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V
The dead came down the River Vay, drifting in lazy fleets, turning in the current. They bumped along the hulls of the barges and ran up onto the mudbanks where the river’s bends robbed the waters of their force. Seagulls came up from the sea, sculling across the sky, flocking down to loiter around any grounded corpse and wait for it to be opened by dogs. There were the corpses of men and women and children from the masterless villages on the Vaywater; Kyrinin corpses from the river’s distant marshy headwaters, where the Snake had fallen into strife with the Taral-Haig Marchlords; corpses from the vast flat cattle lands north of Drandar, where nobles long settled in wary peace now openly feuded, and Heron Kyrinin crossed the river to prey on the displaced or undefended. In Hoke, capital of the Thaneless Darga
VI
Shraeve brought Kanin up from the fetid, half-flooded cellar into which he had been cast. His hands had been bound behind him long enough for all sensation to have leaked out of them. She pushed him along a echoing hallway where silt was caked at the base of the walls. There were other Inkallim there, he was dimly aware, just two or three of them. They stared at him but said nothing. He was propelled roughly out into the street, and almost fell. He winced at the assault of the light, for feeble as it was, it seemed garish after the gloom of his prison. His discomfort was brief, for Shraeve steered him in through the doorway to the spiralling stair that led up to the halfbreed’s lair. The steps were worn and uneven, the walls rough and coated with mould and webs. Kanin offered no resistance. He consisted of nothing but hate, and it filled him so completely that it choked any coherent thought. It was a greedy, many-hued hate that made no distinction between Aeglyss, Shraeve, himself. Of all its indiscriminate barbs, the sharpest were perhaps those turned inward. He loathed his failure, his weakness. He emerged into the hall at the top of the stairs, and heard Aeglyss before he saw him. “Cut his bonds.” “He might still be dangerous,” Shraeve said behind him. “You think so? Cut his bonds in any case.” The Inkallim sawed at the cords about his wrists with a knife. When the bindings fell away, the blood rushing back into his hands was agonising. He barely noticed the pain, consumed instead by the immediate notion of spi