The Lannis-Haig men broke through to what remained of Aewult’s Palace Shield. Many of the shieldmen were already dead, crumpled in the snow, their breastplates smeared with dirt and blood. The survivors were fighting desperately to keep the teeming masses of the Black Road from their master.
At first Taim was not certain whether Aewult recognised him. The Bloodheir’s eyes were wild.
“Sire, come away,” Taim shouted. His horse was tossing its head, shaking. He could not tell how badly it was injured; how much longer he had before it fell again.
“We can’t keep you safe here,” Taim cried. “There’s already fighting far behind us. We must fall back to Kolglas.”
Taim saw such loathing, such visceral hatred, in Aewult’s face then that he feared the Bloodheir was about to attack him. Instead, Aewult wheeled his massive horse and made for safety. Most of his Palace Shield broke away and followed in his wake, barging through the ranks of Taim’s men. A few of the huge armour-clad warriors were too entangled in the fray to escape so easily. Even as Taim watched, one of them went down, a long-handled axe hooking his neck and hauling him backwards out of his saddle.
Aewult was instantly out of sight, vanished into the white void that surrounded them. Taim swept snowflakes from his brow with the back of his sword hand. There was nothing to be gained by fighting on here. The Black Road warriors were too numerous, and dozens of them were already spilling out over the snowfield in pursuit of the Bloodheir.
“With me, Lannis!” Taim cried, and drove his horse after Aewult.
One of his own men crashed to the ground in a spray of snow and earth. Taim turned to help him, but was too late. Half a dozen Black Roaders fell upon the Lannis man like hounds on a stricken boar. Taim battered them aside and killed one with a single blow to his head. The dead rider’s horse struggled to its feet and hobbled a few paces before slumping down again.
“Inkallim!” Taim heard someone shouting.
He looked. The last of the Bloodheir’s Palace Shield to have remained behind was unmounted, standing with his feet widely spaced and both hands on the hilt of his upraised sword. It was a stupid pose, Taim though. Either the man was ill-trained, or his mind had been clouded by shock or fear. Blinking through the falling snow, Taim saw the mass of the enemy back away. Inexplicably, a space opened, a moment of silence stretched itself out. Then a figure was coming, out of the crowd, out of the snow: a tall, rangy woman with hair as black as ink tied tightly back. She came with long strides. Snowflakes spun about her, tumbling in her wake. She wore a rigid dark cuirass of hard leather. Two swords were sheathed on her back. As she came up to the shieldman she reached back over her shoulders and swept the blades free.
Taim was held, gripped by this most awful of sights: a fell raven of the Battle, come like the very animating spirit of this gelid killing ground to mark his flight. Aewult’s abandoned shieldman steadied himself, prepared to meet this new opponent. He was huge, at least a head taller than her, and as broad-shouldered as she was lean. His sword snapped down, beginning its killing arc. And then there was only an instant’s blurred movement and the Inkallim was beyond him. She was lowering her twin blades, and she was staring at Taim. Behind her, the shieldman toppled.
Light blades, one a fraction shorter than the other, the old, appraising part of Taim’s mind noted. Single-edged, they had to be wickedly sharp to fell a man in such a way. And she must be a rare talent to wield them with such precision: one of those blades had opened the shieldman’s throat as it passed. Taim felt a cold challenge in the gaze that the woman fixed on him. Once, when he had been younger, it might have lit an answering anger in him; he might have sprung forwards to meet that challenge, whether it was imagined or real. Not now, though. He hauled his horse around and kicked it into a gallop.
The Lannis-Haig riders pounded through the ever-deepening snow. It was chaotic, dangerous. They could not see what lay before them, nor what came after them. They rode down several of the Black Roaders who were pursuing Aewult, but of the Bloodheir and his surviving Palace Shield there was no sign. As he charged along, forcing his way to the head of his straggling company, Taim locked his mind onto a single, sharp idea. He had done what he could for Aewult, discharged his duty; now all he cared about was bringing as many of his men as possible back to Kolglas. Whatever battles were still being fought out in the snowstorm, there would be no resolution. Friend and foe alike were blind, lost. The most anyone could hope for on this bloody, white day was to live, and see tomorrow.
He slowed his men to a walk, reordered them into a column. Their losses were not desperate, but enough to pain him; enough to hollow him out a little with premonitions of guilt, of sleeplessness. Then, allowing, just briefly, his head to hang down and his eyes to close, he grasped for the first time the full extent of his heart-sick weariness. He was, in a way that did not befit the highest warrior of his Blood, tired to his very bones of leading men to their deaths. He had thought it would be easier now that he faced the Black Road, a true and lasting enemy of his Blood, but it seemed even that salve for his uneasy heart was inadequate.
Taim lifted his head once more. A fresh wind was picking up, coming in off the estuary and swirling the snowflakes in a fiercer dance. The cold was numbing his face. He could hear the sea on the rocky shore off to his right, and that was enough for him to cling to. So long as they kept moving, and kept that sound close upon their flank, Kolglas was within reach. He laid a hand on his horse’s neck, and could feel the unsteadiness of its stride, the faltering of its muscles. It did not have long left, he thought.
They had to fight more than once. The blizzard had taken the battle and twisted it, crumbled it into the chaos of a hundred grim, brutal little struggles. Small bands of warriors stumbled back and forth through the blinding storm, flailing about in knee-deep snowdrifts, crashing up against one another, killing, dying. When Taim led his dwindling company back to the ditch and dyke that they had found covered with the dead and wounded on their journey out, fresh slaughter was being done there. New layers of corpses were being laid down over those — already snow-covered — that had fallen earlier.
Taim and his men cut their way through. He lashed out all around him, in a kind of surfeited stupor. Again and again he felt his sword jarring in his hand as it met flesh, armour or shield, but he hardly knew whether he struck friend or enemy. He constantly expected his horse to die beneath him, to pitch him down into the dark red slush. Somehow, it did not, and it bore him through the battle, up over the bund and across the ditch beyond. And then there was no one left to oppose them. There was only the snowstorm, and the long march back to Kolglas, and the hundreds or thousands of others, stunned and exhausted, lost and empty-eyed, who were trudging back in that same direction through the last dwindling light of the day.
At last there came a time when Taim was in a stable in Kolglas, and the blizzard was outside, beyond wooden walls, and he was hauling his saddle from his horse’s back with aching arms. The great animal shook. He went to fetch water and feed for it, but when he returned it had collapsed. So as night fell and the snow kept spinning down out of the darkness, he sent the stablehands away and stood in the light of a guttering oil lamp and watched his horse die there on the straw.