Fall of Thanes tgw-3

by Brian Ruckley

  “Nothing must be,” he cried in tones of venom and fire. “I am only the gate, and the truth enters through me, becomes me, and shapes the world according to its tenets. What we see now is only the true nature of the world, of us all. Nothing more. I cannot prevent it.” He was suddenly speaking softly, so laden with sorrow and regret that those same feelings took hold of Shraeve. “I cannot close what has been opened. Cannot heal my wounds. Cannot bring them back, none of them. I cannot even tell, any more, where I end and it… everything… begins. I don’t know whether I poisoned it, or it me… You can’t imagine… how I wish…”

  He sagged against a pillar, then just as quickly gathered himself and lifted his head.

  “We discover the truth now. That’s the thing. We become what we have always been, at our root. We enter an age of misrule, and I am its herald, its doorkeeper, its lord. Its God.”

  “The Black Road is the truth,” Shraeve said. She backed away from him. He waved a dismissive hand in her direction, its flaking raw skin oozing fluid.

  “Hate is coming,” he murmured, lifting his gaze towards the ruptured roof of the hall. “He is coming. From Glasbridge. Is there… is there still a place called Glasbridge?”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, he burns brightly. He’s the hardest, the purest of you all. Nothing but hate to him, and it’s all his own. He takes nothing from me, gives nothing.” The na’kyrim sounded strangely joyful, raised up by a perverse pleasure.

  “Who?” Shraeve asked. “Kanin?”

  “Kanin. Yes. The brother. There’s no flame will forge a keener hatred than the breaking of families. I know that. I learned that. I learned that a long time ago.”

  “He’s coming here?” Shraeve asked.

  He looked at her clearly for the first time then, fully present and aware. He appeared almost surprised to discover that he was not alone, though his sallow features were only briefly troubled.

  “You should not spend your energies fighting a chaos that cannot be halted,” he rasped. “You do not need to worry about such things. Whatever consumes us, will consume our enemies too. There are none left to oppose us, for my Shadowhand does his work well. None except him perhaps. Kanin. He’s moving. Drawing near, with hate in his heart and hate all around him, like a cloud. He’s done what you say you can’t, raven: kept a host at his side, found the will to quell it and guide it. So now we’ll see. Who is stronger, the Battle Inkall or a Thane who has no thought in his head save vengeance?”

  “Do not let her die.”

  “Get out of my way, then,” barked Yvane, pushing Orisian so forcefully that he rocked back on his heels.

  She was packing moss around the arrow embedded in Ess’yr’s pale flesh. The Kyrinin’s throat was trembling with each breath as if it contained beating wings. Her eyes were open but unseeing. Orisian had leaned over her, and looked into them, and found nothing there. No response, no recognition, only vacant grey orbs in which he saw the depths of his own despair.

  “Please,” he said now to Yvane, but the na’kyrim was not paying any attention to him.

  “Where’s Varryn?” She looked around, fruitlessly scanning the silent forest. “I need those herbs before I try to take the arrow out.”

  The blood had almost stopped. It had soaked into Ess’yr’s jerkin and into the grass beneath her. It had laid down crusted ribbons across the ivory of her exposed breast and shoulder. It had coated Yvane’s fingers. The fletching of the arrow, standing almost two hand spans above Ess’yr’s chest, twitched in time with her breathing.

  “Is she — ” Orisian began.

  “I don’t know,” Yvane shouted without looking at him. She bent down and pressed her ear to that pallid chest. She listened for a moment and then straightened and pushed a finger into Ess’yr’s mouth, parting her slack lips.

  “She’s not breathing blood, as far as I can see or hear,” Yvane said. “That’s good. Where’s Varryn?”

  “Watch her!” Taim Narran was suddenly shouting.

  Orisian twisted round on his haunches, startled by the anger in the Captain’s voice. K’rina was staggering away, plunging with surprising speed into the thickets to the north of the spreading oak tree. Taim was already running after her, spitting curses at the man who had been tasked with watching the comatose na’kyrim. That man was entirely untouched by Taim’s scorn, for he had his head in his hands and was groaning distantly.

  Orisian surged to his feet, so clumsily that he lurched sideways and almost fell. He could still see K’rina, struggling with entangling briars. She would not get far, surely. Taim would have her in just a moment or two. He looked down at Ess’yr; felt anew the aridity of his mouth, the impotent tremors starting in his hands. The fear. He knelt down again.

  “Keep clear,” Yvane muttered. “Give me room.”

  She tried to feel under Ess’yr’s shoulder while holding down the compress of moss with her other hand, but quickly hissed in frustration.

  “Lift her up a little,” she told Orisian.

  He was afraid to touch Ess’yr. He felt sick at the thought of causing her pain, of doing unwitting harm.

  “Lift her shoulder,” Yvane snapped.

  He did, and Ess’yr gave a faint, descending sigh. She was still there, at least enough to feel something. Yvane probed at her back, exploring her shoulder blade with firm fingers. Apparently satisfied, she nodded to Orisian, and he let Ess’yr sink back into the grass as gently as he could. She was so light, he thought. So light.

  “The head of the arrow’s almost through,” Yvane said softly. “Nicking her shoulder blade, I think, not in it.”

  “Is that good?” Orisian asked.

  “Maybe. Is any of this good? Arrow has to come out, or she’ll die a hard death. Might do anyway. Getting it out’s going to be an ugly business.” She shook her head.

  Taim Narran returned, a feebly struggling K’rina held tightly in his grasp. Orisian registered them only in the dimmest of ways, for he was shaken by memories of almost visionary intensity and immediacy. Inurian, lying with an arrow buried deep in his back, the strength-the life-draining from him with every breath. The two of them, Kyrinin and na’kyrim, lay side by side in his imagination.

  “Look at her, look at her,” Yvane was whispering. “What’s a Fox doing here? She should be up there in the Car Criagar, in some vo’an. Hunting deer. Tanning hides. They should all be there still. Not dead, not dying.”

  She looked up as Taim gently settled K’rina down onto the ground beside them. As Yvane’s gaze settled upon her fellow na’kyrim, whose expression was entirely blank, almost childlike, her brow furrowed and sadness tugged at the corners of her mouth.

  A mist of light rain drifted down through the branches of the oak. It was cold on Orisian’s face. He curled his lips into his mouth, sucked that wet breath of the sky from them. Ess’yr’s eyes were slowly closing.

  “We need shelter,” he said.

  Yvane nodded curtly.

  K’rina was trying to rise again. Taim Narran pressed her down with a hand upon her shoulder. Orisian looked around. The dead lay all about, some in strangely twisted or contorted poses, other looking as if they had fallen asleep. Of the three Lannis warriors who had survived, two stood staring silently outward, though it was difficult to tell whether they were watchful or simply lost in distraction. The third, the man who had let K’rina slip away from him, was still whimpering into his hands. Lost not in distraction but in the miasma of dismay and despair Orisian could sense thickening just beyond the boundaries of his own thoughts. He saw all this, and found it faintly unreal and distant, as if he viewed it through the translucent gauze of the thinnest curtain.

  Varryn came running, spear in one hand, a mass of leaves and stems and bark in the other. He rushed in and dropped to one knee beside his ailing sister; opened his fingers to show his bounty to Yvane. The na’kyrim stared at the herbs and then grunted.

  “If that’s the best we can do,” she said.

  “The
forest edge is near,” Varryn reported dully. “Open ground. A Huanin hut. Empty.”

  “We should go,” Orisian said at once.

  Yvane grimaced. “She won’t move well. We need to get the arrow out first.”

  They carried Ess’yr back to the stream down which they had fled earlier. She moaned as they went, lapsing in and out of consciousness. Every agonised sound that escaped her lips rasped on Orisian’s ears and made him wince.

  At the water’s edge they laid her down on her side. Yvane quietly and calmly cut away Ess’yr’s jacket with a knife, peeling it back from her shoulder. The na’kyrim whispered to Varryn in the language of the Fox as she worked. His expression betrayed no reaction to her words. His gaze never strayed from his sister’s face. Orisian turned his head aside, averting his eyes from the blood caking Ess’yr’s skin.

  He looked back in time to see Yvane setting down a crushed handful of the herbs mixed with moss. She had squeezed it into a neat, flat compress. Then she nodded to Varryn. He took the protruding shaft of the arrow in both hands and snapped it cleanly off, close to the flights. Ess’yr gasped, the pain finding her even in whatever distant, detached place she now resided. Orisian’s eyes widened in sudden understanding as Varryn took hold once more of the broken shaft.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Be quiet,” Yvane told him. “This needs doing.”

  She rotated and stretched Ess’yr’s arm a little, flexing the shoulder blade beneath her pristine skin. And Varryn pushed the arrow deeper. Its point burst bloodily out from Ess’yr’s back. She jerked and groaned, but Yvane held her. Varryn moved quickly round behind his sister, took hold of the gory head of the arrow and pulled it, with a single, firm movement, through her body. Rivulets of blood trickled from both new and old wounds.

  They washed her with water from the river, working back through the gore to expose and clean the tears in her skin. Orisian had to fight off waves of nausea, and his hands shook as he opened them to let the water he cupped there spill across her breast and shoulder. It was not horror or disgust that had hold of him, but fear. The thought of this woman dying made him feeble. Helpless.

  Once the wounds were bandaged, poultices securely strapped in place, Varryn slung his sister over his shoulder and strode away northwards without another word.

  “Thank you,” Orisian said to Yvane as she rose, wiping mud from her knees. She did not reply, but went to help K’rina get to her feet.

  Taim already had the three warriors moving, following Varryn. He watched Orisian with an unreadable expression.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Orisian shook his head then shrugged. He did not know the answer to that question, and it seemed entirely unimportant to him.

  “We should hurry,” he said, stooping to pick up his shield. “The White Owls might come back.”

  “They’d probably have returned already if they were going to. Some kind of madness in them, to fight as they did. Should have waited for darkness, picked us off one by one. Not the Kyrinin way, running onto swords and shields like that. As if they didn’t care any more about their own lives. Perhaps they don’t care enough about ours to try again.”

  They went in a straggling single line through the fringe of Anlane, moving with less caution now than once they had. It did not take long for the forest to begin to thin. The trees were interspersed with stumps where the tallest and straightest of their brethren had been felled. Soon enough, there were more stumps than standing trees, and they came out at the crest of a long, shallow grassy slope. At its foot was a woodsman’s cottage. Its shutters and door hung open. Crows roosting on its roof scattered upwards. Varryn was already halfway down the slope.

  Orisian paused there, amongst the last of the saplings, Anlane’s outliers. Beyond that cottage, stretching out into the grey veils of soft rain, was the Glas Valley. Flat ground scattered with clumps of trees, dotted here and there with lonely buildings almost lost in the mist. Home. But he felt neither welcomed nor relieved. It had been a kind of desperate hope that brought him here, yet now he could imagine nothing good coming of this return. And still, despite that terrible foreboding, he felt it was where he had to be. If he belonged anywhere, it was here, in this bleak moment; and if there was any purpose he could claim as his own, it awaited him somewhere out there in the mist. In his homeland.

  II

  Kan Avor dominated the grey skyline like a challenge. Kanin smiled at the sight of its jagged, broken towers, its crumbling sprawl. A great rotten bruise on the earth. His pleasure was not engendered by the city itself, though. It was what it signified that woke his venomous, obsessive desires and promised them fulfilment. In his imagination visions crowded in upon him: an endless succession of different deaths for Aeglyss. He could smell the halfbreed’s blood, hear his wails, see his head springing free from the stump of his neck or his stomach split open by a single slash from a sword. He could feel his own hands about the halfbreed’s throat, the bones in there cracking and splintering beneath his iron grasp.

  Kanin fought to rid himself of these all-consuming imaginings, but could do no more than cordon them off in a part of his mind, so that though he still heard their intoxicating whispers and still felt that unbridled longing for the release their realisation would bring him, he had the space within his skull to think clearly. To do what needed doing.

  The main body of his ragged army was streaming ahead of him, struggling through the marsh and mire towards Kan Avor. Lannis folk, most of that vanguard. They spread out as they advanced. Not an army at all, in truth. Just a mob given licence to visit vengeance upon their most hated enemies, blinded for the moment to the truth that they did so in service to another enemy. They would be worthless, Kanin knew, as soon as they met any organised resistance. But they could still serve a purpose, and it was a matter of complete indifference to Kanin whether a single one of them lived to see tomorrow’s dawn. As was his own survival, as long as he achieved his goal before death claimed him.

  His horse was restless beneath him, eager to follow the rushing figures ahead. He gave the reins a gentle tug, and muttered a soothing word or two to the animal. Sheets of heavier rain swept through, intermittently obscuring Kan Avor’s looming form. All the land around the ruined city was turning into a swamp. Kanin did not mind. The mists and rain offered some concealment.

  He twisted in the saddle and looked down the neat line of his Shield. Igris was despondent and sullen, rainwater trickling from his hair down over his cheekbones. Behind stood two hundred Black Road warriors, all on foot, all silent and grim-countenanced. This was all that Kanin had managed to retain his hold upon. The rest had rebelled, or disappeared, or gone mad. The Glasbridge they had left when they marched out that dawn was a chaos of warring bands, frenzied killing, hungers of every kind let off their leash.

  “We move round to the south,” Kanin told Igris. “Let those Lannis idiots draw out what they can of the halfbreed’s defences.”

  Igris stared dolefully after the vast rabble of townsfolk flailing its way across the flat ground, closing slowly on the distant ruins.

  “Wake up,” snapped Kanin.

  His shieldman stirred himself and nudged his horse into motion. Kanin’s Shield led the way, and the rest of the warriors fell into column behind them. Kanin summoned Eska and the other two Hunt Inkallim with a flick of his head. They came, with Eska’s three hounds following at their heels. The dogs’ fur glistened with moisture, drawn like dew from the air and beaded over their bristly hides.

  “I will find the halfbreed,” Kanin said to the Inkallim. “I will try to kill him. You make your own away. Use whatever confusion we may create to draw near to him. Do nothing to endanger yourselves. Whatever Cannek may have told you, I do not want your aid. I refuse it, unless and until you see me within reach of the halfbreed, and act then only if in doing so you can aid me in striking him down. Do you understand?”

  Eska nodded casually.

  “Do you consent?”
Kanin asked pointedly.

  She smiled narrowly. “I was commanded to preserve your life if I could, Thane. But it is difficult, when the one to be protected is so uninterested in his own continuation. It is our feeling — ” she included her silent companions with a brief glance “-that either you or the halfbreed must die. It is evidently not possible for both of you to persist in this world. Therefore, keeping you alive seems to require that we first accomplish his destruction.”

  “Good,” grunted Kanin.

  Eska shrugged. “Only sense. And, in any case, I dislike what I have seen of him and of his adherents, and of the kind of world he creates around him. Cannek’s judgement of him feels right to me. Perhaps fate will yet validate it, through us.”

  “If I fail,” Kanin said as he guided his horse after his marching warriors, “if I fall, do not be deterred. I am sure the Hooded God, if he still watches over us, finds you more to his liking than me. Fate may yet favour you even if it condemns me.”

  “Our feet are upon the Road, Thane,” Eska called after him.

  He made no reply, but rode on through the rain.

  The slaughter began far out to Kanin’s left. He saw it dimly, through the obscuring, pulsing bands of drifting rain. He heard it fitfully, for the air was sluggish and an unwilling messenger. But it pleased him, for it was a beginning; and once begun, this would flow quickly to its end.

  Figures came running out from the grey bulk of Kan Avor, first just a few of them and then more and more until they swarmed across the boggy plain. There were no battle lines drawn up, no planning or preparation. People just emerged from the city and threw themselves at the motley forces advancing upon it. Kanin and his own company watched, but no enemy emerged to oppose their careful skirting of the city’s southern edge. The killing and dying was done closer to the river, where the ground was as much water as earth.

  Knee-deep in pools, tripped by tussocks of reed and grass, amongst the emergent bones of those who had died on this same field more than a century and a half before, the desperate and deranged flung themselves at each other. They drowned one another in the stagnant waters, fell and were trampled and suffocated in the sucking mud. They beat and tore with swords and fists and cudgels and stones. A few horses churned through the marsh, most of them ridden by ravens of the Battle Inkall, but they were clumsy and ponderous. The rain fell, and washed blood from wounds down into the waterlogged foundations of the valley; cries rose, and screams, into the vaporous clouds.