Both blades lashed down towards him, clattering against his shield with unexpected force and driving him backwards. Her right leg kicked out at Varryn. The Kyrinin was fast enough to crash his bow into her thigh; not fast enough to avoid the lunging foot that hammered into the base of his throat and sent him staggering into the wall. Taim heard the crack of his head against the stonework quite clearly. Varryn slumped down.
The Inkallim landed with perfect balance and poise. She flicked a single glance at the stunned Kyrinin, then fixed her gaze on Taim. As she did so, though, one blade reached back towards Varryn.
Taim roared and rushed at her, shield foremost, sword held back for a stabbing thrust. The Inkallim drifted out of his path with absurd ease and casually cut open his upper arm as she did so. But he had put her out of reach of Varryn, for now at least.
She rose out of her fighting stance and took a few leisurely steps sideways. They carried her a little closer to the door. Taim backed towards it. Varryn was not stirring. There was no way Taim could defend both stairway and Kyrinin without quickly losing one or both. Suffused with sharp guilt, he chose the stairway, and hoped that the Inkallim cared more for that than she did for finishing an unconscious foe.
“I saw you once before, I think,” he said to her. “In a snowstorm, at Glasbridge.”
“Did you?” She seemed entirely uninterested. “Stand aside.”
“I can’t do that. My Thane commanded me to hold this stair.”
“That boy who was with you? He’s nothing.”
“He is my Thane.”
Her lip curled in disdain. She reached up and hooked a single finger over the shaft of the arrow still embedded in her shoulder. With the most fleeting of grimaces, she snapped it off, leaving just a split stub protruding from her flesh. Taim considered attacking her in that moment of distraction, but in truth it was no distraction at all, for her eyes never left him, her balance never wavered.
She let the broken arrow fall and sprang forward in a flurry of whirling blades, belabouring his shield, ringing against his own sword. His defence was desperate. This raven was astonishingly fast and precise. She nicked his thigh. Almost had his eye; would have done, had he not read the sudden change in her blade’s course at the last possible moment and jerked back.
She paused as he retreated into the doorway itself.
“You’re too late,” he said, hoping to keep her attention upon him and away from Varryn.
She glared at him but made no reply. She moistened her lips. There was a constant shiver running down Taim’s neck and spine, a kernel of pain building behind his eyes, a flutter of bitter hopelessness in his heart. None of this he believed to be truly his, and he set himself against it. But it would not release him entirely. It sapped his strength and his will.
His mind reached for hope, for inspiration. Its harvest was meagre. There was perhaps the faintest suggestion that the arrow hampered her movements. If so, that would only grow worse if he could live long enough to give it the chance. And there was the stairway. He edged back into the shadows at the foot of the spiral of steps. She needed space to get the best from those fearsome swords and from her speed. Above her, with shield between them, he would have a chance. To delay her, if nothing else. But only if she came after him.
“You cannot reach him,” he said as he reached back to set his foot on the first of the steps.
She smiled then, the malevolent smirk of a wolf.
“You think not?” she said, and ran at him.
Orisian could not answer the question that had been put to him. The depth and resonant power of the voice that had asked it stunned him, and made him for a moment stand quite still, letting his sword and shield hang down.
“You mean me harm.” The voice rang like the mightiest, most sombre of bells. “That I can feel, can know. But it’s a cold kind of… regret. It doesn’t burn in you as it did in the others.”
Orisian gathered himself, almost groaning at the effort it took to shake off the deadening pain and the weight of the fell mind that pressed down upon his own. K’rina was walking very slowly forward, taking tiny steps. That roused Orisian enough to get his own, leaden body moving. He forced himself ahead of the na’kyrim.
“Who is that with you?” the voice asked him. “I can’t see. My eyes… Can’t find anything… What? You’ve brought some empty vessel with you? A body with no mind, no thought, no life in it?”
Orisian advanced, each halting stride a struggle. He could hear Kanin muttering something, but did not look. He kept his gaze fixed on the na’kyrim, who slowly became clear amidst the shadows as Orisian drew nearer.
He thought at first that Aeglyss must be dead. A naked, hairless, scabrous head on a lopsided and bruised neck. The face, what little Orisian could see of it, marred by a score of tiny wounds and blisters and blemishes. Streaked with blood. Fragile shoulders, the bony points of them showing through the gown. That gown itself, foully decorated with stains. The hands, one lying atop the other in Aeglyss’ lap, so wasted that Orisian could see every bone through the skin. Each finger ending in an open sore where the nail should have been.
The whole entirely withered and wretched and unmoving. Yet he was not dead, for Orisian heard him, and could feel his seething will all around. It ran dark, intrusive fingers over Orisian’s thoughts. This was the home and heart of all that poisoned the world and the Shared. Orisian recognised the teeming mass of unfettered emotion that clawed at him, could almost see it as a boiling black cloud that filled the hall and flooded out through the windows, rushing in great spreading columns out into the sky, blanketing the world. The anger and the bitter hatred, the self-loathing, the fear. It was all here, in its first and simplest form.
“Why do I catch the scent of Anain?”
The doubt, the almost childish puzzlement in those words, was so acute it made Orisian sigh in distant pain. He was losing himself beneath the onslaught of this formless, purposeless power. If he did not act, he would be unable to do so at all.
He lurched forward, sword raised.
“No,” the voice told him. “Kneel.”
And his sword slipped from his numb fingers, and his knees buckled and he went down heavily. He shrugged his arm free of the shield and it fell away from him.
“Who are you?” This time Orisian did not think the question was for him. “I can’t see you. Why can’t I see you?”
K’rina was shuffling closer to Aeglyss.
And then, quite suddenly: “Aeglyss,” K’rina said. “It’s me. It’s K’rina. I came for you.”
She had a beautiful voice. Light, and fine, and easy.
Orisian could feel Aeglyss’ confusion. It was so powerful, it became his, and he stared, uncomprehending, at K’rina as if he was seeing her for the first time. She stood straight, head held up. Alive and present. He felt a subtle transformation taking place inside him, inside everything. That confusion and the anger that underlay it was shifting, changing its shape. Those first emotions did not disappear, but a… joy was merging itself with them.
“K’rina?”
“I came for you, my son. My foster son. I felt your pain and knew I had to come.”
“Yes.” Orisian thought his skull might burst at the vigour in that single word.
“I am here for you.” K’rina smiled, stretching her arms out towards Aeglyss. “Come. We can be together.”
“Yes.” Again, it was exultant, rising, roaring upwards. “Let me see.”
Orisian felt all that force and power that swirled about him gathering itself, drawing itself in to coalesce around that one smiling woman, and within her. K’rina shook. She rocked from toe to heel. Her arms jerked. Her mouth opened.
There was a sudden lessening, a dampening of the cacophony raging inside Orisian. He rose to his feet, fighting back surges of nausea. He recovered his sword. When he straightened, testing the weight of the sword in his hand, K’rina had turned towards him and was staring at him.
“What?” she said through taut lips, but the voice was not truly hers now. It quivered with Aeglyss’ power, with his strident tone. “No.”
The snapped denial was like a blow in the face. Orisian closed his eyes and shook his head to try to clear it.
“No,” he heard again, and the sound rang around the hall, setting echoes of fear and anger running across the stone.
The anger found a home in Orisian, and burned in him and blurred his vision. Amidst that fierce seizure he
