Godless World 2 - Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  So now he rode on, beyond exhaustion, up and up into higher, bleaker territories. The rain had soaked him so thoroughly that he expected at any moment to start shivering. The pack on his back felt so heavy it could have been filled with lead, even though there was little in there now save his water skin and little crossbow. The hard stone surface of the road seemed a huge distance below him, and he began to worry about falling off and breaking some bone. Ammen did not know how much further he could go. The only thing that kept him moving onwards was the knowledge that he was on the right track. He had spoken to an old man, thick-accented and suspicious in the doorway of his stone hut, and learned that a party of Haig men had ridden this way.

  The rain stopped and the sky cleared as night began to fall. For a multitude of reasons, he did not dare to stop: he would fall still further behind the Shadowhand, his horse would run away as soon as he was off its back, he would fall asleep by the roadside and freeze or be killed by some cutpurse. Held erect only by stubbornness, he remained in the saddle and hoped for a moonlit night. He got it.

  Some indeterminate time after the last wink of the sun had been snuffed out on the western horizon, and cold moonlight had turned all the world to shades of grey, he saw the light of windows and torches ahead. So fearful was he now of any encounter with another living thing that he kicked his reluctant mount into a trot so that he might pass by quickly. As he did so, clattering up the road, he saw a clutch of houses on the bare slope above the road, and amongst them an inn. There was a stable block, with guards outside it, and another pair of warriors loitering at the door of the inn. Staring back over his shoulder as he rode away from the hamlet, Ammen discovered his mind to be briefly alive once more. It could only be the Chancellor and his escort, he thought.

  Dawn found him slumped over the neck of his horse. The animal stood at the edge of the road, tearing at some spiky grass. Ammen Sharp jerked into wakefulness, almost crying out at the stiff agonies that beset his back and legs. The horse barely stirred beneath him. It was at least as drained as he was. Horrified at his lapse, Ammen looked this way and that. Dawn had only just broken. The light was insipid, and he was deep in the shadow of the mountains to the east. He could remember little of his ride through the night, other than the single bright moment of his discovery of the Shadowhand's party. He could not even be sure how far ahead of them he was.

  He did not get much further. The pain in his bone and muscle was too great, the fog in his head too obscuring. He lacked the strength to keep fighting against the horse's desire to stop. Each time it came to a listless halt, it took still more savage work with his heels to force it into motion again. At the point when he was on the verge of surrender, undone by both the animal's weakness and his own, Ammen looked up and saw the ruin of some hut or storehouse a short way up the slope above the road. It was like no building he had ever seen, with huge slabs of flat stone that bore some kind of writing, but it was close, and it was a hiding place.

  Groaning at the effort, Ammen swung one leg up and across the horse's haunches and stumbled to the ground. He almost fell. His legs had forgotten how to bear him. As soon as his foot touched the ground, the place where the dog had bitten him flared into protest. The horse turned its head to stare at him and he was afraid that it would kick him. He slapped its rump as hard as he could and it trotted on up the road, the stirrups flapping at its side.

  Even the short climb up to the little ruin cost Ammen every sliver of his remaining strength. He slumped down amidst the pile of rocks and wept, out of desolate, despairing fatigue.

  Mordyn Jerain rode the stone track to Highfast in silence. He ignored - often did not even see - the fields and farms and villages, the hills and scree slopes, that passed by. He felt, now and again, the edge of the wind or the chill spray of a shower, but would only tug the hood of his cape a little lower, hunch his shoulders, and then forget the weather once more. His mind was busy. He thought of his precious Tara and his Palace of Red Stone; he wondered what strange sights and people might await him in the castle of the na'kyrim to which he travelled; he gnawed away at the question of how best to bring Orisian oc Lannis-Haig to heel; he sketched out, somewhat despondently, a number of ways in which Aewult might mishandle the recovery of the Glas valley.

  He and his dozen guards maintained a steady but slow pace. They stopped twice at wayside inns to pass the night. On both occasions, a couple of the guards raced ahead to have the inns cleared and rooms prepared. The Chancellor noted, but found uninteresting, the mixture of awe and antipathy with which the innkeepers and their staff regarded him. He had one of his guards taste all the food that was served before he allowed any of it to pass his own lips. He slept badly, disturbed by uneven mattresses, the creeping of rats in the roof, the pattering of rain. Once, on the second night, he was even woken, after he had finally fallen asleep, by the clatter of some horse trotting by outside in the darkness.

  Early on the third and last day of the journey they passed by the tomb of Morvain. A crude and unimpressive memorial to that infamous rebel's life and death, Mordyn thought, but still it was the first thing he had seen since leaving Kolkyre that caught his interest. The tomb's roof had fallen in. The Chancellor reined in his horse and looked about him. He took in the bleak, bare walls of the valley, the foaming river rushing over boulders down below. It was an austere resting place for the corpse of one supposedly so vital, so vigorous.

  Morvain had, in the Shadowhand's view, died a foolish, pointless death. The rebel had driven his army to the brink of starvation maintaining his unsuccessful siege of Highfast. Finally admitting defeat and leading them back down this road, he had been thrown by his horse and soon died of his injuries. All in the cause of rebelling against a Kingship that was already failing, and of besieging a castle that was not only famously impregnable but also, by then, unimportant. There could be few more pointed illustrations of the need to choose one's battles with care.

  Mordyn could see that there were inscriptions on some of the jumbled rocks of the tomb. He was almost tempted to dismount and clamber up there to see what they said. It would be fitting if they were homilies on the fate awaiting those whose ambition outran their judgement, but that seemed more than a little unlikely.

  The Shadowhand turned away. One of his escort was pointing up the track. Frowning, Mordyn looked, and saw a single riderless horse standing dejectedly in the road some way ahead.

  He lifted a heel to nudge his own horse onwards. Before he could jab it back into the animal's flank, one of his guards was shouting.

  "There's someone up there."

  "What's that?" another of the warriors called out.

  Several of them kicked at their mounts, moving closer to Mordyn.

  He looked back up at the tomb. It was almost impossible to make anything out clearly, but there did seem to be someone rising amidst the rocks: an indistinct, slight figure with something in its hands. The Shadowhand frowned. There was a crack and something was in the air, darting down. The sun came out. Its glare filled his eyes.

  Mordyn felt an impact on his head and the world was suddenly smeared, blotched with black and dark red patches. Then he was seeing the sky, seeing the great sheet of cloud that was sliding away from the sun and leaving blue in its wake. He hit the ground and darkness enfolded him.

  X

  Tyn the Dreamer was a disturbing sight. He looked like a corpse. There was a faint acrid, sickly smell in the room, hovering on the edge of Orisian's senses and whispering of death to him. Tyn's silver hair - sparse but long - was splayed lifelessly across his pillow. His face looked like a skull overlaid with a thin white gauze. There was nothing to say the man was alive save the intermittent feeble rise and fall of his chest beneath the sheets.

  Cerys and the other half-dozen na'kyrim who accompanied her and Orisian had a quiet, reserved demeanour, as if they were in the presence of some dead, mourned lord. Orisian looked around the small gathering - Cerys had not deigned to tell him the names of these people -
and saw sorrow and awe together in their expressions. Turning back to Tyn, he wondered how old the man was. To judge by his emaciated appearance and his discoloured, fragile skin, he might have been over a century, but Orisian knew better than to make assumptions in the strange world of the na'kyrim.

  "He has weakened a good deal, these last few days," Cerys murmured. "His body is failing, and not even Amonyn can do anything to halt its decline."

  "Is he dying?" Orisian asked quietly.

  "Perhaps. We do not know. Tyn long ago passed beyond our understanding. You are looking at something - at a man - unique in all the world. His mind travels parts of the Shared we could not follow him into, even before the recent . . . changes made it such a turbulent place."

  Cerys leaned over the Dreamer, angling her head so that her ear hovered over his lips. "He chose this," she said, "but when he made his choice, the Shared was a wonder; a benign ocean to be explored. Some of us here envied him greatly, for his ability to give himself up to it so completely. Now, though . . . the ocean he travels has turned against him. Against us all."

  One of the other na'kyrim, a tall and striking man, more powerfully built than any other of his kind that Orisian had seen, laid a hand on the Elect's back. It looked to Orisian like comfort. Cerys gave no sign that she felt the touch. She straightened.

  "Even if we were deaf to the troubles in the Shared, Thane, we would still know that things had gone awry." She extended a long, languid finger towards the Dreamer. "Tyn's rest was once peaceful. Now it cannot even be called rest. He suffers, and his suffering spills over, in his tormented mutterings, his decaying body. He is quiet now, but often he is gripped by spasms. Sometimes he cries out: not words at all, just cries of horror. The change began on that night when we all sensed . . . whatever it was we sensed."

  "Aeglyss," Orisian said.

  "Yes," one of the other na'kyrim said quickly, before Cerys could reply. Orisian looked at her, and saw a young woman with fierce, clear grey eyes. Her features were unremarkable, more humanlike than those of most of her colleagues. Even her skin, though pale, had a certain warm health to it that most na'kyrim lacked. Orisian's mind made a swift connection.

  "You know him? Aeglyss, I mean. Bannain said there was someone here who knew him long ago, in Dyrkyrnon."

  The young woman made to speak, but Cerys held a hand out, stilling her. Orisian saw plainly enough that obedience to the gesture required an effort of self-control.

  "This is Eshenna," the Elect said. "She came to us only a few years ago. And before that, yes, she lived in Dyrkyrnon. As did Aeglyss for a time, apparently. When he was a child."

  "I did not know him well," Eshenna said, her gaze fixed on Orisian, "but well enough to recognise his presence in the Shared."

  "And you know this woman K'rina?" Orisian asked.

  "We will talk of Aeglyss later," the Elect said quietly. She was watching the Dreamer now. "There was another reason I wanted you to see Tyn; other news, that has come from his lips, drifting up out of whatever depths he is now lost in." She turned back to Orisian. "He speaks, you see. Our Dreamer speaks."

  Orisian glanced back to the Dreamer. Tyn's cheek was twitching, his lips trembling. One of the na'kyrim - the man who had comforted Cerys before - sat on the edge of the bed and pressed his palm to the sleeper's forehead. His fingernails, Orisian saw, were as white as any Kyrinin's.

  "Yes, I know he speaks," Orisian said. He tried to keep his voice level, calm. It was unsettling to be the object of so many pairs of intent, inhuman eyes, to be beneath the strange weight of their attention. And a vague frustration was building in him. He wanted to speak of Aeglyss now, not later. He had slept badly in the dank dormitory down in the guts of Highfast. Lying awake in the darkness, hearing the drip of water, the scurry of rats, his restless mind had turned from one image to another, and then another, without pause: Inurian, Ess'yr, Kennet. Dawn had found him still tired, and uneasy; doubtful of himself, and of Highfast.

  "These days, much of what Tyn says is garbled," Cerys said. "It makes little sense, though it is all shot through with fear, and with distress. Until recently, we had scribes at his bedside all the time to record whatever they could. We had to remove them. They were becoming . . . sick. Whatever corruption Aeglyss is spreading through the Shared is stronger here. Poor Tyn is a wick, through which it rises and leaks out."

  "What is it that you want me to hear, then?" asked Orisian. The desire to leave this small, oppressive room with its decay-tinged air was growing strong within him. Rothe was awaiting him outside; fretting, no doubt, at being refused permission to accompany his charge into this chamber.

  "Amongst those fragments Tyn has spoken that make any sense, much concerns the Anain. It accords with what some of us have suspected. They are stirring, Thane. They rouse themselves, and turn their attention outward, as they have not done for centuries."

  She watched Orisian intently, searching for some reaction; all of them did. Rather than look back into those penetrating eyes, Orisian stared at Tyn's pallid face.

  "Bannain said as much," he murmured.

  "The Anain answer to no law but their own," Cerys said. "The rest of us - Huanin, Kyrinin, Saolin, na'kyrim - we are like bubbles of air that rise out the Shared, spin about on its surface. The Anain, they are the currents that move it; they are its ebb and flow. If they wake, if they . . . exert themselves, we will all be as powerless as the meekest lamb."

  "I understand that. As I can do nothing to prevent it, it seems pointless to fret over it."

  "Then you do not fully understand," Cerys said gravely. Orisian thought there was perhaps a trace of disappointment in her voice, but it was so faint that he could not be sure. "The attention of the Anain has been drawn by what happened to Aeglyss, by what he has become. We are all but certain of that. His power, his pain and anger, foul the Shared. That must be to the Anain as it would be to us if the air we breathe, the water we drink, the blood in our veins, were all corrupted. To know their intent or purposes is beyond us, but we fear they rise in order to oppose and destroy Aeglyss."

  "Fear?" Orisian echoed. "He's as much to blame for the death of my father as anyone. He imprisoned my sister. Killed Inurian, we think. I do not fear his destruction."

  "You should fear the means of it, if that means is the Anain," Cerys snapped. Orisian blinked in surprise at the sudden sharpness of her tone, and the way her words rang in his ears. There was a shivering down his spine, and a tingling in his scalp. For a moment, he was aware of nothing but the Elect's cold, hard face looming large in his vision. She was not human, he reminded himself; and not all na'kyrim were as restrained and gentle in their capacities as Inurian had been. He almost took a step backwards, giving in to the thrill of fear that jolted his heart, but he held himself firm.

  "Last time the Anain rose," Cerys continued, more levelly, "they turned back armies, drowned a city beneath a sea of trees. They care nothing for our concerns, Thane, and we know next to nothing of theirs. They might raise another Deep Rove over your whole Glas valley. They might slaughter every na'kyrim in the world, all in the name of just one whose life offends them."

  Orisian drew a deep breath down into his chest. His heartbeat slowed a little.

  "You're afraid," he said quietly, facing Cerys. "Yvane told me as much."

  He saw the Elect's jaw tighten, and fear fluttered again in his stomach, but he pressed on. "She said you - and her, and all na'kyrim - are afraid of Aeglyss, and of what he might do. There's more, though, isn't there? You're afraid of what might happen because of him, too. It might be the Anain, it might be Gryvan oc Haig, when he finds out there's a powerful na'kyrim who has sided with the Black Road."

  No one replied for what seemed like a long time. Cerys had taken hold of the chain she wore around her neck. She stared at Orisian for a moment, then closed her eyes.

  "Yvane ever thought in such ruts," someone said - Orisian was not sure who, though the voice was male.

  Cerys smiled briefly, sadly.r />
  "Will you come with me, Thane? Being in this room gives me a cruel headache. Perhaps fresher air is what we need."

  He followed her willingly, glad to leave the tight confines of the Dreamer's chamber. Rothe's relief when he saw them emerge was evident. The big shieldman fell in close behind Orisian, who gave him a reassuring smile. The Elect made no protest at Rothe's presence.

  He expected that Cerys would lead them back down, through the huge keep and into the passages and chambers cut into the rock of the mountain like the tracks of maggots in an apple. Instead, they climbed. A stone spiral of steps carried them up and disgorged them, unexpectedly, onto the keep's roof.

  The wind blasted away all memory of the airless chamber where Tyn lay. It tugged at Orisian's hair and jacket, snapped the Elect's long, heavy dress about her legs. Orisian closed one eye and twisted his head away from the gale. Clouds were surging along overhead, layer upon layer of them flowing across the sky, a turbulent flood of vapours and mists. The convolutions and complexities of Highfast tumbled away beneath them: walls and buildings and battlements spilling down from the keep to crowd the peak.

  Cerys, though, led them around the low crenellations to the keep's eastern edge. Holding her hair back from her face, she glanced at Orisian and then gestured out into the void. He leaned cautiously out and looked down. The sheer wall towered over a deep and wild gorge. The cliff faces beneath were precipitous; impregnable. Further out, ranks of jagged, craggy summits jostled to fill the horizon. Pennants of cloud, or perhaps powdery snow, were streaming out from the highest of them: fierce winter flags. Orisian could see not a single tree, no sign of life at all, save one. A great flock of crows was jousting with the wind beneath him. The black birds flashed to and fro, spinning and sweeping in the gale that roared down the gorge. They were like dark flecks of ash flung into the air by a furious fire. Some of them appeared to be disappearing into - and others emerging from - openings in the cliff far below.