself to knife two men in a tavern brawl, and then to attempt the same upon the Guards sent to arrest him. “This —” he advanced down the line, and indicated the second kneeling prisoner “—is the ringleader of a mob from Ramarok on the coast. They were hungry because the seal hunters have gone south. They thought a family was hoarding food, so they burned them out of their house and slaughtered them—husband, wife, children—in the street. Clubbed them to death. Then they set upon one another. Killed another dozen.” The High Thane stood behind the last of them: a long-haired young woman who was calmly watching Theor. The First returned her gaze, sensing that there was some meaning or intent in it, but unable to tease it out. Ragnor looked down at the woman, curling his lip in contempt. He grabbed a handful of her hair and shook her head roughly. “This,” he snarled, “this one I am not sure of. She might be a mere tool, a mere agent. Or perhaps she is the thing itself: one of Avenn’s shadow-haunters. I don’t know, and I don’t care.” He shot a meaningful glance at Theor. “If she’s of the Hunt itself, I don’t care. She was rousing the villagers in the lands around Effen, preaching the coming of the Kall, filling them with the fire they needed to send them off across the Vale of Stones. All but emptied three villages, she did, and when she was commanded to cease, she disappeared, only to be found repeating her game two days later.” Ragnor released the woman, slapping her hard across the back of the head as he stepped away. Guards moved into place behind each of the prisoners. They held cords in their hands. “Ragnor, wait,” Theor said, taking a pace forward. He did not know if the woman was one of the Hunt, but if she was… “No,” Ragnor said flatly. “I have no patience left, First. I will not wait any longer, for anything or anyone.” He nodded to the guards. Theor stepped back. Vana, he realised, was not watching; she was staring up at a ram’s skull mounted high on the wall, pouring her attention into the polished bone, the curled horn. The cords slipped around necks. They were twisted tight at once. They dug into skin. Mouths stretched open, tongues fluttered. Eyes gaped. The woman struggled to rise, but the guard behind her kicked the back of her knee and pushed her down again. On each of the three throats a red blush spread; muscles and sinews stood despairingly taut. Something collapsed with a soft crunch. A distorted rattle escaped the woman’s throat. Her executioner redoubled his efforts, tightening, crushing. One of the men—the one from Ramarok—died first. Then the woman, then the Horin man. They fell, or were pushed, forward, and lay crumpled on the dais. Ragnor oc Gyre scuffed the woman’s long hair away from her face, exposing her protruding tongue and the string of saliva loosed from her mouth. “Do you see?” the Thane of Thanes murmured. “Do you understand? I have gibbets and stakes and pyres aplenty. If I have to fill them all, use every one of them, I will have an end to this. However many have to die, I mean to cure us of this madness. This disease. I have had enough.” Theor’s litter-bearers hurried to take up their positions, and watched him expectantly as he emerged onto the steps outside the Great Hall. It was snowing once more. The hundred Battle Inkallim were still spread across the yard in a great arc. Theor stood just outside the doors, rubbing his hands together. They tingled uncomfortably at the sudden transition from the warmth of the hall into the day’s bitter chill. Vana oc Horin-Gyre appeared at his side. She paused, pulling up the seal-trimmed hood of her cloak. Her attendants hurried to fetch their horses from wherever they had been stabled. “I saw a bear slain on the day of your husband’s interment,” Theor said quietly. “Ragnor’s own Shield quilled its breast with crossbow bolts. You saw it too. The High Thane himself laughed that it might be an omen, of the fall of a great lord or a sudden change in the order of things.” Angain’s widow looked sharply at him, then returned her attention to the task of pulling on sleek calf-hide gloves. “The Road does not grant us omens, of course,” said Theor. “But still. There is change in the air, I think. I fear.” “Spare me any further involvement in your noble enterprises, First,” said Vana, and now the bitterness in her voice was unmistakable. “I thought I had the mettle to succeed my husband, to match his fervour, his strength. I find I do not. I am weary, and I have no remaining interest in the creed, or omens, or the wars you choose to fight. My family has already paid a high enough price.” “It was never our intent, or desire, to do anything other than nurture the fire that your husband, alone amongst all the Thanes, kept alight. Many of the Inkallim who crossed the Vale were specifically tasked with keeping your children safe if —” “Then they failed,” Vana snapped. She flexed her fingers inside the gloves irritably. “You failed. Wain is dead. Kanin, by all accounts, is shunned by those now guiding the war. That vile halfbreed who first whispered thought of war in my husband’s ear rules in Kan Avor, I hear, with this Shraeve of yours serving as his Shieldmaiden. That is not what my husband hoped for.” “There is much, I agree, that is unexpected in all of this —” Theor nodded sympathetically “—but it is not given to any of us to predict fate’s course.” “No?” Vana said. She glared at him, but he saw more pain than anger in her eyes. He felt a sudden sympathy for this woman who found her strength unequal to the challenges the world presented. “I’ll make a prediction for you: I will never have my son back, just as I will never see my daughter again. Ragnor wants me to summon him, as if anything I could say would change anything. I know my son, First. Wain is dead. Kanin would return only if there were none left to punish for that, deservingly or not. He will require a surfeit of blood, and still it will not heal him. In search of that healing he can never find, he will go on and on until he drowns in the blood of the dead.” “As will we all, eventually,” Theor murmured as Vana walked away from him, descending the steps to where her grooms now waited with the horses. “It’s the fate of this world to drown in blood, sooner or later.”
III
“You’ve never heard of it before?” Orisian asked. Yvane shook her head. “I’d never have believed it possible. I hardly believe it is possible, even now.” She was walking alongside Orisian’s horse, trudging up the long, bleak track to Highfast. Her tolerance for riding had been thoroughly exhausted, and no one made any protest at her refusal, for she did not slow their progress. All of them, horses included, were bleary and sluggish. It had been two nights now since any of them had had any meaningful rest. Above, clouds spun and churned about the Karkyre Peaks. Gusts of eye-watering wind came tumbling down from the heights to sting their faces. Slabs of snow were scattered all across the mountains, clinging to whatever seams in the rocks gave them purchase and shelter. Most of the snow had been scoured from the track, but sometimes, when they were in the lee of some huge ridge or cliff, there were drifts deep enough to make progress painfully slow. “We saw it, though,” Orisian said. “We did. We saw something done for the first time, as far as I know, in all the world, in all its history. Myself, I was happier when I thought such a thing impossible. He is stronger than the Anain. He—one man, one na’kyrim—has killed…” She splayed her hands, as if pushing away words, or thoughts, that she could not accommodate. “It doesn’t change anything,” Orisian said. “No?” Yvane grunted. “Tell your Fox friends that. They may disagree.” Orisian glanced ahead towards Ess’yr and Varryn. They were thirty or forty paces further up the track, pushing on, heads down, with more stubborn resilience than anyone else could manage. Neither of them had spoken of what they had seen in those woods, when the Anain had appeared before them, and died. They alone had seen it killing the Black Roaders, and Orisian could barely imagine what that must have meant for them, to witness first the waking of the forest, and then its destruction; to see one of the beings they considered tutelary spirits of their lands, their lives, snuffed out like the feeblest of candle flames. Who, Orisian wondered, did the Kyrinin imagine would protect them from their restless dead, if the Anain could no longer safely venture near the surface of the world? “But still,” Orisian said quietly, “it doesn’t change anything.” Yvane looked at him. He met her gaze without flinching, and saw nothing in her of the fire, the challenge and argument that had so often been there. She was instead thoughtful and grave. After a time, she pursed her lips and looked away. “The Anain know now that they can’t oppose him. If they thought to use K’rina against him… Now they cannot even protect her, or guide her, for if they rise up, Aeglyss has proved he can kill them. Ha.” Her curt laugh was sad, mournful. “They raised a forest once, to still a war. Now this one man is too much for them. And no; I suppose it doesn’t really change anything. We merely go from dark to darker.”
* * *
The doors of Highfast were closed. They stood tall and narrow, ancient but firm. Thick snow was falling as Orisian led his company across the arching stone bridge that tenuously wedded the mountain to the pinnacle from which Highfast clambered in mounting buttresses and walls and towers into the sky. Orisian had his collar high and tight about his neck, but still meltwater trickled down from his numb face and spread its chill beneath his jerkin. Snow layered every flat surface of the fortress, a succession of white ramparts stepping towards cloud. The guards—disembodied voices crying out from hidden windows or battlements—refused to open the great doors. That angered Orisian. “Bring your Captain here,” he shouted into the blizzard, standing in his stirrups as if that would strengthen his voice. “Herraic still lives, doesn’t he?” They had to wait then, hunched down in their saddles, heads turned away from the wind-blown snowflakes. No one spoke. The ride up from Ive Bridge had been a miserable, punishing journey. To be denied shelter now that they stood at the very gate of their destination was unbearably, unacceptably bitter. “I’d not thought to see you here again, sire,” came Herraic’s familiar voice from above, stretched and buffeted by the wind. “Open the gates, Herraic. You know me well enough. I’ve forty men here needing shelter, half a dozen of them wounded or sick.” “But it’s not just men, is it, sire? Forgive me, forgive me, but I see woodwights and na’kyrim there in your ranks. It’s ill fortune, ill-timed, that you bring them to our door.” Orisian looked round. His warriors lined the bridge, stretching back in double file, the last few all but obscured by sheets of snows. He could see Yvane and Eshenna, uncomfortably sheltering between horses in the midst of the column, and K’rina, tiny, tied tight to Taim’s back. Ess’yr and Varryn were almost hidden, standing at the rear. It must have taken a keen eye to find them. Or a suspicious one. “They ride with me, Herraic,” Orisian shouted angrily up at the invisible Captain of Highfast. “You’ve seen them all before, save one. You know they’re no threat.” “Things change.” There was regret in his words, though he still shouted them into the storm. “I like it no better than you, sire, but things change for the worse. Trust’s too rare, the dangers too great, for any chances to be taken now. Since you left… there’s been too much blood shed since you last came to my gate, sire.” Orisian slapped his thigh in exasperation. “Herraic!” he shouted, his ire swelling his voice and bearing it up against the walls of the fortress. “Do you truly mean to bar your doors against the Thane of a Blood that’s fought and suffered alongside your own for more than a hundred years?” “There’d be few more welcome than you, sire. But Kyrinin and na’kyrim… no, I cannot. Not now, not after all that’s happened. If you’d been here, if you’d seen…” Orisian stopped listening, let the wind bellow over the Captain’s words. He dismounted and trudged through ankle-deep snow to stand at the head of Taim’s horse. Holding the animal’s bridle, he glanced at K’rina. The na’kyrim seemed to be sleeping, her cheek pressing into the warrior’s broad back, though it was difficult to tell with her what was sleep and what daze, what simple absence. “You can untie her now. Send five men back up the track with Ess’yr and Varryn and the na’kyrim. Tell them to get well out of sight but go no further than they need to. We’ll send for them soon.” “We’ll have a roof over our head tonight after all, then?” Taim grunted. “Without doubt.” Taim stood at Orisian’s side as he hammered on Highfast’s great doors with the hilt of his sword. “You’ve got what you want, Herraic,” Orisian cried. “Let us in.” The doors groaned and rasped as they swung slowly open, protesting at such disturbance of their cold-stiffened bones of wood and iron. Herraic and four of his warriors waited within, a few paces along the stone tunnel that lay beyond the entrance. The Captain of Highfast was a short and stout man who had struck Orisian as somewhat nervous and fragile of spirit even on their first meeting. He had shed some weight since then, and the shadows beneath his eyes and the hesitancy of his movement gave him the air of a beaten man. Orisian strode up to him and stood face to face. “I’d expected a warmer welcome.” Herraic looked anguished. “I offer all I can, sire. There’s little warmth for any of us within these walls.” “How many swords have you got left?” Orisian asked, waving his own warriors forward. They advanced on foot, leading their horses noisily up the long passageway. Swarms of snowflakes came billowing in around them. “Less than twenty,” Herraic stammered. “And a few willing men amongst the foresters and villagers who’ve found refuge here.” “Good,” said Orisian curtly. He looked beyond Herraic, saw that the first of his warriors was entering the deep, high-walled yard beyond the passageway. He nodded to Taim. The warrior moved more quickly than even Orisian had expected, driving Herraic back against the wall in a single lunge; grasping the Captain’s throat with one wide hand, with the other freeing his sword and touching its point to Herraic’s belly. “Yield your castle, Captain,” Taim said quite softly and calmly. One of Herraic’s men started forward, but Orisian interposed himself, sword and shield readied. He felt no hesitation, no uncertainty. Exhaustion had emptied him of everything save a sickening kind of desperation. He had no talking, no reasoning, left in him; neither the patience nor the strength for anything other than a swift resolution. The advancing warrior must have seen something in his face or his eyes, for the man hesitated. The wind surged down the passageway. Orisian could hear and dimly see his men dispersing to confront and disarm Highfast’s garrison. His eyes were failing, though, crippled by weariness. Snowflakes boiled in the air between him and the warrior he faced, streaking white blurs across his vision. “Herraic…” he said. And behind him, choked out through Taim’s crushing grasp: “Yes… yes, sire. I yield Highfast to you. Please.” It was the voice of a broken man, and as Orisian carefully lowered his sword and shield, he could hear Herraic begin to weep. There was no fighting. None of Highfast’s defenders had the appetite for resistance. At Herraic’s command they laid down their arms with apparent relief, and though they were sullen and resentful, all permitted themselves to be herded into the largest of the dining halls. A dozen families were assembled there too. They huddled in the corner, watching Orisian and Taim and the rest. The parents hugged their children close, as if guarding them against some fearful sight. As if some avatar of the terrible outside world had breached the walls of their sanctuary and now stood before them clothed in threat. Standing there, surveying this miserable gathering, Orisian was for a moment struck breathless by overpowering shame that he could instil such fear in mothers and fathers and children. He closed his eyes, bit his lower lip and turned away. He was not to blame. He did only what was necessary. “Give them food and drink, if you can find some,” he murmured to one of his men. He drew in a deep breath and blew it out again. It trembled in his throat and chest. He did not know how much longer he could bear this. He needed sleep, craved it as a starving man might crave food. Herraic was sitting, elbows on knees, head in hands, on a bench. Taim stood over him. Orisian saw sympathy in Taim’s face as he regarded the fallen Captain, and somehow the sight of that gave him a fragment of strength. There remained some little space, some capacity, for something other than anger, or fear, or exhaustion, even now. “What happened, to so poison this place?” Orisian asked Herraic. Highfast’s Captain slowly lifted his head, blinking “The Dreamer woke, and… and I don’t know. The na’kyrim fell to slaughtering one another. Woodwights came; there was madness. A madness in the air, in the heart. It was a horror, sire. If you could have seen…” “Where are the na’kyrim?” Orisian demanded. “They can’t all be dead, can they?” Herraic winced, as if struck. “Where are they?” Orisian asked again, taking a step closer to the portly Captain. “There’s an old cellar, once for wine and ale. We keep them there.” “Show us,” Orisian said quietly The stench was startling: ordure and sweat and mould and misery, all hot in Orisian’s face as the cellar exhaled a gout of its vile breath. He stood only for a moment on the threshold; saw in the sickly candlelight the hunched forms of men and women crowded into corners, lying asleep or unconscious or dead along the walls, two or three coming unsteadily towards the faint light admitted by the opening of the door. A moment was enough to see all this, and to feel the unreasoning anger boiling up in him, to feel tears burning in his eyes, not knowing whether they were born of the acrid stink, or despair, or pure, perfect rage. He spun about and lunged for Herraic. The Captain gave a yelp of surprise and raised his hands in defence, but Orisian rode a ferocious wave and would not be denied. He slapped Herraic’s hands aside, seized a bunch of his jerkin and punched the man back against the wall. Herraic stumbled at the impact, and Orisian bore him down to the floor of the passageway. “Orisian!” he heard someone shouting. The cry was distant, coming from far outside the narrow, choking ambit of his attention. He pressed a knee onto Herraic’s chest. The Captain of Highfast struggled, but was pinned into the angle between floor and wall. Orisian tugged at the hilt of his sword. The wall hindered him: his knuckles jarred against the stonework. He felt no pain, but the delay saved Herraic. “Orisian!” someone shouted again. Taim Narran, he knew, though the knowledge had no purchase upon him, no meaning that could penetrate his inundating fury. He twisted to free his sword. Herraic was pushing at him, the Captain’s eyes stretched in alarm. Then an arm was about Orisian’s chest, drawing him calmly but irresistibly up and away. Herraic rolled out from beneath him and scrambled to his feet. Orisian bucked for a moment against Taim’s restraining grasp, then ceased his struggles. “We’ve foes enough already, sire,” Taim murmured as he withdrew his arms. Orisian said nothing. He stared bitterly at Herraic, who had backed himself up against the opposite side of the passage, quivering like a hunted and cornered fawn. “It had to be done,” Herraic gasped. “It had to be done. You don’t know what it was like. The safety of my men… We couldn’t be sure of anything.” “Where are the rest of them?” Orisian asked. “Dead,” said Herraic, then hurriedly: “Killed by the Dreamer, or the wights that came. You don’t know what it was like. Please…” Orisian ground his right hand into a fist, clenching his fingernails into the palm of his hand. Only thus could he master the desire to reach again for his sword. The dancing shadows thrown by the torchlight surged and pulsed at the edge of his vision, a mocking chorus that seemed to urge him on and demand violence of him. The floor rocked beneath his feet. Herraic clearly saw something of the battle raging between instinct and restraint. “They’re safe here,” the Captain of Highfast cried, imploring. “Tempers are running hot and hard, too much for me to control. If I’d let them wander about, I couldn’t be certain of keeping them alive. I couldn’t be sure of their safety.” “Feared for your own, more likely,” Taim Narran said levelly. He had a hand on Orisian’s arm again, gently drawing him back round towards the cellar doorway. “Are you all right, sire?” he asked. Orisian puffed out his cheeks and nodded. He turned his back on Herraic. Standing in the doorway, short and pale and blinking, with his hands clasped up by his chin, was Hammarn of Koldihrve. The old na’kyrim looked with faint curiosity at Orisian. “I know you, I think.” He smiled, pleased by the acuity of his own memory. “Yes, yes. Rode a ship with you, and walked a road. Though you were prettier then.” Orisian brushed a reflexive fingertip along the line the scar on his cheek. Hammarn looked from side to side, his face twitching into anticipation, both alarmed and excited. “Is the lady with you? The one with the nettlesome tongue?” Orisian gave a sad, gentle grunt. “Yvane? Yes, she’ll be here, Hammarn. Come, I’ll take you to her.”
IV
“What else would you expect?” asked Yvane. “The oldest of hatreds, the oldest of fears. And they could hardly have a better excuse to surrender to it. Aeglyss reminded them of where those fears come from. And with his corruption of the Shared feeding their every doubt, every suspicion, every buried resentment… no, it’s no surprise.” “You’d forgive them?” asked Orisian, disbelieving. “You, of all people?” They were descending a long sloping corridor, just the two of them, walking slowly down into Highfast’s foundations. The passageway was dark, save for the torch Orisian carried. The flame flapped now and again, sending their shadows careening over the square-cut stone facing of the walls. Even here, close to the stronghold’s roots, the air moved. The breath of the Karkyre Peaks found its way in through the porous skin of Highfast to these deep places. “I didn’t say anything about forgiveness,” Yvane told him. “But you accept it.” “And nothing about acceptance, either,” the na’kyrim said. “You’re too young.” Orisian came to a sudden halt and turned to her, angry. “Or I’m too old, too bruised,” she said quickly. “Either way, horrors that seem fresh and new to you are stale to me. What happened here, what Herraic and his men did, that’s the stuff of every tale I heard in my childhood. It’s the commonest of currencies between Huanin and na’kyrim, at least since the War of the Tainted. I despise it. Loathe it. I’m just not surprised by it.” He glared at her, then shook his head and continued down the sinking passage. “Perhaps I’ve lived too long,” Yvane muttered as she followed him. “But it’s not just that. I fear anger, as you should. Let it in, give it nourishment and it’ll overrun you.” Orisian said nothing, marching sullenly on. His fist about the burning torch was painfully tight, he realised. It took a moment of concentration to soften the muscles and take some of the iron out of his fingers. He knew she was right, and he did fear what might happen inside him—what might already be happening—if he yielded to the torrent of emotions he could sense running there. But anger was not the strongest, the most dangerous current; the shadow he felt at his heels, its ever more familiar breath across the nape of his neck, was a desolate hopelessness. It was despair not rage that would claim him if his defences faltered. They spiralled down a rough staircase, a columnar vein bearing them ever further from the distant, forgotten sky. Of all the surviving na’kyrim, only Hammarn had remained up in the portions of Highfast that had been built atop the pinnacle rather than carved out of it. He had passed the first night of his recovered freedom in a small, high sleeping chamber with Yvane and K’rina. All the rest, with barely a word, hardly a moment spared to gather food and water, had disappeared into these ancient, chthonic depths. As if to turn their backs upon the world and separate themselves from it. As if compelled by fear, or shame, or bitterness to bury themselves. An errant shadow angling across the stonework of the stairway caught Orisian’s eye. He paused, touched fingertip to rock. He traced the carved symbols, their edges blunted and bevelled by time. “Look at that,” he muttered. “A stonemason’s mark, I think. That must be… how old?” Yvane leaned against the wall, a couple of steps above him. She was a little out of breath. “Seven hundred years or more. One of Marain’s masons, perhaps.” “So many lifetimes, and it’s lain here in the stone all that time. Kings, and wars, and Thanes, all come and gone, half-forgotten.” He let his hand fall. He felt the weight of the unknown past here. A thousand and more years, with all their suffering, all their deaths, lost to memory. None of it of consequence now, yet all of it real and heavy. “Do you want to rest?” he asked Yvane quietly. “Don’t be silly,” she muttered, a reassuring touch of the old brashness there in her voice. “It’s hardly any distance now.” Orisian nodded and resumed his descent. “Plenty of places they could have chosen to sulk in, though,” he heard Yvane saying irritably behind him. “Seems a bit overexcited of them to burrow quite so deep.” The na’kyrim had gathered in a chamber where Highfast’s hollow roots brushed the precipitous surface of the mountain. The shutters at the windows were propped narrowly open, giving a glimpse of the immense open spaces, the plummeting drop, that lay outside; admitting a dull light and cold threads of unceasing wind. Simple beds filled much of the room, and many were occupied by the sleeping or the sick or the weak. “Look at this, look at this,” Yvane murmured in distress as they walked the length of the chamber. In even the plainest, most human of na’kyrim faces Orisian had until now always seen some trace of their Kyrinin parentage: a composed serenity, an elegant balance in their features or those calm grey eyes. Now he saw only wounds, of body and spirit alike. Eyes had the nervous restlessness of the hunted and hounded. Skin was marred by sores or cuts or burns. Cheeks had sunk into hollow bowls, sucked in by hunger or misery. One woman lay unmoving save for the constant, silent working of her thin lips, a smear of burned and raw flesh disfiguring one side of her face and crusting up across part of her scalp. The wound was coated in a slick white salve, but it looked inflamed. Orisian was glad that she had her eyes closed, for he feared what he might see there had he met her gaze. He felt his anger as a pain in his chest. It knotted itself there, and because he fought to keep it locked away, it raged all the more brightly and bitterly. It clamoured for release, demanding that there must be punishment, that only the suffering of the guilty could answer this suffering of the innocent. But he refused it. He had never known its like, never known this hot, sharp conviction, like a howl inside him, that the only healing he could ever hope for was with a sword in his hand and blood upon its blade. But still he refused it. Eshenna was seated on one of the beds closest to the windows. Little gusts of wind stirred her hair. Her hands were folded in her lap like white fallen leaves. She looked up as Yvane sat beside her on the thin mattress. Orisian saw the same thing in her eyes he had seen in so many others: a defeated, drained emptiness. “This is where I belonged,” Eshenna murmured as she looked down once more to her hands. She held some tiny fragment of cloth there, twisting it around her long fingers. “These are the people I belong to. I should never have left. I should have been here.” “No,” murmured Yvane. “We couldn’t have made any difference,” Orisian said. “None of us. Not here.” “I know,” Eshenna whispered. “That’s not why I should have been here.” And Orisian understood her. He felt the same longing rising up in him: not to have been here in Highfast when Aeglyss came, but to have slipped Rothe’s grasp when his shieldman dragged him out of Castle Kolglas on the night of Winterbirth. To have plunged back into the fire and the fury and been at his father’s side. Try to save his father, try to save Inurian. And, in failing, to be released from the burden of all that had flowed from that one night. He closed his eyes. All his anger easily folded itself into a shaming despair, a profound sense that nothing was as it was meant to be. He should have paid the same price that had been demanded of Kylane and Kennet, Rothe and Inurian. And he could have wept then, thinking of his mother and brother, bound in linen winding sheets, riding the corpse-ship out to The Grave. For the first time he understood, not with his head but with his heart, what had been inside his father all those years since the Heart Fever stole away Lairis and Fariel. It was not grief; it was the desire to have gone with them. It was guilt at having let them go alone. He blinked at Eshenna. “Where’s Amonyn?” he managed to ask. “The Scribing Hall,” she told him. “I know the way,” Orisian said.
* * *
The cavernous space of the Scribing Hall felt cold and dead. Wet ash was piled thickly against some of the walls and smeared across the floor. In one corner was a great, precarious heap of half-burned timbers, fragments of shelves and tables and chairs. Thick black soot streaked the walls and darkened the ceiling. Everything, everywhere, lay beneath the finest grey dust of destruction. A few meagre stacks of books and manuscripts had been assembled on some of the surviving desks. Many were scorched, their edges charred and curled. It was a pitiful remnant of the innumerable writings Orisian had seen when last he entered this library. “That’s what remains to us of all the labours since Lorryn first came here,” Amonyn murmured. “More than two and a half centuries.” Orisian remembered seeing him on his first visit to Highfast; one of their Council, he thought, though they had never spoken as far as he could recall. There seemed to be a consensus amongst the na’kyrim that this man, as much as any, was now their leader. He was tall and handsome, still possessed of a certain grace and air of physical power despite recent hardships. He was subdued, though. Sorrowful and weary. Orisian stirred a strandline of ash with the toe of his boot. “Cerys… the Elect… died here,” said Amonyn. He sighed. “It would have broken her heart to see it thus. It breaks all our hearts.” “Asking too much to start again,” Orisian said. It was half-statement, half-question. Amonyn pressed long, milk-nailed fingers into his eyes. There was a strength about him, but it was not an unopposed strength. It was there, and evident, because it was required. Because the man it fortified was beleaguered. “There are those who wish to leave this place and never return. Too much grief here. Too much horror.” Orisian nodded silently. Amonyn lifted his gaze towards the small windows high on the far wall. They admitted only a watery light. “This was meant to be a sanctuary for us,” the na’kyrim said. “And in the end it was one of our own kind who breached it. It was the Shared, ours alone, that undid us. But then, sanctuaries can only ever come to one of two ends: they cease to be required or they fail. It was never likely that Highfast’s end would be of the first kind, I suppose. That would have been asking for deeper changes in the world than are common.” “Where would you go if you left?” “Dyrkyrnon, for most.” “I imagine there’s no place there for a Scribing Hall, or a library.” “It seems unlikely,” said Amonyn quietly. “You should stay. All of you.” Amonyn glanced sideways at him. A shrewd, thoughtful look. “It would be, for many, the harder choice to stay. Something was lost here, and it could never be recovered. Safety, for a people who find the world ill-provided with that quality. They—we—trusted this place.” The na’kyrim studied Orisian as intently as a gemsmith examining a stone. “There was less sadness in you when last you were here,” he said. “Less darkness. Eshenna has told me a little of what you have seen since then. She expressed some concern about you.” “She need not worry.” “No?” Amonyn sighed. “Such wounds as you bear are difficult to conceal from na’kyrim. From some of us, at least. Doors that were once open in you are now barred. Windows have been shuttered. It is not unusual for any of us, when we are bruised, to retreat in the hope of avoiding further injury.” Orisian crossed to one of the smoke-blackened desks and rested back against its edge. The solitude and disconnection he had for so long now felt growing within him were softened for a moment by a vivid sense of Inurian’s presence. He could recall his lost friend’s face with fresh clarity, envisaging it graced with a sympathetic smile. There was much about Amonyn that reminded him of Inurian. “I’ve not chosen to bar any doors,” he said, “but… things have changed. All those I most valued are dead, or have been parted from me. And I am Thane now. I imagine Thanes must always be somewhat alone.” Amonyn raised his faint eyebrows and gave a slight shrug. “I have little experience of Thanes,” he admitted. “I think any man, though, whatever his station, will break if he takes all the weight of decisions, all the assaults of the world, upon himself alone.” “You’ve seen K’rina?” Orisian asked. Amonyn hesitated for a moment, as if debating whether to concede such a shift in the conversation. The decision was made, and he nodded. “Do you understand what has happened to her?” asked Orisian. “Eshenna claims she is some kind of… weapon. Or trap.” “It may be so,” Amonyn said. He was grave, his voice tinged with sadness. “Her essence is either gone, or so deeply buried as to be beyond giving any sign even in the Shared. When she is near, I feel…” He curled the fingers of one hand in the air, reaching for precision. Defeated, he let his hand fall back to his side. “There is a hunger there. A mindless hunger. And the spoor of the Anain are upon her, like the tracks of deer in the earth. Whatever has been made of her, they did the making.” Orisian pursed his lips. His hands closed upon the lip of the desk. The wood felt brittle and dry beneath his grip. He looked at his palm and saw a bar of ash across it. “There is something of her that reminds me of Tyn, the Dreamer,” Amonyn said, wincing at the memory. “Of what Aeglyss did to him. How he… emptied him, and then wore the empty shell himself. K’rina is a shell, but what is now within? Perhaps nothing.” He sighed. “But in truth no one here can tell you any more than Eshenna or Yvane have already done. To learn more about K’rina, we would need to go much deeper into the Shared than any of us would dare. What Eshenna has already discovered… It was an act of great bravery, or desperation, for her to search it out.” Orisian nodded. “Too much for her, I think,” he said. “I regret that. It was at my insistence that she did it.” “You won’t find anyone here eager to repeat the venture. The beast found his way inside our defences once already. We would not invite him in again.” “It must be very difficult for you, to be frightened of the Shared,” Orisian said. There was that instant of acute, appraising attention once more, as if Amonyn was surprised to hear such sentiments from a Huanin. “It is,” the na’kyrim said quietly. “We have lost more than one home.” “And until Aeglyss is gone, you can none of you return to the one that’s inside your heads.” “We must exile ourselves from the Shared. K’rina’s wound was not serious. She has needed no more than the most mundane of ministrations. But there are those within these walls who are dying from their wounds, their ailments. I might save some of them, if I had the courage, or the strength, to allow the Shared to flow through me. But I do not. None of us do.” Orisian looked up at the huge roof of the hall, dropped his gaze to the few surviving books collected on nearby desks. “You should stay, all of you. That’s what I came to tell you. You’d be no safer—probably less—out there on the roads, perhaps even in Dyrkyrnon. I will leave men here to guard you, and to keep Herraic and the others in order.” Amonyn stooped elegantly to pull a fragment of parchment from a drift of ash. He frowned at it briefly then let it fall. It fluttered down, black and illegible. “Not everything that is broken can be mended, however much we—you—might wish otherwise. Some things… do not mend.” “I know that,” Orisian said. “Believe me, I understand that. I know that the past cannot be changed, cannot be undone. But the future… I still believe, still hope, that can be changed, can be shaped by what we choose to do. And enough has already been lost. We shouldn’t give up any more without a fight. Anything that’s worth preserving, it needs to be fought for now, don’t you think? Or there will be nothing left at all of any worth, any brightness.” “Everyone has to choose their own battles to fight,” Amonyn said quietly. “We will see, though. Give us your warriors to guard us, and perhaps. Perhaps. There might be some of us willing to remain. You don’t mean to stay here yourself, though.” Orisian shook his head. “I can’t see any other choice. If I hid away here…” The words faded, losing themselves. The na’kyrim angled his head, smiling now with the very smile Orisian’s memory had put upon Inurian’s face. “There’s always choice. We seldom understand our every reason for doing what we do, but somewhere, hidden or not, made or unmade, there’s always choice. We each choose our own battles, as I said.” There was, high in the great keep of the ancient fortress, a wide chamber from which the Wardens of the Aygll Kings once exercised the power of those distant monarchs. They judged those who disturbed the peace of the long road Highfast guarded; they levied the tithes that paid for Dun Aygll’s palaces and for the many royal pleasures of their inhabitants; they marshalled the warriors who enforced peace upon the Karkyre Peaks, and all the land from Ive to Hent to Stone. As the road fell into ruin, as the Storm Years sent the mountain folk down onto the plains in search of easier, safer lives, as Highfast itself declined into its long slumber, so that chamber had grown quiet. Each dwindling of Highfast’s garrison had seen its inhabitants retreat into ever more restricted portions of the vast stronghold, withdrawing from many of its innumerable passages and halls and turrets. So this lofty chamber had emptied of voices, and populated itself instead with dust and silences and the webs of hopeful spiders. Orisian called all his warriors there because he wanted privacy from Herraic and his sullen, subjugated men. Because he wanted light, and the sight of the sky, to be attendant upon this moment. From the windows here, where Highfast reached almost to its utmost height above its vast, precipitous pedestal, he could see an ocean of scudding clouds brushing over serried ranks of peaks. “I will take K’rina into the north,” he said. “To the Glas Valley. As close as I can get to Kan Avor, and to Aeglyss.” He looked not at the faces of those assembled before him, but at the old, indistinct carving of a crown set into the stonework above the door. He felt strangely unfamiliar to himself, as if some part of him had stepped aside from his tempestuous core, where fear and confusion and agonies of doubt boiled. He was unexpectedly calm. “It is a journey she was meant to make, I think, until we—I—stole her away from it. Now she cannot make it alone, so I will take her. Past Hent, and through Anlane. Most of you are to stay here, and I’ll want your pledge to keep safe all who are within these walls, human and na’kyrim alike. Guard them against whatever may come from outside, or from within. It’s the only service your Blood, and your Thane, requires of you now. “If there are ten of you who are willing to come with me, and with K’rina, I would welcome your aid. No more than ten, for there’ll be no battles if I can help it. At this time of year, this season, most of the White Owls should be quartered in their winter camps. With care, we might go entirely unnoticed. But I will take no one who does not come by their own free choice.” Taim Narran stepped forward, of course, even before Orisian had drawn breath: a single, determined pace closer to his Thane. Others followed him, one by one, the only sound their soft feet on the flagstoned floor. And for Orisian there was both relief and guilt in the sight of them coming out from amongst their fellows. Offering themselves, and their lives, to him. Afterwards, as the warriors departed, descending the long stairways, Taim Narran came to him. “Are you sure?” was all the warrior asked him, gently. “Not sure. I’ve seen and heard enough to make me think it needs doing. And I’m here; there’s no one else to do it. But you don’t have to come, Taim. Highfast will need a strong hand to hold it, and there’s no one I’d trust more than you. You’ve a wife and a daughter waiting for you who’ll need you after all this is done. I’d be glad to see you stay, truly.” Taim Narran only shook his head sadly at that, and went after his men. Orisian and Yvane were left alone in the broad chamber, the na’kyrim watching him with hard eyes. “Stay,” Orisian said to her. “You’ve done enough. More than enough.” “I’ll come for K’rina. She deserves that much of us, at least. There should be someone of her own kind there to care for her, to watch over her. Someone who understands something of what she was, what her life was, before she became only a tool of those with wars to fight.” “I care for her,” Orisian said. The fires in him were damped down, for now. He wanted only quiet. He would not argue with Yvane. And there was, in any case, a truth he could entirely understand in her subdued anger. “Perhaps you do,” she said. “Perhaps you think you do. But still she is used. By the Anain. By us. Na’kyrim have learned—hundreds of years have taught us—to find caring and trust and safety only in one another. In our own. If there is anything of K’rina left, lost in the Shared or sealed away inside her body, she deserves to look out and see a face like her own. And I played my part in helping you to find her. Whether that was wise or not, I don’t know, but I’ll not walk away from her now.” She left him there, and he stood for a time breathing the damp air, tasting its age and its abandonment. Listening to the timeless, unending wind tumbling over the skin of the fortress. Watching as flurries of snow began to swirl once more past the windows. When he at last stirred himself, he went to find Ess’yr and Varryn. He said not a word to them, nor they to him. He merely settled himself onto a bench and watched them. They rolled spare bowstrings about their fingers and packed them away in pouches. They sewed new seams into their hide boots where they had started to split. They sighted along the shafts of their arrows in search of imperfections, smoothed the feathered flights. They inspected their water bags for wear and for leaks. All of this they did unhurriedly, silently. That concentration, that graceful intensity of attention and purpose, was soothing to Orisian. It spoke to him of acceptance, of calm accommodation to the future the world offered up. For so long, as a child searching for solace in the wake of the Heart Fever, he had imagined that there might be other kinds of lives than his, ones that rode the tempests of the world with greater ease. He had seized upon every hint that Inurian let slip about the ways of the Kyrinin, taking them to be tokens of just such lives; fragmentary promises that other possibilities existed beyond the walls of bereaved Castle Kolglas. He could still summon up some trace of those childhood hopes, but it was the memory of them that offered comfort now, not their substance. He knew more; was no longer that child. Varryn stood tall, and held his long spear straight at his side. For the first time in many days, he looked directly into Orisian’s eyes and spoke to him. “We go now into the lands of the enemy?” Orisian nodded wordlessly, feeling that faint, still peace drift away. And he watched as the thinnest of smiles tightened on the Kyrinin warrior’s face. As the tattoos that told the tales of the deaths he had wrought flexed on his skin. “Then I will wet my spear with their blood. And they will learn the Fox still live.”
V
Eska of the Hunt left her dogs behind in Glasbridge and walked alone into the Glas Valley, towards Kan Avor. There was deep snow across the fields, but still she shunned the roads, the better to avoid any inconvenient attention. It found her in any case. Before she was out of sight of Glasbridge’s dark outline hunched down on the western horizon, she saw three figures coming towards her across a pristine expanse of snow. They laboured, though whether that was due to the depth of snow, or because like many others in this ravaged valley they were sick or starving, she could not tell at this distance. It hardly mattered. They did not have the look of warriors, certainly not Inkallim, and thus, even hale and hearty, were unlikely to be any threat to her. She strode on along the line of a snow-buried ditch, ignoring them. One of the men called out to her as they drew near, angling across the great white field to intercept her course. His accent marked him as Gyre, from the Bloodstone Hills; most likely, she thought, the Frein Valley. She had been there once, tracking the killer of one of the Lore. She had always had a talent for voices, for reading them and remembering their cadences. It had been useful, on occasion, in her service of the Inkall. She read disorder and desperation in this man’s voice. She marched on, head down. The snow crunched crisply beneath her booted feet. “Wait, there,” the man shouted again. Eska still did not look round, but she could hear that they were close now, too close to ignore. She must either run—she could easily outpace them, no doubt—or face them. There might be something to be gained, she supposed, in talking to them. Some fragment of information, perhaps. That was, after all, the currency she dealt in, and the substance of the task Kanin oc Horin-Gyre had bestowed upon her. She stood still, and turned to face the three men. They were grimy and gaunt. Hungry, she judged, but not yet quite enfeebled by it. One at least had a feverish look that suggested illness. She quickly made the necessary assessment: a staff one leaned upon, a hammer hanging from a belt, a tiny knife, a scabbarded sword that must have been stolen or looted from the dead. They were much like scores, perhaps hundreds, of others scattered all across the Glas Valley: ordinary folk who had marched in the wake of the Battle, fired by faith or greed or hope, only to find the business of fighting an ill-supplied war in the midst of winter more brutal and breaking than they had imagined. Debris left behind as the stronger, more vigorous flood had swept on into the south. “Any food?” the nearest of the men asked without preamble. Eska shook her head silently. His eyes tracked her lean lines, tracing the form of her muscles beneath her hides. His gaze lingered for a moment upon her spear, darted down to her leather boots. “No food,” he mumbled. “Where are you going?” “Kan Avor,” she said. “Have you been there?” The man shrugged. She saw a flicker of unease, perhaps remembered horror, in the eyes of one of his companions, though. “I would be interested to know how things stand there,” she said. “Who you saw there. What is happening.” “Nothing good,” the first man rasped. The others clearly deferred to him. “Too much…” He wrinkled his nose, as if at a foul stench. “Too much of what?” Eska enquired, and as soon as she did so, saw that her efforts would be fruitless. The man grimaced. He was angered. “Too much of everything,” he muttered, then: “You’re not like us, not like everyone else. Who are you?” His tone, the way he stared avariciously at Eska’s boots, made clear that his curiosity was not born of any desire for friendship. “I am of the Hunt Inkall,” she said levelly. That was as much as she would share. “One of Tegric’s Children? Ha, ha.” He sounded enthused at the thought of such reputed prey. It was absurd. In normal times, such men should be cowed by her presence, her implied abilities. Such calculation was clearly beyond them now. They, like so many, had abandoned their judgement in favour of baser, more feral urges. Eska saw it all around her in recent days. Some seemed barely affected by the strange, ubiquitous sickness of the mind; many—most, she thought—were slowly, incrementally slipping into madness. She had even found herself becoming increasingly ill-tempered, murderous rage sometimes held at bay only by a lifetime of habitual self-discipline. Now, though, regarding these wretched men, she thought in dispassionate, practical terms. They were clearly disinclined to provide her with any useful knowledge. So be it. They could not prevent her escape, but if by some bizarre chance word of her approach preceded her to Kan Avor and there fell into an unfriendly ear, matters might become unnecessarily complicated. She felt faint regret as she came to her decision. These lives would end without having greatly aided in the advancement of the creed. But then, each and every life could only be as it was written, nothing more and nothing less. Fate had brought these men to her; she was but its tool in this. The ringleader advanced, leering as he did so. She staggered him with a blow from the butt of her spear into his ribcage. The same movement, rebounding in a smooth arc, satisfying in its precision, brought the barbed spear-point back to lay open the second man’s face. She glimpsed the blood-flecked bone of his cheek as she spun on one foot and crouched, punching the base of her spear into the snow for support, straightening a leg to crack her heel into the third’s knee. He howled and hobbled sideways. The snow tripped him. Eska rose. The first of her assailants had recovered his balance, and was clumsily drawing that purloined sword with all the facility of one who had never held such a weapon in his life. She drove her spear into his belly with enough force to lift him off his feet, and left it there. She kicked the man who had fallen in the side of his head as he began to rise. He slumped back. She took a handful of his hair and hammered the heel of her free hand once into the bridge of his nose. There was a splintering crunch and he went limp. The one whose cheek she had cut was staggering away, vainly trying to press back a flap of skin to his face, his hands fumbling in the blood that she had freed. She followed him, tearing her barbed spear free from the dying, howling ringleader’s stomach as she went. She put it into the small of the fleeing man’s back. She twisted it and pulled. He came staggering back towards her, caught on the barbs. She threw a foot up against his spine and kicked him free. He fell forwards. Eska walked on towards Kan Avor. She came to the city across ground that remembered its recent inundation. It had been the Glas Water, before the breaking of the Dyke, and that sodden past remained close. Beneath the snow, a thin crust of ice and frozen mud lay like skin over soft silt. Her feet sometimes broke through into cloying, part-liquid earth that was thick with dead reed stems and half-decayed water weed. Clumps of straggly, leafless willows stood here and there, their pliable branches bent by snow and icicles. Once, ice crackled under her foot and dropped her into an ankle-deep pool of black, almost glutinous, water. She at once unlaced her boots and dried both them and her feet as best she could. In the north she had seen toes, even legs and lives, lost for want of such simple precautions. Sitting there, rubbing at her skin to warm it, she noticed the end of a leg bone jutting out from the mud close by, the ball joint like a smooth fist. It was not the first bone she had seen: there had been half a jaw, four ribs protruding from the snow like the fringe of a broken-toothed comb. All human. The dead lay thickly here. It might be, she supposed, the result of the Heart Fever that had raged through the Lannis Blood a few years ago, but the remains looked to have more age to them than that. She preferred to think them the dead of Kan Avor Field, the great battle fought here a century and a half ago, when the Black Road was driven from these lands. She found that a pleasing thought. “We came back,” she whispered foolishly to the leg bone as she rose and continued on her way. Kan Avor lay beneath a fetid fog. Eska felt its moisture on her hair, her skin. And she felt its stench close like an invisible hand over her mouth and nose. She smelled mud and rot and death and smoke and waste, so potent, all of them, that even through the muffling snow and ice they fouled the air. The frozen ruins were teeming with people, far more than she had anticipated. And there were bodies, which was just as she had anticipated. A woman lay stiff and taut in the doorway of a house that had long ago lost its roof. Her dead eyes watched Eska pass through lashes beaded with frost. One arm was bent at the elbow, lifting her splayed grey hand towards the street. Dogs had chewed off the fingers. In a little square, a corpse hung from a protruding stone high up on a wall. They—someone—had suspended him by his arms and killed him, possibly slowly, with a multitude of blows. Eska’s cursory glance was enough to pick out perhaps twenty separate wounds. His clothes, soaked with blood, had frozen rigid and black. From the toe of one naked foot hung a tiny icicle of blood, a single fat drop arrested in the act of readying itself to fall. The smell of roasting flesh drew Eska to a ruined house. It must once have been a noble residence, for there was a stable block, and in its yard a crowd had gathered to watch the hind leg of a horse being turned on a spit above a crackling fire. It was a twisted echo of the place’s former purpose, but that did not interest Eska; she thought instead how wasteful it was to consume an animal that might have carried a warrior south or hauled firewood or supplies. She noted, as she progressed through the hallucinatory dream that Kan Avor had become, each accent, each ragged banner, each subtly distinctive variation in raiment. She found people of every ilk. Warriors from every Blood; countryfolk and townsfolk; Tarbains; Battle Inkallim. Even some of the defeated Lannis Blood, from whose manner it was impossible to tell whether they were prisoners or slaves, or equal and welcomed followers of the halfbreed. All save the Inkallim mingled with little regard to status or origin, as if all previous associations and bonds had been overlaid or broken all together. Only Nyve’s ravens—or better perhaps to name them Shraeve’s now—held themselves aloof. And there were Kyrinin. Eska saw just a few of them, lingering silently at the fringes of human gatherings, moving through the shattered streets on obscure errands. She despised them for their presence here. Such as they had no rightful place in the city that, however ruined, embodied the history of the Black Road. She averted her gaze from their tattooed faces, their rangy forms. But she counted them, as she counted everyone. She came to a crowded street, one that stank of mud and humanity. The people gathered there milled about without evident purpose. They snarled at one another when they were jostled, but otherwise were all but silent. Some were barefoot. Some, too poorly dressed for the harsh weather, sat shivering in doorways or at the foot of walls. Eska moved amongst them, noting with contempt how far these fellow northerners of hers had fallen; how destitute and weak many of them appeared. She felt no pity for those amongst them who so clearly suffered from the cold or from hunger or from sickness. Their own stupidity was the cause, as far as she was concerned, and it earned for them every miserable moment. Many of the men and women often looked towards a door in a crumbling edifice along one side of the street. Others glanced constantly up towards empty windows above. Those blank, dark apertures were framed with moss and ferns sprouting from the seams of the stonework. There was nothing to see, but Eska felt the simmering collective excitement. All attention, conscious or otherwise, was upon some invisible focus behind those walls, beyond those windows. Eska drifted through the throng, counting, always counting, always studying. She strove to avoid notice, but she could hardly conceal her health, her weapons, her clean leathers and hides. People stared at her. She kept her eyes empty, unresponsive. Then the door was opening, and a stillness fell across the street as if a wind had suddenly fallen away. Into the eerie calm came Shraeve of the Battle and other Inkallim, and Kyrinin, and last of all Aeglyss the na’kyrim. He was stooped, as if so old that his very bones were bent by the burden of years. He walked unsteadily, each pace a short and sliding shuffle. His hair was thinning, and where it remained the strands looked fragile as spider’s web, almost translucent. Every bone in his face was visible beneath the bleached, cracked skin. His hand, when he extended it towards some adoring spectator, bore fingers like crooked twigs. Where his fingernails should have been were raw sores. So reduced and brittle and damaged did he appear that it was difficult to tell that he was na’kyrim rather than human; the dwindling of his body masked the differences, drawing all his features down into indistinct decrepitude. Had Eska seen him on the street of some city, not knowing who he was, she might have veered away from him, thinking him the bearer of some wasting plague. And yet. There was in him something that held the eye. Something that caught her breath in her throat, and filled her with the deep certainty that this frail, eroded figure was far more than mere man. All around her, people were kneeling. Smiling. Eska knelt too, the better to merge with the crowd. But in doing so she sensed, if only distantly, the rightness of the gesture. She felt, between her thoughts, in the gaps left in her skull by her own mind, the movement of this broken man’s thoughts, the ferocity of his desires and his remorseless capacity to fulfil them. She felt these things, and could have been transported by them as one consumed by hunger might be on catching the faint scent of the richest imaginable food. But she did not succumb. Eska had come to the Hunt as a child too young to speak or walk. An orphan probably, though there was no way of being certain since the records were imperfect. She had no memory of what preceded the discipline and the apparatus of the Hunt, and her every desire—even her faith in the creed—had been subsumed by her devotion to the Inkall. She had no sense of needs or imperatives beyond service to the Hunt. As the vast unspoken, promissory temptations of the halfbreed’s presence washed about and through her, she clung to that clear and narrow allegiance, and found it sturdy. She remained observer, not participant. Aeglyss raised his arms. He was perhaps too weak to straighten them, for his hands came little higher than his head, the elbows remained crooked. “Friends,” he murmured, and the word came to Eska from both within and without. It embraced her and soothed her. She smiled despite herself. “Faithful friends. We move towards the light of a new sun, you and I. Great changes are upon us, and I am their herald, their helmsman.” Whispers in the crowd, like the rustling of leaves: affirmations and adorations. Eska could feel the edges of her attention contracting. This halfbreed drew everything in towards himself. “I have promised many things,” Aeglyss said. “And the time comes when I shall make good those promises. This world has ever been found wanting. From my first breath, I have gone, step by step, into its dark heart, and over all those years it has shown me how it revels in cruelty, how it feeds upon deceit, takes pleasure in the suffering and the death of those who least deserve it.” The truth of all he said was like a light burning inside Eska’s eyes. It was bright, and she could imagine the warmth and the comfort it could offer, yet she was not blinded by it. Narrowly, determinedly, she thought of the crossbow on her back. Its weight grounded her. Had she been prepared, with crossbow in hand and a bolt ready for its string, she might have killed this halfbreed here and now, before Shraeve or the watchful Kyrinin could intervene. She concentrated upon that thought, and turned it over and over in her mind, as if practising some protective ritual of the sort the Tarbains once favoured. She girded her mind with imagined visions of the lethal act, clinging to them. “All of this I have seen,” Aeglyss called out, “and I have learned it well. And now I am granted the strength to cure the world of its ills.” Kanin had told her not to throw her life away in any attempt upon Aeglyss. Eska doubted the Thane’s insistence that no single dart or blade was likely to prove fatal to the na’kyrim—she had yet to find a neck that would not yield to a sharp-edged caress—but she was prepared to wait a while longer before testing it. Aeglyss was smiling now, in a wolfish way. Eska thought she saw contempt there, as he surveyed the kneeling, bowing host filling the street, but she doubted anyone else would share her impression. “A world must be broken before it can be made whole again,” Aeglyss intoned. “There must be a purging with fire and with blood. We must strip everything back to bare soil before we can plant new seeds. Is it not so?” “Yes,” Eska heard a woman at her side murmur, and others all through the crowd. A hundred whispers of assent. “And thus is the purpose of all my suffering revealed. Though I did not seek it, the strength is in me to subjugate all the world to a single will. I—we—shall lay bare the earth. Start afresh. I shall remove all dispute, sweep away all pride. There will be no more envy, no more traitors. Only the faithful.” Eska repeated that word to herself within the chamber of her head: faithful. She could feel the ardour trying to shake its way free of her stern self-restraint; she could feel that eager, ambitious portion of her spirit struggling to carry the rest of her into surrender and submission to the halfbreed’s certainty. But it was not, she thought, the creed to which he truly demanded faith. It was to him. Though he spoke in the language of the Black Road—the unmaking of the world, its purging by bloodshed—it was not the return of the Gods he hoped to usher in, but his own dominion. Cannek had told Eska as much, before his ill-fated endeavours at Hommen. He had told her that Aeglyss was, at heart, a mad child. Nothing more. She had always thought Cannek a perceptive, perhaps even wise, man. “Tomorrow, at dawn, there will be wonders,” Aeglyss proclaimed, nodding as if compelled to do so by the irresistible truth of what he said. “Tomorrow I will descend upon our enemies, and undo them. I will deliver to you, and to us all, the greatest of victories. I will give to you the place of the Fisherwoman’s birth.” The roar of delight shivered back and forth along the street, echoing from the stonework. Some woman, overcome, leapt to her feet and ran towards Aeglyss, arms outstretched, wild ecstasy in her face. She was blind to all save him, sending those who obstructed her path sprawling away. She wept and laughed as she ran. One of the Kyrinin standing beside Aeglyss, tall and powerful, his face thick with tattooed swirls and curves, rapped the heel of his spear once upon the cobbles, let it spring up free. He caught it again, stretched out a foot and planted it firmly, then snapped the spear forward. It went flat and true into the woman’s chest and lodged there. Her frenzied, delirious wail was cut short as she plunged back and down. “Tomorrow, you may witness the wonder,” Aeglyss said as if nothing had happened. The woman was groaning, but no one paid her any heed. Eska could not see her any more, but the spear stood erect and it trembled with the woman’s faltering breaths. “Those who are here at dawn, you will find me there, in the hall above.” Aeglyss gestured towards the windows. Every head was tipped up to follow his hand. “I shall exceed Orlane, and Dorthyn, and all who went before. In your name, in your service, I shall make dust of the past, for these are new times we live in, and a new world we are making. Attend, and see what wonders I work on your behalf.”
*
Glasbridge’s harbour was empty of boats. The deserted quayside stood silent, its moorings idle, its taverns and shops burned or deserted. Wet slush covered its stones. Offshore, amidst the turbulent waves driving in from the vast estuary, the short mast of some half-sunken fishing boat rocked like a swamped sapling. Kanin stared at it for a time, narrowing his eyes against the sleet sweeping in on the wind. He imagined for a moment that its movement, the regular, solitary beat of its instability, might convey some message to him. There was nothing there, though. He turned to the crowd standing there on the quay, a miserable, bedraggled assemblage. Some of the last dregs of Glasbridge’s Lannis inhabitants. There were only a few men of fighting age. Women and a few children, old men, frail men, regarded him with various kinds of contempt and resentment. Sixty of them, nearly one in six, as best he could guess, of those who had not died during their town’s destruction and capture, or not escaped it. They had been dragged and driven here like recalcitrant sheep, full of hate but too battered and defeated to offer any resistance. Kanin’s warriors ringed the Lannis folk, enclosing them in a silent cordon of spears and swords. He doubted such precautions were really necessary. These were broken people. And that was something he meant to change, even if only a little. A Gyre man was kneeling before him, his hands tied behind his back. Kanin spat meltwater from his lips. “You know me,” he shouted across the wind at the townsfolk. “You know I’ve made this town mine. I’ve opened the food stores to you, fed you as well as we eat ourselves. Those of you who’d been made slaves or servants, I’ve freed you from that.” He grimaced at a sudden flurry of sleet. “This man killed a Lannis girl yesterday.” He kicked the Gyre captive in the back, sending him sprawling into the slush. Igris hauled the man back onto his knees. The shieldman had great coiled chains looped over his shoulder, found in the storeroom of a half-wrecked smithy. “Now you see how things go in my town,” Kanin shouted, and nodded to Igris. The shieldman hesitated. He winced. “Do it,” Kanin hissed. Others of his Shield came forward. They helped Igris to entwine the chains about the Gyre man, securing them with cords. One took his ankles, another his shoulders, and they carried him to the edge of the quay. The man stared at Kanin all the way. There was no hatred in his dark eyes, only accusation. “I go without fear,” the man said, quite distinctly, quite calmly. “I don’t doubt it,” muttered Kanin. “But still you go.” His warriors swung their cargo once, then heaved him out. The sea swallowed him with a deep, hollow smack and he was gone, leaving not the slightest trace in the relentless waves slapping up against the stonework. Some of the Lannis townsfolk crowded to the edge, pushing past the guards, craning their necks to try and follow the man’s descent. One kicked slush after him. Another whispered curses Kanin could not hear above the wind and water. “I don’t expect love or loyalty from you,” Kanin said. They turned back to him, and he saw new patterns in their faces now: puzzlement in some, suspicion in others. “I do expect the sense to see that things can change. Have changed. I will shield you from the basest cruelties of your conquerors. I will permit no more of your children to die, or be stolen away by the ravens. I will feed you, and clothe you, as well as I feed and clothe the most devoted of my own followers. I will even seek boats and, if I find them, give them to you, and not hinder your departure.” He could see out of the corner of his eye Igris watching him with poorly disguised horror. He had not told his Shield or any of his warriors his full intent today. There had been no need or point in doing so. He was Thane, and more than that he was a man alone, engaged in an undertaking none of them could see clearly enough to grasp. Only he understood what extremities the times demanded. “But not all of you,” Kanin said, concentrating upon the attentive, bewildered townsfolk. “I want you to go amongst your fellows, and tell them what you have seen and what I have said here today. And tomorrow I will have all of you who can hold a weapon, and have the strength to walk for a day, assembled here at dawn. I don’t care who—men or women, it doesn’t matter—but you will come here, and I will arm you and train you and give you an enemy to oppose. “Because I am not your worst enemy, and you are not mine. I will show you the greatest enemy your Blood has ever had, the one responsible for all your suffering and shame, and you will fight him at my side. I will give you back the honour of your Blood. Those you leave behind here will be protected and preserved for as long as you keep this bargain with me. If you fail in what I require of you, you will all suffer the consequences.” They stared at him, a mass of disbelief and confusion, and he stared back. Resolute. Unwavering. In the silence, gulls came drifting in off the sea, their cries sharp. “That is all,” Kanin said, and turned. He walked away, ignoring his own warriors and their questioning glances. He could hold them for a time yet, he was sure. For long enough. Only Igris came hurrying after him, sword tapping at his legs, mail shirt clinking. “It doesn’t seem right, sire, to be fighting the faithful when the war is so far…” Kanin spun and leaned towards the shieldman, pointing a single finger at his eye. “The war is where I say it is. By the oath you took to my father, you made the Blood’s battles your own. The Thane is the Blood, and I am Thane yet. I choose our battles. Never forget it. I know what must be done, for the good of the faith, for the good of us all.” Igris quailed before his lord’s wrath, and Kanin stalked away. He was right in this. He was certain of it. If he was the last and only man in all the world who could see what had to be done, so be it. He had strength enough for that, whatever it cost him, wherever it led him. Two figures awaited him a short distance down the harbourside. They were leaning against the side of a broken cart, watching with wry amusement: two of the three Hunt Inkallim who had made themselves his shadows. “Have you found what I need?” Kanin asked them. “You have a rare talent for spreading havoc and confusion, it seems, Thane,” one of the men murmured. “I asked if you have found what I need,” barked Kanin. The man inclined his head, deflecting—or dismissing—the Thane’s anger. “Seventy of them. Every corpse-in-waiting this town has to offer. Most should live long enough to serve your purposes. A fine concoction they are: fevers and sores and suppuration. We’ve got them safely sequestered beyond the reach of any healers. Not that there are many of those to be found hereabouts.” “Good. I want them in Kan Avor tomorrow. I’ll have Igris arrange an escort, and drivers for the wagons. No word from Eska yet?” The man shook his head, and Kanin grunted. He strode away. “You’ll make our task of keeping you alive difficult, Thane, if you turn your own people against you,” one of the Inkallim said behind him. Kanin stopped and hung his head for a moment. Then he turned and stared at the man. “I didn’t give you the task. I don’t care how easy or otherwise you find it. What happens will happen, since none of us chooses the course of the Road. Do we?” He asked it dully at first, but then again, more pointedly, more openly: “Do we?”
VI
The heat of bodies and of breath warmed and moistened the air in the hall. Three hundred people, perhaps, crammed in, standing in expectant, reverent silence. Eska stood at the rear of the crush with her back to one of the gaping windows. She could feel the bitter wind that came up the Glas Valley on her neck, even as the warmth of the hall brushed her face. There was snow on that wind, and an occasional errant flake came tumbling over her shoulder to alight, and vanish into water, upon the hair or jacket of those in front of her. The hall was gloomy, barely recovered from the deepest dark of night. Out to the east, Eska knew, the sky would have caught the first grimy smear of the new day’s approaching light, but here in Kan Avor it would be some time yet before true dawn would break. No lights burned, and in the near-darkness, with such a close-packed crowd, it was difficult to see the halfbreed seated on his stone slab of a throne at the far end of the chamber. When he spoke, his voice was all but disembodied, grating out from the columns, from the wooden floorboards. “I killed one of the ghosts in the green. You could not understand what that means. You who hear nothing of the true thunder rolling beneath the world cannot know what it is to ride its storm winds, to master them thus. No matter. There’s none left, now… none left… who could describe even the outline of what I have become.” The hush was profound. No one breathed, none stirred. Hundreds stood there in the dark, held by that strained voice stealing across the stonework, threading its way in amongst them, running its icy touch across their skin. It seemed, even to Eska, a thing not born of a living, limited throat, but rising from the matter and nature of the world itself: as innate, as inevitable as the breaking of waves on a wild shore, or the rushing of a stream through its mountain bed. “I will give you more easily measurable wonders,” Aeglyss said. Such a slight figure, Eska thought, so small and frail alone there on the bench. Yet so utterly dominant of every eye, every mind. There was, in these extended, rapt moments, nothing else of consequence in the hall. “Because I know the course of your desires, because I know that what I demand of you must be earned by gifts, because it falls to me to shape all things now; because of all this, I will give you what no other could. You and your creed ascend now, on my wings.” The halfbreed fell silent, and his silence took something out of the world, leaving all who had been listening bereaved and diminished. There was nothing that could fill the void his presence left as he drew it back into himself, bowed his head still more deeply into his chest and let out a long, dwindling breath. But light began to come, seeping in hesitantly, eroding the lingering darkness, putting grey accents on every form. And amidst that meagre brightening, they waited and watched.
*
The Bloodheir was gone. Summoned back to Vaymouth by the Thane of Thanes, it was said. Malloc cared nothing for the two thousand men who had marched with him; it was the departure of Aewult nan Haig himself that weighed upon him. Some, Malloc knew, would welcome the Bloodheir’s departure. There were those—all but traitors to his way of thinking—who thought Aewult’s leadership a factor in their recent defeats. In the night just ended, by the glare of their campfire’s flames, Malloc and his companions had killed one such, a man who slighted the Bloodheir’s courage, his merit. The others had held him down and covered his mouth, and Malloc himself slipped a blade twice, thrice, between his ribs. They had dragged the body to a ditch and hidden it amongst reeds there. None could reasonably punish them for their deed, but it would be for the best if the question never arose. There had been a certain comfort in the killing, a small confirmation that the world retained some semblance of sense and balance. Strangely sweeter to him than the taking of any of the other lives he had claimed in his long service of his Blood, it gave Malloc a memory to set in the scales against his disappointment at the Bloodheir’s departure. He stood now, with Garrent and the others at his side, by the banks of a wide, shallow stream, and remembered the feel of that disloyal, foul-mouthed fool dying beneath his knife. The man had been a Taral-Haig archer, somehow separated from his company in the darkness. In the new day’s half-light, the waters of this stream looked darker and more turbid than they had any right to be. There were many such brown waterways scurrying down towards the sea from the northern fringes of the Ayth-Haig moors. It galled Malloc to find himself in such a peripheral posting, when any battle—if there was even to be such a thing—would be decided nearer the coast, beside the road that pointed the way south. That was where most of the remaining Haig forces were gathered. None defended Kilvale itself. The town would stand or fall by the strength of its own inhabitants and the warriors of its own Blood. There had been killings traded between Kilkry and Haig. Only word of the Black Road’s approach and the withdrawal of every Haig sword from the town had stilled them. In truth, Malloc doubted the rumours of impending combat that had drifted through the army, with the smoke of its hundreds of campfires, in the evening and night just passed. He had long ago learned to distrust the misshapen guesses that infested any assemblage of fighting men like madly breeding cockroaches. The whispered reports of Black Road companies massing half a day to the north of Kilvale seemed to him no more reliable than any of the hundred other tales he had heard in recent weeks. Some clearly gave them more credence, though, so he found himself here in the misty morning, staring across the chattering waters at rough, undulating ground studded with countless clumps of low trees and shrubs. For all his conviction that this would come to nothing, Malloc clung to a faint hope that he might have the chance to draw his sword today. The waiting, the indolence, had become insupportable. He had never known any body of men so in need of bloodshed. He revelled in the tightening of his own chest at the thought that he might, at last, have the chance to make amends for the defeats inflicted by the Black Road. This was supposedly the only fordable stretch of the river above Kilvale that the Black Road might reach in a single day. Malloc had no idea whether that was true, but it offered at least the possibility that there would be fighting to be done, so he chose to believe it. He chose to hope. What breeze there was on this sluggish morning was out of the west, and it suddenly carried upon it the faintest, most tantalising hint of battle. The damp air brought a murmur out of the furthest mists: the muted song of war. Malloc’s heart thumped, as if fed by the distant sound. He firmed his grip upon the shaft of his spear, shifted his weight from foot to foot. Nobody spoke, in all the ranks of men. Their mood was expressed not in words, but in the creaking of leather, the rasp of swords being drawn, the soft settling of helms onto heads. Malloc saw figures far out beyond the river, imprecise movements at the limit of his mist-curbed vision. The Black Road came in loose array, slowly, spread out amongst the scattered trees, and they came armoured in mounting noise. Voices merged into a rising clamour, forming a fierce, disembodied chorus of intent that seemed almost to come from the hidden sky, descending upon Malloc and his companions from above. There was hunger in that sound, an impersonal pledge of savagery. And as it drew nearer, and as the figures came closer and solidified, Malloc felt sudden fear stealing through his mind. It rose up from within him and ran cold needles over his scalp, sent a tremor running through his arm so that his spear shook. It changed him in a moment, as if he had stepped across a threshold, entering a chilling shadow, becoming someone else. His every thought was smothered by a mounting, absolute dread, a crippling fear of what might—what would—happen with his next heartbeat, or the next. In the last vestigial corner of his former mind, he remembered this. He had felt it before, on the day of this army’s humiliation beyond Kolkyre. Then, as now, all strength had leached from his arms and legs, all reason and courage fled from him. But this was deeper, this was reaching for the core of him, crushing what lay behind his eyes beneath an overwhelming despair. Malloc gasped, feeling his breath clog in his throat. He looked sideways, and saw Garrent, close by, anguish tugging at his face, mouth opening, lips trembling. Malloc’s hand shook once more, and his spear toppled from his numb grip. “Stand firm!” he heard someone shout behind him, but the voice was wild, desperate, fully aware of its own futility. Malloc could see the men and women coming towards him clearly now. He could see their lips moving, and the noise buffeted him, the baying of hounds, the cry of a thousand crows, promising to pick the flesh from his bones. Another few moments, another few agonising beats of his tumbling heart, and they would be at the river, setting their feet into its waters. There were riders here and there amongst the throng, towering in Malloc’s sight, their mounts great beasts with blood falling from their fanged mouths. He moaned, felt his legs quiver. Those on either side of him were backing away. Garrent was turning, letting fall his own spear just as Malloc had done. The first of them was in the river: a woman, leaning forward in anticipation, the water breaking around her ankles, a feral grin upon her face, fire in her eyes. She was staring, it seemed to Malloc, right at him, into him. He saw her sword and knew, with utter precision, what it would feel like when that blade pierced his bowels and twisted there, tearing his guts, opening him. Then the whole host of the Black Road was running at him, howling, the horses pounding in curtains of spray across the ford, and Malloc wailed and fled. They all did. There was nothing but flight, a great jostling crowd pounding away over the rough grass. Malloc knew he was already doomed, already dead; he knew it with a certainty he had never felt before in his life. Still he fled, for his body would permit nothing else. Crossbow bolts came whipping past him. Someone fell across his path and he trampled them. A horse came thundering up beside him, and another man went down, speared. He felt a blow on his back, and pain, but ran on. He pushed others from his path. He stumbled and went down onto hands and knees. His own terror pulled him to his feet and drove him on. Black Roaders were flowing around him, ahead of him, in amongst the fleeing warriors. Malloc heard their wild joy, saw an axe come down in a great arc onto a skull, saw a mounted swordsman laughing as he hacked again and again. Malloc ran as if in a fell dream. He was weeping, he knew. He could hear his own voice, though he did not know what he was saying. Blood spattered his face and he tasted it. There were bodies all over the ground, like boulders, like logs. He clawed at the air before him, wanting to tear his way out of this place, this world, to whatever lay beyond, for he could not endure another moment of this. Someone battered against his shoulder and spun him. He staggered back, facing the enemy now and seeing them pouring towards him in limitless numbers, a vast, mindless dark flood engulfing the land. A man hit Malloc across the throat with his sword, not pausing but running on in search of further prey. Malloc slumped to his knees. Blood bubbled in his mouth. He could see a woman running at him, spear levelled. He lifted his hands, but they were heavy and limp, parting as they rose as if in welcome. The spear hit him high on the chest and knocked him onto his back. He glimpsed grey mist above. He did not remember who he was or what he was doing here. His form contained nothing but fear. It was all of him. Then that mist was blotted out by figures clustering about and above him, and they were stabbing him and kicking him. The blows rained down, and he felt them as a stooping flock of birds plunging into his body. Something was coming towards his face, towards his eyes. His heart stopped, and the descending shape made itself the blade of a sword, falling slowly like a piece of the sky come loose. It grew until he could see nothing else. And then it gathered him into its darkness and took him away.
*