Fall of Thanes

VIII

Taim Narran cast an experienced eye over the host of the Black Road as it edged its way up the road towards Ive. Only a few hundred, he thought, yet the knowledge brought none of the relief he might have expected. Rather, he felt an empty despair at the prospect of inevitable slaughter, and the knowledge that victory or defeat today would bring no release for any save the dead. There must be light somewhere amidst this darkness, he thought, but he seemed to have lost the ability to detect its gleam.

“Move the horsemen out to the right flank,” he said quietly. “They don’t look to have any horses of their own. Perhaps we can get in behind them.”

He did not look round, but heard the riders galloping off to deliver his commands. Everyone, whether of Lannis or Kilkry stock, deferred willingly to him here. A certain martial fame-nothing he treasured or relished-had long ago attached itself to his name, and the people of Ive imagined him to be something he himself had struggled to recognise for some time: a great warrior and leader. They trusted in him to save them, and their town. It was a burden he bore without protest, but not gladly, and not lightly. Never lightly.

There were banners and standards from several of the Black Road Bloods scattered through the approaching army, yet Taim could see little sign of ordered companies or disciplined array. The northerners came on in a jostling mass, spreading out into a long, thick rank on either side of the road. There were no obvious Captains, just these hundreds of men and women come together into one huge blood-hungry crowd. And they bore a grim forest in their van: dozens of tall spears jostling for space against the grey sky, each topped with a severed head or bearing strips of flayed skin that stirred on the wind like pennants.

A woman, hands bound behind her back, legs hobbled, was dragged out in front of the seething army. She was wailing and struggling. Five warriors marched her a few paces forward and threw her down in the middle of the road. One of her captors spread his arms wide and bellowed wordless hatred at the ranks of Kilkry and Lannis men. Then he and the others beat the woman to death with clubs and staffs.

Taim turned away. She had looked to be much the same age as Maira, his daughter. He had never seen this from the Black Road before. This wanton, tribal brutality. It was not how battles were meant to be fought. Or perhaps it was, now.

The noise was new too. In all his years of facing the Black Road, he had grown used to the grim, almost unnatural, silence in which they often fought. This time, his ears rang to hate-filled roaring, like the baying of a thousand leashed hounds.

And then those leashes were slipped, and the dark wall of bodies and blades was rushing towards him. He drew his sword, cast one brief glance up towards the clouds scudding across the sky, not knowing what he hoped to see there, and heeled his horse into motion.

*

Ess’yr held out a flake of greasy squirrel meat to Orisian. He took it with a nod of gratitude. They ate in silence, warmed by the little fire, while the stubby twigs of the apple trees creaked in the breeze. Heavy clouds were racing overhead, but down in the orchard, amidst the aged protection of the trees, with the comforting flames, Orisian felt safe. Almost at ease.

Varryn would not join them, of course. He sat cross-legged some little distance away, cleaning the squirrel skin. He scraped away at the hide with his knife in silence, studiously ignoring Orisian and his sister. Ess’yr herself picked flecks of meat from a leg bone with precise finger and thumb. Orisian watched her, but when she looked at him he averted his eyes with a fleeting self-conscious smile.

He was faintly aware of the warriors loitering beyond the trees, at the back of the Guard barracks. Theirs was not an intrusive presence, though. They were sufficiently comforted by the high stone walls that enclosed the orchard, and sufficiently trusting now of these two Kyrinin, to permit Orisian some little privacy. It was a kind of wonder, he recognised, that a Thane of the Lannis Blood could sit alone in such company without his warriors imagining or expecting disaster. Those protective walls sheltered a moment, a scene, drawn from another world, another possibility, less scarred by bitter history. Though Orisian could not forget all that had happened, or the storms that raged beyond this island of calm, he could find here, in this company, a brief span of rest. Of stillness.

He licked his fingers clean. The fire was burning low, sinking into its bed of bright embers. He threw another couple of sticks onto it and listened to them crackle and hiss.

“There might be trouble coming,” he said pensively. Ess’yr said nothing. She was watching him, her eyes set like polished flints in the blue frame of her tattoos. Varryn’s knife continued to rasp rhythmically across the skin.

“We think the Black Road has cut us off from the south,” Orisian went on, unperturbed by their silence. “Taim’s gone to meet them. He wouldn’t let me go with him.”

“You are precious to him,” Ess’yr said impassively.

“Yes.” Orisian flicked a sideways glance in her direction. Part of him longed to reach out to her, and lay a soft hand on her shoulder, her arm. “Yes, perhaps. Though I don’t know that I’m really any safer here than out there. I’m not sure such a thing as safety’s possible any more.”

Ess’yr looked down, returning her attention to the little carcass.

“I would not…” Orisian began, but the sentence collapsed beneath the confused weight of his feelings. He tried again: “I don’t know quite why you have stayed here. I am-I am glad of it, but… If you want to go, you shouldn’t stay because you think you owe me anything.”

He was aware that Varryn had stopped his work and was now staring at him. The cleaning knife rested point down on the warrior’s knee.

“Owe you?” Ess’yr said. “No. Not you.”

“Inurian?”

“It does not matter,” she said. A lie, Orisian thought; or at best a kind of truth his human understanding could not encompass.

“Our enemy makes alliance with your enemy,” Ess’yr placidly continued. “We do not need to seek them out, for they come in search of you. Your fight is our fight.”

“Your brother does not agree,” Orisian said.

Ess’yr ignored him. Varryn returned to his task.

“It is only that I fear what may happen,” Orisian said. His mood was darkening once again, and he half-regretted speaking. If he had said nothing, just sat here and treasured the silent companionship, he might have preserved the illusion of closeness, of intimacy, a little longer. “I see few paths that lead anywhere other than into shadow. I would regret it if you followed me that way when you did not need to. I just wanted you to know that.”

Ess’yr flicked bones into the fire. The trees above shivered in a momentary surge of wind.

“All paths lead to shadow in the end,” Ess’yr said.

“If we live through today,” said Orisian, watching the trembling flames, “and through the next night, I mean to leave this place. I don’t know what will happen, but the time is coming when all of this will end. One way or the other.”

He realised that he had lost their attention. The two Kyrinin lifted their heads, turned towards the west. Orisian saw the knife fall from Varryn’s hand and his fingers dance into a blur of motion. Ess’yr made a grunting reply to whatever message her brother conveyed and rose to her feet.

“What is it?” Orisian asked softly, looking up at her. He could guess, in truth, for he had learned to read the code of their bodies and moods: in some sound or scent upon the air, some sign too subtle for meagre human senses, they had caught forewarning of danger.

Orisian twisted, a shout for his own warriors gathering in his throat, but Ess’yr was already moving. One pace, two, away from the fire. A stoop to sweep up her spear from where it rested against one of the apple trees. Her front foot stamped down. Her arm snapped forward. The spear flew.

And as that shaft left her hand, and darted across the darkening air between the ancient trees, there was movement atop the wall: a head, and then shoulders, just rising into sight. Orisian had time to register nothing more than a swirl of dark hair, the dull flash of a blade clasped in a gloved hand, before the spear thudded into the man’s chest. He fell back silently and disappeared.

“There are more,” Ess’yr said, reaching for her bow.

But Orisian knew that for himself by then. He could hear the voices, the angry cries, the pounding feet. He leaped up and ran, shouting for his sword and shield as he went.

Taim Narran had abandoned any hope of imposing his will upon the battle. Slaughter swept across the fields and copses and stream beds. Like storm water, it went where it willed, its bloody extremities flowing down whatever channel the rise and fall of the land offered. No command could be given that would shape it or slow it. It was deaf to all save its own inner demands, which impelled it to consume and thrive and rage.

The men and women who acted upon its savage imperative forgot who they were and why they fought. They recognised neither friend nor foe, felt neither fear nor elation. There was within them only the burning need to kill. Each fought alone, subject to that need and only to that need.

Taim’s horse had been hit by a crossbow bolt. It staggered down into a tiny gully and threw him. He splashed across the stream, seeing dark strands of blood threaded in the rushing water. Higher up the gully bodies were lying in the narrow channel. A woman was hacking feverishly at one of them with a long-bladed knife. Taim started towards her, to kill her, but a knot of men came suddenly tumbling down into his path, struggling and stabbing even as they fell and rolled in the stream.

Taim could confidently identify only one of them as an enemy: a massive mailclad warrior who laboured to his feet, water cascading from his back and shoulders. Taim ducked behind his shield and barged into him, knocking him down. A single blow, with all of Taim’s strength behind it, was enough to stave in the side of the man’s helm. He began to convulse at once, thrashing about in the midst of the stream. Blood smeared out from his mouth; he had bitten through his tongue.

Taim was staggered sideways by two wrestling figures. He stumbled precariously over the smooth stones at the edge of the watercourse. The butt of a spear tripped him and in falling he punched his knee against a rock. The sharp, bone-shaking pain was like a lance of light, momentarily sharpening his senses, sending a beat of urgency and energy through him. Without it, he might have been too slow to avoid the axe that slashed down in search of his back. He rolled away through mud and spun onto his feet in time to catch the second axe blow on his shield and cut up into his assailant’s crotch.

He scrambled up the bank of the gully, the soft turf smearing beneath his feet. He emerged onto a field strewn with bodies and with dropped or broken weapons. The thin grass had been trampled and torn. A woman went staggering past, her shattered arm held tight to her side with a hand that was itself split and bloody. A horse was lying on its flank close by, its legs stirring faintly. Beyond it, a Kilkry warrior was fleeing from half a dozen Tarbains, who pursued him with howls of mad fervour. Taim ran to intervene, but his knee rebelled, and he faltered. The Tarbains pulled down the warrior and fell on him like a pack of wolves tearing at a deer.

A terrible hatred had hold of Taim, a formless thing that began with no clear target or cause but willingly gathered those Tarbain tribesmen in and made them its object. Overruling his knee’s protests, he rushed to them. So intent were they upon their savage business that they were deaf and blind to his approach until he was amongst them.

One went down, and then another. A club battered against Taim’s thigh, and he felt the bone blades that studded its head punching through his skin, but there was no pain. He killed another. The rest fled from him. The Kilkry man was long dead, of course. The Tarbains had been trying to behead him.

There was no single battle happening here. There never had been, from the first moments of contact between the opposing forces. Instead, many brutal, separate little struggles were played out across the fields, and on the slopes beyond. Many lonely deaths. A hundred intimate horrors and cruelties.

Taim reeled from fight to fight. His mind and body were exhausted but he drove himself on, possessed by the conviction that the only way he could escape this waking nightmare was by helping it towards its end, by killing everyone who could be killed. And in time he had done that, and he could find no more victims for his blade. The armies had drifted apart. There was no victory or defeat: the numbed survivors on both sides simply walked, or crawled, away, alone or in small bands. The cruel day had taken everything they had to give, and left them empty and trembling and lost, forgetful of themselves. They let weapons and banners fall and stumbled silently back the way they had come

Taim slumped to his hands and knees. He curled his fingers into the earth, making fists through the wiry grass. He was shivering, though he felt an almost feverish heat running through his skin. Blood was crusted all across his thigh where the Tarbain club had hit him. His guts were clenching, twisting. His stomach heaved and he retched and vomited up the morning’s food. Once he was done, he rolled onto his back and lay there for a time, blindly watching the sky as it darkened, moment by moment, towards the gloom of dusk.

*

Ive quickly, almost enthusiastically, surrendered itself to violence. Chaos descended, and as it did so something rose up within the townsfolk to embrace it. Small bands of Black Road raiders burst in all along the western flank of the town, but they were few and disorganised, not enough to truly threaten Ive’s safety. They were enough, though, to act as spark to the fire that had been on the brink of eruption for so many days.

The townspeople rushed from their homes, surging through the dusk in frantic search of enemies, whether real or imagined. In this great boiling cauldron the Black Roaders fought with savage abandon. They hurried from house to house, slaughtering all they found; they battled and died in narrow alleyways; they crept their way to the storehouses and the bakeries and the almshouses and set them afire. Smoke swirled in the yards and streets like acrid fog.

Consumed by their own ungovernable fear and fury, the people of Ive turned upon one another. Those who were not recognised were slain, hacked with kitchen knives and axes, beaten with hammers and impaled upon hay forks. The pillars of flame mounted higher and higher, turning the sky orange and rustred. Horror was piled upon horror. Washed by the heat of a burning house, the family that had abandoned it was killed in the roadway before it. They cried out in vain to their killers, who had forgotten, in their madness, that they knew them. Some neighbours, armed with nothing more than clubs, hunted a Gyre warrior into a farrier’s yard, cornered her there and battered her to death in the shadows; then, hurrying out, blundered into a company of Kilkry swordsmen, thought them foes, and died on the blades of their supposed protectors. The storm raged. Reason and restraint were rent apart.

Some few strove to hold firm against the beast that was running loose.

“We must keep the na’kyrim safe,” Orisian shouted at Torcaill. They ran together, with a handful of Torcaill’s men behind them, out from the gate of the barracks. There had been a sharp, vicious struggle in the orchard: invaders spilling over the walls, going down with Kyrinin arrows in throat or flank, stumbling in amongst the trees and running futilely onto human swords. Onto Orisian’s sword. He had killed a man almost without knowing it, not recognising what was happening until the body was at his feet. Something in him rejoiced at the sight and something else recoiled. Both felt, in that moment, like a true reflection of who he was.

His heart pounded, his arms shook, so ferocious was his body’s response to the sound and scent and feel of battle. Everything faded from his awareness save the overwhelming need to act, to move, to join the bloody dance. He had heard himself shouting as he ran from the orchard, through the courtyard of the barracks. He would have gone blindly and wildly out into the chaos but for the sudden sight of towering flames rising from some building on the far side of the town, and for the sudden burning in his nostrils and eyes as a hot wind blasted smoke into his face. With that bitter smell, he was returned for an instant to Castle Anduran on the night of Winterbirth; and the memory dampened rather than fed the sanguinary ardour that had burned within him.

There was no sign of the Lannis guards who should have been outside the little house where Yvane and Eshenna sheltered. Bursting in, ignoring Torcaill’s anguished demands for caution, Orisian found no sign of the two na’kyrim within, either. He went, clumsy in his haste, knocking aside stools and chairs, out into the little walled yard behind the house.

There was a corpse there, sprawled across the cobblestones. One of his guards, Orisian thought, but he did not have the time to be certain. Half a dozen figures were clustered down by the goat shed. One or two held blazing torches aloft while others hauled at the door, trying to tear it open against faltering resistance from within. Orisian heard Yvane’s voice, angry. Frightened.

“Get away!” Orisian shouted, leaping over the body.

Heads turned.

“There’s halfbreeds in here,” one of them snapped at Orisian, as if that should explain everything to him. “Wightborns!”

As if there was nothing more that could, or should, be said. It was not the words, though, that put a hollow kind of horror into the pit of Orisian’s stomach, but the accent. These men were Ive townsfolk, not northerners.

“Stand aside,” he demanded, lifting his sword a little.

But the door came free then. Yvane came tumbling forward from within the shed, and Eshenna was crying out in fear inside. One of the men roared in triumph. Another threw his torch at Orisian and it came spinning towards him in a wreath of embers and flame. He ducked under it and ran at them.

His shield shook beneath some blow, he cut at legs, veered away from a fist that darted at his head. And amidst all the chaos, he found a kind of clarity, centred upon the need to keep those within that shed alive. He fought as Taim Narran would have wished him to, with a cold determination. For the first time in his life, his mind and body united unquestioningly in the cause of killing. His sword broke an arm, and he heard the crack of the bone. He drove on, brought the blade down on the back of a man who was blocking the shed’s doorway. He trampled the falling figure and turned to bar the entrance himself. And found Torcaill and the others, following in his wake, already ending the one-sided fight.

Orisian sat, legs splayed out on the cobblestones of the yard. Blood was running through the crevices all around him but he did not care. His warriors were dragging away the dead and the injured with little regard for which was which. Orisian unbuckled his shield and laid it flat across his knees.

“They’d have killed you if we hadn’t come,” he said weakly. Even to speak seemed a terrible effort.

“They would,” agreed Yvane. He felt her hand touch his shoulder for a moment. “Thank you.”

“They’d have killed you. And K’rina. Everything would have been for nothing.”

He laid his hands on the gently curving surface of his shield and watched his fingers tremble. It was almost dark now. Still rising into the sky, from all around, were cries of fury and fear, the scattered thunder of running feet, the audible death throes of buildings plunging into fiery ruin. The delirium, perhaps death, of the town.

“This can’t go on,” he said. “I’m killing Kilkry men now. That can’t be right, can it? We have to find a way to end it. There has to be a way.”

“There is a way,” he heard Eshenna say behind him. She sounded utterly exhausted. “Kill Aeglyss. This is his taint, his poison, at work. Use K’rina against him. It’s the purpose the Anain meant for her, until we interfered.”

“Until Aeglyss grew too strong, perhaps,” Yvane said. “Too strong for even the Anain to overcome.”

“Perhaps,” Eshenna acknowledged, empty and faint. “Perhaps. But what other hope is there?”

Nobody spoke for a moment or two, and then Eshenna said again, “What other hope is there?”