Fall of Thanes

VII

K’rina walked as if in a daze, blundering through the night in an erratic, wayward fashion. She stumbled across the rough fields, veering aside from ditches only at the last moment, sometimes splashing down into them without pause and hauling herself up and out the other side. When the occasional stand of sallow and alder loomed suddenly out of the darkness, she would barge her way through it, showing no sign that she was even aware of the branches snagging her clothes or scratching her face.

Taim followed as steadily as he could, never more than half a dozen strides behind the na’kyrim. Her unpredictable and uncompromising course made it difficult, as did his determined efforts to keep equally close to Orisian. The Thane matched K’rina’s path and pace out to her left. Somewhere on the right, further ahead, was Varryn, but the Kyrinin stayed in the darkness and Taim had seen no hint of him for some time.

Though K’rina was the unwitting, unconscious guide, it was for Orisian that Taim reserved the greater portion of his attention. Taim stumbled many times, in some dip or rut in the ground, because he strove to keep the young man in sight.

He could not tell whether it was this constant battle with his senses and with the night, or the simple all-consuming nature of his concern for Orisian’s safety, but Taim felt a rare calm in him. For all the aching of his leg-the thigh muscle still tormented by the memory of that bone-studded club-and the constant enervating anticipation of some sudden assault, he found himself untroubled by distraction, from either within or without. His mind followed a strangely placid course, even as his body struggled on through the lightless, treacherous fields.

It was simplicity that gave him this clarity. He accepted but a single task upon his shoulders now: to bring Orisian safe out of this. It mattered not at all what lay ahead, or what familial longings remained lodged in his heart, or what fears circled him-dark possibilities riding raven wings-and tried to colonise his imagination. All these were things he had no time or space for. They all foundered against the great wall of his need to preserve the life of his Thane. In the singular and absolute primacy of that task he had come perhaps to the purest expression of his self and his history. That he should have come to it as he might well be entering upon the very threshold of his own death did not trouble him. Indeed, it seemed fitting. Taim was content.

Birds erupted now and again from thickets or from the reeds fringing ditches, whirring low away into the darkness. They were the least alarming of the night’s surprises, for strange and unsettling sights and sounds became ever more frequent as they moved further out into the Glas Valley.

The rotund carcass of a cow was suddenly there, in the middle of a bare expanse of ploughed earth. As they passed it by, that bulging form was revealed as grim illusion, for the innards had been hollowed out: the animal’s ribs and the dried, tight hide they supported encased nothing but a great cavity. Following K’rina across a shallow ditch, Taim found something that was both resistant and yielding beneath his foot. He looked down and saw the white and puffy skin of an eyeless corpse, lambent in the faint moonlight, just beneath the surface of the water.

Hoofbeats drummed their way along some track far out to the right. Taim closed up on Orisian. They slowed a little, Orisian catching hold of K’rina’s trailing sleeve to hold her back, and the sound came pounding closer. Too fast, Taim thought. No rider with any wit would go at such speed without light to see by. And when the great brown horse blurred past them, it was indeed riderless, though saddled and with stirrups flailing at its flanks.

Not long after, Varryn abruptly appeared in K’rina’s path and brought her to a halt. He nodded wordlessly ahead. It took time, for it would reveal itself from the corner of an eye, not when he looked directly at it, but soon enough Taim found the dimmest, feeblest tinge of a campfire out there in the blackness. They led K’rina on a wide looping detour, and it was the Kyrinin who decided when they had put sufficient ground between them and the distant flames to let her move freely again, in accordance with whatever mute instinct drove her.

Once there was laughter. It drifted to them from the west, clear but thin. It was a despairing, straining laughter, like the cry of some forlorn animal, closer cousin to misery than joy. It rose and fell, and lost its shape and dwindled away.

For a time Taim was sure he could hear Orisian mumbling to himself. He could not see his Thane’s lips so could not be certain, and the sound was far too soft for any words to reach him. It worried him, for Orisian had seemed in the last few days to be on the brink of some entirely solitary, personal desolation. Like a man clinging to a branch at the river’s edge, half in the current and half out of it, his strength failing, the pull of the water growing.

They halted at last, and took cover in a drainage channel that ran close to a burned-out farmhouse. The water was not as deep as it should have been-the channel was blocked somewhere, perhaps by rubble or a slide of earth-but still it came up over the tops of their boots as they crouched there watching the first grey light of dawn leach into the eastern sky. Taim had to hold K’rina down to prevent her from clambering to her feet and going blindly on. He did it as gently as he could, and she was far too slight and weakened to resist him.

They had not spoken one to another all through the night. The silence had become embedded. Taim was taken by surprise when Orisian broke it.

“Why?” he asked Varryn softly.

That this was a return to some unfinished matter between them was plain. At first he doubted whether the Kyrinin would respond. The answer came, though, as perhaps it would not have done but for that long night the three of them had spent together in this hostile land.

“Because she asked me,” Varryn said. “Because I was not there when she took the wound. If I was there, perhaps she would not have been wounded, but a… a burning was in me. I was lost to myself, lost in the hunting of the enemy. A thing that can make such a madness… it should stop. It should end.”

The quiet wrapped itself about them again, and Taim let his eyes close. He had become accustomed to exhaustion, inured in part to its crippling effects, but it was heavy now.

“Because a good man died to win this woman for you,” Varryn said unexpectedly. “He would run with you now, if he lived. I run for him. Because I saw Anain die. I saw trees made dust. The man who can do this… he will make the ground upon which we walk a dead thing. He will shape clouds out of fear and hide the sun, and we will walk in shadows. It would be a good thing to kill him. Are these reasons enough?”

“Yes,” whispered Orisian after a while. “It’s enough.”

Taim opened his eyes in time to see Kan Avor emerging from the night. Its low grey mass lay across the valley like a granite mountain that had collapsed in on itself. Tendrils of smoke ascended from the ruins towards the light seeping over it from the east. Clouds of black birds climbed from their roosts, and even here, even at this distance, Taim could hear them calling: a raucous, fierce greeting of the new day.

*

“I thought they would be everywhere,” Orisian muttered as he stared out over the lip of that muddy ditch. He shifted a little to take his weight off a stone in the bank that dug into his hip. “I suppose I imagined there would be armies here, the whole valley an armed camp. But it’s… it’s a wasteland.”

Taim grunted. “We’ve seen what happened elsewhere. And to the White Owls, and to us. If there are armies here, it looks like it’ll be armies of the dead, and the mad.”

Orisian glanced up towards the dim sky.

“It won’t be properly light for a while yet. We might reach the ruins, don’t you think? Without being seen?”

Neither Taim nor Varryn made any reply. Both warriors stared out across the level plain towards the hulking mass of Kan Avor. When Orisian looked, he saw no movement, no sign of life save those few thin columns of smoke rising from the ruins, but he was prepared to await the verdict of more experienced eyes.

He feared the consequences if they judged it necessary to await the return of night, though. The darkness brought entirely too much with it now. What was the working of utter exhaustion upon him, and what the corrupting influence of Aeglyss and the Shared, he did not know. But whatever the cause, he dreaded the prospect of yet more black hours in which he would be hunted by his own mind.

He had heard the voices of the dead: Inurian, his father, Rothe, others he did not even recognise yet had known to be shaped without living breath. He had felt waves of wretched dismay breaking over him. For a time-no dream this, something sharper, more potent-he had found himself no longer trudging through the fields but curled in the corner of his childhood bedchamber in Castle Kolglas. Folded in there, bunched into a ball, with his arms covering his head, too terrified to open his eyes. He remembered hope but did not feel it. It might take but one more night to extinguish even that slender memory of it.

“The woman could go alone now,” Varryn said quietly. “It is not so far, if this dead city is the end of her journey.”

“No,” Orisian said. “Whoever is in there, sitting around those fires… she’ll blunder into them.”

Taim laid a soft hand over K’rina’s mouth to stifle a murmur.

“If we can make it to cover before the sun’s in the sky, before the cold’s relented enough to get people moving…” he muttered without enthusiasm. “I like our chances no better if we try to hide out here”

They went on, stumbling on feet deadened by the cold water. Orisian felt desperately exposed, yet his spirits rose. He was liberated from the suffocating, haunted darkness. Even the grim transformation of his homeland that the advancing daylight revealed could not entirely restore the despair that had been riding his back.

They trod on land that should, at this time of year, have been submerged beneath the reflective pools of the Glas Water. Now it was a great sprawl of black, almost liquid mud, dead reed and debris. There were rotted timbers that had been in the water’s grip for decades; the skeletal hull of a little boat abandoned by some fisherman or fowler years ago; even, in places, the shrunken, withered remains of fish that had been stranded by the receding flood, and must have been hidden from scavengers by snow.

Once, as they struggled across that wasted expanse in the gloomy dawn, there was a figure, far away across the mire: some lone wanderer, stumbling and lurching and falling as they did themselves. Too far away to be a threat. Yet Orisian could not help but stare as he splashed through one slick after another of black water. There was something in that lone, tiny figure that held him. He found himself thinking-believing-that it was him; that he was watching himself, from this great distance, and seeing himself as he truly was.

K’rina led them closer and closer to the ruined city, and soon enough Orisian could distinguish the outlines of what had once been individual buildings. That was when they started to find bodies. Some of them were half-buried in the soft earth, some lying in pools. Some were old, picked at by animals, decaying; most were fresh, their features not yet marred, the dried blood not yet washed by rain from their wounds. There were discarded weapons strewn amongst them and here and there the corpse of a horse.

The city rose out of the marsh stealthily. First a few shaped stones, barely visible amongst the rushes. Then a stretch of wall that appeared from the sodden earth and sank back into it within a few paces. Then a stretch of paved road, then the suggestion of a house in a straight-sided pattern of rubble. Then they were amongst it, and Kan Avor showed itself to them.

Sullen dogs staring at them appraisingly as they passed. Rats a dark ripple over the ground as they scattered from a corpse at the sound of Orisian’s footsteps. A campfire giving out one of those faint pillars of smoke that they had seen from out in the valley, but abandoned. No one to tend it or relish its warmth.

The dead. Lying in drifts along a street where some cruel battle had recently been fought out. Beneath a crowd of crows that rose sluggishly from their feast when disturbed, but went no further than the nearest uneven remnant of a wall, and settled there in a patient black line. The dead. Clustered around the ashes of an extinct fire, still wrapped in sleeping blankets.

And the living. A woman, haggard without being old, sitting alone in the ruin of a courtyard. She rose when she saw them and came feebly towards them, but fell and could not rise again. Orisian was not sure whether it had been desperation or anger he had seen on her face.

A little cluster of the sick, at the base of a flight of foreshortened stairs that ascended towards some destination long lost. They coughed and sweated and shivered, and embraced one another, and watched Orisian and the others without hope, interest, or appeal.

Varryn turned and hissed a soft warning, but too late. A handful of warriors emerged ahead of them, coming round a corner and halting, staring towards them in confusion.

“Hold onto K’rina,” Taim said at once.

Orisian did so, clamping her thin wrist in one hand and pulling her towards the shelter of a shapeless pile of rubble. She struggled against him, driven by a fiercer, stronger desire than ever before to continue on.

One of the Black Roaders was loading her crossbow. The others-spearmen-charged. Varryn calmly plucked an arrow from his quiver. He raised his bow, loosed the arrow in a single fluid, rapid movement. The woman with the crossbow fell dead even as she was lifting it to her shoulder.

Taim walked out to meet the three charging spearmen. One of them was growling as he ran. Taim flicked the outstretched spear of the first aside with his sword, and crouched to put his shield into the man’s knees. The helpless, hapless Black Roader, undone by his own reckless pace, was sent cartwheeling right over Taim, landing hard on arms and head in the middle of the street.

Taim surged up and sideways, one spear thrust missing him entirely, the other deflected upwards by his shield. He cut the second man down as he ran past. The third found Varryn coming to meet him, and slowed a touch to level his spear once more. Orisian could not even follow what happened, for the Kyrinin was ruthlessly fast. A blur of spears, the crack of wood against wood and then against skull, and a single lunging stab in and out again. Varryn was already walking over to kill the man Taim had first tumbled as his opponent looked down in surprise at the blood spreading across his stomach, let his spear fall, and sat clumsily down on the cobblestones, pressing both hands against his belly.

“We need the worst, the most tangled and confused of the ruins,” said Taim as he sheathed his sword. “The harder the going, the less likely we are to be seen or to stumble across trouble.”

Orisian nodded. K’rina was still pulling against him. It seemed, though, that she did not understand what it was that restrained her. She did not look at him, merely strained against his grip like a sheep snagged on some thorn bush. When he followed the line of her gaze, it led him to the dark knot of taller, more massive ruins in the city’s heart. That was where she wanted to go. That was where whatever called so insistently to her would be found.