“Not good enough,” Kanin hissed. He took hold of the Inkallim’s upper arm as she walked away from him. It was like grasping rock. He turned her to face him, and she met him with cold contempt.
“I am Banner-captain of the Battle Inkall, Thane,” Shraeve said softly. She glanced at his restraining hand, and he let it fall away from her; not through fear, or respect, but because his purposes would not be served by fighting with her today. Shraeve would have to die as well as Aeglyss, he realised with new clarity, but not now. Not yet.
“I want to know what happened to my sister,” he said. “There is no shame in such a desire.”
“Shame? No, perhaps not. But it serves no purpose. Mourning is but self-pity. You know it as well as I do.”
Once he had known it. Now, it sounded like a hollow platitude, vindictively crafted by the lips of an enemy.
“Let the dead go, Thane,” Shraeve said. “We will join them soon enough, in the better world.”
Men and women were filing past them into the hall. Leaders from the Gyre and Gaven and Fane Bloods; Lore Inkallim, led by the shuffling, hunched, black-lipped figure of Goedellin; Cannek, who studiously avoided Kanin’s gaze as he settled his two hounds down to await his return from the council.
“It’s time,” Shraeve said, and turned away from Kanin.
He followed her into the musty gloom of the hall. It was empty save for a single table at its centre, lined with chairs. Serving girls-whether brought from the north with the armies or prisoners pressed into service, Kanin could not say-were lighting torches along the walls and setting out beakers of wine and ale and plates. At the far end of the hall, standing by small doors that must lead to the kitchens or other antechambers, were White Owl Kyrinin. They were hateful in Kanin’s sight, and he averted his eyes from them.
One or two of those already seated regarded him with curiosity, perhaps even suspicion, as he took his place at the table. He ignored them. They were nothing to him, these latecomers to the war his family had started. Not one of them had offered his father any support; not one of them had crossed the Stone Vale until they, or their masters, caught the scent of victories already won, and of spoils and glory to be claimed. He clasped his hands in his lap and stared fixedly down at them, watching his fingertips redden as the tension within him tightened its grip.
He heard the wide doors of the hall scrape shut. The last of the daylight was excluded and they were left with the yellow flamelight and the scent of smoke. The servants went out, one by one, past the woodwight sentinels, and a heavy silence descended.
“Where’s the halfbreed?” a man asked at length. Kanin had met him once or twice before, long ago: Talark, Captain of a castle on the southern borders of the Gyre Blood. A relative, by marriage, to Ragnor oc Gyre himself.
“He will join us shortly,” Shraeve said placidly. She had taken her twin swords from her back. They rested in their scabbards against the side of her chair. “He is preparing himself.”
“For what, I wonder?” Cannek asked, almost mirthful, as if some unuttered jest was pleasing him.
Shraeve ignored the Hunt Inkallim. “There are other matters to talk of first. Kilvale. Kolkyre.”
“Food, if you’ve any sense,” Talark muttered irritably. “Half my warriors are starving. Most of my horses have gone into their bellies.”
“All the more reason to keep moving on. Conquest will feed our armies. Every town we take, every village, has stores laid in for winter. That promise, and the strength of their faith must keep them — ”
“They have stores only if they don’t burn them or empty them before we get there,” Talark interrupted her. “And if the farmers and villagers who flee before us haven’t already eaten them.”
“The Battle has arranged for supplies to be brought down through the Stone Vale,” Shraeve replied. “A hundred mules, all fully laden, reached Anduran only two days ago.”
“Mules!” Talark scoffed. “It’s wagons we need, and oceans of them. Not a few mules.”
“Perhaps if the High Thane, your master, gave more than half his heart in support of us, you could have those wagons.”
The Gyre warrior glowered at Shraeve. “It’s difficult to get wagons across the Vale at this time of year. You know that.”
“Indeed. Yet you sit in the hall of a Kilkry-Haig town. It seems we-those who came before you, Talark-have already proved that even the impossible can sometimes be possible. If the will is there. The faith.”
One of the Gaven-Gyre warriors cut short the burgeoning argument by rasping her chair back across the floor and rapping the back of her hand on the table.
“If it’s conquest that concerns you, our time might have been better spent busying ourselves with that task instead of riding all the way back here to indulge in petty disputes. There’s more than enough chaos already, without our absence to help it along.”
“She knows that,” Talark grunted. “She’s got her ravens out there taking charge of everything while we’re dragged back here. This serves no purpose save that of the Children of the Hundred.”
“No purpose?” Shraeve snapped, anger colouring her voice for the first time. “There is only one purpose in any of this. The service of the creed. Raising it up until all the world falls beneath its shadow. None who would dissent from that, none who doubt that the moment has come for all other concerns to be set aside, have any place in this endeavour. There must be unity. That is why we are gathered here now. Not to indulge in dispute, but to end it.”
“Don’t question my faithfulness to the creed,” Talark said, though his tone lacked the steel of conviction.
“There must be unity,” Goedellin murmured. All looked towards him. To Kanin’s eyes, the man looked more frail and weary than ever before. He spoke slowly, heavily, his seerstem-darkened lips sluggish. “There must be unity, and certainty. Doubt is the enemy of faith. Yet these times are… confused. Few things seem as clear as once they did.”
“Success is clarity,” Shraeve said. “It answers all questions.” She was firm, but her manner had shed its confrontational edge. It was good to see, Kanin thought, that the Battle’s confidence and arrogance had not yet become bloated enough to crowd out some vestigial respect for an Inner Servant of the Lore.
“Indeed.” Goedellin nodded. “Indeed.” And then: “Perhaps.”
“When Kilvale falls, all doubt will be undone,” said Shraeve with cold certainty. “When we hold the Fisherwoman’s birthplace, the birthplace of our creed, then the fire will burn brightly in every heart. Nothing will quench it then. None will be able to argue fate’s intent.”
“Oh, there’s always room for argument,” Cannek interjected lightly. “It’s in our nature to be disputatious.”
Kanin groaned inwardly. Why taunt the woman? Why so brazenly flaunt his opposition? But, of course, Cannek was one of those who found such liberation in the Black Road that he feared nothing, found nothing troubling. He would dare anything, and greet the consequences of his daring with equanimity. Such sentiments, once familiar, were beyond Kanin’s reach now.
At the far, gloomy end of the hall, the Kyrinin were moving. One of the doors opened. Kanin held his breath, and sensed the same sudden expectation taking hold of everyone else at the table.
The na’kyrim entered, and whatever feelings had been stirring in Kanin turned to disgust at the sight of him. Aeglyss was a wasted figure, emaciated and gaunt, coming unsteadily forward on the arm of a tall woodwight. The halfbreed’s colourless skin was scabbed and slack. Kanin grimaced.
Yet when he looked about the faces of the others gathered there, he saw entirely different emotions portrayed. A hint of unease now and again, but fascination too. Even Talark watched Aeglyss approach with a pathetic, wide-eyed touch of wonder.
There was an empty chair at Shraeve’s side. Aeglyss settled gingerly into it. He looked so small. Kanin imagined that the halfbreed’s neck would break with only the gentlest of twists. The Kyrinin warrior who had escorted Aeglyss to
his place remained standing there, just behind him.
“Must we have woodwights in attendance?” asked Talark, recovering a fragment of his previous antagonism.
“This is Hothyn,” Shraeve said. “He is the son of the White Owl Voice, and leader of the warband that accompanies Aeglyss. His presence is a sign of our strength, not our weakness.”
Yet I saw these same White Owls killing one another in the streets of Glasbridge, Kanin thought. Even in them, Aeglyss could not command the unity you hope for. Not until those who contested it had been killed.
“Do not be distressed by my appearance,” Aeglyss suddenly said. His voice grated in his throat. “I am engaged in a struggle, every day, to contain and to shape what burns within me. It takes its toll. Flesh and bone were not made to bear such burdens. A river that rises in its greatest flood will ruin and break its banks, and so it is with me. The flood is in me. Once I master it, I will repair its ravages.”
He smiled, and Kanin saw yellowing teeth, black veins of corruption and decay spreading from them through white gums. He imagined that were he close enough he would catch the stink of rot from that foul mouth. The smile faded, and Aeglyss closed his eyes.
“I can smell the spice-thick air of Adravane’s Inner Court,” the na’kyrim murmured. “I feel the sand beneath the hoofs of a Saolin running on the Din Sive shore. I remember the Whreinin; can reach out and know what it was to be of the wolfenkind. The Anain raised a forest to drown a city with trees, yet they flee from the shadow of my mind as I move through the Shared. But they cannot flee far enough, or fast enough. Even them I can taste. Their age, their thoughts running like blood through veins of leaf and bough. All of this flows through me, and I flow through all things.”
He shivered, as if a cold pleasure filled him. “Your cause has found a servant in me, and the world has never seen my like. Such is the gift that fate, through me, bestows upon you. It is a terrible gift, but that is my burden. I will bear it and I will serve you.”
He looked around them all then, giving each of those at the table a brief moment of his undivided attention. His gaze brushed most briefly over Kanin, or so it seemed to Kanin himself. Even that instant of contact was enough to feel the weight of what lay behind the na’kyrim’s eyes. To Kanin, it was oppressive and invasive. To others, he saw as their turns came, one by one, it was exhilarating.
“I am the answer you and your people have been seeking all these years,” Aeglyss breathed at length.
And Kanin felt it. He felt it blooming in his breast and spreading its warmth through his limbs. It lifted him, and for the space of those few heartbeats there was nothing but the utter delight of knowing that all was as it should, and must, be. That all his hopes would be fulfilled, in their last and smallest detail. That the world this na’kyrim could promise him was all he could ever desire. Yet still, amidst it all, there was a hard nugget marring the perfection of the sensation: a nugget of hatred; the contradictory whisper that his truest, deepest desire could not be fulfilled by this halfbreed, but only by his death.
“All I ask is that you put your faith in me,” Aeglyss said. “And in the allies I bring to your cause. The White Owls. The force of my own will. The Shadowhand.”
“It’s true, then, that the Shadowhand is bound? That you have done to him what Orlane did to Tarcene?” Goedellin’s voice broke the skin of the moment. Kanin found himself suddenly breathing deeply, realising only now that he had been holding his breath.
“To have such a weapon at our enemy’s very heart…” whispered Talark.
“The Haig Chancellor is bound to our service — ” Shraeve began, but Aeglyss cut her short with a strange, strangled grunt.
“Some things should not be spoken of,” the na’kyrim said. “Think instead of the gifts I shall bring you. Kolkyre, Kilvale. Even unto Vaymouth itself, if that is your wish.”
“Still, Tarcene’s binding hardly ended well. Not for the Kingbinder himself, nor for the Kyrinin he served. Certainly not for Tarcene,” murmured Cannek, but no one save Kanin seemed to even notice that he had spoken.
“There are things-aspects of what I have become-that none can understand,” Aeglyss continued. “Burdens I must bear alone, in silence. Only my own kind could understand what I… but they are afraid. They fear my brightness will burn them. Only one… only she… She would understand.”
His head twitched and dipped to one side. His crab-like hand scraped rigidly across the surface of the table. His eyes lost their focus.
“But she’s been stolen from me,” he rasped. “I can’t find her. She is gone.”
Goedellin was regarding the na’kyrim with consternation. Talark frowned uneasily. Yes, Kanin thought, you can see if you choose to; see his madness. This is the man you would make master of your hopes, your fates? This poisoned ruin of a man, whose thoughts trickle through his own fingers like so much grain? But the moment did not last. The doubts had no time to take root.
“We should eat,” Shraeve said, and at the sound of her voice Aeglyss recovered himself.
“Yes,” he sighed, straightening in his chair, drawing his hand back to press it against his chest. “We should eat.”
The food was neither plentiful nor elegant. Bread and broth and a single haunch of mutton. They ate in silence. All save Aeglyss. He touched nothing, only watched.
A serving girl made her way around the table, pouring out wine from a clay jug. She came to Aeglyss last, and wiped the lip of the jug clean with a cloth before emptying the last of its contents into his cup. Aeglyss pushed away his plateful of neglected food. He lifted the cup to his lips and drank deeply. As he set it down again his hand gave a brief involuntary jerk, spilling wine on the table.
Kanin saw Cannek lay down a hunk of bread he had been gnawing. The Inkallim was watching Aeglyss intently. Others caught the change in mood. Conversations died.
Aeglyss’ face was white, paler even than it had been before. His eyes, the pupils dilated, were gleaming wetly. A muscle in his left cheek twitched, though his jaw was tight clenched. Otherwise, he was as motionless as a statue. Kanin looked around. Every eye was upon the halfbreed.
Still Aeglyss had not moved. His white fingernails were digging into the rough surface of the table. His eyes stared rigidly at Cannek. The Inkallim was quite calm.
“What have you done?” Shraeve said softly.
Abruptly Aeglyss retched, gripped by a convulsion that rose from deep in his midriff. He hunched forward and then straightened with a great gasp. The movement seemed to release all the tension from his body. He put one hand to his mouth and spat a small dark object into his palm. He held it out: a perfect orb of black matter the size of an eyeball, with strands of saliva still clinging to it.
“Yours, I think,” said Aeglyss thickly to Cannek. He set it down upon the table, where it rested like a dull, sodden marble a child had discarded. Cannek regarded it thoughtfully for a moment or two, his hands clasped together before him. The globule lost its form, slumping into a viscous stain.
“That’s very clever,” Cannek murmured with a smile.
“What is this?” Goedellin asked, his voice all indignant puzzlement. “Poison?”
Cannek’s hands parted, and there was a blade in one of them. Shraeve’s arm snapped up. One of her swords, still sheathed, came spinning across the table. Cannek ducked and swayed to one side, so that the sword went cartwheeling away off the side of his head. It was enough to spoil his own aim. His knife, sent darting out with a flick of his wrist, flashed past Aeglyss’ shoulder. Shraeve followed her sword, vaulting the table, pivoting on one hand to drive a straight-legged kick into Cannek’s chest. The Hunt Inkallim went crashing back with his chair, rolling and rising smoothly to a crouch.
But Shraeve was too fast even for him. In the moment it took Cannek to recover his balance, she hit him with her full weight, wrapping an arm about his neck, splaying her other hand over his eyes. She took him backwards, tumbled the pair of them across the floor. And out of that b
lur of movement rose a clear, long cracking.
Shraeve stood. Cannek lay, eyes and mouth open, head tilted sideways on a broken neck. Shraeve brushed dust from her knees. The assembled warriors stared in a mixture of amazement and confusion at the dead Inkallim. Only Kanin turned back at once to Aeglyss. And found the na’kyrim watching him. Aeglyss wiped the back of his hand across his lips. He was breathing fast.
“Is that what you all require?” the halfbreed said loudly, and was at once the focus of all attention once more. “That’s the kind of answer you people demand, isn’t it? There’s fate for you. There’s the choice made for you. I live.”
Kanin wondered if he was the only one to hear the contempt, the bitterness, that suffused Aeglyss’ words. Silently, he raged against the immobility of his limbs, and against the impotence of his own anger. His sword was within reach-he imagined it calling out to him-but Aeglyss, the idea of Aeglyss, filled his field of vision: out of reach, untouchable, inviolable.
“You cannot kill me, for I am not as you are,” Aeglyss said. He slammed his bony fist down on the table. “You think because I am flesh, I am weak. No, no. You must learn to think differently. You will learn. For all your hatred and your betrayals, I will raise you up. I will give you all that you want, feed all the hungers in your hearts, and those who turn against me will be cast down and ruined. There is no other way. No other truth.”
“As it is written,” Shraeve murmured as she picked up her sword and came back around the table to stand beside Hothyn. The two warriors, Inkallim and White Owl, flanked the na’kyrim. And no gaze would meet the challenge those three offered. No one could deny them the submission they demanded.
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