“It sounds like a matter the Lore is better placed to judge than the Battle,” Eska said placidly. Her head was clearing now. Her nausea had subsided, leaving only a sour twist in her stomach.
Goedellin looked up at the mention of the Lore. His stained lips were pressed tight in a miserable pinch.
“There is time yet for…” Shraeve began, but then Aeglyss was rolling onto his stomach with a thick gurgling splutter. The White Owls and Inkallim who had gathered around him started back.
Aeglyss crawled on all fours. His hands flexed against the planking of the floor like frail white spiders. The open sores where his fingernails had once been split and leaked noisome fluid. His scabrous head bobbed up and down. Blood dripped from his face, hair fell from his scalp.
“Help me, Shraeve,” he sobbed. “Help me. Save me. I am lost.”
His gown hung limp from the bones of hip and shoulder and ribcage.
“Am I safe yet? Am I safe? I can’t tell; can’t tell anything any more. I don’t know.”
Eska saw unguarded confusion and distaste flutter for a moment on the faces of a few: several of the wood-wights, one or two of the Inkallim. There are flaws here still, she thought. There is room for doubt in some hearts, when the madness is not fully upon them.
“It’s killing me,” Aeglyss groaned. “Tearing me apart. It’s too much, too much for my body, my bones. Oh, what have they done to me?”
He crawled, jerking, across the floor like some demented child made of sticks and string. Shraeve went to him and knelt at his side. She shot a wildly hostile glare in Eska’s direction.
“Go,” she hissed. “Take Goedellin with you. Take him to that pathetic Thane of yours.”
Goedellin hobbled towards the door without further urging. He glanced uneasily, again and again, at the twitching na’kyrim as he went. Eska followed him without looking back. She heard Aeglyss muttering as she went.
“It’s not enough. This’ll eat me away unless I can see into the heart of it, see all of it. I need to go deeper. I need to go further.”
Shraeve’s whispered reply was too soft for Eska to hear. But Aeglyss shouted, and she could hear him still as she descended the stairway that carried her and Goedellin out into the derelict city.
“No,” the halfbreed cried. “I need more. I need to be more. It’s tearing me apart, unless I master it. I need to be made afresh. Again! Again!”
VII
In the night, those uncomfortable beneath Kanin’s yoke had come for him, seething out of Glasbridge’s alleys and ruins. It was not the Lannis folk who rose, but the motley bands of Black Road looters and idlers and thieves that had occupied the town before his arrival. Titles and past allegiances meant nothing, it seemed, in this newly savage world; scores had come, half of them armed with nothing more than staffs or kitchen knives, to test this Thane’s determination. They had not found him wanting.
While the mob battered at the iron-stiffened door of the Guard House and smashed in the shutters on its windows, Kanin himself had led his Shield and twenty other warriors out over the wall of the little yard in which Glasbridge’s Guard had once drilled. They had fallen on the rear of the baying throng, so suddenly and unexpectedly that the slaughter had been trivially easy. The killing brought Kanin less relief, less respite from his tortured preoccupations, than such deeds once had. It was purposeless beyond the preservation of his own life, and he set little store by that measure of purpose.
In the wake of it, though, standing with the dead and the crippled strewn about him, with groans and whimpers populating the darkness, he had rediscovered some little of the cleansing cold fire. One of his own Shield, a tall man, black-bearded, had cornered some ragged Gyre villager in the doorway of one of the shacks opposite the Guard House. As Kanin watched impassively, the shieldman’s shoulders shook, his sword sank to hang loosely at his side. The man he should have been killing was immobile for a moment, bewildered, and then fled into the night.
Kanin seized the shieldman’s shoulder and spun him about. There were tears on the man’s face, and the sight of them roused all of Kanin’s ire.
“What are you doing?” he shouted.
“I cannot, sire.” The words were tremulous. The man’s brow furrowed. The sword fell from his limp hand.
“Cannot?” Kanin snarled. All of the others were watching now. There was nothing else, in that silent, dark street, save Thane and shieldman.
“It’s all wrong. We’re fighting our own. I don’t understand why…”
Kanin cut him down, and the man fell without a sound, his legs folding beneath him. Another blow, as he lay there staring blankly up, finished him. Kanin stalked back towards the Guard House, pushing through the ranks of his warriors. He glimpsed in Igris’ face as he passed the subtle flinch of repressed doubt and distaste.
He turned on the threshold.
“Any who doubt me, who lack the courage to stand by their Thane, their Blood, come to me with a sword in your hand, and test your fate against mine. I don’t fear it. I’ll gladly face anyone. But if you’ve not the spine to do that, you’ll fight and you’ll die for me as your oaths demand. I will bring down those now ruling in Kan Avor or I will die in the trying. So will you.”
Now, watching oily black smoke boil its way into the morning sky from the corpse fires, Kanin still felt the echo of that anger shivering through him. There were none left he could rely on, or trust. Not even his Shield. None who saw what seemed so obvious to him. If he did not move soon, he would be betrayed, abandoned.
“We passed carts carrying the sick to Kan Avor, Thane,” Goedellin said behind him.
“Did you?” Kanin muttered without interest.
He turned reluctantly away from the window. He was wasting his time even talking to the Lore Inkallim, he suspected. Eska, who had brought the man hobbling into Glasbridge that morning, had implied as much in her curt report of what she had seen in Kan Avor.
“The men who guarded them told us you had sent them.”
“What of it? I do as I see fit. The creed has ever enjoined us to do so. Well, it seems fit to me to send sickness unto sickness. Fever breeds fever, my nursemaid always said. Let it fill Kan Avor, I say. Let the halfbreed find his streets filled with the stench of the dying.”
“Is it true that you have given arms to Lannis men? That you are training and drilling them to fight alongside your own warriors?”
Kanin ignored that. Once, his upbringing, his faith, might have required him to submit to the judgement of this learned man, so wise in the ways of the creed. Now he was entirely, coldly uninterested in the opinions of the Lore. He was a man without any allegiance, any duty, save to his own determined intent. He was entirely alone, and that very solitude rendered him impervious to all judgements save those of his own heart.
Goedellin shook his bowed head. “But there must be unity, Thane. The faithful must be — ”
“The faithful must be cured of the madness that has come upon them,” Kanin said flatly. “I know corruption when I smell its stink, even if your nose is failing you. It’s not glory that we’re all rising towards, but chaos. Subjugation to the will of that mad halfbreed. We’re becoming beasts, and he is the beating heart of our affliction. Our ruin.”
“Is it truly the curing of the faithful you seek, or merely vengeance for your sister’s death?”
Kanin could easily have struck him then. It would cost him nothing to kill this revered man, nothing that he had not already sacrificed at least. Only the fact that he heard not accusation but weariness in Goedellin’s voice stayed his hand.
“They thought in Kan Avor that you had sent the Hunt to kill him,” the Lore Inkallim said.
“Did they. And did you ask Eska? You had time enough, didn’t you, to get to the truth of it, between there and here?”
Goedellin frowned.
“She was-is-unwilling to speak with me,” he muttered.
“Ha! Then you’ve come to dig out my secrets, old man? Are you running er
rands for the halfbreed now?”
He might have expected some indignation in response, but Goedellin seemed a man lost, too adrift on the currents of his own confusion to rise to such provocation. He merely shook his head, chewed his dark lips.
“I went to Kan Avor in the hope of fostering unity, Thane. There is much that needs mending.”
“I agree. And I know how to mend it.”
“No, no.” Goedellin was unsettled. He clasped his hands, interlacing his fingers, then parted them again. “The faith, the faith. It must be of a single mind in times such as this. We stand upon the brink of — ”
“What, then?” Kanin interrupted. “Would you have me make common cause with Shraeve and the halfbreed? Surrender myself to the same madness as everyone else? I won’t do it.”
The Lore Inkallim shook his head despondently. Kanin narrowed his eyes. Understanding blossomed within him.
“You don’t know, do you, old man? You doubt. You suspect I’m right…”
“I don’t know,” Goedellin conceded. Softly, like a defeated, shamed child. “I don’t know. I had thought it might become clearer to me. But I see things, I feel things, so… unnatural. It is…”
“Foul,” Kanin encouraged him. “Wrong. It is against all reason for one such as Aeglyss to be the answer to the creed’s hopes.”
“Reason?” Goedellin murmured. “Reason has never been a cornerstone of the creed, Thane. Fate does not submit itself to reason.”
Kanin groaned in exasperation.
“Seek guidance, then, from your First, if you’re too fearful to make your own decisions.” he sneered. “If you’ve not the courage for it, send messengers to Kan Dredar, telling them how things have gone awry. Hope that Theor and the rest will render the judgement you’re incapable of.”
Still there was no reaction from Goedellin. No anger, no resentment, no bruised self-importance. Kanin had never seen one of the Lore so enfeebled by uncertainty.
“My messages go unanswered,” Goedellin said miserably. “I do not even know if they have reached the Sanctuary.”
Kanin did not conceal his contempt. “I’ll waste no more time on you. Look at yourself, Inkallim. Where’s all the strength, the discipline of the Lore now? You’re supposed to be the ones who guard the people against error. What use are you, when one halfbreed can steal everything away from under your very nose? The Battle, the people, the creed itself.”
The Thane pulled open the door.
“Try your visionary dreams for answers, Goedellin. If your reason isn’t enough, or your masters in Kan Dredar, try your secret roots and herbs. I’ll find you a bed, if you want one, and you can reside here as long as you wish, but spare me any more of your fumblings, your flailings.”
Goedellin grunted. “Perhaps. Seerstem’s brought no clarity yet; quite the opposite. But perhaps. I hope for understanding.”
“You hope in vain,” said Kanin scornfully. “Your dreams won’t bring you anything, because you don’t even know the right questions to ask. This stopped being about the creed, about fate, a long time ago, but still you think there’s some truth to be teased out of it. There isn’t. This is about blood now, Inkallim, and who is willing to spend and spill the most of it. This is about who is fierce enough, determined enough, to come out of the fighting pit alive.”
He left Goedellin sitting there alone, a sad and shrunken figure hunched down in a chair. A man left puzzled and bereft by a world that had twisted itself into a shape he could no longer comprehend.
Outside the ruins of Kan Avor, on the fringes of the sodden plain that had once been the Glas Water, a huge willow tree stood. It carried snow in the joints of its soaring branches. Its immense trunk burst from the ground and sprayed up into the air like the antler-crown of some titanic buried stag. When it was young, spindling its way up out of the wet earth amidst a host of its eager fellows, Avann oc Gyre ruled in Kan Avor, and the streets of that place bustled with the life of a thriving Blood. Later, there had been slaughter within sight of it, and the blood of thousands had sunk into the loam, to its youthful roots. As it rose to its full stature, so the Lannis Blood had risen around it, and a great dyke had been constructed, and the proud city so near at hand was drowned. The long seasonal pulse of the Glas Water ruled its life thereafter: in the winters, the waters came to lap around the base of its slowly swelling trunk; in summers, they retreated. And in those dry times, the people of the valley came and cut away its peers one by one. It had been alone for many years, standing in solitude amidst pool and marsh, spared the axe by chance which the years turned to habit.
Upon this solitary giant a multitude converged. They came from Grive, and from Anduran, and from Targlas beyond it, trampling new pathways into the expanse of blank snow that lay across the valley. It was not only the people of the Black Road who assembled there on the frigid flatlands. The subjugated folk of the Lannis Blood gathered too, some by choice, some driven like cattle by their new rulers. The promise of momentous events was abroad and compelling. They came from vast Anlane itself: White Owls emerging in bands of ten and twenty from beneath its vast bare canopy.
Most of all, they came from Kan Avor, the dead city reborn yet still dead. They swarmed out from that rubble in their hundreds, disgorged from its every crevice. And in the midst of them came the na’kyrim himself, riding a wagon pulled by gigantic Lannis horses that had once hauled timber from the forests. He sat in it alone, braced against straw bales wrapped in cloth, armoured against the cold by a heavy cloak that he enfolded about himself so deeply his shape was lost beneath its weight. Ice crackled under the wheels as they crunched through the frozen puddles along the track.
Forty Battle Inkallim rode in escort. Hothyn and his Kyrinin walked after the cart in a great dispersed crowd. On either side, as far as any eye might see, the na’kyrim’s people were strewn across the white plain, all of them moving through the winter towards that single huge willow tree: a convocation of the mad and the wild and the desperate and the fierce.
The wagoner snapped his switch at the rumps of the horses with one hand, hauled sideways at the reins with the other. The wagon creaked round in a tight circle and groaned to a halt beneath the spreading tree. The westering sun glowed coldly behind cloud. The multitude gathered. A thousand plumes of exhaled breath misted over their heads.
Shraeve the Inkallim drew her horse to a halt beside the wagon and leaned towards its lone passenger.
“This still seems ill advised,” she said quietly.
Aeglyss looked out with filmy eyes from within his ragged, enveloping cloak. Twin runnels of mucus had dried-or frozen, for he had a bloodless, heatless glaze to his skin-under his nose and across his lips. What little more of his face was visible was cracked and flaked. He shivered.
“Are you dying?” Shraeve asked.
“Dying?” rasped the na’kyrim. “Perhaps. Becoming, more likely. Becoming something new.”
His voice was thin. Gone was its rich, seductive lustre and its smooth caress. Now it was the crumbling away to dust of dead bark, the rustling of crisp, fallen leaves beneath a foot.
“You fear my death?” he asked her. “Or is it your own loss of influence you fear? The loss of the fire at which you warm your hands? Without me, how long would you last?”
“I do not see the necessity. That is all. You have more than enough — ”
“What would you know of necessity?” snarled Aeglyss, his sharp anger fouling his throat and almost choking him. “You know nothing about me. About what I was before, what I am now. I hear a thousand voices, countless voices, in my head. I hear the dead and the living. I suck in hatred and fear and sickness with every breath. My body burns and breaks around me, consumed by this… this flood pouring through me. And I can’t mend it. I can’t still the voices.”
Shraeve scowled at the wagoner, who had twisted on his seat and was looking back at Aeglyss with an expression of fearful awe. Seeing her displeasure, he turned away once more, and made himself small.
His eyes were closed now. His head tipped back. The hood of his cloak fell away, revealing his almost naked head. The skin was so frail and thin, the bones of his skull seemed to show through it, giving it the sheen of ivory.
“The Shadowhand strains against the bonds I’ve set on him. His is a fierce will. I must be stronger, if I’m not to lose him. And the Anain. I hear them still, thinking their great, hateful thoughts. Distant… distant, but I hear them. They’ll come again for me one day, when their hate is greater than their fear. I need to be the flood itself, not just the channel the flood flows through. You wouldn’t understand. How could you?”
Shraeve’s horse had dropped its head to nuzzle the snow in search of grass. She tugged irritably at the reins.
“It will all have been for nothing, if you die now,” she said.
Aeglyss’ head sank down until his chin rested on his chest. He coughed and wheezed.
“Nothing? Maybe. But let your precious fate decide.” He spat the words contemptuously. “If it’s a new world you want out of this, this is how it happens. This is the only way it can happen, because without it I will come apart. I don’t fear death. I can master it. I just need to go deeper, further; to the root of the world. So do it. Do it, raven.”
There was no more talking after that. Only the brutal business of hoisting the fragile na’kyrim up on the tree’s creased trunk, the driving of nails through the old, unhealed wounds in his wrists. A hush cloaked all the hundreds, the thousands, gathered to bear witness. They stood in a vast arc, all silent, all watching the hammers, feeling their beat like that of war drums. They were exposed, in that great flat land, to the twilight’s raw wind and to the sleet that gave it teeth, but no fires were lit, no shelters erected.
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