Fall of Thanes

VI

Anyara woke in a sweat, with a soft cry and a racing heart. In her dreams she had been pursued by a twisted, bestial form of herself, driven wild by fear and anger and grief. The roiling darkness that had been all about her had thickened and churned to prevent her escape, holding her for her own clawed fingers to rend.

She wiped her brow, pulled her cloyingly damp nightgown away from her skin. These cruel dreams had ebbed a little in the first few days of her enforced sojourn in Vaymouth. Now they had returned with renewed and hungry vigour. Each night she spent in the Palace of Red Stone, they came more fiercely than the last. A few tears ran down her face, the echo of the unconstrained, fevered emotions of her sleep. She brushed them away and rose, feeling heavy, from the bed.

In the night, the palace was perfectly silent. Faint moonlight fell through the windows. The air was cool and still. Anyara settled a heavy robe about her shoulders and pulled its fur collar tight about her throat. She slipped her feet into soft hide sandals and went out into the passageway.

“All you all right?”

The voice startled her. Coinach stepped forward into the soft pool of silver shed by a little skylight.

“I forgot you were here.” Anyara smiled.

“Always. I thought I heard you but was not sure. I should have come in to check.”

“No, no.” Anyara waved her shieldman’s self-doubt away. “I’m fine. Can’t sleep, that’s all.”

She glanced at the simple wooden chair let into an alcove where Coinach spent each night.

“You can’t get much sleep either, I imagine,” she said.

“I am not here to sleep, my lady. But I’ve had much worse beds in my time, in any case.” They both spoke in whispers. The heavy silence of the palace felt insistent, as if it would resent any attempt to disturb it.

“Will you walk with me a little?” Anyara asked. “My head needs clearing.”

They went together along the corridor, the sound of their careful footsteps sighing along the stone walls ahead of them. From each narrow window high in those walls a diffuse beam of moonlight descended to illuminate them as they passed beneath it. There was the faintest lingering scent on the air, like a memory of warmer days.

“What is that smell?” Anyara murmured. “It never seems to quite go away.”

“The Shadowhand’s wife roasts spices on her braziers,” Coinach whispered.

“Oh. I never thought to ask her.”

Anyara led the way into a long, thin room that ran along the side of the palace. Facing them were tall, barred doors inlaid with patterns of pearl and dark wood. Anyara went to one and lifted the thin beam that held it closed.

“I’d like to see the moon,” she said.

But Coinach gently interposed himself.

“They sometimes have guards out on the terraces. Best to let me go first.”

He pulled open the great shutter, and the cold night air swept in. Anyara closed her eyes for a moment, savouring its cleansing flow over her face, through her hair.

“Come,” Coinach said. “There’s no one here.”

They stepped out onto the narrow terrace. Before them Vaymouth was a dark ocean, speckled with just a few faint points of light, bounded by the smooth, dark curve of its walls as they swept away into the distance. The Moon Palace rose, a lambent mass, above the city’s heart, as if some wan, sickly giant had hunched his shoulders up out of dark earth. Anyara turned about, searching instead for the true moon. It stood just above the city wall, bright and large. She gazed up at it, letting its light fill her eyes and her mind for a moment. Then she dropped her head, and looked back to the sleeping city.

“Vaymouth’s bigger than I ever imagined,” she said. “I knew but didn’t know. That sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”

“No, my lady.”

“I’m afraid,” Anyara said abruptly, surprising herself. She had not meant to say that, yet the sound of the words seemed right. Fitting. “I thought I could bear everything, anything, if I had to. I thought I’d mastered it, but now it’s growing heavy again, all the fear and the sorrow. I don’t want to be frightened. I hate it.”

Coinach was looking at her, but his face was in shadow and she could not be sure what expression he wore. She did not know quite what she wanted from him. Still, she felt an unexpected easing within her, now that she had permitted this small fraction of her fragility to show itself.

Out in Vaymouth’s great darkness: a blooming orange glow, much stronger and larger than any of the other tiny lights shining there. Anyara frowned at it, puzzled. Coinach followed her gaze. The glow spread, and splayed itself outwards and upwards, a fiery fist swelling and then unfurling thick fingers of flame that reached for the star-strewn sky.

“That’ll be an unpleasant waking for someone,” Coinach said softly.

There was another, further off, in an entirely different quarter of the city: another seed of fire that flickered into being and then built and built. The nocturnal silence that had seemed so natural before now felt out of place. The flames clambered ferociously higher and higher, their hearts turning white, but no sound reached the Palace of Red Stone. There was scent, though, the first bitter trace of smoke in the air.

“Look, there’s a third,” Coinach said, pointing out into the night.

“And there,” said Anyara.

It seemed that every part of Vaymouth had its own eruption of consuming flame. The Moon Palace was growing dimmer, obscured by drifting smoke, its reflected moonlight outshone by a wilder, more sinister light. And the first sounds reached Anyara’s ears: a murmur of calamity, anguished cries blunted and flattened by distance, the roaring of delirious firestorms made into a whisper.

“What’s happening?” she wondered.

“I don’t know.”

Anyara shifted uneasily. There was too much of the quality of her dreams about this. Too much of the madness she felt running beneath the skin of the world, like a black river under a carapace of ice.

“We should never have come,” she said, staring out at the beacons of destruction that marked out the whole territory of the city. “I thought we could serve best by letting Aewult have his way. I thought there might be opportunity… but none of it’s turning out as I hoped. We should have fought our way out of Aewult’s camp rather than let him make us prisoners.”

“I would gladly have made the attempt, my lady, had you asked it of me. He had some ten thousand warriors, so I fear it might have proved difficult. Still, I would have made the attempt.”

“I will see it!” Gryvan oc Haig snapped at Kale.

That flare of anger was enough to make the shieldman nod curtly and avert his eyes.

“As you wish, sire,” the lean warrior said, nudging his horse on ahead.

“I will see what’s done to my city!” Gryvan shouted after his guardian. “It is my right, my duty!”

His own vehemence shocked him, and made him a little ashamed. He glanced uncomfortably around. Many in the mass of riders were looking at him. All, at least, had the grace to turn away when his own gaze fell upon them. It was unwise, Gryvan knew, to flaunt his anger-his confusion, if he was honest-so brazenly, before so many eyes, but his grip on his emotions grew daily less sure. They tore their way up through him, every setback bringing them closer to boiling over. He imagined them as some pack of beasts clawing at his innards, consuming him from within.

A hundred of his warriors, led by Kale and the rest of his Shield, surrounded him. He was within the walls of his own impregnable, wondrous city. Yet despite all of this, Gryvan felt exposed. Assailed. The faces of his people, who thronged the streets this morning and watched his passing from every window and doorway, seemed inimical to him. But he could no longer tell whether that was their true character, or whether he only painted them with his own bitter bewilderment at the course of events.

“The Captain of your Shield is quite right, sire,” Mordyn Jerain said, settling his own horse into step with Gryvan’s. “The city’s mood is fragile. Caution would be wise.”

“They set a dozen fires,” Gryvan hissed, wrestling his voice into submission. “Ten people dead, I hear. Someone thinks they can torch my city with impunity. Well, I’ll see their handiwork. And then I’ll see them, whoever they are, broken on wheels, and spitted on stakes and have their heads rolled in the dirt at my feet.”

“Quite so. I wish we could have spoken before riding out, though. There is much I wanted to discuss with you today. Had you not been already mounted when I reached the palace…”

“Now, suddenly, you want to talk? Well, it can wait an hour or two yet. Gods, does this not sicken you with fury? How can you be so unmoved? We made this city what it is together, you and I. It’s your child as much as mine.”

“Children heal quickly, sire.”

Gryvan heard-or imagined, he could not be sure which-dismissive insolence in that reply and twisted in his saddle to snarl at his Chancellor. But Mordyn was looking away, angling his head up towards the rooftops.

“What’s that?” Mordyn muttered.

Gryvan’s anger faltered. He crushed the reins in his frustrated hands. But there was a sound, clattering in over the tiled roofs. Gryvan listened for a moment or two, teasing it out from amongst the rattle of hoofs on cobbles. He did not know what to make of it at first. Its nature was elusive, as if it both belonged and did not belong in the city. Then he had it. Riot. Mob.

“Swords,” he cried at once. He bared his own blade.

Kale was riding towards him, shouting at the lines of warriors as he came.

“You should turn back, sire,” the shieldman said to his Thane, quite calm. “There is disorder up ahead.”

“No,” said Gryvan flatly. In this, suddenly, he found an answer to all the tumultuous ire that had been building in him for so long. His body knew what kind of release it required, and already his heart was pounding in anticipation. He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and the great beast sprang forward.

A crowd was surging through a little marketplace. It tore at shuttered windows, rendered barrels, stalls, even an old abandoned wagon, down to fragments of wood, and then sent that debris flying up in a cloud of useless missiles. It surged around the well at the centre of the square, and crushed its human bodies against the stone parapet. It overturned a massive watering trough and broke in the door of a long-empty hovel.

Down upon this ravening beast, the High Thane’s hundred warriors fell like thunder. Gryvan himself was in the midst of the storm, seized by a bloodthirsty rage. He and his father, and his grandfather before that, had made this city and its people all that they now were. That there should be arson, that mobs should rampage through the streets-these things were an affront to the Haig line. They wounded him as surely as any blow to his own flesh. He would wet the streets of his wondrous city with the blood of those who offered such grievous offence.

Gryvan’s sword rose and fell. He felt the shiver of its impact upon bone tingling up his arm. He felt the breaking of bodies that went down beneath his huge horse. A thousand voices, crying out in anguish, or anger, or pain, or terror, washed over him and he revelled in the fierce noise. He cut and slashed and barged his way to the heart of the square. A youth was standing on the rim of the well, lashing out with a length of wood. Gryvan cut his legs from under him, sent him tumbling back and down into the dark, stone-clad gullet.

The crowd fell away beneath the onslaught. What the city’s Guard had been unable to quell, the hundred trained warriors on their warhorses snuffed out quickly and brutally. The passions that had burned in the breasts of the rioters twisted into terror. They scattered, and the riders went after them and cut them down in side streets and doorways. Gryvan sat astride his mount, sword still naked in his hand, surrounded by gore and corpses.

Kale dismounted and tore something from the neck of one of the bodies. He held it up to the High Thane.

“Most of them are Craftsmen, sire. Apprentices, at least.”

He dropped the clasp into Gryvan’s outstretched palm. It bore the impressed image of a tiny hammer and scales.

“Goldsmith,” Gryvan murmured. He was weary now. Drained.

“Yes.” Kale nodded. “Many bear the same badge, or that of other Crafts. A number of their buildings were amongst those burned last night. They seek those responsible, perhaps.”

“And they think that gives them leave to run rampant through my city?” Gryvan growled.

“There are too many who think they need no longer ask our leave to do anything,” Mordyn Jerain said, coming-now that the slaughter was done-to his master’s side. “The world ever seeks to test the will of great men. Now is the time of your testing.”

“And you’ve a thought on how I should meet it. Is that it?”

Mordyn Jerain dipped his head in knowing assent.

“Very well,” Gryvan said, casting a last, simmering eye over the bodies littering the market square. “All of this must be answered. I’ll hear you.”

“No.” Gryvan shook his head. It was part denial, part disbelief, part astonishment at the thought that what his Shadowhand was saying might be true.

“Yes,” insisted Mordyn quietly. “Have I ever failed you, sire?”

“Not in anything of consequence,” Gryvan muttered.

“Indeed. Then trust me in this: a corruption has entered the heart of your domains. That which threatens to consume us comes not from without, but within.”

Gryvan paced up and down over the thick mottled rug. The beaker of wine in his hand was forgotten.

“Why did you not tell me all of this at once, immediately on your return?” he cried.

“I doubted it, sire. How could I not? Such things strain the sinews of belief. I thought it prudent to conduct certain investigations of my own. Now I have the sad proofs.” The Chancellor unfurled a roll of parchments from a tube at his belt. “Copies of letters I was shown in Anduran, during my captivity. messages the Black Road discovered there. Others I have found for myself since my return. And all sing the same foul melody, sire.”

Gryvan slammed his cup down on an ornate little table. He ignored the manuscripts that Mordyn held out to him.

“I’ll not trust a single word that comes from the mouth of the Black Road,” he snarled.

“A wise precaution.” Mordyn nodded placidly. The tumultuous emotions that raged within Gryvan found no reflection in his Chancellor. There was a calmness about the man that would better suit reports of the weather. “They no doubt take delight in pointing out the rot within our own house. Yet whether or not you choose to trust their intent in sharing their discoveries with me, there is a truth to be discerned. A pattern.”

Gryvan threw himself down into a chair so violently that it rocked back on its legs.

“Conspiracy against me? Against Haig?”

The Shadowhand rolled the parchments up once more and slipped them back into their tube. He set it down beside the High Thane’s discarded wine cup.

“I will leave these for you to examine at your leisure, if you see fit. But yes: conspiracy. The Crafts conspired with the Dornach Kingship, promising to deliver up the Dargannan Blood even as they were trying to buy its future Thane. They urged Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig to throw off his duties to you, and he in his turn promised them free rein if they could foster war between us and Dornach, and raise him up to be High Thane in your stead.”

“This is insanity,” breathed Gryvan.

“Of a kind,” the Chancellor nodded. “Madness born of hatred and ambition and greed. We have been slowly, quietly betrayed, sire. For many years. Until the Black Road entered the fray, the treacheries were discreet and careful. Now… now, our enemies have been intoxicated by the chaos, mistaking it for our weakness. They become incautious. Aewult’s every effort against the Black Road was hindered-blatantly, fragrantly-by Lannis and Kilkry.”

“I thought his accusations absurd,” Gryvan growled. “Flailings born of humiliation.”

“As might I, sire, had I not witnessed some of it for myself. You know I would not absolve the Bloodheir of blame had he earned it. He did not. I saw the contempt, the defiance, with which he was treated. How else but by treachery can we explain his defeat, when he had ten thousand of your finest warriors at his back? And you’ve heard the same tale I have, of what happened to Aewult’s messengers when they sought out the Lannis boy?”

“In Ive. Yes. Murdered.” Gryvan rubbed his brow. He felt overwhelmed. And his head ached.

“Indeed. Neither Lannis nor Kilkry Bloods has ever acceded, in their hearts, to your family’s rule. And the Crafts… well, your rule has swelled their coffers, yet they have learned not gratitude, but ambition. Arrogance. The Goldsmiths stir up discontent; they send their mobs raging through the streets of your city like wild animals. My people have already heard it whispered in taverns and workshops that the Crafts set those fires themselves, as pretext. But a man whose enemies assemble to assail him is as much benefited as beset, for they reveal themselves.”

Gryvan frowned at his Chancellor.

“You begin to see, do you not?” murmured Mordyn, stepping closer. There was an eager edge to him suddenly. His eyes burned with a passion Gryvan had not seen there since his return from the north.

“See what?” the High Thane asked.

“A thousand years of history have taught us that it takes great men, strong men, to impose order upon this world. It takes men with the will to seize whatever opportunities chaos offers up; the will to bend events to the shape of their own desires. Grey Kulkain did it, forging the Bloods from the horrors of the Storm Years. Your own family has done it, rising from the disasters of the Black Road’s very birth to overthrow Kilkry’s dominion. Such momentous times are come again, sire. Your time.”

Gryvan rose once more to his feet. He clasped his hands behind his back and went to the nearest of the tall windows, through which a bleak light fell. There was his city, his precious city, arrayed before him in all its expansive wonder. His gaze fell upon the gaudy tower the Gemsmiths had recently chosen to adorn their Crafthouse with. A prideful statement, that. Perhaps one of intent also. He chewed his lip.

“The opportunity is here,” he heard Mordyn saying behind him. “If we but have the courage to imagine it.”

“You doubt my mettle?” Gryvan asked darkly without turning round.

“No, sire. Never.”

Gryvan stared down at his black boots. His sons were flawed-he knew that-yet still they were his sons, and entitled to receive from him the same legacy he had inherited from his father: the ascendancy of the Haig Blood; order and security, imposed upon the turbulent peoples of these lands through strength, and through force of will. He could feel his cheeks colouring, a hot flush of rage at the thought that those who dwelled beneath the protective aegis of Haig power would dare to conspire against it.

“I was released by Ragnor oc Gyre’s Captains as a token of their benign intent,” Mordyn said. “The influence of the most bellicose factions within the Black Road is dwindling. They had slipped from Ragnor’s control for a time, it’s true, but that has changed. They understand that they cannot prevail against our martial strength, whatever minor victories they might have won thus far.”

Gryvan closed his eyes against the pounding ache that was building in his skull. His hands, still clasped behind his back, tightened, the fingers bars of steel locked around one another.

“They will retire from all the lands they have occupied,” Mordyn continued. “They will withdraw across the Stone Vale, and make over to you all the territory they have seized. To you personally, sire, not to Kilkry or Lannis. They pledge a permanent peace, on condition that you rule those lands directly and unmake the Bloods that formerly held them. Ragnor knows that without Kilkry and Lannis to stir up these ancient, dry troubles, there can be peace between our peoples. In pursuit of the same quarry, he pledges in his turn to wipe away the Horin Blood.”

“Peace…” rasped Gryvan.

“The better to deal with those enemies that lie more nearly at hand. The Crafts. Dornach. The time is ripe. Everything you have long dreamed of lies before you now, sire. It is all possible, now that they have revealed themselves. We have only to reach out and grasp the future, to make it real.”

“I need…” Gryvan’s tongue stumbled over his own words. There was some part of him that feared the fell anger, the grasping hunger, roiling in his breast. Yet the larger part rejoiced in the scent of crisis, the anticipation of long-held ambitions upon the brink of realisation. Kilkry, Dargannan, Lannis, all swept away. The Crafts humbled. Dornach bloodied, perhaps even subjugated. And King, perhaps? Perhaps even that?

“I need more certainty,” the stubbornly cautious fraction of him said as he turned back to face his Chancellor. “I need to know.”

“We have a day or two,” Mordyn said with a flat smile. He seemed entirely unsurprised by Gryvan’s hesitancy. “No more, I would suggest. And no time at all, perhaps, for one or two matters.”

“Such as?” Gryvan asked. He wanted this to end now. His mind seethed, his temples throbbed. Why was it so difficult to think clearly? He wanted only to retire to his chambers.

“I hear rumours of a plot-fostered by the Goldsmiths, perhaps-to seize Igryn and return him to his lands, in the hope of stirring up yet more enfeebling trouble for us. Allow me to have him removed to In’Vay. Once he is there, out of sight and mind, he can be quietly killed. None will mourn his passing. None who are true friends to the Haig Blood, at least.”

“Very well. My wife no longer finds him amusing, in any case.”

“And recall the Bloodheir from Kilvale, sire. Send word at once. Have him bring a few thousand of his men back here. The greater threat now is from Dornach, perhaps Dargannan; perhaps still closer to home, if the Crafts and those they have suborned think us weak. The people of the city grow more restive with every passing day. We may need Aewult’s swords to cure them of that ill.

“The forces of the Black Road lack both the vigour and the inclination to test him again, and I can set them on the path back to their own lands with a single message. Better yet, if we but halt all movement of ships in and out of Kolkyre, they might yet wipe away the last vestiges of the Kilkry Blood on our behalf, even as they retire. Roaric will quickly fail, if we close the sea to him.”

“I need to know,” the High Thane repeated.

“I believe we can clear away whatever doubts you harbour, sire,” Mordyn said, nodding sympathetically. “There is one here in Vaymouth who surely knows the truth of it, and might be compelled to share it. The Dornachman. Alem T’anarch.”

“The Ambassador?” Gryvan murmured, faintly incredulous.

“You must have the truth. You said as much yourself. Such truths cannot be won easily, or without daring. T’anarch… he has no supporters here, sire, no mobs to rise up in his name. And his masters have never concealed their contempt for us, their envy of our strength.”

“Would you have open war with the Kingship?”

“If this comes to nothing, whatever wounds we open may be healed. But there is war already, I think, open or otherwise. A great many will be rendered carrion by the end of it: those who shy away from the demands of the moment or yield the initiative to their opponents.”

Carrion, thought Gryvan, his weariness briefly pierced by lances of bitter anger. Yes, if there are those who think to test my resolve, that is their destiny. I shall not meekly surrender all that I hold, all that I have won. Let those who imagine otherwise learn the harsh lessons of their error. The weak, the foolhardy, the traitorous, become carrion. Such is the world.