Godless World 3 - Fall of Thanes

by Brian Ruckley

  Not long after, Varryn abruptly appeared in K'rina's path and brought her to a halt. He nodded wordlessly ahead. It took time, for it would reveal itself from the corner of an eye, not when he looked directly at it, but soon enough Taim found the dimmest, feeblest tinge of a campfire out there in the blackness. They led K'rina on a wide looping detour, and it was the Kyrinin who decided when they had put sufficient ground between them and the distant flames to let her move freely again, in accordance with whatever mute instinct drove her.

  Once there was laughter. It drifted to them from the west, clear but thin. It was a despairing, straining laughter, like the cry of some forlorn animal, closer cousin to misery than joy. It rose and fell, and lost its shape and dwindled away.

  For a time Taim was sure he could hear Orisian mumbling to himself. He could not see his Thane's lips so could not be certain, and the sound was far too soft for any words to reach him. It worried him, for Orisian had seemed in the last few days to be on the brink of some entirely solitary, personal desolation. Like a man clinging to a branch at the river's edge, half in the current and half out of it, his strength failing, the pull of the water growing.

  They halted at last, and took cover in a drainage channel that ran close to a burned-out farmhouse. The water was not as deep as it should have been--the channel was blocked somewhere, perhaps by rubble or a slide of earth--but still it came up over the tops of their boots as they crouched there watching the first grey light of dawn leach into the eastern sky. Taim had to hold K'rina down to prevent her from clambering to her feet and going blindly on. He did it as gently as he could, and she was far too slight and weakened to resist him.

  They had not spoken one to another all through the night. The silence had become embedded. Taim was taken by surprise when Orisian broke it.

  "Why?" he asked Varryn softly.

  That this was a return to some unfinished matter between them was plain. At first he doubted whether the Kyrinin would respond. The answer came, though, as perhaps it would not have done but for that long night the three of them had spent together in this hostile land.

  "Because she asked me," Varryn said. "Because I was not there when she took the wound. If I was there, perhaps she would not have been wounded, but a... a burning was in me. I was lost to myself, lost in the hunting of the enemy. A thing that can make such a madness... it should stop. It should end."

  The quiet wrapped itself about them again, and Taim let his eyes close. He had become accustomed to exhaustion, inured in part to its crippling effects, but it was heavy now.

  "Because a good man died to win this woman for you," Varryn said unexpectedly. "He would run with you now, if he lived. I run for him. Because I saw Anain die. I saw trees made dust. The man who can do this... he will make the ground upon which we walk a dead thing. He will shape clouds out of fear and hide the sun, and we will walk in shadows. It would be a good thing to kill him. Are these reasons enough?"

  "Yes," whispered Orisian after a while. "It's enough."

  Taim opened his eyes in time to see Kan Avor emerging from the night. Its low grey mass lay across the valley like a granite mountain that had collapsed in on itself. Tendrils of smoke ascended from the ruins towards the light seeping over it from the east. Clouds of black birds climbed from their roosts, and even here, even at this distance, Taim could hear them calling: a raucous, fierce greeting of the new day.

  *

  "I thought they would be everywhere," Orisian muttered as he stared out over the lip of that muddy ditch. He shifted a little to take his weight off a stone in the bank that dug into his hip. "I suppose I imagined there would be armies here, the whole valley an armed camp. But it's... it's a wasteland."

  Taim grunted. "We've seen what happened elsewhere. And to the White Owls, and to us. If there are armies here, it looks like it'll be armies of the dead, and the mad."

  Orisian glanced up towards the dim sky.

  "It won't be properly light for a while yet. We might reach the ruins, don't you think? Without being seen?"

  Neither Taim nor Varryn made any reply. Both warriors stared out across the level plain towards the hulking mass of Kan Avor. When Orisian looked, he saw no movement, no sign of life save those few thin columns of smoke rising from the ruins, but he was prepared to await the verdict of more experienced eyes.

  He feared the consequences if they judged it necessary to await the return of night, though. The darkness brought entirely too much with it now. What was the working of utter exhaustion upon him, and what the corrupting influence of Aeglyss and the Shared, he did not know. But whatever the cause, he dreaded the prospect of yet more black hours in which he would be hunted by his own mind.

  He had heard the voices of the dead: Inurian, his father, Rothe, others he did not even recognise yet had known to be shaped without living breath. He had felt waves of wretched dismay breaking over him. For a time--no dream this, something sharper, more potent--he had found himself no longer trudging through the fields but curled in the corner of his childhood bedchamber in Castle Kolglas. Folded in there, bunched into a ball, with his arms covering his head, too terrified to open his eyes. He remembered hope but did not feel it. It might take but one more night to extinguish even that slender memory of it.

  "The woman could go alone now," Varryn said quietly. "It is not so far, if this dead city is the end of her journey."

  "No," Orisian said. "Whoever is in there, sitting around those fires... she'll blunder into them."

  Taim laid a soft hand over K'rina's mouth to stifle a murmur.

  "If we can make it to cover before the sun's in the sky, before the cold's relented enough to get people moving..." he muttered without enthusiasm. "I like our chances no better if we try to hide out here"

  They went on, stumbling on feet deadened by the cold water. Orisian felt desperately exposed, yet his spirits rose. He was liberated from the suffocating, haunted darkness. Even the grim transformation of his homeland that the advancing daylight revealed could not entirely restore the despair that had been riding his back.

  They trod on land that should, at this time of year, have been submerged beneath the reflective pools of the Glas Water. Now it was a great sprawl of black, almost liquid mud, dead reed and debris. There were rotted timbers that had been in the water's grip for decades; the skeletal hull of a little boat abandoned by some fisherman or fowler years ago; even, in places, the shrunken, withered remains of fish that had been stranded by the receding flood, and must have been hidden from scavengers by snow.

  Once, as they struggled across that wasted expanse in the gloomy dawn, there was a figure, far away across the mire: some lone wanderer, stumbling and lurching and falling as they did themselves. Too far away to be a threat. Yet Orisian could not help but stare as he splashed through one slick after another of black water. There was something in that lone, tiny figure that held him. He found himself thinking--believing--that it was him; that he was watching himself, from this great distance, and seeing himself as he truly was.

  K'rina led them closer and closer to the ruined city, and soon enough Orisian could distinguish the outlines of what had once been individual buildings. That was when they started to find bodies. Some of them were half-buried in the soft earth, some lying in pools. Some were old, picked at by animals, decaying; most were fresh, their features not yet marred, the dried blood not yet washed by rain from their wounds. There were discarded weapons strewn amongst them and here and there the corpse of a horse.

  The city rose out of the marsh stealthily. First a few shaped stones, barely visible amongst the rushes. Then a stretch of wall that appeared from the sodden earth and sank back into it within a few paces. Then a stretch of paved road, then the suggestion of a house in a straight-sided pattern of rubble. Then they were amongst it, and Kan Avor showed itself to them.

  Sullen dogs staring at them appraisingly as they passed. Rats a dark ripple over the ground as they scattered from a corpse at the sound of Orisian's footsteps. A
campfire giving out one of those faint pillars of smoke that they had seen from out in the valley, but abandoned. No one to tend it or relish its warmth.

  The dead. Lying in drifts along a street where some cruel battle had recently been fought out. Beneath a crowd of crows that rose sluggishly from their feast when disturbed, but went no further than the nearest uneven remnant of a wall, and settled there in a patient black line. The dead. Clustered around the ashes of an extinct fire, still wrapped in sleeping blankets.

  And the living. A woman, haggard without being old, sitting alone in the ruin of a courtyard. She rose when she saw them and came feebly towards them, but fell and could not rise again. Orisian was not sure whether it had been desperation or anger he had seen on her face.

  A little cluster of the sick, at the base of a flight of foreshortened stairs that ascended towards some destination long lost. They coughed and sweated and shivered, and embraced one another, and watched Orisian and the others without hope, interest, or appeal.

  Varryn turned and hissed a soft warning, but too late. A handful of warriors emerged ahead of them, coming round a corner and halting, staring towards them in confusion.

  "Hold onto K'rina," Taim said at once.

  Orisian did so, clamping her thin wrist in one hand and pulling her towards the shelter of a shapeless pile of rubble. She struggled against him, driven by a fiercer, stronger desire than ever before to continue on.

  One of the Black Roaders was loading her crossbow. The others--spearmen--charged. Varryn calmly plucked an arrow from his quiver. He raised his bow, loosed the arrow in a single fluid, rapid movement. The woman with the crossbow fell dead even as she was lifting it to her shoulder.

  Taim walked out to meet the three charging spearmen. One of them was growling as he ran. Taim flicked the outstretched spear of the first aside with his sword, and crouched to put his shield into the man's knees. The helpless, hapless Black Roader, undone by his own reckless pace, was sent cartwheeling right over Taim, landing hard on arms and head in the middle of the street.

  Taim surged up and sideways, one spear thrust missing him entirely, the other deflected upwards by his shield. He cut the second man down as he ran past. The third found Varryn coming to meet him, and slowed a touch to level his spear once more. Orisian could not even follow what happened, for the Kyrinin was ruthlessly fast. A blur of spears, the crack of wood against wood and then against skull, and a single lunging stab in and out again. Varryn was already walking over to kill the man Taim had first tumbled as his opponent looked down in surprise at the blood spreading across his stomach, let his spear fall, and sat clumsily down on the cobblestones, pressing both hands against his belly.

  "We need the worst, the most tangled and confused of the ruins," said Taim as he sheathed his sword. "The harder the going, the less likely we are to be seen or to stumble across trouble."

  Orisian nodded. K'rina was still pulling against him. It seemed, though, that she did not understand what it was that restrained her. She did not look at him, merely strained against his grip like a sheep snagged on some thorn bush. When he followed the line of her gaze, it led him to the dark knot of taller, more massive ruins in the city's heart. That was where she wanted to go. That was where whatever called so insistently to her would be found.

  VIII

  Kanin rose feebly through oceans of pain. He was made of it, and inhabited it. The light he ascended towards hurt him. The hard stone he began to feel beneath him woke aches in his muscles. And his hands... his hands gathered into them all that ocean through which he swam. They were like fire.

  He moaned as he forced open his crusted eyes. The pain of his maimed hands was beyond anything he could have conceived of. There was nothing else save that searing, pounding, crippling torment. All that he saw and heard came to him through the howl of agony, rendered all but senseless by its journey.

  Shraeve was standing before Aeglyss. Saying something, angry. The na'kyrim simply stared at her.

  Shraeve shouted at him. Kanin could not make out what she was saying. Her anger could not penetrate his pain. But then, though his lips did not move, Aeglyss spoke, and Kanin could hear his words, for they were of the same stuff as his pain, and thus within him. A part of him.

  "The Shadowhand is dead. I can't remember... did I tell you that? He died. And was glad of it. I tasted him as he faded into... into the Shared. Into me. No, it doesn't matter. He served his purpose. He did what I required of him.

  "As did you, my fierce raven, until this... this doubt entered into you. What happened? Is it too bright for you, this light you have helped to reveal? I tell you there is no more need for armies or for wars, that the victory is already won. But you don't understand. You don't hear. Very well. Very well."

  Something else amongst Kanin's pain then. A flow, a gathering of force. Shraeve had gone down onto her knees. One hand reached impotently towards Aeglyss, the other fumbled at the hilt of one of her swords.

  "I knew you would turn against me eventually," Kanin heard the great voice say, almost sad. "The last of them, perhaps, but in the end... the same. But I can heal you of this betrayal, Shraeve. The Shadowhand is gone... that fragment of my will I lodged in his mind is returned to me. I can give it to you, and bind us closer than ever before. I can give you back that faith you have lost."

  Shraeve was sitting back on her heels, her spine arching, her head tipping back. Her arms fell limp at her sides. Her mouth was open, and though Kanin could hear nothing from her, he thought she might be screaming.

  "Yes..." the halfbreed's voice whispered in the bones of Kanin's skull. "You don't have to leave me yet. Never. You'll stay at my side. Can you see, Thane? Do you see? This is what your sister submitted herself to. She became a part of me, as she could never have been a part of you."

  Kanin fainted away at that moment, but the refuge of insensibility was fleeting. He was called back, dragged back into that foul hall of pain and cruelty and horrors. Aeglyss had not moved. Shraeve was striding towards the door. Kanin knew--or was shown--that the Inkallim was no longer as she had been. Though he saw two people before him, there was but a single will.

  "We might need her yet, Thane," the monster murmured inside him. "There is an... intent. Somewhere near. Intent. Not fierce, not burning, but clear. Becoming clear. I feel it but cannot find it. We will see. You and I. We will see."

  *

  Never had Eska moved with such care and precision. A near-lifetime of training, of submission to the strictures and teachings of the Hunt, went into her every delicate step over the loose rubble. She judged every fall of her foot with minute attention; assessed and refined her balance constantly. She passed across the treacherous territory of Kan Avor as silently and slowly as would a cat suspecting the presence of an unprepared mouse.

  She did not return to her previous vantage point. To do so would be absurdly reckless, and though her emotions were running high, they were not yet so incapacitating as to rob her of all sense. She found instead a more distant but well concealed perch. There was an empty courtyard that must once have been colonnaded, for there were the stumps of columns, like a line of dead trees. Set into its furthest wall were shelved alcoves in which she guessed statues once had stood. Those statues were long gone, and Eska crouched in place of one of them, half her own height above the ground. She was in shadow there and confident none but the most acute of eyes would uncover her.

  From that secluded nook she could gaze out across the ruined court and through a gap in the opposite wall--originally a window perhaps, but now roughened into a ragged hole--into the street beyond. Thirty paces up that street, in her line of sight, two Battle Inkallim stood outside the door from which she had seen the halfbreed emerge to confront Kanin oc Horin-Gyre. The door, she assumed, behind which the na'kyrim now lurked, somewhere in the crumbling palace. She meant to put an end to him--was determined upon it as she had been upon no other task in her life--but would do so meticulously. Carefully. And that required the remova
l of those who would protect him.

  She had seen no sign of other Inkallim on her approach to this hiding place. Had seen in fact hardly anyone who was not obviously sick in body or mind or both. The whole city had declined into a kind of demented lassitude. Whatever unnatural pall of corruption lay over the place--and she could feel it herself, feeding the turbulent emotions within her--had defeated and destroyed all save a handful of its inhabitants.

  She set one bolt down on the ledge at her feet. Held another between her teeth while she cocked the bow. Everything was done slowly, with small movements. She had nothing and no one to fall back on this time. There could be no mistakes.

  She took aim. She visualised the flight of the bolt, its dipping flight across the courtyard, through the window, out into the light and on into flesh. It was clear in her mind's eye. The man she had taken as her target was looking away, talking to his companion. She exhaled, waited for a single heartbeat and released the bowstring. As soon as it was gone, she knew it was a good kill. If the man did not make some sudden, unexpected move, he was dead.

  She lowered the crossbow and levered its string back into place. She did not watch the first bolt's flight as she reached for the next, but she listened attentively and was rewarded with the thud of its strike and the cry of surprise that greeted it. She raised the reloaded bow and settled herself for the second time.

  One of the Inkallim was down, moving fitfully and, she could tell from those movements, hopelessly. The second was running down the line of her aim. He was good, she acknowledged. Alert and fast. She fixed her eyes on his chest, just off centre, and exhaled.

  The Inkallim veered abruptly out of sight. She could hear him for a moment, but then even that clue was taken away. She dropped lightly to the ground. Her spear rested against the wall by the alcove, but she left it where it was for now. If he got close enough for her to need a spear, she would most likely be in fatal trouble anyway.