Godless World 3 - Fall of Thanes

by Brian Ruckley

  He shivered, as if a cold pleasure filled him. "Your cause has found a servant in me, and the world has never seen my like. Such is the gift that fate, through me, bestows upon you. It is a terrible gift, but that is my burden. I will bear it and I will serve you."

  He looked around them all then, giving each of those at the table a brief moment of his undivided attention. His gaze brushed most briefly over Kanin, or so it seemed to Kanin himself. Even that instant of contact was enough to feel the weight of what lay behind the na'kyrim's eyes. To Kanin, it was oppressive and invasive. To others, he saw as their turns came, one by one, it was exhilarating.

  "I am the answer you and your people have been seeking all these years," Aeglyss breathed at length.

  And Kanin felt it. He felt it blooming in his breast and spreading its warmth through his limbs. It lifted him, and for the space of those few heartbeats there was nothing but the utter delight of knowing that all was as it should, and must, be. That all his hopes would be fulfilled, in their last and smallest detail. That the world this na'kyrim could promise him was all he could ever desire. Yet still, amidst it all, there was a hard nugget marring the perfection of the sensation: a nugget of hatred; the contradictory whisper that his truest, deepest desire could not be fulfilled by this halfbreed, but only by his death.

  "All I ask is that you put your faith in me," Aeglyss said. "And in the allies I bring to your cause. The White Owls. The force of my own will. The Shadowhand."

  "It's true, then, that the Shadowhand is bound? That you have done to him what Orlane did to Tarcene?" Goedellin's voice broke the skin of the moment. Kanin found himself suddenly breathing deeply, realising only now that he had been holding his breath.

  "To have such a weapon at our enemy's very heart..." whispered Talark.

  "The Haig Chancellor is bound to our service --" Shraeve began, but Aeglyss cut her short with a strange, strangled grunt.

  "Some things should not be spoken of," the na'kyrim said. "Think instead of the gifts I shall bring you. Kolkyre, Kilvale. Even unto Vaymouth itself, if that is your wish."

  "Still, Tarcene's binding hardly ended well. Not for the Kingbinder himself, nor for the Kyrinin he served. Certainly not for Tarcene," murmured Cannek, but no one save Kanin seemed to even notice that he had spoken.

  "There are things--aspects of what I have become--that none can understand," Aeglyss continued. "Burdens I must bear alone, in silence. Only my own kind could understand what I... but they are afraid. They fear my brightness will burn them. Only one... only she... She would understand."

  His head twitched and dipped to one side. His crab-like hand scraped rigidly across the surface of the table. His eyes lost their focus.

  "But she's been stolen from me," he rasped. "I can't find her. She is gone."

  Goedellin was regarding the na'kyrim with consternation. Talark frowned uneasily. Yes, Kanin thought, you can see if you choose to; see his madness. This is the man you would make master of your hopes, your fates? This poisoned ruin of a man, whose thoughts trickle through his own fingers like so much grain? But the moment did not last. The doubts had no time to take root.

  "We should eat," Shraeve said, and at the sound of her voice Aeglyss recovered himself.

  "Yes," he sighed, straightening in his chair, drawing his hand back to press it against his chest. "We should eat."

  The food was neither plentiful nor elegant. Bread and broth and a single haunch of mutton. They ate in silence. All save Aeglyss. He touched nothing, only watched.

  A serving girl made her way around the table, pouring out wine from a clay jug. She came to Aeglyss last, and wiped the lip of the jug clean with a cloth before emptying the last of its contents into his cup. Aeglyss pushed away his plateful of neglected food. He lifted the cup to his lips and drank deeply. As he set it down again his hand gave a brief involuntary jerk, spilling wine on the table.

  Kanin saw Cannek lay down a hunk of bread he had been gnawing. The Inkallim was watching Aeglyss intently. Others caught the change in mood. Conversations died.

  Aeglyss' face was white, paler even than it had been before. His eyes, the pupils dilated, were gleaming wetly. A muscle in his left cheek twitched, though his jaw was tight clenched. Otherwise, he was as motionless as a statue. Kanin looked around. Every eye was upon the halfbreed.

  Still Aeglyss had not moved. His white fingernails were digging into the rough surface of the table. His eyes stared rigidly at Cannek. The Inkallim was quite calm.

  "What have you done?" Shraeve said softly.

  Abruptly Aeglyss retched, gripped by a convulsion that rose from deep in his midriff. He hunched forward and then straightened with a great gasp. The movement seemed to release all the tension from his body. He put one hand to his mouth and spat a small dark object into his palm. He held it out: a perfect orb of black matter the size of an eyeball, with strands of saliva still clinging to it.

  "Yours, I think," said Aeglyss thickly to Cannek. He set it down upon the table, where it rested like a dull, sodden marble a child had discarded. Cannek regarded it thoughtfully for a moment or two, his hands clasped together before him. The globule lost its form, slumping into a viscous stain.

  "That's very clever," Cannek murmured with a smile.

  "What is this?" Goedellin asked, his voice all indignant puzzlement. "Poison?"

  Cannek's hands parted, and there was a blade in one of them. Shraeve's arm snapped up. One of her swords, still sheathed, came spinning across the table. Cannek ducked and swayed to one side, so that the sword went cartwheeling away off the side of his head. It was enough to spoil his own aim. His knife, sent darting out with a flick of his wrist, flashed past Aeglyss' shoulder. Shraeve followed her sword, vaulting the table, pivoting on one hand to drive a straight-legged kick into Cannek's chest. The Hunt Inkallim went crashing back with his chair, rolling and rising smoothly to a crouch.

  But Shraeve was too fast even for him. In the moment it took Cannek to recover his balance, she hit him with her full weight, wrapping an arm about his neck, splaying her other hand over his eyes. She took him backwards, tumbled the pair of them across the floor. And out of that blur of movement rose a clear, long cracking.

  Shraeve stood. Cannek lay, eyes and mouth open, head tilted sideways on a broken neck. Shraeve brushed dust from her knees. The assembled warriors stared in a mixture of amazement and confusion at the dead Inkallim. Only Kanin turned back at once to Aeglyss. And found the na'kyrim watching him. Aeglyss wiped the back of his hand across his lips. He was breathing fast.

  "Is that what you all require?" the halfbreed said loudly, and was at once the focus of all attention once more. "That's the kind of answer you people demand, isn't it? There's fate for you. There's the choice made for you. I live."

  Kanin wondered if he was the only one to hear the contempt, the bitterness, that suffused Aeglyss' words. Silently, he raged against the immobility of his limbs, and against the impotence of his own anger. His sword was within reach--he imagined it calling out to him--but Aeglyss, the idea of Aeglyss, filled his field of vision: out of reach, untouchable, inviolable.

  "You cannot kill me, for I am not as you are," Aeglyss said. He slammed his bony fist down on the table. "You think because I am flesh, I am weak. No, no. You must learn to think differently. You will learn. For all your hatred and your betrayals, I will raise you up. I will give you all that you want, feed all the hungers in your hearts, and those who turn against me will be cast down and ruined. There is no other way. No other truth."

  "As it is written," Shraeve murmured as she picked up her sword and came back around the table to stand beside Hothyn. The two warriors, Inkallim and White Owl, flanked the na'kyrim. And no gaze would meet the challenge those three offered. No one could deny them the submission they demanded.

  "Kill the girl who served me my wine," Aeglyss said. "And all the rest of the servants. All of them."

  He looked up at Shraeve and she nodded.

  "You've uttered not a
word, Thane," Aeglyss said to Kanin. "I've never known such silence from you. Have you nothing to say?"

  "Nothing." Kanin rose, horrified at the effort it took to turn away from Aeglyss, and at the yearning he felt to love the halfbreed and all that he offered. But his hatred provided the one, thin sheen of armour he needed to resist that call. He spared a lingering moment for a last look at Cannek lying dead on the floor, and walked out. An absurd, half-formed smile had been locked into the Inkallim's lips by death.

  Kanin waited outside, and the rest came soon after him, emerging blinking into the clear winter light. All were silent; some thoughtful, some shocked and shaken. In some faces he was sickened to see a sort of joy. This, he understood, was how it happened. There were some--many, perhaps--who found the horrors that Aeglyss embodied and offered not repellent but intoxicating. Once they caught their first scent of his corruption they wanted nothing more than to drink deep of it, to drown themselves in it.

  When Goedellin appeared, Kanin stepped in front of the Lore Inkallim, forcing the old, bent man to stop.

  "How many have to die, Goedellin? Before you will open your eyes to this madness?"

  The Inner Servant rapped the heel of his walking stick on the ground but said nothing.

  "My sister was the truest and most loyal follower of the creed, old man. Every beat of her heart was a promise of faith. Is she owed nothing for that lifetime of fidelity? Did it earn her no honour from the Lore?"

  "Such matters are not straightforward, Thane," Goedellin grumbled. He shuffled sideways, trying to pass.

  Kanin blocked his path. "We had tutors when we were children," he said quietly, insistently. "Tutors from your Inkall."

  "I know. Wain told me."

  "Did she tell you that my father wanted to send them away? After only a couple of seasons, he doubted his decision to bring them to Hakkan. She changed so quickly, you see. She devoured their teachings as if she had been starving until then, without ever knowing it. My father was disturbed by it."

  The Inner Servant of the Lore angled his head a little, looking up to meet Kanin's gaze just for a moment.

  "We knew nothing of it until one day the tutors were simply gone. Wain flew into such a rage." Kanin smiled at the memory, at the thought of that distant childhood, but knew it would bring unbearable pain if he let it take too firm a hold. "She meant to have them back, and she did. A little girl, Goedellin, bending a whole castle, the household of a Thane, to her will. She sulked, and raged, and the tutors were recalled. That was what it meant to her."

  The Inkallim was shaking his bowed head, though what the gesture meant Kanin did not know.

  "She should not have died," Kanin whispered. "You know this is not as it should be. You know this is not fate."

  "What else is there, Thane?" Goedellin snapped. "What else is there?"

  "Corruption! You think the warriors of the creed are fated to fawn over that monstrous little creature in there? You think this is what Tegric's Hundred died for? For us to submit ourselves to the twisted delusions of that...?"

  "Thane."

  Kanin turned. Shraeve was standing a few paces away in the doorway, watching him with those dead eyes. Her swords lay once more across her back, their hilts framing her face.

  "Aeglyss would talk with you," she said.

  In the instant of Kanin's distraction, Goedellin brushed unsteadily past him, hobbling after all the others.

  "It's not fate," Kanin hissed after the old man. "It's something else."

  He turned back to Shraeve, his lip curled in contempt. "Let your master talk to those who wish to hear."

  "You will wish to hear this, Thane." She was unmoved by his bitter tone, as if what he felt or thought was of less consequence than the dance of a fly on a breeze. "It is for no one else but you. It concerns your sister."

  And she turned and walked away. Like a hunter who knew her quarry was safely taken, needing and deserving no more of her attention. Kanin followed, heavy-footed, back into the hall, unable to do anything else. He wondered, with little interest, if he might be going to his death.

  Behind him he heard startled, pitiful yelps. They were killing Cannek's hounds.

  Aeglyss was alone in the hall, standing waiting for Kanin. Cannek's corpse was gone, along with Hothyn and the other woodwights who must have carried it away. So easily do we vanish from the world, Kanin thought. Our every intention and hope disappears in a moment, and counts for nothing.

  Shraeve, at his side, drew Kanin to a halt three swords' lengths from Aeglyss. Feeling her touch, he turned to rebuke her, but the words died in his throat, smothered by the sound of Aeglyss' voice.

  "You hate me, Thane. Don't trouble to deny it. I can taste your hatred of me, and that's a flavour I know well. It's been all around me through my whole life, the very air I breathe. There's nothing more to you than your desire to see me dead. And I understand. I do."

  The halfbreed's voice dripped with concern, with affection. A warm, comforting sense of sympathy enfolded Kanin, an almost physical sensation: a kind hand, taking him in its gentle grasp.

  "Terrible things have happened," Aeglyss whispered. "You know but a fragment of it. I promise you, though, I promise you: I loved your sister just as dearly as you did."

  The truth of that was an unquestionable certainty, insinuating itself into Kanin's mind, entangling itself with the instinctive revulsion he felt at the thought. The bitter retorts that came boiling up towards his lips were snared and snuffed out.

  "I can hardly tell any more what I remember, what I imagine, what memories I gather into me from the Shared," Aeglyss rasped. "But I know I loved her, and she loved me. She loved me as none has before. Only my mother... my mothers. But I was not strong enough to save her. Oh, I longed to. You cannot know..."

  A tear, at the corner of the na'kyrim's grey eye. Kanin could see nothing else but that perfect bead of moisture, a gleam of torchlight reflected in its smooth surface. It ran free, and Kanin watched its descent, felt his own vast grief carried along with it and growing, bursting up, swelling to merge with the still greater sorrow that filled the hall like a turbid mist. He trembled, overcome by the sense that there was nothing in all the world save loss and impotence.

  "Nothing is as I wanted it to be," Aeglyss said thickly. "I never asked for all this death. Hers least of all. Don't you understand? What has happened is... I didn't choose this. Why can't you see that? Give me your forgiveness, Thane. Give me her forgiveness."

  "Forgive?" Kanin murmured. His thoughts were softening, losing their shape.

  "It was my weakness." Aeglyss hung his head. "I could not sustain her love for me and still take hold of the Shadowhand. I would have done, if I could. Oh, nothing would have been sweeter. But I am too weak, too feeble; and I had to have the Shadowhand." He looked suddenly at Shraeve, and then to Kanin, beseeching. "We had to have the Shadowhand, did we not? We needed him? I gave up so much--Wain, K'rina--but the sacrifice was necessary, wasn't it?"

  Kanin pitied the halfbreed in that moment, and could easily have reached out to him in comfort, offered the forgiveness and agreement that he craved. Yet nothing, no bewilderment of his mind, could wholly extinguish the murderous flame that persisted in the deepest, most fortified, refuge of his self. It flickered there still, and through all the fogs that beset him, its light remained a beacon he could follow.

  "No path worth following is without sacrifice," he heard Shraeve saying beside him.

  "No," whispered Aeglyss. "No. And she knew that. Wain knew that." He looked up, and there was a new chill in the gaze he laid upon Kanin. "Others know it. Yet you do not, Thane. You are like ice, on which none of this can find purchase. There is something in you that resists me. Denies me.

  "Why is it that you cannot share in this understanding? The Battle sees the shape of things, the Lore, and the White Owls. The Bloods fall in at my side, for they understand what it is I offer, what I can give to those who walk with me. All I ask for is loyalty. Trust. If those things
had been there from the start--if you had offered them to me, Thane--none of this need have happened. Yet here we are. By choice or not, wondrous events begin to unfold, and I allow even those who have betrayed me to share in them. Why can you not be a part of this?"

  Stubborn contempt rose within Kanin.

  "Do you really not know?" he asked the halfbreed. "Do you really understand so little of people?"

  Aeglyss said nothing, but Kanin could see in his face genuine uncertainty, infantile hurt.

  "If you wanted me to walk at your side," Kanin said flatly, "you should not have taken my sister from me."

  A twist of some violent emotion distorted Aeglyss' features for a moment. He bared his teeth.

  "From you?" he hissed. "You think the loss only yours? You don't know! What it cost me..."

  He faltered. A tremor ran through his feeble frame, twisting his head to one side, tugging at his eyelids. Spittle bubbled out onto his chin.

  The soft deadening of Kanin's senses abruptly cleared. He blinked. Aeglyss slumped down onto one knee, coughing. Sudden hope blossomed within Kanin. The halfbreed's head was bowed, jerking as he spat out phlegm from his lungs. Kanin's hand went to his sword. The blade began to sigh out of its scabbard. He stepped forward, possessed by a vision of what was about to happen, what he could do in the next moment.

  And Shraeve lashed her forearm across his throat. He staggered, choking. Shraeve stepped in front of him, shielding Aeglyss from his sight, and his intent. She reached up and lightly grasped the hilts of the two swords sheathed across her back.

  "It is my belief, Thane, that this man serves fate, and our creed. I do not know if you could harm him, but I will not permit the attempt."