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 spinning about and attacking Shraeve. But the Inkallim pushed him violently forward before the cut cords had even hit the ground, and he staggered some way down the length of the hall and fell to his knees.
“Stand up,” the halfbreed said.
Kanin’s body did so, a little clumsily, without his mind even having the time to consider refusal. He looked at the na’kyrim, sitting there on his stone slab bench, and saw only the roughest, most approximate, imitation of a living man: hairless, suppurating, cadaverous. Pathetically small, too feeble to move. But the shadows around and behind him seemed to have a life of their own. And the eyes that fixed themselves upon Kanin, though bloody and sickly, still carried a vile intensity.
“You must do something,” Shraeve said as she moved to stand beside one of the columns lining the hall, level with Kanin. “There are only three or four of us left fit to fight. The rest are dead or sick, or fallen away into madness or stupor. The whole city-the whole valley-is full of nothing but the dead and the dying. Those not yet too weak from disease or hunger… all turn against all. There is no order.”
Aeglyss did not move. His eyes did not stray from Kanin’s.
“We have no armies left,” Shraeve said, more strident. “There are none to command, and none willing to listen to any command. If you do not cure this sickness that afflicts — ”
“She doubts me now,” Aeglyss said quietly to Kanin. “Even her. No. No. She doubts herself, her judgement. She wonders if she made a mistake.”
“That is not true,” Shraeve said at once.
“Liar.” Said without a trace of emotion, as if it were a word without the slightest weight. “She thought I would serve her ends. Be a sword in her hand and make her the champion of her creed. As you, your father, thought I would serve your ambitions, and then be cast aside. Now, too late, she wonders what she has unleashed upon the world. She wonders what has become of the great armies fortified by my will she thought would carry her triumphant across all the world. Well, the day of armies is past. The world is conquered by other means now.”
Shraeve shifted her weight, took a single stride forward.
“Be still,” Aeglyss said sharply.
The Inkallim did as she was commanded. Still, the na’kyrim had not so much as glanced at her.
“You don’t imagine I cared what became of any of them, do you?” he murmured to Kanin. “The White Owls? You, your cause? Never. None of it. I only… I only cared to be a part of it all. To be a part. But none of you would have me. And now look. You will become a part of me, instead. I am become… all of it. Everything.”
“Nothing,” rasped Kanin.
“You don’t believe that.” There was perhaps a bitter smile stretching Aeglyss’ bleeding lips. “You, more than most, see a little of it, I think. Not all, of course. You don’t understand. None could… not even me. All that has happened, is happening, to me… I don’t understand it.”
“This is a waste of time,” Shraeve said. “We must — ”
“Quiet,” whispered Aeglyss, and the word contained such vast insistence that Kanin felt his own throat constricting, and felt fear momentarily gnawing at the edges of his hatred.
“You made this happen, Thane,” Aeglyss said to him.
“No,” growled Kanin.
“Yes. Nobody but you. I served you and your family loyally. I did what was asked of me, brought your army to the gates of your enemy’s city. Yet you turned your back on me. You made me a liar in the eyes of the White Owls. Because of that, because of your treachery, I was taken to the Stone. I was broken and remade. So should I thank you for your betrayal, for turning me into what I now am? Should I praise your mindless loathing of me, since it has made me into… into this? Or should I kill you for it? Should I make you suffer as I have suffered, as all the meek and the different and the outcasts have suffered?”
Kanin wanted to fling himself at the foul vision of decay slumped on the bench before him, but his legs would not obey him. They were dead things beneath him, barely able to support his own weight.
“I tried to do myself again what was done to me on the Breaking Stone, you know,” Aeglyss murmured. “I thought I might be able to control it, if I… I tried to… grow. It did not work. I am already all that is possible.”
He grunted out a strangled laugh.
“There, Thane. You have made me all that is possible. And it’s not enough. Mind and body cannot sustain what I have become. Not without breaking, without crumbling. I can make slaves of Shadowhands and the sisters of Thanes. I can master the Anain, make myself lord of the Shared, make myself the very thought at the core of the world. Yet I cannot control it. I cannot make that thought sharp and neat, cannot choose how it ebbs and flows. Soon I will be gone, lost in the very storms I have created, and only that thought-that storm-will remain, for ever. I will have reshaped the world in my image, and the world shall be as I have made it, unto its very end. Yet I cannot even mend my own flesh.”
“Perhaps,” said Kanin, “you know in your black heart that the only thing that could mend you is death.”
Aeglyss stared at him without speaking. Those eyes held Kanin, stabbed him, picked him apart. There was not the slightest movement in the na’kyrim’s crippled frame, yet Kanin felt the violent energies seeping out of him.
“There is truly nothing in you, save that one desire,” Aeglyss croaked. He sounded both fascinated and puzzled. “You are unlike any of them, even the Children of the Hundred, in your purity. There is nothing to you now other than hate. Of me, of yourself. And at the heart of it all, the longing to see me dead. As if that will cure you.”
Kanin could say no more. The halfbreed had him in some intangible grip that was wholly irresistible.
“But if it was true…” Aeglyss whispered “… if it was true. I do not know what would become of me, if you had your wish. You could kill the body, perhaps… but… I do not know any more. I do not know if you can stop this… this…”
He coughed and shook. Dropped his head for a moment, and freed Kanin from that oppressive gaze, but not from the bonds of his attention. Then he looked up again and smiled the smile of a dying man.
“Do it then,” he said.
Kanin did not move. Aeglyss looked sideways towards Shraeve, moving his eyes but not his head.
“You will not raise a hand against this man,” the halfbreed rasped. “I forbid it.”
Shraeve’s resistance to the command was obvious. But so was its immense force. Kanin could feel it weighing down upon him, and he was not even its object. The Inkallim’s face twitched as internal wars raged between her instincts and the halfbreed’s indomitable will. There could only ever be one outcome.
“You hear me?” Aeglyss asked her. “You understand?”
Shraeve nodded once, the muscles and tendons in her neck taut, her teeth clenched.
“Good.” The na’kyrim’s eyes drifted back, took a moment or two to find and settle upon Kanin once more. “Here is your moment then, Thane. Here it is. You can set both of us free now. Do as your heart dictates.”