Beyond her, he saw a young Kyrinin-slighter and younger than he was himself-sitting astride the chest of a dead or dying man, pounding at his wrecked skull with a rock. The sight was transfixing. Orisian watched in stunned awe as the rock rose, flicking gore and blood into the air.
He was almost too late in blocking another spear thrust, and was staggered by it. The spear’s tip scraped along the leather belt at his waist. Orisian slashed at his attacker, but the White Owl sprang nimbly back. And looked down, startled, at the other spear that suddenly burst from his own stomach.
Varryn carried his impaled victim a couple of paces forward before driving him down onto the ground. Orisian started to thank him, but saw at once that the Fox was far beyond the reach of any words. Varryn’s eyes had a glaze of fierce detachment. He snarled savagely as he hauled at his spear to free it from the back of the White Owl. The blue tattoos on his cheeks were overlaid with streams of blood coursing from a ragged scalp wound. His hair was matted down over his brow.
He hissed as he spun, bringing his spear round in a flashing flat arc and breaking it across the midriff of another closing White Owl. He leaped high and came down on the back of a Kyrinin who was sparring with Taim. Orisian stepped forward. A flicker of movement sensed out of the corner of his eye had him lifting his shield. It caught an arrow out of the air and shook. Orisian looked out towards the youth who had loosed the shaft. The Kyrinin stared back at him, slowly lowering his bow with trembling hands, and then turned on his heel and vanished into the forest.
Orisian turned about. The shadow of the oak tree now fell upon the dead, the dying and the last of the fleeing White Owls. Soft moans and gasped breaths. The stench of blood and spilled guts. Orisian saw a Kyrinin arm extended up, reaching weakly and futilely for the overhanging boughs. He saw Taim Narran on his knees, shield laid flat before him, panting. He saw more than a dozen bodies, and one White Owl limping in a tight, unsteady circle, holding a crippled and ragged arm tight in against her side. She gave out a susurrant whimper. Her eyes were closed. Varryn put an arrow into her neck, and she staggered sideways and then fell.
Varryn turned towards Orisian. The Kyrinin’s chest was heaving in a way Orisian had never seen before, from exertion and perhaps from the intensity of the fires that burned within him. Fires that subsided now, for the warrior blinked and blew out his cheeks, stretching the coils of his blue kin’thyn, and let his bow hang limply from his hand. His eyes cleared.
Orisian nodded, a gesture of simple acknowledgement, a welcoming back of someone who had been absent, in more ways than one, until that moment. But he realised that the Kyrinin’s attention had already found another object. Those eyes focused beyond Orisian, sharpening upon something over his shoulder. Varryn’s face went slack, his lips parted. Orisian turned, frowning.
And only then did he grasp the true shape of the disaster that had been closing upon them-upon him-all this time. For Ess’yr lay on her back, hair spread over the grass like a filamentous disc framing her head. She stared up, unblinking, through the branches of the oak tree to the sky above. One hand rested lightly on her breast, the fingertips just barely touching the shaft of the arrow that was sunk deep into her fluttering chest. Her blood was turning the deerskin of her jacket black.
CHAPTER 5
There is a ruin at the heart of the Lannis Blood: Kan Avor, the drowned city where once the Thanes of Gyre ruled, and where the creed of the Black Road was nurtured and tended. It stands now empty and silent, in the cold embrace of still waters and marsh. Birds roost upon its crumbling walls and bats hide in its broken towers.
The people of the Glas Valley treasure this ruin, and all but venerate it. They think it a token of their determination, a glorious symbol of their past triumphs over the Black Road. They imagine that its persistence invigorates them. “See,” they say to one another. “See these broken and shackled towers. Here is the fate of our enemies. So strong is our grasp upon this land that we can tame mighty rivers and with them drown the cities of our foes.”
It would have been better to unpick this city: to break it apart, stone from stone, carry away its every timber, plough its streets back into the soft earth until nothing remained. Kan Avor is the constant shadow of the past upon the present. It commemorates not glory but unforgiven and unforgotten hurts. When men venerate the memory of war and strife, and make temples of its relics, and seek to learn from the ruins of yesterday how they should live their lives today, then they have made themselves prisoners of the past, condemned to fight its wars again and again. For few wars are ever truly finished. There is always some remaining vein of bitterness for those who can neither forgive nor forget to mine.
Time works many wonders, but they are not all to be treasured. It makes shackles out of past triumphs, burdens from victories. Bonds from memories. And it heals only if those who ride its currents are willing to be healed.
I
The Inkallim came to the na’kyrim in his ruined, rotting citadel on the floodplain. She came hesitantly, almost stumbling, eyes gritted and reddened by sleeplessness. Though the waters that had once imprisoned this city had retreated, it could never be free of their legacy. So she came with mud on her shoes, the stink of decay and mould on her clothing. And though she was one of the Children of the Hundred, and had been fashioned by those who trained her into a cold and remorseless weapon, imbued with all the certainty of her faith and her capabilities, the world had become wholly inhospitable to certainties. So she came as a supplicant, and for the first time in her hard life there was fear in her as she spoke.
“Aeglyss, can you hear me?”
The na’kyrim did not pause in his shuffling, limping, staggering progress around the columned hall. He hauled his cadaverous form on a weaving path amongst and around the pillars, wandering aimless in that sparse forest of stone trees. He walked barefoot, and his split and scabbed feet left prints of pus and blood on the dank floorboards. He moved slowly, and seemed at each and every moment to be on the point of falling.
Yet the air the Inkallim breathed felt alive. It was heavy in her mouth and throat and lungs, full of his power. It pressed upon her chest and her back and shoulders, as if he was not only contained within this shambling and broken body in its stained, ragged gown, but also in the glistening, moist walls and in the space they defined. As if he was everywhere.
She followed him, walking in those bloody footprints.
“Can you hear me?” she asked. “You must help me. You must hide some of your light, Aeglyss.”
He did not seem to hear her, for though he murmured erratic little whispers, whatever conversation he held was with himself, or with no one. What few words rose loud enough for the Inkallim to hear were in a language she did not know.
“Please,” she said. A word that her lips barely remembered well enough to form. “Our warriors turn on one another. They forget themselves, their cause, everything. They lie down and do not rise. They lose their minds. There is sickness in every street, every shelter. Fevers claim more each day, and there is barely a healer with enough sense or strength to treat them. Our triumph-the creed’s ascendancy-remains incomplete…”
He turned suddenly and sharply. His thin gown hung slack from his bony shoulders. The contours of his bones-ribs, hips-showed through its material. He stared at her from deep within the pits his eyes had sunk into. There was blood in those eyes, a fine net of countless broken vessels leaking soft red.
