Orisian hesitated, suddenly thinking of Ive. There had been an abandoned, almost accusatory, air about Erval as the Guard Captain had watched them ride out. The town had been a shell by then, all but empty. Only a few dozen left behind, likely to soon follow all the others who had already scattered into the east, into the frigid wilds. If they had been too slow to flee, this same terrible thing might be happening in Ive even now, Orisian thought. Killings in the street, the abrupt, unthinking ending of lives.
Someone came in from the side and planted a spear firmly into the chest of the Black Roader, who growled and cursed and coughed as he died.
It did not last long. Those who had held Ive Bridge were not, it turned out, the ferocious, faith-inspired warriors Orisian had expected. They were instead the drunk, the sick and the hungry; gaunt and frail many of them, others injured. All dead, soon enough.
“I’ll take Ess’yr and Varryn, Torcaill and three men back to fetch Yvane and the others,” Orisian said, watching with Taim as his men dragged the corpses to the river’s edge and heaved them into the torrent.
“Be quick,” Taim said. “These were just deserters or looters, but it doesn’t mean there’s nothing worse around.”
“I doubt it,” Orisian murmured. “There’s nothing here for anyone. The lowlands, the towns; that’s what they’ll want. But yes. I’ll be quick. Don’t let anyone get too settled. We should press on as soon as I’m back.”
“Nothing to settle with,” Taim grunted. “There’s hardly enough food here for a quarter our number.”
They went more slowly back up the trail, Ess’yr and Varryn running ahead, disappearing into the darkness. Orisian watched them go with a twinge of regret. He had wanted to thank Ess’yr for her arrow, but there was a strange lassitude in him now. He felt faintly dizzy, and when he blinked saw inside his eyes the spittle-flecked lips of that hate-filled, broken-legged man working over crooked teeth.
He rode beside Torcaill. The warrior’s head dipped lower, bit by bit. His hands rested loosely on his horse’s neck. The animal began to slow.
“There’s something I want to ask of you,” Orisian said quietly.
Torcaill jerked upright and blew out his cheeks.
“Forgive me, sire,” he said.
“It’s all right. We’re all tired. Listen, there’s something I’d like you to do for me.”
“Whatever you command, of course.”
“No,” Orisian shook his head. “I’ll not command you in this. Only ask. It’s… it will be difficult. I’d like you to try to reach Vaymouth. Just you and a couple of men: whoever you’d want to choose. If you stay away from the main roads until you get into Ayth-Haig lands…”
The words trailed away as he became guiltily aware of how inadequate they were; how blandly unequal they were to the magnitude of what he was asking.
“Of course, sire,” Torcaill said levelly. “If it’s what you wish.”
“I want… I’d like you to try to find my sister, if you can. I’m not sure what’s going to happen here, to me, but I think… I think Anyara might need help. Protect her. Get her out of Vaymouth, if you can. And give her a message from me.”
“I’ll do everything — ”
“Rider!” someone shouted, and a moment later Orisian could hear it too: the hammering of hoofs coming wildly, dangerously up the road towards them.
“Spread out,” Torcaill hissed, drawing his sword.
“It’s all right,” Orisian said. “Whoever it is, I doubt they would have got past Ess’yr and Varryn if they were a threat.”
It was one of the warriors who had remained hidden in the copse. He was fraught and dishevelled. There were wounds on his face, the blood black in the gloom. Orisian felt a dull dread in his gut.
“We were attacked, sire,” the man gasped as he hauled his mount to an ungainly halt in the middle of the road. “Tarbains, just a handful.”
Orisian hung his head. “Who’s dead?” he asked quietly.
“Four men, sire. We killed all of the savages, though.”
“And the na’kyrim?”
“There was much confusion. We… Some of the horses ran wild. We were scattered, for a time, all of us. In the darkness…”
“The na’kyrim?” Orisian asked again, that dread now a hard, cold fist rising in his chest, making it difficult to breathe.
“Two of them are safe, sire. We found them. But the mute one, the mad one: she’s gone. Not killed, but gone. In the confusion, she slipped away.”
Beyond the man, the two Kyrinin were drifting back out of the night, pale shapes slowly coalescing amongst the silent boulders on either side of the road. Orisian slumped in his saddle, abruptly and profoundly exhausted.
VIII
In the Vare Waste, amongst the mule-stubborn masterless men who scraped a living from its labyrinthine canyons and gorges, feuds long-forgotten or forgiven were reborn. Along the goat trails, through the scrublands, raiding parties ran. Men sent their wives and children to hide in caves while they waged petty wars over the boulder-fields. And still they found time to prey, as well, upon the Kilkry folk who came stumbling into that wind-blasted wasteland, fleeing the slaughter wrought by the Black Road.
In Dun Aygll there was no war, but minds still foundered: the people seized Rot-scarred beggars from the streets and burned them alive on pyres built amidst the ruins of ancient royal residences; a Tal Dyreen merchant, accused by rumour of using shaved weights, was dragged from his house and carried to the Old Market, and killed there, more than a hundred hands sharing in the deed.
On distant Tal Dyre itself, the households of two merchant princes elevated quarrel to murder. They hunted one another with knives through the lanes of the island’s palace-encrusted slopes, until the nights grew deadly and the people fearful.
A Huanin trader, arriving as he had many times before at a Snake vo’an to exchange knives for furs, offered insult with an ill-judged remark implying them to be subservient to the Taral-Haig Marchlords. Some of the older women, even the vo’an’tyr herself, counselled tolerance; it was not the first, and would not be the last, time that the ignorance and stupidity of a slow-minded Huanin had led them to abuse the clan’s hospitality. But younger, hotter hearts demurred. There was debate and then argument, and then threat and accusation. It might have gone further had the elders not stepped aside, the better to preserve the clan’s peace. The young warriors broke the trader’s wrists and ankles with stones, and set their hunting dogs on him.
On the Nar Vay shore, west of Vaymouth, two brothers-long of dark inclination, guilty of innumerable small cruelties in their childhoods-went one night, without cause, from house to house in their fishing village and took blades to their friends, and their family and their lovers. They killed six, injured more, before the menfolk gathered and pursued them to the gravel beach. One died beneath the cudgels and harpoons and scaling knives of the villagers; the other waded into the sea, going on and out with the moonlimned waves breaking across his shoulders, laughing madly until he was taken under.
And in Vaymouth-huge, jostling, choking, loud Vaymouth-the sickness rose, day by day, closer to the surface. The city so long accustomed to singing itself songs woven from chinking coins, hammers in workshops, the seductive cries of hawkers and pedlars, the gossip of washerwomen, found another more corrosive strand entering its harmonies. It found another voice with which to whisper its tales of itself. Anger murmured in its alleys and inns, bitter distrust and doubt sighing coldly through its marketplaces and potteries. In sleep and in waking, a dark imagination took hold of its inhabitants, and many succumbed to it.
The Craft apprentices rioted, each death of one of their number inciting the survivors to greater outrage. The Captain of the Guard in the Tannery Ward was killed by his wife’s lover. His men took their vengeance upon the man, his parents, his sister, but found that bloodletting insufficient to sate their hunger and went on to the next house, and the next, and the next, looting and killing and feasting until they
fell exhausted or drunk. Three women were killed in as many nights, their dismembered bodies found in dank dawns within sight of the Moon Palace’s walls. Fear stalked the city, and bred the violence that it fed upon.
*
Anyara found the terrace from which she and Coinach had watched the fires burgeoning across Vaymouth a convenient and quiet refuge whenever the increasingly oppressive atmosphere in the Palace of Red Stone grew intolerable, and she needed the touch of cold, cleansing air on her face or a glimpse of the sky. The denizens of the palace never seemed to use it-not in this season, at least-and though there were sometimes guards upon it at night, during the day it was empty and silent.
On this particular day it was cold too.
“Could you bring me a cloak from my chambers?” she asked Coinach quietly.
He nodded and disappeared into the body of the palace. As soon as he was out of sight, Anyara felt guilty. It was hardly respectful, of either his standing or his capabilities, to treat a shieldman as if he were a maidservant. Yet Coinach had raised no protest. He never would, she suspected, almost irrespective of what she asked of him. She was aware that the two of them were acting less and less like a Thane’s sister and her loyal bodyguard; more and more like companions-exiles-who found in one another the only friendship and support they could rely upon.
Still, there was a sharp chill on the air and she did need the cloak. And Eleth, the maid assigned to her, had been mysteriously absent for the last two days. Sick, the others had told Anyara when she asked after her, but their curt replies had an evasive impatience about them that did not inspire belief.
Perhaps, she told herself, they were just unsettled by the general confusion and nervous mood that had taken hold of all Vaymouth. There had been other fires since those first bright beacons of destruction blooming in the night. More riots. Anyara had heard the crowds roaring along the streets of the city even through the thick walls of the palace. Now she could see a distant pillar of smoke climbing into the sky. Some ruin, still smouldering.
She folded her arms, tucking her hands into her sleeves. She blew a long, slow breath upwards and watched the mist of it drifting and fading away. Voices reached her from somewhere below the terrace. She knew there was a long narrow walled garden down there, where nothing but a few harshly pruned and trained fruit trees grew.
The voices were instantly recognisable: Tara and Mordyn. Yet both had a strident edge she had never heard in them before.
“You took her riding, I hear,” the Chancellor was saying. “Well, no more. She is to be confined within these walls, on Gryvan’s command.”
“As you wish, of course, but tell me why, at least. I find no harm in the girl.”
“That’s not for you to judge.”
“Not for me to judge? Don’t speak to me as if I were one of your lackeys. I’m your wife, or have you truly forgotten that as thoroughly as it seems?”
Anyara, shrinking back from the terrace’s balustrade, winced at the anguish in Tara’s voice. There was much pain there, though it was so intimately entangled with anger that the two were hardly distinguishable.
“I forget nothing,” Mordyn said, suddenly gentle. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Then tell me why. I’ve never pried into any of your dealings needlessly, but now you set such briars about yourself I cannot even draw near. Tell me what this child’s done. I’ve seen nothing in her save sorrow and strength, and loyalty to her family.”
“Have a care you don’t align yourself with treacherous friends.”
A sound behind her had Anyara spinning about, raising her hands to fend off some assault. It was only Coinach, though, stepping out onto the terrace, carrying her cloak. He wore a questioning expression, but she held a palm out to him and pressed a finger to her lips. He came carefully closer.
“Treacherous friends?” Tara was crying out below. Her distress must be profound-all-consuming-to permit this kind of indiscretion, Anyara knew. There would surely be servants and guards who could hear all of this just as clearly as she could herself.
“You know,” Tara went on, her tone moderating a touch, veering back towards grief and confusion, “you used to know, at least, that I would not allow so much as a feather’s width of distance to separate us, but this talk of Lannis and Kilkry treachery is absurd. Whatever their failings, they would never do anything to weaken our resistance to the Black Road. Lannis owes its very existence to the struggle against them. They’re obsessed with it. You know all this far better than I. Why can’t you explain to me what’s changed?
“Please! Don’t turn away from me. Listen to me. Explain to me. I need to understand.” She was begging him now. “Surely it’s Aewult’s clumsiness, his ineptitude, that’s caused this confusion. You said from the start he should not have been sent north. You said — ”
“What I said does not matter.” The Shadowhand’s voice was leaden. All Tara’s desperate longing evidently moved him not at all. “What is: that’s our concern now. There is conspiracy against us, against the High Thane. That is all you need to know.”
“All I need to know? How can you say such things?”
“I have no time for this. There is conspiracy. I have shown Gryvan the proofs of it, and he acts upon them as he sees fit. The girl, and her Blood, stand condemned in his eyes, along with many others. Her brother killed Aewult’s messengers. He is to be outlawed.”
Coinach was pulling gently at Anyara’s sleeve. She glanced at him, and his concern was clear. With good reason, Anyara knew: if they were known to have overheard this fraught exchange, troubles could flock about them as thickly as crows on a carcass. But then, as was abundantly clear, they were already beset by plentiful troubles.
“Proofs?” Tara snapped. “What proofs?”
“My own report of what I discovered while in the hands of the Black Road. Letters. Messages I’ve uncovered since then. Enough, woman!”
“Messages? Those you wrote yourself?”
Then, suddenly, the sharp sound of palm on flesh. A stinging blow.
“Don’t question me,” cried Mordyn Jerain. “Never question me. And never speak such an accusation again, to me or anyone else.”
Too forcefully to be resisted, Coinach drew Anyara back and led her into the shadows of the long room at the back of the terrace. As she retreated, she thought she could just hear, almost too faint for her to catch, Tara’s soft gasps of shock, and horror, and betrayal. Perhaps they were the choked remnants of sobs.
“We should get back to your chambers,” Coinach whispered. “They must find us safely there, and safely ignorant, should anyone wonder where we are.”
Anyara nodded. They went quickly and quietly back through the corridors.
Alem T’anarch liked to think of himself as a man of refined but modest tastes. The thin cord with which he tied his long pale hair had gold thread braided into it, but the strand was so delicate as to be almost invisible. His sword, which he wore only on the most important of occasions, had small diamonds set into its scabbard. They were discreet, though. Certainly not as boorishly indulgent as so much of the wealth on display in Vaymouth had become.
Alem had been ambassador of the Dornach Kingship to the Haig Blood for long enough to acquire a grudging respect for the vigour of his hosts, but this was increasingly overlaid by much less charitable sentiments. The overbearing self-confidence of Gryvan oc Haig, his family and his entire Blood had become tedious; all the more so since it had started to express itself in the ever more ostentatious adornment of Vaymouth with palaces and grand Craft establishments and pointless ceremonial. And in recent times there had been growing hostility towards Alem’s own Kingship. It had become absurdly acute since Gryvan’s discovery of Dornachmen fighting in the service of the rebellious Dargannan-Haig Blood. Alem had found himself treated without even the faint respect his position had previously commanded. He had been denied any contact with Gryvan or any of his high officials.
He now strode through the echoing corr
idors of the Moon Palace with, therefore, a mix of anticipation and trepidation. That he should at last be granted the audience he had long sought was a relief, but the manner of his summoning to it-abrupt, discourteous-did not bode well. His attendants, hurrying in his wake, looked worried. No one wanted war with the Haig Bloods-not yet, at least-but the possibility hung in the air like the stench of an approaching corpse-ship.
It was regrettable, Alem recognised, that Jain T’erin had sold his warband to Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig, but the Dornach Kingship had always produced a supply of stubbornly independent adventurers: sons disinherited by the fall of their fathers in one of the regular reorderings that swept through the nobility; warriors cut loose when the excessive popularity or success of their commanders led to the disbanding of whole armies. It was the way of things, and it was absurd to hold the King responsible for the deeds of those spawned by such developments. In truth, Alem’s own subsequent demand for compensatory payments to the families of those dead mercenaries had probably been misjudged, but the instruction had come from Evaness and his doubts had been overruled. The late Jain T’erin-or his family, at least-evidently still had influential friends at court.
Alem and his party drew to a halt before the massive double doors of Gryvan’s Great Hall. The guards standing there regarded them with the disdain which Alem had come to expect. He ignored them. The doorkeeper, a slight and ageing man, raised the ancient staff that was his symbol and pounded its gnarled, polished head against the door. The arrival of anticipated visitors thus announced, there was nothing to do but wait, which everyone did in tense silence.
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