halfbreed’s defences.”
Igris stared dolefully after the vast rabble of townsfolk flailing its way across the flat ground, closing slowly on the distant ruins.
“Wake up,” snapped Kanin.
His shieldman stirred himself and nudged his horse into motion. Kanin’s Shield led the way, and the rest of the warriors fell into column behind them. Kanin summoned Eska and the other two Hunt Inkallim with a flick of his head. They came, with Eska’s three hounds following at their heels. The dogs’ fur glistened with moisture, drawn like dew from the air and beaded over their bristly hides.
“I will find the halfbreed,” Kanin said to the Inkallim. “I will try to kill him. You make your own away. Use whatever confusion we may create to draw near to him. Do nothing to endanger yourselves. Whatever Cannek may have told you, I do not want your aid. I refuse it, unless and until you see me within reach of the halfbreed, and act then only if in doing so you can aid me in striking him down. Do you understand?”
Eska nodded casually.
“Do you consent?” Kanin asked pointedly.
She smiled narrowly. “I was commanded to preserve your life if I could, Thane. But it is difficult, when the one to be protected is so uninterested in his own continuation. It is our feeling — ” she included her silent companions with a brief glance “-that either you or the halfbreed must die. It is evidently not possible for both of you to persist in this world. Therefore, keeping you alive seems to require that we first accomplish his destruction.”
“Good,” grunted Kanin.
Eska shrugged. “Only sense. And, in any case, I dislike what I have seen of him and of his adherents, and of the kind of world he creates around him. Cannek’s judgement of him feels right to me. Perhaps fate will yet validate it, through us.”
“If I fail,” Kanin said as he guided his horse after his marching warriors, “if I fall, do not be deterred. I am sure the Hooded God, if he still watches over us, finds you more to his liking than me. Fate may yet favour you even if it condemns me.”
“Our feet are upon the Road, Thane,” Eska called after him.
He made no reply, but rode on through the rain.
The slaughter began far out to Kanin’s left. He saw it dimly, through the obscuring, pulsing bands of drifting rain. He heard it fitfully, for the air was sluggish and an unwilling messenger. But it pleased him, for it was a beginning; and once begun, this would flow quickly to its end.
Figures came running out from the grey bulk of Kan Avor, first just a few of them and then more and more until they swarmed across the boggy plain. There were no battle lines drawn up, no planning or preparation. People just emerged from the city and threw themselves at the motley forces advancing upon it. Kanin and his own company watched, but no enemy emerged to oppose their careful skirting of the city’s southern edge. The killing and dying was done closer to the river, where the ground was as much water as earth.
Knee-deep in pools, tripped by tussocks of reed and grass, amongst the emergent bones of those who had died on this same field more than a century and a half before, the desperate and deranged flung themselves at each other. They drowned one another in the stagnant waters, fell and were trampled and suffocated in the sucking mud. They beat and tore with swords and fists and cudgels and stones. A few horses churned through the marsh, most of them ridden by ravens of the Battle Inkall, but they were clumsy and ponderous. The rain fell, and washed blood from wounds down into the waterlogged foundations of the valley; cries rose, and screams, into the vaporous clouds.
All of this Kanin saw from a distance, but even across that intervening space he felt the nature of it. He felt its savagery, its mindless, flailing, destructive energy. He felt the yearning it embodied: the hunger to kill and to be killed. He knew it well.
“Turn to the city,” he called out.
Entering Kan Avor, passing between its first shattered buildings and onto its foul streets, was to cross a threshold. Beyond, within, lay a land of the dead and mad, the crippled and ailing. Some of the bodies scattered through the ruins bore the marks of violence-many had been dismembered or were half-eaten-but more were unblemished. Sickness, starvation, exhaustion had made this blighted place their home. Skeletal forms lurked amongst the remains of the city. They stared out from its shadows, coughing and shivering and cowering.
The wet stench was foul: rotting flesh, excrement, burned meat. As Kanin led his company in, the ruins slowly rising about them as if clambering out of the saturated earth, he could hear dogs howling. Rats teemed in the shadows, running in gutters and alleys like streams of dark water. Above, broad-winged birds turned in endless circles, stacked above one another in columns of patient observation.
Soon, even amidst such dereliction, they were having to fight their way. Men and women spilled out from the side streets, came tumbling out from doorways, leaped down from rooftops or the tops of walls. Like animals, starving beasts, they threw themselves at Kanin’s company. They came in such numbers and with such ferocious abandon that the column was scattered almost at once. Inchoate carnage spread itself through the ruins, all against all in a frenzy of bloodletting.
Through that violent sea, Kanin ploughed a steady path. He cut away the hands that clung to his saddle and tore at the reins. His horse reared and stamped down, pounding bodies into the sodden dirt, crushing them against ancient cobbles. The street was choked with pushing, surging masses of people. Forests of spears jostled towards him, rattling against one another. The air bristled with missiles of every kind. Stones and tiles and bolts and darts flew like great dark insects. Kanin felt blows on his shield and shoulders and legs, but none seemed to wound him.
And he found himself transported once more into that high, calm place where the demands of battle freed him of all other concerns and burdens. His sword rose and fell, the beat of a martial heart marking out the rhythm of his progress. The faceless horde that milled before and all around him was to him as inanimate and brute a thing as a thicket of tangled undergrowth. He carved his way through it, and its blood painted his boots and his blade and the flanks of his plunging, straining mount. He took no joy in it, for in itself it had no meaning to him. But his body felt more filled with fiery life than it had in a long time, and his mind as light and free.
Ahead, through the rain, he could see the cluster of decapitated towers at the heart of the city. Once the abode, he dimly recognised, of the Thanes of Gyre; once the sanctuary in which the faltering fledgling creed of the Black Road had been protected and nurtured. Without that protection, so much would have been different. Everything would have been different. And those same shattered palaces would not now be the abode of abomination and corruption. Eska had assured him he would find Aeglyss there, lodged in the very centre of this dead place, like a maggot deep in the flesh of a carcass.
The crowds in front of him thinned, and he stabbed his horse’s flanks with his heels. It burst forward into an expanse of open ground. Other riders came with him and erupted into that space with wild cries. They rode down the scattering dregs of their opponents, driving spears into backs. Kanin wheeled his horse about, aware that it was breathing badly, perhaps wounded, certainly on the fringes of panic. Igris and a few others of his Shield were emerging from the street. Blood-their own and that of others-was on their faces, in their hair, splattered across their chain vests and leather gauntlets. The drizzle made countless red tears of it, flowing down over them.
Battle still raged behind them and on every side. Screams and the clash of weapons echoed flatly from the stones of the dead city, heavy on the air. Figures struggled back and forth, fell, faltered, died.
“Did you see Eska?” Kanin shouted at Igris.
His shieldman shook his head dumbly. Kanin did not care. He had cast his dice, and in the casting had liberated himself. He looked around at the undulating walls that bordered this grey field of rubble and mud. There were beams of rotten wood sticking out from a heap of stones, split and eroded and draped in rotting plant matter. A dead woman was sitting with her back resting against one of those beams, her head slumped forward onto her chest, her arms laid limply on the ground beside her.
This place, this whole foul city, had been dead for more than a hundred years and dying for longer. Death was drawn to it, and freeing it from its long inundation had only opened the way for ever more mortality and decay and corruption to flow into it and fill its derelict streets. Kanin, for those few transcendent moments as he turned about, was filled with the sudden desire to see everything, every detail of the desolation, and take it all into him. He was, he thought, the avatar of death, returning in fierce splendour to his natural home. Aeglyss was not in truth the lord of this place or of the world that was being born; no, it was Kanin himself, and the slaughter that attended
