Temegrin’s warriors started forwards, swords leaping from their scabbards.
“Hold!” cried Aeglyss, like a storm. Mordyn cowered, swords fell from stunned hands. Mail-clad warriors fell to their knees and dug their hands into the mud.
“Did you see?” Aeglyss shouted. “You saw him lay his hands on me? He meant to kill me. Did you see?”
The crowd at his back was roaring, a deep howl of incoherent fury. But within that cacophony the na’kyrim ’s voice was an iron thread.
“He asks fate to choose between us. So be it.”
Mordyn heard the crack of bones breaking, like wet sticks. Not just once, but twice, then again and again: a ripple of tiny, sharp, savage sounds like the fracturing of an ice sheet. But it was not ice that was breaking. It was Temegrin’s arms. They crackled. The Eagle screamed and fell to his knees. Aeglyss stepped forwards and stretched those shattered arms up, the hands at their extremities fluttering limply.
“I am chosen! I am chosen! I am chosen!” Aeglyss cried it out again and again. The sound fell upon the Eagle’s warriors like blows, clubbing them back and down. Mordyn fell to his hands and knees, retching dryly. Only Wain did not stir at the torrent of power rushing out from the na’kyrim. She watched, quite still, as he stared madly down at Temegrin’s tear-streaked face.
“You chose the wrong mongrel to make an enemy of this time, Eagle,” Aeglyss said.
The na’kyrim reached down and pulled a short knife from Temegrin’s belt. The warrior’s arms fell back to his sides, and though he wailed at the agony of it, he did not — could not — move. He knelt there, raging and sobbing, and Aeglyss pushed the knife deep into the side of his neck, twisting it.
Temegrin fell onto his side, dead weight. Aeglyss dropped the knife, raised his hand, with the Eagle’s blood thick upon it. He stumbled forwards, amongst the Gyre warriors. The frozen marsh splintered beneath his feet.
“It is done. It is done. There’s to be nothing now, not for any of us, but fire and blood and a rising-up until all the world lies beneath us. Come with me. I am its herald, and its bearer, and its sword. I will give you shelter.”
Mordyn watched them scramble out of the na’kyrim ’s path, saw the horror in their faces. And felt what they felt, bursting in his own breast: the awe and the wonder and the dazzling light that fell from Aeglyss, the certainty that here was the centre of the world, the seed of everything that was to come. It was an invasion, a foreign intrusion that overwhelmed his own deeper repulsion and disgust; but it was irresistible.
Aeglyss fell, slapping down into the sodden soil.
Wain dropped Mordyn’s leash and ran to the na’kyrim ’s side. She knelt there and cradled his head in her hands.
“It is done,” Mordyn heard him murmur. “Carry me back. My legs are gone. I am empty.”
VII
Mordyn did not see Aeglyss again until the afternoon of the day after Temegrin’s death. He was left, all that time, alone in the decrepit chamber that had become his gaol cell. No one brought him any food or drink. Such thirst afflicted him that he licked moisture from the walls, until ice began to creep across the stonework.
He was frightened now. Not just for himself, but for everything he had left behind when he rode out of Vaymouth. It felt tremendously distant, that vast and bustling city, as if it belonged in a world wholly unconnected with the one that he now inhabited. His Palace of Red Stone would be shining in the sharp winter sun. Tara would be soaking in the hot baths she loved at this time of year. The streets would be aswarm with visitors to the winter markets. Gryvan oc Haig would be in his high Moon Palace, dreaming of glories yet to come.
All of it seemed unutterably warm, and safe, and unreachable, to the Chancellor in his cold imprisonment. And fragile, too. Everything he and Gryvan had built over the last few years, all the wealth and power and future conquests they had worked to secure, now struck Mordyn as flimsy, illusory. Sitting here in Kan Avor, overshadowed by the baleful, ubiquitous presence of Aeglyss, the Chancellor could no longer believe in the permanence of any earthly, mortal power, or the solidity of any wall. There was now, he feared, nothing left for the world save a dark descent into madness and destruction. Nothing of his labours would survive, nothing of his loves. What he had seen and felt here in the Glas valley admitted of no other possibility, in his besieged mind.
Mordyn struggled ineffectually against the encroaching despair. It leached out of Kan Avor’s ruined fabric into his heart. When Wain nan Horin-Gyre came for him, with her Shield grim and silent about her, he made no complaint or resistance. He allowed them to take him out into the bitter air. There was a fine crystalline dust of snow across the city, glinting like innumerable minute fragments of glass. There were icicles hanging from the ruins. His breath steamed in front of him.
On the street, in between heaps of mud that had been cleared from the roadway, columns of men and women were forming up. Scores of cruel faces watched the Chancellor shambling past. There were Kyrinin, lean and pale, and horses, great dark beasts, with the warriors who had escorted Temegrin to his death astride them.
The Chancellor was taken up the spiral staircase and dragged into the columned hall from which he had watched the slaughter of the Lannis farmers in the street below. Aeglyss was there, slumped on the stone bench at the far end, and Shraeve the Inkallim, with her raven-black hair and dead eyes, and a single tall Kyrinin whose face was an intricate dance of blue curls and curves. The na’kyrim did not look up as Mordyn was brought in.
“Bring him here. To me,” he said, and his voice was feeble.
Two of Wain’s Shield took hold of Mordyn’s arms, swept him down the centre of the hall and cast him onto the wooden floor in front of Aeglyss. The halfbreed’s naked foot, Mordyn saw, was trembling, twitching in tiny spasms.
“Come here, Shadowhand,” Aeglyss hissed at him.
Mordyn wanted nothing more than to haul himself away, put as much space as he could between himself and this monstrosity. But a compulsion was upon him, and he slid himself forwards and rested his back against the stone bench, almost touching the na’kyrim ’s legs.
“Send your warriors away, Wain,” Aeglyss said, at last lifting his head a little, staring out from under his creased and gaunt brow. “You do not need your Shield here.”
The warriors did not hesitate, Mordyn saw. They did not wait for Wain’s command, or even look to her for assent. They turned and went silently from the hall. Wain herself stood still and limp, watching Aeglyss. Shraeve, leaning against one of the stone columns, snorted in amusement, or perhaps contempt.
“Be quiet,” Aeglyss muttered, sounding more weary than angry. He rose to his feet and tottered away from Mordyn, stooped and unsteady. It put the Chancellor in mind of the aged cripples that haunted Vaymouth’s streets, or the dying, wasted victims of the King’s Rot. It was absurd to be afraid of such an enfeebled figure, yet Mordyn knew, with an absolute certainty that was beyond the argument of his eyes, that fear was justified.
“It is not what I intended,” Aeglyss said as he shuffled down the hall’s length. His bare feet made soft scraping sounds. “You understand that, Wain?”
Mordyn saw her nod.
“None of it is as I intended. The Anain…” He shook his head convulsively, shivered. “I did nothing to harm them, yet they come for me. I went seeking her — K’rina — but they stole her, and I found this one instead.”
He turned, halfway down the hall, and glanced back at Mordyn. It was a casual, cursory glance.
“And now that fool… that idiot of an Eagle… has forced me… Left me no choice, Wain. You see? The storm is breaking, and I must armour myself against it, or it will consume me. All of us.”