Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  “You think yourself more than that?” she muttered angrily.

  Aeglyss pushed away the platter that had been placed before him.

  “Whatever I’m following, it’s no warrior maiden. And it won’t be the ravens or Ragnor’s tame eagle, either. You’ll see. Your eyes will open.”

  “Your arrogance outruns your importance,” Wain hissed, struggling to keep her voice down, “Already I regret not killing you at Kan Avor. Is that what you want?”

  Only now did she look at the na’kyrim , fixing him with the glare that had cowed so many others before him. But he met her eyes with his own: grey, implacable. His slender hand slipped over hers, and though she meant to push him away, her arm was no longer subject to her will. There were shadows moving in his eyes, or perhaps behind them.

  “Ignorance excuses all failings,” he whispered, “in the greatest and most noble just as in the most lowly.”

  Wain could feel warmth inside her hand. It spread as if from some gentle ember buried deep in her flesh.

  “You mistake past truths for those of the present, Thane’s sister. It is easy to forgive, for you were not there when the world changed. You did not see me upon the Stone.”

  Heat tingled beneath the skin of her forearm, winding its tendrils over her muscles, crawling up and around her elbow. She imagined herself pulling away from this creature who wore the semblance of a man, yet she did not – could not – move. She was distantly aware of the drone of surrounding conversations, of the clatter of plates and tankards, but it was those stone-coloured eyes that seemed in that moment to contain all the world. And they held her, drew her close, even as her mind sought to deny them.

  “I am a gift to you,” Aeglyss said. “Call it fate if you like, or fortune, but never imagine that nothing has changed. You needn’t fear men like Temegrin. Not now. He has been . . . exceeded. There is no strength

  – of arms, of will, of authority – that cannot be exceeded.”

  “I never feared him,” murmured Wain. The sounds she made were so faint, more like breaths than words. The warmth was in her neck, blushing up, cupping her chin, reaching for her lips, her cheeks.

  And then Aeglyss withdrew his hand from hers, and the warmth was gone. She fought a wave of dizziness. She could suddenly hear the babble of voices that filled the hall, feel the grain of the table top beneath her fingers. She brought her hands together, searching for the reassuring solidity of her rings.

  Aeglyss was looking over his shoulder now. Wain turned her head, and found Fiallic standing there.

  “I thought we might have a quiet word,” the Inkallim said. He was ignoring Aeglyss. The na’kyrim turned back to the table.

  “If you wish,” said Wain.

  Fiallic gestured to the open door of the hall. “Will you walk with me? Just for a moment or two.”

  Wain hesitated, and silently cursed herself for doing so. She hated uncertainty, despised those who allowed it to gain a foothold in their thoughts, yet found herself more and more afflicted by it. She rose and strode away from the table, away from Aeglyss. Fiallic walked at her side.

  “You seem distracted,” the Inkallim said. “Does what you have found here in Anduran displease you?”

  “I am fine,” Wain snapped.

  “Very well.”

  They threaded a path through the warriors scattered across the hall’s floor. Gyre spearmen shuffled aside to let them pass, but did so grudgingly. Wain was tempted to kick one of them, or tread on a tardy hand.

  Fiallic ushered her out into the courtyard. It was quieter now than it had been before. A wagon loaded with sacks of horse feed was rumbling in through the castle gate.

  “You saw that Temegrin mislikes the path that fate is following,” Fiallic said. He watched the wagon drawing to a halt. Men began to haul the sacks off.

  “So much was obvious,” Wain said.

  “You are aware that the High Thane would not even have sent his Third Captain if the Battle Inkall had not marched to your aid? He made no move until the commonfolk began to follow us across the Stone Vale.”

  Wain had no intention of being drawn so easily into criticism of Ragnor oc Gyre. That a Banner-captain of the Battle should tread upon such ground was in itself worrying: it spoke of dangerous, unpredictable times.

  “How many swords does Temegrin command?” she asked.

  “A thousand and a half. Five hundred of them are Tarbains. Well-trained and disciplined, by the standards of Tarbains, but Tarbains nevertheless. It was we Inkallim, and the army of farmers and herdsmen and fishermen, that took Tanwrye, not the swords of Gyre.”

  Wain grunted non-committally.

  “My advice to you would be to have a care in your dealings with the Eagle,” Fiallic continued. “His master in Kan Dredar does not like this war. We do not know what orders Temegrin was given, but it is unlikely they were the same as those I received from the First of the Battle.”

  “And they were?” asked Wain. She strove to sound only mildly interested. There was something unsettling about one of the ravens being so forthcoming. She had never known there to be anything other than unity of purpose between the Inkallim and the Gyre Blood; not in her lifetime, at least.

  “To pursue this conflict as far, and as fiercely, as fate will allow. To make myself an ally of your Blood.

  To oppose any effort – from whatever quarter – to deny the full expression of whatever outcome fate has in mind for us.”

  “And what outcome is it that you expect? What do the Children of the Hundred hope for?”

  Fiallic smiled. The wagon, now empty, was being slowly wheeled around. The huge horse that drew it looked weary; its head was hanging low. Little birds were already dropping down from the battlements to scavenge feed that had leaked out from the sacks.

  “I expect nothing,” Fiallic said. “I wait to be shown what the Black Road has in store for us. We have the beast by the tail now. It will either turn upon us, and consume us, or drag us in its wake to glory.”

  “The beast?”

  “War. There is no surer way to test fate.”

  “No,” said Wain quietly.

  “You should speak with Goedellin.”

  Wain hung her head for a moment. Those strange, intense moments with Aeglyss had left her inexplicably tired. Her arms and shoulders felt slack, lifeless; her thoughts were sluggish.

  “Be assured that the Children of the Hundred are your friends,” Fiallic said with measured precision.

  “The Horin-Gyre Blood has earned the gratitude of all in whom the faith burns brightly. If there are others whose gratitude is more . . . grudging, well, all the more reason to secure whatever bonds of friendship are offered. Goedellin represents the First of the Lore here. Whatever Temegrin may think, there is none more central to matters than Goedellin. There is none whose friendship could do more to secure your Blood’s position.”

  “Very well. Very well.”

  VI

  Goedellin, Inner Servant of the Lore Inkall, was not a man whose appearance put those meeting him for the first time at their ease. What little hair remained on his head was white and wispy; the scalp that showed beneath it was a tapestry of blotches, moles and blemishes. His lips were dark grey, veined with streaks of black: the legacy of the seerstem that some of the Lore used. His back was bent into a hook, pulling his shoulders and head down and forwards. Wain towered over him. Walking alongside him through the yard of what had been Anduran’s gaol, she had to shorten her stride to little more than a shuffle to avoid leaving him behind. The Inkallim’s legs were crooked, swaying out at the knees. He leaned on a thick, twisted stick.

  “It was the house of the gaoler, I am told,” Goedellin said as they drew near to the squat building.

  “Yes,” Wain murmured. “I think it was.” She found Goedellin unsettling not so much in how he looked as in who he was. The Inner Servants of the Lore were its most senior and most respected members.

  Each one had spent years in the consideration of
the creed, reflecting upon its meaning. They stood but a single step beneath the First himself in the hierarchy. For one such as Wain, wedded to the faith in heart and mind, Goedellin inspired a respectful, nervous awe that the bloodiest, most terrible of warriors could never have matched.

  The door to the house opened as Goedellin stepped carefully up onto the threshold. A young Inkallim, perhaps a candidate for the Lore, ushered them inside. The interior was bare – looted, Wain suspected, when she and her brother had first overrun this city – but that austerity seemed fitting for the lodging of the Lore. The room Goedellin led her into still held a grand table – its surface now scarred, and notches cut into its edges – but the chairs clearly did not belong. They were simple, crude. Goedellin settled stiffly into one. He rested his walking stick against its arm, and indicated that Wain should sit opposite him.

  “Fiallic advises me that I should not detain you for too long,” the old man said. The tilt of his head made it hard to see his lips or eyes. Wain found herself staring at his scalp. “He tells me you will be eager to leave this place, and return to Glasbridge.”

  “My brother with be waiting for me, yes. There will be a great battle soon. I should be there.”

  “Of course. Your reputation is well known. They tell me you are a fierce young woman, Wain nan Horin-Gyre. But a faithful one, too.”

  “I hope to be.”

  “Well. Fiallic also told me you brought a halfbreed with you, who is already causing trouble.”

  “We sent him away. We tried to set him aside, and the woodwights too. But fate has returned him to us.

  He brings the White Owls to fight for our cause; more than ever before. He says there are many hundreds of them, many hundreds, already moving through Anlane. It seems to me . . . or at least it did . .

  . I thought perhaps he would not have returned, despite all the obstacles, were he not fated to play a part in our struggle.”

  “It seems to you? You know, do you not, that the Lore frowns upon any suggestion that we can know in advance what course fate will follow?”

  “I do. I pretend no knowledge of it. I speak only of a willingness to accept that fate may impose distasteful allies, whatever my personal preferences.”

  “That’s a neat construction. It has a dutiful sound to it. Were you tutored in the creed by the Lore as a child?”

  Wain nodded. “My father brought two Lore Inkallim to Hakkan when my brother and I were young.

  They remained only for a year or two.” She felt now, facing this Inner Servant, much as she had then, listening in rapt wonder to the soft, firm voices of those tutors. The truth of what they had told her, all those years ago, had been so clear to her that it was like a blast of cold wind, scouring away dust from her child’s heart.

  “A good man, Angain,” Goedellin mused. “Would that more of the Thanes did the same. It’s rare for them to invite such tutors into their homes these days. Your Blood has long been an example that others might look to; a shame it has gone unregarded by those with the most to learn.”

  Wain hung her head and said nothing.

  “You are uncertain now, of the halfbreed’s place?” Goedellin asked her. “Of whether he is to be a part of all this?”

  Wain nodded silently.

  “So,” the Inkallim sighed. “Whenever we come to a fork in the road, it looks like a choice. It feels like a decision. But these feelings, these choices that we imagine we could make, they are illusions. Choice and decision were taken from us. The Gods require of us that we learn to live without them; learn that some things are beyond our power to change. Such is the penance we must all do, in answer to the hubris of our forebears. You understand all of this, of course?”

  “I do,” Wain said.

  “It is, in part, only a matter of perspective. A life can have but one path. We poor mortals see that path only when we stand at death’s very portal, and can turn and look back down the road we have travelled.

  Then, and only then, we see the way we have come, unbranching, stretching back to the moment of our birth. The Black Road. However it might have appeared to us as we walked it, there were in truth no choices, no decisions. Only that one path, as the Hooded God read it in his book when we drew our first breath in this empty world.”

  Goedellin was watching her, pursing his dark-tinted lips. It seemed that he expected some kind of response.

  “I understand this,” Wain said. “I accepted it long ago.”

  “The creed rules your heart, and your mind?” Goedellin asked her. “Unreservedly? Certainly?”

  “It does,” she replied without hesitation.

  Goedellin nodded: a gentle, kindly gesture. “And this na’kyrim ? Is he a true adherent of the creed?”

  Wain’s hesitation was fleeting, but she saw in Goedellin’s eyes that he noted it. “I believe he is,” she said. She knew it sounded defensive. “I am not certain.”

  Again, Goedellin nodded. “You do well not to claim certainty. There’s none of us, save the Last God himself, who can see into a heart and take the true measure of its devotion.”

  A sound outside caught his attention. He rose crookedly to his feet, and went with small, careful steps to the window. He beckoned Wain with a gnarled finger. Looking out, she saw twenty or thirty young children clustered in the yard. Many were crying, others were sullen and silent and fearful. Several shivered, clothed in thin garments that were no match for the wintry air. Battle Inkallim shepherded them across the cobblestones.

  “A small part of the harvest,” Goedellin murmured.

  One of the children – a little girl – was jostled from behind and fell, cracking her knees. She wailed. One of the ravens reached down with a single hand and lifted her bodily to her feet, pushed her back in amongst the crowd of waifs.

  “You’re sending them north?” Wain asked.

  “Of course. There is nothing for them here. Those that survive will be Children of the Hundred, one day.

  We do them a great service, though they may not know it for some time. And there will be losses to be made good. There will be gaps in the rank of the Battle to be filled before all this is done.”

  “You do mean to see this war fought, then,” Wain murmured. “To its conclusion. Whatever that may be.”

  Goedellin shuffled back towards his chair. “We have three thousand of the Battle here. Such a force does not march lightly. They will not be returning to Kan Dredar until they have tested themselves fully against the Haig Bloods, and against fate.”

  Wain returned to her own seat.

  “Your devotion to the creed is well known, of course,” the Inkallim said as he settled back down. “My earlier question was not born of any doubt. How stands your brother in this regard? Do the fires of the faith burn as brightly in the new Thane of the Horin-Gyre Blood as they do in you? As they did in your father?”

  “They do.” Wain might have said no more than that, but her mind was caught up in this strange fancy that she was a child again, and Goedellin one of those old tutors who had so impressed her. Their wisdom, their sere gravity, had always compelled her to speak honestly. “Perhaps it takes more . . . effort on his part to hold firm to the creed. But he does hold firm.”

  “Do you understand why I make these enquiries, and ponder these matters?”

  “I would not question the Lore’s right to enquire as it sees fit in matters of the faith.”

  “No. I imagine you would not. Still, this is not solely a matter of the faith. The Lore, the Battle, the Hunt: all the Children of the Hundred are now engaged in this struggle that your Blood began. We are committed, to some extent. We will incur loss. We face risks, in terms of our standing, our relationship with the other Bloods. With Thanes.”

  “Your support for my Blood is a great gift. I – and my brother – know it.”

  “Well, there is the nub of things. Our support is for your Blood only insofar as it serves the larger purpose of supporting, of strengthening, the creed. So long as this war, and the
survival of your Blood, offers some possibility of advancing the cause and the dominion of the Black Road, we Inkallim have little choice but to test the limitations that fate might set upon that advance.” Goedellin glanced up from his hunched position, scouring Wain’s face for some sign. “Do you think survival is too strong a word to use, perhaps?”

  Outside, in the yard, a baby was crying now. It was a piercing sound, distracting. Wain hesitated. “I do not know. We have spent most of my Blood’s fighting strength here. But it does not matter, in the end. If my Blood is fated to pass into extinction, so it must be. I know . . .” She faltered, fearful now that she might say the wrong thing. Yet the Inkallim’s steady gaze struck her as more reassuring than threatening.

  “I know, or think I know, that our success has won us little affection from the Gyre Blood. The reasons why that should be so are obscure to me.”

  Goedellin grunted and lowered his eyes. “Our High Thane excels in matters of obscurity. Well. Your Blood will survive, if fate smiles upon us. Your brother might have made the shaping of such a smile a little easier, had he left an heir behind him, safe in your mother’s care at Hakkan. No matter. We – the Inkallim – will stand shoulder to shoulder with you. For so long as it seems that such unity serves the cause of the Black Road, of course. Do you understand yet the import of what I said about choice? Its illusory nature?”

  “I am not sure I do.”

  “There is little more to it than this: whatever choices we make – you about your na’kyrim , we Inkallim about the movement of armies – are predestined, their outcome already inscribed upon the pages of the Hooded God’s book. The significance of any decision is not, therefore, in the decision itself, but in the thought that underlies it. The posture, if you like, of the mind that makes it. The correct posture is one that gives primacy to the advancement of the creed, and willingly accepts whatever consequences may flow from adhering to that principle.”

  “I understand that,” Wain said, nodding. Goedellin was not looking at her, and could not see the gesture.