Orisian tried to do as he was told. His fingers were clumsy, unable to move as fast and nimbly as his mind desired of them.
Ess’yr had an arrow at her bowstring. She scurried a few paces away from them and peered over the tree trunk. There were a couple of hollow cracks as arrows smacked into the dead wood, the whispering flight of two or three more that flashed overhead and disappeared into the forest. Ess’yr rose to a crouch and loosed off an arrow in reply.
“How many?” Rothe demanded of her as she sank back down, reaching for another shaft.
“Enough,” she said calmly.
“Enough for what?” the shieldman muttered in exasperation.
Orisian had sword and shield ready now. He stayed in a low crouch, trying to ignore the fluttering heartbeat he felt in his throat, the cold sweat on his brow and his palms.
“Where’s Varryn?” he asked.
“They are coming,” Ess’yr said. She spun, still sunk down on her haunches, and sighted along the length of the great tree trunk. A figure rounded its far end, where its root plate stood tall: a Kyrinin, a man with a tattooed face. Then Ess’yr’s arrow was lodged in his chest and he was pitching backwards.
“Behind you,” Ess’yr hissed, casting aside the bow and taking up her spear.
Rothe and Orisian both looked over their shoulders. Another White Owl warrior was leaping over the tree trunk, little more than a spear’s length away. Rothe surged up before Orisian could move. Shieldman and Kyrinin crashed together. Orisian heard gasps of violently expelled breath as the two of them fell in a tangle. The White Owl was faster, more agile, than Rothe; he rolled and swept up onto his feet, already in a low fighting stance. Rothe was still scrambling to get upright.
Orisian rushed at the back of the White Owl. He knew at once that he was too slow. He could see the Kyrinin turning, the tip of his spear snapping round at stomach height. Something else hammered into Orisian from the side, knocking him flying. He hit the ground clumsily, his sword pinned beneath him. He was distantly aware that his shin had smacked against a sharp-edged rock, but the pain was carried away, for now, on the flood of the moment.
He sat up, managed to get his sword out from under him. A blur of closing movement gave him enough warning to lift his shield. It took the spear thrust close to its centre and trapped the point there, holding it fast. Orisian tried to roll onto his feet, but the White Owl still had hold of the spear. A single hard tug was enough both to twist Orisian onto his knees and to pull it free of the shield. Orisian watched the butt of the spear sweeping towards him. He could see it coming, it seemed slow, it seemed that he had plenty of time to block it with his sword; yet his arm was only now beginning to move, far too late. The moment passed. The butt of the spear leaped into his face. He felt the skin under his cheekbone split. He felt a rush of hot, wet blood in his mouth. One eye was awash with blinding light. He slumped sideways, flailing with his shield. A blow landed on it. He blinked and saw the White Owl standing over him, readying another stabbing lunge. He slashed at the Kyrinin’s legs with his sword. The Kyrinin sprang out of reach.
Ess’yr came from behind and drove her own spear into the small of the White Owl’s back. He arched, his mouth silently stretched open. Ess’yr tripped him and pinned him to the ground. Orisian swayed onto his feet. He still could not see properly. He spat teeth onto the muddy grass. Blood and saliva trailed from his mouth. Through the showers of blurry lights that cascaded across his vision, he saw White Owls spilling over the huge fallen tree. Rothe was still fighting, bodies at his feet. Ess’yr tried to wrench her spear free, but it resisted. She released it and turned to meet the wave of assailants with a knife.
Orisian stumbled forwards. The White Owl that Ess’yr had impaled was stirring, clawing at the ground.
The spear protruding from his back jerked and swung about. Orisian hacked at the back of his head, felt the blade meet bone, and stepped over him. There was a terrible anger howling inside his skull, a vast roaring filling his ears.
Ess’yr dodged the thrust of a spear, stabbed its wielder in the groin. A second White Owl reached her before she could untangle herself, knocked her down. Orisian cried out, bloody spittle filming his lips, and sprang forwards. There was no room in his mind for thought, but his body took over, leaped up, brought the sword down on the Kyrinin’s shoulder. Orisian heard the clear crack of bone breaking. The White Owl fell, within reach of Ess’yr and her knife. Orisian rushed on beyond.
He ducked behind his shield and charged, meaning to drive his way to Rothe so that he could stand back to back with his shieldman. One Kyrinin darted out of his path; the next, he crashed up against and pressed to the thick bole of the dead tree. The White Owl writhed and strained, gripping the rim of Orisian’s shield with one hand and pulling it this way and that. Another was coming from the side. Orisian managed to turn aside the incoming spear with a wild sweep of his sword, but the movement left him open with his blade down and wide. The Kyrinin recovered more quickly, brought the spear back up, then jerked. An arrow was in his side. Another darted in beside it. He fell. Orisian had no time to think.
The White Owl he had pinned against the great log was too strong for him to hold. He hacked at the exposed legs below his shield until the Kyrinin went down.
He saw the na’kyrim woman they had come for curled up against the tree trunk like a child, a dead White Owl laid out beside her almost as if they were a sleeping couple. He saw Varryn coming sprinting from amongst the trees, and behind him human figures: Torcaill’s men. He saw Ess’yr, a spear in her hand once more, trading blocks and blows with an opponent. And he saw Rothe, down on one knee, shield up to block one attack, sword parrying another, nothing left to block the third that punched a spear deep into his shoulder.
Orisian lunged forwards. He was in amongst them. Blows landed on his shield, on his hip. Someone went down on his left. He looked, terrified, but it was not Rothe. The shieldman had got back to his feet.
His shield arm was hanging limp, defeated by injuries old and new. He cut down one of the White Owls in front of Orisian, stretched out sword and arm, pushing Orisian back.
“Stay clear,” Rothe said. Then something hit him at the base of his neck. There was blood there. The shieldman’s eyes flared for a moment. Varryn brushed past them, spear and elbows jabbing and stabbing. One of Torcaill’s warriors crashed by. Rothe took an uncertain step backwards, and toppled.
Orisian heard the clatter of spears, the gasps of pain and exertion, felt the impact of bodies falling or feet stamping. He saw only Rothe. He dropped his sword and fell to his knees at his shieldman’s side. Rothe was watching him. Only his eyes moved. He coughed and blood bubbled out across his lips and beard.
Orisian shook his shield free, cast it away. He cupped Rothe’s face in his hands. Strands of blood were falling from his own mouth. The wound in Rothe’s throat was gurgling. Rothe blinked, again and again.
His gaze never faltered, never left Orisian’s eyes. Orisian pressed a hand to Rothe’s neck. The blood flooded slickly out between his fingers and across the back of his hand. Dark. Remorseless.
“Wait, wait,” Orisian heard himself saying.
Rothe blinked once more. And then never again.
VIII
“What would you have me do?” Cerys asked wearily. “Kill him?”
She looked from face to face. There was no challenge in her gaze. The question was an honest one. She had no answers of her own.
Of Highfast’s Council, Eshenna was gone, and Alian remained too sick, too crippled by the presence of Aeglyss, to rise from her bed. The others sat here, enmeshed in worry, seeking solutions to a problem that all of them, Cerys suspected, knew was beyond them.
“No,” Mon Dyvain murmured. “We cannot cut down the Dreamer, or allow Herraic’s men to do so.
Can we? We cannot give up on him so easily.”
“Hardly easily,” Amonyn said. “But I agree. There is still some hope, however faint its light might be. His body liv
es, even if another dwells in it. His mind might yet return. Aeglyss must exhaust his patience soon.”
Cerys sighed. So often, over the years, she had found Amonyn to be of the same mind as her in all things. So often, his calm confidence had been an aid to her as she bore the heavy duties of the Elect.
Now, though . . . now she was not so sure. Aeglyss showed little sign of running out of patience so far, though he had been shut away in a long-disused bedchamber for a full day and night now. They took him food and water, and Cerys had given him false promises of further discussion, even aid. Through it all, he had barely spoken. He simply stared at anyone who entered the room. They all left disturbed and distressed.
Amonyn smiled at her. It was a weary smile, but heartfelt. He clings to the possibility of escape from this net we’re caught in, she thought. Through all his weariness, he finds cause for hope. Amonyn had gone without sleep now for a longer spell than was wise. Until he was summoned to this gathering, he had been constantly at the bedside of Mordyn Jerain, tending to the Chancellor’s grave injuries as only he could. It had drained him, left him more emptied out than Cerys had ever seen him. Such use of the Shared was always punishing, but now, with everything twisted out of recognition by Aeglyss, it was doubly so.
“No.”
The word was spoken with such precision and firmness that it caught all of them unawares. Olyn, the blind old keeper of crows, sat with his arms folded across his chest, his brow furrowed in grave concentration.
“No?” Cerys asked quietly.
Olyn shook his head, blinked his milky eyes.
“Tyn is gone. The one who lives now in his body is a plague. Nothing will remain unruined if he persists.
He is a blight upon this world, and all that’s in it. You all know it, but won’t face it. You all see it. Even these blind old eyes of mine can see it. Who’ll deny it?”
The old man’s lips were trembling. His long silver hair shivered as he turned his head this way and that. It cut Cerys to the quick to see this gentle man so distressed.
“None of us could deny that Aeglyss fouls the Shared with his—”
“No,” Olyn snapped. He laid his hands on the table. They were shaking, trembling against the wood.
“Not fouls. Corrupts, wrecks. Never, never . . . there has never been the like of this. I’ve lived too long that I should be here to learn of it.” He was almost weeping. Cerys looked away. “Am I the only one who dreams of nothing but death and suffering and rage? Who is afraid, at every waking moment, lost to fear? Who can hardly walk in a straight line sometimes, so violent are the storms that buffet my thoughts?
Am I?”
No one said anything. Cerys had her hands on her iron chain of office, but the cold metal offered none of the reassurance it sometimes did. What use an Elect, or a Council even, rendered so impotent?
“I am not the only one,” Olyn said. “We can feel death, in the Shared, spreading its raven wings. Its shadow will fall across all things and all peoples. They do not know it yet, but we do. And its cause, its seed, is here, in Highfast. In Tyn. We should kill the body he is in, and hope against hope that in doing so we may harm him. Nothing else makes sense.”
The premonition of something awful came to them all in the same moment. A stillness, a profound hesitation as if every living thing had paused, then the blinding, dizzying surge of raw power through the Shared. Olyn cried out. Cerys staggered to her feet.
The door to the meeting chamber crashed open. A na’kyrim was there, but Cerys could not be certain who: her vision was fragmenting.
“Elect,” the newcomer was gasping. “Come – please come. He is . . . he has gone mad.”
Cerys reeled out into the corridor. She could feel Aeglyss inside her skull. Or, at least, she could feel the Shared, but it was no longer easy to tell the difference between the two. She walked into a storm of the mind, and it was as ferocious as any gale that had ever lashed at Highfast.
“Find Herraic,” she gasped, unsure whether anyone could or would hear her. “Bring his men.”
This was terror beyond anything Cerys had ever known: all-embracing, crippling. It howled inside her.
She lurched from one side of the passage to the other, fending off the walls as they swung towards her.
Every bone, every muscle in her body burned with the desire to run, but run where? Everything around her was warped and twisted. The Shared overwhelmed her, bleeding through and hauling her into madness. The room in which Aeglyss was locked was close, but it might as well have been half the world away.
Her hands scraped along the hard walls of Highfast, but her feet stumbled across a sward of green grass; grass that writhed and flailed, animated by the vast will of the Anain. She smelled the deep, hot, ancient soils of endless forests, chokingly oppressive. The passageway down which she stumbled contorted itself into a chaos of shadows and light, of vague figures that ran alongside her, calling like birds, or screaming in fury. She could hear blades clashing, she could smell the sea, she could feel the blasting heat of a great fire on her face. None of it was real, and all of it was real, for it was flooding out of the Shared and into her. A thousand truths, unfiltered, harvested from all across the world, out of memory and experience, all pouring into her mind and tearing it asunder. And all overlaid by the savage, embittered anger of one man.
Then someone took hold of her hand. Someone was murmuring her name, laying down soft walls of protection around the bruised periphery of her mind. It was Amonyn, of course; there, at her side amidst the madness, easing her back towards a clear sense of herself. She held on to him tightly, and pressed her face into his shoulder for a few moments. When she felt strong enough to look up and into his eyes, she saw there such an enervated, haunted spirit that it almost broke her. But she said nothing. There was nothing to say. They went onwards together.
One of Herraic’s men was hunched down outside the door, his spear lying forgotten at his side. He had wrapped his arms about his knees, pulling his legs in to his chest. He was shaking. Amonyn knelt beside him while Cerys opened the door. She half expected to die in the next few moments.
There was an overturned table. The mattress of the bed had been shredded, its horsehair stuffing disgorged in great black drifts across the floor. The shards of a clay jug were scattered across the room, a great swathe of wet stone on the wall showing where it had struck. And there was blood: on the sheet, on Tyn’s crooked fingers, and on his face, where Aeglyss had clawed furrows out of the flesh of his cheeks.
The eyes that turned upon Cerys were bestial. The snarl was something that could only come from an animal’s throat. Yet he wept, and the grief and pain that swirled about him and buffeted her senses belonged to something more than a beast. He gave no sign of recognising her; she barely recognised herself, for she was adrift now, in the limitless Shared.
“She is gone,” he howled, and the sound staggered her, sent her to her knees, hands clasped uselessly over her ears.
“Lost in the green.” He tore at the gown he wore, ripping open its front, revealing the white skin and the cage of the ribs beneath. “Taken from me. Again, and again, and again. Always to be taken from me.”
He was hobbling towards her, like some tottering corpse. Cerys tried to get to her feet, but he had hold of her and there was a strength in him far greater than anything Tyn’s wasted muscles could have allowed. His fingers dug into her shoulder, crushing down onto bone. She cried out. He lifted her onto her feet, as if she was a child’s straw doll. He pressed her against the wall.
“How?” he shouted into her face. “Tell me! Why have they taken her from me? Dragging her down into the . . .”
His voice faltered. He gagged and spluttered as if choked by his own rage.
Cerys took a feeble hold on his wrists, but could do nothing to loosen his grip upon her. There was blood on his arms. She could feel it flowing beneath her fingers, from wounds in Tyn’s wrists. How much blood could there be, in this emaciated body?
/> “Aeglyss,” she murmured. It was not her that he raged against, she knew. The violence that set the Shared afire was not directed at her. It was uncontrolled, unfocused.
“Let me help you,” she managed to say. But he did not seem to hear her.
“They’ll not have me. Not!” He spat the words. His spittle was on her lips, across her eyes.
Then Amonyn was there, hauling at Tyn’s arms. Aeglyss turned and looked upon Amonyn, and Cerys felt the contemptuous hatred surge like a boiling thundercloud. She opened her mouth to cry out in warning, but there was no time. Aeglyss released her, she slumped; he struck Amonyn, just once, across the head.
Amonyn fell, and in that fall somehow the greatest extremities of blind fury were spent. Tyn’s bony shoulders went slack as he stared down at the prostrate figure. Cerys could breathe again, could give her thoughts some kind of form. She steadied herself on her feet, still leaning against the wall. She thought she could hear footsteps, somewhere off in the maze of passageways, drawing closer.
“The healer,” Aeglyss murmured, still staring at Amonyn. He knelt.
“No,” Cerys whispered, unsure of what it was she denied, or feared.
“Be silent. Liar. You think I don’t know your lies? Your deceit?”
She felt cold.
“You’re less than nothing. All of you here, little rats hiding in your tunnels. There’s nothing for me here, nothing that you’ll give me. Ha! Nothing’s given. Only taken.”
He caressed Amonyn’s slack face.
“You think I don’t know you have secrets? You think I don’t know you mean to betray me? I know betrayal, as I know water and meat and the turning of the seasons. It is . . . it never changes.”
“No,” whispered Cerys. She pushed herself away from the wall, reaching for him.
“Be silent.” And she was, for her throat clenched itself shut and she could draw no breath, and her legs and her arms were twigs, grass. She fell.
“Each day, I grow stronger,” Aeglyss said softly. “Each day, I sink deeper. I learn. Things are revealed to me.” He leaned down close to Amonyn, sniffing at him. “You na’kyrim . You . . . halfbreeds. There is nothing you can keep from me. You, least of all.”
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