Fall of Thanes

*

There was a corpse in the street outside Jaen Narran’s house in Kolkyre. She stared down at it from one of the upper windows. Some youth—sixteen or seventeen, she judged—who had been killed in the night. Dogs came nosing about. The few people who ventured out from their homes disregarded both the dogs and the human carrion that attracted them. They seemed wilfully blind, as if a surfeit of horrors and troubles had left them incapable of acknowledging another. Jain leaned out and shouted at the dogs. They looked up at her, still stretching out towards the dead flesh of the youth. She beat the open shutter with the palm of her hand, but the dogs did not fear her. They turned back to the corpse, sniffing at it. Jaen took the bowl of water from beside her bed and slapped its contents out towards the beasts. They loped away then, without panic. They would be back, she knew. An old man walking stiffly down the street had stopped to watch. He stared up at her now, puzzlement on his face. Jaen glared at him, then withdrew, pulling the shutters closed behind her. The killings and the fighting and the fires and the cries came mostly at night but, like some rot slowly expanding beyond the darkness that had formed it, they colonised each passing day more aggressively than the one before. All of Kolkyre had taken up arms, and though the greatest hatred was reserved for the Black Road army encamped outside its landward walls, there was too much of it to be entirely absorbed by that single, inaccessible foe. The anger found other outlets for its immense unspent reserves, and turned the city in upon itself. Jaen heard all the tales from the servants in the Tower of Thrones, or from the homeless La