“That’ll split at the first blow. Find another. We’ll stand against whatever marches up from the south. We’ll hold it, and bleed it, and pin it there for this great army to come down upon it. And those of us who die will die in a great cause, and in a great victory.”
The house where Wain and Kanin had taken quarters when they overran Anduran still stood, on the edge of the square. She wandered up its stairs, from room to room, while her warriors outside mounted up. There were memories here that had a warm, tempting texture to them: of their first, triumphant surge into this city, and of the dizzying sense that fate might lay out for them the richest of feasts. Wain knew that it was an indulgence to seek out those memories, and a failing to take comfort in them. In normal times, she would need no such recourse to the past. These were not normal times, though, and she felt almost a stranger in her own skull. She was unsettled. The certainties of life and of the world, usually so clear to her, had lost something of their sharpness. What reassurance her discussion with Goedellin had brought was a fragile thing, already fraying at the edges.
She stared, for a time, into a fireplace. There was only ash there now, and a few fragments of dead, charred wood.
A soft sound had her spinning on her heel, and reaching for her sword. Aeglyss was standing in the doorway, his hands clasped across his midriff.
“You should not be in here,” Wain snapped.
“Why not?” the na’kyrim asked as he drifted into the room. “Is your solitude so precious to you?”
“Precious enough that I don’t want it disturbed by you, halfbreed.” She strove to make her tone dismissive, contemptuous. It did not come easily, though.
Aeglyss smiled, and Wain had the lurching sense of her self splintering. It was as if two different beings, looking out through her eyes, saw two different things. That smile was at once leering and warming; the na’kyrim ’s face was at once sickly and captivating; her throat tightened from both repulsion and anticipation. Was this madness?
Her vision blurred then, and the dim light that suffused the room dipped for an instant into a murky fog. She shook her head, and found Aeglyss close to her, almost touching. She stepped backwards from him, but he murmured “No,” and followed her.
She tried to call for her Shield, but some invisible hand was pressed across her mouth, stilling all sound.
“It is your instincts you fight against, Thane’s sister.” He whispered the words, but they filled Wain’s every sense, they were glowing and ringing and hot against her skin. “What I have become wakes something in you. Don’t you see? You won’t be the only one. When I reach out, when I drift, I can feel hopes and desires and hungers and hatreds all flocking about me. They cluster in my wake. Oh, I wish I could show you.”
His mouth was close to her cheek. She could feel his breath, and smell his sweet, rotten exhalations.
“Let me show you. Open yourself to me.” His hands, like spiders: one on her shoulder, the other cupping her breast, pressing the rings of her mail shirt against her. “Please.”
The strands of her resistance were thinning. They would have parted, she distantly knew, had Aeglyss himself not faltered then. A spasm deformed his face, baring his teeth like a snarl. His hands jerked, perhaps bruising her in the instant before they splayed themselves open and fell away. Trembling, released, she pushed him and he staggered backwards.
“Help me,” he gasped. “They’re coming for me. Can you smell it? The leaves, the forest?”
He reeled sideways, thumping into the wall. Wain edged towards the open door, horrified but still feeling the residue of a shaming desire.
Aeglyss sagged. “No. No.” He sank down on to his haunches, pressed against the wall, like a child making himself small, trying to hide. “You’ll not have me. I’m too…”
Wain turned away. Her head was heavy, resistant to the movement. She took a step, and then another, and her legs were sluggish. She had to force her way out of the room against the reluctance of her own body.
“Wain,” Aeglyss said behind her, and she could not help but look back at him. He was still crouched down there, in the crease between wall and floor, staring up at her. “I have terrible enemies,” he murmured. “The great beasts of the Shared would turn upon me. But you are not my enemy. You know it, in your heart. And I am not yours. Please. I am the greatest friend fate will ever grant you, and your cause.”
Perhaps. She was not certain whether she spoke it aloud, or only thought it deep in the turbulence this na’kyrim spun her mind into. Perhaps. I cannot think clearly. I cannot tell. Not any more. She walked out and descended into the more comprehensible company of her warriors.
VII
Something had died, up amongst the rocks. An eagle clambered into the sky as soon as Orisian and his company came in sight, its huge wings hauling it up and away from the hidden corpse. The ravens were more determined, or more hungry perhaps. They hopped and croaked amongst the boulders without regard to the column of riders passing on the road below.
Orisian had fifty men with him, all of them veterans of the war against Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig. The road they followed was an old one, a trading route from the days of the Kingship. Neglect had crumbled away some of its fabric, but it remained a good surface. It had carried them up the northern bank of the River Kyre, through the flat coastal farmlands and on into the rolling pasture-draped hills where the Kilkry Blood bred its famous horses and grazed its innumerable cattle. Now those hills were becoming mountains. The road ran along a terrace cut into a steep, bare slope above the river. The Kyre, down there in the huge gutter it had carved for itself, rushed between great boulders, rumbling as it foamed, milky, through rapids.
They had been climbing for some time. If he twisted and craned his neck, Orisian could still just make out the sea far behind them: a vast grey slab across the western horizon. Looking ahead, on up the road, there was nothing but the long bleak valley of the Kyre, driving into the heart of the Karkyre Peaks. Somewhere in those mountains, Orisian knew, was Highfast, and he hoped it would offer something by way of warmth or comfort. The Karkyre Peaks were no loftier than the Car Criagar, but they were, if anything, still more unwelcoming. There was almost no vegetation, even on these lower slopes. A few stunted and ragged bushes hung on amongst the stones, and there were scattered patches of wiry, sparse grass; apart from that, it was a world of bare rock, scree and stone-dust. Ahead, a score of jagged pinnacles dominated the skyline, sharp-backed ridges splaying out from them. The mountains of the Car Criagar were massive, old, broad-shouldered; these Karkyre Peaks were like serrated blades newly stabbed up from out of the earth.
The desolation, and perhaps the leaden quality of the light, worked on the minds of Orisian and all his companions. There was no talking. The only sounds were the persistent flat roar of the river below, the clatter of hoofs and the occasional eerie cries of ravens. Ess’yr, Varryn, Yvane and Hammarn had all refused to ride. They walked in the midst of the column of horsemen. The two Kyrinin were cowled, the better to conceal themselves from the curious — and potentially hostile — eyes of observers. Orisian was surprised at how much human life there was along this road, even now that they had reached such barren terrain. In the last day they had passed a dozen hamlets or solitary huts. The inhabitants were uniformly silent and hard-eyed, watching them pass from the shadows of doorways, as if they resented this disturbance of their solitude.
Rounding a turn, Orisian’s eye was caught by a strange structure a short way above the road. It looked as though someone had tried to build a squat house out of great flat-sided boulders, only to be defeated by the sheer mass of their intended materials. Even at this distance, writing and symbols were faintly visible, cut into the weathered face of the rocks.