I
The Inkallim came to the na’kyrim in his ruined, rotting citadel on the floodplain. She came hesitantly, almost stumbling, eyes gritted and reddened by sleeplessness. Though the waters that had once imprisoned this city had retreated, it could never be free of their legacy. So she came with mud on her shoes, the stink of decay and mould on her clothing. And though she was one of the Children of the Hundred, and had been fashioned by those who trained her into a cold and remorseless weapon, imbued with all the certainty of her faith and her capabilities, the world had become wholly inhospitable to certainties. So she came as a supplicant, and for the first time in her hard life there was fear in her as she spoke. “Aeglyss, can you hear me?” The na’kyrim did not pause in his shuffling, limping, staggering progress around the columned hall. He hauled his cadaverous form on a weaving path amongst and around the pillars, wandering aimless in that sparse forest of stone trees. He walked barefoot, and his split and scabbed feet left prints of pus and blood on the dank floorboards. He moved slowly, and seemed at each and every moment to be on the point of falling. Yet the air the Inkallim breathed felt alive. It was heavy in her mouth and throat and lungs, full of his power. It pressed upon her chest and her back and shoulders, as if he was not only contained within this shambling and broken body in its stained, ragged gown, but also in the glistening, moist walls and in the space they defined. As if he was everywhere. She followed him, walking in those bloody footprints. “Can you hear me?” she asked. “You must help me. You must hide some of your light, Aeglyss.” He did not seem to hear her, for though he murmured erratic little whispers, whatever conversation he held was with himself, or with no one. What few words rose loud enough for the Inkallim to hear were in a language she did not know. “Please,” she said. A word that her lips barely remembered well enough to form. “Our warriors turn on one another. They forget themselves, their cause, everything. They lie down and do not rise. They lose their minds. There is sickness in every street, every shelter. Fevers claim more each day, and there is barely a healer with enough sense or strength to treat them. Our triumph—the creed’s ascendancy—remains incomplete…” He turned suddenly and sharply. His thin gown hung slack from his bony shoulders. The contours of his bones—ribs, hips—showed through its material. He stared at her from deep within the pits his eyes had sunk into. There was blood in those eyes, a fine net of countless broken vessels leaking soft red. “Who are you?” he asked quietly. His voice cracked and creaked like the stale hinge of a long-forgotten door. “Shraeve,” she told him. “Shraeve. You know me.” “I know everyone,” he grunted. And turned away once more, lurching on in his unsteady circuit of the hall. There were cries rising up from outside, wailing that might be lamentation or simple madness. The Inkallim was not distracted by them. Such sounds—and worse—were common currency now in Kan Avor. The city had found its voice in them. She followed after the na’kyrim. “Shraeve…” he whispered. “Shraeve… Shraeve. Yes, the raven. The fierce one, the cold one. Thinks she’s so wise, so clever. Not a true friend.” “You can calm them,” she insisted. “You must calm them, bring our people back to us. If they will not—cannot—submit themselves to our commands, everything we have gained could yet slip away.” “There is nothing I can do,” Aeglyss said bluntly, and then halted and looked around him as if puzzled. He frowned in contemplation. “There must be,” said Shraeve. He stared at her, and there was a shifting of the shadows about him. He flickered in and out of darkness for a few moments. It pained her eyes, and she clenched them almost shut. “Must be?” he hissed. “Don’t you think I would, if I could?” Scourges and daggers filled his voice. She, Banner-captain of the Battle Inkallim, quailed before this feeble, tottering figure. “Nothing must be,” he cried in tones of venom and fire. “I am only the gate, and the truth enters through me, becomes me, and shapes the world according to its tenets. What we see now is only the true nature of the world, of us all. Nothing more. I cannot prevent it.” He was suddenly speaking softly, so laden with sorrow and regret that those same feelings took hold of Shraeve. “I cannot close what has been opened. Cannot heal my wounds. Cannot bring them back, none of them. I cannot even tell, any more, where I end and it… everything… begins. I don’t know whether I poisoned it, or it me… You can’t imagine… how I wish…” He sagged against a pillar, then just as quickly gathered himself and lifted his head. “We discover the truth now. That’s the thing. We become what we have always been, at our root. We enter an age of misrule, and I am its herald, its doorkeeper, its lord. Its God.” “The Black Road is the truth,” Shraeve said. She backed away from him. He waved a dismissive hand in her direction, its flaking raw skin oozing fluid. “Hate is coming,” he murmured, lifting his gaze towards the ruptured roof of the hall. “He is coming. From Glasbridge. Is there… is there still a place called Glasbridge?” “Of course.” “Oh, he burns brightly. He’s the hardest, the purest of you all. Nothing but hate to him, and it’s all his own. He takes nothing from me, gives nothing.” The na’kyrim sounded strangely joyful, raised up by a perverse pleasure. “Who?” Shraeve asked. “Kanin?” “Kanin. Yes. The brother. There’s no flame will forge a keener hatred than the breaking of families. I know that. I learned that. I learned that a long time ago.” “He’s coming here?” Shraeve asked. He looked at her clearly for the first time then, fully present and aware. He appeared almost surprised to discover that he was not alone, though his sallow features were only briefly troubled. “You should not spend your energies fighting a chaos that cannot be halted,” he rasped. “You do not need to worry about such things. Whatever consumes us, will consume our enemies too. There are none left to oppose us, for my Shadowhand does his work well. None except him perhaps. Kanin. He’s moving. Drawing near, with hate in his heart and hate all around him, like a cloud. He’s done what you say you can’t, raven: kept a host at his side, found the will to quell it and guide it. So now we’ll see. Who is stronger, the Battle Inkall or a Thane who has no thought in his head save vengeance?” “Do not let her die.” “Get out of my way, then,” barked Yvane, pushing Orisian so forcefully that he rocked back on his heels. She was packing moss around the arrow embedded in Ess’yr’s pale flesh. The Kyrinin’s throat was trembling with each breath as if it contained beating wings. Her eyes were open but unseeing. Orisian had leaned over her, and looked into them, and found nothing there. No response, no recognition, only vacant grey orbs in which he saw the depths of his own despair. “Please,” he said now to Yvane, but the na’kyrim was not paying any attention to him. “Where’s Varryn?” She looked around, fruitlessly scanning the silent forest. “I need those herbs before I try to take the arrow out.” The blood had almost stopped. It had soaked into Ess’yr’s jerkin and into the grass beneath her. It had laid down crusted ribbons across the ivory of her exposed breast and shoulder. It had coated Yvane’s fingers. The fletching of the arrow, standing almost two hand spans above Ess’yr’s chest, twitched in time with her breathing. “Is she —” Orisian began. “I don’t know,” Yvane shouted without looking at him. She bent down and pressed her ear to that pallid chest. She listened for a moment and then straightened and pushed a finger into Ess’yr’s mouth, parting her slack lips. “She’s not breathing blood, as far as I can see or hear,” Yvane said. “That’s good. Where’s Varryn?” “Watch her!” Taim Narran was suddenly shouting. Orisian twisted round on his haunches, startled by the anger in the Captain’s voice. K’rina was staggering away, plunging with surprising speed into the thickets to the north of the spreading oak tree. Taim was already running after her, spitting curses at the man who had been tasked with watching the comatose na’kyrim. That man was entirely untouched by Taim’s scorn, for he had his head in his hands and was groaning distantly. Orisian surged to his feet, so clumsily that he lurched sideways and almost fell. He could still see K’rina, struggling with entangling briars. She would not get far, surely. Taim would have her in just a moment or two. He looked down at Ess’yr; felt anew the aridity of his mouth, the impotent tremors starting in his hands. The fear. He knelt down again. “Keep clear,” Yvane muttered. “Give me room.” She tried to feel under Ess’yr’s shoulder while holding down the compress of moss with her other hand, but quickly hissed in frustration. “Lift her up a little,” she told Orisian. He was afraid to touch Ess’yr. He felt sick at the thought of causing her pain, of doing unwitting harm. “Lift her shoulder,” Yvane snapped. He did, and Ess’yr gave a faint, descending sigh. She was still there, at least enough to feel something. Yvane probed at her back, exploring her shoulder blade with firm fingers. Apparently satisfied, she nodded to Orisian, and he let Ess’yr sink back into the grass as gently as he could. She was so light, he thought. So light. “The head of the arrow’s almost through,” Yvane said softly. “Nicking her shoulder blade, I think, not in it.” “Is that good?” Orisian asked. “Maybe. Is any of this good? Arrow has to come out, or she’ll die a hard death. Might do anyway. Getting it out’s going to be an ugly business.” She shook her head. Taim Narran returned, a feebly struggling K’rina held tightly in his grasp. Orisian registered them only in the dimmest of ways, for he was shaken by memories of almost visionary intensity and immediacy. Inurian, lying with an arrow buried deep in his back, the strength—the life—draining from him with every breath. The two of them, Kyrinin and na’kyrim, lay side by side in his imagination. “Look at her, look at her,” Yvane was whispering. “What’s a Fox doing here? She should be up there in the Car Criagar, in some vo’an. Hunting deer. Tanning hides. They should all be there still. Not dead, not dying.” She looked up as Taim gently settled K’rina down onto the ground beside them. As Yvane’s gaze settled upon her fellow na’kyrim, whose expression was entirely blank, almost childlike, her brow furrowed and sadness tugged at the corners of her mouth. A mist of light rain drifted down through the branches of the oak. It was cold on Orisian’s face. He curled his lips into his mouth, sucked that wet breath of the sky from them. Ess’yr’s eyes were slowly closing. “We need shelter,” he said. Yvane nodded curtly. K’rina was trying to rise again. Taim Narran pressed her down with a hand upon her shoulder. Orisian looked around. The dead lay all about, some in strangely twisted or contorted poses, other looking as if they had fallen asleep. Of the three Lannis warriors who had survived, two stood staring silently outward, though it was difficult to tell whether they were watchful or simply lost in distraction. The third, the man who had let K’rina slip away from him, was still whimpering into his hands. Lost not in distraction but in the miasma of dismay and despair Orisian could sense thickening just beyond the boundaries of his own thoughts. He saw all this, and found it faintly unreal and distant, as if he viewed it through the translucent gauze of the thinnest curtain. Varryn came running, spear in one hand, a mass of leaves and stems and bark in the other. He rushed in and dropped to one knee beside his ailing sister; opened his fingers to show his bounty to Yvane. The na’kyrim stared at the herbs and then grunted. “If that’s the best we can do,” she said. “The forest edge is near,” Varryn reported dully. “Open ground. A Huanin hut. Empty.” “We should go,” Orisian said at once. Yvane grimaced. “She won’t move well. We need to get the arrow out first.” They carried Ess’yr back to the stream down which they had fled earlier. She moaned as they went, lapsing in and out of consciousness. Every agonised sound that escaped her lips rasped on Orisian’s ears and made him wince. At the water’s edge they laid her down on her side. Yvane quietly and calmly cut away Ess’yr’s jacket with a knife, peeling it back from her shoulder. The na’kyrim whispered to Varryn in the language of the Fox as she worked. His expression betrayed no reaction to her words. His gaze never strayed from his sister’s face. Orisian turned his head aside, averting his eyes from the blood caking Ess’yr’s skin. He looked back in time to see Yvane setting down a crushed handful of the herbs mixed with moss. She had squeezed it into a neat, flat compress. Then she nodded to Varryn. He took the protruding shaft of the arrow in both hands and snapped it cleanly off, close to the flights. Ess’yr gasped, the pain finding her even in whatever distant, detached place she now resided. Orisian’s eyes widened in sudden understanding as Varryn took hold once more of the broken shaft. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Be quiet,” Yvane told him. “This needs doing.” She rotated and stretched Ess’yr’s arm a little, flexing the shoulder blade beneath her pristine skin. And Varryn pushed the arrow deeper. Its point burst bloodily out from Ess’yr’s back. She jerked and groaned, but Yvane held her. Varryn moved quickly round behind his sister, took hold of the gory head of the arrow and pulled it, with a single, firm movement, through her body. Rivulets of blood trickled from both new and old wounds. They washed her with water from the river, working back through the gore to expose and clean the tears in her skin. Orisian had to fight off waves of nausea, and his hands shook as he opened them to let the water he cupped there spill across her breast and shoulder. It was not horror or disgust that had hold of him, but fear. The thought of this woman dying made him feeble. Helpless. Once the wounds were bandaged, poultices securely strapped in place, Varryn slung his sister over his shoulder and strode away northwards without another word. “Thank you,” Orisian said to Yvane as she rose, wiping mud from her knees. She did not reply, but went to help K’rina get to her feet. Taim already had the three warriors moving, following Varryn. He watched Orisian with an unreadable expression. “Are you all right?” he asked. Orisian shook his head then shrugged. He did not know the answer to that question, and it seemed entirely unimportant to him. “We should hurry,” he said, stooping to pick up his shield. “The White Owls might come back.” “They’d probably have returned already if they were going to. Some kind of madness in them, to fight as they did. Should have waited for darkness, picked us off one by one. Not the Kyrinin way, running onto swords and shields like that. As if they didn’t care any more about their own lives. Perhaps they don’t care enough about ours to try again.” They went in a straggling single line through the fringe of Anlane, moving with less caution now than once they had. It did not take long for the forest to begin to thin. The trees were interspersed with stumps where the tallest and straightest of their brethren had been felled. Soon enough, there were more stumps than standing trees, and they came out at the crest of a long, shallow grassy slope. At its foot was a woodsman’s cottage. Its shutters and door hung open. Crows roosting on its roof scattered upwards. Varryn was already halfway down the slope. Orisian paused there, amongst the last of the saplings, Anlane’s outliers. Beyond that cottage, stretching out into the grey veils of soft rain, was the Glas Valley. Flat ground scattered with clumps of trees, dotted here and there with lonely buildings almost lost in the mist. Home. But he felt neither welcomed nor relieved. It had been a kind of desperate hope that brought him here, yet now he could imagine nothing good coming of this return. And still, despite that terrible foreboding, he felt it was where he had to be. If he belonged anywhere, it was here, in this bleak moment; and if there was any purpose he could claim as his own, it awaited him somewhere out there in the mist. In his homeland.
II
Kan Avor dominated the grey skyline like a challenge. Kanin smiled at the sight of its jagged, broken towers, its crumbling sprawl. A great rotten bruise on the earth. His pleasure was not engendered by the city itself, though. It was what it signified that woke his venomous, obsessive desires and promised them fulfilment. In his imagination visions crowded in upon him: an endless succession of different deaths for Aeglyss. He could smell the halfbreed’s blood, hear his wails, see his head springing free from the stump of his neck or his stomach split open by a single slash from a sword. He could feel his own hands about the halfbreed’s throat, the bones in there cracking and splintering beneath his iron grasp. Kanin fought to rid himself of these all-consuming imaginings, but could do no more than cordon them off in a part of his mind, so that though he still heard their intoxicating whispers and still felt that unbridled longing for the release their realisation would bring him, he had the space within his skull to think clearly. To do what needed doing. The main body of his ragged army was streaming ahead of him, struggling through the marsh and mire towards Kan Avor. Lannis folk, most of that vanguard. They spread out as they advanced. Not an army at all, in truth. Just a mob given licence to visit vengeance upon their most hated enemies, blinded for the moment to the truth that they did so in service to another enemy. They would be worthless, Kanin knew, as soon as they met any organised resistance. But they could still serve a purpose, and it was a matter of complete indifference to Kanin whether a single one of them lived to see tomorrow’s dawn. As was his own survival, as long as he achieved his goal before death claimed him. His horse was restless beneath him, eager to follow the rushing figures ahead. He gave the reins a gentle tug, and muttered a soothing word or two to the animal. Sheets of heavier rain swept through, intermittently obscuring Kan Avor’s looming form. All the land around the ruined city was turning into a swamp. Kanin did not mind. The mists and rain offered some concealment. He twisted in the saddle and looked down the neat line of his Shield. Igris was despondent and sullen, rainwater trickling from his hair down over his cheekbones. Behind stood two hundred Black Road warriors, all on foot, all silent and grim-countenanced. This was all that Kanin had managed to retain his hold upon. The rest had rebelled, or disappeared, or gone mad. The Glasbridge they had left when they marched out that dawn was a chaos of warring bands, frenzied killing, hungers of every kind let off their leash. “We move round to the south,” Kanin told Igris. “Let those Lannis idiots draw out what they can of the halfbreed’s defences.” Igris stared dolefully after the vast rabble of townsfolk flailing its way across the flat ground, closing slowly on the distant ruins. “Wake up,” snapped Kanin. His shieldman stirred himself and nudged his horse into motion. Kanin’s Shield led the way, and the rest of the warriors fell into column behind them. Kanin summoned Eska and the other two Hunt Inkallim with a flick of his head. They came, with Eska’s three hounds following at their heels. The dogs’ fur glistened with moisture, drawn like dew from the air and beaded over their bristly hides. “I will find the halfbreed,” Kanin said to the Inkallim. “I will try to kill him. You make your own away. Use whatever confusion we may create to draw near to him. Do nothing to endanger yourselves. Whatever Cannek may have told you, I do not want your aid. I refuse it, unless and until you see me within reach of the halfbreed, and act then only if in doing so you can aid me in striking him down. Do you understand?” Eska nodded casually. “Do you consent?” Kanin asked pointedly. She smiled narrowly. “I was commanded to preserve your life if I could, Thane. But it is difficult, when the one to be protected is so uninterested in his own continuation. It is our feeling —” she included her silent companions with a brief glance “—that either you or the halfbreed must die. It is evidently not possible for both of you to persist in this world. Therefore, keeping you alive seems to require that we first accomplish his destruction.” “Good,” grunted Kanin. Eska shrugged. “Only sense. And, in any case, I dislike what I have seen of him and of his adherents, and of the kind of world he creates around him. Cannek’s judgement of him feels right to me. Perhaps fate will yet validate it, through us.” “If I fail,” Kanin said as he guided his horse after his marching warriors, “if I fall, do not be deterred. I am sure the Hooded God, if he still watches over us, finds you more to his liking than me. Fate may yet favour you even if it condemns me.” “Our feet are upon the Road, Thane,” Eska called after him. He made no reply, but rode on through the rain. The slaughter began far out to Kanin’s left. He saw it dimly, through the obscuring, pulsing bands of drifting rain. He heard it fitfully, for the air was sluggish and an unwilling messenger. But it pleased him, for it was a beginning; and once begun, this would flow quickly to its end. Figures came running out from the grey bulk of Kan Avor, first just a few of them and then more and more until they swarmed across the boggy plain. There were no battle lines drawn up, no planning or preparation. People just emerged from the city and threw themselves at the motley forces advancing upon it. Kanin and his own company watched, but no enemy emerged to oppose their careful skirting of the city’s southern edge. The killing and dying was done closer to the river, where the ground was as much water as earth. Knee-deep in pools, tripped by tussocks of reed and grass, amongst the emergent bones of those who had died on this same field more than a century and a half before, the desperate and deranged flung themselves at each other. They drowned one another in the stagnant waters, fell and were trampled and suffocated in the sucking mud. They beat and tore with swords and fists and cudgels and stones. A few horses churned through the marsh, most of them ridden by ravens of the Battle Inkall, but they were clumsy and ponderous. The rain fell, and washed blood from wounds down into the waterlogged foundations of the valley; cries rose, and screams, into the vaporous clouds. All of this Kanin saw from a distance, but even across that intervening space he felt the nature of it. He felt its savagery, its mindless, flailing, destructive energy. He felt the yearning it embodied: the hunger to kill and to be killed. He knew it well. “Turn to the city,” he called out. Entering Kan Avor, passing between its first shattered buildings and onto its foul streets, was to cross a threshold. Beyond, within, lay a land of the dead and mad, the crippled and ailing. Some of the bodies scattered through the ruins bore the marks of violence—many had been dismembered or were half-eaten—but more were unblemished. Sickness, starvation, exhaustion had made this blighted place their home. Skeletal forms lurked amongst the remains of the city. They stared out from its shadows, coughing and shivering and cowering. The wet stench was foul: rotting flesh, excrement, burned meat. As Kanin led his company in, the ruins slowly rising about them as if clambering out of the saturated earth, he could hear dogs howling. Rats teemed in the shadows, running in gutters and alleys like streams of dark water. Above, broad-winged birds turned in endless circles, stacked above one another in columns of patient observation. Soon, even amidst such dereliction, they were having to fight their way. Men and women spilled out from the side streets, came tumbling out from doorways, leaped down from rooftops or the tops of walls. Like animals, starving beasts, they threw themselves at Kanin’s company. They came in such numbers and with such ferocious abandon that the column was scattered almost at once. Inchoate carnage spread itself through the ruins, all against all in a frenzy of bloodletting. Through that violent sea, Kanin ploughed a steady path. He cut away the hands that clung to his saddle and tore at the reins. His horse reared and stamped down, pounding bodies into the sodden dirt, crushing them against ancient cobbles. The street was choked with pushing, surging masses of people. Forests of spears jostled towards him, rattling against one another. The air bristled with missiles of every kind. Stones and tiles and bolts and darts flew like great dark insects. Kanin felt blows on his shield and shoulders and legs, but none seemed to wound him. And he found himself transported once more into that high, calm place where the demands of battle freed him of all other concerns and burdens. His sword rose and fell, the beat of a martial heart marking out the rhythm of his progress. The faceless horde that milled before and all around him was to him as inanimate and brute a thing as a thicket of tangled undergrowth. He carved his way through it, and its blood painted his boots and his blade and the flanks of his plunging, straining mount. He took no joy in it, for in itself it had no meaning to him. But his body felt more filled with fiery life than it had in a long time, and his mind as light and free. Ahead, through the rain, he could see the cluster of decapitated towers at the heart of the city. Once the abode, he dimly recognised, of the Thanes of Gyre; once the sanctuary in which the faltering fledgling creed of the Black Road had been protected and nurtured. Without that protection, so much would have been different. Everything would have been different. And those same shattered palaces would not now be the abode of abomination and corruption. Eska had assured him he would find Aeglyss there, lodged in the very centre of this dead place, like a maggot deep in the flesh of a carcass. The crowds in front of him thinned, and he stabbed his horse’s flanks with his heels. It burst forward into an expanse of open ground. Other riders came with him and erupted into that space with wild cries. They rode down the scattering dregs of their opponents, driving spears into backs. Kanin wheeled his horse about, aware that it was breathing badly, perhaps wounded, certainly on the fringes of panic. Igris and a few others of his Shield were emerging from the street. Blood—their own and that of others—was on their faces, in their hair, splattered across their chain vests and leather gauntlets. The drizzle made countless red tears of it, flowing down over them. Battle still raged behind them and on every side. Screams and the clash of weapons echoed flatly from the stones of the dead city, heavy on the air. Figures struggled back and forth, fell, faltered, died. “Did you see Eska?” Kanin shouted at Igris. His shieldman shook his head dumbly. Kanin did not care. He had cast his dice, and in the casting had liberated himself. He looked around at the undulating walls that bordered this grey field of rubble and mud. There were beams of rotten wood sticking out from a heap of stones, split and eroded and draped in rotting plant matter. A dead woman was sitting with her back resting against one of those beams, her head slumped forward onto her chest, her arms laid limply on the ground beside her. This place, this whole foul city, had been dead for more than a hundred years and dying for longer. Death was drawn to it, and freeing it from its long inundation had only opened the way for ever more mortality and decay and corruption to flow into it and fill its derelict streets. Kanin, for those few transcendent moments as he turned about, was filled with the sudden desire to see everything, every detail of the desolation, and take it all into him. He was, he thought, the avatar of death, returning in fierce splendour to his natural home. Aeglyss was not in truth the lord of this place or of the world that was being born; no, it was Kanin himself, and the slaughter that attended upon him. The moment, the vision, passed, and he sank back into his saddle. He was still imbued with a desperate excitement, but he was only a man once more. He led his warriors across the rubble and puddles and corpses towards an opening—the stone-formed memory of a street, perhaps, that once ran from this wide square. It carried them deeper, closer to the jagged bulk of palaces and parapets in which all Kanin’s desires were now invested. Like vermin, like swarming vermin, the inhabitants of Kan Avor came clambering and staggering from every side. Kanin and his Shield were beset once more, their horses plunging through a clawing sea of outstretched hands, a rain of stones. His sword arm ached, but his mounting anger drowned out that weary pain. He raged against the capacity of this city to oppose him; to vomit this unending flood of poisoned flesh up from its crevices and alleyways and drains, and batter at him with it. He was turned about for a moment as his horse faltered in confusion or weakness. He saw two of his men go down, dragged into the gaping maw of the mob and devoured. He saw how few warriors remained at his side and at his back. And his horse slumped down, tried to rise, and failed. The throng closed on him. He was crushed and beaten and choked with the heat and stink of bodies. The light of the muted day was dimmed still further as a dozen hands hauled him from his saddle, and the crowd engulfed him. But he still had his sword and still had strength in his legs. He rose, and made of his blade and shield a storm. He killed and killed until he was no longer alone; until Igris was there, and others. Until they opened a path of corpses that led on. Deeper. There were only six of them. Their horses were gone, all dragged down. The rest of the warriors were dead or scattered, fighting their own doomed battles now. Behind them, the entire city seethed with slayers and their victims, their voices and their struggles filling the sky with a single shrill howl. Kanin ran, and Kan Avor yielded its heart to him. It took him in beneath the cliffs of its greatest edifices, and led him down cobbled streets, past doorways with carved lintels, and eroded statues bedecked in regalia of mud and moss. It took him into its rotten core. The first of the Battle Inkallim came running alone, quite suddenly, from beneath a cracked archway, a long thin axe held out to her side. Like a dark arrow. Kanin veered towards her, but two of his Shield were closer and faster. They stepped between Thane and raven. And the raven feinted and weaved her darting way inside a sword thrust, and split one of their skulls. The second shieldman cut her across the hamstring, and she staggered but did not lose her grip on the axe. It came free of bone, and swung low and hard into the man’s knee, taking his leg from under him, the joint flexing at an impossible angle. The Inkallim limped another clumsy pace towards Kanin before she fell. He hammered his sword halfway through her neck. Her eyes turned white as they tipped back in their orbits. “Sire,” Igris shouted. Kanin turned. Seven more Inkallim, arrayed across the street. They were relaxed, their shoulders loose, their expressions full of calm confidence. Two leaned on spears; others cradled naked swords. Shraeve was there, arms folded across her chest, staring at Kanin. “Have enough died yet, Thane, to assuage your anger?” she asked him levelly. “Have you amassed sufficient dead to convince you of your error?” Igris and the last two of his Shield—one man, one woman—stood in front of Kanin. Shraeve smiled as they formed that defiant barrier. “Your forces are somewhat meagre, Thane. If fate’s favour is measured in numbers, I think you find yourself condemned.” Kanin looked back over his shoulder. The way he had come was closed off: thirty or more men and women, warriors and commonfolk and Tarbains. All wild-eyed, half of them bloodied. The rain had stopped, he realised. Blood no longer ran freely, but thickened and crusted on skin. His hopes became dust. What had seemed so possible now was plain folly. What madness had been upon him that he had thought himself capable of overcoming the fever of an entire world? “You did not think we would leave him undefended, did you?” Shraeve said. He stared back at her, and in that stare she evidently found the answer to any and all questions. “Very well,” she said with a dead smile. And even as she spoke, two spears were in the air, spinning along shallow arcs. Kanin started forward. So did Igris and the other two of his Shield. Only Kanin and Igris completed more than half a stride, as the spears hit home. Shraeve did not even move. The six other ravens spread into a half-circle, sinking gently into fighting stances. Kanin and Igris found themselves back to back, as that half-circle slowly extended itself, reaching to enclose them. “My feet are on the Road,” Kanin heard his shieldman murmuring. “My feet are on the Road.” Kanin bit back his scorn for such futile fidelity. But what did it matter? Death came as it wished, and what rode in its wake only the dead could know. Let those entering its embrace believe what they wished. To die a fool was no worse than to die alone and faithless. A flurry of blows. The scuffing of feet over the grimy cobbles. A hissing gasp. Kanin did not look round. He could not, for the three Inkallim facing him edged closer, eyeing him with all the focused intent of hounds stalking a stag at bay. “Igris?” he muttered. He heard metal on metal. Something—a shield, perhaps—striking the ground. Another muffled impact and then silence. Igris slumped against Kanin’s back. The sudden weight almost made him lose his balance, but he leaned against it. Slowly, the burden slid down his spine into the small of his back, across his thighs. Then it was gone, and Kanin swayed for a moment. He spared only the briefest of instants to look down and see Igris lying there, face down, his head by Kanin’s feet. There was blood on his neck and scalp. Kanin grinned at the nearest of the Inkallim. “So be it,” he said. But they backed away. They opened the circle that had held him and fell slowly back into rank across the street, aligning themselves with Shraeve once more. Past her shoulder, past the hilt of her sword, two dozen paces back, at the base of a tall column of curved stonework that could only encase a stairway, a door was opening. Kanin straightened, lowering his sword, letting his shield come back to his side. And Aeglyss emerged.
III
Aeglyss leaned heavily on Hothyn the White Owl as he advanced out into the street. His head—a simple skull, almost, in its gaunt and fleshless angles—lolled on a limp neck. The plain robe he wore was patterned with brown and red and black stains, the exudates of the wrecked and porous body beneath. At the sight of him, Kanin was instantly blind to all else, and he sprang forward. “Be still,” Aeglyss said, like a thunderclap on the damp air. Kanin staggered to a halt, dizzied. The world spun about him for a moment, a swirling vision of dirty grey stonework and mud and figures that flashed past too quickly to be recognised. He steadied himself. The na’kyrim was staring at him, and that gaze was all contempt, all confidence. Shraeve started to move. Long, languid strides, hands reaching slowly up for the hilts that framed her face. Her eyes were on Kanin, wholly committed to his death. And he could see it quite clearly for himself. He could envisage with the utmost clarity his own graceful execution. She would be like a hawk, composed entirely of speed and power, falling upon him. He would die now on Shraeve’s twin blades, and go into the darkness knowing he had failed. He would follow Wain, knowing there would never be an answer to her death. He knew all this, and the weight of it felt as though it would crush his heart, but still he hefted his sword in his hand and tightened his grip upon the straps of his shield until the leather creaked, and stepped forward to meet her. Perhaps… perhaps… “Wait,” said Aeglyss. Shraeve stopped. She passed from motion into perfect immobility in the blink of an eye. Her gaze remained locked onto Kanin. He found that he had come to a halt too. Two dozen paces separated Thane and raven. Kanin could feel his heart thumping, straining, in his chest. Its beat was the only sound in all the world. A silence descended upon them all, every warrior gathered there at Kan Avor’s centre. Then Aeglyss was edging sideways, his gown trailing through the mud. He moved like an ancient, all brittleness and fragility. But his voice… his voice was like the ocean. “You have done all that you could have done, Bloodheir,” the halfbreed rasped. “No. Thane. I forget. Or remember too much.” He coughed and shivered. Blood was trickling from his nose. Hothyn followed him, a watchful, silent attendant. “You never understood, though. Because there is something in you—this hatred—that deafens you, blinds you, you never grasped what has been happening all around you. You see only the surface of things. But you needed to feel, Thane, if you were to understand.” Aeglyss extended a bony arm, and pressed his hand against a wall. He leaned thus, letting the ruined city take his weight. “If you could have felt it, you would have understood that this is not something you can undo. Not with all your hatred, all your stubbornness. You are not equal to the task of opposing me, because I am become the world.” There were cracks in the skin of the halfbreed’s naked scalp, Kanin could see. Fissures in him. Failings of the body. But it was not his body that filled the street, coiled like fog around the buildings, streamed out from the stones. It was not in his limbs that his awful strength resided. “I am become the world,” Aeglyss repeated. His eyes were closed. His eyelids were seeping sores. “And it would be easy to let you die, for the world is finished with you. But that is not what I want. And the choice is mine to make.” “No,” said Kanin through gritted teeth. The denial cost him a great effort, for the halfbreed’s monumental will had hold of him. “Yes. You will be what I want you to be, Thane, because that is the nature of things now. Surely you do not imagine you could have come this far, had I not permitted it? I think a thing, and it becomes real. That is what… that is how… No, no. Things have happened… Did I dream them? Scavenge them from the memory of the world? Things I never wanted…” Then something darted from the ruins, some dark fleck of movement that leaped towards the na’kyrim. It was too fast to follow, too fleeting for any of them to react. Any of them save the one Kyrinin. In the time it took Kanin to turn his head, Hothyn managed a single surging stride, set his hands on the halfbreed’s shoulders, twisted and hauled him aside, and caught the crossbow bolt square in his own back. The White Owl fell against Aeglyss, and in the manner of that collapse Kanin could see at once that he was dead. Aeglyss swayed for a moment, reaching round to grasp the stub of the quarrel that had buried itself between ribs and deep into the heart beyond, then the Kyrinin’s weight was too much for him and he toppled backwards. The passage of time slowed. Shraeve was pointing. Inkallim were running, homing on the source of that fatal dart. Kanin blinked—it felt glacial and leaden—and looked back to Aeglyss. The na’kyrim was pinned beneath Hothyn’s corpse, struggling feebly to roll it away. And Kanin moved. One long stride, then another, giant paces that swept him over the silt-packed cobbles. There was nothing save the sight of the halfbreed, down and distracted, and the feel of his own body, the might that coursed through his legs and his shoulders and chest. The world, the future, fate: all of it yielding itself to him and opening itself. He had but to reach out and take hold of what was offered. He ran towards Aeglyss, and his sword was rising, attaining the height from which it would fall, and in falling salve all hurts. Shraeve hit him from the side, driving her shoulder into his armpit. It felt like a log of hardwood punching into his ribcage, and it knocked him from his feet. She somersaulted away from him and somehow twisted so that she came to rest facing him, crouched on one foot, one knee, hands already up and grasping the hilts of her swords. Kanin tried to get to his feet, but his shield hampered him. He was too slow, he knew. He had seen Shraeve fight; seen her speed. But the Inkallim was smiling, rising without urgency. Her two swords eased free of their scabbards and she held them out, one on either side, rolling her wrists so that the blades stirred the air in lazy circles. Kanin’s flank where she had hit him protested violently as he lifted himself off the cobblestones. He used sword and shield to lever himself up, and forced himself to straighten, ignoring the cramping pain from his ribs. He wanted to look for Aeglyss, but Shraeve was advancing slowly, that disdainful smile still upon her face. “Come, then,” Kanin murmured. He would welcome it now, to be freed from the chains of sorrow and failed hopes. “I killed your sister, Thane,” Shraeve said quietly. “Not Aeglyss. Me. It was necessary.” “Necessary. Necessary.” Kanin repeated the word in incomprehension. It had no meaning to him, his mind could not grasp its shape. It bore no relation he could conceive of to Wain. To her death. Yet it filled him with renewed fire. It burned away the dull fog of surrender. He threw himself at the Inkallim, and heard as he did so, as if from very far away, Aeglyss crying out, “Don’t kill him.” She was all that he had imagined she would be. A dark and dancing flame, always and inevitably just out of reach. He fought as he never had before, knowing that there was nothing to preserve his strength, or will, or passion. It all came to this. Shraeve’s swords wove fluid webs which he could not penetrate. They notched his shield and struck splinters from its face. Her body described patterns that he did not recognise, and could not follow or predict. His blunt attacks lagged always an instant behind, though he poured every last measure of his skill and effort into them. His boots scraped and slipped across the uneven surface of the street; hers flowed. She laid open his cheek. She dented the chain links on his breast. Kanin had never been so wholly present within the moments of a battle. He had never been so fast or so acutely conscious of each movement, each fractional instant. He had never been a better warrior than he was there, facing Shraeve in the decrepit streets of the shattered city, beneath broken towers. And it was not enough. From the first ringing touch of their contending blades, he had understood that it would not be enough. He cut at her hip. Shraeve blocked the blow. As he pulled his sword arm back to gather the distance for another attempt, he found the point of her second sword pursuing it, lancing diagonally between the two of them towards his elbow. He straightened that retreating arm out and twisted his shoulder back to let Shraeve’s lunge take her across him. She turned as she went, showing her back to him. He began to bring his shield sweeping up and around, aiming its rim at the side of her head. A sudden dip and surge and Shraeve was rising, still turning, in the air; moving no longer across him but towards him. Her trailing arm was snapping round. Kanin saw it, read its path, and could do nothing to prevent it. A dark blur, as of a rock rushing down at him, and the pommel of her sword hit his cheekbone, just in front of his ear. He felt his shield strike Shraeve, but she rolled over it, like an acrobat playing games at a feast. The impact had blinded him. Pain flashed through his skull, as bright and loud as summer lightning. There was a ringing whine in his ears. His legs softened, the knee joints quaking and yawing as he staggered, sinking towards the cobblestones. Another stunning blow, in the centre of his chest, deadening him. He plunged backwards, blind and deaf. His body was nothing but pain and crushing pressure. He hit a wall or perhaps the ground, the back of his head cracking against stone, and felt consciousness faltering. The beat of his heart slowed and slowed. “Don’t kill him,” he heard the na’kyrim saying again as he receded. As soon as the bolt had leaped from her crossbow, Eska was gone. She ducked and scrambled on all fours away from the waist-high stump of wall that had concealed her. Behind her, shouts, pursuit. She did not need to look. Shraeve’s ravens—perhaps even Shraeve herself—would be pouring through this labyrinthine rubble in moments. If she had permitted herself the luxury of such feelings, that might have given Eska a certain pleasure. She would, in many ways, welcome the testing of her skills against their cruder abilities. The Battle might benefit from a lesson in humility. Now, though, it was escape that dominated her thoughts. She had glimpsed, down the path her quarrel had carved through the air towards the na’kyrim’s chest, the wood-wight’s first reflexive movement. He had reacted with an immediacy she would not have thought possible. This was a lesson for her; one she would remember, should she ever be required to hunt his kind. She could not be certain, for certainty would have demanded hesitation, but she guessed that he might even have been sufficiently fast to save the halfbreed. Her sole concern now was to keep herself alive long enough to find out, and if necessary to rectify her failure. She hauled herself, snake-like, through a hole at the base of a wall. Frost or flood had broken out just enough stones to permit her passage. In the unroofed chamber beyond, the mud was deep. It coated her face and stomach as she slithered into it and sprang upright. There were three corpses here, lying as if asleep against piles of fallen building blocks, wrapped in blankets. They had been alive when she first came this way. Sick, probably dying, but alive. She had seen many such pathetic groupings as she picked her way through Kan Avor’s dismal maze. Half the people of the city seemed to be in the grip of one affliction or another. The febrile suffering of these three in particular, she had chosen to end. It would have been intolerable to her to leave them there alive—even if only barely—across her chosen escape route. She paused only long enough to sling her crossbow across her back, roll one of the bodies aside and retrieve her spear from where she had left it, hidden beneath that dead flesh. She vaulted through what had once been a window, and splashed into the puddle of filthy water beyond. The ruins stretched out before her, the leaning, slumping carcasses of countless houses. She ran into that thicket of stone, more concerned with speed now than concealment. The Battle would come quickly, as was their wont. They seldom submitted themselves to the restraint of subtlety. It would have been easier had she not been left alone by the unpredictable tumult of Kan Avor. One of her fellow Inkallim she had heard die, overrun by the raving mob that he led away from her. The other had simply disappeared as if the city had opened and folded itself about him. Even now, the sounds of war hung over Kan Avor like a fell miasma. The fire Kanin oc Horin-Gyre had lit had taken on a life of its own, and Eska could feel for herself the creeping, persuasive seductions of its sole imperative. Its hunger for death and violence gnawed at the edges of her mind, trying to make her its own. There would be few save the dead left here by nightfall. Against the background murmur of slaughter, she caught a nearer sound: splashing footfalls behind her, the rattle of scabbards on belts. Too close to be ignored. It was not, then, to be easy. Still, she had one ally left to her. She turned in a narrow passageway floored with great square paving stones. The remnant walls that bounded it were high enough and narrow enough to make it ill-suited to swordplay; a spear, though, would work well. As she stood there, settling into a ready stance, she whistled: a long, keening note. The first of the ravens appeared at the end of the passage, shouted at the sight of her, and came straight at her. He was a big man, and broad. Behind him, she glimpsed one, two more, but his dark mass blocked her sight of them as he closed on her. She read his intent in his eyes and his pace: he would impale himself upon her spear, and keep it there, in his body, while his companions rushed over him to cut her down. Typical of the Battle. And likely to undo her, Eska judged. She whistled again, still louder. The Battle Inkallim was almost on her. She dipped into a crouch, bracing herself. The force of his charge onto her spear shook down through its shaft into her hands. She resisted only enough to be certain that mortal damage was done, and to hear the roaring, gasping bursting of the air out from his lungs, and then she dropped the spear, turned and ran. She could hear them coming after her, stamping over their dying fellow. But she could hear something else now, ahead of her rather than behind, and it was a sound that might yet save her. The hound came into the narrow gullet of constricting rubble at a pounding gallop, teeth already bared in a spittle-ornamented snarl, its massive shoulders pumping, its back flexing as it strained for every fragment of speed its frame could give. It came with fury, for that was what her call had demanded of it. This was the last of them—the others had died clearing her path in through the outskirts—and it was the best, for she had chosen to preserve it for just such a moment as this. She hurdled the beast as it bounded towards her, and it flowed beneath her without faltering. It had eyes only for those following in her wake. She landed and spun on her heels, already shrugging the crossbow free from her back. She watched the great dog fling itself up at the throat of the leading Inkallim, even as her hands dragged back the bow’s string, as her fingers went to the quiver of bolts at her belt and plucked one out. Dog and raven went down, thrashing in a confusion of limbs. They battered themselves, both of them, against the stonework, against the ground. The kicking of the Inkallim’s legs, and the thick, desperate cries, told her the hound’s teeth had found a grip. The second of the ravens could not pass the flailing combatants. He hacked at them instead, raining ferocious indiscriminate blows down. His blade opened the dog’s haunch, broke its hip, skinned its shoulder, and still it fought and shook its massive head, tearing at flesh. The woman beneath it had stopped struggling. The last of the Inkallim set both hands on the hilt of his sword and raised it before him, point down. He plunged it into the hound’s body, just behind its neck, and the animal gave a gurgling whimper and went limp. The man looked up then, sword still buried deep in the dog, and his eyes met Eska’s. She was sighting down the line of the quarrel. She saw his recognition of his fate. He tensed to withdraw his blade. She freed the bolt, and it was in his chest, and he fell silently back. His sword stood there, erect. It had gone through the dog and into the dead woman beneath.
IV
The cottage smelled of abandonment. The outside, the winter, had seeped into its fabric, softened it and made it no longer habitation but incipient ruin. There were browned leaves on the floor, blown in through open windows. Dark stains tracked the invasive waters that had found their way in through an unmended roof. It was cold and empty in the way only a place that had long lacked a fire in its hearth, and voices around its table, could be. Orisian ran his fingers over the carved bowls that were still neatly stacked on a shelf and the bottles draped with cobwebs. The detritus of lives now lost or driven off. There were no bodies, at least. Orisian could remember all too clearly another woodsman’s cottage, on the slopes of the Car Criagar, where a good deal of blood had been spilled. That place had smelled much worse. Ess’yr lay on a low, hard bed. Orisian saw in her something entirely new: a fragile vulnerability. Pangs of a powerful emotion swept through him, but it was no simple thing. He felt it acutely, but could not fully understand it. Guilt, longing, fear. All those things and perhaps more. “Can I get you something?” he asked softly, not wanting to rouse K’rina from her torpor on the other side of the room. “Water? Food?” “Nothing,” Ess’yr whispered. He sat on the edge of the bed; felt the lightest of contact between the small of his back and her thigh. She appeared to be on the brink of sleep or unconsciousness. Her eyes, as she looked up into his face, would lose their focus now and again, and drift, then return to him and be sharp and clear once more. Even her intricate tattoos, the token of the lives she had taken, seemed to have lost some of their colour and faded a little into the pallor of her skin. “You would never have been here if you had not found me that night,” Orisian said. “Winterbirth.” He could see in her eyes that she heard him, and understood him, but she said nothing. If she felt pain, she did not show it. Now, as ever, she drew upon reserves of calm and composure he had seen in no one else, calm that exceeded the capacity of the world to assail it. It was, he suddenly realised, something precious beyond limit to him: that there should be someone near at hand who had within them that imperturbable strength, that resilient self-possession and balance. Someone, he thought, who had found that core of grace and peace and persistence that he had unknowingly been seeking himself since the Heart Fever stole the better part of his life away. Inurian had had it in some measure. Ess’yr had it in abundance. Orisian looked at her and saw… he saw another world, another life. In those sculpted features and their unutterable grace he saw a world that should have been. One in which there had been no deaths, no Heart Fever even; in which there was still laughter, and companionship, and a lightness of spirit. He was not sure whether he was a part of that world he glimpsed. He did not know whether, in it, he would have found her. He did not even know whether what he saw came from within her, or within him, or from somewhere else entirely. But it was, despite that, utterly beautiful to him. It was filled with light, and that light shone in her alabaster skin, and in her eyes, and in her fine, frail lips. He reached out carefully, and touched her. As he had imagined doing so often. He laid his fingertips on the curve of her chin, and felt a gossamer strand of her gleaming hair brush the back of his hand. Through his fingers he felt her warmth, and it seemed to him that that was a part of the light too. He leaned towards her, sinking as if towards a dream. And her hand was on his chest, gentle but firm. The slightest roll of her head took her skin away from his fingers. He felt the pressure of her hand on his breastbone. It was not urgent, not hard, but it was calmly insistent. She slowly pushed him back and lifted his face away from hers. “No,” she said, soft as the movement of a feather, and the light receded. What he had seen, that place, that possibility he had caught a distant sight of, faded. He felt alone and reduced. But he nodded, just once. Ess’yr let her arm fall back to her side. She closed her eyes. Orisian rose from the bed and walked away. He could remember the light, just. He could remember how it had made him feel. But not what it contained. Not precisely what it was that might have been. Outside the cottage he found a colourless world, desolate. The stumps of felled trees. The cold prickle of drizzle on the air. A muffled, sluggish silence. Yvane was sitting on a stump not far away. She was picking dried berries from a clay pot she must have found somewhere inside, placing them one by one into her mouth. She watched Orisian as he emerged and stood blinking up at the featureless clouds. He turned away from her. There was a path beaten into the grass. He followed it to the side of a tiny stream running in a narrow cut between concealing clumps of grass and rushes. He knelt down and scooped searingly cold water over his face. It ran from his chin and bubbled on his lips as he breathed through it. He sat there and looked back towards the cabin. It looked lifeless, even now. It looked as though it belonged to the brooding forest that waited just a little way up the slope. Yvane was walking towards him, still eating those berries as she came. He ignored her, and stared at the timber walls, the slanting roof, the collapsed woodshed, as if the cottage and its contents were a mystery he might unravel by examination; as if it held a secret truth. But his mind was empty. For the first time in days—weeks—there was a hollow silence in him. Nothing. “She will probably live, if the wound stays clean,” Yvane said, looking down at him. “If she’s tended.” He nodded but said nothing. The na’kyrim offered him the little pot and the last of the wizened fruits it contained. He waved it away. “If Varryn finds the medicines he’s out looking for now,” Yvane added. “It’s not the best of seasons for it —” “She will live,” Orisian interrupted her. Yvane sniffed. “Probably.” She lifted the pot and tipped its contents into her mouth. “She will,” Orisian said. Yvane bent and raised a handful of water to her lips. “I hope you’re right,” she said, after she had swallowed it down. Movement at the door of the cottage drew Orisian’s attention. K’rina came hesitantly out into the damp, stumbling, her arms folded across her chest. She made her way northwards over the dark grass. Yvane saw Orisian was looking that way, and turned to follow his gaze. She sighed. “I’ll…” the na’kyrim began, but Orisian shook his head. “No need. See?” Taim and one of the warriors were coming, returning from their foray out into the fogs and rains of the valley. They trudged steadily and slowly up towards the cabin, adjusting their path without a break in stride to intercept K’rina’s weaving course. Orisian and Yvane watched the two burly men close on the oblivious na’kyrim and gather her up, turn her about and ease her back towards the bed she had risen from. They were gentle, as if they shepherded a sick child, or a simple one. “Before we left Highfast, I spoke with Eshenna about K’rina,” Yvane said. Orisian stood up. The movement dizzied him. “She was a kind and gentle woman, from the sound if it,” Yvane went on. “Too kind and gentle, perhaps. She cared for Aeglyss, back there in Dyrkyrnon, when no one else would.” “Don’t, Yvane.” “No, you should hear this. Why not? She made good fish traps, apparently. And knew the best places to put them. She caught a lot of fish. She used to sing to the children. Old Huanin songs. Her parents were —” “Yvane…” “Why don’t you want to know?” Orisian could have left her, walked away from her and taken refuge in the cottage. But something in him would not permit that. Something chose to face her. They were both quite calm. For once, there was not the slightest trace of argument between them. “Because it’s not knowledge I can do anything with,” he said to her. “Her parents… Ah, I can’t remember their names. Eshenna told me, but it’s so hard to keep things clear now.” Yvane rubbed her cheek wearily. “But it doesn’t matter. The point is that she had parents, they gave her life. She was a child once, and grew, and lived and thought and hoped and wanted. All of that wasn’t for this. Not be made into… this. To be used.” “I know. She had a life. I know that. She didn’t deserve any of this. But how many of our lives turn out the way we hope they will? Na’kyrim, Huanin, Kyrinin. We none of us deserved any of this, did we?” “It’s her love for Aeglyss… Whatever’s been done to her, it’s hung on the hook of her love for him. She’s the moth to his flame, or maybe it’s the other way round now. But it started with love.” “It’s too late for this, Yvane. This is where we are. There’s no going back, no unpicking what’s brought us here.” “You’re taking her to her death.” “We don’t know that,” Orisian snapped. “Unless you know more than you’ve told me, we can’t be sure. Do you? Have you kept something from me?” Yvane returned his gaze sternly. “I know nothing more than you,” she said. “But don’t pretend you understand less than you do.” “I might have led us all to our deaths. All of us, Yvane. We could all die. Every one of us. Do you want to know the name of every man’s parents? What about Ess’yr? Shall we drag her from her bed, demand that she shares with us her family, her life? I don’t know the name of her mother or her father. I don’t know where she was born, where she has been. I don’t know… Shall we…” He faltered, suddenly becoming aware of how his voice was rising. There was a dampness on his face and when he touched a fingertip to it, he was surprised to discover that he was weeping. “She will live,” Yvane said quietly. “I…” Orisian mumbled, hearing the words as if someone else spoke them, “I… was born in Castle Kolglas. I learned how to hawk with my sister and my brother, along the shore. My mother sang. It was the greatest happiness… It was like joy when she sang. Her name was Lairis. My father’s name was Kennet. And my brother’s… my brother’s name was Fariel.” He shook his head. “We die,” he said. “We all die. Known or unknown, mourned or unmourned. All that we are, and all that we have been, passes. We all come to that same end, and it’s neither just nor deserved nor glorious. You don’t need me to tell you that, Yvane. And you know as well as I do, better than I do, that all of this—Aeglyss, everything—all of it has to stop, somehow. If it doesn’t… if it doesn’t we’re all lost.” A brief fire in her eyes—the heat of anger—and sudden venom in her voice. “And it’s always na’kyrim, isn’t it, who pay the price? Every convulsion, every war, whatever its cause, it’s na’kyrim who get crushed in the middle of it. Too strange, too different… too feared…” She lifted a hand to her brow, wincing in pain or distress. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m sorry. It’s… I lose track of myself… I can’t tell what’s his, what’s mine. There’s so much hurt to draw on. Or perhaps it draws on me, on all of us. But I know… I do know. She’s all we—you—have. There’s nothing else to set against what he’s become.” “Then why? Why fight against it? Why make it hard?” “It should be hard, don’t you think?” she said at once, with just a hint of that old combative note. All her own that, none of it borrowed from the Shared. “That’s all that’s changed, now that Aeglyss has loosed his poison in the Shared: it’s made it easy. It’s taken away everything that should be there, all the restraints and hesitations and sympathies. It’s freed us all to surrender to the darkest of our instincts, the most painful of our memories. And I don’t want it to be so easy.” She lifted her hands as if to beg for his understanding, but then let them sink back. “He’s made of the Shared, the whole, something that separates us all, turns us inwards, and leaves us with nothing for company but our anger or grief or fear or hate. The one thing that binds and unites us, and he used it to divide us. He made us alone.” Her voice fell as she spoke. She seemed suddenly so much older and more fragile than ever before that Orisian almost reached out to take her hands. Yet comfort felt like a lie to him. It had no place here or anywhere. And perhaps that was of Aeglyss’ making as well, but even if so it made the bleak thought no less certain, no less tenaciously rooted in his mind. “You stay here, with Ess’yr,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do. I’ll… I’ll take K’rina. No, not take her; I will only follow where she leads now, Yvane. I’ll force nothing on her, just keep her safe, as the Anain who fashioned her can no longer do. Justly or unjustly, the need—the desire—is in her. All I will do is give her the protection she needs to fulfil it. If that is a cruelty, and cold… I don’t know. It seems to me that it’s the smallest of the cruelties that lie ahead down other paths any of us—all of us—might follow.” “Do you know where we are?” Orisian asked Taim softly as they stood together in the doorway of the cottage. The warrior frowned out at the landscape slowly emerging from the thinning mists. A heavy dusk was gathering, settling itself across the dank, still valley, but in this last slow hour of the day it was yet possible to see some way over the grassland and the fields. A solitary owl—not white but pale like sand—was ghosting its way through the murk. There was no other movement. No sound. “I’ve an idea,” he said. “South of Grive. Kan Avor can’t be more than a day’s walk, if that’s what you’re thinking.” “It is. But it’ll be a night’s walk.” Orisian grunted. “We’ve become creatures of darkness. I fear daylight more than the shadows now. And there’s no time to wait, in any case.” Taim glanced back into the gloomy interior of the hut. Yvane was crouched at Ess’yr’s bedside, applying a fresh poultice of the herbs Varryn had brought back from the forest. The Kyrinin himself stood behind her, watching every movement with a dark intensity on his face. “She can’t travel any further,” Taim said. “No. Yvane will stay with her, tend her. It’s… it’s probably for the best in any case. I wouldn’t want her… either of them…” Orisian let the sentence fade away. It was a fruitless thought. All thoughts seemed fruitless, defeated by the unfathomable obscurity of the future. It was as if an endless bank of sea fog lay across his path, impenetrable to foresight. He found he did not fear it, though. He almost welcomed it, for the promise of release it offered. Its dark, unknowable embrace could be no more harsh, no more painful, than that of the present or of his memories. “Owinn is the only one left, I think,” said Taim. He nodded towards the young warrior seated on a tree stump, methodically cleaning the blade of his sword with a handful of wet grass. “The other two haven’t returned. We may have lost them. Or they’ve lost themselves.” “Is he…?” Orisian was unsure how to ask the question, but Taim understood anyway. “He seems calm. Untouched. Can’t be certain, of course. Nothing seems certain any more. But so far I’ve seen nothing in him to make me fear for him.” “He can stay, then. Guard them. I would go alone, Taim, if I thought I could. I’d take no one but K’rina. But if we find trouble…” “I know,” Taim said levelly. “I wouldn’t stay, even if you commanded me to.” “I’m sorry,” Orisian said. “I truly am.” Taim smiled. There was great weariness in it, yet Orisian was struck by how easily it seemed to come to the warrior’s lips. There was nothing forced or pretended about it. “Enough sorrow already,” Taim murmured. “It mends nothing. Now we just see what happens.” Orisian went to stand over Ess’yr. Yvane had moved away, crushing roots with the heel of her hand on the scored, frayed surface of an old table. Varryn remained, though, looking down at his sister. He stared at her with such concentration, with so knitted a brow and such narrow eyes, that it seemed he might almost imagine he could heal her grave wound by strength of will alone. Ess’yr herself was awake; conscious, if only distantly so. Her eyelids were heavy. “We will have to leave you here,” Orisian said to her. He did not bend towards her or reach for her, or do anything to close the distance between them. There was no bridge to lay across that gap now. He knew that. He could never draw any nearer to her than this, never know any more of her than what he already did. It was a terrible loss to him, that fading away into nothing of possibility. He could not even say whether he was capable of bearing it, for the burdens on his heart no longer differentiated themselves one from the other. They merely pressed down, a single, slow pressure that one day, he knew, would become insupportable in its collective weight. It took her a moment or two to focus on his face. He wondered what she saw but could read nothing in her gaze. “Taim and I will take K’rina a little further. As close as we can to wherever it is she wants to go. Tonight.” At first he was not sure she could even hear him. Her lips, her eyes, remained motionless and placid. But then she moistened those lips with the tip of her tongue. “Go well,” she whispered. He nodded. It seemed wholly insufficient, yet there was nothing more in him to say. Nothing that the sadness within him would permit to rise to his lips, at least. To leave now would be to leave an ocean of words unuttered; to attempt to make words of the ocean would do nothing to drain it. He turned away. “I think Inurian would find it good, what you do,” he heard Ess’yr say in that frail voice. “He would find it wise.” “I hope so.” He felt a powerful need to be outside, free of the confinement of that cottage. The rain might be gone, the mists cleared, but the cold air of the descending night still bore enough moisture to make its touch soft and fresh. He closed his eyes and lifted his face towards the sky. He did not know how long he stood thus. No thoughts, none of the turbulence that had grown so familiar, troubled him. He simply stood, face uplifted, until the softest of movements at his side drew him back. “My sister…” said Varryn, uncharacteristically subdued and hesitant “… my sister asks that I go with you.” Orisian frowned. “Stay,” he said. “Watch over her. She may need you.” Conflicting emotions disturbed Varryn’s smooth features, like the shadows of the roiling clouds passing overhead. It was a momentary perturbation; he set his jaw firmly, pushed his chin out a fraction. “No,” the Kyrinin said. “I will go with you.” “Why?” Orisian asked, but Varryn had already turned and was ducking his head under the cabin’s lintel. Orisian stared after him briefly. Then the sound of that owl, calling its melancholy notes out across the valley, drew him back to the soft night. There was nothing to see. Darkness had all but engulfed the land now. And when Orisian looked out into it, he saw not so much the absence of light as the absence of everything. A waiting void.
V
The dead came down the River Vay, drifting in lazy fleets, turning in the current. They bumped along the hulls of the barges and ran up onto the mudbanks where the river’s bends robbed the waters of their force. Seagulls came up from the sea, sculling across the sky, flocking down to loiter around any grounded corpse and wait for it to be opened by dogs. There were the corpses of men and women and children from the masterless villages on the Vaywater; Kyrinin corpses from the river’s distant marshy headwaters, where the Snake had fallen into strife with the Taral-Haig Marchlords; corpses from the vast flat cattle lands north of Drandar, where nobles long settled in wary peace now openly feuded, and Heron Kyrinin crossed the river to prey on the displaced or undefended. In Hoke, capital of the Thaneless Dargannan Blood, half the city burned while its garrison of Haig warriors was besieged in its barracks. Those men too burned, in time. Along the shore, a Dornach ship landed raiders who razed a village and then fell to fighting amongst themselves over the loot. In the Far Dyne Hills, west of Dun Aygll, where once Kings mined for precious metals and woodsmen mined timber from forests they thought inexhaustible, gangs of youths hunted tithe-collectors. Punitive bands of warriors—Haig men and Ayth men alike—hunted youths and their families. Wandering companies of Black Road scavengers and pillagers roamed the bare hillsides, brutally aimless in their destruction. Many villagers, despairing of all order, drove their flocks south into the immense vale of the Blackwater River, where the lowlanders defended their lands with ambushes and pit traps. Far beyond the Vale of Stones, in the still snow-cloaked lands of the Black Road, Battle Inkallim—few of them now but ferocious still—warred with the High Thane’s companies. Townsfolk rose on one side or the other. One night, when the moon was stark and full, warriors broke into the Sanctuary of the Lore, dragged many of its youngest Inkallim out into the snow and killed them beneath the watchful pine trees. In Dyrkyrnon—secret Dyrkyrnon, secluded by both choice and by the trackless wetlands in which it nestled—na’kyrim walked in fear of the Shared, of shadows in the mind, of each other. Some became deranged and fled into the marshes, there to drown or die on the spears of the increasingly untrusting Heron clan. Some lapsed into uncommunicative despair and began to waste slowly away. One tore her own eyes out and plunged a fish knife into her own neck. The world reeled and staggered, and with the rising and setting of each sun it descended deeper into the morass from which it could not pull free. And though the days grew longer, as winter withdrew slowly into the north, it seemed to all its inhabitants that there was a diminishing of light, an overthrowing of it by ever more profound darkness. Anyara watched Coinach’s face. In the dim light of a single candle he was trying to slip some heavy thread through the eye of a huge needle. His intense concentration, and the not infrequent winces of frustration, amused her. She turned her attention back to the pot of broth simmering over a low fire. It smelled tolerable if not good. It would be warming at least, and there would be enough left to be reheated at dawn tomorrow, to fortify themselves against the long and likely uncomfortable journey that awaited them. The cottage was cramped but secure and dry. They had no idea whose it was. Tara Jerain had simply told them they would be met at a certain place on the road towards the docks outside Vaymouth and provided with shelter. And so they had been. Tara was, as had become clear, a resourceful and knowledgeable woman. She had provided them with horses and suitably worn and moth-eaten clothing to conceal their status. She had found them the Tal Dyreen captain who meant to run the first ship into Kolkyre, now that the blockade of that city was at the very least unlikely to be strictly enforced and quite probably abandoned altogether. Anyara could think of nowhere else to go. She wanted to be as close to the Glas Valley as she could, and to be amongst at least a few of the people of her own Blood. The dangers of the journey and the destination, such as they were, seemed to her no greater than remaining in Vaymouth. The city was lit by fires every night, as competing factions fought blindly, wildly for control. The slightest rumour, of any kind, was enough to send vengeful mobs raging through the streets. No one knew who ruled. Stravan oc Haig, notionally Thane since the death of his father and elder brother, had not been seen for days. Dead of a pox, some said; poisoned by his mad mother, claimed others. Merely drunk and asleep, most insisted. It was no place to be, especially for those present at the death of Chancellor, High Thane and Bloodheir. Tara had assiduously spread word that Kale had been the killer: a Hunt Inkallim incredibly waiting all these years for the most opportune moment. It was impossible to say how many believed such a wild tale. But Lheanor had died in his Tower of Thrones at the hand of an ageing woman, and in such a world who was to say what might happen? Tara had not spoken a word to Anyara about what had happened. The vacant look that was often in her eyes, her subdued manner, the shaking that often took hold of her hands, so violent she could not hold a cup steady, all suggested its effects. But she would not speak of it, and Anyara had not forced her. There was a shuffling outside the door, and Coinach at once dropped the still-unthreaded needle and reached for his sword. Then a tapping and a whisper. “My lady, it’s Torcaill. Your brother sent me.” Coinach was still cautious as he opened the door just a fraction and peered out into the night, but he saw a face he knew, and the tension fell out of his frame. “There were three of us, but the other two…” Torcaill looked ashen, even in the yellow light of the candle. Like a man who had been without food or sleep for days on end. His clothing was filthy and frayed. “It was difficult,” he said. “And when I reached Vaymouth, I heard you’d been in the Chancellor’s palace. I went there, and his wife… Tara, is it? She told me where to find you. Once I had convinced her I was who I claimed to be, and that wasn’t easy. Is it true… what they say happened?” “It depends what you’ve heard,” muttered Coinach. “We’ll tell you soon enough,” Anyara said. “Orisian sent you? Where is he? How is he?” She could hear the impatience in her own voice, but it was only excitement, eagerness, and it pleased her. She revelled in it. “I have a message from him,” Torcaill said, and proffered a canvas tube. Anyara took it and unfurled the parchment from within. She leaned closer to the candle to read it. The handwriting was crude and a little clumsy. Her brother had never been the most gifted with a quill. She read it quickly, thinking she would read it again more slowly once she had its gist. But a single reading was enough for her. She put it aside. The parchment, so long trained to the shape of that tube, rolled itself up again and hid the words. Anyara felt she might cry and blinked into the embers of the fire a few times. But tears did not come. They were not quite ready. She found, after a few moments, that she was embracing Coinach instead.
VI
Shraeve brought Kanin up from the fetid, half-flooded cellar into which he had been cast. His hands had been bound behind him long enough for all sensation to have leaked out of them. She pushed him along a echoing hallway where silt was caked at the base of the walls. There were other Inkallim there, he was dimly aware, just two or three of them. They stared at him but said nothing. He was propelled roughly out into the street, and almost fell. He winced at the assault of the light, for feeble as it was, it seemed garish after the gloom of his prison. His discomfort was brief, for Shraeve steered him in through the doorway to the spiralling stair that led up to the halfbreed’s lair. The steps were worn and uneven, the walls rough and coated with mould and webs. Kanin offered no resistance. He consisted of nothing but hate, and it filled him so completely that it choked any coherent thought. It was a greedy, many-hued hate that made no distinction between Aeglyss, Shraeve, himself. Of all its indiscriminate barbs, the sharpest were perhaps those turned inward. He loathed his failure, his weakness. He emerged into the hall at the top of the stairs, and heard Aeglyss before he saw him. “Cut his bonds.” “He might still be dangerous,” Shraeve said behind him. “You think so? Cut his bonds in any case.” The Inkallim sawed at the cords about his wrists with a knife. When the bindings fell away, the blood rushing back into his hands was agonising. He barely noticed the pain, consumed instead by the immediate notion of spinning about and attacking Shraeve. But the Inkallim pushed him violently forward before the cut cords had even hit the ground, and he staggered some way down the length of the hall and fell to his knees. “Stand up,” the halfbreed said. Kanin’s body did so, a little clumsily, without his mind even having the time to consider refusal. He looked at the na’kyrim, sitting there on his stone slab bench, and saw only the roughest, most approximate, imitation of a living man: hairless, suppurating, cadaverous. Pathetically small, too feeble to move. But the shadows around and behind him seemed to have a life of their own. And the eyes that fixed themselves upon Kanin, though bloody and sickly, still carried a vile intensity. “You must do something,” Shraeve said as she moved to stand beside one of the columns lining the hall, level with Kanin. “There are only three or four of us left fit to fight. The rest are dead or sick, or fallen away into madness or stupor. The whole city—the whole valley—is full of nothing but the dead and the dying. Those not yet too weak from disease or hunger… all turn against all. There is no order.” Aeglyss did not move. His eyes did not stray from Kanin’s. “We have no armies left,” Shraeve said, more strident. “There are none to command, and none willing to listen to any command. If you do not cure this sickness that afflicts —” “She doubts me now,” Aeglyss said quietly to Kanin. “Even her. No. No. She doubts herself, her judgement. She wonders if she made a mistake.” “That is not true,” Shraeve said at once. “Liar.” Said without a trace of emotion, as if it were a word without the slightest weight. “She thought I would serve her ends. Be a sword in her hand and make her the champion of her creed. As you, your father, thought I would serve your ambitions, and then be cast aside. Now, too late, she wonders what she has unleashed upon the world. She wonders what has become of the great armies fortified by my will she thought would carry her triumphant across all the world. Well, the day of armies is past. The world is conquered by other means now.” Shraeve shifted her weight, took a single stride forward. “Be still,” Aeglyss said sharply. The Inkallim did as she was commanded. Still, the na’kyrim had not so much as glanced at her. “You don’t imagine I cared what became of any of them, do you?” he murmured to Kanin. “The White Owls? You, your cause? Never. None of it. I only… I only cared to be a part of it all. To be a part. But none of you would have me. And now look. You will become a part of me, instead. I am become… all of it. Everything.” “Nothing,” rasped Kanin. “You don’t believe that.” There was perhaps a bitter smile stretching Aeglyss’ bleeding lips. “You, more than most, see a little of it, I think. Not all, of course. You don’t understand. None could… not even me. All that has happened, is happening, to me… I don’t understand it.” “This is a waste of time,” Shraeve said. “We must —” “Quiet,” whispered Aeglyss, and the word contained such vast insistence that Kanin felt his own throat constricting, and felt fear momentarily gnawing at the edges of his hatred. “You made this happen, Thane,” Aeglyss said to him. “No,” growled Kanin. “Yes. Nobody but you. I served you and your family loyally. I did what was asked of me, brought your army to the gates of your enemy’s city. Yet you turned your back on me. You made me a liar in the eyes of the White Owls. Because of that, because of your treachery, I was taken to the Stone. I was broken and remade. So should I thank you for your betrayal, for turning me into what I now am? Should I praise your mindless loathing of me, since it has made me into… into this? Or should I kill you for it? Should I make you suffer as I have suffered, as all the meek and the different and the outcasts have suffered?” Kanin wanted to fling himself at the foul vision of decay slumped on the bench before him, but his legs would not obey him. They were dead things beneath him, barely able to support his own weight. “I tried to do myself again what was done to me on the Breaking Stone, you know,” Aeglyss murmured. “I thought I might be able to control it, if I… I tried to… grow. It did not work. I am already all that is possible.” He grunted out a strangled laugh. “There, Thane. You have made me all that is possible. And it’s not enough. Mind and body cannot sustain what I have become. Not without breaking, without crumbling. I can make slaves of Shadowhands and the sisters of Thanes. I can master the Anain, make myself lord of the Shared, make myself the very thought at the core of the world. Yet I cannot control it. I cannot make that thought sharp and neat, cannot choose how it ebbs and flows. Soon I will be gone, lost in the very storms I have created, and only that thought—that storm—will remain, for ever. I will have reshaped the world in my image, and the world shall be as I have made it, unto its very end. Yet I cannot even mend my own flesh.” “Perhaps,” said Kanin, “you know in your black heart that the only thing that could mend you is death.” Aeglyss stared at him without speaking. Those eyes held Kanin, stabbed him, picked him apart. There was not the slightest movement in the na’kyrim’s crippled frame, yet Kanin felt the violent energies seeping out of him. “There is truly nothing in you, save that one desire,” Aeglyss croaked. He sounded both fascinated and puzzled. “You are unlike any of them, even the Children of the Hundred, in your purity. There is nothing to you now other than hate. Of me, of yourself. And at the heart of it all, the longing to see me dead. As if that will cure you.” Kanin could say no more. The halfbreed had him in some intangible grip that was wholly irresistible. “But if it was true…” Aeglyss whispered “… if it was true. I do not know what would become of me, if you had your wish. You could kill the body, perhaps… but… I do not know any more. I do not know if you can stop this… this…” He coughed and shook. Dropped his head for a moment, and freed Kanin from that oppressive gaze, but not from the bonds of his attention. Then he looked up again and smiled the smile of a dying man. “Do it then,” he said. Kanin did not move. Aeglyss looked sideways towards Shraeve, moving his eyes but not his head. “You will not raise a hand against this man,” the halfbreed rasped. “I forbid it.” Shraeve’s resistance to the command was obvious. But so was its immense force. Kanin could feel it weighing down upon him, and he was not even its object. The Inkallim’s face twitched as internal wars raged between her instincts and the halfbreed’s indomitable will. There could only ever be one outcome. “You hear me?” Aeglyss asked her. “You understand?” Shraeve nodded once, the muscles and tendons in her neck taut, her teeth clenched. “Good.” The na’kyrim’s eyes drifted back, took a moment or two to find and settle upon Kanin once more. “Here is your moment then, Thane. Here it is. You can set both of us free now. Do as your heart dictates.” And with that last word, Kanin was set free. Vigour surged through his arms and his legs. Every fragment of doubt or despair that lurked within him melted away before the single bright truth that he stood now in the sole moment of any consequence in his life. And that he was capable; he was potent. He could—would—forge precious meaning from the base metal of all that had gone before. There was no one here but him and Aeglyss. There were no walls about them, no sky above, for the entirety of existence was composed of the two of them: the decrepit halfbreed, croaking and wheezing, and the man who had come through war, through years, through a lifetime, to kill him. Kanin walked forward. Each stride felt vast, consuming immense distances as it bore him closer and closer to the feeble figure awaiting him. Aeglyss was lifting his head slowly. He was expectant, unresisting. Kanin could have laughed with joy. He opened his hands, feeling the limitless power they contained. He looked into the halfbreed’s eyes as he descended upon him, and saw nothing there: no colour, no life, no awareness. Now, Kanin knew, now there will be peace. Now I will be made whole again. His hands were on the halfbreed’s throat. As so often in his dreams, in all his bitter longings, he had become the bearer of death: a raven sweeping down from a God’s throne to bestow endings and darkness and punishment. He felt bone beneath his fingers, and cartilage and wasted muscles that offered no resistance. He squeezed. Felt that fragile neck yielding. And then his mind was opened, and he was inundated. He was caught up in a torrential flow that parted him from his body, made of him a cloud that was tugged and torn and stretched across an intolerable expanse of… everything. He was on a great stone, crucified there, with lances of fire driven through his wrists and into the rock, overwhelming agony burning in him. He was running, fleeing through dense forests of trees that reached out for him, and he could hear and smell and taste the wolfenkind who ran alongside him, just out of sight, their animal voices taunting him with promises of a savage death. He was a King, riding a ship in a younger world, closing on a sandy shore. A child watching a Kyrinin army in malachite armour marching through the streets of a white city. He was rocking on the deep currents, looking up towards the surface of the sea, watching the light fracturing and dancing down through the waves. He chased Wain through the rocks. It was summer. They were young. He could not catch her, for she was the faster, the nimbler, but still he chased, drawn onwards by the sound of her laughter shivering around the boulders. She let him catch her before long. No game could hold her interest for long. She was standing, staring back the way they had come, with a serious expression on her child’s face. Behind them, below them, Castle Hakkan was spread over the mountainside. The sunlight somehow softened it and made it look almost warm. “You will be Thane one day,” Wain said gravely. “What?” Kanin asked. He wanted laughter and pursuit, not stern conversation. “You will be Thane, and I will be a Thane’s sister.” He pushed her, but she was not to be so easily forced back into levity. “And we’ll be great warriors,” she said firmly to him, fixing him with that steely gaze that their father found so amusing. “Great warriors!” Kanin cried in agreement, engaged by the idea. “And we’ll fight wars. We’ll fight wars at the end of the world, in the Kall. We’ll be the best, the bravest of all.” “Both of us.” Kanin grinned. “Great warriors.” And he was so sure of it, back then. He could see the whole of his life laid out ahead, him and Wain marching into it side by side. The two of them, lit by the sun, illuminating the world with their own fierce light. Kanin looked down. In his small hands—so smooth, so delicate—he had a stick. He was clasping it, wrapping his fingers around it, trying inexplicably to crush it. “I asked you once for forgiveness.” The voice was inside Kanin. He was suddenly nothing more than a thought adrift in shadow. And that other thought, the one to which the voice belonged, was with him, entwined about him, wrapping him in its coils. “That was a mistake,” it said. Kanin existed only when it spoke. Between the words he was nothing. Absence. “I did not understand then. Now I know better. There can be no forgiveness. What I have done, what has been done to me, what I have become… it is all beyond forgiveness, or blame, or guilt, or judgement. I am the Shared… consumed by it, consuming it. Which…” The voice faltered, and Kanin remembered himself a little. “Which of us can say what is right or wrong? Such things… There is no meaning to it. Not when we are all but different aspects of a single thought in a single vast mind.” No, Kanin thought, not knowing what it was he denied. “I am the mind of the world,” the voice whispered into him, and now it was jagged with anguish, with a pleading cadence. “Too much. I don’t know what’s… I have forgotten what is madness and what sanity. But you can free me from this. Perhaps.” Kanin sucked in a great stinging breath and looked down at Aeglyss’ blistered and bleeding face. Wounds opened up there even now, the skin parting as if sliced by an invisible knife. Thin blood was trickling down over Kanin’s hands where they still held the halfbreed’s neck in their grip. But his fingers were as iron, heavy and inert. Kanin could not compel them to close any further, could not even feel them. Aeglyss’ eyes were closed. Kanin could smell the foul sores that pockmarked his brow and scalp. It was the stench of a plague pit. The halfbreed’s throat was half crushed, but still he spoke. Those split and scabbed lips barely moved, yet the voice was clear and crisp in Kanin’s ears. “Show me, Thane. If I am mad, if I am a disease, a mistake, show me. I will not yield. I cannot. It will not permit that, what is in me. But you can overcome it, if that is what the world requires.” Kanin willed his hands to extinguish the life they held. They were deaf to his mind’s commands. He stared down at them, and wept in frustration and cried out in rage. Aeglyss slowly lifted his own hands and set them about Kanin’s wrists. “Now,” the halfbreed whispered. “Now. If not now, then never.” Kanin had no answer. His arms were dead weights, unyoked from his will. He could feel the wall of denial, of resistance, rising up before him as Aeglyss gathered his strength. A gloom was settling about him, a clot of dead air, greyed and fibrous. He could not breathe. “Never, then,” Aeglyss hissed. Kanin cried out in pain as his hands were slowly but irresistibly forced apart. The na’kyrim’s thin arms had an impossible strength in them, and Kanin had nothing with which to oppose it. “Kneel down,” Aeglyss commanded, and Kanin did. With perverse gentleness, Aeglyss released his wrists, but before Kanin’s arms could fall back to his sides, the halfbreed delicately took hold of his hands. There was a terrible intimacy in it. Kanin could feel those long fingers pressing into his palms; he could feel a thumb resting lightly on the back of each of his hands. “I am so tired,” Aeglyss said sorrowfully. Then, so fiercely that Kanin felt the words as daggers in his chest and stomach: “You failed me. Again. You failed me. What is in you… not strong enough.” His voice was fragmentary. Something in his neck was broken or displaced. Kanin shook his head. Failure was too small a word for this. The enormity of his fall was overpowering. Crippling. “I am so tired,” Aeglyss rattled. It sounded like the shifting of cartilaginous rubble in his throat. The slightest beat of pressure; the halfbreed’s thumbs pressing down a fraction harder. Kanin’s hands crumpled. He heard the breaking of every bone like a flock of argumentative birds swirling about his head. He felt every rupture like a point of cold, coruscating fire. He screamed as tendons split, joints were twisted apart. Bones split and split again, splintering into smaller and smaller fragments. He felt the debris within his hands being pulped, and the pain was so vast and unendurable that he fell away towards oblivion. But Aeglyss would not allow that escape. Kanin’s consciousness was embraced by that of the halfbreed, and borne up by it, and thrust back into the world of limitless suffering. Kanin looked up at the na’kyrim’s ruined face. Aeglyss was opening and closing his mouth like a man choking. No sound but inarticulate croaks emerged. Kanin heard more, though, within his head. “Stay with me, Thane. I am not done yet. Not done with the world. You made me. You will be my witness.” Aeglyss released Kanin’s hands and the Thane roared in stupefied agony as they hung limp from his wrists, bloated bags of blood and fragmentary wreckage. “You should have killed me a long time ago,” said the air, and the boards beneath Kanin’s knees, and the pitted stone of the columns, and the darkness crowding across his vision, all speaking with the voice of the halfbreed. “Now it’s too late. For all of us.”
VII
K’rina walked as if in a daze, blundering through the night in an erratic, wayward fashion. She stumbled across the rough fields, veering aside from ditches only at the last moment, sometimes splashing down into them without pause and hauling herself up and out the other side. When the occasional stand of sallow and alder loomed suddenly out of the darkness, she would barge her way through it, showing no sign that she was even aware of the branches snagging her clothes or scratching her face. Taim followed as steadily as he could, never more than half a dozen strides behind the na’kyrim. Her unpredictable and uncompromising course made it difficult, as did his determined efforts to keep equally close to Orisian. The Thane matched K’rina’s path and pace out to her left. Somewhere on the right, further ahead, was Varryn, but the Kyrinin stayed in the darkness and Taim had seen no hint of him for some time. Though K’rina was the unwitting, unconscious guide, it was for Orisian that Taim reserved the greater portion of his attention. Taim stumbled many times, in some dip or rut in the ground, because he strove to keep the young man in sight. He could not tell whether it was this constant battle with his senses and with the night, or the simple all-consuming nature of his concern for Orisian’s safety, but Taim felt a rare calm in him. For all the aching of his leg—the thigh muscle still tormented by the memory of that bone-studded club—and the constant enervating anticipation of some sudden assault, he found himself untroubled by distraction, from either within or without. His mind followed a strangely placid course, even as his body struggled on through the lightless, treacherous fields. It was simplicity that gave him this clarity. He accepted but a single task upon his shoulders now: to bring Orisian safe out of this. It mattered not at all what lay ahead, or what familial longings remained lodged in his heart, or what fears circled him—dark possibilities riding raven wings—and tried to colonise his imagination. All these were things he had no time or space for. They all foundered against the great wall of his need to preserve the life of his Thane. In the singular and absolute primacy of that task he had come perhaps to the purest expression of his self and his history. That he should have come to it as he might well be entering upon the very threshold of his own death did not trouble him. Indeed, it seemed fitting. Taim was content. Birds erupted now and again from thickets or from the reeds fringing ditches, whirring low away into the darkness. They were the least alarming of the night’s surprises, for strange and unsettling sights and sounds became ever more frequent as they moved further out into the Glas Valley. The rotund carcass of a cow was suddenly there, in the middle of a bare expanse of ploughed earth. As they passed it by, that bulging form was revealed as grim illusion, for the innards had been hollowed out: the animal’s ribs and the dried, tight hide they supported encased nothing but a great cavity. Following K’rina across a shallow ditch, Taim found something that was both resistant and yielding beneath his foot. He looked down and saw the white and puffy skin of an eyeless corpse, lambent in the faint moonlight, just beneath the surface of the water. Hoofbeats drummed their way along some track far out to the right. Taim closed up on Orisian. They slowed a little, Orisian catching hold of K’rina’s trailing sleeve to hold her back, and the sound came pounding closer. Too fast, Taim thought. No rider with any wit would go at such speed without light to see by. And when the great brown horse blurred past them, it was indeed riderless, though saddled and with stirrups flailing at its flanks. Not long after, Varryn abruptly appeared in K’rina’s path and brought her to a halt. He nodded wordlessly ahead. It took time, for it would reveal itself from the corner of an eye, not when he looked directly at it, but soon enough Taim found the dimmest, feeblest tinge of a campfire out there in the blackness. They led K’rina on a wide looping detour, and it was the Kyrinin who decided when they had put sufficient ground between them and the distant flames to let her move freely again, in accordance with whatever mute instinct drove her. Once there was laughter. It drifted to them from the west, clear but thin. It was a despairing, straining laughter, like the cry of some forlorn animal, closer cousin to misery than joy. It rose and fell, and lost its shape and dwindled away. For a time Taim was sure he could hear Orisian mumbling to himself. He could not see his Thane’s lips so could not be certain, and the sound was far too soft for any words to reach him. It worried him, for Orisian had seemed in the last few days to be on the brink of some entirely solitary, personal desolation. Like a man clinging to a branch at the river’s edge, half in the current and half out of it, his strength failing, the pull of the water growing. They halted at last, and took cover in a drainage channel that ran close to a burned-out farmhouse. The water was not as deep as it should have been—the channel was blocked somewhere, perhaps by rubble or a slide of earth—but still it came up over the tops of their boots as they crouched there watching the first grey light of dawn leach into the eastern sky. Taim had to hold K’rina down to prevent her from clambering to her feet and going blindly on. He did it as gently as he could, and she was far too slight and weakened to resist him. They had not spoken one to another all through the night. The silence had become embedded. Taim was taken by surprise when Orisian broke it. “Why?” he asked Varryn softly. That this was a return to some unfinished matter between them was plain. At first he doubted whether the Kyrinin would respond. The answer came, though, as perhaps it would not have done but for that long night the three of them had spent together in this hostile land. “Because she asked me,” Varryn said. “Because I was not there when she took the wound. If I was there, perhaps she would not have been wounded, but a… a burning was in me. I was lost to myself, lost in the hunting of the enemy. A thing that can make such a madness… it should stop. It should end.” The quiet wrapped itself about them again, and Taim let his eyes close. He had become accustomed to exhaustion, inured in part to its crippling effects, but it was heavy now. “Because a good man died to win this woman for you,” Varryn said unexpectedly. “He would run with you now, if he lived. I run for him. Because I saw Anain die. I saw trees made dust. The man who can do this… he will make the ground upon which we walk a dead thing. He will shape clouds out of fear and hide the sun, and we will walk in shadows. It would be a good thing to kill him. Are these reasons enough?” “Yes,” whispered Orisian after a while. “It’s enough.” Taim opened his eyes in time to see Kan Avor emerging from the night. Its low grey mass lay across the valley like a granite mountain that had collapsed in on itself. Tendrils of smoke ascended from the ruins towards the light seeping over it from the east. Clouds of black birds climbed from their roosts, and even here, even at this distance, Taim could hear them calling: a raucous, fierce greeting of the new day.
*
“I thought they would be everywhere,” Orisian muttered as he stared out over the lip of that muddy ditch. He shifted a little to take his weight off a stone in the bank that dug into his hip. “I suppose I imagined there would be armies here, the whole valley an armed camp. But it’s… it’s a wasteland.” Taim grunted. “We’ve seen what happened elsewhere. And to the White Owls, and to us. If there are armies here, it looks like it’ll be armies of the dead, and the mad.” Orisian glanced up towards the dim sky. “It won’t be properly light for a while yet. We might reach the ruins, don’t you think? Without being seen?” Neither Taim nor Varryn made any reply. Both warriors stared out across the level plain towards the hulking mass of Kan Avor. When Orisian looked, he saw no movement, no sign of life save those few thin columns of smoke rising from the ruins, but he was prepared to await the verdict of more experienced eyes. He feared the consequences if they judged it necessary to await the return of night, though. The darkness brought entirely too much with it now. What was the working of utter exhaustion upon him, and what the corrupting influence of Aeglyss and the Shared, he did not know. But whatever the cause, he dreaded the prospect of yet more black hours in which he would be hunted by his own mind. He had heard the voices of the dead: Inurian, his father, Rothe, others he did not even recognise yet had known to be shaped without living breath. He had felt waves of wretched dismay breaking over him. For a time—no dream this, something sharper, more potent—he had found himself no longer trudging through the fields but curled in the corner of his childhood bedchamber in Castle Kolglas. Folded in there, bunched into a ball, with his arms covering his head, too terrified to open his eyes. He remembered hope but did not feel it. It might take but one more night to extinguish even that slender memory of it. “The woman could go alone now,” Varryn said quietly. “It is not so far, if this dead city is the end of her journey.” “No,” Orisian said. “Whoever is in there, sitting around those fires… she’ll blunder into them.” Taim laid a soft hand over K’rina’s mouth to stifle a murmur. “If we can make it to cover before the sun’s in the sky, before the cold’s relented enough to get people moving…” he muttered without enthusiasm. “I like our chances no better if we try to hide out here” They went on, stumbling on feet deadened by the cold water. Orisian felt desperately exposed, yet his spirits rose. He was liberated from the suffocating, haunted darkness. Even the grim transformation of his homeland that the advancing daylight revealed could not entirely restore the despair that had been riding his back. They trod on land that should, at this time of year, have been submerged beneath the reflective pools of the Glas Water. Now it was a great sprawl of black, almost liquid mud, dead reed and debris. There were rotted timbers that had been in the water’s grip for decades; the skeletal hull of a little boat abandoned by some fisherman or fowler years ago; even, in places, the shrunken, withered remains of fish that had been stranded by the receding flood, and must have been hidden from scavengers by snow. Once, as they struggled across that wasted expanse in the gloomy dawn, there was a figure, far away across the mire: some lone wanderer, stumbling and lurching and falling as they did themselves. Too far away to be a threat. Yet Orisian could not help but stare as he splashed through one slick after another of black water. There was something in that lone, tiny figure that held him. He found himself thinking—believing—that it was him; that he was watching himself, from this great distance, and seeing himself as he truly was. K’rina led them closer and closer to the ruined city, and soon enough Orisian could distinguish the outlines of what had once been individual buildings. That was when they started to find bodies. Some of them were half-buried in the soft earth, some lying in pools. Some were old, picked at by animals, decaying; most were fresh, their features not yet marred, the dried blood not yet washed by rain from their wounds. There were discarded weapons strewn amongst them and here and there the corpse of a horse. The city rose out of the marsh stealthily. First a few shaped stones, barely visible amongst the rushes. Then a stretch of wall that appeared from the sodden earth and sank back into it within a few paces. Then a stretch of paved road, then the suggestion of a house in a straight-sided pattern of rubble. Then they were amongst it, and Kan Avor showed itself to them. Sullen dogs staring at them appraisingly as they passed. Rats a dark ripple over the ground as they scattered from a corpse at the sound of Orisian’s footsteps. A campfire giving out one of those faint pillars of smoke that they had seen from out in the valley, but abandoned. No one to tend it or relish its warmth. The dead. Lying in drifts along a street where some cruel battle had recently been fought out. Beneath a crowd of crows that rose sluggishly from their feast when disturbed, but went no further than the nearest uneven remnant of a wall, and settled there in a patient black line. The dead. Clustered around the ashes of an extinct fire, still wrapped in sleeping blankets. And the living. A woman, haggard without being old, sitting alone in the ruin of a courtyard. She rose when she saw them and came feebly towards them, but fell and could not rise again. Orisian was not sure whether it had been desperation or anger he had seen on her face. A little cluster of the sick, at the base of a flight of foreshortened stairs that ascended towards some destination long lost. They coughed and sweated and shivered, and embraced one another, and watched Orisian and the others without hope, interest, or appeal. Varryn turned and hissed a soft warning, but too late. A handful of warriors emerged ahead of them, coming round a corner and halting, staring towards them in confusion. “Hold onto K’rina,” Taim said at once. Orisian did so, clamping her thin wrist in one hand and pulling her towards the shelter of a shapeless pile of rubble. She struggled against him, driven by a fiercer, stronger desire than ever before to continue on. One of the Black Roaders was loading her crossbow. The others—spearmen—charged. Varryn calmly plucked an arrow from his quiver. He raised his bow, loosed the arrow in a single fluid, rapid movement. The woman with the crossbow fell dead even as she was lifting it to her shoulder. Taim walked out to meet the three charging spearmen. One of them was growling as he ran. Taim flicked the outstretched spear of the first aside with his sword, and crouched to put his shield into the man’s knees. The helpless, hapless Black Roader, undone by his own reckless pace, was sent cartwheeling right over Taim, landing hard on arms and head in the middle of the street. Taim surged up and sideways, one spear thrust missing him entirely, the other deflected upwards by his shield. He cut the second man down as he ran past. The third found Varryn coming to meet him, and slowed a touch to level his spear once more. Orisian could not even follow what happened, for the Kyrinin was ruthlessly fast. A blur of spears, the crack of wood against wood and then against skull, and a single lunging stab in and out again. Varryn was already walking over to kill the man Taim had first tumbled as his opponent looked down in surprise at the blood spreading across his stomach, let his spear fall, and sat clumsily down on the cobblestones, pressing both hands against his belly. “We need the worst, the most tangled and confused of the ruins,” said Taim as he sheathed his sword. “The harder the going, the less likely we are to be seen or to stumble across trouble.” Orisian nodded. K’rina was still pulling against him. It seemed, though, that she did not understand what it was that restrained her. She did not look at him, merely strained against his grip like a sheep snagged on some thorn bush. When he followed the line of her gaze, it led him to the dark knot of taller, more massive ruins in the city’s heart. That was where she wanted to go. That was where whatever called so insistently to her would be found.
VIII
Kanin rose feebly through oceans of pain. He was made of it, and inhabited it. The light he ascended towards hurt him. The hard stone he began to feel beneath him woke aches in his muscles. And his hands… his hands gathered into them all that ocean through which he swam. They were like fire. He moaned as he forced open his crusted eyes. The pain of his maimed hands was beyond anything he could have conceived of. There was nothing else save that searing, pounding, crippling torment. All that he saw and heard came to him through the howl of agony, rendered all but senseless by its journey. Shraeve was standing before Aeglyss. Saying something, angry. The na’kyrim simply stared at her. Shraeve shouted at him. Kanin could not make out what she was saying. Her anger could not penetrate his pain. But then, though his lips did not move, Aeglyss spoke, and Kanin could hear his words, for they were of the same stuff as his pain, and thus within him. A part of him. “The Shadowhand is dead. I can’t remember… did I tell you that? He died. And was glad of it. I tasted him as he faded into… into the Shared. Into me. No, it doesn’t matter. He served his purpose. He did what I required of him. “As did you, my fierce raven, until this… this doubt entered into you. What happened? Is it too bright for you, this light you have helped to reveal? I tell you there is no more need for armies or for wars, that the victory is already won. But you don’t understand. You don’t hear. Very well. Very well.” Something else amongst Kanin’s pain then. A flow, a gathering of force. Shraeve had gone down onto her knees. One hand reached impotently towards Aeglyss, the other fumbled at the hilt of one of her swords. “I knew you would turn against me eventually,” Kanin heard the great voice say, almost sad. “The last of them, perhaps, but in the end… the same. But I can heal you of this betrayal, Shraeve. The Shadowhand is gone… that fragment of my will I lodged in his mind is returned to me. I can give it to you, and bind us closer than ever before. I can give you back that faith you have lost.” Shraeve was sitting back on her heels, her spine arching, her head tipping back. Her arms fell limp at her sides. Her mouth was open, and though Kanin could hear nothing from her, he thought she might be screaming. “Yes…” the halfbreed’s voice whispered in the bones of Kanin’s skull. “You don’t have to leave me yet. Never. You’ll stay at my side. Can you see, Thane? Do you see? This is what your sister submitted herself to. She became a part of me, as she could never have been a part of you.” Kanin fainted away at that moment, but the refuge of insensibility was fleeting. He was called back, dragged back into that foul hall of pain and cruelty and horrors. Aeglyss had not moved. Shraeve was striding towards the door. Kanin knew—or was shown—that the Inkallim was no longer as she had been. Though he saw two people before him, there was but a single will. “We might need her yet, Thane,” the monster murmured inside him. “There is an… intent. Somewhere near. Intent. Not fierce, not burning, but clear. Becoming clear. I feel it but cannot find it. We will see. You and I. We will see.”
*
Never had Eska moved with such care and precision. A near-lifetime of training, of submission to the strictures and teachings of the Hunt, went into her every delicate step over the loose rubble. She judged every fall of her foot with minute attention; assessed and refined her balance constantly. She passed across the treacherous territory of Kan Avor as silently and slowly as would a cat suspecting the presence of an unprepared mouse. She did not return to her previous vantage point. To do so would be absurdly reckless, and though her emotions were running high, they were not yet so incapacitating as to rob her of all sense. She found instead a more distant but well concealed perch. There was an empty courtyard that must once have been colonnaded, for there were the stumps of columns, like a line of dead trees. Set into its furthest wall were shelved alcoves in which she guessed statues once had stood. Those statues were long gone, and Eska crouched in place of one of them, half her own height above the ground. She was in shadow there and confident none but the most acute of eyes would uncover her. From that secluded nook she could gaze out across the ruined court and through a gap in the opposite wall—originally a window perhaps, but now roughened into a ragged hole—into the street beyond. Thirty paces up that street, in her line of sight, two Battle Inkallim stood outside the door from which she had seen the halfbreed emerge to confront Kanin oc Horin-Gyre. The door, she assumed, behind which the na’kyrim now lurked, somewhere in the crumbling palace. She meant to put an end to him—was determined upon it as she had been upon no other task in her life—but would do so meticulously. Carefully. And that required the removal of those who would protect him. She had seen no sign of other Inkallim on her approach to this hiding place. Had seen in fact hardly anyone who was not obviously sick in body or mind or both. The whole city had declined into a kind of demented lassitude. Whatever unnatural pall of corruption lay over the place—and she could feel it herself, feeding the turbulent emotions within her—had defeated and destroyed all save a handful of its inhabitants. She set one bolt down on the ledge at her feet. Held another between her teeth while she cocked the bow. Everything was done slowly, with small movements. She had nothing and no one to fall back on this time. There could be no mistakes. She took aim. She visualised the flight of the bolt, its dipping flight across the courtyard, through the window, out into the light and on into flesh. It was clear in her mind’s eye. The man she had taken as her target was looking away, talking to his companion. She exhaled, waited for a single heartbeat and released the bowstring. As soon as it was gone, she knew it was a good kill. If the man did not make some sudden, unexpected move, he was dead. She lowered the crossbow and levered its string back into place. She did not watch the first bolt’s flight as she reached for the next, but she listened attentively and was rewarded with the thud of its strike and the cry of surprise that greeted it. She raised the reloaded bow and settled herself for the second time. One of the Inkallim was down, moving fitfully and, she could tell from those movements, hopelessly. The second was running down the line of her aim. He was good, she acknowledged. Alert and fast. She fixed her eyes on his chest, just off centre, and exhaled. The Inkallim veered abruptly out of sight. She could hear him for a moment, but then even that clue was taken away. She dropped lightly to the ground. Her spear rested against the wall by the alcove, but she left it where it was for now. If he got close enough for her to need a spear, she would most likely be in fatal trouble anyway. She strained her senses, reaching out to gather in any traitorous sound or glimpse that might offer itself. Nothing came. She turned slowly, crossbow poised. Nothing. She waited. The Inkallim came rushing from behind her. She heard his boots on the stone slabs. She spun and looked into his eyes, and the crossbow trembled in her hands as it loosed its cargo. The bolt knocked the raven off his feet. Eska puffed out her cheeks. She caught dark movement at the very edge of her field of vision. Turned. And saw Shraeve sprinting towards her. The door on the far side of the street stood open. Shraeve was running for the hole in the wall that separated them. There was no time for another bolt. Eska reached blindly for her spear. Shraeve leaped, bent her head down, folded her knees up into her chest, and came flashing through the ragged window. Eska had her spear in her hand and was running before the raven hit the ground. She ran not for the open door, but for the ruins. Her only chance, she knew, would be if she could rid herself of Shraeve. Eska had always been fast, even by the standards of the Hunt. Shraeve matched her, though. Eska could measure in the sound of the raven’s pounding feet the ebbing away of her hopes. She cut into alleyways, vaulted fallen walls, swept over tumbled stones lying like scree against the face of a building. And Shraeve drew gradually closer. Eska burst upon a band of ragged people struggling over the corpse of a dog. They were pulling it this way and that, snarling at one another. They looked up and let the carcass fall. To her they were made of stone. She weaved her path through them without breaking stride, heard their cries like low moans falling from her back. She heard too their more strident cries as Shraeve ploughed through them, and the sound of impacts and bodies falling. Eska asked her legs for more and found they had but little to give her. The slightest lengthening of her stride. That was all. She still held her crossbow in one hand, her spear in the other. They hampered her and grew steadily heavier. A passageway spat her out into open ground: a wide square speckled with pale bodies from which birds rose and dogs retreated at her sudden appearance. She turned, out in the open, chest heaving, lungs burning, to face Shraeve. Who slowed as she came near, lapsing into a casual walk and then coming to a halt. She had not even drawn her swords. She stood there empty-handed, and regarded Eska with narrow, dispassionate eyes. “My feet are on the Road,” Eska said breathlessly, and flung the crossbow. She darted forward in its wake, both hands set firmly on her spear. Shraeve dodged the spinning bow with ease and reached for her swords. By the time Eska closed with her, the blades were free but still high. It looked like a trap to Eska, who could see the shaft of her spear shattering beneath downward blows. At the last moment she snatched the blade of the spear aside and brought the butt round in a low sweep towards Shraeve’s knee. The raven danced back out of reach. Shraeve rushed forward behind that failed attack, but Eska, retreating, managed to spin the spear in her hands in time to level its tip and fend off the charge. They circled one another. Eska placed her feet carefully, mistrusting the uneven ground. She never let her attention stray from Shraeve, though. She did not expect this to last long. “You have betrayed the faith,” she said, in the slender hope of winning some minor advantage by distracting the raven. But Shraeve did not even blink. She might as well have been deaf. Eska caught the slight dip in Shraeve’s hips. It gave the merest instant of warning. Shraeve surged forward. Eska stabbed. Shraeve crossed her swords beneath the spear and snapped them up. Eska watched the shaft of her spear caught in the intersection of those two rising blades, lifted by them, its barbed point guided harmlessly over Shraeve’s shoulder. She tried to whip it back, prepare for another lunge, but it was too late. Shraeve somehow parted her swords in such a way that one pushed the spear out high and wide as the other came low and flat for Eska’s belly. It was smoother and neater and faster than anything Eska had ever seen. She twisted desperately, but still the blade sliced across her lower back. She felt it cutting her. And still Shraeve was moving. Inside the spear now, she pivoted on her leading foot and kicked Eska in the stomach. Eska staggered. Bile burned up her throat and she gagged. Her spear was torn from her hands. Her heels met a block of stone and she fell. The back of her head hit another hard angle as she landed, and pain encircled her skull. She grimaced up and saw Shraeve standing over her, swords already returning to their sheaths. Eska tried to roll onto her hands and knees, but her wounded back cramped and the searing pain locked her in place. Shraeve picked up the barbed spear. She held it over Eska’s stomach. Drew it back in preparation for the final strike. Then suddenly lifted her head, and turned it to one side, frowning. As if she caught some summons on the air. Eska could hear nothing. But Shraeve straightened, shook her head once. Eska tried to roll aside again, and this time she mastered her body’s protests. She began to move just as Shraeve, almost absently, punched the spear down. It went through Eska’s side. She heard its point grating on the stones beneath her, felt her blood following it. She gasped and took hold of the spear’s shaft with one hand. Through eyes almost shut by pain, she saw Shraeve turning away, running back towards the centre of Kan Avor.
IX
They crawled through the wreckage of Kan Avor like cautious rats picking over the carcass of a whale. Were it not for K’rina, it would have been easy to lose track of where they were and where they were heading. Every time taller walls or buildings closed about them, Orisian lost all sense of direction. K’rina knew, though. Always and instinctively. She would have scrambled recklessly and eagerly, as fast as she could go, through the ruins if they had let her. It fell to Orisian to restrain her, for Taim and Varryn spent their entire concentration upon scouring the way ahead for any hint of danger. There was little. One man—a warrior from one of the Black Road Bloods—they found trying to light a fire with a pathetic pile of damp sticks. Varryn killed him quietly. Other than that, the only movement they detected was distant. Orisian was struggling with a mounting pain inside his head: not in the bone but deep, in the place where his thoughts dwelled. It came and went, but each time it retreated it returned stronger and sharper. There was whispering as well, but that he was becoming accustomed to. The competing tasks of preventing K’rina from rushing on ahead and traversing the derelict terrain safely and quietly himself were demanding enough to keep him from slipping entirely into the diffuse besieging despair and anger he felt all about him. He had the strange sense that they were falling, not advancing. Some great pit was drawing them into itself. Yet of all the feelings clamouring for his attention, fear was the least of them. He had somehow moved beyond the reach of that particular assailant. Perhaps he was simply too tired, in all possible ways, to succumb. The utter desolation of Kan Avor, the physical and mental destitution of those they had found alive here, the weight of the dead upon the city: all of this seemed to be murmuring to him that it was too late. Whatever happened, a wound had been delivered to the world that could never be quite healed. Too much had been broken for it ever to be restored to its former state. Still he went on. And if he detected an increasingly wild edge to Varryn’s movement and gaze, he chose to ignore it. If he thought he saw Taim’s shoulders sinking gradually lower, and a grim, sombre intensity taking hold of the warrior, he said nothing. Kan Avor had them all in its grip, and it could only be endured, not escaped. K’rina led them, in the bleak afternoon light, to a street over which the greatest of Kan Avor’s surviving edifices loomed. It might have been a palace in the lost days of the Gyre Blood’s dominion. It had the stubs of towers still adorning its upper reaches, and faded carvings in its stonework. Blank and empty windows looked out from high in its walls over the grey ruins. The na’kyrim almost tore free of Orisian’s grasp as they crouched behind a low wall, staring at the open door opposite them. He had to take a firm hold of her shoulders with both hands to keep her from running out into the street and bolting for that door. She hissed in frustration and tried to shake him loose. “Leads to a stairway,” Taim murmured. “Is that an Inkallim?” Orisian asked, staring at the corpse slumped against the base of the wall just outside the doorway. “I think so.” “Not long dead,” Varryn observed. His tone was tense, as if his jaw and lips and tongue were becoming too stiff to easily move. “I’ll take a look,” Taim said. “Wait for my sign.” He advanced cautiously into the street, looking up and down its length. He edged closer to the doorway, pausing to lean tentatively down towards the fallen Inkallim, searching for any movement in his chest. Satisfied, Taim leaned through the open door. After a brief, tense wait, he withdrew and gestured towards Orisian. Varryn moved at once, eager to throw off his enforced immobility. Orisian followed more slowly, K’rina bucking in his grasp. “Seems deserted,” Taim whispered as they gathered by the doorway. “Can’t hear anything. Perhaps they’re all dead.” “Not all of them,” Orisian said. “Not him. You can feel that he’s not dead, can’t you?” Taim nodded tightly. “Whatever K’rina wants, it’s in here,” said Orisian. “He’s in here.” “Someone,” Varryn hissed. “Where?” demanded Taim. The Kyrinin nodded towards the end of the street, already reaching for an arrow. As he did so, an Inkallim emerged. She was tall, and ran with long, easy strides. Her black hair was tied back. She carried two swords, held loose at her side, slightly splayed ahead of her. She betrayed no surprise at their presence, but increased her pace and came racing towards them. Varryn’s arrow sprang out to meet her. She swayed, and it skimmed past her arm. Orisian was astonished. “Get into the stairwell,” snapped Taim. She was coming still faster. Varryn snatched another arrow from his quiver and sent it darting for her chest. Again the Inkallim dipped and twisted in mid-stride, but she was closer now, with less time to react. The arrow smacked into her shoulder and stayed there. She barely faltered. “Keep her out of here, if you can,” Orisian said to Taim. He yielded at last to K’rina’s silent demands, and let the na’kyrim drag him into and up the stairwell. She climbed quickly, and he followed, one hand on her trailing wrist, the other clumsily drawing his sword. He scraped it against the confining wall of the spiral. His head was spinning. He felt as if he was fighting against a raging headwind as he climbed those rough steps. Some great pressure leaned against him. It was nothing conscious, nothing directed, just the immense weight of whatever he drew near. Now, too late, he felt fear taking hold of him. Whether it was his, or someone else’s, he did not know, but it tightened and tightened. At the head of the stairway was a plain wooden door. Orisian pulled K’rina aside just as she reached out for it. He leaned close, listening intently. He could hear nothing, in part because there was a throbbing bellow building within his head. He closed his eyes for a moment and fought back the terror that made him want to sink down onto the ancient stone and curl up there; fought the empty certainty of his own impotence that flooded into him; fought the sapping weariness that made granite of his arms and legs. He fought against all this but could not defeat it. Could not entirely hold it back. But nor was he defeated by it. He slowly pushed the door open and led the suddenly calm and compliant K’rina inside. The daylight coming in through the windows and through the holes in the collapsing roof was not strong enough to dispel every shadow from the hall. The rows of pillars that ran the length of the chamber on either side laid faint dark bars down across the floorboards. There was a musty, damp smell. Some way down the hall, slumped against the foot of a pillar, was a man Orisian did not at first recognise. He took in his haggard features, his battered chain mail. It was difficult to tell whether the man was alive or dead, awake or asleep. But his face was familiar. Orisian’s gaze dropped to the man’s hands, resting in his lap. They were thick, like fat, overfilled waterskins. And black and blue and yellow with damage. The fingers lay at odd, ungainly angles. Orisian looked back to the man’s face and frowned. It was the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir, he realised. The man who had hunted him through the streets of Koldihrve, who had tried and failed to kill him there in the Vale of Tears. Orisian took a hesitant step into the room. The old soft floorboards creaked beneath his boots. He glanced at K’rina, puzzled by an abrupt change in her demeanour. She was staring down the hall, her grey eyes entirely absorbed in whatever she saw there. Orisian peered into the gloom that filled the far end of the chamber. He thought he could see, pale and indistinct, some small, sunken figure sitting there. Unmoving. Corpse-like. “Who are you?” a vast and sullen voice asked inside his mind. Taim barely had time to ready himself before the Inkallim was upon them. He lifted his shield across his chest. Saw Varryn set both hands on his bow and draw it back like a club. Then she was there, and leaping high into the space between them. Taim thought she meant perhaps to fling herself beyond them in an attempt the reach the doorway they blocked, but even as the expectation formed, he saw that it was wrong. Both blades lashed down towards him, clattering against his shield with unexpected force and driving him backwards. Her right leg kicked out at Varryn. The Kyrinin was fast enough to crash his bow into her thigh; not fast enough to avoid the lunging foot that hammered into the base of his throat and sent him staggering into the wall. Taim heard the crack of his head against the stonework quite clearly. Varryn slumped down. The Inkallim landed with perfect balance and poise. She flicked a single glance at the stunned Kyrinin, then fixed her gaze on Taim. As she did so, though, one blade reached back towards Varryn. Taim roared and rushed at her, shield foremost, sword held back for a stabbing thrust. The Inkallim drifted out of his path with absurd ease and casually cut open his upper arm as she did so. But he had put her out of reach of Varryn, for now at least. She rose out of her fighting stance and took a few leisurely steps sideways. They carried her a little closer to the door. Taim backed towards it. Varryn was not stirring. There was no way Taim could defend both stairway and Kyrinin without quickly losing one or both. Suffused with sharp guilt, he chose the stairway, and hoped that the Inkallim cared more for that than she did for finishing an unconscious foe. “I saw you once before, I think,” he said to her. “In a snowstorm, at Glasbridge.” “Did you?” She seemed entirely uninterested. “Stand aside.” “I can’t do that. My Thane commanded me to hold this stair.” “That boy who was with you? He’s nothing.” “He is my Thane.” Her lip curled in disdain. She reached up and hooked a single finger over the shaft of the arrow still embedded in her shoulder. With the most fleeting of grimaces, she snapped it off, leaving just a split stub protruding from her flesh. Taim considered attacking her in that moment of distraction, but in truth it was no distraction at all, for her eyes never left him, her balance never wavered. She let the broken arrow fall and sprang forward in a flurry of whirling blades, belabouring his shield, ringing against his own sword. His defence was desperate. This raven was astonishingly fast and precise. She nicked his thigh. Almost had his eye; would have done, had he not read the sudden change in her blade’s course at the last possible moment and jerked back. She paused as he retreated into the doorway itself. “You’re too late,” he said, hoping to keep her attention upon him and away from Varryn. She glared at him but made no reply. She moistened her lips. There was a constant shiver running down Taim’s neck and spine, a kernel of pain building behind his eyes, a flutter of bitter hopelessness in his heart. None of this he believed to be truly his, and he set himself against it. But it would not release him entirely. It sapped his strength and his will. His mind reached for hope, for inspiration. Its harvest was meagre. There was perhaps the faintest suggestion that the arrow hampered her movements. If so, that would only grow worse if he could live long enough to give it the chance. And there was the stairway. He edged back into the shadows at the foot of the spiral of steps. She needed space to get the best from those fearsome swords and from her speed. Above her, with shield between them, he would have a chance. To delay her, if nothing else. But only if she came after him. “You cannot reach him,” he said as he reached back to set his foot on the first of the steps. She smiled then, the malevolent smirk of a wolf. “You think not?” she said, and ran at him. Orisian could not answer the question that had been put to him. The depth and resonant power of the voice that had asked it stunned him, and made him for a moment stand quite still, letting his sword and shield hang down. “You mean me harm.” The voice rang like the mightiest, most sombre of bells. “That I can feel, can know. But it’s a cold kind of… regret. It doesn’t burn in you as it did in the others.” Orisian gathered himself, almost groaning at the effort it took to shake off the deadening pain and the weight of the fell mind that pressed down upon his own. K’rina was walking very slowly forward, taking tiny steps. That roused Orisian enough to get his own, leaden body moving. He forced himself ahead of the na’kyrim. “Who is that with you?” the voice asked him. “I can’t see. My eyes… Can’t find anything… What? You’ve brought some empty vessel with you? A body with no mind, no thought, no life in it?” Orisian advanced, each halting stride a struggle. He could hear Kanin muttering something, but did not look. He kept his gaze fixed on the na’kyrim, who slowly became clear amidst the shadows as Orisian drew nearer. He thought at first that Aeglyss must be dead. A naked, hairless, scabrous head on a lopsided and bruised neck. The face, what little Orisian could see of it, marred by a score of tiny wounds and blisters and blemishes. Streaked with blood. Fragile shoulders, the bony points of them showing through the gown. That gown itself, foully decorated with stains. The hands, one lying atop the other in Aeglyss’ lap, so wasted that Orisian could see every bone through the skin. Each finger ending in an open sore where the nail should have been. The whole entirely withered and wretched and unmoving. Yet he was not dead, for Orisian heard him, and could feel his seething will all around. It ran dark, intrusive fingers over Orisian’s thoughts. This was the home and heart of all that poisoned the world and the Shared. Orisian recognised the teeming mass of unfettered emotion that clawed at him, could almost see it as a boiling black cloud that filled the hall and flooded out through the windows, rushing in great spreading columns out into the sky, blanketing the world. The anger and the bitter hatred, the self-loathing, the fear. It was all here, in its first and simplest form. “Why do I catch the scent of Anain?” The doubt, the almost childish puzzlement in those words, was so acute it made Orisian sigh in distant pain. He was losing himself beneath the onslaught of this formless, purposeless power. If he did not act, he would be unable to do so at all. He lurched forward, sword raised. “No,” the voice told him. “Kneel.” And his sword slipped from his numb fingers, and his knees buckled and he went down heavily. He shrugged his arm free of the shield and it fell away from him. “Who are you?” This time Orisian did not think the question was for him. “I can’t see you. Why can’t I see you?” K’rina was shuffling closer to Aeglyss. And then, quite suddenly: “Aeglyss,” K’rina said. “It’s me. It’s K’rina. I came for you.” She had a beautiful voice. Light, and fine, and easy. Orisian could feel Aeglyss’ confusion. It was so powerful, it became his, and he stared, uncomprehending, at K’rina as if he was seeing her for the first time. She stood straight, head held up. Alive and present. He felt a subtle transformation taking place inside him, inside everything. That confusion and the anger that underlay it was shifting, changing its shape. Those first emotions did not disappear, but a… joy was merging itself with them. “K’rina?” “I came for you, my son. My foster son. I felt your pain and knew I had to come.” “Yes.” Orisian thought his skull might burst at the vigour in that single word. “I am here for you.” K’rina smiled, stretching her arms out towards Aeglyss. “Come. We can be together.” “Yes.” Again, it was exultant, rising, roaring upwards. “Let me see.” Orisian felt all that force and power that swirled about him gathering itself, drawing itself in to coalesce around that one smiling woman, and within her. K’rina shook. She rocked from toe to heel. Her arms jerked. Her mouth opened. There was a sudden lessening, a dampening of the cacophony raging inside Orisian. He rose to his feet, fighting back surges of nausea. He recovered his sword. When he straightened, testing the weight of the sword in his hand, K’rina had turned towards him and was staring at him. “What?” she said through taut lips, but the voice was not truly hers now. It quivered with Aeglyss’ power, with his strident tone. “No.” The snapped denial was like a blow in the face. Orisian closed his eyes and shook his head to try to clear it. “No,” he heard again, and the sound rang around the hall, setting echoes of fear and anger running across the stone. The anger found a home in Orisian, and burned in him and blurred his vision. Amidst that fierce seizure he knew what needed to happen. What needed to be done. He advanced towards K’rina. “No,” cried Aeglyss yet again in K’rina’s voice. “I’m sorry,” gasped Orisian through the waves of crushing fury that broke over him. He could feel blood running from his nose. There was liquid beading in his eyes, and he did not know whether that was blood as well or tears. He took another heavy pace closer to K’rina. She moved suddenly, tottering on rigid legs towards him, toppling as if to fall at his feet. She was reaching for him, those delicate white hands splayed, coming towards his face. Aeglyss, Orisian shouted silently at himself. It is Aeglyss. Only him. They were in each other’s embrace then, clasped together. K’rina’s hands closed themselves on Orisian’s head. His free hand settled on her waist, just firm enough to feel her hip bone. With his other hand he drove his sword through her midriff. As steel entered flesh, so those fingers laid on his scalp suddenly tightened and pressed down, and Orisian was flung tumbling and scattering and attenuating out of his body. He was there, with Aeglyss, inside the howling nothingness that was K’rina. Orisian was but a collection of thoughts pulled this way and that by the raging tempest. That tempest was both Aeglyss and what had awaited him here within the shell of the woman who had once been his loving guardian. Two vast powers contended, the one striving to drag itself back and up towards the waking world of surfaces and light and substance; the other flailing at the first, raking it, dragging it, entwining it, struggling to contain it and haul it away, down into the bottomless void beneath. K’rina was cage and she was trap. There was nothing of her here, not the most tenuous echo or memory of who she had been or what she consisted of. Her body had been mere vessel for older, vaster powers. Orisian could feel himself coming apart, unable to shape coherent thought amidst such titanic expression of unbridled potencies. Aeglyss—the maelstrom that was his rage and desire—was in the grip of the immense will of the Anain. Their furious struggle, a storm fit to encompass worlds, threw off gouts of raw sensation that tore holes in the fabric of Orisian’s consciousness, and left fragments of themselves drifting through his faltering thoughts. He felt rasping tendrils of briar wrapped around his naked limbs, gouging great troughs into his flesh. He felt writhing tendrils forcing themselves into his mouth and into his throat, piercing him, growing into him. He felt clouds of leaves brushing over his skin; heard the creaking of ancient, mindful timber; tasted loam. He was Aeglyss lying shivering in the snow, folded into the arms of his dead mother, feeling himself dying piece by piece of grief and fear. He was Aeglyss crucified upon the Breaking Stone, enduring the agonising revelation of possibility, feeling in the core of his being the immeasurable, unbounded wonder of the Shared opening itself to him and filling him like a flood bursting through a holed dyke. He glimpsed, for a flashing, searing instant, the workings of the Anain mind, the many-in-one immensity of its slow movement through the insubstantial world within a world that was the Shared. He glimpsed their longing to silence the raucous, poisonous chaos Aeglyss inflicted; their deep and diffuse dismay at the suffering, the deformation, he brought to all the countless minds woven into the web of the Shared; their fear of him. And their cold and cruel calculation in taking the only living being he loved and snuffing her out of existence like the most trivial of flames on a candle, hollowing her out and making of her a snare for the monster loosed in the Shared. Wave after wave of experience and awareness burned through Orisian, and each left him thinner than the last, each carried away some portion of his being. But then something changed, and what was rushing up towards him, blanking out all else in the enormity of its power, was no mere fragment, no glimpse. It was Aeglyss, his entirety. And Orisian was suddenly back in his own body, standing in the hall in Kan Avor with K’rina’s hands pressed to his scalp, his sword in her stomach. Her eyes—black eyes, lightless—staring into his own. He could feel Aeglyss raging towards him, feel the buffeting of his approach and the purity of his deranged anger. He could not move. Those fingers crushing against his skull were like steel claws. His own muscles were lifeless and limp, unresponsive to his terror. He understood. Aeglyss could not be killed with sword, or knife, or fire. No bodily harm could silence him as long as he could reach into the Shared, for that was where the essence of him dwelled now. He would be unending, and a part of him would reside, for ever, in every and any mind. Unless he could be contained in this na’kyrim’s body as it died. Unless the Anain could hold him there while Orisian’s blade stilled its heart. Some part of the Anain would die with him, for the prison they had made of K’rina could not be escaped, even by its makers; but Aeglyss would cease, and be gone from the world and from the Shared. But now Aeglyss was ascending again. He was boiling up to the surface and pouring himself into Orisian. “Yield to me,” Aeglyss howled. “Open yourself to me. Become a part of me.” Blood ran thickly over Orisian’s lips now. He could taste it. He could feel it inside his ears, trickling out and down his neck. K’rina’s fingers were white-hot bars against his bone. He could feel himself collapsing beneath their impossible strength. “No,” he thought. “I will give you life,” Aeglyss roared. “Let me in.” Orisian was diminishing, like mist exposed to the morning’s glare. He could still feel his pain, but he was moving slowly away from it. He could observe it from beyond its crippling weight. He could hear and feel the Anain rising in Aeglyss’ wake. They climbed from the deeps, reaching for him. All the corruption of the Shared that Aeglyss had begun was now removed from it, locked with the na’kyrim’s mind inside K’rina. He poured it into Orisian. Every bitterness, every resentment, every hatred and fear and jealousy ran through him in place of blood, in place of the air in his lungs. Its coruscating intensity eroded him. Out of it, though, out of that dark and misshapen memory of the Shared, he could find one thing. One choice. He could remember Lairis, and Fariel, and Kennet. Inurian and Rothe. He could smell his mother’s hair, and hear the golden music of her voice. He could see Fariel, standing silhouetted against the sun. He could embrace his sorrow at the loss of those who had gone before and without him. “Release me,” commanded Aeglyss. “Give yourself to me.” K’rina’s hands crushed in against his skull. Orisian could hear crackings, ruptures. The splitting and collapsing of bone. Light was flaring in his eyes. It would end if he but yielded. The Anain were there, enfolding Aeglyss. But the na’kyrim was flooding into Orisian, forcing his way between the last resistant strands of thought. Such agonies resounded in Orisian’s head that he was blind and deaf and dumb. He felt hollow breakage in his temples, the back of his skull. No. He did not speak it. He simply chose. And reached towards the beloved dead. As they faded, and he faded, he could feel Aeglyss falling away. Into the smothering Anain. Into the eternal, perfect cage of K’rina. Aeglyss screamed in impotent ire. And fell. And he faded, just as Orisian did. He faltered, just as Orisian did. He ceased.
*
The Inkallim came on and up. She lacked the room for elegant and deceptive swings in the tight confines of the stairwell, but still she was fast, and in her hands those swords could stab and probe with all the speed of daggers. Again and again, a rain of blows aimed at his chest and shoulders would draw Taim’s shield up, and then she would somehow have changed her grip on a sword and it was lancing down towards his feet. Each time he had to yield another step, and together they climbed, in that fierce dance, slowly towards whatever lay above. At length, inevitably, Taim was too slow, and she laid a deep cut through the side of his boot into his calf. He felt the blood at once, even as he was steadying himself. His strength was flowing out, through that and his other wounds. He could not hope to sustain this effort for long. Already, he was breathing hard, and his shield was beginning to feel heavy on his arm. If he permitted this struggle to continue, he would die, and so would Orisian. There would be, he knew, no more than a hint of an opening, so that was all he sought. When it came, he was not even confident it was so much as a hint. She was moving up and forward, both blades lunging up but a little way behind the rising of her body. His feet were as they had to be, his back heel braced against the riser of the next step. The natural flow of his weight was taking him forward. He launched himself, flung himself as high and hard as he could, aiming to pass over her shoulder. And he let his sword fall, for he needed his hand. He made a club of his shield and punched it into her shoulder, driving the stub of the arrow still deeper into flesh. He reached for the strapping that held her scabbards crossways on her back with his free hand, locked his fingers under it, and rolled himself over her, surrendering his body to the plummeting fall beyond. Her twin swords darted up more quickly than he had expected, and he felt another slicing pain across his leg, but his weight had hit her by then, and he was falling into the open spiral of the stairwell beyond her, and taking her with him. They fell entwined, clattering and flailing their way down. Taim felt a finger breaking as his hand was twisted free from its grip on the strapping, a blinding blow on his cheekbone that split the skin, bruises being hammered into his legs and flanks by the steps and the walls. His shield almost broke his nose. He could hear metal clanging off the stonework. The final impact was punishing. Taim landed on his side, with his shield beneath him. A searing pain made him think for a moment he had snapped a bone in the arm pinned under him; there was no sound of breakage, though. He sucked in a chestful of air, lifting his dazed head and looking blearily about for the Inkallim. She was lying on her front beside him, blood streaming from a gash in her forehead. He could not see her swords. Her eyes were already blinking open, staring out at him through the blood coursing over them and through the lashes. Taim’s body was a welter of small agonies and expansive aches. It screamed and spasmed in protest as he willed it to move. The Inkallim planted her hands and pushed herself up. Taim caught the hiss of pain as she did so, and took heart from it. He struggled to get his knees under him so that he could rise. The Inkallim was halfway up, but her injured shoulder, with that arrowhead buried deep inside it, buckled and dipped, and had her swaying. Taim hit her backhanded across the mouth with the ball of his gloved fist. She rolled onto her side, into the base of the wall. Taim staggered to his feet, but lost his balance and had to put out a hand to stop himself falling back onto the stairs. A sudden stave of fire impaled his thigh, and he looked down to find her fingers clawing into the wound she had put there earlier. It was her weaker arm, for with her good one she was hauling herself upright, scraping herself up against the wall. Taim howled, and hammered the edge of his shield down on her extended shoulder. Her bloody fingers were ripped free from his leg. Taim thought he heard something snapping or tearing in the shoulder joint. He whipped the shield back up and hit her in the face with it. She slumped. He hit her again and again, putting all his weight behind the shield, pounding it at her head until he felt her skull break. Chest heaving, propped against the wall on one straight arm, trembling, he shook the shield free. It rolled out into the street, spun a wobbling circle there and fell flat. Taim took one short look at the dead Inkallim and climbed the steps. Each small rise felt like torment, and he had to hold on to the walls to keep himself from falling. He found his sword halfway up. His broken finger was in his sword hand, so he had to hold it in the other. The hilt felt thick there, clumsy and unfamiliar. He found an open door at the top of the stairs and stumbled into a hall. His feet were loud on the rotten floorboards, but there was none there able to react. He walked heavily forward to where K’rina and Orisian lay together in some strange embrace, in the centre of the hall. Orisian’s sword had transfixed the na’kyrim. A twisted, tortured strand of sound drew Taim’s attention to one of the pillars. A battered, dishevelled man was slumped there, with dead ruins for hands. Taim did not recognise him. He was laughing, but it was a sick, choking kind of laughter. He was staring down towards the far end of the hall. Taim looked that way, and saw perched on a low stone bench, a small, pale cadaver. It looked almost as if someone had arranged it there: set the hands together neatly in its lap, placed the bare, blistered, decaying feet side by side, perfectly aligned. It was a frail thing. A sad, pathetic thing. And then Taim realised it was not dead. Its chest shivered with faint breath. He walked slowly towards it. It did not move save for that tremor in its ribcage. It made no sound save for the rustle in and out of fresh and spent air. Taim stood over it. His mind was clear, he realised. For the first time in… weeks, perhaps, there was a flawless unity: he was whole, and entire, and only himself. He heard nothing save the slow, calm turning of his own thoughts. He felt nothing save weariness and sadness. He put a hand under the horror’s chin and lifted its face. It was ravaged by disease and injury. But the eyes were open. Taim looked into them. They were full of blood, only the smallest flecks of their original slaty grey showing through here and there. And they were empty. Utterly unresponsive. Taim ran his sword through the centre of that fluttering chest. There was almost no resistance. It was like cutting through parchment. The corpse fell sideways and lay there on the bench. Taim turned away and walked back to stand over Orisian. The man propped against the pillar was still laughing, though it was softer, fading slowly. He was looking at Taim now, watching him with an unreadable expression. Taim wondered briefly whether to kill him. But he did not know who he was, or what he deserved. His injuries would surely put an end to him soon enough. And, most powerfully of all, Taim had had enough of killing. He sheathed his sword and went down on one knee. Taim raised his dead Thane in his arms, and bore the body away from that hall. He was surprised at how light it was.
X
Winter’s end came amidst a series of damp days, with cloud and winds that ran boisterously up the Glas Valley. Some few eager trees brought forth the very first tender leaves of the new season, as luminously green as the most radiant of gems. White blushes of delicate flowers spread through the forest floor. Birds rediscovered their songs. This resurgence went uncelebrated, even by those for whom this movement of the world out of slumber and into renewed wakefulness would normally be cause for festivity. There had in past years been garlands of the earliest flowers worn by the girls, flocks of sheep or cattle driven through the streets of towns with all the children running alongside and feasting, of course. Few hearts were light enough for such things this year. Many were fearful, bewildered. Some were still engaged in the business of bloodshed. Some were waiting, still hoping, for certainty that the awful shadow beneath which they had suffered, and to which they had lost a precious fraction of themselves, had truly lifted. And some were yet making hard journeys toward unknown futures. Eska of the Hunt and Kanin oc Horin-Gyre descended into the lands of the Horin Blood down an old, long-disused drover’s road. He leaned on her, for he was still weak and seldom had the strength to walk unaided for very far. That he had any strength at all was a source of no little surprise to Eska. She had thought him to be doomed when she found him in the hall in Kan Avor, slumped on the floor close to the wasted corpse of Aeglyss and that of another na’kyrim, a woman Eska did not recognise. The Thane’s hands had been black with corruption. Useless appendages already, she suspected, rotting on the inside. She had cut them off and sealed the stumps with fire. It was necessary, but she had expected such treatment to kill him. As it transpired, Kanin was more resilient than she had imagined. He had not died then, and she was beginning to believe that he would not be dying soon. The long walk through the mountains had been brutal, for she had kept them well clear of the Vale of Stones, disinclined to follow what she adjudged was likely to be a dangerous, if much easier, path. The flood of the faithful that had come south across the Vale was now reversed, but in different form. Now, it was a trickle, a meagre, desultory flow of broken and lost people. Most of those Eska had seen were dazed, so defeated by the memory of what they had seen and felt and done that they made themselves easy victims of the vengeful people of the Glas Valley. There were even fewer of those than there were survivors of the Black Road army, but their anger burned the brighter, and they hunted the retreating companies mercilessly. So Eska had chosen a rougher, narrower trail, winding its way through higher valleys and around colder peaks. There had been bad weather and driving winds, but Kanin had not succumbed. Nor had she, and her own wound was no small burden. It had been a prolonged and agonising business extracting her own barbed spear from her flank. She had made several unsuccessful attempts at breaking the shaft, and pulling it through her body before she achieved it, and in the course of her struggles had several times been rendered senseless by the pain. She still could not walk without considerable suffering, and bending or stretching or twisting were entirely beyond her. The weight of Kanin oc Horin-Gyre across her shoulders made it worse. But she said nothing. The Thane had said no more than a few words to her all through their long march. He talked sometimes in his troubled sleep, but it was seldom comprehensible. When they rested, he would simply sit and stare out across the blasted snowscape. Silent. Lost in memory, or imagining, or thought. Sometimes he would look down at the blunt, bandaged stumps of his wrists. If he despaired at the sight of his maiming, he hid it well. And now they at last descended. There was still snow, but it was melting quickly. On the lower slopes Eska could see people moving, and further down the valley a little village. Distantly, she could hear the lowing of cattle cooped up in some shed. “It’s done, then,” she said to Kanin. And to her surprise he took his arm away from her shoulders and slumped down into the snow and sat there weeping. His face crumpled as thoroughly as would that of any distraught child. Eska stood at a respectful distance and waited. It took a long time. When he was emptied of it, he looked across to her and lifted his arms from his knees. “Do you think a man can still be Thane, with…” He could not finish the question. Eska shrugged. “I do not know. I saw a man once, in Kan Dredar, who had lost his hand. To a bear, I think. He had a carver make him a wooden one. It was crude. Of little use, and he could not wear it all the time for it rubbed his… skin raw. But he looked whole.” “Ha. I would settle for that. To look whole. If I had my hands, still all I would hope for was to look whole. Some wounds never close up, no matter how carefully they are tended. But a man need not be whole to be Thane. Come, help me up. Let us see what welcome awaits us.”
*
Anyara stood with Ilessa oc Kilkry on the quayside of Kolglas, watching the crew ready the ship. They worked in silence. The crowd assembled all along the harbour watched in silence. The seagulls wheeled overhead, screeching. “I am grateful that you came,” Anyara said to the older woman. “Of course. Our Bloods spring from the same root. And now, it seems, we are greatly in your debt. Your brother’s debt. Of course I came.” Anyara smiled and nodded her thanks. There was a faint warmth in the sun on her face. It felt like an entirely new thing: a sensation she had never before experienced in all her life. As if it were a new kind of warmth in a new world. “You must have a great many demands upon your time, though,” she said. “And it cannot have been an easy journey.” “Are any journeys easy now? And there is too little time, no matter where I am, how hard I labour. Repairs. Rebuilding. Finding food for the unhomed and the orphaned. The Tal Dyreens bring shiploads of grain and require us to empty our treasury in exchange for it. The Black Road still lurks in distant corners of our lands. We will be fighting bandits for years, I think. Many fled into the Vare Waste, many beyond the Karkyre Peaks, where by all rumours’ account they are not welcomed by what remains of the White Owls. Not welcomed at all.” “And Highfast?” “It might be again as it was once was. Perhaps. There are some prepared to try. A few. There was a message from one of them—a man called Hammarn—for the na’kyrim… for Yvane. I gave it to her last night. It seemed to please her, though it was difficult to be sure.” Anyara looked along the quayside a little way. Someone was moving through the crowd, handing out oatmeal biscuits and offering ale. It seemed a strange fragment of normality amidst so much that felt unreal. Impossible. “Your son…?” she asked quietly. Dismay perturbed Ilessa’s features, just briefly. She mastered herself. “Unchanged. Roaric is lost to us, I fear. He moves and breathes, and speaks even at times. But his sense has fled him. He is Thane, but… but the reins must stay in my hands. For as long as I can hold them.” “I’m sorry.” “Sorry. Yes. It will not be easy for either of us, I think. The Bloods are not accustomed to the rule of a woman.” Anyara grunted. “To say the least of it. They will accustom themselves to it in time. But not yet: every day I am asked when I intend to marry and put a Thane on the throne beside me.” “You should,” Ilessa said, too quickly, too forcefully. It was gentler when she repeated it: “You should. Not to please others, not to silence doubters. Because you will not want to be alone. Not for long. Do not make yourself alone.” “No,” murmured Anyara. And then asked, “What do you suppose will happen?” “We can’t know that. We will have to wait and see. And hope we meet it well.” The crowd at the far end of the harbour shifted and parted, and a small group came through. Yvane, and Coinach, and Taim Narran with his arm about his wife Jaen. That was a good sight, those two in such an embrace. It made Anyara smile. The first time she had smiled today. She was still smiling as her eyes met Coinach’s, and his own lips caught the warmth and reflected it. “My lady,” her shieldman said, dipping his head respectfully as they drew near. He took such pleasure in flouting her command to call her by her name. It was a game between them now. A gentle, affectionate game. Yvane looked the most despondent of all of them. Her gaze was on the lidded clay vase Anyara clutched to her breast. Anyara tightened her grip on the vessel. “It will soon be done,” she said to the na’kyrim, and Yvane nodded sadly. “They look to be ready, my lady,” Taim said. Anyara turned to the long, low boat. The oarsmen were at their posts. The helmsman stood at the tiller. That smile was gone already, but it could not have survived this moment in any case. “Let’s go then,” she said. Taim hugged his wife, and kissed her forehead, and whispered in her ear. She touched her hand to his cheek and backed away. The rest of them descended into the corpse-ship. The oarsmen edged it slowly out of the harbour. Castle Kolglas, standing on its rocky outpost amidst the waves, watched them pass; and Anyara watched it, awash with memories, with regrets and sorrow. The place was still empty, still a ruin. She did not know when—or if—it would be habitable once more. There was a rare, light wind from the south today, and Anyara was glad of that, for she wanted this outward journey to be a quick one. Once beyond the harbour’s embrace, the single square sail was soon raised, and it flapped and creaked and then caught the wind and tightened, and the prow of the ship began to punch its way through the waves, out into the Glas Estuary. Anyara sat alone on a bench, with that vase held tight, and closed her eyes. She surrendered herself to the sound of the sea on the hull, the voices of the seagulls that escorted them, the sun on her face. It was not peace, but there was a secret stillness in those sensations she could draw upon. Dimly, she could hear Taim talking with Ilessa oc Kilkry behind her. Their voices were low. “And Haig?” Taim was asking. Ilessa snorted. “Chaos, from what I hear. They lost thousands in the battles, and now they’re fighting Dornach and Dargannan in the south. It’s going badly, evidently. Not that anyone seems to know who is giving the orders. One day I’m told it’s the Crafts, the next someone says Stravan has turned up and taken the throne. Whoever it is, they’re in no position to try to drag Kilkry and Lannis back under their yoke.” “Perhaps there’s no Haig Blood left at all,” Taim mused. “There’s Abeh. But they say she lost her mind when her husband was killed, and hasn’t recovered. Foul woman. I’d not wish such… horrors on anyone, but she… no, not even her perhaps. What about the Black Road?” “Oh, it’s…” Anyara could hear Taim’s shrug. “Mystifying. We had a message from Ragnor oc Gyre himself—meant for Gryvan, but we took it—pledging immediate peace, lasting peace. We questioned the messenger, sent one or two scouts north across the Vale ourselves, and it’s as if the madness hasn’t ended up there, as far as we can tell. The Inkallim have been all but destroyed, but whatever’s left of them is fighting Ragnor, along with half his own people. Horin-Gyre seems to be the only Blood that hasn’t taken up arms against one of the others.” “Well, it gives us time, at least.” “It does. But I leave as much of the plotting as I can to others now. I’ve hung up my sword. There’s a new Captain in Castle Anduran: Torcaill. He’s…” Anyara let the voices fade from her awareness. Time. There was never enough of that. They stepped onto The Grave. A wind-scoured, bare isle beneath the rugged headland of Dol Harigaig. Anyara could feel the spray from the waves breaking along the island’s western shore. The wind cast her hair across her face. It was called Il Dromnone first, and people said it was the body of a fallen giant. It became The Grave during the Heart Fever, when the harboursides of Kolglas and Glasbridge filled every day with bodies wrapped in cerements, and the corpse-ships ploughed back and forth with cruel regularity. Lairis and Fariel had come here. Now she had brought Orisian to join them, certain in her heart that it was what he would have chosen. She cradled the clay pot containing his ashes in her arms as she walked over The Grave’s uneven, slick rocks. Taim had carried Orisian out of Kan Avor through a day and long night, without stopping, to a cottage on the edge of Anlane where others waited. They had built a pyre amongst tree stumps, looking out over the valley, and consigned him to the flames. Afterwards, Anyara knew—though the na’kyrim would not speak of it—Yvane had gone back into Kan Avor with Taim. And what, she wondered, must it have cost the warrior to return to that place, having once escaped it? They had gone back and found K’rina’s body, and buried it out in the marshlands by the River Glas. But Anyara had not been there, for any of it. Now she would mourn in her way. Yvane, Coinach and Taim stood by the boat on flat rocks. She walked away from them, going alone across the naked isle, buffeted by the wind, tasting the sea on her lips. When she came to what she thought was the highest point in The Grave’s low emergence above the waves, she stopped and stood, and savoured for a moment this wild and free place. The wind was bringing tears to her eyes. It was not grief. Not yet. She held the urn in both hands and lifted it up, showed it to that little group gathered back at the water’s edge. Then she turned and showed it to two more watchers. High up, on the precipitous slope above the cliffs of Dol Harigaig, two pale and distant figures stood. They were too far away for Anyara to see clearly, but she knew that Varryn and Ess’yr had eyes much sharper than her own. She was not sure, but she thought one at least of them raised an arm in acknowledgement of her gesture. Anyara hugged the urn to her and knelt down. She did cry then, briefly. She folded herself over that hard clay vase, and was angry, and sad, and frightened. She let those feelings go, on the wind; imagined them tumbling and skimming away over the foaming crests of the waves into the north. She took the lid from the urn, and let the wind take her brother’s ashes too. “Forgiven,” she whispered as she watched it clouding away, dusting itself over the rocks, spinning on gusts into the sky. “Forgiven, of course. But there was nothing to forgive.” As the corpse-ship readied itself to depart from The Grave, a small rowboat was lowered noisily over the side. Yvane climbed down into it, and a single oarsman—the strongest of the crew. He flailed his way across the waves and the wind to a narrow gravel beach nestled among gigantic black boulders on the southern flank of Dol Harigaig. He drove his tiny craft up onto that beach, the pebbles hissing as the keel ploughed into them. Yvane clambered out, ungainly but dry-shod, thanked the man and walked towards Ess’yr and Varryn, who had descended to meet her. No words were exchanged between na’kyrim and Kyrinin. They climbed together up onto the high ground, going slowly and carefully over first a winding trail made by wild goats, and then on the damp, slick turf of the headland. Ess’yr moved easily, though one arm was still bound up in a tight sling. They walked for a long time along the Car Anagais that formed the steep northern shore of the estuary, skirting the tree line as they went. The land was empty, for the Fox were much reduced, and no vo’an remained south of the Vale of Tears. Perhaps in future years. Perhaps. Late on the second day, as the greater ramparts of the Car Criagar came into sight ahead of them, they turned northward, and began the long descent through hills and wooded vales towards the Dihrve Valley. They parted then. Yvane and Varryn went on ahead to find a place to camp for the night. Ess’yr went down to the thickets along the side of a narrow, gurgling stream. She found there a stand of willow, and cut a stem. She chose a good one, straight and healthy, on the brink of giving forth its fresh, dagger-shaped leaves. She trimmed its cut base to make the wound clean and neat. Then she pushed it into the soft, moist earth close to the bank of the stream. She opened the hole it had made by rolling her wrist, swaying the stake round in widening circles, and then withdrew it and laid it flat on the ground. From under her belt she brought a folded scrap of deerhide. As she could work with only one hand, she had to put it down on a fallen log in order to open it out and take hold of the knotted cord it contained. She knelt and gently lowered the cord into the hole the willow stake had made. Her long fingers carefully pressed it in deep, to make sure it was settled and secure there. She paused, head bowed, in reflection for a few moments. Ess’yr rose, and planted the staff of willow over the cord. She firmed it into place with her foot and stepped back. The willow stood tall and perfectly erect. She nodded once to it, respectfully, turned and walked away. To find her brother and the na’kyrim. To join them beside a fire, and eat and rest and anticipate the coming of a new season.
Epilogue
Anyara With all my heart, I would be with you now. I try not to fear for you. I remind myself that you were always the stronger of us. Even when there were three of us, I think perhaps you were the strongest, though I did not understand it until later. Rothe died. Torcaill can tell you how and why, if you want to know. We are the last of home now, you and I, the last of Kolglas. I look around me, and I see familiar faces, but I miss those I knew in Kolglas. I want more than anything to walk with you through the market in Kolglas again, and to go hawking with you along its shore, and to steal warm bread from its kitchens. That is what I mean to do. It is what I hope to do. But that may not be how this ends. I do not know if I can make any difference in any of this, but I think I see at least the outline of something that perhaps needs to be done. And I choose to try to do it. You do not deserve the burden, but there is no one else. If I am gone, I leave to your care our Blood and our home. I think now, looking back, that we all die, little by little, as each of those we love departs before us. Forgive me, sister, if I have gone before you. Orisian
the passage of time
The First Age Began when the Gods made the world and put the One Race in it to inhabit it. Ended when the One Race rose up against the Gods and was destroyed. The Second Age Began when the Gods made the Five Races: Huanin, Kyrinin, Whreinin, Saolin and Anain. The Huanin and Kyrinin made war upon the Whreinin and destroyed that race, and were thereafter named the Tainted Races for their sin, and forfeited the love of the Gods. Ended when the Gods departed from the world. The Third Age Began with the absence of the Gods, and with chaos. Year280 The Adravane and Aygll Kingships arose 398 Marain the Stonemason began the construction of Highfast, at the behest of the Aygll King 451 The Alsire Kingship arose, and the era of the Three Kingships began 775 The three Huanin Kingships united against the Kyrinin clans and the War of the Tainted began 787 Tarcene, the Aygll King, was bound, his mind enslaved, by the na’kyrim Orlane; his own daughter, in despair, killed him 788 Tane, the Kyrinin’s Shining City, was captured by the Huanin armies, the Deep Rove was raised by the Anain, and the War of the Tainted ended 792 Morvain’s Revolt, a rising against the faltering Aygll Kingship, culminated in a failed siege of Highfast 793 The last Aygll monarch—Lerr, the Boy King—was slain at In’Vay, and the era of the Three Kingships ended; Aygll lands descended into chaos and the Storm Years began 847 The Bloods—Kilkry, Haig, Gyre, Ayth and Taral—were founded in Aygll lands, and Kulkain oc Kilkry became the first Thane of Thanes; the end of the Storm Years 849 Kulkain oc Kilkry bade Lorryn the na’kyrim establish at Highfast a library for the preservation of learning and knowledge 852 The last Alsire King was slain, and the first King of the Dornach line took his throne in Evaness 922 The Black Road heresy arose in Kilvale; Amanath the Fisherwoman, its originator, was executed and the creed outlawed by the Bloods 939 Avann oc Gyre-Kilkry, Thane of the Gyre Blood, adopted the creed of the Black Road 940 Civil war broke out amongst the Kilkry Bloods, between the adherents of the Black Road and those opposed to the creed 942 Following their defeat in battle at Kan Avor, the Gyre Blood and all adherents of the Black Road were exiled beyond the Vale of Stones, and founded there the Bloods of the Black Road: Gyre, Horin, Gaven, Wyn and Fane 945 The Lore and Battle Inkalls were founded by the Bloods of the Black Road 948 The last attempt by the Kilkry Bloods to crush the fledgling Bloods of the Black Road in the north ended in failure; their armies retired south of the Vale of Stones and the fortification of Tanwrye began 959 The Hunt Inkall was founded by the Bloods of the Black Road 973 The Lannis Blood was founded, in reward for Sirian Lannis dar Kilkry’s defeat of the invading forces of the Black Road at Kolglas 997 Haig replaced Kilkry as first amongst the True Bloods 1052 The Dargannan Blood was founded 1069 The Lannis-Haig Blood defeated Horin-Gyre in the Battle of the Stone Vale, near Tanwrye 1070 Tavan oc Lannis-Haig died, and his son Croesan succeeded him as Thane of the Lannis Blood 1097 The Lannis-Haig Blood was afflicted by the Heart Fever, which killed almost one in six 1102 The Dargannan Blood rebelled against the authority of Haig, and Gryvan oc Haig, Thane of Thanes, summoned the armies of the True Bloods to march against them