He drew her onwards, through corridors. They passed by torches burning on the walls. Aeglyss took one and lit their way with it, though the shadows stayed all around them, and the light seemed sickly to Cerys. She recognised the passageways they walked along, knew that they were familiar, but they belonged to someone else, to another life.
They entered into a great chamber, where daylight spilled in through high windows, and there were ranks of writing desks. Cerys smelled parchment and ink and dust. She knew this place. There were people here: just one or two. They were afraid. They cowered. Aeglyss could taste their fear, and she could too. It was a sharp, acrid touch on her tongue, in her nose.
Aeglyss turned around and around, arms outstretched, the flame of his torch crackling.
“Look, Elect. What a wonder.”
She looked, and saw books, and rolls of parchment and shelves. The Scribing Hall, she thought. The library.
“Tyn? Elect, what is happening?” someone called.
She frowned in the direction of the voice. A man was there, half-hidden behind one the desks. He stared out, fearful. Bannain, she thought to herself. I remember his name.
“Nothing,” Aeglyss shouted. Then he had hold of the front of Cerys’s dress. He dragged her close to him. She did not resist, for he was already all around her.
“Wake, Elect. Wake up. You should see this.”
She plummeted back into her body as if falling from a great height into a pool of cold water. She gasped for breath. Her head spun.
“What a task,” Aeglyss cried. “What a burden, to watch over all this for so many years.”
“Leave us!” Cerys shouted, her mind tumbling away into panic.
“No! Whose gratitude have you earned by all these years of devotions? What have you achieved by storing up the past here, making it so precious?”
“Please. Please.”
She cast a desperate glance sideways. Bannain and two scribes were rising hesitantly.
“Forget them,” Aeglyss hissed. “I am here to relieve you of your burdens, Elect. All of you. Memory is no longer needed, for what is to come will be unlike what has been before. There are to be no more secrets. I declare the past dead. Your task is done with. Are you not pleased?”
“Release me.” She struggled against him, but his grip was firm.
“Oh, I intend to. I will take the weight of your responsibilities from your shoulders.”
He threw her down, and she sprawled to the floor, sending a chair skittering away across the flagstones. He was laughing. Savage glee poured forth from Tyn’s stale throat, coarse and wild. Cerys got to her feet.
Aeglyss strode down a rank of shelves, drawing the flame of the torch he carried across the books and the scrolls and the manuscripts.
“No,” Cerys shouted, but he ignored her.
Gouts of black smoke burst up. She could see flames taking hold. Everything that mattered about Highfast was here, in this hall. And Aeglyss laughed as he swept the torch back and forth. Cerys moved towards him, but Bannain was faster. He darted forwards, and as he did so he faded. He folded the Shared about himself for a heartbeat, spilled the Elect’s gaze off his back. He was gone. Gone to her, but not to Aeglyss. Tyn’s arm snapped around. Sparks erupted in a frenzied cloud as the torch struck Bannain on the side of the head.
He crashed against one of the desks. Aeglyss followed him, kicking aside a chair that came between them.
“You think tricks like that will work on me? That is my ocean you’re swimming in, child.”
Bannain groaned and rolled onto his side. Cerys glimpsed a red welt across his temple. She cast about for something, anything, to use against Aeglyss. Smoke was thickening the air now, rasping down into her chest with every breath. The sound of the hungry, consuming flames filled her ears, and their hateful, triumphant light danced across the walls. She took up a chair and rushed towards Aeglyss.
He crouched and struck Bannain’s head again and again with the torch. Embers spun away across the floor. There was a stench of burned hair and flesh. Bannain was not struggling. Aeglyss laughed.
Cerys smashed the chair across his back. It burst into fragments. He staggered up, dropping the flaming brand. He spun and seemed to Cerys to fill her vision. Sheets of flame were roaring up the shelves and walls behind him. He bore down on her. There was blood in Tyn’s long hair: ruby strands in that silver waterfall. Smoke billowed across his shoulders.
He took hold of her chain of office and twisted it in his hands, tightening it around her neck.
“Did you want to kill me, Elect? Is that what you wanted?”
There were others beating him, trying to drag him off. He roared defiance and pulled the chain tighter and tighter. Cerys clawed at Tyn’s face. She opened fresh cuts over those that already disfigured it.
“My spears are at the gates, Elect. It is done. I will make war on all the world, if it makes war on me.”
His restraint was crumbling. His wild, blind rage roared through the Shared. He was a terrible thing, she saw now. Worse even than they had feared; more consumed by hate and anger, more potent. He was a tempest that would not cease until it had brought all the world, and all the Shared, to ruin.
Cerys clutched at the chain. So many times she had felt those iron links beneath her fingertips. She smelled his blood, and the smoke. She began to thin. The Shared pulled her gently apart, like a soft breeze working upon the morning’s mist. Tyn’s face was twisted into a furious mask of hatred. She felt something cracking and collapsing in her throat. She saw flames, all around her. Her hands, pale, beautiful, lifted for a moment before her eyes, then dropped. Though she thought her eyes were still open, there was only darkness after that. She surrendered, and let herself end, and fall backwards, dissolving, away and down into the limitless depths.
Herraic Crenn dar Kilkry-Haig could smell smoke. Its acrid taint suffused the air of Highfast. He set down a half-eaten apple, and sniffed.
Herraic was a man aware of his own shortcomings. He sometimes regretted them, in a detached and melancholic way, but had long since stopped imagining he could change himself. As distant cousin to the Thane, he might have expected swift elevation to some lucrative or responsible post; instead, he had filled a succession of undemanding and at times almost trivial positions. For several years he had been harbourmaster, not of Kolkyre or Donnish but of Skeil Anchor, a drab and quiet port frequented only by fishermen and sealers. He had briefly been Captain of the Guard in Stone, a remote town of just a hundred families on the upper reaches of the Kyre. Now he commanded the tiny garrison of Highfast. None was the kind of role that delivered wealth or fame.
Even so, as Captain of Highfast he had found a degree of contentment. Nothing of any great consequence ever happened here amidst the Peaks. His responsibilities were simple and therefore within his capabilities: ensuring the safety of the na’kyrim who dwelled in the castle’s roots, keeping the road out to the west clear of thieves, and maintaining order amongst the few inhabitants of the nearby mountains and forests. Those inhabitants were self-reliant, solitary folk who made almost no demands upon his attention. The sense of having at last found a task to which he was suited had engendered a certain peace in Herraic’s heart.
That peace had been shattered by recent events. He seldom had cause to spend much time with Cerys and the other na’kyrim, but their agitated and despondent state had communicated itself to him over the last two or three weeks. Then the Lannis-Haig Thane had arrived, causing Herraic to fret over everything from the dilapidated appearance of the fortifications to the dismal near-dereliction of the stables in which the Thane’s horse had to be quartered. And shortly after, Herraic found himself playing host to the Shadowhand himself, and in a gravely, perhaps mortally wounded condition at that. The infamous Chancellor would have died by now, but for the care of the na’kyrim healer. He still might.
Finally — the torch to the pyre of Herraic’s dwindling ease — there had been the mysterious business with the na’kyrim risen from his bed after years of dreaming. Herraic had not fully understood the explanation of that, though it had all sounded to him unpleasantly like the kind of thing that went on in olden days, when halfbreeds wielded terrible power.
Now, when he had rashly started to think that things could not get any worse, might even be showing some signs of improvement, he smelled smoke. It was not the familiar oily stink of lamps, nor the homely scent of charcoal from kitchens or brazier. This was a drier, stronger smell. It reminded him of a long ago day when wildfires had torn through the grasslands around Skeil Anchor one parched summer. He knew at once that whatever was burning should not be. He left his quiet chambers and went out into the deep courtyard before the main keep, to
