“This is what I wanted you to see. To understand,” he said softly. “It is not the Black Road that rules here. It is me. Or what burns in me.”
Mordyn was left, for a time, seated on wet stone, his back resting against the stub of a fallen pillar. His memory, his sense of himself, came and went. He was not certain how he had come to this place. It was some kind of empty hall, only half-roofed. There was wet moss beneath his fingers, growing in the cracks of the flagstone floor.
He could hear voices, sometimes loud and near, sometimes faint like weather far beyond a distant horizon. There were people standing close to him. One was the Horin Thane’s sister. She watched him, but did not speak to him. Warriors were gathered about her. Her Shield, perhaps. He was almost certain that the women of the Gyre Bloods sometimes had Shields, in mimicry of their menfolk. It was not only his hunger, or the pain in his head, that made it so difficult to dredge up such fragments of knowledge. To his profound distress, his mind, always his most prized possession, was unruly, sluggish. His every thought writhed and slipped away from him almost as soon as it was begun. There was something in the air of this place, in its foetid, decaying presence, that was inimical to sense and to order.
No, he told himself. That was a half-truth. It was the strange, mad na’kyrim. He was the source of the imbalance that afflicted everything here. Somehow, he was staining everything with his own delirium. Mordyn felt as if he had fallen into some fool’s story, of the mad times when halfbreeds wielded awful power, and bent the shape of the world to fit their own desires.
He realised he was slumping slowly to one side, his head lolling down towards his shoulder. He struggled to right himself, sighing at the discomfort such movement caused him. There were Kyrinin in the chamber now. His erratic vision turned them into tall, sweeping blurs. A vast terror shook the Chancellor of the Haig Bloods then, feeding off his helplessness and his pain. It receded, but left him feeling like a child, lost and confused, surrounded by things he could not understand.
The na’kyrim was there, face to face with Wain nan Horin-Gyre. Mordyn longed to close his eyes and shut out these vile visions, but he was transfixed. The sickly, half-human Aeglyss was smiling, whispering in tones of silver and velvet, cupping the woman’s chin, tipping her head back, tracing the line of her lips with a single fingertip. It looked obscene. Then the na’kyrim was turning his head, looking towards Mordyn. The smile remained in place. Splitting, bleeding lips stretched back to expose yellowing teeth. Mordyn felt that terror stirring again, reaching its tendrils up towards him.
“You look hungry, Chancellor. Shall I have someone fetch you food?” Even as he stared at Mordyn, and spoke to him, the na’kyrim ’s finger was stroking the skin of Wain’s throat, a vile caress. “Mutton, perhaps. It’s spitted outside.”
Mordyn blinked. He could not tell whether he was hungry or not, whether the emptiness he felt was of the stomach or the heart.
“Go and cut our honoured guest some meat, Wain,” Aeglyss murmured. He came and squatted down in front of the Chancellor.
“You’re fragile, Shadowhand. It hurts, I know. But you are not going to die. You will heal.”
“How… how did I come here?”
“Ha! A shame you slept through the whole adventure! I stole you away, from the greatest castle in all the Bloods. I did, and my White Owls. Oh, Chancellor, what wonders you poor, common Huanin are deprived of. What marvels you are blind to. I can feel the grass beneath their feet when they run, I can hear the wind in the trees above them. I can whisper in their heads and in their hearts, and they will do as I bid them, even if they never hear me.”
Someone else was moving behind the na’kyrim. Mordyn squinted, but his eyes were rebellious and faltering. He could see only that there was someone standing there, a woman perhaps. Hair as black as ink; something — sticks? The hilts of swords? — protruding from her shoulders.
“Is this truly the famed Shadowhand?” he heard her ask. A cold voice. He heard nothing in it save the wintry north, and hardness.
“Ah,” Aeglyss whispered without looking round. “They are interested in you, Chancellor. Of course they are. You’re a prize indeed. The ravens come to circle you. Perhaps they think your corpse is ready to be picked clean.”
“He could be of great value to us.” the woman said.
“Us?” Mordyn could see that Aeglyss was smiling. “I haven’t decided yet, Shraeve. I haven’t decided what his value is. But remember, in the days to come, that it was I who found him, I who brought him here.”
Wain returned and knelt at Mordyn’s side. She pressed a fragment of greasy mutton into his mouth. Its juices filled him with an urgent hunger. He chewed it and swallowed it down. It rasped a hot, painful track down his gullet.
“I don’t know what hold this madman has over you, lady,” he whispered, “but you must take me away from him. You must talk to me. I can make agreements…”
“Be quiet.” Aeglyss had risen to his feet. He kicked Mordyn’s foot. “She won’t bargain with you. Leave us, Wain. Wait for me. I will come to you soon.”
Mordyn watched in despair as the sister of the Horin-Gyre Thane meekly dropped a few more slivers of meat into his lap and retreated. He was not the only one to observe her departure with interest.
“Does Kanin know you’ve got her so well-trained?” the woman Aeglyss had called Shraeve asked. “Whatever you’ve done to her, he’ll not forgive you for this. Tell me, for I would know: is this the work of Orlane? Do you think yourself him, reborn?”
“Don’t speak of her,” Aeglyss snapped. “Or of things you don’t understand.” Mordyn felt the command like a blow upon his breastbone, a lance punched through his chest, even though it was not directed at him. The tall woman withstood it. But she could not meet the halfbreed’s gaze. She bent her head away. Inkallim, Mordyn thought, belatedly understanding Aeglyss’s reference to ravens. Even Inkallim will not face him down.
They locked Mordyn in a chamber that stank of rotting weed and noisome mud. A grey-brown sludge covered its floor. Black and green mould patterned its walls, following each seam and crack. Carved pillars flanked the door. A stone bench was cut into the bay of the window. There was a wide grate in which fierce fires must once have burned. Now there was nothing, save the cracked wooden pallet on which Mordyn lay, and the thin moth-holed blankets they gave him to cover himself.
He lay there and willed his fear into submission. He denied the pulsing ache in his head until it slipped into the background. He begged himself to rise above the harrying doubts and distractions that dogged his every thought. Slowly, in the night’s darkness, he gained some small mastery over it all, and was, for a time, himself again. There was always an answer to every question; a chink in the defences of every obstacle that lay athwart his path. He struggled to make himself believe that, alone amidst the city’s foul decay, and tried not to think of what lay outside the locked door. He tried not to imagine what might lie beyond that one cold night’s horizon.
VI
“I’m told that Avann oc Gyre held audiences here, in this very chamber, before he fell foul of the High Thanes of Kilkry.”
Aeglyss walked slowly, a little unsteadily, around the periphery of the columned hall.
“Do you like it, Chancellor?” he asked.
They were high here, by the broken-topped standards of Kan Avor: two storeys above the mud that passed for ground; two flights of coiled, slippery steps above the highest water marks the flood had imprinted on the buildings. The planking of the hall’s wooden floor was intact, but overlaid, in places, by moss and slime. Great thick beams still supported the roof above, but there were holes that had admitted the rain and the wind and light. The columns on which the beams rested were pitted and eroded. The stone bench that stood at the far end of the hall was spotted with patches of lichen. There was a smell of soft, saturated timber.
Mordyn Jerain hardly noticed the damp and the decay and the stenches any more. Three days and three nights he had been here, trapped
in this mad, corrupt nest of snakes. He thought it was that long, at least. His senses, his awareness of what was around him, came and went. Sometimes, momentarily, he forgot who he was. The only thing he never forgot was Aeglyss. The malignant presence of the halfbreed was everywhere, in the walls, in the air he breathed, in the interstices of his thoughts. When he slept, the Shadowhand dreamed dreams that he did not believe were even his own. He dreamed of forests, and of fires, and murder and rage, and all of it, he was almost certain, was born of this creature who was twisting the world into an imitation of his own diseased mind.
Mordyn’s body was recovering slowly. But his heart, his spirit and his hope were being picked, bit by bit, apart. He had given up trying to speak to Wain nan Horin-Gyre. She was nothing more than an obedient hound at the halfbreed’s heel, of no more consequence or significance than the Kyrinin who came and went at his command, or the scores of men and women who milled about Kan Avor’s rubble-strewn streets. There was, Mordyn now knew, nothing here that mattered save Aeglyss. But he had no idea what to do with that knowledge, or even where it had come from, how it had infested his mind. He had never imagined that the world held such things as this halfbreed. He had no weapons in his armoury of manipulation and influence that could serve against such an opponent. And though despair was no part of his nature, it was taking hold of him.
“Come here,” Aeglyss said, beckoning Mordyn to join him at one of the windows.
The halfbreed laid a spindly arm across Mordyn’s shoulders. Its touch filled the Chancellor with revulsion, though there was no weight to it.
He was alone here with the na’kyrim. Wain and some of her warriors waited outside, on the stairway. He could kill Aeglyss before they could possibly intervene; throttle the vile life out of him perhaps, or beat his head to a pulp on the stone window ledge. He could do it. His body was strong enough. Not his heart, though. Not his will. This man cannot be killed, some awed part of his mind whispered to him, any more than the wind could be dragged out of the sky and crushed in your hands; any more than winter could be slain, with axe or fire or storm of arrows.
“Look at that.” Aeglyss extended a crooked, wiry finger.
Below, in a wide street, a crowd was gathered. It surged back and forth, like a mountain stream plunging and swirling in a rocky bowl. In its midst were three figures: mud-streaked men clad in simple clothes, flailing about with clubs and staves.
“Thieves,” Aeglyss whispered in Mordyn’s ear, holding him close. “Farmers who lost their land, I suppose. They stole food from us in the night, killed one of Wain’s guards. They thought themselves safe, hiding down by the river. But no. My White Owls can find anyone, if there’s a trail to follow.”
The crowd — a jumbled mixture of warriors, and Inkallim, and men and women as ragged as the farmers were — howled and roared and drove the captives up and down the street. One of the men slipped and went down. The throng flowed over him, trampling.
“Can you feel it?” Aeglyss asked. “The need they have, for blood.”
Mordyn shivered, though he was not cold.
“I don’t know, you see,” Aeglyss hissed, “whether it is mine or theirs. Whether I… make it, or whether it came here in their minds, already nestled there. There’s too much I don’t know. Don’t understand.”
A rock struck one of the farmers on the side of the head. Blood at once ran down his face, and he staggered, lifting his hands in a vain effort at protection. Someone stabbed a spear into his stomach. A sword slashed in and lifted a part of his scalp away from his skull. The man fell, silently.
A small band of Kyrinin appeared at the end of the street.
“Ah, look now,” Aeglyss breathed. “Now they’ll have what they want. Now the beast that’s in them will be fed.”
He leaned forwards out of the window, his arm slipping away from Mordyn’s shoulder as he did so. The Chancellor sagged a little at the sudden removal of that terrible, weightless burden.
“Let the White Owls have that last one,” Aeglyss shouted down. Every face, every gaze, was drawn by his cry. The sound was not loud, but penetrating, as if it was the voice of the city itself, emerging from the stone and the earth. “Let his punishment be at their hands.”
He looked back to Mordyn and smiled. The crowd parted and the few Kyrinin came softly through it. The last surviving prisoner was weeping and shaking. He made no attempt to flee; simply stood there, and beat his chest in despair. The Kyrinin took him and bound his hands and his feet and laid him down in the middle of the street. A perfect circle of silent, attentive observers formed. There was an awful stillness about the scene: an expectant, anticipatory thrill. Mordyn could feel it himself, the yearning for this moment to culminate in cathartic violence.
The Kyrinin tore the man’s shirt from his body. Two of them produced knives. They began to carve long strips of skin away from his chest.
Aeglyss closed his eyes and lifted his head back and breathed in deeply, as if inhaling the screams.
“Sit, Chancellor. You must be tired.” He took Mordyn to the ancient bench and settled him onto it. “Thanes sat there once. And now you.”
Mordyn had to press his hands down against the rough stone to hold himself steady and erect. Aeglyss lowered himself onto the floor and sat there, cross-legged. The robe he wore was filthy, its hem frayed. He was looking at his fingernails. Delicately, he lifted one away from its bed. It fell like the petal of dead flower. Aeglyss grunted. He lifted the exposed fingertip to his mouth and licked it, watching Mordyn now.
“Too much for this poor body,” Aeglyss said. He sounded sad and tired. “My exertions in securing your presence here… I reached a little too far, I think. I am learning, but too slowly. Too slowly.”
He coughed, and bloody saliva crept over his chin. He dragged the back of his hand across it.
“I don’t know what to do with you, Shadowhand. You’re too precious a thing to be given up to the rest of them. They’d squander you. Waste you. Yet… oh, to put her aside would be too much for me. Too cruel.”
He hugged himself, wrapping his chest in his arms. Rocking. There was a sudden redoubling of the screams outside. Mordyn started at it. Aeglyss did not seem to hear it.
“I can’t. I can’t. How has it come to this? What did I do that such miseries should be visited upon me? I had no choice. That’s the truth in this. They’ll none of them love us, Shadowhand. Never. No matter what service we do them. They’ll always try to cast us out, curse our names, sooner or later. Or try to kill us. They’ll stake us up on stones.”
He sprang to his feet and strode forwards. Mordyn felt as though his skull would split asunder, such was the pressure building there. He closed his eyes, but still saw shadows and light moving on the inside of his eyelids. All reason was leaking out of his world. The na’kyrim ’s voice was within him, just as much as it was without. Nothing would still it. A fingertip prodded at his eyelid. He jerked his head to one side. A hand brushed his cheek.
“You think they love me now?” Aeglyss asked softly. “The White Owls, the Black Road? All these cold hearts yearning for slaughter? They don’t love me. None save Wain. Perhaps you think I love them? The White Owls are the people of my mother, but I don’t love them. Horin-Gyre is the Blood of my father, but I’ll not love them.”
Those taut lips were at Mordyn’s ear now. The words spilled from them, a mad, angry tumble. Mordyn heard them, but barely grasped their meaning. It was the sound of inchoate madness that held him, that made his heart flutter.
“I’ll climb up on their backs, I’ll raise myself up on the mounds of their corpses. But I’ll not love them. There’s no love, for the likes of you and I. We’re the outsiders, the hounds they want to run at their heels. They work us hard, and feast on the fruits of our labour, but it’s scraps from the table we get. We were born in the wrong place, or of the wrong father, or at the wrong time. You think Gryvan oc Haig loves you for what you’ve done for him? No!”
Mordyn groaned. He would fa
ll away into unconsciousness in a moment, and he longed for that release. But even as he thought of it, the battering waves of darkness receded.
“Forgive me,” he heard Aeglyss say. “I must learn restraint. There is so much I still have to learn. I know what I must do with you, Chancellor. It’s just… it’s just that I fear to…”
The halfbreed’s voice was moving away. Mordyn cautiously opened his eyes. Aeglyss was stumbling across the floor, his feet scraping over the wooden boards. He drifted around one of the soaring stone columns.
“I’ve known from the first moment I found you. I made terrible sacrifices to bring you here. Terrible. Someone… important slipped through my fingers. The only one I could have trusted. The only one. Stolen from me, because I indulged myself; lingered in that awful place, and called my warriors to fetch you out of there. I lost her. And gained you, Shadowhand.
“Now that I have you, there will be none to gainsay me; none to deny me. They will not turn me away from their tables when they see that I hold the famed Shadowhand. They will not shut me out from their councils. No, they will beg me, they will entreat me, they will seek my favour. Mine! You can aid me, but I know… I’ve learned that aid is not given. Not when I ask for it. I must take it. Take what I need to put myself beyond their reach, beyond everyone’s reach.”
He stopped, poised in mid-stride, teetering like a frail, half-felled tree. He cocked his head to one side.
“Here they come. Now we shall see. Now there will be a decision.”
He looked towards the door, and it swung back on its rusted hinges. Wain stood there, seeing and dismissing the hunched figure of the Chancellor with a single sharp gaze.
“Temegrin is coming,” she said. “He has fifty riders at his back.”
Aeglyss nodded heavily. “He means to kill me, I think. Well. It’s good. Let him, if he can.”
More than two hundred marched out to meet the Eagle of Ragnor oc Gyre’s army, and even then Kan Avor was not emptied. Kyrinin warriors, Battle Inkallim, Wain and her Shield and fifty of her Blood’s spears, a hundred folk from the valleys and mountains of the distant north. They walked out through the city’s tumbled wall and onto the icy, wet fields beyond. Aeglyss and Wain led them, with Shraeve a few paces behind, and Mordyn Jerain at their side. They had put a cord around the Chancellor’s neck, and led him liked a leashed dog.
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