Godless World 2 - Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  The horses, that Torcaill had so wanted to keep, were long gone, abandoned to the wilderness. They could only have slowed, rather than aided, their flight through the tangled forest. The Veiled Woods seemed almost to be folded in upon themselves, trees and brambles and rocks and moss all bent inwards and intertwined in vast confusion. And all dripping wet, suffused with cloud, green and loamy. Not a place for humankind. Perhaps not even a place for Kyrinin, for whenever Orisian caught a glimpse of Ess'yr and Varryn their manner suggested a caution and unease that he did not think even their struggles with the White Owls could fully explain.

  The oppressive otherness of the place ate away at his own spirit. Constantly, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he caught some fleeting movement. Whenever he followed such a hint with his gaze, he found nothing; just the mute vegetation, the still, convoluted trees. But there was something here, something more than human or Kyrinin, of that he became certain. The grass on which they walked was that of autumn, not winter. The leaves on the bushy undergrowth were still a patchwork of reds and browns and mottled greens. The tiny streams that gurgled their rocky way across the forest floor seemed to be giving a voice to a saturating presence that hung, untouchable, in the air and the soil. Sometimes, Orisian was almost certain the treetops stirred when there was no breeze to move them, and at night there would be sudden creakings and crackings as if the oaks and willows were twisting themselves into new shapes. He thought constantly, and fearfully, of the Anain.

  Much of the time, they had to carry K'rina. The thin na'kyrim was often too feeble to walk, though whether it was feebleness of mind or body none could be certain. The raw scratches that had covered her when Orisian first saw her quickly faded into a dull net of scars, flat across her skin. Her distress came and went, with tears and with kneaded hands and trembling brow. Her eyes darted this way and that, or lay dead and sightless in their sockets; her lips shivered and worked in silent flurries, or locked themselves into taut closure. But never did she utter a word. Never did she give any sign of knowing where, or who, she was.

  Neither Eshenna nor Yvane could tell Orisian what had happened - or was still happening - to K'rina.

  "Will she recover?" Orisian asked Eshenna when they paused, sitting for a time on boulders cloaked in lichens. "Can you not even tell me that?"

  "There's nothing there," Eshenna said. "She's gone. Empty."

  Yvane shook her head slowly. "Not empty, I think. A dead space in the Shared, but it's concealment, not emptiness. There's something there."

  "So that's what all this has been for?" Orisian asked. "You cannot even tell me what prize it is we've won with all these deaths." He spoke carefully, wary of his battered mouth. It hurt less now, though there was sometimes still a dull throbbing in his jaw. The stitched wound in his cheek itched, and stung when he stretched it. His tongue was tender, and constantly stumbling over the unexpected gaps amongst his teeth.

  Yvane scowled at him. "Her name's K'rina, if you remember. And whatever has happened to her, I doubt she chose it. Look at her. Do you suppose she's happy with the way things have turned out?"

  Orisian sighed, and tugged at the grass. He was angry; at himself, the White Owls, Eshenna, the world. Even through that obscuring anger, though, he knew that however desperate was his desire to assign blame, K'rina deserved none of it.

  "No," he muttered. "How did she come to this state, though?"

  "The Anain," Yvane said. Eshenna winced at even the word, and the older woman shot her an irritated glance. "We're amongst them here. I can feel them, hear their movement. And K'rina is a part of it, somehow."

  "And Aeglyss?"

  "He has receded, a little. Sunk back into whatever hole his skull has become, since . . ." Yvane faltered. She did that more often now, running aground on her own feelings, or fears.

  "Since Highfast," Orisian finished for her, and she nodded.

  It had come late one morning, perhaps the first after Rothe's death, though Orisian could not be sure, for the passage of time had become an indistinct thing to him for a while. Eshenna had been suddenly on her knees, fists balled and pressing down into the mossy grass. She wailed, and the sound was so piercing and anguished that it turned every head, arrested every stride. Yvane had gone to help her, but she too was shaken by something, sent staggering. Orisian held her up, trying at the same time to reach out a hand to touch Eshenna's back.

  "What is it?" he had asked them.

  "They're dying," cried Eshenna. "Disappearing."

  "Who?" He looked from Eshenna to Yvane, frightened by the extremity of whatever had taken hold of them.

  "Highfast," Yvane stammered. Her arm was shaking in his grasp. "Cerys is gone. Oh, he's too bright, too dark . . . he's burning them away. He's a beast, a great beast gone mad."

  "Save us," Eshenna had said then, and Orisian heard a terrible, hopeless pleading in her voice.

  "There's nothing but death," Yvane said, more controlled but still unsteady and bleak-faced. "Na'kyrim are dying, in Highfast. Aeglyss is there. For a moment . . . for a moment, there was no difference. He was the Shared, and it was him."

  Ever since that morning, Eshenna had been withdrawn. Haunted. She had been, when Orisian first met her in Highfast, urgent and eager; hungry, almost, to leave it behind and step out into the world. What had happened since then, Orisian thought, had been too much for her. Just a few days. That was all it took. That part of him still capable of sympathy regretted the savagery of the lessons the world had seen fit to teach her. But such sympathy as he could summon up was tinged by a cold recognition that such was the nature of the times in which they lived. If Eshenna was paying a price for her curiosity, it was less than others had paid for the recent twists and turns in the path of the world. He disliked the ease with which such thoughts occurred to him now, but he could not deny them.

  They exerted little control over the route they followed. They went where ground and thicket and pursuit permitted, and that meant south and west, towards the towering Karkyre Peaks that they could sometimes glimpse through gaps in the branch-woven roof of the forest. However much Orisian wanted to retrace their steps to Highfast, Ess'yr told him with casual certainty that to attempt it would mean death on White Owl arrows or spear points.

  "We'll be out of here soon," Yvane said to Orisian, as they sat sharing some of the last hard oaten biscuits.

  Orisian looked around, aware that his sight and his thoughts alike were blurred and clumsy. They had been on the move since long before dawn, blundering their way through wooded gullies and rocky thickets. It was miserable, and punishing, but preferable to the alternative of waiting, motionless in the darkness, for Kyrinin to creep out of the moonshadows with murderous intent.

  "Out of where?" he asked. "The Veiled Woods, you mean?"

  Yvane nodded, trying to break a piece off a biscuit with her teeth, failing, and staring doubtfully at it. "The ground's been rising under us since daybreak. Haven't you noticed that the mountains are near?"

  Orisian peered up through the latticework of branches over their heads. His eyes had, this morning, been fixed on the ground beneath his feet. He saw now that Yvane was right. The Karkyre Peaks were close. He could see the texture of their sunlit eastern slopes, and of the clouds around their summits. The snow, white strands laid down in the crannies and crevices of the high rock faces.

  "No choice but to press on, unless you mean to stand and fight," Yvane muttered.

  Orisian said nothing. He gazed up at those lofty slopes. He could almost imagine what it would be like to be up there - high and fresh, washed by the cold winds, with wide-open views - instead of here, trapped in the suffocating woodland.

  "I doubt if the White Owls will keep chasing us all the way across the Peaks," Yvane said. "Not really their sort of hunt, out in the open like that. Mind you, I'd never have believed they'd come all the way through the Hymyr Ot'tryn. Kyrinin'd usually rather lose a finger off their bowstring hand than risk disturbing the Anain. Whatever - whoe
ver - is driving them, it must be strong. Hard." She paused. "Where do you mean to go, then?"

  Orisian lowered his eyes. "Once we've shaken off the White Owls, then we'll see. Kolkyre, at first, I should think."

  He glanced across at K'rina. The mute na'kyrim was sitting with her back against a grassy bank, turning her head this way and that in an effort to avoid the waterskin that Eshenna insisted upon holding to her lips.

  "I'll have to find Taim," he said. "I've let him down."

  "You think so?"

  "I should have gone to Kolglas. We gained nothing at Highfast, and nothing out here." Again, that quick, surreptitious flick of the eyes towards K'rina. "Rothe's died, and the others, for nothing."

  Yvane sniffed. She gave up gnawing at the biscuit and put it back into the folded square of burlap from which it had come. "I don't think so. Not at all. Whatever's happening here, it matters. The Anain have put their mark on this woman. I can't tell you what it means, but I can tell you it matters."

  "Enough for Rothe to pay for it with his life?"

  "He chose how he died. That's the best any of us can ever hope for, that choice."

  "You think he chose that?"

  "Maybe he chose it the day he took whatever oath it is you make them take. Your shieldmen. He took that oath willingly, I imagine? You didn't have to force him?"

  "Of course not."

  "Then he chose the possibility, at least. Accepted it."

  Orisian almost hated Yvane in that moment; hated the ease with which she talked of such things. But he lacked the will to take issue with her.

  "Don't let it harden your heart too much," Yvane murmured. "Don't let it cloud your vision. Hatred, anger: those are the commonest offspring of loss. Doesn't mean they're the best. You Huanin are always making the past master of the present. You make yourselves willing heirs to every grievance of your forefathers; let the burden of every loss or sorrow bend your back. It's the choices you make for yourself in the future that matter, not those you inherit from the past. That's all I'm saying."

  "My vision's not clouded," Orisian muttered, wincing and sighing in pain as his tongue faltered over the ruin of his jaw. He put a hand to his cheek, feeling the stitches there and the angry, swollen crust of the wound.

  "You think not. But you should be careful of your feelings. We all should be. The Shared is untrustworthy now. It's thick with rage, bitterness. Give it space, and it'll take root in your head, feed off your own feelings. Twist them. None of us is beyond its reach."

  Orisian let his hand fall back into his lap. He was so tired, in heart as well as body. He could not see how any of this could come to any good, how there could be healing at the end of this. Too many people had died, now, and too many wounds had been inflicted for there to be any dawn at the end of this night. He had never understood, while his father lived, quite what afflicted Kennet after Lairis and Fariel died. Now, he thought he could glimpse a little of it. It had been absences. The absence of hope, the absence of meaning and sense from the world around him.

  "Rothe was a good man," Yvane said. Her voice was heavy. For the first time since he had met her, Orisian thought he heard true, deep grief there. He looked at her.

  "I don't think he would regret having died in your defence," she said.

  K'rina coughed, spluttering out the water Eshenna had trickled into her mouth. Orisian looked across towards the two na'kyrim. Eshenna was distressed. She edged away from K'rina, defeated.

  "No," Orisian murmured. "He wouldn't have regretted it."

  They came to the edge of the Veiled Woods amidst a misty rain that hid the mountains ahead of them. Everyone climbed up out of the forest onto open hillside with a collective sense of relief. For the first time in days Orisian heard something close to laughter in the voices of Torcaill's men. Torcaill himself had an air of renewed determination.

  "Where now?" the warrior asked Orisian.

  Orisian looked back at the thicket from which they had emerged. Ess'yr and Varryn were still in there somewhere. There had been no sign of White Owls since dawn, and none of the Fox either.

  "Eshenna," Orisian called out. "Do you know where we are?"

  She shook her head.

  "Closest food and shelter is likely to be Stone," Yvane muttered. "Never been there, but it's on the Kyre, high on the western side of the Peaks."

  "We'll try for there, then," Orisian said to Torcaill. "And then Kolkyre, as fast as we can. Give the men a little rest, and food."

  "Might be best to put some more ground between us and the woods," Torcaill suggested. "We could climb higher before resting."

  "No. Once we're moving I don't want us stopping until we have to. We'll rest here for a little while."

  They settled on the damp grass just beyond an arrow's reach from the trees. Torcaill shared out food and water amongst his men. Both were running low. No one had eaten as much as their hunger demanded since the day they had entered the Veiled Woods. Orisian sat facing down towards the forest, watching its edge through the drizzle. He waited as long as he thought he dared, then a fraction longer. He could hear the warriors behind him, further up the slope, growing restive. Just as he rose reluctantly to his feet, he saw what he had been hoping for: Ess'yr and Varryn coming out from amongst the trees. They loped up, heads angled away from the rain.

  Varryn was injured, Orisian saw. A strip of hide was tied about his shoulder, holding a wad of moss or herbs over a wound. It did not seem to hamper him.

  "The enemy falter," Ess'yr said. "They have not enough heart for the chase. If they come further, it will only be few."

  "Good," Orisian said, and smiled. "Good. We mean to go on, across the Peaks."

  Ess'yr nodded. "We will follow your trail. Guard your heels. Fox know high ground better than White Owl."

  Varryn spoke quickly and sharply to his sister in their own tongue. Orisian caught the tone, even if he could understand none of the words: argumentative, contradictory. Ess'yr murmured a soft reply. Varryn turned his gaze upon Orisian. There were flecks of blood laid over the warrior's tattoos, tiny dark, dry spots across his cheek. There was no way to tell whether it was his own or someone else's.

  "I ask something of you," Varryn said.

  "What?" Orisian asked. Ess'yr was turning away, moving off across the fall of the slope. Orisian watched her go.

  "Tell my sister you need us no more," said Varryn. "Tell her it is done. There is no promise to hold her. No need."

  "You want to leave?" Orisian asked him, still unable to tear his eyes away from Ess'yr's retreating back.

  "You go where we are not welcome. Our fight is with the White Owl."

  Ess'yr squatted down, laying her bow and spear out on the grass. Orisian looked at Varryn. The Kyrinin's gaze was intense and demanding.

  "And Ess'yr does not want to go?" Orisian asked. "Is it the ra'tyn? The promise she made to Inurian?"

  "Tell her there is no need," Varryn said.

  "I don't think your fight is only with the White Owl, any more than mine is only with Horin-Gyre," Orisian said. "Things have changed. We're not just fighting the old battles any more."

  "Nevertheless. I ask you to release my sister. She does not see clearly in this. She sees in you the . . . child, the memory, of the na'kyrim she loved."

  "Inurian," Orisian snapped. "His name was Inurian." He knew Varryn had never been fond of Inurian, had undoubtedly disapproved of his sister's involvement with him. His temper was too easily stirred to let such things go unchallenged now.

  "Will you speak to her?" Varryn asked, unmoved.

  Orisian looked at Ess'yr once more. Could she hear what they were saying? He was not sure. She gave no sign of it, but he had grown used to a paucity of signs where the Kyrinin were concerned. She was balanced on her haunches, unstringing her bow, or replacing the string. She did it, as she did everything, with delicate, careful hands.

  Nothing good had come out of all that had happened since Winterbirth, save perhaps this, Orisian thought. Sav
e Ess'yr. He did not know whether she only saw in him a reminder of Inurian and, he found, he did not care. A multitude of thoughts jostled for his attention, each momentary and passing. If Varryn and Ess'yr went alone back into the Veiled Woods, or tried to make their way north, they would surely die. The distances were too great, the dangers too numerous. And he did not want this parting. He was selfishly afraid of it, of the loss it would entail.

  "No," he said. "We're all fighting the same battle, even if you don't believe it. I won't send her away. I'll not tell her - or you - either to stay or to go. She can make her own choices in this. We all do."

  Varryn stalked away from him without another word. Orisian hung his head for a moment, and then turned to tell Torcaill to ready the company for the mountains. He found Yvane staring at him. The na'kyrim was sitting cross-legged, absently scratching the back of her hand and watching him with rare intensity.

  "What?" he asked her.

  She shook her head, and dropped her gaze to her hands. "Nothing."

  II

  As they struggled through the Karkyre Peaks, Orisian was constantly beset by images and memories of the Car Criagar. Now, as then, there was snow and biting winds, though the cold was not quite as deep and his clothes offered more protection. Now, as then, he fought as much against grief and fear as he did against the elements and the brutal terrain. This time, though, he was possessed of an anger that had not been in him before. It was a hard and uncomfortable sensation, lodged like a splinter in his mind. He distrusted it, and doubted it, but could not - or did not want to - rid himself of it. He thought he had learned that vengeance could not heal his wounds, yet now he found himself craving it. The desire crept up on his weary thoughts every now and then, twisted them into the certainty that what was required was death, and yet more death. Every time he lapsed into such bitter reverie, he had to shake himself free of it. And every time he felt a little more distanced from himself, as if he was becoming a stranger inside his own skull.

  They followed goat trails through the stone wilderness of the Peaks, and saw no one. They moved slowly. The paths were narrow and often little more than scratches on the sheer flanks of the mountains. Two of Torcaill's warriors were carrying wounds that hampered them, and K'rina had to be helped and herded like a weak child. Eshenna too was tiring. They had to stop often, and rest as best they could on the exposed slopes.