“Aeglyss is here,” she whispered. “He’s here. Gods, he’s…”
A spasm seized her, and she vomited across Orisian’s feet. He made to kneel down beside her, to put a protective arm about her hunched shoulders, but sudden sound distracted him. A harsh, fast rattle like breaking ice. A thousand splintering cracks rushed through the boughs; deeper ruptures rang in the bellies of the great trees; a mist of wood dust and fragments of bark filled the air. Rustling filled the undergrowth, as if an invisible army of mice was suddenly on the move. Before Orisian’s eyes, a wave of death swept through the woods.
He watched the grass that had so recently flushed green now die and wither into countless brittle, brown curls. Leaves that had burst out, bright and fresh, only moments ago abruptly rusted and fell. Branches broke. Splits ran noisily up tree trunks. Saplings bowed and shrank. Out, out into the undergrowth ran tendrils of destruction, cutting grey pathways through the woodland. Every bush or tree they touched, every blade of grass or clump of fern, died in the blinking of an eye.
Eshenna was groaning. Orisian turned to her, and saw her fall to her hands and knees, then roll onto her back. He breathed, and felt the dry grit of dead vegetation in his throat. It filled the air, like the frailest veil of smoke. He coughed, and spat to clear his mouth. Silence descended. A stillness, like the space between two heartbeats.
Ess’yr was kneeling. She reached for the sear, dead grass before her, and it fell apart in her hand. Her brother stood beside her, his face now unreadable. But his chest, Orisian saw, rose and fell. Rapid, alarmed breaths fluttered in and out of the Kyrinin warrior. He stared, unblinking, at the great tree, now dead, beneath which K’rina lay.
“He killed it,” Yvane said. “Impossible. Impossible. He’s killed one of the Anain.”
“Is he gone?” Orisian bent and shook Yvane, made rough by his fear. “Is he still here, in you or Eshenna? Did he see you?”
She was limp and unresisting in his grasp.
“No, no. He’s gone. It wasn’t us… He didn’t… He came for the Anain. It… it rose too close to the surface. He felt its presence, and he hunted it. He wasn’t looking for anything else.”
“He didn’t find K’rina?”
Yvane shook her head. “Nothing to find. There’s nothing left of her. He cannot feel her any more than I can.”
Orisian released her and straightened. Eshenna lay unconscious on the pale carpet of dead moss and grass. The blight stretched out in all directions. Beyond its bounds, Orisian could just see stands of trees that still lived. Closer to hand, there was only the skeleton of a forest: greys and sickly browns, everything withered, everything bare and angular and bleak. Where the bark had fallen away from tree trunks, it revealed dry, flaking wood that held not the faintest memory of life.
Orisian walked towards K’rina. His feet crunched across dead stalks and fallen twigs. As he drew near, the two limbs that had impaled the Black Road woman cracked and crumbled, falling away into brittle fragments of dead wood. The corpse thumped to the ground.
They waited in silence in the musty hall in Kan Avor. Not a word, hardly a breath, escaped Kyrinin or human. Every one of them watched the na’kyrim trembling upon the stone bench. They watched great dark stains spread across the bandages around his wrists. So suffused were they with blood that it oozed out onto the backs of his hands.
All felt the surging of his power. They felt it in their skin: a shivering born of no cold. They felt it in the place behind their eyes where their self resided, in the blurring there, the sensation of their own minds melting into some vast, accumulative flow that cared nothing for them, did not even recognise them, yet was so immensely potent that it nevertheless gathered them into it. And they exulted in it. It filled them with the liberation of surrender to something far greater than themselves.
This awful, wonderful torrent overwhelmed them, and they grew thinner and thinner beneath its onslaught, until at any moment it felt as though they might be carried off, and parted entirely from the world and from their crude bodies.
And then Aeglyss sucked in a huge wet breath and coughed. He bent forward, almost touching his forehead to his knees. Strands of bloody mucus ran from his nostrils down across his mouth. He licked it away as he staggered to his feet. He brushed past the dazed man and the woman, who still abased themselves before him. Droplets of blood fell from his wrists as he moved. He wheezed, and out of the wheezing came laughter: an attenuated, cold mirth.
“So,” he gasped. “So. They tried to kill me before, but now they learn… now they see what I am. I am too much for them, even for them. Now we know whose land this is. Whose world.”
As he spoke, the movement of his jaw freed flakes of dead skin from his cheeks. They drifted down like tiny withered leaves. He fell to his knees with a bony crack. Shraeve and Hothyn both came quickly to his side. They eased him up. So frail had he become that the Inkallim could almost completely enclose his arm with her hand.
“The flesh is too weak,” he murmured. “Send them away. I don’t want them to see me like this.”
II
Kanin led a company of four hundred into Glasbridge: every man and woman of his Blood he had been able to assert any kind of control over. Many he had wrested away from other roving bands, cowing their rebelliousness through displays of anger and violence. Most wanted nothing more than to wander on south in search of slaughter. He gave them slaughter of a different kind-the execution of those most vocally resistant to his command-and with it exerted a measure of fragile control, over some of them at least. He did not expect to maintain his authority for long. So turbulent had every heart and mind become that he could not imagine any sentiment, or rule, or order, lasting. But he did not need much time. In his dark calculation, he could see no further than a few days, weeks perhaps, ahead. Beyond that, nothing.
Glasbridge was half ruin, half armed camp. All squalor. Even in the short time since Kanin had last ridden its streets, much of the town had slumped still further into decrepitude. It lay now beneath a covering of snow, yet still there was a soft, warm hint of rot on the air. Under the white shroud, decay and corpses lurked. Those houses that had been damaged by fire when Glasbridge was taken by the Black Road, or abandoned since, were miserable sights, crumbling and sodden.
There were, amidst the wreckage, pockets of life and habitation. They found a sprawling stable yard near the centre of the town, with a travellers’ inn and workshops-blacksmith, wheelwright-attached to it. A dozen or more sullen-looking horses were shut up in stalls, but it was the people that caught Kanin’s attention: a hundred at least, milling about in incomprehensible activity. It all struck him as formless, chaotic. There were warriors amongst the crowds. Kanin saw badges and standards from Gyre, Gaven and Wyn, all mixing, keeping to no settled companies. Most of those who had occupied the yard were not fighters at all, though. They were ordinary villagers and townsfolk and farmers, fragments of the host of commoners that had come surging down through the Stone Vale in answer to the call of victory, the promise of restored lands and triumphant faith.
Kanin dismounted, and seized the closest man roughly by the arm.
“Who commands here?” he demanded.
“Commands?” the man repeated vacantly.
Kanin felt dizzy and disoriented. He found himself wondering, absurdly, whether he had changed so much, whether his isolation had become so complete, that he could no longer be understood.
“Whose camp is this?” he shouted in the man’s face.
“Mine. Yours. It belongs to the Road.”
Kanin growled in contempt and thrust him away. Others were coming close now, drawn by curiosity or suspicion. He recognised no one. The faces came to him indistinctly, as if softened and disguised by the veil of his anger. He surged forward and seized the collar of another man’s jerkin in both hands.
“Who claims Glasbridge?” he cried.
The man made no show of resistance. There was an odd, confused expression on his face.
“Fate claims us all, in these times. The Kall is upon us…”
