beneath them and see nothing but great slabs of cloud and fog, the peaks and ridges bare islands protruding from a sea frozen in the instant of its boiling.
Even when the sky was naked above, and there was no snow or sleet, the wind never ceased. It buffeted and bit them. Orisian, like most of the others, wore a woollen scarf across his nose and mouth, and kept the fur-lined hood of his jacket pulled as far up and over his head as it would go. They had taken the best clothing they could find from Highfast’s stores. Still the cold found its way in. Had he not suffered its savage attentions before, and more acutely, in the Car Criagar, it might have been intolerable. Now, he merely shrunk himself inside his cocoon of wool and cloth, and endured.
The horses suffered the most, becoming sluggish and sullen. They held their heads low. Soon, they might become more hindrance than aid. Whether or not the weather gentled, or the track became less snow-clogged and treacherous, there would come a time-perhaps two days, perhaps three-when they reached the edge of Anlane. And that, Orisian suspected, would be no place for riding.
Often, his mind retreated from the harsh reality of the journey, drifting and stumbling its way through corridors of memory and distraction. But they were seldom clean. Untainted. He remembered the day before the Winterbirth feast at Castle Kolglas. So much of that memory was warm, coloured impossibly joyful by the darkness of what had followed it: walking beside Anyara through the market, hearing the light, bubbling chatter of the festive throng, smelling the sticky richness of honey cakes. Yet as he relived it in his head, Orisian found shadows bleeding in at the edges of the scenes his mind recreated. Faces in the crowd that blurred and leered and grimaced, until he turned his imagined attention full upon them, and then they were gone. Not there at all.
And then he was walking with Inurian over the rocks beneath the castle’s wall. Looking for… something. Even the pain of that memory was sweet, for there, before his mind’s eye, was that lost face in all its precise simplicity and affection. So close he could have touched it. So alive. Yet he could hear that the waves slapping at the rocks were heavy, thick with something more than water. Inurian’s lips moved, but Orisian could not hear him, only the seagulls screeching overhead. And their cries became the anguished wails and laughter of mad children.
He was looking down at a corpse. A woman, frozen into a stiff huddle. Snow on her head, in her ear, in the pit of her eye. He was looking down on her from what seemed a great height, yet for all that distance he could see the ends of her eyelashes protruding through the snow. He could see the strands of loose cotton that had frayed from the collar of her coat.
“Couldn’t say whether she’s Kilkry or Black Road.”
“What?” Orisian said, blinking.
Taim Narran twisted in his saddle, looking back.
“Couldn’t say whether she’s Kilkry or Black Road,” he repeated.
Ess’yr and Varryn were standing over the corpse, staring down at it. It lay off to the side of the rough track, beneath the shelter of an overhanging boulder.
“Died of cold, not of blade,” Varryn said.
“Herraic said we might reach Hent in a day, if we didn’t pause,” Orisian said, still dislocated, half of him caught up in that place where the dreams and memories lurked. “How long till nightfall, do you think?”
Varryn flicked a glance towards the western sky, lifted his chin as if to scent the air.
“The third part of the day is yet to come,” the Kyrinin said.
“We should keep moving, then.”
Ess’yr and Varryn ran ahead of the horses, disappearing beyond the rugged writhings of the trail. In the moment when they dipped out of sight, Orisian felt that familiar tug of foreboding and fear. Every moment that he could not see Ess’yr, could not satisfy himself of her safety, was soured by worry. He did not doubt her capabilities but still he worried. Death, it seemed to him, was becoming ever less respectful of the capabilities of those it claimed.
He could hear two of the warriors talking behind him. Low voices, jumbled by the wind, the words separated, some snuffed out, some thrown together. He could not make out what they were saying.
His mind wandered once more, lulled by that sound, human yet incomprehensible, and by the slow and steady crunching of his horse’s hoofs on loose stones and bare rock. He drifted. And this time he saw Ess’yr’s face, just as he had first seen it when slipping in and out of a wounded fever. It was as clear to him now as it had been then. Clearer. The beauty of it, the soft and flawless near-white skin, the framing curtain of hair with an almost metallic yellow glint to it. The eyes, unguarded, grey as flint, looking into his own. He rode in the embrace of that memory.
Hent was stranger than Orisian had expected. It sprawled across the eastern flank of a long, descending ridge. The highest of its buildings lay almost at the crest of the ridge; the lowest, close by the seething river that ran north between fringes of scrubby willow and alder. The buildings themselves were like bulges in the skin of the mountain, as if its innards had burst forth in crumbling disarray and then been reassembled into habitations. The shape of each was governed by the natural form of the rock to which it clung. There was barely a straight line to be seen, save the slate tiles that clad each roof. Snow was piled in every wind-shadow.
The trail dipped down from its perch high on the slope to sweep through the centre of the tiny town, and re- emerged beyond it, scarring its way on towards the low hills and dark brown stain of forest that lay to the north.
A solitary figure was moving, down there amongst all the stone; staggering as if drunk between slope-sided houses. Just that one movement. All the rest was as imperturbably motionless as the giant boulder field it resembled.
“We went to within a spear throw,” Ess’yr murmured at Orisian’s side. “No watch. No guard. Stink of…” She cocked her head. “Stink of Koldihrve. The Huanin there, and their drink.”
“We heard thick sleeping,” Varryn observed.
“What does that mean?” asked Orisian.
“The body sleeps,” said Ess’yr, “but the nose does not.”
Orisian frowned, then: “Snoring?”
Ess’yr shrugged.
“And there is the smell of death,” Varryn said.
They fell back to where Taim Narran and the others waited. All were dismounted save K’rina, who was bound to the saddle of a placid horse by a thick weave of cords and rope. She was hunched forward and low, almost to the animal’s neck, in that strange borderland between sleep and unconsciousness that she occupied most of the time.
“The western side of the ridge is steep,” Taim said as soon as they drew near. “Not even a goat trail that we could see.”
“We could go that way, though?” Orisian asked.
Taim wrinkled the bridge of his nose.
“If necessary. It would be difficult. Dangerous and slow. We’d have to leave the horses.” He looked at K’rina. “She’s in no condition to be clambering around on a mountain slope. What of the town?”
“Seems almost empty,” Orisian muttered, glancing back towards Hent, now hidden by a hump of bare rock. “The Black Road must have been there, maybe still are. But it’s as near to dead as makes no difference.”
“Still, we couldn’t pass through without being seen,” Taim said.
“No.” Orisian shook his head.
“Cloud coming,” Varryn said, looking up beyond the ridgeline towards the grey western sky. Banks of low cloud were indeed streaming in, their vanguard already wisping around the highest outcrops of rock and spilling frail tendrils down the slope.
Taim looked dubious.
“That could help,” he said, “but even so…”
Orisian’s mouth was dry. He swallowed. The world was disappearing before his eyes, lapsing into a blur of moist grey. He could hear his own heartbeat, as if the foggy sprawl of those clouds was deadening and silencing everything else so completely there was nothing else left to hear. Nothing to attend to save his own thoughts, and he barely recognised many of them. He wanted to be rid of them, these flickers of doubt, murmurs of fear. Stirrings of a hot and unfamiliar bloodthirst.
“We’ll try. The place is half-abandoned, and whoever’s left there isn’t expecting us. We’ll try to go straight through.”
