discover a world abandoned by reason, plunged into derangement.
Distraught voices and smoke coiled up out of Highfast’s guts. People were running. The crows had burst in black profusion from the roost in the cliff face above the gorge and plumed and tumbled upwards like a thousand leaves caught on a hot wind. They spun screaming about the man-made pinnacles of Highfast. Herraic saw na’kyrim darting from passageways, across doorways; he saw men of his own meagre garrison running to and fro, and those who had come here with the Shadowhand, gathering and shouting, and glaring about in anger and alarm.
The smoke carried with it fear beyond anything it should naturally have induced: fear that seeped in through the nose and eyes and ears and twisted itself around Herraic’s mind, dizzying and nauseating him. His heart raced, as if meaning to tear itself apart. He found images of blood and violence rushing through his head, invading him. When he tried to shout out commands, an inarticulate, barely human wail escaped his throat instead.
He heard the deep, rumbling, grating sound of Highfast’s main gate opening, and turned in confusion. The inner gate already stood open, as it always did during daylight. Herraic could see down the long tunnel that ran out to the bridge and the road and the mountains. There were figures struggling with one another, down there at the end of the passage. They seemed impossibly distant. Herraic had to narrow his eyes to hold back the blurring waves of distortion that threatened to sweep across his vision. They were his men, fighting with each other there at the outer gate: one trying to push it closed once more, the other trying to prevent him. Herraic was dumbfounded.
Someone brushed past him, almost knocking him over.
“It’s the library,” they were shouting. “The halfbreeds have gone mad. They’re killing each other.”
Herraic’s hands were shaking now. Savage emotions — terror, fury — that were not his own had him in their grip. He was watching, in disbelieving shock, his own mind, his life and everything he had ever thought to be true, all coming apart.
More figures running now, up from the gate, through the passageway, like rats rushing up out of the earth towards the light, towards him. Woodwights. Herraic heard himself laughing at the sheer insanity of all this. There were arrows in the air, ringing off Highfast’s ancient stone. Men were dying. He saw it, but no longer understood it. The Captain of Highfast fled, weeping as he ran.
Herraic hid in a long-abandoned storeroom until the cacophony, both outside and within his skull, subsided. He could not tell how long it took, for he was alone and lost and besieged. As the noises — terrible noises, death cries, screams — fell away, so the relentless, disorientating waves of fear receded. His breath came more easily. His mind fell back into a shape he could recognise. And as it did so, he understood that whatever had happened, it had not been a natural thing, of the natural world. It had been some strange intrusion of the inhuman, incorporeal domain of the na’kyrim into his own. He went, still trembling, to discover what kind of disaster had befallen the castle he had been meant to hold. He held his sword out in front of him, knowing that it was far too late for such a gesture, but clinging to that small token of defiance, and the illusory capability it suggested.
There were still fires burning somewhere. He could smell them, and the sky above Highfast was stained with their black-brown breath. He found bodies. In the courtyard, in passageways, in the stables and the kitchens; human and Kyrinin, and na’kyrim too. Some of his men had made a stand in the stables, it seemed, for their corpses were piled there, with horses dead alongside them. There were dead woodwights, stretched out on the cobbles of the yard, and in doorways leading off it. Amongst them, the corpse of the na’kyrim whom Herraic had seen in Highfast’s kitchens. He had looked dead even then. Now, he had assuredly passed into the Sleeping Dark. Cerys had always called him the Dreamer, but he would be dreaming no more dreams. To judge by the contortions of his limbs, the dried blood on his face and his arms, and his fixed expression of horror, his death had been cruel.
Herraic wandered amongst all this in a daze. He thought at first that he might be the only one left alive, but one by one other survivors came out from their hiding places. Herraic saw in the eyes of every one of them the same stunned vacancy he felt himself. They all looked as though they were only just waking, after a punishing dream.
An old na’kyrim, a little man, was amongst them. He came blinking into the watery light of the courtyard. Herraic, collecting weapons from the bodies of his men, saw the halfbreed shuffle to the centre of the courtyard and stand staring down at the body of the Dreamer. The old man had a piece of wood in his hands, which he kept turning and grasping. It took Herraic a moment or two to recognise him. He could not remember his name, but this was one of those who had come to Highfast with the Lannis Thane, only to remain here when Orisian moved on.
“He’s dead,” Herraic murmured to the halfbreed. That piece of wood in his hands was a half-finished carving, he could see now. The outlines of tiny figures had been cut, but they remained vague and ill-defined, as if they had been frozen in the act of emerging from the wood.
The na’kyrim was shaking his head, and worrying away at the carving with his trembling hands.
“No. Not him. Not dead. Sad to say. Oh, sad to say. He was only visiting. Only passing through.”
Herraic frowned, not understanding. He was distracted by someone shouting his name from one of the windows of the keep. He looked up, squinting against a brief flash of the sun through a crack in the clouds.
“Captain!” he heard. “The Shadowhand’s gone. They took him.”
CHAPTER 4
Power loves not the light of day, nor the attention of curious eyes. In darkness it thrives most. Examined too closely, it withers. A lord may send his army hither and thither, but the true testing of his power is in those places where his army is not. Has he sunk the roots of his power deep enough into the earth of his lands? Has he sent its long fingers far enough through the backstreets and alleys, into the drinking dens and the lending-houses, so that he may gather them unto himself and hold them firm without a single swordsman?
When a man may whisper in a close ear, and that whisper be repeated far away and many moons later, then he has power. When a man may speak against another, and that other be brought to ruin and rue by nothing more than those words, then he has power. And if a man can act without the appearance of action, and bring about great change without the appearance of desiring it, then he has power.
Ask me not who the most powerful has been, for I know not his name, and nor do you. The greatest power will have been cultivated in the shadows, and the further into darkness and secrecy it was sunk, the mightier will have been its exercising.
I
A kind of fever had taken hold of Kolkyre. The ancient city was convulsed by anger, riddled with fearful rumour. The ferment was such that Anyara began to think that normal conversation was no longer possible. Every exchange she heard seemed to be conducted either in whispers or in the anguished, strident tones of outrage or grief. The death of Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig had shaken his city out of balance.
The dead Thane was burned in the gardens that ringed the Tower of Thrones. The fire raged, turning pyre and corpse into a great column of flame, noise, smoke and heat, killing the grass around and beneath. The gardens would be scarred, at least until this winter was done with. As would the people of Kolkyre, Anyara thought, as she watched the faces of those come to witness the conflagration: distraught, stunned, vacant.
Roaric was there, arm about Ilessa, his now-widowed mother. Ilessa was weeping silently. The new Thane of the Kilkry Blood looked like a man barely in control of his emotions. His eyes were locked on the heart of the
