Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  “What happened, then?” Wain asked once they had settled in front of the fire in the absent wheelwright’s house. “I know it cannot have been all that you hoped, or you’d have told me already.”

  A young girl – orphaned or abandoned in the chaos of Glasbridge’s fall and now pressed into service by Wain – brought them bread and bowls of mutton stew. There were ugly burns on the backs of her hands, a legacy of the conflagration that had come after the flood. Kanin tore the bread into chunks and dipped them in the unappetising stew.

  “We cornered the Lannis children in Koldihrve. The boy and the girl were both there. I had . . .” He stretched a hand out towards Wain, closing his fist on air. “I had him within my reach, as close as you are now. But they escaped us. A Tal Dyreen trading ship carried them away.”

  “You’ve got yourself a trophy, I see,” Wain said with a nod at Kanin’s brow.

  The Thane put a hand to the long, half-healed cut there.

  “A woodwight broke her bow on my head,” he muttered. “I’d’ve had the Lannis-Haig brat otherwise. I was so close, Wain. So close.” He shook his head.

  “It’s done,” his sister said. “There’s no point in regretting fate’s path.”

  Kanin made a vague effort at a smile. Wain’s resilience, her steadfast adherence to the creed, had always been a staff he could lean on. He knew she was right, and that he should mimic her calmness in the face of misfortune, but it had never come as easily to him. He had promised his father that the Lannis-Haig line would be extinguished. If fate would not permit him to fulfil that promise, he could not help but regret the fact.

  “What of the White Owls?” Wain asked. “Cannek claims his Hunt Inkallim have seen bands of them coming back out of the Car Criagar these last few nights, crossing the valley.”

  Kanin shrugged. “I stayed clear of the wights as much as I could. They fought the Fox at Koldihrve.

  Won, I think, but I didn’t linger. How do things stand here?”

  “At our high tide. We’ve reached the outermost limit of what is possible. I’ve less than a thousand swords left.”

  Kanin rubbed his eyes. It had been far too long since he had slept properly. Even now, beside a vigorous fire, he could still feel the cold and damp of the Dihrve valley and the high Car Criagar in his limbs; in his heart, almost.

  “No word from Tanwrye?”

  “It is held against us still.”

  “And Ragnor oc Gyre has not seen fit to march to our aid?”

  “There has been no reply to our messages.”

  “We’re spent, then.” Kanin set aside his bowl and stared at the dancing flames. “As you say, it’s the high tide of our good fortune.”

  “Shraeve has set the townsfolk to building a ditch and dyke across the road from Kolglas.”

  Kanin grunted. “She thinks we can hold the road against all the armies of Kilkry-Haig? With a thousand swords?”

  “Who knows what she thinks? She tells me nothing any more. It hardly matters. Fate has given us this much; no more or less.” Wain’s eyes, as she regarded her brother, were clear, placid. “It would not break my heart to come to the end of my Road here, like this. The Book of Lives has been as kind to us as we could have hoped, has it not? And we have followed the course it laid out for us willingly. Nothing more could be asked of us.”

  Kanin had wanted more. He had wanted their victories to be only the first, opening the way for all the armies of the other Bloods; he had wanted the Lannis line extinguished, in the name of his father. He had wanted to be able to die without regrets. Was that desire truly such a failing?

  Wain put more wood on the fire: the spokes of a cartwheel that would never be made.

  “I am minded to wait here,” she said quietly. “Wait for our enemies to come and face us. I do not think we are fated, you and I, to limp back to Hakkan and die in our beds. If I’m right in that, I will die content.”

  Kanin stared at the orange heart of the fire. He had no great longing to see Hakkan again. It would be a poor kind of ending to struggle back across the Vale of Stones, defeated. More life would be no great boon after that.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Content.”

  He wanted it to be true, but his heart remained uneasy.

  The next morning was overcast. The snow had stopped in the night, and soon after dawn a thaw of sorts had begun. Kanin and Wain went out on the road south along the coast, at the head of thirty riders.

  Puddles lay all along the track. The sea lapped against the rocks and stony strands that lined the shore.

  Streams ran gurgling through culverts under the road, hastened by melt water.

  They found Shraeve a little way outside Glasbridge. She and two dozen of her Inkallim were watching while enslaved townsfolk laboured. A ditch had been cut from the top of a shingle beach, across the road and on for two hundred or more paces inland to a rocky, wooded spur.

  Running his eyes over the crowds of sullen labourers, and the low bund they were piling up with spoil from the ditch, Kanin recognised that Shraeve had chosen a good place for her works. Inland, low wooded hills and hummocks – outliers of the great mass of Anlane, further to the south – would hamper any marching army and provide ample opportunities for ambush. Anyone seeking to enter the Glas valley would have no choice but to attempt that rough ground or fight their way over Shraeve’s barrier.

  “It’s as good a place as any to make a stand,” Igris, leader of Kanin’s Shield, muttered.

  “It would be, if we had the strength to hold it,” Kanin said, and nudged his horse on.

  Shraeve herself was standing atop the rampart of sodden earth. She had her back to them as Kanin and his company drew near, her two sheathed swords crossed over her spine. He noticed that Wain drifted away, allowing her horse to slow and veer down onto the shore. Another sign, he assumed, that her patience with the ravens of the Battle was exhausted.

  Shraeve turned. She looked down on Kanin with unreadable eyes.

  “Welcome back, Thane.”

  “You have been busy,” he said, encompassing the length of the embankment with a sweep of his arm.

  She nodded. “We have many hands to put to the task, unwilling as they are.”

  “What will prevent them riding around your little wall, when they come?” he asked, indicating the wooded rising ground to the left. “It may be difficult for them, but we haven’t the numbers to stop them.”

  “I will settle for making it difficult,” Shraeve said, with a hint of contempt. “I expect nothing more than to make the attempt, and let fate decide. Have you come to tell me that is not enough for you? Do you mean to crawl back into the north?”

  There was nothing new in her arrogance, Kanin thought – that was, after all, an attribute shared by every one of the Inkallim – but she had acquired a brazen, confrontational energy. Wain had warned him that since Anduran, Shraeve had been growing ever more assertive, more willing to challenge any authority that was not her own.

  “No,” he said, “that is not what I came to tell you, Shraeve.”

  He pointed at a nearby woman, struggling to carry a small collection of rocks cradled in her arms, slipping on the mud facing of the bank.

  “These people are mine. Glasbridge is mine. These are Horin-Gyre lands, and this is a Horin-Gyre war, unless and until Ragnor oc Gyre claims it for his own. So, I thank you for your efforts in breaking this ground and raising this wall, but you may leave the task to us now. We will finish it. We will hold it.”

  Shraeve glared at him. She was fierce, this raven, but Kanin was resolute. If there was to be no glorious and lasting triumph in all of this, he could at least ensure that the glory of honest, faithful defeat belonged to Horin-Gyre. His Blood had earned that much.

  The Inkallim sprang nimbly down from the bund and stood beside Kanin’s horse. She clapped her hands together, shaking dirt from them; she must have been digging and building herself.

  “As you wish. From the Children of the Hundred to the Hori
n-Gyre Blood, this ditch, this bank: a gift.

  Finish it quickly, Thane. The Hunt killed scouts creeping up from Kolglas in the night.”

  She waved an arm above her head and began walking back up the road towards Glasbridge. From all along the length of the embankment, the other Inkallim silently left their posts and began to follow her.

  “At least you will not have to hold it for long,” Shraeve called over her shoulder.

  “What does that mean?” Kanin shouted after her as Wain rode up from the beach to his side.

  “Have you not heard? Your messengers must be slow. The Battle is marching, coming to join you. The air about your head will be thick with ravens soon. We will see then, Kanin oc Horin-Gyre, whose war this is.”

  Stone walls ringed Tanwrye, and from them ramparts curved out across the southern entrance to the Stone Vale like the outstretched fingers of a monitory hand. Their turrets, battlements and ditches blocked almost all the width of the pass. Tiny outlying forts studded the hillsides around, sentinels to watch over the track and the turbulent river that ran side by side out of the north. It was a formidable defence, and more than once it had proved itself against the Black Road. This time it was being tested to its limits. Most of the outer ramparts, and all of the isolated fortlets, had already fallen.

  Iavin Helt dar Lannis-Haig was cold, down to the marrow of his bones. He had been at his post on the north tower of Tanwrye’s wall since not long after nightfall. It had been snowing for most of that time.

  Winterbirth was long gone, and the peaks within sight of Tanwrye had been cloaked in their white winter vestments for days. Iavin hunched his shoulders, pushing the fur collar of his cape up around his ears. His hunger made it all worse. Staring out at the fires of the Black Road army, he could not help but wonder whether the besiegers fared as poorly as Tanwrye’s defenders. By rights they should be even hungrier, colder and wearier than Iavin and his comrades, but in all the weeks of the siege there had been no sign of a weakening in the will of their enemy. Rather, it was Lannis-Haig hearts that were flagging.

  The shortage of food was not the only thing grinding spirits down. Sickness was prowling the town, picking off the youngest and the oldest, the weak and the wounded. The youth who had shared Iavin’s watch since the siege began had died just two nights gone. Firewood was running short. Families were burning their chairs, their bed frames and roof timbers in their hearths.

  The hardships of the mind were just as severe as those of the body. More than a week ago, just out of bowshot but within clear sight of the walls, a company of Horin-Gyre warriors had erected two huge poles. Spiked atop them were two heads: the heads, if the shouts of the enemy were to be believed, of Croesan, Thane of the Lannis-Haig Blood, and his son Naradin. Iavin could not be certain if it was true –

  his eyesight was not sharp enough to recognise those crow-pecked features at such a distance – but most within Tanwrye were inclined to believe it. After all, if Croesan still lived, he would have brought an army to their relief by now.

  Iavin brushed snowflakes from his collar. An old woman had given him gloves – gloves that had once belonged to the husband the Heart Fever took from her, as it had taken both of Iavin’s parents – and without them he suspected his hands would have been too cold to hold his spear. He rolled his shoulders, trying to loosen the stiff muscles.

  A point of light where there should have been none caught his eye. To the north, high up and far out in the heart of the Vale of Stones, a torch was burning. All else in that direction was utter darkness. There was no moonlight on this cloud-bound night. The yellowish fragment of fire bobbed like a solitary bright moth. Iavin blinked, suspicious that his cold and exhausted eyes were playing tricks. But the light remained, and one by one others appeared.

  Iavin heard a muffled call from somewhere along the wall, and answering shouts. He was not imagining it, then. Others were seeing the same thing. Even as he watched, any last vestiges of doubt were dispelled. A long tongue of fire was slowly winding its way over a saddle in the pass. Scores of torches, carried by scores of hands, were coming south through the falling snow.

  Horns sounded to call Tanwrye’s captains to the walls. There were signs of movement amongst the besieging army, too. Figures passed to and fro in front of the campfires, orders were shouted. And the torches flowing out of the Vale of Stones were in the hundreds now. Iavin watched the fiery river in a kind of numb amazement. It was almost beautiful, this vision of light and fire in the winter’s night; it would have been beautiful, had it not told him that death was coming for him, and for everyone in Tanwrye.

  At dawn, they were still coming. Thousand upon thousand, company after company, the Black Road was flooding through the Vale of Stones. The rocky, snow-covered ground around Tanwrye was already thick with tents and with seething crowds. A constant rumble of noise drifted up and over the besieged town, like a never-ending peal of distant thunder.

  Every warrior who could still walk had come to the walls to witness this gigantic assembly of their foe.

  Iavin Helt should have been resting by now, his watch long done, but nobody expected any rest today, unless it was the final, unending kind offered by the Sleeping Dark. He glanced down the line of grim-faced men that stretched along the top of the wall. There were not nearly enough of them to withstand the coming storm.

  It was not only the number of these newly arrived foes that had stilled any hope in the hearts of Tanwrye’s defenders, but their nature. Sometime in the night, amidst that river of blazing torches out of the Stone Vale, the Battle Inkall had arrived. So many of their great raven standards were now visible in the heart of the enemy camp that older, more experienced men than Iavin had shaken their heads in disbelief and despair. Tanwrye’s garrison included some of the finest warriors the Lannis-Haig Blood could muster; not one of them thought himself a match for the ravens of the Battle Inkall.

  Iavin’s stomach was knotted and growling. He could not tell whether it was hunger or fear. His throat felt tight, his mouth dry. His mind had emptied itself of thoughts, as if it too had been numbed by the night’s awful cold. Hidden behind heavy clouds, the sun climbed the sky. The day grew no warmer, the light no less subdued. Eventually, in the late morning, surges of movement spread through the Black Road camp. Like some great beast bestirring itself, the army rumbled into motion.

  The assault was controlled, precise and overwhelming. It rolled on through the afternoon. The few stretches of outlying wall and palisade that had still been held by Tanwrye’s defenders were stormed one after another. A few survivors made it back to the main town walls; most of their comrades died at their posts.

  Without pause, the Black Road host pressed closer and closer to the town. Beneath a sheltering cloud of crossbow bolts and arrows and stones, ladders were brought to the walls. So thick and relentless were the flights of missiles that those on the battlements who were not struck at once could only hunch down and press themselves against the stone, trying to ignore the cries and pleas of the less fortunate.

  Iavin, crouched low atop the tower, clenched his eyes shut. A hand was gripping his ankle. He knew it was an old man called Hergal, who had risen from his sickbed to come to the wall just that morning. He was already dead.

  “Get up, get up!” someone was shouting.

  It took a great effort of will, but Iavin opened his eyes and looked around.

  Men were surging past him, going to meet a black-haired woman who was vaulting over the parapet.

  Her jerkin and breeches were dark leather, studded with metal. Iavin rose to his feet. It seemed absurd and impossible that the Inkallim – the infamous ravens of the Black Road – were here, within a few paces of where he stood. Hergal’s dead hand fell away from his ankle.

  The woman ducked inside the first warrior’s blow, then drove upwards. She clamped one hand on his throat, stabbing her short sword into his stomach with the other. In a single movement she heaved the dying man backwards, knocking another warrior as
ide. She wrenched her sword free and spun to kick someone in the groin.

  Iavin lunged at her with his spear. Her flank was exposed. He would strike her in the stomach, on the left side. He could see it happening, see her dying, in his mind’s eye. Yet she rolled away and the spearpoint glanced off her hip bone. Somehow – Iavin could not understand how – she turned so quickly that she had hold of his spear before he could recover. She was far stronger than he had ever imagined a woman could be. He let go of the spear and fled as more dark-haired figures spilled over the wall.

  He ran blindly down from the tower and into the town, without a single glance back. A captain he did not know was gathering men beside a well. He seized Iavin’s arm, arresting his flight so abruptly that both of them almost fell.

  “Stand your ground!” he shouted in Iavin’s face. “Arm yourself!”

  Iavin reeled, his mind still a blur of noise and images. Someone thrust a short sword into his hand and he stared down at it. There was blood already on the blade.

  “With me,” the captain was crying now, and Iavin was caught up in the rush and carried back towards the walls.

  There was fighting on one of the ramps that slanted up to the battlements. No sign of Inkallim here, Iavin vaguely recognised as he pushed up with the others to join the fray. He fought against men who wore the ordinary woollen clothes of farmers or artisans, half of them armed with nothing more than clubs or small axes. The ramp was narrow, without the room for skill or precision. Iavin pushed and stabbed at whatever body appeared before him, concentrated only on not losing his footing on the incline. Time drifted.

  There was a sharp blow on his head and for a moment he could see nothing. He could hear himself shouting, perhaps screaming, and felt some blade sliding across his arm and opening it. His sight leaked back as he was crushed against the low wall that bounded the ramp.

  Then, “Back, back!” he heard.

  The press of bodies shifted and swayed. Iavin was suddenly freed and he stumbled, slithering, down the ramp. He sprawled across a corpse and gagged at the corrupt stench of blood and opened guts. He scrambled to his feet and staggered off down the cobbled roadway. He was panting, heaving air into aching lungs. He could taste bile in the back of his mouth.