Fall of Thanes

*

Kanin heard Goedellin’s cry through the stone walls of the Guard House. It roused him from the bleary stupor that passed for sleep these days. At first he was not certain whether it had been a figment of the nightmares that so often tortured his brief slumbers, but then it was repeated, and the agonies of fear it expressed washed away any last fogs from Kanin’s mind. It was the cry of someone exploring depths of anguish most could never imagine, and it grated upon the ear and upon the heart. Kanin pulled his boots on, cursing the stiff, tight leather. He could hear footsteps and worried voices in the corridor outside. He threw a cloak about his shoulders and hastened from his bare sleeping chamber. Igris and three or four others of his Shield were already gathered outside the door to Goedellin’s room, all wearing the tired, limp pallor of those abruptly roused from sleep. From within another rasping, sickening wail. “The door’s barred,” Igris said with a vague and helpless spreading of his hands. “Then break it!” shouted Kanin. One of the shieldmen kicked at the door. It did not yield. “Idiot,” growled Kanin, pushing them all aside. Once, twice, he pounded at the door with his heel. At the second blow, there was a cracking of wood, but still it resisted. Kanin could hear a loud whimpering in there now, like some great dog bemoaning a grievous wound. He roared and stamped against the door. It sprang open in a burst of splinters. Goedellin lay on the low bed, fully clothed. A tiny box was spilled on the floor beside him: a miniature wooden chest, engraved and inlaid like a child’s toy. Wizened fragments of seerstem lay around it. The Lore Inkallim was twisting and writhing, splaying his hands in defence against some invisible threat. He moaned and thrashed, dark spittle foaming on his black lips. Kanin bent over the Lore Inkallim, averting his face from those clawing hands. He grasped Goedellin’s shoulders and pressed him back onto the mattress. “Wake, old man!” he shouted. Goedellin bucked beneath his grasp, impossibly strong for one so frail and contorted by age. Kanin feared that he would break bones if he exerted his full strength, and backed away. Goedellin howled, a ravaged sound. “Fetch water,” Kanin snapped at Igris, who was staring in wide-eyed alarm at the frenzied form upon the bed. “And a healer!” The shieldman went, but even as Kanin turned back to the Lore Inkallim, he could see that it was too late. Goedellin’s hands clenched; his eyes opened; his stained tongue fluttered between his lips. His back, his hooked back, arced against its curve as his head and shoulder thrust down against the pillow. His breath rattled out of him. And then he was still. Fists still raised, eyes still staring up at the blank ceiling above, mouth still agape, tongue lying there limp in a pool of brown spit. Kanin extended a hand, holding the back of it still just above Goedellin’s lips. He did not really need to check. He could see the truth in those blank eyes. “He’s dead,” Kanin muttered. He stooped and picked up the little box from the floor. He turned it over in his hands then dropped its carved lid shut with the touch of a finger. “It’s seems even the dreams of the Lore have turned against them,” he murmured.

VIII

The track from Highfast to Hent was wind-lashed, snow-blasted. It rode the high bare slopes of jagged ridges, rising and falling across the spine of the Karkyre Peaks. Sharp-sided valleys lay below, gorges clawed out of the body of the mountains by immense talons. Clouds surged in from the west, engulfing the track and the summits around it, veiling them in mist and snow, then sweeping on and away to leave them bathed in sunlight, roofed by a curving expanse of pale blue sky. Sometimes, in those clear moments, Orisian could look down into the valley beneath them and see nothing but great slabs of cloud and fog, the peaks and ridges bare islands protruding from a sea frozen in the instant of its boiling. Even when the sky was naked above, and there was no snow or sleet, the wind never ceased. It buffeted and bit them. Orisian, like most of the others, wore a woollen scarf across his nose and mouth, and kept the fur-lined hood of his jacket pulled as far up and over his head as it would go. They had taken the best clothing they could find from Highfast’s stores. Still the cold found its way in. Had he not suffered its savage attentions before, and more acutely, in the Car Criagar, it might have been intolerable. Now, he merely shrunk himself inside his cocoon of wool and cloth, and endured. The horses suffered the most, becoming sluggish and sullen. They held their heads low. Soon, they might become more hindrance than aid. Whether or not the weather gentled, or the track became less snow-clogged and treacherous, there would come a time—perhaps two days, perhaps three—when they reached the edge of Anlane. And that, Orisian suspected, would be no place for riding. Often, his mind retreated from the harsh reality of the journey, drifting and stumbling its way through corridors of memory and distraction. But they were seldom clean. Untainted. He remembered the day before the Winterbirth feast at Castle Kolglas. So much of that memory was warm, coloured impossibly joyful by the darkness of what had followed it: walking beside Anyara through the market, hearing the light, bubbling chatter of the festive throng, smelling the sticky richness of honey cakes. Yet as he relived it in his head, Orisian found shadows bleeding in at the edges of the scenes his mind recreated. Faces in the crowd that blurred and leered and grimaced, until he turned his imagined attention full upon them, and then they were gone. Not there at all. And then he was walking with Inurian over the rocks beneath the castle’s wall. Looking for… something. Even the pain of that memory was sweet, for there, before his mind’s eye, was that lost face in all its precise simplicity and affection. So close he could have touched it. So alive. Yet he could hear that the waves slapping at the rocks were heavy, thick with something more than water. Inurian’s lips moved, but Orisian could not hear him, only the seagulls screeching overhead. And their cries became the anguished wails and laughter of mad children. He was looking down at a corpse. A woman, frozen into a stiff huddle. Snow on her head, in her ear, in the pit of her eye. He was looking down on her from what seemed a great height, yet for all that distance he could see the ends of her eyelashes protruding through the snow. He could see the strands of loose cotton that had frayed from the collar of her coat. “Couldn’t say whether she’s Kilkry or Black Road.” “What?” Orisian said, blinking. Taim Narran twisted in his saddle, looking back. “Couldn’t say whether she’s Kilkry or Black Road,” he repeated. Ess’yr and Varryn were standing over the corpse, staring down at it. It lay off to the side of the rough track, beneath the shelter of an overhanging boulder. “Died of cold, not of blade,” Varryn said. “Herraic said we might reach Hent in a day, if we didn’t pause,” Orisian said, still dislocated, half of him caught up in that place where the dreams and memories lurked. “How long till nightfall, do you think?” Varryn flicked a glance towards the western sky, lifted his chin as if to scent the air. “The third part of the day is yet to come,” the Kyrinin said. “We should keep moving, then.” Ess’yr and Varryn ran ahead of the horses, disappearing beyond the rugged writhings of the trail. In the moment when they dipped out of sight, Orisian felt that familiar tug of foreboding and fear. Every moment that he could not see Ess’yr, could not satisfy himself of her safety, was soured by worry. He did not doubt her capabilities but still he worried. Death, it seemed to him, was becoming ever less respectful of the capabilities of those it claimed. He could hear two of the warriors talking behind him. Low voices, jumbled by the wind, the words separated, some snuffed out, some thrown together. He could not make out what they were saying. His mind wandered once more, lulled by that sound, human yet incomprehensible, and by the slow and steady crunching of his horse’s hoofs on loose stones and bare rock. He drifted. And this time he saw Ess’yr’s face, just as he had first seen it when slipping in and out of a wounded fever. It was as clear to him now as it had been then. Clearer. The beauty of it, the soft and flawless near-white skin, the framing curtain of hair with an almost metallic yellow glint to it. The eyes, unguarded, grey as flint, looking into his own. He rode in the embrace of that memory. Hent was stranger than Orisian had expected. It sprawled across the eastern flank of a long, descending ridge. The highest of its buildings lay almost at the crest of the ridge; the lowest, close by the seething river that ran north between fringes of scrubby willow and alder. The buildings themselves were like bulges in the skin of the mountain, as if its i