Fall of Thanes tgw-3

by Brian Ruckley

  So they came to a place where a great oak, its girth the token of its agedness, had created about itself a wide ring of ground untrammelled by briars or shrubs. When in leaf, its sprawling branches must have cast such shade that nothing but moss and the most meagre of grasses would grow there. Pigeons rattled out of its crown. Beneath it, Ess’yr turned and stood. Taim Narran looked about with a frown.

  “Not much,” the warrior growled. “But if it’s the best we can do…”

  “No more time,” Ess’yr said. She leaned on her bow, forcing its notched limb down towards the looped end of the string.

  “You two get down,” Taim said to Yvane and K’rina, jabbing the point of his sword groundward. “Lie flat, and we’ll shield you as best we can.”

  Yvane sank down onto her haunches. She had to tug at K’rina’s arm to bring the other na’kyrim down.

  “We keep between them and the arrows,” Taim told the remaining warriors. “And keep as much of ourselves behind our shields as we can. Depending on what sort of mood they’re in, they may lose interest if they see arrows aren’t going to do the job. Happens sometimes, with Kyrinin.”

  Not this time, Orisian thought. No one fights with only half their heart any more. He took his place with the others in that feeble shield wall beside Taim. Just seven of them altogether, each sunk down onto his heels, shrinking himself into a knot of tension behind his shield. They arrayed themselves in half a circle, with the two na’kyrim lying at its heart, and behind them the great bulk of the oak. Orisian could smell the wood of his shield, and the dry leather of the grip to which his hand clung with such desperate rigidity. He looked back. Ess’yr was kneeling over Yvane. The Kyrinin’s face was a mask of perfect concentration as she brushed the flights of her arrows with careful fingers, seeking flaws. Deciding, perhaps, in which order to let them fly. The very stillness of her features in such moments gave the branching, curving tattoos of her kin’thyn an almost painted beauty, Orisian thought. He saw Yvane watching him with narrowed eyes, and he turned back into his shield and flexed his fingers about the hilt of his sword.

  “Now,” Ess’yr whispered with no trace of urgency.

  And like massive, gale-driven drops of rain striking shutters, the arrows hit the shields. First one, then a second, then a rippling drumbeat of them smacking home. Orisian felt his own shield tremble against his arm. And again, this time spitting fine splinters into his eyes. He blinked and saw the very tip of an arrow protruding from the inner face of the shield.

  There was a scraping, and a moaning, and a shifting of bodies. And one of the men was slumping back. Orisian leaned back a little to look towards the sound. The man’s lower leg was spitted by an arrow, feathery flights on one side of his calf, bloodied point on the other. Others shuffled clumsily sideways to close the gap he had left. Orisian heard the snap of the arrow’s shaft breaking, and the gasp, through gritted teeth, as the man pulled the arrow through his flesh.

  Within the rhythm of the arrows on shields, there were now a few duller, deeper notes, as some thudded into the trunk of the huge tree behind them. And another sound joined the chorus: the thrumming of Ess’yr’s bowstring as she sent shaft after shaft skimming out just over the tops of the shields in answer.

  “Stay down,” Orisian murmured, but he did not think anyone heard him.

  A spear rattled off the rim of his shield. He ducked instinctively. Then a deep silence descended. Within its ominous emptiness, a bird-a real bird, this-sang a brief, nervous song some way away. Orisian glanced towards Ess’yr. She was hunched down low, head dipped beneath her shoulders.

  “What now?” he whispered.

  She shook her head and gave a brief, puzzled shrug of her eyebrows. It was such a human gesture it made Orisian smile.

  Taim stretched up a little and peered out. Orisian waited a moment, then did the same. The forest stared back at them, blank and motionless.

  “Can’t be that easy,” Taim murmured.

  The wounded man had torn a strip from the sleeve of his shirt, and was binding it about his leg, grimacing in pain. He fumbled at the knot, his hands blunt and clumsy. Yvane made an irritated noise through her teeth and pulled herself forward on her belly. She slapped the man’s hands aside and did his work for him.

  Orisian returned his attention to the forest, and strained to untangle the slanting tree trunks, the shifting shadows, the clumps of undergrowth. Nothing. No sign of anything save the silent, constant forest itself, complete and impassive. But he imagined White Owls crouching within that concealing mass, flickering messages to one another on spidery fingers, signalling intent. Taim was right, he was sure. It could not be this easy.

  “They’re still there?” he asked Ess’yr.

  She nodded.

  Having completed her ministrations, Yvane slipped back to her place at K’rina’s side, brushing hair away from the na’kyrim’s face. It made Orisian think of Anyara, and he did not know why. He frowned, troubled by that image, which had the texture of memory yet could not, for a moment, find its place in his past. And then it came. It was the echo of Anyara doing just that: brushing their mother’s hair aside when it had fallen across her eyes as she lay sick… dying… in her bed. There had been a sheen of sweat across Lairis’ skin, the smell of malady in the air. From amidst the awful cull of the Heart Fever, amidst all its crippling horrors and sorrows, that was what his mind chose to retrieve now. That one quiet moment. A moment of gentleness in the presence of death.

  “There,” Taim breathed, and Orisian was wrenched back into the present.

  He saw the same thing Taim did. Figures drifting silently back and forth amongst the trees. All the movement was soundless, patternless, as if in search of an as-yet-unexpressed form. It spread slowly around them, widening its compass, claiming more and more of the forest.

  The wounded warrior edged back into line, struggling to keep the weight off his bloody leg. And the movement out there found the form it had been seeking, and ceased. Orisian’s heart beat once, twice as he stared out. He held his breath, for everything seemed poised in that narrow span of time upon some brink. Then they came, from all sides, rushing in.

  “Up!” shouted Taim as he surged to his feet.

  Orisian rose, heard arrows whipping by, saw the Kyrinin running towards him, felt their blind fury like a breeze on his face, and then sight and sound and touch all collapsed into a single impenetrable blur. All existence came to be only the act and the sensation of fighting and struggling.

  A White Owl charged straight at him, spear levelled. It glanced off Orisian’s shield, and its wielder ran without pause onto the point of his sword, taking it into himself just under his ribs. Orisian’s arm gave beneath the weight of that savage merging, and the dying Kyrinin fell against his shoulder. Human and inhuman eyes met for an instant. Orisian saw nothing in those ashen pools. The Kyrinin blinked and slipped to the ground.

  Orisian twisted his sword free, fending off another attack with his shield. He hacked about him, battering aside spears and arms that seemed to come reaching in from every side. A hand closed on the upper rim of his shield and began to pull it down and away from him. Taim was suddenly there, cutting at the wrist of the offending arm. Warm flecks of blood hit Orisian’s face.

  He was dimly aware that he was faster now, more assured than he had been before. His blade moved without the need for conscious thought. It swung and blocked and stabbed according to some instinctual imperative of its own. But still he was no match for the man who had once been Captain of Castle Anduran.

  Taim barged through the mass of White Owls. He did not wait for them to come to him, did not give them the time and space to exercise all their speed or dexterity. He ducked this way and that, cutting a gory path across the front of Orisian, and seemed always to be half a moment ahead of any attack that was directed against him. Arrows and the broken stump of a spear adorned the front of his shield like quills, until Taim battered it into the chest and face of a Kyrinin warrior and splint
ered them against his bones.

  Someone fell at Orisian’s feet. He glanced down. One of his warriors writhed there, an arrow in his face. The chaos in which Orisian was caught crowded out any response to that sight, and his eyes flicked up again at once. A tall White Owl was bearing down on him, a great club-a knotted branch of long-dead wood-held above her head in both hands. Orisian got his shield up, and the cudgel shattered against it. Fragments of it stung Orisian’s brow and scalp. The blow knocked his shield low, almost tore it from his grip, and he swayed back. The woman flung the broken remnant of her weapon at him. He twisted his head out of its tumbling path, but it grazed his cheek. She ran at him and he hammered his sword into her upper arm with all his strength. It went deep, through sleeve and skin and flesh, and knocked her aside.

  Beyond her, he saw a young Kyrinin-slighter and younger than he was himself-sitting astride the chest of a dead or dying man, pounding at his wrecked skull with a rock. The sight was transfixing. Orisian watched in stunned awe as the rock rose, flicking gore and blood into the air.

  He was almost too late in blocking another spear thrust, and was staggered by it. The spear’s tip scraped along the leather belt at his waist. Orisian slashed at his attacker, but the White Owl sprang nimbly back. And looked down, startled, at the other spear that suddenly burst from his own stomach.

  Varryn carried his impaled victim a couple of paces forward before driving him down onto the ground. Orisian started to thank him, but saw at once that the Fox was far beyond the reach of any words. Varryn’s eyes had a glaze of fierce detachment. He snarled savagely as he hauled at his spear to free it from the back of the White Owl. The blue tattoos on his cheeks were overlaid with streams of blood coursing from a ragged scalp wound. His hair was matted down over his brow.

  He hissed as he spun, bringing his spear round in a flashing flat arc and breaking it across the midriff of another closing White Owl. He leaped high and came down on the back of a Kyrinin who was sparring with Taim. Orisian stepped forward. A flicker of movement sensed out of the corner of his eye had him lifting his shield. It caught an arrow out of the air and shook. Orisian looked out towards the youth who had loosed the shaft. The Kyrinin stared back at him, slowly lowering his bow with trembling hands, and then turned on his heel and vanished into the forest.

  Orisian turned about. The shadow of the oak tree now fell upon the dead, the dying and the last of the fleeing White Owls. Soft moans and gasped breaths. The stench of blood and spilled guts. Orisian saw a Kyrinin arm extended up, reaching weakly and futilely for the overhanging boughs. He saw Taim Narran on his knees, shield laid flat before him, panting. He saw more than a dozen bodies, and one White Owl limping in a tight, unsteady circle, holding a crippled and ragged arm tight in against her side. She gave out a susurrant whimper. Her eyes were closed. Varryn put an arrow into her neck, and she staggered sideways and then fell.

  Varryn turned towards Orisian. The Kyrinin’s chest was heaving in a way Orisian had never seen before, from exertion and perhaps from the intensity of the fires that burned within him. Fires that subsided now, for the warrior blinked and blew out his cheeks, stretching the coils of his blue kin’thyn, and let his bow hang limply from his hand. His eyes cleared.

  Orisian nodded, a gesture of simple acknowledgement, a welcoming back of someone who had been absent, in more ways than one, until that moment. But he realised that the Kyrinin’s attention had already found another object. Those eyes focused beyond Orisian, sharpening upon something over his shoulder. Varryn’s face went slack, his lips parted. Orisian turned, frowning.

  And only then did he grasp the true shape of the disaster that had been closing upon them-upon him-all this time. For Ess’yr lay on her back, hair spread over the grass like a filamentous disc framing her head. She stared up, unblinking, through the branches of the oak tree to the sky above. One hand rested lightly on her breast, the fingertips just barely touching the shaft of the arrow that was sunk deep into her fluttering chest. Her blood was turning the deerskin of her jacket black.

  CHAPTER 5

  Kan Avor

  There is a ruin at the heart of the Lannis Blood: Kan Avor, the drowned city where once the Thanes of Gyre ruled, and where the creed of the Black Road was nurtured and tended. It stands now empty and silent, in the cold embrace of still waters and marsh. Birds roost upon its crumbling walls and bats hide in its broken towers.

  The people of the Glas Valley treasure this ruin, and all but venerate it. They think it a token of their determination, a glorious symbol of their past triumphs over the Black Road. They imagine that its persistence invigorates them. “See,” they say to one another. “See these broken and shackled towers. Here is the fate of our enemies. So strong is our grasp upon this land that we can tame mighty rivers and with them drown the cities of our foes.”

  It would have been better to unpick this city: to break it apart, stone from stone, carry away its every timber, plough its streets back into the soft earth until nothing remained. Kan Avor is the constant shadow of the past upon the present. It commemorates not glory but unforgiven and unforgotten hurts. When men venerate the memory of war and strife, and make temples of its relics, and seek to learn from the ruins of yesterday how they should live their lives today, then they have made themselves prisoners of the past, condemned to fight its wars again and again. For few wars are ever truly finished. There is always some remaining vein of bitterness for those who can neither forgive nor forget to mine.

  Time works many wonders, but they are not all to be treasured. It makes shackles out of past triumphs, burdens from victories. Bonds from memories. And it heals only if those who ride its currents are willing to be healed.

  From Hallantyr’s Sojourn

  I

  The Inkallim came to the na’kyrim in his ruined, rotting citadel on the floodplain. She came hesitantly, almost stumbling, eyes gritted and reddened by sleeplessness. Though the waters that had once imprisoned this city had retreated, it could never be free of their legacy. So she came with mud on her shoes, the stink of decay and mould on her clothing. And though she was one of the Children of the Hundred, and had been fashioned by those who trained her into a cold and remorseless weapon, imbued with all the certainty of her faith and her capabilities, the world had become wholly inhospitable to certainties. So she came as a supplicant, and for the first time in her hard life there was fear in her as she spoke.

  “Aeglyss, can you hear me?”

  The na’kyrim did not pause in his shuffling, limping, staggering progress around the columned hall. He hauled his cadaverous form on a weaving path amongst and around the pillars, wandering aimless in that sparse forest of stone trees. He walked barefoot, and his split and scabbed feet left prints of pus and blood on the dank floorboards. He moved slowly, and seemed at each and every moment to be on the point of falling.

  Yet the air the Inkallim breathed felt alive. It was heavy in her mouth and throat and lungs, full of his power. It pressed upon her chest and her back and shoulders, as if he was not only contained within this shambling and broken body in its stained, ragged gown, but also in the glistening, moist walls and in the space they defined. As if he was everywhere.

  She followed him, walking in those bloody footprints.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked. “You must help me. You must hide some of your light, Aeglyss.”

  He did not seem to hear her, for though he murmured erratic little whispers, whatever conversation he held was with himself, or with no one. What few words rose loud enough for the Inkallim to hear were in a language she did not know.

  “Please,” she said. A word that her lips barely remembered well enough to form. “Our warriors turn on one another. They forget themselves, their cause, everything. They lie down and do not rise. They lose their minds. There is sickness in every street, every shelter. Fevers claim more each day, and there is barely a healer with enough sense or strength to treat them. Our triumph-the creed’s ascendancy-remains incomplete…”


  He turned suddenly and sharply. His thin gown hung slack from his bony shoulders. The contours of his bones-ribs, hips-showed through its material. He stared at her from deep within the pits his eyes had sunk into. There was blood in those eyes, a fine net of countless broken vessels leaking soft red.

  “Who are you?” he asked quietly. His voice cracked and creaked like the stale hinge of a long-forgotten door.

  “Shraeve,” she told him. “Shraeve. You know me.”

  “I know everyone,” he grunted. And turned away once more, lurching on in his unsteady circuit of the hall. There were cries rising up from outside, wailing that might be lamentation or simple madness. The Inkallim was not distracted by them. Such sounds-and worse-were common currency now in Kan Avor. The city had found its voice in them. She followed after the na’kyrim.

  “Shraeve…” he whispered. “Shraeve… Shraeve. Yes, the raven. The fierce one, the cold one. Thinks she’s so wise, so clever. Not a true friend.”

  “You can calm them,” she insisted. “You must calm them, bring our people back to us. If they will not-cannot-submit themselves to our commands, everything we have gained could yet slip away.”

  “There is nothing I can do,” Aeglyss said bluntly, and then halted and looked around him as if puzzled. He frowned in contemplation.

  “There must be,” said Shraeve.

  He stared at her, and there was a shifting of the shadows about him. He flickered in and out of darkness for a few moments. It pained her eyes, and she clenched them almost shut.

  “Must be?” he hissed. “Don’t you think I would, if I could?”

  Scourges and daggers filled his voice. She, Banner-captain of the Battle Inkallim, quailed before this feeble, tottering figure.