Godless World 3 - Fall of Thanes

by Brian Ruckley

  Anyara was afraid. She sought for all the old, stubborn determination with which she had learned to resist fear and doubt and grief. But that determination was frayed, almost eaten away like some moth-discovered robe. The fear and hopelessness leaked through it. Her only other defence was distraction, and that she turned to willingly and with all the vigour she could muster.

  "Could we steal horses and slip out of the city?" she wondered.

  Coinach looked dubious. The two of them were sequestered in her chambers, the door locked from the inside, the shutters closed across the great windows. They conspired by candlelight, though outside it was a bright if cold afternoon.

  "Nothing's impossible," the warrior said carefully. His doubt was ill concealed.

  "There must be Lannis merchants in the city, aren't there?" she said. "Visiting Craftsmen? Someone who could help us, perhaps smuggle us out."

  "I don't know. I could try to find out..." He sounded doubtful.

  "Yes. I'm forbidden to leave this gilded gaol cell, but you... No one actually said you couldn't go out into the city, did they?"

  "Not that I've heard, lady, no. Seems unlikely they'd --"

  "It's no use anyway," Anyara said. "What good are we to anyone, running away, sneaking off into hiding like some masterless bandit with a price on his head?"

  She clapped her hands together in irritation, and in doing so snapped out the flame of the closest candle. She growled at it, and lit a taper at one of the others to restore it.

  "We should be trying to find a way to undo some of this madness," she muttered, frowning at the wick while she waited for it to take the flame. "Change things, not flee from them. I didn't come here just to be locked away. If we can't unpick the Shadowhand's lies, Orisian, our whole Blood, everything is at risk. We need help."

  "Yes, though Vaymouth is hardly the most fertile ground to search --"

  A hesitant, almost furtive, knocking at the door interrupted them. It startled Anyara. She almost dropped the still-burning taper, but swiftly recovered herself and gently blew it out. Coinach was already moving towards the door.

  "Who is it?" called Anyara.

  "Eleth, my lady. I have... I have clean bedding."

  Anyara nodded to Coinach, and the shieldman opened the door. The maidservant entered, her arms piled with sheets. She looked curiously from Anyara to Coinach and back again, clearly wondering what kind of business they had been engaged in, locked away together in a darkened room. The suspicion might have amused Anyara once, perhaps embarrassed her, but now she spared it no more than a moment's thought.

  She noticed the change in Eleth at once. Gone were the girl's open, friendly expression, her casual chatter. She seemed smaller, more withdrawn. That alone Anyara might simply have ascribed to the fraught and fractious atmosphere in the palace, and the change in her own status from tolerated guest to prisoner. But there was more, she sensed. Eleth's cheeks drooped, her mouth was set in limp misery. She looked as if she had been crying recently.

  "Are you all right?" Anyara asked as the maid opened the great chest at the foot of the bed and began putting in the fine sheets, one after another in neat, luxuriant layers.

  "Yes, lady," Eleth murmured, and the fluttering of her words betrayed the lie.

  "I've not seen you for days. They told me you were sick."

  "Yes, lady." There were tears there, so close to the surface: a loosely lidded pot simmering towards a cold and sorrowful boil. Anyara toyed absently with the sleeve of her dress, wondering whether to press the matter. She felt a glimmer of concern for the girl, but it was overlaid by other, more urgent, preoccupations.

  "Do you know where the Chancellor's wife is, Eleth?" she asked as the maid softly closed the chest.

  "She is in the bath chamber, lady. Ensuring it has been cleaned as it should, I think."

  "I need to talk to her, Eleth. It's very important. Would you take me to her, please."

  "I am not sure we are supposed to..."

  "I only want to talk to her. No harm can come of it. Please, Eleth."

  The door to the bathing chamber was open. As they drew near, a metallic crash and a skittering clatter rang out. The sudden noise, so obtrusively violent amidst the marmoreal quiet of the palace, halted Eleth in her tracks, and had her shrinking away. Whatever troubled the girl, it was pervasive, rendering her delicate.

  "Wait here," Anyara whispered to Eleth and Coinach, and she went alone, cautiously, to the doorway of the chamber.

  The bath was set into the floor, its polished stone darkly gleaming. There was a soft, persistent scent of perfume on the air, perhaps in the tiles themselves. Heat washed over Anyara's face, for there were braziers burning in each corner of the room. One of them lay on its side, its glowing contents fanned out across the floor, a sprawl of fiercely luminous coals. Tara Jerain stood beside it, staring down at her hands.

  "My lady?" Anyara said.

  Tara did not respond. She seemed fixated, to the exclusion of all else, upon her hands and the angry red welts that were already appearing there.

  "My lady?" Anyara repeated. "Is everything all right?"

  Slowly, Tara looked up. Her exquisite features had none of their usual lustre. She looked almost plain, as if her beauty had been washed out of her. At first, she gave no sign that she even recognised Anyara. She stared at her blankly.

  "What do you want?" she asked at length, blinking like someone waking from sleep.

  "I had hoped to talk to you about --"

  "No, no. Not now. I'm sorry." Tara waved a limp hand as she spoke. Desolate sadness; weeping, blistering burns laid across her fingers and palm.

  Anyara stepped back, reluctantly dipping her head, disappointed to find her intentions thwarted. But Tara spoke again after a moment.

  "Wait. Wait. I have... I seem to have burned my hands."

  "Eleth's here," Anyara said. "I'll send her for a healer. For bandages and salves."

  "Yes. Thank you."

  Anyara glanced at Eleth, who nodded and rushed away with evident relief. Turning back into the moist, scented heat of the bathing room, Anyara carefully advanced. Tara's arms hung loose at her sides now. The spilled charcoal murmured in fiery whispers on the floor. The orange light of those braziers that still stood danced across the innumerable tiles, the smooth stone.

  "We have nothing like this where I come from," Anyara observed.

  "No? No, well I suppose we are privileged to enjoy such indulgences here."

  "Perhaps we should find some water, to cool..."

  "No," Tara said. She wiped sweat from her brow with the back of one of her marred hands. "The healer will bring some, no doubt. The pain is... the pain is only pain."

  Anyara nodded. There was a depth of sorrow in this woman she recognised. Remembered. Loss was the only thing she knew that could at once so fill and so empty someone.

  "You saw him in Kolkyre, did you not?" Tara asked. "Before he was captured?"

  "Your husband. Yes, I did."

  "Was he then as he is now?"

  "I am not sure I know what you mean, lady."

  "Has he changed? Is he as you remember him?"

  Anyara had no idea what it would be best to say. She should be calculating how to win Tara's favour. That had been her intent, after all, in seeking her out. There was no one else she could think of--no one with any influence--in whose ear she might find even a trace of sympathy. Yet calculation felt tawdry and futile in the face of such aching, familiar distress. "He seems... distracted. Graceless, if you will forgive me, in a way he was not before. He frightened me even then, my lady, if I am honest, but now... now he frightens me still, but in different ways."

  Tara stared at her in silence. Anyara feared she had forfeited whatever connection might have been possible between the two of them. But then the Chancellor's wife nodded and hung her head.

  "It is not true, what is being said--what he has said--about my Blood," Anyara ventured. "About my brother."

  "Truth is a rare currenc
y these days," Tara said dully. "If you find it in short supply, you are far from the only one. What was it you wanted? My help?"

  "I thought..." Anyara hesitated. She felt sweat upon her forehead, at her temples. A drop of it traced a crooked path down over her cheekbone. "You know it's not true, I think. You understand that there is something wrong in all of this."

  "It is not my concern," said Tara. A sad, reflective smile tugged at one corner of her mouth, bunched her cheek for a moment. She stared at the blank wall, and the smile faded.

  Anyara could hear rapidly approaching footsteps: soft-slippered feet padding along the corridor. In a moment, she would no longer be alone with the Chancellor's wife.

  "Something has gone wrong," she said again. "And whatever's happening, it can't be just about my Blood, or Kilkry. These lies must have a greater purpose. I don't know what your husband saw... I don't know what happened to him when he was captured by the Black Road --"

  "Enough," said Tara sharply.

  "Don't you feel that everything's going wrong? Doesn't this all feel as if everything's getting twisted out of shape?" Anyara persisted, beyond fear or caution now, hearing Coinach saying something to those arriving outside the chamber; delaying them, on her behalf. "Your husband... he said something strange to me, the other day. He said I had been in the forest, in Anduran, as if he was there with me, though I never met him until Kolkyre. He hasn't... he hasn't mentioned a na'kyrim to you, has he? A man called Aeglyss?"

  The Shadowhand's wife shook her head slowly. She kept watching Anyara, intelligent eyes unblinking, as Eleth came hurrying in, half a dozen others with her: maids and healers. One carried a slopping bucket of water, another great rolls of bandages, a third armfuls of vials and stoppered bottles. The eldest of the men bustled over to Tara Jerain, casting a puzzled glance at the overturned brazier, carefully skirting its scattered contents.

  "What happened, my lady?"

  "I pushed it over," said Tara faintly, holding her hands out for examination. "It was very stupid of me. I felt in need of... noise."

  Anyara backed away, step by step, towards the doorway. Tara's thoughtful gaze never left her, even as the healers muttered over her wounds, and began to spread salves over them.

  *

  The carriage had an escort of thirty men when it left Vaymouth. It rattled through the city streets in a cacophony of clattering wheels and hoofs. Half the lancers raced ahead, ruthlessly sweeping the streets clear of bystanders. There was urgency, for they had been late leaving the barracks beside the Moon Palace. The Captain in charge of the escort had been unexpectedly summoned to attend upon the Chancellor himself, and then kept waiting, frustrated and listless, while the morning sank into a grey and muted afternoon. The audience, when it came, had been mysteriously pointless: a fierce repetition of previous orders, an insistent emphasis on the need for haste. The Captain left the meeting feeling both somewhat battered and thoroughly puzzled that he had lost so much time for no discernible purpose beyond being forcefully reminded of the urgency of his mission.

  The column burst from Vaymouth's northern gate like a hound loosed in pursuit of a stag. The horses pounded up the road, shadowing the winding course of the Vay River upstream. The carriage shook, rocking from side to side. The great expanse of the Vaywater lay at least two days' journey to the north-east. There, on the lake's only island, was the village of In'Vay, and its ancient, crenellated tower. It was a place with a bloody history, a place of execution and slaughter. More than three centuries ago, the warlords of the Taral plains had taken Lerr, the Boy King, there when they betrayed his trust to seize him at parley. It was there he had died, last of his line, strangled in the Lake Tower, his body weighted with stones and sunk into the Vaywater's embrace. It was there the Aygll Kingship had been finally, irretrievably extinguished and the Storm Years birthed.

  Now another fallen lord was being carried to the Lake Tower. Those who rode in escort whipped their horses to a lather in hope of making up the time that had been lost in Vaymouth. The winter days were brief, though. In the shadows cast by its last light of the sun, they had parted from the great road that drove north to Drandar; their path was less travelled, taking an easterly curve.

  There was only one great inn to offer shelter on this stretch. They stopped there to feed and water their horses, and get what rest they could before the next dawn. The carriage stood, square and silent, in the yard to one side of the inn all through the night. Eight men guarded it and the prisoner it contained, some sitting atop its flat roof, others leaning against its wheels, others walking in long, careful circuits of the yard, the inn and the whole hamlet.

  Those who did not keep watch ate well beside roaring ashwood fires, and drank well. Yet their spirits were not greatly lightened by such comforts. They felt the burden of their grave duty, and knew they would have need of punishing haste if they were not to come late to In'Vay. Many of them slept poorly, and some worse than that. By the morning, eighteen of them were crippled by twisting cramps in their guts. They could not sit straight astride their horses, let alone attempt the pace required that day. Acutely mindful of the Chancellor's wrath, the Captain barely hesitated: he beat the inn's master into unconsciousness, then left the sick behind and went with his eleven remaining men on up the road.

  In the low hills that marked the northern limits of Haig lands, they came to a ford. The eyeless man within the carriage heard the wheels splashing through the water, grinding over pebbles. He was shaken roughly back and forth, clinging to his chains to keep himself from being thrown from his hard seat. His thighs and arms were already bruised from the violence of his journey. There were no gentle surfaces within this cold box, and he had no blankets or cushions to soften the blows.

  There was a pause once the wagon came out from the river. He savoured the moments of comparative quiet. His ears still rang from the clamour that had filled his moving prison, every harsh sound that had been trapped in there with him, but now at least he could hear too the soft chuckling of the river, the distant call of some bird circling overhead.

  Then, too soon, they were moving again, the carriage rumbling slowly up an incline. The noise gathered strength, shaping itself slowly into the formless sense-numbing roar he had come to know. This time, though, it was interrupted. Other sounds--sounds that did not fit--intruded and broke the rhythm of wheels and hoofs. Shouts. A horse's scream. Something falling, something thudding against the side of the carriage. Something cracking and breaking under a wheel. He was thrown onto his side as the carriage veered suddenly. He felt it tipping, one set of wheels lifting from the road, then it crashed back and went unsteadily on. More cries. More confusion. Then silence.

  The prisoner pushed himself upright, angled his head to try to catch some revealing sound. The horses hauling the wagon had stopped moving, or they were gone. He heard footsteps and the bar on the door being lifted, the creak of hinges. There would be light, he supposed, flooding in, but he could not see it. He felt a chill breeze.

  "You'd be the very blind man I'm seeking, then," someone said, in a voice straight from the backstreets or the harbour taverns.

  Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig lifted his head towards the words, empty eye sockets hidden behind a linen band. His manacles clanked as he tried to stand.

  "Out with you," the rough voice said. Igryn felt his chains suddenly tighten, hauling him towards the bitterly cold, fresh air. "You've some travelling yet to do. What use you'd be to anyone, I can't imagine, but it's back to the city for you."

  Chapter

  3

  ____

  The Broken Man

  Break a man's bones, and he will heal, and cultivate hatred of you.

  Break a man's spirit, and he is unmendable.

  From To My Sons and His Sons Thereafter by Kulkain oc Kilkry

  I

  For more than a century, Kan Avor had rotted in the watery chains of the Glas Water. They had fallen away with the breaking of Sirian's Dyke, but the city had entered anothe
r kind of bondage: ice encrusted it. Every pool in its pitted and silt-layered streets was frozen. Icicles fringed each protrusion of its gnarled and knotted ruins. Whatever feeble thaw might begin during the day was undone and reversed in the succeeding night. Snow fell, and persisted in every shadow. Winter possessed the city.

  And there were other masters sharing dominion of the courtyards and squares and broken towers. A febrile vigour that threw out on occasion eruptive gouts of madness and brutality, and by communal consent made sudden savagery the most natural, the most basic, expression of the state of being. And the na'kyrim, who resided at the heart of this great ruin, and about whom everything turned, and by whose will all things were deemed to happen.

  They came in their scores and their hundreds, drawn by rumour or by other, silent, far deeper instincts: men and women, those who were warriors and those who were not. Gyre, Gaven, Wyn, Fane. Even Horin. They came, many, without knowing precisely what drew them there, to the shattered city squatting amidst marsh and mud in the centre of the Glas Valley. Some died, in fights or of sickness or hunger. Others found a ruin for shelter, a fire for warmth, and slowly came to an understanding: that they had reached the axis about which the world now turned, the spring from which a terrible, cleansing flood was flowing out across the world. The lever that was overturning every now-outdated law and rule. And some sought to set eyes upon the lord of this cruelly transformative domain. Some sought out the na'kyrim himself.

  In a dank, columned chamber where, in the very infancy of the Black Road, Avann oc Gyre had once held court, Aeglyss sat slumped upon a massive stone bench. He wore a plain linen robe. Bandages about his wrists concealed wounds that never quite healed. Meltwater dripped from holes up amongst the half-rotten roof beams. It spread dark stains across the great oaken floorboards of the hall.

  Hothyn and three other White Owls stood behind Aeglyss. A dozen Battle Inkallim, silent and still and dark, were scattered down the length of the chamber, leaning against the crumbling pillars, staring out from the windows whose shutters had long since been torn away. Shraeve herself met the small groups of the na'kyrim's adherents emerging from the winding stairway that coiled its way up from the street below. If she found no threat in their manner or possessions, they were permitted to approach him, to bathe in the flows of certainty, of conviction, that emanated from him.