Bloodheir

VIII

“What would you have me do?” Cerys asked wearily. “Kill him?”

She looked from face to face. There was no challenge in her gaze. The question was an honest one. She had no answers of her own.

Of Highfast’s Council, Eshenna was gone, and Alian remained too sick, too crippled by the presence of Aeglyss, to rise from her bed. The others sat here, enmeshed in worry, seeking solutions to a problem that all of them, Cerys suspected, knew was beyond them.

“No,” Mon Dyvain murmured. “We cannot cut down the Dreamer, or allow Herraic’s men to do so. Can we? We cannot give up on him so easily.”

“Hardly easily,” Amonyn said. “But I agree. There is still some hope, however faint its light might be. His body lives, even if another dwells in it. His mind might yet return. Aeglyss must exhaust his patience soon.”

Cerys sighed. So often, over the years, she had found Amonyn to be of the same mind as her in all things. So often, his calm confidence had been an aid to her as she bore the heavy duties of the Elect. Now, though… now she was not so sure. Aeglyss showed little sign of running out of patience so far, though he had been shut away in a long-disused bedchamber for a full day and night now. They took him food and water, and Cerys had given him false promises of further discussion, even aid. Through it all, he had barely spoken. He simply stared at anyone who entered the room. They all left disturbed and distressed.

Amonyn smiled at her. It was a weary smile, but heartfelt. He clings to the possibility of escape from this net we’re caught in, she thought. Through all his weariness, he finds cause for hope. Amonyn had gone without sleep now for a longer spell than was wise. Until he was summoned to this gathering, he had been constantly at the bedside of Mordyn Jerain, tending to the Chancellor’s grave injuries as only he could. It had drained him, left him more emptied out than Cerys had ever seen him. Such use of the Shared was always punishing, but now, with everything twisted out of recognition by Aeglyss, it was doubly so.

“No.”

The word was spoken with such precision and firmness that it caught all of them unawares. Olyn, the blind old keeper of crows, sat with his arms folded across his chest, his brow furrowed in grave concentration.

“No?” Cerys asked quietly.

Olyn shook his head, blinked his milky eyes.

“Tyn is gone. The one who lives now in his body is a plague. Nothing will remain unruined if he persists. He is a blight upon this world, and all that’s in it. You all know it, but won’t face it. You all see it. Even these blind old eyes of mine can see it. Who’ll deny it?”

The old man’s lips were trembling. His long silver hair shivered as he turned his head this way and that. It cut Cerys to the quick to see this gentle man so distressed.

“None of us could deny that Aeglyss fouls the Shared with his-”

“No,” Olyn snapped. He laid his hands on the table. They were shaking, trembling against the wood. “Not fouls. Corrupts, wrecks. Never, never… there has never been the like of this. I’ve lived too long that I should be here to learn of it.” He was almost weeping. Cerys looked away. “Am I the only one who dreams of nothing but death and suffering and rage? Who is afraid, at every waking moment, lost to fear? Who can hardly walk in a straight line sometimes, so violent are the storms that buffet my thoughts? Am I?”

No one said anything. Cerys had her hands on her iron chain of office, but the cold metal offered none of the reassurance it sometimes did. What use an Elect, or a Council even, rendered so impotent?

“I am not the only one,” Olyn said. “We can feel death, in the Shared, spreading its raven wings. Its shadow will fall across all things and all peoples. They do not know it yet, but we do. And its cause, its seed, is here, in Highfast. In Tyn. We should kill the body he is in, and hope against hope that in doing so we may harm him. Nothing else makes sense.”

The premonition of something awful came to them all in the same moment. A stillness, a profound hesitation as if every living thing had paused, then the blinding, dizzying surge of raw power through the Shared. Olyn cried out. Cerys staggered to her feet.

The door to the meeting chamber crashed open. A na’kyrim was there, but Cerys could not be certain who: her vision was fragmenting.

“Elect,” the newcomer was gasping. “Come — please come. He is.. he has gone mad.”

Cerys reeled out into the corridor. She could feel Aeglyss inside her skull. Or, at least, she could feel the Shared, but it was no longer easy to tell the difference between the two. She walked into a storm of the mind, and it was as ferocious as any gale that had ever lashed at Highfast.

“Find Herraic,” she gasped, unsure whether anyone could or would hear her. “Bring his men.”

This was terror beyond anything Cerys had ever known: all-embracing, crippling. It howled inside her. She lurched from one side of the passage to the other, fending off the walls as they swung towards her. Every bone, every muscle in her body burned with the desire to run, but run where? Everything around her was warped and twisted. The Shared overwhelmed her, bleeding through and hauling her into madness. The room in which Aeglyss was locked was close, but it might as well have been half the world away.

Her hands scraped along the hard walls of Highfast, but her feet stumbled across a sward of green grass; grass that writhed and flailed, animated by the vast will of the Anain. She smelled the deep, hot, ancient soils of endless forests, chokingly oppressive. The passageway down which she stumbled contorted itself into a chaos of shadows and light, of vague figures that ran alongside her, calling like birds, or screaming in fury. She could hear blades clashing, she could smell the sea, she could feel the blasting heat of a great fire on her face. None of it was real, and all of it was real, for it was flooding out of the Shared and into her. A thousand truths, unfiltered, harvested from all across the world, out of memory and experience, all pouring into her mind and tearing it asunder. And all overlaid by the savage, embittered anger of one man.

Then someone took hold of her hand. Someone was murmuring her name, laying down soft walls of protection around the bruised periphery of her mind. It was Amonyn, of course; there, at her side amidst the madness, easing her back towards a clear sense of herself. She held on to him tightly, and pressed her face into his shoulder for a few moments. When she felt strong enough to look up and into his eyes, she saw there such an enervated, haunted spirit that it almost broke her. But she said nothing. There was nothing to say. They went onwards together.

One of Herraic’s men was hunched down outside the door, his spear lying forgotten at his side. He had wrapped his arms about his knees, pulling his legs in to his chest. He was shaking. Amonyn knelt beside him while Cerys opened the door. She half expected to die in the next few moments.

There was an overturned table. The mattress of the bed had been shredded, its horsehair stuffing disgorged in great black drifts across the floor. The shards of a clay jug were scattered across the room, a great swathe of wet stone on the wall showing where it had struck. And there was blood: on the sheet, on Tyn’s crooked fingers, and on his face, where Aeglyss had clawed furrows out of the flesh of his cheeks.

The eyes that turned upon Cerys were bestial. The snarl was something that could only come from an animal’s throat. Yet he wept, and the grief and pain that swirled about him and buffeted her senses belonged to something more than a beast. He gave no sign of recognising her; she barely recognised herself, for she was adrift now, in the limitless Shared.

“She is gone,” he howled, and the sound staggered her, sent her to her knees, hands clasped uselessly over her ears.

“Lost in the green.” He tore at the gown he wore, ripping open its front, revealing the white skin and the cage of the ribs beneath. “Taken from me. Again, and again, and again. Always to be taken from me.”

He was hobbling towards her, like some tottering corpse. Cerys tried to get to her feet, but he had hold of her and there was a strength in him far greater than anything Tyn’s wasted muscles could have allowed. His fingers dug into her shoulder, crushing down onto bone. She cried out. He lifted her onto her feet, as if she was a child’s straw doll. He pressed her against the wall.

“How?” he shouted into her face. “Tell me! Why have they taken her from me? Dragging her down into the…”

His voice faltered. He gagged and spluttered as if choked by his own rage.

Cerys took a feeble hold on his wrists, but could do nothing to loosen his grip upon her. There was blood on his arms. She could feel it flowing beneath her fingers, from wounds in Tyn’s wrists. How much blood could there be, in this emaciated body?

“Aeglyss,” she murmured. It was not her that he raged against, she knew. The violence that set the Shared afire was not directed at her. It was uncontrolled, unfocused.

“Let me help you,” she managed to say. But he did not seem to hear her.

“They’ll not have me. Not!” He spat the words. His spittle was on her lips, across her eyes.

Then Amonyn was there, hauling at Tyn’s arms. Aeglyss turned and looked upon Amonyn, and Cerys felt the contemptuous hatred surge like a boiling thundercloud. She opened her mouth to cry out in warning, but there was no time. Aeglyss released her, she slumped; he struck Amonyn, just once, across the head.

Amonyn fell, and in that fall somehow the greatest extremities of blind fury were spent. Tyn’s bony shoulders went slack as he stared down at the prostrate figure. Cerys could breathe again, could give her thoughts some kind of form. She steadied herself on her feet, still leaning against the wall. She thought she could hear footsteps, somewhere off in the maze of passageways, drawing closer.

“The healer,” Aeglyss murmured, still staring at Amonyn. He knelt.

“No,” Cerys whispered, unsure of what it was she denied, or feared.

“Be silent. Liar. You think I don’t know your lies? Your deceit?”

She felt cold.

“You’re less than nothing. All of you here, little rats hiding in your tunnels. There’s nothing for me here, nothing that you’ll give me. Ha! Nothing’s given. Only taken.”

He caressed Amonyn’s slack face.

“You think I don’t know you have secrets? You think I don’t know you mean to betray me? I know betrayal, as I know water and meat and the turning of the seasons. It is… it never changes.”

“No,” whispered Cerys. She pushed herself away from the wall, reaching for him.

“Be silent.” And she was, for her throat clenched itself shut and she could draw no breath, and her legs and her arms were twigs, grass. She fell.

“Each day, I grow stronger,” Aeglyss said softly. “Each day, I sink deeper. I learn. Things are revealed to me.” He leaned down close to Amonyn, sniffing at him. “You na’kyrim. You… halfbreeds. There is nothing you can keep from me. You, least of all.”

He rose, and loomed over Cerys. She was stretching out an arm, trying to take hold of Amonyn’s hand. She did not want to die, but she wanted him to die even less.

“You were my own kind,” Aeglyss was saying. She paid him no heed. All that mattered was that she touch Amonyn, that neither he nor she should be alone. “But you want nothing to do with me. I know that. So be it. I am not of your kind any more. I am something else, and I am to have nothing: no companions, no sanctuary, no… It does not matter. The Anain may hunt me, take everything that I love, if they want. You can plot against me. No matter. I take what I need, Elect. There is to be no more trust, no more talking. Not in all the world.”

He came down onto his hands and knees, crouched over her like a dog. She felt his lips brushing her ear.

“You should not have tried to keep secrets from me. I know you have the Shadowhand here, Elect,” he said. And then he collapsed. Tyn lay curled on the floor, his shallow, rattling breath the only sound save the heavy footsteps of Herraic’s warriors coming running.

They buried Rothe in the clearing where he had fallen. Torcaill was disapproving, Orisian knew, eager to be away from that threatening place with its smothering mists and enclosing trees, but he said nothing. Eshenna and Yvane were uneasy, fearful no doubt of any intrusion upon this domain of the Anain, but they raised no complaint. Orisian dug the grave himself, first with a short blade one of the warriors lent him, to break open the soft, wet earth, then with his hands, clawing out great fistfuls of the black soil. Others helped, but he barely registered their presence or their exertions.

The few horses that had not been lost in the sprawling, frantic pursuit and skirmishing through the forest grazed on the glade’s wet grass. Ess’yr and Varryn sat on a log, watching. Sentries looked nervously out on all sides, knowing they had little chance of anticipating any attack. Torcaill himself knelt, cleaning Rothe’s sword. All of this Orisian knew, vaguely, was around him. It seemed like nothing to do with him. He just dug.

They lowered Rothe into the ground. Torcaill laid the sword on his chest, folded his arms across it. Then Orisian laid Rothe’s shield over his hands. As he straightened, the warriors — not many more than twenty of them alive now — stepped forwards, ringing the shallow grave. As one, they bent and began covering Rothe with earth. Orisian watched that face he knew so well gradually, incrementally disappear.

“He deserved a pyre,” he murmured. His jaw throbbed. His mouth was swollen and tasted foul, of blood and ruin. He could not speak well, or clearly.

“He did,” Torcaill agreed. “But this is the best we can do for him. It’s better than others have had, today.”

“They all deserved better. But him especially.”

After it was done, they covered the grave with dead wood and stones.

Orisian sat, numb and cold, while one of the warriors — he did not even know his name — cleaned the dried blood from his face. Probing with his tongue, he could feel the empty sockets of the teeth he had lost. It was not until the needle and sinew began to close up the great gash across his cheek that he felt the pain. It was sharp and insistent enough to cut through the fog that enshrouded his mind. He closed his eyes and endured it as the stitches went in.

Afterwards, Ess’yr beckoned him over. She said nothing, but made him sit at her side. She had collected a few clumps of some pale green moss-like plant. Now she chewed on a little of it. After a few moments, she touched a thumb to his chin and pressed his mouth open. She removed the moist, pulped mass from her own mouth and gently pressed it into the space between his cheek and gum. The juices that oozed from it made his wounds sting.

Wreaths of mist drifted amongst the treetops all around. Orisian stared blankly at them. His gaze slipped down and rested on K’rina. She was sitting cross-legged, rocking back and forth. She turned her hands over, and back and over again, examining them as if she had never seen such strange objects before. The tiny scratches all over her skin were like a fine net. No word, no sense, had passed her lips since they had found her; no sign that she was anything more than a madwoman, lost in the forest. That was the treasure Rothe and the others had died to deliver into Orisian’s hands.

Someone shouted out. Men were running. Ess’yr was on her feet, raising her bow.

“They’re coming again,” Orisian heard. It might have been Torcaill’s voice. He looked at Rothe’s grave. Someone leaped across it, rushing with sword drawn to meet whatever danger now came.

Dull and distant, without thought, Orisian reached for his own blade and rose to his feet.

For two days they waited. Guards stood outside the door behind which the monster lurked. Or possibly lurked. Cerys and others went back and forth from that gloomy chamber, spending hours at Tyn’s bedside, and learned nothing. They found nothing save silence, and a dead, empty space in the Shared. The Dreamer breathed, his eyes moved beneath their lids, but there was no life in him. His body was truly a shell now, an empty, abandoned shell. There was no Tyn, no Aeglyss. The wounds in his face and his wrists dried, but did not heal. Cerys sat and stared into that gaunt face, as if by merely looking she might find some answer. But none came. The Shared was still, unresponsive. The Dreamer did not stir. The iron chain around her neck grew heavier.

Amonyn lay in his own quarters, alive but bruised both without and within. Herraic came to see Tyn himself, and fretted and frowned impotently until Cerys asked him to leave. Mordyn Jerain hesitated between life and death, his wounds half-healed. Olyn stayed in the crows’ roost, and would not emerge. Highfast was paralysed, prostrated by trepidation and gloom and uncertainty. Snow fell, and laid white blankets across the roofs and battlements and courtyards.

During the short hours of daylight, the Elect could busy herself with her duties. She could find enough activity to fend off the darkest of her thoughts. It was an illusory, temporary calm but necessary. At night, she had no such defences, and could not even take comfort in Amonyn’s company. Guilt and doubts circled her, snapping at her.

She wondered if she had failed Tyn, through some lack of wisdom or lack of knowledge in the ways of the Shared. Not for the first time, she thought of Inurian. He might have been Elect instead of her, had he stayed in Highfast. Had that been what he wanted from life. Would his failures have been less?

Now and again, in the sleepless night, Cerys would shake and scold herself for giving in to such futile self-doubt. It served no purpose to play these games. What was done, was done. Still, dawn would find her at the Dreamer’s bedside. She rested her elbows on his sheets, held her chain of office clasped in her hands. She closed her eyes and wondered if Tyn was still there, somewhere, and if he would hear her when she asked for his forgiveness.

Then, on the morning of the third day: “Elect.”

She opened her eyes. Tyn was gazing at her. He was smiling. And it was not Tyn.

“They are here.”

He was rising from the bed, casting aside the sheet. She could only watch.

“Did you think I had gone? No, Elect. Just waiting. I do not mean to leave this place empty-handed. And I do have friends, after all. Would you like to meet them?”

He came around the bed to her side, took her hand in his. There was no warmth in his skin, only the cold of dead flesh.

“Walk with me, Elect. Show me your mighty library, your precious store of wisdom that fills you with such pride.”

She saw — or thought she saw — him enshrouded by a vast cape of shadow that swelled up behind him like a living thing. It drowned out the world, leaving her alone with him, the two of them alone in a dark domain where the very air was made of his thoughts, the ground upon which she walked was made of his hatred for her and for all things.

They moved, though she could not say which of them led the other. A door opened, and there were men there. Warriors. Guards, she vaguely remembered. She saw them faintly, as through a veil. They were saying something, but their words were only sounds that fluttered up against her and fell away, spent and meaningless.

“No,” she heard Aeglyss saying, and his voice was all about her, in her blood and her bones. “The Elect and I are going to the library. You, you are going to the gates. Open them. Open Highfast.”

He drew her onwards, through corridors. They passed by torches burning on the walls. Aeglyss took one and lit their way with it, though the shadows stayed all around them, and the light seemed sickly to Cerys. She recognised the passageways they walked along, knew that they were familiar, but they belonged to someone else, to another life.

They entered into a great chamber, where daylight spilled in through high windows, and there were ranks of writing desks. Cerys smelled parchment and ink and dust. She knew this place. There were people here: just one or two. They were afraid. They cowered. Aeglyss could taste their fear, and she could too. It was a sharp, acrid touch on her tongue, in her nose.

Aeglyss turned around and around, arms outstretched, the flame of his torch crackling.

“Look, Elect. What a wonder.”

She looked, and saw books, and rolls of parchment and shelves. The Scribing Hall, she thought. The library.

“Tyn? Elect, what is happening?” someone called.

She frowned in the direction of the voice. A man was there, half-hidden behind one the desks. He stared out, fearful. Bannain, she thought to herself. I remember his name.

“Nothing,” Aeglyss shouted. Then he had hold of the front of Cerys’s dress. He dragged her close to him. She did not resist, for he was already all around her.

“Wake, Elect. Wake up. You should see this.”

She plummeted back into her body as if falling from a great height into a pool of cold water. She gasped for breath. Her head spun.

“What a task,” Aeglyss cried. “What a burden, to watch over all this for so many years.”

“Leave us!” Cerys shouted, her mind tumbling away into panic.

“No! Whose gratitude have you earned by all these years of devotions? What have you achieved by storing up the past here, making it so precious?”

“Please. Please.”

She cast a desperate glance sideways. Bannain and two scribes were rising hesitantly.

“Forget them,” Aeglyss hissed. “I am here to relieve you of your burdens, Elect. All of you. Memory is no longer needed, for what is to come will be unlike what has been before. There are to be no more secrets. I declare the past dead. Your task is done with. Are you not pleased?”

“Release me.” She struggled against him, but his grip was firm.

“Oh, I intend to. I will take the weight of your responsibilities from your shoulders.”

He threw her down, and she sprawled to the floor, sending a chair skittering away across the flagstones. He was laughing. Savage glee poured forth from Tyn’s stale throat, coarse and wild. Cerys got to her feet.

Aeglyss strode down a rank of shelves, drawing the flame of the torch he carried across the books and the scrolls and the manuscripts.

“No,” Cerys shouted, but he ignored her.

Gouts of black smoke burst up. She could see flames taking hold. Everything that mattered about Highfast was here, in this hall. And Aeglyss laughed as he swept the torch back and forth. Cerys moved towards him, but Bannain was faster. He darted forwards, and as he did so he faded. He folded the Shared about himself for a heartbeat, spilled the Elect’s gaze off his back. He was gone. Gone to her, but not to Aeglyss. Tyn’s arm snapped around. Sparks erupted in a frenzied cloud as the torch struck Bannain on the side of the head.

He crashed against one of the desks. Aeglyss followed him, kicking aside a chair that came between them.

“You think tricks like that will work on me? That is my ocean you’re swimming in, child.”

Bannain groaned and rolled onto his side. Cerys glimpsed a red welt across his temple. She cast about for something, anything, to use against Aeglyss. Smoke was thickening the air now, rasping down into her chest with every breath. The sound of the hungry, consuming flames filled her ears, and their hateful, triumphant light danced across the walls. She took up a chair and rushed towards Aeglyss.

He crouched and struck Bannain’s head again and again with the torch. Embers spun away across the floor. There was a stench of burned hair and flesh. Bannain was not struggling. Aeglyss laughed.

Cerys smashed the chair across his back. It burst into fragments. He staggered up, dropping the flaming brand. He spun and seemed to Cerys to fill her vision. Sheets of flame were roaring up the shelves and walls behind him. He bore down on her. There was blood in Tyn’s long hair: ruby strands in that silver waterfall. Smoke billowed across his shoulders.

He took hold of her chain of office and twisted it in his hands, tightening it around her neck.

“Did you want to kill me, Elect? Is that what you wanted?”

There were others beating him, trying to drag him off. He roared defiance and pulled the chain tighter and tighter. Cerys clawed at Tyn’s face. She opened fresh cuts over those that already disfigured it.

“My spears are at the gates, Elect. It is done. I will make war on all the world, if it makes war on me.”

His restraint was crumbling. His wild, blind rage roared through the Shared. He was a terrible thing, she saw now. Worse even than they had feared; more consumed by hate and anger, more potent. He was a tempest that would not cease until it had brought all the world, and all the Shared, to ruin.

Cerys clutched at the chain. So many times she had felt those iron links beneath her fingertips. She smelled his blood, and the smoke. She began to thin. The Shared pulled her gently apart, like a soft breeze working upon the morning’s mist. Tyn’s face was twisted into a furious mask of hatred. She felt something cracking and collapsing in her throat. She saw flames, all around her. Her hands, pale, beautiful, lifted for a moment before her eyes, then dropped. Though she thought her eyes were still open, there was only darkness after that. She surrendered, and let herself end, and fall backwards, dissolving, away and down into the limitless depths.

Herraic Crenn dar Kilkry-Haig could smell smoke. Its acrid taint suffused the air of Highfast. He set down a half-eaten apple, and sniffed.

Herraic was a man aware of his own shortcomings. He sometimes regretted them, in a detached and melancholic way, but had long since stopped imagining he could change himself. As distant cousin to the Thane, he might have expected swift elevation to some lucrative or responsible post; instead, he had filled a succession of undemanding and at times almost trivial positions. For several years he had been harbourmaster, not of Kolkyre or Donnish but of Skeil Anchor, a drab and quiet port frequented only by fishermen and sealers. He had briefly been Captain of the Guard in Stone, a remote town of just a hundred families on the upper reaches of the Kyre. Now he commanded the tiny garrison of Highfast. None was the kind of role that delivered wealth or fame.

Even so, as Captain of Highfast he had found a degree of contentment. Nothing of any great consequence ever happened here amidst the Peaks. His responsibilities were simple and therefore within his capabilities: ensuring the safety of the na’kyrim who dwelled in the castle’s roots, keeping the road out to the west clear of thieves, and maintaining order amongst the few inhabitants of the nearby mountains and forests. Those inhabitants were self-reliant, solitary folk who made almost no demands upon his attention. The sense of having at last found a task to which he was suited had engendered a certain peace in Herraic’s heart.

That peace had been shattered by recent events. He seldom had cause to spend much time with Cerys and the other na’kyrim, but their agitated and despondent state had communicated itself to him over the last two or three weeks. Then the Lannis-Haig Thane had arrived, causing Herraic to fret over everything from the dilapidated appearance of the fortifications to the dismal near-dereliction of the stables in which the Thane’s horse had to be quartered. And shortly after, Herraic found himself playing host to the Shadowhand himself, and in a gravely, perhaps mortally wounded condition at that. The infamous Chancellor would have died by now, but for the care of the na’kyrim healer. He still might.

Finally — the torch to the pyre of Herraic’s dwindling ease — there had been the mysterious business with the na’kyrim risen from his bed after years of dreaming. Herraic had not fully understood the explanation of that, though it had all sounded to him unpleasantly like the kind of thing that went on in olden days, when halfbreeds wielded terrible power.

Now, when he had rashly started to think that things could not get any worse, might even be showing some signs of improvement, he smelled smoke. It was not the familiar oily stink of lamps, nor the homely scent of charcoal from kitchens or brazier. This was a drier, stronger smell. It reminded him of a long ago day when wildfires had torn through the grasslands around Skeil Anchor one parched summer. He knew at once that whatever was burning should not be. He left his quiet chambers and went out into the deep courtyard before the main keep, to discover a world abandoned by reason, plunged into derangement.

Distraught voices and smoke coiled up out of Highfast’s guts. People were running. The crows had burst in black profusion from the roost in the cliff face above the gorge and plumed and tumbled upwards like a thousand leaves caught on a hot wind. They spun screaming about the man-made pinnacles of Highfast. Herraic saw na’kyrim darting from passageways, across doorways; he saw men of his own meagre garrison running to and fro, and those who had come here with the Shadowhand, gathering and shouting, and glaring about in anger and alarm.

The smoke carried with it fear beyond anything it should naturally have induced: fear that seeped in through the nose and eyes and ears and twisted itself around Herraic’s mind, dizzying and nauseating him. His heart raced, as if meaning to tear itself apart. He found images of blood and violence rushing through his head, invading him. When he tried to shout out commands, an inarticulate, barely human wail escaped his throat instead.

He heard the deep, rumbling, grating sound of Highfast’s main gate opening, and turned in confusion. The inner gate already stood open, as it always did during daylight. Herraic could see down the long tunnel that ran out to the bridge and the road and the mountains. There were figures struggling with one another, down there at the end of the passage. They seemed impossibly distant. Herraic had to narrow his eyes to hold back the blurring waves of distortion that threatened to sweep across his vision. They were his men, fighting with each other there at the outer gate: one trying to push it closed once more, the other trying to prevent him. Herraic was dumbfounded.

Someone brushed past him, almost knocking him over.

“It’s the library,” they were shouting. “The halfbreeds have gone mad. They’re killing each other.”

Herraic’s hands were shaking now. Savage emotions — terror, fury — that were not his own had him in their grip. He was watching, in disbelieving shock, his own mind, his life and everything he had ever thought to be true, all coming apart.

More figures running now, up from the gate, through the passageway, like rats rushing up out of the earth towards the light, towards him. Woodwights. Herraic heard himself laughing at the sheer insanity of all this. There were arrows in the air, ringing off Highfast’s ancient stone. Men were dying. He saw it, but no longer understood it. The Captain of Highfast fled, weeping as he ran.

Herraic hid in a long-abandoned storeroom until the cacophony, both outside and within his skull, subsided. He could not tell how long it took, for he was alone and lost and besieged. As the noises — terrible noises, death cries, screams — fell away, so the relentless, disorientating waves of fear receded. His breath came more easily. His mind fell back into a shape he could recognise. And as it did so, he understood that whatever had happened, it had not been a natural thing, of the natural world. It had been some strange intrusion of the inhuman, incorporeal domain of the na’kyrim into his own. He went, still trembling, to discover what kind of disaster had befallen the castle he had been meant to hold. He held his sword out in front of him, knowing that it was far too late for such a gesture, but clinging to that small token of defiance, and the illusory capability it suggested.

There were still fires burning somewhere. He could smell them, and the sky above Highfast was stained with their black-brown breath. He found bodies. In the courtyard, in passageways, in the stables and the kitchens; human and Kyrinin, and na’kyrim too. Some of his men had made a stand in the stables, it seemed, for their corpses were piled there, with horses dead alongside them. There were dead woodwights, stretched out on the cobbles of the yard, and in doorways leading off it. Amongst them, the corpse of the na’kyrim whom Herraic had seen in Highfast’s kitchens. He had looked dead even then. Now, he had assuredly passed into the Sleeping Dark. Cerys had always called him the Dreamer, but he would be dreaming no more dreams. To judge by the contortions of his limbs, the dried blood on his face and his arms, and his fixed expression of horror, his death had been cruel.

Herraic wandered amongst all this in a daze. He thought at first that he might be the only one left alive, but one by one other survivors came out from their hiding places. Herraic saw in the eyes of every one of them the same stunned vacancy he felt himself. They all looked as though they were only just waking, after a punishing dream.

An old na’kyrim, a little man, was amongst them. He came blinking into the watery light of the courtyard. Herraic, collecting weapons from the bodies of his men, saw the halfbreed shuffle to the centre of the courtyard and stand staring down at the body of the Dreamer. The old man had a piece of wood in his hands, which he kept turning and grasping. It took Herraic a moment or two to recognise him. He could not remember his name, but this was one of those who had come to Highfast with the Lannis Thane, only to remain here when Orisian moved on.

“He’s dead,” Herraic murmured to the halfbreed. That piece of wood in his hands was a half-finished carving, he could see now. The outlines of tiny figures had been cut, but they remained vague and ill-defined, as if they had been frozen in the act of emerging from the wood.

The na’kyrim was shaking his head, and worrying away at the carving with his trembling hands.

“No. Not him. Not dead. Sad to say. Oh, sad to say. He was only visiting. Only passing through.”

Herraic frowned, not understanding. He was distracted by someone shouting his name from one of the windows of the keep. He looked up, squinting against a brief flash of the sun through a crack in the clouds.

“Captain!” he heard. “The Shadowhand’s gone. They took him.”