Kanin threw the man to the ground, trampled over him to reach others. The thickening crowd made him feel enclosed, beset, and his rage flared in response. He pushed a woman aside.
“Has the halfbreed sent you?” she asked as she stumbled, and the hope in her words broke the last shreds of Kanin’s restraint. He spun, and brought his sword out from its scabbard and round in a rising arc that caught the woman on the shoulder.
Someone rushed at him, lunging at his upper chest with a blunt pole. He dipped his shoulders enough to send the stave glancing away off his mail, straightened and brought his sword hacking up into the armpit of his assailant. And then horses were all about, clattering and barging; his own warriors pouring in on all sides and pushing the throng back, cutting into it and splaying it apart like a ship’s prow punching into the surf.
Kanin ran to his own horse and sprang into the saddle. A great fury, and a great excitement, had hold of him.
“I am Kanin oc Horin-Gyre,” he cried as his horse turned around and around, as his warriors surged across the stable yard, scattering men and women, overturning cooking cauldrons and stalls and racks of weapons. “My Blood sprang from this town, before our exile, and I claim it. I will hold it, in my own name, and that of the High Thane. No one else. No one else!”
In time, Kanin’s anger abated. It left behind it that familiar raw bitterness that was always there now, that sense of solitary anguish. He gave no orders, made no plans. He merely watched in silence from the back of his horse while Igris and the rest of his Shield took charge, silencing with their blades any show of dissent amongst those gathered in the yard, then sending out bands of thirty or forty riders at a time to impose Horin authority upon the rest of the town. It was all necessary, Kanin knew, but it was only a prelude. Without rage to buoy him up, the present could not hold his interest; it was the future that constantly called upon his impatient attention. Only the future could offer him any release.
Once a sullen peace had descended, he went with his Shield towards the harbour. There had been barns and storehouses there, still holding unspoiled food, when last he had been in this town. He needed them, for if he could not feed his little army, it would turn to bones and dust in his hands. And without it, that future he dreamed of would never come, and he might never escape the horrors of the present.
“We are followed,” Igris muttered, riding at his side.
Kanin did not look round.
“I know,” he said. “Hunt Inkallim?”
“Three of them. A few dozen paces back.”
“They’ve been watching us since yesterday,” Kanin said. He drew his horse to a halt and hauled it around.
The three Inkallim-two men, one woman-were standing in the middle of the street, flanked by three great dogs that had settled onto their haunches and sat there, their breath steaming out from their massive jaws.
“Wait here,” Kanin said to Igris, and rode back the way they had come. The Inkallim watched his approach impassively. Kanin’s horse mistrusted the hounds, and he had to wrestle its head up with the reins to hold it steady before them. He stared down at the Inkallim.
“What do you want?” he asked. “By whose command do you follow so obviously in my footsteps?”
“Cannek’s,” said the woman, taking a pace forward. She wore simple leather and hide clothes, carried a crossbow slung across her back and leaned her weight on a spear with a subtly barbed point. Her face was plain, her manner casual. She regarded Kanin with all the presumed equality he had come to expect of the Inkallim.
“The dead make poor captains,” Kanin said.
“Yet we often find ourselves serving them. Do we not, Thane?”
He glared at her and curled his lip. She was unmoved, her placid gaze unwavering.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Eska. We were instructed, in the event of Cannek’s death, to preserve your life, if possible. To give you what aid we could.”
Kanin smiled at that.
“The Road I mean to follow will make that a thankless task.”
Eska gave a laconic shrug.
“Follow, then, if that’s your wish,” Kanin said, and turned his horse away from them. “I may find a use for your talents in the days to come.”
“What is it you intend to do, Thane?” she asked him as he rode back towards his Shield.
“What Cannek couldn’t.”
The Corpseway that ran from Kan Dredar’s market square, past the great trading hall and on up the long ramp to the gates of Ragnor oc Gyre’s castle was living up to its name. Evenly spaced along its length were forty gibbets, a score on either side. Each bore a naked corpse. Crows and ravens lifted casually into the air as Theor’s party approached, then settled back to their stubborn, patient work upon the frozen bodies.
Theor glanced out from his litter. His bearers were tiring and their pace had slowed. The snow was thinner on the road than elsewhere, but churned into ruts and ridges by the constant passage of wheel and hoof, it made for hard work. The sight of the exemplary dead along the road did not greatly interest him. A great many were coming to their end this winter. Such times, periods when death gorged itself, came now and again, in the form of war or disease or famine. As if this failing world strove vainly to cleanse itself.
He grunted and sank back against his chair. His difficulty was that what was happening now felt entirely unlike cleansing to him. Quite the reverse, in fact.
He felt the ground rising. He could hear the bearers gasping for breath as they laboured up the incline towards Ragnor’s stronghold. A horn blew somewhere within the outer palisade. It irritated him, if only because he could imagine Ragnor, alerted by that signal, already rehearsing his false friendship, his offhand threats. Theor leaned out once more, and shouted towards the troop of Battle Inkallim riding ahead.
“Quicker! I grow cold.”
There were forty of them up there, and another sixty riding two abreast behind. All were dressed for war, in cuirasses of rigid black leather, carrying raven pennants and lances. Their horses were the finest left in Nyve’s capacious stables. An impressive sight, but in truth Theor and Nyve alike had hoped for a still more assertive display of the Battle’s strength. Nothing, it seemed, was fated to follow the course mere mortals might hope for in these times. Wild Tarbains, unyoked to the creed, had been raiding out of the Tan Dihrin; two hundred Inkallim had been sent to quell this resurgence of the tribesmen’s long-quiescent martial ardour. In the disputed pine forests between Gaven-Gyre and Wyn-Gyre lands, woodsfolk had started bloody feuds; another hundred of Nyve’s swords had departed to impose a peace the rival Thanes seemed reluctant, or unable, to enforce. It all left Theor with a lesser escort than he had anticipated, but that disappointment he could easily accommodate. What he found troubling was the pattern of it all, the constant sense of incipient, aimless chaos.
He was shaken uncomfortably from side to side as his litter-bearers struggled to keep up with the riders ahead. Another of the roadside corpses swung across his rocking field of vision. These grim ornaments that Ragnor had hung along his road were another token of insidious decay. Three riots there had now been in Kan Dredar. None of them difficult for the High Thane’s warriors to put down; all of them surprising. Such rebellious, rampant demonstrations were unusual amongst the Bloods of the Black Road. Internecine violence was far from unknown, but these random eruptions of mindless strife were something new.
Could this be what the Kall felt like? Did the fated, promised destruction of this world begin in petty violence and murder? Mobs in the street, a na’kyrim raising himself up out of the chaos in the south?
The wooden gate in the palisade stood open. Behind it was a great ditch. Nyve’s ravens clattered across the bridge that led to the inner, stone gatehouse. Theor closed his eyes briefly, willing his mind to clear itself of doubt and distraction. He did not know quite what to expect from this audience, but recognised that he would be ill prepared to meet it if he could not shed his gnawing uncertainty. He heard the next huge iron gate clank open, and breathed out. He was, he forcefully reminded himself, no child, no callow youth or novice of the creed. He was the First of the Lore. There could be, should be, no one more capable of meeting such turbulent times with resolution. It was difficult, though, when lack of sleep blunted every thought.
The gigantic pitched roof of Ragnor’s Great Hall held no snow. Water dripped from its every eave. It would be hot inside, Theor knew as he clambered a little stiffly out from his litter. Ragnor kept his fires burning day and night. The First of the Lore stood before the mighty doors of the hall and stretched, digging his fingers into the muscles at
