“No.”
The word was spoken with such precision and firmness that it caught all of them unawares. Olyn, the blind old keeper of crows, sat with his arms folded across his chest, his brow furrowed in grave concentration.
“No?” Cerys asked quietly.
Olyn shook his head, blinked his milky eyes.
“Tyn is gone. The one who lives now in his body is a plague. Nothing will remain unruined if he persists. He is a blight upon this world, and all that’s in it. You all know it, but won’t face it. You all see it. Even these blind old eyes of mine can see it. Who’ll deny it?”
The old man’s lips were trembling. His long silver hair shivered as he turned his head this way and that. It cut Cerys to the quick to see this gentle man so distressed.
“None of us could deny that Aeglyss fouls the Shared with his-”
“No,” Olyn snapped. He laid his hands on the table. They were shaking, trembling against the wood. “Not fouls. Corrupts, wrecks. Never, never… there has never been the like of this. I’ve lived too long that I should be here to learn of it.” He was almost weeping. Cerys looked away. “Am I the only one who dreams of nothing but death and suffering and rage? Who is afraid, at every waking moment, lost to fear? Who can hardly walk in a straight line sometimes, so violent are the storms that buffet my thoughts? Am I?”
No one said anything. Cerys had her hands on her iron chain of office, but the cold metal offered none of the reassurance it sometimes did. What use an Elect, or a Council even, rendered so impotent?
“I am not the only one,” Olyn said. “We can feel death, in the Shared, spreading its raven wings. Its shadow will fall across all things and all peoples. They do not know it yet, but we do. And its cause, its seed, is here, in Highfast. In Tyn. We should kill the body he is in, and hope against hope that in doing so we may harm him. Nothing else makes sense.”
The premonition of something awful came to them all in the same moment. A stillness, a profound hesitation as if every living thing had paused, then the blinding, dizzying surge of raw power through the Shared. Olyn cried out. Cerys staggered to her feet.
The door to the meeting chamber crashed open. A na’kyrim was there, but Cerys could not be certain who: her vision was fragmenting.
“Elect,” the newcomer was gasping. “Come — please come. He is.. he has gone mad.”
Cerys reeled out into the corridor. She could feel Aeglyss inside her skull. Or, at least, she could feel the Shared, but it was no longer easy to tell the difference between the two. She walked into a storm of the mind, and it was as ferocious as any gale that had ever lashed at Highfast.
“Find Herraic,” she gasped, unsure whether anyone could or would hear her. “Bring his men.”
This was terror beyond anything Cerys had ever known: all-embracing, crippling. It howled inside her. She lurched from one side of the passage to the other, fending off the walls as they swung towards her. Every bone, every muscle in her body burned with the desire to run, but run where? Everything around her was warped and twisted. The Shared overwhelmed her, bleeding through and hauling her into madness. The room in which Aeglyss was locked was close, but it might as well have been half the world away.
Her hands scraped along the hard walls of Highfast, but her feet stumbled across a sward of green grass; grass that writhed and flailed, animated by the vast will of the Anain. She smelled the deep, hot, ancient soils of endless forests, chokingly oppressive. The passageway down which she stumbled contorted itself into a chaos of shadows and light, of vague figures that ran alongside her, calling like birds, or screaming in fury. She could hear blades clashing, she could smell the sea, she could feel the blasting heat of a great fire on her face. None of it was real, and all of it was real, for it was flooding out of the Shared and into her. A thousand truths, unfiltered, harvested from all across the world, out of memory and experience, all pouring into her mind and tearing it asunder. And all overlaid by the savage, embittered anger of one man.
Then someone took hold of her hand. Someone was murmuring her name, laying down soft walls of protection around the bruised periphery of her mind. It was Amonyn, of course; there, at her side amidst the madness, easing her back towards a clear sense of herself. She held on to him tightly, and pressed her face into his shoulder for a few moments. When she felt strong enough to look up and into his eyes, she saw there such an enervated, haunted spirit that it almost broke her. But she said nothing. There was nothing to say. They went onwards together.
One of Herraic’s men was hunched down outside the door, his spear lying forgotten at his side. He had wrapped his arms about his knees, pulling his legs in to his chest. He was shaking. Amonyn knelt beside him while Cerys opened the door. She half expected to die in the next few moments.
There was an overturned table. The mattress of the bed had been shredded, its horsehair stuffing disgorged in great black drifts across the floor. The shards of a clay jug were scattered across the room, a great swathe of wet stone on the wall showing where it had struck. And there was blood: on the sheet, on Tyn’s crooked fingers, and on his face, where Aeglyss had clawed furrows out of the flesh of his cheeks.
The eyes that turned upon Cerys were bestial. The snarl was something that could only come from an animal’s throat. Yet he wept, and the grief and pain that swirled about him and buffeted her senses belonged to something more than a beast. He gave no sign of recognising her; she barely recognised herself, for she was adrift now, in the limitless Shared.
“She is gone,” he howled, and the sound staggered her, sent her to her knees, hands clasped uselessly over her ears.
“Lost in the green.” He tore at the gown he wore, ripping open its front, revealing the white skin and the cage of the ribs beneath. “Taken from me. Again, and again, and again. Always to be taken from me.”
He was hobbling towards her, like some tottering corpse. Cerys tried to get to her feet, but he had hold of her and there was a strength in him far greater than anything Tyn’s wasted muscles could have allowed. His fingers dug into her shoulder, crushing down onto bone. She cried out. He lifted her onto her feet, as if she was a child’s straw doll. He pressed her against the wall.
“How?” he shouted into her face. “Tell me! Why have they taken her from me? Dragging her down into the…”
His voice faltered. He gagged and spluttered as if choked by his own rage.
Cerys took a feeble hold on his wrists, but could do nothing to loosen his grip upon her. There was blood on his arms. She could feel it flowing beneath her fingers, from wounds in Tyn’s wrists. How much blood could there be, in this emaciated body?
“Aeglyss,” she murmured. It was not her that he raged against, she knew. The violence that set the Shared afire was not directed at her. It was uncontrolled, unfocused.
“Let me help you,” she managed to say. But he did not seem to hear her.
“They’ll not have me. Not!” He spat the words. His spittle was on her lips, across her eyes.
Then Amonyn was there, hauling at Tyn’s arms. Aeglyss turned and looked upon Amonyn, and Cerys felt the contemptuous hatred surge like a boiling thundercloud. She opened her mouth to cry out in warning, but there was no time. Aeglyss released her, she slumped; he struck Amonyn, just once, across the head.
Amonyn fell, and in that fall somehow the greatest extremities of blind fury were spent. Tyn’s bony shoulders went slack as he stared down at the prostrate figure. Cerys could breathe again, could give her thoughts some kind of form. She steadied herself on her feet, still leaning against the wall. She thought she could hear footsteps, somewhere off in the maze of passageways, drawing closer.
“The healer,” Aeglyss murmured, still staring at Amonyn. He knelt.
“No,” Cerys whispered, unsure of what it was she denied, or feared.
“Be silent. Liar. You think I don’t know your lies? Your deceit?”
She felt cold.
“You’re less than nothing. All of you here, little rats hiding in your tunnels. There’s nothing for me here, nothing that you’ll give me. Ha! Nothing’s given. Only taken.”
He caressed Amonyn’s slack face.
“You think I don’t know you have secrets? You think I don’t know you mean to betray me? I know betrayal, as I know water and meat and the turning of the seasons. It is… it never changes.”
“No,” whispered Cerys. She pushed herself away from the wall, reaching for him.
“Be silent.” And she was, for her throat clenched itself shut and she could draw no breath, and her legs and her arms were twigs, grass. She fell.
