Godless World 2 - Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

Roaric was starting to move, surging up. Cailla was reaching, thrusting her knife at the Bloodheir's face. Roaric dodged the blow. Ilessa's mouth was open, screaming or wailing. Roaric bore Cailla backwards and down. Anyara's stare swung back onto Lheanor, and stayed there.

  The grey-haired Thane of the Kilkry Blood was slumped limply, sinking. His head lolled to one side. He was looking at Anyara, his eyes quite still and clear. And his blood was pumping out of the wound in his neck, spilling on his shoulder and down his chest and onto the table, a terrible dark red flood that did not stop.

  There was a cacophony then. An eruption of sound and movement that overwhelmed the senses. Within it, distinct amongst the welter of noise, Anyara could hear a rhythmic pulse, like the slow, wet beat of a drum. It was Roaric, hammering Cailla's head against the stone floor.

  V

  Anduran was seething, boiling with the masses of the Black Road. They had filled the half-ruined city, spilled out over the walls and sprawled across the surrounding fields. In their thousands, they swarmed like flies drawn to the remains of a great dead beast. Half the city had been burned, but even the gutted shells of buildings had been occupied if they offered so much as a fragment of shelter. Hundreds of tents had sprung up in the fields outside the walls. Every farmhouse within sight of the city had become the heart of a new canvas settlement; every barn held more men and women than horses.

  Coming up towards the city from the direction of Grive, Wain nan Horin-Gyre was struck by the impression of disorder. She saw little sign of discipline or organisation. Most of the camps she passed had no banners to proclaim their Blood, no real warriors at all. The tents had been pitched apparently at random. She saw several that would be thrown down by the first severe wind; others that would soak their occupants in a finger's depth of water as soon as any heavy rains came. Dozens of campfires were burning, but there was no evidence that there had been much collection of firewood. People had gathered what they could from abandoned houses or the little clumps of trees and now preferred to savour the warmth rather than lay in the stocks to last them all through the night.

  There were exceptions to the general air of carelessness. Wain led her warriors past one squat grey farmhouse that had been taken over by the Children of the Hundred. A raven-feathered banner was planted outside it. Smoke was rising from the chimney, and horses were being watered at a trough. A pair of Inkallim were standing outside sheds, guarding precious cattle to judge by the lowing that emanated from within. Their expressions blank, they watched Wain and her company pass.

  She knew how strange - alarming even - her companions would appear to these observers. Aeglyss and his White Owls walked behind her own Horin-Gyre warriors. It was those Kyrinin that drew every eye as they came closer to Anduran itself, and Wain could see the hostility in every face. People came to the side of the road, scowling. She heard mutterings of contempt, anger. These were the ordinary folk of the creed, she reminded herself, drawn from all the Bloods of the Black Road: farmers, fishermen, hunters and craftsmen. Their faith was burning hot, or they would never have left their distant homes to come and fight here. And their hatred of woodwights was ingrained, unquestioning.

  Wain turned her horse, ready to tell Aeglyss that his inhuman companions should wait out of sight. Even as she did so, someone threw a stone. It fell amongst the White Owl warriors. Another followed almost at once, and then a third. A thick crowd jostled itself closer on either side of the road, pressing up towards the fifty or so Kyrinin. There were angry shouts. The White Owls reacted quickly, silently. They backed into a tight clump, facing outwards, Aeglyss safe in its heart. Spearpoints bristled like the quills of a porcupine.

  "Get back!" Wain cried as she urged her horse on, but the noise from the mob perhaps drowned her voice out.

  A stout, pale man of middle years hacked at one of the Kyrinin spears with a little axe. The shaft of the spear dipped, swung and jabbed out in a single fluid movement. The point punched into the man's shoulder. He howled and stumbled back into the press of bodies.

  "Scatter them," Wain shouted to her Shield, and drove her own horse into the midst of the crowd. She slipped one foot from a stirrup and kicked out. The warriors of her Shield, ploughing through the throng, were less restrained. She glimpsed swords rising and falling.

  "They are under our protection," she cried at the backs of the fleeing figures that were suddenly all around.

  She set her own warriors around the knot of Kyrinin: a wall of horseflesh and iron. Aeglyss looked up at her and smiled.

  "A warm welcome," he murmured.

  There was something so profoundly arrogant in the casual smile, the almost dismissive tone, that Wain's hand tightened on the reins. Even now, after hours of turning the question over in her mind, she did not understand what held her back. Why not reach down and strike this halfbreed creature? Why not just kill him and all his woodwights? And yet, and yet . . . There was a bright, fierce intensity in his half-human eyes. His air of powerful intent, firm will, was like a protective cloak thrown over his shoulders. When he made her the object of his full attention, when he held his penetrating gaze fast upon her, she could feel it on her, inside her. Sometimes, vanishingly faint, she thought she could hear, within her mind, the sound of what raged in him: a muted roar, as of an immense cataract muffled by distance. However nagging her misgivings, however persistent the undercurrent of fear, when she looked at him she saw opportunity; possibility. He had served a purpose before, when he had opened the way through White Owl lands for the Horin-Gyre army. Now, clearly, he had changed. He had become . . . more. Therefore what greater purpose might he now serve, in the remorseless unveiling of fate's course?

  "Wain?" Aeglyss said. "Are you all right?"

  She shook herself, uncertain how much time she had lost to thought. Uncertain, for a moment, whether all of the thoughts that ran through her head were wholly her own. Was it her imagination, or did confusion, distraction, surround Aeglyss like a miasma of the mind?

  "Your White Owls are liable to be cut to pieces before we reach the city," she said. "Send them away. They can surely find some woods to hide in until you return."

  Aeglyss raised an eyebrow and looked at the Kyrinin warriors gathered around him.

  "But this is my spear a'an, commanded by their Voice to remain at my side. It is no light duty. They take it most seriously."

  "You're the one who claims to wield such great power," Wain muttered, hauling her horse around and away. "Persuade them to accept the parting. I can't protect them, or you, if they come further with us."

  The scene inside Anduran was very different to that beyond the walls. The city had been claimed by the Inkallim, and by their quiet purposefulness. Riding through its streets, Wain saw more of the dour ravens than she had ever seen in one place before. The last time anything more than a handful of Battle Inkallim had taken the field had been precisely thirty-three years ago, when hundreds of them had marched with the army that Wain's doomed uncle had led through the Vale of Stones to die beneath the walls of Tanwrye. Marched, but not fought. The warriors of Horin-Gyre had been slaughtered while that company of Inkallim looked on. The cruel reversal fate had worked was not lost on Wain: her Blood's betrayers then might be its saviours now.

  Aeglyss was walking a little way behind her. Wain's Shield rode, at her command, on either side of him; whether to protect him or her, she had not been sure even as she gave the order. In the halfbreed's footsteps came the one White Owl Kyrinin who had refused to be parted from him. It was the powerful, elaborately tattooed man that Aeglyss had identified as the son of the White Owl Voice. Hothyn, Wain now knew he was called. All of the other woodwights had departed, after an extended and - to Wain's ears - rather agitated appeal from Aeglyss. She had sent a few of her own warriors to escort them, in the hope of preventing any further disturbances. Hothyn, though, had simply stood there, watching Aeglyss in silence.

  "He will not go," Aeglyss said when Wain pressed the issue.

  "You c
ould make him, if you wanted to."

  "I probably could. I'm not minded to do so."

  It was typical of the halfbreed's manner, ever since Wain had found him at the ruins of Kan Avor: an easy arrogance, and a reticence about his intent and his standing with the woodwights. But she had consented to Hothyn's presence. She had seen enough to know that there might be bargaining to be done, here in Anduran. There was a question, unresolved, of control and influence. The Battle Inkall was clearly present in numbers, but where were the warriors of Gyre, and the other Bloods? Who commanded the masses of commonfolk? The army that their dead father had given to her and to Kanin to lead was now a broken, exhausted thing. If they hoped to make their voice heard in whatever was to follow, making it clear they still had hold of the White Owl Kyrinin would do no harm.

  Wain left most of her warriors in the great square at Anduran's heart, and went on towards the castle with only her Shield, and with Aeglyss and Hothyn.

  The courtyard of Castle Anduran was crowded. There were Gyre warriors scattered across it, tending to horses, cleaning weapons, or just sitting in silent groups on the cobbles. The figures that caught Wain's attention, though, were the Inkallim: twenty or thirty of them, standing by the front of the main keep. Shraeve was there, of course. She looked up as Wain drew near, staring, giving no sign of welcome.

  Two men stood apart from the others, deep in conversation. One was clad in the dark leather of the Battle Inkall, his black-dyed hair hanging down over his shoulders. The other, older and broader, with a weather-roughened face and a rather battered chain-mail jerkin, had hide boots with long brown feathers sewn on at the calfs. Wain knew them both, though neither well, and their presence told her most of what she needed to know about how things stood, both here in Anduran and back beyond the Vale of Stones.

  Fiallic, the Inkallim, was Banner-captain of the Battle. He was second only to Nyve in the hierarchy of that Inkall, and was assumed to be the First's most likely successor. It was said that he was the greatest warrior the Battle had produced in a hundred years. He had, if Wain remembered rightly, won the rank of Banner-captain in the shortest, most one-sided trial of combat the Battle had witnessed in half a century. The other man was Temegrin nan Gyre, a cousin of Ragnor's and Third Captain in the High Thane's standing army. He was widely called - at his own insistence - the Eagle, but his reputation hardly merited such a noble association. Wain had never heard of him winning any victory, save for the slaughter twenty years ago of some Tarbain villagers who had abandoned their homes and set out to march into the east rather than adopt the creed of the Black Road.

  As she strode towards the two men, brushing past Shraeve without acknowledging her, Wain had to suppress a twinge of disappointment. If Temegrin was the best that Ragnor oc Gyre would offer in support of this war, the High Thane was making little effort to conceal his lack of enthusiasm. Unless the Eagle had been improbably elevated in status, he would be commanding at most a couple of thousand Gyre warriors: not much more than a token force. For the Banner-captain himself to be here, by contrast, spoke of total commitment on the part of the Battle. Such a divergence of intent between the Gyre Blood and the Inkallim did not bode well. And it did - as Shraeve had implied before she left Glasbridge - suggest that the ravens meant to make this war their own.

  Temegrin glanced up as she drew near. He looked to be in poor humour.

  "Greetings, lady," he rumbled.

  She gave him a curt nod, then straightened her back and lifted her chin a fraction. She was almost as tall as Temegrin, and did not intend to appear anything other than his equal. In the last few weeks she had, she suspected, seen more fighting than he had in his whole life.

  Fiallic the Inkallim faced her with a more welcoming expression. He had surprisingly gentle eyes. They gave a misleading impression of his nature, she was certain.

  "Banner-captain," she said. "We never thought to see the Battle field such strength. I am pleased to find you here."

  "I imagine you are," Fiallic said with a faint smile. "Shraeve tells me your own strength is all but spent."

  "It is." Wain saw no point in denying it. "But we hold Glasbridge still. Much remains possible, if fate smiles upon us."

  "Yes. Shraeve told me that as well."

  "We'll save talk of what's possible for later," muttered Temegrin irritably. "We've enough to worry about in the now without turning to the hereafter. The High Thane's command was to raze Tanwrye, and that's done. I'll not consent to any discussion of further adventures until I know more of what we face."

  "I doubt our enemies will grant us much time for discussion," said Fiallic in a soft voice.

  "We expect an assault on Glasbridge at any time . . ." Wain began, but Temegrin cut her short, chopping the air with his hand.

  "Enough. We'll not discuss this out in a courtyard for every ear to listen. And why is your brother not here, anyway? I'd thought he would be the one to deal with these matters."

  Wain ignored the implied insult, shedding it with a twitch of her shoulders. "I share the burden of command with him. You can be assured that I speak with his authority as well as my own. And, as I said, there is likely to be bloodshed in the next few days. One of us had to remain."

  Temegrin grunted, apparently unconvinced.

  "I had heard your alliance with the White Owls was a thing of the past," murmured Fiallic.

  Wain glanced at him, and found him looking beyond her. She turned her head, and saw Aeglyss and Hothyn standing there amidst her Shield. Many of the other warriors gathered in the courtyard were watching them, though the na'kyrim and Kyrinin themselves seemed unperturbed by this hostile attention. Aeglyss, Wain saw, had his eyes fixed upon her. She felt a tingle, like the brush of invisible fingertips, run down her neck.

  Temegrin followed the line of Fiallic's gaze and made a thick, deep sound of disapproval.

  "That alliance should be a thing of the past," the Eagle said. "What were you thinking, to bring a woodwight and a halfbreed here?"

  Wain set her back to Aeglyss once more. Both Temegrin and Fiallic continued to stare at the silent na'kyrim and his inhuman companion. She wondered what they saw there. Did they, like her, feel Aeglyss's presence as an almost physical weight bearing down on their senses?

  "That's another matter best discussed elsewhere," was all she said.

  "Now, then," growled Temegrin. "Come."

  He stamped up into the keep, his feet punishing the steps for his foul mood. Fiallic followed. Wain glanced at Aeglyss, and was caught on the hook of his eyes. Not so much as a tremor disturbed the immobility of his lips, yet she knew what he wanted; what he required of her. She gave a single, sharp nod to summon him and Hothyn after her.

  "I didn't mean for these . . . these to join us," protested the Eagle as he, Wain and Fiallic settled into chairs around a fine circular table. The walls were partly panelled with dark wood. It might have been one of Croesan's private chambers once.

  "You question their presence in my company," Wain muttered. "You can see for yourself. Judge for yourself." She could not keep a trace of irritation from her voice, though it was directed at herself as much as anyone. She should not have brought Aeglyss in here. It was the act of a fool, no better than jabbing a sleeping bear - or eagle - with a stick. Yet she had done it, and matters would fall out now as fate saw fit.

  "I don't need to judge anything. A woodwight and a halfbreed? They've no place in this room, and no place in the company of the faithful."

  "Oh, that's an old song," whispered Aeglyss. He was standing behind Wain. She half-turned, meaning to tell him to be silent, but somehow the words stuck in her throat.

  "You know . . ." the na'kyrim cocked his head as he spoke, his interest plainly caught by the thought he meant to express, "everything I see, everyone I meet, it seems to me that I have seen it, met them, before. I do not understand it, but everything, and everyone, tastes . . . familiar."

  "I will not have our time wasted by some half-wight who--" Temegrin g
rowled menacingly.

  "You, for example," Aeglyss interrupted him. "The Eagle. I know nothing of you, yet I know this: your heart does not burn with hunger for the remade world. You find this world, this life, more to your liking than one true to the creed should, perhaps."

  Wain could clearly see the storm of fury that rose within Temegrin. It blushed his cheeks, knotted his brow, bared his teeth. But before that storm broke, Aeglyss laughed.

  "Do you deny it?" he demanded of the Eagle through his laughter, and the words were like corded whips that lashed from him to Temegrin and coiled about the warrior's throat, his chest. The air quivered at the sound of them and Wain flinched despite herself. Even impassive Fiallic narrowed his eyes and winced.

  Temegrin was straining, yearning to pull back from whatever it was that burned in the na'kyrim's grey eyes. But he was held. Beads of sweat were on his forehead. Wain could hear his teeth grinding together. Her skin was crawling, her mouth dry. She felt only the side eddies of whatever torrential flow Aeglyss had turned upon Temegrin, yet her head spun, her mind tumbled out of her grasp.

  Then Aeglyss grunted and turned away, dropping his gaze to the floor.

  "No, you do not," he murmured.

  Temegrin the Eagle slumped in his chair. His chest heaved - a few wild breaths - and then slowed. He regained his composure.

  "What . . . what monstrosity is this you've brought into our midst, Wain?" he rasped.

  "Wait," said Fiallic. His tone admitted no possibility of dissent or disobedience. He was watching Aeglyss, though the na'kyrim had drifted away from the table now, and was examining some wooden panelling on the wall. "There will be no more talk, no more discussion of any kind, in this room until the halfbreed has removed himself. Or is removed. The wight, too."

  And there, Wain thought, is the true face of the Banner-captain of the Battle Inkall. There was more threat, more danger, in the Inkallim's cold, level voice than Temegrin could ever imbue his bluster with.

  Yet Aeglyss kept his back to them. It was if he had been struck deaf, or was some open-eyed sleepwalker. He laid his spidery fingers, with their long, clouded nails, on a dark, scratched panel, caressing it. Hothyn was staring at Wain. It was an empty gaze, without threat, without even comprehension as far as she could tell.