Fall of Thanes

IX

Disaster came upon them slowly, revealing itself by increments as it emerged from the shadows and the wilds. It came first in the last dregs of the twilight, in the form of tracks through the mud at the side of a stream, that Varryn leaned close to, and tested with his fingers, and proclaimed half a day old at most. A White Owl family, with children, he said, moving north and west. It came again, betraying a little more of its shape in the gathering darkness, as the scent of a distant fire that none save Ess’yr or Varryn could detect. None doubted their inhuman senses, though, and all followed the Kyrinin as they bent their course away from the unseen, fearful beacon and led their stumbling, blundering charges through the night-thronged thickets. Some of the warriors muttered mutinously at the unwisdom of traversing wight-haunted lands by nothing more than moonlight, but Orisian could read the urgency and unease taking root in Ess’yr and her brother, and he kept them moving. They did halt, in time, if only briefly. A taut, restless interlude in which they blindly passed morsels of food from hand to hand to mouth and rubbed aching feet in vain attempts to soothe them. Ess’yr and Varryn went out into the night, of course, remorseless in their suspicious quartering of this untrustworthy ground. While they were gone, K’rina began to moan softly. It was a troubling sound, like the mournful voice of the darkness itself. “Keep her quiet,” someone hissed in sibilant anger. “I’m trying,” Yvane muttered, and though he could not see her clearly, Orisian could hear her slight shifting movements as she reached for K’rina. Whether to comfort her or cover her mouth, he did not know. “She’s unsettled,” Yvane whispered as the other na’kyrim’s restlessness diminished. “Agitated. Feels something or knows something. Because we’re getting closer, maybe.” Ess’yr returned suddenly, as if stepping out from one of the grey tree trunks into their midst. She brought with her another fragment of threat, another traced portion of disaster’s outline. “Someone is killed, far behind us,” she said into Orisian’s ear, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. “We hear him dying. A Kyrinin. We must move. Death runs through the forest. We must run faster.” But they could not run, for Anlane would not so easily open itself to humankind, or any kind perhaps. Not in the sombre darkness, not when its soils were soaked with meltwater, its streams swollen. They could only struggle on, none of them—Orisian least of all—knowing whether what lay before or behind them was more deserving of their fear. Ess’yr stayed close, guiding their every pace with inexhaustible patience. For all her efforts, they slipped and tripped and fell. But they kept moving, as if by moving they might hasten the departure of the treacherous darkness and eventually leave the night behind. Orisian dreamed without sleeping, even as he staggered along, of Inurian, and of Rothe and others. They were formless dreams composed of nothing but the presence of the lost. He dreamed, or thought he did, of Aeglyss. He had no other name to give to that pitiless black fog he imagined drifting through the forest all around him. There was no malice in it, just a cold and bitter accusation of futility that sapped his strength and his will. He could feel not just his legs but his heart and his hope growing sluggish and torpid. By the time dawn came, he had forgotten its possibility. All but a last, small stubborn part of him had surrendered, and accepted that the night and the forest had consumed all the world, and would be its entirety for ever. When the light came, wan and hesitant, he disbelieved it at first, and thought it only an illusory trick of his failing mind. But it was a true light. It brought no relief, though. Instead it brought a slow nightmare, shuffling in their wake out of the darkness, gathering itself, closing on them. “We’ve lost someone,” Taim Narran said grimly. They stood in bleary, numb assembly beneath a lightning-split oak. The great wound in the tree’s trunk was darkened by age, the exposed heartwood softened by rot. A gnarled knoll of rock and earth and thin grass stood nearby, a knuckled clenching of the forest floor. “Kellach’s gone,” said Taim. “Did no one hear anything? No one see anything?” There was only a shaking of heads, a casting down of eyes. Taim’s anguish was raw, sharpened by his exhaustion. It hurt Orisian to see it. He wanted to tell the warrior not to blame himself, but it would do no good. It was not the kind of guilt Taim could put aside, even when it belonged to his Thane, not him. One of the warriors was weeping. His comrades watched him. They said nothing, showed nothing: no sympathy, no understanding, no contempt, no judgement. They merely watched, as if tears were now as natural and inevitable a thing as the clouds drifting above them. He did not weep for their lost companion, Orisian knew; he wept for everything. Because there was something rising in him that demanded the shedding of tears. Something that might, before long, demand the shedding of blood. “We ca