It is best not to let doubts linger.”
Kanin stood in silence for a heartbeat or two. He was frightened. The sister he had loved and relied upon all his life was as unfamiliar to him now as the most distant stranger. Once they barely needed to speak to understand one another’s intent; now when they talked it was as if they did so in different languages. He had lost his only true friend here, and was bereft.
“Wain, listen to me. This is all wrong. What are you doing here, amongst woodwights and…” he stabbed a finger towards Aeglyss “.. and halfbreeds? This is no place for you, sister. We’ve won. The way to Kolglas is open to us now. We don’t need all this.”
She set herself between him and the bed, a resolute wall. Kanin stared at her in anguished confusion.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “We need him.”
“What are you doing? Wain, what are you doing? You’ll put yourself between me and this creature?”
His passion washed over her, finding no purchase.
“He is important to us. To everything,” she said placidly.
“This is madness.” In his desperation, Kanin cast about in vain for words that might rouse her from whatever torpor had taken hold of her mind. He wanted to seize her and shake her, but was terribly afraid that she would fight him if he did so.
“Not madness,” Wain insisted. “This is fate, revealing itself to us. You will see, I promise you. We are only at the beginning of things, Kanin. Great, wonderful things.” There was at last some emotion in her voice, but it was only a pained need for him to understand. “We draw near to the unmaking of the world, don’t you see? He is the herald of all that. The key to it.”
“Him?” Kanin shouted, surrendering to fury. He pointed again at the pallid, emaciated na’kyrim lying on the bed. “Look at him, Wain! He’s barely even alive.”
“You see only the least part of him there. There is one he wants at his side. He has gone in search of her, to guide her to him. He swims in oceans we cannot imagine, brother. He becomes them. I will watch over him until he wakes.”
Kanin cried out in disbelief. He could feel his face reddening, could feel anger shaking his hand.
“Come with me,” he implored her. “You need rest. We’ll go back to Anduran. We’ve done all that could be asked of us here.”
“I cannot leave him now,” Wain said, quite calm and soft but obdurate. “Do you not feel it? Sleeping or waking, he is spreading his shadow across us all. His will colours every thought, every mood now. It forces… change. Movement. Why do you suppose the Kyrinin have come to such strife amongst themselves? Why do you suppose our army fights with such vigour; is so hungry for death’s embrace? Because Aeglyss has changed, and changes all of us now.”
Kanin stepped to one side, thinking to pass around his sister. He did not know quite what he would do if he could reach Aeglyss: kill him, or merely wake him? He did not care.
Wain shifted to block his way again.
“I am to watch over him until he wakes.”
Kanin hung his head. He was unused to the kind of impotent uncertainty that filled him. Whatever doubts or hesitations might occasionally have beset him in the past, he had always been able to draw upon the reserves of his faith, or upon the support of Wain herself, to find a path. Now he felt bereaved, and the one he would otherwise have turned to for aid was the one he had lost.
“There is to be a council, Wain,” he murmured. “Fiallic, and the Eagle, and Goedellin and all the captains are gathering on the southern edge of the town. We should be there. There are decisions to be made. Fiallic wants to drive on to Kolglas and beyond as fast as the weather will allow. Temegrin resists.”
“Fiallic will have his way,” Wain said placidly. “You go. I will remain here. Our victory in this war — and we will have victory, brother — will not be shaped in the council tents of the Inkallim or the Gyre Blood. You will see, in time.”
Kanin left, desolate. Going down the stairs, his knee almost betrayed him. He slumped against the wall. Igris tried to help him down the last few steps, but Kanin pushed him off.
In the courtyard, he found his Shield clustered around a water barrel. They passed around overflowing cups as they watched the Kyrinin dragging the bodies of their fallen comrades in from the street. The dead were piled against a wall, beneath the overhanging eaves. Kanin angrily gathered his warriors and led them out.
Shraeve was arriving just as he left, at the head of a dozen or more mounted ravens of the Battle. Several bore fresh wounds. The Inkallim had fought savagely. Shraeve nodded down at Kanin as he hobbled past her horse.
“You’re going to the Eagle’s council, Thane?”
He nodded without looking at her, angry now — at himself and at Igris — for the presence of the walking stick upon which he leaned. The Inkallim had proved themselves valuable allies at last, but in Kanin’s mind their past betrayals of his Blood were not undone. And Shraeve was still an arrogant, abrasive presence.
“I thought you might be there too,” he muttered.
“I am not needed there. Fiallic is Banner-captain. He is the will of the Battle here. And I am interested in whatever your sister has got herself involved in. That halfbreed of yours really has proved to be remarkably surprising, don’t you think?”
At that, Kanin could not help but glare up at the woman.
“He’s mad,” he snapped. “And dying. You waste your interest, raven, by spending it on him.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. My instincts tell me otherwise. You might find, Thane, that a great and terrible fate is unfolding itself here. We will see, no doubt. We will see.”
V
The Elect’s every instinct, of body and mind alike, howled with alarm, cried out for flight. It took a determined effort to hold her gaze upon the abomination before her.
She had come here, climbing up through the keep of Highfast, in answer to a call only one closely attuned to the Shared could have sensed. It was the call of sudden change, of the sudden bursting in of brilliant light as a shutter is pulled back. She had been alone in the midst of the keep, returning from a brief, uncomfortable meeting with Herraic. They had been discussing the care of the Chancellor of the Haig Bloods, who lay unconscious, near death, in Herraic’s own quarters. The Captain was nervous, unsettled by such unforeseen disturbance of Highfast’s normal routines, and the meeting had been a little bad-tempered.
Cerys was still turning it over, wondering whether she should have been quite so curt with the man, when her mind was struck numb. Alone in a narrow corridor, she had staggered, would have fallen had she not reached out and pressed a hand to the dank wall. And then, shivering, she had tipped her head back and gazed up at the ceiling. But it was not blank stone that she saw, and not with eyes that she looked. Down, down, through the walls and the gutters and the passageways of Highfast, power was pouring. A dark, malignant torrent of delirious potency cascaded through the Shared, and she knew, without question, from whence it came.
So she had climbed, heavy-legged and fearful, hoping that someone else might join her before she reached her destination, someone to share the burden of witnessing whatever awaited her. And hoping, at the same time, that no one else would come, for she was the Elect and the na’kyrim of Highfast were her charge, and she must guard them against this. At the door of the Dreamer’s chamber she had hesitated. It had taken every fragment of will she could muster to force herself to open that door and to step inside.
It was not Tyn, not the man she had viewed with affectionate concern for all these years. It had his form, it was made of his stuff, but it was not him. The fact that this cadaverous figure moved and spoke gave it the semblance of life and familiarity, but they signified little more than the writhing of maggots beneath the hide of a dead cow. The maggots did not give the cow life. This was not the Dreamer awoken. Aeglyss wore Tyn’s body like a cloak.
“I don’t like this skin,” the abomination slurred, holding up a gaunt hand and staring at it.
“Set it aside, then,” said Cerys. “Remove yourself. Return to your own skin. Your proper place.”
Tyn grimaced. His gums were white, those teeth that remained jaundiced.
