“I saw you once before, I think,” he said to her. “In a snowstorm, at Glasbridge.”
“Did you?” She seemed entirely uninterested. “Stand aside.”
“I can’t do that. My Thane commanded me to hold this stair.”
“That boy who was with you? He’s nothing.”
“He is my Thane.”
Her lip curled in disdain. She reached up and hooked a single finger over the shaft of the arrow still embedded in her shoulder. With the most fleeting of grimaces, she snapped it off, leaving just a split stub protruding from her flesh. Taim considered attacking her in that moment of distraction, but in truth it was no distraction at all, for her eyes never left him, her balance never wavered.
She let the broken arrow fall and sprang forward in a flurry of whirling blades, belabouring his shield, ringing against his own sword. His defence was desperate. This raven was astonishingly fast and precise. She nicked his thigh. Almost had his eye; would have done, had he not read the sudden change in her blade’s course at the last possible moment and jerked back.
She paused as he retreated into the doorway itself.
“You’re too late,” he said, hoping to keep her attention upon him and away from Varryn.
She glared at him but made no reply. She moistened her lips. There was a constant shiver running down Taim’s neck and spine, a kernel of pain building behind his eyes, a flutter of bitter hopelessness in his heart. None of this he believed to be truly his, and he set himself against it. But it would not release him entirely. It sapped his strength and his will.
His mind reached for hope, for inspiration. Its harvest was meagre. There was perhaps the faintest suggestion that the arrow hampered her movements. If so, that would only grow worse if he could live long enough to give it the chance. And there was the stairway. He edged back into the shadows at the foot of the spiral of steps. She needed space to get the best from those fearsome swords and from her speed. Above her, with shield between them, he would have a chance. To delay her, if nothing else. But only if she came after him.
“You cannot reach him,” he said as he reached back to set his foot on the first of the steps.
She smiled then, the malevolent smirk of a wolf.
“You think not?” she said, and ran at him.
Orisian could not answer the question that had been put to him. The depth and resonant power of the voice that had asked it stunned him, and made him for a moment stand quite still, letting his sword and shield hang down.
“You mean me harm.” The voice rang like the mightiest, most sombre of bells. “That I can feel, can know. But it’s a cold kind of… regret. It doesn’t burn in you as it did in the others.”
Orisian gathered himself, almost groaning at the effort it took to shake off the deadening pain and the weight of the fell mind that pressed down upon his own. K’rina was walking very slowly forward, taking tiny steps. That roused Orisian enough to get his own, leaden body moving. He forced himself ahead of the na’kyrim.
“Who is that with you?” the voice asked him. “I can’t see. My eyes… Can’t find anything… What? You’ve brought some empty vessel with you? A body with no mind, no thought, no life in it?”
Orisian advanced, each halting stride a struggle. He could hear Kanin muttering something, but did not look. He kept his gaze fixed on the na’kyrim, who slowly became clear amidst the shadows as Orisian drew nearer.
He thought at first that Aeglyss must be dead. A naked, hairless, scabrous head on a lopsided and bruised neck. The face, what little Orisian could see of it, marred by a score of tiny wounds and blisters and blemishes. Streaked with blood. Fragile shoulders, the bony points of them showing through the gown. That gown itself, foully decorated with stains. The hands, one lying atop the other in Aeglyss’ lap, so wasted that Orisian could see every bone through the skin. Each finger ending in an open sore where the nail should have been.
The whole entirely withered and wretched and unmoving. Yet he was not dead, for Orisian heard him, and could feel his seething will all around. It ran dark, intrusive fingers over Orisian’s thoughts. This was the home and heart of all that poisoned the world and the Shared. Orisian recognised the teeming mass of unfettered emotion that clawed at him, could almost see it as a boiling black cloud that filled the hall and flooded out through the windows, rushing in great spreading columns out into the sky, blanketing the world. The anger and the bitter hatred, the self-loathing, the fear. It was all here, in its first and simplest form.
“Why do I catch the scent of Anain?”
The doubt, the almost childish puzzlement in those words, was so acute it made Orisian sigh in distant pain. He was losing himself beneath the onslaught of this formless, purposeless power. If he did not act, he would be unable to do so at all.
He lurched forward, sword raised.
“No,” the voice told him. “Kneel.”
And his sword slipped from his numb fingers, and his knees buckled and he went down heavily. He shrugged his arm free of the shield and it fell away from him.
“Who are you?” This time Orisian did not think the question was for him. “I can’t see you. Why can’t I see you?”
K’rina was shuffling closer to Aeglyss.
And then, quite suddenly: “Aeglyss,” K’rina said. “It’s me. It’s K’rina. I came for you.”
She had a beautiful voice. Light, and fine, and easy.
Orisian could feel Aeglyss’ confusion. It was so powerful, it became his, and he stared, uncomprehending, at K’rina as if he was seeing her for the first time. She stood straight, head held up. Alive and present. He felt a subtle transformation taking place inside him, inside everything. That confusion and the anger that underlay it was shifting, changing its shape. Those first emotions did not disappear, but a… joy was merging itself with them.
“K’rina?”
“I came for you, my son. My foster son. I felt your pain and knew I had to come.”
“Yes.” Orisian thought his skull might burst at the vigour in that single word.
“I am here for you.” K’rina smiled, stretching her arms out towards Aeglyss. “Come. We can be together.”
“Yes.” Again, it was exultant, rising, roaring upwards. “Let me see.”
Orisian felt all that force and power that swirled about him gathering itself, drawing itself in to coalesce around that one smiling woman, and within her. K’rina shook. She rocked from toe to heel. Her arms jerked. Her mouth opened.
There was a sudden lessening, a dampening of the cacophony raging inside Orisian. He rose to his feet, fighting back surges of nausea. He recovered his sword. When he straightened, testing the weight of the sword in his hand, K’rina had turned towards him and was staring at him.
“What?” she said through taut lips, but the voice was not truly hers now. It quivered with Aeglyss’ power, with his strident tone. “No.”
The snapped denial was like a blow in the face. Orisian closed his eyes and shook his head to try to clear it.
“No,” he heard again, and the sound rang around the hall, setting echoes of fear and anger running across the stone.
The anger found a home in Orisian, and burned in him and blurred his vision. Amidst that fierce seizure he knew what needed to happen. What needed to be done. He advanced towards K’rina.
“No,” cried Aeglyss yet again in K’rina’s voice.
“I’m sorry,” gasped Orisian through the waves of crushing fury that broke over him. He could feel blood running from his nose. There was liquid beading in his eyes, and he did not know whether that was blood as well or tears. He took another heavy pace closer to K’rina.
She moved suddenly, tottering on rigid legs towards him, toppling as if to fall at his feet. She was reaching for him, those delicate white hands splayed, coming towards his face. Aeglyss, Orisian shouted silently at himself. It is Aeglyss. Only him.
They were in each other’s embrace then, clasped together. K’rina’s hands closed themselves on O
risian’s head. His free hand settled on her waist, just firm enough to feel her hip bone. With his other hand he drove his sword through her midriff.
As steel entered flesh, so those fingers laid on his scalp suddenly tightened and pressed down, and Orisian was flung tumbling and scattering and attenuating out of his body.
He was there, with Aeglyss, inside the howling nothingness that was K’rina. Orisian was but a collection of thoughts pulled this way and that by the raging tempest. That tempest was both Aeglyss and what had awaited him here within the shell of the woman who had once been his loving guardian. Two vast powers contended, the one striving to drag itself back and up towards the waking world of surfaces and light and substance; the other flailing at the first, raking it, dragging it, entwining it, struggling to contain it and haul it away, down into the bottomless void beneath.
K’rina was cage and she was trap. There was nothing of her here, not the most tenuous echo or memory of who she had been or what she consisted of. Her body had been mere vessel for older, vaster powers. Orisian could feel himself coming apart, unable to shape coherent thought amidst such titanic expression of unbridled potencies.
Aeglyss-the maelstrom that was his rage and desire-was in the grip of the immense will of the Anain. Their furious struggle, a storm fit to encompass worlds, threw off gouts of raw sensation that tore holes in the fabric of Orisian’s consciousness, and left fragments of themselves drifting through his faltering thoughts.
He felt rasping tendrils of briar wrapped around his naked limbs, gouging great troughs into his flesh. He felt writhing tendrils forcing themselves into his mouth and into his throat, piercing him, growing into him. He felt clouds of leaves brushing over his skin; heard the creaking of ancient, mindful timber; tasted loam.
He was Aeglyss lying shivering in the snow, folded into the arms of his dead mother, feeling himself dying piece by piece of grief and fear. He was Aeglyss crucified upon the Breaking Stone, enduring the agonising revelation of possibility, feeling in the core of his being the immeasurable, unbounded wonder of the Shared opening itself to him and filling him like a flood bursting through a holed dyke.
He glimpsed, for a flashing, searing instant, the workings of the Anain mind, the many-in-one immensity of its slow movement through the insubstantial world within a world that was the Shared. He glimpsed their longing to silence the raucous, poisonous chaos Aeglyss inflicted; their deep and diffuse dismay at the suffering, the deformation, he brought to all the countless minds woven into the web of the Shared; their fear of him. And their cold and cruel calculation in taking the only living being he loved and snuffing her out of existence like the most trivial of flames on a candle, hollowing her out and making of her a snare for the monster loosed in the Shared.
Wave after wave of experience and awareness burned through Orisian, and each left him thinner than the last, each carried away some portion of his being. But then something changed, and what was rushing up towards him, blanking out all else in the enormity of its power, was no mere fragment, no glimpse. It was Aeglyss, his entirety.
And Orisian was suddenly back in his own body, standing in the hall in Kan Avor with K’rina’s hands pressed to his scalp, his sword in her stomach. Her eyes-black eyes, lightless-staring into his own. He could feel Aeglyss raging towards him, feel the buffeting of his approach and the purity of his deranged anger. He could not move. Those fingers crushing against his skull were like steel claws. His own muscles were lifeless and limp, unresponsive to his terror.
He understood. Aeglyss could not be killed with sword, or knife, or fire. No bodily harm could silence him as long as he could reach into the Shared, for that was where the essence of him dwelled now. He would be unending, and a part of him would reside, for ever, in every and any mind. Unless he could be contained in this na’kyrim’s body as it died. Unless the Anain could hold him there while Orisian’s blade stilled its heart. Some part of the Anain would die with him, for the prison they had made of K’rina could not be escaped, even by its makers; but Aeglyss would cease, and be gone from the world and from the Shared.
But now Aeglyss was ascending again. He was boiling up to the surface and pouring himself into Orisian.
“Yield to me,” Aeglyss howled. “Open yourself to me. Become a part of me.”
Blood ran thickly over Orisian’s lips now. He could taste it. He could feel it inside his ears, trickling out and down his neck. K’rina’s fingers were white-hot bars against his bone. He could feel himself collapsing beneath their impossible strength.
“No,” he thought.
“I will give you life,” Aeglyss roared. “Let me in.”
Orisian was diminishing, like mist exposed to the morning’s glare. He could still feel his pain, but he was moving slowly away from it. He could observe it from beyond its crippling weight. He could hear and feel the Anain rising in Aeglyss’ wake. They climbed from the deeps, reaching for him.
All the corruption of the Shared that Aeglyss had begun was now removed from it, locked with the na’kyrim’s mind inside K’rina. He poured it into Orisian. Every bitterness, every resentment, every hatred and fear and jealousy ran through him in place of blood, in place of the air in his lungs. Its coruscating intensity eroded him.
Out of it, though, out of that dark and misshapen memory of the Shared, he could find one thing. One choice. He could remember Lairis, and Fariel, and Kennet. Inurian and Rothe. He could smell his mother’s hair, and hear the golden music of her voice. He could see Fariel, standing silhouetted against the sun. He could embrace his sorrow at the loss of those who had gone before and without him.
“Release me,” commanded Aeglyss. “Give yourself to me.”
K’rina’s hands crushed in against his skull. Orisian could hear crackings, ruptures. The splitting and collapsing of bone. Light was flaring in his eyes. It would end if he but yielded. The Anain were there, enfolding Aeglyss. But the na’kyrim was flooding into Orisian, forcing his way between the last resistant strands of thought.
Such agonies resounded in Orisian’s head that he was blind and deaf and dumb. He felt hollow breakage in his temples, the back of his skull.
No. He did not speak it. He simply chose. And reached towards the beloved dead. As they faded, and he faded, he could feel Aeglyss falling away. Into the smothering Anain. Into the eternal, perfect cage of K’rina. Aeglyss screamed in impotent ire. And fell. And he faded, just as Orisian did. He faltered, just as Orisian did. He ceased.
The Inkallim came on and up. She lacked the room for elegant and deceptive swings in the tight confines of the stairwell, but still she was fast, and in her hands those swords could stab and probe with all the speed of daggers. Again and again, a rain of blows aimed at his chest and shoulders would draw Taim’s shield up, and then she would somehow have changed her grip on a sword and it was lancing down towards his feet. Each time he had to yield another step, and together they climbed, in that fierce dance, slowly towards whatever lay above.
At length, inevitably, Taim was too slow, and she laid a deep cut through the side of his boot into his calf. He felt the blood at once, even as he was steadying himself. His strength was flowing out, through that and his other wounds. He could not hope to sustain this effort for long. Already, he was breathing hard, and his shield was beginning to feel heavy on his arm. If he permitted this struggle to continue, he would die, and so would Orisian.
There would be, he knew, no more than a hint of an opening, so that was all he sought. When it came, he was not even confident it was so much as a hint. She was moving up and forward, both blades lunging up but a little way behind the rising of her body. His feet were as they had to be, his back heel braced against the riser of the next step. The natural flow of his weight was taking him forward. He launched himself, flung himself as high and hard as he could, aiming to pass over her shoulder. And he let his sword fall, for he needed his hand.
He made a club of his shield and punched it into her shoulder, driving the stub of th
e arrow still deeper into flesh. He reached for the strapping that held her scabbards crossways on her back with his free hand, locked his fingers under it, and rolled himself over her, surrendering his body to the plummeting fall beyond. Her twin swords darted up more quickly than he had expected, and he felt another slicing pain across his leg, but his weight had hit her by then, and he was falling into the open spiral of the stairwell beyond her, and taking her with him.
They fell entwined, clattering and flailing their way down. Taim felt a finger breaking as his hand was twisted free from its grip on the strapping, a blinding blow on his cheekbone that split the skin, bruises being hammered into his legs and flanks by the steps and the walls. His shield almost broke his nose. He could hear metal clanging off the stonework.
The final impact was punishing. Taim landed on his side, with his shield beneath him. A searing pain made him think for a moment he had snapped a bone in the arm pinned under him; there was no sound of breakage, though. He sucked in a chestful of air, lifting his dazed head and looking blearily about for the Inkallim. She was lying on her front beside him, blood streaming from a gash in her forehead. He could not see her swords. Her eyes were already blinking open, staring out at him through the blood coursing over them and through the lashes.
Taim’s body was a welter of small agonies and expansive aches. It screamed and spasmed in protest as he willed it to move. The Inkallim planted her hands and pushed herself up. Taim caught the hiss of pain as she did so, and took heart from it. He struggled to get his knees under him so that he could rise. The Inkallim was halfway up, but her injured shoulder, with that arrowhead buried deep inside it, buckled and dipped, and had her swaying.
Taim hit her backhanded across the mouth with the ball of his gloved fist. She rolled onto her side, into the base of the wall. Taim staggered to his feet, but lost his balance and had to put out a hand to stop himself falling back onto the stairs. A sudden stave of fire impaled his thigh, and he looked down to find her fingers clawing into the wound she had put there earlier. It was her weaker arm, for with her good one she was hauling herself upright, scraping herself up against the wall.
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