“Is this truly the famed Shadowhand?” he heard her ask. A cold voice. He heard nothing in it save the wintry north, and hardness.
“Ah,” Aeglyss whispered without looking round. “They are interested in you, Chancellor. Of course they are. You’re a prize indeed. The ravens come to circle you. Perhaps they think your corpse is ready to be picked clean.”
“He could be of great value to us.” the woman said.
“Us?” Mordyn could see that Aeglyss was smiling. “I haven’t decided yet, Shraeve. I haven’t decided what his value is. But remember, in the days to come, that it was I who found him, I who brought him here.”
Wain returned and knelt at Mordyn’s side. She pressed a fragment of greasy mutton into his mouth. Its juices filled him with an urgent hunger. He chewed it and swallowed it down. It rasped a hot, painful track down his gullet.
“I don’t know what hold this madman has over you, lady,” he whispered, “but you must take me away from him. You must talk to me. I can make agreements…”
“Be quiet.” Aeglyss had risen to his feet. He kicked Mordyn’s foot. “She won’t bargain with you. Leave us, Wain. Wait for me. I will come to you soon.”
Mordyn watched in despair as the sister of the Horin-Gyre Thane meekly dropped a few more slivers of meat into his lap and retreated. He was not the only one to observe her departure with interest.
“Does Kanin know you’ve got her so well-trained?” the woman Aeglyss had called Shraeve asked. “Whatever you’ve done to her, he’ll not forgive you for this. Tell me, for I would know: is this the work of Orlane? Do you think yourself him, reborn?”
“Don’t speak of her,” Aeglyss snapped. “Or of things you don’t understand.” Mordyn felt the command like a blow upon his breastbone, a lance punched through his chest, even though it was not directed at him. The tall woman withstood it. But she could not meet the halfbreed’s gaze. She bent her head away. Inkallim, Mordyn thought, belatedly understanding Aeglyss’s reference to ravens. Even Inkallim will not face him down.
They locked Mordyn in a chamber that stank of rotting weed and noisome mud. A grey-brown sludge covered its floor. Black and green mould patterned its walls, following each seam and crack. Carved pillars flanked the door. A stone bench was cut into the bay of the window. There was a wide grate in which fierce fires must once have burned. Now there was nothing, save the cracked wooden pallet on which Mordyn lay, and the thin moth-holed blankets they gave him to cover himself.
He lay there and willed his fear into submission. He denied the pulsing ache in his head until it slipped into the background. He begged himself to rise above the harrying doubts and distractions that dogged his every thought. Slowly, in the night’s darkness, he gained some small mastery over it all, and was, for a time, himself again. There was always an answer to every question; a chink in the defences of every obstacle that lay athwart his path. He struggled to make himself believe that, alone amidst the city’s foul decay, and tried not to think of what lay outside the locked door. He tried not to imagine what might lie beyond that one cold night’s horizon.
VI
“I’m told that Avann oc Gyre held audiences here, in this very chamber, before he fell foul of the High Thanes of Kilkry.”
Aeglyss walked slowly, a little unsteadily, around the periphery of the columned hall.
“Do you like it, Chancellor?” he asked.
They were high here, by the broken-topped standards of Kan Avor: two storeys above the mud that passed for ground; two flights of coiled, slippery steps above the highest water marks the flood had imprinted on the buildings. The planking of the hall’s wooden floor was intact, but overlaid, in places, by moss and slime. Great thick beams still supported the roof above, but there were holes that had admitted the rain and the wind and light. The columns on which the beams rested were pitted and eroded. The stone bench that stood at the far end of the hall was spotted with patches of lichen. There was a smell of soft, saturated timber.
Mordyn Jerain hardly noticed the damp and the decay and the stenches any more. Three days and three nights he had been here, trapped in this mad, corrupt nest of snakes. He thought it was that long, at least. His senses, his awareness of what was around him, came and went. Sometimes, momentarily, he forgot who he was. The only thing he never forgot was Aeglyss. The malignant presence of the halfbreed was everywhere, in the walls, in the air he breathed, in the interstices of his thoughts. When he slept, the Shadowhand dreamed dreams that he did not believe were even his own. He dreamed of forests, and of fires, and murder and rage, and all of it, he was almost certain, was born of this creature who was twisting the world into an imitation of his own diseased mind.
Mordyn’s body was recovering slowly. But his heart, his spirit and his hope were being picked, bit by bit, apart. He had given up trying to speak to Wain nan Horin-Gyre. She was nothing more than an obedient hound at the halfbreed’s heel, of no more consequence or significance than the Kyrinin who came and went at his command, or the scores of men and women who milled about Kan Avor’s rubble-strewn streets. There was, Mordyn now knew, nothing here that mattered save Aeglyss. But he had no idea what to do with that knowledge, or even where it had come from, how it had infested his mind. He had never imagined that the world held such things as this halfbreed. He had no weapons in his armoury of manipulation and influence that could serve against such an opponent. And though despair was no part of his nature, it was taking hold of him.
“Come here,” Aeglyss said, beckoning Mordyn to join him at one of the windows.
The halfbreed laid a spindly arm across Mordyn’s shoulders. Its touch filled the Chancellor with revulsion, though there was no weight to it.
He was alone here with the na’kyrim. Wain and some of her warriors waited outside, on the stairway. He could kill Aeglyss before they could possibly intervene; throttle the vile life out of him perhaps, or beat his head to a pulp on the stone window ledge. He could do it. His body was strong enough. Not his heart, though. Not his will. This man cannot be killed, some awed part of his mind whispered to him, any more than the wind could be dragged out of the sky and crushed in your hands; any more than winter could be slain, with axe or fire or storm of arrows.
“Look at that.” Aeglyss extended a crooked, wiry finger.
Below, in a wide street, a crowd was gathered. It surged back and forth, like a mountain stream plunging and swirling in a rocky bowl. In its midst were three figures: mud-streaked men clad in simple clothes, flailing about with clubs and staves.
“Thieves,” Aeglyss whispered in Mordyn’s ear, holding him close. “Farmers who lost their land, I suppose. They stole food from us in the night, killed one of Wain’s guards. They thought themselves safe, hiding down by the river. But no. My White Owls can find anyone, if there’s a trail to follow.”
The crowd — a jumbled mixture of warriors, and Inkallim, and men and women as ragged as the farmers were — howled and roared and drove the captives up and down the street. One of the men slipped and went down. The throng flowed over him, trampling.
“Can you feel it?” Aeglyss asked. “The need they have, for blood.”
Mordyn shivered, though he was not cold.
“I don’t know, you see,” Aeglyss hissed, “whether it is mine or theirs. Whether I… make it, or whether it came here in their minds, already nestled there. There’s too much I don’t know. Don’t understand.”
A rock struck one of the farmers on the side of the head. Blood at once ran down his face, and he staggered, lifting his hands in a vain effort at protection. Someone stabbed a spear into his stomach. A sword slashed in and lifted a part of his scalp away from his skull. The man fell, silently.
A small band of Kyrinin appeared at the end of the street.
“Ah, look now,” Aeglyss breathed. “Now they’ll have what they want. Now the beast that’s in them will be fed.”
He leaned forwards out of the window, his arm slipping away from Mordyn’s shoulder as he did so. The Chancellor sagged a little at the sudden removal of that terrible, weightless burden.
“Let the White Owls have that last one,” Aeglyss shouted down. Every face, every gaze, was drawn by his cry. The sound was not loud, but penetrating, as if it was the voice of the city itself, emerging from the stone and
