Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  “I told you to hold your tongue. You are not fit to speak, or to breathe, in the company of the faithful. Of warriors. Of humans.”

  Then, to Mordyn’s horror, Aeglyss turned his head and looked directly at him. And smiled. A sad smile, fit to break a man’s heart. The Chancellor was filled up with fear at the touch of that smile, taken by a sudden urge to cry out a warning to Temegrin, to fall to his knees and hide his face in his hands.

  “You see,” whispered Aeglyss, and Mordyn did not know if the words were spoken out loud or only in him, for him. “You see. This is how it will always be. Hatred. Always.”

  And it seemed to Mordyn that Aeglyss was growing, and spilling a shadow from his shoulders and from his long hair, and that the air was thickening, the light of the setting sun an orange mist that turned everything to its own sickly shade. And the great crowd of his followers was stirring, rising up and murmuring.

  Temegrin lunged at Aeglyss, who made no attempt to avoid his grasp. Mordyn groaned, unable to breathe now, seeing everything with a terrible clarity. His ears were ringing.

  The Eagle had Aeglyss by the throat, both hands like claws, and was bellowing into his face.

  “What will you do, mongrel? What do you think you can do? You’re nothing! I could crush your neck, break it, with one hand. What are you going to do?”

  And Aeglyss, inexplicably, was grinning at him: a mad, wet grin.

  “We’re none of us more than sticks in skin, Eagle,” he hissed between taut lips. He raised his frail hands, set one on each of Temegrin’s forearms.

  The Gyre warrior was a powerful man. Aeglyss was almost nothing, like the survivor of a famine. His form was all bone and angles. Yet, impossibly, it was the Eagle who released his grip, who found his arms forced back and held fast by those lean inhuman hands. Temegrin’s face was twisted by some sort of horror or pain. Aeglyss had hold of his wrists, and was laughing.

  Temegrin’s warriors started forwards, swords leaping from their scabbards.

  “Hold!” cried Aeglyss, like a storm. Mordyn cowered, swords fell from stunned hands. Mail-clad warriors fell to their knees and dug their hands into the mud.

  “Did you see?” Aeglyss shouted. “You saw him lay his hands on me? He meant to kill me. Did you see?”

  The crowd at his back was roaring, a deep howl of incoherent fury. But within that cacophony the na’kyrim ’s voice was an iron thread.

  “He asks fate to choose between us. So be it.”

  Mordyn heard the crack of bones breaking, like wet sticks. Not just once, but twice, then again and again: a ripple of tiny, sharp, savage sounds like the fracturing of an ice sheet. But it was not ice that was breaking. It was Temegrin’s arms. They crackled. The Eagle screamed and fell to his knees. Aeglyss stepped forwards and stretched those shattered arms up, the hands at their extremities fluttering limply.

  “I am chosen! I am chosen! I am chosen!” Aeglyss cried it out again and again. The sound fell upon the Eagle’s warriors like blows, clubbing them back and down. Mordyn fell to his hands and knees, retching dryly. Only Wain did not stir at the torrent of power rushing out from the na’kyrim . She watched, quite still, as he stared madly down at Temegrin’s tear-streaked face.

  “You chose the wrong mongrel to make an enemy of this time, Eagle,” Aeglyss said.

  The na’kyrim reached down and pulled a short knife from Temegrin’s belt. The warrior’s arms fell back to his sides, and though he wailed at the agony of it, he did not – could not – move. He knelt there, raging and sobbing, and Aeglyss pushed the knife deep into the side of his neck, twisting it.

  Temegrin fell onto his side, dead weight. Aeglyss dropped the knife, raised his hand, with the Eagle’s blood thick upon it. He stumbled forwards, amongst the Gyre warriors. The frozen marsh splintered beneath his feet.

  “It is done. It is done. There’s to be nothing now, not for any of us, but fire and blood and a rising-up until all the world lies beneath us. Come with me. I am its herald, and its bearer, and its sword. I will give you shelter.”

  Mordyn watched them scramble out of the na’kyrim ’s path, saw the horror in their faces. And felt what they felt, bursting in his own breast: the awe and the wonder and the dazzling light that fell from Aeglyss, the certainty that here was the centre of the world, the seed of everything that was to come. It was an invasion, a foreign intrusion that overwhelmed his own deeper repulsion and disgust; but it was irresistible.

  Aeglyss fell, slapping down into the sodden soil.

  Wain dropped Mordyn’s leash and ran to the na’kyrim ’s side. She knelt there and cradled his head in her hands.

  “It is done,” Mordyn heard him murmur. “Carry me back. My legs are gone. I am empty.”

  VII

  Mordyn did not see Aeglyss again until the afternoon of the day after Temegrin’s death. He was left, all that time, alone in the decrepit chamber that had become his gaol cell. No one brought him any food or drink. Such thirst afflicted him that he licked moisture from the walls, until ice began to creep across the stonework.

  He was frightened now. Not just for himself, but for everything he had left behind when he rode out of Vaymouth. It felt tremendously distant, that vast and bustling city, as if it belonged in a world wholly unconnected with the one that he now inhabited. His Palace of Red Stone would be shining in the sharp winter sun. Tara would be soaking in the hot baths she loved at this time of year. The streets would be aswarm with visitors to the winter markets. Gryvan oc Haig would be in his high Moon Palace, dreaming of glories yet to come.

  All of it seemed unutterably warm, and safe, and unreachable, to the Chancellor in his cold imprisonment. And fragile, too. Everything he and Gryvan had built over the last few years, all the wealth and power and future conquests they had worked to secure, now struck Mordyn as flimsy, illusory.

  Sitting here in Kan Avor, overshadowed by the baleful, ubiquitous presence of Aeglyss, the Chancellor could no longer believe in the permanence of any earthly, mortal power, or the solidity of any wall. There was now, he feared, nothing left for the world save a dark descent into madness and destruction. Nothing of his labours would survive, nothing of his loves. What he had seen and felt here in the Glas valley admitted of no other possibility, in his besieged mind.

  Mordyn struggled ineffectually against the encroaching despair. It leached out of Kan Avor’s ruined fabric into his heart. When Wain nan Horin-Gyre came for him, with her Shield grim and silent about her, he made no complaint or resistance. He allowed them to take him out into the bitter air. There was a fine crystalline dust of snow across the city, glinting like innumerable minute fragments of glass. There were icicles hanging from the ruins. His breath steamed in front of him.

  On the street, in between heaps of mud that had been cleared from the roadway, columns of men and women were forming up. Scores of cruel faces watched the Chancellor shambling past. There were Kyrinin, lean and pale, and horses, great dark beasts, with the warriors who had escorted Temegrin to his death astride them.

  The Chancellor was taken up the spiral staircase and dragged into the columned hall from which he had watched the slaughter of the Lannis farmers in the street below. Aeglyss was there, slumped on the stone bench at the far end, and Shraeve the Inkallim, with her raven-black hair and dead eyes, and a single tall Kyrinin whose face was an intricate dance of blue curls and curves. The na’kyrim did not look up as Mordyn was brought in.

  “Bring him here. To me,” he said, and his voice was feeble.

  Two of Wain’s Shield took hold of Mordyn’s arms, swept him down the centre of the hall and cast him onto the wooden floor in front of Aeglyss. The halfbreed’s naked foot, Mordyn saw, was trembling, twitching in tiny spasms.

  “Come here, Shadowhand,” Aeglyss hissed at him.

  Mordyn wanted nothing more than to haul himself away, put as much space as he could between himself and this monstrosity. But a compulsion was upon him, and he slid himself forwards and rested his back against the ston
e bench, almost touching the na’kyrim ’s legs.

  “Send your warriors away, Wain,” Aeglyss said, at last lifting his head a little, staring out from under his creased and gaunt brow. “You do not need your Shield here.”

  The warriors did not hesitate, Mordyn saw. They did not wait for Wain’s command, or even look to her for assent. They turned and went silently from the hall. Wain herself stood still and limp, watching Aeglyss. Shraeve, leaning against one of the stone columns, snorted in amusement, or perhaps contempt.

  “Be quiet,” Aeglyss muttered, sounding more weary than angry. He rose to his feet and tottered away from Mordyn, stooped and unsteady. It put the Chancellor in mind of the aged cripples that haunted Vaymouth’s streets, or the dying, wasted victims of the King’s Rot. It was absurd to be afraid of such an enfeebled figure, yet Mordyn knew, with an absolute certainty that was beyond the argument of his eyes, that fear was justified.

  “It is not what I intended,” Aeglyss said as he shuffled down the hall’s length. His bare feet made soft scraping sounds. “You understand that, Wain?”

  Mordyn saw her nod.

  “None of it is as I intended. The Anain . . .” He shook his head convulsively, shivered. “I did nothing to harm them, yet they come for me. I went seeking her – K’rina – but they stole her, and I found this one instead.”

  He turned, halfway down the hall, and glanced back at Mordyn. It was a casual, cursory glance.

  “And now that fool . . . that idiot of an Eagle . . . has forced me . . . Left me no choice, Wain. You see?

  The storm is breaking, and I must armour myself against it, or it will consume me. All of us.”

  He laid a hand on Wain’s cheek. Her eyes half-closed at the touch, and Mordyn thought he glimpsed both ecstasy and horror in her face, just for a moment, before it settled back into blank repose. The lone Kyrinin had turned away, moving soundlessly to gaze out from the open window.

  “I have the Chancellor of Gryvan oc Haig,” Aeglyss said, letting his hand fall away from Wain’s skin. “I cannot turn away from that. Cannot set aside what is being offered me. Everything, everything is possible.”

  His voice was rising, taking on a shrill, unstable edge.

  “Shraeve, do you understand?” He was staring at the Inkallim. She remained silent, unmoving. “I can only hold one mind. Securely, unbreakably. Only one. Oh, I must crack my own heart today. Do you understand?”

  Aeglyss was wringing his hands, kneading them together like a man consumed by uncontrollable grief.

  “I cannot . . . I am too weak. Even Orlane could not do more. If I lay myself across two of them I will be too thin, too feeble.” He turned back to Wain, who was watching him without any hint of emotion, and smiled at her through tears. “Forgive me for my weakness, beloved. Forgive my failings. If I had known . . . I did not know I would have to take away what I have given you.”

  He spun away again, as if he could not bear to set eyes upon her. “Raven, do you not understand? We must have this . . .” Aeglyss extended a bony finger towards Mordyn. The Shadowhand shrank away from the gesture. “I must. And to have him, I must give up what I hold most dear. But it would be too cruel to leave her without that light, now that she has known it, to withdraw the shelter of my wing. She would not understand it . . . me. She would not forgive.”

  He hung his head.

  “Shraeve?” he said. Plaintive. Imploring. Insistent. “Have you not yet seen enough? Do you not yet believe in what I make possible?”

  The Inkallim stared at him for a moment or two, then slowly, slowly, she turned her head towards Wain nan Horin-Gyre. Mordyn felt himself, and all the world, poised between two forms, caught in a shapeless moment beyond which it might become one thing, or another, wholly different.

  “Shraeve,” Aeglyss whispered.

  And she was moving: one long stride, and two, and one of her blades was coming out over her shoulder.

  Mordyn wanted to close his eyes, but could not.

  Wain stood quite still. She was watching Aeglyss, though his back was turned to her. Her face was calm. It remained so even as Shraeve reached her, and even as the blade descended. Mordyn saw metal flash down, heard a dull sound, a soft breath. Aeglyss howled, and the pain in that cry struck the Chancellor blind and deaf and stilled his mind and froze his heart. He drifted in a small death of darkness and silence.

  “Do you see? Do you see?”

  Mordyn Jerain blinked and came back to himself. He did not know how long he had been lost. He was still slumped where he had been before, against the bench where the long-gone Gyre Thanes once sat.

  He could still hear the dripping of water, still feel the grain of the floorboards beneath his fingers.

  But now Aeglyss had hold of his head, one hand pressed to each of Mordyn’s temples, and the na’kyrim was leaning in to fill his field of vision.

  “Do you see?” Aeglyss demanded again. His voice filled Mordyn with grief, and with anger and with fear. It crowded out his own thoughts and left no room for his own feelings. He could not breathe. Nor could he turn his head, but out of the corner of his eye he could see a body on the ground, and Shraeve standing over it. She still held her sword. It hung straight down at her side. Something – blood – was dripping from its tip. The Kyrinin warrior was at her side, staring down at the corpse.

  “Do you see what I have given up for you, Shadowhand?” Aeglyss demanded of him. His eyes were bloodshot, tear-filled, anguished. “Do you understand the price I have paid? What I . . . I have killed a Thane’s sister for you. One who loved me. Would have loved me for ever, without fail. Are you worthy?

  Are you . . .”

  The na’kyrim broke off, turned away, shaking and choking. Freed of the pressure of those mad eyes, Mordyn could suck in a great breath of air. He lifted his arm. Never had he felt so devoid of strength.

  Aeglyss recovered himself and fixed him once more with an unrelenting gaze. Mordyn felt a mounting pulse in his head; not his own heartbeat, it was faster, harder than that, hammer blows pounding against the inner curve of his skull.

  “Now,” rasped Aeglyss, “now you will see what wonders I can bring, Shraeve. Now you will see that you are right in thinking me the answer to the world’s need.”

  Mordyn tried to struggle, he commanded his arms and legs to lash out. Yet they barely stirred. The strings that bound his body to his will were loosened. He made to cry out – he did not know whether in fear or abuse – but no sound louder than a croak escaped his constricting throat.

  “There is no more time,” Aeglyss whispered. “Not for any of us. No more time for hiding or hanging back. We must race now, Shadowhand; race for the sun and the light and the glory. And death will take the hindmost.”

  Mordyn felt tears on his face. The hands that clasped his head were throbbing, beating against his temples with their insistent heat and force. His sight was blurring and darkening from the edges. He felt himself to be falling away inside his own head, descending into darkness. He could see nothing but those inhuman eyes before him. They were dwindling, but it was him who was receding, not them. And in the space he left behind him, another was rushing in, and he could feel the grief, the exultation, the delirious potency of that other as if they were his own.

  The Shadowhand briefly imagined himself embracing Tara, his precious wife; smelling her hair, feeling her cheek against his. He managed, just for a few transitory instants, to hold her, and feel again the wonderful lightness of love. Then he was pulling away even from her. He reached out as he fell, but she was gone. He was gone.

  The shutters were closed in the Palace of Red Stone. The fires and the braziers were stoked up, curtains drawn across every door. But still Tara Jerain felt cold. Ever since the Crossing, Vaymouth had been in the grip of chill winds coming down all the way from the Karkyre Peaks, perhaps from the Tan Dihrin itself. They laid frosts across the gardens and the rooftops, had even once, briefly, locked every drinking trough and washerwoman’s tub in ice.

/>   The Shadowhand’s wife walked alone through the echoing corridors of the Palace at dusk. She carried a candle, cupping its flame with her hand, following its shimmering light down the marble ways. She had nowhere to go, and nothing to do, this night. Her maids were drawing her a bath, and spreading fresh silks across her bed, but she was restless and not yet ready to sink back into the warm waters or into sleep.

  Each of the last half-dozen evenings had been the same. With the onset of dusk, Tara found her mood darkening in turn. An imprecise, indefinable anxiety began to seep into her thoughts. She could settle to no task, and find no distraction. This fretful stirring of her mind forced her body into motion. It brought no great easing of her worries, but the act of pacing through the halls and passages kept them in the background.

  And what was it that so undermined her ease? She could not say, though of course her persistent fear for her husband’s safety was a part of it. Word had come to Vaymouth of Aewult’s defeat – humiliation, some murmured when they thought themselves safe from prying ears – outside Glasbridge, but her unease had already taken root before that grim news. Perhaps it was only weariness, for her sleep had been a poor and wretched thing for some time now. She woke in the morning with heavy eyes, and a heavy heart, and fading memories of distressing dreams. She was not alone in suffering thus, she had gathered. There was something in the season, or in the air coming down out of the north, inimical to restful sleep, it seemed.

  A movement of the chilly air shook the flame of the candle, and she paused for a moment to ensure it did not falter. A chink, somewhere, in the palace’s defences. She would have one of the maids go in search of a shutter left open, or a door ajar. Tara wanted the palace sealed, impenetrable to the winter.

  She walked on. There was no sound save the soft tread of her slippers. The silence was not peaceful, though. It was, she now thought, oppressive as never before. She would like it to be broken, and with one sound above all others: Mordyn’s voice, ringing from the stone and marble walls, echoing through the chambers. Nobody seemed to be able to tell her where her husband was, or why she had received no word from him. He had marched with Aewult, someone told her, and returned with him to Kolkyre; he was in the Tower of Thrones, locking horns with Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig, another said. Or, inexplicably, had he gone to Highfast, as one rumour had it? She did not know. But she did know that she wanted him back, warming her bed and her heart and armouring her against the chills of winter. Perhaps only then would she sleep deeply again, and only then would the mist of unease be lifted.