Fall of Thanes

V

Eska of the Hunt left her dogs behind in Glasbridge and walked alone into the Glas Valley, towards Kan Avor. There was deep snow across the fields, but still she shunned the roads, the better to avoid any inconvenient attention. It found her in any case.

Before she was out of sight of Glasbridge’s dark outline hunched down on the western horizon, she saw three figures coming towards her across a pristine expanse of snow. They laboured, though whether that was due to the depth of snow, or because like many others in this ravaged valley they were sick or starving, she could not tell at this distance. It hardly mattered. They did not have the look of warriors, certainly not Inkallim, and thus, even hale and hearty, were unlikely to be any threat to her. She strode on along the line of a snow-buried ditch, ignoring them.

One of the men called out to her as they drew near, angling across the great white field to intercept her course. His accent marked him as Gyre, from the Bloodstone Hills; most likely, she thought, the Frein Valley. She had been there once, tracking the killer of one of the Lore. She had always had a talent for voices, for reading them and remembering their cadences. It had been useful, on occasion, in her service of the Inkall.

She read disorder and desperation in this man’s voice. She marched on, head down. The snow crunched crisply beneath her booted feet.

“Wait, there,” the man shouted again.

Eska still did not look round, but she could hear that they were close now, too close to ignore. She must either run-she could easily outpace them, no doubt-or face them. There might be something to be gained, she supposed, in talking to them. Some fragment of information, perhaps. That was, after all, the currency she dealt in, and the substance of the task Kanin oc Horin-Gyre had bestowed upon her.

She stood still, and turned to face the three men. They were grimy and gaunt. Hungry, she judged, but not yet quite enfeebled by it. One at least had a feverish look that suggested illness. She quickly made the necessary assessment: a staff one leaned upon, a hammer hanging from a belt, a tiny knife, a scabbarded sword that must have been stolen or looted from the dead. They were much like scores, perhaps hundreds, of others scattered all across the Glas Valley: ordinary folk who had marched in the wake of the Battle, fired by faith or greed or hope, only to find the business of fighting an ill-supplied war in the midst of winter more brutal and breaking than they had imagined. Debris left behind as the stronger, more vigorous flood had swept on into the south.

“Any food?” the nearest of the men asked without preamble.

Eska shook her head silently.

His eyes tracked her lean lines, tracing the form of her muscles beneath her hides. His gaze lingered for a moment upon her spear, darted down to her leather boots.

“No food,” he mumbled. “Where are you going?”

“Kan Avor,” she said. “Have you been there?”

The man shrugged. She saw a flicker of unease, perhaps remembered horror, in the eyes of one of his companions, though.

“I would be interested to know how things stand there,” she said. “Who you saw there. What is happening.”

“Nothing good,” the first man rasped. The others clearly deferred to him. “Too much…” He wrinkled his nose, as if at a foul stench.

“Too much of what?” Eska enquired, and as soon as she did so, saw that her efforts would be fruitless. The man grimaced. He was angered.

“Too much of everything,” he muttered, then: “You’re not like us, not like everyone else. Who are you?” His tone, the way he stared avariciously at Eska’s boots, made clear that his curiosity was not born of any desire for friendship.

“I am of the Hunt Inkall,” she said levelly. That was as much as she would share.

“One of Tegric’s Children? Ha, ha.”

He sounded enthused at the thought of such reputed prey. It was absurd. In normal times, such men should be cowed by her presence, her implied abilities. Such calculation was clearly beyond them now. They, like so many, had abandoned their judgement in favour of baser, more feral urges. Eska saw it all around her in recent days. Some seemed barely affected by the strange, ubiquitous sickness of the mind; many-most, she thought-were slowly, incrementally slipping into madness. She had even found herself becoming increasingly ill-tempered, murderous rage sometimes held at bay only by a lifetime of habitual self-discipline.

Now, though, regarding these wretched men, she thought in dispassionate, practical terms. They were clearly disinclined to provide her with any useful knowledge. So be it. They could not prevent her escape, but if by some bizarre chance word of her approach preceded her to Kan Avor and there fell into an unfriendly ear, matters might become unnecessarily complicated.

She felt faint regret as she came to her decision. These lives would end without having greatly aided in the advancement of the creed. But then, each and every life could only be as it was written, nothing more and nothing less. Fate had brought these men to her; she was but its tool in this.

The ringleader advanced, leering as he did so. She staggered him with a blow from the butt of her spear into his ribcage. The same movement, rebounding in a smooth arc, satisfying in its precision, brought the barbed spear-point back to lay open the second man’s face. She glimpsed the blood-flecked bone of his cheek as she spun on one foot and crouched, punching the base of her spear into the snow for support, straightening a leg to crack her heel into the third’s knee. He howled and hobbled sideways. The snow tripped him.

Eska rose. The first of her assailants had recovered his balance, and was clumsily drawing that purloined sword with all the facility of one who had never held such a weapon in his life. She drove her spear into his belly with enough force to lift him off his feet, and left it there. She kicked the man who had fallen in the side of his head as he began to rise. He slumped back. She took a handful of his hair and hammered the heel of her free hand once into the bridge of his nose. There was a splintering crunch and he went limp.

The one whose cheek she had cut was staggering away, vainly trying to press back a flap of skin to his face, his hands fumbling in the blood that she had freed. She followed him, tearing her barbed spear free from the dying, howling ringleader’s stomach as she went. She put it into the small of the fleeing man’s back. She twisted it and pulled. He came staggering back towards her, caught on the barbs. She threw a foot up against his spine and kicked him free. He fell forwards.

Eska walked on towards Kan Avor.

She came to the city across ground that remembered its recent inundation. It had been the Glas Water, before the breaking of the Dyke, and that sodden past remained close. Beneath the snow, a thin crust of ice and frozen mud lay like skin over soft silt. Her feet sometimes broke through into cloying, part-liquid earth that was thick with dead reed stems and half-decayed water weed. Clumps of straggly, leafless willows stood here and there, their pliable branches bent by snow and icicles. Once, ice crackled under her foot and dropped her into an ankle-deep pool of black, almost glutinous, water. She at once unlaced her boots and dried both them and her feet as best she could. In the north she had seen toes, even legs and lives, lost for want of such simple precautions.

Sitting there, rubbing at her skin to warm it, she noticed the end of a leg bone jutting out from the mud close by, the ball joint like a smooth fist. It was not the first bone she had seen: there had been half a jaw, four ribs protruding from the snow like the fringe of a broken-toothed comb. All human. The dead lay thickly here. It might be, she supposed, the result of the Heart Fever that had raged through the Lannis Blood a few years ago, but the remains looked to have more age to them than that. She preferred to think them the dead of Kan Avor Field, the great battle fought here a century and a half ago, when the Black Road was driven from these lands. She found that a pleasing thought.

“We came back,” she whispered foolishly to the leg bone as she rose and continued on her way.

Kan Avor lay beneath a fetid fog. Eska felt its moisture on her hair, her skin. And she felt its stench close like an invisible hand over her mouth and nose. She smelled mud and rot and death and smoke and waste, so potent, all of them, that even through the muffling snow and ice they fouled the air. The frozen ruins were teeming with people, far more than she had anticipated. And there were bodies, which was just as she had anticipated.

A woman lay stiff and taut in the doorway of a house that had long ago lost its roof. Her dead eyes watched Eska pass through lashes beaded with frost. One arm was bent at the elbow, lifting her splayed grey hand towards the street. Dogs had chewed off the fingers. In a little square, a corpse hung from a protruding stone high up on a wall. They-someone-had suspended him by his arms and killed him, possibly slowly, with a multitude of blows. Eska’s cursory glance was enough to pick out perhaps twenty separate wounds. His clothes, soaked with blood, had frozen rigid and black. From the toe of one naked foot hung a tiny icicle of blood, a single fat drop arrested in the act of readying itself to fall.

The smell of roasting flesh drew Eska to a ruined house. It must once have been a noble residence, for there was a stable block, and in its yard a crowd had gathered to watch the hind leg of a horse being turned on a spit above a crackling fire. It was a twisted echo of the place’s former purpose, but that did not interest Eska; she thought instead how wasteful it was to consume an animal that might have carried a warrior south or hauled firewood or supplies.

She noted, as she progressed through the hallucinatory dream that Kan Avor had become, each accent, each ragged banner, each subtly distinctive variation in raiment. She found people of every ilk. Warriors from every Blood; countryfolk and townsfolk; Tarbains; Battle Inkallim. Even some of the defeated Lannis Blood, from whose manner it was impossible to tell whether they were prisoners or slaves, or equal and welcomed followers of the halfbreed. All save the Inkallim mingled with little regard to status or origin, as if all previous associations and bonds had been overlaid or broken all together. Only Nyve’s ravens-or better perhaps to name them Shraeve’s now-held themselves aloof.

And there were Kyrinin. Eska saw just a few of them, lingering silently at the fringes of human gatherings, moving through the shattered streets on obscure errands. She despised them for their presence here. Such as they had no rightful place in the city that, however ruined, embodied the history of the Black Road. She averted her gaze from their tattooed faces, their rangy forms. But she counted them, as she counted everyone.

She came to a crowded street, one that stank of mud and humanity. The people gathered there milled about without evident purpose. They snarled at one another when they were jostled, but otherwise were all but silent. Some were barefoot. Some, too poorly dressed for the harsh weather, sat shivering in doorways or at the foot of walls. Eska moved amongst them, noting with contempt how far these fellow northerners of hers had fallen; how destitute and weak many of them appeared. She felt no pity for those amongst them who so clearly suffered from the cold or from hunger or from sickness. Their own stupidity was the cause, as far as she was concerned, and it earned for them every miserable moment.

Many of the men and women often looked towards a door in a crumbling edifice along one side of the street. Others glanced constantly up towards empty windows above. Those blank, dark apertures were framed with moss and ferns sprouting from the seams of the stonework. There was nothing to see, but Eska felt the simmering collective excitement. All attention, conscious or otherwise, was upon some invisible focus behind those walls, beyond those windows.

Eska drifted through the throng, counting, always counting, always studying. She strove to avoid notice, but she could hardly conceal her health, her weapons, her clean leathers and hides. People stared at her. She kept her eyes empty, unresponsive.

Then the door was opening, and a stillness fell across the street as if a wind had suddenly fallen away. Into the eerie calm came Shraeve of the Battle and other Inkallim, and Kyrinin, and last of all Aeglyss the na’kyrim.

He was stooped, as if so old that his very bones were bent by the burden of years. He walked unsteadily, each pace a short and sliding shuffle. His hair was thinning, and where it remained the strands looked fragile as spider’s web, almost translucent. Every bone in his face was visible beneath the bleached, cracked skin. His hand, when he extended it towards some adoring spectator, bore fingers like crooked twigs. Where his fingernails should have been were raw sores. So reduced and brittle and damaged did he appear that it was difficult to tell that he was na’kyrim rather than human; the dwindling of his body masked the differences, drawing all his features down into indistinct decrepitude. Had Eska seen him on the street of some city, not knowing who he was, she might have veered away from him, thinking him the bearer of some wasting plague.

And yet. There was in him something that held the eye. Something that caught her breath in her throat, and filled her with the deep certainty that this frail, eroded figure was far more than mere man. All around her, people were kneeling. Smiling. Eska knelt too, the better to merge with the crowd. But in doing so she sensed, if only distantly, the rightness of the gesture. She felt, between her thoughts, in the gaps left in her skull by her own mind, the movement of this broken man’s thoughts, the ferocity of his desires and his remorseless capacity to fulfil them. She felt these things, and could have been transported by them as one consumed by hunger might be on catching the faint scent of the richest imaginable food. But she did not succumb.

Eska had come to the Hunt as a child too young to speak or walk. An orphan probably, though there was no way of being certain since the records were imperfect. She had no memory of what preceded the discipline and the apparatus of the Hunt, and her every desire-even her faith in the creed-had been subsumed by her devotion to the Inkall. She had no sense of needs or imperatives beyond service to the Hunt. As the vast unspoken, promissory temptations of the halfbreed’s presence washed about and through her, she clung to that clear and narrow allegiance, and found it sturdy. She remained observer, not participant.

Aeglyss raised his arms. He was perhaps too weak to straighten them, for his hands came little higher than his head, the elbows remained crooked.

“Friends,” he murmured, and the word came to Eska from both within and without. It embraced her and soothed her. She smiled despite herself.

“Faithful friends. We move towards the light of a new sun, you and I. Great changes are upon us, and I am their herald, their helmsman.”

Whispers in the crowd, like the rustling of leaves: affirmations and adorations. Eska could feel the edges of her attention contracting. This halfbreed drew everything in towards himself.

“I have promised many things,” Aeglyss said. “And the time comes when I shall make good those promises. This world has ever been found wanting. From my first breath, I have gone, step by step, into its dark heart, and over all those years it has shown me how it revels in cruelty, how it feeds upon deceit, takes pleasure in the suffering and the death of those who least deserve it.”

The truth of all he said was like a light burning inside Eska’s eyes. It was bright, and she could imagine the warmth and the comfort it could offer, yet she was not blinded by it. Narrowly, determinedly, she thought of the crossbow on her back. Its weight grounded her. Had she been prepared, with crossbow in hand and a bolt ready for its string, she might have killed this halfbreed here and now, before Shraeve or the watchful Kyrinin could intervene. She concentrated upon that thought, and turned it over and over in her mind, as if practising some protective ritual of the sort the Tarbains once favoured. She girded her mind with imagined visions of the lethal act, clinging to them.

“All of this I have seen,” Aeglyss called out, “and I have learned it well. And now I am granted the strength to cure the world of its ills.”

Kanin had told her not to throw her life away in any attempt upon Aeglyss. Eska doubted the Thane’s insistence that no single dart or blade was likely to prove fatal to the na’kyrim-she had yet to find a neck that would not yield to a sharp-edged caress-but she was prepared to wait a while longer before testing it.

Aeglyss was smiling now, in a wolfish way. Eska thought she saw contempt there, as he surveyed the kneeling, bowing host filling the street, but she doubted anyone else would share her impression.

“A world must be broken before it can be made whole again,” Aeglyss intoned. “There must be a purging with fire and with blood. We must strip everything back to bare soil before we can plant new seeds. Is it not so?”

“Yes,” Eska heard a woman at her side murmur, and others all through the crowd. A hundred whispers of assent.

“And thus is the purpose of all my suffering revealed. Though I did not seek it, the strength is in me to subjugate all the world to a single will. I-we-shall lay bare the earth. Start afresh. I shall remove all dispute, sweep away all pride. There will be no more envy, no more traitors. Only the faithful.”

Eska repeated that word to herself within the chamber of her head: faithful. She could feel the ardour trying to shake its way free of her stern self-restraint; she could feel that eager, ambitious portion of her spirit struggling to carry the rest of her into surrender and submission to the halfbreed’s certainty. But it was not, she thought, the creed to which he truly demanded faith. It was to him. Though he spoke in the language of the Black Road-the unmaking of the world, its purging by bloodshed-it was not the return of the Gods he hoped to usher in, but his own dominion. Cannek had told Eska as much, before his ill-fated endeavours at Hommen. He had told her that Aeglyss was, at heart, a mad child. Nothing more. She had always thought Cannek a perceptive, perhaps even wise, man.

“Tomorrow, at dawn, there will be wonders,” Aeglyss proclaimed, nodding as if compelled to do so by the irresistible truth of what he said. “Tomorrow I will descend upon our enemies, and undo them. I will deliver to you, and to us all, the greatest of victories. I will give to you the place of the Fisherwoman’s birth.”

The roar of delight shivered back and forth along the street, echoing from the stonework. Some woman, overcome, leapt to her feet and ran towards Aeglyss, arms outstretched, wild ecstasy in her face. She was blind to all save him, sending those who obstructed her path sprawling away. She wept and laughed as she ran.

One of the Kyrinin standing beside Aeglyss, tall and powerful, his face thick with tattooed swirls and curves, rapped the heel of his spear once upon the cobbles, let it spring up free. He caught it again, stretched out a foot and planted it firmly, then snapped the spear forward. It went flat and true into the woman’s chest and lodged there. Her frenzied, delirious wail was cut short as she plunged back and down.

“Tomorrow, you may witness the wonder,” Aeglyss said as if nothing had happened. The woman was groaning, but no one paid her any heed. Eska could not see her any more, but the spear stood erect and it trembled with the woman’s faltering breaths.

“Those who are here at dawn, you will find me there, in the hall above.” Aeglyss gestured towards the windows. Every head was tipped up to follow his hand. “I shall exceed Orlane, and Dorthyn, and all who went before. In your name, in your service, I shall make dust of the past, for these are new times we live in, and a new world we are making. Attend, and see what wonders I work on your behalf.”

Glasbridge’s harbour was empty of boats. The deserted quayside stood silent, its moorings idle, its taverns and shops burned or deserted. Wet slush covered its stones. Offshore, amidst the turbulent waves driving in from the vast estuary, the short mast of some half-sunken fishing boat rocked like a swamped sapling. Kanin stared at it for a time, narrowing his eyes against the sleet sweeping in on the wind. He imagined for a moment that its movement, the regular, solitary beat of its instability, might convey some message to him. There was nothing there, though.

He turned to the crowd standing there on the quay, a miserable, bedraggled assemblage. Some of the last dregs of Glasbridge’s Lannis inhabitants. There were only a few men of fighting age. Women and a few children, old men, frail men, regarded him with various kinds of contempt and resentment. Sixty of them, nearly one in six, as best he could guess, of those who had not died during their town’s destruction and capture, or not escaped it. They had been dragged and driven here like recalcitrant sheep, full of hate but too battered and defeated to offer any resistance.

Kanin’s warriors ringed the Lannis folk, enclosing them in a silent cordon of spears and swords. He doubted such precautions were really necessary. These were broken people. And that was something he meant to change, even if only a little.

A Gyre man was kneeling before him, his hands tied behind his back. Kanin spat meltwater from his lips.

“You know me,” he shouted across the wind at the townsfolk. “You know I’ve made this town mine. I’ve opened the food stores to you, fed you as well as we eat ourselves. Those of you who’d been made slaves or servants, I’ve freed you from that.”

He grimaced at a sudden flurry of sleet.

“This man killed a Lannis girl yesterday.”

He kicked the Gyre captive in the back, sending him sprawling into the slush. Igris hauled the man back onto his knees. The shieldman had great coiled chains looped over his shoulder, found in the storeroom of a half-wrecked smithy.

“Now you see how things go in my town,” Kanin shouted, and nodded to Igris. The shieldman hesitated. He winced.

“Do it,” Kanin hissed.

Others of his Shield came forward. They helped Igris to entwine the chains about the Gyre man, securing them with cords. One took his ankles, another his shoulders, and they carried him to the edge of the quay. The man stared at Kanin all the way. There was no hatred in his dark eyes, only accusation.

“I go without fear,” the man said, quite distinctly, quite calmly.

“I don’t doubt it,” muttered Kanin. “But still you go.”

His warriors swung their cargo once, then heaved him out. The sea swallowed him with a deep, hollow smack and he was gone, leaving not the slightest trace in the relentless waves slapping up against the stonework. Some of the Lannis townsfolk crowded to the edge, pushing past the guards, craning their necks to try and follow the man’s descent. One kicked slush after him. Another whispered curses Kanin could not hear above the wind and water.

“I don’t expect love or loyalty from you,” Kanin said. They turned back to him, and he saw new patterns in their faces now: puzzlement in some, suspicion in others. “I do expect the sense to see that things can change. Have changed. I will shield you from the basest cruelties of your conquerors. I will permit no more of your children to die, or be stolen away by the ravens. I will feed you, and clothe you, as well as I feed and clothe the most devoted of my own followers. I will even seek boats and, if I find them, give them to you, and not hinder your departure.”

He could see out of the corner of his eye Igris watching him with poorly disguised horror. He had not told his Shield or any of his warriors his full intent today. There had been no need or point in doing so. He was Thane, and more than that he was a man alone, engaged in an undertaking none of them could see clearly enough to grasp. Only he understood what extremities the times demanded.

“But not all of you,” Kanin said, concentrating upon the attentive, bewildered townsfolk. “I want you to go amongst your fellows, and tell them what you have seen and what I have said here today. And tomorrow I will have all of you who can hold a weapon, and have the strength to walk for a day, assembled here at dawn. I don’t care who-men or women, it doesn’t matter-but you will come here, and I will arm you and train you and give you an enemy to oppose.

“Because I am not your worst enemy, and you are not mine. I will show you the greatest enemy your Blood has ever had, the one responsible for all your suffering and shame, and you will fight him at my side. I will give you back the honour of your Blood. Those you leave behind here will be protected and preserved for as long as you keep this bargain with me. If you fail in what I require of you, you will all suffer the consequences.”

They stared at him, a mass of disbelief and confusion, and he stared back. Resolute. Unwavering. In the silence, gulls came drifting in off the sea, their cries sharp.

“That is all,” Kanin said, and turned. He walked away, ignoring his own warriors and their questioning glances. He could hold them for a time yet, he was sure. For long enough.

Only Igris came hurrying after him, sword tapping at his legs, mail shirt clinking.

“It doesn’t seem right, sire, to be fighting the faithful when the war is so far…”

Kanin spun and leaned towards the shieldman, pointing a single finger at his eye.

“The war is where I say it is. By the oath you took to my father, you made the Blood’s battles your own. The Thane is the Blood, and I am Thane yet. I choose our battles. Never forget it. I know what must be done, for the good of the faith, for the good of us all.”

Igris quailed before his lord’s wrath, and Kanin stalked away. He was right in this. He was certain of it. If he was the last and only man in all the world who could see what had to be done, so be it. He had strength enough for that, whatever it cost him, wherever it led him.

Two figures awaited him a short distance down the harbourside. They were leaning against the side of a broken cart, watching with wry amusement: two of the three Hunt Inkallim who had made themselves his shadows.

“Have you found what I need?” Kanin asked them.

“You have a rare talent for spreading havoc and confusion, it seems, Thane,” one of the men murmured.

“I asked if you have found what I need,” barked Kanin.

The man inclined his head, deflecting-or dismissing-the Thane’s anger.

“Seventy of them. Every corpse-in-waiting this town has to offer. Most should live long enough to serve your purposes. A fine concoction they are: fevers and sores and suppuration. We’ve got them safely sequestered beyond the reach of any healers. Not that there are many of those to be found hereabouts.”

“Good. I want them in Kan Avor tomorrow. I’ll have Igris arrange an escort, and drivers for the wagons. No word from Eska yet?”

The man shook his head, and Kanin grunted. He strode away.

“You’ll make our task of keeping you alive difficult, Thane, if you turn your own people against you,” one of the Inkallim said behind him.

Kanin stopped and hung his head for a moment. Then he turned and stared at the man.

“I didn’t give you the task. I don’t care how easy or otherwise you find it. What happens will happen, since none of us chooses the course of the Road. Do we?” He asked it dully at first, but then again, more pointedly, more openly: “Do we?”