fiercer in my adherence to the Blood of my birth and upbringing. But-and this is the important part, Thane, so I hope you are listening-though the fires of my loyal ardour may have been damped down a little by the years, they are far from extinguished.
“I am a part of my Blood. A part many might wish to excise, I suppose, but a part nevertheless. I belong. And I believe, in my deeply buried heart, that the Bloods are a boon to this world. I believe that without them, and without my Blood in particular, we would sink back into the self-mutilation that has so often afflicted us as a people, as a race. As a godless world. You will therefore understand, Thane, that it troubles me greatly to see the Haig Blood convulsed, as it is now, by a multitude of difficulties.”
“You’ll find no sympathy in me,” Igryn sneered. He turned his blind head towards Torquentine. The smile upon his bruised and misused face was ugly. Mad. “I’d like nothing better than to eat your Thane’s warm heart out of the bowl of his broken chest.”
“Unfortunately, I do not doubt the sincerity of your desire in that regard. And therein lies my dilemma, for I find myself at a loss to know what to do with you. Quite aside from my instinctive wish to do no more harm than is strictly necessary to the Blood of my birth, change is something I find distinctly undesirable at the best of times. I would go so far as to say, in fact, that I am thoroughly averse to it, for reasons both temperamental and professional. And there is altogether too much of it in the air at the moment. Wanton, egregious change for no better reason than that everyone seems to have forgotten the limits of appropriate behaviour. Do you know who commissioned me to bring about your removal from the custody of Gryvan’s men, Thane?”
“No,” hissed Igryn through gritted teeth. “And I don’t care.”
“How ungrateful of you. What would you do if I were to return you to your own lands?”
“Make you rich. Raise an army. Avenge myself upon your Blood and render as many of your women sonless, brotherless and husbandless as I could.”
Torquentine emitted a curtailed, stifled laugh. He glanced over to Magrayn. She was as impassive, as quietly observant as ever.
“Surely he would have been dead long ago, were he as guilelessly stupid as he appears?” he said to her.
Magrayn frowned. It was an expression that made the exposed, corrupted flesh of her rotted face stir in interesting ways.
“He is sick,” she suggested. “Deranged.”
“Quite possibly,” Torquentine said. “I have not left this chamber for some time, Thane, yet I have a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, spread all through this city, all through the lands of this Blood, and others. I see, and I hear, everything. All of that knowledge flows back to this chamber, and pools here in me. And what do I glean from it? What do I discern of the shape of the world?”
He waited for a response from Igryn, but the Thane was silent, his head turning very slowly, very slightly, from side to side.
“I see the Crafts and the Moon Palace edging towards outright war,” Torquentine continued. “I see your own lands rent by unrest. Not mere banditry but utter lawlessness, and rumours of Dornach ships already scouting your shores with half a mind to land an army by all accounts. I see the Black Road seething across the borders of the Ayth Blood like a swarm of wolves, consuming and destroying. I see murderous mobs rampaging in the streets above us here, battling the Guard. Everywhere I see unreason and savagery and disintegration. It is as if every desire, every ambition now runs unbridled. The fetters of restraint have been cast off by all those upon whom they served a most valuable purpose.”
He sighed. Even as he spoke, he could feel the creeping anxiety that had nested, of late, in his chest. He was a man who craved, who needed, order and control and organisation. Everything, in fact, that the world now seemed determined to slough like some redundant skin.
“And all of it growing worse. Each part of it feeding off the rest, each brutality precipitating another, each stupidity exceeding the one that went before. I have even crept my eyes and my ears into the very house of the man who decided you should be free, Thane. I watch him, I eavesdrop upon him. And I mislike what I see and what I hear. Things have changed in strange and unreadable ways. In that house and everywhere. This puts me in a sorely testing position.”
Igryn laughed. A cackle, like a crow.
“I will eat his heart,” the Thane of the Dargannan Blood murmured.
Torquentine raised his eyebrows and scratched disconsolately at his folded throat.
“As you say, Magrayn: sick. He surrenders himself all too willingly, I think, to the malady that besets the whole world. Ah well. As I was about to explain, I find myself unwilling to comply with my instructions. Returning him to his homeland would only feed a fire that already rages beyond control. I have no wish to play the part of midwife at the birthing of a world given over to unreason and chaos. I just cannot bring myself to do it.”
“Shall I return him to the storeroom?” Magrayn asked.
“Indeed. And make sure there’s nothing there he can hurt himself with. Until I decide what to do with him, it’s rather important he stays alive.”
The two guards unceremoniously hooked their hands under Igryn’s armpits and hoisted him up from the bench. He did not resist, but seemed unable to support his own weight. His legs buckled at the knee and he hung like an ancient, infirm greybeard propped up on a fence.
“Seems like nothing much, doesn’t he?” Torquentine reflected sadly. “Yet because of him, I invite the wrath of the Shadowhand. I all but betroth myself to catastrophe. Constantly surprising, the way things turn out, isn’t it? And I never took much pleasure in surprises.”
II
Yvane was trembling, Orisian realised. They had paused beside a pool into which the waters of a stream plunged from a low cliff. Moss and ferns festooned the rock face, a miniature, verdant abundance still resplendent in the green that winter had stolen from the rest of the forest. These were no mighty falls. The column of water that churned down into the pool was slight by comparison with that Orisian had seen at Sarn’s Leap, long ago. Still the sound, the cold mist that drifted over his face, was enough to make him think of Inurian. Enough to prickle his heart with needles of guilt and shame. They had left the na’kyrim there alone, and he had died. He had died on his own. What a fearful, awful thing that seemed to Orisian now: that a man so gentle and so deserving of better, had died alone, amongst enemies.
Focusing his attention upon Yvane gave him a handhold with which to resist the tug of those lacerating memories. She sat crosslegged beside K’rina, who was curled into a ball, arms folded about her knees. As Orisian watched, Yvane held out one of her hands before her, the fingers spread. She stared at it. Even from a few paces away, Orisian could see that it shook. Yvane frowned in concentration. She was trying to still her hand, Orisian realised. She failed, and let it fall, palsied, into her lap.
“Is it bad?” he asked quietly.
“I can smell wolfenkind,” she replied. Her voice was somehow different. It had an attenuated fragility to it that was new. “The memory of them. I can hear them running through a forest far older than this one. It sounds like death.”
“It’s not long now,” Orisian said. “Another few days, that’s all. Then we can — ”
“What?” said Yvane sharply, glaring at him. “You really think it will be that easy? What is it you think is going to happen?”
Orisian stared blankly at her. She was changing, he thought. Bit by bit, she was becoming someone he did not know. Perhaps they all were.
“It won’t be easy for her,” Yvane muttered, looking down at K’rina. The other na’kyrim appeared entirely at peace, hugging herself into a safe, quiet ball.
Splashing behind him distracted Orisian. He twisted around. The warriors were along the edge of the pool into which the falls tumbled. Some were drinking its clear waters, others soaking tired and blistered feet. One had waded out, barefoot, into the middle of the pool. He stood there, unsteady on hidden rocks, arms outstretched as the spray from the waterfall threw shifting, tenuous veils across him. He was, Orisian saw to his alarm, weeping. He made no sound yet his face was contorted with grief, his cheeks bunched in anguish.
