overwhelming agony burning in him. He was running, fleeing through dense forests of trees that reached out for him, and he could hear and smell and taste the wolfenkind who ran alongside him, just out of sight, their animal voices taunting him with promises of a savage death. He was a King, riding a ship in a younger world, closing on a sandy shore. A child watching a Kyrinin army in malachite armour marching through the streets of a white city. He was rocking on the deep currents, looking up towards the surface of the sea, watching the light fracturing and dancing down through the waves.
He chased Wain through the rocks. It was summer. They were young. He could not catch her, for she was the faster, the nimbler, but still he chased, drawn onwards by the sound of her laughter shivering around the boulders. She let him catch her before long. No game could hold her interest for long. She was standing, staring back the way they had come, with a serious expression on her child’s face.
Behind them, below them, Castle Hakkan was spread over the mountainside. The sunlight somehow softened it and made it look almost warm.
“You will be Thane one day,” Wain said gravely.
“What?” Kanin asked. He wanted laughter and pursuit, not stern conversation.
“You will be Thane, and I will be a Thane’s sister.”
He pushed her, but she was not to be so easily forced back into levity.
“And we’ll be great warriors,” she said firmly to him, fixing him with that steely gaze that their father found so amusing.
“Great warriors!” Kanin cried in agreement, engaged by the idea.
“And we’ll fight wars. We’ll fight wars at the end of the world, in the Kall. We’ll be the best, the bravest of all.”
“Both of us.” Kanin grinned. “Great warriors.” And he was so sure of it, back then. He could see the whole of his life laid out ahead, him and Wain marching into it side by side. The two of them, lit by the sun, illuminating the world with their own fierce light.
Kanin looked down. In his small hands-so smooth, so delicate-he had a stick. He was clasping it, wrapping his fingers around it, trying inexplicably to crush it.
“I asked you once for forgiveness.”
The voice was inside Kanin. He was suddenly nothing more than a thought adrift in shadow. And that other thought, the one to which the voice belonged, was with him, entwined about him, wrapping him in its coils.
“That was a mistake,” it said. Kanin existed only when it spoke. Between the words he was nothing. Absence. “I did not understand then. Now I know better. There can be no forgiveness. What I have done, what has been done to me, what I have become… it is all beyond forgiveness, or blame, or guilt, or judgement. I am the Shared… consumed by it, consuming it. Which…”
The voice faltered, and Kanin remembered himself a little.
“Which of us can say what is right or wrong? Such things… There is no meaning to it. Not when we are all but different aspects of a single thought in a single vast mind.”
No, Kanin thought, not knowing what it was he denied.
“I am the mind of the world,” the voice whispered into him, and now it was jagged with anguish, with a pleading cadence. “Too much. I don’t know what’s… I have forgotten what is madness and what sanity. But you can free me from this. Perhaps.”
Kanin sucked in a great stinging breath and looked down at Aeglyss’ blistered and bleeding face. Wounds opened up there even now, the skin parting as if sliced by an invisible knife. Thin blood was trickling down over Kanin’s hands where they still held the halfbreed’s neck in their grip. But his fingers were as iron, heavy and inert. Kanin could not compel them to close any further, could not even feel them.
Aeglyss’ eyes were closed. Kanin could smell the foul sores that pockmarked his brow and scalp. It was the stench of a plague pit.
The halfbreed’s throat was half crushed, but still he spoke. Those split and scabbed lips barely moved, yet the voice was clear and crisp in Kanin’s ears.
“Show me, Thane. If I am mad, if I am a disease, a mistake, show me. I will not yield. I cannot. It will not permit that, what is in me. But you can overcome it, if that is what the world requires.”
Kanin willed his hands to extinguish the life they held. They were deaf to his mind’s commands. He stared down at them, and wept in frustration and cried out in rage.
Aeglyss slowly lifted his own hands and set them about Kanin’s wrists.
“Now,” the halfbreed whispered. “Now. If not now, then never.”
Kanin had no answer. His arms were dead weights, unyoked from his will. He could feel the wall of denial, of resistance, rising up before him as Aeglyss gathered his strength. A gloom was settling about him, a clot of dead air, greyed and fibrous. He could not breathe.
“Never, then,” Aeglyss hissed.
Kanin cried out in pain as his hands were slowly but irresistibly forced apart. The na’kyrim’s thin arms had an impossible strength in them, and Kanin had nothing with which to oppose it.
“Kneel down,” Aeglyss commanded, and Kanin did.
With perverse gentleness, Aeglyss released his wrists, but before Kanin’s arms could fall back to his sides, the halfbreed delicately took hold of his hands. There was a terrible intimacy in it. Kanin could feel those long fingers pressing into his palms; he could feel a thumb resting lightly on the back of each of his hands.
“I am so tired,” Aeglyss said sorrowfully. Then, so fiercely that Kanin felt the words as daggers in his chest and stomach: “You failed me. Again. You failed me. What is in you… not strong enough.” His voice was fragmentary. Something in his neck was broken or displaced.
Kanin shook his head. Failure was too small a word for this. The enormity of his fall was overpowering. Crippling.
“I am so tired,” Aeglyss rattled. It sounded like the shifting of cartilaginous rubble in his throat.
The slightest beat of pressure; the halfbreed’s thumbs pressing down a fraction harder. Kanin’s hands crumpled. He heard the breaking of every bone like a flock of argumentative birds swirling about his head. He felt every rupture like a point of cold, coruscating fire. He screamed as tendons split, joints were twisted apart. Bones split and split again, splintering into smaller and smaller fragments. He felt the debris within his hands being pulped, and the pain was so vast and unendurable that he fell away towards oblivion.
But Aeglyss would not allow that escape. Kanin’s consciousness was embraced by that of the halfbreed, and borne up by it, and thrust back into the world of limitless suffering. Kanin looked up at the na’kyrim’s ruined face. Aeglyss was opening and closing his mouth like a man choking. No sound but inarticulate croaks emerged. Kanin heard more, though, within his head.
“Stay with me, Thane. I am not done yet. Not done with the world. You made me. You will be my witness.”
Aeglyss released Kanin’s hands and the Thane roared in stupefied agony as they hung limp from his wrists, bloated bags of blood and fragmentary wreckage.
“You should have killed me a long time ago,” said the air, and the boards beneath Kanin’s knees, and the pitted stone of the columns, and the darkness crowding across his vision, all speaking with the voice of the halfbreed. “Now it’s too late. For all of us.”
VII
K’rina walked as if in a daze, blundering through the night in an erratic, wayward fashion. She stumbled across the rough fields, veering aside from ditches only at the last moment, sometimes splashing down into them without pause and hauling herself up and out the other side. When the occasional stand of sallow and alder loomed suddenly out of the darkness, she would barge her way through it, showing no sign that she was even aware of the branches snagging her clothes or scratching her face.
Taim followed as steadily as he could, never more than half a dozen strides behind the na’kyrim. Her unpredictable and uncompromising course made it difficult, as did his determined efforts to keep equally close to Orisian. The Thane matched K’rina’s path and pace out to her left. Somewhere on the right, further ahead, was
