And yet. There was in him something that held the eye. Something that caught her breath in her throat, and filled her with the deep certainty that this frail, eroded figure was far more than mere man. All around her, people were kneeling. Smiling. Eska knelt too, the better to merge with the crowd. But in doing so she sensed, if only distantly, the rightness of the gesture. She felt, between her thoughts, in the gaps left in her skull by her own mind, the movement of this broken man’s thoughts, the ferocity of his desires and his remorseless capacity to fulfil them. She felt these things, and could have been transported by them as one consumed by hunger might be on catching the faint scent of the richest imaginable food. But she did not succumb.
Eska had come to the Hunt as a child too young to speak or walk. An orphan probably, though there was no way of being certain since the records were imperfect. She had no memory of what preceded the discipline and the apparatus of the Hunt, and her every desire-even her faith in the creed-had been subsumed by her devotion to the Inkall. She had no sense of needs or imperatives beyond service to the Hunt. As the vast unspoken, promissory temptations of the halfbreed’s presence washed about and through her, she clung to that clear and narrow allegiance, and found it sturdy. She remained observer, not participant.
Aeglyss raised his arms. He was perhaps too weak to straighten them, for his hands came little higher than his head, the elbows remained crooked.
“Friends,” he murmured, and the word came to Eska from both within and without. It embraced her and soothed her. She smiled despite herself.
“Faithful friends. We move towards the light of a new sun, you and I. Great changes are upon us, and I am their herald, their helmsman.”
Whispers in the crowd, like the rustling of leaves: affirmations and adorations. Eska could feel the edges of her attention contracting. This halfbreed drew everything in towards himself.
“I have promised many things,” Aeglyss said. “And the time comes when I shall make good those promises. This world has ever been found wanting. From my first breath, I have gone, step by step, into its dark heart, and over all those years it has shown me how it revels in cruelty, how it feeds upon deceit, takes pleasure in the suffering and the death of those who least deserve it.”
The truth of all he said was like a light burning inside Eska’s eyes. It was bright, and she could imagine the warmth and the comfort it could offer, yet she was not blinded by it. Narrowly, determinedly, she thought of the crossbow on her back. Its weight grounded her. Had she been prepared, with crossbow in hand and a bolt ready for its string, she might have killed this halfbreed here and now, before Shraeve or the watchful Kyrinin could intervene. She concentrated upon that thought, and turned it over and over in her mind, as if practising some protective ritual of the sort the Tarbains once favoured. She girded her mind with imagined visions of the lethal act, clinging to them.
“All of this I have seen,” Aeglyss called out, “and I have learned it well. And now I am granted the strength to cure the world of its ills.”
Kanin had told her not to throw her life away in any attempt upon Aeglyss. Eska doubted the Thane’s insistence that no single dart or blade was likely to prove fatal to the na’kyrim-she had yet to find a neck that would not yield to a sharp-edged caress-but she was prepared to wait a while longer before testing it.
Aeglyss was smiling now, in a wolfish way. Eska thought she saw contempt there, as he surveyed the kneeling, bowing host filling the street, but she doubted anyone else would share her impression.
“A world must be broken before it can be made whole again,” Aeglyss intoned. “There must be a purging with fire and with blood. We must strip everything back to bare soil before we can plant new seeds. Is it not so?”
“Yes,” Eska heard a woman at her side murmur, and others all through the crowd. A hundred whispers of assent.
“And thus is the purpose of all my suffering revealed. Though I did not seek it, the strength is in me to subjugate all the world to a single will. I-we-shall lay bare the earth. Start afresh. I shall remove all dispute, sweep away all pride. There will be no more envy, no more traitors. Only the faithful.”
Eska repeated that word to herself within the chamber of her head: faithful. She could feel the ardour trying to shake its way free of her stern self-restraint; she could feel that eager, ambitious portion of her spirit struggling to carry the rest of her into surrender and submission to the halfbreed’s certainty. But it was not, she thought, the creed to which he truly demanded faith. It was to him. Though he spoke in the language of the Black Road-the unmaking of the world, its purging by bloodshed-it was not the return of the Gods he hoped to usher in, but his own dominion. Cannek had told Eska as much, before his ill-fated endeavours at Hommen. He had told her that Aeglyss was, at heart, a mad child. Nothing more. She had always thought Cannek a perceptive, perhaps even wise, man.
“Tomorrow, at dawn, there will be wonders,” Aeglyss proclaimed, nodding as if compelled to do so by the irresistible truth of what he said. “Tomorrow I will descend upon our enemies, and undo them. I will deliver to you, and to us all, the greatest of victories. I will give to you the place of the Fisherwoman’s birth.”
The roar of delight shivered back and forth along the street, echoing from the stonework. Some woman, overcome, leapt to her feet and ran towards Aeglyss, arms outstretched, wild ecstasy in her face. She was blind to all save him, sending those who obstructed her path sprawling away. She wept and laughed as she ran.
One of the Kyrinin standing beside Aeglyss, tall and powerful, his face thick with tattooed swirls and curves, rapped the heel of his spear once upon the cobbles, let it spring up free. He caught it again, stretched out a foot and planted it firmly, then snapped the spear forward. It went flat and true into the woman’s chest and lodged there. Her frenzied, delirious wail was cut short as she plunged back and down.
“Tomorrow, you may witness the wonder,” Aeglyss said as if nothing had happened. The woman was groaning, but no one paid her any heed. Eska could not see her any more, but the spear stood erect and it trembled with the woman’s faltering breaths.
“Those who are here at dawn, you will find me there, in the hall above.” Aeglyss gestured towards the windows. Every head was tipped up to follow his hand. “I shall exceed Orlane, and Dorthyn, and all who went before. In your name, in your service, I shall make dust of the past, for these are new times we live in, and a new world we are making. Attend, and see what wonders I work on your behalf.”
Glasbridge’s harbour was empty of boats. The deserted quayside stood silent, its moorings idle, its taverns and shops burned or deserted. Wet slush covered its stones. Offshore, amidst the turbulent waves driving in from the vast estuary, the short mast of some half-sunken fishing boat rocked like a swamped sapling. Kanin stared at it for a time, narrowing his eyes against the sleet sweeping in on the wind. He imagined for a moment that its movement, the regular, solitary beat of its instability, might convey some message to him. There was nothing there, though.
He turned to the crowd standing there on the quay, a miserable, bedraggled assemblage. Some of the last dregs of Glasbridge’s Lannis inhabitants. There were only a few men of fighting age. Women and a few children, old men, frail men, regarded him with various kinds of contempt and resentment. Sixty of them, nearly one in six, as best he could guess, of those who had not died during their town’s destruction and capture, or not escaped it. They had been dragged and driven here like recalcitrant sheep, full of hate but too battered and defeated to offer any resistance.
Kanin’s warriors ringed the Lannis folk, enclosing them in a silent cordon of spears and swords. He doubted such precautions were really necessary. These were broken people. And that was something he meant to change, even if only a little.
A Gyre man was kneeling before him, his hands tied behind his back. Kanin spat meltwater from his lips.
“You know me,” he shouted across the wind at the townsfolk. “You know I’ve made this tow
n mine. I’ve opened the food stores to you, fed you as well as we eat ourselves. Those of you who’d been made slaves or servants, I’ve freed you from that.”
He grimaced at a sudden flurry of sleet.
“This man killed a Lannis girl yesterday.”
He kicked the Gyre captive in the back, sending him sprawling into the slush. Igris hauled the man back onto his knees. The shieldman had great coiled chains looped over his shoulder, found in the storeroom of a half-wrecked smithy.
“Now you see how things go in my town,” Kanin shouted, and nodded to Igris. The shieldman hesitated. He winced.
“Do it,” Kanin hissed.
Others of his Shield came forward. They helped Igris to entwine the chains about the Gyre man, securing them with cords. One took his ankles, another his shoulders, and they carried him to the edge of the quay. The man stared at Kanin all the way. There was no hatred in his dark eyes, only accusation.
“I go without fear,” the man said, quite distinctly, quite calmly.
“I don’t doubt it,” muttered Kanin. “But still you go.”
His warriors swung their cargo once, then heaved him out. The sea swallowed him with a deep, hollow smack and he was gone, leaving not the slightest trace in the relentless waves slapping up against the stonework. Some of the Lannis townsfolk crowded to the edge, pushing past the guards, craning their necks to try and follow the man’s descent. One kicked slush after him. Another whispered curses Kanin could not hear above the wind and water.
“I don’t expect love or loyalty from you,” Kanin said. They turned back to him, and he saw new patterns in their faces now: puzzlement in some, suspicion in others. “I do expect the sense to see that things can change. Have changed. I will shield you from the basest cruelties of your conquerors. I will permit no more of your children to die, or be stolen away by the ravens. I will feed you, and clothe you, as well as I feed and clothe the most devoted of my own followers. I will even seek boats and, if I find them, give them to you, and not hinder your departure.”
He could see out of the corner of his eye Igris watching him with poorly disguised horror. He had not told his Shield or any of his warriors his full intent today. There had been no need or point in doing so. He was Thane, and more than that he was a man alone, engaged in an undertaking none of them could see clearly enough to grasp. Only he understood what extremities the times demanded.
“But not all of you,” Kanin said, concentrating upon the attentive, bewildered townsfolk. “I want you to go amongst your fellows, and tell them what you have seen and what I have said here today. And tomorrow I will have all of you who can hold a weapon, and have the strength to walk for a day, assembled here at dawn. I don’t care who-men or women, it doesn’t matter-but you will come here, and I will arm you and train you and give you an enemy to oppose.
“Because I am not your worst enemy, and you are not mine. I will show you the greatest enemy your Blood has ever had, the one responsible for all your suffering and shame, and you will fight him at my side. I will give you back the honour of your Blood. Those you leave behind here will be protected and preserved for as long as you keep this bargain with me. If you fail in what I require of you, you will all suffer the consequences.”
They stared at him, a mass of disbelief and confusion, and he stared back. Resolute. Unwavering. In the silence, gulls came drifting in off the sea, their cries sharp.
“That is all,” Kanin said, and turned. He walked away, ignoring his own warriors and their questioning glances. He could hold them for a time yet, he was sure. For long enough.
Only Igris came hurrying after him, sword tapping at his legs, mail shirt clinking.
“It doesn’t seem right, sire, to be fighting the faithful when the war is so far…”
Kanin spun and leaned towards the shieldman, pointing a single finger at his eye.
“The war is where I say it is. By the oath you took to my father, you made the Blood’s battles your own. The Thane is the Blood, and I am Thane yet. I choose our battles. Never forget it. I know what must be done, for the good of the faith, for the good of us all.”
Igris quailed before his lord’s wrath, and Kanin stalked away. He was right in this. He was certain of it. If he was the last and only man in all the world who could see what had to be done, so be it. He had strength enough for that, whatever it cost him, wherever it led him.
Two figures awaited him a short distance down the harbourside. They were leaning against the side of a broken cart, watching with wry amusement: two of the three Hunt Inkallim who had made themselves his shadows.
“Have you found what I need?” Kanin asked them.
“You have a rare talent for spreading havoc and confusion, it seems, Thane,” one of the men murmured.
“I asked if you have found what I need,” barked Kanin.
The man inclined his head, deflecting-or dismissing-the Thane’s anger.
“Seventy of them. Every corpse-in-waiting this town has to offer. Most should live long enough to serve your purposes. A fine concoction they are: fevers and sores and suppuration. We’ve got them safely sequestered beyond the reach of any healers. Not that there are many of those to be found hereabouts.”
“Good. I want them in Kan Avor tomorrow. I’ll have Igris arrange an escort, and drivers for the wagons. No word from Eska yet?”
The man shook his head, and Kanin grunted. He strode away.
“You’ll make our task of keeping you alive difficult, Thane, if you turn your own people against you,” one of the Inkallim said behind him.
Kanin stopped and hung his head for a moment. Then he turned and stared at the man.
“I didn’t give you the task. I don’t care how easy or otherwise you find it. What happens will happen, since none of us chooses the course of the Road. Do we?” He asked it dully at first, but then again, more pointedly, more openly: “Do we?”
VI
The heat of bodies and of breath warmed and moistened the air in the hall. Three hundred people, perhaps, crammed in, standing in expectant, reverent silence. Eska stood at the rear of the crush with her back to one of the gaping windows. She could feel the bitter wind that came up the Glas Valley on her neck, even as the warmth of the hall brushed her face. There was snow on that wind, and an occasional errant flake came tumbling over her shoulder to alight, and vanish into water, upon the hair or jacket of those in front of her.
The hall was gloomy, barely recovered from the deepest dark of night. Out to the east, Eska knew, the sky would have caught the first grimy smear of the new day’s approaching light, but here in Kan Avor it would be some time yet before true dawn would break. No lights burned, and in the near-darkness, with such a close-packed crowd, it was difficult to see the halfbreed seated on his stone slab of a throne at the far end of the chamber. When he spoke, his voice was all but disembodied, grating out from the columns, from the wooden floorboards.
“I killed one of the ghosts in the green. You could not understand what that means. You who hear nothing of the true thunder rolling beneath the world cannot know what it is to ride its storm winds, to master them thus. No matter. There’s none left, now… none left… who could describe even the outline of what I have become.”
The hush was profound. No one breathed, none stirred. Hundreds stood there in the dark, held by that strained voice stealing across the stonework, threading its way in amongst them, running its icy touch across their skin. It seemed, even to Eska, a thing not born of a living, limited throat, but rising from the matter and nature of the world itself: as innate, as inevitable as the breaking of waves on a wild shore, or the rushing of a stream through its mountain bed.
“I will give you more easily measurable wonders,” Aeglyss said.
Such a slight figure, Eska thought, so small and frail alone there on the bench. Yet so utterly dominant of every eye, every mind. There was, in these extended, rapt moments, nothing else of consequence in the hall.
“Because I know the cou
rse of your desires, because I know that what I demand of you must be earned by gifts, because it falls to me to shape all things now; because of all this, I will give you what no other could. You and your creed ascend now, on my wings.”
The halfbreed fell silent, and his silence took something out of the world, leaving all who had been listening bereaved and diminished. There was nothing that could fill the void his presence left as he drew it back into himself, bowed his head still more deeply into his chest and let out a long, dwindling breath. But light began to come, seeping in hesitantly, eroding the lingering darkness, putting grey accents on every form. And amidst that meagre brightening, they waited and watched.
*
The Bloodheir was gone. Summoned back to Vaymouth by the Thane of Thanes, it was said. Malloc cared nothing for the two thousand men who had marched with him; it was the departure of Aewult nan Haig himself that weighed upon him. Some, Malloc knew, would welcome the Bloodheir’s departure. There were those-all but traitors to his way of thinking-who thought Aewult’s leadership a factor in their recent defeats. In the night just ended, by the glare of their campfire’s flames, Malloc and his companions had killed one such, a man who slighted the Bloodheir’s courage, his merit. The others had held him down and covered his mouth, and Malloc himself slipped a blade twice, thrice, between his ribs. They had dragged the body to a ditch and hidden it amongst reeds there. None could reasonably punish them for their deed, but it would be for the best if the question never arose.
There had been a certain comfort in the killing, a small confirmation that the world retained some semblance of sense and balance. Strangely sweeter to him than the taking of any of the other lives he had claimed in his long service of his Blood, it gave Malloc a memory to set in the scales against his disappointment at the Bloodheir’s departure. He stood now, with Garrent and the others at his side, by the banks of a wide, shallow stream, and remembered the feel of that disloyal, foul-mouthed fool dying beneath his knife. The man had been a Taral-Haig archer, somehow separated from his company in the darkness.
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