distinct amongst the welter of noise, Anyara could hear a rhythmic pulse, like the slow, wet beat of a drum. It was Roaric, hammering Cailla’s head against the stone floor.
V
Anduran was seething, boiling with the masses of the Black Road. They had filled the half-ruined city, spilled out over the walls and sprawled across the surrounding fields. In their thousands, they swarmed like flies drawn to the remains of a great dead beast. Half the city had been burned, but even the gutted shells of buildings had been occupied if they offered so much as a fragment of shelter. Hundreds of tents had sprung up in the fields outside the walls. Every farmhouse within sight of the city had become the heart of a new canvas settlement; every barn held more men and women than horses.
Coming up towards the city from the direction of Grive, Wain nan Horin-Gyre was struck by the impression of disorder. She saw little sign of discipline or organisation. Most of the camps she passed had no banners to proclaim their Blood, no real warriors at all. The tents had been pitched apparently at random. She saw several that would be thrown down by the first severe wind; others that would soak their occupants in a finger’s depth of water as soon as any heavy rains came. Dozens of campfires were burning, but there was no evidence that there had been much collection of firewood. People had gathered what they could from abandoned houses or the little clumps of trees and now preferred to savour the warmth rather than lay in the stocks to last them all through the night.
There were exceptions to the general air of carelessness. Wain led her warriors past one squat grey farmhouse that had been taken over by the Children of the Hundred. A raven-feathered banner was planted outside it. Smoke was rising from the chimney, and horses were being watered at a trough. A pair of Inkallim were standing outside sheds, guarding precious cattle to judge by the lowing that emanated from within. Their expressions blank, they watched Wain and her company pass.
She knew how strange — alarming even — her companions would appear to these observers. Aeglyss and his White Owls walked behind her own Horin-Gyre warriors. It was those Kyrinin that drew every eye as they came closer to Anduran itself, and Wain could see the hostility in every face. People came to the side of the road, scowling. She heard mutterings of contempt, anger. These were the ordinary folk of the creed, she reminded herself, drawn from all the Bloods of the Black Road: farmers, fishermen, hunters and craftsmen. Their faith was burning hot, or they would never have left their distant homes to come and fight here. And their hatred of woodwights was ingrained, unquestioning.
Wain turned her horse, ready to tell Aeglyss that his inhuman companions should wait out of sight. Even as she did so, someone threw a stone. It fell amongst the White Owl warriors. Another followed almost at once, and then a third. A thick crowd jostled itself closer on either side of the road, pressing up towards the fifty or so Kyrinin. There were angry shouts. The White Owls reacted quickly, silently. They backed into a tight clump, facing outwards, Aeglyss safe in its heart. Spearpoints bristled like the quills of a porcupine.
“Get back!” Wain cried as she urged her horse on, but the noise from the mob perhaps drowned her voice out.
A stout, pale man of middle years hacked at one of the Kyrinin spears with a little axe. The shaft of the spear dipped, swung and jabbed out in a single fluid movement. The point punched into the man’s shoulder. He howled and stumbled back into the press of bodies.
“Scatter them,” Wain shouted to her Shield, and drove her own horse into the midst of the crowd. She slipped one foot from a stirrup and kicked out. The warriors of her Shield, ploughing through the throng, were less restrained. She glimpsed swords rising and falling.
“They are under our protection,” she cried at the backs of the fleeing figures that were suddenly all around.
She set her own warriors around the knot of Kyrinin: a wall of horseflesh and iron. Aeglyss looked up at her and smiled.
“A warm welcome,” he murmured.
There was something so profoundly arrogant in the casual smile, the almost dismissive tone, that Wain’s hand tightened on the reins. Even now, after hours of turning the question over in her mind, she did not understand what held her back. Why not reach down and strike this halfbreed creature? Why not just kill him and all his woodwights? And yet, and yet… There was a bright, fierce intensity in his half-human eyes. His air of powerful intent, firm will, was like a protective cloak thrown over his shoulders. When he made her the object of his full attention, when he held his penetrating gaze fast upon her, she could feel it on her, inside her. Sometimes, vanishingly faint, she thought she could hear, within her mind, the sound of what raged in him: a muted roar, as of an immense cataract muffled by distance. However nagging her misgivings, however persistent the undercurrent of fear, when she looked at him she saw opportunity; possibility. He had served a purpose before, when he had opened the way through White Owl lands for the Horin-Gyre army. Now, clearly, he had changed. He had become… more. Therefore what greater purpose might he now serve, in the remorseless unveiling of fate’s course?
“Wain?” Aeglyss said. “Are you all right?”
She shook herself, uncertain how much time she had lost to thought. Uncertain, for a moment, whether all of the thoughts that ran through her head were wholly her own. Was it her imagination, or did confusion, distraction, surround Aeglyss like a miasma of the mind?
“Your White Owls are liable to be cut to pieces before we reach the city,” she said. “Send them away. They can surely find some woods to hide in until you return.”
Aeglyss raised an eyebrow and looked at the Kyrinin warriors gathered around him.
“But this is my spear a’an, commanded by their Voice to remain at my side. It is no light duty. They take it most seriously.”
“You’re the one who claims to wield such great power,” Wain muttered, hauling her horse around and away. “Persuade them to accept the parting. I can’t protect them, or you, if they come further with us.”
The scene inside Anduran was very different to that beyond the walls. The city had been claimed by the Inkallim, and by their quiet purposefulness. Riding through its streets, Wain saw more of the dour ravens than she had ever seen in one place before. The last time anything more than a handful of Battle Inkallim had taken the field had been precisely thirty-three years ago, when hundreds of them had marched with the army that Wain’s doomed uncle had led through the Vale of Stones to die beneath the walls of Tanwrye. Marched, but not fought. The warriors of Horin-Gyre had been slaughtered while that company of Inkallim looked on. The cruel reversal fate had worked was not lost on Wain: her Blood’s betrayers then might be its saviours now.
Aeglyss was walking a little way behind her. Wain’s Shield rode, at her command, on either side of him; whether to protect him or her, she had not been sure even as she gave the order. In the halfbreed’s footsteps came the one White Owl Kyrinin who had refused to be parted from him. It was the powerful, elaborately tattooed man that Aeglyss had identified as the son of the White Owl Voice. Hothyn, Wain now knew he was called. All of the other woodwights had departed, after an extended and — to Wain’s ears — rather agitated appeal from Aeglyss. She had sent a few of her own warriors to escort them, in the hope of preventing any further disturbances. Hothyn, though, had simply stood there, watching Aeglyss in silence.
“He will not go,” Aeglyss said when Wain pressed the issue.
“You could make him, if you wanted to.”
“I probably could. I’m not minded to do so.”
It was typical of the halfbreed’s manner, ever since Wain had found him at the ruins of Kan Avor: an easy arrogance, and a reticence about his intent and his standing with the woodwights. But she had consented to Hothyn’s presence. She had seen enough to know that there might be bargaining to be done, here in Anduran. There was a question, unresolved, of control and influence. The Battle Inkall was clearly present in numbers, but where were the warriors of Gyre, and the other Bloods? Who commanded the masses of commonfolk? The army that their dead father had given to her and to Kanin to lead was now a broken, exhausted thing. If they hoped to make their voice heard in whatever was to follow, making it clear they still had hold of the White Owl Kyrinin would do no harm.
Wain left most of her warriors in the great square at Anduran’s heart, and went on towards the castle with only her Shield, and with Aeglyss and Hothyn.
