The shortage of food was not the only thing grinding spirits down. Sickness was prowling the town, picking off the youngest and the oldest, the weak and the wounded. The youth who had shared Iavin’s watch since the siege began had died just two nights gone. Firewood was running short. Families were burning their chairs, their bed frames and roof timbers in their hearths.
The hardships of the mind were just as severe as those of the body. More than a week ago, just out of bowshot but within clear sight of the walls, a company of Horin-Gyre warriors had erected two huge poles. Spiked atop them were two heads: the heads, if the shouts of the enemy were to be believed, of Croesan, Thane of the Lannis-Haig Blood, and his son Naradin. Iavin could not be certain if it was true — his eyesight was not sharp enough to recognise those crow-pecked features at such a distance — but most within Tanwrye were inclined to believe it. After all, if Croesan still lived, he would have brought an army to their relief by now.
Iavin brushed snowflakes from his collar. An old woman had given him gloves — gloves that had once belonged to the husband the Heart Fever took from her, as it had taken both of Iavin’s parents — and without them he suspected his hands would have been too cold to hold his spear. He rolled his shoulders, trying to loosen the stiff muscles.
A point of light where there should have been none caught his eye. To the north, high up and far out in the heart of the Vale of Stones, a torch was burning. All else in that direction was utter darkness. There was no moonlight on this cloud-bound night. The yellowish fragment of fire bobbed like a solitary bright moth. Iavin blinked, suspicious that his cold and exhausted eyes were playing tricks. But the light remained, and one by one others appeared.
Iavin heard a muffled call from somewhere along the wall, and answering shouts. He was not imagining it, then. Others were seeing the same thing. Even as he watched, any last vestiges of doubt were dispelled. A long tongue of fire was slowly winding its way over a saddle in the pass. Scores of torches, carried by scores of hands, were coming south through the falling snow.
Horns sounded to call Tanwrye’s captains to the walls. There were signs of movement amongst the besieging army, too. Figures passed to and fro in front of the campfires, orders were shouted. And the torches flowing out of the Vale of Stones were in the hundreds now. Iavin watched the fiery river in a kind of numb amazement. It was almost beautiful, this vision of light and fire in the winter’s night; it would have been beautiful, had it not told him that death was coming for him, and for everyone in Tanwrye.
At dawn, they were still coming. Thousand upon thousand, company after company, the Black Road was flooding through the Vale of Stones. The rocky, snow-covered ground around Tanwrye was already thick with tents and with seething crowds. A constant rumble of noise drifted up and over the besieged town, like a never-ending peal of distant thunder.
Every warrior who could still walk had come to the walls to witness this gigantic assembly of their foe. Iavin Helt should have been resting by now, his watch long done, but nobody expected any rest today, unless it was the final, unending kind offered by the Sleeping Dark. He glanced down the line of grim-faced men that stretched along the top of the wall. There were not nearly enough of them to withstand the coming storm.
It was not only the number of these newly arrived foes that had stilled any hope in the hearts of Tanwrye’s defenders, but their nature. Sometime in the night, amidst that river of blazing torches out of the Stone Vale, the Battle Inkall had arrived. So many of their great raven standards were now visible in the heart of the enemy camp that older, more experienced men than Iavin had shaken their heads in disbelief and despair. Tanwrye’s garrison included some of the finest warriors the Lannis-Haig Blood could muster; not one of them thought himself a match for the ravens of the Battle Inkall.
Iavin’s stomach was knotted and growling. He could not tell whether it was hunger or fear. His throat felt tight, his mouth dry. His mind had emptied itself of thoughts, as if it too had been numbed by the night’s awful cold. Hidden behind heavy clouds, the sun climbed the sky. The day grew no warmer, the light no less subdued. Eventually, in the late morning, surges of movement spread through the Black Road camp. Like some great beast bestirring itself, the army rumbled into motion.
The assault was controlled, precise and overwhelming. It rolled on through the afternoon. The few stretches of outlying wall and palisade that had still been held by Tanwrye’s defenders were stormed one after another. A few survivors made it back to the main town walls; most of their comrades died at their posts.
Without pause, the Black Road host pressed closer and closer to the town. Beneath a sheltering cloud of crossbow bolts and arrows and stones, ladders were brought to the walls. So thick and relentless were the flights of missiles that those on the battlements who were not struck at once could only hunch down and press themselves against the stone, trying to ignore the cries and pleas of the less fortunate. Iavin, crouched low atop the tower, clenched his eyes shut. A hand was gripping his ankle. He knew it was an old man called Hergal, who had risen from his sickbed to come to the wall just that morning. He was already dead.
“Get up, get up!” someone was shouting.
It took a great effort of will, but Iavin opened his eyes and looked around.
Men were surging past him, going to meet a black-haired woman who was vaulting over the parapet. Her jerkin and breeches were dark leather, studded with metal. Iavin rose to his feet. It seemed absurd and impossible that the Inkallim — the infamous ravens of the Black Road — were here, within a few paces of where he stood. Hergal’s dead hand fell away from his ankle.
The woman ducked inside the first warrior’s blow, then drove upwards. She clamped one hand on his throat, stabbing her short sword into his stomach with the other. In a single movement she heaved the dying man backwards, knocking another warrior aside. She wrenched her sword free and spun to kick someone in the groin.
Iavin lunged at her with his spear. Her flank was exposed. He would strike her in the stomach, on the left side. He could see it happening, see her dying, in his mind’s eye. Yet she rolled away and the spearpoint glanced off her hip bone. Somehow — Iavin could not understand how — she turned so quickly that she had hold of his spear before he could recover. She was far stronger than he had ever imagined a woman could be. He let go of the spear and fled as more dark-haired figures spilled over the wall.
He ran blindly down from the tower and into the town, without a single glance back. A captain he did not know was gathering men beside a well. He seized Iavin’s arm, arresting his flight so abruptly that both of them almost fell.
“Stand your ground!” he shouted in Iavin’s face. “Arm yourself!”
Iavin reeled, his mind still a blur of noise and images. Someone thrust a short sword into his hand and he stared down at it. There was blood already on the blade.
“With me,” the captain was crying now, and Iavin was caught up in the rush and carried back towards the walls.
There was fighting on one of the ramps that slanted up to the battlements. No sign of Inkallim here, Iavin vaguely recognised as he pushed up with the others to join the fray. He fought against men who wore the ordinary woollen clothes of farmers or artisans, half of them armed with nothing more than clubs or small axes. The ramp was narrow, without the room for skill or precision. Iavin pushed and stabbed at whatever body appeared before him, concentrated only on not losing his footing on the incline. Time drifted.
There was a sharp blow on his head and for a moment he could see nothing. He could hear himself shouting, perhaps screaming, and felt some blade sliding across his arm and opening it. His sight leaked back as he was crushed against the low wall that bounded the ramp.
Then, “Back, back!” he heard.
The press of bodies shifted and swayed. Iavin was suddenly freed and he stumbled, slithering, down the ramp. He sprawled across a corpse and gagged at the corrupt stench of blood and opened guts. He scrambled to his feet and staggere
d off down the cobbled roadway. He was panting, heaving air into aching lungs. He could taste bile in the back of his mouth.
Iavin found himself in a small market square. He looked around. There were thirty or forty other warriors close by, some kneeling with spears and shields readied. A great block of sheds stood nearby. For the goats and sheep, Iavin remembered, that they bought and sold here. There was a massive stone-built hay barn, too. He was at the very heart of Tanwrye. There was nowhere else to fly to from here.
They came howling and boiling out from the side streets: Tarbain tribesmen, covered in bone and stone talismans. They swept up to the knot of Lannis-Haig warriors, flowed around it and embraced it like the flooding sea taking hold of a rocky outcrop. Iavin hacked and slashed. The clatter of weapons and stamping of feet, cries of horror and fury, all swelled and filled his ears. He felt blows against his arms and chest, flickers of pain carried away on the anger that seethed in him. Then on his side: a smack and a sudden numbness. He saw the blade darting back, saw a blur of his own blood. Darkness came rushing up, reached for him and flung its veil across his eyes.
Iavin still heard the terrible cacophony as he fell, but in a moment it too dissolved into the dark. His was only one amongst the many deaths on the day Tanwrye, the bastion so long believed to be impregnable, fell.
All through the Antyryn Hyr, the Thousand Tree-clad Valleys, the White Owls were moving. Messengers had gone out from the great vo’an at the heart of the forest, racing along the secret ways that Kyrinin feet had trodden for hundreds of years. From every one of the clan’s winter camps, they had summoned a spear a’an to come. So the White Owls ran beneath the leafless canopy of Anlane and a cloud-thick sky. They came silent and swift to answer the Voice’s call.
Five lifetimes ago, thousands of the White Owl had fought and died in the War of the Tainted. Only the Heron, Bull and Horse had fielded greater companies against the seething masses of humankind. The Huanin, who lived in a waking dream of their own splendour, might imagine that such strength was gone for ever. If so, they were misled by their own pride-fattened ignorance. The warband that had crossed into the Car Criagar to hunt Fox had been but a fraction of the clan’s spears. The vast deeps of the Thousand Tree-Clad Valleys held numbers unguessed by the Huanin. Many hundreds of warriors were on the move as the winter deepened and the first full snows of the season began to fall.
Rumours ran with the spear a’ans, twisting and thickening, feeding off one another. There was a na’kyrim, it was said, child of a long-dead White Owl mother. A man who had been on the clan’s Breaking Stone, the great boulder the Walking God had left behind, and — unthinkably, impossibly — had not died. Instead, the whisperers said, he had been changed. It was because of him, and because of what he had become, that the spears were now gathering.
The ground in front of the Voice’s lodge was hard and bare, sculpted by the touch of thousands of feet over many years. Song staffs, entwined with skulls and feathers and ivy, stood there. The people gathered before them, facing the lodge. The woven anhyne looked on from one side. The smoke of the ever-burning torkyr, the constant flame of the clan, drifted from behind the lodge.
Not all had gathered outside the Voice’s lodge, but many did. They came because they wanted to see and hear this na’kyrim who had stirred up such tumult; some because they thought this man must die before his presence caused more chaos, others because the scent of his power filled their hearts and minds with a febrile hope.
The na’kyrim lifted his head as he emerged from the lodge, casting his half-human eyes over the crowd. At the touch of that gaze, every man, woman and child felt a prickling of their skin, a drying in their throat. The na’kyrim was frail and drained, still ravaged by his long hours on the Breaking Stone, yet his presence was potent; arresting. It reached inside them, like an invisible hand.
He advanced slowly, carefully. The Voice came behind him. She walked with her head down.
Aeglyss took a great, deep breath as if flushing out his lungs with the clean air of the vo’an, the cleansing smoke of the torkyr. One of the kakyrin, the keepers of bones and stories and memories, stepped forwards from amongst the throng. He was an old man, the twofold kin’thyn tattoos on his face faded and weathered. His necklace of bone and owl feathers rustled as he walked. He stood in front of Aeglyss, but the na’kyrim ignored him.
“Is he not to be returned to the Breaking Stone, then?” the kakyrin enquired levelly. It was impossible to say whose answer he sought. He was examining Aeglyss through narrowed eyes.
“It’s not… I can’t be,” Aeglyss murmured.
“Is he mind-sick?” the kakyrin asked.
“Perhaps,” whispered the Voice. She took a few paces closer. “But it is a strange kind of mind-sickness. The Breaking Stone could not contain his spirit. Do you not feel it? He thickens the air with power. The White Owl have not had a child such as this in half a thousand years. Longer.”
“He betrayed us before. Made false promises. His words, his lies, they are more potent than anything you or I might utter. He can make nets out of words, to cast over our minds.”
“He says he was the one betrayed, by the Huanin of the Road. He says the false promises he made were made at their behest, and that he thought them to be true when he spoke them. The thought is in my mind that I believe him in this, and it is my own thought, unsnared in any net of his making.”
“You think he will give the clan back the strength it once had?”
“He may. We were mighty once, before the City fell. None then would have dared to steal our lands, fell our trees, drive our hunters from their summer grounds. We have been less than we were for a long time.”
The kakyrin sniffed. “As has every people, of every land.” He shook his head. His necklace rattled. “I see only a part-human whose mind has rotted.”
Aeglyss cupped the old man’s face in his hands. The kakyrin started backwards, but Aeglyss held him fast and the impulse to recoil seemed to fail almost before it had taken hold. The kakyrin began to groan. Aeglyss shook. His eyes rolled up slowly until the pupils were hidden.
“Do you see?” he rasped. “Do you see?”
The kakyrin ’s legs went slack. He slumped, only Aeglyss’s grip on his face keeping him from falling to the ground.
“Do you see?” Aeglyss demanded again, more distantly this time. The crowd of onlookers seethed; there were cries of anger, alarm.
“Release him,” the Voice said to Aeglyss, putting a hand on his arm. She spoke the words not as a command but softly.
Aeglyss blinked and looked down at the old woman, then at the man. His hands fell back to his sides. The kakyrin slumped to his knees, and swayed there.
“Have you harmed him?” the Voice asked.
“No,” breathed Aeglyss. “Not so much as you harmed me by placing me on the Stone. But I have forgiven you. Forgiven all of you.” He called it out loudly. “If I’ve been broken, it was only to be made afresh. Thus, I forgive you.”
“All the world,” the kakyrin was mumbling. “All the world.”
A warrior stepped out from the crowd, his spear levelled at Aeglyss, dark intent fixed in his eyes. The na’kyrim held him with a flashing, savage glare.
“You are my mother’s people,” cried Aeglyss, and the warrior shrank from the cry. “You are my people. My heart beats in time with yours, and whatever mistakes there have been in the past are done with now. Forgiven, forgotten. I am not as I was, and the White Owls shall not be as they were. Together we shall make such a beginning as the world has never seen. All things can change. If I will it.”
Children wailed in distant huts. The bravest of warriors felt tremors in their hands; the wisest of heads spun; the keenest of ears rang with endless echoes of anger and hunger.
“Have I not already given you the blood of the Fox to bathe your spears in? Has this not already been a bitter season for your enemies? More warriors now wear the kin’thyn than the clan has seen in a lifetime.”
There were cries of assent, some dazed, some eager. There was weeping too, in the great crowd.
“If I will it,” Aeglyss repeated, “all things can change. Let your will run with mine. I shall be the strength in your arms, the swiftness in your legs. You shall be the spear in my hands. I will bind the Huanin of the Road to us with bonds they cannot break; I will bend them until their arms serve our purposes. Long enough we have suffered. Long enough we have been less than we once were. Now all the world will be set into two camps: those who are friends to the White Owl and those who are enemies. And our enemies shall fall. They shall crumble. It is…”
He faltered, cast his stare up towards the flat sea of cloud. A thin, icy snow was beginning to fall. The na’kyrim sighed and fell to his knees. His head tipped back and he stared into the bleak, unbounded expanse of the sky.
“I shall be servant to all your hopes and dreams,” he said quietly. “I shall make them real.”
Though he spoke softly, all heard. And many felt belief unfolding itself in their hearts like a dark flower.
VI
The woman was holding something up to Orisian, but he could not quite see what it was. There were scabs on her face, whether from injury or disease he could not tell.
“Please take it, sire,” the woman said. “It was my husband’s. He died well, at Grive.”
She was seated, with dozens of others, at the side of the road. It was a short street, in Kolkyre’s northern quarter, lined with shacks and crude shelters. It had been largely uninhabited until recently, the refuge of just a few impoverished or sickly souls. Now new huts were springing up, made out of scavenged wood. Old, abandoned hovels were once again occupied. The recent arrivals had come out of the Glas valley. They were Orisian’s people, fleeing all the way here to Kolkyre after the fall of Anduran and Glasbridge. Only those without friends or family, without the coin to buy better shelter, without a strong will or resilient hope, ended here on this squalid street.
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