Bloodheir

VI

“I’m told that Avann oc Gyre held audiences here, in this very chamber, before he fell foul of the High Thanes of Kilkry.”

Aeglyss walked slowly, a little unsteadily, around the periphery of the columned hall.

“Do you like it, Chancellor?” he asked.

They were high here, by the broken-topped standards of Kan Avor: two storeys above the mud that passed for ground; two flights of coiled, slippery steps above the highest water marks the flood had imprinted on the buildings. The planking of the hall’s wooden floor was intact, but overlaid, in places, by moss and slime. Great thick beams still supported the roof above, but there were holes that had admitted the rain and the wind and light. The columns on which the beams rested were pitted and eroded. The stone bench that stood at the far end of the hall was spotted with patches of lichen. There was a smell of soft, saturated timber.

Mordyn Jerain hardly noticed the damp and the decay and the stenches any more. Three days and three nights he had been here, trapped in this mad, corrupt nest of snakes. He thought it was that long, at least. His senses, his awareness of what was around him, came and went. Sometimes, momentarily, he forgot who he was. The only thing he never forgot was Aeglyss. The malignant presence of the halfbreed was everywhere, in the walls, in the air he breathed, in the interstices of his thoughts. When he slept, the Shadowhand dreamed dreams that he did not believe were even his own. He dreamed of forests, and of fires, and murder and rage, and all of it, he was almost certain, was born of this creature who was twisting the world into an imitation of his own diseased mind.

Mordyn’s body was recovering slowly. But his heart, his spirit and his hope were being picked, bit by bit, apart. He had given up trying to speak to Wain nan Horin-Gyre. She was nothing more than an obedient hound at the halfbreed’s heel, of no more consequence or significance than the Kyrinin who came and went at his command, or the scores of men and women who milled about Kan Avor’s rubble-strewn streets. There was, Mordyn now knew, nothing here that mattered save Aeglyss. But he had no idea what to do with that knowledge, or even where it had come from, how it had infested his mind. He had never imagined that the world held such things as this halfbreed. He had no weapons in his armoury of manipulation and influence that could serve against such an opponent. And though despair was no part of his nature, it was taking hold of him.

“Come here,” Aeglyss said, beckoning Mordyn to join him at one of the windows.

The halfbreed laid a spindly arm across Mordyn’s shoulders. Its touch filled the Chancellor with revulsion, though there was no weight to it.

He was alone here with the na’kyrim. Wain and some of her warriors waited outside, on the stairway. He could kill Aeglyss before they could possibly intervene; throttle the vile life out of him perhaps, or beat his head to a pulp on the stone window ledge. He could do it. His body was strong enough. Not his heart, though. Not his will. This man cannot be killed, some awed part of his mind whispered to him, any more than the wind could be dragged out of the sky and crushed in your hands; any more than winter could be slain, with axe or fire or storm of arrows.

“Look at that.” Aeglyss extended a crooked, wiry finger.

Below, in a wide street, a crowd was gathered. It surged back and forth, like a mountain stream plunging and swirling in a rocky bowl. In its midst were three figures: mud-streaked men clad in simple clothes, flailing about with clubs and staves.

“Thieves,” Aeglyss whispered in Mordyn’s ear, holding him close. “Farmers who lost their land, I suppose. They stole food from us in the night, killed one of Wain’s guards. They thought themselves safe, hiding down by the river. But no. My White Owls can find anyone, if there’s a trail to follow.”

The crowd — a jumbled mixture of warriors, and Inkallim, and men and women as ragged as the farmers were — howled and roared and drove the captives up and down the street. One of the men slipped and went down. The throng flowed over him, trampling.

“Can you feel it?” Aeglyss asked. “The need they have, for blood.”

Mordyn shivered, though he was not cold.

“I don’t know, you see,” Aeglyss hissed, “whether it is mine or theirs. Whether I… make it, or whether it came here in their minds, already nestled there. There’s too much I don’t know. Don’t understand.”

A rock struck one of the farmers on the side of the head. Blood at once ran down his face, and he staggered, lifting his hands in a vain effort at protection. Someone stabbed a spear into his stomach. A sword slashed in and lifted a part of his scalp away from his skull. The man fell, silently.

A small band of Kyrinin appeared at the end of the street.

“Ah, look now,” Aeglyss breathed. “Now they’ll have what they want. Now the beast that’s in them will be fed.”

He leaned forwards out of the window, his arm slipping away from Mordyn’s shoulder as he did so. The Chancellor sagged a little at the sudden removal of that terrible, weightless burden.

“Let the White Owls have that last one,” Aeglyss shouted down. Every face, every gaze, was drawn by his cry. The sound was not loud, but penetrating, as if it was the voice of the city itself, emerging from the stone and the earth. “Let his punishment be at their hands.”

He looked back to Mordyn and smiled. The crowd parted and the few Kyrinin came softly through it. The last surviving prisoner was weeping and shaking. He made no attempt to flee; simply stood there, and beat his chest in despair. The Kyrinin took him and bound his hands and his feet and laid him down in the middle of the street. A perfect circle of silent, attentive observers formed. There was an awful stillness about the scene: an expectant, anticipatory thrill. Mordyn could feel it himself, the yearning for this moment to culminate in cathartic violence.

The Kyrinin tore the man’s shirt from his body. Two of them produced knives. They began to carve long strips of skin away from his chest.

Aeglyss closed his eyes and lifted his head back and breathed in deeply, as if inhaling the screams.

“Sit, Chancellor. You must be tired.” He took Mordyn to the ancient bench and settled him onto it. “Thanes sat there once. And now you.”

Mordyn had to press his hands down against the rough stone to hold himself steady and erect. Aeglyss lowered himself onto the floor and sat there, cross-legged. The robe he wore was filthy, its hem frayed. He was looking at his fingernails. Delicately, he lifted one away from its bed. It fell like the petal of dead flower. Aeglyss grunted. He lifted the exposed fingertip to his mouth and licked it, watching Mordyn now.

“Too much for this poor body,” Aeglyss said. He sounded sad and tired. “My exertions in securing your presence here… I reached a little too far, I think. I am learning, but too slowly. Too slowly.”

He coughed, and bloody saliva crept over his chin. He dragged the back of his hand across it.

“I don’t know what to do with you, Shadowhand. You’re too precious a thing to be given up to the rest of them. They’d squander you. Waste you. Yet… oh, to put her aside would be too much for me. Too cruel.”

He hugged himself, wrapping his chest in his arms. Rocking. There was a sudden redoubling of the screams outside. Mordyn started at it. Aeglyss did not seem to hear it.

“I can’t. I can’t. How has it come to this? What did I do that such miseries should be visited upon me? I had no choice. That’s the truth in this. They’ll none of them love us, Shadowhand. Never. No matter what service we do them. They’ll always try to cast us out, curse our names, sooner or later. Or try to kill us. They’ll stake us up on stones.”

He sprang to his feet and strode forwards. Mordyn felt as though his skull would split asunder, such was the pressure building there. He closed his eyes, but still saw shadows and light moving on the inside of his eyelids. All reason was leaking out of his world. The na’kyrim ’s voice was within him, just as much as it was without. Nothing would still it. A fingertip prodded at his eyelid. He jerked his head to one side. A hand brushed his cheek.

“You think they love me now?” Aeglyss asked softly. “The White Owls, the Black Road? All these cold hearts yearning for slaughter? They don’t love me. None save Wain. Perhaps you think I love them? The White Owls are the people of my mother, but I don’t love them. Horin-Gyre is the Blood of my father, but I’ll not love them.”

Those taut lips were at Mordyn’s ear now. The words spilled from them, a mad, angry tumble. Mordyn heard them, but barely grasped their meaning. It was the sound of inchoate madness that held him, that made his heart flutter.

“I’ll climb up on their backs, I’ll raise myself up on the mounds of their corpses. But I’ll not love them. There’s no love, for the likes of you and I. We’re the outsiders, the hounds they want to run at their heels. They work us hard, and feast on the fruits of our labour, but it’s scraps from the table we get. We were born in the wrong place, or of the wrong father, or at the wrong time. You think Gryvan oc Haig loves you for what you’ve done for him? No!”

Mordyn groaned. He would fall away into unconsciousness in a moment, and he longed for that release. But even as he thought of it, the battering waves of darkness receded.

“Forgive me,” he heard Aeglyss say. “I must learn restraint. There is so much I still have to learn. I know what I must do with you, Chancellor. It’s just… it’s just that I fear to…”

The halfbreed’s voice was moving away. Mordyn cautiously opened his eyes. Aeglyss was stumbling across the floor, his feet scraping over the wooden boards. He drifted around one of the soaring stone columns.

“I’ve known from the first moment I found you. I made terrible sacrifices to bring you here. Terrible. Someone… important slipped through my fingers. The only one I could have trusted. The only one. Stolen from me, because I indulged myself; lingered in that awful place, and called my warriors to fetch you out of there. I lost her. And gained you, Shadowhand.

“Now that I have you, there will be none to gainsay me; none to deny me. They will not turn me away from their tables when they see that I hold the famed Shadowhand. They will not shut me out from their councils. No, they will beg me, they will entreat me, they will seek my favour. Mine! You can aid me, but I know… I’ve learned that aid is not given. Not when I ask for it. I must take it. Take what I need to put myself beyond their reach, beyond everyone’s reach.”

He stopped, poised in mid-stride, teetering like a frail, half-felled tree. He cocked his head to one side.

“Here they come. Now we shall see. Now there will be a decision.”

He looked towards the door, and it swung back on its rusted hinges. Wain stood there, seeing and dismissing the hunched figure of the Chancellor with a single sharp gaze.

“Temegrin is coming,” she said. “He has fifty riders at his back.”

Aeglyss nodded heavily. “He means to kill me, I think. Well. It’s good. Let him, if he can.”

More than two hundred marched out to meet the Eagle of Ragnor oc Gyre’s army, and even then Kan Avor was not emptied. Kyrinin warriors, Battle Inkallim, Wain and her Shield and fifty of her Blood’s spears, a hundred folk from the valleys and mountains of the distant north. They walked out through the city’s tumbled wall and onto the icy, wet fields beyond. Aeglyss and Wain led them, with Shraeve a few paces behind, and Mordyn Jerain at their side. They had put a cord around the Chancellor’s neck, and led him liked a leashed dog.

Aeglyss stumbled often as he walked. It was not only that the ground here was treacherous, sucking mud beneath a thin skin of ice, more marsh than solid earth; his legs seemed unequal to the task of bearing him. Wain helped him with one hand, dragging Mordyn along with the other. The great muted company drew itself up in loose array and stood watching Temegrin and his band of warriors come cantering up with the sinking orange sun at their backs, flags and pennants flying, mud and water and shards of shattered ice churning beneath the hoofs of their horses. Mordyn could feel their approach in his legs, rumbling up from the ground, shaking his bones. They looked magnificent, these warriors from beyond the Vale of Stones.

Temegrin sprang down from his horse, his feet crunching through ice as he landed. His coarse-skinned face was flushed with anger, Mordyn could see. He tried to remember what he knew of this man. He had certainly had reports of him, but so sluggish and disjointed had his memory become that he could not dredge them up. There were eagle feathers fluttering at the top of his boots as he stamped up towards Wain and Aeglyss. Silly, Mordyn thought. This is no place for birds. Not even eagles.

“So it’s true,” Temegrin snarled at Wain. “This is Gryvan’s Chancellor?” He looked at Mordyn with avaricious loathing.

“It is,” Wain said.

The Eagle grinned. “I thought it impossible, when I was told. I had the man who first reported it beaten for spreading lies and rumour. But behold! The Shadowhand himself.”

A dozen of his warriors had dismounted and lined up behind him now. Mordyn stared at the ground. This was humiliation more than he could bear, to be gloated over like a prized exhibit at some Tal Dyreen slave market of old.

“But when did you mean to send word to us, Wain?” he heard Temegrin asking, his voice seething with threat. “I had to come all the way from Kolglas to see with my own eyes, for we’ve had no word from you of this great boon that fate has granted our cause.”

She made no answer, and that angered the Eagle still more.

“How did he come here?” he shouted.

“Ask your questions of me,” Aeglyss said softly.

Mordyn risked a glance sideways. The halfbreed was standing limply, shrunken and fragile amongst these great warriors in their mail shirts. Mordyn could hardly bear to look at him, for dread burst in through his eyes at the very sight of that stooped frame. Temegrin perhaps could not yet see it, or sense it, for he ignored the na’kyrim. He reached out a huge gloved hand, stretching to take from Wain the cord that bound the Chancellor. She twitched it out of his grasp.

“Don’t try my patience, lady,” the Eagle snarled. “I command the High Thane’s army here. You’ll surrender this man to me.”

“He is not for you,” Aeglyss said.

“Silence! Silence! Don’t dare speak to me, halfbreed.”

Temegrin shook with rage. He swept his head back and forth, contemptuously surveying the strange throng assembled before him.

“Shraeve,” he shouted. “Is this what the ravens have come to, consorting with halfbreeds and wights and traitors? Where does the Battle stand in this?”

“I am here to watch, and to learn, and to witness fate’s unfolding of its intent.”

Temegrin threw his hands up in exasperation. “Madness! Wain, out of respect for your father and your brother, I give you this chance to come back to the straight and level path. Come away from this place. Bring the Shadowhand with me to Kolglas, and you will be honoured amongst-”

“She will not go with you, Eagle,” Aeglyss interrupted.

At that, Temegrin finally turned his full, ferocious attention upon the na’kyrim. He took two long, fast strides to stand in front of him.

“I told you to hold your tongue. You are not fit to speak, or to breathe, in the company of the faithful. Of warriors. Of humans.”

Then, to Mordyn’s horror, Aeglyss turned his head and looked directly at him. And smiled. A sad smile, fit to break a man’s heart. The Chancellor was filled up with fear at the touch of that smile, taken by a sudden urge to cry out a warning to Temegrin, to fall to his knees and hide his face in his hands.

“You see,” whispered Aeglyss, and Mordyn did not know if the words were spoken out loud or only in him, for him. “You see. This is how it will always be. Hatred. Always.”

And it seemed to Mordyn that Aeglyss was growing, and spilling a shadow from his shoulders and from his long hair, and that the air was thickening, the light of the setting sun an orange mist that turned everything to its own sickly shade. And the great crowd of his followers was stirring, rising up and murmuring.

Temegrin lunged at Aeglyss, who made no attempt to avoid his grasp. Mordyn groaned, unable to breathe now, seeing everything with a terrible clarity. His ears were ringing.

The Eagle had Aeglyss by the throat, both hands like claws, and was bellowing into his face.

“What will you do, mongrel? What do you think you can do? You’re nothing! I could crush your neck, break it, with one hand. What are you going to do?”

And Aeglyss, inexplicably, was grinning at him: a mad, wet grin.

“We’re none of us more than sticks in skin, Eagle,” he hissed between taut lips. He raised his frail hands, set one on each of Temegrin’s forearms.

The Gyre warrior was a powerful man. Aeglyss was almost nothing, like the survivor of a famine. His form was all bone and angles. Yet, impossibly, it was the Eagle who released his grip, who found his arms forced back and held fast by those lean inhuman hands. Temegrin’s face was twisted by some sort of horror or pain. Aeglyss had hold of his wrists, and was laughing.

Temegrin’s warriors started forwards, swords leaping from their scabbards.

“Hold!” cried Aeglyss, like a storm. Mordyn cowered, swords fell from stunned hands. Mail-clad warriors fell to their knees and dug their hands into the mud.

“Did you see?” Aeglyss shouted. “You saw him lay his hands on me? He meant to kill me. Did you see?”

The crowd at his back was roaring, a deep howl of incoherent fury. But within that cacophony the na’kyrim ’s voice was an iron thread.

“He asks fate to choose between us. So be it.”

Mordyn heard the crack of bones breaking, like wet sticks. Not just once, but twice, then again and again: a ripple of tiny, sharp, savage sounds like the fracturing of an ice sheet. But it was not ice that was breaking. It was Temegrin’s arms. They crackled. The Eagle screamed and fell to his knees. Aeglyss stepped forwards and stretched those shattered arms up, the hands at their extremities fluttering limply.

“I am chosen! I am chosen! I am chosen!” Aeglyss cried it out again and again. The sound fell upon the Eagle’s warriors like blows, clubbing them back and down. Mordyn fell to his hands and knees, retching dryly. Only Wain did not stir at the torrent of power rushing out from the na’kyrim. She watched, quite still, as he stared madly down at Temegrin’s tear-streaked face.

“You chose the wrong mongrel to make an enemy of this time, Eagle,” Aeglyss said.

The na’kyrim reached down and pulled a short knife from Temegrin’s belt. The warrior’s arms fell back to his sides, and though he wailed at the agony of it, he did not — could not — move. He knelt there, raging and sobbing, and Aeglyss pushed the knife deep into the side of his neck, twisting it.

Temegrin fell onto his side, dead weight. Aeglyss dropped the knife, raised his hand, with the Eagle’s blood thick upon it. He stumbled forwards, amongst the Gyre warriors. The frozen marsh splintered beneath his feet.

“It is done. It is done. There’s to be nothing now, not for any of us, but fire and blood and a rising-up until all the world lies beneath us. Come with me. I am its herald, and its bearer, and its sword. I will give you shelter.”

Mordyn watched them scramble out of the na’kyrim ’s path, saw the horror in their faces. And felt what they felt, bursting in his own breast: the awe and the wonder and the dazzling light that fell from Aeglyss, the certainty that here was the centre of the world, the seed of everything that was to come. It was an invasion, a foreign intrusion that overwhelmed his own deeper repulsion and disgust; but it was irresistible.

Aeglyss fell, slapping down into the sodden soil.

Wain dropped Mordyn’s leash and ran to the na’kyrim ’s side. She knelt there and cradled his head in her hands.

“It is done,” Mordyn heard him murmur. “Carry me back. My legs are gone. I am empty.”