Fall of Thanes

IV

“What else would you expect?” asked Yvane. “The oldest of hatreds, the oldest of fears. And they could hardly have a better excuse to surrender to it. Aeglyss reminded them of where those fears come from. And with his corruption of the Shared feeding their every doubt, every suspicion, every buried resentment… no, it’s no surprise.”

“You’d forgive them?” asked Orisian, disbelieving. “You, of all people?”

They were descending a long sloping corridor, just the two of them, walking slowly down into Highfast’s foundations. The passageway was dark, save for the torch Orisian carried. The flame flapped now and again, sending their shadows careening over the square-cut stone facing of the walls. Even here, close to the stronghold’s roots, the air moved. The breath of the Karkyre Peaks found its way in through the porous skin of Highfast to these deep places.

“I didn’t say anything about forgiveness,” Yvane told him.

“But you accept it.”

“And nothing about acceptance, either,” the na’kyrim said. “You’re too young.”

Orisian came to a sudden halt and turned to her, angry.

“Or I’m too old, too bruised,” she said quickly. “Either way, horrors that seem fresh and new to you are stale to me. What happened here, what Herraic and his men did, that’s the stuff of every tale I heard in my childhood. It’s the commonest of currencies between Huanin and na’kyrim, at least since the War of the Tainted. I despise it. Loathe it. I’m just not surprised by it.”

He glared at her, then shook his head and continued down the sinking passage.

“Perhaps I’ve lived too long,” Yvane muttered as she followed him. “But it’s not just that. I fear anger, as you should. Let it in, give it nourishment and it’ll overrun you.”

Orisian said nothing, marching sullenly on. His fist about the burning torch was painfully tight, he realised. It took a moment of concentration to soften the muscles and take some of the iron out of his fingers. He knew she was right, and he did fear what might happen inside him-what might already be happening-if he yielded to the torrent of emotions he could sense running there. But anger was not the strongest, the most dangerous current; the shadow he felt at his heels, its ever more familiar breath across the nape of his neck, was a desolate hopelessness. It was despair not rage that would claim him if his defences faltered.

They spiralled down a rough staircase, a columnar vein bearing them ever further from the distant, forgotten sky. Of all the surviving na’kyrim, only Hammarn had remained up in the portions of Highfast that had been built atop the pinnacle rather than carved out of it. He had passed the first night of his recovered freedom in a small, high sleeping chamber with Yvane and K’rina. All the rest, with barely a word, hardly a moment spared to gather food and water, had disappeared into these ancient, chthonic depths. As if to turn their backs upon the world and separate themselves from it. As if compelled by fear, or shame, or bitterness to bury themselves.

An errant shadow angling across the stonework of the stairway caught Orisian’s eye. He paused, touched fingertip to rock. He traced the carved symbols, their edges blunted and bevelled by time.

“Look at that,” he muttered. “A stonemason’s mark, I think. That must be… how old?”

Yvane leaned against the wall, a couple of steps above him. She was a little out of breath. “Seven hundred years or more. One of Marain’s masons, perhaps.”

“So many lifetimes, and it’s lain here in the stone all that time. Kings, and wars, and Thanes, all come and gone, half-forgotten.” He let his hand fall. He felt the weight of the unknown past here. A thousand and more years, with all their suffering, all their deaths, lost to memory. None of it of consequence now, yet all of it real and heavy.

“Do you want to rest?” he asked Yvane quietly.

“Don’t be silly,” she muttered, a reassuring touch of the old brashness there in her voice. “It’s hardly any distance now.”

Orisian nodded and resumed his descent.

“Plenty of places they could have chosen to sulk in, though,” he heard Yvane saying irritably behind him. “Seems a bit overexcited of them to burrow quite so deep.”

The na’kyrim had gathered in a chamber where Highfast’s hollow roots brushed the precipitous surface of the mountain. The shutters at the windows were propped narrowly open, giving a glimpse of the immense open spaces, the plummeting drop, that lay outside; admitting a dull light and cold threads of unceasing wind.

Simple beds filled much of the room, and many were occupied by the sleeping or the sick or the weak.

“Look at this, look at this,” Yvane murmured in distress as they walked the length of the chamber.

In even the plainest, most human of na’kyrim faces Orisian had until now always seen some trace of their Kyrinin parentage: a composed serenity, an elegant balance in their features or those calm grey eyes. Now he saw only wounds, of body and spirit alike. Eyes had the nervous restlessness of the hunted and hounded. Skin was marred by sores or cuts or burns. Cheeks had sunk into hollow bowls, sucked in by hunger or misery. One woman lay unmoving save for the constant, silent working of her thin lips, a smear of burned and raw flesh disfiguring one side of her face and crusting up across part of her scalp. The wound was coated in a slick white salve, but it looked inflamed. Orisian was glad that she had her eyes closed, for he feared what he might see there had he met her gaze.

He felt his anger as a pain in his chest. It knotted itself there, and because he fought to keep it locked away, it raged all the more brightly and bitterly. It clamoured for release, demanding that there must be punishment, that only the suffering of the guilty could answer this suffering of the innocent. But he refused it. He had never known its like, never known this hot, sharp conviction, like a howl inside him, that the only healing he could ever hope for was with a sword in his hand and blood upon its blade. But still he refused it.

Eshenna was seated on one of the beds closest to the windows. Little gusts of wind stirred her hair. Her hands were folded in her lap like white fallen leaves.

She looked up as Yvane sat beside her on the thin mattress. Orisian saw the same thing in her eyes he had seen in so many others: a defeated, drained emptiness.

“This is where I belonged,” Eshenna murmured as she looked down once more to her hands. She held some tiny fragment of cloth there, twisting it around her long fingers. “These are the people I belong to. I should never have left. I should have been here.”

“No,” murmured Yvane.

“We couldn’t have made any difference,” Orisian said. “None of us. Not here.”

“I know,” Eshenna whispered. “That’s not why I should have been here.”

And Orisian understood her. He felt the same longing rising up in him: not to have been here in Highfast when Aeglyss came, but to have slipped Rothe’s grasp when his shieldman dragged him out of Castle Kolglas on the night of Winterbirth. To have plunged back into the fire and the fury and been at his father’s side. Try to save his father, try to save Inurian. And, in failing, to be released from the burden of all that had flowed from that one night.

He closed his eyes. All his anger easily folded itself into a shaming despair, a profound sense that nothing was as it was meant to be. He should have paid the same price that had been demanded of Kylane and Kennet, Rothe and Inurian. And he could have wept then, thinking of his mother and brother, bound in linen winding sheets, riding the corpse-ship out to The Grave. For the first time he understood, not with his head but with his heart, what had been inside his father all those years since the Heart Fever stole away Lairis and Fariel. It was not grief; it was the desire to have gone with them. It was guilt at having let them go alone.

He blinked at Eshenna.

“Where’s Amonyn?” he managed to ask.

“The Scribing Hall,” she told him.

“I know the way,” Orisian said.

The cavernous space of the Scribing Hall felt cold and dead. Wet ash was piled thickly against some of the walls and smeared across the floor. In one corner was a great, precarious heap of half-burned timbers, fragments of shelves and tables and chairs. Thick black soot streaked the walls and darkened the ceiling. Everything, everywhere, lay beneath the finest grey dust of destruction. A few meagre stacks of books and manuscripts had been assembled on some of the surviving desks. Many were scorched, their edges charred and curled. It was a pitiful remnant of the innumerable writings Orisian had seen when last he entered this library.

“That’s what remains to us of all the labours since Lorryn first came here,” Amonyn murmured. “More than two and a half centuries.”

Orisian remembered seeing him on his first visit to Highfast; one of their Council, he thought, though they had never spoken as far as he could recall. There seemed to be a consensus amongst the na’kyrim that this man, as much as any, was now their leader. He was tall and handsome, still possessed of a certain grace and air of physical power despite recent hardships. He was subdued, though. Sorrowful and weary.

Orisian stirred a strandline of ash with the toe of his boot.

“Cerys… the Elect… died here,” said Amonyn. He sighed. “It would have broken her heart to see it thus. It breaks all our hearts.”

“Asking too much to start again,” Orisian said. It was half-statement, half-question.

Amonyn pressed long, milk-nailed fingers into his eyes. There was a strength about him, but it was not an unopposed strength. It was there, and evident, because it was required. Because the man it fortified was beleaguered.

“There are those who wish to leave this place and never return. Too much grief here. Too much horror.”

Orisian nodded silently. Amonyn lifted his gaze towards the small windows high on the far wall. They admitted only a watery light.

“This was meant to be a sanctuary for us,” the na’kyrim said. “And in the end it was one of our own kind who breached it. It was the Shared, ours alone, that undid us. But then, sanctuaries can only ever come to one of two ends: they cease to be required or they fail. It was never likely that Highfast’s end would be of the first kind, I suppose. That would have been asking for deeper changes in the world than are common.”

“Where would you go if you left?”

“Dyrkyrnon, for most.”

“I imagine there’s no place there for a Scribing Hall, or a library.”

“It seems unlikely,” said Amonyn quietly.

“You should stay. All of you.”

Amonyn glanced sideways at him. A shrewd, thoughtful look.

“It would be, for many, the harder choice to stay. Something was lost here, and it could never be recovered. Safety, for a people who find the world ill-provided with that quality. They-we-trusted this place.”

The na’kyrim studied Orisian as intently as a gemsmith examining a stone.

“There was less sadness in you when last you were here,” he said. “Less darkness. Eshenna has told me a little of what you have seen since then. She expressed some concern about you.”

“She need not worry.”

“No?” Amonyn sighed. “Such wounds as you bear are difficult to conceal from na’kyrim. From some of us, at least. Doors that were once open in you are now barred. Windows have been shuttered. It is not unusual for any of us, when we are bruised, to retreat in the hope of avoiding further injury.”

Orisian crossed to one of the smoke-blackened desks and rested back against its edge. The solitude and disconnection he had for so long now felt growing within him were softened for a moment by a vivid sense of Inurian’s presence. He could recall his lost friend’s face with fresh clarity, envisaging it graced with a sympathetic smile. There was much about Amonyn that reminded him of Inurian.

“I’ve not chosen to bar any doors,” he said, “but… things have changed. All those I most valued are dead, or have been parted from me. And I am Thane now. I imagine Thanes must always be somewhat alone.”

Amonyn raised his faint eyebrows and gave a slight shrug.

“I have little experience of Thanes,” he admitted. “I think any man, though, whatever his station, will break if he takes all the weight of decisions, all the assaults of the world, upon himself alone.”

“You’ve seen K’rina?” Orisian asked.

Amonyn hesitated for a moment, as if debating whether to concede such a shift in the conversation. The decision was made, and he nodded.

“Do you understand what has happened to her?” asked Orisian. “Eshenna claims she is some kind of… weapon. Or trap.”

“It may be so,” Amonyn said. He was grave, his voice tinged with sadness. “Her essence is either gone, or so deeply buried as to be beyond giving any sign even in the Shared. When she is near, I feel…” He curled the fingers of one hand in the air, reaching for precision. Defeated, he let his hand fall back to his side. “There is a hunger there. A mindless hunger. And the spoor of the Anain are upon her, like the tracks of deer in the earth. Whatever has been made of her, they did the making.”

Orisian pursed his lips. His hands closed upon the lip of the desk. The wood felt brittle and dry beneath his grip. He looked at his palm and saw a bar of ash across it.

“There is something of her that reminds me of Tyn, the Dreamer,” Amonyn said, wincing at the memory. “Of what Aeglyss did to him. How he… emptied him, and then wore the empty shell himself. K’rina is a shell, but what is now within? Perhaps nothing.” He sighed. “But in truth no one here can tell you any more than Eshenna or Yvane have already done. To learn more about K’rina, we would need to go much deeper into the Shared than any of us would dare. What Eshenna has already discovered… It was an act of great bravery, or desperation, for her to search it out.”

Orisian nodded. “Too much for her, I think,” he said. “I regret that. It was at my insistence that she did it.”

“You won’t find anyone here eager to repeat the venture. The beast found his way inside our defences once already. We would not invite him in again.”

“It must be very difficult for you, to be frightened of the Shared,” Orisian said.

There was that instant of acute, appraising attention once more, as if Amonyn was surprised to hear such sentiments from a Huanin.

“It is,” the na’kyrim said quietly. “We have lost more than one home.”

“And until Aeglyss is gone, you can none of you return to the one that’s inside your heads.”

“We must exile ourselves from the Shared. K’rina’s wound was not serious. She has needed no more than the most mundane of ministrations. But there are those within these walls who are dying from their wounds, their ailments. I might save some of them, if I had the courage, or the strength, to allow the Shared to flow through me. But I do not. None of us do.”

Orisian looked up at the huge roof of the hall, dropped his gaze to the few surviving books collected on nearby desks. “You should stay, all of you. That’s what I came to tell you. You’d be no safer-probably less-out there on the roads, perhaps even in Dyrkyrnon. I will leave men here to guard you, and to keep Herraic and the others in order.”

Amonyn stooped elegantly to pull a fragment of parchment from a drift of ash. He frowned at it briefly then let it fall. It fluttered down, black and illegible.

“Not everything that is broken can be mended, however much we-you-might wish otherwise. Some things… do not mend.”

“I know that,” Orisian said. “Believe me, I understand that. I know that the past cannot be changed, cannot be undone. But the future… I still believe, still hope, that can be changed, can be shaped by what we choose to do. And enough has already been lost. We shouldn’t give up any more without a fight. Anything that’s worth preserving, it needs to be fought for now, don’t you think? Or there will be nothing left at all of any worth, any brightness.”

“Everyone has to choose their own battles to fight,” Amonyn said quietly. “We will see, though. Give us your warriors to guard us, and perhaps. Perhaps. There might be some of us willing to remain. You don’t mean to stay here yourself, though.”

Orisian shook his head. “I can’t see any other choice. If I hid away here…” The words faded, losing themselves.

The na’kyrim angled his head, smiling now with the very smile Orisian’s memory had put upon Inurian’s face.

“There’s always choice. We seldom understand our every reason for doing what we do, but somewhere, hidden or not, made or unmade, there’s always choice. We each choose our own battles, as I said.”

There was, high in the great keep of the ancient fortress, a wide chamber from which the Wardens of the Aygll Kings once exercised the power of those distant monarchs. They judged those who disturbed the peace of the long road Highfast guarded; they levied the tithes that paid for Dun Aygll’s palaces and for the many royal pleasures of their inhabitants; they marshalled the warriors who enforced peace upon the Karkyre Peaks, and all the land from Ive to Hent to Stone. As the road fell into ruin, as the Storm Years sent the mountain folk down onto the plains in search of easier, safer lives, as Highfast itself declined into its long slumber, so that chamber had grown quiet. Each dwindling of Highfast’s garrison had seen its inhabitants retreat into ever more restricted portions of the vast stronghold, withdrawing from many of its innumerable passages and halls and turrets. So this lofty chamber had emptied of voices, and populated itself instead with dust and silences and the webs of hopeful spiders.

Orisian called all his warriors there because he wanted privacy from Herraic and his sullen, subjugated men. Because he wanted light, and the sight of the sky, to be attendant upon this moment. From the windows here, where Highfast reached almost to its utmost height above its vast, precipitous pedestal, he could see an ocean of scudding clouds brushing over serried ranks of peaks.

“I will take K’rina into the north,” he said. “To the Glas Valley. As close as I can get to Kan Avor, and to Aeglyss.”

He looked not at the faces of those assembled before him, but at the old, indistinct carving of a crown set into the stonework above the door. He felt strangely unfamiliar to himself, as if some part of him had stepped aside from his tempestuous core, where fear and confusion and agonies of doubt boiled. He was unexpectedly calm.

“It is a journey she was meant to make, I think, until we-I-stole her away from it. Now she cannot make it alone, so I will take her. Past Hent, and through Anlane. Most of you are to stay here, and I’ll want your pledge to keep safe all who are within these walls, human and na’kyrim alike. Guard them against whatever may come from outside, or from within. It’s the only service your Blood, and your Thane, requires of you now.

“If there are ten of you who are willing to come with me, and with K’rina, I would welcome your aid. No more than ten, for there’ll be no battles if I can help it. At this time of year, this season, most of the White Owls should be quartered in their winter camps. With care, we might go entirely unnoticed. But I will take no one who does not come by their own free choice.”

Taim Narran stepped forward, of course, even before Orisian had drawn breath: a single, determined pace closer to his Thane. Others followed him, one by one, the only sound their soft feet on the flagstoned floor. And for Orisian there was both relief and guilt in the sight of them coming out from amongst their fellows. Offering themselves, and their lives, to him.

Afterwards, as the warriors departed, descending the long stairways, Taim Narran came to him.

“Are you sure?” was all the warrior asked him, gently.

“Not sure. I’ve seen and heard enough to make me think it needs doing. And I’m here; there’s no one else to do it. But you don’t have to come, Taim. Highfast will need a strong hand to hold it, and there’s no one I’d trust more than you. You’ve a wife and a daughter waiting for you who’ll need you after all this is done. I’d be glad to see you stay, truly.”

Taim Narran only shook his head sadly at that, and went after his men. Orisian and Yvane were left alone in the broad chamber, the na’kyrim watching him with hard eyes.

“Stay,” Orisian said to her. “You’ve done enough. More than enough.”

“I’ll come for K’rina. She deserves that much of us, at least. There should be someone of her own kind there to care for her, to watch over her. Someone who understands something of what she was, what her life was, before she became only a tool of those with wars to fight.”

“I care for her,” Orisian said. The fires in him were damped down, for now. He wanted only quiet. He would not argue with Yvane. And there was, in any case, a truth he could entirely understand in her subdued anger.

“Perhaps you do,” she said. “Perhaps you think you do. But still she is used. By the Anain. By us. Na’kyrim have learned-hundreds of years have taught us-to find caring and trust and safety only in one another. In our own. If there is anything of K’rina left, lost in the Shared or sealed away inside her body, she deserves to look out and see a face like her own. And I played my part in helping you to find her. Whether that was wise or not, I don’t know, but I’ll not walk away from her now.”

She left him there, and he stood for a time breathing the damp air, tasting its age and its abandonment. Listening to the timeless, unending wind tumbling over the skin of the fortress. Watching as flurries of snow began to swirl once more past the windows.

When he at last stirred himself, he went to find Ess’yr and Varryn. He said not a word to them, nor they to him. He merely settled himself onto a bench and watched them. They rolled spare bowstrings about their fingers and packed them away in pouches. They sewed new seams into their hide boots where they had started to split. They sighted along the shafts of their arrows in search of imperfections, smoothed the feathered flights. They inspected their water bags for wear and for leaks.

All of this they did unhurriedly, silently. That concentration, that graceful intensity of attention and purpose, was soothing to Orisian. It spoke to him of acceptance, of calm accommodation to the future the world offered up. For so long, as a child searching for solace in the wake of the Heart Fever, he had imagined that there might be other kinds of lives than his, ones that rode the tempests of the world with greater ease. He had seized upon every hint that Inurian let slip about the ways of the Kyrinin, taking them to be tokens of just such lives; fragmentary promises that other possibilities existed beyond the walls of bereaved Castle Kolglas.

He could still summon up some trace of those childhood hopes, but it was the memory of them that offered comfort now, not their substance. He knew more; was no longer that child.

Varryn stood tall, and held his long spear straight at his side. For the first time in many days, he looked directly into Orisian’s eyes and spoke to him.

“We go now into the lands of the enemy?”

Orisian nodded wordlessly, feeling that faint, still peace drift away. And he watched as the thinnest of smiles tightened on the Kyrinin warrior’s face. As the tattoos that told the tales of the deaths he had wrought flexed on his skin.

“Then I will wet my spear with their blood. And they will learn the Fox still live.”