Fall of Thanes tgw-3

by Brian Ruckley

  Consumed by their own ungovernable fear and fury, the people of Ive turned upon one another. Those who were not recognised were slain, hacked with kitchen knives and axes, beaten with hammers and impaled upon hay forks. The pillars of flame mounted higher and higher, turning the sky orange and rustred. Horror was piled upon horror. Washed by the heat of a burning house, the family that had abandoned it was killed in the roadway before it. They cried out in vain to their killers, who had forgotten, in their madness, that they knew them. Some neighbours, armed with nothing more than clubs, hunted a Gyre warrior into a farrier’s yard, cornered her there and battered her to death in the shadows; then, hurrying out, blundered into a company of Kilkry swordsmen, thought them foes, and died on the blades of their supposed protectors. The storm raged. Reason and restraint were rent apart.

  Some few strove to hold firm against the beast that was running loose.

  “We must keep the na’kyrim safe,” Orisian shouted at Torcaill. They ran together, with a handful of Torcaill’s men behind them, out from the gate of the barracks. There had been a sharp, vicious struggle in the orchard: invaders spilling over the walls, going down with Kyrinin arrows in throat or flank, stumbling in amongst the trees and running futilely onto human swords. Onto Orisian’s sword. He had killed a man almost without knowing it, not recognising what was happening until the body was at his feet. Something in him rejoiced at the sight and something else recoiled. Both felt, in that moment, like a true reflection of who he was.

  His heart pounded, his arms shook, so ferocious was his body’s response to the sound and scent and feel of battle. Everything faded from his awareness save the overwhelming need to act, to move, to join the bloody dance. He had heard himself shouting as he ran from the orchard, through the courtyard of the barracks. He would have gone blindly and wildly out into the chaos but for the sudden sight of towering flames rising from some building on the far side of the town, and for the sudden burning in his nostrils and eyes as a hot wind blasted smoke into his face. With that bitter smell, he was returned for an instant to Castle Anduran on the night of Winterbirth; and the memory dampened rather than fed the sanguinary ardour that had burned within him.

  There was no sign of the Lannis guards who should have been outside the little house where Yvane and Eshenna sheltered. Bursting in, ignoring Torcaill’s anguished demands for caution, Orisian found no sign of the two na’kyrim within, either. He went, clumsy in his haste, knocking aside stools and chairs, out into the little walled yard behind the house.

  There was a corpse there, sprawled across the cobblestones. One of his guards, Orisian thought, but he did not have the time to be certain. Half a dozen figures were clustered down by the goat shed. One or two held blazing torches aloft while others hauled at the door, trying to tear it open against faltering resistance from within. Orisian heard Yvane’s voice, angry. Frightened.

  “Get away!” Orisian shouted, leaping over the body.

  Heads turned.

  “There’s halfbreeds in here,” one of them snapped at Orisian, as if that should explain everything to him. “Wightborns!”

  As if there was nothing more that could, or should, be said. It was not the words, though, that put a hollow kind of horror into the pit of Orisian’s stomach, but the accent. These men were Ive townsfolk, not northerners.

  “Stand aside,” he demanded, lifting his sword a little.

  But the door came free then. Yvane came tumbling forward from within the shed, and Eshenna was crying out in fear inside. One of the men roared in triumph. Another threw his torch at Orisian and it came spinning towards him in a wreath of embers and flame. He ducked under it and ran at them.

  His shield shook beneath some blow, he cut at legs, veered away from a fist that darted at his head. And amidst all the chaos, he found a kind of clarity, centred upon the need to keep those within that shed alive. He fought as Taim Narran would have wished him to, with a cold determination. For the first time in his life, his mind and body united unquestioningly in the cause of killing. His sword broke an arm, and he heard the crack of the bone. He drove on, brought the blade down on the back of a man who was blocking the shed’s doorway. He trampled the falling figure and turned to bar the entrance himself. And found Torcaill and the others, following in his wake, already ending the one-sided fight.

  Orisian sat, legs splayed out on the cobblestones of the yard. Blood was running through the crevices all around him but he did not care. His warriors were dragging away the dead and the injured with little regard for which was which. Orisian unbuckled his shield and laid it flat across his knees.

  “They’d have killed you if we hadn’t come,” he said weakly. Even to speak seemed a terrible effort.

  “They would,” agreed Yvane. He felt her hand touch his shoulder for a moment. “Thank you.”

  “They’d have killed you. And K’rina. Everything would have been for nothing.”

  He laid his hands on the gently curving surface of his shield and watched his fingers tremble. It was almost dark now. Still rising into the sky, from all around, were cries of fury and fear, the scattered thunder of running feet, the audible death throes of buildings plunging into fiery ruin. The delirium, perhaps death, of the town.

  “This can’t go on,” he said. “I’m killing Kilkry men now. That can’t be right, can it? We have to find a way to end it. There has to be a way.”

  “There is a way,” he heard Eshenna say behind him. She sounded utterly exhausted. “Kill Aeglyss. This is his taint, his poison, at work. Use K’rina against him. It’s the purpose the Anain meant for her, until we interfered.”

  “Until Aeglyss grew too strong, perhaps,” Yvane said. “Too strong for even the Anain to overcome.”

  “Perhaps,” Eshenna acknowledged, empty and faint. “Perhaps. But what other hope is there?”

  Nobody spoke for a moment or two, and then Eshenna said again, “What other hope is there?”

  CHAPTER 2

  The City

  This place, this city, shall henceforth be the seat of High Thanes; first amongst all cities, as we are now first amongst all Bloods. Vaymouth is mighty now, and shall be mightier still in years to come, for who can doubt that all the world will walk the road to its gates? All deeds of consequence, all acts of significance, shall be done here and nowhere else.

  Memories of Tane will be dimmed and overshadowed. Kolkyre will be forgotten. The pride of those who dwell in distant Evaness will be blunted, their arrogant tongues stilled. We who call Vaymouth home shall live amidst the greatest power and the greatest glory this world has known since the Gods departed. Their radiant presence has passed, never to return, but see here what other lights a people may find amidst the darkness, what we may build with our own hands, and shape with our will: all the goods and coin of the world, flowing like tributary streams into the river of our streets and our marketplaces. Peace and prosperity and order. Great walls to shelter us, great towers to keep watch from. These are the stars by which we plot our course. These are the torches to light our path into the future.

  The glories of the Gods are lost to us; if there are to be new glories we must fashion them for ourselves, carving them from the base matter of this abandoned world. This, the city, shall be their embodiment, and the place where they burn most brightly.

  From Merwen’s Encomium

  I

  The two young girls walked hand in hand, whispering as they went. Anyara did not need to hear what they said to know that they were beyond the reach of the world. They were followed, as they wandered idly through the bare garden, by maids who carried songbirds in gilded cages, but they might as well have been entirely alone. The girls were enclosed in the perfect privacy of their own realm: the place in childhood where nothing mattered save whatever thought had hold of them at that moment; where adults were but faint and inconvenient clouds on the horizon of their secret concerns.

  Anyara could remember such a place, though she had inhabited it only briefly. She and
Orisian and Fariel had shared it, in the days before the Heart Fever: a few precious years in which everything had been bright and exciting, and fashioned for them and them alone. She was exiled from that place by the passage of time, by deaths. And now by distance, for she sat on a marble bench in a terrace garden of Gryvan oc Haig’s Moon Palace. These self-absorbed girls she watched were the children of some lady of the High Thane’s court.

  Anyara shrugged deeper into her fur coat. Winter had followed her southwards. All the way down from Kolkyre, through Ayth-Haig lands, across the moors and on through the farmlands of the Nar Vay shore, it had been an intangible, morose hound dogging every step her horse had taken, eating up the land in her wake. There was a faint mist on the air now. Around this palace in which she was a comfortable, imprisoned guest, Vaymouth sprawled beneath a dank grey blanket. All sound was deadened by the thick air. The birds in their cages did not sing.

  “It must seem a silly affectation to you, this fashion for birdcages.”

  Tara Jerain, the wife of the Haig Blood’s infamous Chancellor, smiled down at Anyara.

  “I hadn’t given it any thought,” Anyara murmured.

  Tara gave her another complicitous, almost conspiratorial, smile.

  “It’s kind of you to be so gentle with our foibles,” she said. “I don’t like them myself. The birds, I mean. May I join you?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Tara settled herself on the bench. The many layers of fine fabric that enveloped her sighed and shifted over one another. Even in this dull light there were threads in there that shone and glimmered. The Chancellor’s wife clasped her hands in her lap. The cuffs of her cape were trimmed with the white fur of snow hares.

  “Nobody was interested in songbirds until Abeh oc Haig decided she liked them.” She leaned a little closer to Anyara as she spoke. “Then, all of a sudden, every lady of the court-even the girls, intent upon being ladies one day-realised that they are the most fascinating and precious of things. Silly. Birds aren’t meant to sing in the winter, but still everyone must have one.”

  “Everyone except you,” Anyara grunted.

  “Oh, no.” Tara shook her head lightly. “I have one. Of course I do. Two, in fact. The best that money can buy, I’m told.”

  Anyara wished this woman would leave her alone. She found more than enough that was hateful about her situation here in Vaymouth without being subjected to the babbling of the self-regarding butterflies who thronged the Moon Palace. She had heard of Tara Jerain, of course, even before she was brought here: the beautiful, cunning wife of the hated, still more cunning, Shadowhand. And Tara was indeed beautiful: eyes that even in this wintry light glittered like jewels, skin that bore a lustrous sheen of health. Her poise and confidence made Anyara feel like a child all over again.

  “Those who think they know about such things tell me we’ll have snow here in a few days,” Tara mused absently. “Some years we have none at all, you know. I enjoy snow, myself. It makes everything look better than it really is, like fine furs and gems.”

  Again, that warm smile. Anyara could think of no good reason why the Chancellor’s wife should suddenly have decided to make this pretence at friendship. She had paid her no attention before now. No one in the Moon Palace had.

  On the day of her arrival, Anyara-aching, tired and feeling entirely bedraggled-had endured a brief and rather strange audience with Gryvan oc Haig himself and his wife Abeh. They seemed more than a little bemused-in Abeh’s case, offended-by her presence, as if she were an unexpected and unwanted guest they did not know what to do with. All of which served to irritate Anyara almost beyond concealment. She comforted herself by imagining that Aewult nan Haig might in due course learn precisely what the High Thane thought of sons who sent unsought hostages to their fathers.

  Since that initial, clumsy welcome, Anyara had found herself all but ignored. She had fine chambers on the favoured south flank of the palace. She was given gifts of gowns and necklaces. Maidservants were assigned to her service. But almost no one spoke to her. She was given no reason or excuse to leave those fine chambers, and if she did so of her own accord, she found herself oppressively shadowed by those same, watchful maids, who would herd her back to her rooms as if she were a wayward, simple-minded sheep in need of penning. She had asked, once, to borrow horses so that she and Coinach could ride out towards the sea. She had not expected the request to be granted, and it was not.

  “Your shieldman has been much remarked upon.”

  Anyara glanced round. Coinach was standing a short distance away, by the gates that gave out onto these tidy gardens. He was rigidly straight-backed, staring ahead, steadfastly ignoring all the ladies and the servants and the children. It made Anyara smile, though she dipped her head to hide the expression from Tara Jerain. Coinach’s determination to retain his dignity even in these disquieting circumstances had a touch of youthful pride and dogged loyalty about it that she found very pleasing.

  “He’s a striking man,” Tara observed. “And it’s so unusual for us here to see a woman with so… martial an attendant.”

  “Things are a little different in the north these days,” Anyara said rather more sharply than she intended. She did not know whether it was Coinach or herself she was defending. “Very different. Perhaps if all of you — ”

  Tara cut her short with a flourish of her smooth, ringed fingers.

  “That’s not what I wanted to discuss with you, in any case. Really, it’s a little too cold to spend more time than is necessary out here, don’t you think? I have a proposition for you. I thought you might find it more comfortable, more… well, more comfortable, if we found you different quarters.” Tara leaned in once more and whispered, “Things can be so formal and tedious here, don’t you find?”

  “What have you got in mind?” Anyara asked cautiously.

  “My own home, of course. We have a great many rooms that might find favour in your eyes, and I think you’ll find it a good deal quieter. Much more calming.”

  Anyara thought for a moment or two, and then looked sideways at Tara.

  “Is this Gryvan’s idea?” she asked. “He doesn’t know what to do with me, so tidies me away into your care. Am I so much of an embarrassment to him?”

  Tara rolled her eyes in amused frustration. It was such a natural, relaxed gesture that Anyara found herself warming to the woman. She had to remind herself that this was the Shadowhand’s wife, and by that measure unlikely to be a reliable friend.

  “Really,” Tara said, “is everyone of your Blood so blunt? It’s refreshing, but there is no need to make quite such a close alliance with suspicion. Look — ” confiding, companionable “-there’s been some misunderstanding between your brother and Aewult. Or between Aewult and Taim Narran. I don’t know; I don’t follow these things closely. But it will all be cleared up before long, I’m sure, particularly now that Mordyn is coming back to us.”

  “Your husband?” Anyara said in surprise. She knew the Shadowhand had been injured and then gone missing in the chaos consuming the Kilkry Blood. It had been one of the charges-or suspicions at least-laid against her, against Orisian, by Aewult nan Haig when he took her hostage.

  “Oh, yes,” Tara said with such undisguised, apparently uncontrived delight that Anyara once again felt that questionable twinge of affection for her. “Have you not heard? My husband is on his way south even now. He will be here very soon. And really, there’s no need for you to be shut up in this marble tomb in the meantime. That is what I think, anyway, and the High Thane agrees.”

  Anyara nodded thoughtfully. She did not dare to hope that all of this would really be so easily tidied away, but there was no denying that she hated the Moon Palace. If Gryvan oc Haig wanted her out of the way, for whatever reason, she was not inclined to resist.

  The two girls she had been watching earlier had turned back to their maids. One of them was poking a stick through the golden bars of her birdcage, trying to make the prisoner within sing.

  “
All right,” Anyara said. “I’d be grateful for your hospitality.”

  “Do you find our new accommodation more to your taste?” Anyara asked Coinach.

  The shieldman shrugged and wrinkled his nose.

  “Each palace seems much like another to me. What colour it is makes little odds.” He stood uncomfortably in the doorway of Anyara’s new quarters in the Palace of Red Stone. His stiffness and formality amused her, for no obvious reason.

  “It’s porphyry,” she said. “The red.”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh, don’t try so hard to sound interested.” Anyara lifted the finely carved lid of a massive chest at the foot of the bed and peered in. Sheets and blankets: linen, wool, silk. Better, if she was any judge, than what she had slept amidst in the High Thane’s palace.

  “Sorry, my lady.”

  “And don’t start calling me that again,” Anyara said in mock irritation. She sniffed the bowl of water at the bedside. It had a strong scent. Roses, perhaps. “There’re more than enough ladies in this city already.”

  Coinach made a non-committal noise that came surprisingly close to a grunt.

  “Perhaps now that we’re little a less closely watched, we can start some training again,” Anyara mused.

  Since leaving Kolkyre, there had been almost no opportunities for Anyara to refine her still rudimentary skills with a blade. The constant supervision had made it all but impossible. If she was honest, she feared drawing ridicule down upon herself and-even more so-upon Coinach if they were observed.

  “Perhaps,” Coinach acknowledged without notable enthusiasm.

  The shieldman moved aside to allow a maidservant to enter, bearing fresh pillows for Anyara’s bed. She was a short but graceful girl, much the same age as Anyara, with strikingly red hair. She gave a neat bobbing curtsy, and there was even a flicker of a smile on her face.