And the mist-shape of his dead brother turned its vague head towards him. Had there been eyes there, they would have been upon him. Orisian lost all awareness of where he was, or even when. For the space of three heartbeats-and he felt them, each one, loud and sharp in his breast-there was only him and this memory of Fariel.
“I’m sorry,” Orisian said. “I tried.” He did not know what he was saying, or why. It was the need in him, the despair, that spoke.
“Orisian!”
The shout snapped him out of his dark reverie. Taim Narran was pushing past him. Just in time to block a spear thrust delivering by a laughing, leering woman. She wore a mail shirt, a dented metal skullcap of a helm, heavy boots that rose to the knees of her thick hide leggings. It was the garb of a warrior, yet she fought without skill, without guile. Spittle flew from her lips; her eyes rolled this way and that in their sockets.
Orisian fell back onto his heels. Taim flattened his shield, driving the point of the woman’s spear into the ground. His sword came down and smashed through the spear’s shaft; would have taken the woman’s hands too, had she not released it an instant before. She came at Taim again, reaching for him with bare hands, not hesitating. Grinning, muttering. He snapped his sword up, and the backhanded sweep hit her on her cheekbone, gouged its way up into the side of her face. Sent that little helmet soaring away, down the hillside, clattering off a wall before the hungry mists swallowed it. Orisian stared after it. He heard it bouncing once, twice: metal on stone. Ringing like some ailing, cracked bell. And then there was silence.
“I saw the dead,” Orisian said.
He was sitting on a cloak spread over wet grass. Hent was some way behind them. They had travelled deep into the night, driven on by a common, unspoken desire to put as much ground as possible between them and that awful place.
There had been not just skulls, but finger bones threaded onto sinews and hung from the eaves of houses. A corpse spreadeagled on a flat roof, hands and feet tied. The tiles beneath it stained by blood, for the woman had been alive when she was stretched out there, and when the carrion birds had come spiralling out of the sky. A tiny compound, the workspace of a stonecarver, now filled with bodies. They lay three deep, with snow draped over them.
Of the Black Road company that had wrought such havoc upon that remote town, only a handful had remained for Ess’yr and Varryn and Taim and the rest to kill. Some had died of disease, some had apparently been killed by their companions. None of the dead had been interred or burned. They lay amongst the townsfolk, discarded and forgotten. It was as if, once Hent’s inhabitants had been slain, the mad rage that fuelled their slaughter had demanded yet more tribute of those it possessed. And they had mindlessly done what it required of them.
“Not the dead,” Yvane said beside Orisian. “Memory. The Shared. The dead-the echo of them-persist in the Shared as long as there are those still living who remember them. Much longer than that, if stories are told of them, if their names are not forgotten.”
She shifted uncomfortably upon the cloak, searching for an accommodating undulation in the hard ground beneath.
“It is Aeglyss, spreading. The walls between our minds and the Shared are breaking down. For you, today, it came as the dead, as death itself. It will come to each of us as our own minds and inclinations permit it. As they invite it. For those who know only struggle, only anger and killing… well, we saw back there what it does to them.”
“What about you?”
“I hold it at bay. So far.” There was a subtle strain in her voice. “I felt something last night. A… I don’t know. Something. He grows stronger, or at least sinks deeper into the Shared.”
Orisian looked into the east. He was not sure whether he imagined it, but there seemed to be a hint of dawn out there. A grainy lightening of the horizon.
“If the Shared can bring the dead to the surface like that, then is it the Sleeping Dark?” he asked, watching that possible, longed-for, distant daybreak.
“Oh, if you want answers to questions like that, you need to ask them of a wiser head than mine.”
“There must be those who have thought of such things.”
“There are. At length, and for many years, in Highfast. And elsewhere. Why do you suppose some of the Kyrinin imagine the Anain, the lords of the Shared, to be the shepherds of their unresting dead? Does it matter, though? The answer?”
“I don’t know,” Orisian said at length. “Is Inurian there, then? In the Shared?”
“Not him. The dead are dead. Gone. What remains in the Shared is only the memory of him. The sound of his voice, the sense of who he was. Something like him, but not truly him. He has ended.”
Orisian nodded, sad.
“It might be best if you tried to shut such things out,” Yvane said gently. “It’s only something inside you, wounding itself with the Shared.”
“But I remember them so clearly.”
“That’s good, I imagine. It would be, anyway, in quieter times. Just don’t let the memory of them crowd out the living for you.”
The dawn did come, and blearily illuminated a vast landscape. The ground sank away to the east of them in successive lines of grass-clad hills, interspersed with crags and snowfields and clusters of scrubby trees. Beyond that, sweeping off towards the faint and hesitant sun, lay Anlane. Endless, from this high vantage point. Rolling like a brown and grey sea into the indefinable distance, where it and the huge sky blurred into nothingness. All the world was silent forest, and Orisian feared it. He looked out over Anlane’s illimitable wilds and imagined it to be alive, a gigantic sleeping power that waited only for his footsteps to disturb it. A place that, once entered, could not be left.
Taim Narran was checking over the horses nearby. Yvane was kneeling beside K’rina’s prostrate form, changing the bandages on her shoulder wound. The warriors, one by one, were mounting their horses as Taim approved their condition. It was all done with hardly a word.
Ess’yr came across the grass to Orisian. She was holding something out to him. He looked down at what lay in her palm and at first did not recognise it.
“Too long since the last we made of these,” Ess’yr said.
Two cords, each of them with a dozen or more small, tight knots spread along their length. A dozen memories, Orisian knew. A dozen thoughts, embodied in those tiny tangles of cord, to go into the wet earth in place of a lost, irrecoverable body.
“You and Varryn?” he said quietly. He was afraid to reach out and accept these tokens, afraid of their implications and importance. But Ess’yr sank her hand a little closer to his own, tilting it to let the cords edge closer to her fingertips.
“It is not a good time for the dead to wander, to go unrooted in willow,” she said. “When Anain can die, there are none to shepherd the restless dead.”
Orisian willed his hand to rise, and accepted the two cords into his grasp. They were light. Yet he felt every knot in them as a hard point pressing against his skin. He stared down at them: the beaded kernels of two lives.
“Which is yours?” he asked.
Ess’yr touched a finger to one of the strands.
“If you live and we do not, plant them beneath stakes of willow,” she said.
Orisian nodded numbly, for he could never have refused her this. That she should bring such a thing to him, and make him its guardian, filled him with a kind of awe. And a faint, intimate hope, perhaps, glimmering there deep inside him. But he feared it too, this responsibility that he knew with absolute certainty would bring unbearable pain should he ever be called upon to discharge it.
“If you are to die, I do not think you will do it alone,” he murmured. “I may not be able to do as you ask.”
“Perhaps.” She sounded unconcerned. “But the ra’tyn is done now. The promise I made to Inurian. It is spent. Where we go now, where you choose to go, Varryn and I have other battles to fight. We become a spear a’an, entering the lands of the enemy. I have done what I can for Inurian. For you. We will go as far as we can with you,
