ground,” smiled Nyve.
Theor shrugged regretfully. “I must do as my heart and my faith bid me.”
“As I say, the horse is running. It is not our hands that guide it, but fate.”
“That is as it may be, but I fear Ragnor oc Gyre lays the blame for his Captain’s death on our all too mortal shoulders. Temegrin the Eagle may not have been the most valued of the High Thane’s servants, but neither was he entirely inconsequential. Ragnor sees our scheming, rather than fate’s working, in the ascendancy of this halfbreed. In Shraeve’s… accomplishments.”
“And you?” Nyve asked quietly. “I care less than I should what our High Thane thinks. Tell me what you see.”
“I see nothing as clearly as I would wish. Fiallic was a good man. Measured. You told me yourself he was the finest Banner-captain the Battle has had in our lifetimes. Shraeve is… more turbulent.” He spread his hands, an almost helpless gesture. “This is not where any of us thought this track might lead. You cannot be as free of doubt as you pretend.”
Nyve grunted. “Of course. If it was my choice, I’d have Fiallic back. If these bent hands could shape things, he would have killed Shraeve. But he didn’t. No message I’ve had from the south, no rumour even, denies that she won her rank justly, by the will of fate.”
“And the halfbreed? She has drawn up your entire host, all the ranks of your ravens, at the side of some mongrel who was supposed to be nothing more than a tool in the hands of the Horin Blood. I find myself uncertain whose purposes are being served.”
Nyve regarded Theor pensively. He rested his hands, knuckles down, on the bench.
“I was never much given to deep thought on matters such as this; you know that.” He gestured, club-handed, at the lumpen scar across the side of his head. “Had I spent much time thinking about it, I’d likely have taken flight. Let the hound that took my ear go hungry. But the path of my life was not written that way. It seems to me…”
He hesitated, narrowing his eyes as he searched for the right words. “It seems to me that this is what we are for, you and I. Our lives have been very simple things: to serve the creed, to follow-and foster-the descent of this world to its inevitable ruin. We have been, in every sense that matters, meaningless except in our service to that purpose.
“So don’t ask me to shed whatever little meaning I have had now, in the twilight of my life.” Nyve smiled, as if feeling the glow of that very twilight on his skin. “The ascendancy of the creed is closer than ever before. By whatever means, however unexpectedly, Shraeve has restored us-the Inkalls-to heights we have not seen in many years. It is to us that the people look now for guidance, not the Thanes. If we pull back, hesitate, would we not make a lie of the long lives we have led? Would we not be denying the very purpose that has been our guide? I am too old to make such changes, friend. We both are. We’ve always been in the hands of fate. That the journey along the Road has become tortuous does not change that.”
Theor nodded. He understood. He felt it himself: the nagging sense that whatever doubts now assailed him were a betrayal of something precious and central to him. That if he surrendered to them, he would render himself, and the life he had lived, entirely empty. Still, those doubts were there. As was the insidious, all but heretical, fear that fate was somehow going astray from its proper path.
“Do you sleep well?” he asked Nyve. “Are your dreams troubled?”
There was only the briefest moment of hesitation. “I dream of violence. And of death. But I have always done so. They’ve been my sleep-companions as long as I can remember. And you? Is your rest uneasy?”
“It is.” Theor had to hold himself back. Some things he could not share, even with this oldest of friends. The waking dreams brought by seerstem belonged to the Lore, and only to the Lore. Yet a part of him wanted to tell Nyve how harsh and inhospitable the inner territories that seerstem opened up had become. The herb had blackened Theor’s lips over the years: the smallest of prices to pay for the comfort and insight it had brought. But whatever it brought now, it was not comfort. Fear, sometimes. Doubt. It obscured where once it had clarified. The strange dreamlands that lay beyond the seerstem gate were bleak and unwelcoming. There was always the sensation of someone looking over his shoulder, or some movement just beyond the corner of his dreaming eye.
“I’m tired,” he murmured. “Perhaps that’s all it is. Perhaps I grow too old and weak to face the unfolding of fate’s great plan.”
“You’ve a few years in you yet,” Nyve grunted.
“Perhaps. I am to meet with Ragnor oc Gyre. Down in Kan Dredar. He refuses to come to the Sanctuary, which is as sure a sign as you could wish for of his fraying patience. I thought perhaps you could provide me with an escort. I hear that there is unrest in the town. Riots. Killings.”
“You shall have as fine a guard of my ravens as you wish, First.” Nyve chuckled. “It will do our High Thane good to see that all the Children of the Hundred stand shoulder to shoulder in this. And that the Battle still has enough swords here to put on a show.”
Theor smiled, and in smiling tried to pull taut the old, secure strands of his friendship with the master of the Battle. But there was a looseness in them that had never been there before, and he could not overcome it. The profound agreement of their instincts had always persisted without having to be spoken. Now, he felt it to be seamed with faint flaws that could not be patched with words, or with mere affection. He secretly and fearfully mourned the loss of its perfection.
VIII
Taim Narran cast an experienced eye over the host of the Black Road as it edged its way up the road towards Ive. Only a few hundred, he thought, yet the knowledge brought none of the relief he might have expected. Rather, he felt an empty despair at the prospect of inevitable slaughter, and the knowledge that victory or defeat today would bring no release for any save the dead. There must be light somewhere amidst this darkness, he thought, but he seemed to have lost the ability to detect its gleam.
“Move the horsemen out to the right flank,” he said quietly. “They don’t look to have any horses of their own. Perhaps we can get in behind them.”
He did not look round, but heard the riders galloping off to deliver his commands. Everyone, whether of Lannis or Kilkry stock, deferred willingly to him here. A certain martial fame-nothing he treasured or relished-had long ago attached itself to his name, and the people of Ive imagined him to be something he himself had struggled to recognise for some time: a great warrior and leader. They trusted in him to save them, and their town. It was a burden he bore without protest, but not gladly, and not lightly. Never lightly.
There were banners and standards from several of the Black Road Bloods scattered through the approaching army, yet Taim could see little sign of ordered companies or disciplined array. The northerners came on in a jostling mass, spreading out into a long, thick rank on either side of the road. There were no obvious Captains, just these hundreds of men and women come together into one huge blood-hungry crowd. And they bore a grim forest in their van: dozens of tall spears jostling for space against the grey sky, each topped with a severed head or bearing strips of flayed skin that stirred on the wind like pennants.
A woman, hands bound behind her back, legs hobbled, was dragged out in front of the seething army. She was wailing and struggling. Five warriors marched her a few paces forward and threw her down in the middle of the road. One of her captors spread his arms wide and bellowed wordless hatred at the ranks of Kilkry and Lannis men. Then he and the others beat the woman to death with clubs and staffs.
Taim turned away. She had looked to be much the same age as Maira, his daughter. He had never seen this from the Black Road before. This wanton, tribal brutality. It was not how battles were meant to be fought. Or perhaps it was, now.
The noise was new too. In all his years of facing the Black Road, he had grown used to the grim, almost unnatural, silence in which they often fought. This time, his ears rang to hate-filled roaring, like the baying of a thousand leashed hounds.
And then those leashes were slipped, and the dark wall of bodies and blades was rushing towards him. He drew his sword, cast one brief glance up towards the clouds scudding across the sky, not knowing what he hoped to see there, and heeled his horse into motion.
