Fall of Thanes

*

The carriage had an escort of thirty men when it left Vaymouth. It rattled through the city streets in a cacophony of clattering wheels and hoofs. Half the lancers raced ahead, ruthlessly sweeping the streets clear of bystanders. There was urgency, for they had been late leaving the barracks beside the Moon Palace. The Captain in charge of the escort had been unexpectedly summoned to attend upon the Chancellor himself, and then kept waiting, frustrated and listless, while the morning sank into a grey and muted afternoon. The audience, when it came, had been mysteriously pointless: a fierce repetition of previous orders, an insistent emphasis on the need for haste. The Captain left the meeting feeling both somewhat battered and thoroughly puzzled that he had lost so much time for no discernible purpose beyond being forcefully reminded of the urgency of his mission. The column burst from Vaymouth’s northern gate like a hound loosed in pursuit of a stag. The horses pounded up the road, shadowing the winding course of the Vay River upstream. The carriage shook, rocking from side to side. The great expanse of the Vaywater lay at least two days’ journey to the north-east. There, on the lake’s only island, was the village of In’Vay, and its ancient, crenellated tower. It was a place with a bloody history, a place of execution and slaughter. More than three centuries ago, the warlords of the Taral plains had taken Lerr, the Boy King, there when they betrayed his trust to seize him at parley. It was there he had died, last of his line, strangled in the Lake Tower, his body weighted with stones and sunk into the Vaywater’s embrace. It was there the Aygll Kingship had been finally, irretrievably extinguished and the Storm Years birthed. Now another fallen lord was being carried to the Lake Tower. Those who rode in escort whipped their horses to a lather in hope of making up the time that had been lost in Vaymouth. The winter days were brief, though. In the shadows cast by its last light of the sun, they had parted from the great road that drove north to Drandar; their path was less travelled, taking an easterly curve. There was only one great i

CHAPTER 3

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The Broken Man

Break a man’s bones, and he will heal, and cultivate hatred of you. Break a man’s spirit, and he is unmendable.

From To My Sons and His Sons Thereafter by Kulkain oc Kilkry

I

For more than a century, Kan Avor had rotted in the watery chains of the Glas Water. They had fallen away with the breaking of Sirian’s Dyke, but the city had entered another kind of bondage: ice encrusted it. Every pool in its pitted and silt-layered streets was frozen. Icicles fringed each protrusion of its gnarled and knotted ruins. Whatever feeble thaw might begin during the day was undone and reversed in the succeeding night. Snow fell, and persisted in every shadow. Winter possessed the city. And there were other masters sharing dominion of the courtyards and squares and broken towers. A febrile vigour that threw out on occasion eruptive gouts of madness and brutality, and by communal consent made sudden savagery the most natural, the most basic, expression of the state of being. And the na’kyrim, who resided at the heart of this great ruin, and about whom everything turned, and by whose will all things were deemed to happen. They came in their scores and their hundreds, drawn by rumour or by other, silent, far deeper instincts: men and women, those who were warriors and those who were not. Gyre, Gaven, Wyn, Fane. Even Horin. They came, many, without knowing precisely what drew them there, to the shattered city squatting amidst marsh and mud in the centre of the Glas Valley. Some died, in fights or of sickness or hunger. Others found a ruin for shelter, a fire for warmth, and slowly came to an understanding: that they had reached the axis about which the world now turned, the spring from which a terrible, cleansing flood was flowing out across the world. The lever that was overturning every now-outdated law and rule. And some sought to set eyes upon the lord of this cruelly transformative domain. Some sought out the na’kyrim himself. In a dank, columned chamber where, in the very infancy of the Black Road, Ava