Fall of Thanes tgw-3

by Brian Ruckley

  Ess’yr sniffed. “Perhaps. Most likely not. They hunt; look ahead, not behind.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Orisian said.

  They scrambled down, slipping and stumbling as they went, and the woods embraced them. The floor of the vale was flat, but the vegetation was so dense and tangled that it was impossible for any save Ess’yr and Varryn to move either quietly or easily. The two Kyrinin rushed ahead, one on either flank. Orisian led the rest through the thickets, trusting Ess’yr to give warning of any ambush. Had those pursuing K’rina been White Owls, he might have felt more caution, but both Ess’yr and Varryn were certain that the booted feet they tracked in the na’kyrim’s wake belonged to mere Huanin.

  Yvane was labouring along close by.

  “They might not harm her,” Orisian said to her as they ran. “They might only want to find her, as the White Owls did before.”

  “Maybe,” she gasped. “If they know her. But she’s empty-gone-so Aeglyss cannot sense her, cannot guide anyone to her. Chances are, they have no idea who she is. Just crossed her trail by accident. If they reach her first, it won’t go well.”

  The effort of speaking was too much for her, and she fell behind him. Orisian surged onwards, battering his way through trailing ivy and snagging, thorned stems. Panic clamoured within him, but he denied it. To lose K’rina now would be unthinkable. It would leave him-all of them-utterly lost. He would not surrender to that outcome yet.

  There was no snow down here beneath the woodland’s roof, but the ground was wet and studded with exposed rocks. A warrior coming up alongside Orisian, then moving ahead of him, went down with a gasp as his leading foot skidded away.

  A shrill scream came from up ahead, piercing through the rumble of running feet and panted breaths. Orisian stumbled at the sound of it, slowed and unbalanced by a crippling fear for Ess’yr. But even as the grating cry was cut off, he recognised that it had not been born of a Kyrinin throat.

  The ground shook. No, not the ground. The thin grass, the mat of dead leaves strewn through it, the low bare shrubs: they stirred. A spreading web of disturbance went across the woodland floor like the waves fleeing a stone dropped into water. The thinnest twigs in the canopy trembled, a palsy running through the outermost extremity of every tree. Orisian discovered the flavour of loam and leaf and wood in his mouth and nostrils, cloying, almost overpowering. He staggered from a run into a walk, looking this way and that.

  “What is it?” he shouted over his shoulder to Yvane, already guessing the answer.

  “Anain,” she rasped from some way behind him.

  There was a roaring in the branches overhead, as if storm winds blew through them, but the air was still, the clouds glimpsed beyond, flat and unmoving. Orisian looked to his left. His warriors were rushing on past him.

  As one darted by, and then another, Orisian glimpsed beyond them a subtler movement. Out in the dim depths of the woodland, there was change: a blunt, misshapen form that drew itself together for a moment out of trailing creepers and twisting briars, like a half-formed idea in clay beneath the hands of a potter. A knot of stems turned as he watched, and he had the potent, brief sense of being observed. Then a flashing, green blushing of fresh leaf burst forth, and the stems and branches fell apart, and with a rattle of wood something went racing away ahead of them, leaving a trail of impossible greenery breaking out from every bough in its wake.

  “Wait.” Aeglyss lifted a single hooked finger. His cracked tongue flicked over his lips. “I… hear. Movement. Movement. I catch the scent of…”

  His head tipped back. A long sibilant hiss escaped him. “Ah. See? The great beasts come out to play. They don’t fear me enough yet, then. Not yet.”

  His eyes went glassy, their bloodshot grey overlaid with a wet film. A string of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth.

  There was the faintest whisper from his lips before they went slack: “We’ll see, then. We’ll see what I’ve become.”

  “What’s happening to him?” whispered the man crouching down beside Shraeve.

  Aeglyss swayed, and for a moment might have overbalanced and tumbled from the bench. He steadied, and sat there, sunken down onto his bones. His eyes closed.

  “He reaches out,” the Inkallim said flatly.

  There was a clearing of sorts, and at its furthest edge lay K’rina, curled into a little hollow between the roots of a great tree. One hand was clasped to her shoulder; blood spread across the skin. The spear that had wounded her lay by her side. There were bodies scattered across the grass: warriors of the Black Road. Some had Kyrinin arrows in them. One of Orisian’s own men was going from one to another, ensuring that they were dead. To one side, Ess’yr and Varryn stood motionless, staring at the scene before them. For once, their blue-lined faces betrayed powerful emotion: awestruck fear.

  All of this Orisian saw as soon as he stepped into the pool of cold light falling through the gap in the canopy. None of it held his attention, for he saw the same wonders as the Kyrinin, and was similarly awed by them. Beneath his feet, and spreading out in every direction, lush green grass covered the ground, and he could smell its newness and the earth it had broken in bursting forth. Every tree wore a verdant cloak of leaves, every fern had unfurled bright new, fragile fronds. The scattered clumps of moss all but glowed with the vigour of fresh spring growth. Life, in delirious, impossible abundance, had come to this place.

  And death, too. One of the men lying in the centre of the clearing was all but obscured by the mat of long, binding grass that had overgrown him, and by the coil of briars that had engulfed his head, tearing the skin away from his face, pushing down into his mouth, his throat, so violently that his jaw was forced unnaturally wide, his lips shredded. Looming over K’rina’s huddled form was a Black Road warrior, a woman, who stood erect not by the strength of her own legs but by the two lances of wood that impaled her, one through her stomach, another through her neck. Her dead eyes were wide with shock, her mouth gaping. The tree beneath which K’rina now lay had reached out those unnatural, spiralling spars from the mass of its trunk and punched them through the Black Roader. As it had done to another, a man, who lay on the other side of the na’kyrim. A spear of a branch-too smooth and formed to be a true branch-had come out from the tree’s bole, and arced down and punched into the notch between shoulder and neck, transfixing the man, collapsing him down into a broken heap, erupting from his groin and pinning him into the soft, damp soil.

  Orisian took a couple of stunned paces forward, fearing to tread upon the luxuriant growth that should not exist yet did. A similar unease afflicted his warriors, for they moved cautiously and hesitantly, afraid to disturb whatever fell power had worked this transformation.

  Orisian felt Yvane at his shoulder. She was breathing heavily.

  “Can you still feel it?” he asked her. “The Anain?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It came to save K’rina?” Orisian whispered, half-questioning, half-marvelling.

  “He’s here,” wailed Eshenna behind them.

  Yvane slumped against Orisian, one hand pressed to her temple, the other clawing at his shoulder for support. He dropped his sword and struggled to hold her up.

  The trees shook. They creaked and groaned. A painful beat throbbed in Orisian’s skull, each pulse tugging at the corner of his eye, sending a hot tingle through his scalp.

  “He’ll see us,” Eshenna moaned. “He’ll see us.”

  “Yvane…” Orisian murmured. Her legs had gone loose beneath her. She slipped down his flank onto her knees.

  “Aeglyss is here,” she whispered. “He’s here. Gods, he’s…”

  A spasm seized her, and she vomited across Orisian’s feet. He made to kneel down beside her, to put a protective arm about her hunched shoulders, but sudden sound distracted him. A harsh, fast rattle like breaking ice. A thousand splintering cracks rushed through the boughs; deeper ruptures rang in the bellies of the great trees; a mist of wood dust and fragments of bark
filled the air. Rustling filled the undergrowth, as if an invisible army of mice was suddenly on the move. Before Orisian’s eyes, a wave of death swept through the woods.

  He watched the grass that had so recently flushed green now die and wither into countless brittle, brown curls. Leaves that had burst out, bright and fresh, only moments ago abruptly rusted and fell. Branches broke. Splits ran noisily up tree trunks. Saplings bowed and shrank. Out, out into the undergrowth ran tendrils of destruction, cutting grey pathways through the woodland. Every bush or tree they touched, every blade of grass or clump of fern, died in the blinking of an eye.

  Eshenna was groaning. Orisian turned to her, and saw her fall to her hands and knees, then roll onto her back. He breathed, and felt the dry grit of dead vegetation in his throat. It filled the air, like the frailest veil of smoke. He coughed, and spat to clear his mouth. Silence descended. A stillness, like the space between two heartbeats.

  Ess’yr was kneeling. She reached for the sear, dead grass before her, and it fell apart in her hand. Her brother stood beside her, his face now unreadable. But his chest, Orisian saw, rose and fell. Rapid, alarmed breaths fluttered in and out of the Kyrinin warrior. He stared, unblinking, at the great tree, now dead, beneath which K’rina lay.

  “He killed it,” Yvane said. “Impossible. Impossible. He’s killed one of the Anain.”

  “Is he gone?” Orisian bent and shook Yvane, made rough by his fear. “Is he still here, in you or Eshenna? Did he see you?”

  She was limp and unresisting in his grasp.

  “No, no. He’s gone. It wasn’t us… He didn’t… He came for the Anain. It… it rose too close to the surface. He felt its presence, and he hunted it. He wasn’t looking for anything else.”

  “He didn’t find K’rina?”

  Yvane shook her head. “Nothing to find. There’s nothing left of her. He cannot feel her any more than I can.”

  Orisian released her and straightened. Eshenna lay unconscious on the pale carpet of dead moss and grass. The blight stretched out in all directions. Beyond its bounds, Orisian could just see stands of trees that still lived. Closer to hand, there was only the skeleton of a forest: greys and sickly browns, everything withered, everything bare and angular and bleak. Where the bark had fallen away from tree trunks, it revealed dry, flaking wood that held not the faintest memory of life.

  Orisian walked towards K’rina. His feet crunched across dead stalks and fallen twigs. As he drew near, the two limbs that had impaled the Black Road woman cracked and crumbled, falling away into brittle fragments of dead wood. The corpse thumped to the ground.

  They waited in silence in the musty hall in Kan Avor. Not a word, hardly a breath, escaped Kyrinin or human. Every one of them watched the na’kyrim trembling upon the stone bench. They watched great dark stains spread across the bandages around his wrists. So suffused were they with blood that it oozed out onto the backs of his hands.

  All felt the surging of his power. They felt it in their skin: a shivering born of no cold. They felt it in the place behind their eyes where their self resided, in the blurring there, the sensation of their own minds melting into some vast, accumulative flow that cared nothing for them, did not even recognise them, yet was so immensely potent that it nevertheless gathered them into it. And they exulted in it. It filled them with the liberation of surrender to something far greater than themselves.

  This awful, wonderful torrent overwhelmed them, and they grew thinner and thinner beneath its onslaught, until at any moment it felt as though they might be carried off, and parted entirely from the world and from their crude bodies.

  And then Aeglyss sucked in a huge wet breath and coughed. He bent forward, almost touching his forehead to his knees. Strands of bloody mucus ran from his nostrils down across his mouth. He licked it away as he staggered to his feet. He brushed past the dazed man and the woman, who still abased themselves before him. Droplets of blood fell from his wrists as he moved. He wheezed, and out of the wheezing came laughter: an attenuated, cold mirth.

  “So,” he gasped. “So. They tried to kill me before, but now they learn… now they see what I am. I am too much for them, even for them. Now we know whose land this is. Whose world.”

  As he spoke, the movement of his jaw freed flakes of dead skin from his cheeks. They drifted down like tiny withered leaves. He fell to his knees with a bony crack. Shraeve and Hothyn both came quickly to his side. They eased him up. So frail had he become that the Inkallim could almost completely enclose his arm with her hand.

  “The flesh is too weak,” he murmured. “Send them away. I don’t want them to see me like this.”

  II

  Kanin led a company of four hundred into Glasbridge: every man and woman of his Blood he had been able to assert any kind of control over. Many he had wrested away from other roving bands, cowing their rebelliousness through displays of anger and violence. Most wanted nothing more than to wander on south in search of slaughter. He gave them slaughter of a different kind-the execution of those most vocally resistant to his command-and with it exerted a measure of fragile control, over some of them at least. He did not expect to maintain his authority for long. So turbulent had every heart and mind become that he could not imagine any sentiment, or rule, or order, lasting. But he did not need much time. In his dark calculation, he could see no further than a few days, weeks perhaps, ahead. Beyond that, nothing.

  Glasbridge was half ruin, half armed camp. All squalor. Even in the short time since Kanin had last ridden its streets, much of the town had slumped still further into decrepitude. It lay now beneath a covering of snow, yet still there was a soft, warm hint of rot on the air. Under the white shroud, decay and corpses lurked. Those houses that had been damaged by fire when Glasbridge was taken by the Black Road, or abandoned since, were miserable sights, crumbling and sodden.

  There were, amidst the wreckage, pockets of life and habitation. They found a sprawling stable yard near the centre of the town, with a travellers’ inn and workshops-blacksmith, wheelwright-attached to it. A dozen or more sullen-looking horses were shut up in stalls, but it was the people that caught Kanin’s attention: a hundred at least, milling about in incomprehensible activity. It all struck him as formless, chaotic. There were warriors amongst the crowds. Kanin saw badges and standards from Gyre, Gaven and Wyn, all mixing, keeping to no settled companies. Most of those who had occupied the yard were not fighters at all, though. They were ordinary villagers and townsfolk and farmers, fragments of the host of commoners that had come surging down through the Stone Vale in answer to the call of victory, the promise of restored lands and triumphant faith.

  Kanin dismounted, and seized the closest man roughly by the arm.

  “Who commands here?” he demanded.

  “Commands?” the man repeated vacantly.

  Kanin felt dizzy and disoriented. He found himself wondering, absurdly, whether he had changed so much, whether his isolation had become so complete, that he could no longer be understood.

  “Whose camp is this?” he shouted in the man’s face.

  “Mine. Yours. It belongs to the Road.”

  Kanin growled in contempt and thrust him away. Others were coming close now, drawn by curiosity or suspicion. He recognised no one. The faces came to him indistinctly, as if softened and disguised by the veil of his anger. He surged forward and seized the collar of another man’s jerkin in both hands.

  “Who claims Glasbridge?” he cried.

  The man made no show of resistance. There was an odd, confused expression on his face.

  “Fate claims us all, in these times. The Kall is upon us…”

  Kanin threw the man to the ground, trampled over him to reach others. The thickening crowd made him feel enclosed, beset, and his rage flared in response. He pushed a woman aside.

  “Has the halfbreed sent you?” she asked as she stumbled, and the hope in her words broke the last shreds of Kanin’s restraint. He spun, and brought his sword out from its scabbard and ro
und in a rising arc that caught the woman on the shoulder.

  Someone rushed at him, lunging at his upper chest with a blunt pole. He dipped his shoulders enough to send the stave glancing away off his mail, straightened and brought his sword hacking up into the armpit of his assailant. And then horses were all about, clattering and barging; his own warriors pouring in on all sides and pushing the throng back, cutting into it and splaying it apart like a ship’s prow punching into the surf.

  Kanin ran to his own horse and sprang into the saddle. A great fury, and a great excitement, had hold of him.

  “I am Kanin oc Horin-Gyre,” he cried as his horse turned around and around, as his warriors surged across the stable yard, scattering men and women, overturning cooking cauldrons and stalls and racks of weapons. “My Blood sprang from this town, before our exile, and I claim it. I will hold it, in my own name, and that of the High Thane. No one else. No one else!”

  In time, Kanin’s anger abated. It left behind it that familiar raw bitterness that was always there now, that sense of solitary anguish. He gave no orders, made no plans. He merely watched in silence from the back of his horse while Igris and the rest of his Shield took charge, silencing with their blades any show of dissent amongst those gathered in the yard, then sending out bands of thirty or forty riders at a time to impose Horin authority upon the rest of the town. It was all necessary, Kanin knew, but it was only a prelude. Without rage to buoy him up, the present could not hold his interest; it was the future that constantly called upon his impatient attention. Only the future could offer him any release.

  Once a sullen peace had descended, he went with his Shield towards the harbour. There had been barns and storehouses there, still holding unspoiled food, when last he had been in this town. He needed them, for if he could not feed his little army, it would turn to bones and dust in his hands. And without it, that future he dreamed of would never come, and he might never escape the horrors of the present.