Fall of Thanes

V

As she moved through the Palace of Red Stone, treading lightly along its polished passageways, Anyara became aware of a low, almost subliminal, sound. At first it seemed to be emanating from the marble, as if it resonated to the beat of some vast drum deep in the earth. But the sound grew slowly more distinct and constant as she reached the northern side of the palace. It took on its own character. There was some great crowd, she realised, out there on the streets beyond these quiet marmoreal precincts, and this was its single voice, built out of a thousand individual cries and shouts, the tramping of many feet, the jostling of bodies one against the other. Built out of the fury of the mob.

The realisation roused more curiosity than fear in her. When she chanced upon an open door, she drifted cautiously through it and into an empty room. Though she could not pretend to feel safe, moving alone through the palace’s intricate passageways, she would have gone mad hiding away in her chambers all day and all night. She had crept out, carefully ensuring that she did not disturb Coinach, who had for once lapsed into an uncomfortable-looking sleep at his watch post in the corridor outside. She thus breached both the Chancellor’s command for her to remain in gentle incarceration, and Coinach’s trust that she would allow him to guard her as he thought necessary. The first breach she cared nothing for; the second she felt was justified, for Coinach desperately needed sleep, and she knew herself how rare and precious were those brief spells of slumber undisturbed by restless dreams.

It was a dining room, but one evidently not used during the winter, for the long table was entirely bare, the fireplace spotlessly clean, the tapestries on the wall concealed behind sheets to protect them from any intrusive light. There were tall windows, but they were shuttered, and the shutters were secured with heavy, ornate copper hooks.

The noise was unmistakable now, even though Anyara had never heard quite its like. A great collective rage. It was an unsettling sound.

“What are you doing here?”

She turned towards that ice-laden voice, its chill daggers cutting through the tumultuous rumble outside. She fought the black fear it loosed in her but could not prevent its rise. She felt herself shrinking, retreating into a corner of her mind.

“I was looking for your wife, Chancellor,” she managed to say.

Mordyn Jerain smiled at her, but he did it with his teeth, not his eyes. He was between Anyara and the only doorway, and that frightened her. She squeezed her hands together in search of a steadying focus.

“You hear it?” the Chancellor said. He came a few paces closer to her. She edged back until she felt the edge of the table against her thighs.

“You hear the mob in full cry? That is the sound of an ending,” Mordyn said, cocking his head. “That is the sound of change. Perhaps you hear it, and you think it a wild thing, beyond control.”

He had an air of contentment, as if he listened to the sweetest and most melodious of music.

“Not so,” he mused, his eyelids languidly drooping. “I made it. It is as much a product of my craft as the crop a farmer harvests is the product of his. Such has ever been my gift. To shape that which others assume cannot be shaped.”

There were, now and again, even through the Palace of Red Stone’s thick walls, and those heavy shutters, individual voices to be heard amidst the otherwise formless noise: jagged rocks briefly exposed and then drowned again by the churning waves. Other than that, the sound could as easily have been born of animal throats as human.

The Chancellor seemed lost in reverie, and Anyara moved to ease herself around him towards the doorway. His eyes at once sprang open and alert, and he reached out and laid a hand on the tabletop, blocking her path with his arm. He was oppressively close to her.

“In truth,” he breathed, “the crop is not quite ready for the scythe. Another day or two. No more, I think. Then the harvest comes.”

“I do not understand such matters,” Anyara said, marshalling all the submissive, compliant girlishness that came no more naturally to her than flight would to a fish. “I have no interest in them.”

“Indeed?” Mordyn said with arched, coldly amused eyebrows. “You are something of a novice when it comes to dissemblance, I see. But do not worry. For now, my interest in you could not be less were you some dim-witted scullery maid. It is given to precious few to exert some influence upon the course of great events; to guide the current, rather than be merely carried along by it. You, my dear lady, are not one of those few. You are a gnat. No, of even less import. You are a common prisoner. Your Blood is extinguished.”

“My brother will — ”

The blow, an open-handed slap that had every strand of the Chancellor’s strength behind it, was so sudden and violent that she reeled. Lights danced across Anyara’s vision. Pain blazed in her cheek with such ferocity that she wondered if he had split it open.

Mordyn came after her before she had a chance to compose herself. He seized her neck with one hand, her flailing arm with the other, and smashed her face down onto the table. He pinned her there and leaned over her, hissing into her ear.

“You are not listening. Your brother? Where is your brother, lady? Hiding somewhere. Cowering like some craven child in a hovel, or a cave. Or dead, perhaps. Do you think he’s dead?”

“Orisian’s not dead.”

“No? It doesn’t matter. He is of no consequence. Less even than you. Do you understand? Entirely, utterly of no consequence. None of them are. The day of Thanes enters its twilight. They will pass. They will fall. Another power is coming, and it will rule in their stead.”

“Let go of me!”

“No. Listen. I have seen, and I understand, what is coming. I am a part of it, and I will be one of those to rise, at his side, from the wreckage when the new dawn comes. Your brother will not. He and all his kind, Thanes and Kings and Bloodheirs and Stewards, their time is ending.”

He bent still closer to her ear, so close she could feel his lips brushing her skin.

“Your time is ending.”

“You’re his, aren’t you?” Anyara said. “Bound, like Tarcene. Somehow, he made you his tool. His toy.”

Those fingers on her tightened. She felt the nails digging into her skin, pressing harder on the muscles and the veins beneath. She could no longer tell what was the sound of the mob outside and what the rushing of her own blood, its beating in her head.

“What is happening here?”

Anyara could not move, could not see the doorway, but that voice-light, clear, graceful-was enough to abruptly calm her fear.

Mordyn released his grip upon the side of her neck and stepped away from her. She no longer felt the heat of his breath. Stiffly, cautiously, Anyara levered herself up off the table. One side of her face burned, and she could feel the print of his hand there like a brand; the other ached from the impact with the table. She refused to touch either. She would not give him that pleasure.

Both she and the Chancellor looked towards the door, and towards Tara Jerain standing there, in a gown of surpassing elegance, her hands neatly clasped across her stomach.

“What is happening here?” she asked again. Perfect composure. Not a hint of accusation or displeasure, only bland enquiry.

Anyara glared at Mordyn, but he had already dismissed her from his thoughts. He was moving towards the door, adjusting his sleeves, sweeping back his hair. He paid no more attention to his wife than to Anyara. He brushed past Tara, jolting her shoulder out of the way.

“You will regret that,” Anyara said levelly but loudly to his back.

He paused, already almost lost in the shadows behind Tara.

“I don’t think so,” he said without looking around. The Chancellor laughed, and disappeared into the corridor.

And with his departure, as the muted roar of the riot rose and fell like waves rubbing up against the walls of the palace, Tara’s mask crumbled. Her hand covered her mouth, her brow tightened and creased into grief. Her eyes gleamed with unshed tears.

“My lady,” Anyara said at once, walking quickly towards her, one arm outstretched in a calculated gesture of both sympathy and appeal. “I need your help. Something terrible is happening, to all of us. I know you see that. I know you do.”

Tara said nothing, her mouth, and whatever pain it might have expressed, still hidden behind that smooth hand. But her soft anguished eyes were firmly upon Anyara.

“Take me to the High Thane,” Anyara said. “Please. It’s all I can think of to do, and I can’t do it without your help.”

The Moon Palace was in a ferment. Servants ran hither and thither, every one of them wearing much the same expression of alarm and weary unease. The guards, who seemed to be posted at virtually every door, every junction of passageways, stared with intense suspicion at all who came within sight. A number of them watched with particular narrow-eyed attention as Coinach passed them, but none made any move to intercept him. He was in the company of the Chancellor’s wife, after all.

As she and Tara hastened into the palace’s heart, Anyara noted several ladies of the High Thane’s court rushing along, shepherding young children like a gaggle of geese. All of them were dressed for travel, in hooded cloaks and fur gloves and stout, if refined, boots.

“People are running away,” Anyara murmured.

“Do you blame them?” Tara asked her.

And Anyara could not, in truth. She had seen enough of the city’s condition, during the brief but fraught journey from the Palace of Red Stone, to convince her of the absolute wisdom of leaving its confines. The earlier riot had died down but left its flotsam scattered through the streets. A few bodies. Many burned-out houses and workshops. Heaps of debris-broken pots, roof tiles, shards of wood-strewn everywhere. And fearful faces peering from windows.

Tara had been inclined to turn back when a company of the High Thane’s warriors had ridden at the gallop through a crossroads ahead of them. Anyara had prevailed upon her to continue, though not without some unease of her own. It was all uncomfortably reminiscent of what she had seen at Koldihrve, albeit on a grander scale.

In the distance they had been able to hear fighting. Everywhere there had been the faint but persistent smell of smoke. Coinach’s disquiet had become more and more pronounced, until he too had tried to insist on a return to the Chancellor’s palace.

“We’re no safer there,” Anyara had said sternly, angling her face to ensure he could see the livid bruise already blooming where Mordyn Jerain had struck her. The anguished expression on his face at the sight of it instantly made her feel profoundly guilty. Ashamed of her cruelty. It had been her choice alone to shed his protection.

Now, struggling through the nascent chaos within the Moon Palace, she doubted her insistence on coming here. Not out of any fear for their safety, but because she was beginning to wonder whether any place so self-evidently veering towards panic could exercise enough will and authority to actually control events.

They finally found their way to the chamber of some court official. Anyara was gratified by the fawning deference the man displayed towards Tara, though he was infuriatingly non-committal regarding the prospect of an immediate audience with the High Thane. Tara’s demeanour changed markedly and instantly. She berated the man with stern authority, and he hurried off, suitably chastened, to make the necessary enquiries.

They waited, tense, in that chamber for what seemed a long time. Anyara could tell, from Coinach’s distracted manner and the way he chewed absently at his lip, that he was struggling with himself over his failure to keep her safe from harm. She longed to offer him some comfort, but it was something she did not want to discuss in front of Tara, so she held her tongue and made a point of smiling warmly at her shieldman whenever she caught his eye.

The audience was granted. They were ushered, with all appropriate haste, along high, echoing corridors, to a side room adjoining one of the feasting halls. It was surprisingly sparsely furnished, though the wall hangings were exquisite and the rug one of the most obviously costly Anyara had ever seen.

Gryvan oc Haig sat in a broad dark chair with high arms. There was no other seating. Anyara, Tara and Coinach were forced to stand in a line, on the centre of that luxurious rug. Kale, chief amongst the High Thane’s shieldmen, stood to one side, staring fixedly and pointedly at Coinach. He looked to Anyara like a miserable, surly man.

Tara executed a tidy curtsy for the Thane of Thanes. Anyara copied her, aware that she made the gesture appear entirely graceless by comparison.

“I would have received you in more pleasing surroundings, my lady,” Gryvan growled at Tara, “had you not come in such disreputable company.”

To her credit, the Chancellor’s wife betrayed no hint of discomfiture at such a gruff welcome. Her poise, given the extremity of the distress Anyara knew very well she was controlling, was remarkable.

“The times seem most disreputable, sire.” Tara smiled. “One can’t always choose one’s company as freely as one would wish in such circumstances.”

Anyara ignored the subtle insult. Nothing mattered save inducing Gryvan to listen to what she had to say. Impatience was rampant in her, but that too she strove to ignore and silence.

“I like to think I may choose mine,” Gryvan said. He still had not looked at Anyara. “What is wrong with your hands?” he asked Tara.

She glanced at the discreet bandages that protected the worst of her burns.

“It is nothing, truly. A slight accident, that is all. I can be unaccountably clumsy on occasion.”

Gryvan nodded. He had all too evidently lost interest in the subject as soon as he asked the question.

“We will be brief, sire,” Tara assured him. She kept that smile perfectly in place, and not for an instant did it look anything other than entirely natural and sincere.

Gryvan appeared far from satisfied, but he lapsed into a heavy silence. There were dark, sagging bags of skin under his eyes, Anyara noted. A tremor, perhaps a tic, in his cheek that she had never noticed before. A latent accusatory anger in his gaze. None of these struck her as promising signs. Tara glanced at Anyara and nodded.

“Sire,” Anyara began, then paused to gather herself, for she realised her voice had sounded a little too urgent and assertive. “Sire, I know you will not be inclined to give credence to anything I say…”

Gryvan grunted a dry affirmation to that.

“… but I beg you just to hear me out. There’s something wrong about everything that’s happening, you must agree to that.”

“I must do nothing,” Gryvan interrupted her. “High Thanes are permitted to make their own choices about what they do.”

“Of course, sire,” Anyara said hurriedly. “Forgive me. I mean only that something seems amiss in the sudden rising to the surface of so many tensions, so much dissent. I believe I know the cause of some of it at least, perhaps all of it. That is all I came to tell you, sire, for though you doubt the loyalty of my Blood to yours, I can assure you — ”

“What nonsense is she prattling about?” Gryvan asked Tara.

The Chancellor’s wife inclined her head sympathetically, projecting complete understanding of Gryvan’s irritation.

“Well,” Tara murmured, “I have a suspicion there may be just a grain of truth in her ideas, sire. We may-we do-disagree, she and I, on the details, but I fear… I fear there is indeed an… an issue that may have to be resolved.”

“An issue?” Gryvan said, frowning.

“Your Chancellor, sire,” Anyara said. “He is not himself. Entirely and completely not himself. I think he has… may have been bound by a na’kyrim. As Tarcene was, sire. Orlane Kingbinder. There is a man, Aeglyss, who marches with the Black Road…”

“Bound?” Gryvan cried incredulously. “Have you come here to mock me?”

“Perhaps not bound, sire,” Tara said quickly. “Perhaps not that. But… my husband is behaving strangely, sire. Ever since his return. Much that he has done and said is… confusing.”

“Are you accusing your own husband of treachery?” Gryvan demanded.

“No, sire.” Tara’s edifice of control and good humour was at last crumbling. Anyara could see, and hear, the chinks in her armour widening. “No, not that. But something ails him. It might be wise to place less weight upon his advice than you have been accustomed to do in times past.”

“Oh, believe me,” said Gryvan in dark and threatening tones, “I already have ample reasons of my own to do just that. And doubts, lady. I have doubts. But binding. This… this prisoner is talking of binding. That would be… something else entirely.”

“You’ve no more cause to make a prisoner of me than you have to…” Anyara cursed herself for the sharp retort, but it was too late. Gryvan settled his full, glowering attention upon her.

“Your brother is outlawed.”

Anyara could clearly hear the danger in the High Thane’s voice, yet she could not stop herself.

“The accusations against him are lies,” she said bluntly.

“Lies? Then where is your brother?” The High Thane’s face was abruptly contorted by rage, stretched like a freshly scraped hide pegged out to dry. “Where is your brother?” he howled, spittle flying, a red blush of anger spreading through his cheeks, his neck. “I don’t see him here, where he belongs. Now, in time of crisis, in time of crisis… where’s the boy?” He stabbed a stiff finger in Anyara’s direction. Like a weapon. “We fight wars, we are beset by enemies, by traitors, and where is he?”

“I — ” Anyara began, but there was to be no voice in this echoing chamber save one.

“Traitors!” Gryvan snarled. He looked like a dog, Anyara thought. A dog hauling at its leash, all teeth and fury and foam. “This city… this city was founded by sailors and fishermen, before the Gods left this world. Long before the Kingships, there were markets here, and watchtowers, and granaries. The Aygll Kings kept a winter palace here for a time. The… the… Before the War of the Tainted, there were Kyrinin here, in these streets. They had huts down by the river. You see? Do you see how old this place is? How ancient?

“But it was my grandfather who built the wall. It was my father who raised the Moon Palace. It was us, our line, that made it great. I’ll not yield it now, if that’s what you think. I’ll not let everything be taken away from us. Not as long as I’ve strength in my arm and a fire in my heart.”

“Sire,” Tara began in a placatory manner, but Gryvan shouted over her.

“Out! Get out!”

Tara bowed and began to back away immediately. Anyara could not surrender quite so readily.

“Sire…”

“Out,” hissed Kale, the shieldman. The unexpected sound startled Anyara, as did what she saw in his eyes. She allowed Coinach to gently pull her out into the corridor.

“Mad?” Torquentine grunted. “Is she sure?”

“She seems so.” Magrayn nodded. She was watching with a somewhat sceptical, concerned expression as a dozen burly men attempted to ease her prodigious master sideways from his bed of thick cushions onto the massive trolley standing ready to receive his weight.

“And do we have any faith in her judgement in such matters?”

“Well, she is only a maid. But she has served in the Palace of Red Stone for some time. She should be capable of recognising… unusual, perverse behaviour on the Shadowhand’s part.”

“The man engages in little else,” Torquentine observed. “Move your hand, man. I’ve some… a rash, shall we say.”

The wheels on the trolley creaked ominously as the first of Torquentine’s buttocks was allowed to rest upon it. Magrayn grimaced. Torquentine noted this and frowned.

“You assured me this has been tested,” he pointed out.

“Indeed. It has.”

Torquentine found her tone considerably less reassuring than he would have hoped. But he had committed himself into his doorkeeper’s capable hands once he had made the decision to depart for pastures new. It was too late to lose faith in her competence.

“Do we trust her? This maid?” he asked. “She is not some ploy of the Shadowhand’s, turning our curiosity against us?”

“I think it unlikely. We have convinced her, I am sure, that her father’s life is forfeit should she fail us.”

“Hmm. The mattress on this trolley is distressingly thin. How long must I remain perched upon it?”

“Not long.”

He recognised her imprecision as predictive of extended discomfort. If not suffering, indeed. He chose not to press the matter, as the only alternative would be to remain here in his Vaymouth cellar, and that prospect pleased him still less.

“No reason, I suppose, that the Chancellor should be excused from falling prey to the malady of the mind claiming so many others, merely by virtue of his wit and title. When an entire city plunges into disorder and rapine and pillage, nothing should surprise us.”

“Particularly if the Chancellor concerned helped the plunge along himself,” Magrayn said. With Torquentine settled upon his unconventional transport, she nodded to the men standing ready by the far wall of his subterranean lair. Obedient to her command, they began to remove the false stones set in the wall, slowly exposing a tunnel running off south-westwards.

“Indeed, indeed,” Torquentine mused as he watched the men work. “There’s the most disquieting element in the whole affair. Still, I suppose if we conclude the Chancellor is mad, it clarifies a good deal. A madman may do anything. He may wantonly arrange the torture and murder of a rival Kingship’s Ambassador, thereby all but inviting them to make war. He may arrange for the escape of a rebellious minor Thane, thus practically ensuring the renewal of the rebellion so recently crushed.

“He may, if rumour is true, persuade the High Thane to withdraw a portion of his army from the field on the very eve of what consequently proved to be our Blood’s greatest defeat in battle. Leaving those intolerable Black Road creatures considerably closer to Vaymouth than to their own borders and with notably little between them and us to distract them. He might even, absurd as it sounds, find someone-some insufficiently cautious and rightly regretful fool-willing to set a few fires, and use said fires as a lever to break apart the bonds which held together our city’s evidently fragile arrangements of power and patronage and mutual restraint.”

The widening portal in the wall revealed a straight tunnel with walls of soft, muddy earth supported by an extensive framework of struts and beams and planking. It smelled bad down there, and Torquentine wrinkled his nose. It also looked unpleasantly wet. There was water trickling down the walls, and lying in slack pools as far as he could see.

“Not an attractive view,” he said. “Still, I cannot bring myself to remain in a city become so distressingly unpredictable and violent. It’s impossible to conduct any kind of useful business. Particularly when one is about to give quite possibly mortal offence to one-possibly more-of the most powerful men in the land.”

“You have decided, then?” Magrayn asked.

Torquentine nodded. “One last task for you, my dear, before we fly from this sadly precarious nest. Take our inconvenient prisoner to the Moon Palace and leave an appropriate message. If Mordyn Jerain’s the rot at the heart of all this trouble, we may as well give some assistance to those who might be able to cut it out. There’ll never be another coin to be made out of this city, illicit or otherwise, unless someone does.”

“I will meet you at the docks,” Magrayn said.

A number of hands gently but firmly pressed against his back had Torquentine trundling indecorously forward. He felt like a morsel being wheeled into the waiting gullet of a giant snake.

“The boat is fully prepared?” he asked Magrayn as she moved towards the door.

“It is. The captain has all the specified supplies on board for the journey.”

“Good, good.” Torquentine tapped his chin with a single stout finger. A certain despondency was settling over him at the thought of what lay ahead. “I must admit, I do not look forward with much glee to the process of boarding ship.”

“Don’t worry,” Magrayn said lightly. Had he not known better, Torquentine might almost have thought he detected the contours of a smile struggling to emerge upon her lips. “They have strong ropes and nets. I checked.”

“Ropes and nets,” Torquentine muttered glumly, shaking his head, as his doorkeeper disappeared to prepare Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig for one further, and likely final, journey. “Ropes and nets.”