VII
In the night, those uncomfortable beneath Kanin’s yoke had come for him, seething out of Glasbridge’s alleys and ruins. It was not the Lannis folk who rose, but the motley bands of Black Road looters and idlers and thieves that had occupied the town before his arrival. Titles and past allegiances meant nothing, it seemed, in this newly savage world; scores had come, half of them armed with nothing more than staffs or kitchen knives, to test this Thane’s determination. They had not found him wanting. While the mob battered at the iron-stiffened door of the Guard House and smashed in the shutters on its windows, Kanin himself had led his Shield and twenty other warriors out over the wall of the little yard in which Glasbridge’s Guard had once drilled. They had fallen on the rear of the baying throng, so suddenly and unexpectedly that the slaughter had been trivially easy. The killing brought Kanin less relief, less respite from his tortured preoccupations, than such deeds once had. It was purposeless beyond the preservation of his own life, and he set little store by that measure of purpose. In the wake of it, though, standing with the dead and the crippled strewn about him, with groans and whimpers populating the darkness, he had rediscovered some little of the cleansing cold fire. One of his own Shield, a tall man, black-bearded, had cornered some ragged Gyre villager in the doorway of one of the shacks opposite the Guard House. As Kanin watched impassively, the shieldman’s shoulders shook, his sword sank to hang loosely at his side. The man he should have been killing was immobile for a moment, bewildered, and then fled into the night. Kanin seized the shieldman’s shoulder and spun him about. There were tears on the man’s face, and the sight of them roused all of Kanin’s ire. “What are you doing?” he shouted. “I cannot, sire.” The words were tremulous. The man’s brow furrowed. The sword fell from his limp hand. “Cannot?” Kanin snarled. All of the others were watching now. There was nothing else, in that silent, dark street, save Thane and shieldman. “It’s all wrong. We’re fighting our own. I don’t understand why…” Kanin cut him down, and the man fell without a sound, his legs folding beneath him. Another blow, as he lay there staring blankly up, finished him. Kanin stalked back towards the Guard House, pushing through the ranks of his warriors. He glimpsed in Igris’ face as he passed the subtle flinch of repressed doubt and distaste. He turned on the threshold. “Any who doubt me, who lack the courage to stand by their Thane, their Blood, come to me with a sword in your hand, and test your fate against mine. I don’t fear it. I’ll gladly face anyone. But if you’ve not the spine to do that, you’ll fight and you’ll die for me as your oaths demand. I will bring down those now ruling in Kan Avor or I will die in the trying. So will you.” Now, watching oily black smoke boil its way into the morning sky from the corpse fires, Kanin still felt the echo of that anger shivering through him. There were none left he could rely on, or trust. Not even his Shield. None who saw what seemed so obvious to him. If he did not move soon, he would be betrayed, abandoned. “We passed carts carrying the sick to Kan Avor, Thane,” Goedellin said behind him. “Did you?” Kanin muttered without interest. He turned reluctantly away from the window. He was wasting his time even talking to the Lore Inkallim, he suspected. Eska, who had brought the man hobbling into Glasbridge that morning, had implied as much in her curt report of what she had seen in Kan Avor. “The men who guarded them told us you had sent them.” “What of it? I do as I see fit. The creed has ever enjoined us to do so. Well, it seems fit to me to send sickness unto sickness. Fever breeds fever, my nursemaid always said. Let it fill Kan Avor, I say. Let the halfbreed find his streets filled with the stench of the dying.” “Is it true that you have given arms to Lannis men? That you are training and drilling them to fight alongside your own warriors?” Kanin ignored that. Once, his upbringing, his faith, might have required him to submit to the judgement of this learned man, so wise in the ways of the creed. Now he was entirely, coldly uninterested in the opinions of the Lore. He was a man without any allegiance, any duty, save to his own determined intent. He was entirely alone, and that very solitude rendered him impervious to all judgements save those of his own heart. Goedellin shook his bowed head. “But there must be unity, Thane. The faithful must be —” “The faithful must be cured of the madness that has come upon them,” Kanin said flatly. “I know corruption when I smell its stink, even if your nose is failing you. It’s not glory that we’re all rising towards, but chaos. Subjugation to the will of that mad halfbreed. We’re becoming beasts, and he is the beating heart of our affliction. Our ruin.” “Is it truly the curing of the faithful you seek, or merely vengeance for your sister’s death?” Kanin could easily have struck him then. It would cost him nothing to kill this revered man, nothing that he had not already sacrificed at least. Only the fact that he heard not accusation but weariness in Goedellin’s voice stayed his hand. “They thought in Kan Avor that you had sent the Hunt to kill him,” the Lore Inkallim said. “Did they. And did you ask Eska? You had time enough, didn’t you, to get to the truth of it, between there and here?” Goedellin frowned. “She was—is—unwilling to speak with me,” he muttered. “Ha! Then you’ve come to dig out my secrets, old man? Are you running errands for the halfbreed now?” He might have expected some indignation in response, but Goedellin seemed a man lost, too adrift on the currents of his own confusion to rise to such provocation. He merely shook his head, chewed his dark lips. “I went to Kan Avor in the hope of fostering unity, Thane. There is much that needs mending.” “I agree. And I know how to mend it.” “No, no.” Goedellin was unsettled. He clasped his hands, interlacing his fingers, then parted them again. “The faith, the faith. It must be of a single mind in times such as this. We stand upon the brink of —” “What, then?” Kanin interrupted. “Would you have me make common cause with Shraeve and the halfbreed? Surrender myself to the same madness as everyone else? I won’t do it.” The Lore Inkallim shook his head despondently. Kanin narrowed his eyes. Understanding blossomed within him. “You don’t know, do you, old man? You doubt. You suspect I’m right…” “I don’t know,” Goedellin conceded. Softly, like a defeated, shamed child. “I don’t know. I had thought it might become clearer to me. But I see things, I feel things, so… unnatural. It is…” “Foul,” Kanin encouraged him. “Wrong. It is against all reason for one such as Aeglyss to be the answer to the creed’s hopes.” “Reason?” Goedellin murmured. “Reason has never been a cornerstone of the creed, Thane. Fate does not submit itself to reason.” Kanin groaned in exasperation. “Seek guidance, then, from your First, if you’re too fearful to make your own decisions.” he sneered. “If you’ve not the courage for it, send messengers to Kan Dredar, telling them how things have gone awry. Hope that Theor and the rest will render the judgement you’re incapable of.” Still there was no reaction from Goedellin. No anger, no resentment, no bruised self-importance. Kanin had never seen one of the Lore so enfeebled by uncertainty. “My messages go unanswered,” Goedellin said miserably. “I do not even know if they have reached the Sanctuary.” Kanin did not conceal his contempt. “I’ll waste no more time on you. Look at yourself, Inkallim. Where’s all the strength, the discipline of the Lore now? You’re supposed to be the ones who guard the people against error. What use are you, when one halfbreed can steal everything away from under your very nose? The Battle, the people, the creed itself.” The Thane pulled open the door. “Try your visionary dreams for answers, Goedellin. If your reason isn’t enough, or your masters in Kan Dredar, try your secret roots and herbs. I’ll find you a bed, if you want one, and you can reside here as long as you wish, but spare me any more of your fumblings, your flailings.” Goedellin grunted. “Perhaps. Seerstem’s brought no clarity yet; quite the opposite. But perhaps. I hope for understanding.” “You hope in vain,” said Kanin scornfully. “Your dreams won’t bring you anything, because you don’t even know the right questions to ask. This stopped being about the creed, about fate, a long time ago, but still you think there’s some truth to be teased out of it. There isn’t. This is about blood now, Inkallim, and who is willing to spend and spill the most of it. This is about who is fierce enough, determined enough, to come out of the fighting pit alive.” He left Goedellin sitting there alone, a sad and shrunken figure hunched down in a chair. A man left puzzled and bereft by a world that had twisted itself into a shape he could no longer comprehend.
*
Outside the ruins of Kan Avor, on the fringes of the sodden plain that had once been the Glas Water, a huge willow tree stood. It carried snow in the joints of its soaring branches. Its immense trunk burst from the ground and sprayed up into the air like the antler-crown of some titanic buried stag. When it was young, spindling its way up out of the wet earth amidst a host of its eager fellows, Avann oc Gyre ruled in Kan Avor, and the streets of that place bustled with the life of a thriving Blood. Later, there had been slaughter within sight of it, and the blood of thousands had sunk into the loam, to its youthful roots. As it rose to its full stature, so the Lannis Blood had risen around it, and a great dyke had been constructed, and the proud city so near at hand was drowned. The long seasonal pulse of the Glas Water ruled its life thereafter: in the winters, the waters came to lap around the base of its slowly swelling trunk; in summers, they retreated. And in those dry times, the people of the valley came and cut away its peers one by one. It had been alone for many years, standing in solitude amidst pool and marsh, spared the axe by chance which the years turned to habit. Upon this solitary giant a multitude converged. They came from Grive, and from Anduran, and from Targlas beyond it, trampling new pathways into the expanse of blank snow that lay across the valley. It was not only the people of the Black Road who assembled there on the frigid flatlands. The subjugated folk of the Lannis Blood gathered too, some by choice, some driven like cattle by their new rulers. The promise of momentous events was abroad and compelling. They came from vast Anlane itself: White Owls emerging in bands of ten and twenty from beneath its vast bare canopy. Most of all, they came from Kan Avor, the dead city reborn yet still dead. They swarmed out from that rubble in their hundreds, disgorged from its every crevice. And in the midst of them came the na’kyrim himself, riding a wagon pulled by gigantic Lannis horses that had once hauled timber from the forests. He sat in it alone, braced against straw bales wrapped in cloth, armoured against the cold by a heavy cloak that he enfolded about himself so deeply his shape was lost beneath its weight. Ice crackled under the wheels as they crunched through the frozen puddles along the track. Forty Battle Inkallim rode in escort. Hothyn and his Kyrinin walked after the cart in a great dispersed crowd. On either side, as far as any eye might see, the na’kyrim’s people were strewn across the white plain, all of them moving through the winter towards that single huge willow tree: a convocation of the mad and the wild and the desperate and the fierce. The wagoner snapped his switch at the rumps of the horses with one hand, hauled sideways at the reins with the other. The wagon creaked round in a tight circle and groaned to a halt beneath the spreading tree. The westering sun glowed coldly behind cloud. The multitude gathered. A thousand plumes of exhaled breath misted over their heads. Shraeve the Inkallim drew her horse to a halt beside the wagon and leaned towards its lone passenger. “This still seems ill advised,” she said quietly. Aeglyss looked out with filmy eyes from within his ragged, enveloping cloak. Twin runnels of mucus had dried—or frozen, for he had a bloodless, heatless glaze to his skin—under his nose and across his lips. What little more of his face was visible was cracked and flaked. He shivered. “Are you dying?” Shraeve asked. “Dying?” rasped the na’kyrim. “Perhaps. Becoming, more likely. Becoming something new.” His voice was thin. Gone was its rich, seductive lustre and its smooth caress. Now it was the crumbling away to dust of dead bark, the rustling of crisp, fallen leaves beneath a foot. “You fear my death?” he asked her. “Or is it your own loss of influence you fear? The loss of the fire at which you warm your hands? Without me, how long would you last?” “I do not see the necessity. That is all. You have more than enough —” “What would you know of necessity?” snarled Aeglyss, his sharp anger fouling his throat and almost choking him. “You know nothing about me. About what I was before, what I am now. I hear a thousand voices, countless voices, in my head. I hear the dead and the living. I suck in hatred and fear and sickness with every breath. My body burns and breaks around me, consumed by this… this flood pouring through me. And I can’t mend it. I can’t still the voices.” Shraeve scowled at the wagoner, who had twisted on his seat and was looking back at Aeglyss with an expression of fearful awe. Seeing her displeasure, he turned away once more, and made himself small. “I have to give them more. They’ll cease to love me if I don’t give them more,” Aeglyss hissed. “I know. I know. They’ll turn on me if I don’t give them more. Show them more. They always do, eventually. Always.” His eyes were closed now. His head tipped back. The hood of his cloak fell away, revealing his almost naked head. The skin was so frail and thin, the bones of his skull seemed to show through it, giving it the sheen of ivory. “The Shadowhand strains against the bonds I’ve set on him. His is a fierce will. I must be stronger, if I’m not to lose him. And the Anain. I hear them still, thinking their great, hateful thoughts. Distant… distant, but I hear them. They’ll come again for me one day, when their hate is greater than their fear. I need to be the flood itself, not just the channel the flood flows through. You wouldn’t understand. How could you?” Shraeve’s horse had dropped its head to nuzzle the snow in search of grass. She tugged irritably at the reins. “It will all have been for nothing, if you die now,” she said. Aeglyss’ head sank down until his chin rested on his chest. He coughed and wheezed. “Nothing? Maybe. But let your precious fate decide.” He spat the words contemptuously. “If it’s a new world you want out of this, this is how it happens. This is the only way it can happen, because without it I will come apart. I don’t fear death. I can master it. I just need to go deeper, further; to the root of the world. So do it. Do it, raven.” There was no more talking after that. Only the brutal business of hoisting the fragile na’kyrim up on the tree’s creased trunk, the driving of nails through the old, unhealed wounds in his wrists. A hush cloaked all the hundreds, the thousands, gathered to bear witness. They stood in a vast arc, all silent, all watching the hammers, feeling their beat like that of war drums. They were exposed, in that great flat land, to the twilight’s raw wind and to the sleet that gave it teeth, but no fires were lit, no shelters erected. Darkness descended, and the mighty tree buried its uppermost branches in the night. The crucified na’kyrim was lost against the dark trunk, save for his pale face, his white hands. Those scraps of him shone amidst the murk. The attendant host was unnaturally still, held fast by reverent expectancy. The sleet turned to rain. The snow in the tree’s intricate web of boughs was eroded. That spread across the ground slumped into slush and turned the earth beneath those innumerable feet into mud. And still they waited. Still they anticipated… something. There was not a single voice to be heard, save that of some distant owl and that of the night itself: raindrops pattering through twigs and into puddles. And then the soft, soft moaning of the na’kyrim came drifting out from the tree. It went through the crowd like a breeze, yet was stronger by far than the wind that drove the rain. With it, slowly, came his suffering, and that seeped through the skin of them all. His pain took root in every bone, and it was a wondrous pain that bound them together in the sensation of rising, ascending through its layers towards some endless presence that waited to embrace and unite them. As his limbs shook and strained, so convulsions spun their way through the throng. People fell to the ground and thrashed in the mud. He rasped out a score of hollow, panting breaths, and others wailed and clawed at their scalps, tore at their hair, suddenly succumbing to horrors that danced inside their heads. Some rode the crashing waves of emotion and experience that pulsed out from the na’kyrim; others were undone by them, and tumbled and broken by them. Some wept quiet tears of joy in the darkness; some fell to their knees; some lost themselves entirely in uncomprehending terror and fled screaming. The assault on every mind did not diminish, but grew stronger, more remorseless. People saw places that lay half a world away; they lived entire lifetimes, in moments, that belonged to others; they heard the voices of the dead. They knew for an instant what it was to be Anain or Saolin, or to be a na’kyrim crucified upon a tree with the Shared become indistinguishable from his own mind. And madness came in the wake of that knowledge, and claimed one, then another, then dozens. Killing began. Stranglings and beatings and knifings and suffocations in the sucking mud; flurries of lethal movement in amongst the great trembling mass. Kyrinin ran, lithe and agile, hissing as they lashed about them with their spears. The deaths drew no attention. Those standing next to a man who was dragged down did not notice, so enraptured or possessed were they by the transcendent power surging all about and through them. It lasted for a long time. The rain died away. Fragments of moonlight fell through passing gaps in the cloud. They lit the na’kyrim. Made his blood black. All across the great assemblage scattered outbursts of anguish, or weeping, or laughter cavorted like eddies in a wild current. And slowly the horrors and the visions and the power receded. Those driven to savagery by them halted, stood looking in confusion down at those they had slain. Minds clumsily recovered themselves from madness, remembering, bit by bit, their former shapes. There came a time when the na’kyrim opened crusted eyes and whispered, “Take me down.” The Inkallim did as he commanded. He wept at the agony of it, and sank into limp unconsciousness. They carried him—there was no weight to him at all—towards the wagon. People came stumbling forward out of the crowd, reaching out, longing to touch him, longing to draw near to the fount of such frightful, vast outpourings. The ravens pushed them away. They laid his bloody, broken form in the bed of the wagon and it groaned its way back towards the invisible ruined city that waited out in the night. Shraeve alone rode with him, seated at his side, watching the shivering of his eyes beneath their cracked and bleeding lids. As the wagon progressed through the great, now silent, assemblage, those it passed fell in behind it; those ahead of it pressed closer and closer, hoping to see for themselves its incomprehensible and awe-inspiring cargo. But Shraeve alone heard him when he murmured, “Not enough. Not enough. Still it’s too deep, too wide. Infinite.”
*
Kanin heard Goedellin’s cry through the stone walls of the Guard House. It roused him from the bleary stupor that passed for sleep these days. At first he was not certain whether it had been a figment of the nightmares that so often tortured his brief slumbers, but then it was repeated, and the agonies of fear it expressed washed away any last fogs from Kanin’s mind. It was the cry of someone exploring depths of anguish most could never imagine, and it grated upon the ear and upon the heart. Kanin pulled his boots on, cursing the stiff, tight leather. He could hear footsteps and worried voices in the corridor outside. He threw a cloak about his shoulders and hastened from his bare sleeping chamber. Igris and three or four others of his Shield were already gathered outside the door to Goedellin’s room, all wearing the tired, limp pallor of those abruptly roused from sleep. From within another rasping, sickening wail. “The door’s barred,” Igris said with a vague and helpless spreading of his hands. “Then break it!” shouted Kanin. One of the shieldmen kicked at the door. It did not yield. “Idiot,” growled Kanin, pushing them all aside. Once, twice, he pounded at the door with his heel. At the second blow, there was a cracking of wood, but still it resisted. Kanin could hear a loud whimpering in there now, like some great dog bemoaning a grievous wound. He roared and stamped against the door. It sprang open in a burst of splinters. Goedellin lay on the low bed, fully clothed. A tiny box was spilled on the floor beside him: a miniature wooden chest, engraved and inlaid like a child’s toy. Wizened fragments of seerstem lay around it. The Lore Inkallim was twisting and writhing, splaying his hands in defence against some invisible threat. He moaned and thrashed, dark spittle foaming on his black lips. Kanin bent over the Lore Inkallim, averting his face from those clawing hands. He grasped Goedellin’s shoulders and pressed him back onto the mattress. “Wake, old man!” he shouted. Goedellin bucked beneath his grasp, impossibly strong for one so frail and contorted by age. Kanin feared that he would break bones if he exerted his full strength, and backed away. Goedellin howled, a ravaged sound. “Fetch water,” Kanin snapped at Igris, who was staring in wide-eyed alarm at the frenzied form upon the bed. “And a healer!” The shieldman went, but even as Kanin turned back to the Lore Inkallim, he could see that it was too late. Goedellin’s hands clenched; his eyes opened; his stained tongue fluttered between his lips. His back, his hooked back, arced against its curve as his head and shoulder thrust down against the pillow. His breath rattled out of him. And then he was still. Fists still raised, eyes still staring up at the blank ceiling above, mouth still agape, tongue lying there limp in a pool of brown spit. Kanin extended a hand, holding the back of it still just above Goedellin’s lips. He did not really need to check. He could see the truth in those blank eyes. “He’s dead,” Kanin muttered. He stooped and picked up the little box from the floor. He turned it over in his hands then dropped its carved lid shut with the touch of a finger. “It’s seems even the dreams of the Lore have turned against them,” he murmured.
VIII
The track from Highfast to Hent was wind-lashed, snow-blasted. It rode the high bare slopes of jagged ridges, rising and falling across the spine of the Karkyre Peaks. Sharp-sided valleys lay below, gorges clawed out of the body of the mountains by immense talons. Clouds surged in from the west, engulfing the track and the summits around it, veiling them in mist and snow, then sweeping on and away to leave them bathed in sunlight, roofed by a curving expanse of pale blue sky. Sometimes, in those clear moments, Orisian could look down into the valley beneath them and see nothing but great slabs of cloud and fog, the peaks and ridges bare islands protruding from a sea frozen in the instant of its boiling. Even when the sky was naked above, and there was no snow or sleet, the wind never ceased. It buffeted and bit them. Orisian, like most of the others, wore a woollen scarf across his nose and mouth, and kept the fur-lined hood of his jacket pulled as far up and over his head as it would go. They had taken the best clothing they could find from Highfast’s stores. Still the cold found its way in. Had he not suffered its savage attentions before, and more acutely, in the Car Criagar, it might have been intolerable. Now, he merely shrunk himself inside his cocoon of wool and cloth, and endured. The horses suffered the most, becoming sluggish and sullen. They held their heads low. Soon, they might become more hindrance than aid. Whether or not the weather gentled, or the track became less snow-clogged and treacherous, there would come a time—perhaps two days, perhaps three—when they reached the edge of Anlane. And that, Orisian suspected, would be no place for riding. Often, his mind retreated from the harsh reality of the journey, drifting and stumbling its way through corridors of memory and distraction. But they were seldom clean. Untainted. He remembered the day before the Winterbirth feast at Castle Kolglas. So much of that memory was warm, coloured impossibly joyful by the darkness of what had followed it: walking beside Anyara through the market, hearing the light, bubbling chatter of the festive throng, smelling the sticky richness of honey cakes. Yet as he relived it in his head, Orisian found shadows bleeding in at the edges of the scenes his mind recreated. Faces in the crowd that blurred and leered and grimaced, until he turned his imagined attention full upon them, and then they were gone. Not there at all. And then he was walking with Inurian over the rocks beneath the castle’s wall. Looking for… something. Even the pain of that memory was sweet, for there, before his mind’s eye, was that lost face in all its precise simplicity and affection. So close he could have touched it. So alive. Yet he could hear that the waves slapping at the rocks were heavy, thick with something more than water. Inurian’s lips moved, but Orisian could not hear him, only the seagulls screeching overhead. And their cries became the anguished wails and laughter of mad children. He was looking down at a corpse. A woman, frozen into a stiff huddle. Snow on her head, in her ear, in the pit of her eye. He was looking down on her from what seemed a great height, yet for all that distance he could see the ends of her eyelashes protruding through the snow. He could see the strands of loose cotton that had frayed from the collar of her coat. “Couldn’t say whether she’s Kilkry or Black Road.” “What?” Orisian said, blinking. Taim Narran twisted in his saddle, looking back. “Couldn’t say whether she’s Kilkry or Black Road,” he repeated. Ess’yr and Varryn were standing over the corpse, staring down at it. It lay off to the side of the rough track, beneath the shelter of an overhanging boulder. “Died of cold, not of blade,” Varryn said. “Herraic said we might reach Hent in a day, if we didn’t pause,” Orisian said, still dislocated, half of him caught up in that place where the dreams and memories lurked. “How long till nightfall, do you think?” Varryn flicked a glance towards the western sky, lifted his chin as if to scent the air. “The third part of the day is yet to come,” the Kyrinin said. “We should keep moving, then.” Ess’yr and Varryn ran ahead of the horses, disappearing beyond the rugged writhings of the trail. In the moment when they dipped out of sight, Orisian felt that familiar tug of foreboding and fear. Every moment that he could not see Ess’yr, could not satisfy himself of her safety, was soured by worry. He did not doubt her capabilities but still he worried. Death, it seemed to him, was becoming ever less respectful of the capabilities of those it claimed. He could hear two of the warriors talking behind him. Low voices, jumbled by the wind, the words separated, some snuffed out, some thrown together. He could not make out what they were saying. His mind wandered once more, lulled by that sound, human yet incomprehensible, and by the slow and steady crunching of his horse’s hoofs on loose stones and bare rock. He drifted. And this time he saw Ess’yr’s face, just as he had first seen it when slipping in and out of a wounded fever. It was as clear to him now as it had been then. Clearer. The beauty of it, the soft and flawless near-white skin, the framing curtain of hair with an almost metallic yellow glint to it. The eyes, unguarded, grey as flint, looking into his own. He rode in the embrace of that memory. Hent was stranger than Orisian had expected. It sprawled across the eastern flank of a long, descending ridge. The highest of its buildings lay almost at the crest of the ridge; the lowest, close by the seething river that ran north between fringes of scrubby willow and alder. The buildings themselves were like bulges in the skin of the mountain, as if its innards had burst forth in crumbling disarray and then been reassembled into habitations. The shape of each was governed by the natural form of the rock to which it clung. There was barely a straight line to be seen, save the slate tiles that clad each roof. Snow was piled in every wind-shadow. The trail dipped down from its perch high on the slope to sweep through the centre of the tiny town, and re-emerged beyond it, scarring its way on towards the low hills and dark brown stain of forest that lay to the north. A solitary figure was moving, down there amongst all the stone; staggering as if drunk between slope-sided houses. Just that one movement. All the rest was as imperturbably motionless as the giant boulder field it resembled. “We went to within a spear throw,” Ess’yr murmured at Orisian’s side. “No watch. No guard. Stink of…” She cocked her head. “Stink of Koldihrve. The Huanin there, and their drink.” “We heard thick sleeping,” Varryn observed. “What does that mean?” asked Orisian. “The body sleeps,” said Ess’yr, “but the nose does not.” Orisian frowned, then: “Snoring?” Ess’yr shrugged. “And there is the smell of death,” Varryn said. They fell back to where Taim Narran and the others waited. All were dismounted save K’rina, who was bound to the saddle of a placid horse by a thick weave of cords and rope. She was hunched forward and low, almost to the animal’s neck, in that strange borderland between sleep and unconsciousness that she occupied most of the time. “The western side of the ridge is steep,” Taim said as soon as they drew near. “Not even a goat trail that we could see.” “We could go that way, though?” Orisian asked. Taim wrinkled the bridge of his nose. “If necessary. It would be difficult. Dangerous and slow. We’d have to leave the horses.” He looked at K’rina. “She’s in no condition to be clambering around on a mountain slope. What of the town?” “Seems almost empty,” Orisian muttered, glancing back towards Hent, now hidden by a hump of bare rock. “The Black Road must have been there, maybe still are. But it’s as near to dead as makes no difference.” “Still, we couldn’t pass through without being seen,” Taim said. “No.” Orisian shook his head. “Cloud coming,” Varryn said, looking up beyond the ridgeline towards the grey western sky. Banks of low cloud were indeed streaming in, their vanguard already wisping around the highest outcrops of rock and spilling frail tendrils down the slope. Taim looked dubious. “That could help,” he said, “but even so…” Orisian’s mouth was dry. He swallowed. The world was disappearing before his eyes, lapsing into a blur of moist grey. He could hear his own heartbeat, as if the foggy sprawl of those clouds was deadening and silencing everything else so completely there was nothing else left to hear. Nothing to attend to save his own thoughts, and he barely recognised many of them. He wanted to be rid of them, these flickers of doubt, murmurs of fear. Stirrings of a hot and unfamiliar bloodthirst. “We’ll try. The place is half-abandoned, and whoever’s left there isn’t expecting us. We’ll try to go straight through.” The slow, silent descent into the town proved a crossing from the fixed and steady world into the domain of madness. The first of the stone houses loomed out of the mist. Orisian went, as soft-footed as he could, to crouch in the lee of its irregular wall. The moisture-laden air rolled thickly over his face. Up ahead, the mist took Ess’yr as he watched, fading her into its concealing mystery. Varryn went with her, and first one then two of Taim’s men. Orisian could hear nothing. He could see little more. Just the intricate patina of lichens and mosses that had colonised the rough stone blocks of the wall. Just the narrowing, undulating trail, now gathering water, harvested from the sinking cloud, into its crevices. He could feel tiny beads of water forming all across his skin, merging with one another into a cold sheen. He licked his upper lip, drinking the stuff of the sky. Taim Narran eased past him, moving without haste in a low crouch. The warrior rounded the corner of the house. He went almost soundlessly, leaving no trace but the gentle turning of a pebble under his heel. Orisian edged forward. He had his shield on his arm. It was cumbersome, but its weight and breadth were comforting. This place, and these moments, felt unsafe, as if the skin of things was wearing thin. There were whispers of trepidation in his head, and he had the distracting sense that they came not from within but from out there, just beyond the fog-defined limit of his vision. As if there was something waiting for him. Beckoning him. He looked around the corner. Taim Narran was there, hunched down with his back against a strange, conical structure of rocks—a storage chamber of some kind. He pointed silently to the opposite wall of the narrow alley. Orisian looked, and at first could not understand what his eyes told him. There were bulbous shapes hanging from the wall: bloated waterskins or rocks some river had smoothed into unnatural spheres. Orisian frowned. The mist thinned briefly, showed them to him more clearly, and then drew a dank veil once more. Skulls. Human, as far he could tell. Adorning the back wall of a house like mad decoration. He stared at Taim. The warrior raised his eyebrows and shuffled back to join Orisian on the main track. “Stay close,” Taim whispered. He led the way forward, still cautious but moving more quickly now. Orisian followed. Those distant murmurs inside his mind came now from skulls, which he imagined to festoon every invisible building out beyond the wall of mist. Two more warriors were close behind him, and beyond them somewhere the rest were waiting with Yvane and K’rina and the horses. The animals had their hoofs muffled, in the hope that they might pass unnoticed once the way had been cleared or secured, but Orisian felt an inexplicable certainty that whatever was here in Hent had already noticed them all, had already begun to gather itself all around them, unseen. A sound from up ahead, vanishingly faint: indecipherable but swiftly followed by a sibilant whimper. Then scraping, uneven footsteps and a shape was coalescing out of the grey nothingness. A man stumbled into sight down the centre of the track. He staggered against the bulging wall of a house, then came on. He wore an ill-fitting chain jerkin over a ragged hide jacket. One foot was booted, the other bare. There was an open wound in his throat, robbing him of the power of breath and speech even as it spilled his blood down onto his chest. As Orisian watched, the man’s eyes rolled up into his head and he pitched forward. Taim darted up and caught him as he fell, then lowered him gently to the ground, one precautionary hand clamped over his mouth and nose. The man died without any further sound. Orisian and Taim knelt by the corpse, both of them gazing ahead. There was no more movement in the shifting, rolling bank of mist. A sickly scent rose from the dead man: an alloy of ale and vomit. “Is he Black Road?” Orisian whispered. Taim put a finger to his lips. They went on, deeper into the town’s heart. A face startled Orisian, looking up at him from a shallow gutter cut along the side of the track. It was a girl’s face, tiny and delicate, softened and blotched and a little deformed by incipient decay. She had been dead for some time. Orisian could not help but look into those smeared eyes. As he did so, he found himself looking not at this nameless girl but at the face of mute Bair, the stable hand who had died in Castle Kolglas; and the darkness of night rather than the gloom of fogs enveloped him, and he could smell smoke and straw and horses. The vision was more acute, more merciless, than memory. It mastered him and held him there, on the night of Winterbirth. He heard the clamour of battle, the crackle of flames, and experienced once again the dizzying mix of fear and anger that had been in him then. And he was turning, knowing already what he would see; knowing that his father was about to die, a knife in his chest. He did not want to witness that again, but still he turned towards it, caught by its irresistible pull. There was a hand on his arm, and instead of his father, he saw Taim Narran, leaning close in, staring worriedly into his eyes. Orisian sucked in wet air and nodded. Taim looked unconvinced, but released his grip and moved on. The track twisted and plunged down between two houses that angled out of the mountainside like flat ledges. Varryn was crouching on one of the slate roofs, at Orisian’s eye level. The Kyrinin was holding out a hand in warning. Taim shrank back, extending his own arm to nudge Orisian half a pace back up the track. Even as they retreated, a figure appeared in the doorway of the hut, directly beneath Varryn. A frowning, gaunt-faced man peering about him like someone roused from sleep by a puzzling but unthreatening sound in the night. He rubbed at his stubbled chin as he looked down the track and then up. His eyes met Orisian’s and widened. His hand frozen in mid-movement, he said something: still puzzled, but with the first foretaste of alarm in his northern-accented voice. Varryn flicked himself flat onto the roof and his two long arms darted down, one hand spreading across the man’s mouth, the other clasping his throat in a cage of rigid fingers that dug into the skin, crushing. The man gave out a muffled, groaning yelp, only half-stifled. He twisted against Varryn’s grip, and it seemed he might be free in a moment. Taim Narran rushed forward, heedless now of the noise his boots made on the rocky path. He punched the man once in the centre of the chest, with all his strength and with all the weight of his sword, its hilt firmly clenched in his fist. The man flew back into the dark interior, his breath gusting out from him, and Taim followed him without breaking stride. Varryn gathered up his spear and bow and vaulted lightly down from the roof. He glanced once in through the doorway and then, evidently satisfied by whatever he saw there, looked up at Orisian. “There are few,” he said quietly. “They die easily.” “Are any of the townsfolk left?” Orisian asked. His own voice sounded distant and hollow to him. “Have you found any of them?” Varryn said nothing but dipped the point of his spear down the slope of the path. Orisian’s gazed followed, and he saw there lying in the mist another corpse. The hands were tied behind its back. The head was gone, leaving an open, rotting stump of neck. Orisian blinked at it, then looked down at his feet. When he lifted his eyes again, Varryn had disappeared and Taim was emerging from the house. His sword was dark with blood. He held up a short length of cord. “Woven from human hair,” he muttered. “He was wearing it like a necklace.” “What happened here?” Orisian wondered. “Madness,” Taim said. His expression was troubled. For the first time he could remember, Orisian saw a fleeting distress there, an unease that bordered upon fear. “Can you feel it?” Orisian asked, not knowing what answer he hoped for. He did not want to be the only one who sensed the sickness boiling in Hent’s gut, and congealing out of the air. But then, if he was not the only one, it meant that the sickness was real. It was here, closing on them. Taim shook his head, not in disagreement but confusion. “Something,” he said. “I feel something.” There was an anguished cry from somewhere ahead. Another death amidst the vapours. “Go and bring the others on through, as fast as you safely can,” Taim said to one of the warriors coming hesitantly up behind them. As the man trotted back the way they had come, Taim grimaced at Orisian. “The sooner we’re clear of this place the better, I think,” he said. Orisian opened his mouth to agree but was struck dumb by the insubstantial figure that he suddenly saw a little way up the slope, in the entrance to one of the tight, twisting paths that ran between Hent’s high-walled yards and squat houses. The form was at first too faint to be sure whether it was made of flesh or from tendrils of heavy cloud. Its features were obscured or absent. Yet he knew who it was. He took a step up the track. “Fariel,” he murmured. And the mist-shape of his dead brother turned its vague head towards him. Had there been eyes there, they would have been upon him. Orisian lost all awareness of where he was, or even when. For the space of three heartbeats—and he felt them, each one, loud and sharp in his breast—there was only him and this memory of Fariel. “I’m sorry,” Orisian said. “I tried.” He did not know what he was saying, or why. It was the need in him, the despair, that spoke. “Orisian!” The shout snapped him out of his dark reverie. Taim Narran was pushing past him. Just in time to block a spear thrust delivering by a laughing, leering woman. She wore a mail shirt, a dented metal skullcap of a helm, heavy boots that rose to the knees of her thick hide leggings. It was the garb of a warrior, yet she fought without skill, without guile. Spittle flew from her lips; her eyes rolled this way and that in their sockets. Orisian fell back onto his heels. Taim flattened his shield, driving the point of the woman’s spear into the ground. His sword came down and smashed through the spear’s shaft; would have taken the woman’s hands too, had she not released it an instant before. She came at Taim again, reaching for him with bare hands, not hesitating. Grinning, muttering. He snapped his sword up, and the backhanded sweep hit her on her cheekbone, gouged its way up into the side of her face. Sent that little helmet soaring away, down the hillside, clattering off a wall before the hungry mists swallowed it. Orisian stared after it. He heard it bouncing once, twice: metal on stone. Ringing like some ailing, cracked bell. And then there was silence. “I saw the dead,” Orisian said. He was sitting on a cloak spread over wet grass. Hent was some way behind them. They had travelled deep into the night, driven on by a common, unspoken desire to put as much ground as possible between them and that awful place. There had been not just skulls, but finger bones threaded onto sinews and hung from the eaves of houses. A corpse spreadeagled on a flat roof, hands and feet tied. The tiles beneath it stained by blood, for the woman had been alive when she was stretched out there, and when the carrion birds had come spiralling out of the sky. A tiny compound, the workspace of a stonecarver, now filled with bodies. They lay three deep, with snow draped over them. Of the Black Road company that had wrought such havoc upon that remote town, only a handful had remained for Ess’yr and Varryn and Taim and the rest to kill. Some had died of disease, some had apparently been killed by their companions. None of the dead had been interred or burned. They lay amongst the townsfolk, discarded and forgotten. It was as if, once Hent’s inhabitants had been slain, the mad rage that fuelled their slaughter had demanded yet more tribute of those it possessed. And they had mindlessly done what it required of them. “Not the dead,” Yvane said beside Orisian. “Memory. The Shared. The dead—the echo of them—persist in the Shared as long as there are those still living who remember them. Much longer than that, if stories are told of them, if their names are not forgotten.” She shifted uncomfortably upon the cloak, searching for an accommodating undulation in the hard ground beneath. “It is Aeglyss, spreading. The walls between our minds and the Shared are breaking down. For you, today, it came as the dead, as death itself. It will come to each of us as our own minds and inclinations permit it. As they invite it. For those who know only struggle, only anger and killing… well, we saw back there what it does to them.” “What about you?” “I hold it at bay. So far.” There was a subtle strain in her voice. “I felt something last night. A… I don’t know. Something. He grows stronger, or at least sinks deeper into the Shared.” Orisian looked into the east. He was not sure whether he imagined it, but there seemed to be a hint of dawn out there. A grainy lightening of the horizon. “If the Shared can bring the dead to the surface like that, then is it the Sleeping Dark?” he asked, watching that possible, longed-for, distant daybreak. “Oh, if you want answers to questions like that, you need to ask them of a wiser head than mine.” “There must be those who have thought of such things.” “There are. At length, and for many years, in Highfast. And elsewhere. Why do you suppose some of the Kyrinin imagine the Anain, the lords of the Shared, to be the shepherds of their unresting dead? Does it matter, though? The answer?” “I don’t know,” Orisian said at length. “Is Inurian there, then? In the Shared?” “Not him. The dead are dead. Gone. What remains in the Shared is only the memory of him. The sound of his voice, the sense of who he was. Something like him, but not truly him. He has ended.” Orisian nodded, sad. “It might be best if you tried to shut such things out,” Yvane said gently. “It’s only something inside you, wounding itself with the Shared.” “But I remember them so clearly.” “That’s good, I imagine. It would be, anyway, in quieter times. Just don’t let the memory of them crowd out the living for you.” The dawn did come, and blearily illuminated a vast landscape. The ground sank away to the east of them in successive lines of grass-clad hills, interspersed with crags and snowfields and clusters of scrubby trees. Beyond that, sweeping off towards the faint and hesitant sun, lay Anlane. Endless, from this high vantage point. Rolling like a brown and grey sea into the indefinable distance, where it and the huge sky blurred into nothingness. All the world was silent forest, and Orisian feared it. He looked out over Anlane’s illimitable wilds and imagined it to be alive, a gigantic sleeping power that waited only for his footsteps to disturb it. A place that, once entered, could not be left. Taim Narran was checking over the horses nearby. Yvane was kneeling beside K’rina’s prostrate form, changing the bandages on her shoulder wound. The warriors, one by one, were mounting their horses as Taim approved their condition. It was all done with hardly a word. Ess’yr came across the grass to Orisian. She was holding something out to him. He looked down at what lay in her palm and at first did not recognise it. “Too long since the last we made of these,” Ess’yr said. Two cords, each of them with a dozen or more small, tight knots spread along their length. A dozen memories, Orisian knew. A dozen thoughts, embodied in those tiny tangles of cord, to go into the wet earth in place of a lost, irrecoverable body. “You and Varryn?” he said quietly. He was afraid to reach out and accept these tokens, afraid of their implications and importance. But Ess’yr sank her hand a little closer to his own, tilting it to let the cords edge closer to her fingertips. “It is not a good time for the dead to wander, to go unrooted in willow,” she said. “When Anain can die, there are none to shepherd the restless dead.” Orisian willed his hand to rise, and accepted the two cords into his grasp. They were light. Yet he felt every knot in them as a hard point pressing against his skin. He stared down at them: the beaded kernels of two lives. “Which is yours?” he asked. Ess’yr touched a finger to one of the strands. “If you live and we do not, plant them beneath stakes of willow,” she said. Orisian nodded numbly, for he could never have refused her this. That she should bring such a thing to him, and make him its guardian, filled him with a kind of awe. And a faint, intimate hope, perhaps, glimmering there deep inside him. But he feared it too, this responsibility that he knew with absolute certainty would bring unbearable pain should he ever be called upon to discharge it. “If you are to die, I do not think you will do it alone,” he murmured. “I may not be able to do as you ask.” “Perhaps.” She sounded unconcerned. “But the ra’tyn is done now. The promise I made to Inurian. It is spent. Where we go now, where you choose to go, Varryn and I have other battles to fight. We become a spear a’an, entering the lands of the enemy. I have done what I can for Inurian. For you. We will go as far as we can with you, but…” The words trailed away. Orisian lifted his head and looked into her eyes. So imperturbably calm and knowing, those flinty windows, yet revealing nothing of what lay beyond them, within. “I understand,” he said. “I will keep them safe.” The thought came to him suddenly, woken by the sorrow of potential partings, potential loss. “Will you wait for a moment?” he asked her. He found a cord of his own, sealing the mouth of a canvas bag that held only a few remnant scraps of food. Long enough, he thought. He sat cross-legged on the cold, damp grass and began looping a chain of knots into the cord’s length. He was clumsy, but stubbornly persisted. Each knot he moistened with the tip of his tongue, as he had seen Ess’yr and Varryn do, long ago in the vo’an where he had woken from wounded slumber to her face. One for the time before the Heart Fever, a bright memory of family. Then one for his mother, one for his brother, one for his father. The memories came clearly, carrying equal parts of comfort and misery. One for Inurian, one for Anyara. That last hurt him more than he expected, for its texture of distance and parting. But he remembered her strength and her unruly vigour, and found a smile. One for Rothe, too raw and recent to linger upon, no matter how much he longed to recall only the man’s gruff companionship and loyal affection. And the last of them, tightening into the strand, clenching itself into permanence, for Ess’yr. For what might have been, in a world, or a life, other than this one. He wept a little, running his finger over what he had made, but nor for long. He took it to Ess’yr, who had been standing patiently some way down the slope. “Will you bury it for me, if the time comes?” he asked her. She took it from him, cupping it, coiled like a thin, sleeping snake, in her hand. “Not in a dyn hane,” she said. “Not with the true people.” “No,” he said. “I understand. But somewhere? Somewhere fitting for a Huanin?” She regarded him silently for a few breaths. He felt like reaching out to her, touching her, trying to convey how deeply this request expressed his heart. But, soon enough, she nodded in assent and closed her hand about the cord of his life.
IX
Ever since riding out from Highfast, the conviction had been growing in Taim Narran that he was moving towards his death. That he would never again see Jaen or his daughter. That his grandchild would be born, and would grow, without him. He did not fear death. He had seen countless others fall to it, and learned its banal and crude flavour, over the years, but that had never taught him fear. The Sleeping Dark promised only an eternity of unbeing: no pain, no grief, no suffering. Nothing to fear but a great deal to regret: the sorrow his absence would inflict upon those he left behind, the sights, the people he would never see again. The immense incompleteness of everything he would leave behind, for there would always, inevitably, be uncounted things he should have said or done, messages he should have conveyed. The trees came first in ones and twos, scattered across the long, shallow slope they were descending. Then clumps of them, more and more, until they merged into a single unbroken canopy. Anlane closed itself above and behind them. Taim felt his tension mount in response to the deepening of the shadows. This place had been a battleground for his Blood from the moment Sirian first wore the title of Thane. It had been a meagre, intermittent kind of war, the struggle against the depredations of the White Owls, but a war nonetheless, and a savage one. Merciless. Anlane could never, to someone of Taim’s upbringing and experiences, be anything other than a bad memory. The trees crowded about them, a numberless host moving imperceptibly slowly to smother them. Perhaps even absorb them. Taim was aware of a change in the air. It was as if they had entered the body of some immense sleeping creature, and burrowed now ever deeper into its living flesh. It was not warm, but the wind was gone, the sharp edge of the cold dulled. New scents drifted up from the forest floor: wet bark, rotting leaves. Soon, much sooner than he had hoped, Taim was ducking to avoid branches that reached out across the dwindling trail the Fox had found for them to follow. The path narrowed to something only deer or boar might pass along without difficulty. Twigs and outstretched tendrils of ivy brushed Taim’s legs and the flanks of his horse, to the animal’s increasing displeasure. Behind him, he could hear men cursing as boughs grazed face or scalp. And then there was a huge tree lying across the trail, coated in slick moss, a thin crust of half-melted snow lining the length of its trunk. To one side its great root plate had been torn out of the earth and stood now like the flattened, upraised hand of a giant. To the other, its branches had, in their crashing descent, crumpled a huge swathe of the woods into an impenetrable tangle of shattered timber, bent and bowed saplings. Its fall had torn a great rent in the otherwise inviolate canopy, a wound in the skin of Anlane. Taim felt the cooler breath of the sky drifting down onto his face. There was a fine drizzle on it. Rain, not snow, he thought. That at least was something to be thankful for. He sighed and twisted in his saddle. Orisian was not far behind, waiting expectantly for word. “We’re done with horses, I think,” Taim said. They walked on in silence. The land folded itself in creases, humps and hollows around which tiny brooks trickled. There were outcrops of rock with trees growing from their crannies. Again and again, the path disappeared altogether, to human eye at least. Each time it did so, Ess’yr or Varryn would be waiting some little way ahead, almost invisible amidst the undergrowth and shadows until betrayed by movement, beckoning the laggard Huanin onward. Taim sent two men forward: four more eyes, inadequate as they might be, to ward against surprises. Necessary as the abandonment of the horses had been, being on foot in such foreign terrain had darkened the already fragile mood. There was an almost palpable sense of vulnerability amongst the warriors. They had the skittishness of sheep, starting at every sound—real or imagined—and darting their eyes this way and that. Only two of the party did not seem to share this nervous trepidation, Taim saw when he glanced back over his shoulder. Yvane, who led K’rina steadily along. And Orisian. Whose calm was almost unnatural. Almost unsettling. He looked to Taim like a man whose burdens, whose fears, were becoming less rather than more. That Taim found troubling. Ess’yr and Varryn and the two scouts Taim had sent out were standing together up ahead. As he drew near, Taim was at first unsure of what he was seeing. A spindly sapling had been cut off at chest height. The break was clean and angled: the work of a blade rather than of wind or heavy snow. It had left the thin, shortened trunk with a sharp point. And onto that point, and then down like thin cuts of meat impaled on a vertical spit, five small squarish pieces of some strange material had been forced. Like a child’s pretence at flags, Taim thought vaguely as he leaned closer, puzzled. One of the crude pennants was torn and ragged where some animal seemed to have been gnawing at it. Another had some faded swirling blue insignia upon it. That shade, and those shapes, had a familiarity to them that he could not at first resolve. Orisian, kneeling and lightly touching one of the scraps between thumb and forefinger, spoke the conclusion Taim’s own mind belatedly approached. “Skin.” Orisian withdrew his hand without haste. “Huanin and Kyrinin,” Ess’yr confirmed. Her distaste, disgust even, was evident. Yvane brushed past Taim’s shoulder and squinted at the gruesome array of flayed squares. “Ettanaryn,” the na’kyrim grunted. “Not of the usual sort, though.” “What are they?” Orisian asked. “When the a’ans roam far in the warm season, they mark the edge,” Ess’yr told him. “The furthest reach.” “It’s an old way of marking the limits of hunting grounds,” Yvane grunted. “Clan territory, for those clans that still live by the oldest traditions. Not like this, though. Not with skin.” “Huanin and Kyrinin,” Ess’yr observed quietly. “All fresh cut. No more than two, three days.” She flicked a fingertip at the palest fragment of skin, with its dull blue patterns. “White Owl kin’thyn. They cut the face from one of their own.” Varryn was already moving away, drifting silently ahead, deeper into the forest. Taim watched him go. It was a grim border they were crossing now. Whatever lay beyond it could only be horrific, if its limits were circumscribed by such tokens of mutilation. It was not, Taim expected, going to be a place welcoming of humankind. “Eyes open,” he murmured to the men nervously gathered around. They were, all of them, staring fixedly at the limp squares of skin. “Eyes open, hands ready,” Taim said more sharply, gesturing them onwards with a sweep of his arm. They bedded down that night on a gentle slope amidst a stand of uniform, straight ash trees. There was to be no fire, of course. The only shelter from the persistent but thin mist of drizzle was the thick canopy of intermingled branches and a few holly trees clustered along one side of their campsite. It would be a hard, miserable night, Taim knew, but he doubted anyone had been expecting much sleep. Taim unrolled the blanket that he would fold about himself to fend off the worst of the night’s chill. The ground was at least softened a touch by a thick layer of dead leaves. A strange mumbling distracted Taim from this unappealing prospect. Coming out of the darkness like the muted babble of a tiny brook: a faint and frail voice. Taim followed the sound. It took no more than half a dozen paces to reveal its source. Sitting there, arms folded, legs crossed, his head sunken, was one of the warriors. Eagan. A young man—barely twenty—born in Grive. Son of a beekeeper, Taim remembered. He had fought well at Ive Bridge. Now he was lost in some waking dream. His senseless whispering was relentless, and strained despite its quietness. His head dipped and rose in shallow nods, as if keeping time with some beat in his ramblings that no one else could detect. “Eagan,” Taim said softly, standing over the warrior. There was no response, only that wordless rambling, rushing on and on. Taim bent and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. Eagan looked up. His lips still moved, still danced, but there was suddenly no sound at all. In the deep gloom of the forest floor Taim could not see his eyes clearly but was almost certain he would have found no recognition there. He squeezed the shoulder more tightly. “Eagan,” he said again. And the man snorted. Shook his head once, sharply. Unfolded his arms. “Sir?” Eagan asked. “Stretch yourself out. Try to get some rest.” Taim returned, thoughtful, to his own blanket. A little further down the slope, he could see the figures of Ess’yr and Orisian kneeling together in the leaf litter. The Kyrinin brushed dead leaves from the surface of a flat stone. She began to break apart one of the flat, round oatcakes they had brought as rations from Highfast, and spread the crumbs out on the stone. Orisian did the same, copying her every action with an eerie precision. Taim knew what it was. He had seen the Kyrinin perform this same small ritual before, making offerings to ward off the attentions of the dead. It was a part of their strange beliefs, and the amounts of food thus wasted were of no consequence, so Taim had never raised any protest. But for a Thane of a True Blood to share in the act? Watching them now, with their careful, measured movements and almost reverential manner, half lost in the shadow and darkness, it would have been possible to mistake them for two Kyrinin. Taim lay down, flat on his back. He was glad that he was—he hoped—the only one to have seen Orisian in such close communion with the Kyrinin woman. It was unsettling enough for some of the men to note how clearly comforting and easy their Thane found Ess’yr’s presence, how attentively he sometimes watched her. For all the disarray and riot the world had fallen into, there remained boundaries that many would not willingly see crossed. Taim closed his eyes, not in hope of sleep but in search of distracting, warming memories that might take him away, however briefly, from this cold forest. The wound in his leg, taken at Ive, ached dully. The muscle was stiff and sore. He reached for the image of Jaen’s face, the texture of her skin beneath his fingers, the knowing affection of her smile. And he reached too, with hand rather than mind, for his sheathed sword. He held it to his chest, and clasped it tight.
*
There was a corpse in the street outside Jaen Narran’s house in Kolkyre. She stared down at it from one of the upper windows. Some youth—sixteen or seventeen, she judged—who had been killed in the night. Dogs came nosing about. The few people who ventured out from their homes disregarded both the dogs and the human carrion that attracted them. They seemed wilfully blind, as if a surfeit of horrors and troubles had left them incapable of acknowledging another. Jain leaned out and shouted at the dogs. They looked up at her, still stretching out towards the dead flesh of the youth. She beat the open shutter with the palm of her hand, but the dogs did not fear her. They turned back to the corpse, sniffing at it. Jaen took the bowl of water from beside her bed and slapped its contents out towards the beasts. They loped away then, without panic. They would be back, she knew. An old man walking stiffly down the street had stopped to watch. He stared up at her now, puzzlement on his face. Jaen glared at him, then withdrew, pulling the shutters closed behind her. The killings and the fighting and the fires and the cries came mostly at night but, like some rot slowly expanding beyond the darkness that had formed it, they colonised each passing day more aggressively than the one before. All of Kolkyre had taken up arms, and though the greatest hatred was reserved for the Black Road army encamped outside its landward walls, there was too much of it to be entirely absorbed by that single, inaccessible foe. The anger found other outlets for its immense unspent reserves, and turned the city in upon itself. Jaen heard all the tales from the servants in the Tower of Thrones, or from the homeless Lannis folk she supplied with food and blankets and firewood: murder and thievery, feud and suspicion. Those who hailed from lands beyond the Kilkry or Lannis Bloods were dead by now, or hiding behind barred doors and closed windows, too fearful to dare the unruly, hostile city streets. Those who were wealthy had turned their homes into fortresses, protected by hired clubmen. The Guard fought brief wars against gangs of the hungry and the desperate and the mad. Order was never more than a transient presence, liable at any moment to be rent by some new upwelling of chaos. Jaen thumped down the rickety stairs, letting her feet convey her frustrations to the boards. Her daughter Maira was there, leaning back in a cushioned chair. Though the child in her was yet too small to swell her belly, she rested a hand there nevertheless, gently protective. Her husband Achlinn was hanging a pot of water to boil over the fire, hissing at the heat of the glowing embers. “You rise earlier every day,” Jaen said to her daughter. Maira smiled. It was an exhausted smile, but contented too. “I don’t sleep, and I’d sooner be up than lying there awake. Not that Achlinn thanks me for it.” Her husband grimaced in mock demonstration of his suffering. He was a gentle man, Jaen had always thought. Good enough, just, for her precious daughter. This placid scene was enough to blunt Jaen’s ill humour. “Are our guardians awake?” she asked. Maira nodded towards the door in the rear wall. “They went to get a little rest. I told them it would be all right. I feel bad, each of them having to stand watch over us for half the night like this.” Jaen grunted. “Too bad for them I need to go to the Tower this morning, then. One at least’ll have to do escort duty.” The two gruff Guardsmen had been assigned their protective responsibilities by Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig himself. At first Jaen had thought it unnecessary and faintly embarrassing. Now she valued their taciturn presence. Part of her regretted her refusal of the Thane’s offer to take up residence in the Tower of Thrones itself. She found its austere isolation, looming over the rest of the city like an intrusion from some other, entirely unconnected place, unsettling, and had preferred this comfortable billet in a house much closer to the quarter where the displaced people of her own Blood had settled. But each day—and more particularly night—here amidst the city’s gradual disintegration made her doubt that decision more. On Maira’s behalf, if not her own. Perhaps the time had come to seek the security of the Tower’s impregnable stone. The corpse had gone by the time she ventured out onto the street, following cautiously behind her scowling guard. Someone must have dragged it away. She was glad. There was a dog sniffing the ground where it had lain. The animal looked up at her with a disappointed expression as she passed. A crowd had gathered at the gate in the low wall encircling the mound from which the Tower of Thrones needled its way up into the sky. The guards were beset by showers of shouted demands, interspersed with aimless and vitriolic abuse. Following her doggedly determined escort, Jaen could hear people crying out for access to the Tower’s food stores, accusing some family or other of riot, clamouring for an immediate sally against the besieging forces of the Black Road. She hunched her shoulders and ducked as she was jostled this way and that. Jagged words teemed about her head like an army of angry wasps. Entering into the gardens beyond the gate was a relief. Jaen sighed and shook her shoulders. Matters were definitely taking a turn for the worse. She resolved, as she ascended the path towards the Tower, to bring Maira and Achlinn here that very afternoon. The city outside this mute and ancient fastness felt entirely too volatile. Ilessa oc Kilkry-Haig was waiting, as expected, in her chambers. Jaen was surprised to find Ilessa’s son, the Thane Roaric, already there, and in full and heated flow. “They betray us,” the Thane was saying. “There’s no other description… no other word does justice to their treachery.” He saw that Ilessa’s attention had been drawn elsewhere, and looked over his shoulder. Jaen, standing in the doorway, dipped her head. “Forgive me, lady,” she said. “The maid did not tell me you had company. I will wait outside.” “No, no,” said Ilessa, beckoning Jaen. “I told them to admit you as soon as you arrived. We are almost done here. It will do no harm for you to hear this, anyway.” She returned her gaze to her son, challenging him to dispute her invitation to Jaen. The Thane seemed unconcerned. Barely interested, in fact. He was entirely focused upon his own furious thoughts. “Not a single supply ship’s berthed in two days. And the Captain of the last to reach us was quite clear: Gryvan’s forbidden any vessel to dock here, and he’s got his own and Tal Dyreen hulls on the water to make sure his ban is observed.” “We’ve stores enough to last a while longer,” Ilessa said. Her tone was measured, in contrast to Roaric’s bluster. “But only a while,” the Thane growled. “And only if we keep them tightly controlled. People will get hungry. They’re already in a foul temper. In every kind of unreasoning, foul temper. I’d have Gryvan by the neck if he was here, High Thane or not.” He made a fist of his hand, his knuckles whitening as he crushed the life out of an imagined throat. “Fortunate that he’s not,” Ilessa murmured. “The day will come. This will all be over eventually, and then I’ll have —” “I? I?” snapped Ilessa, her composure cracking a little. “It’s not just you, Roaric. You’re the Blood, all of it, now. Think of it. If you want anything to be left of it when this is all over, you need to see clearly what must be done now, not give yourself over to fancies of future vengeance.” Roaric frowned but held his tongue. “If food supplies need to be rationed, so be it,” Ilessa said. “We need to plan for that. And we can still run small boats—smugglers’ boats—along the coast and maybe out to Il Anaron. They might slip through Haig’s fingers.” “It won’t be enough,” Roaric said darkly. “But you see to it, if you think it worth your time. I’d sooner fight for our freedom than creep about like cowed outlaws. We’re alone now. Black Road on one side, Haig on the other. Both wanting to tear us down, break us down. Well, I won’t permit it! Yes, I’m Thane, if that’s what you want to hear. And I’ll be a Thane, a Thane with a sword in his hand and fire in his belly.” He brushed past Jaen without acknowledging her presence. Ilessa stared after him. She looked to Jaen like a woman grown accustomed to desperate sadness; still burdened by it, but used to it. “He turns all his grief into anger,” Ilessa said quietly. “He has a lot to grieve over. A lot to be angry about.” “He does.” Ilessa gestured towards a bench in the bay window. It was overlaid with a beautifully woven carpet. “Sit with me.” Jaen did as she was bid. She had come here, as she did almost every day now, to talk with Ilessa about the needs of the hundreds of Lannis folk caged within Kolkyre’s walls alongside its natives. But that seemed a matter for another time. “I didn’t know about the ships,” she said. “I can hardly believe Haig would abandon us. Not even abandon us; worse, turn against us. Offer us up to the Black Road.” Ilessa shook her head in sorrowful astonishment. “Nor I. Yet here we are. The world’s forgotten whatever sense it once possessed. It’s all like a bad dream from which we can’t wake. Every hand against us. Our own hands against us.” She cocked her head towards the window. “Sometimes, when the wind’s right, you can hear screaming, shouting, even from up here. Our own people, losing their minds, down in the city.” “It’s not good. I was thinking… perhaps it is time—past time—my daughter and I came into the Tower. If there’s still room for us.” “Of course.” Ilessa smiled. “I should have insisted upon it before now.” She pushed back her hair with a slow hand. It smoothed the creases from her brow, just for a moment. “You must be worried about your husband,” she said. Worried, thought Jaen. No, that is not the word. There is no word for what I feel. To be at once terrified, stalked by impotent panic, and at the same time calmed by that very impotence. There is nothing I can do for Taim. Wherever he is, he will live or die by his own strength, his own capabilities. And I will be either made whole again, or broken for ever. “My husband has a habit of surviving,” she murmured. “Of coming back to me.” “I hope you are right.” “Hope is all we have, my lady. It fades a little every day, but I cling to whatever shreds of it remain.” “I wish my men had learned the same habits your husband did,” Ilessa said. The sadness in her words was distant, thoughtful. Cavernous loss and sorrow were there, though, an echoing chamber in the background. Jaen could not bring herself to feel fortunate, but she could recognise her own suffering as that of someone who feared what might happen; Ilessa’s was that of someone assailed by what had already happened, and could never be changed. Which was worse, she could not say. “Roaric is being consumed, slowly,” Ilessa continued. Still quiet. Still treading a precarious path over a chasm. “Death seems to rule the world now. It walks among us, feeding off the madness. It’s too much for my son. I fear for him. And for all of us. Though I love him with all my heart, I fear where he might lead us.” Jaen saw then which was worse, for no matter how much had already been lost, how much darkness had already come, there was always more to fear. And once the texture of loss had been learned, it was much easier to imagine its return.
CHAPTER 4
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He Who Waits
In the twilight of the First Age, when the One Race was drifting towards its final, fatal war against the Gods, they sent an envoy into the high Tan Dihrin. His name was Martanan, and he climbed through storm and snow to the peak of peaks, where the turning sky struck fire from the utmost pinnacle. There he found, cut into the rock of that summit, the great stone throne he sought, and he knelt before it and called out to the God whose place it was to appear before him. The God came, and filled the throne with his dark form. And his raven companions came, and settled upon his shoulders. Martanan bowed his head at first, for he was afraid to look upon the fell countenance he had called forth. But he was the emissary of his people, and he owed them courage, so he lifted his eyes and spoke. “We call you He Who Waits, great one, and live in fear of your attention. We call you Death, and your shadow is long, falling across us even in the midst of life. I am sent to ask you this question: why must it be so? Why have you, the immortal Gods, made us so frail and fragile? Why do you keep the boon of life unending only for yourselves?” When Death replied, his voice was deep and terrible, and it sprang from the mouths of his ravens. “Because without endings there can be no beginnings. To live for ever is a burden, though you know it not. We choose not to inflict its weight upon you.” “If burden it is, still my people desire it. The burdens we bear now are no less. Those we love die, and we are beset by grief. We ourselves die, and are forgotten. We die, and all that we have built and laboured for is undone after us.” “Even so,” the God said. “Even so. There must be death in this world, lest all meaning be lost.” “Yet still we would choose otherwise,” Martanan said, and at that the ravens rose into the air and their black wings assailed him. “You may choose how you live,” the God cried through his birds. “You may choose how you shape meaning out of my shadow. We grant you that freedom. But choice is empty in the absence of consequence. Without it, you and everything you did would mean nothing more than does the aimless motion of a cloud in the sky. There must be consequence, and I am its final measure and its shape and its weight. Every one of you, sooner or later, will come into my embrace.”
From First Tales transcribed by Quenquane the Simple
I
The main gates of the Battle Inkall’s sprawling compound were closed and barred. Theor of the Lore leaned out from his rocking litter as the bearers stumbled through the snow towards the imposing and entirely unwelcoming facade. The low wall stretching away on either side of the gate was lined with Inkallim: statues of black leather, each with a tall spear held perfectly erect. And, outside the gates, a still more numerous host. Seventy or more of Ragnor oc Gyre’s warriors. His Shield, in polished chain mail that borrowed a dull gleam from the grey sky; mounted spearmen, whose horses bore metal plates across their brows and cheeks. And the High Thane himself, massive and magnificent in a huge cloak of sable fur that spread back over the haunches of his own great mount. Theor’s litter-bearers struggled along the front of this martial array, and came to a panting, trembling halt before Ragnor. The High Thane stared down silently as Theor clambered stiffly out. The First’s feet crunched into the snow, and he felt its cold pressure even through the down-lined hide of his boots. He straightened, and ground his fingers into the small of his back where the muscles had tightened. “What are you doing here, First?” the High Thane asked. Blunt. Confrontational, unless Theor misread him entirely. “I heard there was some difficulty,” Theor said. “I thought I might be of assistance in resolving any misunderstanding that may have arisen.” “No misunderstanding.” A breeze ruffled the High Thane’s hair and spun his horse’s steaming breath away. Theor winced up at him, narrowing his eyes. It was not easy to see details of his expression, silhouetted as he was against the sun-lightened afternoon clouds. His voice was giving little away now, only a steely determination. “Ah.” Theor nodded. He glanced towards the Inkallim studding the top of the wall, and then back to Ragnor. “I will confer with those within, High Thane.” Ragnor said nothing. Theor turned and trudged towards the gates, beckoning his exhausted bearers to follow him with their burden. It was not far from the Lore’s Sanctuary, further along the slopes above Kan Dredar, but they had covered the distance quickly. Theor had understood the need for haste as soon as word of what was happening reached him. He had not wanted to come. The Sanctuary he had left behind him was in a ferment of dismay and alarm. Two Lore Inkallim had inexplicably died, on successive nights, while dreaming their seerstem dreams. And they had died not peacefully, but screaming, convulsing. “I told you what I wanted,” he heard Ragnor saying behind him, in measured tones. “And that my patience was at an end.” Theor paused. He angled his head a fraction towards his shoulder but did not look round. One of the gates creaked open, just wide enough to admit him and his attendants, and he entered the domain of the Battle. “I did not know you were here,” Theor said to Avenn, First of the Hunt. He strove to disguise his unease but could not hide from himself the bitter twist of suspicion, distrust even, he felt. It was rare for the Firsts to meet; rarer still for the Hunt and Battle to consort without the presence of the Lore. In such febrile, fragile times, it lit an unreasoning flame of resentment in Theor to find Nyve and Avenn together. He should be too old, too secure in his authority, to succumb to such sentiments, yet both security and the wisdom of age were states he felt ever more thoroughly exiled from. Avenn smiled thinly. Her long black hair had a lifeless, leaden quality to it. The pinprick scars of a childhood pox that marred her cheeks gave her a faintly aged, damaged look. But there was vigour, almost delight, in her eyes. “Interesting times,” she said. She would, of course, think so, Theor reflected. She had been born for moments such as this: tumult and contest. Opportunity, as she would see it. For whatever reason, the Hunt had always chosen such as she for its leader. A passing thought, like a beam of light glimpsed through scudding cloud: Shraeve should have been of the Hunt not the Battle. Her ferocity, her passion, would have found a better home there. Theor grunted, and let the insight go. “Narqan?” Nyve asked. The First of the Battle was seated by a roaring fire, a pitcher and cup of the vile liquor on a table by his side. “No,” muttered Theor. He moistened his stained lips. The dry heat of Nyve’s chambers had rendered them brittle. “He wants all the children,” Nyve said, pouring himself another draught of the fermented milk. “Two hundred or so have reached us, this last day or two. Spoils from the Glas Valley.” “Has he said what he wants them for?” Theor asked wearily as he sank into a chair opposite Nyve. “What does it matter what he says?” said Avenn, but he ignored her. Nyve took a thoughtful sip from his cup, lifting it between the knuckles of his crippled hands, and bared his teeth as the liquid burned its way down his throat. Theor knew that feeling well enough, and gave a faint grimace of his own at the memory. “He claims he wants them to tend his herds, mine his ores, carry his stones,” the First of the Battle said. “All the tasks he says go undone because our war has called so many of the faithful into its embrace. Foolishness, of course. What help would a few score children be? They’re the strong ones, true enough. Those who survived the winnowing of the march up through the Stone Vale. But children, still.” Theor nodded. “He wants them because if he leaves them here, they will become Inkallim one day. Those who live; those who can be brought into the faith. He wants them because in taking them he thinks to prove a point to us, to the people, to himself.” “Because we will not abase ourselves before him and do as he bids us,” muttered Avenn. “Indeed,” Theor agreed. Still he kept his attention upon Nyve rather than the mistress of the Hunt. His old friend was the crux of things here; he was certain. A log slipped from the fire and shed sparking embers across the hearth. Nyve extended a foot and pushed it back into the heart of the flames. “How long has he been waiting at your gate?” Theor asked. Nyve lifted his eyes towards the ceiling as if in thought. “Since midday or thereabouts. His pride, his stubbornness will not permit him to depart just yet, it appears.” Dread was tightening its icy fingers about Theor’s heart. Here, amidst this warmth, in the company of those who should be his most comforting allies, ensconced in this soft and soothing chair, he felt the ground beneath his feet crumbling away, tipping him towards a dizzying chasm. Did neither of these two feel it? No, he knew. Other extremities had mastered their hearts. “It serves no purpose to taunt him so,” he said. “Give him this small victory.” “No,” said Avenn at once. She pushed herself away from the window frame against which she had been leaning. “He will not be satisfied. He has turned against us, against the creed. Three loyal servants of the Hunt have been executed, on his command, this last week. Now is not the moment to shirk our responsibilities, when the eyes of the Last God are upon us, when the Kall —” “Do not dare!” cried Theor, snapping his head around and fixing the rangy woman with a ferocious glare. “Do not claim the authority of the Lore as your own!” Avenn inclined her head in submission. It was a thin sheen, though. Theor could see that quite clearly. She was not in the least cowed. How had it come to this? How had everything, every past certainty, become so unclear and unstable? How had fear, and the fury it engendered, become so deeply rooted in him? “I do need the children,” Nyve said quietly. “We have lost a great many of the Battle in the south. And here, for that matter. Ten killed in fighting on the border between Gaven and Wyn only two days ago. Time was, our mere presence was enough to quell the most recalcitrant of troublemakers. No longer. Now it requires our blood, our lives. And it has all left me with fewer of my ravens here than for many, many years. I am disinclined to concede our weakness by yielding to his demands.” Everything about the old Inkallim was calm and composed. His clubbed hands rested on the arms of the chair. His head was cocked at a relaxed, friendly angle. A trace of a smile even passed across his lips. Yet Theor looked at him and almost despaired. He could see it behind those sparkling eyes, he could hear it in the silent corners of the flame-lit room: the beating of the raven’s wing. His friend had crossed some inner threshold. And Theor, for reasons he did not entirely understand, could not follow him. “Not yet,” Theor murmured, and then, more clearly, lifting his chin: “The breach is not irretrievable yet.” “No?” said Nyve. “We are too far down this road to turn back. I will not recall the Battle from beyond the Vale. Perhaps I could not, even if I wished it. What is happening there is out of our hands. I cannot give Ragnor what he wants. Fate determines all now.” “As always.” It was easy, instinctive, to utter those two words, but Theor wondered if they sounded as hollow to the others as they did to him. Almost certainly not. “But give him this one, small thing, and we create the space for something to change. We allow for the possibility that fate may choose another course. Do not assume that we must part company with the Gyre Blood now. Today. That is all I ask.” “We cannot ignore what is happening,” muttered Avenn. “Better to reach for the inevitable future than turn our backs on it, and enter it blindly.” But Nyve pursed his lips and thought, staring all the time into Theor’s eyes. “Very well,” he said at length. “He can have his children today. But no more. The Inkalls are nothing if they submit to the will and whim of a Thane. What we serve is greater than Ragnor, than his line. We have always known that. All of us.” He smiled sadly as he spoke, and in that smile Theor saw their parting. They both knew, in their different ways, that something was ending. And they both saw, he suspected, other, harder endings drawing near, closing upon them from the horizon of the coming days.
*
“You’re drooling,” Torquentine said. Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig sucked spittle back from his lips. “Untie my hands, if it offends you,” the blind Thane growled. He sat hunched upon an upholstered bench. He straightened, pressing his back against the stone wall. It would not last, Torquentine knew. Twice already Igryn had gathered himself, put some dignity into his spine, and each time something in him—or some absence in him, perhaps—gradually bent his back down again, twisted his mouth into a leer, laced his words with venom and turned his measured breathing into panting, rasping gasps. It was as if there was a beast within him that could be resisted only for so long before it began to reshape him. It put Torquentine in mind of the long dead wolfenkind. “I’ll keep your hands bounds for the time being, if it’s all the same to you,” he said. “Or even if it’s not, of course. Wipe the man’s chin for him, would you, my dear?” This last he spoke to Magrayn, and she went at once to gently swipe a cloth over the Thane’s bearded chin. She was not the only one of Torquentine’s attendants present. This was one of those rare occasions on which he had felt it wise to invite men of violence down into his buried lair. Two of them stood close by Igryn: muscular, their faces battered by a lifetime’s rough usage. They were good, both of them, at performing the more brutal kinds of tasks. Between them, they had killed five men by Torquentine’s command over the years. And more on their own initiative, no doubt. It was not only to keep a wary watch upon Igryn that Torquentine wanted them close, though. The streets of Ash Pit—and of all Vaymouth—were unpredictably tumultuous; the whole city was turbid with distrust, suspicion, accusation. Mayhem simmered, and burst erratically into the open. These burly clubmen offered some small reassurance that such disturbance would be resisted should it seek to reach down into Torquentine’s abode. Both of them had been amongst the band that had seized the disgraced Dargannan Thane on the road to In’Vay. And never had Torquentine taken less pleasure from the successful outcome of one of his endeavours. The very presence of Igryn here in his secret sanctuary would have been enough to set him squirming in distress, had his great bulk not argued against such physical expression of his inner turmoil. He settled for tugging absently at loose threads in the seams of the great cushions upon which he reclined. “I have but one eye myself, you know,” he told Igryn. “No, I do not know. I know your appearance no more than I do your name, or your intent.” “Oh, my appearance is magnificent, I assure you,” Torquentine grunted. “But, since the Thane of Thanes saw fit to take your eyes, you will just have to imagine it for yourself. And let us leave my name similarly obscured. As for my intent… that, that is a good question. “But tarry on the subject of eyes for a moment. You know how I lost the one that is, I assure you, absent? No, of course you don’t. It was in fact laid open by the blade of a dockside ruffian. I too, in those days, was something of a dockside ruffian, so I describe him thus without malice or disapproval. This was before Gryvan was Thane, you understand. I’m sorry. Does his name offend you?” Igryn was grimacing once more, his lips straining slowly back to reveal clenched teeth. At the mention of the High Thane, a snarl had begun to form at the corner of his mouth, and was poised there still, half-born. “In any case,” Torquentine continued, carefully burying his unease beneath a casual tone, “this man of whom I speak, he was, as it turned out, of unusual descent: father a Tal Dyreen, mother from the Free Coast. He’d been living a rat’s life in and around Vaymouth for years, but it did not teach him much love or respect for the Haig Blood in whose house—whose lands—he was a guest. Indeed, he made that lack of affection for his hosts abundantly clear, at tedious length, one night in a tavern down by the dockyards. I listened as long as I could, but in time I felt compelled to challenge his views. I did so with a knife, and he defended them similarly. In due course, the matter was resolved in my favour. It cost me an eye, but it cost him his life, so I have always been mindful that I paid much the lower price that night.” Torquentine fluttered his bloated fingers in Magrayn’s direction. She pulled a clean, fresh cloth free from her waistband and laid it across his palm. He carefully mopped sweat from his cheeks and brow. So many breathing bodies within this confined space had made it moist and warm. “Are you still listening, Thane?” he asked. Igryn was hunching forward once more. He had begun to work his jaw as if chewing some resistant matter. Strands of his hair were hanging down across the bandage that covered his eye sockets. “Straighten him up, would you?” Torquentine muttered to his men, who were staring distastefully at the Thane. One of them planted a broad hand firmly on Igryn’s shoulder and pushed him, a little more roughly than was necessary, erect. Igryn’s head cracked against the stonework, but he did not seem to notice. “I hear an idiot dribbling nonsense. Is that you talking?” Igryn ground his chin into the notch between neck and shoulder. “My beard itches.” “If you’ve brought fleas into my home, I’ll be sorely disappointed,” Torquentine muttered. “But to return to my point. I was a different man in those days, you understand. And not only in my possession of two eyes. I was somewhat… more modestly proportioned, shall we say? More germanely, I was somewhat hotter of temper and fiercer in my adherence to the Blood of my birth and upbringing. But—and this is the important part, Thane, so I hope you are listening—though the fires of my loyal ardour may have been damped down a little by the years, they are far from extinguished. “I am a part of my Blood. A part many might wish to excise, I suppose, but a part nevertheless. I belong. And I believe, in my deeply buried heart, that the Bloods are a boon to this world. I believe that without them, and without my Blood in particular, we would sink back into the self-mutilation that has so often afflicted us as a people, as a race. As a godless world. You will therefore understand, Thane, that it troubles me greatly to see the Haig Blood convulsed, as it is now, by a multitude of difficulties.” “You’ll find no sympathy in me,” Igryn sneered. He turned his blind head towards Torquentine. The smile upon his bruised and misused face was ugly. Mad. “I’d like nothing better than to eat your Thane’s warm heart out of the bowl of his broken chest.” “Unfortunately, I do not doubt the sincerity of your desire in that regard. And therein lies my dilemma, for I find myself at a loss to know what to do with you. Quite aside from my instinctive wish to do no more harm than is strictly necessary to the Blood of my birth, change is something I find distinctly undesirable at the best of times. I would go so far as to say, in fact, that I am thoroughly averse to it, for reasons both temperamental and professional. And there is altogether too much of it in the air at the moment. Wanton, egregious change for no better reason than that everyone seems to have forgotten the limits of appropriate behaviour. Do you know who commissioned me to bring about your removal from the custody of Gryvan’s men, Thane?” “No,” hissed Igryn through gritted teeth. “And I don’t care.” “How ungrateful of you. What would you do if I were to return you to your own lands?” “Make you rich. Raise an army. Avenge myself upon your Blood and render as many of your women sonless, brotherless and husbandless as I could.” Torquentine emitted a curtailed, stifled laugh. He glanced over to Magrayn. She was as impassive, as quietly observant as ever. “Surely he would have been dead long ago, were he as guilelessly stupid as he appears?” he said to her. Magrayn frowned. It was an expression that made the exposed, corrupted flesh of her rotted face stir in interesting ways. “He is sick,” she suggested. “Deranged.” “Quite possibly,” Torquentine said. “I have not left this chamber for some time, Thane, yet I have a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, spread all through this city, all through the lands of this Blood, and others. I see, and I hear, everything. All of that knowledge flows back to this chamber, and pools here in me. And what do I glean from it? What do I discern of the shape of the world?” He waited for a response from Igryn, but the Thane was silent, his head turning very slowly, very slightly, from side to side. “I see the Crafts and the Moon Palace edging towards outright war,” Torquentine continued. “I see your own lands rent by unrest. Not mere banditry but utter lawlessness, and rumours of Dornach ships already scouting your shores with half a mind to land an army by all accounts. I see the Black Road seething across the borders of the Ayth Blood like a swarm of wolves, consuming and destroying. I see murderous mobs rampaging in the streets above us here, battling the Guard. Everywhere I see unreason and savagery and disintegration. It is as if every desire, every ambition now runs unbridled. The fetters of restraint have been cast off by all those upon whom they served a most valuable purpose.” He sighed. Even as he spoke, he could feel the creeping anxiety that had nested, of late, in his chest. He was a man who craved, who needed, order and control and organisation. Everything, in fact, that the world now seemed determined to slough like some redundant skin. “And all of it growing worse. Each part of it feeding off the rest, each brutality precipitating another, each stupidity exceeding the one that went before. I have even crept my eyes and my ears into the very house of the man who decided you should be free, Thane. I watch him, I eavesdrop upon him. And I mislike what I see and what I hear. Things have changed in strange and unreadable ways. In that house and everywhere. This puts me in a sorely testing position.” Igryn laughed. A cackle, like a crow. “I will eat his heart,” the Thane of the Dargannan Blood murmured. Torquentine raised his eyebrows and scratched disconsolately at his folded throat. “As you say, Magrayn: sick. He surrenders himself all too willingly, I think, to the malady that besets the whole world. Ah well. As I was about to explain, I find myself unwilling to comply with my instructions. Returning him to his homeland would only feed a fire that already rages beyond control. I have no wish to play the part of midwife at the birthing of a world given over to unreason and chaos. I just cannot bring myself to do it.” “Shall I return him to the storeroom?” Magrayn asked. “Indeed. And make sure there’s nothing there he can hurt himself with. Until I decide what to do with him, it’s rather important he stays alive.” The two guards unceremoniously hooked their hands under Igryn’s armpits and hoisted him up from the bench. He did not resist, but seemed unable to support his own weight. His legs buckled at the knee and he hung like an ancient, infirm greybeard propped up on a fence. “Seems like nothing much, doesn’t he?” Torquentine reflected sadly. “Yet because of him, I invite the wrath of the Shadowhand. I all but betroth myself to catastrophe. Constantly surprising, the way things turn out, isn’t it? And I never took much pleasure in surprises.”
II
Yvane was trembling, Orisian realised. They had paused beside a pool into which the waters of a stream plunged from a low cliff. Moss and ferns festooned the rock face, a miniature, verdant abundance still resplendent in the green that winter had stolen from the rest of the forest. These were no mighty falls. The column of water that churned down into the pool was slight by comparison with that Orisian had seen at Sarn’s Leap, long ago. Still the sound, the cold mist that drifted over his face, was enough to make him think of Inurian. Enough to prickle his heart with needles of guilt and shame. They had left the na’kyrim there alone, and he had died. He had died on his own. What a fearful, awful thing that seemed to Orisian now: that a man so gentle and so deserving of better, had died alone, amongst enemies. Focusing his attention upon Yvane gave him a handhold with which to resist the tug of those lacerating memories. She sat crosslegged beside K’rina, who was curled into a ball, arms folded about her knees. As Orisian watched, Yvane held out one of her hands before her, the fingers spread. She stared at it. Even from a few paces away, Orisian could see that it shook. Yvane frowned in concentration. She was trying to still her hand, Orisian realised. She failed, and let it fall, palsied, into her lap. “Is it bad?” he asked quietly. “I can smell wolfenkind,” she replied. Her voice was somehow different. It had an attenuated fragility to it that was new. “The memory of them. I can hear them running through a forest far older than this one. It sounds like death.” “It’s not long now,” Orisian said. “Another few days, that’s all. Then we can —” “What?” said Yvane sharply, glaring at him. “You really think it will be that easy? What is it you think is going to happen?” Orisian stared blankly at her. She was changing, he thought. Bit by bit, she was becoming someone he did not know. Perhaps they all were. “It won’t be easy for her,” Yvane muttered, looking down at K’rina. The other na’kyrim appeared entirely at peace, hugging herself into a safe, quiet ball. Splashing behind him distracted Orisian. He twisted around. The warriors were along the edge of the pool into which the falls tumbled. Some were drinking its clear waters, others soaking tired and blistered feet. One had waded out, barefoot, into the middle of the pool. He stood there, unsteady on hidden rocks, arms outstretched as the spray from the waterfall threw shifting, tenuous veils across him. He was, Orisian saw to his alarm, weeping. He made no sound yet his face was contorted with grief, his cheeks bunched in anguish. “Eagan, get out of there,” Taim Narran was saying. The warrior gave no sign of having heard the command. He drew his arms slowly in, closed his hands over his face. He was shaken by silent sobs. “You’ll not be fit for walking if you don’t come out of there,” Taim said, more sternly now. He was not angry yet, but there was urgency there. Orisian rose to his feet. Eagan was entirely unresponsive to his Captain’s voice. Orisian could feel fear settling itself over him like a cape, and he did not know why. A flicker of movement drew his eyes up to the top of the waterfall. Varryn was there, tall against the pale sky. He and Ess’yr had been—as they always were now—scouting ahead, roving like hunting dogs through the forest. Now he stared down with the piercing, attentive eyes of a hawk. Even as Orisian watched, the Kyrinin set down his spear and unslung his bow from his back. “Wait…” Orisian said, but he said it softly, and the words were drowned out as Eagan took a few lurching, splashing steps back towards the edge of the pool. The warrior’s hands fell away from his face. With one, he began to tug helplessly at the thongs that bound the neck of his jerkin; with the other he reached out to Taim. No more tears fell, but still his expression was one of despairing horror. “I can’t…” he gasped out. He sounded very young to Orisian. He sounded like a distraught, helpless child. “Get out of there,” Taim said. He held out a hand. Eagan locked his grasp about Taim’s wrist and hauled violently, dragging him instantly face forward into the water. Taim vanished below the surface with a booming, hollow splash. Eagan surged up onto the bank and staggered back the way they had come. His sodden leggings spilled clouds of droplets. His naked feet, bleached by the cold of the stream, slithered on the wet grass. “Wait,” Orisian shouted, moving to intercept Eagan. Two of the other warriors took hold of their companion, grabbing handfuls of his collar and sleeves. He howled and threw one off. He struck the other on the cheekbone with the heel of his hand, and the man stumbled back. “I can’t,” Eagan cried. “We can’t!” Orisian stepped in front of him and stretched out his arms to block Eagan’s path. “It’s all right,” Orisian said, the stupidity, the inadequacy of the words ringing in his ears. His eyes met Eagan’s, and he knew in that instant that the man was lost. That something in him had given way. He saw something else there, in those wide and desperate eyes, and it set his hand moving towards the hilt of his sword before his mind recognised it. Beyond Eagan, Taim was rising, water pouring from him. “No,” said Orisian as his sword began to slide from its scabbard. Eagan’s own blade was slipping free as he staggered towards his Thane, as heavy and inevitable as a falling tree. There was a thud, and a spasm of distraction twitched across Eagan’s face. The feathers of an arrow trembled above his shoulder. The shaft had come in steeply, from the top of the waterfall, to lance down into his back. It was not enough to stop him, though it gave Orisian time to get his sword free and raise it to block Eagan’s ragged swing. Orisian staggered back. “Eagan!” another of the men shouted as he came up behind. Confusion and anger and shock writhed together in that single word. Eagan spun around, and his sword spun with him. It took his comrade high on the side of the face, and the man fell leadenly back, his eyes wide in surprise as the blade streaked his blood across the air. Another arrow darted down and found its target, but Eagan did not fall. He turned back towards Orisian, raising his sword above his head as if to bring it bludgeoning down. He gave out a strained keening, a grief-stricken, doomed wail. Orisian drove the point of his sword up into his stomach, under his ribs. Eagan was struck abruptly dumb. He dropped his own weapon and slumped sideways. Orisian stared down at him, listening to his shallow, faltering breaths. Eagan’s eyes were open. They stared at the grass into which his head was pressed. The spaces between his breaths grew longer and longer. Taim came striding up from the pool, hair pasted across his forehead, water still falling from his chin and the cuffs of his jerkin. “Stand back, sire,” he said to Orisian. Taim kicked Eagan’s sword away and knelt to look into the man’s face. “He’s finished,” Orisian said bleakly. Taim only nodded as he rose to his feet once more. Eagan was not breathing any more. Nor was the man he had struck with his sword. The others were all standing motionless, with the waterfall splattering away behind them, staring either at the dead men or at Orisian. In every eye that was upon him Orisian detected—or thought he detected—accusation. He looked up to the head of the falls. Varryn was still there, silhouetted, unstringing his bow. Orisian nodded once towards the Kyrinin warrior. Varryn simply turned away and disappeared from sight. “Not long now,” Orisian whispered to no one but himself. “Please.” The dead White Owls were strewn all along the eastern flank of a long, low, forested ridge. The trees were sparse along the crest of the ridge, and many of the corpses lay exposed to the sky. They were not alone. Ravens spiralled overhead, croaking in protest at this interruption to their feasting. As Orisian trod carefully between the bodies, a buzzard swept heavily up from a nearby tree and glided away over the canopy. The thin snow that persisted on this higher ground was patterned with innumerable tracks: the prints of the men and women and children who had died here intermingled with those of their killers, overlaid by the marks of the eaters of the dead. Several of the corpses had been opened or gnawed. Fox and crow and bear had been busy. Orisian did not know what to think. He had never seen so many Kyrinin dead. Although these were notionally his enemies, and their clan had taken Rothe’s life and made war upon Ess’yr’s people, he could not help but lament the transformation of so much grace and power into sanguine ugliness. Without life to animate them, the bodies looked ungainly. Pathetic almost, with their disordered, frozen clothes, their scattered bundles of belongings. He could make no connection between these sad shells and the Kyrinin he had seen, and known, and fought in the weeks since Winterbirth. Yvane and K’rina lingered further up the slope. The bulbous bare rocks almost hid them from sight. Taim and his men were moving amongst the bodies, each following a solitary, silent path from corpse to corpse. Looking for what? Orisian wondered. There was no life here, not even its faintest residue. Taking the measure of death, perhaps. Feeling its texture, learning afresh its look. Ess’yr and Varryn were coming up towards him, emerging from the deeper shadows down there in the thick forest, where the dead and the tree trunks and the dark ground merged into uniform gloom. Varryn’s expression filled Orisian with an imprecise, all-encompassing regret. The Kyrinin was not smiling, but his eyes gleamed with restrained excitement. “It is good,” Varryn said as they drew near. “No,” Orisian said. “No, it’s not.” Ess’yr held out the bloodied stub of an arrow. It had been broken off halfway along the shaft. “White Owl,” she said. Orisian was glad not to hear her brother’s eagerness reflected in her. But nor did he hear any trace of sorrow, any hint of distress at this slaughter. “The enemy kill each other. Like a snared beast, they tear at their own legs. Their own bodies. It will make our path easier.” “Easier,” Orisian echoed. He stooped down to the dead White Owl girl who lay at his feet. Half-dusted with snow, she was face down. Her arms lay neatly in at her sides, one leg bent, the other quite straight. She was small. No more than ten years old, he guessed. He picked up a little bow from where it had spilled out of the bedding roll she had been carrying. Like a toy, he thought. And remembered that he had seen the same thing in the hands of a Fox child, long ago by the banks of the River Dihrve. “Let’s keep moving,” he said. There was a foulness about this place. He wanted only to leave it far behind. As the two Kyrinin trotted down into the next broad vale in Anlane’s endless undulations, Orisian noticed one of Taim’s warriors staring after them. There was no warmth in the man’s fixed gaze. No sentiment at all, in fact, save mistrust. Suspicion. We’re all snared now, Orisian thought. Every one of us.
*
Across the moors north of Dun Aygll, the host of Black Road spread. It splintered and crumbled, like a vast flock of birds that had ridden fierce winds but found them, in the end, too potent and been scattered by them. It consumed everything it encountered: farms and villages and the fragile remnants of the Haig army. And it consumed itself. Tarbains hunted stragglers of any ilk, slaughtered and stripped them. Parties of Battle Inkallim rode back and forth across the bare and sodden land, seeking to reassert control over this vast beast, only to find it ungovernable. As often as not, they encountered nothing but madness and frenzy and feral bloodlust. Where they could not impose order, they imposed death instead, for there was a kind of madness upon many of them as well. The masterless villages on the eastern shore of the Vaywater, where no Blood and no Thane held sway, turned on one another. The fishermen and goatherds and hunters and weavers laid down the tools of their crafts and took up knives and axes and spears instead. They fought over disputed fields and over stolen goats. They paid no heed to other concerns, and one settlement—Karlakan—was thus taken unawares when a wandering band of Heron Kyrinin, straying perversely far from their territories, descended upon it in the night. By dawn, blood was running down into the waters of the great lake and curling away in stained eddies. In Koldihrve, at the mouth of the Vale of Tears, the men of the town hunted na’kyrim after nightfall. The Heron and the Hawk, who had planted peace staffs along their boundaries only one season ago, disinterred all the grievances that had been so recently buried. The young men and the young women took up their spears once more. They raided, as they had done before, but this time they went not in their tens but in their scores, and wherever the spear a’ans went, they left not even the youngest of children or the frailest of elders alive. And in Anlane the White Owl Kyrinin made war upon themselves. A few who had doubted all along the intoxicating promises of the na’kyrim Aeglyss, and found themselves dismayed by the fierce passions that now seemed to rule their fellows, spoke out. And were slain. The last of them was cut apart on the hard ground before the lodge of the Voice herself. But the killing, and the dissent, once begun did not stop. Though many of the warriors were long gone, venturing far beyond the clan’s territory to assuage their lately rediscovered martial pride and hunger for the blood of their people’s myriad enemies, enough remained to fight over every trifle, and even the least warlike, the youngest, the oldest, the most infirm, found enough passion burning in them to lift a spear or set arrow to string. The dyke had been broken, and through the breach came flooding every resentment and division. Rumour and accusation spun all through Anlane like seeds upon the wind. Vo’ans began to break apart, families and warbands taking to paths that would normally remain untrodden until the summer, many neither knowing nor caring whether they were fleeing or pursuing, hunter or hunted. The wise chanted in their tents, questing after truth, but no answers came. Only fear and confusion. But still they chanted, and hoped for clarity, while outside and everywhere in the Thousand Tree-Clad Valleys the bloodshed continued.
III
The contours of the darkness within Ragnor oc Gyre’s fortress in Kan Dredar were subtle. Slight gradations laid a patchwork cloak of blacks and greys and shadow over the foundry and the bakery, the barracks and the stables, the low keep where the High Thane dwelled; and the Great Hall loomed over all with its huge steepled roof and its giant doors, around the edges of which light and noise and heat bled into the winter’s night. All else was quiet. Rats ran along the base of the storehouse wall, noses down. There was smoke coiling out from the armourer’s workshop, but the fires from which it sprang had long since been left to dwindle. The smiths were in the Hall with everyone else. Beyond the outer palisade, in the trees down by the river, an owl called. There were none to hear it, save the guards in the watchtowers and at the gates, and most of them were too busy bemoaning their drawing of such a cold duty while the rest of Ragnor’s household had its revels. None to hear it, save those guards, and one other. Shadow separated itself, a part of it coming free and slipping silently across the narrow stretch of ground between storehouse and Great Hall. Two rats, startled by this sudden intrusion into their nocturnal dominion, scampered for their tunnels in the hard earth. The assassin who came to rest crouching at the foot of the hall’s looming rear wall had ash thickly smeared over his face. Every garment he wore was black. His hands were sheathed in gloves thin enough to ensure their movement would not be hampered. He paused there, secure in lightless obscurity, and took a few steady breaths to regulate his heartbeat and clear his mind. Satisfied, he rose smoothly to his feet, still pressing himself against the stone wall. The whites of his eyes were the only imperfection in his sombre concealment. They darted this way and that now, like pale pebbles. And found nothing to concern him. No light in any overlooking window, no movement. Turning, he extended one arm up and took hold of the rough stonework. He was lean but nonetheless powerful. Fingers like steel bars raised him up the wall. His boots were light, little more than black-dyed slippers of soft calf-hide. It was easy to find places for both hands and feet on the surface. He climbed without haste, for haste was the enemy of both precision and silence. If anything betrayed him now, it would be sound rather than sight. There was not even enough moonlight for him to see the details of the wall before his own face. He went by touch and feel, and by memory. He had studied the route he must follow from down below over the last two days. The small crossbow on his back was tied tight to prevent any movement. The cords constrained him only very slightly, not enough to impede his ascent. That distant owl was calling again, and that pleased him. It gave the night a veneer of normalcy and calm, and would thus offer false comfort to those keeping watch. It allowed him to think that fate might favour his endeavour. Up to the very eaves he climbed, and into the utter darkness of their overhang. Fingers locked into crevices, he drew up his knees, bracing his feet between the rough-cut blocks of stone. Now he was entirely hidden. Even someone wandering unexpectedly along directly beneath him would struggle to descry his lofty presence, should their gaze drift improbably upwards. Another moment or two to moderate his breathing and his heart. Then exploratory fingers delicately extended along the very top of the wall, tracing the line where the stones met the protruding woodwork and beams of the huge roof. He could hear the voices of those within, dull and indistinct, a rumbling murmur punctuated by occasional laughter or shouts. He shut the distraction out. He dwelled only in this moment, thought only of his own body, his holds and what his reaching hand sought. Soon enough he found it: a gap where uneven stones and prised-apart wood combined to yield less than two hands’ span of space. Even through his gloves he could feel the heat of the air oozing out from that opening and he could smell the smoke and the scents of food and drink and bodies that the hall exhaled through this tiny flaw in its fabric. Two crab-like cramped movements across the stone were enough to take him there, and now, with his eyes directly before it, he could see the soft orange firelight reflected on dark woodwork within. One hand hooked in there gave him enough security to loosen the crossbow’s bindings with the other. The weapon preceded him into the roofspace. He emptied his lungs to shrink his chest and followed it, forcing himself through this most narrow of entrances. Others had preceded the assassin up this wall, just a handful of times. One had climbed to open the way, easing apart wooden struts just enough to admit a lean and determined body. He did not know how long ago that had been, for it was not his place to know such things. One or two, after that, had entered the High Thane’s hall just as he now did, though they had brought only their ears and their eyes with them, seeking only information. He came with more fatal intent, and felt himself to be the first. The only one that mattered. The roof of the Great Hall rode a massive and intricate fretwork of beams and timbers, a supportive weave of wood and nails. Like a marten making its sinuous way through the branches of a forest canopy, the assassin edged towards an angular perch, where he would be concealed from all but the most acute of eyes but able to lock his own gaze upon Ragnor oc Gyre, who feasted below. The High Thane filled his wolfskin-clad throne. His lavish gestures and bellowing voice said he had already drunk more than his fill. As had most of the others who thronged the length of the great chamber. They sat on benches and rugs, crowded round the three huge fires blazing in their open hearths. They milled about—many unsteadily—brandishing cups and joints of meat. Some fought, and those around them paid no heed to their struggles, consumed by their own kinds of madness. One—an old, bearded man—was naked, and danced on the fringe of the flames, gabbling nonsensically, his body turning pink and raw as the heat raged at him. There was a dead man lying by one of the fires, his blood spread around his neck and shoulders. In one corner, close by Ragnor, a woman—one of his Shield—was hunched over the corpse of a hunting dog, pulling at it, flaying it. Shadows swept and cavorted around the walls, flung there by the light of those exuberant fires: not just the soft-edged blurs of the churning host, but the starker, sharper darknesses cast by the huge antler trophies that hung everywhere. The assassin found the frenzied scene repellent. He had been brought up to another kind of life, one that could never condone such mad indulgence. And that upbringing came now to its purpose and goal. All his discipline could not wholly suppress the eagerness blossoming in his breast. This moment was what he was for; it was the sum of all his years. Though the bestial passions he saw expressed below him were not something he could share, there was passion of a sort within him. A yearning to be the deliverer of death, a longing—such as he had never felt before—to be the weapon by which fate delivered its judgement. He rocked fractionally, testing the stability of his position. It was good enough. Still, he kept his movements slow and contained as he drew back the string of the crossbow. The smoke that pooled amidst the rafters of the hall was stinging his throat and eyes. His body wanted to sniff or cough, but he mastered the animal urges. Below, Ragnor was shouting something at his Master of the Hall, who stood beside the throne, an island of morose solemnity amidst the sea of merriment. The old man did not appear to reply, but the High Thane laughed. The assassin eased one of his two bolts from the tiny flat quiver that he wore inside his black shirt, and nestled it into place on the bow. The weapon was not powerful, but Ragnor seldom wore chain at times such as this, so it need only punch the quarrel through cloth and hide and skin. It was more than capable of that. And once the bolt found its place in the High Thane’s flesh, it too was capable of doing what was needful. It was finely, savagely barbed, and would fight all attempts to free it from a wound. And it would foul that wound too, for a crust of excrement and soil and spittle was dried upon its point. Whether quickly or slowly, Ragnor oc Gyre would die. The assassin had to lean a little to one side to gain the clear straight line to the High Thane that he desired. He made the adjustment cautiously, his hips and thighs and back tensing to keep him from overbalancing. His muscles were trained for such exertion, and he barely noticed the effort required. Slowly, he dipped his head to sight along the waiting bolt. Smoke rasped at his eyes and he winced. His vision blurred for a moment and he had to clench his eyes shut, squeezing tears out. The smoke was worse than he had expected. He blinked again and again, still holding his head quite still and steady down over the crossbow’s butt. His sight cleared. He breathed out, whispering as he did so, “My feet are on the road. I go without fear.” And the string cracked forward, and the barbed bolt flashed free from its shallow gutter. And Ragnor oc Gyre leaned across towards his Master of the Hall, crying some jovial abuse at him. And the crossbow bolt thumped into the throne, pinning the collar of Ragnor’s jerkin to the wolfskin and wood. The assassin was already moving, turning back towards the hidden gap by which he had entered. He heard the howl of outrage, the roars of confusion and alarm, but did not look. He would not do so until he was poised on the brink of escape. If, in that moment, there seemed the time and opportunity for the second bolt, he would try again. If not, he would vanish out into the night and come again, elsewhere, tomorrow or the next day or the next, until the Gyre Blood was relieved of its Thane. He reached through the smoke and the heat and the tears that filmed and dulled his eyes for a slanting beam to haul himself round. And almost missed the hold, his fingers slipping for a moment over flat wood. He swayed. His other arm came up to balance him, and the end of the crossbow it carried jarred against another timber. Jarred free. The crossbow fell, plunging down into the world of light and noise and anger below. He could see the narrow black void that marked his escape route, and darted towards it. He could smell the cold, fresh night air beyond, could imagine the freedom of the open black sky above his head. And crossbow bolts were flying up, like a flurry of answers to the challenge he had dispatched downwards. They smacked splinters from the wooden lattice through which he moved. They would not find him, he was sure. Already he was consumed by the sour sense of failure, but still he did not doubt he would live to serve the creed another day. Until one bolt out of the flock that swarmed up towards him impaled his trailing hand, nailing it to a beam. Through the very centre of the back of his hand it went, and buried itself deep in the wood. He gasped, not in pain but in surprise. And in frustration, for he needed that hand as he swung forward. He stared through bleary eyes at the very place he would be reaching for with it. He could see, indistinctly, the saw marks in the flat face of the timber. He blinked, and overbalanced, and fell. His arm wrenched at his shoulder joint as his entire weight was abruptly hung from that single impaled hand. It held only for an instant, then the bolt tore out from his flesh, ripping itself free between two fingers. He tipped backwards as he fell, gazing up into the darkness of the roof. An outstretched antler of one the trophies on the wall stabbed into his thigh, and gouged down the back of his leg to his knee, tumbling him in the air. He plummeted head down, a host of snarling faces rushing up to greet him from below.
*
“What were you thinking?” Theor had his hands half-raised, poised as if arrested in the midst of some violent movement. He could not tear his gaze away from them. His eyes took in the aged, slack hide that his skin had become, the terrible impotence of these limbs that once, surely, must have felt capable and powerful. The fury that was in him was in them too, seething and burning in the palms and the fingers. And it was such a pathetic thing, that fury. It was empty, powerless to change anything. Powerless even, he felt, to express itself honestly. “What were you thinking?” he cried again at Avenn. The First of the Hunt glared at him. He suddenly imagined himself seizing her by the throat, crushing and crushing the contemptuous, arrogant life out of her with these same trembling hands. He imagined her slumping to her knees, gasping for breath that would not come. Slowly he lowered his hands. It would not happen like that, of course. He was a feeble old man, a boat drifting broken-ruddered amidst rocks and storms. She was of the Hunt. Fierce, strong. And certain of her purpose. Her faith. “I did what the times, the circumstances, the creed, seemed to called for,” Avenn said. Not even a semblance of deference in her any more. She would not deign to make the most passing pretence at submission to the Lore’s authority. Theor could only shake his head. “He was feasting,” Avenn snarled. “Feasting? In times such as these? Celebrating what? The fact that we’ve made ourselves his subjects. The fact that he can steal a hundred orphans from the Battle merely by demanding it. The fact that he can kill Hunt Inkallim without fear of redress, without us raising a hand or a blade to prevent him. The fact that we lack the will to pursue this grand, this glorious enterprise that has been begun through to its utmost conclusion. The fact that we falter.” Oh, the fire that burned in her was bright. Theor could remember when such sacred fervour raised him up just as it now did Avenn. It had not been so very long ago, yet it felt an age. It felt as if those righteous sentiments and certainties had dwelt in the heart of an entirely different person. Someone else. Someone who had not been prey to the doubts and the sickening fears that now ate away at him. “This sudden caution that cripples you is unwarranted, First,” snarled Avenn. She was striding up and down on the reed matting that covered the floor. This was a chamber meant for peaceful contemplation. Theor had brought her here for the sake of privacy and discretion. “But you goad the High Thane into striking out against us,” he muttered, that rage that had briefly so animated him leaching away. It was unsustainable. “Ragnor’s temper already runs hot as a fever. He’s been walking upon the brink of unreason for days. Now…” He hung his head. “I regret nothing,” Avenn said. “Fate will dispose things as it sees fit. I came to tell you of this only out of courtesy.” “But you came too late. You come to me in the morning to tell me of something done the night before. That is not courtesy but contempt.” “You know how things stand now,” Avenn muttered unapologetically. “I have given fate the chance to make its choice. To move forward.” Theor could have wept, and he did not know why, beyond the certainty that there was a terrible wrongness in all of this. And that the awful, crippling guilt he now felt was somehow deserved. He had come to mistrust so many of his feelings, his instincts, and to fear their turbulence, tossed about by gales that seemed to come from outside him, but that… that guilt felt true and clear, even if he did not understand whence it sprang. “You’ve done nothing but give Ragnor the excuse to tear the Inkalls apart,” he said leadenly, recognising the futility of anything other than silence. “It had to come, sooner or later,” Avenn shouted. “This is the time when all matters will be resolved. This is the time when the world must come apart, when all hopes and intents shall fail, save that of fate itself. This is the end of this world, old man, and if your wits and your courage had not failed you, you would see that as clearly as the rest of us. You betray the Lore, and the faith, with your craven reticence.” “No…” Theor could find no words, no armour against either her accusations or the world’s collapse. “The First of the Battle will stand by the Hunt in this, even if the Lore will not,” Avenn said. “Did Nyve know?” Theor asked, dreading the answer. “No. But he will not contest fate’s course. He will welcome it.” That was true, of course. The flood that seemed to be bearing all of them along in its destructive embrace had taken hold of Nyve. It was more than a lifetime’s friendship could hope to resist. “And Ragnor will leave him no choice now,” Avenn continued. She spoke almost casually, as to some servant or follower. “He will surely come against us. Good. The people will rise up in our defence if he makes war upon the Inkalls.” “You think that will deter him?” Theor said. “You think he cares any more about what is wise or considered? He doesn’t care. He is as blind as… as all of us.” “Fate will show us the way. And if that way is to ruin and rue, so be it. How could the end of all things and the birthing of new be attended by anything but ruin?” “You’re mad,” murmured Theor, turning away, walking towards the door. “As are we all now.” He left her there, not even glancing back to see whether the First of the Hunt followed him out of the meditatory chamber. There was nothing more to be said. The world had become inimical to words, and to reason. The madness that had so many others in its grip would brook no resistance from those—like Theor—who found themselves beyond its grasp; and so he was to be forgotten, ignored. He could no longer find the strength within himself to resent or oppose that. Outside, it was snowing, but it was a meagre, grainy kind of snow. The flakes were not the buoyant fat flowers of midwinter, but icy granules that came on desultory gusts of wind. Thick snow still lay over the Sanctuary, the relic of what had already been a long, hard season. There would be a thaw soon enough, Theor knew. The days were slowly lengthening. The mountain streams would fatten with meltwater and rush white and blue down into the valley. The lying snow would merge into the earth and bloat it, turn it to mud. There would, eventually, be a breaking of buds and a piercing of that mud by soft new shoots. If the world did not come to its end. If this was not, in fact, the Kall. Theor was tired. No, more than tired. Utterly drained. Lifeless, lightless. A young Inkallim came a little hesitantly across the snow towards him. A girl whose name he could not recall. So much seemed to be slipping away from him now. “First, there is a messenger come from the Battle.” Theor came to a shuffling halt. The hem of his robe settled over the snow. “From Nyve?” he asked wearily. “Yes, First. The messenger asks that you return with him to consult with the First of the Battle. There are… apparently, there are companies of Gyre warriors moving out from Kan Dredar. Moving up the slopes.” “Of course there are,” sighed Theor. His bones felt heavy, as if they were encrusted with defeat and disappointment, so thickened and burdened by their own weight that he could hardly lift them. All he wanted to do, all he could conceive of doing, was sleep. Hide away behind a locked door, in darkness, and be nothing for a time. “Send the messenger back where he came from,” he said. “Tell him I will come later. Not now. Later, if I can.” He trudged on, moving beneath the pine trees that filled so much of the compound. The young Inkallim had not moved. “What is happening, First?” she called after him. It was not quite fear that coloured her voice. Not yet. “Nothing, child,” Theor said without stopping or looking round. “Nothing.”
IV
When Theor woke, it was from an intermittent slumber that had done nothing to renew him. He rose stiffly and dressed. His skin felt every scrape of his robe’s rough material. He felt no hunger or thirst, no desire of any kind that might lead him out from this bare chamber. Yet there was nothing to hold him here either. Solitude brought no easing of his despair. He went out, and found others clustered in the corridor, conferring in muted whispers. They looked up, startled, at his emergence. “You should see…” one of them stammered. He let them lead him to the walls of the Sanctuary. Let them guide him up the steps onto the narrow walkway cut into its inner face. He went numbly, without expectation. What they wanted to show him was smoke. It was climbing up into a sky thick with white clouds, tracing its darker way against that bleached background in two twisting columns that merged as they rose, and then slowly bent and spread to drift in black sheets high above the snow-clad hills. Those who accompanied him talked and fretted, but Theor took none of it in. He gazed up at that dark pillar ascending from the earth towards the firmament above and felt nothing. No surprise, no confusion, no fear. He found himself beyond such things. It was the compound of the Battle burning. There was nothing else out there on the wooded slopes that could give rise to such a conflagration. The wind was coming from his back, otherwise Theor did not doubt that he would have smelled the ash, the burning timbers. Perhaps burning flesh. Perhaps he would even have heard the cries of the dying, the commotion of sudden death. As they stood there on the wall, a shape emerged from the trees, coming steadily towards them. Some cried out and pointed, tugging at Theor’s arm to direct his attention. He did not respond. It was a grey horse, trotting along, following the hard-packed snow of the path between the deeper, pristine drifts that flanked it. It came at its own pace, following its own course, for the man who rode it was slumped forward, draped limply around its neck. Even from this distance, it was not hard to recognise him as a Battle Inkallim. The blackness of his hair, and of his leather armour, stood out against the pale hide of his mount and the luminously white snow. The man’s blood had stained the horse’s shoulder, forming a dark red-brown blemish that flexed and pulsed as it moved along. There were crossbow bolts standing proud from the man’s back. Two of them, Theor thought, though he could not be sure. “We must intercede, First,” one of those gathered upon the wall cried, all panic and confusion. “They will listen to the Lore, surely? The High Thane, the Battle, they must listen to the Lore. No one else perhaps, but us.” Theor did not know what to say. Neither Ragnor nor Nyve would listen. They had boiled over and could hear nothing but the roaring of their own hearts, their own rages. The time when consideration, negotiation, moderation might gain any purchase upon anyone had passed. Fury bestrode the world and would not yield its dominion. That Theor himself could not partake of the heady brew rendered him isolated, at a loss. For whatever reason, he had been left becalmed and irrelevant in some backwater while the river flooded on without him. As if fate had no further need for him. If it even was fate that governed this torrent. He turned away while the horse was still approaching with its grim cargo. He descended from the wall, ignoring the questions and pleas his fellow Inkallim belaboured him with. He went silently back to his own small bedchamber and closed the door behind him, and took a little box out from its hiding place. Three of the Lore had now died within the walls of the Sanctuary while dreaming seerstem dreams. It was unprecedented. Theor himself had forbidden any others to venture into that once-so-soothing territory. But now… there was nowhere else to turn. He could find no truth or sense any longer on this side of the seerstem gate. There were no answers here. Nothing for him to hold on to. He felt entirely defeated by the vastness of the world and its confusion. He took out one of the shrivelled fragments from the box and regarded it blankly. He did not truly imagine it could bring him any of the clarity he so craved, but that tiny hope persisted. Even before the deaths began, there had been little save troubling turmoil to be found in those strange dreams. But still he set the seerstem in his mouth and crushed it between his teeth. He lay back on the hard bed and closed his eyes. Slowly, slowly, the seerstem took him. It dulled him and enfolded him and gently parted the threads holding him to the waking world. He sank, and the darkness bled across his eyes and silence leaked into his ears. And he saw a thousand flickering shadows darting back and forth across a limitless gloomy expanse. He felt a thousand fluttering touches on the skin of his thoughts. A thousand sparks of anger, of fear, hate, anguish, awful grief, each one no more than an instant, like an ocean of tiny, transient stars flaring and dying across his mind. They dizzied him and dazzled him and he wailed soundlessly in his dreams at the deluge. This place to which seerstem gave entry had twisted so radically away from its once-familiar and restful form that it now felt like an exposed pinnacle surrounded by a churning storm. Standing there he was besieged and buffeted by clamorous delirium. Whatever faint hope he had nurtured that there might yet be answers to be found here was shattered, and its fragments torn away on the howling winds that blew through him. Lights flashed before him, and he knew they were not lights but lives. It was a fearful lightning storm of being. It was too much. Panic boiled in him, and he longed above all else to escape this invasive maelstrom, but the seerstem had him, and he could not choose to wake from its clutches yet. And then he was not alone. He saw nothing, heard nothing, but he felt a presence settling all about him, as if the black sky had descended and gathered itself into a single shell that enclosed him. It was a cold presence. One that pressed upon his consciousness, probed it with insistent fingers. “Who are you?” Theor stammered. “What are you?” “No.” The voice was inside him, reverberating in the chamber of his mind. “Here, the questions are mine to ask. Who are you? Another of those who stumble blindly about the fringes of this place. Another trespasser who does not belong.” “I am…” The man did not know his name any more, for that part of his memory, and his self, was eclipsed by this immense all-encompassing presence. He fell silent. “This is not for you. All of this, not for you. Your blood is too singular. Too clean, too pure.” The voice spat that last word with venom. It burned the man. “Your kind does not belong here.” “Who are you? Are you… are you the Hooded God?” “Oh, your dreams of the Road. These pathetic comforts you preach to yourselves. Like children, afraid of the dark, afraid of being alone. To be alone; I could teach you about that. I could show you. No, I’m not your Last God.” The man felt himself failing. He was crumbling beneath the weight of this vast attention. “He Who Waits?” He mumbled it; he gasped it. “He Who Waits, then? Not gone at all, but always here? Always with us, all this time?” The laughter was all around him, all through him, tearing at him. “You’d make me Death?” And a heavy silence, a nothingness for a time. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I want… I wanted everything to be different. Not death. That’s not what I wanted. I only wanted… I only wanted…” Agonies seeped from the voice into the man, filling him with another’s suffering. And it continued: “None of this is as I thought it would be. But it cannot be changed.” Swiftly as they had come, the doubt and sorrow that had suffused the voice receded. The darkness grew deeper. The shadows massed. “But this place is not for you. This is my body, my flesh. My blood. You are within me, and that is not… So, yes. A God, if you like. I am sitting now, in a cold room, in a ruined city, talking to someone… talking… failing. My body decays. I cannot mend it. Nothing can be mended now. But I am here too. And greater here, beyond decay.” Theor remembered who he was then. He was granted that, as the presence shrank away from him a little, and withdrew itself from the fabric of his thoughts. He fell, from nowhere towards nowhere, simply plummeting through a roaring void; and the awful presence was that through which he fell, and it was with him also, gathering and taking hold of his essence. It whispered in his mind, “If I am to be a God. Let it be Death.” It tore Theor apart. He felt himself opened and splintered. Shards of his awareness were ripped away. This foul, omnipotent being that claimed the mantle of Death flayed his mind with claws of pure loathing and rage. It poured all its jealousies and hatreds and bitterness into him, and they dismembered him. In the last, flickering, dimming glimmer of Theor’s own thoughts, beyond the agony and the terror, there was only a long, descending murmur of regret and a lingering bitter certainty of failure and error. That faded. And fluttered. And finally wisped away, dispersing into the unbounded, eternal Shared. And in the Sanctuary of the Lore Inkallim struggled to hold the First’s flailing limbs steady. He bucked and arched on the trestle bed and spat black-tainted foam at them as he screamed. Then he fell suddenly silent and still. The Inkallim backed away from him, alarmed. Tears streamed from his open, staring eyes. His heart pounded, and each mighty beat shook him, and drew a single gasping breath from him. Until there came one clenching of his heart that did not release itself; one breath that was cut short and lay unfinished in his throat. His hands twisted the bed sheet beneath him into knots. And Theor, First of the Lore, died. Outside, in the snowbound grounds of the Sanctuary, the ancient pine trees stood as they had done for so many years. Tiny birds spiralled up their trunks, seeking insects wintering in the crevices of the bark. Above, midway between the sharp peaks of the trees and the thinning cloud, buzzards were circling. Tiny drops of rain—not snow but rain—were flickering down. The buzzards arced away, lazy wings bearing them towards Kan Dredar in the valley below, or towards the compound of the Battle Inkall. There would be food for them there.
*
“I see them,” Igris said from the window. Kanin oc Horin-Gyre set down the bowl of cold broth he had been holding to his lips and twisted in his chair. “You’re sure?” he said to his shieldman. Igris nodded. He was staring out over a street on the very south-eastern fringe of Glasbridge. This part of the town had been beset by both flood and fire when the town fell to the Black Road. The house in which they waited, and in which Kanin took a hasty meal, had no roof to it. The floorboards were charred; the shutters at the window from which Igris looked out hung split and smoke-blackened and broken. There was even now, long since the floodwaters had receded, a damp stink of rot to the place. Kanin had had to sweep a thin crust of snow from the table when they first entered. He wiped soup from his lips with the back of his hand. “How many?” he asked without getting up. “Can’t tell yet, sire,” Igris replied. “Eska said there were twenty, when she saw them on the road this morning.” “Might be twenty. Or they might have seen her. Perhaps they split up.” “They didn’t see her,” said Kanin scornfully. “She’s of the Hunt, man. You think they get themselves seen except by choice?” Igris shrugged. There was weary defeat in that sluggish movement. “We’d best go down to greet them, then,” Kanin said, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. He lifted his chain shirt from where it lay on the table and shrugged it over his head. “Are you sure?” Igris murmured. Such a small sound, so frail, to come from such a man. It was resigned yet perhaps still carried the faintest thread of hope that his master might turn aside from his chosen course. Kanin glared at his shieldman’s back. “You question me? Doubt me?” Igris said nothing. Kanin took a heavy cloak down from a hook on the wall. “Just do what I require of you,” he said. “Do as your Thane requires. You’ve enough honour, enough memory of who you are, to do that, I hope.” His shieldman followed him out onto the street. The man stank of reluctance, and Kanin despised him for that. The slush outside was almost ankle deep. The night before had been the first in a long time that had not frozen. As a result, Glasbridge’s white covering was softening, turning grey, melting into its ruins and its mud. Kanin splashed out into the centre of the road and stood there, feet spaced enough to give him a firm stance, cloak flicked back clear of his sword. He waited. The riders came around the corner in single file. The horses moved very slowly. One by one they came into sight: six, ten, twelve, then fifteen, twenty. All black-haired. All tall and upright. All clad in dark leather with iron studwork or buckles or hilts glinting softly here and there. Ravens, riding into Glasbridge. Kanin smiled to himself. Then, still fifty or more paces distant, the lead rider halted her horse with the merest rolling of her wrist to tighten the reins. She stared down the street towards Kanin. Others of the riders came sedately forward and conferred with their leader. The muted exchange was curt. She nodded once, and two men peeled themselves away from the rest, easing their mounts round and heading, just as unhurriedly as they had come, back out towards the fields beyond the town. Kanin’s smile died on his lips. His disappointment was far more bitter than he would have expected. It did not, in truth, matter greatly. After today, everything would rush onwards. The end—whatever its form, whatever its nature—would come quickly, and nothing and no one could change that. But he had hoped that this beginning might at least be perfect, flawless. It would have felt good. The Inkallim were coming on again, once more falling into a disciplined file. They had that arrogant, assured air that attended every member of the Battle. Kanin loathed it, now more than ever. Their forerunners had betrayed his Blood. They had abandoned it in the Vale of Stones thirty years ago, watching its finest warriors go down beneath the blades of a Lannis army. And now he stood, Thane of his people, in a ruined street, as Battle Inkallim came pace by careful pace towards him, and everything was at once the same and entirely different. This time Lannis was gone, burned away to ashes. But again Horin was betrayed. The Battle had stolen away every victory Kanin’s Blood had won for the faith; they had handed it all to the mad halfbreed. They had condemned the world to his vile rule. They had lifted the man responsible for Wain’s death up on their shoulders and made thousands bend the knee to him. Kanin made fists of his hands to stop them shaking. Today, today it would begin. The lead rider came to a halt before him. Two more let their horses drift wide to flank her on each side. She stared down at Kanin impassively. “Thane,” she said. He nodded. “You’ve come for me, I assume?” “We have a message for you.” “From Kan Avor. From the halfbreed.” He did not conceal his contempt. It washed over her. Her pride made her impervious, he thought. It made her careless too, perhaps. “You have gathered many spears here, Thane. Gathered them where they are not required. The war, the struggle of the faithful against the faithless, is happening far to the south of here. At Kolkyre. Beyond Kilvale. That is where your spears are needed.” “Because your strength falters?” Kanin smiled. “Because everything comes apart in your hands? I see, raven. I hear. I know your armies melt away like the winter snow come the thaw. I was there. I saw it start. Madness sprouting everywhere. Disorder. By now I’m sure your many Captains cannot hold more than a handful of spears together, cannot muster anything but the smallest of companies that will actually follow an order.” Her face was an impassive mask, but he could see the truth of it in her eyes. “That’s what you’ve achieved for the creed, raven,” he told her. “Chaos.” “Your strength is required,” she said flatly. “You don’t understand what you’ve helped to create, do you? Strength is not measured by the enumeration of spears and swords any more. It is not measured in armies. Strength is a matter of will now. It’s about who can stand against the madness and keep a steady course through the storm. It’s about who can keep sight of what they need to do.” “Your swords are required, Thane. Do not fail the creed now.” “You threaten me?” he said. “A Thane?” And he laughed at her. He possessed his own kind of madness, he knew. A sort of joy at the setting aside of all pretence and delay. A storm of blood would be released, and he felt joy at the prospect of it, for he had wearied of everything else. Nothing else could offer him any meaning, or peace, or rest. Nothing else, he felt certain, offered any kind of salvation, to him or to anyone. So there would be blood, and he would rejoice in it. “My strength is my own,” he said. “I’ll keep it to myself. Tell me, is there much sickness in Kan Avor? Are there fevers eating away at your halfbreed’s slaves yet?” Her eyes narrowed just enough to please him. “You have warriors hidden in two houses behind us, Thane. You cannot imagine that is enough to prevent word of your betrayal reaching Kan Avor. You cannot imagine it is so easy to kill the Children of the Hundred.” Again he laughed. That savage joy was pounding in him, coursing through his veins like invigorating fire. He imagined that with it inside him he might be capable of anything. He might be capable of shaking the whole world to its foundations. “Oh,” he laughed, “I do not imagine it to be easy. That is why I have warriors hidden in a great many more than two houses, raven.” He raised his left hand. Before the movement was finished, there were crossbow bolts standing in the chests of the three Inkallim before him. They appeared there with dull thuds, as if snapping out through the ribcages from within. But they had come, Kanin knew, from Hunt bows. Eska and her two fellow Inkallim. He harvested another small, bitter joy from that: Inkallim killed Inkallim at the behest of a Horin Thane. One of the ravens fell at once, sliding with blank eyes out of his saddle. The other two swayed but remained astride the horses. Those first three bolts were the vanguard of a swarm that clattered in from every direction, lashing at the column of Inkallim. One quarrel darted so close by Kanin’s face that he felt the brush of its fletching on his cheek. He did not flinch. He seized the slack reins out of the woman’s limp hand. She was starting to slump forward, folding herself about the bolt buried in her chest, but she still breathed. Kanin twisted the horse’s head out of the way and stabbed his sword up into her stomach. It did not penetrate her leathers, but it was enough to knock her to the ground. As she fell, Kanin heard crossbow bolts strike the horse’s flank. The animal screamed in panic, and tore itself free of his grasp. His people were pouring into the street, hurrying to close with those of the Inkallim that had not already fallen. His people, he called them. The truth was, he had brought more Lannis men than warriors of his own Blood to prepare this welcome. He trusted their visceral hatred of the ravens more than he trusted the loyalty of his own swords. His father would have been ashamed, enraged, had he lived to see such things. Kanin did not care. It no longer mattered. The Children of the Hundred fought as he would have expected them to: ferociously, fanatically. Many of them were wounded, with bolts nestled in their flesh, but they fought nevertheless. When a horse fell or was dragged down, its rider rolled clear and rose and carved a path into the converging throng. When the ravens died—pierced, as often as not, by a forest of spears lunging in from every side—they did so silently. Still fighting. Two of the Inkallim came riding through the crowd towards Kanin. Their swords flashed, slashing down first on one side, then the other, as they cut away every enemy that closed upon them. They had eyes only for Kanin. Those they killed and maimed did not even merit their attention. Kanin grinned at them as they drew near, and hefted his sword. Igris was at his side. One of the Inkallim was suddenly twisted by the impact of a bolt in her shoulder. That was enough to open the path for the spear that jabbed up from below and pierced her. The other burst free of the mob, his horse surging into a charge. Igris ran forward. To Kanin, it seemed a slow and dreamlike moment: the sound of the battle receded, his shieldman drifted into the path of the horse. The great beast moved with strange grace, forelegs rising and falling, lifting mud and slush in elegant plumes from the road. Igris did not try for the Inkallim. He ducked low and veered sideways, and hit the horse’s leg with his sword. The blow sent the blade spinning away out of his hand but broke the animal’s leg too. Kanin watched with detached fascination as the horse buckled, ploughing down into the wet sludge, rolling, sending up a great curving curtain of spray. The Inkallim leaped from the horse’s back and erupted through that curtain, reaching for Kanin. It all seemed so slow. Kanin’s mind raced, but his body followed its commands with what felt like glacial lethargy. He leaned back and twisted as the Inkallim came towards him. As the raven’s blade came up, levelling itself, arrowing itself in. The impact was stunning. It smashed the breath out of Kanin’s chest, sent him sprawling, punched off his feet. His cloak spread and flapped about him. Like wings, he thought foolishly as he hit the ground and slid on his back. The sword had torn across his breastbone, ripping open his chain shirt, lacerating his chest. He could feel his own hot blood on his skin. But it was not a deep wound. By the smallest of margins, the blade’s point had come at too sharp an angle to punch its way through the cage of his ribs. Not dead, was all Kanin thought as he struggled to get to his feet. Not dead yet. The Inkallim was rising too. His sword was gone, twisted out of his hands. Kanin still had his. He scrambled forward, slithering through the slush, and lashed out at the Inkallim’s ankles. The man leaped above the swing. Then Igris came roaring in and hit him about the waist, embracing him, bearing him down. The two of them rolled, and flailed, and clawed at one another. Kanin stood over them. Every breath lit bands of fiery pain that encircled his chest. His legs felt loose, his sword terribly heavy in his hand. The Inkallim somehow got a heel into Igris’ groin and half-kicked, half-pushed the shieldman away. Kanin took his chance. He hacked down at the raven’s head, once, twice, until the skull broke and caved in. Again he struck, and again. It took him that long to master himself. Fighting off waves of dizziness, he extended a hand and hauled Igris to his feet. The shieldman was gasping, wild-eyed. “Well done,” Kanin murmured. He turned back to the battle, and found it to be over. Dead littered the street. One horse was limping in a trembling circle, another pounding away riderless. It had cost better than thirty lives to bring down those few Inkallim, but it had been done. Townsfolk were beating some of the corpses, pulping them with staffs and clubs. Stiffly, painfully, Kanin sheathed his sword and pressed a hand to his wound. It would need cleaning. There would be fragments of cloth or metal to be picked out of his opened flesh. But it would not kill him. “Enough,” he shouted. The pain almost choked him, and he had to close his eyes for a moment. When he opened them he spoke more softly, more carefully. “Enough. We’re done here. Now it’s Kan Avor.”
V
As she moved through the Palace of Red Stone, treading lightly along its polished passageways, Anyara became aware of a low, almost subliminal, sound. At first it seemed to be emanating from the marble, as if it resonated to the beat of some vast drum deep in the earth. But the sound grew slowly more distinct and constant as she reached the northern side of the palace. It took on its own character. There was some great crowd, she realised, out there on the streets beyond these quiet marmoreal precincts, and this was its single voice, built out of a thousand individual cries and shouts, the tramping of many feet, the jostling of bodies one against the other. Built out of the fury of the mob. The realisation roused more curiosity than fear in her. When she chanced upon an open door, she drifted cautiously through it and into an empty room. Though she could not pretend to feel safe, moving alone through the palace’s intricate passageways, she would have gone mad hiding away in her chambers all day and all night. She had crept out, carefully ensuring that she did not disturb Coinach, who had for once lapsed into an uncomfortable-looking sleep at his watch post in the corridor outside. She thus breached both the Chancellor’s command for her to remain in gentle incarceration, and Coinach’s trust that she would allow him to guard her as he thought necessary. The first breach she cared nothing for; the second she felt was justified, for Coinach desperately needed sleep, and she knew herself how rare and precious were those brief spells of slumber undisturbed by restless dreams. It was a dining room, but one evidently not used during the winter, for the long table was entirely bare, the fireplace spotlessly clean, the tapestries on the wall concealed behind sheets to protect them from any intrusive light. There were tall windows, but they were shuttered, and the shutters were secured with heavy, ornate copper hooks. The noise was unmistakable now, even though Anyara had never heard quite its like. A great collective rage. It was an unsettling sound. “What are you doing here?” She turned towards that ice-laden voice, its chill daggers cutting through the tumultuous rumble outside. She fought the black fear it loosed in her but could not prevent its rise. She felt herself shrinking, retreating into a corner of her mind. “I was looking for your wife, Chancellor,” she managed to say. Mordyn Jerain smiled at her, but he did it with his teeth, not his eyes. He was between Anyara and the only doorway, and that frightened her. She squeezed her hands together in search of a steadying focus. “You hear it?” the Chancellor said. He came a few paces closer to her. She edged back until she felt the edge of the table against her thighs. “You hear the mob in full cry? That is the sound of an ending,” Mordyn said, cocking his head. “That is the sound of change. Perhaps you hear it, and you think it a wild thing, beyond control.” He had an air of contentment, as if he listened to the sweetest and most melodious of music. “Not so,” he mused, his eyelids languidly drooping. “I made it. It is as much a product of my craft as the crop a farmer harvests is the product of his. Such has ever been my gift. To shape that which others assume cannot be shaped.” There were, now and again, even through the Palace of Red Stone’s thick walls, and those heavy shutters, individual voices to be heard amidst the otherwise formless noise: jagged rocks briefly exposed and then drowned again by the churning waves. Other than that, the sound could as easily have been born of animal throats as human. The Chancellor seemed lost in reverie, and Anyara moved to ease herself around him towards the doorway. His eyes at once sprang open and alert, and he reached out and laid a hand on the tabletop, blocking her path with his arm. He was oppressively close to her. “In truth,” he breathed, “the crop is not quite ready for the scythe. Another day or two. No more, I think. Then the harvest comes.” “I do not understand such matters,” Anyara said, marshalling all the submissive, compliant girlishness that came no more naturally to her than flight would to a fish. “I have no interest in them.” “Indeed?” Mordyn said with arched, coldly amused eyebrows. “You are something of a novice when it comes to dissemblance, I see. But do not worry. For now, my interest in you could not be less were you some dim-witted scullery maid. It is given to precious few to exert some influence upon the course of great events; to guide the current, rather than be merely carried along by it. You, my dear lady, are not one of those few. You are a gnat. No, of even less import. You are a common prisoner. Your Blood is extinguished.” “My brother will —” The blow, an open-handed slap that had every strand of the Chancellor’s strength behind it, was so sudden and violent that she reeled. Lights danced across Anyara’s vision. Pain blazed in her cheek with such ferocity that she wondered if he had split it open. Mordyn came after her before she had a chance to compose herself. He seized her neck with one hand, her flailing arm with the other, and smashed her face down onto the table. He pinned her there and leaned over her, hissing into her ear. “You are not listening. Your brother? Where is your brother, lady? Hiding somewhere. Cowering like some craven child in a hovel, or a cave. Or dead, perhaps. Do you think he’s dead?” “Orisian’s not dead.” “No? It doesn’t matter. He is of no consequence. Less even than you. Do you understand? Entirely, utterly of no consequence. None of them are. The day of Thanes enters its twilight. They will pass. They will fall. Another power is coming, and it will rule in their stead.” “Let go of me!” “No. Listen. I have seen, and I understand, what is coming. I am a part of it, and I will be one of those to rise, at his side, from the wreckage when the new dawn comes. Your brother will not. He and all his kind, Thanes and Kings and Bloodheirs and Stewards, their time is ending.” He bent still closer to her ear, so close she could feel his lips brushing her skin. “Your time is ending.” “You’re his, aren’t you?” Anyara said. “Bound, like Tarcene. Somehow, he made you his tool. His toy.” Those fingers on her tightened. She felt the nails digging into her skin, pressing harder on the muscles and the veins beneath. She could no longer tell what was the sound of the mob outside and what the rushing of her own blood, its beating in her head. “What is happening here?” Anyara could not move, could not see the doorway, but that voice—light, clear, graceful—was enough to abruptly calm her fear. Mordyn released his grip upon the side of her neck and stepped away from her. She no longer felt the heat of his breath. Stiffly, cautiously, Anyara levered herself up off the table. One side of her face burned, and she could feel the print of his hand there like a brand; the other ached from the impact with the table. She refused to touch either. She would not give him that pleasure. Both she and the Chancellor looked towards the door, and towards Tara Jerain standing there, in a gown of surpassing elegance, her hands neatly clasped across her stomach. “What is happening here?” she asked again. Perfect composure. Not a hint of accusation or displeasure, only bland enquiry. Anyara glared at Mordyn, but he had already dismissed her from his thoughts. He was moving towards the door, adjusting his sleeves, sweeping back his hair. He paid no more attention to his wife than to Anyara. He brushed past Tara, jolting her shoulder out of the way. “You will regret that,” Anyara said levelly but loudly to his back. He paused, already almost lost in the shadows behind Tara. “I don’t think so,” he said without looking around. The Chancellor laughed, and disappeared into the corridor. And with his departure, as the muted roar of the riot rose and fell like waves rubbing up against the walls of the palace, Tara’s mask crumbled. Her hand covered her mouth, her brow tightened and creased into grief. Her eyes gleamed with unshed tears. “My lady,” Anyara said at once, walking quickly towards her, one arm outstretched in a calculated gesture of both sympathy and appeal. “I need your help. Something terrible is happening, to all of us. I know you see that. I know you do.” Tara said nothing, her mouth, and whatever pain it might have expressed, still hidden behind that smooth hand. But her soft anguished eyes were firmly upon Anyara. “Take me to the High Thane,” Anyara said. “Please. It’s all I can think of to do, and I can’t do it without your help.” The Moon Palace was in a ferment. Servants ran hither and thither, every one of them wearing much the same expression of alarm and weary unease. The guards, who seemed to be posted at virtually every door, every junction of passageways, stared with intense suspicion at all who came within sight. A number of them watched with particular narrow-eyed attention as Coinach passed them, but none made any move to intercept him. He was in the company of the Chancellor’s wife, after all. As she and Tara hastened into the palace’s heart, Anyara noted several ladies of the High Thane’s court rushing along, shepherding young children like a gaggle of geese. All of them were dressed for travel, in hooded cloaks and fur gloves and stout, if refined, boots. “People are running away,” Anyara murmured. “Do you blame them?” Tara asked her. And Anyara could not, in truth. She had seen enough of the city’s condition, during the brief but fraught journey from the Palace of Red Stone, to convince her of the absolute wisdom of leaving its confines. The earlier riot had died down but left its flotsam scattered through the streets. A few bodies. Many burned-out houses and workshops. Heaps of debris—broken pots, roof tiles, shards of wood—strewn everywhere. And fearful faces peering from windows. Tara had been inclined to turn back when a company of the High Thane’s warriors had ridden at the gallop through a crossroads ahead of them. Anyara had prevailed upon her to continue, though not without some unease of her own. It was all uncomfortably reminiscent of what she had seen at Koldihrve, albeit on a grander scale. In the distance they had been able to hear fighting. Everywhere there had been the faint but persistent smell of smoke. Coinach’s disquiet had become more and more pronounced, until he too had tried to insist on a return to the Chancellor’s palace. “We’re no safer there,” Anyara had said sternly, angling her face to ensure he could see the livid bruise already blooming where Mordyn Jerain had struck her. The anguished expression on his face at the sight of it instantly made her feel profoundly guilty. Ashamed of her cruelty. It had been her choice alone to shed his protection. Now, struggling through the nascent chaos within the Moon Palace, she doubted her insistence on coming here. Not out of any fear for their safety, but because she was beginning to wonder whether any place so self-evidently veering towards panic could exercise enough will and authority to actually control events. They finally found their way to the chamber of some court official. Anyara was gratified by the fawning deference the man displayed towards Tara, though he was infuriatingly non-committal regarding the prospect of an immediate audience with the High Thane. Tara’s demeanour changed markedly and instantly. She berated the man with stern authority, and he hurried off, suitably chastened, to make the necessary enquiries. They waited, tense, in that chamber for what seemed a long time. Anyara could tell, from Coinach’s distracted manner and the way he chewed absently at his lip, that he was struggling with himself over his failure to keep her safe from harm. She longed to offer him some comfort, but it was something she did not want to discuss in front of Tara, so she held her tongue and made a point of smiling warmly at her shieldman whenever she caught his eye. The audience was granted. They were ushered, with all appropriate haste, along high, echoing corridors, to a side room adjoining one of the feasting halls. It was surprisingly sparsely furnished, though the wall hangings were exquisite and the rug one of the most obviously costly Anyara had ever seen. Gryvan oc Haig sat in a broad dark chair with high arms. There was no other seating. Anyara, Tara and Coinach were forced to stand in a line, on the centre of that luxurious rug. Kale, chief amongst the High Thane’s shieldmen, stood to one side, staring fixedly and pointedly at Coinach. He looked to Anyara like a miserable, surly man. Tara executed a tidy curtsy for the Thane of Thanes. Anyara copied her, aware that she made the gesture appear entirely graceless by comparison. “I would have received you in more pleasing surroundings, my lady,” Gryvan growled at Tara, “had you not come in such disreputable company.” To her credit, the Chancellor’s wife betrayed no hint of discomfiture at such a gruff welcome. Her poise, given the extremity of the distress Anyara knew very well she was controlling, was remarkable. “The times seem most disreputable, sire.” Tara smiled. “One can’t always choose one’s company as freely as one would wish in such circumstances.” Anyara ignored the subtle insult. Nothing mattered save inducing Gryvan to listen to what she had to say. Impatience was rampant in her, but that too she strove to ignore and silence. “I like to think I may choose mine,” Gryvan said. He still had not looked at Anyara. “What is wrong with your hands?” he asked Tara. She glanced at the discreet bandages that protected the worst of her burns. “It is nothing, truly. A slight accident, that is all. I can be unaccountably clumsy on occasion.” Gryvan nodded. He had all too evidently lost interest in the subject as soon as he asked the question. “We will be brief, sire,” Tara assured him. She kept that smile perfectly in place, and not for an instant did it look anything other than entirely natural and sincere. Gryvan appeared far from satisfied, but he lapsed into a heavy silence. There were dark, sagging bags of skin under his eyes, Anyara noted. A tremor, perhaps a tic, in his cheek that she had never noticed before. A latent accusatory anger in his gaze. None of these struck her as promising signs. Tara glanced at Anyara and nodded. “Sire,” Anyara began, then paused to gather herself, for she realised her voice had sounded a little too urgent and assertive. “Sire, I know you will not be inclined to give credence to anything I say…” Gryvan grunted a dry affirmation to that. “… but I beg you just to hear me out. There’s something wrong about everything that’s happening, you must agree to that.” “I must do nothing,” Gryvan interrupted her. “High Thanes are permitted to make their own choices about what they do.” “Of course, sire,” Anyara said hurriedly. “Forgive me. I mean only that something seems amiss in the sudden rising to the surface of so many tensions, so much dissent. I believe I know the cause of some of it at least, perhaps all of it. That is all I came to tell you, sire, for though you doubt the loyalty of my Blood to yours, I can assure you —” “What nonsense is she prattling about?” Gryvan asked Tara. The Chancellor’s wife inclined her head sympathetically, projecting complete understanding of Gryvan’s irritation. “Well,” Tara murmured, “I have a suspicion there may be just a grain of truth in her ideas, sire. We may—we do—disagree, she and I, on the details, but I fear… I fear there is indeed an… an issue that may have to be resolved.” “An issue?” Gryvan said, frowning. “Your Chancellor, sire,” Anyara said. “He is not himself. Entirely and completely not himself. I think he has… may have been bound by a na’kyrim. As Tarcene was, sire. Orlane Kingbinder. There is a man, Aeglyss, who marches with the Black Road…” “Bound?” Gryvan cried incredulously. “Have you come here to mock me?” “Perhaps not bound, sire,” Tara said quickly. “Perhaps not that. But… my husband is behaving strangely, sire. Ever since his return. Much that he has done and said is… confusing.” “Are you accusing your own husband of treachery?” Gryvan demanded. “No, sire.” Tara’s edifice of control and good humour was at last crumbling. Anyara could see, and hear, the chinks in her armour widening. “No, not that. But something ails him. It might be wise to place less weight upon his advice than you have been accustomed to do in times past.” “Oh, believe me,” said Gryvan in dark and threatening tones, “I already have ample reasons of my own to do just that. And doubts, lady. I have doubts. But binding. This… this prisoner is talking of binding. That would be… something else entirely.” “You’ve no more cause to make a prisoner of me than you have to…” Anyara cursed herself for the sharp retort, but it was too late. Gryvan settled his full, glowering attention upon her. “Your brother is outlawed.” Anyara could clearly hear the danger in the High Thane’s voice, yet she could not stop herself. “The accusations against him are lies,” she said bluntly. “Lies? Then where is your brother?” The High Thane’s face was abruptly contorted by rage, stretched like a freshly scraped hide pegged out to dry. “Where is your brother?” he howled, spittle flying, a red blush of anger spreading through his cheeks, his neck. “I don’t see him here, where he belongs. Now, in time of crisis, in time of crisis… where’s the boy?” He stabbed a stiff finger in Anyara’s direction. Like a weapon. “We fight wars, we are beset by enemies, by traitors, and where is he?” “I —” Anyara began, but there was to be no voice in this echoing chamber save one. “Traitors!” Gryvan snarled. He looked like a dog, Anyara thought. A dog hauling at its leash, all teeth and fury and foam. “This city… this city was founded by sailors and fishermen, before the Gods left this world. Long before the Kingships, there were markets here, and watchtowers, and granaries. The Aygll Kings kept a winter palace here for a time. The… the… Before the War of the Tainted, there were Kyrinin here, in these streets. They had huts down by the river. You see? Do you see how old this place is? How ancient? “But it was my grandfather who built the wall. It was my father who raised the Moon Palace. It was us, our line, that made it great. I’ll not yield it now, if that’s what you think. I’ll not let everything be taken away from us. Not as long as I’ve strength in my arm and a fire in my heart.” “Sire,” Tara began in a placatory manner, but Gryvan shouted over her. “Out! Get out!” Tara bowed and began to back away immediately. Anyara could not surrender quite so readily. “Sire…” “Out,” hissed Kale, the shieldman. The unexpected sound startled Anyara, as did what she saw in his eyes. She allowed Coinach to gently pull her out into the corridor.
*
“Mad?” Torquentine grunted. “Is she sure?” “She seems so.” Magrayn nodded. She was watching with a somewhat sceptical, concerned expression as a dozen burly men attempted to ease her prodigious master sideways from his bed of thick cushions onto the massive trolley standing ready to receive his weight. “And do we have any faith in her judgement in such matters?” “Well, she is only a maid. But she has served in the Palace of Red Stone for some time. She should be capable of recognising… unusual, perverse behaviour on the Shadowhand’s part.” “The man engages in little else,” Torquentine observed. “Move your hand, man. I’ve some… a rash, shall we say.” The wheels on the trolley creaked ominously as the first of Torquentine’s buttocks was allowed to rest upon it. Magrayn grimaced. Torquentine noted this and frowned. “You assured me this has been tested,” he pointed out. “Indeed. It has.” Torquentine found her tone considerably less reassuring than he would have hoped. But he had committed himself into his doorkeeper’s capable hands once he had made the decision to depart for pastures new. It was too late to lose faith in her competence. “Do we trust her? This maid?” he asked. “She is not some ploy of the Shadowhand’s, turning our curiosity against us?” “I think it unlikely. We have convinced her, I am sure, that her father’s life is forfeit should she fail us.” “Hmm. The mattress on this trolley is distressingly thin. How long must I remain perched upon it?” “Not long.” He recognised her imprecision as predictive of extended discomfort. If not suffering, indeed. He chose not to press the matter, as the only alternative would be to remain here in his Vaymouth cellar, and that prospect pleased him still less. “No reason, I suppose, that the Chancellor should be excused from falling prey to the malady of the mind claiming so many others, merely by virtue of his wit and title. When an entire city plunges into disorder and rapine and pillage, nothing should surprise us.” “Particularly if the Chancellor concerned helped the plunge along himself,” Magrayn said. With Torquentine settled upon his unconventional transport, she nodded to the men standing ready by the far wall of his subterranean lair. Obedient to her command, they began to remove the false stones set in the wall, slowly exposing a tunnel running off south-westwards. “Indeed, indeed,” Torquentine mused as he watched the men work. “There’s the most disquieting element in the whole affair. Still, I suppose if we conclude the Chancellor is mad, it clarifies a good deal. A madman may do anything. He may wantonly arrange the torture and murder of a rival Kingship’s Ambassador, thereby all but inviting them to make war. He may arrange for the escape of a rebellious minor Thane, thus practically ensuring the renewal of the rebellion so recently crushed. “He may, if rumour is true, persuade the High Thane to withdraw a portion of his army from the field on the very eve of what consequently proved to be our Blood’s greatest defeat in battle. Leaving those intolerable Black Road creatures considerably closer to Vaymouth than to their own borders and with notably little between them and us to distract them. He might even, absurd as it sounds, find someone—some insufficiently cautious and rightly regretful fool—willing to set a few fires, and use said fires as a lever to break apart the bonds which held together our city’s evidently fragile arrangements of power and patronage and mutual restraint.” The widening portal in the wall revealed a straight tunnel with walls of soft, muddy earth supported by an extensive framework of struts and beams and planking. It smelled bad down there, and Torquentine wrinkled his nose. It also looked unpleasantly wet. There was water trickling down the walls, and lying in slack pools as far as he could see. “Not an attractive view,” he said. “Still, I cannot bring myself to remain in a city become so distressingly unpredictable and violent. It’s impossible to conduct any kind of useful business. Particularly when one is about to give quite possibly mortal offence to one—possibly more—of the most powerful men in the land.” “You have decided, then?” Magrayn asked. Torquentine nodded. “One last task for you, my dear, before we fly from this sadly precarious nest. Take our inconvenient prisoner to the Moon Palace and leave an appropriate message. If Mordyn Jerain’s the rot at the heart of all this trouble, we may as well give some assistance to those who might be able to cut it out. There’ll never be another coin to be made out of this city, illicit or otherwise, unless someone does.” “I will meet you at the docks,” Magrayn said. A number of hands gently but firmly pressed against his back had Torquentine trundling indecorously forward. He felt like a morsel being wheeled into the waiting gullet of a giant snake. “The boat is fully prepared?” he asked Magrayn as she moved towards the door. “It is. The captain has all the specified supplies on board for the journey.” “Good, good.” Torquentine tapped his chin with a single stout finger. A certain despondency was settling over him at the thought of what lay ahead. “I must admit, I do not look forward with much glee to the process of boarding ship.” “Don’t worry,” Magrayn said lightly. Had he not known better, Torquentine might almost have thought he detected the contours of a smile struggling to emerge upon her lips. “They have strong ropes and nets. I checked.” “Ropes and nets,” Torquentine muttered glumly, shaking his head, as his doorkeeper disappeared to prepare Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig for one further, and likely final, journey. “Ropes and nets.”
VI
On the best days, Jaen Narran could imagine, to look out from a high window of Kolkyre’s Tower of Thrones would be to see views truly fit for a Thane, and once for High Thanes. Westward, the city sweeping down to the sprawling harbour teemed with life, and beyond it lay Anaron’s Bay with its lines of gentle waves marching in one after another. Perhaps, she imagined, on a clear and sharp day, it might even be possible to glimpse Il Anaron itself, the great island out in the distance. Eastward, the long curve of the city wall and then the broad expanse of the plains—thick with rich green grass in high summer, those—mounted gradually in successive ranks of ridges and hills until finally they merged into the very foothills of the Karkyre Peaks. But the best days had long been absent from Kolkyre. Now the view to the west showed a silent and moribund harbour. That to the east revealed not immense fields thick with grass but the huge black and brown stain of the besieging forces of the Black Road, arcing around the city like a scar. A scene rather closer to hand held Jaen’s attention now, though. She stood beside Ilessa oc Kilkry-Haig, staring down at the violence being done within the Tower’s own encircling wall. The Steward’s House, where Lagair Haldyn, Gryvan oc Haig’s mouthpiece, resided, abutted that wall, down at the foot of the mound on which the Tower of Thrones stood. It was in fact built into the fabric of the wall. Now, the Steward’s House was under assault. Crowds of Kilkry warriors milled about, some battering at its door with a heavy wooden beam, others tearing at the wooden shutters closed over its windows. Marshalling these disorderly and frenzied forces was Roaric, the Thane himself. He sat astride his finest warhorse, his Shield arrayed about him, further up the mound. Now and again he would shout some command or encouragement. Jaen and Ilessa were too far above to hear what he said, but his words never seemed to have any significant effect, in any case. The warriors he thought to guide were in the grip of their own fury. Once he had given them a target for their simmering resentment and frustration, in the form of the Steward and his household, they had followed their own instincts and hungers, not their Thane’s instructions. Lagair Haldyn had been barricaded inside his official residence for several days, Jaen knew. He was far from alone in taking such measures. The city streets had become entirely unsafe for any except the most savage and determined. Still, he had even better reasons than most for keeping out of sight, given the deep-seated hatred with which the Haig Blood was now almost universally regarded in Kolkyre. Ilessa and Jaen waited only long enough to see the Steward dragged out into the gardens before they turned away. They could not avoid his screams, though, which were piercing and easily loud enough to reach up to the heights of the Tower. They were abruptly curtailed. “That’s the end of any chance of reconciling with Haig,” muttered Ilessa as they descended hurriedly down the central spine of the Tower. “Such chances might have been slim in any case,” Jaen ventured to suggest. “Oh, I know. I can regret their abandonment, nevertheless. But my son was not to be swayed in this or in anything else. Not any more. The fever is upon him, and wholly his master.” The resignation in Ilessa’s voice was not flawless. Jaen could still catch the trace of desperate sadness that was there. The woman was seeing the last of her family surrender himself to the practices of the slaughterhouse. Whatever virtues Roaric might once have possessed, they were of the past now, for day by day he had become someone ruled by a single obsessive need: to lash out, to struggle against the chains he felt so heavily upon him. The Steward’s misfortune was to be the most easily within reach, and thus the first to suffer. They found Roaric at the foot of the stairs, issuing flurries of orders to his attending Captains. They were in the same eager, fierce mood as their Thane. As word of his intent had spread, so had that mood. So had the anticipation of blood, and the yearning for it. Whatever sickness it was that so beset Kolkyre, one of its clearest and commonest effects, Jaen had observed, was to convince those falling victim to it that they could be healed only by the shedding of other people’s blood. “Is there nothing I can say?” Ilessa asked her son, ignoring the warriors crowding around him. Roaric waved them away. “No,” he said, pulling on his gauntlets once more. “If you do not meet with success…” “If a man feared defeat, he would never give battle,” Roaric snapped. There was contempt in his tone, and Jaen could see how it wounded Ilessa. Yet she must have known this would be her reception, and had chosen even so to make one final attempt. “Every victory is inevitably succeeded by defeat,” Roaric went on dismissively, as if he addressed a child. “It is the nature of our lives. A man might fight a thousand battles and emerge triumphant from every one; still, he will suffer defeat in the end, for we die and we are forgotten. If we cannot face defeat, we must live always, throughout our lives, in fear. For it awaits us all.” “Very wise, I’m sure,” muttered Ilessa. “In this instance, if you are defeated, your city is liable to fall with you.” “What would you have me do?” cried Roaric furiously. His cheeks reddened. “We starve because Vaymouth will send us no supplies. We kill one another. We lie awake at night, too terrified of our dreams to attempt sleep. We are withering. Your people, Mother, are dying. Every day. Every night. Well, if death wants us, let us at least force it to come for us as we fight. “You’ve seen what’s happening to them out there.” He lashed an arm out in a vaguely easterly direction. “The Black Road fails just as we do. Hundreds of them have gone off into the north or the south. Those who remain fight amongst themselves, scatter further and further across the land. Every night you can hear the cries of the dying. Every day there are more bodies piled up outside their camps. They’re rotting away.” “Let them rot, then,” Ilessa said quietly. Her calm in the face of Roaric’s violent emotions was extraordinary. “Let them kill one another. Let them sicken and die. If we can but hold together for a while…” “We cannot! We cannot. I cannot.” Jaen could see the anguish in the young man now, breaching for once the anger that so often disguised it. “We are shamed. All our lands gone, save this one city. Every battle lost. Haig treating us like… like vermin. It must not stand. It must not stand. Not if I’m to be a Thane worthy of the title. Not if… Not if…” “Would you have me watch you die, then, from the city walls?” Ilessa asked coldly. “I did not see your brother die. But I was there when your father had his throat opened. Would you have me witness your end too?” Roaric glared at his mother, then turned on his heel and walked out into the wintry light. For all the harshness of her last question, Jaen could see the tremor in Ilessa’s lips and chin as her last son turned his back on her and went back to his warhorse.
*
The two women were together, on the walls of Vaymouth, to watch events unfold. Jaen had argued against it, fearful for Ilessa’s heart. But the Thane’s mother had only murmured, “I need to see. I need to see for myself. I won’t have someone else coming to me, bringing me that news.” So they were on the walls watching when the horns sounded all round the rim of the city. They were there when Vaymouth opened its gates and poured its men, by the thousand, out onto the fields. Warriors and townsfolk, seamen and exiles, all came flooding out in thick dark streams. The noise of their advance reverberated through the stones of those walls. Jaen felt it, in her feet, in her breastbone, the deep rumble of imminent carnage. The Black Roaders were not unprepared, but nor were they capable of ordered movement. Their companies massed in tardy disarray, some not at all. Bands of horsemen galloped up and down behind their dishevelled lines, as if maddened and disorientated. Campfires, inadvertently kicked apart in the rush for weapons and armour, spread and soon flames were flickering up from tents and from piles of stores. Jaen stared out as both armies began to come apart almost at once. From either side, while the hosts churned back and forth in confusion, knots of warriors would break free, like swirling bees separating from a greater swarm, and rush forward to throw themselves futilely against their enemy. Jaen had never seen such a conflict before, but she had been wedded to her Blood’s greatest warrior for many years, and she knew a little of how battles were meant to be fought. And she knew a good deal of how precious life was, and how reluctantly it should be given up. This was a new time, though. New rules governed the waging of war and the value of life alike. The two armies never mustered a coordinated advance; they simply bled into one another as more and more of their numbers flung themselves into the fray. The open ground between the two forces was gradually whittled away, contracting into little islands of stillness in a sea of furious motion, finally disappearing altogether as the waves of strife and death closed over them. Jaen and Ilessa now gazed out over a single tempestuous form that swayed over the land, surging first here and then there, drifting slowly south and leaving the trampled ground strewn with hundreds of bodies. “There is my son,” Ilessa said quietly. She pointed, and Jaen saw Roaric, atop his great horse, leading his Shield in a wild charge through the heart of the battle. They cut a swathe through the vast throng, though whether it was foes or friends who were going down beneath their flashing blades and pounding hoofs it was not possible to tell. On and on they rode, and a multitude of deaths attended their passage. In time a denser knot of figures took them in its grip, and the waves of that cruel sea lapped ever higher about them, and seemed about to overwhelm them. Jaen could feel Ilessa tensing by her side, and could only wonder at the woman’s stubborn, dignified determination to witness her son’s fate. It would have been beyond Jaen to stand here and watch Taim fight for his life in this way. The horsemen were obscured for a few moments, swamped by the throngs of bodies pressing in against them. Then the host thinned itself again, and they could still see Roaric, unhorsed now, fighting with his Shield about him, laying down whole drifts of corpses before them. Set to drown in blood, Jaen thought gloomily. Set to cede dominion over the world to death itself. And so it went, for a long time. The tides of battle ebbed and flowed; the dead crowded the field, coalescing amongst the grass into a single smooth bruise on the surface of the land. Long after it seemed that the fallen must outnumber the living, an end came. It was a stuttering, hesitant ending, imprecise. In some places on the field warriors found there was no one left to kill. In others the forces of the Black Road began to straggle away, scattering in any and all directions. Weary cheers went up along the walls. Not from Jaen or Ilessa. The two of them went down and waited inside the city’s greatest gate. Roaric’s army came trickling back in. The men stumbled and fell; stared about them with wide, uncomprehending eyes. Few were capable of celebration or of responding to the approbation of those who had watched their victory from afar. Several staggered in through the gate and, as if they had been sustained only by the driving imperative to attain that goal, fell in the roadway, dead or unconscious. At last the Thane returned to his city. He came not on his mighty warhorse, but carried on a litter by his Shield. Ilessa drew them aside and leaned over her son. “He took no wound, my lady,” one of the massive warriors carrying the litter said. “He simply fell, and we found him thus.” The Thane of the Kilkry Blood laughed and wept at the same time. Tears streamed from his eyes. “Roaric,” Ilessa whispered. “Roaric.” All too clearly Jaen caught the pleading in those words, the all-consuming desire for her son to return to her from whatever place he had become lost in. But he did not respond. His jaw moved, but no words emerged. “Take him to the Tower,” Ilessa said, defeated. “Time will heal him, or nothing will.” Gryvan oc Haig stared in disbelief at the figure kneeling before him. “At the gate?” he said. “Yes, sire.” Kale’s intonation was typically flat and dispassionate, but even he was regarding Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig with a certain puzzled fascination. “Trussed and bound, just as you see him.” “And no one saw how he came to be there?” “There was a crowd milling about. When it cleared, he remained. With a burlap sack over his head. And a message. A parchment tucked inside his jacket.” “Message?” Gryvan could feel his anger building. He was heartily sick of surprises, even ones as relatively benign as the unexpected return of something he had thought lost. Each new instance of the unanticipated merely fed his conviction that he was conspired against. Mocked. “What message?” “That we should, if we want to know where Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig has been these last few days, consult with our Chancellor.” Gryvan roared, and swept the wine ewer and goblets from the table at his side. They skittered across the marble floor, spinning and decorating the polished slabs with a spray of red liquid. “Send for him! I want to see my Shadowhand here now.” The word reached Gryvan some time later that his Chancellor was indisposed and unable to come to the Moon Palace. The message had been delayed in its journey between the two palaces because the first man dispatched to convey the summons to the Chancellor had been swept up in a running street fight between two very extensive families in the Meddock Ward and been knifed in the heart. Both the contents of the message and the reason for its tardiness infuriated Gryvan. He could assert control over neither his city nor the chief official of his court. The High Thane went through his palace like a gale. Its disorder, the frantic demeanour of its inhabitants, further stoked up the fire in him. He bellowed at the servants milling pointlessly about in the corridors. He kicked aside the hunting hounds that had somehow got loose in one of the stairwells. The thunder of his rage preceded him through the palace, and all who heard it scattered at his approach. He found the Bloodheir in his chambers, playing some dicing game with the slatternly girl he had been spending so much time with recently. Gryvan could not remember her name, but he remembered very well that Abeh had forbidden her to enter the Moon Palace. “Get the whore out of here,” the High Thane growled as he stalked into the room. Aewult bridled at that. “There’s no —” he began, but Gryvan was in no mood for debate. “You prefer to stay here rather than in your own palace while the unrest continues, so be it. But while you do, you’ll obey our… my rules. Get the whore out.” “Go, Ishbel,” Aewult said grudgingly to her. When she was gone, Gryvan slumped heavily onto one of the cushioned benches that flanked the fireplace. “Where’s your brother?” he asked wearily. Aewult smiled bitterly. “Stravan is… indisposed. He found a stock of exceptionally fine Drandar wine this morning. And a number of young ladies eager to share it with him.” Gryvan shook his head. Stravan was a sot, and a wastrel, and a burden of a son. Unworthy of his distinguished lineage. “He is not the only one indisposed,” he sighed. “Get yourself ready. You and I are going to the Palace of Red Stone. There are answers there, and I mean to have them. You might learn something. To have one son fit to succeed me should at least be possible, surely.”
VII
Anyara paced listlessly up and down in front of the fire in her chambers in the Palace of Red Stone. Coinach was seated with his head in his hands. “We have to go,” the shieldman said. “Somehow. Anyhow. That was the chance you wanted, the audience with Gryvan. Nothing came of it. We have to get out of Vaymouth. The place is tinder.” Anyara had never seen him so disturbed. He had killed a man as they returned from the Moon Palace earlier that day. As they left the vast main square—all but deserted now—that adjoined Gryvan’s towering home, and started their way down a wide street lined with stalls and shops, the man had run out from an alleyway. Closer to old age than youth, he was dressed as an artisan. Certainly a trained and skilled worker, perhaps even a Craftsman. Yet he wailed as he ran at Anyara’s horse, his eyes bulging from their sockets. Coinach was riding on her other side, so he was unable to come between them. The man threw himself up at Anyara before she had a chance to react. Only the fact that he clumsily missed his grip on her arm prevented him from dragging her from the saddle. She tried to slap him away, but he ducked beneath her sweeping arm and scrabbled once more for a hold, this time on her leg. Coinach landed a stinging blow on her horse’s haunch, and it sprang forward startled, carrying her immediately out of reach of her assailant. Coinach had calmly leaned low out of his saddle and killed the man with a single sword stroke to the neck. He was considerably less calm now. “The city’s not safe,” he said, not for the first time since their return. Anyara kept pacing, her mind working furiously. “We can’t run away,” she muttered. “The Chancellor could deliver this city, this Blood, every Blood to the Black Road. If that’s what he wants to do.” “We don’t know.” He lifted his head out of his hands. “I know,” snapped Anyara. “I’ve heard him. I’ve looked into his eyes. He’s going to drag us all down into ruin, unless someone stops him.” “Do you want me to kill him?” Coinach asked dolefully. “Is that it?” Anyara stopped and looked at him. “Would you do it, if I asked you to?” “Of course,” he said without hesitation. “But if I did… what then?” There was a soft knocking at the door, followed at once by a tentative, familiar voice: “My lady?” “Come in, Eleth,” Anyara called, and the maid entered. That the girl’s mood had improved compared with recent days was immediately obvious. There was a renewed energy in her movements, and a bright and alert gleam in her eye. Anyara found this bewildering when the city around them was sinking every day further into chaos. “You seem much happier,” she said, unable to entirely conceal her confusion and faint suspicion. “Thank you, yes.” Eleth smiled. She paused, but when she realised that more explanation was expected she added, “My father was… sick. But the sickness has… well, it’s gone away.” “If only all sicknesses were so amenable,” Anyara muttered. “Yes, my lady. The High Thane is here, my lady. He has… I was told to say your presence is required.” “Gryvan?” Anyara said in surprise, raising her eyebrows towards Coinach. The shieldman rose slowly to his feet, frowning. “I don’t understand,” he said. “And the Bloodheir, too,” Eleth said. That thoroughly deflated Anyara’s briefly waking hopes. Of all the people she desired to see, or imagined could possibly be of any assistance to her, Aewult nan Haig was the very least and last. “You shouldn’t go,” Coinach said firmly. Anyara grunted. “You want me to turn down a summons from the Thane of Thanes, while I’m trapped in the same building with him? Oh, Coinach, I have to go. And it’s another chance, isn’t it? It might be. We don’t know. We’ll never know, if I don’t try.” Coinach’s face fell, but he said nothing. “Where’s the Chancellor’s wife?” Anyara asked Eleth. “Oh, she’s been sent for too, my lady. On her way, I’m sure. If not there already.” Tara was waiting for Anyara outside the broad double doors of a room Anyara could not recall ever having been inside. They were ornately carved from some exotic dark wood. They smelled of oil, and gleamed. Tara took Anyara by the arm as she approached. Eleth was dismissed with a silent look. “Listen to me,” Tara whispered. “I know what this is. Gryvan’s angry, looking for answers. He’s only here because Mordyn refused to go to him in the Moon Palace earlier. Listen to me.” Tara’s agitation was unsettling, especially in one normally so entirely in command of the impression she gave. “Please. Do not lose me my husband, Anyara. That is all I ask of you. Let it be a sickness. A sickness of the mind. Not treachery. Not binding. If you should convince Gryvan of such things, he will have my husband killed. If it’s a sickness… there might be exile. Imprisonment, perhaps. Not death.” Anyara did not know what to say. She felt indebted to this woman, and understood something of just how much she treasured her husband. And yet… there was more at stake than that here. Kale pulled the doors open. The lean shieldman stared out at them with chilly indifference, as if he knew none of them. “You wait out here,” he said levelly to Coinach. “No,” Coinach said promptly. Kale smiled then, and it was a strikingly lifeless and troubling sight. “It is not a request or a suggestion. It is the command of your High Thane.” Anyara smiled reassuringly at Coinach, though she felt more in need of reassurance herself than of providing it. He turned reluctantly away and stood with his back against the wall, staring straight ahead. Kale ushered Tara and Anyara inside, and closed the doors behind them. The room was high-ceilinged, the walls painted with bright murals. No windows. One other set of doors, opposite those by which they had just entered. A single bare table set with six chairs, at two of which Gryvan oc Haig and his son were seated. “You must let me provide some refreshment,” Mordyn Jerain was saying casually. “Wine, at least.” “Nothing,” Gryvan snapped. Mordyn Jerain turned, a transparent pretence at having only just noticed Anyara and Tara’s arrival. “Ah, here we are.” He smiled. “Now perhaps we can resolve this confusion.” He wore all his old charm, and it fitted him as snugly as a custom-made glove. Anyara looked at him, and it was like looking at an entirely different person from the one who had given her the bruise still discolouring her face. Here was someone all fluid grace and natural warmth. “Sit, sit,” he said to Anyara, gesturing towards chairs. “The High Thane wants to talk with us.” Watching him warily, Anyara settled into a seat opposite Gryvan. Tara Jerain, she noticed, was staring at her husband, rapt. Her face did not seem to be able to decide between unease and relief, as if she did not trust what her eyes and ears told her. “You too,” Mordyn said gently to her, and Tara sat at Anyara’s side. Gryvan, evidently inured to the effects of the man’s charm by long exposure, was glowering at the Shadowhand as he walked slowly around the table. Aewult looked merely bored, though he did favour Anyara with a particularly savage glare before he resumed his studied detachment. “I want answers,” Gryvan rasped, his hands bunched into fists on the surface of the table. “As do we all.” Mordyn nodded. “And we shall have them, I am sure.” He paused suddenly in his circuit of the room, and frowned. “Do you hear something?” he asked of no one in particular. And in the question’s wake came the unmistakable sound of raised voices and hurried feet somewhere within the Palace of Red Stone. Then what struck Anyara immediately as the sound of fighting. Her first thought was concern for Coinach, but the disturbance seemed to be coming from the front of the palace, beyond the door through which Gryvan and Aewult had presumably entered, not that at which Coinach stood guard. Tara was rising from her chair, alarmed. “Wait, wait,” muttered Mordyn, extending a hand. “It’s probably nothing, but let’s wait a moment. Let’s not rush into anything.” “I’ll see what’s happening,” said Aewult, rising, but Gryvan pushed his son back down into his seat. “Kale,” the High Thane said. “Find out what it is.” The brief tumult was already fading, but Gryvan’s shieldman obediently turned and went out through the doors behind the High Thane’s chair. Mordyn moved round that way, craning his neck as if to peer out as the doors swung shut behind Kale. The Chancellor took hold of the doors to hurry them on their way, and pushed them firmly closed. There was a dull clack as some latch fell into place. Anyara frowned at the sound, which seemed out of place. Inappropriate. Mordyn turned, each of his hands reaching into the opposite sleeve. He withdrew them as he stepped forward, smiling. Anyara saw the gleam of metal, and had a vivid, ghastly memory of a feast night in the Tower of Thrones, and a serving woman leaning close to Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig. She opened her mouth to cry out. “How simple,” Mordyn said with satisfaction. Tara was rising once more from her chair, shock plain on her face. Gryvan twisted round in his chair to see what was happening. The Chancellor drove one of the long-bladed narrow knives into the back of Aewult’s neck, at the base of his skull. The other went in under Gryvan’s chin as he turned onto it. As soon as the blades were planted, the Shadowhand was running, darting around the table. He reached the second set of doors before either Tara or Anyara had got free of their hampering chairs. “Coinach!” Anyara shouted. The same dull clack of wood on wood as Mordyn sealed the doors. “What have you done?” Tara Jerain gasped, hands rising to her mouth as she looked from her husband to the dead Thane and his son, their blood flooding out over the table. “Paid some clubmen off the street to stage some distracting little trouble,” Mordyn muttered. He ran at Anyara, surprisingly fast, and seized her by her shoulders. He threw her violently against the wall and she fell. “Didn’t really think that would work,” she heard the Chancellor saying through the faint ringing in her ears. She could hear the doors shaking too. Coinach shouting: “Anyara!” “Thought I would be dead by now, but it would have been a price worth paying.” Anyara got unsteadily to her feet. Mordyn had his wife by the throat, was holding her down on the surface of the table. Her mouth was agape. “I suspected the game was done as soon as I heard you had been to see Gryvan. Knew it beyond doubt when I got his message demanding I go there myself. A pity. I could have done so much more. But this will do. This is enough.” Tara had her hands about Mordyn’s wrists, straining ineffectually to pry them apart. The door shook once more beneath Coinach’s assaults. Anyara looked from the latch holding the door shut to the knife protruding from the back of Aewult’s head. And chose the knife. She leaned across the table and wrenched it free with a sickening crunch. Mordyn looked round at her. She rushed at him. None of the meagre training she had received from Coinach was needed. Mordyn raised no defence. He merely looked into her eyes as she ran at him, and kept his hands on Tara’s throat. Anyara stabbed him in the side, under his arm. She did remember something Coinach had told her then, and punched the knife in and out once, twice more, reaching for the heart. To be certain. Mordyn fell heavily. Tara did not stir at first, but then lifted herself up groggily, one hand pawing at her neck. Anyara opened the door to admit Coinach. The shieldman came in with sword in hand, his eyes widening in astonishment as he took in the gory scene. “What happened?” he murmured. “We have to get out of here,” Anyara said, considerably more calmly than she felt. “Help me with Tara.” She tried to put supporting hands under Tara’s elbows, but the Chancellor’s wife pushed her away. She was staring down at her dead husband. “Tara,” Anyara said quietly. “We should go.” The doors opposite rattled as someone tried to open them. “We really should go,” Coinach said emphatically. The doors crashed open under Kale’s foot, and the High Thane’s shieldman strode in, sword readied. His eyes moved with precision and speed, and settled on Coinach. Kale leaped forward, brushing the corner of the table. His sword came sweeping down. Coinach raised his own, and caught the descending blade and held it there. He brought his knee firmly up into Kale’s groin, lifting him momentarily off his feet and staggering him. Coinach went after him, making two or three rapid slashing cuts. A single slightly misjudged parry and Coinach’s blade had skidded off the top of Kale’s blocking thrust and into his side. Anyara heard a rib break from the other side of the room. Kale buckled, and Coinach hit him again, and again as he went down. Once Kale was on the ground, Coinach finished him with a straight thrust to his throat. He frowned as he sheathed his sword. “I had heard he was better than that.” He sounded vaguely disappointed.
VIII
Ess’yr scaled a mighty tree and crouched there, far above, in the crook of a branch. Sunlight had cracked the clouds and it spilled in pale abundance down through the boughs, patterning the forest floor with a web of shadows and ponds of light. It warmed the tan hues of Ess’yr’s hide jacket. Breathed life and lustre into her hair. Gazing up at her, Orisian squinted into the unfamiliar glare. He had to raise a hand to put a protective shadow over his eyes. How long since he had done that? He could even feel, when a beam of that light fell upon his cheek and his jaw, just a murmur of warmth in it. A whisper, presaging a new season. That heat stirred memories of other years in his skin. The only place it could not penetrate was the thick scar where a White Owl spear had opened his face. That remained cold and dead. “Can you see anything?” he said. He did not call it out, for though she was high, she would hear him well enough. “The valley.” Her voice came drifting down from the canopy, as natural as falling leaves. “I see your valley.” The land sloped away on either side of them, to north and south. Southwards, sunwards, there was only Anlane, rolling to distant horizons. Northwards—Orisian turned that way now, though he could see nothing through the tangle of tree trunks and branches—northwards lay his homeland. “How far?” he asked the treetops. “Tomorrow,” Ess’yr replied. “Late tomorrow, we could be under an open sky.” Murmurs passed amongst the warriors gathered at the base of the towering oak. Orisian could not read their tone. It might be anticipation, unease, even unrest. K’rina was seated with her back against the massive bole. Yvane was trying to ease water into her, trickling it out from a skin onto unresponsive lips. Neither was paying attention, of course. They had become almost a world unto themselves, just the two of them, bound together—and separated from the others—by their alloyed blood. It pained Orisian, but he understood it too. At some level, he understood it all too clearly. He let his gaze ascend once more, tracing the line of the tree trunk up through the great spray of limbs, seeing her there. The dappled shade made her almost seem a part of the tree, or of the forest itself. Had he not known she was there, he would never have detected her. Then she moved, extending a long arm and shifting her weight smoothly so that her leg could come reaching down. She turned and bent her head to look for that next foothold, and for a moment her eyes met Orisian’s, and they looked at one another, she above and he below, through the fretwork of branches. Then she was moving down, as easily as if she descended a stairway. As he watched her, Orisian had a sudden vision of a young girl—Anyara—in another tree, in another time, doing just this, but coming loose and falling, tumbling down, rattling from bough to bough all the way down. He could hear the sickening sound of it, and could feel the shock and lurching fear that had filled his child’s breast. Now, in Anlane, he lifted his hand to his mouth to still the very cry he had let slip all those years ago. But it was Ess’yr, not his sister, who was coming down towards him, and he blinked his way clear of the vivid memory. He anchored himself with the sight of this graceful form moving with utter confidence back to earth. She jumped the last of it, landing lightly on the balls of her feet in front of Orisian. Her knees folded and she sank down onto her haunches, recovered her spear from where she had left it by the tree, and straightened. She wiped her free hand across her upper chest, leaving tiny fragments of loose bark on the hide. “Late tomorrow,” she said quietly, and he nodded. The sound of movement some little way ahead, down the dipping northern slope, drew every gaze and had men reaching for their swords, but it was only Taim Narran and the two warriors he had taken with him, struggling free of thick and brittle undergrowth. “No sign of trouble,” Taim said as he came up towards them. “Varryn says some White Owl have passed along a trail down at the bottom in the last day or two, but they were moving quickly. And there was some smokesign from a long way to the east. Too far off to be much of a worry yet.” “We’ve been lucky,” said Orisian. From the corner of his eye, he saw the grimace of disgust that flashed across one of the warriors” face. He understood it at once. Eagan had died; had been killed by Orisian himself. No luck attended upon such a journey. How could such a thing have left him so unmarked that he should utter such foolish words? He was ashamed, but bewildered too. For a moment, he was unsure whether he had in truth killed Eagan. It had the quality of delusion, of nightmare, that memory. “Not so lucky,” said Yvane, still squatting down beside K’rina. Orisian looked sharply at her, wondering if—as she had sometimes before—she knew the pattern of his thoughts without his needing to say a word. But she was on another track. “There shouldn’t really be any White Owls at all wandering around these parts at this time of year. They should all be cosied away in their winter camps, telling themselves tales and tending their fires. Don’t start thinking we’ve luck in our company. They might be busy hunting each other now, but a spear a’an will be just as happy to make our acquaintance if they stumble across us, I’m sure.” Orisian nodded. Beats of pain were taking hold in his temples. He could feel himself drifting again, something in him trying to separate itself, to sink away and turn to other thoughts, other dreams. The forest around him, even the ground beneath his feet, was beginning to seem unreal and thin. If he reached out, he thought, he might pierce it; put a rent into the world and see what lay beyond it. He shook himself and began to walk downhill. He was frightened to look into the faces of the men he needed to follow him, fearful of what he might see there. “Let’s cover what ground we can today and tonight,” he said. “Then tomorrow we’ll see. We’ll see where we are, and what to do.” “All right,” Taim was saying briskly behind him. “You heard. There’s nothing to be gained by lingering here.” For a time, as the day dwindled into dusk, Ess’yr walked alongside him. “I had forgotten… until just now, I had forgotten the first man I killed,” he said softly to her. “Do you remember? You were there.” She did not reply, but he could tell from the way she held her head, the way she curbed her stride to match his own, that she would listen, if he talked. It was not easy to do so, for his thoughts grew less clear and less easily herded with every passing hour. But she would listen, and there was no one else he would be so willing to speak to. “The Tarbain I—we—killed,” he said, “at the cottage in the Car Criagar. He was the first, and I had almost forgotten what that felt like. How it made me feel. Now, I have killed another man—Eagan, his name was Eagan—and there was almost no burden to it. He was one of my own men, one of my own Blood, and his death had too little weight to it.” “It was necessary,” Ess’yr said quietly. “Varryn saw. He told me.” “Perhaps. I don’t know. There’s a lot I’m not sure about. It was not something I ever wanted… I never wanted to be able to kill men and have it be so… light.” The ground was falling away slowly but steadily beneath their feet. Anlane was gradually diminishing itself around them, yielding pace by pace to the pull of the great valley that lay to the north. It was as if the very shape of the earth conspired to draw them down towards whatever waited by the Glas, in Kan Avor. “I think of the life I lived once,” Orisian murmured, watching the green grass and the broken, withered leaves, “before my mother and my brother died, and it’s as if I’m on a ship, and that life is an island, falling away behind me. I can’t reach it. I can see the sunlight on it; I can hear waves breaking on its shore; I can remember, almost, how good it felt to be there. But I can’t reach it. It’s further away every day.” “Where does your ship go?” “What?” “This ship you are on. Where does it go?” “I don’t know.” “All journeys have the same ending.” “Do they?” “You call it the Sleeping Dark. We call it Darlankyn.” “I suppose so. I hope not yet, though. Not yet.” She was quiet for a time, and Orisian fell into the rhythm of his own steps. He could hear—acutely, it seemed to him—the fall of his feet, the rustling of the fallen leaves beneath them, the soft sighing of grass under his heel and against his shin. Yet he heard nothing of Ess’yr. She moved through this place in silence, as if she had no substance. He wondered for a moment, without alarm or distress, whether she might not be an entirely imagined presence, summoned up by his wandering mind. Perhaps the real Ess’yr was somewhere up ahead, hunting and tracking her way through the forest with her breath; perhaps he walked now with the Ess’yr he longed for, not the one who was. But she spoke again, and she spoke of things his mind could surely not have woven for itself. “There is some kind of return in every journey, in every life. When the God Who Laughed made my people—all my people, all Kyrinin—he walked across the world and came, at the end, back to the place where he began. There are mountains, in the lands of the Boar clan now: they are Eltenn Omrhynan. First and Last, perhaps you would say. They are the knot in the circle of his journey, the beginning and the end. An important place to us. But what he did on the journey was more important. In the shape made he upon the land, he spoke a truth. Endings and beginnings are smaller things than the movement between them, and the manner of it.” “That sounds like Inurian,” Orisian said, and though once he might have regretted reminding her of her lost lover, now that hardly seemed to matter. She said nothing at first, and they strode on, side by side, beneath the leaning, leafless trees of Anlane. Then: “It does.” “Do you think of him often?” Orisian asked. “I do, now.” “Yes,” she said very softly. Orisian felt gentle sorrow walking between them, like a friend: not separating them but linking them. “He would not want us to remember only the ending of him, I suppose,” said Orisian. “It was the movement that came before that mattered. And the manner of it.” “Yes,” said Ess’yr again after a few heartbeats, a few paces. And then she lifted her head and looked towards the sun, and lengthened her stride and moved on ahead of him, returning to Anlane’s embrace. Orisian watched her go this time without any pangs of regret or trepidation. This did not feel—as so many such moments had in the past—like a parting.
IX
Disaster came upon them slowly, revealing itself by increments as it emerged from the shadows and the wilds. It came first in the last dregs of the twilight, in the form of tracks through the mud at the side of a stream, that Varryn leaned close to, and tested with his fingers, and proclaimed half a day old at most. A White Owl family, with children, he said, moving north and west. It came again, betraying a little more of its shape in the gathering darkness, as the scent of a distant fire that none save Ess’yr or Varryn could detect. None doubted their inhuman senses, though, and all followed the Kyrinin as they bent their course away from the unseen, fearful beacon and led their stumbling, blundering charges through the night-thronged thickets. Some of the warriors muttered mutinously at the unwisdom of traversing wight-haunted lands by nothing more than moonlight, but Orisian could read the urgency and unease taking root in Ess’yr and her brother, and he kept them moving. They did halt, in time, if only briefly. A taut, restless interlude in which they blindly passed morsels of food from hand to hand to mouth and rubbed aching feet in vain attempts to soothe them. Ess’yr and Varryn went out into the night, of course, remorseless in their suspicious quartering of this untrustworthy ground. While they were gone, K’rina began to moan softly. It was a troubling sound, like the mournful voice of the darkness itself. “Keep her quiet,” someone hissed in sibilant anger. “I’m trying,” Yvane muttered, and though he could not see her clearly, Orisian could hear her slight shifting movements as she reached for K’rina. Whether to comfort her or cover her mouth, he did not know. “She’s unsettled,” Yvane whispered as the other na’kyrim’s restlessness diminished. “Agitated. Feels something or knows something. Because we’re getting closer, maybe.” Ess’yr returned suddenly, as if stepping out from one of the grey tree trunks into their midst. She brought with her another fragment of threat, another traced portion of disaster’s outline. “Someone is killed, far behind us,” she said into Orisian’s ear, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. “We hear him dying. A Kyrinin. We must move. Death runs through the forest. We must run faster.” But they could not run, for Anlane would not so easily open itself to humankind, or any kind perhaps. Not in the sombre darkness, not when its soils were soaked with meltwater, its streams swollen. They could only struggle on, none of them—Orisian least of all—knowing whether what lay before or behind them was more deserving of their fear. Ess’yr stayed close, guiding their every pace with inexhaustible patience. For all her efforts, they slipped and tripped and fell. But they kept moving, as if by moving they might hasten the departure of the treacherous darkness and eventually leave the night behind. Orisian dreamed without sleeping, even as he staggered along, of Inurian, and of Rothe and others. They were formless dreams composed of nothing but the presence of the lost. He dreamed, or thought he did, of Aeglyss. He had no other name to give to that pitiless black fog he imagined drifting through the forest all around him. There was no malice in it, just a cold and bitter accusation of futility that sapped his strength and his will. He could feel not just his legs but his heart and his hope growing sluggish and torpid. By the time dawn came, he had forgotten its possibility. All but a last, small stubborn part of him had surrendered, and accepted that the night and the forest had consumed all the world, and would be its entirety for ever. When the light came, wan and hesitant, he disbelieved it at first, and thought it only an illusory trick of his failing mind. But it was a true light. It brought no relief, though. Instead it brought a slow nightmare, shuffling in their wake out of the darkness, gathering itself, closing on them. “We’ve lost someone,” Taim Narran said grimly. They stood in bleary, numb assembly beneath a lightning-split oak. The great wound in the tree’s trunk was darkened by age, the exposed heartwood softened by rot. A gnarled knoll of rock and earth and thin grass stood nearby, a knuckled clenching of the forest floor. “Kellach’s gone,” said Taim. “Did no one hear anything? No one see anything?” There was only a shaking of heads, a casting down of eyes. Taim’s anguish was raw, sharpened by his exhaustion. It hurt Orisian to see it. He wanted to tell the warrior not to blame himself, but it would do no good. It was not the kind of guilt Taim could put aside, even when it belonged to his Thane, not him. One of the warriors was weeping. His comrades watched him. They said nothing, showed nothing: no sympathy, no understanding, no contempt, no judgement. They merely watched, as if tears were now as natural and inevitable a thing as the clouds drifting above them. He did not weep for their lost companion, Orisian knew; he wept for everything. Because there was something rising in him that demanded the shedding of tears. Something that might, before long, demand the shedding of blood. “We cannot go back,” Ess’yr said flatly. No one looked at her. Then Varryn was running down towards them, swinging around the shoulder of that bare knoll. He leaped from a boulder to land lightly at his sister’s side, already hissing something to her in the Fox tongue as he hit the ground. Tension sprang into her shoulders. “The enemy,” she said. And with nothing more than that, no more warning, there were White Owls amongst them. Figures spilled over the knoll and came rushing down like a loose flock of great pale birds. Orisian had time only to lift his shield and snap his sword free of its scabbard before there was movement and noise all about him, a storm of it. A solid blow on the face of his shield knocked him back a couple of paces, but the Kyrinin who had struck him swept on by. Orisian had a glimpse of wide grey eyes, the dark and swirling kin’thyn, a rictus of a mouth. He was not sure the White Owl had even seen him. The next assuredly did, for a spear darted at Orisian’s thigh. He knocked it down and aside and its tip punched into the mossy earth. The Kyrinin who wielded it dropped it and ran on, bounding past the wild flash of a warrior’s blade. They had not come to fight, Orisian realised. The White Owls were pouring through the thin rank his men had prepared to meet this supposed charge, not pausing to offer anything more than the most cursory of assaults. In two and threes, they came leaping over the crest of the knoll, sped down its flank and danced their lithe way through the cordon of slow and clumsy humans, and then were gone, plunging back into the forest. It was like the dolphins that breached sometimes in the Glas estuary: emerging for only the briefest of instants into the world of light and air, then gone again, back into the limitless blank ocean. Not all those making up that bewildered, impotent cordon were human, though. And one of them at least was fast enough, and impassioned enough, to weave a furious dance of his own. In a single sideways glance, Orisian saw Varryn, a fervent smile upon his face, moving with impossible, lethal agility. The Kyrinin flicked out his arm, and his spear punched a neat hole in a White Owl’s neck, and was withdrawn before the victim had even begun to stagger. Varryn lunged to his side and caught another on the forehead with the spear’s butt, streaking a red split across the white skin; he spun and the spear was suddenly in flight, blurring up the slope and into the stomach of a third descending White Owl. A flicker in the corner of his eye had Orisian ducking and lurching away from a shadow, but the Kyrinin who cast it was past him and gone in the same moment. He looked after the disappearing woman, and saw Yvane crouching down, her back to him, protective arms enclosing K’rina’s hunched form. And Taim Narran standing in front of the two na’kyrim, making a wall of his body and sword and shield. The warrior did not reach for any of the White Owls as they sprinted by; he let them pass. He saw Orisian looking at him. “Get over here,” Taim snapped, and Orisian obeyed instinctively. He stood at Taim’s side, a fraction behind him, and they watched the Kyrinin flowing around and beyond them. In every face that passed Orisian saw the same thing: some strange admixture of panic and confusion and fear. It was so far from the measured composure he associated with Kyrinin that he found it almost repellent. As suddenly as it had begun, it was over. But Varryn was unwilling to let it end. He sent an arrow skimming between the tree trunks in pursuit of the last of the receding figures, ran forward a few paces and set another to his bowstring, then another. He sped into the dappled forest without a backwards glance. There were a handful of dead White Owls, and one of Taim’s men. A spear was embedded in the warrior’s chest, broken off halfway down its length. It must have been almost an accident, Orisian thought, staring down at the youth’s corpse. They were not even trying to kill us, and still someone had to die. He knelt and gently closed the open, blank eyes. Ess’yr climbed to the top of the knoll and crouched there, turning and lifting her head this way and that. Orisian returned to Yvane and K’rina. They were rising carefully to their feet, the one supported and guided by the other. “Are you all right?” he asked Yvane. She looked at him, and for the first time he saw in her eyes the same empty despair that he felt lodged patiently and watchfully at the back of his mind. In Yvane it had come into its full, bleak flowering. “This can’t go on,” she said. “Did you see them? Did you feel it in them?” “What?” asked Orisian cautiously. “Out of their minds. Didn’t know who they were, what they were doing. The weight of him, of what he’s done, too much for them.” Orisian nodded, for the want of anything to say. Yvane swallowed and seemed to recover herself a little. “The White Owl clan is older than any of your Bloods. It’s older than the Kingship that came before, even. There were people who called themselves White Owls when the Whreinin still hunted through these forest, in the Age before this one.” “When there were still Gods,” Orisian murmured. “Perhaps. And you see? You see what they have come to? Slaughtering one another like maddened beasts. Running about, senseless. Lost children.” “It’s what we’re all coming to, isn’t it?” said Orisian quietly. “We’re halfway there already. That’s why we have to go on.” Ess’yr came down from the knoll. There was blood on the tip of her spear, Orisian noted. A glutinous smear of it, already drying. “We must move,” she said. The unfamiliar strain in her voice, as much as her words, alarmed Orisian. Her face was as elegantly expressionless as ever, but something was tightening within her. “More come,” she said. As if summoned up by that single terse statement, there were cries in the forest. Looping, bounding cries, like the voices of birds. Distant, Orisian thought, but drawing nearer. The sound was unearthly, a disordered, jumbled melody of stretched and falling notes. It could have been Anlane itself, the mind of that vast place, calling out. Or announcing its waking. Announcing its joining of battle. “They hunt,” Ess’yr said. “We must go. Now.” She led them on, moving now with insistent haste that they struggled to match. “What about Varryn?” Orisian called after her. “He will find his way,” she told him. Yet another of the babbling streams that crossed Anlane like veins in its vast body blocked their path. Too wide to leap across, they would have to wade. Ess’yr paused upon its bank, looking up and down its writhing rocky length. “In the water,” she said, and stepped into the flow. She turned and began to splash down-stream, picking a nimble course between weed-clothed stones. There was an instant of hesitation amongst those who followed her. Some of the men exchanged doubting, reluctant glances. But those calls were still in the air behind them, bounding through the treetops. “Hurry,” said Orisian, and went after her. His boots filled at once with the brutally cold water, as if seized by hands of ice. The current pushed at his heels, piling water up against the back of his legs. Sensation retreated, withdrawing up through his limbs, leaving his feet deadened to all save the dull pain of intense cold. He stumbled, constantly fearful of losing his footing on some slick and slimy stone. Behind him, he could hear the others following. Though in truth he did not know whether they followed him or fled those haunting voices that filled the forest. The brook led them where it willed, cutting a more or less northerly course over gently sloping ground. The notion settled upon Orisian that he walked in waters that would soon be part of the Glas. He was carried homeward by some fragment of the single titanic movement that joined stream, and great river, and ocean. This stream down which he laboured might soon be waves lapping at the walls of Castle Kolglas. And with that thought, he realised that he was not moving homeward at all, for his home was gone. Whatever he was returning to, it was not home but something else. He heard a splash and breathless, gasping curses behind him, and turned. Yvane was struggling to raise K’rina from where she had fallen. Water churned about them. Taim stopped to help, waving the rest of the men on. Orisian waded back against the force of the water, but K’rina was on her feet by the time he reached them. “Is she all right?” he asked Yvane, but the na’kyrim did not hear, or ignored him. As they moved away from him, a fleeting glimpse of something pale drew his eyes back up the stream. He looked that way, and saw nothing. Only the drooping trees that lined the banks. The water murmuring busily along. Clumps of rushes nodding at its edge. Then something: a single movement from left to right, as of an indistinct figure passing a distant window. And another. White Owls, he realised, darting across the stream. They were at the furthest limit of sight that the dense forest and the wandering stream’s course would permit. The only sound was at his back, as his companions made their sodden way along the bed of the brook. He saw these silent, wan instants of motion as the Kyrinin crossed one by one, and it seemed to be happening in another place entirely, without connection to him. Until one of them stopped, halfway across, and stared directly at him. Even at that distance, Orisian knew their eyes met. He could envisage precisely that intent grey gaze, and feel its questioning touch upon him. He was already turning as a second figure joined the first, and as a flurry of fluting bird calls came down towards him, riding the cold air that hung above the stream between the overhanging trees. “They’ve seen us,” he shouted. “They’re coming.” The waters were hateful now, thickening about his legs, hampering every desperate surging stride. “Out of the water!” he shouted, but Ess’yr already had them clambering up onto the bank. Orisian’s feet throbbed as he staggered onto the grass, his sodden, heavy leggings plastered to his skin. “We need some clear ground,” Taim was muttering. “Can’t win against Kyrinin if we get spread out, scattered amongst the trees.” Ess’yr was listening intently to the calls cascading through the forest. “They gather first,” she said. “Not mad, these ones, then,” said Yvane bleakly. “They know what they’re doing.” K’rina was leaning against her, shivering. Looking at the frail na’kyrim, a wave of weariness and feebleness ran through Orisian. All he had achieved here, following instincts that had seemed so sure and certain, was to deliver them all to a futile death. Ess’yr was not finished yet, though. She led them on, away from the stream. The warriors followed without urging, their fear rendering them at last pliant. Orisian could see in their slumping shoulders and their gaunt, empty faces that the forest, its rigours, its accumulation of threat, had defeated them and left them willing to cleave to any guide who appeared to grasp its subtle horrors. So they came to a place where a great oak, its girth the token of its agedness, had created about itself a wide ring of ground untrammelled by briars or shrubs. When in leaf, its sprawling branches must have cast such shade that nothing but moss and the most meagre of grasses would grow there. Pigeons rattled out of its crown. Beneath it, Ess’yr turned and stood. Taim Narran looked about with a frown. “Not much,” the warrior growled. “But if it’s the best we can do…” “No more time,” Ess’yr said. She leaned on her bow, forcing its notched limb down towards the looped end of the string. “You two get down,” Taim said to Yvane and K’rina, jabbing the point of his sword groundward. “Lie flat, and we’ll shield you as best we can.” Yvane sank down onto her haunches. She had to tug at K’rina’s arm to bring the other na’kyrim down. “We keep between them and the arrows,” Taim told the remaining warriors. “And keep as much of ourselves behind our shields as we can. Depending on what sort of mood they’re in, they may lose interest if they see arrows aren’t going to do the job. Happens sometimes, with Kyrinin.” Not this time, Orisian thought. No one fights with only half their heart any more. He took his place with the others in that feeble shield wall beside Taim. Just seven of them altogether, each sunk down onto his heels, shrinking himself into a knot of tension behind his shield. They arrayed themselves in half a circle, with the two na’kyrim lying at its heart, and behind them the great bulk of the oak. Orisian could smell the wood of his shield, and the dry leather of the grip to which his hand clung with such desperate rigidity. He looked back. Ess’yr was kneeling over Yvane. The Kyrinin’s face was a mask of perfect concentration as she brushed the flights of her arrows with careful fingers, seeking flaws. Deciding, perhaps, in which order to let them fly. The very stillness of her features in such moments gave the branching, curving tattoos of her kin’thyn an almost painted beauty, Orisian thought. He saw Yvane watching him with narrowed eyes, and he turned back into his shield and flexed his fingers about the hilt of his sword. “Now,” Ess’yr whispered with no trace of urgency. And like massive, gale-driven drops of rain striking shutters, the arrows hit the shields. First one, then a second, then a rippling drumbeat of them smacking home. Orisian felt his own shield tremble against his arm. And again, this time spitting fine splinters into his eyes. He blinked and saw the very tip of an arrow protruding from the inner face of the shield. There was a scraping, and a moaning, and a shifting of bodies. And one of the men was slumping back. Orisian leaned back a little to look towards the sound. The man’s lower leg was spitted by an arrow, feathery flights on one side of his calf, bloodied point on the other. Others shuffled clumsily sideways to close the gap he had left. Orisian heard the snap of the arrow’s shaft breaking, and the gasp, through gritted teeth, as the man pulled the arrow through his flesh. Within the rhythm of the arrows on shields, there were now a few duller, deeper notes, as some thudded into the trunk of the huge tree behind them. And another sound joined the chorus: the thrumming of Ess’yr’s bowstring as she sent shaft after shaft skimming out just over the tops of the shields in answer. “Stay down,” Orisian murmured, but he did not think anyone heard him. A spear rattled off the rim of his shield. He ducked instinctively. Then a deep silence descended. Within its ominous emptiness, a bird—a real bird, this—sang a brief, nervous song some way away. Orisian glanced towards Ess’yr. She was hunched down low, head dipped beneath her shoulders. “What now?” he whispered. She shook her head and gave a brief, puzzled shrug of her eyebrows. It was such a human gesture it made Orisian smile. Taim stretched up a little and peered out. Orisian waited a moment, then did the same. The forest stared back at them, blank and motionless. “Can’t be that easy,” Taim murmured. The wounded man had torn a strip from the sleeve of his shirt, and was binding it about his leg, grimacing in pain. He fumbled at the knot, his hands blunt and clumsy. Yvane made an irritated noise through her teeth and pulled herself forward on her belly. She slapped the man’s hands aside and did his work for him. Orisian returned his attention to the forest, and strained to untangle the slanting tree trunks, the shifting shadows, the clumps of undergrowth. Nothing. No sign of anything save the silent, constant forest itself, complete and impassive. But he imagined White Owls crouching within that concealing mass, flickering messages to one another on spidery fingers, signalling intent. Taim was right, he was sure. It could not be this easy. “They’re still there?” he asked Ess’yr. She nodded. Having completed her ministrations, Yvane slipped back to her place at K’rina’s side, brushing hair away from the na’kyrim’s face. It made Orisian think of Anyara, and he did not know why. He frowned, troubled by that image, which had the texture of memory yet could not, for a moment, find its place in his past. And then it came. It was the echo of Anyara doing just that: brushing their mother’s hair aside when it had fallen across her eyes as she lay sick… dying… in her bed. There had been a sheen of sweat across Lairis’ skin, the smell of malady in the air. From amidst the awful cull of the Heart Fever, amidst all its crippling horrors and sorrows, that was what his mind chose to retrieve now. That one quiet moment. A moment of gentleness in the presence of death. “There,” Taim breathed, and Orisian was wrenched back into the present. He saw the same thing Taim did. Figures drifting silently back and forth amongst the trees. All the movement was soundless, patternless, as if in search of an as-yet-unexpressed form. It spread slowly around them, widening its compass, claiming more and more of the forest. The wounded warrior edged back into line, struggling to keep the weight off his bloody leg. And the movement out there found the form it had been seeking, and ceased. Orisian’s heart beat once, twice as he stared out. He held his breath, for everything seemed poised in that narrow span of time upon some brink. Then they came, from all sides, rushing in. “Up!” shouted Taim as he surged to his feet. Orisian rose, heard arrows whipping by, saw the Kyrinin running towards him, felt their blind fury like a breeze on his face, and then sight and sound and touch all collapsed into a single impenetrable blur. All existence came to be only the act and the sensation of fighting and struggling. A White Owl charged straight at him, spear levelled. It glanced off Orisian’s shield, and its wielder ran without pause onto the point of his sword, taking it into himself just under his ribs. Orisian’s arm gave beneath the weight of that savage merging, and the dying Kyrinin fell against his shoulder. Human and inhuman eyes met for an instant. Orisian saw nothing in those ashen pools. The Kyrinin blinked and slipped to the ground. Orisian twisted his sword free, fending off another attack with his shield. He hacked about him, battering aside spears and arms that seemed to come reaching in from every side. A hand closed on the upper rim of his shield and began to pull it down and away from him. Taim was suddenly there, cutting at the wrist of the offending arm. Warm flecks of blood hit Orisian’s face. He was dimly aware that he was faster now, more assured than he had been before. His blade moved without the need for conscious thought. It swung and blocked and stabbed according to some instinctual imperative of its own. But still he was no match for the man who had once been Captain of Castle Anduran. Taim barged through the mass of White Owls. He did not wait for them to come to him, did not give them the time and space to exercise all their speed or dexterity. He ducked this way and that, cutting a gory path across the front of Orisian, and seemed always to be half a moment ahead of any attack that was directed against him. Arrows and the broken stump of a spear adorned the front of his shield like quills, until Taim battered it into the chest and face of a Kyrinin warrior and splintered them against his bones. Someone fell at Orisian’s feet. He glanced down. One of his warriors writhed there, an arrow in his face. The chaos in which Orisian was caught crowded out any response to that sight, and his eyes flicked up again at once. A tall White Owl was bearing down on him, a great club—a knotted branch of long-dead wood—held above her head in both hands. Orisian got his shield up, and the cudgel shattered against it. Fragments of it stung Orisian’s brow and scalp. The blow knocked his shield low, almost tore it from his grip, and he swayed back. The woman flung the broken remnant of her weapon at him. He twisted his head out of its tumbling path, but it grazed his cheek. She ran at him and he hammered his sword into her upper arm with all his strength. It went deep, through sleeve and skin and flesh, and knocked her aside. Beyond her, he saw a young Kyrinin—slighter and younger than he was himself—sitting astride the chest of a dead or dying man, pounding at his wrecked skull with a rock. The sight was transfixing. Orisian watched in stunned awe as the rock rose, flicking gore and blood into the air. He was almost too late in blocking another spear thrust, and was staggered by it. The spear’s tip scraped along the leather belt at his waist. Orisian slashed at his attacker, but the White Owl sprang nimbly back. And looked down, startled, at the other spear that suddenly burst from his own stomach. Varryn carried his impaled victim a couple of paces forward before driving him down onto the ground. Orisian started to thank him, but saw at once that the Fox was far beyond the reach of any words. Varryn’s eyes had a glaze of fierce detachment. He snarled savagely as he hauled at his spear to free it from the back of the White Owl. The blue tattoos on his cheeks were overlaid with streams of blood coursing from a ragged scalp wound. His hair was matted down over his brow. He hissed as he spun, bringing his spear round in a flashing flat arc and breaking it across the midriff of another closing White Owl. He leaped high and came down on the back of a Kyrinin who was sparring with Taim. Orisian stepped forward. A flicker of movement sensed out of the corner of his eye had him lifting his shield. It caught an arrow out of the air and shook. Orisian looked out towards the youth who had loosed the shaft. The Kyrinin stared back at him, slowly lowering his bow with trembling hands, and then turned on his heel and vanished into the forest. Orisian turned about. The shadow of the oak tree now fell upon the dead, the dying and the last of the fleeing White Owls. Soft moans and gasped breaths. The stench of blood and spilled guts. Orisian saw a Kyrinin arm extended up, reaching weakly and futilely for the overhanging boughs. He saw Taim Narran on his knees, shield laid flat before him, panting. He saw more than a dozen bodies, and one White Owl limping in a tight, unsteady circle, holding a crippled and ragged arm tight in against her side. She gave out a susurrant whimper. Her eyes were closed. Varryn put an arrow into her neck, and she staggered sideways and then fell. Varryn turned towards Orisian. The Kyrinin’s chest was heaving in a way Orisian had never seen before, from exertion and perhaps from the intensity of the fires that burned within him. Fires that subsided now, for the warrior blinked and blew out his cheeks, stretching the coils of his blue kin’thyn, and let his bow hang limply from his hand. His eyes cleared. Orisian nodded, a gesture of simple acknowledgement, a welcoming back of someone who had been absent, in more ways than one, until that moment. But he realised that the Kyrinin’s attention had already found another object. Those eyes focused beyond Orisian, sharpening upon something over his shoulder. Varryn’s face went slack, his lips parted. Orisian turned, frowning. And only then did he grasp the true shape of the disaster that had been closing upon them—upon him—all this time. For Ess’yr lay on her back, hair spread over the grass like a filamentous disc framing her head. She stared up, unblinking, through the branches of the oak tree to the sky above. One hand rested lightly on her breast, the fingertips just barely touching the shaft of the arrow that was sunk deep into her fluttering chest. Her blood was turning the deerskin of her jacket black.
CHAPTER 5
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Kan Avor
There is a ruin at the heart of the Lannis Blood: Kan Avor, the drowned city where once the Thanes of Gyre ruled, and where the creed of the Black Road was nurtured and tended. It stands now empty and silent, in the cold embrace of still waters and marsh. Birds roost upon its crumbling walls and bats hide in its broken towers. The people of the Glas Valley treasure this ruin, and all but venerate it. They think it a token of their determination, a glorious symbol of their past triumphs over the Black Road. They imagine that its persistence invigorates them. “See,” they say to one another. “See these broken and shackled towers. Here is the fate of our enemies. So strong is our grasp upon this land that we can tame mighty rivers and with them drown the cities of our foes.” It would have been better to unpick this city: to break it apart, stone from stone, carry away its every timber, plough its streets back into the soft earth until nothing remained. Kan Avor is the constant shadow of the past upon the present. It commemorates not glory but unforgiven and unforgotten hurts. When men venerate the memory of war and strife, and make temples of its relics, and seek to learn from the ruins of yesterday how they should live their lives today, then they have made themselves prisoners of the past, condemned to fight its wars again and again. For few wars are ever truly finished. There is always some remaining vein of bitterness for those who can neither forgive nor forget to mine. Time works many wonders, but they are not all to be treasured. It makes shackles out of past triumphs, burdens from victories. Bonds from memories. And it heals only if those who ride its currents are willing to be healed.