Reluctantly, Mordyn turned to Aeglyss. He had never been this close to a na'kyrim before. Were their grey eyes always so like chips of cold stone? Was their skin always so corpse-pale? Did the object of their attention always feel so assailed, so overwhelmed?
"You think me Wain's servant, perhaps?" Aeglyss asked with a lopsided smile. He stretched one arm out towards Mordyn, turning it to expose the underside of his wrist. The cuff of his jacket slid back a little way, revealing a swollen, scabbed wound. "I ceased to be anyone's servant the day they put stakes through my arms. I learned then that a servant buys nothing but cruelty with his service. That loyalty is unknown to all of you with pure, unpolluted blood running in your veins."
He interlaced his fingers to make a double fist of his hands. Mordyn could not look away, though he longed to. That fear was still there, tearing at his thoughts.
"Let me show you," whispered Aeglyss, then more loudly: "Wain. Thane's sister. Kneel for me, my beloved. Show this noble man how much of a servant I am to you."
Out of the corner of his eye, Mordyn could see Wain doing as she was bid. Aeglyss did not even glance at her.
"Do you see, Chancellor? Do you understand? It is not the Horin-Gyre Blood you will be taking counsel with. It is not Wain who holds your life in her hands. It is not the Black Road that rules here. Come, I will show you."
Kan Avor was all mud, ruin and rot. What had once been streets were now little more than soggy culverts ankle-deep in silt and decaying vegetation. Some of the buildings must once have been grand but the ones that still stood were now crumbling and gutted. Those walls that retained more than a few courses of stone bore dark, mouldy bands on them: the high-water marks left each winter when the Glas Water had been at its fullest flood. But the dam that had created that great lake was gone now, of course. The waters it had restrained had poured away and ravaged Glasbridge on their way to the sea. Freed from its watery imprisonment, Kan Avor was revealed as nothing more than the sodden, rotting skeleton of a long-dead city.
Mordyn Jerain hobbled along behind Aeglyss. Wain supported him, without which aid he would not have been able to walk. Every movement of his head triggered a pulse of pain. His body was feeble. He felt like an old man.
"Keep moving," Aeglyss muttered. "If you stand still for too long, you're likely to get stuck in the mud." He laughed to himself.
In a small square, bordered by half-tumbled, roofless houses, people were labouring to clear away the silt that the Glas Water had left behind. They dug down to the ancient cobblestones, unearthing all manner of debris as they did so: roofing tiles, shattered pots, even bones. The mud was piled up at the edges of the square. Water oozed out from these mounds, spreading in a filthy slick across the newly exposed cobbles.
In the centre of the square, a broken statue lay in two pieces. It looked like the image of some tall and noble man, though it was so chipped and pitted and stained that it was impossible to be certain. Whoever's glory it had been meant to extol, it no longer served that purpose: the figure had shattered across the waist, leaving legs and barrel-chest divided and forlorn.
Aeglyss lingered beside the head of the fallen statue. He looked almost wistful as he touched the cracked stone brow.
"I don't know," the na'kyrim murmured, as if in answer to some silent question.
Mordyn had to lean his weight against Wain. He hated such vulnerability, but his muscles and bones had nothing to offer him. He felt sick.
"Who are these people?" the Shadowhand asked.
Aeglyss lifted his head and looked around the square. For a moment, he seemed puzzled, like a man suddenly waking and not knowing quite where he was. A woman stumbled past, carrying a wicker basket of mud on her back. Aeglyss watched her empty it out, turn around and come back for another load.
"I don't know. Oh, does it matter? They're . . . followers, if you like." Again, he laughed, in that disconnected, abrupt way. He was, as far as Mordyn could tell, quite mad.
"Come," the na'kyrim said. "This isn't what I wanted you to see. Not all, at least. I'll show you. Can you climb some steps, great Chancellor?"
Mordyn started to shake his head, but lancing pain arrested the movement.
"No," he groaned.
"Well, try. For me. You need to see for yourself. Everyone does."
Wain helped the Chancellor to follow after Aeglyss. They moved away from the square, picking their way amongst ruins. Mordyn glimpsed indistinct figures here and there. There were men and women, human and Kyrinin, digging, gathering, watching, or just standing staring up at the sky or at leaning walls and broken-topped towers. Mordyn could not find purpose or pattern in anything he saw, and could not tell whether the lack was in him or in the world.
There was a stretch of wall, thirty or forty paces long, standing alone. Whatever buildings it had connected or guarded were gone, slumped into rubble. It was crenellated, with a flight of worn steps running up to the battlements. Aeglyss climbed up, beckoning for Mordyn to do likewise.
"I can't," he muttered.
"Of course you can," the na'kyrim snapped irritably. He stopped halfway up the flight of stairs and turned. "You will. You're stronger than you imagine. Lift your foot. One step at a time. You're not so tired; not so weak. Climb up, Chancellor."
And Mordyn's weariness abated. The ache in his head receded, still there but set behind some softening barrier that left someone else to suffer it, not him, not now. Wain's hand was at his elbow, easing him towards the steps. He drifted up them without feeling them beneath his feet. Then he was standing atop the orphaned wall, and the pale light was hurting his eyes. He winced against it.
"Look," Aeglyss said at his side. "What do you see?"
The Chancellor looked and saw before him the edges of ruined Kan Avor, bleeding without clear boundary into the surrounding marshes and fields. The grey of fallen stone gave way bit by bit to the brown and green of mud and grass, and the black of still pools. There were distant copses, far-off barns and farmhouses like smudges on his eyes; a dark line, tracing the weaving course of a river. And beyond, high ground: ranks of hills and mountains rising up to merge into the featureless sky.
"What do you see?" Aeglyss asked again.
Mordyn narrowed his eyes. He saw figures moving across this great indistinct landscape. Small groups of people, out in the fields, following invisible tracks. Some were on horses, some on foot. Some came in wagons, some walked alone. He could see a dozen, two dozen, three.
"They don't even know why they're coming," Aeglyss murmured. "They just come. It is like . . . do you suppose the geese know why they turn south when winter is come? Or do they just wake one morning and find that they must fly? Perhaps their hearts just long for the sun that has abandoned them, and that longing carries them aloft, and southwards, without them ever knowing its intent. Do you think that might be so, wise Chancellor?"
"I don't know. I never troubled myself over the motives of geese."
"Ha. No. Why should you? You are one of the great, and the powerful, of course. You have no need to concern yourself with such things. Well, I'll tell you what I think, shall I? Would that interest you more?"
Mordyn closed his eyes for a moment, and turned his head away from the na'kyrim. He was afraid of this man.
"They don't know why they come, these pilgrims," Aeglyss continued. "I do. I know. They come because they have desires, and questions, and instincts, and longings; and because, to each and to all of these things, I am an answer. They come because the light of the sun will always draw life to it, without reason and without understanding. And I am that light. In the Shared, I now burn brightly, Chancellor. They cannot see it, cannot comprehend it, but they feel it. They feel the promise of glory, or of change, or of death, or of peace. They know, in their hearts, that something great and strange is happening here. So they come."
Mordyn made to descend the short flight of steps. He felt dizzy and unstable, exposed.
"Stay," Aeglyss whispered, and Mordyn's body obeyed
before his mind had even made sense of the word. "I am beset by enemies on every side, Shadowhand. My own kind, your kind. The Anain. I must armour myself. I must have friends, who will stand by me. I must have shield and sword, to protect myself and to strike out at those who would drag me down. I've learned well; slowly, but well. There are only friends and enemies. Nothing in between. So you must be a friend to me, Chancellor, or you are nothing."
The na'kyrim turned and gazed out across the vast valley floor. A cough hunched his shoulders for a moment, then he straightened. He wiped spittle from his lips with the back of his bony hand. There was something in his eyes, as he stared out, of wonder, or awe.
"This is what I wanted you to see. To understand," he said softly. "It is not the Black Road that rules here. It is me. Or what burns in me."
Mordyn was left, for a time, seated on wet stone, his back resting against the stub of a fallen pillar. His memory, his sense of himself, came and went. He was not certain how he had come to this place. It was some kind of empty hall, only half-roofed. There was wet moss beneath his fingers, growing in the cracks of the flagstone floor.
He could hear voices, sometimes loud and near, sometimes faint like weather far beyond a distant horizon. There were people standing close to him. One was the Horin Thane's sister. She watched him, but did not speak to him. Warriors were gathered about her. Her Shield, perhaps. He was almost certain that the women of the Gyre Bloods sometimes had Shields, in mimicry of their menfolk. It was not only his hunger, or the pain in his head, that made it so difficult to dredge up such fragments of knowledge. To his profound distress, his mind, always his most prized possession, was unruly, sluggish. His every thought writhed and slipped away from him almost as soon as it was begun. There was something in the air of this place, in its foetid, decaying presence, that was inimical to sense and to order.
No, he told himself. That was a half-truth. It was the strange, mad na'kyrim. He was the source of the imbalance that afflicted everything here. Somehow, he was staining everything with his own delirium. Mordyn felt as if he had fallen into some fool's story, of the mad times when halfbreeds wielded awful power, and bent the shape of the world to fit their own desires.
He realised he was slumping slowly to one side, his head lolling down towards his shoulder. He struggled to right himself, sighing at the discomfort such movement caused him. There were Kyrinin in the chamber now. His erratic vision turned them into tall, sweeping blurs. A vast terror shook the Chancellor of the Haig Bloods then, feeding off his helplessness and his pain. It receded, but left him feeling like a child, lost and confused, surrounded by things he could not understand.
The na'kyrim was there, face to face with Wain nan Horin-Gyre. Mordyn longed to close his eyes and shut out these vile visions, but he was transfixed. The sickly, half-human Aeglyss was smiling, whispering in tones of silver and velvet, cupping the woman's chin, tipping her head back, tracing the line of her lips with a single fingertip. It looked obscene. Then the na'kyrim was turning his head, looking towards Mordyn. The smile remained in place. Splitting, bleeding lips stretched back to expose yellowing teeth. Mordyn felt that terror stirring again, reaching its tendrils up towards him.
"You look hungry, Chancellor. Shall I have someone fetch you food?" Even as he stared at Mordyn, and spoke to him, the na'kyrim's finger was stroking the skin of Wain's throat, a vile caress. "Mutton, perhaps. It's spitted outside."
Mordyn blinked. He could not tell whether he was hungry or not, whether the emptiness he felt was of the stomach or the heart.
"Go and cut our honoured guest some meat, Wain," Aeglyss murmured. He came and squatted down in front of the Chancellor.
"You're fragile, Shadowhand. It hurts, I know. But you are not going to die. You will heal."
"How . . . how did I come here?"
"Ha! A shame you slept through the whole adventure! I stole you away, from the greatest castle in all the Bloods. I did, and my White Owls. Oh, Chancellor, what wonders you poor, common Huanin are deprived of. What marvels you are blind to. I can feel the grass beneath their feet when they run, I can hear the wind in the trees above them. I can whisper in their heads and in their hearts, and they will do as I bid them, even if they never hear me."
Someone else was moving behind the na'kyrim. Mordyn squinted, but his eyes were rebellious and faltering. He could see only that there was someone standing there, a woman perhaps. Hair as black as ink; something - sticks? The hilts of swords? - protruding from her shoulders.
"Is this truly the famed Shadowhand?" he heard her ask. A cold voice. He heard nothing in it save the wintry north, and hardness.
"Ah," Aeglyss whispered without looking round. "They are interested in you, Chancellor. Of course they are. You're a prize indeed. The ravens come to circle you. Perhaps they think your corpse is ready to be picked clean."
"He could be of great value to us." the woman said.
"Us?" Mordyn could see that Aeglyss was smiling. "I haven't decided yet, Shraeve. I haven't decided what his value is. But remember, in the days to come, that it was I who found him, I who brought him here."
Wain returned and knelt at Mordyn's side. She pressed a fragment of greasy mutton into his mouth. Its juices filled him with an urgent hunger. He chewed it and swallowed it down. It rasped a hot, painful track down his gullet.
"I don't know what hold this madman has over you, lady," he whispered, "but you must take me away from him. You must talk to me. I can make agreements . . ."
"Be quiet." Aeglyss had risen to his feet. He kicked Mordyn's foot. "She won't bargain with you. Leave us, Wain. Wait for me. I will come to you soon."
Mordyn watched in despair as the sister of the Horin-Gyre Thane meekly dropped a few more slivers of meat into his lap and retreated. He was not the only one to observe her departure with interest.
"Does Kanin know you've got her so well-trained?" the woman Aeglyss had called Shraeve asked. "Whatever you've done to her, he'll not forgive you for this. Tell me, for I would know: is this the work of Orlane? Do you think yourself him, reborn?"
"Don't speak of her," Aeglyss snapped. "Or of things you don't understand." Mordyn felt the command like a blow upon his breastbone, a lance punched through his chest, even though it was not directed at him. The tall woman withstood it. But she could not meet the halfbreed's gaze. She bent her head away. Inkallim, Mordyn thought, belatedly understanding Aeglyss's reference to ravens. Even Inkallim will not face him down.
They locked Mordyn in a chamber that stank of rotting weed and noisome mud. A grey-brown sludge covered its floor. Black and green mould patterned its walls, following each seam and crack. Carved pillars flanked the door. A stone bench was cut into the bay of the window. There was a wide grate in which fierce fires must once have burned. Now there was nothing, save the cracked wooden pallet on which Mordyn lay, and the thin moth-holed blankets they gave him to cover himself.
He lay there and willed his fear into submission. He denied the pulsing ache in his head until it slipped into the background. He begged himself to rise above the harrying doubts and distractions that dogged his every thought. Slowly, in the night's darkness, he gained some small mastery over it all, and was, for a time, himself again. There was always an answer to every question; a chink in the defences of every obstacle that lay athwart his path. He struggled to make himself believe that, alone amidst the city's foul decay, and tried not to think of what lay outside the locked door. He tried not to imagine what might lie beyond that one cold night's horizon.
VI
"I'm told that Avann oc Gyre held audiences here, in this very chamber, before he fell foul of the High Thanes of Kilkry."
Aeglyss walked slowly, a little unsteadily, around the periphery of the columned hall.
"Do you like it, Chancellor?" he asked.
They were high here, by the broken-topped standards of Kan Avor: two storeys above the mud that passed for ground; two flights of coiled, slippery steps above the highest water marks the flood
had imprinted on the buildings. The planking of the hall's wooden floor was intact, but overlaid, in places, by moss and slime. Great thick beams still supported the roof above, but there were holes that had admitted the rain and the wind and light. The columns on which the beams rested were pitted and eroded. The stone bench that stood at the far end of the hall was spotted with patches of lichen. There was a smell of soft, saturated timber.
Mordyn Jerain hardly noticed the damp and the decay and the stenches any more. Three days and three nights he had been here, trapped in this mad, corrupt nest of snakes. He thought it was that long, at least. His senses, his awareness of what was around him, came and went. Sometimes, momentarily, he forgot who he was. The only thing he never forgot was Aeglyss. The malignant presence of the halfbreed was everywhere, in the walls, in the air he breathed, in the interstices of his thoughts. When he slept, the Shadowhand dreamed dreams that he did not believe were even his own. He dreamed of forests, and of fires, and murder and rage, and all of it, he was almost certain, was born of this creature who was twisting the world into an imitation of his own diseased mind.
Mordyn's body was recovering slowly. But his heart, his spirit and his hope were being picked, bit by bit, apart. He had given up trying to speak to Wain nan Horin-Gyre. She was nothing more than an obedient hound at the halfbreed's heel, of no more consequence or significance than the Kyrinin who came and went at his command, or the scores of men and women who milled about Kan Avor's rubble-strewn streets. There was, Mordyn now knew, nothing here that mattered save Aeglyss. But he had no idea what to do with that knowledge, or even where it had come from, how it had infested his mind. He had never imagined that the world held such things as this halfbreed. He had no weapons in his armoury of manipulation and influence that could serve against such an opponent. And though despair was no part of his nature, it was taking hold of him.
"Come here," Aeglyss said, beckoning Mordyn to join him at one of the windows.
Godless World 2 - Bloodheir Page 41
