Godless World 3 - Fall of Thanes

by Brian Ruckley

  She strained her senses, reaching out to gather in any traitorous sound or glimpse that might offer itself. Nothing came. She turned slowly, crossbow poised. Nothing. She waited.

  The Inkallim came rushing from behind her. She heard his boots on the stone slabs. She spun and looked into his eyes, and the crossbow trembled in her hands as it loosed its cargo. The bolt knocked the raven off his feet. Eska puffed out her cheeks.

  She caught dark movement at the very edge of her field of vision. Turned. And saw Shraeve sprinting towards her. The door on the far side of the street stood open. Shraeve was running for the hole in the wall that separated them. There was no time for another bolt. Eska reached blindly for her spear.

  Shraeve leaped, bent her head down, folded her knees up into her chest, and came flashing through the ragged window. Eska had her spear in her hand and was running before the raven hit the ground. She ran not for the open door, but for the ruins. Her only chance, she knew, would be if she could rid herself of Shraeve.

  Eska had always been fast, even by the standards of the Hunt. Shraeve matched her, though. Eska could measure in the sound of the raven's pounding feet the ebbing away of her hopes. She cut into alleyways, vaulted fallen walls, swept over tumbled stones lying like scree against the face of a building. And Shraeve drew gradually closer.

  Eska burst upon a band of ragged people struggling over the corpse of a dog. They were pulling it this way and that, snarling at one another. They looked up and let the carcass fall. To her they were made of stone. She weaved her path through them without breaking stride, heard their cries like low moans falling from her back. She heard too their more strident cries as Shraeve ploughed through them, and the sound of impacts and bodies falling.

  Eska asked her legs for more and found they had but little to give her. The slightest lengthening of her stride. That was all. She still held her crossbow in one hand, her spear in the other. They hampered her and grew steadily heavier. A passageway spat her out into open ground: a wide square speckled with pale bodies from which birds rose and dogs retreated at her sudden appearance.

  She turned, out in the open, chest heaving, lungs burning, to face Shraeve. Who slowed as she came near, lapsing into a casual walk and then coming to a halt. She had not even drawn her swords. She stood there empty-handed, and regarded Eska with narrow, dispassionate eyes.

  "My feet are on the Road," Eska said breathlessly, and flung the crossbow.

  She darted forward in its wake, both hands set firmly on her spear. Shraeve dodged the spinning bow with ease and reached for her swords. By the time Eska closed with her, the blades were free but still high. It looked like a trap to Eska, who could see the shaft of her spear shattering beneath downward blows. At the last moment she snatched the blade of the spear aside and brought the butt round in a low sweep towards Shraeve's knee. The raven danced back out of reach.

  Shraeve rushed forward behind that failed attack, but Eska, retreating, managed to spin the spear in her hands in time to level its tip and fend off the charge. They circled one another. Eska placed her feet carefully, mistrusting the uneven ground. She never let her attention stray from Shraeve, though. She did not expect this to last long.

  "You have betrayed the faith," she said, in the slender hope of winning some minor advantage by distracting the raven. But Shraeve did not even blink. She might as well have been deaf.

  Eska caught the slight dip in Shraeve's hips. It gave the merest instant of warning. Shraeve surged forward. Eska stabbed. Shraeve crossed her swords beneath the spear and snapped them up. Eska watched the shaft of her spear caught in the intersection of those two rising blades, lifted by them, its barbed point guided harmlessly over Shraeve's shoulder. She tried to whip it back, prepare for another lunge, but it was too late. Shraeve somehow parted her swords in such a way that one pushed the spear out high and wide as the other came low and flat for Eska's belly. It was smoother and neater and faster than anything Eska had ever seen.

  She twisted desperately, but still the blade sliced across her lower back. She felt it cutting her. And still Shraeve was moving. Inside the spear now, she pivoted on her leading foot and kicked Eska in the stomach.

  Eska staggered. Bile burned up her throat and she gagged. Her spear was torn from her hands. Her heels met a block of stone and she fell. The back of her head hit another hard angle as she landed, and pain encircled her skull.

  She grimaced up and saw Shraeve standing over her, swords already returning to their sheaths. Eska tried to roll onto her hands and knees, but her wounded back cramped and the searing pain locked her in place. Shraeve picked up the barbed spear. She held it over Eska's stomach. Drew it back in preparation for the final strike.

  Then suddenly lifted her head, and turned it to one side, frowning. As if she caught some summons on the air. Eska could hear nothing. But Shraeve straightened, shook her head once. Eska tried to roll aside again, and this time she mastered her body's protests. She began to move just as Shraeve, almost absently, punched the spear down.

  It went through Eska's side. She heard its point grating on the stones beneath her, felt her blood following it. She gasped and took hold of the spear's shaft with one hand. Through eyes almost shut by pain, she saw Shraeve turning away, running back towards the centre of Kan Avor.

  IX

  They crawled through the wreckage of Kan Avor like cautious rats picking over the carcass of a whale. Were it not for K'rina, it would have been easy to lose track of where they were and where they were heading. Every time taller walls or buildings closed about them, Orisian lost all sense of direction. K'rina knew, though. Always and instinctively. She would have scrambled recklessly and eagerly, as fast as she could go, through the ruins if they had let her.

  It fell to Orisian to restrain her, for Taim and Varryn spent their entire concentration upon scouring the way ahead for any hint of danger. There was little. One man--a warrior from one of the Black Road Bloods--they found trying to light a fire with a pathetic pile of damp sticks. Varryn killed him quietly. Other than that, the only movement they detected was distant.

  Orisian was struggling with a mounting pain inside his head: not in the bone but deep, in the place where his thoughts dwelled. It came and went, but each time it retreated it returned stronger and sharper. There was whispering as well, but that he was becoming accustomed to. The competing tasks of preventing K'rina from rushing on ahead and traversing the derelict terrain safely and quietly himself were demanding enough to keep him from slipping entirely into the diffuse besieging despair and anger he felt all about him.

  He had the strange sense that they were falling, not advancing. Some great pit was drawing them into itself. Yet of all the feelings clamouring for his attention, fear was the least of them. He had somehow moved beyond the reach of that particular assailant. Perhaps he was simply too tired, in all possible ways, to succumb. The utter desolation of Kan Avor, the physical and mental destitution of those they had found alive here, the weight of the dead upon the city: all of this seemed to be murmuring to him that it was too late. Whatever happened, a wound had been delivered to the world that could never be quite healed. Too much had been broken for it ever to be restored to its former state.

  Still he went on. And if he detected an increasingly wild edge to Varryn's movement and gaze, he chose to ignore it. If he thought he saw Taim's shoulders sinking gradually lower, and a grim, sombre intensity taking hold of the warrior, he said nothing. Kan Avor had them all in its grip, and it could only be endured, not escaped.

  K'rina led them, in the bleak afternoon light, to a street over which the greatest of Kan Avor's surviving edifices loomed. It might have been a palace in the lost days of the Gyre Blood's dominion. It had the stubs of towers still adorning its upper reaches, and faded carvings in its stonework. Blank and empty windows looked out from high in its walls over the grey ruins.

  The na'kyrim almost tore free of Orisian's grasp as they crouched behind a low wall, staring at the open door op
posite them. He had to take a firm hold of her shoulders with both hands to keep her from running out into the street and bolting for that door. She hissed in frustration and tried to shake him loose.

  "Leads to a stairway," Taim murmured.

  "Is that an Inkallim?" Orisian asked, staring at the corpse slumped against the base of the wall just outside the doorway.

  "I think so."

  "Not long dead," Varryn observed. His tone was tense, as if his jaw and lips and tongue were becoming too stiff to easily move.

  "I'll take a look," Taim said. "Wait for my sign."

  He advanced cautiously into the street, looking up and down its length. He edged closer to the doorway, pausing to lean tentatively down towards the fallen Inkallim, searching for any movement in his chest.

  Satisfied, Taim leaned through the open door. After a brief, tense wait, he withdrew and gestured towards Orisian. Varryn moved at once, eager to throw off his enforced immobility. Orisian followed more slowly, K'rina bucking in his grasp.

  "Seems deserted," Taim whispered as they gathered by the doorway. "Can't hear anything. Perhaps they're all dead."

  "Not all of them," Orisian said. "Not him. You can feel that he's not dead, can't you?"

  Taim nodded tightly.

  "Whatever K'rina wants, it's in here," said Orisian. "He's in here."

  "Someone," Varryn hissed.

  "Where?" demanded Taim.

  The Kyrinin nodded towards the end of the street, already reaching for an arrow. As he did so, an Inkallim emerged. She was tall, and ran with long, easy strides. Her black hair was tied back. She carried two swords, held loose at her side, slightly splayed ahead of her. She betrayed no surprise at their presence, but increased her pace and came racing towards them.

  Varryn's arrow sprang out to meet her. She swayed, and it skimmed past her arm. Orisian was astonished.

  "Get into the stairwell," snapped Taim.

  She was coming still faster. Varryn snatched another arrow from his quiver and sent it darting for her chest. Again the Inkallim dipped and twisted in mid-stride, but she was closer now, with less time to react. The arrow smacked into her shoulder and stayed there. She barely faltered.

  "Keep her out of here, if you can," Orisian said to Taim. He yielded at last to K'rina's silent demands, and let the na'kyrim drag him into and up the stairwell. She climbed quickly, and he followed, one hand on her trailing wrist, the other clumsily drawing his sword. He scraped it against the confining wall of the spiral.

  His head was spinning. He felt as if he was fighting against a raging headwind as he climbed those rough steps. Some great pressure leaned against him. It was nothing conscious, nothing directed, just the immense weight of whatever he drew near. Now, too late, he felt fear taking hold of him. Whether it was his, or someone else's, he did not know, but it tightened and tightened.

  At the head of the stairway was a plain wooden door. Orisian pulled K'rina aside just as she reached out for it. He leaned close, listening intently. He could hear nothing, in part because there was a throbbing bellow building within his head. He closed his eyes for a moment and fought back the terror that made him want to sink down onto the ancient stone and curl up there; fought the empty certainty of his own impotence that flooded into him; fought the sapping weariness that made granite of his arms and legs.

  He fought against all this but could not defeat it. Could not entirely hold it back. But nor was he defeated by it. He slowly pushed the door open and led the suddenly calm and compliant K'rina inside.

  The daylight coming in through the windows and through the holes in the collapsing roof was not strong enough to dispel every shadow from the hall. The rows of pillars that ran the length of the chamber on either side laid faint dark bars down across the floorboards. There was a musty, damp smell.

  Some way down the hall, slumped against the foot of a pillar, was a man Orisian did not at first recognise. He took in his haggard features, his battered chain mail. It was difficult to tell whether the man was alive or dead, awake or asleep. But his face was familiar. Orisian's gaze dropped to the man's hands, resting in his lap. They were thick, like fat, overfilled waterskins. And black and blue and yellow with damage. The fingers lay at odd, ungainly angles. Orisian looked back to the man's face and frowned. It was the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir, he realised. The man who had hunted him through the streets of Koldihrve, who had tried and failed to kill him there in the Vale of Tears.

  Orisian took a hesitant step into the room. The old soft floorboards creaked beneath his boots. He glanced at K'rina, puzzled by an abrupt change in her demeanour. She was staring down the hall, her grey eyes entirely absorbed in whatever she saw there.

  Orisian peered into the gloom that filled the far end of the chamber. He thought he could see, pale and indistinct, some small, sunken figure sitting there. Unmoving. Corpse-like.

  "Who are you?" a vast and sullen voice asked inside his mind.

  Taim barely had time to ready himself before the Inkallim was upon them. He lifted his shield across his chest. Saw Varryn set both hands on his bow and draw it back like a club. Then she was there, and leaping high into the space between them. Taim thought she meant perhaps to fling herself beyond them in an attempt the reach the doorway they blocked, but even as the expectation formed, he saw that it was wrong.

  Both blades lashed down towards him, clattering against his shield with unexpected force and driving him backwards. Her right leg kicked out at Varryn. The Kyrinin was fast enough to crash his bow into her thigh; not fast enough to avoid the lunging foot that hammered into the base of his throat and sent him staggering into the wall. Taim heard the crack of his head against the stonework quite clearly. Varryn slumped down.

  The Inkallim landed with perfect balance and poise. She flicked a single glance at the stunned Kyrinin, then fixed her gaze on Taim. As she did so, though, one blade reached back towards Varryn.

  Taim roared and rushed at her, shield foremost, sword held back for a stabbing thrust. The Inkallim drifted out of his path with absurd ease and casually cut open his upper arm as she did so. But he had put her out of reach of Varryn, for now at least.

  She rose out of her fighting stance and took a few leisurely steps sideways. They carried her a little closer to the door. Taim backed towards it. Varryn was not stirring. There was no way Taim could defend both stairway and Kyrinin without quickly losing one or both. Suffused with sharp guilt, he chose the stairway, and hoped that the Inkallim cared more for that than she did for finishing an unconscious foe.

  "I saw you once before, I think," he said to her. "In a snowstorm, at Glasbridge."

  "Did you?" She seemed entirely uninterested. "Stand aside."

  "I can't do that. My Thane commanded me to hold this stair."

  "That boy who was with you? He's nothing."

  "He is my Thane."

  Her lip curled in disdain. She reached up and hooked a single finger over the shaft of the arrow still embedded in her shoulder. With the most fleeting of grimaces, she snapped it off, leaving just a split stub protruding from her flesh. Taim considered attacking her in that moment of distraction, but in truth it was no distraction at all, for her eyes never left him, her balance never wavered.

  She let the broken arrow fall and sprang forward in a flurry of whirling blades, belabouring his shield, ringing against his own sword. His defence was desperate. This raven was astonishingly fast and precise. She nicked his thigh. Almost had his eye; would have done, had he not read the sudden change in her blade's course at the last possible moment and jerked back.

  She paused as he retreated into the doorway itself.

  "You're too late," he said, hoping to keep her attention upon him and away from Varryn.

  She glared at him but made no reply. She moistened her lips. There was a constant shiver running down Taim's neck and spine, a kernel of pain building behind his eyes, a flutter of bitter hopelessness in his heart. None of this he believed to be truly his, and he set himself against i
t. But it would not release him entirely. It sapped his strength and his will.

  His mind reached for hope, for inspiration. Its harvest was meagre. There was perhaps the faintest suggestion that the arrow hampered her movements. If so, that would only grow worse if he could live long enough to give it the chance. And there was the stairway. He edged back into the shadows at the foot of the spiral of steps. She needed space to get the best from those fearsome swords and from her speed. Above her, with shield between them, he would have a chance. To delay her, if nothing else. But only if she came after him.

  "You cannot reach him," he said as he reached back to set his foot on the first of the steps.

  She smiled then, the malevolent smirk of a wolf.

  "You think not?" she said, and ran at him.

  Orisian could not answer the question that had been put to him. The depth and resonant power of the voice that had asked it stunned him, and made him for a moment stand quite still, letting his sword and shield hang down.

  "You mean me harm." The voice rang like the mightiest, most sombre of bells. "That I can feel, can know. But it's a cold kind of... regret. It doesn't burn in you as it did in the others."

  Orisian gathered himself, almost groaning at the effort it took to shake off the deadening pain and the weight of the fell mind that pressed down upon his own. K'rina was walking very slowly forward, taking tiny steps. That roused Orisian enough to get his own, leaden body moving. He forced himself ahead of the na'kyrim.

  "Who is that with you?" the voice asked him. "I can't see. My eyes... Can't find anything... What? You've brought some empty vessel with you? A body with no mind, no thought, no life in it?"

  Orisian advanced, each halting stride a struggle. He could hear Kanin muttering something, but did not look. He kept his gaze fixed on the na'kyrim, who slowly became clear amidst the shadows as Orisian drew nearer.

  He thought at first that Aeglyss must be dead. A naked, hairless, scabrous head on a lopsided and bruised neck. The face, what little Orisian could see of it, marred by a score of tiny wounds and blisters and blemishes. Streaked with blood. Fragile shoulders, the bony points of them showing through the gown. That gown itself, foully decorated with stains. The hands, one lying atop the other in Aeglyss' lap, so wasted that Orisian could see every bone through the skin. Each finger ending in an open sore where the nail should have been.