Fall of Thanes

IV

When Theor woke, it was from an intermittent slumber that had done nothing to renew him. He rose stiffly and dressed. His skin felt every scrape of his robe’s rough material. He felt no hunger or thirst, no desire of any kind that might lead him out from this bare chamber. Yet there was nothing to hold him here either. Solitude brought no easing of his despair.

He went out, and found others clustered in the corridor, conferring in muted whispers. They looked up, startled, at his emergence.

“You should see…” one of them stammered.

He let them lead him to the walls of the Sanctuary. Let them guide him up the steps onto the narrow walkway cut into its inner face. He went numbly, without expectation.

What they wanted to show him was smoke. It was climbing up into a sky thick with white clouds, tracing its darker way against that bleached background in two twisting columns that merged as they rose, and then slowly bent and spread to drift in black sheets high above the snow-clad hills. Those who accompanied him talked and fretted, but Theor took none of it in. He gazed up at that dark pillar ascending from the earth towards the firmament above and felt nothing. No surprise, no confusion, no fear. He found himself beyond such things.

It was the compound of the Battle burning. There was nothing else out there on the wooded slopes that could give rise to such a conflagration. The wind was coming from his back, otherwise Theor did not doubt that he would have smelled the ash, the burning timbers. Perhaps burning flesh. Perhaps he would even have heard the cries of the dying, the commotion of sudden death.

As they stood there on the wall, a shape emerged from the trees, coming steadily towards them. Some cried out and pointed, tugging at Theor’s arm to direct his attention. He did not respond. It was a grey horse, trotting along, following the hard-packed snow of the path between the deeper, pristine drifts that flanked it. It came at its own pace, following its own course, for the man who rode it was slumped forward, draped limply around its neck. Even from this distance, it was not hard to recognise him as a Battle Inkallim. The blackness of his hair, and of his leather armour, stood out against the pale hide of his mount and the luminously white snow.

The man’s blood had stained the horse’s shoulder, forming a dark red-brown blemish that flexed and pulsed as it moved along. There were crossbow bolts standing proud from the man’s back. Two of them, Theor thought, though he could not be sure.

“We must intercede, First,” one of those gathered upon the wall cried, all panic and confusion. “They will listen to the Lore, surely? The High Thane, the Battle, they must listen to the Lore. No one else perhaps, but us.”

Theor did not know what to say. Neither Ragnor nor Nyve would listen. They had boiled over and could hear nothing but the roaring of their own hearts, their own rages. The time when consideration, negotiation, moderation might gain any purchase upon anyone had passed. Fury bestrode the world and would not yield its dominion. That Theor himself could not partake of the heady brew rendered him isolated, at a loss. For whatever reason, he had been left becalmed and irrelevant in some backwater while the river flooded on without him. As if fate had no further need for him. If it even was fate that governed this torrent.

He turned away while the horse was still approaching with its grim cargo. He descended from the wall, ignoring the questions and pleas his fellow Inkallim belaboured him with. He went silently back to his own small bedchamber and closed the door behind him, and took a little box out from its hiding place.

Three of the Lore had now died within the walls of the Sanctuary while dreaming seerstem dreams. It was unprecedented. Theor himself had forbidden any others to venture into that once-so-soothing territory. But now… there was nowhere else to turn. He could find no truth or sense any longer on this side of the seerstem gate. There were no answers here. Nothing for him to hold on to. He felt entirely defeated by the vastness of the world and its confusion.

He took out one of the shrivelled fragments from the box and regarded it blankly. He did not truly imagine it could bring him any of the clarity he so craved, but that tiny hope persisted. Even before the deaths began, there had been little save troubling turmoil to be found in those strange dreams. But still he set the seerstem in his mouth and crushed it between his teeth. He lay back on the hard bed and closed his eyes.

Slowly, slowly, the seerstem took him. It dulled him and enfolded him and gently parted the threads holding him to the waking world. He sank, and the darkness bled across his eyes and silence leaked into his ears.

And he saw a thousand flickering shadows darting back and forth across a limitless gloomy expanse. He felt a thousand fluttering touches on the skin of his thoughts. A thousand sparks of anger, of fear, hate, anguish, awful grief, each one no more than an instant, like an ocean of tiny, transient stars flaring and dying across his mind. They dizzied him and dazzled him and he wailed soundlessly in his dreams at the deluge. This place to which seerstem gave entry had twisted so radically away from its once-familiar and restful form that it now felt like an exposed pinnacle surrounded by a churning storm. Standing there he was besieged and buffeted by clamorous delirium.

Whatever faint hope he had nurtured that there might yet be answers to be found here was shattered, and its fragments torn away on the howling winds that blew through him. Lights flashed before him, and he knew they were not lights but lives. It was a fearful lightning storm of being. It was too much. Panic boiled in him, and he longed above all else to escape this invasive maelstrom, but the seerstem had him, and he could not choose to wake from its clutches yet.

And then he was not alone. He saw nothing, heard nothing, but he felt a presence settling all about him, as if the black sky had descended and gathered itself into a single shell that enclosed him. It was a cold presence. One that pressed upon his consciousness, probed it with insistent fingers.

“Who are you?” Theor stammered. “What are you?”

“No.” The voice was inside him, reverberating in the chamber of his mind. “Here, the questions are mine to ask. Who are you? Another of those who stumble blindly about the fringes of this place. Another trespasser who does not belong.”

“I am…” The man did not know his name any more, for that part of his memory, and his self, was eclipsed by this immense all-encompassing presence. He fell silent.

“This is not for you. All of this, not for you. Your blood is too singular. Too clean, too pure.” The voice spat that last word with venom. It burned the man. “Your kind does not belong here.”

“Who are you? Are you… are you the Hooded God?”

“Oh, your dreams of the Road. These pathetic comforts you preach to yourselves. Like children, afraid of the dark, afraid of being alone. To be alone; I could teach you about that. I could show you. No, I’m not your Last God.”

The man felt himself failing. He was crumbling beneath the weight of this vast attention.

“He Who Waits?” He mumbled it; he gasped it. “He Who Waits, then? Not gone at all, but always here? Always with us, all this time?”

The laughter was all around him, all through him, tearing at him.

“You’d make me Death?” And a heavy silence, a nothingness for a time. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I want… I wanted everything to be different. Not death. That’s not what I wanted. I only wanted… I only wanted…” Agonies seeped from the voice into the man, filling him with another’s suffering. And it continued: “None of this is as I thought it would be. But it cannot be changed.”

Swiftly as they had come, the doubt and sorrow that had suffused the voice receded. The darkness grew deeper. The shadows massed.

“But this place is not for you. This is my body, my flesh. My blood. You are within me, and that is not… So, yes. A God, if you like. I am sitting now, in a cold room, in a ruined city, talking to someone… talking… failing. My body decays. I cannot mend it. Nothing can be mended now. But I am here too. And greater here, beyond decay.”

Theor remembered who he was then. He was granted that, as the presence shrank away from him a little, and withdrew itself from the fabric of his thoughts. He fell, from nowhere towards nowhere, simply plummeting through a roaring void; and the awful presence was that through which he fell, and it was with him also, gathering and taking hold of his essence.

It whispered in his mind, “If I am to be a God. Let it be Death.”

It tore Theor apart. He felt himself opened and splintered. Shards of his awareness were ripped away. This foul, omnipotent being that claimed the mantle of Death flayed his mind with claws of pure loathing and rage. It poured all its jealousies and hatreds and bitterness into him, and they dismembered him. In the last, flickering, dimming glimmer of Theor’s own thoughts, beyond the agony and the terror, there was only a long, descending murmur of regret and a lingering bitter certainty of failure and error. That faded. And fluttered. And finally wisped away, dispersing into the unbounded, eternal Shared.

And in the Sanctuary of the Lore Inkallim struggled to hold the First’s flailing limbs steady. He bucked and arched on the trestle bed and spat black-tainted foam at them as he screamed. Then he fell suddenly silent and still. The Inkallim backed away from him, alarmed. Tears streamed from his open, staring eyes. His heart pounded, and each mighty beat shook him, and drew a single gasping breath from him. Until there came one clenching of his heart that did not release itself; one breath that was cut short and lay unfinished in his throat. His hands twisted the bed sheet beneath him into knots. And Theor, First of the Lore, died.

Outside, in the snowbound grounds of the Sanctuary, the ancient pine trees stood as they had done for so many years. Tiny birds spiralled up their trunks, seeking insects wintering in the crevices of the bark. Above, midway between the sharp peaks of the trees and the thinning cloud, buzzards were circling. Tiny drops of rain-not snow but rain-were flickering down. The buzzards arced away, lazy wings bearing them towards Kan Dredar in the valley below, or towards the compound of the Battle Inkall. There would be food for them there.

“I see them,” Igris said from the window.

Kanin oc Horin-Gyre set down the bowl of cold broth he had been holding to his lips and twisted in his chair.

“You’re sure?” he said to his shieldman.

Igris nodded. He was staring out over a street on the very south-eastern fringe of Glasbridge. This part of the town had been beset by both flood and fire when the town fell to the Black Road. The house in which they waited, and in which Kanin took a hasty meal, had no roof to it. The floorboards were charred; the shutters at the window from which Igris looked out hung split and smoke-blackened and broken. There was even now, long since the floodwaters had receded, a damp stink of rot to the place. Kanin had had to sweep a thin crust of snow from the table when they first entered.

He wiped soup from his lips with the back of his hand.

“How many?” he asked without getting up.

“Can’t tell yet, sire,” Igris replied.

“Eska said there were twenty, when she saw them on the road this morning.”

“Might be twenty. Or they might have seen her. Perhaps they split up.”

“They didn’t see her,” said Kanin scornfully. “She’s of the Hunt, man. You think they get themselves seen except by choice?”

Igris shrugged. There was weary defeat in that sluggish movement.

“We’d best go down to greet them, then,” Kanin said, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. He lifted his chain shirt from where it lay on the table and shrugged it over his head.

“Are you sure?” Igris murmured. Such a small sound, so frail, to come from such a man. It was resigned yet perhaps still carried the faintest thread of hope that his master might turn aside from his chosen course. Kanin glared at his shieldman’s back.

“You question me? Doubt me?”

Igris said nothing. Kanin took a heavy cloak down from a hook on the wall.

“Just do what I require of you,” he said. “Do as your Thane requires. You’ve enough honour, enough memory of who you are, to do that, I hope.”

His shieldman followed him out onto the street. The man stank of reluctance, and Kanin despised him for that. The slush outside was almost ankle deep. The night before had been the first in a long time that had not frozen. As a result, Glasbridge’s white covering was softening, turning grey, melting into its ruins and its mud. Kanin splashed out into the centre of the road and stood there, feet spaced enough to give him a firm stance, cloak flicked back clear of his sword. He waited.

The riders came around the corner in single file. The horses moved very slowly. One by one they came into sight: six, ten, twelve, then fifteen, twenty. All black-haired. All tall and upright. All clad in dark leather with iron studwork or buckles or hilts glinting softly here and there. Ravens, riding into Glasbridge. Kanin smiled to himself.

Then, still fifty or more paces distant, the lead rider halted her horse with the merest rolling of her wrist to tighten the reins. She stared down the street towards Kanin. Others of the riders came sedately forward and conferred with their leader. The muted exchange was curt. She nodded once, and two men peeled themselves away from the rest, easing their mounts round and heading, just as unhurriedly as they had come, back out towards the fields beyond the town.

Kanin’s smile died on his lips. His disappointment was far more bitter than he would have expected. It did not, in truth, matter greatly. After today, everything would rush onwards. The end-whatever its form, whatever its nature-would come quickly, and nothing and no one could change that. But he had hoped that this beginning might at least be perfect, flawless. It would have felt good.

The Inkallim were coming on again, once more falling into a disciplined file. They had that arrogant, assured air that attended every member of the Battle. Kanin loathed it, now more than ever. Their forerunners had betrayed his Blood. They had abandoned it in the Vale of Stones thirty years ago, watching its finest warriors go down beneath the blades of a Lannis army.

And now he stood, Thane of his people, in a ruined street, as Battle Inkallim came pace by careful pace towards him, and everything was at once the same and entirely different. This time Lannis was gone, burned away to ashes. But again Horin was betrayed. The Battle had stolen away every victory Kanin’s Blood had won for the faith; they had handed it all to the mad halfbreed. They had condemned the world to his vile rule. They had lifted the man responsible for Wain’s death up on their shoulders and made thousands bend the knee to him.

Kanin made fists of his hands to stop them shaking. Today, today it would begin.

The lead rider came to a halt before him. Two more let their horses drift wide to flank her on each side. She stared down at Kanin impassively.

“Thane,” she said.

He nodded. “You’ve come for me, I assume?”

“We have a message for you.”

“From Kan Avor. From the halfbreed.” He did not conceal his contempt. It washed over her. Her pride made her impervious, he thought. It made her careless too, perhaps.

“You have gathered many spears here, Thane. Gathered them where they are not required. The war, the struggle of the faithful against the faithless, is happening far to the south of here. At Kolkyre. Beyond Kilvale. That is where your spears are needed.”

“Because your strength falters?” Kanin smiled. “Because everything comes apart in your hands? I see, raven. I hear. I know your armies melt away like the winter snow come the thaw. I was there. I saw it start. Madness sprouting everywhere. Disorder. By now I’m sure your many Captains cannot hold more than a handful of spears together, cannot muster anything but the smallest of companies that will actually follow an order.”

Her face was an impassive mask, but he could see the truth of it in her eyes.

“That’s what you’ve achieved for the creed, raven,” he told her. “Chaos.”

“Your strength is required,” she said flatly.

“You don’t understand what you’ve helped to create, do you? Strength is not measured by the enumeration of spears and swords any more. It is not measured in armies. Strength is a matter of will now. It’s about who can stand against the madness and keep a steady course through the storm. It’s about who can keep sight of what they need to do.”

“Your swords are required, Thane. Do not fail the creed now.”

“You threaten me?” he said. “A Thane?” And he laughed at her. He possessed his own kind of madness, he knew. A sort of joy at the setting aside of all pretence and delay. A storm of blood would be released, and he felt joy at the prospect of it, for he had wearied of everything else. Nothing else could offer him any meaning, or peace, or rest. Nothing else, he felt certain, offered any kind of salvation, to him or to anyone. So there would be blood, and he would rejoice in it.

“My strength is my own,” he said. “I’ll keep it to myself. Tell me, is there much sickness in Kan Avor? Are there fevers eating away at your halfbreed’s slaves yet?”

Her eyes narrowed just enough to please him. “You have warriors hidden in two houses behind us, Thane. You cannot imagine that is enough to prevent word of your betrayal reaching Kan Avor. You cannot imagine it is so easy to kill the Children of the Hundred.”

Again he laughed. That savage joy was pounding in him, coursing through his veins like invigorating fire. He imagined that with it inside him he might be capable of anything. He might be capable of shaking the whole world to its foundations.

“Oh,” he laughed, “I do not imagine it to be easy. That is why I have warriors hidden in a great many more than two houses, raven.”

He raised his left hand. Before the movement was finished, there were crossbow bolts standing in the chests of the three Inkallim before him. They appeared there with dull thuds, as if snapping out through the ribcages from within. But they had come, Kanin knew, from Hunt bows. Eska and her two fellow Inkallim. He harvested another small, bitter joy from that: Inkallim killed Inkallim at the behest of a Horin Thane.

One of the ravens fell at once, sliding with blank eyes out of his saddle. The other two swayed but remained astride the horses.

Those first three bolts were the vanguard of a swarm that clattered in from every direction, lashing at the column of Inkallim. One quarrel darted so close by Kanin’s face that he felt the brush of its fletching on his cheek. He did not flinch. He seized the slack reins out of the woman’s limp hand. She was starting to slump forward, folding herself about the bolt buried in her chest, but she still breathed. Kanin twisted the horse’s head out of the way and stabbed his sword up into her stomach. It did not penetrate her leathers, but it was enough to knock her to the ground. As she fell, Kanin heard crossbow bolts strike the horse’s flank. The animal screamed in panic, and tore itself free of his grasp.

His people were pouring into the street, hurrying to close with those of the Inkallim that had not already fallen. His people, he called them. The truth was, he had brought more Lannis men than warriors of his own Blood to prepare this welcome. He trusted their visceral hatred of the ravens more than he trusted the loyalty of his own swords. His father would have been ashamed, enraged, had he lived to see such things. Kanin did not care. It no longer mattered.

The Children of the Hundred fought as he would have expected them to: ferociously, fanatically. Many of them were wounded, with bolts nestled in their flesh, but they fought nevertheless. When a horse fell or was dragged down, its rider rolled clear and rose and carved a path into the converging throng. When the ravens died-pierced, as often as not, by a forest of spears lunging in from every side-they did so silently. Still fighting.

Two of the Inkallim came riding through the crowd towards Kanin. Their swords flashed, slashing down first on one side, then the other, as they cut away every enemy that closed upon them. They had eyes only for Kanin. Those they killed and maimed did not even merit their attention.

Kanin grinned at them as they drew near, and hefted his sword. Igris was at his side. One of the Inkallim was suddenly twisted by the impact of a bolt in her shoulder. That was enough to open the path for the spear that jabbed up from below and pierced her. The other burst free of the mob, his horse surging into a charge. Igris ran forward. To Kanin, it seemed a slow and dreamlike moment: the sound of the battle receded, his shieldman drifted into the path of the horse. The great beast moved with strange grace, forelegs rising and falling, lifting mud and slush in elegant plumes from the road.

Igris did not try for the Inkallim. He ducked low and veered sideways, and hit the horse’s leg with his sword. The blow sent the blade spinning away out of his hand but broke the animal’s leg too. Kanin watched with detached fascination as the horse buckled, ploughing down into the wet sludge, rolling, sending up a great curving curtain of spray. The Inkallim leaped from the horse’s back and erupted through that curtain, reaching for Kanin. It all seemed so slow. Kanin’s mind raced, but his body followed its commands with what felt like glacial lethargy. He leaned back and twisted as the Inkallim came towards him. As the raven’s blade came up, levelling itself, arrowing itself in.

The impact was stunning. It smashed the breath out of Kanin’s chest, sent him sprawling, punched off his feet. His cloak spread and flapped about him. Like wings, he thought foolishly as he hit the ground and slid on his back. The sword had torn across his breastbone, ripping open his chain shirt, lacerating his chest. He could feel his own hot blood on his skin. But it was not a deep wound. By the smallest of margins, the blade’s point had come at too sharp an angle to punch its way through the cage of his ribs. Not dead, was all Kanin thought as he struggled to get to his feet. Not dead yet.

The Inkallim was rising too. His sword was gone, twisted out of his hands. Kanin still had his. He scrambled forward, slithering through the slush, and lashed out at the Inkallim’s ankles. The man leaped above the swing. Then Igris came roaring in and hit him about the waist, embracing him, bearing him down. The two of them rolled, and flailed, and clawed at one another.

Kanin stood over them. Every breath lit bands of fiery pain that encircled his chest. His legs felt loose, his sword terribly heavy in his hand. The Inkallim somehow got a heel into Igris’ groin and half-kicked, half-pushed the shieldman away. Kanin took his chance. He hacked down at the raven’s head, once, twice, until the skull broke and caved in. Again he struck, and again. It took him that long to master himself. Fighting off waves of dizziness, he extended a hand and hauled Igris to his feet. The shieldman was gasping, wild-eyed.

“Well done,” Kanin murmured.

He turned back to the battle, and found it to be over. Dead littered the street. One horse was limping in a trembling circle, another pounding away riderless. It had cost better than thirty lives to bring down those few Inkallim, but it had been done. Townsfolk were beating some of the corpses, pulping them with staffs and clubs. Stiffly, painfully, Kanin sheathed his sword and pressed a hand to his wound. It would need cleaning. There would be fragments of cloth or metal to be picked out of his opened flesh. But it would not kill him.

“Enough,” he shouted. The pain almost choked him, and he had to close his eyes for a moment. When he opened them he spoke more softly, more carefully.

“Enough. We’re done here. Now it’s Kan Avor.”