“I will take K’rina into the north,” he said. “To the Glas Valley. As close as I can get to Kan Avor, and to Aeglyss.”
He looked not at the faces of those assembled before him, but at the old, indistinct carving of a crown set into the stonework above the door. He felt strangely unfamiliar to himself, as if some part of him had stepped aside from his tempestuous core, where fear and confusion and agonies of doubt boiled. He was unexpectedly calm.
“It is a journey she was meant to make, I think, until we-I-stole her away from it. Now she cannot make it alone, so I will take her. Past Hent, and through Anlane. Most of you are to stay here, and I’ll want your pledge to keep safe all who are within these walls, human and na’kyrim alike. Guard them against whatever may come from outside, or from within. It’s the only service your Blood, and your Thane, requires of you now.
“If there are ten of you who are willing to come with me, and with K’rina, I would welcome your aid. No more than ten, for there’ll be no battles if I can help it. At this time of year, this season, most of the White Owls should be quartered in their winter camps. With care, we might go entirely unnoticed. But I will take no one who does not come by their own free choice.”
Taim Narran stepped forward, of course, even before Orisian had drawn breath: a single, determined pace closer to his Thane. Others followed him, one by one, the only sound their soft feet on the flagstoned floor. And for Orisian there was both relief and guilt in the sight of them coming out from amongst their fellows. Offering themselves, and their lives, to him.
Afterwards, as the warriors departed, descending the long stairways, Taim Narran came to him.
“Are you sure?” was all the warrior asked him, gently.
“Not sure. I’ve seen and heard enough to make me think it needs doing. And I’m here; there’s no one else to do it. But you don’t have to come, Taim. Highfast will need a strong hand to hold it, and there’s no one I’d trust more than you. You’ve a wife and a daughter waiting for you who’ll need you after all this is done. I’d be glad to see you stay, truly.”
Taim Narran only shook his head sadly at that, and went after his men. Orisian and Yvane were left alone in the broad chamber, the na’kyrim watching him with hard eyes.
“Stay,” Orisian said to her. “You’ve done enough. More than enough.”
“I’ll come for K’rina. She deserves that much of us, at least. There should be someone of her own kind there to care for her, to watch over her. Someone who understands something of what she was, what her life was, before she became only a tool of those with wars to fight.”
“I care for her,” Orisian said. The fires in him were damped down, for now. He wanted only quiet. He would not argue with Yvane. And there was, in any case, a truth he could entirely understand in her subdued anger.
“Perhaps you do,” she said. “Perhaps you think you do. But still she is used. By the Anain. By us. Na’kyrim have learned-hundreds of years have taught us-to find caring and trust and safety only in one another. In our own. If there is anything of K’rina left, lost in the Shared or sealed away inside her body, she deserves to look out and see a face like her own. And I played my part in helping you to find her. Whether that was wise or not, I don’t know, but I’ll not walk away from her now.”
She left him there, and he stood for a time breathing the damp air, tasting its age and its abandonment. Listening to the timeless, unending wind tumbling over the skin of the fortress. Watching as flurries of snow began to swirl once more past the windows.
When he at last stirred himself, he went to find Ess’yr and Varryn. He said not a word to them, nor they to him. He merely settled himself onto a bench and watched them. They rolled spare bowstrings about their fingers and packed them away in pouches. They sewed new seams into their hide boots where they had started to split. They sighted along the shafts of their arrows in search of imperfections, smoothed the feathered flights. They inspected their water bags for wear and for leaks.
All of this they did unhurriedly, silently. That concentration, that graceful intensity of attention and purpose, was soothing to Orisian. It spoke to him of acceptance, of calm accommodation to the future the world offered up. For so long, as a child searching for solace in the wake of the Heart Fever, he had imagined that there might be other kinds of lives than his, ones that rode the tempests of the world with greater ease. He had seized upon every hint that Inurian let slip about the ways of the Kyrinin, taking them to be tokens of just such lives; fragmentary promises that other possibilities existed beyond the walls of bereaved Castle Kolglas.
He could still summon up some trace of those childhood hopes, but it was the memory of them that offered comfort now, not their substance. He knew more; was no longer that child.
Varryn stood tall, and held his long spear straight at his side. For the first time in many days, he looked directly into Orisian’s eyes and spoke to him.
“We go now into the lands of the enemy?”
Orisian nodded wordlessly, feeling that faint, still peace drift away. And he watched as the thinnest of smiles tightened on the Kyrinin warrior’s face. As the tattoos that told the tales of the deaths he had wrought flexed on his skin.
“Then I will wet my spear with their blood. And they will learn the Fox still live.”
V
Eska of the Hunt left her dogs behind in Glasbridge and walked alone into the Glas Valley, towards Kan Avor. There was deep snow across the fields, but still she shunned the roads, the better to avoid any inconvenient attention. It found her in any case.
Before she was out of sight of Glasbridge’s dark outline hunched down on the western horizon, she saw three figures coming towards her across a pristine expanse of snow. They laboured, though whether that was due to the depth of snow, or because like many others in this ravaged valley they were sick or starving, she could not tell at this distance. It hardly mattered. They did not have the look of warriors, certainly not Inkallim, and thus, even hale and hearty, were unlikely to be any threat to her. She strode on along the line of a snow-buried ditch, ignoring them.
One of the men called out to her as they drew near, angling across the great white field to intercept her course. His accent marked him as Gyre, from the Bloodstone Hills; most likely, she thought, the Frein Valley. She had been there once, tracking the killer of one of the Lore. She had always had a talent for voices, for reading them and remembering their cadences. It had been useful, on occasion, in her service of the Inkall.
She read disorder and desperation in this man’s voice. She marched on, head down. The snow crunched crisply beneath her booted feet.
“Wait, there,” the man shouted again.
Eska still did not look round, but she could hear that they were close now, too close to ignore. She must either run-she could easily outpace them, no doubt-or face them. There might be something to be gained, she supposed, in talking to them. Some fragment of information, perhaps. That was, after all, the currency she dealt in, and the substance of the task Kanin oc Horin-Gyre had bestowed upon her.
She stood still, and turned to face the three men. They were grimy and gaunt. Hungry, she judged, but not yet quite enfeebled by it. One at least had a feverish look that suggested illness. She quickly made the necessary assessment: a staff one leaned upon, a hammer hanging from a belt, a tiny knife, a scabbarded sword that must have been stolen or looted from the dead. They were much like scores, perhaps hundreds, of others scattered all across the Glas Valley: ordinary folk who had marched in the wake of the Battle, fired by faith or greed or hope, only to find the business of fighting an ill-supplied war in the midst of winter more brutal and breaking than they had imagined. Debris left behind as the stronger, more vigorous flood had swept on into the south.
“Any food?” the nearest of the men asked without preamble.
Eska shook her head silently.
His eyes tracked her lean lines, tracing the form of her muscles beneath her hides. His gaze lingered for a mo
ment upon her spear, darted down to her leather boots.
“No food,” he mumbled. “Where are you going?”
“Kan Avor,” she said. “Have you been there?”
The man shrugged. She saw a flicker of unease, perhaps remembered horror, in the eyes of one of his companions, though.
“I would be interested to know how things stand there,” she said. “Who you saw there. What is happening.”
“Nothing good,” the first man rasped. The others clearly deferred to him. “Too much…” He wrinkled his nose, as if at a foul stench.
“Too much of what?” Eska enquired, and as soon as she did so, saw that her efforts would be fruitless. The man grimaced. He was angered.
“Too much of everything,” he muttered, then: “You’re not like us, not like everyone else. Who are you?” His tone, the way he stared avariciously at Eska’s boots, made clear that his curiosity was not born of any desire for friendship.
“I am of the Hunt Inkall,” she said levelly. That was as much as she would share.
“One of Tegric’s Children? Ha, ha.”
He sounded enthused at the thought of such reputed prey. It was absurd. In normal times, such men should be cowed by her presence, her implied abilities. Such calculation was clearly beyond them now. They, like so many, had abandoned their judgement in favour of baser, more feral urges. Eska saw it all around her in recent days. Some seemed barely affected by the strange, ubiquitous sickness of the mind; many-most, she thought-were slowly, incrementally slipping into madness. She had even found herself becoming increasingly ill-tempered, murderous rage sometimes held at bay only by a lifetime of habitual self-discipline.
Now, though, regarding these wretched men, she thought in dispassionate, practical terms. They were clearly disinclined to provide her with any useful knowledge. So be it. They could not prevent her escape, but if by some bizarre chance word of her approach preceded her to Kan Avor and there fell into an unfriendly ear, matters might become unnecessarily complicated.
She felt faint regret as she came to her decision. These lives would end without having greatly aided in the advancement of the creed. But then, each and every life could only be as it was written, nothing more and nothing less. Fate had brought these men to her; she was but its tool in this.
The ringleader advanced, leering as he did so. She staggered him with a blow from the butt of her spear into his ribcage. The same movement, rebounding in a smooth arc, satisfying in its precision, brought the barbed spear-point back to lay open the second man’s face. She glimpsed the blood-flecked bone of his cheek as she spun on one foot and crouched, punching the base of her spear into the snow for support, straightening a leg to crack her heel into the third’s knee. He howled and hobbled sideways. The snow tripped him.
Eska rose. The first of her assailants had recovered his balance, and was clumsily drawing that purloined sword with all the facility of one who had never held such a weapon in his life. She drove her spear into his belly with enough force to lift him off his feet, and left it there. She kicked the man who had fallen in the side of his head as he began to rise. He slumped back. She took a handful of his hair and hammered the heel of her free hand once into the bridge of his nose. There was a splintering crunch and he went limp.
The one whose cheek she had cut was staggering away, vainly trying to press back a flap of skin to his face, his hands fumbling in the blood that she had freed. She followed him, tearing her barbed spear free from the dying, howling ringleader’s stomach as she went. She put it into the small of the fleeing man’s back. She twisted it and pulled. He came staggering back towards her, caught on the barbs. She threw a foot up against his spine and kicked him free. He fell forwards.
Eska walked on towards Kan Avor.
She came to the city across ground that remembered its recent inundation. It had been the Glas Water, before the breaking of the Dyke, and that sodden past remained close. Beneath the snow, a thin crust of ice and frozen mud lay like skin over soft silt. Her feet sometimes broke through into cloying, part-liquid earth that was thick with dead reed stems and half-decayed water weed. Clumps of straggly, leafless willows stood here and there, their pliable branches bent by snow and icicles. Once, ice crackled under her foot and dropped her into an ankle-deep pool of black, almost glutinous, water. She at once unlaced her boots and dried both them and her feet as best she could. In the north she had seen toes, even legs and lives, lost for want of such simple precautions.
Sitting there, rubbing at her skin to warm it, she noticed the end of a leg bone jutting out from the mud close by, the ball joint like a smooth fist. It was not the first bone she had seen: there had been half a jaw, four ribs protruding from the snow like the fringe of a broken-toothed comb. All human. The dead lay thickly here. It might be, she supposed, the result of the Heart Fever that had raged through the Lannis Blood a few years ago, but the remains looked to have more age to them than that. She preferred to think them the dead of Kan Avor Field, the great battle fought here a century and a half ago, when the Black Road was driven from these lands. She found that a pleasing thought.
“We came back,” she whispered foolishly to the leg bone as she rose and continued on her way.
Kan Avor lay beneath a fetid fog. Eska felt its moisture on her hair, her skin. And she felt its stench close like an invisible hand over her mouth and nose. She smelled mud and rot and death and smoke and waste, so potent, all of them, that even through the muffling snow and ice they fouled the air. The frozen ruins were teeming with people, far more than she had anticipated. And there were bodies, which was just as she had anticipated.
A woman lay stiff and taut in the doorway of a house that had long ago lost its roof. Her dead eyes watched Eska pass through lashes beaded with frost. One arm was bent at the elbow, lifting her splayed grey hand towards the street. Dogs had chewed off the fingers. In a little square, a corpse hung from a protruding stone high up on a wall. They-someone-had suspended him by his arms and killed him, possibly slowly, with a multitude of blows. Eska’s cursory glance was enough to pick out perhaps twenty separate wounds. His clothes, soaked with blood, had frozen rigid and black. From the toe of one naked foot hung a tiny icicle of blood, a single fat drop arrested in the act of readying itself to fall.
The smell of roasting flesh drew Eska to a ruined house. It must once have been a noble residence, for there was a stable block, and in its yard a crowd had gathered to watch the hind leg of a horse being turned on a spit above a crackling fire. It was a twisted echo of the place’s former purpose, but that did not interest Eska; she thought instead how wasteful it was to consume an animal that might have carried a warrior south or hauled firewood or supplies.
She noted, as she progressed through the hallucinatory dream that Kan Avor had become, each accent, each ragged banner, each subtly distinctive variation in raiment. She found people of every ilk. Warriors from every Blood; countryfolk and townsfolk; Tarbains; Battle Inkallim. Even some of the defeated Lannis Blood, from whose manner it was impossible to tell whether they were prisoners or slaves, or equal and welcomed followers of the halfbreed. All save the Inkallim mingled with little regard to status or origin, as if all previous associations and bonds had been overlaid or broken all together. Only Nyve’s ravens-or better perhaps to name them Shraeve’s now-held themselves aloof.
And there were Kyrinin. Eska saw just a few of them, lingering silently at the fringes of human gatherings, moving through the shattered streets on obscure errands. She despised them for their presence here. Such as they had no rightful place in the city that, however ruined, embodied the history of the Black Road. She averted her gaze from their tattooed faces, their rangy forms. But she counted them, as she counted everyone.
She came to a crowded street, one that stank of mud and humanity. The people gathered there milled about without evident purpose. They snarled at one another when they were jostled, but otherwise were all but silent. Some were barefoot. Some, too poorly dressed for th
e harsh weather, sat shivering in doorways or at the foot of walls. Eska moved amongst them, noting with contempt how far these fellow northerners of hers had fallen; how destitute and weak many of them appeared. She felt no pity for those amongst them who so clearly suffered from the cold or from hunger or from sickness. Their own stupidity was the cause, as far as she was concerned, and it earned for them every miserable moment.
Many of the men and women often looked towards a door in a crumbling edifice along one side of the street. Others glanced constantly up towards empty windows above. Those blank, dark apertures were framed with moss and ferns sprouting from the seams of the stonework. There was nothing to see, but Eska felt the simmering collective excitement. All attention, conscious or otherwise, was upon some invisible focus behind those walls, beyond those windows.
Eska drifted through the throng, counting, always counting, always studying. She strove to avoid notice, but she could hardly conceal her health, her weapons, her clean leathers and hides. People stared at her. She kept her eyes empty, unresponsive.
Then the door was opening, and a stillness fell across the street as if a wind had suddenly fallen away. Into the eerie calm came Shraeve of the Battle and other Inkallim, and Kyrinin, and last of all Aeglyss the na’kyrim.
He was stooped, as if so old that his very bones were bent by the burden of years. He walked unsteadily, each pace a short and sliding shuffle. His hair was thinning, and where it remained the strands looked fragile as spider’s web, almost translucent. Every bone in his face was visible beneath the bleached, cracked skin. His hand, when he extended it towards some adoring spectator, bore fingers like crooked twigs. Where his fingernails should have been were raw sores. So reduced and brittle and damaged did he appear that it was difficult to tell that he was na’kyrim rather than human; the dwindling of his body masked the differences, drawing all his features down into indistinct decrepitude. Had Eska seen him on the street of some city, not knowing who he was, she might have veered away from him, thinking him the bearer of some wasting plague.
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