with enough force to lift him off his feet, and left it there. She kicked the man who had fallen in the side of his head as he began to rise. He slumped back. She took a handful of his hair and hammered the heel of her free hand once into the bridge of his nose. There was a splintering crunch and he went limp.
The one whose cheek she had cut was staggering away, vainly trying to press back a flap of skin to his face, his hands fumbling in the blood that she had freed. She followed him, tearing her barbed spear free from the dying, howling ringleader’s stomach as she went. She put it into the small of the fleeing man’s back. She twisted it and pulled. He came staggering back towards her, caught on the barbs. She threw a foot up against his spine and kicked him free. He fell forwards.
Eska walked on towards Kan Avor.
She came to the city across ground that remembered its recent inundation. It had been the Glas Water, before the breaking of the Dyke, and that sodden past remained close. Beneath the snow, a thin crust of ice and frozen mud lay like skin over soft silt. Her feet sometimes broke through into cloying, part-liquid earth that was thick with dead reed stems and half-decayed water weed. Clumps of straggly, leafless willows stood here and there, their pliable branches bent by snow and icicles. Once, ice crackled under her foot and dropped her into an ankle-deep pool of black, almost glutinous, water. She at once unlaced her boots and dried both them and her feet as best she could. In the north she had seen toes, even legs and lives, lost for want of such simple precautions.
Sitting there, rubbing at her skin to warm it, she noticed the end of a leg bone jutting out from the mud close by, the ball joint like a smooth fist. It was not the first bone she had seen: there had been half a jaw, four ribs protruding from the snow like the fringe of a broken-toothed comb. All human. The dead lay thickly here. It might be, she supposed, the result of the Heart Fever that had raged through the Lannis Blood a few years ago, but the remains looked to have more age to them than that. She preferred to think them the dead of Kan Avor Field, the great battle fought here a century and a half ago, when the Black Road was driven from these lands. She found that a pleasing thought.
“We came back,” she whispered foolishly to the leg bone as she rose and continued on her way.
Kan Avor lay beneath a fetid fog. Eska felt its moisture on her hair, her skin. And she felt its stench close like an invisible hand over her mouth and nose. She smelled mud and rot and death and smoke and waste, so potent, all of them, that even through the muffling snow and ice they fouled the air. The frozen ruins were teeming with people, far more than she had anticipated. And there were bodies, which was just as she had anticipated.
A woman lay stiff and taut in the doorway of a house that had long ago lost its roof. Her dead eyes watched Eska pass through lashes beaded with frost. One arm was bent at the elbow, lifting her splayed grey hand towards the street. Dogs had chewed off the fingers. In a little square, a corpse hung from a protruding stone high up on a wall. They-someone-had suspended him by his arms and killed him, possibly slowly, with a multitude of blows. Eska’s cursory glance was enough to pick out perhaps twenty separate wounds. His clothes, soaked with blood, had frozen rigid and black. From the toe of one naked foot hung a tiny icicle of blood, a single fat drop arrested in the act of readying itself to fall.
The smell of roasting flesh drew Eska to a ruined house. It must once have been a noble residence, for there was a stable block, and in its yard a crowd had gathered to watch the hind leg of a horse being turned on a spit above a crackling fire. It was a twisted echo of the place’s former purpose, but that did not interest Eska; she thought instead how wasteful it was to consume an animal that might have carried a warrior south or hauled firewood or supplies.
She noted, as she progressed through the hallucinatory dream that Kan Avor had become, each accent, each ragged banner, each subtly distinctive variation in raiment. She found people of every ilk. Warriors from every Blood; countryfolk and townsfolk; Tarbains; Battle Inkallim. Even some of the defeated Lannis Blood, from whose manner it was impossible to tell whether they were prisoners or slaves, or equal and welcomed followers of the halfbreed. All save the Inkallim mingled with little regard to status or origin, as if all previous associations and bonds had been overlaid or broken all together. Only Nyve’s ravens-or better perhaps to name them Shraeve’s now-held themselves aloof.
And there were Kyrinin. Eska saw just a few of them, lingering silently at the fringes of human gatherings, moving through the shattered streets on obscure errands. She despised them for their presence here. Such as they had no rightful place in the city that, however ruined, embodied the history of the Black Road. She averted her gaze from their tattooed faces, their rangy forms. But she counted them, as she counted everyone.
She came to a crowded street, one that stank of mud and humanity. The people gathered there milled about without evident purpose. They snarled at one another when they were jostled, but otherwise were all but silent. Some were barefoot. Some, too poorly dressed for the harsh weather, sat shivering in doorways or at the foot of walls. Eska moved amongst them, noting with contempt how far these fellow northerners of hers had fallen; how destitute and weak many of them appeared. She felt no pity for those amongst them who so clearly suffered from the cold or from hunger or from sickness. Their own stupidity was the cause, as far as she was concerned, and it earned for them every miserable moment.
Many of the men and women often looked towards a door in a crumbling edifice along one side of the street. Others glanced constantly up towards empty windows above. Those blank, dark apertures were framed with moss and ferns sprouting from the seams of the stonework. There was nothing to see, but Eska felt the simmering collective excitement. All attention, conscious or otherwise, was upon some invisible focus behind those walls, beyond those windows.
Eska drifted through the throng, counting, always counting, always studying. She strove to avoid notice, but she could hardly conceal her health, her weapons, her clean leathers and hides. People stared at her. She kept her eyes empty, unresponsive.
Then the door was opening, and a stillness fell across the street as if a wind had suddenly fallen away. Into the eerie calm came Shraeve of the Battle and other Inkallim, and Kyrinin, and last of all Aeglyss the na’kyrim.
He was stooped, as if so old that his very bones were bent by the burden of years. He walked unsteadily, each pace a short and sliding shuffle. His hair was thinning, and where it remained the strands looked fragile as spider’s web, almost translucent. Every bone in his face was visible beneath the bleached, cracked skin. His hand, when he extended it towards some adoring spectator, bore fingers like crooked twigs. Where his fingernails should have been were raw sores. So reduced and brittle and damaged did he appear that it was difficult to tell that he was na’kyrim rather than human; the dwindling of his body masked the differences, drawing all his features down into indistinct decrepitude. Had Eska seen him on the street of some city, not knowing who he was, she might have veered away from him, thinking him the bearer of some wasting plague.
And yet. There was in him something that held the eye. Something that caught her breath in her throat, and filled her with the deep certainty that this frail, eroded figure was far more than mere man. All around her, people were kneeling. Smiling. Eska knelt too, the better to merge with the crowd. But in doing so she sensed, if only distantly, the rightness of the gesture. She felt, between her thoughts, in the gaps left in her skull by her own mind, the movement of this broken man’s thoughts, the ferocity of his desires and his remorseless capacity to fulfil them. She felt these things, and could have been transported by them as one consumed by hunger might be on catching the faint scent of the richest imaginable food. But she did not succumb.
Eska had come to the Hunt as a child too young to speak or walk. An orphan probably, though there was no way of being certain since the records were imperfect. She had no memory of what preceded the discipline and the apparatus of the Hunt, and her every desire-even her faith in the creed-had been subsumed by her devotion to the Inkall. She had no sense of needs or imperatives beyond service to the Hunt. As the vast unspoken, promissory temptations of the halfbreed’s presence washed about and through her, she clung to that clear and narrow allegiance, and found it sturdy. She remained observer, not participant.
Aeglyss raised his arms. He was perhaps too weak to straighten them, for his hands came little higher than his head, the elbows remained crooked.
“Friends,” he murmured, and the word came to Eska from both within and without. It embraced her and soothed her. She smiled despite herself.
“Faithful friends. We move towards the light of a new sun, you and I. Great changes are upon us, and I am their herald, their helmsman.”
Whispers in the crowd, like the rustling of leaves: affirmations and adorations. Eska could feel the edges of her attention contracting. This halfbreed drew everything in towards himself.
“I have promised many things,” Aeglyss said. “And the time comes when I shall make good those promises. This world has ever been found wanting. From my first breath, I have gone, step by step, into its dark heart, and
