Fall of Thanes

VI

Shraeve brought Kanin up from the fetid, half-flooded cellar into which he had been cast. His hands had been bound behind him long enough for all sensation to have leaked out of them. She pushed him along a echoing hallway where silt was caked at the base of the walls. There were other Inkallim there, he was dimly aware, just two or three of them. They stared at him but said nothing.

He was propelled roughly out into the street, and almost fell. He winced at the assault of the light, for feeble as it was, it seemed garish after the gloom of his prison. His discomfort was brief, for Shraeve steered him in through the doorway to the spiralling stair that led up to the halfbreed’s lair. The steps were worn and uneven, the walls rough and coated with mould and webs.

Kanin offered no resistance. He consisted of nothing but hate, and it filled him so completely that it choked any coherent thought. It was a greedy, many-hued hate that made no distinction between Aeglyss, Shraeve, himself. Of all its indiscriminate barbs, the sharpest were perhaps those turned inward. He loathed his failure, his weakness.

He emerged into the hall at the top of the stairs, and heard Aeglyss before he saw him.

“Cut his bonds.”

“He might still be dangerous,” Shraeve said behind him.

“You think so? Cut his bonds in any case.”

The Inkallim sawed at the cords about his wrists with a knife. When the bindings fell away, the blood rushing back into his hands was agonising. He barely noticed the pain, consumed instead by the immediate notion of spinning about and attacking Shraeve. But the Inkallim pushed him violently forward before the cut cords had even hit the ground, and he staggered some way down the length of the hall and fell to his knees.

“Stand up,” the halfbreed said.

Kanin’s body did so, a little clumsily, without his mind even having the time to consider refusal. He looked at the na’kyrim, sitting there on his stone slab bench, and saw only the roughest, most approximate, imitation of a living man: hairless, suppurating, cadaverous. Pathetically small, too feeble to move. But the shadows around and behind him seemed to have a life of their own. And the eyes that fixed themselves upon Kanin, though bloody and sickly, still carried a vile intensity.

“You must do something,” Shraeve said as she moved to stand beside one of the columns lining the hall, level with Kanin. “There are only three or four of us left fit to fight. The rest are dead or sick, or fallen away into madness or stupor. The whole city-the whole valley-is full of nothing but the dead and the dying. Those not yet too weak from disease or hunger… all turn against all. There is no order.”

Aeglyss did not move. His eyes did not stray from Kanin’s.

“We have no armies left,” Shraeve said, more strident. “There are none to command, and none willing to listen to any command. If you do not cure this sickness that afflicts — ”

“She doubts me now,” Aeglyss said quietly to Kanin. “Even her. No. No. She doubts herself, her judgement. She wonders if she made a mistake.”

“That is not true,” Shraeve said at once.

“Liar.” Said without a trace of emotion, as if it were a word without the slightest weight. “She thought I would serve her ends. Be a sword in her hand and make her the champion of her creed. As you, your father, thought I would serve your ambitions, and then be cast aside. Now, too late, she wonders what she has unleashed upon the world. She wonders what has become of the great armies fortified by my will she thought would carry her triumphant across all the world. Well, the day of armies is past. The world is conquered by other means now.”

Shraeve shifted her weight, took a single stride forward.

“Be still,” Aeglyss said sharply.

The Inkallim did as she was commanded. Still, the na’kyrim had not so much as glanced at her.

“You don’t imagine I cared what became of any of them, do you?” he murmured to Kanin. “The White Owls? You, your cause? Never. None of it. I only… I only cared to be a part of it all. To be a part. But none of you would have me. And now look. You will become a part of me, instead. I am become… all of it. Everything.”

“Nothing,” rasped Kanin.

“You don’t believe that.” There was perhaps a bitter smile stretching Aeglyss’ bleeding lips. “You, more than most, see a little of it, I think. Not all, of course. You don’t understand. None could… not even me. All that has happened, is happening, to me… I don’t understand it.”

“This is a waste of time,” Shraeve said. “We must — ”

“Quiet,” whispered Aeglyss, and the word contained such vast insistence that Kanin felt his own throat constricting, and felt fear momentarily gnawing at the edges of his hatred.

“You made this happen, Thane,” Aeglyss said to him.

“No,” growled Kanin.

“Yes. Nobody but you. I served you and your family loyally. I did what was asked of me, brought your army to the gates of your enemy’s city. Yet you turned your back on me. You made me a liar in the eyes of the White Owls. Because of that, because of your treachery, I was taken to the Stone. I was broken and remade. So should I thank you for your betrayal, for turning me into what I now am? Should I praise your mindless loathing of me, since it has made me into… into this? Or should I kill you for it? Should I make you suffer as I have suffered, as all the meek and the different and the outcasts have suffered?”

Kanin wanted to fling himself at the foul vision of decay slumped on the bench before him, but his legs would not obey him. They were dead things beneath him, barely able to support his own weight.

“I tried to do myself again what was done to me on the Breaking Stone, you know,” Aeglyss murmured. “I thought I might be able to control it, if I… I tried to… grow. It did not work. I am already all that is possible.”

He grunted out a strangled laugh.

“There, Thane. You have made me all that is possible. And it’s not enough. Mind and body cannot sustain what I have become. Not without breaking, without crumbling. I can make slaves of Shadowhands and the sisters of Thanes. I can master the Anain, make myself lord of the Shared, make myself the very thought at the core of the world. Yet I cannot control it. I cannot make that thought sharp and neat, cannot choose how it ebbs and flows. Soon I will be gone, lost in the very storms I have created, and only that thought-that storm-will remain, for ever. I will have reshaped the world in my image, and the world shall be as I have made it, unto its very end. Yet I cannot even mend my own flesh.”

“Perhaps,” said Kanin, “you know in your black heart that the only thing that could mend you is death.”

Aeglyss stared at him without speaking. Those eyes held Kanin, stabbed him, picked him apart. There was not the slightest movement in the na’kyrim’s crippled frame, yet Kanin felt the violent energies seeping out of him.

“There is truly nothing in you, save that one desire,” Aeglyss croaked. He sounded both fascinated and puzzled. “You are unlike any of them, even the Children of the Hundred, in your purity. There is nothing to you now other than hate. Of me, of yourself. And at the heart of it all, the longing to see me dead. As if that will cure you.”

Kanin could say no more. The halfbreed had him in some intangible grip that was wholly irresistible.

“But if it was true…” Aeglyss whispered “… if it was true. I do not know what would become of me, if you had your wish. You could kill the body, perhaps… but… I do not know any more. I do not know if you can stop this… this…”

He coughed and shook. Dropped his head for a moment, and freed Kanin from that oppressive gaze, but not from the bonds of his attention. Then he looked up again and smiled the smile of a dying man.

“Do it then,” he said.

Kanin did not move. Aeglyss looked sideways towards Shraeve, moving his eyes but not his head.

“You will not raise a hand against this man,” the halfbreed rasped. “I forbid it.”

Shraeve’s resistance to the command was obvious. But so was its immense force. Kanin could feel it weighing down upon him, and he was not even its object. The Inkallim’s face twitched as internal wars raged between her instincts and the halfbreed’s indomitable will. There could only ever be one outcome.

“You hear me?” Aeglyss asked her. “You understand?”

Shraeve nodded once, the muscles and tendons in her neck taut, her teeth clenched.

“Good.” The na’kyrim’s eyes drifted back, took a moment or two to find and settle upon Kanin once more. “Here is your moment then, Thane. Here it is. You can set both of us free now. Do as your heart dictates.”

And with that last word, Kanin was set free. Vigour surged through his arms and his legs. Every fragment of doubt or despair that lurked within him melted away before the single bright truth that he stood now in the sole moment of any consequence in his life. And that he was capable; he was potent. He could-would-forge precious meaning from the base metal of all that had gone before.

There was no one here but him and Aeglyss. There were no walls about them, no sky above, for the entirety of existence was composed of the two of them: the decrepit halfbreed, croaking and wheezing, and the man who had come through war, through years, through a lifetime, to kill him.

Kanin walked forward. Each stride felt vast, consuming immense distances as it bore him closer and closer to the feeble figure awaiting him. Aeglyss was lifting his head slowly. He was expectant, unresisting. Kanin could have laughed with joy. He opened his hands, feeling the limitless power they contained. He looked into the halfbreed’s eyes as he descended upon him, and saw nothing there: no colour, no life, no awareness.

Now, Kanin knew, now there will be peace. Now I will be made whole again.

His hands were on the halfbreed’s throat. As so often in his dreams, in all his bitter longings, he had become the bearer of death: a raven sweeping down from a God’s throne to bestow endings and darkness and punishment. He felt bone beneath his fingers, and cartilage and wasted muscles that offered no resistance. He squeezed. Felt that fragile neck yielding.

And then his mind was opened, and he was inundated. He was caught up in a torrential flow that parted him from his body, made of him a cloud that was tugged and torn and stretched across an intolerable expanse of… everything.

He was on a great stone, crucified there, with lances of fire driven through his wrists and into the rock, overwhelming agony burning in him. He was running, fleeing through dense forests of trees that reached out for him, and he could hear and smell and taste the wolfenkind who ran alongside him, just out of sight, their animal voices taunting him with promises of a savage death. He was a King, riding a ship in a younger world, closing on a sandy shore. A child watching a Kyrinin army in malachite armour marching through the streets of a white city. He was rocking on the deep currents, looking up towards the surface of the sea, watching the light fracturing and dancing down through the waves.

He chased Wain through the rocks. It was summer. They were young. He could not catch her, for she was the faster, the nimbler, but still he chased, drawn onwards by the sound of her laughter shivering around the boulders. She let him catch her before long. No game could hold her interest for long. She was standing, staring back the way they had come, with a serious expression on her child’s face.

Behind them, below them, Castle Hakkan was spread over the mountainside. The sunlight somehow softened it and made it look almost warm.

“You will be Thane one day,” Wain said gravely.

“What?” Kanin asked. He wanted laughter and pursuit, not stern conversation.

“You will be Thane, and I will be a Thane’s sister.”

He pushed her, but she was not to be so easily forced back into levity.

“And we’ll be great warriors,” she said firmly to him, fixing him with that steely gaze that their father found so amusing.

“Great warriors!” Kanin cried in agreement, engaged by the idea.

“And we’ll fight wars. We’ll fight wars at the end of the world, in the Kall. We’ll be the best, the bravest of all.”

“Both of us.” Kanin grinned. “Great warriors.” And he was so sure of it, back then. He could see the whole of his life laid out ahead, him and Wain marching into it side by side. The two of them, lit by the sun, illuminating the world with their own fierce light.

Kanin looked down. In his small hands-so smooth, so delicate-he had a stick. He was clasping it, wrapping his fingers around it, trying inexplicably to crush it.

“I asked you once for forgiveness.”

The voice was inside Kanin. He was suddenly nothing more than a thought adrift in shadow. And that other thought, the one to which the voice belonged, was with him, entwined about him, wrapping him in its coils.

“That was a mistake,” it said. Kanin existed only when it spoke. Between the words he was nothing. Absence. “I did not understand then. Now I know better. There can be no forgiveness. What I have done, what has been done to me, what I have become… it is all beyond forgiveness, or blame, or guilt, or judgement. I am the Shared… consumed by it, consuming it. Which…”

The voice faltered, and Kanin remembered himself a little.

“Which of us can say what is right or wrong? Such things… There is no meaning to it. Not when we are all but different aspects of a single thought in a single vast mind.”

No, Kanin thought, not knowing what it was he denied.

“I am the mind of the world,” the voice whispered into him, and now it was jagged with anguish, with a pleading cadence. “Too much. I don’t know what’s… I have forgotten what is madness and what sanity. But you can free me from this. Perhaps.”

Kanin sucked in a great stinging breath and looked down at Aeglyss’ blistered and bleeding face. Wounds opened up there even now, the skin parting as if sliced by an invisible knife. Thin blood was trickling down over Kanin’s hands where they still held the halfbreed’s neck in their grip. But his fingers were as iron, heavy and inert. Kanin could not compel them to close any further, could not even feel them.

Aeglyss’ eyes were closed. Kanin could smell the foul sores that pockmarked his brow and scalp. It was the stench of a plague pit.

The halfbreed’s throat was half crushed, but still he spoke. Those split and scabbed lips barely moved, yet the voice was clear and crisp in Kanin’s ears.

“Show me, Thane. If I am mad, if I am a disease, a mistake, show me. I will not yield. I cannot. It will not permit that, what is in me. But you can overcome it, if that is what the world requires.”

Kanin willed his hands to extinguish the life they held. They were deaf to his mind’s commands. He stared down at them, and wept in frustration and cried out in rage.

Aeglyss slowly lifted his own hands and set them about Kanin’s wrists.

“Now,” the halfbreed whispered. “Now. If not now, then never.”

Kanin had no answer. His arms were dead weights, unyoked from his will. He could feel the wall of denial, of resistance, rising up before him as Aeglyss gathered his strength. A gloom was settling about him, a clot of dead air, greyed and fibrous. He could not breathe.

“Never, then,” Aeglyss hissed.

Kanin cried out in pain as his hands were slowly but irresistibly forced apart. The na’kyrim’s thin arms had an impossible strength in them, and Kanin had nothing with which to oppose it.

“Kneel down,” Aeglyss commanded, and Kanin did.

With perverse gentleness, Aeglyss released his wrists, but before Kanin’s arms could fall back to his sides, the halfbreed delicately took hold of his hands. There was a terrible intimacy in it. Kanin could feel those long fingers pressing into his palms; he could feel a thumb resting lightly on the back of each of his hands.

“I am so tired,” Aeglyss said sorrowfully. Then, so fiercely that Kanin felt the words as daggers in his chest and stomach: “You failed me. Again. You failed me. What is in you… not strong enough.” His voice was fragmentary. Something in his neck was broken or displaced.

Kanin shook his head. Failure was too small a word for this. The enormity of his fall was overpowering. Crippling.

“I am so tired,” Aeglyss rattled. It sounded like the shifting of cartilaginous rubble in his throat.

The slightest beat of pressure; the halfbreed’s thumbs pressing down a fraction harder. Kanin’s hands crumpled. He heard the breaking of every bone like a flock of argumentative birds swirling about his head. He felt every rupture like a point of cold, coruscating fire. He screamed as tendons split, joints were twisted apart. Bones split and split again, splintering into smaller and smaller fragments. He felt the debris within his hands being pulped, and the pain was so vast and unendurable that he fell away towards oblivion.

But Aeglyss would not allow that escape. Kanin’s consciousness was embraced by that of the halfbreed, and borne up by it, and thrust back into the world of limitless suffering. Kanin looked up at the na’kyrim’s ruined face. Aeglyss was opening and closing his mouth like a man choking. No sound but inarticulate croaks emerged. Kanin heard more, though, within his head.

“Stay with me, Thane. I am not done yet. Not done with the world. You made me. You will be my witness.”

Aeglyss released Kanin’s hands and the Thane roared in stupefied agony as they hung limp from his wrists, bloated bags of blood and fragmentary wreckage.

“You should have killed me a long time ago,” said the air, and the boards beneath Kanin’s knees, and the pitted stone of the columns, and the darkness crowding across his vision, all speaking with the voice of the halfbreed. “Now it’s too late. For all of us.”