knew what needed to happen. What needed to be done. He advanced towards K’rina.
“No,” cried Aeglyss yet again in K’rina’s voice.
“I’m sorry,” gasped Orisian through the waves of crushing fury that broke over him. He could feel blood running from his nose. There was liquid beading in his eyes, and he did not know whether that was blood as well or tears. He took another heavy pace closer to K’rina.
She moved suddenly, tottering on rigid legs towards him, toppling as if to fall at his feet. She was reaching for him, those delicate white hands splayed, coming towards his face. Aeglyss, Orisian shouted silently at himself. It is Aeglyss. Only him.
They were in each other’s embrace then, clasped together. K’rina’s hands closed themselves on Orisian’s head. His free hand settled on her waist, just firm enough to feel her hip bone. With his other hand he drove his sword through her midriff.
As steel entered flesh, so those fingers laid on his scalp suddenly tightened and pressed down, and Orisian was flung tumbling and scattering and attenuating out of his body.
He was there, with Aeglyss, inside the howling nothingness that was K’rina. Orisian was but a collection of thoughts pulled this way and that by the raging tempest. That tempest was both Aeglyss and what had awaited him here within the shell of the woman who had once been his loving guardian. Two vast powers contended, the one striving to drag itself back and up towards the waking world of surfaces and light and substance; the other flailing at the first, raking it, dragging it, entwining it, struggling to contain it and haul it away, down into the bottomless void beneath.
K’rina was cage and she was trap. There was nothing of her here, not the most tenuous echo or memory of who she had been or what she consisted of. Her body had been mere vessel for older, vaster powers. Orisian could feel himself coming apart, unable to shape coherent thought amidst such titanic expression of unbridled potencies.
Aeglyss-the maelstrom that was his rage and desire-was in the grip of the immense will of the Anain. Their furious struggle, a storm fit to encompass worlds, threw off gouts of raw sensation that tore holes in the fabric of Orisian’s consciousness, and left fragments of themselves drifting through his faltering thoughts.
He felt rasping tendrils of briar wrapped around his naked limbs, gouging great troughs into his flesh. He felt writhing tendrils forcing themselves into his mouth and into his throat, piercing him, growing into him. He felt clouds of leaves brushing over his skin; heard the creaking of ancient, mindful timber; tasted loam.
He was Aeglyss lying shivering in the snow, folded into the arms of his dead mother, feeling himself dying piece by piece of grief and fear. He was Aeglyss crucified upon the Breaking Stone, enduring the agonising revelation of possibility, feeling in the core of his being the immeasurable, unbounded wonder of the Shared opening itself to him and filling him like a flood bursting through a holed dyke.
He glimpsed, for a flashing, searing instant, the workings of the Anain mind, the many-in-one immensity of its slow movement through the insubstantial world within a world that was the Shared. He glimpsed their longing to silence the raucous, poisonous chaos Aeglyss inflicted; their deep and diffuse dismay at the suffering, the deformation, he brought to all the countless minds woven into the web of the Shared; their fear of him. And their cold and cruel calculation in taking the only living being he loved and snuffing her out of existence like the most trivial of flames on a candle, hollowing her out and making of her a snare for the monster loosed in the Shared.
Wave after wave of experience and awareness burned through Orisian, and each left him thinner than the last, each carried away some portion of his being. But then something changed, and what was rushing up towards him, blanking out all else in the enormity of its power, was no mere fragment, no glimpse. It was Aeglyss, his entirety.
And Orisian was suddenly back in his own body, standing in the hall in Kan Avor with K’rina’s hands pressed to his scalp, his sword in her stomach. Her eyes-black eyes, lightless-staring into his own. He could feel Aeglyss raging towards him, feel the buffeting of his approach and the purity of his deranged anger. He could not move. Those fingers crushing against his skull were like steel claws. His own muscles were lifeless and limp, unresponsive to his terror.
He understood. Aeglyss could not be killed with sword, or knife, or fire. No bodily harm could silence him as long as he could reach into the Shared, for that was where the essence of him dwelled now. He would be unending, and a part of him would reside, for ever, in every and any mind. Unless he could be contained in this na’kyrim’s body as it died. Unless the Anain could hold him there while Orisian’s blade stilled its heart. Some part of the Anain would die with him, for the prison they had made of K’rina could not be escaped, even by its makers; but Aeglyss would cease, and be gone from the world and from the Shared.
But now Aeglyss was ascending again. He was boiling up to the surface and pouring himself into Orisian.
“Yield to me,” Aeglyss howled. “Open yourself to me. Become a part of me.”
Blood ran thickly over Orisian’s lips now. He could taste it. He could feel it inside his ears, trickling out and down his neck. K’rina’s fingers were white-hot bars against his bone. He could feel himself collapsing beneath their impossible strength.
“No,” he thought.
“I will give you life,” Aeglyss roared. “Let me in.”
Orisian was diminishing, like mist exposed to the morning’s glare. He could still feel his pain, but he was moving slowly away from it. He could observe it from beyond its crippling weight. He could hear and feel the Anain rising in Aeglyss’ wake. They climbed from the deeps, reaching for him.
All the corruption of the Shared that Aeglyss had begun was now removed from it, locked with the na’kyrim’s mind inside K’rina. He poured it into Orisian. Every bitterness, every resentment, every hatred and fear and jealousy ran through him in place of blood, in place of the air in his lungs. Its coruscating intensity eroded him.
Out of it, though, out of that dark and misshapen memory of the Shared, he could find one thing. One choice. He could remember Lairis, and Fariel, and Kennet. Inurian and Rothe. He could smell his mother’s hair, and hear the golden music of her voice. He could see Fariel, standing silhouetted against the sun. He could embrace his sorrow at the loss of those who had gone before and without him.
“Release me,” commanded Aeglyss. “Give yourself to me.”
K’rina’s hands crushed in against his skull. Orisian could hear crackings, ruptures. The splitting and collapsing of bone. Light was flaring in his eyes. It would end if he but yielded. The Anain were there, enfolding Aeglyss. But the na’kyrim was flooding into Orisian, forcing his way between the last resistant strands of thought.
Such agonies resounded in Orisian’s head that he was blind and deaf and dumb. He felt hollow breakage in his temples, the back of his skull.
No. He did not speak it. He simply chose. And reached towards the beloved dead. As they faded, and he faded, he could feel Aeglyss falling away. Into the smothering Anain. Into the eternal, perfect cage of K’rina. Aeglyss screamed in impotent ire. And fell. And he faded, just as Orisian did. He faltered, just as Orisian did. He ceased.
The Inkallim came on and up. She lacked the room for elegant and deceptive swings in the tight confines of the stairwell, but still she was fast, and in her hands those swords could stab and probe with all the speed of daggers. Again and again, a rain of blows aimed at his chest and shoulders would draw Taim’s shield up, and then she would somehow have changed her grip on a sword and it was lancing down towards his feet. Each time he had to yield another step, and together they climbed, in that fierce dance, slowly towards whatever lay above.
At length, inevitably, Taim was too slow, and she laid a deep cut through the side of his boot into his calf. He felt the blood at once, even as he was steadying himself. His strength was flowing out, through that and his other wounds. He could not hope to sustain this effort for long. Already, he was breathing hard, and his shield was beginning to feel heavy on his arm. If he permitted this struggle to continue, he would die, and so would Orisian.
There would be, he knew, no more than a hint of an opening, so that was all he sought. When it came, he was not even confident it was so much as a hint. She was moving up and forward, both blades lunging up but a little way behind the rising of her body. His feet were as they had to be, his back heel braced against the riser of the next step. The natural flow of his weight was taking him forward. He launched himself, flung himself as high and hard as he could, aiming to pass over her shoulder. And he let his sword fall, for he needed his hand.
He made a club of his shield and punched it into her shoulder, driving the stub of the arrow still deeper into
