Fall of Thanes

VIII

The track from Highfast to Hent was wind-lashed, snow-blasted. It rode the high bare slopes of jagged ridges, rising and falling across the spine of the Karkyre Peaks. Sharp-sided valleys lay below, gorges clawed out of the body of the mountains by immense talons. Clouds surged in from the west, engulfing the track and the summits around it, veiling them in mist and snow, then sweeping on and away to leave them bathed in sunlight, roofed by a curving expanse of pale blue sky. Sometimes, in those clear moments, Orisian could look down into the valley beneath them and see nothing but great slabs of cloud and fog, the peaks and ridges bare islands protruding from a sea frozen in the instant of its boiling.

Even when the sky was naked above, and there was no snow or sleet, the wind never ceased. It buffeted and bit them. Orisian, like most of the others, wore a woollen scarf across his nose and mouth, and kept the fur-lined hood of his jacket pulled as far up and over his head as it would go. They had taken the best clothing they could find from Highfast’s stores. Still the cold found its way in. Had he not suffered its savage attentions before, and more acutely, in the Car Criagar, it might have been intolerable. Now, he merely shrunk himself inside his cocoon of wool and cloth, and endured.

The horses suffered the most, becoming sluggish and sullen. They held their heads low. Soon, they might become more hindrance than aid. Whether or not the weather gentled, or the track became less snow-clogged and treacherous, there would come a time-perhaps two days, perhaps three-when they reached the edge of Anlane. And that, Orisian suspected, would be no place for riding.

Often, his mind retreated from the harsh reality of the journey, drifting and stumbling its way through corridors of memory and distraction. But they were seldom clean. Untainted. He remembered the day before the Winterbirth feast at Castle Kolglas. So much of that memory was warm, coloured impossibly joyful by the darkness of what had followed it: walking beside Anyara through the market, hearing the light, bubbling chatter of the festive throng, smelling the sticky richness of honey cakes. Yet as he relived it in his head, Orisian found shadows bleeding in at the edges of the scenes his mind recreated. Faces in the crowd that blurred and leered and grimaced, until he turned his imagined attention full upon them, and then they were gone. Not there at all.

And then he was walking with Inurian over the rocks beneath the castle’s wall. Looking for… something. Even the pain of that memory was sweet, for there, before his mind’s eye, was that lost face in all its precise simplicity and affection. So close he could have touched it. So alive. Yet he could hear that the waves slapping at the rocks were heavy, thick with something more than water. Inurian’s lips moved, but Orisian could not hear him, only the seagulls screeching overhead. And their cries became the anguished wails and laughter of mad children.

He was looking down at a corpse. A woman, frozen into a stiff huddle. Snow on her head, in her ear, in the pit of her eye. He was looking down on her from what seemed a great height, yet for all that distance he could see the ends of her eyelashes protruding through the snow. He could see the strands of loose cotton that had frayed from the collar of her coat.

“Couldn’t say whether she’s Kilkry or Black Road.”

“What?” Orisian said, blinking.

Taim Narran twisted in his saddle, looking back.

“Couldn’t say whether she’s Kilkry or Black Road,” he repeated.

Ess’yr and Varryn were standing over the corpse, staring down at it. It lay off to the side of the rough track, beneath the shelter of an overhanging boulder.

“Died of cold, not of blade,” Varryn said.

“Herraic said we might reach Hent in a day, if we didn’t pause,” Orisian said, still dislocated, half of him caught up in that place where the dreams and memories lurked. “How long till nightfall, do you think?”

Varryn flicked a glance towards the western sky, lifted his chin as if to scent the air.

“The third part of the day is yet to come,” the Kyrinin said.

“We should keep moving, then.”

Ess’yr and Varryn ran ahead of the horses, disappearing beyond the rugged writhings of the trail. In the moment when they dipped out of sight, Orisian felt that familiar tug of foreboding and fear. Every moment that he could not see Ess’yr, could not satisfy himself of her safety, was soured by worry. He did not doubt her capabilities but still he worried. Death, it seemed to him, was becoming ever less respectful of the capabilities of those it claimed.

He could hear two of the warriors talking behind him. Low voices, jumbled by the wind, the words separated, some snuffed out, some thrown together. He could not make out what they were saying.

His mind wandered once more, lulled by that sound, human yet incomprehensible, and by the slow and steady crunching of his horse’s hoofs on loose stones and bare rock. He drifted. And this time he saw Ess’yr’s face, just as he had first seen it when slipping in and out of a wounded fever. It was as clear to him now as it had been then. Clearer. The beauty of it, the soft and flawless near-white skin, the framing curtain of hair with an almost metallic yellow glint to it. The eyes, unguarded, grey as flint, looking into his own. He rode in the embrace of that memory.

Hent was stranger than Orisian had expected. It sprawled across the eastern flank of a long, descending ridge. The highest of its buildings lay almost at the crest of the ridge; the lowest, close by the seething river that ran north between fringes of scrubby willow and alder. The buildings themselves were like bulges in the skin of the mountain, as if its innards had burst forth in crumbling disarray and then been reassembled into habitations. The shape of each was governed by the natural form of the rock to which it clung. There was barely a straight line to be seen, save the slate tiles that clad each roof. Snow was piled in every wind-shadow.

The trail dipped down from its perch high on the slope to sweep through the centre of the tiny town, and re-emerged beyond it, scarring its way on towards the low hills and dark brown stain of forest that lay to the north.

A solitary figure was moving, down there amongst all the stone; staggering as if drunk between slope-sided houses. Just that one movement. All the rest was as imperturbably motionless as the giant boulder field it resembled.

“We went to within a spear throw,” Ess’yr murmured at Orisian’s side. “No watch. No guard. Stink of…” She cocked her head. “Stink of Koldihrve. The Huanin there, and their drink.”

“We heard thick sleeping,” Varryn observed.

“What does that mean?” asked Orisian.

“The body sleeps,” said Ess’yr, “but the nose does not.”

Orisian frowned, then: “Snoring?”

Ess’yr shrugged.

“And there is the smell of death,” Varryn said.

They fell back to where Taim Narran and the others waited. All were dismounted save K’rina, who was bound to the saddle of a placid horse by a thick weave of cords and rope. She was hunched forward and low, almost to the animal’s neck, in that strange borderland between sleep and unconsciousness that she occupied most of the time.

“The western side of the ridge is steep,” Taim said as soon as they drew near. “Not even a goat trail that we could see.”

“We could go that way, though?” Orisian asked.

Taim wrinkled the bridge of his nose.

“If necessary. It would be difficult. Dangerous and slow. We’d have to leave the horses.” He looked at K’rina. “She’s in no condition to be clambering around on a mountain slope. What of the town?”

“Seems almost empty,” Orisian muttered, glancing back towards Hent, now hidden by a hump of bare rock. “The Black Road must have been there, maybe still are. But it’s as near to dead as makes no difference.”

“Still, we couldn’t pass through without being seen,” Taim said.

“No.” Orisian shook his head.

“Cloud coming,” Varryn said, looking up beyond the ridgeline towards the grey western sky. Banks of low cloud were indeed streaming in, their vanguard already wisping around the highest outcrops of rock and spilling frail tendrils down the slope.

Taim looked dubious.

“That could help,” he said, “but even so…”

Orisian’s mouth was dry. He swallowed. The world was disappearing before his eyes, lapsing into a blur of moist grey. He could hear his own heartbeat, as if the foggy sprawl of those clouds was deadening and silencing everything else so completely there was nothing else left to hear. Nothing to attend to save his own thoughts, and he barely recognised many of them. He wanted to be rid of them, these flickers of doubt, murmurs of fear. Stirrings of a hot and unfamiliar bloodthirst.

“We’ll try. The place is half-abandoned, and whoever’s left there isn’t expecting us. We’ll try to go straight through.”

The slow, silent descent into the town proved a crossing from the fixed and steady world into the domain of madness.

The first of the stone houses loomed out of the mist. Orisian went, as soft-footed as he could, to crouch in the lee of its irregular wall. The moisture-laden air rolled thickly over his face. Up ahead, the mist took Ess’yr as he watched, fading her into its concealing mystery. Varryn went with her, and first one then two of Taim’s men.

Orisian could hear nothing. He could see little more. Just the intricate patina of lichens and mosses that had colonised the rough stone blocks of the wall. Just the narrowing, undulating trail, now gathering water, harvested from the sinking cloud, into its crevices. He could feel tiny beads of water forming all across his skin, merging with one another into a cold sheen. He licked his upper lip, drinking the stuff of the sky.

Taim Narran eased past him, moving without haste in a low crouch. The warrior rounded the corner of the house. He went almost soundlessly, leaving no trace but the gentle turning of a pebble under his heel. Orisian edged forward. He had his shield on his arm. It was cumbersome, but its weight and breadth were comforting. This place, and these moments, felt unsafe, as if the skin of things was wearing thin. There were whispers of trepidation in his head, and he had the distracting sense that they came not from within but from out there, just beyond the fog-defined limit of his vision. As if there was something waiting for him. Beckoning him.

He looked around the corner. Taim Narran was there, hunched down with his back against a strange, conical structure of rocks-a storage chamber of some kind. He pointed silently to the opposite wall of the narrow alley. Orisian looked, and at first could not understand what his eyes told him. There were bulbous shapes hanging from the wall: bloated waterskins or rocks some river had smoothed into unnatural spheres. Orisian frowned. The mist thinned briefly, showed them to him more clearly, and then drew a dank veil once more. Skulls. Human, as far he could tell. Adorning the back wall of a house like mad decoration.

He stared at Taim. The warrior raised his eyebrows and shuffled back to join Orisian on the main track.

“Stay close,” Taim whispered.

He led the way forward, still cautious but moving more quickly now. Orisian followed. Those distant murmurs inside his mind came now from skulls, which he imagined to festoon every invisible building out beyond the wall of mist. Two more warriors were close behind him, and beyond them somewhere the rest were waiting with Yvane and K’rina and the horses. The animals had their hoofs muffled, in the hope that they might pass unnoticed once the way had been cleared or secured, but Orisian felt an inexplicable certainty that whatever was here in Hent had already noticed them all, had already begun to gather itself all around them, unseen.

A sound from up ahead, vanishingly faint: indecipherable but swiftly followed by a sibilant whimper. Then scraping, uneven footsteps and a shape was coalescing out of the grey nothingness. A man stumbled into sight down the centre of the track. He staggered against the bulging wall of a house, then came on. He wore an ill-fitting chain jerkin over a ragged hide jacket. One foot was booted, the other bare. There was an open wound in his throat, robbing him of the power of breath and speech even as it spilled his blood down onto his chest. As Orisian watched, the man’s eyes rolled up into his head and he pitched forward. Taim darted up and caught him as he fell, then lowered him gently to the ground, one precautionary hand clamped over his mouth and nose. The man died without any further sound.

Orisian and Taim knelt by the corpse, both of them gazing ahead. There was no more movement in the shifting, rolling bank of mist. A sickly scent rose from the dead man: an alloy of ale and vomit.

“Is he Black Road?” Orisian whispered.

Taim put a finger to his lips.

They went on, deeper into the town’s heart. A face startled Orisian, looking up at him from a shallow gutter cut along the side of the track. It was a girl’s face, tiny and delicate, softened and blotched and a little deformed by incipient decay. She had been dead for some time. Orisian could not help but look into those smeared eyes. As he did so, he found himself looking not at this nameless girl but at the face of mute Bair, the stable hand who had died in Castle Kolglas; and the darkness of night rather than the gloom of fogs enveloped him, and he could smell smoke and straw and horses. The vision was more acute, more merciless, than memory. It mastered him and held him there, on the night of Winterbirth. He heard the clamour of battle, the crackle of flames, and experienced once again the dizzying mix of fear and anger that had been in him then. And he was turning, knowing already what he would see; knowing that his father was about to die, a knife in his chest. He did not want to witness that again, but still he turned towards it, caught by its irresistible pull.

There was a hand on his arm, and instead of his father, he saw Taim Narran, leaning close in, staring worriedly into his eyes. Orisian sucked in wet air and nodded. Taim looked unconvinced, but released his grip and moved on.

The track twisted and plunged down between two houses that angled out of the mountainside like flat ledges. Varryn was crouching on one of the slate roofs, at Orisian’s eye level. The Kyrinin was holding out a hand in warning. Taim shrank back, extending his own arm to nudge Orisian half a pace back up the track.

Even as they retreated, a figure appeared in the doorway of the hut, directly beneath Varryn. A frowning, gaunt-faced man peering about him like someone roused from sleep by a puzzling but unthreatening sound in the night. He rubbed at his stubbled chin as he looked down the track and then up. His eyes met Orisian’s and widened. His hand frozen in mid-movement, he said something: still puzzled, but with the first foretaste of alarm in his northern-accented voice.

Varryn flicked himself flat onto the roof and his two long arms darted down, one hand spreading across the man’s mouth, the other clasping his throat in a cage of rigid fingers that dug into the skin, crushing. The man gave out a muffled, groaning yelp, only half-stifled. He twisted against Varryn’s grip, and it seemed he might be free in a moment. Taim Narran rushed forward, heedless now of the noise his boots made on the rocky path. He punched the man once in the centre of the chest, with all his strength and with all the weight of his sword, its hilt firmly clenched in his fist. The man flew back into the dark interior, his breath gusting out from him, and Taim followed him without breaking stride.

Varryn gathered up his spear and bow and vaulted lightly down from the roof. He glanced once in through the doorway and then, evidently satisfied by whatever he saw there, looked up at Orisian.

“There are few,” he said quietly. “They die easily.”

“Are any of the townsfolk left?” Orisian asked. His own voice sounded distant and hollow to him. “Have you found any of them?”

Varryn said nothing but dipped the point of his spear down the slope of the path. Orisian’s gazed followed, and he saw there lying in the mist another corpse. The hands were tied behind its back. The head was gone, leaving an open, rotting stump of neck. Orisian blinked at it, then looked down at his feet. When he lifted his eyes again, Varryn had disappeared and Taim was emerging from the house. His sword was dark with blood. He held up a short length of cord.

“Woven from human hair,” he muttered. “He was wearing it like a necklace.”

“What happened here?” Orisian wondered.

“Madness,” Taim said. His expression was troubled. For the first time he could remember, Orisian saw a fleeting distress there, an unease that bordered upon fear.

“Can you feel it?” Orisian asked, not knowing what answer he hoped for. He did not want to be the only one who sensed the sickness boiling in Hent’s gut, and congealing out of the air. But then, if he was not the only one, it meant that the sickness was real. It was here, closing on them.

Taim shook his head, not in disagreement but confusion.

“Something,” he said. “I feel something.”

There was an anguished cry from somewhere ahead. Another death amidst the vapours.

“Go and bring the others on through, as fast as you safely can,” Taim said to one of the warriors coming hesitantly up behind them.

As the man trotted back the way they had come, Taim grimaced at Orisian.

“The sooner we’re clear of this place the better, I think,” he said.

Orisian opened his mouth to agree but was struck dumb by the insubstantial figure that he suddenly saw a little way up the slope, in the entrance to one of the tight, twisting paths that ran between Hent’s high-walled yards and squat houses. The form was at first too faint to be sure whether it was made of flesh or from tendrils of heavy cloud. Its features were obscured or absent. Yet he knew who it was.

He took a step up the track.

“Fariel,” he murmured.

And the mist-shape of his dead brother turned its vague head towards him. Had there been eyes there, they would have been upon him. Orisian lost all awareness of where he was, or even when. For the space of three heartbeats-and he felt them, each one, loud and sharp in his breast-there was only him and this memory of Fariel.

“I’m sorry,” Orisian said. “I tried.” He did not know what he was saying, or why. It was the need in him, the despair, that spoke.

“Orisian!”

The shout snapped him out of his dark reverie. Taim Narran was pushing past him. Just in time to block a spear thrust delivering by a laughing, leering woman. She wore a mail shirt, a dented metal skullcap of a helm, heavy boots that rose to the knees of her thick hide leggings. It was the garb of a warrior, yet she fought without skill, without guile. Spittle flew from her lips; her eyes rolled this way and that in their sockets.

Orisian fell back onto his heels. Taim flattened his shield, driving the point of the woman’s spear into the ground. His sword came down and smashed through the spear’s shaft; would have taken the woman’s hands too, had she not released it an instant before. She came at Taim again, reaching for him with bare hands, not hesitating. Grinning, muttering. He snapped his sword up, and the backhanded sweep hit her on her cheekbone, gouged its way up into the side of her face. Sent that little helmet soaring away, down the hillside, clattering off a wall before the hungry mists swallowed it. Orisian stared after it. He heard it bouncing once, twice: metal on stone. Ringing like some ailing, cracked bell. And then there was silence.

“I saw the dead,” Orisian said.

He was sitting on a cloak spread over wet grass. Hent was some way behind them. They had travelled deep into the night, driven on by a common, unspoken desire to put as much ground as possible between them and that awful place.

There had been not just skulls, but finger bones threaded onto sinews and hung from the eaves of houses. A corpse spreadeagled on a flat roof, hands and feet tied. The tiles beneath it stained by blood, for the woman had been alive when she was stretched out there, and when the carrion birds had come spiralling out of the sky. A tiny compound, the workspace of a stonecarver, now filled with bodies. They lay three deep, with snow draped over them.

Of the Black Road company that had wrought such havoc upon that remote town, only a handful had remained for Ess’yr and Varryn and Taim and the rest to kill. Some had died of disease, some had apparently been killed by their companions. None of the dead had been interred or burned. They lay amongst the townsfolk, discarded and forgotten. It was as if, once Hent’s inhabitants had been slain, the mad rage that fuelled their slaughter had demanded yet more tribute of those it possessed. And they had mindlessly done what it required of them.

“Not the dead,” Yvane said beside Orisian. “Memory. The Shared. The dead-the echo of them-persist in the Shared as long as there are those still living who remember them. Much longer than that, if stories are told of them, if their names are not forgotten.”

She shifted uncomfortably upon the cloak, searching for an accommodating undulation in the hard ground beneath.

“It is Aeglyss, spreading. The walls between our minds and the Shared are breaking down. For you, today, it came as the dead, as death itself. It will come to each of us as our own minds and inclinations permit it. As they invite it. For those who know only struggle, only anger and killing… well, we saw back there what it does to them.”

“What about you?”

“I hold it at bay. So far.” There was a subtle strain in her voice. “I felt something last night. A… I don’t know. Something. He grows stronger, or at least sinks deeper into the Shared.”

Orisian looked into the east. He was not sure whether he imagined it, but there seemed to be a hint of dawn out there. A grainy lightening of the horizon.

“If the Shared can bring the dead to the surface like that, then is it the Sleeping Dark?” he asked, watching that possible, longed-for, distant daybreak.

“Oh, if you want answers to questions like that, you need to ask them of a wiser head than mine.”

“There must be those who have thought of such things.”

“There are. At length, and for many years, in Highfast. And elsewhere. Why do you suppose some of the Kyrinin imagine the Anain, the lords of the Shared, to be the shepherds of their unresting dead? Does it matter, though? The answer?”

“I don’t know,” Orisian said at length. “Is Inurian there, then? In the Shared?”

“Not him. The dead are dead. Gone. What remains in the Shared is only the memory of him. The sound of his voice, the sense of who he was. Something like him, but not truly him. He has ended.”

Orisian nodded, sad.

“It might be best if you tried to shut such things out,” Yvane said gently. “It’s only something inside you, wounding itself with the Shared.”

“But I remember them so clearly.”

“That’s good, I imagine. It would be, anyway, in quieter times. Just don’t let the memory of them crowd out the living for you.”

The dawn did come, and blearily illuminated a vast landscape. The ground sank away to the east of them in successive lines of grass-clad hills, interspersed with crags and snowfields and clusters of scrubby trees. Beyond that, sweeping off towards the faint and hesitant sun, lay Anlane. Endless, from this high vantage point. Rolling like a brown and grey sea into the indefinable distance, where it and the huge sky blurred into nothingness. All the world was silent forest, and Orisian feared it. He looked out over Anlane’s illimitable wilds and imagined it to be alive, a gigantic sleeping power that waited only for his footsteps to disturb it. A place that, once entered, could not be left.

Taim Narran was checking over the horses nearby. Yvane was kneeling beside K’rina’s prostrate form, changing the bandages on her shoulder wound. The warriors, one by one, were mounting their horses as Taim approved their condition. It was all done with hardly a word.

Ess’yr came across the grass to Orisian. She was holding something out to him. He looked down at what lay in her palm and at first did not recognise it.

“Too long since the last we made of these,” Ess’yr said.

Two cords, each of them with a dozen or more small, tight knots spread along their length. A dozen memories, Orisian knew. A dozen thoughts, embodied in those tiny tangles of cord, to go into the wet earth in place of a lost, irrecoverable body.

“You and Varryn?” he said quietly. He was afraid to reach out and accept these tokens, afraid of their implications and importance. But Ess’yr sank her hand a little closer to his own, tilting it to let the cords edge closer to her fingertips.

“It is not a good time for the dead to wander, to go unrooted in willow,” she said. “When Anain can die, there are none to shepherd the restless dead.”

Orisian willed his hand to rise, and accepted the two cords into his grasp. They were light. Yet he felt every knot in them as a hard point pressing against his skin. He stared down at them: the beaded kernels of two lives.

“Which is yours?” he asked.

Ess’yr touched a finger to one of the strands.

“If you live and we do not, plant them beneath stakes of willow,” she said.

Orisian nodded numbly, for he could never have refused her this. That she should bring such a thing to him, and make him its guardian, filled him with a kind of awe. And a faint, intimate hope, perhaps, glimmering there deep inside him. But he feared it too, this responsibility that he knew with absolute certainty would bring unbearable pain should he ever be called upon to discharge it.

“If you are to die, I do not think you will do it alone,” he murmured. “I may not be able to do as you ask.”

“Perhaps.” She sounded unconcerned. “But the ra’tyn is done now. The promise I made to Inurian. It is spent. Where we go now, where you choose to go, Varryn and I have other battles to fight. We become a spear a’an, entering the lands of the enemy. I have done what I can for Inurian. For you. We will go as far as we can with you, but…”

The words trailed away. Orisian lifted his head and looked into her eyes. So imperturbably calm and knowing, those flinty windows, yet revealing nothing of what lay beyond them, within.

“I understand,” he said. “I will keep them safe.”

The thought came to him suddenly, woken by the sorrow of potential partings, potential loss.

“Will you wait for a moment?” he asked her.

He found a cord of his own, sealing the mouth of a canvas bag that held only a few remnant scraps of food. Long enough, he thought.

He sat cross-legged on the cold, damp grass and began looping a chain of knots into the cord’s length. He was clumsy, but stubbornly persisted. Each knot he moistened with the tip of his tongue, as he had seen Ess’yr and Varryn do, long ago in the vo’an where he had woken from wounded slumber to her face.

One for the time before the Heart Fever, a bright memory of family. Then one for his mother, one for his brother, one for his father. The memories came clearly, carrying equal parts of comfort and misery. One for Inurian, one for Anyara. That last hurt him more than he expected, for its texture of distance and parting. But he remembered her strength and her unruly vigour, and found a smile. One for Rothe, too raw and recent to linger upon, no matter how much he longed to recall only the man’s gruff companionship and loyal affection. And the last of them, tightening into the strand, clenching itself into permanence, for Ess’yr. For what might have been, in a world, or a life, other than this one.

He wept a little, running his finger over what he had made, but nor for long. He took it to Ess’yr, who had been standing patiently some way down the slope.

“Will you bury it for me, if the time comes?” he asked her.

She took it from him, cupping it, coiled like a thin, sleeping snake, in her hand.

“Not in a dyn hane,” she said. “Not with the true people.”

“No,” he said. “I understand. But somewhere? Somewhere fitting for a Huanin?”

She regarded him silently for a few breaths. He felt like reaching out to her, touching her, trying to convey how deeply this request expressed his heart. But, soon enough, she nodded in assent and closed her hand about the cord of his life.