Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  Iavin found himself in a small market square. He looked around. There were thirty or forty other warriors close by, some kneeling with spears and shields readied. A great block of sheds stood nearby.

  For the goats and sheep, Iavin remembered, that they bought and sold here. There was a massive stone-built hay barn, too. He was at the very heart of Tanwrye. There was nowhere else to fly to from here.

  They came howling and boiling out from the side streets: Tarbain tribesmen, covered in bone and stone talismans. They swept up to the knot of Lannis-Haig warriors, flowed around it and embraced it like the flooding sea taking hold of a rocky outcrop. Iavin hacked and slashed. The clatter of weapons and stamping of feet, cries of horror and fury, all swelled and filled his ears. He felt blows against his arms and chest, flickers of pain carried away on the anger that seethed in him. Then on his side: a smack and a sudden numbness. He saw the blade darting back, saw a blur of his own blood. Darkness came rushing up, reached for him and flung its veil across his eyes.

  Iavin still heard the terrible cacophony as he fell, but in a moment it too dissolved into the dark. His was only one amongst the many deaths on the day Tanwrye, the bastion so long believed to be impregnable, fell.

  All through the Antyryn Hyr, the Thousand Tree-clad Valleys, the White Owls were moving.

  Messengers had gone out from the great vo’an at the heart of the forest, racing along the secret ways that Kyrinin feet had trodden for hundreds of years. From every one of the clan’s winter camps, they had summoned a spear a’an to come. So the White Owls ran beneath the leafless canopy of Anlane and a cloud-thick sky. They came silent and swift to answer the Voice’s call.

  Five lifetimes ago, thousands of the White Owl had fought and died in the War of the Tainted. Only the Heron, Bull and Horse had fielded greater companies against the seething masses of humankind. The Huanin, who lived in a waking dream of their own splendour, might imagine that such strength was gone for ever. If so, they were misled by their own pride-fattened ignorance. The warband that had crossed into the Car Criagar to hunt Fox had been but a fraction of the clan’s spears. The vast deeps of the Thousand Tree-Clad Valleys held numbers unguessed by the Huanin. Many hundreds of warriors were on the move as the winter deepened and the first full snows of the season began to fall.

  Rumours ran with the spear a’ans , twisting and thickening, feeding off one another. There was a na’kyrim , it was said, child of a long-dead White Owl mother. A man who had been on the clan’s Breaking Stone, the great boulder the Walking God had left behind, and – unthinkably, impossibly – had not died. Instead, the whisperers said, he had been changed. It was because of him, and because of what he had become, that the spears were now gathering.

  The ground in front of the Voice’s lodge was hard and bare, sculpted by the touch of thousands of feet over many years. Song staffs, entwined with skulls and feathers and ivy, stood there. The people gathered before them, facing the lodge. The woven anhyne looked on from one side. The smoke of the ever-burning torkyr , the constant flame of the clan, drifted from behind the lodge.

  Not all had gathered outside the Voice’s lodge, but many did. They came because they wanted to see and hear this na’kyrim who had stirred up such tumult; some because they thought this man must die before his presence caused more chaos, others because the scent of his power filled their hearts and minds with a febrile hope.

  The na’kyrim lifted his head as he emerged from the lodge, casting his half-human eyes over the crowd.

  At the touch of that gaze, every man, woman and child felt a prickling of their skin, a drying in their throat. The na’kyrim was frail and drained, still ravaged by his long hours on the Breaking Stone, yet his presence was potent; arresting. It reached inside them, like an invisible hand.

  He advanced slowly, carefully. The Voice came behind him. She walked with her head down.

  Aeglyss took a great, deep breath as if flushing out his lungs with the clean air of the vo’an , the cleansing smoke of the torkyr . One of the kakyrin , the keepers of bones and stories and memories, stepped forwards from amongst the throng. He was an old man, the twofold kin’thyn tattoos on his face faded and weathered. His necklace of bone and owl feathers rustled as he walked. He stood in front of Aeglyss, but the na’kyrim ignored him.

  “Is he not to be returned to the Breaking Stone, then?” the kakyrin enquired levelly. It was impossible to say whose answer he sought. He was examining Aeglyss through narrowed eyes.

  “It’s not . . . I can’t be,” Aeglyss murmured.

  “Is he mind-sick?” the kakyrin asked.

  “Perhaps,” whispered the Voice. She took a few paces closer. “But it is a strange kind of mind-sickness. The Breaking Stone could not contain his spirit. Do you not feel it? He thickens the air with power. The White Owl have not had a child such as this in half a thousand years. Longer.”

  “He betrayed us before. Made false promises. His words, his lies, they are more potent than anything you or I might utter. He can make nets out of words, to cast over our minds.”

  “He says he was the one betrayed, by the Huanin of the Road. He says the false promises he made were made at their behest, and that he thought them to be true when he spoke them. The thought is in my mind that I believe him in this, and it is my own thought, unsnared in any net of his making.”

  “You think he will give the clan back the strength it once had?”

  “He may. We were mighty once, before the City fell. None then would have dared to steal our lands, fell our trees, drive our hunters from their summer grounds. We have been less than we were for a long time.”

  The kakyrin sniffed. “As has every people, of every land.” He shook his head. His necklace rattled. “I see only a part-human whose mind has rotted.”

  Aeglyss cupped the old man’s face in his hands. The kakyrin started backwards, but Aeglyss held him fast and the impulse to recoil seemed to fail almost before it had taken hold. The kakyrin began to groan.

  Aeglyss shook. His eyes rolled up slowly until the pupils were hidden.

  “Do you see?” he rasped. “Do you see?”

  The kakyrin ’s legs went slack. He slumped, only Aeglyss’s grip on his face keeping him from falling to the ground.

  “Do you see?” Aeglyss demanded again, more distantly this time. The crowd of onlookers seethed; there were cries of anger, alarm.

  “Release him,” the Voice said to Aeglyss, putting a hand on his arm. She spoke the words not as a command but softly.

  Aeglyss blinked and looked down at the old woman, then at the man. His hands fell back to his sides.

  The kakyrin slumped to his knees, and swayed there.

  “Have you harmed him?” the Voice asked.

  “No,” breathed Aeglyss. “Not so much as you harmed me by placing me on the Stone. But I have forgiven you. Forgiven all of you.” He called it out loudly. “If I’ve been broken, it was only to be made afresh. Thus, I forgive you.”

  “All the world,” the kakyrin was mumbling. “All the world.”

  A warrior stepped out from the crowd, his spear levelled at Aeglyss, dark intent fixed in his eyes. The na’kyrim held him with a flashing, savage glare.

  “You are my mother’s people,” cried Aeglyss, and the warrior shrank from the cry. “You are my people. My heart beats in time with yours, and whatever mistakes there have been in the past are done with now. Forgiven, forgotten. I am not as I was, and the White Owls shall not be as they were.

  Together we shall make such a beginning as the world has never seen. All things can change. If I will it.”

  Children wailed in distant huts. The bravest of warriors felt tremors in their hands; the wisest of heads spun; the keenest of ears rang with endless echoes of anger and hunger.

  “Have I not already given you the blood of the Fox to bathe your spears in? Has this not already been a bitter season for your enemies? More warriors now wear the kin’thyn than the clan has seen in a lifetime.”

&
nbsp; There were cries of assent, some dazed, some eager. There was weeping too, in the great crowd.

  “If I will it,” Aeglyss repeated, “all things can change. Let your will run with mine. I shall be the strength in your arms, the swiftness in your legs. You shall be the spear in my hands. I will bind the Huanin of the Road to us with bonds they cannot break; I will bend them until their arms serve our purposes. Long enough we have suffered. Long enough we have been less than we once were. Now all the world will be set into two camps: those who are friends to the White Owl and those who are enemies. And our enemies shall fall. They shall crumble. It is . . .”

  He faltered, cast his stare up towards the flat sea of cloud. A thin, icy snow was beginning to fall. The na’kyrim sighed and fell to his knees. His head tipped back and he stared into the bleak, unbounded expanse of the sky.

  “I shall be servant to all your hopes and dreams,” he said quietly. “I shall make them real.”

  Though he spoke softly, all heard. And many felt belief unfolding itself in their hearts like a dark flower.

  VI

  The woman was holding something up to Orisian, but he could not quite see what it was. There were scabs on her face, whether from injury or disease he could not tell.

  “Please take it, sire,” the woman said. “It was my husband’s. He died well, at Grive.”

  She was seated, with dozens of others, at the side of the road. It was a short street, in Kolkyre’s northern quarter, lined with shacks and crude shelters. It had been largely uninhabited until recently, the refuge of just a few impoverished or sickly souls. Now new huts were springing up, made out of scavenged wood. Old, abandoned hovels were once again occupied. The recent arrivals had come out of the Glas valley. They were Orisian’s people, fleeing all the way here to Kolkyre after the fall of Anduran and Glasbridge. Only those without friends or family, without the coin to buy better shelter, without a strong will or resilient hope, ended here on this squalid street.

  Orisian took what the woman offered him. It was a simple leather skullcap. He pressed it back into her hands.

  “Keep it. Please. I’m sure your husband would rather you kept it.”

  He walked on, with Taim and Rothe on either side of him.

  “How many are there?” he asked Taim quietly.

  “A hundred or so here. There’re others who have found themselves a better place in the city. These are the lost, the ones who escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.”

  A grubby little boy ran up and touched Orisian’s leg before retreating back to his young mother’s side.

  “They’ve come a long way,” Orisian murmured.

  Taim nodded. “There’s hundreds more at Kolglas, by all accounts, but there’s not enough food there.

  And people are afraid the Black Road will take it, of course, so some have moved on to Stryne, to Hommen, even as far as here.”

  “They’re getting food, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, yes. Lheanor’s paid for some of it. He even sent woodworkers down here to help with the huts.

  The Woollers have been sending sacks of bread. They won’t starve, Orisian.”

  “The only thing they need is their homes back,” Rothe said. His anger was taut, a muscle beneath the skin of his words.

  Up ahead, an old man was brandishing a stick at an overeager stray dog that nosed the sack beside him.

  The dog shrank back, baring its teeth. A younger man nearby threw a stone at it.

  “Let’s get back,” Orisian said. “We’re doing no good marching up and down in front of these people.”

  Rothe grunted. “I’d not be so sure about that. It won’t feed them, but the sight of you might warm their hearts a little.”

  They walked back through busy, noisy streets, heading for the Tower of Thrones. Kolkyre’s northern parts were where most of the artisans lived and their houses, workshops and stalls were everywhere.

  Little wagons full of timber blocked the narrow roads; beggars and hawkers harassed every passer-by.

  Anger was seldom far away for Orisian, these last few days. Everything he saw, everything he heard, was a little coloured by it. He struggled to distinguish between the anger born of what the Horin-Gyre Blood had done to his people and that summoned up by the hostile, patronising games he feared Aewult and the Shadowhand were playing with him. He vaguely sensed, but could not disentangle, another strand that was turned inward: anger at what he feared might prove to be his own shortcomings and inadequacies; his inability to live up to the demands placed upon him.

  “We serve no purpose, lingering here while half our Blood is unhomed and the other half is starving,” he muttered.

  A man pushing a barrow of charcoal came up behind them, shouting that they should move aside and let him pass. Rothe stopped and turned, glowering. The man almost slipped, hauling his barrow to a halt before it ran into the shieldman’s shins. He spat out some harsh words, but bit his lip when Rothe took a step nearer to him.

  Orisian pulled Rothe aside. “Let him pass. It’s his street more than it’s ours.”

  The man ran by them, weaving his way on through the crowds. There was an angry cry of pain as he scraped the barrow along someone’s calf.

  As they stood there for that moment, withdrawn to the edge of the street, Taim Narran surreptitiously touched Orisian’s arm.

  “There are two men, sire, some way behind us. Big. Leather jerkins. Do you see them?”

  Orisian looked back the way they had come. He saw those that Taim meant easily enough: two burly men engaged in earnest conversation with a woman selling tallow candles through a window in the front of her house. He nodded.

  “I saw at least one of them earlier, when we left the Tower,” Taim said quietly. “Come, let’s walk on.”

  He guided Orisian back into the flow of townsfolk. Rothe fell a few paces behind, shadowing the Thane and his Captain. Orisian noticed the shieldman carefully freeing his injured arm from its sling.

  “They’ve followed us all the way up this street,” Taim said. “Paused when we paused.” He flicked a glance sideways, at a stall festooned with simple pots and jugs and beakers. “Moving again, now that we are.”

  “What do you suggest?” Orisian asked.

  “Well, I may be seeing something that’s not there. Even if I’m right, chances are they mean no immediate harm. In either case, we could ignore them for now; worry about it once you’re safely back in the Tower.”

  Orisian sidestepped a little pile of horse dung. A mob of seagulls swept screaming low over the street in pursuit of one of their number that had snatched up some scrap of food. In the Car Criagar, and in distant Koldihrve, Orisian had thought that some kind of safety awaited them if only they could take to the sea and slip away to the south. Now, at the end of that journey, he found only more struggles, more uncertainties. Instead of becoming clearer, answers receded from him. And they would keep receding, he suspected, unless and until he found a way to chart his own course.

  “Could they be Lheanor’s men, watching over us?” he asked Taim.

  “Unlikely, sire.” The warrior sniffed. “He’d not set such a watch on you without letting us know, would he?”

  “Then I want to know who they are, and what they intend. Now, before we get back to the Tower.”

  Taim beckoned Rothe without breaking his stride. The shieldman trotted up to join them.

  “We’ll turn along the next side street,” Taim said quite casually. “You and Orisian press on down it, in clear sight. I’ll hang back. Give the hounds sniffing our heels a surprise.”

  They took the next turning on their right. It was a narrow lane, though still busy. Some women and girls were hanging freshly dyed sheets out to dry. A pair of men were arguing over a cockerel that one of them held in his hands. Half a dozen children were throwing pebbles up onto a shingled roof, laughing at the rattle. Rothe led Orisian on at a slightly faster pace. Taim turned aside and Orisian lost sight of him.

  “Best not
to look back,” Rothe muttered. “Don’t want to give them any sign of what’s happening.”

  “Can Taim manage two?”

  “Oh, you needn’t worry about that. They’ll be sorry they woke up this morning.”

  Only a moment or two later, a flurry of footfalls, shouts and dull impacts burst out behind them and both Orisian and Rothe spun around. Taim was kneeling on one man who lay face down in the roadway. The second was hobbling off as fast as what looked to be a thoroughly deadened leg would allow.

  The cockerel had escaped its owner in the excitement, and ran chattering off down the lane. Both the men who had been arguing over it set off in pursuit. The little gang of children had dropped their pebbles and were pointing excitedly at Taim and his captive.

  “Could only hold one, sire,” Taim said apologetically as Orisian and Rothe walked up to him.

  “One’s enough,” Rothe said with feeling. “Let’s turn him over.”

  They rolled the dazed man onto his back and Taim rested a swordpoint on his chest, pinning him to the cobbles. Rothe leaned down.

  “Who are you, then?” he asked, and even to Orisian his voice sounded cold and threatening.

  The prone man turned his face aside and maintained a stubborn silence. Taim tapped the man’s chest with his blade.

  “Now is not the moment for bravery. We are none of us here renowned for our patience. You’ll come to no harm, if you but share your purpose with us.”

  “I’d no purpose but to be walking with a friend,” the man spat a little indistinctly. He still seemed somewhat stunned, either by the unexpected course of events or by his fall to the ground. “We’d not thought to find bandits here. You’ve no right to set upon us.”

  Rothe straightened. He and Taim glanced at one another and Orisian saw some kind of understanding pass between the two warriors. Taim sheathed his sword. He kicked the man, without any great force, in the ribs.