“Despite everything, I will fight for you, Bloodheir. Against the Black Road, I will always fight. I only ask that you let me do that.”
“No.” The refusal was emphatic. “You stay a prisoner until this is done. Afterwards, we’ll see what’s to be done with you, but this is one battle you will watch with bound hands.”
Taim struggled to his feet. He was painfully stiff.
“What of Kilkry-Haig?” he asked. “You need Roaric’s strength at your side for this.”
Aewult’s face darkened, and he glared at Taim before spinning about and striding away.
“I’ll not ask that prideful whelp for anything,” he shouted over his shoulder. “If he chooses to come out and fight, all the better. But he’ll do it under my command, or not at all.”
Theor, First of the Lore, had spent a long and tedious day with his officials, seeing to the mundane trifles that kept the Inkall alive and functioning. Appointing tutors to see to the care of the Lore’s youngest recruits; agreeing the names of those to be sent amongst the Tarbains once winter was done, to ensure the survival of the creed in their savage hearts; deciding the process of interrogation and examination for those seeking elevation to the ranks of the Inner Servants.
Theor found it difficult to concentrate on such matters. They did not bore him — they were the stitches that held the Inkall together, and he valued them as such — but he was weary and distracted. At dusk he trudged across the snow-filled compound, pausing only to listen to the hooting of an owl somewhere amongst the pine trees. He was not in the mood for company and conversation, so ordered that he be brought food in his own chambers. He ate there alone.
A message had come from Nyve that morning. The First of the Battle had received word from Fiallic, reporting the death of Temegrin the Eagle, in circumstances that remained unclear. It was news both encouraging and disquieting. Ragnor oc Gyre had conspired with the enemies of the creed to protect his own earthly power, and the Eagle was his mouthpiece, hampering every effort to pursue the conflict with the Haig Bloods to its necessary conclusion. His death was a sign that fate might, on this occasion, side with the Inkallim. Yet Wain nan Horin-Gyre had died, too. That was a sore loss. And the Thane of Thanes would not take the death of his Third Captain lightly. Theor anticipated difficulties in convincing Ragnor that the Children of the Hundred had no part in the deed.
The First set aside his half-eaten meal. His appetite was meagre these days. He reclined on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. According to Nyve, there was talk, far away beyond the Stone Vale, that the Horin Blood’s tame na’kyrim had had a hand in Temegrin’s death. That was a disconcerting thought. The very existence of such halfbreeds was an aspect of the hubris that had provoked the Gods into departure. Five races had been created, distinct and self-contained. Na’kyrim symbolised the inability of Huanin and Kyrinin to accept the boundaries laid down by the Gods. To have one playing a role in matters of such import to the creed was… unexpected. Puzzling.
Theor rolled onto his side and reached down to the carved box on the floor. He removed a fragment of seerstem, slipped it into his mouth and lay back. He worked it gently between his teeth, feeling its black juices thicken his saliva. A cold tingling stole across his tongue and his cheeks, leaving numbness in its wake. It was a familiar sensation, and one that in years gone by he had always greeted with vague pleasure. Now, though, he felt an undeniable sense of trepidation. His seerstem dreams had been less than comforting of late. It was something all his schooling had not prepared him for. There was, to his knowledge, no precedent in the Lore’s history for the powerful and unsettling visions that now came in seerstem’s wake.
He was not alone in his experiences. Every one of the few senior Lore Inkallim permitted the use of the herb had been suffering similar disturbance of their meditation. There was much inconclusive debate about what it signified. Theor was himself uncertain, though he had his suspicions. Might it not be possible that they were caught up in the turbulence caused by a fateful convergence of great events? Might this even be the result of thousands upon thousands of lives being channelled into a single, unified path that would carry them all to the Kall itself, and to the ultimate realisation of the Black Road’s entire purpose? He hardly dared to hope, and had taken care not to voice such thoughts.
Numbing tendrils spread across his skin, creeping over his scalp towards the back of his skull. He could feel his very thoughts slowing and retreating, leaving space behind them for other things to enter his mind. He closed his eyes.
Much could be gained from seerstem: a sense of the intricate immensity of life and mind, spread out across the world, the scale of the Gods’ creation; a humbling awareness of the insignificance of any individual within that pattern. Sometimes it was even possible to glimpse fate’s roots, the chains of events and deeds stretching back from the present into the distant past. Such had been the case until recently, at least. Theor did not expect what awaited him now to be quite so soothing.
He felt as if he was sinking into the mattress, as if he himself was a dwindling spark of light, fading. Anger flickered across the surface of his mind: not anger to be felt, but anger as a wind that blew upon him, anger that he tasted and heard. It was a rage without cause and without object, like a fire that burned without any fuel. After it came the sickening sense of a tumbling, plummeting fall. He was dimly aware that his hands were clutching the bed sheet on which his distant body lay.
And then he was adrift in a dark and howling waste; suspended in a limitless void, with titanic shapes moving far beneath him, rolling as they hunted through the emptiness. Then flashes: he was one amongst thousands, running along a hard road; he was spun through treetops, carried on a vast and monstrous consciousness; he was alone in darkness, where the very fabric of the air was made of loneliness.
There was the figure of a man, an indistinct outline that spread and broadened until it filled his field of view and shut out everything else. That figure’s head turned, great planes of darkness sliding over one another. Eyes opened — eyes that were first grey then black then nothing, voids — and their gaze was a writhing, piercing thing that burned its way in through Theor’s own eyes and his mouth and his nose and filled him and scoured away the last shreds of his own awareness.
He heard a voice, deep in his bones: “Who are you? This is not your place. You do not belong here.”
And he woke, crying out. Drenched in cold sweat. Shaking.
Theor struggled upright in his bed. As he fumbled to pour water from the beaker at his bedside, it was all he could do not to vomit. It had been worse, this time. Much worse. He wanted to believe, with all his heart, that these things which the seerstem was showing him were the signs of the world twisting itself into a new shape; that they presaged the delivery of all humankind out of its long solitude. And he did feel a powerful sense of great change, an anticipation as if the world was poised upon the brink of a wholly new season, unlike anything it had seen before. But if that was so, why did he feel so unclean, so run through with sickness and corruption? Why was it fear that lay like a stone in the pit of his stomach, not hope?
V
From his vantage point atop a low hillock at the eastern end of the Haig lines, Taim Narran watched arrows climb and then descend like rain upon the ranks of the Black Road army. They were too distant for him to see any bodies falling. The host of the Gyre Bloods was a great grey lake into which the arrows fell and disappeared. He knew what it would be like down there, amongst the torrential shafts. He could imagine the sound of arrowheads thudding into shields and the earth and flesh.
Since first light, the two armies had faced one another, each strung out across the road that led down towards Kolkyre. The great city was only an hour or two’s march south of them. If Aewult failed today, the Kilkry Blood would be besieged by the next dawn. The Haig Bloodheir had more than ten thousand men arrayed to block the approach to Kolkyre, his losses at Glasbridge and since more than made good by the fresh com
panies that had come up from the south. It was as great a host as any the True Bloods had fielded since Gryvan came to power. And it was matched — exceeded, Taim’s experienced eye suggested — by the forces of the Black Road.
The northerners were coming forwards now, along their whole line. The grassy expanse between the two armies gradually disappeared beneath the slow and ominous advance. The air was full of arrows, their flight constant, their effect negligible.
Taim was behind a triple line of Haig warriors. His hands were bound, his horse’s reins securely held by one of his half-dozen guards. The scabbard at his side remained empty. He was only a spectator, brought here to witness, not to fight. Taim feared what he might witness, though. He mistrusted this day, and what it might bring. There were a hundred or more Taral-Haig riders close behind him, scattered across the top of the little hill, and he could hear them talking. They sounded almost eager for the bloodshed to begin. Most of them had young voices; callow.
The centre of the Black Road army halted. Its wings came on, closing on the higher ground that flanked the road. Taim stretched up out of his saddle, gazing across towards the low ridge to the west where Aewult had stationed himself. He could make out no detail save a thicket of pennants, and the pale glimmer of Palace Shield breastplates. The first blows would fall there, Taim thought, and here where he himself was trapped. The enemy chose to test itself on rising ground, against prepared defenders. It was foolish, but typical of the Black Road: a charge across the low ground where the road pierced the centre of the Haig lines would have been easier, but offered less reward for success, so they chose the harder course, in the hope of a greater prize. They would not care what price they had to pay.
“They’ll learn a hard lesson today,” he heard one of his guards say.
He could see over the heads of the warriors lined up to the meet the assault. The companies coming rushing up towards them were incoherent, lightly armed. Yet here and there amongst the disordered mass, Taim could see Inkallim, and there were clusters of more disciplined warriors. The Black Road roared with a single voice as it came boiling up the north face of the hillock and crashed into the Haig lines. Taim tugged instinctively against his bonds. They were secure, he already knew, but his body cried out for freedom of movement, now that battle was joined so close. For all his weariness with the brutal business of the warrior’s craft, still it was his calling and his life, and it was not in his nature to stand by while others died at the hands of his Blood’s oldest enemies.
The Taral-Haig horsemen were caught up in the moment too, and they closed up into a tighter formation. Some of them were shouting out. Other voices crowded the air: cries of the wounded and dying. Taim saw a single Inkallim burst through the ranks of Haig spearmen. Isolated, she blurred into flashing movement as she was surrounded. She shattered spears and ducked and rolled; took the legs from under one man, cut up into the armpit of a second. An axe came down on her shoulder blade. She staggered, spun and landed a fatal blow. Her shield turned aside another attack, her sword stove in the side of a helmet. They killed her eventually, but not before she had slain or crippled six.
The struggle along the hilltop burned fierce and furious and then faltered. The Black Road flood receded. Their warriors fell back, running and tumbling and slipping down the slope. Cheers rang out, and spears were shaken aloft and rattled against shields. A rider came cantering up and called the company of Taral-Haig horsemen off down the line to where battle was still joined. They went gladly. Too gladly, Taim thought, too hopeful of a speedy end to a struggle that had not yet run its course.
The dead and injured were dragged out from the front line. Men shifted themselves, closing up gaps. Taim looked westward. The far flank of the Haig army was still intact too. Aewult held the ridge beyond the road, and there was a dense speckling of the fallen strewn across the grass before and beneath it.
“They’re coming again,” someone said, and Taim turned back to the still-living enemy closer at hand.
A dark line, tight-packed, was forming across the front rank of the Black Road at the foot of the hill. It came fragment by fragment, out from amongst the mass, flecks of charcoal drifting to the fore and thickening into a wall. It was a soundless thing, and its silence spread, quieting the field, quieting even, it seemed to Taim, the Haig warriors arrayed before him. They were bloodied but undefeated, these spearmen from Nar Vay and the woods of Dramain, yet they grew soft and still. Like a black fog clinging to the ground that line was coming on, far away and thus slow, across the trampled grass; hundreds of warriors, moving at a steady trot. The sound of their feet on the slope swelled, it rumbled. But still no cry came from a single throat. There was only the building, deep, rhythmic roar of their footfalls.
“Send to get your horsemen back,” Taim hissed at the nearest of his guards.
The man turned reluctantly, his eyes lingering upon the scene unfolding before him.
“Don’t try to give any orders here,” he snapped.
Taim too found himself unable to look away from the approaching storm. They were close enough now that he could make out individual figures, all of them smooth and flowing in their movements, not one of them breaking rank, falling behind. He was filled with a kind of awe, and a numb surprise that he should be here, on this day, to see this.
“If you can’t put horses on their flank, you’re done.” he persisted. “Your line’s too thin.”
The guard snorted in disgust. “Maybe if it was Lannis men in it. Three’s deep enough when it’s Haig.”
Three ranks: shield-bearers with short stabbing spears kneeling, and behind them a second row brandishing longer pole-spears; then fierce moorsmen from the high ground between Dramain and Dun Aygll, with axes and hammers and short swords. It was a spiny nut for any attacker to seek to grasp. But not enough, Taim knew in the pit of his stomach. He knew it with the certainty of every year he had spent in the warrior’s craft, and every winter he had spent upon his Blood’s northern border, staring out across the Vale of Stones and knowing what kind of enemy might one day come across it.
“They’re Inkallim, you fool,” he said, wearily, knowing it was too late. “All of them. Six might not be deep enough, let alone three.”
The guard glared at him, then snapped his gaze back to the mass of warriors now pounding up the slope, only a few shallow breaths from impact. They wore dark leather breastplates, or studded jerkins, leggings with black greaves, shields with carved ravens, and black hair streaming out. Taim heard the guard’s sudden intake of breath.
“So many?” the man murmured.
The moment elongated itself, as if the whole world shared in that sucking-in of breath, holding it, poised, as the rolling thunder of the charge resounded through the earth and shook the roots of the hill and built and built until the Inkallim plunged in amongst the spears and there was nothing save the vast crashing clamour of slaughter. The air above the two meeting lines was suddenly full: blood and fragments of broken spears, mud and grass and splinters from shields. Taim wanted to look away, but could not. The front rank of defenders was already gone, consumed in that first fierce impact, nothing more than a long heap of the dead, wounded and fallen. The ravens came over it, trampling their own as willingly as they trampled their foes, unpausing, and danced their way on into the second and the third.
Out to the west, down the long sweep of ground to the road and across it, the rest of the Haig line was shifting, drawn as if by invisible cords towards the murderous chaos enveloping the hillock. Already, though, the whole host of the Black Road was surging into motion, pressing forwards. Taim experienced a twist of horrified disgust at what he was witnessing: thousands upon thousands of men and women, flinging themselves into full, unrestrained battle. More would surely die this day than had fallen on any since that of Kan Avor Field, when the Gyre Blood was driven into exile, over two centuries ago. A terrible decision would be made, through carnage.
He looked for any sign of the men he had led to An
Caman and back, to Kolglas and Glasbridge, but the armies had become great beasts in which all the warriors were only sinews and scales, no longer recognisable. The two hosts seethed across the plain, flung limbs made of horsemen against one another, tore at each other with claws built from swordsmen. A soft, misty cloud rose from the heaving masses: the steam of breath and sweat rising as from the back of a huge, labouring monster.
The smell reached Taim then, of blood and opened guts and broken earth. He knew it too well. He saw a man staggering back from the slaughter, unarmed, with one cheek and ear cut away and his left shoulder and chest drenched in blood, a great thick coating of it. The man reached out as he stumbled, straining with his hands to grasp something only he could see, or imagine. Taim lost track of him as a wedge of spearmen came running up and swept past to throw themselves into the riot of death.
“Cut my bonds,” he shouted at his guard. “I can fight.”
The man did not reply. Taim could see in his wide eyes and open mouth that he was lost in shock.
As anyone might be, on seeing for the first time Inkallim go about their bloody business. The ravens carved holes in the Haig lines with obscene ease. It was more massacre than battle. There was no order in this, no rock for anyone caught in this flood to cling to. There was only the deafening single noise of battle, a constantly changing, constantly identical surging bellow. Men killed and were killed, and it was brutal and brief and mind-numbing.
Taim’s horse stirred beneath him, disturbed by the screams of other animals dying somewhere out in the carnage. He looked around. His guards had gathered themselves, and were muttering together. Men were running now, braving the abuse and even the blades of their own captains; preferring flight to another moment facing the Inkallim. Down where the road ran between the two hillocks, the Haig lines were buckling too. Taim looked the other way, out across the undulating fields to the east. He could see a body of riders, cutting across the face of a long green slope. They were coming from the north, and therefore had to be of the Black Road.
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