Fall of Thanes

VIII

In the Vare Waste, amongst the mule-stubborn masterless men who scraped a living from its labyrinthine canyons and gorges, feuds long-forgotten or forgiven were reborn. Along the goat trails, through the scrublands, raiding parties ran. Men sent their wives and children to hide in caves while they waged petty wars over the boulder-fields. And still they found time to prey, as well, upon the Kilkry folk who came stumbling into that wind-blasted wasteland, fleeing the slaughter wrought by the Black Road.

In Dun Aygll there was no war, but minds still foundered: the people seized Rot-scarred beggars from the streets and burned them alive on pyres built amidst the ruins of ancient royal residences; a Tal Dyreen merchant, accused by rumour of using shaved weights, was dragged from his house and carried to the Old Market, and killed there, more than a hundred hands sharing in the deed.

On distant Tal Dyre itself, the households of two merchant princes elevated quarrel to murder. They hunted one another with knives through the lanes of the island’s palace-encrusted slopes, until the nights grew deadly and the people fearful.

A Huanin trader, arriving as he had many times before at a Snake vo’an to exchange knives for furs, offered insult with an ill-judged remark implying them to be subservient to the Taral-Haig Marchlords. Some of the older women, even the vo’an’tyr herself, counselled tolerance; it was not the first, and would not be the last, time that the ignorance and stupidity of a slow-minded Huanin had led them to abuse the clan’s hospitality. But younger, hotter hearts demurred. There was debate and then argument, and then threat and accusation. It might have gone further had the elders not stepped aside, the better to preserve the clan’s peace. The young warriors broke the trader’s wrists and ankles with stones, and set their hunting dogs on him.

On the Nar Vay shore, west of Vaymouth, two brothers-long of dark inclination, guilty of innumerable small cruelties in their childhoods-went one night, without cause, from house to house in their fishing village and took blades to their friends, and their family and their lovers. They killed six, injured more, before the menfolk gathered and pursued them to the gravel beach. One died beneath the cudgels and harpoons and scaling knives of the villagers; the other waded into the sea, going on and out with the moonlimned waves breaking across his shoulders, laughing madly until he was taken under.

And in Vaymouth-huge, jostling, choking, loud Vaymouth-the sickness rose, day by day, closer to the surface. The city so long accustomed to singing itself songs woven from chinking coins, hammers in workshops, the seductive cries of hawkers and pedlars, the gossip of washerwomen, found another more corrosive strand entering its harmonies. It found another voice with which to whisper its tales of itself. Anger murmured in its alleys and inns, bitter distrust and doubt sighing coldly through its marketplaces and potteries. In sleep and in waking, a dark imagination took hold of its inhabitants, and many succumbed to it.

The Craft apprentices rioted, each death of one of their number inciting the survivors to greater outrage. The Captain of the Guard in the Tannery Ward was killed by his wife’s lover. His men took their vengeance upon the man, his parents, his sister, but found that bloodletting insufficient to sate their hunger and went on to the next house, and the next, and the next, looting and killing and feasting until they fell exhausted or drunk. Three women were killed in as many nights, their dismembered bodies found in dank dawns within sight of the Moon Palace’s walls. Fear stalked the city, and bred the violence that it fed upon.

*

Anyara found the terrace from which she and Coinach had watched the fires burgeoning across Vaymouth a convenient and quiet refuge whenever the increasingly oppressive atmosphere in the Palace of Red Stone grew intolerable, and she needed the touch of cold, cleansing air on her face or a glimpse of the sky. The denizens of the palace never seemed to use it-not in this season, at least-and though there were sometimes guards upon it at night, during the day it was empty and silent.

On this particular day it was cold too.

“Could you bring me a cloak from my chambers?” she asked Coinach quietly.

He nodded and disappeared into the body of the palace. As soon as he was out of sight, Anyara felt guilty. It was hardly respectful, of either his standing or his capabilities, to treat a shieldman as if he were a maidservant. Yet Coinach had raised no protest. He never would, she suspected, almost irrespective of what she asked of him. She was aware that the two of them were acting less and less like a Thane’s sister and her loyal bodyguard; more and more like companions-exiles-who found in one another the only friendship and support they could rely upon.

Still, there was a sharp chill on the air and she did need the cloak. And Eleth, the maid assigned to her, had been mysteriously absent for the last two days. Sick, the others had told Anyara when she asked after her, but their curt replies had an evasive impatience about them that did not inspire belief.

Perhaps, she told herself, they were just unsettled by the general confusion and nervous mood that had taken hold of all Vaymouth. There had been other fires since those first bright beacons of destruction blooming in the night. More riots. Anyara had heard the crowds roaring along the streets of the city even through the thick walls of the palace. Now she could see a distant pillar of smoke climbing into the sky. Some ruin, still smouldering.

She folded her arms, tucking her hands into her sleeves. She blew a long, slow breath upwards and watched the mist of it drifting and fading away. Voices reached her from somewhere below the terrace. She knew there was a long narrow walled garden down there, where nothing but a few harshly pruned and trained fruit trees grew.

The voices were instantly recognisable: Tara and Mordyn. Yet both had a strident edge she had never heard in them before.

“You took her riding, I hear,” the Chancellor was saying. “Well, no more. She is to be confined within these walls, on Gryvan’s command.”

“As you wish, of course, but tell me why, at least. I find no harm in the girl.”

“That’s not for you to judge.”

“Not for me to judge? Don’t speak to me as if I were one of your lackeys. I’m your wife, or have you truly forgotten that as thoroughly as it seems?”

Anyara, shrinking back from the terrace’s balustrade, winced at the anguish in Tara’s voice. There was much pain there, though it was so intimately entangled with anger that the two were hardly distinguishable.

“I forget nothing,” Mordyn said, suddenly gentle. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Then tell me why. I’ve never pried into any of your dealings needlessly, but now you set such briars about yourself I cannot even draw near. Tell me what this child’s done. I’ve seen nothing in her save sorrow and strength, and loyalty to her family.”

“Have a care you don’t align yourself with treacherous friends.”

A sound behind her had Anyara spinning about, raising her hands to fend off some assault. It was only Coinach, though, stepping out onto the terrace, carrying her cloak. He wore a questioning expression, but she held a palm out to him and pressed a finger to her lips. He came carefully closer.

“Treacherous friends?” Tara was crying out below. Her distress must be profound-all-consuming-to permit this kind of indiscretion, Anyara knew. There would surely be servants and guards who could hear all of this just as clearly as she could herself.

“You know,” Tara went on, her tone moderating a touch, veering back towards grief and confusion, “you used to know, at least, that I would not allow so much as a feather’s width of distance to separate us, but this talk of Lannis and Kilkry treachery is absurd. Whatever their failings, they would never do anything to weaken our resistance to the Black Road. Lannis owes its very existence to the struggle against them. They’re obsessed with it. You know all this far better than I. Why can’t you explain to me what’s changed?

“Please! Don’t turn away from me. Listen to me. Explain to me. I need to understand.” She was begging him now. “Surely it’s Aewult’s clumsiness, his ineptitude, that’s caused this confusion. You said from the start he should not have been sent north. You said — ”

“What I said does not matter.” The Shadowhand’s voice was leaden. All Tara’s desperate longing evidently moved him not at all. “What is: that’s our concern now. There is conspiracy against us, against the High Thane. That is all you need to know.”

“All I need to know? How can you say such things?”

“I have no time for this. There is conspiracy. I have shown Gryvan the proofs of it, and he acts upon them as he sees fit. The girl, and her Blood, stand condemned in his eyes, along with many others. Her brother killed Aewult’s messengers. He is to be outlawed.”

Coinach was pulling gently at Anyara’s sleeve. She glanced at him, and his concern was clear. With good reason, Anyara knew: if they were known to have overheard this fraught exchange, troubles could flock about them as thickly as crows on a carcass. But then, as was abundantly clear, they were already beset by plentiful troubles.

“Proofs?” Tara snapped. “What proofs?”

“My own report of what I discovered while in the hands of the Black Road. Letters. Messages I’ve uncovered since then. Enough, woman!”

“Messages? Those you wrote yourself?”

Then, suddenly, the sharp sound of palm on flesh. A stinging blow.

“Don’t question me,” cried Mordyn Jerain. “Never question me. And never speak such an accusation again, to me or anyone else.”

Too forcefully to be resisted, Coinach drew Anyara back and led her into the shadows of the long room at the back of the terrace. As she retreated, she thought she could just hear, almost too faint for her to catch, Tara’s soft gasps of shock, and horror, and betrayal. Perhaps they were the choked remnants of sobs.

“We should get back to your chambers,” Coinach whispered. “They must find us safely there, and safely ignorant, should anyone wonder where we are.”

Anyara nodded. They went quickly and quietly back through the corridors.

Alem T’anarch liked to think of himself as a man of refined but modest tastes. The thin cord with which he tied his long pale hair had gold thread braided into it, but the strand was so delicate as to be almost invisible. His sword, which he wore only on the most important of occasions, had small diamonds set into its scabbard. They were discreet, though. Certainly not as boorishly indulgent as so much of the wealth on display in Vaymouth had become.

Alem had been ambassador of the Dornach Kingship to the Haig Blood for long enough to acquire a grudging respect for the vigour of his hosts, but this was increasingly overlaid by much less charitable sentiments. The overbearing self-confidence of Gryvan oc Haig, his family and his entire Blood had become tedious; all the more so since it had started to express itself in the ever more ostentatious adornment of Vaymouth with palaces and grand Craft establishments and pointless ceremonial. And in recent times there had been growing hostility towards Alem’s own Kingship. It had become absurdly acute since Gryvan’s discovery of Dornachmen fighting in the service of the rebellious Dargannan-Haig Blood. Alem had found himself treated without even the faint respect his position had previously commanded. He had been denied any contact with Gryvan or any of his high officials.

He now strode through the echoing corridors of the Moon Palace with, therefore, a mix of anticipation and trepidation. That he should at last be granted the audience he had long sought was a relief, but the manner of his summoning to it-abrupt, discourteous-did not bode well. His attendants, hurrying in his wake, looked worried. No one wanted war with the Haig Bloods-not yet, at least-but the possibility hung in the air like the stench of an approaching corpse-ship.

It was regrettable, Alem recognised, that Jain T’erin had sold his warband to Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig, but the Dornach Kingship had always produced a supply of stubbornly independent adventurers: sons disinherited by the fall of their fathers in one of the regular reorderings that swept through the nobility; warriors cut loose when the excessive popularity or success of their commanders led to the disbanding of whole armies. It was the way of things, and it was absurd to hold the King responsible for the deeds of those spawned by such developments. In truth, Alem’s own subsequent demand for compensatory payments to the families of those dead mercenaries had probably been misjudged, but the instruction had come from Evaness and his doubts had been overruled. The late Jain T’erin-or his family, at least-evidently still had influential friends at court.

Alem and his party drew to a halt before the massive double doors of Gryvan’s Great Hall. The guards standing there regarded them with the disdain which Alem had come to expect. He ignored them. The doorkeeper, a slight and ageing man, raised the ancient staff that was his symbol and pounded its gnarled, polished head against the door. The arrival of anticipated visitors thus announced, there was nothing to do but wait, which everyone did in tense silence.

That wait was, unsurprisingly, longer than was dignified. Alem studied the intricate carvings on the panels of the door. It was supposedly a relic of the Aygll Kingship, removed from Dun Aygll by some warlord during the Storm Years. Whether that tale of its origin was true or not, it betrayed the instincts of the Haig family. They sought to accrue to themselves some of the glamour once attached to the extinct Kingship.

There were notches and scars here and there, but the quality of the craftsmanship remained evident. Alem’s gaze traced the intertwining coils of ivy and the elegantly depicted warriors. There were figures high up on the door whose faces had been cut away, leaving ugly wounds that marred the otherwise balanced compositions. Those, Alem knew, had been images of Kyrinin, once allies of the Kingship, later its avowed enemies.

The doors swung belatedly open, ending Alem’s bitter musings. He advanced into the Great Hall, holding his head up and wearing a carefully neutral expression. His footsteps rang in the cavernous vaulted and columned hall. It was unusually empty, and the journey from the door to the Throne Dais at the far end felt uncomfortably exposed. Gryvan oc Haig was waiting there, his crimson cloak drawn across his chest. That was seldom a good sign, Alem thought as he drew near. Whenever that cloak was upon the High Thane’s shoulders, it swelled his sense of his own grandeur. It was no more pleasing to see Abeh, Gryvan’s wife, sitting in her own throne at his side. Alem could barely recall a single well-judged word ever having passed her lips.

The Ambassador was more encouraged by the sight of Mordyn Jerain standing close by the Thane of Thanes. The Chancellor’s head was bowed, so Alem was unable to make the eye contact he would have desired, but still he felt a hint of hope. For all the dubious games Jerain undoubtedly played, Alem had always found him to be, if nothing else, intelligent and considered. It had been a relief to hear that he was safely returned to the city, and to Gryvan’s side, after his prolonged absence. If anyone in this increasingly turbulent city might be prevailed upon to see the wisdom of a return to civility, it would surely be Mordyn Jerain.

Alem came to a halt before the dais, and bowed to the Thane of Thanes. He put a little more depth into the gesture than was usually his wont, for though he served a true King, and this man merited none of the respect such a title conferred, a conciliatory demeanour seemed the wisest course.

“I am grateful for the opportunity to present myself, sire,” he said, head still bent.

“Perhaps you should await developments before deciding how grateful you are,” Gryvan oc Haig replied, and Alem noted with unease the chill that ran through the words. Slowly, the Ambassador lifted his head, attempting a faint, relaxed smile. He caught the eye of Kale, the Captain of the High Thane’s Shield, as he did so, and wondered at the dead, reptilian quality of the man’s gaze. No, not even reptilian; the lizards that basked amongst the sand dunes of his homeland’s coast had more life in their regard.

“It is fortunate that you reached us here without coming to any harm,” Gryvan said. “The streets are somewhat dangerous.”

Alem was uncertain how best to respond to that. It seemed an odd gambit for a ruler to draw such attention to his inability to keep order in his own city.

“The masses ever find ways to test the will of their masters, I find,” he said smoothly. “I think they will remember soon enough how unwise it is to so taunt the mighty, no?”

“Three nights of trouble, we’ve had,” Gryvan mused, his hands clutching the edges of his lurid cloak ever more tightly. “Fires. Riot. Murders.”

“They will keep to their houses once it snows, or rains,” Alem said. He found it difficult to maintain a buoyant strand of levity in his voice, particularly as he had the strong impression Gryvan did not care what he said. Was, in fact, barely even listening. And the Chancellor still had not raised his head. Mordyn looked thinner than Alem remembered, his shoulders a little narrower.

“There is such a fervour in the people,” Gryvan said, “one cannot help but wonder about its source. We are no strangers to discontent and dispute here, yet never-not in my lifetime, nor my father’s-has it found such… shameful expression. Why is that, do you suppose? What has changed, Ambassador?”

Alem’s hopes of a successful audience had been slender from the start. Now they withered like a blighted vine. Gryvan’s soft-spoken words were laced with threat, with malice. Alem wondered whether the Shadowhand’s studied disengagement was a silent message: a warning that he could expect no succour from that quarter. He cleared his throat.

“A man would have to be rich in presumption, I think, to advise a High Thane upon the rule of his own city. No? The one who stands before you now, sire, is not such a man. Not at all. The matters I hoped to discuss are entirely — ”

“See how he seeks to slither out from under your boot,” hissed Abeh venomously.

Alem blinked in surprise at her outburst.

“My lady, I intend no slithering. I mean only that it is not my place to make comment on these unfortunate disturbances. In knowing that, I show only respect.”

“Unfortunate?” Abeh sneered. “Do you pretend you don’t rejoice in this ruining of Vaymouth? Do you claim your spirits aren’t lifted by the sight of everything we have built here being torn down?”

Alem smiled. A stupid gesture, he knew, as likely to antagonise as to assuage the High Thane’s tempestuous wife. It was born of bemusement. He smothered it as quickly as he could beneath a bland mask of-hopefully-foolish puzzlement.

“This was the fairest of cities,” Abeh snarled at him. “Now it’s being fouled. All this discord, all this damage. Ugly!”

Alem began to wonder if the woman had finally lapsed into the frothing, idiot decline that had always seemed her most likely fate, but he was saved from having to find a coherent response to her rantings by Gryvan himself.

“Hush,” the Thane of Thanes said, with a glance at his wife. “Hush. We’ll have no answers from him like that.”

“Answers?” Alem echoed. “I came in expectation of… not such questions, at least. I am too slow, perhaps. It might be so. Yet I admit, I do not understand.” It was cold in this cursed hall, he thought. They could not even keep the winter chill from their own palaces, these fools.

“Be quiet,” said Gryvan. “Mordyn?”

The Chancellor now at last lifted his head and took a step forward. There was not even a glimmer of recognition in his eyes as he regarded Alem; not a hint at the years of careful sparring that lay between them, the grudging respect the Ambassador thought had grown. It was a stranger who now looked down upon him from the dais, and an unfriendly one at that.

“I have seen,” Mordyn intoned, “in Kolkyre and Anduran, evidence of conspiracy between Lannis and Kilkry, the Crafts and this man’s Kingship. I was given letters that the Gyre Bloods found. I have uncovered more since my return.”

“This is absurd,” Alem protested.

“Silence!” Kale came striding forward as he shouted, halting halfway down the steps at the front of the dais. The lean warrior glared at Alem with contempt.

“The High Thane has been shown proofs,” Mordyn Jerain was saying levelly. “The patterns, the tracks left by those who seek to undermine the rule of Haig, have been revealed to him. He sees clearly now, and all your lies and your pretences will not serve to cloud his sight again.”

“I tell no lies,” said Alem. “If you accuse me of this, you are much in error. And giving great offence to me and my master.” His unease was transforming itself incrementally into fear. This discourse might wear a cloak of eloquence and be housed in a grand hall, but its substance was that of the alleyway, the knife fight.

“Do you deny, Ambassador,” Mordyn said, “that your Kingship has conspired with the Goldsmiths to foment disorder? That you covet the lands of the Free Coast, and of the Dargannan Blood, and even up to the gates of Vaymouth itself? Do you deny that even now your armies assemble along your northern borders, at your ports, imagining us weak? Do you pretend that Dornach coin is not lining the pockets of the mobs tormenting Vaymouth’s slumber every night?”

“All that, I deny,” Alem said. “And if you have more, that I deny too, but will not tarry to hear it. You invite these imagined dangers of yours into reality by your insults, and I will give no aid to you in that. Therefore, I remove myself from your presence, sires and lady.”

He bowed, feeling the weight of his pounding heart in his chest, and backed away. He turned and saw Gryvan’s men spread across the distant doorway, blocking it; others advancing down the echoing length of the hall.

“I must have the truth in this, Ambassador,” Gryvan said, almost sorrowfully, behind him. “You will understand that. You understand power. Its necessities. The requirement-absolute, unwavering-to defend it, and preserve it. I cannot stand idly by when all that I have inherited, all that I will pass on to my son, is threatened.”

Alem turned back to face the throne. The servants and scribes who had accompanied him into this trap were clustering tightly together, looking nervously about as the Haig warriors drew slowly closer.

“I must act,” said Gryvan. “I must. If the dangers that crowd about me prove illusory, so be it. Whatever harm is done can be undone in time. I will regret it, and endure that regret. But if I fail to act, and those dangers prove real, I will have wilfully squandered the labour of generations. You can understand, surely, that when I see signs of sickness in my body, however faint, however uncertain, it is better to examine them, to excise them even, than to pay them no heed?”

“Gryvan, I implore you — ” Alem reached out his hands, unashamed by the supplicatory gesture and by the pleading in his voice, knowing in his mounting despair that nothing mattered save somehow reaching the High Thane, making him understand “-give thought to the consequences of this. Where has your sense gone? Whatever lies have been dripped into your ear, you…”

Alem could hear jostling behind him, cries of outrage. The High Thane’s shieldmen were seizing his attendants or pushing them aside. Kale, the rangy leader of this pack of hounds, was stepping down from the Throne Dais, coming towards him with an air of malicious, eager intent.

“Thane, there is no sense in this,” Alem shouted, his voice climbing a shrill ladder of alarm. “You must see that! You cannot truly believe we would play such crude games against you. You invite disaster!”

Kale had hold of his shoulders. He could feel the warrior’s iron-hard fingers grinding into his muscles through the cloth. Beyond, Alem saw that Gryvan was no longer looking at him. The High Thane gazed up into the vaulted roof of the hall, detached, as if his presence were merely accidental.

“Disaster,” Gryvan muttered, so softly that Alem barely heard it, “as I have been recently reminded, comes to those who allow events to precede them. I, Ambassador — ” he said this into the great cavern of the hall’s roof “-I choose to walk ahead of events. I choose to shape them, not be shaped by them. I am Thane of Thanes, and I am fierce enough still to hold my throne.”

They took the Ambassador from the Great Hall and bore him into the bowels of the Moon Palace. They followed seldom-used passages, and bundled him down dark and tight spiralling stairways. There was no glory or elegance there. No marble, no carvings, no fine and graceful tapestries. Only bare rock and rough-hewn steps; torches giving out tarry smoke and walls streaked with grime.

They took him as deep as it was possible to go, to places few ever visited, and fewer wished to visit. There they showed him cruel instruments. They showed him branding irons and hammers; water-filled barrels big enough to hold a manacled man; iron-tipped whips and flaying knives. Though his mind cowered in disbelieving horror, he denied them the words-the confession-they desired.

They tore his clothes from him. They ripped his finery into pieces and cast it into braziers. They cut away his hair with knives, so roughly that some of it tore from his scalp, and he felt blood on his head.

Though he knew nothing would come of it, he begged them to think again, to turn aside from this terrible course their Thane had set them upon. There was only hatred in their eyes, only abuse on their lips.

They asked him again to confess his crimes, and those of his people, and those of his King. And he could see how they craved his refusal. They wanted it, above all else, so that they should have the chance to break him. There was something unnatural, excessive in their eager ferocity.

He gave them what they wanted, for he would not betray his people with falsehoods. He would not invite the consequences such lies would have. His captors turned gladly to the tools that hung on the walls about them, that rested against stands and waited in the seething braziers.

And in time, bloodily, they broke the Ambassador of the Dornach Kingship in that deep and dark place, and he assented to every accusation that was relentlessly put to him. He gave truth to every falsehood the Shadowhand had uttered. And once that truth was given, and his purpose served, the High Thane’s men put a knife into Alem T’anarch’s heart and sent his corpse to be burned on the pyres, in Ash Pit, reserved for the bodies of murderers and thieves and traitors.