Wain hung her head and said nothing.
“You are uncertain now, of the halfbreed’s place?” Goedellin asked her. “Of whether he is to be a part of all this?”
Wain nodded silently.
“So,” the Inkallim sighed. “Whenever we come to a fork in the road, it looks like a choice. It feels like a decision. But these feelings, these choices that we imagine we could make, they are illusions. Choice and decision were taken from us. The Gods require of us that we learn to live without them; learn that some things are beyond our power to change. Such is the penance we must all do, in answer to the hubris of our forebears. You understand all of this, of course?”
“I do,” Wain said.
“It is, in part, only a matter of perspective. A life can have but one path. We poor mortals see that path only when we stand at death’s very portal, and can turn and look back down the road we have travelled. Then, and only then, we see the way we have come, unbranching, stretching back to the moment of our birth. The Black Road. However it might have appeared to us as we walked it, there were in truth no choices, no decisions. Only that one path, as the Hooded God read it in his book when we drew our first breath in this empty world.”
Goedellin was watching her, pursing his dark-tinted lips. It seemed that he expected some kind of response.
“I understand this,” Wain said. “I accepted it long ago.”
“The creed rules your heart, and your mind?” Goedellin asked her. “Unreservedly? Certainly?”
“It does,” she replied without hesitation.
Goedellin nodded: a gentle, kindly gesture. “And this na’kyrim? Is he a true adherent of the creed?”
Wain’s hesitation was fleeting, but she saw in Goedellin’s eyes that he noted it. “I believe he is,” she said. She knew it sounded defensive. “I am not certain.”
Again, Goedellin nodded. “You do well not to claim certainty. There’s none of us, save the Last God himself, who can see into a heart and take the true measure of its devotion.”
A sound outside caught his attention. He rose crookedly to his feet, and went with small, careful steps to the window. He beckoned Wain with a gnarled finger. Looking out, she saw twenty or thirty young children clustered in the yard. Many were crying, others were sullen and silent and fearful. Several shivered, clothed in thin garments that were no match for the wintry air. Battle Inkallim shepherded them across the cobblestones.
“A small part of the harvest,” Goedellin murmured.
One of the children — a little girl — was jostled from behind and fell, cracking her knees. She wailed. One of the ravens reached down with a single hand and lifted her bodily to her feet, pushed her back in amongst the crowd of waifs.
“You’re sending them north?” Wain asked.
“Of course. There is nothing for them here. Those that survive will be Children of the Hundred, one day. We do them a great service, though they may not know it for some time. And there will be losses to be made good. There will be gaps in the rank of the Battle to be filled before all this is done.”
“You do mean to see this war fought, then,” Wain murmured. “To its conclusion. Whatever that may be.”
Goedellin shuffled back towards his chair. “We have three thousand of the Battle here. Such a force does not march lightly. They will not be returning to Kan Dredar until they have tested themselves fully against the Haig Bloods, and against fate.”
Wain returned to her own seat.
“Your devotion to the creed is well known, of course,” the Inkallim said as he settled back down. “My earlier question was not born of any doubt. How stands your brother in this regard? Do the fires of the faith burn as brightly in the new Thane of the Horin-Gyre Blood as they do in you? As they did in your father?”
“They do.” Wain might have said no more than that, but her mind was caught up in this strange fancy that she was a child again, and Goedellin one of those old tutors who had so impressed her. Their wisdom, their sere gravity, had always compelled her to speak honestly. “Perhaps it takes more… effort on his part to hold firm to the creed. But he does hold firm.”
“Do you understand why I make these enquiries, and ponder these matters?”
“I would not question the Lore’s right to enquire as it sees fit in matters of the faith.”
“No. I imagine you would not. Still, this is not solely a matter of the faith. The Lore, the Battle, the Hunt: all the Children of the Hundred are now engaged in this struggle that your Blood began. We are committed, to some extent. We will incur loss. We face risks, in terms of our standing, our relationship with the other Bloods. With Thanes.”
“Your support for my Blood is a great gift. I — and my brother — know it.”
“Well, there is the nub of things. Our support is for your Blood only insofar as it serves the larger purpose of supporting, of strengthening, the creed. So long as this war, and the survival of your Blood, offers some possibility of advancing the cause and the dominion of the Black Road, we Inkallim have little choice but to test the limitations that fate might set upon that advance.” Goedellin glanced up from his hunched position, scouring Wain’s face for some sign. “Do you think survival is too strong a word to use, perhaps?”
Outside, in the yard, a baby was crying now. It was a piercing sound, distracting. Wain hesitated. “I do not know. We have spent most of my Blood’s fighting strength here. But it does not matter, in the end. If my Blood is fated to pass into extinction, so it must be. I know…” She faltered, fearful now that she might say the wrong thing. Yet the Inkallim’s steady gaze struck her as more reassuring than threatening. “I know, or think I know, that our success has won us little affection from the Gyre Blood. The reasons why that should be so are obscure to me.”
Goedellin grunted and lowered his eyes. “Our High Thane excels in matters of obscurity. Well. Your Blood will survive, if fate smiles upon us. Your brother might have made the shaping of such a smile a little easier, had he left an heir behind him, safe in your mother’s care at Hakkan. No matter. We — the Inkallim — will stand shoulder to shoulder with you. For so long as it seems that such unity serves the cause of the Black Road, of course. Do you understand yet the import of what I said about choice? Its illusory nature?”
“I am not sure I do.”
“There is little more to it than this: whatever choices we make — you about your na’kyrim, we Inkallim about the movement of armies — are predestined, their outcome already inscribed upon the pages of the Hooded God’s book. The significance of any decision is not, therefore, in the decision itself, but in the thought that underlies it. The posture, if you like, of the mind that makes it. The correct posture is one that gives primacy to the advancement of the creed, and willingly accepts whatever consequences may flow from adhering to that principle.”
“I understand that,” Wain said, nodding. Goedellin was not looking at her, and could not see the gesture.
“Very well. The Firsts concluded that committing the strength of the Inkalls to this struggle offered at least the possibility of firming the Black Road’s grip upon the world. Whether it does so or not, we will all live — or die — with the consequences of that commitment. We need ask ourselves only one question about this na’kyrim that so unsettles Fiallic, and so offends the noble Eagle. Can he serve the creed? Does he offer the possibility of advancing our cause?”
“Yes,” Wain said, and then, with greater certainty, “Yes.”
Goedellin looked up at her and smiled blackly.
“Well, then,” he said.
“Temegrin will not be happy. He wants Aeglyss dead.”
“So Fiallic told me. No matter. The Eagle is timid. Those whose answer to the Black Road is timidity seldom prosper. You keep the halfbreed at your side. We will do what we can to dissuade Temegrin, and others if needed, from intemperate action.”
Wain nodded. Goedellin coughed and hung his head, so that she could no longer see his eyes, or those stained lips.
Wain gathered the few warriors of her Blood who remained in the city on the main square. She had them lay out their weapons and chain mail and shields on the ground. She and her Shield walked up and down the meagre ranks, heads down, eyes searching for any flaw. Wain found a mail shirt with broken links. She struck the man who owned it on the chest, staggering him a little.
“You’re done here,” she said as she walked. “We’re done with this city. The newcomers can have it: Gyre, or the Battle, or the thousands who follow them. The battle’s to the south now, and so is your Thane, so that’s where we’ll take ourselves. To Glasbridge. That’s where your Blood makes its stand.”
She kicked a battered shield with the toe of her boot. It skittered away over the cobbles.
“That’ll split at the first blow. Find another. We’ll stand against whatever marches up from the south. We’ll hold it, and bleed it, and pin it there for this great army to come down upon it. And those of us who die will die in a great cause, and in a great victory.”
The house where Wain and Kanin had taken quarters when they overran Anduran still stood, on the edge of the square. She wandered up its stairs, from room to room, while her warriors outside mounted up. There were memories here that had a warm, tempting texture to them: of their first, triumphant surge into this city, and of the dizzying sense that fate might lay out for them the richest of feasts. Wain knew that it was an indulgence to seek out those memories, and a failing to take comfort in them. In normal times, she would need no such recourse to the past. These were not normal times, though, and she felt almost a stranger in her own skull. She was unsettled. The certainties of life and of the world, usually so clear to her, had lost something of their sharpness. What reassurance her discussion with Goedellin had brought was a fragile thing, already fraying at the edges.
She stared, for a time, into a fireplace. There was only ash there now, and a few fragments of dead, charred wood.
A soft sound had her spinning on her heel, and reaching for her sword. Aeglyss was standing in the doorway, his hands clasped across his midriff.
“You should not be in here,” Wain snapped.
“Why not?” the na’kyrim asked as he drifted into the room. “Is your solitude so precious to you?”
“Precious enough that I don’t want it disturbed by you, halfbreed.” She strove to make her tone dismissive, contemptuous. It did not come easily, though.
Aeglyss smiled, and Wain had the lurching sense of her self splintering. It was as if two different beings, looking out through her eyes, saw two different things. That smile was at once leering and warming; the na’kyrim ’s face was at once sickly and captivating; her throat tightened from both repulsion and anticipation. Was this madness?
Her vision blurred then, and the dim light that suffused the room dipped for an instant into a murky fog. She shook her head, and found Aeglyss close to her, almost touching. She stepped backwards from him, but he murmured “No,” and followed her.
She tried to call for her Shield, but some invisible hand was pressed across her mouth, stilling all sound.
“It is your instincts you fight against, Thane’s sister.” He whispered the words, but they filled Wain’s every sense, they were glowing and ringing and hot against her skin. “What I have become wakes something in you. Don’t you see? You won’t be the only one. When I reach out, when I drift, I can feel hopes and desires and hungers and hatreds all flocking about me. They cluster in my wake. Oh, I wish I could show you.”
His mouth was close to her cheek. She could feel his breath, and smell his sweet, rotten exhalations.
“Let me show you. Open yourself to me.” His hands, like spiders: one on her shoulder, the other cupping her breast, pressing the rings of her mail shirt against her. “Please.”
The strands of her resistance were thinning. They would have parted, she distantly knew, had Aeglyss himself not faltered then. A spasm deformed his face, baring his teeth like a snarl. His hands jerked, perhaps bruising her in the instant before they splayed themselves open and fell away. Trembling, released, she pushed him and he staggered backwards.
“Help me,” he gasped. “They’re coming for me. Can you smell it? The leaves, the forest?”
He reeled sideways, thumping into the wall. Wain edged towards the open door, horrified but still feeling the residue of a shaming desire.
Aeglyss sagged. “No. No.” He sank down on to his haunches, pressed against the wall, like a child making himself small, trying to hide. “You’ll not have me. I’m too…”
Wain turned away. Her head was heavy, resistant to the movement. She took a step, and then another, and her legs were sluggish. She had to force her way out of the room against the reluctance of her own body.
“Wain,” Aeglyss said behind her, and she could not help but look back at him. He was still crouched down there, in the crease between wall and floor, staring up at her. “I have terrible enemies,” he murmured. “The great beasts of the Shared would turn upon me. But you are not my enemy. You know it, in your heart. And I am not yours. Please. I am the greatest friend fate will ever grant you, and your cause.”
Perhaps. She was not certain whether she spoke it aloud, or only thought it deep in the turbulence this na’kyrim spun her mind into. Perhaps. I cannot think clearly. I cannot tell. Not any more. She walked out and descended into the more comprehensible company of her warriors.
VII
Something had died, up amongst the rocks. An eagle clambered into the sky as soon as Orisian and his company came in sight, its huge wings hauling it up and away from the hidden corpse. The ravens were more determined, or more hungry perhaps. They hopped and croaked amongst the boulders without regard to the column of riders passing on the road below.
Orisian had fifty men with him, all of them veterans of the war against Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig. The road they followed was an old one, a trading route from the days of the Kingship. Neglect had crumbled away some of its fabric, but it remained a good surface. It had carried them up the northern bank of the River Kyre, through the flat coastal farmlands and on into the rolling pasture-draped hills where the Kilkry Blood bred its famous horses and grazed its innumerable cattle. Now those hills were becoming mountains. The road ran along a terrace cut into a steep, bare slope above the river. The Kyre, down there in the huge gutter it had carved for itself, rushed between great boulders, rumbling as it foamed, milky, through rapids.
They had been climbing for some time. If he twisted and craned his neck, Orisian could still just make out the sea far behind them: a vast grey slab across the western horizon. Looking ahead, on up the road, there was nothing but the long bleak valley of the Kyre, driving into the heart of the Karkyre Peaks. Somewhere in those mountains, Orisian knew, was Highfast, and he hoped it would offer something by way of warmth or comfort. The Karkyre Peaks were no loftier than the Car Criagar, but they were, if anything, still more unwelcoming. There was almost no vegetation, even on these lower slopes. A few stunted and ragged bushes hung on amongst the stones, and there were scattered patches of wiry, sparse grass; apart from that, it was a world of bare rock, scree and stone-dust. Ahead, a score of jagged pinnacles dominated the skyline, sharp-backed ridges splaying out from them. The mountains of the Car Criagar were massive, old, broad-shouldered; these Karkyre Peaks were like serrated blades newly stabbed up from out of the earth.
The desolation, and perhaps the leaden quality of the light, worked on the minds of Orisian and all his companions. There was no talking. The only sounds were the persistent flat roar of the river below, the clatter of hoofs and the occasional eerie cries of ravens. Ess’yr, Varryn, Yvane and Hammarn had all refused to ride. They walked in the midst of the column of horsemen. The two Kyrinin were cowled, the better to conceal themselves fr
om the curious — and potentially hostile — eyes of observers. Orisian was surprised at how much human life there was along this road, even now that they had reached such barren terrain. In the last day they had passed a dozen hamlets or solitary huts. The inhabitants were uniformly silent and hard-eyed, watching them pass from the shadows of doorways, as if they resented this disturbance of their solitude.
Rounding a turn, Orisian’s eye was caught by a strange structure a short way above the road. It looked as though someone had tried to build a squat house out of great flat-sided boulders, only to be defeated by the sheer mass of their intended materials. Even at this distance, writing and symbols were faintly visible, cut into the weathered face of the rocks.
“What’s that?” Orisian asked.
Bannain, riding just ahead on a short-legged mountain pony, glanced up.
“It’s Morvain’s tomb. He died here, retreating from Highfast after the failure of his siege. Looted out long ago. There’s nothing left within. So I’m told, anyway.”
“I’m surprised the Aygll Kings let it stand.”
“Well, it was in the last days of their rule. It was Lerr, the Boy King, that Morvain rebelled against, and he’d already lost his grip on most of these lands. The child was dead himself within a year or two of Morvain’s death.”
“Hard times,” Rothe muttered from behind them.
“Yes,” acknowledged Bannain, then shrugged and gave his reins a casual shake. “No more so than these, though. This world’s not given to resting easy.”
They rode on. The road became ever more like a broad ledge cut into the side of a cliff. Walls of bare rock loomed above them. Below, a smaller river flowed into the Kyre: a tumultuous confluence that had fashioned a bowl in which to seethe. The road swung north and followed the lesser tributary up into the mountains.
Orisian rode beside Ess’yr. She was walking well, with no obvious sign of the broken ribs that had hampered her since their descent from the Car Criagar. Her face was hidden from him, lost in the depths of her capacious hood.
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