Godless World 3 - Fall of Thanes

by Brian Ruckley

  "I have to give them more. They'll cease to love me if I don't give them more," Aeglyss hissed. "I know. I know. They'll turn on me if I don't give them more. Show them more. They always do, eventually. Always."

  His eyes were closed now. His head tipped back. The hood of his cloak fell away, revealing his almost naked head. The skin was so frail and thin, the bones of his skull seemed to show through it, giving it the sheen of ivory.

  "The Shadowhand strains against the bonds I've set on him. His is a fierce will. I must be stronger, if I'm not to lose him. And the Anain. I hear them still, thinking their great, hateful thoughts. Distant... distant, but I hear them. They'll come again for me one day, when their hate is greater than their fear. I need to be the flood itself, not just the channel the flood flows through. You wouldn't understand. How could you?"

  Shraeve's horse had dropped its head to nuzzle the snow in search of grass. She tugged irritably at the reins.

  "It will all have been for nothing, if you die now," she said.

  Aeglyss' head sank down until his chin rested on his chest. He coughed and wheezed.

  "Nothing? Maybe. But let your precious fate decide." He spat the words contemptuously. "If it's a new world you want out of this, this is how it happens. This is the only way it can happen, because without it I will come apart. I don't fear death. I can master it. I just need to go deeper, further; to the root of the world. So do it. Do it, raven."

  There was no more talking after that. Only the brutal business of hoisting the fragile na'kyrim up on the tree's creased trunk, the driving of nails through the old, unhealed wounds in his wrists. A hush cloaked all the hundreds, the thousands, gathered to bear witness. They stood in a vast arc, all silent, all watching the hammers, feeling their beat like that of war drums. They were exposed, in that great flat land, to the twilight's raw wind and to the sleet that gave it teeth, but no fires were lit, no shelters erected.

  Darkness descended, and the mighty tree buried its uppermost branches in the night. The crucified na'kyrim was lost against the dark trunk, save for his pale face, his white hands. Those scraps of him shone amidst the murk. The attendant host was unnaturally still, held fast by reverent expectancy. The sleet turned to rain. The snow in the tree's intricate web of boughs was eroded. That spread across the ground slumped into slush and turned the earth beneath those innumerable feet into mud. And still they waited. Still they anticipated... something.

  There was not a single voice to be heard, save that of some distant owl and that of the night itself: raindrops pattering through twigs and into puddles. And then the soft, soft moaning of the na'kyrim came drifting out from the tree. It went through the crowd like a breeze, yet was stronger by far than the wind that drove the rain. With it, slowly, came his suffering, and that seeped through the skin of them all. His pain took root in every bone, and it was a wondrous pain that bound them together in the sensation of rising, ascending through its layers towards some endless presence that waited to embrace and unite them.

  As his limbs shook and strained, so convulsions spun their way through the throng. People fell to the ground and thrashed in the mud. He rasped out a score of hollow, panting breaths, and others wailed and clawed at their scalps, tore at their hair, suddenly succumbing to horrors that danced inside their heads. Some rode the crashing waves of emotion and experience that pulsed out from the na'kyrim; others were undone by them, and tumbled and broken by them.

  Some wept quiet tears of joy in the darkness; some fell to their knees; some lost themselves entirely in uncomprehending terror and fled screaming. The assault on every mind did not diminish, but grew stronger, more remorseless. People saw places that lay half a world away; they lived entire lifetimes, in moments, that belonged to others; they heard the voices of the dead. They knew for an instant what it was to be Anain or Saolin, or to be a na'kyrim crucified upon a tree with the Shared become indistinguishable from his own mind. And madness came in the wake of that knowledge, and claimed one, then another, then dozens.

  Killing began. Stranglings and beatings and knifings and suffocations in the sucking mud; flurries of lethal movement in amongst the great trembling mass. Kyrinin ran, lithe and agile, hissing as they lashed about them with their spears. The deaths drew no attention. Those standing next to a man who was dragged down did not notice, so enraptured or possessed were they by the transcendent power surging all about and through them.

  It lasted for a long time. The rain died away. Fragments of moonlight fell through passing gaps in the cloud. They lit the na'kyrim. Made his blood black. All across the great assemblage scattered outbursts of anguish, or weeping, or laughter cavorted like eddies in a wild current. And slowly the horrors and the visions and the power receded. Those driven to savagery by them halted, stood looking in confusion down at those they had slain. Minds clumsily recovered themselves from madness, remembering, bit by bit, their former shapes.

  There came a time when the na'kyrim opened crusted eyes and whispered, "Take me down."

  The Inkallim did as he commanded. He wept at the agony of it, and sank into limp unconsciousness. They carried him--there was no weight to him at all--towards the wagon. People came stumbling forward out of the crowd, reaching out, longing to touch him, longing to draw near to the fount of such frightful, vast outpourings. The ravens pushed them away.

  They laid his bloody, broken form in the bed of the wagon and it groaned its way back towards the invisible ruined city that waited out in the night. Shraeve alone rode with him, seated at his side, watching the shivering of his eyes beneath their cracked and bleeding lids. As the wagon progressed through the great, now silent, assemblage, those it passed fell in behind it; those ahead of it pressed closer and closer, hoping to see for themselves its incomprehensible and awe-inspiring cargo.

  But Shraeve alone heard him when he murmured, "Not enough. Not enough. Still it's too deep, too wide. Infinite."

  *

  Kanin heard Goedellin's cry through the stone walls of the Guard House. It roused him from the bleary stupor that passed for sleep these days. At first he was not certain whether it had been a figment of the nightmares that so often tortured his brief slumbers, but then it was repeated, and the agonies of fear it expressed washed away any last fogs from Kanin's mind. It was the cry of someone exploring depths of anguish most could never imagine, and it grated upon the ear and upon the heart.

  Kanin pulled his boots on, cursing the stiff, tight leather. He could hear footsteps and worried voices in the corridor outside. He threw a cloak about his shoulders and hastened from his bare sleeping chamber.

  Igris and three or four others of his Shield were already gathered outside the door to Goedellin's room, all wearing the tired, limp pallor of those abruptly roused from sleep. From within another rasping, sickening wail.

  "The door's barred," Igris said with a vague and helpless spreading of his hands.

  "Then break it!" shouted Kanin.

  One of the shieldmen kicked at the door. It did not yield.

  "Idiot," growled Kanin, pushing them all aside.

  Once, twice, he pounded at the door with his heel. At the second blow, there was a cracking of wood, but still it resisted. Kanin could hear a loud whimpering in there now, like some great dog bemoaning a grievous wound. He roared and stamped against the door. It sprang open in a burst of splinters.

  Goedellin lay on the low bed, fully clothed. A tiny box was spilled on the floor beside him: a miniature wooden chest, engraved and inlaid like a child's toy. Wizened fragments of seerstem lay around it. The Lore Inkallim was twisting and writhing, splaying his hands in defence against some invisible threat. He moaned and thrashed, dark spittle foaming on his black lips.

  Kanin bent over the Lore Inkallim, averting his face from those clawing hands. He grasped Goedellin's shoulders and pressed him back onto the mattress.

  "Wake, old man!" he shouted.

  Goedellin bucked beneath his grasp, impossibly strong for one so frail and contorted by a
ge. Kanin feared that he would break bones if he exerted his full strength, and backed away. Goedellin howled, a ravaged sound.

  "Fetch water," Kanin snapped at Igris, who was staring in wide-eyed alarm at the frenzied form upon the bed. "And a healer!"

  The shieldman went, but even as Kanin turned back to the Lore Inkallim, he could see that it was too late. Goedellin's hands clenched; his eyes opened; his stained tongue fluttered between his lips. His back, his hooked back, arced against its curve as his head and shoulder thrust down against the pillow. His breath rattled out of him.

  And then he was still. Fists still raised, eyes still staring up at the blank ceiling above, mouth still agape, tongue lying there limp in a pool of brown spit. Kanin extended a hand, holding the back of it still just above Goedellin's lips. He did not really need to check. He could see the truth in those blank eyes.

  "He's dead," Kanin muttered.

  He stooped and picked up the little box from the floor. He turned it over in his hands then dropped its carved lid shut with the touch of a finger.

  "It's seems even the dreams of the Lore have turned against them," he murmured.

  VIII

  The track from Highfast to Hent was wind-lashed, snow-blasted. It rode the high bare slopes of jagged ridges, rising and falling across the spine of the Karkyre Peaks. Sharp-sided valleys lay below, gorges clawed out of the body of the mountains by immense talons. Clouds surged in from the west, engulfing the track and the summits around it, veiling them in mist and snow, then sweeping on and away to leave them bathed in sunlight, roofed by a curving expanse of pale blue sky. Sometimes, in those clear moments, Orisian could look down into the valley beneath them and see nothing but great slabs of cloud and fog, the peaks and ridges bare islands protruding from a sea frozen in the instant of its boiling.

  Even when the sky was naked above, and there was no snow or sleet, the wind never ceased. It buffeted and bit them. Orisian, like most of the others, wore a woollen scarf across his nose and mouth, and kept the furlined hood of his jacket pulled as far up and over his head as it would go. They had taken the best clothing they could find from Highfast's stores. Still the cold found its way in. Had he not suffered its savage attentions before, and more acutely, in the Car Criagar, it might have been intolerable. Now, he merely shrunk himself inside his cocoon of wool and cloth, and endured.

  The horses suffered the most, becoming sluggish and sullen. They held their heads low. Soon, they might become more hindrance than aid. Whether or not the weather gentled, or the track became less snow-clogged and treacherous, there would come a time--perhaps two days, perhaps three--when they reached the edge of Anlane. And that, Orisian suspected, would be no place for riding.

  Often, his mind retreated from the harsh reality of the journey, drifting and stumbling its way through corridors of memory and distraction. But they were seldom clean. Untainted. He remembered the day before the Winterbirth feast at Castle Kolglas. So much of that memory was warm, coloured impossibly joyful by the darkness of what had followed it: walking beside Anyara through the market, hearing the light, bubbling chatter of the festive throng, smelling the sticky richness of honey cakes. Yet as he relived it in his head, Orisian found shadows bleeding in at the edges of the scenes his mind recreated. Faces in the crowd that blurred and leered and grimaced, until he turned his imagined attention full upon them, and then they were gone. Not there at all.

  And then he was walking with Inurian over the rocks beneath the castle's wall. Looking for... something. Even the pain of that memory was sweet, for there, before his mind's eye, was that lost face in all its precise simplicity and affection. So close he could have touched it. So alive. Yet he could hear that the waves slapping at the rocks were heavy, thick with something more than water. Inurian's lips moved, but Orisian could not hear him, only the seagulls screeching overhead. And their cries became the anguished wails and laughter of mad children.

  He was looking down at a corpse. A woman, frozen into a stiff huddle. Snow on her head, in her ear, in the pit of her eye. He was looking down on her from what seemed a great height, yet for all that distance he could see the ends of her eyelashes protruding through the snow. He could see the strands of loose cotton that had frayed from the collar of her coat.

  "Couldn't say whether she's Kilkry or Black Road."

  "What?" Orisian said, blinking.

  Taim Narran twisted in his saddle, looking back.

  "Couldn't say whether she's Kilkry or Black Road," he repeated.

  Ess'yr and Varryn were standing over the corpse, staring down at it. It lay off to the side of the rough track, beneath the shelter of an overhanging boulder.

  "Died of cold, not of blade," Varryn said.

  "Herraic said we might reach Hent in a day, if we didn't pause," Orisian said, still dislocated, half of him caught up in that place where the dreams and memories lurked. "How long till nightfall, do you think?"

  Varryn flicked a glance towards the western sky, lifted his chin as if to scent the air.

  "The third part of the day is yet to come," the Kyrinin said.

  "We should keep moving, then."

  Ess'yr and Varryn ran ahead of the horses, disappearing beyond the rugged writhings of the trail. In the moment when they dipped out of sight, Orisian felt that familiar tug of foreboding and fear. Every moment that he could not see Ess'yr, could not satisfy himself of her safety, was soured by worry. He did not doubt her capabilities but still he worried. Death, it seemed to him, was becoming ever less respectful of the capabilities of those it claimed.

  He could hear two of the warriors talking behind him. Low voices, jumbled by the wind, the words separated, some snuffed out, some thrown together. He could not make out what they were saying.

  His mind wandered once more, lulled by that sound, human yet incomprehensible, and by the slow and steady crunching of his horse's hoofs on loose stones and bare rock. He drifted. And this time he saw Ess'yr's face, just as he had first seen it when slipping in and out of a wounded fever. It was as clear to him now as it had been then. Clearer. The beauty of it, the soft and flawless near-white skin, the framing curtain of hair with an almost metallic yellow glint to it. The eyes, unguarded, grey as flint, looking into his own. He rode in the embrace of that memory.

  Hent was stranger than Orisian had expected. It sprawled across the eastern flank of a long, descending ridge. The highest of its buildings lay almost at the crest of the ridge; the lowest, close by the seething river that ran north between fringes of scrubby willow and alder. The buildings themselves were like bulges in the skin of the mountain, as if its innards had burst forth in crumbling disarray and then been reassembled into habitations. The shape of each was governed by the natural form of the rock to which it clung. There was barely a straight line to be seen, save the slate tiles that clad each roof. Snow was piled in every wind-shadow.

  The trail dipped down from its perch high on the slope to sweep through the centre of the tiny town, and re-emerged beyond it, scarring its way on towards the low hills and dark brown stain of forest that lay to the north.

  A solitary figure was moving, down there amongst all the stone; staggering as if drunk between slope-sided houses. Just that one movement. All the rest was as imperturbably motionless as the giant boulder field it resembled.

  "We went to within a spear throw," Ess'yr murmured at Orisian's side. "No watch. No guard. Stink of..." She cocked her head. "Stink of Koldihrve. The Huanin there, and their drink."

  "We heard thick sleeping," Varryn observed.

  "What does that mean?" asked Orisian.

  "The body sleeps," said Ess'yr, "but the nose does not."

  Orisian frowned, then: "Snoring?"

  Ess'yr shrugged.

  "And there is the smell of death," Varryn said.

  They fell back to where Taim Narran and the others waited. All were dismounted save K'rina, who was bound to the saddle of a placid horse by a thick weave of cords and rope. She was hunched forward and low
, almost to the animal's neck, in that strange borderland between sleep and unconsciousness that she occupied most of the time.

  "The western side of the ridge is steep," Taim said as soon as they drew near. "Not even a goat trail that we could see."

  "We could go that way, though?" Orisian asked.

  Taim wrinkled the bridge of his nose.

  "If necessary. It would be difficult. Dangerous and slow. We'd have to leave the horses." He looked at K'rina. "She's in no condition to be clambering around on a mountain slope. What of the town?"

  "Seems almost empty," Orisian muttered, glancing back towards Hent, now hidden by a hump of bare rock. "The Black Road must have been there, maybe still are. But it's as near to dead as makes no difference."

  "Still, we couldn't pass through without being seen," Taim said.

  "No." Orisian shook his head.

  "Cloud coming," Varryn said, looking up beyond the ridgeline towards the grey western sky. Banks of low cloud were indeed streaming in, their vanguard already wisping around the highest outcrops of rock and spilling frail tendrils down the slope.

  Taim looked dubious.

  "That could help," he said, "but even so..."

  Orisian's mouth was dry. He swallowed. The world was disappearing before his eyes, lapsing into a blur of moist grey. He could hear his own heartbeat, as if the foggy sprawl of those clouds was deadening and silencing everything else so completely there was nothing else left to hear. Nothing to attend to save his own thoughts, and he barely recognised many of them. He wanted to be rid of them, these flickers of doubt, murmurs of fear. Stirrings of a hot and unfamiliar bloodthirst.

  "We'll try. The place is half-abandoned, and whoever's left there isn't expecting us. We'll try to go straight through."

  The slow, silent descent into the town proved a crossing from the fixed and steady world into the domain of madness.