over all those years it has shown me how it revels in cruelty, how it feeds upon deceit, takes pleasure in the suffering and the death of those who least deserve it.”
The truth of all he said was like a light burning inside Eska’s eyes. It was bright, and she could imagine the warmth and the comfort it could offer, yet she was not blinded by it. Narrowly, determinedly, she thought of the crossbow on her back. Its weight grounded her. Had she been prepared, with crossbow in hand and a bolt ready for its string, she might have killed this halfbreed here and now, before Shraeve or the watchful Kyrinin could intervene. She concentrated upon that thought, and turned it over and over in her mind, as if practising some protective ritual of the sort the Tarbains once favoured. She girded her mind with imagined visions of the lethal act, clinging to them.
“All of this I have seen,” Aeglyss called out, “and I have learned it well. And now I am granted the strength to cure the world of its ills.”
Kanin had told her not to throw her life away in any attempt upon Aeglyss. Eska doubted the Thane’s insistence that no single dart or blade was likely to prove fatal to the na’kyrim-she had yet to find a neck that would not yield to a sharp-edged caress-but she was prepared to wait a while longer before testing it.
Aeglyss was smiling now, in a wolfish way. Eska thought she saw contempt there, as he surveyed the kneeling, bowing host filling the street, but she doubted anyone else would share her impression.
“A world must be broken before it can be made whole again,” Aeglyss intoned. “There must be a purging with fire and with blood. We must strip everything back to bare soil before we can plant new seeds. Is it not so?”
“Yes,” Eska heard a woman at her side murmur, and others all through the crowd. A hundred whispers of assent.
“And thus is the purpose of all my suffering revealed. Though I did not seek it, the strength is in me to subjugate all the world to a single will. I-we-shall lay bare the earth. Start afresh. I shall remove all dispute, sweep away all pride. There will be no more envy, no more traitors. Only the faithful.”
Eska repeated that word to herself within the chamber of her head: faithful. She could feel the ardour trying to shake its way free of her stern self-restraint; she could feel that eager, ambitious portion of her spirit struggling to carry the rest of her into surrender and submission to the halfbreed’s certainty. But it was not, she thought, the creed to which he truly demanded faith. It was to him. Though he spoke in the language of the Black Road-the unmaking of the world, its purging by bloodshed-it was not the return of the Gods he hoped to usher in, but his own dominion. Cannek had told Eska as much, before his ill-fated endeavours at Hommen. He had told her that Aeglyss was, at heart, a mad child. Nothing more. She had always thought Cannek a perceptive, perhaps even wise, man.
“Tomorrow, at dawn, there will be wonders,” Aeglyss proclaimed, nodding as if compelled to do so by the irresistible truth of what he said. “Tomorrow I will descend upon our enemies, and undo them. I will deliver to you, and to us all, the greatest of victories. I will give to you the place of the Fisherwoman’s birth.”
The roar of delight shivered back and forth along the street, echoing from the stonework. Some woman, overcome, leapt to her feet and ran towards Aeglyss, arms outstretched, wild ecstasy in her face. She was blind to all save him, sending those who obstructed her path sprawling away. She wept and laughed as she ran.
One of the Kyrinin standing beside Aeglyss, tall and powerful, his face thick with tattooed swirls and curves, rapped the heel of his spear once upon the cobbles, let it spring up free. He caught it again, stretched out a foot and planted it firmly, then snapped the spear forward. It went flat and true into the woman’s chest and lodged there. Her frenzied, delirious wail was cut short as she plunged back and down.
“Tomorrow, you may witness the wonder,” Aeglyss said as if nothing had happened. The woman was groaning, but no one paid her any heed. Eska could not see her any more, but the spear stood erect and it trembled with the woman’s faltering breaths.
“Those who are here at dawn, you will find me there, in the hall above.” Aeglyss gestured towards the windows. Every head was tipped up to follow his hand. “I shall exceed Orlane, and Dorthyn, and all who went before. In your name, in your service, I shall make dust of the past, for these are new times we live in, and a new world we are making. Attend, and see what wonders I work on your behalf.”
Glasbridge’s harbour was empty of boats. The deserted quayside stood silent, its moorings idle, its taverns and shops burned or deserted. Wet slush covered its stones. Offshore, amidst the turbulent waves driving in from the vast estuary, the short mast of some half-sunken fishing boat rocked like a swamped sapling. Kanin stared at it for a time, narrowing his eyes against the sleet sweeping in on the wind. He imagined for a moment that its movement, the regular, solitary beat of its instability, might convey some message to him. There was nothing there, though.
He turned to the crowd standing there on the quay, a miserable, bedraggled assemblage. Some of the last dregs of Glasbridge’s Lannis inhabitants. There were only a few men of fighting age. Women and a few children, old men, frail men, regarded him with various kinds of contempt and resentment. Sixty of them, nearly one in six, as best he could guess, of those who had not died during their town’s destruction and capture, or not escaped it. They had been dragged and driven here like recalcitrant sheep, full of hate but too battered and defeated to offer any resistance.
Kanin’s warriors ringed the Lannis folk, enclosing them in a silent cordon of spears and swords. He doubted such precautions were really necessary. These were broken people. And that was something he meant to change, even if only a little.
A Gyre man was kneeling before him, his hands tied behind his back. Kanin spat meltwater from his lips.
“You know me,” he shouted across the wind at the townsfolk. “You know I’ve made this town mine. I’ve opened the food stores to you, fed you as well as we eat ourselves. Those of you who’d been made slaves or servants, I’ve freed you from that.”
He grimaced at a sudden flurry of sleet.
“This man killed a Lannis girl yesterday.”
He kicked the Gyre captive in the back, sending him sprawling into the slush. Igris hauled the man back onto his knees. The shieldman had great coiled chains looped over his shoulder, found in the storeroom of a half-wrecked smithy.
“Now you see how things go in my town,” Kanin shouted, and nodded to Igris. The shieldman hesitated. He winced.
“Do it,” Kanin hissed.
Others of his Shield came forward. They helped Igris to entwine the chains about the Gyre man, securing them with cords. One took his ankles, another his shoulders, and they carried him to the edge of the quay. The man stared at Kanin all the way. There was no hatred in his dark eyes, only accusation.
“I go without fear,” the man said, quite distinctly, quite calmly.
“I don’t doubt it,” muttered Kanin. “But still you go.”
His warriors swung their cargo once, then heaved him out. The sea swallowed him with a deep, hollow smack and he was gone, leaving not the slightest trace in the relentless waves slapping up against the stonework. Some of the Lannis townsfolk crowded to the edge, pushing past the guards, craning their necks to try and follow the man’s descent. One kicked slush after him. Another whispered curses Kanin could not hear above the wind and water.
“I don’t expect love or loyalty from you,” Kanin said. They turned back to him, and he saw new patterns in their faces now: puzzlement in some, suspicion in others. “I do expect the sense to see that things can change. Have changed. I will shield you from the basest cruelties of your conquerors. I will permit no more of your children to die, or be stolen away by the ravens. I will feed you, and clothe you, as well as I feed and clothe the most devoted of my own followers. I will even seek boats and, if I find them, give them to you, and not hinder your departure.”
He could see out of the corner of his eye Igris watching him with poorly disguised horror. He had not told his Shield or any of his warriors his full intent today. There had been no need or point in doing so. He was Thane, and more than that he was a man alone, engaged in an undertaking none of them could see clearly enough to grasp. Only he understood what extremities the times demanded.
“But not all of you,” Kanin said, concentrating upon the attentive, bewildered townsfolk. “I want you to go amongst your fellows, and tell them what you have seen and what I have said here today. And tomorrow I will have
