Godless World 3 - Fall of Thanes

by Brian Ruckley

  A brief fire in her eyes--the heat of anger--and sudden venom in her voice. "And it's always na'kyrim, isn't it, who pay the price? Every convulsion, every war, whatever its cause, it's na'kyrim who get crushed in the middle of it. Too strange, too different... too feared..."

  She lifted a hand to her brow, wincing in pain or distress.

  "I'm sorry," she muttered. "I'm sorry. It's... I lose track of myself... I can't tell what's his, what's mine. There's so much hurt to draw on. Or perhaps it draws on me, on all of us. But I know... I do know. She's all we--you--have. There's nothing else to set against what he's become."

  "Then why? Why fight against it? Why make it hard?"

  "It should be hard, don't you think?" she said at once, with just a hint of that old combative note. All her own that, none of it borrowed from the Shared. "That's all that's changed, now that Aeglyss has loosed his poison in the Shared: it's made it easy. It's taken away everything that should be there, all the restraints and hesitations and sympathies. It's freed us all to surrender to the darkest of our instincts, the most painful of our memories. And I don't want it to be so easy."

  She lifted her hands as if to beg for his understanding, but then let them sink back.

  "He's made of the Shared, the whole, something that separates us all, turns us inwards, and leaves us with nothing for company but our anger or grief or fear or hate. The one thing that binds and unites us, and he used it to divide us. He made us alone."

  Her voice fell as she spoke. She seemed suddenly so much older and more fragile than ever before that Orisian almost reached out to take her hands. Yet comfort felt like a lie to him. It had no place here or anywhere. And perhaps that was of Aeglyss' making as well, but even if so it made the bleak thought no less certain, no less tenaciously rooted in his mind.

  "You stay here, with Ess'yr," he said. "There's nothing more you can do. I'll... I'll take K'rina. No, not take her; I will only follow where she leads now, Yvane. I'll force nothing on her, just keep her safe, as the Anain who fashioned her can no longer do. Justly or unjustly, the need--the desire--is in her. All I will do is give her the protection she needs to fulfil it. If that is a cruelty, and cold... I don't know. It seems to me that it's the smallest of the cruelties that lie ahead down other paths any of us--all of us--might follow."

  "Do you know where we are?" Orisian asked Taim softly as they stood together in the doorway of the cottage.

  The warrior frowned out at the landscape slowly emerging from the thinning mists. A heavy dusk was gathering, settling itself across the dank, still valley, but in this last slow hour of the day it was yet possible to see some way over the grassland and the fields. A solitary owl--not white but pale like sand--was ghosting its way through the murk. There was no other movement. No sound.

  "I've an idea," he said. "South of Grive. Kan Avor can't be more than a day's walk, if that's what you're thinking."

  "It is. But it'll be a night's walk." Orisian grunted. "We've become creatures of darkness. I fear daylight more than the shadows now. And there's no time to wait, in any case."

  Taim glanced back into the gloomy interior of the hut. Yvane was crouched at Ess'yr's bedside, applying a fresh poultice of the herbs Varryn had brought back from the forest. The Kyrinin himself stood behind her, watching every movement with a dark intensity on his face.

  "She can't travel any further," Taim said.

  "No. Yvane will stay with her, tend her. It's... it's probably for the best in any case. I wouldn't want her... either of them..."

  Orisian let the sentence fade away. It was a fruitless thought. All thoughts seemed fruitless, defeated by the unfathomable obscurity of the future. It was as if an endless bank of sea fog lay across his path, impenetrable to foresight. He found he did not fear it, though. He almost welcomed it, for the promise of release it offered. Its dark, unknowable embrace could be no more harsh, no more painful, than that of the present or of his memories.

  "Owinn is the only one left, I think," said Taim. He nodded towards the young warrior seated on a tree stump, methodically cleaning the blade of his sword with a handful of wet grass. "The other two haven't returned. We may have lost them. Or they've lost themselves."

  "Is he...?" Orisian was unsure how to ask the question, but Taim understood anyway.

  "He seems calm. Untouched. Can't be certain, of course. Nothing seems certain any more. But so far I've seen nothing in him to make me fear for him."

  "He can stay, then. Guard them. I would go alone, Taim, if I thought I could. I'd take no one but K'rina. But if we find trouble..."

  "I know," Taim said levelly. "I wouldn't stay, even if you commanded me to."

  "I'm sorry," Orisian said. "I truly am."

  Taim smiled. There was great weariness in it, yet Orisian was struck by how easily it seemed to come to the warrior's lips. There was nothing forced or pretended about it.

  "Enough sorrow already," Taim murmured. "It mends nothing. Now we just see what happens."

  Orisian went to stand over Ess'yr. Yvane had moved away, crushing roots with the heel of her hand on the scored, frayed surface of an old table. Varryn remained, though, looking down at his sister. He stared at her with such concentration, with so knitted a brow and such narrow eyes, that it seemed he might almost imagine he could heal her grave wound by strength of will alone.

  Ess'yr herself was awake; conscious, if only distantly so. Her eyelids were heavy.

  "We will have to leave you here," Orisian said to her. He did not bend towards her or reach for her, or do anything to close the distance between them. There was no bridge to lay across that gap now. He knew that. He could never draw any nearer to her than this, never know any more of her than what he already did. It was a terrible loss to him, that fading away into nothing of possibility. He could not even say whether he was capable of bearing it, for the burdens on his heart no longer differentiated themselves one from the other. They merely pressed down, a single, slow pressure that one day, he knew, would become insupportable in its collective weight.

  It took her a moment or two to focus on his face. He wondered what she saw but could read nothing in her gaze.

  "Taim and I will take K'rina a little further. As close as we can to wherever it is she wants to go. Tonight."

  At first he was not sure she could even hear him. Her lips, her eyes, remained motionless and placid. But then she moistened those lips with the tip of her tongue.

  "Go well," she whispered.

  He nodded. It seemed wholly insufficient, yet there was nothing more in him to say. Nothing that the sadness within him would permit to rise to his lips, at least. To leave now would be to leave an ocean of words unuttered; to attempt to make words of the ocean would do nothing to drain it. He turned away.

  "I think Inurian would find it good, what you do," he heard Ess'yr say in that frail voice. "He would find it wise."

  "I hope so."

  He felt a powerful need to be outside, free of the confinement of that cottage. The rain might be gone, the mists cleared, but the cold air of the descending night still bore enough moisture to make its touch soft and fresh. He closed his eyes and lifted his face towards the sky.

  He did not know how long he stood thus. No thoughts, none of the turbulence that had grown so familiar, troubled him. He simply stood, face uplifted, until the softest of movements at his side drew him back.

  "My sister..." said Varryn, uncharacteristically subdued and hesitant "... my sister asks that I go with you."

  Orisian frowned.

  "Stay," he said. "Watch over her. She may need you."

  Conflicting emotions disturbed Varryn's smooth features, like the shadows of the roiling clouds passing overhead. It was a momentary perturbation; he set his jaw firmly, pushed his chin out a fraction.

  "No," the Kyrinin said. "I will go with you."

  "Why?" Orisian asked, but Varryn had already turned and was ducking his head under the cabin's lintel.

  Orisian stared after him briefly
. Then the sound of that owl, calling its melancholy notes out across the valley, drew him back to the soft night. There was nothing to see. Darkness had all but engulfed the land now. And when Orisian looked out into it, he saw not so much the absence of light as the absence of everything. A waiting void.

  V

  The dead came down the River Vay, drifting in lazy fleets, turning in the current. They bumped along the hulls of the barges and ran up onto the mudbanks where the river's bends robbed the waters of their force. Seagulls came up from the sea, sculling across the sky, flocking down to loiter around any grounded corpse and wait for it to be opened by dogs. There were the corpses of men and women and children from the masterless villages on the Vaywater; Kyrinin corpses from the river's distant marshy headwaters, where the Snake had fallen into strife with the Taral-Haig Marchlords; corpses from the vast flat cattle lands north of Drandar, where nobles long settled in wary peace now openly feuded, and Heron Kyrinin crossed the river to prey on the displaced or undefended.

  In Hoke, capital of the Thaneless Dargannan Blood, half the city burned while its garrison of Haig warriors was besieged in its barracks. Those men too burned, in time. Along the shore, a Dornach ship landed raiders who razed a village and then fell to fighting amongst themselves over the loot.

  In the Far Dyne Hills, west of Dun Aygll, where once Kings mined for precious metals and woodsmen mined timber from forests they thought inexhaustible, gangs of youths hunted tithe-collectors. Punitive bands of warriors--Haig men and Ayth men alike--hunted youths and their families. Wandering companies of Black Road scavengers and pillagers roamed the bare hillsides, brutally aimless in their destruction. Many villagers, despairing of all order, drove their flocks south into the immense vale of the Blackwater River, where the lowlanders defended their lands with ambushes and pit traps.

  Far beyond the Vale of Stones, in the still snow-cloaked lands of the Black Road, Battle Inkallim--few of them now but ferocious still--warred with the High Thane's companies. Townsfolk rose on one side or the other. One night, when the moon was stark and full, warriors broke into the Sanctuary of the Lore, dragged many of its youngest Inkallim out into the snow and killed them beneath the watchful pine trees.

  In Dyrkyrnon--secret Dyrkyrnon, secluded by both choice and by the trackless wetlands in which it nestled--na'kyrim walked in fear of the Shared, of shadows in the mind, of each other. Some became deranged and fled into the marshes, there to drown or die on the spears of the increasingly untrusting Heron clan. Some lapsed into uncommunicative despair and began to waste slowly away. One tore her own eyes out and plunged a fish knife into her own neck.

  The world reeled and staggered, and with the rising and setting of each sun it descended deeper into the morass from which it could not pull free. And though the days grew longer, as winter withdrew slowly into the north, it seemed to all its inhabitants that there was a diminishing of light, an overthrowing of it by ever more profound darkness.

  Anyara watched Coinach's face. In the dim light of a single candle he was trying to slip some heavy thread through the eye of a huge needle. His intense concentration, and the not infrequent winces of frustration, amused her. She turned her attention back to the pot of broth simmering over a low fire. It smelled tolerable if not good. It would be warming at least, and there would be enough left to be reheated at dawn tomorrow, to fortify themselves against the long and likely uncomfortable journey that awaited them.

  The cottage was cramped but secure and dry. They had no idea whose it was. Tara Jerain had simply told them they would be met at a certain place on the road towards the docks outside Vaymouth and provided with shelter. And so they had been. Tara was, as had become clear, a resourceful and knowledgeable woman. She had provided them with horses and suitably worn and moth-eaten clothing to conceal their status. She had found them the Tal Dyreen captain who meant to run the first ship into Kolkyre, now that the blockade of that city was at the very least unlikely to be strictly enforced and quite probably abandoned altogether. Anyara could think of nowhere else to go. She wanted to be as close to the Glas Valley as she could, and to be amongst at least a few of the people of her own Blood. The dangers of the journey and the destination, such as they were, seemed to her no greater than remaining in Vaymouth.

  The city was lit by fires every night, as competing factions fought blindly, wildly for control. The slightest rumour, of any kind, was enough to send vengeful mobs raging through the streets. No one knew who ruled. Stravan oc Haig, notionally Thane since the death of his father and elder brother, had not been seen for days. Dead of a pox, some said; poisoned by his mad mother, claimed others. Merely drunk and asleep, most insisted.

  It was no place to be, especially for those present at the death of Chancellor, High Thane and Bloodheir. Tara had assiduously spread word that Kale had been the killer: a Hunt Inkallim incredibly waiting all these years for the most opportune moment. It was impossible to say how many believed such a wild tale. But Lheanor had died in his Tower of Thrones at the hand of an ageing woman, and in such a world who was to say what might happen?

  Tara had not spoken a word to Anyara about what had happened. The vacant look that was often in her eyes, her subdued manner, the shaking that often took hold of her hands, so violent she could not hold a cup steady, all suggested its effects. But she would not speak of it, and Anyara had not forced her.

  There was a shuffling outside the door, and Coinach at once dropped the still-unthreaded needle and reached for his sword. Then a tapping and a whisper.

  "My lady, it's Torcaill. Your brother sent me."

  Coinach was still cautious as he opened the door just a fraction and peered out into the night, but he saw a face he knew, and the tension fell out of his frame.

  "There were three of us, but the other two..." Torcaill looked ashen, even in the yellow light of the candle. Like a man who had been without food or sleep for days on end. His clothing was filthy and frayed.

  "It was difficult," he said. "And when I reached Vaymouth, I heard you'd been in the Chancellor's palace. I went there, and his wife... Tara, is it? She told me where to find you. Once I had convinced her I was who I claimed to be, and that wasn't easy. Is it true... what they say happened?"

  "It depends what you've heard," muttered Coinach.

  "We'll tell you soon enough," Anyara said. "Orisian sent you? Where is he? How is he?"

  She could hear the impatience in her own voice, but it was only excitement, eagerness, and it pleased her. She revelled in it.

  "I have a message from him," Torcaill said, and proffered a canvas tube.

  Anyara took it and unfurled the parchment from within. She leaned closer to the candle to read it. The handwriting was crude and a little clumsy. Her brother had never been the most gifted with a quill.

  She read it quickly, thinking she would read it again more slowly once she had its gist. But a single reading was enough for her. She put it aside. The parchment, so long trained to the shape of that tube, rolled itself up again and hid the words.

  Anyara felt she might cry and blinked into the embers of the fire a few times. But tears did not come. They were not quite ready. She found, after a few moments, that she was embracing Coinach instead.

  VI

  Shraeve brought Kanin up from the fetid, half-flooded cellar into which he had been cast. His hands had been bound behind him long enough for all sensation to have leaked out of them. She pushed him along a echoing hallway where silt was caked at the base of the walls. There were other Inkallim there, he was dimly aware, just two or three of them. They stared at him but said nothing.

  He was propelled roughly out into the street, and almost fell. He winced at the assault of the light, for feeble as it was, it seemed garish after the gloom of his prison. His discomfort was brief, for Shraeve steered him in through the doorway to the spiralling stair that led up to the halfbreed's lair. The steps were worn and uneven, the walls rough and coated with mould and webs.

  Kanin offered n
o resistance. He consisted of nothing but hate, and it filled him so completely that it choked any coherent thought. It was a greedy, many-hued hate that made no distinction between Aeglyss, Shraeve, himself. Of all its indiscriminate barbs, the sharpest were perhaps those turned inward. He loathed his failure, his weakness.

  He emerged into the hall at the top of the stairs, and heard Aeglyss before he saw him.

  "Cut his bonds."

  "He might still be dangerous," Shraeve said behind him.

  "You think so? Cut his bonds in any case."

  The Inkallim sawed at the cords about his wrists with a knife. When the bindings fell away, the blood rushing back into his hands was agonising. He barely noticed the pain, consumed instead by the immediate notion of spinning about and attacking Shraeve. But the Inkallim pushed him violently forward before the cut cords had even hit the ground, and he staggered some way down the length of the hall and fell to his knees.

  "Stand up," the halfbreed said.

  Kanin's body did so, a little clumsily, without his mind even having the time to consider refusal. He looked at the na'kyrim, sitting there on his stone slab bench, and saw only the roughest, most approximate, imitation of a living man: hairless, suppurating, cadaverous. Pathetically small, too feeble to move. But the shadows around and behind him seemed to have a life of their own. And the eyes that fixed themselves upon Kanin, though bloody and sickly, still carried a vile intensity.

  "You must do something," Shraeve said as she moved to stand beside one of the columns lining the hall, level with Kanin. "There are only three or four of us left fit to fight. The rest are dead or sick, or fallen away into madness or stupor. The whole city--the whole valley--is full of nothing but the dead and the dying. Those not yet too weak from disease or hunger... all turn against all. There is no order."

  Aeglyss did not move. His eyes did not stray from Kanin's.