Glas Water. Now it was a great sprawl of black, almost liquid mud, dead reed and debris. There were rotted timbers that had been in the water’s grip for decades; the skeletal hull of a little boat abandoned by some fisherman or fowler years ago; even, in places, the shrunken, withered remains of fish that had been stranded by the receding flood, and must have been hidden from scavengers by snow.
Once, as they struggled across that wasted expanse in the gloomy dawn, there was a figure, far away across the mire: some lone wanderer, stumbling and lurching and falling as they did themselves. Too far away to be a threat. Yet Orisian could not help but stare as he splashed through one slick after another of black water. There was something in that lone, tiny figure that held him. He found himself thinking-believing-that it was him; that he was watching himself, from this great distance, and seeing himself as he truly was.
K’rina led them closer and closer to the ruined city, and soon enough Orisian could distinguish the outlines of what had once been individual buildings. That was when they started to find bodies. Some of them were half-buried in the soft earth, some lying in pools. Some were old, picked at by animals, decaying; most were fresh, their features not yet marred, the dried blood not yet washed by rain from their wounds. There were discarded weapons strewn amongst them and here and there the corpse of a horse.
The city rose out of the marsh stealthily. First a few shaped stones, barely visible amongst the rushes. Then a stretch of wall that appeared from the sodden earth and sank back into it within a few paces. Then a stretch of paved road, then the suggestion of a house in a straight-sided pattern of rubble. Then they were amongst it, and Kan Avor showed itself to them.
Sullen dogs staring at them appraisingly as they passed. Rats a dark ripple over the ground as they scattered from a corpse at the sound of Orisian’s footsteps. A campfire giving out one of those faint pillars of smoke that they had seen from out in the valley, but abandoned. No one to tend it or relish its warmth.
The dead. Lying in drifts along a street where some cruel battle had recently been fought out. Beneath a crowd of crows that rose sluggishly from their feast when disturbed, but went no further than the nearest uneven remnant of a wall, and settled there in a patient black line. The dead. Clustered around the ashes of an extinct fire, still wrapped in sleeping blankets.
And the living. A woman, haggard without being old, sitting alone in the ruin of a courtyard. She rose when she saw them and came feebly towards them, but fell and could not rise again. Orisian was not sure whether it had been desperation or anger he had seen on her face.
A little cluster of the sick, at the base of a flight of foreshortened stairs that ascended towards some destination long lost. They coughed and sweated and shivered, and embraced one another, and watched Orisian and the others without hope, interest, or appeal.
Varryn turned and hissed a soft warning, but too late. A handful of warriors emerged ahead of them, coming round a corner and halting, staring towards them in confusion.
“Hold onto K’rina,” Taim said at once.
Orisian did so, clamping her thin wrist in one hand and pulling her towards the shelter of a shapeless pile of rubble. She struggled against him, driven by a fiercer, stronger desire than ever before to continue on.
One of the Black Roaders was loading her crossbow. The others-spearmen-charged. Varryn calmly plucked an arrow from his quiver. He raised his bow, loosed the arrow in a single fluid, rapid movement. The woman with the crossbow fell dead even as she was lifting it to her shoulder.
Taim walked out to meet the three charging spearmen. One of them was growling as he ran. Taim flicked the outstretched spear of the first aside with his sword, and crouched to put his shield into the man’s knees. The helpless, hapless Black Roader, undone by his own reckless pace, was sent cartwheeling right over Taim, landing hard on arms and head in the middle of the street.
Taim surged up and sideways, one spear thrust missing him entirely, the other deflected upwards by his shield. He cut the second man down as he ran past. The third found Varryn coming to meet him, and slowed a touch to level his spear once more. Orisian could not even follow what happened, for the Kyrinin was ruthlessly fast. A blur of spears, the crack of wood against wood and then against skull, and a single lunging stab in and out again. Varryn was already walking over to kill the man Taim had first tumbled as his opponent looked down in surprise at the blood spreading across his stomach, let his spear fall, and sat clumsily down on the cobblestones, pressing both hands against his belly.
“We need the worst, the most tangled and confused of the ruins,” said Taim as he sheathed his sword. “The harder the going, the less likely we are to be seen or to stumble across trouble.”
Orisian nodded. K’rina was still pulling against him. It seemed, though, that she did not understand what it was that restrained her. She did not look at him, merely strained against his grip like a sheep snagged on some thorn bush. When he followed the line of her gaze, it led him to the dark knot of taller, more massive ruins in the city’s heart. That was where she wanted to go. That was where whatever called so insistently to her would be found.
VIII
Kanin rose feebly through oceans of pain. He was made of it, and inhabited it. The light he ascended towards hurt him. The hard stone he began to feel beneath him woke aches in his muscles. And his hands… his hands gathered into them all that ocean through which he swam. They were like fire.
He moaned as he forced open his crusted eyes. The pain of his maimed hands was beyond anything he could have conceived of. There was nothing else save that searing, pounding, crippling torment. All that he saw and heard came to him through the howl of agony, rendered all but senseless by its journey.
Shraeve was standing before Aeglyss. Saying something, angry. The na’kyrim simply stared at her.
Shraeve shouted at him. Kanin could not make out what she was saying. Her anger could not penetrate his pain. But then, though his lips did not move, Aeglyss spoke, and Kanin could hear his words, for they were of the same stuff as his pain, and thus within him. A part of him.
“The Shadowhand is dead. I can’t remember… did I tell you that? He died. And was glad of it. I tasted him as he faded into… into the Shared. Into me. No, it doesn’t matter. He served his purpose. He did what I required of him.
“As did you, my fierce raven, until this… this doubt entered into you. What happened? Is it too bright for you, this light you have helped to reveal? I tell you there is no more need for armies or for wars, that the victory is already won. But you don’t understand. You don’t hear. Very well. Very well.”
Something else amongst Kanin’s pain then. A flow, a gathering of force. Shraeve had gone down onto her knees. One hand reached impotently towards Aeglyss, the other fumbled at the hilt of one of her swords.
“I knew you would turn against me eventually,” Kanin heard the great voice say, almost sad. “The last of them, perhaps, but in the end… the same. But I can heal you of this betrayal, Shraeve. The Shadowhand is gone… that fragment of my will I lodged in his mind is returned to me. I can give it to you, and bind us closer than ever before. I can give you back that faith you have lost.”
Shraeve was sitting back on her heels, her spine arching, her head tipping back. Her arms fell limp at her sides. Her mouth was open, and though Kanin could hear nothing from her, he thought she might be screaming.
“Yes…” the halfbreed’s voice whispered in the bones of Kanin’s skull. “You don’t have to leave me yet. Never. You’ll stay at my side. Can you see, Thane? Do you see? This is what your sister submitted herself to. She became a part of me, as she could never have been a part of you.”
Kanin fainted away at that moment, but the refuge of insensibility was fleeting. He was called back, dragged back into that foul hall of pain and cruelty and horrors. Aeglyss had not moved. Shraeve was striding towards the door. Kanin knew-or was shown-that the Inkallim was no longer as she had been. Though he saw two people before him, there was but a single will.
“We might need her yet, Thane,” the monster murmured inside him. “There is an… intent. Somewhere near. Intent. Not fierce, not burning, but clear. Becoming clear. I feel it but cannot find it. We will see. You and I. We will see.”
*
Never had Eska moved with such care and precision. A near-lifetime of training, of submission to the
