Fall of Thanes

IX

Disaster came upon them slowly, revealing itself by increments as it emerged from the shadows and the wilds. It came first in the last dregs of the twilight, in the form of tracks through the mud at the side of a stream, that Varryn leaned close to, and tested with his fingers, and proclaimed half a day old at most. A White Owl family, with children, he said, moving north and west.

It came again, betraying a little more of its shape in the gathering darkness, as the scent of a distant fire that none save Ess’yr or Varryn could detect. None doubted their inhuman senses, though, and all followed the Kyrinin as they bent their course away from the unseen, fearful beacon and led their stumbling, blundering charges through the night-thronged thickets. Some of the warriors muttered mutinously at the unwisdom of traversing wight-haunted lands by nothing more than moonlight, but Orisian could read the urgency and unease taking root in Ess’yr and her brother, and he kept them moving.

They did halt, in time, if only briefly. A taut, restless interlude in which they blindly passed morsels of food from hand to hand to mouth and rubbed aching feet in vain attempts to soothe them. Ess’yr and Varryn went out into the night, of course, remorseless in their suspicious quartering of this untrustworthy ground.

While they were gone, K’rina began to moan softly. It was a troubling sound, like the mournful voice of the darkness itself.

“Keep her quiet,” someone hissed in sibilant anger.

“I’m trying,” Yvane muttered, and though he could not see her clearly, Orisian could hear her slight shifting movements as she reached for K’rina. Whether to comfort her or cover her mouth, he did not know.

“She’s unsettled,” Yvane whispered as the other na’kyrim’s restlessness diminished. “Agitated. Feels something or knows something. Because we’re getting closer, maybe.”

Ess’yr returned suddenly, as if stepping out from one of the grey tree trunks into their midst. She brought with her another fragment of threat, another traced portion of disaster’s outline.

“Someone is killed, far behind us,” she said into Orisian’s ear, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. “We hear him dying. A Kyrinin. We must move. Death runs through the forest. We must run faster.”

But they could not run, for Anlane would not so easily open itself to humankind, or any kind perhaps. Not in the sombre darkness, not when its soils were soaked with meltwater, its streams swollen. They could only struggle on, none of them-Orisian least of all-knowing whether what lay before or behind them was more deserving of their fear. Ess’yr stayed close, guiding their every pace with inexhaustible patience. For all her efforts, they slipped and tripped and fell. But they kept moving, as if by moving they might hasten the departure of the treacherous darkness and eventually leave the night behind.

Orisian dreamed without sleeping, even as he staggered along, of Inurian, and of Rothe and others. They were formless dreams composed of nothing but the presence of the lost. He dreamed, or thought he did, of Aeglyss. He had no other name to give to that pitiless black fog he imagined drifting through the forest all around him. There was no malice in it, just a cold and bitter accusation of futility that sapped his strength and his will. He could feel not just his legs but his heart and his hope growing sluggish and torpid.

By the time dawn came, he had forgotten its possibility. All but a last, small stubborn part of him had surrendered, and accepted that the night and the forest had consumed all the world, and would be its entirety for ever. When the light came, wan and hesitant, he disbelieved it at first, and thought it only an illusory trick of his failing mind. But it was a true light. It brought no relief, though. Instead it brought a slow nightmare, shuffling in their wake out of the darkness, gathering itself, closing on them.

“We’ve lost someone,” Taim Narran said grimly.

They stood in bleary, numb assembly beneath a lightning-split oak. The great wound in the tree’s trunk was darkened by age, the exposed heartwood softened by rot. A gnarled knoll of rock and earth and thin grass stood nearby, a knuckled clenching of the forest floor.

“Kellach’s gone,” said Taim. “Did no one hear anything? No one see anything?”

There was only a shaking of heads, a casting down of eyes. Taim’s anguish was raw, sharpened by his exhaustion. It hurt Orisian to see it. He wanted to tell the warrior not to blame himself, but it would do no good. It was not the kind of guilt Taim could put aside, even when it belonged to his Thane, not him.

One of the warriors was weeping. His comrades watched him. They said nothing, showed nothing: no sympathy, no understanding, no contempt, no judgement. They merely watched, as if tears were now as natural and inevitable a thing as the clouds drifting above them. He did not weep for their lost companion, Orisian knew; he wept for everything. Because there was something rising in him that demanded the shedding of tears. Something that might, before long, demand the shedding of blood.

“We cannot go back,” Ess’yr said flatly.

No one looked at her.

Then Varryn was running down towards them, swinging around the shoulder of that bare knoll. He leaped from a boulder to land lightly at his sister’s side, already hissing something to her in the Fox tongue as he hit the ground. Tension sprang into her shoulders.

“The enemy,” she said.

And with nothing more than that, no more warning, there were White Owls amongst them. Figures spilled over the knoll and came rushing down like a loose flock of great pale birds. Orisian had time only to lift his shield and snap his sword free of its scabbard before there was movement and noise all about him, a storm of it. A solid blow on the face of his shield knocked him back a couple of paces, but the Kyrinin who had struck him swept on by. Orisian had a glimpse of wide grey eyes, the dark and swirling kin’thyn, a rictus of a mouth. He was not sure the White Owl had even seen him.

The next assuredly did, for a spear darted at Orisian’s thigh. He knocked it down and aside and its tip punched into the mossy earth. The Kyrinin who wielded it dropped it and ran on, bounding past the wild flash of a warrior’s blade. They had not come to fight, Orisian realised. The White Owls were pouring through the thin rank his men had prepared to meet this supposed charge, not pausing to offer anything more than the most cursory of assaults. In two and threes, they came leaping over the crest of the knoll, sped down its flank and danced their lithe way through the cordon of slow and clumsy humans, and then were gone, plunging back into the forest. It was like the dolphins that breached sometimes in the Glas estuary: emerging for only the briefest of instants into the world of light and air, then gone again, back into the limitless blank ocean.

Not all those making up that bewildered, impotent cordon were human, though. And one of them at least was fast enough, and impassioned enough, to weave a furious dance of his own. In a single sideways glance, Orisian saw Varryn, a fervent smile upon his face, moving with impossible, lethal agility. The Kyrinin flicked out his arm, and his spear punched a neat hole in a White Owl’s neck, and was withdrawn before the victim had even begun to stagger. Varryn lunged to his side and caught another on the forehead with the spear’s butt, streaking a red split across the white skin; he spun and the spear was suddenly in flight, blurring up the slope and into the stomach of a third descending White Owl.

A flicker in the corner of his eye had Orisian ducking and lurching away from a shadow, but the Kyrinin who cast it was past him and gone in the same moment. He looked after the disappearing woman, and saw Yvane crouching down, her back to him, protective arms enclosing K’rina’s hunched form. And Taim Narran standing in front of the two na’kyrim, making a wall of his body and sword and shield. The warrior did not reach for any of the White Owls as they sprinted by; he let them pass. He saw Orisian looking at him.

“Get over here,” Taim snapped, and Orisian obeyed instinctively.

He stood at Taim’s side, a fraction behind him, and they watched the Kyrinin flowing around and beyond them. In every face that passed Orisian saw the same thing: some strange admixture of panic and confusion and fear. It was so far from the measured composure he associated with Kyrinin that he found it almost repellent.

As suddenly as it had begun, it was over. But Varryn was unwilling to let it end. He sent an arrow skimming between the tree trunks in pursuit of the last of the receding figures, ran forward a few paces and set another to his bowstring, then another. He sped into the dappled forest without a backwards glance.

There were a handful of dead White Owls, and one of Taim’s men. A spear was embedded in the warrior’s chest, broken off halfway down its length. It must have been almost an accident, Orisian thought, staring down at the youth’s corpse. They were not even trying to kill us, and still someone had to die. He knelt and gently closed the open, blank eyes.

Ess’yr climbed to the top of the knoll and crouched there, turning and lifting her head this way and that.

Orisian returned to Yvane and K’rina. They were rising carefully to their feet, the one supported and guided by the other.

“Are you all right?” he asked Yvane.

She looked at him, and for the first time he saw in her eyes the same empty despair that he felt lodged patiently and watchfully at the back of his mind. In Yvane it had come into its full, bleak flowering.

“This can’t go on,” she said. “Did you see them? Did you feel it in them?”

“What?” asked Orisian cautiously.

“Out of their minds. Didn’t know who they were, what they were doing. The weight of him, of what he’s done, too much for them.”

Orisian nodded, for the want of anything to say.

Yvane swallowed and seemed to recover herself a little.

“The White Owl clan is older than any of your Bloods. It’s older than the Kingship that came before, even. There were people who called themselves White Owls when the Whreinin still hunted through these forest, in the Age before this one.”

“When there were still Gods,” Orisian murmured.

“Perhaps. And you see? You see what they have come to? Slaughtering one another like maddened beasts. Running about, senseless. Lost children.”

“It’s what we’re all coming to, isn’t it?” said Orisian quietly. “We’re halfway there already. That’s why we have to go on.”

Ess’yr came down from the knoll. There was blood on the tip of her spear, Orisian noted. A glutinous smear of it, already drying.

“We must move,” she said.

The unfamiliar strain in her voice, as much as her words, alarmed Orisian. Her face was as elegantly expressionless as ever, but something was tightening within her.

“More come,” she said.

As if summoned up by that single terse statement, there were cries in the forest. Looping, bounding cries, like the voices of birds. Distant, Orisian thought, but drawing nearer. The sound was unearthly, a disordered, jumbled melody of stretched and falling notes. It could have been Anlane itself, the mind of that vast place, calling out. Or announcing its waking. Announcing its joining of battle.

“They hunt,” Ess’yr said. “We must go. Now.”

She led them on, moving now with insistent haste that they struggled to match.

“What about Varryn?” Orisian called after her.

“He will find his way,” she told him.

Yet another of the babbling streams that crossed Anlane like veins in its vast body blocked their path. Too wide to leap across, they would have to wade.

Ess’yr paused upon its bank, looking up and down its writhing rocky length.

“In the water,” she said, and stepped into the flow. She turned and began to splash down-stream, picking a nimble course between weed-clothed stones.

There was an instant of hesitation amongst those who followed her. Some of the men exchanged doubting, reluctant glances. But those calls were still in the air behind them, bounding through the treetops.

“Hurry,” said Orisian, and went after her.

His boots filled at once with the brutally cold water, as if seized by hands of ice. The current pushed at his heels, piling water up against the back of his legs. Sensation retreated, withdrawing up through his limbs, leaving his feet deadened to all save the dull pain of intense cold. He stumbled, constantly fearful of losing his footing on some slick and slimy stone. Behind him, he could hear the others following. Though in truth he did not know whether they followed him or fled those haunting voices that filled the forest.

The brook led them where it willed, cutting a more or less northerly course over gently sloping ground. The notion settled upon Orisian that he walked in waters that would soon be part of the Glas. He was carried homeward by some fragment of the single titanic movement that joined stream, and great river, and ocean. This stream down which he laboured might soon be waves lapping at the walls of Castle Kolglas. And with that thought, he realised that he was not moving homeward at all, for his home was gone. Whatever he was returning to, it was not home but something else.

He heard a splash and breathless, gasping curses behind him, and turned. Yvane was struggling to raise K’rina from where she had fallen. Water churned about them. Taim stopped to help, waving the rest of the men on. Orisian waded back against the force of the water, but K’rina was on her feet by the time he reached them.

“Is she all right?” he asked Yvane, but the na’kyrim did not hear, or ignored him.

As they moved away from him, a fleeting glimpse of something pale drew his eyes back up the stream. He looked that way, and saw nothing. Only the drooping trees that lined the banks. The water murmuring busily along. Clumps of rushes nodding at its edge.

Then something: a single movement from left to right, as of an indistinct figure passing a distant window. And another. White Owls, he realised, darting across the stream. They were at the furthest limit of sight that the dense forest and the wandering stream’s course would permit. The only sound was at his back, as his companions made their sodden way along the bed of the brook. He saw these silent, wan instants of motion as the Kyrinin crossed one by one, and it seemed to be happening in another place entirely, without connection to him.

Until one of them stopped, halfway across, and stared directly at him. Even at that distance, Orisian knew their eyes met. He could envisage precisely that intent grey gaze, and feel its questioning touch upon him. He was already turning as a second figure joined the first, and as a flurry of fluting bird calls came down towards him, riding the cold air that hung above the stream between the overhanging trees.

“They’ve seen us,” he shouted. “They’re coming.”

The waters were hateful now, thickening about his legs, hampering every desperate surging stride.

“Out of the water!” he shouted, but Ess’yr already had them clambering up onto the bank.

Orisian’s feet throbbed as he staggered onto the grass, his sodden, heavy leggings plastered to his skin.

“We need some clear ground,” Taim was muttering. “Can’t win against Kyrinin if we get spread out, scattered amongst the trees.”

Ess’yr was listening intently to the calls cascading through the forest.

“They gather first,” she said.

“Not mad, these ones, then,” said Yvane bleakly. “They know what they’re doing.”

K’rina was leaning against her, shivering. Looking at the frail na’kyrim, a wave of weariness and feebleness ran through Orisian. All he had achieved here, following instincts that had seemed so sure and certain, was to deliver them all to a futile death.

Ess’yr was not finished yet, though. She led them on, away from the stream. The warriors followed without urging, their fear rendering them at last pliant. Orisian could see in their slumping shoulders and their gaunt, empty faces that the forest, its rigours, its accumulation of threat, had defeated them and left them willing to cleave to any guide who appeared to grasp its subtle horrors.

So they came to a place where a great oak, its girth the token of its agedness, had created about itself a wide ring of ground untrammelled by briars or shrubs. When in leaf, its sprawling branches must have cast such shade that nothing but moss and the most meagre of grasses would grow there. Pigeons rattled out of its crown. Beneath it, Ess’yr turned and stood. Taim Narran looked about with a frown.

“Not much,” the warrior growled. “But if it’s the best we can do…”

“No more time,” Ess’yr said. She leaned on her bow, forcing its notched limb down towards the looped end of the string.

“You two get down,” Taim said to Yvane and K’rina, jabbing the point of his sword groundward. “Lie flat, and we’ll shield you as best we can.”

Yvane sank down onto her haunches. She had to tug at K’rina’s arm to bring the other na’kyrim down.

“We keep between them and the arrows,” Taim told the remaining warriors. “And keep as much of ourselves behind our shields as we can. Depending on what sort of mood they’re in, they may lose interest if they see arrows aren’t going to do the job. Happens sometimes, with Kyrinin.”

Not this time, Orisian thought. No one fights with only half their heart any more. He took his place with the others in that feeble shield wall beside Taim. Just seven of them altogether, each sunk down onto his heels, shrinking himself into a knot of tension behind his shield. They arrayed themselves in half a circle, with the two na’kyrim lying at its heart, and behind them the great bulk of the oak. Orisian could smell the wood of his shield, and the dry leather of the grip to which his hand clung with such desperate rigidity. He looked back. Ess’yr was kneeling over Yvane. The Kyrinin’s face was a mask of perfect concentration as she brushed the flights of her arrows with careful fingers, seeking flaws. Deciding, perhaps, in which order to let them fly. The very stillness of her features in such moments gave the branching, curving tattoos of her kin’thyn an almost painted beauty, Orisian thought. He saw Yvane watching him with narrowed eyes, and he turned back into his shield and flexed his fingers about the hilt of his sword.

“Now,” Ess’yr whispered with no trace of urgency.

And like massive, gale-driven drops of rain striking shutters, the arrows hit the shields. First one, then a second, then a rippling drumbeat of them smacking home. Orisian felt his own shield tremble against his arm. And again, this time spitting fine splinters into his eyes. He blinked and saw the very tip of an arrow protruding from the inner face of the shield.

There was a scraping, and a moaning, and a shifting of bodies. And one of the men was slumping back. Orisian leaned back a little to look towards the sound. The man’s lower leg was spitted by an arrow, feathery flights on one side of his calf, bloodied point on the other. Others shuffled clumsily sideways to close the gap he had left. Orisian heard the snap of the arrow’s shaft breaking, and the gasp, through gritted teeth, as the man pulled the arrow through his flesh.

Within the rhythm of the arrows on shields, there were now a few duller, deeper notes, as some thudded into the trunk of the huge tree behind them. And another sound joined the chorus: the thrumming of Ess’yr’s bowstring as she sent shaft after shaft skimming out just over the tops of the shields in answer.

“Stay down,” Orisian murmured, but he did not think anyone heard him.

A spear rattled off the rim of his shield. He ducked instinctively. Then a deep silence descended. Within its ominous emptiness, a bird-a real bird, this-sang a brief, nervous song some way away. Orisian glanced towards Ess’yr. She was hunched down low, head dipped beneath her shoulders.

“What now?” he whispered.

She shook her head and gave a brief, puzzled shrug of her eyebrows. It was such a human gesture it made Orisian smile.

Taim stretched up a little and peered out. Orisian waited a moment, then did the same. The forest stared back at them, blank and motionless.

“Can’t be that easy,” Taim murmured.

The wounded man had torn a strip from the sleeve of his shirt, and was binding it about his leg, grimacing in pain. He fumbled at the knot, his hands blunt and clumsy. Yvane made an irritated noise through her teeth and pulled herself forward on her belly. She slapped the man’s hands aside and did his work for him.

Orisian returned his attention to the forest, and strained to untangle the slanting tree trunks, the shifting shadows, the clumps of undergrowth. Nothing. No sign of anything save the silent, constant forest itself, complete and impassive. But he imagined White Owls crouching within that concealing mass, flickering messages to one another on spidery fingers, signalling intent. Taim was right, he was sure. It could not be this easy.

“They’re still there?” he asked Ess’yr.

She nodded.

Having completed her ministrations, Yvane slipped back to her place at K’rina’s side, brushing hair away from the na’kyrim’s face. It made Orisian think of Anyara, and he did not know why. He frowned, troubled by that image, which had the texture of memory yet could not, for a moment, find its place in his past. And then it came. It was the echo of Anyara doing just that: brushing their mother’s hair aside when it had fallen across her eyes as she lay sick… dying… in her bed. There had been a sheen of sweat across Lairis’ skin, the smell of malady in the air. From amidst the awful cull of the Heart Fever, amidst all its crippling horrors and sorrows, that was what his mind chose to retrieve now. That one quiet moment. A moment of gentleness in the presence of death.

“There,” Taim breathed, and Orisian was wrenched back into the present.

He saw the same thing Taim did. Figures drifting silently back and forth amongst the trees. All the movement was soundless, patternless, as if in search of an as-yet-unexpressed form. It spread slowly around them, widening its compass, claiming more and more of the forest.

The wounded warrior edged back into line, struggling to keep the weight off his bloody leg. And the movement out there found the form it had been seeking, and ceased. Orisian’s heart beat once, twice as he stared out. He held his breath, for everything seemed poised in that narrow span of time upon some brink. Then they came, from all sides, rushing in.

“Up!” shouted Taim as he surged to his feet.

Orisian rose, heard arrows whipping by, saw the Kyrinin running towards him, felt their blind fury like a breeze on his face, and then sight and sound and touch all collapsed into a single impenetrable blur. All existence came to be only the act and the sensation of fighting and struggling.

A White Owl charged straight at him, spear levelled. It glanced off Orisian’s shield, and its wielder ran without pause onto the point of his sword, taking it into himself just under his ribs. Orisian’s arm gave beneath the weight of that savage merging, and the dying Kyrinin fell against his shoulder. Human and inhuman eyes met for an instant. Orisian saw nothing in those ashen pools. The Kyrinin blinked and slipped to the ground.

Orisian twisted his sword free, fending off another attack with his shield. He hacked about him, battering aside spears and arms that seemed to come reaching in from every side. A hand closed on the upper rim of his shield and began to pull it down and away from him. Taim was suddenly there, cutting at the wrist of the offending arm. Warm flecks of blood hit Orisian’s face.

He was dimly aware that he was faster now, more assured than he had been before. His blade moved without the need for conscious thought. It swung and blocked and stabbed according to some instinctual imperative of its own. But still he was no match for the man who had once been Captain of Castle Anduran.

Taim barged through the mass of White Owls. He did not wait for them to come to him, did not give them the time and space to exercise all their speed or dexterity. He ducked this way and that, cutting a gory path across the front of Orisian, and seemed always to be half a moment ahead of any attack that was directed against him. Arrows and the broken stump of a spear adorned the front of his shield like quills, until Taim battered it into the chest and face of a Kyrinin warrior and splintered them against his bones.

Someone fell at Orisian’s feet. He glanced down. One of his warriors writhed there, an arrow in his face. The chaos in which Orisian was caught crowded out any response to that sight, and his eyes flicked up again at once. A tall White Owl was bearing down on him, a great club-a knotted branch of long-dead wood-held above her head in both hands. Orisian got his shield up, and the cudgel shattered against it. Fragments of it stung Orisian’s brow and scalp. The blow knocked his shield low, almost tore it from his grip, and he swayed back. The woman flung the broken remnant of her weapon at him. He twisted his head out of its tumbling path, but it grazed his cheek. She ran at him and he hammered his sword into her upper arm with all his strength. It went deep, through sleeve and skin and flesh, and knocked her aside.

Beyond her, he saw a young Kyrinin-slighter and younger than he was himself-sitting astride the chest of a dead or dying man, pounding at his wrecked skull with a rock. The sight was transfixing. Orisian watched in stunned awe as the rock rose, flicking gore and blood into the air.

He was almost too late in blocking another spear thrust, and was staggered by it. The spear’s tip scraped along the leather belt at his waist. Orisian slashed at his attacker, but the White Owl sprang nimbly back. And looked down, startled, at the other spear that suddenly burst from his own stomach.

Varryn carried his impaled victim a couple of paces forward before driving him down onto the ground. Orisian started to thank him, but saw at once that the Fox was far beyond the reach of any words. Varryn’s eyes had a glaze of fierce detachment. He snarled savagely as he hauled at his spear to free it from the back of the White Owl. The blue tattoos on his cheeks were overlaid with streams of blood coursing from a ragged scalp wound. His hair was matted down over his brow.

He hissed as he spun, bringing his spear round in a flashing flat arc and breaking it across the midriff of another closing White Owl. He leaped high and came down on the back of a Kyrinin who was sparring with Taim. Orisian stepped forward. A flicker of movement sensed out of the corner of his eye had him lifting his shield. It caught an arrow out of the air and shook. Orisian looked out towards the youth who had loosed the shaft. The Kyrinin stared back at him, slowly lowering his bow with trembling hands, and then turned on his heel and vanished into the forest.

Orisian turned about. The shadow of the oak tree now fell upon the dead, the dying and the last of the fleeing White Owls. Soft moans and gasped breaths. The stench of blood and spilled guts. Orisian saw a Kyrinin arm extended up, reaching weakly and futilely for the overhanging boughs. He saw Taim Narran on his knees, shield laid flat before him, panting. He saw more than a dozen bodies, and one White Owl limping in a tight, unsteady circle, holding a crippled and ragged arm tight in against her side. She gave out a susurrant whimper. Her eyes were closed. Varryn put an arrow into her neck, and she staggered sideways and then fell.

Varryn turned towards Orisian. The Kyrinin’s chest was heaving in a way Orisian had never seen before, from exertion and perhaps from the intensity of the fires that burned within him. Fires that subsided now, for the warrior blinked and blew out his cheeks, stretching the coils of his blue kin’thyn, and let his bow hang limply from his hand. His eyes cleared.

Orisian nodded, a gesture of simple acknowledgement, a welcoming back of someone who had been absent, in more ways than one, until that moment. But he realised that the Kyrinin’s attention had already found another object. Those eyes focused beyond Orisian, sharpening upon something over his shoulder. Varryn’s face went slack, his lips parted. Orisian turned, frowning.

And only then did he grasp the true shape of the disaster that had been closing upon them-upon him-all this time. For Ess’yr lay on her back, hair spread over the grass like a filamentous disc framing her head. She stared up, unblinking, through the branches of the oak tree to the sky above. One hand rested lightly on her breast, the fingertips just barely touching the shaft of the arrow that was sunk deep into her fluttering chest. Her blood was turning the deerskin of her jacket black.