all of you who can hold a weapon, and have the strength to walk for a day, assembled here at dawn. I don’t care who-men or women, it doesn’t matter-but you will come here, and I will arm you and train you and give you an enemy to oppose.
“Because I am not your worst enemy, and you are not mine. I will show you the greatest enemy your Blood has ever had, the one responsible for all your suffering and shame, and you will fight him at my side. I will give you back the honour of your Blood. Those you leave behind here will be protected and preserved for as long as you keep this bargain with me. If you fail in what I require of you, you will all suffer the consequences.”
They stared at him, a mass of disbelief and confusion, and he stared back. Resolute. Unwavering. In the silence, gulls came drifting in off the sea, their cries sharp.
“That is all,” Kanin said, and turned. He walked away, ignoring his own warriors and their questioning glances. He could hold them for a time yet, he was sure. For long enough.
Only Igris came hurrying after him, sword tapping at his legs, mail shirt clinking.
“It doesn’t seem right, sire, to be fighting the faithful when the war is so far…”
Kanin spun and leaned towards the shieldman, pointing a single finger at his eye.
“The war is where I say it is. By the oath you took to my father, you made the Blood’s battles your own. The Thane is the Blood, and I am Thane yet. I choose our battles. Never forget it. I know what must be done, for the good of the faith, for the good of us all.”
Igris quailed before his lord’s wrath, and Kanin stalked away. He was right in this. He was certain of it. If he was the last and only man in all the world who could see what had to be done, so be it. He had strength enough for that, whatever it cost him, wherever it led him.
Two figures awaited him a short distance down the harbourside. They were leaning against the side of a broken cart, watching with wry amusement: two of the three Hunt Inkallim who had made themselves his shadows.
“Have you found what I need?” Kanin asked them.
“You have a rare talent for spreading havoc and confusion, it seems, Thane,” one of the men murmured.
“I asked if you have found what I need,” barked Kanin.
The man inclined his head, deflecting-or dismissing-the Thane’s anger.
“Seventy of them. Every corpse-in-waiting this town has to offer. Most should live long enough to serve your purposes. A fine concoction they are: fevers and sores and suppuration. We’ve got them safely sequestered beyond the reach of any healers. Not that there are many of those to be found hereabouts.”
“Good. I want them in Kan Avor tomorrow. I’ll have Igris arrange an escort, and drivers for the wagons. No word from Eska yet?”
The man shook his head, and Kanin grunted. He strode away.
“You’ll make our task of keeping you alive difficult, Thane, if you turn your own people against you,” one of the Inkallim said behind him.
Kanin stopped and hung his head for a moment. Then he turned and stared at the man.
“I didn’t give you the task. I don’t care how easy or otherwise you find it. What happens will happen, since none of us chooses the course of the Road. Do we?” He asked it dully at first, but then again, more pointedly, more openly: “Do we?”
VI
The heat of bodies and of breath warmed and moistened the air in the hall. Three hundred people, perhaps, crammed in, standing in expectant, reverent silence. Eska stood at the rear of the crush with her back to one of the gaping windows. She could feel the bitter wind that came up the Glas Valley on her neck, even as the warmth of the hall brushed her face. There was snow on that wind, and an occasional errant flake came tumbling over her shoulder to alight, and vanish into water, upon the hair or jacket of those in front of her.
The hall was gloomy, barely recovered from the deepest dark of night. Out to the east, Eska knew, the sky would have caught the first grimy smear of the new day’s approaching light, but here in Kan Avor it would be some time yet before true dawn would break. No lights burned, and in the near-darkness, with such a close-packed crowd, it was difficult to see the halfbreed seated on his stone slab of a throne at the far end of the chamber. When he spoke, his voice was all but disembodied, grating out from the columns, from the wooden floorboards.
“I killed one of the ghosts in the green. You could not understand what that means. You who hear nothing of the true thunder rolling beneath the world cannot know what it is to ride its storm winds, to master them thus. No matter. There’s none left, now… none left… who could describe even the outline of what I have become.”
The hush was profound. No one breathed, none stirred. Hundreds stood there in the dark, held by that strained voice stealing across the stonework, threading its way in amongst them, running its icy touch across their skin. It seemed, even to Eska, a thing not born of a living, limited throat, but rising from the matter and nature of the world itself: as innate, as inevitable as the breaking of waves on a wild shore, or the rushing of a stream through its mountain bed.
“I will give you more easily measurable wonders,” Aeglyss said.
Such a slight figure, Eska thought, so small and frail alone there on the bench. Yet so utterly dominant of every eye, every mind. There was, in these extended, rapt moments, nothing else of consequence in the hall.
“Because I know the course of your desires, because I know that what I demand of you must be earned by gifts, because it falls to me to shape all things now; because of all this, I will give you what no other could. You and your creed ascend now, on my wings.”
The halfbreed fell silent, and his silence took something out of the world, leaving all who had been listening bereaved and diminished. There was nothing that could fill the void his presence left as he drew it back into himself, bowed his head still more deeply into his chest and let out a long, dwindling breath. But light began to come, seeping in hesitantly, eroding the lingering darkness, putting grey accents on every form. And amidst that meagre brightening, they waited and watched.
*
The Bloodheir was gone. Summoned back to Vaymouth by the Thane of Thanes, it was said. Malloc cared nothing for the two thousand men who had marched with him; it was the departure of Aewult nan Haig himself that weighed upon him. Some, Malloc knew, would welcome the Bloodheir’s departure. There were those-all but traitors to his way of thinking-who thought Aewult’s leadership a factor in their recent defeats. In the night just ended, by the glare of their campfire’s flames, Malloc and his companions had killed one such, a man who slighted the Bloodheir’s courage, his merit. The others had held him down and covered his mouth, and Malloc himself slipped a blade twice, thrice, between his ribs. They had dragged the body to a ditch and hidden it amongst reeds there. None could reasonably punish them for their deed, but it would be for the best if the question never arose.
There had been a certain comfort in the killing, a small confirmation that the world retained some semblance of sense and balance. Strangely sweeter to him than the taking of any of the other lives he had claimed in his long service of his Blood, it gave Malloc a memory to set in the scales against his disappointment at the Bloodheir’s departure. He stood now, with Garrent and the others at his side, by the banks of a wide, shallow stream, and remembered the feel of that disloyal, foul-mouthed fool dying beneath his knife. The man had been a Taral-Haig archer, somehow separated from his company in the darkness.
In the new day’s half-light, the waters of this stream looked darker and more turbid than they had any right to be. There were many such brown waterways scurrying down towards the sea from the northern fringes of the Ayth-Haig moors. It galled Malloc to find himself in such a peripheral posting, when any battle-if there was even to be such a thing-would be decided nearer the coast, beside the road that pointed the way south. That was where most of the remaining Haig forces were gathered. None defended Kilvale itself. The town would stand or fall by the strength of its own inhabitants and the warriors of its own Blood. There had been killings traded between Kilkry and Haig. Only word of the Black Road’s approach and the withdrawal of every Haig sword from the town had stilled them.
In truth, Malloc doubted the rumours of impending combat that had drifted through the army, with the smoke of its hundreds of campfires, in the evening and night just passed. He had long ago learned to distrust the misshapen guesses that infested any assemblage of fighting men like madly breeding cockroaches. The whispered
