IX
They crawled through the wreckage of Kan Avor like cautious rats picking over the carcass of a whale. Were it not for K’rina, it would have been easy to lose track of where they were and where they were heading. Every time taller walls or buildings closed about them, Orisian lost all sense of direction. K’rina knew, though. Always and instinctively. She would have scrambled recklessly and eagerly, as fast as she could go, through the ruins if they had let her.
It fell to Orisian to restrain her, for Taim and Varryn spent their entire concentration upon scouring the way ahead for any hint of danger. There was little. One man-a warrior from one of the Black Road Bloods-they found trying to light a fire with a pathetic pile of damp sticks. Varryn killed him quietly. Other than that, the only movement they detected was distant.
Orisian was struggling with a mounting pain inside his head: not in the bone but deep, in the place where his thoughts dwelled. It came and went, but each time it retreated it returned stronger and sharper. There was whispering as well, but that he was becoming accustomed to. The competing tasks of preventing K’rina from rushing on ahead and traversing the derelict terrain safely and quietly himself were demanding enough to keep him from slipping entirely into the diffuse besieging despair and anger he felt all about him.
He had the strange sense that they were falling, not advancing. Some great pit was drawing them into itself. Yet of all the feelings clamouring for his attention, fear was the least of them. He had somehow moved beyond the reach of that particular assailant. Perhaps he was simply too tired, in all possible ways, to succumb. The utter desolation of Kan Avor, the physical and mental destitution of those they had found alive here, the weight of the dead upon the city: all of this seemed to be murmuring to him that it was too late. Whatever happened, a wound had been delivered to the world that could never be quite healed. Too much had been broken for it ever to be restored to its former state.
Still he went on. And if he detected an increasingly wild edge to Varryn’s movement and gaze, he chose to ignore it. If he thought he saw Taim’s shoulders sinking gradually lower, and a grim, sombre intensity taking hold of the warrior, he said nothing. Kan Avor had them all in its grip, and it could only be endured, not escaped.
K’rina led them, in the bleak afternoon light, to a street over which the greatest of Kan Avor’s surviving edifices loomed. It might have been a palace in the lost days of the Gyre Blood’s dominion. It had the stubs of towers still adorning its upper reaches, and faded carvings in its stonework. Blank and empty windows looked out from high in its walls over the grey ruins.
The na’kyrim almost tore free of Orisian’s grasp as they crouched behind a low wall, staring at the open door opposite them. He had to take a firm hold of her shoulders with both hands to keep her from running out into the street and bolting for that door. She hissed in frustration and tried to shake him loose.
“Leads to a stairway,” Taim murmured.
“Is that an Inkallim?” Orisian asked, staring at the corpse slumped against the base of the wall just outside the doorway.
“I think so.”
“Not long dead,” Varryn observed. His tone was tense, as if his jaw and lips and tongue were becoming too stiff to easily move.
“I’ll take a look,” Taim said. “Wait for my sign.”
He advanced cautiously into the street, looking up and down its length. He edged closer to the doorway, pausing to lean tentatively down towards the fallen Inkallim, searching for any movement in his chest.
Satisfied, Taim leaned through the open door. After a brief, tense wait, he withdrew and gestured towards Orisian. Varryn moved at once, eager to throw off his enforced immobility. Orisian followed more slowly, K’rina bucking in his grasp.
“Seems deserted,” Taim whispered as they gathered by the doorway. “Can’t hear anything. Perhaps they’re all dead.”
“Not all of them,” Orisian said. “Not him. You can feel that he’s not dead, can’t you?”
Taim nodded tightly.
“Whatever K’rina wants, it’s in here,” said Orisian. “He’s in here.”
“Someone,” Varryn hissed.
“Where?” demanded Taim.
The Kyrinin nodded towards the end of the street, already reaching for an arrow. As he did so, an Inkallim emerged. She was tall, and ran with long, easy strides. Her black hair was tied back. She carried two swords, held loose at her side, slightly splayed ahead of her. She betrayed no surprise at their presence, but increased her pace and came racing towards them.
Varryn’s arrow sprang out to meet her. She swayed, and it skimmed past her arm. Orisian was astonished.
“Get into the stairwell,” snapped Taim.
She was coming still faster. Varryn snatched another arrow from his quiver and sent it darting for her chest. Again the Inkallim dipped and twisted in mid-stride, but she was closer now, with less time to react. The arrow smacked into her shoulder and stayed there. She barely faltered.
“Keep her out of here, if you can,” Orisian said to Taim. He yielded at last to K’rina’s silent demands, and let the na’kyrim drag him into and up the stairwell. She climbed quickly, and he followed, one hand on her trailing wrist, the other clumsily drawing his sword. He scraped it against the confining wall of the spiral.
His head was spinning. He felt as if he was fighting against a raging headwind as he climbed those rough steps. Some great pressure leaned against him. It was nothing conscious, nothing directed, just the immense weight of whatever he drew near. Now, too late, he felt fear taking hold of him. Whether it was his, or someone else’s, he did not know, but it tightened and tightened.
At the head of the stairway was a plain wooden door. Orisian pulled K’rina aside just as she reached out for it. He leaned close, listening intently. He could hear nothing, in part because there was a throbbing bellow building within his head. He closed his eyes for a moment and fought back the terror that made him want to sink down onto the ancient stone and curl up there; fought the empty certainty of his own impotence that flooded into him; fought the sapping weariness that made granite of his arms and legs.
He fought against all this but could not defeat it. Could not entirely hold it back. But nor was he defeated by it. He slowly pushed the door open and led the suddenly calm and compliant K’rina inside.
The daylight coming in through the windows and through the holes in the collapsing roof was not strong enough to dispel every shadow from the hall. The rows of pillars that ran the length of the chamber on either side laid faint dark bars down across the floorboards. There was a musty, damp smell.
Some way down the hall, slumped against the foot of a pillar, was a man Orisian did not at first recognise. He took in his haggard features, his battered chain mail. It was difficult to tell whether the man was alive or dead, awake or asleep. But his face was familiar. Orisian’s gaze dropped to the man’s hands, resting in his lap. They were thick, like fat, overfilled waterskins. And black and blue and yellow with damage. The fingers lay at odd, ungainly angles. Orisian looked back to the man’s face and frowned. It was the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir, he realised. The man who had hunted him through the streets of Koldihrve, who had tried and failed to kill him there in the Vale of Tears.
Orisian took a hesitant step into the room. The old soft floorboards creaked beneath his boots. He glanced at K’rina, puzzled by an abrupt change in her demeanour. She was staring down the hall, her grey eyes entirely absorbed in whatever she saw there.
Orisian peered into the gloom that filled the far end of the chamber. He thought he could see, pale and indistinct, some small, sunken figure sitting there. Unmoving. Corpse-like.
“Who are you?” a vast and sullen voice asked inside his mind.
Taim barely had time to ready himself before the Inkallim was upon them. He lifted his shield across his chest. Saw Varryn set both hands on his bow and draw it back like a club. Then she was there, and leaping high into the space between them. Taim thought she meant perhaps to fling herself beyond them in an attempt the reach the doorway they blocked, but even as the expectation formed, he saw that it was wrong.
