Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  Fiallic darted in. Shraeve spiralled up and away, like an acrobat, and was on her feet, flicking his attack aside. He has her, though, Kanin thought. He has the tiniest fragment of greater speed, the minutely sharper eye that is required of the victor. He will kill her. And then Aeglyss.

  At the thought of the na’kyrim , Kanin tore his eyes away from the furious struggle within the enclosure, searching for him. Aeglyss was there, further down the slope, some way round the perimeter of the crowd. He was amongst his Kyrinin, thirty or forty of them. One of them was supporting him. Look at him, Kanin thought. Unable to even stand straight. Any eye can see the man’s sick; dying already, perhaps. Why would Shraeve sacrifice herself in such a perverse cause? What hold is it that this creature exerts?

  The ringing of blades snapped his attention back to the sheep pen. Fiallic was rushing Shraeve, driving her backwards in a blindingly fast flurry of blows and blocks and feints. He forced her to the wall of their arena, pinning her against its rough stone surface. His shield pushed back one sword, he parried her second with his own blade, and butted her across the bridge of her nose. Kanin saw the blood bloom, and smear down her face, and once again he thought she must be finished now. But Shraeve ducked down, put her shoulder into Fiallic’s armpit and heaved him, by sheer strength, backwards and away from her. Blood dripped from her chin.

  Kanin glanced back towards Aeglyss, wondering whether he would see fear there; whether the halfbreed could see his own death, coming down the track towards him. Instead, what he saw was Aeglyss swaying, his head twitching as if fending off flies. Even at this distance, Kanin could see a sheen of sweat on the halfbreed’s forehead. There was a faint ringing in Kanin’s ears, so faint he could not be sure he heard it.

  He saw Fiallic falter, taking a hesitant half-step and giving his head a sharp shake. Shraeve closed on him. Kanin stared at Aeglyss, fury rising in him. The na’kyrim ’s lips were drawn back from his teeth in a coarse grin of pain or pleasure. His mouth slowly opened. His inhuman eyes were following Fiallic’s every movement. No, Kanin thought. No. His skin was tingling.

  Fiallic blocked an attack, but he was slow. Shraeve got a cut in at his shoulder, putting a deep wound there. She had blood across her eyes. She should have been barely able to see. Fiallic staggered. He was blinking furiously. There was a look of strained surprise on his face. Inexplicably, he made no attempt to put his shield between himself and Shraeve. She squatted, bringing both blades flashing round in a flat sweep, one above the other, and a fraction behind. The first took Fiallic in the back of the knee, cutting one leg from under him. The second opened his hamstring.

  He fell in the snow. Shraeve straightened, slow and considered now. She wiped one sleeve across her eyes, smudging a track through the blood. She walked towards Fiallic. He was rising unsteadily to his feet. Neither leg could take his full weight. He levered himself up with his sword, its point driven into the ground. Shraeve steadied both her blades, one low, one high, and ran at him.

  Kanin was moving before Fiallic hit the ground. Intent and purpose had hold of him, and he was pushing his way through the crowd, elbowing people aside blindly. He could see Aeglyss, amongst his wight guards, could see his satisfaction. Kanin had his sword halfway from its scabbard. He heard Igris coming behind, shouting at people to move aside. They could reach the halfbreed, Kanin thought, surprised at the detached clarity of his mind. With his Shield at his side, he could cut through to Aeglyss. Kill him.

  A firm hand on his arm twisted him aside. People were scattering, opening up a space of trampled, dirty snow. He was staring at Cannek, hearing the heavy breathing of one of the Inkallim’s great dogs. Kanin pulled his arm free, but Cannek reached out and seized it again.

  “Not now, Thane,” he said softly. “Not now. He has his White Owls, and the Battle will defend him, if Shraeve commands it. And she will.”

  “Release me,” Kanin hissed. The dog growled at the threat in his voice, but he did not care.

  “How many swords do you have, Thane?” Cannek asked. He took his hand from Kanin’s arm, but did not release his eyes. “Not enough. Not today.”

  Kanin stared at the Inkallim. The hard, insistent beat of anger was still there in his chest, but its mastery of him was broken for a moment. He looked down, over the heads of the crowd milling between them, and saw Aeglyss. The na’kyrim was watching him, a dead smile on his lips. Clouds of snowflakes swept between them.

  “It was him,” Kanin said. “Fiallic should have won. Would have done, but for him.”

  “There will be another time,” Cannek whispered. “He has mastered the Battle today, but not the Lore.

  Not the Hunt. Do you hear me? You are Thane of your Blood. If you die today there is none to follow you.”

  Kanin let his blade slide back into its sheath. It was heavy on his hips, its presence still urging him to release it; use it. But Cannek was right. Fate favoured courage, but not always stupidity. He would die, with all his Shield, if he set himself against the White Owls and the Battle here and now. That did not matter in itself. What mattered was whether he could achieve the halfbreed’s death before his own. There would surely be another time, soon, when he could be more certain of that.

  “The Haig army awaits us now. After that – if there is anything for us after that – we should talk, away from curious eyes and ears,” Cannek said. Kanin was no longer listening to him, though.

  The crowd was dispersing. There was laughter, here and there; excited voices raised. The tramp of feet across the snow-clad hillside, clouds of breath pluming up. And from the Inkallim, only silence, and obedience. As the others drifted away, they closed in, like black birds thickening on carrion, around the killing pen. Shraeve, Banner-captain of the Battle, climbed out and limped towards Aeglyss. Two of the Inkallim who had ringed the stone enclosure vaulted in and moved towards Fiallic’s corpse. This was not how it was meant to be, Kanin was thinking. None of it. This is not fate, but ruin. The corruption of everything we desired. All our hopes. All shaking themselves to dust.

  IV

  Taim Narran watched Anyara’s departure from a distance, for his captors would not permit him to approach her. The sister of his own Thane, and he was denied the chance to bid her farewell, or to comfort her. She bore it well, he could see, and gave no sign of needing his comfort: straight-backed on her horse, looking about her openly and without faltering. But how could she not be feeling vulnerable, beset? She was being carried off to Vaymouth by those whose professed friendship had become the thinnest of skins across the meat of their contempt. They did not call her a prisoner, and she did not comport herself as one, but the distinction between that and hostage was slender; and hostage she surely was. Hostage and shield, for Aewult clearly meant to use her – and Taim himself, and Orisian even – to deflect, or to absorb, his father’s anger. Anger that might be savage, now that a battle had been lost, an army battered, a Chancellor mislaid.

  Anyara left the camp of the Haig army in the midst of a long column of wagons, carrying the wounded and the sickly off towards Donnish. Taim stood and watched her go until the haze that lay along the coast swallowed her up. He had demanded of Aewult that he be allowed to accompany her, and the Bloodheir had smirked.

  “No, Captain. I don’t want you and her hatching plots together, the way you and your Thane did.

  Anyway, I want you to see the end of this. I want you here with me. Your reckoning will come after I’m done with the Black Road.”

  To Taim, Aewult reeked of fear. The Bloodheir might not even recognise that as what he was feeling, but Taim had no doubt. Aewult was afraid. And he was angry. Those were his reactions to defeat, and those were his reasons for his treatment of Anyara and Taim himself.

  The entire army had the same stench. Like a stockman, granted by long familiarity the ability to read the mood of his animals, Taim could gather all the little signs and shape them into an instinctive understanding of the men around him. Everything – the downcast eyes, the bluff,
forced laughter, the men staggering drunkenly about after dark – all of it spoke eloquently to him of trepidation. This army had the splinter of defeat lodged in its heart, and it would remain there, and fester, unless and until a cleansing victory was won. The men, the individual threads within the weave of the army, promised one another that they would be clambering over drifts of Black Road dead soon; they muttered around their campfires, painting word pictures of the terrible slaughter that they would visit upon their enemies. But it was lies; hopeful lies they told one another to stave off the doubts within.

  New companies were coming up from the south. The grim mood opened its arms as they arrived and drew them in. Every man here on the plain outside Kolkyre knew that there was a terrible battle moving towards them. As surely as the turning seasons, violence was coming. It was like a dark, roiling storm approaching from the horizon. None could see beyond it. That the army of the Black Road had mysteriously slowed to a crawl, lingering in the empty lands along the north coast of Kilkry territory, only made the waiting harder and gave the foreboding more time to sink its roots deep.

  Whenever Taim’s gaze fell upon Kolkyre, with its ever-present seagulls circling above, and the Tower of Thrones defiantly punctuating its skyline, he feared that the future might be even bleaker than most imagined. The gates of the city were closed. Haig warriors were posted on each of the roads outside them. Nothing, and no one, came or went from Kolkyre save by sea. So, Aewult had pledged, it would remain, until Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig recovered his proper humility and complied with the demands made of him. And so, Roaric seemed to indicate by his mute refusal, he was content for it to remain. Neither man would earn respect or credit from this, Taim thought, but while he felt contempt for Aewult, he felt only pity for Roaric. The young Kilkry Thane had come into his power in evil times, and by evil circumstance, and his nature made him unsuited to facing the challenges of this moment. Perhaps he would learn, in time; perhaps, by the time he learned, it would be too late.

  Taim wandered through the outskirts of the encampment, listless and dispirited. The men Aewult had set to watch him – surly, uncommunicative swordsmen – shadowed him at a few paces’ distance. Taim paused to watch a gang of camp followers slaughtering a pair of pigs. The animals screamed and struggled. They were scrawny, and not likely to make good eating, but fresh meat was growing rare and precious. A youth held one of the pigs down while a woman cut its throat and it bled.

  The morning after Anyara’s departure, Taim discovered what her presence had meant to him personally.

  The whole camp was submerged beneath a miasma of steam and mist and smoke, through which sunlight shone in fragmentary rays, lighting frosted grass and iced puddles in the mud. Guards came to him and unceremoniously removed him from the tent in which he slept, herding him across the crunching ground.

  There was a pile of barrels, some of them broken, and behind that a lopsided wagon that had lost a wheel and rested on the stub of its axle. Scattered around the wagon were a dozen or more men, sullen and gaunt. Each one of them was seated, or curled up, on the ground, wrapped in a blanket, and with a shackle running from his ankle to a spike hammered into the frozen soil. A pair of guards were sitting precariously on the elevated end of the wagon, muttering to each other.

  As Taim silently allowed them to chain him down, and hobble his legs with cords, one of the guards leered at him from his lofty perch.

  “The first time you try to pull up the spike, it’s a beating,” the man barked. “The second time it’s a killing.”

  They gave him a blanket that smelled musty and old, and a platter of unidentifiable food. He pulled the blanket tight about his shoulders, closed his eyes and waited. And that was how he spent most of each day that followed.

  Taim made no complaint to his guards, sought no gentler treatment, no finer food, no warmer cloak. He asked nothing of them, save one thing, and that one thing he requested every morning, every afternoon, every evening: he asked to be allowed to see his wife and his daughter.

  There was no privation he could be subjected to that would disturb him, for he had been a warrior all his life, learned long ago that hunger, or cold, or discomfort could be set aside. But he was afraid now, acutely afraid, that he might die without seeing Jaen or Maira again, and that fear was almost intolerable.

  So he asked, every day, that they should be brought out from the city, and every day he was refused.

  And with each refusal, hatred for Aewult nan Haig and all his Blood gathered a little more of Taim’s heart within its ambit.

  He became more and more acutely aware of a contradiction in his hopes. He wanted – needed –

  Aewult to emerge triumphant from the great confrontation with the Black Road that must now be imminent; at the same time, he longed for the Bloodheir to be humbled, sent scurrying back to Vaymouth with shame swarming about his head. It was a bitter, resentful strand in his thoughts that felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar. He was dismayed that it so preoccupied him.

  One night, it snowed. Taim pulled his blanket over his head. He felt the snow piling up on it. He lay there shivering and wondered if the Haig Blood had so lost its collective mind that it would allow him to die here.

  He heard footsteps coming over the hard ground. Someone kicked him in the back, and when he sat up, spilling snow, one of the guards thrust another, thicker blanket into his hands. A small fire was built, and the prisoners shuffled into a circle around it, as close as their chains would allow. One man did not stir.

  He remained curled up like a snow-covered boulder. The guards kicked him once, twice, before they realised he was dead. They levered up the spike securing his chain to the ground and carried the body away.

  In the morning, Aewult nan Haig came and squatted down on his haunches in front of Taim. He stayed out of reach.

  “Time to get you back on horseback, Captain,” the Bloodheir said, smiling.

  Taim said nothing. Aewult stood up. He tapped the heel of one boot against the toe of the other to loosen snow from the sole.

  “The Black Road is moving again. Seems they’ve found the courage to face us.”

  “Let me go back to my men,” Taim said. He sat up straight, shrugging the blanket off his shoulders.

  Aewult shook his head. “They’ll be fighting under Haig command this time. What’s left of them will, anyway. I’ve attached them to one of my father’s best companies, from Vaymouth. I’ll be keeping you as far away from them – as far away from everything of consequence – as possible. Oh, don’t look so disappointed. You can’t have expected me to do anything else, surely?”

  “Despite everything, I will fight for you, Bloodheir. Against the Black Road, I will always fight. I only ask that you let me do that.”

  “No.” The refusal was emphatic. “You stay a prisoner until this is done. Afterwards, we’ll see what’s to be done with you, but this is one battle you will watch with bound hands.”

  Taim struggled to his feet. He was painfully stiff.

  “What of Kilkry-Haig?” he asked. “You need Roaric’s strength at your side for this.”

  Aewult’s face darkened, and he glared at Taim before spinning about and striding away.

  “I’ll not ask that prideful whelp for anything,” he shouted over his shoulder. “If he chooses to come out and fight, all the better. But he’ll do it under my command, or not at all.”

  Theor, First of the Lore, had spent a long and tedious day with his officials, seeing to the mundane trifles that kept the Inkall alive and functioning. Appointing tutors to see to the care of the Lore’s youngest recruits; agreeing the names of those to be sent amongst the Tarbains once winter was done, to ensure the survival of the creed in their savage hearts; deciding the process of interrogation and examination for those seeking elevation to the ranks of the Inner Servants.

  Theor found it difficult to concentrate on such matters. They did not bore him – they were the stitches that held the Inkall together, and he valued them as such – bu
t he was weary and distracted. At dusk he trudged across the snow-filled compound, pausing only to listen to the hooting of an owl somewhere amongst the pine trees. He was not in the mood for company and conversation, so ordered that he be brought food in his own chambers. He ate there alone.

  A message had come from Nyve that morning. The First of the Battle had received word from Fiallic, reporting the death of Temegrin the Eagle, in circumstances that remained unclear. It was news both encouraging and disquieting. Ragnor oc Gyre had conspired with the enemies of the creed to protect his own earthly power, and the Eagle was his mouthpiece, hampering every effort to pursue the conflict with the Haig Bloods to its necessary conclusion. His death was a sign that fate might, on this occasion, side with the Inkallim. Yet Wain nan Horin-Gyre had died, too. That was a sore loss. And the Thane of Thanes would not take the death of his Third Captain lightly. Theor anticipated difficulties in convincing Ragnor that the Children of the Hundred had no part in the deed.

  The First set aside his half-eaten meal. His appetite was meagre these days. He reclined on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. According to Nyve, there was talk, far away beyond the Stone Vale, that the Horin Blood’s tame na’kyrim had had a hand in Temegrin’s death. That was a disconcerting thought. The very existence of such halfbreeds was an aspect of the hubris that had provoked the Gods into departure.

  Five races had been created, distinct and self-contained. Na’kyrim symbolised the inability of Huanin and Kyrinin to accept the boundaries laid down by the Gods. To have one playing a role in matters of such import to the creed was . . . unexpected. Puzzling.