The prisoner pushed himself upright, angled his head to try to catch some revealing sound. The horses hauling the wagon had stopped moving, or they were gone. He heard footsteps and the bar on the door being lifted, the creak of hinges. There would be light, he supposed, flooding in, but he could not see it. He felt a chill breeze.
“You’d be the very blind man I’m seeking, then,” someone said, in a voice straight from the backstreets or the harbour taverns.
Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig lifted his head towards the words, empty eye sockets hidden behind a linen band. His manacles clanked as he tried to stand.
“Out with you,” the rough voice said. Igryn felt his chains suddenly tighten, hauling him towards the bitterly cold, fresh air. “You’ve some travelling yet to do. What use you’d be to anyone, I can’t imagine, but it’s back to the city for you.”
CHAPTER 3
Break a man’s bones, and he will heal, and cultivate hatred of you.
Break a man’s spirit, and he is unmendable.
I
For more than a century, Kan Avor had rotted in the watery chains of the Glas Water. They had fallen away with the breaking of Sirian’s Dyke, but the city had entered another kind of bondage: ice encrusted it. Every pool in its pitted and silt-layered streets was frozen. Icicles fringed each protrusion of its gnarled and knotted ruins. Whatever feeble thaw might begin during the day was undone and reversed in the succeeding night. Snow fell, and persisted in every shadow. Winter possessed the city.
And there were other masters sharing dominion of the courtyards and squares and broken towers. A febrile vigour that threw out on occasion eruptive gouts of madness and brutality, and by communal consent made sudden savagery the most natural, the most basic, expression of the state of being. And the na’kyrim, who resided at the heart of this great ruin, and about whom everything turned, and by whose will all things were deemed to happen.
They came in their scores and their hundreds, drawn by rumour or by other, silent, far deeper instincts: men and women, those who were warriors and those who were not. Gyre, Gaven, Wyn, Fane. Even Horin. They came, many, without knowing precisely what drew them there, to the shattered city squatting amidst marsh and mud in the centre of the Glas Valley. Some died, in fights or of sickness or hunger. Others found a ruin for shelter, a fire for warmth, and slowly came to an understanding: that they had reached the axis about which the world now turned, the spring from which a terrible, cleansing flood was flowing out across the world. The lever that was overturning every now-outdated law and rule. And some sought to set eyes upon the lord of this cruelly transformative domain. Some sought out the na’kyrim himself.
In a dank, columned chamber where, in the very infancy of the Black Road, Avann oc Gyre had once held court, Aeglyss sat slumped upon a massive stone bench. He wore a plain linen robe. Bandages about his wrists concealed wounds that never quite healed. Meltwater dripped from holes up amongst the half-rotten roof beams. It spread dark stains across the great oaken floorboards of the hall.
Hothyn and three other White Owls stood behind Aeglyss. A dozen Battle Inkallim, silent and still and dark, were scattered down the length of the chamber, leaning against the crumbling pillars, staring out from the windows whose shutters had long since been torn away. Shraeve herself met the small groups of the na’kyrim’s adherents emerging from the winding stairway that coiled its way up from the street below. If she found no threat in their manner or possessions, they were permitted to approach him, to bathe in the flows of certainty, of conviction, that emanated from him.
“I am tired,” Aeglyss croaked to Shraeve as she escorted a pair of awed votaries up to his crude throne.
“These are the last two,” she told him. “Afterwards, I have messengers to instruct before they depart for our armies, so you will be left in peace.”
“Peace,” Aeglyss said, with a crooked laugh. Then: “Messengers. Kilvale?”
“Yes. In four days, as you instruct.”
“Good. Good. The ground will be prepared by then. You’re sure, though? They must be ready. I will exert myself at dawn, but it will test me. The Shadowhand is a turbulent slave; I already pay a heavy price for his continued obedience. To reach so far… so many… it will not last long. They must move quickly, if my strength is to be added to their own.”
“It will be made clear,” Shraeve nodded. “Dawn, four days from now. Our messengers will kill as many horses as it takes to get the word there in time.”
“Good. And once I give them Kilvale… I’ll be safe, then. I’ll have them. All of them. None would betray the man who offers such gifts.”
His skin hung slack from his face, as if slowly coming unfixed from the bones beneath. His hair was thin. Bare, blotched scalp showed through here and there. Blood veined the slate of his eyes; the rims of his eyelids were red and moist. Yet the man and the woman now crouching before him regarded him with wonder. They felt, rather than saw, his potency.
“What do they want?” Aeglyss asked. He would not look at them. He angled his gaze away, towards the pale square of one of the windows.
“Only this,” Shraeve said. “To draw near. To know for themselves that their hopes have been answered in you.”
“And do they?” Aeglyss asked, still averting his gaze. “Do they feel the truth of it, if I say to them that I can give them what them want?”
“Yes,” breathed the man at once, and smiled an exultant smile.
*
Orisian’s horse baulked at the steep, rocky slope plunging down into the huge gully. He did not blame it. The hillside fell away, swooping down into a wide band of trees that curved west like a broad, dark river. Looking on it from above, it was impossible to see the stream that had cut this valley, only the tangled, leafless canopy of the countless trees that clustered about its course.
Orisian leapt to the ground and led his horse over to Ess’yr. The Kyrinin was crouched down, running a hand over the short, snow-speckled turf.
“You’re certain?” he asked her.
She nodded towards the wooded ravine.
“She descended.”
“And the others?”
“Still follow, or pursue. Perhaps by sight, more likely by track. Six or seven. We are very close behind.”
Orisian hissed in frustration and beckoned the nearest warrior. He pushed his reins into the man’s hands.
“Two of you watch over the horses here. The rest of us’ll go down on foot.”
He saw the briefest flicker of reluctance on one or two faces, but none of the nine men hesitated. Torcaill was gone, bearing Orisian’s hopes and fears for Anyara into the south. It left Orisian reliant upon the instinctive
