The Thane of the Horin Blood had no intention of showing any interest in the doings of these Kyrinin intruders. Had Wain not insisted upon it, he would never have allowed them — or Aeglyss — to enter the town. He led his Shield past the White Owls, through a gate and into the wide cobbled courtyard beyond. This was the extensive house that Wain and Aeglyss and all their companions now occupied. Previously the possession of some senior official in the Woollers’ Craft, it was an elaborate conglomeration of courtyards, workshops and apartments. The place still had the smell of wool and hides and oils lingering about it.
“Wain!” he shouted, standing in the centre of the courtyard. He turned around, pivoting on the stick, shouting her name again.
He saw her at a window. She peered out from under the eaves. Drops of water were falling from the lip of the tiles.
“With me,” Kanin snapped at Igris. “The rest of you remain here. Keep clear of the woodwights. I don’t want any trouble.”
He was disgusted, but not surprised, to find Wain in a bedchamber, watching over the slumbering form of Aeglyss. Kanin had thrown the door back with a clatter, but the na’kyrim did not stir. A single glance was enough to convince Kanin that the halfbreed was sick. His skin had a sheen of sweat, though its pallor was cold. He had thinned in the time since he had disappeared from Anduran, as if gripped by some wasting affliction. Kanin could see the shape of his bones across his brow, in his cheeks and jaw.
“There are woodwights slaughtering each other in the streets,” the Thane said to his sister. “What’s happening?”
“A dispute to be settled,” she said flatly. “There was an incident at Sirian’s Dyke, involving the Anain. Some of the White Owls wavered in their loyalty. It seems it became necessary to come to a final decision on the matter. It is best not to let doubts linger.”
Kanin stood in silence for a heartbeat or two. He was frightened. The sister he had loved and relied upon all his life was as unfamiliar to him now as the most distant stranger. Once they barely needed to speak to understand one another’s intent; now when they talked it was as if they did so in different languages. He had lost his only true friend here, and was bereft.
“Wain, listen to me. This is all wrong. What are you doing here, amongst woodwights and…” he stabbed a finger towards Aeglyss “.. and halfbreeds? This is no place for you, sister. We’ve won. The way to Kolglas is open to us now. We don’t need all this.”
She set herself between him and the bed, a resolute wall. Kanin stared at her in anguished confusion.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “We need him.”
“What are you doing? Wain, what are you doing? You’ll put yourself between me and this creature?”
His passion washed over her, finding no purchase.
“He is important to us. To everything,” she said placidly.
“This is madness.” In his desperation, Kanin cast about in vain for words that might rouse her from whatever torpor had taken hold of her mind. He wanted to seize her and shake her, but was terribly afraid that she would fight him if he did so.
“Not madness,” Wain insisted. “This is fate, revealing itself to us. You will see, I promise you. We are only at the beginning of things, Kanin. Great, wonderful things.” There was at last some emotion in her voice, but it was only a pained need for him to understand. “We draw near to the unmaking of the world, don’t you see? He is the herald of all that. The key to it.”
“Him?” Kanin shouted, surrendering to fury. He pointed again at the pallid, emaciated na’kyrim lying on the bed. “Look at him, Wain! He’s barely even alive.”
“You see only the least part of him there. There is one he wants at his side. He has gone in search of her, to guide her to him. He swims in oceans we cannot imagine, brother. He becomes them. I will watch over him until he wakes.”
Kanin cried out in disbelief. He could feel his face reddening, could feel anger shaking his hand.
“Come with me,” he implored her. “You need rest. We’ll go back to Anduran. We’ve done all that could be asked of us here.”
“I cannot leave him now,” Wain said, quite calm and soft but obdurate. “Do you not feel it? Sleeping or waking, he is spreading his shadow across us all. His will colours every thought, every mood now. It forces… change. Movement. Why do you suppose the Kyrinin have come to such strife amongst themselves? Why do you suppose our army fights with such vigour; is so hungry for death’s embrace? Because Aeglyss has changed, and changes all of us now.”
Kanin stepped to one side, thinking to pass around his sister. He did not know quite what he would do if he could reach Aeglyss: kill him, or merely wake him? He did not care.
Wain shifted to block his way again.
“I am to watch over him until he wakes.”
Kanin hung his head. He was unused to the kind of impotent uncertainty that filled him. Whatever doubts or hesitations might occasionally have beset him in the past, he had always been able to draw upon the reserves of his faith, or upon the support of Wain herself, to find a path. Now he felt bereaved, and the one he would otherwise have turned to for aid was the one he had lost.
“There is to be a council, Wain,” he murmured. “Fiallic, and the Eagle, and Goedellin and all the captains are gathering on the southern edge of the town. We should be there. There are decisions to be made. Fiallic wants to drive on to Kolglas and beyond as fast as the weather will allow. Temegrin resists.”
“Fiallic will have his way,” Wain said placidly. “You go. I will remain here. Our victory in this war — and we will have victory, brother — will not be shaped in the council tents of the Inkallim or the Gyre Blood. You will see, in time.”
Kanin left, desolate. Going down the stairs, his knee almost betrayed him. He slumped against the wall. Igris tried to help him down the last few steps, but Kanin pushed him off.
In the courtyard, he found his Shield clustered around a water barrel. They passed around overflowing cups as they watched the Kyrinin dragging the bodies of their fallen comrades in from the street. The dead were piled against a wall, beneath the overhanging eaves. Kanin angrily gathered his warriors and led them out.
Shraeve was arriving just as he left, at the head of a dozen or more mounted ravens of the Battle. Several bore fresh wounds. The Inkallim had fought savagely. Shraeve nodded down at Kanin as he hobbled past her horse.
“You’re going to the Eagle’s council, Thane?”
He nodded without looking at her, angry now — at himself and at Igris — for the presence of the walking stick upon which he leaned. The Inkallim had proved themselves valuable allies at last, but in Kanin’s mind their past betrayals of his Blood were not undone. And Shraeve was still an arrogant, abrasive presence.
“I thought you might be there too,” he muttered.
“I am not needed there. Fiallic is Banner-captain. He is the will of the Battle here. And I am interested in whatever your sister has got herself involved in. That halfbreed of yours really has proved to be remarkably surprising, don’t you think?”
At that, Kanin could not help but glare up at the woman.
“He’s mad,” he snapped. “And dying. You waste your interest, raven, by spending it on him.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. My instincts tell me otherwise. You might find, Thane, that a great and terrible fate is unfolding itself here. We will see, no doubt. We will see.”
V
The Elect’s every instinct, of body and mind alike, howled with alarm, cried out for flight. It took a determined effort to hold her gaze upon the abomination before her.
She had come here, climbing up through the keep of Highfast, in answer to a call only one closely attuned to the Shared could have sensed. It was the call of sudden change, of the sudden bursting in of brilliant light as a shutter is pulled back. She had been alone in the midst of the keep, returning from a brief, uncomfortable meeting with Herraic. They had been discussing the care of the Chancellor of the Haig Bloods, who lay u
nconscious, near death, in Herraic’s own quarters. The Captain was nervous, unsettled by such unforeseen disturbance of Highfast’s normal routines, and the meeting had been a little bad-tempered.
Cerys was still turning it over, wondering whether she should have been quite so curt with the man, when her mind was struck numb. Alone in a narrow corridor, she had staggered, would have fallen had she not reached out and pressed a hand to the dank wall. And then, shivering, she had tipped her head back and gazed up at the ceiling. But it was not blank stone that she saw, and not with eyes that she looked. Down, down, through the walls and the gutters and the passageways of Highfast, power was pouring. A dark, malignant torrent of delirious potency cascaded through the Shared, and she knew, without question, from whence it came.
So she had climbed, heavy-legged and fearful, hoping that someone else might join her before she reached her destination, someone to share the burden of witnessing whatever awaited her. And hoping, at the same time, that no one else would come, for she was the Elect and the na’kyrim of Highfast were her charge, and she must guard them against this. At the door of the Dreamer’s chamber she had hesitated. It had taken every fragment of will she could muster to force herself to open that door and to step inside.
It was not Tyn, not the man she had viewed with affectionate concern for all these years. It had his form, it was made of his stuff, but it was not him. The fact that this cadaverous figure moved and spoke gave it the semblance of life and familiarity, but they signified little more than the writhing of maggots beneath the hide of a dead cow. The maggots did not give the cow life. This was not the Dreamer awoken. Aeglyss wore Tyn’s body like a cloak.
“I don’t like this skin,” the abomination slurred, holding up a gaunt hand and staring at it.
“Set it aside, then,” said Cerys. “Remove yourself. Return to your own skin. Your proper place.”
Tyn grimaced. His gums were white, those teeth that remained jaundiced.
“What do you think that would achieve? He is gone, the one who inhabited this shell. Gone, utterly. His mind was a frail thing, almost wasted away. I cut it free. I watched it… melt into the Shared. You should not mourn it. There was almost nothing left of him even before I came.”
Cerys closed her eyes. She gripped the iron chain around her neck with one hand. She had no way to tell whether Aeglyss spoke the truth. If she could have reached out into the Shared with her mind, perhaps she might have caught some hint of Tyn’s presence and thus discovered whether or not he persisted, unhomed. But she no longer dared to let her awareness extend into even the shallowest fringes of the Shared. Such was the turbulence, the turmoil, surrounding Aeglyss that she knew she would be unable to hold on to any sense of herself. Already her head spun and she had to fight back waves of nausea.
“Don’t close those lovely eyes, lady. You should look upon me — look upon this — in wonder. I thought you were all scholars here. Aren’t you? Here is something you’ve never seen before.”
When she looked upon him, it was with all the contempt she could muster.
“You think yourself clever, do you?” she spat.
“I don’t think clever is quite the word for it. No, not clever. I don’t have the words that would fit this. But come, let’s not be cruel.”
The blanched head rocked on its flimsy neck. The mouth sagged open, giving out a faint groan. Cerys felt the tumult in her mind recede a fraction. Her thoughts were no longer buffeted quite so viciously this way and that. It was as if Aeglyss had sucked back into himself some small portion of whatever poison it was that leaked out from him into the Shared. The effort it took was evident from the tremors that shook Tyn’s shoulders. He barely controls this, the Elect thought. It is too much for him.
“You are uninvited,” she said. “I did not invite you into this place any more than Tyn invited you into his body.”
“You should thank me for the mercy I’ve shown him. Have you heard of the Healer’s Blade? Every healer who travels with the Black Road army carries one, to end the suffering of those whose wounds cannot be healed. This old man was no different. I cut him loose from this rotting shell. It was only an anchor, holding him back; he’d long ago surrendered himself to the Shared.”
“I will hold no debates with one who steals the bodies of others,” Cerys said and turned on her heel. The door was only a few paces away. She felt an urgent need to put its solid oak between her and this obscenity.
“You will not turn your back on me!” cried Aeglyss from Tyn’s throat. “You will not!” The words were ragged, but the fury that informed them was real. And it burned not only in that voice; in the Shared, it was a howling storm of ire.
The world lurched sideways beneath the Elect’s feet. Or was it she who veered and swayed? A wind blew through her mind, so loud and hard that it snatched away her thoughts and sent them swirling off into nothingness. The door for which she reached, the wooden peg that would lift its latch, receded, rushing away into the distance. The floor snapped up and crashed against her knees. Then it twisted itself, slammed against her head. The world had turned itself on its side. The bottom of the door stood vertically before her eyes. In the narrow gap between door and flagstone flooring, she saw the warm glow shed by some torch out in the passageway beyond. It looked safe, comforting and immensely distant. Someone was whispering in her ear.
“Don’t turn your back on me. This is a sanctuary, isn’t it? For my kind? For all our kind? That’s what I’d heard. You can’t cast me out. Never again.”
Billowing white cloth — the hem of Tyn’s gown — brushed over her face. Naked, near-skeletal feet were walking away from her. She heard the creak of the door on its ancient hinges and then it was closing, and the hunched, frail figure had passed out into the passages of Highfast.
“Cerys. Cerys.”
Someone was speaking her name. Why? Could they not see that she was asleep? She was so tired.
“Elect.” The voice was more insistent now. Someone was lifting her, sitting her upright. She wondered why her bed was so hard, so cold.
She opened her eyes. She was on the floor of the Dreamer’s bedchamber. Amonyn knelt in front of her, holding her arms, gazing at her with an expression of such pained concern that she wanted to cry and cup his face in her hands. She did not, because others stood behind him and, whatever there was between Amonyn and her, it was a private thing.
“Are you injured?” he asked her. She had always loved his voice.
“I don’t think so,” she murmured. “Only bruised. Help me up.”
He did so, and her dizziness was such that she might not have managed it without his help. She leaned against him. She felt sick.
“What happened?” she asked.
Amonyn shook his head. “We don’t know. Tyn came out, you did not, so we came looking for you.”
“Tyn. No, not Tyn. Where is he?”
“In the keep’s kitchens. Mon Dyvain and Alian are watching him, but he will not speak to them. We know it’s not Tyn, though. Is it.. Mon Dyvain claims it is Aeglyss.”
Cerys could only nod.
“How?” Amonyn asked.
“I have no idea,” she sighed.
“Everyone is frightened. He trails fear behind him. Bannain has gone to fetch Herraic and his warriors.”
Cerys forced herself to stand up straight. She breathed deeply, building walls against the pain and terror that were echoing through the Shared.
“I doubt whether swords can help us with this,” she said. “It would be Tyn they struck, not Aeglyss. I don’t know if the Dreamer is truly lost to us, but I’ll not see his body harmed until I am certain his mind is gone. Come, help me to the kitchens.”
“He has refused to speak to anyone.”
“He will speak to me. I am the Elect.”
They went down the stairway in silence. Fear and anxiety went with them, as present and immediate to their minds as heat or cold would be to their skin.
The na’kyrim had their own k
itchens, deep down in the rock of Highfast’s foundations. Those at the base of the keep served the castle’s human inhabitants only. Normally, Cerys imagined, there would have been some maids or cooks milling about. Now she found them deserted, save for Mon Dyvain, Alian and the unnatural intruder over whom they watched. The servants must have fled at the sight of this grim, corpse-like figure.
Tyn — she could not help but think of it as being the Dreamer still — was hunched over one of the kitchen tables, gorging himself on scraps left over from whatever meal the garrison had recently taken. He gave no sign of noticing the arrival of Cerys and the others who followed in her wake. Mon Dyvain glanced at her. He said nothing, but his confusion and distress were obvious.
Cerys drew closer to Tyn. Instinctively, she put the table between her and the gaunt figure. It was not, after all, Tyn.
Aeglyss looked up, fragments of meat protruding from between his lips.
“This body starves, yet no food seems to assuage the hunger,” he said indistinctly.
“He… it… has not left the chamber you stole it from for thirty years. You tax it beyond its limits.”
Aeglyss chewed and swallowed, all the time staring at Cerys. He held a stub of bread in one hand, but made no move to tear at it.
“What do you want here?” Cerys asked, as calmly as she could. Now, being so close to him, being the focus of his attention and thought, the nausea was returning. She rested a hand on the table top, partly to steady herself and partly to ensure some connection with the real, tangible world.
Aeglyss made a strangulated, choking sound. It took her a moment or two to recognise it for laughter.
“Isn’t it sanctuary that any of our kind coming here always want?”
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